1245: New Game Plus

I'm currently 90 hours or so into Ar Tonelico Qoga, an RPG that is, by all accounts, quite short (about 30-40 hours or so) under normal circumstances. And yet for some reason I've been inspired to not only try and get all its endings, but to literally see everything it has to offer, leading to the grossly extended playtime just mentioned.

This is not something I generally do unless I really like a game, so it's considerable praise from me to Ar Tonelico Qoga that I'm doing this. I never went back and finished Dragon Age Origins with a different, well, origin, for example, nor did I ever go back and play through Knights of the Old Republic as a Dark Jedi rather than the poncey Light Side-type person I normally do. I liked those games, sure, but they didn't grab me by the Feels in the same way that the Ar Tonelico series has done fairly consistently over the course of three games, despite the fact that both Dragon Age and KOTOR are objectively "better" games in terms of mechanics, production quality and all manner of other considerations.

I've been trying to determine the reasons why Ar Tonelico in particular has resonated with me so much that I want to seek out everything it's hiding. Longtime readers may recall that I felt much the same way about Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, a game which was almost universally panned by the press (though not quite as much as its predecessor) that I actually ended up loving.

The reasons why these games resonated with me so much are many. Chief among them is the fact that I genuinely adore both the setting and the characters. Neptunia's cast is silly and full of tropetacular stereotypes, but, crucially, is well aware of what it's doing and consistently pokes fun at itself. Ar Tonelico, meanwhile, simply has an astonishingly well-realised world with some incredible backstory and lore. And, unlike many Western RPGs that include an in-game encyclopaedia of completely irrelevant information, Ar Tonelico's lore is woven into the tapestry of not only the individual games, but the overarching narrative that runs across the three games in the series. Each game stands by itself, but playing all three gives you a thoroughly deep understanding of the situation that humanity has found itself in, and the quirks of this strange world's unique culture.

Aside from the narrative, setting and characters, though, another reason I have found such enjoyment in the Ar Tonelico series is that I've never once felt like I was grinding through content, plodding through "filler" material solely designed to artificially bump up the playtime. Granted, I artificially bumped up the playtime to a certain degree myself by deciding (foolishly) that I'd seek out each and every treasure chest in the game for the measly promise of a bronze PSN trophy, but even while doing that, I begrudged the game anything it was doing — though I must admit that after I hit level 99 with all my characters, I began to wish there was a button to turn enemy encounters off.

I'm not going to lie; not everyone will enjoy the Ar Tonelico series. If you can't stomach big-eyed teenage anime girls and Japanese voice acting with a lot of melodramatic screaming and crying, then this series probably won't do much for you. If you enjoy those things, though — or if you can at least look past them — then you'll find one of the most interesting, emotionally engaging JRPG series that I've ever played, and one that, across its three games, has some of the richest content I think I've ever explored in the genre.

I've got five more endings to get. I'm closing in on the first of these, and the last four should be pretty straightforward to get. When I've seen everything the game has to offer, I'll be genuinely sad to leave the game world behind, because not only will I be done with Ar Tonelico Qoga, I'll be done with the series, too; not to spoil anything, but the "true" ending of the third game all but guarantees that there won't be a fourth game.

Still, stranger things have happened, particularly in the world of Japanese games.

1244: New Leaf

I started playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf on 3DS today. I haven't played an Animal Crossing game since whatever the one on the DS was called, and I didn't really get very far into that one. It wasn't that I didn't like it, it's that it came out at a time when there was all manner of other stuff I wanted to play, and I didn't give it enough of a chance to get into it. Consequently, when it came to time to trade some stuff in — this was back when I still traded in games, something which I rarely do these days (though I still buy used games) — it was one of the first things to go.

Consequently, I'm still pretty much a complete newcomer to Animal Crossing and the way it does things. And I'm still somewhat confused. But in a kind of good way.

