Listen to the Rain

The Games Awards dropped another Final Fantasy VII Remake trailer, so just I like I did with the last trailer from back in May, I'm going to compare the Japanese and English dilaogue.

First, here's the trailer:

Watch on YouTube

I haven't been able to find one with Japanese audio, but this was posted by Square Enix Japan, so I assume that the subtitles here are from the Japanese script. Which is interesting, because sometimes the dialogue is, uh, very different:

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There are more differences here than there were in the first trailer! The first exchange between Aerith and Cloud is completely different in Japanese, Cloud explicitly mentions what he promised Tifa rather than just alluding to its existence, and in the English Tifa is more expressive in being glad to see Cloud. A lot of the other stuff is just stylistic--"Okay, that...was pretty cool" isn't really a bad translation of さっすが, which is kind of an interjection when someone does something good or cool that's exactly the kind of good or cool you would have expected them to do--but there are some major changes that swap the meaning around!

Like, compare English Aerith here to Japanese Aerith. English Aerith has a devil-may-care attitude, and when Cloud tells her that the situation is dangerous, she brushes it off. She's not worried. In Japanese, it sounds more like Cloud is reassuring Aerith that he can protect her and she's telling him that she knows he can. In English she's sassy, in Japanese she's passive. I wonder how that's going to play out over the entire game.

I do love the "next five seconds line." English or Japanese, Cloud's like "Yeah, yeah, mystical Planet crap, whatever, can we focus on the giant scorpion deathbot here?"

I'm curious how those different lines will work in the different version. I'm guessing they'll have different lip syncing in English and Japanese, and maybe different cutscene timing too? Aerith's first line here is so much longer in Japanese but her lips are clearly synced to the English.

Now that we know this is probably coming to other places than just the PS4/5, I look forward to playing it in 2021.

Morrowind is my favorite game of all time (though Breath of the Wild is rapidly creeping up on it...), and just recently the Elder Scrolls series hit its 25th anniversary! Bethesda is giving away Morrowind for free through Sunday, if you're not one of the people who's bought it multiple times like me.

I still have the map from the collector's edition, framed and hanging on my office wall at home.

If you want to know my thoughts about the game, I finished a heavily-modded playthrough of it in 2014 and wrote a review of it here. I've considered replaying it again, because I really want to play through the Uvrith's Legacy mod as a member of House Telvanni, and do the vampire playthrough with the trio of Vampiric Hunger, Vampire Embrace and Vampire Realism. And scripted spells so I can turn into a bat, the best way to fast travel. And maybe a playthrough as something other than an elf. But that playthrough I wrote about took me from 2009 to 2014, on and off, and probably about 500 hours of game time. There are so many other things I could do with that time.

There's a giant oral history of Morrowind article at Polygon that I have saved to read when I have more time to sit down. It's over twenty thousand words, so it's not something I can read over my lunch break like a lot of the articles I read. But I can use the time I save by not replaying Morrowind to read it.

I don't know that we'll ever see a game with Morrowind's degree of both freedom and weirdness again. Morrowind is the other half of my love of fungal forests sparked by Crystalis, and the political machinations, the slow burn of figuring out what the plot is, and the main quest actively encouraging the PC to go off and do sidequests are still rare in gaming today. I love the care they put in crafting a strange and compelling setting. I think it took me years to realize that "foyada," the Ashlander word for a ravine carved out by lava that remains after the lava has gone, was made up for the game, and "What exactly happened at Red Mountain?" and "What were the Dwemer trying to accomplish?" and "Was Dagoth Ur right?" are still questions debated among the fandom. Xenophobic nativism vs. colonial oppression was a conflict so good that Bethesda reused it in Skyrim, except Dagoth Ur is much more compelling than Ulfric Stormcloak could ever be. I mean, look at this:

Nerevarine: "What is your plan for the Dunmer?"
Dagoth Ur: "I will free the Dunmer from the Imperial yoke, and cast down the false gods of the Temple. I will lead them out of their ancient superstitions, and gift them with intimate knowledge of the divine. Then, perhaps, when Morrowind is once again restored to its ancient glories, it will be time to consider whether the Dunmer should cultivate ambitions of empire."
Nerevarine: "How do you justify your crimes?"
Dagoth Ur: "If, by my crimes, you mean the inevitable suffering and destruction caused by war, then I accept the burden of leadership. The Sixth House cannot be restored without war. Enlightenment cannot grow back without the risk of upsetting the tradition-bound and complacent herd. And the Mongrel armies of the Empire cannot be expelled from Morrowind without bloodshed. As I have charity and compassion, I grieve. But our mission is just and noble."

