1751: Speaking in Tongues

My Final Fantasy XIV Free Company was afflicted with something that seems to come to all MMORPG guilds at one point or another recently: that which is colloquially referred to as “drama”.

Ultimately, the drama itself wasn’t particularly serious — no-one was hurt and no damage was done, though arguably an ill-thought-out prank by an outgoing member was not the best means of handling the situation — but what I found interesting was the discussions that followed it up.

Essentially, the conclusion that many of us came to is that communication is important. It may sound like a simple piece of advice — common sense, obvious, even — but it’s so easy to forget, even in an inherently social situation like a massively multiplayer online game. In a Free Company the size of ours, it’s inevitable that cliques form, friendships blossom and smaller subgroups start doing things together. That’s the natural way of things, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. That is, until it starts having a negative impact on the group as a whole for whatever reason — perhaps some members see these smaller subgroups as somewhat exclusionary; perhaps the subgroups find it difficult to relate to other people; perhaps everyone could just stand to be a bit more open and honest with one another.

There were a number of contributing factors in this instance that I won’t bore you with now, but suffice to say that a lack of communication was the root cause of the issues we suffered. And, positively, said lack of communication was correctly identified quickly as the root cause of these issues, and people have been making determined efforts to try and make things right. Although the initial “drama” wasn’t particularly pleasant or fun to witness, it turns out it ultimately had a positive impact; people are talking more, cooperating more and doing more things together. Plans have been put in place for more organised cooperation on the more difficult things the game has to offer, and people are just generally being more helpful and pleasant towards one another.

It’s testament to the overall quality of people we have in the Free Company as a whole that the active members — many of whom could be argued to be implicated in the whole exclusivity/lack of communication thing — have taken this stuff happening on the chin, haven’t got angry and upset and have done something positive from it: they’ve learned from it, identified things that we can do better and differently for one another, and ultimately the Free Company will hopefully be a far more pleasant place overall as a result.

Me, I’m mostly just glad it all seems to be over and done with for now. I hate to see friends fighting with one another, or — in this case — just misunderstanding one another. It’s a great pity that the situation led us to lose a few Free Company members who had been with us since the beginning — and people I enjoyed playing with, moreover — but these things happen, and ultimately we’ll be a stronger group as a result.

Now let’s all just enjoy the game!

1745: Dreams of Ice

Andie and I journeyed all the way back from Aberdeen to Southampton today — a trip that took somewhere in the region of 11 hours altogether. I offered to drive some of the way, but Andie decided that she would be just as comfortable driving as she would be in the passenger seat, so I was relegated to the position of passenger and entertainment-chooser. (We have plumbed the very depths of everything the BBC Radio iPlayer catalogue has to offer.)

We were both quite keen to get back today due to the release of Final Fantasy XIV’s fourth major patch, dubbed Dreams of Ice. This is the penultimate big patch in the series before the full-scale expansion drops next year, and as such the main storyline is starting to build to a climax. Alongside that, one of the principal “side stories” — that of the super-difficult endgame dungeons The Binding Coil of Bahamut — finally comes to an end in this patch, so the most dedicated of raiders can take on what is effectively the game’s “true final boss” with their friends. Meanwhile, there is plenty of other stuff to keep slightly less hardcore players occupied.

I haven’t done everything yet, not by a long shot, and I wasn’t expecting to in the space of a few hours this evening. I have, however, had the opportunity to check out two of the new dungeons — Snowcloak and The Sunken Temple of Qarn (Hard) — and play through roughly half of the new episode of the main storyline. I haven’t yet taken on this patch’s “big fight” against ice queen Shiva, but that’s coming up, and since my friends and I are yet to clear the Second Coil of Bahamut, the Final Coil of Bahamut is probably some weeks or even months away yet.

There’s plenty of new stuff to get stuck into, though, and once the initial excitement of brand-new content has worn off in a few days, there’s a lot of gear to set my sights on. The addition of a new endgame currency (and the retirement of one) has led to a new “tier” of equipment being added to the game, and I’m looking forward to seeing the impact that has on the already spectacular amount of damage that my Black Mage puts out without breaking a sweat. I’m also intending on gearing up my Paladin a decent amount, too, because 1) it’s already catching up with Black Mage and 2) I’m really enjoying the tanking I’ve been doing. With our regular group seemingly putting me in one of the tank roles for the Second Coil of Bahamut, it will probably pay to have some better gear, too, anyway.

