I got that new Spectrum. I was going to call it a Spectrum Mini, but it really isn’t — it’s a well-crafted replica of the original 48K Speccy, rubber keys and all, only it has stuff like HDMI out, USB ports and suchlike.
Like TheC64 Mini/Maxi, TheA500 Mini and The400 Mini, it’s an emulation box with a bunch of built-in games (48 this time) and the ability to load your own stuff from USB.
As I type this, a vast collection of Spectrum games and demos are copying themselves to a USB stick, so I haven’t had time to try that side of things today. I have had a play with some of the built-in games, though, and they’re a really interesting mix.
There’s expected stuff like Manic Miner and Skool Daze — though no Jet Set Willy, interestingly — but of particular note is the selection of modern indies that are included. There’s some really cool stuff in there, including a 3D platformer called Cosmic Payback and and light-based puzzler called Tenebra, both of which I’ve had some fun with today.
The Spectrum is not a system I know well at all, having grown up an Atari boy. So I’m thinking I may chronicle some of my explorations and discoveries on YouTube. While I’m on, I’ve never really covered the built-in games on TheC64 and TheA500 Mini either, so between those three I think they’ll make some nice companion pieces to my 400 Mini playlist and all the other Atari stuff I’ve done.
These systems were bitter rivals back in the day, but today it’s easy to be in a position where you can appreciate all of them. And you should, because they all have unique charms, for sure.
Anyway, that’s a loose plan in place that I’ll likely start on tomorrow. For now, sleep beckons!
This is a discussion I’ve had a few times on Discord of late, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here. So, being in need of something to write for today, I thought I’d ponder it here.
I grew up being rather fond of fantasy — you know, swords, magic, elves, goblins, that sort of thing. I attribute this primarily to my brother’s girlfriend of his teenage years introducing me to HeroQuest and the Elric of Melnibone role-playing game; I never played the latter but I did play a fair few sessions of the former, and even managed to convince my parents to get me Advanced Heroquest by Games Workshop for one birthday, which I think has successfully hit the table maybe two or three times in my entire life. (Lucky it has solid solo rules!)
Similarly, one (well, two, technically, I guess) of my favourite book series growing up was David Eddings’ Belgariad/Malloreon cycle, which chronicles the rise of young farm boy Garion into a god-slaying hero and powerful sorcerer. Also of note was Douglas Hill’s Blade of the Poisoner and its sequel Master of Fiends, both of which were really for kids, but which I enjoyed and re-read numerous times in my youth.
What do all the above have in common? They’re all simple, straightforward, old-fashioned fantasy. I add those qualifiers because I feel we don’t get a lot of simple, straightforward, old-fashioned fantasy any more. We get a shitload of “dark fantasy”, sure, and we also get a lot of “ironic parody fantasy”. But just straightforward, simple fantasy? That feels like a dying breed.
To clarify what I mean by these terms: by “dark fantasy” I mean a world where everyone is either miserable or fucking (often simultaneously), the streets are made of mud and the dwarves say “fuck” a lot. By “ironic parody fantasy” I mean “teeheehee, the heroes of this fantasy world know what a ‘level’ is and talk like they’re in a Marvel movie!”.
Both of these have their appeal — they must do, otherwise there wouldn’t be so fucking many of both of them — but I feel we’ve reached a point where “subverting the expectations of the fantasy genre” is now more of a cliché than… the fantasy genre itself. I hunger for a good old-fashioned tale of swords and sorcery where no-one says “well, that happened” or “fuck”, and which culminates in the plucky young hero, who came from humble beginnings, punching out some sort of god-like entity.
It doesn’t even feel like we get this in video games much any more. Final Fantasy has very much gone down the “dark fantasy” route in more recent installments and I think that has been a positive move for the series — Final Fantasy XVI and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin are particular highlights from recent memory — and a lot of anime-style RPGs play up the comedic angle somewhat. There’s nothing wrong with either of these things — I enjoy both when I’m in the mood for them — but sometimes you just want something a bit more… straightforward, I guess?
I’m intrigued to try out Metaphor: ReFantazio at some indefinite point in the future, though I suspect that veers towards “dark fantasy”, and I have several dungeon crawlers waiting in the wings that might fit the bill.
I’m not mad about this or anything — trends and tastes change, after all — but I just think it might be nice if we could see a bit more in the way of old-school barbarians-in-loincloths-and-wizards-with-beards fantasy. It was a defining influence on me growing up, and it would be nice to revisit that.
