Gracefully Stepping Aside

In the past, David and I have shared the various ways in which a game ends up on the backlog.  Often, it starts with a good game that we put down and just happen to never get back around to.  Sometimes, it's a game that ends up frustrating you so badly after a boss fight or random encounter that you don't want to look at it again for the indefinite future, and, unlike Devil Summoner 2, doesn't have a bitchin' enough soundtrack to keep you coming back for more.

Unfortunate for my pride, but fortunate for my eardrums!

And of course, with no shortage of good games having come out in the past few years, it's easy to push aside a respectable game in interests of another, never to get back to it.  All of this is, of course, ignoring the everyday factors of life such as work, school, family, or other obligations.

What we haven't discussed at length, is this rare case:  Occasionally, a game gets put on the backlog because it's just too good.  You're scared to let it consume you because you know that after finishing it, it will be hard to find another game in your stack that measures up to it.  Enter Tales of Graces f.  While I have no shortage of excellent games from the Tales series, Graces, which sports one of the best combat systems in the series, has (at least early on), fairly likable characters, and is a rare case of us getting a "final mix" of a games distinguishes it as one of the better games in the series.

Unfortunately, it also risks diminishing the experience of the other Tales games I have.

Now Loading.

I've spoken at length in the past about my tenacity when it comes to playing games:  That when I start something, it's enormously hard for me to give up.  I am tenacious in pursuit of my goal, and pursue it with a relentless focus until my goal is achieved:

Be it games or microwave ovens.

But even Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock was wise enough to realize when his relentless pursuit of a goal was a bit too much (for the record, it happens in season 5, without spoiling anything).  It's a rarity when it happens.  In my case, it's a signal to my friends (and hopefully you all) that a game is truly awful when, within an hour or less of playing it, I declare it a cesspool of poorly realized concepts and gameplay.

No, this isn't another review about Hyperdimension Neptunia (though amazingly enough, I heard the sequel was actually good).  This isn't even a story about a game on my personal backlog, but one I nevertheless consider backlogged.  This is a story about Mana Khemia:  Student Alliance.

Gotta catch 'em all.

I've never gotten into the Pokemon games: I didn't own any of the gameboy systems when they were becoming widely popular, and it wasn't a fad that I jumped in on. I mean they seemed interesting, but with so many different versions being released, the decision on which one to buy could be overwhelming, or at times downright pointless when the next edition was about to come out. TV Tropes, perhaps, captured this most succinctly with another game:

Kind of like this.

Tropes notwithstanding, I came home from work today to this from David:

David 1:53 pm

Alright, so imagine that you want to train your dog to fight other dogs. You've got a dachsund, and you keep going to dog parks and challenging owners to battles. Instead of getting thrown in jail, you're allowed to do this, and after winning enough fights your dachsund becomes a pitbull.

So imagine now that this transformation after enough fights into a larger and more powerful dog is a trait shared by every breed on Earth, and that there are tons of these dogs roaming around free, everywhere.

Not only that, but some of these dogs can breath fire or have psychic powers. Or both

But once someone takes one in, they become absolutely loyal to that person forever.

Now, you can't NOT have trainers, because then you've just got packs of wild dogs breathing fire and psyching people to death all over the place. But at the same time, you can't have too many of these trainers working together, because they would try to overthrow the government with their pack of mutant dogs, or just murder everybody.

David 1:55 pm

So if you're a smart and concerned government who wants to kill two birds with one stone, what do you do?

I posit that the entire Pokemon League is a conspiracy of passive oppression. Where being the Champion is a sign of ultimate prestige, there's no incentive to work with other trainers, and to qualify for the competition you have to be constantly on the go, never staying in one place and making friends with other trainers for very long.

And they're justified in doing this, because everytime a team of trainers does get together, they DO try to overthrow the government or murder everybody.

The Pokemon League is a hoax perpetuated by the governments of the various regions to keep Pokemon trainers from realizing that they hold ultimate power in their hands and the authorities are useless against them.

Ayn 3:00 pm

.. So this is what I come back to.

My life is awesome.

Did you C&P this from somewhere, or is this what law class has taught you?

David 3:01 pm

I got into a conversation with a friend last night about why Pokemon fighting is legal but not dog fighting.

And In the course of explaining it I realized the conspiracy.

Death is No Escape: Demon's Souls

There's a long-standing tradition in games that you only get a certain number of chances to fulfill your objective before having to either use a continue (and lose much progress) or start over entirely if you run out of those, too. While this conceit has fallen to the wayside in recent years, games up to and including the PS2-era followed the construct of only allowing a player a certain number of lives, and when the counter hit zero that was it, you had to start the game from the beginning. The advent of automatic save points in every game pushed this aside, to the relief of many a long-time gamer tired of losing all their progress to one super-difficult point. If there was one boon to this system, it was that as your remaining lives ticked lower, you became increasingly cautious and careful, and maybe played the game a little better than you would have otherwise.

When they made Demon's Souls, Atlus decided they'd had quite enough of that bullshit. From now on, if you die, the game gets harder.

"What is that, happiness? That won't do."

