1948: Five of My Favourite Music Games

I've been a fan of music-based "rhythm action" games ever since they started being a thing around the time of the PS1 era, and while there aren't anywhere near as many around these days as there were in their heyday, there are still some great ones out there. And, of course, those old games are, in most cases, just as playable today, so long as you can deal with some dated graphics!

Without further ado, then, here are five* of my favourites.

Bust-A-Groove

I can't quite remember if this was my first ever encounter with rhythm action, but it was certainly one of my favourite games of the PS1 era. It's also the sort of game that would probably never see a retail release these days: it'd be much more likely to be a £15-20 downloadable game. (In fact, why isn't it downloadable on PSN? Get on that, Sony!)

Bust-A-Groove was an unusual and creative title that took the overall aesthetic of a one-on-one fighter and transplanted the hot versus action into the context of a dancing competition. Each song was based on four-beat bars, and in each bar you'd have to make sure you hit one of the face buttons on the PlayStation controller on the fourth beat. As you built up combos, you were given more and more directional inputs to squeeze in before that all-important fourth beat, but these didn't need to be in time. You were usually pressing O or X on the fourth beat, but pressing Triangle would allow you to use one of your character's special attacks (limited in the number of times you could use them per stage) and pressing Square would allow you to dodge an incoming special attack from the previous bar; failure to do so would put you out of action for a few bars and allow your opponent to get ahead.

Bust-A-Groove wasn't perfect, particularly in two-player mode, where two equally matched players tended to reach a stalemate due to the way the game's scoring worked. But as a single-player rhythm action game in particular, it's still hard to beat — and it had some of the most memorable songs of any game I've ever played.

Frequency/Amplitude

I always get Frequency and Amplitude mixed up — one was the sequel to the other — so I'll cop out and put them both in here, since they were fairly similar to one another, as I recall.

Frequency and Amplitude were early titles from Harmonix, who would go on to create the Rock Band series. And it's clear where the inspiration for those later, more popular titles came from: Frequency and Amplitude had the "note highways" almost as we recognise them today, but with a twist: you were playing all the parts on your controller.

This wasn't as ridiculous as it sounds; what you'd do is pick a "track" (as in, part of a song, not a whole album track or something) and bang out a decent combo on it. After a short period, that track would "lock" in place and continue playing, allowing you to move on to another one and gradually build up the texture of the music, effectively creating a dynamic remix as you played. Perform well enough and you'd be able to get all the parts going together; perform badly and it would sound like a teenage wannabe rock group attempting to perform a piece far too ambitious for them one lunchtime at school.

Space Channel 5 Parts 1 and 2

Yes, I know that's two games, making my "five" rather dishonest (particularly after including both Frequency and Amplitude), but really, Space Channel 5 deserves to be considered as a complete… thing. Because it's quite something.

I've often described Space Channel 5 as "the gayest game ever" (the second-gayest game ever being Final Fantasy X-2) and I stand by that sentiment. Gloriously, unabashedly cheesy and camp as fuck with a kitschy '60s sci-fi aesthetic, Space Channel 5 sees the leggy pink-haired beauty Ulala strutting her way to fending off an alien invasion and eventually saving the galaxy from the machinations of an evil villain.

Space Channel 5's gameplay is extremely simple, essentially boiling down to a game of rhythmic Simon Says. Flowing pretty much seamlessly from cutscene to gameplay, Ulala would be confronted with some sort of sticky situation to resolve, and would have to do so by copying the moves of whatever dastardly (or, in many cases, not-so-dastardly) foe she's facing this time. The twist on the usual Simon Says formula is that you have to do it in rhythm as your "partner" did it, too, and there are some seriously challenging rhythms to deal with. Once you learn it, though, you should be able to rattle through the whole game in about twenty minutes or so, but it's very replayable, much like an entertaining short movie. Space Channel 5 Part 2 also comes with a sort of "challenge mode" alongside the main story, and that's a lot tougher.

Space Channel 5 Part 2 is also noteworthy for featuring a bizarre cameo from a low-polygon depiction of the late Michael Jackson… sorry, "Space Michael".

Elite Beat Agents

Elite Beat Agents is one of the best games on the Nintendo DS, and, surprisingly, one of the most effective examples of storytelling I've ever seen.

The titular Agents are tasked with jetting off around the world to save people from various mishaps, and they do so by dancing at them. Exactly how this solves the problem is anyone's guess, but it seems to work, even going so far as to fend off an alien invasion accompanied by Jumpin' Jack Flash in the wonderful finale.

The game uses licensed tracks (albeit cover versions in most cases) to complement the on-screen action and help tell their stories, and there's at least one instance where the combination of music, subject matter and events in the story are genuinely emotional. You know the one if you've played it. (Also, it's in the video above.)

But aside from all this, Elite Beat Agents is a strong rhythm game that makes excellent use of the DS' touchscreen and stylus — and is a challenge and a half even for the most seasoned rhythm game pro, to boot. It's just a pity we never saw the sequel over here.

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva f

I include Project Diva f (and its PS3 counterpart F, though I greatly prefer playing on Vita) on this list rather than its (apparently superior) sequel largely because I haven't played said sequel. Project Diva f is a great game in its own right, however, and made me all sorts of happy the first time I played it, largely because it reminded me of the old PS1-era games.

It's no Bust-A-Groove, though; no regular beats for you here. Instead, you're expected to play Project Diva f's levels like a percussion instrument. Depending on the piece in question, you might be accompanying the vocals, lead guitar and synth, rhythm section or even playing some completely different counter-rhythms that complement the main bulk of the music. The lower difficulties are deceptively easy; the higher difficulties are as challenging as playing an actual instrument.

It's satisfying though. Pulling off a "Perfect" score on a difficult level is a wonderful feeling, and it's something that will only come with practice — remember that, when games didn't hand victory to you on a plate? Yes, in order to get good at Project Diva f you're going to have to do more than just try each song once or twice; you're going to have to actually learn them, so that eventually you don't even need to look at the incoming note patterns, you can just perform them. When you reach that stage, then you're a true Miku master.

Senran Kagura: Bon Appetit!

I won't lie, I've lost count now, but I'm pretty sure we're not doing "five" any more. Oh well.

Senran Kagura: Bon Appetit! is a game in which the ninja girls of Senran Kagura take time off from fighting each other and worrying about youma to indulge themselves in a cooking competition organised by pervy old ninja master Hanzo, who apparently wants nothing more than to watch his granddaughter and her friends literally cook each other's clothes off in an attempt to secure a Super-Secret Ninja Art Scroll that will grant one wish.

It is as ridiculous as it sounds, but there's actually a really solid, fun — albeit simple and straightforward — rhythm game underneath, with some wonderful pieces of original music; for those less familiar with Senran Kagura, it has consistently great soundtracks, and Bon Appetit! is no exception; good job for a music game, huh?

Not only that, but the game actually makes an effort to put all this ridiculousness in context with story sequences just like those in the mainline Senran Kagura games. It does take great pains to point out that you probably shouldn't take Bon Appetit! too seriously or expect it to be acknowledged in the "canonical" Senran Kagura narrative, but it's more than just a generic rhythm game with the Senran Kagura characters hastily slapped atop it.

It's lewd as fuck, though; if you thought the clothes-ripping action of the main games was a touch on the suggestive side, you've not experienced anything until you've seen the cast posing provocatively and naked atop various delicious-looking desserts. But that is what Senran Kagura does, and by golly, we love it for it.

