Super Mario Bros 3: Brick by Brick - A book about gaming that made me not want to write about games

Let it be known forthwith that I am what Bob Chipman might have considered in his younger years as his rival. I am, after all, a Sonic fan, and my main nostalgic fueled repartees include the little blue guy. But,unlike (?) Chipman, my brother and I owned an SNES, a Genesis, and a Playstation. So I did play the Mario games and I can appreciate them. I'm not good at them, but I can appreciate them. By the way, I won't say stuff like "Let it be known forthwith" anymore, but just FYI, that kind of faux knowledgeable-ness is what I got out of the book so... yeah. That's how I chose to start this. This is probably gonna be slightly more serious than, say, my review of Style Savvy. So I mean bail now, suckers, 'cause this shit's about to be long and boring. Read something else I wrote, maybe? Oh! Go back to what you were doing before. Do you need help? Because I can help.

I'm serious, BAIL.

You're still here, huh? I'm so sorry. I really am. I wanted to start every paragraph with I'm so sorry, but I realized that that would stop being funny. I can't guarantee this will be good. Or great. This book made me physically exhausted. I'm not even sure it's really like, that bad. I just... I dunno. But I'm sorry.

I read this book, Super Mario Bros 3: Brick by Brick, mostly because I hadn't known Bob Chipman as a game reviewer. Like, I don't really pay attention to media of any kind unless someone I know is excited about it.  The exception being Sonic because no one I know cares about Sonic. I would be so lucky if someone wrote a love note in the form of a novel about Sonic CD... but there's enough of those "[Franchise] and Philosophy" type books that makes me think I'm OK without a loving send off to my favorite Sonic game. All this besides the point, I read this book because I thought it would be by a guy who loved games but didn't know much about them, you know, that kind of thing? Then I thought it would examine how Super Mario Bros. 3 (SMB3) was made... you know, referencing that "Brick by Brick" part of the title. This was not that.

I started reading this a long time ago, put it down and promptly forgot about it because it's not that great. But after I read an excerpt and put it down, even though I was still playing games I just never felt like writing about them anymore. This after a friend generously gifted me a game on Steam. I just was done with writing. I couldn't anymore. I had stuff in the works, it's still here, all unfinished and hard to look at. I was going to review Frantic Antics for Genesis, that was a game I recall my brother and I just giving up on. The Power Rangers game for SNES, like a full on beat-'em-up that we loved to play. I was going to review Ninja Turtles, which I had played with my film buff, Ninja Turtle fanatic friend I think twice and was itching to play again. I had started writing a bit on Don't Starve, which another friend of mine gifted to me because she wanted to see what I'd do with it. I had been researching the game at the time, and I don't think I played it even ONCE in the time after I got this book. I stopped playing all of the games I was planning on playing when I started reading this book. It just turned me off of them. I didn't stop gaming. I just stopped gaming with the intention to write.

Bob Chipman had been working for Escapist at the time. I liked Yahtzee, although not his opinions all the time. So I was on the Escapist for a good deal of time. I watched Jimquisition which I thought was interesting (with a great theme song). Then I found The Big Picture, one of his video series on Escapist. He also had Escape to the Movies, but I wasn't interested in that one. I liked The Big Picture. I thought Bob was a movie reviewer/analyst, not a games one. He, like the others who had written books, shamelessly plugged his book in his videos. I was interested in it, but not enough to buy it. It was $10 I had but I wasn't willing to put in his pocket. I liked the guy, but not that much. Eventually I lost interest in Yahtzee and stopped going to the Escapist.

Alright, if you read this far I'm going to spare you the rest of my life story discovering Bob Chipman, because who fucking cares right? Exactly. Well, the first like 86 or so pages of SMB3: Brick by Brick is basically this. It's a history of Bob's life and what Mario was doing at the time. Just like what I've written above, it has jack shit to do with the majority of the rest of the book. From here on I'll (try to) actually review the book for real, and all this crap about how I personally was introduced to Bob Chipman and how no one cares about Sonic means nothing in respect to the actual content. I wrote my intro that way because this is how a massive chunk of the book comes off to me. As far as I can tell, Bob did this as a device to frame the book in a "loving" type embrace. He wants you to see him as this ultimate lover of Mario-- the old Mario, the classic Mario-- who became disillusioned when Mario seemed to lose to Sonic and the Genesis (when was this? Did I miss this?) and eventually came back when the new Mario games resembled the older ones again.

To be perfectly fair, an introduction to how the game is connected to the author isn't a bad idea, but... not for 86 pages. There are 208 pages in my digital copy of the book, and I stopped reading the first time within the first 86 pages. And this stuff has nothing to do with SMB3, so like... just why, why would you put me through this? For an introduction, maybe 10 pages would've sufficed. On top of that, looking at the cover, what I expected from this book was some talk about the levels, the enemies, the history, and then probably an explanation as to how SMB3 is better than Sonic 3 and Knuckles by any definition of the phrase "greatest game ever made". I would say from that generation of games, the contender that Sonic 3 and Knuckles was going up against was Super Mario World... but that's just me though.

Instead the book starts with "the history," as part one is "A Brief History of Mario". Then part two is about Bob Chipman's life. He coins this part "My Life in the Mushroom Kingdom" but I mean it would have been much more interesting if he was on mushrooms or in Alice in Wonderland's Wonderland and that was what this part was about. Instead it's an auto-biography about some guy on the internet. This is different from, say, Fat Girl by Judith Moore. Where in that book she makes it perfectly clear that the book was about her and only her-- her struggles with her weight, her food issues, her image issues-- and sticks to that premise, this book set itself up as a book about SMB3 and instead there's a good portion of it that's just lollygagging around with Chipman and reading a history that I think Wikipedia did a better job summarizing. Part three was called "The Game" which encompassed "the levels" and "the enemies" part written on the cover. You know, until you get to part four, called "Super Mario Bros. 3: Beginning to End," which is of course... the levels and how you beat them Bob Chipman style.

I think maybe that the theme underlying the entire book was that SMB3 was "the greatest game of all time," but being a GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) is something that requires proof. Proof that Chipman doesn't really... give, like he's saying that it's his favorite and that's cool and all, but that doesn't mean that you get to decide what is or isn't a GOAT of a generation. My favorite Zelda game is Majora's Mask and my favorite Sonic game is Sonic CD. I know that the GOAT of each of those series isn't my favorite game, though. Chipman doesn't seem to have the awareness that just because he likes something doesn't mean it's a GOAT, but also that just because something isn't a GOAT doesn't mean that it isn't iconic.

BUT IS HE, THOUGH?

And I think part of the issue I had can be found in the introduction, where he does this "why even do this" retrospective type intro (by the way, this introduction wasn't in the table of contents, usually one would at least have "Introduction" in the table of contents) in which he's saying stuff like "It would probably make more sense to look at his career as a whole and not at one game," and "This isn't even the most important Mario game in any sense of the term," all of which are things that personally, I would hesitate to mention. He starts by saying "Why write a book about Super Mario Bros. 3? I'm going to assume somebody is asking that question. I am, and I'm the one writing the damn thing."

