indigozeal

Oh, there's so much about which to talk, but this bears posting right now: there's a new Neo Angelique game on the way! The return of His Holiness stabby priest Mathias! (Er, from the dead? I don't know if this new project's following the continuity of the previous game or that of the anime. The latter seemed to have better visibility; it was a minor hit when it originally aired.)

Anyhow: More Neo Angelique! More Mathias! It's a Christmas miracle!

As you've probably heard, Igarashi's successor to Castlevania was announced and fully funded within a scant two hours. The bright roses-'n'-jewel-tones art design and gothloli aesthetic is proving a sticking point for me, partially because it's a bit removed from the mist-covered, slate-grey Transylvania we all know and love, and partially because it's so weirdly reminiscent of Neo Angelique, right down to the protag's frilly purple skirt-dress. But stained glass is a really intriguing visual motif for the game - something that connects the game with its forebear yet lets it go in a new direction artistically. It could set up some killer lighting effects. The game's in an embryonic stage - not scheduled for release till two years hence - so we'll see how this new style pulls itself together.

On a more pragmatic note, it is a bit depressing to see Igarashi slumming it with the Game Grumps plugging indie darlings like Shovel Knight and Rogue Legacy, games that are already success stories and don't need additional exposure. I understand it's great publicity for Igarashi's own project, and he himself explains magnaminously in the Kickstarter video that the soul of Igavanias lives on in the games it inspired. I just wish the folks on U.S. shores had the good grace to get out of the man's way in this critical hour, but asking for grace from anyone on the internet seems to be too much these days. It's cheering, though, that the new game will be produced by Inti Creates, the same studio that's behind Mighty No. 9 and which seems to be turning into a safe haven for Japanese talent that's been given the shaft in the mobile boom. "I'll finally be able to make a game that uses a controller" - poor man.

I love that the final stretch goal is voice acting by David Hayter. Top-notch presentation, additional rewards that unlock with social media & fanart activity, and tiers like "put your pet in the game's bestiary" - man, this is how to do a Kickstarter.

(In other news, I have yet to get into the backers' forum for the NightCry Kickstarter.)
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So I spent a bit on doujinshi this weekend. I forgot what I was originally searching for that led to the discovery, but I happened across the Otaku Republic shop, which stocks a relative wealth of Akari Funato and Lunar doujinshi. (Not all the entries under the "LUNAR" tag are related to the franchise, of course, but enough are.) I didn't end up getting most of the Lunar doujins, though, because a) they're $18 a pop, and b) most of them were made by this one artist whose stuff looks a bit rough and not always...mentally well. The cover of one of his alleged Lunar books is a photo of a sweaty, bleeding bespectacled man with the words "DIE DIE DIE" scrawled down the side. (I do see belatedly, though, that he did a doujinshi for the DS Lunar, which I would've snapped up for sheer novelty had it not taken me a while to recognize the characters, much less pick them out from the Zardoz-like entity in the background threatening to eat them.) Anyhow, I got a book from this artist with Mia on the cover, so we'll see how that goes.

As for the Funato doujin, I see that she has, despite being busy commercially with Under the Rose, put out a couple end-of-year anthology doujin recently. The work inside, though, doesn't seem to be of recent vintage; the books seem to be anthologies of older promo pieces for a variety of games. I see the second book has a Phantasy Star III piece, which almost motivated me to buy it, but looking at the preview images, I don't think it'd get through customs. I opted to get an anthology book from her for 2011, which was close to the release of Harmony, so maybe (*maybe*) there'll be some Lunar stuff in there. (Funato insists that absolutely all her Lunar work is in her PDFs, but that is, as previously discussed, not accurate. She seems to have cut her ties completely with the franchise, though, which is a shame; I would've liked to have seen some Vheen Hikuusen anniversary art or something.)

Anyhow, after buying those two books plus a Baten Kaitos and a Mystic Ark doujinshi, I started hunting around for other doujin shops, with the intention of checking them out later. (I had already, as you've gathered, spent a good amount of time at Otaku Republic.) I did, though, pop in on this From Japan place that claimed to offer a multi-store search engine, and I wasn't expecting to find much (I've looked on Yahoo Auctions and Rakuten for doujin for years with nearly no results), but lo and behold:

Vheen Hikuusen doujinshi. They're from a store called Suruga-Ya from their Yahoo Shopping (not Auctions) outlet, and they're apparently a part of a four-issue series (the other two feature Mia on the cover, though). I ended up getting the whole series (plus a spare Baten Kaitos doujin) through the Buyee proxy - Buyee's owned by Tenso, which I've used before, so I thought it was the safest choice. Upon surfing, though, I've learned that Suruga-Ya doesn't always follow through on its orders with the utmost diligence, so I'm still on shaky ground here - but it was just a joy to see a doujin with a smiling & happy TnK Dyne & Ghaleon on the cover. Fingers crossed that these arrive safely.

Incidentally, I did feel that I'd wasted a bit of my money with my initial Otaku Republic trip - three of the doujinshi on which I'd spent $18 at Otaku Republic were available at Suruga-Ya for the equivalent of a couple bucks a pop. That's not figuring in shipping, though (both from the store to the proxy and from the proxy to me), which is always the absolute killer. (Shipping is already included in Otaku Republic's prices.) I'll expect I'll have wasted some money at Otaku Republic (provided Suruga-Ya actually delivers its order), but not that much, in the long run. Of course, "wasted" is a relative term here, considering that I'll have spent triple digits on a handful of comic books in any event.

