1938: XCOM: The Board Game: Some First Impressions

My brother bought me a copy of XCOM: The Board Game for my birthday, so I spent a bit of time learning it today since you can play it solo, and I’m planning on playing it with some friends this weekend.

I must confess that I’m not actually massively familiar with XCOM as a whole, though I did play UFO: Enemy Unknown back when it first came out, and I do at least own a copy of the more recent reboot, even if I have never actually booted it up as yet. I know the principle, though, and I also know that knowledge of the video game series isn’t particularly important for enjoying the board game, as the board game has a somewhat different focus than the video game.

Basically, aliens are invading and everyone is fucked unless you save them. You do this by responding to UFO sightings around the world, completing missions, researching technology and, hopefully, eventually thwarting the alien menace. While you’re doing this, the various regions of the world are gradually getting more and more panicked by the Bad Things that are happening everywhere, so you need to try and take care of them as much as you can lest your funding gets pulled from that region.

XCOM: The Board Game is a cooperative affair for one to four players. However many players are playing, four “roles” are used, with multiple players taking on more than one role if you’re playing with less than a full complement. The Commander is in charge of the overall budget. The Science Officer is in charge of research. The Squad Leader is in charge of leading the troops on the ground. And the one I’ve forgotten the name of is in charge of other important stuff like communications and whatnot.

Yes, communications; XCOM: The Board Game has an interesting twist on the usual “players against the game” formula of cooperative tabletop games: there’s a companion app for smartphones/tablets, and it is required to play, not optional. The reason for this is the “real-time” phase of each round, which requires someone to be in charge of the app and bark out orders to the other players as the app issues them; the players, in turn, then have strict time limits in which to complete their actions, and the exact “phases” through which a turn proceeds are part randomly generated, part determined by the information you pass the app about the current situation of the game.

It’s an elegant solution to the sometimes clunky nature of cooperative games that rely on “event cards” or equivalent to help build the narrative of a play session. Those who like to know all the possible things that might happen in a turn may balk at the idea of not having a deck of cards to flick through before or after the game, but the element of mystery is very much a part of the XCOM experience, as is responding to unexpected threats at a moment’s notice.

The real-time phase is pretty hectic — and, I can imagine, prone to some horrible disasters. It’s followed by a resolution phase in which the app walks you through each step in turn and tells you how to resolve each action. Unlike the real-time phase, the order of actions in which is part-randomised (though you always get new technologies and budget first in a turn), the resolution phase follows a fixed order, so learning this will allow you to formulate effective strategies.

The basic mechanic of the resolution phase is press-your-luck dice rolls. Generally speaking, for every (insert appropriate unit here) you have on a particular task, you get a blue die, which is marked with some blank sides and some “success” sides. Each task requires at least one success to complete; enemies generally require multiple successes to defeat. If you fail to get the successes you need on one roll, you can press your luck and try again — the risk factor comes in the fact that the “threat level” increases for this task each time you do it, making it more likely that you’ll take losses even if you’re ultimately successful in completing the task. Losses are determined by a special red eight-sided die; this is marked with numbers, and rolling equal to or under the current threat level (it begins at 1 and goes up to 5, so there’ll never be a guaranteed loss) counts as a loss, which usually means military units are killed and “reusable” units such as scientists and satellites are exhausted, meaning they’ll be out of action for a whole round.

The mechanics are simple to understand and seem to combine a good amount of luck and strategy. You can, of course, manipulate the amount of “luck” you’ll be relying on by assigning more units to a particular task, but there are limits in place — not to mention something of a shortage of units to scatter around the world!

I lost both the solo games I tried earlier; once from two continents falling into full-on panic (which results in an immediate loss) and once from my base being destroyed by alien intruders. I had a great time, though, and I’m very interested to see how the play dynamic changes with multiple people around the table; it’s rather overwhelming to take responsibility for everything!

1937: This Starry Midnight We Make

I’m a big fan of the work of Carpe Fulgur, the small, independent localisation team previously responsible for bringing English-speaking audiences the excellent Recettear, its predecessor Chantelise and the charming Metroidvania-ish Fortune Summoners, and who have most recently been working on the sprawling behemoth that is Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter alongside Xseed Games.

I was pretty intrigued, then, when Andrew Dice of Carpe Fulgur proudly announced the team’s fifth project: a peculiar affair called This Starry Midnight We Make. Unlike Carpe Fulgur’s previous output, it’s not a role-playing game. It is… well, it’s kind of baffling, to be honest. I guess technically it’s a puzzle game of sorts, but I actually want to describe it more as a game about experimentation.

I sat down and played the demo version — available now on Steam, with the full version coming later this month — and recorded my experiences, bewilderment and all. Here’s what happened when I had a go:

As you can see if you watched the video, the game blends visual novel-style storytelling with its main mechanic: creating “stars” in a magical basin that appears to influence what happens in Kyoto according to the astrological phenomena you create.

The basic format of the game involves plopping stones into this basin and watching them do stuff, then figuring out how to make them do other stuff. The basin is split into five elemental areas, represented by faint swirling coloured gases, and the combination of the elemental area you drop a stone into and the type of stone you drop determines what happens next.

As you progress through the game, you’re tasked with a series of quests that ask you to create specific phenomena. What’s interesting is that after an initial, rather brief and unenlightening tutorial, you’re pretty much left to figure everything out for yourself. How, exactly, do you create a nebula? The game sure isn’t going to tell you right off the bat, though it will record the phenomenon in your notebook once you’ve created it once, allowing you to refer back to it and check how you did it if you’re not sure.

Beginning with the simple task of creating individual stars, the quests later start demanding that you create evolved forms of stars that involve mixing different types together, manipulating the amount of elemental gas in an area of the basin and even using “clay stars” to fuse others together. Beyond that, you’re tasked with creating “constellations” using specific combinations of stars that you’ve created, and the game hints that once these have been created, they’ll be used as “tools” to further manipulate your astral creations, though the demo stops before you get to see what this means for yourself.

What I found initially offputting but subsequently rather compelling about This Starry Midnight We Make is what I hinted at above: you have to figure out everything for yourself. And this is a huge adjustment from a lot of modern games, which spend much of their early hours walking you through every step of the mechanics you might be using throughout the game until you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re supposed to be doing. Not so in This Starry Midnight We Make. You are, in effect, a scientist, given some interesting things to fiddle around with and left to your own devices to try things out and see what happens. Some of the things you do will work — and these form genuine “Eureka!” moments, since you’ve figured them out for yourself — and others will not work, forcing you to analyse your “mistakes” and learn from them… or perhaps determine what caused an unexpected reaction to happen.

