The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I’ve been playing Persona 3 Portable, so I was once again struck by the most amazing of battle themes. No, not Mass Destruction. After the Battle, the fight victory music. Maybe this sounds weird, but this is by far my favorite bit of music in the game. Give it a listen while I ramble about it for a bit.

I feel like this little song is a success on so many levels. It fits perfectly with the whole music themes of the game for one. It has the sort of hip, pop-y sensibilities of the rest of the game in the guitar bits that come in after a little bit. It’s also completely functional battle victory music. But I feel like it does more than that. I feel like it reflects the themes of the game in general.

Most RPG victory tunes are extremely happy. I mean, you know, like, the classics of Final Fantasy. These songs say, “We did it, we won, everything is awesome now!” It’s a celebration of an accomplishment. Ironically, any single battle in most of those games ISN’T an accomplishment, even though it treats it like one.

Persona 3 takes a more sinister take. It’s darker. There’s a bit of that “we won” excitement, eventually, but that isn’t where it starts. It starts with a very dark little melody and goes downward. While Final Fantasy is trumpeting the victory from the heavens, Persona 3 is saying, “This is only the beginning.” The fight is over, but the battle has yet to be won. It’s pessimistic, like most of the game it’s around. Because, let’s face it, there’s always going to be another encounter. There’s always going to be another fight. The game knows it. It uses it.

I just find that refreshing, I guess. It’s different. This is the track, more than anything, that sticks out and stays with me from that game. (Well, besides Mass Destruction. Nobody can escape the BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY!)

I don’t have anything interesting to say, so you get to hear about a dream instead.

I was some sort of wizard or witch, and I was being held captive in a castle and forced to work. I couldn’t remember anything about where I came from or what I was doing there. It was some sort of memory wipe, I had decided. However, I could still remember how to use magic, and due to incredible incompetence on the part of my captors, I still had my wand. So I bided my time, working away as a slave, preparing to break free.

Eventually, I got brought before my captor, and in a daring feat of wand-play, started fucking up the joint and blasting my way out of there Harry Potter Style. I soon escaped.

And then I woke up.

Now, when I say me, I mean my character in the dream. Because my character woke up, and was looking down on a miniature DnD dungeon version of the castle. It turned out that this was some sort of MGS Virtual Reality training for magic users. This capture scenario was a common one used in training.

I thought that was cool.

Dream time then flashed forward and I was then training people using this same board, only this time I was the dungeon master, moving pieces to manipulate their training and such.

Then I actually woke up.

Yeah, so… wizard VR training via Dungeons and Dragons. Sounds like a good plan. Let’s get that implemented.

I’ve been watching Spoony’s Wrestling Rants pretty religiously since he started them.

The question is, why am I doing this?

I have never, ever followed wrestling. I mean, I think I remember being sort of interested for an extremely short while as a child? At the very least, I know I went to see some sort of live WWF show at some point. Whether that was something I wanted to do or something my parents thought I’d enjoy, I honestly have no idea. I also remember having great times with the N64 WCW vs NWO game that everyone loved, because everyone loved it. Scantily-Clad Hulk Hogan was just going to kick some ass. That’s all there was to it.

And that’s basically my entire experience with professional Wrestling.

But I’m spending hours listening to these blow by blow readings of notes from the shows as they air now. Nothing I hear makes me actually want to watch the shows. Nothing about them makes them seem good, perse. I continue to watch. (Well, more listen, I tend to just put it on in the background.)

I mean, Spoony is a funny guy. I enjoy hearing him talk about things, even completely unscripted like that. That’s certainly part of it. I think more of the reason I watch, though, is just the passion he puts into these breakdowns. He is very passionate about wrestling, and is annoyed to see it in the garbage. I’ve been that sort of fan before, who was loving something, and saw it fall apart in front of them. (Let’s say, as an example… Harry Potter as J. K. Rowling developed protection from editors and started doing dumb things.) I have been there. Granted, I can’t remember being there with something that constantly ups and downs week after week like this wrestling obsession seems to. But it’s a sort of love/hate that I think all people have about something, whether it be a show or, say, a sports team I’d guess, if you were the kind of person who enjoyed a sporting event. It’s a very natural, real sort of feeling. It’s very, very relatable, even though I only vaguely know what Spoony is talking about half the time. (A lot of the names I get are from my playing through of the excellent TNA iPhone Wrestling RPG.)

