Welcome back to the third installment in my series documenting my attempts to speedrun Mario 64. If you're joining us for the first time, the first entry can be found here, and the second one here. Or you can just go to my blog and look at my older posts. Whatever works. If you'd rather jump in here, I'll give you the quick rundown: I'm not trying to have competitive times here. I just want to learn how it's done, and then do it. This game is way, way too competitive for me to try to get serious about anyway.

In the last entry, I beat Bowser in the Dark World and made my way into the basement, where some tough stars await me. This is also the place where I'll be performing the first major trick that will allow me to break sequence, the "Mips Clip". I won't be covering that today, but I will be going over everything leading up to it.

Our first stop is Shifting Sand Land, and it's a pretty daunting one. The first star we're going after is In the Talons of the Big Bird, but we're not going to get it the way everyone does on their first run through. That would take too long! Instead, we're going to jump over the dunes here, skip across the quicksand, and run up the pillar. Then we're going to long jump onto the nearby Shy Guy right into the vulture's claws.

The issue I ran into here was how quickly I needed to do this. Unlike the other stars, this one requires the level to be in a specific state for it to work, and if I take too long doing this, the vulture will have flown somewhere else, losing me a lot of time. I can hang out on one of the pillars and wait for him if I screw up, but really, if I don't nail this trick, I lose a ton of time. Not to mention style points.

After a fair number of deaths and save state reloads, I nailed it. Once you hit the star, it jets away from the bird's talons, so the next step is to continue your descent using the momentum from the Shy Guy to land on the pyramid. From there, it's a few easy jumps to the star.

While the last star had complications of its own, this next one gave me much more trouble. We're shooting for the star on the pyramid this time, but once again, we don't want to get there the normal way. Instead, we change the camera angle when we land in the level. This is so the next part can be done by holding the analog stick directly left instead of finding an exact angle to move at. We jump up and over this dune, which requires both a triple jump and a dive, and any mistakes will see you sliding down the hill. This is bad because the setup for this trick involves you moving from exactly where the level starts you at.

It took me a lot of tries to finally get right. It's probably easier than I'm making it out to be, but my hands just couldn't pull this one off very easily. I can't even imagine trying to learn this one without save states. The thing is, once you make it over the dune, it's not over. You're meant to use the momentum from sliding down the dune towards the pyramid to your advantage. Once you slide down, you use the speed from sliding to triple jump up the slope of the pyramid to the star. I… I couldn't really nail this. It required me being consistent, which is something I've yet to really do in this learning run. I needed to be able to get over the hill, then jump straight to the star without any stops in between.

Instead, I ran down the pyramid's entrance ramp and used that as a runway for a triple jump, getting the star a lot slower than I was supposed to. This is another one that is going to take a lot of practice, I think.

Once we jump out of the false wall for the second time, we make our way towards the giant painting of fire hanging a short ways down the hall. That's not ominous at all. Thankfully, we don't need to spend a lot of time in Lethal Lava Land, as we only need one star here.

It's one of the easiest stars in the game, if you know what you're doing at all. The first step is to long jump to the left onto an island with a red block on it. Well, it would have a red block on it, but we never hit any switches in this run, so all we see is an intangible cube hanging in the air. It's fine though, since we can get to where we need to go with a few more long jumps. Once we get to the sliding block puzzle, we can run across it, quickly collecting 8 red coins, making a star appear. Conveniently, it's right next to us, and we can easily collect our prize and get out of this nightmare hellscape.

Next up is the dreaded Hazy Maze Cave. This is maybe one of the most frustrating levels to do on a normal run, but it's actually pretty fun and not too challenging in a speedrun context. The first star is one we'd normally only gain access to after making our way through the titular hazy maze, but we can reach it without that. There's a very fast way to pull this off, but it requires a pretty precise triple jump followed by another precise wall jump to do successfully. I figured I'd stick with what works, getting the star the way I already was getting it in my casual runs. I make a much easier wall jump onto a platform that is only a long jump away from the star. Take that, hazy maze.

Once we get spit out of the level, we rush over to the excited Toad waiting in the corner of the room. He gives us a star, and all we had to do was button through text! Once that's in our pocket, we jump back into the metallic pool for our second star in Hazy Maze Cave. We do this one exactly as intended, only moving more efficiently. I still need to work on that. This star asks us to do a wall jump to reach its hiding place above a slope where boulders rush down to crush Mario to death. The boulders are a bit random where they fall, so this one can be a bit tough to nail consistently, since it asks the player to react rather than memorize. Fortunately, I don't have much trouble with that part, and can get the star without too much hassle.

The last star we get before we sequence break is waiting on an island in the middle of an underground lake that sits deep below the rest of the hazy cave. Normally, you'd have to maneuver your way onto a Nessie-like dinosaur in order to get the height required to jump onto this island, but we don't need to do that at all. Instead, we make our way over to an elevator and step on it to trigger it heading down. We immediately go off the side of the elevator, falling to where it would have taken us. Here's the cool part. We start pushing up against the wall in just the right spot here and wait for the elevator to come down and crush us. When it presses down on Mario, though, we actually clip through the wall (and the floor) and start falling towards the underground lake from above. It's quite simple to angle your fall directly onto the island from here, and we can collect the star without even getting our clothes wet. This is a glitch that looks cool. It's super flashy, and impresses people who see it. It's actually super easy to do! I'd honestly recommend anyone replaying the game to try this one out, it feels very cool and it does skip an otherwise tedious part of the level.

