2222: I Can’t Decide if Final Fantasy Record Keeper is Good or Not

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I’ve been having a sporadic go at Final Fantasy Record Keeper on mobile recently. I sort of like it, but I also sort of think it’s rubbish. It’s hard to say which opinion carries the greater weight at the moment.

For the unfamiliar, Record Keeper is a Final Fantasy fanservice game in that it allows you, as an original (and rather dull) character created specifically for the game, to venture into the worlds of most of the mainline Final Fantasy games from I-XIV and engage in some of the iconic battles from the series. Major plot beats are presented as “dungeons” in which you have to complete several different stages concluding with a boss fight against a boss from that point in the original game, complete with its original attack patterns.

As you progress through the game, you unlock various characters from Final Fantasy history, and you’re encouraged to swap them around and experiment with different party combinations, as a character running a dungeon from their “own” game gets significant bonuses. You can then get equipment — again, sourced from all the various games — and give them to characters to power them up and make them stronger, as well as crafting “ability orbs” that allow them to cast spells and skills that deal more damage or have special effects.

There’s actually quite a lot to it, but the fact that it’s a free-to-play mobile game means that it’s riddled with irritating features. Firstly and perhaps most significantly is the fact that it’s entirely dependent on being online, with painfully sluggish menus and lengthy load times, even when the game has cached its data. Worse, if your network connection flakes out while you’re playing, the whole game freezes until connectivity is restored, even if you’re in the middle of battle.

Then there’s the social features, which actually weren’t in the game when it originally launched. As is usually the case in mobile games of this type, you have the opportunity to “borrow” another player’s showcase character when you run a dungeon, and make use of their special ability a limited number of times during the dungeon. A nice idea, for sure, but completely unbalanced; most other players are well above my current level and consequently inflict one-hit kills on bosses, making strategic play unnecessary. It would perhaps be better if you were matched with players who were of a similar level or amount of progress through the game to you.

Free-to-play also means gacha, and in this case that comes in the form of the “relics”, the equipment you give to your characters. Rather than purchasing these from a shop, you “draw” them, either one crap one for free per day or a chance at better ones if you spend money or use the rarer “Mythril” currency you acquire through playing. Relics can be levelled up and upgraded in rarity independently of characters, so the main metagame comes from collecting and fusing these items together to form a powerful (overpowered?) party to challenge the content in the game.

There’s a lot to dislike about Final Fantasy Record Keeper, but a lot to like, too; the developers are clearly very much in love with Final Fantasy as a whole, incorporating authentic graphics, sound, music and animations into the game. The fact that the boss fights make use of authentic attack patterns — even from less “conventional” Final Fantasies such as XIV — is a really nice touch for longstanding fans of the series, and the Relic and Ability systems provide plenty of scope for customising and upgrading characters.

It’s a nice idea, in other words; I’m just not sure that a free-to-play mobile game was quite the optimal way to do this. Still, it’s significantly better than many other mobile games I’ve fiddled with in the past, so I’ll give it a chance for a bit longer and see if it holds my interest.

2221: Seeing the Final Product Forming

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I spent a chunk of time today porting the work I’ve already done on a story from Google Docs online to Scrivener on my Mac. Scrivener is a piece of software I picked up quite a while back and have used sporadically whenever I feel creative; it’s a lovely piece of software to keep written projects of any size manageable and organised.

For the unfamiliar, Scrivener allows you to organise your whole project into a single file, including the chapters and sections/scenes of your book, research material, front matter and general notes. Within the file, you have a tree structure of folders and items, with numerous templates available for various types of project. When you’re all done, you “compile” the project like a computer program, and Scrivener spits the finished product out in the format of your choice, be it double-spaced manuscript for sending to a publisher, attractively laid out pages ready for self-publishing, or various popular eBook formats. You can even export it to a word processor if you so desire, allowing you to format it further using tools beyond that which Scrivener offers.

I was surprised what a feeling of motivation I felt from porting the existing content over to Scrivener, and I attribute this primarily to the fact that what you bung into Scrivener looks remarkably like what the finished product will end up being. In fact, if you compile a project in progress to a PDF just to have a look at how things appear, it’s even more motivating, because you can imagine holding the finished book in your hands. That’s quite exciting.

Just the fact that Scrivener uses some very attractive, convincingly “book-like” default fonts helps with this feeling of seeing the final product coming together, though. Couple that with the fact that Scrivener’s interface is designed to be as clean and distraction-free as possible, and all in all you have a piece of software that is eminently suitable for creative types to realise their written ambitions — even if you barely use a fraction of the functionality the software has to offer, which I suspect is a category I will probably fall into unless I want to get really anal about page headers or something.

Anyway. This is a long-winded way of saying that I have been successfully motivating myself to continue with my creative writing project while I still don’t have any full time work. I’m under no illusions that I’ll be able to make money from this — at least initially — but the story I’m working on at present is a passion project that it will simply be satisfying to see completed at last, and released into the wild. If anyone ends up actually buying it, so much the better, of course, but if nothing else completing a project of this sort will 1) show me that I can do it, and hopefully inspire me to do more that take less than 15 years to complete and 2) stop my mother telling me every so often that I should “write that book”. (She hasn’t done that for a while, to be fair, which probably means it’s due a mention sometime soon… I know you’re reading, Mum, so take this as assurance that I’m doing it.)