Demon's Souls is a game that punishes you for being bad at it. It punishes you for being mediocre at it. If you're good enough to actually make it to a boss, it punishes you for that, too. I've played games that were hard. I've played games where the designers clearly wanted to push you and make you a better player. It's not accurate to say Demon's Souls has a steep learning curve. Demon's Souls is the Chinese-facing side of K2. This game straight up does not want you to win and will do what it has to so as to ensure you lose.

That's not even getting into New Game+.

As you might imagine, this one has been on my Backlog for awhile, and not because I bought it and forgot about it. It's because in any one sitting, I can only take so much humiliating death before the hope is ground out of me and distilled into the fine humors from which Demon's Souls extracts its nutrients. The makers of this game looked at the average number of deaths in Aztec rituals honoring Quetzacoatl and said, "Well there's our baseline." The people who thought up Demon's Souls have less remorse than John Wayne Gacy on mescaline, and are exactly as excited about killing you.

So over the last couple years since its release, I've made several serious efforts at Atlus's opus to difficulty, and each time I've made it just a little bit further, yet have been unable to reach the final boss. As it stands right now, I'm at a point where I've got three stages left uncleared, and if I can conquer them I'll finally have a shot at beating the whole game. Unfortunately, I've hit another bump as I keep dying at the exact same spot over and over again every time. While I deal with that, I figured now would be a pretty good time to examine how I got this far to begin with.

And now, for something completely different.

While I'm in between clearing the massive backlog of RPGs I have, I sometimes engage in bouts of Ultimate Marvel Versus Capcom 3 with Nick, who was kind enough to buy me the game as a Christmas present.

I'm pretty crappy at most fighting games, but getting slightly better at them.  But, this isn't a post about how Nick stomped the ever-living hell out of me during our first match-up, how I've gotten slightly better, or even how much I've come to loathe Hulk.

It's about grooving with a friend:  Specifically the one your best friend nearly beats you with.

Alright, so maybe I haven't given up all hope.

Well, that happened.

But you know what?  I finally get it.

I finally get why fans of the Kingdom Hearts franchise keep gobbling up spin off, after spin off, after spin off, even when they're dreadfully dull.

No, I haven't hit my head.  No, I'm not suddenly back on the train of ardent support of Kingdom Hearts (I suspect the Enabler would hit me until I wasn't, as she should).  However, after recently finishing Kingdom Hearts II, I'm finally understanding why fans get excited with each new entry into the series that is produced. What I don't understand, however, is that given the frequent teasers and glacial progress in moving the story forward, what I don't understand is why fans haven't crucified Tetsuya Nomura by this point.

Jerk.

Kingdom Hearts II isn't a perfect game by any means.  Furthermore, after hearing a lot of negativity around the game, I went in with low expectations, especially after playing two of the last three spin-offs.  However, my experience was more enjoyable than I anticipated:  Due in part to actually being able to make sense of the convoluted story (playing the aforementioned spin offs helped), but also because, by comparison, the cast was a lot more likeable.

This isn't a post that's about me reviewing the gameplay aspects of Kingdom Hearts II.  Instead, I'd like to first talk about what connected me more to the second game than any of the spin-offs.  Following that, we'll be examining the game through the perspective of someone who's played the prequels and spin-offs, as well as surfacing a few of the questions that would have inevitably arisen if you played the game when it first came out (i.e. before most of the spin-offs came out), or just decided to play it out of chronological order.  Be warned:  Spoilers lie ahead.

But along with those, a whole lot of confusion.

Hyperdimension Neptunia: I came, I saw, I turned my PS3 off.

"Virtually everything a JRPG should not be"

"Powerful premise, regrettable result"

"A case study in how not to design videogames, Hyperdimension Neptunia aspires to be a parody of the console war and instead winds up an unfunny joke"

If you peruse the reviews at GameFAQs, the above denotes the lower rated ones of the PS3 game Hyperdimension Neptunia.  To be fair, I tend to ignore any reviews that are radically in favor of a game or radically against, often finding the middle of the ground reviews to be the most honest.

But you know, in the case of Neptunia, they might not be that far off. . .

If you're expecting a long post where I bemoan all the flaws of Neptunia and tell you how every moment from start to the game's ending was an excruciating journey, you're not going to get that.  I played Neptunia for about 25 minutes:  Long enough to see the introduction sequence, long enough to play through the first dungeon.  Long enough to get acquainted with a few of the characters, and long enough to get a feel for the battle system.  Have a look at it yourself:

While gameplay trailers can only do a game so much justice (or injustice), I'm wondering if you all picked up on some of the same things I did:  The horrendously slow feel of the combat.  The dull music.  The bland, uninspired background.  I was treated to a lesser version of this in the tutorial stage and quite frankly, couldn't bring myself to play the game much longer.

..In the end, yeah, that's all I really have for this post.  A poster at BlueGartr who loves JRPGs as much (if not more) than I did convinced me to give the game another shot, but that will likely happen far, far into the future.  The sad reality is that while the story of Neptunia might have kept me interested enough to play years ago, today it has to contend with numerous other games with much more engaging gameplay for my attention.

..And even if  it didn't, at this point, I'd rather go through another play of Unlimited SaGa.