2506: Fifteen

Well, it's Final Fantasy XV day and I've spent a good five or six hours playing it this evening.

It's good. Real good.

I haven't progressed that far in the story as yet as it's simply fun to wander around exploring, doing sidequests and listening to the soundtracks of old Final Fantasy games while the gang drive around in their car. However, I'm very much looking forward to the world opening up a bit more — I'm penned in to a relatively "small" area at the moment by barricades that prevent going more than a certain distance by road or on foot — and seeing what is out there to discover.

Even in this fairly fenced-off starter area it's clear that it's going to be a fun ride, though. In particular, I'm very much enjoying the combat; far from being a hack-and-slash action game along the lines of something like Kingdom Hearts, it manages to blend what looks like fast-paced action with relatively strategic, cerebral combat that rewards careful positioning and exploitation of enemy resistances and weaknesses.

And the world of Eos is one simultaneously filled with wonderment and pleasingly familiar mundanity. In the first few hours, I've spent time at a seaside resort, a motel and a truck stop, but also fought recurring Final Fantasy monsters such as goblins and flans, and run away screaming at the sight of an Iron Giant. I've hunted down groups of monsters and fished up a meal for a stray cat. And I've witnessed the devastation that Niflheim wreaked on protagonist Noctis' home city of Insomnia.

And the music. Dear lord. I already knew that the soundtrack was going to be something special from the preview tracks I'd previously heard, but the full experience is something else. Multiple battle themes according to the context make me very happy indeed, particularly as they're all wonderfully energetic, blasting pieces full of drama and excitement. But the more incidental music is very pleasant, too, changing according to the time of day and your surroundings and, in settlements, adjusting its mix according to whether you're inside or outside.

The whole concept of it being "a fantasy based on reality" has been pulled off very effectively so far. The world and the places you visit are all very plausible and realistic, but overlaid on the top of all that is the wonderful sci-fi/fantasy blend that Final Fantasy has been so good at for years. It really, really works as a setting, and I'm looking forward to exploring it in more depth over the coming weeks.

For now, though, as I have an eight-hour shift to work tomorrow and I have a cold coming on, I should probably call it a night there. Probably.

2505: Final Fantasy

With Final Fantasy XV out tomorrow and my excitement for it at an extreme level, I've decided that I'm going to devote the next month on my other site MoeGamer to an in-depth exploration of the series as a whole.

Final Fantasy as a whole may be a little outside my usual mission with MoeGamer — it is neither underappreciated nor overlooked — but it's worth discussing nonetheless, particularly with regard to those installments along the way that are regarded less favourably.

It's also worth discussing as it's a series with a long, interesting history, and can quite rightly be described as genre-defining alongside its longtime rival Dragon Quest.

Mostly I want to talk about it because it's been important to me for a long time now. Nearly 20 years, in fact, which is a scary prospect, as my first encounter with the series is still absolutely fresh in my mind, as if I'd just experienced it yesterday.

I first heard of Final Fantasy VII, my first point of contact with the series, through my brother. I had a PlayStation at the time (well, more accurately, I had a hand-me-down Japanese PlayStation that my brother left behind) but, what with it being a Japanese model, I hadn't really explored the games available for it beyond the three I already had: Ridge Racer, Tekken and Raiden Project.

Hearing my brother describe Final Fantasy VII made me want to try it, though. I'd already had experience with story-heavy games thanks to our family's mutual love of point-and-click adventure titles from Sierra and LucasArts, but this sounded like something different; something more. Specifically, the thing that got me interested in it was the promise of a scene partway through the game where pretty much everyone who had played it ended up crying. (Said scene is now one of the most famous scenes in all of gaming, but back in '97, it was easier to remain unspoiled.)

So, reading up on the old "disc swap" trick that allowed you to play different region games on a PlayStation, I propped my PlayStation's lid open with a biro lid and a bit of Blu-Tack and inserted the first of the three discs of my shiny new copy of Final Fantasy VII, not sure what to expect.

I was immediately blown away by the spectacular video intro sequence that moved almost seamlessly into in-game action, with polygonal characters moving perfectly in sync with the prerendered background camera angles. (I was then slightly distracted by the rather primitive field screen character models Final Fantasy VII is now somewhat notorious for, but I quickly became accustomed to them.)

The music drew me in. The action started right away. It was like being part of a movie. Then I got into my first battle and, having never really played an RPG before, was initially baffled. Once again, though, it didn't take me long to become accustomed, and there was no turning back from that point: the game had me well and truly in its clutches.

I enthused about the game to my friends at school. They were initially skeptical, but it didn't take a lot of convincing to get them to give it a try. And before long, they were as obsessed with this spectacular new game as I was. We played it through together, discussing things we'd found and things we'd achieved; we'd complete it, and start over again, eager to enjoy the story all over again. We devoured guidebooks and online FAQs about the game, keen to see everything it was possible to see. And, on one particularly memorable occasion fueled by tequila and various other intoxicants, we played for 36 hours straight, my friend Woody passing out midway through the G-Bike sequence, having some very peculiar dreams and suddenly waking up demanding to know "what's an X-Walker?" (To this day, we have no idea. X-Potions? Sure. X-Walker? No clue.)

The impact Final Fantasy VII had on me drew me to explore the rest of the series. While at the time I found the NES original a little hard to appreciate — it was just a bit too clunky in comparison to the later games — from IV onwards (or II as it was known back then thanks to the fact Final Fantasy II, III and V didn't see Western releases until many years after their NES and SNES original versions) in particular I found them to be just as compelling despite their more primitive visuals and sounds.

These were games that told stories that resonated with me. Stories about people who rose up from humble beginnings, gathering a group of close companions and achieving something incredible. This sort of thing is seen as cliched as all hell these days, but there's a reason the standard JRPG tropes have been a thing for as long as they have: even before video games, this story structure is proven to be an effective way of telling a heroic epic.

