1243: A Realm Reborn

I spent some time with the Final Fantasy XIV beta earlier. Since said beta is now in its third phase, Square-Enix has dropped all the non-disclosure agreements and has started to allow people to talk about it, which is nice, because I'd quite like to talk about it. I'll add at this point that I've only just started participating in the beta, so my thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV are based purely on the hour or two I spent fiddling around with it earlier. But — spoiler alert — my thoughts are positive.

I'll preface this by saying that I really enjoyed Final Fantasy XI, Square-Enix's previous foray into the massively multiplayer online RPG market. Final Fantasy XI successfully managed to capture the feel of a Final Fantasy game while simultaneously transplanting it to a massively-multiplayer environment. It had its problems, sure — mainly a glacial rate of experience gain that didn't accelerate in line with what level you were, meaning by the time you reached about level 20 or so it was taking weeks to gain a single level — but it was good fun, and I met some entertaining people during my time in that world. (Bendix and Nefertari, I often wonder where you are! I miss you! [Bendix pokes.])

Anyway, from what I can see, Final Fantasy XIV — in its new A Realm Reborn incarnation, at least — appears to fix most of the annoying things about Final Fantasy XI while keeping the things that were awesome.

One of my favourite things about Final Fantasy XI was character creation. It was a very simplistic character generation tool with very limited options, but the characters it created looked recognisably "Final Fantasy" in nature. They had the spiky hair and the obviously Japanese "look" about them (artistically as opposed to their physical characteristics), and I found them a lot more appealing to look at than, say, World of Warcraft's heavily-exaggerated, low-poly physiques.

Final Fantasy XIV takes the recognisably Japanese aesthetic of XI and provides you with a veritable wealth of options with which to customise your avatar. Consequently, you can take a much greater degree of control over how you represent yourself to the world, but you'll still come out of the process looking like a Final Fantasy character. And the decisions you make about your character's appearance aren't just there to be forgotten, either; cutscenes in the game make a point of giving you a good look at the parts of your character you don't normally see during regular gameplay — i.e. their face.

Once into the game proper, I was immediately struck by how much better than XI it looks. This isn't altogether surprising, of course — XI was built on an engine designed to run on the PlayStation 2, while XIV was designed for the PlayStation 3 and beyond. There's a high level of graphical detail, but the best thing about the way the game looks is the butter-smooth frame rate. XI was capped at somewhere around 25-30 frames per second regardless of how good your computer was; XIV, meanwhile, will happily glide along at 60+ frames per second, looking simply lovely in the process.

The sound is way better, too. Final Fantasy XI had a great soundtrack, but it sounded very synthesised. This was in keeping with the "sound" of the Final Fantasy series at the time — it wasn't until Final Fantasy XIII that we'd finally get a fully-orchestrated soundtrack for the duration of the game rather than just in special cutscenes — but it sounds a little dated now. Final Fantasy XIV, meanwhile, has a simply gorgeous orchestral soundtrack that I'm going to have to score a copy of if and when it becomes available. It's properly "cinematic" in nature, and is very much in keeping with the game's style.

In terms of gameplay, your initial minutes and hours in the game are relatively business as usual for an MMO. You pick your class (which also determines your starting city) and set off to complete quests for random strangers all over town. These quests are generally either fetch quests of some description, or kill quests that demand you leave the safety of the city walls and start punching ladybirds in the face. Like Final Fantasy XI, however, a nice feeling of "context" is given to these quests through short dialogue sequences before and after them, which is much more immersive and interesting than World of Warcraft's pop-up wall of text. The quests themselves generally aren't all that interesting — yet, anyway — but promise to provide the main means through which the game's story unfolds a little later.

The biggest and most welcome change from XI's mechanics is in the way you gain experience. In XI, the maximum amount of experience you could gain from a single enemy was 200, and this was only if you took on something considerably stronger than yourself, preferably in a group. Since the amount of experience required to level up increased very rapidly, there was a lot of grinding involved. This improved significantly with subsequent updates, which added "hunt" quests with experience bonuses, but the quests you got from NPCs around town largely remained as a means of gaining cool items rather than experience.

In XIV, meanwhile, you get experience for all sorts of things. You get it for killing monsters, for completing quests and even for crafting items. This means that you don't get the feeling you occasionally got in XI whereby you felt like you were "wasting your time" if you weren't out in the fields killing monsters — you can be rewarded for non-combat activities, which is great.