"Come Nerevar, friend or traitor, come. Come and look upon the Heart and Akulakahn, and bring Wraithguard, I have need of it."

So good.

Breath of the Wild is more fun to play, but Morrowind's plot and setting will win out every time. I've wanted to run a tabletop RPG version of it for years. Maybe someday.

Woke up to this:

"Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 - Announcement Trailer (ESRB)" (Watch on YouTube)

Objectively there's not much there, just a moody voiceover and footage that's not taken from gameplay. What's more, the combat was the worst part by far of the original Bloodlines, so a video filled with chasing down people in a warehouse is a weird way of announcing this.

But I'm so hyped.

I mean, I'm a huge Vampire: the Masquerade fan, and I loved the original Bloodlines. I remember the Ocean House Hotel, and how it made a predator of the night feel like a child hiding from the monster under the bed. I remember picking a side in the factional battles among the vampires of Southern California. I remember that the entire plot is Prince LaCroix's attempt to dispose of a troublesome fledgling after being forced to spare the PC due to his weak grip on power, and having the PC not only survive every suicide mission but actually accomplish them with flying colors. I remember the thin-blooded vampires on Santa Monica beach, who barely understood what they were, standing around a single oildrum fire. I remember the extra elements of the World of Darkness thrown in, like the Shih demon hunter apprentice tracking down a Rokea wereshark with the PC's help.

I remember Caine, progenitor of the Kindred, working as a cab driver in LA.

None of that is the action or the combat powers. They've got Brian Mitsoda, a designer on the original Bloodlines, so they know how important the writing was and how it led to devoted fans spending a decade and a half patching Bloodlines to fix up the problems caused by it being released too early. Though maybe that's the reason other than it being easier to make that they made an action trailer--it shows the improvement in the part of the game that most need improvement. And hopefully they won't have the development or technical trouble the original Bloodlines had.

I don't usually get into following game dev, not since I stopped playing World of Warcraft and following the patches and expansions, but I suspect I'll be checking in on this.

Final Fantasy VI is my favorite Final Fantasy, and playing it through again hasn't changed that opinion.

I didn't own an SNES as a child, but several of my friends did. I remember us playing through FFVI together, trading off at various story points, taking turns naming characters--I named Setzer "Han" because he was a gambler and a scoundrel and also I was ten--but I didn't get very far. I came in wherever the person's save was, and of course it wasn't a group game or anything like that. They absolutely kept playing while the rest of us weren't around, and so I only remember bits. The Opera House where I got to name Setzer, of course. The opening crawl, obviously inspired by Star Wars, with Tina (Eng: "Terra"), Biggs (Eng: "Vicks"), and Wedge piloting their mage armors across a desolate snowfield toward the lights of Narshe in the distance. Protecting Banon on a raft down a rushing river and repeatedly choosing the looping fork to take advantage of his healing ability. But no consistency. No real understanding of how the story all fit together. All that came later when I played it through on my own.


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​For a long time, Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire was my gaming white whale. After I played Quest for Glory I: So You Want to Be a Hero at my friend's house, I played a copy of it for a long time, and later went out and bought the VGA remake. By that time Quest for Glory III: Wages of War was out, so I got that too, and later Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness. But Quest for Glory II never got a remake and still had EGA graphics in the days of 640x480 and 256 colors, and that's probably why I could never find it for sale. For years, I would import my character from QFG straight into QFGIII and rely on the recap at the beginning of QFGIII explaining the battle against the wizard Ad Avis and the salvation of Raseir. I assume Sierra put it in there because there were a lot of people in my situation.

While I was at university, I finally found a copy of Quest for Glory II on the high seas and played through the whole series back to back. I didn't fall immediately in love with it or discover a magical hidden gem. It's a good game with a few oddities. But it's better constructed and more true to the spirit of Quest for Glory than its immediate sequel, and as a QFG game it's a better adventure game than most of Sierra's output while also being a fun RPG to boot.


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​Last year, I played through Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. It was amazing, the best JRPG that I've played in over a decade, with a cliffhanger ending that demanded an immediate resolution. And then I...didn’t start the second game until September of this year because I got sidetracked. You know how it goes. I wanted to play more Zelda games before Breath of the Wild came out, and then I was a little intimidated by the commitment than Trails SC would required, since I tend to only play one game at a time.