So I keep watching and listening and absorbing more knowledge about wrestling than I ever thought I’d know. I suppose that’s alright.

I’m like “You know what gamez are fun to play with peoples who maybe don’t know so much about games? Rail shooters.” So I used my awesome Gamefly powers to Gamefly up a copy of Dead Space: Extraction for my Nintendo Wii.

We played it for an hour or two, and then I sent it back.

It’s obvious the people who made Extraction had good ideas and high hopes. They were looking at the Wii, and how shitty actual shooters were on it, and they thought, “Hey, we can make a light gun shooter that has depth like a regular shooter! And tell a story!” These sound like great things, you know? In reality, though, it just ends up being really stupid.

First off, the storytelling just isn’t compelling. This is mostly because you almost always have a target icon on the screen while people are talking. So you do what anyone would do. You flail it about on the screen, and fire shots near people’s heads that they ignore, and generally completely break immersion. I don’t often say this, but a cutscene would have been much more effective during these sequences. It’s also extra-annoying when you’re character looks around, because he almost always isn’t going to look at what you actually want to look at, which is the powerup in the corner of the screen.

Speaking of powerups, the game rewards you mashing the A button constantly to try to grab things completely at random. I got way, way more ammo that way than actually attempting to pick up ammunition. This is yet another annoying thing you do during boring story bits that just completely breaks it apart.

Basically, what I’m saying is that it’s a huge, huge mistake to let you fire your gun at all in these sequences. The targeting thing is huge, and a big distraction, even during actual gameplay. Putting it up there when I’m supposed to listen to people talking just makes me want to shoot people in the head. It’s not a good idea.

The actual shooting isn’t bad. It’s normal light gun fare. But when you have to go through all these talky bits that constantly break up the action so much, there just seems to be little point to going on with it. You can have the same fun faster by booting up House of the Dead: Overkill. You’ll actually laugh at the little tiny bits of plot in that game, too.

They tried with Extraction. They really did. But the game was just boring. You pick up a light gun game and expect to shoot things. Exploration where you aren’t actually exploring just isn’t any fun. Not being able to shoot things isn’t any fun. It could have been a lot better than it was. I didn’t feel bad sending it back.

The thing that really kept me going through most of Dragon Quest 9, though, was the story.

Now, one might thing one can’t have a super-deep story with a party of completely created people. I agree that this is a challenge of sorts. Having that character customization is important to the gameplay, but you can’t completely forget the story. The choice the designers of Dragon Quest 9 went with was to have a bunch of little tiny stories going on that you are on the fringe of in each town you go to. This worked fantastically.

Dragon Quest has always had a knack, at least since I started playing it, of doing very simple, straightforward, but touching stories. Each town in Dragon Quest 9 does this rather well. Since you are an angel who, for the most part, exists to do good things, going into towns and attempting to fix what is wrong there is really easy to narratively justify. The game itself takes plenty of time to flesh out the characters in the towns as well, and make them complete people of a sort. Sure, eventually you’re going to have to go into a dungeon and fight a dude. That’s just the kind of game it is. But at the same time, you’ll be, at some point, helping a husband grieve by showing off the good he’s done and playing detective at a school. These things really do work. They straddle a fine line between cheesy and simple, and pull it off. They were enjoyable to experience.

At the same time, the whole concept had, for the most part, run its course at the end of my 49 hour run through the game. They were classy enough to know when the story couldn’t sustain itself any longer, and let it come to an end. This is something I completely, fantastically appreciate. So few things know how to end.

Of course, it doesn’t really end. There is an insane amount of post-game content in the game. It’s just nothing I care to dive into. All the quests in the game were overwhelmingly annoying. All incredibly luck-based for the most part, or just flat-out time consuming. There are surely some interesting ones, sure, and the treasure maps are interesting as well. But even those require a lot of grinding to be relevant. To get good drops, which is the point of them, you have to beat them over and over and over. That just isn’t my bag. More power to people enjoying it though! Me, I am going to move on to something else… like… a game I’ve already bought two copies of and just bought a third copy of. Yep.

Apparently my server is going crazy! People are trying to fix it and such, but who knows when things will be working. I’m told I’m posting this in a small window of working-ness. If you’re seeing this, things didn’t get working in time for me to finishing writing a blog for today. I know you all are very sad about that. But hey, news of Server issues, that’s an exciting blog, right?

