Any dedicated JRPG fan will know what an uphill struggle it is to get people who have found themselves drifting away from the genre to actually play one of your favorite games.

All too often, people are keen to dismiss the whole genre as “Japanese bullshit” at best, depraved disgusting sexist paedophilic misogynist nonsense at worst.

Ever-determined and ever-optimistic, I took to a Google+ community (Editor’s Note: I know, I know, this ages this article a bit) I’m a member of that represents a small but diverse cross-section of gamers from all across the world, covering a broad spectrum of ages, experience levels and tastes, and I posed them a question. You can read an archive of the whole thread here if you like, but I’ll summarize my findings below.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

My question simply asked people to look at the above image and tell me — without looking up any information they didn’t already know, and assuming they had all the time in the world available to play these games — which ones they would be willing to try out.

The games collected here are just a random sample of titles that I’d call “JRPGs” from my personal game shelf, and if you’re curious, they include Aselia the Eternal, Lost Odyssey, Eternal Sonata, Blue Dragon, Nier and Resonance of Fate on the top row; Shadow Hearts, Shadow Hearts Covenant, Persona 3, .hack Infection, Final Fantasy XII and Drakengard on the second row; Ar Tonelico, Ar Tonelico II, Odin Sphere, Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower on the third row; Hyperdimension Neptunia, Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2, Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland, Dark Souls and 3D Dot Game Heroes on the fourth row; and The Adventures of Alundra and Yakuza 4 on the bottom.

The responses I got were pretty interesting. The titles which attracted the most interest were the ones which have had lots of high-profile sites writing about them, and consequently lots of people talking about them. These included the three “Operation Rainfall” titles Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower; Yakuza 4; Dark Souls and Persona 3. If Ni no Kuni was around when I’d done this experiment, it would be included in this category, too.

At the other end of the spectrum, people were more cautious about titles like Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata due to mediocre or inconsistent reviews, and most were completely unaware of more “niche” or explicitly anime-style titles such as Hyperdimension Neptunia, Atelier Rorona and Aselia the Eternal, with Aselia being by far the least-recognized title among them due to its PC-only release in the West.

But why is this? Why does something like Ni no Kuni sell out everywhere (believe me, I know; I spent several hours trying to order a copy shortly after its release) and yet other examples of the genre go pretty much ignored? Why are so many people quick to state that this last console generation has been light on good JRPGs, when a healthy proportion of the titles above are PS3 or Xbox 360 titles? What is stopping people from checking out some of these games? I delved deeper, and started to probe as to why some titles resonated more than others.

“I would give the games that garnered more positive attention from the community a go first,” said one participant in the discussion, who had previously played both Dark Souls and Persona 3 to completion, but had only a passing familiarity with the genre as a whole. “Of those that I know absolutely nothing about, I would probably pick the titles that looked more serious, dark, and adult first, and the cutesy, fetishized, anime style games would be the last things I would try, if at all.”

When probed as to why the “cutesy” games put him off, he added “It’s the aesthetic, for sure. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, or a personal one, but I can’t take that oversexualized, twelve year old anime girl art style seriously, no matter how great the ‘story’ is. The point seems to be titillation above all else. Anime is fine, but this particular subset of it doesn’t interest me.”

That’s a fair point there, and one which is particularly apparent in the Hyperdimension Neptunia games. A number of the beautifully-drawn “event” pictures that are peppered throughout the story have a rather gratuitous “bounce” feature whereby you can press a button to make the characters in shot boing up and down a bit and consequently get a glimpse of some boob-jiggling action.

Completing the game also unlocks some promotional artwork which is rather heavy on the titillation — these include one of the character Uni in her rather skimpily-dressed “goddess form” doing crunches with her legs spread, and another of the twin characters Rom and Ram sitting naked (but tactically covered in soap bubbles) in a bath eating a banana together in what can only be described as a somewhat provocative manner. In both cases, there’s no explicit sexual content, but it’s clear what the implications are, and some people might not like that, particularly given the apparent (though never outright stated) age of the characters. Fair enough.

Except… that’s not really the whole story at all. While a lot of Hyperdimension Neptunia and its sequel is made up of seemingly rather gratuitous fanservice like this, it’s actually a strong example of satire and parody of common tropes; Neptunia knows exactly what it’s doing, revels in it and invites the player to laugh along with it.

There are considerably more positive things you can say about it, too — like the fact that the all-female cast never once needs to rely on a male character to save them, or the fact that most of the main cast are pretty obviously gay and everyone just accepts this as perfectly natural and nothing worth commenting on… or indeed the simple fact that the game as a whole makes it very clear that the creators of the game consider these characters as far more than just tits and ass — they’re well-defined characters who each have their own personalities, and I defy anyone who plays both games through to not feel attached to at least some of them by the end. The very definition of moe.

Sadly, though, the provocative, titillating part is the thing that people less tuned in to the quirks of Japanese media notice first, meaning that they probably won’t give the games enough of a chance to discover the deeper, more thought-provoking bits. That is, of course, their prerogative, but it’s also a prime case of judging a book by its cover — albeit one which, one might argue, is at least partly the fault of both the developer and publisher!

But I digress.

“I usually try to avoid privileging ‘cute’ over ‘grim’ or vice versa because in my mind the true Zen is in embracing both the Black Knights and the Unbearably Fluffy Bunnies,” pondered another participant in the discussion. “You can do either well or badly; well-done stuff still deserves love whether it involves ruffles and sparkly romance scenes or bleak post-apocalyptic vistas in which a Lone Hero is the only source of light in a dying world, etc. Something that is ‘cute’ to look at can nevertheless be thought-provoking and interesting, and something that is ‘serious’ can still feel like something composed on the back of a junior high notebook.”

Another fair point, and one that’s true of anime just as much as games — first impressions count and help determine whether or not you’re going to stick with something, sure, but in many — though not all — cases there are a variety of hidden layers beneath that bear further exploration.

“Re: art styles and ‘darkness’ — as an anime fan for many years now I am completely unfazed by big eyes and spiky hair, though I roll my eyes at oversized breasts with the best of ‘em,” she added. “Though, in fairness, I also roll my eyes at those women in WRPGs like Skyrim whose armor has great big ‘windows’ right over their breasts. Really, guys? That’s like tattooing your chest with an X and ‘Stab here.’”

“[Most of] them interest me in the ‘man, I loved Voltron when I was a kid’ kind of way,” added another commenter. “What I mean is I’ll always have a soft spot for the anime aesthetic, but as a 40 year old father I simply don’t find anything to relate to in the games. I don’t even try anymore, no matter how great the reviews say they are.”

What you can “relate” to is very much a subjective thing, and it doesn’t have to be something that directly equates to your own life — the commenter above notes that Rayman is a particular favorite, for example. However, characters who do resonate with players’ real-life situations can also be extremely powerful — you just have to look at how well “parent players” responded to the character of Lee in Telltale’s The Walking Dead game as a good example.

That said, Nier is a game on this list that should, by that theory, have resonated with this commenter, as it is a game about a father doing anything to save his child, but he had little interest in trying it, due in part to its mediocre review scores, its reputation and the fact you need to beat the second half of the game four times to see the whole story.

“Based on covers alone I’d play much of the bottom left side (and have!) because when a cover comes at me with their very direct anime style I know they’re speaking my language,” said another commenter who, as you might expect, is a big fan of both anime and the more colorful end of JRPGs in general. “Odin Sphere and Aselia the Eternal both are high on my list because of their very striking beautiful artwork. Shadow Hearts is interesting because a friend of mine mentions it often, Resonance of Fate has the Tri-Ace logo on it and I love those guys. The rest don’t really leap at me in the same way — I’d still probably look at the back, but I see a lot of drab colors and lack of contrast.”

This is effectively the opposite of what our first commenter was saying; rather than being put off by the colorful anime style, this participant in the discussion actually sees it as an appealing element that attracts him to the games. (I very much fall into this category, too.) It is all a matter of taste, ultimately, and it’s good that a diverse spectrum of opinions is catered to by the modern games industry.

“Moe is the worst thing to happen to anime and Japanese games,” said another commenter who obviously feels rather strongly about this. “A lot of American fans will agree with you there. We’re still trying to accept the fact that most Japanese games are targeted towards 17-year-olds and not 35-year-olds like the rest of the global video game industry.”

I have always been of the opinion that “target age” is, for the most part, a fairly meaningless concept since no two people of the same age are exactly alike. I’m in my thirties, and I like moe. I enjoy the feeling of virtually hanging out with characters who are specifically designed to be fun to be around and who are designed to elicit feelings of genuine affection — it’s a nice atmosphere to immerse yourself in. I am by no means the only person of my age to feel this way, either.

Moe is also such an ill-defined concept that it’s all but impossible to pin it down as a single cause of driving someone away from a game. Look at the success of Recettear on PC, for example — a game that is so overflowing with adorableness you should probably put a towel down before starting to play it.

“I enjoy the insanity, energy and visual pop of many moe themes in general,” responded the anime-and-JRPG fan from earlier. “There is also often a theme of pure-hearted love or friendship or the like along with it — something you don’t see in a whole lot of Western media outside of cartoons, which tend to be fairly low quality.

“Interestingly, I think the Brony movement is very much the Western equivalent to the beginning of moe,” he continued. “Different cultures find different things acceptable and pleasing. However when a thing can speak to someone in the strongest possible terms of love, tolerance and friendship in a colorful and direct way I can’t say I’m surprised that plenty of people find that makes them feel good, and ‘what makes you feel good’ is not a bad guideline on what you want to watch, talk about and give double thumbs to!

“Also, Japan at least found that people are willing to spend a lot more money in the name of love and hugs and endorphins then on grim tales of space and fantasy. Exceptions exist to the rule, but I’m not surprised you can draw ‘deeper’ from a moe-influenced wallet because you’re tapping into emotions that make the subject feel like things are alright, and that life sure is exciting and fun.”

I was pleased that someone brought up the Brony phenomenon, because I was going to do it if no-one else did. There’s a huge amount of crossover in the appeal elements of Lauren Faust’s My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the more colorful side of JRPGs — multi-layered humor that adults will “get” on a different level to kids; bright, colorful, cheerful visuals; themes of love and tolerance; strong, exaggerated characters who tend to embody particular character traits; the list goes on, and can apply just as much to something like Hyperdimension Neptunia as it can to My Little Pony. (In other words, if you’re a JRPG fan, you should maybe check the show out — and vice versa, for that matter!)

One thing became abundantly apparent from the discussions surrounding this issue: you really can’t please everyone. And that’s actually a good thing (though perhaps not for sales figures) — by specifically focusing deeply on a particular niche rather than attempting to make something with broad but shallow appeal, developers are much more likely to evoke a strong emotional response and build a small but dedicated base of series evangelists who feel that these games really “speak” to them.

And this isn’t just true for JRPGs, either; it’s something that the industry as a whole is starting to really understand. Outside of companies like EA, Activision and Ubisoft, who are still for the most part courting the biggest audience possible — a necessity, given the size of their games’ budgets — a lot of developers are now realizing that they’ll get a much stronger, more passionate response from fans if they give them what they want to see rather than trying to cater to the lowest common denominator. So long as that situation continues on its present path, I think we can all be happy in our own little virtual worlds.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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Today, March 16, is the birthday of Japanese voice actress Asami Imai, one of the most distinctive, recognisable voices in modern Japanese entertainment.

Since her debut in 1999, she has racked up an impressive number of roles to her name across a variety of different media. Among enthusiasts of Japanese gaming, she’s probably best known for her roles as Noire in the Neptunia series, Makise Kurisu in the Steins;Gate visual novels, and Ikaruga in the Senran Kagura series.

She’s had an interesting career, for sure — so let’s take a look at it!

Imai first came to voice acting while she was still studying, and got off to a good start in 1998 by winning the Grand Prize for the Voice Actress category at the Enix Anime Awards. A year later, she made her debut on a drama CD for Toki no Daichi ~Hana no Ōkoku no Majo ~ (Witch of the Kingdom of the Time of the Earth Flower), a work based on a manga by Miyuki Yama which also saw a three-episode OVA release around the same time.

From 2000 onwards, Imai built up a solid base of work in anime, with contributions to a variety of different series — though primarily in supporting roles. The most well-known of these include Snow White reimagining Prétear from 2000, in which she played the character Eiko; and visual novel adaptation Da Capo in 2003, in which she played the part of numerous background characters.

Imai began working in video games not long after her anime voice acting career was well underway. One of her earliest credited video game roles was in the visual novel Muv-Luv in 2003, in which she played the role of Keiko Horikoshi, but it would be two years later with the release of The Idolmaster in Japanese arcades that Imai would take on one of her most recognisable and enduring roles: Chihaya Kisaragi, which Imai has played in every incarnation of the series except the 2007 anime adaptation Xenoglossia.

Imai has enjoyed steady work in both anime and video games pretty much since her debut, but it would be 2011 before many Western game players would become a lot more aware of her, since this was the year in which both Gust’s Atelier Totori (in which Imai plays the title character’s sister Cecilia) and, more significantly, Idea Factory’s Hyperdimension Neptunia.

These games are important for Western fans of Imai’s work because they were some of the first examples of Imai’s voice acting to see a Western release. Since 2010, a number of her earlier roles (most notably Muv-Luv and Koihime Muso) have subsequently been localised, but it was Neptunia in particular that helped make her name among Western otaku.

Today, Imai’s portrayal of guardian goddess and PlayStation personification Noire is as much an iconic part of the character as Tsunako’s distinctive artwork and the series’ trademark snappy and satirical script. In many ways the quintessential tsundere — twintails, hot-and-cold attitude, a perpetual state of denial — Noire quickly became and remained a fan favourite, and Imai’s stellar voice work was a big part of that.

Combining slight whininess with a strong sense of femininity in her human form — and emphasising the latter in particular with a strong dose of confidence, assertiveness and even aggression in her goddess “HDD” form — Imai’s performance fit the character absolutely perfectly and, along with equally strong performances from her castmates Rie Tanaka (Neptune), Kana Asumi (Blanc) and Rina Sato (Vert), played a big part in giving the Neptunia series the strong sense of identity it has today, not to mention helping to kick off one of the most surprisingly prolific phenomena in all of Japanese gaming.

Noire isn’t Imai’s only role of particular note, however; a year before Neptunia released on its home turf, she put on one of her most beloved performances as science prodigy Kurisu Makise in 5pb. and Nitroplus’ mindbending visual novel Steins;Gate. It would be 2014 before Western players would get the opportunity to experience this time-travelling, wordline-hopping adventure in full for themselves, though in the meantime, many Western otaku did take the opportunity to enjoy the excellent 2011 anime adaptation in which Imai reprised her role.

In many ways, Kurisu is a similar character to Noire. She has somewhat tsundere tendencies, can be rather hot-headed at times, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly — though in the case of both Steins;Gate and Neptunia, Imai’s characters find themselves reluctantly dragged into a web of ridiculousness by the works’ respective protagonists, and end up learning that they don’t necessarily need to keep their “walls” up all the time when they’re with people they love and enjoy the company of.

Imai has been in a number of games since these important watershed moments in her career, and with increasing numbers of dual-audio (or Japanese-only audio) localised releases here in the West, we’re hearing her voice more and more frequently, in games ranging from the BlazBlue series of fighting games to Monster Hunter-like Toukiden: Kiwami and peculiar roguelike The Awakened Fate Ultimatum.

Aside from Noire and Kurisu, Imai’s other most well-known role in the West is that of Ikaruga in Kenichiro Takaki’s Senran Kagura series. Ikaruga is a proud character rather than a tsundere, and very much concerned with propriety and tradition. Given the energetic, chaotic nature of much of the rest of Senran Kagura’s cast — particularly her classmates in Hanzou Academy — Ikaruga often finds herself playing “straight man” to all sorts of shenanigans, though as the series has gone on, her character has developed and softened somewhat, showing a less up-tight side that is more willing to have fun.

Once again, Imai’s performance of Ikaruga is as much a part of the character as Yaegashi’s distinctive character art; her voice is recognisable for those who have previously spent countless hours in the company of Noire and/or Kurisu, but Ikaruga is very much her own character. Rather than being the type that is quick to anger, Imai plays Ikaruga in a relatively understated manner, reflecting her calm demeanour and respect for her place in society. This makes for a dramatically strong contrast when Ikaruga is forced to raise her voice — both during times of crisis and simply when her classmates’ nonsense is getting out of hand — as well as a strong sense of Ikaruga being one of the most grounded, “Japanese” members of Senran Kagura’s core cast.

Imai is a prolific voice actress and one of the most beloved parts of the modern Japanese video game and anime industries. Today, she continues to perform in ongoing series such as Neptunia and Senran Kagura, and is also enjoying a successful career in music alongside her voice acting work — both as a soloist and as part of the duo Artery Vein with her Senran Kagura and Neptunia castmate Eri Kitamura (Homura and Uni, respectively).

Many of our favourite characters are richer, more distinctive and “complete” thanks to Imai’s contributions. So I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing her a very happy birthday — and perhaps indulging in some of her work to celebrate.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

Localisation is, it seems, a somewhat thorny issue these days — but it’s one worth discussing.

Before I begin today, I’d like to emphasise that by no means am I attempting to present a “definitive” opinion here. By its very nature, this is a topic that is highly subjective and a matter of opinion, and that means you may not agree with my views. And that is, of course, fine; all I’m attempting to do here is to highlight one possible perspective and provide some food for thought on a complex issue with no “right” answers.

Preamble over and done with, then; let’s talk about localisation, beginning with a little personal context that may go some distance towards explaining why I feel the way I do about all this.

I first discovered a love for Japanese games with Final Fantasy VII. It’s a clichéd introduction to Japanese games in general — and the RPG genre specifically — but there’s a reason it’s a cliché. Final Fantasy VII was so unlike anything else around at the time that you couldn’t help being swept up in it. It was compelling, intoxicating, thrilling; it was one of the most visually striking and narratively dramatic games that we’d ever seen, quite rightly regarded as a significant step forward for both the RPG genre and the handling of narrative in video games, and an experience noticeably distinct from what Western developers were putting out.

It wasn’t perfect, though. Final Fantasy VII’s translation had serious issues in its original PS1 incarnation, many of which looked like a side-effect of an attempt to translate the script as literally as possible from its original Japanese. Awkward phrasing, incorrect grammar, peculiar choices of words; none of this actually hurt the experience significantly — for many people, including me, the original sloppy translation of Final Fantasy VII was actually rather charming — but it was very noticeable, even at the time, and it’s doubtful that it would have been allowed through quality assurance if the game was fully voiced. Since Final Fantasy didn’t incorporate voice acting until PS2 installment Final Fantasy X, however, we were collectively somewhat more forgiving towards clunky text, as no-one was reading it out loud to highlight how awkward it was.

As a European, I was somewhat dismayed to discover shortly after my love for JRPGs burst into full bloom that many games that had already been translated into English for the American market simply didn’t make it that last step across the Atlantic. In the PS1 era, we missed out on a lot of great games, including Square Enix titles Parasite Eve, Xenogears and Brave Fencer Musashi, well-regarded classics such as Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and its sequel Eternal Blue, and plenty of others besides. This meant I eagerly and gratefully snapped up any games that did come my way, and discovered some favourites that are often regarded as “forgotten classics” in the process.

Some of the most high-profile, well-respected localisations in the PS1 era took great liberties with the original script — and due to the relative rarity of fully-voiced games due to the CD-ROM medium’s lack of storage capacity, very few people were actually aware of this, especially since dual-audio titles were practically non-existent. Localisation specialists such as Working Designs were praised for bringing the compelling stories of titles like The Adventures of Alundra and the Lunar series to the West while making them accessible and understandable with their own distinctive stylistic voice in the English language. This is an approach still adopted by many localisation teams today, only now it tends to come under much stronger scrutiny as, due to the rise in number of dual-audio titles, it’s much easier to compare the English translation to the original Japanese audio.

What the way of working in the PS1 era meant is that Japanese games localised for the West tended to be examined entirely on the merits of their English script rather than “in context” by comparing to the original Japanese. There are pros and cons to this approach: treating the game as if it is, to all intents and purposes, an English-language game allows you to consider how it looks from the perspective of someone who isn’t fully immersed in Japanese popular culture, which can be a valuable way of looking at things. However, it can also lead to misunderstandings when you come across something that isn’t directly translatable, or something which has different “meaning” in Japanese to how it does in the West.

