Subatomic Brainfreeze

By the way, your Christmas gift is Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden

This is late news, and I haven't actually gotten the necessary ingredients myself (and don't ask me about getting them), but I thought you all might like to know that after a very long time in the making, AGTP has released their translation of Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden. This is one of the really good ones, and I'm very much looking forward to playing it in English. I am a personal IRC witness (#badassmanlyraws, espernet, place to be) that Gid pulled his own goddamn head off getting this project done, so everybody buy him a drink of at least 18 meters in height.

The Last Remnant impressions

Outside of Dragon Quest, I haven't played a Square-Enix RPG since my PS1-era adolescence, when I would run through at least one a month. I used to think Xenogears was a really good videogame, God help me. A lot of people say that this was the peak of their output, but those people think in large numbers that Final Fantasy VII was the greatest videogame ever made. So it logically follows that they have to be wrong. Eventually arcade games monopolized my interest, and I no longer really have the desire-- though, I admit, I have the time-- to spend a month with an RPG.

But I try new games sometimes, you know? I had a two-year foray into Bemani that ended when the game stopped being fun. I tried a CCG for a month or two, but stopped when I realized the pricing scheme was completely extortionate. And somewhere in there, I sat around carefully analyzing my Hokuto no Ken slot machine. I never told you guys about the Irem-developed pachinko RPG I found! It was fantastic! But you get the idea. A few weeks ago, I thought it would be nice to come full circle and get a new Squenix RPG, The Last Remnant. The game had been recommended to me by enough people that, if not good, it would at least be interesting. The Last Remnant is, thankfully, both.

It's a traditional JRPG with most of the things I dislike about JRPGs-- weepy protagonists, random battles, stat overload, boring battles-- removed. The closest comparison is probably Romancing Saga, many of whose systems are borrowed. The selling point, though, is something that I believe (could be wrong) is all this game's own: mid-scale army battles. I don't want to say large-scale because that's Dragon Force, or the army battles in Suikoden. Instead of individual party members, you have groups of party members, called Unions. You put together Unions yourself: hire soldiers, sort out the members, put them in formations, and basically maximize their effectiveness. The union functions as one entity: if its collective HP runs out, everybody dies.

I'm just starting out, and I have three unions of three characters, giving me nine guys on the field at any given time. I've got more people in reserve, but the story is kind of a pain in the ass, and you can only expand your army when you reach certain in-story milestones. Meanwhile, enemies come out in equivalent numbers, and if you're not careful-- or just unlucky-- your party can be mobbed to death.

Battles are actually a pretty good time in this game: while it's traditionally turn-based, with speed deciding which unit attacks first, there is none of the ceremonial pausing between attacks that's typical in a JRPG. Instead, attacks simply happen, one after the other, with a minimum of fuss. There is some fancy stuff, but it's not in the majority, and it's not pointlessly overdone like the famous FF summon spells. At random intervals, you get a Shenmue-style "press this button now" prompt. This is a love-or-hate mechanic for a lot of people (you can turn it off), but I think it's well implemented here. It's a very simple way of interrupting the eventual tedium of RPG battles by simply forcing the player onto their toes. If you space out, you'll miss the chance for a big hit on offense or a turnaround on defense. You won't die if you miss these, but they still offer a serious advantage.

The design philosophy, as in Saga, seems to be "lots of random stuff": for example, leveling in the traditional sense does not exist. Instead, the game raises your stats according to what you do: what happens is that people you use to fight naturally become fighters, people you  use to cast spell grow into mages, and so on. There are things in the battle system, too, that seem governed by stats unseen to the player: for example, options in battle all change according to the situation, and characters' "super moves" seem to only appear when the game feels like you need to use them. There's a lot you're going to be leaving to the game here, and in an age of Nippon Ichi-style micromanagement I can live with that.

