Tag: MoeGamer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about the Vita

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about “progressiveness”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about Falcom

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about Neptunia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about overlooked games

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

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

Let’s talk about why this happens

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

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

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

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

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

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

2461: Gratuitous Self-Promotion

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Hey, you. If you’re reading this, chances are you know me in some capacity or another, either online, offline or perhaps both. You may even follow this blog on a semi-regular basis, in which case thank you very much for enduring my directionless rambling.

Some of you may not be aware that I have another site, however; one with a bit more “structure” to its content, but also with a regular posting schedule. Some of you may already be aware of it, but perhaps haven’t checked it out for a while. And some of you may already be loyal readers, in which case, again, thank you very much.

My other site is called MoeGamer and you can find it at http://moegamer.net.

MoeGamer has a pretty straightforward mission: to provide detailed and in-depth coverage of Japanese and Japanese-inspired games that often don’t get the attention they deserve in the mainstream press — or, in the worst cases, get written off for one reason or another, usually on the grounds that they’re “pervy”.

I started it as a continuation of a regular, weekly column I had when I worked as USgamer; dubbed JPgamer, the column built up an audience of regular readers who appreciated what I did for these games, which was something that many other sites didn’t bother with, particularly in this age of growing and obnoxious political correctness that seems inclined to brand anything with pretty girls in as “problematic”. After I was laid off from USgamer, I decided to start MoeGamer simply to continue what I was doing with JPgamer, but over the course of the last few months I’ve been building it into something bigger.

Back in March of this year, I decided to reboot MoeGamer into something with a bit more structure; prior to this point, I had simply posted content on it whenever I felt like it and about whatever topics I saw fit. This meant that there were often long periods of time when I didn’t post anything, and I wasn’t happy with that.

As such, my reboot of the site sees me posting on a weekly basis, with a specific focus on a “cover game” for a month-long period. Over the course of four articles, I explore these cover games from a variety of perspectives: a look at their historical context; an exploration of their mechanics; a deep-dive into their narrative, themes and characterisation; and a look at their audio-visual aesthetics. This has proven to be a good way for me to talk about each of these games in as much detail as I’d like without overwhelming readers with a single, insanely long article. (Make no mistake, this is still long-form writing, however, because I believe there’s plenty of people out there still hungry for detailed writing even as the collective attention span of Internet denizens has gone right down the toilet in the last few years.)

MoeGamer is primarily intended for existing enthusiasts of Japanese (and Japan-inspired) gaming and entertainment, but I make a conscious effort with each piece to keep things accessible to everyone without any assumed knowledge. The order in which I chose to post the articles about each “cover game” was deliberate, too: talking about a game’s history gives you the opportunity to introduce it in general terms to those who aren’t familiar with it, then a discussion of its mechanics gives most people an idea of whether they’d enjoy playing it. After that, an analysis of its narrative is “taking things to the next level”, as it were, and finally exploring its audio-visual aesthetic provides a good opportunity to provide “further reading” with regard to its art, music and inspirations.

In other words, don’t feel like there’s nothing for you on MoeGamer if you’re not an existing fan of Japanese popular entertainment. I strive to make the site an informative, knowledgeable resource about some of the most interesting and underappreciated games on the market, from both yesterday and today, and hope that over the course of my articles, I can do my part to help dispel some of the unhelpful preconceptions that mainstream media perpetuates with regard to Japanese popular entertainment.

I’m doing this as a passion project at present, but a number of readers have been generous enough to pledge their support to my work via Patreon. At present, it’s a much-appreciated trickle of money each month that perhaps pays for a new game or piece of equipment, but it would be a dream come true to make enough money from MoeGamer to call it an actual job. I’m skeptical as to whether that will ever happen, but in the meantime I’m eternally grateful for each and every person who has shown their support to the site. If you like the sound of what I’m doing, please do consider pledging a small amount per month and help me keep doing what I love doing — you can do so here.

If you can’t spare any cash, that’s fine, too; you can also show your support by paying the site a visit and sharing the articles you particularly enjoy with friends and family on social media. MoeGamer is not ad-supported (any ads which do appear are WordPress’ work, not mine) and so remains clickbait-free, 100% guaranteed — share with confidence!

Thanks for your time and support. I hope you enjoy the content currently on MoeGamer, and which I’ve got planned for the coming months.

