Yo guys! This is my weekly blog about videogames and visual novels! Well, mostly weekly. Last week real life kicked me in the face and, due to my rule of not talking about my real life problems; I really had nothing to talk about. If you want to know what happened, this happened, and that’s all I’m going to say on the issue.
SO ANYWAY, back to regular gaming and... novelling? I guess that works, sort of.
So Half Minute Hero is a game I’ve been meaning to play for quite some time now. I don’t know why I never actually picked it up, but I managed to steal a copy from a friend of mine, so yay videogames!
So for people who don’t know, Half Minute Hero is an RPG game in which each adventure is 30 seconds long. At the start of each level you have a pretty clear goal and also a few bonus objectives to do. Walking around the map can trigger random encounters and causes the timer to go down, while chilling in towns pauses the timer, and there you can buy stuff like new weapons or heal your health or pray to the time goddess to reset the time back to 30 seconds. The levels are, rather predictably, really short, but super addicting, causing me to blast through 20 or so without even realising how much time I was spending playing the game.
In each level you get graded on how fast you beat the level, which usually just boils down to how many times you had to reset the timer, but it’s the other objectives that give you a surprising amount of choice on how to tackle the level. For instance, in an early level you can easily just grind for a little bit to get your level greater than the bosses level (which the game kindly points out to you as soon as it happens) or you can go find bug swatter that will kill the boss in one hit. There are several different people you can recruit or help along the way that will be added to your ‘party’ for that one level, which also has its benefits.
I haven’t checked out the other modes just yet but I’m enjoying myself so far, it’s a great game for just playing in small bursts, even if those small bursts turn into huge bursts and eat up entire days at a time oh well!
In an attempt to keep up with everything that current with iOS gaming, I decided to play Jetpack Joyride. That’s what everyone’s into right now, right?
Jetpack Joyride is one of those one button games, you press and hold the screen to activate the jetpack and fly upwards, and then everything after that is just simply avoiding lasers and electricity and shit like that. You collect coins that can buy upgrades and you can get vehicles which operate slightly differently (such as a Gravity Suit in which the one button tap flips gravity).
The game is incredibly basic with the only real goal being how long can you survive. The game is one hit kill when you’re not in a vehicle, and one hit to get from vehicle back to the jetpack, much akin to a Mario mushroom in that regard. Though on top of the ‘how far can you do’ there are mini objectives, some as ‘get this far without collecting any coins’ or ‘high five scientists’ and stuff like that. These mini objectives are what give the game a lot of life for me, as it’s a lot of fun trying to achieve as many as possible in a single run, even if the end result is just simply more coins to buy different outfits.
Again this is another one of those games that you can just play for a few minutes at a time, yet it can eat up a lot of time without you really realising it, and therefore it was relegated to the game what I play when I was bored in university lectures for a while. It’s a lot of fun and, much like Half Minute Hero, it’s weird that I waited this long to actually try it out. Like, with this one I’ve actually had it installed on my phone for months but never bothered to actually load it up. Then again I guess a lot of my iPhone games are regulated to that fate.
This week I played the rather recently translated Hoshizora no Memoria. I’ve been looking forward to this one for quite some time now an absolutely had to jump on it as soon as the fan patch was released. So hey, I’m being slightly relevant for once in my visual novel selection, and not just “hey this game from 12 years ago doesn’t have the best art you guys”. Well, more relevant, I guess, they are still porn games after all.
This game stars You, Kogasaka You that is, who returns to his hometown. He and his sister left his hometown seven years prior to the start of the game thanks to his mother getting a job transfer, and moves back after her death. He has fond memories of watching the stars at night with a girl who he promised to that they’d meet again. However, he has no means of contacting her, and therefore the only way he keeps hope of meeting her is returning to the observation platform they hung out at as kids. When he gets there, he meets a girl who looks like the girl from his memory who calls herself Mare, a grim reaper who reaps nightmares. After several interactions with Mare, she reaps his nightmare of remembering the name of the girl from his past. And now with even less knowledge of who he’s looking for, he joins the Astronomy Club to continue his love for watching the stars, and hopes that that will help him in his journey.