Even in those early days, though, I could tell that the Final Fantasy series wasn't one to rest on its laurels. While I had a fairly Western RPG feel to it with its completely mute, characterless party, II introduced the series convention of having a party of predefined characters with actual personalities. III brought us the Job system for the first time. IV gave us an incredibly detailed story full of emotion. V refined the Job system further. VI turned the narrative conventions of the series on its head by not really having a "main" character, instead allowing us the opportunity to spend time with an enormous ensemble cast. And so on, and so on.

I'll talk about this in detail once I start writing the MoeGamer pieces, but Final Fantasy is a series that has constantly reinvented itself over and over again. Even in those installments that seem superficially similar (I-III, IV-VI, VII-IX) there are enough unique components to each title to make them distinct from one another, and from X onwards the series has enjoyed even more drastic, dramatic reinventions with each installment. And this isn't even getting into the myriad spin-off titles, many of which are even more fondly regarded than the mainline titles in the series.

As you can tell, I'll have plenty to write about. And I'm afraid you're almost certainly going to have to put up with a lot of enthusing about XV on this here site from tomorrow onwards, too. I make no apologies for my excitement in this regard.

Now, just a good night's sleep and a day of work between me and my first adventures in the lands of Eos. Can't wait.

2499: One Week to Go

Until what, you ask? Until Final Fantasy XV, of course.

Regular readers will know that I don't often get hyped up about big-budget releases, but ever since I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time back in my schooldays, the mainline Final Fantasy series has been something that I cannot — will not — miss out on. And the signs are good for XV to be an incredible installment.

Here's a new trailer if you're not sure what the fuss is about:

There are so many things I like about this trailer, and what it promises from the full game.

Broadly speaking, I really like the "fantasy based on reality" idea that appears to have been the main impetus behind its design. Final Fantasy XV's game world, Eos, is based on the modern age in a believable manner — right down to your party sometimes spending downtime with their heads stuck in their respective smartphones rather than talking to one another — but incorporates classic Final Fantasy material in amongst all that. I'm a big fan of this idea; I love the concept of "supernatural crazy things happen in a world that is like ours", so I'm very much on board with Final Fantasy XV's overall setting.

One of the things I'm most interested in is the small playable cast, which consists of just four members plus occasional guests. This is one of the smallest playable casts in Final Fantasy history, though the last time the party was this small (FFI and FFIII; you could perhaps make the argument for FFV too) the technology wasn't really there to do anything interesting with characterisation. (EDIT: descarte25 quite rightly pointed out in the comments that we've also seen small casts in X-2, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns.) Now, though, we have incredibly realistic character models doing believable things in a plausible fantasy world. And the small cast size means that everyone is going to get some exploration; no-one is going to feel like a "bonus party member" who is little more than a walking collection of stats and abilities.

It's an interesting bunch of characters, too. Noct, while looking like one of the most emo teenagers in the entire history of the series — which is saying something in a series that features Squall Leonhart — has already shown himself across a couple of demos and an anime series to be a likeable, interesting and anything but morose protagonist with plenty of depth to his character. The fact that it is his story rather than an unlikely group of heroes who just happen to stumble into their destiny to save the world puts an interesting twist on the series' prior formula. Noct starts the game as someone unique and special, though perhaps doesn't quite know what to do with his status, and thus relies on his friends to help him through his journey.

One of the key themes of the game as a whole is intended to be the bonds of brotherhood between the four characters in the main cast. They grew up together, fight together and live together on the road as Noct continues his journey; although the circumstances of each of them meeting, as depicted in the Brotherhood anime, were anything but natural — not least because Noct is a prince — it's clear that their mutual relationships are going to develop and deepen over the course of the adventure. The best RPGs convey a clear sense of party members being true companions, closer than family, and if Final Fantasy XV pulls it off correctly, it's going to be a memorable ensemble cast for sure.

Outside of the story, there are a bunch of gameplay systems I'm looking forward to, too. The Ascension system looks like an intriguingly deep means of developing the four characters' abilities, for one, and the magic system, where you mix elemental energy with other items to produce all manner of different effects, looks particularly fascinating. Magic is also interesting in that it has an impact on the environment around you, too; fling a Fire spell and the surroundings will burn and become scorched; fling a Blizzard spell and everything will become coated in frost. This is not something that is normally acknowledged in role-playing games, so I'm interested to see how it fits in here.

There look to be a wide variety of sidequests along the way, too, including Final Fantasy XII-style hunts. I'll be interested to see how deep these sidequests are; technically the Behemoth hunt in the Episode Duscae demo was a sidequest, and that had a ton of things to do along the way, including investigating the area, tracking the beast to its lair and devising a spectacular strategy to deal with it — including abilities for each character that were unique to that fight rather than simple hack and slash. While I'm not counting on all sidequests being that interesting, the designers have claimed that they've made an attempt for there not to be "filler" content ("bring me 50 pelts from the monsters on the plains!") and so hopefully this stuff will be worth doing. It remains to be seen how well they achieve this.

That's probably enough enthusing for now, because you can bet there'll be plenty more to come next week once the game's actually in my PS4. Here's an hour-long video of some of the music from the game.

2497: The Further Adventures of Class Zero

After some further time with Final Fantasy Type-0, I'm now 100% on board with what it has to offer. It's a slow burn, to be sure — its rather drab early hours don't really sell it all that well, but by the time it's flinging Alexander, Bahamut Zero and Gilgamesh (including the correct music) around with gay abandon it's hard not to enjoy the ride.

I'm planning a Final Fantasy month over at MoeGamer at some point in the near future, so I'll write more about this then, but I did want to comment a little on the game's tone, because it's markedly different from the mainline Final Fantasy series, and makes this abundantly clear from the outset.

Mainline Final Fantasy games are benchmark JRPGs for many people; they're regarded as the quintessential example of "young hero gathers a band of companions and saves the world", despite a number of installments deviating from this stereotypical formula. One thing you can say with a reasonable amount of confidence, however, is that, on balance, they're optimistic affairs, all about bonds of friendship and love overcoming great evil and that sort of thing. This isn't to say that the series doesn't have its dark moments — in fact, several installments' darkest moments make up some of the most iconic and influential moments in all of gaming history — but on the whole, it's a series designed to make you feel like part of a heroic epic with all the optimism that involves.

