1929: Another Episode

One thing I really like for reasons I can’t quite explain is when one type of media uses conventions from another, and does so effectively.

I’m particularly enamoured with the idea of video games taking cues from TV shows and adopting an episodic structure. This is something that both Eastern and Western developers have been experimenting with over the last few years, and both have approached it in markedly different ways.

The Western approach involves a developer releasing a “season” of discrete, separate games (typically five or six) at semi-regular intervals, with the complete run telling an entire story, and the possibility existing for a “second season” should the first one prove popular enough. (So far, this has happened with the episodic Sam and Max and The Walking Dead games, both by Telltale Games.)

This is all very well and good — particularly as they’re usually priced in such a way that buying the complete “season” is the same price as one regular-sized game, since individual episodes tend to just be a couple of hours long — but the biggest issue Western developers have had with this format is timeliness. It’s rare to get episodes less than a month apart, and in some cases it’s several months.

The most notoriously extreme case, of course, is Valve’s Half-Life 2, which promised to follow up the original game’s story with a series of three “episodes”. A fair plan, the theory behind it being that releasing what was effectively Half-Life 3 in smaller episodes rather than as one big game would allow devoted fans to get their hands on the new game — or part of it, anyway — sooner than they would otherwise be able to. It didn’t quite work out that way, of course: Half-Life 2 came out in 2004, Half-Life 2 Episode 1 followed two years later in 2006, and it was another year before Half-Life 2 Episode 2 appeared in 2007 and ended on a cliffhanger that now, in 2015, remains unresolved due to the continued absence of Half-Life 2 Episode 3.

This is a problem for the episodic format; the power of television series is that you can check in with them at regular, predictable intervals, and your time with the cast and characters becomes something of an “event” in your life, whether you’re marathoning a show on Netflix or kicking it old-school and watching things as they’re actually broadcast on TV. In order for that to work, the episodes need to be close together — typically a week apart. As Western-developed episodic games stand, however, their development cycles are such that releasing them a week apart simply wouldn’t be possible unless they were all developed at the same time, in which case you might as well release them as one big game anyway.

So that’s what a number of Japanese developers have done: take the episodic format (in many cases, complete with teaser, opening credits sequence, “monster of the week”, cliffhanger and end credits) and stick a bunch of them together into a single game.

It’s an effective approach in several ways. Narratively speaking, it allows the story to flow through a number of different distinct but interconnected arcs before reaching a conclusion that — hopefully — wraps them all together and resolves everything nicely. Mechanically, meanwhile, it provides a suitable structure for gradually introducing new concepts at set intervals so as not to overwhelm the player with overly complex systems right from the get-go.

I’ve played a number of Japanese games and visual novels that adopt this approach in recent years, with notable examples including School Days HQ, which quite simply was an interactive six-episode anime series, and My Girlfriend is the President, which even went so far as to conclude each episode with a “Next Time On…” teaser before immediately jumping in.

Two particularly effective examples from the very recent past and present are Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus and Omega Quintet, the latter of which I’m currently playing on PS4 and, as noted yesterday, am adoring.

Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus has an interesting structure. There are four main story arcs, each of which focuses on one of the four ninja schools involved in the overall narrative. These each tell a story by themselves and have their own distinct mood, themes and tone, but they also work together to help build up a full picture of the world in which Senran Kagura unfolds. Once you have cleared all four of the main stories, there’s a final episode that wraps everything up neatly. In effect, the complete game works like one of those anime series that has an abrupt tonal shift partway through its run (either between seasons, as in the case of something like To Love-Ru, or in some cases right in the middle of a season, as seen in Sword Art Online), perhaps moving to focus on a different set of characters, a different storytelling format or simply a change of subject matter.

But it doesn’t stop there. Shinovi Versus also features a short, five-level mini-story for each and every one of the playable characters in the game, with these effectively acting in the same manner as “OVAs” — short episodes, often distributed through means such as first print run mangas, preorders and the like, that don’t have anything to do with the main story and are sometimes considered non-canonical. By the time you’ve finished these as well as the main story, you have a very thorough understanding of every single character involved in that narrative. It’s an effective approach.

Omega Quintet, meanwhile, goes all-out anime in its approach, with pre-credits teasers, opening titles, self-contained narrative arcs that build up the overall story, gradual introduction and exploration of main characters an episode at a time, cliffhangers and end credits sequences. Yes, Omega Quintet is a game in which you’ll see the “end credits” multiple times over the course of a single playthrough, and it’s always satisfying to do so; the episodes are structured sensibly in both the narrative and mechanical senses I mentioned above and it works really well as a format. One more reason to like a game I’m already enamoured with.

