2033: #4favocharacters

As luck would have it, just as I was settling down to get this written, someone tagged me in one of those viral Twitter things where you post pictures of four favourite somethings (in this case characters) and then tag a bunch of new people to see what they come up with.

I responded relatively hastily, though I did make one substitution before I submitted. I kept mine to the world of games, largely because I think that was the intention, and also because if I start getting into TV series and anime I would have been there all night deciding.

Anyway. This seems like a good opportunity to expand on my choices. My picks were as follows:

Katsuragi (Senran Kagura)

I’ve already written reams of text on Katsuragi so I won’t delve too much into that again, but suffice to say that Katsu-nee is one of my favourite characters due to the fact that I think she’d be fun to hang out with if she was a real person. I question whether or not she’d actually hang out with a dude like me, of course, given that Senran Kagura rather strongly implies that she’s a bit gay — also the whole “I’m not a ninja” thing — but, assuming that sort of thing isn’t a consideration… yes, I think Katsuragi would be fun to hang around with.

The most appealing thing about Katsuragi is not her aggressive sexuality — though her self-confidence and willingness to pursue what she desires rather than moping around in the dark about it is something I can respect — but rather it’s that in her calmer moments, she’s the very model of the perfect older sister. She’s kind, she’s caring, she looks out for the people she loves and she’ll do anything to protect them — though she’s most certainly not averse to playing a prank or two to have some fun at their expense.

Senran Kagura as a whole is filled with deep and fascinating characters, and those who actually bother to give the series the time of day (rather than writing it off because boobs) all have their favourites, leading to frequently quite heated discussions online. I could have picked any number of the Senrans, but on balance, it’s Katsuragi that my thoughts keep returning to, so Katsuragi it is.

Noire (Hyperdimension Neptunia)

I love all of the Neptunia cast to pieces, but from the moment I “met” her for the first time, I knew that Noire was going to be my favourite. Twintailed hair, a tsundere personality, a propensity towards attractive but impractical-looking outfits with garters, belts and straps all over the place? Sign me up.

After spending a considerable amount of time with her over the course of a number of different games now (with more still to go), I realise that my connection with Noire goes somewhat deeper. It’s not just that she exhibits traits that I find attractive. It’s not even that she’s cute or has a figure to die for (man, Tsunako really knows how to draw curves). It’s that, amid the chaos of your typical Neptunia story, I find her to be probably the most relatable of the cast — with the possible exception of IF, whose world-weary exasperation with the nonsense she constantly gets caught up in nicely reflects the feelings of frustration and annoyance I often feel at the most stupid things our own world has to offer.

Noire, though, she’s an interesting one. Determined to always do her very best and prove that she “can only do everything”, she often falls foul of her own ambitions and desire to climb to the top of the heap. This is particularly apparent in Hyperdevotion Noire, where an impulsive act towards the beginning of the game throws the world into chaos — but rather than slinking away quietly to pretend like she had nothing to do with it, she takes responsibility and does her best to make things right, even in the face of constant and frustrating opposition.

Noire is lonely, too. She has a lot of what could be described as niche interests — though not quite to the degree of the yaoi-loving Vert — but doesn’t quite feel comfortable sharing them with anyone. The closest she comes to opening up to another person is with the player-protagonist characters in Hyperdevotion Noire and Hyperdimension Neptunia PP‘; it’s kind of sad that she has trouble being this honest with the people who are ostensibly her best friends, even as they’re honest with her. I suppose that, more than anything, is why I feel like I can relate to her somewhat; while I’m not a goddess running a country, I can most certainly understand the desire to shout about the things you’re passionate about but hesitating, not knowing what people will think of you if you do open up.

Maya Fey (Ace Attorney)

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Maya Fey from the Ace Attorney series, a character whom I don’t particularly relate to as such, but whom I find enormously fun to have around.

Maya is the perfect foil to Ace Attorney protagonist Phoenix Wright’s initially bumbling ways, and grows and changes with him as a character. Initially appearing to be rather childish, over the course of the Ace Attorney games she gradually shows herself to be a deep and complex character, holding enormous respect for her cultural traditions and a passionate belief in Wright’s ability to find the truth in even the most confusing of cases.

Maya and Phoenix’s relationship is kept somewhat ambiguous throughout the games. It’s clear that there’s a bit of a “spark” there between them, but whether or not it’s simply close friendship through shared trauma — they first meet as a result of the death of Maya’s sister Mia, which Phoenix ends up investigating and eventually solving — or something more is never quite clear. One can probably assume that Phoenix, being a few years older (early 20s to Maya’s 17 at the outset of the first Ace Attorney game) is understandably hesitant to even consider taking things any further, but frankly, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see them get together in one of the games. To my recollection, though, it hasn’t happened — though it has been a while!

