I am biased. I am not afraid to admit this. I grew up without much of a father figure for a lot of my formative years, so it was natural that it would come down to the two other family members in the household to greatly shape my outlook and personality. Those two people were my mother and sister. I've mentioned it before, but my mother went to law school while still raising us children and my sister has fairly substantial mental issues. There were a lot of times where life was very trying on us all for a lot of reasons, but nevertheless, those two people shaped how I understand, how I interact with, how I exist with, how I love women. There are other girls and women who naturally have had their share of influence on me, but at the very least, I can't deny how, like everyone else, the specific circumstances of my upbringing made me who I am at this very minute.
Bear all that in mind as I write these next paragraphs.
You can disagree with what someone has to say or what they do or the choices that they make. I understand that. Not all people are made to get along like that. I should know. I'm an atheist, a former Catholic, a socialist, a Japanese speaker, a pacifist, and most of all, a humanist. I know that this world and its societies are not made such that everybody finds each other agreeable 100 percent of the time. Hell, some of the demographics I've listed myself as belonging to have had a knack for attracting death threats to this very day. This is not a message saying "let's all hold hands hands together in harmony and dance under the rainbow!" In fact, healthy disagreements are good for the soul, for they help bring about introspection of oneself and a greater sense of understanding and empathy with other people. Hence, if you legitimately found something disagreeable with tonight's antics and are of sound, rational composure, there's no problem here. I'm not here to pick a fight with anybody, let alone those who have no reason to be badgered for their perfectly fine opinions. This blog is not written to those people, whether I know them personally on here or not.
Where I draw the line is if that disagreement is used as a justification to deprive someone of their human dignity, or at least attempt to do so. I don't care who you are or how right you might think you are. That is no excuse to humiliate and degrade someone, especially from afar, in the safety of Internet anonymity. That's not just cowardice; that's being a dick of the worst degree. Even if that person did something to you as a person or has thick enough skin to take the insults anyway, that's not an excuse to be arbitrarily malicious, especially during opportunities when cheap shots can be plentiful and easy. Respect for people as individuals for what they've done and their opinions cannot be forced, but at the very least, there shouldn't be any question as to whether they at least deserve respect on the level of being a fellow human being. People are who they are and they do what they do and they say what they say. To that end, we all do this no more and no less than anyone else on this planet. We are all just as human as anyone else and to deny that with name-calling or anything else worse is to commit an existential fallacy I just cannot bring myself to ever agree with.
But much like how most forms of respect cannot be forced, I cannot force anybody who may have disagreements with me to change their thinking, and nor do I intend to do so. All I can say about this time in particular is that with the Internet, the nice thing about dealing with something unpleasant is that it's gone as soon as you hit that X button in the upper corner of your browser window. It's such a simple coping mechanism and yet I feel sometimes that isn't exercised nearly as much as it should be.
Let the sleeping dogs lie and let the dogs that want to stay there enjoy their own company if they want to. There's no need to disrupt that sort of order on a site like this, especially on special occasions.
As many Americans were probably wont to do, I ended up heading back home earlier this week to spend time with my family on Memorial Day. Although we no longer have any living relatives who fought in a war, the holiday is always a good opportunity for us to sit down, have a barbecue, and bond in the midst of all of our busy lives. After all, I'm normally a Japanese student by day, my mother a legal advocate for disabled kids, my older sister an ever persistent and productive worker despite her own mental disabilities, and my father a plumber with his own business. Suffice it to say that we get together when either our schedules naturally allow us to or we force them to do so, but that these breaks are rare occasions to sit down and just talk and do whatever.
I bring this all up because it was on Memorial Day that my mother and I ended up talking about Persona 4, partly because I had a copy of the game's Japanese art book sitting nearby, having only recently been rediscovered in my bedroom. My mom has always been one to respect my love of games, but at a distance. Part of it is a generation gap, part of it is a lack of intuitiveness for her, and part of it is simply the culture and mentality behind a lot of games. As a sociology major and the proud owner of a law degree, she often needs her entertainment to at least have some intellectual engagement in order to be enjoyable and games, although improving in that arena, don't have a consistent history of doing so, at least in an accessible way to the masses. While I greatly treasure a "smart" game as well, it's less of an issue for me since I grew up with games as a means of escapism during a rather emotionally bumpy childhood, so I'm better able to appreciate games on rawer, visceral levels when need be.
Here's a picture of Rhythm Tengoku, to break up the wall of text. That game is pretty damn fantastic, even today. Regardless, the subject of Persona 4 came up and when I told her it was one of my all-time favorite games, she was curious, since she knows I'm a bit of a connoisseur. I told her that it was a lot of things that made the game feel so special and still occupy my thoughts today. In particular, I emphasized the characterizations, how well Atlus had written them and crafted people I could really relate to. For every member in the main cast, there was usually a direct analog in my real life that I knew at that age as well I could reference while interacting with them. The fact that they all have problems and traits I understood from my own experience was what allowed me to bond with the cast, in a way, I said. To emphasize my point, I ended up pointing to individual characters on the cover of the art book and describing their basic traits, saying stuff like, "Well, Chie here is the quirky girl who has some self-esteem and inadequacy issues" and "Kanji's got problems figuring out his sexuality as a man." What initially started as intrigued confusion from my mother as to how I could think of a game so highly eventually turned into respect and admiration for that very same game. I had eventually made her into a mini-fan of Persona 4 of sorts once I described the game's premise and flow in terms she could understand as a woman who grew up with classic books and movies at every turn of her life. When she said that it was the sort of game she'd have probably gotten really into at my age as well, had it existed at the time, I was nothing short of pleased, since, for once, she and I had a mutual understanding as to why I love the unique act of pressing buttons and seeing things unfold on a screen accordingly.
