1184: For the Love of God, Please Learn About Snopes.com

Hello, you, random acquaintance and/or friend of my parents on Facebook. Yes, you. The one who has been clicking "Like" and "Share" on everything from posts that imply you want cancer to kill everyone if you don't click "Like" to posts that wilfully spread misinformation, such as accusations that Red Bull causes brain tumours, that baby carrots are saturated with chlorine, or that aspartame causes cancer, brain tumours and multiple sclerosis.

You know who you are.

I'd like to introduce you to a website. I'd like you and this website to become best friends. I would like you to go to this website any time you find yourself questioning the validity of something that someone else asks you to share. I would like you to check this website before you share the thing that someone asks you to share. And if this website informs you that the thing that someone asks you to share is not, in fact, true, please politely tell the person who asked you to share the thing about this website, and direct them to the relevant entry debunking the thing they asked you to share. (Conversely, if this website informs you that the thing that someone asks you to share is, in fact, true, feel free to share as you see fit, but please stop using quite so many exclamation marks.)

This website is called Snopes.com.

It may not look like much, but it has been around in one form or another since 1995, and has been debunking chain letters and other urban myths ever since. It is a valuable resource that has been proven on numerous occasions to be both accurate and reliable. Please use it.

The reason I bring this up is that the unpleasantness that accompanied the Boston Marathon yesterday has brought with it a number of stories that are complete fabrications, and which have nonetheless found themselves spreading at an alarming rate across all varieties of social media. There is a convenient page summarising all of the claims made about the Boston Marathon and the events which supposedly occurred there right here. Please read it. Please familiarise yourself with it. Please take note of which stories are completely false and/or based on inconclusive, unproven information. Please do not share stories which have been proven to be false, or which are based on inconclusive, unproven information.

You may feel that there is "no harm" in "raising awareness" of issues by sharing things like this, even if they are not true. Unfortunately, that is not the case. By polluting social media with falsehoods, it becomes difficult for people who are personally invested in an unfolding story such as the Boston Marathon bombings to determine what the facts really are. By polluting social media with falsehoods, you run the risk of causing considerable distress to these people who are likely already very emotional. By polluting social media with falsehoods you continue to perpetuate a cycle where people willingly share misinformation in lieu of actually doing something useful, because clicking "like" and "share" feels like you've done your bit. And, frankly, by polluting social media with falsehoods, you make yourself look uninformed at best; gullible and stupid at worst.

So use a bit of common sense, will you? The next time something sounds unbelievable, it probably is; before you jump on that "Share" button, pay a quick visit to Snopes.com and look up the key points. And if Snopes.com tells you that the claims are complete rubbish, for heaven's sake don't just share them anyway. Educate the person you saw them from. Teach them about Snopes.com. And hopefully together we can make the world a less ignorant place.

1183: Suit Up

Page_1 I was exceedingly bored today, so rather than sitting around in my pants as I usually do I decided to put on my suit for no reason other than for the hell of it.

Well, there were a few reasons, to be honest. I'm not a particularly vain type, as anyone who has met me and seen the state of my hair (both -cut and facial) will attest, but I've never quite been comfortable with my "look", for want of a better word. I don't really have a signature "look" unless you count "jeans and (usually) geeky T-shirt" as a "look", and I'm not sure I do, because that involves pretty much the minimum amount of effort possible that enables you to go outside and not be arrested.

I also wanted to see if there was any truth to the pseudo-psychological theory that if you dress "professionally" you'll be in a more "worky" frame of mind.

I've also been watching a lot of Friends recently and noted that most of the male characters in that spend a lot of time wearing suits. (This was, of course, followed up by the character of Barney in How I Met Your Mother, who makes wearing a suit into an explicit character trait rather than something that "just is".)

So what were my conclusions?

Umm… to be honest, I'm not sure I really have anything particularly… conclusive. That said, wearing a suit is more comfortable than I remember, though it can get a bit hot and stuffy if you keep the jacket on.

Did I feel more "confident" and "professional", though?

I can't really say with any certainty. This is perhaps largely to do with the fact that I put it on once I had done all my paid work for the day and was taking a wander into town to sit in various coffee shops and post things on Games Are Evil then work on my game a bit. To my credit, I did get quite a lot done, but I think this may be more to do with the amount of coffee I consumed and my surroundings than what I was covering myself up with. Or perhaps it was part of the whole equation.

Oh well. I can't say it was a particularly unpleasant experience, anyway. And since I'm working from home and not in an office, it's about the only airing this suit gets apart from weddings (yes, people I know who got married in the last year, I wore the same suit to your wedding that I "just wear" or put on for job interviews) or job interviews (yes, people who interview me, I wear the same suit to your interview that I wear to my friends' weddings) so I might as well give it a day out every so often.

