Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy is finally down for the count, after nearly 80 hours. That was quite the ride, and a lesson to me never to assume that all games in a series will be "quite short" just because some of the later ones are!

With it being after midnight here, I'm going to save my writeup on the subject for tomorrow, so apologies for those who were hoping for a long read today. May I direct you in the direction of yesterday's 4,500 words on Nurse Love Addiction if you haven't enjoyed it already?

I have a busy weekend ahead of me. Nintendo Life have asked me to review Is It Wrong to Try and Pick Up Girls In a Dungeon: Familia Myth – Infinite Combate (Danmachi hereafter) so I'll need to get stuck into that for the majority of the weekend. Not that I'm complaining — I was interested to check this game out anyway, though I hadn't preordered it as other stuff was higher priority for me.

I decided to pass on today's Limited Run Games release of the Grandia HD Collection. While I would like a copy to have on my shelf, the price they have it up for plus their extortionate shipping to Europe means it's actually cheaper for me to buy copies of the original PS1 and Dreamcast games, even though the former in particular is relatively pricey. That does mean I miss out on the Japanese voice acting in Grandia, sadly, but I'll probably live. I can always play that patched ISO that's floating around the Internet if I really feel that strongly about it!

Anyway, with my heart full of that unique combination of joy and sadness that only finishing a really long character-centric RPG can provide you with, it is off to bed with me now. Watch out for the new Mana Khemia 2 article tomorrow, and S-Rank Patrons, I'll get your wallpaper done tomorrow, too.

Have a pleasant evening, and onwards into the weekend!

Hello everyone. Not a lot to report today; I'm nearing the end of Mana Khemia 2, but I may have to delay the next part of the feature just to polish it off before I write about it. I want to do this properly, after all!

S-rank Patrons, your new wallpaper will be coming in the next couple of days when I find some time to put it together, so please watch out for that!

And if you were wondering about the incident I talked about yesterday, I'm pleased to report that my friend went directly to their workplace and explained the situation, and the workplace supported them fully. They even promised to get their legal team involved if the offending tweets were not removed. Result! Just goes to show that for all we might complain about our day jobs, sometimes it does help to have Big Corporate on your side. Perhaps.

Anyway, that's about all I have to report for today, aside from the fact that I treated myself to some goodies from Play-Asia earlier — specifically the Switch version of Maitetsu: Pure Station (which only got a physical release in Asia) and the upcoming Switch release of Clannad spinoff Tomoyo After CS, which apparently has a whole RPG alongside the visual novel stuff.

I guess at some point I should probably get around to that lovely Kickstarter edition of Clannad I've been proudly displaying on my shelf for several years now, huh? I have a few more nurses to love before I can even think about that, though…

A friend of mine got "doxxed" today. If you're unfamiliar with the word, this means that trolls found his personal details and spread them around online with malicious intent. Specifically, they found out my friend's real name, the city in which they live and their workplace, and proceeded to tweet at said workplace with vile accusations of paedophilia.

Regrettably, I have been through something similar. It was back in 2011, I believe. One evening I logged on to Twitter only to discover a torrent of abuse in my mentions from people referring to me as a "paedophile". Over the course of the next couple of hours, I received several emails and phone calls from family members and friends informing me that someone had been in contact with them — usually by phone — making these vile accusations in person.

It was a frightening, horrifying experience at the time, but a bit of rational thinking after the fact uncovered the truth behind the whole attack: why it happened, how it happened, and how to avoid it happening again.

In my case, I was attacked because I had stated publicly that I enjoyed the then-new My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic animated series. This, believe it or not, was enough to pick me out as a prospective target for the troll group in question, and their modus operandi was — and apparently still is, if it's the same group — to spread horrible accusations online. It has been the same case for my friend; the trolls in question don't actually believe they really are a paedophile — they just have a vendetta against people who are interested in anime, and some heated online debates my friend was involved in earlier today was enough to paint a target on his back. 

Accusations of paedophilia are one of the most potentially damaging things you can level at someone. I talked a bit about why that is the case in my article on Destructoid's review of Valkyrie Drive from a few years back — check out that piece here if you haven't read it before. Suffice to say that the choice of this particular accusation is very deliberate on the part of the troll groups — it's an accusation with a heavy emotive charge; one that makes people angry and irrational, and, regrettably, not all that likely to pursue the truth. Instead, with social media being the way it is, those angry people will then proceed to spread the lies further and further — assuming they gained any traction in the first place, which they sometimes don't.

