The RPG Duelling League
RPG Debate => RPG Reviews => Topic started by: Grefter on February 19, 2011, 08:13:37 AM
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The reasons everyone should play Deus Ex.
Everyone should play Deus Ex. Not just because it is one of the most widely positively viewed games you can find around and not just because it is one of the "classics" that missing is like being a Cinema buff and not having seen Schindler's List. It should be played because it is the game that grabs half the crazy ideas you and your friends have ever had for a game and makes it work.
Do you remember when you just watched the Matrix and guys in long coats from the future that took on armies of dudes with assault rifles with pistols was cool? This game does that. Remember when you read about Nanotechnology and thought it was the coolest thing ever and how it would let you fix damaged organs in cancer patients? Well it doesn't do that, instead it lets you lift giant crates, regenerate from any wound and detonate anti-armour small arms as soon as they are fired at you with your mind, which is almost as cool as the cancer thing. This is the game that took your young impressionable ideas of super megacorporations led by hypercompetent villains that buy out the government branches while forming the Illuminati come to life in a fully realised world. It is terribly melodramatic and plays it so straight that it is delightful. Topping it all off? The game is just damned fun to play.
Call me old fashioned but that is the main reason to play the game. Ignore all the hype for it and ignore the plot. You just have a game that is straight up fun to play. You have choices from the very start on how you want to shape your journey picking skills that will determine your approaches to your objectives. What is this swimming skill? I am a super secret agent man I won't need that! And you won't. Unless you choose to go that route! Then for a cheap investment you can effectively swim underwater for about 10 minutes. Even splashing into a few different areas is rewarding, there is no need to hyperfocus on one or two skills when being passignly competent at lockpicking, bypassing electronic security and computer hacking all will provide you a wide array of ways to approach your objectives. There is no need to be a perfect shot with a rifle if you can take that side door and have as long as you want to line up your shots.
Then of course there is simple choices that are not even effected by your choices of skills, do you roll out guns blazing or do you take a more tactically minded stealthy approach, both are just as viable as one another. One obviously trends more towards your skill choices being combat based clearly, but there is distinct variations to both paths that can be taken even still.
Most importantly however is that not only does the game give you all these tools to play with, it gives you sandboxes to use them in. Not a big vast open world to do as you will to your hearts content, but carefully crafted sequences of challenges for you to meet. Some paths may be more difficult than others given your skillset, but enough searching or persistencecan even see you through paths that are counter to your chosen skillset if you insist on proceeding. This isn't a case of sequence breaking, but rewarding self set goals, you are on the path you chose for yourself. Of course that is assuming you just stick to one path. For those slightly more obsessive players the world is so well populated that the more you search the more of the fully realised world you will experience. You can run around a part of Paris and find a drug dealer asking you to break into a nearby bakery to steal some drugs hidden in the oven overnight. You only run into encounters like this by exploration, both the dealer and the bakery are entirely optional areas of a larger section of a Paris city area. Don't let my description of it not being an open world mislead you. The game has its boundaries and limited areas, but these are big areas that you can easilly sink some time into.
It is a game of choice and consequences, not all of which are rewards, but never are an unexpected punishment. There are at times even rewards for pushing the game in directions that are counter to what people are telling to you do in game. It creates for a wholely unique gaming experience. A world with a refined plot that will swerve if the player pushes it and keep running, a shooter that is refined to the point where gunfire is something that can be largely ignored and if you desire lethal approaches even completely bypassed, in some cases it even being the safe route to disabling a target. There is boss fights and they can all be bypassed or completely ignored if desired. The largest criticism for the choices you will find is likely that some of the choices are fairly shallow or are presented and immediately resolved, however the game comes ahead with the sheer number of choices that you have all creating their own little minor permutations on what is still a largely carefully constructed story that someone wants to say. This is choice without "But thou must!" or same responses to alternate dialogues. This is a game where choice is something you make and you deal with the consequences of it and the game keeps going. Events are bigger than the player themself, but the player is still a central actor in the larger story.
So yes. You should play this game whoever you are that is reading this. Yes you Ralp. Andrew. Or Gregory. Whatever your name is. You there with the eye and maybe another one to the left or right of it. This is a fantastic game and one that you should have played already, but if you are still reading this then you are clearly not playing it or replaying it right now. Get to it. It costs a tenner. At the time of typing this you can get it for a $20 with one of the greatest examples of how to not learn anything from your predecessor and the follies of restricting all versions of a game because of one platforms weaknesses. There is even currently a Square Enix sale going on with this and a bunch of other stuff for $75 if you are so inclined (19/02/11 sale is about to end even).
The game is amazing. The game is available and it is old enough that it will run on almost anything you can get your hands on. There is bug fixes that should fix almost any issues you can see.
Once you are done playing it you should also watch the mind blowing speed run of it to watch a man Air Surf grenades off buildings to stop from dying or using them to teleport through walls.
Edit - On the off chance that anyone ever listens to a word I say when I tell you that this game that is awesome that you will play and go "Oh my gods that was awesome why did no one ever tell me about this game!??!?!?", there is a modded executable you can get that will let you play a the game a bit more consistently on newer systems. http://kentie.net/article/dxguide/ Of great note is also this work that he has done http://kentie.net/article/d3d10drv to enable DirectX 10 support to the game so you can do some fairly neat things to take some of the rough edges off the game graphically (specifically enable V-Sync which does just that).
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We need more Grefter the Fashionista.
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I will second that Deus Ex rant. It's just delightfully put together from top to bottom and does a great job at letting either explore or charge straight ahead.
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I'm not sure why I haven't played Deus Ex yet.
Rest assured that when I do I will rant and rave about how nobody recommended me this game, now go play this undiscovered jewel.
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It is a first person game and you play with a touch pad is probably why. Or you could play the PS2 version. Then I make fun of you.
I should probably grab my fashion rants and Golden Sun rants and throw them in here (Maybe edit together?).
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I thought it could be played with a keyboard? That is how I always choose to play FPS games on computer. If it can't, that might be why I haven't played more of it. Man, fuck mouse FPS.
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You uh can, it does actually come from the era where the default controls had that as an option. It controls infinitely more imprecisely though, but whatever floats your boat (you can tell you grew up on a Mac there Marathon boy).
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The Ten days of Soddom a log of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn
Here is a condesned version of my posts regarding Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. A game that everyone should play as a way to know what not to do with RPGs. Note that this takes place over a month or so as play takes place mostly on the bus to and from work or just prior to sleeping. That and I just plain had better things to do, like eat lead paint chips and to defecate on Police officers in an attempt to get myself away from this game.
20/12/10 Day 1
I have started Golden Sun DD as well, why I have spent money on it I don't know. I just needed something different to play. I am loving it. It is bad in all the ways I expect GS to be, it is easy, stupid and it sucks hard.
On the other hand I get to make Matthew make ANGRY FACE in response to every piece of dialogue and laugh at how inappropriately the game interprets that response to be. Like Garret's retarded son being a retard ANGRY FACE and Garret snaps back at you telling you not to get pissy at him.
On the other hand though, the world did not need to know that Garret grows up to have a pornstache in his mid forties.
31/12/10 Day 2
I don't feel like actually saying all this again because yeah. A chunk of text from IRC are quoted here
<Grefter> Sooooooooooooo.
<Grefter> Golden Sun Dark Dawn just went to a really dark place.
<hinode> ff.net?
<Xeroma> as in can't see shit on the screen?
<Grefter> No as in it shocked me and I had to close my DS.
<Grefter> Go to get the Ice gem thing from a ruin so that I can make big blocks of ice.
<Xeroma> uh oh
<Grefter> You come across the Ice Queen.
<Grefter> "NO Don't take me back I don't want to be a slave ever again."
<Grefter> So boss fight ensues against this women against her will.
<Grefter> ACTUAL LINE FROM TYRELL AFTERWARDS.
<Grefter> "I guess she knows her place now."
<Grefter> Wow.
<Grefter> Just fucking wow.
<Namagomi> ...jegus wtf
<Xeroma> that's bad even for GS writing
<Grefter> Five across the eyes and go make me a sandwich.
* Soppy-ClearGenderRoles is now known as Soppy-CLEARGENDERROLES
Covers it.
What the fuck Camelot.
31/12/10 Addendum
Only posting it here so that they are together because I feel bad that people are going to be skipping Dark Dawn because of one line.
When I stopped going oh my god they actually had that line and opened up my DS there was a bit more context to it. Karis says that she feels bad about forcing it on the spirit against her will and Tyrell does some embararssed sad face emoticon thing. Someone wonders whether the spirits came first or if the stones that they are kept in came first.
Then the monk dude from the first games that had been tricked into freeing her says "It doesn't matter she is back where she belongs now".
Camelot: What do you say to a woman with 2 black eyes? Nothing, she has already been told twice.
Keep it classy.
31/12/10 Response to why are you playing this game?
To revel in mediocrity. I think Golden Sun is a very important RPG series. It shows what happens when you make an RPG and know exactly how it all goes together without actually putting any thought or effort into it thereby making an utterly shit game that gets all the essentials right.
Also managing to do this three times, each time getting critical acclaim and great reviews.
04/01/11 Day 3
So some people wanted more Golden Sun Dark Dawn nonsense. I haven't been playing it much becase it is stupid.
But anyway, so after sending the women back to the kitchen you can now restart the Alchemy Forge in one town that you have gone back and forward to constantly so that you can fly to another mountain peak so that you can try to go back to your original fetch quest. This game is matryoshka doll of fetch quests much like BoF 2 is.
NOTE: FROM THIS POINT ON THERE IS NO DIALOGUE IN GAME.
Anyway, so you fly to the other mountain by going through a short floating platform sequence. Then the only thing you can do over there is go into some ruins and start up a series of clockwork devices by solving horoscope themed puzzles. Once you have all them started the Sagitarius puzzle (the last one) causes the mirror outside the temple entrance to have an arrow shoot out of it. You exit out of the ruins again and use Grip synergy on the arror and it starts the mirror swinging as it was a pendulum on a giant horoscope clock. Because you started this clock a path down from the mountain levitates up from no where and you exit to the world map.
I have no words to describe what the fuck here. This is what I mean when I say the game has all the key things to make a decent RPG. There is a long sequence to get to the next town, a series of puzzles and fairly short challenges. There is just nothing connecting these things, no reason for them, no explanation for them at all and no way at all of knowing the effect these things will have. Why do you solve these puzzles? Because they are there and it will probably get you to the next place. Somehow.
Who the hell made this ruin? Why would you make it like this? This was supposedly a special road that ancient civilisation used. How did the path levitate? How do you make that work on clockwork? Why the hell is it on a horoscope clock? lolanswers
Worst part of it? There was actually a block puzzle Lufia styles where you have 3 blocks to put in spots without overlapping the paths of the blocks that I looked up the answer for online because I was lazy and didn't feel like thinking about puzzles at 8 in the morning on the bus to work while I am listening to a podcast. Easy puzzle, just feeling lazy. You want to know what the answer was? LOL CAST THIS SPELL THE GAME GIVES YOU IT WILL TELL YOU THE ANSWER.
This game has easy puzzles and then like 1/4 of the way through the game it gives you a solve the fucking puzzle spell.
Note that this doesn't quite end up being as bad as it sounds, there isn't many other places the spell actually tell you where to move objects around, just tell you when you can certain Psynergy on objects. So I guess instead of a solve puzzle spell it is a solve mildly thought invoking puzzles spell
05/01/11 Response again to why are you playing this game?
Similar reasons to why I played FF13. I payed full price for entry on this ride, so I sure as shit am finishing it.
06/01/11 Day 4
So we finally stopped dicking around and made it to the town where we should meet Kraden that is right next to the mountain area where we can find the Mountain Roc and get to the outer layer of the Matroyshka Doll fetch quest. FUCK YES SOMETHING MIGHT HAPPEN. The new recruit left and asked us to get the band to play a specific and she would come back in town.
Can't find the dude in town. The band doesn't have an option to pick the song to summon the chick. So you leave town. You get some dialogue of lol couldn't find that bitch or dude. Then 2 of the band members that can play the song mention that they are going on journeys and that someone else is already on a journey and that there is only 6 people in the world that can play the song.
You are fucking kidding me.
07/01/11 Discussing why it is stupid to throw a stupidly easy fetch quest for you to talk to people that show up along the way during the main plot so that you can summon second Wind user recruit
They didn't have to do that though. Svelta clearly wanted nothing at all to do with getting the Roc feather and that she was cool to wait until you had done that shit before coming to chill with the party. That is all they needed to justify it.
07/01/11 Day 5
The game threw out some more fetch quests and then it crashed. I lost back to before the band incident. Not sure when I will pick it back up.
11/01/11 Day 6
So I forced myself to play through the parts I knew. This game goes much faster when you know exactly where you are going and where to search in town for all the hidden stuff worth shit. I am now falling asleep to uncurse a tree or something. Again I am not exactly sure why this is happening. I thought I was supposed to be saving some pirates kid from being boiled alive, but hey I ended up in this town, talked to a woman and she said to do it. So it is happening.
Also a side plot that only really comes up in books and in one area of the game (has been expanded in books in like every town since that one area) is the exploits of Emperor Ko and his general failings as a human being. I approve of this message.
13/01/11 Day 7
Fuck this game. Fuck it in its stupid fucking everything. It pushed beyond the point of mediocrity in how far it will stretch being mind numbingly dull. The fetch quests have no end in sight as the fetch quest that started the game is resolution to another fetch quest that we only just recently got (that we still have other things spiral off to fetch to get answers from). I lost my patience with a 10 minute text scroll of bad dialogue between a Djinn and 2 Trees that told us that the princess fetch quests were in another castle. I hate everything.
13/01/11 Response to "So the game is Lufia 1?"
No. Lufia 1 is a fucking masterpiece compared to this shit. Lufia 1 has actual classical story telling techniques in it. Lufia 1 is regardless of all the bullshit an overarching plot that is a love story.
This game is about getting a feather to fix a jetpack that some dick head broke. I am about to get that feather and in doing so going to keep going with more sidequest bullshit that oh my god just make it fucking stop.
I am clearly not framing this properly. There has been a single sequence with the main villains at this point it is a good few hours into the game and is long out of sight by now. One scene with someone who is probably a lackey that was never properly defined and happened a couple of hours after the main villains. Otherwise there has been absolutely zero interaction with your antagonists. It has just been chains of fetch quests to do completely bat shit insane random bullshit.
That is right. This is a game about a magic back pack and it is FUCKING BORING AS SHIT. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU SCREW THIS UP.
I haven't been this pissed off about a game since FF13 god fucking dammit.
13/01/11 Transcript of IRC during the above posts. Presented to you by DjinnAndTonic who felt the need to log my bursts of anger.
[00:19] <Grefter> ;'jklfdsff THIS GAME
[00:20] <Grefter> So go through a forest maze in Golden Sun. Jump on a Tree branch. Get lifted up and talk to a tree with a face on it. Half way through the conversation the party gets suprised by a talking cliff right behind them that they didn't see.
<Grefter> This entire fucking game is full of "ERrrr what do we do here? Oh I know talking cliff from original games"
[00:21] I wish someone had been actually physically pregnant with the idea of this game.
So I could build a time machine and punch them in the stomach.
<Grefter> So then the fact that this game is a complete and total miscarriage would at least be my fault.
<Grefter> Wait, sorry, it isn't a talking cliff.
It is an arse ugly tree that just looks like it is made of rock.
[00:25] <Grefter> STOP TALKING OH MY GODS JUST STOP TALKING
<Grefter> For fucks sake.
So much stupid shitty dialogue to get a fetch quest.
And it still isn't over.
[00:28] <superaielman> You really make that game sound worse than GS1.
<Grefter> We have to have the next part of another fetch quest pushed along.
<superaielman> And that is pretty damn bad
[00:29] <Grefter> It should be played.
FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
FUCK FUCKING FUCK YOU
<Grefter> The solution to the next fetch quest?
[00:30] Involves resolving the fetch quest that starts the fucking game.
MY GODS I WANT TO FUCKING PUNCH SOMETHING>
[00:31] <SageAcrin> So basically they decided that what people liked about Golden Sun was "Everything" and didn't bother examining anything and instead cloned GS1 in a haphazard way that accidentally made more fetchquests, then tossed in GS2's battle system.
I see.
<Grefter> SO MANY FETCH QUESTS.
I can't keep up with why we are going fucking anywhere anymore.
[00:32] <Grefter> AND THEY ARE STILL TALKING.
[00:33] <Grefter> Subtracting five minutes for me to bitch about it.
<Grefter> That is 10 minutes of raw text scroll.
To be told to go away.
I hate this game.
This is the first time I actually ahve hated it.
Not just it being bad.
<Grefter> I just straight up fucking hate it now.
[00:36] <Grefter> Nonononononon onononononon o don't make my read more tlaking after walking one screen.
[00:39] <Grefter> stoptalkingstoptalkingstoptalking
24/01/11 Day8
Played more. I am just blindly following the walkthrough at this point. I am honestly not sure how the fuck you are meant to know where to go between these towns. They don't mention each other or give directions. The walkthrough tells me to go there and the plot keeps flowing.
26/01/11 Day 9
Things happen more. People keep talking. Lots of people are dead because of the Eclipse thing! Shame that like it is only people without names. Couple of people you don't care about are dead. woooooooooooo
29/01/11 Day 10
Coincidentally just finished it also.
I don't really understand how you can say all that stuff above and say the game is decent, but we never really see eye to eye on games and look for different things in games, so eh what can you do.
The last ton of the game is more of the same. Random shit in the plot coming out of nowhere. No plot resolution for the very first things you do in the game. It is just a pile of nonsense to string together some gameplay. If you want my opinion on the game just check every other post I have made about it. At least for those I had something new to complain about. Here the only thing I could add is the slow boat, which yeah is just boat is slow like Twil noted.
The final boss at least finally had something put up a fight though! Go it! Going in directly after the fight with the villains was actually a bad idea! I should have just mashed attack on the boss before it because PP was actually an issue on this fight. I had to use a whole Psycrystal on Matthew because of all the Odysseys I had cast and there was revival required. Also the boss has damage, so healing is useful, there was even points where I wanted both MT healers on the field. To highlight it even more he has a move that can strip targets of all Djinn, so you have to swap people around as well (first fight in the game I ever did that on). Actually equipping Eoleo and Amiti properly instead of just using cast offs when I remembered to change their gear would have helped a bit. Muliple Djinn classes have better stat bonuses so might have made the fight more manageable. He is also probably still vulnerable to Summon spam. Generally taking the game more seriously would likely have made it fairly trivial, but hey playing fairly casually it certainly tried a little bit which is more than anything else in the game had.
So to lazy to do stat topic even super lazy mode on it. So someone else is going to have to play it (AHAHAHA take that bitches).
Short notes. Game sucked, has basic concepts of an RPG there, plenty of dialogue, stats, a combat system. It uses none of them for anything remotely any good.
For reference the "Stuff above" there is Twilkitri on it. Here is his post, not to hate on him or anything, I just can't quite work out how to make the above make sense without it for reference and it brings up some good points itself. It works as something of a counterpoint for my anger and bile.
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn - finished
Not going to bother to do any aftergame things. Ended up permamissing a world map Djinn so for all I know they may be blocked off for me anyway. The heck do they still use world map Djinn at all, let alone in a game where big swathes of the map become inaccessible.
Game was decent in general.
Too many puzzles which you solve just because they're there and end up being necessary to have solved to progress. Follow path up mountain, nothing there but vaguely astrology-based puzzles? Of course you should spend time solving them without even dialoguing about the path having apparently ended. It was completely obvious that this would cause flying rocks to come out of nowhere to provide a path down.
On a different tack, setting up the Lens. There is seemingly only one correct position for each of the controls to be in, which is automatically selected when you manipulate them. Why weren't they in this position in the first place then? It's not exactly a knowledge or skills roadblock, since you need to use all the skills necessary to get to the place in the first place, and the characters never researched what settings would be required or anything.
The ship is too slow.
The emotional response system is atrocious. I hit angryface at every opportunity for the humour value and a large proportion of the time the reaction to this indicated that Matthew had gotten angry at a completely different person than expected. When the reactions were making sense in the first place anyway.
I can only assume that the 'spell that solves puzzles' antihype is referring to Insight. Which just indicates what psynergy would have any effect on any active objects on-screen. And consequently only solves 'puzzles' which consist solely of 'use some psynergy on something'. Way to go. This does solve puzzles such as SLAP THE SUN TO REVERSE ITS ROTATION but puzzles like that are stupid anyway, and your other option there would be just checking all your different psynergy to see whether it was a valid target. Also the 'puzzle' where the guy wanted some sort of food, but that was designed to demonstrate what Insight could do in the first place and in the second place using it on people never comes up again as far as I remember, unless you want to see the seemingly random emotional state they're feeling and that they are valid targets for Spirit Sense.
I would say that the game is superior to GS2. Not sure whether it's superior to GS1 or not though. Regardless of the layers of roadblocks before you get the ship, at least everything is fairly nicely structured. After you get the ship things turn into faux-free-roaming chicanery similar to GS2 except that all the interesting places are locked off until you get a particular spell.
Ultimately I do stand by my statements early that people should play this game. It is certainly one of those bad games that people with an interest in design should partake of, particularly if you are into design concepts of JRPGs, which anyone here presumably is at least tangentially. I wouldn't spend money on it brand new or anything, but if you can then borrow a copy or get it cheap second hand (so that the money goes to someone more deserving than the publisher of this tripe, you know like a parasite that is trying to not give money to people that supply them with product).
What next? Maybe I will compile some of my posts making fun of clothing design in games. Maybe even do some more.
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Michael Caine
So in my endeavour to continue to write more I have started to write based on requests, why think of my own material when other people can do it for me?
Cmdr King requested a tribut to Michael Caine and so we begin.
I can't recall the first Michael Caine movie I saw. I do remember the first Michael Caine movie I went and saw purely on the strength of Michael Caine however. Children of Men, Caine has an important but overall minor role as he does these daysplaying an old hippy. My love for Children of Men extends far beyond just Michael Caine, but he is absolutely brilliant in it. You quite easilly develop a far greater attachment to him than the lead male (who is also very good), he is a caring husband and something of a Sociologist revolutionary. His ultimate demise is emotional blackmail at its finest. Everyone knows him from his roles in the new Batman reboot where he plays Alfred almost to perfection, his lines about his time in Burma relating to how destruction is all that drives some people is one of the most memorable lines in a film full of quotable quotes. This is the kind of character he has been playing on and off for nearly 20 years now, but there is far more to Michael Caine than the friendly old experienced man of the world type.
A much younger Michael Caine is a very powerful thing. From greats such as Zulu, Alfie and The Italian Job where he is well remembered and highly praised, there is other treasures like the Harry Palmer series starting with the Ipcress File (available on Bluray I just found out today, just finished watching it, thanks CK, you managed to make me sink a $20 into this) and continuing with 2 more films from back in 60s. Here he isn't a pretty man as you will commonly see in the modern interpretations of some of these films, but he is amazingly attractive, very masculine and funny. Very much like his friend Sean Connery was in his youth. If you haven't dug deep into Cinema of the past and want to just check out some good movies then grabbing things with Michael Caine in them are not a bad place to go to. Be sure to not miss Get Carter amongst all these treasures. They aren't unknown gems by any stretch of the imagination, but they are old enough that our generation is quite likely to have missed them.
After his take off you get the period that in his biography he refers to as the period where he stopped being cast as leading male roles and started playing people's fathers. I am probably mistiming this somewhat, but I am going to say it is the mid 70's to 80's. The highlights here to not miss are The Man Who Would Be King, starring himself and Sean Connery, based on the short story by Rudyard Kipling (which is also based on some real life events in Borneo and Ghor). I have to admit this is easilly the biggest gap I have in my watching of his career as the next big great movie of his that I have seen in this era is Educating Rita which I had only seen recently, this is a movie that I couldn't quite explain my love for it even after processing it for a while. It was a touching film that really pulled on my desire to return to university. Suffice to say it is of the Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester school of movie. It is about education and really is up the alley of people that love education. There is others from this era also that people will have seen, Jaws 2 for example. One in particular that is a gap in my library also is The Jigsaw Man which I don't know a great deal about, but it stars Lawrence Olivier alongside Caine, which is pretty much a wet dream waiting to be watched. Lawrence Olivier is a tale for another time though, suffice to say he is among many actors heroes.
Then we reach the 90s and onwards. After the Muppet Christmas Carrol (not going to touch on this, everyone knows this one), there is a much more relaxed period of telemovies and so on. Then there is The Cider House Rules. The Cider House Rules is probably not the start of the more modern Michael Caine era but it is certainly the one to leave an impact for myself with him playing the elderly father figure to a young Toby Macguire, young being 3 years before the first Spiderman movie, so a known entity, but still one to catch you off guard. There is a lot of fun films in here as well, Miss Congeniality, Austin Powers, a cameo of sorts in the Get Carter remake. All of which let me tell you if you have a thing for a more refined elderly gentleman let me tell you, this will keep you going for a while and it is only uphill from here. You get Batman movies, Children of Men, The Prestige all of which he shines through with an amazing performance that leaves you wanting more. You also get a few films with a return to form as a lead actor with Is Anybody There (one I need to see myself also) and Harry Brown, which if anyone has heard me recently talk about is an amazingly rough movie to watch, but brilliant. Michael Caine is more than capable of still playing a very hard man. It is delicious in its violence and the sharp brutal (over the top) message that it sends. A nice touch is that it is filmed in the rough neighbourhood that Michael Caine grew up in.
Also I have referenced it a few times, but he also has a biography out, The Elephant to Hollywood which is quite a read or listen if you prefer Audiobook format (which is how I consumed it, narrated by the man himself), well worth a look even if you are not a budding cinema buff like myself it is just an interesting story of an actor's life and career and if you like a sappy nice life story it is a good one, he is a very lucky man even with all his hard work. Well worth the time you put into it.
So we are done. I have enough demands for FASHION that I believe something along those lines, over porting old work or writing something original is in demand.
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No article today because some guy went and suggested a really good topic which has blown my past the quota I had been aiming for each day. So expect something substantial in a day or two. Might port over FASHION tomorrow afternoon after work.
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(http://members.optusnet.com.au/grefter/dgfashion.jpg)
So guys it is time for the cops to arrive. We are going to be calling you out on your terrible taste in clothing in video games! We will also be starting so many sentences with OH that you won't even begin to believe. Not like I can even begin to believe that I found a picture of Fashion Police that featured a sign with an arrow pointing to a hot Fashion Policewoman proudly pronouncing her to be a Dick Girl Rodeo.
Where do we begin? There is so many choices, but this one is the easiest because I am blatantly copying and posting another post! Lets being with some basics for the gents.
(http://members.optusnet.com.au/grefter/badd.gif)
Oh my this man knows how to dress with style, not necessarilly class and distinction but very nice. Only real downside is the tie is to bright to go with the dark shirt under than coat. Earth tones was a good choice, but something darker would work better really. Work with what you have guys, if you are a ruggedly handsome dude then you don't need to add much more because you are ruggedly handsome and in shape.
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Really you are going to do that? You are seriously going to do Wolverine hair? Okay. You try that man. That isn't really what I was talking about, but you go right ahead. I suppose at least you do have the build to pull off a shirt open that far down, nice to see a totally manly dude like you shaves his chest though. I am not even going to dignify the coat with a mention. Cool popped collar bro.
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Oh wow. Oh my indeed. You are going to wear those glasses in public and expect them to take you seriously? Okay I uh guess you can do that then. Why am I looking at dudes here so much?
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Don't you point at me like that. Your dress is entirely inappropriate for what you are doing, that bleach job is extreme and if it isn't a wig now it is going to be in a few months time because that kind of extreme peroxide treatment does terrible things to your hair lady. Well done on your amazingly careful job on shaving those arm pits though. That must take an astounding level of dilligence to pull off every day. Ignoring how amazingly inappropriate that dress is for midday wear like when we first meet you in game, I have to respect your dedication to the getup, you prove quite formidable in your eveningwear. The full-length formal gloves do go well with the evening gown and the red piping is actually quite tasteful with the pattern on the front and the heart on the top of the glove (that we can't see hear while you are glorying us with your aforementioned pristinely shaven arm pits). A shame about the boa, you do need to accessorise with that getup, but that isn't really the first port of call I would go to when something as simple as pearls would do the job. They certainly would not scream out HOOKER quite like the boa and that collar do.
Again with the glasses though. You look like you are planning to do the worlds first piece of formal welding. Why are we looking at police here though? This was supposed to be a series about attorneys at law.
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Oh I see, because French Cuffs flared that far out with cuff links that are clearly made of glass are absolutely dreadful darling. They really didn't need to be on both side of the cuff and they need to be about a quarter of the size. Also big shoulders are so 30 years ago. You are lucky you have the figure to pull off that waistcoat and it is real shame you ruin such well fitted sleeves on those puffy shoulders.
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There isn't much to say here. The purple is of course ridiculous, but making fun of a pimp for wearing purple is like making fun of a policeman in blue. It is part of the Uniform. You may as well go make fun of Prince for his taste in clothing. That covers the Cravatt also. What we are looking at here is a pimp in a three piece suit. The hair is a pretty wicked Widow's Peak paired with either some crazy hair gel or even crazier amazing natural cowlicks. Whatever you have you may as well work with it though.
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At ease. Well not that you could really be more at ease given you appear to be wearing pajamas. Lucky you can totally pull it off with that whole cute look. The hat is also a good idea because my gods your forehead is huge, it is like half your face and your eyebrows are half way up it, not at the bottom. Accessorising intelligently to conceal and accentuate your features. Well done miss. Also of course we must end this on Cool popped collar bro.
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Oh my, it is like looking into a mirror. That is the exact same experssion I am making right now as I look at that outfit. First off, the medal is stupid, put it in a show case, unless you just won in which case you have no right to look nearly as horrified as you do. Now do us all a favour and find the person that suggested you wear a pink shirt with pink piping and a pink headband and drown them in a bucket of your own urine. Then you plan to complete the look with a white sports jacket? I hope you are intending to go to some kind of blacklight disco where you will look absolutely amazing in that getup, you will stand out like no one else there. For future reference, gelling up the ends of your long hair does not excuse you of getting a haircut when it is required. Consult a stylist before trying such horrible ideas in the future, you look like you are trying to impress everyone with a crown of thorns, you suffer for our sins by not cutting your hair and dressing horribly. We also have a case of accessorising beyond the jacket that must be addressed here. Fingerless gloves do not go with your outfit at all. They are black and you are wearing pink and black. The most amazing part however is the fact that they seem to be rolled up so we can see the inner lining at your wrists. Which means either two things, you have fingerless gloves that go up to your elbows which is amazingly retarded or you have just cut the fingers off of a pair of women's opera gloves. I am not sure which is worse. Again we must note Cool popped collar bro.
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Sigh. Emma. You continue to be a complete and total delight. Yes yes yes, there is excessive amounts of pink of course, but I can overlook this because personality makes up for colour here. Also she is a Scientist, colour coordination is optional with what science makes up for in raw sexy department. A three piece suit how marvelous. The coat being a lab coat only adds to the allure. Top it all off with a Cricket Cap and oh dear this is all working far better than it should. How can anyone pull off a horizontal striped tie like that? I can't even begin to put into words how fabulous you truely are. Rounding the whole outfit out with a nice messenger bag (OF SCIENCE!) and that badge and you have the complete package here ladies and gentleman.
All images cribbed from either here http://www.doulifee.com/Storage/aceatt/ or directly from Court Records http://www.court-records.net/ where these are constructed from.
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World Building, How to do it where the Player doesn't have to see it
Alright, today's article is actually going to be RPG related for a change, specifically world building. World building is something that is easilly placed at the wayside while writing a plot for a game, designing encounters or putting together a new IP. It is something that you can easilly make quite successful games without paying much attention to at all, however when it is done well with some real thought it creates a highly memorable experience for the player and far more importantly business wise, it is one of the key ways to start a series. Suffice to say games have been made and sold almost entirely on the premise of the world building.
There is plenty of examples here but I primarilly want to examine three in particular and may give some examples of others that do similarly, we will be looking at Ar Tonelico, Mass Effect and Final Fantasy 13. With these three primary examples I want to examine two kinds of ways that I think of world development taking place in games from the viewpoint of the player, Actively and Passively. Exactly what I mean I will cover in relevant sections, but suffice to say that this is painting these concepts with a very broad brush. The final section is of course for everyone that knows me is going to be about how to do it wrong, it is important to learn from failures as well as it is from success or mediocrity and it also can easilly highlight how little it matters to get the world building in perfectly for its presence to have a positive spin for fans.
Active world building
When I use the term Active world building I am talking of an experience of the world that the player has to seek out for themselves, this normally is a sign that there is a fleshed out setting that the story is taking place in, but for the core narrative it is not required. It may be the window dressing or only necessarilly be required for the larger narrative arc that is to be addressed in future games. This is the example I want to use Mass Effect for, straight up front this is a game I greatly enjoyed and have partaken of a great deal of the larger lore of the world, not as much as I could have, but I am relatively well versed in the setting itself.
The specific style that Mass Effect uses is an encyclopedia of all the terms, species and most importantly the technology of the setting. For the player who has no real interest in the plot it sits are a large unapproachable mountain of text. For the enthusiast it is a veritable font of information that is seemingly unending which progressively gets larger and larger as you get through the game. This is a good way of seperating what your players need to know and what you want to show them with this universe that you have created. It lets you trim some of the fat from your storytelling with establishing the world that your character lives in and can jump straight into establishing the character themselves or directly into the action if you are looking to jump directly into the second act of your three act plot (yes, there is other plot structures and when a game uses something else I will write about it). It is a useful tool, especially if you have an overactive writing department like Bioware seems to. This is far from a new idea in gaming of course, that is largely what your Civilopedia was for in Civilisation 1 back in the day or UFOPedia from the best game ever made. Another way that Bioware have expanded on that is with the breadth and scope of optional content in the game, from sidequests on main worlds to planet landings and searching planets for emblems and minerals. That kind of covers the nuts and bolts by what I mean by Active world building. You have this world out there and the player is taking part in it, but it is clearly a very small part of it. You aren't going to show them the rest of it as that isn't what your game is there to do, however you are going to give them the means to get out there and look at it on their own or to look it up for themselves if they so desire.