Seventy-seven hours later, my verdict is that I should have played this back in February and March instead of Wasteland 2. I could have moved on to Trails in the Sky the 3rd by now and finished up the first trilogy rather than spending my time shooting robots with assault rifles, the true post-apocalyptic überweapon. And in Trails SC I even got to shoot some robots with gattling guns, so it would have been the best of both worlds. Long as they were, those seventy-seven hours were an excellent use of my time.

Warning before I start: this review contains spoilers for Trails in the Sky FC. The games are so tightly connected it’s impossible for me to discuss the characters or plot in any real detail without them.


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Before Kingdom Hearts, there was another time that Square created a strange hybrid RPG with action elements!

I first played this with my sister and another kid who lived across the street, and we got almost to the end. If I remember right, we nearly stalled out in the volcano and then couldn't beat the Smith Gang when we went on to the final boss, which strikes me as almost unbelievable now that I'm replaying through. Was I ever that bad at video games? Is my memory just bad and we actually won?

Well, I won this time.


Shine get.
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I was one of the Final Fantasy fans that failed to make Dragon Quest popular in the West. I borrowed a friend's copy of Final Fantasy and played it to death, even beating it after weeks of work, but I saw someone playing Dragon Warrior and I just wasn't that interested. Simplistic sprites? Shakespearean English? Dying to magicians when he tried to head out to Garinham to buy stronger weapons and armor? No thank you. It wasn't until I went to university that I tried playing Dragon Warrior again, and I thought it was fun enough, persisted to the end, and then left the series behind.

Until I saw that some of the Dragon Quest games had been ported to iOS and I had a two-week-long trip to Japan coming up. I had vague memories of seeing Dragon Warrior IV in Nintendo Power and I'd heard good things about it, so I bought it, downloaded it, and loaded it up during the flight. And while I didn't beat it during the trip--I decided that writing thirty thousand words in daily blogging about it was a better use of my time--I've beaten it now! And it was pretty good!



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I am not a member of the Pokemon generation.

Like I've mentioned before, I got out of consoles after the NES, so my first introduction to Pokemon as something more than that thing people talked about that I didn't know anything about at all was in Smash Brothers, so I thought of pokemon as basically natural disasters. Sometimes they were avoidable, sometimes not, and sometimes you could control them and really annoy your friends by spamming lightning bolts. But nothing about the context around them. And then while we were on the road to Chiyoda, Pokemon Go came out in Japan and I finally managed to create an account and play the game. And for whatever reason, I find it really fun and still play basically every day. Mass Transit makes it easy.

Then year is the 20th anniversary of Pokemon, and so I thought now is definitely the time. And after consulting my friends, and then ignoring most of their advice, and loaded up a copy of Pokemon Fire Red--in Japanese, for the practice--and set out on my journey to ポケモンゲットだぜ！ (pokemon getto da ze!, uh, something like, "Pokemon, I'm gonna get them!")



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That was a wild ride. And in some ways, I don't have much to say because I said it all already.

Baldur's Gate II hasn't unseated Morrowind as my favorite game, but it came really close. Morrowind has its mythological exploration and interesting cultures, and Baldur's Gate II has the relationships between the PC and the other party members. This is where Bioware romances started, and while they were pretty basic in their original forms, with only four romanceable NPCs and only one for a female PC, the basic structure allowed a thousand mods to bloom. Some of them good, like Xan, some of them...less so.

I wish I had written down my time through Baldur's Gate as well, because that really would have provided a complete experience. That full zero-to-hero arc is part of what makes Baldur's Gate I and II so amazing to me. In the very beginning, 250 hours of gameplay ago , Chiyo was a sheltered orphan in Candlekeep and nearly died when an assassin set upon her in the stables of her home. Years later, she fought off a powerful elven wizard in hell for custody of her soul, and this isn't even the end of her story. The Throne of Bhaal awaits.

Eventually. I'm not diving into that quite yet.