In my case, my family and friends were located as a result of publicly available personal information I had online — specifically, in the WHOIS record of a domain I owned at the time. Working outwards from that information, the trolls tracked down my Facebook and Twitter accounts, my WordPress blog, the website and contact details of my brother, my parents' contact details, the website I was running at the time while I was between jobs and the contact details of the person who owned said website. I am fortunate in that I was unemployed at the time, otherwise I have little doubt they would have tracked down my workplace, too, as they have done with my friend today.

I went to the local police with all the evidence of harassment I had, and reported the matter to Twitter. The police listened to my concerns, but ultimately weren't able (or willing?) to do anything, and the most Twitter did was suspend my old username, because the trolls had hijacked it to post vile shit in my name when I had attempted to "hide" from them while panicking.

Ultimately it all blew over with no permanent damage — though I believe there's still a page out there somewhere that highlights nothing more than just how stupid the whole thing was. But it was terrifying at the time, and I completely understand how my friend feels when they say they are fearing for their life and livelihood right now.

As a "survivor" of this sort of attack, I have a few recommendations for those who think they might need them. This shouldn't be something anyone has to worry about, but unfortunately the Internet is an untamed wasteland of festering sewage rather than the brave new frontier of knowledge that was promised back in the late '90s. Anyway:

• Don't list your workplace online unless you absolutely have to for some reason. Even then, question if you really have to. I have not mentioned my place of work anywhere online, I closed down my LinkedIn account without updating it when I got my current job, and have not even mentioned it to close friends online in any sort of context that could find its way out into public.

• If you have a domain name or website, pay that little extra to hide your details. My entire incident stemmed from me cheaping out on my web hosting. Pay the couple of extra quid a month to hide your details and replace them with some generic company name and address.

• Do not engage or respond to the trolls. They are trying to get a reaction and hoping that your stress, frustration, anger and fear will get the better of you, leading to you doing or saying something they can take further advantage of. Shut down all possible avenues of communication as much as possible. Report and block the instigators. Explain the situation to your friends in a private environment such as email or Discord. Private or deactivate your social media accounts if you need to. But do not engage.

• Explain the situation to family and friends. It can be embarrassing to talk about given the nature of the accusations, but explain the situation to anyone you think they might go after. Your family and friends know you much better than some random idiot on the Internet. Who do you think they are going to believe?

• Remember that the situation is inevitably less serious than it appears. In the heat of the moment, this can be easy to forget. But in the case of my friend's incident earlier today, the "evidence" the doxxers compiled and shared was nothing more than an archive of their Facebook page, their spouse's Facebook page, and two Steam accounts. None of these "proved" anything whatsoever.

I hope none of you reading this ever have to go through this experience, as it's a really unpleasant thing to deal with. It is an unfortunate reality of certain parts of the Internet, however, so I hope the above advice and support proves helpful should you find yourself needing it.

Stay safe out there!

I've mentioned a few times recently about how great it is that the outgoing seventh generation of consoles has entered "games for 50p" territory. You can pick up an armful of Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii games for pocket change these days, and it's a great opportunity to try out some things that you didn't want to spend £40-50 on back in the day.

One thing that I've been really enjoying doing is picking up games that reviewed especially poorly and giving them a go. These are the games that are really cheap now — and if my experiences with some of the supposed garbage from the PS2 era is anything to go by, there are some surprisingly enjoyable experiences to be had among them.

Over the last couple of days, I've been enjoying Double Helix and Activision's Battleship, based on the movie of the pen-and-paper game. Yes, that was a thing that happened, though I suspect most people have probably forgotten by now. The Xbox 360/PS3 game got absolutely panned back in the day for being, on paper, a stupid idea that is nothing to do with the essence of Battleship. (Interestingly, there was also a companion Wii and 3DS game that was more of a turn-based strategy-affair; this ended up being much more well-received, but by virtue of its host platforms wasn't talked about nearly as much.)

If you've never come across Battleship, here's the gist. Aliens have emerged from… somewhere under the sea, and are causing trouble in the Hawaiian archipelago. As silent-but-named protagonist Cole Mathis, it's your job to play a leading role in the obliteration of said enemy forces from the archipelago before they're able to solidify their position and set their sights on the wider world.

The plot doesn't really matter. I assume it ties in with the movie (which I haven't seen), but it really doesn't matter, because this is a game about, well, gameplay. You control Mathis from a first-person perspective and are able to do all the things you'd expect to be able to do in a console first-person shooter from 2012: you can walk, sprint, crouch, jump and look down your iron sights. You can carry two guns at once, plus up to four grenades. Different guns are more or less effective against different enemy types. And yes, since your foes are aliens, you can loot their bodies and use their own weapons against them — the most commonly seen is an enormously satisfying chaingun-like affair.