Now that is all well and good, but how something is done speaks nothing for how it is done well. Mass Effect itself handles the reference document component with mixed degrees of success, the menus for finding details leave a bit to be desired, but that may just be the student of the library or closet database designer in me speaking, it certainly is quite servicable for what it does. How it does it well though is helping to parcel out information in manageable bites, no article is excessively large, there is no treatise on how they solved the P=NP? or built a functional AI. There is however information on almost any given topic you could want to know the cliff notes of on the universe, from man kinds first contact with aliens to the workings of the Space Shotguns and why the hell anyone bothers with a short range weapon in space combat situations. Also is that there is a priority of importance in articles that is fairly prominently displayed to the player and is intuitive also. All the important info that will expand your knowledge of the universe with things that will directly effect the plot are voice acted. All the entries that are voice acted are stored in a different submenu to all the pieces about the different classes of Star Ship that the races have. Simple and Clean but effective, people that are here for the violence never need to open the menu, for those that enjoy the larger narrative have a way that they can actively seek out further information that is neatly presented to them in the format consistent with the rest of the game and for the grognards that need to know the nitty gritty of the universe have it all there laid out in front of them, they just have to get to reading it. They can even read the planetary descriptions while exploring which will give them a rundown of the weather and environmental features of every world in every star system you can visit. That sums up to an absolutely amazing amount of text that is entirely optional and makes for a complete and fleshed out universe waiting to be explored. Which you can do, because Mass Effect has an absolutely ridiculous chunk of optional content that can easilly skyrocket your characters into their mid 20s levelwise (with a cap of 40 first way through the game) without touching the main plot outside of the introduction. You have 4 planets that you need to visit over the course of the main plot in Mass Effect, there is far more than just those four star systems available, you have 17 Star Clusters to visit, which have varying numbers of Star systems within them and under them a varying number of Planets. Each Star System has at least one planet that you can land on and explore on foot. This is where it falls through as most of the planets are desolate wastelands that you drive aroundf or 10 minutes in your balloon mobile to find some dudes to shoot. Welcome to the galaxy, even though it is blooming with life, most of it is still a void of nothingness and gas giants. It entices the player with rewards of cashmoney for finding little doodads, but that is mostly just a reward mechanism (certainly a profitable one) in play to get people out there looking around. At the end of the day though it is entirely optional content so at its core, it only effects the game flow as much as the player wants it to. This gives greater freedom in plot writing, it is something of a having your cake and eating it too. It is fairly inelegant but effective. Probably most importantly though is the way the library is built up. This isn't your text book that is handed to you Ultima style of it is all right there in the manual off you go or everything is available from the start ala Civilopedia from ealier example. Entries are unlocked fairly organically based on the conversations player has or the items they see or the parts of the world they interact with. This is something you see fairly prominently in other games that have a similar system, however one advantage here is that Mass Effect doesn't have the amazingly gauche hotlinks with underlines leading from article to article. This is a game, not fucking Wikipedia.
As for other games that do this and do it well. X-Com: UFO Defense and its first two sequels do fairly admirable jobs (not RPGs, but the first one is aforementioned Best Game Ever Made tm), Dragon Age fits in its way (terrible menus though). Plenty of others that do this horribly come to mind, more on the obvious later.
Passive world building
For Passive world building, we are talking about the counter to the above. The players experience of the world is much more naturalistic, it happens with the natural flow of the gameplay rather than the player having to actively seek it out. Regardless of how the player gets through the game, unless they are not paying attention to anything around them then they are going to get something of a feeling for the world at large. The game I want to use here is not the best example of it that springs to mind, but is an RPG that was noted by some in the DL as being a good case for it or at least that was the main thing that they got from the game, Ar Tonelico. Now for yet another disclaimer, I did not enjoy this game and have not taken it on board nearly as strongly as the example above.
The world of Ar Tonelico is fairly fully realised as a world that is constructed with a musically powered internet that is full of loli robots who peddle in pornography. So it is close to the real world except all the fat pipe is run through one main tower. The game also runs you through the history of the world somewhat, how it came to be constructed, why there is lolibot pornographers and why the Internet Viruses want to kill everything. The way that the world parcels this information out to you is piece by piece as you make your way through the game, as you go to places it explains to you the significance of it and why it is all so important. This works for world building because the game takes you everywhere. You visit absolutely every area of the tower of Ar Tonelico, you start in the middle of the tower and are dumped down the bottom of it, the first story arc is pretty much making your way back up to the middle of the tower through the areas that are most densely populated, so you are shown how the society works in its dysfunctional way where pornographers are used as the primary weapons in the world. You observe most of the different cultures in the world while you are down there because you get dumped as far away from the tower as you can be, make it to the majour city, some drama happens and you go to the satellite of corporate mercenary sin and eventually on to the traditional native hold on to your cultural history types before making it back to the main characters home in the middle of the tower, where you really learn about the society there for the first time. It is a pretty long journey that shows you half the tower and by far the most important part from a world building perspective as it is where all the population is and the rest is mostly just the Internet backbone. The climax of the plot involves you needing to climb further up the tower to a point where you can teleport down to the bottom again, some more drama ensues with you covering the last unexplored areas down the base of the tower and you eventually end up building a rocket to get to the top part. That part is mostly boring because as anyone involved in actual infrastructure backbone will tell you, if you aren't into it then looking at a DSLAM is pretty boring. By the start of the final act you have explored the majority from top to bottom and have met all the key players and had the whole plot layed out for you. Almost none of this is optional, it is all right there in the flow of the narrative. From there it is just tying up loose ends and off you go.
So what the hell does that even mean? Ar Tonelico is structured in such a way that just by the nature of playing the game and giving 2 shits about it the player will learn something about the world. They will passively take it in. It is just there. There is varying degrees to how you can do this, Ar Tonelico specifically spoon feeds you the whole thing, it is all there and you kind of have to take it on board, it isn't really framed by the larger narrative in any way, it is presented in such a way that the world itself is something of the story (mileage varies here, I disagree with this personally and consider it a conceit of the storyteller that I give 2 fucks about this world and why Internet Virus wants to rape lolibots). This isn't the only kind of world building that involves the player passively taking it on board however. You can present games in such a way that the natural flow of the gameplay itself empowers the players in discovering the nature of the world through regular play. This may seem very similar to Active above, both do involve the player finding the information, but in this case it is that through regular gameplay then the player will discover details about the world, rather than it being a secondary objective that they are succeeding in doing. The latter is far more elegant and is really something of an idealistic design goal, the likes of which Valve is commonly praised for example. Their games are notorious for not having the world spoon fed to you, but they also hide very little away. It is all there, you have but to look and since most of the games are largely on rails you don't have to look far. The approach of interactive cutscenes further embraces this as the player is given the opportunity to observe the world freely while the game proceeds along fairly organically (depending on how well put together the scripts are of course). The biggest flaw to this is likely it relies on the player to play along with the designer which again can be something of a conceit, but the main thing to take away is that the game needs to be good as a game as well, the world building is just gravy. Whereas with the first method where you are forcing it on the player, the world building had better damned well be good, because I don't think anyone really played Ar Tonelico strictly for the gameplay unless they are an even bigger fan of Press X to win than myself.
Again with the examples, let us proceed with me heaping praise and fanboying on things. I sadly can't think of a world that force feeds the world building to someone that I can positively say it is well done, it is a common and effective way of world building in RPGs, but I can't think of anything specific that is elegant and well handled. Halflife 2 is the quintessential posterchild for the show the player rather than tell kind of passive world building, but most of Valve's other plot oriented games are noteworthy for it, both the original Halflife and Portal. Even Left 4 Dead has something of it in there as well with the writing on the walls in the safe houses. Other studios do it, but it really is something of a signature with Valve. This is also more along the lines of the world building in Mass Effect 2 with the people around you and the advertising commonly chatting quite freely about the state of the galaxy.
How to get totally wrong
By process of elmination you may have guess it that the one that got it totally wrong was Final Fantasy 13. Big suprise for everyone, Grefter is hating on Final Fantasy 13. Now before someone forms a lynch mob, remember that I am right and you are wrong like all the time. Now that we have got my vainglorious jokes out of the way, I am being absolutely serious here. All you have to do is examine the game with the two methods I described above and more importantly how to do them well. Suffice to say Final Fantasy tries fairly hard at the passive world building, you cover a lot of ground in that game. Even more obviously the game provides you with a vertiable whale of information, it is just a shame that much like a Japanese research vessel it ended up being released to market.
So how did Final Fantasy 13 get it so wrong? Well lets start with the Active experience because that one is very blatant. Final Fantasy 13 doesn't just restrict itself to nice flavourful fluff to its encyclopedia, it stuff the plot in there as well. Your experience with the core plot is disjointed and jarring because there seems to be an expectation that you are reading all the entries. Terms, creatures, people and places are sort of bandied around and paraded through the game with next to no point of reference. The game even as it proudly proclaims starts you off right in the action, much like they did in Final Fantasy 7. A huge problem there is Final Fantasy 7 may have had a huge flashy showy intro, it was so much more than just for show. Final Fantasy 7 shows you exactly where you are, you are in a freaking huge city and you are on a train, holy shit now you are fighting some dudes this game is intense. Final Fantasy goes okay you are a prisoner on a train now you are killing some dudes then the train crashed and now you are on a highway. There is no framework for it, but if you sat down for 20 minutes you know exactly where you are, what Cocoon is and have an idea who Lightning is. You know what that defeats? THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT. Here is a good experiment, find someone who hasn't played this thing yet and see how long it takes them to work out that Cocoon is the moon. If you haven't read it and that was suprising, don't worry, there is nothing that will actually clue you into that for a damn good long time in game. So spoilers I guess. Cocoon is the fucking moon. You cover a lot of ground in the game, but each of the areas is completely disconnected, this isn't a fault of the design of everything being a path that you can't revisit. You can do this kind of design without that shit. It is that the way you get from point A to point B tends to have no real sense of relationship. You fly everywhere and get the cutscenes being dialogue scenes from in the cockpit and can only see clouds or epic space battles on ice monster motor cycles or some other dumb shit. Towards the end of the game they just straight up go "Fuck it you got teleported into a magic training ground" then "Fuck it you got teleported out now fly away from the moon" and ultimately "Fuck it you got teleported back onto the moon" The only area that really shows your progress between two points is the second last dungeon sequence where you run through a residential area on Cocoon. But it is okay, you end up in an endless plain of moving platforms after that where you fight the final boss just so shit doesn't make sense. What I am trying to say here is the game fails at world building because all it does is show you setpieces with no sense of context. I am glad there is all this stuff in the world, but what the hell does it mean? How does it work? Why do we care? Maybe someone does, but I don't, because haters got to hate and the game did nothing to make me care. Even while I was playing it I couldn't have told you where any two given points were in relation to each other. Sure there is more to world building than mapping it out, but it is a damned good place to start.
Now how does it get the Active world building so wrong? The encyclopedia is huge, it covers everything, even the plot! Well lets look at how I said Mass effect handles the sheer volume of its information well. An intuitive system of prioritising important information and an easy way to access and be engaged by that information that gells with the rest of the game. What does Final Fantasy 13 do? Throws you a book and goes "Here you go bro, work it out for yourself lol". One thing it does get right is that it builds the entries organically as you go along. I hope you remembered what that term you never heard of before at the start of that 15 minute cutscene, because when it is over you can look it up if you remember what it was amongst the other ones. Now I honestly can't tell you if the game highlights new entries, but that would have gone a long way (Another one Mass Effect does from memory). There is next to no point to documenting the entire world if you are going to do nothing at all to make it presentable. As bad as I found Final Fantasy 13 gameplay I can tell you that the last thing I wanted to do was reading instead. If I wanted to read I would have grabbed an unread Vonnegut book off my shelf rather than read about the way Vanille's period has unsynched from the lunar cycle over the years or the flavour of condom Snow preferred to use when he was not knocking up Fang's mother and giving birth to Lightning. So in their attempt to make Final Fantasy 13 as accessible as possible by dropping you right in the action all they succeeded in doing was failing to engage the player and providing them with an nigh unapproachable wall of text to catch up on just so they can try to make sense of a plot that doesn't even have the decency to have a consistent internal logic from cutscene to cutscene.
World building isn't an incredibly difficult prospect, most games have it to some degree even if just by accident. It is far from necessary to make a good game as well and obviously for some it doesn't even detract from the game to do it poorly. There is however ways to do it poorly and if you are going to do it you need to make it accessible to the player. If it is optional you can certainly incentivise it, but that is not necessary because if it is actually good players will seek it out on their own. My own self inflated opinion of it is that Final Fantasy 13 failed to do any of the above. It is impenetrable and aloof, the game would have been better without it. They could have saved money entirely by not paying for any writers at all and just let the two 5 year olds that they had directing the main plot and designing the summons and related cutscenes have full creative control.
The song we sang on that fateful night it didn't actually sound anything like this song. This is just a tribute.
To finish it all off I want to continue on with what is likely to become something of a theme in this topic, there is a game that does both of the above and mixes them together in its own way. Deus Ex is an absolutely stunning game. It achieves a seemless melding of both of the above methods. There is so much world building in Deus Ex that is tucked away in emails or data pads that are not required to beat the game at all that expand the world into complete details explaining how a megacorporation effectively bought out the UN's emergency response service and turned it into its own army, who the Illuminati were and how the usurper took power down to tiny details about why there is a pair of corpses in the hotel room down the hall from your brother's hotel/apartment. The scope of the information is both local to the area you are in (the game takes place in various places across America, France and Hong Kong) and on a more global scale. The real catch here is though that browsing and looking for these things is the natural way to progress through the game, you get key passwords or keycodes from these things. You are always given ways around locked doors or bypassing security systems, but there isn't enough lockpicks or multitools to get around them all without heavy investment into these skills. This is coupled with casual conversations with NPCs, overheard NPC conversations and locations that tell a story by themselves such as the sunken ferry off the dock at Libery Island or the Clinic in Hell's Kitchen. So you have a game where you don't have to read everything, but if you want you can search the areas completely to find everything but regardless of how invested in it you will get some of the story because that is just the way that the game is played. This is just one more facet of how great Deus Ex is, one more experiment that worked.
I think that covers everything I wanted to say on the topic, it is fairly high level overall, but we are clocking in at about the length of a second year Psychology assignment so this will suffice for now. I might return to the topic in future discussion.
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So it is midnight on Friday and I want something to put something together that I can lean on in in the future for filler, because I figure it will happen. So I figure I will return to the route cause of FASHION talk and that is Suikoden.
(http://members.optusnet.com.au/grefter/dgfashion.jpg)
So when I am in dire need to write something, I will be progressively going through the Suikosource character list alphabetically. I will not hotlink their images, but will provide links to the character pages in question. I might crib the images and host them somewhere else if I work something else out larger than my fairly limited hosting space I have with my ISP.
As a free bonus component Suikoden FASHION comes built in with a trivia game we like to call Boy or Girl. Look at the character picture and guess the sex of the character in the picture.
All work here courtesy of http://www.suikosource.com a great place to go for Suikoden info and art and hilarity at said art.
Abizboah (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=1)
He is naked. Next.
Ace (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=2)
Ace has a pretty good getup going with a jacket and cammo pants tucked into the tops of his army boots. A chestlate and vambraces is kind of functional. Not sure why he felt the need to have red all over the place, I guess it helps him blend in with all the bleeding he does in game with his crippling weakness to getting punched in the face by Golems. We again have those strange fingerless gloves that go up to your elbows, at least in this case they presumably prevent the vambraces from chafing. The brown and black on the coat clashes and doesn't make sense, why he is wearing a heavy jacket like that when it is warm in that part of the world I won't ever know, but I guess that is why he rolls up the sleeves. Not much negative to say here other than those metal things tacked onto the boots much be an absolute pain in the arse on his cobbler, unless the Suikoverse has invented an equivalent to Dunlop welting those boots are likely hand made with big fuck off chunks of metal riveted into them.
Achilles (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=3) No image
Addie (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=4) No image
Adlai (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=5)
A purple Kimono(?)with yellow piping, not bad, but there is a chance that he is just wearing a dress. The purple and orange pockets on the labcoat are straight up freaky. The green sandles with yellow and red straps on the toe clash horribly and what kind of scientist wears open toed shoes on site?
Adrienne (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=97)
A blacksmith who has the bottom half of a cowboy and the top half of an exteme burn victim waiting to happen. Awwww yeah bro lets go do some smithing with a belly shirt halter top with leather straps. Gloves that I am goign to give the benefit of the doubt as being leather as I am feeling generous, but only go up to the wrist (what happened to the ones that go up to the elbow? Those might actually be relevant to someone who works with hot metals) and some vambraces again, this time with nothing to stop them rubbing. Bonus points for being our first Boy or Girl contestant. Fully sick mullet.
Adrienne is female.
Aegia (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=6) No image
Agares (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=7)
There isn't much to say, royalty dresses in purple and crazy extravagantly, we appear to have a classy white number underneath the whole getup with a wolf fur cloak and the purple robes of state over the top. Agares is a man who accessorizes with style and decadence his place beholds. Pristine white gloves and shoes with the cane to match leaves very little to say. He bears himself well, does his hair fittingly and has a minimalistic crown that suits a man of his apparent elegance.
Age (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=8) No image
Agnes (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=98)
A pleated black dress with read highlights running underneath the pleats? Well no it isn't even pleated. It is a dress made up of what appears to be 8 lenghts of black cloth with the ends stitched together connected to some read strips. I suppose it is kind of original? I can't think of a fashion that uses it. Might be a bit better without that stupid jackey top with the flared ot wrists or the hair that is some how behind her cheek, in front of her chest and yet somehow supposed to be straight. Not to mention the thoroughly confusing lightsource, is it in front of her face where it is highlighted and reflects off her hair? Or is it behind here where the sleeves sre shown to be in the shade? No matter. The jacked is stupid and the hair is confusing. Now lets round it all out with what if they didn't appear to be platform shoes I would call Go-Go boots as they have a really tall boots that uh somehow appear to make it barely past her shin? Wow those are some ridiculously long legs. They don't even make it half way up her calf but buckle up three times above that. Without seeing how that red line extends around the ankle I can't say how they exactly unbuckle, but unless they keep going those are horrible shoes to put your foot into, you must manipulate ankle in a pretty crazy way.
To round it all out I am not exactly sure what is going on in this picture, there appears to be a general motion to the right, yet she is standing pigeon toed in those boots. The hands are splayed out like she is presenting something. I guess that does support the Go-Go boot theory though, maybe she is dancing horribly. We will never know.
Aila (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=9)
This is going to be a bit of a running theme with Grassland people, they have a nice aesthetic. I don't understand how some of their clothes work, but they can pull them off pretty well in general. The shoes are confusing as ever, I guess they are a sandal that they slip into? Whatever. The really confusing thing is where the hell do a nomadic tribe get their hands on lycra to make leggings like that for their whole tribe to wear? Let along giant 80s bangles like Aila has. The collar on the tunic is a cute way to round out the whole thing.
Aaaand that is it for today.
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How RPGs have been abused into making money with bad shooters.
This article assumes you know something of how modern First Person shooters function and is much more oriented in that space than about RPGs, so I will try to explain some components as I go though what with this being an RPG site and not Shooting Dudes In Faces For Awesome Victory SHAZBOT.com or the like.
There has been a growing trend in many action games of late to inclued a levelling system taken straight from our favourite grindy little genre, level up, gain experience for killing guys or killing guys in special ways, get new gear, be more powerful and have more options. Some have praised this as a way to improve the longevity of a game and that it empowers the player with a reward cycle. I will be arguing something fairly different in here.
The core games that I am going to be criticizing here are the latest few iterations of the Call of Duty series, but it applies to many other games that have come out (to a much lesser extent). First of all we have to examine some core decisions to this level up system. As you level up you gain access to newer guns and perks that let you more effectively deal with your enemies, fairly standard RPG levelling up system. For an example of the kinds of things it unlocks you can refer to this page for perks (http://www.themodernwarfare2.com/mw2/multiplayer/perks/)or this page for weapons (http://www.themodernwarfare2.com/mw2/multiplayer/weapons/) You can see many things are unlocked by playing as well as just experience. So the better you are the more you will unlock, seems fair enough, rewarding good play and so on. The problem here however is that they are consistent positive feedback loops, the more you win the better stuff you get, the easier it makes to win, your victories aren't necessarilly because of a skill gap, but are in part artificially created gap based on unlocked equipment. It is a cycle that feeds on itself sucking the player in. A great little series on Escapist Magazine touches on this far more succintly and well than I feel I can here in an article from November 2010 on The Skinner Box (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2487-The-Skinner-Box) and it is one I highly reccomend viewing.
That all seems fairly innocuous if a bit tedious and favours experienced players, but it gets worse the more you know about Call of Duty's main gameplay. Call of Duty has a game method that rewards the victor disproportionately to the loser. The more you win the easier it becomes to keep winning, this would be Kill Streaks (http://www.themodernwarfare2.com/mw2/multiplayer/killstreaks/) for every kill beyond your third in a row through to the eleventh you will get progressively more powerful extra weapons to use, which will make the next kill even easier. For 15 kills you get to turn off all the enemy electronic devices with an EMP (leaving yours still active) meaning anyone else performing as well loses their advantages, putting you at a complete and total advantage for 60 seconds. From theren it is 10 more kills away from an instant win. Plenty of games give the player winning and advantage in competetive FPS, the classical example being Counter Strike which avoids the normal benefit of not losing orientation on respawn by having distinct rounds, it gives the vitor more money than the loser to buy weapons next round and the winning team is less likely to have to invest in more weapons. It is a clear advantage to the victor, early wins are a big advantage, but it is not one that is entirely insurmountable, after 3 or so rounds the victors will have enough bankroll to keep going through multiple losses on even footing, but the losers will also be on even footing. There is a fixed threshold on how big the disadvantage can be because of the in game economy. When we are looking at the advantages in Call of Duty however the scale of the advantages here are of a completely different magnititude. Being able to buy a budget Assault rifle or a better assault rifle earlier in the game against instant win button, especially considering the person getting the instant win button is more likely to be starting the game with a better weapon.
To be fair to the games, they do give you benefits that you can get if you die a lot these would be Death Streaks (http://www.themodernwarfare2.com/mw2/multiplayer/deathstreaks/), if you are going to click any link I provide I reccomend it be this one, because there you can note that you don't get access to these until you are level 4, 6, 27 and 39. So well after you have sunk many hours into the game, then you can start to fight back a little better against experienced players. Yet another barrier against entry as a new gamer, but like all the other components the more you play it the more likely you are to get it and even more frustratingly, the harder it makes for people beneath you to actually capitalise on a successful kill.
Now when you combine these two things together it starts to paint a portrait of what I find so deplorable in these games, they are innately stacked against the newer player. This makes the game harder to play competetively, to be on even footing you need to sink an innordinate number of hours into the game with a shakey footing start and that is just in the online community. To even play this game at LANs where the top tier of competetive gaming takes place they have to have specifically modified versions of the game to fix the balance. All of this puts the kerfuffle about dedicated servers in the PC gaming community into a different light if you are not used to looking at the games from this angle. The inability to have a dedicated server makes it harder to balance the game for competetive play, makes it harder to control the conditions of the server and leaves you at the whims of the matchmaking system. Worst of all? The host will have a massive advantage on ping if you are playing on the internet. There is always some disparity there based on distance to server, but you are normally talking in a magnitude of 50ms of lag, for the host? They are running with 0ms lag, you need to have everyone with very good connections and be playing locally to cut everyone's ping down to 50ms. That or have better net code than I have ever seen in a game.
You could however disregard the game as a piece of competetive multiplayer entertainment and just treat it as just a game to play. Ignore the stacking of advantages and disadvantages and fair play because hey, there is clearly a market for such games with people playing MMORPGs for PVP components with all the delightful farce that surrounds those outside of the top tier of play. This still makes for an inherently flawed game with some serious downsides. What might those be? These imbalances natually poison the community. You make it nearly impossible for new players to come into the game as everyone else has such a huge head start, I am sure you still get new players, but the incoming numbers after a few months plummet compared to what you can get with a game that has a flat entry level. Without new players gaming communities just die out and move on to other games.
So we have a game that is unbalanced in favour of early starters and self defeating as a piece of community building. How do concepts like this make it into a AAA title that is worth millions? Easilly. They are there by design. We are looking at the same kind of design we are seeing in modern many kinds of modern technologies, built in obsolescence. The game isn't meant to last any longer than the 12 or 18 months it takes to churn out the next component of the franchise to start the same whole vicious cycle again. Tear it all down and rebuild it all over again reselling the same core product again at full price of entry all over again. Engaging in the same self fulfilling cycle of reward and parasitic community creation all over again. This is great for publishers but terrible for gamers themselves, instead of breeding inclusive communities it breeds short lived heirarchy based communities that thrive for short periods of time and then devour themselves as they run out of new easy kill fodder. This is on top of the obvious negative side to gamers where previously a strong community based multiplayer game could be an absolutely amazing value for money investment, they instead become sucked into your regular purchase cycles like we see with mobile phones and other gadgetry. This isn't to say it will kill the industry, far from it, people trapped in these cycles will keep buying and playing fairly obviously, but what it does curb is innovation. You get by the numbers shooters that feed into these habits and as long as the market for this kind of gameplay is large it will continue to thrive. There is always the threat that MMORPGs have though in that they will hit the threshhold for the marke and possibly even stifle all competition, but we aren't quite there yet.
Now I have hated on the one series enough, you can shrug it off as well it is just one company doing it, Activision and no one likes them anyway right with all their mass firings and raping Guitar Heros and whatnot? Well no, last I looked Call of Duty was being hailed as one of the best selling games of all time (taking sales from 3 platforms added together) and the proof in the pudding? The huge sales were at release. A fairly fun page to look at is this http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ You can compare what people are playing. I won't really do any statistics analysis here, but just want to highlight the fact that if you look, remember to compare peak playerships as well as current and not that Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source are 12 and just over 6 years old respectively. That is community longevity. Consider the number of players you see there for the original game and remember that when Counter-Strike was taking off you could pick up a copy of Halflife for $15 and Counter-Strike was free. Value for money at almost the best ratio you will find in gaming. That is a strong win for a consumer. Now with that horrible segue into talking about Steam I really want to note just how big this phenomenon is becoming, currently as of writing this, Crysis 2 just came up for Preorder, one of the benefits for the Preorder is a free 5 levels in Multiplayer at release. So regardless of any setbacks on release date or quality of the game, before you have had any chance to find out anything at all about the game other than the marketting prerelease hype, they want you to pony up your money a month before release just so you don't get screwed over and caught in the tail end of this cycle. You thought it was bad when Gamestop and EB were asking you to preorder or you might not be able to get a game? How about when it was preorder or missing out on content? Well, they successfully found a new spin on it that hurts gamers even more. You have to preorder to not be at a statistical disadvantage in a competetive game. Very nicely done from a marketting perspective, but horrible for gamers. I hope all your friends are going to buy the game too and didn't choose to preorder Brink instead or are just going to stick with Bulletstorm or something else, because otherwise you are shit out of luck.
Now why do I take so much umbrage to it and note it here on an RPG site? Well these get bandied around as RPG elements, but they aren't really the core components of what makes an RPG, they are a common execution of the genre, but far from the heart and soul of the genre and there have been other games out there that have successfully taken those same RPG elements without taking the grind with it (For people following on the forum, this is my obligatory Deus Ex hype here), you can integrate things like this wonderfully in Shooters and they are fairly easilly adapted to other genres as well, but is this really the elements we as gamers want taken from them? Not really for myself personally, such things have their place and in competetive play they should be kept far away. Leave this kind of thing to the singleplayer environment or to non-competetive gaming modes. It sure is fairly fun in Co-operative gameplay modes that have such things. Hell in Real Time Strategy this very thing has developped its own little genre, which is again a thing for another time.
Just as a closer here (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits) is a direct link to Extra Credits which is a fantastic series on Escapist Magazine that covers topics far more broadly than I do, more succintly, better researched and far more optimistically than I do. Check them out.
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There has been a demand for more
fillerFashion! So here we go
(http://members.optusnet.com.au/grefter/dgfashion.jpg)
We pick up where we left off still on A in Suikoden.
Ain Gide (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=10)
Oh Suikoden 1 you are the gift that keeps giving. Probably the first of many generic brown cloaks, that wonderful pallete choice of clashing purple and green mixed in with orange. These are the signature of Suikoden 1 art even more than the crazy body proportions like the hands that reach from the shoulders to half way down the torso. The knee high lace up healed boots that accentuate the calf that of course clash with the rest of the outfit. To crown it off you have to love the Super Saijin haircut. Apparently Suikoverse has invented Hairspray as well as Dunlop welting.
Aisha - No image
Akaghi (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=100)
Again hairspray immediatly comes to the fore. Well honestly it is probably just grease which is just as amazing honestly, where exactly does one find a sufficient supply of grease and the clean water supply needed to maintain that hairstyle on a ship? Akaghi at least has clothing that doesn't clash. If he was a bit more buff he could totally pull of the wife beater. He would badly need to get a haircut losing the pinhead thing, but more importantly losing those carefully curled sideburns. Do we need to add the curling iron to the list of things being made completely out of date here? I suppose not. If he dropped the haircut and worked out it is almost a workable look. The purple is a bit much of course, but it almost works! Now lets talk about that rape face. That is one scary rape face. The pose really isn't helping, it is like he was caught mid thrust given the way his hips are jutting forward. He gets really into it as well, right up on his tiptoes. Thats right kid, scary rapeface here is a NINJA. He can break into your house while you sleep.
Alanis (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=12)
AHHHHHHHHHHH WHAT HAPPENED TO HER LEGS.
Seriously, the perspective on this piece of art is positively disturbing. As with most Suikoden 3 art though, the outfit is pretty decent, if a bit baffling for someone living in a presumably temperate area like grasslands, but an area that isn't suffering from a lack of water (everything in Suikoden 3 is quite green), meaning it is likely fairly humid. Regardless though, it is a nice dress with matching jacket. Very heavy jacket for the weather which is the part that really throws me. The haircut is a bit much work, but works for a little girl (note that the fring is straight and the back is curly, either she straightens or she curls).
Albert (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=13)
There isn't much to say about Albert other than Ciato would totally do him over a barstool. The overcoat is wayyyyy to big for him, but whatever, he still pulls it off. No wonder he teleports around with Luc though, a white leather coat like that would be a complete and total bitch to keep clean if you walked anywhere at all. The coat would be warm as hell, which as far as a running theme of criticism for Suikoden 3 art is one I am prepared to take, at least they can look good.
Alberto (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=14)
Unlike Albert above Alberto is not wearing clothing that is completely batshit insane for the weather he is in. The glasses work pretty well for him and a dude rocking a ponytail with hair that curly has earned the right to have that chinstrap beard. The patterned shirt actually is kind of cool if a bit strong (orange?) I would like to see if the cuffs are similarly patterned given that the hem of the shirt and the collar are, so I will give it the benefit of the doubt here and assume whichever looks best. Burgundy pants are... well shit I guess they could work for some, I wouldn't do it with light brown hair though personally. The booties are terrible though. That shit is borderline ugg boot territory which instantly loses you a million points. Gods something that loose would suck hard to walk more than a few metres in, would be comfy as a slipper though I guess. Green shoes with burgundy pants is terrible. The shirt is still pretty cool though, he should totally hook up with a chick in a peasant dress.
Aldo (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=96)
Aldo looks like a generic elf but isn't even an elf. I do laugh at the hair flowing in the breeze wile the rest of his clothing sits perfectly still. Those purple tassles should be moving as well at least. I don't really have much to say here, pants, functional boots and a vest is fine honestly. I fear we have another thrust forward pelvis here though. Is Aldo showing us that he is an archer or is he about to put his fingers up to his mouth and poke his tongue through as a proposition to all the ladies? We will never know.
Alec Wisemail - No image
Alen (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=16)
Suikoden 1 head shots are so very much better than the main art. So of course I will be talking about the full body shots. The head! It is huge! The whole torso which is to small for the head just happens to also be to small for the body. This shit is creepy as fuck, it is like Frankenstein started with midgets and progressively ran out of midget parts as he worked his way upwards. Generic armour and stuff. Boring boring boring. Nice clown shoes bro.
Alen Wisemail - No image
Alenia (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=17)
Ahhh Queen's Knights outfit, you almost look good generally speaking. Alenia of course fucks it up just like she does everything else. Short skirt underneath that chest armour girl and either really tight leggings or some honestly pretty sexy pantyhose (?!??!?? Pantyhose has been invented? Even if it hasn't apparently they have lycra!) I have no idea what the go with the boots are, knee high and look like they are about to slide off at any moment, just kind of floppy looking. Strange. Purple with a dull bronze is kind of gross as well. Don't pick blended colours from nearly opposite sides of the colour wheel. At least they are both dull tones so it isn't overly offensive like Suikoden 1.
That is as good a point to stop as any.
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Well I was going to put out another Suikoden FASHION filler, but instead I am going to direct you to read this.
http://www.visionmachine.net/download/index.shtml
Vision Machine is a free comic that explores the concept of freedom of information, user agreements, open source, virtual economics and a ton of other amazingly delicious science fiction concepts that are on the forefront of IT discussions these days. I would love to write a thousand word review of it or if I was more skilled to do a piece of work in that setting, however I lack the writing skill and am just completely blown away by it.
Actually honestly what I really wish I could do was code something really simple and release it as opensource that is Vision Machine related.
