Rune Factory Frontier is paradise for anyone with ADD.  You will do a dozen different things a day and make no significant progress in any of them.  For me, this was really fun for about a week and a half.  Then sort of boring but enjoyable enough for another week.  And then a few weeks of drudgery akin to World of Warcraft culminating in my farmer committing suicide to escape his hellish existence.

I have since started playing Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon on my shiny new PSP.  So far it has the benefits of Rune Factory (spiffy new system, more interesting plot than Harvest Moon) without the disadvantages (requiring ingredients to cook, assembling a dozen different things, raising monsters, managing runeys).  Plus I’m a robot!  But don’t tell anyone.

Black Sigil, on the other hand, is a quite progress-y DS RPG in the vein of the SNES classics.  Except it forgets that the classics were classic because they were accessible, ran quickly, and had just enough combat to be interesting without the player losing grip of the story.  The result is a game that’s alternatingly difficult and frustrating, and ultimately more disappointing than Suikoden Tierkreis, which had incredibly bland (though easy) random battles.

Next I will be tackling Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor, which has gotten rave reviews from a lot of places.  I’m not sure I’ll be so impressed; the only tactical RPG that really amazed me was Final Fantasy Tactics, and there are only a couple others I’d consider replaying (Saiyuki and Vandal-Hearts).  Nearly every other game in the genre has crushed my soul in one way or another and to be honest I’ve been tired of them for a while.  Perhaps some hee-hoo Jack Frosty goodness will manage to rekindle my interest in the genre.

On a completely different note, videolamer’s editor Jay and I have been talking about an entirely-too-serious topic: the rebuilding/recovery of Japan after World War II and its impact on modern war-crime denialism (one of my Japanese culture profs brought in her highschool history textbook; three paragraphs on WW2, which showed Japan in an entirely defensive and reactionary position in the war).  Some estimates of the civilian casualties in East Asia due to Japanese occupation are as high as 30 million, but very little is said about it.  To further my knowledge of this area, I have begun reading John Dower’s Embracing Defeat which discusses the reconstruction in general (which I read some about before) and goes into detail about the cover-up that ensured Emperor Hirohito would never be forced to take responsibility for actions taken during the war.  Interesting stuff.

Very rarely has a game so short managed to occupy my mind for so long.  Baroque presents a set of mysteries large and small; a world that is at the same time both cohesive and shocking.  I have seen the first pair of Silent Hill games, which are the closest analogue I know of.  Both have strange things happen, but neither bothers with being either coherent or sensical (as I recall, it was either “oh, that’s just Silent Hill and weird things happen there” or “oh, it’s just some ancient demon god resurrecting” depending on your ending).  In the end, Baroque manages to top them because it has a coherent explanation for each weird thing that happens.  But it doesn’t explain things piece by piece except in small parts; the larger picture has to be derived from the events, down to exactly what a baroque is.  The differences between the Malkuth order and the Koriel group are lost in the fact that only rarely is either discussed; you interact with some members of each, but it takes a while to figure out what the goal of each is.  Presumably the less explored areas of the plot are explained in the manga.

But at the same time, Baroque is a short-ish Roguelike.  Played on Easy, it’s quite beatable within 15 hours and is not nearly as punishing as the usual; to hear reviews, Normal is crushing while Hard is… well, probably a lot like Rogue or Nethack.  Play on Easy and you’ll be rewarded with an easy (though occasionally frantic) game attached to an interesting plot.  Play on the other difficulties and I’ve no doubt you’ll find an interesting plot in between running for dear life through a dungeon that wants to kill you.

And yet, despite its depth, there is very little detail to Baroque at all!  The town only contains 6 NPCs; each has only a few significant lines.  Perhaps another half-dozen dwell in the Nerve Tower; most have still fewer lines.  Special events account for the majority of plot development, but even they would be numbered in paragraphs rather than pages.  Sting was able to create a moderately intense plot in Riviera: The Promised Land despite very little dialogue; they reproduced this in Baroque, and made the setting much more interesting to boot. (incidentally, it might be vice-versa, since Baroque was originally made in ’99).