There's some neat little additions to the usual formula, too. As well as quests, you have Hunting, Crafting and Gathering logs, which challenge you to hunt specific creatures, craft specific items and gather specific raw materials respectively. Successfully completing challenges in these logs provides significant experience bonuses, so if you just want to spend a bit of time grinding rather than working on specific quests, this provides a degree of "direction" to what you're doing by encouraging you to hunt down specific things.

I'm only level 5 so far, so that's about all I can talk about as yet. I haven't yet fiddled around with the strange class system, whereby you can change your class simply by changing your equipment, but I'm interested to see how it differs from XI's excellent Job system. I also haven't actually spoken to or teamed up with anyone yet, but the community speaking publicly seems to be very friendly and very positive about the game so far, which is nice to see. I'm sure it won't last, but for now it's nice to see people speaking politely and helpfully to one another.

Anyway. It's nearly 4am because Ar Tonelico. I am, much to my chagrin, apparently chasing the Platinum trophy for that game, and one of the tasks required to attain said intangible reward is to locate all the treasure chests in the whole game. I am having some difficulty with said task, but I will return to that tomorrow, and perhaps even finally finish the damn thing.

1241: The Trouble with Rule 34

Lest you're unfamiliar with one of the most notorious "Rules of the Internet", Rule 34 states that "There is porn of it. No exceptions." In other words, if it exists, someone, somewhere, somehow has generated some form of pornographic version of it. It may be "official", it may be a fan work, but one way or another there is some sort of pornography based around absolutely anything you can think of.

My issue with Rule 34 is not that it exists, nor the fact that it's true in an alarmingly high number of cases. No, my issue with Rule 34 is somewhat more psychological in nature.

Let's back up a moment. Currently I'm playing Ar Tonelico Qoga on PS3, a game that features a mechanic in which characters take their clothes off in order to become more powerful. (It is justified in the game's lore, to its credit, but yes, it is totally fanservicey.) Consequently, you spend a hefty amount of time in the game looking at the cast in their skimpies — particularly the female characters.

And yet do I want to see them actually completely naked? Do I want to see them — if you'll pardon the explicitness for a moment — getting fucked roughly from behind or covered in jizz? Well… no, not really.

Why not, though? I find the characters themselves attractive — enough to want to spend virtual time with them, enough to genuinely agonise over decision points that require me to pick between them, and enough to project my own feelings about various issues and people onto them — so why don't I feel the need to look at erotic material featuring them?

Well, the simple answer is… because of all the reasons I listed above. In a good character-led game (or movie, or TV series, or book, or whatever) you develop a close, intimate bond with the characters involved. In many cases, you spend a significant portion of time with them, and usually at a point in their life that is somehow meaningful or important in some way. This "important" moment could be anything from coming to terms with something small they've been in denial about for a long time, or it could be saving the world alongside them. Either way, you're there with them, and you feel close to them. All right, maybe you don't, but I do.

Consequently, unless you're the sort of person who has a somewhat… physical relationship with your closest friends, to suddenly throw nakedness and banging into the mix can be somewhat… jarring. If my virtual time with these people has been, up until this point, entirely non-sexual (or at least, not explicitly sexual), I find it a bit weird to suddenly see them in this whole other way, and not at all comfortable in many cases. Kind of like, say, if I had a sister, suddenly saw her naked and got turned on in the process. (I don't, haven't and wouldn't, before you rethink your friendship with me.)

Which is kind of weird when you think about it, sister stuff aside. (Kind of wish I hadn't mentioned that now.) Being physically intimate with someone else is… well, the clue's in what I just said. It's intimate. If you're very close with someone you love, chances are you want to have sex with them. (Sometimes you want to have sex with people you don't love, but that's an entirely different matter.) And yet I have no desire to look up erotic images of, say, Finnel from Ar Tonelico Qoga (pictured to the right), even though she's a character I feel close to and can relate to in many ways having spent the last 56 (at last count) hours of gameplay with her.

I wonder why this is? It's perhaps the fact that a lot of pornography ("real" or otherwise) is presented from a third-person perspective, making the viewer feel somewhat detached from the action. (Exceptions do, of course, exist.) Taking this interpretation to an extreme, I could probably argue that looking at an erotic image of, say, Finnel getting banged would feel like I was watching someone else having sex with her, rather than finding the image of her naked body in any way arousing, or feeling like I was the one in a physically intimate situation with her.