Anyway. Maya is a fun character who is enjoyable to hang out with. Since the majority of the Ace Attorney games unfold from first-person perspective, Maya is the character you see most frequently, since she often offers observations and suggestions to “you” (as Phoenix) while you’re investigating the crime scenes. Spend that much time with a character — the Ace Attorney games aren’t short! — and you’re bound to develop some affection for them.

Hanako (Katawa Shoujo)

Games had captivated and emotionally engaged me with their stories before, but it was Katawa Shoujo that forged the tastes I have today. And, specifically, it was Hanako — though before we get into any arguments about “best girl”, I liked all the others; I just liked Hanako the best. And here’s why.

Again, like with Noire, I found Hanako to be relatable. And again, not because I’m in the literal same situation as her — Hanako has burn scars all over one side of her body due to a past trauma, and thankfully I am free of such readily apparent mementoes of tragedy — but because I recognise so many of her personality traits, her route in Katawa Shoujo was almost painful to play through.

Hanako suffers from dreadful social anxiety, much like I have done. Hanako’s is far worse than mine, at least at the start of the game — she literally can’t stay in the same room with people she doesn’t know — but her feelings of being trapped in an uncomfortable situation, of wanting to do nothing but bolt; they were all too familiar.

Hanako’s route is one of the most interesting ones in Katawa Shoujo because things sort of happen in a bit of a haze. When protagonist Hisao sleeps with Hanako, for example, it’s clear that the two of them were very much caught up in the moment, with Hisao unable to restrain himself, and Hanako unable to communicate quite what she was feeling. This leads to a gut-wrenchingly awkward scene after the fact where Hisao realises that technically Hanako never actually said “yes” to him. From here, the story can branch in one of two different ways: Hisao can either try and be overprotective of Hanako, which ends rather badly with her finally snapping and casting him out of her life, or he can quietly support her when she needs it, allowing her to work through her issues at her own pace, opening up when she’s good and ready.

It’s this last bit that I found particularly poignant. There are a lot of things with which I need help, that is most certainly for sure. But I’m someone who tends to prefer to have the satisfaction of at least trying to solve things himself. I don’t like asking for help, and I don’t like people interfering when I haven’t invited them — but I do welcome support and encouragement when I make it clear that I am in need of it. I understood Hanako’s frustration in the “bad ending”. I understood her sense of closure in the good ending as both she and Hisao come to terms with their own broken lives, accepting both themselves and each other as they both look forward to a future in which they no longer have to be alone.

1376: Turnabout Weekend

I am glad this week is over. Really glad. It’s not been a great one.

Granted, pretty much all of the “bad things” that have happened have actually happened to Andie rather than me — she’s the one who got ill, then her phone broke, just to add insult to injury — but what with me being somewhat of the anxious persuasion, all this has had a bit of an effect on me too.

Still, pretty sure the worst of everything is over and done with now, which means we can hopefully enjoy a quiet, peaceful weekend and get back to some semblance of normality next week. Andie’s not yet sure if she’s going back to work next week or not, but that’s up to her, not me, of course.

So what am I up to? Well, I spent a chunk of this evening playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory and finally cleared the enormous backlog of sidequests I’d built up, leading me to achieve a “perfect 40” rating for a chapter, which is what I was really after. Helpfully, chasing all these sidequests has equipped me with some powerful items and levelled my characters up to “comfortably overpowered” status, so the remainder of the story should be reasonably straightforward — though, of course, there will be plenty more sidequests to do along the way, too.

I also downloaded Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies (aka Ace Attorney 5) yesterday, and am already in love with it. Those who know me well will know that the Ace Attorney series is one of those few series that, like Neptunia, I will immediately purchase a new installment of without question and without reading reviews. I’m only partway into the game’s first chapter so far, but it’s already impressive stuff.

The DS versions of the Ace Attorney series were actually enhanced ports of Game Boy Advance games, and thus were rather technologically limited. It wasn’t until brand new content was added in the fifth case of the first game, the fourth game in the main series and the Ace Attorney Investigations spinoff came out that we started to see some slight variations on the formula — better use of the touchscreen, for example, along with objects that could be examined in 3D.

Ace Attorney 5 is a bit of a milestone for the series, then, in that it’s the first installment to be specifically built for the platform it’s on rather than based on old code and assets. And it shows.

I was a little worried when I heard that Capcom was making the shift to 3D characters and environments — the 2D artwork of the original games was always charming and full of character, and I was concerned that the move to 3D would lose some of this. Thankfully, it hasn’t; the 3D characters are cel-shaded and look convincingly like much better-animated versions of their 2D counterparts, with a few tweaks here and there. Phoenix Wright looks noticeably older, for example, but this makes sense — by this point, he’s a veteran defense lawyer, not the frantically sweating rookie he was in the first game.