At the very least, my host continues to be awesome and completely helpful on the customer service side, so I can’t complain there. Seriously, they always amaze me with how good their tech support and service is.

It’s probably okay to take a little break anyway. Stress and tiredness… totally fantastic and down on me. So, you know. This will work.

Whenever I beat an RPG, it’s cause for celebration, because I never beat RPGs. It’s also a sign that said RPG is really fantastic. Dragon Quest 9 is really fantastic. It is, without a doubt, one of the best games you could pick up for your DS, even if you don’t like Seth Green.

If you haven’t played a Dragon Quest, you might think, as I once did, that the actual gameplay of a Dragon Quest is incredibly old school and very boring. This is not true. While it is very traditional in many ways, Dragon Quest is smart enough to know how to mix things up and keep things different. Unlike some RPGs, you really put to use almost every spell you learn, for example. Status effect spells like Sleep can be extremely useful in some situations. Overcoming fights with proper use of skills can be just as useful as pure levels.

Additionally, Dragon Quest 9 is a return to the job system of some earlier Dragon Quests, and that adds a lot of depth to the game. Basically, you can switch jobs just about any time you like by going to a place called the Alltrades Abbey. These jobs work kind of like FFXI, although not quite. When you switch to a job, you start as the level you’ve gotten to in that job. So if you haven’t used it before, you’re at level 1. This seems like a horrible idea, but honestly, it’s not hard to boost people back up, which surprised me. You can go crazy with grinding, sure, but it’s less important than it initially seems. You don’t carry over spells or stats when you change classes. What you do keep are your abilities and stat bonuses you have bought with skill points. As you level up in jobs, you get these points, and can invest them in various weapon or class skill lines. Some are stat boosts that affect all classes, like “+30 Natural Strength” which makes you always have 30 more strength than you would have without that boost. Those are probably the ones you go for the most. However, there are also a wide variety of abilities that can be used in combat or out. The one I probably got the most use out of was the wand skill Caudecus, which worked like a slightly more powerful version of Heal, but which my spellcaster had access to as long as she had a wand: She didn’t have to be in a class like Priest who had healing spells to heal that way. Skill points don’t have to be spent immediately, nor in the class in which they are gained. As such, the game rewards you for leveling a few levels in a class you never expect a character to use, and then taking those skill points back to the class you want them to be more powerful in and spending them. At first, the whole system seems really clunky, honestly, but after you play with it for awhile you begin to see how smart and well-thought-out it is.

On top of all this character building, you also can equip crazy amounts of gear. All of it shows on your character, which is totally cool. You can focus on dressing up and looking neat, or you can focus on pure stat-gains, if you want. I did a combination of the two. The result, though, is that your party is very customizable, and very much yours. You’re completely tailoring their skills and classes and wardrobe, and you really become attached to them because of that. It’s awesome. I can’t remember a set of generic characters I’ve gotten more attached to in recent memory.

Of course, it’s taking those characters through the story that really makes the game awesome. But that kind of stuff I’m going to talk about tomorrow. That’s right, I’m doing two days of DQ Review. Deal.

I’ve got two solid story ideas right now.

The only problem is that they are two solid furry porn story ideas.

Both of them sound like a lot of fun. One is Brer’s fault, whether he likes it or not. Both would potentially focus on characters and actual potential romance. Both would have the fucked-up kinks I enjoy without being all raep tyme like most stories involving them are. I mean, I do think they’re very solid furry porn story ideas.

But let’s face it: I’ve been so out of it I’ve been having trouble keeping up with this blog every day. I don’t think I’ve really been doing a great job with that either. Writing something, putting effort into something like that, where I couldn’t share it with most of the people I know, just really bothers me. Writing is work. It’s work I find rewarding, but it is work. Putting that much work into a story like that, when I could be working on other things… my brain won’t let me do it.

I don’t want to come off like I’m belittling people who write good erotica. I appreciate a good erotic story, certainly, and there’s definitely a strong craft to it and nothing at all wrong with it. I just don’t feel like that’s a strong point of my own writing. Additionally, I feel like the people who work on those things are people who have a readerbase made up of people who don’t care about that sort of thing. I could share these stories with, I dunno… Brer, Kale, Ecks… maybe Cris if she wanted to read. That’s basically it. As much as I enjoy those people and love them, it wouldn’t really be a story for them. It’s really all about my kinks. They’d be nice and read it, and hopefully like it, but I wouldn’t be doing them a favor.

