1528: Oi, Hyakkihei

Now I’ve actually written my review for it over on USgamer, I can talk a little more about The Witch and the Hundred Knight, the game I’ve been playing most recently.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it initially. It’s one of those games where there was a fair amount of negative buzz surrounding it quite early on, led by an early review from IGN that wasn’t altogether kind. But if my experiences with Time and Eternity were anything to go by, I knew very well that “popular” opinion was something I was unlikely to mesh with, and thus I went in to The Witch and the Hundred Knight with an open mind.

I was very pleasantly surprised. What we have here is a very unconventional Japanese RPG in every respect. It’s not turn-based, it’s not party-based, it’s not overly moe or ecchi, it’s not a comedy. Instead, it’s an action RPG with a surprisingly dark, deep storyline, and one of the most interesting main characters I’ve had the pleasure to hang out with virtually in quite some time.

Metallia, the eponymous Witch, is a horrible person. Or at least she initially puts herself across as one. She’s foul-mouthed, she’s quick to anger and she’s aggressive. She appears to have no qualms about inflicting bloody revenge on those she feels to have wronged her, and she seems utterly miserable and bitter about everything.

Over the course of the game, we learn about her. We get to see her gradually letting new people into her life, and starting to seemingly trust them. We get some hints about where all that bitterness and rage has come from. And, quite early on, we also learn that Metallia is not long for this world — though not why immediately.

We observe all this through the eyes of the Hundred Knight, a supposedly mythical figure that Metallia summons at the outset of the game to do her bidding. The Hundred Knight is the player avatar, though, so you have a certain degree of autonomy from Metallia’s wishes, and indeed can express your opinions non-verbally at various points throughout the game. You’re still bound to Metallia, so progress in the overall plot is largely determined by eventually fulfilling her wishes of destroying the “Pillars of Temperance” and spreading her swamp around the world, but between those predictable story beats, the Hundred Knight gets involved in a number of distinct adventures, each of which forms itself into a neatly contained episode of the overall narrative.

A particularly effective episode is the seventh chapter in the game. I won’t spoil the details for those who are planning on playing the game for themselves, but suffice to say that it tells a complete, surprising and interesting self-contained story with a surprisingly emotional payoff. It explores both Metallia and the other members of the cast who have joined by this point, and blends both humour and pathos to a surprisingly effective degree.

The pathos aspect is what I think I’ve found most surprising about The Witch and the Hundred Knight so far. Developer Nippon Ichi is typically known for relatively light-hearted fare, though in some cases (ZHP is a good example) there’s often a more thought-provoking core underneath the exterior fluff. The Witch and the Hundred Knight is, I think, the first Nippon Ichi game where the “dark” aspect has been very much pushed to the forefront, with any comedic moments being somewhat incidental rather than the other way around. The narrative is bleak and, at times, genuinely sad without resorting to being overly “gritty”. It’s a stark contrast to what I wrote about a short while ago with regard to triple-A games; compared to Thief, which wants desperately to be treated as an 18-rated movie, The Witch and the Hundred Knight never feels like it’s trying too hard and, consequently, ends up coming across as far more genuinely mature than Thief ever did despite being considerably more colourful and stuffed full of stylised, bizarre characters.

Anyway. As I noted in my review for The Witch and the Hundred Knight, I’m sure not everyone will be into the particularly abrasive personality of Metallia and her adventures, but if you’re after an interesting action RPG with a compelling, unusual story and some satisfying, challenging game systems, you could certainly do far worse, so check it out if you have the chance.

1499: Per. So. Na

So, Atlus confirmed today that the four new Persona games — Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth for 3DS, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax for PS3 and 360, Persona 4: Dancing All Night for PlayStation Vita and Persona 5 for PlayStation 3 — are coming to English-speaking territories. And there was, as they say, much rejoicing.

My love of the Persona series is well-documented on these very pages, but I’m particularly pleased the three spinoff titles are all making it West. I’m especially excited about Dancing All Night — as evidenced by yesterday’s post, music games are very much my jam, and Dancing All Night is looking very lovely indeed. I can take or leave Persona 4 Arena Ultimax for now — I’m still yet to beat the first one, though I will get to it eventually — and Persona Q intimidates me a little as someone who is still yet to play an Etrian Odyssey game. But all of them are appealing in one way or another; all of them are games I will play and love.