An exception to the feelings I describe above comes in the realm of eroge — visual novels with erotic content. In this case, the lack of "discomfort" I feel at seeing the characters in compromising situations is perhaps more understandable — it is, in many cases, in context. It's not out of character for the protagonist of a visual novel and his loved one to want to indulge in some nookie to show how much they're into each other. In many cases, the actual sexual content is teased and built up to with sexual tension — for all its faults and ridiculousness, I found that My Girlfriend is the President was actually very good at this, for example; the ero scenes were undoubtedly erotic, but I didn't find them satisfying because of that — no, I found them satisfying because they marked a turning point in these characters' relationships, or saw them showing a side of themselves that "the public" didn't see.

In other words, in these cases, the sex doesn't feel out of place or out of character because of the context. It makes sense. The relationship between the characters (and between the characters and player) is built on the understanding that these are people for whom sex is A Thing, and that they're probably going to want to do it at some point. With that expectation in place, it somehow feels less awkward. (Until someone walks in on you watching an H-scene, of course.)

Perhaps I'm alone in this, and everyone who loved Final Fantasy VII as much as I did when I was younger is happily wanking away to contextless animated GIFs of Tifa giving Cloud a soapy titwank. I don't know. And I have a strange feeling no-one would admit to it even if they did!

1240: Zzzz

Please don't expect anything especially coherent for the next few days. E3 is happening, and I worked a 20-hour day yesterday, a pretty long one today (with a few breaks) and will doubtless continue to do so while the show is still on. I'm not even at the show. This does, however, mean that I don't have to endure parties where everyone around me is getting drunk and inevitably having more fun than me.

That said, it would be quite nice to hang out with some people I only know as Twitter avatars at present – or people that I haven't seen in person for several years.

Things I have seen at E3 that I like so far: Final Fantasy XV, Monolithsoft's X, Bayonetta 2, The Wonderful 101, The Crew, Quantum Break, David Cage's Dark Sorcerer thingy, the PlayStation 4.

Things I have seen at E3 that I am not crazy about: The Xbox One, Battlefield 4, Killzone, Titanfall, Destiny, any other shooters. BORING.

If you want any more from me, go check out USgamer. And I'll be back to my more usual wordy self later in the week all being well.

Now, sleep.

1239: I Think I'm Actually Dying

Hello. It is 1:43 in the morning and I am still at work. I am actually in an office doing work, too — the nature of my new job means that I can actually pop in to the Eurogamer offices in Brighton on occasion and feel like I actually work with other people (when in fact my real colleagues are several thousand miles away, but eh.)

The reason it is 1:43 in the morning and I am still at work is because it is E3. I have been working since 11am yesterday, and I will likely continue working until approximately 4am, at which point I have to drive back to Southampton, which will take nearly two hours. Thankfully, this is the only day that this much crap is going on at E3, so I can live with it for now.

I can also live with it because I'm actually enjoying myself. I can tell I enjoy my job because I think about writing things for it when I'm not "on the clock," as it were. I want to post things. I want to talk about games. It's great fun. The other people who work with me on USgamer feel the same way, too, and we're building a great site through our collective enthusiasm and knowledge.

Speaking of USgamer, the site's now live after a somewhat hectic day. The sites have been up and down all day for various reasons, but they currently seem somewhat stable. Check it out here. Enjoy! And that's all I'm going to write for now, because I need to conserve my energy somewhat!

1238: Inns and Cathedrals and Traders (and Builders), Oh My!

(Aside: I usually hate it when people use the "x and y and z, oh my!" trope for titles, but I couldn't resist this time. "Keep Calm and [insert humorous thing here]" can still fuck off, though.)

Andie and I played a game of Carcassonne this evening. It's one of our favourite games, both in physical format and on iOS, and it's probably the one we play together most, with Ticket to Ride being a close second.

Recently, I picked up two of the expansions to Carcassonne as I'd heard that they added some interest to the base game. Not that there's anything wrong with the base game as is, but it can sometimes be interesting to add some additional mechanics, or change a few things around. And sure enough, Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders both change Carcassonne to a noticeable degree — and, for my money, make it a considerably better, more interesting game in the process — without breaking what makes the original game so good.

