Visual Novel Theatre- Analog: A Hate Story

Ok, here’s the deal.  Working from home has led to me playing a lot more visual novels.  Taking my lunches in my War Room makes that a bit more convenient.  So we may be seeing some more of these posts in the future.  Recently, I played/read through Analog: A Hate Story by Christine Love, and wanted to give myself a blast from the past, given that two of her earlier works were two of my first posts in this blog that has a hell of a lot of tenure in the old blogosphere.  But, time’s at a premium.  So I’m going to challenge myself here.  Set myself a time limit.  Write this, quick and dirty, in the time I have available before my next engagement. So, this is going to be rough.  No editing.  Little polish.  Minimal talking about how sexy I am.  Which is very.  Just so you know.

I’m getting sidetracked.

Analog: A Hate Story is, as the name implies, a successor to Christine Love’s first work, Digital: A Love Story, and you could maybe call a sequel because for all I know they take place in the same continuities.  You’re some sort of future space scavenger.  Which basically just means that you go into space and hack dead people’s email accounts.  Somebody hires you to go do that to the Mugunghwa, an old Korean space ship that’s just shown up on the parts of space that people bother looking at again after like a thousand years.   So you go there and start up the ship and it turns out you’re the first person to do anything with the ship in like 600 years, and everyone’s dead, and even before everyone died things went to hell.  So you talk to the AI and snoop through people’s e-mails, which are strangely full of logs that are actually useful and descriptive and more like diary entries and there’s not a penis enlargement spam thing to be seen.  I don’t know why they keep sending those to me.  My penis is glorious enough already.

I’m getting sidetracked.

Gameplay-wise, the ship itself, you control through a text parser.  When you activate the AI, you’ll get a more flexible interface to be reading all the stuff.  The AIs are very advanced, incredibly human-like, and have their own motivations, actions, and what not.  Unless you know the right codes, you can only see whatever e-mails the AI are willing to show you.  The AI’s ability to directly accept speech has been broken, so your interactions with them are limited to answering binary questions they present to you and showing them whatever emails/log entries you want them to comment on.  And, that’s how you progress through it.  Read the stuff, slowly piece the story together, try and get enough of a dialogue going with the AIs to get to the real good plot-twisty material.  

The plot itself largely centers around sexism.  And before we get the idiots from both sides that seem to make up the loudest voices whenever sexism comes up in games, this is a specific type of sexism, that doesn’t really apply to modern day life.  No matter how much said idiots talking about the game online seem to try to make it do so.  In the ship, it looks like most everyone all died at one specific year.  300 years or so before that, something happened to the ship that set their culture, collective knowledge, and overall intelligences back to a Joseon-era Korea style community.  So this is about sexism in Joseon-era Korea.  With artificial intelligence.  And e-mail.  And spaceships.  It’s a weird sort of anachronism that honestly seems a little forced, although the VN doesn’t say why they got culture-shocked back to the bad times so maybe it makes more sense once the sequel picks it up.  In any case, when that happened, AI memory got wiped and reprogrammed, everyone turned into idiots, and things got bad.  Like, we see it from the women’s point of view most often, and they definitely got the short end of the stick, but backwards societies are no good for anybody, and, realistically, nobody’s really living up to their potential there.  Birthrates have been falling to an incredible degree, men and women’s roles are sharply divided and both are recognized solely for their political positioning rather than their merit, few know how to actually work the technology they depend on to survive and they have even less knowledge of medicine, old age sets in when people are in their 20s to 30s, etc.

C’mon Aether, gotta pick up the pace here.

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Witcher 2 and Tough Love Training

I’ve gotten pretty good at video games, in general.  I won’t say I’m the best.  It’s not hard to find someone better than me at any given challenge.  Now am I necessarily good at all games.  You could probably beat be at a racing or fighting game.  Or a rhythm game.  Or one of those sportsers.  Or… you know what?  We’ll just stop there.  In general, overall, I’m pretty good.  And I’m starting to get an appreciation for those games and challenges that have made me better.  We’ve talked about a few of them here.  Ninja Gaiden honed my instincts and reflexes.  The Dark Souls run taught me to make full use of my resources.  Well, I want to honor another such experience I’ve had lately.  I played Witcher 2.  And it, too, has made me better at video games.