Here are some quick links you might be interested in:

October 2016’s Cover Game: Gal*Gun Double Peace

Previous Cover Games

One Way Heroics (September 2016)
RPG Maker MV (August 2016)
Ys (July 2016)
Dungeon Travelers 2 (June 2016)
Megadimension Neptunia V-II (May 2016)
Senran Kagura Estival Versus (April 2016)

All games covered by MoeGamer to date (including one-off articles and content from before the revamp)

More about MoeGamer

Moe 101: the beginner’s guide

2318: Rebooting in Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2292: Thirty-Five

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It was my birthday today; I am now thirty-five years of age, which means on some forms I’m officially in the next age bracket. If ever there were a more obvious marker of our respective mutual creeping towards the grave, it is surely moving down through the age ranges on official forms. I’m not sure if this means I count as “middle-aged” or not yet and honestly I don’t really care all that much; age has always just been a number to me, and, for better or worse, I’ve always preferred to act the age I feel rather than the age I am.

It was a pleasantly quiet day today — something much-needed for both my wife Andie and me after numerous recent stressors. We had a lazy morning, Andie made a “mug cake” in the microwave for me (delicious), and then we went out to our local Japanese eatery Zen for some sushi and deep-fried goods (also delicious). The remainder of the day has been spent writing an article about Senran Kagura’s art and soundtrack, playing Final Fantasy X HD and, as a lazy post-dinner activity, a spot of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3.

I’m probably supposed to reflect on where I’ve come from and where I’m going on such a momentous occasion as my age going up by one. Right now that’s a fairly depressing prospect, though, to be honest, so I’m going to refrain from going too much into that. Let’s just say that things haven’t been great, but plans are in motion to make life a little better, even if it takes a while to bring them to fruition.

For now, I’m pursuing home-based work so I can be with my wife while she’s off work with her chronic pain condition; hopefully this will provide enough of an income to at least survive on, if not live a particularly exciting life, but then I never really lived much of an exciting life anyway, with the most exciting things I tend to buy being either video or board games. With that in mind, please do get in touch if you have any (paying!) writing work that I might be able to do from home — or if you’d like to support me directly, please consider making a pledge to my Patreon, which was set up with a mind to making my work on MoeGamer a bit more regular and in-depth.

You may ponder why I don’t pursue writing gigs in the games press any more. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind that, though the way I’ve been treated in the past has somewhat soured me on the business as a whole — plus there’s the fact that the mainstream games press (i.e. the ones that pay) all still have the “feminism” stick firmly jammed up their collective asses which, far from promoting the amorphous concept of “diversity” as they’d like to think, actually just stifles criticism from a variety of perspectives, not to mention thoughtful, meaningful exploration of games on the more provocative end of the spectrum. And as my good friend Chris was kind enough to say the other day, I’m better at writing about games than 1,200 word reviews talking about how nice the graphics are and whether or not there’s any screen tearing, or 500-word news pieces on industry Twitter spats and inevitably fake rumours about new Nintendo hardware.

MoeGamer, as it stands, is an experiment in sustained long-form writing on very specific topics in games, and if this proves to be worthwhile I’ll consider expanding the project into perhaps putting together a book or two. That would be exciting. As longstanding readers well know, I firmly believe that there’s an absolute ton of scope for thoughtful, interesting, meaningful analysis of games beyond what the current clickbait model of games journalism focuses on, and longform articles not beholden to advertisers or honest-to-goodness books are clearly the way to go for this sort of thing.

Other people out there are already doing this sort of thing; Boss Fight Books is a particularly interesting project, though it takes a somewhat scattershot approach to which games are noteworthy for one reason or another, and many (though not all, thankfully) of the authors involved are members of “the clique” of games writers and developers that has made viewpoints that deviate from the standard (and fallacious) “everything is sexist and gamers are awful people” rather unwelcome. In other words, I don’t see them publishing a book exploring the satire of Hyperdimension Neptunia or the meaning carried in the sexual content of The Fruit of Grisaia any time soon.

Basically, now I’ve made the decision to, at least for the immediate future, stay at home for work, I can start looking at ways to 1) pin down a reasonably secure monthly income and 2) start pursuing passion projects in earnest. Because for all the noble intentions in the world, the last thing you want to do after coming home from a 9-5 is sit down at the computer and do something else that feels like it’s “productive”, even if it’s something you do genuinely really want to do. I’m going to have to make some decisions on how to proceed from here — do I keep attempting to promote my Patreon, or look into something like Kickstarter to fund a book series? Do I look into monetising MoeGamer’s content somehow, or share it across some other channels such as video? (I kind of hate video for anything other than TV shows and the occasional Zero Punctuation; give me some nice words any day, millennials’ attention spans be damned.) Do I attempt to pitch some articles to mainstream games press sites? (Probably not.)