And then there’s Persona 5, which we know next to nothing about so far. I’m really looking forward to this. The Persona team’s previous game on consoles was Catherine, which turned out to be seriously great — not to mention a hefty challenge — and set a certain level of expectation for what a Persona 5 might look like. I’m thinking cel-shaded visuals interspersed with anime cutscenes, and that same sense of exquisite stylishness that has permeated the series since at least its third installment.

As for the others, I would worry that they’re milking Persona 4 dry were it not for the fact that all the spinoff games featuring the Investigation Team and pals are very different beasts. Of the upcoming titles, only Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is remotely similar to a Persona 4 game we’ve already had — and given that game’s surprisingly visual novel-ish nature, I don’t mind all that much, since it’s the story that’s the important thing, rather than the fighting. (Although competitive players might disagree.)

As for Persona Q and Dancing All Night, though? I can’t wait to give them a try — particularly, as I say, the latter. Rise was adorable in Persona 4, and the opportunity to spend another game in her company as she does what she does best — singing and dancing in an indefatigably cheerful manner — is not something to be passed up, particularly with the prospect of other Persona 4 stars putting in an appearance, too. Yu, Persona 4’s original protagonist, looks particularly fetching strutting his stuff — I very much like how he’s taken on a lot more of his own personality since the original game thanks to spinoff titles and the official anime adaptation.

But sadly we have a fair while to wait before we can get our hands on them. Persona Q and Ultimax aren’t showing up until autumn of this year, and Dancing All Night and Persona 5 are next year. Still, the fact they’re not just around the corner is probably a good thing — gives me time to clear my backlog a bit, not to mention review the several games I’ve got on my plate at the moment!

1498: Diva

I’ve been playing a bit of Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F on PS3 recently. Every time I play it, I’m reminded that I really love rhythm games, regardless of whether or not they have “famous” music in them. (More hardcore Miku fans than I would probably be able to do a better job of explaining how each and every one of the tracks in Project Diva F is famous, but I’m happy just knowing “the one from Nyancat”, “the one from Leekspin” and “the one from Black Rock Shooter” for the moment.)

It helps, of course, that Project Diva F is an excellent rhythm game. It doesn’t do anything too complicated with its gameplay — it’s just tapping or occasionally holding buttons to the beat, sometimes breaking for some analogue stick-flicking rather than button-pressing — but has a good scoring system that rewards you in a number of different ways: overall accuracy, successfully completing high-pressure “technical zone” sequences and unlocking the “true” end to a track by completing another special bonus zone. You can then bump up the challenge factor through a nifty risk/reward mechanic whereby it becomes easier to fail a track, but in exchange you get considerably more “Diva Points” to spend on goodies if you successfully make it all the way through.

I tend to judge music games based on how “in the zone” they make me feel. A good music game makes you feel at one with the rhythms in its tracks, and you feel like the buttons you’re tapping have a real connection to the song. This doesn’t necessarily mean just tapping out the beat — I recall vividly explaining to my friend Woody way back when that the various button-presses in Vib Ribbon didn’t necessarily follow the vocal lines or the drum beat, but were in fact more like what you’d do if you were drumming your fingers to the song, and the note patterns in Project Diva F are much the same way. Sometimes you’re tapping out the rhythm that Miku and friends are singing; others, you’re following the guitar line, or the drums, or something else that is prominent in the soundtrack. Learning each track is a matter of familiarising yourself with what you’re “playing” at any given moment, and how it fits in with the song as a whole.

In short, Project Diva F gets me feeling very much “in the zone” while I’m playing. It’s one of those music games that’s hypnotic to play, though the fact that notes come from all directions means that you’re not left with that strange “the whole room is scrolling!” feeling that I always got from lengthy Guitar Hero or Rock Band sessions. The background videos are a lot of fun, too, featuring Miku and her friends getting up to various misadventures just like real pop stars in real music videos.

And the customisation. Man. I have a thing for playing dress-up in video games, and Project Diva F does not disappoint in this regard at all. Each of the game’s characters has a hefty number of different costumes to unlock, with various accessories on top of that. Then you can decorate each of their rooms, and unlock amusing, silly cutscenes when they interact with the items. Some of the items even have a practical function — setting Miku’s alarm clock puts her to sleep, for example, and she’ll wake herself (and you) up when the timer expires. Arguably not all that useful on a TV-attached console such as the PS3, but a nice touch — and I can see it being cool on the Vita version we’re supposedly getting in the West relatively soon.

