Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, the PSP version of FFT, is among the best writings I have ever seen, in a game or otherwise. A few very rare mistakes overlooked, it is spectacular: the plot is better explained, the characterization is far more fitting, even the sometimes overly poetic lines look perfectly in place:
“Back whence you came! Quick as shadows, or this one’s blood makes crimson snow! Do not think to try my patience! This keep packs such a store of powder as you could scarce imagine! More than enough to deliver the lot of you to the Father’s keeping, should your feet lack proper haste!”
The original PSX game was grand on its own. The PSP version is grand twice, and part of the reason is the new translation. Another part is the inclusion of animated sequences in place of some cutscenes, with English dubbing far exceeding any expectations and a beautiful style of animation and coloring. I would happily watch a movie or anime series of that. Square should make an anime of it indeed.
Another game that should be made into an anime is Xenosaga – the whole trilogy, in fact. Not because it is as good as FFT, but to spare players from it. I tried the third installment, despite having never played the first two: after sitting in front of my TV with the control-pad in my hands for around four hours, I had played effectively for less than one hour. Dismayed, I looked around the web for information, to see if the whole game was like that, and found it was worse: I do not remember exactly, but I recall something about a special edition of the third game bringing DVDs with cutscenes from the previous two games, totaling over twenty hours of animation. That is over 40 episodes and they were only 2/3 into the story! Why not just release an anime series instead?
Back to the PSP, however. Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth is the PSP release of the PSX’s original. In all honesty, I never quite understood the success of the original. If you land in any town in search of plot, you waste a tick of the timer, and each tick lost is less experience you gain, less chance to please the gods with the warrior you send. With this, only each character’s personal story gets told, with Lenneth’s set aside most of the time. One secret character in special, whose background relates to the Valkyrie’s, requires completely arbitrary order of visits to places the player would never otherwise visit. It makes me wonder how anyone ever found the best ending.
Other than that, though, Valkyrie Profile is good, yes, albeit repetitive at times. Chaining long combos with multiple finishing strikes breaks the monotony now and then, but even that can get old. “Purify Weird Soul” is funny the first few dozen times, but moments later the horrid dub comes up with the same voices that dubbed Pokemon in the US; the guy that says “W-w-wow, everyone’s so tough!” at the end of each battle is said to have played Ash Ketchum – I wonder how Pokemon has any fame at all in the US with a protagonist dubbed like that.
(Which reminds me: in the American dub of Pokemon, they always stress the beginning of words. “PI!-kachu, THUN!-dershock!”. I wonder if Americans normally yell like that. “MA!-ry, WHE!-re are you?, CO!-me back here!”.)
Still, not only does Valkyrie Profile punishes the player for trying to go deeper into the plot, what it does deliver is translated very poorly (dubbing aside). The fairy Freya leaves behind in the cave as a tutorial for Lenneth even has notes and doubts from the translator! “If you have any doubt, ask HIM/HER.”, “(should I talk about whipping a dead horse?)”.
Like Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP, Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth gained new animated sequences, but they add nothing but eye-candy. I believe they have no dialogue, even, and exist only to justify a re-release of the game and show the PSP’s UMD can store more pre-rendered video than the PSX’s CD. “But surely the bad dubbing was redone for VP:L”, I thought, and I was wrong. “At least the horrid fairy translation notes must be fixed!”, I hoped, but to no avail at all. Everything is exactly the same as the original game. Even the characters’ menu appear stretched, because the PSP is in widescreen format – faced with that, I actually wonder if the scenes and game sequences they did convert to widescreen format indeed got wider or simply got cut above and below.
Back when VP:L was released, the PSP needed good games, not direct PSX ports with a handful of new CGI animation. FFT offered many improvements over the original; VP:L just exists to prevent a proper PSP version from being released.
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