I find it difficult to envision how the game will carry this strange concept through a full-length narrative, but I’m kind of intrigued to find out. It’s a slow burn of a game, for sure, and its obtuseness will doubtless put many people off within about ten minutes of starting, but if you put some time in and make the effort to actually experiment with it yourself, you’ll find a strangely compelling experience waiting for you.

Do I recommend it? I’m hesitant to do so before seeing the full version, but I can at least recommend that you give the demo a try for yourself to see what you think and whether it might be for you. It’s available now from Steam.

1936: Modern Old-School

One of the games I’ve been playing a bunch on my shiny new PlayStation 4 is Resogun, a game that I was previously moderately excited about, and which, prior to Omega Quintet (and, arguably, Final Fantasy Type-0, which I’m interested to try at some point in the near future) was a game I often cited as the only (then-current) reason that I’d be interested in a PlayStation 4.

But it wasn’t enough by itself to make me want to buy one. For a new platform to be truly compelling for me, there needs to be some long-form games that I’m interested in, whereas Resogun is an arcade game, intended to be enjoyed in relatively short bursts. This isn’t a criticism of it, mind, but I’d have had a tough time justifying a PlayStation 4 purchase to myself purely on the strength of what is, essentially, next-gen Defender.

But oh, what a game Resogun actually is! I’m still skeptical of whether I’d have found it worth buying a PS4 for by itself — although in retrospect, I bought an Xbox 360 primarily because of Geometry Wars, which is even more simplistic than Resogun — but I’m absolutely in love with it, because it represents a true fusion between classic old-school arcade-style gameplay and modern presentation.

At its core, as previously noted, Resogun is similar to the classic arcade game Defender. You fly a little ship that can move and fire left and right at will. Like Defender, the game unfolds on a scrolling, wrapping stage, though here it’s represented as a cylinder that you fly around the outer surface of. Like Defender, your job is to save little green humans from being abducted by invading alien flying saucers. Unlike Defender, there’s significantly more to it than that.

For starters, the humans are held in captivity before you can rescue them. In order to do so, you need to destroy “Keepers” — special enemies that show up every so often with a green glow surrounding them. You’ll get an audible announcement when some Keepers show up, but not a visual indicator showing where they are if they’re around the other side of the level, so you’ll need to find and destroy them quickly to save the human in question, because if you miss any of them — or, in some cases, destroy them in the wrong order — the human will immediately die. Succeed, however, and the human will pop out of his little prison box and start running around on the ground, at which point he becomes vulnerable to being abducted, falling into holes, drowning and being splattered by unpleasant things. He also becomes available to be picked up by your ship and transported to one of the rescue pods at the top of the level.

To complete a level, you need to proceed through three “phases”. Each phase requires you to destroy a certain amount of enemies represented by a bar filling up at the bottom of the screen. When you complete a phase, you get a brief “time out” where you can still move and fire, but you’re invincible and the enemies move in slow-motion. This allows you a moment to compose yourself and get yourself into an advantageous position before proceeding. The end of the third phase, however, jumps directly into a boss battle, with bosses taking the form of various peculiar geometric shapes that warp and twist before your very eyes as you shoot chunks off them and chip away at their energy bar. When the boss is dead, the whole level explodes and you move on to the next one. Repeat for five levels, beat game.

Except that’s not all that there is to Resogun — at least not with the excellent DLC packages that have been released since it originally came out. Between these two packages (available as a bundle or individually) there are several new modes, including Survival, which places you on a single level and tasks you with surviving through a series of increasingly difficult days, acquiring power-ups by picking up humans; Protector, which requires you to deliver humans to cities to rebuild them and subsequently defend them from giant alien flying saucers; Commando, which casts you as a human attempting to protect his house from falling meteors in scenes somewhat reminiscent of Missile Command for a new generation; and Challenge, which gives you a series of unconventional ways to play the game and tasks you with completing some generally pretty fiendish objectives.

Resogun is unabashedly a score-attack game, and consequently it naturally comes with online support, allowing you to compare your scores both to your friends and the rest of the world’s players. You can also filter these scores by time, allowing you to challenge friends each week or month to see who is truly the best (this week/month), and scores are tracked completely independently for each mode and difficulty setting.

Combine this with a robust ship editor, allowing you to create your own custom ships using the 3D “voxel” pixels from which the entire game is built (and which it is very fond of exploding things into at a moment’s notice) and the ability to share said creations online and you have a remarkably “complete”-feeling package that, now I’ve spent some time with it, I’m pretty confident in recommending as an essential purchase for anyone with a PlayStation 4. (Assuming you like shooting things and watching numbers go up. And who doesn’t like shooting things and watching numbers go up?)

So yeah. Buy Resogun. You won’t regret it.

1935: Brave Frontier: Pete’s Completely Unofficial and Possibly Inaccurate FAQ

I like writing guides, as I’ve discussed before, so instead of making some “hilarious” walkthrough of my tedious daily routine as I’ve done in the past, I thought I’d write something actually useful to someone: a guide on what I’ve learned about the game Brave Frontier, which I’ve talked a little about recently, and which isn’t entirely forthcoming with all the information you might need to get the most out of it during play. Without further ado, then.

What is this game?

Brave Frontier is a free-to-play mobile RPG from Alim and Gumi. It’s available for both iOS and Android devices. There’s a linear story to follow, but it’s mostly a game about collecting and upgrading “units” — various heroic characters and monsters whom you can recruit into your team, level up and evolve into more advanced forms of themselves.

Do I have to pay to play?

Brave Frontier has an energy system that depletes as you take your party on quests, with later quests or those with larger, more significant rewards costing more energy to take on. If you have insufficient remaining energy to take on a quest, you can either use a “gem” to restore it completely to its maximum level, or wait for it to regenerate at the rate of roughly one point per three minutes. As you level up, you’ll gradually gain more maximum energy; one point every few levels, and a more significant jump every five levels.

Gems are also used for “rare summons” — immediately acquiring units of higher rarity levels — and restoring the separate, much shorter energy bar for the player-vs-player Arena mode.