I haven’t even touched the frankly terrifying Edit Mode yet, in which you can cut your own music videos and set up your own playable note patterns to your own music. If I jump down that particular rabbit-hole, I can see myself getting thoroughly lost, so I’ve held off for now. But I’m sure I’ll investigate at some point in the near future.

If you’re a fan of music games as I am, be sure to check it out; don’t worry that you might not know many of the songs — you’ll pick them up by the umpteenth time you play them to perfect your score!

1492: The Alchemist of Arland, Reprise

I’ve been enjoying Atelier Rorona for the past few days, so I thought I’d talk a little about what I like about it. I know that Atelier Rorona isn’t the best of the three …of Arland games on PS3, but my completionist nature (from a narrative perspective, anyway) insists that I play it thoroughly first before moving on to the supposedly superior Atelier Totori and Atelier Meruru. And while I was originally intending to wait for the revamped version of Atelier Rorona before I played it, there’s still no confirmation one way or the other of whether it’s coming to the West. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t, but either way, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. I started playing it a while back — June of last year, in fact — but only got about ten hours in due to a combination of Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, Time and Eternity and Tales of Xillia. Now, no more interruptions!

So what the hell is Atelier Rorona and why should you care? Well, it’s… I guess it’s an RPG? It certainly has all the trappings of a typical RPG — hit points, experience points, levels, skills — but it’s not at all your usual “band of plucky heroes saves the world” affair. No, instead it’s a rather smaller-scale affair in which you play a young girl called Rorona who is tasked with saving the alchemy workshop in which she works by fulfilling a series of increasingly unreasonable requests. These all come from Meredith Alcock, the head of the Ministry of Arland, who is keen to stamp out alchemy in favour of industrialisation for his own, presumably greedy reasons. Failure to meet the requirements of the assignments brings your game to a premature end; successfully completing them means you’re immediately presented with another one until you reach the conclusion of the game.

Amid all these assignments are numerous visual novel-style narrative paths that are woven throughout the course of the game, and which you can advance by improving your relationships with various characters by performing additional tasks for them. There are numerous endings to the game, and it’s designed to be replayed several times. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to attempt to play as much of Rorona as possible before moving on to Totori, or if I’m going to cycle around Rorona, Totori and Meruru several times in sequence. Either way, I’m presently enjoying the experience enough to want to try and see as many of the endings as possible.

It’s not necessarily the narrative that is the biggest draw in Atelier Rorona though. No, this being a Gust game, the emphasis is very much on an in-depth crafting system, which is excellent yet enjoyably distinct from that seen in Atelier’s stablemate Ar Tonelico. In Ar Tonelico, crafting was a means of seeing various interactions between the characters and getting to know them a little better — plus getting some great items out of the experience in the process. In Atelier, meanwhile, the crafting system is the core of the game: it’s the way you complete most of the assignments in the game, and the solution to most of the quests you’re presented with to earn money or improve your relationship with other characters.

The reason it’s so interesting is because it’s a lot deeper than simpler systems seen in other games that require you to do nothing more than combine specific items to get a brand new item. In Atelier Rorona, you have to take the quality of your ingredients into account — and things like organic ingredients spoil over time — as well as the various “traits” they have attached to them. In many cases, these are nothing more than flavour — if you make a metal ingot that is “stinky” it doesn’t affect the stats of any items you subsequently create using it, for example — but in others you can do things like boost the base effect of a healing or attack item, improve the stats on equipment and improve its quality beyond that which its component items would normally provide.

There’s a lot of number-crunching involved to optimise your alchemy, and you can’t always count on having perfect ingredients available, so sometimes you’ll have to improvise somewhat. The ability to do this is reflected by some ingredient items for recipes being a generic category rather than a specific item. For example, when making a “Spring Cup” item that contains liquid, the exact liquid you put in there is up to you — it could be water, it could be tree sap, or something altogether more unpleasant. The items you choose to put in there will affect the final quality of the item, and experimentation is often very rewarding.

Key to doing well in Atelier Rorona is managing your time effectively, because everything you do causes the in-game clock to tick away, counting down towards each new deadline. Whether you’re crafting something or going out into the field to gather ingredients and fight monsters, everything takes time, so if you want to optimise how you’re playing the game — which is presumably important when going for some of the endings — you’ll need to plan your time well. Probably better than I’m doing right now, but I’m fine with just seeing which ending I get first time, then specifically attempting to pursue one or more of the others on a subsequent playthrough.

