To speak for the "..."

This piece is my attempt to speak for the unspoken - the silent protagonist. The archetype has been in a rough patch for a while, with countless more to come, no doubt, but there's value in the character. Playing the archetype "straight" in today's climate would likely cause more people to roll their eyes but there is space for subversion.

Dragon Quest V is that sort of wilful experimentation that only comes from years of exploring the same subject matter. The Silent Protagonist is always the hero? Then let's tear them down and force them to watch a chatty NPC replace "their" duties instead. Dragon Quest IV showed shades of this deconstruction with its focus on telling the stories of your comrades before yours, but Chunsoft and Yuji Horii really laid the despair on thick in Dragon Quest V. It's a fantastic game that everyone should play if only to realise that Dragon Quest has been, and always will be, more than "the same old thing".

The cold science of Pokémon

Wow, haven't used this for a while....

Nightmare Mode is back everybody and I was the ickle firsty for the relaunch with this piece on the scientific side of Pokémon Red and Blue.

I still have so much to say about Pokémon, in particular the first generation. This piece was really a jumbled up version of my ongoing Pokémon Red Let's Play with some extra snippets which I'll further elaborate on when I get to them in my everlasting saga of updates.

Pokémon is more important than a series of minor updates. If you dig deep into the designs of these creatures, you'll find all sorts of surprises. I'm sure the story behind Cubone's helmet has been well and truly spoiled for you, but there's really obscure ones like the traditional Japanese story Of a Mirror and a Bell reflected in the design of Bronzor and Bronzong respectively, and the cross-cultural mythology of the giant turtle who holds the world on top of its back. It's wonderful stuff.

In other news, work on my zine (two of them now!) is trudging along. It turns out that one piece is proving far more difficult, and lengthy, to write than expected. I... really have no excuse for how long this is all taking. I am excited to show it all when it's done, though.

As always, the art is done by the lovely Jake Lawrence.

Remixing Samurai Champloo

It's all about the music, you know?

Cowboy Bebop did it first but it wasn't until Samurai Champloo that I realised anachronism could be used for more than just humour. Anachronism grounded Cowboy Bebop in the past whilst flinging the setting far into the future and the opposite was true with Samurai Champloo. Set in Edo Period Japan, Samurai Champloo uses hip hop to update the history of Japan to a modern context.

But what distinguishes Samurai Champloo from Cowboy Bebop's score is Watanabe's efforts to make hip hop affect how the story is told. He briefly flirted with the idea in Jupiter Jazz with Gren's wind-up music box triggering his memories in an inspired metaphor of winding back the clock, but Watanabe really came into his stride with Samurai Champloo. The chopped up samples of hip hop and record scratching lend the story a staccato rhythm both visually and textually. Scenes and episodes are divided by musical cues and emceeing. It's more than Cowboy Bebop's thematic use of jazz to enhance the atmosphere, it's genuine engagement with the text.

And closer examination reveals that hip hop is remarkably suitable for a show set in Edo Period Japan. It was an era of great societal change. The samurai were superseded by businessmen who saw that profiting of their fellow man was better than killing them and an inkling of Western culture had slipped into the borders before the rigid port lockdown for all foreigners. Japan was a melting pot of change and social upheaval. In contrast to Cowboy Bebop's infatuation with the past, Samurai Champloo is concerned with the uncertain future. Much like Spike and Jet before them, Mugen and Jin find themselves penniless and without a consistent job but, instead of languishing in their prior greatness, toss themselves into the future with reckless abandonment.

Samurai Champloo is a show about appropriation. It's about a culture on the cusp of rapid change and figuring out what it can identify with while inviting all the exciting changes of globalisation. It looks to the past only to figure out what it can steal. And hip hop is the great appropriation of our times. It takes the old and makes it new again and by doing so forges a greater appreciation of what has come before us.

But, if there's one thing that the show makes abundantly clear, it's that Mugen and Jin don't belong in this brave new world. As much as the pair seem to adapt to the life of hired swordsmen, the culture around them are no longer interested in killing people. There's baseball to look forward to and an inkling of Japan's rapid technological advancement and its eventual terrible misfortune. When a sample in a hop hop track is so readily absorbed into popular consciousness without even an awareness of where it came from, or even a question as to whether or not it is a sample, society tends to forget what came before. All the jumps, grooves, and scratches of a vinyl are invigorating at the start, but they gradually wear away the original underneath it.

Samurai Champloo is built to show change as inevitable, natural, and even damn cool, but the show trips itself up at the end with a disappointing finale. Mugen and Jin live when they should have died. But then I wonder why I wanted them to die so much and realise that maybe my responsibility as a consumer is just to enjoy the show put in front of me. Maybe Watanabe, the DJ, is the one responsible for preserving and appreciating the culture we've lost. He's the one that mixed the two to begin with. Let him keep his sappy ending. We've got a future ahead of us.

The Giant Steps of Cowboy Bebop

It's all about the music, you know?

It's a pretty exciting opening. The blaring trumpets, the rapid-fire cuts and bursts of colour, the drum fill and then a moment of silence before a groovy bass line kicks in and everyone is ready to go. Cowboy Bebop's score is renowned for good reason but it goes deeper than simply having great tunes. Take the score away from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya and it'll be of a little consequence. Take the score away from Cowboy Bebop and everything changes. The soundtrack of Cowboy Bebop informs every aspect of its storytelling.

Cowboy Bebop is not some happy accident. Shinichiro Watanabe understands – really gets – how to use music as something more than cool window dressing. Samurai Champloo was released five years later to critical acclaim and garnered the same gushy reaction to its music, despite being of a completely different musical genre. And, from an outsider's perspective, Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo feel wildly different to each other both in plot and setting. Samurai Champloo takes place in Edo Period Japan and follows the adventures of three travellers in search of the “samurai who smells of sunflowers”, while Cowboy Bebop is set years in the future and focuses on a group of bounty hunters.

With its improvisational and, at times, sombre jazz soundtrack, it's almost natural that Cowboy Bebop tells the tale of a group of “losers” haunted by their pasts, out of cash, and barely scraping together a living. The cast of Cowboy Bebop are really a bunch of musicians themselves, skirting from place to place performing (or in their case catching bounties), living off their meagre winnings until they run dry, and then doing the same thing all over again. There's real romanticism at work here. The impoverished artist, the freedom to be tied to no one, and, of course, the indulgence. To devote yourself to your work entirely and break free from the concerns of reality.