So that’s that. Writer? Windows or OSX-equipped? Give Scrivener a go, and you might just be surprised how much you can get done.

2220: Evasive Action

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“What’s the most significant secret you’ve ever kept? Did the truth ever come out?”
Daily Post, February 17, 2016

To be honest, I don’t have all that many secrets. I spew most of the things that many people might keep private on this blog most days, as I figured out a while back that keeping secrets from people is a sure-fire way to lead to mistrust and awkwardness.

As such, I have to look back to my past to ponder the subject of secrets. And, I have to say, even then, I didn’t have that many in the way of significant secrets. For the teenaged me, though, no secret was more sacred than who I fancied at any given moment.

Deciding I liked someone always felt like a significant moment when I was young. It was always a conscious decision, and there was always some sort of stimulus that triggered previously dormant feelings of attraction and affection towards someone. I’ve never been someone who was solely attracted to others based on physical appearance; even as a teenager, I could appreciate how aesthetically pleasing someone might be, but I would never consider myself to like them until I had some idea of what kind of person they were.

I didn’t need to know a lot about them, mind; being shy and socially awkward from a young age, a member of the opposite sex giving me the time of day and actually talking to me without being obviously repulsed by my bad hair, bad skin and periodic outbreaks of zits was usually enough to trigger a feeling in the pit of my stomach that was both delicious and uncomfortable; I tended to think of it as the old cliche “butterflies in the stomach”, and while there was not one single instance while I was still a teenager where my feelings were requited — my first girlfriend was more a case of circumstance rather than prior attraction, but perhaps more on that another time — I secretly rather enjoyed the feeling of liking someone from afar.

This would lead to internal conflict. My feelings towards that week/month’s object of affection would grow and grow, but with them being a sacred secret to me, I wouldn’t breathe a word about them to anyone, because I’d got into my head that if anyone found out that I liked them, they’d immediately and automatically start hating me. On the few occasions where I did successfully pluck up the courage to admit to someone that I liked them “that way”, not one of them automatically started hating me, which was always a pleasant surprise, but it didn’t stop me feeling that way until… well, perhaps not ever. I’m quite insecure.

Anyway. Eventually those feelings would reach boiling point and despite them being a sacred secret, I’d have to tell someone. Not the person in question though, of course, absolutely not. No, I’d usually tell one of my friends, who would then, usually, proceed to either immediately tell the person in question or, more commonly, hijack one of my school exercise books and scrawl the name of my desired paramour across the middle pages in rather ornate, artistic text. On one particularly memorable occasion the book was returned to me with the name in question actually painted with watercolours, which I thought was rather more effort than warranted by the news that I, once again, fancied that girl I sat next to in orchestra who played the clarinet with me. Perhaps it was my friends’ own peculiar way of demonstrating their affection and support for my numerous doomed, unrequited loves.

Regardless, though, that sort of thing makes up the majority of what I’d consider to be significant secrets in my life to date. I’m not sure if I should be pleased I haven’t felt the need to keep many things secret, or a little despondent at the fact I apparently live quite a boring life…

2219: Picking at the Scab of Creativity

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That’s a horrible metaphor, I know, but the more I think about it, the more that it seems to make a certain amount of sense.

I’ve been picking at said scab for the last few days, as I said I was going to. I haven’t been spending all day on it or anything, but an hour here and an hour there has meant that a story I’ve been wanting to finish since my teenage years is finally making some progress further beyond the point where it typically stalls any time I attempt to form it into some sort of… well, format.

I’m taking a different approach to what I usually do, and it feels like it’s working. Those who have read my various month-long sort of NaNoWriMo projects and other creative pieces will know that I have something of a tendency to write in a fairly spontaneous manner — in other words, I don’t really plan anything out in advance, and this usually serves me well but occasionally sees me writing myself into a bit of a dead end I’m not sure how to escape from. In contrast, then, said scab-picking has involved not just continuing on with what I’ve already written — which is a substantial number of words that I’m actually quite pleased with so far — but instead planning out a synopsis, chapter by chapter, of what’s coming next.

Doing this has helped me get over the biggest creative block I’ve had with this work — a creative block that has lasted a good 15 years or so at last count. The trouble with this story is that I know how it begins and I know roughly how it ends, but I’ve never quite figured out what happens in the middle of it or the specifics of the ending. Now I’m planning each chapter out in general terms rather than trying to write meaningful scenes as I get to them, I feel like I’m developing a much stronger sense of the work’s complete structure, and those middle bits are starting to fall into place naturally. It’s that old thing where a huge job looks daunting if you look at the whole thing, but if you take it a single task at a time it suddenly seems a lot more manageable.

So picking a scab then — why? Well, because I’ve been picking at it for the last few days, and each time I do so, I feel my creativity loosen up a bit. It’s surely — hopefully — only a matter of time before that scab comes off completely and creativity comes gushing forth from a newly reopened wound, splattering the walls and desk with… you know what? Maybe I didn’t think this metaphor through as much as I thought I had.