Misc. notes:

- If anyone heads over to Otaku Republic looking for Lunar manga, a word of warning: this book mainly contains a Magical School Lunar fanfic. I don't think there are any actual comics or art in it.

- Suruga-Ya has a good deal of other Lunar doujins, but they appear to consist mainly of blandly-drawn Lucia romances, which, from my limited experience with Lunar doujin, seem to be the predominant genre in the field. I like Lucia, and she's a good character, but she's an easy character to get wrong, and many artists use her unfamiliarity with the way the human world works to cast her as vapid & dumb.

- After searching through the stuff that was tagged with Funato's name outright, I also took a look through stuff that was tagged with what Otaku Republic claimed was the name of the doujin circle to which she belonged before she became an "official" game artist, so to speak. It turned up a lot of results that I don't think are entirely accurate - the styles are so disparate that it'd have to be a very big circle with a constant turnover in membership to have produced all the books. I did, however, come across this Ocarina of Time doujin, and I'm trying to figure out if it the cover was produced by Funato or not. Yeah, it says "Orie Asato only" on the cover, but that does really look like Funato's early style & coloring. And yet there's enough of a difference where I can't be sure. Hmm.
(Additional note: oh, God dammit. I knew the name of Funato's early doujin circle was billed in certain manga as "Fight & Magic," so I put that into the search engine, and it returned all sorts of books. They're all out-of-stock, though.)
(Additional additional note: I have that "Kingdom of Bugs" Fight & Magic doujin - the one with the girl in pigtail braids & an orange dress on the cover - and it's an anthology doujin she did with another artist with illustrations & real short (like two-page) comics on a variety of 8-bit & 16-bit RPGs - FF4, FF5, Lagrange Point, some Dragon Quests, etc. It's a pleasant little distraction but not a top-priority purchase.)

- I've seen that Octopus Tentacle doujin of Funato's everywhere, but I don't know what it's about. I think I ran across a quick explanation from Funato somewhere (her website probably) that branded it as covering some RPG series I didn't care for, but I can't recall exactly which series it was at the moment. (The book's not what you think a doujin named "Octopus Tentacle" would be about, let's put it that way.)

- Looking for Phantasy Star is a tricky prospect, as you're inundated with PSO stuff (and I'm not sure what the point of PSO doujin is; it always details the adventures of the artist's MMO characters, which really isn't for the amusement of anyone but the artist). I have found what appears to be an annual anthology series of PS doujin that seems to center on the original, main line of games, and while I admire the effort, the art - the cover art, at least - seems kind of uneven throughout the series, and the books look a bit cheaply made. I'll probably bite on one eventually, but I held off for now.
In other PS doujin news, the cover of this one seems interesting, from what I can make out from the blurry scan, but it's unfortunately out of stock.

- I'm not sure, but I think that this might be a paper version of that Neo Angelique Nyx doujin I mentioned earlier.

- Angelique Collet by way of Claire Redfield.

- It's pitiful that I checked, but there seems to be nothing - absolutely nothing - out there in the Japanese fan world, doujinshi, fanart, or otherwise, for Vay.
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Mia, Lunar: The Silver Star etc.: Mia used to be one of my favorite characters in Lunar, but I kind of don't like her that much anymore. With time, I've come to care less and less about Silver Star's five ostensible main characters, whose own small character troubles seem self-involved and by orders of magnitude less interesting than the Ghaleon-Dyne ideological conflict on which the game is founded, and while Mia's the most tolerable and grounded - not to mention just the plain nicest - of the bunch, she does get dragged down by association. There's another part of the problem, though: she is, or at least is treated by the fans at large, as a reader wish-fulfillment character: she gets to be doted on by Ghaleon in what fan works are fond of interpreting as a half-parental, half-adult paramour way, and while I don't mean to be playing fandom police here, I've come to find the various expressions of this a bit creepy. The alternative is Funato's take on her as an empty-headed baby doll, which (rare for a Funato characterization for me) I find even less appealing. Also: I find Funato's manner of drawing her excessively sugary and yet at the same time unsettling. "It's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes..."

Morris, Lunar: Vheen Hikuusen Monogatari: Steelstrings has brought up how Vheen Hikuusen probably isn't better-known among Lunar fans due to availability. It's a pity, then, that Morris hasn't found a larger fanbase. I'm quite possibly his only fan, actually. The illustration of him sitting with the window open, sadly, slightly-sardonically and masochistically listening to the beautiful singing voice of the love he knows he'll never have, is one of Vheen Hikuusen's most affecting panels for me. For the bulk of the story, he seems suave and well-adjusted - a smiling uncle figure to his students, the mazoku group's liaison to the human community, kind of a...well, not a sybarite or hedonist, but almost there, someone who appears Teflon to life's disappointments - and yet in the end, you learn that he's been going through the same mental struggle as Latona, showing that you never really know everything that's going on with people.
But that is an aggravatingly condescending speech he gives about Latona in the end, in parts.