Ironically enough, that big old story was not what I originally wanted to call to your attention today, especially since I didn't expect it to turn into a multi-paragraph behemoth. But still, I wanted to retell it for the context of this reprinted forum post I provide below. Coming from a thread in which the topic starter tries to propose a plot he feels is original and could help stymie the maligned trend of relying heavily on cliches in game narratives, I decided to provided my own thoughts on stories in games and how they're married to the gameplay mechanics to make the final product what they are. It's a subject I think about a lot, but I suppose the conversation I had with my mother earlier in this week made the subject fresh enough to warrant another bit of rambling from me. It also probably helped that the original poster reminded me of myself years and years ago, when, as a gamer, I wanted nothing more than for every game ever to be original and innovative, traits I still appreciate within a more accommodating viewpoint these days. So here my response finally is, word for word, and for once it's not actually about Japan. At least not directly.
Here's an image of a game with more dubious contributions to the advancement of narrative in the medium. ----- It's not normally the ideas at their core that make or break a story-focused game's potential, but rather their execution. A lot of people have common interests in literary themes that appeal and relate to things that they can understand in their daily lives. It's why you see a lot of basic points transcend any number of stories: they need some sort of common ground with the viewer, player, reader, whoever and time-worn tropes are one way of doing it. Things normally only start getting iffy if the execution of those premises is stale or cliche, since it then shows that the creators are unable to spin their narrative in a way that still appeals to their audience despite some of the familiar territory it covers.
Take Mass Effect, for example. I can't say that I've personally completed it myself, but from my perspective, the series has a lot of the fundamentals of your average space opera. Intriguing alien races, exotic locations, galactic politics, and, of course, a human hero, to give the audience a perspective from which they can watch the events unfold and, by proxy, relate to them. By these tenants alone, it'd be easy to conclude that Mass Effect games graft a lot of their plots' individual facets from most every piece of science fiction before it, from Star Wars to Star Trek to arguably even something like Ghost in the Shell. The reason why it still stands out is that dialog and the personalities interjected into its flow make for a dynamic experience for the players. You don't get to just watch Commander Shepard kick ass and wax rhetoric from afar; you're an active participant in it, an omnipresent force able to influence situations (albeit in a scripted way) on your own terms, in the manner that you'd use personally if you were actually there. It also doesn't hurt that Bioware knows their stuff when it comes to RPGs and has the gameplay to back it up, too, of course.
This image wasn't in the original post, but I thought I should give you SOMETHING to keep going. I would have totally bought that shirt, too, were it not for its adherence to the hidden rule in Tokyo where all pieces of fashion must be irrationally expensive. That shirt was like, $30 to $35, if I recall. It's those sorts of unique traits in execution despite at least some underlying familiarity in the themes that allows the best story-driven games to become so big and influential. Metal Gear Solid games are hardly the first works of fiction to cover the threats of nuclear weaponry, but they still stand out thanks to Kojima's training in filmography and a knack for making plots that take huge, global problems apply them to the characters on a personal level. There have certainly been a lot of games to take place before Personas 3 and 4 that involved growing up in high school and the implications of everything from teen suicide to how people project themselves, but they're still appealing because they're portrayed in a way where you can influence ordinary lives and, particularly in 4's case, possibly come away learning something about yourself or other people. Innumerable games have mooched off of Japanese mythology, yet Okami was still well-loved because it had good visual artistry and technology to back it all up and make everything nothing short of beautiful. Gameplay-wise, these are all pretty vastly different from each other, but they all share that common potential problem of being bogged down by poor execution of their well-trodden ideas, yet still ultimately come through in the end and make experiences that are compelling in their own right, even in comparison to the source materials from which they may have borrowed.
My point is that I don't see a whole lot of actual potential execution that your game has at this point to transcend the self-admittedly worn territory the plot seems to exhibit by itself. Off the top of my head, here are some games I can already think of that cover a lot of similar ground:
Tales of Symphonia, Abyss, etc. Lots of religious and political dissections regarding whether the established moralities really are good for humanity. Characterizations aplenty of people on all sides of a given conflict with plausibly explained motivations for why they do what they do, both good and bad.
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor. Depending on which plot route you take, the game's ending can be very heavily about working with or against the major religious order in place and the implications of those decisions. As with other Megami Tensei games in general, though, the overarching design and gameplay mechanics are generally skewed to have a skeptical tone. There is a reason why God's minions such as the angels are usually portrayed as major jerks in these games.
Fallout 3. Naturally, a lot of decision making to be had in this game, with the game acknowledging that regardless of whether something is good or evil, there are inherent pluses and minuses to be had in the charades. It's not as though some people chose to set off the nuke simply because they were jackasses.
Shadow of the Colossus. While you can't influence the plot, it is definitely one about the ambiguities of what good and evil really are and the influences it can have on the human soul's integrity one way or another.
Grand Theft Auto IV. As a character who's often put into situations that can't really end all that well one way or another, Niko Bellic sometimes has a lot on his plate. Who you choose to associate and, by extension, who you choose to kill, has consequences both tangible and intangible, with a lot of the major ones forcing automatic game saves to occur immediately after they happen. Just like real life, sometimes you have to have your cake in that game and eat it, too, even if that cake turned out horribly.
Alpha Protocol. Actual quality issues aside, it seems to be a lot like the other Western games in this list in that it takes your decisions and forces you to live with the consequences without giving you a chance to restart. Apparently this can result in pretty drastic changes in the plot affecting everything from the ending to who you even meet along the way.