Most games you play these days take a very proactive approach to directing the player's enjoyment. "Go here," the game will say. "Do this." In the case of terrible, awful, shitty Facebook games, more often than not the game will literally prevent you from clicking on anything but the thing it wants you to click on.

Animal Crossing, meanwhile, takes the complete opposite approach. It drops you into a strange world — a small town populated by animals in which you are inexplicably the only human resident, and which you have somehow become the mayor of — and then pretty much tells you to just get on with it. There are characters wandering around who will give you a nudge in the direction of things to do, but for the most part, the game is all about figuring out what the fuck it is you're supposed to be doing.

And the answer isn't a simple one. There's a sense of structure given to the game by the ever-present loan-shark raccoon Tom Nook and his increasingly-unreasonable bills he keeps lumping you with game after game, but other than that it's entirely up to you to make your own fun. Will you cultivate a crop of profitable fruit trees? Will you spend your time catching bugs? Will you dig up fossils and try to fill the museum? Or will you primarily spend your time bumming around your friends' towns, stealing their fruit when they're not looking?

This latter part is where the 3DS version is infinitely superior to the DS version. Theoretically, the DS version featured Internet connectivity and the ability to do things with your friends, but when I was playing I didn't know anyone else, and as such this feature — which is, to be honest, a big part of the game's appeal — was completely useless. Contrast that with today, when I went over to my friend Jeff's town along with our mutual friend Cody, then we took a trip over to a tropical island, swam in the sea, harvested bananas and mangoes and marvelled at Cody's ability to catch the most enormous fish I've ever seen.

It's an utterly pointless experience at heart, but unlike many of those utterly pointless Facebook games out there which are only after your money, Animal Crossing's self-contained nature means that there's always a sense of gentle, good-natured humour about the experience — and, more importantly, no pressure on the player. It's an escapist experience for you to dip into for half an hour to an hour at a time, not something you play as your "big game". And yet even in those short, bite-sized sessions — ideal for handheld play — there's plenty of stuff to do, and enough variety to keep some people playing for hour after hour after hour after hour.

It remains to be seen how long I stick with it, but I'm interested to see how much more there is to the experience over time. Something must be there to keep people playing for upwards of a hundred hours; let's see if I can find it.

1243: A Realm Reborn

I spent some time with the Final Fantasy XIV beta earlier. Since said beta is now in its third phase, Square-Enix has dropped all the non-disclosure agreements and has started to allow people to talk about it, which is nice, because I'd quite like to talk about it. I'll add at this point that I've only just started participating in the beta, so my thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV are based purely on the hour or two I spent fiddling around with it earlier. But — spoiler alert — my thoughts are positive.

I'll preface this by saying that I really enjoyed Final Fantasy XI, Square-Enix's previous foray into the massively multiplayer online RPG market. Final Fantasy XI successfully managed to capture the feel of a Final Fantasy game while simultaneously transplanting it to a massively-multiplayer environment. It had its problems, sure — mainly a glacial rate of experience gain that didn't accelerate in line with what level you were, meaning by the time you reached about level 20 or so it was taking weeks to gain a single level — but it was good fun, and I met some entertaining people during my time in that world. (Bendix and Nefertari, I often wonder where you are! I miss you! [Bendix pokes.])

Anyway, from what I can see, Final Fantasy XIV — in its new A Realm Reborn incarnation, at least — appears to fix most of the annoying things about Final Fantasy XI while keeping the things that were awesome.

One of my favourite things about Final Fantasy XI was character creation. It was a very simplistic character generation tool with very limited options, but the characters it created looked recognisably "Final Fantasy" in nature. They had the spiky hair and the obviously Japanese "look" about them (artistically as opposed to their physical characteristics), and I found them a lot more appealing to look at than, say, World of Warcraft's heavily-exaggerated, low-poly physiques.

