Super Fluke (Day 169)

I can't quite recall the final play time logged for Seiken Densetsu 3, but we did vanquish the final boss late last night after a short session. It was somewhere around 18 hours, but I don't think we made it to 20. I wish Secret of Mana kept track of the number of hours played so I could compare the two, but if I had to guess I'd say maybe it was a little longer. Still, as I have discussed at length already on this blog, SD3 is a pretty good game and the final battle was nice.

Both SoM and SD3 have above average soundtracks composed by Hiroki Kikuta. The final battle theme from SD3 in particular was really good, but there were plenty of memorable themes that contrast nicely with other popular soundtracks of the time. Uematsu's Final Fantasy themes are more immediately listenable and  Yasunori Mitsuda's Chrono Trigger tracks have a nice mystical quality. Kikuta's best work is heavy on percussion and is frequently tribal and energetic. He sometimes fails to hit the mark on the more peaceful compositions, though.

I think we're definitely going to play it again, but who knows when. Carlie/Lise/Angela (the charaters we didn't pick) is actually sounding like a nice composition for our next playthrough. The play style is almost exactly the opposite in that it is completely centered around spellcasting as opposed to melee combat. This probably happen until we've played a few other games. For the past few weeks we've been playing something just about every night after 9 o'clock or so--and that has remained fairly consistent. Who knows how long we'll keep it up. I'm unemployed and saddled with a ridiculous amount of free time, so I'm definitely game for the time being.

We started up Final Fantasy VI last night/this morning at my suggestion. After some deliberation on my part, I decided we should play the original American release. It's the version I'm most familiar with and I figured it would be best for him to play it first. I think I'd still like to try the more literal fan translation of the game at some point, but I'll tackle that on my own. There are also some hacks out there that increase the difficulty of the game that I'd be interested in trying. I'll definitely write about that when it happens.

It got pretty late, so we didn't make it terribly far. We escaped the caves of Narshe with Terra and Locke and made our way to Figaro Castle. After Kefka dropped in and ruined everyone's fun, the party (with Edgar in tow) made their way to the cave south of the castle astride some chocobos. It's interesting to observe my co-op partner's impression to one of my favorite video games of all time--while he's playing it for the first time ever. I'm actually a little concerned he won't like it since he's never been a huge turn-based RPG guy. He did like Chrono Trigger, but I feel like that's a very accessible RPG that has aged beautifully. It's hard for me to say the same about FFVI even if I still love it.

It's about 9:30 AM right now and I'm still up--because my sleep schedule is really bizarre at the moment. Honestly, it's been like this for awhile. I've been making sure to get up before 9 PM every night but beyond that I've been waking up at really random times. Sometimes I'll wake up right at 9 PM after having only slept three or four hours--and then I'll go back to sleep at around 3 or 4 AM.

I remembered earlier today that Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Blizzard's new digital card game went into open beta recently. I decided to download it and give it a try. I'm enjoying it so far, but I'll probably talk more about that later.