Month: January 2019

Another Eden Protips

Just some random notes, and some screenshots at the bottom here.

You should be playing this, right now. It's one of the best JRPGs I've played in ages. It's not quite on par with Final Fantasy VII, or Dragon Quest 8, or Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, or even Chrono Trigger, but it's pretty close, which is just incredible from a mobage.

Characters in the back row of your party restore HP & MP every round of combat, so once someone's tapped out, switch them back, and pretty soon you can switch them forward, fully healed and ready to go. Once you have Robot Girl Riica and another healer, one of them can stay in the back all the time, while the other heals. You'll never have to run back to town!

But even then, you may run out, the volcano dungeon especially just took forever and ground me down. Hit Food on the main menu, and you can fully heal once. You'll get another food for free the next time you visit an inn.

Death isn't the handicap it used to be in the olden days. When a party member is KO'd, a cat comes on screen and pulls them off (!), and they revive after the fight. If you're TPK'd, you restart at the start of the area. Which I don't love, but there's no save points, it's just perpetual autosave. Certainly it fits the mobage experience better.

There are hidden passages in many areas. When you find a dead end, try to walk through it. Of course, sometimes this backfires and you fight a giant monster… I'm going to have to scour all the early areas again when I get up to level 30, assuming I can get back to them.

There's a flower-buying sidequest which is the worst thing in the game, after trying everything the horrible old woman tells you, and getting them wrong because I fell asleep mid-speech: mouseover for spoiler here.

Unsolved: My main party's Level 18-21, but the only high-level gear I have is a few Level 21 items I picked up in chests. The weapon shops are now at Level 16 gear, which I can't make because I don't have the mats from the next zone; most of the gear I can make and have equipped is Level 10 or 13. This is not optimal. I have at least 7 characters I need to equip with weapons and armor, and soon "Badges" (we don' need no steenkin' badges!). I hate falling behind.

There's a lot of Chronos Stones (premium currency) from Record events, but you can also get 10 free every day by hitting + and tapping the free offer link. No videos or any other scams, just a hidden freebie. This is a shockingly fair, non-ripoff gachapon game. Which means I do need to buy something to support them, but I dunno if they're going to make their money back on it.

I got to 1000 Chronos Stones, did a 10-unit pull, and got a really great ★★★★★ half-beastman pugilist, Lokido; a ★★★☆ (so she can star up, but starts weak) knight/tank, Soira; a spare ★★★★☆ druid healer, Mariel, who I haven't levelled yet, even tho technically she's better than my main healer; and 4 of 7 ★★★ "sisters" who all suck, and 3 of ? ★★★ knights who all suck. The character mix in this game is weird, and there's not much backstory yet; though they all have individual quests after I finish many chapters of the game, so maybe there's more there.

What I'm Watching: Polar

Someone please inform Netflix that disco is not appropriate at any time. I could go the rest of my life without hearing Earth Wind and Fire's awful falsetto and Casio demo loop "music".

When Mads is brooding or doing a job, it's shot like a Scandinavian crime drama, grainy camera and maybe teal/orange crap. Everywhere else, the color palette is super-saturated like a Technicolor cartoon.

Anyway. Crew of young Tarantino-wannabe assassins are killing retired assassins, which seems like a job you wouldn't take if you're an assassin, because you'd want to retire someday. Millennials just got no long-term planning skills, I guess.

Mads Mikkelsen's Duncan "Black Kaiser" Vizla is an asshole old assassin with his shit together. Don't get attached to anyone or anything in this. Nothing nice is going to happen.

While he's out being calm and professional, the wannabes are dressing up (mostly Sindy, the Debbie Does Dallas cheerleader of the hit squad) and committing atrocities to try to find Vizla. There's some lovely hits and some really stupid gross-out ones.

The villain is like TV's Frank with an acid burn or wine stain on his face, I can't take him seriously. He's just too fat and petulant, and his entire scam is suicidally stupid.

Yet again women are used as hostages and bait because that's all hack screenwriters can think of doing.

This does, however, have the coolest gun since REASON. I'm disappointed there's no swordfight, though we're teased with one.

Then there's a tacky moral confrontation which tries to make up for all this overly fun violence.

★★★½☆ This is almost the definition of a 3.5: mediocre but engaging enough that you should watch it if you like trash movies.

Another Eden

Finally available and patched, let's see.

It's very cute. The characters aren't quite chibi, but not realistic either. They move a little silly, like puppets waving their limbs around. Each area is a side-scroller, you can only move west or east, but there's a lot of things to tap on and they interact or give you loot, and then swipe up or down to move north or south. There's a minimap and a world map, but not really a middle ground where I can scroll around a big path map.

Opening is very, very cliché. You wake up late for your first day at work as town guard. Mysterious backstory of you and your sister abandoned in the woods. Peasant village has a bunch of wells you can climb down into and there's loot or events. Some running around to teach fighting Goblins (sigh) and gathering sparkly things in the woods. Then obviously monsters attack your beloved peasant village and kidnap your sister, because of course women only exist to be put in refrigerators. You get a literal sword from a stone that makes you a "hero". SIGH.