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Longtime readers of my blog and MoeGamer will know that the visual novel series Grisaia has been something of a defining influence on my media tastes for quite some time. Indeed, over on MoeGamer there’s probably a book’s worth of words on the first two games that I invite you to read at your leisure.
And yet. And yet. For some reason, despite coming to the end of second entry The Labyrinth of Grisaia in 2017 and being incredibly excited about the cliffhanger it ended on, and curious on how it might end up… I have only just got around to making a start on the final part of the original trilogy The Eden of Grisaia. I say “the original trilogy”, because since The Eden of Grisaia’s release in English, there have been numerous non-canonical spinoff titles released in the series, plus an entire second series of games known as Grisaia Phantom Trigger which, I believe, is eight volumes long. (Granted, I believe one “volume” of Phantom Trigger is a tad shorter than one of the original three Grisaia games, but still.)
Anyway, like I say, I have finally got around to starting The Eden of Grisaia. I was concerned it would be tough to get back into after seven years away from the series, but almost immediately I was reminded why I love this series, and why I’ve always considered it so important to me. So I’m definitely going to make reading through this final volume from the first trilogy an absolute priority, because I am thrilled to be back in the company of these characters.
But what is Grisaia? I mean, my simple answer to that is “go read the MoeGamer articles linked above”, but you may not have the time to read a five-figure word count on the subject. So I will attempt to summarise the series thus:
Grisaia is, in part, a coming-of-age story about people finding their place in the world. This might not sound particularly unusual for a visual novel, and indeed Grisaia initially looks like it’s doing its very best to be a fairly conventional high school romance sort of affair. There’s an unvoiced male protagonist, a harem of young women who all come to adore him for one reason or another, nookie (in the 18+ version, anyway, which is absolutely the version you should be playing) and multiple endings.
But there’s one fairly large spanner thrown in the works almost immediately, and that is the protagonist in question: Yuuji Kazami. He is anything but a “self-insert” or cipher for the player, and right from the opening moments of the first installment The Fruit of Grisaia it’s clear that something is up with him. We join him just as he has walked 150km to get to his new school, Mihama Academy, and over the course of his interactions with the five main heroines, we come to learn that he has a mysterious “job”.
Initially, the details of this “job” are kept exceedingly vague, but it becomes apparent very quickly that Yuuji is no ordinary high school boy. He is wise — and cynical — well beyond his years, and he uses this experience to help the heroines in various ways. He by no means acts as a “magic bullet” to solve all their problems for them, but his experience in the ways of the world helps him form an incredibly close bond with all five of them. In the original The Fruit of Grisaia, these bonds are implied to be exclusive, and indeed there are even “After Stories” in second part The Labyrinth of Grisaia that continue on that assumption.
But the main story of Grisaia really gets started in The Labyrinth of Grisaia. It’s there we learn all about Yuuji’s background — which I won’t spoil here for the moment, but it’s fair to say he is cynical, jaded and experienced in some curiously specialised skills with very good reason — and the whole thing concludes on a dramatic moment that effectively seems to take Yuuji completely out of the picture.
Now, it’s a bold series that seemingly removes its protagonist from proceedings two-thirds of the way through, but that’s exactly how final part The Eden of Grisaia starts. We switch to third-person narration and follow, for the most part, the exploits of the five heroines as they leave Mihama Academy behind and take on the seemingly impossible task of getting Yuuji back. We have occasional cuts back to Yuuji’s present situation, but the focus is still very much on the heroines. At least it has been for as far as I’ve read so far.
This is a really interesting narrative technique, because it makes it abundantly clear that while The Fruit of Grisaia very much had a kind of “dating sim”-style setup in which you had to pick the right choices to get onto your favourite girl’s route and then pick the right choices to get her “good” ending, The Labyrinth and The Eden of Grisaia have a very specific story to tell. Indeed, the main narratives of both unfold as a kinetic novel with no player input whatsoever. It’s testament to the quality of the writing (and the translation) that Grisaia remains so thoroughly compelling, even after it takes away both the player’s already limited agency in proceedings and the character they were supposed to be “inhabiting”.
Don’t mistake the switch to third-person narration as being boring, though. The Eden of Grisaia’s narrator may be omniscient and non-participant, but they very much have a personality of their own, and they have some exceedingly entertaining remarks to make at times — usually at the expense of Michiru Matsushima, the group’s resident “idiot”.