I wonder if we will ever see Half-Life 2: Episode 3, though. It’s become something of a joke by now, and we are, to be honest, getting to the stage where people who originally played Half-Life 2 “back in the day” probably don’t care any more (I don’t, though I’d play Episode 3 if it came out due to sheer curiosity) and a new generation of gamers might not even know what it is. It is the great Unfinished Symphony in gaming, and a warning to any other developers considering the episodic approach: take your cues from the Japanese way of doing it, and save yourself a whole lot of hassle.

1912: #WaifuWednesday (special guest: #BoobsNotBlood)

So Wednesday rolls around again, and as we established last week, that means it’s time for Waifu Wednesday.

Before that, a ~~short~~ hefty preamble, though, because it’s being discussed as something of a hot topic on the social media Interwebs at the very time I type this. I refer to the issue summarised under the Twitter hashtag #BoobsNotBlood, in which a number of people have begun pointing out the hypocrisy of popular media in being absolutely fine with graphic violence — the most recent example of which being the new Mortal Kombat game — but immediately shunning anything that has even the slightest hint of being sexual. (Unless, of course, it’s being used for advertising, in which case it’s fucking everywhere, no play on words intended.)

Mortal Kombat, to put things in context for those who are less familiar, is a series that has always prided itself on being graphic. Back on its original release, it was one of the first games to use digitised real actors as its sprites, and one of the first arcade fighting games to feature blood and gore splattering around the screen as the fight continued. Its most notorious feature, though, was the ability to perform a “Fatality” move on a defeated opponent — by entering a convoluted series of button inputs, you could kill your opponent in an assortment of overblown and violent ways, ranging from ripping out their heart to pulling out their spine. The latest Mortal Kombat continues this tradition, even going so far as to provide some of the most obnoxious microtransactions I’ve ever seen — the ability to buy tokens allowing you to perform these Fatality moves more easily without having to learn the button inputs. That’s a whole separate issue, though, that I’m sure we’ll talk about another time.

Anyway. I have absolutely no problem with Mortal Kombat, or indeed pretty much any violent game or piece of media. Violence has become so normalised in modern popular culture that, for the most part, people tend not to bat an eyelid at it any more. (There are exceptions; very realistic gore, torture and any form of depicting realistic violence against women still tends to make people uncomfortable at the very least.) That, in itself, is perhaps a concern for some people, but so long as you’re able to distinguish fantasy from reality — and pretty much everyone is, with the exception of people who already have some pretty severe mental disorders — it’s not a problem as such for your average adult human. (We could get into the whole “think of the children” thing here, but again, that’s probably an issue to tackle another day; I’m primarily concerned with people old enough to make their own decisions here.)

So violence is, for the most part, A-OK in the eyes of popular culture in the West. Sexuality, though, is a big no-no. And this is where the primary resistance to modern Japanese games tends to come from: because the otaku market in Japan — who enjoy fanservice and sexualised content — is a sizeable one with disposable income to throw around, that is the market that many anime and game creators choose to focus their attention on. And with good reason: you go where the money is. It’s the exact same reason we have so many annualised sports games and dudebro shooters here in the West: they sell.

You may not think that otaku games and dudebro shooters have much in common, but there’s one very important aspect in which they’re very much alike: people outside of their core demographic seem to wilfully misunderstand and misinterpret them, and then make a point of talking them down — in the process alienating the people who do like them — at every opportunity. I’ve been guilty of this myself over the years, but since throwing myself more into the things I love to the exclusion of things I didn’t like but explored because I felt I “had” to, I’ve become more content to simply live and let live: I’m never going to play, say, Halo 5 because it just doesn’t appeal, but I certainly don’t begrudge anyone who will enjoy it the experience of playing it.

A key difference, though, is that otaku games are a relatively small market in the West, while dudebro shooters make up the majority of the market. This is the complete inverse of the situation in Japan. The otaku games are seen as a minority, so they’re an easy target; I don’t know if their critics are simply trying to outright get rid of them altogether — I suspect there are at least a few people out there who wouldn’t mind if we never saw a doe-eyed moe girl ever again — and so it’s their controversial aspects — their sexuality — that tends to inflame the ire of critics who, generally, have absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about.

And yet, as Mr Matt Sainsbury of Digitally Downloaded said during a Twitter discussion yesterday, sex has been a crucial part of artistic expression since… well, forever. And yet the moment we see a flash of panties, a bit of cleavage, a provocative pose or a bit of dialogue about boob size, that seemingly invalidates the whole experience in the eyes of some critics. It’s painfully inconsistent and hypocritical to completely devalue an experience on the grounds of sexualised content when extreme violence passes without comment. (To clarify: I don’t have a problem with either, and believe that content creators are free to make whatever they like — or what they feel will be popular — without external pressure from people who speak from an ill-informed perspective.)