We most commonly see this today with many Western critics’ quasi-Puritanical reactions to nudity in Japanese games. In Japanese media, the use of nudity has a number of specific “meanings” that aren’t necessarily sexual in nature: the idea of “skinship” is a common theme in Japanese media that is often more about a general sense of closeness and friendship than sexuality, for example, whereas in the West we tend to associate nudity in narrative entertainment media with imminent sexual activity. (This isn’t to say nudity in Japanese games never leads to sexual encounters, of course, though that tends to remain the domain of eroge and nukige rather than more mainstream console and handheld games, where such content is more strictly regulated.) Meanwhile, nudity is also used elsewhere in Japanese media as symbolism for opening yourself up to someone, or understanding someone. Senran Kagura is a great example of this latter interpretation; concluding a battle by stripping your opponent naked is a potent symbol of your complete dominance of them through a comprehensive understanding of how they fight.

Part of the difficulty of translating Japanese is the fact that, as a language, it is fundamentally different to English — and not just in terms of the characters used to write it, either. Japanese is a heavily contextual language in which one simple word or phrase can mean multiple things according to who says it, how they say it, when, to whom, where they are saying it and why. One can, of course, make this argument for English too, but Japanese has contextual cues down to a fine art.

Take the phrase “yoroshiku onegaishimasu”, for example, which is very common. Depending on context, this can mean “pleased to meet you”, “I look forward to working with you”, “please take care of me”, “thank you for the service you are about to provide for me”, “it’s up to you”, “please come again” and plenty of other things besides. There isn’t a single, universal translation that a localiser can use when they come across “yoroshiku onegaishimasu” in a Japanese script, so they have to make a judgement call on what it means according to the context, so far as they can determine from the material they have available to them — which may, of course, vary enormously depending on if the game is being localised alongside its Japanese release, or localised after the Japanese version has already been completed and been on the market for some time.

The localisation process is full of these judgement calls, and different companies work in different ways. There are a variety of different reasons for this, but an important consideration for any localisation team is how important a sense of “Japaneseness” is to the work, and whether it is important to maintain that in any localised version.

With something like Persona 5, the answer is pretty obvious: it’s a game about Japanese kids doing Japanese things in a Japanese city, so of course you can’t go changing the fundamental character of the work by attempting to transplant it to a Western setting. The Japaneseness needs to remain intact as much as possible, so a localisation as authentic to the original script as possible is the most desirable outcome. That means keeping in things like honorifics and mentions of Japanese culture and history, while adapting words and phrases that aren’t directly translatable (such as the aforementioned yoroshiku onegaishimasu) to reflect the meaning according to the assumed context.

Atlus did a pretty good job with Persona 5’s localisation, all told, but that didn’t stop some people complaining about it — most notably a number of members of the commercial press. You cannot, it seems, please everyone, even where the best approach to take is as seemingly obvious as it is in this instance.

With other games, the “correct” approach might not be so clear. Take something like Ace Attorney, for example, which did undergo significant changes from its original Japanese script but nonetheless still contains quite a few elements of Japanese culture, particularly with regard to spirituality and religion. In this instance, the changes were made both to make the games more accessible to a wider audience, and also to make puns work better in the translated languages.

Take the protagonist’s name, for example. In Japan, he’s known as Naruhodo Ryuuichi, an unsubtle pun on the Japanese word “naruhodo”, meaning “I see”. Calling someone “Mr. I See” in English would be awkward, so he became “Mr. Wright”, allowing for plenty of similar puns in the “Wright/right as homophones” genre.

Interestingly, when Ace Attorney starts to get more Japanese, it makes no attempt to hide it or indeed explain what a Shinto shrine is doing in the mountains just outside an American city. Later games make reference to Japanese concepts like youkai and suchlike, and oddly enough, they don’t feel as jarring as you might expect. This is perhaps why, despite the major changes to the core cast of Ace Attorney when compared to the original script, fans have generally been pretty happy with the localisation on the whole; while full of changes, it is still fairly true to the original intention.

NIS America’s localisation of the original Hyperdimension Neptunia is a point of contention for many Western fans of Japanese games. NISA took a lot of liberties with the original script, de-emphasising the overt religious references — themselves a satirical parody of the quasi-religious fervour with which console fanboys will defend their “platform of choice” — and adding a layer of technology-themed puns atop them. The main characters were no longer megami (goddesses) — now they were “CPUs”, or “Console Patron Units”. They no longer underwent a megami henshin (goddess transformation); now they activated their “HDD” or “Hard Drive Divinity” mode.

Purists were — and still are — angry with these changes, feeling that they compromised the fundamental meaning of the work in an attempt to insert unnecessary humour. But Neptunia has, from the outset, been a series built as parody and satire, so it makes a certain degree of sense for such things to be added in an English localisation, particularly as the underlying meaning of the main cast as goddesses is still intact beneath the new terminology.

In other words, Neptunia is an example of a game where overt “Japaneseness” isn’t a particularly important aspect, aside from its anime-inspired aesthetic. In fact, there’s a strong argument to be made that the reason Neptunia has become such a worldwide phenomenon since its original release despite consistently mediocre review scores from a bewildered press is because it is so inviting, welcoming and language-agnostic. It doesn’t require a deep involvement with or understanding of the otaku subculture to appreciate — though for sure it has additional depth if you have at least a passing awareness of it — and has, instead, attracted many new fans through its colourful characters, engaging gameplay and well-written, witty scripts that are very much products of their time, and deliberately so.

As satirical games, it’s particularly important to consider the context in which each Neptunia game was released, as this gives additional meaning to a number of different installments, particularly when we consider their English incarnations, which are now handled by Idea Factory’s own international offshoot.

Hyperdimension Neptunia U, for example, which concerns the power that the press has to manipulate public perception, was released in the West during the height of discussions over press ethics as a result of the “GamerGate” controversy — and indeed makes a pretty on-the-nose reference to the whole thing at one point. Megadimension Neptunia V-II, meanwhile, made a plot point of the difficult transitional period between two console generations: something that was actually happening at the time as the PS4 started to gather momentum.

This puts these games in an interesting position in that it prevents them from being truly “timeless”, but at the same time that is how satire works: it’s most effective as a direct response to (and mockery of) something that is fresh in people’s minds, particularly if that something is a specific event. Satire is also unique to a particular culture, since everyone sees these events in a different light according to their own societal norms and attitudes. To return to the earlier example of Hyperdimension Neptunia U, for example, Japan’s understanding and awareness of GamerGate and press ethics in general is very different to the discussions this matter has spawned in the West, so it needed handling differently according to the cultural contexts in which the game was released.

And this is what Neptunia has done particularly well ever since its first installment, especially in English. Its use of memes and cultural references that are relevant at the time of release is a deliberate, conscious decision; it can make the games seem a little dated or hard to follow when revisited some time later, but as direct responses to events and the overall landscape of the games industry at the time of their respective releases, the Neptunia series is hard to beat. And a big part of that comes from the localisation; if it relied on Japanese-only 2channel and LINE memes rather than cultural references more easily digestible by the West, its English versions wouldn’t have nearly the same impact or widespread appeal — and it already struggles against the tide so far as the press is concerned, at least.

Where the matter of how much power localisers should have over a work becomes somewhat more complicated is when we come to works that have content edited or cut completely on the grounds of “taste”, or in an attempt to avoid the notorious “Adults Only” ESRB rating, which was once the kiss of death for a title hoping to sell any copies at retail.

Perhaps the most notorious example of this in recent years is Criminal Girls, which underwent a number of changes. Specifically, its BDSM-themed minigame (which is used as part of the progression system to teach the characters new abilities) was rebranded from oshioki (“punishment”) to “motivation” in its English incarnation, the suggestive moaning was removed from this content and a pink mist was added to obscure the provocative imagery. The mist initially covers the picture almost completely but gradually clears with each advancement in your relationship with the character in question until what lies beneath is clearly visible. This also, conveniently, coincides with the most provocative picture in each series, usually involving the character exposing part of her breasts or behind, sometimes even pulling down her panties or hitching up her top.

Criminal Girls is often derided as a particularly heinous example of “censorship” at work and it’s easy to understand why: on paper, the changes made sound pretty major, though they at least stop short of cutting out the minigame completely — which would have been difficult, anyway, since it is so heavily intertwined with the game’s progression system.

But in actual fact, personally speaking, I found the modifications made to the game, surprisingly, very much work in context, particularly if you take the time to give it a deeper reading — something it actually deserves, since far from being mindless ecchi fanservice, it’s actually a rather thought-provoking work at heart, featuring some challenging and powerful themes in its latter hours.

The core theme of Criminal Girls is the concept of building trust between the player-protagonist and the “delinquent” girls he commands in their attempt to ascend out of the underworld and get a second chance at life. In this sense, the rebranding from “punishment” to “motivation” makes sense, particularly as the activity is framed as you removing corrupt influences from them rather than actually inflicting pain on them deliberately as a consequence of something they’ve done wrong. The girls come out of the experience more powerful and able to do things that they weren’t able to do previously thanks to the removal of the things that have been holding them back, while the protagonist becomes closer to them; it’s an inherently positive experience for everyone involved, whereas the term “punishment” has negative connotations.

The pink mist can be read as symbolism, too, and fits nicely with the core theme. When you first begin your relationship with a girl, she is completely obscured, the pink mist reflecting the fact that she is unwilling to let you see her true self or “let you in”. As your relationship increases in intensity and the girl comes to trust you more, the mist lifts, revealing the girl underneath as she “exposes” herself to you, both physically and emotionally, the changes in her costume being another example of how nudity can be used as a reflection of closeness, trust and friendship rather than being a purely sexual thing. As you try a new activity, the mist returns, reflecting her uneasiness with a change to the status quo, but again this, too, will eventually lift. Far from being a simple case of edited content, it’s actually quite an artful addition to these scenes that works well.

Regardless of how well it works in context, the question that many people have fixated on is whether or not these changes should have been made in the first place. And there isn’t really an easy answer for this, since different people have different attitudes. Some would have preferred the original experience as Japanese players had it. Some found the suggestive moaning in the Japanese original awkward so are actually quite pleased these sequences now play out somewhat more quietly. As for me? Well, I’ve outlined how I feel about it above, but to summarise, I certainly didn’t feel like my time with Criminal Girls was in any way compromised as a result of these changes, and in some ways they even added an additional layer of meaning.

And this is, for me, is the most important question when it comes to localisation: does it capture the original meaning and intent of the source material? Does it even, perhaps, enhance it? Answering that question involves considering whether or not the work needs an inherent sense of “being Japanese” to be effective from a Western perspective, and how best to handle the localisation accordingly.

If the story and characters are quintessentially Japanese and the work makes frequent reference to Japanese societal conventions, then a more literal approach to the translation, as seen in Persona 5, is preferable. In all other scenarios, so far as I’m concerned, I’m more than happy to experience the work as interpreted by a localisation team; after all, as we’ve discussed above, localisers have to make all sorts of judgement calls throughout the translation process, even for the most mundane words and phrases, so there’s no guarantee that even a supposedly “literal” translation is word-for-word accurate to the Japanese anyway.

In some cases, a localised version even becomes the “preferred” version of a work, and subsequently has an influence on the Japanese creators; Final Fantasy XIV is a good example of this, with its George R.R. Martin-inspired dialogue and prose being so well-written and consistently applied to the English version that it had a profound impact on producer Naoki Yoshida and his team, who now work closely with the English language team for a coherent worldwide experience.

In the end, as clichéd as the argument is, the only true way to experience a piece of Japanese media “as originally intended”, without any interference from people who weren’t originally involved with it, is to play it in Japanese. For many, that’s reason enough to pursue the study of the language — that and all the Japanese games that don’t get localised that you’ll suddenly have access to, of course!

But there’s also a great deal of value to be extracted from viewing a work through another lens, considering how meaning and context can change between cultures and whether “literal” is always the best approach. Sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised, and it’s important to celebrate the localisers who do a good job in this way.

Ultimately something to be conscious of is the fact that we’ve never had it so good in terms of the number of Japanese games that make it to the West — and I know I certainly don’t want a return to the dark days of the European PS1. Therefore, it’s important to remember that while it can often be worth making your opinion known when a company makes a decision you disagree with, it’s just as important — if not more so — to make it known when you’ve had a good time with something, even if you didn’t expect to in the first place. Nothing but negativity can breed contempt, after all, and Japanese games in general get enough of that from the mainstream press without enthusiasts getting in on the action too.

So personally speaking, I’m never going to make a blanket sort of statement about particular companies’ approaches being “good” or “bad”; every work is worth considering on its own individual merit — and as a complete work, rather than fixating on one aspect or scene — and every quality localised game is ultimately our gain, as English-speaking fans of the medium.

Your mileage may, of course, vary. But me? I’m just grateful for all the amazing games I get to play these days: games that speak to me, resonate with me and which have, without a doubt, enriched and made my life much, much more fulfilling. And I’m grateful to those who bring those games to me in a language I can understand.

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A good dungeon crawler has two aspects it has to nail in order to be successful: combat and exploration.

Japanese takes on the genre often tend to incorporate a strong sense of narrative and characterisation to the experience, too — and certainly MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death is no exception to this — but at its core, a dungeon crawler is about 1) navigating your way through a series of increasingly complicated mazes, and 2) kicking the snot out of any monsters who appear to block your path.

We’ve already talked about MeiQ’s interesting and unconventional combat, progression and equipment mechanics. So now let’s take a closer look at its approach to dungeon design.

We’ve previously discussed how part of the design philosophy behind MeiQ was clearly to make a historically rather impenetrable-seeming subgenre of role-playing games more accessible to newcomers. And, indeed, this is very much reflected in how the game’s maps increase in complexity as you progress, with the most complicated, challenging areas to explore being completely optional endgame dungeons only unlocked by clearing the main story on four separate difficulty levels.

Being a traditional “gridder”, MeiQ’s dungeons are primarily designed in two dimensions, to be explored a “square” at a time, with all corners being 90 degrees. While this places certain limitations on exactly what can be accomplished from a design perspective, game developers have been designing dungeons in this fashion since the earliest days of gaming, so there are plenty of interesting applications of these simple tools.

A common approach that many dungeon crawlers take is to “make every square count”: to fill as much of the available space as possible with traversable areas, arranged in a deliberately complicated, confusing manner. Take, for example, this map from Dungeon Travelers 2:

As you can see, very little of the map is left empty, and the route through it isn’t immediately clear. You may also notice that there are a lot of “gimmicks” such as one-way walls and dark areas as well as a large number of routes up to the next floor rather than just one. This is a pretty common approach to dungeon crawler map design.

MeiQ, on the other hand, starts deceptively simple.

It’s still recognisably a maze, just not a very complicated one. There are a few dead ends to discover, but there’s only really one path onwards. And although you may notice two stairways up on this map, the linear path you follow in this initial dungeon means that you’ll naturally encounter them without having to go too far off track, rather than having to seek out secret areas.

This may look like a simple approach — almost insultingly so, to dungeon crawler veterans — but at least it isn’t as simple as the original Phantasy Star’s first dungeon, which was literally a single pathway with one branch off it.

However, it is less complicated than the first floor of the grandaddy of them all, Wizardry:

Interestingly, you’ll see from Wizardry’s map that it incorporates some common dungeon crawler gimmicks right from the outset, most notably one-way walls, which you can pass through in one direction, but which become a solid wall if you attempt to go back through them. MeiQ, meanwhile, keeps things simple for its first few dungeons; it does incorporate most of the common gimmicks by the end, but usually only once, and mostly quite late in the game.

One thing MeiQ does do with its dungeon design is make use of much more in the way of “open space” than your typical dungeon crawler. Here, for example, is a floor from the Blue Tower, whose interior resembles a forest:

You’ll notice that this has a much more “organic” design to it than we typically see in conventional dungeon crawlers, making use of more gradual-seeming corners and meandering pathways as much as is possible using a grid-based arrangement, rather than featuring exclusively 90-degree angles.

It’s also not conforming to the unwritten “make every square count” rule. Said rule originated as a result of the tight memory and storage space constrictions placed on developers creating games in the early days of the medium — it was necessary to squeeze things in as tightly as possible to make the game as big as it could be and make most efficient use of the available technology — but it’s been proudly maintained by the majority of dungeon crawler developers today, as seen in the above example from Dungeon Travelers 2, or indeed this from Demon Gaze:

MeiQ isn’t the first game of its type to create dungeons that are modelled after organic, open-plan or outdoor areas such as forests, but it is one of the few that is arguably making fuller use of the technology available to it by allowing its maps to spread themselves out over a wide area and not worry about having to squeeze everything into, say, a 20×20 grid as in Wizardry.

Contrast the above map from MeiQ’s Blue Tower with this example from venerable Western dungeon crawler Lands of Lore, for example, which represents a swampy, wooded area:

There’s a reasonable amount of open space in Lands of Lore’s map, but nowhere near as much as in MeiQ’s. Lands of Lore also consistently restricts itself to passageways that are a single square wide, while MeiQ has no qualms in featuring more open areas representing “clearings” in the forest, linked by passageways and pathways.

In many ways, MeiQ’s dungeon design is often rather more akin to what you might expect from a tile-based top-down RPG from the 8- or 16-bit era such as the old Final Fantasy games. A number of its areas are designed to make an aesthetically pleasing arrangement, either in an organic, chaotic style as seen above, or in some cases later in the game, actually forming pixel-art images:

Any time MeiQ opts for this latter approach, however, it takes care not to make things too easy for the player to navigate. Rather than filling large areas with solid “colour”, it scatters single squares of obstacles or arrangements of walls around the place to keep things interesting and get in the way. In the case of the “skull” above they don’t really hinder navigation too much, but in this more complex “cross” arrangement on the very next level they most certainly do, especially in the tangled middle area:

All this focus on “big-picture” design isn’t to say that MeiQ doesn’t enjoy a good old-fashioned maze, mind you, and it’s here that we can point out one of the game’s main strengths: its variety in dungeon design. Rather than being constantly confined to cramped corridors with different tilesets, we find ourselves exploring many different environments, each of which has a distinctive style to its maps.

Besides the forest of the Blue Tower and the ruins of the Dark Tower that we’ve already seen, a particular highlight is the White Tower, which is probably the most “maze-like” dungeon of the main story content.

The principle behind how the White Tower’s various floors are designed is pretty simple: split each floor into a grid of equal-sized rooms, then link them together with one or more passageways. To complicate matters, add some locked doors that require switches to be pressed, and secret doors that can be recognised in the main 3D view by a visible shadow.

It’s a simple approach, but very effective, and the White Tower is a pleasure to explore as a result. This particular dungeon doesn’t rely exclusively on this method, either; it’s at this point in the game that you start coming across a lot more of the usual dungeon crawler gimmicks such as pairs of teleporters and groups of floors that require you to go repeatedly back and forth between them to find the path forward.

MeiQ doesn’t overuse any one gimmick in its main story content — most of the dungeons only use one or two of these tricks at a time at most, and you’ll tend to only see each of them used once or twice across the entire story.

This is a sensible decision, as it allows the game to gradually increase in complexity as it progresses without overwhelming the newbie dungeon crawler. Once you beat the “final” boss and get into the postgame, however, all bets are off, and the game starts throwing you challenges such as the mindbending maze seen above, or the delightfully silly “Floor of Nihility”, which is simply a huge empty area floating in space, with a pathway to the next area somewhere in its expanse.

MeiQ is so rewarding to play because of the sheer variety in the areas you’re exploring. You’re rarely confined to one “type” of floor for very long; once you overcome one challenge, rather than being presented with more of the same, you’ll instead tend to find yourself doing something different for a while.

To use the previously mentioned White Tower as an example, there are initially two interconnected floors of the grid-like maze to negotiate before you encounter a floor entirely themed around teleporters, requiring a completely different approach. Elsewhere in the game, the Blue Tower features a small floor with a variety of exits into the next area’s labyrinth, with only one providing the correct route forward. And the fire-themed Red Tower tasks you with hunting down and destroying all the statues on one of its floors to deactivate an impassable fiery barrier.

You’ll encounter a floor entirely covered with ice, where you’ll have to determine how to reach your desired destination while only being able to move in a straight line until you hit something. You’ll descend into the depths of a temple four different times from different starting points in order to open up a path to its deepest secrets. And you’ll explore an “illusionary prison” where every passageway is completely invisible until you stand next to it on the map.

