Lovely story. Wouldn't call this taunting a hater at all, if I had to guess I would say that the person was happy that the magazine acknowledged him and created an inside joke together with him. This is how you make super fans for your brand.
I wish more brands interacted with their audience in this human-like, friendly banter, playful sort of way, instead of the sterile corporate happy-speak as if the reply is a way to perform for an audience, or instantly trying to sell you multiple calls to action if you interact with them.
> I wish more brands interacted with their audience in this human-like, friendly banter, playful sort of way
And I’m sure brands wish they could do it without fear of being misinterpreted and causing a litany of issues for what amounted to a well meaning joke. No one wants to be the social media person that causes trouble for the company (and thus themselves) for being a bit too friendly to an unreasonable entitled prick.
Heck, I’ve seen it happen (more than once) in a support forum context where someone is a regular and always treated respectfully and helped whenever they ask, but one day the support person is a tad more relaxed (read: less corporate, more open and personal) in their communication and the customer is offended out of left field. Which then becomes stressful for the support person and naturally causes them to clam up in future communications.
Yes, big companies definitely take it too far in their frustratingly sterile I’ll-restate-everything-you-said-and-repeat-your-name-over-and-over direction, but “human-like, friendly banter, playful” is incredibly risky and not worth the stress.
Blame our litigious society for making this kind of interaction impossible. Plus when is the line crossed between "friendly banter" and straight-up harrassment?
I think this sort of thing is much harder to do in the modern digital world.
It’s one thing when it’s one-way, magazine -> audience, and the current edition is off of newsstands in a month or two. Once you throw in forums and social media then the public gets to shape the narrative.
The fun police have much more of a platform these days. Back when they were just writing letters to the editor their screaming was lost to the void. These days it gets amplified by the algorithm and may be latched onto by the most insufferable people who have an axe to grind or just crave attention.
Agree, with "hater" in the title, I expected a 20 page manifesto discussing every little detail that's supposedly wrong with the game. That was pretty moderate and the inside joke this created is like funny little easteregg.
The fact that the website this comes from is "ff8isthe.best" makes this so much better. I love hyper-specific websites.
Also, I love documentation on these obscure things from times passed. I'm not sure where else I would have ran into this, but I appreciate the author for writing this kind of thing down.
This was what the Internet made beautiful for a time, international access to hyper-specific deep sites on highly specific topics.
Instead we get 9000 identical sites regurgitating the same identical garbage; I want sites where I can enjoy people going into way too much detail about something they feel strongly about, like why steam engines were going to lose to diesel no matter what, because diesel can get traction going up an incline that a steam engine simply cannot do (and that detailed page is lost to me, I can't find it).
It's just how subreddits devolve to meme-reposting unless actively and strongly countered; forums were a bit better at that but you had to have active moderation.
> I want sites where I can enjoy people going into way too much detail about something they feel strongly about, like why steam engines were going to lose to diesel no matter what, because diesel can get traction going up an incline that a steam engine simply cannot do (and that detailed page is lost to me, I can't find it).
You can find plenty of that as content, it just exists on platforms rather than individual sites, and mostly as video.
Not the same, it's much harder to watch video content than content you can read.
I don't have time to spend 30 minutes watching some in-depth video essay on a game, but I can read someone's blog for 5 minutes that hits all the relevant points.
lots of publishing history in different media tells the story. "Broadcast media" was always suspect from the point of view of artsy, sophisticated and niche circles.. and I do mean circles, because publishing, content creation, and fans are all different people and need each other to make it work. This has been done "well" over and over.. but in the digital realms the incentives and mechanisms are powerful in overwhelming ways. More people than have ever existed in previous eras, are involved now.
Cory Doctorow has plenty of (imperfect) insight into some of these things.. a local bookstore and network of those used to be an answer.. evolution is not over
Viz in the UK had a long-running single frame comic called “rude kid” depicting a mother asking her son to do something and his response was some variation of “bollocks” or “fuck off.”
FF8 is a WEIRD game. It also was my introduction to the depth of power publishers have over the game review "independent" press.