So with that in mind, let’s take a conspicuously sexy character for this week’s Waifu Wednesday.

This is Katsuragi from the Senran Kagura series. She’s a member of the Hanzou Academy, a school that trains “good shinobi” — ninjas who supposedly do work for the benefit of all, rather than individual self-interest.

Katsuragi is an interesting character in a number of ways. She’s arguably not the most explicitly sexual of the Senran Kagura girls — that honour probably goes to Haruka, who I’m sure we’ll talk about in the near future — but she is certainly one of those who is most comfortable with her own body, personality and sexuality.

This is an important and interesting point about most of the cast of Senran Kagura, actually; while the series is most widely renowned for its exaggerated jiggling boobs — indeed, the series creator has gone on record as unashamedly saying the reason the series exists at all is because he wanted to see pretty girls with jiggling boobs in 3D on the Nintendo 3DS — the girls aren’t simply well-stacked stick-figures, as sometimes seen in other anime-inspired work. Rather, in most official artwork — and indeed in the game, too — they’re depicted as having healthy curves and, in most cases, being happy with their bodies. (The couple of exceptions to this — Mirai and Ryoubi — have their dissatisfaction with their bodies explored as part of their own personal story arcs.)

Like most of the cast of Senran Kagura, it was not happy circumstances that drew Katsuragi to the Path of the Shinobi. I shan’t spoil her personal plot here, as it’s explored in more detail than I can give justice to in a few short paragraphs in both Senran Kagura Burst and Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus (and, presumably, the recently released Estival Versus, which is currently only available in Japanese). Suffice to say, though, Katsuragi has a fair amount of personal demons to take on, and a lot of sorrow to deal with.

She has two main means of dealing with these things: firstly, by acting as an “older sister” figure for many of the other group members, who recognise this and refer to her as “Katsu-nee”, “-nee” being a Japanese suffix to denote an older female sibling, but also often used in contexts like this where intimate personal relationships take on a “sister-like” quality. She is a character that her friends in Hanzou look up to and trust greatly, and often confide in.

Her second means of dealing with the emotional baggage she’s been dragging around with her is being a complete pervert, and it’s this aspect of her personality that is more obvious from the start. It’s also this aspect of her personality that cause many people to write her off as little more than a shallow, fanservicey character, but it goes much deeper than that.

Katsuragi’s perversions — particularly her habitual groping of her peers’ breasts — are a form of self-expression for her, and a reflection of the fact she has had to, to a certain degree, bring herself up without some of the normal “boundaries” set for youngsters. She herself refers to her behaviour as sekuhara (sexual harassment) and confesses in Shinovi Versus that she uses it as something of an icebreaker. Her peers don’t always see it the same way, of course — it’s a rather intimate invasion of personal space, after all — but as they — and the player — come to understand Katsuragi, it becomes more and more apparent that this exaggerated behaviour of hers is simply a front for how she’s really feeling inside; she maintains the facade of an energetic, enthusiastic, overly sexual young woman in order to avoid having to burden others with her own emotional turmoil; while others are happy to confide in her, she has some difficulty in being truly honest with them.

Katsuragi develops something of a rivalry with Hikage from Homura’s Crimson Squad. In many ways, Hikage is the polar opposite of Katsuragi, in that while Katsuragi is vibrant and, at first glance, extremely open about her feelings and passions — although as we’ve just talked about, the truth becomes apparent over time — Hikage is dour, emotionless and seemingly unable to enjoy anything. Katsuragi makes it her mission to try and get Hikage to “enjoy” a fight between the two of them, even though they are technically on “opposite” sides of the good/evil divide between shinobi. The two eventually strike up something of a friendship as a result; opposites, as they say, attract.

Katsuragi is an unashamedly sexual character who likes to show off — she explicitly says so when she performs her Ninja Transformation sequence in Shinovi Versus. Where critics tend to habitually misunderstand her — and the Senran Kagura series as a whole — is that this isn’t just there “for the sake of it”. It’s part of who she is, and that should be acknowledged — without shaming it — but, more importantly, it’s not the entirety of her being. She’s a complex, interesting character, and very much one of my favourites in the series, and that’s why I’ve devoted so many words to her today.

Thank you.

1889: My Dear Ninjas

Having finished Criminal Girls, I was all set to make a start on Hyperdevotion Noire, a game that I’ve been very excited to play for quite some time. But I didn’t; I decided I should try and clear out some of the games I’ve left half-finished first, the main one being Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus.