Final Fantasy XIV takes the recognisably Japanese aesthetic of XI and provides you with a veritable wealth of options with which to customise your avatar. Consequently, you can take a much greater degree of control over how you represent yourself to the world, but you'll still come out of the process looking like a Final Fantasy character. And the decisions you make about your character's appearance aren't just there to be forgotten, either; cutscenes in the game make a point of giving you a good look at the parts of your character you don't normally see during regular gameplay — i.e. their face.

Once into the game proper, I was immediately struck by how much better than XI it looks. This isn't altogether surprising, of course — XI was built on an engine designed to run on the PlayStation 2, while XIV was designed for the PlayStation 3 and beyond. There's a high level of graphical detail, but the best thing about the way the game looks is the butter-smooth frame rate. XI was capped at somewhere around 25-30 frames per second regardless of how good your computer was; XIV, meanwhile, will happily glide along at 60+ frames per second, looking simply lovely in the process.

The sound is way better, too. Final Fantasy XI had a great soundtrack, but it sounded very synthesised. This was in keeping with the "sound" of the Final Fantasy series at the time — it wasn't until Final Fantasy XIII that we'd finally get a fully-orchestrated soundtrack for the duration of the game rather than just in special cutscenes — but it sounds a little dated now. Final Fantasy XIV, meanwhile, has a simply gorgeous orchestral soundtrack that I'm going to have to score a copy of if and when it becomes available. It's properly "cinematic" in nature, and is very much in keeping with the game's style.

In terms of gameplay, your initial minutes and hours in the game are relatively business as usual for an MMO. You pick your class (which also determines your starting city) and set off to complete quests for random strangers all over town. These quests are generally either fetch quests of some description, or kill quests that demand you leave the safety of the city walls and start punching ladybirds in the face. Like Final Fantasy XI, however, a nice feeling of "context" is given to these quests through short dialogue sequences before and after them, which is much more immersive and interesting than World of Warcraft's pop-up wall of text. The quests themselves generally aren't all that interesting — yet, anyway — but promise to provide the main means through which the game's story unfolds a little later.

The biggest and most welcome change from XI's mechanics is in the way you gain experience. In XI, the maximum amount of experience you could gain from a single enemy was 200, and this was only if you took on something considerably stronger than yourself, preferably in a group. Since the amount of experience required to level up increased very rapidly, there was a lot of grinding involved. This improved significantly with subsequent updates, which added "hunt" quests with experience bonuses, but the quests you got from NPCs around town largely remained as a means of gaining cool items rather than experience.

In XIV, meanwhile, you get experience for all sorts of things. You get it for killing monsters, for completing quests and even for crafting items. This means that you don't get the feeling you occasionally got in XI whereby you felt like you were "wasting your time" if you weren't out in the fields killing monsters — you can be rewarded for non-combat activities, which is great.

There's some neat little additions to the usual formula, too. As well as quests, you have Hunting, Crafting and Gathering logs, which challenge you to hunt specific creatures, craft specific items and gather specific raw materials respectively. Successfully completing challenges in these logs provides significant experience bonuses, so if you just want to spend a bit of time grinding rather than working on specific quests, this provides a degree of "direction" to what you're doing by encouraging you to hunt down specific things.

I'm only level 5 so far, so that's about all I can talk about as yet. I haven't yet fiddled around with the strange class system, whereby you can change your class simply by changing your equipment, but I'm interested to see how it differs from XI's excellent Job system. I also haven't actually spoken to or teamed up with anyone yet, but the community speaking publicly seems to be very friendly and very positive about the game so far, which is nice to see. I'm sure it won't last, but for now it's nice to see people speaking politely and helpfully to one another.

Anyway. It's nearly 4am because Ar Tonelico. I am, much to my chagrin, apparently chasing the Platinum trophy for that game, and one of the tasks required to attain said intangible reward is to locate all the treasure chests in the whole game. I am having some difficulty with said task, but I will return to that tomorrow, and perhaps even finally finish the damn thing.

