I didn’t care for the eggs Monday, Feb 9 2009

I have thrust myself deep into other projects at this time and that leaves me with no desire to put any effort into this kind of personal writing. Even when dramatic things happen like a person I know getting arrested for doing stupid things. I guess the moral of that story is that if you’re stupid then avoid the police or anyone who would call the police on you.

In the little time I’ve had otherwise I’ve been playing Ar Tonelico 2.  I had started to think the game might not come out in English but it did. Then when my pre-ordered copy got back-ordered I feared I would not receive it but I did. Of course I didn’t think I’d get around to playing it much either but I have. At the moment I think that I’m 1/3 of the way through the game and it’s decent despite being somewhat inconsistent. The localisation might have been rushed as there are lots of shoddy grammatical errors. In particular I think that every instance which should be “your” is written as “you’re” even though the opposite mistake is not made. I lambasted Eternal Eden for this and whoever fucked up here deserves a reaming too. I know that there were issues with getting this game out and by the time they finally got the go-ahead there was probably a need to rush but the fact that the people working on this game either didn’t notice or didn’t care that a lot of the dialogue makes no sense and is rife with errors is just disgusting.

Other than that the game play is OK. Only concepts remain from the last game as even cosmosphere diving ends out having a different feel to it and just about everything else is different. Battles are much more active and the game is somewhat harder if you are poor at the timing elements like I am. The overall pace is faster but early on locations are not very diverse and in order to get everything you have to do a lot of back-tracking and checking around. Which is pretty tedious. Something else that annoyed me is the poor spacing of equipment upgrades early on. Hopefully this trend will not continue throughout the game but if it does it will suck. Keeping up with synthesis is also more difficult in this game and reminds me more of the way things were in Atelier Iris which is the only non-AT Gust game I’ve played.

The plot of the game is more convoluted than the first one as well and to me the story seems at least much more cynical if not necessarily darker. I find the characters less likeable early on but as the plot develops and the reasons for their pathos become apparent they are more sympathetic. Right off the bat I noticed what a marked improvement the new protagonist Croix was over the previous one Lyner though. Lyner was the sort of stereotypical moronic/optimistic/courageous (is there really a difference?) male lead that is usually in (harem) love comedies and I thought he was definitely the weak point of that game. Croix is not the opposite of Lyner but he is more serious and… Actually now that I think about it the best way to put it is that Lyner was bokke and Croix is tsubokke! I guess put another way Lyner is a doofus and Croix is a “straight-man” which is where my preferences lie. The writers do a poor job of getting you to like Luca or Cloche early on though. The two definitely have more obscure characters when compared to the girls in the last game but this also seems contrived.

The most annoying thing in the game is actually something that makes a lot of sense. Your party members constantly come and go. There were various times when this doesn’t really make sense but a lot of the times it does. Usually it doesn’t matter that much but since you can only synthesize with certain reyvateils at certain shops and there are other subquests involving them that makes a big difference. Just as you get into the swing of that is when you start having to split a lot really. I suppose that this serves as extra incentive to encourage you to play through the game multiple times by actually having some things that are different though so whatever. Honestly I kept meaning to but I never did complete my second playthrough of the first game since it just wasn’t that big of a deal. With the impending release of AT2 I felt that I should go and finish it up but I did not, and now in the full swing of this game I’d rather just beat it first. After doing that I might go back to the first and finish it. What the hell right?

Seeing as it’s actually been two calender years since the second game came out in Japan and I haven’t heard anything about it, on top of the reshuffling of Banpresto (what the hell did they do in this game exactly?) into Namco Bandai games, there might not be a 3rd game. That might be OK. There is definitely more they could do with this series but it’s hard to imagine a game with the same formula would be dramatically different.

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I made Kung Pao Chicken today. Wednesday, Feb 4 2009

Recently I bought, played, and beat Dragon Quest IV Chapters of the Chosen for the Nintendo DS. As far as I know DQIV was the only DQ game I had never played at all, and wouldn’t you know that it turns out to be the only one that I kind of like?

Frankly I am apathetic towards the franchise. I wouldn’t say that the games are terrible but to me they tend to lack plot, quality dialogue, and exciting gameplay. Most of the games are addictive. You have to be a certain kind of person to be willing to grind your main character to level 50 in DQ IV even though the spell you get for doing so is no longer very useful at that point in the game. I am apparently that kind of person, but I am also the kind of person who can recognize that such a thing is a shining example of bad game design.

The strengths of the game are that it has good pacing and you are pretty much at liberty to use whatever party you wish (as long as you use the Hero who is an all-rounder) in order to complete the game. The weaknesses are the plot, the gameplay, and the localisation which deserves its own paragraph.

It is impossible for me to tell whether the nearly indecipherable character dialogue is the worst video game translation into English that I’ve ever seen or some bizarre attempt to give everyone a horrible stereotypical accent which makes them seem like idiots. Either way this is inexcusable in the year 2008 (when it came out in english) and if the game actually had any dialogue that mattered I probably would have been pissed off. Fortunately the game has absolutely no meaningful plot and you can advance by just wandering around and occasionally talking to someone who has a name or is a ruler. Hey, isn’t that poor design as well? Yeah but it works so what the hell.

