#i just think it's neat. from kazuma's perspective too

[brushstrokes-art]

masked apprentice with a shoulder cat what will he do (spoilers under the cut!)

so when i was initially getting into tgaa, specifically upon reaching 1-2, i had already been spoiled on two things:

kazuma survives.

kazuma is a catboy.

then during the case i got the impression that darka had Mysteriously Vanished midway through the investigation. i then proceeded to leap to several conclusions, and for a good long while i was convinced that kazuma had somehow taken darka with him and whenever he showed back up it'd be with a certain black cat in tow.

obviously that never happened, but like. what if, y'know?

[megatentious]

My lengthy defense of the most hated Persona game

Here’s my grand defense for the most hated game in the series: Persona 1, AKA Revelations: Persona. I know it’s too late to try and rehabilitate the game’s reputation on the internet, but I’m hoping that by rambling in modestly structured form for a bit, at least some folks might be able to look at Persona with a fresh perspective. It would be cool if everyone could try to understand what the game did so well and why it resonated so strongly with me and 2 or so other people. If you are the kind of person that thinks games age and become archaic, then I probably don’t have any hope of reaching you, but still, try to put yourself in the right mindset and approach the game on its own terms, and maybe you’ll discover something quite special.

So, Persona. Persona does very interesting things with choice. As the first Megaten rpg released in America, the negotiation system was a revelation (har har), providing the choice to talk your way out of battles and into rewards is a natural D&D element that never got a foothold in countless videogame conversions of the game, and in the first Persona these elements are at their peak. With every demon having four moods, four series of animation and four sets of voiced sound effects, the expanded options really let you get into the headspace of the demons you’re conversing with, unlike traditional SMT’s more spare binary system. Getting into the thick of things with complex sets of reactions (Joy + Interest, that’s what’s up) makes for a fun simulation.

The theme of choice is also really built into the game’s fabric, it’s the reason why in old usenet postings, Persona was recommended to folks who were fans of Gold Box games, during a time when RPG labels were more porous and that sneaky “J” hadn’t yet latched itself omnipresently to the term. Choice here also extends to the fifth character in your party, a friendly way to promote replay value without new game plus, and certain choices locking you out of giant chunks of the game, an unfriendly way of getting you through the game again. In a world though where developers are desperate to ensure that gamers experience all content (so many buzzwords!), the chutzpah of Persona being willing to lock you out of huge swathes of the game is something I actually admire.

It’s easy to underestimate the impact of the modern day setting in a post Persona 3/TWEWY/Alpha Protocol world, but dungeons that were hospitals and police stations and high school students snarling “EAT THIS” with MIGs in pitched street battles felt revelatory. Exploring the comically low-rent polygonal city (is this another reference to the abstracted icons of SMT1 and 2 world maps?) was actually fun, as ridiculous as waiting for traffic to pass might seem. There are also many complaints about the first person perspective dungeons, even though the rest of the game is third person, but the setting variety is nice and many of the wall patterns are quite evocative (Deva Yuga looks like Persepolis!)

The game also does PSX-era philosophizing in a tasteful and generally thoughtful way, while contemporaries were drawing from Evangelion, Persona looked to Zhuangzi and Jung. Not very high-falutin, true, but at least middle brow enough such that my 14 year old Sophie’s World reading self was entranced. The game has something neat to say about loneliness and identity and the way we construct the world around ourselves (all hinted at in the moody intro. The story is very nice and very Kaneko, even if he’s overestimating the literary quality in this interview, I’m very fond of it and it is my franchise favorite.

Here’s where I alienate the remaining people who might have been on board with me so far: if you ignore the loss of the Snow Queen Quest, a 20 hour alternate version of the story that takes place in a series of SMT:If... like towers, Revelations: Persona is actually the superior game. “Lunarvale,” a hodgepodge of America and Japan cobbled together by localizers attempting to mask the game’s origins, is actually more weird and interesting than the Mikage-cho that appears in Persona PSP. This bizarre mashup, combined with a nonsense translation attempt, somehow manages to better fit the lurid dreamscape vibe the original developers were going for. I can’t undersell how one-of-a-kind and wonderfully unsettling the game’s atmosphere is in the PSX version, and this is helped along of course by the sound.

