1427: RPG With a Stupid Name

Nearly forgot to write something today. But here I am at 2 in the morning having just finished a lengthy session of Bravely Default in bed.

(Yes, as promised, I finished Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory earlier, and it was awesome. But I'll save further discussion of that for another day.)

Bravely Default, meanwhile, has been a very pleasant surprise so far — though at least part of this is due to the fact that, as I mentioned before, I knew very little about this game going into it.

Bravely Default, then, is a new Final Fantasy game. I don't just mean that in the "it's a bit like Final Fantasy" sense, I mean that it is Final Fantasy — right down to the item names, abilities and Job system. Quite why it doesn't carry the Final Fantasy name is anyone's guess — perhaps Square Enix wants to continue to take the Final Fantasy brand in a different direction, while Bravely Default will pick up where the more old-school installments in the series left off? I can't say I'd object to that situation all that much; I like the new Final Fantasies for sure, but playing Bravely Default has reminded me somewhat that the older entries had their charms, too.

It's closest in execution to Final Fantasy V, in that you have a four-character party, each of whom has a character level and a Job level for each of the available Jobs in the game. Both level up independently; levelling up your character improves your base stats, while levelling up your Job gives you access to better abilities and passive skills. You can also make use of the abilities or passive skills from Jobs you're not currently equipped with, but there are limitations and the stat changes that come with a Job change may make some abilities impractical — while it's cool to have a heavily-armoured knight that can fling black magic spells around, for example, he'll never be as good at magic damage as a dedicated black mage.

There's some interesting modern systems at play amid the traditional RPG mechanics, too. The game's use of the 3DS StreetPass system allows you to summon other players' characters and make use of them, and to "link" with your 3DS friends to borrow their abilities — particularly useful if they've levelled up a Job you haven't and unlocked access to a useful special ability.

Less thrilling is the "Bravely Second" system, whereby you can tap the Start button in mid-battle to interrupt whatever's going on and sneak in an extra turn, with actions in this bonus turn costing "SP" rather than the usual "BP" to perform. You can only "carry" up to three SP at once, and they're acquired at the rate of one every eight hours you have the 3DS asleep and running Bravely Default — or, alternatively, you can pay for them. Ugh. Fortunately, so far I haven't seen any need to make use of this system; it mostly seems to be a "panic button" system whereby you can get yourself out of a sticky situation should the worst happen. If you play well, you shouldn't need to use it at all, I hope.

There's also a strange real-time building minigame where you reconstruct a village, and the more players you StreetPassed with, the more workers you have to devote to projects and, consequently, the quicker they can complete their work. Working on the village unlocks shops, special abilities and new items; it's a neat use of real-time mechanics without it feeling like a means of extracting money from you, because there's mercifully no monetisation option to speed things along. What it does mean is that you can make some sort of "progress" on the game even if you don't have a lot of time to play; simply flip open your 3DS, start your workers on a project, then put it to sleep and come back later — when you do have time to play the game proper, you'll have some handy extras.

Mostly, though, the emphasis is on a beautifully presented old-school role-playing game with some excellent mechanics, some stunning music and a pretty cool augmented reality opening cutscene. I'm looking forward to playing more, and I anticipate it stealing a significant proportion of my time from hereon.

Lucky I finished Neptunia Victory, then, huh?

1426: Day of Rest

I have done absolutely nothing "useful" today, and instead spent most of the day playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory in an attempt to actually finish the bloody thing before the year is over.

Thankfully, it finally seems as if I am going to succeed, since I've successfully attained every single one of the trophies except the three that relate to the three endings. I'm on course to complete the "True" ending in this first playthrough, then I'll race through and get the Normal and Good endings in subsequent playthroughs. If Victory is anything like its predecessor, the actual "game" side of things will end up being extremely short if you're not doing any side content and skipping story scenes you've already seen. Despite this, however, I've somehow now spent over a hundred hours on this game — so I think I can definitely say I've got my money's worth.

I'll be sorry to see the back of it when I'm all done, to be honest, because the Neptunia cast, while tropetacular, is immensely lovable and has a wonderful chemistry between them. Mostly I'm impressed that they've managed to spin out what I imagine probably began as a bit of a joke — hey, let's imagine the "console wars" as if they were actual wars between goddesses — for three games, with more on the horizon. Oh, and I'm slightly annoyed with myself that I accidentally put myself on the "true" ending path first, because my brain always prefers saving the "best" ending for last. Still, it's too late now, plus the "true" ending is the only path where you get certain characters required to achieve some of the trophies, so it's probably a good thing: I'm getting all the "grindy" stuff out of the way now so my subsequent two playthroughs can be straight runs to the two respective finish lines.

