Blendo Games is the studio name of Brendon Chung, and he is who I want to be when I grow up. He’s been cranking out brilliantly weird experimental games for years now, and Flotilla is the most polished and complete one yet.

You can download the demo for Windows, but I’ve been waiting for the Xbox 360 version, which went live last week. It’s in the Indie Games section, and is so far beyond any of the other games there, it’s almost embarrassing; it’s kind of like finding a complete draft of Kavalier and Clay buried in a thread on a comic book message board. Microsoft has done a noble job democratizing game development and distribution, but they kind of need a better filter on their Indie Games category, maybe a “No Really These Are Good” section.

In any case, the Xbox download will cost you five bucks, and the PC version is only ten. Even if you don’t think you’d be into the game, go ahead and buy it just to support the principle.

You can watch the demo video to get an idea of what the “core” gameplay is like — it’s a series of tactical battles in 3D space. Spaceships are more vulnerable on their backs and bottoms, so there’s a good bit of focus on flanking maneuvers and balancing ship speed and seriously this is all missing the point.

The point is that the game has a level of polish in the presentation and imagination in the storytelling that makes it abundantly clear this is one guy’s unique voice. There’s an attention to detail in all of the UI and graphic design that would be in the top tier of “professional” games, and is just plain overkill for an “indie” project. Even better, the tactical combat in Flotilla is part of a whole adventure mode, in which you’ll be encountering space rhinos, stowaway toucans, and psychic dogs. Like the previous Blendo project Gravity Bone [YouTube video of the first level], it’s not just that the whole is better than the sum of its parts, it’s that the whole is a self-contained package of genius that seems to come out of nowhere.

I’m not even any good at the tactical combat, and I can never survive past the second battle. I still bought the game without a second thought and I’m enjoying the hell out of it.

When I first got interested in videogames, it was via the Atari 2600, in the days when most of the games were made by one or two people and then packaged up to support the Activision or Atari brand names. When I got interested in making games, though, was via the old “album cover” games of Electronic Arts, and later the LucasArts adventure games. What those games had in common was that they acknowledged they were creative works, not just a prepackaged toy or a piece of Commercial Entertainment Product. Over the years, having “A Game By Some Dude” on the front of the box became less cool and more a case of ego-tripping on the part of Mr. Dude, but for a while it was a huge deal: a reminder that a videogame can be a medium of expression, just as much as a comic book, or novel, or painting, or film.

That’s what I’m seeing when I browse through the Blendo Games site (although Chung doesn’t feel the need to paste his name all over everything; he mostly lets the games speak for themselves). I’d like to believe that games and the tools for making them have advanced to the point where we can reach that level of artistry and creativity of the late 80s/early 90s, where you don’t need a huge team or a publisher or an established franchise to make a videogame, you just need a good idea.

I’d like to believe that, anyway. It’s more likely that Chung is just crazy talented and/or too weird to talk himself out of making a game out of a novel idea.

The joke about Final Fantasy X was that it was called Final Fantasy X because all you did was hit the X button over and over again. I’m a little over three hours into Final Fantasy XIII, and so far it seems like Square Enix has been spending the last eight years trying to find a way to dispense with even that level of meddlesome button-pressing.

Granted, I’d been warned about this. Most reviews hit the same points: it’s a lot more stripped down and linear than previous Final Fantasy games, with all the exploration jettisoned in favor of long tunnels leading up to a boss fight. But the only review I’d read that was actually negative was Chris Kohler’s on the GameLife blog. All the others I’d seen warned that the game takes fifteen hours to take off, but once it does, it has the most interesting combat system in the series to date.

I’ve played at least half of every Final Fantasy game since VII, so I figured it was inevitable I’d end up getting it. I just figured it’d be later rather than sooner, until Best Buy informed me that my store credit was about to expire and I’d best get to stimulating the economy, pronto. (Incidentally, at the store I was trying to decide between a videogame and a printer. Both were the same price. Did I miss some event that made the bottom drop out of the printer market? Or have I been so wrapped up in digital distribution that I didn’t notice that games have gotten crazy expensive?)