But I'm not asking that, and if someone is the answer to the question is pretty simple. He's written this book because he loves SMB3. Isn't that basically the only reason to write a book about one particular game in a series that isn't the highest grossing, the most troubling, the best selling, or any sort of record breaker as someone who isn't a novelist or a historian?

The introduction is a slog of a piece, though. He eventually says "I'm doing it because no one else has done it" even though people have done this very thing. Just not in novel form. People have critiqued games like this one in great detail. Some of them do it in videos, others in blog posts, some have written articles, and others through talks. But the idea that no one has looked deeply into games and really seen them for what they were to a generation is laughable. Chipman's entire job hinged on that. So I guess this was more like a "fuck ya'll, you ain't doin' it right" kind of move?

The collective response to Chipman, as written by Big Sean.

What stood out to me the most in the introduction aside from the opening sentences being a critical miss as far as getting the audience interested is concerned was also a lot of thesaurus pounding and editing errors. I mean, I'm writing this online for a bunch of my friends to see. The chances that people are going to see this who aren't directly in some way related to me or my friend group are low. As such, sentence structure, spelling errors, grammatical faux pas-- that doesn't matter right now to me. I do try to keep on top of it, but I start sentences with and, plus I do have sentence fragments, and you know there are comma splices. I believe Chipman has only written in this kind of format, though. If he views his fans as his friends and has a similar leniency as far as grammar goes, then I assume his blog is also overrun with grammatical mistakes. But this is a book that was being sold to people, for the love of God. It was to go out to not just his fans, but to masses. Granted, it wasn't as though Chipman got it published through a publishing company (I believe it's published by Fangamer, so I suppose it's akin to self publishing in that sense) so there was probably no expectation that anyone outside of his fans would read it, no editor who read it and said, "What is this?" and no proofreader who could look it over and say, "Stop using ellipses, they have strict guidelines as to when they can be used like every other grammatical structure."

He tends to sway towards "big" words over using ones that people might better understand or even ones that he might better understand. For example, he calls Shigeru Miyamoto iconoclatic, meaning characterized by attack on cherished beliefs or institutions. Maybe he did demolish some walls back in the day when Mario was being made, but "iconoclast" is more or less synonymous with "critic," "renegade," and "dissenter."  Miyamoto isn't really these things, in respect to his creations.

I'm dragging because the next two parts are literally why I stopped writing this blog. I'm serious, it's pretty bad. Bail now. Do it!

In a weird, almost reverent way, I think Chipman does view Miyamoto as a God among Man. He writes the creation of Mario as though he was trying to divine it from ancient scrolls. I know of Miyamoto because he created some of the GOATs in video games, but I don't really talk with video game designers who have made popular games like The NEW Super Mario Bros. I can't really say that people talk about him in whispers like he's a sorcerer who deigned himself to walk among the filth of man. Most people I know are equally likely to have criticized his work as they were to praise him. I think people admire him, but can still recognize his humanity. Chipman seems like he's unable to see Miyamoto as a human. Chipman sees Mario as a "perfect creation" come from a "perfect being" in a way that is almost revolting considering that Chipman was an adult when this was written.

It takes two pages to explain how Miyamoto created Mario, even though in the second paragraph on the first page, Chipman basically tells us exactly how it happened: Miyamoto thought up Mario himself. Literally all Chipman had to do after that was explain the first game Mario was in, but instead he writes Psalms about Miyamoto. It's annoying. I like Miyamoto, but not this much.

And in the third world he rose again, in accordance with his programming.

Going on, Chipman explains in many, many words how Mario appeared in a few other games before SMB3. This is the very thing he said the book wouldn't be. This book was claiming to have something in it that I felt I would be interested in, a story of the history of SMB3. SMB3 was the draw for the movie The Wizard, so I thought there would be some interesting backstory as to why they decided to make a movie to promote the game... or you know, some fascinating insight into what it took to make SMB3. But... no, Chipman just says in far too many words the same things that I already knew coming in. And I will admit that maybe someone somewhere got this book and wasn't already aware of these things. But they've been better written and summarized elsewhere. Plus, he said in the introduction that he wasn't going to be writing about Mario's career. But here we are reading about Mario's career!

He talks briefly about how the evil, nasty SEGA corporation created Sonic the Hedgehog, whose games were "edgy" (they were marketed that way) and made Nintendo seem "uncool" and how SEGA got the lucrative, full blood version of Mortal Kombat for the Genesis because of their painting of Nintendo as old stogy types. It was war, the Great Console War of 91. And then Sony, taken aback by Nintendo's betrayal after showing a system Nintendo had partnered with them to make and then back out of, created the Playstation in 94. How could they?

You MONSTER! Nintendo suffered at your hand. REPENT!

I mean his history is trying its best to be unbiased, but he keeps painting Nintendo like it's some underdog. Nintendo has been basically riding on nostalgia for years. The reason they can do that is because even back then when people were like, "Aww, Sonic's so edgy and cool," and "Mortal Kombat was ported to the Genesis," the most iconic games were still on Nintendo platforms. I mean Megaman was on Nintendo for a while. Final Fantasy. Mario. Zelda. These were/are all Nintendo franchises. Nintendo's GameBoy system is literally the only system that ended up with a successful set of handhelds following it (Sorry SEGA Game Gear. PSP did OK, considering) where there were even more games in these franchises to play. And even though Final Fantasy moved to Sony, they still published games like Tactics Advance (an amazing game, mind you) to the GameBoy Advance. Nintendo was never an underdog in this respect. But whenever Mario seems to be flagging in history, Chipman treats this like Nintendo's entire company suddenly went under.

Part two starts by explaining that Chipman and Mario were "born" in the same year. Chipman says "I can't remember a world without Mario" and to be fair, I can understand this. This is something that should have been in the introduction though.

Chipman explains that he wasn't a gamer as a child, but one of his friends had an NES and he saw the first Mario game he ever played, Super Mario Bros., and was immediately hooked. He couldn't get an NES right away, so he had to settle for playing with his dad's Atari system. But one day, he got an NES. He says he couldn't remember the hows or whys, just that there was a period when he didn't have an NES and a period when he did have one. All of this would have worked in the introduction, seriously.

The rest of this is stuff that really doesn't matter in the scheme of things. I'm glad I didn't pay for this, because it's just nothing to do with the focus of the book, SMB3. Never mind that he didn't like The Super Mario Bros. Super Show-- Were we watching the same thing? Did you not hear that theme song? Okay, it was actually pretty bad, but I loved it-- but most of this is just Chipman being like, "I was bad at school" and "I played video games to escape reality," which makes him like a good number of people in many ways. It also isn't interesting in a book about SMB3.

"Waahhh, life was hard once! No one has ever felt the way I feel! This book is definitely about SMB3 though!"

He eventually drops the bombshell that the reveal of SMB3 in The Wizard was burning into his memory, quite like the JFK assassination for his parents generation and the way 9/11 was for our generation. After I read that, I stopped writing this blog.

