2284: Nights of Azure: Encounter in the Abyss

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I only have a couple of trophies left before I have the Platinum on Gust's action RPG Nights of Azure, and I'm coming away from the game very impressed. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it to begin with — though I adored its aesthetic and narrative — but once I got my head around its unconventional systems and subversions of standard RPG mechanics, I was well and truly enraptured.

The game has excellent combat. I was concerned that it would be a little hack-and-slashy when I first started playing, but as it progresses and you open up more and more systems and options for yourself, it becomes really interesting. In fact, oddly enough, one game that I'm constantly reminded of while I'm playing Nights of Azure is Final Fantasy XIV, of all things; while the two games may not appear to have much in common initially, one being an action RPG and one being a hotbar-and-cooldown-based MMO, I maintain that Nights of Azure is what Final Fantasy XIV would play like if it was a single-player action game.

Perhaps I should clarify that. Both are based on making good use of a gradually expanding roster of abilities that you unlock bit by bit as you progress through the game, rather than outright customisation (though Nights of Azure has considerably more customisation when it comes to equipment than FFXIV, with up to four items being equippable, each having both an effect on Arnice's stats and some sort of special effect). Both are based on a combination of open world adventuring (albeit in Nights of Azure's case, said "world" being just one town) and linear dungeons with boss encounters. And in both cases, said boss encounters are based heavily on learning the boss' attacks, how to avoid them, making sure you don't stand in area of effect markers, and recognising when it's safe to attack.

This latter aspect is particularly apparent in the later hours of the game and especially the "epilogue" chapter after you beat the final boss for the first time. The "epilogue" is actually a retread of the last chapter with some additional content and the ability to raise Arnice to the level cap of 11 rather than the previous 10; she also gains the ability to transform into Nightmare form as well as her previous Demon, Moon Rabbit, Phantom and Armour forms. More importantly, totally completing this final chapter unlocks the "true" ending, which I haven't seen yet, since I'm cleaning up the last few trophies first.

Throughout the game, there are a number of boss battles. These are all very good and have a nice amount of variety between them, but for me, the absolute highlight of the game's battles has been the optional "Abyss" battle in the Arena. The Arena is initially designed as a place to practice the various techniques you'll need to use in the game, ranging from chaining long combos to defeating enemies using only your summoned Servans. "Abyss", meanwhile, is the culmination of everything you've learned, in theory, pitting you against the toughest individual foe in the game over the course of several phases; a fight that rivals some of Final Fantasy XIV's raid bosses in its complexity.

Let me explain how I beat the fight and you'll see.

Your opponent is a demon girl fiend — Yfritte, I believe, though don't quote me on that. She's a level 11 opponent — enemies in the game go up to level 15, and your Servans can level this high with an appropriate ability, though Arnice herself can only level to 11. Unlike similar-looking enemies you might have encountered elsewhere in the game, Yfritte (as we'll call her, even if she isn't) has about a bazillion HP and, it becomes clear immediately after engaging her, isn't going to go down without one hell of a fight.

You start across the Arena from Yfritte with no Servans summoned. I summoned all my Servans immediately — my main party consisting of Alraune (healer), Plumie (ranged damage dealer), Toy Trooper (group of damage dealers) and Toy Sentinel (single damage dealer, hits lots of times) — and straight away set off Toy Trooper and Toy Sentinel's Burst attacks to deal some initial damage to Yfritte.

Using Arnice's Blood Sword, I alternated between using the Special attack, which knocks Yfritte down for a couple of seconds, and the Weak attack, which, with the Vlad's Crest item I had equipped, restored Arnice's SP quickly enough to perform Special attacks almost indefinitely, effectively stun-locking Yfritte. This process repeats until about 80% of her HP, at which point she summons two Manticores.

The Manticores can Paralyse you and your Servans, so it's a good idea to have status-repelling abilities or equipment on at least Arnice and your healer. They also have a nasty multi-hit fire breath attack, so staying behind or to the side of them is a good idea. Continue alternating Weak and Special attacks to repeatedly knock them down until Arnice's Transformation bar fills, at which point the combination of Servans I had equipped allowed me to transform into the speedy Moon Rabbit form.

Moon Rabbit's Special attack needs 100SP, but it's a huge area-effect attack that hits lots of times — and, with Vlad's Crest equipped, this means that 100SP is regenerated almost immediately if you hit more than one target with it. It also inflicts Bleed for some damage over time, so it's good for upping your average damage per second. I repeatedly triggered Moon Rabbit's Special Attack, taking care to catch Yfritte and the two Manticores in the AoE, until the transformation ran out, by which point the Manticores were dead and Yfritte had a chunk of life missing.

There now follows a short phase where Yfritte is by herself. She flings missiles at you from a distance, some of which home in on you, and sets off close-range area effect abilities when you're up close, some of which are powerful enough to one-shot Arnice. Distract her with your Servans — use Alraune's Mega Heal to top up their HP if necessary — and return to the Weak-Special combo to keep her off-balance.