I gave up on making the images in this post relevant a long time ago. Fargo! Nothing on this list might be an exact match to what you've described, but I'd say that they're similar enough that things on your end would have to be fleshed out significantly more to make your game stand out in the midst of a lot of these other ones. Sometimes that can't happen with just the story by itself. People in this thread are asking what the gameplay is like for a reason, as that can contribute to the game's story and thematic executions in more personal, immediate, and visceral ways. There are very few story-heavy games that can get away with using the story as a complete clutch. Indeed, there's still actual gameplay in them because the designers intended for their plots to be interactive experiences. Otherwise, if the creators were interested in just purely telling a story, they could have gone off and told it in any number of other more static, established mediums. Gameplay can, does, and should accent the narrative if that's what's important. The dialog system in Mass Effect and Social Links in Personas 3 and 4 are two ways how previous games have accomplished this and it's up to you to create your own solution if you're hell-bent on making a game that lives and dies with its story. That part doesn't even necessarily have to be original; just, again, well-executed. The line for what works and what doesn't, though, is on a case-by-case basis.
In the end, there's no real reason why I had to make the post this long or critical other than for my own personal sake of wanting intellectual engagement and the chance to play some Devil's Advocate. But still, hopefully this might give you some ideas on how to move forward (if you're genuinely serious about all this) and why people will still have legitimate questions anyway. All good creators strive to be the best and original in their own way, but that's not possible without outside feedback, either, so don't be surprised if people keep calling you out on what you've presented if you're not ready to back up your ideas with more of them, ideally fleshed-out. -----
Here's one final picture to reward you for all your patience with this blog post. It's a parody that works on multiple levels if you read enough into it. 14 Comments
Putting up two reviews in one week probably isn't much of a feat for some of Giant Bomb's more prolific reviewers, but for me, it's still a bit of a surprise. While I'm still pretty talkative about games on here and have made my sometimes controversial opinions known far and wide, during the school year, I'm lucky if I get more than five reviews done each semester. It's really the combination of a lot of things. My studies eat up a lot of time, as languages are wont to do, and on top of that, I write a fair amount of academic stuff to begin with. Sometimes the final product doesn't look like it took a whole lot of energy in retrospect, but when it actually takes a fair number of man hours to write up research papers like this one, I can feel a bit drained when it comes to writing most anything. It's one of the main reasons why you also don't see a huge amount of blogging out of me when I'm not on break: it's just unfortunately not my main occupation that I can't devote my time and energy, too. Having a lot of passions in life has its pluses and minuses like that.
But nevertheless, not only did I write a review for Sega's great SRPG Valkyria Chronicles that I'll plug one more time, but I also managed to churn one out for Trauma Team on the Wii after finishing that one this week as well. The latter game was a bit of a hard game for me to review, mainly because it was difficult for me to accurately portray what went well and why. Describing the fluidity and the well-designed nature of the controls and the impact they have on a game like Trauma Team is a largely abstract matter, one that I can feel instantaneously and enjoy greatly, but nevertheless have trouble replicating with just words. That's actually the main reason why I never wrote a complete review of Second Opinion, the first Wii game I ever actually got. Out of all the games to have come out within those first few months of the Wii's launch, I felt that Second Opinion, by far, was the smartest about taking advantage of the Wii's controls and that contributed greatly to my enjoyment of the game as a whole. It's just that putting those feelings into text, conveying the implications of Atlus' really quite brilliant design decisions for that stuff was an overly hard issue to tackle. With a new game in the series fresh in our minds, however, even in the midst of juggernauts like Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Red Dead Redemption, I thought I would try to actually tackle the problem and definitively show why the game's controls make it so great.
Whether I actually succeeded on that front could be debatable, but if any of you got so much as an inkling of what I was trying to say on that front, then I'll be content. Pure abstractness has never been my forte in writing, personally.
Beings as I don't have a paycheck attached to the hobby, I write reviews of games when I feel the opinions I have on them can contribute something new to the discussions. If I'm lucky, timing isn't a huge issue; when I get games brand new at release, more often than not, I'll write up a review on it because it's still fresh in a lot of people's minds and therefore not everything about it has necessarily been said. As a game gets older, things get more ambiguous on that front. When I finally bought a PS3 Slim recently, for example, I also bought and finished a copy of MGS4 with it. I really, really, really enjoyed that game and now agree with a lot of assessments that it was indeed one of 2008's best, but when it came time for a review, I decided against doing one. I like a lot of Kojima's stuff, but years after they're released, it's hard to come up with new material that hasn't already been rehashed and analyzed to death. Kojima knows his cinematography. He knows his dialog and over the top plots. He (now) knows how to make his gameplay be complete experiences on their own, too. But those are given points when a lot of people talk about his games and if there's one thing I hate doing when it comes to writing, it's being redundant. It feels tedious and if other people have already expressed the exact same views I have about something, chances are pretty high that they've done so at least as well as I could. Such are the sorts of roadblocks I tend to run into when deciding whether to review a game I played that didn't come out that same year.
That's usually not the case with more obscure releases and why I'm more consistent covering them in review form when I feel the inspiration to do so. Games like Okami and Beyond Good & Evil naturally have their followings, but they're not nearly as huge as what the mainstream stuff attaches, so even when I play older stuff, I'm usually still fairly motivated to give them a review, despite their age. Unless it's absurdly old stuff like Hebereke. That game is pretty great, but dude, don't ask me to do a Famicom game review. I'm not the Angry Video Game Nerd for a reason.
But yeah, that brings me to my review of Valkyria Chronicles. It's an SRPG on the PS3 and a pretty great one at that. It did enough things right that I definitely intend to buy the sequel when it makes its way to the States this summer. But if I go any further than that, I'll just be repeating what I said in my review. You did just read everything I had to say on being redundant, after all, even if I'm ironically doing just that by bringing it up. Again.
Japanese Home is a very mystical place. Dance parties are pretty much everywhere you look, the people are actually nice and friendly, and the atmosphere is pretty laid back overall. You could do worse than hang out there if you wanted to fool around with a bunch of people for a few hours without ever hearing a snippet of "asl?" And ideally speak Japanese.