Shinovi Versus is an underappreciated little diamond in the Vita library. It’s an enjoyably over-the-top 3D action game vaguely in the vein of Dynasty Warriors (in that in a number of levels you hack and slash your way through hundreds of enemies, and your combo count frequently reaches the thousands) but also providing a fun take on fighting in 3D.

There are two… well, maybe three core appeal elements when we’re talking about Senran Kagura, and Shinovi Versus in particular. The first is, of course, the fanservice element; let’s not beat around the bush here, it’s the reason the series exists in the first place. The girls are pretty, their boobs are jiggly, the costumes are sexy and as you fight, they get ripped. Despite the girls technically being ninjas and using a variety of rather painful-looking implements to battle one another, no-one ever seems to really get hurt or killed; the main damage anyone suffers is to their pride, since a well-timed Ninja Art at the conclusion of a bout can cheerfully whip off the underwear of your opponent, leaving them in no doubt as to who is the winner.

But anyway. The two main things I wanted to talk about were the narrative and the mechanics. The narrative I’ve already talked about in past posts: considering the game is regarded by outsiders as little more than gratuitous fanservice, if you’re unfamiliar with it you may be surprised to note that the series features some excellent characterisation, including characters with genuine development and growth over the course of their stories. It’s a game that’s not afraid to juxtapose the serious and the absurd, either; while the main storylines for each of the four “schools” involved in the overall plot are fairly serious in tone, the girls’ individual stories are more light-hearted in nature, leading to some ridiculous situations. It effectively allows us to see the cast “at work” and “at play”, and it gives us a pretty good picture of who they all are as people.

Mechanically, the game is a delight. The control scheme is simple to understand, but the depth comes from the wide variety of characters and how very differently from one another they all handle. Some are friendly to simple button-mashing — Asuka is a good example, particularly once she unlocks her spinny death tornado move — while others demand mobility, observation, timing and sometimes unconventional tactics. By the end of your time with the game, you’ll have at least one “favourite” character, both in narrative terms and mechanically, too.

It’s a game bursting with content. There are four separate “episodes” to the story, each focusing on a different main cast, and each has a different tone. The scenes involving characters returning from Senran Kagura Burst on the 3DS are heartwarming, while the scenes involving new characters give us a good idea of what makes the newcomers tick. Depending on which order you choose to play the stories, you’ll meet all the characters from several different perspectives, and between all these angles — and side missions like the girls’ individual stories — you’ll get a solid understanding of who everyone is and how they all relate to one another.

Not bad for a fanservice-heavy hack and slash. I’m pleased to be rediscovering it now that Criminal Girls is done and dusted, and looking forward to spending some time with the characters I don’t know all that well yet.

1805: Christmas is Over

Well, it’s the evening of Sunday December 28, and I’m counting down the hours until I have to get up at some ungodly hour in the morning and trudge all the way to work. (Okay, I drive most of it, but there’s still an honest-to-goodness half-hour trudge at the other end, which I’m really not relishing in the current cold weather.)

The Christmas break has been nice, and the fact I’d spent the previous few months at work, away from home (as opposed to working from home as I was previously) has made me appreciate it somewhat more. I’ve enjoyed the time off, I’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to just relax without the pressure to “do” anything, and I’ve enjoyed having the time to indulge in some favourite games, TV shows and anime without time commitments.

I finished the Hanzou story in Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus today — that’s one of the four stories in the game. I enjoyed it a lot; gameplay-wise, it’s a significant improvement on the first game thanks to its jump to 3D, and its narrative is interesting. Throughout the course of the story, we learn some new things about the main cast as well as get introduced to the newcomers in this particular installment: the girls of the Gessen shinobi school, and the new members of the Hebijou school that Homura and her gang hailed from in the original game before being exiled following the events at Burst’s finale.

My initial reaction to the Hanzou story was that I was slightly disappointed there weren’t more of the visual novel sequences giving background on the girls and how they were feeling about various things — but on balance, I think there was a good amount. The game didn’t try to do too much: it introduced one major plot/background point per character through several of these sequences peppered throughout the course of the entire narrative arc, and the rest of the story was delivered through snappy but enjoyable talking-heads sequences that were just about characters talking to one another, not narration. It worked well, and it teased just enough information about the Gessen girls to make me want to find out more about them: fortunately, I can now do just that by playing through their story, followed by Hebijou and finally Homura and her friends in the Crimson Squad.

