Listen to the Rain

I don't usually play visual novels--if you look back through the visual novel tag, you'll find only two other examples of games. It's not because I don't like them conceptually or anything, since I've had the install discs for Ever 17 sitting on my hard drive through four computers and I keep telling myself that someday, someday, I'll get it to. And someday, I will! I got to this one first, though, for three reasons. The first is that sashagee told me about it and said it was probably the kind of game I would like, I think because the sequel was advertised to her on Playstation when she was browsing through sale games. The second is that the background is full of fantasy races, with a line about how the "elves have left the forest to build their startups" right in the intro, though that ended up grating on me in the end for reasons I'll get into. The third is that the playtime on HLTB was around five hours and I was running out of time in the month. Even though I intended to play it two weekends ago, and didn't, and then I intended to play it last weekend, and didn't...

Well, I started it on Tuesday and finished it on Friday after about five hours or so. At least an hour of that involved Laila sitting on my lap, wanting to see the game with the "chairs" or the "blue dresses." That makes me feel like I'll probably be playing more visual novels in the future.


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Been reading Against the Darkmaster--odd name, but a neat RPG based on the old ICE Middle-Earth Roleplaying--and thinking of it lately. Yesterday I read a blog post about what Middle-Earth looks like if you ignore everything after The Hobbit and how it's a much more fairy-tale, magical place. For example:

• "Burglar" is a known social role, and you can hire them to help your wandering adventurer party
• Animals can talk, and people can learn animal languages.
• Bloodlines have idiosyncratic magical powers. Bilbo can't understand the thrush, but Bard--of the old blood of Dale--can. Beorn can turn into a bear, and while this is treated as wild and a bit dangerous, it isn't something totally unique that the dwarves have never heard of.
• Magical items are common. The dwarves find Gondolin-forged swords in a random troll den and one of the trolls has a magical wallet that screams when Bilbo lifts it. There are rings of invisibility and glowing gemstones. Bard has an arrow that kills anything it hits. None of these have glorious, thousand-year storied histories, they're just there.
• There's no indication that humans can't be wizards. Gandalf, Radagast, and the Necromancer are all just old men who know magic.
• Everyone sings. The dwarves sing a silly song while eating and then a grim and melancholy song of their lost home. The elves sing "Tra-la-la lally, here down in the valley, ha ha!" Can you imagine the seven sons of Fëanor singing that? Even the goblins sing! "And down down to Goblin-town / You go, my lad!"
• There's a note that some goblins and dwarves work together! Can you imagine that in The Lord of the Rings?
• Most of the land is wilderness, with the occasionally small kingdom or settlement. Dale is gone but Laketown remains, and Dorwinion is off somewhere but close enough for the elves to trade with. There are enough scattered settlements in Eriador for the trolls to have eaten "a village and a half" after coming down from the mountains.
• The wilderness is wild but not expected to be dangerous. Proof? The dwarves do not bring weapons on their quest--until they loot the troll-hole they have no weapons at all. The wilderness is very dangerous but this is implied to be a recent thing.
• The elves are much more like Fair Folk. They hold hidden revels in the woods that outsiders cannot approach, love getting drunk and singing silly songs, and are happy to lock up visitors for a hundred years if they get annoyed with them. They'll leave their woods to go treasure-hunting but otherwise just want to hang out in a magical forest.
• Dwarves are on the decline but dragons are on the rise. There are a lot of empty dwarf-holds in the north that are now dragon lairs.
• Troll are smart enough to argue about nonsense until the sun comes up and they turn to stone. They're not living siege weapons. They have names like "Bert" and "William"
• Possibly most important--there's no Dark Lord. There are a lot of evil overlords out there, like the Necromancer or the Goblin King, but there's no "Free Peoples vs. Evil" great struggle.

In summary, it's much more gameable than a world descended from The Silmarillion, which is great for epic storytelling but not particularly good to have adventurers doing their thing.

This continues sashagee's pattern of getting me into interminable online games.

