RE: Tales of Xillia 2

Somebody’s getting trolled here, and it’s probably me.

O brilliant SPOILERS of coldest steel, rend the infinite SPOILERS, and crush my enemies to nothing!  SAVAGE SPOILER FURY!

The sign of victory!  (And spoilers.)

What Are Video Games For?

Alternate post title: DURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP.

ShootStravaganza!! THE FINALE!

So, let’s talk about shooters one last time.  Because I thought about giving Destiny another shot, but decided against it; I made a cat robot in the beta, but now I want to make a female avatar.

If the game industry won’t put women in, then the duty falls to us.  #ForJusticeOrSomething

Are Video Games Actually Hurting Us?

So I started watching Kamen Rider Gaim.

I said as much on Twitter, but it bears repeating: Gaim strikes me as what happens when a man watches the movie version of West Side Story, and takes it WAY too seriously -- and upon realizing that the streets of New York aren’t filled with gang battles won via elaborate dance moves, proceeded to have a nervous breakdown. 

The show starts in one place, and becomes something completely different barely a quarter of the way in.  Without giving away any spoilers, let’s just say that head writer Gen Urobuchi has evidently been playing a lot of Devil Survivor…and unfortunately, happened to watch huge swaths of the abysmal anime adaption.

That -- much like the majority of this post -- is pretty depressing.  So you might want to have your favorite comedic video or song uploaded.  

(Should your search fail, Gaim will provide.)  

ShootStravaganza!! Battlefield 4

“The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will He keep His anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us.”

--Psalm 103:8-12

*sigh*

So.  You knew this one was coming, didn’t you?

So How Good is Harry Potter, Really?

A while back, I got to meet one of my dad’s work friends, and he asked me what I had in mind as per the whole “life” thing.  I told him I had the writing equivalent of “hoop dreams” -- though not in those words, because that would require me to be witty on the spot.  In any case, the conversation ended up shifting to J.K. Rowling and the mind-crunchingly famous Harry Potter series -- which he didn’t think was all that great.

Not being a devoted, diehard Potter fan, I can’t say his opinion filled me with rage.  It caught me off guard, sure, but I understood what he meant.  Failing to do so would bring me closer to believing that the canon is perfect, which -- as you know -- is impossible so long as it fails to focus on Sir Neville M.F, Longbottom.  But for what it’s worth, I think that overall, the Potterverse has its fair share of juice.  It wouldn’t have become a cultural tour de force if it wasn’t.  Although considering what other book series also became a tour de force, that might not have the hallowed status it once did.

But enough about that.  Let’s talk Potter.

ShootStravaganza!! MGS5: Ground Zeroes

Cripes.  How do you even talk about this game?

The only way you can is the obvious way -- by bringing up the fact that it’s a forty dollar demo.  And it IS a forty dollar demo, without question.  That’s literally the only reason it exists, even if it’s got a spiffy title independent of the upcoming The Phantom Pain.  And it’s not a justified existence by any means, believe you me.  Remember, I’m the guy who raised a stink over The Last of Us and its DLC -- fifteen dollars for maybe an hour and a half of cutscenes, and maybe thirty minutes of gameplay.  So I can’t in good faith recommend Ground Zeroes to anyone.

And jeez, does this set one hell of a bad precedent.  Konami and crew likely only did it because they needed to restock the war chest, and they figured with the MGS name attached, they could get away with it.  And they did.  Even if some people raised complaints, others -- and plenty of them, by the sound of it -- spoke with the one thing that mattered: their wallets.  So I guess this is the new standard now.  I take issues with games like Destiny offering access to its beta demo solely by preordering the game (and “subtly” pushing a thought-free purchase under the idea that “eh, I already preordered it, so I might as well keep it”), but that’s a saintly practice compared to Ground Zeroes. 

Now.  Let’s talk about the actual game.

A Very Special (Deadly?!) Post

You know…I’ve been thinking.

ShootStravaganza!! Mercenary Kings

You might think it’s a little unfair of me to add a game like Mercenary Kings to this miniseries, by way of it being a shooter in the sole sense that “it has guns”.  But then again, I could counter that by saying there was never any exact definition as to what sort of shooter would appear in the ShootStravaganza.  Given that there’s a third-person shooter coming up, is it really so far-fetched to have a game that leans hard toward being an old-school 2D platformer?

No.  No it is not, good sir or madam.

Moving on to more pertinent matters -- this game has sprites, and that makes me happy.  I agree with the sentiment of a lot of gamers, and think that sprites are cool…and on top of that, something precious ended up being lost in the transition from 2D to 3D.  I’ve got one of the later Breath of Fire games on my PS3, and the animations there make me lament that that didn’t become the future of gaming.  Same goes for Street Fighter; I like (and still play) IV, but there’s just no beating the marvel of Alex tearing his shirt, Sean’s two-fisted dragon punch, and pretty much everything about Makoto and Elena.  A well-made sprite leads to a level of artistic expression that 3D can’t always match.  Or if not that, then it at least offers something friggin’ cool.

So the same applies to Mercenary Kings, as you’d expect.  I just wish there was more to it than that.