YAMATA NO OROCHI'S PROFILE

So Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins, an RPG Maker game released back in 2008, was translated into English just a few months ago. I wrote a Twitter thread on the game here and interviewed the translator here. But I still don't see that many folks in the English-speaking RPG Maker community talking about the game! This is a huge bummer because Ruina is one of the coolest, most idiosyncratic games ever made in the RPG Maker engine.



Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins is an RPG Maker game that takes influence from tabletop RPGs and gamebooks. It is packed with stuff that most RPG Maker games do not have. Custom art? Ruina's loaded with it. Custom menu systems programmed in RPG Maker 2000? Ruina has it. A Dragon Age Origins-style background system that lets you play through four different perspectives? With an additional job system layered over that which lets you either play into or defy those roles? Ruina's got them. Defined encounters that play out based on your characters's stats and skills? Countless hidden secrets to tease out over multiple playthroughs? Ruina's pretty substantial, as well--the game's 20-30 hours long, but there's a decent amount of variance based on your character's build, the choices you make etc. Ruina is a monolith.



If you like RPG Maker games, western RPGs, Etrian Odyssey or games made by Craze, this game is required reading. Also, please help me out because I'm stuck fighting that evil guy on a horse down on the island. How do you beat him?? I have no idea. Please help me, RPG Maker community.

So Spring 2012 is arguably the best season of anime to come around in years.

You have Shinichiro Watanabe and Yoko Kanno getting back together to adapt an award-winning manga about high school students and jazz to the screen. You have the directors of Michiko to Hatchin and Redline making an incredibly stylish take on Lupin the Third. You have Kenji Nakamura directing what looks like his first legitimately great show since Mononoke. You have a long-form drama about brotherly love, astronauts and space. You have the director of the previously mentioned show making a surreal romantic comedy about high schoolers with a studio more known for its pornographic output, and against all odds, it's brilliant. And if all of that isn't enough, you have a sequel to Eureka Seven.

That's not even mentioning continuations of Fate/Zero, Aquarion EVOL and Bodacious Space Pirates. Neither is it mentioning shows like Sankrea, which I don't think are quite good enough to compete with any of the above, but would be pretty decent competitors in any other season. Where did all of this stuff come from? It's like it's falling from the sky!

This must be the umpteenth anime thread on this forum, but since there's so much good stuff coming out right now, I thought it would be worth opening up a venue for discussion. Any thoughts?

So a new game by Christine Love is out. It's called...



Excuse me?

Christine Love's the author of Digital: A Love Story, one of the best-written indie games of 2010. She then proceeded to write the oddly titled don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story, which was a lot more divisive but was still pretty neat. The former was a mystery/romance set in an alternate 1988, and involved conspiracies, dial tones and hacking the Gibson. The latter delved into social networking, the illusion of privacy and high school drama.

Both those were made in Ren'py, so I guess you could say that she was a writer of visual novels, if those visual novels went into genuinely awkward places, were genuinely well-written and forced the player to make actual, painful choices. Not that regular visual novels don't do that, but hey, her stuff is written in English!

So what is this again?

Analogue: A Hate Story seems to be a spiritual sequel of sorts to Digital (note the title) except with an interface more akin to don't take it personally. You play as an unnamed guy going to investigate the logs of the last generation ship to leave Earth in search of other planets. It isn't so much a traditional visual novel as it is an investigation sim, where you dig through reams of logs with the ship's A.I. in order to uncover the mystery of what actually happened. Also there's probably romance involved, but I've only played through the trial so I dunno.

From what I've played, if you're looking for a traditional video game with explosions or numbers to crunch or other things, this might not be your cup of tea. But if you're looking for an interesting experience, this just might be worth keeping an eye on. The full version costs around $15 dollars, but there's a free trial that covers about 15% of the game and still manages to go into some pretty interesting territory. Also you could always play through Digital first, which is free and certainly worth playing.

Anyway, this certainly isn't what you would call a game with mainstream appeal, but if you liked stuff like RE: Allistair++ and The World is Made of Paper, you might want to check this out, if only for its pedigree. I'm not sure whether it's any better or worse than Digital from the bit I've played, but at best it could very well be amazing and at worst thought-provoking.

EDIT: Rock Paper Shotgun's review of Digital: A Love Story: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03/17/wot-i-think-digital-a-love-story/

and their review of don't take it personally: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/04/06/dont-take-it-personally-review/

...just to provide some context.

Chrono Cross just came out yesterday on the Playstation Network, available for PS3s and PSPs everywhere. Think about that for a second.



Playstation-era JRPGs can be a pretty controversial subject. Was Final Fantasy VIII an avant-garde masterpiece or a broken soap opera populated by unlikable characters? Did Xenogears really have The Best Story in a Video Game Ever, or is it instead a barely-finished regurgitation of Evangelion and an intro class in psychology? About the only game that people seem to agree was pretty cool without reservations was Suikoden II, and even that didn't have a great translation (granted, most of them did back then.) And of all these games, one of the most controversial was Chrono Cross--a game that received a rave reception when it was released, only to later be labelled as a failure that not only had terrible gameplay and arguably one of the most convoluted plots in any videogame ever but was also (to add insult to injury) a horrible sequel to SNES-era masterpiece Chrono Trigger.

BUT I remember the game fondly from my childhood and never had a chance to play it all the way through, so I am working on it right now! So far, I can understand the hate to a degree--recruitable party members add replay value but have very little depth, characters frequently espouse philosophy at every opportunity and finding a hidden Uplift element in the beginning of the game requires talking to a pot four or five times until it starts yelling at you.

On the other hand, the game is aesthetically brilliant--the island motif is whimsical, a world away from other JRPGs and generally really well done. The element system is a neat compromise between character individuality and Final Fantasy VIII-era customization where all characters are the same. The subject matter is heavy as hell, and the occasional flashes of plot evident in the opening village are a lot stranger and more disturbing than Chrono Trigger ever was. And the soundtrack is magnificent, of course. Overall the game feels like a weird fusion of Xenogears and Chrono Trigger (which makes sense considering the writer of Xenogears was director and writer of Chrono Cross, as well as the Zeal segment in Trigger) and while it's imperfect and a little bizarre it's certainly very interesting, and a world away from the more populist Final Fantasy games.

Anyway, I'll continue playing through this, and maybe posting reactions if things get better or take a major turn for the worse. Anyone have anything interesting to say about Chrono Cross? Experiences with the game? Proof of the game's terribleness or of Masato Kato's insanity? Let's Plays (The Dark Id did a pretty good one)? Anything's good so long as it isn't something like "Chrono Cross is bad, end of story"--actual reasons would be great. This is one of the most batshit insane JRPGs ever released for the Playstation, after all.

Some neat articles:
Jeremy Parish's take, which takes the middle ground.
Pitchfork's retrospective, which is considerably more snarky but also surprisingly restrained.

ADDENDUM: Vagrant Story is probably the Playstation game most loved by critics to this day, but even it has an active hatedom, so...

Has anybody heard of this?

http://www.johnwizard.com/

It's another one of those ridiculously expensive RPG Maker games being sold these days, except that it's actually good. It's essentially Legend of Zelda, Eternal Eden and Deadly Sin mashed together and then seasoned with very good writing and surprisingly decent atmospherics. RTP graphics aside, this is probably the best RPG Maker VX game that I've seen. Definitely a case where you shouldn't judge a book by its cover!

On the other hand, it's 20 dollars. Which is a lot. But if you're in a crazy mood and feel like throwing your money away you could probably do a lot worse than this.