Tag: Japanese games

2495: A Step in the Right Direction

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When I heard that VICE Gaming was rebranding to Waypoint, my reaction was a hearty “shrug and move on”. In the past, VICE Gaming has been responsible for some truly terrible articles about games many of my friends and I are interested in, most notably the Senran Kagura series. I won’t bring them up here, but suffice to say, I’ve written many angry words in the past on the subject.

Consequently, when I happened to see this tweet earlier, my immediate reaction was to predict yet another ill-informed, overly judgemental article about the prevalence of boobs in the game, without exploring any of the things that actually make it an interesting series. (Yes, yes, gratuitous plug for my own work there, but I’ve written a lot about Senran Kagura.)

Out of curiosity — or perhaps partly to vindicate what I will freely admit was prejudice — I clicked through to the article when someone else shared it and took a look.

Here it is.

My goodness me.

I was genuinely surprised to read not the usual screed about how it’s a piece of misogynist filth that everyone should feel ashamed of the mere existence of, but instead a good interview with series creator Kenichiro Takaki about his philosophy towards character design, sexualised content and all manner of other things. Even more notably, the article acknowledges that Senran Kagura games are actually damn fine brawlers in their own right, and far from being simple ecchi delivery vehicles.

I have to give some kudos to Waypoint for publishing this article, and to Patrick Klepek for writing it in the first place. I’ve had my differences of opinion with how Klepek covers things in the industry in recent years — like many other full-time games journos, he has often shown a significant lean towards the oft-irrational “social justice” side of the spectrum — but in this instance, he’s done what he was once known for back in what many regard as “the good old days”. It’s a solid piece of reporting with some interesting questions and no moral high-horsing. Klepek acknowledges that Senran Kagura’s sexualisation is not the sort of thing that generally appeals to him, but doesn’t put it down for that; moreover, he even says that he’s enjoyed playing the games after a few hours.

The article is just plain nice to read; a breath of fresh air in the current climate. Every interview I’ve read with Takaki in the past has shown him to be an incredibly enthusiastic creator with a clear vision; he’s someone who’s passionate about his work and utterly in love with the characters he and his team have created, and this absolutely comes across in Waypoint’s piece. It makes me happy. It makes me really happy to see this.

And when I’m happy to read something, I absolutely don’t mind sharing it with other people. You’ll notice that I’ve added a direct link to the article in this piece rather than using archive.is to deprive the site of ad impressions, and this is because I firmly believe that this is the sort of thing we need to see a lot more of in the future.

I’ve grown very tired of writing the same article about the shitty deal Japanese games get when it comes to the Western games press, and yet every time I see another ill-informed rant on anime girls, I feel I have to say something, because not enough other people are. I’m sure you can understand and appreciate how absolutely wonderful it is to be able to share a piece of writing about the games I enjoy so much that doesn’t tear them to shreds, that doesn’t brand anyone who enjoys them as some sort of sexual deviant, and that does allow a creator to celebrate both the success and popularity of their work while acknowledging that it may not be to everyone’s liking.

While VICE Gaming’s past misdeeds mean that Waypoint has a lot of work to do in order to gain my trust, this article is very much a step in the right direction, and I think everyone — particularly those who have been angry about poor coverage of Japanese games in the past — should acknowledge that; hell, celebrate it, even.

Let’s see more of this in the future, please, and less of the moral crusading. Games are fun; games are thing that people get great joy from; games cater to diverse interests and tastes. The games press of recent years seems to have forgotten that somewhat, despite regularly spouting buzzwords like “diversity” (when what they actually mean in most cases is “people who aren’t white” rather than true all-encompassing diversity). But seeing articles like this gives me a glimmer of hope that we might have turned a corner.

Now we just need to see other sites follow suit — and Waypoint to continue in this manner.

[EDIT: It did not. How naive I was.]

2493: Japan’s Great Games, and Their Lack of Coverage

This tweet from the Editor-in-Chief of gaming news site DualShockers caught my attention earlier tonight:

As regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of Japanese games and visual novels and will frequently wax lyrical at great length on the subject of my favourite titles. Hell, I even set up a whole new website — MoeGamer — to have a convenient place to put my more in-depth commentary on games that I’ve found particularly interesting.

Over the last couple of years — in particular since I started my JPgamer column on USgamer, and subsequently moved on to my MoeGamer project after I was laid off from the site — I’ve gotten to know a fair few “faraway friends” on the Internet thanks to a mutual love of games from Japan. And all of them — including me — feel the same way: it’s sad that almost the entirety of a whole country’s output gets thrown under the bus, usually in the name of “progressiveness”, and usually with woefully little understanding of the works they have cast aside.

Sure, the Final Fantasies (except XIV) and Souls games of the world still get plenty of column inches, but the rest, as Nelva points out in his tweet, is ignored at best, and treated appallingly at worst.

I found Nelva’s tweet noteworthy because it’s the first time I recall seeing a member of the games press (aside from me) come out with sentiments like this, outside of sites that specifically dedicate themselves to this sort of thing. As such, I thought it worth talking about a bit, and to draw particular attention to a number of noteworthy developers, publishers and series that are well-regarded and regularly praised among players, but which receive less than stellar treatment from the press.

Let’s talk about the Vita

Dear old PlayStation Vita. One of my favourite platforms of all time, and declared “dead” roughly every two months by some idiot who sees that there hasn’t been a Call of Duty game on it since the atrocious Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified.

As a handheld gaming machine, Vita is never going to match the big boys in terms of power, and it doesn’t need to: when you’re playing something on the go, aspirations of being some grand cinematic masterpiece are largely wasted on a screen the size of an envelope. And this is why we don’t get any triple-A games on the platform.

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What we do get is an absolute shitload of Japanese games. What we do get is an absolute shitload of Japanese role-playing games — a genre frequently and erroneously declared “dead” alongside the Vita by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. What we also get is a bunch of visual novels and strategy games. And this is just Japan we’re talking about, remember; all this is on top of all the great indie titles we get from Western developers.

There are a number of developers out there who put out their games on Vita as their lead (or only!) platform. And if these games got any coverage, it would be plain as day to see that the Vita is far from dead; there are plenty of great new games coming out for it on a monthly basis, many of which hail from Japan.

Let’s talk about “progressiveness”

It’s the current fashion in the games press to be as “progressive” as possible. That is to say, it’s fashionable to berate any games that feature attractive women or any kind of provocative, adult-leaning content as “problematic”, in the hope that frequent use of that word will make these critics look somehow educated and intelligent. In practice, all it does is undermine the other big argument these people make, which is that “games need to grow up”. You can have one or the other. You can treat gamers as adults and trust them to handle provocative content, or you can sanitise the medium to such a degree that everything becomes generic, inoffensive waffle.

The ironic thing about the supposed “progressive” arguments against these games — particularly against the ones that feature attractive women — is that they completely fail to explore the game on anything other than the most superficial level. It is, quite simply, “this game has women in short skirts with big boobs, so it’s bad”. This isn’t an exaggeration; this is a paraphrase of several Senran Kagura articles I’ve read from “progressive” games journalists.

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As I’ve written at great length over on MoeGamer, I find it interesting that a lot of these games from Japan actually handle some pretty weighty themes throughout, and do so sensitively and enjoyably. In some cases, games, much like anime, allow creators to explore aspects of society that are still somewhat “taboo” in parts of Japan, such as homosexual relationships.