But now it is 2:45am and I am very tired. Both Andie and I rallied a bit once we got home and started playing, but now I am abundantly ready to go to sleep and hopefully wake up rather late and reasonably refreshed tomorrow. I have the rest of the week off, so I intend to enjoy it fully by bumming around not doing very much at all except playing Final Fantasy XIV. No change there then, huh?

1722: Shared Hardship on the Shores of La Noscea

I had an enjoyably bizarre experience in Final Fantasy XIV earlier on — and it’s the sort of thing that couldn’t possibly have been planned; the kind of emergent weirdness that only comes about when you put the unpredictability of humans into the mix with a set of systems that always play by set rules, regardless of context.

In order to explain the situation for those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV, indulge me a moment, veterans, while I define a few things.

One of the main systems in Final Fantasy XIV is known as the Full Active Time Event (or FATE) system. These are essentially “public quests” that spawn at predictable points on the map, but on an unpredictable schedule. Some spawn more frequently than others; some are required to progress in certain quests; some are more “popular” than others owing to their convenient location or rewards on offer.

There are three important things to note about FATEs: firstly, they’re time limited, usually providing you 15 minutes to complete the main objective, which is generally plenty of time; secondly, if you are standing inside the blue circle that represents the FATE area on the map and hit just one enemy once — even if it’s just a glancing, accidental blow from a weapon better suited for channeling powerful magics than melee combat — you are considered to have “participated” in that FATE; thirdly, the number of people who participated in a FATE the previous time it spawned determines how difficult it is the next time around: in other words, at peak periods, FATEs are designed to be challenging for larger groups of people, whereas if the last time a FATE spawned no-one took part in it at all, the next time it appears it will probably be completable by a (well-geared) solo adventurer, perhaps with a chocobo companion in tow.

Completely separate from FATEs is a newer system called The Hunt, in which each area in the game has three Elite Marks that players can hunt down for substantial rewards: a B-rank mark, which you can fight solo, and which only offers rewards if you have a specific Mark Bill inviting you to hunt it down; an A-rank mark, which requires about 4-8 people minimum to take down, but which offers rewards according to how much you (and, in most cases, your party) contributed to the kill; and an S-rank mark, which is much more powerful but works along the same lines as the A-rank marks in terms of rewards. We’re mostly concerned with A-rank marks here, since S-rank marks have special conditions that need to be fulfilled before they’ll show up in most cases, whereas A-rank marks will just show up regardless.

A-rank marks spawn on predictable schedules — you can see the timers ticking away for the server I play on right here, for example — and appear roughly once every four hours. What normally happens is that hunting parties will gather when the first marks on the list are approaching the “four hours since last killed” mark, then spread out and start looking for the beasts to respawn. There then follows a phenomenon that has become known as the “A-Train”, where hunting parties move from zone to zone and pick off all the A-rank marks on the list one at a time until they’re all dead, at which point the parties will all disband — unless there’s the possibility of an S-rank showing up — and reconvene again when the first timer on the list hits four hours. It’s like clockwork; it’s perhaps not how the designers intended the system to work when it was first designed — and indeed, it’s been tweaked and reorganised several times since it launched — but if you can get involved (which is usually as simple as throwing up a Party Finder ad with the word “Hunt” in it) it can be both fun and rewarding, if not particularly challenging in most cases.

Anyway, the point here is that when an A-rank mark shows up, a horde of players normally follows — and I do mean a horde. We’re talking maybe 30 or so people minimum, and usually much more than that.

When I was sauntering around the lands of Western La Noscea earlier today, hacking and slashing my way through some FATEs in an attempt to collect the very last Atma crystal I needed to upgrade my Paladin’s relic weapon into its Atma form, I happened to stumble across one of these gatherings, who had showed up to fight the giant crab Nahn. Nahn, as it turned out, had spawned right in the middle of the FATE I had actually run to this area to complete, and as such there was something in the region of 50 people standing around, killing Sahagin indiscriminately to clear the area ready for the big group push towards Nahn. The important thing to note here is that the Sahagin they were hacking, slashing, punching and setting fire to (depending on class) were parts of the FATE I had shown up to complete, so as far as the game was concerned, when that FATE’s boss fell, over 50 people had participated in it.