While I'll be sorry to see the back of Neptune and the gang, it'll also be nice to be able to play other stuff without guilt. Neptunia Victory has been on my shelf since April of this year, though my starting to play it was delayed by quite how much I ended up loving the Ar Tonelico series. I was then further delayed partway through by reviewing Time and Eternity — a game that I maintain is nowhere near as bad as a lot of people made out — and Tales of Xillia — which was utterly fantastic. Both of those were lengthy RPGs — 40 hours or so in Time and Eternity's case, nearly 100 for Tales of Xillia and consequently something had to fall a little by the wayside in order to play them and be able to review them in a timely manner.

Next on the schedule once Victory is down for the count is the highly anticipated 3DS RPG Bravely Default, which isn't out in America until February, so I'm going to get a head start on it ahead of reviewing it for USgamer. To be honest, I know absolutely nothing about Bravely Default save for the fact it's by Square Enix, it's a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy: The Four Heroes of Light (which I never played) and that it has distinctly Final Fantasy Tactics-esque art. Beyond that, I'm going in with complete beginner's mind, which I find is often the best way to be, as it minimises the possibility of disappointment and maximises the possibility of pleasant surprises. We shall see, I guess; doubtless I'll have a few thoughts to share on here ahead of the official review closer to the North American release date.

1425: An Open Note to @Twitter

[Note: Since I wrote this post this morning, Twitter has reversed its policies on blocking. That was fast!]

I'm not normally one to jump on the controversy du jour and add my voice to the throngs of people yelling about a particular issue, but in the case of Twitter's recent changes to its "block" system, whereby blocked users are now effectively "muted" in only one direction rather than truly blocked, I feel it's important I share my experiences.

Earlier in the year, I suffered an organised campaign of harassment that was enough to drive me from the Twitter service and completely close my account. I only returned a while later for professional reasons — in my occupation of online journalist, Twitter is a convenient means of both getting in touch with people and promoting content. Were it not for my job, I doubt I would have returned.

The harassment stemmed from a single word in my profile: "Brony." Lest you're unfamiliar, this term describes an adult-age fan of the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic by Lauren Faust and her team. The "Brony" community is a large and active one on the Internet, and for the most part a hugely supportive one, with its creed being "love and tolerate". It accounts for a significant proportion of creative derivative works such as fan fiction, artwork and music videos, and is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. I always considered myself somewhat on the periphery of this fandom, since although I liked the show I wasn't so deep in that I was making these creative works; I included the word in my Twitter bio as a means of showing my support for the community, however, and acknowledging something I found to be enjoyable.

What I wasn't aware of until my harassment incident was the fact that there are people on Twitter — and the Internet at large — who specifically seek out self-professed "Bronies" and torment them, usually through repeated and public accusations of paedophilia. In my case, this began as a series of Twitter @mentions that grew in frequency and intensity over the course of several days; I quickly blocked the main instigators without engaging with them, but more and more people came as the situation escalated and the group responsible for the harassment — known as the GNAA — came together against me.

I changed my Twitter username in an attempt to deter the attackers, but all this achieved was causing them to take over my original username, pose as me and post links to pornographic content.

The harassment went a step further than just Twitter @mentions, however. My Twitter bio also linked to the Twitter account of my brother, and to the video games website I was, at the time, managing editor of. The instigators of the harassment followed these links to my brother's personal website and the site I worked for, trawled the WHOIS records to find the phone numbers of the owners — my brother himself and the person who was paying for the hosting of the games site respectively — and then called them to make further accusations of paedophilia against me.

These calls continued for several days, and prompted me to contact the police to find out if there was anything I could do. Unfortunately the police were unable to do much save for keep the incident on file, and recommended that I work with Twitter to resolve the situation.

I contacted Twitter to explain the situation and point the support staff in the direction of the accounts that had been instigating most of the trouble, and which had hijacked my original account name to pose as me. After several days of waiting, during which the harassment continued, Twitter's response was that those responsible were not in breach of Twitter's terms and conditions because it was a "personal dispute". It took another round of contacting them to convince them to suspend my original username, at which point I decided to leave the service entirely, and had no intention of returning unless I absolutely had to.

Without Twitter's Block function allowing for forced unfollows and true blocking of troublemakers, this incident would have been even worse than it already was. Moreover, Twitter has shown itself to be either incapable or unwilling of dealing with persistent and organised harassment that spills out into the non-online sphere.

