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Lovely story. Wouldn't call this taunting a hater at all, if I had to guess I would say that the person was happy that the magazine acknowledged him and created an inside joke together with him. This is how you make super fans for your brand.

I wish more brands interacted with their audience in this human-like, friendly banter, playful sort of way, instead of the sterile corporate happy-speak as if the reply is a way to perform for an audience, or instantly trying to sell you multiple calls to action if you interact with them.

> I wish more brands interacted with their audience in this human-like, friendly banter, playful sort of way

And I’m sure brands wish they could do it without fear of being misinterpreted and causing a litany of issues for what amounted to a well meaning joke. No one wants to be the social media person that causes trouble for the company (and thus themselves) for being a bit too friendly to an unreasonable entitled prick.

Heck, I’ve seen it happen (more than once) in a support forum context where someone is a regular and always treated respectfully and helped whenever they ask, but one day the support person is a tad more relaxed (read: less corporate, more open and personal) in their communication and the customer is offended out of left field. Which then becomes stressful for the support person and naturally causes them to clam up in future communications.

Yes, big companies definitely take it too far in their frustratingly sterile I’ll-restate-everything-you-said-and-repeat-your-name-over-and-over direction, but “human-like, friendly banter, playful” is incredibly risky and not worth the stress.

Or that the person never existed and was merely a funny editorial device to keep a joke going.

Source: Wizard comics did stuff like this all of the time.

Agree, with "hater" in the title, I expected a 20 page manifesto discussing every little detail that's supposedly wrong with the game. That was pretty moderate and the inside joke this created is like funny little easteregg.
Blame our litigious society for making this kind of interaction impossible. Plus when is the line crossed between "friendly banter" and straight-up harrassment?
I think this sort of thing is much harder to do in the modern digital world.

It’s one thing when it’s one-way, magazine -> audience, and the current edition is off of newsstands in a month or two. Once you throw in forums and social media then the public gets to shape the narrative.

Didn't the Wendy's Twitter account do that. Then the copy cat's were a little to try hard. Maybe I'm mis remembering.
The gag with the spine art reminds me of this (video boxed sets of the series Monk): https://trout.me.uk/monk.jpg
Good stuff. In case you missed it, if I’m guessing right (I don’t know the show well), the lead character is obsessive/compulsive and would be wildly irritated if he knew that the videos about his life cannot be neatly displayed on a shelf because the last one’s spine was formatted differently from the others. Why did I need to make this post?
The slanted text comments on this reddit page is extra infuriating!

https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/ro5e6r/t...

Whats the problem? Just turn the last one round.
The fact that the website this comes from is "ff8isthe.best" makes this so much better. I love hyper-specific websites.

Also, I love documentation on these obscure things from times passed. I'm not sure where else I would have ran into this, but I appreciate the author for writing this kind of thing down.

This was what the Internet made beautiful for a time, international access to hyper-specific deep sites on highly specific topics.

Instead we get 9000 identical sites regurgitating the same identical garbage; I want sites where I can enjoy people going into way too much detail about something they feel strongly about, like why steam engines were going to lose to diesel no matter what, because diesel can get traction going up an incline that a steam engine simply cannot do (and that detailed page is lost to me, I can't find it).

It's just how subreddits devolve to meme-reposting unless actively and strongly countered; forums were a bit better at that but you had to have active moderation.

Viz in the UK had a long-running single frame comic called “rude kid” depicting a mother asking her son to do something and his response was some variation of “bollocks” or “fuck off.”

https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=6e8c819a630d1523&hl=en...

Went on for years and for all I know still continues today.

FF8 is a WEIRD game. It also was my introduction to the depth of power publishers have over the game review "independent" press.

FF8 was universally lauded by the major sites as the best JRPG since sliced bread. In reality it had an unlikeable lead character, an absolutely bizarre plot with time flashbacks that were totally nonsensical, the main party was composed of thoroughly unlikable teenagers, the plot twists about their shared mother was just dropped out of nowhere, the game mechanics required you to "junction" to a summon spirit to get things out of your backpack, leveling up was actually a bad thing, and ... just so much more. Cards. Draw grinding. Gunblades.

This VERY LONG review perfectly tears it apart, but, uh, warning it has epiteths like "fag" and others that date it to the teenage slang of the late 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFTkY0IFL1g

I think he may have rereleased this at some point and cleaned it up of the unfortunate language.

