Devil Survivor - "Rest in peace, sinners."

Devil Survivor is a game that ought to be selling millions of copies. It won't and will likely attain cult hit status in a couple of weeks and be impossible to find anywhere, but it still should be selling like hotcakes.

What you have here is an Atlus turn-based strategy RPG (Atlus being the creators of Persona) about the Apocalypse occurring in Tokyo. The story draws on Christian/Old Testament material in that strange Japanese way, but fortunately not in that Japanese way. Technology, angels, the internet, rock music and government conspiracies are also involved. It's a wild ride and is occasionally a bit too wacky, but over all it's a good yarn.

If you've ever played Advanced Wars or Fire Emblem or FF Tactics, then you're already familiar with the rudimentaries of the system. You have 3-4 people on a grid-based map, each of whom have various elemental attacks and movement-manipulating spells. Battles are thus strategic and extremely intense. Haphazard attacks, bad mana management and poor formations often result in party wipes.

In layman's terms: The game is really bloody hard.

But beyond the raw gameplay is a really compelling storyline that handles something that few games handle well... Choice. So let's talk about that.


(As you can see, I find all my screenshots by google image searching them. Stupid sites putting watermarks on the things)

When I play a Bioware RPG or really any game that involves making important choices, the first thing I'll often do whenever anything happens is save. That's a pretty basic thing, I thought... being able to save and then go back if you don't like what happens is something you sorta take for granted.


But here's the thing... Devil Survivor has only one save slot. And because the fights are so damn hard, you'd have to be crazy to not be saving constantly. Moreover, the way things are set up in the game has it so that a choice you make at one point will have irrevocable consequences an hour or so down the road.

At one point I heard that a certain person was being hunted by a very angry man who hangs out with demons. At the same time as that was happening though, a woman was trying to fulfill a blood oath. I gave said lady a hand in a tough but fun fight and then immediately afterward got to see my pal get incinerated before my very eyes. And, since my choice to help the woman over him had occurred much earlier, there was nothing I could do to 'fix' it.

It's really amazing how much that changes. I found myself really thinking about the decisions the game made me make in a way that really wouldn't have been an issue if I'd had 15 saved games. I actually would put my DS down and think about what I was doing and why, which was I think a strange thing.


The other interesting thing about choice in the game is what they're willing to let you do and become. If you're so inclined, you can become plain old evil and sit on a big chair sipping red wine while concocting evil plans and being attended upon by hot evil slave girls and thinking about how evil you are. But there are at least 5-6 endings and there's a rather large grey area surrounding the non-ultimate evil ones. As I was making the Big Choice, I found that I couldn't really decide which course would really be right. Questions of free will, morality and human progress all sorta bounce between them.

I think that's much better than the usual good ending vs. evil ending that crops up in RPGs. Evil is there and good is there too, but there's a lot in between.

It's a crime that stuff like this passes by mostly unnoticed while shit like Metal Gear sells millions of copies. So go buy it!
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Persona 4 - "I reach out for the truth."

Persona 4 was really damn good.

It's a modern fantasy/mystery RPG/Visual Novel hybrid set in a Japanese small town. It's a crossbreed of Majora's Mask, Final Fantasy and Fate/Stay Night, except much more sophisticated. The story is immensely complicated and nuanced while the gameplay is well thought out and challenging, though it's really the scope of the entire affair that defies description. The game is long, but unlike other RPGs that usually have a filler 'go collect some knickknacks for us', Persona is packed full of stories upon stories.

The game revolves around a series of murders in the town of Inaba, with bodies showing up on foggy days hanging upside down from powerlines. I won't talk too much about the plot (that would take too long), but as you might guess the police are baffled and it lies with you to form a sort of Scooby Doo mystery-solving gang in order to stop the murderer.