Anyway. Disgusting mental imagery aside, I’m pleased with my progress, even though it’s relatively minor in the grand scheme of what I need to do to finish the damn thing. It is progress, though, and while I’m still not feeling great about bumming around at home all day rather than having a proper job, it is at least helping me to feel like I’m achieving something, however miniscule that something might be. And that’s pretty important.

Let’s hope I can keep that motivation going, a bit at a time.

2218: Megadimension Neptunia: Report from 21 Hours In

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Good Lord, this game is good.

As I mentioned the other day, Megadimension Neptunia V-II marks something of a watershed moment for the series in that it’s no longer “good, but [insert caveat of your choice here]” and is just plain good. Great, even.

I’m about 21 hours in so far. I’ve finished the first of the three main stories that make up the complete experience — Zerodimension Neptunia Z — and am now in the second, Hyperdimension Neptunia G. This part — at least the first bit of it; I don’t know how long it is in total — is split into four distinct scenarios, each of which focuses on one of the four main goddess characters (and one of the four new “Gold Third” characters, who personify various Japanese game companies from Capcom to Square Enix), and so far I’ve played through Blanc’s route from start to finish.

Like Compile Heart’s previous game Omega Quintet, MegaNep spreads out its mechanics over the course of quite a few hours. 20 hours in, I’m still getting tutorial messages when I’m afflicted with a status effect I haven’t suffered before, though I think that most of the main core mechanics of the game have now been introduced by this point. Unlike Final Fantasy XIII, which often draws the ire of commentators for taking a similar approach to spreading out its new mechanics, MegaNep never feels like it’s artificially constraining you, though; the new systems I’ve seen so far were all introduced at the changeover between Zerodimension Neptunia Z and Hyperdimension Neptunia G, which was an eminently sensible way to do things, since it allows Z to stand by itself as a complete-feeling experience, then G to move on and feel distinctive in its own right thanks to the additional things you have to juggle.

What of those additional things, though? Well, aside from the things that Z already shook up — the world map is now node-based a la Final Fantasy Tactics, and you can have random encounters while moving from place to place; the battle system has been completely revamped from previous installments — G introduces (and, in some cases, reintroduces) a number of new systems.

First is the Scout system originally seen in Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. Essentially, this is a small army of chibi characters (series veterans will recognise them as the “Chirper” characters who fulfil the role of incidental NPCs) that you can send out to dungeons, and they will then report back with what they find. Whereas Victory’s Scout system simply required you to enter and leave locations a certain number of times before the Scouts would return, MegaNep’s Scouts head out in real time and then report back with items, money, new dungeon features (boss monsters or clues to hidden treasure) or whole new dungeons. There’s still a heavy degree of RNG involved, but it’s a fairly painless process, and the real-time element means you can easily leave it running while you’re doing other errands in-game. Scouts also provide passive bonuses to you if you’re exploring the same dungeon they’re deployed to, so they’re helpful in ways other than just finding stuff, too.

Next is the Investment system, which allows you to develop towns by spending your hard-earned Credits in three areas: Commercial, Industrial and Public Relations. Upgrading Commercial increases the stock in the shops; upgrading Industrial gives you access to new crafting recipes; upgrading Public Relations triggers events that can reward you with items, new Scouts or simply an entertaining scene. That’s pretty straightforward.

Then you have the Route Building system, which is also reasonably straightforward. Discover a new dungeon and you can’t just click on it on the map like in the older games; you have to build a node-based pathway to it first, which costs money.

Then you have the Hidden Treasure system for each dungeon, which replaces the old games’ spamming the “sonar”-type ability to find invisible items. Here, to find a hidden treasure, first of all you have to have a Scout discover a clue to its location, then fulfil the conditions in the clue, then collect the treasure. Sometimes dungeons have more than one treasure, which means you have to do the process twice, though the conditions are usually different. The conditions make the dungeon-crawling a bit more interesting, because they have a decent amount of variety in them: some require you to collect all the regular treasures in a dungeon (some of which may be in awkward places or behind barriers that require the “Breaker” ability to smash) while others require you to execute 8 “Symbol Attacks” in a row without getting spotted by any enemies, which challenges your stealth and pattern-spotting skills. Others still require you to defeat each and every enemy symbol in the whole dungeon at least once — they don’t all have to be dead at the same time, but you do have to keep track of what you’ve already killed and what you haven’t.

In Blanc’s route, we get a number of different characters to play with, each of whom handles rather differently, fixing the issue from the older games where most of the characters felt rather interchangeable with the exception of their special skills. Blanc herself has a marked disparity between her physical and magic defense, for example, while her sisters Rom and Ram have half of Blanc’s HP but much stronger magic resistance and the ability to attack both at range and over a wider area. The brief time you get to play with Capcom personification C-Sha is a ton of fun, too; her combo skills are all named after fighting game terminology, and it’s more fun than it should be triggering Rush attacks called simply “PPPK” then seeing her doing a punch-punch-punch-kick combo on the enemy.

The story is proving to be surprisingly compelling so far, too. The Zerodimension episode had a mixture of lightheartedness and post-apocalyptic bleakness and worked well. Blanc’s route of the Hyperdimension story deals with a plausible view of a dystopian society where everything and everyone is controlled by the state, and how revolutionaries fighting against this sort of regime aren’t always in it for the right reasons. Neptunia’s stories have always been far more clever than most reviewers give them credit for, being heavily allegorical for the most part, but so far MegaNep seems to have taken things to a new level. The writing and localisation is good (aside from a few easily ignored typos here and there) and, crucially, the new characters — of whom there are quite a few — fit right in to the world without breaking a sweat.