I can't say anything more than read this. It is free in all the best ways possible. I am in love with this book.
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Alex (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=19)
Big brown boots with jeans tucked, an open button shirt and an orange vest. Screams "Hello boys!" like some kind of mix of a Cowboy and the construction worker from the village people. Comes with his own rop as well. If the face wasn't ugly with that nose the hair might even contribute to the pretty gay cowboy look. Wait this dude is married with a kid?
Alhazred (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=20)
HELLO LITTLE BOY WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE A LOOK AT MY MAGNIFYING GLASS? REACH INTO MY PANTS AND TAKE IT OUT. Looks like a cross breed between a Garden Gnome and Heihachi Mishima. Get rid of the cloak and you could almost take it serious if it wasn't for the pedomagnifier. For bonus fun times, follow the chain connected to the Magnifying glass. He tucks it into his pants and it is connected to his backpack. This has to make putting down that backpack an adventure and a half with risks of the magnifying glass pulling the pants down, being dropped on the floor or having to take a bag full of books off his back with one hand while he grasps the magnifying glass. The really confusing thing is all they had to do was put pockets on the jacket and connect it to that, which would have been perfect, except for the fact that it would have made the crotch mounted expansion device even creepier to keep stuff in his trunks. Another character with pants tucked into the tops of their boots, this is an odd fashion convention that they have here.
Amada (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=21)
Check out my junk. I carry it around in a bandage. With a pysique like this it is a crim to wear more than 8 pieces of clothing, so I chose a pair of sandals, an open tunic, some leg wraps, a wrist wrap and a bandage for my abs and junk because they are TOTALLY SICK bro. Did you catch my good side? My only regret is that the tunic does not have a collar to pop.
Ameria (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=99)
Ermine coat, Go-Go boots, thigh high stockings (Again with the hosiery), crazy short shorts, see through shirt and a choker. Well done Ameria, you are the first hooker we have. I can't even work out exactly which market you are servicing, the coat says up market, but the see-through mesh top says low end. I also thoroughly enjoy the suspscious bulge at the front of the shorts. Is she packing or is she just prepared to service gentleman with a preference for strapons? We will never know. For a fun game try standing in that pose for an extended period. Your neck and shoulders will hurt like a bitch. Ensure that your left shoulder is held back at a different angle than the right.
Anabelle (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=22)
Bright cyan bandana and shirt! Fur lined vest and boots with a heel! Otherwise functional outfit! Hair to absofuckinglutely die for! Nothing else to say!
Andarc Bergman (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=834)
Nice earth tones, that standard Japanese Researcher Mage Dude outfit with mantle and tabard thing. Lots of use of colour and it doesn't really clash. The glasses work well. Also boring, much like Andarc in general. Silly weapon. AXEWAND.
Anita (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=23)
Custom made high heel plated boots and greaves. Especially noting that Anita looks like something that just stepped out of the 80s. Strong woman wearing pants and a weird skirted thing with crazy huge shoulder pads, like wow, just nutso big there. Popped collar on the blouse. Big earrings and short feathered hair. Keep that 80s spirit alive guys, in another 30 years it might be in fashion again.
Anji (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=24)
Again we have a headshot and a full body shot where the headshot is kind of silly, but the full body shot is completely ridiculous. This guy is a pirate and he wears 2 layers of thick baggy clothing and crazy huge ugg boots. I hope he knows how to swim in heavy clothing because if he ever goes overboard this dude is going to sink like a fucking stone. Where does a pirate find hairspray during a civil war? On any other character with less ridiculous shoes and haircut that might even be fairly passable for Suikoden 1 art. There is no BRONZE GOD action or crazy proportions going on with the torso but most of all the colours aren't painfully clashing taken from a horrible pallette. Go you Anji, you manage to make something almost passable completely ridiculous.
Anna Lightfellow - No Image
Annallee (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=26)
Lady that imitates a fish and then joins your army, has 4 letters in an 8 letter long name dresses sensibly. How dull. Nice peasant dress. Perfect match for Alberto maybe?
Anne (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=27)
Standard Grasslander kind of functional but totally crazy outfit statement goes here. Anne has a really weird one. At first glance it looks alright, then you need to compartmentalise each component working upwards. Those white bands really really do not want to be attached to those shoes, they make a pretty neat little flat foot shoe if they don't. If they do they are like those amazingly terrible sandal boot abominations that seem to be in widely available at the momen (I REFUSE to call this (http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=imghp&biw=1280&bih=810&q=boot+sandal&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=g4gs1g5&aql=&oq=) terrible shit fashionable ugh, click that link if you want to get an insatiable urge to punch someone's face in). ANYWAY, before I go off on a tangent about modern fashion disasters lets move up this woman's legs and criticise video games. Those patterns in the bottom of those pants are kind of crazy, that shit would be terrible to wash, I guess you could pull it off as they have to hand wash everything, but the stitching on those pants is kind of crazy. Moving up more, wow those are some figure hugging pants, does she use a lubricant to get them on? Split tunic/dress thing is confusing, but whatever, this is fashion and just designed to look good. I doubt Anne walks more than 3 metres in a day. Further up, is that more patterns cut out of the pants to reveal more skin or is that a belt? I think it is honestly skin. This is why she can't walk more than 3 metres in a day. If she goes outside long enough to get tan lines that has to look really weird. Armbands with weird colours that work well. Earth tones people, they will get you far. Note the way that the tunic/dress thing lifts and seperates. Either Anne has invented the strapless Wonderbra in the grasslands, she is AMAZINGLY gifted with breastacular bouyancy or that is an absolutely amazing dress/tunic thing. It even hugs the top of her breasts. Just wow. What the hell are those sleeves attached to? It looks like a really crazy jacket, because they farly clearly go over the top of part of the dress/tunic near her right armpit. Again with the weird patterened gaps. Is the jewlerry attached or does she wear a necklace underneath the whit cloth? Hair even MORE to die for than Annabelle. Such full body and an amazing perm. How does a Grasslander do it? Absolutely amazing. Completely fantastic but you know what? All the issues I have with the function and form of this outfit? This is the first one I think we have that is entirely impossible that actually totally works. Anne is just a dead sexy lady. Hugo should totally have hit that.
Anos - No image
HAHA ANOS
Antonio (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=29)
White guy with a Fu Manchu moustache. Creepy as fuck. Chef's outfits are ridiculous even in real life. Nice shoes with no socks. Also take note ladies, Antonio generally seems to be in proportion unlike most Suikoden 1 art and he has HUGE feet if you know what I mean. One possibility is that he has heard some rumours and just wears shoes 8 sizes to big, but given his stance? I say he is just inviting all the ladies. All the single ladies.
Apple (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=30)
Three pieces to discuss! So we will have three paragraphs just for Apple. I honestly wholeheartedly approve since she is the recurring character that I was most pleased to see each iteration. Suikoden 1's Apple art is something special and I will have to link you to the theme song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uS5b8aQ6z8). From days of long ago. From uncharted regions of the universe comes a legend. The legend of Voltron, Defender of the Universe. A mighty robot, loved by good, feared by evil. I have no idea why Apple is dressed like a generic 80s/90s/2000s/Japan is stuck in the 80s forever anime space female, but even it doesn't hide the crazy bad haircut, the stupidly huge boots and disturbingly large breasts for such a young teen. Cream outfit with yellow leggings and red trim is stupid, especially with brown hair and green eyes. This outfit would be absolutely horrible to keep clean.
Suikoden 2 art, now I need to find a completely different theme song. Suffice to say I totally dig the haircut (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR5mgcRyv2w). Grow up a bit and generally be in proportion and the outfit looks less ridiculous, especially the boots. Darker shades on the trim and leggings make this outfit great. Seriously I thoroughly enjoy how functional and comfortable this outfit is. Apple knows how to dress and how to be totally awesome. It is a shame the series never let her grow into her own full character instead of being the Competence the character. Still she is totally bitching. The glasses totally work as well.
And when we hit older Apple (30s is it?), oh man she doesn't stop being amazing. Again with the haircut. Glasses totally still work. The hair is great. Functional clothing all around. SENSIBLE SHOES. Sigh, Apple is great.
Ashtat Falenas (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=31)
Arshtat's outfit is extravagant and amazing, see the stuff I say about Agares? Crank that shit up to 11 here. Perfectly fitting for her position, expensive material used exessively, flowing draped garments that exentuate her figure and WHOA tight around the breasts, this is one seriously stacked lady and she works that shit like it is everybody's business. Crazy impractical dress, but totally the kind of shit you could see being used as a portrait dress in an fairly exotic temperate climate like Falcena. Nice use of colour, there is lots of it and fairly diverse ones, but subtle tones and theflow really well, they are all fairly closely connected with the only part of the clothing that is really busy is the shoulder and chest area where you have the white, purple, yellow/gold and blues all meeting and it honestly works pretty well. Big thumbs up. Bonus points for being an outfit you could actually make and wear if you had a stupid amount of money.
Arthur (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=32)
You are shit Arthur, I hope Guillaume rapes gives you a sweet lollipop that stupid grin off your face. Your boots are way to big, read striped socks? Go away. Functional pants that you roll up for no damned reason (they would fit you perfectly if be a bit baggy, which rolling them up does nothing for). That vest is stupid. Get rid of that shit. Your glasses are like half the size of your head. Get a haircut.
And that is done. Making up for yesterday I guess? I was hoping to finish off A, but hit 2k words already and there is still more to go.
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Going to finish off A tonight as I ran out of time and don't really have a topic to sink my teeth into. Dragon Age 2 demo takes my time like nobodies business.
Assam - No Image
Augusine Nabor (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=34)
Pants tucked into boots, actually fits this time as Augstine is a gentleman of breeding. Tight pants, but not overly tight, they actually look like they are made of cloth! Amazingly not anachronistic technology here. There isn't much to say here, he is a beautiful man and dresses like it, blonde hair and blue eyes? Yes he can get away with a blue vest and dress shirt with tails. The flared out cuffs must make it a bitch to each chips and gravy, but such is life. Marvelous hair and the hat is nice. It could be worn at a far more rakish angle if he wanted to be even more debonaire.
Ax (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=35)
NAKED. Why does a lizard have fur on its ears. Why does a Lizard have protruding ears actually?
Axel (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=101)
Does not live up to the Axel name (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dASqLXiuomY). Disappointing and boring all around. Totally styling there with your vest tucked into your pants and your pants tucked into your boots. It is a sham you don't have your hair tucked into your tunic. Boring boring boring, just like the character!
Aya - No Image
Ayame (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=36)
I really kind of want to know where the hell you get socks that fade from white to turquoise to black. I don't think I could pull them off, but damn they are seriously pimping. Greaves and sandles is a weird look. That robe/gi/thing starts weirdly high up. It is like she dresses in a bath robe that is 4 sizes to big and belts it at her waist with half of it bunched up around her shoulders. NINJA! Nice breastplat that only covers your tits and not your awesomely vulnerable abdomen and shoulder armour that I assume restrictsaids your arm movement. Bracers to protect your hands and fingerless gloves so you can risk losing all manua dexterity. So awesome. How the hell do you get lycra that clings that closely to your face to cling tightly just below the ear and maintain the contour of your nose. That must take some crazy prep time. Not as much as the ZANY NINJA HAIR, but still a lot of preperation time. Regardless though, the socks are totally bitching.
Ayana (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=38)
MAID. SWORD MAID. BORING.
Ayda (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=39)
Okay so Suikoden 2 isn't the first game to pull off the totally white girl as a native Indian thing, but when Tekken did it they just made them look like white trash. Suikoden 2 pulls out all the stops making the girl white as fuck, wear a full native outfit and then give her red hair. Classy. Not much to say about the outfit, I kind of have no real frame of reference to it as a piece of fashion. I do question how exactly she got the different colour stitching around the bottom of that shoe. Is it alternated colour stitching on a traditional soled shoe? Is it beeds tied into a leather mocassin type deal? I guess I will never know. Note that it looks like she is barely holding onto the bow with her finger tips, even more loosely than the arrow.
So that is A finished. I am not sure what I plan to do with this. The ideal is to get through all the letters. Maybe do all 26 and then do a big extended thing to upload letter at a time onto the main site with images instead of just links. Did people enjoy this? I know having the images on the page makes it a much more fun endeavour like Feeling His Full Length Edgeworth was. Is anyone even reading this anymore? I don't know, but I do know I need to get some more serious articles written as well.
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Did people enjoy this? I know having the images on the page makes it a much more fun endeavour like Feeling His Full Length Edgeworth was. Is anyone even reading this anymore? I don't know, but I do know I need to get some more serious articles written as well.
It is definitely something I take the time to go through and compare with the pictures each day. Very entertaining. Serious articles are good reads as well, keep it up.
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Totally seconding Tonfa here, but if I -didn't- enjoy analyses of Suikoden art I would have to be the most polite person ever.
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I want to print these things and frame them on my wall.
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Did people enjoy this? I know having the images on the page makes it a much more fun endeavour like Feeling His Full Length Edgeworth was. Is anyone even reading this anymore? I don't know, but I do know I need to get some more serious articles written as well.
It is definitely something I take the time to go through and compare with the pictures each day. Very entertaining. Serious articles are good reads as well, keep it up.
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I don't agree with all of your fashion choices and some of your art critiques show some inexperience with figure-drawing (though your complaints on S1/S4 art are all spot-on, your S3 complaints on proportions and positioning just strike me as intentionally misinterpreting the artwork).
Despite that, I've been reading them all religiously and they make me chuckle.
I still kind of prefer your serious articles, though.
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Nuh-uh. Grefter fashion is superior.
That said I do kind of miss the vein of format and tone you did with the PW stuff, I seriously cracked up for ages on that one. Suiko stuff is great and you should continue, if you are making me click on the links to check out the art you are doing it right.
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I prefer humor to having nothing to say about a character, I stand by the Alanis thing though. The distance between her knees and the tops of the boots is all wrong unless you are assuming a very specific steep angle shot, which makes the entire top half of her body completely at odds with her feet. I can't think of to many things about S3 art that I really harp on the perspectives and proportions though.
Also yeah it is hard to hold a dialogue with Suikoden characters compared to PW characters. Just so much less to work with. Alright glad people are reading it, I was cool with 2 responses this morning, that was all I needed. Thanks guys.
Post incoming sometime. Will edit it in.
So with Fenrir back I guess now is as good a time as any to celebrate games that none of us have heard of or played, myself included. This is one I think we actually should get a bit of a following in the DL. Bonus points for it being French. Also not actually written for that reason, but serendipity and so on.
Winter Voices, an RPG in episodes
Winter Voices is an RPG that is from a little indie company that is trying to make an MMO. Having dipped my toes into Winter Voices I honestly have no idea why they are even trying to make an MMO. They are fairly clearly capable of something far more personally engaging and capable than that, but such is life. This little treasure of a game is available on Steam for a reasonably cheap price.
The game is set in a remote village in a Tundra, the town seems much more about getting by day to day and surviving in the harsh climate. It isn't like Teudogar (http://www.teudogar.com/) where it is a historic story and setting, there is a fairly modern setting involved, it is just a very remote village. You roll up your character from one of three classes that are essentiall a hunter, a village girl or what amounts to a village lorekeeper in training. They are each adept at different things, the hunter is good at focus and physical challenges, the village girl has better social skills and some other things and the lorekeeper is more intelligent and has better memory skills. So you have fairly diverse character choices.
Story is where this game shines through, the opening to this story is with the death of your father and the game largely seems to revolve around dealing with the grief or aftermath of this. Your father was a quiet aloof man. You have dialogue trees that show your reaction and different classes seem to react differently. This is where the combat in the game comes into play. The opening combat sequences aren't fighting monsters. It is fighting representations of your grief. You don't fight them so much as evade them and deal with them. Topping it all off, it isn't actually that unique a combat system, it is a grid based affair where you have HP/Willpower (which is essentially mana) and a set of abilities that you can use, picking new ones as you level up. It is a nice way of showing that a fairly stock RPG combat system can be used to interpret so much more than just mashing monsters into a pulpy mass.
The intro of the game really tries to highlight that the different characters will be different ways of playing, Huntress is physically formidable and is the most likely to survive and has Intuition as a primary stat. Practical class that gets through life. Of note is that they dominate the Physique stat, but the game makes note that Physique does not have an effect in combat at all, again playing to the strengths of the game. The Weaver gives different dialouge options sarcasm and cynicism comes into play, but they assure you that this is the lighter path to take. Weavers are supposedly generally more happy than the other two classes. The final one is the Volva. Picking this class warns you that it is the hardest one to play and that it is only reccomended if you are used to the kind of game. More on them and their primary stat later that I quite like, but it does note that for all their difficulty they are the most rewarding to play. Given that they are the lorekeepers and medicine women of the village, the story of one of those dealing with their own grief could make for quite the compelling tale indeed.
You want strong female role models? Well here is a start. You always play a female and while it centres around the death of your father, it is not really to do with the loss of the father, he is distant at best and given some of the dialogue options almost uncaring possibly. The game is how this girl deals with adversity and comes through the situation.
It is a game I have been meaning to keep go back to and play more than a short while, but as people may have noticed last year was a pretty damn good year for me with my more regular PC gaming. That or I had dreadful shit to trawl through. Suffice to say it has caught my eye and imagination and I really think it is something people should check out. I am not sure exactly how it pans out but it is unique so far.
There is other things that set it apart though, it is episodic, which has worked pretty well for Telltale games with their point and click adventures, but it is interesting to see someone try this kind of charging model for RPGs that is releasing them at a somewhat consistent rate and haven't dried up (Penny Arcade game is the only one that springs to mind).
One specific mechanic that interests me that I kind of want to talk about in closing is the game's use of a stat Memory. This is the primary stat of the Volva (the lorekeeper style class). Memory as a stat boosts the experience you get, so Volvas will level up faster than other characters, however the stat has a downside, the better your memory the more damage you take. This is absolutely delicious flavour given the focus of the game being a story of grief and dealing with it. Other characters can choose to increase Memory as well if it suits your purpose. It is an interesting trade off in a stat that has gameplay effects. Most of the other stats are fairly straight forward standard affairs, but this one in particular is one I quite like and wanted to mention.
So yeah hopefully this brings an interesting little game to someone else' attention.
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Have played it and would characterize it as a collection of great ideas with some awkward execution. If you are sympathetic to people trying off-the-wall ideas and not necessarily succeeding at everything they shoot for but still giving them props for trying then it's worth a look. I am fairly forgiving of botched implementation if there are novel ideas at the core of it, so I enjoyed it for what it tried to do, but I can't help but second some of the complaints I've read in reviews. Primarily that it's sloooow-moving. To some extent this suits the story since it's entirely about internal action, but when it extends to combat it's often needlessly so. Enemies spamming attacks that barely damage your character (okay, so I built a tank that deflects her problems via sarcasm) and eat up time with their repeated animations, some interface/navigation clunkiness, narration is so leaden and sedate that it's well past the point where one could charitably call it calm deliberation--there's a variety of first-time-developer hang-ups like this. Patches may have affected some of the mechanical stuff since I played it, not sure (I know they altered some battle conditions, at least).
Still worth looking at for people interested in quirky ideas for the sake of quirky ideas, though, as the core concept really is a standout one. The first episode shouldn't cost you much if you're not sure. It does enough right that I feel like the developers could really produce something great with more practice. At the very least, they succeed pretty well at atmosphere and that was obviously their priority anyway. The backgrounds have a lovely hand-drawn look that I never get tired of looking at even though it involves a lot of white snowy whiteness (which I can hardly say isn't fitting). There were a lot of times I felt like someone was trying to remake Haibane Renmei in game form. This isn't a bad thing. And I can't really praise the music enough, reminds me of NIN in a mellow mood at its best and picks up the slack in setting the scene when the writing isn't pulling its weight (hit-or-miss there, sometimes they do nail ominous foreboding and sometimes it's just overblown). Wish I could find a collection of it somewhere. It's what kept me going through the more annoying battles.
So basically strange game is strange. If you are too then you might get along. It really feels like a love-it-or-hate-it proposition to me, though. Takes a fair amount of patience to keep at it, but I guess if you can't find that at a site where people voluntarily compile statistics on fictional characters then you can't find it anywhere.
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At $5 an installment it can be forgiven for a fair bit I find personally.
Edit - Glad someone else has given it a look though.
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Haven't even heard about this game!
I really like the more serious posts. Great reads.
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Gameplay and Plot segregation
On and off on the forums people will have heard me praise games for having characters gameplay abilities align to the abilities of the character shown in the plot of the game before. This is another factor that I feel greatly helps contribute to what can make a game great, much like world building. It is something that is entirely optional when building your game, there has certainly been a great many of highly praised games that don't really have gameplay abilities and plot abilities reflect each other, but as a story telling tool and a gameplay tool when it is leveraged well it empowers both the story teller and can be used to enhance gameplay.
I have talked about the ways that gameplay power being noted in plot previously help before in other parts of the site before so some of this may be old hat for some. The primary effect that it has though is to help draw the player into the story somewhat. It isn't a direct effect, certainly not a crutch to replace a good compelling story, but by showing that the things that you are telling the characters to do over and over again in player controlled sections actually correlates somewhat to the events that are happening in the plot adds to the overall cohesiveness of the setting. The world is functioning by a consistent set or rules (or at least more consistent than if there is no overlap at all). It also helps to give meaning to the players actions, it is a bit of a stretch to expect that as far as the core plot is concerned that every fight the player takes part in during your regular RPG play is canonical of the story, but it is a nice nod at least to this is how the characters are actually expected to have dealt with the situations that they are put into. This takes a bit of the sting out of the lengthy sequence of events that are the hoops we jump through to get through to the next scripted plot sequence. It doesn't need to be at a 1;1 ratio, that is going above and beyond for story telling, especially in an RPG where we are normally looking at fairly abstracted concepts for combat (turn based for a good portion of the genre first of all), but small links help and if you have enough of them you can get away with it. A fairly minor example of it that is fairly cute is the way the main character in Dragon Quest 8 (from here on referred to as Watermelon) is immune to curses. It explains how Watermelon survived the devastation of his native kingdom prior to the start of the game, gameplay wise it makes him immune to a rare almost never used status outside of the first boss fight of the game where Yangus can be hit by it and is kind of screwed over by it, but Watermelon shrugs it off. It then is largely dropped until the aftergame dungeon where FUCK YOU WATERMELON IS A DRAGON plot happens, regardless of that it is a neat little nod. Wild Arms 4 is kind of my poster child for this, your platforming assistance tools are part of the plot, your combat abilities are part of the plot and so on. It is far from perfect at it, but it is there from the outset and is repeatedly noted through the whole game. It really all adds up to help make what is at heart a plot that is Kids Good Adults Bad still fairly compelling. It is a ridiculous over the top plot that still keeps you engaged, it isn't all because of this stuff of course. Some nice characterisation and completely embracing the silly goes a long way, but it certainly doesn't hurt either.
Wild Arms 4 is a useful example for how it can help you these same principles can enhance the gameplay as well as the story side of RPGs though. There is the fairly obvious link where having the plot powers set out can help with character design and abilities or serve as inspiration for boss mechanics, that is fairly obvious especially for anyone who has read into general design principles before like Mark Rosewater's columns over at the official Magic: The Gathering website (always good reads by the way). One other really key area that it helps though is that it helps clue the player into what they can expect with strange boss fight mechanics ahead of time. While the mechanics of the boss fights in Wild Arms 4 are not completely telegraphed to you based on the powers of each specific boss, the mechanics are relatively self evident once you see them in action and part of this is from having seen them in action plot wise. Hugo shifts away a panel instead of being hit if it is available, matching up with his powers you see in the cutscenes beforehand. Lambda's premonition comes to the fore, Balgain is slow and will kill you in one shot if you somehow get hit by his slow wind up and so on. You won't necessarily know the exact mechanics ahead of time, but there isn't really any that come completely out of left field. This helps ease the player into the gameplay of your combat system and keeps them engaged, it loops back into being a benefit for the storytelling, the more invested the player is in the action of the combat rather than treating it as a separate intellectual puzzle to overcome the more you are going to be sucking them into the plot as well. It is all a bit self reinforcing. The more focus you put into it the more it pays off.
I really feel like I should elaborate on this more, maybe some other time, but that is a quick run-down on why I will occasionally ramble on about the benefits of not sticking to the classic plot and gameplay powers being segregated by big cast iron gates like we see in some games. It isn't something that is necessarily important or required, but it is a nice little bonus and it is a little bit of polish to a game that will keep on giving if you follow through with it.
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Babbage (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=40)
Oh hey there guy, I see you are a man who works with dangerous materials given the way you need to cover your legs up and tie the hems of your pantsto keep anything out. I like that you role you sleeves up as well, it must get hot being all covered up like that. Best be safe. I also have no idea what the deal with this pose is. One arm raised with knee raised as well, image taken mid step? If so it is strange that your opposite shoulder to the raised foot is more forward than the other with the hand just kind of dangling back behind the top of the shoulder. That shit cannot be comfortable. You could almost guess it is lying on your back turned on its side working underneath a machine, but clearly gravity disagrees. Are you walking backwards? I don't know what is going on here. Colours work, but whatever it is work clothes. Also love that a guy that works with complex cog based machinery wers loose fitting clothes with one suspender strap loose. That isn't asking for trouble.
Badeaux (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=41)
Why hello there Badeaux I see your sly proposition with raised eyebrows and raised whip. Not really interested, didn't you know that Fur is Murder? You did? You are a vegetarian you say? Well that is a little suprising all things considered. What do I mean? Well lets just say that you are wearing more hide than your bear friend does. No, I mean the one that lives near Green Hill. No, I mean the one that is an animal. No, I mean the one that is actually of the Ursidae familly. Yes, the one that doesn't wear studded leather. Okay. I guess Tuesday is alright, but this isn't my kind of scene. What have I just agreed to?
Bahram Luger (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=42)
Bahram Luger's Sad Face is catching :( Nice coat with some very fancy embroderty on the cuffs and collar not to mention the shirt that matches. Pretty trendy (for the 1800s) low slung sabre sheath and swordbelt. Accessorizes very well and has the figure to pull off those tight linen pants, nice shapely calves as well. The shoes and knee high hose confuse me though. This guy spends most of his time on a ship? Those hose and shoes must be a total bitch to keep in order, the hose really could do to be a few inches shorter, cut off just below the knee rather than above works much better, will accentuate thse shapely calves all the more good sir. Also suprising the loafers don't have any ornamentation to them given how extravagant the coat and sabre are it is a little stunning to say the least, no buckle? Not even a brogue? Fine, there is an elegance to simplicity I suppose. I do have to ask though, just how hard are those shoes to walk in? I mean they have next to no heal in them at all and start about half way up the foot of where I would expect a loafer to. They must be amazingly easy to step out of. You sir are fortunate that you can rock such an amazingly manly stache and such an outrageous part with that brutal Widow's Peak. It works for you though, lucky man indeed. Could proooobably use a bit of codpiece though given the trends of the era this outfit is taken from it leaves the trousers a bit underwhelming.
Bang (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=106)
Bang. How appropriate, I would shoot you as well. Gods you are a boring old man. You even manage to make a Toothbrush moustache boring. Your hair badly needs a wash as well by the looks of it or is in bad need of some extra body, so flat and dead. I have praised the use of Earth Tones before, but there is such a thing as going to far. You even fail to make your accessories remotely interesting, a vest and a headband and you are still about as interesting as week old semen stains on a hotel carpet. That is to say you should have been cleaned up after whoever spawned you checked out, but no one could be fucking bothered. Die in a fire.
Barbara (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=43)
Oh hey, we see a return of Orange and Green with Red hair to die for. Amazingly this doesn't immediately make me want to gouge my eyes out. The difference between Suikoden 1 and 2 is that vast, even using the same ill advised pallete Suikoden 2 characters are somewhat tolerable. As a pattern the dress is pretty nice and given that you are in a kind of management position I can let you get away with the nice slippers. Olive shoes with a pale green scarf and skirt is confusing. The Green scarf really needs to go, you don't need it with hair like that. I do like that the artist kind of didn't seem to know what to do with the mouth. It is a deep red everywhere but the teeth like has a mouth full of strawberry jam. I hope it is tasty!
Barbarossa Rugner (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=44)
How do you ruin a set of platemail? Give it pansy elf booties. I presume they exist entirely just to kick dudes in their package. Just totally ruin people's day with that kind of shit. Why is the lining of the cloak a boring grey? This is an Emperor, line that shit with red velvet or something. On the topic of the cloak, ignoring the horrible lining it is pretty amazing. I mean the colour pallete here ruins it with the bright purple, but if it was a darker purple? Man those shoulders on it ould be fucking intimidating as shit. Big fuck off rubies on it with presumably gold wire lining worked into a wite fur shoulder? Damn man just damn. The armour shows to have a pretty elaborate working in it on the chest and knees, nice and extravagnt. The legs freak me right the fuck out though, we have another dude who's torso makes up less than half of their height, Scarlet Moon Empire apparently just has guys with huge legs. Then there is the leg armour as well. The leg plates go up past the groin plate. Presumably they are so well crafted that they cut off just where your legs move and provide some coverage for the hips? I have no idea, that is what the waist of the armour is for. Now lets talk a little about personal hygeine mister Emperor Guy. You really need to brush or at least comb your hair once in a while. Also the Stache is totally bitching, you should keep it up, but it is no wonder Windy never puts out. It isn't so much that you have one, it is that you don't appear to ever trim it. There is parts of it that stick upwards. You really need to start looking after yourself a bit more if you want to let Windy take you to paradise with her "Gate Rune" if you will. Also of course we must note cool popped collar bro.
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Reasons to play bad games, or why I hate fun.
There are a lot of reasons to play bad games. Certainly not as many reasons to not play them, after all they are bad and you are probably not enjoying yourself. Considering how often I rant on games I hate on the internet I figure it is probably about time I actually put it into words why I do it other than just sort of figure people have picked up on it by now. This is going to be delving into the psychology of a stupid stupid man, so enjoy it while it lasts because I will start swearing at you by the end of the week.
The primary reason I play games I know I won't enjoy is egotism and paranoia. I am paranoid and want to know how everything works and egotistical enough that my primary concern is understanding how I work. This certainly has its advantages it has lead me to discovering all kinds of new things that I do in fact enjoy and need to expand upon. This recent advent into Fashion? Turns out after 2 decades of being a total nerd and not caring about personal appearance that I still don't care about personal appearance, but do have a strong appreciation for fine clothing and classic concepts of style. Same goes for music, but we are talking games here. I play bad games so I get a better understanding what I dislike about them and what I like in good games. Not really a shocking new revelation, introspection is the nature of the introvert after all.
It goes a bit deeper than that. Specifically my need to understand how things work. A good game is fantastic and is a beautiful puzzle to put together, you see each specific thing that makes it work and in some cases it is a chunk of perfection carefully engineered to endear itself towards me, like Portal was a few years ago when it was released. It certainly did a good job at it with me and every other nerd in existence. A bad game on the other hand isn't really an amazing wonderland to run through and delight as you overturn each new design concept as it becomes apparent while looking back on it and seeing how it was applied earlier and only just now strikes you at the depth of the work gone into it (Valve commentaries are great showing you everything you missed as well). Instead you turn over disgusting horrible things and marvel at how badly put together they are. It is still essentially the same exercise as with the good game, just it isn't discovering nearly as interesting things. It is the analysis, not the subject that I enjoy. So that is one answer, a reason to play bad games is because they are a game there to play. It is something to do, something to look at and something to analyse. Why did you stick your dick in the lightsocket she asks? Because it was there he replies.
The concept of there being a game outside of the game is something that doesn't really seem to spring to mind to people when I get really worked up about a game that I am busy hating one. This concept of there being a meta level to games is far from new or remotely interesting, there is enough drinking games for bad movies and books around the place that it is certainly not just me that undertakes this kind of endeavour, there is a whole wiki for it that destroys your soul (TV Trops of course). Now how much they completely miss the mark is a discussion for another time (I will be fair to them, it is a Wiki and video games is by definition not their forte). It isn't just me, it certainly isn't everyone on the internet everywhere ever, let alone all the world wide over, but analysis is a big nerd past time. Especially you English majour types out there, they study this shit and then decide to hang around a bunch of math nerds and then don't play Deus Ex and totally fail to recognise a great game when it is right in front of them, but will rant on and on about game design just for fun because it is like right there (which is why you should write more often Alex or at least discuss it even if people will disagree. Forget other people's feelings, this is fun and life is but a game and we nought but players in it. CHECKMATE! King me and that is Uno.)
From talking of critical analysis we move into far more dull base reasons, but there is a good chance that if I am playing a game I have payed good money for it. It may not be as great as replaying something I like, but the fact of the matter is that I crave new stimulus and I have forked out $50 for yet another abomination, I may as well milk it for all the joy I can. It is infantile and stupid, but again like many a nerd, I am a bit of a completionist. Not all that much of one, I will do it until it stops giving me something fun to do. If the analysis falls through or the game is dreadfully repetetive it stops being fun and giving me things to rip on then I will tend to dump it like a sack of shit. A good example of this is probably why I am so amazingly harsh on N1 games. They fall into very repetetive traps that bore me to play them and each successive game seems dead set on milking that same basic failure in design. Sure they are certainly for some people, but I am sure some of you think purple chalk is tasty. I prefer my bad games to reach a bit more than retreading, unless of course we are talking about catastrophic failure to change anything, but that is less enjoying a game and far more seeing how long Camelot can keep putting out the same game for and get 8 or 9/10 reviews for the 12th time. One of these days they will stop making games that still mimic something from Shining Force.
Yet another reason, it seems that I like to rant about things on the internet. There is a small group of people that like to read me swearing at them for not having a clue how great Arcanum is and why they should play horribly buggy games that have all the sense of balance and fairness as Judge Doom. Especially when they have the gall to like boring kind of balanced games that play themselves. So yeah I like to entertain even if it is at times naught but infantile provocation.