Mathias, Neo Angelique: Unfortunately, Mathias's story serves to illustrate neoromance's storytelling limitations: it's so often bent on being smotheringly fluffy that it cannot discern between negative emotions, which may or may not be justifiable, and wrongful actions borne of them, and it therefore considers the very state of having negative emotions to be evil in itself. It's telling that the miffing of Mathias's storyline in this manner was the turning point for the quality of the show, which until then had been going quite well.
Five thoughts on Mathias in general:
- This is indeed representative of the central tragedy of Mathias's character, but I can't envision him in any outfit other than his priest robes. They gave him a gold and green jacket-and-shirt combo on the cover of the Platinum Harmony CD, but even something that conservative doesn't work on him. When it comes to the robes, however, it's crucial that Mathias have all the various overlays and capes and whatnot. The whole ensemble looks beautiful, but the gown by itself looks like a granny nightgown. (And the gloves look like granny gloves. Never have the building blocks of an outfit looked so nice assembled and so dorky individually. And yet that's in line with Mathias, I think.)
- One of Neo Angelique's hallmarks was its thoughtful use of untraditional color schemes, and Mathias's own was among the best; it's a faded, worn version of Rene's palette. (Its pale pastels bring to mind Phantasy Star's Lutz, both he and and Mathias being self-sacrificing men with light, cool palettes dedicated to religious orders.)
- I want to get Mathias's ending in the game, but in an aggravating instance of visual-novel logic, it's inaccessible unless you've already gotten the ending for Rene, who, if you're partial to Mathias, is probably the character to whom you're least charitably inclined.) I am curious as to how Mathias's character is worked into the story of the game, which opens with Rene as already Head of the Order, as Mathias being forced out of the reins of power is the crux of his character arc.
- About Erenfried:"I did want to shake him and lock him in a cell for most of the first series, then Mathias did it for me, and all was well."I know that feel, bro.
- I have a hard time remembering these days if his name is spelled with one or two t's. Sad that Neo Ange's faded so from both my own and public memory, particularly when so much of its potential remained untapped.

Masami Eiri, Serial Experiments Lain: On further nomenclature debacles, I keep forgetting which is this man's given name and which is his family name. But regarding Masami:It speaks to just how smart Lain was that at the core of its labyrinthine, intellectualized jigsaw-puzzle conspiracy (the show midway through its run takes an entire episode to put everything from previous eps together in voiceover for the viewers so that they're up to speed for the big revelation) it put perhaps its most human character (besides ordinary schoolgirl Alice). Many villains present portraits of urban normalcy lapsed into madness, but Eiri is one of the best: his once-starched lab jacket, the last remnant of his time of respectable employment, wreathing his scarecrow frame like a cloak; his virtual body symbolically swathed with tape where it was in meatspace cleaved in three; his now-long and bedraggled hair that parts upon his debut to reveal a masterful smirk beneath, becoming a Sadako-esque symbol of weaponized submission and anonymity; his personal realm of a deserted suburban cityspace with scraggly telephone poles stark against a sickly orange sky; the backwards conversation he has with the heroine upon revealing himself; his diseased entreaties to her to "love me"; his impotent salaryman ranting of "I'll quit! I'll quit!" ground out beneath his breath through gritted teeth in the ending, which surely touches base with anyone watching. Lain didn't need a great villain to be great, but thank the Deus it got Masami anyhow.

Minax, Ultima: It occurs to be how Minax doesn't really get her due in the Ultima series. Perhaps it's because her installment is viewed as the "weird" Ultima, but her accomplishments are considerable - I mean, she actually won, conquering one planet and laying waste to another, and the good guys had to resort to time travel to stand a chance - and yet the series, just like the Britannians investigating the wreckage of Mondain's castle before Ultima II times, characterizes her as Mondain's less-powerful sidekick, his moll. Respect, people.
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I was delaying posting this until I finished my reaction posts for the first half of Silent Hill 4. I'm not going to get back to that game in the next couple weeks, though, and I'd rather do one unbroken stream of commentary for it - so heck with it; let's get this out the door and take an accounting of the games I played in 2012.

Beaten:
Neo Angelique, PSP ("be an ordinary Aube Hunter" ending)
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, PSP via Dracula X Chronicles
9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, DS
Glory of Heracles, DS
Silent Hill, PSP via PSOne Classics
Mystic Ark, Super Famicom (via emulator)
Earthbound, SNES (via emulator)
Ib, PC (RPGMaker title)
Eternal Darkness, Gamecube
Silent Hill 2, Playstation 2
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Gamecube (finished main campaigns, all three characters; finished Orthanc w/ Gimli & secret character)
Resident Evil, Saturn (finished Jill w/Chris rescued; you gotta give me more notice than that to get Barry out alive, game)
Phantasy Star III, Mega Drive (x4, via emulator & save states - I've given enough to/done my non-assisted time with this game already)

Little stuff:
Slayin', PC (finished as Knight and Mage; end boss keeps killing me as Rogue!)
Home, PC