The weird thing about the story is that entire set up is sort of brushed away for the majority of the time playing, and is instead focused on Kogasaka interacting with the members of the Astronomy Club and making new friends in the usual high school environment. These friends include his sister, Chimani, who has a habit in talking in third person, Asuho, a friend from Kogasaka’s primary school, Isuzu, Kogasaka’s neighbour, and the twins Komomo and Kosame, who are complete polar opposites. The characters themselves work really well and all integrate into the story, all building up toward a rather interesting plot twist and revelation. And then the game continues for another like 5 hours.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the next 5 hours, but the game is structured weird. You’re introduced to the characters, and then that all play into a big story in which things happen, and then the main character is all “yeah it’s cool brah” and you get launched into whatever route you triggered flags for. Sure a lot of other games do this too, but here it just feels a little bit weird considering how big of a twist the common route takes near its conclusion. It also doesn’t help that when replaying the game to see the other routes (which are good, don’t get me wrong) you have to go through the entire common route again, which is incredibly long.
The routes are pretty standard, some being better than others. They all follow a rather simple structure of helping the selected girl’s ‘nightmare’ (some of them being more literal than others), but at the same time that can result in interesting story arcs. Each route you complete adds a little bit more to the common route too, eventually culminating in a ‘true’ route, which is predictably where the initial set up of the game comes into play, you know, 50 hours in.
Then again, the complaint of “there’s too much good content here” is a strange complaint to have, I really enjoyed my time with this game and I’d recommend it, just know if you want to see everything you have to be incredibly committed due to the sheer quantity of story that exists in this game. It’s worth it though, as the true route at the end of the game easily outdoes the rest of the routes in terms of quality.
And I guess that’s this thing over with! Hopefully I’ll be here again next week, so look forward to that I guess! Or don’t, whatever, I’ll just be here watching Adventure Time from start to finish.
Yeah it’s this thing again. How delightful right? It’s your one stop place for things that I do every week! That usually entails videogames and visual novels, and every so often I venture into the realm of ‘other things’, but you know whatever. So as I sit here with absolutely no money and all these videogames coming out that I can’t buy, I guess this is a highlight of my week.
Which is an incredibly depressing thing to think about.
Oh god.
I’m just going to say it, I like Mario Party. I’m that guy that likes Mario Party. I’m that guy that will play Mario Party and will keep track of everything in my head so I’d know exactly who would get the bonus stars and actually employ some strategy to win as many games as I could. So this year marks the 9th instalment in the Mario Party series, and also the 9th instalment of Call Of Duty, yeah, just saying.
Hey so, if you watched the TNT you’ll notice that the game is completely different to the other 8 games, and I don’t have to explain how weirdly different it is. If you didn’t watch it, however, things different yo. Instead of having a set number of turns and collecting stars and having mini games at the end of every turn, you know, the elements that make Mario Party, well, Mario Party, you’re now collecting mini stars and each level in a set length, and mini games happen at random times. I was super sceptical the first time I played it but I actually really enjoyed playing it. Then again, I enjoyed Mario Party, so maybe I’m crazy.
The mini games are vastly improved from Mario Party 8 too, as there aren’t many mini games that rely on motion controls, something that can be a little hectic with 4 people all at various angles to a television. The mini games also appear a lot less which is good as there is less fatigue to them. Each level also has two boss battles which can be a lot of fun and employ a great mix of cooperative and competitive play, trying to work together to beat the boss but making sure you beat the boss more. The silliest change is the Bowser spaces that, among other things, can play reverse mini games, in which the person in last place gets the stars. These are a lot more fun than they should be, such as a normal mini game where you’re trying to avoid getting hit by thwomps turns into who can jump into the thwomps the fastest.
Me, that’s who, I’m the best at losing at mini games on purpose.
As someone who would much rather play this year’s ninth instalment of Mario Party to this year’s ninth instalment of Call of Shooting Dudes in the Face, it’s no surprise that I enjoyed what I got. But it’s definitely a four player game, I can’t imagine the tediousness that would occur playing this in any other situation. Luckily I’ve found myself a good group of friends who I can sometimes trick into playing Mario Party with me. The trick is to never remind them that I win every single time, and if they do remember, try to convince them it’s all to do with luck.
And then destroy them.
Even though it isn’t a game in its own right, I guess I’ve been playing the Nintendo 3DS game recently. The 3DS is still super interesting to me, even if for the last month or so the only game that’s been in there is Pokemon Black. Sure the whole “I’m a student and therefore I never have any money ever” thing might be part of the reason, but the whole “nothing decent is coming out” might also be a tiny factor.
