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Octopath Traveler Demo - Impressions

Fall is now upon us, as the days grow shorter, and the weather cooler, it’s a perfect time to stay inside, next to the fire and enjoy the bountiful harvest of free-range 2017 video games. Nintendo has been having a particularly good year; the Switch is selling to the point where the company doesn’t even know if they can meet demand this holiday season, first party releases are well received,  and they’ve successfully courted smaller developers, old and new to the platform, including the hugely successful Stardew Valley, with games like Hollow Knight and Cosmic Star Heroine joining the fray at a later date.

Nintendo’s latest Direct went over even more high-profile releases in the 30 or so minutes they devoted to the Switch. But as far as I’m concerned, Square Enix’s yet-untitled RPG, Project Octopath Traveller, stole the show.  We’d already heard that Silicon Studio (of Bravely Default &  Bravely Second fame) was working on a RPG; but these were the first details we’d seen since the game was teased in one of the first Switch directs, boasting a standout visual style marrying 2D character sprites and 3D backgrounds.

Nintendo devoted a chunk of this direct to the a basic rundown of the game’s systems, then dropped the demo on the Switch e-shop shortly after their hour long presentation, and it’s, in a word, fantastic.

The demo follows two of the eight playable characters through the first chapter of their respective stories, at about and hour a piece, and showcases how their character abilities they interact with the world.  For example, the Dancer, Primrose, can “Allure” townspeople into following her, and, hilariously, have them participate as guests in combat. The Soldier, Olberic, can duel NPCs via turn-based combat to knock them out for a short time.

It’s a cool idea, conceptually, giving players multiple ways to solve side quests, but in practise, the two abilities in the demo feel a bit same-y. For their part, Square Enix is taking player feedback into account with a short survey after completing the demo, so it’s likely the finished product will be drastically different.

For a gander at everything else Nintendo announced during this last direct, you can check out the replay here.

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Got something planned here in the next little bit, but life has gotten sorta busy. More to come. 

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Role-Playing for One: Revisiting the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook Series

https://gamebooks.org was used as reference for this piece, with background from http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-08-16-you-are-the-hero-a-history-of-fighting-fantasy

I've always loved reading. When other kids were playing our school's custom made tennis ball tag game (largely an excuse to whip tennis balls at people), messing around in class or just generally engaging in grade-school mayhem, I always had a book handy.

I read in class when I was done my work (and sometimes when I wasn’t). I read on car trips. I read on the bus rides home, or while walking. I read when I had nothing else to do. I read at home instead of going outside, or even instead of video games; my usual escapist pastime of my formative years.

By the summer I turned eleven, I was reading literally anything I could get my hands on, from the Animorphs series, X-Files episode novelizations, ‘Young Adult’ novels about first aid, or even the Star Trek technical manual. I will even admit to having read crappy novelizations of Ninja Gaiden and Blaster Master at some point.

In my defense - it was a different time.

So, while kids my age were at summer camp, my idea of a day out was either going to my local bookstore or biking over to the library. I'd spend entire afternoons wandering the air-conditioned stacks, checking books out armfuls at a time, then spending stretches of days inside alternating between console RPGs and reading stacks of books by my bed.

It was around that time, on one of my trips that I first found a gamebook.

You probably know them as the Choose Your Own Adventure books. At very least, you’ve probably seen the covers. The concept behind the series is simple: books with non-linear page numbers dividing the narrative into decision points, ending in a number of ways based on your decisions throughout.

The series has always been the poster child for utterly ridiculous deaths -  and some of them were downright gruesome for a series that was aimed at pre-teens. An illustrated scene featuring your character being strangled by a Yakuza assassin is just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, as a connoisseur of truly awful video game character deaths - a trait developed from a childhood playing adventure games, I can confirm that some of these are actually pretty gruesome. 

