The Rat's Den

My Favorite Books of 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:00:00 +0000

I meant to start posting regularly again, but didn't quite muster the energy. Hopefully this year will be a return to normality, or at least something close to it.

Despite being laid up over half of 2025, I didn't spend much time reading. I mostly attribute it to the fact that I fell down the YouTube rabbit hole and it became my go-to for "I'm not feeling well but I need entertainment," and I'm far more familiar with various YouTube channels than I ever was before. When I did feel well enough to do more, I ended up gaming instead, which was good for my gaming backlog, but not so much my reading one!

So I only read one book for 2025, but at least I'm getting closer to finishing Legend of the Galactic Heroes! You can consider this one recommended even though I won't be doling out any asterisks for a top pick when it's my only pick.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Vol. 8: Desolation by Yoshiki Tanaka

We finally get what looks to be the final face off between Reinhard and Yang as Yang's forces are bottled up in Iserlohn Fortress and Reinhard himself arrives to take out the last remaining holdouts from the Free Planet Alliance. I won't get into spoilers, so unfortunately this write-up is going to be shorter than the myriad thoughts I actually had, but I definitely did not see what would happen midway through the book. In the hands of a lesser writer I could see this event substantially taking the wind out of the series' sails, but I think there's a lot of material left to mine here and I'm interested in seeing how the remaining two books will handle this.

My Favorite Anime of 2024

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 15:00:00 +0000

As with the books, my life got impacted so I only watched one series this year, but I liked it enough that I still want to draw some attention to it. Just as with the books, there will be no asterisk (*) for my Top 3 of the year since I only completed one series.

7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!

This series was clearly titled to appeal to fans of the subgenre of anime involving teenage girls reborn as the villainess of a particular story, but takes a quick left turn in the first episode and the villainess part doesn't factor into the equation at all. In fact the carefree part doesn't apply either. The real story is that Rishe keeps dying for various reasons a few years after her fiance breaks off their engagement, and every time in the future the neighboring nation of Galkhein begins a war of conquest under the leadership of Emperor Arnold.

Each time Rishe revives at the moment her engagement is broken, and each time she loops she tries something else, lives a different life, learns a different trade, and because of that she becomes a very knowledgeable woman. However her seventh loop ends up in her attracting the interest of not yet emperor, but currently Crown Prince Arnold (who actually killed her in her sixth life) and she ends up accepting an engagement to him in hopes of changing his outlook on life so the war never begins. Unfortunately the series ends without any resolution, but I'm definitely interested in reading the source novels now.

My Favorite Games of 2024

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:00:00 +0000

I didn't mean to take another month between posts, but as I alluded to in January I'm having life issues that has made regularly posting difficult and I'll make a post about it eventually, probably after my very short anime of 2024 post. The only reason these 2024 wrap-ups even exist is because I worked on them throughout last year so I did not have to spend much time writing or editing them to post now.

That said, on to what I'd written prior to all my issues:

Having not completed a single RPG in the past two years, it felt like 2024 was the year to remedy that.

I usually designate these great games as my Top 3 picks each year by marking them with an asterisk (*) and these are the 12 games I liked the most out of the ones I finished in 2024, in the order I played them. If the game is available on multiple platforms, the one I played on is listed first. Usually I try to complete at least one game a month, but because of said issues I fell short this year.

Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi (Switch, PS4, XB1, Windows)

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I got into Undernauts with its alt-1970s Japan setting and truly inspired character designs. It's a first person dungeon crawler, but with modern day quality of life auto-mapping and easier than average difficulty for a game of its type. The story is more nuanced than you'd expect for the genre and made me want to get to the bottom of what really happened. The only thing I'd fault it for is that the post-credits scene makes it clear the story isn't over, and the only way to see the story through in its entirety is to complete the punishing post-game.

Unpacking (Switch, PS4, PS5, XB1, Windows, iOS, Android)

Unpacking was a media darling when it first came out. The premise is simple. You unpack the belongings of an unseen girl/young woman as she moves from place to place over the course of her life. From what she carries with her, how she chooses to augment her belongings, and where you are allowed to place things, you learn a surprisingly large amount of what kind of person she is and what has happened in her life. I thought it was an interesting concept, but was less enamored by the actual gameplay.

Process of Elimination (Switch, PS4) *

If you need to fill the Danganronpa (or Ace Attorney) shaped hole in your gaming needs, Process of Elimination is likely to do the job. It doesn't feel as polished as the more established names, but if you want to be trapped in a murder mystery with a bunch of colorful characters who gradually get picked off one by one, it's a solid pick. Evidence collection deviates from the point and click methods of its predecessors, going for an isometric map over which you can direct a team of detectives. It's nice to see a fresh take, but the implementation feels a little clunky. I really liked that the deduction portion of the game involves putting all clues together in context, and rarely involves waving around contradicting evidence, so I really felt smart when solving a murder. Would buy a sequel in a heartbeat.

Collar x Malice Unlimited (Switch)

The fandisc to Collar x Malice. I was going to play this back when it first released, but that ended up happening shortly before I had surgery for my first cancer, and it fell off my radar. By the time I remembered I still had it in my closet a lot had changed in the otome gaming landscape so it kept getting deprioritized in favor of non-sequels. That said, it's a little hit or miss for me. The characters I liked least had the best After Stories and the ones I looked forward to the most had the weakest. The extras were just okay and the Adonis route less exciting than expected.

The Centennial Case : A Shijima Story (Switch, PS5, PS4, Windows, iOS, Android) *

Mystery novelist Haruka is asked by a friend if she would look into a hundred year mystery involving his family and a skeleton they found buried behind their cherry tree. Has a very different feel from most games being primarily told through live action segments and the player being asked to assemble hypotheses from clues obtained during those scenes rather than being in direct control over an investigation. I found the story extremely gripping even if the actual game mechanics were a bit clunky. Having the same group of actors play different roles in different time periods was a nice touch, and also made it easier to keep characters straight since there wasn't a constant parade of new faces.

Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Switch)

Third entry in the Famicom Detective Club series. It manages to modernize the gameplay from the NES remakes, keeping the unusual dialogue system for pulling out clues, while getting rid of the less sensical logic jumps occasionally experienced in the older games. The investigation part of the game is deep and a constant source of tension, but the story wraps up in a mediocre fashion that is both unsatisfying and a post-credits info dump.

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth (Switch, PS4, XB1, Windows, DS) *

I played the remaster as part of the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, having played the original on DS when it came out years ago. It's still a fun ride as tightly laced straight man Miles Edgeworth as he investigates crimes filled with a cast of wacky characters with a stubborn sense of logic. I don't think he needed to be saddled with a teenage sidekick, as Kay didn't feel as natural a partner as Maya did for Phoenix in the original three Ace Attorney games, but I suppose the design team felt a need to parallel the earlier games.

Ace Attorney Investigations 2 : Prosecutor's Gambit (Switch, PS4, XB1, Windows)

After many years this is finally available in English in the first time! Though I think the overall throughline of the story could have been smoother and Kay felt more stapled on than the first game, it was still a very good run with a lot of returning cameos (some of them very deep cuts!) without feeling like it was wallowing too heavily in fan service. I was particularly happy with what they did with an "annoying" character to both give him his comeuppance and then turn him around into being someone we could be sympathetic towards.

9 R.I.P. (Switch)

Misa Issihiki is spirited away as part of a supernatural plan to help her deal with her inability to stand up to her mother regarding her plans for college. Romance involving ghosts and yokai, so there's nearly always an element of separation involved in the endings, but some of them wrap up satisfactorily for all involved.

Digimon Survive (Switch, PS4, XB1, Windows)

Strategy/visual novel hybrid that leans heavily into nostalgia. Unlike most Digimon games it takes inspiration from the anime and features a number of human characters with partner digimon rather than a single human player character who raises and collects hundreds of them. Though collecting can still be done, this is a much more narratively focused game with an emphasis on human and digimon partners. There is also a fairly strong plot emphasis on the "survive" in the title, though I feel like it hits harder in the early game than the late.

even if Tempest: Dawning Connections (Switch)

The fan disk to even if Tempest. To be honest, the fandisk was a mixed bag for me, and since it's tonally different from the original game, being more focused on romantic relationships than the drama of trying to survive, it doesn't feel as exciting as the first game. To be fair, most routes employ a non-romantic plotline to try and retain some of the tension and drama, but they don't always work the best. My favorite routes were Zenn's and the non-romantic The Fellowship due to the additional worldbuilding.

My Favorite Books of 2024

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 15:00:00 +0000

I didn't end up reading much in 2024 for reasons I'll eventually post about at some point, but suffice to say there's a reason I stopped posting on my blog for months and the only reason these 2024 wrap-ups are coming out now is because I work on them throughout the year so I did not have to spend much time writing or editing them.

Normally I would list the twelve books I enjoyed the most, and mark my three favorites with an asterisk (*), but this year because I didn't read that much, I'm just listing the four I finished and will not be marking any of them.

Krieg by Steve Lyons

I'm not a Warhammer 40,000 player, nor am I really a reader of the franchise's numerous books, but when I found out they had a faction inspired by World War I trench warfare, and they had a book based on these fanatical soldiers who were willing to hurl themselves into certain death in the name of the God Emperor, I realized I had to read it and the book did not disappoint. I still have little interest in any other Warhammer material, but I think I would be inclined to pick up another book about the crazy yet oddly mysterious soldiers of Krieg.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes Vol 6: Flight by Yoshiki Tanaka

Yang continues to be my favorite character in this series as he ends up retired due to circumstances of the last book and he goes about doing exactly what he wants to do with his pensioner's lifestyle. But of course things can't remain that way and there are still too many people who misunderstand him and what he would actually do versus what they think he'll do. Reinhard has his problems too, but I didn't find his side of the volume as compelling as Yang's.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes Vol 7: Tempest by Yoshiki Tanaka

I found this to be a pretty exciting volume, with relationships starting to fracture on Reinhard's side and Yang's crew making a play to keep the Free Planet Alliance alive even if the FPA isn't exactly their biggest fan. We also get to see the payoff for a gambit Yang set up back in Volume 5.

Baccano!, Vol. 11: 1705 The Ironic Light Orchestra by Ryogho Narita

One of the one-offs set in one of Baccano's non-1930s settings, this time following Huey Laforet and how he came to meet and reluctantly become friends with Elmer Albatross. Set in 1705 Italy, it's an unusual story about what seems to be a serial killer targeting children, but ultimately leads to a much bigger conspiracy about how their small town functions. Likely skippable if you don't want to read every volume since Huey tends to be a distant figure in the main 1930s setting, Elmer hasn't shown his face except in flashbacks, and prominent third character Monica has not been seen at all until this point.

VN Talk: even if Tempest - Part 3: Tyril

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000

I probably should be glad I'm writing this two years after release instead of immediately after, because I'm sorry Tyril fans, he just didn't work for me. When I first got the game I thought he might, because his relationship with Anastasia has so much potential.

Tyril is an inquisitor whose job it is to ferret out witches and mete justice upon them. He's an uncompromising individual and known as the best in his organization. Since Anastasia's knowledge of future events due to her Fatal Rewind ability can make her seem like a witch, conflict between her and Tyril should be ripe with tension. If he found out, would he believe her? Or would he follow his duty and treat her as a witch?

While that fear is there from Anastasia's side of things, Tyril is entangled in an entirely different mess that ultimately did neither his route nor the main plot any favors. In fact many of the items I'm going to discuss in my later "dropped plot" thread originate in Tyril's route, and the result was that his route is very busy with details that end up going nowhere. And ultimately I had to question his competency as an inquisitor at all.

You would think that Tyril being an inquisitor and Anatasia possibly being a witch (the game flip-flops) would be more than enough drama for his route, but no. He also has to be Prince Conrad's personal assassin, and the descendant of the Ishik clan of lorekeepers once in service of the royal family, and it's out of a misguided sense of repentance he's serving Conrad so he can restore his clan's honor. And he also runs around looking like a ninja while being a masked vigilante, which is hilarious once you realize this world has no ninjas and he cottoned on to the idea after hearing stories from Zenn. (Why? Doesn't he have enough to do? Does the man ever sleep?)

Tyril, as a personality, is fine. He's ruthless, a strict disciplinarian, but has bad manners and loosens up when drunk. Not even friendship will stop him from carrying out his duty when Crius falls under suspicion, but if he can fulfill his duty while offering a friend a hand he doesn't mind taking it. (Hence he'll torture Crius, but will stop early under the pretense that Crius is being sexually gratified by it so it's useless as a confession technique.) He's probably not the greatest person to have as a friend, but certainly useful. Offer him a swig of his favorite bad alcohol (so bad nobody brews it anymore) and he'll move heaven and earth to find the item you're looking for. If he wasn't terrible at life decisions and no doubt the man who killed Maya in the prologue timeline, I would probably consider him adorkable.

But his personal baggage between the backstory about his clan, the hidden story of being Conrad's assassin, and the obvious story as an inquisitor is a lot, and as a result I don't feel like any one part of it got any justice. Him being the vigilante Ninja is just so squeezed in there it's easy to forget and probably could have been dropped without any detriment to the plot or his character.

When we learn about the mysterious Ishik clan we hear they were wiped out for betraying the king (probably a trumped up accusation) and that's why they were all hunted down and killed twenty years ago, with the exception of one survivor; a girl who was spared by one of the knights.

When Anastasia approaches Tyril to have him hunt down the girl (presumably now a woman) in exchange for the alcohol he likes, he refuses despite the offer. Then we find out that he's actually an Ishik himself and that he was at the massacre where his clan was killed, but he survived by hiding in a den full of snakes.

The implication is that Tyril was the survivor who was spared by the knight, and that's why he refused to find "her" since that would reveal his own identity, but the gender doesn't match, nor does Anastasia say anything like "I thought the survivor was a girl" until the very end of his route, like the writer almost forgot when it had been bothering me ever since the reveal.

Also the fact that Tyril chooses to serve Conrad makes no sense. It did in the prologue timeline where Conrad was the son favored to inherit the throne, but in all of the post-prologue timelines, Lucien is of equal or better standing. Conrad even tells Anastasia in Tyril's route that he has to fight dirty to overcome the inherent advantage Lucien has by being the one who physically resembles their father the most. If Lucien rises to the throne, then any goodwill Tyril earns in Conrad's service would mean nothing since he could not affect any change, so if Tyril's primary aim is to redeem the Ishik by becoming a stooge for the royal family, then why Conrad and not Lucien?

It's possible Tyril did not know what an awful person Conrad truly is when they first met, but even if Conrad had been an absolute saint, that wouldn't change the fact that Tyril would be entrusting his clan's restoration to the king choosing the "right" prince as his heir. This could have been fixed with some exposition, like Tyril intended to approach the princes collectively, and Conrad ensnared him first, but without knowing more it seems like Tyril made a gamble and ended up with a loser, which doesn't lend any confidence to his decision making.

Yes, it serves as drama since the first Membrum trial wraps up about halfway through his route, which allows Tyril's service to Conrad and the Ishik be the focus of the second half, but it didn't feel thought through. It was gripping while it was happening, the game's narrative is exceedingly good at that, but I wasn't satisfied by the end.

Tyril is supposed to be clever, with his faults being in his personality and not his intelligence, but we're supposed to accept that he's been stupid with the most important part of his life.

Apparently Tyril can't accept it either which is why his route ends in his heavily implied suicide.

It would be a tremendous blow to realize he's been sacrificing his pride and his ethics in service of a royal family that wasn't even real, but it would have been a much crueler blow if it didn't look like his service was misguided to begin with.

Tyril, for all his bark, has little in the way of actual bite, and once it's clear how oppressed he is, the back and forth between him being a disciplinarian and him being a dork who can't handle positive feelings is largely done. The whole bit about the royal family not being real is certainly the nail in the coffin that kicked off the tragic ending (and Anastasia's own implied suicide so she could try again), but we don't really see how hard it hit him. Anastasia parts ways with him as if it's any other farewell, and it's only because she had a vision of the future that she runs back to find he's passed away.

I suspect that the very small Ninja subplot was to show that despite Tyril being locked into his position as inquisitor and assassin he is still trying to do good deeds to make up for the bad ones, but one reason I disliked it it because it shows that Tyril does not fully believe that people are witches just because they are accused. In the prologue he has no issue with burning Anastasia to death after she gets condemned and he's hailed as the best around, and there's no reason to think he isn't a supreme hunter of witches at that point in the story, but by the end we learn that witches are a very specific thing tied to the goddess Norna, which means that every single witch Tyril has hunted in his career has been an innocent person. If he's secretly trying to fight the system that's a large amount of collateral damage.

It's something that could have been worked around if there had been more focus on him actually being an inquisitor, but with his identity spread over so many buckets there just isn't the space.

And what possibly bothered me the most about his arc as a character is that there's little throughline when it comes to the final canon timeline. Did he actually develop as a character?

Tyril goes through a lot in his route, and even if I disagree with the in-world logic behind his choices, he's still put through the ringer badly enough that the truth results in his death. Yet when it comes to Lucien's route, where everything is more or less put right and the truth comes out to the most important players involved, he remains his usual dour self. It's not until the very end when he discovers Anastasia is Norna's reincarnation that he completely does a 180 and now he's the most reverential follower she could have (because she's the goddess, and thus definitely who he should be serving).

It's actually a bit awkward for Anastasia to start a relationship with him in the final timeline, because worshiping aside, he admits that he and the other Tyril Anastasia fell in love with are not the same man, but he's game to try. That's fine on the romantic front, but you'd think he'd be kicking himself in the ass over all the suffering he went through in service of Conrad and none of that comes into play. He does not attempt to kill himself, even though he learns an even darker truth than he does in his own route.

If thinking his clan was killed by a fake king whose son he still tried serving anyway was enough to make him suicidal, you'd think finding out his entire clan had been obliviously toiling away for over a thousand years for a fake royal family would send him over the edge as well. His entire heritage has been built on a lie.

I realize this is a romance game, so Tyril needs to have a happy ending. Sending him over the edge isn't desirable for the player base, but I can't see why one "good" ending where everything is resolved results in him deciding it's better for him to die and the other doesn't. And it's not like Anastasia intervenes in the happy ending to stop him from offing himself. It's just not an issue.

If Tyril's multiple roles had been dialed back I think it would have been easier to have him die in his own route while still living in another. Personally, if I had to pick one, I would have removed the Ishik clan, because ultimately the Rose of Tranquil Time ended up being a terrible can of worms I'm going to discuss in the dropped plot post and if the rose was removed then the Ishik could be cut as well.

What I missed the most is that Tyril is supposed to be the bane of witches as an inquisitor, and we never see him wrestle with how his job conflicts with who and what Anastasia seems to be. That entire possibility is just dropped, and it's because by the time he learns she's a "witch" (which is still debatable since right after that Ish "proves" she's not because she can't touch him) it's time to move on to the Tyril working as Conrad's assassin plot. I was ready for a great enemies to lovers plot and it wasn't there.

VN Talk: even if Tempest - Part 2: Crius

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000

I struggled over how best to write my Crius entry since I knew I wanted to discuss him as a character without making it specifically about his route. Part of it is because of how his route ends. I was flabbergasted and given the timelooping nature of even if Tempest I wondered if somehow we might pick up again from that ending and then move on to a happy one.

But how? Would there be a new story branch ahead where Anastastia could make a different decision?

As you probably know from my overview post or having played the game yourself, Anastasia experiences every rewind. Regardless of whether a given timeline still exists, she remembers it, and Lucien's route, being the final one, wraps up the overall story--for everyone.

So while I normally do a critique of each love interest's route, it just doesn't make sense for even if Tempest, and I knew that would be the case as soon as I finished Crius's ending. Spoilers ahead, but I have to say that dang I loved the end of his route.

Full disclosure, I am not put off by tragic endings. So hitting the end of Crius's route where he just fades away because he never killed anyone as a Membrum absolutely hit me in the feels and I loved it. Though I liked his mix of being a manipulative flirt in service of a higher duty, I didn't realize how much until Anastasia rewound to begin another timeline. As I played through Tyril's route Anastasia's memories of Crius's had been erased, but she would periodically get flashes of memory regarding what happened between the two of them.

I make it feel (to me at any rate) that she was living a false life this second time around with occasional glimpses of the real one peering through. It's probably felt this way for other players who chose Tyril first and presumably received Tyril flashbacks while going through Crius's route.

Crius's route ending, the timeline when she fell in love with him, is not a terribly good ending, which is why I couldn't really talk about the route as a story. He dies and Anastasia presumably dies from her injuries soon after, which is why she loops back to a different choice, where she chose the Justice card from the Witch of Ruin.

But Crius's personal character arc is worth talking about, because it's a lot more nuanced than we're led to believe.

Though he comes off as a charismatic rake from the very first time he appears in the prologue, he's surprisingly non-flirty. He's fulfilling a request for a friend (Tyril) and is happy to help. Crius has a public face where presumably wines and dines those he wants to assist him, since we hear about those moments, but we don't see them. If not for his posture and character art (and being voiced by Makoto Furukawa), he wouldn't immediately come off as a possible ladies' man.