Witcher 2 is perhaps not as hard as Ninja Gaiden or Dark Souls was, but it was just as much of a tough love teacher for me.  The important thing about that game lie in just how its combat system works.  In contrast to the OG Witcher game, where almost all the gameplay that mattered was tied up in your preparation and planning, Witcher 2 is a lot more active.  It has a structure you might recognize from other games.  You’ve got a light and a strong attack.  You can dodge roll or block.  You can fire off a spell or chuck knives or bombs, if you’re needing ranged attacks.  If you break it down like that, it sounds a lot like your typical action game.

And it plays a lot like a typical action game, which is what made it such an effective teacher for me.  Every single instinct I had told me that I could just wade into a fight like I would in many other games and trust in my reflexes and spur of the moment decisions to see me through.  So I would do that.  And I would die, so many times, to random gangs of jobbers.  Because while the Witcher 2 feels like an action game, it’s not.  It’s an RPG.  That has its roots in the first Witcher, where anticipating situations, crafting solutions, and making the right choices of your preparations before you ever wandered into the fight were the big keys to making it anywhere.  If you’re playing Witcher 2 at any higher level than easy, your enemies are as strong or stronger than you and can bring you down in just a couple of hits, and the controls, although they’re a lot more free that in many other RPGs, still aren’t fluid enough to let you weave into and out of enemies like you could in something like Bayonetta.  If you want success in this game, you need to unlearn a lot of the lessons that action games have taught you, and actually think about and strategize your fights.

That’s a hard lesson to learn.  “I’m playing stupid” became a common refrain of mine when I found myself falling to a challenge that seemed completely feasible to me, needing to remind myself that I couldn’t just hack and slash through whatever like I could with most games.  Success required preparations.  Walking into a fight without using alchemy to buff myself and my weapons, without a good set of traps and bombs at hand, and without an idea of what I wanted to do with my spells would quickly lead to my demise.  And the game didn’t make the planning process easy, either.  The whole system was built around managing downsides.  Blocking and spells used up the same meter, and using that meter reduced your damage, so if I was needing to play defensively or use some of the powerful magic effects, I needed to be prepared to be a bit less sword-happy.  Yet, trying to keep my sword damage at max made my Geralt inflexible and rather vulnerable, and particularly poor at dealing with crowds.  The most powerful buffs came with equally powerful debuffs.  I could significantly increase my damage at the cost of significantly reducing my health.  I could speed up greatly how fast I regenerated the blocking and magic juice, but I’d get hit hard by status effects if I did so.  Preparing for a battle wasn’t so much a matter of picking which numbers I wanted to go up as it was a matter of trying to determine a significantly varying strategy for a potentially unknown situation and sticking with it until it worked.

And I had to do that again, and again and again.  Fall into old habits, realize I’m playing stupid, then stop turning my brain off and relying on pure twitch gameskills and actually think about it.  Use my reflexes, yes, but don’t rely on them wholly.  The Witcher 2 had me practice this again and again until I finally started to get used to the idea that I actually had to use my conscious mind in a fight, not just the instinctual one.  And since I finished that game and moved on to other ones, that practice has stuck with me.  The “I’m playing stupid” and actually strategizing on top of my raw skills has been coming again.  And I’ve been seeing faster successes because of it.  

So yeah, at this point in my gaming career, it’s starting to get a bit rare to see the game that can have the sudden and long-term impact on my skill like this.  Witcher 2 has made me a better player.  And that’s something to celebrate.  

Project G-Son of Godzilla (1967)

Alternate Title: Ok, I guess Godzilla’s a dad now?

I don’t care about this movie.  You can’t make me care about this movie.  I can barely bring myself to write this post.

That’s how you know this post is going to be a good one, right?

So this movie is another Jun Fukuda joint, the same director behind the previous film that wasn’t quite up to what we’ve come to expect from Godzilla and didn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense but was still kind of ok.  As I believe I previously mentioned Fukuda wasn’t a big fan of his own Godzilla output in retrospect, although I would say he’s probably being a bit too harsh on himself, overall.  He did make a few that are really good for those like me who love the extra dumb ridiculous stuff.