Love Live! School Idol Festival

The most recent addition to this list (which I've been keeping in my head prior to this post), Love Live! School Idol Festival is one of a few games that have got me playing games on my phone again for the first time in ages.

The basic rhythm gameplay of School Idol Festival is solid, and designed well for touchscreens — the icons you have to tap are all arranged in an inverted arc across the screen, making it easy to hit them all with your thumbs even when holding on to your phone. The songs are a lot of fun, too, capturing a lot of the energy of the show — and, of course, making use of some of the show's most well-known and loved songs.

But arguably the more interesting thing about School Idol Festival — and the thing that keeps players coming back to it day after day — is its comprehensive metagame. At its core, it's a fairly standard Japanese style collectible card game — collect cards of varying rarity, sacrifice cards you don't need to level up cards you do need, increase the rarity of cards and assemble a powerful team — but the attachment to Love Live! makes it very endearing, and the game even goes so far as to include fully-voiced (in Japanese) visual novel-style story sequences as you make progress. The metagame also affects your performance; better cards will allow you to obtain better scores, and different cards have different "skills" that trigger over the course of a song and provide you with bonuses or other benefits.

You'll obviously get the most out of School Idol Festival if you're already familiar with Love Live!, but even if you're not, it's a solid rhythm game in its own right — so long as you like super-happy, cheerful, saccharine-sweet J-idol music. And I'm not sure I trust anyone who says they don't!

Okay, okay, I'm done. Whatever.

* Hah.

1945: Mobile Free-to-Play: Another Tale of East vs. West

Brave Frontier has some lovely and distinctive artwork; screenshots in this post are all from it.

I've been highly resistant to mobile free-to-play games for some time now, a fact I primarily attribute to the extremely well-paid but soul-crushing period I spent reviewing them for the industry-facing sites Inside Mobile Apps and Inside Social Games, both of which have subsequently been folded into AdWeek's SocialTimes blog.

I describe this period as "soul-crushing" not because I disliked the work or the people I worked for — on the contrary, it was an enjoyable opportunity to work with some fun people — but because it was just so utterly disheartening, as a fan of "games as art", to see the cynical money-machine games being churned out by the boatload, with no-one truly having the confidence to innovate, instead simply reskinning established systems with a different theme and hoping no-one would notice.

Amid the dross churned out by companies like Zynga, King and their ilk, there were the occasional little gems, though, and they almost always hailed from our Eastern cousins in Korea, Japan and other nearby regions. Eastern mobile game development was by no means infallible, of course — titles which grew to inexplicable popularity, such as Rage of Bahamut, were often just as vapid as their Western counterparts — but on the whole, when a genuinely good free-to-play mobile game hit the app stores, it was, more often than not (and with a few notable exceptions) of Eastern origin.

Screenshot_2015-05-18-22-02-50 — This feisty lady is the pride of my party at present.

Fast forward to today and I find myself enjoying not one, not two, but three separate free-to-play mobile games, and there's a fourth that I had some fun with but have left alone for a while now. All of these games are, once again, of Eastern origin; meanwhile, offerings from established Western big hitters like Zynga, King, Nimblebit, Gameloft and EA all fail to hold my attention because they're still relying on the same old crap they were a few years back when I was reviewing them.

So what's the difference with these Eastern-developed games? Well, primarily it's the amount of effort that appears to have been put into them — and the fact that they're fun.

Brave Frontier, which I've talked about in a few previous entries, for example, is an enjoyable battle-centric RPG in which you assemble a party of collectible heroes, power them up and send them on quests — either story-free "Vortex" quests which are themed each day of the week and allow you to acquire specific items more easily, or a lengthy, story-driven campaign that, while cliched, has actually proven to be surprisingly compelling so far.

Puzzle and Dragons, meanwhile, takes the Puzzle Quest formula of combining casual colour-matching puzzle gameplay with Pokemon-esque collection and levelling mechanics, creating an engaging, enjoyable game that blends the best bits of RPGs and puzzlers.

Love Live! School Idol Festival, on the other hand, not only serves as wonderful fanservice for the anime show itself — which I'm currently in the middle of watching, and am enjoying a great deal — but is also a really fun rhythm action game.

Finally, I don't play much of Valkyrie Crusade any more, but it made enough of an impact on me to want to write about it in a bit more detail over on MoeGamer.

Screenshot_2015-05-18-22-07-52 Interestingly, all four of these games are based on the same basic system — something which I criticised Western-developed free-to-play mobile games for above — but manage to distinguish themselves from one another by the additional elements they stack on top of this basic structure. Western free-to-play games, conversely, tend to adopt one system and stick with it, without adding anything in particular to the formula.

There are a few common systems in use in Western mobile free-to-play games.

There's the "citybuilder" genre, which superficially resembles simulation classics like SimCity and Transport Tycoon, but actually requires no strategic thought or knowledge of human geography. Instead, these games effectively act as a simple toy set in which you wait for timers to expire, then tap on buildings to get money out of them, which you then subsequently invest in more buildings so you end up with more timers to wait to expire and then tap on. Paying up in these games can skip timers — which are often ridiculously lengthy — and allow you to get more currency without having to actually "grind" to acquire it. Examples of this type of game include Nimblebit's Tiny Tower, EA's The Simpsons: Tapped Out and numerous attempts to stomp SimCity into the ground, Fox's Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff and Gameloft's My Little Pony. Farming games such as SuperCell's Hay Day and Zynga's own FarmVille are also pretty much the same as citybuilders, too, except they involve building up a small farm instead of a whole city. Mechanically, however, they're exactly the same.

There's the "casual puzzler" genre, which generally rips off PopCap's Bejeweled by challenging you to swap coloured gems/sweets/fruits/farm animals around to make lines of three or more like-coloured gems/sweets/fruits/farm animals, at which point they disappear and more take their place. These generally involve a linear sequence of levels, and paid options in the games generally take the form of additional "lives" to continue playing after failing a level several times — lives otherwise regenerate over a long period of real time — and, in many cases, power-ups to make the game significantly easier, to a game-breaking degree in some cases.

Then there's the "midcore strategy" game, which, in the same way as the "citybuilder" genre bears only a superficial resemblance to the original SimCity, bears only the most cursory of resemblances to actual strategy games. Midcore strategy games generally involve building a base through a similar means to a citybuilding game — yes, that means more timers to tap on, this time to get resources — and recruiting units, which also take varying periods of real time to build. There's usually a competitive element to them, though, where you can take your recruited units to another player's base and throw them at it in the hope that they might be able to do some damage. While these sequences tend to resemble classic real-time strategy games such as Command & Conquer and StarCraft, the lack of input you generally have means that coming up with a "strategy" is next to impossible, so it becomes more a matter of a numbers game: how many powerful units can you afford to throw at your foes? Payment options in these games are generally similar to citybuilders — speed up timers, buy currency, acquire exclusive units and buildings to give yourself an advantage over other players.

There are other types of Western-developed mobile free-to-play games, but these three types are by far the most widespread. The thing they all have in common is that the paid options deliberately break the game; they're effectively paid cheats. The most egregious example of this is the ability to simply buy in-game currency rather than having to earn it: it effectively removes any need for the player to develop any sort of "money-making engine", which has been a core part of simulation and strategy games involving resource management since the early days. But "power-ups" such as those seen in King's games are almost as bad; in some cases, these power-ups even allow you to completely skip a level, meaning you're effectively paying not to play the game. (Powerups like this are inevitably paired with unreasonable difficulty spikes or nigh-unbeatable levels, forcing many players into a position where they feel they have to pay up if they want to continue playing.)