The big mechanical twist in Battleship is that you're on an island, and the ships of your fleet are all around you. With a tap of the left bumper, you can call up a strategic map to move your ships around. If you put them in marked strategic spots, you become able to call in bombardments from the sea, which can help even the odds in tricky encounters. But you also need to make sure that those ships stay safe — because the aliens have ships, too. As such, you'll need to move your ships around to engage the enemy fleet and keep it under control while also achieving your objectives on the ground.

This actually works really well. While you're in the first-person part of the game, there are constant readouts of your ships' status on screen, as well as an activity feed of what they're up to. Audible radio chatter also keeps you up to date on the situation, so you know when you need to switch to the strategic view and take action. Coolest of all, though, is the fact that you can actually look out to sea from the island you're on, and see the ships moving around and fighting.

Some interesting depth is added by the fact that defeated enemies in the first-person segment drop "wild cards", which can be used in the strategic view. Some of these apply upgrades to your ships, such as increased attack or defensive power or wider radar range. Some of them provide an immediate benefit, such as an instant repair. And the most fun is the "Ship Control!" (with an exclamation mark) card, which allows you to take direct control of a specific ship's guns and fling everything you have at their current target, with a hefty damage boost to help you sink your enemy's battleship.

None of this is super-complex — the "ship control" sequences are especially simplistic, but enjoyable enough regardless — but the combination of everything is enough to keep things interesting and varied, and as a result I've been having a genuinely good time with the game.

I understand the whole thing is only about four hours long, but then I paid a couple of quid for it, so that doesn't really bother me in the slightest. Full writeup (and possibly a short;Play video) coming up soon on MoeGamer.

Okay, I've been carrying this around all day and haven't been able to actually talk about it with anyone, so I'm just going to splurge it out here. Spoilers for Nurse Love Addiction ahead — stop reading here if you plan on playing it yourself! Skip ahead to after the "block quote" section to avoid spoilers.

All right. So, as you know, I've been reading Nurse Love Addiction at bedtime lately. I figured it'd be a good choice — cute, pink, pastel-coloured romantic visual novel about a bunch of gay nursing students. And indeed so far it has been. Well, it was until partway through my reading session last night.

For a bit of context, the lead character Asuka is a bit of an airhead, as female VN protagonists often tend to be. The early hours of the story see her affections flitting around somewhat between her sister and the two girls she finds herself grouped up with during her nursing training. There's Itsuki the rather forthright, overly honest young woman (who is also a not-particularly-secret otaku and doujin game developer) and Sakuya, the "princess"-like character, who is calm and refined, but is dealing with a sickly parent who keeps demanding her attention and dragging her away from her studies.

Itsuki and Sakuya are in a relationship with one another. Early in the visual novel, Asuka witnesses an intimate kiss between the pair of them when they think no-one is watching, and starts to Feel Things as a result. A little later, when Itsuki and Sakuya have a serious falling out with one another — to such a degree that Itsuki moves out of the dormitory room she was living in with Sakuya — Asuka starts to find herself even more confused about what is going on. On the one hand, she wants things to go back to normal. On the other, she can't deny that she definitely has feelings for Sakuya.

Eventually, the school festival rolls around. At Teito Nursing Academy, the first-years are responsible for running the whole thing, because the second- and third-years are all busy with their studies. Asuka and Sakuya have some disagreements over what their group should put on as an attraction, but eventually reach a compromise by running a "nurse cafe", whose gimmick is that they take their patrons' blood pressure along with their order, and provide those with high blood pressure with a low-sugar menu.

Anyway, this is all besides the point. After the festival day is over, Asuka heads up to the school rooftop because she received a note from Sakuya to meet her there. Sakuya follows along a little while after, and, long story short, she kisses Asuka. Asuka has no idea what to do with this information, particularly as Sakuya departs shortly afterwards having left some cryptic words with her.

Asuka also doesn't get much time to think it over, because a moment later, she is stabbed in the stomach by an unknown assailant apparently wearing a nurse uniform. And we, the audience, get to witness and experience this in excruciating detail, with a gory event image and some very graphic descriptions of what Asuka is thinking and feeling as she feels her life slipping away.

She wakes up what feels like a moment later, only to discover that her sister found her collapsed on the rooftop and she has since been asleep for a full day. There is also no trace of any stab wound anywhere on her body, leaving her understandably confused as to what actually happened and what was a delusion, a dream… or something else altogether.