In the end, I was mostly happy with my list of mods except for Sword Coast Stratagems. I had it set so that pre-buffing was only on NPCs that the designers thought would reasonably have buffed before engaging the PCs, but that was much more extensive than I would have expected. And there were egregious moments, like stripping all the party's buffs between phases in the final battle but still allowing Irenicus to autobuff. If I could go back, I'd keep the spell AI but turn off almost everything else, including the harder battles. Those are obviously designed for someone willing to use a lot of the exploits that I turned off, like allowing simulacrums and projected images to use quickslot items, or keeping Vhailor's Helm--which I modded out of the game--on the PC and then using simulacrum/time stop cheese to do a ton of damage to enemies during time stops. I said in my original post that I'm in favor of difficulty-increasing mods as long as it doesn't mean the AI cheats, and it fell down too much on the AI cheating for my taste. It was just annoying, reducing every battle to wizards stripping buffs from each other, as I mentioned in probably a dozen posts.

The stand-out mods for me were the banter pack, which increases the number of inter-party banters, and the Xan romance mod. I took so long in Chapters 2 and 3 that almost all of the non-Imoen banters were exhausted during the time, but without the banter mod I probably would have run out of banter in the first ten hours or so. And Xan's romance... It's cheesy in places, but I installed it as a parody of schoolpsychnerd and my relationship, with Chiyo as the eternally-chipper half and Xan as the doom and gloom half. I totally forgot the vampire dreams, which add a lot of context to Xan's eternal gloominess. It was mostly a well-written display of understated emotion, with Xan's love coming out in little gestures unless Chiyo was under threat. The most memorable part was probably when Chiyo picked a fight with a red dragon and Xan rushed over to her afterward.

If I could change anything, I'd go back and add more dialogue to the earlier sections. When I first started I would take notes while I played and do the write-ups later, so I had the gist of what was said rather than the specifics. Later on I would write the posts while I played, so I spent a lot of time transcribing dialogue. Some of that is because I was more interested in transcribing the text of plot-important dialogue rather than all the quests I was on, but part of it was wanting to more accurately preserve the experience. I might go back at some point and edit some earlier posts with the exact dialogue for more of the banter, since that's the best part.

The end of the game jumped right into Throne of Bhaal, but I'm not going to. I've been playing this game on and off for a year and a half, and the original reason I started, other than never having beaten it before, is I wanted to play the original before I played all the kickstarted isometric RPGs that were inspired by the old Infinity Engine games. And now I've done that, and I can go play Wasteland II and Pillars of Eternity with a clean conscience. Probably Wasteland II first. I need a break from fantasy worlds.

Forgotten Realms as a setting seems almost overwhelming, but Baldur's Gate II presents it in a very digestible format. It really dials into the world, with the extended period in a drow city, the random githyanki that show up wanting their silver sword, the society of the elves and their gods, and Irenicus's plan.

Now I can see why Irenicus is so well-loved as a villain. Some of it is David Warner's voice acting, spoiled extensively here, but some of it is that I have a soft spot for "become a god" plots. Also, it's the way that he plans ahead. Insinuating Yoshimo into the party--when I first played the game, I took Yoshimo willingly and I would have been caught completely be surprise by his betrayal--setting up Spellhold as a trap, making common cause with the drow, starting the guild war in Athkatla...while it seems that he's distant and not paying attention for much of the game, in retrospect it's obvious that all the major plots that aren't quests to go get money, like the aforementioned quest to deal with a dragon, are the results of his plots. There are so many RPGs where the villain doesn't seem to be doing much during the game, or where the "true villain" suddenly reveals itself at the end despite never previously showing up at all *cough*FFIV*cough* that seeing one where he's so well-integrated is a joy. And most of the time, when he talked, I wouldn't skip past his dialogue because I wanted to hear the voice acting.

What a fantastic game. It took me almost 150 hours, but it was time well spent and I'm looking forward to Throne of Bhaal...eventually.

I know I've said that I was out of other things to do several times before, but this time I really mean it. All that's left is to eliminate Irenicus's minions in Suldanessellar, free the elves, and take the fight to Irenicus. I have a high-level party, I have powerful weapons and armor, and I'm ready. Let's do this.

But first, Moon Prism Power Makeup!
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I've finished basically everything there is to do in the base game, unless there are some quests left added by mods that I don't know about. My quest log only has a few leftover bits from quests that weren't cleaned up because the triggers failed to fire or because I did things in the wrong order or because I jumped the gun and used the console to fix what I thought was broken and it turned out I was just in the wrong place, and only a couple of those. The next stop is Suldanessellar.

Except, well, since I have Throne of Bhaal installed, there's one place I can go first.
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