The three Eastern games I mentioned above, as I noted previously, are all ostensibly based on the same system, known as gacha. This is a system based on those capsule toy machines that you see in supermarkets, and which are rather popular in places like Japan. Essentially, using either a currency earned in-game or one that you purchase with real money, you can "draw" something to add to your collection — a playable character in Brave Frontier's case; a monster to add to your party in Puzzle & Dragons' case; a card depicting one of the Love Live! cast in the case of School Idol Festival. Generally speaking, the things you draw using the "hard" currency — the one you can pay for — are better than the ones you acquire using the currency you earn in-game (which usually takes the form of a "social currency", earned through interacting with other players in a rather limited manner). This may sound game-breaking in the same way as buying a power-up in Candy Crush Saga or buying currency in CityVille, but there's a key difference: you still have to do something with the things you acquire by paying, and they're not an immediate "win" button. Sometimes you're not even able to use them right away.

Take Brave Frontier as an example. While it may be tempting to simply throw money at the game in an attempt to recruit an entire party of five- and six-star heroes, this simply won't work early in the game due to the "cost" limit placed on your party, which increases as you level up your player. Not only that, but these five- and six-star heroes still start at level 1, so you'll still need to actually play the game in order to level them up and get them fighting at their maximum potential; otherwise, they simply look cool.

Notably, these games generally also allow you to acquire the "hard" currency at a slow rate and enjoy a trickle-feed of these high-quality heroes/monsters/adorable wannabe idols. And, in fact, this makes acquiring one feel more meaningful and more of an event; it actually makes it feel less like the game is trying to force you to spend money, and instead inviting you to do so if you'd like to enjoy more of the same. I don't mind admitting that I tossed a fiver at Brave Frontier during a special "you might get one of these special heroes!" event the other day because I've been enjoying playing it; I certainly haven't, at any point, felt like I need to spend money on it to enjoy it, however; my current party (which is pretty kick-ass, I have to say) has been assembled entirely for free.

The big contrast between Eastern and Western philosophy with these games, then, appears to be the attitude towards getting the player to pay up. Western games, in my experience, are fond of creating what is rather horrendously called "fun pain", which can be alleviated by paying up; in other words, inconveniencing the player in an otherwise fun experience to such a degree that they reach for the credit card just to shut the game up. Eastern games, meanwhile, appear to provide paid items as an optional extra that is, under no circumstances, required to have an enjoyable experience with the game.

The other thing that's interesting is that Eastern games appear to be more open to the idea of combining different gameplay types together — Puzzle & Dragons, for example, combines an interesting twist on match-3 puzzlers with RPG and gacha mechanics, while Valkyrie Crusade features gacha, turn-based RPG combat, deckbuilding and optimisation, and even citybuilding, the difference in its use of the latter aspect being that while you're waiting for your wait timers you have other things to do rather than twiddling your thumbs or reaching for the credit card.

There are exceptions to both of these rules, of course; there are great Western free-to-play mobile games just as there are horrible, shitty, exploitative Eastern free-to-play mobile games. But on the whole, in my experience, it would appear to be the Eastern-developed games that have the right idea — creating a fun experience and hoping at least a few people will be happy to pay up in gratitude for a fun experience — while the Western free-to-play mobile market, more concerned with making a quick buck, seems to be floundering somewhat.

1941: What Happened to the Games Press?

I find myself thinking this a lot recently, particularly as sites like Polygon do increasingly stupid things on a seemingly daily basis (just recently, they managed to piss off the entire community of people who enjoy modern niche Japanese RPGs with a spectacularly ill-informed piece that I posted a lengthy rebuttal to over on MoeGamer, and subsequently baffled everyone by complaining that The Witcher 3 didn't appear to have any black people in it, and that in a setting where, canonically, women are treated like shit, the women were treated like shit) and I find myself increasingly turning to smaller sites on the few occasions I do actually want to read someone else's thoughts about games — and to Twitter on the more frequent occasions when I want to talk about games with people who share my interests.

The games press used to be the very definition of "enthusiast", in that it was, well, enthusiastic. Upcoming new games were anticipated with excitement, unexpectedly brilliant games were celebrated, legendarily awful games became famous in their own right. In most cases, coverage was handled in a light-hearted, humorous and often irreverent manner, not afraid to crack politically incorrect jokes and generally seem like the people responsible for it were actually having a good time.

These days, I go to a site like Polygon and often come away feeling like its writers actively hate the medium they claim to specialise in. It seems like every other week there's a new big controversy of some description, and these sites seem to take it upon themselves to take a Firm Moral Standpoint on such issues, usually with the strong implications that If You Don't Agree With This, You Are An Awful Shit and Should Probably Be Killed.

Sometimes these controversies become justifiably big deals — although, to be honest, it's getting harder and harder to think of genuine examples, simply because of the amount of noise spouted on a daily basis. It's the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" syndrome; the more you shout and scream and rave about How Awful Everything Is, Oh My! *faints* the less likely people are to take you seriously. Particularly when it's just so incongruous; I can't quite work out if the abrupt gear-change into "by the way, this is misogynist and probably racist too" in Polygon's otherwise very positive review of The Witcher 3 is hilarious or tragic, but either way, I can't take it seriously any more, because it's just parroting the same points I've seen over and over again, without any real consideration of context.

I think back to the days when I used to read games magazines before the Internet came along and ruined that industry. I think back with fond memories on the specific magazines I used to read — mostly the ones my brother worked on, for obvious reasons — and can actually remember a lot about them: the articles therein, the games covered, the reasons I liked taking them into the toilet to read while I was having a shit even if I'd already read them from cover to cover multiple times. Advanced Computer Entertainment (aka ACE); Zero; Mega Drive Advanced Gaming; Control (later Super Control); ST Action; Atari User; Page 6; The Official Nintendo Magazine; N64 Magazine; PSM; GamesTM; PC Player; PC Zone; EGM; OPM; and doubtless some others I've forgotten — I don't remember any of these magazines ever taking a Firm Moral Standpoint on controversial issues, and I certainly don't ever remember them directly attacking either portions of or their whole audience. (Well, except for Charlie Brooker's "Sick Notes" section in latter-day PC Zone, in which people wrote in to him specifically to get insulted.)

Meanwhile, today, we have a far more fast-moving games press in which articles are generally disposable, forgettable, designed to get quick, immediate clicks right now and, for the most part, not remain "evergreen" and stand the test of time. That means a rise in tabloid-style controversy and moral panics, and a decline in writers having the opportunity to express their own specific, creative voices or specialisms. And that's really sad.

One positive thing that is coming of the growing sense of dissatisfaction a lot of people like myself feel with the big gaming sites is the fact that smaller sites are on the rise, and doing a good job from a content perspective of catering to niches that are typically underserved by the mainstream publications. The situation isn't ideal as yet — most of these outlets aren't able to pay their staff, since making money from writing words on the Internet is harder than it's ever been, given people's reluctance to pay for things online, and even greater reluctance to allow themselves to be advertised at — but it is undergoing a change.

I'm glad to see that, in some respects, but sad in others; as time goes on, we move further and further away from what I now recognise, with the rose-tinted spectacles of +1 nostalgia, as the Golden Age of Games Magazines. Fashions come and go, of course, but with the way the media has been advancing over the course of the last ten or twenty years, I don't see us returning to anything like it any time soon.

1939: Ah, So That's What PlayStation Plus is For

Up until now, I've been a bit resistant to PlayStation Plus, the subscription service that Sony provides for its PlayStation platforms.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't been outright against it or anything; it's more that I've never really seen the need for it in my life.