Thus far I am very much back in Grisaia mode, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. I also know that Grisaia games are a very long read — honestly, it’s knowing there are probably 30+ hours of reading ahead that caused me to put off Eden for so long — but I am going to take my time and enjoy it.
In the meantime, if you’ve never explored the series for yourself, I still highly recommend it. Yes, it’s a bit of a commitment to read all of it, to say the least, but it’s a journey well worth taking. It’s regarded as an absolute classic of the medium with very good reason, and my “Complete Box” version of it that I have on my shelf is absolutely one of my prized gaming-related possessions.
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Having finished Death Mark II last night, I kicked off a recommendation today: 1000xRESIST, which is a game title I have no idea how to say out loud.
I played it for a good 6 hours or so in total, so I think it’s safe to say I’m having a good time. I thought I’d reached the end, but then a whole new bit started, and with it being half past 1 in the morning I thought I’d probably better stop.
I don’t want to spoil too much about the game because it’s very much a “story game” that is light on what we’d call traditional “gameplay” beyond moving around various beautifully presented environments, but I thought I’d pen a few words at least.
In 1000xRESIST, you play the role of Watcher, a clone of the mysterious “ALLMOTHER”, the sole survivor of a global crisis that wiped out the rest of humanity. An entire society of the ALLMOTHER’s clones has apparently sprouted up and is functioning about as well as can be expected in a futuristic post-apocalyptic dystopia where breathing the unfiltered air causes all your bodily fluids to leak out through your eyes.
What’s particularly interesting about this game is that you get to see the “past” of the ALLMOTHER via various means, and because your character is from a time period that is completely unfamiliar with concepts like “high school” and “boys”, there’s a marvellously “uncanny” feel to everything you do and see.
It’s not overdone, but it is almost intoxicatingly disorienting to begin with. As time goes on, you get used to it, though; you learn the curious little phrases that have come about as a result of generations’ worth of worshipping the ALLMOTHER, and you start to understand why this peculiar society functions the way it does.
There’s definitely a lot to unpack in the narrative as a whole, as there’s a swathe of different themes tackled at various times. It’s intelligently written, never patronising, and dear Lord is it (apparently) compelling, given the amount of time I’ve spent on it today.
Thankfully, I have a couple of days off work tomorrow and Tuesday, so I should hopefully be able to polish it off in that time. I’m keen to talk more about it, as I suspect pondering it on “paper” will help me process the many varied themes it brings to the table.
Tomorrow I’m going to do some streaming, as I have done the past few weeks. 8pm UK time, twitch.tv/pjedavison. Be there, or… don’t be there, I guess. But it’d be nice if you were.
Rather than grinding through another layer of Mon-Yu, though, I thought it’d be a nice opportunity to play some shoot ’em ups and, assuming his availability lasts, have a bit of a chat with my good friend Chris, who enjoys a good shoot ’em up. We haven’t had the opportunity to record a MoeGamer Podcast for a very long time, and while this isn’t quite the same thing, it’ll be fun to have a good chat. As an American, Chris is quite understandably a bit under the weather about… everything, so hopefully a bit of fun will take his mind off things for a couple of hours.
Anyway! I don’t have overly specific plans other than “play some fun stuff”, but I’m going to keep it limited to the Evercade Toaplan Arcade cartridges, of which there are now four. (Well, technically there will be four by the end of the year, but since I work for Blaze I have the last two already.) These are, for me, personal highlights of the complete Evercade library, and I’m thrilled to have worked on all of them.
The games are fantastic, and we were fortunate enough to have access to former Toaplan staffers such as Masahiro Yuge and Tatsuya Uemura to provide some additional commentary for the manuals. I even managed to get some commentary from Tim Follin for Toaplan Arcade 4, since that features the NES port of Sky Shark, which has a soundtrack by the great man himself — though he doesn’t think it’s his best work!
I’m not sure how well streaming copes with something as frenetic as a shoot ’em up, but it’ll be an interesting experiment regardless. Rationally speaking, if a stream can cope with modern 3D games such as first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, I’m sure it can cope with spaceships going boom.
Like I say, I haven’t decided specifically what I might play on stream as yet; I’ll just take things as they come. I’ll probably give the new collections some love, though, as they have a number of games that I think are particularly interesting and noteworthy. Toaplan Arcade 3, for example, has both Batsugun and Batsugun Special Version, which are spectacularly good games, but I want to give Vimana some love, too, as that’s one very few people have heard of and I really like it.