But that's beside the point.
Prior to one of my many dance parties there tonight, I ended up in the Japanese marketplace and lo and behold, I saw Deadly Premonition being advertised in a video reel. This makes sense, since the game was a multiplatform release over there, but to see it actually being advertised in any shape or form was still a bit surreal. Here's some photographic proof below. I didn't have capture equipment with me, so the quality isn't fantastic, but it should get the job done.
Gallery
Maybe with any luck, we'll also get costume parts for York, Emily, and George so we can run wild with the Deadly Premonition propaganda over there. What are your hopes and dreams for the game's future domination on Home?
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I've been using the Internet for a long, long time. Maybe not far back enough to have fond memories of BBS servers and baud modems, but I certainly saw the rise and fall of companies like Juno, AOL, and Netscape. I was alive when the online economic bubble first popped and people came to the bitter realization that, uh, hey, if you wanted to make money on the Internet, you'd have to do better than have a witty domain name and mangled Java/HTML. So much like a lot of the other fine folks here on Giant Bomb, I'm in tune to the Internet's subcultures. This naturally includes a certain predisposition towards erotica and porn. After all, I get morbid enjoyment out of places like Omegle, so I better know about that particular underbelly of the Internet.
I'm not here to stop you from running around and saying "asl" followed by a proposition for pics and/or camsex. People are like any other animal: horny as all hell and wanting to propagate the Earth instinctually so mankind can retain its dominance over the rest of nature. Just a word of advice: don't let the search for bewbage and hotness result in your death. If this Team Fortress 2 video is to be believed, too many people let their hormones overcome their sense of rationality.
If you haven't read the press release stuff that Future Publishing put out to hype its upcoming Mario Galaxy 2-centric issue, you should really do so here. It's not any surprise that the official magazine of a console manufacturer would go out of its way to hype its coverage, but when you've got someone saying that its review is "the only one that matters," that's when things become morbidly humorous. I'm pretty sure I don't even need to say why. So let's take the time to see what sorts of press releases other, lesser-known games would get if they had the backing and finances of a big-name first party magazine, as depicted by yours truly.
It's so old, it's new! And in ONE BAJILLIONDY-P RESOLUTION! Promise! "Not since the critically loved and philosophically profound release of Pac-Man Fever back in 2002 have we been so excited for a flagship game here at the Namco Brigade Magazine, but we have reason to believe that Katamari Forever, the latest in a series of roundabout games Keita Takahashi has been crafting for his entire development career, will be, by far, the most important game in history yet. Why do we say that? It's so important to history because it features so much of it! Read our review that takes up the entire magazine (even our letters section!) and find out for yourself why recycling levels makes old games automatically new! And relevant! Again! Plus, just this once, the issue will be printed exclusively on velcro balls so that you can roll up the world around you while learning about Takahashi's latest gaming Mona Lisa! And remeber, we at Namco Brigade Magazine provide the only reviews worth reading. If it's not flattered in here, it's not worth it, like our competitors' products!"
It's like that other game about stuff getting killed when it rains and fogs, but, like, David Lynchier. That automatically makes it better in our book. "It's been a long road here at All Things Twin Peaks. We were shocked and awed just like you were at the Tokyo Game Show in 2007 when we got to exclusively cover the remake of our beloved television series, then known simply as 'Rainy Woods.' But the wait is finally over and we've got the exclusive, 30-episode long review before everyone else! You, the subscribers, will be the first to learn before everyone else in the world why the adventures of Agent Francis York Morgan, Emily Wyatt, and George Woodman make for David Lynch's most moving production yet. To commemorate this momentous occasion, we've also got a special distribution deal exclusively for this review: it'll be printed inside the game itself, so you can know right after your purchased it why you spent the best $20 in your entire existence! As always, look forward to our review because here at All Things Twin Peaks, we strive to be the only authoritative voice on all things ever, Twin Peaks or otherwise. It's why we even have a coffee review section, after all." Hotel Dusk We realize now that we were foolish to trust in even this game, especially since we have MUGEN nowadays. "Our dear readers, we've seen the truth. After looking at Twilight Princess' overall Metacritic score and seeing that it isn't as immaculate as that still holy Ocarina of Time, we here at Nintendo Power have seen the light. The future of Nintendo is not with Zelda. It's not with Mario, although bless his soul for working so hard for us all these year. It's not in Metroid; not after Team Ninja Touched it. It's not in Star Fox, even if it is the world's greatest and only Arwing flight simulator. It's not even in F-Zero, the series we only remember when we're drunk and waxing nostalgic about everything from hot high school hookups to that first joint. No, the future of Nintendo lies exclusively in Hotel Dusk, the most expensive adventure game ever made, exclusively for the Nintendo DS. Combining a strong narrative with such a striking artistic style, we at Nintendo Power are unafraid to profess our faith in the bright, beautiful future that is Cing's magnificent game. To celebrate the upcoming holiday that is the game's release, we've got a 20-page review and walkthrough that will help you complete the game from start to finish while ensuring you know why we love it death. We're also throwing in copies of Casablanca and Dick Tracy to show you the game's inspiration first hand and we've even got an interview with a real life detective who proves once and for all just how ordinary of a life Kyle Hyde really leads! So get excited and remember, here at Nintendo Power, we're the only reviews you can trust. We get paid by the man, so we know the man best and can therefore speak most truthfully about him. Stay tuned!"