I mean... as someone who read Sonic Comics and watched Sonic SatAM, seeing Sonic the Fighters was like God's Gift to me. There, characters no one gave a shit about were given life. Sure, most people would go in and say "Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles. I know them." But barely anyone had played Sonic CD, so no one knew Amy. And there she was in the game, fighting! If you played as her, you could even beat Metal Sonic, who had captured her in Sonic CD. Crazy! And then there were other characters no one cared about. Bean, who showed up in Tails' Adventures, for some reason being called Bean the Dynamite. Fang the Sniper, who I knew as Nack the Weasel. His sister Nic was in a group with Bark the Polar Bear, but I think Bark eventually just is someone who hangs out with Bean. And Espio the chameleon, part of the Chaotix group with Charmy and Vector. This was a crazy game for me made even stranger that it came to the US at all, mind you. And I don't think it's bigger than 9/11 or JFK's assassination, or even that big at all. I guess you could say that Lost World, which seems to me like it's the continuation of a scrapped, but really cool Sonic project that would have had Sonic in space in a Super Mario Galaxy and Sonic Colors way long ago, might have also been that way to me, considering how excited I was when I heard about it (although immediately after I was told it wasn't being developed anymore, so... sad face) would also be a "big event" for me. But they weren't so big that they matched up with these tragedies. Up until this point Chipman had been boring. He had been wordy. He had even been uninteresting. But this line was mind blowing. At first I stopped reading and thought I  was reading it wrong or misunderstanding. But no, I was reading it correctly. After that I just kind of felt like Chipman was just trying to emphasize how big and amazing it was, but... why not like, "when [famous album by famous group] came out" as opposed to relating this happy event to two that are decidedly sad? I mean I just did not understand it.

I didn't take offense to it, but I saw it as something that just drew all the want to write about games out of me. Here was an adult who wrote about games and movies for a living, stating in no uncertain terms that not just did he compare reveal of SMB3 in The Wizard to 9/11, but he viewed the two as the same, emotionally. Personally, I can't live up to that. I would feel ashamed to write something like that. So I just... stopped writing and I stopped reading his book, too. I'm not sure if this will make sense to you guys, but after reading that far I just got...disillusioned. This guy was someone that people thought was an authority on films and games, at least, that's how he presented himself. And this is what he wrote? This is how he viewed a movie that wasn't that good? I could understand if he was a child, but he's an adult. He wrote this and he seemed to do it with no awareness at how just mindblowingly stupid the comparison was-- and he never fixed it, it was never edited out and wiped away for only his eyes to see. No, this is in a published book, a book that you can pay money for. I mean the line itself isn't really a bombshell of a line, but I remember reading it, closing Adobe Reader, and picking up my DS and thinking, "Nope. Millennium Girl. I'm just gonna play Millennium Girl. I don't care. I don't care anymore."

I came back to the book accidentally. I had abandoned it, but recently as I was going through my Dropbox I found it and all the weirdness came flooding back. I felt like if I sat down and finished this book, if I appraised it and reviewed it, if I found the things that were good in it ans also saw it's many (MANY) flaws, maybe I would be more interested in writing again. I also figured I should explain why I stopped writing in the first place. No matter the reason, this book was calling to me. "Finish me," it said, "Then write a review and drop off the face of the Earth, you piece of shit."

After Chipman writes about how two tragedies were the same to him as the tragedy that was The Wizard, I guess, he goes on to say that SEGA was fighting back with Sonic in 91. You know, that thing he said before? Yep. He repeats it here. He talks about how he was so firmly Team Mario, he actively hated Sonic and SEGA, like... he viewed SEGA as the enemy. Look, I enjoy being like, "Mario sucks," but I'm the first to admit I feel that way because I'm shit at Mario games, full stop. I've literally only been good at Super Mario World, and I'm not even fantastic at that game. But as much as I give Mario a hard time, even when I was 12 I knew that the "rivalry" wasn't a real thing. and Mario has brilliant games, really fun ones that I enjoy playing. Sonic also has fun games, but Sonic's are just more fun to me. Chipman is so firmly in love with Mario that his 12 year old self sees Mario as someone who is threatened by Sonic somehow.

He talks about the Super Mario Bros. Movie. This movie is literal garbage, in my opinion. My boyfriend loves it for some reason, I assume because Mario (although I'm not completely sure he's not just saying that to deliberately troll me since Mario sucks)? But it's pretty bad. Chipman describes the build up from the fervor of a really rabid fan particularly well, so I can sort of understand why some one might view it as a pretty big deal. It was bad, but Chipman at that time convinced himself it was good.

He talks about getting older and how the "Great Console Wars" were like his personal Vietnam. Ugh. Deep in the trenches of the Mushroom Kingdom, were we? I suspect that Sonic fans were bunkering up in Sandopolis at that time? I mean the comparisons he makes are just awful.

You guys never went through the strict training SEGA fans went through during the Great Console Wars.

He continues, saying that Nintendo and Sega were joined by Playstation in 94 (again, he mentioned this already so I really don't know why he decided that in his personal history he would rehash the history of the consoles) which tried to show Sega and Nintendo as child's stuff. Chipman refers to the black Genesis and the two grey Nintendo consoles as "candy-colored," which is odd. The only black candy I know is licorice, and I strain to even call that a candy.

He explains that Yoshi's Island was the game that broke the game's storyline by claiming Mario and Luigi were from Mushroom Kingdom and not from New York. He viewed it as "an early signal that [his] relationship with Mario and his world was fundamentally changing whether he wanted it to or not." Jesus H. Christ... I mean, the movie was only barely related to it, in the two cartoons I can remember prior to Yoshi's Island I think it's like only slightly related to the story of the games. You mean when Mario met Dracula in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show while he was in New York, that's canon? Come the hell on, man.

...Actually, let it be canon, this is the best.

All of this (watered down a LOT) could have just been his introduction. You know? But instead we're treated to this mess of a set of chapters, which leads directly into a part he labels "desertion" which is a period of his life in which he was uninterested in Mario. This is followed by another chapter, "A Decade in Darkness" in which he just talks about how he was basically doing anything but playing SMB3. You know that thing he's writing a book about? Yep. Anything but that. When finally he gets back into games, he wants to play the old ones from his childhood again, so he gets the GameBoy Advance that was modeled to look like the NES and gets all the new and old Mario games.  Like who. the fuck. cares about this shit?

I wish I could explain the rest of this part in the loving detail that I explained the previous parts. But I can't. It's too long and too boring and just so pointless. I don't care about The Life and Times of Bob Chipman, I care about SMB3. Just get to the game already, sheesh.

I will however, talk briefly about this particularly strange scenelet he wrote up in his epilogue to this part. In it he says that he was going to try and find a Wii U, as his was delivered defective, and was in a line at a store with a woman and her son. He notes that the woman is likely to be picking up a pre-order, but that her son gave away that the pre-order was likely for a Wii U. He was decked out in Mario stuff. Chipman does what I think is standard for when you run into a kid as an adult. You smile, you nod. Maybe you say hi if the kid is super friendly. He says the kid looks up at him with a look of surprise, as if to ask "this big older guy knows Mario, too?"

