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).

“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. -_______-

I was introduced to the Star Ocean series through SO3–yes, the one with the ridiculous 4D plot twist. I didn’t think that was that horrible, obviously, since I went on to buy the PSP remakes of SO1 and 2 when they came out. I enjoyed all three games in the series (though Claude and Rena annoyed the heck outta me), but to be honest, the Star Ocean games have never really had stellar storytelling and well-developed casts. What they do have is some really good gameplay, namely, the battle system and item creation system. SO4, the prequel of the entire series, shares both of these traits–except in an extremely amplified form, so in the end we have a game with really addicting gameplay, but really bad cutscenes and characters.

For someone who enjoys good story and character development, this game is… kind of a nightmare. The underlying plot isn’t really horrible–it’s mediocre and kind of ridiculous at times, but it’s not really anything we haven’t seen happen before in jRPGs. Earth is on the brink of destruction after World War 3; people are forced to explore space for an alternative living space. The protagonists, Edge Maverick and Reimi Saionji, are part of a group chosen and formed for this purpose. As they journey through space and explore different worlds, they discover a group called Grigori working in the background, escalating the evolution and destruction of entire planets, and ultimately, the entire universe. Sounds like standard RPG fare, right? And it is, so the plot isn’t the problem. The problem is that the cutscenes telling this story are so badly-written that I actually facepalmed and wandered off to do other things whenever they showed up. I have never done this before, not even with FF13′s cheesy romantic scenes or Xenosaga’s Shion-being-an-airhead scenes. And I don’t really have the skill to correctly describe how bad the cutscenes are, so I guess I’ll give some examples:

Typical cutscene before the last four boss fights:
BOSS: ONE AND ALL AND ALL AND ONE AND-
EDGE: WHAT.
BOSS: We are going to destroy the world so no one feels suffering. If you join our collective being, you will never feel pain.
EDGE: NO. YOU ARE WRONG!!!!111!!1!1!!!!!!!!!
BOSS: SILLY PEOPLES DO YOU NOT SEE HOW POWERFUL WE ARE [cast random spell at party!]
PARTY: AAAAH
EDGE: ADFAGAKLFJ YOU ARE STILL WRONG HOW CAN YOU THINK THAT WE WOULD BE HAPPY LIKE THIS
BOSS: LET’S SPOUT SOME MORE STUFF ABOUT SUFFERING AND PAIN AND BEING ONE AND ALL
EDGE: NO STILL WRONG LET ME SPOUT SOME MORE SELF-RIGHTEOUS NONSENSE AT YOU EVEN THOUGH IT WILL ACCOMPLISH NOTHING
BOSS: TALK TALK TALK SUFFERING SADNESS TALK TALK TALK TALK VOID TALK TALK TALK
EDGE: TALK JUSTICE TALK TALK HAPPINESS TALK TALK TALK KILLING PLANETS IS WRONG TALK TALK TALK
BOSS: ARGH YOU TALK TOO MUCH SO I WILL TALK BACK AT YOU
EDGE: TALK TALK TALK TALK TALK
PARTY MEMBERS: EVERYONE GETS A LINE!
EDGE: YEAH!
BOSS: YOU PEOPLE ARE DUMB.
Five minutes later, the boss fight begins.

The above exchange happens at least four times. I am not exaggerating; they have the same conversation every time they meet a new boss near/at endgame. And then there is this other gem that I am quite fond of:

Edge and party ends up on an alternate Earth 100 years before their time. Reimi gets captured; Edge walks into the military base to find her:
VAGUELY EVIL LOOKING WOMAN: Hello there, people. Your friend is safe with us!
EDGE: Oh cool! That’s a relief! What a nice woman you are.
WOMAN: Yeah. She “told” us about your advanced technology. Give it to us so we can save this Earth!
EDGE: Er… Sure! Never mind that it could be potentially dangerous and cause all kinds of problems since this Earth is, you know, at least 100 years backwards in time and technology. Never mind that I just walked through an entire institution focused on questionable “research” of things and people from other planets! I’ll just hand over this crystal that powers my ship so I can save the Earth! Yeah!
Woman proceeds to throw them in prison and blows up Alternate Earth.