I should probably address the dominant critical response to this game right now: the game got low review scores because it has severe graphical problems. I should also note that a lot of uncreative piles with shinysmooth graphics get much more reasonable scores. Somebody's priorities are showing! But yes, the graphical issues in The Last Remnant can only be described as severe, and they absolutely cut into my enjoyment of the game.

Square used the Unreal 3 engine, and, well, Square isn't too good with the Unreal 3 engine, it seems. The game has that problem that Halo 2 had, where the background textures don't load completely and you're stuck looking at a featureless mass for a little while when you enter an area. This is especially distracting during cutscenes, where you've nothing to do but look at the scenery anyway, and often the scenery never appears. Worse, during battles, the framerate often slows to a near-halt. The pretty battle effects all go completely to waste as they chug along at five frames a second. Worse than that is that the slowdown often fucks your timing on those "hey press A" events. What's sad is that this puts a damper on the battle system, which is by a mile the best part of the game.

I also have an additional criticism: though this is almost certainly a deliberate design choice, given its persistence, the game constantly puts you in places, doesn't tell you what to do, and expects you to figure it out. I'm at an early juncture in the game story where the characters have to wait for something to happen. Your best buddy says "hey, let's go have a look around!" and you do so. In a typical JRPG the game's unconscious instruction when this happens in a story is "check everywhere in town and something will happen". So you do, but in this game, nothing happens.

At this point, I figured I had to do everything in town, so I took up and completed all the quests available in town, opening up loads of new dungeons and two new towns past them. I didn't understand why the story hadn't progressed (especially given that I was supposed to be "waiting a little while" but had instead spent six or so game hours clearing out dungeons), but I figured that if I kept going, it would. So I did the quests in the next town, too. And so on, and so on, and the exploration and the side quests never stopped coming. It turns out, now that I read a walkthrough, that I should have taken up a quest that I didn't notice in that first town, a long time ago.

In Fallout 3 (and Elder Scrolls in general, as Fallout 3 is an Elder Scrolls game with guns), the game makes clear what the main storyline quest is, and you can safely assume that anything else you do is on the side. There isn't exactly hand-holding, but your goals are clear. Not so here! Quests are the same way, unfortunately. In one I was told to find and defeat a boss monster, for example, when in fact I had to find an item (which is not stated to be a key) and use it on a number of statues around the map (which are not stated to be locks) in order to make a teleporter to the big boss appear. Videogame, videogame! Why do you do these things?

So yes, The Last Remnant is extremely rough. Do not buy it unless you can load it to your hard drive (seven gigs per disc, fixes the load times but not the graphical problems) or until Squenix releases a patch that fixes the horrific performance issues. But even so, the game is really fresh and ambitious: I don't think it ought to be overlooked.

Fate/ stay night: Fate route clear- I AM THE SO OF MY BORED

A truth for the ages. It took me 42 hours to learn this, you know, and I'm not going to act like it wasn't a tough trip. It wasn't like the time I watched LoGH, eagerly devouring hours of material every sitting. It wasn't like when I was 14 and I had the free time to consider 40 hours a medium-length game. It was a serious test of patience getting through the first third of Fate/ stay night. There's a lot you need to get past.

Obviously, the visual novel format is not for everybody in the first place: player input is minimal and you really are reading a book. It's quite removed from even something like Phoenix Wright: you read that game too, but you're also thinking critically, solving puzzles, and being involved. By contrast, Fate and its ilk are a different approach to game narrative altogether: just make the player the viewer instead of the player.

It's not really a bad idea in theory, and Fate's extremely user-friendly interface makes it easy to specify exactly how you want to read the story: I put it on auto-play, sped up the text, and shortened the pauses between lines a little bit. A custom-tailored sit back and relax situation. A lot of people argue that this isn't a videogame at all. I beg to differ. It's obviously a videogame. You have to vicariously save a fictional princess. That's a damn videogame.