Type-0, meanwhile, occupies the complete other end of the spectrum. I talked a little yesterday about how it de-emphasises the role of the individual in favour of a large cast of characters, and the further you play, the more this becomes apparent. Part of Type-0's background lore is the fact that when someone dies, anyone who knew them forgets who they were, even if they were very close. This is one of many reflections the game makes on the horrors of war; a very literal interpretation of Stalin's supposed (and possibly misattributed) quote "when one dies, it is a tragedy; when a million die, it is a statistic".

Type-0 lays it on fairly thick with its depictions of the brutality and the senselessness of war. It doesn't do so in a particularly preachy manner, however; the game's setup is such that it's fair to spend some time pondering whether anyone — including the side you're on — are the "good guys" in the conflict depicted. Instead, we simply see various horrors unfolding, both through the eyes of Class Zero on the ground, and through the distant detachment of the narrator during the documentary-style cutscenes that punctuate the main beats of the narrative as a whole.

One particularly chilling moment comes in the aftermath of a mission late in the game, which culminates with your side in the conflict summoning Alexander as an ultimate weapon of mass destruction; in order to do so, many of your allies give up their lives as they channel their magic and life force into the summoning. The devastation that Alexander wreaks is immense, presented to you in simple, cold statistics — white text on a black screen — after the battle is over. While in the heat of the moment, Alexander's summoning is pure Final Fantasy fanservice, the realisation that the spectacular light show you just witnessed cost the lives of many people on both sides of the conflict makes you wonder whether or not it was worth it.

I'm nearing the end of the game now, I think; just two more chapters to go. I'll be interested to see how it ends — particularly if it concludes on as bleak a note as its opening sequence, featuring a seriously wounded soldier trying his best to reach his destination with his also wounded chocobo, then finally dying, forgotten, on the streets as the conflict continues to rage around him. I'm also interested to do a second playthrough once I've beaten it once; not only are you at a more suitable level to tackle the optional "Expert Trials" on a second playthrough, there are also additional missions called "Code Crimson" which add additional details and context to the story.

Considering Type-0 is a spinoff game in the Final Fantasy series rather than a mainline installment — and considering it originated as a Japan-only, handheld-only title — it's impressive quite how much lore has been packed into this game, all of it reviewable through an in-game encyclopaedia. You don't need to know most of it to appreciate the story, mind you; it's simply there as "additional reading" if you find it interesting. While I wasn't sure about Type-0 when I first started playing it, the longer I spend with it, the more fascinating I find this war-torn world that seems to be on a collision course with absolute disaster, so I very much welcome this additional content, particularly as some of it comes in the form of cutscenes that explain what happens to a number of minor characters along the way.

I'll have definitely beaten it at least once by the time Final Fantasy XV rolls around; whether I'll have made it through any more of that remains to be seen, but now I'm familiar with how it all works and got to know the characters, I'm certainly up for a bit of New Game Plus.

2496: Type Zero

In anticipation of the imminent Final Fantasy XV — a game which I am getting increasingly desperate to play the closer its release date creeps — I decided to boot up a game I've had on my shelf for a while, but haven't really done anything with: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD for PlayStation 4.

I had pretty much no idea what I was in for when I fired it up for the first time. I just knew, prior to its release, that it was a well-regarded game for PSP that had previously been confined to Japan, and that people had been clamouring for a localisation for quite some time. In fact, so desperate were English speakers for an English version of the game that there was already a decent quality fan translation of the PSP version available, though in order to play that you'd need to 1) know how to "do" PSP homebrew and 2) be willing to "do" PSP homebrew.

In other words, Final Fantasy Type-0 was a mystery to me when I first started it. After about 15 or so hours with it so far, I think I've kind of got my head around what it's all about and where it sits in relation to other Final Fantasy spinoff games — and the mainline series, for that matter.

Type-0 (formerly Final Fantasy Agito XIII) is part of the overly ambitious Fabula Nova Crystallis series which also includes the Final Fantasy XIII games and the upcoming Final Fantasy XV (formerly Final Fantasy Versus XIII), though since the series was first conceived each of the projects kind of diverged off in its own direction — hence the name changes, abandoning the direct links to XIII — so that now they only have the loosest of thematic and stylistic connections with one another.

That said, Type-0's mythology is quite closely related to that of Final Fantasy XIII despite unfolding in a different world, with particular regard to the existence of "l'Cie", individuals who have submitted themselves to the will of a superior entity (in FFXIII's case, powerful godlike beings called fal'Cie; in Type-0, the "peristylium" crystals that form the centrepieces of the game world Orience's various city-states) and an obligation to fulfil some grand purpose called a Focus in exchange for kinda-sorta immortality and badass magical powers. Unlike Final Fantasy XIII, you don't play l'Cie in Type-0; they're part of the backdrop of the ongoing story.

Type-0's narrative focuses on the dominion of Rubrum and its elite training facility Akademeia. Across thirteen classes, Akademeia trains young people to become Agito, the best of the best when it comes to martial and magical prowess. Among the classes, the cream of the crop is found in Class Zero, a unit of youngsters with particularly exceptional powers that has, until the events at the start of the game, been kept somewhat secret from the rest of Akademeia.

Class Zero is brought out of hiding and into immediate active service as Agito Cadets when the Militesi Empire invades Rubrum's capital and Akademeia itself. Against rather improbable odds — including a l'Cie — they manage to push back the imperial incursion and retake Akademeia, giving Rubrum the opportunity to pick itself up and start planning a counter-offensive. From here, Class Zero plays a leading role in helping Rubrum to expand its territory, push the Militesi Empire back and prevent them from deploying any more of their weapons of mass destruction, such as the Ultima Bomb which devastated one of the other city-states of Orience.

If this all sounds highly political and like the setup for a strategy game such as Final Fantasy Tactics… well, you'd be wrong, technically, but there is something to that comparison, which we'll get onto in a moment.

In actual fact, Type-0 is an action RPG in which you control a single member of Class Zero at once — accompanied by up to two of their classmates, depending on the situation — as they attempt to complete missions for Rubrum and, in between mission days, wander the dominion generally helping out and making life miserable for the Militesi Empire. Unlike mainline Final Fantasy games (with the possible exception of XII) where the emphasis tends to be on the core cast's personal stories, Type-0's plot is less about individuals and more about the ongoing conflict between Rubrum and Militesi.

