What’s up guys?! Welcome to another edition to the blog that the enemy doesn’t want you to read! In this blog you might be so lucky as to find my confused ramblings about video games, visual novels, programming, anime and other stuff like that. So this week marked the first week of university. This marks two things, it means meeting up with friends and playing silly videogames until 3am, and it also marks the realisation that videogames are dead, I hate videogames, everything sucks and I hate you, fuck you leave me alone... but I digress. I should probably start typing about stuff!

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles

Part of me feels bad that, until this week, I hadn’t actually played Crystal Chronicles before. Mostly due to the fact that I never really played a lot of multiplayer games, and having enough equipment to actually play a four player game of Crystal Chronicles is so insane that I didn’t know anyone crazy enough to be able to set it up. So now in university, I am lucky enough to know the most insane people in the world when it comes to games, who obviously have enough equipment to set up a Crystal Chronicles game on a whim.

Not really much to say here other then we ended up spending the better part of a night playing four player Crystal Chronicles loaded from an old save. This meant there wasn’t really any story context, and I was told to go the completely overpowered tank with ~60 attack and “just charge in and attack, I’ll heal you whenever”. Due to this I probably missed a huge chunk of the game, but I still had a lot of fun. The chalice carrying mechanic is super interesting, and a really great way of solving the problem of people just splitting away from the party. The only problem with it I could find is just how goddamn slow it makes movement. This was only intensified when my friend suggested we stop and cast haste. After spending TWO WHOLE MINUTES trying to figure out how to cast haste, when we started moving again I wasn’t even going any faster. In fact, if we HADN’T stopped to caste haste, we would have been to the boss of that level within those two minutes.

Fuck my friends.

Mario Party

At about 1am or so, having more games than common sense, we decided to switch to the Nintendo 64 and play Mario Party. The first thing we did after loading someone’s save, was go into the shop and buy the fly guy mini-game. The second thing we did was play the fly guy mini-game, aww yeah.

So for the three of you that don’t know what the fly guy mini-game is, you basically have ten seconds to rotate the Nintendo 64 control stick as many times as you can, to get the fly guy to fly around the room. The more rotations you made, the further the fly guy flies. Each of us had two turns to see who can get the highest score. After the first round, I was standing victorious, with 8 rotations more than anyone else. The second time, however, I got beaten by ONE ROTATION. I wouldn’t’ve minded this that much, if it wasn’t for the fact that in my second attempt I got the exact same amount of rotations as the first attempt. Not only that, but my palm burst the fuck open and was bleeding not but two seconds into the second attempt. I spent the rest of the game, and the rest of the night, not being able to close my hand without being in rather intense pain. Due to this, I ended up losing the actual game rather poorly, falling back into last place. We also had like 2 chance times per turn it felt like for the majority of the game, so in case you were wondering, Mario Party is still totally Mario Party.

Mario Party 4

The next day, most of us met back up (and by met back up I mean I walked in unannounced to the flat and just sat down in the living room until we played games) to play Mario Party 4. Not really much to say about this one because it’s still totally Mario Party. My hand had healed by this time, which means I completely and utterly dominated the entire match. Due to this I showed who the goddamn boss was by getting the most stars in the game, and then getting all three bonus stars as well to further show my party superstar dominance. Not any chance times in this game which is probably for the best, but meant that the game wasn’t as crazy as it could’ve been.

A few silly moments though. One of my friends managed to land right next to the star with 68 coins, and with no-one even close to him, there was no way he couldn’t get that star, or so he thought. He managed to get the short stick and was using the controller with a pretty unresponsive control stick. My turn was just before him, and landed on a battle circle, and would luck have it it was a 50 coin wager. I purposely chose the mini-game that involved rather precise movement using the control stick, meaning he was in dead last by an incredible margin. By the time his turn came around, with 2 coins short of getting the star that’s right in front of him, I’m surprised he didn’t kill me.

Space Station Silicon Valley

So something that I have been educated about is the existence of Space Station Silicon Valley, and I still can’t process that this is an actual game. Everything about it is just incredibly stupid in the best way possible and I... ok, let’s see if I can remember what this game is actually about.

So the game takes place in the year 3000, in a giant space station zoo that was created 1000 years ago and ended up drifting into space. The space station ended up drifting back to Earth and an astronaut and his AI companion is sent to investigate. Oh also the entire zoo is made up of robotic animals. Anyway when they two head to the space station they end up crashing and the AI companion gets destroyed. You play as the destroyed AI companion, as one of his chips survived, and you control that. You can possess the robotic animals to solve a bunch of puzzles in puzzle platform gameplay, while the astronaut just chills in the crash landed rocket doing nothing.

“So what I’m saying is this is the greatest game ever made.” Said my friend after he was done explaining this to me, as I sat there with an incredibly perplexed look on my face, looking at the TV screen as a king penguin was ordering smaller penguins to throw snowballs at a polar bear and then used a rocket propulsion out his ass to fly up to a higher platform to collect music notes.

Video games!

So there’s a weird aspect to Japanese culture that doesn’t seem to have a parallel when compared to western culture, and that is doujin circles. What these are are groups of people who create content on an amateur level, as opposed to anything professional. This has fucking fascinated me for the longest time, as it seems to be the next level up from people who draw fanart or write fanfiction, or delving into any level of groeuvre. Some of these circles do eventually go on to a more professional level. One such example is the amazing EasyGameStation, makers of Recettear and Chantelise. Before they made those, however, they made a completely unofficial sequel to the PS1 RPG Threads of Fate called Duo Princess. Pretty crazy if you ask me. Another doujin circle, and in fact is the focus of this week’s visual novel, is Supplement Time, a doujin circle that has made a number of visual novels based on the Vocaloid franchise.