It’s annoying, really, because on one hand it’s region specific, I dumped a bunch of money into the eShop wallet because I knew they’d be a lot of cool games coming out on that service. And yeah a lot of great games did come out for the system, in America, that is. A lot of the games I’m really looking forward to have yet to release over here, some of them 3 months now after they’ve been released in America. It’s good to know when they do eventually come out here I already have my money ready, but damn, I just want to buy VVVVVV for a 4th time and my region won’t let me.
Not to say the eShop hasn’t served me well, I’ve been playing a bunch of the demos they’ve been released. Even demos for games I know I don’t want to buy like Cooking Mama 4 just because I can. I can’t complain at all though, because it’s how I found out about Rhythm Thief. So in like 2 weeks this game comes out and I’m totally doing to somehow get it as soon as I can and play it a bunch. I went from not knowing this game even existed to having 100+ fan art images of the main character saved on my computer within 24 hours. First impressions seems to be a silly story based rhythm game akin to Space Channel 5, but each minigame seems to be completely different. So expect more on that when it comes out!
I’ve also done most of the whole streetpass aspect of the 3DS. For those that don’t know there are two games you can play which is supported by meeting other people who also have 3DSs and streetpassing them. The two games is a basic image tile swap game and a rather in-depth RPG game. I can’t remember when I talked about it but hey I went more in-depth on these things a few weeks back. Long story short I’ve got pretty much every single hat in Streetpass Quest and almost every single puzzle piece in Puzzleswap. I also found out that the amount of coins you can accumulate at once is 300 the hard way, so I spent them all on Street Fighter IV statues that I never use. Videogames!
Gay porn. It’s a rather weird thing don’t you think? It’s the one thing that can be so diverse yet for some reason they all are just encompassed in one giant umbrella. Now with ‘normal’ porn there are so many weird and weird categories, but when it comes to gay stuff there is never that level of, personal preference, I guess. There’s also a weird thing where quite a bit of gay porn in Japan is usually just incredibly feminine people that just happen to have penises. Where am I going with this? I really have no idea, but this week I played Enzai: Falsely Accused, another one of those boy love visual novels, so those are still totally a thing!
The main character is called Guys, who is a rather typical rapscallion hanging out with his friends. One day he and his friends take refuge in a shop during a thunderstorm, and decide to steal as the storm lets up. As he’s getting chased away he runs into the authorities and ends up getting falsely accused for murder. After being forced into a confession, he gets thrown into jail where he has to try him damndest to survive.
You can probably assume where the porn aspect of this story comes in from, it’s a jail story full of a lot of guys, and rather interestingly the main character is very often the ‘bottom’, and... Well, very often against his will. It’s an interesting thing to have the main character of the story being the one that’s completely helpless in those kinds of situations. But overlooking that aspect of it, they actually story is honestly rather interesting. The characters are a good range of extremely shitty and sort of likeable, Guys tries his best to form friendships that will help him survive his sentence, and the result is something that works a lot better than I expected.
On top of that, the story weaves in and out of Guys meeting up with his lawyer trying to prove his innocence. While that aspect of the story does get a little interesting by the end, it seems to take a long time for it to actually happen. By the time the end of the game rolls around, Guys has been in jail for three years. While I appreciate the game not taking too long to get to the good parts of the story, it’s weird to just have months pass in a few sentences and the characters not really reflecting that all that well.
But that’s a rather small issue, and if I had to gripe on anything else, all the gay shit gets in the way of the story a lot of the time. In the story there is a guard that always ‘has his way’ whenever he decides to show up, and while that does a great job in making him hateable, it just gets monotonous at a point. It’s a moot point to being up, as I’m sure I could gripe about this about most visual novels I’ve talked about in this blog, but it was especially apparent here. So if you can get past that aspect of it, I’d recommend it for the story. While is really what this blog is about, so mission accomplished I guess.
I’m gonna stop there so you don’t get any more of the gay cooties. You know the worst kind of cooties. I’m pretty sure it’s contagious so you should probably go do something incredibly manly to counteract it. And while you do that I guess I’m going to go to sleep and wait until the next time I get to write another one of these. So until then, catch you guys later!
Oh god oh jeez.
Like just ugh, be quiet, I can’t.
This is my weekly blog, it’s super early in the morning and this probably wasn’t the best idea in the world.
Gah this screen is so bright.
Videogames, visual novels, other things maybe, random song that has only a vague connection to what’s being said, right I’ve covered the basics lets go.
