2225: People Asking for “Literal” Translations of Games Aren’t Looking for Google Translate

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There’s been a lot of discussion over this topic on Twitter recently, thanks in part to the recent release of Fire Emblem Fates and its somewhat controversial localisation by Nintendo of America. There’s a lot of noise and ill-informed opinion being thrown around by both “sides” of the debate, so I thought it would be a good time to stick my own oar in and muddy the waters still further.

There are basically two sides to the argument over Fire Emblem specifically. It’s actually a little more complicated than that, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll look at two core beliefs.

On one side, you have people who are arguing that they want a literal, authentic recreation of the Japanese original, only in the English language. They want character names to stay the same; they want conversations to unfold in the same way; they want all the same content that the Japanese players had in the game.

On the other, you have people who are arguing that during the localisation process, changes are both necessary and inevitable in order to fit the needs of the new market. The exact definition of these needs varies according to who you speak to — some suggest it’s to do with a corporation (Nintendo of America in this case) wanting to continue curating a very specific brand image, while others suggest it’s a cultural thing: things that are acceptable, palatable or recognisable to the original Japanese audience may mean nothing to an English-speaking demographic.

Both sides have their points. I’ve enjoyed localised games that err very much on one side or the other. Slice-of-life visual novels, for example, very much benefit from remaining true to the original Japanese as much as possible: interpersonal relationships in particular unfold in very different ways in Japan, and maintaining things like the honorifics in a text help to reflect the different ways people defer to one another according to perceived social hierarchy. Along the same lines, role-playing games that are very much steeped in Japanese culture — the Persona series is a good example — also benefit from remaining as true as possible to the original Japanese script as much as possible, since, like visual novels, the relationships between characters are often dependent on Japanese societal norms rather than Western ones.

On the other side of the fence, some more drastic localisations have been very good, too. Few people would argue that the Ace Attorney series is extraordinarily well written in its English incarnation, but it’s very different to its Japanese counterpart, largely because a lot of the puns and jokes in the original Japanese simply wouldn’t make sense in English. Same with the Neptunia series, whose original translation by NIS America is the source of some ire for more die-hard fans, but which has also remained the standard by which the series continues to be localised today. And the same with Final Fantasy XIV, whose floridly Shakespearean script was so good in English a lot of the changes actually ended up backported into Japanese.

Personally speaking, my priority for the most part is getting to play games that I wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to play. I don’t like content being cut and I don’t like feeling that the experience I’m having is noticeably inferior to the Japanese original, but if it’s a game I want to play and the changes are relatively unobtrusive — Dungeon Travelers 2 is a good example, since this is technically “censored” in places through the modification of a few images, but the changes are minor at best, and the game probably wouldn’t have seen release if they hadn’t been made — then I’ll happily support the efforts of companies who attempt to bring games over as unscathed as possible.

I can’t say I feel massively strongly about Fire Emblem Fates in particular because I have no real attachment to the series, but there are a number of issues with the localisation that I really don’t like. One is the removal of content that wasn’t offensive in the first place — the “head-patting” minigame, which is a reflection of the Japanese tendency to use head-pats as a sign of affection — not necessarily attraction or lust — between characters. Another is the outright butchering of the script that has taken place in a number of parts, most notably the support conversation between two characters which was an in-depth discussion of finding common ground, honour among thieves and whatnot in Japanese, but which has been replaced with four screens of them going “…” to each other in English. That is not, in any way, acceptable localisation, because it’s completely changing the original intent of the scene.

Now onto the point I wanted to make with the title of this post: the “localisation means changes” brigade have a couple of favourite arguments. Let’s take them in turn.

You want a literal translation? Run the script through Google Translate and see how you like it.

This is by far the most common, and it’s based on a flawed assumption: the fact that people asking for a “literal” translation are literally asking for a literal translation, when they’re not. In a way, it’s their own fault for using the word “literal” perhaps incorrectly; “authentic” or “true to the original” might be a better description, but “literal” is the term that people tend to prefer to use, so let’s stick with that for now.

No, as I discussed above, the people who want a “literal” translation are not asking for the text to be run through Google Translate, because, among other reasons, the differences in grammar between languages butchers the original intent of the scene beyond all recognition. What they are asking for is the scene to be correctly translated into its closest possible English equivalent, without any changes based on perceived appropriateness according to Western cultural norms. What they are also asking for is the maintaining of the text’s “Japaneseness” as much as possible: that means maintaining the use of honorifics and concepts with no direct translation such as senpai and the use of onii-san/onee-san to people who aren’t your brother/sister.

That’s not a particularly unreasonable ask, is it? Doesn’t that show a degree of respect to the original creators, an awareness of your audience and also has the added benefit of potentially teaching people about another culture? Some games actually run with this concept; visual novel Steins;Gate, for example, features an interactive hyperlinked glossary of Japanese terminology used in the game, including Japanese Internet memes and slang as well as more widespread cultural concepts.

So no. People asking for a “literal” translation aren’t asking for the script to be fed through the mangler that is Google Translate. So stop responding to arguments they aren’t making.

You want the authentic experience? Just learn Japanese. Oh, I forgot, learning a language is more difficult than complaining.

The whole point of localisation is so that new audiences have access to works from other cultures. Through a culture’s art, we can learn about them, understand them, appreciate them — or, in some cases, be happy with what we’ve got ourselves! By mangling the cultural authenticity of a text, be it by inserting random Internet memes — which not only spoil the character of the piece in most cases, they also date it horribly — or by stripping out elements that made it authentically “Japanese” in the first place, you’re doing a disservice to the original work, and to the audience who wants to know more about another culture that they find fascinating.

Moreover, a lot of people who argue in favour of drastic localisation changes are the same people who are constantly bleating on about buzzword of the moment “diversity” — used here to mean “celebrating anything that isn’t by a white man”. Isn’t stomping all over the text of another culture using Western sensibilities the very antithesis of the “diversity” that seems to be the Holy Grail among progressive types at the moment?

Anyway. Asking people to learn Japanese isn’t a terrible argument: not only does it let you play the original versions of localised games, it also gives you access to a huge library of titles that never make it across the ocean. But it’s also not a particularly practical option for a lot of people. Japanese is a complicated language that takes a long time to learn, and some people simply don’t have the right kind of mindset to effectively study a new language, particularly if they’re a little older and their brain finds it more difficult to take in entirely new language-related information. Should people who are unable to study Japanese for whatever reason be denied access to authentic experiences? No, of course not.