I’m sure you can imagine what happened a little later, after Nahn was defeated and after I returned to the area to complete the same FATE again as it happened to appear while I was passing through.

Yes, believing that 50 players being in the area, battering Sahagin left, right and centre, was a representative example of the zone’s population at that particular hour, the game adjusted the difficulty of the FATE to cater not to little old me and the two other people who happened to wander into the FATE at the same time as me — oh no — but instead to the 50+ people who were no longer present, now doubtless considerably further down the tracks of this particular run of the A-Train.

I didn’t notice this initially. I thought that the “trash” enemies that you have to defeat before the main boss monster showed up were a little stronger than I remembered, but I thought nothing of it. My companions and I slaughtered our way through them until the boss showed up, at which point I, as the Paladin — a protector “tank” type — got its attention by smacking it firmly upside the chops with my shield, and then began inserting my sword into various parts of its anatomy while my companions got busy with magic spells and poking it with a spear respectively.

I figured something was amiss when the health bar of the boss was moving very slowly despite us all unleashing our most powerful attacks. To put it in context, the boss’ health was declining at roughly the same speed as a well-geared party taking on Ramuh Extreme, currently one of the most challenging fights in the game. Fortunately, the boss didn’t receive a damage buff at the same time as his vastly increased hit points, otherwise we would have been in real trouble.

We persisted, though, shaving away a tiny sliver of health with each hit. Andie happened to be passing by at one point, and joined the fray to contribute a bit of extra damage from her Bard class. We were making progress, a tiny bit at a time, though the longer the fight was going on the more exhausted my Paladin was getting, my ever-declining TP (Tactical Points, used for triggering physical attacks) getting perilously close to the zero mark. I had the boss’ attention pretty firmly, though, so I eased off the powerful attacks and let my (TP-free) automatic basic attack do its work for a little while.

The timer ticked down. We were into single digits of minutes remaining, despite the fact that we’d all entered the fray with the full 15 minutes on the clock. The boss was barely at 50% of his HP, and I was starting to doubt whether or not we’d be able to beat it. Still we persisted.

“DIE DAMMIT!” I typed in frustration, on the /say channel so that my companions (whom, aside from Andie, I didn’t know) could “hear” me.

“for real!!!” came back the response from one of them. We’d shared a moment. It was nice. Still we fought on.

My TP had recovered a bit by now, so I triggered my Fight or Flight ability — which temporarily increases my Paladin’s damage output — and started hacking away with a bit more gusto once again. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but the boss’ health bar seemed to be going down noticeably faster. It looked as if we might just make it.

In fact, it was beginning to look like we’d make it just as the timer hit zero. Would we pull it off?

Sadly not. At less that 1% HP remaining, the timer expired and we failed the FATE. Our characters all fell to our knees and wept for the 15 minutes of effort we’d just put in — and, of course, to add insult to injury, I didn’t get an Atma crystal from that FATE either.

I don’t regret the experience, though. As I say, I shared a moment with those other people who were there at the same time as me, all doubtless thinking the same things, willing their characters to do just that little bit more damage. When I happened to run into them again doing another FATE in the area about half an hour later, we exchanged pleasantries and had a laugh about how the new FATE was quite a bit easier than our earlier tragedy. Then we went our separate ways. It was a real “ships in the night” moment, but it made what would have otherwise been a frustrating experience into something highly memorable — and, indeed, something I ended up wanting to write about at length.

I’ve got one more Atma crystal to go before my Paladin’s weapon and shield can be upgraded, hot on the heels of my Black Mage’s weapon reaching the powerful Novus (second-to-top) upgrade phase recently. If I can have more experiences like the one I just described, though, I really don’t mind it taking a little longer; shared hardships like that — while fairly trivial in this instance — can bring people closer together, even if it’s just for a moment or two.