There are plenty of secrets to discover, too. The main story dungeons each house a number of “sealed doors” that lead to mysterious star-filled other dimensions, some of which contain powerful Zodiac Beast bosses to defeat. There are a wide variety of treasures to discover, and quests to complete that reward you with useful items for both exploration and battle. And, with each of the four difficulty levels you beat the story’s final boss on, you unlock a new postgame dungeon to challenge.

There’s a lot to do in MeiQ, in other words, and while veteran dungeon crawlers may find its early stages rather straightforward and easy to navigate, the game is paced well and in such a way that even total beginners to the subgenre can feel confident negotiating even the most complex mazes by the end — and those looking for a stiff challenge will find what they’re looking for in the substantial postgame content.

In terms of achieving its goal of making dungeon crawlers accessible while still keeping them challenging for experienced explorers, then, MeiQ mostly succeeds admirably — perhaps slightly favouring those who err more towards the “beginner” end of the spectrum. That said, even though the game requires four clears of the main story to unlock all the postgame content, each new difficulty level ramps up the challenge factor of combat significantly, and continuing to increase in level allows you to uncover more and more powerful equipment for your characters and Guardians, so there’s always something new to discover.

Whether you have the time or patience to uncover all of MeiQ’s mysteries is entirely down to your own personal circumstances and preferences — but make no mistake, if you’re willing to go the distance, there’s a whole lot of game to love right here. And even if you aren’t, there’s still a solid, entertaining and pleasingly accessible dungeon crawler populated by some absolutely charming characters to enjoy. You certainly get your money’s worth.

Now where are those last couple of Zodiac Beasts…?

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As I write this, I have beside me a copy of the October 1997 issue of PC Zone, a then-popular, now sadly defunct PC games magazine from my homeland of the UK.

I keep this magazine around for two reasons: firstly, the walkthrough of Discworld II on page 145 was written by none other than a teenage yours truly, earned me what felt like a small fortune when I was in secondary school, and represented one of the earliest occasions on which words I had written appeared on national newsstands; and secondly, I simply enjoy looking back on old magazines and seeing how much the games industry and its members’ attitudes have changed over the years.

It’s this second point that I particularly want to explore today.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

“People everywhere these days continue to think of interactive movies as a load of rubbish, and I must admit that most of them are,” wrote Luke Bruenjes of Victoria, Australia, author of the magazine’s “Letter of the Month” and subsequent winner of a pile of promotional T-shirts that the PC Zone staff didn’t want. “But this is only because the stories are so bad. Game designers spend ages working on gameplay, interactivity, playability, puzzles and the like, when all their creative energy should be directed at developing the story. The only thing that makes a game any good is a story, not the design, the puzzles and the rest. No producers really care about the story — they tend to think that if it looks good and plays well, it will sell.”

I was interested to read Bruenjes’ thoughts from back in 1997, because they kind of mirror my own personal attitudes right now. Obviously everyone comes to games for different reasons — a question which we explored back in the early days of this column — but for me, I’m much more likely to forgive dodgy (or non-existent) game mechanics if the story, characters and game world have hooked me in and made me want to know more. But we’ll come back to that in a moment — let’s look at the response from Jeremy Wells, editor of PC Zone at the time.

“Interactive movies do tend to get a bit of a slagging, but that’s because most of the games that fall under this banner have been utterly crap,” begins Wells’ response to Bruenjes. “Take Phantasmagoria, for example. The story could have quite easily been made into a movie, but the limited level of interaction made it nice to look at, but very dull to play. When people buy games they expect to a) be entertained (it’s got to be fun) and b) be immersed. Phantasmagoria didn’t fulfil either criteria and just left people feeling frustrated because it didn’t meet their expectations of what a game should do.

“Roberta Williams (who developed Phantasmagoria and the excellent King’s Quest series of adventures), Chris Roberts (of Wing Commander fame) and LucasArts (who produced the superb Indiana Jones and Monkey Island adventures) all pride themselves on telling stories within their games,” Wells continues. “They also appreciate that gamers want a high level of interactivity, immersion and expect to be entertained. A good story isn’t enough. Look at games like Quake, which get people ducking and diving, and [Command & Conquer], which turn them into twitching megalomaniacs. Other elements are integral to the whole of the gaming equation.”

The fact that Bruenjes was writing about story being the most important thing in a game to him back in 1997 was an interesting point to me, but if anything I found Wells’ response considerably more fascinating because it represents an attitude that has undergone a much bigger shift over the years. People who feel like Bruenjes are still around — I’m one of them, as I’ve already said — but those who feel like Wells felt at the time are seemingly starting to dwindle in number.

There are, of course, still people out there who believe gameplay is king (and even those who believe that any attempt to put stories in games is “idiotic”) but the mainstream’s attitude towards games that put story first, gameplay second is changing significantly — you only have to look at the overwhelmingly positive critical response to titles such as Thatgamecompany’s Flower and Journey and Telltale’s episodic adventures to see this, not to mention the fact that a lot of people could overlook, for example, Spec Ops: The Line’s rather pedestrian third-person shooter gameplay simply because its narrative was so clever and compelling.

What has caused this shift in attitudes over the years, then? There are a number of contributing factors. Let’s first remember that back in 1997, Internet usage — at least in PC Zone’s home territory of the UK — wasn’t anywhere near as ubiquitous as it is today, and thus a lot of people got their opinions on all things game-related from newsstand publications rather than online discussion.

There were considerably fewer magazines (and writers thereof) in 1997 than there are people commenting on the Internet every day in 2013, which meant that opinions tended to be a lot more homogeneous.

If a magazine said that something was crap — like PC Zone frequently did with interactive movies – a lot of people tended to believe it without question. This is, of course, a hugely oversimplified model of media theory, but the principle is there, at least — if there are fewer reliable opinions out there for people to explore and review before making their own mind up, then there’s significantly less chance of dissent and consequently less likelihood that people will take a chance on something and occasionally find themselves pleasantly surprised.

Today, meanwhile, while we have a lot more supposed “opinion leaders” with a platform in the mainstream press than we did back in print’s heyday, we also have a lot of people more willing to put themselves out there with opinions that don’t necessarily match the “norms” of the industry. MoeGamer itself is a good example.

Consequently we find a lot more people inspired by these dissenting opinions to give things a chance that they might not have done otherwise. This is a very positive thing on the whole, as it means that the games industry of today covers a much broader spectrum of genres and demographics than it did back in 1997. It also, of course, has the negative side-effect of giving everyone a voice which, as anyone who has ever read a YouTube comments section will know, isn’t always a good  thing.

Perhaps a bigger change the industry has gone through over time, though, is a growing sense of maturity and the acceptance that a “good game” doesn’t necessarily have to have that elusive perfect balance between graphics, sound, playability and longevity that many magazines used to place an undue amount of focus on. The term “game” these days is actually a rather misleading one, because it covers experiences as diverse as the barely-interactive medium of visual novels (which, of course, is what we’re primarily concerned with in this column) to the completely freeform, unstructured “make your own fun” experiences of titles that, when they launched, were seemingly genre-defying, such as Don’t Starve, Proteus and Minecraft.

Visual novels were around even in the late ’90s, but for various reasons didn’t enjoy as much acceptance from the public in the West as they do today. Now, visual novels are still something of a niche interest outside of Japan, but we are at least getting officially-translated versions of Japanese titles for more “mainstream” systems such as PSP (Corpse Party and its sequel Book of Shadows), DS (Ace Attorney, 999), Vita and 3DS (Virtue’s Last Reward, the sequel to 999) as well as a whole string of titles for PC thanks to the efforts of specialist publishers such as Mangagamer and JAST USA.

Not only that, but we’re getting independent Western developers such as Christine Love, Winter Wolves and Hanako Games — not to mention higher-profile studios such as Telltale Games, David Cage’s Quantic Dream and Dontnod — adopting the visual novel format and variations thereof as a means of telling interactive stories, often to significant degrees of success.

It’s a sign of how far we’ve come that these games — which are often extremely light on what we’d traditionally refer to as “gameplay” — can be recognized, praised and celebrated purely on the strength of their stories, how well they tell them and their respective sense of emotional engagement rather than how “fun” they are.

Imagine how a title such as School Days HQ would have been received back in the PC Zone of 1997, for example; it would have more than likely been slated for similar reasons to those Wells used to dismiss Phantasmagoria — a “limited level of interaction making it nice to look at but dull to play.”

Back then, simply telling a great story and allowing the player to subtly influence the outcome via a few important choices wasn’t enough; nowadays, however, we live in a much more enlightened age where the fact we’re not always directly moving a little man around on screen with our joystick isn’t necessarily seen as a bad thing.

You know what? I’m fine with that. Opening your mind to new experiences and potentially finding something that really resonates with you is one of the best things about gaming today, and I wouldn’t want to change it for anything. Let’s keep being this cool, and enjoying creative works for their creativity rather than marking things off on an imaginary, arbitrary checklist.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

Although self-described feminist pop culture critic Anita Sarkeesian has abandoned her Tropes vs Women in Video Games project, she hasn’t stopped exerting her influence over an apparently enthralled games industry.

Writing on May 19, 2017, James Batchelor of industry publication Gamesindustry.biz reported on Sarkeesian’s speech at the 2017 Nordic Game conference, an annual event that describes itself as “the leading games conference in Europe”.

Sarkeesian’s 45-minute speech was called “Diversity is Not a Checklist”, and, broadly speaking, was an exhortation to the industry to better represent the diversity of its audience through playable characters, and to tell stories that “recognise the systemic oppression” that women and “people of colour” face.

Not, in itself, a bad topic to explore — though as we’ll discuss in a moment, it disregards one of the key reasons many people turn to video games as entertainment and represents just a single perspective. The main problem is, as with much of Sarkeesian’s previous work, her lack of knowledge and awareness regarding the industry outside the most high-profile parts of the Western triple-A and “in-crowd” indie spheres undermines a great many of her arguments. And, unsurprisingly, Batchelor does not take the opportunity to analyse her remarks in his report, instead simply parroting them uncritically.

Enough is enough. It’s time the industry stopped hanging on Anita Sarkeesian’s every word — or at least started thinking about the things she is saying a little more critically, and researching her claims rather than accepting them at face value. Here are 13 reasons why.

Her subject knowledge is narrow and blinkered

As we’ve already mentioned, Sarkeesian shows little to no awareness of the industry that exists outside of the “bubble” that gets reported on by the mainstream press: a bubble than consists primarily of high-profile triple-A games, and Western indie titles developed by individuals or teams who have cultivated good working relationships with staffers from the big commercial publications.

Indeed, in her Nordic Game talk, the only games she references that are not big-budget triple-A titles are Gone Home (which received a great deal of attention and praise due to it being the work of someone who previously worked on BioShock), Cart Life and Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, the latter two of which are the kind of “fashionable” indie that tend to receive a great deal of attention and celebration from the press.

In particular, Sarkeesian demonstrates no knowledge of the Japanese console games industry outside of a passing reference to Final Fantasy XV (which we’ll come to later), and likewise seemingly no awareness of game-like narrative media such as visual novels.

Is this a problem? Well, yes, it is; Sarkeesian has a habit of speaking in very broad statements that tend to tar the entirety of the industry with the same brush, when in fact the modern games business is comprised of many, many disparate parts, each doing their own thing in their own way.

To speak on behalf of the entire industry, as Sarkeesian aspires to, you need to have an awareness of all these parts, what they’re doing, who they’re catering to and why. But by then you’d probably realise that saying something as sweeping as “it’s time we actually created an industry that’s more inclusive and respectful of its audience” is a bit silly, as there are significant parts of the business that are already doing this.

She doesn’t deliver on her promises

Sarkeesian ran a high-profile Kickstarter campaign in 2012 in order to fund the production of her Tropes vs Women in Video Games web video series. It was nearly a year later before the first video emerged, and by the beginning of 2015, she had tackled only six out of the originally planned 12 topics, instead deciding to meander off in another direction. She explained this situation as being due to her increased commitments to public and media appearances.

However, at the time of writing in 2017, many Kickstarter backers are yet to receive the rewards they signed up for in 2012, and many critics still question exactly how the crowdfunding money was spent, given that the project was never really “finished” as originally promised. Given the rather simplistic nature of the videos themselves, it’s questionable as to how much budget they really required to make.

Her arguments are Feminism 101 level

Since the conclusion of Tropes vs Women in Video Games, a few more people have been willing to admit that the arguments she makes in her videos are rather simplistic at best.

Her first “damsel in distress” video, for example, spends a long time listing examples of women getting kidnapped in video games and stating bluntly that this is a “problematic” thing we should care about, while getting her facts completely wrong in a number of instances — such as inaccurately noting that Peach has “never been a playable character again in the [Super Mario] franchise” since Super Mario Bros. 2, and showing no awareness of Double Dragon Neon’s finale, in which “damsel” Marion demonstrates herself to be more than capable of sticking up for herself by punching the final boss right in the balls.

Her arguments are no more complex than “women are treated badly because of the patriarchy”, and demonstrate little to no attempt to understand how or why such tropes came to be in the first place, or indeed why many of them have such enduring popularity.

More than that, because she is the most high profile feminist critic of video games, she undermines the work of those attempting to use feminism to analyse video games in more depth. She sets the bar low, and in the process causes people to become resistant to criticism from this ideological perspective, even where there are valid discussions to be had.

She is dismissive of disagreement or debate

Comments are closed on most of Sarkeesian’s media on the grounds that she has been subject to “sexist harassment”. And, for sure, there has been a certain amount of that from the jerks of the Internet. Any high-profile figure saying controversial things is going to attract trolls, unfortunately; such is the way of an anonymous online existence in the 21st century.

But she doesn’t welcome any discussion at all. She does not engage with people in debate or tolerate criticism of her work. She demonstrates no awareness of perspectives other than her own, nor any willingness to explore these alternative viewpoints. Her way is presented as the One True Way, and the rather abrasive manner in which she delivers many of her arguments implies that she very much believes that those who feel differently to her do not hold opinions even worth considering.

She applies one theoretical model to an incredibly diverse medium

The trouble with feminist media theory is that it tends to be — in Sarkeesian’s case, at least — rather predictable and straightforward: patriarchy exists, therefore men are in positions of power, therefore women are oppressed, and media reflects all of the above. It is, of course, not that simple.

In the games business, we have people like Tsunako, the female artist responsible for the delightfully distinctive (and sexy) character designs of the Neptunia series and its stablemate Fairy Fencer F; we have Taro Yoko, who made the lead character of Nier Automata a sexy female android because he “likes girls”, but also quietly made her part of a fascinating, detailed narrative, too; we have Kenichiro Takaki, who, legend has it, brought about the Senran Kagura series because he wanted to see breasts popping out of the Nintendo 3DS’ screen, but ended up making one of the most well-realised (and large) all-female casts in all of gaming; we have Fenrir Vier, who made a visual novel about gay girls fighting demons simply because he wanted to, and believes that “diversity should be created by way of creators putting their individuality into their work”.

To write off the hard work of these creators — and the inherent progressiveness and positivity of many of their creations — because of some amorphous concept of “patriarchy” is an incredibly blinkered attitude. Not only that, but many of Sarkeesian’s “favourite” tropes to explore, such as the aforementioned “damsel in distress”, are actually used pretty rarely in modern interactive media, if you take the time to pick it apart.

She offers no solutions, only negativity

“This is problematic,” Sarkeesian will say, and there her argument stops, offering no real solutions for the “problem” she has taken great pains to point out in exacting detail.

Even in her speech at Nordic Game, she accused titles like Dishonored 2 and Watch Dogs 2 of being “little more than lip service” despite having aspects that she approved of, and noted that “they require a more complex understanding of how evil and oppression in society is actually perpetuated to go along with the richer worlds and characters”.

Well, sure, but how? That’s where her arguments tend to stop; she cites examples of games that she thinks are doing it “right” — and plenty that are doing it “wrong” — but offers no practical solutions for developers to follow or the audience to look out for. It’s all “this is bad”, not “this is how we could do this a bit better”; as most of us learned back in primary school, constructive criticism is infinitely more helpful than destructive, pure negativity.

She shows little to no awareness of works outside her comfort zone

We’ll come onto this in more detail in a moment, but a big blind spot in Sarkeesian’s subject knowledge appears to be Japanese games. Conspiracy theorists might suggest that she is actually fully aware of the wide range of Japanese games on the market today and simply chooses not to mention them because many of them completely undermine her arguments and theories, but I would never say such a thing.

No, given that I’ve seen first-hand on a number of occasions how ill-informed the mainstream commercial press can be with regard to Japanese games, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if any awareness Sarkeesian has of Japanese games is purely based on the sort of inaccurate hearsay that bans people discussing titles like Criminal Girls on the inexplicably still-popular gaming forum NeoGAF, or leads freelance reviewers to describe Hatsune Miku fans as “degenerates”.

The fact is, even if Sarkeesian does have an awareness of the industry outside the Western triple-A and indie bubble, she doesn’t demonstrate it or acknowledge it. And, as we’ve already discussed, that’s a major issue if she’s going to condemn an entire medium for its supposedly deeply entrenched sexism problem.

The press does not look at her work critically, instead idolising her

You need only look at Batchelor’s report on her Nordic Game talk for an example of this. He makes no attempt to question her claims or provide his own perspective; her words are presented as unquestionable gospel, and indeed the one acknowledgement of a dissenting view in the piece — a mention of a provocative question from an audience member — is framed as something ridiculous and worthy of derision.

The press’ inability — or unwillingness — to question Sarkeesian or disagree with her observations is primarily what has led to the situation we have with the majority of mainstream commercial sites these days, in which attempts at unqualified, unresearched feminist critique tend to be the “default” approach.

Why has this happened? It’s at least partly due to Sarkeesian’s unwillingness to engage with critics or those who wish to debate her; by lumping together the genuine trolls with those who simply disagree, as she has done on a number of occasions in the past, she has poisoned the well for alternative viewpoints, making a feminist approach the only viable option for sites that hope to maintain a “progressive” reputation.

This is a big problem, because it shuts down discussion, and suggests to the audience that there is only one “right” way to feel about things.

“Male Gaze” is an oversimplification of how players feel towards characters

Speak to a fan of a series like Neptunia or Senran Kagura and ask them what their favourite character is. Then ask them why. Chances are their answer will be considerably more complex and nuanced than “I want to fuck them”.

Sarkeesian dismisses the few female protagonists she is aware of as being oversexualised and designed with the male gaze in mind, and while it’s true that many female characters do tend to be designed to be physically attractive, assuming that this is the only thing players will care about is a gross oversimplification.

For one, this argument completely erases the existence of the substantial female fanbases of series like Neptunia and Senran Kagura, refusing to acknowledge that there are women out there who simply like these characters — or, indeed, that there are gay women out there who find these characters physically attractive, too.

It also denies the feelings of players — male, female, straight, gay — who engage fully with the characters in one way or another. One person might find a character enormously relatable. Another might like a character because they remind them of a friend or family member. Another still might simply find the character’s personality traits appealing and enjoy spending virtual time with them.

It’s pretty rare to find someone who likes a character purely because they want to fantasise about having sex with them —  because it’s pretty rare for a character to be designed purely to appeal to base desires like this. Even in the most blatantly sexualised games like the Dead or Alive Xtreme series, players still tend to gravitate towards their favourite characters because they like them as “people”, not just as something to ogle.

Hell, even in outright pornographic games like Custom Maid 3D 2, it’s hard not to get attached to the characters and develop favourites based on far more than just their physical appearance. Believe me, I know.

Japanese games feature considerably more empowered, capable women than men

The explosion in popularity of the moe aesthetic across all forms of Japanese popular media often comes under fire, particularly from people who aren’t a fan of its brightly coloured sugary sweetness. But one thing it’s impossible to argue against is the sheer number of female characters that moe has brought to the forefront of many different works.

This is reflected in modern Japanese games, too. Look at this month’s Cover Game MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death, for example, which features a core cast of five highly capable young women. Or the aforementioned Neptunia and Senran Kagura series, which feature expansive all-female casts, many of whom are gay. Or Dungeon Travelers 2, which makes its male “protagonist” almost completely useless, instead focusing on the capabilities of its huge cast of playable women. Or Nights of Azure, which features a gay woman as its protagonist.

Strong women in Japanese games actually predates the rise of moe by quite a bit. Final Fantasy, for example, has featured women in leading roles since its second installment (first if you believe, as some do, that the White Mage in the original Final Fantasy was female). Gust’s Atelier series has primarily featured female protagonists since its inception in 1997. And visual novels, shoot ’em ups and other Japanese computer games have featured ass-kicking women since the days of the PC-88 and PC-98.