Cheetahmen II Despite the fact that we gave this cool little spot a rare 40/40, not even its majesty can compare to what we have in store for you! "I think it goes without saying, but we here at the Official Cheetahmen II Magazine have had pretty high expectations for this game's release, especially since we named our magazine exclusively after it. After seeing the bold new direction that platformers were beginning to take in the original Cheetahmen game in Action 52, we knew we wanted to climb aboard the revolution and propagate it to the masses. Thankfully for us all, Cheetahmen II is a godsend and much, much more, so we're here to announce our upcoming issue devoted to this review. Of course we'll have our regular features, such as 'Are YOU Faster Than a Cheetah?' But we wanted to make this issue of Official Cheetahmen II Magazine special, because a special game is worth special attention. Thus, we're doing things in style! Instead of releasing this issue to newsstands, we're putting all of the issues in a box and ditching it in a warehouse, just like our game! We're making you work hard to understand our love of this life-changing NES sequel, but believe us, you'll thank us for being even more enlightened than the Buddha. Keep an eye out on our BBS board, alt.rec.thisgamerools, where we'll start posting clues on where to find the magazines in a completely arbitrary and unnecessary alternate reality game! (I know you wanna say 'ARGH,' but bear with us on this one.) Like we've always done with this magazine, take care to note that when it comes to Cheetahmen II, our opinion is the only one worth reading, since it's our's and not somebody else's. Until next time, keep Cheetah-ing your way through life!"
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What a strange world we'd live in if all games were like that, no? Well thank capitalism we all aren't rich enough to promote our own games in self-titled promotional magazines yet, because otherwise the future would sure be grim. And full of 10s. For now, it's confined to a little magazine hailing from the UK. I think we can manage to keep that under control.
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With Japanese, ironically the very last of my finals, out of my way, summer vacation has commenced as of yesterday and with it the beginning of my roommates moving out and returning to their homes. Although this means that I'll pretty much have this place entirely to myself for the next three months, I'm still going out of my way to ensure I at least accomplish a few things in their absence so I don't die of loneliness and/or depression and/or lack of human contact and/or being a drama queen. Such is the underlying theme of today's discussion, even if the individual topics hardly mesh. You have my thanks in advance if you stick for the entire read.
I have a lot of unfinished games I should probably get around to taking care of.
You thought I was going to make a Duke Nukem Forever joke, right? Let's try some Capcom Fighting All-Stars instead. Like the second Professor Layton game. I really enjoyed the first one, even if I ended up resorting to a guide just so I could advance the plot and not be stuck figuring out more sheeps-and-wolves conundrums. I spent about five hours with this new installment soon after it came out because I figured I could give a little extra love to Level 5. But then studies and (presumably other games) caught up to me and save for one modest attempt to get further, I've pretty much been at the same point in the game as I was months ago when I bought it. It's sad. It seems like a lovely game and that voice acting is still really good and fitting for the setting. Hopefully I'll complete it.
Muramasa on the Wii is another game that needs completing. Months and months ago, I nearly finished Momohime's campaign and really enjoyed what the game had to offer on her end. I never got around to playing Kisuke's storyline, but since the combat is almost certainly going to be more of the same, I'm perfectly fine with that. Muramasa was the first Vanillaware game I didn't have serious gripes with, which is a good accomplishment on their part since I felt that they always came really close with all their other games. Considering each character only takes up about 10 hours to finish if you don't do sidequest stuff, Muramasa will probably be addressed first before Layton, if only for efficiency reasons.
Then there's the DS version of GTA: Chinatown Wars. I bought it for $20 when that was still just a sale price about a year ago and I'm baffled as to why I haven't given it more attention. It seems like a really good rendition of the GTA formula for a portable platform since they finally caught on that the Stories side series just wasn't executed all that hotly. The touch screen stuff works well with the spirit of the series and the plot, while not particularly spectacular, seems serviceable enough. Someday, I tell myself. Someday I'll get past that first hour.
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 also bears mentioning in here. Despite the rather lacking story of its prequel, the gameplay has some of the better mechanics pre-Persona and was enough to keep me going for the 20-ish hours it lasted. Unfortunately, that last dungeon really did a hell of a job of undoing all that goodwill. Really sporadic difficulty spikes coupled with way more teleportation puzzles than necessary and an anticlimactic final boss make for an iffy ending to an otherwise enjoyable game. That trauma acquired at the end seems to have carried over into the sequel. Although the plot seems to have finally gotten genuinely intriguing even in the beginning stages, I think I just need more cooldown time before really sitting down and going through it. At this point, it still feels like I'm playing the same game even if it is mechanically different in a few areas. Atlus would have ultimately been better off just releasing the whole saga as one game instead of experimenting in episodic content, but what's there works well enough.
Just taking a little break. I will also finish my guide for this game, too, and it will put everything Prima, Brady, and Nintendo Power made to shame. Promise. The PSP port of the original Persona game is another Megami Tensei game that needs finishing. In this day and age, it is by all means rough around the edges. Combat could have definitely been streamlined significantly and the exploration mechanics are so 1990s that it's not even funny. It's all functional and the game in fact features one of the few demon negotiation systems I haven't utterly loathed, which is a pretty big plus in my book. As a Persona fan who got on board with FES, though, it's still nice to be able to experience the prequel and pick up on references that still obliquely show up in the later games I'm more familiar with. Having committed 20 hours to it, I'll probably go back to it eventually. I liked enough of what I saw and I can put it into a 90s era context enough to still be okay with how the game operates.
Strange Journey is the last SMT game I'll list on here, promise. I've committed around 30 hours to it, but the current boss I'm stuck at has me so frustrated that I decided to put it away for a while before I maul my DS out of rage. Main SMT games are notorious for their difficulty and it's especially true for the area where I'm at. Up until that point, I was really enjoying the game. I always like seeing how Atlus experiments with their RPG formulas so each installment always feels distinct and this game has enough new ideas I'd love to see incorporated into future Megami Tensei games. Hell, it's technically the first one in the series to have an achievement system. Wrap your head around that one. But again. Difficulty. I'll tolerate it for quite a while, but there comes a point where I just have to put it down and tackle it later when my mind is refreshed again and this is definitely one of those times when it comes to Strange Journey.