1242: Sod Off, LinkedIn

I have a LinkedIn account. It is one of those things that people recommend you have. And yet I don't think I have ever used it. Not for finding a job, not for "professional networking" and certainly not for socialising. In fact, I find the whole thing massively irritating.

The thing that irks me so much about LinkedIn is that the people who do actually use it are inevitably the sort of greasy smarmballs who refer to themselves as "entrepreneurs" and "gurus" (neither of those are jobs; sorry to burst your bubble) and run "startups". They communicate exclusively in that particularly annoying brand of business-speak that gave us such awful additions to the English language as "monetise" and "leverage" used as a verb.

That's not all, though. LinkedIn itself perpetually bombards you with emails about what's "hot" on their network each week, and again, the articles linked to are almost certainly written by people who woke up one day, decided they were an expert on "business" and promptly started vomiting their thoughts all over the Internet.

This sort of thing occasionally spills over onto other social networks, particularly Google+, which appears to harbour a healthy number of LinkedIn refugees. You can spot one of these people's posts a mile off — they're inevitably an image post featuring some sort of "inspirational" image, and the accompanying text usually makes the person posting the image sound like they're a 50-year old discovering Imgur for the first time.

But I digress.

No, I find LinkedIn utterly useless because no-one I have come into contact with on there appears to use it for… well, anything at all, really. I have a "professional network" that is, apparently, 236 "connections" strong, and yet I have never spoken to any of them on LinkedIn. Many of them I speak to daily on Twitter and Facebook, which leaves LinkedIn rather — if you'll pardon the employment-related pun — redundant. The people I have as connections on LinkedIn who I don't speak to daily on Twitter and Facebook are generally people whose mobile apps I might have reviewed once in the past, and this apparently makes me a "professional connection", even if I slated their app for being shit. (I did that a fair bit; there's a lot of shit out there.)

I find myself wondering why I keep an account open at that God-forsaken website, but everyone I mention it to seems to think that you "must" have a LinkedIn account these days, otherwise you're some sort of unemployable nobody. I guess if nothing else it provides a reasonably convenient means of creating an electronic CV that can be easily shared with employers. The Recommendations thing is a good idea in theory, too — though the fact that they don't show up on your "public" profile, only to people who have actually added you as a connection is irritating — but these appear to have been superseded by "endorsements" whereby people who remember to log in to LinkedIn every so often click through a few automatic prompts to confirm that yes, I do indeed have skills in "Facebook" and "iOS", without even thinking about it.

Basically, LinkedIn represents all that is wrong with the social Web. It's full of self-important imbeciles who believe they are the ones who know how the world works, and that everyone else is wrong. It's utterly vapid and useless to 95% of the population, and the other 5% you probably wouldn't want to speak to anyway.

So yeah. Fuck LinkedIn.

1241: The Trouble with Rule 34

Lest you're unfamiliar with one of the most notorious "Rules of the Internet", Rule 34 states that "There is porn of it. No exceptions." In other words, if it exists, someone, somewhere, somehow has generated some form of pornographic version of it. It may be "official", it may be a fan work, but one way or another there is some sort of pornography based around absolutely anything you can think of.

My issue with Rule 34 is not that it exists, nor the fact that it's true in an alarmingly high number of cases. No, my issue with Rule 34 is somewhat more psychological in nature.

Let's back up a moment. Currently I'm playing Ar Tonelico Qoga on PS3, a game that features a mechanic in which characters take their clothes off in order to become more powerful. (It is justified in the game's lore, to its credit, but yes, it is totally fanservicey.) Consequently, you spend a hefty amount of time in the game looking at the cast in their skimpies — particularly the female characters.

And yet do I want to see them actually completely naked? Do I want to see them — if you'll pardon the explicitness for a moment — getting fucked roughly from behind or covered in jizz? Well… no, not really.

Why not, though? I find the characters themselves attractive — enough to want to spend virtual time with them, enough to genuinely agonise over decision points that require me to pick between them, and enough to project my own feelings about various issues and people onto them — so why don't I feel the need to look at erotic material featuring them?