After a while, she'll summon a huge number of level 1 Shadows. Move away from Yfritte and hack and slash through the Shadows to build up both SP and the Transformation bar. It's potentially worth unsummoning your Servans at this point, as the Shadows don't hit hard and if you keep clear of Yfritte (and avoid her missiles) you won't take a lot of damage. Plus when you re-summon the Servans, they'll have full SP again, although their HP will be where you left it, so be ready to heal if necessary.

I had a second deck of Servans set up to transform Arnice into Nightmare form, so I took the opportunity to use this powerful transformation once the bar was full. Nightmare form has a wide arc ranged attack that hits multiple times as its default weak attack, so spamming this and avoiding Yfritte's missiles does a significant amount of damage in a short space of time. Once I was safely in Nightmare form, I switched back to my initial deck, summoned Alraune for healing purposes just in case a shot got through, and prepared for the next phase.

The next phase comes when Yfritte summons a huge blue area of effect marker on the ground. This inflicts poison and is also slippery ice, so having status resist abilities or equipment is a good idea, particularly on Alraune. The Mermaid's Tear item completely nullifies any area-effect abilities, so this effectively allows Alraune to shrug it off and continue healing you. Don't summon any other Servans until the AoE disappears, since they're dumb enough to blindly charge straight into it, get poisoned and die straight away. Once it goes away, however, go nuts; return to the Weak-Special combo to knock Yfritte off balance until the next phase starts.

Next up, Yfritte summons a doll who chucks toys at you, which can be easily avoided, and a spirit-type who we'll affectionately refer to as the "bullet hell fairy". Kill the doll first, since it's not got many HP and will go down quickly. The bullet hell fairy is a little more troublesome, since she repeatedly summons large groups of bullets which then explode for significant damage. You can see where they're going to appear and get out of the way of them; use the Follow command on Servans to get them out of harm's way. They're always in the same formation: one at "twelve o'clock", then two more at "eight" and "four". Take care to continue dodging Yfritte's bullets and close-range AoEs while you deal with the fairy.

By now we're getting close to the end, but there's still a couple of phases to go. Yfritte will do another big AoE — red this time — so deal with it the same way: unsummon everything except an immune Alraune and perhaps pelt Yfritte from afar with the Blitz Shooter if she refuses to come out of her little safe space. When the AoE disappears, you're on the home straight.

Yfritte will summon some Shadows again — level 7 this time, so they don't go down so easily. Re-summon your Servans and get them to hack and slash their way through the hordes, though keep an eye on where Yfritte is so you don't get caught out by a one-shot AoE at this late stage in the fight. Build up SP with Weak attacks and clear an area with a Special from the Blood Sword, preferably catching Yfritte on the outside of it so you can knock her down for a bit of damage. Repeat until you charge up another transformation; it's a good idea to pick Moon Rabbit for this one for the large Special AoE, though Nightmare works too, since its ranged attack covers a wide area. Basically you want to rip through as many Shadows as possible while still hitting Yfritte in order to keep your SP topped up.

Towards the end of the fight, Yfritte will summon a Stone Hellion — the same really annoying ones that were in earlier Arena battles, equipped entirely with nothing but one-shot abilities with huge AoEs. Fortunately this one goes down a little easier than the boss-class ones in earlier battles, so catch him in a Moon Rabbit Special if you can while continuing to hit Yfritte. Take care to avoid all his big AoEs — Moon Rabbit's speed is really helpful here — and continue pelting Yfritte with everything you've got while making sure to stay clear of her bullets and AoEs as well as ensuring you don't get overwhelmed by shadows… and eventually, hopefully, you will prevail with time to spare.

2283: Emergency, Emergency, Incoming Enemy Fighters

Star Fox Zero is out this week. This game has kind of snuck up on me, but I'm very excited to give it a go, because I love Star Fox.

Or, well, I love the original Star Fox/Starwing and the N64 sequel/remake/reboot/whatever it was Star Fox 64/Lylat Wars — I must confess, I never played the more recent games on the Gamecube and DS, partly because they weren't particularly well received and partly because they didn't quite sound like what I wanted from a Star Fox game, which is to say, a solid rail shooter in '90s arcade style.

I vividly remember playing the original Star Fox (in Japanese) for the first time. Having been playing computer games on the Atari ST, I was already used to what was supposedly Star Fox's biggest innovation: polygonal 3D graphics. And, in fact, in many regards, the polygonal graphics found in Atari ST games were often more complex and impressive than those found in Star Fox, though there were a few fancy tricks that Nintendo's game used sparingly that absolutely couldn't have been done on the ST, most notably some occasional texture mapping and the combination of hardware-scaled sprites with the polygonal ships and structures.

