1912: #WaifuWednesday (special guest: #BoobsNotBlood)

So Wednesday rolls around again, and as we established last week, that means it's time for Waifu Wednesday.

Before that, a ~~short~~ hefty preamble, though, because it's being discussed as something of a hot topic on the social media Interwebs at the very time I type this. I refer to the issue summarised under the Twitter hashtag #BoobsNotBlood, in which a number of people have begun pointing out the hypocrisy of popular media in being absolutely fine with graphic violence — the most recent example of which being the new Mortal Kombat game — but immediately shunning anything that has even the slightest hint of being sexual. (Unless, of course, it's being used for advertising, in which case it's fucking everywhere, no play on words intended.)

Mortal Kombat, to put things in context for those who are less familiar, is a series that has always prided itself on being graphic. Back on its original release, it was one of the first games to use digitised real actors as its sprites, and one of the first arcade fighting games to feature blood and gore splattering around the screen as the fight continued. Its most notorious feature, though, was the ability to perform a "Fatality" move on a defeated opponent — by entering a convoluted series of button inputs, you could kill your opponent in an assortment of overblown and violent ways, ranging from ripping out their heart to pulling out their spine. The latest Mortal Kombat continues this tradition, even going so far as to provide some of the most obnoxious microtransactions I've ever seen — the ability to buy tokens allowing you to perform these Fatality moves more easily without having to learn the button inputs. That's a whole separate issue, though, that I'm sure we'll talk about another time.

Anyway. I have absolutely no problem with Mortal Kombat, or indeed pretty much any violent game or piece of media. Violence has become so normalised in modern popular culture that, for the most part, people tend not to bat an eyelid at it any more. (There are exceptions; very realistic gore, torture and any form of depicting realistic violence against women still tends to make people uncomfortable at the very least.) That, in itself, is perhaps a concern for some people, but so long as you're able to distinguish fantasy from reality — and pretty much everyone is, with the exception of people who already have some pretty severe mental disorders — it's not a problem as such for your average adult human. (We could get into the whole "think of the children" thing here, but again, that's probably an issue to tackle another day; I'm primarily concerned with people old enough to make their own decisions here.)

So violence is, for the most part, A-OK in the eyes of popular culture in the West. Sexuality, though, is a big no-no. And this is where the primary resistance to modern Japanese games tends to come from: because the otaku market in Japan — who enjoy fanservice and sexualised content — is a sizeable one with disposable income to throw around, that is the market that many anime and game creators choose to focus their attention on. And with good reason: you go where the money is. It's the exact same reason we have so many annualised sports games and dudebro shooters here in the West: they sell.

You may not think that otaku games and dudebro shooters have much in common, but there's one very important aspect in which they're very much alike: people outside of their core demographic seem to wilfully misunderstand and misinterpret them, and then make a point of talking them down — in the process alienating the people who do like them — at every opportunity. I've been guilty of this myself over the years, but since throwing myself more into the things I love to the exclusion of things I didn't like but explored because I felt I "had" to, I've become more content to simply live and let live: I'm never going to play, say, Halo 5 because it just doesn't appeal, but I certainly don't begrudge anyone who will enjoy it the experience of playing it.

A key difference, though, is that otaku games are a relatively small market in the West, while dudebro shooters make up the majority of the market. This is the complete inverse of the situation in Japan. The otaku games are seen as a minority, so they're an easy target; I don't know if their critics are simply trying to outright get rid of them altogether — I suspect there are at least a few people out there who wouldn't mind if we never saw a doe-eyed moe girl ever again — and so it's their controversial aspects — their sexuality — that tends to inflame the ire of critics who, generally, have absolutely no fucking idea what they're talking about.

And yet, as Mr Matt Sainsbury of Digitally Downloaded said during a Twitter discussion yesterday, sex has been a crucial part of artistic expression since… well, forever. And yet the moment we see a flash of panties, a bit of cleavage, a provocative pose or a bit of dialogue about boob size, that seemingly invalidates the whole experience in the eyes of some critics. It's painfully inconsistent and hypocritical to completely devalue an experience on the grounds of sexualised content when extreme violence passes without comment. (To clarify: I don't have a problem with either, and believe that content creators are free to make whatever they like — or what they feel will be popular — without external pressure from people who speak from an ill-informed perspective.)

So with that in mind, let's take a conspicuously sexy character for this week's Waifu Wednesday.

This is Katsuragi from the Senran Kagura series. She's a member of the Hanzou Academy, a school that trains "good shinobi" — ninjas who supposedly do work for the benefit of all, rather than individual self-interest.

Katsuragi is an interesting character in a number of ways. She's arguably not the most explicitly sexual of the Senran Kagura girls — that honour probably goes to Haruka, who I'm sure we'll talk about in the near future — but she is certainly one of those who is most comfortable with her own body, personality and sexuality.

This is an important and interesting point about most of the cast of Senran Kagura, actually; while the series is most widely renowned for its exaggerated jiggling boobs — indeed, the series creator has gone on record as unashamedly saying the reason the series exists at all is because he wanted to see pretty girls with jiggling boobs in 3D on the Nintendo 3DS — the girls aren't simply well-stacked stick-figures, as sometimes seen in other anime-inspired work. Rather, in most official artwork — and indeed in the game, too — they're depicted as having healthy curves and, in most cases, being happy with their bodies. (The couple of exceptions to this — Mirai and Ryoubi — have their dissatisfaction with their bodies explored as part of their own personal story arcs.)

Like most of the cast of Senran Kagura, it was not happy circumstances that drew Katsuragi to the Path of the Shinobi. I shan't spoil her personal plot here, as it's explored in more detail than I can give justice to in a few short paragraphs in both Senran Kagura Burst and Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus (and, presumably, the recently released Estival Versus, which is currently only available in Japanese). Suffice to say, though, Katsuragi has a fair amount of personal demons to take on, and a lot of sorrow to deal with.

She has two main means of dealing with these things: firstly, by acting as an "older sister" figure for many of the other group members, who recognise this and refer to her as "Katsu-nee", "-nee" being a Japanese suffix to denote an older female sibling, but also often used in contexts like this where intimate personal relationships take on a "sister-like" quality. She is a character that her friends in Hanzou look up to and trust greatly, and often confide in.

Her second means of dealing with the emotional baggage she's been dragging around with her is being a complete pervert, and it's this aspect of her personality that is more obvious from the start. It's also this aspect of her personality that cause many people to write her off as little more than a shallow, fanservicey character, but it goes much deeper than that.