Others set a great example by having an all-female cast, often with no mention of men or romantic entanglements whatsoever.

Others still have a point to make with their erotic or quasi-erotic content; a while back, for example, I wrote a lengthy piece about how Criminal Girls uses its S&M-themed ecchi content to reinforce the narrative’s key message about trust. Or there are works like visual novel The Fruit of Grisaia, in which its erotic content is used as part of the characterisation process, particularly when it comes to the character Amane, who is an aggressively sexual individual for reasons that become apparent later in her narrative arc.

In damning the majority of Japan’s cultural output on the grounds of “progressiveness”, the self-proclaimed “progressives” are ironically missing out on some of the most progressive games out there.

Let’s talk about Falcom

Let’s talk a bit about Falcom first of all. Falcom is a developer who has been around since pretty much the dawn of gaming, with its long-running Ys series arguably playing a defining role in the modern action RPG.

Of perhaps even greater note, meanwhile, the most recent installments in the Legend of Heroes series — Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel — are absolute masterworks in how to blend the best bits of Western and Eastern RPGs. They’re well-written with excellent characterisation (though admittedly too wordy for some), they have some of the most astonishingly detailed worldbuilding I’ve ever seen in a game through a combination of their visuals and their texts, and they’re simply great games, to boot. And yet, it’s rare to hear them mentioned, even by self-professed JRPG enthusiasts in the press.

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Why? Well, at least partly because they were on PSP and Vita as their lead platforms, though Trails in the Sky’s two currently available localised chapters have made the jump to PC since then. It goes back to what we said about the Vita before; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t cover the games, the platform withers, though at least in the case of the Trails series, there’s the formidable combination of XSEED’s enthusiastic social media team and plenty of fans who are more than happy to promote the series via word of mouth.

But it saddens me that there are probably a whole lot of people out there who have no idea that these games exist, or have no idea quite how good they are. That, surely, is the press doing these games a great disservice.

Let’s talk about Neptunia

And Idea Factory in general, while we’re on.

Idea Factory and its label Compile Heart have been very prolific over the last few years, and it’s fair to say that in the twilight of the PS3 era it took a while for them to find their feet. Titles such as Trinity Universe and Hyperdimension Neptunia were very much inferior to much of the platform’s other fare in technical terms, though those who played them will happily attest that they are both overflowing with charm to more than make up for their technological shortcomings.

Unfortunately, some people have never got past a bad experience they had with a game a few years back, and seemingly outright refuse to cover new titles from a company that has grown astronomically in popularity over the last few years — and, moreover, a company that has clearly learned from its mistakes, with each new game being better than the last by a considerable margin.

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This is most clearly demonstrated by the Neptunia series, which has gone from unknown niche-interest JRPG to full-on cultural phenomenon over the course of the last six years or so. People online love Neptunia. There’s fan art everywhere, there are role-players on Twitter, there are mods for popular Steam games to insert the characters, there are people using Source Filmmaker to create their own Neptunia dioramas and videos — and, of course, there are the games, which tend to enjoy solid sales on console platforms (typically Vita, though the most recent mainline installment jumped to PS4) and then again a few months down the line when they hit PC.

Neptunia games still aren’t the most technologically advanced games on the market, but what they have always had since day one is an absolute ton of soul — not to mention the aforementioned progressiveness thanks to homosexual characters and a strongly capable all-female main cast — and something which is very much underexplored in gaming as a whole: satirical humour. Their developers know what the players want from a Neptunia game, and they provide it. And they are widely loved as a result.

Coverage? Some idiot on Kotaku writing about how the animated Live2D character sprites in the dialogue sequences freak them out. And little else.

I love Neptunia, as you know. But even if I didn’t, it would seem very strange to me not to acknowledge something that is so popular on the Internet at large that it’s frequent meme fodder. And yet that’s exactly what happens with today’s games press: it doesn’t fit the unwritten criteria, so it doesn’t get explored.

Let’s talk about overlooked games

I played through the visual novel Root Letter recently and had a great time with it. I only knew about it because it happened to catch my eye one day when I was browsing the publisher’s other works. I’ve barely seen a peep about it on other websites. I, meanwhile, wrote a bunch about it here.

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In the case of Root Letter, the press can’t even play the progressive booby card to refuse to cover it: Root Letter has no ecchi content whatsoever, instead adopting an art style that features hand-drawn characters and “painted” backdrops of real locations in Japan. On top of looking beautiful, it’s the start of a new series from a fairly major publisher in Japan (Kadokawa) and, judging by the speed we got an English version over here, it looks likely that we’re going to see the other installments shortly after their native versions, too. Not only that, it’s noteworthy in that it focuses not on a group of teenagers as many other Japanese works do, but instead on a group of 33-year olds.

Let’s talk about why this happens

We all know why this happens: clicks. What games critic has time to cover obscure Japanese games when they could be raking in the clicks by posting meaningless, needless “guide content” for Watch Dogs 2 or Call of Duty? I know, I’ve been there, done that.

The thing is, this approach to content strategy becomes a vicious cycle. These games remain popular at least partly because they’re always plastered all over the major gaming sites, and the relentless pursuit of This Tuesday’s Article On The Big Game That Came Out Last Week does damage to gaming criticism as a whole because it gives needless amounts of attention to titles that already have a ton of attention on them thanks to their astronomical marketing budgets.

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What I’d really like to see is more sites making a specific effort to go out of their way to cover games that are a little more off the beaten track, but which still have cultural significance of some sort — whether it’s the popularity of something like Neptunia, or the self-conscious maturity of Root Letter — and helping to broaden the medium for everyone. Some sites already make an effort to cover Western indie games in this regard, and while there are occasionally some questions to be asked over whether certain games would be covered if the developer and the writer weren’t friends with one another, I feel it’s more important to note that this is a start.

While we’re on, what I’d also like to see is a complete end to the mockery of Japanese games in the press, particularly by those who clearly have no intention of attempting to engage with a game. No-one should be mocking anyone else’s taste — particularly those in positions of power as “tastemakers”; live and let live.

The insufferable “progressive” crowd are always going on about “diversity”, so what I would very much like to see is an acknowledgement of Japan in 2016 as part of that diversity. There’s still a rich flow of quality games coming out of that country on a monthly basis, and as Nelva noted in that tweet that sparked off this whole entry, very few of them that don’t have Souls or Fantasy in their title get a look-in. Wouldn’t it be great to see that change?

I’m not going to hold my breath, mind you. In the meantime, well, I’ll do what I can with MoeGamer — so please, show your support if you like what you see.

2386: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: Doing F2p Mobile Games Right

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A while back, I wrote a piece on my other site MoeGamer about how free-to-play games had quietly got good. While there is, make no mistake, still a veritable flood of absolute shit being released on a seemingly daily basis, occasionally someone gets it right, and it’s worth celebrating when they do.

Which brings us to Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a free-to-play mobile game developed as a collaboration between Final Fantasy rights holder Square Enix and mobile game specialists Alim and Gumi.

The astute among you will recognise the latter two as being behind Brave Frontier, one of the mobile games I had previously praised for not being a total pile of shit. Brave Frontier wasn’t without its problems — most notably a lack of any real strategy in the combat thanks to a relatively limited number of things you could do — but so far as mobile free-to-play RPGs went, it was certainly one of the better ones, featuring an interesting story with some enjoyable characterisation and a wide variety of units presented in beautiful pixel art.