Well, the simple answer is… because of all the reasons I listed above. In a good character-led game (or movie, or TV series, or book, or whatever) you develop a close, intimate bond with the characters involved. In many cases, you spend a significant portion of time with them, and usually at a point in their life that is somehow meaningful or important in some way. This "important" moment could be anything from coming to terms with something small they've been in denial about for a long time, or it could be saving the world alongside them. Either way, you're there with them, and you feel close to them. All right, maybe you don't, but I do.

Consequently, unless you're the sort of person who has a somewhat… physical relationship with your closest friends, to suddenly throw nakedness and banging into the mix can be somewhat… jarring. If my virtual time with these people has been, up until this point, entirely non-sexual (or at least, not explicitly sexual), I find it a bit weird to suddenly see them in this whole other way, and not at all comfortable in many cases. Kind of like, say, if I had a sister, suddenly saw her naked and got turned on in the process. (I don't, haven't and wouldn't, before you rethink your friendship with me.)

Which is kind of weird when you think about it, sister stuff aside. (Kind of wish I hadn't mentioned that now.) Being physically intimate with someone else is… well, the clue's in what I just said. It's intimate. If you're very close with someone you love, chances are you want to have sex with them. (Sometimes you want to have sex with people you don't love, but that's an entirely different matter.) And yet I have no desire to look up erotic images of, say, Finnel from Ar Tonelico Qoga (pictured to the right), even though she's a character I feel close to and can relate to in many ways having spent the last 56 (at last count) hours of gameplay with her.

I wonder why this is? It's perhaps the fact that a lot of pornography ("real" or otherwise) is presented from a third-person perspective, making the viewer feel somewhat detached from the action. (Exceptions do, of course, exist.) Taking this interpretation to an extreme, I could probably argue that looking at an erotic image of, say, Finnel getting banged would feel like I was watching someone else having sex with her, rather than finding the image of her naked body in any way arousing, or feeling like I was the one in a physically intimate situation with her.

An exception to the feelings I describe above comes in the realm of eroge — visual novels with erotic content. In this case, the lack of "discomfort" I feel at seeing the characters in compromising situations is perhaps more understandable — it is, in many cases, in context. It's not out of character for the protagonist of a visual novel and his loved one to want to indulge in some nookie to show how much they're into each other. In many cases, the actual sexual content is teased and built up to with sexual tension — for all its faults and ridiculousness, I found that My Girlfriend is the President was actually very good at this, for example; the ero scenes were undoubtedly erotic, but I didn't find them satisfying because of that — no, I found them satisfying because they marked a turning point in these characters' relationships, or saw them showing a side of themselves that "the public" didn't see.

In other words, in these cases, the sex doesn't feel out of place or out of character because of the context. It makes sense. The relationship between the characters (and between the characters and player) is built on the understanding that these are people for whom sex is A Thing, and that they're probably going to want to do it at some point. With that expectation in place, it somehow feels less awkward. (Until someone walks in on you watching an H-scene, of course.)

Perhaps I'm alone in this, and everyone who loved Final Fantasy VII as much as I did when I was younger is happily wanking away to contextless animated GIFs of Tifa giving Cloud a soapy titwank. I don't know. And I have a strange feeling no-one would admit to it even if they did!

1240: Zzzz

Please don't expect anything especially coherent for the next few days. E3 is happening, and I worked a 20-hour day yesterday, a pretty long one today (with a few breaks) and will doubtless continue to do so while the show is still on. I'm not even at the show. This does, however, mean that I don't have to endure parties where everyone around me is getting drunk and inevitably having more fun than me.

That said, it would be quite nice to hang out with some people I only know as Twitter avatars at present – or people that I haven't seen in person for several years.