I am not the only person who has suffered such abuse at the hands of online bullies, but everyone who has has something in common: all they are doing is attempting to be their true selves, unashamed of who they are, what they do and what they like — and attempting to engage with like-minded or supportive people. Harassment on the grounds of something that you are — or, in my case, something that you like — is completely unacceptable, and it's not at all appropriate to just brush these levels of personal attacks off as personal disputes, then do nothing about them.

The changes to the Block policies do not encourage a change in behaviour on the part of the bullies. If anything, they punish the victim more by forcing them to take their account private when they may wish to remain public in order to meet new friends. Twitter is taking its policies with regard to harassment and bullying in the wrong direction — and these policies weren't in a particularly good place to begin with, as I can say from first-hand experience.

I would encourage Twitter to rethink how it is handling this situation, and to ensure that more robust solutions are in place for blocking and reporting persistent offenders. Twitter is an enormously useful online communication resource, and the means through which I have come to know a significant number of friends a lot better. But it needs to be a safe place; for marginalised and vulnerable groups, those who have suffered previous harassment or those who simply suffer from social anxiety, these new changes are not a step in the right direction.

Please consider the good of the community that has been built and not just the supposed needs of the business. When you build a social network, both aspects are important; without the former, the latter simply ceases to exist.

1424: わたしはいぎりすじんです。(Or Something.)

Last Japanese class before the Christmas break this evening. I've been quite pleased with my progress to date, though there are still things I struggle to remember — and the second half of the hiragana table continues to elude my memory. I'll get there in the end, though, particularly if I make some time to revise over the Christmas break.

One thing that's really struck me after each session is how much I get into the "other language" mindset when I come out of the class. Immediately after finishing a session, my brain is still in "Japanese" mode and I find myself having to stop myself saying ありがとう rather than "thanks" when someone holds the door for me, or attempting to respond to someone's initiation of a conversation with some random Japanese phrase. ("So, how did you like that?" ”スミスさんのほんです。”　"That's… nice. See you later." ”おやすみなさい！”　"Yeah, whatever.")

This is a positive sign, I guess. And more and more phrases are coming readily to mind, too. Not necessarily enough to make a conversation flow particularly naturally, mind, but enough to be able to state some basic things and ask some basic questions.

Japanese is a challenging language to learn for sure, but the fact is it's perhaps not as challenging as its crazy non-Roman alphabets might suggest. In fact, grammatically speaking, it's a lot simpler than English, and its pronunciation — reading kanji aside — is very straightforward, since there's only one way to pronounce each hiragana/katakana character. Once you get your head around the correct pronunciations of the vowel sounds in particular, it becomes very easy to read Japanese words and phrases out loud — if they're in romaji, anyway; deciphering hiranaga and katakana takes a little longer to learn, but once you get your head around it, it should be reasonably straightforward.

I have no idea how long it will take to get my use of the language to a functional standard for something useful, such as going to Japan, speaking to a Japanese person without the aid of an interpreter or even seeking a career that makes use of said knowledge.

Actually, the latter point is an interesting one; I've mentioned a few times on these pages that over the years I've realised I don't have a whole lot of "ambition" to be a particularly successful, well-known or famous person. I have accomplished one personal goal by becoming a professional games journalist — and believe me, there are days when that isn't all it's cracked up to be — but beyond that? Who knows.

Well, that's not quite true; since getting considerably more interested in Japanese entertainment — video games, anime and other related material — I've found myself thinking that a career in translation and localisation would be something I'd really enjoy doing. I'm under no illusions, of course; I follow a few localisation specialists on Twitter, and they put in long hours, do hard work and regularly have to deal with some of the more idiosyncratic aspects of both English and Japanese… but that's the sort of challenge I think I'd enjoy. I can see myself poring over the script for, I don't know, a Legend of Heroes game and mulling over the best possible translation of a particular idiom; arguing with fellow localisers about whether or not it should be a straight translation that keeps the Japanese character intact, or an Ace Attorney-style localisation that transplants the overall narrative thread to a situation that's a bit more "Western".

Anyway, that's at least a few years off yet, but it's something to potentially aim for, anyway. And in the meantime I can satisfy myself with starting to understand more and more of the unsubtitled battle callouts in JRPGs and fighting games, or recognising particular common words and phrases in anime.

わたしはうちにかえります。

おやすみなさい！！

Or, you know, something.

1423: Enough With the "Corruption" Allegations

Cracked published an article today that pissed a lot of people off. (I'm not linking to it, but here's a Pastebin of the relevant section.)

