August already almost done... gonna get an article done too.
This is not about my favorite Dessert like food like cakes and puddings and stuff like that. This is more like that question "if you were on a deserted island and could ONLY take one thing......." except in this case the question is more like if you were on a deserted island and could only take ONE desert... which one would you take.
I've narrowed it down to three finalist for My Favorite Desert:
1. The Desert of Doom (from 1995's Secret of Evermore)
2. The Desert of Death (from 1997's Breath of Fire III)
3. The Dusty Dunes Desert (from 1994's Earthbound)
First off, you know you have a good desert if you have to name it... same goes in real life... like we have some decent deserts in real life like the Gobi desert.
Since this is a quick-draw McGraw style entry to this blog, I'm gonna gimmick the length a bit by making a rating system to judge these respective video game deserts. The rating system is as so:
Vastness:
Desertness:
Feel:
Music:
Oasis (Oasii):
Danger:
Bad Guys:
Desert Denizens:
It's hard to really explain my reasonings for these categorizations to rank my Deserts but... what we can do? You know? Honestly, "Feel", is probably best-most described at its source as a blatant "personal bias" which just gives me some wiggle room to put my favoritist one over in the end of the article.
Alright let us begin with an honorable mention...
....the year was 199X... and I programmed one of the most amateur video games ever made called The Legend of Liberace 3 for PC. Within this game, I had a Desert, which was a culmination of all three Deserts mentioned above MELDED together into one SUPER DESERT. It is an honorable mention as greatest desert. To be fair... the main coolest part of the desert was how cool it looked and the credit for that goes to my cousin who took my "template maps" that had all the events, programming, writing, etc. on them and beautified said maps using his gifts of the artistic persuasion. So, yes, before we continue, the Desert, from The Legend of Liberace 3, which combined all three of the above deserts into a massive unwieldingly great Super Desert should be given a brief mention.
Alright, let us now begin our Desert review, shall we?
The Desert of Doom
Secret of Evermore is an under-rated game in general. I bet no one in Japan has even played SquareSoft Hawaii's American aimed RPG and if they did they would probably just scoff at it. Then again, maybe not, as Live A Live is a comedy/parody RPG in its own right that I feel is very under rated and that one was only released in Japan and not US of A.
I feel comedy/parody RPGs other than Earthbound are rare and not highly remembered. My very own The Legend of Liberace 3 a parody/comedy ode to the SNES era of RPGs is barely even remembered and seems totally lost to sands of time.
Let's talk 'bout Secret now, Secret's desert was no joke, man. In Secret of Evermore... you and your dog are separated after Fire Eyes's evil twin geeky sister blows up a volcano and jettisons you and your dog skyward into uncertainty. When you both wake up... you are in some violent viking town and your dog has transmogrified into a fantastically well-bred greyhound and is in a faraway castle. To re-unite yourself with your best friend, your doggie, you have to cross the longest desert anyone, to that date, ever put into a video game.
This desert is no joke... and you know at the end of it is the town with that castle where your best friend is so you are not saving and coming back to it later... because... you miss your dog.... badly.
Bromide, some deserts 'aint even a joke, son. You take 5 units of damage every coupla seconds you spend in this dusty bad boy... and I have like 138 HPs in total, old friend... and those spiders and flying skulls? They do like 20 - 30 damage when they catch ya nappin' so you better have some petals or nectars ... or enough water and roots to cast Heal or you will not make it to the town and find your dog... you won't.
This desert doesn't end... and you start to think it's like a throw back to the NES days where you have to like go Left, Right, Left, Up to make it to the next screen (which to be frank was a dopey gimmick)... but no... this desert isn't gimmicked ... you have to keep walking upwards until you get to the end... and it NEVER ENDS.
This was the first desert that really made me put down the controller and turn inwardly to myself and wonder in the silence of my own mind..... "Is there an End?" not only to the desert but just in general? What if it's all a big game and there's no end to it!?
I'm gonna give its Vastness the highest possible rating because this is the only desert I can remember that truly felt endless and made me wonder if Life Itself was just a Great Big Cosmic Joke.