It does feel very different to previous Neptunia games, but after the three Re;Births that all had the same basic mechanics, it’s refreshing to have a game that feels both comfortingly familiar and fresh at the same time. I’m delighted with the experience so far, and am looking forward to playing it to death over the course of the next few weeks. Expect further reports to follow.

2217: When You Have No Occupation, You Should Stay Occupied

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One of the things that is most difficult about being out of work is keeping yourself occupied without falling into unproductive routines. It would be extremely easy to not bother doing anything useful at all each and every day, treating the time “off” as a kind of holiday, watching television, playing games, listening to the radio or falling into a deep, existential depression while staring at the ceiling of one’s bedroom. I say it is extremely easy to do these things because I have done all these things while out of work at various points. Sometimes you need that time to yourself, but unfortunately, said time to yourself doesn’t pay the bills.

Doing nothing but hunting for jobs isn’t necessarily the most productive course of action either, though. Job-hunting is an enormously demoralising experience, since by its very definition you’re going to be faced with more inexplicable rejection than acceptance in most cases. At other times, you’ll find yourself faced with an opportunity that just doesn’t seem quite right, but which you feel guilty turning down because you need work. (I say this having turned down two opportunities recently that didn’t feel right at all. Like, a big ol’ “bad feeling in the guy” not right at all.) That can be exhausting, and the toll it takes on your mental faculties can have an adverse effect on your subsequent attempts to find work as you lose patience with it and get tempted to apply to any old thing on the off-chance someone will find you in any way employable.

Therefore, it’s important to find other ways to occupy yourself, and to divide your days up into various things that, if they’re not necessarily directly productive, they at least provide you with the opportunity to feel like you’ve accomplished something. Indulging in a creative project, learning something new, practising your skills in something — all of these things are good ways to spend your time and if you’re out of work, it’s an ideal opportunity to spend some of those empty hours doing them.

You’ll notice that I’m writing this and using the word “you” a lot, as if I’m giving advice to someone else. Really, I’m giving advice to myself, to be perfectly honest, since as previously noted, I find it much too easy to sink into depression and just want to comfort myself with things that don’t require too much in the way of effort. But that way leads further into bad situations, so from tomorrow, I’m going to make a particular effort to spend a bit of time each day doing something that makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something. I don’t think I’m going to go so far as to schedule what I should do when — not for the moment, anyway, though that has worked for me in the past — but I am going to ensure that I do at least one thing every day for a minimum of an hour that leaves me feeling satisfied that I’m not completely wasting my time.

Activities that spring immediately to mind to accomplish this include music practice, music composition, creative writing (both fiction and non-fiction — I have a number of ideas for both), Japanese language studies, developing my computer skills (particularly with regard to things like programming and/or web design), working on the next edition of the magazine I shared with you a while back and making more gaming videos. That should keep me busy on a fairly regular basis; some of those things may even lead to further actual paying opportunities of various descriptions in the future, if not immediately.

Mostly they’re attempts to keep myself occupied and feeling positive. I feel I’m at a particularly low ebb right now, if that wasn’t already abundantly clear from my recent entries, and I want to feel like I’m making the best of a bad situation rather than wallowing in sadness. It won’t be easy, but I feel it’s probably the best way to approach what I’m dealing with at the moment.

Wish me luck.

2216: An Open Letter to Idea Factory International, Marvelous, Koei Tecmo, NIS America and More

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Hello IFI (and IF in general), NISA (and NIS), Marvelous (worldwide), Koei Tecmo, XSEED, Tamsoft, Atlus, Falcom, Gust, JAST USA, Mangagamer, Frontwing, Sekai Project, Denpasoft and anyone else I’ve forgotten. (The “and more” in the header is to cover my own ass in case there’s some really obvious companies that I either forgot to mention or simply didn’t have space for in the headline.)

I’m writing to say something very simple that isn’t said enough these days: thank you.

Why do I want to thank you all? Well, to explain that I need to explain a little about myself first.

I am Pete. I am 34 years old, and frankly my life hasn’t quite gone in the direction I hoped it would. As the result of a combination of factors, I am saddled with depression and anxiety at the best of times, and this makes functioning relatively “normally” in society quite challenging at times. Sure, I can handle going out to the shops or ordering a coffee or whatever, but there are some things that regular people would find utterly trivial that I find either tremendously difficult or nigh-impossible: meeting new people; deferring to authority figures that I don’t respect; making small talk; being assertive and standing up for myself; at times, even expressing my own feelings clearly.

These things all feed into one another, creating a cycle of anxiety that it’s very difficult to break out of once it starts rearing its ugly head. And when I’m in a period of my life that I describe as “dark” — when things really aren’t going well at all, such as my present situation, between jobs and struggling to work out what I’m supposed to do next — it’s all the more difficult to resist the allure of those bleak emotions and their desire to make me do nothing but stare at a wall for hours at a time.