A bit of context for those less familiar with it, then: PlayStation Plus is required for you to play online multiplayer games on PlayStation 4. (It is not required to play online with PlayStation 3 and Vita.) This aspect of it I can take or leave, since I don't play a lot of online games — Final Fantasy XIV is the only one I play with any regularity, in fact, and I play that on PC.

PlayStation Plus also allows you to upload save games to "the cloud" so that you can easily, say, transfer them between different devices or delete a game and restore your progress later on. Again, I haven't had much need for this; the one and only time I wished I had it was when I had a downloadable review copy of Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection on Vita, subsequently got a physical copy (because I like physical copies) and discovered that it was impossible to delete the downloadable version without also deleting its save data due to Vita's somewhat restrictive file system. If I'd had PlayStation Plus, I would have been able to back up my save, delete the downloadable version then bring it back in to play with the physical version.

PlayStation Plus also provides you with discounts on games from the PlayStation Store each month. These are often quite significant discounts, but you do have to bear in mind that you're paying the subscription fee each month, so you're perhaps not saving quite as much as you think you are.

And finally, PlayStation Plus provides you with "free" games each month. I put the term "free" in quotation marks because you don't own them in the same way as you would if you'd actually bought them outright, either in physical or downloadable form. Rather, you have unlimited access to them for as long as you continue to subscribe to PlayStation Plus; they're effectively extended rentals, if you like.

Now, this latter aspect had been the part I'd probably been most "against", because I like to own my games, preferably in physical format, and PlayStation Plus didn't seem especially compatible with that mindset. What I hadn't counted on, as I've discovered since I signed up for my trial period on my new PS4, was the fact that PlayStation Plus actually provides you with a risk-free means of trying out some things you'd perhaps found interesting, but didn't really want to hand over the money for in case they weren't all that good.

This month, for example, one of the "free" games on PS4 (and PS3 and Vita, for that matter) is a title called Race the Sun. This is an independently developed game in which you fly a low-polygon spaceship across a randomly generated low-polygon world that changes every real-time day, attempt not to crash into anything and usually fail. It starts extremely simple, almost insultingly so — I nearly put the game down a few moments after starting it because it seemed so bare-bones and simplistic — but gradually grows in depth and complexity as you complete objectives and "level up", with new mechanics gradually unlocking as you progress through the levels. Now I'm about halfway through the unlocks and finding it an addictive little affair; the somewhat Star Fox-esque aesthetic is appealing, the music is good, the gameplay is frustrating but addictive and it has a somewhat more satisfying feel than your average mobile phone endless runner — which, let's face it, is basically what it is, with a few extra knobs on.

Would I have spent money on Race the Sun? Well, I certainly wrote about it a bit when I was still working at USgamer, as I thought it looked interesting. It had never quite looked interesting enough for me to actually want to hand over the cash for it, though, and as such it initially passed me by, though I still contemplated it every time I saw it in a Steam sale.

Here's the power of PlayStation Plus, then; it allows me to investigate these games that I've found interesting but, for one reason or another, never bought my own copy of. There's no risk in me doing this, and I get a decent selection to choose from each month. It's more effective than a demo because you get the whole game. And it's less morally questionable than piracy because you're still paying for the game and the devs are getting a cut — it's just getting to them via different means.

And if I end up actually really liking something I've got through PlayStation Plus? There's nothing stopping me actually buying a copy to keep permanently in my collection even if I let my subscription lapse.

So okay, I admit it; I should have probably checked PlayStation Plus out sooner. But better late than never, huh?

1937: This Starry Midnight We Make

I'm a big fan of the work of Carpe Fulgur, the small, independent localisation team previously responsible for bringing English-speaking audiences the excellent Recettear, its predecessor Chantelise and the charming Metroidvania-ish Fortune Summoners, and who have most recently been working on the sprawling behemoth that is Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter alongside Xseed Games.

I was pretty intrigued, then, when Andrew Dice of Carpe Fulgur proudly announced the team's fifth project: a peculiar affair called This Starry Midnight We Make. Unlike Carpe Fulgur's previous output, it's not a role-playing game. It is… well, it's kind of baffling, to be honest. I guess technically it's a puzzle game of sorts, but I actually want to describe it more as a game about experimentation.

I sat down and played the demo version — available now on Steam, with the full version coming later this month — and recorded my experiences, bewilderment and all. Here's what happened when I had a go:

As you can see if you watched the video, the game blends visual novel-style storytelling with its main mechanic: creating "stars" in a magical basin that appears to influence what happens in Kyoto according to the astrological phenomena you create.

The basic format of the game involves plopping stones into this basin and watching them do stuff, then figuring out how to make them do other stuff. The basin is split into five elemental areas, represented by faint swirling coloured gases, and the combination of the elemental area you drop a stone into and the type of stone you drop determines what happens next.

As you progress through the game, you're tasked with a series of quests that ask you to create specific phenomena. What's interesting is that after an initial, rather brief and unenlightening tutorial, you're pretty much left to figure everything out for yourself. How, exactly, do you create a nebula? The game sure isn't going to tell you right off the bat, though it will record the phenomenon in your notebook once you've created it once, allowing you to refer back to it and check how you did it if you're not sure.

Beginning with the simple task of creating individual stars, the quests later start demanding that you create evolved forms of stars that involve mixing different types together, manipulating the amount of elemental gas in an area of the basin and even using "clay stars" to fuse others together. Beyond that, you're tasked with creating "constellations" using specific combinations of stars that you've created, and the game hints that once these have been created, they'll be used as "tools" to further manipulate your astral creations, though the demo stops before you get to see what this means for yourself.

What I found initially offputting but subsequently rather compelling about This Starry Midnight We Make is what I hinted at above: you have to figure out everything for yourself. And this is a huge adjustment from a lot of modern games, which spend much of their early hours walking you through every step of the mechanics you might be using throughout the game until you're absolutely sure you know what you're supposed to be doing. Not so in This Starry Midnight We Make. You are, in effect, a scientist, given some interesting things to fiddle around with and left to your own devices to try things out and see what happens. Some of the things you do will work — and these form genuine "Eureka!" moments, since you've figured them out for yourself — and others will not work, forcing you to analyse your "mistakes" and learn from them… or perhaps determine what caused an unexpected reaction to happen.

I find it difficult to envision how the game will carry this strange concept through a full-length narrative, but I'm kind of intrigued to find out. It's a slow burn of a game, for sure, and its obtuseness will doubtless put many people off within about ten minutes of starting, but if you put some time in and make the effort to actually experiment with it yourself, you'll find a strangely compelling experience waiting for you.

Do I recommend it? I'm hesitant to do so before seeing the full version, but I can at least recommend that you give the demo a try for yourself to see what you think and whether it might be for you. It's available now from Steam.

1936: Modern Old-School

One of the games I've been playing a bunch on my shiny new PlayStation 4 is Resogun, a game that I was previously moderately excited about, and which, prior to Omega Quintet (and, arguably, Final Fantasy Type-0, which I'm interested to try at some point in the near future) was a game I often cited as the only (then-current) reason that I'd be interested in a PlayStation 4.

But it wasn't enough by itself to make me want to buy one. For a new platform to be truly compelling for me, there needs to be some long-form games that I'm interested in, whereas Resogun is an arcade game, intended to be enjoyed in relatively short bursts. This isn't a criticism of it, mind, but I'd have had a tough time justifying a PlayStation 4 purchase to myself purely on the strength of what is, essentially, next-gen Defender.