On the one hand, Mihoyo obviously took the lessons of Breath of the Wild to heart. The game is an open-world RPG with a stamina bar and climbing mechanics, with gathering ingredients for healing and buff foods a vital part of the experience. There are camps of goblin-like monsters containing treasure chests. Early on there's a quest to get a gliding license. There are fourseven elementally-themed lands to explore. There are ancient ruins inhabited by robots that look like stone statues. There are environmental puzzles to solve with treasure chests as the reward. It's not post-apocalyptic but it has the same peaceful, Ghibli air, with cel-shaded art, anime designs, and beautiful orchestral music. And honestly, it looks fantastic:


I like the tactics involved in putting teams together and using their combined elemental abilities to overcome new challenges, taking advantage of combo bonuses and swapping characters mid-fight to stack up the damage. I love elemental magic systems, and this particular combination is one I haven't seen before--seven elements: Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Wood, Lightning, and Ice. There are seven countries, each worshipping a particular god and each based on an element, devoted to an ideal, and themed after a real-world culture:

• Mondstadt: Air, Freedom, Germany
  
• Liyue: Earth, Contracts, China.
  
• Inazuma: Lightning, Eternity, Japan.
  
• Sumeru: Wood, Wisdom, Middle-East/South Asia(??).
  
• Fontaine: Water, Justice, France.
  
• Natlan: Fire, War, pre-Columbian Central America(??)
  
• Snezhnaya: Ice, [Unknown], Russia.

The nations are so one-dimensional because they're directly ruled by meddling gods with strong ideas about how things should work. The plot, at least the minimal part I've gotten through in the air country, seems pretty interesting.

Now, the bad parts.

Genshin Impact is a predatory gacha game that does its absolute best to squeeze money out of you. As with every gacha game, you get a few characters through the story but there are dozens of other optional characters that can only be obtained through gambling. You get some of the currency (called Primogems) needed to buy chances (called Wishes) through the game, but enough to make one wish every day or two--definitely not enough to be sure of getting a character that's available for only a limited time. And furthermore, there's a mechanic that seems like it's designed to reduce the heartbreak of getting duplicate characters called Constellations, where getting dupes provides bonuses to those characters, except that some of those bonuses are so powerful they take characters from average to amazing all by themselves. "To Be Cleaned," Noelle's fourth constellation makes her shield a bomb when enemies breach it, and "Must Be Spotless," her sixth constellation (of six), increases her burst attack's power by 50% and adds one second to its duration for every enemy defeated during it.

It's evil genius, in a way, that Mihoyo found a way to turn duplicate characters from a disheartening experience to another chance for grinding and thus, for money.

There are daily and weekly missions to get primogems. Achievements award primogens, as do story quests, but the fastest way to get them is just to pay, and with a 0.6% chance to roll any given five-star character, it'll take a lot of wishes to get one you want. There is a mechanically literally called Pity that guarantees a five-star character after 90 wishes without one, but of course it's not necessarily the five-star character you want. For that, you have to wish another 90 times. And then wish another thousand times or so to max out their constellation at a price of around $1100. Getting your full waifu collection is going to cost you a pretty penny or a lot of grinding. And this is just characters--of course they need weapons and accessories as well, which have to be rolled for as well.

Just yesterday I went to go fight a boss because the list of possible loot included some five-star items. I didn't get any, obviously, so out of curiosity I went to look up the drop chance and it turns out the drop chance is 0%--I need to raise my level a lot if I want to fight the version of the boss that drops those. Despite that, the game still tells me they're possible drops.

On top of all this, boss fights and dungeons are also time-gated. You need to use "resin" to claim the rewards and only get a certain amount of it per day. Unless, of course, you pay to get more.

I do like the exploration gameplay and the plot, and I'm playing because sashagee wants to play together. But I'm casting several side-eyes at the game at the moment, and I doubt I'll be doing a lot of grinding once I finish the story. I'm not here to collect the waifus, I'm here for the plot and the worldbuilding.

Maybe I'll run a TTRPG in the setting when there's more information out about the game.

When I first started playing Final Fantasy XIV, Stormblood was the final frontier. Oh sure, Shadowbringers had been out for over a year by that time, but I started playing because sashagee got me into it and she had last played in 2018, when Patch 4.3 was current. As I watched her play while she tried to convince me to join her, I saw the quest text "Use the Duty Finder to confront Tsukuyomi in Castrum Fluminis" or "The airship has arrived above the remains of Dalmasca's capital city. Set off into the Estersands and locate the missing Jenomis" on the side of her screen as she roamed around the broad plains of Yanxia while Drowning in the Horizon played. And when I started playing A Realm Reborn, she waited for me to catch up for six months, so I'd be doing low-level quests in the starting zones and she'd be galavanting around the far east, talking to mysterious beings and performing tasks whose purpose I simply couldn't fathom.

