A Minor Variation

Some more thoughts and further analysis of Hakuoki, mostly regarding the individual routes of the game and the interesting effect that resulted from the order in which I, mostly by chance, played through them.

( TL;DR serious business analysis of samurai romance game with vampires in it. )

Edit to add: Almost as good as playing the game myself? Reading a blind Let's Play by a straight adult man and watching his reactions as he succumbs to an overwhelming case of the feels:

Oh my God.

My breath catches in my throat, and I feel a rush of blood through my body, warmth starting in the pit of my stomach and spreading through my chest and up to my face. It’s the kind of adrenaline you get in a moment of shock, where the body floods the system to be ready for anything, fight or flight. I am stunned. There are no words for this — I never expected this to happen. I never thought something like this would happen. ... not to anyone I knew. Even when everything was at its worst, even when we were under fire from artillery shells as we desperately attempted to evacuate Kyoto, I never thought anyone would die.

...

But [Chizuru] was prepared.

All that up there? All those feelings, those physical reactions, that adrenaline?

That was me in real life.

Oh my God.

THIS GAME.

Okay.

Now that I've calmed down some, let me discuss Mass Effect 3.

( Stuff I did not like: )

( The Ending )


Now, with the negativity out of the way, ( Things I liked: )

As I gain some distance from the ending, I think, overall, it has not ruined the experience for me, and I'll be able to do another play through, perhaps through the trilogy as a whole. I'm just going to... turn the console off after the last talk with Anderson, and imagine my own ending from there.

I finished a complete replay of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 yesterday, in preparation for ME3 coming out tomorrow. ( TL;DR about plot structure ensues. )

In the meantime, I've started playing Final Fantasy XIII-2, which is extremely pretty but seriously, wtf is going on? I have no idea. I like Noel, though. I choose to believe he's somehow a descendant of Squall - he looks a lot like him with no scar and slightly longer hair, and he's got that wing pattern on the back of his shirt, and it's not like Final Fantasy fandom hasn't embraced any number of theories on less evidence than that.

(Don't you dare try to fix Noel and Serah up into a romance, game.)

Damn, but this game enforces its headcount limit with an iron fist.

I can't help but feel that Cecil really is the derpiest FF hero I've encountered thus far. Yes, even moreso than Vaan.

Baigan: "Cecil! I was kind of an ass in the first fifteen minutes of the game but I am totally on your side now. Let me help!"
Cecil: "Great! You can walk right behind me! :D"
Palom and Porom: exchange sidelong glances.

Also:

"...Say, Rosa?"
"Yes, Cecil? ♥"
"Why do you have a spell that teleports you into my bedroom?"
"...oh... no reason. ♥"

I finished Dragon Age II this weekend, so... my observations, let me show you them.

( First, the gameplay. Cut for spam, no spoilers. )

( About the storyline. May include some minor spoilers; I'll try to be vague about anything major. )

( Companions and other characters. Again, may contain some spoilers. )

There was probably more I meant to say, but this is spammy enough for now and it's stupid o'clock, so I'll let that be it.

Laguna in Dissidia 012 Duodecim: hell yes.

I hope to see him pester Squall to no end.

Twofers for both questions today! JUST BECAUSE.

Day 16 - What is the absolute worst pairing?

( I dreamt I was a moron. )

ALMOST AS BAD:

( The reason we didn't interfere with your outrageous behavior was... You couldn't have been thinking it was because we feared you? I will tell you clearly now. The reason we didn't invite you to our organization was because we didn't even see the slightest use for you. )

Day 17 - A pairing you thought would never work out, but did?

( Will you walk the road of carnage with me? )

But since that's really obscure and only involves approximately one and a half actual characters, have another one to go with it:

( Come on, sempai, would you please stop growing mushrooms in other people's closets? )

( The questions. )

So I said I'd try to have an interesting story to post after I got back from Dragon*Con. what I actually came back with was a week-long case of con crud, and I'm still kind of stuffy. As a result, I've been pretty much brain-dead since I got back. Whoops!

The con was fun, overlooking the egregious amount of time I spent standing in lines - four hours on Thursday to get my badge, and then what seemed like most of the day on Saturday for one thing or another. I got to see yang_wenli, which was cool; got my badge and my copy of Storm Front signed by Jim Butcher, saw Adam Savage's panel (and sat two rows back from the Rifftrax guys), saw Lips Down On Dixie's performance of Rocky Horror (which would have been more fun if the audience hadn't been trying really hard on the callbacks and failing equally hard), attended several dances (mostly not my thing, but the Last Party on Alderaan was kind of fun), stayed up until all hours and generally ran around a lot.