At 15 stars, the hero of the 16-star run finally makes an appearance: the yellow rabbit, Mips. By catching him and carrying him to a door, you can use him to clip Mario through a door that he would normally be unable to pass through without 30 stars. We'll go over this in more detail next time. For now, we can stare at him uncomfortably as we wait for my next entry.

This may have been a mistake, but after wanting to play Persona 4 Golden for so long, my resolve finally broke and I purchased a Playstation Vita on Amazon. I definitely didn't have the money for it, only making the purchase thanks to my tax return. That's not to say it was really all that expensive. I got it used, and also bought with a memory card (in case the used one does not come with it) and the game for 200 bucks total.

This is old news, but holy shit are those memory cards overpriced. I bought a 4 gigabyte one for 25 fucking dollars. And double the space was double the price. I figured that for now, I just needed to be able to save my game, so 4 gigs would have to do. Hopefully the used one comes with a memory card of its own, since the listing didn't say it didn't come with one. If that's the case, I'll be able to download all the Vita games I bought on accident while looking for stuff to buy on PS3 over the years. That store is really bad at separating Vita stuff from the rest of it. Sigh.

I made the mistake of buying a few more games for it, which is a mistake because I shouldn't have blown so much money on this thing, but also because the games I bought are long titles that will eat up almost as many hours as Persona will. I bought a copy of Tales of Hearts R, being a fan of the series and never having the ability to play that one. Yeah, a second long-ass JRPG to murder my time with.

The other game I bought was the newly released Steins;Gate 0, a sequel of sorts to the original visual novel that I adore. It was on sale on amazon for 25$, and I knew I'd want to play it eventually, so I went ahead and did that deed, too. For those of you who don't know, Steins;Gate is one of the greatest visual novels ever released (in my opinion, though I'm not alone in that belief) which also received a critically acclaimed and successful anime adaptation, too. It's a truly brilliant story, themed around consequences, both for your actions, and for trying to fix your mistakes. I have not seen the anime, so I don't know how closely it follows the story of the visual novel, but if you don't have 30+ hours to spend on a (fucking excellent) story, that might be the way to experience it.

That was a digression, but an important one, I think. Anyway. I bought a Vita and it was probably a bad decision but I'm really looking forward to it anyway. That's all!

Hey guys! What was supposed to be a weekly piece turned into a monthly one, thanks to intense procrastination combined with a computer meltdown that left me without my laptop for about a week. For those of you just jumping in, I'm documenting my attempt to learn the basics of speedrunning Mario 64. I don't plan to be, like, competitive or anything, but playing the game this way shines a brand new light onto it. Last time we covered up to the first half of Whomp's Fortress.

The only thing worth mentioning about the remaining stars in Whomp's Fortress is that when climbing the tower for the second star, you jump straight from the first platform up to the last platform using a well-placed wall kick. Otherwise, getting there is the same as getting there to fight Whomp in the previous star. After that, you simply ride the owl into the caged star and move on. There's an extremely difficult trick that allows one to get into the cage without using the owl at all, but it's "frame perfect" and not within my capabilities at this point. The speedrunning guide I saw showed them just using the owl, so for now, I'll stick to that. I just need to get used to controlling it and get a feel for where Mario lands when dropped.

Next up is Cool, Cool Mountain. You can skip literally the entire slide by going off the right edge at the very beginning and falling onto the bottom part of the slide. Just make sure to dive before you hit the ground, or the falling damage will kill you. I knew there were ways to shortcut through this level, but didn't realize you could skip the entire thing. Kinda cool.

The next star is a bit more... well, a lot more complicated. It's the one where you bring the penguin baby to its mom. The way to do this quickly is by sliding off the side of the level and using the momentum to get all the way down to the mother penguin without engaging with pretty much any part of the level. It's tough, and I couldn't quite nail it. I managed to get about halfway there, but at that point, it's faster to use the teleport, I think. Can you teleport holding the little guy? Not sure. Either way, I've gotta practice this one later.

The third star we get on this level is my favorite one, Wall Kicks Will Work. Now normally, in order to access the part of the level where this star resides, you have to take the cannon there. This involves making your way to the lonely platform where the red bob-omb resides, then watching the cannon-opening cutscene play out, then getting to the cannon, then firing it… it's a long process. Thankfully, you can skip all of that, because if you fall off the edge of the map above the little section where this star hangs out, then dive or kick on the way down, you can land right in the normally off-limits area. From there, you do the cool-looking wall kicks and make your way to the star in an extremely flashy way. I don't do that part perfectly most of the time, but I'm getting close.

At this point, we have 8 stars, so it's off to face Bowser in the Dark World.

This level was rough for me. As far as tricks go, you can triple jump up the blue slide, which was easier than I thought it would be and saves a decent amount of time. After that, you make an awkward jump to reach a platform you're not supposed to. This took a few tries, but wasn't too difficult.

The last bit has you jumping across relatively small platforms, then wall jumping to skip the whole seesaw-esque area. I couldn't quite nail the jumps, and got slowed down significantly by Mario sidling along the wall here. The tricks themselves aren't actually too hard, but this whole level is very much about efficiency of movement, which I don't have down at all yet. I felt like I was fumbling my way through it the entire time. On top of that, I've never been great at timing my Bowser throws, so that's something I need to work on, too.

