Oh man is it this time already? Hey everyone and welcome to yet another monotonous edition of my weekly blog. Here I talk about visual novels, videogames, and absolutely nothing else in the slightest. Also ever since I had to submit work for university my sleeping pattern is completely different, so at the time I post this I should be asleep for a good few hours. But some reason instead of changing when I post the blog I just stay up and get super goddamn tired. So let’s get into it so I can get some sleep!
Oh right, a song link, err, have I used this one yet? Probably, but whatever, anyway, NOW we can get going with the blog!
Fortune Summoners
So the videogame I’ve been playing a bunch of this week is Fortune Summoners, the latest joint from Carpe Fulgur. As what’s become tradition whenever Carpe Fulgur drops a game, I buy install and play it the second it’s available. In fact I bought and installed this game before it was even in the new releases tab on Steam, so that was a thing. This is the first of their games not made by EasyGameStation, but at this stage I trust Carpe Fulgur to be choosing only the highest quality stuff to bring over.
The best way I can describe Fortune Summoners is Zelda 2 mixed with Demon Souls which might turn away a large percentage of you, but hear me out! The combat is a lot like Zelda 2 as it’s side scrolling and stuff like that, but the Demon Souls aspect comes about in the movement. While the movement feels like the entire world is made of ice, the attacking is really deliberate, and if you don’t stop and think about each encounter you’re gonna get messed up. When I first started playing I just mashed the attack button whenever I got close to an enemy, but even the starting slimes feel like they’ve been coded in such a way that if you do that, they’ll just jump over every attack you throw. Needless to say when I started playing I wasn’t having that much fun because of this, but eventually I got used to the combat and the game is much better for it.
The story is of a young girl called Arche as her family moves to a new town to open an item shop. Here she attends a new school that teaches magic. She, however, doesn’t have an elemental stone, and therefore can’t participate in the practice. One of her classmates claims there’s an elemental stone hidden in a nearby cave, so naturally she goes exploring. After a few trips she eventually finds a stone, but the power has been sealed away. Then, you know, videogames, I guess. Arche goes to find a way to break the seal and does other stuff in the process and videogames.
I’m definitely enjoying the game; it just took a while to get to that point. The combat as I said either will probably make or break the game for a lot of people. Also either I’m an idiot or the game doesn’t really explain itself that well. I usually just go exploring and accidently stumble on to what I’m meant to be doing. There are a few limitations, like the bridge will be broken until you’re meant to use it and stuff like that, but a few times after not knowing what to do, I’d just go fight or talk to townspeople and eventually find the right path again. I can’t tell if that’s a fault of mine or not, so I’m going to assume it is.
Oh, something I forgot to mention, there’s another really cool tihgn about the combat, and that’s the levelling system. The levelling works almost like any other RPG in that you get experience for every enemy you kill, but on top of that there is a level cap to prevent excessive grinding. When you start the game you’re limited to level 3 for the first few days. Then when you complete the first dungeon you find a giant item that increases your level cap. Then after that these are hidden in other dungeons. It’s a really cool system that encourages you to go exploring in all the dungeons to raise your level cap. Without grinding I’ve found the rate in which I find these items and how Arche levels up to be pretty comparable, always being one or two levels away from my cap at any given time.
I’m only a few hours into the game so there’s still quite a bit to go, but yeah, I highly recommend at least trying out the demo, which covers up until the end of the first dungeon.
The weirdest thing about the English visual novel scene is the battle between officially translated releases and fan translated releases. While I understand that it’s rather impractical for some of the bigger releases get official translations, as I imagine the developers ask hell of money for them, it’s still annoying that the official stuff is always the worst and might have soured some people’s opinion on visual novels as a whole, and these people think visual novels shouldn’t be allowed on a videogame database dedicated to videogames despite being videogames just because of a few extreme ones and somehow it’s perfectly acceptable to kill and main thousands of dudes but if there’s a sex scene then oh no that’s terrible Psycosis you need to stop writing these blogs we don’t want any promotion given to these vile creations.
...Hypothetcially speaking of course.
Silver Chaos
Besides the extreme examples, another group of games that get translated a lot, both officially and unofficially, are boy love visual novels, which is to say, oh god I’m so gay look how gay I am everything about this is homosexual in nature: the videogame. So yeah, this week I decided to take a look at Silver Chaos. Because someone has to, right?
The story is set in generic medieval adventure land and starts with the main character, Might, on the verge of death after falling off a cliff. His friend, Adonis, finds him in a hospital bed, and learns he doesn’t have long to live. However, a mysterious person gives him a book containing a magic spell that will be able to save Might’s life, at the cost of his own. Adonis performs the spell, and is captured by an evil spirit just as Might regains consciousness. Might then sets off to find where Adonis has been taken, and is rather homosexual in his adventures.
The intro really brought up a lot of discussion, or rather; when I saw my bros I asked them if they would sacrifice themselves for another. The stipulations were you loved the person you were going to revive, but also that they loved you back, which made for an interesting dynamic. I was of the opinion that it is an incredibly selfish thing to do, whereas one of my friend’s thought the opposite, leading to the discussion. I think it’s selfish because all you’re doing is relieving yourself of the heartbreak. If a person you loved died, you would have to carry the burden of that death and lost love for the rest of your life. By switching roles, you yourself can feel good knowing that the person you love is still alive, but the burden has been passed on to them instead. My friend’s point of view was, I think, the more straight forward approach, of it being the ultimate sacrifice, allowing the person you love to continue living and hopefully love another. Both points of view are valid, and while we both said given the circumstances we would in fact go through with it, I don’t think it’s as noble as some might. I also asked this to another group of friends, but their response was “I would just revive them using the Dragon Balls.” Good to see I keep such great company.
One thing I have noticed in this visual novel, and to be honest in a lot of other boy love visual novels I’ve played, is that every single character is gay. Like, damn, there isn’t a straight one out the entire cast. I guess the game is meant to appeal to people that’d like that kind of thing but hot damn, it’s still strange. Even the king, who has a son that is of course incredibly effeminate, is gay. I just can’t process this much gay at once.
Oh right, the actual visual novel. The story works for what it is. You meet a bunch of people as you get ready to go out and save Adonis from whatever took him. It’s here that you get to choose which guy the main character should get with, but that doesn’t amount to much more than alternative endings. While each character has their own story, they’re mostly brushed off pretty quickly.
Something that has become commonplace recently is that I do a bunch of stupid pony related mashups. Last week’s episode gave me a new song to mess around with, so I decided the best way to go about that was to put it to Lady Gaga, naturally.
Space Jam Sundays
Something you may or not know is that I recently got myself a Tumblr page, I figured it’d be convenient to have some place for all my mashups to go since I’ve grown accustom to never updating my actual website ever. A project I decided to start there is ‘Space Jam Sundays’, where, rather predictably, I post a mashup featuring Quad City DJ’s award winning masterpiece ‘Space Jam’. So far the songs have included My Little Pony, Haruhi Suzumiya, Flo Rida and Ocarina of Time. What could tomorrow’s track be? Who knows! You’ll just have to go there to find out!
And again that’s it from me! Though speaking of mashups I’m hard at work on my next half hour long project, and it’s pretty... actually, it’s incredibly stupid. There’s a 5 second section that has samples from Beastie Boys, The Killers, Daft Punk, The Eagles and Rick Ross and somehow it doesn’t sound like the worst thing ever. Hopefully I’ll be able to get that out soon so I can spend my time on real projects like videogames!
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