Depending on how casually you play, you’ll probably find there is no need to pay for gems — especially in the early levels, when you level up quite quickly and your energy bar is fully restored on each level-up.

How do I get gems?

You can pay for them, but you also get one free every so often; specifically, for completing an entire area in the main story campaign, sometimes as a daily login bonus reward if you play for several days in succession, sometimes as a “Brave Points” bonus for earning points by completing daily objectives.

How do I get units?

There are three ways of acquiring new units:

1) Receiving them as a drop from a quest. With the exception of daily and special event dungeons, these are usually very low rarity units.

2) Acquiring them through “Honor Points”. You receive honor points when you borrow another player’s character to fill the sixth slot in your party, with 5 points awarded if they’re a stranger and 10 points if they’re on your friends list. You’ll also receive honor points when other people borrow your character to use in their party in the same way. 100 honor points equates to one “free” summon, but again, these tend to be quite low rarity for the most part. It’s usually best to save up your honor points until there’s a special promotion on promising specific units you wouldn’t normally be able to get through these means; the game will make you aware of this when it’s available.

3) Acquiring them using gems. 5 gems equates to one “rare” summon, which will net you a unit of three-star (“Rare”) or higher rarity. These units will probably form the backbone of your party, but note their “cost” value; when building your party, the total cost of all the units you use cannot exceed your current cost cap. Cost cap increases with your player level alongside your maximum energy.

How do I make units better?

There are three things you need to do to improve a unit: level it up, level up its Brave Burst, and evolve it.

Levelling it up requires you to “fuse” it with other units. Each unit fused to the base unit gives you a particular amount of experience based on what it is, with slightly more experience being given if its elemental type matches that of the base unit. More valuable, rarer units are worth more experience. The most experience can be acquired from units that drop in the “Metal Parade” dungeon in the Vortex Gate; keys to unlock this are issued in the Administration Office in Imperial Capital Randall every weekday except Wednesday, so be sure to go and pick them up as often as possible. Note that when you unlock it, the Metal Parade only stays open for an hour, so only unlock it when you have enough energy to make the most of it!

Levelling up a unit’s Brave Burst — its unique special move — relies a little more on randomness than standard levelling. A unit has ten levels of Brave Burst, with some more powerful and rarer units able to acquire a Super and Ultimate Brave Burst after this. To level up a Brave Burst, perform fusion, and look for material units that say “BB UP?” or “BB UP!” on them. “BB UP?” units give a small chance of levelling up the base unit’s Brave Burst when fused, while “BB UP!” units will guarantee an increase in Brave Burst. Generally speaking, units that are appropriate to use for levelling up a Brave Burst can be identified by the type of Brave Burst they use. Healer units require other healers to level up their Brave Burst, for example, while attacking units require other units with offensive Brave Bursts.

Evolving a unit is the process you perform when a unit reaches its level cap. The level cap is determined by the number of stars the unit has, or its rarity. Three-star units have a level cap of 40, for example, while five-star units can be levelled to 80. Note that there’s a “Zel” (currency) cost every time you perform fusion, and this gets more expensive the higher level a unit is. There’s also a Zel fee to pay at evolution time.

To evolve a unit, you must collect the required additional units. These are usually found in the Tuesday daily dungeons in the Vortex Gate. For lower-rarity units, you’ll need Nymphs; as you progress through the tiers, you’ll need Spirits, Idols, Totems, Pots and Mecha Gods. Initially you won’t know exactly what evolution materials are required for a unit, but once you’ve encountered or acquired the units in question once, they’ll be revealed for your reference. Refer to the Brave Frontier Wiki to find the specific units you need if you get stuck.

Keep an eye out for special units such as Frogs — these provide significant, one-off bonuses when fused without requiring a level-up. Some increase attack power, some defense, some recovery power, some HP. Some even open up a second slot for equipping Spheres.

How should I build my party?

It depends how much effort you want to put in. I use a single standard setup for everything I do; it has a mix of different elemental types, a healer unit, a unit who can boost the acquisition of Brave Burst crystals during battle and a unit that can boost attack power. This is good for most situations.

The main quest is split into dungeons that tend to be centred around a single elemental type, so if you want to optimise your party you may wish to build a full party of each elemental type, then choose the appropriate complementary element to the enemies you’re facing. Remember, elemental weaknesses are a one-way circle for the most part: fire beats earth beats lightning beats water beats fire (and so on). Dark and light have a reciprocal relationship, meanwhile; they both beat each other.

Special events and daily dungeons are often more challenging than the main quest, so you’ll want to bring along your best units for these. For the Metal Parade, you’ll want to bring units that hit a lot of times, since the most damage you can do to a Metal unit with a single hit is 1 point.

Pay attention to the unit you choose as Leader, too. Not only do you get the benefit of their Leader skill, which is usually a passive buff of some description, this will also be the unit you loan to other players. In other words, you want your Leader unit to be as attractive as possible (stats-wise or, if you’re feeling shallow, the prettiest girl) to encourage people to use it and provide you with Honor Points.

Note that different instances of the same unit can have different “types”, so be sure to pick one that you’ll find the most effective. “Lord” type units are balanced. “Anima” type units gain more HP than usual when levelling up. “Breaker” type units gain more attack power than usual. “Guardian” type units gain more defense power than usual. “Oracle” type units gain more recovery power than usual.

How do I fight?

Fighting is a simple case of tapping the unit’s status bar to cause it to attack; there’s no need to wait for one unit to finish its turn before triggering another one, either. In fact, if more than one unit hits something at the same time, a “Spark” is triggered, increasing the amount of damage by a significant amount.

After all your units have taken a turn, you’ll receive Brave Crystals (BC) and Heart Crystals (HC). The former are randomly distributed throughout your party and increase their Brave Burst gauge. The latter are likewise randomly distributed and restore hit points. After this is done, the enemy gets a turn. Note than many enemies — particularly bosses — have more than one action per turn, some of which can hit your whole party at once.

You can use items to turn the tide of battle; remember to acquire these from the Town before you leave, and use them before triggering any attacks, since you can only use them at the start of your turn.

Use Brave Bursts wisely. Although you get a bonus to the amount of BC and HC dropped if you “overkill” an enemy, there’s little sense in unloading everyone’s BB on a single fairy. If you can dispatch a group with normal attacks, do so and save your BB for larger groups or bosses. Also make sure you familiarise yourself with your units’ Brave Bursts before you get into battle; not all of them are offensive in nature!