That probably doesn’t sound like it’s a compliment, but I’m intending it as such.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, I was crapping all over this movie.  So whereas Ishiro Honda would direct Godzilla films to be about big dumb monster action but also had this hidden theme of social commentary layered underneath it, and underneath that would have a sense of vague sense of “you know, this is all good fun but this would also be crazy horrible to live through”.  Three layers there.  It’s like a cake where the top layer is crazy fun but the middle layer has encyclopedia pages in it that make you think of how horrible society as a whole is, and the bottom layer has a picture of your abs crying in it so you regret the whole thing.  That analogy got away from me a bit, I think.  But yeah, Honda’s movies were more dumb fun that made you think a bit about it.  Jun Fukuda cut out the thinking part.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it didn’t.  It didn’t here.

Son of Godzilla is notable for introducing Minilla, the hideously ugly Godzilla baby whose existence proves there is no such thing as a kind and loving god in the Godzilla universe.  Even as far as child-relating young versions of Godzilla, Minilla somehow manages to be even less cool than Godzooky, and at the modern day, we’ve gotten exposed to Godzilla Jr. who is both way cuter than Minilla could ever be and could mop the floor with him without even getting short of breath.

Look at him.  Doesn’t that make your soul shrivel up a little?

Anyways, lets get on with the recap.

The Mystery Blogger Award!

A while back, we got another one of those social bloggy award things.  And you know what, it’s time to run those down.

So our blog award today comes courtesy of noted friend-of-Aether Red Metal, and I think this one, the Mystery Blogger Award, is in fact one that I haven’t gotten before.  Given how award winning this blog is, that’s becoming more and more of a rarity.  So, Red Metal, thank you for the easy content and the opportunity to express myself.  And hey, you like video games, or movies, and hate traditional media critics, you should give his site a looksee.  You’ll probably like what you see there.

Jumping in, we’ve got 11 questions to run down.

1. What’s the most unusual work you’ve ever experienced?

I had to think long and hard about this one.  There’s a lot of values for unusual that we could go with here.  Maybe the works that make a point of being unusual?  Or how about the ones that have a whole bunch of elements that only seem connected by PCP?  Or maybe we should take a look at the things that have never been replicated, or the ones that came out of strange circumstances, or the ones that speak to me in a way I don’t think they’re going to to another human being alive?

In the end, I just kind of settled on the Sword of Truth series.  This is not the most unusual work by many of the metrics I listed above, but it is very notable for being the absolute best example I can think of for when editors look at something, figure ‘eh, it’s still making money’, and let the creator just have whatever they want out of it.  For a long time.  It’s a huge novel series, I think twenty one novels as of this current writing, and I kind of checked out of it at around book 10 so it could be going even stranger places than I remember.  It starts out as something of a more typical fantasy novel, albeit with a side villain that rapes little boys serving a biggest villain that will make little boys come to a familial love with him so he can murder them in magic rituals and also the lead character spends a lot of time being captured by murder BDSM practitioners and the titular Sword of Truth is a magic sword that makes people really really angry and apparently that helps them find the truth, so you know, your value of typical may vary.  Then, it got successful.  Then, author Terry Goodkind got to do whatever he wanted with it.  And author Terry Goodkind loves two things; 1: writing incredibly detailed, lavish descriptions of settings and actions that end up stretching the plot so long that he runs out of space and time at the end of the book and has to rush to wrap everything up in as few pages as possible, and 2: creating incredibly strange situations so he can force his sometimes stupid political views down your throat.  Over the course of the series, the hero has murdered the local equivalent of the senate because he grew tired of their politics working against him, slaughtered a bunch of pacifists, decided that it’s foolish to believe in the afterlife in spite of the fact that he has been to the afterlife and has regularly spoken with the spirits of the dead and the devil equivalent, has a personal army of torturers, marries someone that comes from a clan of women that reproduce solely by raping men they’ve turned into mind-slaves and forcing them to kill any male children that result, and he’s the hero.  Anyone that has a problem with any of that is wrong and evil.  You’re expected to take it all as completely, unambiguously capital-r Right.  Also, he’s a magician, but his magic works by emotion and need which is basically a means for the author to write in whatever the plot needs to move forward without bothering to justify it.  Like, it’s in his magic that he just instinctively knows whatever to do without needing to learn it or actually figure things out…3

It’s actually kind of interesting to see, this is how far someone can take stuff like this.  The thing that makes this unique, is that it’s sometimes actually rather well written.  Like, the author is not like most that’ll devolve into just going on screeds all the time, where it largely seems to be that they don’t have skill beyond the central idea.  Terry Goodkind has real fantasy writing skills when he feels like using them.  He just doesn’t, most of the time.