But oh, what a game Resogun actually is! I'm still skeptical of whether I'd have found it worth buying a PS4 for by itself — although in retrospect, I bought an Xbox 360 primarily because of Geometry Wars, which is even more simplistic than Resogun — but I'm absolutely in love with it, because it represents a true fusion between classic old-school arcade-style gameplay and modern presentation.

At its core, as previously noted, Resogun is similar to the classic arcade game Defender. You fly a little ship that can move and fire left and right at will. Like Defender, the game unfolds on a scrolling, wrapping stage, though here it's represented as a cylinder that you fly around the outer surface of. Like Defender, your job is to save little green humans from being abducted by invading alien flying saucers. Unlike Defender, there's significantly more to it than that.

For starters, the humans are held in captivity before you can rescue them. In order to do so, you need to destroy "Keepers" — special enemies that show up every so often with a green glow surrounding them. You'll get an audible announcement when some Keepers show up, but not a visual indicator showing where they are if they're around the other side of the level, so you'll need to find and destroy them quickly to save the human in question, because if you miss any of them — or, in some cases, destroy them in the wrong order — the human will immediately die. Succeed, however, and the human will pop out of his little prison box and start running around on the ground, at which point he becomes vulnerable to being abducted, falling into holes, drowning and being splattered by unpleasant things. He also becomes available to be picked up by your ship and transported to one of the rescue pods at the top of the level.

To complete a level, you need to proceed through three "phases". Each phase requires you to destroy a certain amount of enemies represented by a bar filling up at the bottom of the screen. When you complete a phase, you get a brief "time out" where you can still move and fire, but you're invincible and the enemies move in slow-motion. This allows you a moment to compose yourself and get yourself into an advantageous position before proceeding. The end of the third phase, however, jumps directly into a boss battle, with bosses taking the form of various peculiar geometric shapes that warp and twist before your very eyes as you shoot chunks off them and chip away at their energy bar. When the boss is dead, the whole level explodes and you move on to the next one. Repeat for five levels, beat game.

Except that's not all that there is to Resogun — at least not with the excellent DLC packages that have been released since it originally came out. Between these two packages (available as a bundle or individually) there are several new modes, including Survival, which places you on a single level and tasks you with surviving through a series of increasingly difficult days, acquiring power-ups by picking up humans; Protector, which requires you to deliver humans to cities to rebuild them and subsequently defend them from giant alien flying saucers; Commando, which casts you as a human attempting to protect his house from falling meteors in scenes somewhat reminiscent of Missile Command for a new generation; and Challenge, which gives you a series of unconventional ways to play the game and tasks you with completing some generally pretty fiendish objectives.

Resogun is unabashedly a score-attack game, and consequently it naturally comes with online support, allowing you to compare your scores both to your friends and the rest of the world's players. You can also filter these scores by time, allowing you to challenge friends each week or month to see who is truly the best (this week/month), and scores are tracked completely independently for each mode and difficulty setting.

Combine this with a robust ship editor, allowing you to create your own custom ships using the 3D "voxel" pixels from which the entire game is built (and which it is very fond of exploding things into at a moment's notice) and the ability to share said creations online and you have a remarkably "complete"-feeling package that, now I've spent some time with it, I'm pretty confident in recommending as an essential purchase for anyone with a PlayStation 4. (Assuming you like shooting things and watching numbers go up. And who doesn't like shooting things and watching numbers go up?)

So yeah. Buy Resogun. You won't regret it.

1935: Brave Frontier: Pete's Completely Unofficial and Possibly Inaccurate FAQ

I like writing guides, as I've discussed before, so instead of making some "hilarious" walkthrough of my tedious daily routine as I've done in the past, I thought I'd write something actually useful to someone: a guide on what I've learned about the game Brave Frontier, which I've talked a little about recently, and which isn't entirely forthcoming with all the information you might need to get the most out of it during play. Without further ado, then.

What is this game?

Brave Frontier is a free-to-play mobile RPG from Alim and Gumi. It's available for both iOS and Android devices. There's a linear story to follow, but it's mostly a game about collecting and upgrading "units" — various heroic characters and monsters whom you can recruit into your team, level up and evolve into more advanced forms of themselves.

Do I have to pay to play?

Brave Frontier has an energy system that depletes as you take your party on quests, with later quests or those with larger, more significant rewards costing more energy to take on. If you have insufficient remaining energy to take on a quest, you can either use a "gem" to restore it completely to its maximum level, or wait for it to regenerate at the rate of roughly one point per three minutes. As you level up, you'll gradually gain more maximum energy; one point every few levels, and a more significant jump every five levels.

Gems are also used for "rare summons" — immediately acquiring units of higher rarity levels — and restoring the separate, much shorter energy bar for the player-vs-player Arena mode.

Depending on how casually you play, you'll probably find there is no need to pay for gems — especially in the early levels, when you level up quite quickly and your energy bar is fully restored on each level-up.

How do I get gems?

You can pay for them, but you also get one free every so often; specifically, for completing an entire area in the main story campaign, sometimes as a daily login bonus reward if you play for several days in succession, sometimes as a "Brave Points" bonus for earning points by completing daily objectives.

How do I get units?

There are three ways of acquiring new units:

1) Receiving them as a drop from a quest. With the exception of daily and special event dungeons, these are usually very low rarity units.

2) Acquiring them through "Honor Points". You receive honor points when you borrow another player's character to fill the sixth slot in your party, with 5 points awarded if they're a stranger and 10 points if they're on your friends list. You'll also receive honor points when other people borrow your character to use in their party in the same way. 100 honor points equates to one "free" summon, but again, these tend to be quite low rarity for the most part. It's usually best to save up your honor points until there's a special promotion on promising specific units you wouldn't normally be able to get through these means; the game will make you aware of this when it's available.

3) Acquiring them using gems. 5 gems equates to one "rare" summon, which will net you a unit of three-star ("Rare") or higher rarity. These units will probably form the backbone of your party, but note their "cost" value; when building your party, the total cost of all the units you use cannot exceed your current cost cap. Cost cap increases with your player level alongside your maximum energy.

How do I make units better?

There are three things you need to do to improve a unit: level it up, level up its Brave Burst, and evolve it.

Levelling it up requires you to "fuse" it with other units. Each unit fused to the base unit gives you a particular amount of experience based on what it is, with slightly more experience being given if its elemental type matches that of the base unit. More valuable, rarer units are worth more experience. The most experience can be acquired from units that drop in the "Metal Parade" dungeon in the Vortex Gate; keys to unlock this are issued in the Administration Office in Imperial Capital Randall every weekday except Wednesday, so be sure to go and pick them up as often as possible. Note that when you unlock it, the Metal Parade only stays open for an hour, so only unlock it when you have enough energy to make the most of it!

Levelling up a unit's Brave Burst — its unique special move — relies a little more on randomness than standard levelling. A unit has ten levels of Brave Burst, with some more powerful and rarer units able to acquire a Super and Ultimate Brave Burst after this. To level up a Brave Burst, perform fusion, and look for material units that say "BB UP?" or "BB UP!" on them. "BB UP?" units give a small chance of levelling up the base unit's Brave Burst when fused, while "BB UP!" units will guarantee an increase in Brave Burst. Generally speaking, units that are appropriate to use for levelling up a Brave Burst can be identified by the type of Brave Burst they use. Healer units require other healers to level up their Brave Burst, for example, while attacking units require other units with offensive Brave Bursts.