I’ve seen both sides of this argument unfolding recently and it’s frankly getting rather tiresome — mostly because many of the arguments, as we’ve seen above, are based on mistaken assumptions. This has been a worryingly growing trend over the last few years, and it’s this, in part, that has led to the overwhelmingly negative atmosphere a lot of online interactions carry over their heads these days; everyone is afraid to offend everyone else.

In this instance, I would be inclined to defer to the opinions of people who passionately consume Japanese games and other media, and who want an authentic experience from their localised material. It’s not as if we’re short of Western experiences for people who find heavily Japanese titles “too Japanese” or otherwise inaccessible for some reason, and ultimately keeping things as true to their original form as possible helps everyone to understand each other that little bit better, which is surely the best possible outcome to all this.

But I’m sure this argument will keep raging and no-one will pay any attention to what I’ve said here, so what do I know…

2224: Megadimension Neptunia: 50 Hour Report

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50 hours deep in Megadimension Neptunia VII and I’m just starting the third and final “episode”, Heart Dimension Neptunia H. So far I haven’t set foot in the titular Heart Dimension, but the plot has been set up; in the meantime I’ve been doing a little bit of questing and grinding with the CPU Candidates, who are the focus of the initial part of the H arc.

The game continues to be the most enjoyable Neptunia game yet. Everything about it is honed and refined to round off the scrappy edges of the previous installments; while the Re;Birth remakes provided small, incremental improvements on the format set in place by Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, MegaNep is, as I’ve previously noted, a complete overhaul of pretty much every system in the game, from the battle mechanics to the way “shares” work.

Perhaps one of the best changes is how unique each character now feels to play in battle. Rather than all essentially working in the same way outside of the SP-powered special skills and super-powerful EXE Drive attacks, now each character very much has their own distinctive feel and circumstances in which they are useful. This is achieved in several ways, largely to do with the weapons and combo attacks they are able to use.

Each weapon in MegaNep not only has the usual stats, but it also has a specific arrangement of combo slots, split into three categories: Rush, Power and Standard. (Break attacks have gone the way of the Guard Points bar that they were used to damage; I can’t say I miss the system, since it became largely irrelevant after a certain power level in the old games.) As in previous games, Rush attacks focus on a high hit count, with less power per individual hit, and also have a more significant impact on the EXE Drive meter, which now, incidentally, resets between every battle rather than carrying over as in the previous games. Power attacks, meanwhile, have fewer hits, hit harder and in many cases carry an elemental affinity, allowing you to exploit weaknesses. And Standard attacks are somewhere in between the two.

Where things get interesting is in trying to arrange these combos optimally. Characters learn new combo moves as they level up, but each can only be put in a single slot. Moreover, the first attack a weapon performs is fixed and not tied to the character’s unlocked skills; this comes into play when considering the individual combo moves’ Combo Traits, which, if fulfilled when you use them in battle, means that the combo move that triggered it will 1) be guaranteed to hit and 2) be guaranteed to crit with every hit, increasing overall damage considerably. Combo Traits vary from “All previous attacks did not use a Combo Trait” to “Haven’t used Power attacks” and numerous others besides. The challenge when customising a character is to give them as many workable combos with Traits as possible, enabling them to respond to different situations in an optimal manner. It seems to be impossible to build the “perfect” combo — every move triggering a Combo Trait — at my current level, but I wonder if it will be an option with later weapons and/or combo moves.

Anyway. Given that each character has their own set of combo skills and their own set of weapons (each of which has its own arrangement of combo slots as well as its own area of effect) there’s a considerable degree of flexibility in how you set up your party, particularly with the sheer number of playable characters on offer in the game. And you’ll want to rotate them around, too; back-line characters no longer gain experience points (with a couple of exceptions) and there are certain circumstances where you’re obliged to use one or more specific characters in a fight, so they better be suitably set up when that time comes! The series’ Lily Rank system is back, too, only this time Lily Ranks are gained by characters fighting together in the front row, making them somewhat easier to gain — at least it feels that way so far — and in order to max these out you’ll need to tweak your party arrangement every so often, particularly if you’re Trophy hunting.

Elsewhere in the combat, while there are a lot of disposable popcorn enemies — particularly on the world map, where after a certain point random battles become more of an inconvenience than an actual hazard in getting to your destination — the highlights of the game are the boss fights. The game knows this, too, presenting you with unique interface elements, including one thing that I oddly like very much and can’t quite explain why: the boss HP meter with multiple bars. Yes, rather than depleting one bar very slowly while battering down a boss-level enemy, MegaNep takes a Final Fantasy XII-esque approach of having a number of “lights” beneath the main HP bar for a boss, with a light dimming each time you empty the bar. Dim all the lights and you’ve won. It’s essentially a variation on the system that was used in titles like Shining Force and Senran Kagura, where different coloured HP bars represented how many “extra” bars a character or enemy had over the maximum possible to display on screen proportionally.

Outside of my rather specific, peculiar tastes in HP meters, though, back to the boss fights themselves: a lot of them are pretty good, and this is largely thanks to a couple of new mechanics introduced in MegaNep. One is the “Parts Break” system, whereby certain enemies have breakable sections with their own durability counts. In order to damage the part, your character needs to be standing in an appropriate place when they either unleash their combo or a special move. Break the part and you get extra XP, credits and a chance at some extra drops. In many cases, breaking the part also has an effect on the boss, either reducing an aspect of its defences or removing the capability for a particular attack. In one particularly memorable confrontation, a boss is completely immune to all damage except Parts damage until you break the cape on his back — to make matters more challenging, the cape can only be damaged by attacks with an elemental affinity. The fight quickly turns into an entertaining dance as you decide whether to try and break his gauntlets and the horn on his head to cripple his special attacks, or whether to focus on trying to get behind him to destroy his cape and be able to deal some real damage.

The new EXE Drive system works well, too; rather than encouraging you to get into a bunch of random fights in a dungeon just to charge it up before a boss fight, the fact it 1) resets at the start of combat and 2) fills much more quickly than in past games means that you’re much more likely to be using the spectacular, entertaining EXE Drive moves, which is good, because there are a lot more of them, including several multi-character ones that necessitate surrounding an enemy in appropriate formations. Transforming the CPUs and their sisters into their HDD (and, later, their Next Form) incarnations also costs a bar of EXE Drive rather than SP, meaning you can pretty much guarantee the ability to transform in every fight if you need it — to discourage spamming this, however, transforming now costs Shares, though getting KO’d costs significantly more Shares, so you’ll want to weigh up the pros and cons before doing anything rash. Shares work like their original intention in the first Hyperdimension Neptunia game: the more shares one of the nations has, the stronger their CPU (and her sister) is. They’re no longer a zero-sum game, however; increasing one nation’s shares no longer means taking them from someone else; it’s possible to have all four nations with maxed-out share bars, all enjoying the benefits of being Top Nep.