"You", by the way, are Shirou Emiya, a young dumbfuck who winds up a Master in the Holy Grail War. Simply put, seven mages are chosen as Masters, summon Servants-- each of whom is the reincarnated spirit of a legendary hero-- and do battle in hopes of obtaining the Holy Grail. Shirou accidentally summons the strongest servant, Saber, and the two fight a superhero war and (genre requirement) fall in love. I rather like this part of it: there's no question that Type-Moon has built a really rich mythology for their characters. The game actually has, for example, an RPG-styled status screen that you can use at any time to read up on the particulars of the Servants, their histories, and their abilities.

As I mentioned elsewhere, the particulars of all this are explained at great length, which is fine, but writer Kinoko Nasu has a serious problem with restating himself: the line "people die when they're killed" is famous at least partially because it's emblematic of the kind of obvious statements these characters regularly make, over and over again. A lot of the time I would just put on my headphones, get up from my chair, and fix my figure shelves, looking back every so often at the dialogue as the characters repeated themselves without end.

The only time you will be thankful for this is when Shirou makes repeated, in-depth descriptions of the horrific abuse he takes in battle with Servants. This is because Shirou is a total, unbearable douchebag and by far the worst thing about this game. He's not a "I don't like him but at least he's interesting" character like you see in stuff like Eva or Macross Plus. He's just straightforward, honest, stubborn and when presented with a choice, he always makes the wrong one. He doesn't make reasonable decisions that happen to go wrong: he purposely makes the most boneheaded moves imaginable, all the way through. He's supposed to be self-sacrificing and heroic, but he just looks like an idiot with a death wish. Not a bad guy: just too fucking stupid to live. To make matters worse, the game-- and Saber's subconscious, and indeed, the universe itself-- is one hundred percent on his side.

Like, okay, let's say you're Shirou and you're protected by this ghost of a swordswoman whose abilities are miles beyond human, and the two of you have got to fight a bunch of things like her. Let's say that. Would you really be so unwilling to suck up your chauvinism as to say "Hey, listen... you're a girl. You can't fight, see. You've got a pussy." (protip: not actual game dialogue)? Would anybody? Seriously? I can accept swords that shoot god lasers and a dude who has to die twelve times, and even a spear that hits whether or not it hits, but for the life of me I can't imagine the inborn superpower that made Shirou such an imbecile. Even love is only so dumb!

In fact, one of the best parts of the game is-- when given the chance-- making even dumber choices than Shirou would normally make, and getting him killed in gruesome fashion. Dying in Fate is not really a bad thing at all: writing about slow, nasty deaths is probably Nasu's strong point. Furthermore, you're actually rewarded with the comic-relief Tiger Dojo sections, which are a worthy goal in and of themselves. Ostensibly, minor characters Taiga and Ilya are around to tell you what you did wrong. In practice, the choices are usually pretty obvious, so when you die, you probably did it to see this comedy twosome's wacky antics. Beware of lions!

The fighting is surprisingly well-done for a game of this genre: it's still on the cheap and done in stills, but the engine at least ghettoes out some movement with a lot of visual effects that really do go a long way towards making the slideshow feel kinetic. I did have one big complaint about the fights: the reuse of artwork. Each character has five or six "fighting" illustrations used during all fight scenes, and it's extremely rare that two characters are ever shown onscreen in battle with each other. You hear them fighting, Shirou describes it, you see stock art of the flash of a blade, but you never really see what the hell is going on. The servants always look like PVC figures, no mater what condition they're in, and there's never a point where I visually feel the impact of the battle. It's a little frustrating when the verbal description of battle is so grand and the visual presentation thereof is so not.

Also, like a magical girl show or a super robot anime, Saber's big attack is always the same two drawings in sequence, all the way to the very end. Coupled with all the other reused artwork, it feels really lazy that even a special moment like this is never treated as such. I'm pretty sure they even use the same voice clip.