Evolving a unit is the process you perform when a unit reaches its level cap. The level cap is determined by the number of stars the unit has, or its rarity. Three-star units have a level cap of 40, for example, while five-star units can be levelled to 80. Note that there's a "Zel" (currency) cost every time you perform fusion, and this gets more expensive the higher level a unit is. There's also a Zel fee to pay at evolution time.

To evolve a unit, you must collect the required additional units. These are usually found in the Tuesday daily dungeons in the Vortex Gate. For lower-rarity units, you'll need Nymphs; as you progress through the tiers, you'll need Spirits, Idols, Totems, Pots and Mecha Gods. Initially you won't know exactly what evolution materials are required for a unit, but once you've encountered or acquired the units in question once, they'll be revealed for your reference. Refer to the Brave Frontier Wiki to find the specific units you need if you get stuck.

Keep an eye out for special units such as Frogs — these provide significant, one-off bonuses when fused without requiring a level-up. Some increase attack power, some defense, some recovery power, some HP. Some even open up a second slot for equipping Spheres.

How should I build my party?

It depends how much effort you want to put in. I use a single standard setup for everything I do; it has a mix of different elemental types, a healer unit, a unit who can boost the acquisition of Brave Burst crystals during battle and a unit that can boost attack power. This is good for most situations.

The main quest is split into dungeons that tend to be centred around a single elemental type, so if you want to optimise your party you may wish to build a full party of each elemental type, then choose the appropriate complementary element to the enemies you're facing. Remember, elemental weaknesses are a one-way circle for the most part: fire beats earth beats lightning beats water beats fire (and so on). Dark and light have a reciprocal relationship, meanwhile; they both beat each other.

Special events and daily dungeons are often more challenging than the main quest, so you'll want to bring along your best units for these. For the Metal Parade, you'll want to bring units that hit a lot of times, since the most damage you can do to a Metal unit with a single hit is 1 point.

Pay attention to the unit you choose as Leader, too. Not only do you get the benefit of their Leader skill, which is usually a passive buff of some description, this will also be the unit you loan to other players. In other words, you want your Leader unit to be as attractive as possible (stats-wise or, if you're feeling shallow, the prettiest girl) to encourage people to use it and provide you with Honor Points.

Note that different instances of the same unit can have different "types", so be sure to pick one that you'll find the most effective. "Lord" type units are balanced. "Anima" type units gain more HP than usual when levelling up. "Breaker" type units gain more attack power than usual. "Guardian" type units gain more defense power than usual. "Oracle" type units gain more recovery power than usual.

How do I fight?

Fighting is a simple case of tapping the unit's status bar to cause it to attack; there's no need to wait for one unit to finish its turn before triggering another one, either. In fact, if more than one unit hits something at the same time, a "Spark" is triggered, increasing the amount of damage by a significant amount.

After all your units have taken a turn, you'll receive Brave Crystals (BC) and Heart Crystals (HC). The former are randomly distributed throughout your party and increase their Brave Burst gauge. The latter are likewise randomly distributed and restore hit points. After this is done, the enemy gets a turn. Note than many enemies — particularly bosses — have more than one action per turn, some of which can hit your whole party at once.

You can use items to turn the tide of battle; remember to acquire these from the Town before you leave, and use them before triggering any attacks, since you can only use them at the start of your turn.

Use Brave Bursts wisely. Although you get a bonus to the amount of BC and HC dropped if you "overkill" an enemy, there's little sense in unloading everyone's BB on a single fairy. If you can dispatch a group with normal attacks, do so and save your BB for larger groups or bosses. Also make sure you familiarise yourself with your units' Brave Bursts before you get into battle; not all of them are offensive in nature!

How do I level up quickly?

Remember you level up separately from your units. Benefits of levelling yourself up include a higher energy cap, a higher "cost" cap (allowing you to include more, rarer units in your party) and a full restoration of your energy bar and arena orbs.

You get experience for every "Quest" you complete, whether it's in the main quest or the Vortex Gate. Vortex Gate quests are usually worth more experience than you'd usually get for that amount of energy spent in the main quest, but they're often tougher — and you get nothing if your party is defeated before you beat the boss.

The fastest way to gain experience is with the weekly Karma dungeon on Mondays. Not only does this drop absolutely tons of Karma, a currency used for upgrading the Town and unlocking more effective equipment and consumable items, but also provides a significant amount of player experience. There are three "levels" of this dungeon; start at the bottom and work your way up. You will require some seriously powerful units to be able to defeat the boss at the end of the level 3 dungeon, so don't jump in there unless you're absolutely prepared.

How do I get more money?

Two ways. Firstly, there's a weekly dungeon at the weekend that drops a lot of Zel. Secondly, every Wednesday you can pick up a Jewel Key from the administration office in Imperial Capital Randall. This can be used to unlock the Jewel Parade, which works in the same way as the Metal Parade: it stays open for an hour, after which you'll need another key to get back in, so only open it up when you have the energy to use.

Jewel Parade drops Jewel-type units, which are completely useless for anything other than selling, so take full advantage of this. Acquire as many as you can before the Parade closes, then sell them off for vast profit.

How do I win in the Arena?

You don't have direct control of your units in the Arena, so all you can do is make sure you send your best possible units for the job: it's a good idea to have a healer unit of some description, as this can turn the tide of a battle in your favour. It's also a very good idea to take units with powerful Brave Bursts that can attack the entire enemy party at once, and any units that can provide buffs or increases to BC drop rates are useful, too; generally speaking, whoever gets to Brave Burst first will usually be the victor so if you can push yourself into a position where that's more likely to be you, you'll be golden.

What do I do in the Town?

Three things: acquire raw materials, upgrade the town's facilities, and buy/craft things. The Synthesis shop sells consumable items such as health potions and temporary buffs; remember to "equip" these to your hotbar before entering a difficult quest, as they will make a huge difference. The Sphere shop, meanwhile, allows you to create equippable items that either add special effects to your attacks or increase stats and resistances. Don't neglect these; they can make an otherwise seemingly weak character into a valuable member of your party.

Should I play this game? It sounds stupid.

It is kind of stupid and ultimately fairly pointless — but if you're someone who enjoys collecting things, making them fight other things and making on-screen numbers gradually get bigger over time, you'll probably have at least a bit of fun with it. It has some lovely art and great music, too.

Can I add you as a friend?

Sure. Type in my ID — the easy-to-remember 9630492642 — and we'll both get happy nice things to share.

Where can I find out more?

The Brave Frontier Wiki is a terrifyingly comprehensive resource of information for this game.

1933: #WaifuWednesday: The Girls of Omega Quintet

One of the central themes of Idea Factory and Compile Heart's new PlayStation 4 RPG Omega Quintet is the contrast between the private lives of those looked up to as "idols" and the public face they put on display.

This concept is actually, to some observers, a key aspect of Japanese culture at large. It's known as honne and tatemae and, specifically, describes the contrast between your true feelings and desires (honne) and the facade you put up to the public (tatemae). It accounts for a lot of things, particularly in popular culture — media like anime and video games are, among other things, a means of exploring and engaging with honne without having to crack tatemae.

It may sound like a strange concept, but in fact a lot of us do it without even thinking: ponder, if you will, the things you've looked at on the Internet in the last week, and how likely you are to talk about them with other people. It may be that you're fortunate enough to have open-minded friends and relatives who are more than happy to discuss anything and everything with you — or perhaps you simply don't care what people think of you — but there are bound to be at least some situations where you know to keep your mouth shut about things you find interesting, whether they're some form of fucked up pornography or unpopular sociopolitical ideas. Any time you bite your tongue and think better of "oversharing"? Well, that's the closest we have to tatemae in the West.