Katsuragi's perversions — particularly her habitual groping of her peers' breasts — are a form of self-expression for her, and a reflection of the fact she has had to, to a certain degree, bring herself up without some of the normal "boundaries" set for youngsters. She herself refers to her behaviour as sekuhara (sexual harassment) and confesses in Shinovi Versus that she uses it as something of an icebreaker. Her peers don't always see it the same way, of course — it's a rather intimate invasion of personal space, after all — but as they — and the player — come to understand Katsuragi, it becomes more and more apparent that this exaggerated behaviour of hers is simply a front for how she's really feeling inside; she maintains the facade of an energetic, enthusiastic, overly sexual young woman in order to avoid having to burden others with her own emotional turmoil; while others are happy to confide in her, she has some difficulty in being truly honest with them.

Katsuragi develops something of a rivalry with Hikage from Homura's Crimson Squad. In many ways, Hikage is the polar opposite of Katsuragi, in that while Katsuragi is vibrant and, at first glance, extremely open about her feelings and passions — although as we've just talked about, the truth becomes apparent over time — Hikage is dour, emotionless and seemingly unable to enjoy anything. Katsuragi makes it her mission to try and get Hikage to "enjoy" a fight between the two of them, even though they are technically on "opposite" sides of the good/evil divide between shinobi. The two eventually strike up something of a friendship as a result; opposites, as they say, attract.

Katsuragi is an unashamedly sexual character who likes to show off — she explicitly says so when she performs her Ninja Transformation sequence in Shinovi Versus. Where critics tend to habitually misunderstand her — and the Senran Kagura series as a whole — is that this isn't just there "for the sake of it". It's part of who she is, and that should be acknowledged — without shaming it — but, more importantly, it's not the entirety of her being. She's a complex, interesting character, and very much one of my favourites in the series, and that's why I've devoted so many words to her today.

Thank you.

1911: Life in Los Santos

I grabbed the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V this week. Grand Theft Auto is one of the few games where I'll happily suckle on the foul teat of triple-A gaming because, unlike a lot of other recent releases, for the most part the games tend to actually work and live up to their potential rather than just being flashy showcases. (Of course, in Grand Theft Auto V's case, its online component was completely broken at its console launch, but the single player worked perfectly, at least.)

I picked up the PC version not to play through the single-player game again — I enjoyed it on PS3, but not enough to play it again — but instead to delve into Grand Theft Auto Online, which has been gradually evolving since its barely functional initial incarnation into something rather interesting over the months since its original release.

I'm not yet fully convinced that it quite realises the ambition it clearly has, but it's certainly interesting to play and fun with friends. I had a bit of a tool around with my friend Tim earlier tonight, and hopefully a couple of our other friends will be joining us in short order.

GTA Online starts with a rather overly long tutorial in which you're introduced to race events, shooty bang-bang events and missions. After that you're pretty much flung into the game world and invited to do what you want, whether that's causing the traditional chaos of a Grand Theft Auto game, taking on other players in competitive challenges ranging from races to team-based shooting events, or simply exploring the world. There's arguably less incentive to explore in GTA Online as in the single-player, since the online mode lacks single-player's collectibles, but there's a certain amount of fun to be had from just trying to get to different places and admire the scenery — because by golly, does the game ever look lovely on PC.

The default way a GTA Online session works is that you log on and are put in a "session" with up to 30 or so other players. Each player is wandering around the game world doing their own thing; they might be stealing cars, holding up stores or causing chaos. The latter option — attacking innocent pedestrians and destroying property — causes your "mental state" meter to rise, indicating that you're becoming increasingly unhinged and dangerous, and once it reaches a certain level you will be highlighted on the map for other players to hunt down and kill for rewards. You can also just kill other players and attempt to take money they have failed to bank, too, but this also has an impact on your mental state.

The meat of the game comes in the form of "jobs", which are instanced activities scattered around the map. The majority of these are races (in cars, aircraft, boats and on bicycles) or variations on deathmatch (last man standing, last team standing, team deathmatch, capture the thingy) but there are also missions to take on that are a little more like the activities you'd normally be doing in single player — things like chasing down cars, stealing things without the cops noticing and that sort of thing. Once you advance to a certain rank, you can also take on full-blown Heists with a team of four people, but I haven't had the opportunity to try those yet.

When you hop into a Job, you have the opportunity to invite people. You can invite friends, crew members, the people who were in your free-roaming session or simply cast a wide net to anyone who might be interested in playing that job. Those people who were invited get a text message sent to their in-game phone and can join the Job wherever they are on the map at the time; once everyone is together and everything is in order — whoever is "hosting" the Job gets control over various settings, including the enjoyable ability to lock the camera angle to the new (and very impressive) first-person mode added for the PC version.

Completing a Job rewards you with money and Reputation Points, or RP. RP allows you to increase in rank, with more activities and purchasable items becoming available as you progress. In this way, the game starts fairly simple and gradually expands over time; "rank" isn't quite the same as "level" in an MMO in that it has no impact on your character's abilities — these can all be levelled up independently of one another — but rather it simply increases the amount of available content on offer to those of higher rank.

So far it seems like fun, though when playing with random people I haven't seen much incentive for people to interact or talk to one another. I've seen people get into random firefights with one another, but certainly in free-roam it doesn't seem ideally set up for "cooperative" play — there doesn't seem to be a way of making a "party", for example, though it is possible to create a friends-only session to ensure you only play with people that you like or trust.

I think the issue with GTA Online is that it's not quite sure what it wants to be. It has some rather MMO-esque ideas — advancing in rank; daily, weekly and monthly challenges; instanced content — but the execution is a little wanting in a few areas. Load times are fairly astronomical, for one thing, and there are a few bugs here and there. Being an online game, though, in theory both of these issues can be fixed in time, so hopefully things will improve.

I don't wish this to sound negative, though, because so far my few hours in GTA Online have been rather fun. Whether or not I stick with it in the long term remains to be seen, but I'm hoping it will be a game that a number of my friends and I can enjoy together on a semi-regular basis for some time yet.

1910: Please Proceed to the Right - One Way Heroics

I've been revisiting a game I reviewed a while back: One Way Heroics from Japanese indie developer Smoking WOLF and localisation specialists Playism.

I made a video, even.

For those disinclined to watch a complete 40-minute playthrough of the game (the first time I ever beat it, fact fans — lucky I was recording, eh?) I shall also use the power of written words to explain what's going on and why you should give this game a shot.

One Way Heroics is a sort-of roguelike crossed with the auto-scrolling levels from old Super Mario Bros. games. If that sounds strange, you'd be right, but that's what makes the game interesting.

The concept is simple: the Darkness is swallowing the land a bit at a time, and it's up to you to track down the Demon Lord supposedly responsible for this whole mess and punch him in the face until he stops being such a rotter. The encroaching darkness is represented by the scrolling screen — every move or action you perform causes it to advance slightly, and if you fall off the left side of the screen, you die. Naturally, this opens up the possibility of getting "trapped" in places, so you have to plan your movements pretty carefully to make sure you don't get stuck.