I did actually beat him fast than I expected, only needing two throws to blow him up instead of the three or four I thought would happen. I can definitely do better, but that was surprisingly alright.

Next up, we go into the basement! There's some preeeetty difficult stuff down there, so it should be fun. Hopefully I get the next part up sooner this time, it's going to be a fun one, I think. And a longer one, too.

Lately I've had... kind of a lot of time on my hands. There's a million reasons why, some of them depressing, some of them entirely my own fault, but regardless, this excess of time has lead me to watch a lot of archived Awesome Games Done Quick speedruns. I've mostly stuck to seeing stuff I haven't seen before, but there are a few runs I find myself watching over and over again.

Siglemic's 120-star runs through Super Mario 64 fascinate me. Watching a game I love be so expertly played is fun on its own, but seeing the ways to break it has made me see SM64 in a whole new light. Since then, I've fumbled around in the game, trying to get to stars in ways the developers never intended, and it's brought an entirely new type of enjoyment to my experience.

Now let's be clear about something: I am not good at Super Mario 64. I'm not good at video games in general, but even with all the time I've sunk into this game over my life, I still can't even beat the final boss consistently. But watching it played like this...

I want to do it too.

I have no intention of actually being competitive here. I don't want to go for a world record, I don't want to speedrun full-time or anything. I legitimately don't think I'll ever have the skills to do that, and Mario 64 is such a popular game that record times are extremely tight. But that's okay. I figured I would set a few goals for myself and once I've met those, I'll be satisfied.

My first goal is to be able to beat the game with only 16 stars. Yeah, that's the lowest amount needed in order to complete the game. Through a series of glitches, it's possible to clip through a number of different doors that would normally block your path until you got more stars.

Once I'm able to do that, I'll work on movement optimization and nailing down some of the more difficult tricks. After that, we can start looking at getting good time.

Anyways, I thought I'd chronicle this little journey. There's every chance in the world I give up entirely and this series ends abruptly, but for now, I'm excited.

The First Trick: Lakitu Skip

Okay, so this technically doesn't really help me hit the first goal I laid out for myself. This trick is just a time-saver at the beginning of a run, but it's a cool-looking one and every SM64 runner worth their salt can do it consistently.

What this trick entails is long-jumping along the bridge in front of the castle in such a way that you avoid triggering the cutscene where Lakitu explains the camera controls to you. It's a pretty precise jump, requiring you to land on the exact edge of the bridge's guardrail.

Land too far from the edge and you trigger the cutscene anyway. Land too close to the edge, and Mario hangs from it, and climbing up then triggers the cutscene. It's not the most difficult thing in the world, but it's definitely not simple.

Thanks to the magic of emulation, I was able to use save states to make the repetition more bearable; without them, a second attempt at this trick would involve resetting the game and watching the opening cutscene again. And again. And again. [Heads up, I not only own this game, but I own it multiple times over. I own two copies of the N64 cart, I own it on Wii Virtual Console, and I own it on Wii U Virtual Console. If I had access to my Wii U right now, I would be playing it there.]

After about 9 or 10 tries, I got it. Awesome! It's doable. Knowing that this simple trick isn't totally beyond my capabilities is a real confidence-boost for me in regards to this endeavor. I reloaded and tried it again. No dice. It took me about 9 or 10 attempts to get it again. Then again. That time it only took me about 5 tries. I definitely don't have it down with any consistency, but for the sake of actually having something to write about, I moved on.

The Next Step: Let's Find 15 Stars!

There are still a number of tricks I need to learn to make this process even remotely speedy, but my current goal is to get through the game with 16 stars, not to do it quickly. I figure I'll buckle down and learn that stuff once I'm confident that I can even finish this thing.

I chose my stars based on a route I saw suggested for beginning speedrunners, though I didn't really look at the strategies for getting those stars quickly. We'll save that for later. Anyways, the route basically asks us to get one star on Bob-omb Battlefield first.

This star actually requires a pretty tough trick to do optimally. It's called the "bomb clip" or "clippy" and it involves grabbing a bomb as it's about to explode and using it to clip through the gate to get to the star. I tried it a few times, but couldn't quite nail it. I figured I'd put some more time into mastering it later, and got the star the casual way.

The next place of business is Whomp's Fortress, where we get 4 of the available stars before moving on. According to runners, this is actually one of the scariest levels to speedrun, even if it's a pretty basic stage to play casually. All the falls that are possible can make for huge time losses if you aren't careful.

Fortunately, the first star you're meant to get is one I already know the fast way to get. "Shoot Into the Wild Blue" normally asks you to open the cannon and launch yourself to where the star waits, risking death if you miss. Thankfully, a simple wall jump gets us there risk-free.

The next star is the Whomp fight. There's only a few things I really needed to get down for this one. The first is the ability to skip most of the middle-lower part of the level with a well-placed wall jump, launching Mario off of the bricks to the floating island right here.

The only other thing to note about this stage is that if you're mid-ground-pound animation when Whomp tries to crush Mario, he goes straight through him. The ground-pound animation then finishes right as he lands, hitting Whomp and speeding up the fight significantly. It wasn't long before I won the fight, and took my third star as a reward.