In fact Tyril describes Crius as a man who carefully uses up his pawns, with Anastasia being one of the rare pawns that Crius has bothered to introduce to him (after her post-prologue rewind to before any of them met). The fact Anastasia is also a pawn, though one he's clearly favoring more than his other cadets, is worth noting.

Crius is a man who cares about very little, because he's living on borrowed time. He has morals, and generally treats people fairly, but he's close to very few people because the future barely matters to him. Even though he's turned into a Membrum in his own route and is compelled to commit a murder of passion, nothing happens on that very first night, because there's nothing he cares about enough that the Witch of Ruin can compel him to murder for it, and that includes Anastasia. The Witch ends up having to make a second Membrum in order for the murder to start.

Anastasia eventually learns that Crius suffers from a progressive disease that gradually robs him of his senses including the ability to feel pain. The only way to cure it is with medicine made from a red Garuda feather, and Crius doesn't do anything to deflect the possibility that the sole reason he is in the Wings of Garuda is in the vain hope that eventually a red garuda will hatch before his time is up and his position will allow him to take advantage of it.

Suddenly the reasons for him being a public flirt when he's not in private as we see him for most of the route, makes sense. He admits he's wringing wealthy women to donate to the Wings of Garuda because the Wings' survival is his only lead to his own survival. Crius is a man just trying to live in a world where there's little else for him to hold on to (since his sister died during his childhood and he does not seem close to the rest of his family).

And when he finally has something he realizes he cares about (Anastasia, after she loses Maya to the second Membrum), it's too late. He's already a failure doomed to fade away. Anastasia discovers the cure for Crius's disease when her garuda undergoes a transformation that conveniently turns its plumage red, but it no longer means anything. Crius spends his last day trying to offer solace for Hugo (who tried to avenge Crius's sister by mass murdering everyone involved) and then saving Anastasia from a misguided attempt at revenge.

Even relatively detached from most people, Crius still decided to plant evidence to suggest he was the murderer instead of Hugo (knowing he'd be dead soon anyway), with his only regret being unable to stay with Anastasia.

I loved the Membrum reveal and how it showed he'd changed. Had he fallen in love first, turning into a Membrum would have been very difficult for him, and it also colored my perception of him on every other route. Since I knew exactly when he realized he was attracted to Anastasia, and it only happens on his route, it was easy to conclude their relationship was platonic on all the others with no sense of potential romance, and for the most part, that works. We see him looking out for her more as a subordinate than anything else.

But knowing Crius and his history made other parts of the game so much harder. When I got to Zenn's route Anastasia is allowed to keep the memories of her lives with both Crius and Tyril, and there comes a point where she as the Membrum needs to pin a murder on another suspect so she can continue investigating another day and possibly win the game.

In theory you can choose any of the witch's chosen suspects, but in practice I think Crius is the only option, and knowing what we do about him, this scene cuts deep. Anastasia always looked up to him, had feelings for him in his route (which is mandatory to play prior to this scene), and though he initially tries to corner her into confessing, fully knowing she has to be the Membrum, he ultimately he dies without objection because he comes to realize that she's on a personal quest she can only accomplish by going through him. The way he goes out, with just a few words to the sister he expects to see again, shows how easily he can allow himself to die and how little holds him to the world. Rubbing the salt on the wound is that one of the ways we can falsely pin the crime on him is tying the murder to the church, making it an act of revenge for his sister's death, which Anastasia only knows about due to her timeloops.

This scene hurts, because Anastasia is doing it in service of her mission, hoping that at the end of the day she'll be able to undo it all and eventually obtain an ideal future where everyone survives. It's a burden she carries every time someone dies and she swears to do better next time. But Crius was my favorite so it was a hefty gut punch on a personal level. I loved it, but as mentioned, I'm not put off by tragic endings.

Crius's story does come to a close though, and being an otome, there is a happy ending for him. Regardless of the route, as long as she has her post-Crius route memories, Anastasia makes sure that he gets his medicine so at least his disease won't claim him, and after Lucien's route completes it's possible to choose an epilogue with any of the men, allowing for a happily ever after.

Personally I thought Crius had one of the better epilogues. Though it's awkward since Anastasia realizes she is remembering a relationship that the current Crius has never experienced, and it's a little odd that this Crius would so easily accept that if they were in a relationship in another timeline it must have been a good thing, I thought it fit with his personality to give it a go. She's asked him for a lot of things over the various timelines, and no matter how odd they might have been, he's always heard her out.

Even in Zenn's route when he spends a fair amount of time working against her, he still made give her a chance to speak. Accepting odd things might just be who he is, and since he has access to his medicine in the final canon timeline, he can finally live for a future with the woman he loves. Most importantly, this Crius makes the voluntary decision to move forward, to make an attachment to someone for possibly the first time in years.

VN Talk: even if Tempest - Part 1: Overview

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 27 May 2024 14:00:00 +0000

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch
Release: 2022

I was originally skeptical about playing even if Tempest because writer/director Ayane Ushio is the same person who wrote and directed Norn9: Var Commons, which struggled with its overly ambitious narrative, so I didn't pick it up until it was on sale. Now that I've finished it, I have to say it may well be one of my favorite visual novels of all time, with the caveat that I can still see signs of what were likely aborted plot threads.

Thankfully most of those are easy to overlook due to the strong central narrative, so I'll save the bulk of them for another post. For now, I'll just leave it at this: The story definitely changed during production, and the signs are there if you look, with the biggest indication being the fact that the title screen prominently depicts a monster holding Anatasia that never appears during the game itself. This is the title screen which you will see every time you start up the game, and a heck of a thing to leave in if it was never supposed to play a role.

But despite whatever changes may have been made, even if Tempest is an excellent dark fantasy of revenge, sacrifice, and discovering the truth no matter the cost. Though Anatasia's ability to rewind time by dying is occasionally played for a dark laugh, the deaths of others are never taken lightly, even if she theoretically can revive them if she rewinds far enough. In fact one of the burdens she carries is making sure that any sacrifices made can be corrected by the time she finally pulls free of the meat grinder she's trapped inside.

Normally for an otome visual novel there is a common route and then the story branches into different love interest routes that are more or less a different reality if the protagonist had made different choices.

That is not the case with even if Tempest. Since Anatasia's Fatal Rewind ability means she can rewind time, she gets to experience multiple timelines over the course of the game. And not to put too fine a point on it, the fact she rewinds at the end of each route save the last means that things did not work out well. Each love interest takes a key role in a different timeline, but Anastasia carries the memories of all these loops so every timeline is canon to her personal experience.

It's completely bonkers.

As a result of the more linear narrative, playing through the different love interests happens mostly in order (with the exception of Crius and Tyril being interchangeable to start) as Anastasia gets closer and closer to the truth of what is happening. I normally use a walkthrough after my first playthrough to speed through the game. However I found that undesirable for even if Tempest, mostly due to the trials which are similar to Ace Attorney and Danganronpa (which I go into detail more here), but also because I was really glad that I didn't look at a walkthrough until I got to the end of my first playthrough and started my second, since it would have made a narrative choice less of a surprise. Because of that, I chose to play the rest of the game blind.

I usually don't bother with spoiler warnings for games over a year old since anyone searching for information this long after release likely knows spoilers are everywhere, but just in case, you may want to stop reading now if you're concerned about spoilers.

Like I did for Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly I'm going to cover the game's main story in this overview and rather than a route post in subsequent weeks for each love interest, I'm going to do a character post to discuss their personal story. This is largely because three of the four routes don't necessarily have endings, they're either ambiguous or bad, which causes Anastasia to loop back in time for the next one. There is only one story, and it runs through all four routes. The happy endings all branch off that final route.

At the beginning of the game Anastasia is largely helpless, an abused daughter of a marquess who lives locked away in an attic until a royal request for her hand in marriage forces her family to let her leave lest there be a scandal. This reacquaints her with her childhood friend Prince Lucien, who somehow convinced his older brother (and presumed heir to the throne) Prince Conrad to marry her. At first Conrad is all sympathy and affection for the emotionally starved Anastasia, but when she tries to repay him by investigating the illegal siphoning of royal funds it costs her the life of her loyal maid and confidante, Maya, and she discovers Conrad is the culprit.

Conrad offers to keep her as his fianceé as long as she behaves, but Anastasia decides she'd rather kill herself than submit to oppression again, starting the first of many death-induced timeloops, with the real kicker coming in the next loop which ends with Conrad pinning his crimes on her and having her burned at the stake as a witch. This breaks the dam holding back Anastasia's rage and sets her off on her quest fueled by piss and vinegar to make them all pay.

I loved it.

There's no mystery behind her looping. After her second death she learns an extradimensional witch has given her the Fatal Rewind ability in exchange for helping him track down the Witch of Ruin in her world, the Ecumene. He suspects the Witch of Ruin was involved in the events preceding her death, so the investigation would be a win-win for both of them, but mostly she's out to expose the truth about Conrad and escape the clutches of her abusive stepmother (who is also the sister of the current king and thus Conrad's aunt).

The game properly begins after a deeper rewind of eight years to when Anastasia was still a child, during which she pretends to go to a convent with her maid Maya before she can be locked in the attic. Instead she joins a group of cadets training to join the Knights of Garuda, who have access to the royal castle (and thus Conrad), due being guardians of the goddess Norna's beloved garuda birds.

This makes the Anastasia of the majority of the game much different from the one we meet in the prologue, as she's now a driven woman who has grown to adulthood twice, and the second time with a single-minded intensity to protect the only person she still considers family (Maya) and to bring Conrad to justice, since she assumes without direct interference from her, Conrad's plans to siphon royal funds and use slave labor would still happen.

And to be fair, it's very easy for the player to get on board the Conrad hate train. Even if our current Conrad has yet to have (and may never have) Maya killed or abuse Anastasia's trust because of the time rewinds, he's quick to flaunt his superiority and willingness to play chessmaster to those he feels no need to humor, so the desire to see him pay stays alive every time we're forced to interact with the man.

But despite the fact Anastasia expects only her personal circumstances have changed after the ten year rewind, there are a few things "wrong" once she catches up to her previous present day. Prince Lucien, who was a spineless wimp pre-looping, has grown into a much stronger young man, nicknamed the "Frozen Prince." Zenn, who was previously the son of a viscount working in the castle, is now a rough and tumble detective who probably wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the castle. And her father is now inexplicably bedridden when he wasn't before.

Maddeningly for Anastasia, despite being able to reverse time, there are occasions when she has to let someone die for the short term so she can progress further in a particular timeline (and get more information about what's really going on) before doing a more complete rewind before the start of most present day events. For the first two routes this costs her both Maya and Lucien, with a particularly dark montage of Anastasia trying to loop a single day over and over again in a futile attempt to save Maya.

More maddening for the player are Lucien's deaths, since his limited contact with Anastasia prevents us from asking him why he changed and why he has complete and utter faith that Anastasia will persevere. The guy gives up his life twice so Anastasia's quest can continue.

Aside from changes Anastasia does not believe she could have influenced, the antics of the Witch of Ruin keep interfering with her quest for revenge. It's not that she begrudges trying to stop him, as the witch begins messing with her shortly after she qualifies to join the Knights of Garuda, and he is clearly up to no good, but the mystery of what he is doing and why become the driving force of the plot in the way a known quantity like Conrad does not.

After the witch makes his return known, the city prepares for the ensuing Carnival based on the rules laid out the last time he decided to play. At night, the Witch of Ruin forces every human in the capital to sleep with the exception of one who is turned into the witch's plaything, the Membrum. Membra supposedly get superhuman strength and their desires are twisted so that they kill in pursuit of them. Once they have done so, the magical sleep is lifted and the city's inhabitants can check on each other to see who survived. Red chains appear around the necks of five people, one of whom is the Membrum, and from there, a witch trial or Carnival is held. Three hundred jurors must vote for which of the five suspects is actually the Membrum, upon which that person will be executed. If they fail to vote correctly, the killings will continue every night until the people get it right.

The witch trials are fascinating since Anastasia gets to participate from the perspective of different roles in different timelines. She has been the innocent person marked as a dummy target by the witch. She got to play the role of an inquisitor administering the trial. And she gets to be the Membrum, which admittedly was a banger of a role, as by that point in the story she realizes that she will have to condemn innocent people to die if she's to win the Carnival and get to the truth behind the Witch of Ruin. And I'll say, getting Crius falsely executed as the Membrum without him understanding why was one of the most deliciously painful things the game had me do. (He was my favorite.)

So what is the truth? What is she really chasing after?

Anastasia has two different goals most of the game, with the idea that chasing one will enable her to solve the other, but the Witch of Ruin and Conrad and her stepmother's cruelty to her are completely unrelated, which gives me the suspicion that Rune, the witch who gives her the Fatal Rewind in the prologue, was lying to her when he laid out the circumstances of their bargain. This would not have been that surprising since he knows who and what she really is.

In the third route, Anastasia learns that Ish, the Witch of Ruin, used to be a servant of the goddess Norna, and she is, in fact, Norna reborn as a human after a great deal of betrayal and trauma.

Humans didn't originally exist in the Ecumene, but Norna did, and opened portals to other worlds and offered refuge to the needy humans there. The settlers began to build a kingdom, and the king was going to marry Norna, at least until he suffered from a needy ego that could not stand the thought that Norna would continue to live eternal and he would be relegated to history as second fiddle beside the woman they considered a goddess.

So he tried to kill her and passed off another woman as his goddess wife, which is why the royal family of the present day claim a divine lineage. Norna survived the attack, and could no longer find solace among humans who viewed her powers as witchcraft (since the "goddess" was with the king). In despair she split her powers among her various servitor witches, including Rune and Ish, and then abandoned her body to be reborn as an ordinary human.

Ish felt betrayed that after all she went through she would want to be one of them, and holding the witch trials has been his way of baiting out Norna's reincarnation. He's not aware of anything that happens in an erased timeline, because the whole reality is rolled back including him inside it (but not Rune who is in an interdimensional space outside), but he does know whenever Norna's powers are used, which includes the Fatal Rewind.

So every time Anastasia has restarted the timeline, he becomes aware and he has known she is Norna since her farthest jump back of eight years ago. In fact it's because he shapeshifted to look like Maya that Anastasia realizes the reason Lucien turned out different is because of a letter "Maya" encouraged her to send him before running away to become a knight cadet.

Though I liked the fairy tale stories of Norna and the witch presented at the start of each chapter and how they ended up being distortions of the same person, I found I was less enamored with Anastasia being her reincarnation. And to be honest, I don't think Anastasia was really thrilled about it either.

There's a point in the finale of the game where she finds the body Norna had sealed away and they speak to each other (which to me implies they are very much not the same person). There doesn't seem to be any progression from the person Norna was to the person Anastasia is. They are just two people talking to each other. Norna understands she has made some regrettable decisions, and she is sorry for all the trouble Ish has caused. Then she's gone, though she spares taking Ish into oblivion with her at Anastasia's request.

Anastasia gives up her goddess power in the end and is a normal human when the credits roll. (In most endings. She keeps them in Zenn's.) After all that, she decides she doesn't care about revenge on Conrad anymore, and by then I didn't either.

That's not a patch against the game. Throughout it I was grumbling that I would be disappointed if Conrad was forgiven or allowed to go free. It's just, when you're dealing with the warping of reality, a corrupt prince is a smaller menace in a much larger picture. And by then we know that Zenn, Crius, and Tyril had dismantled the slavery ring before Anastasia even met them for the "first time" after her first big rewind. While I was a little annoyed she didn't get to participate, I know that waiting for her to grow up doesn't make any sense when the three older guys can free those people as soon as possible (which Zenn was able to do since he retains his memories every rewind).

While the game has some flaws, like the lack of any romantic tension in Lucien's route, and some logic gaps left by unfulfilled plot threads, by making the entire game one single story it raises the stakes more than any other otome I've played. It was very hard to put the game down and I settled for writing notes between routes rather than full blog posts as I normally do just because I didn't know how things were going to go. In retrospect that kind of bit me in the butt as it's taken me months to get this blog series properly written out as I had to reconstruct so much material out of my notes, but it was worth revisiting the game as I did.

Why Unpacking Didn't Work for Me

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 13 May 2024 14:00:00 +0000

I finished Unpacking recently. It was an indie and critical darling, wearing so many awards on its Steam page it'd rival a military general. I'd wanted to play it for a while, but found the list price too steep for a 3-4 hour game, no matter how well reviewed.

Still, I really liked what I'd heard about it. I'd read reviews where journalists were impressed by the game's subtle storytelling and how the player would learn about this girl/woman's life from the things she unpacked as she moved to different places in her life.

I like good storytelling. I'm a writer after all. And I like seeing novel forms of storytelling in games that can't be accomplished through conventional fiction. Learning this woman's story through her possessions sounded up my alley.

When I started the game, I quickly realized that the person whose belongings I unpacked was clearly a person of her own and not me. Though you can turn it off, by default there are only certain locations an item can be accepted. So you can't leave a book under your bed's pillow even though the game will physically allow you to put one there. (I can't be the only kid who slept with a book under their pillow…)

It was a little jarring at first. Since I was unpacking a child's belongings I figured I'd unpack it as I probably would when I was a kid, but the game's demands made it clear this was not me.

Though this is a "cozy" game I actually found it rather stressful as the game increasingly has this unnamed person move to ever larger habitations with more rooms and a more complex set of belongings. I didn't like to end a play session in the middle of unpacking. I wanted to finish.

And I think that's where Unpacking started breaking down for me.

The act of unpacking dozens of rooms, the actual moment to moment gameplay, wasn't that appealing. You open a box and you can't see what's inside of it. Items come out one at a time and you have no idea if there are ten books in there or one, because our unnamed woman accidentally packed something in the wrong box. It annoyed me finding something in the wrong box. I'd be unpacking living room items and suddenly find something for the bathroom. It'd make some logical sense if it was at the top of the box, maybe she forgot to pack it and needed to find a place for it really quick, but lots of these mispacked items would show up in the middle.

As a result I found the unpacking tedious instead of relaxing. By the end I was trying to optimize my placement time rather than trying to put things away based on aesthetics, so the only thing that held my interest was the story and the novelty regarding how the story was told.

One of the things that really got my attention in an early review was a scenario when the woman moves in with a boyfriend after graduation. It's clearly his apartment when she moves in, because his stuff is already in place and the dresser drawers are haphazardly used. At first glance, there's not much space for her belongings, but with some work you can get everything to fit sensibly. Except for her college degree.

There is no wall space. Her boyfriend has used up all of it and you are not allowed to take down his things. You can rearrange, but 100% full is still 100% full even if the game did allow you to pick up and swap items. There are, in fact, only two places the degree can be hung; over the toilet in the bathroom (which the game will tell you is not an acceptable location) or under the bed.

It's probably not surprising that the relationship doesn't work out, and the next move is back into her childhood home.

I loved this. I loved seeing all the small details. The girl has dreidel toys, so I wondered if she was Jewish or had simply gotten them as part of a lesson in school, and then later in life I unpacked a menorah, confirming her religion. I know that she's an artist, but worked as a store clerk just out of school, and that she likes to add plush chicks to her chicken collection. She's a gamer with an affinity for Nintendo platforms, moving about with a GameCube when she's younger and adding a Wii when she ages up. When a new girlfriend moves in, I conclude she's Asian, likely Chinese. Those details are great.

But those are details. They're not a story.

When I got the game, I wondered how it would end. How long would we follow this woman? Would our final unpacking be a retirement home? Or would the final unpacking actually be a bookend to her life with perhaps her grandchildren packing up her belongings after she passes away?

Those are both end of life scenarios, but that's the problem. Where should Unpacking end? Since this isn't an endless game of randomized unpacking scenarios, it has to end at some point, and it does.

The problem is, the ending is not telegraphed. I finished a particularly long and complicated unpacking late at night, so I figured this was a good stopping point. The game transitioned to the photo album interface with the right arrow button highlighted to turn the page to the next unpacking, just as it always does, but I decided not to hit it and turned off my Switch.

I came back the next day, ready for another round, and clicked the arrow to continue. The credits rolled. It was one of the most anticlimactic starts to a play session I'd ever had.

In retrospect, I can see that the multi-story house with a baby on the way was clearly going to be a transition point in our woman's life, but all her moves have been transition points. Why was this move in particular the last one? Families move all the time. Is it because she's now a home owner and this is the place she intends to live out her days?

That would be fine if there was some inkling that was going to be the case. It would probably be difficult to telegraph that in the unpacking itself, but she always concludes each move with a note in her photo album, and she doesn't say anything that suggests that this is a final move. It's looking forward to the baby, which is appropriate, because it's another start for her, but for the player it doesn't signal an ending. So, I expected the story to continue, but it didn't.

And that has left me with a rather grumpy feeling.