The fact that I wasn't as immediately gobsmacked by Star Fox's graphics as I felt like I was supposed to be didn't matter, though, because everything else about that game made up for its relatively simplistic polygons. The spinning, digitised speech-accompanied launch sequence that reminded me of an arcade game; the incredible music; the G-LOC-style zooming in and out of the cockpit in the spaceflight sections — all of these things combined to give me an experience on a home console that, while I recognised wasn't quite up to the standard of arcade games — most notably in terms of frame rate, resolution and screen size — certainly came damn close, reminding me in particular of Namco's Starblade, particularly in the first-person spaceflight sections.

Lylat Wars was interesting because there were a lot of things it did better than its predecessor, and some things it did worse. Most notably, the graphics were considerably better, with the game being probably one of the most visually impressive games on the N64, and the music was fairly atrocious, making use of Nintendo's dreadful MIDI synth chip that it used throughout most of the N64 era, which somehow managed to sound worse than the wonderful wavetable synthesis music of the previous generation's SNES. Thanks to its inclusion of digitised speech throughout instead of nonsensical babbling, Lylat Wars was also the birthplace of what was arguably one of the first ever gaming memes in the form of "Do a barrel roll!" — though my friends and I always preferred "You've gotta use the boost to get through!" for some reason.

I'm looking forward to trying out Star Fox Zero for myself, an am unperturbed by question marks over its strange-sounding control scheme; Splatoon's control scheme sounds strange on paper, and that certainly works extremely well, so I'm open to being convinced. I'm also reassured that Arthur Gies of Polygon hates it, because Arthur Gies of Polygon hates anything fun.

Game assures me that my copy has been shipped so if I'm lucky it might even arrive a day early tomorrow… if not, expect some first impressions on Friday.

All ships check in!!

2282: What Kind of Gamer are You?

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An email thread between me and my friends earlier extended to well over a hundred messages, and only part of it consisted of us casting aspersions on each other's sexuality or threatening to cave each other's heads in with Ikea shelving. No; the most interesting part of it was the part where we decided to discuss what games we'd find mutually pleasing to play on our vaguely regular Tuesday night board gaming sessions.

The struggle we have, you see, is that our group is split kind of down the middle. Two of our number — Tom and Sam — very much enjoy strategic, competitive games that they can train to be good at and quite reliably destroy the rest of us at given any opportunity they have. Their favourite game is Agricola, a game which I respect enormously from a mechanical perspective, but absolutely positively cannot get my head around from a strategic perspective. I can make the most perfect farm in the world and still lose due to not having enough points on cards or bonus points or whatever, and it's enormously frustrating.

Tom and Sam, meanwhile, have played a bunch of the game both in its tabletop and mobile app formats, and consequently know it rather well — what strategies work, what combinations of cards go well together, and a sensible sequence of actions to take. The rest of us, on the other hand, do not have this knowledge and tend to struggle our way through the game, usually fairly secure in the knowledge that we won't be victorious.

My friend Tim and I are essentially the "opposite" to this. We enjoy cooperative games in which the entire group plays against the game itself — or perhaps plays against a single adversary player, as in games such as Descent and Advanced Heroquest. For the most part, we have nothing against competitive games, enjoying plenty in our own right, but our preference tends to be for cooperative, heavily thematic games that encourage a touch of role-playing. If we do play a competitive game, we enjoy those that have an element of randomness to them, such as deckbuilders or those where dice rolls are a central mechanic — games such as Thunderstone, Carcassonne and Catan are among our favourite competitive games.

The wild card in our group is James, who has garnered something of a reputation among our little ensemble as being "the backstabber" — largely due to his enthusiasm for the game City of Horror, in which attaining victory is mostly dependent on being as much of an asshole to the other players as possible while maintaining a facade of apparent cooperativeness in the early stages.

As our email discussion proceeded, James explained his approach in a bit more detail. For him, it's less about outright backstabbing and more about pushing the boundaries of the game's rules to see what is possible. For example, in our last game of Agricola, he decided to see if the game — which, for the most part, has little direct interaction between players save only one person being able to take each action space at a time — could be played in an outright adversarial manner. Deliberately taking aim at both Sam and Tom — whom, you'll recall, are considerably better at the game than the rest of us — James decided to sacrifice any and all of his own scoring potential in the name of trying to make life as difficult as possible for Sam and Tom, hoping that either Tim or I would win. It was an entertaining exercise, for sure, though I still didn't win.

These gaming archetypes conform to how we tend to play video games, too. Tim and I tend to favour either narrative-heavy single-player experiences or cooperative affairs such as Warhammer End Times: Vermintide, whereas Sam and Tom are big players of hefty, competitive games like Civilization V. James is somewhere in a middle, a little less keen (or able?) to break the boundaries of the rules in video games, though he noted specifically that the thing he enjoyed most about Grand Theft Auto Online, which we're all playing semi-regularly at the moment, is being able to show up to each session dressed in an increasingly outlandish, freakish outfit to make us all laugh. Once again, making his own fun. (James, never quite able to shake off that "backstabber" reputation, is also the player most likely to shoot you in the face with a shotgun if you enter the same square mile of map that he occupies.)