Played, not finished:
most of the NES Mega Mans, Gamecube compilation - I had part of a separate post all typed up about this, but long story short: I discovered I don't really have the patience anymore for try-try-again platforming bullshit of any stripe. I enjoy the Robot Master stages but lose interest in the Wily levels. I haven't finished a single game, sadly.
Lumines II, PSP
Every Extend Extra, PSP
Metroid, NES - Yeah, about this. I made another go at Metroid this summer and actually made considerable progress over my earlier attempts. I hit a complete wall, though, at Kraid - I must've gone at him an Arino level of times and can't really beat his (frankly ridiculous) pattern. I thought more energy tanks might help (I had three), but I soon learned that to find the other energy tanks in Metroid, you have to shoot walls. All the walls. Every inch of all the walls - and there's nothing that differentiates wall sections that might hold items from those that don't. I mean, there're 100 to 1000 wall tiles per room, and I've uncovered about 60 rooms to date. I could look up the answers - but I've uncovered so much on my own that I feel (stupidly, I know) that resorting to an FAQ at this point would be giving up, even though the game is patently unfair. So I'm at an impasse where I'm too stubborn to get help but won't progress on my own. Bah.
Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon, PSP
Girl's Garden, SG-1000 (but you can never finish this)
Silent Hill 4: The Room, PS2

Best: Silent Hill 2 by a wide mile.
Symphony of the Night is a good runner-up. Honorable mention goes to Ib, a neat small game with strong art design that does a lot in its limited space.

Worst: Objectively, it's probably Phantasy Star III, but I knew all about that going in. And at least it's trying. In some parts. Kind of. Earthbound, on the other hand, was an aggravating and frustrating play experience that didn't deliver on its vaunted charm and humor and had open contempt for the player. Second was Glory of Heracles, a big "why bother?".

Surprisingly Good: Ib takes the cake here, a sprightly little game that's smarter and more elegant that it ever had to be. Girl's Garden also figures in: '80's arcade games weren't supposed to be outright pretty, and "girls' games" weren't supposed to be actually good. On the LP front, I'll steal from the Something Awful thread and note that MODE, an FMV dating/party/conversation sim where the positive/neutral/negative tone of your responses rather than a formal dialogue tree dictates story development, is in the Deadly Premonition framework: a game that arrests your attention with sheer, seemingly-amateur bizarreness but gradually betrays legitimate quality and stimulating originality.

Miscellanea: 999 is very good, compelling and tense with likable characters and great music. That said, it's gotten a Deep Space Nine/Firefly-type fandom that aggressively proselytizes, and its flaws - the pseudoscience; the demand for excessive replays; how the final twist is kind of a leap too far - are shortsold. Eternal Darkness finishes strongly and has some good environments at the end but is rarely scary and kind of stupid for most of its length. I'm making peace with Silent Hill as time goes by, but I'd put in the "interesting curiosity" basket before the "classic"; its attempt at a story hinted at, not directly told, is done miles better by its sequel.

I can't really think of a single moment or place in Home that I can point to as a standout, but its commentary on how the choices available to the player must work to form a coherent narrative deserves recognition.

Great characters: James Sunderland and all his entourage. Angela in particular - despite all her mental scars, it's she who goes to her fate with eyes wide open. The J.D. plotline, what I got to play of it, was done refreshingly well, taking the revelation of J.D.'s true nature and going from there instead of ending with it - examining what it meant for this truly kind person to be an artificial, created being, and how he consequently felt apart and "different" from the rest of society despite all his warmth and good cheer because of it. I didn't finish the game or even get up much past his intervention in the plot, but I can't overlook Silent Hill 4's Walter Sullivan: he who has done the unspeakable, has had the unspeakable done to him, who within himself contains multitudes and paves a bloody trail in his quest for eternal love and safety.

Making room for 999 and its wealth of contradictory descriptors for the best of its cast. Snake: intelligent, given to cheerfully smutty remarks, omnicompetent yet still overconfident, devoted in all humility to his sister. Lotus: a techie, a mom, a coward, a shrewd thinker, a romantic. Clover: At first an innocent ball of genki; later a deep brooder who takes duty and proactivity to impressive lengths. Seven: a consummate professional, a gregarious goof, a physical force, yet more often than not the smartest man in the room.

LP-wise, Dietrich Troy and the revelations about him in the true ending, crystallized in one perfect scene, the one on the bike. (I know supergreatfriend's Spy Fiction LP was from 2011, but I just got into it last year.) Shadows of the Damned's Garcia Hotspur: "I'm a Mexican, Johnson, not a Mexican't." (Yes, I know that line was stolen from a movie, but it fits Hotspur best.) MODE's Mohawk mobster Riel Attaychek is an infuriating conversationalist but a kind of fascinating jerk. He seems to genuinely like people and have a healthy roll-with-the-punches outlook on life but is nonetheless abrasive, self-absorbed, and materialistic, which is an interesting and refreshing choice for a game's Guide to Inner Wisdom.

Great Moments: Silent Hill 2: "I got a letter." The opening walk. Angela on the staircase. "...It's all the same once they're dead!" Mary's ending monologue in the Leave ending. Pretty much everything from rowing across the lake onward.

Ib: The doll room. Eternal Darkness: The final battle. 999: Safe ending: The laugh, and the transformation afterwards. Glory of Heracles, of all games: The death where you learn the truth about the Heracles situation, which I thought was the one graceful note in an empty game.

Silent Hill: The arrival of Kaufmann in the ending, where a tertiary character oversteps the boundaries of his role and changes the entire game, and the jokey end credits. Silent Hill 4: Looking out the peephole during Apartment World, which signals a drastic change in Henry's participation in the narrative. Look into the abyss...etc.