FF8 was universally lauded by the major sites as the best JRPG since sliced bread. In reality it had an unlikeable lead character, an absolutely bizarre plot with time flashbacks that were totally nonsensical, the main party was composed of thoroughly unlikable teenagers, the plot twists about their shared mother was just dropped out of nowhere, the game mechanics required you to "junction" to a summon spirit to get things out of your backpack, leveling up was actually a bad thing, and ... just so much more. Cards. Draw grinding. Gunblades.
This VERY LONG review perfectly tears it apart, but, uh, warning it has epiteths like "fag" and others that date it to the teenage slang of the late 90s.
Huh? Nobody shared a mother, you set a limited amount of abilities in battle, one of which could be use item, but there was no restriction to your backpack out of battle.
I’ve played it basically every year since release, it scratches an itch that no other Final Fantasy does. It’s very marmite but it’s far, far from bad at all.
They were all in the same orphanage run by Edea, but only the gun guy remembered, the rest forgot due to (HANDWAVE) GF junction amnesia.
... it's kind of spectacularly good and bad at the same time. But it is bad. The spoony video shows how bad it is, and yet like you it is clear he's played the game MANY times.
Good stuff. In case you missed it, if I’m guessing right (I don’t know the show well), the lead character is obsessive/compulsive and would be wildly irritated if he knew that the videos about his life cannot be neatly displayed on a shelf because the last one’s spine was formatted differently from the others. Why did I need to make this post?
Subreddits can have their own individual ‘skins’ - i haven’t seen behind the scenes so I don’t know what that’s like to edit and what’s allowed, but - it’s definitely enough to achieve an effect like this.
Users can also opt out of subreddit specific styles.
Yes! As a victim several times of "nitpickers" on posts I've replied to on different sites, it's absolutely bonkers how far they will go to prove a point that wasn't ever brought up. After patiently explaining what I had written, usually several times in a variety of ways, some will contact the administrator and have the entire thread removed!
And FWIW loved Final Fantasy VIII. More then VII. The soundtrack was fantastic, I used to have an imported full orchestral arrangement that was in heavy rotation in my tweens.
Yeah I think FFVIII hit this really artistic note in a way that very few other games were able to at the time. I get that might not be everyone's cup of tea but it remains one of my favourite FF games.
I love this guy's web site. This is what the internet was really made for, grinding your own personal axe and venting your ancient, slightly obsessive, grudges.
A hard fact to digest is that if you have a website like this, content might not come as often as an audience expects.
Which nowadays doesn't work, as people are content crackheads, quality isn't that important anymore.
This article is just perfectly written, and the image at the end... nobody will read this and regret it later, but it is a story that doesn't happen every single day.
Fans of the FF games are very passionate about their favorite game(s). In the earlier days of the Internet, there were endless debates about VI vs VII. Those truly had an inspirational effect on people—but rarely in a good way. Or maybe it's just the perfect cross section of Internet-arguers and JRPG-obsessives that makes for insufferable, endless debates and ranking lists.
Anyway, enough beating around the bush. Here's my list (B tier and above):
I have many pages of good things to say about X-2. I love it very much. It's not as good as the masterpiece that was X, but it didn't need to be either. Defending X-2 as a great game is a hill I die on from time to time. Dress spheres were cool, revisiting the world and what fresh problems it has in the wake of newly found freedom, how they wrestle with the the realization that their religion was both corrupt and a sham, getting more insight into the Zanarkand-Bevelle war, and seeing the characters, especially Yuna, grow into her own person while dealing with the double whammy of her saviorhood and being given a lease on life she didn't expect to have.
btw Dark Souls 2 is the best in the trilogy, don't @ me
Yay, love the Chrono Trigger in the top 3. People always bring it up, either to say they love it or that it's overrated. It is not overrated! its correctly rated, it really is that good.