There's a selection of different character classes to play, each with their own distinctive pixel-art appearance and base stats. They can be further customised by choosing "Perks" at the outset of the game, which give you skills such as lockpicking, swimming and mountain climbing, or simple bonuses to your base statistics. Each class has its own starting equipment and skills, too, and you'll have the opportunity to unlock additional skills and abilities as you progress.

This is a game in which you shouldn't get too attached to anything — the town you just visited, your character, your equipment — and should instead keep pushing onwards. As you progress, the path your journey takes will see you finding new items or upgrading your existing ones with scrolls you discover. Eventually, the basic weapon you start the game with can become something like what I had by the end of the video above: a high-quality sword that is difficult to break, sets things on fire and confuses enemies.

Although your characters and the worlds they explore are inherently "disposable", there is a degree of persistence in the game: completing a run, whether or not it was successful, rewards you with "Hero Points" that can be spent on purchasing new perks and character classes or expanding your Dimensional Vault, allowing you to carry items across into a subsequent playthrough.

There's also some interesting online features. Every day, a specific random world "seed" is set aside as one for online play, and while you don't directly adventure alongside other player characters — it's not "true" multiplayer — you get updates on how other people are doing and may occasionally run into the ghosts of those who were less lucky. If you successfully complete the game, you'll be told how many people got there ahead of you and you'll have the opportunity to compare your performance with them. It's a simple, subtle and unobtrusive use of online features, and it works very well in the context of the game.

I've really enjoyed revisiting this game recently, and was delighted to hear the news that it's being kind-of remade for Vita by Spike Chunsoft as part of their Mystery Dungeon series. As you'll know if you've played it, this game would be perfect for handheld play, so I'll absolutely be there when it releases!

For now, I've got a Demon Lord to punch in the face.

1909: How to Black Mage

Following on from yesterday's post summarising what I've learned about playing Paladin in Final Fantasy XIV, I will now follow up with what I have learned about playing Black Mage, the class I initially started playing the game in. Again, I'm not claiming to be the World's Best Black Mage, but this is what works for me.

Golden Rules

As a DPS class, your job is to maximise your damage output as much as possible — but at the same time, you're no good to anyone dead. Black Mages wear light armour and have significantly lower HP values than melee DPS classes, so try and avoid taking damage as much as possible. If it's avoidable, you should be avoiding it — even if this comes at the expense of a spell you're in the middle of casting.

In other words, if you find yourself in an area-effect marker and you're in the middle of casting a spell, don't hesitate, move, even if this interrupts your cast. The only exception to this is if your cast bar only has about 10% or so remaining, in which case the spell will still go off even if you start moving. Learn encounters and be able to anticipate attacks so you know when it's safe to stand still and let off some spells and when you should be prioritising movement. If you outgear content, you may be able to survive some big hits, but this isn't a good habit to get into. Particularly heavy hits will interrupt your cast anyway, so just get out of the way, okay?

Black Mage Basics

Learn how Astral Fire and Umbral Ice work. Astral Fire increases the damage from your Fire spells but nullifies MP regeneration. Umbral Ice increases your MP regeneration at the expense of damage for your Fire spells. Thunder spells are unaffected by whether you're in Astral Fire or Umbral Ice, so should be cast while you're in Umbral Ice and regenerating for your next barrage of Fire spells.

Blowing a Thing Up

Black Mages have two real modes they'll be in depending on content: single-target, used for bosses and individual enemies, and area-effect, used in dungeons and particularly on big pulls.

When attacking a single target, here's the sequence of spells you should be using:

Fire III -> Fire -> repeat Fire until 770MP or less -> Blizzard III -> Thunder I -> Blizzard I -> repeat

This has (apparently) been calculated as the optimum DPS rotation for most Black Mages, since it allows you to cast pretty much continually. The 770MP threshold is there so that you have enough MP to cast Blizzard III once — which puts you into Umbral Ice status and thus starts your MP regeneration — and get off a cast of Thunder I (which deals damage over time) even if you haven't yet had a "tick" of MP replenishing.

Why not Thunder II or Thunder III? Because they cast considerably slower. Once you hit level 50, Thunder II will be largely irrelevant, and Thunder III should be saved for your "Thundercloud" procs, which allow you to instantly cast a Thunder spell to deal all its damage immediately plus the damage-over-time effect it usually does.

On that note, because Thunder III has a stronger, longer damage-over-time effect than Thunder I, if you hit a Thundercloud proc before Blizzard III in the combo above, replace the Thunder I with another Blizzard I or Scathe, since there's no sense "overwriting" the Thunder III status effect with an inferior effect. The only exception to this should be if there's only a couple of seconds left on the Thunder effect.

When to Hit Firestarter and Thundercloud

If the target currently doesn't have a Thunder effect on it, Thundercloud can be hit immediately to bump up your DPS somewhat — remember to use Thunder III rather than Thunder I. If the target does currently have Thunder on it, it may be worth saving it for the Umbral Ice phase; the immediate cast may allow you to get an extra Blizzard I or Scathe in there at the end for a small DPS increase.

Firestarter should be used immediately if in Astral Fire, and never in Umbral Ice. If you get a Firestarter with your last Fire before your Blizzard III and it's too late to cancel the Blizzard III cast, don't panic; cast Blizzard III -> Thunder -> Blizzard I as normal, by which point your MP should be back at full, then drop in a Transpose. This puts you back at Astral Fire I status, which is a slight damage decrease from Astral Fire III, but still enough to make the free Fire III from Firestarter meaningful. After using Firestarter in this way, continue from Fire.

Blowing Several Things Up

When facing three or more targets, it's probably more efficient to use area-effect spells. Here's a sequence of spells that works well and is apparently, again, optimised for maximum DPS.

Fire III -> Flare -> Transpose -> Fire III -> Fire II -> Fire II -> repeat from Flare

This combo allows you to use Flare considerably more often than the frequently seen Fire III -> Fire II until 250MP -> Flare and thus represents an increase in damage potential.

Target an enemy as close to the centre of the group as possible. If the enemy you're targeting is down to about 20% HP or less, switch to another target with more HP so you don't have your cast interrupted by the enemy being killed before you get your spell off.

Double and Triple Flares

Flare normally costs all your MP and requires at least 250MP to cast in the first place. As such, it usually leaves you with 0MP in Astral Fire III status, which is no good to anyone. As such, Transpose is normally used immediately after Flare to regenerate some MP, and indeed this is how the sequence above is built.

However, there's a couple of little tricks Black Mages can use to get more than one Flare off in quick succession. All you need to do is get at least 250MP back, which can be done using either an X-Ether potion or the skill Convert, which sacrifices some of your HP to give you some MP.