Things I have seen at E3 that I like so far: Final Fantasy XV, Monolithsoft's X, Bayonetta 2, The Wonderful 101, The Crew, Quantum Break, David Cage's Dark Sorcerer thingy, the PlayStation 4.

Things I have seen at E3 that I am not crazy about: The Xbox One, Battlefield 4, Killzone, Titanfall, Destiny, any other shooters. BORING.

If you want any more from me, go check out USgamer. And I'll be back to my more usual wordy self later in the week all being well.

Now, sleep.

1239: I Think I'm Actually Dying

Hello. It is 1:43 in the morning and I am still at work. I am actually in an office doing work, too — the nature of my new job means that I can actually pop in to the Eurogamer offices in Brighton on occasion and feel like I actually work with other people (when in fact my real colleagues are several thousand miles away, but eh.)

The reason it is 1:43 in the morning and I am still at work is because it is E3. I have been working since 11am yesterday, and I will likely continue working until approximately 4am, at which point I have to drive back to Southampton, which will take nearly two hours. Thankfully, this is the only day that this much crap is going on at E3, so I can live with it for now.

I can also live with it because I'm actually enjoying myself. I can tell I enjoy my job because I think about writing things for it when I'm not "on the clock," as it were. I want to post things. I want to talk about games. It's great fun. The other people who work with me on USgamer feel the same way, too, and we're building a great site through our collective enthusiasm and knowledge.

Speaking of USgamer, the site's now live after a somewhat hectic day. The sites have been up and down all day for various reasons, but they currently seem somewhat stable. Check it out here. Enjoy! And that's all I'm going to write for now, because I need to conserve my energy somewhat!

1238: Inns and Cathedrals and Traders (and Builders), Oh My!

(Aside: I usually hate it when people use the "x and y and z, oh my!" trope for titles, but I couldn't resist this time. "Keep Calm and [insert humorous thing here]" can still fuck off, though.)

Andie and I played a game of Carcassonne this evening. It's one of our favourite games, both in physical format and on iOS, and it's probably the one we play together most, with Ticket to Ride being a close second.

Recently, I picked up two of the expansions to Carcassonne as I'd heard that they added some interest to the base game. Not that there's anything wrong with the base game as is, but it can sometimes be interesting to add some additional mechanics, or change a few things around. And sure enough, Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders both change Carcassonne to a noticeable degree — and, for my money, make it a considerably better, more interesting game in the process — without breaking what makes the original game so good.

For the uninitiated, Carcassonne is a tile-laying game in which you and up to five other players take it in turns to draw tiles representing areas of French countryside out of a bag, then place them in such a manner that you gradually build up a map. When you place a tile, you can put one of your little wooden "followers" (affectionately referred to as "meeples" by most board game geeks) on one of the tile's features to "claim" it. When you finish the feature in question — making a completely enclosed wall for a city, having something at both ends for a road, completely surrounding it with other tiles for a monastery — you score points. At the end of the game, you score additional points for any half-finished features, and also for any "farms" you have claimed — these are fields in which you've placed a follower, in which you gain an additional 3 points for every completed city that borders that field.

The fun in Carcassonne is in strategically placing the tiles in such a manner that you can complete features while simultaneously screwing over your opponents. The "farmers" mechanic in particular is highly competitive, but focusing too much attention on it can cost you the game.

What Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders do is add a few little twists on these basic mechanics.

Inns & Cathedrals is the simpler of the two expansions. In the additional tiles that make up the expansion, there are several road tiles that have an inn on them. If you add an inn to a road that you've claimed, you get 2 points per tile instead of the usual 1 when you complete it, but to balance out the increased reward, there's an additional risk: if you fail to complete it, at the end of the game, you get nothing for that road instead of the usual 1 point per tile. Similarly, if you place a cathedral in a city, you get 3 points per tile and flag in that city when you complete it instead of the usual 2, but nothing at the end of the game if you fail to complete it. Starting one of these features can be a gamble — particularly as the cathedral pieces are among the most awkward city tiles available — but can be enormously lucrative. Alongside these new tiles, there's also a "big meeple" piece for each player that has the strength of two normal followers — great for aggressively stealing territory from other players.