Anyway. I’ve waffled on for over 1,300 words on the systems in this game and not even mentioned the story and characters, which are still my favourite bit of the series. I’ll save that for another day, though, perhaps when I’ve finished my first playthrough: there’s a lot to talk about, with this being by far the most interesting Neptunia game story-wise as well as in terms of mechanics.

It’s pretty good, in other words. Very good, in fact. Buy it. Support it. I want to see more Neps. (At this point, I don’t think we have a lot to worry about there.)

2218: Megadimension Neptunia: Report from 21 Hours In

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Good Lord, this game is good.

As I mentioned the other day, Megadimension Neptunia V-II marks something of a watershed moment for the series in that it’s no longer “good, but [insert caveat of your choice here]” and is just plain good. Great, even.

I’m about 21 hours in so far. I’ve finished the first of the three main stories that make up the complete experience — Zerodimension Neptunia Z — and am now in the second, Hyperdimension Neptunia G. This part — at least the first bit of it; I don’t know how long it is in total — is split into four distinct scenarios, each of which focuses on one of the four main goddess characters (and one of the four new “Gold Third” characters, who personify various Japanese game companies from Capcom to Square Enix), and so far I’ve played through Blanc’s route from start to finish.

Like Compile Heart’s previous game Omega Quintet, MegaNep spreads out its mechanics over the course of quite a few hours. 20 hours in, I’m still getting tutorial messages when I’m afflicted with a status effect I haven’t suffered before, though I think that most of the main core mechanics of the game have now been introduced by this point. Unlike Final Fantasy XIII, which often draws the ire of commentators for taking a similar approach to spreading out its new mechanics, MegaNep never feels like it’s artificially constraining you, though; the new systems I’ve seen so far were all introduced at the changeover between Zerodimension Neptunia Z and Hyperdimension Neptunia G, which was an eminently sensible way to do things, since it allows Z to stand by itself as a complete-feeling experience, then G to move on and feel distinctive in its own right thanks to the additional things you have to juggle.

What of those additional things, though? Well, aside from the things that Z already shook up — the world map is now node-based a la Final Fantasy Tactics, and you can have random encounters while moving from place to place; the battle system has been completely revamped from previous installments — G introduces (and, in some cases, reintroduces) a number of new systems.

First is the Scout system originally seen in Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. Essentially, this is a small army of chibi characters (series veterans will recognise them as the “Chirper” characters who fulfil the role of incidental NPCs) that you can send out to dungeons, and they will then report back with what they find. Whereas Victory’s Scout system simply required you to enter and leave locations a certain number of times before the Scouts would return, MegaNep’s Scouts head out in real time and then report back with items, money, new dungeon features (boss monsters or clues to hidden treasure) or whole new dungeons. There’s still a heavy degree of RNG involved, but it’s a fairly painless process, and the real-time element means you can easily leave it running while you’re doing other errands in-game. Scouts also provide passive bonuses to you if you’re exploring the same dungeon they’re deployed to, so they’re helpful in ways other than just finding stuff, too.

Next is the Investment system, which allows you to develop towns by spending your hard-earned Credits in three areas: Commercial, Industrial and Public Relations. Upgrading Commercial increases the stock in the shops; upgrading Industrial gives you access to new crafting recipes; upgrading Public Relations triggers events that can reward you with items, new Scouts or simply an entertaining scene. That’s pretty straightforward.

Then you have the Route Building system, which is also reasonably straightforward. Discover a new dungeon and you can’t just click on it on the map like in the older games; you have to build a node-based pathway to it first, which costs money.

Then you have the Hidden Treasure system for each dungeon, which replaces the old games’ spamming the “sonar”-type ability to find invisible items. Here, to find a hidden treasure, first of all you have to have a Scout discover a clue to its location, then fulfil the conditions in the clue, then collect the treasure. Sometimes dungeons have more than one treasure, which means you have to do the process twice, though the conditions are usually different. The conditions make the dungeon-crawling a bit more interesting, because they have a decent amount of variety in them: some require you to collect all the regular treasures in a dungeon (some of which may be in awkward places or behind barriers that require the “Breaker” ability to smash) while others require you to execute 8 “Symbol Attacks” in a row without getting spotted by any enemies, which challenges your stealth and pattern-spotting skills. Others still require you to defeat each and every enemy symbol in the whole dungeon at least once — they don’t all have to be dead at the same time, but you do have to keep track of what you’ve already killed and what you haven’t.

In Blanc’s route, we get a number of different characters to play with, each of whom handles rather differently, fixing the issue from the older games where most of the characters felt rather interchangeable with the exception of their special skills. Blanc herself has a marked disparity between her physical and magic defense, for example, while her sisters Rom and Ram have half of Blanc’s HP but much stronger magic resistance and the ability to attack both at range and over a wider area. The brief time you get to play with Capcom personification C-Sha is a ton of fun, too; her combo skills are all named after fighting game terminology, and it’s more fun than it should be triggering Rush attacks called simply “PPPK” then seeing her doing a punch-punch-punch-kick combo on the enemy.

The story is proving to be surprisingly compelling so far, too. The Zerodimension episode had a mixture of lightheartedness and post-apocalyptic bleakness and worked well. Blanc’s route of the Hyperdimension story deals with a plausible view of a dystopian society where everything and everyone is controlled by the state, and how revolutionaries fighting against this sort of regime aren’t always in it for the right reasons. Neptunia’s stories have always been far more clever than most reviewers give them credit for, being heavily allegorical for the most part, but so far MegaNep seems to have taken things to a new level. The writing and localisation is good (aside from a few easily ignored typos here and there) and, crucially, the new characters — of whom there are quite a few — fit right in to the world without breaking a sweat.

It does feel very different to previous Neptunia games, but after the three Re;Births that all had the same basic mechanics, it’s refreshing to have a game that feels both comfortingly familiar and fresh at the same time. I’m delighted with the experience so far, and am looking forward to playing it to death over the course of the next few weeks. Expect further reports to follow.

2211: On “Burn in Hell, Yarny”

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A videogame called Unravel will be released tomorrow. It may be a good game, and it is certainly a good-looking one, with a soft focus and hazy depth of field; tree leaves rustle convincingly and thick snowflakes pile up as the camera pans ever right-ward. It appears to make use of this tactile world for a series of physics-based puzzles, like moving rocks to get up on ledges and creating makeshift vines with which to soar across little ponds. These may be very clever puzzles, building toward a resolution that is very satisfying, but I will never know, because I will never play Unravel, and that is because its protagonist, a little red yarn-man named Yarny, can go fuck himself.