For the uninitiated, Carcassonne is a tile-laying game in which you and up to five other players take it in turns to draw tiles representing areas of French countryside out of a bag, then place them in such a manner that you gradually build up a map. When you place a tile, you can put one of your little wooden "followers" (affectionately referred to as "meeples" by most board game geeks) on one of the tile's features to "claim" it. When you finish the feature in question — making a completely enclosed wall for a city, having something at both ends for a road, completely surrounding it with other tiles for a monastery — you score points. At the end of the game, you score additional points for any half-finished features, and also for any "farms" you have claimed — these are fields in which you've placed a follower, in which you gain an additional 3 points for every completed city that borders that field.

The fun in Carcassonne is in strategically placing the tiles in such a manner that you can complete features while simultaneously screwing over your opponents. The "farmers" mechanic in particular is highly competitive, but focusing too much attention on it can cost you the game.

What Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders do is add a few little twists on these basic mechanics.

Inns & Cathedrals is the simpler of the two expansions. In the additional tiles that make up the expansion, there are several road tiles that have an inn on them. If you add an inn to a road that you've claimed, you get 2 points per tile instead of the usual 1 when you complete it, but to balance out the increased reward, there's an additional risk: if you fail to complete it, at the end of the game, you get nothing for that road instead of the usual 1 point per tile. Similarly, if you place a cathedral in a city, you get 3 points per tile and flag in that city when you complete it instead of the usual 2, but nothing at the end of the game if you fail to complete it. Starting one of these features can be a gamble — particularly as the cathedral pieces are among the most awkward city tiles available — but can be enormously lucrative. Alongside these new tiles, there's also a "big meeple" piece for each player that has the strength of two normal followers — great for aggressively stealing territory from other players.

Traders & Builders, meanwhile, adds three distinct mechanics. Firstly, the "trader" mechanic means that if you finish a city (by laying the last tile), you claim all the "goods" represented on the various city tiles, even if you don't have any followers in the city. At the end of the game, the player who has the most of a type of good gains 10 bonus points, and there are three different types of goods, allowing for a potential bonus of up to 30 points for a savvy trader.

Meanwhile, a new "builder" piece can be placed in a city or on a road that you've already claimed. On subsequent turns, if you add to the city or road the builder is on, you immediately get an extra turn. Careful placement of the builder is a must, as it's quite easy to get him "stuck" and be unable to enjoy his benefits.

Finally, a new "pig" piece can be added to a farm you already control, and this means that if you're still in control of that farm at the end of the game, you'll gain 4 points per city in that field instead of 3. This can potentially be quite a big difference.

Both expansions also include a selection of new tiles with interesting new designs that add intriguing strategic possibilities.

What we found with the two expansions was a much higher-scoring game than usual, with much bigger "swings". In other words, the fact that things like the inns and cathedrals let you score considerably more points than usual meant that it was much more possible to "catch up" to a player who is seemingly screaming ahead in the points stakes; at the same time, the "goods" mechanic can completely change the standings at the very end of the game, as happened this evening, when I was all set to win and then Andie's monopoly on all the goods in the kingdom caused her to snatch victory from my clutches by a measly two points. Dammit!

Anyway, I'm glad I picked up these expansions; they add a lot to the base game, and I can see why a lot of board game geeks out there never play without them. I'm interested to try it out with more than two people — with the expansion, the game now supports up to six players altogether, which sounds like a recipe for disaster in the best possible way.

Anyway. E3 starts tomorrow, and I'm spending the day with the fine folks at Eurogamer, so I'm looking forward to that. I'm also proud to announce that USgamer, my new professional home, will be launching tomorrow, so watch this space! That space. Whatever.

1236: On Being That Guy Who Picks 'Japanese' in the Sound Menu

I always used to be one for having my game's voices in English. I liked being able to understand what they were saying as well as reading the subtitles on screen. In some cases, I didn't have the option; I'll always associate Persona 3 and 4 with English voices, for example, even though, in retrospect, it would probably be better with Japanese voice acting. In others, the English voiceover job was so genuinely good that I didn't want to try the Japanese version — Xenoblade Chronicles springs immediately to mind in this regard.

I can remember the moment that I realised Japanese voice acting was something worth exploring even though I didn't speak the language, though. It was while I was playing the utterly terrifying PSP visual novel/adventure game Corpse Party — one of my favourite games on that platform, and legitimately one of the most disturbing games I've ever experienced — that I realised that, frankly, Japanese video game voice actors aren't afraid to let rip with the utterly raw emotion. They'll shout until their voice cracks; they'll scream; they'll cry. And by God, they sound like they mean it.