If the other two …of Arland games are as enjoyable as Atelier Rorona I can see myself spending a hefty amount of time on this series. It helps that Rorona has an amazing soundtrack — I shouldn’t expect anything less from Gust after Ar Tonelico’s magnificence in that regard — but the gameplay is rock-solid too. I’m looking forward to crafting a whole bunch more pies, bombs and mysterious liquids over the next few weeks, and I don’t doubt I’ll report further on my progress as I continue.

1374: Nep-Ko

Now that I’ve finished Tales of Xillia I am, as promised, once again playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. I’m now pushing 60 hours of playtime, a significant proportion of the last few of which have been spent doing nothing but non-story content.

And lordy, what a lot of non-story content there is. There’s sidequests to do, which tend to have fairly modest rewards but challenge you to battle powerful monsters and master the game’s various mechanics. There’s a crafting system, which requires you to discover new recipes for various items, then gather the materials for them either from enemies or “harvest points” in dungeons. There’s the Scout system, in which you send out numerous NPCs on your behalf to check out dungeons and potentially manipulate the items, enemies, drop rates or experience point gain in particular areas and occasionally discover completely new places. And there’s little tricks like earning money by gathering an item called “Invisible Cloth,” purchasing a cheap costume, combining it with the aforementioned Invisible Cloth to make a new item of clothing and then selling them for 1.5 million credits a pop.

All of this side stuff is conspiring to prevent me from advancing the game’s story. Said story is immensely entertaining as it always has been in the Neptunia series, but Victory’s mechanics and optional content are far more solid than even Neptunia mk2, which certainly had plenty of things to do. The combat system has been refined into something that is immensely enjoyable to repeatedly engage in, the difficulty has been ramped up considerably over the rather straightforward mk2, and just chasing down these sidequests and items is extremely addictive.

Although the Neptunia series is widely derided by the mainstream press, I’m consistently impressed by what it’s managed to achieve over the course of three games. What initially began as something of a cheap joke at the expense of the games industry and the “console wars” in particular has developed into something much more over time — each of the game’s main characters has been developed into their own unique person with a distinctive personality. Okay, there’s plenty of standard anime tropes at work, but combined with the fact that these characters are supposed to represent games consoles and manufacturers, it really works; why wouldn’t PlayStation be a tsundere who enjoys nothing more than working too hard, and why wouldn’t she have a sister afraid of never quite being able to match up? Why wouldn’t Nintendo live in a vibrantly-coloured candyland but actually be ruthless, cold and prone to bouts of completely irrational anger?

By nearly 60 hours into Victory, I’m no longer really thinking of the Neptunia cast as “the Sega one, the PlayStation one, the Microsoft one”; they’ve become great characters in their own right, and their interactions with one another are a real highlight. In fact, such is the popularity and success of the series in its native Japan, it’s got its own anime spinoff which I’m curious to watch at some point, and there are several new games on the way, too.

I find it quite odd but also rather pleasing how much this game series has resonated with me since I first picked it up on a whim out of interest one day. “Objectively” speaking — in as much as it’s possible to be “objective” when talking about pieces of entertainment — there are far better games out there, both in terms of gameplay and technical proficiency, but something about the adventures of Neptune and the gang has really spoken to me ever since that clunky first game, and has ensured that any time something with the words Hyperdimension Neptunia is released, it’s pretty much an instapurchase for me. It’s been a while since a “big-name” game has elicited that sort of feeling from me.

1352: Critical Urgency

I can’t remember if I’ve talked about Velocity here before, so here I am talking about Velocity.

Velocity, in case you’ve never come across it before, is a game from the Brighton-based indie developer FuturLab. It began its life as a PlayStation Minis title for PS3 and PSP, then was subsequently ported to Vita with numerous enhancements as Velocity Ultra. So positive was the reception to the first game, it seems, that the team at FuturLab is currently in the process of putting together a sequel — a sequel that’s looking rather fab, if the early version I had the good fortune to play at the recent <a href=”http://www.usgamer.net/articles/egx-turning-up-the-velocity” target=”_blank”>Eurogamer Expo</a> is anything to go by.

But I want to talk about the original today, or rather Velocity Ultra. I reviewed Velocity Ultra a while back for USgamer and enjoyed it a lot, but I must confess that in the process of reviewing it, I didn’t make it through every little bit of content it had to offer — largely because doing so would have taken significantly longer than I had time for, and also because I’d already seen a lot of it in Velocity’s previous incarnation as a PlayStation Minis title.