That's about all I had in me for today, so I put the controller down. I plan to practice Lakitu skip a little every day, but I'm not going to blog about those little practice sessions unless I make significant progress. Otherwise, expect me to post about my acquisition of the remaining stars in my next entry. If that ends up not needing a lot of editorializing, than I can start documenting my attempt to nail the most important glitch in the run: Mips Clip. But until then... uh, I don't exactly have a sign off. Maybe I'll figure one out for the next post? A lot of mysteries await us next time.

I made a mistake.

I got excited for a game prior to release.

Okay, so that's not the whole story. That on it's own doesn't always end badly. And there are a few other games that I'm still pretty excited for that have yet to come out; the upcoming Zelda game and Persona 5, among others.

But I got excited for a free game this time, meaning I could download it the moment it came out without worrying about my finances. It was exciting, thinking I might be able to play a game I was looking forward to the moment it came out!

The game in question is Fire Emblem Heroes, which officially came out in the United States... about 45 minutes ago. It's about 4:45 PM in my neck of the woods, meaning that the game didn't come out until about 16 hours after midnight.

The thing is, they didn't give any real ETA beyond the date, so I stayed up late last night waiting for it to come out. Really late. I was hoping it would drop at midnight EST. It didn't. So then I hoped it would drop at midnight HST, the farthest-behind time in the US (Hawaii). The time difference is 5 hours. It was 3 AM where I'm at when that milestone passed me by.

I mean, 3 AM isn't a big deal. My sleep schedule is the most insane thing in the world. I find myself up way later than that pretty regularly. So I figured it might hit at 9 AM Eastern. I stayed up until about 6 before my frustration reached a climax. It had come out in other regions. I was seeing people post screenshots, and talk about the game. It was killing me. So I took my sleeping meds and went to bed. I checked one last time at 7 before falling asleep.

And I woke up at 1:30 PM. I know. I must be a real mess if I can say that nonchalantly. You're 100% right, but that's beside the point, here. I checked the Google Play store upon waking, knowing it would be out by then, because it'd be crazy if it wasn't.

It wasn't.

Now, as the clock approaches 5, I'm fighting through server issues to download a patch. The server problems themselves aren't bothering me. I expected these. The Pokemon Go launch was a nightmare, though I wasn't playing it at launch and didn't experience it myself. Server problems on day one of a major release, especially one that is ostensibly free, aren't a surprise at this point. I mean, that's not to say it doesn't suck, or that people shouldn't be fighting to address these issues, but I had resigned myself to this process before the release.

The reason I wanted to get started on it so soon was so that I could get it all downloaded, even if it was going to take hours and hours. I was hoping to have the worst parts of the server problems behind me, so that I would only have to put up with connection issues during play after that. I had really hoped to be able to put some time into it today, almost as a reward for being so on-the-ball and getting it started the moment it came out. Now I'm sitting here, on the back half of the day, looking at a download progress bar stay at 89%.

I will probably make the mistake of getting excited for something to this degree again. I won't be able to help it. And I'll convince myself that it'll be different this time, or I'll be able to push through any issues because I'm so dedicated to it. And it'll probably go a similar direction. I'm writing this mostly to complain, but also to remind myself to take it easy next time. Playing the game a day or two late isn't the end of the world if I don't make it the end of the world. This experience was an ordeal, but it's an ordeal that was entirely my own fault. Maybe next time I can sidestep this a little bit, knowing how it turned out this time.

[Spoilers for Twilight Princess ahead, up to about 1/3 of the way through the game.]

Twilight Princess gets a bad rap.

Sure, there are some people who will tirelessly defend it, hailing it as one of the best Legend of Zelda titles in existence… but I think those people have been in the minority lately. Nowadays, it seems like most people look at Twilight Princess and see it as the series' first grand misstep down the path to stagnation. And maybe they're right. Once the fervor surrounding its release died down, you started to see people who thought Zelda games needed to change. They felt that Twilight Princess was too similar to the rest of the series, and that the formula was getting old.

It wasn't long before that opinion became popular belief. Twilight Princess was boring, and all the praise it got when it came out was unjustified. Everyone was so blinded by their excitement for a new Zelda game that they couldn't see reality. Twilight Princess was bad.

I bought into this perspective eventually, too. Part of it was born of a newfound respect for Wind Waker; that game, while not without its issues, is easily one of the best games in the series, and people were so down on it when it came out. This made the narrative that the internet was mistaken about its love for Twilight Princess much easier to believe. They got it backwards. Wind Waker was the good one and Twilight Princess was the bad one.

The thing is, Twilight Princess is actually pretty good. It's certainly not the strongest entry in the franchise, but by no means is it bad. By no means is it boring. I realized this when playing through the HD rerelease that came out a few months ago. Whatever the opposite of rose-tinted glasses are? I had those on when looking back at Twilight Princess. The game is actually still a ton of fun to play, and manages to have a few really fantastic story moments in spite of its strong-arm attempt to be "dark". And the music in it can easily stand alongside the rest of the excellent music that the series is known for.

I might even go as far as to say the music in this game is some of the best that The Legend of Zelda has to offer. On top of just generally being excellent, it also has a very distinct sound when compared to other titles in the series. The music of The Legend of Zelda is unique among video games, and the music of Twilight Princess is unique among Zelda games.

If you don't believe me, listen to Midna's Lament, a fan-favorite and perhaps the signature song of Twilight Princess.

Yeah. It's preeeeetty good. This song is fantastic. And I'm here to talk about this song being fantastic.