To perform two Flares in a row, do one of the following:

Fire III -> Flare -> X-Ether -> Flare
Fire III -> Flare -> Convert -> Flare

To perform three Flares in a row, simply combine the two:

Fire III -> Flare -> X-Ether -> Flare -> Convert -> Flare

Since Flare has a long cast time, it's worth using Swiftcast on the final Flare in one of these sequences to make it cast instantly.

Note that triple Flare in particular generates an enormous amount of aggro, so either warn your tank that you're going to do it, or make use of the level 34 Bard skill Quelling Strikes — which Black Mages can use as a cross-class ability — to reduce the aggro you're generating before you unleash the beast.

Also note that X-Ethers, Convert and Swiftcast all have cooldowns of varying lengths (Swiftcast is back up quickest, then Convert, then X-Ethers), so don't double or triple Flare carelessly; save it for when you're dealing with a large group or need to deal a massive amount of damage very quickly.

Staying Safe

Black Mages have a few skills that help them stay safe, chief among which are Manawall and Manaward. Manawall will absorb two physical attacks before it's dispelled. Manaward will absorb up to 30% of your maximum HP's worth of damage before it's dispelled. Both have a time limit and a moderate-length cooldown, though, so you can't simply keep them up all the time.

It can sometimes be tough to tell which are physical attacks and which are magic attacks. As a general rule, anything that involves elemental damage — fire, ice, thunder, wind, water — is probably magic, while everything else is physical. Note that the earth damage Titan does seems to be considered to be physical damage rather than magic damage despite it being elemental in nature.

One interesting side-effect of Manawall — and the game's damage system in general — is that if you don't take any damage from something, associated Bad Things won't happen either. This means that Manawall, when used effectively, can be used to avoid status effects and knockbacks. Learn which encounters allow you to do this.

Another interesting ability that Black Mage has is Aetherial Manipulation, which causes you to fly through the air to a target player. This is useful for getting out of the way quickly — or in trials like The Whorleater (Extreme) where you're at risk of falling off the platform, it can be a lifesaver.

Finally, squishy party members and tanks alike will thank you for casting Apocatastasis on them, which reduces elemental damage for a short period. Plus it makes a great noise. Note that once someone has had this cast on them, they can't have it cast on them again for a short period. The ability also has a cooldown period, so only use this when it will actually be of benefit to the party member in question!

1908: How to Paladin

Can't think of much to write this evening, so since I was helping some people out in Final Fantasy XIV earlier, I thought I may as well share the things I helped them out with in a more coherent form. That way, if anyone asks in future, I can simply point them to this post. Wild, huh.

Okay. Over the next couple of days, I'm going to share what I've learned from playing Paladin and Black Mage in Final Fantasy XIV. Paladin is a tank class, while Black Mage is a DPS class. Both are very different and have nothing to do with each other; they are collected together here simply because they're the two classes I have the most experience with.

I'm also not claiming to be the be-all, end-all authority on either of these classes; I'm simply sharing what I know in the hope that it will be of some use to other players like me who enjoy the game, enjoy challenging the higher-end content like Coil but who aren't five-days-a-week, six-hours-a-night hardcore raiders.

All right then. Let's begin with Paladin.

Note: The following information assumes a level 50 character with access to all its abilities at the time of writing, but is mostly applicable to lower-level play, too; you simply don't have as many abilities to use.

Paladin

As a Paladin, your job is to get punched in the face in lieu of the rest of your party. This is what tanks do. Paladins differ from the other tanks — Warriors — in that they have a lower amount of overall HP and damage output, but a greater selection of defensive abilities. Warrior, conversely, relies on a combination of self-healing tied to damage output, much higher damage output overall and significantly higher base HP.

Remember, as a tank your job is to maintain "aggro" (also known as "threat" or "enmity" depending on who you're talking to) rather than dealing a lot of damage. You can check aggro in two ways: the coloured gems in the target list on the left of the screen — ideally you want them to be red, indicating that those targets are targeting you and not others — or the little bars that appear over the job icons in the party list in the top-left corner. Know which abilities generate the most aggro: any damage will generate aggro, but Savage Blade and Rage of Halone are specifically designed to generate more than usual. Flash generates aggro over a circular area around you, as does Circle of Scorn. And Shield Lob generates aggro at range. Provoke does something a little different, which we'll talk about later.

Paladin is arguably the "easier" of the two tank classes to play, so for those trying tanking for the first time — like me, when I started Paladin — it's a good choice. Warrior is more complex, with lots to keep track of at once, so if you're uneasy it's a good idea to save that for later.

Getting Ready

In a four-player dungeon, make sure you are in Shield Oath. This makes you take less damage and also increases the amount of aggro you generate. In an eight-player trial or raid, agree with the other tank who will be "main tank" and who will be "off tank". If you're main, go with Shield Oath. If you're off, go with Sword Oath unless you'll both be picking up separate enemies at the same time, as in the Battle in the Big Keep trial, in which case you should both be on Shield Oath in most situations.

The Pull

As a tank, it's usually your job to kick off an encounter. In a four-player dungeon where you are the only tank, you should do this by running towards the group of enemies and using Shield Lob on what you intend to be your initial main target — some tanks like to mark this target to make it clear to their party which target they should attack first. The reason you should use Shield Lob rather than just running in and using a close-range attack is that it allows you to get an immediate, ranged head-start on aggro generation, because once the DPS and healers get going, you're going to need that head-start, particularly if there's a gear disparity between you and them.

Run right through the group of enemies to the other side, then turn around so you are facing the rest of your party and the enemies are facing away from the party. (This is so any enemies with "cleave" attacks — cone-shaped attacks that hit multiple targets — won't hit other party members.) As you do so, use Flash at least twice, and Circle of Scorn if it's ready to use. This extends your head-start on aggro on your main target and also builds aggro on the surrounding enemies.

You Got 'Em, Now Keep 'Em

What you do next depends on how many enemies you're dealing with.

If you're fighting a single enemy — like a boss, for example — then go with Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Rage of Halone repeatedly. This is the simplest possible tanking situation, and you are unlikely to lose aggro like this. If you are, make sure you are using Shield Oath.

If you're fighting a small group of enemies (two or three), go with Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Rage of Halone on the main target, drop in a Flash every couple of times around the combo and change targets every couple of times to make sure you generate aggro on the whole group. Healers generate aggro by healing, so making sure you hit each member of the group every so often — with your main focus being on the main target — means that enemies are less likely to peel away and clobber the healer.