This was the opening to an article from Kill Screen, a site that originally positioned itself at the very spearhead of “new games journalism”, boasting both a print magazine and an online component that would offer something a little different from the usual consumer advice/PR/news, previews, reviews cycle that most games-focused sites had provided up until that point.

I remember Kill Screen launching; it was actually at the first PAX I went to — I even still have a copy of their “Issue Zero” that I picked up at the show somewhere. It looked like it was going to be a great read, and a bold new frontier for games criticism.

Look at that opening paragraph again. Look at the last half of the last sentence.

“I will never play Unravel, and that is because its protagonist, a little red yarn-man named Yarny, can go fuck himself.”

Needless to say, I do not feel the same way about Kill Screen as I did when it was first launched. I hadn’t felt the same way for quite some time, to be honest, since its take on intelligent criticism had started to veer rather too heavily in favour of heavily ideological-based arguments rather than actual analysis of the art on its own merits — a scourge that the entire games press has been afflicted with for the past few years — but this article today has cemented my feelings.

What I did want to talk about, though, is the staggering hypocrisy of some people — within and outside games journalism — when censuring this article, and it most certainly has received almost universal censure from all angles. Deservedly so.

The key thrust of the article is that the author has no plants to play Unravel because he doesn’t like the look of it. He doesn’t like the look of the protagonist, and he doesn’t like the fact that the game looks like it’s going to be a narrative-centric, emotional experience that emphasises artistry (in the traditional sense) over game design.

You know what? Those are perfectly valid reasons to not want to play a game. There are lots of games I don’t want to play because I don’t like the look of them, because I don’t like that type of game, because the subject matter doesn’t appeal or because I know people I don’t like love them. Rational or not, pretty much any reason you can think of not to play a game is an absolutely valid one from your own personal perspective: we’re already living in an age where it’s literally impossible to play every single game out there, even if all you did all day every day was play games, so everyone, consciously or not, has their own set of selection criteria for what they put on their plate at any given moment.

What isn’t okay, though, is then picking on something that 1) you confess doesn’t appeal to you and 2) you admit you have no intention of playing (and therefore speaking from a position of authority on) anyway — and then writing a critical article about how it’s symptomatic of everything wrong with modern gaming. The author has some fair points — that some developers believe emotional manipulation of the player is an end unto itself, and that this isn’t the same as creating something truly artistic — but they are completely invalidated by the position of ignorance from which he is speaking: he’s criticising Unravel and games like it without any knowledge of what they’re actually like — he’s speaking on the basis of assumptions, not taking the time to research it for himself.

Where else have we seen this happen? Oh, right, with pretty much every niche-interest Japanese game released over the last few years. We’ve seen series like Senran Kagura berated for having boobs in them, but little to no discussion of their more progressive aspects such as homosexuality, sexual kinks, forming friendships across ideological barriers and accepting people for who they are. We’ve seen my longstanding favourite Hyperdimension Neptunia all but rejected from any cultural significance for being “hypersexualised” and having characters that both possess breasts and breathe, with little to no mention of the series’ perpetually on-point satire of games and game culture, excellent writing and characters strong enough to carry games in a wide variety of styles. We’ve even seen people branding the “Amie” feature from the Japanese version of Fire Emblem Fates as “creepy” and expressing pleasure that it had been removed, despite displaying no understanding of its context, either in-game or within the Japanese cultural context of “skinship” or “naked association”. And I could go on. For pages.

Sound familiar? Why, yes, in all the above cases, the critics of these titles were speaking from spectacularly ill-informed, ignorant positions — in some cases not even playing the games, or barely playing them for more than a few minutes in the instances where they did bother to boot them up at all — and, thus, were speaking from a position where they were unqualified to offer meaningful, trustworthy criticism of these games. And yet because games journalism is very much a cult of personality, people who didn’t know about these games already take these critics’ words at face value — assuming they’re a high-profile critic like Jim Sterling, or at least from a site seen as “reputable” (i.e. big) by the masses — and don’t bother to question them. And this leads to these games being pushed further into the niches they’re already in, and to a lot of people missing out on experiences that they may well find themselves pleasantly surprised by.

The worst thing it does is contribute to the overwhelming air of negativity and cynicism that pervades modern games writing. Many members of the press are extremely burned out on the increasingly penny-pinching tactics of triple-A publishers — day-one DLC, preorder incentives, platform-exclusive content, betas-that-are-not-betas-they’re-demos-that-you-can-only-play-if-you-preorder — and this causes the exhaustion and cynicism to infect their explorations of anything that might be just slightly outside the norm. Oh, sure, there’s plenty of indie darlings that get elevated to “gaming Messiah” status — Undertale, The Witness and Firewatch all spring to mind in recent months — but poor old Japan repeatedly gets shafted by people who, like the author of the Kill Screen piece, have no intention of exploring them in sufficient detail to provide adequate comment and criticism on them.

Life is too short — and there are too many games out there — to waste time on negative articles about “why I don’t like this” or “why I don’t want to play this” or “why this doesn’t appeal to me”. So why does it keep happening? I’d much rather read a games press that is more positive in tone: willing to criticise where appropriate, but where the thing first and foremost in every critic’s mind is the celebration of this amazing, growing, constantly changing medium that shatters cultural borders into something the whole world can truly understand and enjoy together.

You don’t have to love everything. I certainly don’t. But how about we think about keeping our mouths shut about the things we hate, let the people who do love them enjoy them, and we focus on the things that we love, too. Doesn’t that sound much nicer than “I have no intention of playing this game because I don’t like the look of the protagonist”?

(Oh, and for the record, I have no interest in playing Unravel either; Braid and Limbo were enough to put me off arty platformers for quite some time. I would not, however, dream of attempting to offer criticism on it having not played it — and I wouldn’t even feel comfortable commenting on Braid and Limbo because I don’t feel I played them enough to be well-informed before tiring of them. Now, I’m off to go and play some disgusting degenerate pervert Japanese role-playing games and probably fap myself into a frenzy in the process. Or perhaps just enjoy the things I love rather than bitching about things I hate and have no intention of trying to enjoy.)

2155: On Dead or Alive Xtreme

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It will probably come as no surprise to you, dear reader, to learn that I enjoy the Dead or Alive Xtreme series — perhaps even more so than the fighting game series that they are a spin off of. Dead or Alive has always been the one fighting game series that I’ve actually felt like I sort of almost understood, though I’ve never been able to play it at anything approaching competitive level; however, the fact that I’ve always enjoyed it has, at least, meant that I know a lot of the characters reasonably well, and am a particular fan of several of them.