Am I going to "suit up" as my "new look" though? Probably not. I have far too many geeky T-shirts that I actually like showing off. (No-one has recognised my Deadly Premonition one yet, frustratingly.)

1182: Fixed That For You

Page_1 I've had a week of not having a lot of luck with technology. Firstly, I was reminded that my electric piano was suffering a sticky key issue on the B above middle C (which is quite a commonly-used note) and proving rather difficult to play effectively. This was annoying, because as I noted yesterday, I'd just come into possession of the official piano arrangements for the Nier and Final Fantasy X-2 soundtracks along with some fan-arranged printouts of a variety of anime and game pieces.

Secondly, my PS2 Slim mutilated my Ar Tonelico 2 disc right in the middle of one of the endings I hadn't seen, causing it to freeze up completely and not be able to go any further. (I have since replaced the PS2 Slim with a PS2 Fat — which hasn't arrived yet — and acquired a new copy of Ar Tonelico 2, but that's some money I didn't really need to spend.)

Fortunately, one of these problems has been rectified thanks to Andie's willingness to get her hands dirty and tinker around inside things. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) Loosely following some instructions online, we took the casing off my Yamaha P80 and had a look inside. It wasn't immediately obvious what was causing the key in question to stick, but as it happened, the process of popping it out (which we didn't even manage to do completely, just sort of half-out) and popping it back in again completely fixed the problem. This was, as I'm sure you can imagine, extremely pleasing as it means 1) I don't have to attempt to fit my piano into the back of a Peugeot 207; 2) I don't have to drive it 25 miles to the nearest Yamaha engineer; and 3) I don't have to pay aforementioned Yamaha engineer £100+ to get it fixed. Don't get me wrong, I would have happily paid Captain Piano-Fix his fee in order to get things sorted, but given that the fix was apparently that simple — I guess the key must have got knocked out of its normal place somehow, perhaps while we were moving house — I'm glad that I don't have to do any of the above three things.

This isn't the first time I've seen something get "fixed" by peculiar means. Back in university, I came into possession of a Sega Saturn, which I still own to this day (though I no longer have any games for it). The controller that came with the Saturn didn't work very well, so, having nothing better to do that evening — my housemate was out and no-one fancied going down to the Union to get obliterated on Juicy Lucies — I took it apart and decided to see what I could do, despite not having any clue whatsoever about how it worked. Eventually, I ended up cleaning the contacts on the circuit board using a piece of kitchen towel dipped in vodka — I honestly have no idea why this particular combination of things seemed like the right thing to do at the time; I was possibly a bit drunk — and putting it back together again. Astonishingly, it worked after this. To date, I have no idea if my ridiculous efforts to "fix" the thing actually had any effect or whether it was just the simple process of taking it apart and putting it together again.

I guess the moral of this story is that if something is broken (and out of warranty) then there are worse things you can do than pull out all the screws, pull everything out and then put it back together again. Obviously don't try and do this on a human body, however, because 1) human bodies don't have any screws and 2) they're a lot harder to put back together once you've disassembled them, which is why degrees in Medicine take so long to complete.

1181: 1:20am Blogging

It is 1:20am and I haven't written anything here, nor do I have any particular idea as to what to write about. So I'm just going to write any old crap that comes into my head right now. I hope you'll forgive me for that. This isn't going to be a "freewriting" exercise as my brain is not awake enough for the mental agility required for that (though doing freewriting when absolutely exhausted is probably an interesting exercise in itself) — instead, it's just going to be… stuff. All right? Good.

As I was logging in to write this post, I happened to see what my "top searches" are. I find these interesting to look at every so often as they provide a curious insight into how people are finding me here. And it's not always in the manner you might expect. (Those bloody stickman GIFs I made a while back attracted a lot of people, but that seems to have died down somewhat now.)

My top searches at present are "My Girlfriend is the President Irina Route", "Candy Crush Features on PC that Aren't on Mobile", "You Have Earned a Trophy" and "Cis Male Guilt". I think that about sums things up nicely, doesn't it? If any of those things have brought you here, allow me to address them in order: Irina's route in My Girlfriend is the President was my third favourite route after Ell-chan and Yukino but ahead of Ran-neechan; Candy Crush Saga is a mug's game whatever platform you play it on, so go and buy a copy of Bejeweled instead; well done, you have earned a trophy; and cis male guilt is one of the most irritating blights on the Interwebs of 2013. Happy? Good.

I've had a fairly dull day today, which is why I don't have a lot to talk about, really. I've done a fair amount of work on my game, though nothing significantly more interesting than the stuff I talked about yesterday. In terms of how far through the "plot" I am, though, I've officially finished the first "day" in the story and got the structure in place for the next five in-game days to branch off in several different directions and lead the player towards one of the endings. So progress is being made — noticeable progress — which is exciting.