The gameplay didn't do it for me, and because of that ending, the story left me unsatisfied as well. It wasn't horrible, just disappointing. That the mechanics didn't click with me wasn't really the issue. I knew this was a short game so I wasn't worried that I'd eventually chuck the game out of irritation. It was just how anticlimactic the ending was. Here are the credits! Here's a look at the backsides of the happy couple as they start their new life with a baby! But I thought I was going to do another unpacking…

Generally a game, or any creative work really, wants to go out on its best foot, to leave the audience with a favorable impression. Surprise credits isn't the way to go, and the way I came back to my final "play" session is an impression of Unpacking that is never going to leave.

Half a Year Later and I Need to Rethink Radiant Tale

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 14:00:00 +0000

I usually don't spend much time thinking about a game after I'm done blogging about it. The writing itself is a way to let all my thoughts and feelings out, and even the things I didn't say usually exist in notes and excised paragraphs (since I like to keep posts to about 2000 words each). If Radiant Tale had been a one and done title my post would probably remain another mark checking off a game I had wanted to play.

But Radiant Tale Fanfare! is coming out at the end of June so I need to reckon with what I thought about the original. Fair warning, spoilers ahead.

The original Radiant Tale interested me because of the noblebright fantasy setting, but also because writers Nao Kojima and Sachi Arino were half the writing team for Code:Realize ~Guardian of Rebirth~, which I consider my gold standard for the genre, and Kojima had also written part of Cafe Enchante, which I still think fondly of.

So I was buoyed by expectations for how the story would work based on their past projects, which are particularly notable for their themes around found family, where the protagonists and her various love interests support each other through thick and thin. I like when the guys who aren't currently in a romance with the protagonist get to play an active part in the story and become buddies with the other men. It avoids looking like a harem situation when everyone has a reason for being there and it's not because the protagonist turns them on.

Radiant Tale was my most anticipated title of 2024. Perhaps unfairly, I had expectations. It didn't need to be perfect, Cafe Enchante definitely had things I didn't care for (like what happened to Kotone in Misyr's route), but I did expect the highs to outweigh the lows.

And overall I think they did, which is why I'm fussing over Fanfare. It's more like there are pieces of Radiant Tale that I really like, but it doesn't come together.

For instance, the found family thing. While Radiant Tale does have a reason for everyone to be together besides the protagonist (since Tifalia joins an already established group), and they do help each other when the chips are down, it feels more like a group of coworkers than found family. If you like your coworker you'll help them out, you might drive them home if they're sick, or do other things that are regular acts of kindness. But that doesn't mean you're both going bowling on Friday night.

And that's kind of what Radiant Tale gives us. After the halfway point when CIRCUS is finishing their first tour, they even expect to go their separate ways, never to reconvene again, and there's little to suggest their attitude changes after the actual end of the game. They send a few letters, but the band is not together nor planning to get together (barring Vilio's ending since he has the golden route that solves everyone's problems and caps it off with him and Tifalia getting married months later during one of their performances).

They're not a bad group of characters, I can't say anyone bored me, but they aren't as tight knit as I originally expected them to be. And to be frank Ion's good ending pissed me off with his possessiveness of Tifalia where he didn't want her spending as much time thinking about his friends as thinking about him (and I had liked him up until that point). Jealousy just ruins the found family dynamic when the intention is to restrict one family member from seeing the others.

And it's not just that. I disliked Paschalia's route because everyone in CIRCUS made potentially invasive plans to save Paschalia's life without running any of it by Paschalia himself. As someone who has survived two different cancers I was so mortified for the guy. I'd like to think if they really cared they would have let him decide the way he wanted to approach his illness; present the options but not push. A family should be supportive, rather than deciding support.

And then there was general plot stuff like the scripting at the scene of Balto's murder, Vilio's half-assed common route, what exactly were the circumstances around Radie's amnesia, etc.

I'm not here to nitpick individual instances, since most of this can be found in my 6-part VN Talk series, but the thing is my opinions of a game can change with time and perspective. I left Radiant Tale feeling that it was the weakest sibling of Code:Realize and Cafe Enchante, but would still probably make my Top 10 list of otome. I wanted to feel like I had enjoyed it. Now… I'm not so certain.

And with Fanfare coming stateside this summer, I need to figure out whether I'm going to get it. It used to be I'd clear my gaming schedule for a Code:Realize fan disc (what you'd probably call a stand alone expansion in another genre), and I would have done so for Cafe Enchante if it'd had one, but with Radiant Tale it's not that I hate the original, so much as I find myself disappointed.

I was listening to the even if Tempest soundtrack while working on my blog posts for it and it got me pumped, remembering some of my favorite parts of the game. Cafe Enchante's soundtrack was more hit or miss, but still there were very good tracks that reminded me of the best moments of the game. When I played Radiant Tale though, I just felt… bored. I like the opening song "Michi no Sekai e Fanfare," but none of the instrumental tracks sparked anything in me unless they used "Michi no Sekai e Fanfare" as a leitmotif. While that could be a fault of the composition, it also means that scenes never felt powerful enough to connect with the music.

I can't point to any one thing as a key factor that let me down, but in general I suppose it's more the sense that the package did not come together in a greater whole, and I'm not entirely sure if that's me and my outsized expectations or the game itself. I suspect that if I hadn't known the writing pedigree my expectations would have been lower, but I would likely have complained about the same things.

For perspective, I think Cafe Enchante, despite its problems, ultimately sits comfortably in my Top 5 otome because I felt the game came together well enough to overlook the flaws. Radiant Tale didn't have the magic to keep it together.

It wasn't all bad. Lack of a found family dynamic (and spotty plotting) aside, I liked Zafora and Vilio's story arcs. I liked the worldbuilding and how old tales used as parts of CIRCUS's performances later became critical lore for the final route. But I did dislike the ending to Paschalia and Radie's routes, and the jealousy line in Ion's. When I put it that way, I suppose I liked "half" the game, and I'm not sure that's enough to enjoy a fan disc, especially when there will be After Stories for the endings I didn't enjoy as much.

A fan disc is generally full of low stakes post-game epilogues and side stories so there's less of a chance the game will trip over itself with continuity errors or questionable plotting. The worst case is that it could be boring. And when it comes to it, I might not be interested in seeing what happens next. I could be proven wrong. I didn't like Impey's route in the original Code:Realize, but he won me over in the fan discs, so there's hope.

After writing all this, I think my conclusion is that I'm still interested, there are aspects of the game I'd like to revisit, but I'll wait for a sale. Which likely means I won't be covering it on my blog any time soon, but I've got plenty of backlog so I'm not hurting for material.

X-Men '97: Morph is Back!

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 14:00:00 +0000

I watched the 90s X-Men: The Animated Series back when I was in school with no knowledge of the comic books. While I haven't rewatched it so I can't vouch for how it has aged, I remember that at the time I really enjoyed it for having one of the few things animated television had at the time; an ongoing storyline. As it turns out, many of those story arcs were adapted from the comics, and eventually formed the basis by which I would judge every X-Men adaptation to follow. Also, as it turns out, the character I most fell in love with, was largely made up specifically for the animated series.

More specifically, since it was his job to get killed off in the first two-parter, they reinvented an old Marvel character who wasn't being used anymore and gave him the new code name Morph.

Yes, I managed to fall in love with a character who died in the first two episodes. I was really into shapeshifters so Morph naturally played into the character type I'd root for the most.

The show was still interesting enough though, so I kept watching. And then season 2 happened, and Morph returned as a mind-controlled antagonist. He later got freed from mind-control, but was still mentally messed up. And so going forward generally each season would have a Morph episode I'd look forward to as he dealt with his trauma, and then he'd be gone until the next one. I really liked those check-ins, even though by the final season I knew that a large part of the reason he was kept on the sidelines was likely that he didn't have a comic book equivalent that took part in many of the story arcs they were adapting.

Still, he was included in the send-off of Charles Xavier in the series finale, which made me happy to see that he was still considered in-universe as a core part of the X-Men.

Now, getting close to 30 years later, we have X-Men '97 which rather than reboot the series simply picks up where the original left off. Xavier is gone and the world entrusted to those left behind. (Though I notice they leave it as the Professor has passed away and not that he sailed away in a starship with his alien princess girlfriend as a way to try to preserve his life.)

I figured I would watch it at some point, since it looks like the animation team did an excellent job of recreating the feel of the 90s cartoon as we remembered it rather than what it actually looked like. The side by side opening comparisons on YouTube are a little unfair as the original opening was incredibly good and when you look at actual episode footage from the older show you can see it's much flatter than the new work by Studio Mir, best known for the Avatar series and the Voltron remake.

X-Men '97 was going to remain in the "at some point" like a lot of things in my viewing backlog, except that I did watch one of those opening comparison videos and noticed that there were two additions to the cast. The original X-Men, perhaps realizing they were dealing with a large cast of characters and an audience who are probably unfamiliar with most of them, had a neat opening sequence that would showcase a character (and their powers if possible) along with their name. This allowed viewers to gradually pick up everyone's names over time.

Morph, as I later realized, was not in this line-up, since he was introduced with the intention of being killed off, but since everyone was new to me, it was hard to recognize that his name was not among the deluge before he died.

But he is in the opening of X-Men '97. (And Bishop. Which I have a slightly harder time accepting for story reasons, but don't want to get into here.)

The new opening credits first show Morph as how we knew him back in the older series, before turning him into a blank slate looking humanoid rather like a doppelganger from Dungeons & Dragons, which has been a "I'm a shapeshifting creature with no actual identity" marker in other media before, so while I missed the more human look, I wasn't thrown by it.

It also looks like Morph is now non-binary. Not a problem, since being a shapeshifter able to assume either gender likely makes gender irrelevant, but it was a little jarring that I found out through the informational boxes played during the ending credits and not from natural dialogue (so far as I noticed).

I felt a little like Morph's long journey out of PTSD and back into the land of ready for action was glossed over, though I vaguely remember their return to the manor in the original series was also rather abrupt so this might not entirely be X-Men '97's fault.

Because Morph was introduced and killed off so quickly, in a way, X-Men '97 is the first time we're really seeing them when they're not dealing with trauma, and I'm not entirely sure they would have been my favorite now if I was a kid watching this for the first time. They're a little weird and a little inappropriate with their humor, but it's nice that having them alive gives Wolverine a buddy. The two were supposed to be good friends in the original, so failing to save and actually saving Morph were big character moments for Wolverine, but it was something that was said rather than told.

X-Men '97 makes sure Morph and Wolverine hang out and get to be the buddies they're supposed to be. Which is great.

But watching the two launch episodes also gives me another reason to understand why Morph was likely left to "recover" for the majority of the series. Now that they're part of the active team again, it's pretty obvious that Morph isn't that great at combat in a series where the majority of the showcase mutants are living weapons.

There are moments where they get to use their shapeshifting to great effect, turning into the mutant Archangel in order to fly, and others where it seems a little more forced. Basically, to make Morph combat-worthy, the writer uses them as a source of Easter eggs mimicking various characters from the old show, often giving them their powers as well. While this makes sense for Archangel, who has wings, it was stretching my disbelief a bit to see Morph turn into Psylocke and use her psychic blades, since this implies it's not just a physical mimicry but one that goes all the way down to the genetic level. At that point, what's stopping Morph from shifting into a double of Magneto and using all the power of magnetism?

(This actually reminds me of one of the old Morph episodes when Wolverine tries to hunt them down and a mentally unstable Morph turns into a rhinoceros while fighting him. Once the shapeshifting stretched beyond humanoid forms, one of my friends called bull on the writing.)

Still, I'm glad Morph's integration into the cast gave me the impetus to watch X-Men '97 since it was an enjoyable return to memory lane and I look forward to seeing what the rest of the series has for the season. I know there are a lot more characters than room to give all of them story arcs (hence retaining an updated version of the opening credits that lists all the key players in the cast and seems to be updated with every episode), but I hope Morph gets a bit of a spotlight for themselves. I feel like we still have a lot of catching up to do.

And also, I just really want to see Morph on an infiltration mission of some kind. That's what shapeshifters do best!

(Next Day Addendum: I ended up watching the 72 episodes in 35 minutes recap over on Screen Crush which does an amazing job of touching on every single episode of the original X-Men and I'd completely forgotten Morph had shapeshifted to use other mutants' powers in the past, and that they pretty much solo-ed Master Mold in one of their return episodes, so I take back that they would have been baggage for lack of combat ability. Now it's more of a question of why wouldn't you throw them at every enemy you've got?)

even if Tempest is a Fabulous Mystery Game

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 14:00:00 +0000

I love mystery games, as you may have noticed if you've spent any time reading here. My introduction to visual novels was the Ace Attorney series and since then I've enjoyed titles such as Danganronpa, Raging Loop, and Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happinesss. I also enjoyed Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, which if it hadn't been in 3D may as well have been a visual novel. Getting to the bottom of a crime-laden mystery is something I enjoy.

But when I heard that even if Tempest had trials where you use evidence to ferret out the culprit, I assumed it would be a half-baked mechanic, mostly because it's otome. Perhaps that's an unfair assessment, that media aimed at women would phone it in, but most otome games that come to the US are visual novels and if there is any gameplay beyond making choices, it's a relatively easy activity so the player doesn't get frustrated when the main point of the game is playing out a romance.

Both Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly and Collar x Malice require the player to shoot a gun sometimes, but one is extremely forgiving and the other is more of a matter of having good timing than good aim. As someone with notoriously bad shooter skills, those examples were not a downside for me, but being a mystery lover, a half-assed murder trial would garner a sigh of boredom at best and ruin my immersion at worst.

I needn't have worried.

After I finished my first high tension witch trial, during which I was afraid I'd screwed up so badly my protagonist Anastasia was going to be burned at the stake, I was actually discombobulated to come to the next scene and be greeted by Anastasia's love interest. In the midst of all the investigation, sussing people out, and going through my evidence list at the trial itself I'd somehow forgotten which genre of game I was playing.

After the initial surprise, I realized that this is a game that feels particularly geared towards me. I like Anastasia as a heroine. She's willing to do the years of hard work to forge herself into the person she wants to be. She plans ahead. She knows the object of her revenge and how to expose him, and she is willing to do whatever it takes to save the person closest to being family that she has.

So when Anastasia needs to bring down the Witch of Ruin as part of the bargain for her friend's life and her revenge, she barrels into the witch trial like hell on wheels.

Which is to say, she's a lot more action oriented than most otome protagonists, and clearly takes the lead in the investigations, even if her current man is tagging along. This makes her work well as the protagonist for a mystery game and she's just as motivated as the player to get these murders solved.

And from a game mechanics perspective, I was pleasantly surprised. Unlike Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, which also allow the player to visit a variety of locations, there is a limited amount of time to hunt down clues, which prevents the player from starting the trial with a full suite of information. You have a set of suspects marked by the Witch of Ruin, but only one of them has been turned into the witch's plaything, and I was given 11 hours until the trial began (appropriately at midnight). Each avenue of investigation had a time cost associated with it, so I wouldn't be able to follow all of them before the trial began, which as a mystery game veteran was rather unsettling.

It's okay to proceed without all the clues? I can't have all the clues? What madness is this?

And then the trial itself isn't really about establishing evidence or pointing out the flaws in another person's logic, though that can help. The witch trial is decided in the court of public opinion so even if you're completely correct, it won't mean anything if Anastasia is pissing off the 300 jurors so much that they're unwilling to believe her.

Though I don't think the trials are as freeform as they initially appear, I found I loved the format. Knowing that the right answer might not actually exist in my evidence because I didn't do that investigation added an edge to the presentation, and presenting the wrong answer usually doesn't result in the player being thrown back to the evidence list until they find the right answer. Instead, most of the time the game will acknowledge you chose poorly and the trial will move on, with failure being the result of multiple decisions over the course of the trial rather than a failing to present an obscure piece of evidence five times in a row at a single point in time. (I do like Ace Attorney but I don't like feeling obligated to save right before presenting evidence because I don't know which item out of twenty is the one I need.)

The trial even has decision points where you can choose to focus the debate around a particular person, and there is more than one option that will satisfactorily end the trial with the correct culprit being identified. As long as Anastasia does enough to shift the blame where she wants it to go (because it's court of public opinion), it's a win.

There are only two things that bothered me. The first is that when the game transitions to the evidence list, it doesn't let you back up and read the last line of dialogue regarding what you are trying to prove or disprove. Since most of the time the penalty is just a reputation hit and the trial moves on, it's not horrible, but being able to read the last line of dialogue lets you compare the evidence to what was just said and that's not possible here. Most other games with a trial system will let you do this. Worse, on the rare occasion you really have to pick a specific piece of evidence before the game will move on, you might find yourself stabbing in the dark for your second or third picks because you can't remember what you're supporting or disproving.

The second issue is that I think it's actually possible to hose yourself going into the witch trial on Zenn's route. (And spoilers ahead for the rest of this paragraph and the next.) I often went into witch trials with missing pieces of evidence, so I didn't think anything of it when I entered the Zenn route trial with the intention to falsely convict Crius of being the Membrum. But the problem was, I got far enough that Anatasia was ready for the killing blow that would "prove" his guilt and I didn't have anything. I kept trying one thing after another and none of my evidence seemed to be working. After about five tries using increasingly absurd pieces of evidence (eiT is not as obtuse as AA can be) and taking constant reputation hits, I finally gave up and loaded an older save.

I think there are only two ways to falsely convict Crius, either by revealing that he knew the first victim, or providing a motivation for killing the second. There are only four investigation leads at this point in the game, and the player has time for three, so in theory there's no way the player can leave without at least one piece of evidence to earn a conviction unless they purposely stop investigating early, but it's possible to do one of the investigations and not get the evidence based on a dialogue choice, which is what I'd done. I don't mind not having all the evidence necessary for a perfect trial, but having to restart the game from an earlier point in time because I can't finish the trial at all shouldn't happen.

End spoilers.

When the witch trials came to an end, there was still more story to go, but I realized I was a little sad that it was not likely many fans of mystery games (who aren't also part of otome fandom) would bother to play this game. The non-linear trial system that accepts multiple answers and provides multiple investigation routes without losing the thread of the story is quite frankly an amazing experience and I hope to see something like it again in another game. Unfortunately, with even if Tempest being an otome and the story wrapping up so witch trials will no longer happen, this is not a case where we would expect a sequel with those mechanics back in action, and Voltage, the publisher and developer, has never developed anything outside of otome so it's unlikely this mechanic would return in an unrelated title.

If you're interested in a game that will give you three solid trials and a pretty engrossing mystery that sometimes has romantic overtones, then I absolutely recommend this. It's a novel spin on the investigation and trial system.

Ten Trials of Babel: The Doppelganger Maze

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Platform: Windows (also on Mac)
Release: 2023

Most otome that finds its way into English is of the visual novel genre. Otome itself is more of a story/demographic categorization, involving female protagonists romancing male love interests, but the gameplay itself can be a rhythm game, a visual novel, or an RPG. Some people will even include games such as Fire Emblem and Dragon Age which are not restricted to female protagonists but nonetheless have a strong romantic component to them.

That is to say, there is a reason I'm not including Ten Trials of Babel: The Doppelganger Maze in the usual VN Talk series even though it is otome. This is a puzzle adventure game and if you're not using a walkthrough, you're probably going to want a notepad near you to work out some of the puzzles. But if you want an assortment of guys to fall for your protagonist, that's all there.

Ten Trials of Babel: The Doppelganger Maze is probably the gaming mash-up of my dreams, being otome crossed with a survival game and for something as short as it is, I was pleasantly surprised by how big it went with the worldbuilding. At first I thought it was too much for a game that I knew was going to be limited in scope, but it manages to make it work for reasons that I'll get to. But first, it just launched in English last November, so be warned there are SPOILERS after the break, including the ending.

First off, I want to clear up that the ten trials in the title are clearly a reference to the ten floors of the Babel Tower that is the survival game, and not that the player is going to play through all ten trials as you might expect. The game clocks in at about 10 hours if you want to do everything, more if you make a number of mistakes and have to replay segments like I did.

I knew the playthrough time going in, but I still thought I was going to go through all ten trials, one on each floor, since it's clear that the Story World we begin the game in has multiple floors. But in actuality, each Story World takes place on a "floor" of Babel Tower and the characters, known as Story Divers, typically can choose which floor they want to enter when starting a new game. High level players can enter lower level floors to farm points that will allow them to buy equipment, skills, and other resources that might allow them to survive at a higher level one. So even though there are three floors in this particular Story World, all of it actually takes place on Babel's Floor 1.

Nameable protagonist Xixy finds herself waking up in a virtual world, told about this interdimensional survival game by a "friendly" AI, and then unceremoniously tossed into her first Story World with not only her own survival at stake, but that of humanity itself. No pressure!