There are other games, but those are my main concerns. To quickly wrap up the other ones, there's Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. The game has a nice sense of style and the gameplay is a relaxing, well-done Zelda clone with a lot of heart and charm to it. Pokemon SoulSilver will probably also re-enter the fray at some point whenever I can get over my anger at the Elite Four. Screw Koga's Muk. Bully on the PC is also another game I'd like to tackle again. Despite finishing the PS2 version, it's nice to revisit the game a few years later and, hey, it actually runs just fine on my rig. Fantastic.
But instead of all that....
I get sidetracked very, very easily, in case you haven't noticed. I decided to start playing Picross 3D instead. My history with the Picross series ironically started with a homebrew PSP version that I spent a lot of time playing just last summer, but after coming to fall in love with the series' formula with that, it didn't take much to convince me to buy this new edition. The Quick Look on the site finally enlightened me as to how the game operates and I was intrigued by it so much that upon seeing it come out for only $20, I was convinced into buying it.
I do not regret this purchase in the slightest.
It takes the Picross formula into some pretty logical directions, but it's just all so eloquently executed that it's ultimately an even more intellectual game with less of the gambling experimentation you'd sometimes have to do with the old formula. That still happens from time to time, but more likely than not, it's because you haven't exercised absolutely all of your options. The game's tutorials, while a bit lengthy and excessively segmented at times, are very good primers to get you into how it all works and it's very much so necessary you familiarize yourself with it, since the numbering mechanics in particular have changed quite a bit compared to the older games.
I'll probably review it eventually, but here's the tl;dr: Just go buy it. At the very least, try out the demo, but for $20, it's a very worthwhile package. Nintendo has always been one of the best companies when it comes to puzzlers both Tetris and non-Tetris and Picross 3D doesn't break that trend. Besides, HAL Labs made it. They usually do a pretty great job, no?
In other news....
It's tangent time! I remember when I used to be able to actually do these, too! Let's quickly talk about other stuff going on for the duration of my summer. The lack of money has unfortunately forced me to stay put here instead of returning to Japan, although considering that I'll be returning next year for a very lengthy duration, I can be patient. In the meantime, much like with last summer, I'll be spending part of this one reviewing all of the grammar points I picked up over the year. This is mostly so that when the new school year starts again, I'm not playing catch up like a lot of other students; as I major, I feel I can't necessarily afford that. Being able to chat with natives on places such as Facebook and SharedTalk negate that issue to an extent, but when it comes to languages, I prefer to be prepared. This is also the summer where I'll probably be kicking my verbal skills into significantly high gear, as I feel that I'm comfortable enough with my writing where I should now be focusing my attention on conversational stuff. Lucky for me, that's apparently what third-year Japanese is mostly about at my university, but it doesn't hurt to get a head start.
The review stuff is mostly a side project, though, as I do actually like to enjoy the fact that I have a break from schooling. My brain appreciates the rest. Translation work will probably resume soon enough, but first I need to be reminded what not being in school actually feels like. Considering my last one essentially ended a month early because of study abroad, this is an opportunity I'll gladly take.
On the side, I'm also trying to find work so I can keep saving up money. As much as the government and my school like to throw grants and loans at me for being a good student, more of it would be handy and I'm not against going part-time to accomplish that. Unfortunately for me, there isn't a whole lot available right now in my city and thanks to a lack of a driver's license, I'm more or less stuck here. I can manage without the job if I have to, but it wouldn't be ideal, The sooner I can nab one, the better.
According to Direct2Drive reviewers, this series actually promotes socialism. I wouldn't know because the only relevant business sim was RollerCoaster Tycoon anyway. Regardless, this summer will probably be about my cooking and photography for the large part. I don't really discuss either one on here very often, but their both hobbies I greatly enjoy. I inherited the former from my mother, as I spent a lot of my younger years watching and helping her make meals. My skills aren't nearly as high or as diverse as her's yet, but now that I have more free time than I know what to do with, hopefully that can start changing over this summer. Recipe difficulty doesn't really scare me as I have enough experience to have the right intuition for that stuff, so thankfully I should be able to start getting creative sooner rather than later. I yearn for a lot of old food I used to have at home, so those will probably be the first things I memorize first. I have no specific order in mind, though, as I'll probably just improvise somewhat as I go along anyway.
As for photography, it was something I started taking a serious interest in after reading a lot of Danny Choo's blog. The quality and artistry of his photos made start taking the medium really seriously and after getting my own modest point-and-shoot and really experimenting with the technical stuff on it, the way I look at and interact with the world has changed quite a bit. I appreciate being able to capture things in the moment and giving people all around the world a look at what I call home, so I fell in love with photography pretty soon after I started getting into it. I'm looking to replace my regular Nikon Coolpix with a higher end DSLR that'll let me change the resulting photo a lot more, although finances again, prevent this from being an immediate thing. As it is, what I have works just fine for now, but the potential for what my photos could become quality-wise is enough to ensure that I will make sure sooner or later to replace it. At the very latest, this should happen before I move to Japan next year.
I'm pretty much done here.
Drunken sexting Rise never ceases to be amusing. Oh, did you see that Mario video on the front page? The one with the guy beating it with a DDR pad? Fantastic stuff. I even followed him on here, since I sure as hell still haven't beaten the original game with even a regular controller. Mad props to him.
Also, this potential Threadless shirt looks fantastic. It damn well better make it to the storefront, since I'd sure as hell buy it and fully intend it to as soon as it happens. I subscribe to their newsletter already, too, so I can stalk the shirt's progress even more.
On a final note, I got a copy of Black Dynamite for my birthday recently. It's easily the best not-blaxploitation film I've ever seen. Fantastic stuff. Here's a YouTube video summarizing some of the reasons why, but really, you should just go out and watch it. Such a good parody of both its genre and the 70s in general.