This is nothing unusual, of course, what with Cracked being renowned for clickbaiting rather than particularly rewarding content, but today it crossed a line from being relatively inoffensive clickbait into perpetuating some bullshit that has been on the rise for a few years now: the assumption, among certain members of the public, that game journalists are inherently corrupt, and that good review scores are frequently "bought" by publishers, particularly those who are advertising on the site in question.

The assumption that this sort of thing is going on probably goes back to "Gerstmanngate" back at Gamespot, when Jeff Gerstmann was let go following a mediocre review of Kane & Lynch from Eidos, and the story runs that Eidos put pressure on Gamespot to let Gerstmann go because they were ploughing a lot of money into the site at that time, paying considerable amounts to "reskin" all of Gamespot with a Kane & Lynch theme. It took several years — and Gamespot purchasing Gerstmann's new online home Giant Bomb — before the full story came out, and it actually wasn't all that different to what it appeared to be in the first place, though there were a few other factors at play, too.

The fact is, in this instance, Gerstmann didn't do anything wrong, and Gamespot's behaviour in this instance was highly irregular for the rest of the industry — so much so that it's an incident still talked about today, and one which hasn't been recreated since. And yet somehow we're still plagued with the assumption that the big gaming sites — and indeed some of the smaller ones — are in cahoots with the publishers, with stacks of cash regularly changing hands in exchange for good review scores. The Cracked piece's evidence for this was the disparity between Metacritic critic aggregates and user review scores for a variety of popular titles, including Mass Effect 3, Call of Duty Ghosts and a few others — neglecting to take the commonplace practice of "review bombing" into account, whereby Metacritic users deliberately skew their scores in one direction or the other in an attempt to influence the overall user rating. (This also happens on Amazon.)

I can categorically state that any respectable site worth its salt in today's modern gaming industry is completely independent from developers and publishers, and has no moral or financial obligation to be nice to people. Reviews of video games are the opinion of one or two people at most, and common practice in the industry sees people who are interested in particular genres being given games of that type to review — it makes sense, since they have the specialist knowledge, and giving a game of a particular type to someone who clearly is not experienced in that genre often attracts accusations of bias in the other direction, so sites can't really win.

Packets of money do not change hands in exchange for review scores. The most contact your average video game journalist has with a publisher during the review process is a couple of emails back and forth requesting review codes, and perhaps another when it's all over sending a link to the publisher's PR representative sharing the review. Review events such as the writer of the Cracked piece describes are relatively unusual, and most outlets deliberately eschew these tightly-controlled environments in favour of giving their reviewers adequate time to spend with the game and get a good feel for it, rather than playing edited highlights with a PR person breathing down their neck. These events do occasionally happen, of course, particularly for big games, and they can be useful — Call of Duty events can be a good opportunity to test out the games' multiplayer modes before the game goes live on public servers, for example — but for the most part, lavish, PR-funded events tend to be for previews rather than reviews, and again, no money exchanges hands. Because why the hell would it?

The Cracked piece is based on a number of completely unsubstantiated assumptions, and on a number of flat-out inaccuracies. Publishers do not pay either outlets or individual reviewers for the right to quote their words on box art or in trailers, for example; nor do any but the most disreputable publications charge publishers for reviews — look at the recent controversy over Indie Game Mag, for example; they've since released the person who was attempting to charge for reviews and ditched his policies, since pretty much any games journalist or outlet with any respectability was genuinely shocked and disapproving of what was going on there.

I've worked for a number of different magazines and online outlets over the years — both paid and unpaid — and all have been the absolute picture of honour, respectability, professionalism and ethics. Ironically, the rest of the Cracked piece actually made some fair points about the state of the industry in 2013 — though I disagree fundamentally with its core assertion that the industry is teetering on the brink of a crash — but, J.F. Sargent and Dave Williams, your unsubstantiated allegations about the games press are massively disrespectful to those of us who work our arses off every day to bring people the latest news, views and opinions about what's hot in gaming, and it's extremely disappointing to see that even after widespread criticism of the Cracked piece today, it still has not been edited, modified or clarified.

Perhaps this is revenge for all the times people have referred to Cracked as lowest-common-denominator Internet clickbait with absolutely no journalistic integrity; unfortunately, pieces like this one today only go to prove that there's more than an element of truth to those allegations.

1422: Zero Bossu

Can't remember if I've mentioned Virtue's Last Reward or its predecessor Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors or Some Other Combination Thereof (aka 999) on these pages to date, so I thought now might be a good time to talk about them, with particular (and spoiler-free) regard to the latter.