Kind of.

I actually want to talk about how it's used in-game. About a third of the way into the Twilight Princess, Link and Midna (essentially the game's Navi replacement, for those unfamiliar) find themselves face-to-face with the game's primary antagonist, Zant. Up to this point, Link has been gathering pieces of a powerful artifact for Midna in order to grant her the power to take him on. Having finally gathered all of the pieces together, Midna thinks herself armed and ready to take him on. Unfortunately, Midna underestimates him, and Zant quickly dashes any hopes of a victory, effortlessly taking the pieces from her and discarding them. He aggressively holds Midna close to him, as he uncomfortably whispers in her ear, telling her that he needs her. It's actually an incredibly creepy scene, and one of the few times that the game's attempts at being "dark" pay off.

Zant attacks Link and Midna both, injuring them. The two are whisked away by a being of light before Zant can finish them off, but this process damages Midna so severely that her physical appearance changes. It's clear that she doesn't have long left to live. In her state of near-death, Midna asks to see Princess Zelda. Link ends up carrying her in the direction of Hyrule Castle.

This is when Midna's Lament starts playing. Link desperately makes his way to the castle, carrying a dying Midna on his back. The player is given control at this point, and there is a powerful sense of urgency. Enemies start to gather, hoping to take advantage of Link in his panicked state. They dot the route to the castle, and must either be dealt with or avoided in order to progress. Link tries to stay away from them, but an aggressive Bulblin notices, and starts closing the distance between them.

And then the moment is dead. Midna's Lament is overridden by the ambient "an enemy is nearby" music. As if it were any other moment in time; as if the usual Hyrule Field music had been playing; the enemy's approach causes another song to start up. And it's the worst. What would otherwise be one of the best sequences of the entire series falls apart in a single moment. This section of gameplay could have been a great example of how to use player control to enhance a game's story; by giving the player control of Link in his desperate rush to save Midna, they are made to feel panicked and desperate themselves. Then the rest of game mechanics show up and ruin the whole thing.

I think this could have been easily avoided. I personally would have found the entire scene more effective were it utterly devoid of enemies. Forcing me to stop and handle them destroys the pacing for me, even without the abrupt tonal dissonance that the musical shift brings. It could be argued that the enemies add urgency for some players, making them feel desperate to be rid of them, since they're slowing them down. In that case, there's still no good reason for the musical change they bring. The slow warning notes of the enemy encounter music kill what little momentum might have remained after being slowed to a halt in order to deal with them in the first place.

This is such a frustrating thing for me. I want to be able to bring up this entire sequence when talking about great moments in video games, but I find it hard to do. In three playthroughs, I've never gotten the full impact of the scene due to this one grating design decision (or oversight.) The use of Midna's Lament in Twilight Princess is a brilliant example of music, writing, and gameplay all coming together to create a powerful emotional moment. It's just unfortunate that it's also an example of all those factors fighting against each other, given how easily and nonchalantly the game mechanics interrupt the momentum of the song. It's a moment that could have been better; should have been better; and might have helped Twilight Princess stand the test of time were it executed better.

Today I wanted to focus on something near and dear to me: video game music. I hope to talk about it semi-regularly, and will probably cover a random grab-bag of songs or soundtracks each time I do. So these songs aren't neccessarily all my favorite video game songs, but they're all really good and they're what I felt like discussing today. So yeah! Music! And stuff.

We'll Start Here

The Persona games are fantastic. Not only from a gameplay perspective, but from a presentation perspective, too.

In fact, the slick presentation of the Persona games might be my favorite thing about them. The menus, while not the most pleasant to navigate, are so stylish that those faults are forgiven. The art style in general is pleasing to the eye... especially mine. But coupled with the excellent visual presentation is an incredible soundtrack.

Take this track, for example; it plays during every single random encounter in Persona 4. It somehow manages to never get old, though. It starts out bombastically, with it's, uh, "oddly-worded" phonetically-sung English lyrics ringing out proudly. It then shifts gears to the heavy-ish guitar part, which is tonally different enough from the intro and chorus that it keeps the song from getting repetitive, even after the literal thousandth time hearing it.

That, and it's also just a rad song, isn't it?

To anyone who hasn't played Crypt of the Necrodancer yet: do that. I want to talk about the game in more detail in a separate post, but I can't really write a piece about video game music and leave out this soundtrack.

Start the video. Now give it, like, twenty seconds. I'll wait.

Okay, you're on board now. I know this for a fact. There's no way you're not. This song is so goddamn good that you can't listen to that much of it without loving it. I'm not super familiar with electronic music aside from game music but... this shit works without the game behind it, easily. And trust me when I say that the game only serves to make it better.

The Pokemon games actually have a surprising number of good tracks, but none are quite as, well, infamous as this one.

The Pokemon games are ostensibly for kids, and everything prior to showing up in Lavender Town is light and carefree, patting the player on the back after every accomplishment and espousing the joys of Pokemon battling.

Then you get here. And this fucking song starts playing. It's immediately off-putting, but couple that with the fact that the town hosts the region's only graveyard for Pokemon and you've created my four-year-old self's first experience with existential terror.

It's not that the graveyard stuff is particularly well done or anything. In fact, most of the plot of those early games was... I mean, it was kind of left to the imagination. But this song certainly pushed that imagination in a certain direction. It's fucking creepy, man.