Most importantly though? Sometimes I will play terrible games I hate just to be able to enjoy conversation, even if it is conversation where I have to hold back the bile and hate that I feel for such wretched games. Man one time someone even thought I liked Final Fantasy 13 because of it. I may hate the game with a fiery passion, but I can talk to you about it for a good hour or so before I start dreaming of glassing you in the eye to make the conversation go away. It is fun to be able to talk to or at least follow a conversation between people who are so heavilly invested in games. I mean to put it into perspective, I flunked out of complex mathematics in high school, I passed your more regular need this for science maths, but failed horribly in the fields that expand into imaginary math and all the stuff that explains the fun shit with Euler's number and whatnot. I was more than capable of understanding the concepts, but lacked the drive to be able to pass the exams. So take that 2 years of senior high school study for it and it is worthless to me as a student. As a human being though? It kept me involved at least at a basic level with a discussion between two of our resident math nerds on a long car trip to DLC3 and it was fantastic. Hands down one of the reasons I continue to travel to the US is because of encounters like that. So I play terrible games so I can listen to nerds talk about imaginary numbers and rub one out to it a few years later.
1500 words later, why do I play bad games? Because I am a complete and total nerd and I hate fun.
Tuesday nights are bowling nights so don't expect much more than a Suikoden post. The day after that is when Dragon Age 2 comes out, so I wouldn't hold your breath for much particularly inspired new writing for a while after that. We are either going to see fanboy posting or a lot of Suikoden FASHION. If I have the sense to do it I will do screenshots and a fashion log for it while I play. Or shit just a play log of something I hopefully love.
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I think my relationship towards the things you write is much like your relationship towards the things mc writes. It's just fascinating.
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Hating on classics and embracing genetic throwbacks in RPGs.
So I have been realising an odd little running theme in my modern tastes in RPGs. I am liking fewer of the modern action influenced JRPGs that are floating around or not liking the strange weird ones that are still trying to turn completely random events into an interesting and compelling method of play (SaGa turned the Last Remnant here, dude, give up, you keep making it worse and it only gets good when you remake your original work but substitute 8 bit characters with midget trannies), it is really strange, I am far more in favour of the throwbacks like Dragon Quest 8 and 9 even though they do bother me a little in and of themselves by not doing something new or interesting, but I certainly reject them far less aggressively than their contemperaries. They have something of a benefit of timing, both games were released at a time when that kind of game was something I wanted pretty badly.
There is more to it than just good timing though, they have a polish to them that some of the other games don't. They take an old point of game design and refine it to a fairly slickly put together little package, sure there is points where they completely go off the rails into batshit stupid, but both are pretty much aftergame. It is even in Square games, of the newest generation of Square games the one I reacted least violently to was Lost Odyssey, which if pretty much a straight rip of old turn based games with front and back row and add in a way to break down that back row. It is a largely safe and by the numbers game.
Yet oddly enough the throwbacks of these games are the ones that I so vehemently lay in the boot with regards to. Early Dragon Quest? Don't make me laugh, I did my time in 6 and was thoroughly unimpressed, it was the stock standard combat system I had seen in Lufia 2 which itself was incredibly stock standard, but Dragon Quest just did it worse in almost every way. It even reaches far more recently into the middle parts of the Playstation 2 era, Shin Megami Tensei games? Don't make me laugh, I tried them for the style and was almost consistently repelled by the combat system. What point did it change? I am not really sure. I think it was the point where more action oriented systems began to feel pointlessly gimmicky, they weren't adding something strategic to it, it was just another hoop to jump through to do the same shit you could do in real time. I would probably pinpoint it somewhere around the release of Shadow Hearts 3. Hell I could even blame the whole thing on Wild Arms 4 reminding me that Turn based wasn't completley devoid of new ideas and that it was really my home territory.
Where Shadow Hearts 3 was a boring retread of the earlier combat systems refined slightly I stopped caring so much about perfecting my timing, I played through with the standard ring and got more fun out of just playing it more laid back than I had Shadow Hearts 2. It let a game which almost tried sometimes, but still let you one round bosses fight back that little bit more. Right about the end of that game where I was tired of jumping through the same hoops just for a minor stat boost. Why did I care that much? Wooo I have rhythm , can I go back to playing my RPG now? The irony of how much I enjoy Guitar Hero/Rock Band games is not lost on me. I suppose 60 hours or more over three games tired me of tapping out the same 5 beat pattern over and over that is Yuri's attack chain. It kind of stops being anything special at that point. It probably didn't help that I found the more different or experimental systems there were in that patch the less polished I found them or the more infuriating, star Ocean 3 for example was a game I enjoyed, but felt was crippled horribly by the barrier system. It didn't need to be there and didn't really add much to the game.
That doesn't really address specifically about the old games that really rubbed me the wrong way. I mean I was always all about the turn based strategy games, never has there really been a turn based game that I regretted the lack of a Real Time variant of. I suppose it really comes down to just how easilly I am swayed by a bit of polish or conceding difficulty to the player with the benefit of increased user friendliness. Save points before bosses and the like make games easier, but I appreciate that they are there, it saves me time and effort. Variable text scroll speed, more options in menus for bits and pieces to let me tweak the play session to how I want it exactly. The more modern games definitely have these in spades over their older counterparts. Does this mean I prefer easier games? Well yeah honestly it does. There is certainly room for punishing games in the market, but a flood of them or an uncompromising position of only making games in that vein is not something that endears me towards a product.
So I guess the heart of the matter was I was primed and ready for a revival of an old favourite system that was polished and didn't punish the player for failing a dull repetetive task that they have performed over and over again. On the other hand, from the where I picked up the SNES era games through to the middle of the PS2 era, I was also more than open to the idea of having the chance to fail at a game because of my own lapse in skill compared to randomly losing to instant death spells. Do I want a happy medium? Yeah probably and it is getting there so long as some key studios don't go totally belly up.
What does this rant say? Not much of anything really.
Not really happy with this one, but it is something.
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I promise this will be the only time I say it directly, but... PLAY RADIANT HISTORIA
I cannot guarantee you'll like it, but it definitely does some things in line with your comments here and at a minimum I am curious what you make of it.
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I won't be holding my breath. Not because I don't want to but as an Atlus release that doesn't seem to be coming to Aus it might be a bit hard. I mean it has been out for 2 or 3 weeks. Last time I tried to import an Atlus DS game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etrian_Odyssey_3) that had been out for that long I wasn't able to get it because it was already discontinued. Will certainly try though after Neph's review, your reccomendation and a few other positive things.
Edit - Yep already unavailable on Play-Asia.
Edit 2 - Okay it worked with Amazon of all things and I picked up DQ6 as well.
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I think Atlus did a second run of RH.
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Alpha Protocol, a broken fun game of cheese and awesome
Alpha Protocol was a strange point in the middle of 2010. It is a bit of a mess as far as balance goes and has a strangely overly punishing stealth system for a spy game. It received fairly cold reviews from gamers and critics in general, it just felt fairly half baked. Looking back on it though and having recently replayed it for a while it really does shine through as better than the general response to it was at release. Everyone just was hoping for a bit more than it delivered and that hurt the response to the final product, pretty much the story of every Obsidian release so far (though New Vegas has had a fairly strong response quite deservedly for everything but the horrible engine which is not their fault, but certainly didn't hold back the mindless praise for games that aren't even half as good).
One of the things that Alpha Protocol goes out of its way to address is the lack of a strong voice to the main character, you don't have the same level of customisation that mroe modern PC RPGs have given you character wise in a trade off. You do control dialogue, but regardless of the options you choose Michael Thornton has a fairly clearly defined character, is always a bit of a smarmy smart arse douche even if you play a by the books agent. You certainly have control over the way the conversation flows, down to being able to just cut off communications early in many points which even then still effects character responses. Which brings into the next strong point of the game, there is a fairly crazy number of permutations to choices that you can make in this game. Most choices in the game have a long term effect on who survives, who is friendly and who is an enemy. This extends on to the availability and cost of weapons and intel on the black market that you purchase equipment through and ultimately changes who you can call for help on at the end of the game and provides many different endings for the game as well. It really does feel like playing a pretty epic spy movie with double crossing and covert ops all over the place on the whole spectrum of low fi spy movies, to your gritty realistic modern movies spiralling all the way out into your full blown crazy Bond style characters and events. It is a pretty amazing cross section of the spy film genre and my favourite example of the whole thing is pretty much Sie and G3. Sie is an ex KGB mercenary that you can side with in Moscow, she is a Bond character, she single handedly leads and dominates a group of mercs or something, but they may as well not exist. It is mostly Sie. She is a hard woman that likes it when you are aggressive, she wears a pair of bright pink plastic glasses, cammo pants, a boob tube with her bright pink wonder bra poking out the top, a beret and combat boots. Otherwise she is rocking an M60 and various ammunition carrying peripherals. She is pure Bond and of course has a thick Russian accent. Siding with her will earn you the ire of G3 a clandestine reincarnation of an old black ops group, much like the agency Thornton is part of at the start of the game. This would be your Bourne style modern spy movie group. They are all about appearing out of nowhere, being nearly untraceable and unidentifiable and getting out again quickly, cleanly and quietly. Having these two things in the same world and actively competing with each other is fantastic and a lot of fun. On the topic of long term changes and effects, the outcome of the opening mission sequence lets you spare, execute or arrest the target of your mission. Letting him go free opens up an entirely new option during the end game. Unforseen consequence, but one that makes sense in the context of the game and just empowers the player. This is exactly how you can and should do choice and consequence. You can do it without the player knowing exactly what will happen but do it without punishing the player.
The gameplay is a bit of a sore point, it isn't overly hard, but it is a bit overly punishing for some play styles. If you are trying to be a sneaky type? The system is way harsh. Being seen as a stealth character is pretty brutal, this is a kill a few guys and the game acts like you went on a rampage kind of game. You get spotted and you are probably going to set off an alarm. It is perfectly fine as an option to be super stealthy and highly lethal, but the game reacts differently if you are stealthy and non-lethal. It gives you plenty of tools to bypass guards when you take the stealth skills which is good, but early on it is rough. You get used to it and it is pretty fulfilling when you do it. The real problem is the save system, it uses a checkpoint system. So you have to keep going back to it when you get spotted. Early on where the game is at its most polished, this isn't much of a problem, but as you get further in the checkpoints get to be a bit less forgiving and you can go for long stretches just to be spotted before a checkpoint, alarm goes off, stealth approach killed off. You can turn off alarms and so on, but it isn't quite the same thing. How much this rubs the wrong way will depend how much of a perfectionist you are. As a whole though the stealth path is really well layed out and you are given a lot of skills to use to bypass direct fire fights, it is a lot of fun. This however leads into one of the games biggest problems. It has boss fights. So you can make your way through the introduction sequence then get set loose on the world with three areas to choose from that you want to approach. You pick one and sneak your way through with the game praising you for doing so, then you get to the last mission of the area and have a boss fight. Wait where did that come from? Okay you still have a gun and some explosives, lets put them to use. No that won't do you any good without sinking points into a weapon skill, even if you invest in an expensive weapon it just won't be nearly as effective as if you sunk some points into Pistol or something. It is a little disappointing and certainly miffed me my first play through where I specialised in stealth and tech right up until I couldn't penetrate the bosses regenerating shield stat and do more than a sliver of health worth of damage to him (player has that shield as well, it is Endurance, works like pretty standard regenning health meter from a cover based shooter). So I went off to another area and built up weapon skill, finished off the last two areas and their bosses before coming back. Yeah with some skill the fight wasn't nearly as bad. I didn't have to fiddle with ways to trick the AI and try to plant bombs up his arse to do no damage. Sadly I chose poorly in weapon skills. Shotguns are hands down the worse choice of weapon in the game. I think hand to hand might even be better. SMG, Rifle and Pistol are all head and shoulders better than Shotguns. They do damage slower, punish misses far more and has the weakest special shot in the game along with special ammo that is pretty much worthless against bosses as well. Fun choice to play with when I didn't want to stealth kill dudes, just sneak up behind them and blow them in half. To kill bosses though? Not so crash hot. So the games skill balance is a bit lacking and it doesn't exactly go out of its way to tell you that you really really want a fighting skill. After the three area bosses there is only more boss fights to go as well. So you had best get good at them.
Topping it all off with the choices and so on is the skill system, you have 5 combat skills to pick from, each playing differently, stealth, tech skills for hacking (Sabotage) and whatnot, toughness for those who are going to just be shooting some dudes and a sort of catch all skill called Technical Aptitude which boosts your healing skills, lets you get more ammo and generally make all weapons and armour better in one way or another. You have enough points over the game as a whole to max out pretty much 3 of these skills. So you have fairly good skill choices for replay to make it differently, on top of the ever changing plot options with how you handle situations. You can gear yourself up to handle the situations in the game completely differently than you otherwise would have.
Rounding out the whole replayability thing that the game has going for it is one part of character creation that I haven't covered yet is that the game has Background for how you got into Alpha Protocol as an agent. There is three main ones, Army guy, Tech guy for the CIA or a Freelancer that got around the world. They each specialise in combat, stealth/sabotage and general all rounder types with these choices unlocking different dialogue and effecting the plot in their own minor ways. There is a fourth option though which is to be a rookie, which makes you have less starting skills, which overall makes you weaker throughout the whole game (a few points really adds up!), it even has its own dialogue options to go with it. It is a nice touch to add a minor hard mode that is rewarding to the player plotwise. Play through the game once as Rookie and you unlock Veteran, which again has new dialogue options and is honestly just straight up broken with the skill choices. With all of them I believe you can reshuffle the skills they start with if you choose. The best part of this implementation is that you have a game that rewards for replays and is pretty clearly designed with replayability in mind without trapping the player into it just to see content. No Breath of Fire 5 having to play the game multiple times to unlock the plot thing or even Nier's honestly interesting sounding replay mechanic for completely different plot experiences for an overarching metaplot of zaniness and file deletion.
So it is a game with a lot of promise that badly needed a bit more polish in its combat (which is a big part of the game). It is kind of a more focussed Deus Ex and it is lesser for it, but explores a lot of interesting things that Deus Ex couldn't or didn't. One of my first summaries for it was Deus Ex Light and it holds up pretty well, which is more praise than the game is worth, but it is better than the reception that it got at release. So if you see it in a bargain bin somewhere I suggest you check it out. Obsidian do good work, just need the budget and schedule to work with.
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I haven't played Deus Ex, but it seems to be about choices that mostly affect gameplay while Alpha Protocol is about choices that mostly affect plot, so they're not really the same thing.
I agree with the good points and didn't care about the bad. (except for the overpowered bosses) This game's cool.
I'm going to 1000/1000 this even though this will take like 10 playthroughs. There's one achievement you can get if you can piss off an important character enough to get him to fight you, but I've screwed it up. one playthrough ruined.
By the way, I found SMGs to be as bad as shotguns. They eat ammo like crazy and don't do enough damage to compensate. Might just be hard mode though.
The zero punctuation review sums this up pretty well I think (like every zero punctuation review it is overly negative, of course) http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1801-Alpha-Protocol
(http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/5253/alphaprotocol4.jpg)
You can't go wrong with this.
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I'm going to 1000/1000 this even though this will take like 10 playthroughs. There's one achievement you can get if you can piss off an important character enough to get him to fight you, but I've screwed it up. one playthrough ruined.
It's actually really easy to accomplish. Just make sure you go Bond every choice. He HATES it.
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You need to get some info on him too. My reputation with him was abmysal at that point, something like -8, and it wasn't enough.
I knew that he congratulates you if you buy a ton of intel, so I didn't get any.
When you storm his house, you can go to a secret room if you know enough about him, then you learn about his secret daughter or something and you can taunt him about that. Then he maybe fights you. If I remember correctly. I need to try that out.
Being suave in the most inappropriate situations is the most fun I had with the game actually. You look like a complete moron if you try it with Alan Parker at the beginning.
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Digital Misery, why it feels so good to be so bad.
More frequently these days games are presenting us with a nice branch of faux morality in games. From the classic Shin Megami Tensei series to your more modern Mass Effect series there is something of a burgeoning market place for having a sliding scale of morality in video games, RPGs in particular but they are getting around in others. It is certainly not as all encompassing as say cover based shooters have been to your third person shooter, but it is a change in pace.
Now a fairly common first reaction to this is that people tend to play it as a good guy up front and maybe play the alternate path on a replay. There are some peopel out there that flat out refuse to play the evil path and that is an admirable goal I suppose, but it is a bit naive on the grand scale of things. It does beg the question of where this push to have an "evil" path through games stems from though. A fairly common dismissive one is that it is for the kiddies or the jaded old men who want GRIMDARK stories or some such, but I think in most cases this is missing something a bit deeper going on here, even in the cases of poorly implemented approaches to the style of story telling. Yes I will concede that there is a portion of the audience that craves this kind of thing, but there is other games out there that you can get that kind of thrill without dragging through 30 hours of RPG combat or dialogue to do, Bulletstorm just came out and that kind of entertainment is prepackaged and right there for the taking.
What is it that an evil path in an RPG gives you as a player? Primarilly it lets you see the story unroll from a different perspective. Sure in some games it is from the perspective of a complete and total thug, but it is different than the shiny good two shoes that these games tend to represent as their counterpart. Does the game play out in the exact same way or not? Some people really lay in the boot without having a completely branching plot for good and evil, but I actually don't mind having them converge together. If a story is well written enough that it makes sense coming at it from either end then that means you have written a fairly decent coherent logical story. If you can do that and have the exact same dialogue from the NPCs and still make it coherent? More power to you I say. Yes the game loses some of its magic on a replay. 40 hour RPGs that you see this in are not commonly designed with high replay in mind for the special kind of player that is someone who is unforgiving of that but so obsessive that they will play through the game twice and not enjoy it on the second run through. On the other side of the coin if you don't make it make sense, you run a good risk of making a completely hilarious script or horribly painful dialogue, all of which is a win for me personally as someone who likes to play games to laugh at them. One great example of the branchign plot however is Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. You play through the majority of the game without there being a great divergence of gameplay for the good or evil paths, you get about 3/4 of the way through the game though and there is a huge schism in the things you are doing, if you are going down the path of evil you essentially get a reprimand, do this thing and in doing it you are damned completely. Arcanum is a really flexible game that will let you do almost anything you want, but at the end of the game when it comes down to the ultimate point of morality there is no turning back. You are either all in evil or you are going down the other path. Best of all at the end of the game it turns it all on it's head and nothing was quite what you were lead to believe. It is delightful and something I haven't really seen done again. It tricks you into thinking it is a simple split path choice and it is is no such thing.
Not everyone is in it for the storytelling though. Some games like Knights of the Old Republic or inFamous go straight for the gameplay rewards. Want to be evil? Congratulations you are a million times better at shooting lightning at people and making them explode. That is above and beyond the more textbook example of getting more gold or better rewards that are common. It adds something to the good/evil dynamic, it is fairly shallow, but it is there at least. These kinds of rewards tend to be split into two kinds, permanent rewards that you can choose to pick up along the way (sacrifice the baby at the altar for +4 HP type deals) or they can be the reward for filling up that good/evil meter by unlocking bits and pieces as you go along the sliding scale and unlocking the ultimate goody bag of good/evil power, commonly again a kind of stat buff. The former is quite easilly abusable from a metagame perspective of picking up the stat buff and being good later to make up for sacrificing the baby. Ultimately though it is nice to have the flexibility in telling your character's story as you see fit if you are into the role play side of it, is it worth sacrificing the baby? Sure why not. As one of my go to games for examples here, Mass Effect 2 handles this quite interestingly in that part of its streamlining of the game in general was that instead of having your Paragon/Renegade meter unlock a boost to a stat that made you better at your conversation skills (the bonus it had associated to it in the first game), they just used that scale as basic statistic itself. So the more you acted in the different archetypes the more convincing you were acting that part. Simple but very effective and generally fairly representive of the kinds of changes made going from Mass Effect 1 to 2.
Specifically building off of the example of Mass Effect 2, a big reason to play the Renegade path (essentially victory by any means, so the "evil" path of Mass Effect) is honestly? It is just plain fun. Not in a juvenile gorefest lets see how much we can totally ruin this world kind of way, but it manages to keep you entertained in the varying ways that the archetype goes around solving the problems presented to the player. Plenty of it is refuge in audacity, considering the other path resolves issues fairly directly and commonly with violence the only direction that Renegade can go is more over the top. Other games do this also to some degree, whether intentionally or not is going to be something you decide for yourself. I don't really have any specific examples here other than everything else that uses a fairly bad morality system. The more poorly implemented the morality system then the higher the likelihood that the sytem will devolve into this unintentionally, for me Knights of the Old Republic is definitely like that. Regardless of the game you are doing it though, if this is the reason you decide to be evil then it is pure spectacle and it is good fun to just run around being a complete and total douche just because you can.
This does beg the question though of what does this actual mean for the morality of the player. Does the actions of the player in game reflect in any way on the player themselves? Well to be blunt the answer is no. To elaborate, the answer is no, not really. The actions of a player in an entirely virtual world that has no interaction with another player or living entity is devoid of any real action or meaning so as to mean nothing on the real character of the player. There is a correlation between depictions of graphic violence and viewers being desensitized to it, but that does not effect the morality of the viewer inherently. Just as someone working customer service is going to lose some of their difficulty in dealing with people and get better at dealing with conflict if they work in a more hostile customer facing department, it does not make a customer service worker more extroverted or seek out conflict. Playing as a morally bankrupt character in a fantasy world will have no impact on the player's own morality, it may aid them in the day when they get to choose between sacrificing the baby for 4 more HP or getting a better cash reward, but little else because the whole thing is entirely made up.
Which brings home something I really want to harp on a bit. The world you are interacting with is not real and most well adapted people can tell the difference there. The rules of morality are different here, for a start they are black and white and clearly defined, that is a pretty big difference right there. The things you do don't have any kind of long lasting effect, they will go away when you stop playing. Well adjusted people know this and can differentiate between the things they do in game and those they do outside of the game. If you run into anyone that argues otherwise then you really need to be questioning just how tight a grasp they have on reality. Do they see morality as absolutes right or wrong? Do they have trouble differentiating between the things you or they do in a game with what you do in your every day life? That is the makings of a psychotic break right there. Be afraid of people like that, they are unwell and should be kept well away from video games and other forms of interactive entertainment. If they are making laws then you might want to think about how you can convince someone that they should be kept from interactive entertainment and also ways that you can convince them that human contact is a form of interactive entertainment.
Now having rambled on about how it isn't real and you can all chill out and shoot some dudes, why exactly is being a total douchebag to made up people so entertaining? Well if you generally are a pretty decent human being who isn't into ritualistic murder it can be many reasons. All the reasons I gave above can tie in to a great many reasons. It could be a cathartic release for the player, you would never do these things in reality, but sometimes it would be nice to do them even if only to people you deem deserving of it. Another could be just an academic interest, throw a character into a scenario, how do they deal with it? The developers have this set piece, how do they provide a route for the evil character. One of my favourite examples of why I replayed as evil much sooner than I expected to was Knights of the Old Replubic. Not because I thought the evil path would be particularly interesting, but I wanted to see how exactly they justified training up the main character as a Jedi when they have consistently shown to be a completley irredeemable even shit. For some they will do it just to do it. It is there, it is a thing to see, it is a thing to do. Why would you not? As sad as it may sound it is something else to experience everything that you can in a game. It helps give perspective the next time you see it done again if you want to get intellectual about it, for others it might just be milking every last bit out of the game they have payed money for.
I think that covers most of the thigns I think are reasons people choose to be bad people in video games, it is obviously because they are mostly bad people in real life.
That brings me back up to speed with my 1000 words a day I think. Maybe a bit behind. Oh well, might do 1500 words on Suikoden fashion before I get back into Dragon Age.
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You need to get some info on him too. My reputation with him was abmysal at that point, something like -8, and it wasn't enough.
I knew that he congratulates you if you buy a ton of intel, so I didn't get any.
When you storm his house, you can go to a secret room if you know enough about him, then you learn about his secret daughter or something and you can taunt him about that. Then he maybe fights you. If I remember correctly. I need to try that out.
Being suave in the most inappropriate situations is the most fun I had with the game actually. You look like a complete moron if you try it with Alan Parker at the beginning.
I never did that. I just had his intel on his relationship with Halbech and his service record and heckled him about how he retired from field work to be someone's bitch, and then killed him.
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Bartholomew (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=104)
Why hello there Suikoden 4. You continue to be confusing. Those shoes, why is the heal constructed from a distinct piece of leather from the rest of it? That is a structurally unsound shoe. Frayed ends on your pants is a good sign that you need to replace them and why do they kind of bunch up just below your arse? I get it at the knees with them slightly bent, but these are clearly loose pants, why do the bunch up there? Confusing. Purple and Orange, no matter how often you try iit does nothing for you, especially with brown hair. Accentuate, not blend in my friend. I don't get what is happening with this pose. It is like he is getting ready to throw the spear, but he is lifting it perpendicular with the ground? It looks like he is holding it by his finger tips with like two fingers and a thumb. Does not compute. Also OH MY GODS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR FACE. The headband is stupid and you should lose it, this is Suikoden not Naruto.
Barts (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=45)
Yo my name is Barts, I am a just chilling with my hoe and rocking a crazy anachronistic bomber jacket. Ignoring the jacket that is actually a pretty nice getup. Nice pants, functional work boots for a farmer, nice shirt and the orange trim even works pretty well. There appears to be a black undershirt that is long enough to extend out of the ends of the jacket? I don't quite get what is going on there, but whatever, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it isn't completely ridiculous because generally speaking Suikoden 3 is winning the shit out of character design here. Hair that long must be a bit of a bitch to keep clean as a farmer, but what are you going to do with a face that pretty and all these hoes. That certainly is a bandana that you are wearing there. Seriously the only real problem I have with Barts is his profession, if he wasn't a farmer this whole thing would work. As one? Damn son you must do no work at all if you can keep a pair of cream pants (jeans probably?) that clean. I really don't think I need to address the bomber jacket and how silly they are as a piece of fashion or how silly it is in a temperate climate like the grasslands.
Bashok - No image
Basil (Suikoden 1) - No image
Basil (Suikoden 4) (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=107)
Ladies and gentleman we have our second contestant in Boy or Girl. The name says boy, but that top says girl! The face says "I don't even know what the fuck I am or what is going on. Am I angry? Am I happy? Am I determined? I am confused." Now good... person shoes and pants work, although they appear to be work a bit low on the waist given where the fork in the pants is, which given the fact that the hems are to far up your leg makes it look like you are trying to pass off a pair of 3/4 length pants as real pants. That top.... that top is ridiculous. It is wider than your shoulders. I know why you walk around with your hands on your hips like that, because with a top like that being wider than your shoulders if you don't have your arms jutting out from your body that tip will just fall right off you. It is a really stupid shirt. Horizontal stripes are terrible and you have colours all over the place and then finish it off with spots. Wow, that whole thing is just fashion disaster central. At least it is earth tones so doesn't draw the eye to it. Maybe people will get to wrapped up in guessing the sex to realise how dumb that shirt is. There appears to be a singlet underneath the shirt, so hey at least you won't be naked when it falls off. Holy Jesus! What is that? What the fuck is that? WHAT IS THAT, PRIVATE PYLE? That junk you have around your neck, it is the most amazingly stupid piece of accessorizing we have seen. It might be the worse one yet. It is a piece of cord. Looped around your neck twice and left dangling like the cord on a hoodie. Congratulations, you managed to find a piece of clothing that is even more likely to fall off than your shirt. I guess it is okay though, since with the shirt you aren't able to move your arms much, so not much is going to cause movement around your chest. Yes it is even worse than your red and green headband. No I can't work out the pattern on it, at first glance it looked like it was leopard print, but for everyones sake I will guess that I just can't see it properly and decide that you haven't completed your ludicrous outfit with a red and green leopard print headband. You are a disgrace.
Basil is also male.
Bastan (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=48)
Oh hey there Bastan. I see that the curtains don't match the drapes, brown stache and white hair? Clearly a wig, but that is obvious. Functional outfit I suppose, it is a constistent look although the belt is worthless, that isn't holding up shit. I am not for the low slung useless belt fashion style. The sleeves could go either way, a bit longer or a bit shorter. really the shirt in general is like 6 sizes to big for the poor guy, you can see the point where the sleeve and torso connect, it is a good ways down his arm where that should be close to the shoulder, that would make the shirt be a lot better if it was a better fit. The red and yellow vertical striped tunic is not particularly flattering, change the yellow to a duller colour maybe? I am not really sure, it is hard to make work with those brown trousers.
Also that decanter thing is really fucking weird.
Bazba (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=49)
YOU ARE A LIZARD. YOUR SHIRT IS ALMOST SILLY LIKE BASIL'S BUT AT LEAST WILL STAY ON YOUR BODY. LIZARDS ARE BORING. SPOTS ARE BAD.
Beechum (http://http//www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=50)
Check me out, I am the most generic Karayan ever. Right down to the fingerless gloves, the black undershirt and the sandals. I need to break out of the mould, everyone just sees me as dull and boring, something that has been done better by like 4 other characterss. I know, PARACHUTE PANTS ARE THE SOLUTION.
Seriously though Beechum looks like a someone's dad who was a wicked cool surfer dude in the 70s and then the early 90s came along, he got divorced and wanted to become hip, relevant and cool again. So he bleached his hair and beared just like in the old days, watched MTV for half an hour and saw the greatest performer all time (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIHAkqCls4A) and wanted to emulate him. This is what all the ladies are into right? This will help him now that he is back on the meat market? Oh I know, kids are all about piercings right? I will get BOTH my ears pierced! You are a genius Beechum, you still totally have it. All the poon in the world will be yours. The belt is stupid as well and must be like just above your junk.
Belcoot (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=51)
Belcoot dresses like an 8 year old. I like blue! I will just wear blue! Fine mum I will wear SOMETHING else as well. I know Orange is good, I will put orange on my sword hilt and wear an orange shirt under my totally sweet orange jacket. Harsh joking on the colours aside, this dude fucking loves his pants. A carefully maintained pleat in a pair of pants you are going into a fight with? Dude is styling. In all other things it is pretty much a functional outfit, padded armour with some chest protection, a bit kidney belt and scabbard, so I can't make fun of the belts. Functional boots, hope they are steel capped for some face stomping. The hair is long and unruly, really needs to look after his pony tail better because those bangs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR5mgcRyv2w) are going to be an absolute pain in the arse. Yes I am going to link to that song every time it comes up. To top it all off? Cool popped collar bro.
That finishes off today and think that brings me up to speed on my targetted word count.
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So in my never ending quest to please Djinn without ever touching his penis (Because neither of us wants that to happen) today I am talking about Grandia 2.
Why it is important to be incredibly vain if you like shitty games.
I am just going to put it out there. I am incredibly awesome and super cool fantastic great. I really enjoy Grandia 2. It is a stupid game with a plot that takes itself incredibly serious while having the big plot twists be, in this order. The Devil wear's a miniskirt, posessed a Nun who totally wants some cock, is really made up of lots of different parts and the first thing that the Devil wants is a good tonguing. Ultimately the Devil is unable to become Horny becaues her boyfriend is Horny instead. Then the Devil got eaten by a fat guy who became the Devil. In a suprise twist God is also dead, but it is okay, Excalibur is really a spaceship. The Fat Devil Guy turns into a moth. Curtain call, game is over.
There is far more wrong with Grandia 2 though. It is stupidly easy. As in like you can setup one character to be the target for almost all attacks and make them take no damage from the pathetically weak attacks of the enemy. Alternately you can easilly cancel almost every remotely threatening move in the game. Worst of all you could just heal any damage through the multitude of cheap healing methods. Shit you could even like just wipe out the enemies before they get a turn with a series of basic attacks. Suffice to say there isn't really much at all to make Grandia 2 stand out as a challenge. That said the gameplay is exactly why it is great for vanity. The simplicity of the combat mixed with a fairly varied character development system gives you that feeling like you are putting a lot of work to completely and totally destroy this shit. Sure it is rejoicing that you effectively kicked a baby for a field goal, but who cares? You totally wrecked their shit and they never even touched you. Take that Melfice. Go cry into you stew you punk bitch! Pure fuel into the fire for how totally awesome you are. Vanity is spoon fed by games that are ridiculously easy like this. As a counterpart I suppose I should note that bad games that are hard have the same effect. Oh man you totally sat down and beat Deadly Towers? Congratulations that was a clearly positive life affirming good thing to do (http://nononotheotherthing.ytmnd.com). Yeah bro you are totally showing all those nubs how to rock it hardcore and old school.
The best part about a game that takes itself far to seriously when it is completly ridiculous is that you have two easy ways to defend the game. If people take it seriously themselves and hate on it then they obviously didn't get the joke. I mean seriously I just flew Excalibur into the Moon that is really the Devil. Of course that is a joke oh my god what are you five? On the other hand if someone just keeps making fun of it as a joke? I mean seriously I just flew Excalibur into the Moon that is really the Devil. THAT IS SO EPIC, WHY DO YOU HATE FUN? Of course those snarky douches amongst you are going to start crying hypocrisy now now, but I think you are missing a little important point of vanity here. Of course the vain can be hypocrites, they can't be wrong. That would be dangerous to a carefully structured fortress that is ones perception of reality and ones self in it. I can't be wrong I played this game for 60 hours, of course it is great and totally meaningful in every way. It isn't that I enjoy it, it is that it is great and I am great for being great like this great game that is so bad that it is awesome like me. The worse a game the easier it is to defend playing it because duh have you even heard of irony? I like this game because it is SOOOOOO bad, but seriously you should try it out it is awesome.
