1249: Platinum

Finally finished Ar Tonelico Qoga as much as it is possible to finish it tonight. I saw every ending, got every PSN trophy (including one that required me to go back and replay a good three hours due to an inadvertent mistake I made, and that ABSOLUTE COCK of a “find every treasure chest” trophy) and generally had my money’s worth several times over.

All told, the experience took me in excess of a hundred hours altogether. Given that I exhausted literally every piece of content that game had to offer, I’m happy with that. Were there more content, I would have probably continued, but as it stands, I feel very satisfied with what I’ve experienced.

A hundred hours is a long time to spend on a single piece of entertainment, and there was a growing movement a while back in favour of shorter, more easily-digestible games. To be honest, I can see the appeal — it’s nice to sit down to play something and know that you’re almost definitely going to finish it — but at the same time there’s something immensely gratifying in a game that takes this long to exhaust the possibilities of.

A hundred hours isn’t actually a particularly long period of time to be required to see everything in a role-playing game, however. Persona 3 and 4 each take approximately a hundred hours to finish normally, let alone collecting all the Personas, completing all the sidequests and levelling up enough to beat The Hardest, Most Irritatingly Cheap Secret Boss in the Known Universe. If you delve into all that extra content, it’s entirely possible you could add at least another 50-100 hours on top of that base figure. I must confess to having never actually finished a Persona game in this manner — generally, by the time I get to the end, I’m exhausted and ready to move on to something else. This is a compliment to the game’s story, incidentally — Persona games are deliberately emotionally exhausting, and the palpable sense of relief you get from beating the final bosses in them remain among some of my favourite moments in gaming.

Where’s the sweet spot? And what was it about Ar Tonelico Qoga that made me want to see absolutely everything it had to offer, regardless of how long it took?

Well, in part, it’s because everything I did felt like meaningful content. Sure, I had to repeat some story bits several times over, but there were differences here and there that kept me paying attention. Nothing felt grindy; my characters hit level 99 naturally while I was doing other stuff, so it was pretty rare that I’d find myself running around in circles waiting for enemy encounters. Similarly, crafting was a pleasure, because the enjoyable combat meant that I’d been inadvertently stocking myself up on ingredients without realising it over the course of the whole game and thus never had to go hunting for anything in particular. And when I did craft something new, I was rewarded with one of the many delightful intra-party scenes where the characters discuss whatever the hell it is they’re putting together this time, and Aoto can embarrass himself in some new and exciting way. (“Every man’s number one fantasy is a drill!”)

I can’t help comparing and contrasting with my experiences in something like Skyrim, which I played and sort of enjoyed for about 35-40 hours or so, then gave up on without getting anywhere near the conclusion of the main plot. It just wasn’t interesting. It didn’t draw me in. I felt like I was walking around a diorama rather than a living world; a model populated by mannequins who all said the same thing rather than a world filled with actual people.

Your average JRPG’s worldbuilding is all an illusion, of course — if anything, most JRPG worlds are even more static than those seen in Western RPGs, but a great deal more character is added by making every single character unique, regardless of their relevance to the overall narrative. This is something that Ar Tonelico did consistently well throughout — NPCs would change what they said according to the point in the story where you visited them, allowing for the exploration of some completely irrelevant but fun little mini-stories in the process.

Anyway. That’s that. Now I have to decide what’s next. While I’m mildly tempted by The Last of Us, I find myself wondering if I’ll feel like I got my money’s worth if it’s over in 10 hours or so. Perhaps I’ll wait until the price comes down a bit, as I have no real interest in the multiplayer modes. In the meantime, I have a pile of shame the size of a house to start on, and doubtless you’ll hear all about what I’m going for next very soon.

1248: OneEighty

So Microsoft reversed its stance on almost everything about Xbox One. I’ll probably write something a little more detailed about this professionally tomorrow, but I thought I’d indulge in some general musings on here while it’s fresh in my mind.

In case you haven’t seen the news yet, here’s the relevant post, in which Microsoft explains it’s backtracking on almost every single contentious policy that it outlined prior to E3, and which had a significant proportion of the game-playing Internet up in arms.

On the whole, it’s good that Microsoft has at least put across the image of being receptive to feedback and willing to act on it, though the ridiculously slow pace at which this news was revealed doesn’t fill me with confidence. Negative public and press reaction alike was already swirling around the Internet even when it was just rumours about 24-hour checkins and restrictions on used games; I find it difficult to believe that Microsoft doesn’t have at least a few social media monkeys on the payroll who would have noticed this sort of thing. And yet they went ahead and announced their plans anyway.