FFBE, as I shall refer to it from hereon, is essentially Brave Frontier 2 with a Final Fantasy skin. And that’s not a bad thing at all, because it manages to fix the few issues I had with Brave Frontier while simultaneously being a surprisingly decent Final Fantasy game in its own right.

I’ll rewind a moment for the benefit of those not already familiar with Brave Frontier and explain FFBE.

In FFBE, you take on the role of Rain, a young and rather idealistic member of the castle knights, who appears to have some unresolved daddy issues in true Final Fantasy tradition. Rain is accompanied by his longstanding friend Laswell, who ironically seems to have gotten on with Rain’s father better than Rain himself. While out on patrol, Rain and Laswell encounter some strange happenings, including a mysterious girl called Fina trapped in a crystal and a man in dark armour who appears to be up to no good.

Unsurprisingly, the man in dark armour is indeed up to no good, and Rain and Laswell return to their home city to find it has been attacked. Their adventure then begins in an attempt to determine what the motivations of the black-clad man are and who exactly this “Fina” girl actually is.

Gameplay has a number of components. Firstly is the metagame, where you collect various units by “summoning” them using premium currency (which the game is pretty generous about doling out for reaching significant milestones), summon tickets (which often come as rewards for logging in regularly, or as part of events) or “friend points” accumulated when making use of your friends’ units. The units vary in strength and their rough power level is denoted by a “star” rating — the more stars, the more powerful, or rather, the more stars, the more potential a unit has, because in order to make it useful, you’re going to have to level it up. In other words, a fully levelled two-star unit may well be a better choice than a completely unlevelled four-star unit.

Levelling up can be accomplished in two ways: by gaining experience from participating in battle (an option that was absent in Brave Frontier) or by “fusing” it with other, unneeded units. In the latter case, you can fuse a unit with any other unit, but there are particular benefits if you fuse with an identical unit, or with a special “experience” unit, the latter providing you with significantly more experience points than a regular unit and thus being the best means of quickly levelling a character if you happen to have any on hand.

Your party can also be equipped with weapons, armour and accessories, which improve their stats to varying degrees, and most units can also equip up to two additional Abilities above and beyond their innate abilities that they acquire as they level up. In this way, you can customise your units as you see fit according to the challenges you know you’re likely to be facing, or simply munchkin them all with the best gear possible so you can steamroller your way through every encounter.

On top of the battle units, you’ll also acquire Espers a la Final Fantasy VI along the way, which can be attached to specific characters to provide them with various passive bonuses as well as a super Summon attack when a meter fills up to maximum in battle. Espers can be levelled up independently of characters, though you have to use collected materials to do this rather than just grinding, and each level awards them with Skill Points that can be used to unlock various abilities, both passive and active.

Once you’re finished fiddling with your party lineup, you can either visit a town or go into battle. Pleasingly, visiting towns is presented in traditional top-down RPG style and there are even sidequests to complete, giving a great degree of personality to the world that Brave Frontier lacked somewhat, thanks to it being entirely menu-driven. For those for whom time is money, however, there’s also a quick access menu that quickly warps you around town to the important places like the shops, though in doing this you’ll probably miss out on NPCs who might have useful information or quests for you.

When you choose to go into battle, there are several different ways you can do this. You can advance the story, which presents you with a string of battles that you have to complete without stopping, punctuated by cutscenes. You can “explore” an area you previously completed the story for, which again goes into a top-down RPG-style exploration mode punctuated with random battle encounters. You can visit the Colosseum to battle monsters and earn points towards various prizes. Or you can enter the Vortex to the Farplane, which has a different special dungeon every day, plus a series of other specialised dungeons that you can unlock as you desire — one for free, additional ones for premium currency. These specialised dungeons provide a convenient means of acquiring experience points for your units, money, crafting materials or other materials needed to power up units or Espers, but the payoff is they tend to cost significantly more energy to jump into than story missions.

Yes, there’s an energy system, but like in Brave Frontier, if you manage it carefully it never becomes an issue. Following story quests tends to see you level your player up regularly enough that your energy bar rarely empties — not only does its capacity expand when you level up, but it also gets refilled to maximum — so this is the best thing to do if you’re spending a bit of time with the game. Alternatively, if you know you only have a few minutes, by far the most effective use of your energy is to tackle the most difficult Vortex dungeons you can manage, as not only will this burn through your energy but it will also provide you with far more loot and experience than regular missions tend to provide in the same amount of time.

The battle system itself is very much like Brave Frontier, with one notable exception: units have more options than just attacking or using their special Burst attack when it’s charged up. Individual units can use items now, rather than you using items on your party from your omniscient overseer perspective, and each unit unlocks individual abilities as they gain levels, which are appropriate either to their Job if they’re generic units or appropriate to their original incarnation if they’re making a guest appearance from another Final Fantasy.

Yes, indeed, Brave Exvius features a considerable amount of series fanservice by incorporating characters from past Final Fantasy games, and they work exactly as they should; Edgar from Final Fantasy VI has his machinist “Tools” abilities present and correct, for example, while more magically-inclined characters have plenty of magic spells to fling around to take advantage of enemies’ elemental weaknesses.

Which perhaps brings us to an obvious question: is this better than Final Fantasy Record Keeper, which is also a fanservice-heavy Final Fantasy free-to-play mobile game?

Yes, it is. And I don’t hesitate one bit when saying that.

Record Keeper is a clunky mess of a game, with loading screens literally every time you tap a button. It’s slow, sluggish, poorly optimised and generally a chore to play, and even the wonderful SNES-style pixel art depictions of every Final Fantasy from I to XIV don’t make up for this. Record Keeper also has no real focus; it sees you leaping around from timeline to timeline pretty much at random, attempting to act as a sort of Final Fantasy Greatest Hits but losing all sense of coherence in the process. This lack of focus also extends to its progression and collection systems, in which you collect characters, but also equipment items, and the main “fuse and improve” mechanics come with the far less interesting equipment than the characters; it’s way less fun to upgrade a sword that supposedly appeared in Final Fantasy XII than it is to buff up Balthier to the max.

Record Keeper makes nostalgia the main — no, the sole — point of its existence, and it suffers for this, particularly when it comes to the underrepresented Final Fantasies like XIV and XI. FFBE, meanwhile, uses nostalgia wisely; it just drip-feeds you classic characters without making a big deal about it, and it doesn’t demand any knowledge of the previous games — if you’re a Final Fantasy newcomer, you might just find that Firion is an awesome fighter, but if you know your Final Fantasy history, you’ll have an understanding of where he actually came from, for example.

FFBE, while suffering from occasional loading breaks and the requirement to be online at all times while playing, at least preloads enough stuff into memory for it not to have to load after every button press, and both in combat and when wandering around town, it’s smooth as butter.

Oh, and FFBE is also a beautiful-looking game. And a beautiful-sounding game, featuring one of the best Final Fantasy battle themes of all time. Yes, seriously. Listen.

Basically… look, it’s really good, all right? And regular readers will know I don’t say that lightly about free-to-play games.

Check it out here on Android, and here on iOS.

2355: Playing God

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After reading up on their work a bit over on Hardcore Gaming 101, I’ve become interested in the Super NES games of a developer called Quintet. Their work consists of several games that I’ve heard of but never actually played, plus one PS1 game that I did enjoy and feel to this day is rather underappreciated: the unusual and interesting action RPG The Granstream Saga.