Here's song that needs more nostalgic recognition from the internet, I think. Super Mario Land has awesome music, it just doesn't really sound like Mario music, exactly. Maybe that's why I don't hear it discussed quite as often as other old games.

Well, whatever. I'll give it the love it deserves. This song in particular is incredible. If you write music, or do anything creative really, you're probably familiar with this line of thinking: "Oh man, that sounds/looks like it fell right out of my head!" That feeling you get when you hear a song or see a piece of art that doesn't just look like you could have made it, it looks like you would have made it, given enough time.

The Muda Kingdom theme is like that for me, a bit. If I were more confident in my guitar playing and songwriting abilities, I'd definitely feel like I would have written this song one day. But, like, the person who wrote it (Hip Tanaka) is way more talented than I am. So I don't think I would have ever really gotten there. That said, I feel that odd closeness to it. That feeling that I have some sort of ownership of it, just because it resonates with me so strongly. I don't know. It's a really cool song.

Alright, so I played a lot of this game as a kid. I never really loved it, exactly, but I did enjoy it, and when you're young, you can play sub-par stuff and not be bothered by it.

Bomberman Hero is kind of sub-par. And thanks to that, I forgot about it. Until recently, it only existed in my brain as a vague memory of how I spent some of my time as a kid. It was overwritten by better stuff, like Ocarina of Time, or Mario 64, both of which have great music too, but we'll put that aside until another post.

Anyways, a friend and I were discussing video game soundtracks from this era of stuff, and he wound up showing me a song from Ape Escape. It was a cool song, but it felt super familiar. It wasn't that it was ripping off this soundtrack or anything, but it gave me very similar vibes. And I found myself looking for this soundtrack, to see if I was right about the music being similar.

I kind of was, but the main thing I discovered was that this game's music was fucking cool, and that I didn't appreciate it when I was playing it as a kid. It was just kind of swimming around in my head as a part of the leftover vibes I have from that time. But man, this shit rules. Rediscovering this soundtrack has been a lot of fun. If anyone has any suggestions for similar stuff to listen to, video game music or otherwise, please let me know. It's cool shit.

We'll End Here

Alright. So here's a thing everyone should already be aware of. Koji Kondo is a goddamn genius. He is the composer of the Legend of Zelda and Mario titles, all of which have incredible soundtracks that not only sound good on their own, but make the games they're a part of better games. His music is integral to the games they're featured on, particularly in the Zelda games. Ocarina of Time would be a different game without Koji Kondo's score. It would be a worse game. and so would the Gamecube's entry in the series, The Wind Waker.

Sometime ago, he wound up participating in a concert series that performed much of the series' music live with an orchestra. During those concerts, he would inevitably step away from the rest of the show and perform a solo piece on the piano. Rather than choose a fan-favorite, Kondo performed something people didn't see coming.

It was beautiful. The track seemed relatively innocuous to me before, playing only a few times in the game - during quiet moments Link spends with his grandmother. The song itself has an incredibly nostalgic feel to it, even divorced from my own nostalgia for The Wind Waker and the rest of the Zelda franchise. That feel is incredibly important in the context of the game, given that it plays when Link's grandmother is sad about him leaving home. The song feels like a memory. It feels like growing old, while your loved ones grow up. It feels like... It feels like feeling left behind.

It's heartbreaking and sweet at the same time. And this performance of the song really brought it all together for me. It helped me understand the song, and why Kondo wrote it. It's beautiful. Now, after hearing his piano rendition, I tear up whenever I hear the original in-game.

Music is integral to video games, making what would normally simply be a satisfying experience into a meaningful one. Even at its least-effective, music can mask poor writing or translations, allowing for emotional storytelling even when the story being told is bad. That, or it can burn a game into your memory, causing a thought of it to resurface after decades, with nothing more than a sound. At its best, music is the story, creating emotional moments of its own. Music can write backstories and emotional baggage onto characters that words and gameplay cannot. Music can make a game complete.

And sometimes, it's just fun to listen to.

I wanted to do a list.

I really did. But I realized that if I don't post something right this second, I will put it off until it's no longer relevant.

I had a busy holiday this year. This might have been my first holiday as an "adult" or whatever. I travelled a lot, did a lot of family stuff, and asked my parents to buy me winter clothes instead of video games. I have been in transit for literally the last 20 hours and there was absolutely no international travel involved, because snowstorms like to hit whenever I need to travel.

So yeah. That's why no list. I'm fucking exhausted. I'm surprised I even have the energy to write this extended intro to make excuses with. My brain is dead. I haven't even unpacked. I just sorted out the bare necessities and plan to figure out the rest tomorrow. But I wanted to post something. So here it is, my favorite game of 2016!

This game was a blast, and a surprising one, too. Over the years, I have been disappointed by crossover titles time and time again. They tend to lack the care and attention to detail that main series games normally receive. That might actually be true in Tokyo Mirage Sessions. In fact, yeah. The Fire Emblem characters have no personalities whatsoever. That's not ideal. But you know what?

They made an awesome game out of it, so it worked out okay. Tokyo Mirage Sessions is a game oozing with style. Incredibly goofy and over-the-top style. And while maybe the story and characters stumble into typical anime/RPG tropes, this works to the game's advantage in a lot of ways. Tokyo Mirage Sessions is a game that lets you enjoy the spectacle and doesn't ask you to do anything else. From a storytelling perspective, that is.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions has a battle system that can only be described as fucking rad. Were this a review, I'd go into the details of how it works mechanically, but this is just a gush-fest, so fucking rad is a serviceable descriptor. It kept me engaged with the combat constantly, even challenging me to ramp up the difficulty or deliberately challenge difficult enemies, just to see if I could pull it off.