I’ve been going back to clean up what I missed in the game recently, though, and I’m reminded of what a fantastic game it is. Beginning as what appears to be a relatively straightforward top-down shooter, the game gradually evolves, changes and grows in complexity as it progresses; firstly, you get the ability to teleport over short distances (including through walls); then you get the ability to drop telepods at strategic points in the level in order to teleport over long distances and take alternative routes. By the time you get through all 50 of the game’s main levels, you’re practically playing a different game.

Things are mixed up along the way, too. Sometimes you’ll have levels that are filled with enemies; other times they’ll be complex maps with multiple paths. Other times still you’ll have a very tight time limit and have to get through as quickly as possible. Different types of level require different strategies.

Where the truly addictive gameplay in Velocity comes in, though, is medal-chasing. Upon completion of a level, you’re ranked according to how many survivors you rescued, how many points you scored and how quickly you successfully completed the level. Attain the highest accolade in all of these categories without dying once and you’ll earn a “perfect” medal, and it’s chasing these “perfects” that is so ridiculously addictive. The reason for this is that the difficulty of achieving the goals is pitched just perfectly; it’s always just tantalisingly out of reach rather than seemingly impossible. Pretty much anyone with a good handle on the mechanics will be able to attain at least a few Perfects along the way, though it does get significantly more difficult as the levels become more complex.

And then there are the secret levels. Secret levels! I can’t remember the last modern game I played that had secret levels, and yet here they are in Velocity, unlocked through getting your tiny Quarp Jet into places you wouldn’t normally expect it to go, usually as a result of checking the map and spotting something out of place. There are a further 20 secret levels on top of the 50 main levels, and not all of them use the standard game mechanics. There’s a 10-level Thrust-inspired minigame, for example; there’s a twist on FuturLab’s earlier game Coconut Dodge; there’s even a version of Snake. Successfully contend with all those and you have the incredibly challenging but rewarding and addictive “Red Zone” and “Blue Zone” levels in which time limits are tight, the pathways tighter and the slightest clipping of a wall will destroy you.

I was delighted that the upcoming Velocity 2X felt so much like the first Velocity when I played it at Eurogamer Expo — and particularly pleased that the brand new sections where you get out of your ship and run around for some platforming sections make use of pretty much the same mechanics, with the only real difference being that you’re now affected by gravity. I’m really looking forward to playing the sequel, but in the meantime, I’ve got a whole bunch of Perfect medals to try and attain, so if you’ll excuse me I’m going to challenge a few more before I go to sleep.

1286: Take a Note, Nep-Nep

When was the last time you played a video game that required you to either 1) map it yourself or 2) make notes while playing? I’m willing to bet it’s quite a long time, unless you’ve either 1) been playing the Etrian Odyssey series or 2) been playing an old-school Sierra game.

I’ve been playing a much more recent game and making notes, however. The game isn’t demanding that I make notes, but I’m getting a strange sense of satisfaction from figuring the game out for myself rather than immediately reaching for the walkthroughs, as is the common approach these days.

The game in question is Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, which I’m now 40 hours into and probably about halfway through the plot, I estimate. I could have raced through and finished by now, I’m sure, but there’s something about this game in particular — even more than the previous two Neptunia games, which I adored in all their flawed glory — that is making me want to take my time and soak everything up.

It’s a different kind of wanting to soak things up to something like Ar Tonelico, though. In the case of Gust’s oeuvre, I wanted to continue immersing myself in the world; spend more time with the characters; see every possible conclusion to that lengthy story that I’d been enjoying so much. With Victory, meanwhile, my enjoyment is coming from the game mechanics as much as the setting and characters.

The three Neptunia games have a fun setting and some immensely entertaining characters, you see, but I wouldn’t call the world especially “immersive”. The only real “exploring” you do is going into dungeons, and these are primarily designed for being 1) a place to fight monsters and 2) a place to harvest items for use in crafting and/or quests. There’s a lot of repeated content — some dungeons are just variations on the same map, a la Phantasy Star Online and Dragon Age II — and thus they’re best regarded as a backdrop for the more interesting stuff that’s going on with the game mechanics.

More so than any of the previous Neptunia games, Victory is a case of a number of individually simplistic systems and mechanics coming together to create something significantly more complicated and deeper than the sum of its parts would appear to create at first glance. Sure, you can play through Victory without exploring these aspects of it, and that’s a perfectly valid way to play. But since mk2 in particular, I’ve found the gameplay of this series so satisfying that I want to indulge myself in all its nuances as much as possible.