So I’ve just been taking it on faith that if I keep at it, the game is suddenly going to open up and reward me with a complex and interesting battle system. And so far, it’s just been testing my faith. They’ve stripped away all the stuff that makes Japanese RPGs compelling, in favor a barely interactive Japanese anime that’s every bit as over-produced and murky and vapid as the ones that made me stop watching anime after Cowboy Bebop.

I don’t mind their mixing up the formula; in fact, I’m all for it. This is of course the series that defines what Japanese RPGs are supposed to be, and if they want to try new stuff instead of just making the same game over and over again, more power to them. But it feels like they’ve jettisoned the core game in favor of all the surface presentational stuff. There’s no leveling up (yet), just a score and a star count at the end of each battle. The stars are good for… I’m not sure, exactly. The game will occasionally toss me a new weapon or piece of equipment, but there’s no real choice involved: this weapon goes with this character, and it’s better so use it now. And I’m being led through a two-hour-long series of tutorials that claim to be introducing more and more complexity, but in fact just have me pressing A more often. (I’m playing on the 360, or it’d be X).

They’ve just started to introduce some limited customization in the form of the big stat wheels from X and XII, but as in those games, it’s something that looks like interactivity but really isn’t. The characters are pretty much pre-defined, and I can only decide whether my obnoxiously twee pre-teen girl is a magic user with 400 HP or 420 HP. They’re clearly heading in the direction of more AI control, like the previous games, and let you do “paradigm shifts” to switch the whole party between attacking, defending, healing, etc. Which sounds fine at first, but results in less interesting choices: it’s as if they replaced a party of characters with just one character. No interesting experiments turning a ninja into a black mage or anything like that. Plus, it’s been almost three hours and I have yet to fight a fireball or an angry custard.

The visuals are outstanding, but that’s to be expected from these things. And worse, they’ve reached Star Wars-prequels levels of over-saturation: the opening has a big train escape sequence through a futuristic city with mechanized monsters with deadly scorpion tails and all kinds of airships and lasers and space tunnels and crumbling buildings. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what was actually happening, though. The cutscenes in Final Fantasy VII were amazing for their time — no doubt they’d look horribly dated now, but the one thing I do know is that they were used effectively. When the game cut to a full-motion video of a new city or a wide vista or the appearance of some huge monster, it was a big moment. Here, it’s all thrown at you at once.

And over the years I’ve developed a lot of patience for the weak characterization in these games — in fact, it’s usually part of the charm of them — but my attachment to these characters ranges from “don’t care” to “actively dislike and want to fall down a deep crevasse.” Final Fantasy XII did a good job of combining moderately annoying characters with a story that seemed pleasantly familiar: a brash backwoods kid teams up with a rogue pilot and his quiet, inhuman sidekick to save a beautiful princess from an evil Empire. Final Fantasy XIII seems familiar, too: there’s the taciturn ex-soldier with a troubled past, the wise-cracking black guy who’s a gun expert, the perky inappropriately dressed girl… hey, wait a second! For good measure, they added a sniveling little whiny boy who needs to die soon, and the lead singer from any given Japanese boy band.

It’s entirely possible that I’ve just outgrown these things. I still haven’t finished Final Fantasy XII, and that was one I was actually enjoying quite a bit. I suppose there’s a devoted (and much younger) audience who just loves poorly-defined characters and J-pop songs and scenes where everyone speaks in half sentences, and this is the game for them. But it seems that there used to be at least a stab at balancing the anime and the actual game. And I always got the sense that there was a little bit of humility on the part of the makers of the game, acknowledging that they’re passable storytellers but great game-makers. Here, it’s gotten Metal Gear Solidified: the cutscenes aren’t nearly as interminable, but they’re given every bit as much focus. The game seems like an afterthought.