I can't say that Music is gonna fair well for Desert of Doom, it is like a Fallouty sorta windy wastelandy kind of ditty... and nothing to write home about. I see online many people remember the soundtrack of Secret of Evermore as being good... I don't think Evermore stood up to its Japanese counterparts in that regard where Final Fantasy had full orchestras making the battle songs. Evermore was more ambience than orchestra.
Vastness: 100
Desertness: 90
Feel: 75
Music: 55
Oasis (Oasii): 90
Danger: 100
Bad Guys: 70
Desert Denizens: 85
Overall: 83
Not bad for Desert of Doom... skeptics are gonna wonder why it lost so many points in so many categories and categorically disagree but I stand by the 55 in Music because it's just ambience and Fallouty and windy... nothing that really makes me say "Desert! Ya!" or anything to that extent.
The denizens are cool. There's a skeleton boatman who can row a boat over the desert and for some trinket amulet he'll take you across. There's a secret Oasis where an alchemy man in greek-guy antiquity robes will teach you the bumble bee spell that's actually pretty good. All in all the very few people you can meet in the desert are chill but mostly it's monsters and the monsters aren't that great... it's palette-swapped spiders and flying zelda skull guys mostly. The low-end scores, especially for music, which is ambient background noise more than music, are justified, and anyone who believes otherwise is allowed to but should start to think if ambient noise is really the way to go in an RPG.
I think I put "Feel" down a bit for the greyhood of the desert... it's the Desert of Doom alright... it is gloomy. To me a desert is more yellow... you know? The barren grayness of the sand matches the barren ambience and the vast lostness of it all... yet even if you tie the whole scene together does it make it good? Sometimes a little contrast is needed, you know?
It's a good desert.
The Desert of Death
Breath of Fire III is a good game. Personally I rank the Breaths of these Fires as such:
1. Breath of Fire 2
2. Breath of Fire 3
3. Breath of Fire 1
4. Breath of Fire 4
5. Breath of Fire 1/4
I debated including Breath of Fire (Dragon's Quarter?) in this list as it killed the franchise dead on arrival. Murdered it.
Breath of Fire 2 is truly one of my all-time favorite video games... and I'm a traditionalist who does NOT prefer the new-age mainstream or fan-made amateur translations of it. Breath of Fire 2 was MEANT to be played with the clunky, hokey, clanging, burgundy-boxed, purply-boxed, ridiculous translation that it had in 1994.
One of all time favorite scenes of writing in a video game comes from the meticulously poorly translated script of Breath of Fire 2... which the clunkiness and hokiness and complete almost slob-like clumsiness of the text just makes this scene so memorable. When Rand tries to sacrifice himself for the greater good of the party.... but then his mom shows up to take the self-sacrifice for him... the dialogue between Rand and Rand's Mom is the best. I love it. I love that scene.... and I bet in the re-translated versions it is not nearly as memorable as in the original translation.
Forget Breath of Fire 2 though, we're talking about the desert of Breath of Fire 3... which used a gimmick that was becoming popular in Playstation RPGs of the time which was in 3D (which prior to the late nineties no RPGs were 3D)... in which it was hard to situate yourself if you rotated the screen... so their desert had a compass to some extent. There were stars in the sky and you knew you were walking north if you could see the North star... and thus you could only walk at night and slept throughout the day.
This isn't a desert, this is an Experience. This is probably how you cross a Gobi in real life, you know? Sleep all day and then walk at night when it's cooler and chiller... and you can see the north star so you have an internal compass in case you accidentally rotate the screen on yourself.
Yo, they pull that in Final Fantasy Seven too where like you are going through the snowy fields, and there's this tent in the middle that has another "All" materia, but they rotate the screen ON YOU! You have to situate yourself in FF7 with like orange colored poles.
I was a big Garr-head in this game, probably as a bleed-over from being a HUGE Rand-head in Breath of Fire 2. Garr is that big monster-dude sitting in the back of the tent near the sleeping bags in that photo north west of this paragraph. There's a part where Garr tries to murder you because he's the last of the Dragon Hunter Men and the lead character (you) is the Last Dragon Man... but I forgave him quick because he's a cool guy. Rei, the guy sharpening the knife is cool too, my party was mainly Three Men in this game, not because I'm a chauvinist (I was a big Nina-head in Breath of Fire 2, for example) but because Garr and Rei are cool in this game.