It's all bullshit, naturally. Spike, Jet, and Faye all know this. The Bebop, the crew's ship, is a transformed husk of a fishing boat now flying through space. A literal fish out of water. Spike's blasé dickishness is really hiding his misery over losing Julia, Jet ends up becoming the paternal figure of the group as a result of his failure to protect Alicia, and Faye, behind all the sex and allure, is painfully alone. After the smoke is settled and the haze of the performance is over, all three of them are left wringing their hands in the spotlight.

And what's jazz now except a shadow of its former self? How do you feel about Giant Steps? Fuck that shit, everyone's played it, it's fifty-years old, it sounds like crap, write a new song, and stop playing that god damn song. I don't care if you can fuckin' modulate it and change it up. You can play in seven, you can play in nine? It's boring.

Ultimately, the crew of Cowboy Bebop can't let go of their past no matter how hard they try. Jazz is the music of an era long since past and yet it still clings, lifelessly. Bebop was a flash of brilliance before it quickly fell into its face. A good idea, a great idea. Let's go out into space and catch bounties for a living. Free from the man, man. A romantic life and a lonely one.

In the world of Cowboy Bebop, if you have a past, you have a death wish. A history is a heavy burden. It doesn't lead to bigger and better things, it leads to stagnation and paper-thin “cool”. And it's intoxicating and rotten and miserable and lovely.

Maybe that's what makes jazz so wonderful. It sounds defeatist in its familiarity. It's pleasing to see and hear such characters and music start off so confidently and quickly spiral out of control. Despite all the improvisation, we all come back to crushing repetition.

Let games be as challenging as they need to be

In which Alois defends the value of easy games. Also Boku No Natsuyasumi.

I hate listening to/complaining about difficulty in games. It feels like such a non-issue. A triviality. The people that really get to me though are the ones that argue modern games aren’t any good because they’re easier to complete. What sort of metric is that? I welcome the idea that by making games easier, we’re letting more people experience the medium and even allowing people to finish titles, too.

Because name another medium where some people don’t even see the complete work? Yes, book and movies can be placed aside whenever someone wants to but they require no effort on the viewer to see/read the whole thing. They’re open to be discussed by anyone.

And games need that level of approachability. We don’t have enough people talking about games.

Colonialism under the guise of the dungeon crawl: Etrian Odyssey and the invasion

I talk about a lot of things that make Etrian Odyssey great in this piece but the best thing about the game, what makes it rise above and beyond even the oldest games in the genre, is how it uses the DS screen.

Because dungeon crawls can be awful to the perfectionist. You have to buy graph paper because you’re gonna be drawing a lot of maps, and normal white paper simply won’t cut it. Then you have to buy a bunch of pencils and various fine pens so you don’t smudge or ruin your map. Then you have to annotate it and make sure every event or treasure is marked correctly. It’s a blissful, addictive experience that’ll ruin even the most patient of people.

Etrian Oydssey dedicates the touch screen entirely to your map. It’s an empty grid at the beginning of your adventure but gradually transforms into a perfectly aligned map. It maintains the intoxicating lure of drawing your own map and gets rid of all the awful ink spills and blotches that can ruin everything. It’s wonderful.

Beating up God in Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth

My latest is up at Nightmare Mode :D

So, apparently this game isn’t as well-loved as I thought it was? That’s kind of understandable, actually.

Valkyrie Profile asks a lot of the player. There’s a strict time limit, a complex battle system, and tri-Ace have the gall to trick you into playing the game a very specific way when you actually have a lot of freedom. Valkyrie Profile is a little too clever for its own good. No wonder it didn’t stick with a lot of people.

You need to get in the right frame of mine to play it. Valkyrie Profile is melancholic. You’re not met with congratulations for mastering these systems. You spend the entire game recruiting dead people and watching their last moments on Earth.

And, similar to Majora’s Mask, the narrative is remarkably understated. You don’t recognise just how oppressive the game is until you’ve let it rest a little bit after your first play.

It’s not a happy game, there’s little room for humour. But there’s a sense of cohesiveness here rare in video games. A unified vision. It’s pretty short, too!

We need more short games.

(Thanks, as always, to TimeCowboy for the wonderful art)

The things that I write

So, I've been a little bit slack with updating this side of the internet. I have two blogs alongside my scheduled writing at Nightmare Mode and I invariably pay more attention to my Tumblr. Why do I do this? I'm not sure. I'd like to say it's because I have an established audience there but that "established audience" is honestly not the sort who would have the time/patience/effort to read the things I write.

I mean, it's Tumblr. It thrives on reblogs and funny images. I'm kind of out of my element there.

Art by Jake Lawrence. Always and forever.

Anyway, I've written two pieces recently that now rest at Nightmare Mode for the foreseeable future. The first was a little treatise on flying in video games and looked at what is my ideal form of flight. It's a little whimsical - as all my pieces often are - but I had a lot of fun with it.

The second piece is, well, I hesitate to call it controversial, but it's certainly the most confrontational piece I've written. I don't get angry or shout at anyone but I look a little deeper into what I want when I play games and respond to a piece by Richard Cobbett about guilt and choice. It's certainly a piece that has words and opinions in it!

And, finally, go pitch things to Nightmare Mode. They're lovely people and they want lovely writing. Write some lovely things, please.

Headshots Episode 1

There's a new video feature up at Nightmare Mode in which the writers get together and answer short questions about games and games culture.

This week's episode is focused on "Your Favourite Guilty Pleasure Game" and I was in it! I was in it for about 10 seconds or so, but I was in it! :p

It's a fun feature and I'm already excited to see where it goes from here.

I derped pretty hard in the video, too.

The Campfire: A nightmare in Hyrule

My new post at Nightmare Mode!

Yes, video games were always scary when I was a kid. The age of polygons introduced freakish characters with pointed ends where things should be round. The Nintendo 64 made things worse by applying a fuzzy sheen to everything so things were even harder to distinguish.