I also, as we saw yesterday, made a start on Final Fantasy. I’ll be writing more about that as I make more progress through it, though with my intended creative writing project in January this will likely be over on the Squadron of Shame forums rather than here.

I’ve also watched some anime for the first time in what feels like months; I’ve been continuing with the farming-themed series Silver Spoon, which was recommended to me by some anime-loving friends, and I’ve been reminded what a good show it is. It has an enjoyably understated plot about a teen boy feeling somewhat out of his depth in an agricultural academy, and some appealing, entertaining characters who occasionally reference recognisable anime tropes without being defined by them. There’s one character in particular who looks like he would be more at home in a series like Dragon Ball Z, for example, so seeing him mucking out cows and working with chickens is rather entertaining, to say the least!

Anyway. Early-ish night for me tonight due to the aforementioned Danger of Work bell tolling, so I’ll sign off there and simply say I hope you all had as restful and pleasant a Christmas as I had, and are looking forward to a good new year.

1794: Oppai Fightin’

Alongside Senran Kagura Bon Appetit, which I talked about a bit yesterday, I’ve also been playing some Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus. I haven’t delved into it particularly deeply so far, having only played through three of the Hanzo girls’ short mini-arcs (effectively an “arcade mode” of sorts, challenging you to complete five stages of gradually increasing difficulty in succession while working through an eminently silly side story) and spent far more time than I’d care to admit gambling in-game currency on the “Lingerie Lottery”, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played so far.

The thing I liked about Senran Kagura Burst on 3DS is that it was a thoroughly modern take on Streets of Rage-style brawlers — you know the kind: walk from left to right punching things in the face and trying not to get punched in the face yourself. I was a little worried about Shinovi Versus, to be honest; I liked the simple but satisfying button-mashy gameplay of Burst so much that I was concerned the shift to 3D wouldn’t be quite as enjoyable to play, what with those pesky extra degrees of freedom to worry about.

Turns out I needn’t have been too worried. While the 3D gameplay does have its own idiosyncrasies — the camera can be a pain on occasion — at heart, it still feels very much like Senran Kagura. That means obscenely huge… combos (it’s not at all unusual to see combo counts numbering into the hundreds or thousands — though with the more sprawling nature of most stages now, it’s significantly more challenging to chain one long string of connecting attacks together without a break), single characters wading into swarms of enemies and punching them into orbit, special moves that range from the faintly plausible to the utterly ridiculous and, of course, ninja girls fighting until each others’ clothes fall off.

Senran Kagura Burst felt a tad button-mashy at times, with the Hanzo girls in particular suffering a little from the “hammer the light attack button” syndrome. To be fair, as the girls levelled up, new combos became available that often required you to carefully time your use of the heavy attack button as well as the light attack, but for the most part you could get through a lot of the game with a single button.

Shinovi Versus initially feels a little like this, but try a few different characters and their differences start to become apparent. Poster girl Asuka is very much of the “hammer the light attack button” mould and consequently is suggested as a beginners’ character, for example, while Hanzo’s resident adorable character Hibari serves up an array of difficult-to-use but effective close-range slap and kick attacks, plus the strange little quirk that it’s actually quite tricky to get her out of the air and back onto solid ground once she’s up there, thanks to the fact that her aerial light attack appears to cause her to trampoline up and down on whoever happens to be unfortunate enough to be underneath her.

Your opponents are more than simple damage sponges, too. They block, they parry, they counterattack and you need varying approaches to even get near them in some cases. Unlike Burst, there’s not really one simple strategy that will serve you well for the whole game; instead, you’ll have to assess the situation on the fly and determine whether you’re best off charging head-on, trying to get behind them, attacking them from above or waiting to counter them when they approach you. It makes for some enjoyable and thrilling battles that are a lot of fun to take part in.

I haven’t got far in the story yet but the early chapters of the Hanzo girls’ narrative appear to pick up nicely where Burst left off, with the group’s now well-established character traits now more evident than ever before. The rather quiet Yagyuu’s obsession with Hibari is kind of adorable to see, particularly as Hibari is a complete contrast to her in almost every way: Yagyuu is reserved and uncomfortable with expressing her emotions, even as it’s clear she genuinely loves Hibari, while Hibari is very loud, emotional and open with her affections. I can see there being some potential for interesting situations between the two of them as the story progresses, and I’m looking forward to seeing it.

So far it seems to be a worthy successor to a game I ended up enjoying a lot more than I expected — a game whose appeal goes far deeper than the fanservice and smut it’s primarily known for. It’s a fine addition to the Vita library, and a great example of how to use a recurring ensemble cast very effectively. I feel it’s going to keep me busy for a good few hours yet.