For the unfamiliar, Final Fantasy Resonance is an adaptation of the defunct mobile game, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. This was, it will not surprise you to hear, a free-to-play gacha game, but when I gave it a try on its original release, I actually found it had some redeeming features — most notably the fact that it didn't seem ashamed of being a video game, which a lot of mobile titles do, inexplicably.

Anyway, I always thought it was a bit of a shame that what, in my limited experience, appeared to be a surprisingly decent Final Fantasy story was trapped in free-to-play gacha hell — particularly as the soundtrack was awesome. Alas, though, it was not to last; the worldwide game shut down in 2024 and the Japanese version a year later, leaving the tales of Rain and company forever consigned to oblivion.

Except! They aren't! Because Final Fantasy Resonance takes the first main story arc of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius and adapts it into a proper, non-gacha, non-free-to-play game. And boy, they've done a great job with it, too — to such a degree that this stands up remarkably well as a possible future direction Square Enix might want to (but almost definitely won't) take the mainline series in for its next installments.

Final Fantasy is a series that has never been afraid of reinventing itself. Supposedly Hironobu Sakaguchi's attitude to the series could be summed up as "if it's not new, it's not Final Fantasy", and this would explain why every entry in the series to date has done something fairly to radically different from its predecessors. I, personally, love this, and have had great fun with the whole series, even the entries that "popular opinion" (spit) won't stop whining and moaning and crying about, like VIII, XIII, XV and XVI.

What Square Enix has basically done with Final Fantasy Resonance is go "all right you whining fucking babies, here is a very traditional Final Fantasy with random battles and little dudes lining up to take it in turns to whack monsters, only with very pretty modern visuals and an amazing soundtrack, are you fucking happy now?!" And I sincerely, absolutely hope that anyone who has ever complained about "the way Final Fantasy has been going" at any point over the last 30 years has picked this game up, started playing and gone "…well, all right, then, fair play". Because it is absolutely what people have been clamouring for, for decades at this point. So if they're not playing this, they don't get to talk about Final Fantasy ever again.

It's not just noteworthy for this angle, though. It's also just a damn fine RPG, and incorporates a lot of the elements I really like in a game like this. The turn-based combat is just turn-based combat without any QTEs or parrying or other bullshit like that. (I liked Expedition 33 well enough, but I could have absolutely done without its Souls-inspired elements.) It has a fun progression system that takes elements from Final Fantasy V, VI and IX, whereby you learn abilities from having "Visions" (actually characters from other Final Fantasy games) equipped, and once an ability is learned you can equip it independently of having the Vision equipped, allowing you to build your characters as you see fit. It has optional fast travel, allowing you to either journey between locations the old-fashioned way, getting into random battles on the way, or simply zapping to a location you need to get to for a quest. And it has Tales-style skits where your party members chat about things while you wander around on the world map.

The story also seems solid so far. It's oddly jarring to have a protagonist that is very… 16 to 32-bit in terms of how idealistic and positive he is, but it's a welcome, nostalgic feeling after so many games that are deliberately dour in tone. That's not to say the game doesn't have any darkness, either; indeed, I'm still in the first chapter, and there has already been one impressively fucked-up moment that I can only assume will get resolved more conclusively at a much later time.

Anyway, I'm having a blast with it so far, and thus I'm going to go and spend a bit more quality time with it right now. Cue That Fanfare…

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The post #oneaday Day 872: Resonance appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Ys is not the only series I am very behind on, of course. I am also very behind on Yakuza, which is at least partly why I started Yakuza 6 on a whim the other day. Technically I'm not "behind" on Suikoden because I never started it prior to this — though I am enjoying it a lot — but I do want to play, at the very least, the first two in the HD Remaster collection.

Then, of course, there is Trails, that which has apparently become Falcom's flagship series. To date, I have played the first Trails in the Sky… twice. I also made a start on Trails in the Sky Second Chapter, but almost immediately after I started playing that game, Falcom announced the remake of the first Trails in the Sky (and its subsequent follow-up), so I figured that I would delay starting a proper, honest to goodness attempt to "do" that series until all of these remakes were out. And in the meantime, the far end of the series continues to extend further and further into the distance; I am several games behind in terms of actually buying the games at this point, so hopefully by the time I do actually start playing Trails properly, they will still be reasonably available.

Does it all matter? No, of course not. So long as these games continue to be available and the hardware to play them on remains in working order, I can play them at any time. That said, I do feel considerably more "pressure" of sorts to play current stuff sooner rather than later, given how many of them have downloadable updates. I do tend to make a habit of primarily purchasing limited-print stuff, which tends to be fully up to date on cart or disc, but in the case of stuff that gets a broader retail release — like the Trails games now do — there are often updates of varying degrees of necessity from the moment you put the disc in.

And don't even get me started on Game Key Cards, still officially the worst thing about Nintendo Switch 2.

Anyway, at some point, then, I think I will probably be jumping into Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. I did actually make a start on this ages ago, during a time when we had some friends over, they got a bit drunk and wanted to see some sort of RPG. I haven't touched it for ages, though, so if and when I do start again, it will be going from the beginning once more. I'm also quite tempted to revisit Ys Origin, purely for its finale music. And then there's the Switch versions of Oath in Felghana and Memories in Celceta, both of which I've played, but which it would be fun to have another look at.

And then after that there's Ys IX and Ys X to play, too. Ahh, an embarrassment of riches, truly. And yet how long do you think I'm going to stare at a wall, wondering if I really should start something new when I already have two big games on the go?

No. Fuck it. You know what, I'm just going to do it. I need some howling Falcom guitars in my life right now, and I'm damn well going to go and get them. You see if I don't!

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The post #oneaday Day 801: Eeeeeeees appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm not entirely sure why this became such a common trope in role-playing games, particularly those of Asian origin. I assume there's some sort of inherent significance to hexagons — or perhaps someone once just thought they looked cool and futuristic, and everyone else copied that first person. Both explanations are entirely plausible.

A lot of people mock role-playing games that pull the "final boss is in space!" trope, but I love it. One of my favourite things in video games is getting the opportunity to explore and play in abstract environments. There's a definite appeal to realistic environments under the right circumstances, but for me, there's always something special about making that switch from "recognisable" to "completely alien". Doesn't matter what game it is; if you go from hanging out in "the real world" to running along platforms suspended in a starfield — or, indeed, as I have been doing in Chains of Promathia this evening, running across a seemingly solid "sea" that floats above the land far below me, leaving a trail of hexagons and the sound of musical notes with every step I take.

I think the reason I like it is the fact it drives home how video games give you the opportunity to "do" things that are outright impossible in real life. There is not actually anywhere that exists that consists of floating platforms in space or transparent hexagons suspended over a petrified natural environment, and thus having the opportunity to spend time in those places as a virtual world is appealing. It's fascinating. In some respects, it provides a window into the creators' imagination, allowing us a sense that we are sharing in something quite special.

Of course, there's an argument to be made that when you explore a realistic but nonetheless fictional world in a game, you're also stepping into the creators' imagination, but it never feels quite as exciting as getting the opportunity to go somewhere completely alien. It's a silly trope, probably one that is overused at this point — and definitely one that has been used inappropriately (Half-Life's finale says hello) — but it's one that I will always like and appreciate.

I am tempted to see if I can finish off Chains of Promathia this evening, but it is already midnight, so I feel like I should probably go to bed like a responsible adult. Probably.

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The post #oneaday Day 758: Hexagons and light appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is a cross-post from my gaming site MoeGamer. I figured if I spent several hours writing this, that absolutely counts as Me Having Written Something for today. So please enjoy, even if you don't normally frequent MoeGamer. I will likely be doing this more going forward.

Last week, I got around to something I've been meaning to do for ages: play through Toby Fox's modern classic Undertale, and attempt to understand why it is so well-regarded and popular.

I'd held off for quite some time for a few reasons: first and foremost was simply a matter of making time for it, since as anyone who knows me will be well aware, I have a lot of video games on my shelves. But I was also quite keen to play the game divorced from the context of its somewhat… passionate fanbase.

I have nothing against the Undertale fanbase, I hasten to add — I've never really come into contact with it directly — but for a game like this, I was keen to approach it with as much of a beginner's mind as possible. I wanted to try and understand what, exactly, it was about Undertale that resonated with people so much when it first released. And I think I got there in the end.

Spoilers follow.

Undertale, for the unfamiliar, casts you in the role of a kind-of-sort-of self-insert character. I say kind-of-sort-of because the protagonist is deliberately gender-ambiguous and you can't customise their appearance. You can customise the way they behave, though, and that's something we'll come back to in a moment.

As Undertale begins, you have fallen down a big hole into the land of monsters. Supposedly, many years ago, humankind and monsters lived together on the surface of the world, but a great war eventually led monsters to becoming trapped underground while humans dominated the surface. This is all the context you're really given at the start of the game; in short order, you meet up with a kind-but-a-bit-too-much monster named Toriel, who wants to take you in and look after you.

Toriel is a rather overbearing, motherly type to a borderline sinister degree, and thus it is natural to want to break free of her clutches and explore the greater world in which you find yourself. You can achieve this in a couple of ways, and herein you get to know probably the most important thing about Undertale, and the tagline it's used in various places in more recent years: this is an RPG where no-one has to die.

It's true! In every combat encounter you run into throughout Undertale, you have the option of fighting the monsters you come face to face with, or attempting to placate or otherwise peacefully resolve the conflict somehow. The exact way you go about this varies from monster to monster, but it is indeed possible to pass through the entire game without anyone dying by your hand.

Interestingly, resolving conflicts peacefully does not reward you with "EXP" that allows you to increase your "LV", meaning that if you choose to do a peaceful playthrough, your character will never get any "stronger". Undertale takes great pains to never actually use the full terms "experience points" and "level" for very good reason: in its world, that is not what "EXP" and "LV" mean. Instead, "EXP" stands for "Execution Points", hence you only acquiring them when you kill someone, and "LV" is short for "LOVE", which in turn is short for Level Of ViolencE.

In combat, regardless of whether or not you choose violence, you will have to fend off enemy attacks in short action sequences loosely inspired by shoot 'em up bullet patterns. By controlling the protagonist's SOUL (all caps, but not an abbreviation or acronym to my knowledge), represented as a heart, you can avoid taking damage from enemy attacks. Each enemy type has its own unique attacks, and the further into the game you go, the more varied these become.

One key variation comes with some enemies' ability to change the colour of the protagonist's SOUL. This causes it to behave in various different ways; for example, when it's blue, it's affected by gravity, meaning it has to "jump" over incoming attacks; when it's purple, it can only move between and across set "wires" on the screen. Enemy attacks also have colours, too; blue attacks are harmless if you stay still, orange attacks are harmless if you're moving when they pass through you, and green "attacks" are actually beneficial, providing a small amount of healing and also often triggering special effects. The green attacks most frequently come up when attempting to peacefully resolve conflicts.

