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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Atlus only pays dividends to import gamers who know english and keep their cash in tight fists Thursday, Aug 7 2008

So far during the past 12 months I distinctly made the decision to not purchase a particular incarnation of two different games and this choice has paid off both times. Of course there have probably been at least 10 such decisions that I’ve regretted but I try not to think about that.

First of all, I did not buy Persona 3. I didn’t buy the japanese version, I didn’t buy the american version of Persona 3, and I did not buy the japanese version of Persona 3 FES. I did buy the american edition of Persona 3 FES for ridiculously cheaper than the other 3 options would have cost me. Upon receiving the game I promptly opened it up to make sure it was there, read the manual, and have let the amaray case collect dust up to this point but it will be there just as soon as I start playing games again. Which might be as soon as I can hold a controller again, which might be never.

Similarly I did not buy Flight Plan’s Japanese PS2 game Poison Pink though I was mightily tempted to get it along with and then after beating Dragon Shadow Spell, also by Flight Plan. Now it turns out that the game will be released by Atlus in america as Eternal Poison. They probably thought that “poison pink” sounded too gay for their core audience. In this case the savings is only monetary as I am not especially confident that I’ll prefer the game in english rather than japanese, but that savings is significant as it would have ended out costing me between 70-90 USD  total for a new copy of the japanese version yet a new copy of the american version will probably only end out costing me 50 USD. I will almost assuredly buy it when it comes out, whenever the hell that will be. Before Persona 4?

Well, it seems like the PS2 is holding on to life even longer than the Super Nintendo or PSone. But I have to ask myself why, out of all the japanese SRPGs that Atlus could have localized for release in the US they chose Poison Pink. It strikes me that considering the american market Dragon Shadow Spell might have been a better choice. On the other hand Atlus has more of a track record for “darker, more mature” (presumably) games like PP and the Shin Megami Tensei series (including the persona and avatar tuner series) and DSS, while a fairly solid game in general with shreds of darkness and interesting plot points, is pretty much fluff. It’s also marginally older and if my own experience with it means anything, particularly unpolished, especially the town/exploration part and the lack of amother fucking status and set-up menus outside of (pre-)battle. I suppose that another consideration, as to why they chose a Flight Plan game rather than an Idea Factory (the Neverland series of games et al.) or perhaps Banpresto (there WAS a shot that they’d localize Original Generations on the PS2 and its Gaiden) game, is that Atlus USA does have an established relationship with Flight Plan having previously also localized some of their (Banpresto Produced in japan) Summon Night games for hand-held systems (Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, probably not PSP, not sure if there are any summon night games on psp) and perhaps those have performed well for them. hmm… Now that I think about it, now that Banpresto is formally part of Namco Bandai perhaps namco bandai didn’t want their competitor in japan (it could be argued that atlus and banpresto formerly did not directly compete against each other but namco and atlus certainly did) to profit off of their product even if it meant that they themselves would not be able to profit from it (japanese companies think that way). That actually makes more sense the more I think about it because Namco is the company that originally had the Megami Tensei series and they sold the rights to it to Atlus in the early 90s/maybe late 80s and Atlus turned it into their signature brand. I’m sure that someone at Namco remembers that and resents it. But really, business is just money, if you put feelings in with money you only get money troubles.

Well so saying all of that, Atlus has distinguished itself in my mind as the only game company left that I buy games from just because they’re from that company. As opposed to how I buy Super Robot Wars games because they’re super robot wars games but usually don’t touch a banpresto/namco bandai game (other than Tales series games which have started to suck as well) otherwise because they suck. I used to be that way about Square before they tried to diversify and released a bunch of crap games which made me wary, and now after their merger with enix I feel like their stuff is more flash than substance although sometimes that flash is worth it (final fantasy XII was fine, dragon quest 8 was alright for dragon quest).

OK so that trivia about the megaten series wore my otaku senses out for the day. Now I will return to speculating on whether or not I’ve wrangled a 100% in the math course I was taking in spite of only getting 100% on < 1/3 of the assignments. I did however only get below 95% on a handful of assignments, I got 98% on the part of the grade that counted for 70% of the grade, and the teacher had said that she was willing to bump grades up a bit if people did exceptional on the final. So I thought “if a b+ to an A then whey not an A to an A+”? And messaged her, which I have not gotten a reply to yet, to see if she’d be willing to take my grade from a 99 to a 100 if I could get 100 on the course final exam. I would never have imagined being able to do that at the start of the course but I got 100% on most of the quizes and the last regular test so hey we’ll see how that turns out. Of course the institute has a retarded policy about not letting you have a copy of your final exam even though they let you keep everything else you do so I have to wait for it to be cleared before I find out what my grade is and can request a viewing. “request a viewing”, you’d think I wanted to look at a historical text.

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