The gist of it is that the powerful entities that administer Babel Cross (the name of the survival game) are pitting ten races from different worlds together in a race to the top of the tower, and the first seven people to reach it will spare their species from annihilation. Even if representatives from multiple races are in the same Story World, they will be assigned different objectives to complete, all but guaranteeing that even if they had a way to communicate with each other, they would be driven apart by the nature of the game to put their goals, and thus their survival, into conflict.

(Note: The name constantly uses "race" for everything, probably because most games use race to describe other species in fantasy games like elf, orc, troll, etc, but it becomes really awkward when the translation uses "interracial" to talk about romantic relationships between different species so I'll be using species and race interchangeably.)

The Babel Cross and the sheer number of people participating in a game that is already in progress by the time Xixy joins her first Story World feels like a lot when it's just her and her three human teammates. The game throws the big picture concept at you right away, but then you spend the next several hours in a very confined setting with a small number of people, and wondering where all these mysterious races that you don't even meet over the course of the game come in. In fact, of the nine non-human races, you only meet four of them, and two of them are undead that used to be human.

It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity since many of them are non-standard fantasy races. I would have liked to know what a meka, a yao, or a relic is like. Instead we got a beast (fairly standard Asian pop culture beast person with a human face but beast ears, tail, and some extra fur here and there), a phantom, a spirit, and a ghost. And yes, there probably could have been some better naming of those last three!

The phantom is not actually undead, but an entity that possesses dead bodies and uses it as a shell for three to five years after which it needs to find another one. I feel like the translators probably should have swapped spirit and ghost though since Arlo is the spirit and relatively benign (compared to DawnWhisper) and DawnWhisper is the ghost and clearly the more malevolent of the two.

To me, a ghost is clearly human in origin and lingers in this world due to ties to its past, which is Arlo's story. A "spirit," at least in English, doesn't have to be human in origin and DawnWhisper, who is a little more vampiric in nature (supposedly having a sun weakness) and makes no mention of having a human past, fits better with this looser definition. I'm only supposing he was human at one point because he wants to turn Xixy into a fellow ghost which suggests this may be how his species propagates.

Occasionally descriptions come up regarding the other races even if we don't meet them, and I think that's because the game really wants the outside reality to be bigger than what the characters are immediately struggling with.

When it's just Xixy and her first few party members, they're all human and happy because that means they've all been assigned the same Story World goal and will not have to work against each other to survive the current floor of Babel. All they care about is solving the puzzles and earning the floor boss's permission to leave, which is their goal. (It's a first floor, so in theory it should be the easiest, though I certainly got myself killed multiple times when not following a walkthrough.)

In fact the first good ending of the game is just the four humans and Arlo, who chooses to join them as a summon rather than becoming a Story Diver himself because he does not want to have to compete against them someday. The group rejoices about managing to leave with a bunch of points so they can later challenge higher floors. It's a pretty upbeat ending with everyone having come together as a team. If the game didn't tell you there was a true ending (and hints at how to unlock it) it would have been a perfectly fine ending to the game.

But what elevates Ten Trials of Babel beyond its death game premise, is the true ending, which is only accessible after completing the good ending. This is where we get into the purpose of the Babel Cross and why we need the big picture worldbuilding with so many species and all the interspecies fighting that has no immediate bearing on our main cast.

This Story World is the Doppelganger Maze because it's themed around doppelgangers. If one gets a clear look at one's own reflection a doppelganger will appear. Though aggressive and irrational at first, it will gradually gain its sanity, and as it does, the original will become weaker. The game is actually pretty slick at getting multiple doppelgangers in play without overwhelming the Story World with mirrors to navigate around. Initially doppelgangers are just something to be careful of creating, but when Xixy is desperate to escape DawnWhisper, she triggers her doppelganger on purpose to create a distraction for him.

For some reason, Xixy's doppelganger is incredibly powerful. Whereas most doppelgangers are versions of how the original sees themselves or wishes they could be, Arlo, as the floor boss, tells them that her doppelganger was set by the Babel system rather than being created through his doppelganger power. Xixy's doppelganger is a future version of her (one that is so strong she can go toe to toe with the millennia old DawnWhisper). Late in the true route, Xixy's doppelganger regains enough sanity for the two to speak civilly, and this is when the game changes.

Everything we've done up until this point has been to clear the Story World, preferably with as many points as possible, so our characters can do this again in another Story World and someday reach the pinnacle of the Babel Tower and earn their race a universe where it survives.

But future Xixy tells the current version of herself that she has won the game, and humanity was destroyed anyway. It wasn't anything the Babel Tower admins did, they kept their word, but humans claimed three of the seven spots (and the game doesn't go into why) and the other races ganged up to exterminate the humans for being greedy.

Worse for future Xixy on a personal level, she lost all the friends she'd made along the way, and she tells current Xixy the fate of all her companions. Since Babel would grant her a wish for reaching the top of the tower, her wish was to die and have her data turned into a doppelganger so she could meet her past self in the very first Story World she ever went to. Future Xixy wants the group to fight the system and tells them how before having current Xixy kill her (since as a doppelganger she'll keep draining the original the longer she exists).

While fighting the system is not an original twist, it's not really what I expected for a short game, and it's after this revelation that all the characters really start to work together. The Babel Cross is supposed to separate the races, but everyone works together to accomplish a perfect score to leave the Story World, whether using creative interpretations of their given goal (like Arlo needs someone to be left behind, which they decide can be Carrus's doppelganger) or helping someone else cheese it.

I wasn't certain I'd like DawnWhisper, being an overbearing and possessive egomaniac, but even when he reveals he's on Babel's payroll, it's more because he knows that if he declined, Babel would send someone else to do the job and Xixy and company know how to deal with him. This leads to a pretty rad scene where Xixy gets to use her future self's power for 3 minutes in a head-to-head fight against him and DawnWhisper's affection meter keeps going up every time she lands a hit on him (since the big thing he loves about her is her potential). Though he's insufferable at times and claims he's only around for Xixy, he's still a member of the team.

The game ends with the group accessing the Tower Tilter permission, which exists within Babel since (surprise!) the entities running Babel are not a monolithic group and there's a person or a faction working against them that has given them a path to the Inverse Babel Tower that can send the whole thing crashing down.

Which… would be in another game, if there is one. We have our twist, we have our climax, and the game ends with everyone exiting the Story World as a team, ready to take on the challenge of toppling the entire Babel Cross at a later date.

It felt like a solid end that I would be happy with even if no sequel ever comes.

And the epilogue is where the fluffier parts of the romance come in. Though there are flirty and occasionally suggestive scenes in the middle of the story (with Victor being quite obvious about his desire to become Xixy's trophy boyfriend), and Xixy needs at minimum friendship with Saint, Victor, and Kruger to access the good ending, the scenes where it can be construed that she has entered a relationship with one of the men only happen in the epilogue after the true ending.

Since it's possible to raise the affection meters of all six guys in a single run (and the dialogue gets hilarious on the true route when it becomes apparent all six are romantically interested in her), I think it's worth doing so you can just access all the character endings at once from a single save. The character endings are pretty good, and even redeemed DawnWhisper for me. (I did find him entertaining as a character, but it wasn't until the epilogue that I thought anything positive about him as a romantic interest.) It also takes the edge off any of the numerous bad endings as they tend to portray the very various guys in the least flattering light you can give them.

The only thing that drags the game down is the translation. While it's usually good, using natural grammar and the humor translates well enough I was laughing several times during the game, it has a problem with choosing the right word.

For instance, it uses "host" instead of "original" when referring to the original person a doppelganger copies. "Senior" is used to refer to the veteran StoryDivers, when in English we would probably use "veteran" or "mentor" depending on the context. Sometimes there are similarly spelled words that are used instead of the appropriate one ("bondage" for "bandage"). Also, I'm pretty sure that the mechanical race of creatures called Meka should have been called Mecha in English, which would make their mechanical nature obvious to English speakers.

This is a game done by a small studio and most of the time the point gets across without being too distracting, so I wouldn't say to avoid it because of the translation quality (I've seen a lot worse), but it would have been nice if it was clearer. The publisher put up a notice on their Steam pages that they are open to suggestions for fixing the text, so hopefully there will be a patch to clean things up at a later date.

But even if there isn't, I really enjoyed this game and $3 for a fully voice acted puzzle adventure game with a dash of romance is a pretty good deal.

Ghost Trick: An Underrated Gem

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Platform: Switch (also on DS, PS4, XB1, Windows, iOS)
Release: 2010 (DS), 2012 (iOS), 2023 (Switch, PS4, XB1, Windows)

Ghost Trick is a stand alone project helmed by Shu Takumi of Ace Attorney fame that originally came out in the heyday of the Nintendo DS. I never got around to picking it up back then, perhaps because what I really wanted was another Ace Attorney game, and largely forgot about it until the Switch remaster.

By this time I knew it was regarded as an underrated title, so I decided to pick it up, and I'm really glad that I did as it may well be one of Shu Takumi's best written games. Since the ending wraps up the story completely and it would be hard to narratively justify a sequel, that's likely why Ghost Trick slipped away into the realm of being an underappreciated classic, but now that the remaster is available on multiple platforms (most importantly Steam), it'll be easy for players to find for years to come.

In Ghost Trick you play as an amnesiac ghost, recently deceased, who discovers he can manipulate objects around him, much like a poltergeist, to influence the actions of nearby people. Additionally he can travel from place to place via land lines (this game is clearly pre-cell phone era) as long as he knows the destination phone number, and most importantly, he can rewind time to 4 minutes before a person's death and by using his abilities it's possible to change their fate, resulting in a new timeline.

Using these "ghost tricks" results in a fun bit of puzzle solving which absolutely ties into the plot itself, but what we're really here for is the story. So there will be spoilers for a 13-year-old game after the break!

What I really like about Ghost Trick is that the game is really good at feeding the player bits of information, enough to keep them interested, but not so little that our ghost feels like he's making no progress. It's more like he keeps getting pieces of a puzzle and the first ones he gets are deceptive in how they fit together.

Sissel, as he later deduces must be his name, essentially wakes up in a junkyard, aware that he's dead, but without knowledge of who he is. The only clue he has is a woman inspecting his body, who seems to have a hitman coming after her. When she gets killed, he's able to rewind to her last four minutes and save her life. More than once, because she needs a lot of help getting away.

In fact, it's pretty funny how Lynne gets used to dying and later even expects that Sissel will find her if she dies and fix things, because one thing that remains even if the timeline changes is the memory of that death. Additionally, Sissel gains the ability to communicate with the person he saves. Since it's a gameplay mechanic, a lot of people end up dying in this game. In fact, most of the cast dies at some point, which allows Sissel to talk to more and more people in his quest to find out what really happened.

Initially Sissel and Lynne have competing priorities on a similar deadline. Sissel was informed by another ghost that they will only last until morning, so he wants to find out who he is, why he was killed, and he has until sunrise to do so (and it's early evening at the start of the game). Lynne is trying to stop the execution of a man she believes to be innocent from happening the next day, and despite Sissel's hopes, she actually has no ties to him and doesn't know who he is. In fact, she tells him he was the one who called her out there.

Once he discovers the prisoner she wants to save knows who he is though, Sissel's goals and Lynne's goals become the same thing. While they aren't entirely a duo since they often investigate separately, she is the closest to being a secondary protagonist since her mission ties into the central story and like Sissel was there at the start of it all.

Discovering Sissel's true identity is the greatest joy of the game, so I'd like to discuss how well it was set up. Sissel, as we learn by the end of the game, is not the ghost of the blond man in red whose corpse he "woke" next to, but actually the recently shot (and killed) cat inside a bag the man was carrying. While every other ghost in the game figures out who they used to be within a few minutes of being dead (it seems all ghosts are a bit confused when they come to), Sissel doesn't gets his memory back, not even fragments, for the majority of the game because it turns out that he was trying to remember a life he never had. Since the cat wasn't immediately visible when he came to, he did not consider it an option.

And I love all the little tidbits and foreshadowing that prepare the player for the reveal that Sissel is actually a cat, so it doesn't come out of nowhere.

We see the cat come out of the bag earlier in the game (its corpse being possessed by Yomiel, his owner), and we also know from Missile's death that once dead there is no language barrier between humans and an animal (or other animals for that matter). So the fact that Sissel the cat has been talking to human characters this entire time fits within the previously established worldbuilding.

Aside from that, he frequently mentions not having any concept of various mundane parts of human life that you'd think he wouldn't have lost along with his personal memories.

When I finished the game I realized I'd spent most of it playing as a cat and dog chasing after the humans who care about them (since Missile becomes playable later in the game), and it just put a smile on my face.

Ghost Trick is populated with a number of larger than life characters like the Ace Attorney series, but I found it interesting how the antagonists were handled. For most of the game we know there's this shadowy organization trying to force the innocent man's execution, and all its members are easily identifiable from an artistic standpoint for having blue faces, so it seems they are the villains of the game, but in the end they don't really matter.

The one who does is Yomiel, the blond man in red who threatened to kill Lynne when she was a kid, but was killed by a freak meteor landing and implanting a shard in his body. This meteor is the genesis of all the ghost tricks in the game, since a ghost only gets tricks if the person/animal died while affected by its radiation. Yomiel ends up being stuck not really alive but not really dead, and the piece inside him still emits radiation into the present day, which is why Sissel came to gain ghost tricks, because he died in close proximity to Yomiel.

Chasing Yomiel while also chasing Sissel's identity makes for great tension, because the more Sissel learns about the man using the false name "Sissel" the more he doesn't like the person he's learning about. When he discovers "Sissel" is not a corpse so much as someone using a ghost trick to temporarily control another's body and leaving his shell behind, he has no idea who he is at all and no longer wants to be Sissel anymore. The game has a nice way of depicting that when Sissel's dialogue portrait changes from the blond man to a nondescript ghost.

Yomiel is also the only antagonist who is truly dangerous since he also has access to the ghost world and is aware that there are other ghosts working against him. Screwing up during one of the "rewind to save a life" segments, can actually result in Yomiel turning to the camera and directly calling out Sissel, which I found unsettling in what is otherwise not a scary game at all.

The thing with Yomiel is that he initially comes off as just an awful person. He's stolen government secrets through use of his ghost tricks and he's selling his services to the highest bidder, which turns out to be a foreign country. The price for his service is eliminating everything and everyone that had something to do with the meteor incident, hence why Lynne is targeted and why we have a former detective, now death row inmate, having a rushed execution.

But Yomiel is betrayed by his client who actually just wants the meteor shard trapped within his body and removes it while Yomiel possessing another person (leaving his actual body an empty shell).

I have somewhat mixed feelings about the finale of the game because Sissel, Missile, Lynne, and a couple other characters end up on the submarine belonging to the shadowy foreigners when they confront Yomiel while he's possessing the body of a young girl. The bad guys nick the meteor shard and escape, ejecting the compartment that holds Yomiel's body, and sinking the rest of the submarine in the process.

There is no way out for the human characters. They can't fix the sub. But they manage to load the ghosts (including a newly dejected Yomiel) in one of the submarine's remaining torpedoes and shoot it towards the ejected compartment to try to get help.

Once there and they revive the detective, who had died in that chamber, Sissel realizes there is still one other corpse in the room whose death he can reverse. And this is a doozy of a moment, because you realize "Yeah, Yomiel died, but it was years ago!" Most of the people we save died shortly before Sissel does his revival trick so the new timeline barely changes, but this is their only option, so they actually jump back ten years, to just four minutes before Yomiel gets hit by the meteor.

The reason I have mixed feelings about this, even after beating the game, is that it changes so much. Almost everything we fought through the entire game, the desperation at the end when escape looked impossible, doesn't happen anymore!

They stop Yomiel from holding the child version of Lynne hostage, the detective ends up not shooting (or thinking he was going to shoot) him, which undoes all the guilt he felt, and when everything lines up save for the fact it looks like the statue they used to block the meteorite is now going to fall on Lynne, ghost Yomiel possesses his old self and pushes her out of the way.

This redeems Yomiel as a character, who actually wasn't a hardened criminal, but got frightened and overwhelmed in the past, and then gradually went insane while in his half-alive/half-dead state. Past Yomiel is not killed, but in the new timeline he survives the stone falling on him and spends some years in prison, only to be on the eve of his release in the epilogue, which brings us up to our new present day, where Sissel is now a cat owned by the detective and his family, which is now intact since he doesn't end up in jail this time over his wife's murder (she was actually killed by Yomiel) and their daughter has both parents now.

Everything wraps up, even the identity of the mysterious tutorial ghost and why it sent Sissel off to find himself in the first place, and now that the radiative meteor will likely not be around dying people/animals anymore, there shouldn't be anymore ghosts and their tricks. Sort of. Cat Sissel from the past ends up being the one impaled by the meteor (when they deflected it, it went into the grass where his past self was hiding), but assuming cat Sissel remembers everything that happened he'll probably be careful going forward.

Given the level of changes caused by rewinding time so far back (to the point Sissel never got close to reviving all the people who died) I'm not sure the characters still remember the "original" timeline, though I suppose it's possible, and that's largely because Sissel keeps his name when he comes to live with the detective's family even though Yomiel was the one who named him.

When we were getting Yomiel's backstory and how he lost his fiancée during his trapped between life and death stage of his existence, we learn that having the cat helped him cope, and thus he named the cat Sissel, after his fiancée. I admit once I learned that Sissel was a woman's name I thought that the cat might have been female, since there's no way ghost Sissel could have known their gender, but the cast continues using male pronouns with the cat, so I guess Yomiel either wasn't particular about matching the gender of the cat to the name or Sissel could be a gender neutral name in the fictional country they live in. (Actually, it's probably the latter since none of the characters comment on Sissel having a woman's name when he chooses to appear like the blond man.)

In any case, despite my conflicted feelings about the complete rewind of the last ten years, I still enjoyed Ghost Trick and the moment I saw the cat first appear in Yomiel's death scene and realized that must be Sissel. It was a long chase to find out who he was in the end, but was very worth it.

My Top 5 Blog Posts of 2023

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Though I expect most of my blog visitors are here to read about the various games I've played, oftentimes which one rises to the top in a given year is a bit of a surprise. Most of the posts are weighted towards the first half of the year, which is expected given that they've been out longer, but coming out earlier did not automatically mean that a given game (or anime)'s post was read more often.

That said, here are the Top 5 of 2023 along with a little speculation about why they're here:

#5 - Frostpunk - Yes, There's a Story Here

Frostpunk has been out for over five years now, so I'm a little surprised by the traffic with this one, but figure there are liking two reasons for this. First, 11-bit Studios ramped up their media push for Frostpunk 2 so there is likely renewed interest in the first game, and second, I talked about the story and the emotional journey taken by the player, which is not usually discussed when talking about a city builder game. It's mentioned so little that I didn't know there was a fixed scenario format when I first started the game.

#4 - Anime Talk: Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion

This one surprised me because I came to Raeliana late and didn't write about it until several weeks after its run ended. Perhaps I'm not the only one hungry for a second season, or likes to read commentary after having watched a show. I'm still hopeful that we'll get the remainder of the novels/manga animated.

#3 - Ambition: A Minuet in Power

I feel a little bad about this one, since I spent a chunk of the post talking about all the flaws in Ambition (especially since the more you play it, the more apparent the problems become, and I played a lot to finish the game with every possible love interest). But that said, I can see why this post would have attracted attention, since Ambition is an indie title and it wasn't a breakdown hit so hasn't been much written about it. It's for smaller titles like this that I try to play and write about an indie or two every year. A high society sim on the eve of the French Revolution is just not a game most people would make, and for that if nothing else, I'm glad Ambition exists.

#2 - OPUS: Echo of Starsong

I'm a little surprised that this wasn't my most popular post last year, since it's a relatively recent indie title, though admittedly one that had already gotten a fair bit of press compared to most so I'm hardly the first person to have covered it. I really enjoyed a number of games last year, but if I had to pick one, OPUS: Echo of Starsong would be it. I know I bounced through a number of reviews before picking it up, and if my own post in turn convinced someone else to play it, that would be worthwhile indeed.

#1 - AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative

For some reason my AINI gripe-a-thon must have struck a nerve since it was head and shoulders above anything else even though it went up about half a year after the game came out since I'd taken so long to finish it. I'm guessing I wasn't the only one with a mixed reaction to it. When I finished I was such a ball of frustration that I also sought out the writings of other people to see if I was the only one who felt the way I did. I'm a bit disappointed that my top post of 2023 is one where I had to force myself to focus on just three gripes or I'd spend pages and pages complaining, but perhaps it was a useful exorcism.

And that covers my round-ups for 2023. Next post should be the first of several covering some of the games I ran through in the final months of last year, giving me a bit of a buffer while I figure out my first game for 2024!

My Favorite Games of 2023

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Last year feels rather strange to me in that I didn't complete any RPGs and I'm not entirely sure how that happened, since I usually manage at least one of them. That said, it felt like such a good year for enjoyable gaming. I only list games I liked enough to finish, which usually means I felt they were good or very good, but great games are fewer and further between.