Mmm, no Chipman, I'm not gonna buy that shit from you. Mario's a Big Fucking Deal to the point of almost ridiculousness. It would be weird if you didn't know who Mario was, not that you do know, and even if the kid is young enough to be like, "Older people know Mario too?" like... what, is his mother not a person who knows about Mario? What about his dad? Does he have no friends with siblings who might have played old Mario games? No neighbors? Like I doubt this kid was so shielded from reality that he hadn't come across someone older than him who had a general idea of who and what Mario was. So fuck this rite of passage, "you can have him now, kid," BS you're trying to pull. God. I hate this so much it's coming out of my PORES.

RUN ALREADY GET OUT OF HERE, YOU'RE ALMOST AT THE END!

He finishes by saying he hopes a young Mario fan might pick up this work. this fan would have never considered their "hobby" could hold deeper truths (I mean, judging by this novel, it can't so... I mean, this hypothetical fan's right, games are nothing) and this book would help them appreciate it. Uh, but I mean... you spent like a million trillion pages talking jack shit, so... no, I doubt it.

Finally we're at the game. Part three. The promised land. But don't worry, I don't have much to write here because Chipman says flat out, "I shouldn't have to explain the subject to you too much since the target audience of this book probably know a lot about Mario." OH YEAH? SO THOSE LAST SET OF PAGES, LIKE THOSE 50ISH PAGES BEFORE THIS, THAT WAS JUST STUFF THAT YOU WEREN'T EXPLAINING? IS THAT IT?!

God... fucking... I can't... this book though!

He basically copies stuff word for word from the manual, so if you're interested in this part I suggest finding a copy of the SMB3 manual online. However, he happens to bungle up a lot of things I thought were quite obvious about the game regardless. As an example, I always viewed SMB3 as a play about the Mario characters. That's why there were curtains and stuff, you know? So the manual refers to every creature in the game as characters... because that's what they were, "characters" in the SMB3 "play". It would also explain why Bowser had 7 kids for no reason. They're all also named after celebrities and musicians, which... reads to me like that "very special episode" of Captain Planet when like a bunch of really famous people playing themselves would be like, "Hey kids! Pollution is pretty bad right?" In that sense, this game's aesthetic is actually kind of cute, like maybe Mario's in the audience watching you as a player "act" through his adventures.

It never explained why Morton's so amazing, but god damn it, he's amazing.

There is some interesting stuff here, though. He explains the enemies pretty well, although again, this could have been done way earlier, my god. There are a lot of enemies and I would've been interested in concept art, things like that, but naw. This book isn't about that life. And despite the info being interesting, it comes across as a wall of text mass dump. To be honest, I would have preferred if he either analyzed the enemies as he came across them or went all out explaining their creation (which by all means could have been boring, I don't know) rather than kind of checklisting them in the beginning. He does just re-explain them later when he comes across them, so... maybe take this part out of the book?

With the ending of this section comes the beginning of the end of this book. Part four.

For starters, he points out that "Oh, the artwork seems to making out like this is a play" which... again, yes, that would explain why the characters and enemies are all called "characters" in the manual, which is basically like a playbill... so... yeah? Before this ingenious observation, he wrote a small diary entry that I believe has given me stage 3 lung cancer. Look, I wrote a review for Sonic CD, and I did it with way less aplomb than this. Like it's a game I love, but I don't need to catalogue my feelings and all that shit, no one cares. We came for SMB3. Just give us SMB3. Plus all of his diary entries are removable without affecting the book since we already read his life god damn story so... I mean if you can remove it and the story doesn't change, it's bad writing. Which is about half of this book, at this point.

So he starts explaining how to play the game, despite saying earlier that he doesn't want this to be a "strategy guide". He tells you exactly which "?" box gives you a mushroom in Level 1-1, he tells you exactly when you see your first Venus FireTrap (the Piranha Plant that spits fireballs), and he'll tell you how to get the first Super Leaf so you can become a tanooki.

Then he stops to tell you about the Tanooki suit in a sectioned off box he titles "The Tale of the Tail", and this is actually interesting except that within the first paragraph of this blurb, he's like, "I'll explain this (speaking about what a tanooki is) later". THEN WHY. DID YOU PUT THIS BOX HERE. NOW. AT THIS MOMENT. YOU MORON. If you're not going to explain exactly what the tanooki is and why flying is a power given to Mario from a suit that resembles a creature that firmly stays on the ground... why did you bring it up? 

He explains how thrilling it is to have to run and jump to fly. Then he tells you where to get a 1-UP and where to find a P-Switch. In 1-2, he tells you where to find the secret room of coins. Literally every secret in the game he lays bare. And while I suppose it's not a bad thing to do, I'm disappointed. I mean, the fun of these kinds of games is finding the secrets yourself. Here Chipman is, claiming to have written something like a loving send-up to the game and the creators... and it's basically just a strategy guide with an auto-biography tacked onto it.

He continues, sometimes writing diary entries, sometimes those little blurbs with actual interesting information, sometimes writing a clear strategy guide, and the rest of the time kind of just writing a play by play of him playing the game. This reeks of someone who doesn't really know what audience they're going for. I don't think a Mario fan wants to read page after page of this. What, would older fans who played this game haven forgotten this game? Or younger fans who haven't played it are just like, "I'll never play that anyway... it's impossible to find on literally every Nintendo system and also on emulator sites?"

I legitimately realized after I wrote the last line of that paragraph that... yeah, that was probably his audience. God, help me.

The book itself is supposed to be a love letter to "the GOAT SMB3" but it's not really showing me love here. I see, when I read this, a religious fervor. Not love, but a "duty" to show this game in it's best light. Even when there are pieces that are more interesting than others, he tries to show all things being equal.

We know, for example, the birth of Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad. But how did the enemies get created? He mentions the chain chomp creation as Miyamoto creating a character that reminded him of a dog who lunged towards him to bite him as a child, only to be stopped by a chain. That's more interesting than half of this stuff. Maybe if he analyzed level design? Maybe if he stopped mis-characterizing things like getting a Fire Flower as "changing how you interact with the world"? I mean it doesn't really do that, I would say that the Fire Flower is a pretty regular way that Mario experiences the world. I don't know what would make this better.

I would love to know what went into making the puzzles for the P-switches, for instance. Or maybe if he learned who was behind the Sun that would just swing down out of the sky and try to kill you, I would love to know who was like "yep, this is a good idea," and why. Why is it a Sun, also? Maybe an analysis on how these old Mario games tended to stick to a particular gimmick per world and how that works as far as making a cohesive game? Or an in-depth analysis on the power-ups and how they're balanced? With every fortress he could explain the bosses and their differences and similarities more, but he just kind of doesn't do that, either. I mean... Kuribo's Shoe appears only in world 5-3, right? It would have been really cool if he used his status as an online reviewer-- you know, that job he's super lucky to have and gets him into panels with people who us normies could never hope to meet-- to somehow get an interview with someone who could explain "Well, we only have it in this level because of [reasons]" or just be like, "I dunno, we just didn't work it into any other place." I mean anything that's even slightly analysis based or just new information we can't get if we watch a video or search for "SMB3" on Google would be great.