… Yeah, facepalm-worthy cutscenes. The characters are very facepalm-worthy themselves too; it’s like Tri-Ace focused on making the characters’ “quirky” sides as quirky as possible, which also makes them as irritating/stereotypical as they could possibly be. It’s… amazing, in a way, and definitely needs to be experienced–just to see how horrifyingly bad they end up being. (Imagine a character who constantly adds “‘kay”/”nano yo” to the end of her sentences for an entire game. And then imagine an airhead who is 100x more annoying than a girl who adds a “cute” phrase at the end of all her sentences.) It doesn’t help that Lymle is the only character in the cast who gets any development; the Private Actions don’t even give much development, except for reestablishing things that have already been established–with two exceptions: Arumat gets some much needed background, and Edge and Reimi get relationship development. (On a side note, I am quite disappointed that only the female characters get actual cutscenes during Private Actions. What the heck, Tri-Ace? You have space and time to make two different Reimi shower scenes but not two final PAs for the two male members of the cast? Not to mention that these two are actually the non-irritating members of the party; they deserve at least a non-dialogue-box PA. ARGH.)

Onto the “good” parts of the game, I guess – the battle system. The SO series has always used a real-time battling system; the trend continues here, with some new side additions like Blindsides, where you get a chance to land a bunch of criticals if you “dodge” at a correct time, and the Bonus Board, where you get certain bonus tiles that multiplies your EXP/Fol/SP/regen gains if you defeat enemies in a certain manner. The AIs, with the exception of Myuria’s, are actually pretty decent too, so the battles are enjoyable. Item Creation is still a pretty large part of the game, though it’s actually quite a bit easier here since there’s no chance to fail. The one thing I kind of have a beef with is the Battle Trophies. In SO4, you need to get 50/100 trophies for a single character in order to remove the level cap for said character. Most of the Battle Trophies aren’t that difficult–I’d say about a fourth of it happens naturally as you play the game and another half isn’t all that hard to manipulate–but there are some that are just plain ridiculous. (Defeat 30k enemies on one single character? Time-consuming and adds nothing to the game, except for maybe 100 hours of mindless slaughtering.) Other than that though, the gameplay is great, and as with other Star Oceans, there’s a huge amount of postgame content.

Graphics and music-wise, I have no complaints, except that Reimi’s eyes are too big and close together and I can’t stop thinking about how strange she looks whenever she shows up on screen.

This post is getting way too long, so I will stop here.

TL;DR: Cutscenes and characters = ARGH; gameplay = great.

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

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.

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.

I CAN’T GET SAMSARA NIFLHEIM AND RAGNAROK TOGETHER ARGH.

this has gone on long enough that i started computing the probabilities of getting this combination in my head.

With Carry On though, it feels like she’s reverted back to Lady K and In Control, which does nothing for her. The album doesn’t deliver that strong “carry on” impression that it is named; instead, it rehashes the old canned HK ballads mixed with some also-canned beat heavy songs. All of the tracks are pretty forgettable, which is a waste – some of them have pretty decent arrangements. Kary herself doesn’t seem like she’s quite in the game here either. She sounds tired, even in the title track. Overall, the album seems like a rushed job, especially when compared to Keep Breathing. I was a bit disappointed – she could do much better.

On a side note, her hair and outfit look pretty good on the cover, but who did her make-up? It makes her look so tired… >.>

Time for some video game ranting! The not-really-new KH originally-mobile-phone-only spinoff was released in January, and… this game just ate an entire week of my life and now I’m not sure if it was even worth it. -_____-

Squeenix needs to stop pumping out spinoffs of this series. Re:coded contributes almost nothing to the original story; it’s almost just a remake of KH1 with less complicated worlds, a “plot” that’s really just an excuse to rehash the KH1 journey, and really quirky gameplay. It’s really irritating when you finish the entire game and feel like absolutely nothing is resolved. (This game’s “plot” does get resolved, but really, this plot doesn’t matter much, and the way the events jump around, I’d be surprised if anyone who hasn’t played KH before knew what it was talking about.)

Anyway, this is where I would insert a long ranting paragraph about this game’s lack of significant plot, but I realized that I don’t even remember a lot of the events myself and the ending explanations didn’t make much sense to me, so I have nothing to rant about. Sad times.