LP greatness: Spy Fiction: The scene on the motorbike, and the ending revelation/confrontation. Shadows of the Damned: I'm not sure this falls into greatness, but I was stricken by the backstory of the songstress Justine, who remolds herself through supreme force of will in response to social mores that aren't even there. It's tragedy and triumph all at the same time, and I'm still not sure what to make of it - except that it's very Suda. MODE: Again, not sure if it's great, but learning what the DOMEs did in the second MODE stream was memorable, and participating in SGF's stream itself was great.

Great places: The Myst-like outside of Silent Hill 4's water prison. Ib's art gallery, and the style of the "town" near the end. Silent Hill 2's fog-covered walk and last location. Mystic Ark's still and silent Myst-like hub island, and its awesome world 6. (Lotta Myst goin' around, but there're far worse visual references.)

Great music: Well, nothing's going to top this.

Most fun: Knocking down ladders atop the Hornburg in Helm's Deep in The Two Towers. Running back 'n' forth poppin' enemies with your little pixel sword in Slayin'. Swinging the sparkly Jewel Sword, or happening across the Valmanway and wondering "what's this?" just before you activate your Win Button in Symphony of the Night. Taking out enemies with one whack of Silent Hill's mighty emergency hammer, particularly after all the skin-of-your-teeth fighting in the first half of the game. Executing spell overkills in Glory of Heracles and getting back more MP than you doled out for it. Dropping blocks to "Regret" or "Black Tambourine" in Lumines II. Romping around collecting purty flowers in Girl's Garden. Navigating Ib - the neat visual puzzles, what artworks you'd encounter next, combined with frequent save points, made playing a delight.

Lessons learned: I am always right and should not second-guess myself when I've decided it's time to cut my losses from a title. Earthbound.

That's it for 2012! Will 2013 be even better? (Spoilers: ehhh.)
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A recent installment of the Q&A feature at the Onion's AV Club asked about pop culture stuff that the writers found hard to get a hold of. Thanks to Yahoo! Japan auctions and scans and torrents and YouTube, that's far less of a question for fans of Japanese gaming than it was a long while ago. I remember the first import book I bought: Yoshitaka Amano's Dawn, his artbook for FF1-4, which I ordered from a black-and-white photocopied catalog from a U.K. comic shop. I had no idea how much art was in it, what quality the book was, even what the cover looked like; I only knew that I wanted to see more of Amano's FF4 stuff than the dribs and drabs that had made it stateside. So little had been disseminated at that early, dial-up stage of the web that almost all of Dawn's art was new to me.

Now, of course, we're drowning in Japanese media. Hell, I have stuff I've physically purchased that I've yet to fully tear into - the last Ultima manga; three Mystic Ark manga. Nowadays, it's less a question of "Can you find it?" and more one of "Do you care enough to fork over the money for shipping?" (Stuff I'd like to pick up if I had the spare change: The Silent Hill 4 complete official guide (there's an incomplete version released earlier that apparently doesn't have as much background info); Clock Tower 3 drama CDs, where the heroine's mother faces off against an old-school Scissorman (though they're probably uploaded somewhere); various Angelique song compilations.) There're still a few things, though, that I don't own for lack of availability rather than lack of money or interest:

- There was a serialized manga for Clock Tower: The Struggle Within/Ghost Head published in some magazine at the time of the game's release that was never issued in tankoubon form. The game's notorious for being lousy, but its tale of a reticent heroine who is occasionally possessed by or has the alternate personality of a brusque, foul-mouthed serial killer is intriguing, and I'd like to see it done right. The drama CDs, narrated by the girl and attributing her personality change solely to mental illness, were effective in the way of a good Twilight Zone episode.

- I've been looking for the original magazine publications of Vheen Hikuusen in Shounen Ace and Asuka DX, but finding old phone-book manga magazines from fifteen years ago isn't an easy task. I've tracked down only the first half of KSK, in which little was changed (off the top of my head, Ghaleon's voice doesn't pique (i.e. his dialogue balloon isn't cracked) when replying "An answer?" to Morris in his office, and that's it). It's the second half in which stuff was changed via the ending being expanded, and it's TnK that had a good number of panels redrawn or replaced. It's not a big thing, but I am obsessive about that book, after all.

- Speaking of Funato, it would be nifty to pick up some of the sticker sheets and whatnot from Funato's early doujin days. I have a few sheets of doujin stationery and a few doujins for some Dragon Quest games I've never played. I'd like to see her Phantasy Star stuff, though.

- This isn't a specific item per se, but the topic does bring to mind a huge stack of Lunar doujinshi that was on Yahoo Japan a few years ago - about twenty books, which was twenty more doujins than had been offered for the entire year then to date. This was in the days before Shopping Mall Japan do-it-yourself bidding systems, so I sent an e-mail to the deputy bidder with whom I was dealing at the time asking for a bid of $200 to be put in. I loaded the auction first thing when I got up the next morning and was delighted to find it had closed well below that...then devastated when I scrolled down and found my deputy bidder wasn't the winner. He'd forgotten to put the bid in. The poor guy was really apologetic about it, and there was no way I could get mad at him, but...dang it, I still think about that and wince. (I think I have only about five paper Lunar doujin, most really short and/or not drawn that well. Some of the older artists have put their entire doujins up on Pixiv, for which I'm grateful. Still...damn, damn, damn.)