Speaking of action, let's use this opportunity to giggle like children about the sex scenes. There are two on this route--one as a result of a hilarious, too-convenient plot device-- and they are both written as though by aliens who are trying to figure out this "human sexuality" thing. Nasu writes his sex scenes more or less the same way he writes his horror, except the music is different. "The white flower is violating the red flower" is particularly silly. And you know, I really hesitate to call this porn. Porn is about getting what you want right now, or at least sometime today. If you wanted porn, there are much easier ways to get it than to read a videogame for twenty hours and then read it for twenty more hours when you wanted some more. Just sayin'.

In conclusion, I am curious enough to maybe trudge through the next part. So I might. In any case, look forward to my reimagining of FSN, "Fate/ Puppet Show" (tm), coming soon to a cardboard box near you.

Somebody licensed Raijin-Oh: WHAAAAAAAAAT

Raijin-Oh, early 90's Sunrise mecha show, kind of like a Brave series but not, catchy theme song, small cult following, coming soon to DVD. Pretty left-field stuff, but this is almost certainly a small group of fans putting the show out as a labor of love. As the anime industry gets more profitable and anime fandom gets more niche, are we going to see this kind of thing happen more often? Will 2020 finally be the year that Colony Drop Inc. acquires of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes license and then beams it, free of charge, into human brains? I don't know, people. I don't know.

I am torrenting the unfinished cut of Gundress, USHERING IN A NEW AGE OF HARD-BOILED GIGA PUNK MOVIES

The unfinished version of Gundress seems to be a treasure unknown to the Western anime fandom. Sure, you can see bits and pieces, but I've never seen the whole fiasco made available online. Since I got the R2 DVD, I've been meaning to rip and distribute the spectacle for everybody to see. I just never did it, you know? Anyway, I (acting as the mysterious organization [BADASS-MANLY-RAWS]) have ripped the movie in shiny H264 and put it up on ye olde Pirate Bay, so have at it. It is untranslated, but you shouldn't need it to enjoy the awful animation on display. I wouldn't normally do this, as the complete version of Gundress has been licensed for years, but this is one of those things you're really never going to see any other way. Enjoy.

Sky Crawlers review on Colony Drop

I'm in a writing mood. I hope it keeps up.

This whole "20 years in jail for comics" thing

I'm late to this party but I want to voice my support all the same. Some poor bastard bought some manga--titles seem undisclosed, but word is that the offending books were yaoi, which bookstores around America sell in droves without incident or even the customers' parents seeming to notice-- from Japan, and was unlucky enough to have the Postal Inspector look at it. They were apparently displeased enough with the guy to confiscate all the media he owned and try to put him in jail for twenty years. I shouldn't have to say so, but this is a witch hunt. It is lunacy, and if this hunt was successful it would mean bad, bad things for all of us who read comics of any kind, manga certainly included.

Anime and manga fans have been saying for years that with the prevalence of manga among teens, it's only a matter of time before some moral crusader goes through a manga collection and decides they oughta make "that kinda thing" (pick a genre, pick a book, pick a panel, it really doesn't matter) illegal. Well, guys, here it is. Some asshole wants to prosecute your fiction.

Keep in mind that this has nothing to do with what you or I think is objectionable. Kodomo no Jikan offends me. Hell, shitty anime offends me too. And I know from personal experience that the far reaches of the internet hold hideous, sickening things that I never want to see again as long as I live. That doesn't mean we go and make these things illegal to make ourselves feel better. The world is free to produce disgusting media and I am free to express my disgust loudly and openly. Banning what the majority of us don't like is a dangerous path that will eventually lead somebody with a badge and a gun to your doorstep. Over cartoons, for shit's sake. Who the hell should have the right to put anybody in jail over a cartoon?

