The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

After, what… months? Month? We finally managed to schedule another play session of high-level DnD campaign. And man, it was an epic one, lasting into the wee hours of the morning and being entertaining! Maps that spanned literally every doodling surface we had! Puzzles! Destroying priceless art! Me having like a million action points and then not using them! Madness!

As we started exploring the temple that we got into last time, we realized it seemed very badly constructed (“I know it’s not a perfect hexagon, but I’m not redrawing it,” Jonathan said) and since there was another temple just right next door, we assumed this must be the beta test temple. I mean, obviously. Just, you know, to give the builders an idea of what the real temple will be like, and test a few things…

So yes, Templ(beta) was filled with many golems. Golems are the magical robots! And Liendshauf (I don’t know how to spell your German character name, man, back off!) found a remote control, and used it to bash many priceless works of art. We also found a rock, which Jonathan represented with a Dire Badger. “That is a very dire rock.” “That’s it. It must be a dire rock. It’s got those spikes all over it.”

The Dire Rock was a very formidable foe.

In any case, the whole building was based around some puzzle ACTION where this crazy system put up barriers to block our path that we could only switch when we were all in certain rooms, and we had to figure out how to traverse the whole temple (or templ, if you will) to get to the bottom. It was actually a pretty well-designed puzzle. I have to give Jonathan props for that. Then again, I was distracting everyone by telling jokes about how “I can’t use this key to open the door! I have to insert the key into the door! That’s like raping the door!” “But look how sluttily the door is dressed!” “Dammit, it is asking for it, isn’t it…” (I don’t think Shauna liked that particular joke. I blame Jick for making me make rape jokes.)

There were also some combats.

The first combat was against a whole bunch of Manticores. In searching for an image of a manticore on his iPhone (for Shauna did not know what a Manticore was) Spaeth came up with this image. That seems like a pretty good representation of the battle.
Or not.
Well, okay, basically, we all ended up clumped in the corner of this library except Spaeth, who charged right in. So he was basically being attacked from all sides while we all lobbed ranged attacks and heals in there. A highlight was me moving into position to use a bit of Magic item that heals 1d6, and got attack of opportunitied for like… 26 damage during the move. A good tradeoff, there!

There was also a very dramatic boss battle against a Mummy who may or may not have been a Werebear. He was a total dick, because I tried to talk to his spirit, being a Shaman and all, and he just punched me. It was probably because he was some sort of Ioun spirit. I decided that Sehenine didn’t much care for his stupid ass or stupid religion!
Spaeth was Immobilized for like… this whole fucking battle, so we basically were having to use all our teleporting skills and such to get him into position, seeing as he deals fucking Sicknasty amounts of damage and we needed him. The boss had some really crazy high amounts of damage dealings as well. We were getting hit for like… half our HP. Lucky that 3/5ths of our party are healers then, huh? It also helped when I used my newly gotten utility power that lets me teleport people to switch places with my spirit companion to yank our Cleric out of the way of a particularly intense attack that would have downed him. (Sorry, my highlights are the things that I did that were awesome. I am biased.)

All in all, it was a damn, damn fun time, and just goes to show how much of a shame it was that we don’t manage to get our schedules working to make that happen more often. Hopefully we can get back together soon. Templ RC 1 is waiting for some exploring!

Hey! Twilight Heroes had an IoTM. Well, two, really. What happened to them, eh?

Item number 1: Hobbes’ Nail Boots. Yay! An IoTM boot that isn’t Roderick’s Boots which is one of the few IoTMs I don’t have! Victory, or something!
But seriously, besides Roderick’s, there just isn’t a shoe in the same caliber as this thing. (The exception maybe being the Treader of the Dust’s Sandals, but that’s a high level only item.) There is never, ever a time when you don’t want an extra added boost of +item, so they’re worth it just for that. The additional melee damage is just icing on the cake, and the pounce attack is nice to have access to, even if it doesn’t seem to trigger ALL that often. Depending on what you’re doing, though, I could almost see the +combat being a hindrance. +noncombat does tend to almost always be more useful. Still, I certainly don’t mind it, and since you simply can’t get +item on any other boot in the game, this is almost certainly worth your stars.