In fact, many of the most enduringly popular characters from Japanese games are women. Off the top of my head (discounting anything from the PS3 era onwards, which is where “moe games” really became a thing) and in no particular order, there’s Nina and Momo from Breath of Fire III; Etna and Flonne from Disgaea; Feena from Grandia; Luna from Lunar; Aya Brea from Parasite Eve; Meryl from Metal Gear Solid; Celes and Terra from Final Fantasy VI; Aeris, Tifa and Yuffie from Final Fantasy VII; Laramee and Arcia from The Granstream Saga (high five if you played that one); and plenty more besides. I could probably go on for hours, to be quite honest, but in the interests of your sanity and my word count, I’ll stop there.

One thing all these characters have in common is that they’re memorable for far more than their physical appearance. Many of them had distinctive designs, for sure, but not one of them was designed as nothing more than fantasy bait for men. Instead, they were memorable for their personalities, their narrative arcs, their relationships with other characters, how much you as a player related to them and many other factors besides.

Cindy

Speaking of which, let’s talk about Cindy from Final Fantasy XV, who Sarkeesian specifically brings up in her Nordic Game speech in response to a question about “power fantasies”.

According to Sarkeesian, “The reason that Kratos [from God of War] is different to someone like Cindy the mechanic [from Final Fantasy XV] is that it is a power fantasy. When men are shown as beefy with rippling muscles, it’s not so men can ogle and sexualise them — it’s so you can live this power fantasy, so that you can be this tough guy that can beat up anyone or anything. That’s very different to when women are sexualised in games, it’s usually so that men can look at their bodies and fantasise about them. That’s very, very different, and living in a patriarchy dictates that we look at men and women’s bodies differently. These are not female power fantasies, because we don’t really know what that means. We haven’t really had space to design and develop that in a lot of meaningful ways.”

Cindy, unfortunately, is a poor example of this, because as we discussed some time ago, she is, by far, the most capable and competent member of the game’s entire cast. To criticise her based on her appearance is objectification in its purest form, since it not only fails to take into account the character’s own stated (and plausible) reasons for dressing the way she does, it also completely erases her contribution to the game’s overall narrative.

When the party’s car breaks down in the intro, it’s Cindy who gets it going again, since none of the core cast know how to fix it. In the latter stages of the game, Cindy is at the forefront of the resistance against demonic forces. And if you take the time to engage with her in the game, she reveals that she has an interesting and complex past that has helped shape her into the highly competent, skilled and reliable person she is today.

As we’ve already mentioned, reducing the player’s relationship with Cindy the character to one of pure lust is a gross oversimplification that is actually rather insulting.

She dismisses the idea of games as escapist fantasies, and the value of them as such

The main thrust of Sarkeesian’s Nordic Game talk was that she seems to believe the games industry has a responsibility to tackle big social issues “seriously and responsibly”.

“Until our narratives begin to reflect the issues that women, people of colour and other marginalised folks face, we’re treating the problems as if they can be solved by checking boxes on a [diversity] checklist,” she said. “We’re applying a band-aid to a deeper wound — and, don’t get me wrong, that band-aid is absolutely essential to addressing the issue, but it’s not the entire treatment.”

She describes games such as Watch Dogs 2 and Dishonored 2 as “striving to be more than mere escapism”, suggesting that escapism, in itself, is a somehow “lesser” goal for games as an entertainment medium to aspire to. And the “power fantasy” discussion ties in with this, too.

Sarkeesian, admittedly, does not suggest that all games need to carry political statements in them, but her words carry the implication that those which do are somehow superior and more worthy of praise.

In fact, there can be a great deal of value in escapist entertainment, which is worth acknowledging — particularly for those who have perhaps found themselves struggling with certain aspects of everyday life. Speaking personally, as someone with both Asperger’s and social anxiety, I have derived great value from engaging with interactive entertainment, both in the form of single-player, narrative-centric experiences and online multiplayer affairs, particularly those which are cooperative, such as Final Fantasy XIV.

As with many things Sarkeesian says, it’s an oversimplification of the real situation. By all means attempt to tackle these tricky social issues through games. But acknowledge and respect the fact that some people really are just there to immerse themselves in something that doesn’t reflect reality in the slightest.

She has played a role in making the enthusiast press boring, uninviting, exclusive, unwelcoming and insular

As we’ve already discussed, journalists in the mainstream commercial games press are completely unwilling to question or analyse Sarkeesian’s statements, and this in turn has led to widespread acceptance of feminist ideology being regarded as the only “correct” approach among many sites. Some follow its dogma more strictly than others — for some time, Polygon has been, by far, the most overt about its political leanings of all the mainstream commercial online games publications — but, much as Sarkeesian does not tolerate discussion or debate, most publications do not tolerate dissenting views when a strongly feminist perspective is laid down in an opinion piece or review.

Far from this making the industry more “inclusive”, all it achieves is alienating many of the people who have been following it for years if they have no interest in getting involved with concepts such as identity politics or feminism. It creates an exclusive “inner circle” of people who have the “correct” opinions on things, and actively discourages diversity of viewpoints.

Perhaps most unforgivably, any games that exist outside of this “inner circle” are barely given the time of day — and regrettably, that includes a lot of modern Japanese games, which are discussed on incredibly superficial levels at best — inevitably with some negative, judgemental comments about the sort of people who might enjoy that kind of thing — and completely ignored at worst.

More than anything, though it’s just plain boring. It’s boring to see members of the press comment how much they think “gamers” are going to hate new game x because it has a female protagonist (spoiler: they won’t). It’s boring to see members of the press write off stuff like Senran Kagura as having no value because of its fanservice. And it’s boring to see the same old arguments trotted out time after time from a stubbornly unyielding ideological perspective, rather than attempting to enjoy a game from the perspective of its target audience.

Sarkeesian isn’t solely to blame for this situation, of course — it’s been festering since about 2010 or so, around the time of the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle — but, without a doubt, her particular brand of high-profile, low-depth feminism has played a significant role in making the commercial games press of 2017 extremely unwelcoming to certain significant parts of its audience.

It’s time the games press stopped idolising Anita Sarkeesian, and started questioning her arguments more. It’s time the games industry as a whole stopped trying to appease people like Sarkeesian, who will perpetually pick fault in everything and seemingly never be able to derive pure joy from anything.

And it’s time Sarkeesian actually played some fucking games.

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What do you think of lengthy games such as JRPGs (or indeed Western RPGs) having multiple endings?

I remember having this discussion with a friend a while back, and he commented that he hated it when there was more than one possible outcome to the story, because he 1) hated having to repeat things and 2) hated feeling like he was “missing out” on part of the game that was “locked off” to him when he started down a particular route.

Obviously this applies more to games where your actions throughout the whole story determine which ending you get rather than a Mass Effect 3-style “which ending would you like?” decision point, but it’s a valid concern that I completely understand in this day and age. Gamers on the whole are getting older and consequently tend to have less time on their hands for lengthy games anyway – so to expect them to play through one game several times in an attempt to see different endings is perhaps unrealistic on the part of developers.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

Or is it? There are plenty of people who have ploughed several hundred hours into Skyrim – a game that can potentially go on forever — to make me think it’s perhaps not quite so unreasonable after all. But there are, of course, other considerations besides simply the amount of time it takes. Repetition, for example, can be really boring.

I became particularly conscious of this question after beating Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia. For those unfamiliar with the game, it has a rather unusual structure. It’s split into three “phases,” each of which is a self-contained story arc with a beginning, middle and finale, and each of which would probably correspond to a single disc in the PS1 era.

There are two interesting things about it, though. Firstly, the second phase has two completely different narrative paths according to which of the game’s two heroines Aurica and Misha you choose to go with; and secondly, you have the option of not playing the third phase at all if you feel satisfied that the story has reached a conclusion at the end of Phase 2. If you do choose to proceed on with Phase 3 (which is about another 15-20 hours of gameplay) you then have the option of four different endings, three of which are accessible on a single playthrough, and the other of which is accessible if you go back and play the other heroine’s route in Phase 2.

Essentially, to get a complete picture of the story, the bare minimum you need to do — pay attention — is play up to Phase 2, save before the decision point, play one girl’s route, save near the end, see her “Phase 2″ ending, reload, proceed to Phase 3, save, see the bad ending (which can occur early in Phase 3), reload, play through to the end of Phase 3, save, see one ending, reload, see the other ending, reload before the decision point in Phase 2, play the other girl’s route, save near the end, see her “Phase 2″ ending and then, if you can be bothered, play through all of Phase 3 again (which is identical except for the ending in both girls’ routes) and see the ending you couldn’t get first time around. (You can skip the replay of Phase 3 if you want to, though, as the two girls’ endings at the end of Phase 3 are rather similar to each other, and the rest of Phase 3 is the same.)

When I first heard that I was going to have to do this to see the complete story, I was a little disheartened at the prospect of going back and replaying a significant proportion of the game again. By the time I’d finished my first playthrough, as tends to happen with JRPGs, I’d developed my characters into a nigh-unstoppable fighting team and I wasn’t that keen to drop back a good 30-40 levels and do it all again — there’s no New Game+ feature here, and no visual novel–style “Skip” button to fast-forward through scenes I’d already seen or indeed whizz past them altogether.

As it happened, I was pleasantly surprised that playing through the other route in Phase 2 didn’t take anywhere near as long as I expected (about 6-7 hours, tops), and it was nicely rewarding to do so.

Rather than being the same story with some minor changes, it was instead a completely different narrative arc that not only focused on a different character, but it had a markedly different tone and style, too. Aurica’s route (which I played through first) feels like the “true” path, as it’s in this route you see all the evil machinations that the game’s antagonists are putting into motion and get to put a stop to them.

Misha’s route, meanwhile, focuses much more on the relationship between Misha and the protagonist Lyner, and includes a number of out-of-context “Meanwhile” scenes from Aurica’s route that make very little sense if you haven’t already seen them in context. Put the two together, however, and you have a complete picture of what is going on.

This sort of approach is actually nothing really very new in Japanese gaming — visual novels tend to follow structures along these lines, for example (though their narrative routes tend not to reconverge once they’ve split), with a complete view of the characters and overall plot only emerging after two or more playthroughs.

School Days HQ is a particularly good example of this in practice. It can be a very interesting and rewarding approach to telling a story that, when done well, strikes a good balance between providing a solid, satisfying experience for someone who only wants to play the game once, and giving a whole ton of additional information for those willing to put a few extra hours in.

It’s a fine line, though — for this to work, it has to be pretty obvious where the “split point” is, and repetition of stuff you’ve seen before needs to be kept to a minimum — or, alternatively, be skippable.

Ar Tonelico succeeds nicely in its handling of this difficult balance. I played through to the end of Phase 3 in my first playthrough, and stopped at the end of Phase 2 with Misha’s route because the story felt “complete” there.

I was left feeling like I had a full understanding of the story and characters, and not frustrated that I had to repeat the same 15-20 hours of Phase 3 again. And after that, I was well and truly invested in this unusual game world and its fascinating lore — and more than ready to tackle the wonderful Ar Tonelico 2: Melody of Metafalica!

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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Nintendo’s Wii gained something of a reputation as a “party game machine”, for better or worse.

The Wii U never quite captured the same success as its predecessor in this regard due to its considerably smaller audience — not to mention the rise of other types of games filling a similar niche — but that didn’t stop Nintendo in particular from producing a number of different games intended to be played socially. With other people. In the same room! Imagine that.

One such example was Wii Party U, a successor to its similarly named predecessor on the older platform. Designed to be accessible and understandable to all ages, it’s neither the most complex nor technically impressive game on the platform — but it is noteworthy for being very successful at what it does.

One of the best things about Wii Party U is that it provides a number of different ways to play, with none of them feeling like the “main attraction”. In this way, players of all ages, ability levels and attention spans can find something to enjoy, whether it’s one of the longer board-game like challenges, shorter games that focus a little more on luck, or simply playing any of the bite-size minigames for fun or competition.

Those looking for a more substantial session with friends are well-catered to by the “TV Party” games. These unfold in a somewhat similar manner to stablemate and fellow party game series Mario Party in that they tend to focus on an overarching “main game” punctuated by shorter minigames.

The easiest of the board games is a simple race to the finish line, which is straightforward to understand but suffers a little from being very hard to catch up if you find yourself lagging behind early on. That said, if everyone takes it in the spirit in which it is intended — some silly, family-friendly fun that shouldn’t be taken too seriously — it’s very enjoyable.

Probably the most enjoyable of the board game-like activities, however, is a Monopoly-style affair where players do laps of a board, collecting items of clothing by stopping on particular spaces representing shops. When they reach the stage in the centre of the board, they put on a “fashion show” and score points according to their collected items — with significant bonuses being awarded for those who have managed to collect a complete matching set, of course.

For those looking for a somewhat chance-based game of a different variety, another of the TV Party activities sees you dropping balls into a machine somewhat akin to those “2p sliders” you find in seaside arcades. The aim is to score as many points as possible by causing balls to drop into the bin in the middle of the machine on your turn, with later rounds adding additional mechanics such as the entertainingly named “avalanche of balls”, which can be triggered by dropping a ball through a moving ring. (Be quiet at the back, there.)

Each of these larger games sees its participants playing minigames at the beginning of each round. These are generally used to give the winning player an advantage of some sort — going first or being able to drop more balls into the machine, for example — but are fun and entertainingly competitive in their own right. Not only that, but they cover a variety of different styles of play, too, all while remaining simple to understand and easy to control for young players or less experienced gamers.

It’s also possible to play just the minigames in various competitive ways, too. Single-player modes allow a solo challenger to either try and set high scores in individual games or survive as long as possible against a relentless wave of computer-controlled opponents. On the multiplayer front, meanwhile, players can compete against one another in isolated minigames or in more structured tournament-style activities to see who is the best. There’s certainly a wide variety of ways to play.

On top of all this, the package provides a particularly interesting use of the Wii U’s GamePad through its “tabletop” games, which are designed to ignore the TV altogether. In these activities, players sit across from one another with the GamePad in between them — the game comes with a plastic stand to help it sit level on a flat surface — and compete against one another. These activities include a digital take on the old Screwball Scramble toy along with variations on foosball, baseball and other simple games. They’re fun, a nice change of pace and a good example of how the GamePad can be used in different ways.

Finally, the game’s last way to play comes in the form of its House Party games, which eschew the more conventional structure of the other modes and instead act as a sort of facilitator for more freeform fun. There’s a Pictionary-like game, for example, and a game that uses the GamePad’s camera to challenge players to make a face representing a particular concept. For those keen to get a bit touchy-feely, there’s even a Twister-like game where you and your friends are challenged to, between you, press a specific and awkward combination of buttons on the GamePad and four Wii Remotes.

The House Party games are all best played with a group of friends who are willing to get into the spirit of things, perhaps with a drink or two inside them, but they’re also a good technology-powered alternative to, say, the sort of parlour games older or less technologically-minded relatives may enjoy playing after a hearty roast dinner. A prime example of what the original Wii was all about — and a reminder that its successor did succeed in recapturing that fun on occasion, but not nearly enough to make it the same kind of phenomenon, sadly.

As can probably be surmised from its title, Wii Party U is not a game you buy to play by yourself for hours — though it does at least cater to those who wish to do so through its minigame challenges and the presence of a surprisingly addictive full-scale puzzle game — but rather it’s a game best enjoyed with friends and family. Its activities are simple enough to be understandable and appealing to even young players or those generally inexperienced in playing video games, and competitive enough to keep the more grizzled veterans among us satisfied. And there’s a range of activities that combine both luck- and skill-based challenges so everyone gets a chance to win rather than the resident “gamer” of the group always dominating proceedings.

All in all, Wii Party U is a fine example of the Wii U’s regrettably rather underused potential to provide party game fun. It makes good use of the GamePad and Wii Remotes in a variety of creative situations, and provides plenty of different ways to play to keep everyone happy for anywhere between a couple of minutes to an hour at a time.

In other words, for those who still see their friends and family in person semi-regularly rather than keeping in touch solely via the Internet, it’s a great addition to your collection — just don’t get too upset if you suddenly find yourself losing out to Grandma!

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Dungeon crawlers aren’t historically associated with having particularly strong stories, perhaps largely due to their origins as mechanics-heavy games with player-created parties.

A number of recent Japanese takes on the subgenre — including, among others, Demon Gaze, Operation Abyss and Dungeon Travelers 2 — have proven it is possible to blend mechanically sound, deeply absorbing dungeon crawling with a strong sense of narrative, however.

MeiQ is the latest game to follow this trend, featuring an imaginative steampunk-cum-sci-fi tale revolving around a strong, all-female central cast of characters.

We’re thrown into MeiQ initially without knowing a great deal about its world, only that something terrible has happened: the planet has stopped spinning, throwing civilisation into a seemingly eternal night and, as these things tend to go, prompting a surge in the local monster populations. Something, clearly, Must Be Done.

We join protagonist Estra as she is sent from her home village to the town of Southern Cross, where we learn she is to undergo blessing ceremonies in each of the city’s elemental-themed towers in order to prove herself worthy to open a path to the “Planet Key”, a device used to start the apparently clockwork planet rotating again.

She’s joined by four other girls from around the world, one of whom hails from Southern Cross itself, and, while they initially choose to go about things their own way as reasonably friendly rivals, circumstances ultimately dictate that they need to cooperate when the full scale of the true threat facing the world reveals itself.

We’ll come back to the characters themselves in a moment, but first it’s worth taking a look at the context in which the events of MeiQ’s narrative unfold. Little of this is made completely explicit over the course of the game’s main story — it’s primarily confined to optional lore items you can discover in treasure chests as you explore the various dungeons — but it becomes important as Estra’s adventure reaches its grand finale, and also provides considerable evidence that MeiQ’s creators have taken the time to think about the broader world in which the game unfolds, not just its dungeons.

The story of the “Planet Key” is clearly one that has been passed down as a legend from generation to generation, and forms the basis of the world’s core belief system. It’s not exactly a “religion” as such, given that there is clear proof of existence of the concepts on which the story is based — most notably the idea of “machina magic”, or magic-like effects produced by nanomachines — although it’s suggested that an actual understanding of how these things work has declined over time, with most people seemingly simply taking things on faith.

As we can discover through historical documents scattered throughout the game, the reason humanity is now residing on what we can safely assume to be an artificially created planet is due to dear old Mother Earth being torn apart by people getting a bit too enthusiastic about the power which “machina” afforded them. Specifically, humanity was initially driven underground by a large-scale machina-powered war for dominance on the surface and subsequently lived in relative peace for a period — albeit somewhat depleted in numbers. But then history repeated itself, making the planet completely uninhabitable both above and below ground.

The solution the survivors came up with was the construction of a new, artificial home, and an exodus of a select few from the devastated Earth to begin anew. From thereon, many of the details are somewhat hazy, given that it seems a considerable amount of time has elapsed between these events and the story that unfolds in MeiQ, so we’re left to infer a lot for ourselves.

One thing that is clear is that the planet stopping has happened before — part of the Planet Key legend is the story of an intrepid Machina Mage who took it upon himself to seek the blessings of the Guardians, wind the Key and start humanity’s new home spinning once again. Upon arrival at Southern Cross, Estra meets a strange cat-like being who claims to be both the elder of the city and that very mage who wound the Key many years ago, but she is understandably skeptical about this, even though the strange feline seems to know what he’s talking about.

Further documents Estra uncovers through her adventures reveal that the mage from all those years ago was known as Albert Schneider, and he proceeded through the four Towers and Southern Cross’ central temple much as Estra and her companions are now doing. He was just as naive as they were in many ways, but was also clearly a well-respected individual, as we later discover through the revelation that the game’s main villain Gagarin was once his disciple.

The pair parted ways after Gagarin sought, against Schneider’s advice, to make use of a forbidden technique to resurrect the dead — the specific dead person in question being strongly inferred to be Gagarin’s loved one, either killed on old Earth or left behind during humanity’s exodus. Gagarin, it seems, was ultimately unsuccessful in his attempts, but we can infer from his interactions with Estra and the party — and the existence of his lackeys Glen, Aria and Gordon — that in the process of conducting his research he came across the Black Machina Cores: a means through which he could gain more power, and perhaps even enough to finally bring his ambitions to fruition.

What we’re presented with in MeiQ is a technologically advanced world viewed through the eyes of a society that has, over time, regressed to a somewhat more primitive state. As such, there’s an element of “unreliable narration” going on through the entire story, particularly with regard to concepts that don’t seem to be fully explained or understood by the core characters.