Although my subject matter in this blog tends to jump from post to post to the point of being erratic, I have a tendency to be pretty single-minded in the actual content itself, not deviating from start to finish, save for natural writing progression. With the school year winding down, however, I have a lot of things both gaming and non-gaming related on my mind. It may thusly be nice to condense them all into one post for once and adapt the multi-subject style I've seen a lot of the more prominent bloggers adopt on here within the past year-ish, so without further ado, let the subject jumping commence.
Oh, and I apologize ahead of time, but I have no tl;dr this time. I have no idea how the hell I'd summarize this post so succinctly anyway, so my bad if I encourage a bit of literacy. Woops.
Year 2 of uni Japanese is done.
Just this once, this site is going to see what it's like to talk about Japan when it has nothing to do with stagnating JRPGs or this game. Amazing. When I was in high school, we were given our choice of two languages. Practical people like myself picked Spanish because, hey, kinda large Mexican population in Colorado while other people went the more arguably flowery route and opted for French. I bring this up because my experiences in university Japanese sometimes have an odd knack for mirroring what happened while I was learning Mexican Spanish. In high school, for example, I really began to hit my stride in fluency toward the end of my second year and so, too, has the case been with Japanese. It's not to say that I was speaking or writing like a native then, nor that I am now with Japanese, but with two years under my belt, it's enough time to really get a good grip on the language and feel confident about experimenting with the grammatical mechanics and vocabulary. As a longtime writer, this is an extremely important thing, as more flexibility always equals better articulation of what's going in my mind. You could probably surmise as much from my generally rambling style.
It's not to say that it was all happy times studying Japanese for the entire year, though. The intermediate level is where you can start running into a lot of road blocks and have generally slower progress in getting from point A to point B, even if the things you accomplish along the way are of a linguistically more meaningful magnitude than before. I had my weeks where I was definitely frustrated more so than in love with the language. Anybody who's had to study humble and honorific verbs can probably attest to the sheer lack of intuitiveness that aspect of Japanese has. This is true even with native speakers, to put it even more so into perspective. Throw in the stresses of having to return to university life almost immediately after having breakneck classes at Sophia University and you can definitely say I had my ups and downs with Japanese this year.
But in the end, I came out more pleased than ever. I can start to carry on real, honest to god conversations that aren't just copy-pasted versions of skits in my textbooks, something which makes me really happy. I had little real experience with natives when learning Spanish, so even though my reading fluency eventually reached near-native levels, my speaking and listening were significantly more mediocre, so I'm glad to be preventing those same problems bit by bit this time around with Japanese. The fact that I've also started doing somewhat major translation work is also a step in the right direction, I'd like to think. With only the finals remaining before I'm completely done with year two Japanese, I'm looking forward to seeing what linguistic directions I end up taking next year, since apparently they really hammer class discussions completely in Japanese at my school for that level. The opportunity to also reapply to study in Japan next year for a much longer period of time should also prove to be exciting. Japan and Japanese society definitely has its issues, especially for foreigners, but it's hard to not miss living there anyway.
I don't know if I've stated it for the record on the blog, but anybody who's seriously studying Japanese is free to drop me a message and ask for tutoring help whenever. By serious, though, I actually do mean it. I don't care if you're doing it through school or through self-study, but so long as you're doing it for more serious reasons than wanting to be an uber-otaku so you can watch all the Gundam series in their native languages, then I'll be happy to help out. Promise.
I wasn't exactly expecting to wake up to that Bungie-Activision news, either.
Quick, somebody come up with another pun tailor-made for Bungie, just like Actiblizzard! Good timing is sometimes an elusive thing. I'll believe Bungie when they say that they've been having those discussions with Activision for the last nine months. Frankly, given that it had almost been three years since Bungie went independent, I'm kind of surprised that this sort of announcement didn't happen sooner. They must have been talking with quite a few people on the side to have gone this long without an announcement about the publishing prospects of their non-Halo work. That still doesn't take away the bitter irony of them announcing this decade-long deal in the very midst of the Infinity Ward exodus and lawsuit issues, though.
Regardless of all that, however, it's the little details in the deal that interest me the most, particularly the fact that Bungie is retaining IP rights for the franchise and that the Activision deal is only for games of that franchise, not anything else outside of it that Bungie also decides to make. While Bungie would have probably asked for both of those things anyway considering they broke away from Microsoft to regain that sort of control over their work again, I can't help but think that the Modern Warfare fiasco accented those desires all the more. It sucks losing money and executive rights over your own creations as Zampella and company learned the hard way. Even if that's the reality for a lot of developer-publisher relationships, those recent happenings just might have added a sense of urgency to ensure Bungie was really firm in getting their way. Considering their pedigree both before and after their work on Halo, they might have been among the few studios who could get away with having that despite the publisher doing their damndest to uphold the exact opposite elsewhere.
As someone who's always respected Bungie and their development methodologies, even if they're not perfect, I'm naturally interested in seeing what they have brewing. A lot of people seem to think it'll be another Halo rehash since that's all they've been doing for the past 11 years (13 if you count when it was still an RTS prototype), but their history is still diverse and they have enough of the really veteran members to still have the capability to try something different. Even if the Activision stuff still casts a dark shadow over the proceedings, it's hard to not be interested in seeing what they pull off. Personally, if they can just master their narrative technique so that they can make the game's story actually as interesting as its background information, I'll be content. It's my biggest gripe with the Halo universe and if they could figure out how to resolve that and still make the gameplay solid, I couldn't ask for anything more out of them. I'm not the easiest person to please, but still not the most demanding, so it could all work out well in the end, I suppose. Maybe. We'll see.
Call of Duty: Vietnam might as well be reality anyway, so let's talk about it like it's a fact.