1700: Showing Your Skills

One of the reasons I think I’ve stuck with Square Enix’s excellent MMO Final Fantasy XIV for as long as I have now — I’ve been playing since the beta, which means my dear character Amarysse is now well over a year old — is that I actually feel like I’m quite good at it. This is a nice feeling.

I’m not saying I’m the best at it, or anything, and I’m certainly not one of those players who makes passive-aggressive comments in the vague direction of those they believe to be “beneath” their skill level (aside: earlier today there was one such jerk in 24-player raid Syrcus Tower berating a newbie tank for what he perceived as a lack of skills, and I was gratified to see all 23 other players admonish him for being an “Internet tough guy”; he shut up shortly afterwards) but I do feel pretty confident that I know how most of the things in the game works, and I’m comfortable helping and advising newcomers with how best to proceed.

As I say, this is a nice feeling, and it occurs to me that there haven’t been all that many games — or indeed activities in general over the years — that I can honestly say that about. I like board games, for example, but I wouldn’t say I’m an expert at, say, Agricola (as my unbroken losing streak will back up), Carcassonne or Catan. Likewise, I like performing music, but I’m realistic about my own abilities; I know there are plenty of people out there who are much better than I am. And likewise, I enjoy writing, too, but again, know that there are a lot of people who are better at that than me, too.

Final Fantasy XIV, though, I feel like I’m largely on top of my game. Sure, I haven’t cleared everything yet — The Second Coil of Bahamut still remains elusive, though this is more a scheduling issue than anything else right now — but I have completed some of the most difficult content, such as The Binding Coil of Bahamut, Turn 5 and the Extreme difficulty version of the Ramuh boss fight. I have a damage-dealer, healer and tank class to level 50 and at least reasonably well-geared in all cases — very well-geared in the case of my “main”, which is the Black Mage damage-dealer class. I know all the dungeons inside out because I’ve run them so many times. I know most of the Primal fights pretty well — with the exception of the Extreme mode variants, which I’ve only done once each — and I’m confident I could talk newcomers through most of The Binding Coil of Bahamut.

Knowing that I’m actually not some newbie scrub who constantly needs help from other people has actually helped me in a personal sense. Being able to complete all this content and even lead expeditions into some of the game’s most challenging dungeons and encounters has meant that I’ve developed my own sense of confidence and assertiveness. I still have some way to go — I’m hesitant about asking people multiple times for something I really want to do, because I don’t want to be a bother, for example — but I’m a lot better than I was.

This particularly comes to mind with regard to the game system added in patch 2.3, known as The Hunt. The Hunt is a take on Final Fantasy XII’s system whereby you’re given “marks” to find out in the world, then substantial rewards for beating them. In the case of Final Fantasy XIV’s take on this system, there are three “tiers”: B-rank, A-rank and S-rank. B-rank hunts can be soloed and you only need to do one per week to get a decent reward. A- and S-rank, meanwhile, require groups of people to beat.

The Hunt is, frankly, one of the most poorly implemented things in the whole of the otherwise pretty consistently excellent Final Fantasy XIV. It offers rewards that are much too big, and it is designed in such a way as to encourage enormous groups to power through it rather than smaller parties being able to take on these challenging monsters without being hassled by others. There’s something of a reputation of A- and S-rank monsters getting “zerg rushed” by hordes of players looking to make some quick endgame currency, and on occasion the sheer number of people showing up for the more lucrative marks can cause game crashes and freezes. Not so good.

By far the worst thing, though, was the fact that it caused a fair amount of tension in the community because, at least initially, no-one quite seemed able to agree how they should be handled. Should the person who found a hunt mark be allowed to engage it in combat whenever they felt ready, or should they wait for other people to turn up first? Is it acceptable for someone to call out a “pull time” for a hunt, even if they weren’t the person who found the monster? Is it acceptable to “reset” a monster (by moving it far enough from its spawn point that it restores all its HP and the fight effectively starts over again) in the name of giving people who haven’t arrived yet the chance to get some credit for the kill? (In the latter case, the official answer to that is “no”; it’s regarded as harassment due to the fact that doing so not only resets the monster’s HP but also individual players’ hidden “contribution points” to slaying the mark, which could potentially affect the rewards they receive.)