Of note among these are the interiors of Southern Cross’ four elemental towers, which the residents of MeiQ’s world believe to be connected to “the Demon Realm”; recurring secondary characters and thief duo Pamela and Gans, who appear to be half-animal, half monster; and the Guardians who stand watch over the altars at the towers’ respective apexes.

The exact explanation for the Demon Realm is a matter of interpretation, given that it causes the towers to clearly defy the laws of physics in numerous ways. Pamela and Gans, meanwhile, act as a reminder that there are many strange things about this world that humanity either doesn’t fully understand — or once understood and has now forgotten. In terms of the overall structure, they also act almost as secondary antagonists; they’re not outright evil as such, but they do frequently get in the way of Estra and her companions’ quest.

The Guardians can be read in a few ways. Clearly mechanical in nature but in possession of at least rudimentary intelligence, the most obvious way to view them is as relics of humanity’s more technologically advanced past: perhaps they were created as artificially intelligent mechanical beings designed to support humanity’s efforts on the new world; perhaps they were even the very weapons that caused the old Earth to be destroyed in the global machina-powered wars. Either way, at the time of MeiQ’s story, access to them is very tightly controlled, restricted only to those who have proven their worth and ability as Machina Mages.

The understanding of what it means to be a Machina Mage apparently differs in various areas of the artificial world, as is clearly exemplified by the five core cast members.

Protagonist Estra, for example, clearly comes from a rather rural environment where living off the land is encouraged and technology does not appear to be a primary concern. She arrives in Southern Cross not really understanding her role or taking it particularly seriously, though her naturally inquisitive, energetic and enthusiastic nature means that she certainly doesn’t resent her obligations.

Estra is a cheerful character who makes a good protagonist due to her natural charisma and magnetism. Indeed, she makes an effort to be friends with all of her four fellow Machina Mages right from the outset of the game, though finds herself let down — albeit gently — by all of them to begin with. It’s not until circumstances demand they each end up having to rather humbly request her assistance that they all come together one by one, but Estra doesn’t hold this “relationship of convenience” against any of them. Indeed, the party becomes a tightly-knit group of friends by the end of the story, with Estra’s relentless positivity and determination acting as the main thing that bonds them all together.

Setia is the first character Estra meets, though she doesn’t actually join the party until much later in the story. Presented as a rather regal but shy gothic lolita — her use of “watakushi” rather than “watashi” when referring to herself in the Japanese script suggests that she’s fully aware of how she is perceived — Setia is seemingly almost as clueless about her role and responsibilities as Estra is, though in her case it is down to an almost crippling lack of self-confidence rather than actual ignorance.

During the opening hours of the game, Setia is torn between a clear desire to cling to Estra as someone to hide behind, and an apparently self-imposed obligation to try and better herself. To her credit, she does deliberately attempt to strike out on her own once the group’s exploration of the towers begins, but her adventures are riddled with misfortune, beginning with her falling down a pit trap in the very first room — one of the very few pit traps in the whole game, interestingly, in contrast to more unforgiving dungeon crawlers — and culminating with her being possessed by Aria, one of Gagarin’s Black Machina Cores.

Much later in the story, Estra and her companions manage to defeat Aria and free Setia from her influence, and Setia manages to use this as an opportunity to learn and grow rather than sinking into despair. It was her weakness and lack of confidence that allowed Aria to dominate her, she comes to conclude, and that led her to become someone she didn’t want to be. In the end, it’s Aria’s rather provocative, dominatrix-style outfit that Setia finds most horrifying out of the whole experience; it was a clear, unavoidable, visual depiction of Setia’s whole identity being completely undermined and consumed, and she knows that she’ll have to change in order to prevent that from ever happening again.

Fortunately, by this point she’s become an important member of the group as a whole — even during her long absence from the rest of them — and has a suitable support network in place to help her through the difficult process of building up her confidence. By the end of the game, she clearly still has a certain amount of shyness and awkwardness about herself, but she’s become assertive enough to speak her mind a little more, particularly when it comes to expressing her desire to spend more time with her new friends.

Maki, a resident of Southern Cross rather than a visitor as the other cast members are, is the first character to actually join Estra’s party when her Machina Core is destroyed and she is left without a Guardian. She initially appears to be the most grounded, sensible member of the group and indeed, little she does through the story does much to challenge that view. Early in the game, she is the one who understands how to get through seemingly impassable barriers, and she is by far the most knowledgeable about machina magic and the role of the Machina Mages in restarting the planet.

But Maki’s knowledgeable and mature “big sister” act conceals a rather more young-seeming, girlish side that gradually becomes apparent over the course of the story — indeed, we can strongly infer that Maki is becoming conscious of it at the same time as the player. Initially content to remain somewhat aloof from the group, speaking as a voice of reason and provider of knowledge and wisdom when necessary, Maki subsequently finds herself feeling mild pangs of jealousy when she sees the fun her fellow adventurers are having at the local hostelry, the Star Wind Inn.

One thing that all the central characters in MeiQ have in common is the fact that their abilities have set them apart from their peers in some way. Estra and Connie, who we’ll come on to in a moment, have probably led the most “normal” existences in this regard, clearly having friends and families who support them, but all of them have been pushed to pursue the quest to restart the planet by themselves and thus become isolated from “normal” society. As such, it’s understandable that they’d end up drawn to one another and find themselves socialising while “off-duty”, as it were.

The practical side of Maki initially has dominance, suggesting to her that because she already lives in Southern Cross, there’s no need for her to go and spend extra time with her adventuring fellows at the inn. But as she sees the developing friendships and affection between the rest of the group, she becomes keen to be more of a part of that, eventually resolving to stay at the inn for the duration of their adventure rather than simply retiring to her own house at the end of each day. It’s a relatively small gesture, but one that helps bring everyone closer together and help them form a coherent, tightly knit group in the end.

Flare, the next character to join the overall group, is a big contrast to Maki’s mature practicality. Very much embodying her favoured element of fire through her hot-headed, rather tsundere personality, Flare is initially aggressive and sullen towards the rest of the group, though her attitude shifts somewhat to dogged determination once she acknowledges the natural talents of her peers. Indeed, for the first couple of dungeons in the game, Flare is a fixture just inside the entrance, waiting to challenge anyone who passes to a duel. She declares Estra her “rival” shortly after the group’s adventures begin, and continues with this rather overeager desire to somehow prove herself right up until, like Maki, her Machina Core is destroyed and she is forced to ask for help.

In typical tsundere fashion, however, Flare is rather proud and unyielding, and does not acknowledge any sort of perceived “weakness” easily. Even when Estra and Maki save her from a potentially fatal fire trap in the Red Tower, she finds it difficult and awkward to say “thank you”, though over time Estra’s influence softens her somewhat. When the entire party finds itself trapped in a room filling with poison gas, Flare, assuming she’s going to die and thus not under any obligations to deal with the consequences of what she is about to say, hastily lets out all of the emotions she’s been repressing for the rest of the game, expressing her true affection towards her new friends and her gratitude for them sticking by her even when she acted like a spoiled bitch towards them. Which is quite a lot of the time.

Like Setia, Flare comes to recognise that a core part of her personality is holding her back — in her case, from forming meaningful bonds with people. She recognises that she needs to redirect her fiery temper: she’s never going to get rid of it completely, because that’s just the sort of person she is, but there are more productive ways in which she could make use of that aggressive energy. By the conclusion of the story, we see a new Flare: one who acknowledges what her friends mean to her, but who also has a sincere desire to be “the best”, using her companions’ abilities and talents as motivation to continually progress and improve.

Finally, Connie is the embodiment of youthful exuberance and natural energy, making her a good fit for the wood element. The most “unsullied” of the cast, there isn’t a cynical bone in her childlike body, and her presence is generally a signal that the general mood is about to get a whole lot more cheerful.

She’s an interesting study in contrasts, though. While Estra’s first encounters with her in the Black Tower see our heroine looking on in bewilderment as Connie spins around and around on the spot, seemingly simply for the pure joy of doing so, it doesn’t take long to realise that, out of the whole group, Connie is one of the people who takes her mission most seriously. She feels she has a lot to prove — primarily to her friends back home — and thus sometimes finds herself stepping into dangerous situations a little too hastily than the others might like.

She’s a good complement to Estra in many ways; while they’re both energetic, cheerful characters, Connie’s childish innocence often serves to act as a dramatic contrast with the darker moments in the story and the unpleasant activities Gagarin and the holders of the three Black Machina Cores get up to. Estra, meanwhile, embodies optimism and positivity, which are essential qualities for a leader — particularly in a story with this sort of tone to it — and thus makes an eminently suitable centrepiece for the rest of the narrative to revolve around.

As with most dungeon crawlers, ultimately MeiQ is primarily about exploring sprawling grid-based maps, beating up enemies and taking their stuff. What its strong characterisation and entertaining — if, at times, clichéd — narrative provide, however, is a convincing, solid sense of context: a feeling that the things you’re doing are part of something bigger, and that they have meaning.

By the time you reach the post-game, whose narrative justification is nothing more than the core cast wanting to spend a bit more time training and hanging out with one other before going their separate ways, you’ll have a good sense of who these characters are and what the world they occupy is really like. That, in turn, gives you, the player, a strong feeling of attachment to them as much more than just collections of stats — and, for many, will be ample incentive to pursue the challenges of the post-game dungeons and higher difficulty levels.

MeiQ isn’t great “literature”, or whatever the video game equivalent might be. What it is, however, is a warm, friendly, comforting experience in a subgenre historically known for being quite unwelcoming to newcomers. A big part of that feeling comes from its characterisation and unfolding narrative. And that feeling, in turn, helps to make MeiQ one of the most approachable dungeon crawlers out there — and a great introduction to the genre for those who have never quite had the confidence to try one before.

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As we’ve already established, Qute’s Eschatos is an absolutely fabulous shoot ’em up that every fan of the genre should have in their collection.

Its predecessors are still very worthwhile games in their own right, too; while technologically rather more primitive than the 60fps cinematic polygonal action of Eschatos, their 2D pixel art and chiptune soundtracks have a great deal of charm to them — and, most importantly, they’re damn fun to play.

Today I wanted to particularly look at Cardinal Sins, one of the two games that eventually begat Eschatos. Technically a freeware spinoff of Eschatos’ true predecessor Judgement Silversword, Cardinal Sins is arguably the most interesting of the two games, for reasons that will become apparent.

Judgement Silversword and Cardinal Sins have their origins on the forgotten (and Japan-only) treasure of a 16-bit handheld console, the Wonderswan Color. This system, today primarily known as the original source of the modernised versions of the first two Final Fantasy games, had a number of interesting features about it, but for shoot ’em up fans one of its coolest aspects was the fact it could be played in a vertical orientation. This was an option that hadn’t been present in a handheld since Atari’s doomed Lynx console in the ’90s, although the Wonderswan Color had a considerably smaller, more comfortable form factor than the grotesque bulkiness of Atari’s system.

Judgement Silversword was first released in 2004, and subsequently followed up by Cardinal Sins, which was released for free via the Internet as what the developers called a “Recycle Edition” of Judgement Silversword. It would be 2011 before these two games would come to a wider audience thanks to the region-free (but also Japan-only) Xbox 360 release of Eschatos and its two predecessors, and 2015 before worldwide audiences could enjoy the three games on PC without having to import anything. Lucky that they were worth the wait then, eh?

Judgement Silversword and Eschatos have a lot in common in that they’re vertically scrolling shoot ’em ups in which you proceed through a linear sequence of stages, defeating waves of enemies and battling bosses while attempting to score as many points as possible. The two even have rather similar scoring mechanics that reward skillful clearing of complete enemy waves without letting any slip by, and both are very much worth your time.

Cardinal Sins is a little different, however. Building on the foundation of Judgement Silversword’s audio-visual assets, Cardinal Sins eschews the usual shoot ’em up structure in favour of a series of trials themed around both the Seven Deadly Sins and the planets of our solar system. Each of these trials requires you to do more than simply shoot all the enemies and survive: they all have a core objective, on which you are graded once the stage is over.

The “Sloth” stage, for example, sees you stockpiling as many 1-ups as possible while trying not to shoot them — an error that the game berates you succinctly for with a pixelated “NO!” on the screen every time you do it — while the “Greed” stage sees you gathering enemy data by destroying enemies, witnessing their different attack patterns and countering their attacks where possible.

The stages all reflect the sins they are themed around to varying degrees: in the aforementioned “Sloth”, for example, it is in your interest to not be quite as relentless as you might normally be in a shoot ’em up because you may end up destroying a precious 1-up; in “Greed” meanwhile, it’s easy to get carried away attempting to gather data from a hard to reach enemy and find yourself ploughing right into an oncoming barrage of bullets.

Unusually, running out of lives in Cardinal Sins doesn’t mean the end of your game. Instead, it simply causes you to fail the stage you are on and proceed to the next one. However, failing a stage in this way does lock you out of the final boss fight and the actual ending of the game — reaching the “end” with at least one blot on your copybook in this regard simply rewards you with a “Thank you for playing!” message before inviting you to try again.

Make it through the “Wrath” stage, however — whose objective is simply “don’t die”, with your final grade being inversely proportional to how many times you disobeyed this rather simple-sounding instruction — and you’ll get to take on the strange “mirror” final boss, whose form changes according to how well you performed in the rest of the game. Successfully defeat it and it’s strongly suggested that your efforts throughout the game have brought about the Apocalypse, so good job if you get that far, hero.

Cardinal Sins is such an appealing game because it subverts a lot of the things you typically expect from a shoot ’em up. It’s not purely about trying to destroy as many enemies as possible — though a couple of stages do emphasise this side of things — but rather about first of all figuring out exactly what the game is asking you to do, then working out exactly how you’re supposed to achieve it.

In some regards, it’s quite like Triangle Service’s Shmups Skills Test, only less obviously split into discrete, unrelated minigames; while each of Cardinal Sins’ stages has its own focus and set of core mechanics, the entire experience feels coherent thanks to its consistent audio-visual presentation and strong degree of polish — impressive when you consider the relatively limited power of the system that originally played host to the game.

In the end, Cardinal Sins is mostly noteworthy for trying to do something a bit different with a genre that often relies on rather safe conventions — and successfully creating an enormously addictive, compelling game as a result. Even now, all these years after its original release, it remains one of the most enjoyably varied, challenging and fascinating variants on the shoot ’em up genre that we’ve ever seen — and a great means of sharpening your skills if you feel like you might be getting a bit rusty.

Judgement Silversword and Cardinal Sins are available for Windows PC via Steam, and are also bundled on the Japan-only physical release of the Xbox 360 version of Eschatos.

NO!

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With a lot of the games I’ve played over the last few years — including many of the visual novels that I’ve read — I’ve found myself thinking “gosh, I really wish I had this when I was a teenager.”

Not just from a technical standpoint — though naturally the games of today look and sound considerably better than those of 15 years ago — but from the perspective of subject matter and the willingness to tackle issues that simply would have been unthinkable to see in a video game of the ’90s.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

A lot of people complain that much of modern anime (and, by extension, visual novels, which are a closely-related medium) is “slice of life” stuff that stars middle- or high-school kids getting up to relatively normal things, and that this isn’t anywhere near as interesting as, say, giant robots kicking each other in the mechanical testicles.

And they may have a point there — who doesn’t love themselves some high-tech bollock-busting? —  but I do feel that there’s a very good reason for such a strong focus on this particular era of characters’ lives in works like this: it’s that a broad spectrum of people can relate to it in some form or another.

For people who are a similar age to the characters in the story, they can relate directly to the experiences that they’re seeing. Perhaps something happens throughout the course of a “slice of life” anime or VN that is almost exactly the same as something which  has happened to them, and from seeing how the characters deal with it, they might get some ideas on how to resolve their own situation.

This, of course, relies on the characters in the VN or anime reacting in a realistic or at least plausible manner to the situations that they are confronted with, which isn’t always the case, but at the very least seeing these issues acknowledged in a creative work might give a teen who is struggling some hope that there are other people out there who have been through trying times, and that they’re not alone.

The choice-based gameplay of multi-route visual novels offers an even greater benefit for these people over the passively-observed anime or kinetic novel media, too — it affords the player/reader a safe environment in which they can “try out” different reactions to various situations and see what might happen as a result. Again, how truly valuable this experience is depends on how realistically the characters have been written, of course!

All this doesn’t mean that those who are a little older — like me — can’t get anything from these works, though. On the contrary, the reader seeing a group of fictional high school kids go through a familiar experience from their own past can be a powerful, emotionally resonant experience. Never underestimate the power of making someone think “I remember that” or sigh wistfully “I wish I’d handled that differently.”

The strength of the high school “slice of life” setting, then, is that it can remain relevant to a broad spectrum of people, even those who are no longer actually in that same situation themselves.

The thing with high school is that it is a time of great flux for many people. Not only are people going through physical changes at that time in their life, but they are also undergoing mental and emotional upheavals, too — struggling to “find themselves” and understand their place in the world with regard to everything from their potential career path to their sexuality.

This process doesn’t begin or end at high school, of course — well into my thirties, I’m yet to feel like I’ve truly “defined” myself in many ways — but high school is an important time, a period of one’s life where you get your first taste of independence and adulthood, and a time where you have to learn to stand on your own two feet.

The reason I’m writing about all this today is because of Kira Kira, which I last mentioned a few weeks ago.

Kira Kira, lest you’re unfamiliar, tells the tale of a soon-to-disband after-school club who decide to form a punk rock group as a means of giving their club a fond farewell. I will refrain from too many spoilers right now, but I will note that their performance at school is far from the end of their story. Instead, the narrative continues to develop down one of a number of different paths — each themed around one of the game’s love interests, as these things tend to go — in which the main cast of four all learn a bit more about themselves and the way they see the world.

Kira Kira, despite starring a bunch of wide-eyed 18-year olds, is still a powerful, relevant experience to me as a thirtysomething man who left education behind a long time ago. The story deals with everything from how you present yourself to the world — explored through an amusing subplot in which the protagonist finds himself in drag for most of the game’s duration — to how you deal with difficulties in your life that are beyond your own control, like family problems or poverty.

It’s thought-provoking, emotionally engaging and a compelling read, yet at no point does it feel like it’s becoming heavy-handed with the points it’s making. Instead, it simply provides a (relatively) realistic exploration of how a disparate group of four teens from very different backgrounds feel about the world — and about each other.

The thing I particularly appreciated about it in its early hours is that it doesn’t hold back on difficult subjects, yet doesn’t become preachy about them. At one point during one of the routes, for example, the protagonist and one of the other characters come across a pretty young girl who is clearly having some difficulties in her own life, and is expressing her frustration through things like self-harm and running away to join an unspecified religious group.

While the game depicts the characters’ reactions to this girl and the way she is dealing with her problems, it never feels like the game is talking down to the player and saying that “this is wrong” or “this isn’t how you should deal with things.” Instead, it presents things in a somewhat matter-of-fact manner and implicitly encourages the player to come to their own conclusions about how they feel, rather than urging them to respond in a specific way.

In this sense, it has a certain amount in common with a couple of good anime series from a few years ago, including Welcome to the NHK, which looks at the phenomenon of hikikomori (shut-ins) and the way they react to society at large, and the more recent Oreimo, which explores, among other things, how various groups and individuals respond to otaku culture.

Neither of these shows are overtly judgemental about their subject matter — the characters in the shows might be, of course, but the shows themselves are encouraging their viewers to make up their own mind about how they feel, and such is the case with Kira Kira. In all of these cases, too, they’re not afraid to infuse the things they have to say with some lighthearted humor.

In short, then, look past the colorful graphics, attractive characters and excellent soundtrack, and Kira Kira is a game that has something to say — and one which a wide variety of people will be able to enjoy and get something from.

If you want to check out Kira Kira for yourself, you can find the adults-only bundle with the Curtain Call follow-up here, and the all-ages version here.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

MangaGamer links on this page are affiliate links; if you make a purchase via one of these, MoeGamer will receive a small commission, for which I thank you in advance!

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If you’ve been gaming as long as I have, you probably remember an outfit called Working Designs.

Working Designs was an American publisher from the PS1 era that specialized in the localization of Japanese games — particularly RPGs, strategy games and shmups — and quickly gained a reputation at the time for being one of the best in the business.

The primary reason for this reputation was the fact that Working Designs’ Western releases of Japanese hits weren’t just straight word-for-word literal translations — rather, they were genuine localisations that made appropriate use of Western slang, turns of phrase and even popular culture references to give them a unique feel all of their own.