Sometimes I wonder why and how I'm still interested in the medium considering how much video games scared me as a child. They were out to get me.

Mega Man: An Outlaw in an Asimovian World

(New post up at Nightmare Mode!)

The original Mega Man is not a fun game.

It's got some really whacky, awkward level design sandwiched between all the really brilliant parts. It's a good game littered with minor design flaws that really hamper your enjoyment. Mega Man laid the foundation but it was Mega Man 2 that would go on to be everything the original game wasn't and demonstrate what a small group of people can do when they pour their heart and soul into development.

While I was playing Mega Man: Powered Up (the remake of Mega Man on the PSP), I was struck by how different it was to the original game. Yes, some levels were redesigned and you can now play as the Robot Masters in the remake, but it was the tonal differences that really stood out to me. Both Mega Man and the Robot Masters dribbled conversation at every moment. Mega Man was clearly the Hero and the Robot Masters were undoubtedly reprogrammed.

This was never seen in the original game.

Mega Man and the Robot Masters never said a word. With no verbal communication at all in the game, motives and intentions were remarkably difficult to discern. Nothing was clearly defined or explained. It was... unsettling.

And that's really where this piece comes from. The atmosphere of the original games on the NES were defined by technical limitations to an extent but it gave the series such an uncertain and unique tone.

Check out TimeCowboy's art on his Tumblr, friends! He did the title image for this article :)

After Pressing Start: Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing never quite gets the attention it deserves. Like a lot of great games, it defies categorisation, appeals to the young and old, and players of all sorts.

But have you ever tried to explain it to somebody? More often than not you’ll be met with a curious stare and questions as to what makes it so enjoyable. Or -even worse- why you would play a game like that when you can simply go outside and do the same thing.

In building mechanics around fishing, eating, writing, catching bugs, moving future, and generally living a normal (well, let’s say “country”) life, Animal Crossing makes the mundane as exciting as blowing up a Grunt in Halo. It’s a charming simulacrum of reality that fills you with FEELINGS each time you boot the game up.

Animal Crossing is real life through a filter of pure happiness.

(The art accompanying this post was done by a Mr. Jake Lawrence of TimeCowboy fame. You should check out his other stuff!)

An Eternally Dull Adventure in Chopin's Dreams

Remember when I said I was in a book?

I'm still in that book but now you can read one of the two pieces I wrote in that book on the internet! And you can read it even if you're 20,000 kilometres away! How does that even work?

Eternal Sonta is frustrating. It has such a wonderful idea that I forget how awful it is each time I put the game down so that I can play it again with the hopes of "oh, maybe it isn't as terrible as I remembered". It never changes. It's always awful.

Phantasy Star Online is Hilarious

What I especially like about this ad, other than the fact it hasn't aged well at all, is how much it screams at you to play it.

These days, you have people dying playing MMOs. You've got warnings from developers like: "Don't play too long or you'll die and you've got a family and school!"

And in this trailer the guy is all like: "Play whenever you want, for as long as you want, do whatever you want, throw your life away! Have a fuckin' ball."

Stifling the Medium

Tangentially related to my most recent piece at Nightmare Mode, I recently came into ownership of the Slime-shaped PS2 controller modelled after the iconic enemy of Dragon Quest.

I don’t bring this up in the article but I tend to frown upon the merchandise that surrounds video games. The t-shirts, wrist straps, plushies, and practically everything that’s bundled around a popular video game when it’s released. It’s not because I’m against the idea of advertising, I simply find it concerning so much of video game advertising is focused around the “extras” rather than the main course. If advertising is meant to facilitate interest and engage people with the product, I can’t help but feel we’re missing out on the interactive side of video games when we buy the t-shirt.

I don’t need my Dragon Quest controller, but I do like how its advertising facilitates experiencing the product.

After Pressing Start: Dragon Quest IV Chapters of the Chosen

Blurgh! Before I forget, I wrote two things this week! I know, right? Busy, busy, busy.

A typical complaint with the Dragon Quest games is that they're all the same. This is a surface level observation. Yes, in terms of genre trappings, Dragon Quest IV is intensely familiar to the ones before it, but it's in the broader details where the differences pop up. Each game is a reaction to the previous one.

Before Dragon Quest IV, Dragon Quest III introduced flexible, player-defined companion characters. Much like the original Final Fantasy, you built your team from the beginning from whatever class you wanted. You could have a full party of mages if you wanted. All dem' options!

So, Dragon Quest IV took player-defined companions from Dragon Quest III and applied personalities and aspirations to them. You were now playing your companions, and it was their stories that were important.

Dragon Quest V would also go on to do its own thing, but that's a tale for another day....

Golf and Godhood

I'm really happy with this piece. I don't think you'll find a critical view on Hot Shots Golf anywhere else on the web.

If you've never liked golf, or don't understand how it could ever be enjoyable, Hot Shots Golf does an admirable job of making you think the opposite. The bright and cheerful presentation gives the experience a wonderfully relaxing and holiday-like feel. And you can play dress up! It's all very silly and lighthearted.

Unfortunately, it can also be incredibly difficult and unfair. A simple mistake in the later levels can cost you the match as you fall behind par. And with a game that's so dependent on sliding bars, varying power levels, and time-based button presses it's very easy to slip up and be punished severely. Hot Shots Golf has yet to meld the charming aesthetic with an equally fair and balanced play experience.

But hey! It's one of the best golf games around and well worth your time.

Gamespite Journal 11

Hey friends,

I'm in a book alongside a collection of fantastic articles! Gamespite Journal 11 is about giving games a second chance. It's about returning to the games we hated long ago and digging underneath the scorn to see if our opinion has changed, or whether there was a brilliant idea nestled underneath a layer of mediocrity.

If you can't afford/don't want to buy a copy, all content will eventually find its way on the site itself and you can read my articles then.

If you do want to buy a copy, the coupon code NEWRMN20 gives you 20% off any orders up to $150 until the end of the month.

Serving the douche: When usability trumps character

Despite what this article might suggest, I really enjoyed Prince of Persia (2008). Admittedly, it was more flash than substance and could charitably be described as an extremely automated game, but giving yourself over to the rhythmic button presses and silky smooth animation was a worthwhile effort. I like to call these types of games "relax em' ups" as the gameplay is mellow enough to get you into a relaxing groove.