In other news? I had a little play on the piano earlier, but given that the B key above middle C is sticking and making it very difficult to play at times, doing so is an infuriating experience. It is doubly infuriating because I have just come into possession of the piano scores for the Nier and Final Fantasy X-2 soundtracks along with a bunch of fan-arranged sheet music for a selection of tracks covering everything from Ar Tonelico 2 to School Days HQ. I would very much like to play all these and record them to share with you, but without a working B key I can't do that to the standard I'd like to. So next week I have to take my keyboard to a scary man in Ringwood who will hopefully fix it without too much difficulty.

That's about it, really. I think I'm going to go to bed now. Andie's having a night out with her friends and isn't back yet. I have no idea when she will be back, but I will almost definitely be awake when it happens. Or perhaps not. I have no idea. I'm quite tired. To such a degree that I'm babbling nonsense out through my fingers, so I think it's probably best for everyone involved if I just cut my losses, click that Publish button and go to bed now. Good night!

1179: Open for Browsing

A few days ago, the app AppGratis was pulled from the App Store for specific reasons unknown, but many conjectured it was due to the service that the company provided for developers — specifically in promotion of their apps. AppGratis, it was claimed, was gaming the system and manipulating the charts of the App Store so that they didn't really accurately reflect reality. I don't know whether or not that's actually true, but it's plausible given the shadiness of some parts of the mobile sector.

What I do know, however, is that the App Store charts are useless anyway, largely due to the huge amounts of miscategorisation (is that a word? It is now) going on, making it absolutely impossible to browse and find something you're looking for.

But is it really that bad? I decided to do a little experiment to see how accurate the descriptors in the Games category — the only App Store category to have subdivisions — actually are. Let's take a look at the Top 10 in a selection of these categories and see if the games therein actually belong in those groupings, shall we? Wait, where are you going…?

Huh. Sod those guys, we didn't like them anyway, right? Here we go, then.

Adventure Games (Paid)

Wikipedia's definition of adventure games:

An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical (e.g. reflexes) challenge.^[1] The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Nearly all adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult.^[2]

Temple Run Oz — not an adventure game, it's an action/arcade game
Minecraft — not an adventure game, it's a… Minecraft
Badland — not an adventure game, it's a platform game
Doodle Jump — not an adventure game, it's a platform/arcade game
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City — not an adventure game, it's an action game
Temple Run Brave — see No. 1
Dead Crossing — not an adventure game, it's a shooter/driving game
Eden — not an adventure game, it's a Minecraft-alike
Clear Vision — not an adventure game, it's a sniper-centric shooting game
Blue Toad Murder Files — HOLY SHIT AN ADVENTURE GAME

One out of ten is correctly categorised. So that's not all that good, really, is it? Let's look at the free adventure games.

Adventure Games (Free)

Gangster Granny — shooter
Temple Run 2 — See No. 1 in the Paid category
The Simpsons: Tapped Out — citybuilder
The Sims: FreePlay — It's The Sims, but more boring
The Croods — citybuilder/farming game
Frontline Commando: D-Day — shooter
Minecraft Lite — Minecraft
Jail Break Now — vaguely adventure-ish
Tap Paradise Cove — citybuilder/farming
Nimble Quest — Snake with a twist

Nope. Nope. Nope. One out of ten, and that might not even count as it's more of a stealth game. Let's look at a favourite genre: role-playing games.

Role-Playing Games (Paid)

Wikipedia again:

A role-playing game (RPG and sometimes roleplaying game^[1]^[2]) is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting or through a process of structured decision-making or character development.^[3] Actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines.^[4]

Slayin — arcade game with RPG elements
Gemini Rue — THIS IS AN ADVENTURE GAME WHAT THE FUCK IS IT DOING IN THE RPG SECTION
Mighty Dungeons — old-school dungeon-crawler. It counts.
Skylanders Battlegrounds — Sort of RPG-ish, but more action game than anything
Dentist Surgery Game — NO. Not even a little bit.
Minecraft Explorer Pro — Not even a game; this should be in the Reference section.
World Explorer – Made for Minecraft — Crap Minecraft clone. Not an RPG.
Monster Wars — Strategy game
Surviving High School — Visual novel/adventure game, not RPG
Minecraft Papercraft Studio — Not a game at all

Hmm. Slightly better. Still not great. And the presence of Gemini Rue in there just feels like the App Store is mocking me for writing this. Let's look at the freebies.

Role-Playing Games (Free)

Beauty Dentist — NO. (Also what the fuck is up with all the dentist games?)
Tekken Card Tournament — Vaguely RPG-ish, but no. It's a card game. There is a card game section.
Mighty Monsters — Pokémon ripoff. Crap, but could accurately be described as an RPG.
Come on, Zombie! — More of an RTS than an action RPG, but I'll allow it.
Campus Life — Poor-quality The Sims knockoff.
Campus Crush — Visual novel/dating sim, not RPG
Dungeon Hunter 4 — Yes!
My Beauty Spa — No!
Epoch — shooter
Crime City — Citybuilder wanting to be edgy, actually just crap. Not RPG.