The two games, collectively known as Zero Escape, are a combination of visual novel and room escape adventure games. The former you've heard me talk about extensively on these very pages; the latter is a peculiarly Japanese offshoot of the adventure game genre in which you're regularly thrown into self-contained puzzles in which you must escape from a room, and everything you need in order to do so is in the room with you.

You actually spend the vast majority of your time in both 999 and Virtue's Last Reward reading non-interactive visual novel segments rather than solving puzzles, but that doesn't make the room escape sequences any less satisfying. In fact, given that the room escape sequences in Virtue's Last Reward in particular are pretty damn challenging, they're incredibly satisfying to successfully solve.

The puzzles strike that perfect balance between bewildering and making you feel smart, you see. At no point will you be thrown into a situation where the answer is so obtuse you'll never work it out without an FAQ at your side, but at the same time, those initial moments as you wander around the room, looking at everything and hoping to find some clues, are magical in how daunting they feel.

How on Earth am I going to get out of here? you'll think. What am I even supposed to do?

Fortunately, those feelings rarely last all that long; after a little careful and methodical investigation, you'll generally uncover one or more "big tasks" that you'll need to complete in order to solve the room, and your job then becomes prioritising these tasks into an appropriate order, figuring out how to complete them and then, well, completing them.

There's a good mix of puzzle types in there, too, though not as much diversity as Level-5's Professor Layton series. For my money, though, I think I prefer Zero Escape's approach because there's at least some attempt to integrate the puzzles into the game's narrative and setting; that said, I'm basing my entire opinion of Professor Layton on the first game in the series, so that may be something that improves in the future — I do own all of them so I fully intend to find out.

Anyway, I digress; Virtue's Last Reward's puzzles in particular are enormously satisfying because they make you feel clever. It's pretty rare you'll find a puzzle in which the solution is just blind trial and error until something good happens — though I still hate slidey-block puzles — instead, for the most part, puzzles are reliant on a keen sense of observation, and a willingness to trawl through the various documents in the in-game archives to figure out various pieces of information's relevance to the situation at hand.

Virtue's Last Reward goes one little extra step beyond this, though; you can solve the room and get out without too much difficulty in most cases, but all rooms have more than one solution, one of which opens the exit and the other of which unlocks supplementary reading material in the in-game archives. It can be just as challenging — if not more so — to figure out what the conditions for unlocking this bonus content are as it can be to just escape the room successfully. And the supplementary material is always worth a read, too; while much of it is revealed in the game, it often delves deeper into the real-life concepts and experiments explored through the narrative, such as the "Chinese Room" experiment and all manner of other things.

Despite reaching the "end" of a number of narrative paths in Virtue's Last Reward, I'm yet to actually get a definitive "ending". I've had two bad endings, a narrative path which I need to go back to when I have more information, an ending that "locked" itself until I figured something out in one of the other narrative paths, and I'm currently working on another branch. All in all, there are supposedly 24 different conclusions, including "bad ends", and you're damn right I'm going to see every one of them.

In fact, let's go work on that right now. Bye-bye.

1421: APPLAUSE

One of the things I find quite interesting when watching my favourite comedy shows from over the years — something I like to do over dinner, or when I just want to switch off my brain and zone out for a bit — is how the role of the "audience" has evolved. Specifically, how we've gone from prominent canned laughter, applause and other reactions to, in many cases, the complete opposite — the total absence of audience noise.

I say this because it took me nearly eight seasons of How I Met Your Mother to notice that that show has a laugh track in the background, albeit a very quiet one. It's nowhere near as pronounced as in, say, Friends, which, in turn, was less pronounced than shows that were very proud of the fact that they were filmed in front of a live studio audience such as The Cosby Show. (I'm probably dating myself somewhat there, but eh. Whatever. The Cosby Show gave us the word "zurbit" to describe the act of blowing a raspberry on someone's stomach, so it clearly had an important impact on culture at large.)

I remember back when I still lived at home and we started to get the first wave of new comedy shows that didn't have laugh tracks in the background. They were often described as "comedy dramas" rather than sitcoms, and initially they made somewhat uncomfortable viewing because it was never quite obvious whether or not you were "supposed" to be laughing. I remember the first time I saw Spaced on TV, for example; it may be one of my favourite shows of all time now, but when it was first on TV and there was no easily recognisable prompt that you should laugh here, here and here, it was a little confusing.

This may sound strange to those of you reading this who have never known anything but shows without an audience track in the background, but it's true. Nowadays, I've adjusted to the norm of there not being a laugh track — so much so that it's jarring when you do notice it in shows like How I Met Your Mother.