I’m not sure what they were hoping to achieve. They didn’t even attempt to put a positive spin on the restrictions — they were just flat-out restrictions on things you could and could not (mostly the latter) do with your new console and your games. Restrictions that would have made the console completely inoperable in a number of countries on launch — including, amusingly, the homeland of The Witcher 3 developers CD Projekt Red, who were just as surprised to discover the restrictions as the rest of us were.

By posting this “We’re Listening” stuff today, they’re attempting to paint themselves as the good guy; the massive corporation who listens to Internet outcry and responds accordingly in a seemingly positive manner.

However, there are a few problems with this. They’re all hypothetical situations, of course, but none of them bode particularly well for Microsoft in the future. Let’s examine them one at a time.

Firstly is the possibility that the whole thing was a carefully-orchestrated PR stunt, which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Announce a series of ridiculous restrictions on the Xbox One, then a week or two later, announce that you’ve “listened” to the public and relaxed said restrictions, come out looking like the good guy.

Secondly is the fact that if it’s that easy for them to turn off these features on the system — the relaxing of the restrictions will apparently come from a day one patch that — oh snap — you need to be connected to the Internet to download — then it will be just as easy for them to turn them back on again without warning in the future. I’d like to hope that they’re not that stupid, but… well, they announced this shit in the first place, so it’s going to be a while before they earn the benefit of the doubt in my eyes again.

Thirdly is the fact that this was even considered. This suggests that Microsoft is keen to adopt some form of online strategy like this in the near future, and that if it didn’t work like this, it could well be implemented in a much more insidious way.

As I say, most of this is conjecture for now, so I’ll leave it at that. It’s going to be interesting to see if Microsoft sticks to its promises, though, because they destroyed a lot of people’s trust with this whole debacle.

1247: Easy Listening, Part 3

I’m feeling marginally lazy, so I thought I’d continue with a post style I last did some time ago. Yes, it’s time for a soundtrack post. And, if you know what I’ve been playing recently, you’ll probably know the subject of said soundtrack post. That’s right, it’s Ar Tonelico!

(Note to those who are sick of me rabbiting on about this series: I’m closing in on absolutely, positively and completely finishing the third and final game in the series, so short of deciding to run through the whole trilogy again — which I promise I won’t do for at least a year or two — you will be subjected to enthusing about something else from thereon. Indulge me a little while longer, however.)

The Ar Tonelico series has consistently fantastic soundtracks, but there’s a clear divide in them between the “game” music and the vocal, choral “Hymnos” pieces that mark special events in the story. Today I’m going to focus on the latter and share some of these astonishing pieces of music with you. I urge you, even if you normally skip past the promise of “video game music”, to listen to these in their entirety: they’re simply gorgeous pieces of music in their own right, and carry a significant amount of emotional weight to them when heard in context.

Let’s begin, then. I’ll try and refrain from spoilers while discussing these, but be aware that the lyrics shown in some of the videos may constitute mild spoilers.

This piece, known as EXEC_LINCA — pretty much all the Ar Tonelico Hymnos songs are named like computer processes or programs — marked the moment that made me sit up and pay attention to the music of this series. Up until this point, the music had been competent, even memorable and catchy, but it wasn’t until this piece that I had to just sit back for a moment and take in the majesty of what I was hearing. This led to some rather conflicting feelings, as the moment in the story where this song comes up is a very dramatic one that makes you want to keep pushing forward — but, of course, pushing forward runs the risk of causing the music to end sooner!

In stark contrast to EXEC_LINCA, EXEC_CHRONICLE_KEY is a much more restrained, majestic piece for the most part. To say too much more about it would constitute spoilers, but suffice to say the time when this piece plays is a moment of significant emotional significance in the story of the first Ar Tonelico game, Melody of Elemia.

A significant proportion of Ar Tonelico 2 is spent attempting to assemble the legendary Hymnos Metafalica, which supposedly has the power to magically create new land. This version is the first time we hear half of the Metafalica theme, known as EXEC_METAFALICA.

Here’s the second half, known as METHOD_METAFALICA.

And here’s what happens when you put the two pieces together: possibly one of the most spectacular, beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Also noteworthy for the moment near the beginning where the two singers are singing in binary code.