Instead Bob goes back and forth this this odd coyness and intellectualism that doesn't really work. One moment he's like, "Hmm, what's that up there... ;)" and the next he's like, "Do this. That'll get you this." He stops to tell you about how he went to see Avengers five times and how it was amazing. He uses oxymoronic phrasing "casually apocalyptic" in a way that requires some explanation.  He claims to be analyzing, but there's a point when he gets angry after using the Tanooki suit and then losing it, so he just rages through a level. If he was actually doing an analysis I would have been pissed off, but this is a thankfully short reprieve from a long, boring, cookie cutter set of "I did this, then this happened" remarks that at least this short break makes me feel like "Oh thank god, it's over. It's almost over."

His play through doesn't read like someone who is great at the game... and I mean, I love Sonic CD but I'm not the world's foremost authority on it, you know? I'm not the fastest or the best at it. that's why I don't speed run it or write books on it where I'm actively documenting my failures at it. Why Chipman chose to do this, I have no idea. I only barely remember SMB3, mostly because I'm bad at Mario games and this one in particular I'm terrible at. My brother was pretty good at them, though, and I remember Giant Land (I recall this being "Big Island) and Sky Land (I think this was called The Sky) best. I remember Giant Land because of the huge Goombas and the cute Kuribo's Shoe (which I knew of as the Goomba's shoe, we played All Stars' remake of this game not the original game). I liked Sky Land's map theme too. I mean I feel like Grass Land had the most easily recognizable one (similar to how everyone knew Sonic's Green Hill Zone theme). Water Land (Wasn't this Sea Side?) probably had one of the better ones also, since it's a very drowsy version of the underwater theme (which is amazing), so it feels like the map theme is kind of gearing you up to actually play. But I feel like the map themes hit their stride with Water Land, Giant Land, and Sky Land. It goes from drowsy to somewhat bubbly, and then Sky Land's more ambling tune. It feels like the game is asking you to wake up, since you're getting closer and closer to the end. After that all the themes aren't really as interesting or fun-- Ice Land's world has the high octave notes that people always attribute to ice, since ice and crystal "probably sound the same" I assume, but the map theme is boring; Pipe Maze has a pretty boring sparse tune that does kind of remind me of the music when you went into the pipes, but definitely isn't interesting in the over world; Dark Land lacks the oppressive power that the final levels in Sonic games had and so it doesn't speak to me much. But beyond that as a theme it does match the levels themselves until you reach the mini bosses, who all have the same relatively cheerful theme as ever. UGH NOW I'M ANALYZING SHIT. I remember this world, but not what went into completing it. Mostly because I personally never "had" to beat it. That's all I'll say about it without actually playing it. But even I'm nostalgic in ways about this game and even I don't understand like... why write this book?

This was a lot and I promised you'd be almost done by now.

And that's what this all comes down to in the end. I have no idea why Chipman wanted to write a tribute to this game. Everything I read in his book waxes poetic about nostalgia. His claims of this being a GOAT are chipped away by this boring, non-critical, wordy Let's Play he has for the entire end of the book. It is as though he spends the time writing this thinking, "They'll see how amazing this is" while writing in nostalgic, rose tinted glasses, unable to understand that for some of us, SMB3 is extremely boring in text form. If nostalgia was all it took to be a GOAT, then that would make this book utterly pointless for a different reason altogether.

But let me be clear, this book is pointless, like in a meandering, well meaning but poorly executed way. It idolizes Mario and Miyamoto and foams at the mouth over Chipman's life, but goes into a dry, sometimes uninterested tone when talking about the game. It isn't about the game, it's about Chipman and how he views the game. It's about how Chipman went through a period when he didn't think about Mario. It's about everything but SMB3. But it wants to much to be about SMB3 that it shoves the game into places it doesn't belong. It rambles and raves, but in the end it's gone nowhere and done nothing.

I spent a while slaving over this book, hoping it would get better after every page, but it didn't and it doesn't. Chipman clearly wishes for this to be a new medium for gaming media, but this book doesn't carve a path that Let's Plays hasn't already. Someone should have stopped him before this was published. I don't understand how there was no abort button for this trainwreck.

What, we just don't have these anymore?!

So would I recommend you buy this book and read it? No, of course not. Hell, after writing this, I can't promise I'll be back to write the review for the game someone gifted me and asked me to review. I wish I'd never set eyes on this book. I wish I'd never read it. It makes my head hurt and leaves me tired. It's a verbal onslaught that you have to weather like a storm. It's terrible. It's awful. I'm done with it, and for the life of me, I'll never ever look back on it again.

Eyes on Me and Not on Final Fantasy VIII

I don't know many people who finished Final Fantasy VIII. Maybe like three people I know, myself included, actually sat through it. And some of those people liked it. I'd make fun of them, but I like Sonic the Hedgehog and Final Fantasy VIII is a hell of a lot more respectable than that.

You're seriously hurting me now, Sonic.

But say what you will about Sonic-- and there's a lot to say-- Final Fantasy VIII crosses some pretty bold lines as far as characters, story, and even music goes. But bold isn't always a good thing. I mean, I know we're all about breaking the mold and finding new ways to tell old stories (or just telling new stories in new ways), but even saying that, there are reasons conventional things are conventional and reasons why new ideas bomb. In the case of Final Fantasy VIII, I know exactly why they went all squishy and romantic on us. It was to remove themselves from the gritty, war-riden future in Final Fantasy VII. If they'd made another game in the same vein as Final Fantasy VII, it would just draw comparison to the two games. The series as a whole banks on the notion that you don't draw parallels between any two games as far as setting and character arcs go. Each game is, in and of itself, a "final fantasy", and it hurts me to write that because now the games within the series are getting sequels.

And the inherent issue there is that we are of course, bound to compare the games within the series because the series is, in fact, a series. Of course we compare VIII to VII, but we're not comparing the setting, just how well the story is told. Hearing now that the story of Final Fantasy VIII was a love story, people like to say that it bombed because it was a love story and therefore, crappy. However, these people are forgetting that love stories show up everywhere, in almost every medium. Even Final Fantasy VII had a love story.

But when we think about Final Fantasy VII, we don't think about squishy love stories even though the death of a character who is a love interest is common fodder for romantic stories from a war perspective. We think about long hair and even longer swords, whiny over powered characters, guns-- war, we think about war. And I guess if you're a guy, Tifa.

Or Yuffie, I guess.

But I find that a lot of people who remember Final Fantasy VII also remember Sephiroth's theme for just being kickass and what not. Mind you, if you remember the soundtrack of FFVII, you probably also remember JENOVA or Aerith's Theme too-- the game was loaded with fantastic tracks. Which brings me now to Final Fantasy VIII, because I can only remember two things from Final Fantasy VIII. The first thing is that Seifer calls Squall (and Zel) a chicken-wuss, which is hilarious since I don't see how it's an insult and because everyone gets all worked up about being called a chicken-wuss by a guy who has a pretty decent David Bowie going on.

I am not the only one who thinks this.

The second thing is Eyes On Me, and quite frankly, I'm not a huge fan of this song as it relates to the game itself.