I want Evermore to win at least one category so I will rank the Vastness as 95 for Desert of Death...
Vastness: 95
Desertness: 100
Feel: 90
Music: 90
Oasis (Oasii): 80
Danger: 100
Bad Guys: 85
Desert Denizens: 50
Overall: 87
Danger-wise, you have, if memory serves me right, like 16 portions of water in your flask, which can be filled at Oasii and if you drink too much and run out you will start getting damage as you walk... so the danger is there and I do remember Game Overing I think when I played this back in Le Day.
I don't remember anyone living in this desert, but I could be mistaken here, I haven't re-played Three in a good dose of time, baba. I do not remember people living in this desert.
The bad guys are okay... like palette swap the green lizard mans for like golden lizard mans? That works. I like the attention to desert detail when you palette-swap the lizard mans like this. I dig it. Because if you fight those lizard mans in the forest, guess what? They are green those lizard mans.
Music wise? It already blasted a good thirty points ahead of Evermore here... they have wind ambience, which honestly is a given, and for Evermore to just use wind ambience as the SOLE music of their desert is sort of phoned-in and a bit low-class, yet to a minimalist they probably love Evermore's desert music. Me? I dig Three's more better. They start with wind ambience and build on it. They have some native drum beats... and not even like stereotypical like Arabic like Sheik of Araby stereotype stuff... like they got tribal drum beats going... like tom-tum-tam-beek.... yeah... like that... tom-tom-tum-ta-na-beek! I'm already digging it... and then they do a third layer on the ambient wind and the tribal taps.... they do a little geet-geet... just a little guitar... not too much... just enough to keep you from falling asleep as you walk through this desert for the next hour or two.
I had it at 80 the music... I'm going back up to adjust that to 90... I'm listening to it as I write right now... and I'm into it... my hands and words are flowing like a calm desert's night. Yo, there's better songs in Breath of Fire Three too.... I remember you go to this junk town where these junk men pull ancient junk out of the water on the coast and the theme to this town is full on and full out funky jazz. Not fake like funky jazz but like legit like professional ass stuff. I'm gonna search for junk town jazz and see if I can pull it up, baba.
They got pan flutes in this stuff... like full on fully out funky jazz with pan flutes... like it's very good the music in this game. There's one with funky splappin' bass in some junky town... and it's like... you walk into this town and are like "who lives in this town? Marcus Miller? Does he live here? Does Larry Graham live in this coastal junk town just fishing out wrecks and funk slappin' on his bass? What's with this great-ass music!?" I'm gonna try and find some nice Breath of Fire III numbers....
Atomic Power is okay, I don't think this is the one though....
Hmmm.... you want some Funky Ambience? Try some "These Little Things" ... that's not bad ... this number is speaking to me:
I can't find the funk that I'm thinkin' 'bout, bootsy baba. Maybe I will find it more later. The people at Over-Clocked remix did Breath of Fire 3 once, I remember, and they really brought out that funk which is present in these tracks.
As for people asking about the "90" for "Feel"... I just felt that this was a desert. That's all.
The Dusty Dunes Desert
You might already know that I like Earthbound. It is more than a video game... it is way more than that... it's bigger than that... and back in the day when people like Roger Ebert would say that video games could never be art... truthfully... they don't get it ... they don't. They just... don't GET it.
This song...
The ambience to build on here in this song? It wasn't wind... there's something almost resembling wind but it's not wind... it wasn't like our first two entries. The ambience they used as layer-one of their building block was not wind... but.... the noise of trying to tune into a radio frequency somewhere along the Arizona and Mexico border and getting odd modulations of feedback from the changing geography and radio waves.
The tonal modulations are more normal to the human ear in modern travel then we care to even realize. This sound is more deserty than we'd like to admit. Does "wind" really make a good building block for desert ambience noise? In modern 2000s or even 1900s travel? No. Dissonant yet almost melodic modulations of foreign (yet not so foreign in a few minutes when you cross the border and the radio waves come in better) radio stations is much more normal to a modern human ear than wind. This is true ambience here. True modern ambience... that is then built upon with a wonky yet likeable synth melody. I like this song. Probably gonna give it like 95, man.