There are lots of things to think about and it’s both exciting and scary. I want everything to be all right, as it emphatically isn’t right now, but at least I have options to explore, so everything isn’t hopeless quite yet. I hope, anyway.

Now, I’m off to bed to hopefully sleep soundly, and then I’m going away for the Bank Holiday weekend to play some board games with friends and probably get attacked by a dog. I sincerely hope this coming weekend is as relaxing as I need it to be, as the last few… weeks, months, I lose track… have been pretty hellish stress-wise, and I’d rather have just one weekend where I can just enjoy myself without having to worry about anything.

Thankfully, I don’t see anything standing in the way of that happening, so expect suitably enthusiastic reports throughout the weekend, and be prepared to commiserate with me on my inevitable losses at games that involve any sort of strategic thinking.

2257: Rebooting MoeGamer

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I’ve already written a substantial post over on my other site MoeGamer about a new plan I have to start writing more hefty long-form pieces on a regular basis, but I figured I’d write something here too. And, since I’m the sort of person who will happily write the same thing in two different ways because he enjoys the act of writing itself, I’m not just copying and pasting the text over, oh dear me no.

I’m rebooting MoeGamer. It’s not a drastic reboot, change of theme, change of layout or anything like that: it’s changing the way I’m thinking about it. To date (well, until last August) I posted on MoeGamer as and when I felt like it: when I particularly wanted to write about a favourite game, or when I particularly wanted to refute something stupid I’d seen from the mainstream press. (“There haven’t been any good RPGs since Final Fantasy VII” was a good example; “Dungeon Travelers 2 is a creepy, porn-lite dungeon crawler” was another.) I made an effort to post pieces of several thousand words in length, much as if I’d be writing a feature article on a regular games site.

And that was fine, apart from a couple of issues, the major one being that it’s very difficult to stay up to date on things to write about if you set yourself even quite a conservative schedule of posting. Eventually, the prospect of running out of things to write about became a bit demoralising, so I stopped to have a think and reflect on what I wanted to do with the site, if anything.

Today, Destructoid published a review of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 which attracted some attention. Not only was it written by a writer with a lengthy track record of baiting the outrage brigade at every opportunity, said writer took the opportunity to insult both the game and the people who might be interested in it over the course of his article. And, once again, I was reminded of the woeful inadequacy of the mainstream games press when covering more specialist titles such as modern Japanese games.

As foul a taste as the review left in my mouth, it gave me an idea. Why not try doing something completely different? By not being beholden to advertising revenue, I have the freedom to wax lyrical about games I find interesting or noteworthy as much as I want. And in-depth analysis is what these games in particular are sorely lacking. Now, I’m not particularly saying Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is necessarily worth some in-depth analysis — although I haven’t played it yet, so couldn’t say for sure — but there are plenty of games out there which are being done an enormous disservice by games journalists who either don’t have the time to invest in 100+ hour RPGs, or who feel “this game is about boobs” is somehow sufficient to describe Senran Kagura.

Much of the problems with modern games criticism come from the twin pressures of time and performance. Everything posted on a site has to perform well, and it has to be timely, otherwise the ad revenue will be shit and no-one will get paid. Unfortunately, this leads to clickbait of various forms — most commonly of the outrage variety these days. I don’t necessarily blame the games journos themselves for this — though there are certain writers, whom I shall refrain from naming for the moment, who can eat a thousand dicks over their incompetent coverage of games that deserve better — because I know from experience they quite simply don’t have the time to explore a game fully in the same way a regular ol’ player will.

But I do. Because I’m a regular ol’ player. So why not leverage that fact and take an extremely in-depth look at a game after the fact, pick apart why it’s noteworthy (or not) from several different angles, and ultimately build up a library of deep, interesting analyses of games that don’t get the time of day from the mainstream games media?

The plan’s pretty simple. Pick a game each month, focus exclusively on that. Write about its mechanics, narrative, aesthetics and context — going into a full article’s worth of detail on each rather than trying to cram everything into a single “review”. Add additional detail as appropriate. Move on to something new the following month. Repeat.