Here’s a strongly-contrasting piece from elsewhere in Ar Tonelico 2. This one technically isn’t a Hymnos piece, being in Japanese, but it’s a lovely little song that accompanies a rare moment of calm in that game’s storyline. It’s called “Hartes ciel, melenas walasye”, which translates to “Beloved World, Beloved People.”

And on to Ar Tonelico Qoga, the third and final game in the series. Give this one a moment to get going; it starts slow and gentle, then builds to a furious climax that truly gets the blood pumping.

And I’ll leave you with this one, a grand, majestic piece that accompanies an important story moment in the latter third of Ar Tonelico Qoga. Again, to say too much more would be to spoil it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the regal nature of this piece.

I hope you enjoyed these pieces. If you’ve never played the Ar Tonelico series, rest assured that the music alone makes these three games more than worth playing — it helps enormously that they’re all excellent games in their own right, too.

1246: Eeeeee Three

It occurs to me that I don’t think I’ve written my own personal thoughts on E3 and the stuff therein yet. Allow me to rectify that.

Let’s start with the Xbox One. While it would be tempting to just write “HAHAHAHAHAHA” and leave it at that, Microsoft’s strategy, if you can call it that, bears some examination.

The Xbox One was received very negatively when it was first announced, thanks to the reveal’s focus on the box’s TV aspect. Things didn’t get much better when Microsoft revealed an FAQ document detailing the fact that yes, the things everyone had been fearing — the console needs to “phone home” once every 24 hours via the Internet; publishers may choose to restrict the resale and/or trading in of games if desired; you can “pause” Kinect but you can’t turn it off — were all true.

The company’s E3 presentation was reasonable, but didn’t show anything that particularly blew me away. We had Call of Duty: Roman Wars, sorry, I mean Ryse: Son of Rome and a host of other stuff so uninspiring that I can’t remember a goodly proportion of it. The few things that were genuinely interesting and outside the “norm” were glossed over; Below, a new title from Sworcery and that weird Might & Magic puzzle RPG that was actually really good developer Capybara was given a minute-long trailer with no explanation, for example.

However, as I wrote over on USgamer the other day, these press conferences aren’t designed for people like me — they’re designed for people who, for want of a better term, don’t know any better. They’re designed for the more casual gameplaying public and shareholders, in other words, and consequently need to show off the biggest, the best, the most exciting-looking. It’s unfortunate that a significant proportion of the “core” gamer population is growing increasingly weary of the biggest, the best, the most exciting-looking, particularly as their favourite studios regularly suffer rounds of layoffs when, say, their five million-selling game “isn’t performing to expectations” or some such nonsense.

All in all, I was left underwhelmed by Xbox One. I didn’t see a single title that sold the system to me, and Microsoft’s determination to make the platform even more closed off and irritating than it already is is just baffling. It’s like they’re looking at feedback and then doing the exact opposite. That can’t be good business, surely.

—

As for the PS4, I was impressed. I can live without all the social nonsense, though I can see that being a bit of fun on occasion — so long as you can turn it off. The fact that Sony simply said “we’re doing things the way we do now” and they got a round of applause says it all, really, though; it’s not a case of people being “set in their ways”, it’s a case of people actively wanting to resist the suspiciously anti-consumer practices that Microsoft are trying to put in place.

Let me go off on a tangent to explain for a moment.

I like owning my games as physical copies, particularly on console. I feel less strongly about this on PC for a reason I haven’t quite worked out, but given the option between getting a physical copy and a digital download on console, I will always, without fail, go for the disc.

The primary reason for this is that I want to always be able to play this game, even if, say, PSN no longer exists one day in the distant future. A secondary reason is that I enjoy displaying my collection the way a movie buff displays their DVDs, a music lover displays their CDs and/or records, and a book lover displays their books. There’s a growing movement to “declutter” our lives from all this stuff we’ve collected over the years, and I really dislike it, because it encourages us to think of things as impermanent. While it can be a pain to store and move all this stuff, I know that if I got rid of any of it, I’d regret it. Sure, once I’m done with, say, Ar Tonelico Qoga it’s unlikely that I’ll go back to it in the immediate future, but what about five years down the line when I hear a snipped of EXEC_COSMOFLIPS and think I’d really like to relive Aoto’s adventures?