But why might you want to spare the monsters of Undertale, when RPG convention has it that you are "supposed" to kill everything in your path? Well, that's because Undertale makes a specific effort to, for want of a better word considering we're talking about "monsters", humanise everyone and everything you come into contact with. Even fodder enemies have personalities and quirks, and it takes the most steely of resolves to look past all that and murder them. But, crucially, the option is there.

Not only that, but Undertale also keeps track of all manner of other things in the background. If you inadvertently killed someone in a first playthrough and then reset the game without having saved, it will know. On subsequent playthroughs, characters you "haven't met yet" will have recollections of you. And if you went all-out and did a "Genocide" run as your first playthrough, there are some fairly significant differences to how everything concludes.

Undertale is a game that is designed to make you think. Not in the sense that it's especially complicated or difficult to understand, but it really does make you think about the consequences of your actions — and how "game logic" might work were it applied to a "real" situation.

A good example comes if you complete what is known as a "True Pacifist" route. This is only possible after "beating" the game once, and fleshes out the story, resolving in an eventual "true ending" where the monsters finally escape the underground and are able to once again live free on the surface. If you open the game up again after you've reached this ending, the game tells you in no uncertain terms that yes, you absolutely can play again by making use of what it calls a "True Reset", but in doing so you are depriving an entire society — and yourself — of a happy ending. And why are you doing that? Just to see what happens? Is that something you can really justify doing?

A valid response to this is, of course, to say "no, I can't", and to close the game down, never to open it again. You got your happy ending. No need for any "what ifs". No need to satisfy your curiosity as to what might happen if you did the most morally reprehensible thing possible at every opportunity. No need to ruin the lives of a significant number of people.

At the same time, the game absolutely does provide plenty of meaningful changes if you do decide you want to see what might happen if you kill everyone. And then, if you decide to do that "True Pacifist" ending again just to "set everything right", there will be consequences to that, too.

This is the stuff that makes Undertale so clever and noteworthy. The moment-to-moment storytelling and dialogue is charming and memorable — I'd go so far as to say that this is a game with one of the clearest senses of authorial voice I've ever played — but the really interesting stuff comes about once you've been through the whole thing once and you start to contemplate and understand how differently some scenes can unfold depending on your previous actions. Various characters can be seen in rather different lights, and encounters can be resolved in other ways depending on everything from the things you've said to other characters to the objects in your inventory.

Of course, under the hood it's all an illusion based on hidden flags and counters, but in the moment, it absolutely works. Undertale is enormously emotionally engaging from start to finish, and I defy anyone to play through to the conclusion of the True Pacifist route and not at least hesitate before contemplating doing a Genocide run.

As previously noted, a lot of this is down to author Toby Fox's excellent writing, but Fox doesn't just use well-crafted dialogue to infuse his characters with personality; he uses visual elements such as fonts and the case in which characters' text-only dialogue is presented to help you build up a mental picture of each character. Probably the best example of both of these comes in the case of Papyrus and Sans, two skeletal characters you encounter early in the game after freeing yourself from Toriel's oppressive motherliness.

Papyrus is loud, brash and outspoken — if he had voice acting, he'd absolutely sound like Skeletor — but is this way in order to cover up intense insecurity and loneliness. We can tell this from the combination of his facial expressions, the things he says… and the fact that, as his name suggests, all his dialogue is presented in all-caps Papyrus font, a font that certain types of people tend to use if they want people to like them. Not only that, he's so desperate for validation and friendship that even if you've been on a Genocide run up until this point in the game, your encounter with Papyrus represents a key opportunity to turn back and change your ways.

By contrast, Sans is much more chilled out. Again, we can tell this from the way he looks at us and the things he says, but also the fact his dialogue is all in lower case Comic Sans, a font that everyone knows to be awful, but it serves a function. It's little stylistic things like this that are almost entirely unique to video games; one could get away with the typeface thing in written creative works, but here, it's the way this is combined with other visual and auditory elements that makes it work quite so well.

Expand this to a whole 7-10 hour game, with a variety of other characters who are all equally well-crafted and play very different roles on your overall journey, and you have something that really gets deep into the emotional centres of your brain, and which will stay with you long after the credits roll. This is a game where the characters feel real enough for you to be personally invested in them, and where all but the most hard-hearted will find it very difficult to make the decision to put them to death.

At least, that's how I felt about it, anyway. The nice thing about Undertale is that you can also go in completely the other direction with it, and look at it as an experiment in how video game narratives can manipulate one's emotions so that we believe in things which very much are, by their very nature, unthinking, unfeeling fabrications of someone's imagination. There's no logical reason why you should feel "bad" for "killing" a character in a video game, because you're not actually killing them. After all, think about how many anonymous grunts you've shot in the head in other games; how many slobbering monsters you've hacked and slashed your way through in your average RPG; how many societies you've doomed when you've set a game aside, never to return to it.

Among other things, Undertale makes us think about the context of our actions in video games, and how that might translate to something a bit more real. At its heart, it's not trying in the slightest to be "realistic", hence its deliberately slipshod visual presentation; it behooves us, then, to ask exactly why we end up caring so much more about these characters presented in low-resolution, often monochromatic pixel art than we might do about, say, an anonymous enemy soldier in a Call of Duty, or an enemy knight in a strategy RPG.

The answer, probably, is love. We don't care about grunts in a first-person shooter because we're never given any reason to. We have no opportunity to get to know them; they have a single mechanical function, and that is to stop us achieving our objectives. And, in turn, as Sans points out to us in the late game, "the more you kill, the easier it becomes to distance yourself; the more you distance yourself, the less you will hurt… the more easily you can bring yourself to hurt others."

In Undertale, meanwhile, every potential "enemy" is depicted as someone or something that could also, under different circumstances, be a friend. Even characters like Papyrus, who might initially appear to be set up in such a way to be a "villain", with his fixation on capturing you and seeming inability to actually follow through on this, end up expressing their support and validation for you. And a lot of this happens early on, making those first kills — the ones from before you find it "easy to distance yourself" — hard to perform.

Yes, part of Undertale's effectiveness comes from the fact that it makes you feel good. Because you are playing "you" — despite not being able to customise the player avatar — the game and its characters are effectively able to address you directly. And many of the things both the game and the individual characters have to say are positive, uplifting and supportive. Would you punch someone in the face if they told you that they believed in you, and that they could see you were trying your best?

Some of you might, and Undertale accepts that as a valid response. Some of you, like me, might be a lot more open to what is essentially emotional manipulation (positive), and thus find yourself staring at that post-game screen, unable to click "True Reset" and undo everything you'd done up until this point.

So yeah. I get it. Undertale is excellent. And I'm glad I finally understand why.

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The post #oneaday Day 371: I finally played Undertale appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Hello. It's after 1am and I haven't written anything, I need a bath (that can wait until tomorrow) and I'm quite tired. So this will probably be a short one. I did want to acknowledge something, though, which is that I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 this evening, and it's real good.

I was a little skeptical about it after feeling a bit burnt by the Blue Prince situation, but this time around it's just flat-out a good game, not "a good game if you have the right kind of brain and 150 hours to plough into it".

I will write more about it on MoeGamer anon, but I did want to acknowledge that my first impressions are very good indeed, and that it has a very distinctive atmosphere about it. I'm getting quite strong Nier vibes from it in terms of its rather melancholy atmosphere — indeed, my wife walked in at one point and asked if it was another Taro Yoko joint. I explained that no, it's French, but I can completely see why she would think that just from overhearing the music.

Oh man, the music. One of the most important things to get right in a dramatic RPG, and boy did they get it bang on in this game. Sweeping orchestral pieces, triumphant choirs, lonely soloists, tinkling pianos, it's all there, and it all hits one right in the Feels.

I was a little concerned about coming to a "J-style" RPG that everyone was saying was the best thing ever when chances are the last "JRPG" they played was Persona 5; I thought it would be an interesting exercise to approach the game from the perspective of someone who has been consistently engaging with this type of game for the last 20 years, while many other folks haven't for various reasons. And I think it's still going to be interesting, but so far my impressions are that no, this isn't just "good if you haven't played an RPG in the last 20 years", it's a good RPG.

There's Nier, there's Final Fantasy, there's even bits of Souls in Expedition 33's DNA, and it all works together in a thoroughly interesting fashion. But, like I say, it's after 1am and I really should probably go to bed. I will write more about this game — much more — over on MoeGamer very soon. But for now, I bid you good night!

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The post #oneaday Day 322: The Expedition appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The recent release of Obscure Claire or whatever it's called has spawned some frankly toxic discourse about turn-based vs. real-time RPGs and the perceived accessibility of the RPG genre, so I thought I would take a moment and see if it was possible to name at least one turn-based RPG that had come out every year between Final Fantasy X, which a frightening number of people think was The Last Great Turn-Based RPG, and now.

I'm taking English language releases as gospel here, not Japanese release dates in the case of games that originated there. Because we're talking about English people and their weird selective memory. I'm also going to try not to include more than one entry from a series, and I'm not restricting the list to just "JRPGs". Anything where you take turns to make numbers pop out of monsters is fair game.

Are you ready? Here we go! (Ya ya ya ya… wait, no, wrong genre.)

2001: Final Fantasy X
2002: Suikoden III
2003: Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire (yes, they count)
2004: Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (aka Final Fantasy Tolkien)
2005: Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time
2006: Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia
2007: Eternal Sonata
2008: Etrian Odyssey II
2009: The Last Remnant
2010: Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland
2011: Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2
2012: Fire Emblem: Awakening (strategy RPGs are still turn-based RPGs!)
2013: Bravely Default
2014: South Park: The Stick of Truth
2015: Shadowrun: Hong Kong
2016: Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
2017: Blue Reflection
2018: Octopath Traveller
2019: Death end re;Quest
2020: Trails of Cold Steel IV
2021: Mary Skelter Finale
2022: Dungeon Travelers 2-2
2023: Sea of Stars
2024: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
2025: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Cor. Some crackers among that lot, for sure, many of which I'm still yet to play.

And, it should probably go without saying, these were far from the only turn-based RPGs released each year, to say nothing of RPGs that don't specifically use turn-based mechanics but are nonetheless particularly noteworthy, such as the Xenoblade Chronicles X rerelease this year.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: turn-based RPGs have never, ever gone anywhere. The only difference with Clair Obscur is that all eyes are on it thanks to it using fancy new Unreal Engine 5 tech — which some are already saying is a bit of a hindrance rather than a benefit.