The feel of the game is claustrophobic, oppressive, panicky.  It is at once both lonely like the Metroid games and as frantic as a shooter  My heart rate must’ve gone up by about 10 while playing the game; even Resident Evil and Silent Hill have places of respite.  Baroque has no such safe havens outside the main town; you can be just as easily poisoned from behind while you’re talking to an NPC in the Nerve Tower as anyplace else.  As a real-time action Roguelike, I would expect nothing less.

Baroque has an official website here; despite being in Japanese it is quite navigable without any knowledge of the language.  The link points to the character section, which is probably the most interesting; each has some nifty artwork, a blurb about the character, and a movie with one of their lines.

Another resource would be the scanlated first manga, which is all over the place; one example here.  The second and third volumes have not been translated, probably since they’re so damnably rare or the original translation group lost interest.

I’ve bought the first two manga volumes online; each cost about as much as the game ($20); I wasn’t disappointed by the first, as it maintains the feel of the game.  I can’t argue with Alice travelling with the protagonist, since it’s hard to have an interesting story with only one person.

Figured I’d post up a few pictures here, if nothing else.  Click on the “more” too see ‘em, along with a description of the trip.

Spotted in Kyoto.  The dwarves have no doubt gone back into hiding since.

One of the coolest aspects of Japan is that it has two sides; the historical, where you can often walk less than 10 minutes from a train station to find something older than the United States, and the modern, where you can often walk less than 10 minutes from a train station to find something more high-tech.  I love to see situations where they’re intermixed; last time I went, I found a satellite dish installed in an historical Shinto shrine.

The Imperial Palace.  It may be an administrative building, but it’s still pretty big.  It’s near impossible to fit the entire building in a single photo, and even if you manage it, you lose the sense of scale.

Waterfall in a garden in Himeji.  Just like the contrast between old and new, there is often a contrast between hurried and peaceful.  This garden is (like the Castle) around 10 minutes from a station, and really relaxing to walk through.

A police station in Ueno (Tokyo).  Cool design.

All in all, cool stuff we saw:

• Akihabara.  Lots of stuff is there, but the noise/signal ratio if you’re looking for games can be pretty bad.  There’s a whole lot of porn and electronics stuff, and advertising isn’t always clear (i.e. “PC games” often means “Erotic PC games only”).
• Den-den Town (Osaka).  Super Potato and the Game Detective Club are both a treat to go through for anyone who likes old games.
• Golden Temple (Kinkakuji).  Pretty much a must-see.
• Himeji Castle.  Another must-see, although a hefty bit of walking for our lazy American feet.
• Meiji shrine, near Harajuku (Tokyo).  Accidental, but the best sites usually are.  Not even 5 minutes from the bustle of Harajuku station, an expansive shrine dedicated to Emperor Meiji.

Of course, those aside, simply the experience of being there – of seeing vending machines full of various citrus-y drinks (CC Lemon, how I miss thee already), bathhouses offering among the most relaxing experiences of my life (try roasting in 110-degree water, then cooling off in 60-degree water – it’s an unparalleled feeling), “yakitate” bread stores filled with baked delights unsurpassed by the best donut shops… there is much to see even in the day-to-day in Japan that is still wondrous to me.  That’s not to say I’d be 100% comfortable living there – anyplace has its problems – but the country is simultaneously familiar and completely new, and entirely navigable with a minimum of language knowledge.  I’d highly recommend taking a trip there at least once – I know I plan on going back.

Mmm, Boss coffee.

In about 20 minutes, I’ll be leaving for the airport.  I’m headed on a trip to Japan.

Long time in the planning, but now that I think about it… there’s nothing in particular I want to see – just want to be there again, and have the chance to explore.  Sure, I’ll be looking for cool stuff – but the simple chance to get away from the routine (much as I enjoy routines) will be nice.  To say nothing of the appeal of the trip.  Japan is foreign and yet familiar, and (one of the themes in Shenmue, coincidentally) contains a culture centuries old that coexists with and is offset by one of the most consumerist, modern cultures on the planet.  It doesn’t do either halfway, either – nothing seems to be halfway there.  It’s a place of extremes.  That’s not to say it’s entirely a good thing… but it is certainly different from the usual.