So when the original Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball came out on the original Xbox, of course I was all over it, but not only for the prospect of seeing Kasumi’s delicious curves in a swimsuit. No, the concept of the game actually sounded rather interesting to me; bear in mind that in the original Xbox generation, getting our hands on some of Japan’s quirkier games — particularly those that weren’t RPGs or fighting games — was a bit of a rarity, especially in Europe, and I had always been fascinated by the idea of non-violent games about relationships. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, despite the name, is more a game about relationships than it is about volleyball — and this is a pattern that continued throughout subsequent installments.

Let’s back up a moment for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the Dead or Alive Xtreme series. The concept is simple and rather silly: Zack, a character from Dead or Alive who is noteworthy for having some of the more outlandish costumes among the male cast, lures a bevy of beauties to his own private island under the pretext that he’s holding a new round of the titular fighting tournament that forms the ultimately irrelevant backdrop to the plot of all the main installments in the series. When the girls arrive, they are momentarily shocked to discover that Zack lied to them, and instead has simply lured them to his island so they can take some time off from kicking each other in the tits and so he can enjoy the view. No-one involved appears to have a problem with any of this, and thus begins a virtual vacation in the extremely pleasant surroundings of Zack Island. Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 is based on the exact same concept, and almost certainly Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 will be too.

The gameplay involves you taking on the role of one of the girls and doing whatever you feel like on the island for two virtual weeks. On each day, you have the opportunity to hang out with characters, buy swimsuits and items, play volleyball, roll around in the sand provocatively, play a pool-hopping game and, in Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, go jetskiing and watersliding. It initially seems like a rather shallow, silly game — and it is — but there’s actually more going on than meets the eye.

Essentially, at its core, Dead or Alive Xtreme is a game about collecting things. There’s not really a set way to “beat” the game, but most players would probably agree that this is achieved when you’ve successfully filled every character’s inventory with every single possible swimsuit and every single collectible item. This takes a very long time indeed, since it’s not a simple case of just grinding out enough money to buy all the items; many of the swimsuits in particular can only be put in a girl’s inventory by successfully giving them to her as a gift — and in order for her to accept them as a gift, she has to like both you and the gift itself, and in order for that to happen, you have to hang out with her, partner up with her, play volleyball with her and all manner of other things. Manipulating the relationship system in order to further your collection is the main point of the game once you get into it.

There’s another reason I like Dead or Alive Xtreme, though, besides the relationship gameplay and the boobs. It’s the fact that each game in the series is, without question, one of the most unashamedly happy, cheerful and genuinely summery-feeling games I’ve ever played. This is achieved through a combination of brightly coloured, highly saturated visuals, beautiful character models and animations, an airy, lightweight tone to everything that happens, and some simply wonderful soundtracks that feature some of the most horrendously cheesy summer pop hits you’ll ever hear. We’re talking Baha Men, B*witched, Hilary Duff and all manner of other goodness. It’s quite something, and even if you don’t particularly like listening to the songs on the soundtrack in isolation, it’s hard not to have a broad grin on your face when they’re used in context in the game to add to the overall atmosphere.

In short, it saddens me that there’s so much negativity surrounding Dead or Alive Xtreme, largely from people who have never played it, because it’s a wonderfully positive, happy, uplifting and enjoyable series of games in which you can just switch off your brain and enjoy a virtual holiday alongside beautiful people. And, in a world increasingly filled with cynicism, bitterness and snark, something so unabashedly honest about its intentions — to make the player happy — is refreshing and enjoyable.

So yes. I will be importing Dead or Alive Xtreme 3‘s Asian English version when it releases. And I’m far from the only one; import specialist PlayAsia has had so many preorders following the announcement that it would not be officially localised that they’ve even dropped the price today.

So much for people not wanting this game on Western shores, huh.

2138: How to Be a Fashion Goddess

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Been playing a bunch of Nintendo Presents New Style Boutique 2: Fashion Forward (aka Style Savvy 3) during downtime lately, and been enjoying it without any shame whatsoever. It’s a decent game, reminding me somewhat of Animal Crossing but with “real” people and a bit more of a sense of direction and progression as you play through it.

I thought I’d assemble a few tips based on what I’ve encountered in the game so far, so without further ado:

Running the Boutique

This is your bread and butter, since you have a decent amount of control over how much money you make with each transaction. The basic strategy is to listen to what your customer wants, then put together an outfit using items you have in stock that add up to a total value as near as possible to their approximate budget. You can exceed their budget by a small amount, but try not to go too far over the top.

The Search function — the magnifying glass icon — is your best friend here, since until you have an idea of which items of clothing have which traits, it’s the easiest way to track down things that meet the customer’s requirements.

Early in the game, customers will make pretty simple requests of you, such as “I want a [trait] [item]”. Fulfilling this request is a simple matter of using the search function to search by Image and Type to narrow down your stock items to what they’re after. From there, pick the thing you think looks best — or, if you’re feeling mercenary, the thing that costs the most but is still within their budget — and offer it to them. To begin with, you can prompt them to “Take a look!” at the clothes, which will give you a couple of chances to correct any mistakes you might have made, but after you’ve made a bit more progress in the game, you have the option to confidently tell them to “Try it on!” if you’re absolutely sure you’ve found the perfect thing for them. If you make a mistake here, the customer will leave without buying anything, so use this with care!

After a while, you’ll have to start putting together complete outfits. This is the same process, only you’ll need to make sure you cover all the basics. At the very least you need one top (inner, shirt/blouse, outer), one bottom (trousers/shorts or skirt) and a pair of shoes or a dress to cover both. To squeeze a bit more cash out of your customer, try and adorn the outfit with some extras such as socks, gloves, earrings, bags and hats. Remember to stay close to their estimated budget, though.

Even later in the game, you’ll start running into characters in the street whom you served earlier. They’ll mention that they want to come and visit you later to find something to match the item you previously sold them. When they do show up, they won’t give you any reminders as to what the item’s traits were, so use a certain amount of judgement based on how they look now to recommend something appropriate — and use “Take a look!” if you’re unsure.

Stocking up

For the most part, customers will order things that you have in stock, thankfully, though you can influence what is fashionable to a certain degree using your shop window mannequin and your store’s decor. Certain items have multiple traits, though there is one “iconic brand” for each particular trait, so you can’t go too far wrong with sticking with what you know.

When paying the Exhibition Hall a visit to stock up, try and get a decent selection of items covering a range of budgets and at least all the essential areas — top, bottom, shoes. Remember that when you buy stock for your store, you get a free unit of the item for your own wardrobe, too. And the first time you visit a particular brand, you’ll get a complete outfit for free!