In 2012, I played a visual novel called Katawa Shoujo for the first time. I’d played Japanese video games before — most notably the Final Fantasy series, which I’d always adored — but Katawa Shoujo, despite being developed in a Japanese style rather than being truly Japanese in origin, inspired me to look further into games from the East. Why? Because Katawa Shoujo demonstrated to me something that I’d suspected for a while: that games could be deeply, personally engaging and feature characters that strongly resonate with me personally. More to the point, Katawa Shoujo helped drag me out of one of those pits of depression and anxiety that I periodically sink into; it helped me remember that although life is full of struggles, it’s always possible to pick yourself up again, and that there are always people out there looking out for you, even if you don’t always know it.

Over the course of that year, I played through a selection of visual novels from JAST and Mangagamer and wrote about them on the now sadly defunct Games Are Evil. (I’ve archived those articles, so when I get the inclination I’m planning on republishing them somewhere.) Early in the following year, I acquired the first two games in the Hyperdimension Neptunia series for PlayStation 3 and decided to give them a go out of simple curiosity; my year of visual novels had made me a big fan of anime-style art in general, and an Internet friend of mine had said vague but positive things about Neptunia in the past, so I took a chance.

I was immediately smitten, and struck with that same feeling I had when I played Katawa Shoujo for the first time. I was hopelessly, utterly enraptured with this world and its characters; they resonated deeply with me and, while not all of them were what I’d call directly relatable to my own circumstances, they all felt very “real”. And once again, I found myself drawn to these games in my darkest periods, their bright colours and relentlessly optimistic attitudes dragging me out of the abyss again and again without fail.

When I had the good fortune to be employed by Eurogamer’s American offshoot USgamer thanks to a previous professional relationship with industry veteran Jaz Rignall, I made a point of highlighting games that made me feel this way, since I was surprised to see that despite the industry’s new-found love for emotionally “honest” games, particularly from the indie scene, there was disappointingly little that had been written about these titles that had been bringing me joy for the last couple of years. In fact, what little that had been written about them tended to be rather dismissive, chastising these games and developers for often being made on a shoestring budget, having poor technical aspects or somehow being “offensive”.

I continued this during my time with USgamer. When a freelance reviewer slated Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F on PlayStation 3 for being “creepy”, I knew that enough was enough; spurred on by my colleague Cassandra Khaw, who also shared similar tastes to me, I upped my efforts to cater to Western fans of Japanese games with my weekly column JPgamer, and published a lengthy article with comments from XSEED and NIS America representatives on the hidden charms of these “otaku games”. I celebrated the joy I derived from the Neptunia series; I made a point of reviewing games that other sites didn’t touch or only had the most cursory experience of — Time and Eternity and The Witch and the Hundred Knight spring immediately to mind here; I attempted to broaden the horizons of people who had come to enjoy story-centric games such as The Walking Dead with explorations of classic Japanese visual novels. I met resistance at every turn, from both aspects of the readership and even my own editor Jeremy Parish, who despite being fairly knowledgeable about both Japanese games in general and RPGs in particular, demonstrated some rather closed-minded views towards the kinds of games I was most keen to celebrate.

I pushed through, though, because this was something I believed in. I made a number of friends through my articles’ comment sections, many of whom I’m still in contact with now, even though I no longer write for USgamer. I became part of the anime and gaming subculture on Twitter, finding numerous other like-minded individuals who shared and understood my tastes. And I’m pretty sure I ultimately lost my gig at USgamer because of my unwillingness to toe the popular line and brand everything from Japan that featured attractive female characters as somehow “problematic” — because that simply isn’t true.

Neptunia features a brilliant cast of female characters and positive attitudes towards many things that self-professed “progressive” types love to complain about. The Witch and the Hundred Knight was a wonderful example of gaming being used to explore tragedy: something which I hadn’t seen done well before. Time and Eternity told a fun story and acknowledged the immense frustration of being unable to consummate a relationship. Senran Kagura, like Neptunia, featured a memorable cast of female characters and, again, extremely positive attitudes towards sexual matters such as kinks, fetishes and homosexuality as well as more everyday issues such as identity, empathy and understanding people with a different background to you. The Atelier series demonstrated it’s possible to make a compelling game out of fairly mundane subject matter and be consistently and relentlessly cheerful throughout; the Ar Tonelico series showed that it’s possible to create a sense of an incredibly well-realised and fantastic world while only showing the tiniest part of it.

Amid all of these individual positive aspects were stories and characters so incredibly relatable and resonant it’s all but assured that, like a good book, a spectacular work of art or an awe-inspiring piece of music, these games are going to stay with me for a very long time indeed. These are games with characters who are “friends” of a sort; characters that are bigger than the individual works in which they appear; characters that have become important cultural figures in their own right, even outside their source material.

And that’s one of the reasons I want to say thank you. For bringing these games — these stories, these characters — to people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to enjoy them. For ignoring the ill-informed hatred and ignorance repeatedly thrown in your direction by jaded, cynical reviewers who refuse to engage with these works and instead write them off as “fanservicey rubbish” just because there are pretty girls in them. For respecting the people who love your work, rather than your shareholders — or at least giving that impression. Hey, business is business.