I just really have, and always have had, problems motivating myself on issues about myself. This is a me thing, writing these stories, so I can’t get myself motivated. If I was about someone else, they’d already be written. I know it.

They’re really good ideas, though. Sometime, maybe, I’ll let them out. Or maybe not.

I walked downstairs, and my mother was crying. I, of course, asked her what was wrong. It turned out that she was looking at music for the Mother/Son dance at Jonathan’s wedding, and thinking about it made her cry. A good cry, certainly. The idea that her youngest son was getting married, though, was pretty overwhelming. It’s a crazy thought.

It’s a crazy thought.

I responded by jokingly saying that it was all his fault for growing up.

But you can’t stop that.

I’ve tried to stall my life for years. Hold back things that I knew I should be doing because they were so stressful. Even now, now that I’m in the thick of them, they’re so stressful that I can barely get out of bed in the morning. Yet, times goes on, my life goes on, and I have to move on. Just like Jonathan has to move on with his life, I have to move on with mine. It’s exciting, and scary, and sad, and wonderful, but it is. It’s something that is inevitable.

More and more, when I think about Jonathan and his wedding, I tend to think of more domestic things. Wanting to settle down, find a steady job I won’t have to leave, have a certain boyfriend there. I think domestic. I think future. I think it’s good, because before, it was always just about transitioning. Now I am on the cusp, it’s nearly here, and I find my mind moving to other things. The sort of things I’m sure my parents would have rather me have been thinking about the whole time. It’s nice. It’s also a totally new feeling. One I worry about having. But that’s probably normal. That’s more normal than I’ve been in a long while.

I admitted the other day that “I’m rarely fine.” Brer said that that was shockingly honest. I am rarely fine. I’m depressed all the time. But things are moving forward. Things are happening. I need to remind myself that things are in motion (I freudianed “emotional” there first) that are going to help. Things are going to get better.

Time will move forward, and things will get better. Different, yes. But sometimes that isn’t so bad. Sometimes you have to cry about your son getting married to enjoy the cool stuff that brings.

Starcraft 2 is out, I’m so close to the Dragon Quest 9 endgame I can taste it, and I spent an evening trying to play Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s Stardust Accelerator: World Championship 2009. Now there is a title!

But yeah, seriously, I was thinking about CARD GAMES ON MOTORCYCLES and I realized it had been a long, long time since I played a Yu-Gi-Oh game. I do love cards games, you know. I’ve also really enjoyed past Yu-Gi-Oh games that just let you play the card game without buying the cards. I figured it was about time to try it again, so I threw one of the more recent ones onto my Gamefly queue.

I’ve always been kind of at awe with the people behind making Yu-Gi-Oh work as an actual card game. They have so much bullshit to contend with that they feel they have to be accurate to from the show that it has to be impossibly hard to make work. The fact that it kind of does work for the most part is crazy awesome. Doesn’t make it a great game, but it’s neat that it does.
I felt like I understood how they had warped the rules from the show to make the game work. I used to anyway. But as I sat down with this game, I realized I must be missing something. I couldn’t figure out how to sacrifice monsters to play other monsters, which is kind of 70% of the game. I have two theories on why this is the case. The first is that I simply don’t know some new rule. It has been years since I played a Yu-Gi-Oh card game. Maybe the rules have changed fundamentally since then. I kind of doubt something to core to how the game was designed has changed, though, but who knows.

The second theory is that I can’t understand the interface. The interface in this game is crazy. It is trying to display so much information on a little DS screen, all of it tappable, that I never really had any idea how to do the things I needed to do. Everything does something. I understand this is a fairly complex card game, but I never remember previous games behind so hard to comprehend, and many of those I played on the GBA, which doesn’t have the benefit of a touch screen, which should make it easier to understand, not harder. Okay, that sentence was horrible, but you get the point. Especially for a game they iterate on every year, there’s no excuse for the interface being as horrible as it is. Or maybe that’s why it’s like that: People who play every year have already figured it out. It’s pretty horrible for a newcomer, though.

There might be a great game in there, or at least a fun little thing. But man, I had such trouble trying to just use the game that I gave up pretty quickly. Especially in the face of all the other wonderful things I could be playing, I just don’t have time for that.

(Cris gets credit for the title. Heh. Couldn’t pass it up!)