The war was about these two or something, right? Having read Le Ly Hayslip's memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, my understanding of the Vietnam war has changed pretty dramatically and become a lot more concrete. As the kid of parents who grew up in that era, of course I've heard plenty about it and its associated protest movements, but after a while, the narrative starts to feel unfortunately same-y and cliche when it comes to people who weren't actually involved in the fighting. That's why Hayslip's book was such a fantastic read for me; it was a personal, humanistic take on a war from an unconventional perspective. Hayslip was hardly a dyed-in-the-wool propagandist and diehard fighter for the Viet Cong, but growing up in a village where she was forced to assist them and ultimately put up with their and the Republicans' (Americans' and South Vietnam's) brutality paints and even grimmer picture of the war than what we're already familiar with. For a lot of different reasons, especially religious, the war the Americans fought and the war the Viet Cong fought were completely different things, making the rampant ambiguities all the more profound when inspected in retrospect. The book presents a sense of humanity for all sides you just don't get from neutral, "unbiased" news reports and that honestly proved to be much more effective for me in the end.
I'm bringing up the book because it shaped how I'll always think about the war and its people involved, both civilian and combatant, so when I read the article on Kotaku that it was really, really likely now that the next Treyarch Call of Duty game would be set in Vietnam, I started to hope that the game will at least try to portray the ethical quandaries to be found a plenty in that war. As someone else pointed out, whereas WWII arguably has more archetypal enemies that make it easier to define who's "good" and who's "bad," the Vietnam War has a distinct lack of that. If Treyarch intends to do any justice to the era at all, it'll have to come to grips with that fact and make it a core part of the game's narrative. Framing it solely as a communist vs. capitalism fight just isn't going to cut it, even if the game is going to solely depict Americans and/or South Vietnamese.
Hopes and ideals are one thing, though, whereas the likely reality can be a completely different thing altogether. As much as I want this Call of Duty game to be the one to follow in Modern Warfare's footsteps and really use the Vietnamese backdrop as a way of being dramatically and ethically provocative, I have my doubts that this well come to fruition. Again, as other people pointed out, Treyarch's Call of Duty games are now famous for their use of historically humorous, but inaccurate zombies and while that cheekiness might work with WWII to an extent thanks to the precedence of other works like Hogan's Heroes, replicating that sort of mentality with Vietnam would just be insulting. It's a war that still has consequences and aftereffects to this day. Treyarch's first duty is naturally to make an entertaining game, but at the very least, I hope they recognize the gravity and scope of their subject, as the lack of that has prevented other Vietnam games from being received well, among other reasons.
Am I speaking implausible? Probably. But as somebody who'd like more humanism in games when it's appropriate, I'd just like to see Vietnam done right in the medium at least once. It has so much narrative potential if portrayed just right, but without the right chemistry, it's bound to flop. It's quite the gold standard Treyarch has potentially set up for themselves, but whether they achieve it is another matter in and of itself.
Today also happens to be my birthday.
I never really liked the actual date of my birthday. April 30 forces me to wait the entire month while almost everyone else I know who has birthdays in the same month gets their turn ahead of me. I've met more people over the years who have this same predicament, too, but the pain of waiting that long never really goes away. Still, it's nice to finally hit 20. Those teenage years were fun, but bloody hell, I sure as hell didn't want to stay there any longer. No complaints moving onward and upward here.
So after a few marathon sessions of Deadly Premonition over the past couple of days, I've completed it and written a subsequent review for it. Perhaps the most surprising thing to come out of all this isn't that the game was actually alright (hell, I even found it charming), but that I actually got around to playing it in the first place. Like the rest of the Internet, I heard a little bit about it in passing when it first came out, but paid it no serious thought because, hey, it was a budget release and that cover art wasn't exactly doing a whole lot to entice me to play it. I'd heard that it was so bad that it was good, but with so many other games coming out at the time and in the near future, I figured I'd be safe if I just avoided it.
In the end, having played it, that assessment would have probably still held true had I not played it. As much as I love deliberately bad games, I never find them to be really necessary experiences if you don't have the extra time and money to spend on them. They're definitely interesting games and can definitely provide perspective on how other games can be developed better, but at the end of the day, they still don't represent the best that the medium has on offer. They represent tangential paths at best and that's okay; only the really major connoisseurs are bound to give it that much attention anyway.
But that's not to say I still didn't really like Deadly Premonition anyway. Much like with the previous Endurance Run influencing people's decisions to buy Persona 4, it is entirely because of those videos that I decided to actually give the game a chance. It's got a hell of a lot of problems and for a lot of people, they have every right to avoid playing the game because of them. It is genuinely bad in a lot of areas, make no excuses. I'd like to think my review made that clear. Yet miraculously, Deadly Premonition isn't killed by those flaws. It should be and if it were any other game, that would probably be the case, yet the way it handles itself is done with such style and eccentricity that you can eventually learn to tolerate them and just consider them some weird secondary aspect to the atmosphere. The fact that it's $20 also probably goes quite a long way to making those issues a lot more tolerable; it's much easier to say it's all relative when your wallet is only out 1/5 of a Ben Franklin because of it and not the usual 3/5.
Deadly Premonition is a weird, quirky, bad, good, great, hilarious, awful game all at once and it knows that. Had Access Games been given a larger budget and a better design document, we could have probably had a mechanically and technologically better and more consistent game all around. But really, a lot of the game's charm comes from it being so inconsistently misshapen and that's probably why I love it so much. It still has heart despite screwing up royally so much. I'll still call it out for everything that's wrong with it, but I know full well that in the end, they help make the game what it is, too. It might be awkward and it might not stand out nearly as much compared to a lot of other releases this year, but I'll be damned if it still doesn't have its weird merits anyway. That's all it could ever really hope to ask for.
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