I'm not a musician, except on the occasions in which I am, but I understand the usage of "theme" when we're talking about "theme music". The term theme (as far as music is concerned), is a melody in which a composition is based. It doesn't always have to be the entire composition, but usually it's at least a piece of it. What we're talking about here is more like theme from a narrative standpoint, and a theme song should do what a thematic concept does-- namely, it should bring to mind the theme of the work at hand. Final Fantasy VIII is a love story, therefore its theme song should be a love song. Right? Right. Except the theme to Final Fantasy VIII is Liberi Fatali.

This isn't a bad theme song-- I'd argue it's pretty good, actually-- but you know... I don't usually think about it as a part of Final Fantasy VIII because Liberi Fatali is exciting and the only part of the song that even has remotely to do with love is the Gabriela Robin-esque made up words "Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinosec", an anagram for "Succession of witches" and "Love". Literally the entire rest of the song could be considered part of a song about children of war or something completely unrelated. I'll give you a translation without the fake words just so you can see what I mean.

Arise from your sleep, my children
Your cradles shall no longer exist
Arise from your sleep, children of Fate

Abandon your cradles

Arise
Discover the garden of Truth

Brilliant truth
Burn the heavens of evil
Burning truth
Set ablaze the heavens of darkness

Prevail, children
Fated day

Lyricswise, compare that to One Winged Angel, where literally every lyric has to do with how wildly pissed off Sephiroth is about literally everything. It's on the opposite end of the spectrum because, as far as that game goes, the song can really apply to Sephiroth (helped by the fact that they say his name like a million times in the song). But I bet money if you hear the theme song to Final Fantasy VII, you'd tell me that I'm being unnecessarily cruel to Final Fantasy VIII.

But I stand by my word because Liberi Fatali is never once given a chance to become a theme like this song was. This song was played in the overworld, plus the theme (musically, not narratively) can be heard literally all over the place in game, including on the world map. Compare to Liberi Fatali, heard in a few places, although I really only noted it in the Ending Theme. But it doesn't have nearly as much impact as Final Fantasy VII's main theme, partially because it has to share top billing with Eyes On Me.

Eyes On Me represents what should be the emotional high point of the game, considering when they chose to play it and the nature of the song itself. It shows up way late in the game (disc... 3? 4?) and as far as songs go, it deserves the acclaim it gets. Faye Wong's vocals do get across the idea of a wistful woman who can't really get across her thoughts to a shy man she believes loves her as much as she loves him. And do I have to say anything about Nobou Uematsu? The guy is a musical genius. So yes, the combination of the two make this song phenomenal, certainly deserving of the acclaim it got. I think considerable amount of work went into the composition and the production and it shows.

Which, I guess, is why they decided to have it play over Squall and Rinoa instead of the two characters it actually applies to, Laguna and Julia.

But to be completely fair, she wrote the song after the fact. Odd that she was writing it the day that Laguna went to the bar to listen to her, but whatever.

But this song is treated like a main theme song, mostly because it is the main theme song, hands down. You just aren't able to sell lonely love ballads to the key demographic, namely males who played Final Fantasy VII. Yeah, there was love and sad things in VII, but that's completely different from trying to market a love story to these people who just finished playing a game about revenge and war and a guy with a gun arm!

Okay, the game wasn't actually about Barret. He's just a guy. A guy with a gun where his hand should be.

So I can see why Liberi Fatali came to be, at least as far as the opening sequence is concerned. All you can really do with Eyes on Me as far as making a music video is put sweet or sad images around, maybe some water, maybe some fades of characters crying... I'm not joking, the song lends itself to a more wistful take than the bombastic Liberi Fatali.

"But... you," You say, frowning, "this all sounds like you have glowing reviews for Eyes On Me and Liberi Fatali, so why write this at all?"

I never said I hated Eyes On Me (unless I did, in which case I was lying), I just dislike how it was used, especially considering the game it was in. Now if you haven't played Final Fantasy VIII, you literally never will because it's not that great of a game and Final Fantasy VII outdoes it in literally every aspect. So I'll tell you the story really quick. Just as an exercise, try to figure out where Eyes On Me plays here. It plays over Squall and Rinoa, so make sure you listen closely to the song and place it where it makes the most sense in the story. Ready?

Oh come on.

Squall is just a guy, with a haircut, who becomes a SeeD soldier in the military. I don't know what SeeD stands for, so let's just skip right past that. What is important is that Balamb Garden, where Squall is training, is the only place that trains SeeDs, until later in the game when that's not true and the explanation for this is really weak. Anyway, SeeDs can summon GFs, Guardian Forces, who for the most part are just... Gods. They're just gods and SeeDs can summon them. So he has to go get Ifrit and then he's sent to war with a classmate Zel and his captain for the mission he's on, Seifer. If it seems like I'm jumping ahead, don't worry, this takes place pretty quickly in the beginning of the game because, surprise, this is part of the final exam to become a SeeD.

They're fighting the Galbadian Army and Seifer's like "Screw the rules, I have... bloodlust," and leaves his team behind. So Selphie joins... wearing a skirt to a battlefield but I guess there was a pants quota that  the army had reached or something. So anyway, Squall and the others find out why the Galbadian Army is there (to reactivate a radio tower, which sounds silly when you think about all the technology these people are using) and try to stop them, but ultimately fail and fight a giant robot spider machine instead. But they all survive and end up passing the SeeD exam, except for Seifer, who sulks somewhere.

So then they have to go to a dance to celebrate surviving a war and being SeeD members now, where Squall meets the girl who thinks he's the best looking guy at the dance. She's right because every one else happens to be background characters from anime. But Squall is too quiet/shy/whatever to dance with her, so she forces him, and then she abandons him when she sees her friends.

"Be vewy quiet. I'm hunting wabbits."

But Squall's in love with her (or something) and so even when his teacher Quistis, who isn't all that much older than he is, comes onto him he's like, "Meh, women." and goes off to do things elsewhere. He gets a mission with Zel and Selphie to join a group called the Forest Owls and help make a small nation called Timber become independent. They have to take a train there. On the train they all fall asleep and have the same dream about a guy named Laguna. After awakening, they meet the Forest Owls and the girl, Rinoa, is the leader of the group.

The Forest Owls are like, "We're going to kidnap Galbadia's president using like, three trains and the fact that no one seems to care about the president's safety!" and all of the SeeD members are like, "Yeah, I guess that doesn't seem like a deliberate trap," and then of course they're all shocked when the president isn't on the train, just a zombie dolled up to look like the president.

"My first order of business is to create a renewable resource of brains."

So they find out the (real) president is actually going to be on TV and it turns out he's going to make a Sorceress the nation's new ambassador. But then Siefer shows up and takes the president hostage, because I guess the president thought he wouldn't need any guards outside of the useless ones who are easily beaten that all presidents get. So the sorceress comes out and lures Siefer to her side by calling him a boy and promising to make him a man, which isn't as creepy as it sounds. But because Zel (I'm pretty sure it was Zel, though I could be wrong) mentioned that Siefer was mad about not becoming a SeeD or that they were SeeDs, Balamb Garden is suddenly a really suspicious place. More than it was before, anyway. So of course, they go back to Balamb Garden to regroup. On the way, they all have a dream about Laguna again.

