Full Archive
A complete archive of every post, unsorted.
Chris and Steve discuss why they love a title deemed disappointing by so many.
A deeper look into how I Am Setsuna's mechanics can empower the player... as long as they can figure it out for themselves.
"Wait, huh? How do you make all those numbers appear?!"
The problem with writing an essay is that anything unrelated to your thesis becomes superfluous. The problem with traditional reviews is that they are awkward and scatter-brained, much like a teenager undergoing the changes of puberty. As I prefer the style of the former, I sadly had not spent much time discussing the mechanics of I Am Setsuna for this week’s feature. They are, for the most part, unrelated to the thesis I held regarding the narrative.
Let us correct that oversight here as the mechanics certainly deserve evaluation. Last week I compared the game’s presentation to its 16-bit ancestors, but this fails to truly capture how I Am Setsuna feels to play.
Why kill someone that's just going to die anyway?
What is a life worth?
Leaning back in this uncomfortable wooden coffee shop chair, teeth gnawing at my lower lip as prog-rock beats and melodies pump into my ears, I ponder what the point of I Am Setsuna was.
I’ve skimmed, glanced, and hummed over a number of forum and blog responses to the game, and it turns out the disappointment experienced over on GamersWithJobs was rather tame compared to the rest of the Internet. For many, the ending seemed pointless, confusing, and lacking in concrete closure. For me, the final shot elicited an obnoxious laugh and declaration that it was “Japan as f**k”.
It’s only in ruminating on one simple choice that I realize what simple idea envelops I Am Setsuna like a blanket.
Swing your sword.
Do not swing your sword.
A conversation about nearly everything but the anime Slayers itself.
With the new design of GamerTagged.net will also come a new series of columns designed to encourage me to write more, at the very least as a “warm-up” to more substantial material. I’m also hoping the regular practice helps make it easier to “get into the writing mood” and further hones my knitting together of phrases, words, and sentences. Giving people more reasons to actually check the site regularly helps, too.
I had fully intended to jump into something a bit more modern after watching Vision of Escaflowne. I had spent an entire week on the topic of nostalgia and wasn’t looking to push the topic any further.
At the same time, I was really sick of seeing that shiny plastic covering my Slayers DVD box set. So I peeled the cellophane away, popped the case open, and plopped the first disc into the tray for casual viewing. Bewitched, this quick trip into a twenty-plus year-old anime became a nightly habit of my brother and I following sorceress Lina Inverse along her adventures.
My first exposure to the series had been in my early teens, before I knew there was even an option to watch anime in its native language. Such VHS cassette tapes were largely special orders, further increasing their rarity. It wasn’t until my siblings and I had ventured into the dark corners of the Echelon Mall (now rebranded as Voorhees Town Center, evidently) that we uncovered “fansubbed” editions of anime, containing episodes of Dragon Ball Z that wouldn’t release in the states until Funimation obtained the rights to the series. Thus began my gradual preference to watch any piece of artistic media in its native language – going so far as to have me pondering a playthrough of The Witcher 3 in Polish rather than English*.
Does nostalgia also negatively impact our perceptions of throwback games like I Am Setsuna?
With the new design of GamerTagged.net will also come a new series of columns designed to encourage me to write more, at the very least as a “warm-up” to more substantial material. I’m also hoping the regular practice helps make it easier to “get into the writing mood” and further hones my knitting together of phrases, words, and sentences. Giving people more reasons to actually check the site regularly helps, too.
I first tried to play I Am Setsuna a couple years ago on the PS4. Something about the presentation at the time just wasn’t doing it for me. After playing the Lost Sphear demo on Nintendo Switch, I feel like there’s some lack of urgency or kineticism in Tokyo RPG Factory’s presentation that the old-school games they’re emulating possess. While I disagree with much of Jeremy Parish’s conclusion regarding the Secret of Mana remake, there’s one thing I partially understand.
Secret of Mana’s characters possessed a sort of floppy intensity on Super NES, somehow conveying the sensation of your heroes throwing themselves into every action with just a few simple frames of animation.
While I personally feel this is Jeremy’s nostalgia talking, I can certainly perceive his meaning in certain swings of the blades of Mana. When the hero lunges in the original title for that level-one charged attack with the sword, his body doesn’t just leap forward. His head ducks down aggressively, leaning forward as the sword is held high. I think the lack of frames in the animation allows the player to create an intent and intensity that is not actually there. Meanwhile, in the remake, these animations are running at 60 frames-per-second, filling those previously empty gaps with silky-smooth movement.
Neither great nor awful, the Secret of Mana remake is... fine.
Is it accurate to compare nostalgia to a hallucinogenic drug? Or is it merely a defensive act to preserve the least-jaded part of ourselves? That ignorant innocent of childhood that saw no blemishes, just the wonderment of new experiences. Every scar and scab was a point of pride, and broken bones became future stories of youthful adventure.
Or, in regards to games, we brushed away all the poor design in favor of the things we loved.
Like everything on the Internet these days, I feel response to the Secret of Mana remake has been limited to binary extremes. Either this remake is precisely what people wanted – a response seeming to be limited to the consumer spectrum – or it is a disservice to the original and would be better off not existing – the common conclusion of members of the press.
It’s amazing this title hasn’t sparked another bloody battle in the eternal feud between Dead Gamers and press.
Regardless of whether things are better or worse, I certainly miss the character creating sensibilities of the 90's.