I’ll be back, hopefully with more pictures and other goodness, at the beginning of September.

This love extended to, while I was in Japan, picking up various Three Kingdoms manga. I found no less than three different takes on Three Kingdoms (four if you count the “split” in the Scholar Bunko series) and one where, while Three Kingdoms is the setting it is not really the focus. I have heard enough of Ikkitousen to know it shouldn’t be considered among these (though I may check it out from sheer curiousity). So I figured I’d write up a bit about each. Read on if this sounds vaguely interesting.

Interestingly, though, during my research on the mysterious Huo Hu in Destiny of an Emperor, I found out that the original Tenchi wo Kurau (天地を喰らう) is actually based on a manga of the same name, rather than Yokoyama Mitsuteru’s Sangokushi. From what I gather (mostly speculation), the manga is incredibly biased towards Shu… like most.

Mitsuteru’s Sangokushi, from what I’ve read of it is just an expansion on the original story with a stronger focus on Liu Bei and his sworn brothers as characters (where in Three Kingdoms you only see the big picture). Zhang Fei is strong and loyal enough, but has a tendency to kill people who get in his way (even inadvertently). Guan Yu is, as always, wise yet decisive, and so on.

The Scholar Bunko series (also, of course, titled Sangokushi) is my favorite, since it’s closer to history or at the very least to the novel. The picture is more balanced than usual; Sun Jian is somewhat hot-headed, but his personality really comes out before Si Shui gate, where due to lack of supplies his troops begin to fail. His confrontation with Yuan Shu (who was to send supplies) thereafter is even more intense than in the novel. Too bad Cheng Pu comes off looking like such a jerk (and he doesn’t return for Chi Bi), but I’m glad he at least has a role.

Cao Cao comes off much like Julius Caesar – ambitious, motivated and somewhat manipulative. Incidentally, he has curly hair and wears a coronet-like headpiece. Just as in the novel, his character is shown in the anecdote wherein he manipulates his own father into mistrusting his uncle, so as to carouse as much as he pleased. Even minor events with Cao Cao such as his single-handed rescue by Cao Hong are faithfully shown.

The third Sangokushi series, which had no other distinguishing features, I can’t say much about. I couldn’t stand to read much of it when I saw that Zhang Fei looked exactly like Xu Zhu in Dynasty Warriors.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from anything that makes a modicum of sense is Ryuurouden (龍狼伝), or Dragon-Wolf Legend. Ryuurouden is the most stereotypical manga you could imagine that could pertain at all to Three Kingdoms. It involves (of course) a Japanese highschooler on a field trip to China who is magically transported back to Three Kingdoms. Even writing that made me shudder. He appears in the middle of Xu Shu’s debut battle (the one with the Seven Gates formation), and that appearance causes Xu Shu to be fatally wounded by a nameless subcommander under Cao Ren. Naturally, said high-schooler is chosen to take over as strategist.  He accepts so as to protect his girlfriend who was transported back with him. Xu Shu’s sister (oh yes, he randomly has a sister, Renhua, who fights alongside him) becomes angry at his death and all sorts of bad things ensue.

Characters are over-the-top – the more important a character is, the larger (physically) they are. Zhang Fei is roughly three times as tall as Shiro (the highschooler) and in several scenes is shown picking up other people one-handed. Zhao Yun, oddly, is shown as overly serious and obeying orders to a fault. He is one of the few good characters (as that’s a believable trait), as Cao Ren is shown as being strong but horribly inept and even Li Dian is shown as intelligent yet highly dishonorable. Ryuurouden does get bonus points, however, for admitting the existence of Sun Qian and even giving him a few important lines!

I only have the first volume of this manga, but it looks like it can only go downhill in most respects. It’s a guilty pleasure – fun to read, but at the same time so badly cliched.

If I had to recommend any one of these, it would be the Scholar version (by Yu Terashima, Toshiaki Kojima, and Lee Chi Ching).  The Scholar Bunko is the “beginning” part (I only have the Yellow Turban Rebellion and Anti-Dong Zhuo Campaign volumes – I don’t know how far it goes), and comes in standard manga size (approx. paperback).  There is also the Burger SC Deluxe (awesome name), which deals with the events of Chi Bi.  It’s a larger sized set, with much nicer art quality.  Unfortunately, it follows the novel in treating Zhou Yu like dirt, but such is life.