The fact that a lot of the above games don't get much attention outside of niche-interest circles is, more often than not, down to a refusal to engage with anything that might be on the lower budget side of things, or particularly if it involves an anime art style. I know people who have missed out on some absolutely fantastic games just because they refuse to engage with anything that looks a bit anime, regardless of subject matter. And that's their loss.

Getting people to "read" a bit more widely is, I'm sure, a problem with every medium. But dear Lord is it ever frustrating when you've spent years of your life screaming about games you find fascinating, only for people to shrug and make it very clear that they haven't paid any attention whatsoever.

Oh well. As I say, their loss. I know what I like, and I have plenty of the stuff that I like on my shelves. And I guess that's all that really matters at this point.

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The post #oneaday Day 320: Attempting to list one turn-based RPG a year for every year between Final Fantasy X and now appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For the unfamiliar, .hack was one of the first (possibly the first) "MMO gone mad, if you die in the game you die for real" series. Unusually, it was designed from the outset as a fully transmedia production: not only were there four PS2 games in the series, each of these games also came with a DVD featuring an episode of a specially made anime known as .hack//Liminality which tells a "real world" story that unfolds concurrently with the events of the game, and there was a completely separate anime series known as .hack//Sign. Since that time, there have apparently been several other anime and manga series, along with the aforementioned .hack//G.U. trilogy of games, which originated on PS2 but which were ported to PS4 in 2017.

That may all sound terribly complicated, but be at ease: you can have a satisfying .hack experience if you just play the games. .hack//Infection, the first of the original set of four games, tells the story of "you", an 8th grader who has just signed up for the hottest new MMO, The World, at the recommendation of your friend Yasuhiko, a veteran player. You join up and in that inimitable "early 2000s MMO" sort of way, you party up with Yasuhiko, or "Orca" as he's known in the game, who destroys absolutely everything before you can even get a hit in by virtue of him being 50 levels higher than you.

But something goes horribly wrong. After an encounter with a mysterious young girl who is seemingly being chased by a bizarre creature carrying a red wand, Orca is entrusted with a strange book and shortly afterwards, his character is "Data Drained", leaving the real Yasuhiko comatose. You end up taking possession of the book, which manifests itself as a strange bracelet that equips you with the power to Data Drain enemies in the game, and it's then up to you to investigate the strange happenings in The World and determine if there's any truth to the game seemingly having an impact on the real world.

The cool thing about .hack//Infection is that the entire PS2 game is diegetic, intended to represent you using your computer to check your mail, read the news and log in to The World. You never see the actual real world yourself in the game — hence the inclusion of the Liminality DVDs — but instead all your investigation is online. This unfolds through a combination of you checking and replying to mails (with predefined responses) and browsing through the official message boards for The World, looking for clues.

Canonically, .hack//Infection is supposed to be unfolding in 2010, but obviously in 2002 developers CyberConnect2 had to make something of a best guess as to what that near-future setting might look like. They actually got a fair few things right, such as high-speed, always-on Internet access being pretty much universal and fibre-optic cables being the main means of this infrastructure being implemented — though here in the real world, fibre broadband is a little more recent than 2010.

What's quite interesting is the design of The World itself, because it could quite plausibly work as an online RPG — though perhaps not in the way that western players understood "MMOs" at the time. For context, World of Warcraft came out in 2004, two years after .hack//Infection, so "MMO" up until that point in the west meant either EverQuest or Ultima Online.

The World is closer in execution to something like Sega's Phantasy Star Online from 2000 in that there are small, shared communal areas (known as "Root Towns") where you can hang out with other players, but your actual fighting and questing takes place in discrete areas that you teleport to rather than exploring a coherent world. It's not quite the same as the "instanced" areas seen in World of Warcraft and, later, Final Fantasy XIV, as you can meet up with other players who happen to be visiting the same area, but the nature of how The World is structured means that you're relatively unlikely to stumble across someone at random.

Anyway, let's not get bogged down too much in details as I'll probably want to write about this on MoeGamer once I'm finished. Suffice to say for now that .hack//Infection and its subsequent parts unfold as a combination of you just flat-out playing The World to get treasure, gear and helpful items, and gradually working your way through the core mystery at the heart of everything. At most points in the game, you can put the main plot on hold and just go dungeon-crawling to your heart's content — and it's probably advisable to, since you'll need to level both your own character and the various companions you can recruit to your cause.

.hack//Infection is somewhat clunky by more recent action RPG standards, but once you get a feel for it and an understanding of its mechanics, it's enjoyable. There's a variety of enemies to deal with, and their different strengths and weaknesses will often require you to think about various strategies to deal with them. And, since the game is supposed to be simulating an MMO, you can pretty much concentrate on your own play; any companions you bring with you will usually do a pretty good job of fighting alongside you, though you can issue various orders to them if you need them to, say, heal or unleash their most powerful abilities. You can also micromanage their equipment to a certain degree, and since equipment has skills attached, by doing this you can try and optimise them for the challenges you're about to face.

I can completely understand the criticisms of .hack from back in the day. It is repetitive. The dungeons are very obviously constructed from pre-built blocks with different textures put atop them, and there's not a lot of variation to them. And yet there's something about .hack that I've always found fascinating and compelling. I think it's the oddly menacing atmosphere the whole thing has; The World, as a game, is designed to be cheerful and colourful, but it's very obvious that there are dark things going on beneath the surface, and that the players of the game are clearly being used for some nefarious purpose.

I'm in no rush to plough through all four games, but I've enjoyed making a start on .hack//Infection this weekend, and as a long term project I'm looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in the end. And there will, of course, be in-depth articles on MoeGamer (and possibly videos) to go along with it.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 114: dotHack and Slash appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Playing Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force this evening, I was struck by a thought about JRPG protagonists over the years and how they often tend to reflect some of the prevalent attitudes from the time in which they were first written.

Perhaps more accurately, JRPG protagonists often tend to reflect some of the prevalent attitudes in the games industry rather than in society at large, but nonetheless, it is clear that things have changed somewhat over time.

Consider the early days of JRPGs: the first Final Fantasy, the first Dragon Quest. These games featured protagonists that were silent and had no story or characterisation behind them save for "you are legendary hero". They were intended primarily to be an avatar for the player: a means for the player to put themselves inside the game, to inhabit the game world, to become that legendary hero. This reflects how many computer and video games were marketed at the time: on the basis that they allowed you to live out fantasies that were impossible — or at the very least unlikely — in reality. Where games had narration, it was in second-person; marketing materials put the emphasis on "you" rather than the name of the protagonist, if they even had one.

Advance a few years as RPGs started getting a little more comfortable with storytelling. We have the early days of the Ys series, for example, where protagonist Adol Christin was still silent, but he had a certain amount of personality about him that could be understood through the way people reacted to and communicated with him. While the Ys games have their dark moments, the overall tone of them is rather light-hearted, being all about the joy of adventure and discovery; once again, the player was brought along for the ride, but this time, they were a companion to the protagonist rather than being the protagonist.

As we moved into the 16-bit era, games started to become more sophisticated and the increased amount of storage capacity available to developers allowed them to be a bit more ambitious with their storytelling. From Final Fantasy IV onwards, we started to get much more well-defined characters in the main cast, and the same, too, was true for longtime rival Dragon Quest. We still had our silent protagonists — our Adols and our Links — but where our protagonists had a voice, they often had noble intentions or goals: to help people, to save the world, or sometimes simply for the joy of adventure. This overall air of positivity about many of the games of this time was a reflection of this period being regarded as something of a "golden age" for games: everyone was excited about what the 16-bit consoles could do, and as rumours started to leak out about the upcoming 32- and 64-bit offerings from Sony and Nintendo respectively, it was an exciting time to be a gamer.

This air of positivity continued throughout the PlayStation/Saturn/N64 era, and can be seen throughout the numerous role-playing games that graced these platforms — although Nintendo's console, being cartridge-based, often got left behind due to developers having grand ambitions that often required the extensive storage capacity of CD-ROM to fully realise. At the same time, though, a hint of darkness started to creep in. With Final Fantasy VII, we had the beginning of the "moody protagonist" trope with Cloud Strife, which was subsequently continued with the sulky Squall in Final Fantasy VIII before reverting to form with Zidane and company in Final Fantasy IX. The arrival of moody, angsty heroes on the scene corresponded roughly with a sharp rise in teens expressing themselves through music and counterculture; Cloud and Squall hit the scene around the same time many of us were listening to Nirvana and contemplating slitting our wrists to Radiohead.

That seed of darkness took root, but didn't flourish just yet. The Dreamcast and PS2 era saw a continuation of the overall air of positivity and the joy of adventure in role-playing games, with a few notable exceptions. Ryudo from Grandia 2 on Dreamcast stands out in many players' memories as being a bit different from the norm. He wasn't all "let's adventure!" like more traditional RPG heroes, but he wasn't really angsty like Cloud and Squall. His attitude erred more towards the bleaker side of things, though; he was cynical and pessimistic on many occasions, but ultimately he did the right thing. I highlight Ryudo in particular here as the starting point for an increasingly common trope we're seeing these days.

In the PS3 era, we started to see JRPG protagonists diverge in two different directions, more often than not distinguished by gender as much as attitude. Female protagonists tended to be lively, energetic, positive and full of life, but often inexperienced or incompetent, at least at the start of their adventures — the Atelier and Neptunia girls are good examples of this — while male protagonists weren't necessarily tormented or angsty as such, but the air of cynicism which Ryudo had introduced in Grandia 2 started to become increasingly apparent with every male-fronted JRPG.

How this connects to Fairy Fencer F is simple: protagonist Fang is a cynical, lazy lout who is primarily out for his own gratification, at least at the start of the story. As the adventure progresses, he does naturally start to think about others as much as — or even more than — himself — but his intense cynicism, his unwillingness to be bothered with anything that sounds too troublesome, feels very much like a response to prevalent attitudes in a lot of gaming today. Many people can't be bothered with anything that's difficult or troublesome; if something's supposed to take a long time they need to find the most "efficient" way, even if that's also the most boring way; and if the opportunity comes up to bypass hard work for the same rewards — paying up to skip content or get overpowered equipment, watching YouTube videos of endings — then many people will take it.

Of course, there's a kind of delicious irony about Fang as commentary on the laziness and cynicism of many people in modern society in a game by Compile Heart, which will inevitably be hundreds of hours long and filled with lots of grinding and busywork. But given the company's history with using games as satirical works — primarily through the Neptunia series, but Fairy Fencer F has, so far, despite a darker, more serious tone, dipped its toes into satire too at times — this irony is doubtless entirely intentional, and Fang's growth as a character over the course of those hundreds of hours is symbolic of those people who aren't cynical, who are willing to put the "work" in to fully enjoy a game. His development, then, mirrors the player's own journey in many ways: breaking through the endless cynicism, laziness and grumpiness that pervades the modern online sphere to find that stepping out into the wider world is rewarding in its own way.