I got a couple free character pulls (pre-order bonus of Miyu, ★★★★ sword girl who is stats-wise literally the main char gender-swapped, and Bivette, ★★★★ mage with regen and fireball, so that's nice), and spent some "free gems" for a third (Urania, a ★★★ pugilist furry) so I have a full party, but they don't back me up in the story event.

Characters have a lot of skill-ups on an Ability Board, the first board is linear, but the second and later ones give you multiple paths/tech trees. After half an hour I still have no equipment, though, lots of materials but the shop won't make me anything.

Combat's a standard turn-based thing, though so far only attacks and Switch (to change out party), no defense, items, or other actions. I've certainly seen better, but it's functional. There's giant monsters in the woods that are FAR out-level, they just one-shot me, so I guess I get back to those much later. They remind me a bit of the dungeon bosses in Etrian Odyssey, being marked on the map even when you can't see them.

Finally I beat the mini-boss in the main quest and reach the actual title sequence, and get to the time-travelling part.

I didn't level-grind enough in the woods, because now I'm a little under-level for fighting robots in the future, but that'll fix itself soon enough.

What I'm Playing: Langrisser, Another Eden

Langrisser's a long-running series of tactical RPGs, later succeeded by Growlanser. The mobile game is very similar to the PSP Growlanser remake, or to Fire Emblem Heroes. Move around a map and fight battles with usually 2-5 heroes chosen from 10 classes with rock-paper-scissors interactions (Infantry -> Lance -> Cavalry loop, Holy -> Demon, Archery -> Flyers, Sailors, Mages, and Assassins are neutral). This has the usual mobage stuff of arenas, "Magic Rift" areas to grind because there's not enough content, gachapon to get more heroes and equipment. There's less blatant "waifu" T&A exploitation material in Langrisser than FEH or many others, there's a few but it's a more serious game.

The combat UI is excellent, maybe one of the easiest to control and see movement and combat ranges. Every character has a band of soldiers with them, which act as a sort of HP buffer, extra damage before you take damage and die; you can swap out what kind of soldiers to change your combat interactions! The scenarios are modestly hard sometimes, not Final Fantasy Tactics hard, but decent tactical puzzles, and many of them have bonus "Feats" like killing optional targets, finding a chest, and so on. Far better than FEH, which bored me to death, it never got interesting.

The main screen is the world map with a bunch of buttons around the edges, better than a blank button-filled home screen like most mobage, but it still has some annoyances. 3 or 4 places you have to tap every time you log in or do anything to collect all the little rewards.

Levelling up characters is absurdly complicated but I kinda like that. You increase "star" rating by collecting soul fragments in gachapon and quest events, but the overall rating of N, R, SR, SSR doesn't change, except for three of the main-story characters; you don't really want to use anything below SR. You also add experience levels, mostly by spending EXP potions, they only gain a little bit from combat. You also upgrade classes, first getting more abilities, then progressing to a more advanced class along a 3-5 stage tree. Equipment starts out scarce and at level 1, and also has to be increased by absorbing "hammers" and other equipment, and eventually by adding enchantments. After 3 days on and off, I have the main-story characters at R, and three SR characters (Imelda, mage, T&A BDSM waifu; Lance, flyer, stern badass; Silver Wolf, assassin, masked mystery man) almost fully equipped, levelled up, and I'm doing fine in the arenas. I have a lot of junk R characters who I wish I could recycle their souls for EXP or something; the only one I've used at all is a pirate captain.

I'm not sure how long I'll keep at it, but there's a lot of depth in the game so far; but I say that a lot just before I quit playing these mobage.

AnotherEden

The more important game got pre-released today, and goes live tomorrow:

I have very high expectations of this. Masato Kato, best known for Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Chrono Cross, and Final Fantasy XI, has been working on this. So, I know there'll be time travel, branching stories, characters making heroic sacrifices, and a ton of crunchy turn-based combat and level-up strategies for the characters. Apparently it's only going to be solo, no events, arenas, or other mobage stuff, but does use gachapon for adding non-main-party characters. A huge contiguous world, no loading screens or warping.

The quotes from the staff in the interviews are interesting:

"This game was created with love by myself and the other staff who were raised on JRPGs. I want everyone to feel the same emotion and surprise I've experienced."
—Takahito Exa, art director

"This is a game which expands on the possibilities of the JRPG genre. It feels nostalgiac, yet modern. I think it's a game not only old-school Japanese game fans will enjoy, but also something younger people can get into as well."
—Shinwoo Choi, character designer

"If I was stuck on a deserted island and could only bring three things with me, I would bring a smartphone, charger, and Another Eden. If I have those, I don't need anything else in my life. I want everyone else to feel that way about Another Eden, too."
—Conomi Akahori, animator

The Boys are Back in Town

Coming sometime this year. I'm more than cautiously optimistic, given this. The Frenchman, the Female, and Mother's Milk look great; I'm not keen on their Wee Hughie or Billy Butcher but you can tell who they are, they're not obviously embarrassing like the Powers adaptation. Hopefully all of them can act the part. The few action scenes in the trailer look great, the slutty, trashy lifestyles of the rich and superpowered look right.