And for my older followers, everything I wrote in this piece contradicts all the nice things I said about Elika before. Opinions, man! What's the deal with them?

The Zoology of Dragon Quest

So, I wrote this thing at nightmaremode....

It started off as a poorly thought out statement trying to talk about the unexplainable reasons we like specific games, but gained shape when I settled on a couple of key monsters and extrapolated on why I liked them. From there it was simply a case of Youtube-hopping through various animal documentaries and faint memories of Biology class.

I had a lot of fun writing this and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!

What's a Nidhogg?

In Norse mythology, Níðhöggr (Malice Striker, often anglicized Nidhogg) is a dragon who gnaws at a root of the World Tree, Yggdrasill. In the mythology, the Nidhogg is said to be controlled by only one person, the Norse God named Hel.

Hel was clearly busy when Nidhogg, the indie, two-player fencing game, was released because he's all up in its business. Having grown fed up with the tasteless morsels of bark and leaves, Nidhogg left his sanctuary in search of man flesh, and found two colour-coded stick figures fighting each other in dark space.


I wrote a thing about Nidhogg!

Black Books

Gaming related? No. Film and TV related? Yes.

"Well, to be honest, after years of smoking and drinking, you do sometimes look at yourself and think...you know, just sometimes, in between the first cigarette with coffee in the morning to that four hundredth glass of cornershop piss at 3am, you do sometimes look at yourself and think...this is fantastic. I'm in heaven."

Let there be no mistake, Black Books is hilarious.

Writing Forays!

Hey friends,

I've written a lot about Nier already (Papa Nier or Brother Nier?, Ambiguity and Nier) but my piece on nightmaremode.net entitled Confronting Violence in Nier truly, finally, closes the book on what I've been trying to put into words for a long time. Click the link to read about Nier, Epic Theatre, New Game +, and excessive murder all in one piece! SPOILERS AHOY!

Cavia have always struck me as a developer that finally found its feet when they released Drakengard. Nier is in many ways a continuation of what Yoko Taro started in Drakengard and you get the sense that if Cavia stuck around long enough, they would have ironed out all the kinks on the technical side of development and made something really important and recognised. There are the grubby marks of an auteur embedded into each game.

We need more games like Nier. They might not be perfectly executed, but what Nier gets right is far more important than anything else in games: It makes you think.

Taking The World With You: Dragon Quest

Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior, if you want to be precise) was a revolution upon release. Today, it garners the respect it deserves for laying the foundation for an entire genre, but that's generally where the appreciation ends. Modern games have refined Dragon Quest's core concepts to the point where its primitive presentation and gameplay are difficult to go back to. But what's been tossed aside alongside the genre's advancements and upheavals and do these morsels deserve better treatment? Far from decrying what's been lost, let's take a look at the more esoteric elements of Dragon Quest that have been gradually chipped away over the years.

Remember drawing maps for video game dungeons? I don't, because I was born far too late to hop on that gravy train, but Dragon Quest practically demands the practice. While the world is an alarmingly small one, Dragon Quest provides you with no map or navigational tools. Towns, cities, and landmarks are all defined by cardinal directions, and dungeons are terrifying gauntlets with no easy way to navigate them. Unlike the illuminated dungeons of The Legend of Zelda, the dungeons in Dragon Quest are pitch black, safe for the four blocks lit up around you. With a Torch in hand, those four lit up spaces become a 3x3 lighting box, allowing easier exploration of a dungeon's labyrinth design. Alas, the high encounter rate inside dungeons provides a more pressing issue to deal with than your limited vision, and dungeons are frequently tackled via multiple trips to and from the nearest Inn. Each trip gradually unlocks more of the dungeon as you travel down new routes but, unless you have a fantastic memory, you'll need to crack out pen and paper to start mapping your progress.

The process of note taking in games has been largely swept aside by modern game developers and replaced with automated maps or helpful signposting. Detractors argue that a game should contain every element of play nestled inside its code, and any external elements are irrelevant. This dismisses what we bring to games by simply playing them, and each stroke of line on a piece of paper designating a dead end represents a hard fought victory, a sinking realisation, or a satisfactory conclusion to our adventure. When people dismiss the simplistic interaction of Dragon Quest, they neglect the exploration and map drawing - exploring the world and familiarising yourself with your surroundings - as a fundamental part of your actions. The turn-based combat is fast and efficient; it's a distraction more than the centre piece of the experience.

No, what's important in Dragon Quest is the hard fought ground you cover each time you set out from the safety of a village. When you emerge from that last dungeon with a veritable tome of knowledge resting on your lap, there's an immense feeling of satisfaction. More than simply having your achievements frozen inside a cartridge, they've claimed an irrefutable permanency beyond an NES chip. A quest, indeed.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles & Nostalgia

I mean, I get the sentiment. Playing Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles by yourself is, arguably, the "wrong" way to play the game. It's simple to pick up and play, the levelling system is obnoxiously centred around having more than one player with you, material hunting for equipment is awfully grindy, and boss fights are nightmarishly difficult. The odds are stacked against you; I get it. But, after finally playing (so many years of waiting) Crystal Chronicles with four players recently, I can't say that one experience is inherently better to the other. Different, sure, but the more abstract qualities of play and the experiential nature of these two modes make equally enjoyable - and equally valid - experiences.

More so than any other multiplayer game, Crystal Chronicles develops a remarkable sense of travel and community. This is conveyed primarily through the narrative conceit itself. You're not so much embarking on an epic quest from point A to point B, but travelling to three different levels per year before looping back to your village and starting all over again. You travel with an old-fashioned caravan across worn out roads and through lived-in spaces. A diary system tracks your progress upon notable discoveries with flavourful text written in a personal, first-person style. Beautiful music with long-forgotten instruments play all manner of medieval tunes that evoke timeless images of adventures long past. Square-Enix nail all the more romantic, intangible aspects of travel so perfectly, but manage to leave a few holes to let the player fill in with their imagination. It's the type of game where you can imagine you and your party members huddled around a crackling campfire at night, looking up at a starry night sky, and talking about all manner of things until the wee hours of the morning.