Or perhaps he's just a grumpy old sod. It's nearly 3am. Humour me.

The post 2402: The JRPG Protagonist as a Sign of the Times appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's something of a novelty these games to start and beat a game over the course of a couple of days — particularly an RPG — but with Dungeon Travelers 2 being considerable in both length and difficulty, I felt that a palate cleanser of some sort was in order before I tackled the remaining 15+ floors of that game's final dungeon. I considered picking up the new Doom, but I couldn't quite bring myself to spend that much on it, so instead, as I noted yesterday, I turned to the Ys series.

This evening, I beat Ys I. Here are some things I thought about it.

Things I liked

• That music! The PC version I was playing has three mixes of the soundtrack available: the original FM version, a remastered MIDI version from a later incarnation and a full-on rock the fuck out version from Falcom's in-house band. I must confess I didn't try the two earlier versions, as Falcom's band is pretty damn amazing. Wailing guitars and pounding drumbeats complemented the action perfectly, and brought a pleasantly nostalgic feeling over me, making me think of both Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which had plenty of widdly-diddly guitars) and my brother (who was always very good at widdly-diddly guitars when I was growing up).
• Levelling up is meaningful. There are ten experience levels in Ys I. Each one is a significant jump in power. From level 1 to level 2 is the difference between taking 4 or 5 hits to kill an enemy and being able to splatter it in a single hit. Your power continues to increase hugely as the game progresses.
• You have an HP bar that gets bigger. I don't know why I like this, I just do. I liked it in Metal Gear Solid, I liked it in Kingdom Hearts and I like it here. It's a satisfying visual representation of your growth in power.
• Your HP bar shows how much damage the last hit you took chipped off. This is really nice. Similar to how fighting game health gauges work, your HP bar in Ys highlights the amount of damage the last hit gave you in a brighter shade of red so you can estimate roughly how many more individual hits you can take before needing to worry about healing.
• Tactical health regeneration. Healing items are few and far between in Ys I, so it's fortunate that you regenerate health by standing still… though only when you're in a place where you can see the sky. Later in the game, you acquire a healing ring that allows you to regenerate in dungeons, too, but for the majority of the time, finding an open-air "clearing" in a dungeon makes a nice checkpoint.
• Cute girls. My goodness. I want to cuddle Feena forever.
• The sense of place and character. I mentioned this yesterday, but Ys I's world feels remarkably coherent, even with its relatively tiny size compared to some other RPGs. By the end of the game, you recognise every character, and the character notebook feature in the game suggests that the writers thought long and hard about each and every NPC in the game, regardless of their importance (or lack thereof) to the plot.
• The interesting structure. Ys I is broadly split into two parts: the first half sees you charging around the overworld completing various quests, and this will probably bring you up to the level cap of 10. Once you've done everything out in the world, you then enter the 25-floor final dungeon Darm Tower, where you'll need to use everything you've learned (and a few other things besides) to make it to the top and kick the last boss' face in.
• The last boss is the hardest thing in the game. I've lost count of the number of RPGs I've played where the final boss is an underwhelming battle thanks to the ability to overlevel yourself for it by doing all manner of side activities beforehand. In narrative terms, the final boss should really be your most significant challenge, so it's always a little disappointing when you can mash it in a couple of turns. Not so in Ys I; this asshole puts up a fight.

Things I liked a little less

• The bosses are a bit primitive. This is perhaps understandable, given the game's heritage — despite this being a modern remake, the original Ys I came out in 1987 and the bosses in particular make this abundantly clear, with very simple attack patterns that have no "intelligence" whatsoever — simply either randomised or predictable path-based movement.
• The last boss is the hardest thing in the game… but for all the wrong reasons. The final boss is all kinds of bullshit. He bounces around the screen, frequently going out of reach. When you hit him, the floor falls away underneath where he was, and this can either kill you instantly or trap you in a corner if you're not careful. He shoots fireballs that split into so many bullets it's literally impossible to dodge them all. Fighting him is more a matter of being able to inflict enough damage on him before he kills you than any real skill at recognising and dealing with his patterns.
• Inconsistent item behaviour is a little unfair. You can't use items or change your equipment in boss battles. This means you can't use that healing potion you've been saving, or the magic mirror to freeze your opponent in place. Worse, the various rings you acquire throughout the game — which vary in effect from doubling your damage dealt to halving your damage taken via allowing you to slowly regenerate when standing still — have no effect whatsoever in boss battles, either.
• There are a number of instances where the game kind of forgets to tell you what to do next. This happens for the first time right at the very beginning of the game, where no-one tells you that in order to trigger an important event you first have to speak to each and every NPC in the starting town. There are a number of other such incidents later in the game, too, but again, this is perhaps a remnant of the game's 1987 heritage, when games were a lot less hand-holdy.

Ultimately, none of the things I liked a bit less about Ys I distracted me from playing it through from start to finish and really enjoying the experience. I'm not sure whether I'll go back and play it on the notorious Nightmare difficulty — I'm not sure I can face some of those bosses again! — but it's a definite possibility. For the immediate "now", though, I think I'm going to move straight on to Ys II to see how Adol's adventure continues.

Yep. I'm 100% on board with this series, and I look forward to exploring the rest of it.

The post 2311: I Finished My First Ys appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

The post 2284: Nights of Azure: Encounter in the Abyss appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

The post 2275: A Need for Progression appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I feel like I've become much more conscious of a lot of single-player games incorporating an almost MMO-like "endgame" these days, though pondering the matter a little further I'm not sure it's as new a concept as I initially thought it was.

My musings on this subject are inspired by my second playthrough of Megadimension Neptunia VII, which is going considerably quicker than my 62-hour first playthrough of it thanks to its myriad of rather lovely New Game Plus features — faster run speed, higher jump height, ability to turn off random encounters and a bunch of other things besides, including the ability to instantly skip story scenes you've seen before — and in which I'm taking aim for the "true" ending and the subsequent postgame, which allows you to continue playing after the credits have rolled to clean up whatever it is you still want to get out of the game.

In the case of Megadimension Neptunia and numerous other games like it — largely JRPGs, with a few exceptions — the postgame is often designed with trophy collecting in mind, with some of the most challenging trophies requiring dedicated effort well above and beyond what the main story of the game demanded. In most cases, you're not actually missing out on any story by pursuing these additional objectives; you're simply expressing a desire to see everything the game has to offer, and to push your knowledge of its mechanics to the limit.

This is where the MMO endgame comparison comes in. Take my particular brand of MMO poison as an example: Final Fantasy XIV has a linear main scenario that takes you from level 1 to level 60 naturally, telling an interesting tale while equipping you with the skills you'll need for high-level play. Once you reach level 60 and beat the main story you have a few choices: you can put the game down, satisfied that you've "finished" it; you can keep playing it to see what the new episodes of the story added in each new content patch add to the overall narrative; or you can delve into the endgame proper, which often relies less on story and more on mechanics and grinding, with the promise of significant increases in your character's power as a reward.

This is exactly the case with modern single-player games that offer postgame content, too. In the case of Megadimension Neptunia VII, there are hidden treasures to hunt down, additional monsters to fight, challenging dungeons to clear and collectibles to… you know. There's no actual obligation for you to take these extra challenges on if you're satisfied with how the main story concluded, but the option is there for those who want to spend a bit more time with the game without having to worry about whether they'll lock themselves out of something by advancing the plot too far.

As I say, I'd got into my head that this was a somewhat recent concept; when I think back to titles that I spent a lot of time with in years gone by, in many cases you had to take care of any and all of your business before you beat the final boss and rolled the credits. Take something like Final Fantasy VII, for example; once you unlock the final dungeon, pretty much the whole world is open to you, and there are a bunch of optional sidequests you can go and complete for some fairly significant rewards if you see fit, though none of them are essential to the plot, and none of them are necessary to beat the final boss. Once you do beat that final boss, though, that's the end of the game — in RPGs of that era, you often didn't even get to save a "clear file" to start a New Game Plus and carry over some of your achievements to a new runthrough.

But when I consider things in a bit more depth, the idea of the postgame — of an ostensibly narrative-based game remaining relevant and interesting to play even after you've seen the story's finale — has been around for quite some time. Konami's PS1 and PS2-era games, for example, often featured a ranking/score screen at the end of the game, challenging you to try it again, but do it faster/better/taking fewer hits. Other games unlocked new difficulty settings, or unlocked alternative (sometimes joke) endings. Capcom's Resident Evil 2 took the ambitious approach of having multiple ways to experience the narrative: you could play it once as Claire, then see what Leon was up to while Claire was doing her thing; then you could play it "for the first time" again as Leon, then see what Claire was up to while Leon was doing his thing. Each of these four playthroughs, while similar, had its own unique content, making the game worth replaying — and once you'd done all that, there were the super-secret paths such as Hunk and Tofu, which mostly acted as a reward for those who had put in enough time and effort to master the game.

MMO players often describe reaching the level cap of their game of choice as "just the beginning" of your experience. And it's very much true; pre-Heavensward Final Fantasy XIV sat at level 50 for a good couple of years, but managed to feel like it was progressing at a regular, steady rate, both in terms of new content and character power levels — and it's doubtless the same with other MMOs that keep adding new stuff to keep level-cap players interested and engaged.

What I find interesting is the idea that a game designed primarily to tell a story — to have a clear end — can have so much beyond that story content, even if it's a single-player game that isn't expanded over time with new content, DLC or the like. It's one of the many things that sets games apart from non-interactive forms of entertainment, and it's an opportunity to enjoy a different side of a game you've taken pleasure in engaging with: having worked your way through the narrative, you're now focusing on mastering the mechanics until you're satisfied you've got everything you're going to out of the game in question.

I never used to do multiple playthroughs of games — except for Final Fantasy VII, which my friends and I were borderline obsessed with in our teens — but these days, I very much enjoy exploring the postgame, trophy hunting and seeing multiple endings. Once I'm done with Megadimension Neptunia VII, I'm particularly looking forward to Dungeon Travelers 2's postgame; from everything I've heard about it, it very much takes the MMO approach of "finishing the story is just the beginning… now prove you really know how to play this game. If, you know, you want to." — and that is something that has come to appeal to me very much over the years, even as many of my peers are getting less and less patient with lengthy, time-consuming games. I wonder what made me go the other way?

Oh well. Time for bed now; tomorrow I will find out if I've actually done all the arbitrary triggers that ensure I will get Megadimension Neptunia VII's "true" ending, or if I need to do the whole bloody thing through for a third time. (That's not actually too bad; to put it in context, while my first playthrough took 62 hours, my second playthrough has probably been no more than 3 hours so far, and I'm just coming into the third and final story arc, which puts me maybe an hour away from the "ending".)