Quintet are perhaps best known for early SNES game ActRaiser and their subsequent Heaven and Earth trilogy, consisting of Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. (The Granstream Saga is kinda sorta also part of this series, too, though in an unofficial-ish capacity and on a different platform to its three predecessors.)

I decided to start with ActRaiser, since when exploring a developer’s work like this I like to start with their early titles and work my way forward through them to see how they developed over time. ActRaiser has primitive elements, for sure — most notably an almost total lack of narrative development, though there are some interesting events that come and go as you play — but by God it’s an interesting game, the likes of which I’ve only ever seen on one (two?) other occasion(s) in the form of Arcen Games’ similarly unusual and fascinating A Valley Without Wind.

ActRaiser casts you in the role of God. (Due to the SNES era being the dawn of Nintendo of America’s prudishness that persists to this day, He is known as “The Master” in the localisation.) Your job is to deal with Satan. (Likewise, everyone’s favourite Ultimate Evil is known as Tanzra in the English version.)

Satan has been up to no good, you see; taking advantage of God having a much-needed rest after Ultimate Good and Ultimate Evil had their last showdown, Satan decided that he should wipe out all of humanity, taint the land to make it uninhabitable by humans should God decide to try and repopulate the world, and then ensconce some of his most trusted lieutenants to make doubly sure that those pesky white-winged types didn’t try and undo all their hard work. God isn’t standing for this, of course, and so begins your unusual quest.

ActRaiser is split into two very different sections. When you first arrive in a realm tainted by Satan’s machinations, your first order of business is to clear out the monsters roaming freely over the land. You do this by descending to the surface and possessing a conveniently placed warrior statue, which comes to life with God’s holy power and proceeds to dish out some righteous justice on anyone who dares come in range of its blade. Fight your way through a distinctly Castlevania-esque level to a boss, kill the boss and you’re ready for the next phase.

Once you’ve cleared out the monsters, God has enough power to create two followers, who immediately start shagging and pumping out new population for you, so long as you tell them to build some nice streets to put their houses on in a completely different mode that is somewhat like SimCity “Lite”. The town then proceeds to repeatedly inbreed with each other as you direct their expansion efforts, with your ultimate aim being for them to build over the top of the inconveniently placed monster lairs around the land, each of which spit out annoying creatures that steal your population or set fire to your buildings at inconvenient moments. Once you’ve successfully redeveloped the monsters’ areas of outstanding natural beauty, you then unlock the second action-platforming stage of the region, which is different and harder, with a different boss at the end. Once this boss is defeated, the region is at complete peace and you can then continue developing it or move on to a new region.

While these two elements of the game are obviously very disparate, they do feed into one another. Your performance in the initial action phase, for example, partly determines the maximum possible population the region will be able to sustain when you start developing it — score more points and you’ll have a higher (unseen) cap on your population. Conversely, the more your population expands in the building phase, the stronger the warrior statue gets in the action phases and the more “SP” God has to spend on Miracles.

Oh yes, Miracles; these are a rather integral part of the building phase, and obviously the most fun, too. Beginning with a lightning bolt that burns down most things on a single tile (including houses) and working up to an earthquake that knocks down all low-level structures in a region, your Miracles are used to both direct development of the towns and clear obstacles out of the way. You have to force yourself to feel a certain amount of detachment when doing this, since as the tech level of each region increases and it becomes able to support houses that hold more occupants, it becomes necessary to demolish low-tech houses to make way for denser developments. And, being God, you don’t use a bulldozer; you use natural disasters, which is far more fun. It’s hard not to feel a little pang of guilt when you watch the little counter of “total population” in the upper-right corner of the screen plummet after you unleash an earthquake, though.

ActRaiser is a really interesting game. Both elements are solid, though neither of them are especially complicated. This is probably for the best; it keeps things reasonably accessible for those who tend to gravitate more towards one of the two styles of gameplay than another, though the difficulty of the action phases in particular is a little on the high side if you’re not accustomed to how unforgiving old-school games are.

Ultimately it’s a satisfying experience to descend to Earth and smite Evil before watching your little minions gradually spread out to cover the entire continent. You really do get the feeling that your people are relying on your divine powers, too; they pray to you every so often and ask you to help make things happen, and they’ll reward you with offerings if you fulfil their requests. Many offerings can then be used in other regions to spread various innovations or culture, making the whole world work a bit better; for example, as soon as the second region discovers that wheat is a more productive crop than corn, you can then export wheat from this region to everywhere else so they can all take advantage of this improved efficiency. Likewise, when your followers reach a man lost in the desert a little too late, a distraught artist discovers the secrets of music, which you can then take to another region and use it to lift their spirits after they’ve been feeling a bit bleak. In this way, the world of ActRaiser feels very much alive, even if you’re not dealing directly with named characters or a rigid, ongoing plot.

I like it a lot, in other words, and it makes me excited to check out Quintet’s other work. You can count on a full report when I get to them.

2318: Rebooting in Progress

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You may recall a while back I decided to reboot my “sister site” to this blog, MoeGamer. Having now spent two months with my new format, I thought I’d revisit the idea here for the benefit of those who haven’t checked in on it recently.

Essentially, my thinking behind MoeGamer’s new format was to forgo the scattershot approach that games journalism and criticism today typically follows, and instead have a laser-sharp focus each month: a single game, or perhaps a series of games. Over the course of that month, I’d post a series of in-depth articles, each of which focused on a specific aspect of the game or series. By the time the month was up, there’d be a complete, substantial amount of writing about the game in question for readers to enjoy at their leisure, with the content remaining relevant long after it was written.

This is part of the problem with modern games journalism and criticism, and part of the reason it’s so trapped in the clickbait quagmire that ruins it so much. The ever-present need to produce timely content to meet embargoes and line up with release dates means that games that often deserve better don’t get the attention they deserve, and some games, as we’ve seen in the past, get a writeup of no value whatsoever, consisting entirely of the writer in question doing nothing but mocking the game and the people who like it without demonstrating any real evidence that they’ve bothered to try and engage with it on anything more than the most superficial level.

As I noted in my previous piece, though, because MoeGamer is a personal site that I write as a passion project, I’m not beholden to the fickle whims of advertising revenue and I have no obligation to bait people in with provocative headlines and articles about the creator of Minecraft calling someone a cunt (which, for what it’s worth, he was perfectly within his rights to do, as the person whingeing at him was being a cunt). Instead, I can explore games that have proven meaningful or interesting to me; games that are worthy of discussion. I can be positive about them, too, highlighting the things they do differently or particularly well and giving people reasons to check them out rather than, as so often happens with reviews today, reasons to avoid them.

The positivity thing in particular is something I feel strongly about. There seems to be a perception in a lot of modern criticism that you’re not doing your job properly if you’re not tearing something apart or telling it things it should do better. While there is value in this sort of criticism at times, it’s very easy to start reaching for things that are of little relevance to the work as a whole. Polygon’s infamous review of The Witcher 3 that complained about the lack of black people in a world inspired by Eastern European folklore is a good example, as is any writeup that bleats about sexism in an anime-style game without demonstrating any evidence of having explored the characters’ backgrounds.