Oh dear. (And seriously, people, why all the virtual dentistry?)

What about board games? I like board games, and there are some good adaptations on the App Store, I know that for a fact. So what do the charts look like?

Board Games (Paid)

Monopoly — Yep
Scrabble — Yep
Words With Friends — Yep
Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition — Yep
Trivial Pursuit — Yep
The Game of Life — Yep
MahJong — Please learn the difference between "Mahjong" and "Mahjong Solitaire", but yep
Pentix: warning! this developer likes to put stupidly long titles in things in the hopes of making their game look better! — Nope
Doodle God — Nope
Risk — Yep

Much better. Not perfect, but better. Shame all the top-selling ones are crap board games, though. Seriously, people, two different varieties of Monopoly? I don't mean to sound like a board game snob (actually, I do) but there are far better games out there. But at least it's actually in the right fucking category.

Board Games (Free)

6 Numbers — Countdown ripoff. More of a puzzle game.
Lazors — Again, more of a puzzle game, but there is a board game a bit like this.
Bingo — Nope. To the Casino section with you! Away, filth!
Four In A Row 2013 — (Spoiler: it's the same as Four in a Row has always been) Yep
Words With Friends Free — Yep
Monopoly Hotels — NOPE. This is a shitty Monopoly-themed building game, not a board game. Sadly, there isn't a "shitty building game" category, but it would better belong elsewhere.
Sudoku — Puzzle, not board game.
Ruzzle — Yet another Boggle ripoff, but yep
Chess Free — Yes!
Friendle — Live Board Games with Friends and Family — The clue's in the name!

Again, better. But again, crap that has nothing to do with board games (except the name in Monopoly Hotels' case) is in the board games category.

So the situation varies a bit from category to category. But it should hopefully be clear from that that there are some significant problems there. Imagine you really want to play an adventure game on your iPhone or iPad — something like the excellent Gemini Rue or Broken Sword. Browse through the adventure game category and you may well have trouble finding things that are actually adventure games. That's a problem.

Sadly, without a complete wipe of the App Store's catalogue and recategorisation of everything, I think we're too late to really do anything about this. Developers deliberately submit their titles to the wrong categories to get greater visibility, and this effect spreads as more and more people do it — and in the meantime, Apple don't appear to care all that much when things are incorrectly categorised. The whole situations is a big ol' mess, and I'm not surprised independent developers working on genuinely great games are enormously frustrated that it's impossible to get their stuff seen amid all the other shite.

1178: Mage Knight Night

We played Mage Knight again this evening and actually managed to successfully get all the way through the introductory scenario, which allows the opportunity to explore the basic rules and get a feel for how the game as a whole works, but which is also (theoretically) significantly shorter than the other scenarios. It still took us about three hours altogether.

I have mixed feelings about long games like this. On the one hand, I really like the experience — the depth and complexity inherent in long games means that they tend to remain consistently interesting throughout, even in something like Mage Knight where there's a fair amount of downtime. Mage Knight is designed in such a way that while other people are taking their turns, you can easily be planning what you're going to do next, so in actual fact you can keep turns fairly snappy if you take the time to think ahead. There are still a lot of turns to take, however.

On the other hand, games that take a long time tend not to hit the table all that often, and we tend to end up playing something we're all familiar with like Agricola, which still frustrates me inordinately because I suck at it. (I do at least have my own copy with which I can practice now, however.)

Despite the apparent complexity of the game that the "walkthrough" game guide appears to imply it has by explaining everything in exhaustive detail, Mage Knight's mechanics are actually relatively simple. It's basically what you get if you combine a deck-building game like Dominion or Ascension with a turn-based strategy RPG-type thing. There are random elements, but for the most part the game is a matter of setting yourself up for success, and then being able to make the best use of the resources you have to hand at any one time.

The basic mechanic involves playing cards to gain values in various abilities. Move cards allow you to, err, move; Influence cards allow you to purchase items and perform special actions in populated locations such as villages and forts; Siege and Ranged Attack cards allow you to deal damage before the enemy attacks; Block cards let you fend off enemy attacks; Attack cards let you attack the enemy after they've had a pop at you; Attack and Block cards with elemental affinities are more or less effective depending on the capabilities of the enemy you're going toe-to-toe with. These "value" cards are then supplemented with cards that allow the use of various special abilities, and most cards have both a weak and a strong effect, with the stronger effect requiring the expenditure of "mana," which can either be collected (and possibly stockpiled) through special actions or drawn from a common pool that changes every so often.