- More Lunar misses: There were also settei sheets for the characters of Silver Star Story (the type that're phtocopied and cheaply bound together, then passed out among a game design staff so they have references for character designs) that sold for the equivalent of $50 a long while back on Y!J. I didn't get them because they didn't seem to offer any art that wasn't published in the 100% Newtype mook, but I really should've bit the bullet just to confirm. (I did end up getting the Magical School LUNAR! settei bunch, which save for a couple merboy designs didn't have anything exciting or new.)

- Similarly, around the same time period, you'd often see what I believe was a semi-official-though-distributed-through-doujin-channels Lunar pin and coin set - the pin bearing the Funato pic of chibi Luna & Lucia with the rainbow moon and the lantern you've probably seen; the coin depicting a dragon and that was supposedly an example of Vane currency. They were up for auction so many times, yet I never got my act together actually to get one.

- In non-Lunar news, there were a number of Phantasy Star comics published in the Sega fan magazine SPEC, including one where Alisa refused the crown and traveled around the galaxy with Lutz. I don't believe the comics have ever been uploaded, since SPEC was a rare commodity even fifteen years ago (I recall the price for one issue going into the hundreds of dollars). I'm curious, but the magazines would go for way more than I could ever afford.

- This is a curiosity, but back in the Dawn days, I would order frequently from the import division of the magazine GameFan, despite the fact that they sold Taiwanese bootleg CDs for $60 a pop. (I didn't know about the whole SonMay thing at the time, of course.) They would play two selections of game music while you were on hold - one of them being the "Phantom Forest" orchestration from Grand Finale, and one being a slow track featuring a single horn that I couldn't identify but brought to mind a glorious morning sunrise in a valley. It was so beautiful I haven't forgotten it to this day, but I've never run across it outside that hold music. (Given what was popular in game music at the time, it was probably from a Ys title. I should get listening to various YouTube playlists.)

- Electronic stuff: There was this goddamn Neo Angelique Nyx doujinshi released entirely online in five volumes all about his past, and I cannot fucking find it. It wasn't spectacular, but it was a notch above the doujin material that artists usually relegate to online freebies, and certainly of interest to the folks at the Angemedia comm, who like Nyx a lot. I saw it a few times, and now it seems to have disappeared from the web and my bookmarks. Similarly, the talented Angelique: Maren no Rokukishi fan artist who drew this put together a little three-page postscript manga about Eugene, trying earnestly to make a tentative family with Teresa & Renaud yet still haunted by his loyalty to Leviath and his own unquiet mind. It was evocative and poignant in a small space, but the artist deleted it for reasons unknown, and I lost my copy in a hard drive crash.
Re: Spy Fiction: The English-language website for the game was taken down long ago, and we fans are wondering what it had on it (most of us having found the game through Deadly Premonition and long after Spy Fiction's original release). I'd like to get a look at more of the character designer's drawings for the cast, but it seems that what was released on the Japanese website is all that's in the public eye.
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I'm thrilled to see that someone's making Animamundi fanart, particularly of the caliber of Candra's work - bold color, strong Art Nouveau-esque lines, and a Lady Death aesthetic. She has other fanart and original work well worth checking out, if you've no problems with the frequent S&M milieu. (Er, but don't go to that Castlevania section at work, unless your boss is particularly permissive regarding scenes of Richter Belmont in various sorts of distress.)

This is just darling.

You've probably seen this already, as it's being reblogged all over, but: If children's drawings were made into toys... (I'm not sure kids mean their drawings to be so literal, but some of the toys made in this vein are incredible.)

"Boldly Gone" is a hilarious and well-drawn webcomic about one of the countless unseen Starfleet captains who aren't named Kirk.

Omigosh! It's Phantasy Star cross-stitch! Also, this.

Speaking of which: oh, Shilka, you dope.

Would you just look at the lush private interiors and glassy rainbow futurescapes this person is posting on Pixiv?

Prepare yourself for fashion eyelashes.

Yeah, that stuff about Tom Bombadil doesn't add up, does it?

There's next to nothing out there for Spy Fiction fanwise, but here's a nice pic of Billy.

A Tumblr for awesome videogame boxart. I've already gotten a few leads on possibly intriguing titles to play - Forget Me Not: Palette, Addie's Present, Yuuyami Doori (is that one related to Twilight Syndrome?)...

Oh, like you fuckers know a thing about Cut Bank. Hollywood, weren't you satisfied with that flick with Seth Green and Vin Diesel from a few years ago that tried to say tiny, tiny Wibaux was large enough to have its own sheriff? Didn't that movie use the exact same plot as this one?

Rebecca Tripp might catch your ears through her light and delicate FF4 and FF6 arrangements, but it's her themed collections of short original compositions based on the zodiac and garden flowers that truly distinguish the artist. Someone get this woman to score a game already.

Finally, Arios cosplaying as Nyx.
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Overdue, I know. I'm going to be going back and forth between the cuts from spoiler talk to vague non-spoiler talk.

As I said in the music post, at its best, 999 is tense and gripping as hell. I don't have a copy of the original Japanese release, so I don't know if this is a faithful translation of a great original script or if Aksys just made shit up, but it's great shit they made up if they did. The music is excellent, tense and creepy and drawing just the right amount of attention to itself, and the character art is expressive and charming, liberally peppered with little evocative gestures like Lotus's dismissive hand flip or Clover's kiddish, pigtail-bouncing jumps for joy. The characters themselves are the game's big draw, illustrated with anime-inspired vibrance but grounded in real human fragility: Clover's a genki high-school girl, but she has spine and will, deeply loves her brother, and manifests the helpless worry of a genuine child (I don't mean that as a perjorative) when he seems to be in peril. Seven has heart and is direct but is also smart and shrewd, and he really likes people. Lotus has biting sarcasm and a refreshing streak of mercenary, self-serving cowardice but also a brain, curiosity, and a lady's upbringing. They have a lot of dimension for a bunch of would-be corpses in a horror title.