Anyway the game took me about 30 something hours to beat and if you’re looking for an RPG on the DS and can stand “classic” RPGs it’s a fair choice. I didn’t bother to complete it by filling out the monster book but I did everything else I could find. In retrospect it probably would have taken me less time to grind to level 50 if I’d done so in the final bonus dungeon looking for Platinum King Jewels instead of the last map area looking for King Slimes since random encounters with other enemies give about twice as much exp in the latter area.

My pet peeve with this game was how lame the equipment that most of the characters could use was. In particular the armor (head, body, and shield or lack thereof) of all the magic users was lame, some of them end out stuck with total shit even at the end. I also don’t understand why Alena couldn’t equip anything that was very good. She maxes out strength and agility and her luck and resilience are very high but her weapons are crap and her armor is worse. It just frustrated me but it probably didn’t make a difference since I always kicked ass with her anyway.

A close second was that the non-magic users didn’t learn any valid skills. Why the hell couldn’t you just select to try and steal crap with Torneko instead of waiting for him to randomly try doing so? Why didn’t Ragnar get any skills? Same with Alena.

And what the hell was up with so many weapons having effects when used as items? Some of them were quite good but why didn’t characters just have some of these skills?

Well whatever, it’s over and that’s that. I will PROBABLY play Dragon Quest IX when it comes out but VIII bored me to the point of inspiring suicide so I’m not expecting much.

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どちが良い（よい）？ Thursday, Jan 22 2009

After I beat the hell out of the old Super Famicom version of Puzzle Bobble last week (clearing all 100 stages) I mentioned that I was challenging the “survival”/”endless” mode to try and eliminate 1000 bubbles. In reality the mode is probably less about how long you can survive than how big of a score you can get; however, I suck at getting high scores regardless of the game and how good I might be at clearing it otherwise. And for some reason until now I was not able to achieve my goal.

But that’s over. Just now I knocked out 1,389 bubbles thereby surpassing my goal by over a third. I actually didn’t even notice it when I went over 1,000. I just realized I’d been playing it for a while and there it was. I have really gotten into the game again after not playing it for years, possibly this whole decade (the original SFC one anyway), but now I should just drop it like a bad habit and focus on almost anything else instead.

On an unrelated matter the US editions of both Persona 4 and Eternal Poison (original name: Poison Pink) came with a packed-in soundtrack CD and bonus artbook. I think the artbooks were supposed to be preorder incentives, but obviously I didn’t preorder them and yet I still got them. I think that these bonus “OST” (original soundtrack) are not the full game OST but I’m not too sure. Anyway I hadn’t really played the games even though I bothered to buy them (I believe I wrote about how I was going to pass on it until I  found a heavy discount on Eternal Poison)  so I forgot about the pack-ins and had not listened to them. I find both moderately enjoyable as far as that thing goes but I think that I prefer the Eternal Poison OST over the P4 one. There’s a certain amount of similarity in that both have a more baroque tone to them, including aria tracks, but it’s more consistent in EP whereas P4 is much more diverse to match its contemporary setting. I don’t really care for the main vocal songs from P4 either now that I think about it. Maybe I’m just not in the mood for japanglish.

As to the artbooks, the P4 one has much larger dimensions but it doesn’t have many more pages. There also seems to be more diverse artwork in the EP book and most of what is showcased is the final version as opposed to the myriad rough and draft sketches in the P4 book. I think that this is due to the interesting proposition of having an array of designers in Eternal Poison for different sets of characters whereas Persona only has its sole designer (umm… does the same person do the monsters/persona as well? I think so). Or possibly it’s because the “main” cast is so large in EP whereas the focus is on the party members in P4 even though it has a fairly wide side cast as well. Also I’m not very excited by the P4 designs. The persona are very interesting but the characters don’t do much for me. On the other hand the designs are consistent and very fitting for “well they’re japanese high school kids”. Due to the myriad of designers and locales in EP there isn’t a lot tying things together other than a general midaeval tone which sometimes gets thrown out the window anyway. So that’s as questionable as the game but I’m a person who likes variety so overall I prefer the EP artbook as well.

Having come this far I might as well say that even though Persona 4 and Eternal Poison are more or less different types of games in semi-different genres there is a clear difference in their quality with Persona 4 coming out on top. In all likelihood I’ll never beat either game, certainly I’ve never beaten a Persona game and the only Megaten games I’ve beaten were the Digital Devil Saga ones. However both are available and if you find yourself hankering for some RPG and the best you’ve got for a console is the PS2 then they’re worth it. Some people have expressed the opinion that P4 is better than any offering on a more recent console anyway but I can not confirm that even though it’s easy to imagine it being better than the likes of Infinite Undiscovery or Lost Odyssey or Valkyria Chronicles which are the only big name rpgs I’m familiar with from last year. Hm. Graphics aside of course. Although P4 really wrings out as much as you can from the PS2.

Well this ended out in an entirely different direction. I might be off to figure out whether it’s something about P4 itself that makes the system sound so noisy while playing it or if my system is conking out. It could be both.

[Almost exactly 5 months after writing this I ended out beating Persona 4 after all. By that time I had forgotten that I’d never beaten any of the Persona games before it even though I own and/or have played most of them in one form or another.]

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