FFVII was great but it is an interesting contrast to games like FFVI / Chrono Trigger. The SNES games came out at the end of their console's lives and made the absolute most of what the hardware had to offer. FFVII was early-ish in the PSX life cycle and pushed JRPGs forward. There were some earlier 3d-ish JRPGs, sure, (wild arms was 1996) but FFVII would go on to define how those games would work for years. It became the prototype, but it also feels like a prototype in a lot of ways. It has a lot of jank. Some of those mini games just aren't fun anymore. The good news is all the stuff they learned about narrative in the previous generations was intact and carried the game where it might have other wise faltered.
Anyways, I still loooove FFVII a ton too. But it's good for different reasons than the later SNES games. Also FFVIII was a lot of fun too, and a much more solid 'game' than FFVII even if some systems were pretty breakable / exploitable.
Yeah, it’s hard to argue with the production value of Chrono Trigger. I debated putting it agead of VII, but the scope of that game is just too big. The story is more interesting, and the materia system is better than the combo system (imo).
Surprisingly no one complains about Tactics or CT being on the list, but they are really amazing even if they’re not “true” FF games.
I was one of the few people that bought Final Fantasy on Nintendo when it came out, well before the series was established. At the time it was great—and II was fine—but III really pushed the class system forward in a way that really defined all the games that came after.
Advance was simplified a bit and slightly less janky, but the AI in the original FFT is superb. I find the original FFT more interesting on a revisit, at least until you unlock Calculators/Arithmeticians and break the game. It does have one of the more egregious fist mission bumps[1] though.
[1] Tactics games often have a very easy tutorial mission, then drop you off in a first or second mission with an enormous difficulty bump. Sometimes even having a reverse difficulty curve, where the challenge spikes hard in the first mission, then slowly declines over the rest of the game.
Since 1995, Private Eye magazine has regularly run a picture of Andrew Neil wearing a baseball cap and vest, in the company of a younger woman, which he was supposed to find embarrassing. A long-running letters page joke is finding spurious reasons to reprint it.
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/blog/?m=201101
Great Stuff Guys! But I worry the concept of a long-running gag may be lost on today’s youth.
If you had some way to illustrate an aging joke, possibly situated near to something much younger (for comparison) I would be deeply obliged if you could print it on page 94 of your organ.
74 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadI wish more brands interacted with their audience in this human-like, friendly banter, playful sort of way, instead of the sterile corporate happy-speak as if the reply is a way to perform for an audience, or instantly trying to sell you multiple calls to action if you interact with them.
Source: Wizard comics did stuff like this all of the time.
And I’m sure brands wish they could do it without fear of being misinterpreted and causing a litany of issues for what amounted to a well meaning joke. No one wants to be the social media person that causes trouble for the company (and thus themselves) for being a bit too friendly to an unreasonable entitled prick.
Heck, I’ve seen it happen (more than once) in a support forum context where someone is a regular and always treated respectfully and helped whenever they ask, but one day the support person is a tad more relaxed (read: less corporate, more open and personal) in their communication and the customer is offended out of left field. Which then becomes stressful for the support person and naturally causes them to clam up in future communications.
Yes, big companies definitely take it too far in their frustratingly sterile I’ll-restate-everything-you-said-and-repeat-your-name-over-and-over direction, but “human-like, friendly banter, playful” is incredibly risky and not worth the stress.
I don't think he could call it harassment if he were still buying the new issues.
It’s one thing when it’s one-way, magazine -> audience, and the current edition is off of newsstands in a month or two. Once you throw in forums and social media then the public gets to shape the narrative.
Also, I love documentation on these obscure things from times passed. I'm not sure where else I would have ran into this, but I appreciate the author for writing this kind of thing down.
Instead we get 9000 identical sites regurgitating the same identical garbage; I want sites where I can enjoy people going into way too much detail about something they feel strongly about, like why steam engines were going to lose to diesel no matter what, because diesel can get traction going up an incline that a steam engine simply cannot do (and that detailed page is lost to me, I can't find it).
It's just how subreddits devolve to meme-reposting unless actively and strongly countered; forums were a bit better at that but you had to have active moderation.
You can find plenty of that as content, it just exists on platforms rather than individual sites, and mostly as video.