If you're fighting a large group of enemies (three or more), as you will probably be doing on a "big pull" or a speedrun of a dungeon, go with Fast Blade -> Riot Blade -> Flash. Although Riot Blade produces less aggro than Savage Blade and Rage of Halone, it has the convenient side-effect of regenerating MP, which you'll be expending with every Flash. By doing this combo, you have effectively bottomless MP with which to keep using Flash and keep the attention of the group. Make sure you move so that Flash hits all the enemies, but try and keep all enemies in front of you and facing away from the party as usual.

Getting 'Em Back and Tank-Swapping

Lost aggro on an enemy? This is where Provoke enters the picture. Provoke is notorious for having the worst tooltip in the whole game, so here is how it works: when you use Provoke, your aggro level on the target is set to the value of the person who currently has the highest amount of aggro, plus one. "One aggro" is not very much, so if you don't follow up Provoke with something, you'll lose the target again and have pretty much wasted the ability.

As such, good Provoke practice is to use Fast Blade -> Savage Blade, then Provoke, then Rage of Halone to secure your lead on aggro. Alternatively, you can Provoke then Shield Lob if you need to pull in an enemy that has moved away from you. In a pinch, so long as you follow Provoke with something, you'll probably keep the enemy on you.

Tank-swapping is simply deliberately using Provoke as above — including the follow-up hits — to take another tank's target off them. This mostly comes into play during Coil and Extreme Primal fights, when taking too many stacks of a debuff a boss gives you will cause you to die. You can also use this to switch places with a main tank that seems to be struggling to mitigate the incoming damage if you know you'll be able to handle it better.

Cooldowns and You

Paladin's basic combos are easy to learn and less complex than Warrior's, so much of the skill is in knowing when to use your "cooldowns" — the abilities which have a persistent effect for a short period, then take a short while to "cool down" before they can be used again. Here's what they do:

Fight or Flight increases damage and, consequently, aggro. This is good to use at the beginning of a fight and indeed whenever it's up. You're never going to be going toe-to-toe with a good DPS numbers-wise, but this will help.

Rampart decreases the damage you take by 20%. It has a fairly short cooldown so in most dungeons you can simply use it when it's available. In trials, which tend to be more "scripted" fights, you'll want to save it for when you know big hits are coming. The Triple -> Spark attack the boss in The Chrysalis does is a good example, as is Ravensbeak in Turn 9 (though if you're doing Turn 9, you probably don't need a guide like this); you'll still take a chunk of damage, but your healers will thank you.

Sentinel decreases the damage you take by 40%. It has a shorter duration and a longer cooldown than Rampart, so it's an ability to be used a little more carefully. Again, if you know a big hit is coming, Sentinel is a good ability to use. In long fights, use Rampart first, then Sentinel, then in most cases Rampart will have cooled down by the time you need to soak another big hit.

Convalescence increases the amount you are healed by for a short period. If you are getting low on HP and want to help your healers out, popping this will get you fighting fit in no time, so long as you do it quickly enough. It is worth setting up a short macro to announce when you are using this so that the healers know you need healing in case their attention has been on other party members. That macro looks something like this:

/p Using Convalescence! <se.1>
/ac "Convalescence" <me>

Awareness means you won't take critical hits for a short period. This is most useful during large pulls where you are taking lots of hits in quick succession — an unlucky run of criticals could do significant damage. It's also useful to pop before a big hit if you have time; an already damaging move critting could knock you to the floor if you're not prepared.

Bulwark increases your likelihood to block with your shield, which reduces damage. Again, it's particularly useful to use when lots of hits are coming in at once, but it's also good to use if both Rampart and Sentinel are on cooldown. Unlike those two abilities, it's not a guaranteed damage reduction as there's a degree of randomness as to whether or not you'll block each hit, but it's better than nothing.

Tempered Will doesn't reduce damage at all, but it has two important functions: it cures Bind and Heavy status, and also makes you temporarily immune to any abilities that would normally cause you to move against your will. Titan's Landslide and Leviathan's deck slams are good examples. By popping Tempered Will before these moves go off, you'll be able to continue standing where you are without worrying about being knocked off, but don't get too overconfident with it!

Hallowed Ground makes you temporarily invincible for a very short period. Note that there is a short "animation lock" between triggering the skill and it actually activating, so it's not an immediate "don't lose" button. This is good to use during large pulls if the healer isn't keeping up with the incoming damage, or when you know a big hit is coming and you're not at full HP or your mitigation cooldowns like Rampart and Sentinel aren't available. It also has a very long cooldown, so in most situations you'll get just the one chance to use it effectively. It's also useful to macro this so the healers know they won't have to heal you for a short period; follow the same format as for Convalescence above.

Good Places to Practice

If you're new to tanking, it can be daunting to think about what to try doing — no-one likes to mess up, after all, and if the tank messes up it's pretty obvious. Here are some good fights where you can get some solid practice:

Brayflox's Longstop is a good low-level dungeon to familiarise yourself with tanking effectively. Its final boss Aiatar demands that you both move it out of the pools of poison it spits and keep it facing away from the party. As a low-level dungeon, though, you don't have access to all of your abilities.

Wanderer's Palace is probably the first level 50 dungeon you'll unlock, and it's very easy to outgear it. This is a good place to practice doing larger than normal pulls, though be sure to check with your party if they're okay with this before charging in!

Wanderer's Palace (Hard) has a final boss that is good practice for moving and positioning enemies. Keep it out of the swirly areas on the ground, otherwise he'll be considerably buffed; move him effectively throughout the fight so you don't cover too much of the arena with unsafe areas.

Labyrinth of the Ancients, the first of the 24-player Crystal Tower raids, has far too many tanks, but the first encounters in this dungeon are good for practicing picking up enemies and grouping them together for area-effect classes like Black Mage to kill as a group. The Atomos fight is also good practice if you volunteer to be the one who picks up the additional monsters that appear and bring them to your comrades standing on the pad.

The Chrysalis, a trial towards the end of the main storyline, is good practice at cooldown management. In particular, pay attention to when the boss casts Triple and Spark; that's the time to use Rampart or Sentinel to mitigate the incoming damage.

The Howling Eye (Extreme) is a good fight to learn about how two tanks are used. Not only do you need to keep the two additional enemies Chirada and Suparna away from one another, you'll also need to tank-swap the Spiny Plume enemy to prevent either of you taking too many stacks of the "Thermal Low" debuff and dying.

Thornmarch (Extreme) is another good fight to practice working together with another tank amid absolute chaos going on around you. You'll need to Focus Target your partner, and tank-swap the boss at the appropriate time. At the same time, you'll need to make sure you're positioned somewhere that isn't going to get other people hurt.