Consider it all fathomed.

Stormblood took me longer than any other expansion to date--three months instead of two--because I had to wait on sashagee to get through the story too! Previously I could just forge ahead at my own pace whenever I wanted, but now that we were playing the game together, I couldn't outpace her too quickly or she'd get annoyed at me. So I spent some time doing other things and we played together when she was feeling well, and in the end we both charged through the fire and smoke of the Ghimlyt Dark together and moved on into Shadowbringers. It's the ending she always hoped for when she got me into the game, even though I took me months and months to get there.


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I was pretty excited to play the game. I preordered it months in advance, and the weekend it came out, I sat down and played it for hours, getting quickly through the opening and the first two dungeons. And then I didn't play it at all until this month, a casuality of my attempt to play Suikoden in Japanese to follow along with the Square Roots Podcast--a task I do intend to get back to eventually--and then my increasingly-prominent social life. When I was out doing something with people five or six nights a week, I didn't have time to play games at all!

Well, thank you for coronavirus for getting me back into gaming.

You might ask why I'm reviewing this if I already reviewed Link's Awakening, and what's more, if my review there was of the DX version and I never played the original. I've never made a distinction between the Zelda games before--I played the GameCube Zelda Collection version of Majora's Mask that allows saving at owl statues, I played the Master Quest version of Ocarina of Time, and I haven't played the HD versions of Wind Waker or Twilight Princess at all. And the simple answer is that I'm the one writing these posts and I can do what I want, but taking it more seriously, the Link's Awakening Remake makes greater gameplay changes than any of the previous enhanced versions. Master Quest changes the dungeons around a bit, Twilight Princess HD has prettier graphics and the map on the WiiU GamePad, but Link's Awakening Remake changes the presentation of the entire game. That's worth some words.


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Working more on the setting I was thinking about magic systems for here. I went with shadaras's suggestion of splitting Changeling: the Lost's Contracts apart into individual spells and called it Sorcery, representing the weird and capricious magic learned from the Fair Folk, and I also want to take Vampire: the Masquerade's necromancy and make that magic learned from ghosts and the dead, and another system that I haven't picked a name for yet based on the demons of the Outer Dark. So that's sorted out.

Anyway, I saw a post on Twitter not that long ago about being careful not to replicate colonialism in fantasy worldbuilding and I've been thinking about it:

( Thoughts )

Anyway, I haven't actually done much fleshing out of the world, but that's what I've thought of so far!

A while ago I wrote about converting Dark Sun over to an Exalted-based system, and while the idea sat in my head for a while, I've since started working on it and gotten pretty far.

( Nerdery within )

Previously, the only non-anime con I've been to is C2E2 2017, so I really wasn't sure what to expect from CONvergence. But a bunch of my friends told me they went and had a great time, and I was going with a bunch of people I knew, so I was sure that it would be at least pleasant.

It was more than pleasant. It was amazing.

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I had such a wonderful time! As I said, I've only ever been to anime cons before, so I wasn't sure what I was getting into. The answer was "The Enchanted Forest!" But also a smaller con that's not blown up into a gigantic mess like ACEN is past the edge of becoming. I never had to wait in a huge line, I got into everything I wanted (as long as it didn't conflict with something else), and I didn't go to anything that wasn't worthwhile. Next year is a bit up in the air, since the con moved hotels this year and so CONvergence 2020 is in August rather than July, but if everyone goes I'll gladly come with them.

It was also nice to not feel like an ancient relic. At anime conventions, I always feel like I'm one of the oldest people there at 36. Admittedly, that does fit with anime--lisekatevans and I were pretty scornful when Cowboy Bebop revealed that grizzled, world-weary ex-cop Jet Black is 36--but it's still disorienting sometimes. At CONvergence I was right in the middle of the age range, which is about where I should be.

I used to make a con circuit, from 2005 to 2008, going to multiple cons every year. Maybe it's time to get back into that again.