With the new design of GamerTagged.net will also come a new series of columns designed to encourage me to write more, at the very least as a “warm-up” to more substantial material. I’m also hoping the regular practice helps make it easier to “get into the writing mood” and further hones my knitting together of phrases, words, and sentences. Giving people more reasons to actually check the site regularly helps, too.
I try not to look back on “the good old days” with the perception that it was better than today. In fact, after this week’s blog postings it will probably become clear I’m in constant contention with nostalgia and how it can manipulate our perceptions of the past.
Unfortunately, I decided to binge through Vision of Escaflowne and now I hate every anime that’s been released since the 90’s.
Steve and I yammer on about the Secret of Mana and other remakes, and just what it is we want in a remake.
A few setbacks mean no new video yet, but it's coming.
Talk about your setbacks.
If you’ve been following my Twitter saga then you’re aware I had run into some issues getting all the footage I’ve captured the past few months ready for editing. I discovered that the problem lies in Elgato’s capture software. At least, that’s the best I could conclude. Evidently some video editors have issue with the variable framerate that Elgato captures at, which can cause crashes or other errors.
No matter what video converter I ran this stuff through, I couldn’t get it to work. Not in Windows Movie Maker 6, at least.
Ah, yes. Windows Movie Maker 6. An ancient piece of software from the days of Windows XP, no longer supported after the shift to Windows Vista and the complete redesign to Windows Live Movie Maker. Oddly enough, Movie Maker 6 contains more features than the later iterations, and thus continues to have a surprising following to this day. It’s incredibly limited compared to what other video editing software can do, but it has one useful feature for me.
A pretty decent game greatly elevated by the excellence of its narrative.
The magic of Iconoclasts lies in its characters. The story wouldn’t be as good were it not for the animated depth in its entire cast. Without the narrative, the mechanics would not be enough to elevate it above other indies of similar style.
Such a statement may seem to devalue the hard work developer Joakim “Konjak” Sandberg had put into the entirety of this game – and startling as it is, pretty much every aspect of this title was handled by just the one man. The rest of the credits are largely QA staffers and relevant staff at publisher BiFrost that helped get this game through quality assurance and certification. Regardless of objective quality, Iconoclasts stands alongside surprisingly polished and executed titles as Stardew Valley.
Despite the Herculean task of making a game by oneself, even Demigods have finite power and are prone to making mistakes.
A glimpse into the atmospheric portrayal of Akihabara within Akiba's Trip.
The booming advertisement for Conception II echoes throughout the cement plaza, voices reverberating into the infinite sky above my head. Fanboys, with strands of hair drooping over bandanas, sulk past me with downcast eyes fixated on their shadows. At a nearby train station, a young woman in maid uniform sings into a cheap, portable karaoke microphone. She dances to the music with a smile as artificial yet sincere as my memories of the cheerleaders at my high school football games. A cool, spring breeze carries her lilting notes over the rumbles of the crowd and din of commerce, bringing a smile to my face.
I didn’t come to the UD+ plaza to listen to amateurs, however. I came for the rambunctious crowd disputing with irate and protesting idol singers. Stepping from the stairs and between the two groups feuding like a Twitter War, I stare the lead idol in the eye …
… and lunge forward, brandishing my limited-edition mecha anime poster as if it were Excalibur against forty-eight screaming, scratching teeny-bopper idols.
Yes folks, I’ve finally got a new piece up over on GamersWithJobs. This one is titled Akiba Mystique, focusing on how a game like Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed establishes such an atmosphere as to make this fictionalized version of Akihabara just tangible enough, despite all of the cracks in the artificial presentation.
I’ve already written plenty on the game, but the appeal runs deep enough I wanted to discuss it further on the GamersWithJobs front page. Hope you enjoy.
Steve and Chris reminisce about the launches of the PlayStation 2, GameBoy Advance, GameCube, and Xbox
The desire to play everything is the antithesis to what it should mean to be a critic
It was a little more than five years ago that a blog I had written was promoted to Destructoid’s front page. After two years with an abundance of professional-grade income I found myself capable of purchasing any game that twitched the richter-scale of my mind, no matter how small the tremor of interest in my heart. This resulted in an abundance of games and a need to keep playing the next thing, and if I ever retread old ground I’d feel guilty.
Despite having “penned” the promoted blog myself, it is as if the lessons came to be forgotten as time had passed on. I’m rediscovering them as if they are new, finally allowing myself the pleasure to revisit old titles last year. As can be seen in my monthly report, I’ve only recently begun to apply these revelations to my approach to making videos.
Which, perhaps, keys in to part of the problem. I fancy myself a games critic, and a games critic must play games! Every game must be played, and each game must be critiqued. This is the nature of it, is it not?
I've decided to keep monthly reports on my progress in working on RamblePak64 videos. Hopefully it will encourage me while keeping transparent with those who follow.
The latest experiment was a failure.
I don’t need to release a video to know the desire to stack up footage from a pile of separate games has been a disaster. In fact, that I haven’t released a video should be proof enough. Clips of partially-started games instead occupy my external hard drives, with only the Metroid games being fully completed. You’d think I’d be on my way to finishing that new episode. Distractions and indecision instead has pile up to delay my progress forward.
This revelation will not get me down. Figuring out why it was a failure would be much more productive, with the first step being an acknowledgement: I didn’t want to play any of the games I intended to do a video on as much as I wanted to play a Metroid game again.
Disagreement! Debate! Discussion! Is Horizon: Zero Dawn actually a great game or merely good-ish? Steve and Chris argue such polarizing conclusions in the latest podcast!