I usually designate these great games as my Top 3 picks each year by marking them with an asterisk (*) and I was pretty sure that I knew what my Top 3 were going to be as we went into November as I'd played what I thought was a shoe-in for my third stellar game in October, but even if Tempest slid in at the end of the year and blew me away, so I'm going to call out Ghost Trick as an honorable mention. In another year it probably would have made Top 3 and it is still a solid game I highly recommend.

With that said, these are the 12 games I liked the most out of the ones I finished in 2023, in the order I played them. If the game is available on multiple platforms, the one I played on is listed first.

OPUS: Echo of Starsong (Switch, Windows, Mac, iOS) *

More often than not, I find one of my favorite games of the year at the start of the year, and that was definitely the case with OPUS: Echo of Starsong, making it one of the few linear games where I dove back in immediately after I finished. Told from the perspective of an elderly Jun Lee, he reflects on the short period of time he knew Eda and what being with her meant to him. If you want an intimate piece of space opera with deep lore and some far future Chinese flavoring, all wrapped up in 12-15 hours of gameplay, this is a must-have, but bring tissues. That's not a spoiler. The frame story makes it clear that Jun and Eda are deprived of any happy ending.

Ambition: A Minuet in Power (Switch, Windows)

When Yvette arrives in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution, her fiance mysteriously does not pick her up, nobody seems to want to associate with him, and he's left her paying for the rent and the maid at what would have been their home. Refusing to return to her village, Yvette forges a new life in Parisian high society, and the player can decide whether she reunites with her fiance or discovers a new love entirely. With a tight calendar system and selling gossip for money, Yvette can nudge the tensions in Paris one way or another. Probably more fun if you like French Revolution stuff, but also good if you just like being a schemer. You can make Yvette somewhat upstanding if you want, but there are a lot of options to play as an awful person.

Buried Stars (Switch, PS4, Windows)

Mystery/suspense visual novel in which a group of aspiring k-pop stars and their floor director are trapped inside a collapsed building. Despite the unusual choice in cast (I never thought I'd be putting on my detective hat with a pop star as my protagonist), the mystery is effective and had me on the edge of my seat through much of the main game. The game's UI is a little misleading in regards to how the story will actually play out, and there are some obvious translation errors, but despite the bumpiness I think this will end up one of the more memorable mystery VNs I've played. Saying why would be a spoiler, but I talk about it here.

My Sweet Bodyguard (iOS, Android)

Part of the Love 365 library app. A college student discovers she's the long lost daughter of the Japanese prime minister and is threatened by unknown forces who want to influence her father. Fortunately she has a crack team of bodyguards looking out for her in what is a surprisingly upbeat and light-hearted romance adventure. It also gets really silly on some routes, so don't come here for any realism. Each route may as well take place in a different reality since plot points and villains generally don't cross over.

Frostpunk (Windows, Mac, PS4, XB1) *

Brutal survival-based city building game. After a deep and potentially neverending frost settles over Victorian England, you play as the captain in charge of a new settlement that strives to survive heading in an unknown future. Though it is possible to make a relatively comfortable life for your people once you know how the game works, I think most first time playthroughs will either end in failure or with barely anyone alive (and you might end up a despot on top of that too). I like how the game makes you consider which lines you'd be willing to cross in order to allow your city to survive, and if you fail, was it because of poor planning or because you valued your morals?

Piofiore: Fated Memories (Switch)

Liliana has grown up as a ward of the church, but for reasons unbeknownst to her, she is extremely important to varying factions fighting for control of a city in 1920s Italy, thus sparking a journey with various men from one of the city's three mafia families or an agent of the church. It's otome, but darker than usual because none of the guys can really say they've walked away without killing someone, though they're generally presented in a nicer light if they're Liliana's current love interest. While I bought this as a fan of anime takes on mafia, it's worth mentioning that Liliana is a civilian, so even if she's present during the action bits, she's usually a non-participant, and some of the heavy decision making by the men happens in scenes when she is not around.

Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders (Windows, Switch, PS4, XB1)

Series of murder mysteries in the style of the old point-and-click pixel adventure games, starring a fictionalized version of Di Renjie, more popularly known in English as the protagonist of the Judge Dee books/movies/TV series, but was a real historical person. This Di is portrayed as relatively young and new to his work, though historically he would have been pushing fifty by the time of the game, which mostly involves solving a series of murders on behalf of Empress Wu Zetian. It's a fairly short game, with some of the usual point-and-click genre problems of not being able to figure out what you missed, but otherwise a fun bit of intrigue. Good if you don't have a lot of time or want a quick palate cleanser before diving into something else.

Radiant Tale (Switch)

It took me a few games to realize that found family is one of my favorite tropes in otome. I love when the entire cast is a group of friends who support each other through thick and thin, so when I realized Radiant Tale shared staff with Code:Realize and Cafe Enchante I knew I had to get this. Tifalia joins a performance troupe called CIRCUS and gains a wacky surrogate family that includes personalities as varied as a fun-loving dragon, a flashy noble, and possibly the world's most unfriendly clown. They're on a JRPG-eque quest to free the kingdom's prince from the spell that has frozen his body and heart in time, and only by literally bringing joy to the world can they heal him. Despite the overly bright and optimistic theming, some of the routes can get unexpectedly dark.

Ghost Trick (Switch, PS4, XB1, Windows, DS, iOS)

HD remaster of the underappreciated mystery solving puzzle game for Nintendo DS. You control an amnesiac ghost who has a number of "tricks" he can perform in order to manipulate the environment and the living around him in order to figure out who he is and why he died. Without spoiling too much, I think pet lovers will enjoy this game. It's not too long, but not too short either, being the rare game that is just the length it needs to be and no more. Fans of Ace Attorney will recognize writer/director Shu Takumi's brand of character writing, though Ghost Trick is less episodic since there is only one central mystery that covers the entire game.

Ten Trials of Babel: The Doppelganger Maze (Windows, Mac)

Indie puzzle adventure game where humans and various fantastical races are unwillingly placed in a survival game where the winner can ensure the continued existence of their race. English translation is usually pretty good, which makes it more obvious when it's not. Puzzles will give you a pretty good workout if that's your thing. Best played with a pad of paper next to you in order to make notes. Though it's probably possible to reach the best ending without romancing anyone, Xixy needs a certain level of friendship with her main three party members to open the way to the true ending.

even if Tempest (Switch) *

I was truly blown away by the narrative in this game, which is marketed as otome, but aside from affection-related dialogue options, plays out more like Raging Loop since it also features one love interest per timeline and a protagonist who tries to abuse timeloops in order to solve a problem. The worldbuilding is fantastic and Anastasia is one of the most engaging female protagonists I've ever had a chance to play, getting to be both strong and vulnerable, vengeful and kind, and rising from a childhood of abuse to being the person she wants to be. She is willing to do whatever it takes to save the ones she loves, and some of what she does is truly heartrending both for her and the player. There are witch trials which will likely appeal to Ace Attorney and Danganronpa fans, with the unique twist that they are playing out in the court of public opinion in which judgment is less a matter of truth than what the jury comes to believe.

The Last Matches (Windows, Mac)

Indie visual novel based on The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. It's very short (about an hour to play through), but felt like a fitting title to close out the year given that it takes place around Christmas. Both the original tragic ending of the story and a happier one are available for our protagonist. I liked the sad ending better, perhaps because it pulls from the original and works better thematically, but also because the happy ending feels surreal, like I can't tell if it really happened. Still, it's a nice little package if you want something quick that will pluck at the heartstrings.

My Favorite Anime of 2023

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Normally I'd start off with my year's favorite books, but I somehow managed to not finish any last year, and I wanted to wait a week on the video games since there are some extras I still need to play through for one of them and it might impact my Top 3 picks. So we're starting with anime for my favorites of 2023!

Attack on Titan finished last November, which means I finally get to include it! Normally I don't like including anime that are likely to get additional seasons since there are a number of series that I'll end up dropping as they go on, making them something I'd rather not recommend, so all of the anime listed below have either wrapped up so there will definitely be no future seasons, or they have not announced any further seasons so I feel I can evaluate them based as they are.

The nine series below are the ones I liked enough to finish, presented in the order I completed them. My top three picks of the year are marked with an asterisk (*).

Summer Time Rendering *

This one was a sleeper release in the US, being that it had been a Disney Plus series in Japan but is definitely not a good fit for Disney Plus in the US, so it came out on Hulu with no fanfare whatsoever, which is too bad since this a fantastic time loop thriller, where the loop restarts a little further in time each time our hero dies, leaving him less and less chance to make any changes, and the villains are aware of the loop as well. I found this an extremely bingeable ride, and finished the entire series in less than a week, which is incredible for someone who usually can't sit through more than a half of TV at a time (which is part of why I like anime and its shorter episode structure).

Psycho-Pass: The Movie

Thanks to the Funimation-Crunchyroll acquisition, I finally got to watch Psycho-Pass: The Movie which takes place after the first two seasons of the anime. It's a stand alone story covering what happens when someone tries exporting the Sybil System to another country and also covers what Kagami has been up to since he left Japan. Much better executed than the second season, but lacks the philosophical punch of the first.

Tomo-chan is a Girl

Romantic comedy about a tomboy who tries to confess to her childhood friend that she likes him as more than a friend, only for him to reply that he loves her too, but clearly in "I love you man!" bromance way as he seems to have never realized that she's actually a girl. At least that's what she thinks, since as the series moves on it's apparent he does realize she's a girl, but is afraid of how their relationship would change if it turns romantic. Both Tomo and Jun are not the sharpest tools in the shed, so most of this is played up for comedy, but that's part of what makes it appealing. We don't have many romances involving two dumb jocks.

My Home Hero

Modern day crime thriller starring an unassuming husband and wife who will do anything to protect their college aged daughter, even if it means committing murder to preemptively stop their daughter's abusive boyfriend from killing her. But when the boyfriend is the son of a prominent yakuza boss, and the police can be dissuaded from offering assistance, the two parents have to get creative to keep their family life intact. Lots of cliffhangers made this a must-watch every week, and I love that even though the husband is usually our POV character, his wife is part of the team and quite capable in her own right, so they can complement each other's strengths and weaknesses. The only thing I don't like is when Tetsuo gets the occasional lone wolf streak and tries going solo since Kasen's escapades are thrilling in a different way from his and I want her along for the ride.

My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999

College student Akane gets dumped by her boyfriend after she started playing an online game just to spend more time with him. Angry, but still interested in playing the game, she ends up meeting a guildie, Yamada, at an IRL event. Yamada initially seems like he couldn't care less about her, he's blunt, he doesn't seem to care about people's emotions, but over time she realizes it's not that he doesn't care, but that he has a different way of looking at things. They are very close in age so in a few years the difference won't matter, but fair warning Yamada is still in high school.

Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Manor *

This is the one I fervently wish for a second season, as manwha readers have praised this thing to no end ahead of the anime's release and the release did not disappoint with the exception of the choice in the season ending. Given that there has been no announcement of a second season, it would have been nice if we hadn't ended in what appears to be the start of another story arc. But that said, this is one the best reborn as another person in a game/book/other world series that I've ever watched, as there is a mysterious reason for why Raeliana was reborn in this world and why the heroine of the book itself has yet to appear, leaving Raeliana in love with a man that she knows belongs to another woman in the "real" story. You've got mystery, politics, murder, and romance. What's not to like?

Undead Murder Farce

As the title suggests, this is pretty much a case of interlopers jumping in and showing a bunch of baffled people how there's all this fakery going on in the mystery currently plaguing them. Aside the first episode, which is all backstory setup, the season is divided into story arcs covering one particular crime that our protagonists Aya and Tsugaru work together to solve. Since Aya is a disembodied head, Tsuguru serves as her arms and legs as they unveil thieves and murderers and continue their search for Aya's missing body.

Gene of AI

Interesting anthology series in a setting where humanoids are robots that are virtually indistinguishable from biological humans. Think Blade Runner, but in a society that accepts humanoids as regular citizens. Each episode focuses on a moral quandary when the person involved is artificial. Is restoring a backup personality a form of murder/suicide when the humanoid's brain is reformated? If a humanoid has feelings for a particular person that isn't reciprocated, is it okay to remove that part of themselves to move on? The execution is not always perfect, and the animation is just okay, but the premise of some of the episodes are quite good.

Attack on Titan *

The 800 pound gorilla for the past 10 years has finally ended. Was it perfect as a series? No. But it would have been impossible to meet the standards of so many fans after such a long time. The final special episode was good though, and with creator Hajime Isayama's input, smoothed over the bumpiness that came with the manga version of the final chapter. I usually don't prefer the ending of the anime to the manga, but I think the anime stuck the landing. It may not have been what we expected when Titans first broke their way into Wall Maria, but all the characters remained true to who they are and did what they could to secure a better future.

Merry Christmas!

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 15:00:00 +0000

Normally I schedule my blog posts to go on up Mondays, and since this Monday is Christmas it seems a bit weird not to acknowledge it. So, I hope you and yours have a Merry Christmas if you celebrate, or a good day if you don't.

Look back on this year there's a lot I didn't get done that I hoped I would have. For instance, I've embarrassingly have not finished any books this year. That isn't to say I haven't read any, but I haven't finished, which is a bit annoying. So when my Top 5 lists go up starting next week, there won't be one for books I've read, since even if I manage to squeeze one in this year, it doesn't see right to showcase just the one. I'll try for a fresh start in 2024.

Similarly, I want to get back into writing regularly again in 2024. To be honest I haven't been able to set a regular schedule for myself since the Covid pandemic, and I don't know if it's an artifact of the fact I'm still working at home or that I just haven't found my groove again after my stomach cancer. But again, that's something I hope to remedy.

I see how this post is starting to turn into a New Year's resolution post, so enough with that!

I'm currently enjoying even if Tempest for the Switch, which feels like an otome tailor made for me between the detective work, the romance, and the dark fantasy setting. I actually forgot I was playing an otome at one point because I was so engrossed in the witch trial portion of the game. It'll be fun trying to fit everything I want to say in the VN Talk for it, but I have a little time since I have other game posts scheduled go up after my Top 5 lists go through.

See you in the next year and have a good one!

Catching Up on an Online Story as a New or Lapsed Player

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 15:00:00 +0000

I used to play World of Warcraft like a lot of fantasy fans, and while I gradually became disenchanted with it over the years, what finally killed it for me was the one-two punch of my stomach cancer surgery, which prevented me from playing for months, and the sexual harassment scandal at Blizzard. The news broke literally the month I thought it was time to resubscribe.

This was during the Shadowlands expansion and I'd long since tired of raiding and grinding. I was mostly there for the ongoing story, and my favorite activity when I ran out of story on my main was making an alt of a different class and leveling through the story all over again.

After enough expansions, Blizzard understandably did not want everyone to play through an increasingly long leveling experience all over again with every character, nor did they want new players to spend too much time trying to catch up with their friends at end game.

So they introduced things like experience boosting heirloom gear to help people level up faster, or outright level skips that could come with the purchase of an expansion. I never used either because the point of my leveling a new character was to see all the stops along the way.

Eventually the leveling process went through so many expansions that they just overhauled the entire process, relegating all content older than Battle for Azeroth to being just "old content" and starting all new players off immediately with BfA as a new "Year 0." Older players could choose to timewalk and level in a different expansion of their choosing, but gone was the whole leveling through the entire story to understand the context of what happened before. I think that was about the time my interest in leveling alts really started to flag.

I actually came back for a few months of the latest expansion Dragonflight because a friend surprise gifted it to me along with a subscription so I could play with her. It was my first time coming back in the middle of an expansion, and I lacked any idea of what happened between the end of Shadowlands and the beginning of Dragonflight.

I played once a week on our game nights, and dutifully leveled taking only main storyline quests along the way so I could hit level 70 about the same time as we finished the main story. I did have some good nostalgia moments, especially seeing the various members of the Blue Dragonflight, many of whom I clearly remembered from previous expansions.

But you know?

By the time I got to the end and was ready to do end game content, I felt like I didn't know anything. Even though I was reading every quest that was clearly part of the main story, I felt like I lacked context about what my character was supposedly fighting for, other than certain new characters were the baddies, and the world itself felt hollow since I skipped all the side quests that generally would have provided the fun and flavor to the setting. If there was yet another poop collecting quest, I never saw it. (Never thought I'd realize one was missing.)

I don't miss the game now that my gift subscription has run out. In fact I felt frustrated that I hadn't the opportunity to play all the remaining story material from Shadowlands before going to Dragonflight and while technically, yes, I could have done that, it would either have required me to put in more time than I was willing to give, or I would have to drag my friend though half an old expansion when she wanted to play the new and shiny.

I'm sure Blizzard thinks this is the best solution that can be offered, since they plan on making Dragonflight the new base experience when the next expansion comes up, sending Shadowlands and BfA to join the other previous expansions in timewalking.

But is it really?

The only other online RPG I played for a long time is Dungeon Fighter Online. Like WoW it also offers ways for people to speed level through events, experience boosting potions, or paid benefits (since it's a free to play game). It also has existed for many years, being only a year younger than WoW.

I recently leveled a brand new character from level 1 to the current cap of 110. And it was fun! It's not an open world game like WoW so there are far fewer side quests, but what they've done over the years to avoid making a long leveling experience even longer is edit it down. There were a lot of plot lines that were interesting, and perhaps were once intended to set up for events that didn't happen, and those were removed. Filler dungeons were cut completely, but they also added new material to better integrate characters that were introduced in later seasons so new players could spend time with them before they became important.

The result was a cohesive story that took about the same amount of time to play through as when I first picked up the game six years ago, but I knew everything. It refreshed my memory and the parts they changed weren't drastic enough to affect a veteran player, but made the overall experience better for someone who wanted to play through again or for the first time.

Though I admit I miss certain zones that were removed over the years (pour one out for the Black Crusade Time Gate dungeon), and I'm sad there's no longer a reality where Morgan doesn't end up a zombie, I find I like this, because when a character returns in new content, it's very easy for a player to remember who they are and why they matter. You don't feel like you missed something because you weren't around.

Nothing relevant is ever tucked away in optional or difficult to reach content. Even raids are played through first as part of a solo/small party experience before being opened for a raid version, so you'll never miss part of the story if you'd rather solo, and that includes older raids, which are seamlessly integrated into the leveling revamp as just another part of the story.

I'm not saying Dungeon Fighter Online has the better story, but it has the better presentation for someone who wants to get caught up on everything while doing nothing more than the usual leveling from 1 to max.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 5: Vilio

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 15:00:00 +0000

Vilio was the character whose route I most wanted to play. I don't always like the poster boys, but Vilio is such an unabashed ray of sunshine that he's actually billed in-universe as your friendly neighborhood dragon. (And his color scheme of red hair with red outfit gives me a bit of an Ys nostalgia vibe, if Adol Christin ever turned into an overenthusiastic dragon.) On other routes, if characters are feeling down or the odds look far too long, Vilio is often the one to give them an optimistic push, to remind them that they're CIRCUS and they'll find a way!

In many ways, I feel Vilio embodies the spirit of Radiant Tale the most. Why shouldn't a cheerful dragon be the poster boy of a game where we solve the world's problems by putting a smile on people's faces?

He can be a bit much, with his extroverted nature and the joy of seeing the world beyond his village combining into a person who is ready to go just about anywhere and do anything, but there's never a sense of abrasiveness about it. The common route and the routes of other love interests tend to play him fairly one note as an over the top curiosity seeker with the occasional shift to seriousness when the situation calls for it, which made me wonder why such an outwardly earnest guy would be the gated love interest. Looking back, it's really Zafora's route that gives the best inkling of what Vilio's actual route will be like.

Radiant Tale was only released a few months ago, so be warned there will be spoilers after the break!

Zafora's route is the only one of the default starter routes that features someone possessed by a Fiend, and Vilio makes no bones about how someone who has been possessed cannot be saved, and he dispatches possessed people with a certainty that feels counter to his otherwise optimistic nature. You would expect someone like Vilio to hold out hope against all odds, but in this case he spares none.

Two of the background details that keep cropping up throughout the common route are the growing number of Fiends, which are born from humans' negative emotions, and the corresponding decrease in the amount of Chloris flowers blooming, which result from joy. Since none of the other four routes provide answers for these phenomena, and given Vilio's unusual knowledge of Fiends (compared to the general public), it's unsurprising they end up being a part of his story.

Vilio is the only member of CIRCUS who was not scouted by Jinnea, but was recruited by King Vigonia himself. He did not have to be the specific dragon to answer the request, but he asked his elders if he could be the one to go, since he wanted to get to know the world he would eventually be expected to sacrifice himself for.

Yeah, that wasn't what I expected for his route. I expected something a little more like an over-the-top action piece with Vilio running around smashing things with glee. But unlike Radie's route, which also wasn't what I expected, I felt like I was seeing new aspects of Vilio's character rather than losing a character I'd previously known.