Said tension led to arguments — bitter, public, loud ones, as players formerly happy to cooperate with one another were suddenly at each other’s throats over how they wanted to play the game. A number of people decided to take charge and say that this was how things were going to be done from now on, and if you didn’t follow their arbitrary rules, they’d do their best to get you blacklisted by as many other players as possible. Not pleasant… and certainly not conducive to someone like me, who still suffers a certain degree of social anxiety in an online environment, wanting to join in the “fun”.

However, the other day, I can’t remember why, but I bit the bullet and gave it a go. I joined a hunt party and killed some monsters with them. And I had fun. The people involved were nice. No-one was yelling at each other or accusing others of “doing it wrong”. (It helped that it was relatively early in the day in server terms, and consequently there were fewer people online.) It inspired me to go back again and get some more rewards. And then to make my own party and lead it — something I wouldn’t even have considered even just a few weeks ago.

Having conquered that anxiety-inducing hurdle, I feel like I’m in a good place; I’m happy with my own level of skill at the game, and happy that I can help others out. I’m also happy to have a positive influence on those around me — I’ve defused more than a few potential arguments among hot-headed players in parties I’ve been involved with — and generally be a good member of the game’s overall community.

Can’t really ask for more than that, can you? And it’s that feeling that means that, even as I have somewhat less time to play now that I have a full-time job, I’ll be sticking with Final Fantasy XIV for quite some time to come, yet.

1693: Rieze Maxia-Elympios Relations

Even after spending a week writing in great detail about it over on MoeGamer, I’m still having an absolute blast with Bandai Namco’s (or is it Namco Bandai? I lose track) Tales of Xillia 2, the direct sequel to one of my favourite recent console role-playing games.

Direct sequels are quite rare in the Japanese role-playing game space; long running series like Tales of and Final Fantasy typically take each new installment as a completely new experience, with the only things each have in common being perhaps some story themes, some item and skill names, maybe a few character names or references, and little else.

There’s a fairly good reason that direct sequels are pretty rare in this particular genre, of course: they’re damned difficult to do well, and if you’re not altogether careful you’ll open yourself up to accusations of simply recycling old content. This is a criticism that has been levelled at Xillia 2 and not altogether unjustifiably — the majority of towns, field areas and dungeons you’ll visit in the early part of the game are lifted wholesale from the original Tales of Xillia with very few changes.

It’s what you do with that recycled content that counts, though, and in the relatively few examples of direct sequels in the JRPG space, it’s been handled pretty well. Final Fantasy X-2, for example, eschewed its predecessor’s very linear path around the world in favour of having everywhere open from the outset, and multiple things available for you to work on at any given time. Final Fantasy XIII-2, meanwhile, fragmented its experience into a slightly messy tale of time travel with a non-linear narrative, completely at odds with the much-maligned linearity of its predecessor. And Tales of Xillia 2 effectively starts you at the other end of the world from its predecessor, showing life in the games’ unusual setting from a pleasantly different perspective.

That’s not all, though. While Xillia 1’s world was relatively open to exploration, you still unlocked things in a fairly linear progression and tended not to go places until you were told to. In Xillia 2, meanwhile, you still unlock areas of the world according to your progression through the main story, but on regular occasions you are left to your own devices to explore, take on sidequests — many of which are repeatable or randomly generated — and simply do as you see fit in the world.

In this sense, Xillia 2 actually ends up feeling a lot more like a crossbreed between traditionally Eastern and Western approaches to role-playing games. You have the tight, linear, character-driven narrative of a Japanese role-playing game coupled with the freedom to go and see what’s over that hill, in that cave, through those wood as seen in Western titles like the Elder Scrolls series.

In fact, Xillia 2 also takes some heavy cues from Japanese role-playing games that do things a little differently, too — most notably the latter two Persona games. Like those two classics, Tales of Xillia 2’s protagonist is pretty much silent, though he does have plenty of personality despite not saying all that much. And like those games, your party members have their own unique individual storylines that are ascribed almost as much importance as the main narrative.