The introductory scenario is basically a case of trying to collect as much shit as possible before the game is over. Bonus points are scored for all the "extra" things you acquire over and above your starting deck — spells, special abilities, mana crystals, treasures, supporting units — and lost for any damage you're still suffering from at the end of the game. In retrospect, triggering the end of the game when I did tonight was a silly move — I should have moved away and simply continued to try and rack up points. (Yes, I lost. Except at being wounded, which I was the best at. Yay negative bonuses!)

My trouble with strategy games like this is that I often lack the confidence to try certain more adventurous things. I'll give you an example: in Mage Knight, when you uncover a "Mage Tower" structure on a new map tile, you can conquer it if you can defeat its guardians, who are typically quite strong and resistant to certain types of damage. The rewards are great — particularly when you take end-game bonuses into account — but it's a bit of a risk, especially if you have a crap hand of cards at the time. This is where the "planning ahead" bit comes into it, I guess — something I clearly need to work on, since I spent most of my time earning points from exploring the map and defeating the "rampaging" enemies on the map rather than the more difficult opponents that would have earned me both more points immediately as well as the potential for bigger bonuses at the end of the game.

Anyway. I'm pleased we got through a whole game, and I'm keen to try it again — perhaps just the introductory scenario again, making some different decisions along the way — and see if I can do any better. I'm also quite tempted to get my own copy, since there are full rules for playing it solo, which I think will be quite an interesting experience. It has the feel of an old-school computer role-playing game — moving a bit at a time over a sprawling map, interacting with people through abstract systems and gradually growing in power. It works well — it's just very time-consuming!

1177: Dev Diary 2

Progress has been continuing on the RPG Maker game I'm working on (which is called One Year Later if you missed the slightly spoilerish post a while back). I'm very pleased with how things are going, because I've pretty much figured out How It All Works and am picking up speed with actually making things happen.

Here's the gist of things. All of this will be common knowledge to the player before they start playing if they read the accompanying "manual" or help file or website or whatever I put out alongside it, so these aren't really spoilers. I will keep specific plot details that aren't immediately apparent under wraps for now, however — I'd like people to explore this game's story with "beginner's mind", after all!

The game is set one year after the conclusion of a typical JRPG, when our plucky band of heroes drawn together by fate successfully defeated the demonic overlord T'Bon and restored peace to the land. At the end of their adventure, they had one last meal together in a pub they'd grown fond of, and agreed to meet back up again exactly one year later. The game begins on that day.

There are six main characters in the story.

Amarysse "Ami" Jerhynsson is the game's main character. She's a 30-year old woman from the farming village of Wishford, the destruction of which set her on her path to adventure when she was rescued from the wreckage by a wandering mercenary. She became the de facto leader of the group thanks to her level-headedness and rationality, despite the fact she never saw herself as particularly remarkable. Since her adventure, she's spent the last year helping the citizens of Wishford rebuild their town, and has been taking after her parents by tending the farm beside her house, much to the pleasure of Wishford's citizens.

Daren "Dax" Zael is the mercenary who rescued Ami from the wreckage of Wishford. No-one knows exactly how old he is, but he appears to be of a similar age or slightly older than Ami in appearance. As soon as he opens his mouth, however, his immature sense of humour and crudeness generally makes people think a little differently about his otherwise seemingly noble bearing. He was a strong fighter and was always the first into battle to protect his friends from harm.

Feena Denimore is a priestess of the Order, the organised religion that worships the divine entity known only as "The Goddess". She is skilled in divine magic and is a beloved priestess, but when she lets her hair down outside of her holy duties, she's cheeky, spunky and flirtatious, and more than capable of drinking someone like Dax under the table.

Hiro Nagase is a teenage boy who spent his formative years learning to fight with a sword under the tutelage of his father. These skills were put to the test shortly after the party came across him in his seemingly-abandoned family home — his parents had been killed by T'Bon's forces, and Hiro decided to tag along with the party in an attempt to get revenge. He likes to make out he is braver than he is, gets easily embarrassed and frequently says stupid things without thinking them through first.

Lily Cole is a teenage girl who came from the small fishing village of Bannford. She once had the strange ability to summon "Guardians" — supernatural creatures thought to be nothing but a myth — and eventually used this skill to seal away T'Bon once and for all. Since the final battle, she lost her powers and is now nothing but a normal, rather cheerful and optimistic teenage girl — traits she somehow managed to retain even in the party's darkest hours.

Zero is a powerful, knowledgeable mage whose real name is unknown. The party rescued him from torture at the hand of one of T'Bon's lieutenants, and he adopted the name "Zero" as a mark of spite against those who had abused him — an attempt to reclaim the word and give it positive connotations. Zero is typically stony-faced, contemplative and quiet, but occasionally displays a dry, dark sense of humour.