Vilio gets his own version of the common route, which starts with his own prologue in Passio, the island home of the dragons, and then follows into more or less the same events as the default common route with added Vilio scenes. There are some differences, such as Tifalia's discovery of Radie's human form plays out in a different part of the camp and takes a little longer to resolve, but for the most part, the changes are minor. What is different is how they are portrayed.

Possibly because the designers did not want to bore the player by making them play through material they've already read, the shared portions of Vilio's common route are told in text-only summary or in an abbreviated fashion; enough to remind the player of what happened and how the characters were feeling, but not much more than that.

But the result was that I found most of the old scenes a boring retread because I already knew what happened and because this was new text as far as the game engine was concerned, I couldn't fast forward to the next choice. Most romance visual novels will allow players to fast forward or even immediately skip to next choice on replay, allowing players to quickly get to unplayed story branches. But Vilio's route is "new" so even though the content is a summary of things on the default common route, it hasn't been played yet and is therefore unskippable.

The most appealing part of the early chapters of Vilio's common route was seeing all of his new POV segments. Though he has town scenes with Tifalia just like all the other love interests, it's the POV segments with other members of CIRCUS that flesh Vilio out as more than the big dumb puppy he initially appears to be.

He learns the truth about Radie and Paschalia, and he encourages Zafora and Ion to take action on the issues that bother them (and Zafora actually hears him out, once he realizes that Vilio isn't there to prattle). I liked the idea of these scenes being things that could have happened on the default common route, but we just didn't see because it wasn't Vilio's story yet.

But it turns out the little details do matter and as a result Vilio's common route is somewhat incompatible with the default one. It's not just that in every other happy ending Vilio merrily goes off traveling without a care in the world (which is definitely not the future he's aiming for in his own route). For instance, after learning of Paschalia's arrangement with Vita, he outright asks King Vigonia if the Lacrima Earrings can be given to Paschalia to extend his life and the king agrees with minimal argument. In Pascalia's route, the earrings are raised as a potential solution by Colivus, and Colivus physically goes back to the capital to argue on Pascalia's behalf, which would have been unnecessary if Vilio had already acquired Vigonia's approval.

As I mentioned earlier, Vilio's story deals with the Fiends, the Chloris blooms, and by extension, how humanity is feeling since they're the source of both. And this ties into the older legends of King Artheir and the four Great Spirits that CIRCUS has been banging about in all their performances the entire common route. It's a pretty sneaky (but good!) way to make sure the player remembers all the lore.

Thus when Vilio brings up Ragules and points out that he disappears from the story, we already know at some point he's no longer a part of Artheir's legend, but not why (at least until Vilio's common route calls attention to it by modifying the Artheir performance to have Ragelus leave the stage during the epilogue). On the face of it, it's not an unreasonable thing to overlook as Theseus and Heracles were friends in Greek mythology, but it's not like they hung out together all the time. So it would be simple to assume Ragules was just not a part of those other adventures.

Vilio is an Archdragon, the only one of his generation, and only an Archdragon can permanently kill Fiends by literally devouring them and letting his body purify their cores. But the Fiends are multiplying faster than he can purify them so this is a losing battle.

Ragules was the previous Archdragon and when he approached his limit, he devoured as many fiends as he could and then was sealed away by Artheir and the four Great Spirits before he could be corrupted himself. Vilio believes he can do the same and though the Great Spirits are no longer around, he believes that they can still do the sealing if Colivus regains his powers (i.e. grows up) since he's supposed to be the most powerful of the royals since Artheir and they use the four core items left behind by the Great Spirits.

And as it happens, the four core items played a part in all four of the previously available routes so we already know that Balto has both the Labyrinth Necklace and the Intaglio Ring at this point in the story, the Lacrima Earrings are in Oriens, and the Caritas Wand in Calida. Moreover, four vessels would need to stand in for the Great Spirits when using the items, and we have them in Zafora, Ion, Paschalia, and Radie, with most of them having a clear connection to the item; Zafora through his lineage, Radie because part of it is literally part of his body, and Ion from having been branded by the ring. Paschalia felt the weakest narratively since even though he's synchronized with a water spirit, Vita herself has no connection to the earrings or the Great Spirit Leve. It would be kind of like saying Tifalia should be able to use the fifth core item, the Rouquette Crown, because she's a human just like Artheir.

It might seem silly that I hadn't noticed that we have four love interests for four core items prior to this point of the story, but the thing is, Vilio is fire aligned and it's brought up multiple times, so the five love interests aren't a one-to-one connection with the items or even the elements since Zafora and Ion are normal humans without any magical connection. It's only after you remove Vilio from consideration and look at the stories of the remaining love interests that you can pair them off.

So CIRCUS sets out on a second tour, but now with three objectives: 1) contain the fiends, 2) help Colivus grow, and 3) retrieve the core items, which they plan to do as they hit each city on tour.

But rather than stick to a retread of the same tour, things go belly up with Vilio nearing his limit sooner than expected, so the tour is put on hold while he lays in recovery. Most of our cast splits up to get the core items from Cultura and Oriens, leaving just Tifalia and Vilio back in Calida, where they can continue being two ships passing in the night.

I felt like Tifalia falling for Vilio was pretty natural. He's fun and excitable, and would never let down a friend. Tifalia could barely be persuaded to join CIRCUS. Vilio begged for the chance, and through him she's able to see that maybe she doesn't want the ordinary life she thought she did. It would be fun traveling with him.

On the other hand, it's harder to figure out when Vilio develops feelings for her, even with his numerous POV segments, because being the friendly guy that he is, it's easy to read his attempts not to worry her as just being considerate. I also suspect that knowing that he intended to die, he would have refrained from thinking about what he expected would never happen.

But this route gives us a new legend of the Dragon's Bride, telling us of a human and dragon who fell in love, and the dragon shared his power so that the human would possess half his power and live as long as him. I like the introduction of this legend, as it would cleanly solve the lifespan issue other routes have tied themselves in knots over, but felt like it could have been handled better, as it comes up before the second Calida performance as "there's this old story…" and then after the second Calida performance while Vilio is lying in recovery Tifalia talks to him about it as if she first heard about it a long time ago and not a couple days before.

Tifalia knows she's in love with Vilio, even though she shouldn't be, because he's going to die, but she wants to ease his burden and suggests becoming his Dragon Bride so she could use her share of his power to help him out. Vilio gives her a sad look saying that it's not a good idea and anyway they can't do it unless the two involved have mutual feelings for each other. She tries to hide how much that hurt her, and it's not until the Vilio POV after this that we finally hear from Vilio himself that he does love her, but he assumes she made the offer because she was trying to be nice.

To be fair, she didn't say she loved him, just that she wanted to be helpful and carry some of his burden. So when he replied that giving her half his power would just weaken him and she would gain no Fiend devouring abilities of her own, he only answered in terms of costs and benefits. Oddly he also suggests that it's not a good idea to become a Dragon's Bride, as if there's a hidden cost to it (besides the obvious outliving everyone other than your dragon spouse), but Tifalia seems to manage fine regardless of which ending the player gets.

With the two of them unwilling to bring up how they actually feel, the narrative forces the issue through a Fiend attack on Tifalia while she is away from camp. The thing about Fiend possession is that it's not like the Fiend wears the person like a mindless puppet. Balto was able to converse perfectly fine as a human being to the point that Zafora has no idea when he was possessed, whether it was years ago before he killed his parents, or much more recently. So when Tifalia is possessed, she is still something like herself, and staggers back to Vilio.

Fiend Tifalia wants to tell him under no uncertain circumstances how she feels, even though it means saying things that a "nice" person wouldn't, and I really like that she doesn't walk it back later after she's un-possessed. Tifalia tells him that she doesn't want him to sacrifice himself even if it means other people will die, and that saving the world won't have meaning to her if he's not in it. Of course Vilio is freaking out because she's possessed, but his dialogue suggests that she's not past the point of no return, just rapidly approaching it.

And since she is somewhat coherent, Vilio realizes that their feelings are mutual, so he performs the ritual to make her his bride (which seems to be just kissing her when it sounded more elaborate when he talked about it earlier), and then we get a short time skip of about a week to set up for the finale.

It was pretty fun to read though. I liked Tifalia's arrival on Passio and that the clan chief was welcoming of her when I thought he was going to be disgusted with the Archdragon choosing a human mate, and I liked that it's Tifalia who undergoes the trials to reach Ragules's grave and obtain the crystal of pure mana that formed when his body finally finished the purification long after his death. I like that Tifalia gets to tell the ghost of Artheir that his solution for the fiend problem years ago didn't actually solve anything since they're now in a cycle where a new Archdragon will have to die to save humanity from the Fiends whenever they get out of control. I like that she, not Colivus who is traveling with her, is the one to declare that they will use the mana crystal to exterminate the fiends.

(Granted, Colivus is the one who will actually do it since he's the mage, but at least she's the one doing all the talking, as she should since by dragon custom she's Vilio's wife now and it's her husband whose life is on the line.)

While she's taking care of getting the crystal, everyone else has regrouped with the core items and is trying to get to Ferus based on the sightings they're received about a black dragon flying around the kingdom in a very clear extermination pattern with Ferus being the last place he needs to hit. When they get there, Vilio is clearly at his limit, but that's when Tifalia and Colivus arrived and Colivus (who grew up towards the end of the trials in Passio) is able to use the crystal and the core items to make a sword of light that will kill only fiends.

He swings it, and it smites all the fiends inside Vilio into a billion pieces where they then fly back to the humans they originally came from, because a small bit of sadness and pain borne by thousands is better than one person shouldering the entire burden. Tifalia even puts an optimistic bow on it pointing out that sometimes it's the negative feelings that push people to do better the next time around.

It was a nice way to end in the spirit of the game's overarching themes, but it made me wonder what caused the Fiends to emerge in the first place. I was under the impression they were just a fact of life in this world, so is there anything to prevent them from coming back again, or is the new plan to sword of light any new Fiend incursions?

Also, I found it really strange that Vilio would go on his final "I'm about to die" binge feeding and just count on his friends being ready when he hit his limit. When he last saw Colivus he still had the body of a child, and this was a problem no one had a guaranteed solution for, and Vilio needs the grown-up Colivus to perform the sealing, so what was he going to do if Colivus was still a child after everyone regrouped? I know Vilio is often portrayed as dumb, but it's more an artifact of his childlike enthusiasm rather than an actual intelligence issue and we know he takes his job seriously, so not having a failsafe feels more like the writers hoped no one would notice so they could amp up the drama.

Either way, Vilio survives, and at least for the present day and possibly centuries to come, the world doesn't have to worry about Fiends. Perhaps because they're already technically married, Vilio's route ends with one more CIRCUS performance that climaxes in Vilio and Tifalia's wedding reception. And it felt very on brand for his ending to be the one where the two remain a part of CIRCUS and continue to perform across the land of Escholtia.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 4: Radie

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 15:00:00 +0000

Sometimes to get a jump on the blog writing I'll start a post before I'm done with a route. It's usually to get some initial thoughts down or to make sure I don't forget something important. It might also contain why a particular character ended up in the play order they did. Occasionally this results in some tweaking as I finish the route and new facts come to light, but Radie had given me a number of false starts and it's because the character I loved was not the one I romanced.

My impression of Radie kept changing from the common route to the first half of his route, to the second half, all the way up until the end. He occupies an unusual space in Tifalia's life since he's not human and has been with her since childhood. He's close enough to be considered family, but because he looks like a cute and cuddly fey beast most of the time (and Tifalia doesn't know any better until midway through Chapter 1 of the story) it's hard to say exactly what family role he occupies. He looks after her like a guardian, but his size and cuddliness suggests more of a pet.

And before I go much further, please realize that Radie's route, though available at the start, contains a fair amount of backstory that isn't covered on other routes and I'll be spoiling that here. While his route doesn't spoil other routes, since they all operate fairly independently of each other, you might be unable to keep that backstory knowledge out of the back of your mind while playing, and for me personally I might have ended up annoyed with Radie for the bulk of the game.

You see, I rather liked furball Radie in comparison to his human form. Though Tifalia initially says human Radie is just the same as furball Radie as she attempts to resume a normal relationship with him (after suddenly discovering her cute fuzzball can turn into adult human man), she later walks this back after more Radie-specific scenes the player has to choose along the common route. And it's true. Even though it's the same character and it's the same voice actor whether he's portraying the grown man or the squeaky fey beast, human Radie lacks much of the behavior of furball Radie.

It's not just the fact he says it would be weird to be acting cute while in the shape of a human man. His sense of humor is gone too. I rather loved furball Radie's smarmy grin and how he could defuse a situation with some self-deprecating humor. Human Radie has no such grin.

Their facial expressions rarely have direct equivalents even though they're drawn by the same artist, with Radie's furball default being open-eyed and slightly turned up, but his human one looks hangdog with his head down and his eyes narrowed like he's sleepy or trying to be mysterious. Human Radie never talks about getting drunk or his amazing dancing. He doesn't rag on his fellow members of CIRCUS. He feels like he's just there to talk business and anything else would be too awkward. Human Radie never made me laugh.

And what was worse, was that after playing far enough I concluded that the furball Radie personality was an affectation created to cheer up Tifalia when she was a child grieving over the loss of her parents. At the time he was trapped in his fey beast form so what else was he going to do to make a kid smile but dance around and act cute?

I can see why he would drop it after he decides it's no longer necessary to maintain, but it's strange that he would suddenly lose all his furball habits after years of exercising them the instant he stands on two legs. And it would have been hilarious watching him brag as a human about having the fluffiest tail and the most exquisite toe beans, and that would feel like Radie.

But I can see why it's not, because that's not the story the writers wanted to tell.

Radie, whose real name is Ralida, is not a fey beast at all, and his human form is his original one. Radie is also a golem, which I didn't expect, largely because the worldbuilding had given no indication that golems exist in this setting.

He was created a thousand years ago by the Great Spirit Celius as one of his experiments to see if he could craft a human heart. Ralida was then sent into the world to observe humanity and obtain a heart. He was also given his fey beast form to disguise the fact he doesn't age since fey beasts are naturally long lived. And when Celius realized a time was coming for him and his fellow Great Spirits to leave, he took half the mana stored in the Caritas Wand and implanted it in Radie, to keep him going for as long as the mission took.

So Radie wandered around for centuries until eventually meeting Tifalia and her parents, after which he moved in with them. It seems they liked how well he got along with them (since they tend to drive off non-science types) and also liked how well he got along with Tifalia, which gave them a convenient babysitter.

I think that if her parents hadn't gotten messed up (we find out in this route that they didn't actually die), Radie would have become an uncle figure and not the older brother figure Tifalia's father suggests after they restore him. Raijel and Meira look like they're in their twenties because that's the age they were when they were frozen, so the idea that Raijel says he viewed Radie like a son feels bizarre since they met while Radie was traveling independently. Radie looks and acts like a fellow twenty-something adult, and Raijel knows Radie's history as a thousand year old golem. I viewed Raijel and Meira's trip to the dragon island to help Radie as a task they were doing for a friend, and not for a surrogate son. A human-shaped Radie would always have been an adult to young Tifalia, and with him not changing while she grew, it would have been obvious that he was a lot older than her.

The main crux of Radie's story is that after seeing his human form, Tifalia starts falling in love with him. She eats herself up inside when he doesn't seem to notice her feelings, and becomes increasingly despondent when she straight up confesses and he fails to reciprocate (which is funny because in other routes he spends time sighing about the fact she's in love with someone else).

Much like with Paschalia's route, I felt more for Radie than her. Radie explains that he's not interested, but that he'll always be there for her and she doesn't have to worry that he'll fall for anyone else. Once I found out that he's a golem, his behavior earlier in the route made sense, though at the time I thought it would have been nice if he was simply uninterested in romance.

Tifalia puts on a stiff upper lip though, and the group goes touring for the first half of his route, like they would at the start of any other. But that comes crashing to a halt at the halfway point.

The game gets a little unclear at this point, since this is when they discover Tifalia's parents are still alive and in suspended animation. Radie is able to use the half-powered Caritas Wand to free them since together he's able to use its full power, and the next day he disappears from camp, only to be later found with amnesia.

On the one hand, some of the dialogue makes it sound like this happened to Radie because he used his wand and his magic combined, but then he was fine for almost a full day afterward. On the other hand, Alest says someone broke into the Sage Tower to use the wand, which sounds like something Radie might have done, but then no one ever follows up this line of investigation. So all we know is that somehow Radie lost his memory, the mana that was supposed to keep him alive in absence of his master is now back in the wand, and somehow Radie still exists despite it.

This second half of the route was rather trying. Aside from having the main love interest act like an emotionless robot in almost every scene, we see absolutely nothing of the cute furball that danced his way into our hearts at the beginning of the game.

Regardless of how he lost his memories, memory-less human Radie is able to gradually get them back through the healing power of the Flora, which CIRCUS produces as it tours the country to continue their ongoing mission to restore Prince Colivus as well. Though viewing his memories is like watching a movie about another person, Radie eventually realizes that his old self had all but accomplished his mission to obtain a human heart when he finally was accepted into a family as one of their own.

Apparently Celius was very particular as to how he wanted this realization to happen so it takes a CIRCUS performance of the Escholtian version of Pinnochio for new Radie to realize what he wants. At the end of the story, the doll (played by Tifalia) becomes a real human after making a wish to her creator and new Radie pretty much decides that's exactly it.

And I mean exactly. He literally calls out to Celius asking to be made human, and the spirit actually answers from wherever the hell he'd gotten off to, transforming Radie into a real boy who can live happily ever after with Tifalia. (And he gets all his memories and emotions back.)

I'll be frank. I didn't like this route. It was my least favorite despite the fact I love furball Radie to bits. But human Radie is a different person. He doesn't make me laugh. He displays none of the traits I found attractive in furball Radie. And the way Tifalia comes on to him so strong makes it feel like she was blasted more by his good looks than anything else because her changing feelings gave me whiplash.

By the end of the route I wasn't even sure I wanted old human Radie back since I was getting used to new human Radie who was clearly more introspective and willing to learn than the old version (though what I really wanted was the drunk furball and I felt severely shortchanged). I did like how Tifalia left it up to emotionless Radie about whether he wanted to bring back his old memories. A part of me thinks it would have been better if he hadn't gotten them back, as the emotionless Radie came to appreciate what he'd lost, but the restored Radie behaves as though he never left.

Personally I wanted a mix of the furball and the human for his route (drunk or not), for it to be clear that Radie was both, in the way fey beasts are. And when he's made mortal, it's clarified that he's actually turned into a fey beast, so he still has the potential to live a stupid long time.

Which, by the way, turns out to have been the reason he turned Tifalia down. He knew he was going to outlive his acquired family and was trying to let her down gently by suggesting she fall in love with someone else. Being a golem he was going to outlive damn well everybody, but even when she believed he was just a fey beast, he still could have given her the longevity excuse.

And it's not really that good of an excuse. While he should have told her, if she's fine with it and he's fine with it (because I think as the surviving partner it would have been far harder for him to live without her than her being old while he looks young), then I don't see the problem. So this entire route ended up being a lot of people trying to solve romantic problems by not talking to each other, which I'm a little tired of.

I still like furball Radie, and I'm thankful he's been the default for most of the game and on other routes, but human Radie probably would have been lurking in the back of my mind annoying me as I played the other routes so I'm glad I tackled this one second to last.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 3: Paschalia

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 15:00:00 +0000

Paschalia ended up being my third route by virtue of being leftover after Zafora and Ion's stories snagged my initial interest, Vilio being locked as the final route, and Radie being recommended for second to last. Also, I generally want to put what I expect to be the least appealing route in the middle, so I have something to look forward to if the middle ends up as less than appealing.

This doesn't mean that I disliked Paschalia, but he's a difficult character to get a feel for on the common route. He's described as being almost ethereal, and that's as apt a description as any. He's soft spoken and non-confrontational. He seems kind, but in practice rarely volunteers to do anything helpful. (The other guys will even mention he didn't help them set up their tents.) He's kind of like pretty wallpaper that happens to be able to do some magic.

We know from the prologue that Paschalia's flowing appearance and blue hair show that he's bonded with a powerful water spirit since the stronger the spirit the greater the mark they make on the person who forms a contract with them, but he seems reluctant to use water magic and wants to find another powerful water mage. But none of that is brought up again unless the player selects him during town events, so if you're not already aiming for Paschalia, he's left something of a gentle enigma.

Now, this is a relatively recent release so be aware there will be spoilers after the break.

I feel like I didn't start to see Paschalia as a character until the end of Ion's route when he suggests Jinnea tattoo the ring's brand on his forehead during their group branding session. It was like "Wow, Paschalia made a joke at Jinnea's expense!" Granted Jinnea makes himself an easy target, but normally it's someone else who takes the shot.

Doing his events make it easier to see Paschalia as a person since he and Tifalia bond over whether they feel up to the level of their more accomplished companions. Paschalia is from a rural village so he's a little naive and unused to the big city. Despite being bonded with a powerful water spirit, he sees himself as very ordinary, and because of this Tifalia can relate, having been a waitress at a very ordinary restaurant up until the day she signed up.