This approach gives me time to work my way through substantial games such as JRPGs and visual novels and complete them to my satisfaction, then write about them in detail. It provides a suitable structure for me to post content regularly. And it provides a variety of perspectives for people who are interested in games for different reasons — not everyone’s as much of a narrative junkie as I am!

I’m sure it’ll be a challenge and I’ll doubtless run into some hurdles along the way. But while I have the time to pursue various creative endeavours, it’s probably best I do that rather than sitting at home twiddling my thumbs and occasionally bursting into tears at the fact I still don’t have an actual job.

I’ll be kicking off this new-style MoeGamer at the beginning of April with coverage of the recently released Senran Kagura Estival Versus, and taking things from there. I’m looking forward to this new challenge, and I hope you’ll be interested to read my work.

2011: Let’s Talk!

0012_001A little while ago, I wrote about chat app Discord and how I thought it was a jolly fine piece of software that had all but replaced Skype and various other solutions for, among other things, in-game voice chat.

Besides high-quality voice chat, Discord is also pretty great for creating text chat servers with custom channels (each of which can have their own permissions set if you so desire) and various other bits and pieces here and there. The app is clearly largely designed with the Final Fantasy XIV community in mind, given its built-in commands to search sites like XIVDB and Gamerescape, but it’s also a flexible, lightweight, easy-to-use and cross-platform chat app that is super-easy to get signed up for and really easy to use.

So I’d like to invite you along to come and chat! I created a server named after my other website MoeGamer, along with a bunch of channels. The server is primarily intended for people to talk about Japanese video games, anime, manga and the like, but there are a selection of other channels for people to talk about what they might be interested in. I’ve had a few people sign up over the course of the day, but not really much participation as yet; understandable, really, since no-one wants to be the first person to say something!

A request, then, dear reader. If you’d like to have a chat with me and hopefully some other like-minded individuals, please do two things for me.

Firstly, join the server here. (You can use Discord via the Web, but I recommend downloading the standalone app for the best and most flexible experience.)

Secondly, participate! Jump into a channel you like the sound of — the invite link I’ve provided will take you to a “welcome” channel that gives you a summary of what all the other channels are all about — and start talking. Even if no-one seems to be saying much to begin with, people who join the server and channels will see the conversation history when they come along for the first time, so if there are some comments, thoughts and even pictures for people to respond to when they sign up, new members will be more inclined to start participating themselves.

I’d love to build this server into a nice little community where we can chat, share stories, share pics and share our thoughts on all things anime, gaming, manga and whatnot. Discord is a great means of doing just that, and I’d love to see more people making use of it and supporting the great work the developers are doing — it’s currently only in alpha, and is already a really well put together piece of software. And who knows? You might even make a few new friends or discover a few new interests in the process.

See you there!

1844: Back in the Game

I’ve started updating my Japanese gaming site MoeGamer again. I’d taken something of a break from it for a while, partly due to a general sense of disillusionment with the whole “writing about games” thing — the whole “getting unceremoniously ditched by the publication I’d loyally written for since its inception because I wasn’t American” thing didn’t help (and yes, that really was the reason I was given for my redundancy), and neither did my well-documented distaste for the way the mainstream games press at large tends to treat Japanese games — and partly simply due to the fact that I didn’t feel I had a lot of time any more.

Having a “normal” job kind of sucks like that, in that it’s a lot harder to find the time to do the things you want to do or that you know you enjoy. I always manage to find time to write this blog each day, of course — though sometimes it’s late in the evening when I publish something, and sometimes that something is a barely coherent mess — but keeping MoeGamer up to date was proving to be somewhat more difficult, at least partly because of the expectation I’d set for myself that everything I put on there would be erring on the slightly more long-form side of things rather than quick, snappy posts. (I’m firmly of the belief that there are plenty of people on the Internet who are capable or reading more than 250 words at a time, and it saddens me to see so many sites dumbing themselves down to cater to people with some sort of attention-deficit disorder.)

That dumbass IGN JRPG article from the other day (which I think I’ve already linked to more than enough; check out my response on MoeGamer to find out more) spurred me into action, though; I wasn’t going to let such an ill-informed piece slide, so I guess I should be thankful to Colin Moriarty for that if nothing else.