The post 2232: Pondering Postgame appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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…

The post 2225: People Asking for "Literal" Translations of Games Aren't Looking for Google Translate appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Having beaten Hyperdimension Neptunia U Action Unleashed to my satisfaction by successfully attaining the Platinum trophy, I immediately started on Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth2, the Vita-based remake of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, previously my favourite game in the series, if not mechanically then certainly in terms of story and characters.

Re;Birth2 is less of a drastic difference from its predecessor because mk2 was already using the initial, slightly unrefined version of the systems seen in Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory and beyond. Re;Birth2 is still worth playing if you're already familiar with the original, however — not only has the battle system been updated to be in line with the solid, enjoyable mechanics of the later installments of the series, the game has also been updated with new scenes and new characters, including the welcome reappearance of RED, one of the best characters from the very first Hyperdimension Neptunia game, and one who was sadly absent from Re;Birth1. Not only that, but the presentation has been brought in line with the rest of the series, too — rather than mk2's somewhat muddy character models used in dialogue sequences, Re;Birth2 makes use of the beautiful Live2D incarnations of Tsunako's art like the other games.

Also added to the base game is the Remake system previously seen in Re;Birth1. This is essentially a crafting component, but as well as crafting items — which you do to make them available in shops rather than adding them to your inventory — you can also craft new game mechanics and visual options. Re;Birth1 had a few interesting options in this regard, but Re;Birth2 takes the idea and really runs with it, going so far as to add everything from a whole real-time passive minigame called Stella's Dungeon that you set running in the background while you play the rest of the game to the ability to make the girls' eyebrows stand out more on their 3D models so they look more like the 2D artwork.

As is tradition for most of the Neptunia series, Re;Birth2 is a gradual evolution rather than a dramatic reinvention, but some of the new additions and changes are very welcome. One of the craftable Plans in the Remake system, for example, allows you to obtain items and experience points from enemies you "symbol attack" on the field screen. In the original mk2, if you attacked an enemy that was significantly lower level than you on the map, they'd simply die and you wouldn't get anything. It was for clearing your way through a dungeon rather than grinding, but it actually wasn't all that useful, since you often wanted to fight enemies in order to collect their drops for various purposes. Re;Birth1 added the option to turn this off via its Remake system, which was a start, but the ability to get rewards from this is new for Re;Birth2, and extremely welcome in the late game, where you're likely to completely destroy most enemies as you grind out Lily Ranks and rare drops.

Coming to this game straight off the extremely light-hearted and silly Hyperdimension Neptunia U Action Unleashed was quite surprising: the overall tone of the whole experience is very different. It's significantly darker, particularly in the opening sequence, and it features some of the best villains the series has seen, each of whom are complex and interesting characters. The use of the extremely girly Nepgear as protagonist was inspired in this instance, since the juxtaposition of her innate sweetness and naive nature with some of the nasty shit that goes on — particularly in the Conquest ending path — is very effective indeed.

I'm only in Chapter 2 of Re;Birth2 so far, but I'm already having a blast with it and reminding myself how and why I love this series — particularly its mainline games. It's going to be a Nep-Nep-filled few months, I'm afraid, since there's Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth3 to go after this, by which point a lovely shiny copy of the actually-brand-new-and-not-a-remake Megadimension Neptunia V-II for PlayStation 4 will finally be in my grasp. Can't wait.

The post 2194: Second Re;Birth appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished the main story of Xenoblade Chronicles X today, but my time with the game is far from over, since there's still a whole lot to do once you clear the story.

I wanted to reflect a little on my experience with the game so far — 100 hours' worth — and reiterate that I think it was absolutely the best game released last year that I had the good fortune to play. There may be some spoilers ahead, but I'll try and keep them to a minimum.

The most common criticism I've read of Xenoblade Chronicles X is that its story is "weak" or "not as good as Xenoblade Chronicles". While I don't disagree that its manner of storytelling is an acquired taste, I don't agree at all that its story is weak or of poor quality — nor do I agree with the assertion that the characters aren't particularly well-defined.

Let's take the first point first. I've already commented on this in depth in this post, but it bears mentioning again: Xenoblade Chronicles X's storytelling is about more than the main scenario quests and the cutscenes. It's an immersive storytelling experience in which you are part of the world of Mira, and things unfold around you, both with and without your intervention. The world changes and evolves as you complete missions and develop your relationships with characters, though the impact of your actions may not necessarily be immediately apparent. As you spend time in New Los Angeles and interact with its populace — initially all human, but later integrating several different xenoform cultures — you start to get a very strong sense of time and place from the people of Mira. It's ultimately one of the most well-realised worlds I've come across since the Final Fantasy MMOs — and, from me, that's high praise indeed, since these have previously been some of my favourite game worlds to hang out in.

Xenoblade Chronicles X's main story is a relatively straightforward affair, though its final act gets into some intriguing philosophical territory. But in many respects, the main story is the least important part of the overall narrative experience: the "true" Xenoblade Chronicles X, if you like, is in going about your day-to-day life as a BLADE, completing missions, interacting with others and developing your understanding of the world as a whole. Sidequests happen in the strangest of places at times, and you'll encounter a huge cast of weird and wonderful characters, many of whom have "affinity" links with one another just waiting to be discovered. Each of these sidequests is crafted with care, attention and meaning, and many of them tell their own compelling little "short stories" in their own right; others still form part of a larger ongoing narrative proceeding in the background alongside the main scenario. As a complete package, it's hard to think of an RPG with quite such a comprehensive narrative that you can explore in as much depth as you like.

Now, on to the second point: that of the characters. It's true that the main scenario largely focuses on the characters of Elma, Lin and Tatsu, with even your avatar not getting a lot in the way of development — though it's worth noting that in stark contrast to many JRPGs, you can play your character's personality in a lot of different ways, and there are often consequences for the choices you make — but to say that the other characters don't get explored is nonsense. For one, all the playable characters have their own chain of affinity missions and heart-to-heart events to explore as you develop your relationships with them, and some of these are even prerequisites for proceeding through the story. Plus, all of them have their own unique things to say during and after battle, with certain character pairings even having unique conversations with one another. Pleasingly, this even includes your avatar (who has a voice in combat despite being a silent protagonist for most of the game) — many of the things he/she says are responded to by other party members, which makes you feel like a more important part of the team than you might do otherwise.

Again, you're free to explore this side of the narrative in as much or as little depth as you please, since most of the affinity missions are optional affairs. The content is there, though — like most things in Xenoblade Chronicles X, though, it simply isn't handed to you on a plate. I like that, though; it gives a feeling of achievement when you discover something.

Final-ish thoughts for now, then? Xenoblade Chronicles X is a masterpiece of sci-fi, and the sci-fi game I've wanted to play since I was very young. It's not perfect by any means — the Wii U hardware arguably holds it back a little at times, though not as much as the original Wii held back titles like the original Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story — but it really is an astoundingly good game, and a truly impressive achievement. It deserves to be celebrated a whole lot more than I've seen, and I shall continue to bang my drum about it for as long as anyone will listen.

The post 2176: Life on Mira appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The piece did have an interesting point to make, which was to conjecture that many creators are interested in making sexually explicit — outright pornographic — games rather than just flashing the odd pair of panties like they do nowadays, and that it's the current strict censorship laws in Japan coupled with the platform holders' stranglehold on what sort of content does and doesn't get approved for sale that is holding this back from happening. I'm not sure I entirely agree with this — the nature of ecchi as opposed to hentai is to tease and titillate rather than be outright explicit, erotic, masturbation material — but it was an interesting point to consider.

Unfortunately, he then went off the deep end with accusations of games like Dungeon Travelers 2 — a game that, by all accounts from people who have played it and not pontificated for thousands of words about How Bad And Wrong Anime Panties Are, is very good indeed — being "borderline child pornography". When called out about it on social media and in comments, he then took to his personal blog to wag his fingers and make some snide remark about the current situation with former "Face of Subway" Jared pleading guilty to numerous child sex-related charges and how, given that situation, people really shouldn't be defending games that "advocate child molestation".

For fuck's sake.

I feel like I have written this post a thousand times over by now, but it seems that I need to write it again, if only to blow off the steam I've had building up inside my head all day. So this may get a little bit angry, and for that I make no apologies whatsoever.

For fuck's sake.

The "child pornography" line is one that is usually trotted out by people who want to criticise Japanese media without knowing anything about it. Yes, Japan has plenty of morally questionable material — to Western sensibilities — readily available. Yes, Japan was somewhat "late to the party" when it came to legislating against this sort of thing. Yes, Japanese creators still produce media that would simply be illegal in Western countries. But Japan is also a different culture. And this isn't excusing any of the things that I personally find morally repugnant — because there are plenty of things I want nothing to do with, just as there are plenty of aspects of Western culture I want nothing to do with — but it is worth considering when contemplating whether or not you should tarnish an entire country's cultural output with as scathing a brush as "paedophilia".

The assumption that "if you're into ecchi games, you're a paedophile" makes — mistakenly — is that people who enjoy this sort of thing cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality. I can guarantee you — speaking from experience — that a considerable proportion of people who like to take a walk on the ecchi side of life are doing so because it entertains them, not because it arouses them. Ecchi games are refreshingly frank, honest and open; ecchi games often have strong characterisation and realistic depictions of how relationships progress — including sexual encounters (or implied sexual encounters at the very least); ecchi games are completely up-front about what they are, and unashamed of that fact. More often than not, ecchi games are having fun with sex. They're using it in a cheeky way, or in some cases as a means of exploring characters. (Criminal Girls is a great example of the latter, with the characters' reactions to the light S&M scenes throughout changing as they grow and mature as people, and their relationship with the protagonist changes.)

What these games are emphatically not is a means for people who want to abuse children to get their rocks off. And this also means that people who enjoy these games are emphatically not paedophiles, or "advocates for child molestation". Do you seriously fucking believe that because someone made use of a silly game mechanic in Omega Labyrinth that they're going to go out and start squeezing the tits of random girls on the streets? Do you seriously fucking believe that someone finding a hand-drawn character in a game — with nothing whatsoever real about them except their voice actor, who is inevitably an adult — attractive in some way means that they're going to be pulling up a dirty old van outside schools and kidnapping children?

In other words, if you must acknowledge them at all, how about you criticise things you don't like without fucking insulting the people who do like them? That would be simply lovely.

I am absofuckinglutely sick of having to defend my hobby against people who take the lazy, "moral majority" approach and decry something they don't like as being "sleazy" or "skeevy" or, as we've seen above, far worse. In my experience, the Japanese games and anime enthusiast community are some of the nicest, most articulate, most friendly, most passionate people I have ever met. Through my coverage of Japanese games back when I was on USgamer — I'm sure fucking glad all the time and effort I spent on that wasn't a complete fucking waste of time — I've made some great and doubtless lifelong friends. And, moreover, I've been exposed to some really, genuinely great games — and not one of them has made me want to go out and fuck kids. Not even a little bit. How about that?