It was around one of the many points in Corpse Party where one of the characters is bawling their eyes out and screaming in terror at the horrific situation they've found themselves in that I realised when it comes to voice acting in games — which are typically accompanied by subtitles, particularly in the visual novel and JRPG genres — it's not about the words that are being said, but about how they're being said. It didn't matter that I didn't understand the Japanese words that were being screeched into my ears (seriously, play that game on headphones and you'll never want to turn the light out again) — the meaning was all too clear simply from the tone of voice.

Those who have been reading regularly will know that I've been playing Ar Tonelico 3 recently. I played the first game in that series in English, largely because I found the English voices in the video cutscenes too jarring when paired with Japanese speech in the main game. I played the second in Japanese because I'd been warned that the English dub, much like the overall translation job, was somewhat questionable. And I started the third in English, but after not very long I switched to Japanese. It is a decision I did not regret.

It's very obvious from the huge rift in quality between the English and Japanese voice tracks in something like Ar Tonelico 3 that the English actors are, for the most part, phoning it in somewhat, while the Japanese actors care about what they're doing. In many cases, it is the difference between a rush job (English) and having well-known professionals handle the voices.

I witnessed a scene this evening — no spoilers — that had me more than a little choked up due to the amount of raw emotion and passion that the actress playing one of the characters was throwing into the delivery of her lines. I believed that she meant what she was saying. This character was supposed to be upset, and I believed that.

The other thing that comes into play is that when a game's dialogue has been translated relatively literally from the original Japanese rather than fully localised, reading it out loud in English often sounds very stilted and artificial, simply because that's not how English people talk. We don't say things like "what is this, all of a sudden?" and start entire conversations with "By the way". We don't refer to ourselves in the third person to be cute. (Usually. Saki will do it!) And we don't use the term "lovey-dovey" anywhere near as much as Japanese people apparently do.

There's nothing wrong with doing a literal translation from the Japanese — so long as you do it with enough care to make it understandable, of course — but if you're going to take this approach to translation, I've come to the conclusion it's best to leave the voices as they are. If, on the other hand, you're going to take the Ace Attorney/Cherry Tree High Comedy Club/Recettear approach to localisation and actually make the dialogue significantly and noticeably more "Western" in the process, then we can talk about English voiceovers.

I must confess to always having found an attitude like the one I just described a little snobby in the past. Having immersed myself in this side of gaming (and anime) culture for this long, though, I totally get it. Once you get used to the infinitely more professional job Japanese voice actors do on productions like Ar Tonelico (and even on lighter fare like Hyperdimension Neptunia, for that matter) you'll likely never want to go back.

1234: Not Going to E3 2013? Here's What to Wear

Are you a video game developer?

Or perhaps a programmer, graphic designer or other exec working in the video game industry?

Or perhaps you're a video game journalist?

If "yes," then it's entirely possible that, much as you would like to go to the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) — the premier trade show for the computer and video game industry — it's just not practical for you to do so. Perhaps you don't have the finances to subsidise a trip there. Perhaps your company won't pay for you to go. Perhaps, if you're a journalist, you actually prefer covering it on the home front.

It's a terrific opportunity to sit back and watch what's hot in your market without actually having to get hot and sweaty in those crowded exhibition halls.

If you've not been to E3 before, you know the challenge. How do you remain comfortable working far away from the convention centre while simultaneously maintaining a professional attitude?

Many people who are not going to E3 prefer to keep a low profile, wearing casual clothes like a baggy t-shirt and jeans. But in an industry increasingly based around remote working, it's worthwhile to spend some time thinking about how what you wear can have a significant impact on your comfort level, while simultaneously allowing you a certain degree of decency if the postman comes to the door with that package you've been expecting for a while.

My suggestion for the gentlemen is this rather fetching Marks & Spencer stretch cotton "Grumpy and Grumpier" two-pack of trunks, with a design copyrighted by Disney. For just £15 GBP, these trunks offer a soft, comfortable fit and add variety to your underwear drawer while simultaneously accurately reflecting your mental state at not being invited to any of those E3 parties.

The trunks include an elasticated waistband for added comfort while consuming entire "sharing bags" of crisps at your desk, and also have a keyhole fly opening for easy access when the beer you're drinking has its inevitable effect on your bladder.