One of the strongest things about the original Xillia was the feeling that this was a real group of characters that had their own individual personalities, feelings and opinions on everything. Offhand comments in the field, frequently hilarious post-battle mini-scenes and the Tales series’ trademark Skits all helped contribute to an atmosphere of these characters feeling like real people that you were meant to care about rather than collections of stats. (Mechanically, they’re all very distinct, too, as it happens, but for me it’s the personality of them all that really shines.) Xillia 2 continues this with aplomb, this time giving you somewhat more freedom to make choices as to how the main character responds to things. Certain choices will affect your relationship values with your party members, while other choices will change the outcome of scenes. It’s an interesting change from Xillia 1’s very “hands-off” approach to story, and it works well, particularly in the context of making the sequel feel distinct from its predecessor despite reusing a lot of content.

I’m yet to beat the game — I’m juggling it with the ever-present Final Fantasy XIV at the moment — but I’m looking forward to seeing how it all concludes. If you enjoyed (and beat!) the previous one, I can strongly recommend Xillia 2; as a sequel, it hits all the right notes, and you absolutely will not be disappointed with the opportunity to spend more time with these wonderful characters.

If you never played Xillia 1? Well, get that sorted right now, soldier; you’re missing out.

1627: Further Enthusing on the Subject of Alchemy

Finally got around to finishing a playthrough of Atelier Rorona Plus today — thanks in part to picking up a copy of the Vita version, which allows you to transfer your save across from the PS3 version, and playing it in the coffee shop when I felt like a change of scenery during a fit of particularly bleak depression earlier in the day. My opinion of it hasn’t changed, but I thought I would enthuse about it once again for those who haven’t yet tasted of its joys.

Rorona Plus is an interesting game, and one with good pacing. Beginning with simple tasks for which the time limit you’re given is ample — leaving you with plenty of time to take on other tasks to build up your relationships and reputation in the town — the game gradually progresses in such a way that what is the same amount of in-game time starts to feel more and more claustrophobic. The things you’re tasked with making start taking longer to produce, and the journeys outside the workshop to gather ingredients and battle monsters take up longer stretches of time, too.

Fortunately, to counterbalance this, you have a number of additional systems open up as you progress — you’re able to “wholesale” items to the shops around town, allowing you to simply purchase useful “intermediate step” ingredients for more complex recipes rather than having to make them every time, and Rorona gets an assistant who can either be sent out to gather ingredients or craft items independently or Rorona. I must confess I didn’t make nearly enough use of these facilities in my first playthrough, but you live and learn; I now recognise that in order to get everything done to such a standard as to unlock the numerous alternative endings to the game, it’s necessary to make heavy use of them.

Herein lies the interesting thing about Rorona Plus: despite having the trappings of a conventional Japanese role-playing game, the meat of the gameplay is actually more about management and strategy. In order to see the most success, you’ll need to plan your time effectively, and set up systems in order to save time whenever possible. Some of these can be constructed yourself — a furnishing system added in the Plus version allows you to build various items that confer helpful benefits on Rorona and her party — while others, such as the aforementioned wholesale and assistant systems, unlock naturally as you progress in the game, though some can be unlocked sooner if you trigger certain events more quickly.

I’m looking forward to playing through the game again knowing what I know now — plus I believe some stuff can be carried over to another playthrough — and seeking out the other endings. Whether or not I’ll go for all of them remains to be seen — I’m keen to play the rest of the series, after all! — but I’ve had a blast so far, and I’m happy that there’s plenty more where that came from.

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.

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.

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…

1116: Neptunia Master System mk2

I finally completed the shit out of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 tonight. And by that I mean I did pretty much everything it was possible to do in that game. I feel confident in saying it’s one of the most consistently fun JRPGs I’ve played for quite some time — not necessarily the best, no, but certainly one that most definitely has its heart in the right place.