But I digress. We're here to talk about the Omega Quintet girls, and I did have a point to make: each of them display both honne and tatemae to varying degrees, and, through necessity, in a far more exaggerated manner than your average citizen. Due to the protagonist's role in the story as the girls' manager — and the player's adoption of that role — you get to see both sides: the honne aspect when they're hanging out and talking among themselves, and the tatemae aspect they display when they're being broadcast to the public.

Otoha_Idol Otoha is arguably the "leading" heroine in the story due to the fact that she's introduced alongside the protagonist Takt. Otoha is a cheerful, positive, upbeat young girl who has always looked at idol culture — or, in the context of Omega Quintet, "Verse Maiden" culture — with starry-eyed awe. Although Omega Quintet's world is post-apocalyptic and in many ways both bleak and dystopian, Otoha's infectious energy allows her to bring a sense of brightness and lightness to even dark situations; fellow Quintet member Aria even says as much in a rare moment of lucidity.

Otoha struggles the most with honne and tatemae. She's a ditz, to put it bluntly, and she often lets this aspect come across even when she's on camera. The first time she attempts to make her "debut", she is literally pushed to the ground and upstaged by Kyouka, who is, at this point, working independently. She struggles for the longest time to get the Verse Maidens' fans to even remember her name and, over time, comes to recognise that her talents don't always match up to her enthusiasm.

That doesn't stop her, though; despite numerous setbacks, she remains determined to realise her dream of being a successful Verse Maiden, and her determination proves inspirational and infectious to her comrades. Even the rather dour Takt is swept along by her energy at times, though he'd never admit it; after all, in the game's earliest moments, it is Otoha who saves Takt from an unpleasant end at the hands of the Blare.

Kanadeko_Idol Kanadeko, meanwhile, is another energetic character. While Otoha is passionate and determined, Kanadeko is more concerned with having fun and being friends with everyone. This is reflected through everything from her perpetually wide-eyed facial expressions to her seeming inability to stand still and her loud voice. She's keen to do a good job as a Verse Maiden not because she's especially passionate about it in the same way as Otoha — though she is dedicated to her work — but because she thinks it will be a fun thing to do.

Kanadeko is the most naturally at home on stage, too. She has natural presence and an energetic aura about her, and in fact she is, in many ways, the character who displays the least difference between her honne and her tatemae. Both on and off the stage, she's confident, loud and, while she recognises that she may not be the best at what she does, she both enjoys it and is keen for others to enjoy it along with her.

Nene_Idol Kanadeko's perpetual companion is Nene, who in many ways is the polar opposite of her loudmouthed counterpart. Nene is shy, awkward and has a tendency to babble incoherently when she's feeling nervous — which is quite frequently. In extreme cases, this trait exhibits itself through her blurting out some things that make people feel a little uncomfortable — such as her enjoyment of and enthusiasm for firearms — usually closely followed up by some embarrassed awkwardness as she apologises for saying "strange" things.

In contrast to Kanadeko, Nene has probably the largest difference between her honne and her tatemae. On stage, she almost becomes a different person. She channels her nervous energy into projecting a confident appearance to the world and, despite both her own shortcomings and her lack of belief in her own abilities, she does a good job. Off the stage, meanwhile, she struggles with depression and anxiety, particularly in social situations, and tries to stick close to Kanadeko whenever she can for two reasons: she trusts Kanadeko, as the two have been together for some time at the story's outset, and she knows that Kanadeko is more than capable of distracting people so she can slip quietly into the background.

Kyouka_Idol Kyouka, meanwhile is the character that is probably most directly concerned with her honne and tatemae. As a "class president" sort of character, Kyouka is serious and determined and almost painfully tsun at times, but she sees her lack of confidence in her performance abilities as a failing, and consequently tries to do something about them. She is also very concerned with what people think about her; she spends quite some time worried that her former mentor Shiori hates her for coming to join the other Verse Maidens, and it takes a reluctant intervention by Takt to help the pair at least start to realise that neither of them really resents the other, though they both find that impossible to admit.

Kyouka wants to be the best, and she finds it inordinately frustrating that Aria is a more natural performer seemingly without realising it or even being aware that she's doing it. She channels that frustration into working herself hard, and indeed it's this determination that brings her together with the other Verse Maidens in the first place: her desire to be the best even at the expense of her own personal welfare sees her throwing herself into a battle she can't possibly win alone, only to be helped out by her soon-to-be-friends.

Kyouka's harsh exterior occasionally slips around the other girls and Takt, however; the first time Takt comes to her room, he's surprised to discover that it's a mess, with notes pinned to the wall, clothes on the floor and rubbish overflowing out of the bin. Kyouka initially thinks nothing of this until it's pointed out to her by Takt and some of the other girls, then becomes extremely embarrassed about it. Several days later, Takt returns to her room only to discover it's in exactly the same state as the last time he saw it; she admits that she eventually concluded it wasn't worth the hassle and that she was more comfortable this way. It's a rare moment of clarity and honesty from Kyouka, and helps to humanise her a great deal.

Aria_Idol Finally, Aria is the most enigmatic of the Verse Maidens. Initially introduced as a happy-go-lucky, cheerful girl whom Kanadeko and Nene knew when they first joined the group long before Otoha and Takt came along, we subsequently discover that she suffered greatly at the hands of the Blare and went into hiding. When she re-emerges, she's seemingly emotionless — but not cold — and seemingly not quite aware of everything that's going on around her. The damage to her mind by the Blare, it seems, was severe.

Or was it? The interesting thing about Aria is that despite her habits of speaking very slowly and hesitantly or referring to people she's talking directly to in the third person, she's clearly one of the more insightful members of the cast, often pointing out things the others don't see. And, because the damage to her mind also seemingly removed any sense of tact, she'll say things bluntly and honestly, sometimes without realising that they might be interpreted as hurtful. At the other end of the spectrum, she frequently tries to make jokes, but her stony-faced expression and emotionless voice often make people misinterpret them as something rather more horrifying — particularly when she jokes about subjects like suicide.

Aria's intriguing to me because she presents an interesting reflection on what it's like to live with depression. Nene does this to a certain degree, too — I find her social anxiety particularly relatable — but Aria's floating through life in her own little world, observing and commenting on things and seemingly being surprised when people notice or acknowledge her, is actually a fairly accurate (if exaggerated) representation of what it feels like some days when depression takes over your perception of the world. You don't quite feel "connected" to anyone; you don't quite feel "real"; sometimes you're not even sure how to interact with others — or if you want to. It's likely no coincidence that her colours are the darkest of all the Verse Maidens — black and purple — and that these colours are shared with the Blare, the source of her trauma.

I'm yet to beat the game so I don't know how these girls' personal stories continue and conclude, but I'm very interested to find out. It's a great ensemble cast overall, and one from which it's very difficult to pick a favourite.

If I had to be pressed for one, though? Nene. Even if she is occasionally terrifying.

1932: Life with No Guide

It's not that often I play games shortly after they've been released, but starting Omega Quintet on literally the day it came out in Europe (physically, anyway; the digital version is out tomorrow, apparently) has reminded me of one interesting thing that you can only do in the moments after a game has been released: play the damn thing without a guide.