Here’s one last picture of all the Bubbles and Baubles staff in their costumes:

( Welcome to the Enchanted Forest! )

I first started playing Dragon Age: Origins a decade ago, shortly after it first came out. Though I was living in Japan at the time and Steam wouldn't let me buy anything due to the conflict between my billing address and my IP, I asked a friend to gift me a copy because I was so excited about the game. Another CRPG by Bioware, which had made Baldur's Gate II and Neverwinter Nights? The promise that your choices, especially your origin story, would deeply affect how the game played out for you? I had been following news of the game for months and I was so excited to play it that I mostly abandoned playing World of Warcraft and dove into Dragon Age, playing twenty hours in a couple weeks even though I was working fifty hour weeks with a two hour commute at the time.

Then, my hard drive crashed and Steam didn't back up my save.

The famed Japanese customer service returned my laptop good as new, including sending a courier to my house to pack it up in a box to my satisfaction and deliver it back to me when it was fixed, and I had fortunately backed up all my music and documents on schoolpsychnerd's new laptop a month or so before the crash, but twenty hours of Dragon Age: Origins was gone. I was discouraged enough that I just went back to World of Warcraft, where my character was preserved on external servers, and didn't touch Dragon Age for a decade. It took the recent Square Roots Podcast series on Dragon Age: Origins to convince me to take a break from Breath of the Wild and pull me back into the game.

It was fun, but I feel like I would have liked it a lot more if I had played it back when it came out.


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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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I almost bought a 3DS because of this game.

I stopped paying attention to gaming news for a long time--basically from late 2005 to 2011-- because 99.9% of my gaming time was taken up with playing World of Warcraft. I don't think I even knew Skyward Sword existed untl I played it at melishus_b's house, for example. But A Link Between Worlds came out in 2013, after I had tuned back into the general gaming consciousness, and everything about it looked great. A game made in the same style as A Link to the Past, set in the same world as A Link to the Past? My favorite Zelda game? And then all the reviews game out and praised it as the greatest Zelda game in years, free of the handholding that had slowly tightened its grip over the series as the years went on. Nonlinearity, with the ability to tackle dungeons and explore in whatever order you want due to the item system? Another system of two worlds like A Link to the Past's Light and Dark World, with intricate connections that need to be navigated to beat the game? All of that sounded like a dream.

Oh, and also Link turns into a painting? Well...I guess it's no stranger than Twilight Princess...

I did not end up buying a 3DS because I had no money, but I never stopped wanting to play A Link Between Worlds. And now I can tell you that it lives up to all that hype I felt five years ago.

The Japanese title makes the connection between it and A Link to the Past even more explicit. A Link to the Past is 神々のトライフォース, "Triforce of the Gods," and A Link Between Worlds is 神々のトライフォース ２.



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Other than Ocarina of Time, this was the Zelda game I was most worried about playing. But whereas in Ocarina's case it's because it was so universally loved, in Skyward Sword it's because of the opposite.

Skyward Sword is a console Legend of Zelda game, so when it came out it got plenty of perfect or near-perfect reviews (AV Club, IGN, Eurogamer, Game Informer). I even listened to an old Nintendo Voice Chat podcast episode a couple months ago where they gushed about how great the game would be. But since then, opinions turned on it a bit. People talk about the motion controls, of course, but they also complain about the fetch quests, the backtracking, and the hand-holding, which have gradually been escalating through the Zelda series and find their ultimate expression here. So when I loaded it up, I wasn't sure whether to expect a complete mess or a maligned masterpiece.

What I got was a game that tries very hard but sadly falls short of its lofty ambitions.

The Japanese title is just a transliteration of the English "Skyward Sword."


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Dramatis Personae:

• Shining Star, mandragora sorcerer-priestess of Nyahré.
  
• Father James, human disciple of the pidgit-folk.
  • Hundred Wings, Father James' familiar spirit bound into the bodies of dozens of ravens.
• Willow, human treesinger raised in Taira.
  
• Amos Burnham, a human from Earth.
  
• Elaphe, a chuzan junior member of the Black Rose.