Finding games that we all enjoy can be quite challenging at times, but it does happen sometimes. The aforementioned Grand Theft Auto Online is suiting our needs for video game multiplayer fun at present, for example, while this evening we ran two simultaneous learning games of Android: Netrunner for those among us who are less experienced to pick up the rules ahead of a planned "boys' weekend" of gaming at the end of the month, during which we're hoping to play a few games of Netrunner.

We left our email thread with the promise of coming up with a short(ish)list of games that we'd all be happy and excited about playing come a Tuesday evening, rather than our attempted "rota" system that we're currently using. We haven't quite perfected our list yet, but I'm confident we can find a selection that we'd all be happy to sit down for a game of.

Assuming James doesn't break the game, of course.

2281: Trying Times

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I'd like to be fairly open about this, within reason, as I don't want to sound like I'm constantly moaning about stuff — particularly with my desire to be more positive that I expressed the other day — but I feel it's important to share with those of you who read regularly and whom I consider to be friends.

It's a difficult period of life right now, as you might have surmised from some recent posts. I'd like to talk a little about what's going on and why, and how you might be able to help.

Basically the main trouble we're having stems from a chronic pain condition my wife has which is called, if I remember correctly, interstitial cystitis, also known as the rather literal "painful bladder syndrome". The issue has been bothering her for well over a year now, and for the last few months she's been off work due to how bad the pain has been. With me having also been out of work since my seasonal position at Game came to an end in January, as you can probably imagine, this has made financial security something of an issue. Technically I do have a new job now, but as I'll explain in a moment, the situation isn't exactly ideal.

Of greater concern than the financial issues — though they are related — is the matter of mental health, both for my wife and for me. Andie's inability to work has led to her being practically housebound, which as anyone who has been housebound will know, can lead to feelings of loneliness and isolation that can sometimes escalate into more severe negative feelings. Without going into details — this isn't the time or place for that — suffice it to say that Andie has had a very difficult time of it with both her mental and physical health over the last few months, and it's by turns heartbreaking, upsetting, frustrating and infuriating to cope with for me, since there's literally nothing I can do about it.

The reason I say the situation with my new job isn't particularly ideal is that, as anyone who has been left alone and isolated with mental health issues will know, being by yourself when you're feeling particularly low isn't a good or safe situation to be in. I know, I've been there — though thankfully the negative feelings I had never escalated to such a degree that I did myself serious harm. (The most I did to myself was bruise my hand a bit from thumping the floor in frustration.) My new job is in Basingstoke, which is at least half an hour's drive away and thus puts me out of range of being able to easily rush back if necessary. It puts Andie in the position where she feels like she has no-one to call on for help in the day if she needs it, and it puts me in the position where I don't know what state I might find her in when I get home, which is, naturally, rather worrying.

So with that in mind, for the next week or two I'm going to be taking some time to make sure she's all right — and that I'm all right, for that matter. We're getting some help and support from various sources — both family and medical — but anything those of you out there in friend-land can offer would be most welcome, even if it's just a kind word and a chat now and again. (If you do feel inclined to help us out financially, may I direct you to my Patreon page, where you can help me make my writing into a proper income stream.)

I hope things are going to be all right. It's easy to fall into a pit of negativity when this sort of thing happens and there doesn't seem to be any sort of easy solution. But with the right help and support, we'll hopefully make it out of this particular pit, be able to get back on track and start living our life the way we want it to again. That would be very nice right now.

2280: Three Wishes

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For a man of my age, I probably give the whole question of "what would you wish for if you got three wishes?" rather more time and attention in my head than it deserves, what with it being something (probably) impossible, but it's something to keep my mind occupied with when I'm trying and failing to fall asleep.

I've had numerous possible answers over the years — never resorting to "I wish I had three more wishes", I might add — but right now, at a particularly shitty point in my life, I find myself settled on three pretty-much definite answers.

1. I wish my wife and I would be in 100% perfect health, mentally and physically. I've struggled with mental health for more years than I was probably aware of it, and it hasn't gotten any easier over the years. In fact, as I get older, it's got more and more difficult, particularly since several attempts to get a career started have gone nowhere — often through no fault of my own, as in the case of my misadventures in games journalism — and left me feeling increasingly useless and worthless to the world at large with each passing year.
Alongside that, my wife has been struggling with a chronic pain condition that I'm always forgetting the name of for well over a year now, and it's taking its toll on both of us. She's been off work for several months now, and the pain has had a severe effect on both her mental health and, by extension, since I'm unable to offer any sort of help besides just being here when I can, my own as well.