Think about this scenario: with this kind of precedent set, somebody with authority can-- if you are unlucky-- go through your stuff and decide that something they don't like the looks of is obscene. From there, it's just a matter of convincing a jury of your fellow Americans that they don't like it either, at which point your comics are illegal and you go to jail. A guy's been convicted for selling Urotsukidoji to other adults. If you're a serious anime fan you've probably already seen something that these people would put you in jail over.

This is not the fun kind of crazy-- that would be pissing in Wounded Man's eyes-- it is the kind of crazy that has to be fought against. The CBLDF is doing that as we speak, so you know what? Give them money. Help them out. They need it, they deserve it, and we need them.

One Outs is DEEPLY SORRY

If you've been watching your One Outs episodes all the way to the end, you've noticed these silly live-action bits at the end with the bubbly girl in the Lycaons uniform with the big ears who punches the air and says GO GO LYCAONZU!. In the eighth episode, it seems that there's been a terrible mistake: you can see that both our moe heroine and the director are bowing their heads in shame. Must be pretty serious business! Well, uh... of course it isn't. What happened was the wrong line made it into the script: somebody misread the katakana "no" (ノ) on the script as a chicken-scratched number 1. As such, the announcer said there was one out.... and then a triple play happened immediately afterwards. It didn't make a whole lot of sense. One must wonder if viewer response to this little flub really prompted a huge apology like this... or whether they were just trying to sell the DVDs, where it is noted-- thank Christ-- that the mistake will be fixed.

....
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GO GO LYCAONZU!

My Tatsunoko vs. Capcom moustache is THICK

Came up with this late last night, am uploading it for your enjoyment. As you can see, the system is extremely versatile and there's loads of room for creativity. Expect people who are actually good at making up combos to turn out some spectacular stuff in this game.

Characters are Jun the Swan and Hurricane Polymer, and the combo only works in the corner. The combo, for your perusal:

jump C, A, B, down B, C, Baroque Cancel
(I left out A here, but it does hit) B, down B, C,
QCF+A, cancel into QCF+AB, D to call out Polymer

After the drill you can do a lot of stuff, but you don't want to knock the guy so high that the drill won't hit him on its way back. I did two A jabs into Jun's second super, which is a reverse dragon punch motion. In training mode you can easily air combo into the Firebird but that would use six super bars total, more than you can actually have in a match.

This game is both the deal and the business.

Fate Stay/Night and the UNGODLY POWER of ZETTAI RYOUIKI

Well, with all this videogame shit done, let's talk about a weird otaku fetish and a videogame that isn't really! Zettai ryouiki (absolute territory) is the bit of exposed flesh between an overknee sock and a short skirt. As bangin explains, otaku-- the poor bastards-- see this bit of thigh, say "Man, I'll never get up there on no lady!", fetishize it, and take the fetish back into fantasyland with them. Now let's see for ourselves the real-life results of The Zettai Ryouiki Technique in otaku culture!

The visual novel I'm working very slowly through, Fate Stay/Night, is as long-winded and slow-paced as it is poorly named. It's not an altogether bad read, it just needs an editor to gently tell author Kinoko Nasu that maybe we don't need to read in detail about every breakfast that takes place in the hero's household. Maybe the discussions of the endless rules and techniques of magic-- I mean, the average RPG probably has a less complex system-- could made just a tad more concise.

In Fate, part of the hero's daily routine is attending a magic lecture from classmate/housemate/secret crush/battle mage Rin Tohsaka. Rin goes goddamn on and on about the rules and minutiae of magic that our hero totally sucks at and will never use anyway. It kinda gets to be a drag when you realize she restates all of her points two or three times for effect, and just like a real academic lecture, your attention starts to drift. Your eyes wander from the unceasing waterfall of exposition, and just when things look worst, your eyes roll downward, and let's take it to the teleprompter. Please listen to this music.

 

And the degenerate is back on target! This is a prime example of a developer working with limited resources for maximum effect. Good job to Type-Moon, you crafty sons of bitches, but I'll still never get through your hundred-hour bookgame.