Each member of Class Zero is unique in their capabilities. Each one wields a different weapon, which all handle very differently from one another, and each one has a unique skill tree, though there is some overlap in common abilities between numerous class members. Some are better at dealing or taking physical damage, some are ranged attackers, others have particularly strong magical capabilities. Ultimately, the best approach to playing the game is to try and keep the entire squad levelled up pretty evenly, which means you're going to need to get comfortable with playing at least a few of the characters, and perhaps bring the ones you don't like so much in the AI-controlled slots so they still get some experience.

The reason I mention Final Fantasy Tactics earlier is that the way you set up your characters in Type-0 bears more than a passing resemblance, albeit without the deep and complex Job system that Tactics has. In Tactics, each character had the ability to equip two different "Job commands" at the same time, allowing them to mix abilities and spells from two classes at the same time. In Type-0, your character has two main ability slots, up to one of which can contain a spell — though some characters can unlock an ability to equip two spells — and the other of which can contain one of their unique abilities. There's also a third ability slot dedicated to defensive magic and abilities, allowing characters to equip curative spells, protective spells or physical abilities such as blocking damage.

In order to succeed in Type-0's missions, you ideally need a mix of different capabilities, since you'll run into enemies that are strong or weak against particular types of attacks, and sometimes you'll encounter enemies that are out of melee reach — on balconies, for example — necessitating ranged attacks. In other words, it's not simply a case of equipping all of your cadets with equipment and abilities that boosts their physical attack power as high as possible; you need to understand which ones are intended as mages, outfit them accordingly and them complement them with physical melee and ranged attackers to cover every eventuality.

The combat system itself takes a little getting used to. You control a single character at a time, and the face buttons on the PlayStation controller are mapped to normal attack with your weapon (Square), abilities and spells (Triangle and X) and defensive abilities (Circle). You can "lock on" to enemies and keep them in sight by holding the right shoulder button, and dodge with Circle while moving.

Notably, attacking doesn't require button-mashing; characters instead continuously attack while you hold down Square. Some characters have different moves available if you push forward or backward on the analog stick while holding square; Sice, for example, has a gap-closing leaping slash forwards when you push forward, an attack behind her when you push backwards and a standard melee combo if you just hold the button without a direction.

The different weapons are all very… well, different, and in order to succeed with a character you need to familiarise yourself with not just the abilities you can equip, but the amount of time the character's various animations take to complete. This is because Type-0's combat is heavy on timed hits; while locked on to an enemy, they will occasionally show a weakness, usually right after an attack or if they're knocked off balance. During this time, depending on the enemy's remaining HP, your lock on reticle will turn either yellow (Breaksight) or red (Killsight), and if you land a successful hit with either a physical attack or magic while either of these is active, you'll do enormous damage, even killing the enemy immediately in the case of Killsight.

Just hitting the attack button as soon as you see the markers isn't generally enough, however; most characters have a bit of a wind-up to their attacks, meaning if you start an attack when the marker appears, you'll probably miss the window by the time it actually impacts the enemy. Instead, you need to watch the enemy animations to anticipate when Breaksight or Killsight are going to appear, and over time you'll come to recognise how different enemy types behave in order to take maximum advantage of this feature. Pudding-type enemies, for example, rear back before they swipe at a foe; when you see them do this, dodging to the side to avoid the strike then immediately launching a forward+Square attack with most characters is a good way to hit their Killsight window perfectly every time.

Type-0 is very much a mechanics-focused game rather than a story-centric game, which puts it somewhat at odds with the mainline Final Fantasy series, but firmly in keeping with many of the spin-off titles such as the aforementioned Final Fantasy Tactics. That's not to say the story is bad — I'm not that far in so far, but it's been a suitably dramatic "wartime epic" so far, with many of its important moments presented in an appealing "documentary" style — but rather it's a game in which its individual characters are of significantly lesser importance than the big picture.

It's an acquired taste, in other words. I wasn't sure I was going to like it all that much when I first started playing, and indeed I know a few people who bounced off it quite quickly. However, give it some time and get to know how the combat works, and it becomes quite rewarding and satisfying. There's plenty of side content to do besides the main missions, and it's one of the most replayable Final Fantasy games I've ever seen, with a second playthrough not only seeing your Cadets at a suitable level to tackle tougher challenges, but also rewarding you with additional story material at various points.

Give it a chance if you haven't already. It's not the best game to ever bear the Final Fantasy name, but it's a solid, interesting game in its own right that demonstrates, once again, that Square Enix isn't at all afraid to experiment and do all manner of strange, wonderful things beneath the Final Fantasy banner.

2495: A Step in the Right Direction

When I heard that VICE Gaming was rebranding to Waypoint, my reaction was a hearty "shrug and move on". In the past, VICE Gaming has been responsible for some truly terrible articles about games many of my friends and I are interested in, most notably the Senran Kagura series. I won't bring them up here, but suffice to say, I've written many angry words in the past on the subject.

Consequently, when I happened to see this tweet earlier, my immediate reaction was to predict yet another ill-informed, overly judgemental article about the prevalence of boobs in the game, without exploring any of the things that actually make it an interesting series. (Yes, yes, gratuitous plug for my own work there, but I've written a lot about Senran Kagura.)

Get ready. pic.twitter.com/COP5dRCOGK

— Waypoint (@waypoint) November 18, 2016

Out of curiosity — or perhaps partly to vindicate what I will freely admit was prejudice — I clicked through to the article when someone else shared it and took a look.

Here it is.

My goodness me.

I was genuinely surprised to read not the usual screed about how it's a piece of misogynist filth that everyone should feel ashamed of the mere existence of, but instead a good interview with series creator Kenichiro Takaki about his philosophy towards character design, sexualised content and all manner of other things. Even more notably, the article acknowledges that Senran Kagura games are actually damn fine brawlers in their own right, and far from being simple ecchi delivery vehicles.