Let me explain what I’ve been doing and taking notes on this evening. In doing so, you’ll hopefully see how the different individual systems at play in Victory combine to make something that is a surprisingly deep experience.

Each dungeon in Victory has a bank of monsters you’ll encounter. Like mk2 and unlike the first game, you can see the monsters on the map and attack or avoid them as you desire, though a single monster figure on the field actually represents a party of enemies that might include other opponent types.

Each monster drops at least one item, most of which are “trash” items that don’t have any use by themselves. But most of these items are used either in crafting recipes — crafting an item once means that it’s then available for purchase in all of the game’s shops, so it’s something you need to do — or for completing quests. Already we have several overlapping systems here — exploring dungeons leads to combat, which leads to the acquisition of items, which can be sold, used in crafting recipes or traded in for quest rewards.

As well as tangible rewards, quests also manipulate the game’s “shares” mechanic that has been around since the first game. I haven’t studied the effects these shares have in great detail yet, but if it’s anything like the first two games, the characters associated with a particular nation will be powered up or down according to how high their shares are. In my experience, it’s not a huge increase or decrease, but I’ll need to analyse things more comprehensively to figure that out. In mk2 the shares values also determined which ending you got; I don’t think that’s the case in Victory but I could be wrong.

Now, here’s the twist on the usual “monsters drop shit” thing — partway through the game, you gain access to a mechanic called Scouting, whereby you can send several NPCs off to scout dungeons while you do other stuff. Depending on how much you pay them and their level of proficiency, they may come back with items, money or, more importantly, a report that something has changed in the dungeon they were scouting. This could be a change in the amount of credits monsters drop or the experience points they award, or it could be a shift in the harvestable items or the monsters wandering around the dungeon.

The latter two are significant, because they are the only means of acquiring some items that are, again, used for crafting or completing quests. Most dungeons have at least one optional boss monster, and it’s usually these that are manipulated through the Scout system. Normally, these optional bosses are referred to as “Dangerous”, which simply means they’re tougher than the other stuff in the dungeon and have their own cool battle theme. However, a Scout spotting a shift in the monster patterns may turn them to either a “Risky” monster, which drops chips that can be used to burn discs with specific characteristics, abilities and stat improvements on, or a “Tough” monster, which drops medals that can be traded in to acquire the actual discs required to make use of this mechanic.

Whether a “Dangerous” monster becomes “Risky” or “Tough” when a scout finds it — actually finding something at all is determined largely by chance, but is influenced by both how much you pay the scout and their own abilities — is decided by whether a “flag” item in a dungeon is standing or broken. If it’s standing and your scout spots a change in monster patterns, you’ll come across a “Tough” monster; if it’s broken, you’ll meet a “Risky” monster. These shifts in monster patterns only last for one in-game “day”, though, so if you’ve sent your scouts off to random places all over the world and they’ve all found new monsters, you’ll need to decide which ones to take on. It becomes necessary to think about where you send your Scouts and why, otherwise it’s a bit of a waste of time.

This “flag” system also determines which harvestable items become available when a scout spots a change in the items available in the dungeon.

Confused? I was initially, too, because the game doesn’t explain this in great detail, which I was initially a bit annoyed about. However, having sat down and actually taken some notes this evening on each dungeon — what the normal lineup of collectable items and monsters are, and the differences that successfully Scouting it has, both with the flag broken and standing — I now feel like I understand this game mechanic. It isn’t explained in great detail because it’s not something you need to use to finish the game. You’re told regularly by NPCs that you don’t need to do quests and you don’t need to use Scouts, but if you do, you’ll find more cool stuff.

I could, of course, have simply gone to GameFAQs and looked all this shit up myself. But there’s something inherently very satisfying about figuring out how it all works myself. It makes me feel like I’m really “beating” the game at what it’s doing — learning how to leverage its rules to my own advantage, rather than simply getting someone to tell me how to do it. It’s something I can see myself doing a lot more in the future, as I’m appreciating the game a great deal more as a result.

1253: Nepgagaga the Third

As I mentioned yesterday, alongside Atelier Rorona, I’m also finally getting around to playing the third Hyperdimension Neptunia game, Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1252: The Alchemist of Arland

Now Ar Tonelico is over and done with, I’ve been able to start up some other games without guilt. Specifically, I made a start on Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory today, which I’ll talk about in more detail in a day or two, as well as Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland.