Glitter Shitter, OMG!
The internet needs more websites like this. This is The Good Internet
Instead we get: hey guys checkout my Twitter thread about $some_topic! 1/x
Right? This kind of content came out around 15 years or so ago.
Since 1995, Private Eye magazine has regularly run a picture of Andrew Neil wearing a baseball cap and vest, in the company of a younger woman, which he was supposed to find embarrassing. A long-running letters page joke is finding spurious reasons to reprint it. https://www.private-eye.co.uk/blog/?m=201101
Great Stuff Guys! But I worry the concept of a long-running gag may be lost on today’s youth.

If you had some way to illustrate an aging joke, possibly situated near to something much younger (for comparison) I would be deeply obliged if you could print it on page 94 of your organ.

Laughed out loud.

And FWIW loved Final Fantasy VIII. More then VII. The soundtrack was fantastic, I used to have an imported full orchestral arrangement that was in heavy rotation in my tweens.

Yeah I think FFVIII hit this really artistic note in a way that very few other games were able to at the time. I get that might not be everyone's cup of tea but it remains one of my favourite FF games.
Final Fantasy titles have a deep gameplay aspect and a deep story aspect. FFVIII wasn't the best story, but it had great gameplay.
Say what you want about AI; say it'll put us all out of work, catalyze a utopia, kill us all; it would never in a million years have done this.
Yeah, VIII was either a love or hate game with nothing in between.

Also > At my day job as a video game history librarian

How did they do that one?

Love the ending. I’ll not spoil it.
Your comment made me bother to read the whole article.

Wow. I literally gaped.

I enjoyed the article as is, but that ending really sealed it. Brilliant.
I must say I admire the dedication.
I love this guy's web site. This is what the internet was really made for, grinding your own personal axe and venting your ancient, slightly obsessive, grudges.
Same.

A hard fact to digest is that if you have a website like this, content might not come as often as an audience expects.

Which nowadays doesn't work, as people are content crackheads, quality isn't that important anymore.

This article is just perfectly written, and the image at the end... nobody will read this and regret it later, but it is a story that doesn't happen every single day.

I've seen similar in forums. A couple of diligent haters, posting frequently, can supply enough drama-energy to keep the forum active for years.
Yes! As a victim several times of "nitpickers" on posts I've replied to on different sites, it's absolutely bonkers how far they will go to prove a point that wasn't ever brought up. After patiently explaining what I had written, usually several times in a variety of ways, some will contact the administrator and have the entire thread removed!
Fans of the FF games are very passionate about their favorite game(s). In the earlier days of the Internet, there were endless debates about VI vs VII. Those truly had an inspirational effect on people—but rarely in a good way. Or maybe it's just the perfect cross section of Internet-arguers and JRPG-obsessives that makes for insufferable, endless debates and ranking lists.

Anyway, enough beating around the bush. Here's my list (B tier and above):

1. Tactics

2. FFVII

3. Chrono Trigger

4. FFV

5. FFIII

6. FFVI

7. FFIV

Yay, love the Chrono Trigger in the top 3. People always bring it up, either to say they love it or that it's overrated. It is not overrated! its correctly rated, it really is that good.

FFVII was great but it is an interesting contrast to games like FFVI / Chrono Trigger. The SNES games came out at the end of their console's lives and made the absolute most of what the hardware had to offer. FFVII was early-ish in the PSX life cycle and pushed JRPGs forward. There were some earlier 3d-ish JRPGs, sure, (wild arms was 1996) but FFVII would go on to define how those games would work for years. It became the prototype, but it also feels like a prototype in a lot of ways. It has a lot of jank. Some of those mini games just aren't fun anymore. The good news is all the stuff they learned about narrative in the previous generations was intact and carried the game where it might have other wise faltered.

Anyways, I still loooove FFVII a ton too. But it's good for different reasons than the later SNES games. Also FFVIII was a lot of fun too, and a much more solid 'game' than FFVII even if some systems were pretty breakable / exploitable.

No love for FFI or FFII? Guess it's time I dig out the ol' emulator again and re-read 8-bit theater...

https://www.nuklearpower.com/2001/03/02/episode-001-were-goi...

Tactics Advance is a good time as well, if you enjoyed Tactics. Different in some ways, but similar mechanically
5 and 3 in front of 4 and 6 is an unusual take.
No one has anything good to say about FFX2.
What puts 3 ahead of 4 and 6 for you?
Nintendo Power magazine had amazing spine art and I can't help but wonder if it inspired the spine art from the article.
Hilarious! Trolling is definitely a art.
Back when Trolling was an art form.
>website url is ff8isthe.best

Name checks out it seems haha

8 was better than 7. There, I said it.
That was hilarious. Thank you.
The editors of this magazine were definitely not spineless.