While opinions on this approach to localisation vary today, the effort the team made to make these games as approachable as possible was very much appreciated by the audience of the time.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

As a Brit, I unfortunately didn’t get to play that many of Working Designs’ titles, a lot of which remained confined to American shores during the PS1 era, but a couple do stick in my mind even now — The Adventures of Alundra, which saw a European release via Psygnosis, and the Lunar series, the first PlayStation-based entry of which was one of the first games I ever imported from overseas, and for which I had to do the then common-knowledge trick of holding my PS1′s disc cover open with a pen lid while swapping CDs during the boot process. Ah, the good old days.

Both of these games are excellent titles that still stand up very well today, as it happens. Let’s look at both of them briefly in turn.

1997′s The Adventures of Alundra, or simply Alundra as it was known in the States, was an action RPG by Matrix Software, a team made up of former developers of the Landstalker series on Genesis. In fact, Alundra was considered by many to be a spiritual successor to the Landstalker series, though it had little in common with its predecessors beyond a similar-looking aesthetic and a protagonist who had boots that were much too big for him.

Lazy critics were quick to compare Alundra to the Zelda series, and indeed there are a number of elements in common between the PS1 title and Nintendo’s classic series, though just as many differences.

Controversial opinion alert: I found Alundra to be a more satisfying experience than its contemporary Zelda: Ocarina of Time, largely because of the former’s darker, more mature plot, memorable characters and frustratingly difficult but immensely satisfying puzzles. (There’s also the fact that Alundra’s beautiful 2D pixel art simply looked a whole lot better than the blurry textures and low polygon counts of Nintendo’s classic.)

At this time we were, for the most part, in the era before online walkthroughs were a commonplace sight, remember, so being able to get your head around a particularly tricky problem in Alundra was something that made you feel absolutely great.

For the most part, puzzles were of the “slide slidey things around until they’re in the right place” variety, but these were often combined with platforming segments in which you had to figure out exactly what path you were trying to make with the objects and then not only make it, but successfully traverse it, too.

Alundra’s gameplay was just part of the appeal, though. Where Working Designs came in was in the excellent writing. Although the titular hero is a silent protagonist, the other characters were crafted so well that this didn’t matter too much. The quality job that the team at Working Designs had done helped you feel like a real part of the increasingly dark and twisted narrative as it weaved its way towards its conclusion.

The nature of the story and characters, which saw Alundra and his friend Meia delving into people’s dreams to free them from nightmares, also allowed for some surprisingly deep and hard-hitting exploration of the characters, tackling themes such as alcoholism and multiple personality disorders.

If you want to play Alundra today — and if you’re a fan of action RPGs with a bit more challenge and depth than the Zeldas of the era, you should — then you can grab a copy from PSN now.

The Lunar series, meanwhile, were more traditional JRPGs, unfolding from a top-down perspective and featuring turn-based combat. What set them apart from their numerous other rivals at the time, however, was, again, the impressive job that Working Designs did on their localisation.

Due to the quality of their English language script, both Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue for PS1 remain some of my favorite JRPGs of all time, even though their core gameplay was relatively unremarkable in comparison to some of the other more technologically advanced offerings of the time.

At least some of this relatively conventional gameplay was due to the fact that both PS1 games were in fact significantly enhanced remakes of much earlier Sega CD titles, which were also localized by Working Designs.

Both Lunar games on PS1 were particularly noteworthy for their high-quality anime sequences that punctuated important narrative moments — one of the big additions over the Sega CD originals. These animations, along with some lengthy fully-voiced sequences using in-game graphics, helped give the whole experience a highly dramatic, cinematic feel despite its rather simplistic presentation — and despite the fact that the chubby in-game sprites didn’t really look a whole lot like the attractive, realistically-proportioned characters in the anime sequences.

If you want to play Lunar today, you have a few options, though none are completely identical to the PS1 version, sadly, and many of them vary quite significantly in quality. Your best bet is trying to track down an original PS1 disc — though be prepared to pay collector’s prices!

It’s sad that Working Designs no longer exists in its original form, but company founder Victor Ireland is still working in the industry today through his new(ish) company Gaijinworks. The company has only released a few games to date and is arguably yet to recapture the former glory of Working Designs — particularly in a market that has changed significantly since the PS1 era — though to their credit they have managed to ensure that former Working Designs titles such as the Arc the Lad Collection and Alundra have been rereleased on PSN.

It’s also worth noting, however, that Working Designs was by no means the only company out there doing high-quality translation and localisation work on Japanese titles. Small outfit Carpe Fulgur, for example, is dedicated to localizing interesting Japanese role-playing games on PC, with three excellent titles available to date under their own banner and a significant contribution to Falcom and Xseed’s epic Trails in the Sky series.

Meanwhile, outfits such as Playism and Nyu Media are dedicated to partnering with other localisation specialists to bring the best of lesser-known Japanese games to us Westerners, and larger publisher-localisers such as the aforementioned Xseed, NIS America, Aksys Games and Idea Factory International are all working hard to ensure we get our recommended daily intake of localised Japanese titles.

There’s never been a better time to be a fan of Japanese games, but as the two titles under discussion today show, there’s plenty of goodness to enjoy if you look back a few console generations, too!

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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There comes a point where something becomes so popular that it’s impossible to ignore, even if your initial reaction to it is “I’m not sure I want to get involved with that.”

Such is the case with Granblue Fantasy, a free-to-play mobile game developed by Cygames and published on the popular Japanese Mobage platform.

Granblue Fantasy is an interesting case because not only is it still immensely popular on its home turf even three years after its original release, it’s also managed to pick up a significant English-speaking following, even without an official release on high-profile digital storefronts such as Apple’s App Store for iOS and Google Play for Android.

So why this game? What sets it apart from the myriad other free-to-play games on the market? Only one way to find out: let’s take an ongoing look at it from the perspective of a newcomer.

Please indulge me a moment while I provide some context to my perspective and preconceptions.

During the period between my time on the sadly defunct GamePro and Gamer Network’s US-based offshoot USgamer, I worked for an organisation called Inside Network, who provided a detailed stat tracking service for developers and publishers of mobile and social games as well as a number of websites that provided business-facing news and reviews about the latest trends in this particular sector.

This was at the height of the Facebook gaming boom: “social gaming”, as it was called, was big news and big business, and everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of the pie. Unfortunately, the kind of people who were interested in making a quick buck off the back of the hottest new tech trend at the time were not, to put it politely, particularly good game designers, and as such the market became utterly saturated with titles attempting to imitate the initial success of popular titles like Zynga’s Farmville.

It was around this time that Japan was starting to ramp up its efforts in a similar field, but rather than tying their games to a social network, they instead opted to focus on mobile devices. This made a lot of sense: free-to-play social games were typically designed to be played in short spurts during periods of downtime rather than focused on for hours at a time, though those who did wish to engage with them for more than a few minutes at once always had the option to pay up for various benefits ranging from refilling their finite “energy” resource (which limited the amount you could play in one go) to getting shortcuts to obtaining powerful items and equipment.

One of the first Japanese mobile games I stumbled across during this period was an earlier title from Granblue Fantasy developer Cygames, known as Rage of Bahamut.

Rage of Bahamut was not an impressive game, especially when compared to many of the Western mobile games of the period. While Western developers were attempting to test the boundaries of what these portable devices were capable of in terms of graphical power and what players were willing to put up with in terms of touchscreen controls, Rage of Bahamut quietly sidled up as a completely HTML-based game that looked and behaved like a website from the late ’90s.

There was no sound, everything you did required an entire image-heavy page of HTML to load and render and gameplay was limited to randomly drawing (admittedly beautifully illustrated) cards of varying value and rarity then tapping on an “Advance” button, watching an experience bar rise and a stamina bar fall. Occasionally you’d have a “battle”, which consisted of the game comparing the total attack value of your cards against the defensive value of an opponent, with the winner being decided automatically with no input required from you.

As you progressed through the game, additional features became available, some of which involved indirectly and asynchronously interacting with other players, and Cygames continually supported the game with new content over its lifespan. But its core mechanics remained pretty simplistic and it never really embraced the capabilities of modern mobile devices to the fullest — presumably in an attempt to allow as wide a variety of players on as wide a variety of devices as possible to play.

On paper, it was pretty rubbish, then, and it certainly soured me personally on free-to-play mobile titles from Japan — but it somehow managed to become extremely popular both in Japan and overseas despite its numerous flaws. In fact, the English language version alone managed to survive from 2012 right through to early 2016, which is a very long time for this kind of game to keep on trucking, particularly in the West — and the game has since spawned two anime adaptations, so it was evidently doing something right to elicit that kind of popular cultural penetration.

Core to Rage of Bahamut’s appeal — and core to the appeal of the vast majority of Japanese mobile games that have come out since — is the idea of the “gacha”, a means of drawing new “things” to use in the main core of the game. The exact “things” you draw vary from game to game, but they usually involve characters, weapons, special abilities or some combination thereof, and are intended to provide the feeling of playing a collectible card game, complete with the aspect of simply enjoying the impressive artwork.

While these games often have a sense of structure and a narrative tying things together, the real appeal for most players is in amassing a collection of the rarest possible cards in order to make their party as powerful as possible, and consequently able to take on the game’s toughest challenges. Unlike physical collectible card games, however, there is no trading between players, so you’re entirely tied to the whims of the game and the odds it provides of drawing the rarer cards.

Most games of this type provide various means of drawing new cards. Some provide the opportunity to draw either for free or using a currency you can earn in the game, but these typically provide common, weak cards. Others allow you to acquire common cards as “loot” by playing the game. All tend to monetise by allowing you to expend a premium currency on guaranteeing yourself a card of at least “rare” or “three star” quality, possibly higher; the more generous titles allow you to earn this premium currency by progressing through the game as well as paying up, while others require that you spend real money to obtain it.

The latter case is becoming rather more rare these days; while these games can prove extremely profitable for their developers if they become successful, much of their income tends to come from a relatively small, dedicated group of players with deep pockets (often referred to less-than-affectionately in the West as “whales”), with the remainder preferring to play for free as much as possible.

So where does this leave Granblue Fantasy, in many ways a spiritual successor to Rage of Bahamut?

Well, it’s kind of interesting, really. At its core, it’s very similar in structure to its precursor: you proceed through a linear sequence of areas, expending energy to do so; you engage in battles in which success is largely determined by ensuring you have bigger numbers than your opponents; you draw new “cards” to power yourself up. And yet the whole thing becomes a significantly more satisfying experience with the simple addition of a bit more audio-visual polish and a significant chunk of genuine, honest to goodness “gameplay”.

That audio-visual polish is particularly noteworthy, especially for longstanding fans of popular Japanese role-playing franchises: Granblue Fantasy’s 2012 release saw the reunion of Final Fantasy series composer Nobuo Uematsu and art director Hideo Minaba for the first time since 2007’s Lost Odyssey on Xbox; the pair had previously worked together on Final Fantasy VI and IX for Super NES and PlayStation respectively.

It’s not just about pretty art and stirring music, however — though both of these are, it has to be said, rather spectacular in their own right. Granblue Fantasy also features a strong narrative aspect with full Japanese voice acting for its main story scenes, and partial voice acting for others. There’s also a strong cast of characters introduced right from the outset, and unlike many other games of this type that attempt to incorporate narrative into their overall structure, the characters involved actually participate in the story rather than acting as simple visual representations of mechanics.

All this helps give Granblue Fantasy a strong feeling of being a “proper” game rather than “just a mobile game”. While its HTML-based origins are still somewhat apparent in places — particularly with its frequent loading breaks — it looks, sounds and feels much more polished than many of its spiritual precursors, making it a much more satisfying experience to play as a result.

And, to add to that feeling of it being a “proper” game, Granblue Fantasy’s battles demand much more in the way of involvement from the player. Long gone are the days of Rage of Bahamut’s completely automated combat, thankfully; Granblue Fantasy instead adopts a turn-based system whereby the player and enemy parties take it in turns to make use of skills and unleash physical attacks on their opponents.

We’ll explore the details of the battle mechanics in a future installment, but suffice to say for now that the addition of these interactive battle scenes goes a long way towards making Granblue Fantasy a much more appealing game to play than earlier titles such as Rage of Bahamut. It’s definitely a strong step in the right direction, particularly with the heavy amount of customisation possible once you’ve built up a decent collection of cards.

Interestingly, despite its popularity both in Japan and overseas, Granblue Fantasy hasn’t seen an official Western release. Instead, Cygames acknowledged the significant proportion of the English-speaking userbase who had been playing the Japanese language version by simply adding an English language option to the Japanese incarnation of the game. In this way, those who had already been playing for some time would be able to keep their progress, while those who wanted to start from the beginning would be able to enjoy the story in full in a language they could understand.

The unfortunate side-effect of this is that it’s not quite as straightforward as it could be to get started with Granblue Fantasy, but if you want to check it out for yourself, you can do so on iOS by signing up for a Japanese iTunes account on the App Store and then searching for the game; Android users, meanwhile, can find the game reasonably simply by going via a service such as QooApp — you’ll need to enable downloads from non-trusted sources (or “sideloading”) to use this.

If you want to play on the Web, meanwhile, there’s an official Chrome extension here that makes life nice and easy for you.

Next time, we’ll look in more detail at how Granblue Fantasy’s core mechanics work, and what you can expect from your first few hours in the game.

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Gravity Rush is an interesting series. Originally intended as something of a flagship title for Sony’s Vita handheld, its first installment was well-received but passed a lot of people by.

Fortunately, it managed to get a second chance at success thanks to an enhanced port for PlayStation 4 by Bluepoint Games, the company previously responsible for the PS3 versions of God of War and Team Ico’s classics Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. And, from there, it did well enough to spawn a true sequel, this time specifically designed for the PlayStation 4.

The two games are both excellent, but both suffered somewhat from poor release timing and, in the case of the first game, the somewhat niche-interest status of the Vita as a platform in the West. Consequently, they haven’t had nearly as much love as they deserve from the general public.

What better reason to take a closer look at where this series came from and why you should check it out, then?

Gravity Rush is the brainchild of Keiichiro Toyama, a director and writer who previously brought us the original Silent Hill on PS1 as well as the unusual horror series Siren. His aim with the new game was to buck the trend for photorealism that most Western developers were going for at the time — and still are, in most cases — and instead produce something that evoked the distinctive feeling of French cartoonist Jean Giraud’s work and the broader Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées tradition.

Toyama’s desire to combine European influences with quintessentially Japanese anime and manga styles was an attempt to give Gravity Rush a sense of global appeal and ensure that the characters were “accepted” outside of Japan.

Indeed, the final result of the team’s work was so successful in this regard that it’s hard to pick fault with it even from the strictest and most unforgiving of modern “progressive” perspectives: the game features a protagonist who is not only female but also dark-skinned, and the overall narrative sees her demonstrating her capability in the face of adversity without sacrificing her innate femininity or indeed her most endearing traits and flaws.

Kat, as we’ll explore more later, is an immensely appealing heroine, and one of the most compelling reasons to check out Gravity Rush. But let’s look a little more generally at the game first.

Gravity Rush began life as a PlayStation 3 project called Gravité — the original French title and numerous French-inspired aspects of the game’s overall aesthetic are almost certainly references to Toyama’s desire to produce something evocative of 20th century Franco-Belgian comics — and actually hasn’t changed a huge amount from its original incarnation. Cancelled and prototype game archiving site Unseen64 has a good series of screenshots and scans that show the recognisable figures of central characters Kat and Raven, the distinctive comic-style cutscenes and the game’s strong use of signature colours fully intact.

The shift to Vita came about partly due to the game’s unusual control system and the platform’s inherent suitability for Toyama’s overall vision for the game. Speaking with Gematsu in 2012, Toyama described the Vita as being perfect for creating “the impression of a different world existing beyond the screen” through its motion controls; indeed, the augmented reality-style way in which you can move the game’s camera by simply pointing the Vita in different directions made for a surprisingly effective illusion that the device was a “window” to another world that continued far beyond the direction in which you happened to be looking at the time.

The newer PS4 releases still support motion controls, but the effect is not quite as convincing on a static screen that you’re not holding in your hands like a camera viewfinder; it’s a shame that the series, at this time, doesn’t support PlayStation VR.

Speaking with Siliconera in 2011, Toyama noted that Gravity Rush had been a long time coming, with his desire to create a game of this type predating even his work on PS1 classic Silent Hill. Toyama claims that Gravity Rush was actually the first game he wanted to create, but the fact the fledgling survival horror genre had become fashionable at the time thanks to Resident Evil led Konami to suggest he work on a horror game first. “After that I was labeled as the horror game guy,” mused Toyama, reflecting on the fact he followed up the original Silent Hill with three titles in the disturbing Siren series. “Finally, the opportunity to show people I can make something different came up and I got to make Gravity Rush.”

It’s clear that Toyama used some of the lessons he learned in producing Silent Hill for Gravity Rush, though. Both games incorporate a semi-open world, for example, though Gravity Rush’s greater freedom of movement thanks to protagonist Kat’s ability to simply “fall” through the air in any direction doubtless made it a much greater challenge to design in a way that will still tax the player and “gate” areas of the game until a suitable amount of progress has been made. In Gravity Rush’s case, this gating is handled as a plot element; part of Kat’s overall quest is to bring back missing segments of town that have been pulled into otherworldly, surreal “rift planes”, with various areas and challenges being inaccessible until this rescue mission is complete.

Perhaps a more important lesson learned from Silent Hill, though, is the matter of making the protagonist a very “human”, relatable sort of character. The whole Silent Hill series has primarily been based around very mundane, non-heroic protagonists with no real special powers and a certain reluctance to get involved with the events unfolding around them, and this makes it easy for the player to relate to them — “normal people can be heroes too”, is one message you can take from it, although in the case of Silent Hill’s numerous tragically flawed characters from over the years, “hero” might not be quite the right word here.

Gravity Rush, meanwhile, adopts a somewhat different approach by making Kat inherently “special” thanks to her abilities, but it also humanises her immensely through her distinctly immature, girlish personality and the strong impression that she’s neither entirely comfortable with her powers nor sure that she actually wants them.

Rather than gracefully flying through the air like a superhero, she twists, turns and tumbles, arms and legs flailing, and typically lands rather heavily, sometimes even falling flat on her face. Couple this endearing clumsiness with her distinctly upbeat personality (and disproportionate obsession with obtaining approval and validation from everyone around her) and you get the impression of someone who has been suddenly provided with powers that they don’t quite understand, but are willing to explore and experiment with.

Kat is a character filled with the optimism of youth and a strong desire to do the “right” thing despite not being quite sure of her place in the world, but she never crosses the line into overblown melodrama; she’s simply an immensely likeable, relatable young girl who happens to be able to fling herself through the sky in whatever direction she pleases thanks to her magic gravity-shifting cat.

In terms of actual gameplay, Gravity Rush and its sequel are both quite challenging to define neatly using established genre descriptors, and this fact is one of the many things that makes them so appealing. They have elements of open-world games, for example, but don’t litter their map with excessive amounts of “theme park” activities just there to pad out the game length. Similarly, they have elements of role-playing games in that Kat gains in power over the course of her adventure, but they’re not games in which you can “grind” easily, nor do you need to.

There’s a bit of character action gameplay in there, too, but combat is relatively infrequent rather than the main focus. And the collectibles and timed challenges scattered around the game world give a feeling of classic platform games ranging from Rare’s collectathons of the N64 era to slightly more recent titles such as Naughty Dog’s Jak and Daxter.

Ultimately, it’s probably counter-productive to attempt to define Gravity Rush and its sequel in terms of existing games, because although they both have common elements with many different genres, they’re distinctive experiences in their own right — even from each other. Gravity Rush is Gravity Rush, in other words, and that’s what makes these games so interesting: they have a clear vision of what they want to do, even if that happens to be bucking the trends and laughing in the face of gaming’s conventions.

Next time, we’ll look in more detail at the various influences on the series’ aesthetic, ranging from Jean Giraud’s comics to broader cultural influences drawn from both European and Japanese sources.

In the meantime, Gravity Rush is available now for both PlayStation 4 and Vita, and Gravity Rush 2 is available for PlayStation 4. Both are eminently worth your time, so if you’ve been looking for a way to occupy yourself this summer you could do far worse than jumping head-first into this series and promptly forgetting which way is “up”.

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We’re going retro this time around, with a classic from the early days of Sega’s 16-bit console, the Mega Drive.