Back on topic of Grandia 2 though, it is a great game for feeding vanity through both these parts. At its core it is a fun little game that is easilly broken. The core ideas behind it are fairly carefully constructed. You have a fairly limited resource in the points you spend to level up moves, skills or spells. Regardless of where you spend them though you are spending them well because everything bends this game over and greases it up ready for action. At the same time the plot just keeps escalating in scope and scale, even to the point where that little runaway homeless kid is really royalty. The Devil and the Nun totally decide to have a threesome with the main character. You fight the Heart of the Devil and it is only half way through the game. All kinds of nonsense. The bigger and louder it gets the more it fuels the escapist fantasy fetish that you are totally rad, which you obviously are because duh.
So vanity just helps you appreciate these shitty games, because no one else can see the true charm and beauty of them. It is totally a self fulfilling prophecy here, you like good things, so everything you like has to be great in its own special way. Vanity definitely helps with that. Of course if enough people hate it you may have to reconsider your position, it might be an ironic thing then.
That or I could just be talking complete and total bullshit. Yeah lets go with that. Honestly there isn't anything wrong with liking bad games. I honestly do enjoy Grandia 2. It is pretty bad, but it is really a big pile of potential fun and a stupid plot with some tropetastic characters that are around long enough that you do get something of an emotional attachment. It isn't great, but it laid ground work for one of the best/worst/best/worst/BEST/WORST FUCK OFF games ever in Grandia 3 which does the amazing job of having a far more compelling combat system, an even tighter balanced resource system and one of the worst plots ever written. For that I am thankful. I do think Grandia 2 in some ways is making the best of a bad situation. It was trailing on after an even more ridiculously easy game, so it couldn't push it overly much without alienating what fanbase the one other game in the series had made. The game's combat system is complex enough to throw new players on a bit of a bender at that. The system was still fairly fresh and greatly refined from the original, so they couldn't turn the balance knobs up to 11 just yet. If you pushed the skill system even further in this game I think it just would have bred a habit of grinding for skill points honestly, as it is the game never really ruins its flow by making players feel like they have to do that. Sure it has a stupid amount of filler dungeons which kills the point of the argument there, but it is another carry over from the original. It is something of a compromise, but it one for the best. The game is light fun fluff, certainly never destined for greatness. None of this makes for a particularly great game, the only real reason I call it shitty is because the points where it drops the ball are pretty big fumbles and I am a picky bastard. As a game? Sure it is worth a look. You probably won't come away from it feeling that it is was an abject waste of time.
Being a vain douchebag certainly helps the appreciation of it though. It is just a shame the ball is dropped so hard in the third act of the game, otherwise the vain douchebags would be idolising Ryudo with his stupid box hat thing which would be great fun to make fun of. Instead they just go and idolize Melfice who just dresses like a gay stripper crossed with a unicorn.
(http://members.optusnet.com.au/grefter/DONGCYCLE.jpg)
Actually you know what? I can live with that.
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Late, but:
It's just part of human nature to be interested in conflicts more than peace. It's why stuff like Extreme makeover, which was about nice people doing nice things for one hour and being happy all the time, lost steam fast while reality shows, which are about people being locked up with other people during two months and slowly going insane, worked for so long. The main difference between Dragon age and those reality shows is that watching virtual people suffer instead is less wrong.
One more good reason why it's good to be a douche (for me it's mostly about seeing where the writers wanted to go)
There's also a big difference between being a standard chaotic evil asshole who kills a ton of innocent people just cause (boring) and being some sort of selfish thug who would do anything for money and has sense of right and wrong (fun).
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Belle (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=52)
Platform elf booties and stripy socks. Cyan and blue pantaloons. Bells attached at the collar (ergh horrible pun). Crazy huge cuffs on that well fitted shirt, puffy shoulders. Zenormous collar that appears to be really old school as it is a seperate piece of clothing. Everything about this girl absolutely screams Mechanical Genius. Oh wait no she just looks like a clown. In a game that actually has a set of clown party members. Belle is thoroughly confusing. It should be noted that at least here other interests include playing with metal (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KsPZ1f7MDs) reading books and eating strawberry pie. Note the complete and total lack of clowning or clown related past times here.
Bergen - No image
Bergen (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=53) - Suikoden 5 character
Wow, the stitching on those shoes is crazy. The soles of those things must peel off like once a week. I really hope he can teleport around. So much green. With pink on the shoes, why is there a purple undershirt. Everything about this is terrible. Even the pattern on the cloak. It is like Theodore (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdnGHVnihfM) was dropped on his head at birth and forgot how to dress in solid consistent colours at least. Just terrible. Also why in the fuck is the shovel carried around underneath the cloak? Kill it with fire. Also note the way the ears stick out completely sideways. Maybe he is some kind of fucked up half dwarf half elf abomination. I don't know, this whole thing just needs to be killed with fire for its own good.
Beril - No image
Bernadette (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=56)
Whoa wholely fuck, I have seen Bernadette's art before. I didn't realise she was on the menu at IHOP though because damn does she come stacked. With padded armour designed to cup and display it seems. I don't really have much to say about the clothes, they are just a confusing mess. Is that a dress? Are those pants? It is like some kind of hybrid native attire mixed with a peasant dress and a maid outfit with that chest getup and the high colour and the puffy shoulders. I just don't even know where the fuck to start with that shit. Let us count the colours instead. 1 White. 2 Red. 3 Blue. 4 Green. 5 Brown. Then there is black hair on top of it. Speaking of hair, wow that is unruly hair for something that you have tied into various chunks. To finish it off, that pose looks amazingly uncomfortable. Wrist completely twisted to face inwards, elbow extended out beyond the hand that is kept down just below the chest. You can certainly hold your hand like that, but not for extended periods. Couple it with the way the back is twisted to the side with the other arm hanging down the side where I can't work out if the arm is meant to be beside/behind/in front of the left leg? Just ow. The light sourcing isn't helping there, there is no shadow on the front of the left arm, so it should be in front of the body, but try standing like that and keeping your left arm straight in that position. Again, not a pose I would want to be holding for long at all. Completely indecipherable what is meant to be going on if it is an action shot.
This isn't really a bad outfit? But I have no idea what the fuck is going on. I will give her the benefit of the doubt that those are full old greek style sandles (another strange culturaly mix) and not fucking boot sandals.
Bernand - No image. That is a fucking horrible name.
Bianca - No image. Is a cat.
Billy (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=59)
This is Billy. Billy is a treasure hunter that wears skinny jeans that hug every conture of his well toned thighs and calves. His jacket is similarly tight only really being loose around his for arms, it is so tight it doesn't even close up properly so he needs to keep it tight with draw strings. Underneath that he has an even tighter titting vest. Underneath that he has a flannel shirt. Top it all of with a Kerchief, a cowboy hat, a rugged cleft chin and a willing smile. Consider this, he comes with his own rope as well. I am thoroughly confused here. It is like someone was describing Indiana Jones to someone over the telephone so that they could draw a picture of him to represent the greatest treasure hunter of all time. However instead of actually describing Indiana Jones they decided they would search for images of gay cowboys instead. Billy scares the everloving fuck out of me. I mean seriously if you haven't played Suikoden 3 you could almost guess that Billy is soliciting. Where is he going to put that thumb? ALTERNATE INTERPRETATION. He is hitching and knows the rules of the book. When hitching you have to pay for your travel somehow. Best of all? His wife left him because of his gambling. He is single boys/girls/gents/ladies/OK so you can settle for him when you find out that Guillaume is already spoken for (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/index.php?char_id=368).
Black - No Image
Blackman (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=61)
Okay I say this with the deepest and most overwhelming respect for this great man. Blackman is VERY happy to see you in his full body art. The portrait is actually much better, one of the better Suikoden 1 art pieces you can find, he is in perspective, dresses functionally, stares into your very soul and knows your deepest darkest secret.
We aren't here to talk about good art though. We hare here to talk about Blackman with a raging hard on. Green booties and overalls that need to be rolled up at the hems because like all Suikoden 1 characters, Blackman suffers from a sever case of dwarfism. I seriously don't quite get the cause for majour difference in the art here, it is polar differences. One is a rugged handsome man who could kill you without blinking and is glorious. The other has a look on his face like he could rape you behind a milking shed and looks like he is just about ready to do it. This is seriously terrible and it pains me to have to say these things especially when the great prophet of Blackman has returned. I am so sorry Fenrir, but there is no denying that he is cracking a fat here.
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This artwork is officially non-canon.
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Oh Billy, I could totally get into the tight-fitting-clothing-gay-cowboy-thing if I wasn't so sure that you're molesting your son, you sick fuck.
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An analysis of Breath of Fire 1 bosses.
So going by request when putting people on the spot makes for some strange topics, today we are talking about Breath of Fire 1. As an old game it does actually sprout up some surprisingly interesting bosses. That is to say maybe three or so? Still that is more than be said for some games. This was done browsing through Meeplelard's Breath of Fire Statistics Topic in our RPG Stats Forum here (http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php/topic,1759.0.html).
Probably the most noteworthy addition to Breath of Fire is a mechanic that the game calls Second Wind that bosses use. It isn't really something I have seen anywhere else, I suppose it could be seen as spinning out into form chains for bosses in later games (FF4 beat it to form chains really if not other games). I think that is giving it a bit more credit than it really deserves though. The basics the system is that the bosses health bar shows only a portion of their health pool. You chip down that and the boss has their Second Wind where they have a second portion of health to get through before they die. When a boss has their Second Wind they end the turn directly after it. So effectively you have two separate health pools to get through, any excess damage to the first HP pool doesn't loop over into the second one, but because it ends the turn you don't really lose out on all that much damage. Now in a game with some really fast bosses like Breath of Fire 1 likes to have this could honestly be incredibly punishing and some seriously horrible design, but because Breath of Fire 1 is a really silly game it actually bypasses it with another mechanic that is totally out there and still stuns me that it was thought to be a great idea for balance, buffs and healing always goes first. It has crazy good initiative. So the Second Wind isn't even that punishing if you are on low health, you aren't going to be stuck waiting for the heal. It can actually play to the player's favour if they have abused the crazy broken Idle spell (check the stat topic for more details), you are likely going to be cancelling out the boss' turn if you know what all the spells in the game do.
I honestly don't quite know what to think of this taken as a whole, I don't think it is a particularly good mechanic, it isn't terribly interesting, but it isn't offensively bad because of the other choices made in the game. If you are going to balance something as strange as this then I am all in favour of you handing the advantage to the player, that is fine to me. It is mostly just that it doesn't really DO anything that bugs me. Not many of the bosses have different AI between parts of the fight based on health levels and those that do seem to are just things like healing spells at low health, not completely different attacks or anything. It is just a baffling design choice, but that is what we get with relatively early dipping into a genre for a company.
For the interesting bosses? Well the two Dragons aren't a bad start. Zog and Sara both take 50% more damage from all magic. For a game that doesn't really have a magic defense stat, it was neat to have enemies that were just thematically weak to magic. Not exactly ground breaking, but it is something.
Next up there is really Myria who is probably one of the earlier bosses I can think of to have a secret hard mode real ending deal going on that was unlocked by optional content. Prototypical example of that kind of thing is Unlimited Indalecio of Star Ocean 2 fame, which this predates by 7 years. I kind of have to respect that to be honest. The only other thing Myria really brings to the table is crazy stupid longevity and some mediocre damage, but it definitely is an interesting dot point in history regardless. Her mediocre damage is the real surprise really.
Jade is the next most interesting one in that he is the boss that really just messes with the player's expectations the most of any boss in the game. As you go through Breath of Fire 1 you tend to have a pretty easy time of the game, there isn't really overly much that stands up to you for very long. The start of the game is overly harsh, but once you get the E.Key everything settles down to nonthreatening damage that is handled by your initiative healing and you are generally pretty cool. Then you get Zog and Sara and they just pack in the HP. Complete and total damage sponges. They are just a trial in longevity more than anything else, but it does make for a pretty exciting climax given that the game is pretty much a mega snooze after the first quarter of the game after your awesome golem dude jumped into a volcano and killed himself because they didn't want you having an awesome golem to stomp on shit. Not surprisingly that is the point you get Dragons for Ryu as well. Not that they are the turning point in the game, it is just the point where shit gets mind numbingly easy for a while, partly because of the Boomerang but mostly the filling out the party roster really.
Gettiing back on track though, Jade just fucks shit up totally. After slogging through Zog and Sara you get to the final dungeon and have a decent size dungeon that escalates fairly well, the random encounters there are a bit of a step up from memory. Then bam along comes Jade. He totally ruins your day. He looks pretty normal at first. Then he likes to randomly throw out Bolt X which outside of rare exceptions just straight up overkills your dudes. Not just kills them in one shot, but kills them by a good margin. That shit is uncalled for and is out of nowhere. If you are really unlucky he will hit you with Instant Death as well. Seriously some rude shit. Then to crown it off? He is still packing in that HP, it just keeps escalating at the end of Breath of Fire 1. He really does one interesting thing though, he completely and totally fucks with the Second Wind system. For the whole game you have got used to bosses using it at low health and it being a sign that you just have to hold it together for a few more rounds at most. Jade has 25000 HP and he gets his Second Wind at 21500 HP. If you aren't going into this fight well aware of it you are dealing with randomly huge spikes in damage to a character that will ruin your day with a health pool that you have no gauge on. Normally you can see boss HP pools on a bar in this game and then you guess another 10-25% for Second Wind. Jade just fucks with all your expectations. It is a boss fight to remember really. Then as above, you get to Myria and she is either not really much damage and only a bit more HP or a bit more damage with stupid amount of health. Jade is all kinds of crazy wacked out bullshit and I respect that.
Finally the most interesting boss in the game is Mote. You won't remember Mote. He is a boring side villain during the boring boring part of the game where they decided it was cool to make you fight flowers, slime, roaches and flies along with a dull boss that they make you fight a pathetic boss twice with two shitty bosses in between. Regardless, Mote is pretty cool. Mote starts the fight huge and massively pixelated so that you can barely make him out at all. He is noteworthy as being one of the few bosses to resist magic. Each time you hit him with Magic or a Physical he will get more and less pixelated respectively. The more pixelated he is the more damage he takes from physicals, the more in focus he gets the more damage he takes from magic. It is a concept that has been used elsewhere, but this is a pretty early example of it in a game with nothing else really like it. Closest thing to it is taking more damage from magic normally. Mote is somewhat unique in that unlike other examples I can think of he starts off massively resistant to magic in his fully pixelated form. The other reason you won't remember his that because of this he is completely and totally rolled by physicals. To top it off he comes just after you unlock Puka as well. I don't quite know what they were thinking, but Puka will 10HKO him by himself if you throw some weak spells at him with someone else. It is pretty crazy. As a fight in an early 90s Console RPG from a company with not much history in the genre? It is pretty fascinating and well worth a look to be honest.
So there we go. Breath of Fire bosses, they are mostly boring, but has some minor stuff of note. Enjoy.
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I really do like Second Wind, not so much as a mechanic, but for the psychological fuckery it lets the game do with some of the lategame bosses. As a mechanic, it principally exists to do what many RPGs do, hide true boss HP so late in a fight things get tense since you never know if you should try for that one last hit that will win the battle, or focus on defence. Psychologically though, it makes for good fun. Final Myria's probably the best example with the "haha second wind after 2000 damage, have fun guessing the rest of the way", though Jade deserves note for being the opposite, you hit him with your 400-damage Bolt X and watch his HP barely move and you're all "WTF". I also liked how Sara had no second wind at all, made good sense with what her plot was.
Pretty much agree with the post otherwise. Not really the most fascinating bosses in the world (certainly no Chrono Trigger, even sticking with the SNES) but there's some scattered interesting stuff in there and it has a nice big endgame spike to make you feel like you're earning your victory over the game. (I also think Zog is better than you're giving him credit for, Char is seriously rude and Gale's pretty scary too, but milage variance and such.)
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It is mostly just I don't respect bosses that only have damage that doesn't really kill outright in a game where you have initiative healing. Considering you have Dragon Ryu and Puka soaking damage the only people truely threatened are Nina and Deis.
Of course mileage varies between me who never runs from encounters and you who have done it as a LLG >_>
Edit - Thinking more about Second Wind, I totally get where you are coming from, I do kind of talk about it with regards to Jade, but yeah I just don't think it is enough. It is used way more than it should. Sara not having it is a nice touch, but nearly every other boss uses it. If it was used about a third of the time I think it would have a much stronger impact.
That said I did think of something that uses the exact same mechanic and does it far worse. Ultimecia's form chaining with dialogue is completely and totally obscene and really annoying. Just straight up frustrating as a player.
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Dragon Ryu doesn't sponge magic damage (no mdef or hp boost), and you lack initiative MT healing. I actually think Jade's ability to wear you down with Chill and rain is more dangerous than BoltX, though the latter certainly is kinda eye-opening and rude. Zog... does depend how much he uses Char and Gale, though, since his backup moves kinda suck.
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Jade gets the job done with Chill and Rain, you don't have full healing, but you (probably? I don't think you do for Zog) have CuraX which is 250 MT Healing, it isn't enough to full heal, but one every couple of turns but it is enough to bump you up enough that the fight is very manageable at least on paper. It HAS been like a decade since I have played, most of this is just on paper here. End game Nina has enough for some 15 shots of this, drop one every 2 turns and you are going for 30 turns. Halve that to get through the dungeon (generous) and I think that is still enough time to take down Jade. Especially if you have done any hunting for White Antlers for AP restoration.
Ryu doesn't have Puka level damage, but he tanks well enough that most of these last few bosses damage is 3HKO territory, so outside of ID or BoltX he isn't in much danger.
ANYWAY I am just working on paper and I do level more than you do on average in these games, so my memories are old and likely fairly different. Mostly just trying to justify my stance, not prove you wrong because you ARE right.
Will edit in a post.
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I don't know what level Nina gets CuraX, but...I was about level 29 with her against Jade. Yeaaaaah. I could imagine that level wise it would be beyond that.
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Um okay I won't edit in something. Meeple lists Nina in the stat topic as level 46 so no idea what the go there is. I am pretty sure I had CuraX on her, but again I level a lot in games and I played this a long time ago when I was even more prone to do so. She learns it at level 37. It is worth noting that Nina levels very fast. She and Deis are in the 40s where everyone else is low to mid 30s in the stat topic. No idea what the go here is.
POST TIEM
Blue Mercenary - No Image, why is this even on Suikosource?
Bob (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=62)
Okay so this is a pretty sweet outfit. I am not sure how anyone can get close tho this. I can't really talk about the shoes, but pants are amazing. Topless and ripped I guess if you have it then you should flaunt it. Does Suikoden have Jamaica? I don't even know, but Bob has a pretty awesome Rasta look going for him. I just can't knock it, I am honestly a fan of the Rastafari movement after all. It is a bit out there at times, but it really has its heart in the right spot. The dreadlocks just totally work here. They are pretty feral in reality, but if you work on it they can look awesome. But oh what is this, Bob has two pieces art to discuss here.
Werewolf Bob looks exactly the same as human Bob right down to the dreadlocks and THAT my friends is completely and totally awesome. We have a Rasta werewolf rocking crazy dreads, crazy awesome tasseled vest and those shoes. The pants are still amazing. There isn't really much to say but Bob beats out all other Suikoden 2 characters on a lines to awesomeness ratio. He says next to nothing and then just rocks your face like Teen Wolf starring a young Bob Marley instead of Michael J Fox.
Slide your rump. Just for a minute let's all do the bump, bump, bump. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otCpCn0l4Wo)
Bolgan (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=63)
Okay Bolgan, I can respect that you like are comfortable with your body, that is cool. I can get behind that. Big dudges don't really need to be massively ashamed. Man I can even get why you shave with wearing those ill advised suspenders. I mean don't get me wrong dude, it is creepy as fuck. Couldn't you just like do the chest hair? You go way beyond that and shave your under arms as well. And your legs as well. Just what the hell man. But whatever, a man will go a long way for his poor choices in fashion which just happen to be suspenders that are actually chains to keep up his skirt. Okay I can deal with that. Even the bracelet things that are pushing this a little overly close to slave role play territory. I will give you that, it is okay if that is your thing. I am a pretty open dude, I can accept that people are into this (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=41) kind of thing. I mean I can even accept that this skirt is a bit on the short size for a guy as big as you. That is cool, whatever man, easy access when you have to do your thing. That is fine, I know how it is you just got to be prepped and ready in a heartbeat when you are into this slave gig openly in your every day life. You never know when it might be time to find a wall to assume the position against and bear down ready for the punishment you love. All that aside I can deal with. But a cyan skirt with brown shoes? You sir are a fucking monster.
Bonaparte - No image
Bora (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_%28manga%29) Atkins - No image
Boris Wizen (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=66)
Okay I know we aren't up to R yet, but I have to say, this family set the standard for good dress in Suikoden. The son does not disappoint. Ignore the fact that it is a 6 foot tall dog guy. Those boots are amazing. Not Fuck Me Pumps or some other fucked up shit, those are just awesome awesome riding boots. With matching green trousers tucked in the tops and Boris rocking an awesomely well fit for comfort green jacket. This is how you dress people, none of this colour vomit all over the place shit. Simple consistent colours. Black and Green topped off nearly perfectly with the pale blue kerchief at the neck. A wonderful collar, worn and buttoned high. Fantastic white hemming on the collor and where the coat joins and on the cuff with and all on black trim. Just fantastic, really really great. Even the rolled back cuffs are great stuff. It is simplicity done nearly to perfection. I love this outfit. The whole dog's head thing just is completely weird looking, it is like a really well done photoshop. Great fashion regardless. 10/10 would look at it again. The real crime here is that it is so hard to actually see this character in game.
Borus Redrum (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=67)
Check me out, I am a knight dude. I think I have already covered the Zexan Knight armour before and how well it works, if I haven't I will do it another time for someone who is infinitely less mockable than Borus and his stupid face and his even more stupid hair. Seriously dude, your body is facing stage left, your head is pointing stage right and you are looking out the corner of your eye to stage left. Just turn your head. You will look twice as smart, mostly because you will no longer resemble a slow child trying to look inside his own ear. Also you are way to serious and your eyebrows constantly being raised make me want to burn down a village, kill children and lie about it. Fucking douchebag. Also what the fuck is up with that goddamned hair dude. You must have to gel that shit like nobodies business and then it looks like you are trying to make it looks like your hair is a tide coming in. It comes up over from the back and then comes down to cover your eyes in an emo fringe, but is gelled back up to a curl sweeping over your right eye. Going back to where it coms up and over on your left hand side though you have it parted slightly and then have the bits thare aren't swooping over into your proto emo fringe jut outwardly at all angles. Then the back of your stupid haircut is all swept back.
Oh alright I just realised why you are standing and looking in that weird way. Because the left hand side of that hair cut must look fucking amazingly stupid with all that hair combed over the front with all that stuff from the right hand side all combed back. God you are such an amazingly douchey poser Borus. Go back to your stylist, give him another blowjob WITHOUT using teeth this time and maybe you will get away with something as tame and stupid as Leo.
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Boz Wilde (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=68)
Okay clothign wise there isn't much to talk about here, this is a pretty classic standard sort of look. I don't know why there is purple in there, but otherwise this outfit works. Boz has so many other things to talk about. First of all is the amazing haircut. It is punk at the front and party at the back. Some kind of a cross between a mohawke and a mullet. This is quite possibly the most Japan stuck in the 80s thing ever, the only thing that could make it more so is if Boz had a leather jacket with rivets in it. The hair is amazing and words cannot really sufficiently explain the phenomenon that is Boz' hair. The next thing we need to ntoe is that Boz is built like a complete and total tank. His hair is deceptive with his height, but look at the width of those sholdres or just compare how wide aprat those legs are splayed. Did you notice it? Boz is about half as wide as he is tall. Now assuming Boz is a short man that is still pretty damned amazing breadth. It is no real wonder Boz got so far in the military. He is practically a portable wall.
In praise of Boz though I have to note that he shares a last name with the great Oscar, there is no way that this is by chance. Clearly Boz is some kind of physical embodiment of all the amazing manliness that Oscar Wilde was imbued with.
Brandeau (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=686)
Whoops, I am sorry, I accidentally found an Alice Cooper fan art piece. Oh? This is an actual Suikoden character? What was he from? Suikoden 4? Oh okay. He has the Rune of Punishment. Well I guess that is fitting enough for Alice Cooper (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCtu7A9WGKs). For an outfit? Well yeah Alice Cooper is fucking awesome, so if you have that skiny wirey dude look then you can totally rock it. A loose coat is sthe way to do it. Nice boots and well fitting trousers are definitely the way to round it out. The unlaced tops on the trousers also works great for it. Sword at your side and fist raised in the air mid head bang is pretty awesome. It is like he has just sung the opening to "Feed My Frankenstein" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYz83aD_UrI) which is just awesome.
He isn't evil, he's just good looking.
Branky (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=69)
Next contest in the boy or girl competition. Branky is apparently male, but the purple eyelid that screams eyeshadow and the bottom of the puppet looking like a dress is just totally throwing. As is the pierced ear and the choker. I am not entirely sure it is actually just a wolf puppet or the possiblity that Mel's psyche so fucked up that her puppet is a cross dressing furry.
Brec (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=105)
NOOOOOOOOOOOO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I CAN'T UNSEE IT. WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE WHY IS THIS THERE GODDAMMIT SUIKODEN 4. Okay. Okay keep it together. The outfit. We can talk about the outfit. He needs new shoes. His toes poke through each one. His pants are patched the schweinhund (http://thecinemasnob.com/2009/09/20/the-bruno-mattei-show-ep-1-ss-girls.aspx). His shirt also badly needs replacing since it isn't covering all of his torso and we can see his snail trail. ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff okay the beard needs trimming as well, he looks after it enough to have gathered it into individual parts with beads. The red woolen cap is kind of there. Why is he wearing leanther wrist guards.
Okay so Suikoden 4 full on has a dude with both his hands down his pants having a fiddle. I didn't even remember this character existed. I wish I didn't know it existed now. Because I have to share the joys of this lets cover how he joins the party.
How to Recruit: Joins with Jango.
Oh okay that isn't so bad. Lets check with Jango.
How to Recruit: After naming your army and ship and after acquiring 51 Stars of Destiny, return to your room.
Okay so the creepy pirate dude who has art of him having a wank is just waiting for Lazlo in his room. Lazlo the one that looks like a teen prostitute (more on that later). Man this got really dark really quick. I was hoping to do these things for a laugh. Then I am confronted with things like this. I kind of just want to curl up into a ball and die right about now.
Bright (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/imageviewnojs.php?img=b/bright01.jpg&char_id=70)
He is naked. Zebra print naked dragons are so last season.
Brown - No image
Busk - No image, but they have 3 paragraphs on him over at Suikosource.
Butz (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ImZTwYwCug) - No image
Byakuren (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=73)
Is also naked. Alright not really something that I can talk about the fashion for, but I really like this character design. The patterns on the snake are pretty neat. Completely and totally unable to happen naturally forming of course, but neat nevertheless.
One thing that thoroughly confuses me about this thing though. It is a White Snake. It has a horn which I wasn't aware that snakes could have. Ignoring that though, I don't understand the fins or those huge feelers, they must get in the way. If they are there in the way all the time then how exactly is Byakuren meant to slide it in (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaE7uiO1qRw)?
Just strage and confusing. Also very naked.
That is B done! Two letters done in a month! At this rate it will only take me another year to do this whole thing. I really probably should do these more often if I want to finish them. I do want to do serious articles with some more frequency, doing these constantly feels like a cop out, but such is life.
Some filler jokes and rambling in here just to make the 1000 words, but didn't want to start C in this post.
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True story, I reset my game because I thought it was glitched when I got to Mote.
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At $5 an installment it can be forgiven for a fair bit I find personally.
Edit - Glad someone else has given it a look though.
Idly noting for anyone remotely interested that it is $2.50 a piece on Steam right now. So yeah.
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Caesar Silverburg (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=135)
Why good sir you do look like a a mix between a young man about to go hit the club trying to pick up and a guerilla commander. The colour choices are a bit all over the places with the greens, the red with the whit and black, but it works, they are nice earth tones and everything is broken up so it is in its own space rather than being a jumbled mess. I don't necessarilly dig the colour scheme or the outfit in general, but it is one that works pretty well for the you good sir.
I suppose I should clarify that first sentence a bit. The jeans and the open jacket with the styled hair absolutely screams younger gentleman on the prowl. especially with the tope of the shirt looking like a dress shirt and the bottom like the tails of an untucked dress shirt. It is a look that works. The Guerilla Commander thing is the jacket again. It is big, well cut and solid looking. The jeans also play into this a bit, but the combat boots are the real thing that set it off. The shirt also plays into it, the bottoms of it and the horizontal striping along the top with how loose it is makes it resemble a kevlar vest. It is a fairly evocative outfit.
I think it really works for Caesar's place in the story and his age. Maybe not the character super well, but the age and the kind of war he fights in it is pretty good. So overall I approve I guess.
Camille (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/imageviewnojs.php?img=c/camille01.gif&char_id=136)
That is just terrible. A black... one piece top? Fuck I don't even know what to call this horrible stripper shit, I am man of class and leisure. I am gladit tightly hugs your crotch and appears to barely be thick enough to cover you properly. I am scared to even ask if that think has a closed seam down the sides or if it is just a hoop of cloth with a hole for your neck. Anyway, I am glad the need to go into battle with some semblance of protection. You have covered your vulnerable knees, shoulers and hands quite well. You appear to go to the same hair stylist as Apple in her early years. You chose poorly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubw5N8iVDHI). There is something else we really need to get out of the way up front. Purple gloves are a big no. Especially with gold trim or bronze or whatever the fuck that is meant to be. You are wearing black and red. Purple should not been in the equation here. Also what the fuck s with the red ribbon everywhere. You don't need it as a belt, that top isn't going to fall off any time soon unless the double sided tape you are clearly using wears out. If that happens then that belt isn't going to do you any damned good. Then again, I guess that is probably the point. The armour plated heels adds to the warrior prostitute look you have going. As is the garter on your left leg. I really wish that wasn't there, now I have to talk about how stupid it is. Actually I don't think I will. Your outfit is stupid. Your haircut is even worse and that smug look in your face means you need to be dumped headfirst down a well. Also what the fuck is with that gold choker? Get the fuck out of my sight.
Camus (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=137)
What the shit did I just finish telling that last thing? You are wearing black and red. Don't bring purple into this. Okay, ignoring the purple cape (which should be a red to match with some black trime and an emblem. Probably a few inches longer as well.) the rest of the outfit is fairly workable. Shoulderpads are a bit much (are those actually pauldrons on a dress uniform?), but otherwise, it is a fairly decent military dress uniform. I don't envy the poor made that has to iron that shirt, assuming those pleats are intentional not just an ironing failure. I like the boots, I like the gloves, the extra stuff worn over the shirt are a bit much but otherwise it works. Fix up the cloak and drop the pauldrons and you almost havea nice outfit there. You do have quite the striking pose there so extra mark fors for effort, but we aren't really doing a photo shoot here.
Carrie (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=138)
Well okay, I have no idea who you are. Suikoden Tactics characters are at least subdued. They don't stand out but they aren't horrible. Nice functional outfit you have there. The messenger bag works really well for you, I would keep it. You have bangs but aren't worth of linking to the song, we save that for the good ones. I am not sure if it is a trick of the scan of the artwork or not but the blending of the purples and blue on this outfit is actually pretty awesome so I will give you the benefit of the doubt on this. I like it. It is simple but functional outfit, the world needs more of that. Sensible shoes as well, I can respect that. Keep it up whoever the hell you are.
Oh you are from Suikoden 4 as well? Wow, I really have not got a clue who you are.
Cathari (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/imageviewnojs.php?img=c/cathari01.png&char_id=139)
Um you wearth a cloak pretty well? Nice boots as well. Your gun is sticking out though so that kind of defeats the point of hiding it under a huge cloak.
I am a bit freaked out here that you can't see anything underneath the cloak other than the shoes. I can't help but think that she is running around naked underneath it just so that she can flash unsuspecting old men.
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Big post been incoming. Was bigger than I expected it to be. This is the one that puts me over the month long mark and yeah a few days after. Was fun. Will keep doing stuff since I have Suikoden to finish up which will take forever, but still. Here is a thing.
Enemy AI, Why I stopped worrying and learned to love the RNG
Constructing a well made piece of AI either for an enemy or for uncontrolled party members has got to be a daunting prospect. It is certainly a piece of scripting well beyond my meager skills in that area. So as is a bit of a theme here, how does it effect the player? Lets talk about a few basic kinds of AI. Dumb party AI, smart party AI, stupid to average enemy AI and smart enemy AI. Also we might touch on just straight up Randomised enemy turns.
Dopey Party AI
Not particularly well constructed party AI is very frustrating for players. The definitive example that floats around seems to be Dragon Quest 4, it was the last game in the series to play with completely uncontrollable party members. You were in control of whoever the main character for a given chapter was and when everyone was in the party the AI would take over everyone but the lead for you. Now following on a series that originally was a single player character controlled game it makes a fair bit of sense, to a modern player it is a fairly dramatic shift from the norm though. Some modern games have done this also, Persona 3 for example which will come up in the next example, but Dragon Quest 4 is going to be our shining example of why bad party member AI can make for incredibly frustrating gameplay (I am sure I will win an award for stating the patently obvious with this paragraph). Some games have barely competent AI that will just scrape by like Star Ocean 2, where it can cast attack spells over and over no problem but couldn't time a healing spell to saves itself and has no qualms whatsoever about spamming elements that the enemies absorb. That is dumb, but at least it is competent enough to get by. Dragon Quest 4 makes it a habit to have your healer spend MP trying to cast Instant Death spells against the final boss. The rift between semi competent AI and terrible AI is astounding there. It really doesn't help that one is able to be fine tuned (You can manually turn off the ability to fast Fire spells in the Fire dungeon in Star Ocean), Dragon Quest 4 is bad enough to the point where the only way people really seem to have had a truely positive play through of the game is if they owned a Game Genie and could put in the code to control the whole party (or they played it on an emulator). I know first hand that it is more than possible to play through games on the caliber of Star Ocean 2 without fussing with the AI that much to have to control their every action. My understanding is that the way to play the original was to pretty much not trust the AI to do much of anything useful and if it did something smart then it was a bonus. It wasn't that it was completely random. It was just that it was dumb as a sack of bricks and you have so little say over what to do. This unsuprisingly makes for a pretty terrible play experience. It isn't to say the original was an unplayable mess that no one liked, just that given control of the characters directly in a Turn Based game massively improved it to the point where you can kind of understand why the series is such a long standing staple of the genre. So yeah, pro tip: If your game is turn based and you have written an imcompetent AI then make it optional. You will alienate less people. This is your obvious statement of the day.