Squall and the others are like, "Shit, we better like... stuff, you know, and things!" and so they decide to assassinate the Sorceress. They get the help of Rinoa's father, who Rinoa is feuding with, and he comes up with a perfectly logical course of action: Split into two groups-- one that snipes (Squall and a sniper) and another which is supposed to be signalling or clearing the way or something (Literally everyone else). But it doesn't matter because Rinoa wants to do her plan, which is make the Sorceress wear a bracelet that supposedly would eliminate her power. Supposedly. They also enlist a sniper named Irvine.

"...Ladies."

So Quistis is like, "No, stick to the plan" when Rinoa tells everyone her plan, but later leaves her post (and Selphie and Zel follow her, because...?) to apologize, only to then end up locked in a room. Rinoa confronts the Sorceress, who has none of Rinoa's crap, and then she goes out to accept her role as ambassador.

Squall and Irvine are there and ready to take out the sorceress when Irvine suddenly gets cold feet for no reason, saying "I always get like this," which makes no sense because he's a sniper and this is his job and even less sense because that makes it seem like he's been trying to murder this woman for ages and failing. In any case, the sorceress, being a sorceress, stops the bullet with a magic barrier when he does fire at her, so Squall tries to brute force her death with melee attacks, but Seifer shows up. After a rousing Dance Magic Dance number, Seifer is defeated, but again the sorceress remembers she's a sorceress and just stabs Squall through the chest with some ice. Usually that would kill a guy, but Squall lives.

God, every one of Seifer's fight scenes is such a production.

So then the entire group gives up after Squall psuedo-dies and they're all jailed. Squall dreams of Laguna again, then wakes up to Siefer complaining about how he doesn't know what SeeD does. Squall goes unconscious from the sheer thought of having to hear Siefer keep complaining, and then Not A Moogle saves him. He meets up with the rest of his group, who escaped jail because their guards were kind of stupid, and together they determine that Galbadia is firing missiles at all the gardens. So they have Squall go back to Balamb and stupid ditzy Selphie try to stop the missiles. Of course, Selphie fails.

"Tee-hee! I can't do anything right!"

At Balamb, people are fighting each other over... morals?... because it was revealed that the Headmaster borrowed money from a guy named NORG. Squall ignores that and finds out that Balamb Garden can fly, praise Jesus, so he moves the garden. But then the controls break so they're just stranded in the ocean. Then Squall and the others defeat NORG. Then they coincidentally crash into a town of train mechanics who fix the Garden. Also, Selphie and her team are there, for some reason. So they rejoin and fly the Garden back to Balamb, where Seifer is looking for a girl named Ellone. But they beat the crap out of him and then go to Selphie's home Garden.

When they get there, everyone (except Irvine) remembers that they came from the same orphanage. Irvine, who knew the whole time, didn't tell them because...? But they determine that they didn't know about the orphanage thing because they all can use GFs, which... cause memory loss, but no one felt like mentioning that to these guys. Whatever, right? But the sorceress used to be the headmaster of their orphanage, shock and appall! They figure they should go to the Orphanage, but Galbadia forces are there. They defeat literally everyone and take down the sorceress.

The Sorceress returns to her normal self, Edea, and tells them that she was possessed by a sorceress from the future called Ultimecia, who just... wants to destroy time by compressing all of it. They believe it because Rinoa gets possessed by Ultimecia soon afterwards. Squall also realizes that he's in love with Rinoa because she makes him feel things. So he's like, "How do we stop her?" and Edea's like, "I guess go back in time and make it so Rinoa can't be possessed? But that would cause a time paradox, I think."

So Squall finds out that the group hallucinations are because a girl named Ellone, who wanders about in what looks like a kimono and makes appearances throughout the game, has been sending them back in time to possess Laguna. Ellone is of course eons away from where the party is.  With Edea in tow, they go to Ellone, but they find out that they need to go to the moon where another Sorceress is, but she's like... frozen up there, and then Rinoa gets for real real possessed and forces her way to this new Sorceress so that she can undo the seal on the moon Sorceress, and then Ultimecia leaves Rinoa floating around in space and possesses the moon Sorceress.

Squall and deus ex machina Ragnarok rescue Rinoa, who is thought to be a sorceress and has to be handed over to the proper athorities. But Squall doesn't want to do that, so he just hands her over and then shows up again like, "On second thought, no, I'll keep her."

So then they rescue Ellone, who was captured, and learn that she can just make people time travel by sending their consciousness into other people. Why? Who knows. But she's part of Ultimecia's plan, because it turns out that a doctor in the nation of Esthar named a machine after Ellone because it does the same thing she does. So Ultimecia was just looking for the real Ellone, and when she found her, planned to use her to control time. Laguna, president of Esthar, is like, "Okay, so let her do what she wants and we'll stop her when that's done" and everyone's like, "Sounds good to me" and so they let Ultimecia possess the moon Sorceress, defeat her, and then let her possess Rinoa so that Ultimecia can go back in time and compress time. Also, Laguna just happens to know that love will help them survive in a world of compressed time, because that's knowledge every president has.

And that works.

They get separated after defeating Ultimecia and Rinoa waits for Squall to return at a garden (a real one, not the ships) and when he doesn't return, just wills him back with magic. So Seifer decides he'd rather be a townie, Quistis no longer pines after Squall, Squall smiles, Rinoa and Squall kiss, Zel is Zel, Selphie is somewhere, and that's the game.

Good thing Ma-Ti was th-- oh, he wasn't? Then this doesn't make any sense.

Now if you read all of that, you're probably thinking Eyes On Me played during the scene where Rinoa was waiting for Squall and he didn't come back, because that fits with the song thematically. Eyes On Me is about a woman waiting on a man to approach her, in a sense, unable to tell him how she feels even though she seems certain that he must love her like she loves him. And they're separated by a "last night" together, in which the man leaves and so it gives her an opportunity to have a song like this written about them. It explains the wistful tone and the ballad. In the case of the game, had Rinoa not been able to just Power of Love him back into reality, it would've been pretty much case in point the overall theme of the song. But, she brings him back... and though it's not explained how, exactly (she's a sorceress?) it still fits with the song. If you're thinking that this was the scene where Eyes on Me was played, you're absolutely right. But I'm only saying that because I wish that was the case.

Actually, Eyes on Me plays when Squall saves Rinoa in space. I guess it's supposed to be like... role reversal...ish? Except for the part where none of it really matches up. The singer is a woman, so... am I supposed to think that Squall sounds like a woman? The song is sung from a first person perspective and Rinoa was pretty much about to die, so you could argue it was from her point of view, but it's a weak argument because I'm pretty sure she was unconscious that whole time. The lyrics talk about shy glances, which doesn't apply to Rinoa but does apply to Squall. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, the emotional high point as far as our main characters go isn't in space. It's when Squall is "dead" for the second time.

Tell...Zel... I always loved him...