The heyday of Techno Soft’s Thunder Force series was arguably around its visually spectacular third and fourth installments, both of which were often used by many proud Mega Drive owners as showcases of their system’s audio-visual capabilities, but the second installment — a launch title for the Genesis in the States — is an interesting game in its own right, mostly because it’s quite different from its better-known successors.

We may not have seen a new Thunder Force game since 2008’s PlayStation 2 release of Thunder Force VI, but the series as a whole remains extremely solid to this day, and one well worth checking out if you’re a dedicated shmup fan.

Although today many people associate Thunder Force with the Mega Drive, it actually began life on Japanese home computers — specifically, the Sharp X1 and MZ-1500 and the NEC PC-6001 and PC-8801. Its first installment was subsequently updated for the more powerful Fujitsu FM-7 and NEC PC-9801 computers with improved visuals, additional content and a level editor.

Thunder Force I was not a side-scrolling Gradius-style shoot ’em up like its most well-known later installments. Rather, it was a top-down free-roaming shoot ’em up in which you had to explore levels in order to destroy shield generators and ultimately defeat a powerful weapon known as the Dyradeizer. It was certainly very different from what most gamers now remember as “Thunder Force“.

It’s relevant to Thunder Force II, however, because this game, originally released on the Sharp X68000 computer in 1988 and subsequently ported to the Mega Drive, acts as a bridge between the first installment and what the series primarily became known for in its latter years. In other words, it incorporates both the top-down free-roaming segments from the original game and the side-scrolling Gradius-style stages that formed the entirety of later Thunder Forces. As such, playing it today is a rather refreshing experience that challenges quite different skill sets to many modern shmups.

Thunder Force II alternates between its top-down and side-scrolling stages. In the former, players must explore a free-roaming level and use ground attacks to destroy a series of enemy bases. There’s no radar or map system to refer to, so it’s necessary to explore and make use of landmarks to orient yourself; the levels do, however, loop both horizontally and vertically so are quite a bit smaller than they might initially appear to be, and they are also often split into discrete sections divided by walls. Finding the correct “path” through the level in these cases involves finding weak, thin sections of wall and destroying them to proceed further.

Since free-roaming movement makes it more difficult to have the sort of scripted, choreographed encounters modern shoot ’em ups are known for today, Thunder Force II has a semi-randomised approach to the enemies that attack you in the top-down stages. As you fly around, different groups of enemies will spawn in various formations, often supported by ground-based installations you haven’t yet destroyed. These formations are preset, recognisable and learnable, but the exact point in the stage at which they appear isn’t predefined, so dealing with them is a matter of learning the individual patterns and how to respond to them as they occur, rather than learning the”choreography” of the level as a whole.

The side-scrolling levels are much more traditional, however, proceeding in a linear fashion from left to right, throwing a number of learnable enemy encounters and minibosses at you, and culminating in a boss battle against a particularly tough enemy. Level design in these sections is solid, often offering a choice of different routes to proceed along and usually requiring you to make a choice between a safe but low-scoring route or a risky but rewarding route.

In both types of level, certain types of enemies drop powerups. Weapon powerups add different fire modes to your “inventory”, which you can switch back and forth between at will rather than simply replacing your current weapon. Different weapons have different pros and cons: some cover a wider area but prevent you from attacking ground targets, for example, while others are weaker but fire more quickly. You do, however, lose all but your basic forward-firing “dual” shot and bi-directional “back” shot every time you lose a life. Which will be frequently, because Thunder Force II is hard.

Alongside weapon powerups, you can also pick up shields, extra lives and “CRAWs”, floating pods which spin around your ship firing normal shots and blocking any bullets they come into contact with. There’s a wide variety of different powerups, and managing to hold on to them for more than about twenty seconds always feels like a significant achievement.

Thunder Force II may look quite dated even compared to its immediate successors — this was a launch title for the Genesis in America, remember, though the considerably more impressive Thunder Force III came out only a year later — but it’s still worth playing today simply to see a shoot ’em up that does something a bit different from the norm. The free-roaming top-down segments are something we don’t see a lot of in the genre these days — and we certainly pretty much never see them combined in a single game with side-scrolling stages.

The game is certainly a stiff challenge — the seeming glee with which the game will bombard you with exciting power-ups right as you’re having to deal with an incoming hail of bullets is almost amusingly sadistic — but it’s a rewarding, enjoyable game. It’s a lot of fun, even from a modern perspective, and it’s the kind of game that will take a while to master rather than being something you can easily burn through in an afternoon.

Ah, the good old days, eh?

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Today I’d like to talk specifically about one of the narrative paths of Overdrive’s visual novel Kira Kira.

Specifically, I’d like to discuss Chie-nee’s path. There are spoilers ahead, so be warned if you’re planning on playing this. (And you should — it’s really rather good.)

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

Kira Kira, lest you’re unaware and/or haven’t read my previous mentions of the subject in this very column, is a visual novel about the (mis)adventures of a Japanese Christian school’s “second literature club” and its members’ attempts to do something special for their last year before they graduate. The story unfolds in three distinct parts, each of which is a self-contained story in its own right, and features several different endings — three “good” ones for the three main heroines, a “true” one only accessible after seeing the three “good” endings, and four “bad” endings.

Kira Kira’s protagonist is Shikanosuke “Shika” Maejima, a rather wordy teen who likes talking about himself. Indeed, much of the narration of the game is delivered as if Shika is directly addressing the player, and his storytelling has a habit of jumping around in time a bit.

As we join him, he’s just getting over a couple of mild emotional traumas — firstly, stress-related medical problems which brought his promising career as a young tennis star to a screeching halt, and secondly, his breakup with his girlfriend.

At the outset, Shika is drifting along somewhat, not really sure what to do with himself, and it’s there that he first encounters the second literature club and its members. Among them is Chie Isurugi, his childhood friend (there’s always at least one childhood friend in this sort of thing), a young woman whom he had somewhat lost touch with in recent years.

Chie is easily the most “mature” of all the characters in Kira Kira. This can at least partly be attributed to the fact that she’s a year older than the rest of them — she had to repeat a year due to her parents’ separation screwing up her grades the previous year — but from Shika’s descriptions, we can also tell that she’s always had a somewhat grown-up attitude towards life.

This accounts for why Shika habitually refers to her as “Chie-nee” as if she is his big sister, rather than using more respectful (“-san”) or diminutive (“-chan”) honorifics towards her.

In fact, later in the game we learn that Shika did once refer to her as “Chie-chan” when they were both younger, but his feelings towards her changed over time as he saw how she was growing up while he was just sort of drifting along down whatever life’s easiest path was.

Even after the two enter into a relationship — which doesn’t occur until near the very end of the game — he still refers to her as “Chie-nee.”

Kira Kira’s three-part overarching story tells a rather heartwarming “coming of age” tale as a whole, but each of these parts works as a self-contained story in its own right.

The first part tells the story of the second literature club coming together and forming a band to give themselves a good sendoff at the school festival; the second tells the tale of their tour around Japan after they all decide that no, they don’t really want to give up the feeling of liberation and freedom that music gave them; and the third — in Chie’s case, at least — concentrates on the relationship between Shika and Chie, as well as Chie’s complicated family life and her own internal struggles.

Although Chie is the most mature of the group, she’s certainly not immune to very human problems. Other members of the group — including Shika — tend to rely heavily on her for support in times of difficulty, since she usually acts as the voice of rationality. But as we get to know her, it transpires that she’s not having a particularly easy time of it at all.

Her father cheated on her mother and left the family to fend for themselves, and throughout the course of the whole game, we see that the divorce proceedings between the two of them are not going at all smoothly. This has a strong impact on Chie’s emotional wellbeing, though she’d never admit it at first.

It’s clear that she goes along with the increasingly outlandish plans of the second literature club and the band in order to escape from her problems and come to terms with them at her own rate, but along the way she encounters a series of happenings that make her think very carefully about what to do next.

One of the most interesting parts comes towards the end of the second chapter of the game, when Chie and Shika come into contact with a mysterious, cheerful-looking girl named Midori.

The pair’s first encounter with Midori comes as she is having second thoughts about joining a religious cult, and it becomes apparent that despite her cheerful exterior, Midori is a deeply troubled young girl, expressing her displeasure and disillusionment with her life through self-harm and running away from home.

Chie and Shika soon discover the reason for this — she is the daughter of a Yakuza family and wants desperately to escape a home life where she feels like she doesn’t belong. So she does, first running away to another religious retreat, then later moving in with Chie, and finally moving into her own house and trying to get her life on track as an independent young girl.

Midori is an extremely strange individual with a habit of coming out with very strange utterances, but it’s clear that Chie respects her courage and willingness to at least try and do something to improve her situation — even if she doesn’t necessarily agree with her methods, or indeed understand her at all at times.

The key moment for Chie comes the last time we see Midori in the game. Chie and Midori have a conversation, the crux of which is Midori telling Chie that she’s too kind and too willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the greater good, and that it’s okay to be selfish sometimes. It takes courage to be selfish, though, and courage is one characteristic that Chie lacks somewhat.

Despite her headstrong attitude and mature demeanor when in public, it becomes particularly clear when we see her alone with Shika as their relationship develops that she’s actually quite timid and nervous inside. Indeed, the first time Shika and Chie make love, Shika constantly worries that he’s actually “raping” her, despite the fact that she clearly said he could do it if he wanted. Note the wording though — “if he wanted.”

By the end of the game, Chie’s problems are far from over — she’s anxious about Shika leaving her in the same way that her father left her family, for example — but she’s grown as a person, both with Shika’s support and everything she’s learned from her experiences with the band.

We leave her as she’s about to go and see her father for the first time since he walked out on the Isurugi family. She’s taking those first tentative steps into a world where she has the courage to sometimes do what she wants to do and express what she’s feeling, instead of simply acting the way everyone expects of her as an “older sister.” It’s a fitting conclusion to a touching and very human tale.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

There was a period in my life where I happily devoured every single JRPG I came across to the exclusion of almost all other types of game.

To be perfectly frank, I’m pretty much back in that situation now after a few years of feeling “obliged” to play the big triple-A games that everyone was talking about, but I still primarily associate my early 20s with “my JRPG period” — or perhaps more accurately, “my first JRPG period.”

Returning to the fold a number of years after my original JRPG binge has allowed me to both appreciate how the genre has changed and evolved over the years, and see the older titles I loved so much first time around in a new light. So with that in mind, let’s look back at a classic long overdue an HD remaster.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

One of the games that left something of a lasting impression on me during The First JRPG Age was Skies of Arcadia on the Dreamcast (and later the Gamecube).

This game, developed by Overworks and published by Sega back in 2000, was immediately striking to me for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was a high-quality JRPG on the Dreamcast, a platform which hadn’t enjoyed anywhere near as many good role-playing experiences as the PS1; and secondly it was set in a rather unconventional, interesting world populated with appealing characters.

In retrospect, a third reason I still think on this game fondly is the fact that I still have very vivid memories of my housemate’s boyfriend staggering in at about 11pm one night, stoned off his tits, and just staring at the screen (where I was playing the Dreamcast version at the time, the next morning’s university lectures be damned) for several minutes before mumbling something about how he could “imagine the ancient civilivilizations [sic] who carved that shit on the walls.” Don’t do drugs, kids.

Skies of Arcadia tells the story of Vyse, a young man who is a member of an organization known as the Blue Rogues alongside his friend Aika. The Blue Rogues are a band of “air pirates” who use their flying airships (in this case, literally pretty much just the sort of ships you’d see in the ocean, only flying) to harass the Armada of the tyrannical Valuan Empire.

As the game progresses, Vyse and Aika come across a mysterious, quiet young woman named Fina, who is a member of the enigmatic Silver Civilization. As tends to be the case with members of enigmatic civilizations, everyone wants a piece of the rather meek Fina, so Vyse and Aika take on the role of her protectors and set out on a grand adventure to help her recover the Gigas-summoning Moon Crystals before the Valuan Empire can use them for assorted unpleasantness.

The story of Skies of Arcadia, though enjoyable fluff with a memorable cast, wasn’t the real star. Rather, the main reason to play it was the wonderful Jules Verne-esque world and the curious characters who inhabited it, who offered a strange blend between the usual colorful JRPG exuberance and the more Western sensibilities of steampunk.

Vyse’s grand adventure took place in a world of floating islands in the sky, with the only way between them being to travel aboard the aforementioned airships. And far from being just a simple means of getting from point A to point B, the use of airships was integrated tightly into the gameplay so as to give the player a wonderful feeling of exploring the uncharted world of the skies.

Besides simply moving between story beats, the player was encouraged to explore the skies and come across “Discoveries,” the details of which could then be sold at Sailors’ Guilds around the world, with the exact reward being dependent on how much (or little) time had elapsed between the Discovery becoming available and Vyse and co. actually finding it.

No game involving ships (airborne or otherwise) would be complete without some sort of “naval” (for want of a better word) combat, though, would it? And Skies of Arcadia certainly didn’t disappoint on that front.

While many of the random encounters Vyse and the gang ran into while exploring the world simply required them to run out on deck and beat down whatever monster was harassing their vessel, occasionally they’d run into fellow airship-owning sky scoundrels and have to indulge in some ship-to-ship combat.

Far from being a simple reskin of the usual battle system, the ship-to-ship combat made use of a strange but very effective strategic system in which you had to plan out your moves in advance on a grid which showed how and when the enemy was going to act. Each of your ship’s cannons could only be fired once per turn, so you had to ensure that you took advantage of openings when they arose while ensuring you defended yourself from incoming fire.

It was also possible to call upon various crew members to make use of their special abilities during ship-to-ship combat, giving a great feeling of everyone working together to take down the powerful opponent. The wonderful cinematic presentation of the airship battles really helped convey the drama of these situations — and the mechanic wasn’t overused throughout the game so it never became overly tiresome.

The same can’t quite be said for the regular character-on-monster combat, however. The encounter rate was so high in the Dreamcast original that it was noticeably reduced in the 2003 Gamecube rerelease Skies of Arcadia Legends – don’t worry, though, level-grinders; the experience gain was increased to make up for the reduced encounter rate.

This isn’t to say that the game’s combat system was bad – while relatively conventional in execution, it was fun, strategic and challenging, and generally required a little more brainpower than just mashing the “Attack” button for every character — it’s just that, well, some people thought there probably didn’t need to be quite so much of it. Sega and Overworks apparently agreed.

The reduced encounter rate wasn’t the only improvement in the Gamecube version. While the textures weren’t improved to a noticeable degree, character models enjoyed an increased polygon count, and the framerate was better. A bunch of new Discoveries were added, a “Wanted List” was added to encourage exploration and battling against challenging enemies, and new sidequests were added.

To compensate for the fact the Gamecube lacked the Dreamcast’s VMU memory card-cum-mini-handheld and was consequently unable to make little beepy noises any time a hidden object was nearby, the interface was adjusted so that feedback was available on screen. The standalone Pinta Quest VMU minigame of the Dreamcast original was, sadly, nowhere to be seen in the Gamecube version, however — understandable, really.

To cut a long story short — seriously, I could happily ramble on for another few thousand words about how great this game was — this is a game that needs to come back for the HD generation. Sadly, there’s been no sign of it yet, even despite occasional reports of Sega renewing various trademarks — the most we’ve seen of Vyse in recent years is as a playable character in kart racer Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed, accompanied by an admittedly excellent Skies of Arcadia-themed level.

All that said, we have seen the digital rerelease of a number of Dreamcast games over the last few years — and Shenmue III is a thing that is actually happening, too — so never say never. Just maybe say “one day, soonish, possibly, if we’re lucky” instead.

In the meantime, if you want to play Skies of Arcadia, you’ll either need a Dreamcast or a Gamecube. The Gamecube version is arguably the slightly superior experience due to its less frustrating random encounter rate and additional content, though it’s worth noting that the music was more heavily-compressed and is thus slightly lower quality on the Gamecube version than the Dreamcast original. The reason for this is that it was squeezed onto a single Gamecube disc instead of the two GD-ROMs of the Dreamcast version.

Regardless of what platform you play it on, though, Skies of Arcadia is a wild ride that is well worth investing some time in. Here’s hoping we hear some good news on the matter at some point in the future, though, as this is a game eminently worth revisiting.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

Last time, we looked at where Cygames’ mobile hit Granblue Fantasy came from, and how it’s become such a phenomenon.

Today, we’re going to look in more detail at the game itself: how it works, how it plays, its similarities and differences from other popular mobile games, and what newcomers can expect from its early hours.

Given that it’s effectively an MMO of sorts, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the game has become a surprisingly sprawling, complex and somewhat daunting affair after three years of active development. But that doesn’t mean it’s completely inaccessible — nor does it suffer from the common MMO problem of new players being too weak to be able to participate in anything.

Let’s take a closer look.

In Granblue Fantasy, you take on the role of wannabe skyfarer and silent protagonist Gran (or his equally silent female counterpart Djeeta) and, in true JRPG tradition, are thrown directly into a Big Plot when you encounter a mysterious young girl named Lyria and her knight protector Katalina, who are apparently on the run from the obligatory Final Fantasy-style evil Empire.

It’s not long before Gran has the absolute shit kicked out of him by the Empire, as these things tend to go. Lyria promptly saves him by intertwining her life force with his, which has the convenient side-effect of allowing Gran to use Lyria’s ability to summon giant slobbering monsters (and pretty girls) from beyond space and time to blow away their enemies. From here, Gran, Lyria and Katalina begin an adventure to seek out the Isle of the Astrals — a legendary location somewhere beyond the floating islands of Phantagrande Skydom — and almost certainly give the Empire a bloody nose or two in the process.

This “summoning” system introduced from the outset forms one of three important core mechanics of Granblue Fantasy that, combined together, determine your party’s overall power level in battle — the other two being the characters you have in your party and the ten different weapons you can have equipped at one time. We’ll come back to how all this works in a moment.

Granblue Fantasy’s core gameplay is split into a few different components, but the thing you’ll likely be doing most frequently in the early game is going out on quests. These, in turn, are split into several different sections: typically a visual novel-style introduction to the quest, a sequence representing a “journey” where you and your party defeat a series of “trash” enemies and acquire loot, then another short story sequence reflecting what happens when you get to your destination, and finally a sequence of one or more turn-based battles.

This latter aspect forms the meat of the game, as it’s where all the characters, weapons and summons you’ve acquired become relevant. Your party of up to four characters (plus two in the reserves who jump in if a frontline member becomes incapacitated) square off against a group of up to three enemies and engage in strict phase-based combat: first you get a turn where you can use as many cooldown-based skills as you want, summon something if it’s ready and finally unleash physical attacks, then the enemy gets to do the same. Enemy skills come at predictable times according to a series of gems that light up with each passing turn, so you can prioritise targets according to which is likely to attack you first.

Elemental affinities are extremely important in Granblue Fantasy, as hitting an enemy’s weak point results in considerably more damage. Conversely, hitting them with an element they are strong against results in less damage, so figuring out which enemies appear in which quest is helpful. Gran’s attack element is determined by the main weapon of the ten he has equipped, while other party members each have a fixed element. The established metagame heavily favours building parties that each focus on a single element rather than jacks-of-all-trades, though in the early hours you’ll tend to find yourself with a somewhat piecemeal lineup of characters, weapons and summons. Thankfully, a well-constructed party only becomes truly necessary — as opposed to just helpful — once you get much further into the game as a whole.

One twist on the battle system comes when fighting bosses, which come in two variants: standard and raid-level. Standard bosses typically appear as part of the story at the end of a quest and are fought by your party alone, while raid bosses are standalone encounters where you can invite other players to participate in battle, with the best rewards going to those who make the biggest contribution to defeating these powerful opponents.

The two types of bosses have a common mechanic: the “Mode” bar, which replaces the standard monsters’ “charge” gems that indicate when they are going to use a special attack. The Mode bar builds up as you deal damage to the boss until it fills, at which point the boss enters Overdrive mode. In Overdrive, they deal more damage and can use special attacks, but the Mode bar gradually declines and is knocked down by damage — some characters even have skills specifically designed to knock down the Mode bar further rather than dealing direct damage. When the bar empties, the boss enters Break status, at which point their defenses are lower and they can no longer use their special attacks.

One of the nice things about Granblue Fantasy is that it gives you the opportunity to participate in raid battles right from the early hours of the story, whereas in other, similar games of this type (A-Lim’s Brave Frontier is a good example) raid content is exclusive to high-level players, making the early game a rather solitary experience. Since each player’s party effectively battles the boss completely separately, there’s no real way for low-level players to mess up mechanics for higher-level or more skilled players, and as long as you get at least one hit in on the boss before it’s defeated, you’ll get some rewards, even if your more experienced peers do most of the work.