It was a really interesting game on the whole, and one that clearly knew its (small, niche) audience very well. I found it particularly interesting that instead of making a direct sequel to the first game, which apparently sold pretty well in Japan but bombed over here due to appalling review scores, they instead chose to reboot the setting and characters, creating a game which newcomers could happily start with but which those who played through its predecessor could appreciate on a deeper level. Neptunia mk2 wasn’t a retelling of the first game’s story — it was a completely new tale that pretty much assumed the first game didn’t happen. This was a little jarring at first, as characters showed up whom I thought should know each other having played the first game, and the characters IF and Compa were obviously retconned to be childhood friends. Over time it ceased to matter, though, and it became clear that Neptunia mk2 was intended to be taken on its own merits without the baggage of its predecessor — a sensible choice, I’m inclined to think.

Besides proving to be a good jumping-on point for the series (the physical package’s apparent rarity aside), Neptunia mk2 also dialed back its reliance on rather forced game and anime references for its humour, instead opting to focus on its distinctive and entertaining (if rather archetypal) characters. The one notable exception to this was in the game’s “true ending” path, where there’s a wonderful scene shortly before the final boss that features the “older sister” characters (meant to personify the seventh-generation consoles plus the ditzy Neptune/Sega, who has no idea what she’s doing and is more interested in cookies than ruling the world) arguing over whose console is best, while the “younger sisters” (who are really the main characters of the game, and who personify the current-generation handheld systems… and, err, the Game Gear) sit and play Monster Hunter together while talking about how awesome Shenmue was.

A side-effect of the above is that the game’s endearing sense of humour can be enjoyed by pretty much anyone, regardless of your knowledge of the video games industry as a whole. Those who have been playing for a long time, however, will appreciate the numerous sly nods and winks throughout — an area called Atari Marsh; a city called Sim City; characters called Cave and Falcom; and enemies that resemble everything from Tetris blocks to Dr Kawashima’s freaky floating head from the Brain Age/Brain Training series.

The overall plot, which is essentially an anti-piracy, pro-“reward the creators of the content you enjoy” parable, initially appears to be a bit heavy-handed with its message, but this is nicely subverted by the time the previous game’s protagonist Neptune puts in an appearance and berates the other characters for “sounding a bit preachy and stuff”. It has a good narrative arc, building to a suitably dramatic conclusion and one of seven different endings — including a shockingly dark one that is quite impressive in its brutality. (Though it could possibly have gone even a bit further than it did.)

One of the most interesting things about it is its female-centric nature. While there’s a lot of fanservice in it — within five minutes of starting, there are three quasi-“bondage” scenes; several characters are prone to flashing their panties at every opportunity (and the in-game camera is happy to encourage this); and a number of the “event” pictures feature a childishly amusing “jiggle” feature that… well, you can probably imagine — it’s difficult to look on the game as being particularly anti-women.

In fact, it’s very positive about a lot of things to do with sex and gender. The whole (enormous) party of playable characters is made up of women, for starters, and while many of these use anime archetypes as the basis for their personality, they’re all their own individual characters with their own quirks and ways of interacting with each other rather than being nothing but shallow stereotypes. This team of ass-kicking women doesn’t once rely on a man to help them out throughout the course of the entire story — and in fact, the few faceless appearances that men do make throughout the plot tend to depict them as shallow, image-obsessed borderline sex pests, with the exception of the boss character Brave, who is more of a Transformer than a man anyway. (Any good that Brave does for the male gender’s representation in the game is immediately undone by Trick, however, who it’s not an exaggeration to say is a revolting robotic paedophile, and one of the most delightfully odious characters I’ve had the pleasure of virtually beating up for a long time.)

There are also no unnecessary romantic scenes in the game, though there’s a subtle implication that all the main characters in the story are gay and that there’s nothing wrong with this whatsoever. (Because, you know, there isn’t.) This doesn’t mean lesbian melodrama or anything, either; rather, it’s simply accepted that some of these girls like each other a bit more than others, and this is depicted in the way that they interact with one another with obvious tenderness and care. It’s clear that these characters and their relationships have been written with genuine affection and a desire to make them believable people rather than just tits and arse, and I came away from the experience feeling like I had a good understanding of who they were, who they got along with the best and who they clashed with. It was one of those experiences where the final credits rolled and I felt like I was going to miss the characters, which is always a good sign.

So that’s that. It’s all done. No more Neptunia… at least until March, when the third game in the series arrives and I will inevitably become obsessed all over again.