When you obtain the ability to design your own outfits, note that any commissioned items you successfully design will reward you with not only your payment for the job, but also ten units of the item you designed, which you are then free to sell. Taking on a bunch of design jobs can be an easy, cheap means of stocking up.

Hairdressing

When you get the opportunity to help out Noor in the hair salon, the mechanics are a little different. Rather than just listening to the customer’s requirements, you have the opportunity to ask them a few questions. You only have a few chances to figure out what they want, however, so rather than making idle chitchat be sure to choose the options that relate to what they want done with their hair, and where there is more than one option relating to their hair, pick the more specific-sounding question.

Picking sensible questions will make notes on your memo pad about the customer’s requirements. After three or four questions, they’ll prompt you to begin, so with any luck you’ll have assembled enough hints to put something suitable together. Try and remember any terminology that they use, because other customers might ask for something similar later, and won’t necessarily explain it. Brush up on terminology using the glossary app in your phone if you’re not sure.

So long as you stay within the customer’s requirements, you can freestyle a bit with the hair with regard to things like colour and suchlike. Doing so can reward you with extra cash if the customer likes it, though if they don’t you will have a chance to correct the issue.

The more haircuts you perform, the more styles you will acquire, and completed hairstyles will be recorded in your “Wig Box” for later recall if you so desire.

Make-up

This is a different process again. Here, customers will show up with a photograph of another character and ask you to do their make-up like them. By pressing the memo button at the bottom of the touchscreen you can flip the photo over to see the colour notes they made on the back; these are the important bits to follow, so take care of these first, then apply some finishing touches such as the correct amount of mascara based on the photograph.

Again, you can freestyle a bit with anything the customer doesn’t specifically state, but be sure to fulfil all their requirements first.

Fashion Show

Once you reach a particular level of fame, Ricky, Sophie and Callie will assist you in putting on a fashion show. Each of these will have a particular theme, and you’ll be required to dress your models in an appropriate outfit. Take note that following the fashion show, you’ll likely experience an upsurge in demand for items of a similar type, so be sure to stock up on items with the same traits ready to sell.

After the initial show, every few customers you serve will reward you with a ticket for your next show. When you sell enough tickets, you can put on another show.

The chalet

You’ll be rewarded with miniatures for various activities in the game, or just for chatting with people in the streets. You can also buy them from Kirsty in the shop next door to your boutique. It’s in your interest to make some nice rooms for a number of reasons: firstly, characters will sometimes come to you and express an interest in renting them, and this can be quite profitable. Secondly, if you connect with another player via local wireless, you can invite them to your chalet and they can purchase items from your rooms. You’re free to set the prices for these items to whatever you like, so if you have a rich friend, feel free to fleece them as much as possible.

As you progress through the game, you’ll get the opportunity to expand the chalet with additional rooms. Take this chance and fill the empty rooms whenever you can; the more available rooms means the more potential rent you can be raking in. Remember to go and collect the rent every so often, though, because your tenants certainly won’t come to you!

Collecting colours

To expand your colour palette, which is used in everything from clothing design to hairdressing and make-up, you need to collect additional colours. In order to do this, you need to chat with Rainbow, who is perpetually hanging out in the park, and show her a photograph with a colour she’s never seen before.

You can look at your colour palette at any time using the app on your phone, and the names of the undiscovered colours generally give a bit of a hint as to where you might be able to find them. Pay the appropriate area a visit (perhaps at the appropriate time of day) and take a photograph with the Y button, then show Rainbow the photograph to receive her assessment and the new colour if you were successful. Generally speaking, the first time you visit a new area you’ll be accompanied with another character, and you’ll have the opportunity to take a photo with them when you arrive. Take them up on this offer by tapping the Y button while your characters strike their poses, since this is usually a good shot to acquire some new colours.

Streetpass

Streetpassing other players has a few benefits. Firstly, you’ll receive their showcase chalet room, which you can drop into your own chalet. Secondly, their player character will come and hang out in your town for a bit, and while they’re there, you’ll have the chance to give them a complete makeover — clothes, hair and makeup. Streetpass customers, who appear as green on the map, aren’t terribly fussy, so you can use them as a creative outlet as you see fit. Then take their money.

Remember to set up your profile and showcase rooms in your chalet!

Building relationships

Chatting to characters on the map is mostly for flavour, though chatting to the more major characters can reveal some background information about your grandmother, the boutique and the town, so be sure to say hello if you see people like Sophie, Callie, Ricky and Evie hanging around. Elsewhere, characters marked with special icons have various uses.

The yellow asterisked characters are characters who have visited your boutique before; talking to them may prompt them to come and visit you again, perhaps to complete an outfit you sold them an item for earlier.

Characters with a pink musical note trigger a sub-event that sometimes unlocks something — a new location, a new game system or perhaps some new styles. It’s generally a good idea to trigger these when you see them, just in case the character wanders off and doesn’t come back for a while.

Characters with a patchwork exclamation mark will give you a hint where to find a new colour. Note that sometimes they will refer to locations you can’t visit yet, so pay attention to anything they say about unfamiliar locales ready for when you are able to visit.

Characters with a house icon want to rent a room in your chalet. You have the option to refuse their request, but there’s generally no real reason to unless you really just don’t like them for whatever reason. Rent is a nice little moneymaker on the side, so take the opportunity when it comes up.

A character with a crystal ball icon occasionally shows up in The Meadows. Speak to her and she’ll give you a fortune reading; answer her questions honestly, and she’ll give you an assessment of your personality.

Finally, characters with a yellow sparkle advance the storyline and often unlock important game elements. These characters will generally hang around until you pay attention to them, so feel free to leave them hanging until you’re done with your current affairs.

Progressing

If your progress seems to have stalled a bit, head back to your boutique and make some sales; it usually won’t be long before the next event shows up. If this doesn’t work, keep selling, designing, cutting and… make-upping until you sell enough tickets for your next fashion show, then take it from there.

If you’re still not sure what to do, be sure to check your messages and schedule in your phone, since the latter in particular usually gives you some idea of what you “should” be doing to continue progressing in the game — though, like Animal Crossing and its ilk, you are, of course, free to ignore this altogether and play however you see fit.

Hope all that helps! Have fun, fashion sistas!

2137: Nintendoes

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I’ve been playing almost exclusively Nintendo games for the past week or two. This wasn’t entirely deliberate, but it’s just sort of happened. And it’s allowing me to rediscover my appreciation of what Nintendo does well.

Nintendo, more than pretty much any other company out there, puts out games that feel satisfyingly complete. They don’t come out of the door half-baked, lacking in content or riddled with bugs; they’re ready to play, bursting with things to do and full of enjoyment waiting to be discovered. And this is how they’ve always been, even since the days of the NES.