Personally speaking, the kind of writing about games that I like to read is positive in nature. Games that changed your life, games that had personal meaning, games that elicited emotional responses, games that people haven’t heard of but should absolutely definitely positively check out. It is eminently possible to remain positive about things and still write interesting, compelling content, and it has the pleasant side-effect of creating a positive atmosphere around the articles, too, which encourages discussion and anecdotes of what the work in question means to other people. (There are exceptions, of course, as with most things on the Internet, but most people I know seem to respond far better to positive, enthusiastic writeups than ill-informed, poorly researched pieces that tear things apart unfairly.)

So that’s what I’m doing with MoeGamer. So far I’ve covered Senran Kagura Estival Versus and Megadimension Neptunia V-II. Next month I’ll be tackling Dungeon Travelers 2. Beyond that, I have a whole shelf full of games that I’m very interested in exploring in this level of depth, and I hope at least some of you enjoy reading my thoughts on them.

2312: After 1.5 Games, I Already Like Ys More Than Any Zelda I’ve Played

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A controversial statement, perhaps — and I make no apologies for a third post about Ys in a row — but one that I feel confident in making, even having only finished the first game and made it about halfway (I estimate?) through the second. (Aside: given how much I’ve enjoyed the first two games so far, you can count on a month of Ys over on MoeGamer at some point in the near future.)

Ys speaks to me in a way that Zelda never has. This isn’t to say that I don’t like Zelda, mind you — I count A Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask among some of my favourite games of all time — but there’s something just… kind of magical about Ys that I’ve been delighted to discover over the past few days, and a little disappointed in myself that I never took the plunge and explored this series earlier.

Let me try to explain what I mean.

I think the thing that sticks out to me most of all is how Ys provides a much more coherent and continuous feeling in its narrative than Zelda does. The fact that Zelda games up until Link’s Awakening still referred to the various dungeons as “levels” made it pretty clear that despite the sprawling overworld in each instance, these were basically games designed on the same linear principles as more traditional action/arcade adventures. This very much gives Zelda games a feeling that persists today: a sharp demarcation between the overworld and the dungeons. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it particularly unusual; many RPGs make this distinction, and massively multiplayer games in particular have an even more stark divide between the two types of content, with dungeons tending to be cooperative multiplayer affairs, while overworld action tends to be (for the most part) solo or social in nature.

But with Ys, there’s no such demarcation. The world is continuous and coherent, and consequently far more believable. You’re not pausing your exploration to get through the mysteriously puzzle-filled castle that happens to stand between you and your objective; you’re continuing your journey, exploring the world, fulfilling the promises you made to the people who believe in you. It’s a continuous, flowing process and narrative, rather than one that is heavily punctuated. Exploration flows into conversation flows into combat flows into more exploration; the only real punctuation comes in the form of the boss fights, which don’t necessarily come at as predictable points as in Zelda games.

This coherent feeling is particularly apparent in Ys II, which expands on the excellent worldbuilding of its predecessor. Characters move around as the story progresses, and they make reference to the places you find yourself travelling to. Sometimes you run across them on your travels as they get up to things independently of you; sometimes you’ll return from an adventure to find them acknowledging your deeds when you speak to them. Contrast with Zelda’s worlds, which tend to be rather static in nature; populated with weird and quirky characters in many cases, sure, but there’s not a lot of feeling of things going on while you’re not there, with the exception of Majora’s Mask, of course, where this sort of thing was the whole game’s central design tenet.

My friend Chris also points out that Ys makes him feel powerful, and he’s absolutely right. This is a big contrast between Ys and Zelda, and it’s partly due to the nature of the protagonist character. While both games sport a visually distinctive but mute self-insert character for the player to inhabit and play as they see fit, Zelda’s hero is a child, while Ys’ hero is a young adult. There’s always been an element of childish clumsiness to Zelda’s combat; even once the series moved into 3D with Ocarina of Time and started having more complex combat mechanics than a single attack button that always did the same thing, Link always felt… not incapable or incompetent as such, but like he perhaps wasn’t quite as comfortable holding a sword and shield as he perhaps should be. Which is understandable in several of the games, where he has the whole “Hero” thing kind of thrust upon him suddenly.

In the case of Ys, meanwhile, there’s a strong feeling that, when played well, you are overwhelming your enemy with superior skill and power. This is depicted differently in both Ys I and Ys II, despite both being based on the same fundamental “bump” system, which allows for button-free attacking and a style of gameplay where you never really have to stop moving.

In Ys I, the feeling of overwhelming power is brought about by the rather brief levelling curve: with a level cap of just 10, each one of those 10 levels is a significant jump in power for protagonist Adol. If you keep pace with where you’re “supposed” to be as you proceed through the story, you’ll take down most enemies in a single hit. It’s not until the very latter stages of the game, when you’ve been level 10 for a while, that you’ll come across enemies that need multiple hits to fell, and even then, no more than one or two extra hits.

In Ys II, meanwhile, the combat is rejigged so that individual hits do less damage, but you can inflict them incredibly quickly, particularly while attacking diagonally. You also push enemies backwards while attacking them, giving the combat a feel somewhat akin to the sport of fencing, where dominating your opponent and forcing them to move how you want them to move is key. In Ys II, careful, tactical movement of enemies — not shoving them into a large group of their friends, for example, nor pushing them into a corner behind a rock that makes it difficult for you to keep up the assault — is absolutely key, and getting it right is an immensely satisfying feeling completely unlike any other action RPG I’ve played.

Then you have things like the items. In Zelda, the items you unlock as you proceed through the game are predictable and are used based on clear, recognisable visual cues that stay the same throughout the game. In Ys, meanwhile, you might use each item only once or twice throughout the game in circumstances where it makes narrative sense to do so, not because it would make a good puzzle or dexterity challenge. This gives the game much more of a traditional “adventure game” feel to it, and I like that very much about it. In Ys II, there are also a number of items you can use in unconventional ways, too, and the game rewards experimentation with, for example, giving healing items as gifts to NPCs, or using the “Alter” magic to turn yourself into a Roo and talk to monsters. While very few of these things are necessary to complete the game, they, like so much else in these games, provide a lovely sense of a world that has been well thought out and beautifully crafted, particularly in these revamped Chronicles+ versions that I’m playing on PC.

This is all my opinion, of course, and doubtless there are some die-hard Zelda fans out there who would feel the complete opposite to me — and doubtless some other people out there who would gleefully point out that Ys and Zelda aren’t really directly comparable at all — but so far, I don’t feel it’s premature to say that I’m already in love with this series, and intend to devour as much of it as I can in short order. Count on further enthusing as and when that happens.

2295: You Should Play Aselia the Eternal

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JAST USA recently released Aselia the Eternal on Steam. The game’s been around for a good few years now — its original Japanese version for even longer — but its release on Steam will doubtless allow a whole new audience to (hopefully) enjoy it. I will now attempt to explain why it is worth giving it a go.

Aselia the Eternal is a combination of a visual novel and a strategy game. The overall balance is very much in favour of the story side of things — it’s a good six hours of reading before you get to the game’s first strategy battle sequence — but when you do get to the strategic aspect, it’s a game that puts up a good fight.

The narrative concerns the player-protagonist Yuuto, who finds himself drawn into another world populated by people who speak a completely different language to him. Unable to find his way home, he gradually learns to communicate with these people — the ones with whom he’s staying known as “Spirits” — and finds himself recruited into the army as an “Etranger”, a wielder of a powerful, sentient sword that regularly threatens to eat his soul.