Did not make it to any of the panels Jim Butcher was on, to my disappointment, mostly because by the time they happened I was thoroughly over StandingInLine*Con, and also his main interview panel was at 10 am on Sunday and I was, uh, up until 4 am. So yeah.

Didn't buy much swag - just dice from Chessex, so as to finally have my own set for gaming, and a birthday/thanks-for-feeding-my-cats present for Jack. There were various things I considered, ranging from LSH art prints in Artist's Alley (if there'd been a Magno I would have bought it, but who am I kidding) to Metropolis PD/Gotham SWAT patches and UNIT parking tags; in most cases I ended up deciding that I could probably get them online later.

So that was Dragon*Con. I probably won't go next year, not because I don't want to so much as because I'm planning a major trip in spring that will use up a bunch of vacation time and probably tap me out financially, so I expect not to be able to afford it and aside from that I would like to have some actual time off for myself at some point in the year. 2012, maybe, if the world does not end!

The con crud emerged during the drive back on Monday and I spent Tuesday and most of Wednesday sick in bed, whee. Then I went back to work. Between one and the other, I have completely failed to have enough focus for things like tagging in online RP (which, er, really sorry about that, guys), continuing my play through of Odin Sphere (about which I'm sure I'll have more to say later), or making this LJ post. I have instead been reduced to playing a ROM of Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side, the for-the-ladies version of a Japanese dating sim of the most G-rated type.

Maybe it's the NyQuil, but I'm finding it hilarious. Especially since, of all the guys in the game, the one I ended up with on my first try was not any of the main guys but instead my teacher.

Then again, he's an emotional repression case with the voice of Takehito Koyasu, so my flist will probably not find this very surprising. Stupid sexy sensei.

I beat FFXIII! Shockingly enough, the boss fights get a lot easier after you spend about 20 hours of play time tooling around Pulse cleaning up Cieth Stone missions and racking up ridiculous amounts of CP. Who would have thought.

I have to say, the ending of the game seemed kind of anticlimactic to me. Upon contemplation, I think the emotional climax of the game may really be somewhere around Chapter 9 or so. After that the characters mostly have their act together emotionally, but the plot gets pretty loose, in comparison with the much more effective storytelling of Chapters 7 and 8. Even without the last-minute time out for extensive sidequesting, the endgame therefore kind of dragged, and lacked the impact that I got out of FFs VIII, IX, and X.

Also: this thing they've been doing in FFXII and XIII about not having a single clear main character is not really doing the storylines any favors. I liked all the main characters in FFXIII, but I think if they had decided early on whether the main character was going to be Lightning or Vanille or Fang (or whoever), it would have allowed for a much stronger resolution. It's not like they have to sacrifice characterization on the rest of the party to do that - FFX didn't.

The game also never gets around to bothering much with the secondary characters either, sadly, which disappointed me. I'd have loved to see more of Cid Raines, Rygdea, and Yaag Rosch. (Especially Rygdea. I choose to believe he's okay out there somewhere after the end FMV, helping out with the cleanup or something. Why only three scenes for Rygdea, Squeenix?)

Overall, I liked it, but it didn't grab me the way earlier games have. I'm still debating as to whether I like it more than I liked FFXII or not; I'm inclined to say yes, at least slightly, by virtue of having a better-developed main cast and a mostly more interesting combat system. (And Snow's shirtless scenes, which they were kind enough to flash back to in the end sequence.)

Dear Squeenix,

Thank you for Snow's shirtless scenes.

Love,
joiedecombat

Okay, but aside from that, now that I am getting further into the plot I am noticing that where FFXIII is succeeding with characterization on all six of the party characters, it's sort of falling down on the supporting cast. Which is to say that I still don't really know who the main villain is going to end up being, and while Cid is pretty and Rygdea cracks me up, they are mostly not around, so it's hard to get a feel for their characters. And Rygdea might just be eye candy and not intended to have much depth (I am not sure yet, he's been in all of two scenes), but Cid needs more screen time to fill the role they've got him playing. Jihl Nabaat, likewise, could do with a bit more fleshing-out, and so could Yaag Rosch. Remains to be seen how that'll turn out.

The six main characters, however, are absolutely winning at characterization. I love Lightning, I love Snow, I love Fang, Sazh is cool, Hope is becoming cool, and Vanille isn't irking me like she was at the start. (And annwyd, when you get the opportunity to play, I suspect you might enjoy the subtext between Fang and Vanille.)