The item number 2 would be the Mummer’s Gloves. Yay! An IoTM set of gloves that isn’t Roderick’s Gloves, one of the few IoTMs I don’t have! If you are a person who is ever going to be thinking of speed-running the eventual versions of this game, these gloves are clearly for you. +noncombat is going to get you far. Very, very far. That alone makes them worth having around, but the occasional stat boosts put it over the top. It’s nowhere near as good for that as the VR Helmet of course, since the VR Helmet boosts your basic XP gains too, but then again, it’s in a different slot, so they don’t have to compete. You can wear both!
The part I like the most, though, is the creating of the Invisible Box. This isn’t a combat skill or anything. You just use your gloves from your inventory to create a scaling defensive buff five times a day. I don’t know why that makes me so happy. I guess it’s just because, usually, such things give you an item that you can use for the buff? And then I never use the buff, or just give the items to other people. Somehow, having it just be used on yourself makes it more novel to me, because I will actually use it. If I don’t buff myself with it, I’m just wasting my uses, you know? And I do love extra defense. I’m a defensive kind of person.

So yeah, two pretty powerful, half-priced items. Pretty nice stuff. I would bet that the non-combat and stats of the Mummer’s Gloves would make it the better investment, but really, you can’t go wrong with either. Or both. I have both.
Yep.

I never played or had any need to play the original Mercenaries. It didn’t seem like a game I would enjoy at all. Mercenaries 2 was originally skipped for similar reasons, as well as due to their completely scary-ass box art. I don’t want to play as that guy. I don’t even want to have anything to do with that guy. It was never on my radar.

But Crackdown had weakened me to the whole open-world concept… and then I went and enjoyed Far Cry 2 so much, once I got it figured out…
So I was weak, and when I saw the game new for $10 in the Toys R Us clearance rack, well, I couldn’t pass it up. Especially since I had been jonsing to try Red Faction: Guerrilla. Here was a cheap replacement I could play until that game dropped in price! Perfect.

I fear, though, that Crackdown has really kind of ruined me on Open World games.
Crackdown was brilliant for many reasons, but one of the things that I don’t think is immediately apparent is that it didn’t have “missions.” Sure, you had a list of people to kill, and you had to eventually go kill them. But there was no “start” and “stop.” You just went for them if you wanted, or you didn’t. The game didn’t load an instance to give you a very guided experience that goes against what an open-world game actually does, you know? This is why I didn’t like Bully, and Mercenaries 2 is no different. There are all these missions (well, they’re called “contracts”) that you take on and have to do. What’s worse, the game doesn’t really penalize you for dying in the missions, letting you just retry them, but if you die outside of a mission, it costs you money and you lose all of your guns and are left with just a pistol. It is actively de-incentivizing you to explore, and instead to just take your helicopter to the next mission point and do the next mission. So you’re pretty well stuck in these missions, and the open world is just some pain in the ass to travel through to get to more missions. Sure, there are things to find in the world (such as large pallets of money that people are keeping in the middle of fields for no sane reason) and little tiny sidequests to take on (the factions point out “High Value Targets” you can capture and buildings you can raze for additional cash) but when you’re risking having to go through the pain of getting yourself re-equipped if you fail, it just doesn’t seem worth doing half the time.