A word of caution: don’t come to this stream expecting high-level play, or anything other than very basic competence. I love shoot ’em ups, but I’m not super-good at them. This is probably because, like many things, I don’t put enough practice in to get good, which is where I think a stream like this might be fun. I can take some time to practice, chat, talk strategy and just generally shoot the breeze — and hopefully having an additional participant in the mix will present some fun topics of discussion. We’ll try not to rant too much about the state of the modern world.
So yeah. That’s the plan for tomorrow. I’ll be going ahead with the stream regardless of whether Chris is available (but he’s said he should be) so please do stop by for a bit if you feel like it! See you then!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
Hello. If you follow me here, it’s relatively likely that you follow me in other places, too. But I realise that there is the possibility you don’t. As such, I would like to devote today’s post to sharing a few things I’ve done over on YouTube. If you would like to follow my YouTube channel, here’s the link. Over there, I make videos on video games, primarily retro stuff but with occasional dalliances into more recent stuff I feel like talking about. And also related topics, which brings me to the first video I would like to share.
Exactly what does Yars’ Revenge taste like? I decided to find out. Yes, I am someone who is foolish enough to see a range of 10 sauces with “Atari” written on them, and then to spend £70 on purchasing all of them. I partly did this because I like Atari, partly because I like a good sauce, and partly because I thought it might make a fun video. I am pleased to report that these ten sauces have fulfilled all of their obligations, and you can see my first reactions to them in the video above.
You probably know this, but for my day job I work for Blaze Entertainment, makers of the Evercade range of consoles and the HyperMegaTech! Super Pocket devices, which are also Evercade compatible. When I learned we would be doing an Atari handheld, I was, of course, delighted — even more so when I learned we would be doing a special edition woodgrain model. In this video, I give a quick overview of all 50 games on the system. I was not paid to do this by either my employer or Atari — I just wanted to, because there’s some cool stuff on there, and I’m an Atari nerd.
Atari attracted some raised eyebrows when they announced Yars Rising, a follow-up to the famous 1982 Atari 2600 title. I played the demo one Steam Next Fest and was very taken with it — helped enormously by the fact I’m very fond of the other games developer WayForward have previously worked on. I bought the full game and really enjoyed it, so I made a video about it, based on my write-up over on MoeGamer. It did quite well by the standards of my channel, too, which was nice.
This video didn’t do very well, at least initially, and it’s still sitting on the low side of the view count compared to some of my other stuff. But I wanted to share it because it’s about a thoroughly interesting game: The Missing by SWERY65. This is a platformer in which you play a woman who can’t die; she can survive being decapitated and dismembered and, indeed, it’s necessary to endure both of those things in order to solve the game’s various puzzles.
Far from being a weirdly violent horror game, though, The Missing is actually a thoroughly fascinating, deeply personal story about gender identity and finding acceptance — both in yourself, and from those around you. The game was so striking to me I really wanted to talk about it, so I’m glad I made this video, even if not that many people watched it.
Let’s close with this one. I went into this thinking that doing a video on a text adventure would be a silly idea, but ended up really enjoying the whole thing. Narrating the whole thing makes for (in my humble opinion, anyway) a relaxing, pleasant video, and I don’t mind admitting that I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of my own voice in this video on multiple occasions. Plus I think Moonmist is a thoroughly interesting game from Infocom that rarely gets talked about.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy those. Please do feel free to subscribe over on YouTube if you want to see more. My wife Andie is away for a couple of days from tomorrow lunchtime, so I’m going to use the time to record a bunch of stuff, I think, and probably do some streaming, too. Join me!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
Hello. Indulge me this evening, if you please, because I want to make a note of an idea I have for a longer article that I’ll likely publish on MoeGamer at some point in the near future. It stems from a discussion I’ve previously had with my friend Chris (my MoeGamer Podcast co-star) about how RPGs are “categorised”, and how “western RPG” and “Japanese RPG” are woefully inadequate terms to talk about the RPG as it exists today.
I’m not going to go too into it today but I wanted to jot down the ideas that were rattling around my head while I was playing Silent Hope this evening. And that is to devise some sort of “taxonomy” for RPGs as they exist today. I’m thinking at the top level, you can split them into two distinct categories: narrative-centric RPGs, where the core of the experience is on enjoying the unfolding story; and mechanics-centric RPGs, where the main point of the game is fiddling with its various systems, optimising your characters and suchlike.