Of course, Eyes on Me isn't even about Squall and Rinoa, which is the giant punch in the face. See, I told you the main story and you might be confused in thinking that the game marketed as a "love story" doesn't really have much love in it, and you're be right (mostly because the love scenes are unnecessary in a recap of the plot, which doesn't have a lot to do with love).  I mean, Squall and Rinoa meet and dance, then travel together and get to know each other and then fall in love, which is... pretty status quo. So what, or rather where, is the "love story" in this?

Well, you might've noticed the cutaways to Laguna. He's actually pretty taken with a woman named Julia, who works at a bar playing piano, but she's not allowed to sing. He gets a chance to talk to her and they confess to loving each other before he has to go out on a mission where his friends get injured. He gets separated from them and ends up living in Esthar. Julia wrote Eyes on Me as a tribute to their love. Laguna ends up married to a woman named Raine and adopts Ellone with her and Julia ends up marrying a commander and giving birth to Rinoa, then dying. (Squall is supposedly Laguna's son, but it's only hinted at.) Remember earlier in the review when I said it applied more to these two? Yeah, I'm not kidding.

But here's the thing. Laguna and Julia? They like, don't really tie into the story much at all. Julia pretty much never does. I mean, yeah, she's Rinoa's mother... but so what? Rinoa's mother has, what, nothing to do with this story? I mean, Julia's death is why Rinoa's arguing with her dad, I think, except that's a pretty throwaway way to put Julia in the story, considering you wrote a song for her. I'm not saying I like FFX-II, but the way the song about the two "dead" characters was put into that game makes more sense than this one.

Then there's Laguna, who ties in more but tends to cause a lot of plotholes. For example, he adopted Ellone-- are you telling me he never once was like, "Yo, Raine, why is it that everyone seems to want to kidnap our adopted daughter?" When he finds Ellone, a doctor is like, "Hey she can send people back in time." Did Ellone... never mention this to Laguna? Then later, Laguna sends Ellone to go live with Raine-- you know, his wife?-- but doesn't actually send for his wife to come live with him, because that would make it so that Squall didn't grow up in an orphanage. That's Lamiroir levels of bad parenting.

"I married a dude and had a kid. But then he died, so I abandoned his entire family and my kid to go back to my previous life."

See, I get that unrequited love is interesting and I get the whole, "Squall and Rinoa complete the love their parents had for each other" thing, but... I mean, this story isn't a love story. So Eyes On Me doesn't really apply. You know what would be a love story? If we dropped the time compression, the Laguna and Julia story, and made it such that Rinoa and Squall meet in a bar, join up and fight the Galbadian Forces, and then at some point one of the two gets mortally injured and the other one goes off looking for a cure. To make it fit with Eyes On Me, Squall would probably need to be the one who gets injured. But whatever. When the injured one is cured, they don't remember the love the two had, so the remainder of the game is just one of them re-building their relationship with the other, still while fighting the Galbadian Forces.

I guess the sorceress is a pretty interesting idea, but ruling time via time compression was a bit... odd. I suppose we could maybe just change what Ultimecia was trying to do with time then things would be more digestible? Maybe if Ultimecia wasn't trying to rule time but was just trying to create a time loop so she could live forever? Wait a minute. That was Garland's story, wasn't it?

Okay, so how about drop time altogether? How about Ultimecia also has some love related issue she's trying to solve via being evil? Like... Okay, Ultimecia could be a girl who's been rejected a lot in love and... Laguna, since he actually is kind of important, happens to be really nice to her. She thinks she has a chance, tries to go for it, and gets spurned. She's devastated by the constant rejection and spends her time honing her sorceress skills, making herself look beautiful through magic, and thinking about revenge. She then decides she wants to straight up remove men from society. So while the civil unrest is going on, she puts herself in a position to start just erasing men from existence by slowly rising in political ranks-- but doesn't erase anyone from existence yet. Years later, she finds out Laguna got married and then left his wife to do military things, so she shows up at his front door, realizes that Raine is pregnant, and waits for the baby's birth. It's Squall, and technically she should erase him, but she gets the idea to have Squall defeat his father for her, since Laguna was her last love and she believes he was leading her on. So she steals Squall away, kills Raine, and raises him to hate his father like she does. Squall gets sent to the Garden, she starts focusing on erasing the men from existence, and the story could just roll from there. Squall becomes a SeeD and joins up with Rinoa. Rinoa is the daughter of a rich guy who isn't backing Ultimecia, calling her a sorceress and implying that she has a secret plan that would rock the foundation of the world and that she can't be made ambassador because she would have free reign over the people. Squall thinks this is frivolous and departs from the team, meeting Irvine who backs the idea of Ultimecia being ambassador, and they hang out on a rooftop overlooking the throng of people and wait for Ultimecia to become ambassador. Ultimecia, unaware that Squall is watching, becomes ambassador and uses her magic to control the women in the crowd to become her army and murder men on sight. Fortunately, Rinoa and the others show up to save Squall and Irvine from being mauled to death by other women. Irvine knows another sorceress, Edea, and theorizes they should go see her. Edea tells them she'd love to reverse what Ultimecia's doing but she's gotten weak and if someone might save her daughter Ellone perhaps Ellone could do something about it. But Ellone's been kidnapped by someone who was really, creepily in love with her and wants to preserve her for all time and jealously stowed her frozen body on the moon. Squall wants to go get her, but he meets Laguna and they get into an argument after Squall determines that Laguna is his father. Laguna tells Squall his real mother is Raine and that Ultimecia killed her. Squall doesn't believe him, but he stops being angry at Laguna when Laguna proves he couldn't have known his wife was pregnant using Squall's birthday and the date he left for the military. Squall and the others try to rescue Ellone from the moon, Squall gets mortally wounded and everyone thinks he's going to die, Edea says they can save Squall with everyone else if they stop Ultimecia, and suddenly everyone has a newfound reason to go stop Ultimecia on top of their already pretty big reason to stop her.... or whatever. That way it's a ton of love stories from different angles: Raine and Laguna's working and complete love story, Ultimecia's broken love story, Squall and Rinoa's budding one-- all while having a war as a backdrop.... you know, so that it is actually a love story and not just a war with love stories on the side?  

Why not just make the whole thing just a bunch of entangled love stories instead of two love stories that don't really have anything to do with the plot as a whole? I mean, this story would have worked without the love plot too. If Rinoa was male, the story would barely change at all.

Eyes On Me is definitely a love ballad, meant for a love story. It's a great song, made clearly with the intention of giving the listener the same longing feeling that the singer has about her loved one. That's exactly why the game should have based itself around Eyes On Me, which it really didn't. Musically, yes, Eyes On Me is clearly the theme of the entire game. Narratively, Eyes On Me takes a back seat to Liberi Fatali, which barely is in the game at all. It's just a poor mixture of music to game, never mind the fact that the game's story is damn near stupid even if you suspend your disbelief. But then, Sonic 2006 exists and I like Sonic the Hedgehog, so I guess I've got no stakes in a argument of stupid stories.

Look, it's just-- It's really stupid. There's time travel and a girl who literally does nothing but get captured, cry, and kiss Sonic. And if you're trying to follow the emeralds, GOOD FUCKING LUCK.