That said, while the absence of a "live" audience has worked well for sitcoms and "comedy dramas," it doesn't work universally well. Game shows that unfold without a live studio audience are a curiously lifeless experience, for example, as anyone who has ever watched Eggheads or Only Connect will tell you. There's nothing inherently wrong with the format of either of these shows (though the combination of smarmy presenter and the titular "eggheads" on Eggheads infuriates me beyond belief) — they just feel a bit "wrong" without, say, applause at the end of a round, or people laughing when someone cracks a joke.

I remember for a while some video games experimented with having a laugh track. The strangest one I remember was the N64 version of Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, which was extremely Japanese and rather poorly translated, which meant the moments when the canned laughter kicked in were often… bizarre, to say the least. (Still, it was a great game; I recall enjoying it more than Zelda at the time.) It's not something that ever really took off, though, and now that laugh tracks are the exception rather than the rule in other forms of media, it's something I don't really see games going back to any time soon — unless they're specifically trying to capture the feeling of '80s or early '90s sitcoms.

Anyway. I didn't really have a point to make with all this. I just thought it was mildly interesting.

1420: Ploot-chan

I've mentioned Hyperdimension Neptunia and its two sequels numerous times on these pages, but I thought today I'd focus particularly on a character who appears for the first time in the third game, Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory.

Plutia — named, much like Neptune, after an abandoned Sega console; in this case, the unreleased second model of the Saturn — is Planeptune's goddess (or "CPU", in Neptunia parlance) in the alternate dimension Neptune finds herself dragged into towards the outset of the game. Much like Neptune, she's largely incompetent at her job, prone to slacking off and being lazy, but it's a different kind of incompetence to Neptune; while Neptune in her human form is an energetic, dizzy young girl, Plutia is rather slothful in many ways; she's habitually clad in slippers and housecoat rather than something a little more appropriate for a goddess, and she speaks very, very slowly and deliberately (in Japanese, anyway) — like a child who doesn't seem to have quite grasped communicating just yet.

Plutia's seeming innocence extends to how she's depicted in battle, too. Initiating a battle with Plutia will often see her exclaiming konnichiwa! ("hello!") or yoroshiku onegaishimasu! (in this context, "nice to meet you!") to the party of enemies, while her turn coming up in the order of action will see her mumbling eto… eto… doushiyou… ("umm… umm… what should I do?") or e… watashi? ("eh? …me?") as if she's perpetually slightly unsure of what's going on around her.

Plutia's not innocent, though. Far from it. Much like Neptune's personality (not to mention cup size) undergoes a significant change when she switches from human form to "HDD" goddess form, Plutia too goes through some changes. While Neptune is all business in HDD form, though, Plutia unleashes her inner desires and becomes a sadistic dominatrix (whom Neptune in particular takes to calling "Sadie") and whom a number of the other characters become rather afraid of.

Plutia in HDD form is actually quite a refreshing character to come across, because she has absolutely no shame in who she is and what she likes. And what she likes more than anything is indulging her sadistic desires — whether that's on her enemies or, in a pinch, her friends.

She's overtly sexualised — arguably more so than most of the rest of the cast, most of whom would put your eye out if they turned around too quickly while in HDD form — but she uses this to her advantage on numerous occasions.

She knows that she scares and disturbs people with her sexuality, so often all it takes is a knowing comment that she's "starting to get angry" to get people to do what she wants them to. This backfires on a few occasions — for example, her early encounter with a young alternate-dimension IF traumatises the latter to such a degree that one of the strongest, spunkiest characters in the other two Neptunia games is relegated considerably more often to the role of "cowering in the background" than she would be normally. A shame, since IF is one of my favourite characters, but the focus on the main cast in Victory certainly works for me, too.

Plutia's sexual preferences are sometimes played for laughs, but more often than not they're played relatively straight, with her castmates alternating between acknowledging her tastes and desires, and trying to hold her back from going too far. Anything… inappropriate that Plutia does is kept completely off-screen, but all that achieves is getting the imagination working even harder. Exactly what did she do to those people who, upon meeting her subsequently, are utterly terrified?

I have not yet finished Victory, though I am, after a long run, on the path to the "true" ending, I think. I'll be interested to see if Plutia is explored any further in the rest of the game; up until now, she's been rather refreshing to spend time with. Terrifying too, yes, but one of the more interesting characters I've seen in a candy-coloured moe RPG in recent memory.