Still, the gameplay itself is not bad. You can pick from three different Mercenaries, not just the one on the cover (although he has arguably the best perk associated with him: quicker regenning health) and then you run around, building your PMC and managing your relationships with these factions in order to get to the final boss and murder him for shooting you in the rear. The gunplay originally feels a little weird (the guns aren’t super-accurate, besides the sniper rifle, and it seems to take multiple shots to take someone down and you can never get ammo for it outside of buying it and air-dropping it to yourself) but I found myself quickly getting used to the fact that it’s nowhere near one shot, one kill, and that you just have to spray enemies for a little while to take them down. This does give you a really go reason to rush in and use Melee a lot, which is a one-hit-kill. (I think it knocks them out, actually, but same difference. I also think my Melee skills were improved by picking the girl Merc, who has a faster run speed so I could rush machine gun turmulents and whatnot and melee the gunners easier) You can buy and helicopter in vehicles and weapons and whatnot, but I really don’t know why you’d want to. It doesn’t really feel good to do so. Air-dropping in a box of ammo doesn’t feel more badass than murdering someone and taking their ammo, so I don’t know why I would, and I have yet to find a specialized weapon so good that I wouldn’t just use the rifles most of the generic enemies drop. There’s also no real reason not to just steal cars as they drive by if you need a vehicle, so I’ve never found a good reason to air-drop transports, either. I don’t know. For being what I assume was the core mechanic to make this game feel different, it doesn’t actually feel very useful. The only thing I really use is calling in the Helicopter for quick transport to other places on the map. There were, however, some missions where I would get free “call in the troops” air-drops, where I could call in helicopters that would drop in 3 grunts to fight for me? That felt pretty awesome, and was a great way to divert fire from me. I think I can buy those, too. Maybe I should be buying a bunch of those and using them more often.

The one thing that I actually really like about the game is that it makes no pretense that you’re not a bad person. There are pickups all over the map, as I said, but they aren’t normal video game collectibles, where it’s okay to take them because they are there just for you. You walk up to a fuel tank, and it says “Steal Fuel.” And you steal it. If the owners are around, they shoot at you. It’s a little touch, but I rather liked that. You just take it. If you’re taking a faction’s stuff, and they get pissed at you, well, just donate money to their war fund until they can’t ignore you any more. You do what you want. You are a very bad person, and not for some noble goal. You just are. I dunno, it’s refreshing not to have some bullshit explanation for every damn thing, and just let it be what it is.

But yeah, I don’t know. Mercenaries 2 is not a perfect game. If I had paid $60 bucks for it, I would probably have been displeased. But the basic elements that make open world games great are hiding in there, and it can be a pretty fun time, if you let it be. It is sure as fuck worth the $10 bucks I’ve paid for it, and after the like… two days straight of playing it, I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten my money’s worth.

So, it’s June. That means it’s the month of the crazy, wacky Super-Content Familiar. This time it is the Baby Sandworm.

It’s probably my favorite June familiar, hands down.

I’ve played all the previous June content areas. I own a Llama, too. Each of the other ones seem like puzzles to overcome in order to get ascension relevant consumables. You have to figure out how to rush through the Violet Fog to get your munchies pills or how to trick the Wormwood to get your Not-a-pipes with the minimum amount of turn investment. There is some funny, entertaining content in there, but it’s all just for the rewards. The Llama stuff was nice, in that it removed the puzzle to get you the items from a specific zone, which you can get while doing other quests. But it’s still just “beating the system for buffs and consumables.” That’s cool. People like that. But it’s not perfect for me, really.

The content that the Baby Sandworm gives you is a series of three, interconnected storyline quests, and that is why I love it.
To do this, they first just give the item people want the most from the content straight out. The sandworm drops Agua de Vida, a spleen for turns item. Wonderful. When you use it, then you get the ‘unlock” item, which isn’t trade-able. That’s an interesting drawback. But once you get into the actual quests, then you get into a quest throughout time. Granted, it makes absolutely no sense that you’re doing this quests by “remembering” what happened over time periods, especially in the future. But the content is entertaining and fun. Hell, it’s got a full in-game implementation of Hunt the Wumpus right in the quest! That’s pretty impressive.

Basically, I loved the quest. I’m going to love going through it several more times over ascensions to get all the rewards. I’m going to appreciate how wanting to do that content is going to make me actually use my spleen to be more efficient. I love this familiar.

And hell, it’s the first full Sombrero Mr. Store familiar. If nothing else, it’s a million times better than a normal Sombrero. There’s no reason not to get this. You know, unless you’re just opposed to donating, I suppose.

So I beat Ghostbusters: The Vidjeo Game.
Honestly, you could probably get away with renting it and then putting in serious time and energy into beating the single player during the rental period. But you should definitely play it. This is how you make a good licensed game, seriously.