For this reason, single-player is frighteningly lonely and overwhelmingly terrifying. The responsibility of collecting enough myrhh to rejuvenate the crystal protecting your village weighs far more heavily on your mind. Levels feel longer and more arduous; teeming with wildlife far more aggressive and dangerous when they only focus on you. Tactics change from the wild, agressive attacking of a four man party to a more measured, coaxing of individuals to engage you one at the time. Bosses are hulking behemoths that are almost exclusively beaten down with hit and run tactics as you carefully count out the frames of your attack animation. Even level ups shifts focus from collecting the simple stat boosting artefacts to the more permanent health upgrades and spell skills, since far greater stat boosts can be found with armour and weapon upgrades.

But, more importantly, your journey through the world of Crystal Chronicles feels more important travelling by yourself. The beautiful art style can be absorbed at a more leisurely pace, and hard fought battles feel much more satisfying when you pull your caravan up to the nearest town over to barter and trade with the locals. The brief, random encounter cutscenes with other caravans as you travel from level to level feel warm and lighthearted but intensely transient. Nothing feels solid and reassuring. It shifts focus away from the familiar and the reliable and lets you consistently absorb wonderful new environments. The Legend of Zelda is consistently praised for its spirit of adventure, but its dedication to habitual, world-building has you routinely returning to some places over and over again during the course of adventure. While Crystal Chronicles drops you back at your village at the end of every game year, the narrative elements of your stable family at home and the gradual changes in earlier levels as the years pass by, give a greater sense of time passed by. Funnily enough, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword achieves the same fluidity of time via Link's consistent returns to his home village of Skyloft, but apparently that game is too linear or something, I don't know. The internet - it hates a lot of things.

Multiplayer in Crystal Chronicles feels like a party. There's a greater sense of forward momentum as your party barrels through levels at breakneck speeds, there's camaraderie and competition, communication - the world suddenly feels like a happier place than before. Teamwork rears its [ugly?] head at every opportunity with spell stacking, careful party composition, and a communal aspect of material gathering. Team roles shift at a moments notice depending on the severity of battles. The rigid and careful planning of single-player is thrown out the window in favour of a more adaptive, flexible play style.

A lot of the more romantic aspects of the game are lost in the process. The soothing music is washed over by near constant chatter, the methodical and gently placed story telling feels out of place in an environment that now requires almost constant action and quick reflexes. In fact, you don't even want to watch it; you skip over it. There are monsters to kill and levels to be beaten - you don't have time to stop and breath for a little while. Unless that stopping means armour and weapon upgrading at the nearest town.

Eventually though, and by the very nature of social gatherings, you have to stop playing and move on with your lives. All the GBAs and Link Cables have to be packed up and taken away with their respective owners. Your multiplayer playthrough is frozen in time until a later date. Returning to your singleplayer file feels ever more lonely, and the textual cries of your friendly, chalice-carrying Moogle can't hope to match the anguished sighs of a party member who's forced into the same deed. Your multiplayer adventures feel like they happend an eternity ago; a long lost memory.

Which is ultimately what Crystal Chronicles is all about - memory. The game timestamps your achievements, small and large, with a diary entry that you can read at any time. The amount of memories you have at the very end of the game determines whether or not you can complete the game. This theme is supported beyond the mechanics of the game, too. The visual style, the intensely melodic music sculpted with ancient instruments, the dense in-game lore - every element of the game is efficiently crafted to engage with familiar, deep-seated tropes of fantasy and mythology. It's a living artefact. It goes beyond the simple nostalgia play and referentialism in the mainline Final Fantasy entries to create manufactured nostalgia. It's a remarkable achievement to make something feel old without actually being old.

What happens in video game narratives is just as important as what happens while we experience the story. The memories we create while playing games are so often fragmented from the games themselves. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles remains one of the few to thematically tie the two together.

East Meets West: The RPG

I have a problem with RPGs. A Western RPG and a Japanese RPG do two very different things and both suffer from poor design choices that prevent me from completely enjoying them. To cover for what the other one lacks, I need to awkwardly jump between two different games in order to get the experience I'm after. I don't have this problem with other genres. An action game from any country satisfies everything I look for in the genre – explosions, intensity, violence – everything is accounted for. A WRPG and JRPG, though, have become so distinct from one another that they've typically been called entirely different genres, despite my insistence that a RPG is a RPG and nationality segregation is dangerous. In their differences, a WRPG and a JRPG have very distinct qualities that feel essential to the RPG genre, and the historical devision between each of them has left me endlessly frustrated. There's a middle ground that can – and should – be reached between each other that would enrich the genre as a whole if the internet bickering settled down.

WRPGs are, technically speaking, a mess. In their pursuit of wide open spaces, enormous dialogue permutations, storyline branches, and open-ended feel their technical difficulties are a severe and noticeable problem. While others can look past this and see the bigger picture, I cannot. Broken quest lines, graphical glitches, and unexplainable occurrences don't enhance the experience of living in a real world – they break it. On top of that, their incorporation of quest design in such a massive space often leads to gameplay that frequently feels like you're simply running to different checkpoints and, in worst case scenarios, can leave you horrendously lost and unsure how to progress. Looking beyond the negatives, WRPGs excel in dialogue (when it isn't endless lore exposition in favour of natural dialogue) and narrative, creating scenarios that feel important and challenge you with moral quandaries. There's a lot of player agency and that feels good. Unfortunately, the execution of these narrative elements leave me wanting. For all the money that Bioware and Bethesda pour into world building, they seemingly pay no attention to animation or character movement. Having a conversation is a painful process of watching an awkward looking NPC stand stock still, look directly into eyes (your soul), and occasionally move through one or two different arm waving animations. It feels like you're conversing with a puppet than a living creature and it's difficult to emphasise with these... things. They speak and sound like humans but move nothing like them. Even my own character, who you think would be blessed with wonderful animation, resembles an inanimate doll. I can't relate to these people no matter how real they sound when they move so unnaturally.

Inanimate puppet.

Emotive, expressive characters.