Plot aside, gameplay was actually surprisingly addictive. It’s a weird combination of KH’s regular action-RPG controls and sidescrolling jump-or-die (or something equally quirky) boss fights. There’s even a very minor dungeon crawling aspect to it. The system itself basically takes the best parts from all other KH games, tweeks them a bit, and smushes them altogether: Days’ panels for levels and stats; BbS’ commands, command melding system, and controls. Music was quite good too – most of it is just KH1 music reused, but the few new tracks are as expected from Shimomura.

Nothing else really notable about the game other than that. I’m also really tired of looking at KH1 sprites. At least rehash the older, hotter versions from KH2, or something. -______-

…

Seriously? He didn’t even DO anything! How does it make sense that they can FORCE people to do human transmutation and still have it work? WHAT?

NOOOOOO THAT WAS HEARTBREAKING :(

defense devil
from the authors of shin angyo onshi. i really like the art and the premise of the story, but it feels like it needs to be more connected. right now it’s a few short arcs with some connecting plot in the background – kinda like khr when it started out. i want to see kukabara return to his true form.

bakuman
i told myself i wouldn’t start this series and then i saw it the other day and the cover looked nicely designed so i bought it. *fail* there’re only two volumes out in chinese right now, but the manga analysis is really interesting, and it’s very readable after i got over the thing with azuki… the calculation behind manga serialization is interesting. kinda makes me think about the calculation behind THIS one though. i like takagi. x_x

beelzebub
i hate how he draws females. x_x other than that, the story is decent; battle manga with a little twist and a pretty solid lead character.

until death do us part
there are conspiracies and underground stuff and SWORDS! >:D i like. the arcs are way too short, but the setting is new enough and there are enough battles and mysterious things to keep it going.

blazer drive
typical shounen. kinda like naruto. even the ART looks like naruto. i do like the stickers thing.

kuroshitsugi
uh. i think we have a successor to CLAMP here. pointless drama and suspense, check. “meaningful and dramatic eyes”, check. boy on boy subtext, check. pretty art, check. why is this shounen?

bloody monday
i like the conspiracies, but… this is pretty far-fetched. high school hacker foils evil evil plans through… uh… tactical use of friends? somehow they win against very experienced assassins? i mean… really? (kujo is pretty though.)

drifters
i always mean to read hellsing, but never got around to it because the chinese scans are really bad quality. drifter looks pretty good so far though. chapter 1 started slow, but 2 is picking up. kind of. it’s a little too early to tell though.

highschool of the dead
zombiessssssss. but too much boobs.

and i need a list of things i keep meaning to read/catch up with but keep forgetting to.
luck stealer
amatsuki
break blade
blame
doubt
fairy cube
law of ueki
neuro
initial d
black god
xblade
the breaker
666satan
oofuri
mixim
monster soul
stigmata
ubel blatt
suicide island

… wtf why is this list so long!

also, i think some name changes are in order in this series:
gundam00 S2: setsuna pwns everything
innovators: ribbons and harem

and some random comments:
- lyle = ♥. also, thanks for the fanservice, sunrise. the semi-nude scene was completely unnecessary, but hey. niiiiiice.
- all gundam series fail at female characters. there is not a moment tonight where i did not want to stab louise.
- YES LOCKON VS AAS ROUND TWO. YES YES YES.
- S1 >>> S2, really. to be honest, it’s not very exciting when every episode is just balahbalahbalah… a bunch of battles, people die, T+A+L get swarmed, setsuna shows up with 00-raiser and pwns everything, battle won. (okay, fine, i don’t care about setsuna very much. tieria and his whole dilemma was done in like two scenes, lockon and anew was like… very mildly hinted until you suddenly get a bed scene and some love proclamations, marie was kinda forgotten in the end, the whole allelujah/hallelujah thing wasn’t addressed… i can go on. and on. and on.)

okay, off to study. again.

… dude what’s even happening in the game any more? i can’t tell.

ALSO, can we have some akaba screentime now? or kakei? or mizumachi (where he’s not the team cheerleader or comic relief)? or, idk, TAKA? people really need to stop disappearing in here.

is shin getting switched out for the mummy guy? we still don’t know what this guy can do.