1563: Sullen and Ill-Tempered

I’ll level with you, dear reader, I’m not entirely sure what to write today. The Black Dog has been creeping in somewhat over the course of the day, leaving me somewhat morose and not particularly in the mood for a great deal of communication. This feeling sucks, but I am taking some small solace from the fact that there are a few irons in the fire right now. Whether or not any of them will come to anything remains to be seen, but at least they’re there.

In the meantime, it’s largely been business as usual. I rediscovered the fun of Japanese doujin title Croixleur earlier through its new Sigma edition and would encourage anyone who enjoys a bit of hack-and-slash goodness to check it out. Then I spent some time moving towards cleaning up the rest of The Witch and the Hundred Knight. I’m torn on which ending to try for, since both the Normal and True endings are very straightforward to get, while the “Bad” ending actually takes significantly more effort to attain.

This isn’t the first time a Japanese game has locked its worst ending behind a particularly complicated series of hoops to jump through, and it probably won’t be the last. The last time I encountered such a practice was with Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, where the “Conquest” ending — an incredibly dark affair that, despite featuring a huge tonal shift from the rest of the game managed to fit in quite well with the overall narrative — required a huge amount of faffing around to accomplish. And your reward? Feeling awful at what you had done to the characters. I am, frankly, glad I did it first, and it’s for this reason I’m contemplating getting The Witch and the Hundred Knight’s “bad” ending out of the way first.

Meanwhile, I continue to be enraptured by Demon Gaze. I adore the characters whom you get to hang out with while back at the inn between expeditions into the game’s sprawling dungeons, but I was surprised to discover that it’s the dungeon-crawling aspect I’ve been having the most fun with. Demon Gaze’s dungeons are relatively simple in terms of tech, being designed on a flat 2D grid, but their design is superb. The current dungeon I’m running through — Endless Road, a dungeon towards the end of the game — is a multi-floor monstrosity that demands you pay careful attention to the relationship between the different levels and areas, and search carefully for secret doors.

Secret doors! When was the last time you searched for a secret door in a video game? Demon Gaze is full of them. Granted, much of the old-school frustration of hunting for secret doors is mitigated by two things — the demon Comet, who, if equipped, marks them with a big flashing mark, and the fact that players tend to leave helpful Gazer Memos in front of them — but it’s still enjoyable to kick down a wall and discover a door behind it.

At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been enjoying the aforementioned Gazer Memo feature a great deal, too. Somewhat similar to the messaging system in Dark Souls (in that you can’t type freely but instead pick from predefined words and phrases) but with a few more suggestive terms included along the way, the Gazer Memo system allows you to scrawl messages on the dungeon floor which are subsequently uploaded to the Internet and downloaded into the game of anyone else who happens to be playing. During the time I was reviewing the game, the messages were fairly sparse and mostly helpful; now, they’re still fairly helpful, but there’s been a clear explosion in players: the sheer number of messages making rather suggestive implications about spears and butts is testament to that, I feel.

It’s fun to leave these messages, too. At several points during the game, after overcoming a particularly challenging maze of one-way doors, I found myself deliberately going back and leaving memos to future adventurers helping them out. (I also left them a few sarcastic “Nope”s if they went the wrong way.) I also couldn’t resist a “Caution! Gigantic Butt Ahead” at the entrance to one particular dungeon — a message that I now see every time I happen to wander back to that area.

But anyway. I’m rambling on about nothing much in particular and it’s getting late. As such, I’m going to leave that there. Here’s hoping that tomorrow is a more positive day.