I was content enough in my discovery, but little did I know that the well went deeper. I still hadn’t heard about Gamebook Adventures. While the Choose Your Own Adventure series got its start in the 70s, the concept of a gamebook that was also a role playing game didn’t materialize until the start of the Fighting Fantasy series of books, starting with 1982’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

The book was penned jointly by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson both of Games Workshop founding fame (Not to be confused with the man behind Steve Jackson games - who confusingly started writing Fighting Fantasy books as well) as an attempt to describe the substance of tabletop role-playing to a wider audience. The end result was something else entirely; a self-contained RPG adventure with Choose Your Own Adventure trappings.

The concept proved decently popular, and Fighting Fantasy exploded to include almost seventy entries in 25 years, including Sorcery!; a story told across 4 separate books that allowed players to transfer their character between them. 

But I wasn't aware of them until the 1990s, when I fished a copy of Appointment with FEAR from a shelf of dog-eared paperbacks at what was quite possibly the world’s most disorganized used bookstore. It’s easy to see why I bought it - It’s pretty hard to say no to a cover this cool.

When I got home, I remember just about flipping out when the book asked me to go get some dice and a pencil to fill out a character sheet. And even though my first run probably ended in failure - most of them do - I was hooked.

I was hooked because, for me, the Fighting Fantasy series was a relief. Beyond it being a cool concept, it allowed a scared, lonely, depressed kid lacking in friends and safe places to see what was so engaging about pencil and paper games. The books hint at what makes pencil-and-paper gaming what it is: skill checks, dice rolls, inventory, combat, and world building, since most of the books take place in the world of Titan - a stand-in for the world building of Dungeons & Dragons without needing the critical element - people. And I love them for it.

These days, a handful of the books have made their way to mobile devices, boasting quality of life improvements like and bookmarks, which saves me trying to read a paperback while trying to hold it like a bowling ball - fingers trying to save various decision points to go back to when you failed.

And fail you would; Fighting Fantasy books are the worst of D&D dungeon design that we love to hate so much - or maybe just hate, depending on your taste. Dead end skill checks that force a restart of the entire book, insufferable mazes that required reams of graph paper to map properly, entire branches of the book that served as red herrings, and even unwinnable states, triggered by forgetting to pick up a key items early in the story. Some of the books boast an instant-death kill-count well in the 30s, not counting combat deaths. I’m working through House of Hell right now, and haven’t gotten more than a few encounters in before dying to some seemingly harmless choice.

While some of the earlier entries show their age, there’s still a lot of worth here - with some caveats. There is a lot of nostalgia at play here. If you’re not the sort of person that likes to make their own maps in video games, or write down notes, this might not be the right fit for you. Many of the Fighting Fantasy apps, published by Tin Man Games on iOS and Android, have a mode where you can “Play like an old-school cheater!”, allowing you to bypass skill checks or item checks that normally lock you out of choices otherwise.

While I certainly don’t think they’re perfect, I do still think they’re worth a look, especially at their price point on mobile - less than $3 on the Canadian Apple or Google Play stores. I don’t guarantee you’ll find them great, but hopefully you can find something of value looking back over what I have no trouble calling a criminally underrated series.

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Standby for some hot #content this week, as I write up my personal feelings on Gamebook Adventures, the love child of D&D and Choose Your Own Adventure books. 

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Amazing piece on Kotaku about Mass Effect: Andromeda. 

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Philip Zimbardo’s PLAYERUNKNOWN’S Murder Island

Before I know it, I’m airborne. The cargo plane glides on above me, spewing avatars from its tail-end at an alarming rate. As I look around, I see a cluster of buildings off to my right, so I point my character towards them and go into a sharp dive, hoping to be the first to hit the ground, and hoping the buildings are passed over for more obvious targets. My parachute opens. I look around, and much to my dismay, see a parachute already below me. I curse.

He hits the ground before my character does, on the opposite side of a moderately sized, two story house, so the second I touch down, I dash for the front door, it flies open, and I freeze. He’s standing there. In his right hand, I see a dark shape, contrasted by the light of the open doorway behind him. He freezes too, but for a second less. I see his gun raise. It levels at me. He fires, twice. I’m hit, but already running for a room hoping to find anything. A weapon, a flak vest, a frying pan.