I have to give some kudos to Waypoint for publishing this article, and to Patrick Klepek for writing it in the first place. I've had my differences of opinion with how Klepek covers things in the industry in recent years — like many other full-time games journos, he has often shown a significant lean towards the oft-irrational "social justice" side of the spectrum — but in this instance, he's done what he was once known for back in what many regard as "the good old days". It's a solid piece of reporting with some interesting questions and no moral high-horsing. Klepek acknowledges that Senran Kagura's sexualisation is not the sort of thing that generally appeals to him, but doesn't put it down for that; moreover, he even says that he's enjoyed playing the games after a few hours.

The article is just plain nice to read; a breath of fresh air in the current climate. Every interview I've read with Takaki in the past has shown him to be an incredibly enthusiastic creator with a clear vision; he's someone who's passionate about his work and utterly in love with the characters he and his team have created, and this absolutely comes across in Waypoint's piece. It makes me happy. It makes me really happy to see this.

And when I'm happy to read something, I absolutely don't mind sharing it with other people. You'll notice that I've added a direct link to the article in this piece rather than using archive.is to deprive the site of ad impressions, and this is because I firmly believe that this is the sort of thing we need to see a lot more of in the future.

I've grown very tired of writing the same article about the shitty deal Japanese games get when it comes to the Western games press, and yet every time I see another ill-informed rant on anime girls, I feel I have to say something, because not enough other people are. I'm sure you can understand and appreciate how absolutely wonderful it is to be able to share a piece of writing about the games I enjoy so much that doesn't tear them to shreds, that doesn't brand anyone who enjoys them as some sort of sexual deviant, and that does allow a creator to celebrate both the success and popularity of their work while acknowledging that it may not be to everyone's liking.

While VICE Gaming's past misdeeds mean that Waypoint has a lot of work to do in order to gain my trust, this article is very much a step in the right direction, and I think everyone — particularly those who have been angry about poor coverage of Japanese games in the past — should acknowledge that; hell, celebrate it, even.

Let's see more of this in the future, please, and less of the moral crusading. Games are fun; games are thing that people get great joy from; games cater to diverse interests and tastes. The games press of recent years seems to have forgotten that somewhat, despite regularly spouting buzzwords like "diversity" (when what they actually mean in most cases is "people who aren't white" rather than true all-encompassing diversity). But seeing articles like this gives me a glimmer of hope that we might have turned a corner.

Now we just need to see other sites follow suit — and Waypoint to continue in this manner.

[EDIT: It did not. How naive I was.]

2494: Space Rogue

I was pleasantly surprised earlier today to see GOG.com release an elderly Origin (old-school Origin the software company, not Origin the unnecessary piece of EA bloatware) title called Space Rogue.

I was particularly surprised to see Space Rogue on GOG.com, primarily because they had already released a game of the same name that had no relation to it — although in retrospect, given that a considerable amount of discussion around the newer game was along the lines of "hey, remember that old Origin game called Space Rogue?" I should have perhaps seen this coming. Still, it's a pleasant surprise regardless.

I have very fond memories of Space Rogue. It was a game from the 16-bit computer era with everything that entailed, which usually meant a box packed with stuff other than the game disks. In Space Rogue's case, there was a wonderful "in-character" manual for the spaceship you pilot in the game, complete with sarcastic notes scrawled "by hand" in the margins. I really miss this kind of thing; the only place we tend to get "feelies" like this any more is in limited edition releases of games, and those tend to be considerably more expensive than standard editions.

But I digress. Space Rogue was an interesting game for its blend of genres — part space sim, part RPG. Origin proved themselves to be masters of both over the years — with their most well-known series including Wing Commander (space sim) and Ultima (RPG) — but Space Rogue was an early example of mashing the two together, which makes it, to date, still pretty distinctive in its respective genres. Sure, titles like Star Citizen, No Man's Sky and Elite have all taken a few tentative strides in the direction of allowing you to get out of your ship and do stuff other than fly around, but none yet have captured what Space Rogue did, which was include a fully-featured "walking around" mode as well as its 3D polygonal space flight sequences.

Details of the plot of Space Rogue elude me, though there are odd bits that I still remember. Of particular note was a lengthy sequence that I was thoroughly enamoured with as a youngster in which you play messenger boy between two sisters living on different space stations. The sequence culminates with one of the sisters throwing her arms around you and thanking you for all your hard work. I found this to be a satisfying conclusion to the episode, even presented purely in text as it was.

I also remember the space stations having various different designs, and greatly enjoying the experience of landing on the one that looked like an aircraft carrier in space. Elite Dangerous does very good space station docking sequences, but 20 years ago, Space Rogue was my favourite.

I also remember the spaceflight sequences having a peculiar "Newtonian" movement option, in which rather than adopt the usual space sim convention of always thrusting forwards and simply turning the direction you're moving, you could spin your ship around and face one direction while moving in another, allowing you to, say, shoot enemies who were on your tail while running away from them.

Due to technological limitations of the time, not all of the space flight sequences took place from the 3D cockpit view. Long-range navigation unfolded from a top-down map that clearly used the same engine as the on-foot segments. While relatively primitive in comparison to the 3D graphics, it gave the game a good feeling of "context" and of moving across vast distances.

I have no idea if Space Rogue is still a good game, but I'm interested to try it again anyway. While it's not a game that ever went down in any Great Gaming History books or whatever, it's nonetheless a game I consider to be a defining experience in my youth, and as such even if it plays like a dog in 2016, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for it.

2493: Japan's Great Games, and Their Lack of Coverage

This tweet from the Editor-in-Chief of gaming news site DualShockers caught my attention earlier tonight:

The Japanese gaming industry produces a ton of great games every year, and the western press systematically proceeds to ignore 95% of them.

— Giuseppe Nelva (@Abriael) November 16, 2016

As regular readers will know, I'm a big fan of Japanese games and visual novels and will frequently wax lyrical at great length on the subject of my favourite titles. Hell, I even set up a whole new website — MoeGamer — to have a convenient place to put my more in-depth commentary on games that I've found particularly interesting.