Progression in Granblue Fantasy is multi-faceted. Looking at things most broadly, you have an overall “rank” that allows you to increase the maximum capacity of your AP and EP resources, which are used to start quests and join other players’ raids respectively — and rather pleasingly, these can “overflow” over their maximum, allowing you to “stockpile” a huge amount in the early game and thus rarely run into situations where your play sessions become throttled. (Even better, the first time you play story or event quests, there is no AP cost whatsoever, so you can continue to progress even if you run out of resources.) Your rank also provides bonuses to Gran’s base HP and attack power stats, and is used to determine whether you can use the full stats of an equipped weapon or simply a considerably nerfed version. No equipment is completely level-locked, but using something below its “required” rank comes with quite a hit to its overall effectiveness.

Protagonist Gran then has a class, and a level for this class. Each class can level up to a maximum of 20, and unlocking more advanced classes generally requires you to have “mastered” two classes from a previous tier as well as expending resources or completing a particular quest. Classes bestow passive bonuses as well as providing access to skills, and each class has a particular specialism: attacking, defending, healing or “special”, which generally covers buffing and debuffing. Mastering a class also provides a permanent passive bonus to Gran, even if he switches, so it’s worth taking the time to level a variety of classes.

The other characters in your party each have a level too, the cap on which is determined by their rarity — rarer characters can reach higher levels. You can “uncap” each character several times to allow them to reach higher maximum power levels; doing so typically requires you to expend the in-game soft currency of Rupies as well as specific items looted from the weekly “Trial” quests.

Then each weapon has a level too, determining the amount of bonus HP and attack power it bestows on the party as a whole. Unlike characters, who gain experience simply through being in a party for a quest, weapons can only be levelled up by fusing them with other items of equipment. Fusing weapons of the same type together can increase the chance of a “Great Success”, which provides bonus experience to the weapon being powered up, and with each successful fusion you gain elemental experience in the element of the weapon you’re working on, which confers even more bonus experience.

The final piece of the puzzle comes with the summons you can equip. Like weapons, you can equip several of these, with one being set as your “main”, and these are levelled up by fusing them with other, unneeded summons. Summons generally have a larger impact on your party’s HP than attack power, while weapons are the opposite; your main summon also has the added benefit of conferring a passive “aura” bonus on the whole party, allowing you to buff your strengths, cover your weaknesses or make use of special abilities such as auto-revive.

All these elements combine to produce your party’s overall power level. There are only two explicit numerical stats to concern yourself with — HP and attack power — which keeps things relatively simple to begin with. Where things get more complex — and interesting — is in the later game where you start focusing on collecting weapons with passive skills that boost your party’s favoured element by a percentage amount, and indeed filling out a complete weapon “grid” with suitable implements of death and dismemberment to maximise your damage output. Doing this generally requires a combination of drawing things using the game’s gacha (which can be played for free using crystals you earn by completing quests for the first time) and participating in events and raids for a chance at some quality loot.

One of the reasons Granblue Fantasy has been so well received by its player base is that there is little to no obligation to spend money on the game in order to progress. Many of the highest rarity weapons can be acquired through events and raids — and indeed some of the most useful, effective weapons are most reliably acquired in this way rather than relying on random draws. This de-emphasises the gacha aspect of the game in favour of actually playing it — though as anyone who has played any MMO over the years will attest, when there’s one thing you really want to drop, count on it taking at least several hours before you see it. This is not a game you can play passively by any means!

If you find yourself enjoying the game, there is one package worth considering splurging on, though: known as “Start Dash” in the original Japanese version of the game and “Beginner’s Draw” in the English edition, this bundle may seem pricey at about $25, but it provides you with a 10-part premium draw (which provides the opportunity to collect SR and SSR-rarity weapons, characters and summons) as well as a ticket that lets you choose a specific character or summon from a list. In this way, if there’s a particular character you’re interested in — perhaps even one that got you into the game — you can acquire them without having to rely on random drop rates. The latter part of this deal is repeated every two months or so in the form of “Surprise Tickets”.

The nice thing about the game’s monetisation is that it isn’t “pay to win” by any means. Weapons and characters aren’t particularly overpowered in the form you initially acquire them in, and will need levelling up in order to make them a useful addition to your team. In this way, even if you do find yourself wanting to toss a bit of money Cygames’ way, you’re never left feeling like you’ve somehow “cheated” for having done so. You’re simply paying to increase your available options or customise your experience — and, as we’ve previously said, if you’re staunchly against throwing money into free-to-play games, you absolutely can play the game without paying a penny — and without being put at a disadvantage for deciding to go this route.

Next time, we’ll take a look at how I’ve spent my first three weeks in the game, and what I’m aiming for next!

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One of the most distinctive aspects of the Gravity Rush series is its aesthetic.

As we noted last time, director Keiichiro Toyama’s desire was to create a game that, while still recognisably Japanese, incorporated elements from other locales in order to create something that, in theory, would be universally appealing across the world. The Western influences he chose to focus on were the Franco-Belgian artists of the bandes dessinées tradition.

The Franco-Belgian influence is particularly apparent in the first installment, while the second, in keeping with its much larger scope, draws more broadly on influences from across Europe. Let’s take a look at the specifics of how Gravity Rush got its distinctive look and feel, starting with a bit of background on Toyama’s main influence from Franco-Belgian comic books: an artist named Jean Giraud, better known to some as Mœbius or Gir.

Jean Giraud was born in a Parisian suburb in 1938, and did not have the most straightforward of upbringings. Not only did he live through World War II — becoming a rather sickly and impoverished child as a result of the food shortages in France at the time — but he also suffered through his parents’ messy divorce.

Desiring escape from a rather drab existence in a France slowly rebuilding itself after the war, Giraud frequently found himself in a local movie theatre which appeared to have something of a preference for American Western B-movies. This naturally caused Giraud to develop a love of the genre, and once he started formal training at Paris’ Duperré School of Applied Arts in 1954 he found himself naturally drawn to producing Western comics.

His teachers at the time did not approve; it would be another 10 years before Lucky Luke creator Maurice de Bevere (better known as just “Morris”) and fellow artist Pierre Vankeer would publish an influential series of articles in Belgian periodical Spirou that would cause Francophone culture at large to regard comics as “the 9th art” — though it’s worth noting that Morris’ original use of the term was seemingly intended somewhat sarcastically. In the mid-50s, meanwhile, comics were still regarded as having a somewhat negative influence on modern French youth — and Westerns in particular were enormously popular with said youth — so it’s unsurprising that Duperré’s faculty at the time were not keen to indulge Giraud’s fancies.

Giraud’s first commercially published works came in 1958 with a series of humorous Western shorts for the magazine Far West. His style at this point was recognisably influenced by popular Belgian comic artist Joseph Gillain, better known as Jijé — and, in fact, Jijé would later become Giraud’s mentor.

Jijé, in turn, was strongly influenced by Tintin artist Hergé’s distinctive style from the early-to-mid 20th century, later dubbed ligne claire (“clear line”) in 1977 by Joost Swarte, a Dutch cartoonist who made use of a similar style. Ligne claire’s most distinctive characteristics are the use of strong lines of uniform width, flat coloured shading without hatching, and downplayed contrast. It’s also known for strong use of colour and obviously “cartoonish” characters appearing atop realistic backdrops.

Giraud didn’t confine himself solely to the ligne claire style, however; over the course of his career, he experimented with a variety of different styles, often adapting different variations to his various pen names. When he signed his work under his own name or simply “Gir”, he’d use a brush; as Mœbius, meanwhile, he’d use a pen.

Giraud’s work, particularly in his later career, was sometimes compared to that of the “new realists”, a 1960s artistic movement exemplified by the idea of its members seeing the world as an “image” from which parts could be taken and incorporated into their work. New Realism encouraged the use of real objects to reflect the reality of the time and place in which the work was created, and was described by the movement’s founder Pierre Restany as “poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality”.

Throughout Gravity Rush, Toyama and his team have drawn a variety of inspirations from Giraud’s whole career, not just a single work or period. Toyama describes the core concept of Gravity Rush as specifically being inspired by a Mœbius work that featured people floating in space, but it’s very apparent that he has a broader appreciation for how Giraud’s style evolved and changed over time.

One of the most noticeable and distinct features of the original Gravity Rush’s look and feel is the way that distant scenery fades into a low-contrast coloured haze, but the outlines of buildings and some details remain visible. This is a clear homage to the uniform lines and low contrast of the ligne claire style favoured by Giraud in his early work; indeed, it gives the in-game graphics — particularly the backgrounds — a look strongly reminiscent of Hergé, Jijé and Uderzo (of Asterix fame).

The second game’s more detailed graphics de-emphasise this heavily stylised aspect of the artwork, but elements of it still remain. Monochromatic outlines of details are still clearly visible as scenery disappears into the distant haze, for example, but much more apparent in Gravity Rush 2 is that other immediately recognisable feature of ligne claire visual art: cartoonish characters on realistic backdrops. In this case, the effect is achieved with cel-shaded characters that reflect the lighting of their environment using a strong, hard contrast between light and dark, and highly detailed, realistic environments packed with interactive, destructible physics objects. The latter aspect in particular gives Gravity Rush 2’s environments a strongly dynamic, realistic feel rather than them feeling like immaculate dioramas.

Gravity Rush can also be argued to reflect the New Realist movement that Giraud’s work was often associated with in his later life. While obviously fantastic in nature as a whole — we’re talking about a game about a girl who wakes up in a floating city and discovers that a cat full of stars lets her shift gravity at will — there’s a pleasant feeling of mundanity about many of the environments that Kat traverses over the course of her adventure.

Despite being a city flying high in the sky, the first game’s setting of Hekseville has a very strong feeling of being traditionally “French” thanks to its architecture, its layout and the people and places you find within. Even the distinctive music that accompanies Kat’s exploration of each district adds to this feeling: the use of instrumentation typically associated with French music (particularly French interpretations of jazz) gives the game a very strong sense of time and place. It’s obviously a setting that is very much based on reality, but with a few fantastic elements added to the mix. It is the very essence of Restany’s “poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality”.

The series doesn’t unfold exclusively in realistic environments, however. Both games feature forays into “rift planes”, where the fantastic elements are heavily played up in various ways. Sometimes Kat may be traversing gravity-defying caves with lava flowing everywhere; other times she may be in a peaceful-seeming space filled with giant mushrooms, flowers and lily pads; at others still she may be foraging around floating, abandoned ruins of an ancient civilisation. In keeping with the New Realist ideas, however, even the most fantastic of these environments feature recognisably realistic elements to keep you at least partially grounded in reality.

Indeed, a significant part of the first game’s main plot involves recovering missing parts of Hekseville from these rift planes, which leads to some extremely memorable moments as you emerge from, say, a pipe full of lava only to see the bizarre sight of a distinctively French-looking plaza unassumingly hovering in front of you in the next chamber.

Gravity Rush 2’s larger scale also means that its aesthetic has a broader scope. While Kat does revisit the very French Hekseville later in the game, the early hours unfold in a community of airborne “houseboats” inspired by less affluent Asian and South American regions, while this is followed by a lengthy stay in the city of Jirga Para Lhao, a city featuring influences from the extremes of rich and poor seen in places such as Italy, Spain and, again, some South American and Asian regions — particularly Hong Kong in the latter case.

Once again, despite the obviously fantastic nature of a city split into four “layers” floating in the sky — the poor people in houseboats at the lowest level, then the marketplace and skyscrapers of the commercial district on the next level up, then the richest of the rich living in their extravagant mansions above that, then finally the authoritarian government far above that on their enormous military airship — there’s a sense of realism and authenticity to the game’s depiction of Jirga Para Lhao. It feels like a city that is very much lived in and works just as a city in our world would, assuming the roads were replaced by vast expanses of clear, open air.

Like its predecessor, Gravity Rush 2 also makes effective use of music to give its environments a strong sense of time and place. The distinctive dance beats and brass-heavy instrumentation heard in Jirga Para Lhao’s marketplace district give a strong Latin flavour, further emphasised by the mournful solo guitar that accompanies a visit to the less fortunate in the fleet of houseboats beneath the city proper. Meanwhile, the rich district, high above the hoi polloi, is accompanied by an absolutely glorious piece of saxophone-heavy muzak of the ilk you’d expect to hear in the elevator of a high-end, exclusive department store; the sort of place where most of us wouldn’t be able to afford a single napkin, let alone anything more substantial. The image this music produces in our mind is absolutely perfect to reflect the elitist, snobbish attitudes of the people living in this district.

Interestingly, probably the least apparent inspiration on Gravity Rush as a whole is Toyama’s native Japan — although Japanese influences are clearly present, particularly with regard to character design, and they’re especially apparent in the graphic novel-style cutscenes that punctuate major story beats.

There’s even a bit of a twist on the usual formulae here, too, though; dark-skinned heroines such as Kat are relatively rare in anime and manga, and blonde hair such as Kat’s is usually reserved for secondary characters as a means of reflecting a sense of “foreignness” or “otherness”. Here, though, she’s the protagonist, the central character. There are some narrative justifications for Kat being represented as something of an “other”, particularly as the people all around her tend to err on the “white” side of things, but this doesn’t change the fact that, as a protagonist in a Japanese work, she’s a relatively unusual figure — and, as we’ll explore later, a particularly memorable one for much more than her skin and hair colour.

Gravity Rush and its sequel are noteworthy games for many reasons — perhaps most importantly for simply being fantastic all-round experiences — but, from an artistic perspective, it’s especially fascinating to see a work so keen to evoke a particular style rather than conforming to established popular conventions, particularly when those conventions — those of Japanese popular culture — are so immediately recognisable.

In Gravity Rush’s case, this bold experiment paid off. While the games’ overall style is, as we’ve discussed, strongly derivative of previous works in the non-interactive visual medium of comic books — and deliberately so — it’s this very style that causes it to be so distinctive in the often risk-averse world of video games, particularly first-party titles put out by companies such as Sony. There’s nothing else out there quite like Gravity Rush — and even putting the high quality of the two games aside, that’s a good reason to celebrate them.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

I wanted to address the music-themed visual novel Kira Kira again today, if I may.

I know I’ve covered it a number of times recently, but it strikes me as quite an interesting if not important work that does a number of particularly noteworthy things.

Specifically, with what I’d like to talk about today, I would like to highlight the question of what it means to “beat,” “complete,” “finish,” “clear,” or whatever you personally call it when you come to the end of a visual novel. It’s a subject I covered from another angle in a recent Swords & Zippers column with regard to JRPGs, and it seems particularly pertinent when discussing Kira Kira.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

There are a number of schools of thought on games (or, more specifically, interactive narratives, whatever form they might take) that have multiple endings.

One approach is that you take your first playthrough as “gospel,” reach the end, deal with the consequences of the decisions you made and then move on to something else.

This is perfectly valid if you’re happy with it, and indeed there are a number of interactive story authors who actively advocate playing in this way — the most high-profile example is probably when Quantic Dream’s David Cage specifically said that playing his interactive movie Heavy Rain more than once would “kill the magic of it”, because the player would no longer have to deal with possibly unwanted or unpleasant consequences of actions.

But another school of thought is that there’s a whole bunch of content there just waiting for you to see and enjoy, and actively denying yourself the potential enjoyment of exploring it is doing not only yourself a disservice, but the authors of the work, too. This is doubly so in works where you only get a full understanding of the characters involved from several playthroughs from different angles – School Days HQ, which I frequently bring up, is a great example, as is stuff like Aselia the Eternal, Katawa Shoujo and, yes, Kira Kira.

Today I’d like to talk a little about Kirari’s route. Massive spoilers are ahead, so stop reading now if you’re planning on playing Kira Kira for yourself and don’t want to ruin the surprises.

Kira Kira is structured in several chapters accordings to the decisions you make throughout the course of the story. The first chapter focuses on the efforts of the Second Literature Club to put together a band in time for the school festival; the second chapter sees the band, high on the success of their performance, take a grand tour of Japan; and from here, things branch off in one of several different directions. There are several “bad” endings that bring the story to a premature close before a lot of things are resolved, one “good” ending for each of the three heroines, one “bad” ending for one of the heroines and one “true” ending that can only be seen once you’ve seen all the “good” endings.

Kira Kira is relatively unusual among this style of visual novel in that the centerpiece of its narrative is not a romantic relationship between the protagonist and one of the three heroines — though once the story starts to branch, it becomes clear that both romance and sex are going to be involved.

We talked about Chie-nee’s route last week, including how it depicted two friends who had known each other forever growing closer through shared experiences and hardships, eventually culminating in a satisfying relationship that was good for both of them. Chie-nee found someone that she could depend on rather than always having to be the “strong, mature one,” while protagonist Shikanosuke found a good influence in his childhood friend and successfully pushed his life in the right direction.

The thing with visual novels is that they can very easily (and very often do) subvert your expectations. Kirari’s route initially looks like it will be relatively similar to Chie-nee’s — she, too, has a difficult home life, though this time it’s because of her family’s poverty rather than the marital breakup of her parents, and Shikanosuke comes along at just the right time to act as a shoulder to cry on — but the overall story takes a very surprising turn in its third chapter.

In Chie-nee’s case, the third chapter brought the story to its conclusion with the relationship between Shikanosuke and Chie-nee proceeding well and having a positive effect on both of them. In Kirari’s case, well… she dies. Horribly.

I was absolutely floored by this. Kirari had been a constant, bright and cheery presence through the entirety of the game’s first two chapters, and the game had rather deftly set her up as the “slightly annoying but cute genki girl” character — she’d always (well, one spectacular episode aside) been full of energy, full of life and, of all the Second Literature Club’s band members, the one most likely to succeed as a performer.

Which, of course, was entirely deliberate; sure, it would be sad (and surprising) to see Shikanosuke, Chie-nee or Kashiwara pass away, but the emotional impact of Kirari’s injuries and subsequent death in a house fire is considerably amplified by the fact that things seemed to be going so well for her — it was looking like she might be able to escape the horrible life she’d been enduring with a constant smile on her face up until now; instead, her life was cruelly snatched away from her. Live fast, die young and all that.

What’s interesting about Kirari’s route is that it doesn’t end with her death. Rather, a fourth chapter begins that takes place five years after the group’s graduation from high school. Shikanosuke is clearly traumatized by the death of the girl he loved, and throws himself into the difficult life of a struggling musician, never really quite managing to make ends meet.

We see his physical health and mental state deteriorate as he regularly blacks out and hallucinates images of Kirari — at one point, the mental image of her even manages to temporarily convince him (and the reader, for that matter) that he had completely imagined her death and that he was the one who had suffered traumatic injuries. We quickly discover this to be false, though, and Shikanosuke slips deeper and deeper into a very dark place — we’re talking full-on utsuge territory here, in stark contrast to the rather light-hearted “slice of life” coming-of-age story that comprises the game’s first half.

Eventually, after a traumatic episode leaves him hospitalized, Shikanosuke returns home to his family, and a sequence of surreal events unfolds where it’s not entirely clear what is real and what is taking place in his imagination. Eventually, it is the spirit/ghost/hallucination of Kirari that brings him back to his senses, allowing him to redouble his efforts with his bandmates — who, in a nice touch, include recurring character Murakami from earlier in the game as well as a girl who is seen in one scene early on and then promptly all but forgotten about in the other routes — and honor Kirari’s memory through music.

We leave Shikanosuke and his new band just as he’s beginning to perform the song he based on doodles and recordings Kirari made before she died. Shikanosuke steps out from his usual role as bass player in the shadows to sing the new song — using the now-burned and charred “skull microphone” that the Second Literature Club bought for Kirari’s birthday early in the game’s narrative. It’s a nice wrap-up to a tale which took a surprisingly tragic, unexpected and thought-provoking twist — and it’s very peculiar to think that those who only play through a single route of Kira Kira might miss this spectacularly emotional episode in a game which already rather effectively tugs at the heartstrings while simultaneously feeling pleasantly youthful and light-hearted.

In summary, then, by all means consider yourself “done” with a visual novel once you’ve played a single route to completion — but bear in mind you could be missing out on some of the most interesting narrative moments in one of the other paths! While personally speaking I think I liked Chie-nee as a character more than I enjoyed Kirari’s company, I was astounded and genuinely shocked by the very different direction Kirari’s narrative took, and extremely glad I investigated it.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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