Random Roar: Life’s Work

From the desk of a squirrel named Rusty

 

A squirrel only lives for about five to ten years out in the wild, but why would you want to live out there when you can double your lifespan in a home like mine?  Wild squirrels are stupid squirrels.

A twenty year life feels like a lot for me, but when Tiger tells me about games like Duke Nukem Forever, which was announced in 1997 and released in 2011… squirrels don’t live fourteen years in the wild unless they’re strong like Ulysses and even some squirrels like me don’t reach fourteen years old when living in a human home.  Humans will sometimes talk about their life’s work, but it almost never consists of one specific thing.  To a squirrel like me, working fourteen years on just one game would very literally be called my life’s work.  I would not have time to start anything else, and chances are, I might not have the time to even finish it.

Tiger also told me about the hellish process that was Final Fantasy XV‘s development, which started in 2006 and was finally released in 2016.  He told me about Kingdom Hearts III, which was announced in 2013, but which was being planned as far back as 2005.  Fourteen years later, Tiger finally got to buy and play it.  If he was a squirrel who bought the first game in the series when it came out, he would likely not have survived long enough to play the supposed end of the trilogy.  I say “supposed end” because I watched him play it.  That game answered very few questions and just piled more on.  It looked like a mess in places, but he seemed to understand it and maybe I should’ve paid more attention when he replayed the other games.  He tells me he’s going to go back and play them again for his big project, and I guess this is his version of “life’s work”?

Anyway, to hear it like he tells it, video games are just taking longer and longer to make, and although humans live a lot longer than squirrels, not even humans live forever.  One of the examples I’ve been given by Tiger is the Shenmue series, which released its third game eighteen years after the second.  It’s a series which contains one single narrative from beginning to end, a narrative which apparently didn’t end with the third game (I didn’t see Tiger play it, but he still brings it up sometimes), but its creator is pretty old for a human and there’s no guarantee he’s going to live another twenty years to put out a fourth Shenmue.

That’s what I don’t understand about humans.  They seem to think they have as much time as they want, so they’ll invest themselves in large projects that take years to finish and which they can’t even guarantee they’ll survive to see the end of.  “Author Existence Failure” is something which has hit creators like Osamu Tezuka (cutting Phoenix short), Robert Jordan (putting The Wheel of Time in jeopardy until another author stepped up to finish it), Geoffrey Chaucer (what everyone calls The Canterbury Tales is an incomplete volume of stories), Sue Grafton (she wrote 25 books in a 26 book series and then kicked the bucket before she could write the last one) and so on.  If there were squirrels like me who tried to create things, the world would be littered with half-finished squirrel projects and it would be a miracle if anything substantial could actually be made.

It feels really strange to me to just wait for something.  How can humans be patient enough to let a decade or more go by before something’s finished?  I can’t imagine hearing about something awesome and then needing to wait ten years before I can finally see it.  To me, that would be like a human having to wait forty years in order to fulfill their curiosity.  Forty years!  That’s four tens, and if you’re waiting that long for something, that’s terrible!

Tiger assures me that there’s a better pedigree behind a game he’s now waiting for, Final Fantasy XVI.  It’s being worked on by someone who has a proven track record of finishing projects and actually delivering them within a time frame even a squirrel would find reasonable, but I haven’t heard anything new about it in months.  Tiger tells me that it’s likely because Yoshi-P (that’s the name of the guy working on it) is focused on promoting the new Final Fantasy XIV expansion, so I expect to hear more about Sixteen once Endwalker is out.

While I wait for more squirrel representation in games – and this is something that I’m well aware I might not live long enough to see – I should focus on things that someone of my relative life span can reasonably anticipate.  That’s why I love watching Tiger play Final Fantasy XIV and why I help him with his crafting.  There’s always something new for the game coming out every few months and it gives a squirrel like me something to look forward to without worrying that I’ll die of old age before it’s out.

On that note, I really should get Tiger to play more of the Atelier series, too.  Unlike games that take years to come out like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, a brand new Atelier game comes out every year.  That’s a game developed relatively from scratch, new every year.  They might recycle the engine and some assets within trilogies in order to reduce costs during development, and it looks like much was shared between the Atelier Iris and Mana Khemia games, but this seems to have helped and not hurt Atelier.  The games are different enough from each other that no one is accusing the series of being derivative garbage like they do with well known franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty.  Apparently most of them are pretty decent, too.  They’re not considered any of the big greats like Dragon Quest and other games already mentioned, but Tiger seems to like casual games of questionable quality, so a series that gets reviews that range from average to a bit above average sounds like something he’ll love, especially if a new one comes out every year.

And while we play those, I can only hope I live long enough to see the games Tiger’s most excited about.

 

 

“There.  Was that long enough, Tiger?”