I was kind of floored by this bizarre but undeniably effective and emotionally devastating curveball the game threw me. I was not expecting this sort of thing at all — largely because I'd not read anything about the game beforehand, and the most I'd heard is that some bits of it were "a bit weird".

And I won't lie, it kind of left me a bit freaked out — but in a way that I enjoy. I haven't played a visual novel that did this to me for quite some time — Grisaia was probably the last to deliver such an effective gutpunch — but I'm excited to be experiencing something like this again. Even if it's making me a bit hesitant to read the next chapters!

Spoilers end!

Anyway, yeah, Nurse Love Addiction is quite a ride. I can't wait to read more. In fact, I think that's what I'm going to go and do right now. Wish me… luck?

It's been a pretty productive weekend, even though I had to cram pretty much everything I wanted to do into today rather than spread it across the whole weekend. I've got another two episodes of all the Atari A to Z series in the can, along with two more short;Play features and two more Final Fantasy Marathon episodes. I haven't managed to squeeze in an Around the Network post on MoeGamer, but I'll do one of those tomorrow during the inevitable downtime from the day job.

I'm going to try and get into the habit of doing Ring Fit Adventure each day, too. It doesn't have to be a lot each day, but I feel like in the long term that would be a healthy habit to get into. I've determined that there's enough space in my bedroom to do it — we have a Switch dock up there thanks to my wife also having a Switch — so that means I can work out with the air conditioning on, and without having to move furniture around. Now it's just a case of actually motivating myself to do it. And, as with so many things, that's just a case of forming a healthy habit and sticking to it.

Ring Fit Adventure is fun, which helps. The core gameplay of the "Adventure" mode works really well, and I love the idea of your "hotbar" of combat skills consisting entirely of exercise moves, with their "elements" corresponding to what kind of move they are. What was the last RPG you played where enemies could be weak to yoga?

To make this work, I need to establish a time of day that I try and do it at, every day. I'm a bit torn on this. Common sense says that first thing in the morning after getting up would be a sensible choice, but I already find it quite difficult to haul myself out of bed in the morning anyway, and I doubt knowing a workout is waiting for me would help inspire that. On the other hand, an invigorating workout might be just the thing I need to get me going first thing in the morning, so perhaps that's worth a try.

Last thing at night is also a possibility, but I don't think that's a good idea, as it's all too easy to just go "ah, it's too late" or "I'm too tired" by that point and skip it. Or perhaps lunchtime? But then I don't want to end up resenting it for eating into my "free" time in the middle of the day.

I'll have to try some different approaches. Tomorrow seems like as good a time as any to give it a go, so let's see how this unfolds!

I'm really tired. It is 1am, so that's partly understandable, but part of it stems from the fact that I had the first alcoholic drinks I've had for… probably several years this evening. Andie had some friends over for a barbecue, so I thought I'd indulge and have a couple. All it seems to have achieved, though, is making me tired and a bit depressed, so I'm not in any great hurry to guzzle down the leftovers.

It's strange how your attitude changes towards things like this over the years. At university, I drank a lot because it was the thing to do, and because it (usually) ended up creating funny stories in one way or another.

My favourite is still the time my friend went running off at high (drunken) speed ahead of me and disappeared completely… then ten minutes later I got a call from his phone. I answered. It was not my friend's voice.

"Can you come and pick your friend up?" the girl on the other end of the phone asked, slightly slurring herself, too. "We're in the Charcoal Grill. We found him in a bush."

Completely unsurprised to hear that the reason I couldn't find my friend was because he'd leapt into a bush outside Safeway and then couldn't get back up again without assistance, I agreed to go and pick him up. I was going to get a chicken burger for the walk home from the Charcoal Grill anyway.

These days, though, I have no desire to have an evening like that. I've got better things to do — and perhaps more importantly, better things to spend my money on. We all must have spent an obscene amount of money on alcohol at university, and that was twenty years ago. It must be even worse now.

Anyway, yeah. No more drinking for me, I think. Sorry this isn't more of a misspelled mess of a drunken blog post, but 1) I don't feel drunk and 2) I'm just melancholy and tired more than anything else.

Off to bed, then. Videos to make tomorrow, and I'd like to be at least vaguely awake to do all that! Hope your Saturday has been pleasant.

My plan to indulge in a little light reading thanks to visual novels before going to sleep has proven to be a good one so far. I'm enjoying Nurse Love Addiction a great deal and, as I suspected there would be, there's a lot more substance to the narrative and characterisation than the rather whimsical title might suggest.

