VG Music: A Genuine Genre?

One of my least favorite questions is the following: “So, what kind of music do you like?” Usually my response is to stall while thinking of some normal, acceptable answer to supply instead of the truth. Usually I default to, “Japanese pop” (which is somewhat true) or sometimes even “classical,” which is the closest I can think to the kind of music I actually like.

Shiny Platinum

I remember back when the trophy list was first announced for Final Fantasy XIII. It had the usual easy trophies—the ones you got for getting through key parts of the game’s story. It also had the annoying ones, like Treasure Hunter. I skimmed the list of trophies, laughed to myself, and asked, “What idiot would waste their time getting all these?”

Uh… hey there

Well, this is awkward. I created this blog quite a few months ago with the intention of, you know, doing something with it. Then I got lazy, as usual. I’m terrible about that sort of thing. My problem when it comes to writing blogs is that I need to be in the mood to do it. That rarely seems to happen.

What changed to make me actually write here? I suddenly find myself with an unprecedented amount of free time, for better or worse. You figure out what the reason behind that could be. It’s not that hard.

Anyway, the name of this blog is The Broken Base. Why? Because it’s a trope that describes the fans of my favorite video game series of all time, Final Fantasy so perfectly. I plan to talk about video games in this blog quite often, so I might as well expound upon things early. I’m a huge fan of Japanese RPGs. They’re called ‘JRPGs’ nowadays thanks to the boom in RPGs made in the West on consoles in the past five years. Have I mentioned how much I hate the term ‘JRPG’? I’ll leave that for another post in the future, most likely 😀

Final Fantasy‘s fandom really ticks me off these days, though. The fandom itself is a horrendous mass of impossible-to-please people who can’t seem to take off their rose-tinted nostalgia goggles for even a second. Everyone has different expectations of the series, but the commonality between everyone seems to be that their expectations tend to be sky high with each title. Naturally, this leads to the newest Final Fantasy game getting hated on relentlessly… until the next game comes out in the series, of course.

Actually, what I’ve described is an Unpleasable Fanbase (tropes will always be capitalized). A Broken Base is the product of a huge split in the fandom. Final Fantasy VII has the distinction of being the first game in the series to do just that. A lot of Final Fantasy fans fall into liking I-VI or VII and after. That’s oversimplifying things, but that is one major division in the fandom. Broken Bases, gotta love ’em.

This is probably a good time to wrap things up, now that I think about it. I don’t really expect much to come of this blog, but who knows. I may end up posting again some time soon if I somehow end up feeling like it.