That isn't to say there isn't a place for party AI that is dumb. As long as it is entirely optional then it honestly isn't a problem. Suikoden has amazingly terrible AI that all it does is basic attacks. It doesn't even prioritise who attacks what particularly well (there is some of that though), but auto-battle there is a godsend when going through old areas or just plain in areas that are stupidly easy like Suikoden games tend to be at times. So feel free to keep writing basic dumb scripting, just apply it where it is useful.
Another one that springs to mind with varying success is one we will touch on more with enemy AI, but there is even optional modes for some characters where you forfeit control of the character to the whims of the Random number generator. Final Fantasy 6 is the one that comes to mind most prominently, of which there is three character choices that have the player forfeit control of the character and leaves actions squarely in the hands of weighted randomised actions. It is certainly not a method I personally prefer, but it is in game with varying degrees of success from terrible to middling to quite potentially game breaking (from my understanding Umaro, Mog's Dances and then the top end broken that is Gau's Rage options in that order). Not really an option that I personally like to use (much like self inflicted Berserk in some games), but it is an interesting trade off of power vs control that is nice to see experimented with. I can't really say much on the success of it, since it is so varied in game. It is a path I tend not to take when offered, I like control. An interesting option regardless.
Smart Party AI - Vote 1 for 2012
There has actually been a few noteworthy games to come out in the last 5 years that use AI controlled party members, Persona 3 is definitely the first one that comes to mind as being fairly noteworthy for it. You have some degree of control over what sorts of things the characters will try to do and they seem to generally actually stick to it. They will capitalise on elemental weakness, which is an important element of the battle system as it ties up the enemy turns and exposes their weak point (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVIjT_8AX0Y) so that you can dispatch them easilly. It isn't always perfect, there is times where they should use Multiple Target weakness spells to tie up more than one enemy that they do not, but generally they are reliable enough to get you through the game. The main is still sort of dragging them through the game, but you can at least rely on them a pinch to not try status on status immune targets for example. On the third iteration of the game in as many years they let the player control the party members and it made the game far easier. I haven't heard as strong a response from Persona 3 Portable as the other two releases, but that is what you are going to get with three releases of the same game in three years. I can't say first hand whether it improves the game exceptionally, but I know I did read complaints that it made the game way easier (shock), but this is also from people that played each release of the game that came out in three years, so I do question the rigor of taking statements like that at face value. Regardless, so you can still make a game these days with uncontrolled party members and get away with it. Persona 3 is something of a cult game, generally well accepted by wider audiences and it goes completely counter to what I say above about bad AI. I honestly can't tell you what else Persona 3 brought to the table that made it so acceptable, I wasn't part of that wider audience that it appealed to (because I hate fun as discussed previously). Regardless of what it brought to the table though, the AI controlled party members in a Turn Based game clearly wasn't a complete and total turn off for everyone and I understand that it isn't a complete and total abject failure.
Another game that it has come up in is lately is of course Final Fantasy 13, the game that not only has AI controlled party members, but lets the player have the game automatically select attack options for them on the one character they do control. The auto-select and team mates will automatically target weakness as well. If you set the AI characters to status moves they will use only the ones that the enemy is vulnerable to or at least stop trying once they are immune. That leaves it so the player only is required to interfere during a critical moment or to change paradigm. Otherwise player involvment is just rubber stamping whatever the best attack is. Press X to let the AI win this war for you. I will let up on Final Fantasy 13 one day, but for now it is a shining example of well done AI pushing the boundaries past the point that I consider acceptable. The game is real time and the AI certainly helps keep the flow of battle nice and consistent, but it is not a net positive effect on the game. That such a hands off approach is not only a good idea, but already optimal irks me as to why this is even a game. It is a sequence of boring combat sequences chained together with boring combat sequences with even less interaction, in that you can't skip the alleged gameplay sequences like you can the plot ones. I can't really fault the AI for this, it is will constructed and functions at a fairly high level of AI. I certainly do blame the design choices that lead to such an AI system being required to keep the game flowing at the already amazingly slow snails pace that it does (see statements about how it gets good at Chapter 10 of 13). So smart AI isn't always goign to make an action based system amazing. It is entirely at the whims of the rest of the gameplay.
So there are times where a good strong AI can make or break a game, but I would definitely say with some confidence that good AI isn't going to save a game. This puts it in something of direct competition with some of the polish I was talking about in World Building. World Building is far from integral to making a good game, but it can save a bad game from the trash heap of obscurity. Having a strong AI though, if it is necessary is something that you absolutely must invest a great deal of time into. I don't think it is necessarilly a bad thing to create a system that is entirely reliant on the AI being in direct control of characters, but it is definitely a restriction in design that I wouldn't want to put a great deal of confidence into for an untested programmer or designer. So just something I would hope that companies are aware of, just how much this effects player experience in the game. This is yet another situation where Persona 3 kind of breaks all my rules though. It is a system that quite clearly does not need the party AI. It is something that I would argue would be vastly improved without it, but in spite of this it apparently works quite well for enough people to make it the successful game that it is. To be honest I am still absolutely in awe of it and the whole phenomenon.
One interesting little option that is kind of rare but neat is a smart (Or at least competent) AI that is entirely optional. The game that springs to mind the most here is Final Fantasy Tactics. Now I know long time players will have some horror stories where it does the dumbest thing on the planet, it is after all the enemy AI functionality, but the fact of the matter is that it is competent enough to beat itself at its own game. Final Fantasy Tactics has a complete enough AI system that there is challenges that have been done entirely utilising the AI system. You utilise some generalised commands (heal, attack, that kind of thing) and the AI will buff itself and allies up, work as a team and is fully capable of beating most of the missions as far as I am aware (I think you have to manually move units onto specific square to open Sluice gates or something on a map? My familiarity with it is limited). It is a case where it doesn't really bring anything to the table, but it wasn't something custom created for the party either. It is little more than a neat addition, but it is a fun option to have and one that I thought was noteworthy while on the topic.
Dumb enemy AI
Dumb enemy AI is fairly common, it works, it gets results, doesn't challenge players to an astounding degree. It makes mistakes and is easier to write. Most of the time you won't really notice it other than to go "Hahaha that was dumb let me put this pike up your anus now ok?". The place where amazingly simple AI stands out the most to me is SRPGs. Now this is far from the only example I will note here, but one that has a fair bit of play and is definitely in the limelight is Disgaea. Enemies in this game are dumb as a sack of bricks. They will group up so you can AoE them down like nobodies business. They will all charge in and berserker rush you at a hold point to be crushed. There is no long term planning, very little buffing once a target is in range. All there is to it is KILL KILL KILL. It is amazingly exploitable when you know what you are doing. At a basic level though? It is functional. It gets the job done. The enemy doesn't just sit there and let you punch it in the face. It is responsive and does something. Dumb AI isn't necessarilly a game ender. It can go a long way to making the game boring, certainly, but this is mostly about a level of difficulty when it comes to enemy AI. It may give you moments of disdain from the players at times, but it isn't going to be hugely impacting on the experience for the player unless they were expecting the AI to be something amazing. So protip, if your AI is dumb and all you have done was add ways for them to jump out of cover (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.E.A.R.) then you should be fine. This again isn't really a flaw in having bad AI so much as marketting handling customer expectations, which is a huge part of the customer experience. This might tie back into my preference for a game to be easy over a game being soul crushingly hard (Challenge is good, unreasonable challenge is bad), but generally speaking for me bad AI isn't completely detrimental to a play experience for me. It may however just be the part of me that does enjoy the power fantasy in some games (see Grandia 2 article).
Another example of what I am going to lump into dumb AI is unresponsive, but highly scripted enemies. Final Fantasy 6 is going to be my go to AI here since it has a big audience and a decent hacking community as well, so the knowledge of the scripting in this game is fairly indepth and easy to track down at a high level. Enemies in this game are completely and totally unresponsive. They will sit there and do their own thing unless explicity coded to counter things. You can note this by things like the lack of offensive dispels and whatnot. How much harder would Magimaster be if he would counter your Life 3 with a dispel? Sure you could still beat him through many other methods, but it would keep you on your toes. Same goes for almost everything in the game and Haste. This is fine and perfectly functional, Final Fantasy 6 is balanced for it. For newer players the game is still interesting and even difficult, for advanced players it opens up all kinds of interesting pathways of abusing the game to completely dismantle it. It makes for a diverse set of options and is a big part in helping the longevity of the game. It is a good way to put a deceptively complex enemy AI into a limited space. At its clockwork it is dumb as a sack of rocks, but it works really well here. I list it as dumb because it honestly is and it doesn't take a great deal of scratching beneath the surface to expose how simple it is at heart. There is an effectiveness in its simplicity which has some added benefits as well, not only did it take up much less space, but it makes for a very malleable set of code. Easy to implement on each enemy and allowing for greater diversity in enemy tactics. On top of that it has certainly done no harm in helping to support the modding community that Final Fantasy 6 has. Not necessarilly a revenue generating component on the last part, but it does help to keep the game relevant and is a small win for the brand.
So dumb AI seems to be good to me, at least for enemies. It doesn't add a great deal to the game unless you have chosen a design model that fits for it, but enemy AI is certainly less a hindrance to game quality like it can be for allies. For the majority of games it is certainly the more prominent one as well, so it is less impacting, but higher prevalence.
Smart enemy AI
I suppose I should really take the time out to justify by what I mean by Smart and Dumb AI, especially for the enemies. Since I went and praised Final Fantasy 6 for being stupid, I think it really deserves qualifying. What I am looking for in the AI is not responding directly to moves the player has done, but responding to the environment or things that could be incoming. It isn't Dumb as in it is bad. It is just fixed in the way it handles situations. That is something to not be daunted by. Dumb simple solutions are often a good one. Complex important things are prone to break more easilly.
Smart enemy AI is a bit more on the rare side, so I am going to be restricted a bit in this. I will be reusing one I noted earlier in Finaly Fantasy Tactics. The AI certainly isn't up to snuff here to compete directly with a human, enemies tend to be working with some kind of advantage (Normally positioning I would argue), but the enemies are quite capable of functioning as a unit, using buffs (I believe they do this as a priority even). They will break your equipment if possible even if they could just directly attack you (net greater benefit of breaking a bow early over attacking an Archer directly for example). They will heal and even revive party members with some modicum of intelligence. There is always something left open for a player to exploit. It is smart enough to stand up as a challenge and varied enough given Final Fantasy Tactic's class variety to keep what is basically the same level of competence in the AI different throughout the whole game. This makes for a fairly interesting argument, the AI in Final Fantasy Tactics though. Is it to smart for its own good? I think it likes to hit a happy medium where for new players it is a challenge and on replays the variety it brings still keeps it fresh. It takes a fairly experienced player with an analytical mind to really start to peel down the layers of the AI and just blatantly abuse it. Chapter 1 might be a bit much for new players I would argue, the AI has more in its toolbox than a new player does and starts with all the normal advantages. Get a player rolling with some skills and more to pick from than Attack, Tackle, Throw Stone and Potion and it picks up fairly fast. Honestly this was the first example and the only one I thought of for a while and I think it is a pretty good balancing act that it plays.
The next example is one that is pretty close to my heart, I love this game. It honestly has a fairly smart reactive AI when you dig into it. Sadly it is also a fairly negative attribute all truth be told. Baldur's Gate 2, it is a great game. It is clunky these days with its approximation of the AD&D ruleset jammed into a real time environment and pausing. The AI on the other hand is reactive. It is chock full of scripted sequences it runs through first, but it does respond to the environment. The classic scenario is the facepalm worthy Time Stop to pause time so they can cast a long spell uninterrupted, Gate to summon a demon. Then after Time Stop has worn off the demon attacks them because they haven't protected themselves from evil. The summoned Demon is the nearest target and the highest priority because it will completely rape the mage's face like a Sand demon through balsa wood (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r38E3CstVA4). Mages are really the only point that the AI gets this chance to shine since everyone else is mostly just responding to whoever shot them in the face or punching things. That or just plain old pathfinding which none of the other games here really have had a chance to touch on, but something that needs to be able to be done reactively, therefore kind of inherently fits into what I have lumped together as Smart AI, but I wouldn't list it as the primary reason. Also the pathfinding is more than terrible though, so lets not use that as an example. The AI does fairly simple things like it will dispel illusion or protection spells if it has relevant dispel moves memorised, it will use Instant Death spells that automatically work on summons. The down side is that it is about as far from perfect as you can get, it has big gaping holes that are open for abuse. It is really telling I think that the mods that make the game challenging and most fun pretty much dump the AI and rely much more on hard scripting of do this move, then this move, counter this with this. Just like Final Fantasy 6 did above. These tend to be more polished than the original boss fights in the game. Not necessarilly more fun to be honest, but they do give you a good challenge for the experienced player. Do I think the smarter AI specifically helps the game? Not necessarilly, it is part of the strange charm it has to it, but it doesn't make the game great. It is other areas of the game that really tend to bring in the fans. Honestly I do feel the game doesn't suffer overly much for having the big gaping holes in the AI, but at times it does feel like the AI is just spamming things at random.
You might note that the only games in this section are ones that have to handle not just responding to moves, but movement in an environment as well. This honestly makes sense, the more you need to interact with the more likely you are going to have to write a responsive AI to deal with that, so it makes sense to build on more like it. This isn't really praising or damning the usage of this. It is just a question of the situation that you need to use it. For most RPGs though when you are just working on the level of abstraction where you don't have an environment and just have 4 dudes in a row beating up on 6 enemies jumbled around the screen then you don't have to have a reactive AI, you can just do it based on hard counters or scripted sequences of attacks. It is really a question of working with whatever tool best fits the scenario. That is to say, in most cases enemy AI doesn't need this level of depth for an RPG. Party AI differs greatly, it does need to be fairly complex if it is forced on you. If it is entirely optional it can be as unresponsive as you want it to be, but it's usage will tend to be fairly marginalised if so.
Random turns, how do they work?
There is really one other way to handle enemy turns, you can just straight up have their turns be randomised. You see this fairly commonly in early RPGs, but it still gets used these days. Good example is the likes of Dragon Quest which I think of the ones I have played has leveraged it best in Dragon Quest 8. I say this uses it best as this is a game where the randomised movesets actually work fairly well into forcing you to change your tactics. The really notable enemies in the game have diverse skillsets cpaable of chipping away at you with multitarget damage or punish with strong single target if you are lapse at healing. The best of the game even introduce Dispel which while a bit infuriating as a player, is certainly effective at forcing you to change tactics. You don't know if you are going to have to rebuff next turn or not, so do you buff or don't you? When your healer is one of your primary buffers as well there is some interesting choices that you have to make and unlike a scripted AI you do have to weigh up your options as to what is incoming next turn. This works really well here. It requires a carefully put together skillset to work, but in this case the implementation of it is entirely on the boss designer, rather than leaving some of it the hands of a scripter as well. The overhead for implementation is even less than that of scripted AI. It makes it easier to balance and places most of the onus on the design rather than later in the picture, which means it is something that can have been mapped out early in development, but thankfully it isn't exactly a basic design principle for the specific moveset, so as long as you aren't talking about scrapping randomised turns late in the project you are left with a fairly malleable combat system, can swap moves in and out and tweak them as desired, rather than having to remake a script just for a change of boss design. It is the simplest of the models looked at here, but it is still to this day fairly effective. I am glad it isn't used everywhere like it was back in the day, but I am pleased to see people still utilising it.
Dragon Quest 8 though, what makes it work so well? The things that I think work best in it that honestly it escalates. Most of the game you don't have to deal with Dispels, then in the last quarter plenty of bosses have it, you have a balancing act between limited resources, rebuffing and the potential to deal with a spike in incoming damage higher than the average. It is a mix of good skillset diversity with multiple turns that enemies get. To offset double acting feeling cheap the game likes to throw you a bone and the enemies occasionally have a move in the repetoire that does nothing at all. You always have a risk of higher than average damage, but if you take every turn assuming that the worst moves are used then you are going to run yourself out of resources fairly quickly. It makes the game an interesting balancing act. It also really does need to be emphasised that the game really does easy you into aspects of the battle system fairly smoothly. That isn't to say that the game starts off easy, the first two bosses are probably the harshest because you have a small party and the only thing in your skillset is pretty much heal and attack. The game doesn't hold back on the damage during these parts, but it also doesn't throw Tension building dispel maniacs at you the moment you get your hands on Angelo. It is a well balanced fine line that I remember disliking at the end of the game when I played it, but upon reflection it is pretty well balanced line that it walks. Not every boss spams dispels in the last quarter of the game. The ones that don't tend to be notoriously easy. It gives you a nice reflection on how far the system has come, a game that actually the frame of reference to have that kind of perspective is fairly rare. I really do appreciate a chance to see randomised turns handled with as much care and precision as this.
That isn't to say randomised enemy turns is flawless, there is certainly plenty of ways you can improve it. Weighted chances are always a good thing, Breath of Fire 1 does that, with certain moves being used at higher ratios than others, that goes a long way to helping players deal with the incoming damage, but still keeping them wary. Keep your boss fights short though and there is a chance that they will just never see a specific move that you have at a low rate because of how dangerous it is. Another fun thing to do is bring in some scripting and have multiple actions, but have each action only capable of pulling from a smaller pool of moves than all the ones you want to use in a fight. It can help restrict the damage incoming or stop using specific moves together. This can be really fun when there is some overlap in the movesets and with differing speeds that moves come out. A small bit, but it helps mix it up. There is still certainly ways you can completely and totally screw up randomised turns, screwing up your weightings or just having terrible movesets will go there. So even though I don't have a "bad" example for this one, don't take it that this is my preferred method. I think bad examples of this are not overly hard to find if you have a visit from RPGs of Christmas Past. I really just wanted to highlight that this still happens and it is still worthy of a place in the market.
A conclusive statement of nothing.
So that covers a whole pile of stuff there. I don't really think there is one way to do this stuff. It is refreshing to see all these kinds of things done when used properly. My personal preference does honestly trend to the fairly late 90s pairing of controlled party in a turn based system, so no real party AI there mixed with low fi scripted combat. That is just my preference though, I do enjoy a well put together reactive AI sometimes as long as the game calls for it. Well that is a lie, I do enjoy games with a reponsive AI that makes bad decisions all over the shop even more, but that is just where I get my enjoment from gaming. For party AI, if I can't be in control of it, I am happier if it isn't spammy and stupid. I don't need it to play the game flawlessly, I just need it to be competent at what it does so I don't have to micromanage it endlessly . Nothing frustrates me more than a game where you can't directly control all actions at the same time, but need to be constantly directing things. Big offender here for me is Tales games on harder modes. It is trying to be an action game, but you end up spending far to much time dicking around in menus for its own good. Totally kills the flow if you aren't abusively good at the real time combat.
My personal tastes aside though, I think there is a lot out there in the genre that has promise. When your base principles are still being effectively applied and competing with emerging new techniques there is a lot of room for growth. So AI is one area that I actually look forward to seeing how it develops in the genre in the next few years.
I don't know how to end this article. So this sentence will do.
Edit - This one took it out of me. Taking the weekend off I think.
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Cecile (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=141)
Okay so I feel weird talking about the clothing of a little girl like this, but I can deal. The knee socks and the tartan skirt are cute. That isn't much of a secret that Cecile is on the adorable side of Suikoden fashion . Other than the fact that she is begging to to lose a leg without them being protected or to lose an eye with that visor perpetually being up the armour is generally fairly functional. Not sure why there is a belt though. It accessorizes pretty well, but she doesn't have a sword, so it isn't a swordbelt. It isn't keeping together the breastplate because that isn't how breastplates function. It isn't exactly holding up any clothing, not the most clashing or non-functional accessorizing we have seen so far. The bangle is actually nice, fitting and not quite as out of place as the belt. Now on to my favourite part of the whole thing is the shoes (you will see how often I start there), those are some seriously impressive shit kickers she is rocking there. Heavens help the poor bastard she is finishing off during clean up with a good curb stomp. I don't quite get now well you could walk in them, but whatever. I think the back needs to be a bit higher, but it might just be obscured by the socks or the perspective.
There isn't to much to see here, it is cute and completely ridiculous but a lot can be forgiven here.
Cedric (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=140)
Okay Cedric freaks me out a little. He has the whole sports uniform of a high school student thing going on there with the shorts, the stripe topped sports socks and the running shoes. Then you get to the top half and it is like a dress uniform with long sleaves and a vest. So you have a pretty crazy clashing uniform thing going on. Then you take that whole uniform and make it as if you are trying to recreate these uniforms with materials available in the 1700s. the pants are belted far lower than shorts really would be. The socks look like they are hand dyed or just plain had the stripes painted on to the material after the fact. The two tone running shoes look like they are clogs. The collar on the top appears to either be on the vest or it is a seperate piece, noting that the long sleeve shirt is not a button down shirt, so unless it is a long sleeved polo shirt (which is a 20th Century piece of fashion) then the collar isn't part of the shirt.
None of that is what freaks me out though. The fingerless gloves are just totally out of place. They also don't freak me out. He kind of has a whole street urchin look going for him in spite of the weird shit. That is cool and fits the character.
The thing that freaks me out is that he has a collar. We will touch on bondage collars in Suikoden 4 at a later date, but on a Teenager with a very young teen look going it freaks me the fuck out.
I suppose at least it is less prominent than other bondage slaves from the game.
Chaco (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=142)
Chaco's head is oddly shaped. He needs to wash his hair. There really isn't much to say other than he is hideous and needs to die in a fire.
Also 1980 called and they want you and your shirt torn off to be a wife beater and those torn off shorts back. Mike Haggar also wanted to let you know that you are wearing that suspender over the wrong shoulder and that real men wear a lifting belt.
Chadli (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=760)
Okay there really isn't much to say here, the outfit is boring and functional. Take a look at the art without reading anything else though and try to guess the job this guy has. Note the full apron, the leather gloves, the sensible enclosed shoes and long sleeve shirt and pants. Ignore the stupid helmet, it is stupid. He is pretty well protected.
So here is what the guy's job is. He is the Item shop owner. He is dressed like a fucking blacksmith and what he does is sell you medicine. Do you trust this dude's medicine? Gloves are good! I can respect the gloves, that is a good practice in a dispensary. The big leather apron seems a bit over the top though.
Now remember the stupid helmet? Either this guy has a serious with high shelves, is a little slow or has some serious worries about the products he is selling. None of these are things I particularly trust in someone that is going to be selling you the things that keep you alive.
Not to mention he appears to be shoving both hands into that front pouch which is far to small for both his hands be required to get something out and is poorly placed to rest your hands in. It is quite well placed just over where he has easy access to his junk if he is going pocket mining though. None of which helps me with this trust issue I have.
I am never buying medicine in Suikoden 4 again. Also we should address the thigns on the Suikosource page which talk about the helmet. Apparently he wears it as a fashion accessory. Someone needs to start reading these entries and take some fucking notes then.
Champo (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/imageviewnojs.php?img=c/champo01.jpg&char_id=761)
This is a pretty cool outfit I guess. It is sensible other than the orange and green, but the black white and green work pretty well. I can live with a cat not having a good scope on colours. I would also comment on how low riding the pants are, but fucked if I know shit about humanoid cat anatomy. If they are in proportion with their arms like a human ar then he is wearing them about 2 inches to low, but who the fuck can work this shit out. So Nekobolds are down compared to the regular Kobolds at this point. However we should note that the trans-humans are beating the shit out of the humans so far in a ratio of batshit crazy:sensible:AWESOME clothing per capita.
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Chadli's helmet. How can you insult someone for their love of fine helmets?
Even in his description:
He fulfills his dream in life by saving up money from his successful shop, to buy a new helmet, surely one of life-changing magnificence.
Life-changing magnificence!
This is a man who knows how to be happy.
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He can be happy eating paste and I will still make fun of him.
People have fun wearing leg warmers, hair bands and having a mullet. That doesn't make the 80s anything but a fashion disaster.
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A helmet is not eating paste. A tasteful helmet can be fashionable. His particular helmet could even be fashionable (with a completely different everything else to go with it, including probably a career change).
The fact that he is dedicated to the cause of accessorizing with a helmet means it could totally work. I posit that the helmet is fabulous and it's the rest of the outfit that lets him down.
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It could be a fashion accessory. I also might not be fat and just be big boned.
I am still going to be sticking with his parents made him wear it so he doesn't hurt himself when he is having a fit because someone made fun of him for his cat's breath smelling like cat food.
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You'll just never understand the LIFE-CHANGING MAGNIFICENCE of Chadli's Helmet.
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Something I noticed in mouse-over:
Why is the link for Caesar a YouTube video?
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A very good question. I think there was a joke that was using that. Or maybe I was just spamming chat with nonsense while working on it.
Fixed now. For reference it is stupid stupid shit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU) that is being replaced.
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Just want to comment on the AI thing...in a bit of a semantic way.
For the Dumb vs. Smart AI thing, at least on enemies, could a better terminology be like Simple vs. Complicated? Or perhaps, Fixed vs. Dynamic?
I don't think its fair to call it "Dumb" for all that I understand where you're coming from, mostly cause "Dumb" has a negative connotation (for all that you explained you did not mean to imply it in a truly negative sense), but I do believe there are better ways to explain it. Fixed vs. Dynamic, for example, neither gives off a genuine connotation of one being superior to the other, just a case of "one is constant, the other changes based on whatever"
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Edit - Oh yeah been not responding to Meeple until I had something to post. Of course the terms aren't fair. I am not fair. It is like I picked the terms to deliberately be aggressive. I write like I do because it is fun to fuck with expectations.
Chandler (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=143)
First up lets just get the obvious out of the way; this is terrible. The colour pallete is shockingly stupid and the dude looks ridiculous. I really want to get that out of the way because there is way more important things to talk about here. Keep in mind that this is a piece of Suikoden 1 art as I say this. The individual pieces of this outfit all have potential. Well maybe not the sandals, they are pretty gross. I suppose they could work with the pants if you were going for an art student from California look or something. You wouldn't be though because those are disgusting sandals. That isn't even mentioning that he is wearing gloves and sandals at the same time. I have no idea what is going on there. Alright, the shoulder pads are beyond retarded as well. I don't even know what the deal is, I think it is a cry for help. Sadly you won't get any good sir as all your peers are in the grip of very similar fashion disasters.
Back on topic though, I dig the pants and the jacket together. It is a nice laid back look. The shirt doesn't go with them. The shirt and the jacket work together quite well though, they needa full length set of pants, especially if you are going to be wearing gloves. The fez and monocle don't really fit with anything else, but make up for a profile that I would love to see in an espionage film set in British India, I think that would be quite fabulous. It isn't a great deal of praise, but for something so hideous I really do feel compelled to note the parts that make this up aren't really the problem here, it is the way they are put together and the fact that he is wearing a bright red turtleneck. Also of course you might have missed it with it being so gray and thin, but if you watch the edge of it you must also note cool popped collar bro.
Chapman (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=144)
Holy shit that is one scary midget. Dude is pretty scary buff for a little man. Looks like he is wearing a pair of full sized shorts as calf length pants, that has to be thrifty that. Don't need custom fitted pants doing that. The reason he is so scary though is that surly look on his face. That and the bright purple steel capped and heeled shit kickers. That is not a boot you want to be on the business end of. This midget is not impressed with you and your smarmy smart comments about fashion ladies and gentleman. He dares you to find something wrong with shorts and a wifebeater with a ripped body. Well I guess we have to talk about the mullet now if that is the case.
You brought it on yourself sir with that pissy scowl on your face and your sullen straw chewing mouth. You do have to give some credit to how proudly displayed the mullet is, there is no hiding it here. It is straight up MULLET REPRESENT territory here with it ponytailed and worn over the shoulder. I especially adore the teased fringe to make it stand up. This is a midget that is dedicated to his simple look. Sadly there is no helping a mullet. The bright purple hair tie to match your fabulous shit kickers is certainly doing you no favours either. This is a look you might have been able to pull off 27 years ago, sadly it doesn't pull any weight these days. Shave the head and get some real decent steel caps going and you have a pretty hard look going though.
Charlemagne (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=762)
Good gods man, Benny Andersson (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f19GKcZU1vg) isn't even dead, you could have waited another 20 years before robbing his wardrobe. Those huge flowing sheer sleeves, the big gaping V Neck on the shirt, the tight tight pants and the crazy huge platform shoes are scary as all fuck. Not to mention the broad belt and the shoulder length blode hair. It really is a shame he has brown eyes otherwise he would be the Aryan Disco Ideal.
I have to really note, this dude's nose really is pretty ugly. It might just be the shading on it, I really don't know. It is just creepy, like he has been putting it somehwere he shouldn't have before a dude wiped properly. The way he is holding his fingers as if to sniff them and revel in the filth of his depraved activities really doesn't help. I just don't even know. I mean I commonly say I don't know what is going on in Suikoden 4 shots. In this case I just plain don't want to know.
On to things I do like though, I totally dig the colouring and material of the shirt. On a girl about 5 years younger it would be pretty nice. Same goes for the pants really. Actually can we swap this guys clothes for one of the Karyan women's? Winning trade I think, not that I am super into that kind of thing, but I am more into it than I am this dude in that outfit.
Also it might just be because he is directly after a midget, but dude looks crazy tall (ignoring the platforms as well). That sword is wayyyyy to short for him, it looks like a toy in his hands, as does the sheath. Maybe if he didn't hold the hilt that close to the cross guard it might look a bit less weird, but I can't really say for sure.
Chief of Dwarf Village (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/imageviewnojs.php?img=c/chief01.gif&char_id=145)
Whoa crazy rapist face on this one. He looks like he is hiding in some bushes having one off the wrist while looking at an under 18s all girls softball match. The unkempt hair helping to form a rapist beard really isn't helping.
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Sporadic update gooooooooooooooo
Chief of Elf Village (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=146)
Okay so right on the tail of the last creepy rapist face we have another one. It isn't quite as bad because his eyes aren't glowing with his lust for your nether regions covered in scars and bleeding from fresh wounds. Ohwever we do have to deal with creepy midget proportions and pansy gay elf booties. No it doesn't help that he is a pansy gay elf. Not only that but we have a horrible colour scheme choice here with white robes, brown trousers topped off with a green and orange tunic. Just plain dreadful. The green sweatband just adds to the 80s and rapist look.
Chiepoo (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=763)
Chiepoo actually brings something interesting to the table. We have a Nekobold who almost dresses in a decent getup. The loafers would almost work with the outfit if he had socks on and they also didn't incorporate what can only be described as clown like construction. The rest of the clothing we are kind of in a situation as we do with the pimping Kobolds. It is a nice outfit, it needs a real tie instead of a bowtie, but this is a nice outfit for a merchant type. It is very middle class. I like it. The BAM there is a cat head on top and a tail. This is fine I guess since we are talking about clothing not animals, but I can't help but comment because goddamn.
Back on topic though, I dig the vest and the slacks. To top it all off the grey pants, black vest with the mustard dress shirt actually work pretty well here, noting the black and grey shoes and how important it is to accessorize as always. Scrapping the bowtie for a grey tie would really round the whole thing out quite well with his build.
Childerich (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/imageviewnojs.php?img=c/childerich01.png&char_id=147)
Hi there, my name is Childerich and I want you to take me completely and totally seriously as a threat and as a human being. So I will rock out in my padded armour and cover it with a pink tunic and strap knives to my arms so that it is impossible for me to go to the bathroom. Oh you can't help but laugh in amazement at my outfit? You think I should accessorize? Okay I will invest in some pretty pink greaves and get some bronze trim! Take me seriously now why don't you! Oh fuck you man. You can totally see me rocking my SICK six pack beneath a tunic worn over the top of padded armour. The human body TOTALLY works like that bro. You wouldn't understand. I have to rock a sweet sixpack like this to draw attention away from the fact that my tunic has a boob window in it. I SWEAR TO GODS THAT I TOTALLY DIDN'T STEAL THIS FROM CHUN LI'S WARDROBE BRO STOP LAUGHING.
QUEENS KNIGHT CHILDERICH NOW BITCHES TAKE ME SERIOUS NOW. Okay, so ignor the boob window on the new outfit. I can totally justify that this time, you can see my armour underneath it. What do you mean my sweet knife arms still look stupid? They are fully wicked to the max dude. And check out these sweet pants. I love the way they are so loose and baggy. It makes me look all mature and shit. Especially with the sweet knife arms dude. It doesn't at all make it look like I found my dad's armour and put it on and the bracers and pants were just 6 sizes bigger than my puny frame. Also do you love the wicked tat? The one on my face bro. It is like full on tribal shit right there. You can take me serious now. Yeah that is right, with my serious grin and my look at you out the corner of my eye look that doesn't at all look like I am trying to hide the fact that I wet my pants.
Cool popped collar bro.
Chisato (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=148)
I dig the peasant dress on this one. I think it is a weakness though. It is bright and colourful, especially with the top and the ... shit I don't even know what to call it. On a dude I would pretend that it is a Cumberbund and call it that (it wouldn't be though on a dude even), but whatever. It is a nice outfit. It is varied and a good use of diverse colours. It is both bright and dark, but the key factor here is that it either blends well or is contrasting colours where you need/want highlights. It is a good outfit overall with a holy shit huge collar. Like wow, with the jacket open like that the collar reaches out to her shoulders. That is crazy. I love the shoes. Sensible flat heel shoes are fucking hot as fuck. Seriously, that is how you look good ladies, by being comfortable. Sure she still looks like she is about to fall over, but at least it is because she is uncoordinated rather than the fact that she is trying to keep balance from 4 square cms being her only connection with the ground. Before I get completely off topic, I also dig the haircut. It is a bit old fashioned, but it works with the look and has to be way more practical than some of the other haircuts we have seen.