Traders & Builders, meanwhile, adds three distinct mechanics. Firstly, the "trader" mechanic means that if you finish a city (by laying the last tile), you claim all the "goods" represented on the various city tiles, even if you don't have any followers in the city. At the end of the game, the player who has the most of a type of good gains 10 bonus points, and there are three different types of goods, allowing for a potential bonus of up to 30 points for a savvy trader.

Meanwhile, a new "builder" piece can be placed in a city or on a road that you've already claimed. On subsequent turns, if you add to the city or road the builder is on, you immediately get an extra turn. Careful placement of the builder is a must, as it's quite easy to get him "stuck" and be unable to enjoy his benefits.

Finally, a new "pig" piece can be added to a farm you already control, and this means that if you're still in control of that farm at the end of the game, you'll gain 4 points per city in that field instead of 3. This can potentially be quite a big difference.

Both expansions also include a selection of new tiles with interesting new designs that add intriguing strategic possibilities.

What we found with the two expansions was a much higher-scoring game than usual, with much bigger "swings". In other words, the fact that things like the inns and cathedrals let you score considerably more points than usual meant that it was much more possible to "catch up" to a player who is seemingly screaming ahead in the points stakes; at the same time, the "goods" mechanic can completely change the standings at the very end of the game, as happened this evening, when I was all set to win and then Andie's monopoly on all the goods in the kingdom caused her to snatch victory from my clutches by a measly two points. Dammit!

Anyway, I'm glad I picked up these expansions; they add a lot to the base game, and I can see why a lot of board game geeks out there never play without them. I'm interested to try it out with more than two people — with the expansion, the game now supports up to six players altogether, which sounds like a recipe for disaster in the best possible way.

Anyway. E3 starts tomorrow, and I'm spending the day with the fine folks at Eurogamer, so I'm looking forward to that. I'm also proud to announce that USgamer, my new professional home, will be launching tomorrow, so watch this space! That space. Whatever.

1237: Is Everything All Right?

Members of the restaurant industry! Be you serving staff or restaurant owner, know this: my meal is just fine, and thus you don't need to ask me if everything is all right with it. If, on the off-chance, something is actually wrong with my meal, I will attract your attention and explain what the problem is. In the meantime, kindly bugger off and leave me alone.

I know this is an irrational thing to get annoyed about, but it's not so much the thing itself that I find irritating as it is the reason it happens. Because when your waiter/waitress comes over and asks you if everything is all right with your meal, they are not doing so because they care. They are doing so because their restaurant's policy is to go and check up on people five or ten minutes after they have started eating, just in case they're too, I don't know, shy to bring up the fact that their food isn't cooked properly.

I give this information from a position of experience, having worked in a few pubs and restaurants back when I was at university. It was simply policy to do this to make it look like the staff cared when in fact all they really wanted was for all the members of the public to go away so they could enjoy a good old-fashioned apple sauce fight in the kitchen.

I think the knowledge of why this happens — to give the illusion of good customer service, rather than simply to provide good customer service — is what makes it particularly infuriating. If I believed at any point that the people attempting to look like they cared about my dining experience actually did care about my dining experience, I'd be fine with it. However, my mind poisoned by my past experiences on the other side of the customer/staff divide, I just can't see it that way; I just can't believe that these people really give a toss whether or not my meal is to my satisfaction or not.

It's the same with going to shops, of course. That innocuous-sounding "is everything all right there, sir?" can usually be translated as "can I sell you anything, sir?" Checkout operators have stickers on their tills reminding them to thank customers for waiting, and to smile at them. And employees of certain fruit-based computer manufacturers' retail presences have a little "routine" to go through any time they attempt to engage a customer in conversation. (To be fair, in the latter case, it worked quite well, but it's still a completely "false" interaction with another person — speaking from the script rather than from the heart.)