Vastness: 75
Desertness: 80
Feel: 100
Music: 95
Oasis (Oasii): 90
Danger: 85
Bad Guys: 85
Desert Denizens: 100
Overall: 88
Danger is there but you can buy Wet Towels in case you catch Sun Stroke so it's not that dangerous...
Denizens gets a smooth full 100 because you meet so many great people in this place. The miners who need you to beat the moles so they can find that diamond that let's you pay your favorite blues band's debts for a second time, the cave of monkeys who teach you how to teleport, the religious guru who tells you all the secrets of life (not joking, the Talah Rama really does do this), you can find Penetella Giovanni's contact lenses, bleached dead bones who will talk to you, sun bathers in bikinis, a monster who is this game's closest equivalent to metal slimes, a three man human mariachi-band/slot-machine, many gift-wrapped presents, a drugstore (all foreigners even in Europe are fascinated why America calls the place we buy shaving cream and stuff a "drug" store), an uncooth weapons trafficker, and of course a black and a white sesame seed.
You are.
If you cared enough to relay these broken hearted seeds's thoughts to each other from one end of the desert to the other... the empathy that exists in your most human of hearts is unquenchable.
Through separation, isolation... these sesame seeds love still existed. They just needed you to be the messenger to relay this! I don't remember if Final Fantasy 6 came out before or after Earthbound but you can do something similar, albeit less totally purely great, in that game with the Mobliz letters.
Personally, I think Earthbound changed the genre of RPGs more than any other game. It did.
I gave the Feel a tight and fully deserved 100... because this desert? It FELT like a desert, YA!
A CHALLENGER APPEARS!!!!!
No, I'm sorry but this article is over, Earthbound won with an 88 defeating Breath of Fire III and The Secret of Evermore.... it's a closed book, the page is turned, okay?
The challenger is Mother One AKA Earthbound Zero? The pre-cursor and proto-version of Earthbound? Alright Mother One, I shall humor your challenge to be the best desert, plead you case.
So, you're telling me you can bypass this long-winding desert in your game? You can skip the desert, just like in Secret of Evermore... but not with a skeleton boatman but with a reckless bi-plane pilot with a cool theme song? Alright... alright... okay... let's negotiate here, Mother One, let's say this bi-plane-over-the-desert song is cool... which it probably isn't ... because I'm pretty confident it's not... but even if it is.... it's not enough to make me reconsider this entire article... but I'm a reasonable man, Mother One, so if your song is as good as you claim... I will henceforth renounce Earthbound as the winner and give you an automatic 90 Overall for your Desert. What is it? The Yucca Desert? Not a bad name. Oh ok, so, your theme song of the desert is the same one from Earthbound but without the very-good Mexican radio ambience in the background? Oh yeah? That's good? Pshaw, I say. That's not gonna win you any trophies, brother. What else you got going for you? I can step on a land mine which seems to be an instant game-over but then the creator of the game felt bad about doing this so wrote a personal apology to the player after you step on this desert land mine? That might win you some "Feel" points, Yucca desert. Yeah. So lemme get this straight, your bi-plane bypass theme song to fly over the desert is that good, huh? Pffft, I'll believe when I see it, Yucca Desert.... if that's even your REAL NAME!
Okay there big shot... let's hear your bi plane song if it's that good, my friend....
....
Oh.... okay. Yeah, I see what you mean. Damn, it's even short enough a song to be my new cell phone ring too. Imagine someone calls me on my cell phone and this comes on? I'd probably answer it in like 10 seconds. Mother One... this desert bypass bi-plane isn't a song... it's an ANTHEM!
I think I'm gonna listen to this on loop on youtube for the next hour! Okay... I give in Yucca Desert... you win. A promise is a promise, Yucca Desert. I just can't listen to this when I walk along the bike path though... my walk is liable to get too funky, Yucca desert.
Final Assessment
Yucca Desert: 90
Dusty Dunes Desert: 88
Desert of Death: 87
Desert of Doom: 83
Congratulations to my dear friend, Yucca Desert, for their come-from-behind, or come-from-out-of-nowhere even, victory in this article about Deserts.