Where WRPGs meander without direction, JRPGs are intensely focused. There is the central storyline and... not much else. Side quests and distractions pop up here and there but their design feels so divorced from the central gameplay that they never take centre stage. You'll never find yourself lost in a JRPG, the narrative is consistently knocked over your head to ensure you know where you're going at all times. More often that not, you're playing a fully-formed character rather than being one yourself. There's very little leeway in determining the arc of your playable character and their comrades; they will be someone very different by game's end no matter what you think. This character focus over inhabiting a world also permeates the cutscenes and character animation. Watch a cutscene from any modern Final Fantasy game and you'll see characters walking around a space, their faces and body language visibly changing to reflect their emotional state, and actively touching and interacting with the people around them. Art style preferences aside, you can see what a character is feeling rather than merely hearing it from their voice actors. Lightning and friends sound and look like they truly believe what they're saying... even if half of the time it doesn't make any sense at all. Yes, JRPGs are still very much “Anime: The Video Game” with all the frustrating tropes and cultural awkwardness that implies. That didn't matter for a time, back when games were text only and the earnest platitudes of JRPG folk felt less forced and easier to digest. More importantly, Neon Genesis: Evangelion didn't exist and had yet to infect Japanese game development with all the wrong lessons about narrative. It's difficult to find a JRPG that has a coherent storyline nowadays and this – more than unnatural dialogue or bizarre character archetypes – is much harder to swallow. Final Fantasy IV was a simple tale, with characters whose motivations could be summed up in a sentence, but the narrative made sense from beginning to end and has stood the test of time.

Outside of narrative differences, WRPGs and JRPGs differ in user interfaces. JRPGs have copped a lot of flack for their lack of evolution in terms of mechanics, often sticking to a tried and true turn-based battle system with little flourishes and measured innovations. Their menu systems too have remained relatively the same. While this can be criticised, its led to very refined, simple, and easy to read menu tinkering from the years and years of playtesting its gone through. The same can't be said of WRPGs who, in their pursuit of meshing the artificial nature of menus with the realistic world inside of video games, have resorted to form over function. Skyrim's user interface is a pain to work with and leads to more time spent dilly-dallying inside of menus than playing the actual game. Mass Effect tripped over itself with item dumps and an obtuse weapon modification system that most didn't even see and Mass Effect 2 decided to simply remove all menu shuffling altogether (almost all, anyway). This isn't a hard feature or a forgotten art of game design. Diablo II has a perfectly functional menu system, hell, even Dragon Age: Origins got it right. People don't mind artificial as long as it's readable and simple to use. We've turned pages in books for years and it hasn't broken the “immersion” yet.

Simple to use.

Nightmarish to use.

I don't think I'm asking for much. I'm merely asking for restraint on both sides and less hesitance to see what individual developers brings to RPGs. WRPGs offer great writing and wondrous world building but in their vastness lies problematic bugs that take away from the experience. Their “Quest” design mentality leads to a to-do list that prevents me from inhabiting the world and WRPGs lack of expressive animation prevents me from forming any emotional connection with the characters in the story. On the other side of the pond, JRPGs are practically bug free and are ravished with little details that complement the experience. Characters move realistically and behave like real people... when they're not spouting out platitudes and awkwardly translated dialogue. JRPGs are focused and easy to follow and you barely ever lost... unless it's in the confusing narrative being told. I want both JRPGs and WRPGs to improve and, at the moment, each one has what the other one doesn't. If they weren't so deathly afraid of each other, I can't help but think that the RPG genre would improve as a whole from their intermingling.

Doggy!

Pretty cute, am I right? Our cat Alice is very good with dogs and the two have become fast friends. Alice is quite old though and the dog's playfulness when she's trying to sleep isn't always appreciated. Stick around until the two minute mark to have your heart microwaved by sweetness.

The dog was adopted and she was already called Lolly, except she doesn't really respond to it when called. We're trying to think of new names for her. Someone on Twitter suggested Colossus because she's little, you see. "Killer" made me laugh but that name is not appropriate for such a little thing >:( .

Can you think of any names?

Rambles on Pokémon

I really liked the days when Pokémon was just a simple monster-pet battling game. One where you got to name your Rival 'buttface' and went on great adventures with your starter and couple of creatures of the wild that looked pretty cool. When your Pokémon related thoughts were pretty much "I have a penguin with a trident on its face, how fucking rad is that?".

Sometimes you'd meet up with a friend and share neat stories and show each other all the cool things you'd found. Heck, sometimes you'd even get to trade around some of those creatures to see new and exciting ones! And occasionally you'd fight and one of you would win because he had Mewtwo and you still hadn't even beaten the Elite 4.

I liked those days before I started analysing each monster's stats and moves and trying to think up optimal strategies. Then I saw that Hariyama could learn Belly Drum in Pokémon Black and White.

And I laughed like a madman.

Stealth in Zelda

Hello friends!

I wrote a big ol' thing about stealth in The Legend of Zelda series at www.sneakybastards.net . Click the link to give it a read. It's quite extensive!

I had a lot of fun writing this! For all the voices out there writing about video games, we have very few websites that encourage a very specific framework to analyse games. You might be surprised at the conclusions I draw from the almost universally reviled stealth section in Zelda games.

Nintendo Network Worries

With the announcement of the Nintendo Network, the internet celebrated. Finally, Nintendo were getting serious about online play and incorporating DLC, digital transactions of retail games, and even offering micro-transactions for developers if they were so inclined. But with such a step, Nintendo are now entering the murky waters of shady business practices. Despite Satoru Iwata's insistence the company will still value their customers, they are ultimately a business, and I can't help but get nervous with a service that allows Nintendo to easily go down the same path other publishers are embracing with their DLC. Cut content intentionally saved for DLC, unlock codes, DRM, broken game releases – these are the realities that face the industry today, and while we may cry out in complaint, there are too many of us that concede and buy into publishers shoddy treatment of costumers. We support this behaviour. Not only that, we actively disparage companies like Nintendo who refuse to “update” their development process to allow this sort of behaviour, a strange Stockholm Syndrome effect exclusive to the video game community. I understand that the internet is responsible for countless beneficial aspects for modern game design like encouraging a viable indie game development scene, online multiplayer (divorced from the Project $10 shenanigans), and even re-contextualising the high score as Achievements and Trophies respectively, but at the moment the bad elements outweigh the good ones. This needs to change.