The Binding Coil of Bahamut, Turn 1 is pretty straightforward until the last boss. When it splits in half, one of the two tanks will have to Provoke it off the other and drag it elsewhere, positioning it so that neither its frontal cleaves or its tail swipes hit other players. With the enormous "Echo" buff on this content now, there's not much to worry about here.

Good luck! Tomorrow, Black Mage.

1906: Tune Out, Jump In

There's something to be said for "unplugging" to various degrees now and again. Some people take this to an extreme and go out into nature without any electronic devices chirruping in their pocket; others might take a more modest approach. But it's a good thing to do now and again, particularly when it comes to the always-on nature of the modern Internet.

I wrote a few days ago about how I'm coming to resent my phone and the compulsions it gives me to pick it up and check it even if nothing interesting is happening on the Internet. Between Reddit and Twitter — I've successfully purged almost all trace of Facebook from my life — I find myself drawn to look at what people have been saying, even if it's been literally minutes since I last did so. There's rarely anything interesting going on, to be perfectly honest, and even on days like today, where there was a temporary brouhaha over one of Polygon's staff members having conveniently acquired the domain name for an upcoming new Lego game the day before it was announced (hmm…) it's questionable as to how much "value" all that sort of thing is actually adding to my life. (Though I guess you could say the same about anything.)

Since my Xbox 360 controller bit the dust last night, meaning I can't play Final Fantasy XIV this evening — I've been playing with controller for far too long to ever be able to switch to keyboard and mouse, even temporarily — I decided to curl up with my Vita and spend some time with a game I've had on the go for quite a while but still not got around to finishing: Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus. I also decided that I was going to sit and play it with headphones on rather than playing through the Vita's admittedly not-all-that-bad-but-still-nothing-compared-to-something-good internal speakers. I also decided that I was going to concentrate on it and not even think about grabbing my phone during loading breaks.

It will doubtless not surprise you to note that the experience was considerably enhanced by the combination of these factors. The use of headphones meant I could enjoy the game's excellent soundtrack and voice acting to the full without disturbing anyone — and also without anyone or anything disturbing me. In turn, this "cutting myself off" from the outside world through headphones made it a lot easier to not give a shit about anything my phone was doing. And by not fiddling with my phone during any sort of downtime like loading breaks or whatever, the whole thing was considerably more immersive.

I've long been a fan of playing games on headphones, ever since I first discovered Wolfenstein 3D and Doom had true stereo sound. It's cool to play on a big speaker system, sure, but sometimes nothing at all compares to being able to completely shut yourself off from everything going on around you and lose yourself in something entertaining and immersive. It doesn't have to be a game, either; it could be a podcast, an audiobook, a favourite album — the important thing is making sure that you're free of external stimuli, and can simply concentrate fully on the thing you're trying to give your attention to.

So now, having broken my concentration to come and extoll the virtues of this practice for you all, I think you all know what I'm going to head back upstairs and do right now.

No, not that, you filthy pervert. (Insert predictable comment about Senran Kagura here.) I'm off to go and see how the Gessen Girls' Academy story of Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus ends. I may be some time!

1906: Waifu Wednesday

There's a sort of tradition among anime and game fans on Twitter — well, game fans who are into the Japanese end of the spectrum, anyway — called Waifu Wednesday, which is often used as a simple excuse to post lots of pictures of anime girls the posters in question find attractive, but sometimes also used as a means of celebrating a favourite character for more than just their physical appearance. Perhaps their story arc resonated with the person who posted it. Perhaps they simply liked them as a person. Perhaps they represented an ideal they wanted to aspire to. Whatever the reasons, Waifu Wednesday is a thing, and, well, why not here too?

For today's Waifu Wednesday, then, I think I want to talk about Nepgear, pictured to the right.

Nepgear, as those of you paying attention to my deviant, disgraceful taste in video games will already know, is the protagonist of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 (and its recent remake Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth2) and the sister of series protagonist Neptune. Specifically, she's Neptune's younger sister; in the series' tradition, she is the personification of a specific game platform, in this case the Sega Game Gear to Neptune's… well, Sega Neptune.

Nepgear isn't the only younger sister character to make an appearance in the series. Sony PlayStation personification Noire — who you better believe will be the subject of a future post like this, because she's one of my favourite characters in the series aside from Nepgear here — has a younger sister called Uni, who represents Sony's handhelds the PSP and Vita. Nintendo Wii personification Blanc, meanwhile, has two younger twin sisters called Rom and Ram, who between them represent the two screens of Nintendo's handhelds the DS and 3DS.

The fact that these characters are personifications of well-known brands and platforms is one of the most well-known things about the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, but it's also one of the least important things about them; it makes up little more than their concept and, in some cases, influences aspects of their design or basic personality type.

The reason I like Nepgear so much is because I can see a certain amount of myself in her. Obviously I'm not a young, pretty, skinny girl — I'm pretty much the exact opposite of her in that regard — but I find her personality and the way she goes about her business to be eminently relatable. Why? She's awkward, she's nerdy, she's lacking in self-confidence and often finds herself the butt of jokes: these are all traits I became aware of in myself when I was younger, and which persist to this day.

It's not just about "negative" traits, though. Although often doubting her own abilities, for example, Nepgear is someone who will try her very best and follow through on a plan when she makes it, even if things don't go entirely as envisioned. She tries hard to do the right thing in all situations — though doesn't always succeed — and makes an effort to bring people together and ensure they are getting along with one another. Obviously she then goes on to fight giant robots and evil goddesses and whatnot, which are parts of my life that haven't happened as yet, but, without wanting to sound too arrogant, for the most part she represents some of the aspects of myself that I actually quite like.

Aside from the relatable aspects, Nepgear is just an altogether pleasingly wholesome character; she's cute, sure, and in her transformed "Purple Sister" form (left) she ups the sexy quotient considerably, but she has never been a character that attempts to take advantage of either her cute or sexy aspects.

Instead, well, I've already used the word wholesome above, but it really is the best way to describe her. She's someone who is very pleasant to spend time in the virtual company of, and she's just plain nice. The kind of person who would always have tea and cake for you if you stopped by; the kind of person who remembers your birthday; the kind of person who does random acts of kindness without any expectation of reward — and who often doesn't receive any kind of reward for her hard work.

In many ways, poor old Nepgear is one of the most "normal" people in the entirety of Hyperdimension Neptunia, and she suffers a bit for it. There's a running gag in the games that followed her starring role in mk2 where she's paranoid about everyone thinking that she's "boring" and, when you compare her to the other characters in the series — particularly the pure, unbridled chaos that her sister Neptune tends to create in her wake — it's perhaps easy to see why she worries.

But even if she goes unappreciated in her own dimension(s), I certainly appreciate Nepgear, and thus it's with pleasure that I give her the dubious honour of a Waifu Wednesday post on this little backwater blog.