However, this post at GAF caught my eye: a top 100 list as voted by readers of Japan’s biggest videogame magazine Famitsu.

Granted, it’s not a great list; I could name a half-dozen games offhand that I think belong on there, but then I’m not Tanaka Six-pack.  I actually doubt such a list voted by, say, readers of Electronic Gaming Monthly would be better.

So instead, I thought it was more interesting to look at what was on there that I didn’t expect.

First up: number 5, Machi.  I hadn’t heard of this game.  Ever.  The Mobygames entry indicates it’s part town-sim, part role-play.  This game sounds really cool, actually.  If I knew Japanese better I’d probably give it a try, but alas, most of my skills are lying in a ditch off some county road.

Second: Far East of Eden 2.  Sounds bland RPG-ish with a feudal Japan setting.  I did find it interesting that it was translated to be a reference to a Steinbeck novel.  I can’t accurately translate the original name, but it refers to being in an evil land outside of heaven.  So, I guess it’s accurate enough.

Third: The Sakura Taisen (or Sakura Wars) games, the first at 13, second at 36 and third at 18.  I’d heard things here or there, but never tried them.  Apparently they are half dating sim, half strategy.  No wonder they’re so popular…

Finally: I guess I’m not completely crazy.  Some other people must really like it too, because Final Fantasy Legend II (aka SaGa II) managed to make it onto the list, at 94th.

Only a couple other things I’m surprised about:

• No (main) Final Fantasy is not on the list (except 12, but the list is too old for it).
• No Wild Arms or Suikoden, ROTK or Nobunaga’s Ambition.  I’d been led to believe all these series were decently popular over there.  Maybe that was just “more popular than in the States”.

On to the next list!

In another (completely unrelated) topic at GAF, a member mentioned Mario Galaxy is now overall rated the Best Game Ever – i.e. taking an average of all reviews for Galaxy, it has the highest ranking at 97.6% as of this writing.  It’s a good game, but I find there is no accounting for taste in reviews.  As the perfect scapegoat, I pick this review (LYS forum post, ’cause I’m lazy) from GamePro back in the day, in which Suikoden 2 is roughly a 65%, with “Control” being the best thing about the game.  It’s painfully obvious that the reviewer had a preview build of the game (as characters’ names are different in the review) and only got 3 hours in before stopping.  What’s more, it complains about “nearly no voiceovers”, when nearly every console game with voiceovers from the PSX era is painful to play.

However, I thought this was kinda neat.  I was under the impression most reviewers would be so jaded about new games that they wouldn’t give any game a perfect score without being bribed.  But it would be pretty hard to bribe the entire internet.  Is Mario fandom coming into play here?  Probably at some level, but it really is a pretty good game.

So… in less ranty stuff, I am stopping RotTK XI for now.  The game is fun, but moves far too slowly.  I’ve gotten back into Skies of Arcadia while playing Mario Galaxy; still more recently, I have installed the RTS classic Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns and am playing through it.  Moves much faster than Koei sim games.

My Japanese has been getting rusty for a while, and I didn’t know if I had the willpower to start anything new for a while.

Then, one of my fellow writers, hearing I had finished a translation project, mentioned a game to me.  Curious, I looked it over… and it captured my soul.  The game is 1999: Hore, Mitakotoka! Seikimatsu, for the NES.  Basically, it’s a Japanese game of Life with an eventual goal of stopping aliens from taking over the world.

By coincidence, danke, the guy who is working on the hacking side of Akira, had looked at the game before and was more than willing to help out with the hacking of 1999.  Tyson, the writer who asked me about it, is more familiar with spoken Japanese than I, and will probably be better with the casual stuff in 1999 than me.  So it looks like it’s in good shape, I just need to find a good part of it to work on…

I also started another game of the Mount&Blade mod The Last Days, based on (the books of course) Tolkien’s LOTR.  Mount&Blade is an excellent engine – no single action/RPG/strategy can surpass it.  TLD is an incredible mod, bringing the minor skirmishes of “vanilla” M&B up a few notches to the grand warfare of Middle-Earth.  My only complaint is that it’s hard as hell, but that’s sort of the idea.

