FINAL FANTASY III
Platform: Super Nintendo
Publisher: Squaresoft

Third-party support like this is why Nintendo’s winning the console wars. Sega may have violence, but the big N has class. Squaresoft’s third Final Fantasy is one of the most impressive pieces of software I have ever seen, brilliant and scintillating from beginning to end. I remember playing Final Fantasy II and thinking video-game stories had finally grown up, but Final Fantasy III’s story makes II look like a child’s picture book.

It’s a thousand years after the apocalyptic War of the Magi. Since the war’s end, magic has been lost, but the survivors and their descendants focused their efforts on developing technology instead, and now the world is essentially recovered. Unfortunately, the expansionist Empire, to the south, already a technological superpower, has rediscovered magic, and now develops hybrid magic/technology weaponry far stronger than any weapon used a millennium ago. As the game picks up, you take control of a party of Imperial soldiers piloting “Magitek” armor suits, including one brainwashed sorceress under the command of the other two soldiers. They seek a frozen “Esper,” a being dating from the ancient war, but when they find it, things don’t go well for the soldiers, and the sorceress ends up alone, un-brainwashed and amnesia-stricken, on the run from both the Empire that controlled her and the remnants of those militaries she crushed at the Empire’s command.

That’s just the first 15 minutes of a long, long game, but I don’t want to go into the story beyond that—it’s best if you play it yourself. Gameplay-wise, it’s got real-time menu-driven combat. The number of characters in your party ends up being quite large, but you can only fight with four at a time; to make up for this, there are many long sequences where the party is split and you switch between different groups of characters far away from each other as they try to accomplish different, complementary objectives.

The graphics are pretty, although the character designs are a bit primitive as a result of the character sprites being so small. The music is excellent. The writing is miles above anything else on the market right now. The translation from Japanese seems really solid. And I can’t say enough good things about the story. You need to find yourself a copy of this one, that’s all there is to it.

I can’t wait for Final Fantasy IV.

KILLER INSTINCT Platform: Arcade Publisher: Midway Fact: Virtua Fighter is ass-ugly, and it doesn’t do a damn thing with its vaunted 3-D. It’s a novelty. Killer Instinct, on the other hand, is built on tried-and-true sprite technology, but unlike the hand-drawn sprites of Street Fighter or the photomanipulated Mortal Kombat characters, Killer Instinct’s sprites are rendered—a series of high-definition CGI images. It’s the most visually attractive fighting game available right now. This is the future of fighting games. Gameplay should be familiar to anyone who’s played Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat—exotic characters with a variety of unique special moves. The game has something like MK’s fatalities, called No Mercy moves, but they’re tougher to pull off, because you have to execute them at the end of a combo that brings your opponent close to death without finishing him off. Where the game is meaningfully different is the combo mechanics. The combos themselves are a lot easier than in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, since they don’t require precise timing—if you can input the correct sequence of button presses, the game handles the combo for you automatically. This should lower the barrier for entry-level players and make the game less intimidating than either of the two reigning champion franchises. Stringing together really long combos is fun, but an opponent with exact timing can break out of those, ensuring that skilled players still have the edge. It’s only available at the arcades right now, but those of us without an endless supply of quarters can hope for a port soon.

SONIC & KNUCKLES
Platform: Sega Genesis
Publisher: Sega

Remember I said Nintendo is winning the console war? Well, they are, but not for lack of effort on Sega’s part. Sonic & Knuckles is the latest Sonic game, following up on Sonic 3. Remember Sonic 3’s ad campaign, and the big deal about the new character, Knuckles the Echidna, who turned out to barely be in it? Well, this time he’s playable. I don’t know what Sega was thinking with the way they handled that, but now that he’s here I can forgive them. Like Tails, he’s not as fast as Sonic, but he has a unique movement mode—while Tails was finally given the ability to fly in Sonic 3, here Knuckles can climb walls. The Sonic series’ll stay great for a long time if they can keep adding new characters as fun as these.

But Knuckles himself isn’t the game’s only draw. The S&K cartridge flips open at the top, and you can plug Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 into it. With the former, this just lets you play through Sonic 2 as Knuckles instead of Sonic or Tails (there are a lot of areas in Sonic 2 that only Knuckles can reach; Sega must have been planning this for a long time), but with the latter, you gain access to both Knuckles as a playable character and the game’s battery backup—if you beat Sonic 3 in lock-on mode, the game keeps going all through S&K, retaining the ability to save, and with a total of twice as many Chaos Emeralds to collect. Sonic 3 & Knuckles, as it’s called, is a long, satisfying play experience, a quantum leap beyond previous Sonic games.

Lock-on cartridge technology is a great feature that adds value to the product for anyone who has an earlier Sonic game, and it’s this sort of technological adaptation that’ll ensure the cartridge always has a place in console gaming. Sony has its new console, the PlayStation, launching in Japan come Christmas, but can you pull these sort of tricks with CDs? I don’t think you can—CDs can’t even store game saves. Nintendo may have the lead, but I think Nintendo and Sega are going to stay on top of the console hierarchy for the foreseeable future.