I’m saying all this for a reason: PS4 fills me with more confidence than Microsoft does in this regard. Xbox One will have disc-based games, sure, but it’s abundantly clear that Microsoft mean business on the whole “you are licensing this piece of software, you don’t own it” thing that everyone ignores in EULAs these days. We still don’t have a straight answer in place for them on what happens when Xbox Live goes down, or when you don’t have Internet access, or when your account gets banned or hacked… or years into the future when the Xbox One is a “retro” console and Xbox Live doesn’t exist in the same form, or perhaps at all. Can you still play your games? Or does the lack of authentication render them completely useless?

Video games are the only art form where I see this discussion happening, and we’re drifting in the wrong direction. As modern games get more and more advanced, they become more and more worthy of preservation as genuine works of art. And yet with each passing console generation seemingly determined to get more and more restrictive and based around connectivity, it’s a real concern to me that some of these titles will one day be lost forever.

Anyway. It remains to be seen whether Sony does anything stupid between now and the PS4 coming out — because this is Sony, let’s not rule it out — but at present, I’m feeling much more confident about them than Microsoft.

—

As for Nintendo, well, they’re Nintendo. Nintendo has always been happy bumbling along doing its own thing… and I’m absolutely fine with that. I have no need for them to try and compete with PS4 and Xbox One or try to become yet another Call of Duty machine. I have no issue with the third-party support that people were whingeing about all the way through the Wii’s lifespan but which didn’t hurt its profitability at all.

What Nintendo machines do are provide “pure games” — experiences which tend not to have any aspirations to be considered “art”, but which provide excellent examples of simply entertaining and fun things to do. For this reason, I’m actually relatively excited to see things like Wii Party U, as Nintendo Land is a big favourite any time friends come over; having something with even more games to play together will be even better.

Anyway, I’m not sure if anyone “won” E3 for me, because I didn’t really come away from the show thinking “I MUST BUY THIS GAME THE SECOND IT COMES OUT” with regard to anything, but it was certainly an interesting show. The coming console generation is going to be an intriguing one to watch, and I have a feeling that Microsoft is going to get its nose bloodied more than once in the process. Whether that will take them down completely or just relegate them to the position Sony spent most of this generation in remains to be seen, but it’s going to be a hell of a fight to watch.

1245: New Game Plus

I’m currently 90 hours or so into Ar Tonelico Qoga, an RPG that is, by all accounts, quite short (about 30-40 hours or so) under normal circumstances. And yet for some reason I’ve been inspired to not only try and get all its endings, but to literally see everything it has to offer, leading to the grossly extended playtime just mentioned.

This is not something I generally do unless I really like a game, so it’s considerable praise from me to Ar Tonelico Qoga that I’m doing this. I never went back and finished Dragon Age Origins with a different, well, origin, for example, nor did I ever go back and play through Knights of the Old Republic as a Dark Jedi rather than the poncey Light Side-type person I normally do. I liked those games, sure, but they didn’t grab me by the Feels in the same way that the Ar Tonelico series has done fairly consistently over the course of three games, despite the fact that both Dragon Age and KOTOR are objectively “better” games in terms of mechanics, production quality and all manner of other considerations.

I’ve been trying to determine the reasons why Ar Tonelico in particular has resonated with me so much that I want to seek out everything it’s hiding. Longtime readers may recall that I felt much the same way about Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, a game which was almost universally panned by the press (though not quite as much as its predecessor) that I actually ended up loving.

The reasons why these games resonated with me so much are many. Chief among them is the fact that I genuinely adore both the setting and the characters. Neptunia’s cast is silly and full of tropetacular stereotypes, but, crucially, is well aware of what it’s doing and consistently pokes fun at itself. Ar Tonelico, meanwhile, simply has an astonishingly well-realised world with some incredible backstory and lore. And, unlike many Western RPGs that include an in-game encyclopaedia of completely irrelevant information, Ar Tonelico’s lore is woven into the tapestry of not only the individual games, but the overarching narrative that runs across the three games in the series. Each game stands by itself, but playing all three gives you a thoroughly deep understanding of the situation that humanity has found itself in, and the quirks of this strange world’s unique culture.

Aside from the narrative, setting and characters, though, another reason I have found such enjoyment in the Ar Tonelico series is that I’ve never once felt like I was grinding through content, plodding through “filler” material solely designed to artificially bump up the playtime. Granted, I artificially bumped up the playtime to a certain degree myself by deciding (foolishly) that I’d seek out each and every treasure chest in the game for the measly promise of a bronze PSN trophy, but even while doing that, I begrudged the game anything it was doing — though I must admit that after I hit level 99 with all my characters, I began to wish there was a button to turn enemy encounters off.