Here are excerpts from some things I wrote on the music in this game:

Revelations: Persona has the best soundtrack in the franchise, possibly the best soundtrack ever made. In raw quantitative terms it's ridiculous, 113 songs and 3 hours of music without being looped, and all without doing Persona 2's trick of repeated (but still awesome!) remixes. Two majorly sweet leitmotifs for the two major quests, employed creatively and thoughtfully, four fantastic composers on four discs, cohesive and thematically coherent when by all rights it should feel disjointed as fuck, this is a generous OST!

Hidehito Aoki (R.I.P.) composed the dungeon music, which is exquisite. Lengthy songs that are moody, elegant, just plain beautiful and get you PUMPED! The iconic Deva Yuga Monochrome: School Revisited Dream-like, synthy, catchy, beautiful, quintessential Persona sound. Pandora's Den (Deepmost Area): The climax at 1:12! Ice Castle/Black Snow The twists and turns in this one, so effing good. Sebek Music, Karma Palace 90's music is the best!!! Misaki Okibe's range is ridiculous, she composed some of the most memorable, interesting tracks in the whole game. Reverse Dream World: You think you have this song figured out in the first few seconds, but stick around to see where it suddenly veers off to around :30, hilarious and awesome. Theme of Nemurin's Love: The intro! The power of a simple lovely melody, a little Uematsu-esque. Augustia's Wood: The save music, so memorable, I love the grumbling. City 2 Accident: Do you remember wandering the streets in the town, disoriented, listening to this gorgeousness, thinking about how Lunarvale suddenly seemed so scary, like an unsettling dream? Bar Attacked by Harem Queen: A bit of jazzy beauty. And most important of all of course, Misaki Okibe is the composer of the Pharmacy Music, featuring vocals by one Hidehito Aoki of all people. Satomi Tadashi Drugstore Song In our heads forever, teaching us about item use since 1996. 

More alienating for readers who have gotten this far: the “whitewashing” character designs were all improvements, Kazuma Kaneko redrew everything himself and it’s easy to tell that a lot of thought was put into the redesigns. Finally, Mark is also >>>> Masao, everyone’s always yelling about the jive-talking but to me he came across as quite smart and savvy. I dunno, maybe this is just a Flavor of Love/Outsourced minorities just wanna see themselves effect operating here, leave me alone you guys! So yes, the franchise’s current fanbase might not be fond of them, but the cast is comprised of characters that are meant to be iconic and not friends you wish you had in real life, a cast that, FFVI-like, is meant to evoke broader themes and not follow the typical arcs of many RPGs these days. Check out the classiness of Yuki’s design, and allow me to quote some more stuff on how Tsuchiya, master of the character theme, nails it for each party member.

The sign of a good character theme is when you can extrapolate from instrument choice and melody to personality. Here Tsuchiya is the man, no one does it better this side of Uematsu. I hear these songs and I've got a perfect picture in my mind of each cast member. It's what I think of when I think of "videogame music" ha, here are my personal favorites, I could listen to these endlessly. Mary/Maki: Cheerful, just a hint of melancholy in the notes, love that slap bass. Yuki: Starts a bit slow, but soon we learn that Yuki's cool but determined. Alana: The song tells me she's brassy, energetic, fun. Chris/Reiji: Dangerous, exciting, a bad-ass delinquent. Ellen/Elly: Classy, elegant, confident.

Some also rag on the dungeon design, but it seems unfair to expect centerpiece labyrinths along the lines of Strange Journey or Etrian Odyssey in a game going for something completely different. Nevertheless, you’ve got tricky mazes with dead ends that test resource allocation skills and provide a sense of accomplishment. Encounters are tough and require thought, careful consideration of when to flee and negotiate is imperative for dungeon survival. This is something that gets lost a bit in the PSP remake as the encounter rate is increased but battles are a bit easier. Exploiting elemental weaknesses isn’t as elegant as in later games, but with a ludicrously high 14 damage types breadth supersedes depth. And there’s even a positioning system to consider that the developers decided to drop from later games rather than refine. In the end, surviving the dungeon and beating the boss is an RPG staple that just plain works, although yes you will probably grit your teeth at some of the loading times.

And finally, you don’t have to take my random word for it. Parish really liked it too! How’s that for an appeal to authority?