There are some games that straddle that line, of course, but for the most part, it’s pretty easy to split them down the middle like that based on what is clearly the main priority. Final Fantasy XIII, for example, is a narrative-centric RPG. Demon Gaze is a mechanics-centric RPG. Where things get quite interesting is that long-running series often go back and forth between being narrative- and mechanics-centric — Final Fantasy is a prime example of this.
You can then divide each half into further subcategories. Narrative-centric RPGs, for example, could be divided into cinematic RPGs, sandbox RPGs, visual novel RPGs and storytelling RPGs, while mechanics-centric RPGs could be split into first-person dungeon crawlers, isometric action RPGs, massively multiplayer games, roguelikes and various other categories, some of which intertwine and cross over with one another.
I haven’t thought about the idea in a lot of depth yet, as you can probably tell from the vagueness, but I think there’s an interesting concept to write about there. The reason I’m not writing about it in detail right now is because it’s 1am and I, as ever, have forgotten to write anything on here sooner. It is not beyond my capabilities to bash out a 3,000+ word epic at 1 in the morning, but I do have to work tomorrow and would rather do so having had something approaching a decent night’s sleep.
So that’s that. I will flesh out the concept in the very near future and post it on MoeGamer. Might even turn into a fun video. We shall see. Anyway, I have recorded the idea here now. Next job is to completely forget that I wrote it down here and revisit the idea in roughly 36 months.
Good night!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I done a stream! It went pretty well, and I enjoyed myself. Even had a few people chatting along. If you want to catch up on it, here it is archived on my YouTube channel:
As you can hopefully see from the thumbnail, we were playing the delightfully named Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armour – You May Be Defeated But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King. This is a dungeon crawler by Experience, makers of, among other things, the Spirit Hunter horror adventures I’ve been playing recently.
I obviously talk more about the game in the stream itself, but my first impressions after a 3-hour session are very positive. It’s really interesting how Experience manage to make what is ostensibly the same kind of game feel cool and different between all their different titles. Mon-Yu is pitched as an entry-level dungeon crawler, but there are plenty of interesting little wrinkles for genre veterans, such as being level capped on each dungeon, meaning you have to figure out how to deal with the bosses without just outlevelling them.
There’s also an interesting equipment system, where equipment gains experience as you use it alongside the characters. Equipment has a “rank” which determines how much it can level up, so sometimes you have to make a decision between keeping your upgraded items or taking a temporary hit to your effectiveness while you power up something with a higher cap.
There’s also a really great “rapid battle” system, where if you know what you’re doing you can get all your characters to auto-attack or repeat their last actions without having to wait for all the animations and log entries to appear on screen. Combine this with the fact that the game has no random encounters — and by its level-capped structure, it discourages grinding to a certain extent — and you have a really interesting take on what has, over the course of the last few years, become one of my favourite subgenres.
Anyway, it’s half past two in the morning now because I made a video about sauce after finishing the stream. Watch out for that on my channel later next week. For now, I must sleep!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
Well, it is this week, anyway. Andie is going out for a friend’s birthday in the evening, so I thought I might take the opportunity to do a bit of streaming. You, dear reader, are welcome to stop by. Here’s my Twitch channel. I’ll be streaming from about 8pm UK time, all being well, and the duration will depend on how much fun I’m having and whether anyone is actually chatting. I plan to go for at least an hour or two, though.
The game I’ve picked to stream is one I deliberately haven’t started yet. It’s Experience’s dungeon crawler Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters and Gain Strong Weapons and Armor. You May Be Defeated, but Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be a Day When the Heroes Defeat the Devil King. I have picked this for several reasons:
I like Experience games.
I like dungeon crawlers.
It has a silly name.
As I understand it, it’s a fairly light and breezy take on the dungeon crawler, so it should be eminently suitable for chatting while playing.
Now I’m sure anyone who is all about “optimising” their Twitch experience would recommend I play something people have actually heard of. But if you’ve ever paid my YouTube channel a visit you will know that I don’t really give a shit about baiting the algorithm and getting huge viewing figures.
In fact, as I’ve discussed previously, I actually don’t like it when a video does well, because after you crash through a certain number of views, people start to get a bit more mean and I’m not a big fan of that. So I’d rather just host a nice little comfortable stream for friends to drop in on as they see fit — and perhaps a few newcomers can pop along and learn a bit about a game they haven’t seen before alongside me.