—

The game begins with Amarysse leaving home and heading for the capital, then meeting up with her former comrades-in-arms. Exactly where the story goes from there depends on the choices the player makes as Amarysse — which aren't always explicit choices from a menu. Sometimes taking a particular action (or choosing not to act) has an effect on the unfolding story and its eventual conclusion. There will be multiple endings as well as a "true ending" that is only accessible once certain conditions have been met. Discovering the "true ending" will require that the player make use of the New Game+ feature to carry over certain data from one playthrough to the next when they see one of the conclusions.

Interacting with the game will largely be like a regular top-down sprite-based JRPG. Players will control Amarysse and any party members tagging along with her as they visit various locations. The emphasis is very much on the story, so what needs to be done next in order to advance the plot will always be very obvious, though charging straight for the next story trigger without completing certain side objectives may mean you miss out on certain events — or perhaps trigger new ones later. Through the New Game+ system, the game will reward the player for experimenting and trying all the possibilities in various playthroughs.

Amarysse collects "topics" as discussions unfold between her, the party members and other incidental characters. Topics have three levels — at "bronze" level, they're something Amarysse is curious about; at "silver" level, they're something she's found something out about and wants to know more; at "gold" level, they're a truth she's discovered beyond any doubt. Advancing the plot will sometimes require Amarysse to use the topics she has collected to trigger various events or discussions between characters. At other times, she will have the opportunity to relax a little by herself and contemplate some of the things that are weighing on her mind. Sometimes, whether or not Amarysse has knowledge of a particular topic will have a significant impact on whether or not she can resolve a critical situation.

Currently, I have a plot outline in my mind. I know how the whole thing is going to end, and I know a few snippets of things that are going to happen along the way. I just have to work out the specifics, which I've found tend to flow quite naturally once I start actually composing scenes. I'm very much looking forward to exploring these characters through writing, and I hope some of you will take the opportunity to explore them through playing the game when it's finished. At present, I have no idea when that will be, but I will, of course, keep you posted!

1176: Absolute Destiny Apocalypse

Utena-1-_(2) At the insistence of my good friend Lynette (well, all right, she mentioned it a couple of times and I was intrigued) I have been watching an anime series called Revolutionary Girl Utena, also known in various places as Shoujo Kakumei Utena and La fillette révolutionnaire Utena.

Utena, as I shall refer to it from hereon, is clearly from a very different period to the anime I have watched to date. It has a very distinctive "'90s anime" appearance to it, particularly with regard to character proportions and design — everyone has chins that could cut glass, and all the girls have inhumanly long legs, a fact usually accentuated by their clothing — but it still makes use of a lot of common non-realistic "stylized" features that we see in modern anime, particularly with regard to facial expressions and the way people move.

Thematically, it's also of a genre I haven't really explored before — technically, it could be described as a "magical girl" anime since Utena regularly gains special powers accompanied by special effects and recognisable catchphrases, but it's a lot more than just Pretty Girl Fights Crime. No; so far I'm only relatively few episodes into the whole thing but it's very clear that there are a lot of things going on.

A friend of mine described Utena as being "like a fever dream" and that's absolutely true. There's a curious sense of surrealism about most of the episodes, with fairly mundane activities juxtaposed with obviously fantastic happenings that only certain characters are aware of. The whole thing is also absolutely riddled with imagery and visual metaphor, some of which are more obvious than others and most of which only contribute to the strange, surreal feelings of things not quite being what they seem.

But you probably want to know what it's all about, right? Well… as I say, I've only seen a few episodes so far so I can't comment with full authority on everything that has happened, but here goes.

00003sp0 Utena is a statuesque high school girl who habitually dresses as a boy. The reason for this is that when she was younger, she was helped by a kind "prince", who gives her a ring with a rose signet and tells the young Utena that it will "lead her to him". It transpires that there are other people out there who wear the rose signet on their rings, and they're at Utena's school. Specifically, they're the student council, who appear to have some sort of special relationship with an unknown entity, person or organisation known as "End of the World" and are keen to "smash the world's shell to bring about revolution" as dictated by their creed. ("If it cannot break out of its shell, a chick will die without being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg.")

Key to the plans of the Student Council is the "Rose Bride" Anthy Himemiya, who also happens to be a student at Utena's school — and who appears to share some characteristics with the "prince" from Utena's past. Anthy, for the most part, appears to be a normal girl, but whoever is "engaged" to her "possesses" her and can make her do anything they want. Through a series of unfortunate happenings, Utena becomes engaged to Anthy and then proceeds to protect her from the other members of the Student Council, who all have their own reasons for wanting to possess the "power of Dios" that Anthy contains.

The interesting thing about the series so far is that no-one is really outright "evil" — there are plenty of obnoxious characters who are unpleasant or dislikable, but they all appear to have their reasons for doing the things they do. In fact, there are several characters who, despite being on the Student Council and thus at various points taking the role of "antagonist", are actually rather sympathetic and/or likable. It's really cool, and I'm looking forward to finding out the truth behind some of them.