That vacant endless stare scares me more than a little though. She looks like a puppet, more a marionette than one of her own though. That would explain the feet I guess.
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Some Douchebag talking about Mainstream game that is SO AWESOME EVERYONE HAS TO PLAY IT
So hey, you may have heard that Rockstar put out another game. Yeah it pretty much plays like the others. You drive around a bit. There is some shooting. There is a bunch of missions to do. Pile of collectibles all over the city. It is your standard Rockstar game right?
Short answer is, no. This game is something else. There is plenty of impressive technology on display here that is fairly neat and shiny, but is not the source of the thing that brings this game above and beyond the standard piece of spectacle, it is how the technology is leveraged that is truely exciting. The techology that is being used here is facial expression modelling, not exactly amazing or new in and of itself. It is also not the first game that had a huge portion of hype built around it (see Ocarina of Time and the strange dissonance between marketting at the time and why some people are about to buy it for the third time). This whole game is essentially focused around leveraging the facial expressions of professional actors hired for the roles during the gameplay.
How exactly do you go about making a game about the strange protusions of ones head that makes up the face? That is a good question sir, but don't lump us all in the same boat as your freakish self. One thing to note is that this isn't about lip synching like has had a lot of praise for its improvements in this generation of engine. This is the animation of the entire face. We are looking at the movement of the eyes, the twisting and shape of the lips and mouth. How people sit idle as well as in full animation while talking. This is far beyond most of what we have seen in even the most well animated games this generation. You will not be staring at a hundred faces going through the same motions here. You will see some similar gestures across characters, but from what I can tell the actual facial animations do vary from actor to actor (deeeeefinitely not something to take on more than face value though, it could be a frequency bias thing here).
As for the game itself and how it utilises such a specific piece of technology? Well the meat and potatoes of the game comes not in the shooting and driving, but in dialogue between characters. A decent portion of the game and the most important component of the game centres around dialogues between characters. It is not limited just to the cutscenes though, of which there is a great deal with a good fun script and some great character acting putting the power of the facial animations to good use. A big part of the game comes in from player driven dialogues as you interact with witnesses and suspects. You will query back and forth between topics with people and need to determine whether people are lying or not, but even more delightfully, whether or not they are partially obscuring the truth from people. You get by doing this entirely on body language, which is where my praise for the facial animation comes in. It isn't a black and white obvious thing based on a key few animations for whether someone is lying or not, you need to take into account the context of what they are doing. A few stereotype pieces of pop psychology will get you far though, staring straight on for truth, looking up and to the left/off to the left for a probable lie or just looking all over the place if they are flighty. These only get you so far though, you could be talking about an uncomfortable topic or the person might be only partially lying, this is where a thorough investigation helps a great deal.
So you have the basis for a pretty fun game there. You wander around and find evidence and then cross examine people and generally have a fun story. Sounds familiar.
(http://members.optusnet.com.au/grefter/amazing.gif)
Hahaha I kid of course. This game is totally not a Phoenix Wright knock off. This game has far more direct overt violence. Also about half way through I don't think we have actually convicted anyone that has actually directly lead to an execution. Also characters in this get laid nowhere near as much. They are generally better dressed though. Well other than Douchecoat.
(http://members.optusnet.com.au/grefter/douche.png)
Douchecoat is a total douche, just as a bit of an FYI.
So we have a fun take on an old genre that is seeing something of a cult resurgence on consoles, point and click adventure. There is some shooting and driving stuff in there as well. You can entirely skip them if you want when you fail a couple of times. It is pretty nice. The game knows what it does best and that isn't driving and shooting. It knows why you have been playing for the last 4 hours and is happy to let you keep doing it.
There is still more that makes this stand out than it being a more American version of Phoenix Wright that is played straight as a 1940s police procedural. Have I mentioned that the plot is actually pretty good? Well yeah it is. The writing is pretty solid. There is some stereotypes in here, but they aren't over the top pastiche like we normally see from Rockstar. They play these very straight, they are much more archetypical than just being straight stereotypes. There is some depth here. Before I go completely losing my point though there is more to it.
Where the bulk of the game is the walking and talking aspect, this game takes it to a step beyond Phoenix Wright. The game won't hold your hand through it all. You need to walk through this yourself. You choose when to move on with questioning and when to stop searching for evidence. The best part though, is that the game will let you fail and there is direct consequences to failure. You can't just ask the same question again and present the right piece of evidence or respond differently. You will have failed to take that route. The game will keep rolling along. There is normally multiple paths to various pieces of evidence, but the more you have the better your case will be and the easier it will be for the player to draw the correct conclusions. Did you arrest the right person? Well there should be evidence to say so. This is great though, the story and gameplay is far more emergent than anything in the genre that I can name since Blade Runner (a touch obscure, but that game is from the FMV heyday of 1997). This is marvelous, a game that punishes failure is something rare these days, but a game that both punishes and almost completely absorbs failure while not absolving the player of these failures? That is something nearly unheard of in this generation of games. Still, this is not what is making the game so amazing, though it is certainly a start. The game is well designed and well polished. It knows what it does well and best of all goes out of its way to leverage what it does well.
This is not to misrepresent the game though. There is audio cues for when you have exhausted all investigation options and located all the evidence in a crime scene. Generally from what I have seen is worth exhausting your interrogation options (unless you are missing a piece of evidence from other testimony, you can't press a witness on the same point again for example. This plays back into punishing failure). I am pretty sure you can actually screw up a case so badly that you can actually game over if there isn't enough evidence to arrest someone, but I haven't seen it yet (something to check out though). Also worth noting again, we are talking about each of these chances of making mistakes having context sensitive responses and reactions within the case, unique responses from the actors and the whole deal here. The amount of scripting and recording that goes into the whole game is truely mind boggling.
One other neat thing is that the game grades you after each mission. I have heard of people restarting missions because they weren't happy with their overall ranking. You lose rating for things like property damage or um running over pedestrians and so on. So we finally have a Rockstar game where not running over grannies is a good thing, for those that were after that. You can even replay missions whenever you want. You know what I like about this thoughthough? As far as I can tell this grading means nothing at all. It is an entirely arbitrary marking scale. My absolute favourite part? It will have far less impact on the player than just straight up convicting a guy on evidence that is shakey, or just plain screwing up. It only adds to the humanising elements.
Still we haven't touched on why I think this game is so important and amazing. It is all in there though for what makes it worth playing at some point if only to note the design decisions and being able to join the greater discourse about the game.
The thing that is so important about this game? We have a game that is finally about people. It isn't about conflict or violence or a war or a cause or anything at all. It is a game that is about people. Reading people, understanding people. Finding motivations behind what people have done or why they haven't done anything. It is really great. We have a mainstream AAA title in 2011 that the goal is not to kill everyone. There is (Sadly honestly) missions that do pan out like that, but the vast majority of the game is about talking to people and listening to what they have to say.
This might be me talking as a psychology student, but I love that there is a game that is essentially a crash course in Interpersonal Communication. It is truely amazing to see something like this not only coming out, but being kind of a big deal in the broader market, coming from a huge studio and having a sky high budget. We have the company that is most notorious for its dehumanising games and over the top stereotype pastiches that are all about desensitisation to violence and so on stepping back and having one of their studios put out what is probably the most humanist game with a budget that big I have ever seen.
What we are dealing with here may have elements in other niche genres, I am sure there is some level of this in the Visual Novel market for example, but what we are seeing here is on a completely different level. Fully animated characters, responsive emergent fully voice acted scripting is something that a Visual Novel really can't produce on the budget and limitations of some of the tropes of the genre. The content is adult and intelligent as well which is a serious plus (something Visual Novels also have a passing reputation for sometimes), but we are again dealing with a budget you could not sink into that kind of storytelling and get away with it.
This bears repeating refined down to simple statements in all caps. So I will do that on the next line down.
WE HAVE AN ADULT GAME MADE BY ADULTS THAT IS FOR ADULTS. THERE IS NO GRIMDARK. THERE IS NO LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR TAKEN. THIS GAME MAKES YOU THINK. IT ISN'T TOWER OF HANOI REPEATED INFINITELY AS PUZZLES. THIS GAME IS DIFFERENT, YOU WILL NOT HAVE PLAYED MUCH LIKE IT BEFORE.
People generally seem to be accepting it with open arms, which I think is quite nice. There is detractors, but that isn't a bad thing either. I don't think that this is a game that everyone is going to love. Nor do I think it is a game that everyone is going to come away from thinking the game itself is amazing. What I do think though is that it is great game to have discussion about. Is this necessarilly where we want gaming to go? I don't think I want everything to be like this. I do want to see more of this in the mainstream though. We could really move on to have something of an adventure game renaissance if things like this take off (dependent on how affordable the tech is...). I want to be able to engage in discourse about it with others. I am saying nothing much new about this here on the internet, but damn I wanted to say it.
So. Anyway. L.A. Noire is a game. You should check it out sometime. It does some stuff pretty well.
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Will there be more Fashionista Grefter on Suikoden soon?
Alternately, WILD ARMS Fashionista?! (At least there's fewer characters!)
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In an attempt to do concise reviews I am going to do some in Haiku
Brink
This game is so shit
That it will kill your mother
With French Space AIDs.
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Bastion
Oh Lord, Oh my Lord
Then I scream "The Plot, The Plot!"
Shiny guns for all.
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Oh hey, there is this topic where I was posting stuff this year. This was a fun experiment.
Chris Lightfellow (http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/?char_id=149)
I believe I have covered how great the Knights of Zexen armour is before. If I haven't now is a good time. If I have, well I haven't updated in months so fuck it whatever.
The muted tones of the cloth in the armour is fantastic. It all feels very practical and utilitarian where it actually isn't entirely. The brown skirt and boots let the orange skirting on the armour really be emphasized which in turn lends the eye to the armour. Simple and clean lines on the armour provide ornamentation without appearing ostentatious, only really becoming explicitly ornamental on the pauldrons, which if you compare to other Knights really shows. This is fine, she is the Knight Cmdr and some kind of explicit presentation if not insignia is perfectly acceptable. The metal armour obviously matches her eyes and hair perfectly, that is the intent of the character quite plain and unsubtle.
There is far more to this outfit than just the armour that I love though it is really simple set of colours but it is a theme that travels way further than it first appears. The patterns and colours from the skirting are touched on all over the body. Just little bits here and their but it really helps tie it all together without the top half or her body being grey/white. Note the yellow on the boot tops and laces with the square patter continuing on the folds of the boot tops taken from the skirting. Orange and yellow patterened swordbelt. A touch of yellow showing through in the joins at the breastplate (presumably whatever is worn underneath the armour). My favourite part that doesn't really show up until you are looking at the picture carefully, the orange and yellow collar turned over the tops of the breastplate. Yellow trim on the solid orange background mirroring the skirting on the armour. It shows that this whole outfit is a set and it really is pretty great. What appears to be a utilitarian piece of gear really is a complete uniform and a show of rank and priviledge. Best of all it looks really good.
I really like that on the whole set there is two spots of black. The lining of the boots and the black of the scabard. Everything else is a dull and muted tone, but is always something that won't clash and contrast with the solid grey/white displayed once you hit the breastplate and keep going up. Of note really quickly on the topic of accessories, the small silver earrings (hard to make out but they are there), adds to the whole simple utilitarian thing with some minor ornamentation.
Also the hair is fabulous. I am going to be stuck on that even more so in just a short while, but damn is that isn't close to the most intimidating side part in existence. Pulling back into a nice elaborate bun. This of course rounds out the sword girl look with the librarian look for all the creepy fetishists out there. Ignore that part though. This is just a damn fine look.
So Chris I think gets a whole article to herself because two outfits and holy shit both of them are great.
Her Grasslands outfit continues the anachronistic combat gear and clothing that seems way too warm for the region thing that we have been seeing. Not that I am going to complain because that thick woolen combat jacket looks great on her. The patterened piping seems to serve no function at all although it follows along the seams of the sleeves (presumably as there is no join at the tops of the sleeve). This theme is repeating from the last outfit in that it is not as utilitarian as first appears, which mirrors the character herself. These outfits really are wonderfully designed and well thought out.
I really like the light, but still somber grey dress under the jacket peaking through the collar and at the ends of the jacket sleeves. Nice and casual, clashing with the combat jacket really well. Again, character stuff. The dark blue pants under it are cool as well. It really looks like a pretty comfortable travel outfit she is rocking underneath stuff there.
So lets talk about how damned hot this outfit must be. Under that jacket that I adore there is a fairly light looking short dress worn primarilly as a top. Under that we see dark blue leggings or pants. Then there is thigh high boots. There is at least two of clothing with good insulation there and gloves to go with it. This climate baffles me.
Moving on to accessories, the slightly darker gloves matching the jacket are great, especially since they are broken up by the ends of the sleeves on the dress and the touch of skin at the wrist. Great stuff. The earrings come back and are far more prominent in the profile shot. Nice little personal touch here I think, it helps put into perspective that not everything in the last outfit was uniform either. Some of it is herself. Low slung swordbelt, notably different from the last one, much thicker and two prongs to the buckle making it much more utility that the last (again, speaking something for the previous outfit being more show than it first appears). Those boots. Oh my gods those boots. Buckled thigh high. Flat heels. Loose fitting but showing defined legs (albeit surprisingly thin given how much armour she carries around). Those are boots that launch a thousand practical foot fetishist to war.
Now I spend time talking about the artistic choices of the picture rather than the clothing. This picture is fairly iconic and stands out a lot in Suikoden 3 art. It is really striking because it doesn't fit the normal stock character sets the others do, but that is part of what really helps it out. The profile shot is just a good character shot for Chris, she is still clearly really stark and harsh a character, but she is out of her armour and not wearing her badge of state. All there that is harsh and confronting is her, rather than her office or her armour. This is part of Chris' character that I really quite like. She is focussed and there is a thing she wants to get done. She will make it happen. I believe the way Eph would phrase it is "Dat eyebrow". Damn that is some impressive work for while she is on the road, but regardless of how much primping and makeup would go into an arched eyebrow like that in real life, it rounds out the look here pretty convincingly. Chris is not a woman to fuck with.
All of this is without going on about the hair. Oh my gods the hair. It is to die for. So straight and cascading down the back flaring out enough that it is whipping around and visible on both sides of her body. I cannot emphasise this enough as someone who has done the long hair thing. That hair is ridiculously straight and so well kept after. Just damn. So good. Once again we return to a staple as well of a seriously amazing fringe (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR5mgcRyv2w) bringing the viscious side part from the bun full circle into something that is stupidly hot to complete the sexy librarian trope. This shit is straight up over the arm of a chair in the middle of the day sexy.
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So Grefter succumbs to the doms. It'd only be appropriate to ask Chris on a date in either Yuber or Geddoe outfits. The latter with a flat, thick, uneven belted chain-mail and gloves enough to handle Chris's divaness, while the former is better suited for a dungeon experience with Chris's grassland outfit.
Also, Grefter with long hair?
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Most of that was written as pandering directed pretty much directly at CK with having fun with language (I am still proud of over the arm of a chair in the middle of the day sexy as a finisher). So read into that what you will about CK. I tend not to say anything about my own tastes other than mixing it in with a flurry of other humor.
I rocked the pony tail pretty much from High School onwards for 7 or so years give or take time with head clippered all over for a PS2 in the middle of University. Was down around between my shoulder blades. Cut it short when I wanted to go respectable for my current job. Still fairly scruffy since I wear it long still, but not even close to pony tail length. Given my taste in metal it is not really shocking that I kept it long. Contemplating growing it out again but don't think I could be bothered.
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Playing with the closet door
So guys. I have a bit of a confession to make. It is probably kind of obvious to you people that have known me for a while, but lots of stuff at work and in my life in general has got me thinking really hard about this thing. I mean I work with people like this all the time and have some pretty good friends in that community. So I think it is time I finally just accepted it and came out to everybody.
You see the thing that I have been really struggling with lately is my place in things and what I really like and enjoy. Like I fixate massively on fashion and stuff like that which you can clearly see in this thread, there is a real running theme in it if you pay attention and I have kind of flirted about it on and off here and there all over the place for a long time sort of jokingly admitting to it and then being completely counter to it 5 minutes later.
Hell I even have a really bad track record at making really inappropriate and probably offensive jokes about people like this before and I think we even have a few in the community that I am sorry if I ever offended you. I might just be kind of self hating a little? I apologise.
You see the thing that spurred me on to post this article is that there was this girl on the bus on the way home. She was wearing this short shorts (of some kind of synthetic material, couldn't pinpoint by sight alone though), like 4 inch heels with legs going onward to infinity (damn girl, just wow), a tank top to show a little bit of belly and this thin cloth jacket with a hoodie that barely fit her and stopped like 3 ribs up her rib cage. She had a necklace, earrings and a bucket hat. She had the pretty face and figure (highly bouyant upper body) to pull this off. I looked at it and it did nothing for me. The only thoughts that crossed my mind was "Well if what you are going for is to show off everything it works pretty well. You have enough skin on display that I don't quite understand the hat, but whatevers." The outfit generally had no real effect on me, all I could do was not construction and functionality.
There is this exact same kind of response all over the place in this thread. I just don't really have an appreciation for clothing that is putting it all out there and doesn't serve a purpose. I don't really express much interest in the female form so much as the bits and pieces that are hanging off it. It is like all I care for is things that make up the whole of it all rather than really accentuating feminine assets.
My taste in music even shines it through as well. I mean if anyone has followed my on and off love/postively baffled relationship with Lady Gaga and her music really shines through given her reputation and all that. I love it when everything is at its bare minimum and stripped right down. Overproduced things just get in the way. It is clutter that gets in the way of the real parts of the song. That isn't to say I only like songs with minimum instrumentation. MGMT is a fantastic example in that they have noises all over the place, they have very busy songs, but every noise is a key part of the experience (if you haven't listened to MGMT over a good set of headphones or with speakers up overly loud you have probably missed something!). My favourite pieces of instrumentation in a given song is pretty much always the bass guitar and the drums. The core of the songs are the things I love. The Framework.
I am seeing it with other things I do as well, not just my hobbies. At work I was struggling with a program and raging against usability of it (inability to upload multiple files at once, having to link said files to other instances in a database one at a time, having to scroll through list of all uploaded files each time). It really just stinks of poor design and a serious lack of testing on the usability. I have been being more aligned with this stream of work in my day to day life and the community surrounding these guys is frustrating me. They keep doing all these things that I don't really like, but I am finding more of myself in these people every day. They aren't bad people, I just wish they wouldn't always fall in these stupid stereotypes so frequently. It is depressing and gives them all a bad name that I am sure some don't deserve. Seriously, any of you reading this, cut that shit out and start acting like normal human beings. I am getting really hung up on Systems Design and System Architect work, even more so than just when I flirt with database structure and design. I am really branching out and getting fixated on the user interface and usability, how fields interact and transfer from one database to another in a fairly complex series of systems used for ordering. I mean it is really way more intense than just a curiosity.
There is something even more telling that I don't think many of you would have noticed other than random odd comments. I think the Elf might have copped some of it when he was in Brisbane for a bit and I caught up with him one afternoon. I have this kind of fascination with architecture. It doesn't dominate my life or anything, but I like to observe how a building is supporting itself, strange attachments and protrusions that actually serve some purpose other than just ornamental value. Actually thinking of it the crew that went to Shaba studios at DL con... 3? 5? Forget which year it was exposed to it even if briefly when we went to lunch. There was this building we wandered to that had the water from the air conditioning as a man made free falling waterfall in the middle of the building to act as the cooling and I suppose oxidation cycle (I suppose there is oxidation in there?) of the air conditioning instead of something more normal like a little water fountain somewhere like you see plenty of places. For serious guys, I thought that was great. Probably no one noticed, but it stuck with me as definitely a thing.
So what I am trying to say guys is that I think I might be an Engineer.
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I suppose I'll have to give up my "Coolest gay man in the DL" badge now. :(
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I didn't know you were an engineer Neph. Sorry for all the jokes :( It kind of surprised me as well right? I grew up playing with all this Science stuff. Turns out it wasn't meant to be. I am more interested in design than creating new ideas.
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Great post.
Are you going to tell your family?
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Finally!
Don't worry Grefter, even though we knew all along, we loved and accepted you for it anyway.
The first step is admitting it to yourself.
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Awww yaay!~
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Finding a Stranger in the Alps
I game in Australia on the off chance that anyone that reads this site doesn't already know. I want to have a little rant that is fairly common to hear from Australians on this here Blagosphere.
The long story short is that we pay near twice as much as the US release for games. It is very slowly becoming better on some platforms some of the time. I trend towards PC games for this reason, we only get gouged about 50% for new releases.
Here is a story of a new sales platform to the market completely and totally fucking this up in the face of an already insulted and downtrodden public who are all too aware of how much we are being spitroasted from both ends for game sales. Especially for digital product where the cost difference in delivery of the product is often dealt to us through the cost of our net connections rather than the producers content servers hosted in the US. (To be fair, plenty of distributors do host servers here in Australia which are notoriously expensive for no good reason. This is a notoriety that grew from the price of server infrastructure when you were relying largely on one ISP to do it well. Now this is no longer the case).
The game being used as example here is a new release. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, it is supposed to be okay and is written by R.A. Salvatore which for some reason gives some dudes big hard ons. When I want a pulpy fantasy plot sometime I will hold my breath for a game written by Margaret Weiss and/or (preferably and) Tracey Hickman. They trend towards a higher fantasy level of pulp in my opinion. I only really have a passing interest in this game. I was just running across the prices on the front pages as it is fairly new while I looked for something else.
(http://www.rpgdl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/alps2.png)
Here we have the games price on Steam. $60US, you know, the price of a new game these days ($40 cheaper than I used to pay for reference). That is all well and good. Steam does a pretty good service and I like it. It has a few downfalls and I don't look forward to the day Valve curls up and dies (heavens forbid), but for now it gives me access to old stuff I like and new stuff at a generally decent price.
Also note that Steam is fully capable of charging a regional price as determined by the publisher. I could just as easilly be posting links about how Darkness 2 is $90 or Modern Warfare 3 is $100 because why the fuck not? Instead I am going to show you something straight up fucking batshit insane retarded.
(http://www.rpgdl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/alps1.png)
This is a screenshot of the cost of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning on Origin at release. A whole $20 more because they have it region encoded on Origin. So yeah I am used to that feeling, it is my colon slightly expanding out as a stranger finds me in the Alps because I live in Australia and I like to play games. It is not really a comfortable feeling, but it is one I am used to baring. You know how it goes in these prison colonies, you fight against it at first and then you just give up and let it happen so you can get on with your day. Even getting abused every day can get mundane. I have things to do and games that I want to play, so I just blow an even larger disproportionate amount of my income on my hobby because that is the price point things have always been and people will pay for it.
The real failure here is that this completely pulls the rug out from under EAs attempts to make Origin a reasonable alternative to platform to Steam. I only use it because I absolutely have to. They aren'y empowering me as a consumer, they are just forcing me to have one more process that I need to shut down after I finish using it to play the one EA game I feel like playing this quarter (bonus points for Old Republic not needing Origin running). I hate to be saying this, but you should have fucked us out of that $20 on Steam if you were even going to hope to get Origin to be taken seriously as an option for this game. Maybe they are contractually obligated to do so to keep the price in brick and mortar stores competetive, but this either means their agreements somehow missed Steam and EA really wanted to sell it at $60 but can't, or they just don't even care enough anymore to fuck us over properly.
I am not even sure what is more insulting. The continued abuse or the fact that it is so half hearted these days. What happened to us EA? We used to have a real good hatefuck relationship going on. I ranted about how you published the same piece of shit drivel every year and then you closed all the studios I liked. Then you went all good for a while and had someone else become even worse and close fucking everything and use studios like they are fuel for their Druuge Maulers. You still put out the same shit drivel every year, but it stopped being so offensive when someone else was showing how to really mistreat your staff and let great talent go to waste making Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. Actually on second thought this isn't such a bad thing.
Really this just baffles me as a business point of view and really just is one more straw that is going towards getting us some sweet wheelchair camel races going. I might even start not buying games over that much maligned $60 price line that so many US posters hate on. Hey at least it isn't $100.
As an aside to a frustrating discussion I had seen pop up in some game scenes (might have been on Extra Curricular? Which is awesome and people should check out.)
Let me just go out there and say this to people that are against grey market purchases in Europe or the like because you aren't supporting your local industry. Here is a textbook example where I literally have no interest at all in supporting the local industry. Developers locally will get my money. Local brick and mortar stores stopped getting my money for PC games years ago when there was a viable alternative that even when they are fucking me over still tend to give me a better price than the local stores (and convenience and all that other glorious bonus that comes with digital distribution). That or you know, I might buy them if they kept any in stock. My PC games sections shrunk to miniscule proportions before I gave up on them, but they have no interest in my business so I won't continue to throw money at them to try and get them to change it.
I tried, I did my part. They slammed my dick in the car door. There is a reason I catch the bus now.
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So just to be clear, the Australian version of Reckoning on Steam costs $60?
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Yes and it cost $20 more through the publisher's own digital distribution network.
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Thumbs up EA.
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I am stunned that EA would be dickish about something. Stunned, I say.
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It isn't the dickish that is the sad thing. Everyone does that to us. It is that they are doing it so poorly.
Don't you care anymore EA? I used to think the black eyes were because you loved me.
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No, they were always a sign of the complete lack of respect EA had for you. The important thing is that now that you realise this, the healing process can begin.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmGkfWDtv78
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Better paid than an art historian in this case.
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So by popular request I have been asked to riff on Final Fantasy 9 character clothing designs. I don't have a bigger introduction than that. Doing this because I was asked to and it should be fun. Pics being linked to from Final Fantasy wiki (http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Wiki) on wikia.
Zidane
(http://images.wikia.com/finalfantasy/images/c/c2/Zidane_Tribal_character.jpg)
May as well start at the nonciest of the nonsense. As I tend to I will start at the top and then jitter all around the place and hyperfocus on the most inane shit. So first of all, this is going to be a really stupid petty complaint given the superdeformed character design and the whole JRPG thing, but hair doesn't work like that, really not without product. It is lifted and then parted down the middle and that is crazy since the life is about the distance from his widow's peak to his eyebrows. Check that distance on your own head and see just how crazy that shit is. To do it like that and have his hair hang out loosely like that he must pull the hair straight up (or hang upside down?) apply like a thick layer of product to just that section of the hair, let it set and then let the hair hang down into place. That or there is a precise application of hair spray. You could just say it is he has a weirdly shaped skull, but the fringe is all wrong for that. See where the part starts? There is clearly hair going in an upwards direction there. The puzzle that is going to keep me up at night is this. Does the part go all the way to the scalp?
Moving down we have a frilly lace neckline and necktie on a vest. It is kind of stupid, but everyone can see that. You don't come here for the obvious shit, so we will move on after I noting, although it looks stupid, it actually goes with the lace cuffs pretty well. I really want to talk about the top here though. the tight white undershirt is fine and all I guess (If Djinn were to cosplay Zidane I would expect it to be a belly shirt instead), but the vest is really short and with the undershirt I don't get the big exposed midriff it leaves. It also is pretty far from the most offensive thing though. You see that buckle on the left? You know what that buckle oes up and holds on? The strap on the other shoulder. Zidane has an adjustable sized piece of leather strapped to his back over the top of his vest. What the fuck is that and what the shit is it even meant to do? I first thought it was maybe holding the knife up with how far forwards it sits on his waist and all that since it had been a while since I had seen his full model. Nope, not at all. He has what amounts to a tiny leather vest or shawl draped over another slightly larger, but still too small vest. What the fuck is that shit and who wakes up in the morning and goes "I have an idea, I need to buckle on a piece of leather."? The only thought is that maybe it is meant to be armor of some kind, more on that later though. Assuming it is then it is pretty goddamned useless, oh cool a piece of thin leather armour to protect my back and restrict movement of my shoulderblades while I leave my entire chest and torso unguarded. This is the best plan.
We may as well get the gloves and cuffs out of the way. These things have baffled me for years. Are they the cuffs off his jacket that he lost the sleeves from? Are they the worst gloves in the world? I have kind of come to the conclusion that they must be the gloves, but it has taken me a ton of puzzling over it to realy come to that conclusion. See if they are loose cuffs they need to sit in place somehow, but they are clearly far larger than his wrists which suggests that they are connected to something and the only option there is the gloves (I can see making jokes about Zidane being such a wanker that his wrists might be bigger than you expet, but there is no way they are like twice the size of his biceps needed to support those cuffs). Soooooo we have these giant cuffs that may or may not be connected to the gloves. They have huge cufflinks that are still way further out on the cuff than they would need to be to actually fix them in place. Possibly you could have them link to part of the glove, that makes the glove need to have something stick out into the cuff and the more I describe that it sounds pretty ridiculous. So yeah. That cuff. What the fuck. It looks like they are probably connected to the gloves one way or another at least. If that is the case, ignoring the who the hell decides to connect a cuff to their gloves thing. Who the hell does that and then decides they need frilly cuffs? Who gets these weird gloves that are matched specifically to one set of clothes in their wardrobe. These gloves. They so crazy.
Continuing down we have the belt. This is going to be pretty quick. That belt holds up his dagger. His swordbelt if you will. It has a buckle that is not buckling anything. It is just tied on. You might want to buy a belt that fits for a change. I believe this is the key indication that the character design was done by Amano rather than Nomura. Leave no belt unbuckled being the driving principle of Nomura.
Now lets talk about these pants. These pants are really weird for some bizzare reasons. They look like they are fairly tight, like the rest of his clothing, but they bulge out in some really strange places as well. I have to obviously point out the creases and general bunching up around his junk. A clear obvious reference to David Bowie from Labyrinth like the face and expression. Those calves are massive and the knees, they are really knobbly. This ties back into something I mentioned all those moons ago about I think there might actually be armor in play here. The weird shapes and marks around the knees really make me think that under those pants is at least some knee pads (not even making a joke). Like some cuisses or something. It would really kind of inform the strange lumpy shapes that he seems to have in this picture. It also kind of lets you maybe in some strange way explain the stupid leather over vest thing. That or you know, Zidane is just a mutant. Which he is. So that could explain it as well.
The boots are super loose, that is pretty universal to FF9, so I won't elaborate more really.
Holy crap I didn't expect to have that much to say about Zidane. So I guess you guys get a running series out of this because no fucking way am I going another night without playing something and you got 1000 words out of me from a "Sure I can totally do that" statement in chat.
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... it took me until you pointed it out to realize how fucking idiotic having loose cuffs on a sleeveless vest is. I feel like a neophyte.
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the tight white undershirt is fine and all I guess (If Djinn were to cosplay Zidane I would expect it to be a belly shirt instead), but the vest is really short and with the undershirt I don't get the big exposed midriff it leaves. It also is pretty far from the most offensive thing though.
While I am all for half-vests with no shirt on, they should NEVER be fastened on a man. They should always hang open to expose their manly pecs to the world. Also, they should be posed on a defeated dinosaur.
Also, I cosplayed Tidus in high school, not Zidane. Get it right, -GEEZ-!
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So, you're advocating Vaan as better dressed than Zidane?
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I said they need to show off their -manly- chests. Vaan and "manly"... you're already not listening.
Although... Vaan lived in a desert, so his nearly-naked thing never bothered me that much.
But notably, I said that half-vests should never be fastened without a shirt. Zidane wears a shirt, therefore it doesn't offend me.
Also, the cuffs are clearly there to give him an aura of "refined"-ness befitting an ACTOR such as himself. The ladies dig it, bro.
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Edit edit- Meh nothing here works. Should have polished before trying.
Deleting shitty draft post.
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bump. requesting more!
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Quick and dirty copy paste of reply to Super in What are you Playing thread http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php/topic,6222.msg151667.html#msg151667 Might expand and format into real post when I get home.
I maintain that it is all about how you balance it. FFT has permadeath that is tuned in such a way that it only adds to the experience. Loosening the restrictions on it is a bit more player friendly but honestly I didn't feel the impact where it was (TO PSP). X-Com again handles it really well.
It CAN be a really terrible mechanic, but it is entirely down to the way it is implemented, not the core mechanic itself. With Roguelikes the journey is a huge part of the experience. Death does many things from being a learning experience to really bringing things down to luck with the randomised components of the game. It acts as something of a showcase of skill also, see Jim being pretty happy with having beaten the game 4 times. It inherently brings up the value on the Risk scale on Risk:Reward scales.
Mixed with the random components it is a huge part of providing replayability to veterans.
One of the things I have really come to appreciate in the modern resurgence of Roguelikes is the tendency to reward death and exploration. It has become something of a trend to unlock new classes, new races, the chance to start off with an item on subsequent plays or presumably even whole new areas/quests (Haven't seen it directly but I expect it exists).
If it was a mechanic that performed no function at all or was implemented in a static game where there was no differentiation between multiple play throughs I would be right on board with you, but Permadeath in Roguelikes actually has always really had a function and definitely has an impact.
Now if you were talking the completely devoid of function death we have in Platformers pretty much since the 16-Bit console generation then I would be right up there with you. Lives and Continues have been pretty fucking worthless and bullshit in Mario games for a very long time. They are plentiful enough to mean nothing, the games have save systems to make them even more meaningless. The only thing they really serve a purpose for is throttling Score which is mostly not something people care about in your console platformer and can be entirely worked around (individual level score) or is straight up not even implemented in any meaningful way these days.