The game brings the humor, as you would hope. It’s got all the voices of the cast, which is a wonderful thing indeed. These are things so many licensed games get wrong, I suppose, but the moment you heard they had the original cast, you knew this game was going to get that right.
So the exciting part is that the gameplay stands up against all the writing.
Granted, there is nothing TOO shocking. It’s fairly stock Third Person Shooter fare. (although most Third Person Shooters nowadays steal Gears of War’s cover system, and this has no cover system, so it almost feels a little fresh because of it.) But it’s very solid, mechanically. You get to wrangle ghosts into traps, which is tons of fun, but they also have “Corporeal” spirits to mix it up, which are bound to physical objects, so they can throw a wide variety of enemies at you. Often you’ll get a mix of ghosts you have to trap, and smaller, corporeal minions which you can just blow up with your proton stream without trapping, to make you have to make choices: Do I take out the big threats, or do I try to clear out the area first of the little guys to make trapping the big ghosts easier?

Your Proton Pack has the standard Proton Beam, which acts just like you expect and is a great general-purpose weapon. You can pretty well use it all game, if you want to. But since you are the “Experimental Equipment Technician” you also get a nice selection of upgrades and other “weapons.” (Although I find it odd that you are supposed to be the Guinea Pig testing all these new weapons, and yet all the other Ghostbusters use them, too. Not that I don’t appreciate the AI having the appropriate weapons for the job.) The first thing you get is your “Boson Dart,” which is basically like a rocket you can fire while shooting your Proton Beam. Then you get the “Shock Blast,” which works like a shotgun and feels completely awesome to use, the “Stasis Stream” which freezes enemies in place, the Slime Blower from the second movie, with attached “Slime Tether” which is basically a setup for environmental puzzles, and my favorite named one, the “Meson Collier.” Using the Slime Blower seems a little weak, but that’s okay because it’s useful for other things. All the other weapons have a great feel, and are effective in most situations, though there is always a best one for the job.

Throughout the game, you can also put on some goggles and scan things with your PKE Meter, Metroid Prime-style. Not only does this provide a tactical benefit, as it gives you extra money to use to buy upgrades, as well as tells you what different beams and whatnot a particular ghost is weak against, but it also is another vector for humor. There are multi-paragraph explanations for everything in the game, and they are all fairly entertaining to read. If you scan a ghost, you can be sure that Tobin’s Spirit Guide will have a full write-up of that Ghost’s history. The same if you find some sort of haunted or supernatural artifact. It’s a nice touch.

I played the game on “Experienced,” but I would probably suggest playing the game on Casual. Experienced isn’t hard, but I certainly didn’t feel like I gained anything by the times I had to restart a few difficult situations time and again. I’m just glad the game was smart enough to have a checkpoint before basically every large-scale combat scenario to keep the frustration to a minimum. But yeah, you aren’t missing anything by playing it on Casual, I don’t think. Go ahead and be a wuss.

But yeah, I’ve thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this game. It’s helped me realize that, more and more, what I want out of games isn’t difficulty, and it isn’t even some sort of clever new gameplay mechanic. It’s just something that’s purely and genuinely fun, and not frustrating. That is pretty well the exact definition of Ghostbusters: The Vidjeo Game. Genuine fun. Play it.

So Wal-Mart sells “draft packs.” It is three “random” boosters of Magic hidden behind a Foil land, so you can’t see what you’re getting. They are 11 dollars. Buying three packs alone would probably be at least 13. So, you know, a little discount, mixed with not having to run all over town to find enough packs (which is often an issue around here without going to the card store. It’s an awesome card store, but, you know, you are paying more that way) and with a little of the fact that I know two Wal-Mart employees to buy the cards with their discount, and you have the perfect excuse to buy these packs and draft with them.

So that’s what we did last night.

The first thing we noticed is that the packs in there aren’t as random as they might seem. Wizards of the Coast must have printed no less than 4 Billion Fifth Dawn packs, because man, I see them discounted constantly, all over the place, and every one of these packs that we bought had a Fifth Dawn booster in them. They also all contained an Eventide booster. This is better than Fifth Dawn. We have opened so, so many Fifth Dawn packs. Three of the Draft Packs also contained a Tenth Edition booster. For no reason, mine contained a Guildpact Booster instead.