The writers likes to alternate between somber darkness and lighthearted fun as they tease out the mystery. The whole game has a very anime style... catchy J-Pop numbers play as you go around town or get into fights and the game has an all-star voice cast that includes the likes of Rie Kugimiya, Yui Horie and Ami Koshimizu (even if you don't know all those names, believe me, you've heard them before).

All in all: It was a fantastic game and I couldn't put it down till the credits rolled. I highly recommend it (the undub version, obviously). After the jump, I'll talk a bit more about the gameplay and then go into a few things about the characters in my usual way.

So one thing about gameplay: Man, this shit was hard.

The first ninety minutes of the game are just visual novel bits and then beating up some ridiculously weak enemies. Then all of a sudden the game becomes this nightmare land where every point of mana is precious and not sufficiently protecting yourself against certain elemental attacks means doom for you and your entire party.


It's not a situation where you'll lose a battle and have to go and grind levels to win. You could play like that, I suppose, but it's more accurate to say that the game wants you to be tactical. Don't expose your elemental weaknesses, buff yourself up, dispel enemy buffs, use the defend command when it's wise to and keep your health bars high. Often boss fights can last over an hour, with a boss switching tactics/forms every time you knock off 1/4th of its health.

It's brutal and exhausting, but ultimately extremely satisfying when you think your way through.

So that aside, let's talk about some interesting points of the game...


This is Kanji. He's a thuggish delinquent with a bad history of gang violence and involvement with the police. He's a good guy though and has a big old heart of gold, in spite of his tough-guy act.

Not that special at first glance, but the thing is that he also has the unusual distinction of being the very first openly gay video game character.

(Some people might take issue with 'first', so let me say that the Bioware lesbians don't count because they're designed first and foremost to titillate players and the blue alien lady isn't even really a lesbian because she comes from a mono-gendered species that can reproduce with more or less anything with a pulse)

I'm not quite sure what to make of the portrayal of Kanji's sexuality. Like for one... The murders in the game involve an alternate dimension that victims are being thrown into, wherein a combination of their desires, anxieties and fears are made manifest by the 'Shadows', a race that feasts upon negative emotion. Kanji gets thrown in there and when you go in to pull him out his dungeon is filled with gay characitures... like you have to fight muscular men in rainbow underwear in there. Not exactly a tasteful depiction, but the place is supposed to be a manifestation of both his fears and desires, so in a way it kind of makes sense. I mean, clearly the writers were having some fun here, but it also shows that this is how he would be afraid people would see him if they knew he were gay.

But the whole thing is muddled when Kanji later develops a huge crush on this one dude who ends up being a girl (albeit a somewhat transgendered one). So I guess he's at least somewhat bi? I really don't know. I actually personally think him and that girl are a pretty good couple (he's very brash and straight-forward while she's intellectual and reserved), but I believe that that sort of thing really doesn't work out long-term. Although I read online that in Japanese culture it's apparently more common to be bi than gay, so who knows?

What I liked about Kanji though is that at no point did he feel like fodder for the degenerate yaoi fangirls of the world nor did he feel like he was an attempt to shout 'hey being gay is ok' or whatnot. He's not someone that's defined by his sexuality as gay characters in fiction so often are, but it's rather just an aspect of him. That's why it made me a bit sad when I read about him online and saw people saying things like 'oh yuck, Kanji! I never used that guy ewwwww.'

I hold some conservative views myself, but for crying out loud people, can we get passed that?

The other thing I want to talk about is the game's primary flaw, mainly the relationship system.


I say 'flaw' but it's actually mostly a good system. A group of characters in the game have mini-storylines that you develop through the game that are attached to a Persona card in the game... as you spend more time with them, you level up that card and get XP bonuses when you make Personas of that class. So say for instance you become friends with Kanji up there, who is the representative of the Emperor card... when I go to the next dungeon and make Odin, an Emperor Persona, I will get a good 6 levels on creation, which is really essential.

The problem is that relationships max out at level 10... not a bad thing in theory, as there are lots of cards to max. But there's an interesting quirk in practice: Once you finish a card, the person is essentially dead to you.