If we were both 100% perfectly healthy mentally and physically, we could get on with enjoying our lives the way we both want to. Life wouldn't feel like a constantly uphill struggle which, frankly, it does at the moment.
2. I wish I had a million pounds. It may be a cliche to wish for a large amount of money, but if I had a large amount of money, it would remove the other main stressor in my life that is at least partly related to our physical and mental health issues: money worries. I don't even want to buy anything particularly extravagant with my hypothetical fortune; I'd simply pay off my debts, quit my job and continue living the way I do at the moment, pursuing my own passion projects in my own time without having to worry about where the money to pay the next bills and the mortgage is going to come from. The rest of the money would simply go towards day-to-day expenses and perhaps a few guilt-free treats.
3. I wish I had the ability to switch between being a man and a woman at will. This one is less grounded in my actual real-life everyday existence right now, since having the ability to do this wouldn't make my current situation any better, but it's something that I've always returned to when pondering this question, and a concept in general that I've always found fascinating from the perspective of walking in "someone else's" shoes. I won't lie, part of my curiosity in this regard is sexual in nature — I mean, come on — but also I feel it would just be interesting to be able to switch between two completely different bodies and appearances at will, making use of the most "appropriate" one for various situations, whatever that might mean.

So there's my three wishes. If any Internet-connected genies are watching, I will happily accept just the first two if you're running a bit short on mystic mojo.

2279: Matchmaking: A Great Way to Waste Time

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I downloaded the Doom beta on PS4 earlier out of curiosity. I hadn't heard particularly positive things about it — though admittedly, this was mostly from disgruntled PC players who were whining about the lack of mod support and how it was "obviously built for consoles" — but as someone who actually used to really like Doom, I was interested to take a look.

I booted up Doom, fiddled around in the options a bit, took note of the entertaining options to weather, dirty up and scuff your armour in character customisation — not to mention painting it lurid shades of pink and purple — and then jumped into the multiplayer playlist.

Then, I waited.

And waited some more.

And then a bit more.

Well, okay, this perhaps makes it sound a bit longer than it actually was: it was probably less than five minutes in total, all told. But that was five minutes utterly wasted in which I wasn't doing anything apart from staring at the screen and perhaps rotating my character model a bit.

My mind was cast back to a comment someone I follow on Twitter made a while back, whose sentiment was along the lines of "rather than wasting your time with endless, pointless matchmaking games, throw yourself into enjoying games with stories; games with clear beginnings, middles and ends". At the time, I thought it a slightly extreme viewpoint, since I have enjoyed multiplayer matchmaking games in the past, but on reflection, he was absolutely right: for me, right now, matchmaking multiplayer games are a total waste of time and energy for what I find to be a subpar, unsatisfying experience compared to something that is either a bit more structured or something that has immediacy.

Doom isn't the only game where I've encountered the tedium of waiting for matchmaking queues. Playing a damage-dealing class on Final Fantasy XIV often leads to long queues for dungeons — although at least in that game, you can do other stuff in the open world while queueing, though there are a few limitations on your activities to prevent your queue popping and you being unavailable. Grand Theft Auto Online is particularly unpleasant to try and find a matchmaking session in, since it's riddled with people who pop into a lobby, then quit out again after five seconds if it's not already full. And I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, too.

So, I think I've had enough. I've felt a slight temptation to check out things like Doom and even the more recent Call of Duty games in the recent past, but on reflection, I feel they'll only frustrate me: time spent "waiting for players…" is time not spent enjoying a story in a single-player game, or trying to beat a high score in an arcade game, or chasing trophies in a game I've reached the post-game for.

This isn't to say I'm not going to play multiplayer at all, mind you: TrackMania Turbo has an excellent multiplayer where you can just jump in and out of player-made rooms at will, with no waiting around for there to be "enough" people to play. And I have a lot of fun playing Grand Theft Auto Online with my local friends. Those represent two different ways of having a fun online experience without getting matchmaking systems involved.

Strangers who are beyond that great wall of matchmaking, then? Fuck 'em; I've got better things to do than wait for them to show up to my party.

2278: Difficulty Switch A and B

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Spending a bit more time with Atari Vault over the last few days makes me appreciate one of the most interesting things about the 2600 — and something that, to my knowledge, hasn't really been done on any other console since: its use of difficulty switches and game selectors.

It wasn't unusual to see 2600 cartridges promising "9 video games" or similar on their front covers; by modern definitions, this wasn't entirely accurate, as each cartridge did indeed contain just one game, but tended to have multiple variations available to play. In some cases, these variations were minor — difficulty modes, essentially — but in others, they changed the gameplay fairly drastically. And along with these selectable games, the 2600 also afforded both players the opportunity to select their difficulty independently of one another.

Handicap systems are still found in modern multiplayer games in various ways, the most common of which being racing games' tendency to give the pack's back markers a slight speed boost to allow them to catch up a bit. But on the 2600, this was a revolutionary feature: by setting difficulty levels independently for each player, it became possible for experienced players to play "fairly" with newcomers, youngsters or those who simply didn't have quite the same dexterity and/or ability to handle those horrible Atari joysticks.

The ways that the difficulty switches were implemented varied from game to game. In the case of Air-Sea Battle, for example, the difficulty switches allowed players to set the size of their bullets independently — less experienced players could have larger bullets, making it easier to hit the targets. In Combat, the difficulty switches adjusted the speed of the player's bullets — more experienced players could choose to have slower shots, making it easier for their opponent to dodge. (Of course, you could then tweak the difficulty further by playing one of the variants where you could "bend" your shots around corners by steering after firing.)