The more modest man-in-his-home office may wish to pair the trunks with this cotton-rich towelling dressing gown. Made from soft and comfortable cotton-rich fabric, this dressing gown has a rich texture for rapidly absorbing moisture, making it ideal for after a bath or shower, or just if you're rather sweaty. It is getting quite warm out, after all. It's also snag-resistant, meaning it stays looking newer for longer.

This product was rated 4.5 out of 5 by people who cared enough to rate it on Marks & Spencer's website, leading some to refer to it as "the Citizen Kane of towelling robes" — an accolade sure to be plastered all over adverts for the robe soon.

For the ladies… I don't know, wear whatever the fuck you want, and don't let Forbes tell you what to do.

1233: Playing It for the Articles

I overheard a Twitter conversation the other day (yes, I'm back on there, largely to make my professional self easier to reach if necessary) in which disparaging comments were thrown around regarding people who "play games for the story".

As someone who primarily plays games for the story, I feel honour-bound to take exception to this line of argument, though I forget exactly what the actual point of the discussion in question was. Anyway. Allow me to describe what being someone who plays games for the story — a self-professed "narrative junkie" — means.

Quite simply, it means that I am extremely forgiving of a wide variety of "sins" on a game's gameplay front if — and it's a big if — the narrative content of the game in question keeps me interested and compelled. (Caveat: the only unforgivable sin that I simply can't get past is a free-to-play game putting up a paywall with an energy system or similar mechanic; no matter how good your narrative is, if you actively stop me from playing your game before I'm good and ready to stop, I'm not coming back. Ever.)

Said narrative doesn't have to be big and clever, or trying to be anything more than a piece of enjoyable entertainment. But it pretty much needs to be there to keep me interested.

Similarly, I can happily take a game with practically no "gameplay" in a traditional sense — see: interactive movies like School Days HQ or any of the myriad visual novels available — so long as the narrative entertains me and keeps me interested.

I'm relatively easily pleased when it comes to storylines. About my only real requirement to enjoy a video game story (or any story in any medium at all, really) is that there are some characters in it that I either like or find interesting — because those two feelings aren't necessarily the same thing. Give me something in which relatively little "happens," but in which I gain a deep understanding of the characters involved, and I'll be very happy indeed.

It's this love for the art of the story that has led me to give a whole bunch of much-derided games the time of day where others would pass them by. The titles which spring most readily to mind are the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, which is riddled with technical flaws, dull gameplay (in the first game, at least; I actually thought the second was genuinely fun, and I'm yet to try the third one) and various other issues; and Nier, which everyone seems to have decided looked drab and boring and thus was unworthy of further exploration. (I never quite understood this; I thought Nier was actually a pretty good-looking game — it certainly had a lot of personality.) Even the Ar Tonelico series, which I've been playing through for the last… quite a while isn't widely regarded as providing shining examples of "good games".

For the record, I found the Neptunia series genuinely amusing as well as being a wonderfully on-the-nose parody of both anime and video game culture; I found Nier a fascinating, deeply moving experience; and Ar Tonelico… well, having known nothing about it when I started playing, this is now a series I would happily defend to the death.

It's this attitude which brought me to the realisation I'm not really a fan of Western-developed role-playing games any more — particularly those of the "open world" variety favoured by Bethesda. I enjoy a good dungeon crawl, sure, but when your lovingly-crafted game world behaves more like a diorama with animatronics than a living world with actual people in it, I get a bit bored.

I realise there's a certain degree of irony in accusing titles like Skyrim of having diorama-like worlds when most JRPG towns are populated by NPCs who constantly stand in the same place and spout the same crap every time you talk to them. But for me, paradoxically, that gives them a lot more personality. Rather than constantly running into the same recycled guard model and wanting to throw a brick through the TV every time someone makes an "arrow to the knee" reference, each NPC is unique and, for those one or two lines they speak, vaguely interesting.

Ar Tonelico handles this rather well by having the NPCs' lines change according to the point in the story you're at. The stories of all three games in the series take place over a relatively small geographical area, so you're revisiting locations a lot; it's a fun little "unofficial" sidequest to check in with your favourite NPCs and see how their own completely irrelevant story arc is progressing. Will the little kid outside the General Store ever get up the courage to ask Sasha to come and play with him? Will Skycat ever actually make a move on Luca or is she just flirting? Will those weird furry creatures ever say anything other than "Poo"?