1905: Gr8 B8 M8

At the time of writing, the biggest hotness in gaming — at least so far as the press is concerned — is From Software's latest game Bloodborne.

Bloodborne is a big release for Sony's PlayStation 4 platform and the latest unofficial installment in the notorious "Souls" series that previously brought us Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls II. (And, if you're a From software purist, the King's Field series, too.)

The Souls series is one that I have tried on a couple of occasions to get into, but never really managed to click with. I played a bit of Demon's Souls when it came out after I heard a friend enthusing about it — I was particularly enamoured with its creative online features — but set it aside quickly after I became frustrated at having to repeat the same 30 minutes of gameplay over and over and over again just for, in some cases, taking a wrong turning and running into an enemy that is, I later learned, intended to act as a signal that You Should Not Be Going This Way. I tried it again recently and got a little further, but didn't really feel much in the way of incentive to go back — it's very light on explicit narrative (although very strong on implied narrative), and I'm someone who pretty much needs an explicit narrative push as an incentive to continue playing something — so I'm probably going to call it a day where I am. I decided to give the series another go when Dark Souls first appeared on PS3 and Xbox 360, but found myself similarly frustrated and not really enjoying myself, and consequently I haven't touched Dark Souls II and have no intention of ever playing Bloodborne.

All this is a little besides the point I want to talk about today, but I just thought I'd slot it in anyway for context. The short version is that while I respect the Souls series for what it's doing, I don't really personally enjoy it. And that's fine; I don't expect everyone to enjoy every game out there, but at least to give things a chance before writing them off. And, for me, the Souls series has had its chance, but I certainly don't begrudge anyone who does enjoy it their enjoyment.

Instead, what I did want to talk about today relates tangentially to the Souls series — and specifically Bloodborne — right now, but is a fairly widespread issue at any given point. And that's the fact that, given the majority of the Internet's continued reliance on ad-based revenue models, if something is the latest hotness, then that thing needs to have the absolute shit covered out of it to ensure people keep coming back day after day to, in theory anyway, devour every little piece of Bloodborne (or whatever the latest greatness is at the time you're reading this if it's far in the future) information that there is out there… even if said information isn't particularly interesting or adds anything meaningful to broader gaming discussion.

The reason I bring this up is today I saw a headline on one site that simply read something along the lines of "You can complete Bloodborne even if you've never beaten a Souls game". Now, that may be true — I can't comment with any authority on whether Bloodborne is more or less accessible than the Souls games — but frankly, I'm not sure I really care, and thus I don't really know who this article is for. The people who like Souls games are probably on board with Bloodborne already, while the people who don't like Souls games — like me — have had three games (plus DLC) to try and learn to love them; in other words, if they're not already on that train, they're probably not taking that trip.

Again, though, the amorphous audience that article is for is besides the point: it's a symptom of the aforementioned issue where whatever is "big" at any given moment has to have hundreds of articles written about it at every opportunity, even if said articles don't really add anything to broader gaming discussion. And the sole reason is to try and attract people to the page and consequently earn some ad revenue. It is, in theory, providing people with the content they "want" to read, but in fact it's more focused on the potential revenue that can be brought in by the eyes on the page.

Clickbait, in other words, though perhaps not in quite such a hyperbolic manner as sites like Buzzfeed and its ilk employ.

For a business, it is, of course, important to try and make money through appropriate means. But in doing this, the online press — and the games press in particular — does a disservice to its audience, because unfortunately when you're writing informative articles or criticism, you can't simply ignore your audience and focus on the bottom line, because otherwise you'll end up without an audience. And it may be the case that the audiences for a lot of sites really are lapping up anything Bloodborne-related with aplomb, however vapid it might be. But I know I'd much rather see two things than the situation we have at the moment, where every major site's front page is practically interchangeable with one another: I'd like to see different sites covering different games at different times, and I'd like to see much broader coverage of the medium as a whole, perhaps with more sites specialising in particular genres, subject matter, types of game or even theoretical/ideological viewpoints.

In order for that to happen, though, we need a fundamental rethink of how we consume content on the Web, and a fundamental rethink of how content creators can make money from that content. Because as wonderful as it is for people to do things "for the love", it would be even more wonderful for people to be able to make a living out of doing the things that they enjoy — and that they're good at. At the moment, people who are writing for sites are mostly slaves to the SEO stats, with occasional exceptions, and that's a real shame.

We are starting to see steps in the right direction, at least. Services such as Patreon, IndieGogo and Kickstarter provide alternative means for people and companies to get some money coming in. Several sites have experimented with subscription models, with varying rates of success. And the audience's growing dissatisfaction with the big names in the business over the course of the last couple of years has encouraged smaller sites to take some bold steps to distinguish themselves and make themselves unique: specialising and declaring that they're going to focus on a particular type of content; listening to what the audience says it wants (and, importantly, doesn't want!) and providing that rather than relying on provocative clickbait or predictable coverage of The Latest Big Releases; exploring alternative revenue streams other than just ads; and giving voices to people — and viewpoints — outside the sometimes rather incestuous-seeming echo chamber that is the inner circle of professional games journalism.

We're certainly a far cry from the golden age of newsstand games magazines, where individual publications had very distinctive voices, styles and ways of covering games. I don't know if we'll ever be able to go back to something along those lines, but I'd much prefer it to what we have today.

1902: Further Adventures in Gamarket

As I continue to make progress through Hyperdevotion Noire, it becomes more and more apparent that the team behind the Neptunia series as a whole simply loves gaming. And there are few places where this is more apparent than in Tsunako's wonderful character designs and the series' trademark sharp writing that brings them to life.

Take Ein Al on the right here. As you can probably infer from both her name and design, she is intended to be the personification of the Final Fantasy series.

Her hairstyle and green eyes are intended to call to mind past (and arguably most famous) Final Fantasy protagonist Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII, while her asymmetrical costume is reminiscent of the clothes worn by the cast of Final Fantasy X, particularly that of protagonist Tidus (for the asymmetry) and central cast member Lulu (for the use of belts and buckles in places you perhaps wouldn't normally find them).

There's a recurring crystal motif on her jewellery and the accents on her clothes — anyone who has been playing Final Fantasy for some years will be familiar with the crystal imagery used in most installments — and the single "wing" on her left shoulder is presumably a reference to the series' most famous final boss anthem, Final Fantasy VII's wonderful One Winged Angel. Meanwhile, the rabbit-like creature on her chest is clearly an homage to the series' recurring "Moogle" creatures, who often provide some much-needed levity to the games' typically serious storylines.