It's a really interesting idea, and one of the coolest things about the 2600. I knew about the existence of these switches before — I've played some 2600 games before — but it hasn't been until I've actually started investigating some of these games in detail that I've really appreciated the surprising amount of interest and flexibility that they bring to these rough-looking but surprisingly fun old games.

Plus another nice feature of 2600 games I've discovered is that they're straightforward and easy to learn enough that my wife and I can play together without me having to spend hours explaining how to do things, or for us to play with an enormous skill imbalance thanks to the fact I have more experience than her. Thanks to the 2600's switches, we can tweak the experience to one that we both find challenging, but fair — and, it has to be said, the 2600 had some enormously fun two-player games that, while simple, can get very, very competitive very quickly!

2277: That Girl's in Lesbians with That Other Girl

Playing through Gust's latest game Nights of Azure, I was struck with how… explicit the romantic relationship between the two heroines is. I don't mean sexually explicit; I mean that the fact that the two of them even have a romantic relationship is acknowledged at all.

Yuri (lesbian) themes are frequently a part of Japanese popular media — an interesting fact to toss back at those who are keen to paint the nation as being somewhat less than progressive when it comes to attitudes towards gay people. Indeed, while "real world" Japanese society in general may not appear to look on homosexuality with as tolerant an eye as we like to think we have here in the West, it's clear that there's plenty of the old "public face, private face" going on, since there are a ton of creators who are obviously fascinated with the idea of same-sex relationships — both male-on-male and female-on-female.

The thing that struck me about Nights of Azure's depiction of its central relationship is the fact that, as I noted above, it's pretty up-front about it. This is noteworthy because although yuri themes often make an appearance in Japanese popular media, they're often more implied than explicit, with it often being left up to the audience (and fan artists) to explore these relationships further.

Take something like popular anime Love Live. Even the most casual viewer will notice the blossoming relationship between Maki and Nico by the end of the run, but the show never particularly draws attention to it; it's just sort of there. Likewise, the Senran Kagura series features a number of obviously romantic relationships between many of its all-female cast members, but it's rare for these to be acknowledged or not "laughed off" by the characters — though, interestingly, latest installment Estival Versus did feature a scene where one character specifically called out Asuka and Homura for being so obviously gay for each other, even if they'd never properly admit it. And the Neptunia series is riddled with yuri undertones, ranging from Nepgear and Uni's heartwarming relationship to Noire's obvious but perpetually unspoken interest in Neptune — and, in most recent installment Megadimension Neptunia V-II, K-Sha's obsession with Noire, though this particular instance was an explicit admission of lady-love.

Nights of Azure, though… it's right there from the beginning, and it develops over the course of the game. Several other characters comment on it. And, most tellingly, there are outright romantic scenes between protagonist Arnice and other leading lady Lilysse. The two share moments of intimacy with one another that, on reflection, are actually quite unusual to see so explicitly depicted in games: in one scene, Arnice comforts an upset Lilysse by draping her arms around her neck from behind and holding her close; in another, the two dance together, their devotion to one another immediately apparent from the way they look at each other. And after a particularly heartfelt make-up session after a dispute between the two, we see them waking up in bed together, having obviously slept facing one another holding hands. (There's no yuri sexytime, though; it's not that kind of game.)

As with other Japanese games that feature yuri themes, Nights of Azure treats its central relationship with the appropriate amount of respect: that is to say, it's just there, and no-one thinks it's anything unusual. A couple of male characters are introduced by hitting on Arnice, but once they see she and Lilysse are obviously involved with one another, they back off — not with an "oh, wow, you're gay" sentiment, but with a simple recognition of "oh, well, you're together" that would have been the same if either of the two ladies involved were the opposite gender.

This is the sort of progressiveness and diversity that is a very positive part of the modern games industry — however, sadly, given Nights of Azure's status as a niche title that a significant number of people probably haven't even heard of, it's a game that you likely won't hear many games writers from big sites talking about.

Consider this my small attempt to acknowledge and celebrate the good that this game is doing, then, and rest assured that Nights of Azure is very much worth your time as an action RPG as well as an interactive lesbian experience.

2276: Video Computer System

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As I wrote in a few posts recently, I've been checking out the new Atari Vault compilation on Steam. Rather than talking about a specific game today, I wanted to talk a little bit about the value of the compilation as a whole, and why I'm enjoying exploring it.

Atari Vault is a compilation of somewhere in the region of 100 Atari games from the '80s. The bulk of the compilation consists of VCS 2600 games, but there are some arcade games in there too, including the likes of Crystal Castles, Missile Command, Major Havoc and Liberator.

I've owned a number of previous similar compilations in the past, and have typically gravitated towards the arcade games, since they seem more "palatable" from a modern perspective than the extremely primitive-looking 2600 games. I recall growing up with the Atari 8-bit home computers, and in comparison to those, 2600 games looked primitive even back at that time when it was relatively current, and as such, I've always found them a little offputting. I've made a specific effort to explore them a bit more this time around, though, and I've been pleased to discover some really interesting games.