Anyway, given that I'm only partway through the series' first story arc, that's really all I can say for now, but I will say that I'm enjoying it, even if it's currently very confusing and bewildering. I get the impression that's entirely deliberate, though — I wonder how many answers I'll have by the end of it all?

1175: Stream of Rubbish

I'm really not at all sure what to write about tonight, so I'm going to indulge in some "freewriting", if you'll pardon me. For those unaware, "freewriting" is where you just start writing and keep going for a set period of time without stopping or going back to correct the things you've done in order to make them make sense. (When freewriting on the computer, I find it very difficult to break my normal habits of automatically correcting typos for the most part, so I am allowing myself that small indulgence, but otherwise this post will be pure, bona fide stream-of-consciousness bullshit. I hope you enjoy. And if you don't… well, I don't really care all that much as it's 11:33 in the evening and I'd quite like to go to bed. I should probably close these brackets and finish this paragraph sometime soon, huh.)

Anyway. What is happening right now? Not a lot, because it's 11:33 in the evening and I'd quite like to go to bed, as previously mentioned. I am sitting in front of my Mac frantically typing this blog post while Andie is sitting in the other room watching Family Guy on BBC Three. This must be at least the sixth or seventh time I've heard the whole series go around and around and around and I'm never quite sure how I feel about it. Family Guy can be quite entertaining, but it's one of those things that it seems to be quite fashionable to bash on these days, so I'm never quite sure if I'm supposed to like it or not. I do know that I like it rather less now that it's been around and around so many times. Certain things remain entertaining on repeat viewings — as I've previously said elsewhere on this blog, for me Friends is one of those shows that I can watch over and over again without getting tired of it for the most part — but for me, Family Guy is a bit of a one-trick pony, particularly when they start pulling the "remember the time when" etc etc jokes where they cut away to something HILARIOUS that probably didn't really happen. What a hoot!

I'm going to stop talking about Family Guy now and think of something else to say. But what? Hmm. How about food? Today we went out for lunch with my parents to Yo! Sushi in WestQuay. I'm a big fan of Yo! Sushi even if it is a bit expensive, really. Go on Sunday, though, and it's an all-you-can-eat for £20 sort of affair, though, so if you leave plenty of room you can ensure you get your money's worth. I really like the food there, too. It's tasty. I'm sure it's not quite up to the standard of a "proper" sushi restaurant, but it's certainly very tasty and a bit different from the normal sort of things that you get around the place.

I can still hear Family Guy and it's a little bit distracting. I will try and maintain my concentration. I set a goal for myself to keep writing non-stop for ten minutes and I'm about halfway through at this point. Lucy the rat is currently running rather aggressively on the wheel in her cage — I can hear, not see her — so I will have to go and check on her in a bit. I like our rats. They are friendly. Lara likes to run up the sleeve of my dressing gown, which is very amusing except when she does a wee in my armpit. To be fair to her, she has only done that once, but it was not very nice.

Anyway, I believe I was talking about sushi before I got distracted by Family Guy. One of the things I like at Yo! Sushi is takoyaki — octopus dumplings which various Japanese video games taught me about the existence of. (I'm specifically thinking of the takoyaki stand people hang out at in Persona 3, but the game I'm currently playing on the DS, Lifesigns, also features a lot of mentions of takoyaki). For some reason, mentioning something repeatedly like that really makes me want to investigate it and try it for myself — and hey, what do you know? Turns out that takoyaki is pretty tasty, though I'm not sure it was quite what I expected when I first had it. I recommend you try it. I didn't have it today because by the time it came around on the conveyor belt at Yo! Sushi, we were already pretty full on everything else we'd eaten. Another time, dear octopus balls, another time.

One more minute to go. Can I break a thousand words by the time that minute passes? Probably not. I'd have to type a little bit quicker than I am typing right now. I can type pretty quickly, but I'm not sure I can type 250 words in a minute. That would be pretty speedy. Superhuman speedy, in fact.

Oh, time's up. Time to go. I apologise for the disjointed, dumb nature of this blog post but I thought I'd do that instead of babbling on about Ar Tonelico II again. (I'll get back to that tomorrow! Just kidding! Maybe.) Anyway. Time for bed. Good night.

1174: The Second Tower

I beat Ar Tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica this evening. Or, more accurately, I saw one of its four endings. Two of the other endings won't be particularly difficult to obtain with the tactical saves I made on the way to the finale, but the last remaining one will require playing about 80% of the game again, albeit with a completely different second "phase". I'll probably take care of that last ending alongside a new game, which will either be Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory or the third Ar Tonelico game, both of which I anticipate I will be enthusing about considerably on these pages in the very near future if previous instalments in their respective franchises are anything to go by.