How do I level up quickly?

Remember you level up separately from your units. Benefits of levelling yourself up include a higher energy cap, a higher “cost” cap (allowing you to include more, rarer units in your party) and a full restoration of your energy bar and arena orbs.

You get experience for every “Quest” you complete, whether it’s in the main quest or the Vortex Gate. Vortex Gate quests are usually worth more experience than you’d usually get for that amount of energy spent in the main quest, but they’re often tougher — and you get nothing if your party is defeated before you beat the boss.

The fastest way to gain experience is with the weekly Karma dungeon on Mondays. Not only does this drop absolutely tons of Karma, a currency used for upgrading the Town and unlocking more effective equipment and consumable items, but also provides a significant amount of player experience. There are three “levels” of this dungeon; start at the bottom and work your way up. You will require some seriously powerful units to be able to defeat the boss at the end of the level 3 dungeon, so don’t jump in there unless you’re absolutely prepared.

How do I get more money?

Two ways. Firstly, there’s a weekly dungeon at the weekend that drops a lot of Zel. Secondly, every Wednesday you can pick up a Jewel Key from the administration office in Imperial Capital Randall. This can be used to unlock the Jewel Parade, which works in the same way as the Metal Parade: it stays open for an hour, after which you’ll need another key to get back in, so only open it up when you have the energy to use.

Jewel Parade drops Jewel-type units, which are completely useless for anything other than selling, so take full advantage of this. Acquire as many as you can before the Parade closes, then sell them off for vast profit.

How do I win in the Arena?

You don’t have direct control of your units in the Arena, so all you can do is make sure you send your best possible units for the job: it’s a good idea to have a healer unit of some description, as this can turn the tide of a battle in your favour. It’s also a very good idea to take units with powerful Brave Bursts that can attack the entire enemy party at once, and any units that can provide buffs or increases to BC drop rates are useful, too; generally speaking, whoever gets to Brave Burst first will usually be the victor so if you can push yourself into a position where that’s more likely to be you, you’ll be golden.

What do I do in the Town?

Three things: acquire raw materials, upgrade the town’s facilities, and buy/craft things. The Synthesis shop sells consumable items such as health potions and temporary buffs; remember to “equip” these to your hotbar before entering a difficult quest, as they will make a huge difference. The Sphere shop, meanwhile, allows you to create equippable items that either add special effects to your attacks or increase stats and resistances. Don’t neglect these; they can make an otherwise seemingly weak character into a valuable member of your party.

Should I play this game? It sounds stupid.

It is kind of stupid and ultimately fairly pointless — but if you’re someone who enjoys collecting things, making them fight other things and making on-screen numbers gradually get bigger over time, you’ll probably have at least a bit of fun with it. It has some lovely art and great music, too.

Can I add you as a friend?

Sure. Type in my ID — the easy-to-remember 9630492642 — and we’ll both get happy nice things to share.

Where can I find out more?

The Brave Frontier Wiki is a terrifyingly comprehensive resource of information for this game.

1934: Across the Universe

I’ve been rewatching Star Trek recently and simultaneously introducing Andie to it. At the time of writing, we’re coming up on the end of season six of The Next Generation and a few episodes deep in Deep Space Nine, because yes, I’m one of those people who likes to watch overlapping shows chronologically so the few-and-far-between crossover episodes happen at the “right” time.

I’ve been really enjoying them. I reached something of a saturation point with Star Trek in my late teens and early twenties as it was on TV an awful lot and it was one of those shows I liked to record every episode of on video. I started collecting the official videos at one point and even had some of the more ostentatious box sets — such as the awesome Data one which had a metallic mould of Brent Spiner’s face — but eventually reached a point where I simply parted ways with it, not because I was no longer enjoying it or had seen it all — to date, there’s a significant chunk of Deep Space Nine I’ve never seen, I’ve not seen beyond the first season of Voyager and I’ve been surprised how little I remember of The Next Generation — but simply because there were lots of other things vying for my attention.

With the modern age of video on demand, though, you can watch a show like Star Trek at your own pace when it’s convenient to you, and with no fear of missing episodes because you’re out on Wednesday nights at 6pm or whatever. This gives the shows a much greater feeling of coherence than if you’re watching disjointed — and sometimes out-of-sequence — episodes once a week on the television, and makes it into a much more enjoyable experience as a result.

Although I’m enjoying revisiting The Next Generation — and, as noted above, have actually forgotten a significant amount of it, so rewatching these episodes feels quite “fresh” — the main thing I’m looking forward to is the completely new episodes of Deep Space Nine. For some reason, when I was younger, I and my family regarded Deep Space Nine as “the boring one” in the Star Trek pantheon, with it not getting truly interesting until the fourth season, when they sped up the theme tune a bit, gave Sisko a badass starship to fly around with and decided it was high time the Klingons started being villains again. Watching it with more mature eyes and — I like to think, anyway — refined tastes, I’m liking it a lot more than I used to for its emphasis on characterisation and relationships over tales of derring-do in space. It’s a good complement to The Next Generation, and watching them in parallel as we have been really highlights this.

Also Odo is a work of genius, combining witty writing with some wonderfully deadpan delivery by Rene Auberjonois. I’m especially interested to find out more about his particular story arc, as that’s something I’ve only seen dribs and drabs of here and there; I stopped collecting the videos and watching the show just as the Dominion storyline was getting underway.

There’s still a long way to go before we’ve watched all of them, but I’m not complaining; the shows — with the possible exception of the first couple of seasons of The Next Generation — very much stand up to the test of time and, while occasionally cheesy (rocking camera shots while people throw themselves around the set ahoy!) remain some of the most interesting, enjoyable, dramatic, emotional and thought-provoking television there has ever been.

Here’s to the final frontier.

1933: #WaifuWednesday: The Girls of Omega Quintet

One of the central themes of Idea Factory and Compile Heart’s new PlayStation 4 RPG Omega Quintet is the contrast between the private lives of those looked up to as “idols” and the public face they put on display.

This concept is actually, to some observers, a key aspect of Japanese culture at large. It’s known as honne and tatemae and, specifically, describes the contrast between your true feelings and desires (honne) and the facade you put up to the public (tatemae). It accounts for a lot of things, particularly in popular culture — media like anime and video games are, among other things, a means of exploring and engaging with honne without having to crack tatemae.