I will, of course, write about it in detail on MoeGamer when I've finished it — depending on how divergent the routes/endings are, there may be several articles in it — but for now, suffice to say that it combines a pleasant bit of Cute Girls Doing Cute Things with some surprisingly harrowing real-world considerations. This isn't a sanitised, super cute and/or pervy look at being a nurse; this is about the real things that trainee nurses have to learn to deal with — and how people sometimes get things wrong.

I can understand why this title is well-regarded now, and why it ended up with a packaged release for Switch via Limited Run Games. I'm also very glad that I picked it up, particularly since the package — which is named Nurse Love Obsession — also includes the other game in the series, Nurse Love Syndrome. (Technically Nurse Love Syndrome came first back in the PSP days, but I believe Nurse Love Addiction was released in the West first — plus the two are mostly unrelated aside from the subject matter, from what I understand.)

It's often quite a while between visual novels for me, but any time I actively engage with one I'm reminded what a thoroughly pleasant sense of closeness and intimacy they provide with their cast of characters — even in titles that aren't relationship-centric or which don't feature sexual content. The core cast of four young women in Nurse Love Addiction are a close-knit bunch, and by riding along with protagonist Asuka (and making occasional decisions on her behalf) you get a real sense of how fondly they regard each other. More than that, you feel included. It's nice.

Anyway, with another week over, I'm off to go read a chapter or two before sleeping. Andie's got some friends coming over for a barbecue tomorrow, so I'll need to conserve some mental energy for having three-dimensional people in the near vicinity.

Hope you've all had a good week. Take care of yourselves in these difficult times!

Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy is taking a little longer than anticipated! I was hoping I might be able to have the whole thing polished off by tomorrow, but I've still got a bit of a way to go in Raze's route, then the "Extra" route at the end for the "true" ending. Rather than doing something silly like staying up super-late several nights in a row, though, I'm going to take my time over it and when it's done, it's done. It's not like I'm on a deadline or anything, and I have something worthwhile to write about it tomorrow anyway, even if it's not the analysis of Raze's complete narrative I was hoping to do.

It seems I was somewhat mistaken in my initial assessment of Atelier games being "generally quite short" (i.e. about 20 hours, which is short for an RPG). I'm now pushing 60 hours in Mana Khemia 2; the first Mana Khemia was about 45 hours, and Atelier Iris 3 was 50 hours or so. At least I know the Arland games, which are coming up after Mana Khemia 2 is done and dusted, actually are fairly short because they're intended to be replayed a few times!

I am absolutely loving my time with the series, though, and I'm glad I set off on this bizarre journey to cover all of them — well, all the Western-released ones, anyway. It's fascinating to see the series evolve over time as Gust experiments with various mechanics and structures. They're an iterative developer; they build on things that work, and cast aside stuff that didn't work. But, importantly, they have the confidence to try things, which is pretty damned impressive when they're pushing these games out on an annual basis.

It will be interesting to see how Atelier Lulua fits into all this. I'll be covering that as part of the Arland games rather than in release order; for those unfamiliar with the series, Lulua was a fourth part to the Arland "trilogy" that was released considerably later than the other three parts. I'm anticipating that there will be some substantial mechanical differences, but it will be good to experience the story while the previous three Arland games are fresh in my mind.

Anyway, that's all stuff to worry about soon! Tomorrow I'll be writing about Mana Khemia 2's excellent New Game Plus mode, then banging out the last few chapters and the Extra mode next week. I've got videos to record over the weekend, and a barbecue to consume, too. Busy busy busy!

The "real world" feels increasingly distant with every passing day. I'm finding it harder and harder to care about the day job, because every day it feels a little less real, a little less important. This is probably not a great state to be in, but I also doubt I'm alone in feeling like this right now.

Still, at least I've been getting things done. The Atelier feature is going well, today's article about Steam and visual novels was very well received, and outside of my continuing dissatisfaction with my "professional" life, things are all right, I guess.

I've been enjoying collecting Xbox 360 and PS3 games lately, since as I've said recently, they are ridiculously cheap right now. It's payday on Friday, so I will probably nip to town over the weekend and come back with another armful of goodies to add to the shelves.

Right now I'm enjoying Test Drive Unlimited, as I talked a bit about on the podcast, and I also made a start on Warriors Orochi 2 today. It's essentially Warriors Orochi: Xtreme Legends, but I'm happy with that! There are some interesting new progression mechanics and a bunch of new characters, so I'm looking forward to exploring it in more detail. In the absence of Warriors Wednesday, I'll certainly write about the experience!

Bit disjointed tonight I know, but it's late; Mana Khemia 2 kept me up! I should probably sleep now though. Thank you as always for indulging me!