So that was our combination. How did it go?

Jonathan drafted a rainbow deck that did well. We all tried to act shocked. Though the fact that he didn’t win WAS kind of shocking.
Spaeth pulled a Joiner Adept first thing, and then proceeded NOT to draft a rainbow deck for no reason whatsoever.
Essner ran a Redish deck with Nobilis of War to a very complete victory.

And me? Well, I drafted a Mono-Black deck based on Blind Creeper and Seize the Soul.
Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking either.
I got a ton of recursion, in a whopping three Desecrator Hags and an Exhumer Thrull, but when you’re having to put Dross Crocodile in your deck because you have nothing above a 2/2? Well, you’re not going to do well. So I annoyed a lot with all my recursion, but did little. I managed to beat my match with Spaeth, though, simply based on him being extremely mana-flooded. So I got a pity win, I guess.

Still, Magic Drafting is always fun times, and I have a shiny new pair of Evershrikes that we opened to put into a revamped White Enchantment deck, along with these Celestial Ancients I have sitting around.

I’ve really got to sit down and do some serious deckbuilding soon.

Recently, in searching for a podcast-friendly game (because I so often need those) I’ve been playing Spelunky. I had installed it a long time ago, played like three lives, said “that’s cool” and then put it down. Then I was cleaning up my desktop, and wanted to move the folder I had it installed in to my games folder. “Hmm, but then I’d forget about it” I thought. So I got it set up as a shortcut in Steam. An hour or so later, I was looking for something to do while listening to a podcast, and saw the link, and then there I was, playing Spelunky.

I mean, I’m still a lightweight. I’ve only played maybe 150 lives at this point. But still, I’ve gotten my first shortcut built, and I’ve made it to the ice levels multiple times. (Well, using said shortcut, not from the beginning.) So that’s something! I’m not completely useless!

The real breakthrough was plugging in my SFIV Fightpad. Intense 2D gaming like this was the whole reason that I bought the fightpad in the first place, and it does not disappoint, now that I’ve put it to its first real test. It feels kind of odd in my grip, or at least it did at first. It has a weird shape that I’m not used to. But the D-pad is completely top notch. A good gamepad really, really makes Spelunky a whole lot more playable, and if you want a 2D gamepad and can still find a Fightpad, it comes highly recommended.

Brickroad, in his wonderful LP of the game, mentioned that “life isn’t that important, because most of the deaths are instant.” Maybe once you get the hang of the game, that’s true, but I’ve died so many times from life, it isn’t even funny. I take plenty of damage from enemies because I suck, and I normally end up dying from falling, and then an enemy taking off my last heart while I’m dazed. I die instantly so much rarer than damage from enemies… and it’s not just because I don’t have a good weapon. I have been successful stealing from shopkeepers many times, and I still die, even with a shotgun and jetpack, even. Just lots of stupid mistakes! But then again, that’s what a roguelike game is all about. YASDs.

Still, man, I’d easily pay money for Spelunky. It is a good, good game. I know the internet already knows this, but I’m just making it official. For the record.

Okay, so I’m going to attempt to make a point about vidjeo gamez. Stand back.

Difficulty in video games. On one paw, you have things like this. Horrible, awful things that only exist to be hard and, potentially, drain your will to live. On the other, you have things, perhaps, like this, where perhaps the complains of “OMG for n00bs too easy” are warranted.

Still, I’m so far in the second camp, it’s silly.

I’ve never been into video games for the challenge. I can’t remember a time when I thought a game was too easy or too simple. I don’t doubt it happened once or twice. But no strong examples spring to mind.
Like most gamers my age, I grew up playing games. I played all of the hard games, of course. At the same time, I sure as hell used my Game Genie a lot. So I guess I had more fun when I was jumping over the levels in Super Mario Brothers 2 than when I was trying it for reals and failing. As games matured I found RPGs, and latched onto them. Here was a genre where, much like in the design of the original Dragon Quest, if you couldn’t defeat something, you could overcome it with sheer perseverance and level-grinding. The fact that I didn’t have skills didn’t matter so much. I could still enjoy the game, and I got a little story in there, too. Then came music games into my consciousness, a genre where it’s just all about fun. There’s a challenge element, but you can set it to easier modes and still feel like a rock star, or, more appropriately for my first excursion, enjoy the humorous and catchy rap tunes.