Gradually, as Yuuto becomes more and more involved in the lives of the Spirits, he starts to worry less and less about trying to find his way back home and more about helping to resolve the conflict that threatens to tear this fantasy world apart. As such, the narrative becomes very much a high fantasy sort of affair — war on a grand scale, magic and mayhem around every corner, transcendence of humanity not at all out of the question — and builds to a thoroughly exciting conclusion that I won’t spoil here.

The story is compelling, interesting, well-written and well-translated, but it’s the gameplay part that is perhaps the most interesting thing about it, since it’s one of the most original takes on strategic RPG-style combat I’ve seen. Virtually eliminating all luck from the equation, combat in Aselia the Eternal is actually about putting units together in small squads to perform most effectively according to what type of unit they are — and by doing this correctly you can effectively guarantee that you’ll win a conflict before you reach it. The tricky part is in finding those suitable combinations in the first place.

The basic rules of engagement have each of your squads made up of three ranks — a frontline fighter, a mid-range tank and a support fighter bringing up the rear. Each of the different types of Spirits perform best in a particular slot: Blue Spirits (such as the eponymous heroine) do their best work as speedy damage dealers in the front row; Green Spirits tend to have the highest defense and HP, so sit in the middle; Red Spirits often have support abilities that can damage an entire enemy squad or provide suitable benefits to your own, so sit at the back. You’re not limited to this arrangement — and indeed, with Yuuto in the mix, who is none of those things, you’ll have at least one squad with an unconventional lineup — but there are clearly optimal ways to do things, making each of the battles in the game as much of a puzzle as a strategic RPG experience.

Aselia the Eternal comes together so nicely because everything it does is in service to its narrative and worldbuilding. Despite not having an open world you can freely explore, its excellent storytelling and descriptive narration builds a wonderfully convincing setting that gives the strategic sequences genuine meaning and drama. And, as a result of that worldbuilding, your units in the strategic sequences become more than just sets of stats and abilities; they become people. People who you don’t want to see die, because yes, this game has permadeath.

The question of being “more than just a soldier” is one of the main narrative themes explored in the game, and it’s a rather wonderful moment when you realise that you, the player, are having the same epiphany that the characters in the game are. There are some wonderfully touching sequences with Yuuto and the Spirits as they get to know one another, and you’re right there with them. And, as the narrative ramps up and you bring more and more allies with you, the tension becomes palpable as you take them into battles that you really don’t want to see them lose.

I don’t want to say too much more because part of the wonder of Aselia the Eternal is exploring the experience for yourself and discovering everything this remarkable work has to offer. Suffice to say if you enjoy in-depth storytelling — and lots of if — and aren’t averse to a bit of red-hot strategy action, you should most certainly check it out. And then strongly consider supporting JAST’s recent release of the sequel Seinarukana, which I’ll be investigating for myself in the near future!

2284: Nights of Azure: Encounter in the Abyss

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I only have a couple of trophies left before I have the Platinum on Gust’s action RPG Nights of Azure, and I’m coming away from the game very impressed. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it to begin with — though I adored its aesthetic and narrative — but once I got my head around its unconventional systems and subversions of standard RPG mechanics, I was well and truly enraptured.

The game has excellent combat. I was concerned that it would be a little hack-and-slashy when I first started playing, but as it progresses and you open up more and more systems and options for yourself, it becomes really interesting. In fact, oddly enough, one game that I’m constantly reminded of while I’m playing Nights of Azure is Final Fantasy XIV, of all things; while the two games may not appear to have much in common initially, one being an action RPG and one being a hotbar-and-cooldown-based MMO, I maintain that Nights of Azure is what Final Fantasy XIV would play like if it was a single-player action game.

Perhaps I should clarify that. Both are based on making good use of a gradually expanding roster of abilities that you unlock bit by bit as you progress through the game, rather than outright customisation (though Nights of Azure has considerably more customisation when it comes to equipment than FFXIV, with up to four items being equippable, each having both an effect on Arnice’s stats and some sort of special effect). Both are based on a combination of open world adventuring (albeit in Nights of Azure’s case, said “world” being just one town) and linear dungeons with boss encounters. And in both cases, said boss encounters are based heavily on learning the boss’ attacks, how to avoid them, making sure you don’t stand in area of effect markers, and recognising when it’s safe to attack.

This latter aspect is particularly apparent in the later hours of the game and especially the “epilogue” chapter after you beat the final boss for the first time. The “epilogue” is actually a retread of the last chapter with some additional content and the ability to raise Arnice to the level cap of 11 rather than the previous 10; she also gains the ability to transform into Nightmare form as well as her previous Demon, Moon Rabbit, Phantom and Armour forms. More importantly, totally completing this final chapter unlocks the “true” ending, which I haven’t seen yet, since I’m cleaning up the last few trophies first.

Throughout the game, there are a number of boss battles. These are all very good and have a nice amount of variety between them, but for me, the absolute highlight of the game’s battles has been the optional “Abyss” battle in the Arena. The Arena is initially designed as a place to practice the various techniques you’ll need to use in the game, ranging from chaining long combos to defeating enemies using only your summoned Servans. “Abyss”, meanwhile, is the culmination of everything you’ve learned, in theory, pitting you against the toughest individual foe in the game over the course of several phases; a fight that rivals some of Final Fantasy XIV’s raid bosses in its complexity.

Let me explain how I beat the fight and you’ll see.

Your opponent is a demon girl fiend — Yfritte, I believe, though don’t quote me on that. She’s a level 11 opponent — enemies in the game go up to level 15, and your Servans can level this high with an appropriate ability, though Arnice herself can only level to 11. Unlike similar-looking enemies you might have encountered elsewhere in the game, Yfritte (as we’ll call her, even if she isn’t) has about a bazillion HP and, it becomes clear immediately after engaging her, isn’t going to go down without one hell of a fight.

You start across the Arena from Yfritte with no Servans summoned. I summoned all my Servans immediately — my main party consisting of Alraune (healer), Plumie (ranged damage dealer), Toy Trooper (group of damage dealers) and Toy Sentinel (single damage dealer, hits lots of times) — and straight away set off Toy Trooper and Toy Sentinel’s Burst attacks to deal some initial damage to Yfritte.

Using Arnice’s Blood Sword, I alternated between using the Special attack, which knocks Yfritte down for a couple of seconds, and the Weak attack, which, with the Vlad’s Crest item I had equipped, restored Arnice’s SP quickly enough to perform Special attacks almost indefinitely, effectively stun-locking Yfritte. This process repeats until about 80% of her HP, at which point she summons two Manticores.

The Manticores can Paralyse you and your Servans, so it’s a good idea to have status-repelling abilities or equipment on at least Arnice and your healer. They also have a nasty multi-hit fire breath attack, so staying behind or to the side of them is a good idea. Continue alternating Weak and Special attacks to repeatedly knock them down until Arnice’s Transformation bar fills, at which point the combination of Servans I had equipped allowed me to transform into the speedy Moon Rabbit form.

Moon Rabbit’s Special attack needs 100SP, but it’s a huge area-effect attack that hits lots of times — and, with Vlad’s Crest equipped, this means that 100SP is regenerated almost immediately if you hit more than one target with it. It also inflicts Bleed for some damage over time, so it’s good for upping your average damage per second. I repeatedly triggered Moon Rabbit’s Special Attack, taking care to catch Yfritte and the two Manticores in the AoE, until the transformation ran out, by which point the Manticores were dead and Yfritte had a chunk of life missing.