Streaming is something that, I know, you have to work hard at in order to get anywhere. To be honest, I’m not so fussed about trying to “make partner” or “go affiliate” or whatever — the thing that appeals to me about streaming more than anything else right now is the prospect of potentially making some human connections with people. I have been so bereft of good company beyond my wife and cats in recent years that I want to try various means of potentially meeting new folks. And streaming would seem like a potentially solid means of discovering people with similar interests that I might get along with.
I know that won’t happen immediately. I’m fine with that. I’ve recorded lots of Let’s Plays for YouTube, so I am intimately familiar with how to talk rubbish entirely to myself while playing a video game. But if some good conversation happens to come about? So much the better. We shall see, I guess.
Anyway, tomorrow evening, 8pm UK time. I’ll let you work out what that is in your region. Let’s hunt some monsters and have a good time!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
Playing through Death Markand now its sequel NG, I’m once again struck by how much I like the “sound novel” approach to Japanese-style adventure games. I last encountered this style of presentation back when I looked at 428: Shibuya Scramble, and I liked it a lot there, too. And I’d like to see more of it.
For the unfamiliar, a “sound novel” is usually a form of visual novel in which audible character speech (as in, voice acting) is eschewed in favour of presenting narration and dialogue exclusively (or almost exclusively in the case of Death Mark and NG) through text. To counterbalance the “loss” of this aspect that is normally found in most visual novels these days, sound novels place a much stronger emphasis on ambient audio.
That means unlike many other visual novels, which tend to have continuous background music as their main accompaniment to the action, sound novels attempt to create a sense of “immersion” in the game environment via a slightly different means. It’s a uniquely “video game” way of doing things, and the more I experience it, the more I really like it.
Part of the reason I appreciate it is because I’m a fast reader, and when I’m playing a visual novel with full voice acting, I find it very difficult to make myself advance the text before the speech has finished playing — even if the speech is not in a language I understand. This is because I know that there is often some very good voice acting in visual novels — it tends to be where a lot of the budget goes — and I worry that I might miss out on some particularly dramatic or emotional moments if I skip the sound.
The game that got me into this habit was Corpse Party on PSP, which is kind of sort of a visual novel, only with RPG-style exploration. The voice acting in that game was so good that I not only listened to every line in its entirety, even though I don’t speak Japanese, I also made listening to the Japanese voice track my norm in most games (well, those that originated in Japan, anyway) I played from thereon.
But I’m always just a bit conscious of the fact that all that lovely voice acting is slowing me down, and since I inevitably read a line faster than it’s spoken — particularly if we’re dealing with one of those characters that speaks incredibly slowly — I can occasionally feel my attention wandering. Now, I could just skip the dialogue and move on to the next line, but like I say, there’s a little switch in my brain that’s flipped, and I can’t flip it back; it just doesn’t feel right to do that.
Sound novels, though, present no such difficulty. I can romp through Death Mark and NG (and indeed 428: Shibuya Scramble before them) at completely my own pace. I don’t need to wait for a voice actor, I don’t need to wait for a dramatic moment, I just read and advance. And I really like it.
This got me thinking more broadly about how I’m settling into a place where I feel like I actually prefer the games that deliberately hold themselves back from trying to be “realistic” in various ways. I played Death Mark immediately after the Silent Hill 2 remake, and while the Silent Hill 2 remake was indisputably excellent, I think I’m actually drifting into a place where I enjoyed Death Mark more in terms of the way it was presented to me. And I’m enjoying NG even more than Death Mark, because it’s doing a lot of the same things, only it feels a bit more polished and refined.
So I think I’m in a place where the “sound novel” approach is fast becoming one of my favourite ways to present an interactive narrative. It’s got the descriptive text and well-crafted dialogue I enjoy, it’s got incredibly atmospheric ambient sound to feel “immersive”, and I can play through it at completely my own pace, rather than being arbitrarily limited by my inability to skip through voice-acted lines.
Of course, in the other games I suppose I could just turn the voice acting off. But then I feel like I’m deliberately depriving myself of an important part of that game’s presentation.
Oh, woe is me. I realise, of course, that this is a completely pointless problem to be worrying about, and, to be honest, I’m not actually worrying about it at all. It just struck me as something interesting while I was playing NG this evening, and I hope I can find some more sound novels to enjoy once I’m done with the Spirit Hunter series.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