I can totally get disliking the mechanic, but thinking of it as having wasted your time and being a "bad" mechanic honestly means that traditional Roguelikes might not be for you. It is really strongly placing the win condition being something you flag as happening in a single play through, something you touch on once and don't look back on. Roguelikes really are the forefather to the Elder Scrollsish open world thing or Sandbox games, the point isn't to win, it is the journey itself. Victory conditions are just to have an end point, not the direct purpose of the games themselves (see them being incredibly mechanics driven and plot light most of the time). Also see other examples of variants on the genre that spin off in to having bottomless dungeon modes after you have reached the threshold of what they could do with plot or monster design (whatever the driving point for the "finish" is).
Kind of want to stop now to leave room for conversation (because 400 words is totes not overly responding)
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There are right ways and wrong ways to do Permadeath. Fire Emblem (talking about 7, never played the others) is the wrong way, you can lose an important character because an enemy hit his 3% critical chance and did triple his normal damage. That's just random number screwing that you have no control over. I see FE Awakenings gives you an option at the beginning of the game to turn permadeath on or off.
Main character dying = game over in Persona is handled better. Yes it's harsh but generally preventable. As you become more familiar with the game you learn what is capable of killing your main and can equip personas to account for it.
Roguelikes are technically the bad kind of permadeath, but that's kind of the point of them. They wouldn't be Roguelikes without this mechanic.
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There is an ocean of difference between permadeath in say FFT or even FE and permadeath in a rougelike. If you get a valuable character turfed in say FFT, you reset or have a game over. The actual time you lose from it is minimal enough. FE is the same thing- and there are even points where it is benefical to let a PC die, rather than recruiting. Permadeath when used as a total wipe is something I find unacceptable. ToM has a lives system. I have lost two lives on the current playthrough. One was a random map encounter, but those guys are douches. Okay. The other was just fiddling in an area the plot told me to go and getting a L40 enemy from triggering things. / There is no skill or anything interesting in there, just memorizing certain things not to do for the next run of the game. It is the wrong type of challenge, as you are just avoiding certain events and playing the game in a cautious enough way so that enough high probability events roll in your favor so that you can win.
Saga Frontier, Final Fantasy 13 and Defense Grid are all very difficult games by genre standards. SaGa will just sometimes drop monsters/situations that will kill you over and over and over, and it's not a big deal because you can save anywhere and quicksave anywhere. You go back to what killed you, work on strategy and tactics and get it done the right way. The more forgiving the game is about deaths/game overs, the tigther the challenge can be and the more it can throw at you without frustrating and turning players off entirely. Defense Grid is a tower defense game that lets you constantly load to checkpoints. Which is good, as having to 30 wave missions from start because of a rumbler or flyer stealing a single core would be frustrating beyond belief.
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Fire Emblem permadeath is almost always preventable as well, Cappy. You just find the person who doesn't die to the crit or doesn't get critted and allow them to deal with it. Or snipe 'em down with ranged attacks (like, say, a person with a Killer weapon). This is why the Luck stat exists, so some people can deal with these low-but-existing crit chances.
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Opposite opinion of Captain K here, of course. In Fire Emblem, that critical is something you can see coming and plan for, since enemy stats are completely transparent. You can either take out the critical person from range (if possible), or find someone with higher luck to reduce the chance (if it's 3%, this shouldn't be difficult), or use someone with high defence/res who will survive even if the 3x damage kicks in. Deaths in Fire Emblem are invariably the result of a player error, so the mechanic merely serves to create a feeling of tension of force the player to pay attention. XCOM uses a very similar approach. It's very slightly more RNG based (there are occasional things you can't plan for, such as poison inducing panic, inducing friendly fire) but for the most part, almost all deaths will be the result of a player error, and the mechanic encourages you not to make that error. In both cases errors aren't fatal since you get more PCs (unless you start losing, like, a dozen PCs or something, but then you really need to suck less). Both FE and XCOM would be worse games without the mechanic, in my opinion.
FFT/TO also do it fine for the most part. The revival thing is incredibly forgiving, and really only serves to give you a reason not to use people as forgettable cannon fodder, and adds some tension later in fights where you might otherwise be mopping up in a boring fashion. TO is more forgivable due to the three hearts thing, but on the other hand you can get some really haxy instant heart losses if you're pushed off a cliff (you learn to try very, very hard to never be in a position where this can happen, but on a few maps it's very hard to avoid) so it balances. Again I think the games are generally improved by this. Contrast Disgaea or Vandal Hearts or even XF where you can use all (or all but one) PC as cannon fodder and I think it compromises the strategic integrity of the games a bit.
Enemy criticals in SMT games which use a press turn-like system are unavoidable nonsense (you can neither predict them nor decide who eats them), on the other hand. One of the many reasons I thought P3 looked terrible: one of my experiences watching the game involved a player dominating a boss fight until he was hit by a critical out of nowhere which he had no way to predict or protect against so far as he was aware. There may be ways to avoid that situation but the player in question didn't know about them so they're certainly less transparent than FE/XCOM examples.
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See you are approaching roguelikes like defeating the final boss is the end goal. That isn't really how Roguelikes function. Roguelikes very specifically are about high risk/reward gameplay. The next room could be incredibly lethal! The next room could have an artifact in it! It is very specifically a genre you aren't meant to beat all the time or even be able to reasonably beat all the time. That is where I would define the gap between Roguelikes very specifically and the more broad Dungeon Crawl type genre, like Etrian Odyssey.
The thing you get from a death in a classic roguelike that doesn't have reward mechanisms for death is just straight up greater player knowledge. When you get to the really abstracted ones like Nethack (or ADOM) it is taken to a very meta level at that point (like you see Sage talking commonly in chat) it is about weighing up the odds of the kinds of enemies that can spawn, the kind of treasure you could get etc. That is intrinsically not the kind of knowledge you are going to realistically get through a single play through/life in a Roguelike.
It occurred to me today that very specifically the same kind of emotional response that Roguelikes generate is the closest thing I can think to in a strictly Single Player game as you get from competitive sports or gaming. You don't expect to win Roguelikes. Hell if you win Roguelikes 50% of the time (like the ratio you would expect to get in a balanced PVP game against a player of the same skill level) then you are doing really well. Competitive players do play to win, but they don't play expecting to win all the time. The same thing comes in Roguelikes. You play them to play them and experience the journey. When you win you win big. When you lose you lose, so you get back in there.
The fans of the genre like the volatile environment and specifically BECAUSE it is Single Player it doesn't need to be fair. There is of course varying degrees (ADOM to ToME and so on) and the great part of? You can straight up strip that part out of the game and you are left with a more classic dungeon crawler (So the jump from ToME to Castle of the Winds). You can have the Roguelike chic in something less punishing.
It is just a mechanic and it is a tool that you have to apply correctly. Roguelikes DO apply it correctly for their target audience (which it seems you aren't). There is still games in the genre for you (Do recommend donating to ToME! Get that unlimited lives mode! Have that gameplay you like without the Permadeath you hate!) hell if it specifically is the TIME investment you hate, there is a neat little game called Hack Slash Loot. It is ultra short scenario Roguelikes that you can do in 10-30 minutes and can save anywhere (with permadeath), has all those death rewards I talked about before.
There is a whole ton of knobs to turn to get the mechanic right. The comparison of FFT and TO isn't to say THESE DO IT RIGHT SO ROGUELIKES ARE FINE, it is entirely to say Permadeath has its place and to label it as a bad mechanic is short sighted. It is the very same mechanic in play, it is just the circumstances that it is implemented.
In the very same way that you can remove it from Roguelikes (and other games that use it) you can add it to existing games to have an "expert" mode. Diablo 2 and 3 do it as do many games in that click spammy dungeon crawly genre (Roguelike throwbacks obviously). The new X-Com has the commonly implemented Iron Man Mode which is straight implementation of Roguelike style no hard saves full permadeath style in Strategy games (this is a common enough option in Western games that it is not really more than noteworthy). Hell there is straight up Pokemon challenge that we all know by now that is built around it.
It is a mechanic that is easy to implement (even if it is entirely in the player's hands) and can be applied broadly across multiple genres. While I will be the first to note that it reduces your target audience significantly when it is not optional, I find it hard to find something like that as "Bad". It is a powerful design tool that in the wrong hands can be anything from nearly completely useless (which makes it incredibly frustrating when it DOES come in to play, which I will touch on in a second) to something that is incredibly frustrating and overly punishing.
Very specifically, it is the central mechanic of Roguelikes. Much like Rhythm Game stuff is the central mechanic of Theatrhythm, just because it is something central to the design I find it hard to say it is a terrible mechanic even though it isn't something I enjoy. Rhythm games work just fine, but I don't really want it in my RPG, so I don't play Theatrhythm. It sure as shit seems to do a damned good job with it though. Hating ADOM because it kills you is kind of missing the point of ADOM. Hating Roguelikes because you don't like Permadeath to me sounds like you are pretty chill with Dungeon Crawlers.
Sometimes it is so intrinsic to the design of a game though that you can't rip it out unfortunately. ADOM without Permadeath sounds like a special level of hell to me honestly (hour upon hour of save scumming to try to get anywhere? That would be a very special experience...). FTL is another example. It is kind of sometimes using the Roguelike core mechanics of randomisation and permadeath and does it in an amazing way that is um not actually a Roguelike (it is like Roguelike with the dungeon crawl part stripped out instead of where a Dungeon crawl can be a Roguelike without permadeath stripped out). It is a pretty special game and even with how much you dislike permadeath I still heartilly recommend it, you probably haven't played anything quite like it before. FTL is incredibly emotive because it is so high risk and has that Permadeath. Your choices have dire consequences and you really have this strange mixed feeling of progression and barely scraping by the entire time (you DO progress, you DO have the odds stacked against you). Best of all each death does teach you something even if it is to maybe not fuck with Space Spiders. Best of all it REALLY rewards exploration. FTL is amazing and is definitely the game I would champion to someone who downright hates Permadeath (in that it is going to be outside your normal genre so you may have less baggage to go with the Permadeath).
FTL is the epitome of Risk:Reward gameplay to me though. The blows are somewhat lessened by the fact that death tends to be a slow drawn out affair and there will be runs where you pull through by the skin of your teeth and then get lucky and make a comeback to just barely scrape through to the last sector (where you get to pit whatever you have managed to scrape together against a final test). It does it all through a sequence of short choices, pick between 3 or 4 places to visit until you get to the exit point (you know where to head) then pick which next sector to go to from 2 or 3. Repeat for 9 sectors. There is none of the standard roguelike turn based wandering around a map and a pretty neat space combat simulation in there as well (which gives you the skill check component the game has). Hard saves would completely kill that feeling of adapting your strategy to what you have on hand. I don't even come close to doing this great game justice when I try to describe it mechanically in its component pieces.
Those paragraphs went totally off the rails, but I really wanted to highlight that even after ranting about how it is a broadly applicable design element even still there is definitely games out there that have it as the KEY design point where it has informed the whole game and can't be stripped out without neutering the entire venture.
Specifically where I think it is done pretty terribly is P3 and P4 main character death = Gameover. Actually kind of the opposite of Elf's problem there though, specifically it is that when they stopped releasing what was essentially a beta version of P3 (I forget how the original handled saves honestly), the mechanic was pretty much worthless. They implement it and then go completely out of their way to make it a non-issue after like the first dungeon trip in the game. You get to make a hard save before each boss so it is pretty much just a random gameover condition, there is pretty close to 0 risk involved. Not only that but the game showers you in things to neutralize your main character's death. Party members will take a lethal blow for you once a fight when you get their social links rolling (which you WANT to do and is the fun part of the games and in P3 and P4 original they are at very achievable SLink ranks), you get 3 party members who will do that. You get consumable items that will block ID automatically if you do get hit about half way through the game, so that kills the douchey volatile RNG ID skills (which are still dick moves to give to enemies really) but if you run out your party members will still eat them for you even if it was MT. That is all without the fact that you can just equip the MC with incredibly defensive Persona's for bosses and the game actively pushes for you to sweep most random enemies in 1 round (and are rewarded for doing so).
P3 and 4 really aggressively go out of their way to build around avoiding this mechanic of killing the Main Character between directly intervening to prevent it and by pushing finding ways to bypass it with foreknowledge (either knowing what element bosses or enemies use or are weak to and exploiting that aggressively). The only reason they seem to implement it at all is because Shin Megami Tensei has always had Main Character death = Game Over (back when its roots were in more punishing dungeon crawl inspired gameplay). The games would only really benefit for just not having it their at all (along with direct controlling other characters which guts an aggravating part of the difficulty of the original P3 release).
If you are going to have it there at least make it a realistic factor with some regularity instead of it being LOLRANDOMBECAUSe CRITZ. FFT you honestly don't get THAT many resets because Ramza crystallized, but it is a present factor in every battle. Persona 3/4 seems to aggressively go out of its way to make it not really a thing, so in the rare times it DOES come up it feels like a kick in the taint the same way it does when you get most or all of your party killed by Multi target Instand Death in a Dragon Quest game.
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I don't think you can divorce the time aspect of permadeath from the problems I have with in roguelikes. It is more than game overing like an FE game or TO, it is the removal of your entire file and starting over from scratch. You have to go through a lot of not challenging and uninteresting parts of the game to get back to where you died, adn that is bad design to me. It really stands out in the case of ToM, because so much energy and focus was put into making the entirely game tightly balanced and challenging. Let me go back to what killed me and figure out what went wrong and go from there. It is not the permadeath that specifically bothers me, but permadeath being a total loss. Even if Ramza crystalizes in FFT, you just get a game over and a chance to redo the fight. It is something mechnically unique to roguelikes, and one reason I have no real interest in them.
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You can't totally drop that component, that is a big part of the risk:reward component of the game. Rogue likes and most other games with permadeath are very high on the risk side of things.
What I think is out of balance for you there is the Reward isn't worth the risk. You have the reward being beating the game or the encounter. This is where I see roguelikes being more akin to competitive games than your single player stuff. The reward isn't to win, the reward is to do as well as you can.
Again I can totally see disliking disproportionate risk:reward paradigms, gods know you have sat through me ranting about them enough times when you are making highly random Low risk:High reward decisions for example (a pet hate as a habitual power gamer...). It is especially hard a point of balance when your reward is nearly entirely player driven with something abstract like win conditions or whether a losing run was "worth" it. The very act of playing a Roguelike is in itself a high risk choice since you have low odds of success and the reward component is entirely outside the bounds of the game itself.
Some of this comes with how tightly tuned roguelikes tend to be, you can realistically be put in an unwinable scenario (given your current equipment load out or your current build etc). Permadeath has a function there of stripping out the ability for the player to get themselves stuck in a a no win scenario or prevents some less creative tactics working (if you respawn instead of loading saves then graveyard zerging is a very real possibility...). Permadeath acts as a pacing mechanic and a skill check here. Again it is a function that it is supposed to do and it is working. I can see disliking it, but still disagree that any of that makes it "bad". It is limiting your target market especially with how effective it is, but that is partly why it is a GOOD mechanic.
There should never be a boring easy part of a good roguelike that is a trudge to play through. I would argue that if there is it means your Roguelike is too loosely tuned and you should think about converting it into a more straight dungeon crawl. Drop the permadeath and let the player have their hard saves. That tight balance you are talking about in ToME is exactly what you should be seeing in every roguelike and really is in the ones I mentioned, but the tuning may be on the harder side of the spectrum (Other than Castle of the Winds that is because it is much more a straight forgiving dungeon crawl and that fact is why I recommend it to people that don't like Roguelikes).
I still argue that you can completely and totally work around even the Time factor (as if dying in a game and learning things is a "waste" if you enjoyed doing it) can be dealt with. Two of the examples I quote both do a really good job with it, Hack Slash Loot very specifically is built to be such small content that death cost you a morning tea break at work if even that. FTL takes an hour or two max to get to the end of and if you haven't learned something each run that gets you to Sector 9 for the first few times then you are far better at thinking through problems than I. Even after the point of learning, FTL is tuned enough so that even getting there is still interesting. Both games have some method of potentially rewarding incomplete runs also (HSL far more so than FTL though).
Deleting your save is soooooooo not unique to Roguelikes. It is definitely where the mechanic comes from but many many other game types include Hardcore/Iron Man Mode these days. I even saw an indie Platformer include it. So a hard platformer that you have no extra lives in. Like doing Contra and not just saying Konami code is for pussies but the 2 extra lives they gave you was too much. Fallout Tactics did it, Temple of Elemental Evil did it if you want 2 examples of games that blur the line between strategy/RPG/dungeon crawlers. It is a very Western thing, but it is definitely not unique to Roguelikes these days.
I do really want to address the part about not being able to redo fights over and over to learn fights separately. That is really not the key kind of gameplay that Roguelikes in general promote. They are very high on the thinking on your feet and making your decisions have a real weight and meaning to them. If you reach a boss and he cock blocks you completely that is your chance to learn. You earned that, now you had best be paying attention. Just loading your save and flailing at them different ways is very counter to that core design component. A common design point you will see is a cock block boss that punishes what is often an effective build to clear the rest of the dungeon, it forces the player to rethink their choices and maybe branch out a bit further (stretching themselves thinner and thus making the normal parts of the dungeon harder so they can more cleanly deal with the boss...). Design like that all points to one thing, you aren't meant to beat the game that first try. You are meant to learn progressively and choices you make at the earlier part of the game will eventually come to be influenced by things that are going to come up later in the game.
You need to play these games differently than you are used to, I think you will enjoy them a lot more if you stop approaching them like you would Tower Defense or a normal RPG. These games will kill you and you should be treating them as such. If you don't want to participate in that part of the learning process then thankfully these days you have a way to opt out. Pretty much every Roguelike you are likely to run into these days has wikis that will do it for you, then you can just be left with the decision making skill component of the gameplay.
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One point before I start: Games with hardcore/iron man modes make that an optional challenge level. If people want to play that way, they are more than welcome to do so. It is the same reason that something as badly designed as Legend of Mana's no future mode is something that does not held against the game. It is strictly put into the game for players who are interested in that type of challenge. Flexible challenge levels are something that every RPG should have. If you're not going to totally railroad the player like FF13, give them the freedom to set and adjust how tough things are however they see fit.
There should never be a boring easy part of a good roguelike that is a trudge to play through.
The beginning sections (should be) much easier to work out; the challenge in those sections is the player getting used to the system and underastanding the mechanics. Permadeath means going through sections you have already cleared and beaten. It is a waste of time to go through sections you have already cleared and solved again, just to get back to where you were. You can't claim a game is high on thinking on your feet, then admit there are situations where it is functionally impossible for the player to win. Learning to avoid opening a chest or fighting an enemy is not strategy or planning, it is just memorization and knowing what to avoid. That type of puntive design is perfectly fine in FF13, but in a roguelike with permadeath? No way. You have to accept the premise that the player getting killed *and starting over* due to things that are not remotely reasonable to know ahead of time is acceptable.
You need to play these games differently than you are used to, I think you will enjoy them a lot more if you stop approaching them like you would Tower Defense or a normal RPG. These games will kill you and you should be treating them as such. If you don't want to participate in that part of the learning process then thankfully these days you have a way to opt out. Pretty much every Roguelike you are likely to run into these days has wikis that will do it for you, then you can just be left with the decision making skill component of the gameplay.
I have zero problems getting killed. I have a massive problem with getting killed and being forced to do tasks I have already cleared. Removing the trial and error part of the gameplay is not fun, and defeats the point of playing the game in the first place. There is a reason why finding the Nash Equalbrium (which is what those FAQs telling you exactly what the boss has/how to counter it) removes the entire point of having to play the game.
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One point before I start: Games with hardcore/iron man modes make that an optional challenge level. If people want to play that way, they are more than welcome to do so. It is the same reason that something as badly designed as Legend of Mana's no future mode is something that does not held against the game. It is strictly put into the game for players who are interested in that type of challenge. Flexible challenge levels are something that every RPG should have. If you're not going to totally railroad the player like FF13, give them the freedom to set and adjust how tough things are however they see fit.
This is again entirely about the target audience. It being optional is a cool bonus not used by the wider audience. If you make a game where it is forced you are designing for a smaller target audience, that doesn't mean it is bad design, it means it is limiting design.
That same line of logic is that because FF13 isn't Halo it is bad design to make JRPGs. Halo has a broader target audience.
I am not arguing that you should like Roguelikes, I am arguing that Permadeath as a mechanic is not bad. If you appreciate the existence of optional Iron Man mode then I don't understand at all saying Permadeath is "bad". You are completely and totally within your rights to put your hand up as not being the target audience for the genre. Whole swaths of the gaming public are not the target audience.
The beginning sections (should be) much easier to work out; the challenge in those sections is the player getting used to the system and underastanding the mechanics. Permadeath means going through sections you have already cleared and beaten. It is a waste of time to go through sections you have already cleared and solved again, just to get back to where you were. You can't claim a game is high on thinking on your feet, then admit there are situations where it is functionally impossible for the player to win. Learning to avoid opening a chest or fighting an enemy is not strategy or planning, it is just memorization and knowing what to avoid. That type of puntive design is perfectly fine in FF13, but in a roguelike with permadeath? No way. You have to accept the premise that the player getting killed *and starting over* due to things that are not remotely reasonable to know ahead of time is acceptable.
The beginning being easier doesn't mean it has to be boring. In all honesty the beginning should always be interesting in a Roguelike because it is the point that is going to inform the direction you will be taking a character. What loot do you get? Do you have something that is so strong you need to deviate from what your original character idea was? If the start of the game is so consistently the same that you find it dull and boring then that sort of highlights why the genre trends towards more difficult and highly random beginnings. They also tend to start hard because that is the mindset they teach you. This game will kill you and it might not be fair. I would argue having a more flat learning curve in a game with permadeath is a bigger disservice to the player than one that teaches you early that you are going to die. A flatter learning curve is definitely going to help develop that boring early section you take issue with though because the star will be easier and boring. More front loaded learning curve lets you tune the start much tighter.
I have zero problems getting killed. I have a massive problem with getting killed and being forced to do tasks I have already cleared. Removing the trial and error part of the gameplay is not fun, and defeats the point of playing the game in the first place. There is a reason why finding the Nash Equalbrium (which is what those FAQs telling you exactly what the boss has/how to counter it) removes the entire point of having to play the game.
That argument falls flat to me entirely. There is more to even just the exploration of these games than just determining what Boss X does or effective ways to deal with creature Y in The Black Forest of Cakes. The random element always presents an element of exploration. Foreknowledge doesn't define your ability to react correctly when put in the position yourself. Sure I may know I can roll Knight in Nethack and get Excalibur really easily by floor 3 if I reach I to pools of water. That sets you up with a good chance of having an easier time with the rest of the game. Going out and doing that and capitalizing on it is something else entirely.
It is like, is there no point in replaying a game just because you know how to beat it? Is there similarly no point in playing something you have watched an LP of that you enjoyed? Understanding and execution are two completely different things. Removing one part of the gameplay doesn't invalidate the playing experience at all, it just means that player chose to play a different game than you seem to have wanted to.
Also it isn't the fact that you are going to die that you need to take the cost of death into account. There is two bits of gameplay you will see far more frequently in Roguelikes than any other game I can think of. Playing defensively and running away being an entirely valid choice (not mandated though).
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Edit - Work in progress, come back later.
Disc One
Prelude~ ~ Advertise I - Nice ambient track, throw in a bridge and extend for 2 minutes and this would be really good.
~ICARO AGAIN ~ Advertise II - This track is like a preview for this entire album compressed into 2 minutes. It covers a lot of distance in that time.
Deep Meditation ~ Title - Menu music. Good track to AFK to because that is what it is written for.
Old Smudged Map ~ Map of Europe - This would be a Chrono Cross track if it was set in Arabia instead of the Mediterranean. I don't see the best track hype frankly (as someone that likes CC OST). It is just more menu music, 30 seconds of substance. It is a good 30 seconds!
Death is The Great Leveller ~ Tower of Atonement - Love the track title. This will from now on be labeled LTTT because it is going to come up a lot. Boom kettle drum. Chimes. High notes on Piano. Dungeon track. They are consistently good I think, but you know the style pretty quickly. Boowoopwoopwoop goes the synth.
Vicious 1915 ~ Battle in Europe - LTTT. Yoshitaka Hirota Battle music! Dissonance! Break beats! Driving bass line! greftarmusikz. It is far from his best but the OST is hitting its stride here. More inspired than dungeon music. Uses some pretty standard electronic music tropes well. There is an anthem followed by a drop at 1:57 which is fun. Has a tendency to really show looping in context for long fights though.
Swoop! ~ Running Wild in Europe - too short like all Zerk tracks. One of the few I think that is worse than the original. When the original is bland it is hard to mix well though. Still appreciate heart pounding pace wall of bass tones.
Suffocation ~ Grim Atmosphere - I wish there was a dubstep mix I this. It has the perfect tone to rip for a bass drop. More dungeon music bwoooooooaaaaaaooooo + piano.
Flame of Strain to Blaze ~ Tension - (http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130306110061/video-game-championship-wrestling/images/9/94/Daniel_Bryan_YES.gif) holy shit yes. This is what I am talking about. That bass line. Unrelenting. One of the better put together battle tracks because the last 20 seconds or so works as an outro standalone or an anthem into a drop in game. May be best put together track technically for what it is. Don't like the title for reference.
In Darkness of a Labyrinth ~ Dungeon - I actually really dig this one. No piano isn't the reason (I like it outside dungeon tracks!), but it helps it stand out. It is a good use of standard horror bgm choices and is a soft enough touch to hit the right tone of SH2 "horror". Good track.
Town of Twilight ~ European Town - this belongs in FF7 or 8 as a Cloud/Tifa or MWaMG/Ellone flashback. It is a good track for what it is. I mad that Town music is 5 minutes long when more interesting and looped combat tracks are like 2 minutes. Motherfucking piano accordion bitches, you better bring it.
Memories of Melodies ~ Peace - this is a pretty laid back piece I don't have much to say about. It is okay. Blends guitar and piano well.
Dear, my Dressmaker ~ The Tailor - I love how upbeat this is. It could be Persona shop music.
Grand Papillon!! ~ Pro-Wrestler - good in game. Boring as fuck out of it.
Soul Comet ~ Spirit of The Wolf - Completely overwrought like all things Blanca related. Suikoden war music.
Glint of Light (Orchestral Arrangement) ~ War of The Hungry Wolf - Back to Greftersongs. Swap the usual range at the start of this one. You high notes are the driving choice here and bass line is you melody. It is good and constantly feels like it is building. I wish it was a minute or two longer and would actually reach something though. Song suffers for being built to loop.
OohLaLa! (Long Version) ~ The Beautiful Girl From Firenze - LTT. This one has some pretty nice bits of instrumentation that might be missed without some bass that kicks. It is a really busy song with some tight sampling with just tons of different instruments and the chanting. Not sure why this is the only character track to get long version. I don't mind since its the best one.
The Real Intentions - Boring.
Glint of Light ~ Mid-Boss in Europe - this is a great track for in game combat music, it loops well and is oppressive as fuck. I love every time it comes on in game. Again with the bass line that won't quit and break beats.
Crack Your Body ~ Mid-Boss Running Wild in Europe - LTTT.Needs to be fleshed into a full song but I fucking love this. Especially the part where it breaks down into an isolated version of the drum line.
Veronica Vera ~ Her Majesty, The Queen - Boring again. Piano is good, just kind if saturated in it at the moment.
Call Back From Jesus -Mysterious Monastery- ~Underground Ruins - LTTT. Chimes :D
Holly Mistletoe ~ Graveyard - Boring.
Take Off! ~ Airship - (http://yeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.com/yes.jpg) A shame it doesn't go anywhere, but what is there is AMAZING.
Anastasia ~ The Imperial Princess's Anxiety - BOOOOOORING. Track title incredibly misleading. It is pretty great to go to sleep with.
Relaxation Mood ~ Relief - This is indeed what this track should be called. Also could be FF8 track.
Anastasia -Going Her Way- ~ The Imperial Princess's Adventure - You know I think this is the one everyone is knee jerking to be worst song on the OST? You would be wrong. It is generic, but upbeat and not all that bad. It would fit Grandia. It isn't great, but its better than anything that has been boring so far.
Spiritualization ~ Holy Land of God - Not boring. This is a good example of a mellow background track on this OST that actually has something to it unlike the others that have been slapped with Boring.
Sadness Mood - That sure is what this song is about.
Never Ending Sadness ~ A Lament - Same as above. They are good at what they are, but they are no Aeris getting shived.
Defeat And Death ~ Game Over - This being a piano piece that drifts into static as it goes on is a pretty great effect for a song that no one has ever heard.
Rasputin ~ Mysterious Monk - A good piece for Rasputin. It is boring.
Evil Gate Opener I ~ Arrival at The Stronghold I - All of these are one song. This part is the worst and is an intro for a minute (should be about 35 seconds IMO).
Evil Gate Opener II ~ Arrival at The Stronghold II - This is the best part of the song. It is fun as hell. Hirota should cut loose with strings like the does when he plods along a Piano.
Evil Gate Opener III ~ Arrival at the Stronghold III - Ending of a song. Good song.
Pulsation Fortress ~ Pulsating Stronghold - lol.
Strain ~ Assault - This is a good battle song with a mix of drum and bass and some chanting. Respect.
Astaroth ~ Battle with The Fallen Angel - This is okay, I dig the chanting etc, but I am kind of lukewarm on it really. I don't think there is anything technically wrong with it. I just don't think it goes very far and gets a full 4 and a half minutes to do its thing unlike most of the OST.
Crack Your Mind ~ The Fallen Angel Runs Wild - LTTT. I dig the weirdness of this track and that it breaks down into waves of synth noise. I don't really know if its great for Shadow Hearts though?
Disc Two
Grey Memories ~ Map of Japan - Boring. Europe map music shits on this.
Rising Sun ~ Japanese Town - A pretty empty song.
Deep in Coma ~ Battle in Japan - More drums. Loops well.
Concon Ticktin Con Ticktin ~ Running Wild in Japan - AMAZING. Crank the BPM and you make Deep in Coma into a fantastic track. It makes the breaks that much sharper. The anthem all the better. Whole thing just feels fucking tense as shit. Also realyl dig the name.
Gathering God ~ Thrill - Alright this is used in comedy section music that sucks. I get what they were going for, but its zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Needs more Kazoo for what they want.
Impatiently Mood - I have nothing to say. There is literally nothing to say about this track. It sure does exist.
Serious Mood ~ Unrest - >:( SRS MOOD.
The Past ~ Personal History - This is good Piano noodling. It gets a pass. Also I think the first full length track that I think deserves the over 4 mins it gets.
Crisis - Yeah you know I like this one. It has that drum line I like. Piano is down nice and low and crazy mechanical for how fast it is. Samples of machinery in use. Cutting loose with strings. Its a good track.
Hatred ~ Toudou Research Institute - Standard dungeon music tropes in play with cymbals and snare drum added. Its okay.
Field of God-Dog ~ Village of The Dog God - 4 minutes of boring. LEAST REPRESENTATIVE NAME.
Fountain of Saint Evel I ~ Spring of The Holy Demon I - I loooooove the effect of this. They take a pretty natural sounding call and then distort it into something just not quite right.
Fountain of Saint Evel II ~ Spring of The Holy Demon II - Yep feel that drum. The dirty as fuck snare (Or you know, just banging on an empty bin maybe) really gets me going. I am also a sucker for just sliding down the frets as well for that stretchy unnatural strings sound. I love the way it peters out and then comes back strong for it's in game loop and the way it gives the song an intimidating outro standalone.
Hardcore to The Brain ~ Mid-Boss in Japan - LTTT. Actually has less pressure to it than the ending of the last track. But as it builds to the whistle that is just slightly off beat. Has the anthem it really just keeps going. Wish it was longer.
Getting Nasty ~ Mid-Boss Runs Wild in Japan - Previous song is really just a prelude to this one though. I fucking looooooooooove this Berserk track. It is just unrelenting. Even when it has a pause it is just to make the next part worse on you as a listener if you are trying to relax. Why didn't they use that whistle though?
Faith or Fate ~ Kato - Kato.mp3 is Kato as fuck. It is giving up distilled into music. Pretty much music to shoot yourself in the head to.
Transience ~ The Miracle - Boring.
ALICE (Piano Arrangement) - The weakest Piano arrangement on the OST. Its still really good. Much better in context than standalone, the song is short and fades out. You know, like Alice does in that scene.
Kallen - I love this track. I dig Karen as a character though. It really does convey that it is a love song. The thing that you don't get in context in game until late is that it is more maternal than romantic.
The Fate ~ Cluster Amaryllis - Yeah this is as god as everyone says it is. It kicks all kinds of arse in game.
The 3 Karma ~ Decisive Battle - This on the other hand completely shits on the above. Hands down the best thing the OST has to offer for things that aren't used in the closing cinematic. More things could do with amazingly distorted radio shouts. This song is fucking brilliant.
Come on ~ The Decisive Battle Runs Wild - Except of course the berserk track is superior in every way. BPM through the roof. The sample I love just abusing the play incessantly. Gods I love everything about this. The fact that they get 2 minutes out of it is also great. Longest Berserk track by nearly double. So great.
Result ~ Victory - Boring. Brrring dong dong SQUEAK SQUEAK.
ICARO (Piano Arrangement) ~ Main Theme - Probably the song that proves I have a soul.
Love Moon Flower ~ Ending - If it wasn't Icaro it was this. It is J-Poppy as fuck. It doesn't matter. It feels earnest. It is so well written that literally doesn't matter if its completely full of shit.
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I am surprised at just how many of these comments I disagree with. Not sure how much of this is focussing on in-game way more than in abstract (I haven't even listened to most of these outside the game), and how much is different taste.
Grefter I'll be looking forward to fashion reviews of the new PW game when you get around to that. We need to hear about how Edgeworth is still pimpin' in his 30's.
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Probably a mix of both. My taste in music is quite pronounced and eclectic. I have also consumed this album many times outside the game.