1419: Endgame

I can't remember if I mentioned it on here, but I reached level 50 — the level cap — with my Black Mage class in Final Fantasy XIV a short while ago, which means that I'm now into what MMO players refer to as "endgame content".

I've only ever reached the level cap in one other MMO to date — World of Warcraft — and in that instance I didn't really explore a lot of what the endgame had to offer. In fact, I think I stopped playing not long after getting that far; I tried to return after a break when Blizzard offered a free upgrade to the Cataclysm expansion back and a free boost to the slightly-higher level cap of 85 that they introduced then, but the magic was gone, and I've felt no inclination to go back since.

You see, as I mentioned in that post I linked to above, for me, a key part of the appeal of MMOs — and indeed RPGs in general — is that journey you make from, quite literally, zero to hero. The road to the level cap is paved with a variety of new skills and things to learn, and by the time you reach your "pinnacle" you're well-equipped with everything you need to survive… and continue onwards.

You see, once you hit level whatever-the-cap-is-in-your-game-of-choice, it stops being about gaining XP, and it starts being about doing other stuff. It starts being about running dungeons, acquiring new gear, taking on new challenges with friends. For those who played through most of the game solo, now is probably the time to jump off the train, because most endgame content is reliant on playing together with others, whether that's running small-scale dungeons to get gear, or taking on raids that require larger parties.

It's also often where the story grinds to something of a halt. In Final Fantasy's case, "endgame" is where you've beaten the final boss of the main scenario quests, so the main story is indeed over. But there's plenty of things still to do, most of which have some sort of narrative context, and if the impressive recent trailer for the upcoming patch 2.1 is anything to go by, the main scenario quests will continue to be added to with each new update every three months, which is nice.

What I've found interesting in the endgame stuff I played this evening, is that it lets you concentrate on the game mechanics a lot more than if you're trying to pay attention to the story. Some MMO players play through the whole game this way, skipping cutscenes and not reading any text, but I can't help but feel in Final Fantasy XIV's case that this is missing the point somewhat.

Regardless, once you reach endgame you're probably going to be running a lot of the same dungeons and other content over and over again, often with different groups of people each time. And while this might sound boring, there's a few things to bear in mind: firstly, some people plough hundreds or even thousands of hours into games like League of Legends and Dota, and those have very few maps, and secondly the appeal isn't necessarily in seeing new and unique content; it's in seeing new and unique people.

I braved Final Fantasy XIV's Duty Finder system for two runs into the "so you've just reached level 50, what now?" dungeon the Wanderer's Palace this evening. My two runs were markedly different from one another, despite the monsters being in the same place and me playing exactly the same character class.

In the first case, the party was well-organised, careful and methodical. We didn't talk much because it was clear from our behaviour that we'd all done this before, and we all knew what we were doing. Consequently, we got through the whole thing without any serious mistakes — and, more importantly, no-one dying.

Compare and contrast with the second party, in which the de facto leader — usually the "tank" class, who runs ahead to get pummelled by enemies while everyone else hangs back and throws fireballs at them — was seemingly trying to race through the dungeon as quickly as possible, and causing issues in the process. Speedruns of dungeons aren't particularly unusual, particularly in the case of places like Wanderer's Palace that provide a good source of material for acquiring high-level gear, but in order to be successful at them you need a well-oiled party that communicates well.

Our poor old tank wasn't very good at speedrunning, you see, and ended up getting him — and the rest of us — into situations that it was difficult to survive. Wanderer's Palace is particularly harsh due to the presence of an unkillable "Tonberry Stalker" enemy who runs up to you and stabs you in the throat if you enter his field of vision; on more than one occasion, the tank attracted so many enemies that we weren't able to defeat them all before someone got throat-stabbed.

This was interesting to me. It wasn't frustrating or annoying because everyone took it in good humour and no-one was a dick about it — a constant risk with online games — but was instead fascinating to see. I have a feeling there's some intriguing psychological observations to be made about the different ways in which people play — and how people like me respond differently to different types of people — but I'm not sure I'm altogether qualified to make those observations.

It was also an interesting experiment for me in that throughout most of the game, I've played with people that I'm at least casually acquainted with. These two runs were attempts to test the water and see what it's like playing with random strangers; you often hear horror stories of people getting together with a bunch of jerks in the Duty Finder but, aside from the tank's clumsiness, there was nothing untoward going on, and so it's something I'd feel comfortable doing again.

Fortunate, really, because I need one hell of a lot of Tomestones if I want to upgrade my equipment to a suitable level to be able to take on the later dungeons and boss fights…

1418: Eight and Thirteen

Final Fantasy, once one of the biggest names in gaming, is now something of a laughingstock to many people.