Games don't do that to me. Like, ever. I am someone who likes to break games, either by overlevelling or finding a late-game weapon early, or something similar. I play most games on normal, but feel no shame knocking it down to easy when the going gets tough. Tokyo Mirage Sessions is the first game I wanted to play my first run through on "hard mode", like, ever. That is high praise.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions isn't an "achievement of gaming"or anything, but it's a damn fun RPG with a battle system that engaged me more than any turn-based combat has since Paper Mario. I'm happy to name it my game of the year.

I adore the Persona games. They're beautiful to look at, they're fun, they're complex… There's a lot to love. And I mean that literally, too. Persona games are long. On average, it takes people 93 hours to get to the ending of Persona 3.

On that note, I have a confession to make: I have never completed a Persona game.

My first exposure to the franchise was through the Endurance Run. I saw the entirety of Persona 4 through Vinny and Jeff's eyes, and I fell in love with it. It was clearly a fantastic game, worth playing myself if I ever found the time. But I did already see the entire game. When the time came for me to buy a JRPG, I went with the previous entry, Persona 3. It was mechanically and tonally similar enough, and the slightly darker edge it seemed to have also appealed to me.

I played it non-stop for a few days. It was, in fact, fantastic. But eventually life caught up to me and I found myself spending less and less time with it. It was hard to try to play something I knew I wasn't going to finish for a couple weeks, at least. So eventually, with about 35 hours spent with it, I stopped. It wasn't a conscious decision; not really. I told myself I was going to pick it back up at some point, but by the time I finally got around to booting it back up, months had passed.

I had no idea where I was in the story. I had a vague sense of what happened in the game up to that point, but after playing for about an hour, I realized that all of the details had been lost. I remember none of the character moments, and had no sense of what I was trying to accomplish in-game, either. It felt like I was trying to read a book while skipping every other chapter; I could suss out the plot, but it was far from the ideal way of experiencing it.

So I started over.

Once again, I found myself barreling through the early parts of the game, but slowing down as I got deeper and deeper into it. I made it to almost exactly the same point I made it to in my previous attempt when I put it down again. Maybe that's a sign that the game has pacing issues. Honestly, though… I think it's on me.

I have a habit of this. The list of games I've never finished far outstrips the list of games I've completed. My Netflix queue consists of almost nothing but shows I made it five or six episodes into before moving on. And I don't drop any of these games or shows intentionally; when I leave a game or TV series behind, it's always with the explicit intention of returning to it later. But I never do. I've even done this with movies, pausing the movie and switching to another tab about 45 minutes in.

It could be my short attention span. I have ADHD, and struggle to sit through meetings and classes in my day-to-day life. That would be a reasonable explanation for it, but that doesn't feel right. That doesn't feel like the reason this keeps happening. Why am I able to binge-watch a show for five hours in the first place? How do I manage to sit through those first five or six episodes at all?

I don't think ADHD is the reason. I think… I think I'm afraid of finishing things. I think the idea of wrapping something up intimidates me. When I finish a game, it's over. Sure, I can replay it, but I will never have the experience I had on my first playthrough again. You only have one "first" anything. And I think I'm terrified of denying that to my future self.

It's not rational. But it checks out; most of the games on that "unfinished" list have save files sitting on the doorstep of a final boss fight. If I don't finish them, they're still a part of my life, right?

As it turns out, not really. If I would just finish them, I'd be able to talk about them more in depth. I wouldn't have to avoid spoilers. I could say I finished it. Right now, they're all just floating around in my head, aimlessly waiting for me to have something to say about them. And I want to say those things. But now my list of unfinished things is so long that I'm never going to finish getting through it.

If you've read my earlier blog posts (and you probably haven't, because I'm talking almost four years earlier, also it's very bad) you'll see that I'm a pretty big fan of the Tales franchise of games. If you're not aware, Tales is a long-running series of Japanese role-playing games made by Bandai Namco that enjoys massive popularity in Japan. While I'm not sure how true this is anymore, there was a time when only Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest meant more to the Japanese RPG-playing audience than Tales did.

In winter of 2014, Bandai Namco released a free-to-play mobile game based off the series in Japan. The game was called Tales of Link, which is exactly as confusing of a title as you think it is. Tales of Link takes the popular characters of the Tales series and drops them into a puzzle-ish mobile game. As far as games you've actually heard about go, this is similar in structure to something like Final Fantasy: Record Keeper, though with much less reverence for the games it's pulling from.

I can't speak to the Japanese version of the game, as I've never played it, but Tales of Link was released globally in April of 2016, and it's a bit of a mess. The actual gameplay itself is kind of terrible, so unless they changed the core mechanics when bringing it worldwide, the original release isn't exactly a treat, either. Put simply, it's a very watered-down "match like-tiles together" game that only uses a 3x3 board. Matching tiles causes the units on them to attack, which is probably the literal first thing you would come up with when designing a free-to-play game in this vein. Enemies show up in waves, attacking you every few turns, whittling down your HP bar in hopes of bringing you to a game over screen. You can outfit your units with equipment and customize them to meet your needs, bringing a unique team of heroes into every battle.