But Ein Al's homage to her source material doesn't stop with her appearance; as previously noted, it extends to how she is written, too. Introduced to the player as she's partway through a rather childish battle of one-upmanship with the character Estelle, who personifies the similarly long-running game series Dragon Quest, we quickly discover that Ein Al has a flair for the overdramatic — some might call it melodramatic — and often finds herself called out for being incomprehensible due to her insistence on staying "in character" at all costs. It's not a coincidence that both of these things are criticisms that are regularly levelled at the Final Fantasy series as a whole, and of course her intense rivalry with Estelle mirrors the longstanding feud between diehard fans of both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, with each believing that their series of choice is somehow "best".

Hyperdevotion Noire is packed with characters like Ein Al who beautifully encapsulate their source material while being their own entertaining figures in their own right. Lid, pictured to the left, is another great example. She personifies the stealth-centric Metal Gear series with obvious visual elements such as her cybernetic eye, bandana and use of the exclamation mark motif — a recurring visual element in the Metal Gear series, much like Final Fantasy's use of crystals — on her breast tattoo, but also reinforces this with more subtle character traits like her habit of mispronouncing words when she is stressed or nervous — perhaps a reference to Metal Gear Solid 2's notorious "Fission Mailed" section which is deliberately designed to confuse, upset and stress out the player.

Lid's homage to her source material carries across into her game mechanics, too. She's a character who excels at being away from the front line, instead preferring to attack from afar using throwing knives and stun grenades — and, like her counterpart Solid Snake from the Metal Gear Solid series, she makes creative use of cardboard boxes to conceal herself and incapacitate the enemy with surprise attacks. In the mission where you first encounter her before you recruit her, you have to play appropriately stealthily to even get near her; careless movement will put you in the line of fire of devastating cannons, much as not having full awareness of your surroundings in Metal Gear Solid tends to lead to a quick and painful death even at the hands of the game's most "grunt-like" enemies.

Hyperdevotion Noire is a little different from the mainline Neptunia series in that there's a little less focus on the central goddesses — who each personify the major console platforms rather than individual game series or companies — and more focus on a large cast of these incidental characters. Each of the game's chapters focuses on a few of them and explores them in enough detail for those who are familiar with the source material to give a knowing smile while simultaneously making them appealing characters to those who are just enjoying them at face value. After that, they're into your party, and the game moves onwards at a pleasingly brisk pace without getting too hung up on any particular characters. It's a rather "episodic" approach, and it works rather well; those who make use of favourite characters and build up their relationship values in combat are rewarded with short bonus scenes, too, so it's not just a case of the characters joining the party and then being completely forgotten about.

This right here is the main reason I love the Neptunia series. It's easy to dismiss it as silly, boobylicious fanservice, but like so much else tossed aside like that by mainstream critics, there's a hell of a lot more going on there than you might think. And I will continue to enjoy it for as long as they keep making them.

1900: 20th Century

Post 1900. Feels like a significant number. I feel I should do something significant, but I'm not sure what.

Perhaps a reintroduction for those who are just joining me, and an explanation of what that "1900" is all about.

Hello. I'm Pete. I've been writing on this blog every day for the past 1900 days. It initially started as a Twitter-based challenge called #oneaday in which the participants were challenged to write absolutely anything every day for a year. I joined a little late, only hearing about it midway through January of 2010, but I decided it was something I wanted to be a part of, so I jumped in. Not everyone who started made it to the end of the year — hell, some people didn't make it to the end of January — but I did. So I carried on. And on.

And now here I am, over five years later, still doing this for my own amusement more than anything else, but also as a means of self-expression, catharsis, stress-relief or simply a place to enthuse about things I'm excited about when no-one else wants to listen. I do that last one a lot.

The last five years have been a rocky road, and not in the pleasant chocolatey way. I'm still in the midst of a fairly unpleasant time of my life thanks to not currently having a regular source of income after a series of unfortunate and horrible episodes of being screwed over, though hopefully the income situation will change soon following some recent events.

I live in a house that I own with my fiancee Andie; we're getting married in June of this year. We have two rats called Clover and Socks. We would like either a cat or a dog, but haven't decided which yet, and figure the former in particular might be an unwise choice while the rats are still around — which hopefully they will be for at least a little while yet.

I'm a musician. Piano is my first instrument, and recently I actually bought my first real (albeit cheap and slightly battered) piano, having been getting by on an electric piano for the last few years — it's just not the same. I also play the clarinet and saxophone; just recently, I've been doing some clarinet teaching for the first time in years in some local primary schools. While sort of fun, it's also been reminding me why I don't want to go back to classroom teaching ever — oh, yes, I'm a qualified classroom teacher with a specialism in music.

I play a lot of Final Fantasy XIV. My character's name is Amarysse Jerhynsson, and you can find her on the Ultros server. To my surprise, Andie started playing a little while back and now possibly plays even more than I do, even coming raiding with me on Sunday nights.

I love Japanese games. I often celebrate them on this blog, but also write about them in more detail on my other site MoeGamer. I set up MoeGamer after being laid off from Eurogamer offshoot USgamer last year. I don't get to update it as often as I'd like to — at least partly because lots of Japanese games are pretty long and I like to have beaten them before I write about them in detail! — but it provides a means of continuing the thing I enjoyed best about my time at USgamer: my weekly JPgamer column, in which I regularly enthused about the Japanese games that other publications ignored at best, ridiculed at worst.

Aside from Final Fantasy XIV, I am currently playing Hyperdevotion Noire and Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus on Vita. I am absolutely loving both. Noire is a surprisingly competent strategy RPG (or unsurprisingly, if you're more familiar with developer Sting than I am) featuring characters who have become firm favourites over the last couple of years. Senran Kagura, meanwhile, continues the series' tradition of blending enjoyably cheeky fanservice with genuinely good stories about the nature of good and evil, what it means to be a shinobi and how you go about finding your place in the world.

I am fat. I have recently started attending Slimming World sessions and have so far lost over 2 stone in 10 weeks, so that's going quite well. I don't know if I'll be able to keep up that pace, but if I can get even vaguely close to my self-imposed target I'll be happy.

I am depressed, and have lost at least one job as an indirect result of this. Recently, I finally plucked up the courage to go to the doctor and talk about it. The doctor complimented me on my thoughtful, philosophical attitude towards it — she caught me on a good day — and prescribed me some anti-anxiety meds. I can't say whether or not they're actually doing anything yet, but, well, baby steps and all that.

To the person who came to this blog by searching for "video games with a lot of pantyshots", may I recommend the Dead or Alive series, Rival Schools on the PSone, Senran Kagura, and any visual novel that errs on the side of "eroge" without getting into weird shit.

To the person who came to this blog by searching for "huniepop kyu", this is for you.

To the people who have been following along for the last 1900 days, thanks for indulging me for so long. To the people who have joined me recently, hello, welcome, and perhaps you understand me a little better now.