And now, difficulty need not be an element at all in games. It’s so far away from what’s actually popular. I couldn’t be happier. Sure, once I’ve mastered a difficulty in Rock Band, I do kick it up to make it more challenging, but that’s not the real reason I’m playing. I want to feel like I’m rocking out to my favorite songs. Sure, I do enjoy a roguelike now and again, and those are the hardest games out there. But the idea isn’t to beat those games. It’s about seeing the progression of your own skills. I know that that’s probably what everyone does in every hard game. “Yes, I made it X amount farther than last time!” But I don’t know. Most games have the end as a goal. Roguelikes don’t. It, like golf, is simply all about bettering yourself. If a roguelike is worth its salt, you will probably never be able to beat every single run you do. But that is okay.
The point is, games without challenge can be just as fun. I love the crap out of all of Telltale’s adventure games, and they are essentially interactive stories than games. Same with Phoenix Wright, or Hotel Dusk. These are very, very entertaining games! I love the crap out of them. Difficulty isn’t necessary.

In fact, more and more I’ve been doing away with difficulty entirely, and enjoying games more for it. I play too much shit to get stuck on one level and play it over and over. The last thing I want in a game is to die more than once or twice in an area, and even if I do die, I want it to have auto-saved close enough to keep the frustration down. So I pick easy in games, sure. All the time. Games I know I’m good at, I go normal. But there’s no shame in Easy mode. I’m sure I got just as much enjoyment out of Persona 4 playing it on Easy than anyone else did on normal, and it stopped me from getting stuck on the harder bosses.

There was a while where I bought into the hype. That I was getting soft spending my time playing Crossword DS and shit. But just like there are a wide variety of types of things in any media, there is a place for easy, casual, and completely non-challenging games. I love them more and more as I have less and less time to consume things that take awhile to get to the fun, or frustrate me during what is supposed to be my leisure time.

Bring on the tiny, fun, easy games, I say. I will be there to buy them.

(And if this blog post didn’t turn out as imagined, I blame PaRappa the Rapper, who completely distracted me for like an hour as I was looking up a youtube video for that link up there. Damn you for being so catchy! But again, I had fun reliving those games. So who cares. WHO CARE
Also, this is probably why I don’t try to write more detailed blog posts. Yep.)

Rock Band Unplugged has a bad rap, I think. It’s gotten mediocre reviews, and I’m not hearing about a lot of people playing it.

That’s a shame, because it is pretty damn good.

Basically, take Amplitude. You remove the techno music, reduce the number of tracks down to four. To compensate for this (since Amplitude was a game about switching tracks and keeping the plates spinning, which isn’t hard at all with four tracks) you have four buttons to hit instead of three, and you add chords. Then you take songs straight from Rock Band 2, put a Rock Band 2 skin on the thing. Bam. You have Rock Band Unplugged.

Yeah, I guess that doesn’t make it sound appealing.
It really isn’t anything revolutionary or something you must play. But it is just about as good as you can get the rock band experience on the go, and I am having quite a good time with it. On Medium, the button presses are fairly close to what the song is, and it’s challenging without being back-breakingly hard. I’m sure on Expert, I would be weeping.

But yes, I am having a good time. So much so that I have Class of Heroes sitting right here, and I keep going back to the World Tour mode. I’m going to beat Rock Band Unplugged.

It’s main flaw, I think, is the same flaw with the first Rock Band: Small number of songs. Now that I’ve experienced Rock Band 2 with all the DLC and all the songs of Rock Band 1, I never want to go back to playing songs more than once in a session. I want that huge list, and this game just doesn’t have it. It’s got a fairly nice setlist, taken almost completely from Rock Band DLC, but I’m still ending up playing songs twice during longer sessions, which is unfortunate.

The game also has The Trees, which is the worst song ever created by mankind. Bleh.