Compare and contrast with these puritanical fuckwits who just want to brand everything not on their Pre-Approved List of Things That Are Super-Rad!! as somehow Bad, Wrong and Problematic, and, well, I know which side I'd rather be on. I'll be over here with my fellow deviants, thank you very much.

The post 2040: Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Playing both of these games from this perspective today made me come to something of a realisation: the essence of a truly great RPG — or, perhaps more accurately, one that I will doubtless think back on particularly fondly long after I've finished, even if it might not be critically acclaimed or widely beloved — is twofold: firstly, it has to draw me in and captivate me with its story and/or characters, then after that, the mechanics have to stand up to hours of play. If both of these things are true, I will happily spend hundreds — even thousands, in the case of Final Fantasy XIV — of hours on the game in question.

There are quite a lot of games that have fallen into this category for me over the years. Gust's Ar Tonelico series is one, for example; while there's not really an "endgame" in any of its three installments, they do have multiple endings that necessitate additional playthroughs (or strategic saving). Compile Heart's Neptunia series is another; with pretty much all of the games in that series (with the exception of the very first and the idol sim Hyperdimension Neptunia PP, which I fully intend to go back to at some point soon) I've seen fit to exhaust absolutely everything they have to offer rather than playing them through once and being done with them. Both Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory and Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 took up well over a hundred hours of my life, for example.

Most recently, as previously noted, Omega Quintet has been keeping me busy in this regard. Omega Quintet has such a pleasing blend of story, characterisation and hugely enjoyable mechanics — its battle system is one of my favourite takes on turn-based combat I think I've ever seen — that I find it fun to just boot up and have a few fights in. The fact that the endgame section rewards you with massive amounts of experience for many of the battles, allowing you to level the girls up to ridiculous power levels — there doesn't appear to be the usual level cap of 99 in place — makes for a hugely satisfying experience. Enemies that once caused me considerable grief can now be defeated relatively easily — though pleasingly, Omega Quintet, particularly on its hardest difficulty, isn't afraid to smack you about a bit every so often if you get a bit cocky; I think I've had more "Game Over" screens in the endgame than I did throughout the whole story, and it's usually been because I made foolish assumptions that I was then punished for.

The only trouble with finding games that I want to spend hundreds of hours with in this way is that it means beating a single game to my satisfaction takes a hell of a long time. Still, I guess it means I shouldn't run out of things to play any time soon, huh? And that's quite a nice feeling.

The post 1992: The Essence of a Great RPG appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My statement is simple: If you're that cynical about video games, find something else — anything — to write about.

I say this after a day in which not one but two utterly dreadful articles were brought to my attention — I'm not going to link to either; you can seek them out yourself if you're that interested.

First up was the review of Fairy Fencer F over on my former stomping grounds of USgamer. After witnessing… the reviewer in question's review style on a couple of other Japanese role-playing game titles — most notably the actually rather excellent Tales of Xillia 2, which he panned — and the fact that, back when I was still on the staff, he wouldn't review Atelier Rorona Plus on the grounds that a Google Image Search for the game looked "creepy", I wasn't altogether surprised to see that he tore this title to shreds, also. And he did so in such a way that told me three things: 1) he had a pre-existing dislike of the company that produced the game (Compile Heart) 2) he hadn't taken the time to engage with the game on anything more than the most superficial level and 3) he simply didn't give a shit about JRPGs as they exist in 2014.

I haven't yet played Fairy Fencer F, but given the way in which the review in question was expressed — telling people who might actually be interested in the game absolutely nothing about the game, its story or its characters and instead bashing Compile Heart and its parent company Idea Factory, bemoaning easily ignored technical issues and generally looking down its nose at people who might want to play it — I don't have much faith in it as a whole. I intend to give the game a fair shot myself once I have time to settle down with it, and when I do I intend to provide some detailed thoughts on the subject over at MoeGamer, much as I did with Tales of Xillia 2 recently.

Now, games journos will often point out how stupid it is to disagree with a review, which is, after all, a subjective opinion. And it kind of is; if you like something which someone else hates, then great; more power to you. But what we had here was more than that — it was an outright unhelpful review, instead more concerned with scrawling "I Hate Compile Heart" over everything than actually providing any sort of interesting, helpful analysis or criticism. It actually felt borderline insulting at times — though thankfully not so much as the site's notorious Hatsune Miku Project Diva F review, which was so offensive to fans of Japanese games that emphatic complaints from me and my then-colleague Cassandra led to the formation of my JPgamer column.

If this was a one-off, I wouldn't mind so much, but the reviewer in question has now done this several times — leading me to question the motivations for assigning him (or him stepping forward; I don't know which way round it was) to these titles in the first place. As the former staffer who single-handedly built up a ton of goodwill with fans of niche titles that get ignored at best, marginalised or even ridiculed at worst by other sites, I can't deny that it smarts a little to see all that goodwill getting well and truly pissed up the wall by giving the sort of games that I would have been all over — and that my fellow enthusiasts would have loved to hear more about — to someone who clearly and obviously hates them. Something that helped make USgamer unique has been lost; now it's just another site with a predictable "loljapan" attitude about it. I would rather the site simply didn't review these titles at all than let this joyless arse anywhere near one ever again, but sadly it's not up to me. How very disappointing.

But let's not get too hung up on Fairy Fencer F because this was, surprisingly, not the most stupid thing posted today. No, that honour goes to the epic-length editorial over on Polygon about finding the tutorial to the new Lord of the Rings game troubling. Why? Because at one point, you sneak up on your wife and kiss her, using the same control scheme and animations as you use later in the game to assassinate people and monsters. Somehow this bizarre objection was spun out to somewhere in the region of 1,500 words — an impressive achievement on the part of the author to take that long to say absolutely nothing, I must admit. (Although frankly, given the state of some of the entries on this blog, I'm probably not one to talk. But eh; there's a difference between a professional, commercial games site and a personal blog I use as an outlet for mental detritus.)

Polygon has been going down the toilet for a long time; I can't say I've ever been a particular fan of their uniquely pretentious brand of games journalism, nor the sanctimonious attitude of several of its staff writers, but since ditching their features staff a while back — the one part of the site that actually had anything meaningful or interesting to say — it really has been circling the drain. I wasn't surprised or angry to read this article today after someone pointed me in its direction earlier; my only real reaction was a sigh and a shake of the head. Games journalism in 2014, ladies and gentlemen; better to say 1,500 words of nothing at all about the week's big release than, you know, say nothing at all. Because if you make people angry you'll at least get some page hits as people share it indignantly.

Today has been one of numerous days that I've looked back on my time with the games press and thought "That was fun while it lasted, but I don't want to go anywhere near that ever again." If a prerequisite for being a member of the games press of 2014 is being a joyless wanker who can't find the fun in anything, then count me out. Give me a call when you ditch the clickbait business model, fire all these miserable tossers and start bringing on board people who are actually enthusiastic — even passionate — about this exciting medium. I won't be sitting by the phone waiting for your call, however; I've got better things to do.

You know, like playing games… and actually enjoying them.

The post 1718: The Joyless Wankers of the Games Press appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For those who haven't read my numerous enthusiastic rants on the previous entries in this much-berated series, allow me to get you up to speed.

The first Hyperdimension Neptunia was critically panned for numerous reasons, but I found myself enjoying it a huge amount despite its crap 3D graphics, repetitive gameplay and clunky mechanics. It established some immensely endearing characters, and it was largely this fact that encouraged me to check out the subsequent entry in the series.

Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 was more of a reboot than a sequel, since it didn't really acknowledge the first game existed. It was superior in almost every respect — better graphics (though the frame rate was still on the low side), an almost infinitely better battle system, more streamlined mechanics and massively better music — but kept the things that were good about the original game: the wry, self-referential sense of humour; the endearing, memorable characters; the amusing setting; the gorgeous 2D art. It was one of the few games I actively wanted to play all the way through and see every single bit of content it had to offer — including the surprisingly dark "conquest" ending that took a considerable amount of effort to unlock.

Now, I'm playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, the third game in the series. This is more evolution from mk2 than the revolution that mk2 was over the original, but that's fine; I loved mk2, so I'm happy to effectively play it again with a bunch of refinements. The adorably ditzy Neptune is back in the lead role this time around, after giving up the spotlight to her sister Nepgear in the previous game, and there's been a strong focus on the rather tsundere girl who represents the PlayStation platform, Noire so far in what I've played. (This is absolutely fine by me, as I have a total crush on Noire.)

I'm still quite early in the new game so far, so I'm hesitant to comment on it too much. What I instead wanted to mention was an Extra Credits episode I watched earlier today, in which the different between game mechanics, the dynamics they create and the aesthetic reasons to play were explored. It got me thinking about the various JRPGs I've been playing recently, and how not all of them would appeal to everyone — even among JRPG fans.

Given the diversity of the games industry today, it's very difficult and not particularly helpful to say that you're a fan of a specific "genre" of games any more, because these genres exclusively describe game mechanics. "I like RPGs," people will say, implying that they like games that involve hit points, statistics and equipment. And yet if I plonked Skyrim's biggest fan down in front of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, they'd probably look at me in disgust, walk out then never speak to me ever again. (I'm seeing my friend Tim tomorrow night, who is possibly the biggest Skyrim fan in the world; I might try it. Though he probably won't walk out of his own house in disgust.)

What we should actually start doing a little more is considering our tastes with regard to things like subject matter, mood and the aesthetics described in the Extra Credits piece. Hyperdimension Neptunia doesn't appeal to me because it's a JRPG — though I enjoy those mechanics and the related play aesthetics — it appeals to me because of its characters; because of its bright colours; because of its light-hearted nature and refusal to let you take it seriously. We're talking about a series of games where one special attack allows you to summon Keiji Inafune in the form of a sword, then hit things with it; and another where a girl using an electric guitar as a weapon smacks an enemy into a giant microwave and then turns it on for massive damage. We're talking about a series of games in which Sega, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft's gaming platforms are personified as a series of young girls who rather aptly embody many of their inspirations' key characteristics.

Despite superficial similarities, I wouldn't necessarily expect someone who enjoyed, say, Ar Tonelico to enjoy Hyperdimension Neptunia — though there may be some crossover. (I love both, for example!) Ar Tonelico has its light-hearted moments but, for the most part, takes itself reasonably seriously; Neptunia, meanwhile, is flippant and silly. Both are emotionally engaging but in completely different ways; Ar Tonelico is dramatic and affecting; Neptunia feels like hanging out with old friends.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to playing more of Neptunia V, particularly as the story seems to have some interesting, mind-bending twists this time around. It's early days yet, but I'm already having a blast, and I anticipate spending a considerable amount of time on this game.