I’m not going to lie; not everyone will enjoy the Ar Tonelico series. If you can’t stomach big-eyed teenage anime girls and Japanese voice acting with a lot of melodramatic screaming and crying, then this series probably won’t do much for you. If you enjoy those things, though — or if you can at least look past them — then you’ll find one of the most interesting, emotionally engaging JRPG series that I’ve ever played, and one that, across its three games, has some of the richest content I think I’ve ever explored in the genre.

I’ve got five more endings to get. I’m closing in on the first of these, and the last four should be pretty straightforward to get. When I’ve seen everything the game has to offer, I’ll be genuinely sad to leave the game world behind, because not only will I be done with Ar Tonelico Qoga, I’ll be done with the series, too; not to spoil anything, but the “true” ending of the third game all but guarantees that there won’t be a fourth game.

Still, stranger things have happened, particularly in the world of Japanese games.

1244: New Leaf

I started playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf on 3DS today. I haven’t played an Animal Crossing game since whatever the one on the DS was called, and I didn’t really get very far into that one. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, it’s that it came out at a time when there was all manner of other stuff I wanted to play, and I didn’t give it enough of a chance to get into it. Consequently, when it came to time to trade some stuff in — this was back when I still traded in games, something which I rarely do these days (though I still buy used games) — it was one of the first things to go.

Consequently, I’m still pretty much a complete newcomer to Animal Crossing and the way it does things. And I’m still somewhat confused. But in a kind of good way.

Most games you play these days take a very proactive approach to directing the player’s enjoyment. “Go here,” the game will say. “Do this.” In the case of terrible, awful, shitty Facebook games, more often than not the game will literally prevent you from clicking on anything but the thing it wants you to click on.

Animal Crossing, meanwhile, takes the complete opposite approach. It drops you into a strange world — a small town populated by animals in which you are inexplicably the only human resident, and which you have somehow become the mayor of — and then pretty much tells you to just get on with it. There are characters wandering around who will give you a nudge in the direction of things to do, but for the most part, the game is all about figuring out what the fuck it is you’re supposed to be doing.

And the answer isn’t a simple one. There’s a sense of structure given to the game by the ever-present loan-shark raccoon Tom Nook and his increasingly-unreasonable bills he keeps lumping you with game after game, but other than that it’s entirely up to you to make your own fun. Will you cultivate a crop of profitable fruit trees? Will you spend your time catching bugs? Will you dig up fossils and try to fill the museum? Or will you primarily spend your time bumming around your friends’ towns, stealing their fruit when they’re not looking?

This latter part is where the 3DS version is infinitely superior to the DS version. Theoretically, the DS version featured Internet connectivity and the ability to do things with your friends, but when I was playing I didn’t know anyone else, and as such this feature — which is, to be honest, a big part of the game’s appeal — was completely useless. Contrast that with today, when I went over to my friend Jeff’s town along with our mutual friend Cody, then we took a trip over to a tropical island, swam in the sea, harvested bananas and mangoes and marvelled at Cody’s ability to catch the most enormous fish I’ve ever seen.

It’s an utterly pointless experience at heart, but unlike many of those utterly pointless Facebook games out there which are only after your money, Animal Crossing’s self-contained nature means that there’s always a sense of gentle, good-natured humour about the experience — and, more importantly, no pressure on the player. It’s an escapist experience for you to dip into for half an hour to an hour at a time, not something you play as your “big game”. And yet even in those short, bite-sized sessions — ideal for handheld play — there’s plenty of stuff to do, and enough variety to keep some people playing for hour after hour after hour after hour.

It remains to be seen how long I stick with it, but I’m interested to see how much more there is to the experience over time. Something must be there to keep people playing for upwards of a hundred hours; let’s see if I can find it.

1243: A Realm Reborn

I spent some time with the Final Fantasy XIV beta earlier. Since said beta is now in its third phase, Square-Enix has dropped all the non-disclosure agreements and has started to allow people to talk about it, which is nice, because I’d quite like to talk about it. I’ll add at this point that I’ve only just started participating in the beta, so my thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV are based purely on the hour or two I spent fiddling around with it earlier. But — spoiler alert — my thoughts are positive.