The other thing I rather like about Nintendo is that their work has a very distinctive “voice”. This is partly the job of the localisation teams who work on the various properties, but the overall “tone” of most Nintendo works is so very consistent — and has been for many years — that I find it difficult to believe that this is purely a regional thing. Rather, I feel that Nintendo almost certainly makes very careful decisions about how it’s going to localise things and make them accessible and tonally appropriate in territories around the world. This even goes as far as making the British/European English and American English versions of games different to quite a considerable degree in some cases, which always feels like a pleasantly “personal” touch.

Now, Nintendo have attracted the ire of a number of people over the last few years thanks to what these folks see as unnecessarily “butchered” translations of games such as Fire Emblem Awakening and Xenoblade Chronicles X. And, for sure, some notable changes have been made from the original scripts — and, in a number of cases, content has been edited or even cut to be in keeping with the perceived values of a particular territory. Memorable examples in recent memory include the shot of Tharja’s panties-clad bum in Fire Emblem Awakening (which featured a curtain being pulled across it in the English version, inadvertently making it look more lewd by hiding her panties altogether) and the inexplicable removal of the breast size slider from Xenoblade Chronicles X‘s character creation tool.

These sorts of edits are nothing new, however. The Legend of Zelda series, for example, has a somewhat different tone in Japan to in the West, particularly in installments such as A Link to the Past on Super NES. In the Japanese original A Link to the Past, for example, the story touched on religious themes, with one of the main villains being a priest. In the English versions, however, religious references were removed, and the “priest” became a “wizard”.

Why does Nintendo do this? For an attempt at inclusivity, I guess; the company has a carefully curated “family-friendly” image to uphold, after all, and “family-friendly” means different things in different territories. From its localisation decisions, we can interpret that Nintendo believes here in the West that “family-friendly” means something that the whole family can sit down and enjoy together without any material provoking arguments or awkwardness between one another. We’ve seen on all too many occasions that discussions and material relating to both religion and sexuality are very much capable of inducing arguments and awkwardness, so out the window they go. It’s kind of a shame for those who prefer their translations to be more literal and true to the original Japanese texts, but it is, after all, what Nintendo has always done — and, I have to admit, that warm, friendly tone most of their localisations tend to have is rather comforting, and quite unlike anything from other localised Japanese works.

This is even apparent in games such as New Style Boutique 2 and Animal Crossing, where there was unlikely to be any real “offensive” content in the first place; both have been localised in such a way as to be as inclusive and welcoming as possible to a broad audience; they’re games that invite you in to enjoy the experience rather than insist you must be this skilled to ride, or whatever. And that’s rather nice, really. Not something that every game needs, of course — some games are all the better for their laser-sharp focus on a very specific, niche-interest audience — but, to be honest, I find it hard to get too riled up about censorship talk when it comes to Nintendo games, simply because I’ve grown up with that warm, friendly, familiar tone of their localisations, and it would feel kind of strange for that to change now.

Anyway. I’m enjoying my Nintendo period right now: currently playing Zelda 3, Hyrule Warriors and New Style Boutique 2. All are very different games from one another. All are simply marvellous. All are proof that Nintendo doesn’t give a shit what its competitors are doing, because they’re quite happy doing their own thing, even if it ends up causing their sales figures to look dismal in comparison to those of Sony and Microsoft.

I hope this Nintendo never goes away. They’re an important part of gaming, and it would be sad to see them go the way of Sega, becoming just another third-party publisher.

2115: Jade Penetrate

Had a go at a game that’s been loitering in my Steam library for a while today: eXceed 3rd Jade Penetrate Black Package. This curiously named game is the third in a series of Japanese indie “bullet hell” shoot ’em ups that I grabbed in some Steam sale or other and have never really explored all that much. The first two games are rather Touhou-ish, while the third, developed by a different team and having a plot that seemingly has absolutely nothing to do with the first two, draws favourable comparisons to Cave’s Mushihimesama series — that, coincidentally, is coming to Steam tomorrow.

Anyway. This being a Japanese game there is a plot where you perhaps wouldn’t normally expect to find one, involving some sort of “to the death” tournament between what appear to be dragon girls aiming to rule over Pandemonium. As you might expect, angst and melodrama ensues and while none of it really matters to the actual game as such, the character designs are cute, the voice acting is decent and it infuses the game with a certain degree of personality that it might not otherwise have had.

The thing I like about eXceed 3rd is that it’s not the kind of bullet hell game that immediately slams your face into a desk and then flushes your head down the toilet. It’s accessible and easy to understand, though to get the highest scores you’ll need to be a little more technical. There’s just two modes of fire — a standard spread shot and a focused attack, which also doubles as a “precise movement” mode — along with the usual bombs, plus a super-powerful special attack. This charges up over time, but can also be charged by grazing bullets, collecting items and various other means.

Boss fights are split into clear and obvious phases, each with memorable names that assist with the learning process that is so important to this kind of game. In many ways, the boss battles are very much the focal point of the game, with the popcorn enemies during the main part of the level being more “filler” than anything else — though there are still some interesting bullet patterns to navigate through before you can challenge the stage’s boss.

As is so often the case with Japanese indie games, eXceed 3rd runs at an incredibly low resolution — 640×480 — which means it will display on pretty much any screen and run at 60fps without too much difficulty. And as is so often the case with Japanese indie games, because eXceed 3rd has been specifically designed for this low resolution, it still manages to look good despite being technically inferior to pretty much everything else in the modern PC gaming market. The attractive, fluid visuals combine with an absolutely rockin’ soundtrack to produce a shmup that really gets the pulse racing — exactly as it should be.

I don’t feel I’ve played the game enough to comment in any more detail on it just yet, but I enjoyed the little I played earlier, and am looking forward to investigating it further. Pewpewpew!

2103: Amane, the Girl Who Learned to Say Thank You

I finished Amane’s route in The Fruit of Grisaia tonight, bringing my time with this absolutely incredible visual novel to a close, and frankly I’m a bit of an emotional wreck right now, but I will do my best to try and collect my thoughts and post something reasonably meaningful.

One thing I will say before I jump into spoiler territory after the “More” tag is that I’m really glad I saved Amane’s route for last. Not just because she was immediately my favourite girl — and still is after playing through her route — but because her route acts as a rather wonderful way to wrap up the entire experience. Her good ending is particularly “conclusive”, and as the last thing I saw in the whole work, it feels like I’ve had a great sense of closure — although, as always with this sort of thing, I’m going to miss these characters very much. At least I have two more games in the series to look forward to!

