Welcome back to my poorly written blog! I got enough comments on my previous blog to warrant another run at this, and to my surprise some of them were even on topic! Also yeah, this is going to be the name of the blog from here on out, even if I don’t play any visual novels every week. This will probably attract a lot more off-topic conversations that I’d prefer, but fuck it; it’s the nineties, who cares?! On with the show!
E3
So yeah, E3 happened. Which meant I spent a lot more time looking at people playing games (or rather, looking at people talking about previously playing games) that actually playing games. So with that said here’s a quick rundown on my E3 opinions.
Microsoft
I’m going to preface this by saying I really don’t enjoy playing first or third person shooters. There’s a very short list of games in these genres that I will actually play and enjoy. So having said that, when Microsoft’s press conference pretty much went “Hey hardcore gamers we’ve got just what you want! A first person shooter, a trailer for a first person shooter, and a third person shooter!” I pretty much shut off. I did, however, think Tomb Raider looked alright, and the Kinect labs stuff was very interesting to me as a programmer.
Electronic Arts
Mass Effect 3 looks so good it almost convinced me to actually play the Mass Effect series, so I’ll get around to that at some point. Need for Speed could be great, SSX could be amazing. Overstrike looks interesting, and finally for reasons I’ve already said, I don’t care about Battlefield 3.
Ubisoft
Sony
I really want Uncharted 3, and the more I see of Saints Row: The Third the more I want it. Bioshock Infinite puts me in the same position as Mass Effect 3, in which it makes me wants to play Bioshock. The only difference is that I’ve actually bought Bioshock, cursed Steam sales. PSVita also looks like it has quite a bit of potential, so it’ll be interesting to see what developers can do with it.
Nintendo
I am VERY excited about everything Nintendo was showing. I want a WiiU and I want a 3DS, I loved almost every game they showed on stage. I even loved the look of all the games they decided to not show at the conference proper, Paper Mario and Kirby being the main subjects. Though admittedly it’s kind of weird that the WiiU can’t upscale Wii games, when the dolphin emulator is able to do just that, and do it surprisingly well.
No One Man Should Have All That Power
Oh man, this week has been amazing! Allow me to show you with some hyperlinks!
So, last week I mentioned the Saints Row: The Third trailer, and made the offhand comment that, and I quote:
“Also every trailer should feature Kanye West, just saying.”
This was something Rufi and I have been joking around since Saints Row, calling Power the ultimate trailer song, little did we know E3 and later the entire Giant Bomb community would back us up on that opinion.
After that, the Microsoft conference showed the Forza 4 trailer, complete with Kanye West’s Power. To which I made another offhand remark on twitter. The actually catalyst, however, would be the Ubisoft conference. Once the Assassin’s Creed Revelations trailer was shown, everyone’s favourite SparklyKiss said on twitter that the music was incredible. I rebutted saying it’d be better with Kanye West’s Power, and after threatening to mix them together, I ended up doing just that.
The joke was over, I got a laugh out of SparklyKiss, and some other people said it was funny. That was enough for me.
The next night, however, completely unbeknownst to me Rufi took it upon himself to repeatedly post the link in the Giant Bomb chat during one of the E3 podcasts. Here he managed to fool Vinny into thinking it was the original trailer. I’m pretty sure that due to this Vinny started pairing the song with random trailers. Admittedly I’m taking his word for this point, since I wasn’t in the chat at the time.
The next day Ryan Davis tweeted a link to said video, I’ll confess this was after I sent him the link, which was in response to him saying he’d ‘blast that fucking Kanye song’ on his speakers. Maybe even due to Vinny talking about it the night before. He then insisted someone mash it with Super 8, and then someone mashed it with Uncharted 3. And then it just sort of exploded from there.
To be honest, I’d be incredibly arrogant to suggest I started this whole thing, but I’d also be incredibly naïve to think I had no part in this either. The dots join up way too conveniently to suggest otherwise. So in that case, I just want to thank Ryan Davis for liking my silly Assassin’s Creed Revelations + Power video so much that he’d show it off, so thanks a bunch for that!
And thank you to everyone who made their own Power mash up trailers, you turned an in joke my friend and I had by ourselves into something completely amazing, so again, thank you! I really love this community sometimes.
Ryan, quite clearly, deserves all that power.
Well it's time for the part all of you have all been waiting for!
Tsundere Imouto wa Haramase Kibou no Hatsujouki!? ~Sekinin Totte Naka ni Dashite yo ne! Hentai Onii!~
Roughly translated as “Moody Little Sister Wants To Be Pregnant With Your Baby!? ~ Be a Man and Shoot It Inside! Perverted Brother! ~”
Be thankful that I’m not being serious here. I mean, the translation is serious, but… you know.
Tears To Tiara
So I played Tears To Tiara again this week, I had originally played this about a year ago and kept it installed just in case I wanted to replay it. Now usually with visual novels there is no point in keeping it installed unless it has a really good story, and I mean really good. Even last week’s Devil on G-String was uninstalled after the story concluded. If this is giving the impression that this game has an amazing story then hah, you have been fooled good sir! The story here is alright, the main draw, however, is the gameplay. This is a videogame through and through, with the typical visual novel style conversations and character interactions interwoven with gameplay.
