my OCDness will kill me one day.

One thing I’ve been incredibly irritated with ever since I began the extremely long process of organizing and retagging my music collection: it’s amazingly difficult to find an at least medium quality version of some covers.

And predictably, my reaction to that is to rescan my own collection. Fun times – I’m barely halfway through the T&T stuff -___- (I would’ve thought that these were pretty easy to find since they’re JE, but it’s been surprisingly difficult).

why did i wait so long to play this

NIER IS AWESOME. What’s with all the bad reviews everywhere? It has possibly the most interesting world and the best cast I’ve seen this console generation, and the writing is actually good.

Apparently, I am in a ranting mood.

I saw the following comment when I was blogsurfing for the latest HK music news just now:

“Interesting that many Hong Kong fellows tend to be very skeptical (sometimes in very uneducated ways, unfortunately) whenever it relates to our own country. If you don’t even know how to respect your own country, no one will ever respect you.”

Normally, I wouldn’t bother responding to self-righteous comments like this, but that whole “respect” bit kind of pisses me off. While I am mostly ignorant of all politics in general, the suggestion that I should “respect” China in order to be respected by others in return is simply absurd.

Skipping over how the mechanics of that notion is simply wrong, I will start with this: for all intents and purposes, I don’t consider China to be my own country. We might be lumped under the list of China’s territories, but we are still operating under a separate governing body. On that topic, the Chinese government hasn’t done much to “respect” the people of Hong Kong either, what with all the efforts and decisions that are geared towards assimilating Hong Kong into China’s governing body. Given China’s socialist rule and general track record, why should I not be skeptical? I happen to enjoy having news sources that are not under control or censored by the government. I also enjoy having government officials and representatives who don’t have to be approved by China and are not completely inept. Is that so wrong? Why would anyone be so naive to think that people wouldn’t be instinctively resentful towards China when it’s a very real fear that Hong Kong is slowly becoming China? Why would anyone be so foolish to think that I should respect that same country’s efforts to push its rule on to me?

And let’s be honest here – China has never had a good reputation when it comes to ethical businesses, not just in Hong Kong, but worldwide. The economy is developing too fast for the government to impose the correct regulations on stopping all the shady business practices that China is infamous for, and the people who could take advantage of this are taking advantage of it to the fullest without regards to the well-being of others. This is the truth. It has nothing to do with respect. What kind of respect should I have for the country known for having industrial chemicals in baby milk powder? More importantly, can this country even command any respect from anyone, when the country’s own people don’t even have pride in its name and have no remorse about destroying it?

And… that is all; I am out of steam. That was a long srsbsns rant. -_______-

Star Ocean: The Last Hope International

HELLO I JUST SPENT 130 HOURS ON THIS IN ALMOST TWO WEEKS. I still can’t decide if I like this game or not. There are so many things wrong with it and so many thing right with it that I just can’t decide, so… extremely long and spoiler-filled rant ahead.

star ocean 4 is a nightmare for OCD people.

I lied – didn’t really want to go through the DFF portions on DDFF again, so I decided to start SO4 instead. This game is quite possibly the worst game possible to play for OCD people like me. It’s that “OMG MUST HAVE THAT LITTLE STAR NEXT TO THIS RIDICULOUS BATTLE TROPHYYYYYYYY *proceeds to work on it for 20 hours*” OCD mentality. FUN TIMES.

In other news, I think this is the worst writing I have encountered in a Star Ocean game. It’s just… wow.

Persona 3 Portable

I’m probably going to be on a loooooong PSP run these days, with all those March Squeenix releases. Might as well write about P3P before I forget.

I’ve played P3:Fes before, so I bought P3P mainly because of the addition of the female protagonist and her new social links. I half expected it to be just an afterthought – add new female protagonist, change a few pronouns, switch some social links, done – but it was a bit better than I expected. The female protagonist actually seems a little bit more empathetic in gameplay interactions, which makes the social links a lot more enjoyable. Her social link options are also better than original MC’s; they actually add character to the male half of the SEES cast. (Her Junpei BFF link was awesome :p.)

Plot-wise, there isn’t much to say, since it’s not like it’s changed from P3. P3P operates in visual novel mode though: instead of anime cutscenes and standard RPG town maps, you get dialogue boxes and static point-and-click town interaction maps. I’ve seen people complain about this, but I didn’t mind it so much; the maps are quite well-designed visually and saves a lot of walking time. (Speaking of visually appealing designs, P3/P4 actually does this pretty well – menus and icons are all designed and presented in a certain pop-pish style.)

As far as gameplay, again, not much has changed. The few new tweaks actually make the game much easier though. For one, you no longer get tired in Tartarus, so all of the dungeon crawling can be condensed into one night per month, which frees up a lot of space for upping attributes and hanging with social links. You can also directly control your allies now, a la P4, so no more Full Assault AI Mitsuru casting Tentarafoo when you need her for Mind Charged Bufudyne. Persona fusing has been made much easier too. Each persona now produces a skill card at certain levels, so instead of sitting around fusing, re-fusing, and down-fusing persona ingredients to get rid of noise for a specific skill set, most skills can be learned with skill cards (with a few exceptions – Morning Star, Samsara, Thunder Reign and the like still have to be inherited). Given that this is a portable system, I personally think the new “shortcut” is acceptable – I’m not going to sit around and fuse for hours when I’m on the go. It does take out the challenge of conquering the fusion system though. There are some more new changes, but those don’t really affect the gameplay so much… There is also a new dungeon-of-sorts added, where you can fight powered-up versions of previous bosses and have gimmicky battles with weird opponents, which is a nice little addition.

I feel like I have more to say, but I can’t quite remember it right now… Oh well. I definitely enjoyed the FeMC P3P – hopefully, Atlus would consider having MCs of both genders in future Personas.

Radiant Historia

Just finished the game with true ending. It made me cry T^T.

This is definitely one of the more satisfying handheld RPGs I’ve played recently though. It’s got many things going for it:

Interesting gameplay: The idea of traveling between different timelines, with actions in one timeline altering the other, isn’t necessarily new, but the pieces fit together pretty well. The battle system is also quite new; your enemies show up on a grid of nine and you have to plan out how to push them around to maximize damage output – more-so early game than late, since early game spells only affect one single square. It can get a little tedious around mid-game, but luckily, at that point you get nicer spells that would both make your life easier and make combat a little more exciting.

Decent story: It actually starts out a bit slow and kind of unravels at the end. You are given the White Chronicle, which has the ability to send you back into certain events you have experienced so you could change them and avoid the bad decisions you have made previously. With it, you can stop the destruction of the world. Early on, the story kind of goes with the flow of Stocke’s life; you don’t really find out why he is given this power and how he can use it to save the world until near the end (though the hints come in pretty early, as early as mid-game). Given how much backtracking and jumping back and forth between two timelines Stocke has to do before the end, the story itself actually wasn’t as confusing as I would’ve expected, and was engaging enough to make me want to play more. The game also has a pretty good protagonist: Stocke comes across as the typical silent brooding protagonist at first, but as the story progresses you realize that he is actually a pretty empathetic man, and is very aware of others around him. The best part is that he is not an idealist; when things need to be done, they are done. It’s amazing that he could keep track of all the different events in the different timelines though. :p

Decent music: Not Shimomura’s best, but still pretty good to listen to. It’s a shame sound quality on the DS isn’t that great.

Apparently Atlus released a really small printing of this game and now it is hard to find anywhere. Hopefully they’ll make another batch, since this game is definitely worthy of it.