The 3D aspect also allows for more dramatic, cinematic presentation; occasionally, in the old games, the view would switch to an overview of the courtroom while the peanut gallery would mumble about something that had just been said. Now, rather than this being a static image, it’s a dynamic pan across the courtroom that looks much cooler. It’s a small touch, but it’s neat.

There’s anime sequences, too, to depict things that don’t really work with just the usual visual novel-style narration. This also means that characters have a voice; I’m pretty sure Wright is voiced by the same guy who did Jude in Tales of Xillia, which will continue to prove distracting until I find out for sure.

In fact, let me research that right now.

………

Yes, he is. Here’s proof. Well, that answers that. So long as Wright doesn’t start coming out with things like “I wish we didn’t have to fight, but we must!” I think we’ll probably be all good.

Oh, yeah. You should buy Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies. I’m sure there will be more enthusing about it in the very near future. Now I’m off to play Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies and flip the bird to this week. Mata ne.

1192: Take That!

(Because it’s just too obvious to start a post about Ace Attorney with the word “Objection!” these days.)

I’ve started replaying the Ace Attorney series, largely because I recently reacquired the two installments I used to have in my collection that went missing when I loaned them to someone unknown a while back. (The person I thought I loaned them to swears blind he doesn’t have them, and I believe him, sooo…) After finishing Lifesigns in all its Ace Attorney-esque glory, I was keen to revisit Nick, Maya and the rest of the gang for some happy fun times.

And I’m reminded why this is still one of my favourite game series of all time. It pushes all my buttons. Visual novel? Check. Adventure game elements (i.e. puzzles?) Check. Interesting characters? Check. Anime silliness? Check. Overdramatic music? Check.

It’s testament to the quality of this game series that, even remembering most (though not all!) of the solutions to the various puzzles throughout, it’s still a compelling experience I’m happy to sit through again, primarily because of the characters throughout.

Phoenix himself is a good protagonist. He doesn’t enforce his personality on the player too much, but he’s very much his own person rather than a blank slate. His growth from constantly-sweating, nervous rookie lawyer in the first game to confident giantkiller over the course of the entire series is heartwarming to see, and as I recall, taking down the villain in the final case of the third game was an immensely satisfying experience on a par with, say, defeating Sephiroth for the first time in FFVII.

One thing I like about the series is that it manages to successfully involve the player in a sense of “conflict” without ever resorting to violence. Not once does Phoenix draw a gun or any other weapon over the course of the game, yet the courtroom showdowns are as thrilling and exciting as any lengthy RPG battle sequence. This is one thing that actually improves slightly as the game progresses — in the first game, you simply have five “lives” in the courtroom sequences, whereas in later games you have a “health bar” that depletes by various amounts when you make an incorrect answer or accusation. This is a much better solution, as it allows for a storytelling trick that is unique to games — drama through interface. When the judge says that you’d better get your facts straight before you answer and you see that an incorrect response will drain your entire health bar in one go, you think damn carefully about what you’re going to say next.

Ace Attorney is also pretty much the poster child for why it’s a good idea to have a “companion character” with the protagonist — particularly if you’re not going to go full-on visual novel and have them narrate everything they do. The chemistry between Maya and Phoenix — which successfully manages to get a cross a real sense of love between the two of them without ever once getting the slightest bit sexualised — is a real highlight of the series, and again it’s something that grows and changes over the course of the three Wright games. It’s a tradition that’s continued in the fourth game Apollo Justice, too, albeit with a different companion character, and again in Ace Attorney Investigations (again with an all-new companion), which brings the wonderful Miles Edgeworth to the fore and inverts the series’ usual format.

The game looks great on the big screen of the DSi XL, too. I’m rediscovering a bunch of great DS titles on those lovely big screens, and I’m really looking forward to playing the other Ace Attorney games in succession. It’s actually been quite a few years since I last played them, and I don’t think I’ve ever played all five one after another. I’ll be interested to see how “coherent” they end up being. We’ll see!

#oneaday Day 744: Being a Sidebar to That Interminable Games and Art Discussion, Regarding Visual Novels

Games are art, games aren’t art, games can never be art. Who gives a toss? Actually, judging by the amount of discussion this topic has been generating over the years, quite a few people. For me and my friends, it was Final Fantasy VII that first made us even consider it. Nowadays, of course, Final Fantasy VII and the JRPG genre in general is regarded as something of a cliche, but that’s not what I’m going to get into here.