GameFAQs is such an ingrained part of gaming culture now that it's very difficult to resist its allure, particularly when playing a complicated, sprawling game like an RPG. It's natural to want to track down every single little secret and see every possible hidden scene, and GameFAQs provides a valuable service to people who feel this way but don't necessarily want to have to put in the hard work to figure things out for themselves. (This isn't a criticism, by the way; sometimes game secrets are so incredibly obtuse it's difficult to fathom how anyone ever discovered them without assistance directly from the developers, and in these cases your average player has little choice but to rely on a guide.)

But playing Omega Quintet before seemingly any guides have hit the Internet is proving to be a pleasurable experience. It's intriguing and fascinating to discover the intricacies of the game system for myself rather than relying on someone else's interpretation. It's satisfying to discover things that work well, and also the things that don't work so well. And, the more I discover about the game — I'm sure I haven't even seen all its mechanics yet, even as I approach the 30-hour mark — the more I'm actually quite grateful for one of the game's most common criticisms: the fact that it doesn't explain a lot of things immediately. Because without the game explicitly setting some things out for you, you have to make use of what information it does give you in order to extrapolate the rest for yourself. And that's enjoyable.

Take today's discovery, for example: a means of acquiring over 200% more rewards at the end of a battle than normal. The game gives you a few brief tutorials in its early hours that mention "bonuses" at the end of battle, and hint that things like your combo hit count and something about "linking" will increase this bonus, but it doesn't sit you down and say "Now you try!" like so many other modern games do. As such, it's possible to forget all about this bonus system and enjoy the combat on a fairly superficial level. But start to delve into it and suddenly it becomes a much more interesting, complex experience, and consequently far more rewarding as a result.

I went from using the same skills in every battle to attempting to make as long a chain of "linked" skills as possible, because the longer this chain, the more significant the bonus you get after battle. This involves looking at the skill information when you select one and taking note of the "link" type marked; in the case of weapon skills, it's inevitably another weapon type. Kyouka's spear skills, for example, link to Otoha's hammer skills; Kanadeko's gauntlet skills link to Aria's fan skills. Where it gets interesting is in the few instances where a character like Nene has some skills that can potentially link in several different directions — one skill might link to Kanadeko's gauntlets, for example, while another might link to Kyouka's spear. In this way, it becomes an interesting challenge to try and optimise the sequence of skills you use in order to link as many as possible without breaking the chain. I haven't quite figured out if it's possible to link everyone's skills that I have so far together into one long sequence yet, but I'm coming perilously close to getting a piece of paper and drawing flow charts to try and work it out.

I'm actually reminded somewhat of the original Hyperdimension Neptunia; perhaps unsurprising, since that was also an Idea Factory/Compile Heart game. The original Neptunia didn't have a particularly popular or well-regarded combat system, but I actually rather enjoyed it for much the same reasons I'm enjoying Omega Quintet; Neptunia, too, had a distinctly puzzle-esque strategic element to how you set up your skills, with much of the challenge and interest coming from setting up your characters with combos that flowed well, maximised the amount of damage you put out and made efficient use of your available action points in a turn. Omega Quintet's combat is considerably more elegant than Neptunia's — IF and Compa have learned a lot since then! — but, to return to the original point of this post, I'm pleased to discover this depth for myself rather than reading about it in a guide.

I'd say I fully intend to try and play the next few games I tackle without looking at a guide at all, but we all know that isn't true. For now, though, I'm greatly enjoying "flying blind" in Omega Quintet, and I feel I have plenty left to discover.

1931: Further Tales from the Frontier

Screenshot_2015-05-03-20-39-48 I'm quite surprised that a free-to-play mobile game has managed to maintain my attention for over two weeks now: you may recall a short while back when I talked about Brave Frontier, and I'm still playing it today.

I think the reason it's "working" for me is that I'm not attempting to make it the focus of my gaming life or anything, but it's something enjoyable to do during brief moments of downtime — sitting on the bog, waiting for pasta water to boil, being unable to get to sleep, that sort of thing. It also helps that it's a fairly solid game at its core, too; it's not the deepest game in the world, but it has enough substance to keep it interesting in short bursts.

What I find curious about it is that it's essentially Pokemon with all the fat trimmed off, and yet while Pokemon didn't hold my attention at all across the three installments I've tried — Red, Gold and Y — Brave Frontier has managed to keep me interested, and I think it's because of all the stuff that's been trimmed out from the Pokemon formula.

Pokemon, to me, always feels like it's not sure what it quite wants to be. It has the structure of a traditional RPG, but then the collectible, tradable and upgradeable aspect of a trading card game. It is arguably more widely renowned for its competitive metagame than anything significant it brings to the storytelling table, though it has managed to spawn a number of anime series and movies since it first burst onto the scene. The "JRPG" side of it and the "collectible monster battling" stuff always seem to be somewhat at odds with one another, and I think that's what's caused me to lose interest in them partway through every time I've tried.

Brave Frontier, meanwhile, focuses on the collectible battling side of things almost exclusively. There's no exploration, no wandering around caves, just battles of various descriptions and, between those battles, upgrading your units to be more powerful, stronger and capable of taking on tougher opponents. It's satisfying to build up a team that works together, whether you've been trying to go for a specific angle (all the same elemental type, for example, or perhaps a strongly defensive group that can survive against hard-hitting enemies) or whether you've been working with the hand you've been dealt, as I have been.

And the game presents you with interesting, meaningful choices to make every time you boot it up. I still dislike the use of "energy" bars in free-to-play games throttling your play sessions, but as I noted in my previous post about Brave Frontier, this game makes use of it as an interesting "risk/reward" mechanic by presenting you with the option to effectively "gamble" your potential play time against the possible rewards available.

You can spent small amounts of energy working your way through the "Quest" mode, which is a linear sequence of battles of gradually (very gradually) increasing difficulty tied together with a surprisingly not-that-bad, if cliche-tastic storyline. In doing so, you'll acquire a selection of not-very-good units (that can be used as "fusion fodder" to upgrade various aspects of your actually-good units) along with the game's currencies, and you'll also get a decent amount of experience.

Screenshot_2015-05-04-20-25-02 Conversely, the daily dungeons that pop up throughout the week each cost significantly more energy to participate in but offer their own unique special characteristics and greater, more predictable rewards — the Monday dungeon, for example, offers significantly greater amounts of experience points than usual, providing you with the ability to level up your "Summoner" character quite quickly, in turn increasing your energy stock and the amount of "Cost" points you're allowed to spend on building your party; other dungeons throughout the week offer units that are required to "evolve" level-capped units to their next tier, large amounts of gold coins or various other rewards. Part of the thing that makes the game interesting is that you have to discover the value of each of these dungeons for yourself; it may not be immediately clear why you'd want to hunt down elemental idols, for example, but once you figure it out you'll know that you need to check in on that particular day to get your hands on some.

There's a certain amount of random-number generation (RNG) at work, of course, but as any MMO player will tell you, that's sort of part of the fun in a perverse, masochistic sort of way: imagine how much more satisfying it is to acquire something you've been trying to hunt down for over a week rather than having it handed to you on a plate. It's frustrating and annoying at times, sure — I'm currently in the aforementioned situation as I attempt to track down the last "Evolution unit" I need to upgrade my party member Selena into her next tier of power — but, as manipulative as it is, it keeps you coming back for another try.

Oh, and I've reached a stage now where my party is winning in the player-vs-player "Arena" significantly more than it loses now, which is satisfying to see. But then the game took me down a peg or two by throwing a boss at me that absolutely obliterated my entire party within a few turns. Time to get busy with the Fusion, I guess…