And on a personal note, the other reason I want to say thank you is for brightening the dark periods in my life, of which there have been many, and which I’m in the middle of one as I type this. I wouldn’t be so melodramatic as to say that Neptunia saved my life or anything — even though it’s possible, I couldn’t say for certain — but I will say that these games, with their colour, their energy, their positivity, their emotional honesty and the feeling that they speak directly to me, have brought immeasurable amounts of joy and comfort to me, even during times when I’ve otherwise been struggling.

So thank you to everyone who has made that possible. Thank you to everyone who continues to make the world a better place for people like me, even facing resistance at every turn from press and public alike. Thank you to those who stand up for what they believe in, and who help to share the cultural output of another, very different country with the Western world. Most of all, thank you for the many memorable hours of fun I’ve spent enjoying these games to date — and for the many more memorable hours I’ll be spending with them in the future.

Thank you.

Pete Davison

2215: Some Initial Megadimension Neptunia V-II Impressions, and Why JRPG Fans Should Pay Attention to the Series

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I write a lot about the Neptunia series, I know, and make no attempt to hide the fact that by now I probably very much fall into the “fanboy” category. But it’s not blind allegiance, by any means; I’ve stuck with the series since its original installment because that original installment resonated with me on a primal level. The characters were strong and interesting, the story was enjoyable, the battle system was fun, the structure was quite unlike previous JRPGs I’d played prior to that point and it was so clear that the experience was packed with love and soul that the technical issues the game suffered from — notably an atrocious framerate, copypasted dungeons and some mechanics that were just straight-up broken — simply didn’t matter to me.

When Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 came along and completely revamped the systems, I was delighted to discover that there was a much more solid game system backing up the strong characters and fun setting. When Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory came along and refined the systems introduced in mk2 to their pinnacle, I spent well over a hundred hours devouring the game and trying to see everything it had to offer. And when the Vita-based Re;Birth games came along, remaking the first three games with the refined mechanics from Victory and introducing numerous new systems in their own right, I was ecstatic to play them through again — though I must confess I’m still yet to even start the remake of Victory, Re;Birth3.

Neptunia has become developer Compile Heart’s headline franchise, replacing the Agarest series that was once their frontrunner. When the original Neptunia released, I doubt anyone could have predicted this, particularly with the poor review scores it attained from the press. But the characters were strong enough to attract a dedicated fanbase of players who loved them and wanted to see more of them — and slowly but surely, we did start to see more of them, firstly with more role-playing games and later with more adventurous exploits into other genres such as dating sim, strategy RPG and arena brawler.

Ultimately, the Neptunia series has been what’s driven Compile Heart to continually develop and improve themselves. The mainline games since mk2 have been iterative rather than truly innovative — and I count the Re;Birth games in here, too, since they’re essentially using Victory’s core mechanics at heart — but the series as a whole is a brilliant example of a developer cautiously and carefully examining what works and what doesn’t, and sensibly moving forward with those things that do while abandoning the things that don’t. What we end up with is a series that is fascinating to play through from start to finish, as you can actually see how it’s developed slowly and surely since its humble beginnings.

And this, among other reasons that I’ve explored at length in many thousands of words prior to today, is why Neptunia is important and worthwhile, and why it shouldn’t be rejected automatically by either players or critics.

I had the misfortune to stumble across an old tweet by a former colleague earlier in which they expressed the belief that giving a positive review to a Compile Heart game was likely to make a reviewer “lose the respect of [their] peers” and that JRPG fans should “pick a better hill to die on” than the Neptunia series. These comments — and others like them — are just so extraordinarily ignorant as to make me genuinely angry. Not because I’m a series fanboy, but because they show a fundamental unwillingness to even attempt to engage with the series on anything more than a superficial level. Said former colleague — supposedly a JRPG specialist — hasn’t reviewed the latest installment Megadimension Neptunia V-II, and going by those comments, that’s probably for the best, particularly if their habitual partner in crime’s review of Fairy Fencer F from a while back is anything to go by. You don’t have to like every game, but going into something with the assumption it’s going to be bad before you even start is not good criticism.

Which brings us, then, to Megadimension Neptunia V-II, which arrived here today and which I’ve spent a considerable amount of time playing since it was delivered.

Remember how I said Neptunia had been mostly iterative rather than innovative? Well, MegaNep (as I shall refer to it hereafter) is the biggest shakeup the series has had since the changeover from the original game to mk2.

It’s still recognisably closer to Victory than anything else, but the core mechanics have had a huge shakeup, even going so far as to incorporate some of the best ideas from the original game — yes, it did have plenty of good ideas, even if they weren’t always executed perfectly.

It being a JRPG, the core of the experience is exploring dungeons and fighting battles. Both counts have been improved considerably in the series’ jump to PlayStation 4. Dungeons are completely new rather than the reused and tweaked assets found in previous games, and much more complex in their layout and geometry. Dungeon Actions make a comeback from the original game, though here they’re tied to craftable key items rather than individual characters, allowing you to unlock various abilities to access new areas and retrieve new treasures.