This is my first encounter with the Atelier series. I do, in fact, own all three PS2 games (known as Atelier Iris) and all three PS3 Arland games (Atelier Rorona, Atelier Totori and Atelier Meruru) plus the first entry in the new Dusk series (Atelier Ayesha), but this is my first time playing them — they’re all games that I picked up when I saw good deals a while back, and subsequently added them to my stack of Stuff I’d Like to Play at Some Indefinite Point in the Future.

From what I understand, each “subseries” in the Atelier franchise as a whole does things markedly differently. The PS2 games, from what I can make out, appear to be rather more conventional JRPGs with a lot of game mechanics brought across from the Ar Tonelico series — no bad thing. The PS3 games, meanwhile, if Atelier Rorona is anything to go by, are an interesting twist — and not at all what I expected.

In Atelier Rorona, you play the titular heroine, a young girl with a bit of a self-confidence problem. Rorona is currently employed in an alchemy workshop as a means of paying off a debt to the alchemist Astrid. Rorona is a lovely girl, but unfortunately Astrid is not particularly popular, and as such the kingdom of Arland is doing its level best to get her workshop shut down so factories can be built on its location. It’s up to you to make sure that doesn’t happen.

On the surface, Atelier Rorona resembles a fairly straightforward JRPG. You have big-eyed anime characters who chat to each other at great length via the medium of 2D emote portraits, text and voice acting. You have hit points, experience and levels. You have “dungeons”. But it’s not a JRPG. No, in fact, it’s actually more of a strategy/management game, in which the most important thing is not pushing through the story or powerlevelling your characters, but instead making careful — very careful — use of your time.

The flow of gameplay in Atelier Rorona is pretty straightforward. Roughly every three months or so of in-game time, you’re given an assignment by the kingdom of Arland; meet the deadline and everything’s fine, but fail to meet the requirements and your alchemy workshop will be shut down, prompting an immediate Game Over. The assignments generally require you to turn in items of one or more different types, with your overall evaluation score for the assignment as a whole being calculated on a combination of the number of items you submitted in total, their quality, and the variety of different types of item you submitted.

Completing assignments isn’t the only thing you have to do, though. No, as well as ensuring that your workshop survives for the next three months, you also have to try and improve its dreadful reputation by taking on smaller-scale quests for the local populace, and improve your relationship with your friends by taking on quests for them. And in the meantime, you need ingredients, of course, so you’ll need to spend a few days every so often going on a jaunt into the forest/ruins/mines to go and collect things. And in order to protect themselves on said jaunts, your party needs equipment, of course, which means you need to synthesise the raw materials needed then take them to the friendly local blacksmith to forge them into something new.

It’s initially overwhelming, but once you get into the groove of prioritising what you need to do vs. what you want to do, it’s a lot of fun.

What I find particularly interesting is that while it’s clearly a strategy game, its approach to things is very different to the high level of abstraction found in Western games. Were this a Western-developed game based on the same premise, you’d be spending a lot of time in abstract menus, dragging icons around and that sort of thing. Combat would perhaps be resolved automatically. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, of course; it’s just a little too dry for my tastes. Which is why I appreciate the amount of time and effort which Gust has made to infuse Atelier Rorona’s tiny world with a great deal of character.

In order to do various things, you need to wander around town and visit people. In the process, you’ll stumble across things happening on various occasions, with further events happening according to your friendship level with your various party members. We get a strong feeling of who Rorona is and how she relates to the people around her, not to mention a strong sense of unfolding narrative, but the core gameplay is straight up hardcore strategy/management.

It’s actively stressful to play, but enjoyable in the process; there’s just enough light relief with the characters and story sequences to keep things interesting. I’m already very much enamoured with the Rorona’s rather tsundere best friend Cordelia, who hasn’t explicitly said so yet, but clearly has a big chip on her shoulder about her short stature. I’m looking forward to the inevitable explosion about that at some point, but in the meantime I have a batch of incense to make that just won’t wait…

1232: Knell of Ar Ciel

I haven’t posted about Ar Tonelico for a while, and having just witnessed the “bad ending” of the third game (ooh, it’s bad) I feel now may be a good time for a progress report on my thoughts thus far before I jump in and try for the other endings.

Ar Tonelico Qoga, as the third game is known, is a peculiar beast. While it’s the most outright “perverted” of the series — the previous two games had plenty in the way of innuendo but stopped short of being overly fanservicey, a couple of scenes where the heroines were clad only in towels aside — it’s also probably the most open-minded of the three with regard to the subject matter it tackles. This is a game that revels in sexuality in all its forms as one of its themes, and if you feel somewhat uncomfortable playing it, I feel I know Gust’s work well enough by now to say that it’s probably intentional that you feel that way.