So remember when I said last week that I wasn’t going to play previous generations of Pokemon?
Well hear me out.
My friends and I are currently in the middle of a third generation Nuzlocke race. I’m playing Emerald and my two friends are playing Ruby and Sapphire, racing to see who can beat the game first.
If you aren’t familiar with what a Nuzlocke run is, I’ll give you a super quick rundown. Nuzlocke runs mean if your pokemon faints during a battle, that pokemon is effectively dead, and you have to release it, or dedicate a box in storage as a ‘graveyard’ of sorts. On top of that there are a few other rules, some runs mean you can only use a pokemon center once per town, or you have to catch the first pokemon you see in each route and nothing else. Our rules are just the basic one and you can only catch one pokemon per route, but it doesn’t have to be the first one you see. But of course the added challenge is that we’re racing.
What that adds is, well, normally if I was doing this kind of run, I’d be grinding in one area for a long period of time to make sure I was super overpowered and don’t lose any pokemon in a gym battle, however, since it’s a race I don’t have that luxury, unless my friends also do exactly that.
Which they don’t, and therefore, I’m currently in last place.
I forgot how cool third generation can be, but it’s still far from my favourite, we did notice the games came out around the time Nintendo were obsessed with water. The entire plot of this game revolves around team Aqua wanting to make the world water or something (we’re using Japanese roms for added difficulty so I’ve forgotten the basics), despite the fact that the region is the most water filled of all the games so far. But this game also came out around the time of Sunshine and Wind Waker, which is pretty weird.
I’d say the real reason I’m in last place is that I totally wiped at the first gym leader and had to start from the beginning, but with some luck I’ve managed to catch up to second place and will hopefully take it on the next run. Two of us are at the seventh gym while the third is at victory road. However, he’s super underpowered, so he’ll be there a while, so it’s still anyone’s game.
Wizorb was finally released on Steam so of course I bought it as soon as I could!
Wizorb at its most basic level is a breakout game with great pixel graphics. You control a paddle and a ball and.. It’s fucking breakout.
When you break objects you get powerups and sometimes money, you can use money to help fund repairs at a destroyed village, which will usually net you keys to unlock bonus levels where you can get more money to help fund repairs at a destroyed village which will net you more keys to unlock bonus levels where you can get more money to help fund repairs at a destroyed village.
The worlds themselves seem way to long for my liking. The first world has something like 13 levels in it and since each level is quite long, I had my fill at around 6 levels. It feels weird complaining that there is too much content, but the fact that the only way you can maintain all of the money you collect (which you can use to help fund repairs at a destroyed village) is to beat every level, and when you’ve got your fill of hitting things with balls around half way through, that can be a little bit annoying. But that might just be my impatience.
It’s a fun game and it looks and sounds phenomenal, I guess I just need to dedicate a lot more time to it as opposed to my usual ‘booting up a game for 10 minutes before quitting and doing something else’ system allows.
How many times have I mentioned how badly visual novels age? I think I must say it at least once a month. It’s pretty much the reason why I really don’t want to play Clannad, despite how much I know I’ll love it, it’s just gonna be a bad experience nowadays. On that note, here’s a visual novel that came out coming up on 11 years now, Crescendo.
In this game you play as Ryo as he reminisces on his time at high school. With graduation approaching within the week, he looks back on the turmoil his life went through and the girls that helped him through it. Obviously not wanting to squander the opportunity, with the reality of maybe never seeing these girls ever again, he has to something something visual novels.
The system of introducing each character in flashbacks is a little bit weird. When each of the girls is introduced the game goes into flashback mode to when they first met. It’s good for showing where obviously their friendship started, but then you have choices to make in the flashbacks. Obviously this is to help set flags and decide which girl to get with, but then implying that no matter what choices you made Ryo still ended up at the same point at the end of his high school life? I didn’t realise this was Mass Effect 3.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-
Barring that the actual game is nothing that exciting all things told, and hey that’s all I have to say about this game I guess. It’s an old game and therefore the art, voices and just about everything is really showing their age (even the characters, this game seemed to have missed the whole making characters older than they appear trend). The stories themselves are rather short, since the game takes place entirely in the last week of high school. 5 days, a perfect amount of time for a girl to instantly fall in love with the main character right? Anyway, this is definitely a visual novel; each character has their forced drama moments an some work better than others. Yeah.
And now I’m going to go lie down oh god.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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