confidentialmisanthropy

I have a bad habit of not thinking very far ahead. I've known the DS launch date for quite a while but it didn't dawn on me 'til Monday that I had duty on the 2nd. So I scored a DS yesterday, for fear of going out Friday and being up shit creek.

There's a wanpaku just spit shy of the base. I've bought some GBA stuff from them before. I went up to the counter there and saw stacks of DS boxes in the back. The guy behind the counter wasn't game for breaking the street date however. This kinda ticked me off. But I had other options. The place I picked up Mawaru! from in October isn't a chain like wanpaku and it's run by a really old couple and I figured they'd be more receptive of my ¥15,000.

And I was right.

I got Mr. Driller and SM64DS. Both of which I find a bit undewhelming for different reasons. I'll write about it on @ GL. It'll be a good read. I promise.

After I got my DS I figured I'd walk around Yokosuka a bit. Usually I just grab the train and take it to Tokyo or just stay on base but I had time to kill and didn't feel like riding the train. I went by a newsstand and held a Famitsu for the first time ever. They're pretty thick. I don't know if they're that thick all the time but it seems pretty stacked for a weekly magazine. They had an interview with Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu, both of which left Squenix recently. Tim Rogers said:

It seems they're making a "new franchise" for Sakaguchi's new company. Uematsu will handle the music, Sakaguchi the direction. It is rumored that Yoshitaka Amano will be the character designer.

A whole lot of revelations in that interview. I mean, back when Tetsuya Nomura became the character designer for Final Fantasy VII, the explanation they fed everyone was "Amano's art wouldn't work in a 3D setting." Naw, that warn't the truth -- it was really "We think some frat boys in America might be put off by Amano's limp-wristed girly men." I mean, really they could have given him a chance -- had Amano's art ever even worked in a 2D setting? You couldn't tell what monster sprites were half the time. We used to have arguments about what was a leg and what was a knife or whatever.

It was great stuff.

Final Fantasy has outgrown the visions of its creators and become a "hot property." Almost no one on the original teams is involved, and the artistic vision is finally getting back on the track that Amano had it barreling down toward the end of Final Fantasy VI. Yet now there is this little company Sakaguchi's starting.

It looks like Sakaguchi, now with millions of dollars of experience and a historically collosal failure at directing a movie, is back to square one. He's back to where he was when he made the original Final Fantasy. So I think -- maybe something good is going to happen now. Maybe he'll make a good game. Maybe a great one.

Maybe.

I finally stumbled upon the Yokosuka Yoshinoya. I still don't know how to pronounce what I order there, although it's always the same thing. I just kinda point at what I want and say, "kore... okii... arrigato gozaimas". Last time the old guy next to me looked at me and said, "Japanese... well." And nodded.

I think he was just trying to be nice. Most people just stare at me.