Over the last couple of years — in particular since I started my JPgamer column on USgamer, and subsequently moved on to my MoeGamer project after I was laid off from the site — I've gotten to know a fair few "faraway friends" on the Internet thanks to a mutual love of games from Japan. And all of them — including me — feel the same way: it's sad that almost the entirety of a whole country's output gets thrown under the bus, usually in the name of "progressiveness", and usually with woefully little understanding of the works they have cast aside.

Sure, the Final Fantasies (except XIV) and Souls games of the world still get plenty of column inches, but the rest, as Nelva points out in his tweet, is ignored at best, and treated appallingly at worst.

I found Nelva's tweet noteworthy because it's the first time I recall seeing a member of the games press (aside from me) come out with sentiments like this, outside of sites that specifically dedicate themselves to this sort of thing. As such, I thought it worth talking about a bit, and to draw particular attention to a number of noteworthy developers, publishers and series that are well-regarded and regularly praised among players, but which receive less than stellar treatment from the press.

Let's talk about the Vita

Dear old PlayStation Vita. One of my favourite platforms of all time, and declared "dead" roughly every two months by some idiot who sees that there hasn't been a Call of Duty game on it since the atrocious Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified.

As a handheld gaming machine, Vita is never going to match the big boys in terms of power, and it doesn't need to: when you're playing something on the go, aspirations of being some grand cinematic masterpiece are largely wasted on a screen the size of an envelope. And this is why we don't get any triple-A games on the platform.

What we do get is an absolute shitload of Japanese games. What we do get is an absolute shitload of Japanese role-playing games — a genre frequently and erroneously declared "dead" alongside the Vita by people who don't know what they're talking about. What we also get is a bunch of visual novels and strategy games. And this is just Japan we're talking about, remember; all this is on top of all the great indie titles we get from Western developers.

There are a number of developers out there who put out their games on Vita as their lead (or only!) platform. And if these games got any coverage, it would be plain as day to see that the Vita is far from dead; there are plenty of great new games coming out for it on a monthly basis, many of which hail from Japan.

Let's talk about "progressiveness"

It's the current fashion in the games press to be as "progressive" as possible. That is to say, it's fashionable to berate any games that feature attractive women or any kind of provocative, adult-leaning content as "problematic", in the hope that frequent use of that word will make these critics look somehow educated and intelligent. In practice, all it does is undermine the other big argument these people make, which is that "games need to grow up". You can have one or the other. You can treat gamers as adults and trust them to handle provocative content, or you can sanitise the medium to such a degree that everything becomes generic, inoffensive waffle.

The ironic thing about the supposed "progressive" arguments against these games — particularly against the ones that feature attractive women — is that they completely fail to explore the game on anything other than the most superficial level. It is, quite simply, "this game has women in short skirts with big boobs, so it's bad". This isn't an exaggeration; this is a paraphrase of several Senran Kagura articles I've read from "progressive" games journalists.

As I've written at great length over on MoeGamer, I find it interesting that a lot of these games from Japan actually handle some pretty weighty themes throughout, and do so sensitively and enjoyably. In some cases, games, much like anime, allow creators to explore aspects of society that are still somewhat "taboo" in parts of Japan, such as homosexual relationships.

Others set a great example by having an all-female cast, often with no mention of men or romantic entanglements whatsoever.

Others still have a point to make with their erotic or quasi-erotic content; a while back, for example, I wrote a lengthy piece about how Criminal Girls uses its S&M-themed ecchi content to reinforce the narrative's key message about trust. Or there are works like visual novel The Fruit of Grisaia, in which its erotic content is used as part of the characterisation process, particularly when it comes to the character Amane, who is an aggressively sexual individual for reasons that become apparent later in her narrative arc.

In damning the majority of Japan's cultural output on the grounds of "progressiveness", the self-proclaimed "progressives" are ironically missing out on some of the most progressive games out there.

Let's talk about Falcom

Let's talk a bit about Falcom first of all. Falcom is a developer who has been around since pretty much the dawn of gaming, with its long-running Ys series arguably playing a defining role in the modern action RPG.

Of perhaps even greater note, meanwhile, the most recent installments in the Legend of Heroes series — Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel — are absolute masterworks in how to blend the best bits of Western and Eastern RPGs. They're well-written with excellent characterisation (though admittedly too wordy for some), they have some of the most astonishingly detailed worldbuilding I've ever seen in a game through a combination of their visuals and their texts, and they're simply great games, to boot. And yet, it's rare to hear them mentioned, even by self-professed JRPG enthusiasts in the press.

Why? Well, at least partly because they were on PSP and Vita as their lead platforms, though Trails in the Sky's two currently available localised chapters have made the jump to PC since then. It goes back to what we said about the Vita before; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't cover the games, the platform withers, though at least in the case of the Trails series, there's the formidable combination of XSEED's enthusiastic social media team and plenty of fans who are more than happy to promote the series via word of mouth.

But it saddens me that there are probably a whole lot of people out there who have no idea that these games exist, or have no idea quite how good they are. That, surely, is the press doing these games a great disservice.

Let's talk about Neptunia

And Idea Factory in general, while we're on.

Idea Factory and its label Compile Heart have been very prolific over the last few years, and it's fair to say that in the twilight of the PS3 era it took a while for them to find their feet. Titles such as Trinity Universe and Hyperdimension Neptunia were very much inferior to much of the platform's other fare in technical terms, though those who played them will happily attest that they are both overflowing with charm to more than make up for their technological shortcomings.

Unfortunately, some people have never got past a bad experience they had with a game a few years back, and seemingly outright refuse to cover new titles from a company that has grown astronomically in popularity over the last few years — and, moreover, a company that has clearly learned from its mistakes, with each new game being better than the last by a considerable margin.

This is most clearly demonstrated by the Neptunia series, which has gone from unknown niche-interest JRPG to full-on cultural phenomenon over the course of the last six years or so. People online love Neptunia. There's fan art everywhere, there are role-players on Twitter, there are mods for popular Steam games to insert the characters, there are people using Source Filmmaker to create their own Neptunia dioramas and videos — and, of course, there are the games, which tend to enjoy solid sales on console platforms (typically Vita, though the most recent mainline installment jumped to PS4) and then again a few months down the line when they hit PC.