It may sound like a strange concept, but in fact a lot of us do it without even thinking: ponder, if you will, the things you’ve looked at on the Internet in the last week, and how likely you are to talk about them with other people. It may be that you’re fortunate enough to have open-minded friends and relatives who are more than happy to discuss anything and everything with you — or perhaps you simply don’t care what people think of you — but there are bound to be at least some situations where you know to keep your mouth shut about things you find interesting, whether they’re some form of fucked up pornography or unpopular sociopolitical ideas. Any time you bite your tongue and think better of “oversharing”? Well, that’s the closest we have to tatemae in the West.

But I digress. We’re here to talk about the Omega Quintet girls, and I did have a point to make: each of them display both honne and tatemae to varying degrees, and, through necessity, in a far more exaggerated manner than your average citizen. Due to the protagonist’s role in the story as the girls’ manager — and the player’s adoption of that role — you get to see both sides: the honne aspect when they’re hanging out and talking among themselves, and the tatemae aspect they display when they’re being broadcast to the public.

Otoha is arguably the “leading” heroine in the story due to the fact that she’s introduced alongside the protagonist Takt. Otoha is a cheerful, positive, upbeat young girl who has always looked at idol culture — or, in the context of Omega Quintet, “Verse Maiden” culture — with starry-eyed awe. Although Omega Quintet’s world is post-apocalyptic and in many ways both bleak and dystopian, Otoha’s infectious energy allows her to bring a sense of brightness and lightness to even dark situations; fellow Quintet member Aria even says as much in a rare moment of lucidity.

Otoha struggles the most with honne and tatemae. She’s a ditz, to put it bluntly, and she often lets this aspect come across even when she’s on camera. The first time she attempts to make her “debut”, she is literally pushed to the ground and upstaged by Kyouka, who is, at this point, working independently. She struggles for the longest time to get the Verse Maidens’ fans to even remember her name and, over time, comes to recognise that her talents don’t always match up to her enthusiasm.

That doesn’t stop her, though; despite numerous setbacks, she remains determined to realise her dream of being a successful Verse Maiden, and her determination proves inspirational and infectious to her comrades. Even the rather dour Takt is swept along by her energy at times, though he’d never admit it; after all, in the game’s earliest moments, it is Otoha who saves Takt from an unpleasant end at the hands of the Blare.

Kanadeko, meanwhile, is another energetic character. While Otoha is passionate and determined, Kanadeko is more concerned with having fun and being friends with everyone. This is reflected through everything from her perpetually wide-eyed facial expressions to her seeming inability to stand still and her loud voice. She’s keen to do a good job as a Verse Maiden not because she’s especially passionate about it in the same way as Otoha — though she is dedicated to her work — but because she thinks it will be a fun thing to do.

Kanadeko is the most naturally at home on stage, too. She has natural presence and an energetic aura about her, and in fact she is, in many ways, the character who displays the least difference between her honne and her tatemae. Both on and off the stage, she’s confident, loud and, while she recognises that she may not be the best at what she does, she both enjoys it and is keen for others to enjoy it along with her.

Kanadeko’s perpetual companion is Nene, who in many ways is the polar opposite of her loudmouthed counterpart. Nene is shy, awkward and has a tendency to babble incoherently when she’s feeling nervous — which is quite frequently. In extreme cases, this trait exhibits itself through her blurting out some things that make people feel a little uncomfortable — such as her enjoyment of and enthusiasm for firearms — usually closely followed up by some embarrassed awkwardness as she apologises for saying “strange” things.

In contrast to Kanadeko, Nene has probably the largest difference between her honne and her tatemae. On stage, she almost becomes a different person. She channels her nervous energy into projecting a confident appearance to the world and, despite both her own shortcomings and her lack of belief in her own abilities, she does a good job. Off the stage, meanwhile, she struggles with depression and anxiety, particularly in social situations, and tries to stick close to Kanadeko whenever she can for two reasons: she trusts Kanadeko, as the two have been together for some time at the story’s outset, and she knows that Kanadeko is more than capable of distracting people so she can slip quietly into the background.

Kyouka, meanwhile is the character that is probably most directly concerned with her honne and tatemae. As a “class president” sort of character, Kyouka is serious and determined and almost painfully tsun at times, but she sees her lack of confidence in her performance abilities as a failing, and consequently tries to do something about them. She is also very concerned with what people think about her; she spends quite some time worried that her former mentor Shiori hates her for coming to join the other Verse Maidens, and it takes a reluctant intervention by Takt to help the pair at least start to realise that neither of them really resents the other, though they both find that impossible to admit.

Kyouka wants to be the best, and she finds it inordinately frustrating that Aria is a more natural performer seemingly without realising it or even being aware that she’s doing it. She channels that frustration into working herself hard, and indeed it’s this determination that brings her together with the other Verse Maidens in the first place: her desire to be the best even at the expense of her own personal welfare sees her throwing herself into a battle she can’t possibly win alone, only to be helped out by her soon-to-be-friends.

Kyouka’s harsh exterior occasionally slips around the other girls and Takt, however; the first time Takt comes to her room, he’s surprised to discover that it’s a mess, with notes pinned to the wall, clothes on the floor and rubbish overflowing out of the bin. Kyouka initially thinks nothing of this until it’s pointed out to her by Takt and some of the other girls, then becomes extremely embarrassed about it. Several days later, Takt returns to her room only to discover it’s in exactly the same state as the last time he saw it; she admits that she eventually concluded it wasn’t worth the hassle and that she was more comfortable this way. It’s a rare moment of clarity and honesty from Kyouka, and helps to humanise her a great deal.

Finally, Aria is the most enigmatic of the Verse Maidens. Initially introduced as a happy-go-lucky, cheerful girl whom Kanadeko and Nene knew when they first joined the group long before Otoha and Takt came along, we subsequently discover that she suffered greatly at the hands of the Blare and went into hiding. When she re-emerges, she’s seemingly emotionless — but not cold — and seemingly not quite aware of everything that’s going on around her. The damage to her mind by the Blare, it seems, was severe.