So you have a situation like with Rise here:


Rise of the Lovers card captured my character's heart with her ability to call out an elemental weakness/immunity of the enemy before a battle starts and her capacity to refill my party's health and mana after each battle (always something to look for in a girl). And of course she's also voiced by Rie Kugimiya. But anyway, at level 10, love was confessed and a long-term commitment was made... But from then on, it was now in my interests to refuse to spend time with her and to ask out a blonde bimbo so that I could max out the Moon social link. And, of course, my doing this will have no effect on Rise.

I'm not saying the game should be a bloody dating sim or something, but that just makes no sense and it really broke the immersion. A lot of the side routes (i.e. the blonde bimbo) are pretty pointless too so why not cut one or two and make it so that you max out that card with the girl that I had my character commit to? Surely that would make more sense than 'okay she loves you, time to start seeing other people!'

... Right?

In the end though, this was a fantastic piece of work that I enjoyed from beginning to end. If at all possible, you should grab it. There's more ...

Mass Effect - "Now where have I seen that before?

So let's make our inaugural post about something I'm going through right now... Mass Effect.

Mass Effect is an RPG by that great titan of RPGs, Bioware... if you haven't ever played a Bioware RPG before, you're doing yourself something of a disservice as they are truly excellent. Up until Mass Effect, however, Bioware's games were based off of preexisting intellectual properties... DnD for Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars for Knights of the Old Republic. This is the first Bioware game I've played that's consisted of a completely original universe and I had high expectations, considering that what they did with other people's ideas had already been so bloody good. Free of the constraints of preexisting universes and canon, you would think Bioware's creative minds would soar. And sure enough, Bioware did come up with an impressively massive and detailed universe... which ended up being a compilation of every single bit of Western science fiction made in the last decade.

I guess fan fiction writers can only ever be fan fiction writers.

I'm not actually finished with Mass Effect, but the average science fiction fan doesn't have to get very far into the game to realize that there's something familiar about everything you see.

You're a ship's captain working on a state of the art vessel built by humans that incorporates technology borrowed from a semi-hostile alien race to create a state of the art stealth system...


Humanity in the universe is a relative newcomer on the galactic scene and most other races regard humanity as an upstart species that's trying to elbow its way into the stars. There's a council of aliens ("The Council") that's basically an intergalactic UN, but humanity doesn't fully recognize its legitimacy and is rife with strong anti-Council sentiment...



The bad guys are a race of robots who were originally built to perform menial tasks but who later turned on their masters when (whoops!) they gained self-awareness...


Their goal is to reawaken a sleeping race of ancient robots who awake every 50000 years to purge the galaxy of organic life...



There's also a space bug species that swarmed around the universe for a while...



And last, but certainly not least, you also run into an evil corporation that tests mind control spores on an unsuspecting human colony...


It's really quite sad. I don't think I've encountered a single original idea in the whole damn game (unless you want to count blue skinned lesbian aliens, which I do not). Even when they try to make an original spin on a old (and tired) idea, it ends up being stolen. Let's take for instance the Zerg (I know Heinlein gets credit for the original idea) derivative race, which they call the Rachnids. The twist for those things was that they didn't really mean it when they tried to swarm the galaxy over and it was all an accident and they didn't realize they were attacking sentient life. They sort of realized why they would end up being wiped out for that and expressed a desire for lasting peace. "Hm," thought I, "I guess that's kind of an interesting."

But then I realized that that's taken pretty much directly out of Ender's Game.

I don't have a problem with homages, but I think most people would agree that the business we're seeing here is taking things just a bit too far. It's sad really. Bioware is still as good at making compelling characters as they always have been, but they're just drowning them in all this derivative crap.

I'll finish the game and all that, though you have to sort of think to yourself: "Maybe Bioware should have stuck with Star Wars after all"
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