Neptunia games still aren't the most technologically advanced games on the market, but what they have always had since day one is an absolute ton of soul — not to mention the aforementioned progressiveness thanks to homosexual characters and a strongly capable all-female main cast — and something which is very much underexplored in gaming as a whole: satirical humour. Their developers know what the players want from a Neptunia game, and they provide it. And they are widely loved as a result.

Coverage? Some idiot on Kotaku writing about how the animated Live2D character sprites in the dialogue sequences freak them out. And little else.

I love Neptunia, as you know. But even if I didn't, it would seem very strange to me not to acknowledge something that is so popular on the Internet at large that it's frequent meme fodder. And yet that's exactly what happens with today's games press: it doesn't fit the unwritten criteria, so it doesn't get explored.

Let's talk about overlooked games

I played through the visual novel Root Letter recently and had a great time with it. I only knew about it because it happened to catch my eye one day when I was browsing the publisher's other works. I've barely seen a peep about it on other websites. I, meanwhile, wrote a bunch about it here.

In the case of Root Letter, the press can't even play the progressive booby card to refuse to cover it: Root Letter has no ecchi content whatsoever, instead adopting an art style that features hand-drawn characters and "painted" backdrops of real locations in Japan. On top of looking beautiful, it's the start of a new series from a fairly major publisher in Japan (Kadokawa) and, judging by the speed we got an English version over here, it looks likely that we're going to see the other installments shortly after their native versions, too. Not only that, it's noteworthy in that it focuses not on a group of teenagers as many other Japanese works do, but instead on a group of 33-year olds.

Let's talk about why this happens

We all know why this happens: clicks. What games critic has time to cover obscure Japanese games when they could be raking in the clicks by posting meaningless, needless "guide content" for Watch Dogs 2 or Call of Duty? I know, I've been there, done that.

The thing is, this approach to content strategy becomes a vicious cycle. These games remain popular at least partly because they're always plastered all over the major gaming sites, and the relentless pursuit of This Tuesday's Article On The Big Game That Came Out Last Week does damage to gaming criticism as a whole because it gives needless amounts of attention to titles that already have a ton of attention on them thanks to their astronomical marketing budgets.

What I'd really like to see is more sites making a specific effort to go out of their way to cover games that are a little more off the beaten track, but which still have cultural significance of some sort — whether it's the popularity of something like Neptunia, or the self-conscious maturity of Root Letter — and helping to broaden the medium for everyone. Some sites already make an effort to cover Western indie games in this regard, and while there are occasionally some questions to be asked over whether certain games would be covered if the developer and the writer weren't friends with one another, I feel it's more important to note that this is a start.

While we're on, what I'd also like to see is a complete end to the mockery of Japanese games in the press, particularly by those who clearly have no intention of attempting to engage with a game. No-one should be mocking anyone else's taste — particularly those in positions of power as "tastemakers"; live and let live.

The insufferable "progressive" crowd are always going on about "diversity", so what I would very much like to see is an acknowledgement of Japan in 2016 as part of that diversity. There's still a rich flow of quality games coming out of that country on a monthly basis, and as Nelva noted in that tweet that sparked off this whole entry, very few of them that don't have Souls or Fantasy in their title get a look-in. Wouldn't it be great to see that change?

I'm not going to hold my breath, mind you. In the meantime, well, I'll do what I can with MoeGamer — so please, show your support if you like what you see.

2491: No, I Won't "Stop Buying Physical Video Games Already!"

This argument seems to crop up every so often as we move ever-onwards into the supposed "digital age", and this time around it was clumsily espoused by Damon Beres of The Huffington Post.

The thrust of Beres' argument is that because digital sales are up, we should all simply stop buying physical products. "[The rise] is pretty good news for one reason in particular," he argues. "Physical video games are basically obsolete wastes of space and resources."

I can see where he's coming from to an extent. Physical games take up space that not everyone has. If you're living in a particularly cramped apartment, for example, you may not want to devote lots of shelves to DVD-size cases when they could be better used for something else — or perhaps even abandoned entirely for those who have gone truly Spartan in their accommodation arrangements.

But Beres' argument is flawed thanks to a few factual inaccuracies, and one absolutely honking issue, the latter of which we'll come on to in a moment.

"You may not realise it," says Beres, "but if you're gaming on a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, the actual disc you buy at the store doesn't really do much. Games need to be installed on your system's hard drive because the consoles can't run games directly off the Blu-Ray discs."

False. Running games from disc is often a much more efficient use of the limited hard drive space both the PS4 and XB1 have available to them, since many games only install the most important files to the hard drive and then pull the data from the disc itself as required. There are exceptions to this rule — graphically intensive triple-A games tend to do full installs to quicken load times, for example — but the last few games I've played on my PS4 booted up straight away after putting the disc in, suggesting that the game perhaps only installed the main executable file and most frequently accessed data files and little else.

Beres continues his argument thus: "Gaming is also more convenient when you move to a digital library. Any games you want are stored on your hard drive and boot up the moment you select them — no getting off of the couch to switch discs out."

Also false… sort of. With entry-level PS4 and XB1 systems only having 500GB hard drives (and the Wii U having an even more pathetic 32GB straight out of the box), there is a hard limit to how many digital games you can have installed on your console at once, after which you will need to delete them and re-download them at a later date if you want to play them again. And with more substantial games weighing in around the 50GB mark, this is a long download, even on fibre-optic broadband; much longer than the time it takes to get a disc down from a shelf and put it in a slot.

This brings us neatly onto the humdinger of the point that Beres has failed to address at all in his article: the question of archiving. At present, we have access to digital console games at the whim of Sony and Microsoft. Sure, right now we can redownload our games as many times as we want if we need to shuffle the contents of our consoles' hard drives around, but what happens in another 5-10 years when a true next generation of consoles shows up? I certainly don't believe that Sony and Microsoft are going to keep the respective digital download stores for old platforms available forever; Sony has already shuttered the PSP's PlayStation Store access, for example, forcing those who hadn't already downloaded their purchases to upgrade to a Vita or PlayStation TV if they want to keep their content. I find myself wondering how long the PS3 PlayStation Store will survive… hopefully they'll at least wait until I've played my PlayStation Plus copy of Yakuza 5.