2. What is the best work you have experienced that no one else seems to know about?

Here’s another one that’s taking some thought, and I can go a couple of ways with it.  Orwell is the one that rises to the top of my mind, though.  It’s a 5 episode game, kind of visual novel-esque, where you’re working for the government of a rather oppressive country, basically spying on people’s digital communications and passing information you find there on to a handler in order to try and track down a gang of terrorists.  It’s very well written and plays with its medium very well.  The story branches in a few select moments based on what information you choose to pass on, if anything, and the choices actually do seem meaningful and nuanced in a way that constantly had me questioning the choices I was making and the outcomes I was pushing for.  It had a central mystery that I kind of got wrong in rather glorious fashion and enjoyed every step of my process getting there.  And it brings a surprising amount of tension for a game in which you’re staring at fake e-mails and chatlogs all the time.  I had a rather great time with it, but it’s not one I’ve heard of from anywhere else.

3. If you could go back in time and go to the premiere of a classic film, which one would you choose?

The 2013 Lone Ranger.  Which is an odd one, given that the film is really not great, but it’s a personal one.  I worked on the film.  It was a rather small capacity, but there’s one scene that would have been very different if I wasn’t involved.  However, I’m not in the credits, nor was any acknowledgment ever forthcoming.  The production company originally working on the film was happily working with my organization, then a dispute caused Disney to can them and get another production company on it, who were just coincidentally wanting to do the exact same scene in the exact same area with the exact same resources that the original production company was planning, but if they publicly acknowledged my organization or anyone else who was involved in that, they’d basically be admitting they were stealing work.  So yeah.  It’s not something I’m bitter about, but it’d be nice to have my part in it recognized, so that’s why I’d want to head to the premier.

4. If you decided to write fiction, which genre would you choose?

This is an easy one.  I have written fiction.  And I go for speculative fiction stuff.  Sci-fi, fantasy, or magical realism that’s kind of heavy on the magic.  I enjoy constructed worlds, or having places that aren’t where I’m currently living.

5. What is the most disappointingly predictable plot twist you’ve ever experienced?

The Passion of the Christ.  Jesus coming back from the dead at the end.  C’mon, totally saw that coming.

6. What do you consider to be the strangest title for a work?

Let’s talk Touhou.  I’m not sure what their naming conventions for their games are, but I’m pretty sure it involves an English dictionary and a dart board.  Let’s see, some examples:

• Antimony of Common Flowers
• Faith in the Goddess of Suwa
• Immaterial and Missing Power
• Shoot the Bullet
• Undefined Fantastic Object
• Double Dealing Character

Granted, I’ve never played any of the games, so maybe there’s a way to parse the titles and have them make sense, or interpret what the content of the games are, or something.  I’m betting not, though.

7. Where in a theater do you prefer to sit?

In the middle, and high enough up that I’m either looking straight at or down at the screen.  Looking up doesn’t bother me as much as it seems to others, but it’s not my preference.  I hate spending the whole film looking slightly to the left or right, however.

8. Do you have any graphic novel/manga series you’re currently following?

Yeah, a couple.  Now that they’ve been releasing omnibusses for it, I’ve been catching up on the Grant Morrison run on Batman, which I think is one of the best runs Batman’s had.  It does some really interesting things, treating everything that’s ever happened to Batman as canon, but largely shuffling aside the stories and characters everyone knows in favor of the weird, the obscure, and the cringeworthy stuff, so much so that the Batman fans are just as lost as the newcomers, and then interpreting those into the current bits.  It also brings up some consequences for that weird not-supposed-to-be-canon time Batman got raped in the 80s, had the original Robin take a role as a rather different but frankly excellent in his own right Batman, and introduced some really interesting villains on top of Batman’s usual rogue’s gallery.  Unfortunately, some of the greater DC universe stuff at the time lended some things that didn’t really mesh well with the traditional street level Batman, and I’m not as much a fan of the Return of Bruce Wayne and Batman Inc. lines as many others are, but overall, it’s a frankly excellent run.

I’ve also been reading through the X-men, started with the originals some time ago and am just now getting caught up to the modern era.  They were never as great as they were when Chris Claremont was writing them, although there are some quality stories in there over the years as well.  And I picked up basically all the published works of Hiro Mashima a while back through Humble Bundle, and I’ve been working my way through Fairy Tail.  It’s kind of a typical shonen thing, and it suffers a bit from the author obviously going by the seat of his pants, but it starts to get pick up a bit and try a lot of new things around the middle of its run that have me interested, so far.