I don't have time to spend 30 minutes watching some in-depth video essay on a game, but I can read someone's blog for 5 minutes that hits all the relevant points.
lots of publishing history in different media tells the story. "Broadcast media" was always suspect from the point of view of artsy, sophisticated and niche circles.. and I do mean circles, because publishing, content creation, and fans are all different people and need each other to make it work. This has been done "well" over and over.. but in the digital realms the incentives and mechanisms are powerful in overwhelming ways. More people than have ever existed in previous eras, are involved now.
Cory Doctorow has plenty of (imperfect) insight into some of these things.. a local bookstore and network of those used to be an answer.. evolution is not over
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=6e8c819a630d1523&hl=en...
Went on for years and for all I know still continues today.
FF8 was universally lauded by the major sites as the best JRPG since sliced bread. In reality it had an unlikeable lead character, an absolutely bizarre plot with time flashbacks that were totally nonsensical, the main party was composed of thoroughly unlikable teenagers, the plot twists about their shared mother was just dropped out of nowhere, the game mechanics required you to "junction" to a summon spirit to get things out of your backpack, leveling up was actually a bad thing, and ... just so much more. Cards. Draw grinding. Gunblades.
This VERY LONG review perfectly tears it apart, but, uh, warning it has epiteths like "fag" and others that date it to the teenage slang of the late 90s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFTkY0IFL1g
I think he may have rereleased this at some point and cleaned it up of the unfortunate language.
I’ve played it basically every year since release, it scratches an itch that no other Final Fantasy does. It’s very marmite but it’s far, far from bad at all.
They were all in the same orphanage run by Edea, but only the gun guy remembered, the rest forgot due to (HANDWAVE) GF junction amnesia.
... it's kind of spectacularly good and bad at the same time. But it is bad. The spoony video shows how bad it is, and yet like you it is clear he's played the game MANY times.
…whatever
https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/ro5e6r/t...
Users can also opt out of subreddit specific styles.
And FWIW loved Final Fantasy VIII. More then VII. The soundtrack was fantastic, I used to have an imported full orchestral arrangement that was in heavy rotation in my tweens.
A hard fact to digest is that if you have a website like this, content might not come as often as an audience expects.
Which nowadays doesn't work, as people are content crackheads, quality isn't that important anymore.
This article is just perfectly written, and the image at the end... nobody will read this and regret it later, but it is a story that doesn't happen every single day.
Name checks out it seems haha
Anyway, enough beating around the bush. Here's my list (B tier and above):
1. Tactics
2. FFVII
3. Chrono Trigger
4. FFV
5. FFIII
6. FFVI
7. FFIV
btw Dark Souls 2 is the best in the trilogy, don't @ me
FFVII was great but it is an interesting contrast to games like FFVI / Chrono Trigger. The SNES games came out at the end of their console's lives and made the absolute most of what the hardware had to offer. FFVII was early-ish in the PSX life cycle and pushed JRPGs forward. There were some earlier 3d-ish JRPGs, sure, (wild arms was 1996) but FFVII would go on to define how those games would work for years. It became the prototype, but it also feels like a prototype in a lot of ways. It has a lot of jank. Some of those mini games just aren't fun anymore. The good news is all the stuff they learned about narrative in the previous generations was intact and carried the game where it might have other wise faltered.
Anyways, I still loooove FFVII a ton too. But it's good for different reasons than the later SNES games. Also FFVIII was a lot of fun too, and a much more solid 'game' than FFVII even if some systems were pretty breakable / exploitable.
Surprisingly no one complains about Tactics or CT being on the list, but they are really amazing even if they’re not “true” FF games.
https://www.nuklearpower.com/2001/03/02/episode-001-were-goi...
[1] Tactics games often have a very easy tutorial mission, then drop you off in a first or second mission with an enormous difficulty bump. Sometimes even having a reverse difficulty curve, where the challenge spikes hard in the first mission, then slowly declines over the rest of the game.
Wow. I literally gaped.
If you had some way to illustrate an aging joke, possibly situated near to something much younger (for comparison) I would be deeply obliged if you could print it on page 94 of your organ.
Also > At my day job as a video game history librarian
How did they do that one?