But we don't really get his backstory until after his route starts, and for pretty good reason. Paschalia is hiding it.

After the start of his route, we get the usual Colivus joins CIRCUS so he can heal and grow, but the troupe leaves Artheir immediately this time and though Colivus spends time with Paschalia to be tutored like he does with other love interests on their routes, the game doesn't draw parallels between the two this time, likely because we still don't know enough about Paschalia's history to see how they are alike. But oddly, I think out of all the love interests, Paschalia and Covilus have the strongest parallel, having been trapped by a terrible malady that requires them to find the inner courage to escape.

So yeah, Paschalia's secret is that he has a fatal illness, which was not hard for me to figure out given that he appears to be convalescing in his hometown when he writes letters in Zafora and Ion's endings, but could come as a shock for someone who plays his route first.

And surprisingly, given Radiant Tale's hit or miss sense of continuity, there's actually a good reason it's only revealed on Paschalia's route and not the others. He works with Colivus on his magic skills, and Colivus is nervous about actually performing, which is line with his personality, so when he screws up and summons ice shards instead of snowflakes in the middle of a performance it's not pulled out of nowhere. Paschalia intervenes, but it takes so much water magic to protect his fellow performers and the entire audience, that he passes out shortly thereafter and symptoms of his disease begin to appear.

In a nutshell, Paschalia has a congenital disease that causes his body to expel more water than it can take in, leading to cracks in his skin, paralyzation in the limbs, and eventually death. People afflicted do not normally survive to adulthood. Paschalia did, but that didn't mean he was in good shape. The water spirits he'd befriended were concerned about losing him, and pleaded with an older spirit to help him, which she did. She meant to form a proper contract with him, but in his weakened state he couldn't actually fulfill his part of the pledge, so instead she synchronized with him, using her own mana to keep his body running.

However, while she's merged with him, she can't refresh her mana, so she will eventually die unless she undoes the synchronization, and when that happens, Paschalia will die. The reason he avoided using magic at first was because he was trying to spare Vita's mana, but eventually he was having so much fun going on an adventure with CIRCUS, a feat he never could have done with his illness, that he started to care less about finding a solution to his illness and just enjoying the time he had left.

Which, to me, was a perfectly fine outlook for a terminally ill person to have.

Paschalia's plan was to return home after CIRCUS finished its job, so Vita could return to her spring as he died, and he planned to tell no one. And that's his choice to make.

But, this is a romance game, so Tifalia develops feelings for Paschalia and finds the fact he doesn't want to think about the future off-putting. While I didn't mind her putting her foot down and dragging Ion out of his mental prison in Ion's route, I found her invasion intrusive in Pascalia's route. His illness was obviously something he wasn't comfortable sharing, and a major factor in not reciprocating any affection from Tifalia.

I can understand why she would feel shut out, and want him to fight harder for his life, but at the same time, it's not her fight. She's not his wife or even his girlfriend yet, and I don't like how the game flashes over previous things Paschalia has said so Tifalia can read into his previous dialogue, conclude he doesn't really want to die, and then rub her interpretation all over the place while he's unconscious.

Well, duh. I never thought he wanted to, but reconciling himself to death is not the same as wanting to.

I know she's a teenager who has never been in love before, and Pascalia has never been in love either, but geez, give the man some space! Is it any surprise he plays unconscious when he first starts waking up after being restored at Vita's spring? It's fine that everyone encourages him to look for another solution, it's fine that they worked on one without him, but it felt like everyone was hurrying him along to fit the pace they wanted rather than what he wanted.

When they get to Oriens in hope that wearing the Lacrima Earrings left behind by the Great Spirit Leve will sustain both him and Vita, Tifalia gets very needy and sad about Pascalia being unwilling to plan a future with her. And the thing is, they don't know if the earring plan will work. Pascalia knows this, and he also knows that wearing the earrings will halt his aging, creating the opposite problem of his friends and family dying while he remains eternal. It's a lot to digest! It would have been nice if he could have said, "Hey, Tifalia, I need some time to figure out if this solution works" and then she could just respect that and chill.

But she keeps assuming he's shutting her out without making the next conclusion that there is a logical reason behind it. Instead it's framed more as a fear of commitment because he doesn't want to leave her grieving for him even though she's more than willing to deal with that. I just want to sit her down and say "It's not what you're willing to sacrifice, but what he feels comfortable with," and it's really strange to feel protective of a love interest because you think the protagonist is a terrible match for him.

It all works out in the end, and of course they end up making the Leve Vows as telegraphed in the common route, even though I think that was awfully tasteless of Leve to sneak it in there as a condition for Pascalia's survival.

Being a Great Spirit, it's unsurprising that even the fragment of the original Leve that remains behind in the Lacrima Earrings has something to say about what is an appropriate use of her artifact. And it's not surprising that she could heal someone affiliated with a water-based illness, but as a spirit it's unsurprising that she can be capricious and cruel.

Understanding that Tifalia is willing to risk her life for Pascalia she imprisons her beneath the sea and gives Pascalia until sunset to find her or the magic that she gives them to breathe underwater will fail. Despite the fact that this is terrible because if Pascalia fails Tifalia will die, the CIRCUS team just sends him on his way with their good wishes and then turns the whole thing into a performance (so they can end the route with a show like all the others). They let everyone in the city know two of their members are challenging Leve and ask for everyone to send them encouragement, which they do in the form of a newly bloomed Flora. Even Leve gets into it, using a curtain of magic to broadcast the finale to everyone in the city.

But even though it's happy and the celebration music is playing, I had absolutely no doubt that if Pascalia failed, Leve would let them die, which made it really hard to get into the same mood. The reason people in the city stopped doing Leve Vows was because of the punishment if the couple fell out of love. She would turn her blessing into a curse.

When Pascalia finally does make it to Tifalia, Leve makes it clear she plans to bless them, which will heal Pascalia, after she hears them promise to each other. You as Tifalia have the opportunity to realize that Leve is requesting that they do the Leve Vows as a condition for Pascalia's survival, but obviously the romantic option is not to question it and just go with it. I guess I'm not very romantic, but I think knowing in the back of your mind that a powerful spirit is going to wreck you if you fall out of love, would make for a terrible environment for love to thrive.

And it's a bit weird that in the final chapter Leve makes a last minute play to make Tifalia lose faith in Pascalia when she made it clear earlier that only Pascalia was going to be tested. I guess it was just something to keep the player narratively occupied since Tifalia really couldn't do much during this segment of the finale.

While not the final thing I want to bring up, I did want to touch on the twin charms that Pascalia and Tifalia use to find each other underwater. Initially Pascalia buys her one in the common route and she buys one for him in return after his route starts. They're intended to be used in pairs as they discover from Liyan, with the charms filling with color depending on their feelings.

Now, you'd think that the charm Pascalia gave Tifalia would reflect his feelings, so she would know how he thinks of her, but that's actually not how it works. The charm shows the wearer how they feel about their partner. Which is like… what the hell? It's like saying "Hey, I'm giving you this gift that will show you how much you care about me every time you look at it." What kind of partner gift exchange is that?

And the only reason it works in this ass-backwards way is so when Pascalia finally comes to terms with his feelings for Tifalia, his charm glows and points the way to her. But because this is so non-intuitive I didn't realize what was happening in earlier scenes when they were separated and staring sadly at their charms. I thought Tifalia didn't want to look at it because she was afraid it would show Pascalia didn't care about her. What was she afraid of then? That she didn't care about him as much as she wanted?

I was hoping after Ion's route I'd be free of this nonsensical plot stuff, but no such luck.

The final scene is Paschalia and Tifalia's wedding, which he figured they ought to do as a formality since they pretty much got married when they made the Leve Vows (and the spirit even gave them rings), but I would have liked Tifalia to have been in on it; seeing as surprising her with a very public wedding with her aunt, her new in-laws, and the entire city of Oriens is something she might have wanted input on. What if she wanted a small wedding in Artheir with Radie dancing down the aisle as the flower fae?

I did manage to enjoy the ending a bit despite my grousing. The rest of CIRCUS accidentally chattering into an open mic and Radie acting like he was giving away his daughter was pretty hilarious. But it seems further proof to me that Radiant Tale is more good character writing than good plot writing.

This leaves me at the door to Radie's route and we'll tackle the furball next week!

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 2: Ion

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 15:00:00 +0000

Since I already had a save set up with Ion's first solo scene complete, it was easy to resume his route, and I already knew his was going to be the darkest of the initial four. How dark? Well, dark for a story where the joy of the common people can cause healing flowers to bloom. But in other games, it could just as well be business as usual.

I want to say that I liked Ion's route, because there's a lot that I did. Tifilia is wonderfully proactive. I love how she's the one who makes the first move and works hard to convince Ion it's worth having a future. His backstory is already covered in the common route, but once on his actual route the story squeezes an exquisite amount of drama from it. His past is never just a bit of color to flesh out the person he is, but actively affects his present. It constrains him throughout his route and the way the details, particularly the hurdles, are parceled out is at an excellent pace so it doesn't feel too heavy-handed or belatedly included.

But the emotional story between Tifilia and Ion, and Ion's personal journey, is about the only thing that's handled well. The rest of the time I felt like the writer(s) were hoping no one would look too closely and not realize that certain things didn't make sense.

This is a relatively recent release so be aware there will be spoilers after the break.

Though Colivus joins CIRCUS to help him grow as he does on other routes, Jinnea suddenly informs everyone that they've been given a second mission, which is to investigate two rumors that the Intaglio Ring may have been found. Why the king or his advisors would give that assignment to CIRCUS instead of like… the Public Security Forces… I haven't the foggiest idea. And because this ring is one of the important symbols of the kingdom (being an artifact left by one of the four Great Spirits and used in royal coronation ceremonies) Jinnea decides that they'll have to set aside their tour to restore Colivus for now.

Really? I completely understand doing both at the same time would not be efficient, but asking CIRCUS to do this at all makes no sense. They should focus on the prince and the rest of the government on the ring. The only reason it has to be them is because the ring was used to brand Ion's tattoo over his eye that forces him to obey the ring wielder, so we need to investigate the ring in order to resolve Ion's story.

The lore behind the ring is that the great fire spirit knew he could be an overly destructive guy, so he left the ring to the first king to stop him if he got out of control, which is fine and dandy if that's what he wanted as a supernatural entity, but why the spirit gave the ring the ability to control anyone other than himself is just bonkers since it's liable to be misused, which it was by Ferus's underground arena to force reluctant or outright disobedient gladiators to fight.

And that's not the only thing.

The group splits up to investigate both Ferus and Cultura, where two suspicious rings have turned up, and Tifalia's group (consisting of Ion, Zafora, Jinnea, and Colivus) head to Cultura under the suspicion that if the Intaglio Ring has been missing for three years and hasn't been found in Ferus during that time, it probably left.

Unfortunately the ring's new owner turns out to be Balto, Zafora's uncle, which surprised me. I wasn't sure I wanted to see him play main villain again, but I figured it would allow Zafora's story (which is unskippable since it's a major part of Chapter 2 of the common route) to resolve without feeling like it was tacked on or left to be handled entirely in the epilogue.

So when Balto actually died shortly thereafter I was surprised again, but in a different way, as the Labyrinth Necklace should have made him unkillable, which is why Balto had to resort to blackmail to get Zafora's father to give it up. Instead he apparently got knifed by a pre-teen assassin who usually operates as Avi's receptionist for his dueling arena in Ferus. I mean, I wasn't upset that Balto died, or even that it was sudden, but the suddenness and the surprise is what the game wants the player to focus on.

The murderer is Luna the orphan! She now has the same mind-controlling mark as Ion! And here's Ion's old compatriot Avi, who used to be a gladiatorial slave along with him, until building a new life for himself as an arena owner. What's more is Avi has the ring! And he uses it on Ion, even trying to get him to kill Tifilia!

We knew the story was building up to the fact that Ion would eventually get controlled into attacking and possibly trying to kill Tifalia, since his lack of freedom even after being freed is a huge part of his story. Knowing that at any moment he could lose his freedom if someone else used the ring is why he's never thought to ask anything for himself or even considered what he might do with his life after CIRCUS ends. So with all the build-up and foreshadowing, this was an emotionally charged scene, and heartbreaking at its end when Ion is forced to depart with Avi and Luna, leaving Tifilia behind.

But then I took that step back and not only was I wondering how Balto had gotten killed, but I was wondering when Luna got branded. Avi makes it clear that Balto really did have the ring, it's not like Avi already had when he came to Cultura. But the framing of the scene is that we find Luna just after she killed Balto. The blood is fresh, she's standing over the body, Avi is not in sight, but she is already branded.

So when did Avi get the ring? It's not impossible Balto did not have it on his person, but given that he certainly knew what it was, I don't think it's likely he would have left it sitting unguarded on top of his desk. And I don't think it's the case that Luna killed Balto, Avi took the ring from his dead body, branded Luna, and then walked away while Luna remained in the same position just so our heroes can find her a moment later (and then for Avi to walk back in as if he'd just arrived a few seconds after them).

If the player is jarred enough in a story that they stop playing and try to figure out how something happened, and it is not a mystery game, then there's some plot hole around here.

I did like that Avi ended up being the villain for Ion's route, because he's also a victim of the underground arena, so we can see the differing paths they took following their freedom three years prior to the beginning of the story. Ion was the only surviving slave who had been branded by the ring, and by his own volition he remained isolated in the palace where he could be kept under guard and unable to hurt anyone. Avi on the other hand, had not been branded and became a successful businessman, eventually taking ownership of the seventh arena in Ferus.

On the outside, Avi is friendly and well adjusted. When we meet him in Chapter 4 of the common route, he gives CIRCUS an insight into how the population here differs from the rest of Escholtia, and he explains how the gladiatorial arenas work in Ferus (the legal ones as opposed to the underground one). He even offers to arrange CIRCUS's show, though no one likes it because like everything in Ferus, it revolves around two people fighting each other.

But unlike Ion who would just as well leave his past behind if he could, Avi is the one who can't let go. And he is sympathetic to a degree. When the Public Security Forces stormed the underground arena three years ago and freed the enslaved gladiators, he's told that he can now forget everything that happened to him. Since the speaker was Alest, a side character we're already acquainted with, we know that he meant the best when he said it, but Avi was forced to kill his own brother in the arena and that's not something you can tell someone to forget.

So I can understand Avi being upset by the fact that present day Ferus acts as if the underground arena never happened. I can understand he's angry that people wanted to demolish the old arena. Even if the memories were painful, it's not something that should be brushed under the rug.

What I didn't understand was how Avi got from people denying his pain to starting up the underground arena all over again. Does he want more people to end up like him and his brother? Or is this a way of proving he survived the system that created him, by inserting himself at the top? He says some stuff about showing the people in Ferus what a real arena match is, but nothing that really bridges the gap between his pain and what he's doing.

Part of the problem with the original underground arena is that most of the gladiators were slaves, many of them taken as children. Avi's dialogue focuses on the killing and not letting his brother's existence be forgotten, but if he's truly bringing the underground arena back, that would also mean bringing back the slavery, which the game does not have him voice, likely to keep him sympathetic.

And then the game keeps stumbling over itself.

When Tifilia's group chases Avi back to Ferus, they find Ion being mind controlled into an arena match against Paschalia as a teaser show in one of the public arenas, where killing your opponent is against the law. The game makes a big deal out of Ion resisting the ring enough to avoid killing Paschalia once he has him down and Avi even gives him a little crap for that, but unless Avi wanted to get Ion arrested he couldn't force him to kill Paschalia in a public match.

It's like the game just forgot that killing people in the arenas is against the law. Except that it later brings it up again when Ion is forced to fight in the restored underground arena and some random guy in the crowd is like "Oh yeah, they're not supposed to kill each other" as if he just had a brain fart and remembered he was supposed to throw out the trash before he left home.

Avi advertises in the city that the underground arena's inaugural match will be Ion against a dragon (since he's imprisoned the CIRCUS members who were investigating Ferus, and is why Paschalia had to fight Ion in the first place) which sounds like it would be amazing for the average duel enjoyer in Ferus. It's what Avi wanted to do in the common route for CIRCUS. So I could absolutely see him wanting to restart the underground arena with that.

But widely advertising for an illegal arena aside, we soon find out that the underground arena isn't big enough for Vilio's dragon form. The team from CIRCUS makes a big deal out of it when they rescue Paschalia and Vilio offers to stay behind so no one else is coerced into fighting Ion as a replacement. The problem for CIRCUS is that Vilio isn't as strong in his human form so Ion may well kill him.

Which brings me to: "Why would you advertise a fight against a dragon when the audience can't even see the dragon?" Vilio is fae and the game lore is explicitly clear that it's impossible for humans to tell a fae from any other human when they are in their human form. So all these people coming to see Ion fight a dragon would just see him fighting another human who is supposedly a shapeshifted dragon and they would just have to take the arena's word for it. I'd be disappointed.

But as I said, I did like the emotional arc of his route, and at least the story comes together in the climax. CIRCUS turns the Ion vs. Vilio match into an impromptu show, with Jinnea even belting out a "Ladies and gentleman!" opening, and everyone works together to both clear the audience (by flooding the arena with water, with assistance from friendly elemental spirits) and tackling Avi in an attempt to get the ring off him.

They fail, but Tifilia gambles on an impressive bit of information Jinnea brought up earlier, that the ring may have a limitation on the number of people it can bind at once and in a big ass move, grabs on to Avi and brands herself, weakening the ring's hold enough that Ion can break free and beat Avi.

And then to make sure that the ring can't be misused against Ion (and possibly Tifalia) again, everyone else in CIRCUS brands themselves with the ring, diluting its power so much it can't be used against any of them, with the side effect of making it like an in-group tattoo commemorating their friendship. That was a classy way of solving the problem and allowing Ion to fulfill his dream for an ordinary life.

The only smudge on the ending was that I didn't like Ion suddenly becoming a possessive boyfriend. It's cute that he moves into Liber with Tifalia, her aunt Spirea, and Radie, and I loved that Tifalia has made it a ritual for him to say he's home before she'll give him a hug, to reinforce to him that he has a home. But when he finds out Tifalia's getting letters from the other guys about what they've been doing and she says she misses them, he gets possessive in a way that is supposed to be sexy and tells her that even though he's friends with those guys he only wants her to think about him.

As somebody whose friends group is fairly evenly balanced between guys and gals, this tees me off and was the final kick I didn't need. For all its flaws Ion's route could have ended on a high note, but instead stumbled as it crossed the finish line.

I still mostly like Ion as a character, and as a whole his route is greater than the sum of its parts, but a lot of those parts are misshapen and don't fit together quite right, which is a pity. I feel like I'm dogging on his route too much, but I really feel like it could have been much, much better if only the writing had been better thought through.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 2: Zafora

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 14:00:00 +0000

I caught what seems to have been a cold that knocked me out on Sunday last week, which ordinarily would have been the day I prepared my post, so this is coming a little late. I'm definitely feeling better now, though I'm not over it entirely and I might not be for a while. This has been my first illness since my cancer treatment left me somewhat immunocompromised, so I don't have a good idea of how long it'll take me to fully get over other than it's longer than it used to be.

That said, back to my next post on Radiant Tale. Beware of spoilers ahead!

After my premature common route ending due to spreading my affection points across too many characters, I knew I wanted to choose between Zafora and Ion. The random Paschalia scenes I got didn't leave me feeling like I knew the character any better, and Zafora and Ion both had intriguing story hooks between Zafora trying to reclaim his father's title and Ion's past as a slave gladiator. I thought I might play through some of Ion's early scenes and then double back to Zafora if he ended up interesting me more, but after I finished my first city exploration with Ion on my second playthrough I knew.

I had to play Zafora. Not resolving his story was bugging the heck out of me, so I left the Ion save alone for a later playthrough and replayed through the common route more cautiously on a new save. This time I made different choices where I'd messed up before (which made up for all those times I accidentally wound up with Paschalia scenes), and finally was rewarded with the last chapter of the common route segueing into the Zafora specific route.

The fact that Zafora ended up being the guy I wanted to play the most surprised me. Going into the game I knew he was the clown, and even if his jester outfit is more Cirque du Soleil than Ringling Bros, I just couldn't see myself romancing one. Even if there's an art to performing a good pratfall, clowns were my least favorite part of the circus as a kid, and it didn't help that Zafora is one of the most acerbic characters I've ever met.

He's probably the least cooperative member of CIRCUS. Though he always does his share when it comes to performances (since his wish depends on their success), he's so prickly that it feels like anyone trying to hug him is going to get stabbed.

And that's probably why of all the characters, his backstory is explored first. If the game didn't put Zafora's personality in context, even players who normally like a guy who runs hot and cold would probably rather romance someone else. But learning so much about him so early is likely what hooked me. I was trying to keep an open mind about the other characters, but as I passed into chapters 3 and 4 I realized that I was having a lot of fun with him.

