Final Fantasy Football

I recently joined a Fantasy Football League for the first time. I enjoy football, and our CS semester-long project was to create a fantasy football program (which I kept calling Final Fantasy Football). What appeals to me is that it seems like an RPG. You form your party, they all have their individual characteristics and strengths, and you have to create a balanced team that’s the strongest you can get. And everything is based on a points system.

The hard part is that the party is so big, and I’ve got so many characters to choose from, many of which I know nothing about. Even from my own home team that I watch regularly, I know names but not stats. This league has 13 active players and 6 bench spots. No Final Fantasy game ever had more than five players on a team at once. So I’m not holding out too high a hopes for my victory. It would take months to analyze each player and choose a decent party (a decent party I may not get, given the live draft format). It reminds me of Chrono Cross, which had, like, 40 different party members to choose from. I hated that game because there were too many characters to level up, so you ended up sticking to a few.

So I’m really relying a lot on the computer to make picks for me and select the appropriate players. That’s the thing about this game, you can be as involved or detached as you want. You could let the computer play for you. But I don’t like a game like that. What would the point of playing be? But really, it might make the same difference because just about everything is going to be luck.

The more fun part is designing the team logo, slogan, and name. This is the most important part I believe. It becomes part of the game to design something that looks awesome. I may not win any points. I may have picked Andre Christocovichlovinsky Jr. (K) for my #1 draft pick. But at least I’ll have a cool logo.