From writing that piece, though — which was actually, I must confess, adapted from something I’d written a few months back but never gotten around to publishing — I felt the old bug biting again. I enjoy writing about games; not necessarily for profit, pageviews or comments, but purely for the enjoyment of expressing myself about things that I love. I have no particular desire to be a professional games critic or journalist any more — not now I’ve experienced firsthand how shittily many of us get treated, and certainly not now that the whole GamerGate situation has put the games press as a whole under more intense scrutiny than ever before — but I do still like writing about games, and I enjoy it when people stumble across my sites for whatever reason, like what I’ve written and decide to say hi. A number of people have dropped by either here or MoeGamer recently and said that they miss my work on USgamer; I’m happy to hear that, because it means that what I was trying to do with my JPgamer column paid off in at least a small way: it gave an often-ignored, often-ostracised subsection of the gaming community something that they could feel like was written for them. And I can say that with some confidence, because I count myself among that subsection of the gaming community, and I wrote those pieces — and indeed everything on MoeGamer — for me.

Going forward, then, I hope to be able to post at least one or two things on MoeGamer a week. I’m not going to attempt to stick to any sort of schedule nor beat myself up if I don’t manage to post something — I’m not trying to make it into a business or even make a bit of pocket money from it — but I am going to use it as a place to post my thoughts about games I’ve enjoyed or am currently enjoying. And I hope other people will continue to enjoy it in that respect, too.

1566: Project MoeGamer

After some umming and ahhing (and not being able to get to sleep again) I decided yesterday to flip the switch on my little side project. I haven’t done a huge amount of promotion or anything for it yet — though I guess this post counts — because I knew I was going to be away for the weekend. But I did feel like I wanted to get it out in the wild and ready to start tinkering with over the next few weeks.

If you haven’t already seen it, I present to you MoeGamer. It’s a site inspired by my love of Japanese games — particularly those towards the more “anime-ish” end of the spectrum — and is intended to be a repository of articles I’ve written regarding games I’ve been playing. I’ve deliberately kept it free of any sort of “structure” for the moment — i.e. it’s not intended to be a news, reviews and preview site — to allow for full creative freedom, and so far I’ve populated it with a selection of articles that have previously been seen on this site (with some minor edits) and one longer original article on the visual novel Kana Little Sister that I haven’t published anywhere before.

My intention for the site in the short term is simply to use it as an outlet for writing about Japanese games in as much detail as I enjoy. Realistically, I know that I’ve been quite lucky to have the freedom I’ve had at USgamer to post my weekly JPgamer column, and I also know that despite the reputation I’ve built up as a result of both JPgamer and my reviews of various Japanese games, it will take a fair bit of fighting at any mainstream site to be able to do the same. In other words, as much as it would be an ideal situation for me to be hired by a site to be their resident Japanese games expert, I know that, given these games’ distinctly “niche” status (i.e. they’re not necessarily huge traffic magnets except when they’re embroiled in some sort of controversy) I will almost certainly not be writing about them on a regular basis unless I really fall on my feet.

And so, MoeGamer.

What I do with the site in the long term will depend on response and whether I have the time and inclination to continue working on it. I have several ideas of things I’d like to do — I’d like to experiment with video for one thing, and if I manage to attract a reasonably sized audience I’ll look at some form of making money from the blog, be it through ads, crowdfunding or something like Patreon — but whether or not any of these get implemented will depend on how much time I have to spend fiddling with the site going forward. The same is true for whether I spend any money on the site; at present, it’s simply a free WordPress blog, but if it proves to be worthwhile I’ll happily purchase a domain name and premium services to make it more customisable.

As it happens, in just under two months I’m going to have a whole lot of time to fiddle around with the site, for better or worse. While I’m not exactly relishing the prospect of finding a new job, I am enjoying that early buzz of getting a new website up and running and looking forward to seeing whether or not it’s something that is viable to keep doing as a side project on the side. At the very least, I doubt I should have too many problems keeping it open as my go-to place for writing about games and archiving stuff that gets lost in all the OneADay posts here, but part of me is hoping I can grow it into something bigger, too.

We’ll see. It’s far too early to ponder right now, and I’m not in a position to do much with the site over the next couple of days — I’m in Kent with some friends playing board games and drinking cider. It should hopefully be a nice period of unwinding after a stressful week.

For now, then, there’s a selection of articles on MoeGamer for your weekend reading — several of which, as I’ve said, longtime readers of this site will recognise — and from early next week onwards, you should hopefully see a whole bunch more there.

In the meantime, please take a look, leave a comment, click the Like button on stuff you’re interested in and feel free to share anything you enjoy. And I can keep writing about the stuff I love.