#oneaday Day 648: Crystal Clear

It's here! My Moero Crystal H review is live on Nintendo Life. Please go check it out! 

I'm excited about this review for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's simply a great game that I'm very happy I had the opportunity to write about. Secondly, and probably most significantly, it's a sign of a certain amount of… "progress", I guess you'd call it.

For those of you who don't know, I was one of the founding members of USgamer.net. When that site first launched, it was envisioned as a place where its writers would each focus on their particular specialisms, allowing the audience to come along and gravitate towards their favourite writers — the people who gave them what they wanted to read about. All was well for a while; I wrote about interesting Japanese arcade games, RPGs and visual novels, Jaz Rignall wrote about racing games, Mike Williams wrote about big stompy robots… and so on. All was good.

Unfortunately, as tends to be the case with writing intended to bring in the ad revenue, the suits decided that wasn't a sustainable model, so a couple of things happened. Firstly, the site shifted away from its more "article-based" model with personal specialisms to a traditional news-and-reviews site. Secondly, Jeremy Parish was brought on board to be the site's editor-in-chief.

Parish is a respected figure in the industry, but I found him exceedingly unpleasant to work with. He frequently belittled my opinions, insisted on having "approval" over every news article I wrote, and on more than one occasion tried to chew me out for things that I actually hadn't done — the most memorable of which was the time I mocked other sites' coverage of Lightning's "boob jiggle" in Lightning Returns, instead focusing on my actual hands-on impressions of the game I'd had from the Eurogamer Expo. He (wilfully?) misunderstood what I was doing as actually covering boob jiggle and nothing else, thereby making it clear he hadn't actually read the article he was so mad about. I had to have uncharacteristically stern words with him over that one.

The reason MoeGamer exists relates to all this. Those of you who have been following me for a while may recall a notorious review of Hatsune Miku Project Diva F for PlayStation 3 written by a freelancer, in which said reviewer referred to the game (which, as anyone who has played it will know, is incredibly wholesome and pleasant) as "bringing the creep factor overseas" and described its audience as "degenerates". My colleague Cassandra and I took great umbrage at this, and the result was the launch of MoeGamer's spiritual predecessor: my column JPgamer, which afforded me a weekly opportunity to once again talk about the games that, in the early days of the site, I had helped build a solid reputation for.

That Miku review hurt a significant part of the audience, because my previous work had shown that USgamer was a lot more friendly to the otaku audience than pretty much any other site around at the time — this was when ragebaiting audiences by insulting them and the games they liked was just starting to get popular — and said otaku audience, quite rightly, felt somewhat betrayed by this. So the first installment of my JPgamer column provided an opportunity to show that no, this wasn't what USgamer was all about, and that yes, there absolutely was a place for the otaku audience to call home here. Because I wanted it too.

The reason why I bring all this up is that while I managed to cover most of the things I wanted to in JPgamer, Parish specifically forbade me from covering the first installment in the Genkai Tokki series, Monster Monpiece. He didn't like the ecchi artwork, so no-one else was allowed to talk about it either. When I say I was forbidden from talking about it, I absolutely mean it; I couldn't even post news stories talking about its release date, or about how it was a pleasant surprise such a niche-interest sort of game — it is, at heart, a collectible card game with really solid mechanics, if you never played it — had ended up localised.

I stuck to Parish's rules to the letter for a quiet life, but I can't help but feel my eventually being laid off from USgamer "so that the site could have an all-American team" (the reason I was actually given… on my birthday, no less) was at least partly a result of him seeing me somehow as a "risk". I mean, we couldn't possibly have "his" site sullied with games he didn't like now, could we? Better to get the perverted Englishman with his dangerous, perverted audience out the door and bring on board some sycophants who will never question his judgement.

Sigh. But anyway.

Now we fast forward to today and here I am posting a review of the official English localisation of the third Genkai Tokki game, Moero Crystal. And giving it a glowing review, too. While I do genuinely feel that it's an absolutely excellent game and would encourage those of you who enjoy good dungeon crawlers (and don't mind a healthy dose of ecchi) to check it out, I also can't help but see the publication of this review as something of a victory over a frustrating aspect of my professional past.

I'm still upset and bitter about the way I was treated at USgamer; I feel I had a promising career (with said promise backed up by site stats and audience engagement) cut short because of all this nonsense. I suspect that if I ever meet Parish in person, I will probably at the very least want to punch him right in the dick for his role in quite literally ruining a significant part of my life, and playing a huge part in the mental health issues I deal with on a daily basis today.

But at least I can enjoy this small victory for now. Which, in these troubled times, is something to celebrate, at least.