This is all a matter of taste, of course, and I'm well aware that there are thousands — millions? — of people out there perfectly happy with the way Skyrim does things. And that's fine. Just, as always, be aware that not everyone enjoys the same things in the same way — no-one's way of enjoying a creative work is inherently "wrong", so live and let live.

1232: Knell of Ar Ciel

I haven't posted about Ar Tonelico for a while, and having just witnessed the "bad ending" of the third game (ooh, it's bad) I feel now may be a good time for a progress report on my thoughts thus far before I jump in and try for the other endings.

Ar Tonelico Qoga, as the third game is known, is a peculiar beast. While it's the most outright "perverted" of the series — the previous two games had plenty in the way of innuendo but stopped short of being overly fanservicey, a couple of scenes where the heroines were clad only in towels aside — it's also probably the most open-minded of the three with regard to the subject matter it tackles. This is a game that revels in sexuality in all its forms as one of its themes, and if you feel somewhat uncomfortable playing it, I feel I know Gust's work well enough by now to say that it's probably intentional that you feel that way.

Let me qualify the above statements a little. Insofar as the game is "perverted", one of its core gameplay mechanics involves the female "Reyvateil" characters (essentially glass-cannon mages if you want to assign them a traditional RPG party role) stripping off their clothes throughout the course of battle. While, yes, this is gratuitous and unnecessary and etc. etc. (for the record: I am an unabashed (well, mildly abashed) pervert and have no issue with pervy fanservice in my entertainment) they do at least make an attempt to justify the reason for this happening to a certain degree in a narrative sense: Reyvateils are artificial human-like life forms that are basically equipped with Wi-Fi (bear with me) and communicate wirelessly with the titular tower of Ar Tonelico in order to produce the magic-like effects of their Songs. By stripping — or "purging", as the game calls it — the Reyvateils are able to get better reception, so to speak, and can absorb more magic from the tower. This translates, in gameplay terms, to the "Burst" gauge, which represents how powerful the Reyvateil's spell will be if you set it off right now, increasing at a much more rapid rate according to how few clothes she is wearing. (They stop short of her getting fully naked, I might add — after purging three levels of clothing, she's down to her skimpies, and purging a fourth time triggers her powerful (and surreal) "Flipsphere" über-attack, at which point her clothes magically reappear.)

Read all that back again, and I'd forgive you for never wanting to give this game the time of day. A game whose female characters strip off in exchange for increased magical capabilities? Sounds like some sort of Male Power Fantasy™. And perhaps it is.

Thing is, though, Ar Tonelico Qoga is far more interesting and intelligent than just pretty girls getting almost-naked. For starters, it's worth noting that after a certain point in the game, all the male characters will strip off at a moment's notice too — performing each character's best attack causes all their clothes to fall off and for you to get a good look at what each of them are packing underneath their armour. Doctor Hikari Gojo's fundoshi in particular is a sight to behold.

But no. It's not even about characters getting naked. Much like the previous two games in the series, the really interesting stuff comes about thanks to the "Dive" mechanic — a system whereby you can increase the power of the two Reyvateils by taking a wander through their "Cosmosphere" — a multi-level psychic world that exists within their subconscious. By exploring the two heroines' Cosmospheres, you learn a great deal about them — facts that simply don't come up explicitly in the game's "normal" plot, but which can help inform your reaction to things that go on once you know them.

As is par for the course in the series, each level of the two heroines' Cosmospheres focuses around some sort of problem that they are having — be it a difficulty coming to terms with who they are, the strange influences other aspects of their personality have on them, or simply something they're having trouble admitting or dealing with. By interacting with the Reyvateil and the other characters in her Cosmosphere, the protagonist Aoto forges an incredibly strong, incredibly intimate bond with the heroines and gets to know them in a way that no-one else in the world does.

This leads to some really interesting scenes, many of which are touching on territory I can't recall exploring in a game before. And unlike the gaudy excesses of the strip-centric battle system, they're handled sensitively and with care; clearly composed by someone who knew what they were talking about.

I'm trying not to spoil anything here for those of you who are reading this and intend to play through this fascinating game, but I feel I should give one example to highlight what I'm talking about, and that is the character who, in one of her Cosmosphere levels, essentially "comes out" as being a submissive or "bottom" with somewhat masochistic tendencies. Given what you know about this character by this point, her confession is not altogether surprising, but what is surprising is that it is actually referenced and explored through more than simple innuendo.