Anyway, Ar Tonelico II. It's… well, fantastic. I must confess to having not been as immediately smitten with it as I was the first game, as the conflicting art styles between the field and battle sprites (and between the field sprites of the first game and the second game) were initially a little jarring. (Seriously, everyone has really, really big hands and massive feet on the field maps and it's very disconcerting to begin with.) But after not very long at all, I found myself looking past this rather superficial consideration and immersing myself in what turned out to be a very pleasingly deep and meaningful story packed with good characterisation and questionable translation from the original Japanese. (On that note, though, the translation was at least understandable despite a few errors, and certainly no worse than some visual novels I've played.)

Spoilarz Ahead

Ar Tonelico II stands on its own, but also fits into the current "trilogy" as the sort of "dark middle episode". Whereas the first Ar Tonelico was rather bright and breezy most of the way through, the land of Ar Tonelico II is a bit bleaker. The people are struggling, there isn't enough land for everyone and everyone is clinging to the seemingly hopeless desire that the land's Holy Maiden will be able to create "Metafalica" — a verdant green land summoned through the use of Reyvateil Song Magic. Plenty of political machinations and backstabbings threaten to fuck everything up completely (and pretty much do on several occasions over the course of the entire narrative) but, this being a JRPG, our plucky band of heroes are there to wander the lands, right wrongs and eventually figure out how in the world they are going to help everyone find hope for the future.

Ar Tonelico II's story is nice in that it isn't quite the clichéd "Big Bad wants to destroy the world" business. Sure, there's world-threatening stuff going on and the eventual aim of the game is to save the world from an unpleasant fate, but it's not quite what you might expect. For starters, you spend most of the game not being quite sure who the "good" and "bad" guys are. There's no sign of a single easily-identifiable antagonist who is fucking shit up and needs a good Omnislash to the face; no white-haired pretty boy accompanied by tubular bells and organ music every time he appears. In fact, over the course of the narrative, none of these characters are presented as one-dimensional — most of them go through some sort of change and/or growth as the story progresses.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ar Tonelico II in this regard is the fact that the final boss "Mir" from the first game is actually a party member in the second — though you don't know this when you first meet her, and in fact it's entirely possible to go through pretty much the whole game without noticing this or figuring it out, depending on the choices you make and the optional events you witness. Not having played the first game won't affect your enjoyment of the second, but if you have played the first game, the moment where you find yourself going "Wait… OH. Mir?!" is a "big reveal" on a par with Darth Revan in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or SHODAN's first appearance in System Shock 2.

Herein lies one of the interesting things about the first two Ar Tonelico games in general: "good" and "evil" aren't absolute. In Ar Tonelico, we get some insight into why Mir is the way she is and why she is so angry about everything — and it's easy to find yourself sympathising with her rather than just wanting to kick her ass. In Ar Tonelico II, by spending some time with her as a (relatively) normal person, we get to find out a whole lot more about her — what happened to her in the distant past, what led her to her actions in the first game, and how she feels about what has happened to her then and since. If you follow her "route" through to its complete conclusion in Ar Tonelico II, it's a really wonderful story arc for one of the most interesting, troubled characters I've encountered in a very long time. I don't yet know if she shows up in Ar Tonelico Qoga, the third game, but I'll be very happy to see her again if she does.

The overriding theme of the Ar Tonelico series is that of bonds between people, and this is particularly apparent in the second game. The main theme of Ar Tonelico II's story is that the more intense a relationship between two or more people, the more painful it is. The more people you surround yourself with, the more "alive" you feel from being part of something bigger than yourself, but the more pain you suffer when you lose those precious people. The world-ending chaos at the end of Ar Tonelico II is not brought about by a desire for dominance or a display of power, but instead out of a simple desire to not feel that sharp pain of loss any longer. If everyone was able to abandon their physical bodies and live on purely as an individual spiritual entity, the primary antagonist's theory goes, no-one would have any need for other people, no-one would feel the pain of loss, and everyone would be happy in their complete and total individuality. But, responds the protagonist, no-one would be truly alive then. Life would not have meaning drawn from the people around you and the hardships you work together to overcome. You'd be little more than data.

It's an interesting and somewhat bittersweet message, but it works hugely well in the context of both the overarching plot and the smaller, individual character-led stories that unfold over the course of the whole game. I'm all for exploring deep and thought-provoking themes through interactive entertainment, and Ar Tonelico II successfully achieves that without sacrificing the "spectacular" side of its overall experience. It's still recognisably a JRPG with all the over-the-top pyrotechnics and anime-style special attacks that entails, but at the same time it's a complex and emotional tale far beyond the "Evil Guy Is Over There, Go Stab Him" trope that people (largely incorrectly) assume still characterises the genre.

In other words, just go play it, all right?