So, the gameplay. This game is an isometric tactical role playing real time strategy game. If you’re now sitting there being all “oh word?” then let me answer your completely hypothetical ‘only here to make a Beastie Boys reference’ late 90’s slang with “word."
I admit I’m not very well versed in this genre so everything I say about it could be complete crap, but that’s the problem with voicing your opinions on videogames I guess. Each battle starts with you being able to place your units down onto the battlefield within a certain distance from a pre-determined starting point. From here you tell each unit who to attack, or what magic to use, who to heal. You know all that awesome stuff. Each battle only contains 1 to 8 or so units, as each main character is a standalone unit, and there are no grouped units. This makes the game rather simple to control, as there are never too many characters to control. Even so, right clicking you can tell all units to attack, heal each other or just generally do whatever. This combined with 5 difficulty levels means if you hate videogames like me, this game can pretty much play itself. Each character also gains experience in each fight, which is rather par for the course. Experience is gained after every attack, even if they don’t kill the enemy. A little cool thing though is that if you die in a battle, you get an option to load your last save or restart the battle. If you restart the battle, you get to keep all the experience you had before you died, however, you have a counter in your save file of ‘total losses’, which only increases if you restart. I’m the kind of guy that played through GTA IV with getting no arrests and no deaths, so rather obviously, I loaded the save file every time.
The story itself is rather good, if a little stretched out. A commander called Drwc appears from ‘The Holy Empire’ to kidnap a girl called Riannon. Riannon is the daughter of the Gael tribe’s chief, who is deceased. As a result of this the next chief of the Gael tribe will be the man Riannon decides to marry. She was captured in order to sacrifice her to summon the demon king called Arawn. Only the blood of the Elf king can summon him, and rather conveniently Riannon is a direct descendant. Arawn is summoned from his coffin and is offered Riannon as a sacrifice; however, suddenly Arthur appears to save the day! Arthur just so happens to be Riannon’s brother and as a result the first soldier of the Gael tribe. However, Arawn decides to kill Drwc instead, and rescues Riannon. Arthur, however, is still angry are Arawn, and threatens to kill him. After bickering back and forth, Riannon shocks both of them by proclaiming to marry the demon king, thus making Arawn the new chief of the Gael tribe, and consequently in command of Arthur. You play the game as the unfortunate Arawn, who was unexpectedly woken up way too early and thrust into this tribe as their leader without his consent. Through-out your adventure you acquire yourself a group of warriors to fight against ‘The Holy Empire’ and save the world.
Rather early on you find yourself a castle. In the castle you can but items, weapons, or talk to characters in your castle. You can also recruit and train new characters to fight, however, these are all generic characters, and do not factor into the story. Those characters can be trained outside of battle and can also change classes, for a fee of course. From your castle you can access the world map, and go to the free plains for a little grinding, or select the place with the big ‘?’ to continue the story.
Unfortunately this game is not without its faults. The first problem I had was the character movement speed is way too slow. Like, horrendously slow. Luckily you can hold the ctrl key, or press the shift key, to go into skip mode. Skip mode is par for the course in visual novels, allowing people to skip text they’ve already read (or any text depending in the setting). In battle this allows all movement and attacks to greatly increase in speed. However, skip mode is turned off after every action, which is just silly! In the dialogue scenes this makes sense, allowing you to quickly switch back to being able to read the text, however, in gameplay it’s incredibly annoying.
The story goes in rather interesting directions, but doesn’t really live up to its own potential. The back story for the main characters, Arawn and Arthur, are rather amazing. But the rest of the characters for the most part are just there, and don’t add much to the overall narrative. This is even weirder considering this is a very linear game, even for a visual novel there are no story branches at all. Usually this would mean the story they did tell was well fleshed out and exciting, but even though all the set up is amazing, the ending feels rushed and extremely dissatisfying.
Overall this visual novel is rather average. It tries to combine both visual novel story telling with tactical role playing, but this just makes both aspects seem rather average, and unfortunately it’s not greater than the sun of its parts.
If this sounds intriguing by all means give it a shot, but there are a few ways you can experience this story. The first way is the PC game, rather straight forward. This is the way that I went, as I prefer not to go down the adaptation routes wherever possible (which is to say, the only adaptations I’m ok with is anime adaptations of manga or light novels). Another way game wise is the PS3 version. This version, while only in Japanese, completely changes everything about this game. The 2D isometric real time gameplay is thrown away in favour of 3D turn based strategy. All of the characters are overhauled with new art, and new scenarios are added near the end of the game, to make the story feel more complete. The last way is the Tears To Tiara anime. The same story but in anime form, hell there’s even an English version licensed by FUNimation if you really hate yourself!
I don’t know for how many weeks I’ll be able to write this amount of sheer stupidity, I mean seriously this blog entry is longer than some end of year reports I’ve submitted. I’ve realized I haven’t been talking about anime here yet. Hopefully I’ll have some to talk about next week, but all of my TV watching time has been taken up by watching every season of Supernatural. Apparently there’s a Supernatural anime somewhere, so that’s pretty stupid. I mean, of course I’ll watch it in Japanese, but I won’t be happy about it.
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