Let me qualify the above statements a little. Insofar as the game is “perverted”, one of its core gameplay mechanics involves the female “Reyvateil” characters (essentially glass-cannon mages if you want to assign them a traditional RPG party role) stripping off their clothes throughout the course of battle. While, yes, this is gratuitous and unnecessary and etc. etc. (for the record: I am an unabashed (well, mildly abashed) pervert and have no issue with pervy fanservice in my entertainment) they do at least make an attempt to justify the reason for this happening to a certain degree in a narrative sense: Reyvateils are artificial human-like life forms that are basically equipped with Wi-Fi (bear with me) and communicate wirelessly with the titular tower of Ar Tonelico in order to produce the magic-like effects of their Songs. By stripping — or “purging”, as the game calls it — the Reyvateils are able to get better reception, so to speak, and can absorb more magic from the tower. This translates, in gameplay terms, to the “Burst” gauge, which represents how powerful the Reyvateil’s spell will be if you set it off right now, increasing at a much more rapid rate according to how few clothes she is wearing. (They stop short of her getting fully naked, I might add — after purging three levels of clothing, she’s down to her skimpies, and purging a fourth time triggers her powerful (and surreal) “Flipsphere” über-attack, at which point her clothes magically reappear.)

Read all that back again, and I’d forgive you for never wanting to give this game the time of day. A game whose female characters strip off in exchange for increased magical capabilities? Sounds like some sort of Male Power Fantasy™. And perhaps it is.

Thing is, though, Ar Tonelico Qoga is far more interesting and intelligent than just pretty girls getting almost-naked. For starters, it’s worth noting that after a certain point in the game, all the male characters will strip off at a moment’s notice too — performing each character’s best attack causes all their clothes to fall off and for you to get a good look at what each of them are packing underneath their armour. Doctor Hikari Gojo’s fundoshi in particular is a sight to behold.

But no. It’s not even about characters getting naked. Much like the previous two games in the series, the really interesting stuff comes about thanks to the “Dive” mechanic — a system whereby you can increase the power of the two Reyvateils by taking a wander through their “Cosmosphere” — a multi-level psychic world that exists within their subconscious. By exploring the two heroines’ Cosmospheres, you learn a great deal about them — facts that simply don’t come up explicitly in the game’s “normal” plot, but which can help inform your reaction to things that go on once you know them.

As is par for the course in the series, each level of the two heroines’ Cosmospheres focuses around some sort of problem that they are having — be it a difficulty coming to terms with who they are, the strange influences other aspects of their personality have on them, or simply something they’re having trouble admitting or dealing with. By interacting with the Reyvateil and the other characters in her Cosmosphere, the protagonist Aoto forges an incredibly strong, incredibly intimate bond with the heroines and gets to know them in a way that no-one else in the world does.

This leads to some really interesting scenes, many of which are touching on territory I can’t recall exploring in a game before. And unlike the gaudy excesses of the strip-centric battle system, they’re handled sensitively and with care; clearly composed by someone who knew what they were talking about.

I’m trying not to spoil anything here for those of you who are reading this and intend to play through this fascinating game, but I feel I should give one example to highlight what I’m talking about, and that is the character who, in one of her Cosmosphere levels, essentially “comes out” as being a submissive or “bottom” with somewhat masochistic tendencies. Given what you know about this character by this point, her confession is not altogether surprising, but what is surprising is that it is actually referenced and explored through more than simple innuendo.

“Don’t take off the chains,” she says after a convoluted, embarrassing and humiliating sequence of events for her, where Aoto is about to give her her freedom. “I feel safe when I’m in the chains, so long as you’re there.”

I’ll confess to not knowing anything about BDSM and related sexual preferences, but I found it fascinating to see this character opening up about her secret passions and desires like this. It wasn’t treated as a kind of “wish fulfilment” scene for male players, either; it was simple, to the point and helped me to understand one aspect of this particular character. In short, it’s the sort of thing I’d like to see explored in more games; sadly, it’s abundantly clear that very few “triple-A” producers would greenlight a game that delves into such subject matter, though thankfully there’s always the “lower-tier” games such as Ar Tonelico willing to step up to the plate and try something new.

As guilty as I feel for what occurred in the bad ending, I should probably go to bed now and absolutely not try to get a better ending now. Right? Right. Suuuuuure.