I also liked how the writers went out of their way to include stupid but subtly illustrative lines that served no big purpose but to provide a light, idle moment:

"I just can't bring myself to like the number 4. ...'Cause it's a half-ass number. Not the best or the worst. ...(9) is a way better number. So what if it's last place, right? Least it's not some lameass middle number."

"-- [picking up doll's foot] This is the left foot of the mannequin.
--[girl, earnestly] Do you think I'm better?
--Uh...what?
--Do you think my legs are skinnier?"

The game is also excellent at not tipping its hand in regards to the identities of its villains; the reveals are all the more shocking and chilling because their identities are a true but well-earned and satisfying-plotted surprise. Few moments in horror games are as chilling as the bit in the Safe ending when ( spoiler )

...But that excellence lasts only up to a point, and here's my first big gripe with the game: The final revelation as to Zero's identity was a bridge too far. When ( spoiler )

My other giant problem is with the gameplay, and this is where I pick up my narrative from my previous posts.

( Yeah, I know the 'spoiler' thing is getting tiresome )

That's right: if you reach the good ending path in 999 too early, you'll be told by the story that you're not ready to see what happens and get a premature game over. You'll then be told you need to start over and take a separate route through the game, then come back once you've finished that path and redo the right route before you'll be allowed to see the ending you rightfully earned.

Imagine if FF4 had done this. You're at the final boss, your party's down and out, when, suddenly, all your past allies - Yang, the twins, even Tellah - come to you in spirit form and give you the energy and hope needed to fight on. The Prologue - the Final Fantasy song - is playing, the battle background is swept up in some kinda starfield-parallax that's awe-inspiring in 1992, Golbez cries "Zeromus! It's the end!", or whatever it is he says in the actually-coherent scripts, and--

--Wait, did you get the Pink Tail? You did get Adamant Armor for every member of your party, didn't you? No? What?! Oh, my! Back to the beginning for you!

Now, would you play through Baron and Mist and the Watery Pass and Damcyan and Mt. Hobs and Fabul and Mysidia and Mt. Ordeals and etc. etc. etc. again to see the ending? Yeah, probably. But a game gets only one chance to seize a great moment; it's never quite the same in reruns. What's particularly frustrating in 999 is that the party actually has all it needs to get past the roadblock, which makes the sudden stop in retrospect a particularly blatant fuck-you.

Only a couple of the text-based choices matter, and only if you're on the path for the best ending; your door choices are the big decider, and they're made largely blind, or are at least illogical enough to be blind. For the first branch: ( yep ) There's a path if you squint and share the programmers' odd priorities, but the game nearly guarantees that you're gonna have to power through it a few times to figure out what's going on.

Part of the appeal of videogames is that they're an "improved" version of real life. Contrary to our world, there is a plot, your actions have meaning, and you do have a fighting chance of figuring out your current predicament or at least reaching some sort of resolution, even if the game is doing something like bringing your objective into question (No More Heroes, Shadow of the Colossus). In 999, though, I did everything right, and I still had no chance. I ultimately felt like my choices weren't relevant, which is a problem for a visual novel; making choices in a story is kind of the genre's whole thing.

(It's interesting to compare this to my Neo Angelique playthrough, where my choices didn't really matter, or at least had considerable room for error and exploration, until without warning they did very much so and one little slip-up in a very short window - a slip-up of whose nature I'm to this day not even sure - blew my whole game. The genre seems to waver between ending requirements that're so strict they dampen exploration and so obtuse that they're unfathomable - both of which, I suppose, encourage hintbook/artbook sales, a favorable outcome for the manufacturer. The genre's reliance on multiple playthroughs also enables these bad habits; the writers don't feel compelled to provide a satisfying play experience the first time through. I've never seen a genre so committed to playing against its strengths.)

A smaller but significant side problem I had with the denouement: ( Yeah, that's the end of the non-spoiler info. Overall, I'm glad I played the title; I just wish the visual novel genre would patch these gaping holes in execution. )
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I have more to say and will have to continue this tomorrow. ( For now, cut )

All right, let's wrap up plot stuff. ( cut )

So I had a bad experience in Neo Ange that led me to power through to the end of the game. It's all over now, but I'll devote a few posts to the postmortem. ( What went wrong )

Current Mood: see, NOW I mean it

So this was the J.D. backstory episode. ( cut )
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One of these days, I will get around to posting something substantial, but until I spend a day without having to clomp around in a blizzard for four hours trying to correct a bureaucratic error, I'm afraid we have to subsist on light fare.

Stolen-image database AnimePaper has a couple Neo Ange pics from the manga that made me take note, for their text and not their artwork: one spells Rayne's big-city hometown of "Farian" as Hua-lian, and another has hub town "Reese" as Ries. Googling brings up a seaside Taiwanese city for the former (which is even situated on the eastern shore, just like Neo's "Farian"), and the characters use even translated to an Angeliqueish "lotus blossom" (if the character meanings hold). Ries isn't as successful, bringing up merely a district in the Austrian city of Graz, but it holds more with Neo's Bavarian/Swiss aesthetic than the more Anglified version.

