Xenogears 10-year anniversary playthrough go go!

Originally posted 2009-09-14.

(I stayed up until 4:00 last Monday and finished Persona 3. The last boss wasn’t as bad as I’d expected!)

I have wanted to play through Xenogears again since… well, since I first finished it in Christmas break of 1999. The 10-year anniversary of that first playthrough seemed like a fine opportunity to do so. In those intervening years, I have learned enough to be perfectly comfortable with the Japanese version of the game. So, I downloaded it to my PSP for ¥600 and jumped in.

People I Met Playing Demon’s Souls

Originally posted 2009-12-30.

Online video games have a deserved reputation for being populated by illiterate, immature, ignorant, inflammatory imbeciles. Penny Arcade, as is their forte, rather coarsely pointed this out some years ago.

I spent 63 hours over the course of a month in Demon’s Souls, the bogglingly deep and captivating Japan-made Western RPG. It was my first video game with an online component (beyond Street Fighter and BlazBlue matchmaking), and I feared for the worst. But every person I met was gracious and neighborly. These are people who bow to you when you join their game. I guess that with a game this unapologetically difficult, the real enemy is the game world itself, and players are inclined to a sort of camaraderie. It also seems that you need to have a well-developed sense of patience and calm in order to get very far in Demon’s Souls.

Back to Persona 3

Originally posted 2009-07-27.

Trying to regularly record my progress with games, hopefully to get some conversations going with my game-enjoying friends. Even if it’s just through disjointed, badly-written megatweets like this.

For some reason, I felt like picking up Persona 3 again, even though I’d sworn off it when it started requiring me to grind. The recommended level for beating Strega is 53, and I’m 40. Stayed up until 3 AM getting to level 42. It’s going to be a long grind.

Ar tonelico impressions

Originally posted 2007-02-07.

• I had hope for the voices. I really did. I believe in my heart that it’s possible for people speaking English in a video game can sound cool and captivating. But once again, I found myself rushing to switch the audio to Japanese, to avoid embarrassment in front of my coworkers.

  • Within 10 minutes of starting the game, centuries-old solemn protector Shurelia said the line “cut the chatter”. We’ll see if that was a fluke or if this is going to be another game where every character sounds like some flippant young dude. It’s hard to tell yet because most of the dialogue so far has been between Lyner and Jack, two flippant young dudes.

  • So far the localization has been solid, so maybe that line was not indicative of how Shurelia is going to speak for the rest of the game. Most lines are translated just about the same way I would have done them myself, with about 75% emphasis on saying exactly what the original line said, and 25% on making it flow naturally.

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