Instead, inspired by finally getting around to downloading, installing and starting Katawa Shoujo, I wanted to say a few words about the visual novel genre of interactive entertainment, and its tangential relevance to the “games as art” issue.

For the uninitiated (and those too lazy to click on the link above), Katawa Shoujo, which apparently literally translates to Cripple Girls, is a visual novel-cum-dating sim developed by members of notorious Internet cesspit 4Chan. It casts the players in the role of a teenage boy struggling to come to terms with his own condition — arrhythmia. As part of his rehabilitation and treatment, he’s transferred to a special school that specifically caters to students with disabilities, and from here he comes to know a variety of strange and wonderful characters, most of whom each have some sort of disability. After the first act, the game then proceeds down one of several paths depending on which girl in the cast the player decides our protagonist is going to pursue.

I shan’t talk any more about Katawa Shoujo specifically at this time, as I’m still partway through my first playthrough and don’t want to draw any conclusions just yet. But what playing it is reminding me is that visual novels are one of my favourite styles of games — and yet, ironically, they’re barely games at all by the traditional definition.

I know I said I wouldn’t talk any more about Katawa Shoujo yet, but in Katawa Shoujo so far, I have pressed the “continue” button a whole lot and made approximately four choices in about two and a half hours of gameplay. I do not feel short-changed by this, as the stuff for which I am pressing “continue” is interesting, compelling and utterly addictive in exactly the same way that a good book is.

The situation is pretty much the same with titles like the Ace Attorney series, arguably my favourite series of all time. The vast majority of your time in these games is spent pressing a large “continue” button, with the occasional choice of where to go next, what to examine and, in the series’ iconic courtroom scenes, using what you have discovered at the appropriate time to prove your case. In these games, there’s one set solution and no deviating from it — but again, I don’t feel short-changed at all.

Why? Well, the technical limitations of the genre mean that you find yourself filling in the blanks with your imagination a lot more than you might if the game were fully-voiced, fully-animated and provided complete freedom of interactivity. Instead, you’re presented with static backdrops; character stills overlaid with maybe three or four different frames of animation to represent different emotions; and text. Lots of text.

The latter part is what puts a lot of people off visual novel titles — the “it’s too much reading” argument — but it’s from all the text that these titles gain all their power. Typically involving the player getting inside the head of the protagonist and playing things from a first-person narrative perspective, the use of text throughout allows for a far more in-depth exploration of the character than we get in even the lengthiest of RPG. We know what the protagonist is feeling; how he reacts to events; what his attitudes towards the other characters are; and any conflicts he might be feeling. It’s a curiously intimate relationship that the player of a visual novel has with the character they’re ostensibly “controlling”, but this intimacy is oddly often amplified by how infrequently you get to make choices or speak for the protagonist. The choices you make, in many cases, are extremely important, and in some cases can cause the entire plot to veer off in a completely different direction. Their relative infrequence makes them powerful moments to mull over.

But what of the relevance to the “games and art” debate? Well, visual novels present an interesting medium for a variety of artists to express themselves. A novel is typically the work of one person — the writer, perhaps with an illustrator in tow depending on what type of book it is. A painting is the work of a visual artist. A piece of music is the work of a composer. But a visual novel requires all of these things — art, music, sound, writing and in some cases, animation and acting — making it a distinctively collaborative, cross-disciplinary medium. Alongside this, it’s one of the most accessible forms of game there is — if you can read, you can play, understand and enjoy a visual novel even if you’ve never, ever picked up a controller before — meaning it has an inherently larger potential audience than the relatively specialised “gamey games” markets. It distinguishes itself from movies, animation and TV shows by providing a middle ground between the “show, don’t tell” of moving pictures and the pure imaginative effort required when reading a novel.

In short, it allows for stories to be told in a way that is unique to its own medium. These stories, while often following similar patterns and very often involving big-eyed anime girls, are no less valid and worthy of study, interpretation and criticism than those presented in more “traditional” media. In fact, if anything, the fact that the visual novel is a relatively new and emergent art form merits more attention than it actually gets.

And sure, while many visual novels descend into Japanese absurdity, titles like Katawa Shoujo; Digital: A Love Story; Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story; and numerous others all push the boundaries of what it’s possible to make interesting interactive entertainment from, along with taking on subject matter I can’t recall ever being dealt with (tastefully, anyway) in other types of game.

Consider how simple early movies were and how sophisticated they are now in comparison. Given visual novels’ relative infancy compared to other media, imagine what the possibilities might hold in the future. Will we ever see a title like this regarded as “interactive literature” or equivalent?

Who knows. All I know right now is this: if your primary motivation for playing interactive entertainment is to be told a story that draws you into its world and characters, you’d do well to check out titles like those that I’ve mentioned above.