It is February, let’s start with the weather as usual.
In my experience, this time of year in Helsinki is when I usually forgive the dark winter for being so depressing, as there usually is a good combination of a sunny days, snow and a frozen sea to walk around on.
But now the sea is not frozen enough to be safe to walk on, there isn’t much snow either and on top of that, the streets are dry, meaning that there is a fair amount of small dust particles blown around by the wind due to the gritting on the walkways that prevent people slipping on ice and breaking a bone.
Oh well, what have I been doing indoors then?
Another Final Fantasy finished
The past year I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy games (five to be exact) and the latest I managed to finish this week was Final Fantasy X-2 (HD Remaster on the PS3). This one surely was different from all the previous Final Fantasy games I’ve played so far. Despite being a direct sequel to Final Fantasy X, which had a somewhat serious tone revolving around belief and religion, this was suddenly all about three young women having a blast together instead (and some world saving and Pokemon-like monster collecting on the side).
Final Fantasy X-2: a wacky mix of Final Fantasy lore, Charlie’s Angels, Pokemon and a lot of questionable costumes.
Final Fantasy fans are understandably divided over this one. Sure, the dialog and characters are something you could easily imagine coming out from a 10-year old girl playing with her dolls. However, the game right from the start makes it clear it shouldn’t be taken as seriously as other Final Fantasy games. The three heroines (Yuna, Rikku and Paine) just cruise around the same world as in FFX on a big airship, helping with people’s problems and just throwing a concert now and then to ease work stress.
The battle system was pretty diverse, and while the mechanism of the main characters being able to change dresses mid-battle is blatant otaku fan service, the sexism really reached some sort of peak (or low point) with a massage minigame I haven’t witnessed since Leisure Suit Larry games.
I think this is the first Final Fantasy game to feature a New Game+ option after completing it the first time. I shall resist temptation.
That moment aside, I enjoyed the game for its girly silliness, but I wasn’t interested in completing the whole story and seeing the “true ending”, as the game actually had multiple possible endings depending how you played it. I’m just too busy with more important stuff than grinding a video game forever like I did with Final Fantasy VII back in the 90s.
Fixing an old website
In other activities, I’ve been cleaning my good old Japan travelogue from broken links (who would have thought that links twenty years old might not last forever). The site layout is very old fashioned by today’s standards (in fact it is based on tables, which wasn’t a good practice even back then), so I’ve been thinking about doing a major update to it just to see how web standards have evolved and make it more readable for mobile devices.
As the travelogue’s material is about 20 years old, I’m not sure is it that relevant anymore for readers interested about travel in Japan, but it still stands as one of my best achievements online, even though it still seems to be riddled with typos and grammar errors (probably like every post in this blog anyways).
Less known art by a Finnish sculptor legend
I’ll wrap this post up with another look at a public art piece in Helsinki. This time I wandered towards a bronze relief that was quite well hidden in an inner ward located beside a busy road people wouldn’t normally walk past for fun.
The relief was donated to the University of Helsinki on its 100th anniversary by artist Wäinö Aaltonen (1894-1966). The 2×2 meter sized piece was on a building’s facade, which I assume used to be a university library, as these days it is used as office space. The piece is called Lukutupa (Reading Room) and has figures of faces and names of various famous Finnish writers (apparently friends of Wäinö as well).
Lukutupa (1955) by Wäinö Aaltonen is one of his later phase works, that is a mixture of different styles.
Looking up who is this Wäinö Aaltonen was a bit embarrassing, as he is in fact responsible for many of the most famous statues all over Helsinki and Finland. To name a few: the statue of Olympic medalist Paavo Nurmi in front of the Olympic Stadium, the statue of Finnish author Aleksis Kivi at the Helsinki Station Square and the statues in the plenary chamber of the Parliament House of Finland. He was nothing less but the leading Finnish sculptor of his time. About time I knew something about him!
Conveniently enough, an exhibition of his work opened this week at the Tampere Art Museum, so it looks like I have at least one solid reason to pay a visit to Tampere. This new hobby of checking out public art really seems to be taking me to places now!