Or was it? The interesting thing about Aria is that despite her habits of speaking very slowly and hesitantly or referring to people she’s talking directly to in the third person, she’s clearly one of the more insightful members of the cast, often pointing out things the others don’t see. And, because the damage to her mind also seemingly removed any sense of tact, she’ll say things bluntly and honestly, sometimes without realising that they might be interpreted as hurtful. At the other end of the spectrum, she frequently tries to make jokes, but her stony-faced expression and emotionless voice often make people misinterpret them as something rather more horrifying — particularly when she jokes about subjects like suicide.

Aria’s intriguing to me because she presents an interesting reflection on what it’s like to live with depression. Nene does this to a certain degree, too — I find her social anxiety particularly relatable — but Aria’s floating through life in her own little world, observing and commenting on things and seemingly being surprised when people notice or acknowledge her, is actually a fairly accurate (if exaggerated) representation of what it feels like some days when depression takes over your perception of the world. You don’t quite feel “connected” to anyone; you don’t quite feel “real”; sometimes you’re not even sure how to interact with others — or if you want to. It’s likely no coincidence that her colours are the darkest of all the Verse Maidens — black and purple — and that these colours are shared with the Blare, the source of her trauma.

I’m yet to beat the game so I don’t know how these girls’ personal stories continue and conclude, but I’m very interested to find out. It’s a great ensemble cast overall, and one from which it’s very difficult to pick a favourite.

If I had to be pressed for one, though? Nene. Even if she is occasionally terrifying.

1932: Life with No Guide

It’s not that often I play games shortly after they’ve been released, but starting Omega Quintet on literally the day it came out in Europe (physically, anyway; the digital version is out tomorrow, apparently) has reminded me of one interesting thing that you can only do in the moments after a game has been released: play the damn thing without a guide.

GameFAQs is such an ingrained part of gaming culture now that it’s very difficult to resist its allure, particularly when playing a complicated, sprawling game like an RPG. It’s natural to want to track down every single little secret and see every possible hidden scene, and GameFAQs provides a valuable service to people who feel this way but don’t necessarily want to have to put in the hard work to figure things out for themselves. (This isn’t a criticism, by the way; sometimes game secrets are so incredibly obtuse it’s difficult to fathom how anyone ever discovered them without assistance directly from the developers, and in these cases your average player has little choice but to rely on a guide.)

But playing Omega Quintet before seemingly any guides have hit the Internet is proving to be a pleasurable experience. It’s intriguing and fascinating to discover the intricacies of the game system for myself rather than relying on someone else’s interpretation. It’s satisfying to discover things that work well, and also the things that don’t work so well. And, the more I discover about the game — I’m sure I haven’t even seen all its mechanics yet, even as I approach the 30-hour mark — the more I’m actually quite grateful for one of the game’s most common criticisms: the fact that it doesn’t explain a lot of things immediately. Because without the game explicitly setting some things out for you, you have to make use of what information it does give you in order to extrapolate the rest for yourself. And that’s enjoyable.

Take today’s discovery, for example: a means of acquiring over 200% more rewards at the end of a battle than normal. The game gives you a few brief tutorials in its early hours that mention “bonuses” at the end of battle, and hint that things like your combo hit count and something about “linking” will increase this bonus, but it doesn’t sit you down and say “Now you try!” like so many other modern games do. As such, it’s possible to forget all about this bonus system and enjoy the combat on a fairly superficial level. But start to delve into it and suddenly it becomes a much more interesting, complex experience, and consequently far more rewarding as a result.

I went from using the same skills in every battle to attempting to make as long a chain of “linked” skills as possible, because the longer this chain, the more significant the bonus you get after battle. This involves looking at the skill information when you select one and taking note of the “link” type marked; in the case of weapon skills, it’s inevitably another weapon type. Kyouka’s spear skills, for example, link to Otoha’s hammer skills; Kanadeko’s gauntlet skills link to Aria’s fan skills. Where it gets interesting is in the few instances where a character like Nene has some skills that can potentially link in several different directions — one skill might link to Kanadeko’s gauntlets, for example, while another might link to Kyouka’s spear. In this way, it becomes an interesting challenge to try and optimise the sequence of skills you use in order to link as many as possible without breaking the chain. I haven’t quite figured out if it’s possible to link everyone’s skills that I have so far together into one long sequence yet, but I’m coming perilously close to getting a piece of paper and drawing flow charts to try and work it out.

I’m actually reminded somewhat of the original Hyperdimension Neptunia; perhaps unsurprising, since that was also an Idea Factory/Compile Heart game. The original Neptunia didn’t have a particularly popular or well-regarded combat system, but I actually rather enjoyed it for much the same reasons I’m enjoying Omega Quintet; Neptunia, too, had a distinctly puzzle-esque strategic element to how you set up your skills, with much of the challenge and interest coming from setting up your characters with combos that flowed well, maximised the amount of damage you put out and made efficient use of your available action points in a turn. Omega Quintet’s combat is considerably more elegant than Neptunia’s — IF and Compa have learned a lot since then! — but, to return to the original point of this post, I’m pleased to discover this depth for myself rather than reading about it in a guide.

I’d say I fully intend to try and play the next few games I tackle without looking at a guide at all, but we all know that isn’t true. For now, though, I’m greatly enjoying “flying blind” in Omega Quintet, and I feel I have plenty left to discover.

1931: Further Tales from the Frontier

I’m quite surprised that a free-to-play mobile game has managed to maintain my attention for over two weeks now: you may recall a short while back when I talked about Brave Frontier, and I’m still playing it today.

I think the reason it’s “working” for me is that I’m not attempting to make it the focus of my gaming life or anything, but it’s something enjoyable to do during brief moments of downtime — sitting on the bog, waiting for pasta water to boil, being unable to get to sleep, that sort of thing. It also helps that it’s a fairly solid game at its core, too; it’s not the deepest game in the world, but it has enough substance to keep it interesting in short bursts.

What I find curious about it is that it’s essentially Pokemon with all the fat trimmed off, and yet while Pokemon didn’t hold my attention at all across the three installments I’ve tried — Red, Gold and Y — Brave Frontier has managed to keep me interested, and I think it’s because of all the stuff that’s been trimmed out from the Pokemon formula.

Pokemon, to me, always feels like it’s not sure what it quite wants to be. It has the structure of a traditional RPG, but then the collectible, tradable and upgradeable aspect of a trading card game. It is arguably more widely renowned for its competitive metagame than anything significant it brings to the storytelling table, though it has managed to spawn a number of anime series and movies since it first burst onto the scene. The “JRPG” side of it and the “collectible monster battling” stuff always seem to be somewhat at odds with one another, and I think that’s what’s caused me to lose interest in them partway through every time I’ve tried.