You may think that sounds kind of awful, and you'd probably be right. It doesn't stop with generic and bare-bones mechanics, though; Tales of Link is one of many mobile games from Japan to utilize something called the gacha system as a means of extracting money from its playerbase. The term is derived from Japanese gachapon machines, (or gashapon machines, I believe it can be pronounced either way) which are pretty much just vending machines that give out a random capsule toy when you put money into them. If you've watched the recent Shenmue Endurance Run on the site, you've seen these before.

The gacha system in Tales of Link is exactly what you think it is: put in some money, and a random character pops out. This isn't unique to this game, not by any means. I'm not sure where it originated, but Puzzle and Dragons took the concept and made what might as well be an infinite amount of money on it. It actually made such an overwhelming impact on the mobile market in Japan that the government up and made parts of the system illegal. A loophole in the law allows games to continue to implement it (I don't really know how it works, but games totally still use it, Puzzle and Dragons included) and it continues to be the primary mechanism for dumping money into these games.

This all sounds like an unenjoyable experience, I imagine. Unfortunately, that's an accurate interpretation, and I've put countless hours into this stupid thing anyway. It's shameful, but I like the Tales games... a lot. And the gacha system draws me in in spite of myself. Like, I know it's terrible and exploitative. Yet somehow I still allow it to be terrible and exploit me. No amount of reasoning or facts or just-plain being broke can push me away from it. Every time they show me a new gacha with new versions of characters I love, I can't help but throw some of my hard-won "Hero Stones" at it. Unless of course, I don't have any left, in which case I always have the option to buy more.

This wouldn't be the worst thing if not for a somewhat recent (like, 3-4 years ago) "addition" to many gacha systems. I know; it's crazy that everything I've outlined up to now isn't the end of this nightmare, but it really isn't. This terrifying twist on the gacha mechanic has been in a lot of these games for a while now, but Tales of Link is the first time I've experienced it for myself: the "10x" roll.

Yeah, I know. It's rough. You can spend ten times as much premium currency to roll the machine ten times at once. This wouldn't be a big deal if that were the end of it, but games that implement this "feature" offer higher percent chances of getting rare units, or sometimes additional rolls. What this actually amounts to is a severe reduction in rewards from individual rolls, and most communities preach to new players to never waste currency on single rolls.

Most of these games sell currency at a rate of .99$ per stone (it's always a fucking stone) and let you pull the gacha once for five stones. Meaning that they charge 50 stones for a "10x" roll. This doesn't translate directly to 50$ per roll, as purchasing more stones at once gives you more for your money, and most games offer a fair number of stones through gameplay, too. I'd say that on average, a "10x" roll costs about 30$ if you buy all of the stones with real money.

That's still a lot.

That's 30$, and it doesn't guarantee you shit! Sure, sometimes you'll have enough stones from in-game events or whatever to do a roll for free every now and then, but that still amounts to thirty fucking dollars of their currency. You're not buying a new game with that, you're buying a chance to digitally own a cool or cute-looking drawing of a character you like with some numbers attached to it.

It's just... I like those characters.

I've been playing Tales of Link enough that I've spent a fair amount of time lurking on community message boards devoted to the game. And the rates for getting cool characters... They're abyssmal. I've seen people dump amounts of money that I've never even held in my hands towards getting a new costume for their favorite character, only to come away empty-handed. In most free-to-play games, the number one in-app purchase is the .99$ option, but if you look at the store page for Tales of Link, you'll see that the most-purchased option is the 70$ one. That is, in fact, the most expensive option, if you were wondering. People invest a lot of time and money into this thing, and it's not even a great game.

I understand why "waifu/husbando-culture" is not super healthy (and also those terms are awful) but, like... These people just love these characters. They've spent hundreds of hours travelling with them, on epic adventures, trying to keep the world from falling apart (or putting it back together, Symphonia fans). Maybe it's lame that they got so attached to fictional characters; maybe it's a problem. I don't know, it's not really my place to judge them. I've done worse things to myself for probably stupider reasons. That's not the important thing here.

I don't know any of these people. I rarely, if ever, post anything on these forums. Still, when I see someone bummed out by not getting that cute cat girl version of a Tales of Xillia character, I get it. It sucks. It sucks to be so passionate about something, and try so hard to get it, only to be rejected. Hell, that might be why some of these people are so attached to fictional characters in the first place; rejection sucks! They all know what they're getting into, and know they might not get what they're looking for, but it still stings when it doesn't happen.

I've done my fair share of rolls, too, but I only have about five or six versions of characters I actually care about that are decent enough stats-wise to actually use. The other characters I use are either from games I haven't played, entries I actively dislike, or happen to be the only character from the game they appear in who I hate. Fortunately I don't get my hopes up too much, and have cut back on the real money I spend significantly. I try to only spend currency earned in-game, for the most part, occasionally dropping 1-5 dollars here and there in weak moments. But still. I get why people spend the money they do on this thing. And I also get why it makes them sad.

I'm not totally sure what I'm getting at, here. It's obvious that free-to-play games are generally pretty exploitative, so I'm not covering new ground there. I guess I just wanted to point out how much of a bummer it is to have a system like the gacha system in a game featuring so many beloved characters. It's bad when a random system like this one keeps powerful items out of your grasp, but being kept away from characters you care about stings so much worse.