For series buffs, it’s fun to trace this game’s historical lineage, as one of the earlier spinoffs of Shin Megami Tensei, it's easy to spot the mainline series influence: the occultism of the opening ritual, the hospital as first dungeon, the first person perspective for dungeon travel, BLUE POINTER MAN, and the omnipresent danger of demons in town and dungeon alike. Revelations: Persona is drawing from a rich and storied history, but manages to recast SMT traditions in interesting new directions. Again, the atmosphere is really unbelievable and something I haven’t come across in other games. It’s more than a simple curiosity and it doesn’t deserve dumb dismissal or sneering derision for its flaws. Revelations: Persona is a real marvel, modern games ought to draw more inspiration from its lessons, and the game belongs in the RPG canon, there I said it!

[cynthiaandsamus]

Custom Toonami Block Week 89 Double Feature Rundown!

Demon Slayer: Mugen Train: So Tanjiro and crew are on the Infinity Train and don’t even meet the girl with divorced parents ot the talking dog or robot or any of that shit. They meet up with Rengoku and get put to sleep so we get the whole deal with exploring character through a dream episode shit… except with Zenitsu and Inosuke it’s just random omake shit, I read that in the manga they showed their dreams first and held the gutpunches of Rengoku and Tanjiro’s dreams for last which probably makes more sense because it’s hard to take Tanjiro’s Survivor Guilt Trauma and Rengoku’s deadbeat dad seriously when it’s immediately followed by Inosuke playing Spelunky and Zenitsu being in a shojo manga. Anyway Tanjiro wakes up because of his dad or something and fights Demon Deidara on top of the train and fucks him up and is all to hell with your survivor’s guilt nightmares I love my family and they’re glad I’m alive and shit and knocks him the fuck out. Unfortunately since this is a movie there’s a big transformation and he turns himself into a train for… some reason. Like yeah obviously it means he gets to live and becomes a boss monster but I feel like after this fight being a demon train is going to seriously hinder his ability to keep eating humans, people aren’t just going to ride the flesh train… also don’t google ‘ride the flesh train’. But anyway Inosuke has to stop Tanjiro from chopping his own head off and they cut the train’s head off right after the random human Engineer does way more damage to Tanjiro than the actual villain did. The train crashes but nobody dies because Rengoku did some flaming backflips or something that made sure no one died despite the entire train flipping the fuck over and doing some Fast and Ferious Mugen Drift bullshit but okay. And then nothing happens and the movie ends and there’s no extra final boss that makes things sad, nope, no siree.

Konosuba: Legend of Crimson: Kazuma thinks he’s starting to fill into his harem protagonist role but we’re all too self-aware to know that won’t happen so he spends the first fifteen minutes or so getting sexually assaulted and it’s honestly kind of uncomfortable but I think the movie kind of knows it because even Aqua is sympathetic to him after that. Anyway we bum around Megumin’s home village for a little while and everyone’s as edgy and dramatic as she is and they all probably have profile pics of that goth girl with the cross from the early 2000s. We get some nice scenes with her and some character development that they actually play relatively straight for once. I read that the VNs kind of push Kazuma/Megumin as the canon ship and this seems to be the main foundation for that development. And then we have Sylvia who is oddly the most nuanced Konosuba character for some reason, like most of them are just extensions of their one gag but Sylvia has a couple different gags and it makes me feel kinda bad when she dies. I’m glad they didn’t harp too much on the dick thing like the internet led me to believe, like they make the one joke about it and move on so we don’t get into transphobic territory. She gets like three different transformations and gets more naked and horny with each one until she’s just a big floating glob of tits like a Senran Kagura boss. It’s neat how they got all the currently revealed Devil King Generals involved to really bring the series progression into perspective and Kazuma does get some respect for solving the issue and literally getting himself nuked on multiple occasions. Also idk since I don’t hear anyone talking about this but the guy who make’s everything’s hot assistant looks kinda like Sylvia and was maybe her as a human before she became a chimera? Idk seems weird to introduce this character now after we know more about the inventor but like I said I haven’t seen anyone else say anything so I may be way off. Also apparently Megumin’s clan was created by that one dude that makes everything and they’re basically Shadow the Hedgehog and were made to be edgy and powerful but mostly edgy. So they beat Sylvia’s giant mecha naga form with the power of friendship and this gun they found and Megumin’s little sister and then take out her naked goo form with Megumin and Yunyun’s Tag Team Spirit Bomb Explosion Cone Gun thing. Megumin has an existential crisis about being more useful but Kazuma tells her she’s fine as she is which is some real development for him coming to appreciate his friends and be appreciated by them which is nice. Also Yunyun is in this movie.