Brave Frontier, meanwhile, focuses on the collectible battling side of things almost exclusively. There’s no exploration, no wandering around caves, just battles of various descriptions and, between those battles, upgrading your units to be more powerful, stronger and capable of taking on tougher opponents. It’s satisfying to build up a team that works together, whether you’ve been trying to go for a specific angle (all the same elemental type, for example, or perhaps a strongly defensive group that can survive against hard-hitting enemies) or whether you’ve been working with the hand you’ve been dealt, as I have been.

And the game presents you with interesting, meaningful choices to make every time you boot it up. I still dislike the use of “energy” bars in free-to-play games throttling your play sessions, but as I noted in my previous post about Brave Frontier, this game makes use of it as an interesting “risk/reward” mechanic by presenting you with the option to effectively “gamble” your potential play time against the possible rewards available.

You can spent small amounts of energy working your way through the “Quest” mode, which is a linear sequence of battles of gradually (very gradually) increasing difficulty tied together with a surprisingly not-that-bad, if cliche-tastic storyline. In doing so, you’ll acquire a selection of not-very-good units (that can be used as “fusion fodder” to upgrade various aspects of your actually-good units) along with the game’s currencies, and you’ll also get a decent amount of experience.

Conversely, the daily dungeons that pop up throughout the week each cost significantly more energy to participate in but offer their own unique special characteristics and greater, more predictable rewards — the Monday dungeon, for example, offers significantly greater amounts of experience points than usual, providing you with the ability to level up your “Summoner” character quite quickly, in turn increasing your energy stock and the amount of “Cost” points you’re allowed to spend on building your party; other dungeons throughout the week offer units that are required to “evolve” level-capped units to their next tier, large amounts of gold coins or various other rewards. Part of the thing that makes the game interesting is that you have to discover the value of each of these dungeons for yourself; it may not be immediately clear why you’d want to hunt down elemental idols, for example, but once you figure it out you’ll know that you need to check in on that particular day to get your hands on some.

There’s a certain amount of random-number generation (RNG) at work, of course, but as any MMO player will tell you, that’s sort of part of the fun in a perverse, masochistic sort of way: imagine how much more satisfying it is to acquire something you’ve been trying to hunt down for over a week rather than having it handed to you on a plate. It’s frustrating and annoying at times, sure — I’m currently in the aforementioned situation as I attempt to track down the last “Evolution unit” I need to upgrade my party member Selena into her next tier of power — but, as manipulative as it is, it keeps you coming back for another try.

Oh, and I’ve reached a stage now where my party is winning in the player-vs-player “Arena” significantly more than it loses now, which is satisfying to see. But then the game took me down a peg or two by throwing a boss at me that absolutely obliterated my entire party within a few turns. Time to get busy with the Fusion, I guess…

1930: Fun with Harmonics

Spent some more time with Omega Quintet today, and I am, as I may have mentioned a couple of times already, absolutely thrilled with how enjoyable it is — and that it’s much more than a reskinned Neptunia. Don’t get me wrong, you know how much I love me some Neptunia, but I’m glad that Compile Heart and Idea Factory weren’t resting on their laurels with this one; it would have been very easy indeed for them to simply lift Neptunia’s admittedly very fun combat system and plonk it in Omega Quintet, but instead Omega Quintet has something all of its own.

Perhaps “all of its own” isn’t quite the right description, mind, since Omega Quintet’s combat is executed as something of a curious blend between the battle systems from the Atelier series, the Ar Tonelico series, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XIII. That’s quite a mixture, but it works really well, particularly when you pull off something as enjoyably silly as this:

The above sequence was recorded at just level 20, by the way; I shudder to think what numbers the girls will be putting out by the end of the game.

Interestingly, the game doesn’t bombard you with the complete combat system right from the get-go; it gradually increases in complexity over the course of the first few chapters at a fairly sedate pace, allowing you to get comfortable and familiar with each new concept before a new one is introduced. Ultimately, by the time the complete battle system has unlocked, you should be well familiar with all the possibilities it has to offer. At about 15 hours or so in, I haven’t seen everything the system has to offer, yet; for some, this may draw unfavourable comparisons to Final Fantasy XIII, which was lambasted for having a “20 hour tutorial”, but it’s worth noting that Omega Quintet does sidestep this issue a little by being somewhat less linear than Final Fantasy XIII was; at any given moment, there’s a bunch of sidequests to do, hidden treasures to find, new areas to open up, items to craft, special items to unlock and all manner of other things to do. (And besides, there was nothing the fuck wrong with the way Final Fantasy XIII did things, anyway. So there.)

Here’s roughly how the system works. Like the Neptunia games, you can get the advantage at the start of combat by attacking an enemy before they come into contact with you; conversely, letting an enemy touch you from behind will give them the advantage. How battle begins sets the opening initiative order, and from there the game follows a clear to understand turn order system, reflected by a graphical representation down the side of the screen.

Each party member has a number of actions per turn, increasing as they increase their overall proficiency with each of the game’s five weapon types — axe, gun, spear, fans and gauntlets. These actions can be used to attack, use a skill or use an item, and when all the actions have been chosen, the party member performs each of them in sequence before the turn order moves on to the next combatant. Of key consideration when choosing skills is the “wait time” — more powerful skills will push the party member’s next turn further down the turn order, potentially giving enemies the opportunity to attack several times before she can go again. Conversely, certain skills increase the enemies’ wait time when they successfully land, so you can manipulate the turn order yourself to a certain degree.

Attacks, skills and even items have an effective range, represented by coloured lines on the ground. Do something to someone in the green area and it will be most effective; then comes blue, yellow and finally red, which means you either can’t do the action at all, or it will be at severely reduced effectiveness. Certain attacks and skills also have a radius, either circular or a range of “tiles” horizontally, vertically or both, meaning you can hit multiple enemies at the same time. At the start of a party member’s turn, you can move them forward or backward in the formation, allowing you to manipulate the positioning to your advantage. There are also “knockback” skills, which are self-explanatory, and “reverse” skills, which… uh, I’m not entirely sure what they do.