Take Haunted House, for example. This is a fairly straightforward top-down "find all the things" game with an intriguing twist: you're in the dark. With your character represented as nothing more than a pair of eyes, you navigate around by either bumping into walls or lighting matches to illuminate the area immediately around you. A single game of Haunted House requires that you find all the pieces of a… thing… an urn? And you have to do so while using as few matches as possible and losing as few lives as possible, for this being a haunted house, it has a number of unpleasant beasties lurking around just waiting to nibble on you.

Or take Save Mary, a prototype game that never saw commercial release, but which presented an interesting twist on vaguely Tetris-ish block puzzles. The eponymous Mary is trapped at the bottom of a pit which is slowly filling with water. You control a crane and have to drop blocks into the well for Mary to climb up. You need to get her high enough to be able to grab her with the crane and save her. Once you've done this, you have to do it again, only with significantly more awkward-shaped blocks. The peculiar variation on the typical block puzzle formula is the fact that Mary has a mind of her own (albeit a predictable one) and you have to be careful not to squish her with the blocks you drop as she wanders back and forth trying to get to high ground.

Or how about Atari Video Cube, a really simple but surprisingly compelling puzzle game loosely based on Rubik's Cube? Controlling a weird little man (who has a name and a backstory and everything, though I can't remember it offhand), it's your job to pick up coloured squares from each of the 3×3 faces of the cube and lay them down so that each side is a solid colour. To make this more difficult, to pick up a coloured tile, you have to swap it with the one you're holding, and to make it even more difficult, you can't walk through tiles that are the same colour as the tile you're holding, even if they're on a different face of the cube.

The 2600 back catalogue appears to be filled with these sorts of interesting little games that we'd probably find laughable if released as full-scale, full-price commercial releases today, but as part of this compilation, they provide a surprising amount of entertainment value — and, in some cases, represent types of games that are very much deserving of a modern remake.

My only issue with them from a modern viewpoint is the fact that 2600 games tend to end rather abruptly, regardless of whether you "win" or "lose", and this can sometimes make victories over a particularly difficult level feel a bit less than satisfying. Still, this was from an age where gaming was quite a social pursuit — many of the 2600 games are very much designed to be played together with a partner — and so, I feel, a key part of the fun back then must have been making your own fun with the games to a certain extent; similar to how a tabletop game doesn't automatically set off fireworks as soon as you win, neither does a 2600 game. The celebrations and victory rewards are entirely up to you; I recommend betting each other a slice of pizza or a big lump of cake on a game of Combat and see how much you like each other by the end of the evening!

2275: A Need for Progression

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Playing some Dungeon Travelers 2 this evening, I found myself pondering exactly why I have, so far, spent 130 hours on this game — the longest I've ever spent on a single-player RPG, I believe — while a short time back, I decided that I really needed to take a break from Final Fantasy XIV, which was previously something of a life and free time-devourer.

On reflection, it comes down to a need for progression; more specifically, a need for a near-constant feeling of progression.

Herein lies the main reason I've set Final Fantasy XIV aside for the time being, and it's by no means an issue exclusive to that game, either — it's a genre-wide thing with all MMOs. And that issue is that once you reach "endgame" level — i.e. you hit the level cap, and progression becomes about acquiring better gear and taking on tougher challenges rather than earning experience points and levelling up — progression stops being constant and instead comes in fits and starts, in extreme cases, with instances of actually improving coming weeks apart from one another.

To put this in some sort of context for those who are unfamiliar with MMO endgames: you have several means of acquiring new gear at the level cap in Final Fantasy XIV. You can loot it from dungeons, which is based on random drops. You can acquire it from the raid dungeon Alexander, but this requires strategically acquiring items from its various floors, because you are limited in what you can acquire each week and different bits of gear require different numbers of items. You can acquire it using Tomestones of Esoterics, which have no limit on how many you can acquire per week. You can acquire it using Tomestones of Lore, of which you're limited to collecting 450 per week. You can take on the lengthy Anima Weapon quest. Or you can acquire it by running the top-tier challenging stuff such as the latest Extreme primal fights or Alexander on Savage difficulty.

Part of the issue here, I guess, is that everyone generally wants to go for the biggest upgrade possible at any given time, and it's these bigger upgrades that you're somehow limited in, meaning progress is artificially constrained. In order to earn a piece of body armour using Tomestones of Lore, for example, which is among the best equipment in the game right now, you need at least two weeks to earn the 825 or so Tomestones required, since you're capped at 450. In that intervening period, all you're doing is grinding for no discernible gain: the actual gain comes only when you've finished the process and you get your shiny new armour. (And then moan about it not having the stats you want, probably.)