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The Squadron of Shame recently tackled the subject of Japanese role-playing games in the first of a new format show that we're experimenting with. You can check out the show here, or if you're on something Flash-enabled, you can use the fancy-pants player below. (If you're not, you'll simply see a white space, for which I apologise.)

If I had to pick a favourite genre of interactive entertainment, it would, without doubt, be the Japanese role-playing game. I came to the genre relatively late (yes, I was one of those people who discovered RPGs in general through Final Fantasy VII) so I didn't really have the NES-era epiphany of realising that RPGs were the only genre of games that were attempting to tell a story — for a while, at least. I also didn't discover the earlier Final Fantasy games until much later, though I have, to date, played every one of them (except XIV) and have finished most of them. I still have V and VI outstanding. Shameful, I know.

There's something about the JRPG genre that has resonated with me ever since I first got off that train in Midgar and that awesome music started up, though. For one, I find the sort of over-the-top wackiness and melodrama that typifies the genre to many people to be entertaining and fun to get invested in. For another, I have absolutely no objection to a bit of moe in my games, and generally find anime characters of this type very appealing despite the fact that in many ways they're just as generic and widespread as the bald space marine with no neck. And for yet another, I enjoy the creativity frequently on display in the genre, both from an artistic and a narrative perspective.

It's a cliché to say that Japanese RPGs are clichéd, and a lot of people who accuse the genre of that probably haven't played one for a while. Sure, there are certain thematic elements and tropes which many of them have in common, but all are unique in some way. I can remember pretty much every JRPG I've played over the years in great detail — contrast this with the fact that there are a whole bunch of shooters I struggle to distinguish from one another, and it's pretty rare than I can even remember characters' names from Western RPGs like The Elder Scrolls. Each JRPG has its own unique cast of characters who are (in most cases) well-developed and display plenty of growth and change over the course of the story. Sure, some of them start their journeys as unlikable arseholes (Squall from FFVIII and Neku from The World Ends With You spring immediately to mind) but having a strong emotional reaction to a character — "I really don't like this guy" — is surely a sign that the writers have done their job well. It's sometimes a difficult experience to play a game with a seemingly dislikable protagonist, but often this is a sign that he's going to go through some experiences to soften that stony heart of his, and I'm a big fan of that particular narrative trope.

Leaving narrative aside, I've always been a fan of the often abstract, creative battle systems that populate Japanese role-playing games. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Final Fantasy series, which significantly shakes up its core mechanics with every single instalment. Don't believe me? Here's how the battle system and related mechanics differ from game to game:

• Final Fantasy — Traditional D&D-style turn-based combat without movement. Spells split into levels, like D&D, and characters have a limited number of casts per level that increases with their character level. Characters have set classes and, later in the game, may promote these to "prestige" classes.
• Final Fantasy II — Turn-based combat, but progression is tied to an Elder Scrolls-like system whereby using something makes it improve. Whack things with a sword and your sword skill will increase. Take a lot of damage and your hit points will increase. Use a lot of magic and your magic points will increase. This system proved rather divisive at the time, and predated Bethesda's implementation of a very similar levelling system into its flagship Western RPG series by six years.
• Final Fantasy III — Turn-based combat, with progression tied to a "Job" system where characters could switch classes almost at will, allowing players to dynamically build a party to fit the situation at hand.
• Final Fantasy IV — The first appearance of "Active Time Battle", the almost-real-time-but-not-quite system which has been present in most of the subsequent titles. Progression and skill unlocks were static and unique for each character.
• Final Fantasy V — The Job system returns in a much more well-implemented fashion. Players may develop Jobs at will, and may also equip certain skills that they have learned from another Job to build multi-purpose characters.
• Final Fantasy VI — Each character has unique special abilities but everyone has the opportunity to learn the same spells by fighting with "Espers" equipped.
• Final Fantasy VII — The Materia system allowed for deep customisation of characters with a slightly puzzly element — how best to fill the available slots in a character's weapon and armour?
• Final Fantasy VIII — By drawing magic out of enemies and "junctioning" these spells to statistics, players could create powerhouses that made their character level practically irrelevant. A bizarre and abstract system that didn't quite work.
• Final Fantasy IX — Characters learned skills from their equipment. Once they had learned the skill, they could use it any time, otherwise they had to keep the equipment in question in use to perform the action.
• Final Fantasy X — A brief break from the Active Time Battle system brought a clever turn-based system where certain actions could rearrange the turn order. Also saw the first appearance of a non-traditional levelling system in the form of the "Sphere Grid"
• Final Fantasy X-2 — A return to the Active Time Battle system and a variation on the Job system came with X-2's Dressphere setup, whereby each of the game's three playable characters could equip several Jobs and switch between them mid-battle.
• Final Fantasy XI — The first MMO entry in the series had another variation on the Job system whereby a single character had levels in every Job, but could only have one active at a time, with a "Sub-Job" becoming available after some progression had been made and allowing characters to use skills from this second Job.
• Final Fantasy XII — Taking the combat of XI and applying it to a single-player game allowed XII to have a real-time feel while still feeling strategic, as players were able to pause the game to issue commands to characters while battling without being sent to a separate screen. Progression was split between a traditional levelling system and the "License Grid", whereby characters had to purchase licenses to use specific pieces of equipment and abilities, then purchase the equipment and abilities separately.
• Final Fantasy XIII — Active Time Battle on a separate combat screen returns, this time with players taking control of a single character in fights that focus more on carefully-timed Paradigm Shifts (effectively Job changes by another name) rather than using specific abilities. Had a distinctly unconventional levelling system whereby characters could gain levels and abilities from six different classes independently.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2 — Similar to XIII, but with only two characters available. Players could catch various monsters to fill the third party slot. Characters could once again develop down the six different paths, though monsters had a fixed class which could also be developed. Unlike XIII, where you were stuck playing as the party leader, in XIII-2 you could switch between the two characters at will, and one of them getting knocked out did not mean failure.

As you can see, Final Fantasy is a series which has evolved significantly over the years, and yet many accuse Square Enix of letting it stagnate. Sure, they've arguably made a few missteps over the years — XII, XIII and XIII-2 have all proven somewhat divisive in particular (though I enjoyed all three of them) — but one thing that the Final Fantasy team really can't be accused of is sitting on their laurels and churning out the same old thing year after year. The same is true for many other JRPG developers. It's one of the richest, most creative genres out there.

So why has it fallen from grace? A combination of factors. With the increasingly-busy lives people lead today, a 100-hour game is no longer necessarily seen as a good thing. Budgets for high-definition games spiral out of control, making the production of an HD JRPG an impractical prospect for many studios, particularly when they can't necessarily count on huge sales numbers to recoup their expenditure. (This is perhaps why MonolithSoft and Mistwalker chose to release the gobsmackingly brilliant Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story on the Wii rather than the more popular/"hardcore" Xbox 360 and PS3.) And the eye of "the average gamer", whoever that might be, has drifted towards the West these days for the majority of their gaming fixes, rather than the East as once was.

There's still a rich back catalogue of excellent titles out there to explore in this deep genre, however — even more so if you learn Japanese. I'm making a point to go back and revisit some titles I missed the first time around at the moment — having recently played Shadow Hearts I'm now on to its excellent sequel, for example — and I'm having a great time. For the vast majority of these games, they're a reminder of a simpler time — no "Your friend is online!" notifications, no party chat invites, no DLC, no controversy over endings even when they sucked — and they're great.

So while the rest of the Internet yells and screams about each other about Mass Effect 3 (still!) I'm more than happy to immerse myself in a world of HP, MP, Attack, Magic, Item, Escape.

The post #oneaday Day 791: Give Me More J appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Here's a stumper for all you RPG fans: exactly how much does taking one hit point of damage hurt?

It's not a particularly straightforward thing to work out, given that hit points are a representative abstraction of physical condition rather than a measurable, uh, measurement. But let's assume for a moment that it is indeed possible to measure one's own hit points. How much, then, would taking one hit point of damage hurt?

The answer to that question would largely depend on what model of hit points you are using. If you're talking Dungeons and Dragons hit points, taking one damage would fucking hurt if you're not in tip-top physical condition. The average "man in the street" sort of person (i.e. not a warrior, rogue, wizard, cleric or what have you) is regarded as a "level 0 human" and generally has something in the region of 2 or 3 hit points, if that. Level 1 wizards often only have in the region of 4 or so. As such, taking one hit point of damage as an average person following the Dungeons and Dragons model would hurt a great deal, putting you potentially up to halfway towards death (or rather, being knocked out, since people don't officially die until bleeding out to -10 hit points in D&D).

Compare and contrast with the JRPG approach to hit points, however, where totals frequently extend into the thousands and, in some cases, the tens of thousands. As a beginning character in a JRPG, you'll often have a low three-figure hit point total to start with, which will progress towards that elusive 9999 (or 99999) as you level up. Assuming that your average person hasn't really levelled up a great deal thanks to a notable lack of monsters (big spiders battled with Hoovers notwithstanding) we can work on the assumption that a single hit point's worth of damage doesn't really hurt a great deal. 'Tis but a scratch and all that.

So, since it's late and my brain is starting to shut down a little bit, let's take this to the next logical extension and consider a variety of horrific injuries to determine exactly how many HP damage they'd do following the two approaches outlined above. We're assuming that the person being injured here is not a Destiny-chosen hero who has been infused by the power of the Goddess/branded by the fal'Cie/chosen by Fate/revealed to be the wielder of the legendary blade Monado but rather, say, that man who works behind the fish counter in Sainsbury's. As such, we'll say he has 4HP in D&D and 150HP in a JRPG.