9. When it comes to reviewing films, which do you feel are more effective – traditional, written reviews or video essays?

Written.  In general, I prefer written reviews.  More content in less time, they don’t require presentation or editing skills to get ideas across effectively, and it feels a bit easier to explore the ideas being presented.  I’m well aware my take on things and what’s important to me doesn’t exactly match up with most other people’s, so I prefer to be able to get my own take on the review and filter it through my own preferences, and that’s a lot easier to do when its written.

Although I kind of wonder, given that this question is posed to a bunch of bloggers, if there might be more of a tilt that direction.

10. What aspects of old-school game design do you wish would make a comeback?

I’d like to see more turn-based RPGs gone through a modern lens.   To some extent, turn-based battle systems have largely gone a way, and in a lot of cases I’d say rightfully so because a lot of developers would just end up leaving them rather mindless in design, just hammer the A/X button until you beat the game.  But I do think there’s definite potential in the structure.  Zeboyd Games has shown that by bringing some more activity and strategy into the turn based structure, Shin Megami Tensei manages it by putting enough pressure on you that you have to strategize within it, and the Mario RPG’s action commands inject energy.  It’s never gone away completely, there’s always our Pokemons and what not out there, but I’d like to see it more, albeit with modern sensibilities and creativity in mind.

11. What aspects of old-school game design are you glad went away?

Lives and continues.  Frankly, I think doing away with those really opened up the medium as a whole.  Repetition is not good for entertainment, being sent back to the start upon enough failure would ruin storytelling, and severe consequences for failure means that the challenges need to be simpler and easier to maintain interest.  Doing away with those let developers up the complexity, give more long-term storytelling, and expand their games a lot more.  We’re better with saves and checkpoints, overall.

Eyes on Judgement

If you know anything about me, you know this world is a far better and sexier place with me around.  But that’s not super relevant to this post.  You might also know that I’m a big Yakuza fan.  Like, the series, not the organized crime bastards.  I love the games.  The extreme manly drama, the pitting of the romanticized noble criminal ideal against the wicked pragmatic crimelords that exist in the same sphere, the excellent and fast-paced action, the city district we’ve gotten to know so well that it’s almost a character in itself, the placing of dark story beats right alongside impossible to take serious goofiness, it fills a very warm place in my cold, dark heart.

However, the series is in a place of big transition right now.  Yakuza 6 broke the mold in a lot of ways.  The biggest, after 20 some years in meat-time and with us watching through Kiryu’s eyes over an in-universe time period from the late 80s up until the end of the new 10s, and the developers decided it was time to close the book on him.  They closed the book in a way that they can and almost certainly will open it up again, but for the time being, the developers are serious that whatever Kiryu’s future involvement, he’s not going to be the center of the story anymore.  Which, honestly, has been a long time coming.  With the series kind of trying to hold onto at least something of a realistic sense in its conflicts, they’ve long had troubles with managing Kiryu’s in-universe power level.  Yakuza 1 started with him being feared, and saw him, with some complicating factors on his side, just rampage through the strongest yakuza family in his area.  Yakuza 2 had him as an absolute legend, and saw him as the muscle of a small group that conquered like four crime families.  Yakuza 3 had to have an absolutely ridiculous plot bringing in the CIA just to up the stakes enough to where his power standings at this point was.  Yakuzas 4 and 5 had to sidestep the issues by having Kiryu as the member of a team of player characters with the least direct involvement in the plot just to keep things feeling threatening, and even then 5 still had Kiryu end a gang war single-handedly take on every single member of another crime family. At the same time.  And win.  At the end of the first act.  So yeah, his power level was a big in-story issue, and there was only so long they could stave it off with prequels and side games.  So it makes sense that they’d see him retire from his main character role at the end of 6.

But we still need our Yakuza fix.  And sure, there’s Yakuza 7 coming out, but what if that’s not good enough for you?  What if you want a completely new perspective of the Yakuza series?  What if you were really curious about what a Yakuza game would be like as seen through the lens of Phoenix Wright?

Judgement is a Yakuza game through and through.  And it manages to be something different at the same time.  The gameplay is familiar.  The setting, which has been so integral to the series, is familiar.  The spirit behind the game is familiar.  But now, we’re looking at it through a new lens, and in a game that’s willing to break the traditional franchise rules.  Let’s jump into that.