I’ll preface this by saying that I really enjoyed Final Fantasy XI, Square-Enix’s previous foray into the massively multiplayer online RPG market. Final Fantasy XI successfully managed to capture the feel of a Final Fantasy game while simultaneously transplanting it to a massively-multiplayer environment. It had its problems, sure — mainly a glacial rate of experience gain that didn’t accelerate in line with what level you were, meaning by the time you reached about level 20 or so it was taking weeks to gain a single level — but it was good fun, and I met some entertaining people during my time in that world. (Bendix and Nefertari, I often wonder where you are! I miss you! [Bendix pokes.])

Anyway, from what I can see, Final Fantasy XIV — in its new A Realm Reborn incarnation, at least — appears to fix most of the annoying things about Final Fantasy XI while keeping the things that were awesome.

One of my favourite things about Final Fantasy XI was character creation. It was a very simplistic character generation tool with very limited options, but the characters it created looked recognisably “Final Fantasy” in nature. They had the spiky hair and the obviously Japanese “look” about them (artistically as opposed to their physical characteristics), and I found them a lot more appealing to look at than, say, World of Warcraft’s heavily-exaggerated, low-poly physiques.

Final Fantasy XIV takes the recognisably Japanese aesthetic of XI and provides you with a veritable wealth of options with which to customise your avatar. Consequently, you can take a much greater degree of control over how you represent yourself to the world, but you’ll still come out of the process looking like a Final Fantasy character. And the decisions you make about your character’s appearance aren’t just there to be forgotten, either; cutscenes in the game make a point of giving you a good look at the parts of your character you don’t normally see during regular gameplay — i.e. their face.

Once into the game proper, I was immediately struck by how much better than XI it looks. This isn’t altogether surprising, of course — XI was built on an engine designed to run on the PlayStation 2, while XIV was designed for the PlayStation 3 and beyond. There’s a high level of graphical detail, but the best thing about the way the game looks is the butter-smooth frame rate. XI was capped at somewhere around 25-30 frames per second regardless of how good your computer was; XIV, meanwhile, will happily glide along at 60+ frames per second, looking simply lovely in the process.

The sound is way better, too. Final Fantasy XI had a great soundtrack, but it sounded very synthesised. This was in keeping with the “sound” of the Final Fantasy series at the time — it wasn’t until Final Fantasy XIII that we’d finally get a fully-orchestrated soundtrack for the duration of the game rather than just in special cutscenes — but it sounds a little dated now. Final Fantasy XIV, meanwhile, has a simply gorgeous orchestral soundtrack that I’m going to have to score a copy of if and when it becomes available. It’s properly “cinematic” in nature, and is very much in keeping with the game’s style.

In terms of gameplay, your initial minutes and hours in the game are relatively business as usual for an MMO. You pick your class (which also determines your starting city) and set off to complete quests for random strangers all over town. These quests are generally either fetch quests of some description, or kill quests that demand you leave the safety of the city walls and start punching ladybirds in the face. Like Final Fantasy XI, however, a nice feeling of “context” is given to these quests through short dialogue sequences before and after them, which is much more immersive and interesting than World of Warcraft’s pop-up wall of text. The quests themselves generally aren’t all that interesting — yet, anyway — but promise to provide the main means through which the game’s story unfolds a little later.

The biggest and most welcome change from XI’s mechanics is in the way you gain experience. In XI, the maximum amount of experience you could gain from a single enemy was 200, and this was only if you took on something considerably stronger than yourself, preferably in a group. Since the amount of experience required to level up increased very rapidly, there was a lot of grinding involved. This improved significantly with subsequent updates, which added “hunt” quests with experience bonuses, but the quests you got from NPCs around town largely remained as a means of gaining cool items rather than experience.

In XIV, meanwhile, you get experience for all sorts of things. You get it for killing monsters, for completing quests and even for crafting items. This means that you don’t get the feeling you occasionally got in XI whereby you felt like you were “wasting your time” if you weren’t out in the fields killing monsters — you can be rewarded for non-combat activities, which is great.

There’s some neat little additions to the usual formula, too. As well as quests, you have Hunting, Crafting and Gathering logs, which challenge you to hunt specific creatures, craft specific items and gather specific raw materials respectively. Successfully completing challenges in these logs provides significant experience bonuses, so if you just want to spend a bit of time grinding rather than working on specific quests, this provides a degree of “direction” to what you’re doing by encouraging you to hunt down specific things.

I’m only level 5 so far, so that’s about all I can talk about as yet. I haven’t yet fiddled around with the strange class system, whereby you can change your class simply by changing your equipment, but I’m interested to see how it differs from XI’s excellent Job system. I also haven’t actually spoken to or teamed up with anyone yet, but the community speaking publicly seems to be very friendly and very positive about the game so far, which is nice to see. I’m sure it won’t last, but for now it’s nice to see people speaking politely and helpfully to one another.