There now follows a short phase where Yfritte is by herself. She flings missiles at you from a distance, some of which home in on you, and sets off close-range area effect abilities when you’re up close, some of which are powerful enough to one-shot Arnice. Distract her with your Servans — use Alraune’s Mega Heal to top up their HP if necessary — and return to the Weak-Special combo to keep her off-balance.

After a while, she’ll summon a huge number of level 1 Shadows. Move away from Yfritte and hack and slash through the Shadows to build up both SP and the Transformation bar. It’s potentially worth unsummoning your Servans at this point, as the Shadows don’t hit hard and if you keep clear of Yfritte (and avoid her missiles) you won’t take a lot of damage. Plus when you re-summon the Servans, they’ll have full SP again, although their HP will be where you left it, so be ready to heal if necessary.

I had a second deck of Servans set up to transform Arnice into Nightmare form, so I took the opportunity to use this powerful transformation once the bar was full. Nightmare form has a wide arc ranged attack that hits multiple times as its default weak attack, so spamming this and avoiding Yfritte’s missiles does a significant amount of damage in a short space of time. Once I was safely in Nightmare form, I switched back to my initial deck, summoned Alraune for healing purposes just in case a shot got through, and prepared for the next phase.

The next phase comes when Yfritte summons a huge blue area of effect marker on the ground. This inflicts poison and is also slippery ice, so having status resist abilities or equipment is a good idea, particularly on Alraune. The Mermaid’s Tear item completely nullifies any area-effect abilities, so this effectively allows Alraune to shrug it off and continue healing you. Don’t summon any other Servans until the AoE disappears, since they’re dumb enough to blindly charge straight into it, get poisoned and die straight away. Once it goes away, however, go nuts; return to the Weak-Special combo to knock Yfritte off balance until the next phase starts.

Next up, Yfritte summons a doll who chucks toys at you, which can be easily avoided, and a spirit-type who we’ll affectionately refer to as the “bullet hell fairy”. Kill the doll first, since it’s not got many HP and will go down quickly. The bullet hell fairy is a little more troublesome, since she repeatedly summons large groups of bullets which then explode for significant damage. You can see where they’re going to appear and get out of the way of them; use the Follow command on Servans to get them out of harm’s way. They’re always in the same formation: one at “twelve o’clock”, then two more at “eight” and “four”. Take care to continue dodging Yfritte’s bullets and close-range AoEs while you deal with the fairy.

By now we’re getting close to the end, but there’s still a couple of phases to go. Yfritte will do another big AoE — red this time — so deal with it the same way: unsummon everything except an immune Alraune and perhaps pelt Yfritte from afar with the Blitz Shooter if she refuses to come out of her little safe space. When the AoE disappears, you’re on the home straight.

Yfritte will summon some Shadows again — level 7 this time, so they don’t go down so easily. Re-summon your Servans and get them to hack and slash their way through the hordes, though keep an eye on where Yfritte is so you don’t get caught out by a one-shot AoE at this late stage in the fight. Build up SP with Weak attacks and clear an area with a Special from the Blood Sword, preferably catching Yfritte on the outside of it so you can knock her down for a bit of damage. Repeat until you charge up another transformation; it’s a good idea to pick Moon Rabbit for this one for the large Special AoE, though Nightmare works too, since its ranged attack covers a wide area. Basically you want to rip through as many Shadows as possible while still hitting Yfritte in order to keep your SP topped up.

Towards the end of the fight, Yfritte will summon a Stone Hellion — the same really annoying ones that were in earlier Arena battles, equipped entirely with nothing but one-shot abilities with huge AoEs. Fortunately this one goes down a little easier than the boss-class ones in earlier battles, so catch him in a Moon Rabbit Special if you can while continuing to hit Yfritte. Take care to avoid all his big AoEs — Moon Rabbit’s speed is really helpful here — and continue pelting Yfritte with everything you’ve got while making sure to stay clear of her bullets and AoEs as well as ensuring you don’t get overwhelmed by shadows… and eventually, hopefully, you will prevail with time to spare.

2277: That Girl’s in Lesbians with That Other Girl

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Playing through Gust’s latest game Nights of Azure, I was struck with how… explicit the romantic relationship between the two heroines is. I don’t mean sexually explicit; I mean that the fact that the two of them even have a romantic relationship is acknowledged at all.

Yuri (lesbian) themes are frequently a part of Japanese popular media — an interesting fact to toss back at those who are keen to paint the nation as being somewhat less than progressive when it comes to attitudes towards gay people. Indeed, while “real world” Japanese society in general may not appear to look on homosexuality with as tolerant an eye as we like to think we have here in the West, it’s clear that there’s plenty of the old “public face, private face” going on, since there are a ton of creators who are obviously fascinated with the idea of same-sex relationships — both male-on-male and female-on-female.

The thing that struck me about Nights of Azure’s depiction of its central relationship is the fact that, as I noted above, it’s pretty up-front about it. This is noteworthy because although yuri themes often make an appearance in Japanese popular media, they’re often more implied than explicit, with it often being left up to the audience (and fan artists) to explore these relationships further.

Take something like popular anime Love Live. Even the most casual viewer will notice the blossoming relationship between Maki and Nico by the end of the run, but the show never particularly draws attention to it; it’s just sort of there. Likewise, the Senran Kagura series features a number of obviously romantic relationships between many of its all-female cast members, but it’s rare for these to be acknowledged or not “laughed off” by the characters — though, interestingly, latest installment Estival Versus did feature a scene where one character specifically called out Asuka and Homura for being so obviously gay for each other, even if they’d never properly admit it. And the Neptunia series is riddled with yuri undertones, ranging from Nepgear and Uni’s heartwarming relationship to Noire’s obvious but perpetually unspoken interest in Neptune — and, in most recent installment Megadimension Neptunia V-II, K-Sha’s obsession with Noire, though this particular instance was an explicit admission of lady-love.

Nights of Azure, though… it’s right there from the beginning, and it develops over the course of the game. Several other characters comment on it. And, most tellingly, there are outright romantic scenes between protagonist Arnice and other leading lady Lilysse. The two share moments of intimacy with one another that, on reflection, are actually quite unusual to see so explicitly depicted in games: in one scene, Arnice comforts an upset Lilysse by draping her arms around her neck from behind and holding her close; in another, the two dance together, their devotion to one another immediately apparent from the way they look at each other. And after a particularly heartfelt make-up session after a dispute between the two, we see them waking up in bed together, having obviously slept facing one another holding hands. (There’s no yuri sexytime, though; it’s not that kind of game.)

As with other Japanese games that feature yuri themes, Nights of Azure treats its central relationship with the appropriate amount of respect: that is to say, it’s just there, and no-one thinks it’s anything unusual. A couple of male characters are introduced by hitting on Arnice, but once they see she and Lilysse are obviously involved with one another, they back off — not with an “oh, wow, you’re gay” sentiment, but with a simple recognition of “oh, well, you’re together” that would have been the same if either of the two ladies involved were the opposite gender.

This is the sort of progressiveness and diversity that is a very positive part of the modern games industry — however, sadly, given Nights of Azure’s status as a niche title that a significant number of people probably haven’t even heard of, it’s a game that you likely won’t hear many games writers from big sites talking about.

Consider this my small attempt to acknowledge and celebrate the good that this game is doing, then, and rest assured that Nights of Azure is very much worth your time as an action RPG as well as an interactive lesbian experience.