To a lot of these detractors, it was the Final Fantasy XIII sub-series that triggered this feeling. (Many of said detractors have not played Final Fantasy XIV, incidentally, refusing to even try it because it's an MMO. Fair enough, but it's also the best Final Fantasy in years.)

To others, though, Final Fantasy VIII is an object of ridicule — and the recent rerelease of the game on Steam has caused all these people to come out of the woodwork once again.

It will undoubtedly prove somewhat unsurprising to you to hear that I played and enjoyed both, and feel that they both get an undeservedly bad rap.

Let's start with Final Fantasy VIII. After my friends and I discovered JRPGs with Final Fantasy VII and promptly played it through a good seven or eight times, Final Fantasy VIII shot straight to the top of our most-anticipated lists. And it looked amazing; gone were Final Fantasy VII's weird super-deformed polygonal models, to be replaced with much more realistically-proportioned character models along the lines of what we now recognise as the "Final Fantasy look" today. Gone was the "magical disaster threatening to destroy the planet" plotline, to be replaced with something that was, above all else, a love story.

Final Fantasy VIII did a bunch of weird, unconventional things, and I loved it for it. Its character-driven story was much more intimate and personal than my limited experience with the genre at the time — hell, it was much more intimate and personal than a lot of games I'd played up until that point, period. It was one of the few times I'd encountered a convincing love story in the context of a video game; Squall and Rinoa were both interesting, flawed characters and I felt myself rooting for them throughout the game.

The battle system was enjoyable, too. The Junction system was really, really odd, but made sense once you got your head around its extremely abstract nature. The reflex-based actions, where you had to pull the trigger on Squall's gunblade for additional damage, or hammer in button combinations while performing Limit Breaks, or repeatedly bash the Square button while summoning a "Guardian Force", gave the battles a feeling of "action game" intensity when they were essentially still sort-of turn-based.

And the final boss? Easily one of the most spectacular final confrontations of the PS1 era, even if the plot in the immediate run-up to it started veering into seriously odd plot-related territory. "Time kompression" was a bit weird, yeah, but it certainly didn't undo all the good work for the many hours beforehand, and damn, those last battles were genuinely exciting.

Fast forward a whole bunch of years (I'd work it out, but I can't be arsed right now) and we have Final Fantasy XIII. Again — I've covered this before — this did things markedly differently to past Final Fantasies, replacing the open-world MMO-style gameplay of Final Fantasy XII with more linear progression that opened up into an interesting, enjoyable open world towards the end.

People hated Final Fantasy XIII for its linearity, but in practice it really wasn't all that much more linear than previous Final Fantasies — it was just more obvious about it. Previous Final Fantasies had provided the illusion of freedom through their world maps, you see, but your progression was still railroaded by being unable to cross certain types of terrain until the story dictated that you got your hands on a particular vehicle. And, like Final Fantasy XIII, these games would tend to open up towards the end, giving you freedom to explore.

There's always been a reason for that linearity in Final Fantasy games, however, and that's to push the story along. Because you didn't get a lot of opportunity to stray from the path set out in front of you, the story was kept pacy and snappy, and maintained its momentum — something which many more open RPGs, and not just those of the J-variety, really struggle with. By the time you reached the more open part, you had an extremely firm grounding in the game's mechanics — more than enough to take on some of the extremely tough challenges that said open world presented you with.

As for the characters? I liked them a lot. Sazh was an interesting character in that he was an older, black character who didn't resort to Mr. T stereotypes like Barret in FFVII. Vanille was cute and adorable. Fang was badass. Lightning was enigmatic, intriguing and all-business; Snow was her perfect foil with his laid-back attitude. And Hope, whom many people accuse of being "whiny", watched his parents die towards the beginning of the game. I think being a little emotional is perhaps understandable in this instance, no?

Ultimately I know that if you've made up your mind about Final Fantasy VIII and XIII I'm probably not going to change your mind, and that's fine; this post simply outlines what I feel about these much-maligned installments in the long-running series. The thing that annoys me, I think, is how people feel the need to declare them unequivocally "crap" when what they really mean is that they didn't personally like them.

But then this is nothing new to the games biz, and I've spent the best part of the last couple of years playing and adoring games that many people think are "crap" if you believe Metacritic scores and the like. Each to their own, I say, and if you can eke out enjoyment from something that isn't popular, I say good on you. And if you can't, maybe try not to make other people feel bad about liking it?