Also, I’m 40 hours into Persona 3.  I wasn’t really into the plot – it’s a little too grandiose to break it down into manageable chunks.  The atmosphere has been great since the beginning, but the plot seems a little… well, distant.

That changed on Friday.  Man, did it change.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more well-done set of scenes in a game before.

だから、これはみじかいでしょ。　私は漢字を覚えないんですし、まだ日本語が下手なんです。

でも、　まだ書いてみてたいんだ。　どうしてですか？　自分も分からない。

コンピュター科学がせんこうだったけど、まだほかのもの（語とか）が知りたいです。時々、練習をするために日本語だけで考えるけど、

このような考えを書くことは三年間でぜんぜんしなかったんです。

まだ下手なんですね。。。

I’ve still got some of it, but it’s like running molasses through a colander.  I need to practice far more often.  I could’ve done most of this better three years ago

(I’m too lazy to edit the image again – the strip is titled “Take and Run” and it’s by (probably – name renderings are odd) Chikusa Hiroko.

It took me about half an hour to do this, because I’m not very good with image editors. The fact that I only took a half an hour shows, and I apologize.  If anyone else knos how better to do all the image modification stuff, I’d love to translate.  I just don’t have the expertise.

To extrapolate more on the source; this is from a 4-koma manga (4-koma being a style- Azumanga Daioh is probably the most famous one in the US – similar to a standard throwaway comic strip). More specifically, if you can’t tell, this is from a 4-koma manga about Wild Arms: Alter Code F. I’ve had 5 full strips (and a few very blurry others) on my hard drive since I took a few minutes with a scanner to grab them about 5 or 6 months ago.

I’m actually really happy with the manga itself, as it pokes fun at dozens of RPG cliches as well as at the ACF plot itself from time to time. It has a variety of artists/authors, some of which I really like too.  And it wasn’t too expensive either.

If anyone wants to see the originals, let me know. I’ve been meaning to talk about these for a while.

One of the international polls recently was “Do you like your name?”. The response was “Yes” by a large majority, but of interest – the country that, in general, disliked their names the most was Japan.

Yeah, yeah, the fact that everyone had to have access to a Wii to vote might’ve skewed things and all that. Statistics and their verifiability aren’t my area of expertise.

But this is interesting, partly because of the way Japanese names are generally chosen.

Some parents pick kanji and then choose the pronunciation based on those characters. Others pick a pronunciation and then try to find characters that fit the pronunciation. Some even pick a pronunciation and then whatever characters they like. As a result, knowing how to write a person’s name doesn’t mean you know how to pronounce it. Further, knowing how a person’s name is pronounced gives you very little idea of how it’s written.

Let’s take an example: Hayao Musou, from the game Jesus. His characters are 武麻速雄.

速雄- Hayao, his given name. Considering only the kun-readings, there are 4 other possible pronunciations for those characters.

武麻- Musou, his family name. “Mu” is an on-reading for the first character. The second character is none of several dozen characters with the pronunciation “sou”. There’s no way to tell this is how “Musou” is pronounced, and there’s no easy way to look it up from the pronunciation either.

If you’ve ever seen Death Note, you can see why the Japanese came up with that nifty idea of having to write a person’s name. And also why one character had to right 20+ different spellings of the same name to ensure he got it right.

Characters also have attributed meanings. Hayao Musou is probably the most outrageous set I’ve seen: “Masculine, Quick Warrior” (with “Hemp” thrown in for good measure).

Names have attributed meanings in Western countries too; although there’s the rather common English last names of “Baker”, “Smith”, etc, there is a meaning behind almost any name (IIRC, biblical names have no direct meanings). For example, my own family name could mean “Descendants of the guardians”. How ’bout that. The difference, though, is that most meanings in English names are hidden. Those in kanji are more direct. What relevance does this have? Probably none at all.