Anyway. It’s nearly 4am because Ar Tonelico. I am, much to my chagrin, apparently chasing the Platinum trophy for that game, and one of the tasks required to attain said intangible reward is to locate all the treasure chests in the whole game. I am having some difficulty with said task, but I will return to that tomorrow, and perhaps even finally finish the damn thing.

1242: Sod Off, LinkedIn

I have a LinkedIn account. It is one of those things that people recommend you have. And yet I don’t think I have ever used it. Not for finding a job, not for “professional networking” and certainly not for socialising. In fact, I find the whole thing massively irritating.

The thing that irks me so much about LinkedIn is that the people who do actually use it are inevitably the sort of greasy smarmballs who refer to themselves as “entrepreneurs” and “gurus” (neither of those are jobs; sorry to burst your bubble) and run “startups”. They communicate exclusively in that particularly annoying brand of business-speak that gave us such awful additions to the English language as “monetise” and “leverage” used as a verb.

That’s not all, though. LinkedIn itself perpetually bombards you with emails about what’s “hot” on their network each week, and again, the articles linked to are almost certainly written by people who woke up one day, decided they were an expert on “business” and promptly started vomiting their thoughts all over the Internet.

This sort of thing occasionally spills over onto other social networks, particularly Google+, which appears to harbour a healthy number of LinkedIn refugees. You can spot one of these people’s posts a mile off — they’re inevitably an image post featuring some sort of “inspirational” image, and the accompanying text usually makes the person posting the image sound like they’re a 50-year old discovering Imgur for the first time.

But I digress.

No, I find LinkedIn utterly useless because no-one I have come into contact with on there appears to use it for… well, anything at all, really. I have a “professional network” that is, apparently, 236 “connections” strong, and yet I have never spoken to any of them on LinkedIn. Many of them I speak to daily on Twitter and Facebook, which leaves LinkedIn rather — if you’ll pardon the employment-related pun — redundant. The people I have as connections on LinkedIn who I don’t speak to daily on Twitter and Facebook are generally people whose mobile apps I might have reviewed once in the past, and this apparently makes me a “professional connection”, even if I slated their app for being shit. (I did that a fair bit; there’s a lot of shit out there.)

I find myself wondering why I keep an account open at that God-forsaken website, but everyone I mention it to seems to think that you “must” have a LinkedIn account these days, otherwise you’re some sort of unemployable nobody. I guess if nothing else it provides a reasonably convenient means of creating an electronic CV that can be easily shared with employers. The Recommendations thing is a good idea in theory, too — though the fact that they don’t show up on your “public” profile, only to people who have actually added you as a connection is irritating — but these appear to have been superseded by “endorsements” whereby people who remember to log in to LinkedIn every so often click through a few automatic prompts to confirm that yes, I do indeed have skills in “Facebook” and “iOS”, without even thinking about it.

Basically, LinkedIn represents all that is wrong with the social Web. It’s full of self-important imbeciles who believe they are the ones who know how the world works, and that everyone else is wrong. It’s utterly vapid and useless to 95% of the population, and the other 5% you probably wouldn’t want to speak to anyway.

So yeah. Fuck LinkedIn.

1241: The Trouble with Rule 34

Lest you’re unfamiliar with one of the most notorious “Rules of the Internet”, Rule 34 states that “There is porn of it. No exceptions.” In other words, if it exists, someone, somewhere, somehow has generated some form of pornographic version of it. It may be “official”, it may be a fan work, but one way or another there is some sort of pornography based around absolutely anything you can think of.

My issue with Rule 34 is not that it exists, nor the fact that it’s true in an alarmingly high number of cases. No, my issue with Rule 34 is somewhat more psychological in nature.

Let’s back up a moment. Currently I’m playing Ar Tonelico Qoga on PS3, a game that features a mechanic in which characters take their clothes off in order to become more powerful. (It is justified in the game’s lore, to its credit, but yes, it is totally fanservicey.) Consequently, you spend a hefty amount of time in the game looking at the cast in their skimpies — particularly the female characters.

And yet do I want to see them actually completely naked? Do I want to see them — if you’ll pardon the explicitness for a moment — getting fucked roughly from behind or covered in jizz? Well… no, not really.