Here’s one thing I have to nitpick slightly; there are certain aspects the game doesn’t explain very well or, indeed, at all in some cases. The stat names, for example, don’t take the usual Attack/Defense/Magic Attack/Magic Defense/Accuracy/Agility format from other Compile Heart games; instead we have Song Power/Stamina/Knowledge/Divinity/Technique/Vitality. You can work out what they are from a bit of experimentation, but it takes a bit of adjustment. Likewise, some of the status effects and added effects (such as the aforementioned “Reverse”) aren’t made very clear at all, though again, you can probably work these things out for yourself.

Personally, I’m actually all for games encouraging you to figure out some of their mechanics for yourself. You don’t need to understand these things to get a kick out of Omega Quintet, but if you’re the sort of person who likes to min-max your characters and have them fighting at maximum effectiveness, be aware that you’ll need to get your hands a little dirty — particularly as the characters in Omega Quintet are significantly more customisable than, say, the Neptunia girls, who don’t allow you to take any control over their development at all, though they do allow you to set up your own custom combos according to how you like to fight. In other words, Omega Quintet’s apparently deliberate obtuseness at times will be a turn-off to some people, but personally, I actually like not being spoon-fed absolutely everything.

Anyway. It’s good. Real good. And I can’t wait to play more. So I’m probably going to do just that right now; I’ve got a combo record to beat, after all.

1929: Another Episode

One thing I really like for reasons I can’t quite explain is when one type of media uses conventions from another, and does so effectively.

I’m particularly enamoured with the idea of video games taking cues from TV shows and adopting an episodic structure. This is something that both Eastern and Western developers have been experimenting with over the last few years, and both have approached it in markedly different ways.

The Western approach involves a developer releasing a “season” of discrete, separate games (typically five or six) at semi-regular intervals, with the complete run telling an entire story, and the possibility existing for a “second season” should the first one prove popular enough. (So far, this has happened with the episodic Sam and Max and The Walking Dead games, both by Telltale Games.)

This is all very well and good — particularly as they’re usually priced in such a way that buying the complete “season” is the same price as one regular-sized game, since individual episodes tend to just be a couple of hours long — but the biggest issue Western developers have had with this format is timeliness. It’s rare to get episodes less than a month apart, and in some cases it’s several months.

The most notoriously extreme case, of course, is Valve’s Half-Life 2, which promised to follow up the original game’s story with a series of three “episodes”. A fair plan, the theory behind it being that releasing what was effectively Half-Life 3 in smaller episodes rather than as one big game would allow devoted fans to get their hands on the new game — or part of it, anyway — sooner than they would otherwise be able to. It didn’t quite work out that way, of course: Half-Life 2 came out in 2004, Half-Life 2 Episode 1 followed two years later in 2006, and it was another year before Half-Life 2 Episode 2 appeared in 2007 and ended on a cliffhanger that now, in 2015, remains unresolved due to the continued absence of Half-Life 2 Episode 3.

This is a problem for the episodic format; the power of television series is that you can check in with them at regular, predictable intervals, and your time with the cast and characters becomes something of an “event” in your life, whether you’re marathoning a show on Netflix or kicking it old-school and watching things as they’re actually broadcast on TV. In order for that to work, the episodes need to be close together — typically a week apart. As Western-developed episodic games stand, however, their development cycles are such that releasing them a week apart simply wouldn’t be possible unless they were all developed at the same time, in which case you might as well release them as one big game anyway.

So that’s what a number of Japanese developers have done: take the episodic format (in many cases, complete with teaser, opening credits sequence, “monster of the week”, cliffhanger and end credits) and stick a bunch of them together into a single game.

It’s an effective approach in several ways. Narratively speaking, it allows the story to flow through a number of different distinct but interconnected arcs before reaching a conclusion that — hopefully — wraps them all together and resolves everything nicely. Mechanically, meanwhile, it provides a suitable structure for gradually introducing new concepts at set intervals so as not to overwhelm the player with overly complex systems right from the get-go.

I’ve played a number of Japanese games and visual novels that adopt this approach in recent years, with notable examples including School Days HQ, which quite simply was an interactive six-episode anime series, and My Girlfriend is the President, which even went so far as to conclude each episode with a “Next Time On…” teaser before immediately jumping in.

Two particularly effective examples from the very recent past and present are Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus and Omega Quintet, the latter of which I’m currently playing on PS4 and, as noted yesterday, am adoring.

Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus has an interesting structure. There are four main story arcs, each of which focuses on one of the four ninja schools involved in the overall narrative. These each tell a story by themselves and have their own distinct mood, themes and tone, but they also work together to help build up a full picture of the world in which Senran Kagura unfolds. Once you have cleared all four of the main stories, there’s a final episode that wraps everything up neatly. In effect, the complete game works like one of those anime series that has an abrupt tonal shift partway through its run (either between seasons, as in the case of something like To Love-Ru, or in some cases right in the middle of a season, as seen in Sword Art Online), perhaps moving to focus on a different set of characters, a different storytelling format or simply a change of subject matter.

But it doesn’t stop there. Shinovi Versus also features a short, five-level mini-story for each and every one of the playable characters in the game, with these effectively acting in the same manner as “OVAs” — short episodes, often distributed through means such as first print run mangas, preorders and the like, that don’t have anything to do with the main story and are sometimes considered non-canonical. By the time you’ve finished these as well as the main story, you have a very thorough understanding of every single character involved in that narrative. It’s an effective approach.

Omega Quintet, meanwhile, goes all-out anime in its approach, with pre-credits teasers, opening titles, self-contained narrative arcs that build up the overall story, gradual introduction and exploration of main characters an episode at a time, cliffhangers and end credits sequences. Yes, Omega Quintet is a game in which you’ll see the “end credits” multiple times over the course of a single playthrough, and it’s always satisfying to do so; the episodes are structured sensibly in both the narrative and mechanical senses I mentioned above and it works really well as a format. One more reason to like a game I’m already enamoured with.

I wonder if we will ever see Half-Life 2: Episode 3, though. It’s become something of a joke by now, and we are, to be honest, getting to the stage where people who originally played Half-Life 2 “back in the day” probably don’t care any more (I don’t, though I’d play Episode 3 if it came out due to sheer curiosity) and a new generation of gamers might not even know what it is. It is the great Unfinished Symphony in gaming, and a warning to any other developers considering the episodic approach: take your cues from the Japanese way of doing it, and save yourself a whole lot of hassle.