Hey there! Another week another hastily written blog. This id the place where I open a notepad file and just turn off my brain for a few hours, and what I’m left with is usually something about videogames and visual novels. I have to do this like twice a week to be safe, because sometimes I just end up writing 2000 words about how sexy Adam Lambert is.

Don’t judge me.

Pokemon Black

So somehow I got back on the Pokeman fix, I don’t hate it, but usually when I’m into Pokemon it takes over my everyday life. I end up saying ‘catch you later’ instead of ‘see you later’ when I’m playing Pokemon, because you know, Pokemon.

Anyway I’ve been playing Black again thanks to the announcement of sequels.

When I last left this game I was trying to get a full pokedex, and I guess that’s still my goal. I finally managed to steal a copy of White from a friend of mine so I could take his legendaries and have another cartridge to trade pokemans too for specific evolutions.

So right now I’m sitting on 560 pokemon caught. Not only that but that’s 560 pokemon in my game, not just ‘evolve this one pokemon and hey all three’, I have one of each pokemon I’ve caught, so that’s a thing. It also means I’m less than 100 away from the full pokedex, but I’m gonig to hit the wall that I hit last time, and the main reason why I didn’t try to get the pokedex finished earlier.

I really don’t like generation 4.

I fell off pokemans around generation 3 and gen 4 went in the complete wrong direction to bring me back, so barring the remakes of Gold and Silver, I never bothered with gen 4. Which means I have no way to get the like 300 fucking legendaries in those games. Seriously, it’s so annoying. Obviously I can just try to convince another friend of mine to give me their ones, but... Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t really want to play older versions of the game after playing Black, hell even playing HeartGold was a chore because Black streamlines so many aspects of the game that it’s painful going back at a point.

So yeah that’s my Pokeman update. Pokemans you guys, they’re pretty cool.

Sengoku Rance

Ok like fuck you.

I know Sengoku Rance is a visual novel, hell, I even covered it ages ago, but I’m putting it in the videogame section because shut up.

So at some point this week I had a friend over and he was playing Katawa Shoujo and asked me about other visual novels. I took the opportunity to give him 5 or 6 of my favourites, and decided on top of that I’d show him a little of Sengoku Rance’s gameplay. He left after about 30 minutes of me showing the game, pretty intrigued, and then I ended up playing the game for a further 12 hours.

So for those who aren’t familiar with the game, it’s a strategy game, which I’ll try to explain, with visual novel trapping surrounding it, which I’m going to brush over because this is the videogame section. So yeah, in this game you play as Rance, trying to take over Japan for... one reason or another. The game is played on a turn by turn basis with other houses, and on your turn you can talk to your commanders (the visual novel aspect), declare war on or attack other territories, and a multitude of misc things.

Then when your fight you have a 3 by 2 grid of commanders, each with their own army. The individual armies represent both health and attack damage. So if one army hasn’t got a lot of dudes, they won’t do that much damage. Each commander also has a base attack, defence, speed and stuff like that. So each unit takes turns to attack and whichever army has the advantage at the end of a set number of attacks, or if they kill everyone in the opposing team, wins that conflict.

There are a bunch of different kinds of units, warriors are good at straight up attacking, foot soldiers can shield and protect other units, ninjas and archers can attack the back row of units and stuff like that.

So after you beat the story once there is an optional mode called ‘free for all’ in which you can start playing as any of the houses in the campaign, and then every house is at war with everyone else. It’s a mode without the story and visual novel aspects if that’s your thing, and it’s also incredibly unfair. There are a few incredibly overpowered houses and a few incredibly underpowered houses, which makes sense in terms of the story but still. I tried to play as one of the weaker houses, and managed to survive a good 60 rounds before being completely destroyed by the demon army.

This is probably the visual novel I play the most, in fact, I think over the years I’ve clocked several hundred hours in this game, probably only being outdone in terms of hours put in by Persona 4 and the various versions of Street Fighter IV. It’s really a great game that I can just lose days to. As my friends pointed out, he can tell I love this game, because my lights just lighted up trying my hardest to explain everything about it.

Man I should just really write the wiki article for this game and be done with it.

Blazblue: Continuum Shift II

Speaking of visual novels, I finally got myself a copy of one of the multitude of versions of Blazblue. I do really like this game but I’ve never actually owned a version of it, instead only playing it when I’m over at friend’s places. Which means I’ve never really gotten good at the game, but somehow I still have a lot of fun with it. Well that’s going to change now that I have it for 3DS, because I’m both going to get better at the game, and probably hate it because I think I know what I’m doing.

I’d say this is a great version of the game, admittedly I haven’t been able to count frames or anything like that when casually playing the console version, but from what I remember this version works just as well as the console counterparts. I’d even go as far as to say I prefer this game to the version of Street Fighter IV they bought out on the 3DS, and that justification boils down to how the bottom screen is handled.

In Street Fighter IV 3DS you can assign specials and ultras to the bottom screen, which completely overpowers all charge characters. In fact it pretty much breaks the game in a lot of ways if you want to play it seriously. Blazblue, however, doesn’t do that; instead they put the movelist on the bottom screen.

That’s fucking genius.

Now when I’m starting to play a new character, I don’t have to fumble around menus and try to remember every single attack just to try and learn combos, instead it’s a quick glance down to the bottom screen and I have all the information I need. It seems like such a simple addition but it adds so much, and it’s a big reason as to why I think this is a really great port of the game.

I haven’t had the time to mess around with the story mode yet but yeah this feels like Blazblue, so that’s a good thing. The idea of just having a fighting game in my pocket that is actually fun to play is still the best thing to happen to handheld gaming, so I’m sure this is going to be played for a long time to come.

Ever17

You know that thing in which you find it hard to talk about something you really like? That’s pretty much the only reason why I’ve delayed talking about Ever17 for so long. I know it isn’t enough to just say ‘guys this game is great you need to experience this’, but, guys, this game is great. So let’s see if I can articulate just why it’s so great.

The story starts off from two different perspectives during an accident at an underwater marine theme park called LeMU. The park gets trapped underwater with only a few people still inside. You can either play as a kid without a name or Takeshi, with some slight changes to who gets trapped in the park depending on who you choose. To be honest delving into the story anymore than that would spoil it, so let’s just say, it goes places.

The multiple perspectives on the story make the game really interesting in a way that doesn’t get taken advantage of that well in other games. The first small section of the game switches between the two protagonists rather seamlessly, interweaving their stories together, before the player gets to choose which perspective to go ahead with. Like I said, the different perspectives hit the same story beats, but there are differences in who get stranded, and some of the story beats don’t end in the same way. Each perspective has two possible endings, and once all four have been seem, there is a hidden fifth route, that makes sense of everything in the grandest way possible that, if you’re like me, will leave you floored at how well it wraps up what really happened in the park.

So if I’m trying to intentionally not talk about the story there’s not really much else to talk about. I guess this is one of those weeks where I just feel the need to tell you this exists and you should do yourself a favour and experience it. It’s one of my favourite visual novels ever for a very good reason, but like I keep saying, delving into it would spoil why it’s so good.

Just go read it.

Oh look I’m at the end already. Well I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition, and I’m going to go pretend to do something as I refresh Giant Bomb to see if anyone has commented. In fact I haven’t caught the new My Little Pony episode so I’ll go do that.

...Yeah I knew I wasn’t getting through an entire entry without mentioning those colourful horses. But I was close!