• Getting an electric shock off an escalator handrail — D&D: 0HP, interrupt current action in surprise; JRPG: 1HP electric damage.
• Falling out of bed while asleep — D&D: 0HP, lose "Sleep" condition; JRPG: 1HP physical damage, lose "Sleep" condition, afflict with "Embarrassment" (special moves charge slower)
• Walking into a coffee table — D&D: 0 HP, maybe stun for a turn, staggering randomly around the room going "OUCH"; JRPG: 1HP physical damage.
• Paper cut — D&D: 0 HP, afflict with "very mild bleeding" status, lose 1HP every 500 turns unless the cut heals (use a bandage or roll a D20 every turn, on a number between 3 and 20, it heals naturally); JRPG: 2HP physical damage.
• Accidentally grating your fingers while attempting to grate cheese — D&D: 0HP, afflict with "very mild bleeding status" as with "paper cut" above; JRPG: 1HP physical damage.
• Stubbing your toe — D&D: 0HP, incapacitate for a turn, remove ability to use vocal components of spells and stealth due to yelling "FAAAAAAAHHHHK!"; JRPG: 3HP physical damage.
• Having a cat that is standing on you decide that it needs to hold on tightly with its claws — D&D: 0HP, 50% possibility of affliction with "very mild bleeding" status as with "paper cut" above, movement forbidden (you've got a cat on you); JRPG: 3HP physical damage, afflict with Rooted (you've got a cat on you).
• Inadvertently ripping off a toenail by catching it on something — D&D: 0HP, afflict with "bleeding" status, lose 1HP every 50 turns unless the cut heals (use a bandage or roll a D20 every turn, on a number between 8 and 20, it heals naturally); JRPG: 10HP physical damage, afflict with Slow.
• Burning your hand on the handle of a poorly-insulated saucepan — D&D: 0HP, interrupt current action, forced shouting of obscenity breaks any Stealth-related effects; JRPG: 10HP Fire damage.
• Standing on an upturned three-prong plug — D&D: 0HP, movement forbidden for 5 turns, remove ability to use vocal components of spells and stealth due to yelling "FUCK. Cunt! ARSE! SHIT that fucking hurts. AAAAARGH."; JRPG: 15HP physical damage, afflict with Rooted.
• Banging your head on a low ceiling even after seeing a "mind your head" sign — D&D: 0HP, dazed for one turn. temporary reduction to Wisdom and Intelligence; JRPG:10HP physical damage, 10MP magic damage for a blow to the head.
• Getting punched in the face by some drunk dude at a bar who thought you were eyeing up his missus but in fact you were trying to read the scrawled sign on the front of that fridge that said that the cheap drinks might actually be a bit out of date — D&D: 1HP; JRPG: 25HP physical damage.
• Suffering any sort of trauma to the testicular area — D&D: 2HP (probably won't kill you unless you've just been punched twice by a drunk dude at a bar who thought you were eyeing up his missus, but it bloody hurts), stunned for 5 turns, temporary reduction to Constitution; JRPG: 50HP physical damage, afflicted with "Stop" status as you wheeze and cough in an attempt to recover your dignity.
• Getting stabbed in the leg, whether accidentally or deliberately — D&D: 2HP, movement rate halved; JRPG: 50HP physical damage, afflicted with "Slow".
• Failing to escape the unwanted affections of an amorous gorilla — D&D: Your adventure is over. You have been adopted by an amorous gorilla as its mate. Any attempt to escape will result in death. JRPG: Perform a badly-executed stealth/platforming sequence to escape.
• Getting stabbed in the face — D&D: 5HP (you will likely bleed to an unhappy -10HP death), permanent reduction to Charisma; JRPG: 100-150HP physical damage.
• Suffering an apparently successful attempt to behead you — D&D: 14HP; JRPG: 150HP
• Getting the smackdown from an angry God/being hit with a planet by the final boss — D&D: 50HP; JRPG: 5000HP
• Standing quite close to the epicentre of a nuclear explosion, you know, enough to get a good view and think "ooh, that's a bit hot, I wish I'd stood back a bit more" — D&D: 998HP; JRPG: 9998HP.
• Standing in the epicentre of a nuclear explosion — D&D: 999HP; JRPG: 9999HP.

Should you find yourself suffering any of these injuries, though, fear not; for a good night's sleep cures all ills, as everyone knows. Unless you're already dead, in which case you'd better get on good terms with your local Cleric or purchase some Phoenix Down.

The post #oneaday Day 763: A Question That No-One Seems To Have Asked Regarding RPGs appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

[This post contains spoilers.]

Final Fantasy XIII is a game about control in its many forms. What happens if the State or Church has complete control over the populace? What happens if beings beyond our understanding control the resources that determine humanity's survival? How do you challenge a fate which seems to be set in stone?

This theme permeates the entire game, from its visual design through its progression structure to the oft-criticised linearity. The game starts with the Sanctum-endorsed "Purge" sending hundreds of citizens to their death. Lightning and her soon-to-be companions are the ones who step up to challenge this seemingly-inevitable fate, but they don't really have a choice. It's fight or die, and to our heroes, death is not an option. This sets them on their path, and once they're on this path, there's no escaping their destiny: they are going to become Pulse l'Cie and receive their Focus: to destroy Cocoon as Ragnarok.

This inescapable destiny is reflected by the fact that there's no deviation from the path on which you, the player, can move. The first part of the game is completely linear for some time, and this is entirely appropriate for the theme. It reflects several things: the tightly-ordered society that is the Sanctum-dominated Cocoon, and the inevitability of preordained destiny. It's not until much, much later in the game that our heroes come across the verdant green hills of Pulse, a land devoid of human life and thus free of the "control" and corruption which the Sanctum and, by extension, the fal'Cie hold over the heads of the population of Cocoon.

But there's subtler things, too. As our heroes progress along their path, they grow in power. At the start of the game, they don't learn from their experiences. Shortly after they become l'Cie, they have the opportunity to develop themselves in the disciplines in which they're good at. Shortly before they arrive at Pulse, when they make the decision to challenge the unjust fate which appears to lie before them, their options open up. The player is able to develop them down pathways which were formerly closed to them. It's harder work for seemingly relatively little benefit, at least to begin with, but the option is there. The path of least resistance still allows the greatest benefits, but those who are willing to make the effort and invest the time will find it pays off later. And as their l'Cie brands advance, bringing them ever-closer to their inescapable destiny—destroy Cocoon or endure an existence worse than death—ironically, their options open up and their potential for advancement becomes ever stronger.

It transpires throughout the course of the story that the party has, in fact, been manipulated for nefarious ends. The interesting thing about the end section of the game is that it jumps firmly back onto rails, but this time it's rails that the party (and/or the player) has chosen to jump onto and follow to their conclusion. There's nothing stopping the player keeping the party down on Pulse, indulging in sidequests, trying to hunt down elusive treasure and wondering if they'll ever be tough enough to take down one of those enormous Adamantoise creatures. The player makes the choice to return to Cocoon and see the story through to its eventual conclusion. And when the final confrontation ends up causing that which the party had struggled so hard to avoid, it's through strength of will that Fang and Vanille manage to use Ragnarok's power to make a choice. A choice not to destroy Cocoon, but to save it instead. The two worlds are changed forever by their actions. The choices that they made put into motion a chain of events that inextricably tie Pulse and Cocoon together—literally, physically.

Ironically, of course, the ultimate control of Final Fantasy XIII's world is that which the creators hold over the player. The characters make choices for themselves and the player is powerless to do anything about it. The player is just along for the ride. But the lengthy setup, the introduction of the characters and the resolution of all their personal stories by the time the party reaches the relative "freedom" of Pulse—if the player has let themselves become invested in the fates of these diverse characters, if they can let themselves look past these characters' first impressions: that Lightning is an aloof, arrogant arse; that Snow is an idiot; that Hope is a whiny brat; that Vanille is an irritatingly girly girl; that Sazh has a stupid name and never quite seems to understand what's going on; that Fang is all too quick to jump off a metaphorical cliff at the slightest provocation—then they'll be right there with them, rooting for them as they decide the fate of the world.

Final Fantasy XIII isn't for everyone. The mixed critical reception the game got on its initial release is more than enough to make that abundantly apparent. Is it the large tracts of linearity, the characters, the fact it's not Final Fantasy (insert number here) that puts people off? I don't know. But I absolutely loved it. It was a spectacular thrill-ride with characters that despite occasional pretensions of obnoxiousness that they display at the outset, end up being a good, memorable ensemble cast—and seriously, what JRPG cast doesn't have occasional pretensions of obnoxiousness? I found it fun to play and beat it with a sense of satisfaction and closure, not least because of the fact that I know that it's over (until the full-on sequel of course) and won't feel obliged to return because of some piecemeal DLC.

I am half-tempted to go Trophy-hunting and/or finish off the last 24% of sidequests on Pulse that I didn't complete—but if I don't, I still feel like I've had a satisfyingly "complete" experience. And that, in this day and age of games that keep getting extended, extended, extended and thus losing the impact of their original "ending"… that's something to be celebrated.

The post #oneaday Day 73: The Late Review - Final Fantasy XIII appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My own tolerance for nonsense is pretty high, as my enjoyment of JRPGs and love of Bayonetta will attest. But even when I'm writing creative stuff myself, I end up picturing some variant on Comic Book Guy reading what I've written and saying "BUT THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN!" I guess I have bullshit filters by proxy, as if I were writing stuff purely for myself, it could make as little sense as I please.

One simple way to overcome your own bullshit filters (whether or not they're proxies like mine), though, is to watch some movies or read some books. When you see how much nonsense other people—published people who actually get paid for their bullshit—put out, you'll feel a lot better.

Let's take Tron: Legacy for a moment, which I went to see the other night. This is a movie built almost entirely on nonsensical premises. Why are the programs in the computer personified as humans? Why do they behave in a human way? Why do they need vehicles? And given that the main distinguishing feature of one group in the movie is that they act "more human", what, in fact, is the difference between them and those who are already acting pretty human? How does a virtual projection of an aircraft stall at altitude in a virtual environment which presumably has no air? THAT WOULD NEVER HA—

Stop. Tron: Legacy isn't a bad movie despite the fact that all of the above issues are clearly nonsensical plot holes which spectacularly fail to be resolved by the end of the movie. I enjoyed it very much and intend going to see it again. In fact, Tron: Legacy is a movie which actually benefits from you specifically not trying to read too much into it. The reason the programs act human? Because it's relatable. The reason they drive vehicles? So there can be awesome action sequences. The reason a virtual aircraft stalls at altitude? Because it's exciting. Nothing more than that.

So it is when you're writing. Not everything has to be laced with hidden meanings, metaphors and commentary on the human condition. In fact, some of the best "hidden meanings" come about completely unintentionally, as an unconscious communication on the part of the author, an unconscious expression of something deep-seated in their mind that comes out in the things that they are writing. A window onto their soul, if you will.

Of course, some people can transcend that kind of writing and deliberately do clever things. But then they probably get labelled as "pretentious" and don't get appreciated in their own lifetime. And everyone wants to be appreciated in their own lifetime, right?

So, the next time you're writing something, take care that it makes sense, sure. But if you want to write something which initially appears to be "stupid", think about the rest of what you're writing too. Does it make sense in context, however "unrealistic" it might be when compared to reality? If so, then there absolutely is no reason that the Blood Sausage of Agamemnon can't turn into a semi truck at the push of a button when combined with the Amulet of Lindor under a full moon.

And if you still feel what you're writing is ridiculous, go watch Tron: Legacy.

The post #oneaday, Day 344: Bullshit Filters appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.