Developing an appreciation for what Nintendo were doing this generation (and still are, to some degree) is a good place to start. Nintendo, in their dedication to “withered technology” over the brand new, shied away from the industry's decision to embrace an always connected gaming platform. While Xbox 360 and PS3 rushed towards the internet in reckless abandon, Nintendo were content to plod along behind them. With the prospect of an internet-enabled machine, patches and updates that were once confined to the PC became a possibility for consoles. Bugs could be fixed, online multiplayer could be continuously adjusted to accommodate unpredictable player behaviour, and even firmware updates could dramatically change the OS of the console. While Xbox 360 and PS3 games were typified by their now PC-like surroundings, the Wii was a bastion for the “old guard”. There were never any concerns when buying a Wii game that you would be getting an incomplete experience. Quality was a problem, but that's a worry for anyone familiar with the industry. What you were getting on the disc was the complete, definitive experience and it was playable as soon as you placed the disc in the machine. No “Day 1” patches and no downloading game data to a hard drive. While Nintendo Wii games typically have a firmware update on the disc now in an effort to stop the homebrew market, they still take a considerably shorter time to start playing than the rest of the gaming landscape. These efforts to instantly plunge you into the game with little hassle should be commended in an age of delayed starts.

The absence of DLC has also given Nintendo products a complete “feel”. You buy a Nintendo game knowing that, a year down the road, you won't be seeing an Anniversary Edition released with all the DLC bundled together. You're getting the definitive version right from the beginning – no exceptions – and that sort of thing is valuable to a customer. It's also valuable to preserving the history of the medium. With multiple different SKUs, nothing is definitive and it muddles what the core experience is. Who's to say that the golden Lancer in Gears of War 3 is more or less important than the vanilla Lancer? Or that the Dragon Age armour in Mass Effect 2 is more or less important than the standard armour? You might scoff and call this trivial but the inclusion of such “exclusive” items fundamentally change a player's mindset inside a game. You're not really inside of the world of Mass Effect when you're giggling over a item from another video game world. The reference breaks the fiction. It creates two differing emotional responses, and with neither version defined as the definitive experience by the developer, it lessens whatever they're trying to make us feel.

There can be a lot of good in DLC and online connectivity. Rockstar used DLC as an opportunity to make complete sequels to GTAIV that resembled the expansion packs of old on PC. Online demos are another great feature that ensures you know what you're getting into before you hand over your money. The dark designs of online connectivity far outweigh all the good that accompanies it, however. Nintendo are only just beginning to treat online play as a serious business aspect of game design and there are an awful lot of pitfalls along the way. What's stopping Nintendo from looking at other publishers DLC behaviour and supporting that? We actively encourage that business model. Ultimately, a business exists to make money and there's nothing wrong with that. Video games are a business. Nintendo's journey into the online world has the potential to treat customers with respect, we just have to support the correct behaviour.

Obligation and Animal Crossing

Obligation is a funny thing.

I don’t feel obligated to do a lot of things in life. I don’t think it’s necessary to see your family or even like your family, especially if they’re awful to you. I don’t owe my old school friends a friendship debt that I must maintain long after high school. I don’t even feel obligated to go to work week after week - I do it because I want to. While it may sound heartless, it frees me from the things that people expect of me and lets me do what I want. People understand that I’m being genuine when I want to help them... hopefully.

Obligation does rear its ugly head in my writing though. Not only do I feel a biting need to write everyday, I’m wracked with guilt and disappointment in myself if I don’t. Realising last week that I wouldn’t be able to make my weekly update on my blog was a painful experience regardless of whether or not anyone would read it, or care. In that one week, I missed practice, I missed the opportunity to improve my writing, and I missed sticking to a schedule that promotes activity. Even if I had a compelling reason that I couldn’t make my weekly update (I was writing, funnily enough), I could of written faster, dawdled less, and made firmer decisions on what word fit best in a sentence.

For a while, video games were something that resembled an obligation in my life, too. Born from my childhood when I had to wring every last drop of entertainment out of a game before I could move on, when I had no money of my own and had to wait between releases, games were things that demanded to be finished completely, regardless of quality or enjoyment. Then I grew up. I realised I was no longer a child with infinite time and if a game wasn’t enjoyable there was no reason for me to finish it. Much like how my writing is an exception to my anti-obligation attitude, however, so too is there an exception with video games.

Animal Crossing compels me to be devoted to it. In its absurd simulation of living with animals, I find myself unable to break the daily routine of talking to friends, fishing, and bug collecting. With other games, the penalty of dropping out of the experience is non-existent, you’re simply conceding that when you do return, you’ll be significantly less skilled at the game than you were previously. Animal Crossing punishes such action with inquisitive villagers asking you where you’ve been, a house filled with cockroaches, weeds littering the village, and missed seasonal events. Simply forgetting a game where such things are tracked feels heartless. I’m abandoning a group of animals and a village that simply can’t maintain itself without my input. It’s not like I can shrug off their questions and invites like I can with the friends in my life. My friends have work, school, and other people in their life that occupy them outside of my presence. These animals have nothing outside of my input – their houses stay the same, their clothes stay the same, their chores remain unfinished. Despite the seasonal changes, the out of control weeds, and the bug infestation suggesting the passage of time, the villagers of Animal Crossing don’t go along for that ride. Some might up and move towns while you’re away but - god forbid - they won’t be able to change their shirt until you talk to them and give them a new one. Even the big events that bundle your villagers to play and have fun together come across as a sort of pack mentality than true individualism. These animals are children, and they need to be looked after.

So, my irrational obligation to care for these strange little creatures stems entirely from their inability to do anything constructive for themselves. I don’t want them to live in a village filled with weeds and insects. I don’t want them to stroll through an empty museum and cry at the lack of exhibits, and I certainly don’t want them to remain in the same shirt for years on end. I care about all of these little things right up until the point where I skip a day of play. My steely, compassionate resolve falters. That one missed day steamrolls into another, and another, until weeks and months have passed and I can no longer face the endless waves of weeds and cockroaches ahead of me. Once that moment has passed, I can no longer return to my village unless a hard reset accompanies me. I can’t look Poncho in the eye and tell him I missed him without feeling a profound sense of guilt. I didn’t try hard enough, I let the poor bear down. Should he appear again in my new town and fail to remember me, I consider it a fair trade. It’s my penance for selfish neglect.