While Willow and Shining Star settled into their tutoring by the Fog Chirurgeons, Father James sent out Hundred Wings and used his own sorcery to look into the crime and vice occurring around the Roaring Lion. He found a lot of mugging and other petty crimes--there seemed to be a rousing industry in waiting until the adventurers who delved into Etemenanki were spending their earnings on debaucheries and then stealing their money--but none of the slavery or other intolerable deeds he was looking for. Amos wandered the town, asking around about strange pipes and their destinations and looking for people willing to go through one. He made a few contacts and also heard a story about a pipe north of tower town in the forest that led to one of the cloud kingdoms. The person who went through explored a bit but heard the hunting cry of a roc and scurried back into the pipe. Amos privately though the storyteller a bit of a coward--they didn't even know if the roc was nesting on the floating island or not--but filed the story away for later. Elaphe went to the markets and sold some of the loot they had hauled out of Etemenanki, getting a nice profit on the loot, and that night at the Roaring Lion, he distributed some of the other loot items to the rest of the party.

They discussed what they were going to do next and eventually decided to take on the gigases west of the city. Shining Star asked the starfolk Wara and Kimé if they wanted to come, mentioning that there would be a meteor shower in four days and they might be able to find a fallen star that could get them home. Kimé seemed all in favor of going, but Wara was reluctant, saying he was just a farmer. Kimé eventually convinced him, however, though that led Shining Star to worry that she was leading them to their deaths. Amos also spoke with Valeria, the human who had arrived in Agarica from the Roman Empire, and told her about their mission. She immediately agreed to come, and with their group thus enlarged the party went to sleep.

In the morning, full of delicious eggs and mushroom beer (and seed porridge for Elaphe), the party bought a pony for Wara and Kimé to ride on and then set out on the western road. As they showed the guards their tax receipts for the tower trip, they saw the Silent One airship cast off the lines, lift into the air, and perform a large circuit of the Tower before flying southward, and then they road outside the city. They passed through farmsteads and small villages, and when they paused to ask some villagers about marauding gigases they were told that they were further west, closer to the forest to the north of tower town. The road went northwest toward the Sarasan grasslands, so they stuck to the road, riding nearly all day and finding little except a few travelers who got off the road when they saw a party of heavily-armed adventurers approaching on horseback. Around dinner time, they stopped and slept in a copse of trees sheltered from the wind and the cold, ate a meal of travel jerky, bread, and dried fruit, and slept. The night was uneventful.

In the morning, Father James sent Hundred Wings to scout north of the road, and the spirit reported back that it had found a burned-out farm a few miles north, within sight of the wood, and gigas tracks nearby. When the party arrived at the farm, they found several slaughtered mooshrooms and a house with one wall caved in and parts still smoldering, though fortunately the thatch roof had not caught fire. There was a charred corpse of a chuzan in one corner of the house and no other bodies, and Shining Star and Kimé lay earth over the body and performed burial rites to appease their spirit. While the others looked over the farm. There was a well for water and tracks leading north to the forest, but no other valuables or loot taken. Eventually, they decided that rather than go hunting in the forest after the gigases, they would try to lure them out. Elaphe piled several mooshrooms north of the cottage and hid his bob-omb inside with instructions to go off if they were seriously disturbed and then they lit a bonfire and began roasting a mooshroom on it, wafting the smell to the woods.

As the fire was going, Shining Star traced a circle around it and began concentrating on it, feeling the heat of the fire and drawing it out. For hours she chanted as the mooshroom roasted, and eventually Willow, Amos, and Father James saw a fox-like creature with multiple tails dancing amidst the flames. Shining Star offered it a bigger fire if it would help them fight the gigases, but the rokon ignored her speech and looked at the cottage. It asked Shining Star what happened to the hearthfire inside, and when she explained about the gigases, it agreed to fight.

As Amos hid on the thatched roof and the others waited in the cottage, they heard the sound of something large moving through the forest and drawing nearer.


Next time, battle!

At the beginning, I had everyone talk about their short- and long-term plans for their characters, since a sandbox game needs to be player-driven to work well. They want to overthrow the Dragon Emperor, of course, but Shining Star wants to help Wara and Kimé get back home and cure Hemah of his curse, and Father James is looking for Predecessor artifacts and evidence of arremer manipulations. Elaphe wants to get extremely rich and leave a trail of mayhem behind him, which is a good motivation for any adventurer. Amos and Willow have slightly more nebulous motivations but I'm sure they'll figure something out.

Next time, battle against 2(?) gigases!