So, if Neo Angelique were translated, would it be better just to leave it as "Farian" or no? On the one hand, it seems we all went for not only the most obvious translation kana-to-Roman-letters-wise but also the most...well, it seems hamhandedly obvious to say "English," considering in what language I'm writing, but the idea of the name being taken from another language never entered our collective consciousness. On the other hand, there's a case to be made for sticking with a name once it's gained traction in a fandom: Leviath's love was an obvious reference to the Greek war-starting goddess Eris, and I've seen at least one official document with her name written in Roman letters as such. But she's been known as "Elis" (with a variable number of l's, but still) among English fans for so long that it seems iconoclastic to gainsay the trend.

(Sheer euphony factors in as well. "Teteiyusu" (from Seimaden) instead of "Tethys" still grates, as the reference is obvious, but I still can't think of "Zadei" as anything else but, though that translation is on its face wrong.)

Also:

- I'm still trying to figure out if the "Aube" Hunter thing is deliberate or just a persistent misspelling of "Orb."

- The Hua-lian pic just emphasizes how trashy that piercing/low-slung pants combo is on Rayne. I know the low-slung-pants trend is an attempt to even up the exploitation stakes genderwise, but...Lord have mercy. I look at Maren's Walter and instantly want to tell him to pull his pants up and turn his music down.

- Has it been four years since Abyss? Aiyaa.
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I should like The World Ends with You much more than I do; it has an excellent soundtrack, the most purely fun RPG gameplay I've experienced, and Sho Minamimoto, plus is a far more effective and tolerable showcase for Nomura's graphical style than Kingdom Hearts. Unfortunately, it also has one of the most bloated scripts out there, with huge chunks where there's no actual gameplay besides wading through text boxes, and the game completely misidentifies its main villain.

I love Hotel Dusk's A-ha aesthetic, and it has the most natural character animations I've seen on any console, but dammit, there's no game here. I suppose that's true of nearly any title in the genre, but the dragginess of Hotel Dusk's story segments underlines that. At least other visual novels have the good grace not to throw in pretend-puzzle segments that refuse to advance because the flags haven't been set correctly (I read that newspaper in the lobby two hours ago, thanks).

Coloris is basically Color Wheel: The Match-Three Game with mechanics focused on color blending, which appeals to me immensely. The levels and game pieces also form little tableaux in ladder mode, like the fluttering petals of a sakura tree or a wheat field at midnight with little moons that phase in and out of view. Unfortunately, Endless Mode comes in just a plain vanilla skin, and the gameplay can get fiddly on higher levels, where it's tough to discern between different shades in an ever-widening palette. It's easy until it's not and the core gameplay never becomes second-nature and the AI is cheap.

I really like and admire Symphony of the Night and want to love it, but my heart's not going there. It's not a "you had to be there when it was released" issue, at least not entirely - the game's genius is apparent enough today. I just keep getting hung up on the little things, like how the game's too easy. It's not you, it's me, babe.

Likewise, I want to love Neo Angelique because I want a good game with these characters and I genuinely like some of the systems they have in play, but the designers go out of their way to render nearly all of those systems irrelevant in the long or even the short run. It's like they're deathly afraid of the game getting in way of the game.
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Current Mood: re: icon: no, not really

( The Guardstone report )
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Trouble started when Vegan Blond Metal Chef was fatigued enough actually to burn a batch of cookies, then promptly collapsed. ( And what happened then, indigo? )
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When we last left off, Rene was pretending to be in his twilight years and wheezing his way through a 36-part history of the universe. ( So then )

After all the excitement of being in on a release of a new installment of one of my favorite franchises, real-life considerations have conspired to keep me away from Maren no Rokukishi. Roku Kishi? I'm honestly not sure whether to treat that "roku" as a counter or not, but I think I might've made a mistake in initially doing so. Six Knights of Dark Love, how's that. Anyhow, to the point: the release window is slipping away from me so that I'd considered jettisoning Neo Ange for a waltz with the Six Knights, but the latter game's subject matter isn't very festive, and Neo Ange has been my very first otome game, so I think I'll finish dancing with what brung me before playing the field.

( OK, so )

Hey! Let's check in and see what everyone's up to down at ol' Hidamari!
( Cut )

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indigozeal

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Entries tagged with neo angelique

ALERT ALERT ALERT: New Neo Angelique game

Igacula is still a threat.

Local woman falls down Lunar doujinshi hole

Angelique meme from Tumblr.

Alphabet meme, M

Let's take a look back at 2012 over a third of the way into 2013.

White whales

Link Drawer, "Is the name of my Castlevania tag appropriate here or not?" edition

You connect the dots between the victims, and that leads you to the perp: on 999

Neo Angelique blah blah

The abrupt ending: Neo Angelique playlog pt. 15

And my entire game is utterly blown: Neo Angelique playlog pt. 14

Alas, poor Jinx: Neo Angelique playlog pt. 13

Neo Angelique playlog interlude

Games you want to love (but can't)

Neo Angelique playlog pt. 12

Neo Angelique playlog pt. 11

Neo Angelique playlog pt. 10

Neo Angelique playlog pt. 9

Neo Angelique playlog pt. 8