Vanquish and Bullet Hell Shooters

Video games have revolved around avoiding attacks since its inception. Dodge the missiles of the other player in Spacewar!, shoot back at them. Avoid the ghosts in Pacman, collect the dots. Don't run into the Goombas in Super Mario Bros., jump on top of them. It's a natural, instinctual reaction when combat is the primary mode of interaction. For every chance you get to hit something, there's an equal chance you're going to get hit in the process. This dichotomy is best represented in shooters and shoot 'em ups, as combat is so heavily involved in these games, and it's in these genres where deviations and experimentations of this formula have flourished. First-person shooters have gone from circle strafing to deal out and avoid damage to implementing a constantly recharging shield for your character in combat, thereby changing tactical consideration from “using the most powerful weapon to dispatch the enemy as quickly as possible in order to preserve health” to “experimenting with the systems and mechanics of the game and enjoying the reactions of your choices”. Third-person shooters, a genre that was slow to find its voice in the market originally, have taken huge strides with the implementation of a cover system. Here, the player is not only paying attention to how and where their character is positioned, but also how long they need to stay our of cover in order to take out an opponent, and finding openings to move forward in the battle and flank their targets. Shoot 'em ups stuck on a relatively linear progression of change where dodging attacks and shooting back at enemies was the modus operandi right up until the bullet hell evolution. Where previous shoot 'em ups only had you avoid simple enemy fire, bullet hell shooters had you avoid a maze of bullets that covered the screen, darting around the slow moving projectiles as you nervously shot back. It was a fascinating twist on the genre that was promptly subverted by the fine folk at Treasure with Ikaruga, a shooter that made the player deliberately crash into bullets and absorb them – provided their ship was the right colour. Projectiles were divided into two categories, black and white, and by switching your ship's polarity to match the attacks, the player could fly through the bullets unharmed. This simple switch up altered the way a player approached the battlefield – instead of moving in between the spaces of gunfire, you were confined to following the path of your enemy's attacks. It was brilliant and inventive design that could never be replicated in the same genre without severely impugning on some form of copyright, or facing the wrath of a thousand fanboys.

Vanquish, despite being a third-person shooter, has very prominent bullet hell shooter elements. Normally, the developments inside of the shoot 'em up genre are divorced from the developments of first and third-person shooters. Shoot 'em ups are difficult, high score focused relics of a period when video games were only about that – the very definition of a niche genre. But, the decision to meld the mechanics of a third-person shooter with the underpinnings of a bullet hell shooter made Vanquish a much more approachable, and entirely unique, shooter in the swirling sea of Gears of War knock offs.

The most noticeable aspect of Vanquish's beating bullet hell shooter heart is that there's gunfire everywhere. Enemies hound you on foot with excessive bullet fire, and bunches of missiles rocket straight up into the air, twisting and curling about, before spiralling down to hit you. Foot soldiers are mixed with giant, hulking robots and powerful vehicles and quickly spread out in all directions. The traditional Gears of War controls couldn't hope to adequately cover the sheer amount of action happening on screen in Vanquish. The slow, hulking, weighty movement of Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago work best when confined to a tunnel. Enemies come towards you in Gears of War and you press through them, always going forward. There's no reason to backtrack in Gears of War because the game isn't designed with that in mind. Even the controls reflect this attitude by placing the ability to turn around on the right analogue stick. Moving left and right on the left analogue stick simply makes Marcus strafe left and right, always facing forward. Vanquish, with its enemies coming from all directions, doesn't have the luxury for these type of controls and in recognising this, the developers have freed up the right analogue stick for camera and aiming only and designated movement entirely to the left one. Sam Gideon doesn't strafe, he runs in every direction at the same pace regardless. This diverse range of movement means that combat is as much about dealing damage as it is about avoiding it; the fundamental core of the bullet hell shooter.

This freedom of movement also extends to the use of cover. Cover is your lifeline in Gears of War but is mostly temporary in Vanquish. I actually died more by bunkering behind cover than I did from simply being out in the open. The main reason is because cover is destructible and enemies are all too eager to destroy it as soon as possible. There's also never really a point in the levels where you can dive behind cover and hope to be reasonably covered from every angle. Chances are that while you may be covered from gunfire in one direction, the soaring, curling missiles will rain down on you at any moment and force you out of safety, or a group of enemies will flank you from another point. It means that Vanquish has a great sense of pace – you're always on the run and trying to find the best position to attack your opponents from, no matter how short lived it is. Cover is a charade in Vanquish, a left over fragment of the third-person shooter genre in order to ease the player into a sense of familiarity.

The biggest giveaway of Vanquish's bullet hell shooter aspirations comes from the inclusion of a score bar, that most archaic system of video game design. Not only do you get points from killing enemies but they're also deducted when you die, or when you stay behind cover for too long (another reason to avoid cover at all times). It's a system in place that rewards skill and knowledge of enemy placement, of knowing what's about to come up and how to defeat it, to abuse all the combat options available to you in order to rank up the highest score. To ignore it in favour of simply completing the list of levels in Vanquish is to ignore what is so compelling about the game. Other inclusions, like the game's risk/reward melee attack that completely drains your shield and leaves you open to damage at the price of dealing massive attack damage, tie into the respective power ups of shoot 'em ups. Even the simple idea of weapon data being stored inside of Sam's suit and transforming the gun in his hands into various different shapes is analogous to the weapon switching in shoot 'em ups where little weapons and doodads hover around your ship, waiting to be used in the battle.

This is all relatively meaningless to the experience in Vanquish, but I couldn't help but see a curious connection between a genre I typically don't enjoy and the otherwise traditional elements of a third-person shooter. I wouldn't say Vanquish is an exact rendition of the mechanics of a bullet hell shooter inside of a shooter but the influence is definitely there, and it adds a much needed burst of speed to an otherwise slow moving genre. In an industry where there isn't an awful lot of permutation and differences between titles, Vanquish sounds out as unique experience. I don't want a sequel for it, I just want to see that same driving enthusiasm in other games to reinvent the simple act of avoiding attacks.