All right. Let’s get spoilery.

Continue reading “2103: Amane, the Girl Who Learned to Say Thank You” →

2097: Dungeon Travelers 2: Some Initial Impressions

Dungeon Travelers 2 came out on PlayStation Vita yesterday. To say I’ve been eagerly anticipating this game is something of an understatement; I’ve been deliberately holding off playing anything else “big” until it came out, because I was keen to be able to devote some time to it. And, after a good few hours with it today, I’m not at all disappointed with my decision to do so.

For the unfamiliar, Dungeon Travelers 2 is a first-person perspective dungeon crawler RPG (of the Wizardry mould that Japan loves so) created as a collaborative effort between visual novel producers Aquaplus, weird-but-cool RPG specialists Sting and That Company People Mostly Know The Name Of Because of Persona, Atlus. It has a somewhat convoluted history: its Japan-only predecessor Dungeon Travelers was a fleshed-out remake of a dungeon crawler that was part of a fandisc for Aquaplus’ visual novel ToHeart 2, though Dungeon Travelers 2 itself doesn’t have anything to do with either the first game or ToHeart 2, simply sharing some aesthetic sensibilities and mechanics.

Dungeon Travelers 2 shot to notoriety a few months back when Polygon’s Phil Kollar berated publisher Atlus for localising the game, which he referred to as a “creepy, porn-lite dungeon crawler”. I responded in some detail to Kollar’s nonsense back when he first blurted it out over at MoeGamer; take a look. Ironically, Kollar’s condemnation of the game actually made a lot of people — me included — who had never heard of it before aware of its existence, and I can’t help feeling that the game has been a bigger success than it probably would have been if he’d just kept his mouth shut. In that sense, I’m not complaining; it’s just a little frustrating to know that he almost certainly won’t have given it any time and attention since that initial piece, having written it off as the usual pervy nonsense.

Dungeon Travelers 2 is an ecchi game, though, make no mistake, if you hadn’t already noticed from the artwork that peppers this post; within five minutes of starting the first dungeon, you’re presented with a rather fetching view of one of the heroines’ panties-clad buttocks, and every boss fight is followed by some rather beautifully drawn artwork of said boss in a somewhat disheveled, suggestive state. Not only that, but the vast majority of enemies are scantily clad cute female characters (the rest are, inexplicably, sentient fruit) that draw a certain degree of inspiration from the popular “monster girl” aesthetic, albeit in a less overt way than something like the anime Monster Musume.

Here’s the thing, though; the ecchi content of Dungeon Travelers 2 works because, like other games that fully embrace their ecchi (or even hentai) side, it’s consistent in its use and it thus becomes part of the overall aesthetic. It’s a sexy game; it’s not about sex as such, mind you, but beautiful girls in sexy poses are very much part of the way it looks, and it is not at all ashamed of that fact. In order to fully enjoy it, you absolutely can’t be ashamed of it, either.

But the ecchi content is the least interesting thing to talk about when it comes to Dungeon Travelers 2, because it’s a really solid game with some interesting mechanics. Of particular note is the game’s approach to teaching you how to play; the electronic manual provided with the software gives you only a bare-bones outline of the interface, but through a combination of in-game lectures (delivered by the deliciously sarcastic Maid-Sensei) and in-context, in-character sub-events that are triggered by your various actions in the dungeon and in battle, the game teaches you how to play and things to watch out for without resorting to insulting your intelligence. Maid-Sensei’s lectures are the nearest thing to an outright tutorial, but those are skippable; the sub-events, meanwhile, are short, snappy, humorous and get their point across without being dull.

There are some interesting systems at play. The concept of the game revolves around “Libras”, who are individuals that are able to seal away monsters in books. The protagonist character is one of these Libras, but he doesn’t take an active role in battle; instead, the game is presented as you, playing the role of Fried the Libra, issuing orders to your gradually expanding party of pretty girl bodyguards and performing the important task of sealing away the monsters when they’ve been defeated.

It doesn’t stop there, though; the Libra concept is a core system of the game. By defeating enough monsters, you can create “Sealbooks” which have two main functions: firstly, they represent the fact that you have researched the monster sufficiently to understand their behaviour and characteristics, depicted in game as revealing their full stats, and secondly, they can be used as a piece of equipment, with each individual monster’s Sealbook having a different special effect. Thanks to a “completion percentage” figure in the game, there’s a definite element of “gotta catch ’em all” going on that I anticipate is going to cause me some issues in the future.

Alongside this is a detailed class system for all your party members, with each character able to level up a number of different classes and learn skills using earned skill points. It’s possible to build and specialise characters in a variety of different ways, and the early game introduces you to a selection of interesting classes, beginning with a fairly straightforward tank and DPS combo — pleasingly, the tank class is able to provoke enemies and increase the likelihood that they’ll be hit in favour of squishy mages — before giving you the peculiar “Spieler” class, which so far appears to be heavily based on luck and random chance, and the “Maid” class, which plays a supportive role that is very distinct from a dedicated healer by buffing and allowing characters to restore the points they use on skills as well as their all-important HP.

I’m not particularly deep into the game as yet, so the dungeons haven’t got especially complicated so far. There have already been some challenging fights, though, and the game is not afraid to slap you about a bit until you remember that you have to play dungeon crawlers a little differently to more conventional RPGs. I got a Game Over in the third fight I had in the whole game, for example, because I overextended myself and forgot that it’s perfectly acceptable in this type of game to advance a bit then run screaming for the exit to lick your wounds and restock; compare and contrast to your more typical JRPG, meanwhile, in which you tend to always be moving forwards rather than backtracking or making multiple expeditions.

In fact, what Dungeon Travelers 2 reminded me of, of all things, is a board game of the Advanced Heroquest ilk. The basic structure is the same: get overarching quest, go into dungeon, come back out if things get hairy, go back in, find treasure, go back out, resupply, go back in, fight a bit further… and so on. The “multiple expeditions” nature of exploration in the game is inherently satisfying, since you can easily see on the convenient automap when you’re making progress, because you’ll be revealing new areas. Discovering new monsters is enjoyable, too, since they’re all depicted with some truly lovely artwork, and the juxtaposition between the “pretty girl” monsters and the “sentient fruit” monsters is bizarre and hilarious.

I’m enjoying it a great deal so far, then, and I’m looking forward to spending a lot of time with it. I’m a relative newbie to the dungeon crawler subgenre of RPGs as a whole, but between Demon Gaze (which was my first real hardcore dungeon-crawling experience) and what I’ve experienced of this so far, I’m very much a believer already.

To the dungeons, then, where pretty girls await!