They've replaced Jack from Jupiter with an invisible man; and/or a tracksuit that stands up by itself. Which really isn't much of a downgrade from Jack, the whiniest and least useful of The Seven. Hm. Though Jack can fly, which is important at a couple points.

The Boys TV-The Seven

The Boys TV-The Boys

The Boys is the cure for taking superheroes as magical demigods. Garth Ennis asks, "What if people had superpowers? What if a corporation could make more of them? What would they be like?" And you know what the answer is. They're people, they would be terrible.

So, the CIA funds a group of counter-superheroes. They get a little power, but not much. They use dirty tricks and crime and scams to keep the supers from getting out of control, and killing more people. And even then, what kind of people do you recruit for such a job? Not our best and brightest, but damaged people who have a reason to fight these fuckers in spandex.

The Boys-G-Men

What I'm Watching: Carmen Sandiego

Remember "Batman: The Animated Series" from '92, the super art deco film noir one? And Erin Esurance? This is that, but in red.

The art and action animation are nicely done. It never has high detail, and sometimes smooth art deco looks too much like paper cutouts, but if you like this kind of thing, it works.

Opens with an annoying detective Chase with an outrasheous fronsh aaacksent by way of Monty Python, Julia a little lesbian cop with an iPad, "Red" running on rooftops, and "Player" (now her sidekick instead of the antagonist like in the games), a hikikomori otaku nerd who plays Control over a radio like Theora in Max Headroom.

Carmen's a running, jumping, grappling-hook-shooting superhero (antihero, but not really that anti-), which I'd chalk up to cartoon physics except Chase is merely human, risks a broken neck trying a rooftop chase. The other pro thieves also have amazing powers and advanced tech, which always makes me wonder why they don't start businesses to sell this tech instead of committing crimes.

However, then they start having dialogue and flashbacks, and the show grinds to a halt. The writing is stiff and formal, everyone clearly enunciates in silly accents, then LOOOOONG pauses between lines. Howard Hawks, where are you when we need you for some talking-over witty banter?! Well, long-dead, just like my patience with this fucking monologue they're STILL doing since I started writing this paragraph.

Of course everyone is obsessed with their tiny glass rectangles now, and can't imagine a world where anyone isn't. Would it be too much to ask for non-phone-based tech? I miss the videogames' insistence that everywhere is in reach of a home computer or phone booth.

Eventually her Thief School (oh no) cohort become Graham Crackle, Le Chevre (goat cheese), El Topo (the Jodorowsky film?), Tigress (clearly a fursuited camwhore), and Mime Bomb (horrific).

So, uh, there's a gem, the Eye of Vishnu. And we first see this dug up in Morocco. Which is, what, 6000 miles west of anyone who has ever worshipped Vishnu?! WHAT THE FUCK, SHOW. You have one job, which is to teach geography & history, and this is a failing grade.

The final caper in the school is not bad, though, and sets up her nom de guerre, costume, and a long-term goal for the series.

Started to watch a third ep, but the whinging ginger driver annoyed me so I stopped for now.

★★★½☆

May the Force be with Tuesday Music

"This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away, to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, hmm? What he was doing. Hmm. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things."
—Master Yoda

What I'm Watching: TempleOS Down the Rabbit Hole

A long, in-depth documentary on the late Terry A. Davis, author of LoseThos (pun of Win-Dows), later called TempleOS.

I'd seen Davis online for a couple decades, but never got far into following him. Davis was an aggressive, bizarrely incoherent "speaking in tongues" Christian racist who hated atheists, the CIA, and "N----rs", so you'd see his posts online and then he'd get downvoted or banned.

His OS, however, is fascinating. 64-bit, limited to VGA graphics, mostly but not solely single-tasking, no Internet or other networking, has a reasonably efficient Norton-style UI with hypertext everywhere, but constant scrolling, blinking, pop-up Bible quotes and hymns which would be maddening. All of which makes it weird but not that interesting, except it was written in assembly by one guy.

In college CompSci classes, you may "write an OS" which mostly means copying Andrew S. Tanenbaum's Minix piece-by-piece until you have a working Minix; which is great, Minix is fun, but this is a far more impressive feat.

LoseThos is for programming as entertainment.
It empowers programmers with kernel privilege because it's fun.
It allows full access to everything because it's fun.
It has no bureaucracy because it's fun.
It's the way it is by choice because it's fun.
LoseThos is in no way a Windows or Linux wannabe -- that would be pointless.
—Terry A. Davis

That's one of the most coherent explanations of the appeal of retrocomputing and low-level programming anyone's ever stated.

There's some interesting features, which are hard to get in modern OSs:

His long downward spiral of trying to be noticed online, then going off his anti-psychotic meds, his conspiracy theories, his embarrassing video streams, and then his final homeless wandering and death, are very troubling. For a long time he appeared to be getting by on donations from 8chan members simultaneously trolling him and supporting him. We do nothing to help these people, and let online gangs take advantage of them.

★★★★☆