Why not, though? I find the characters themselves attractive — enough to want to spend virtual time with them, enough to genuinely agonise over decision points that require me to pick between them, and enough to project my own feelings about various issues and people onto them — so why don’t I feel the need to look at erotic material featuring them?

Well, the simple answer is… because of all the reasons I listed above. In a good character-led game (or movie, or TV series, or book, or whatever) you develop a close, intimate bond with the characters involved. In many cases, you spend a significant portion of time with them, and usually at a point in their life that is somehow meaningful or important in some way. This “important” moment could be anything from coming to terms with something small they’ve been in denial about for a long time, or it could be saving the world alongside them. Either way, you’re there with them, and you feel close to them. All right, maybe you don’t, but I do.

Consequently, unless you’re the sort of person who has a somewhat… physical relationship with your closest friends, to suddenly throw nakedness and banging into the mix can be somewhat… jarring. If my virtual time with these people has been, up until this point, entirely non-sexual (or at least, not explicitly sexual), I find it a bit weird to suddenly see them in this whole other way, and not at all comfortable in many cases. Kind of like, say, if I had a sister, suddenly saw her naked and got turned on in the process. (I don’t, haven’t and wouldn’t, before you rethink your friendship with me.)

Which is kind of weird when you think about it, sister stuff aside. (Kind of wish I hadn’t mentioned that now.) Being physically intimate with someone else is… well, the clue’s in what I just said. It’s intimate. If you’re very close with someone you love, chances are you want to have sex with them. (Sometimes you want to have sex with people you don’t love, but that’s an entirely different matter.) And yet I have no desire to look up erotic images of, say, Finnel from Ar Tonelico Qoga (pictured to the right), even though she’s a character I feel close to and can relate to in many ways having spent the last 56 (at last count) hours of gameplay with her.

I wonder why this is? It’s perhaps the fact that a lot of pornography (“real” or otherwise) is presented from a third-person perspective, making the viewer feel somewhat detached from the action. (Exceptions do, of course, exist.) Taking this interpretation to an extreme, I could probably argue that looking at an erotic image of, say, Finnel getting banged would feel like I was watching someone else having sex with her, rather than finding the image of her naked body in any way arousing, or feeling like I was the one in a physically intimate situation with her.

An exception to the feelings I describe above comes in the realm of eroge — visual novels with erotic content. In this case, the lack of “discomfort” I feel at seeing the characters in compromising situations is perhaps more understandable — it is, in many cases, in context. It’s not out of character for the protagonist of a visual novel and his loved one to want to indulge in some nookie to show how much they’re into each other. In many cases, the actual sexual content is teased and built up to with sexual tension — for all its faults and ridiculousness, I found that My Girlfriend is the President was actually very good at this, for example; the ero scenes were undoubtedly erotic, but I didn’t find them satisfying because of that — no, I found them satisfying because they marked a turning point in these characters’ relationships, or saw them showing a side of themselves that “the public” didn’t see.

In other words, in these cases, the sex doesn’t feel out of place or out of character because of the context. It makes sense. The relationship between the characters (and between the characters and player) is built on the understanding that these are people for whom sex is A Thing, and that they’re probably going to want to do it at some point. With that expectation in place, it somehow feels less awkward. (Until someone walks in on you watching an H-scene, of course.)

Perhaps I’m alone in this, and everyone who loved Final Fantasy VII as much as I did when I was younger is happily wanking away to contextless animated GIFs of Tifa giving Cloud a soapy titwank. I don’t know. And I have a strange feeling no-one would admit to it even if they did!

1240: Zzzz

Please don’t expect anything especially coherent for the next few days. E3 is happening, and I worked a 20-hour day yesterday, a pretty long one today (with a few breaks) and will doubtless continue to do so while the show is still on. I’m not even at the show. This does, however, mean that I don’t have to endure parties where everyone around me is getting drunk and inevitably having more fun than me.

That said, it would be quite nice to hang out with some people I only know as Twitter avatars at present – or people that I haven’t seen in person for several years.

Things I have seen at E3 that I like so far: Final Fantasy XV, Monolithsoft’s X, Bayonetta 2, The Wonderful 101, The Crew, Quantum Break, David Cage’s Dark Sorcerer thingy, the PlayStation 4.

Things I have seen at E3 that I am not crazy about: The Xbox One, Battlefield 4, Killzone, Titanfall, Destiny, any other shooters. BORING.

If you want any more from me, go check out USgamer. And I’ll be back to my more usual wordy self later in the week all being well.

Now, sleep.