Yes, a gun!

He’s in the door as I grab it, and before I can move, he fires twice. I’m hit.

Silence as the now-familiar text appears on screen.

#82/95. Better luck next time!

That's PLAYERUNKNOWN’s Battlegrounds, distilled down; loud, brutal and usually short. It's a third/first person competitive survival shooter in name only, since you're really only “surviving” other people.

L’enfer, c’est les autres.

The formula isn’t anything new: the eponymous PLAYERUNKNOWN was behind the Arma mod, which is exactly this game. Others have also attempted the formula, but this is the first attempt that has seen any sort of groundswell outside of survival game circles.

For the uninitiated: Players skydive onto an abandoned island bristling with ruined buildings containing weaponry (and weapon mods), armor, vehicles, and Red Bull with one goal: don't die.

This, in practice, is much easier said than done.

Airstrikes on random parts of the map are a regular occurrence, other players can be lying in wait anywhere, and  if that wasn’t enough, every few minutes, an ominous blue wall of electricity contracts ever inward, draining health every second you aren't inside it. Last one alive wins.  

It’s about ninety percent, Battle Royale, minus the bomb collars, and minus Beat Takeshi (which is a major point against the game).

Battlegrounds is by no means the best game this year. Given how strong a year it’s been already, that might not be much of a surprise. Like any early access game, it boasts a farmer’s crop of technical issues and suffers from a severe lack of polish. But despite itself,  I can’t stop playing it. More than anything else this year, it changes me into a different person every time I play, and I can’t get enough.

Playing it is nothing like it sounds on paper. If it sounds fairly run of the mill, it’s not. There’s something indescribable about being holed up in some run-down house, hearing footsteps outside just knowing that someone is going to roll through the door to your left at any second.

An inability to find a good weapon is part of it, but the sound design lends credence to the tension here.

Gravel crunching under footfalls, doors opening inside houses, or the sound of distant gunfire like thunder, rolling towards me as I cower inside an attic, listening to the constant drone of flies around me.

There is a sort of weight to every encounter. I still remember my first kill, cringing as the sharp crack of my shotgun echoed through my headphones, my would-be attacker crumpling at my feet like a puppet with its strings cut.

A game you can write stories about doesn’t come along every day. There’s a certain quality to clockwork systems when everything suddenly falls into place and just works.

But what's amazing is that it all gets easier.

By my fifth or sixth match, I'm waiting patiently in a house and cooly unload a dozen rounds through a ruined wall as someone peeks their head in.

I’m lining up headshots, and firing on instinct. Without a thought, I’m stealing a car as someone gets out to try and find me, and as I pull away, I see the two crossbow bolts I fired at its original owner sticking out of the trunk.

Yet in real life I'm not remotely a violent person. I’m not even that big on survival games. That’s not to say that I’m being desensitized to real violence.

But maybe there’s some truth to Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment.

Or maybe there’s just something here that makes people want to tell a story.

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Oh look, my aesthetic in videogame form

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Ryu is a Hand Sorcerer. 

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We were this close to greatness.

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Fantastic piece over at Ars Technica. I’m pretty sure Nintendo just straight up hired magicians for a while.

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Jeff Goldblum is serving sausages out of a food truck called “Chef Goldblum”

Praise be

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The Persona Series Turns 20, Steals All Our Hearts

It’s crazy to think, but the Persona franchise can now legally drink (almost) anywhere in the world.  the series really became known outside Japan after Persona 3 collectively charmed the JRPG faithful in 2006. But its’ history as a spinoff to the Shin Megami Tensei series is much more storied.

I'm proof; I first played Revelations: Persona in 1997, without knowing a thing about its parent series, Shin Megami Tensei. I'm not going to sit here and talk about high concepts or systems; I just thought the box art was ridiculously cool. I rented it at least 4-5 times that summer, biking it home in a bag wrapped around my handlebars, and played it for hours at a time.