Pish and balls. I guess I'm just grumpy. It is nearly 2AM after all. I should probably go to sleep. It is Sunday tomorrow, then on Monday I am covering E3 professionally for the first time in a while, albeit still only on the "home front" rather than actually going there. One day… one day.

I'll leave you with this.

1236: On Being That Guy Who Picks 'Japanese' in the Sound Menu

I always used to be one for having my game's voices in English. I liked being able to understand what they were saying as well as reading the subtitles on screen. In some cases, I didn't have the option; I'll always associate Persona 3 and 4 with English voices, for example, even though, in retrospect, it would probably be better with Japanese voice acting. In others, the English voiceover job was so genuinely good that I didn't want to try the Japanese version — Xenoblade Chronicles springs immediately to mind in this regard.

I can remember the moment that I realised Japanese voice acting was something worth exploring even though I didn't speak the language, though. It was while I was playing the utterly terrifying PSP visual novel/adventure game Corpse Party — one of my favourite games on that platform, and legitimately one of the most disturbing games I've ever experienced — that I realised that, frankly, Japanese video game voice actors aren't afraid to let rip with the utterly raw emotion. They'll shout until their voice cracks; they'll scream; they'll cry. And by God, they sound like they mean it.

It was around one of the many points in Corpse Party where one of the characters is bawling their eyes out and screaming in terror at the horrific situation they've found themselves in that I realised when it comes to voice acting in games — which are typically accompanied by subtitles, particularly in the visual novel and JRPG genres — it's not about the words that are being said, but about how they're being said. It didn't matter that I didn't understand the Japanese words that were being screeched into my ears (seriously, play that game on headphones and you'll never want to turn the light out again) — the meaning was all too clear simply from the tone of voice.

Those who have been reading regularly will know that I've been playing Ar Tonelico 3 recently. I played the first game in that series in English, largely because I found the English voices in the video cutscenes too jarring when paired with Japanese speech in the main game. I played the second in Japanese because I'd been warned that the English dub, much like the overall translation job, was somewhat questionable. And I started the third in English, but after not very long I switched to Japanese. It is a decision I did not regret.

It's very obvious from the huge rift in quality between the English and Japanese voice tracks in something like Ar Tonelico 3 that the English actors are, for the most part, phoning it in somewhat, while the Japanese actors care about what they're doing. In many cases, it is the difference between a rush job (English) and having well-known professionals handle the voices.

I witnessed a scene this evening — no spoilers — that had me more than a little choked up due to the amount of raw emotion and passion that the actress playing one of the characters was throwing into the delivery of her lines. I believed that she meant what she was saying. This character was supposed to be upset, and I believed that.

The other thing that comes into play is that when a game's dialogue has been translated relatively literally from the original Japanese rather than fully localised, reading it out loud in English often sounds very stilted and artificial, simply because that's not how English people talk. We don't say things like "what is this, all of a sudden?" and start entire conversations with "By the way". We don't refer to ourselves in the third person to be cute. (Usually. Saki will do it!) And we don't use the term "lovey-dovey" anywhere near as much as Japanese people apparently do.

There's nothing wrong with doing a literal translation from the Japanese — so long as you do it with enough care to make it understandable, of course — but if you're going to take this approach to translation, I've come to the conclusion it's best to leave the voices as they are. If, on the other hand, you're going to take the Ace Attorney/Cherry Tree High Comedy Club/Recettear approach to localisation and actually make the dialogue significantly and noticeably more "Western" in the process, then we can talk about English voiceovers.

I must confess to always having found an attitude like the one I just described a little snobby in the past. Having immersed myself in this side of gaming (and anime) culture for this long, though, I totally get it. Once you get used to the infinitely more professional job Japanese voice actors do on productions like Ar Tonelico (and even on lighter fare like Hyperdimension Neptunia, for that matter) you'll likely never want to go back.