The battle system is where the biggest changes have come, though. Still allowing limited free movement during a character’s turn, the combo system has had a rethink. Rather than simply spamming your best combo abilities as you unlock them, you can now only “equip” each combo move once. Plus, each weapon has its own particular layout of combo slots, making some more appropriate for multi-hit Rush attacks, while others are better for hard-hitting Power attacks. On top of all that, special conditions (such as “all previous attacks were Rush” or “haven’t used Power attacks”) can trigger if you use combo abilities in an appropriate order, which guarantee hits and crits if you use them effectively. This makes arranging your character’s abilities somewhat puzzle-like, and while it’s not taken to quite the same ridiculous degree as it was in the original Hyperdimension Neptunia — wherein setting up combos was practically a game in itself — it both adds considerable depth to the combat system and provides a reason to use all your different types of attack rather than just the “best” ones.

There are other changes and tweaks, too. Certain enemies have breakable parts, the shattering of which will generally provide you with favourable conditions in the battle. This mechanic is introduced to you with a boss that is barely possible to damage until you break his protective wings; other uses allow you to prevent devastating special attacks from occurring, or inflicting conditions on enemies.

And then there’s the odd complete shake-up, such as the Giant battles, in which you fight, well, giant enemies. Here, you can’t use your combo skills and must rely instead on SP skills, which regenerate a little each turn. Formation becomes particularly important here as your characters arrange themselves on floating islands around the boss, since surrounding or sandwiching an enemy allows you to trigger powerful formation attacks with multiple characters. It’s immensely satisfying, and gives some much-needed cinematic flair to Neptunia’s battles, which, while fun in the previous games, have sometimes lacked the drama of more spectacular JRPGs.

I’m about 6 hours in so far and if Compile Heart’s previous PS4 JRPG Omega Quintet is anything to go by, I haven’t seen a fraction of the game’s mechanics and systems yet. I’m looking forward to discovering more, and am delighted that the game is everything I hoped for and more so far. It’s vindicated my belief that the series is emphatically my favourite in all of gaming, and made me a little sad that there are supposed JRPG experts out there who simply won’t touch this on principle. Neptunia crossed the barrier between “it’s good, but…” and plain ol’ “it’s a good game” quite some time ago, but early impressions very much seem to indicate that MegaNep is comfortably and confidently in “this is really good” territory now.

Pick a better hill to die on? Fuck you, I like it here. It has pudding.

2214: Blue Estate: A Love Letter to Lightguns

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The lightgun shooter is a genre of gaming that has been pretty much dead for a long time — at least partly because the tech that made lightguns work doesn’t work with modern LCD or LED TVs. That said, there have been a few attempts to bring it back using alternative methods, most notably motion controls which, while not quite the same as pointing a gun at the screen and pulling the trigger, at least have the “aim and fire” aspect handled nicely, and arguably in a more accessible manner than traditional light guns.

A while back, I picked up a game on PlayStation 4 called Blue Estate. It was on sale for something ridiculous like £2, so I thought I’d take a chance on it as it sounded interesting. It’s based on a comic, I believe, though I hadn’t heard of it, and it doesn’t appear to be necessary to be familiar with the comic to enjoy the game.

That’s because the game is very much an old-school arcade-style lightgun shooter. And it’s cracking fun.

In the absence of a next-generation GunCon peripheral, Blue Estate uses the motion sensors in the DualShock 4 controller to move a gunsight around on screen, coupled with the L1 or D-pad up buttons to recentre the crosshairs if they drift off a bit as a result of you moving your hand position. They drift off quite frequently, but the ability to snap them back into position means that this isn’t really an issue. (This wouldn’t be an issue with the Wii Remote, which recognises its position relative to the television rather than just responding to movements; the DualShock 4, however, doesn’t work in the same way, and thus this method is necessary.)

Playing Blue Estate is extremely simple. You point with the motion controls, you shoot with a squeeze of the R2 button. Occasionally you’ll be tasked with swiping the DualShock 4 touchpad in a particular direction to perform an action like a melee attack or dodging an incoming projectile, but for the most part this is a game about blasting hordes of goons as quickly, accurately and efficiently as possible in order to rack up 1) a big combo and 2) a big score.

Shooting games of various descriptions were often maligned in the early days of gaming as being the most simplistic, mindless types of games, but this absolutely isn’t true; even Space Invaders taught players the importance of performing quick quasi-mathematical calculations in their heads in order to fire their shots at an appropriate position to intersect with the moving aliens as they descended the screen. In Blue Estate’s case, the quick thinking required is less mathematical and more observational: it’s about prioritising targets and responding to things quickly.

One thing lightgun shooters used to struggle a bit with is how to handle presenting a risk to the player without looking silly. Older lightgun shooters tried several methods — enemies not shooting particularly quickly to give players time to hit them before they got a shot in; enemies focusing on melee attacks; in more advanced games like Time Crisis, a cover system — but it could still sometimes seem a bit convoluted. Blue Estate goes for a hybrid approach of these techniques: as you proceed through each level, sometimes you’ll have the opportunity to pop in and out of cover Time Crisis-style, while at others you’ll simply have to prioritise your targets appropriately to avoid taking damage. The latter case is handled reasonably elegantly with an on-screen “warning” system showing which enemy is going to score a hit on you next, allowing you to pick a suitable order to blow your foes’ heads off.