Now, this sort of design is a key part of how MMOs generally keep people engaged over a long period — if everyone could get the best possible gear immediately, they'd complain about having "not enough content" more than they do already (which is a lot), and that is obviously undesirable for the development team, who are put under pressure to put out more content more quickly, which inevitably leads to quality suffering. Instead, these moments of progression are significant, but time-consuming: they have a noticeable impact on your character's abilities, but only after a long period of doing the same things over and over again until you've earned enough whatevers to get your doohickey.

That sort of treadmill progression had started to become a little less enjoyable to me than it had been, particularly as the current endgame of Final Fantasy XIV now has a number of different grindathons required to get the best possible gear. And so I put it down for now and instead focused on Dungeon Travelers 2's postgame (actually bigger than the main game) which is also a grindfest, but which is considerably more appealing to me right now for that feeling of constant rather than sporadic progression.

Progression in Dungeon Travelers 2 comes in several forms. The most obvious is in the earning of experience points and levelling up: finishing the main story will get you to about level 50, but the postgame will take you to the cap of 99 by its conclusion. This means that rather than hitting a level cap early and progression slowing by very nature of one of its sources being cut off, there's the constant satisfaction of earning experience points right up until the end of the game. And if you're still hungry for more, a "Level Reset" system allows you to discard those hard-earned levels in favour of some bonuses to the character's base stats if they had reached a high enough level, meaning you can level them up all over again and they'll be marginally better.

That's not the only means of progression, though. Gear is another important aspect of progression in Dungeon Travelers 2, much like other dungeon crawlers. The gear system is very interesting, in fact, since it's based around just a few base items, and then built upon with an enchantment system. What happens is you have a piece of base gear (say, a piece of leather armour) which has a bonus value attached to it (say, +5). The bonus indicates how much better than its base incarnation it is, and the value can keep going up and up and up. In order to make it go up, you have to enchant your gear using the Sealbooks you acquire by defeating sets of 9 of each monster in the game. Each of these Sealbooks has a level, and when you use it to enchant a piece of gear, two things happen: the bonus goes up by the tens value of the Sealbook's level (up to a maximum of 5 for books of level 50 and above) and one or more of the Sealbook's special effects (ranging from bonuses to stats to special effects such as regenerating health and TP each turn) is attached to the piece of gear.

Here's an example. I have a set of Leather Armour+40. I run across the wandering blacksmith in a dungeon, who allows you to enchant your gear. I use a level 50 Sealbook to enchant the armour, which increases its bonus to +45 and attaches a DEF Up and Elemental Resistance Up effect to it, making it considerably more defensive than before. Then I use another level 50 Sealbook of the same type to boost it to +50 and keep the same enchantments. Then I use a different Sealbook of a level higher than 50 (to increase the bonus, the Sealbook must be of a higher level than the bonus' current value) to boost it to +55 and add a Max HP Up effect to my existing DEF Up and Elemental Resistance Up effect, since equipment over +50 can have three, not two, effects attached to it. By this point, I've run out of money for the moment, so I take my leave of the bear blacksmith (yes, really) and proceed on my way, secure in the knowledge that I could upgrade that armour twice more before it becomes "capped" and I'd have to start looking for a stronger base item to progress further gear-wise.

These two systems intertwine so that you're always making one form of progress or the other. Levelling is quite slow in Dungeon Travelers 2 compared to more conventional JRPGs, but it has a noticeable impact, particularly on your characters' maximum HP. In the meantime, you can partly plug the gap for an underleveled character by giving them gear with huge bonuses — there's no level restrictions on equipping items — but you'll need to level them to ensure their survival and their usefulness in most cases.

But that's not all, either. The third means of progression in Dungeon Travelers 2 is simply getting further through the dungeons. Every expedition, you'll manage to get a bit further, perhaps even unlocking a shortcut allowing you to get to the new stuff more quickly next time you head in. Perhaps you'll beat a boss. Perhaps you'll find a nice piece of treasure. Perhaps you'll run into an area that has different enemies to the start of the dungeon. Point is, there's always something to discover, and while you're still wandering around grid-based mazes, swearing at one-way doors and teleporters and fighting battle after battle, at no point are you doing exactly the same thing over and over. You're not running the same dungeon time after time; you're discovering new parts of these sprawling mazes. You're not fighting the same bosses; you're taking on progressively more difficult challenges. And yes, you are grinding, but you're not doing so on a treadmill: you're always moving forwards.

This, I've come to the conclusion, is important to me, and it's why I'm not feeling the MMO thing right now. It's also why I've repeatedly bounced off the Souls series, despite trying to like them several times: those games are so heavily based on learning through repetition that I quickly get frustrated with the lack of forward momentum and tend to put them down after being smacked off a cliff by an armoured douchebag with a hammer for the umpteenth time, only to get smacked off a different cliff by a different armoured douchebag with a hammer on the way to reclaim my hard-earned souls and effectively undo the potential for progression I had before the unfortunate incident.

Nah. Give me a constant feeling of moving forward; that's what I really crave from my RPGs these days. And Dungeon Travelers 2 is very much scratching that particular itch right now.