Zafora is a character who values honesty, which likely stems from his uncle's betrayal in his backstory. So when selecting answers for Tifalia, it's fun to be able to choose competitive answers such as refusing to go easy on him the very first time she gets to play a board game with him. Going full blast earns affection with him, while he ends up disappointed and irritated if she tries to go easy on him.

Cultura is the second city CIRCUS visits on their kingdom-wide tour, and most citizens are cowering in their houses due to the mysterious Lunatic Riots, that drive an ordinary person to violence without warning. While there, the group learn that the governor of Cultura is normally a hereditary position (where other city governors are appointed by the capital) with the badass title of Labyrinth Sentinel, since the necklace worn by the sentinel allows them to manipulate the labyrinth that everyone in Cultura is able to navigate with aid from the local wind spirits.

The current Labyrinth Sentinel, Balto, also happens to be Zafora's uncle, who gained the position by murdering Zafora's parents three years prior. Zafora fled after learning what happened, but joined CIRCUS with the intention of asking the king for a magical artifact called Erase that is the only thing that can forcefully separate a sentinel from their necklace. Erase was created in the event a sentinel ever went rogue, but Zafora's problem is that he has no proof that Balto committed the murder (other than his uncle told him he did it) and Balto is currently the legally installed sentinel recognized by the king in Artheir.

Zafora knows his problems can't be solved during CIRCUS's first stay in Cultura, and they're not, but it left all the meaty hooks for a story to follow; we have a disinherited heir, we have a jealous uncle (who is upset that he didn't become sentinel due to a pesky thing called birth order), and Zafora seriously grows in the single chapter in the common route that covers his story.

By the time the team leaves, Zafora knows he can't work alone, and while the CIRCUS performance in Cultura is nominally about the Great Wind Spirit Libera, by the end of it, it's really Zafora asking the people of Cultura to join him.

That isn't to say he suddenly becomes warm and snuggly, because the guy can't admit he bought good-bye presents for everyone and would rather pretend he's giving away some junk he picked up from his information broker job, but once we know it's just Zafora being awkward and not that he's a jerk, it's much easier to take his barbs.

After the common route ends though, there's a bit of a stumble, which I suspect was probably due to different writers handling the two routes. The common route makes it clear that Zafora's wish is to obtain Erase, but after his route starts, he instead shares a petition put together by the citizens of Cultura to have Balto stand down. The king acknowledges it and sends one of his aides to inform Balto that he's being stripped of his position.

Of course we know it's not going to be that easy, and in the meantime CIRCUS gets ready to perform again because Colivus is still child-sized rather than the teenager he ought to be, so they're hoping to give him the confidence to grow up by joining them in their performances. A lot of this route runs parallels between Zafora and Colivus, who are both heirs to their position, and Colivus sees Zafora as someone to look up to and possibly emulate.

When Balto's inevitable rejection of the news arrives, and the group learns he's hiding in the labyrinth, that's when Zafora goes back to asking for Erase, but the king kinda… wusses out. It's not that he has a problem with giving the artifact to Zafora, but only the royal family, due to their hereditary contract with the four Great Spirits, can use all four elements simultaneously to craft the necessary bullets (yes, Erase is a fancy magic gun), and Jinnia explains that the king can't spare the mana right now because he needs to save it to protect the kingdom.

Mind, this is a world with only one kingdom so there is no outside threat and the king currently has a rebelling governor on his hands. This is the situation Erase was crafted specifically for!

Instead Colivus volunteers to do it, even though his magic hasn't fully come back yet. Everyone just kinda hopes he'll figure it out as CIRCUS ends up going back to Cultura. It's not the smartest plan, and Colivus nearly exhausts himself with his daily attempts once they arrive, so I couldn't help but be a bit irritated that the king would rather sit on his duff and leave this up to his still recovering son rather than do it himself. (At least in Vilio's route they give the excuse that King Vigonia's mana is not actually powerful enough to make the bullets.)

This early to middle section of Zafora's route was on the weak side for me. Because Zafora is preparing to take back the title of sentinel, he's often "busy" doing some nebulous task that we rarely learn the details of, so we never get invested in what he's doing. Instead Tifalia spends a lot of time wondering how she can help Zafora because he's working so hard, which usually isn't that romantic. Zafora has two CGs in scenes where the man is either in dire need of rest or has already fallen asleep. Then on top of that, Balto lures Colivus away and when Tifalia comes to rescue him, the two of them are blasted so far by the Labyrinth Necklace's wind magic that they end up in another city.

It's possible to do a romance route where the protagonist and her love interest are separated for a period of time, but I didn't feel like the stakes were high enough that the characters were threatened by the situation. Zafora is okay, he can't leave Cultura due to the wind barrier Balto put up, but he's otherwise perfectly fine and Balto hasn't made any other moves. Meanwhile, Tifalia is safe in Oriens, which is far away so she's in no immediate danger. Yes, being separated is sad and disappointing for them, but with no sense of peril there's no sense of urgency. With the Relay Chalices they're able to talk with each other so there's no wondering about what's happening to their other half while they're separated.

This was also when I realized that Tifalia is really a supporting character on this route rather than the protagonist. Everything revolves around Zafora. It's his title, his uncle, his city. It is nice when he has the moment told from his POV when he wishes Tifalia was with him because he relies on her so much, but you could very easily rewrite Zafora's route with him as the protagonist and Tifalia being his love interest.

And in the end, Vilio just shows up at Oriens and flies her and Colivus back, using Colivus's magic to break through the wind barrier. The only thing critical to the story that happened while they were gone was that Colivus figured out the mental block that was preventing him from crafting the bullets, so he's confident he can make them after he gets back. Breaking the barrier would drain his mana though, so Tifalia and Zafora plan out another performance in Cultura. If they can bloom another Flora this will recharge Colivus's mana and he can make the bullets.

But it just felt like so much busywork for very little pay-off. Colivus could have had his epiphany in Cultura since it wasn't tied to anything specifically in Oriens, and just a conversation with Tifalia, but I guess if he wasn't kicked out so he could drain his mana it would have made the route too short.

Despite being annoyed with the side trip, I felt fairly good about the writing around Zafora himself, except once they began preparing for CIRCUS's next performance. He sends a message to his uncle in the form of a bet, proposing that if CIRCUS brings joy to the people, his uncle surrenders his position, and if CIRCUS fails, they will leave.

For some reason he thinks Balto will be unable to resist accepting, when CIRCUS has already performed well enough that they got a Flora to bloom the last time they were here. Considering that they've already done it in the common route, when people were terrified of their neighbors suddenly becoming violent criminals, it seems hard to expect them to fail when the current problem is that they have a rogue Labyrinth Sentinel who has put them out of work.

Why would his uncle accept a losing bet?

While Balto might have agreed just for the purpose of his mercenaries attacking the performance when everyone is gathered (which they do), Zafora's reasoning suggests that Balto will not think them capable of succeeding, which makes no sense when they already have a track record. Zafora is supposed to be cunning and intelligent, and this felt like the equivalent of his brain slipping on a banana peel.

And in any case, the real point of the performance is to bloom the Flora so Colivus can craft the bullets, which clearly means that Zafora is still expecting to shoot Erase, so he probably knew his uncle wouldn't honor the agreement. Though there is a lot of optimism in Radiant Tale, I'm glad they don't try to redeem Balto.

In fact, he doesn't even survive the final confrontation.

The only innately dark part of Radiant Tale is the existence of the fiends, and even perky Vilio is adamant that a possessed person cannot be saved, and they will eventually turn into a fiend themselves.

Balto being possessed made his actions and ongoing disregard for the city's well-being make a lot more sense. This also allowed him to be killed with impunity without characters yammering about morality and saving him, and I like that the game addresses what this does to Zafora, who will never get a proper sense of closure as to why his uncle killed his parents. Arguably he wouldn't have even if Balto had remained alive, but it still colors his victory with a sense of loss.

I also have to add that I liked Tifilia's assistance in helping Zafora shoot Erase. It would have been really easy to make the moment a case of point and shoot with a badass speech or pose, but when Balto's wind magic tears up Zafora's arms it was nice for Tifalia to step in and help him aim, making it more of a duo action than Zafora solving the problem entirely by himself.

The denouement was bittersweet, since Zafora was going to stay in Cultura, and Tifalia continue on with CIRCUS and their plan to tour the kingdom to fix Colivus, but there was the understanding they would reunite in the future.

Which is why the epilogue infuriated me, because we find Tifalia a year later working back at Liber, and we find out that Zafora hasn't so much as sent her a letter in an entire year. He's lucky that she doesn't tell him to sleep outside when he finally shows up, though it would have been nice if the game had made it clear that he was supposed to reach out to her when he was ready for her to join him.

In fact, she came home right after Cultura since the epilogue pulls a "Surprise, Colivus started growing again. Looks like making the bullets unblocked everything!" So maybe she just went home to be out of his way? Because I don't know why she would have even left.

Aside from that, while I can understand her being upset at him for not contacting her after a year, did she try contacting him? That doesn't excuse Zafora, for just… not writing… but the facepalming goes both ways in this scene. At least she doesn't take it lying down. She does get mad at him, especially with his weak excuse of not knowing what to say to her, and Zafora, being crappy at expressing himself, manages to dig himself in deeper when trying to ask her to live with him. That it came across as him hiring her for a job only to get her pissed at him was icing on the cake.

Despite that, I did like his romance. Maybe not all the plot portions of his route, but the game did succeed in making me fall in love with a clown, which is the best thing I can say about it.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 1: Overview

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 14:00:00 +0000

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch
Release: 2023

Radiant Tale came to my attention for its bright fantasy setting, even though I was less keen on the circus motif. Oddly though, it is a motif rather than a genuine circus. In a rather Japanese fashion, the key members of the cast are part of a performance troupe called CIRCUS (where "Circus" is quite obviously said in English and the name is stylized in all caps for the English translation) and they have a large tent they perform in, but after the first chapter they're more of a theater production than a circus. The troupe is touring the kingdom in order to bring joy to the nation's major cities and cause the healing Chloris flowers to bloom in order to restore the magically stricken prince.

While I can't say this is a game with no evil or no bad guys, and multiple routes have a sense of life and death drama, it is definitely optimistic and the kind of world where the characters really can make things better for people purely by giving a performance that speaks to them.

Radiant Tale could easily have gone the route of having a generic medieval fantasy world found in a lot of anime these days, but I found I loved the worldbuilding in this one. In fact, while some otome games' glossaries feel rather superfluous, Radiant Tale's lore is not window dressing. It's stuffed with detail, and while you might wonder why you need to learn that mages are able to cast magic because they've formed a contract with an elemental spirit, it's all setup for when that knowledge is necessary. Though it can be overwhelming at first, the story is good enough to ensure you remember the important bits even if you're the type to ignore every codex entry that pops up for further reading.

This game is a recent release as of this writing, so please be aware there will be spoilers after the break.

In Radiant Tale we play as Tifalia, a sixteen-year-old girl who was orphaned ten years ago when her researcher parents were killed in an accident. Since then she has lived with her Aunt Spirea and Radie, a fey beast who is considered a part of the family (though since all fey beasts are sentient, it's not exactly clear whether he's a surrogate father, brother, or even family pet). She loves her current life and family, and wouldn't ever dream of leaving them until one day a dragon literally falls out of the sky and barely avoids crushing her on landing.

This kickstarts her meeting the various members of CIRCUS who need a place to stay while they're in town and as it happens, Spirea runs a tavern with some rooms for rent. CIRCUS turns out to be a motley bunch, consisting of an ex-security officer, an acerbic clown, an overeager dragon, a water contractor who seems to have one of the most powerful spirits ever bonded to a human but is pretty wishy-washy about his abilities, and the foppish noble who is running the whole affair.

When their first almost empty performance goes up in flames (literally, Vilio is so happy to get an audience he sets fire to the tent and everything around them), Tifalia is happy to offer them suggestions to attract people while also serving them dinner. She has a knack for promotion, having been involved with her aunt's business for so long, and Jinnea, the leader of CIRCUS, immediately wants to sign her up. After some pushing from her aunt to go explore a little before deciding whether she wants to spend her whole life working at Liber, Tifalia reluctantly agrees to go and Radie comes along to look after her.

From there the common route goes through the kingdom of Escholtia, with each chapter taking place in a different city, and the final performance returning to the capital, Artheir. The plan is to entertain enough people in each of the cities to cause a specially researched flower called a Flora to bloom. It's much stronger than the regular Chloris flowers which already bloom when people experience joy (and they seem to be everywhere, because they were even popping out of nowhere while indoors during the prologue) and so far the Chloris flowers are the only thing that seems to be aiding the otherwise unmoving prince.

Each city (except the return to Artheir) allows Tifalia to spend time with one (and only one) of the love interests while scoping out the city, and occasionally Jinnea, who for a time I was convinced was a love interest considering his prominence in the opening credits. You would think that by consistently (or mostly consistently) selecting a particular love interest in each town would be enough to send you on to the appropriate romance route after the tour ends in Artheir, but the game is surprisingly fiddly about it.

Radiant Tale seems to require a minimum of six positive choices out of ten to go down a character's route, which sounds like a lot of leeway, but there are also what I'll call "split" scenes where CIRCUS splits in half while exploring the town and Tifalia is with only 2-3 of the guys.

In these split scenes, any choice Tifalia makes will award a point to somebody, but not necessarily the guy you're actually interested in (at least if you're playing without a walkthrough like I was). So I ended my first playthrough of the common route with 5 points for Zafora, 1 for Ion, and 3 for Paschalia who I had never chosen to accompany in town but kept getting points for whenever he was grouped with Zafora or the one time I had no idea which choice would take me to which person and went grocery shopping because it sounded like a helpful errand.

Most otome would funnel me on to the route of whoever Tifalia had the highest affection with, which was clearly Zafora, but there's actually a common route ending in this game which results from not having enough affection with anyone, and I hadn't seen one of those in ages. In that ending, CIRCUS wraps up their tour in Artheir, Tifalia goes back to Liber, only to later get wheedled by Jinnea into working as his secretary and that's not a fate I'd wish on anyone.

I have a feeling that the game designers expected the player to use a walkthrough (and anecdotally speaking, it seems like a lot of players do) because when I got the Paschalia scene while groceries shopping he and Tifalia talked as though they'd shared some significant moments together when in actually they hadn't because I had never hung out with him the entire common route. Since the kitchen/cleaning outside/grocery shopping choice is the last one for anyone not already heading for Radie (or Vilio, who has his own version of the common route) it seems like which love interest is connected with which choice should be obvious for the player to avoid referencing an emotional arc that the player may not have seen. Or like Radie, the choice could automatically be made for the player.

If the player doesn't get the Jinnea ending, CIRCUS goes on a second tour, which I was initially surprised by, but it makes sense given that the first tour ends halfway through the story and our cast of characters clearly intend to separate after their job is done. The thing is that Prince Colivus wakes up after the performance in Artheir, but he still looks seven-years-old, the age he was when he accidentally froze himself when he was attacked by a Fiend. Undoing the magic should have brought him back to his actual physical age (and I really feel sorry for a kid having to bum rush from seven to seventeen after coming out of what was practically a coma), but for some reason Colivus is stuck in a seven-year-old body and there is the suspicion that he might be subconsciously holding himself back because of all the responsibility that will fall on him once he grows up.

So CIRCUS's second tour, on most routes anyway, is to boost Colivus's confidence in himself so he feels better and ready to face the world like the teenager he is supposed to be. It is a little weird to think that a performance troupe is toting the crown prince around as another act in their show, but they do make it a point on more than one occasion that they were assembled on orders of the king and everyone including the king seems fine with it.

I wish I could say I liked Colivus's addition to the team, but he felt like an annoying child character the story is forced to revolve around (at least until the love interest's story takes center stage) and it didn't feel like he built a rapport with most of the characters. Since he only joins in the second half, there just isn't the time to integrate him. The climax is coming too fast. While he usually has a role to play so he doesn't come off as mere decoration, most of the time I feel like another character could have done the job. Vilio's is the only route where I felt Colivus was a key part of the story, and perhaps that's why that's the only route where we see the teenage version of Colivus, because his mana needs to be fully unlocked for the finale.

Whether the second CIRCUS tour finishes (I would say usually it does not) depends on the route and the ending. But what I do like is that the end of every route, regardless of whether CIRCUS is actually touring, is turned in a performance of some kind, with the ending of Ion's route being a particular highlight when CIRCUS breaks in phantom thief style with Jinnea's "Ladies and gentlemen!" announcement giving me Magic Kaito vibes as they confuse the heck out of everybody present, including their target.

Each route follows the story of one of the CIRCUS members involving whatever secrets they were hiding when they first joined. A couple of them like Zafora and Ion have their backstories come out during the common route, which is why I wanted to play Zafora's route first, followed by Ion, but the remaining three of Paschalia, Radie, and Vilio only really have their stories addressed in their own routes. I can see why Radie and Vilio should be played later, since Radie's story is also Tifalia's story and the story of her parents, and Vilio is basically the finale all the worldbuilding is building up to, but I feel like Paschalia got a raw deal. I might have been more interested in playing his route if I'd gotten a taste of his story as part of the common route.

Usually I feel like the protagonist herself ought to have a story in otome, so she has a chance to be a protagonist and do things rather than get pulled around by the plot, but even though Tifalia had to be pushed into taking this journey and isn't "special" in the way some of the more fantastic members of CIRCUS are, she puts in the work and her being part of the team isn't just for show. CIRCUS literally would have failed its mission right out of the gates if she hadn't joined.

And once we learn her personal history on Radie's route, we realize that the journey is Tifalia's story. After the loss of her parents she's been afraid of change, and has convinced herself that a life at Liber with her aunt and Radie is all she needs. Thankfully Aunt Spirea realizes that Tifalia should actually see the world outside before deciding whether Liber really is the place she wants to be all her life. And I like that whether Tifalia decides to come back to Liber is not a given, showing that depending on the journey she may find another place she wants to be.

Tifalia is probably one of the most proactive protagonists I've seen in otome. I think there's a tendency for otome protagonists to be a little helpless to better showcase the capability of the love interests, but Tifalia is rarely any more helpless than her male companions who aren't equipped for the situation at hand. When a Fiend wanders into camp, Zafora and Radie aren't going to touch that thing anymore than she is. They're not fighters either.

The result is that Tifalia really feels like one of the team rather than dead weight being kept around as a matter of convenience or to cook the men dinner. Even when she makes some decisions I'm not a fan of, it's usually in the vein of trying to do something to address the problem rather than meekly pulling away. I mean, she does pull back sometimes when it comes to confessing her feelings towards her chosen man, but not always, and regardless she is often the first to declare her feelings so I think that counts for a lot.

Next week we're going to move on to Zafora!

Time Flies and the End of 2023 is Careening Towards Me

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Tom) — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 14:00:00 +0000

I often joke about how at the rate time moves my life will be over before I know it. It's hard to believe it's October already, so we're in the final quarter of 2023.

Most people probably save their retrospectives for December with their end of the year posts, and I usually do my own in January (largely because I don't post more often than once a week and I won't know what last minute books, games, and anime I'll squeeze in the last minute of December). So what October means for me is a general sense of running out of time.

How much did I write this year? Am I ready for another round of NaNoWriMo in November? Did I make any progress on my gaming backlog? Fall is the rush to squeeze in everything I've been putting off all year. I'm not one to make new year's resolutions in January so much as try to complete all of them in the rush to December.

Usually something gets missed. I keep trying new ways to track and manage my time, and I like my current time tracker, so when I wonder "Where did Friday go?" I can actually say "Yes, there was a doctor's appointment, I went grocery shopping afterward, I fell asleep the rest of the afternoon, chatted with gaming friends in the evening, and then played video games until bedtime." So I know what I'm doing. Managing it is still work in progress.

It's interesting being able to see where my time is going, and being able to skip month to month or days at a glance (I'm using a tabbed spreadsheet). Sometimes I use it for something completely unrelated to time management such as "When did I have my last MRI?" since I know I'll find it in there.

But still, time waits for no one and 2023 is already on its way out.

I expect to do NaNoWriMo in November, and I'm mentioning it now because I expect to start my VN Talk series for Radiant Tale next Monday and I'd like it to run uninterrupted for the six weeks it'll take to finish, which will take us midway into November, and a little late to be making NaNo announcements. I really enjoyed this game, it was my single must-play of the year, and though it has its share of things I'm going to complain about, I want to say that the reason I tend to point out the various things that didn't work for me in these various story-based "Talk" posts, is because I like these kinds of games and I wish they had done better. I only ever cover games I like enough to complete.

I'm not sure what will come after Radiant Tale on this blog, but I would like to finish at least one more otome visual novel and one RPG period before the end of the year, though depending on the kind of RPG it might not be post-worthy material. Etrian Odyssey III keeps giving me funny looks and it always bothers me when a game I'm partially through (and still plan to finish) comes out with an HD remake because my playthrough has taken that long.