This is less of an issue on PC, where we're not locked into a specific storefront, despite a significant chunk of gamers choosing to make use of Valve's digital platform Steam as their default means of managing their gaming library — at least partly due to the regular deep discounts we get on even brand new titles on most digital platforms. If Steam were to shut down tomorrow, there are a wide variety of other places on the Internet where you can download the same games, be it alternative digital storefronts such as GOG.com, or even directly from developers' and publishers' websites. PC gamers are also free to back their games up onto physical media whenever they like, and PC gaming is also less subject to the "generational" issues that consoles have, since with each new iteration of the popular operating systems, there are talented developers — amateur and professional alike — dedicated to ensuring that old games continue to work on modern systems.

With consoles, however, we don't have those failsafes in place. If PSN or Xbox Live goes down, no digital games for you. If and when those storefronts close permanently, you'd better hope you'd already downloaded everything you want to keep, otherwise it's lost forever — a potent reminder of the oft-quoted condition in most software's licensing agreements that you are not buying the software itself, merely the right to use it.

Keep a library of discs and cartridges, however, and you can always play your games, regardless of whether you have an Internet connection or if the services in question are working correctly. Keep a library of discs and you get to archive these experiences for future generations — or indeed for yourself — to be able to enjoy ten, twenty, thirty years down the road.

This may not be a priority for every gameplayer — the sort of person who plays nothing but yearly Call of Duty or FIFA installments is unlikely to care, for example, since they tend to play with the mindset that games are disposable experiences — but for those who value gaming as a form of creative expression, as a crafted entertainment experience or even as art will almost certainly want to keep "the games shelf" around for many years to come.

2490: Root Letter: Some First Impressions

Today I've been playing a bunch of Root Letter from Kadokawa Games, localised and published by PQube over here. I'm honestly surprised that I've heard pretty much jack squat about this game except press releases from the publisher, because it's turning out to be a most intriguing, enjoyable visual novel/adventure game hybrid.

Root Letter's basic premise runs thus. 15 years ago, you were penpals with a high school girl named Aya Fumino. In total, you exchanged ten letters with one another before drifting apart, but one day, 15 years later, you discover an eleventh letter with no postmark. In this letter, Aya appears to confess to a murder, but gives no details about the crime, the victim or her current status. Understandably somewhat perturbed by this alarming discovery, you set off for her hometown with only her return address to guide you.

Upon arriving, you find an empty plot where her house is supposed to be, and quickly discover two rather strange stories: firstly, that while the Fumino house did indeed once stand on that plot, it burned down fifteen years ago; secondly, and more disturbingly, the only person by the name of "Aya Fumino" that people in the area seem to know died twenty-five years ago from a mysterious disease.

What unfolds from this point is a mystery story as you attempt to piece together what really happened to Aya — and, if the stories about her death are true, who the person you've been corresponding with actually is — by using her letters from 15 years ago as guidance. Using a combination of the information in the letters and evidence you gather through investigating scenes and conversing with various characters, you gradually come to figure out the identities of "Aya's" classmates, each of whom theoretically hold a piece of the puzzle, but all of whom are extremely reluctant to speak of the past, and of their classmate — the girl you knew as Aya — in particular.

I'm roughly halfway through a first playthrough after a little over five hours, and I believe there are four discrete "routes" for the final two chapters to take, varying according to how you remember your replies to Aya's letters went at the start of each chapter. It's given me a solid idea of how the game works.

Essentially, it's a modern take on old-school "ADV"-style visual novels such as Nocturnal Illusion in that you're given an interface and a variety of actions to perform — including moving between locations, looking at things in a location, asking characters about topics, showing items from your inventory to characters and just standing around thinking — but in practice there's generally only one "correct" option to push the story onward. At the end of most of the chapters, there's an "investigation" sequence where you interrogate someone you suspect to be one of Aya's classmates from 15 years ago, using knowledge you've obtained and physical evidence you've gathered to destroy their arguments.

If this all sounds a bit Ace Attorney, you'd be absolutely right; the structure is very similar, with the standard wandering around exploring gameplay mirroring Ace Attorney's investigation sequences, and the interrogation sequences working much like the courtroom scenes, right down to having a limited number of chances to present the correct piece of evidence and proceed. Pleasingly, the interrogation sequences also feature some ridiculously overdramatic music that rivals Ace Attorney's classic Pursuit ~ Cornered! theme in terms of ramping up the intensity.

One interesting mechanic the game has comes from the protagonist's nickname "Max", which comes from his apparent predilection to give things everything he's got, even when it's not strictly necessary to do so. In mechanical terms, this is represented as "Max Mode", where a meter pulses up the sides of the screen with four different divisions, each representing a particular "intensity" of comment that you want to fling at someone. The bottom of the meter represents simple statements, moving up through lightly provocative, very provocative all the way to "I can't believe you just said that". When these sequences present themselves, you have a limited amount of time to determine how intensely would be appropriate to argue the point Max is presently debating, and the meter moves seemingly unpredictably at times, making it a bit of a test of reactions as much as choosing the right option. Fortunately for those blessed with less than stellar reflexes, you don't lose a "life" if you get one of these wrong; you can simply try again.

Thus far the story has been highly intriguing and hinted at several different directions it could (and probably will) branch off into in its final chapters. The setup is an interesting one, and it's satisfying to gradually see the truth slowly coming into focus as you progress. I have no idea what the actual "truth" is at this point, but I'm very interested to find out.

Since this game has had so little coverage on the Internet at large, I'm going to devote some time on MoeGamer to it at some point in the near future. Whether there's enough to give it the full Cover Game treatment or if it will simply be a one-off article remains to be seen, but count on some more detailed thoughts once I've seen how the whole thing ends up.

For now, if you've been thinking about grabbing this, I'd say do so. And if you've never heard of it and enjoyed titles like Danganronpa or Ace Attorney, you'll definitely want to give this one a go.