Blue Estate is, despite its extremely silly story, which I won’t go into here, a surprisingly skilful game that has a ton of replay value for score attack enthusiasts. The combo system rewards accurate, skilful shooting, and star ratings in various categories at the end of each level encourage you to try and better yourself in various ways. The basic blasting action is also broken up with several challenge-style objectives in the middle of each level, which task you with everything from quickly shooting enemies that pop up from one of several marked locations to killing a group of enemies in the correct order. There are also some rather wonderful boss fights, which are heavily pattern-based but a ton of fun to fight your way through.

The whole thing has the feel of an old-school arcade game: one that you can “learn” in order to get better at. Learning the position and order of the enemies that show up in each level; learning the bosses’ attack patterns; practising your ability to prioritise and quickly respond to targets in order to chain an entire level together — all of these things prove rewarding and fun, even once you’ve seen the story through to its conclusion. And the story provides good incentive to play through the whole thing at least once, even if you have no intention of score-attacking: it’s genuinely amusing but convincingly written with some solid, fun characters and sufficient justification for each of the game’s characters to blast their way through scores of henchmen.

If you haven’t given it a shot — no pun intended — and you’re a fan of the more arcadey side of life, I recommend Blue Estate highly. It may not be a game you’ve heard of, nor may it be a game that many people are talking about, but it’s a whole lot of fun, and worth your time.

2213: Paying Not to Play vs. Games That Let You Break Them

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I’m currently grinding my way through to the Platinum trophy on Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 2, and in the process I’ve unlocked a considerable number of the “Plans” in the game’s “Remake” system. For those who haven’t played any of the Re;Birth games, these are essentially a crafting system that allow you to bolt various bits and pieces onto the base game. These bits and pieces range from a boost to the amount of experience points you gain from battle to new items being available to purchase in the shops.

Re;Birth 2 goes further than its predecessor did with the Plans by pretty much allowing you to break the game altogether. Between the Plan which allows you to automatically defeat enemies you outlevel on the dungeon screen without having to actually do the battle and the “Symbol Attack Gains” Plan, which allows you to still get experience, credits and items as if you had done the battle, grinding to the game’s various endings is arguably a little too easy, particularly if combined with boosts to experience and suchlike.

At least, I’d say this was a little too easy were it not for the fact that I’ve played a bunch of Compile Heart games now, and their endgame is always like this: characters continuing to level after the usual cap of 99, stats increasing to ludicrous levels, superpowered equipment boosting them still further. In Neptunia’s case, the exaggerated power levels of the endgame is arguably all part of the satire and parody that the series is based around: RPGs are known for having big numbers in them in their final hours, so here are bigger numbers than you’ve ever seen (outside of the Disgaea series, that is) popping out of enemies as you batter them around the face and neck repeatedly with various sharp implements.

In the case of the Re;Birth games, how much you break the game is entirely up to you. You don’t have to turn any of the plans on if you don’t want to, but if you do so, it makes working your way through the alternative endings considerably easier — and manages to remain fun in the process, since there’s more to the game than just battles. It’s inherently satisfying to see Nepgear closing in on level 400 as I approach the “True” ending on my third playthrough, and I’m fully intending on blasting through the other endings after this too.

Hyperdimension Neptunia U allows you to completely break it, too, particularly in its endgame. As you clear various components of the game, you unlock various cheats which range from having infinite EXE Drive power for super-special moves to not actually taking any damage from enemies, essentially making you invincible. And yet that game managed to remain fun despite the option to completely break it; testament to its overall charm and the fact that it had a metagame structure that I found enjoyable to grind through in the name of a Platinum trophy.

As I play these deliberately broken games, I can’t help but compare them to what a lot of mobile games do. In the case of mobile games — free-to-play ones, anyway — you generally have the option to pay real money to break the game in some way, be it eliminate grinding, get an overpowered new character/item/weapon or somehow otherwise break the usual rules of the game. Some games are more aggressive than others in trying to convince you to part with your cash, with the most egregious technique being the vile “Energy” bar that throttles how much you’re allowed to play in a single session without either waiting or paying up.

In essence, by paying up to get an advantage in mobile games, you’re more often than not paying not to play the game: paying not to have to collect things, or grind experience points, or earn money, or fuse cards to make better cards, or whatever. Most well-designed free-to-play mobile games do have a means of earning the premium currency required to do most of these things, but in many cases this is painfully slow — fast enough to give you a taste, but just slow enough to make you think it can’t possibly hurt to pay 99p for 15 gems or whatever. And once you do that, any sense of achievement is gone, because you know you didn’t really “earn” whatever you got from it: you just bought it.

Contrast with, say, the Plans in Re;Birth 2, which are also providing the opportunity to not play part of the game — battles with enemies much lower level than you — but demand that you earn the right to do that before you’re able to take advantage of it. Or contrast with Neptunia U’s cheats, which unlock by completing aspects of the game: again, you have to earn your right to make the rest of your grind easier.

In the latter cases, it’s still a player-friendly move that helps save them some time while still being able to explore and enjoy everything the game has to offer, but it carries with it a sense of achievement: the feeling of having earned and unlocked something, rather than just reaching for the credit card when things get a bit tough.

I sincerely hope free-to-play games don’t become the norm, simply for this reason. Paying to skip things or acquire things without having to earn them makes the whole thing feel rather meaningless to me. I know not everyone feels this way, but so long as there are still full-price premium games that don’t want to keep charging me to keep playing — or to not play — then I’ll keep buying ’em.