2275: A Need for Progression

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Playing some Dungeon Travelers 2 this evening, I found myself pondering exactly why I have, so far, spent 130 hours on this game — the longest I’ve ever spent on a single-player RPG, I believe — while a short time back, I decided that I really needed to take a break from Final Fantasy XIV, which was previously something of a life and free time-devourer.

On reflection, it comes down to a need for progression; more specifically, a need for a near-constant feeling of progression.

Herein lies the main reason I’ve set Final Fantasy XIV aside for the time being, and it’s by no means an issue exclusive to that game, either — it’s a genre-wide thing with all MMOs. And that issue is that once you reach “endgame” level — i.e. you hit the level cap, and progression becomes about acquiring better gear and taking on tougher challenges rather than earning experience points and levelling up — progression stops being constant and instead comes in fits and starts, in extreme cases, with instances of actually improving coming weeks apart from one another.

To put this in some sort of context for those who are unfamiliar with MMO endgames: you have several means of acquiring new gear at the level cap in Final Fantasy XIV. You can loot it from dungeons, which is based on random drops. You can acquire it from the raid dungeon Alexander, but this requires strategically acquiring items from its various floors, because you are limited in what you can acquire each week and different bits of gear require different numbers of items. You can acquire it using Tomestones of Esoterics, which have no limit on how many you can acquire per week. You can acquire it using Tomestones of Lore, of which you’re limited to collecting 450 per week. You can take on the lengthy Anima Weapon quest. Or you can acquire it by running the top-tier challenging stuff such as the latest Extreme primal fights or Alexander on Savage difficulty.

Part of the issue here, I guess, is that everyone generally wants to go for the biggest upgrade possible at any given time, and it’s these bigger upgrades that you’re somehow limited in, meaning progress is artificially constrained. In order to earn a piece of body armour using Tomestones of Lore, for example, which is among the best equipment in the game right now, you need at least two weeks to earn the 825 or so Tomestones required, since you’re capped at 450. In that intervening period, all you’re doing is grinding for no discernible gain: the actual gain comes only when you’ve finished the process and you get your shiny new armour. (And then moan about it not having the stats you want, probably.)

Now, this sort of design is a key part of how MMOs generally keep people engaged over a long period — if everyone could get the best possible gear immediately, they’d complain about having “not enough content” more than they do already (which is a lot), and that is obviously undesirable for the development team, who are put under pressure to put out more content more quickly, which inevitably leads to quality suffering. Instead, these moments of progression are significant, but time-consuming: they have a noticeable impact on your character’s abilities, but only after a long period of doing the same things over and over again until you’ve earned enough whatevers to get your doohickey.

That sort of treadmill progression had started to become a little less enjoyable to me than it had been, particularly as the current endgame of Final Fantasy XIV now has a number of different grindathons required to get the best possible gear. And so I put it down for now and instead focused on Dungeon Travelers 2’s postgame (actually bigger than the main game) which is also a grindfest, but which is considerably more appealing to me right now for that feeling of constant rather than sporadic progression.

Progression in Dungeon Travelers 2 comes in several forms. The most obvious is in the earning of experience points and levelling up: finishing the main story will get you to about level 50, but the postgame will take you to the cap of 99 by its conclusion. This means that rather than hitting a level cap early and progression slowing by very nature of one of its sources being cut off, there’s the constant satisfaction of earning experience points right up until the end of the game. And if you’re still hungry for more, a “Level Reset” system allows you to discard those hard-earned levels in favour of some bonuses to the character’s base stats if they had reached a high enough level, meaning you can level them up all over again and they’ll be marginally better.

That’s not the only means of progression, though. Gear is another important aspect of progression in Dungeon Travelers 2, much like other dungeon crawlers. The gear system is very interesting, in fact, since it’s based around just a few base items, and then built upon with an enchantment system. What happens is you have a piece of base gear (say, a piece of leather armour) which has a bonus value attached to it (say, +5). The bonus indicates how much better than its base incarnation it is, and the value can keep going up and up and up. In order to make it go up, you have to enchant your gear using the Sealbooks you acquire by defeating sets of 9 of each monster in the game. Each of these Sealbooks has a level, and when you use it to enchant a piece of gear, two things happen: the bonus goes up by the tens value of the Sealbook’s level (up to a maximum of 5 for books of level 50 and above) and one or more of the Sealbook’s special effects (ranging from bonuses to stats to special effects such as regenerating health and TP each turn) is attached to the piece of gear.

Here’s an example. I have a set of Leather Armour+40. I run across the wandering blacksmith in a dungeon, who allows you to enchant your gear. I use a level 50 Sealbook to enchant the armour, which increases its bonus to +45 and attaches a DEF Up and Elemental Resistance Up effect to it, making it considerably more defensive than before. Then I use another level 50 Sealbook of the same type to boost it to +50 and keep the same enchantments. Then I use a different Sealbook of a level higher than 50 (to increase the bonus, the Sealbook must be of a higher level than the bonus’ current value) to boost it to +55 and add a Max HP Up effect to my existing DEF Up and Elemental Resistance Up effect, since equipment over +50 can have three, not two, effects attached to it. By this point, I’ve run out of money for the moment, so I take my leave of the bear blacksmith (yes, really) and proceed on my way, secure in the knowledge that I could upgrade that armour twice more before it becomes “capped” and I’d have to start looking for a stronger base item to progress further gear-wise.

These two systems intertwine so that you’re always making one form of progress or the other. Levelling is quite slow in Dungeon Travelers 2 compared to more conventional JRPGs, but it has a noticeable impact, particularly on your characters’ maximum HP. In the meantime, you can partly plug the gap for an underleveled character by giving them gear with huge bonuses — there’s no level restrictions on equipping items — but you’ll need to level them to ensure their survival and their usefulness in most cases.

But that’s not all, either. The third means of progression in Dungeon Travelers 2 is simply getting further through the dungeons. Every expedition, you’ll manage to get a bit further, perhaps even unlocking a shortcut allowing you to get to the new stuff more quickly next time you head in. Perhaps you’ll beat a boss. Perhaps you’ll find a nice piece of treasure. Perhaps you’ll run into an area that has different enemies to the start of the dungeon. Point is, there’s always something to discover, and while you’re still wandering around grid-based mazes, swearing at one-way doors and teleporters and fighting battle after battle, at no point are you doing exactly the same thing over and over. You’re not running the same dungeon time after time; you’re discovering new parts of these sprawling mazes. You’re not fighting the same bosses; you’re taking on progressively more difficult challenges. And yes, you are grinding, but you’re not doing so on a treadmill: you’re always moving forwards.

This, I’ve come to the conclusion, is important to me, and it’s why I’m not feeling the MMO thing right now. It’s also why I’ve repeatedly bounced off the Souls series, despite trying to like them several times: those games are so heavily based on learning through repetition that I quickly get frustrated with the lack of forward momentum and tend to put them down after being smacked off a cliff by an armoured douchebag with a hammer for the umpteenth time, only to get smacked off a different cliff by a different armoured douchebag with a hammer on the way to reclaim my hard-earned souls and effectively undo the potential for progression I had before the unfortunate incident.

Nah. Give me a constant feeling of moving forward; that’s what I really crave from my RPGs these days. And Dungeon Travelers 2 is very much scratching that particular itch right now.