There are two main complaints about the game. One is that “it doesn’t capture the spirit of Amplitude.” I can’t really argue with this one. Amplitude is a better game. But it’s not portable, and I’ve played Amplitude to death. Heh.
The second is that “it doesn’t capture the spirit of Rock Band.” This is mostly connected to talking about a lack of multiplayer modes. This is a complete bullshit complaint. If I want to play Rock Band with friends, I will, gasp, play Rock Band with friends. I have never, ever played a PSP game multiplayer, and I probably never will. A portable game NEEDS a strong single-player component. Multiplayer is almost always going to be useless, unless it is hot seat. I guess I just don’t know what these people expect. Guitar Hero On Tour was trying to make the game “feel like Guitar Hero” and that gave us this and was god-awful to play. At least this is a fun game, you know? It’s blatantly using the Rock Band name for sales, but it is a fun game.

So much of me is saying “Yes, but, yes, but, yes, but.” That isn’t a good recommendation, I guess. There is a demo, I hear, so I’d download it and try it, if you’re questioning a purchase. But I’m completely getting my money’s worth out of it. It’s a solid game! Not a must-have. But if you like music games, and actually own a PSP, it is worth your time. Yes. Yes it is.

This manga is very good. I wish it were officially translated, so I could give them lots of money.

I like Shojo manga. I mean, I do. Granted, I’m past the point where I will read most everything, much like I’m pass the point where I’ll enjoy just about any Shonen manga… though fun, especially your first one, there are definitely tropes and a set pattern to putting them together that, eventually, you get tired of reading again and again. Then you look for something different. You look for something with deeper characters than most and an interesting world, like xXxholic. Or you look for something with amazing twists, such as the intense, constant hatred and forced submission take on the standard shojo love triangle in Hot Gimmick. (Which I need to get back to. I hope it stayed as fresh as it started) Most of the time, the gimmick (which is almost ironic to say after I just mentioned Hot Gimmick, huh) is all a shojo manga has, and that isn’t enough to mask the generic, formulaic plot.

Hourou Musuko is formulaic, in ways. It’s got your love triangle action. It’s got kids growing up and finding themselves. And, honestly, it has a gimmick. But that gimmick is that two of the main characters, Shuichi Nitori and Yoshino Takatsuki, are transgendered. Not only does that idea change the tone, the plots, everything about the manga, but it does so in a realistic way, which characters true to life that it can bring me to depressive tears. Sure, there is the standard awkward romance stuff in there, and perhaps some of the things that occur is a little unrealistic, (The schools they go to seem a little too eager to put on many plays where guys and girls switch their roles, for instance) but that stuff is always fun, and the comic doesn’t let it stop this strong look at how kids dealing with knowing their body is wrong try to figure themselves out. So much of what they say to themselves, at times, seems like things that have come out of my own mouth. Their problems are realistic.

And hell, it even does a very admirable job of dealing with how their friends, who know about their issues, deal with them as well. I think Saori is a pretty fantastic character. She’s in love with Nitori, but doesn’t know how to deal with the fact that “he” is leaning towards Takatsuki. Is it because Takatsuki is really a guy? Or does “he” like girls and is just not interested in her? Her dealing with these things in anger, in religion… it’s pretty intense as well. I love it.

I also think it pretty great (although another one of those crazy coincidences that seem unrealistic, but you let it go because it works so well in the story) that Both Takatsuki and Nitori end up meeting and befriending an adult named Yuki, who turns out to be an MtF transsexual. She’s a very awkward character in many ways, oddly sexual with these young kids, for instance, but at the same time, she too is a complete character, and not a stereotype. We see her family situation, the good and the bad, and we see how she views gender, which to her is kind of invisible and inconsequential. It’s also nice for the characters to have someone to come and ask for advice, which makes her a good plot helper, as well.

Anyway… this comic is the real deal. It’s very well written, moving forward at a slow, but purposeful pace. I’m not done with everything translated on the website I linked up there, but it’s been nothing but great so far. I am a fan. I think the fact that it affects me so much just says how well it’s put together.
I highly recommend giving it a chance. Highly.