As you do when you’re a high school student with tons of free time.

The fact that it existed at all blew my mind; Most JRPGs on the Playstation in the late 90s leaned heavily on medieval fantasy as a setting, so a having a game set a present-day, urban fantasy-themed setting was totally unheard of. On top of all that, a plot centered around teens summoning Jungian aspects of their psyche to fight demons invading our reality, all while also dealing with the most teenage of problems was too good for me, also a teen, to pass up.

It was a change in focus and scope that fueled the creation of series spin-offs, too. Shin Megami Tensei: if  was an experiment in creating an RPG similar to Shin Megami Tensei writ large, on a smaller geographic scale, with more focus on characters. Kouji Okada, felt that the first two Megami Tensei games had made the core concepts stale, and so for the spin-off, focused on a single high school overrun by demons rather than a city. The new setting and increased focus on characters proved so popular despite the short development time that Megami Ibunroku Persona, known to us as Persona: Revelations, began development in 1994, hurriedly after If was released.

Unlike the brash, colorful post-Persona 3 games, the first two entries were definitely painted by the same brush as the mainline Shin Megami Tensei games. Persona: Revelations was a fairly dark affair, all muted color palettes, MIDI tunes, and a dark plot involving demonic summoning and the collapse of social order, with a bit of mad science thrown in for good measure. Still, the focus on characters was clearly front-and-center when compared to the gameplay focused Megami Tensei games.  

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not calling Persona: Revelations perfect. Even for the time, it was far from it. The combat was dated even by 90s RPG standards, for starters. Conversing with enemies was novel, but the effort was mostly hamstrung by the localization. Oh boy, the localization.  The first two Persona games were known here in the West for their notoriously shoddy localization. Without writing a novel about 90s English localization; anything culturally Japanese was gone from the mix. Characters’ names were completely changed. Text was directly translated and not revised at all, leading to a lot of clumsy dialog and confusing lines - like when trying to converse with demons. And, the whopper: a character was completely recoloured to appear black, and given lazily written ebonics dialog.

Despite all this, Revelations: Persona exceeded expectations in all regions, and a sequel was quickly developed after its release, doubling down on the urban fantasy of the first game.

However successful Revelations: Persona was, we wouldn’t see it in North America until 2011, on the Playstation Portable. Instead, we in North America got the second of two games, Eternal Punishment, in late 2000.

By then, localization had become more than a euphemism for “let’s culturally sanitize this entire work!” (but that’s a topic for another time) Even so, since there were direct references to Nazis in Innocent Sin, Atlus Japan was reluctant to localize it for western audiences. They moved to localize the direct sequel, Eternal Punishment, instead.

It’s not hard to see why; it’s another setting steeped in urban fantasy, and in true Persona fashion, it introduces old ideas in a novel way. Take the “Rumor” system: your characters can turn rumors into reality by paying rumormongers to spread them around Persona 2’s Sumaru City. In practise, they reveal new shops, weapons, and optional combat encounters, but presented in a novel way.

Which brings us to Persona 3, 4  and now 5; games that are credited with the modernization of the JRPG and the revitalization of the genre. And that’s true in a lot of ways, musically, artistically, graphically, and through its systems. But if you drill down, the modern Persona games have done nothing more than improve on what was already there. And that’s fine, it’s what Atlus does best.

While I absolutely love the direction the series went in with Persona 3, there’s something to be said about the quiet, melancholy tone of the first game’s opening movie. Or how completely batshit insane Innocent Sin is.

All this to say; play Persona 5. It’s fantastic.

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This is fantastic.

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And so it begins...

Hi - Thought I’d make a place to post random game writing and various ramblings. Hope you enjoy!

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Pretty much everyone on the mod team, and myself included, are tired of the SJW/social justice warrior thing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used outside of an attempt to be condescending and shitty. If you want to criticize something on the site, engage with the idea presented and don’t just reduce yourself to throwing around insults.

Matthew Rorie of Giant Bomb (via giantbomblr)