Mirai no Kimi to, Subete no Uta ni

The first of their visual novels features the most well known character, Hastune Miku. The story follows another one of those generic university aged guy who lives by himself in a world where incredibly human looking androids are a commonplace. During a trek back home, he stumbles upon a girl asleep on the ground, and starts panicking. After his phone dies on him, he decides to carry her back to his flat, to take her out of the cold night. He then notices the fact that she has a number on her arm, which makes him realise she is actually an abandoned android, and decides it’s not really worth his time. His conscience gets the better of him, however, and ultimately decides to take her home anyway. He finds that the android’s name is Miku, and also picks up a CD that was with her. When he gets home he finds that the CD is in fact Miku’s install CD. After installing, Miku finally wakes up, but can’t speak, which is pretty much a prerequisite for a singing android. The story revolves around the two of them, them getting to know each other and the protagonist writing songs for Miku to sing.

I find this visual novel’s existence interesting, but then again as I said before the whole doujin circle culture is interesting to me so that makes sense. The visual novel itself is pretty straight forward. By which I mean the story doesn’t have any branch points so the story is literally straight forward with no player choices. It’s also pretty short all things considered, as you could probably get it finished in a few hours or so. I will say however, as rather slice of life the idea of ‘this Vocaloid character and a guy making music’ can get, the story does go in a rather clever direction in its quest for drama and to invoke some kind of emotional response.

Again this is a rather basic yet enjoyable visual novel that is worth checking out if you’re a fan of all this weird extended life that Vocaloid has manage to make for itself. Sometimes I even forget that Vocaloid is actually just some weird music program thanks to all of this.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

So earlier this week I embarked on the incredible journey of watching every episode of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and I ended up tweeting my reactions as I was watching, for added fun. I tried to keep my tweets as spoiler free as possible, while still giving people who have watched the series enough information to know exactly what parts I was referring to with the tweets. I won’t be delving too much into the big story points near the end of the series in this blog, but I will talk about some of the early stuff, so be warned I guess.

The story starts off with a dream sequence, the titular character Madoka sees a mysterious girl fighting a monster in a torn up city. A talking cat appears, telling her that she has the power to help the mysterious girl, as she is clearly not winning the fight. Eventually, Madoka wakes up, and heads to school. At school, as it turns out, there is a new transfer student, who just so happens to be the mysterious girl from her dream, called Homura. Later on that day Madoka hears a voice crying for help. When she goes to investigate, she sees the talking cat from her dream, being chased by Homura. Once rescued from Homura, the cat, known as Kyuubey. After being rescued by upper-classmate Mami, Madoka, along with her best friend Sayaka, learn about the world of the Magical Girls. Kyuubey reveals that he can turn girls into magical girls, and to do so the girl also gets one wish. The catch is, however, Magical Girls have to fight monsters known as Witches. Not only that, but beating Witches can be met with hostile Magical Girls, who want to destroy the Witches themselves. This is because defeating Witches produce Grief Seeds, items used to restore a Magical Girl’s magical powers. The majority of the story revolves around the idea of the Magical Girls, the hidden truth behind what the Magical Girls even are, and the interactions between Madoka and Homura.

As far as the overall story goes, I think it’s really well done. The story goes through many twist and turns, including one that just completely blew my mind that for the remainder of the episode I was sat there with my mouth agape. One of them that was super interesting was, and this is obviously a spoiler so if you’re interested in watching this series you should probably skip this paragraph, was what happened to Miki. Miki, as I stated previously, ended up saving Madoka and Sayaka from a previous witch encounter. However, in episode 3 during another witch hunt, she ends up getting decapitated and subsequently eaten by the witch they were hunting. Luckily, Homura was present, despite being tied up by Miki earlier, and ended up saving Madoka and Sayaka before they could make a wish and become Magical Girls, a fate that Homura is trying to prevent them doing. I found it interesting as I was almost completely convinced that the next chance she could, Madoka would use her wish to bring Miki back, but she never does. Instead using her death almost as a reality check, making her realise just how dangerous being a Magical Girl could be, and ends up not making a wish. It was a really interesting approach, and made me like the anime quite a bit more for not taking the obvious route, at least in my opinion.

The art style is also pretty crazy, whenever the Magical Girls fight these Witches; they go into what is quite possibly the Shadow Realm. In this realm the art style takes a drastic change, into Monty Python territory. Basically, the realm is animated using cut out images, as well as all the enemies, yet the main characters are still in their normal anime style. The contrast of these two incredibly different styles looks fantastic, and it’s something they use in pretty much every episode. While this isn’t as weird and disorientating as something like Bakemonogatari (which, rather unsurprisingly, was made by the same company, Shaft) it does give the anime a unique look and it is definitely better because of it.

Overall Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a really cool anime, and it’s annoying that I feel that I can’t talk about what makes this anime really amazing here due to the fact that it’d be huge spoilers. I managed to get around to watching this anime without seeing any spoilers for it, despite some of my friends raving about it, and I feel like I was extremely better off because of it. So yeah, if you’re looking for some insane magic girl anime then I recommend checking it out!

And with that brings an end to another edition of my weekly blog. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go back to hating everything about videogames!