"Don't take off the chains," she says after a convoluted, embarrassing and humiliating sequence of events for her, where Aoto is about to give her her freedom. "I feel safe when I'm in the chains, so long as you're there."

I'll confess to not knowing anything about BDSM and related sexual preferences, but I found it fascinating to see this character opening up about her secret passions and desires like this. It wasn't treated as a kind of "wish fulfilment" scene for male players, either; it was simple, to the point and helped me to understand one aspect of this particular character. In short, it's the sort of thing I'd like to see explored in more games; sadly, it's abundantly clear that very few "triple-A" producers would greenlight a game that delves into such subject matter, though thankfully there's always the "lower-tier" games such as Ar Tonelico willing to step up to the plate and try something new.

As guilty as I feel for what occurred in the bad ending, I should probably go to bed now and absolutely not try to get a better ending now. Right? Right. Suuuuuure.

1230: In Pursuit of Score

The sole aim in a lot of video games circa the '80s and early '90s used to be to attain a high score. But in all but a few genres of gaming, that simple pleasure of watching a number get steadily higher — a number which proved indisputably how much better than your friends you were — has fallen by the wayside. This is kind of a shame because, having been playing a bunch of games recently in which the old-school objective of "score as many points as possible" is their reason for existence, it's, you know, fun. Lots of fun.

My fondest memories of high-score chasing in recent years came with two different Xbox Live Arcade games: Geometry Wars 2 and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. Both of these games got their hooks into both me and my friends and saw us eschewing bigger, more exciting, more impressive releases that were around at the time in favour of simply pumping in virtual quarter after virtual quarter. Geometry Wars 2 in particular completely monopolised the gaming time of a number of us for a good several weeks, as each of us vied for dominance of the game's six different leaderboards. It became a sort of hypnotic ritual — fire up the game, start up (say) Pacifist mode, play, die, immediately restart and repeat. Three hours later, I'd look up and see that, well, three hours had passed, and that my hands had locked into a claw shape only suitable for 1) holding a controller or 2) in a pinch, wanking.

Since those two games, however, there haven't been that many other titles that have drawn the attention of my friends and I quite so consistently. This is a shame, as I greatly enjoyed that feeling of competition, and relished the opportunity to take a snapshot of my latest high score and rub it in the face of a competitor via some form of social media. (This is where the term "Be A Dick Mode," often stylised as the hashtag "#beadickmode" on Twitter, originated.)

I've been thinking about how and why there hasn't been a simple score-attack game to get everyone's teeth into for a long time. And the only plausible reason I can think of is the fact that gaming has grown even more broad and diverse since that time. The rise of mobile phone games in particular has all but eliminated the perceived need for "simple" arcade games with a score attack mechanic, which is somewhat sad.

Bejeweled Blitz remains popular, of course, but I now refuse to play that game because it's become infested with pay-to-win crap. Leaderboards are utterly meaningless if you sell advantages to players, which is what PopCap's doing. Unfortunately, I appear to be in a minority thinking this, as the "Blitz" puzzle template is immensely popular — in-app purchases and all — with the latest addition to the formula being a rather sorry addition to the Tetris legacy from EA. I'm just not interested; what's the point in playing if all it takes to top the leaderboards is being more willing to dip your hand into your pockets than your rivals? Bullshit, I say. Bullshit!

Fortunately, there is a degree of respite, albeit one that I'm yet to convince my friends to engage with. The shmup genre — which people on the Internet don't quite seem able to agree as to whether it's flourishing or dying — remains a resolutely score-focused genre, and demands a great deal from its players both in terms of simple manual skills and in the learning of often-complex scoring mechanics. Like a good fighting game demands that you spend time exploring its systems and getting to know how everything fits together, a good shmup demands that you study it, figure things out and then try to put all that knowledge into practice while attempting to avoid fiery laser death.

It's immensely satisfying when you figure out how a particular game "works", and the first time you see your score skyrocketing into the high millions or even billions. It's a genre that brings thrills and excitement with minimal effort expended on storytelling or trying to do anything particularly "artistic", but at the same time the finished result can be oddly beautiful — hypnotic bullet patterns; the "dance" of the player's ship navigating through these perilous onslaughts; the sheer, unrelenting energy of most of these games. But these games aren't trying to say something in the same way that an arty indie platformer is trying to say something; no, instead, all they're trying to say is "c'mon, one more try and you'll beat that score" or "c'mon! Bet you can't clear me in one credit."