Bright End of Nowhere

Remember when I was utterly obsessed with Persona 4 (er, as opposed to right now, when I'm only somewhat obsessed) and most of the rest of you were completely baffled by this? They made an anime, and not only is Persona 4: the Animation airing in Japan this fall, but you can get it, subtitled in English, within 24 hours of original air time on Hulu. It's pretty much exactly like the game, minus dungeon crawling. It sends me right to my happy place, and I adore it madly.

In other Things What I Am Watching news, I finally had enough of people beating me over the head and started watching the Eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who and Last Exile (steampunk airships!).

I also seem to have mostly abandoned League of Legends and fallen headfirst in Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. Not that this is a bad thing, considering it means LAN games with housemates as they teach me about flak and tac d.

It sounds like my old DnD 4E game is coming out of hiatus soon, which makes me a lot less pissed for accidentally forgetting to cancel my yearly subscription to DnD Insider. It's useful now! I'm pretty excited because this was the campaign that was a sequel (set 50 years later) to the first 3.5ed campaign I played way back, and we'd just hit Paragon tier when hiatus happened. So I'm looking forward to getting my DnD back on. (My character is the grandkid of my original character, and she's all kinds of cranky because of it. Such as being utterly convinced that her getting assigned to the party is some kind of punishment but no one is telling her what she did wrong.)

So, over the last week or so, a friend decided to take another friend's homebrew Persona tabletop system and write/run the sequel campaign to the original campaign that kind of died a quiet, ignoble death roughly a year ago.

The new campaign is, possibly from my understanding, which of course could be entirely wrong, essentially the Eternal Punishment to the original campaign's Innocent Sin. (Basically, the original GM and the new GM decided by GM-Fiat that the original campaign canonically got the Bad Ending. New campaign is taking that and running from there.) Because of this, my original character is returning for the sequel, is the only PC returning (it's pretty much a new group, and the old GM is now a player, which is great). Except the experience kind of fucked her up bad. How badly? Her Arcana changed from Star to Tower. (The system runs off of the Persona 3 interpretations of the Major Arcana.)

So yeah, I'm pretty excited to play this character again and get some good tabletop going. I'm only currently in one other bi-weekly run, and I realise that I miss it. And it's kind of the impetus to get off my ass and actually write the rules for that Sliders-esque campaign I've been tossing around in my head. I just need to decide if I'll run off of modified FATE or just write a homebrew system for it. GURPS is actually a few orders of magnitude more complicated than what I want for this.

So, my reluctance to pre-order Dragon Age II actually has little to nothing to do with the fact that I haven't finished the first one nor played the demo yet. It actually mostly stems from the fact that, once again, there's Day 1 DLC. Which is irritating in and of itself, but what's got me currently pissy at EA and Bioware is that said DLC was included with the purchase of the Signature Edition (for no extra charge). The Signature Edition was available to everyone who pre-ordered before 2/11 (or thereabouts), and was in fact the edition you would get if you did so.

DA2 showed up on Steam for pre-order on 2/12.

I'm kinda pissy at them. To the point where I'm leaning towards just waiting until the first time the DLC + game pack goes on sale on Steam. It's not like I have a dearth of games to play. In fact, in some ways, they might have done me a favor.

I think my current plan for finishing games is
-DA1 (Origins [currently in Denereim], Awakening, and the 2 DLC packs left)
-P3P (think I'm in September)
-SMT: Devil Survivor (I'm on Day 7, I just need to grind because I chose the crazy option on first playthrough)
-Mass Effect 1 (2nd to last major mission; I suspect 5-8 hours total, including time to remember how to be a sniper)

Then, in some order:
-Mass Effect 2
-Dragon Age 2
-KH: Birth By Sleep
-SMT: Devil Summoner 1 and 2

This is not counting to to be released games:
-Catherine (July)
-Okamiden (mid-March)
-Portal 2 (April)

If you notice something strange on that last list, yes, AtlusUSA has announced that they're localizing Catherine, the game that proves that Atlus has indeed discovered the way to put sheer WTF into game form. It also further convinces me that if we can figure out how to turn WTF into energy, we'd solve the energy crisis. Of course, that means Japan will rule us all, as they are the undisputed masters of generating WTF, but hey. In any case, I will most likely end up pre-ordering Catherine, feel slightly dirty for doing so, and will live in abject fear of what Atlus could possibly include as preorder bonuses. Oh, the things I'll do to try to ensure the existence of a hypothetical Persona 5 (or localized ports of ALL of P2 even!) in my hands.

*tilts head*

I seem to have A Thing for creating "exceedingly reluctant rulers". You know, when they find out a fief/kingdom/planet wants to make them ruler after they've been raised away from it, they keep trying to figure out how to give it back. Crown = Do Not Want.

Amusingly, both of them are female, in systems that rely on first-born inheritance, regardless of gender. Oh boy, I have A Thing. (Yes, Ashura, I am talking about you, however did you guess? You just got company in this category.)

In other, non-original fic news, I wish this apocafic I'm plotting would grow the rest of its plot. I'm so going to be tapped out of crazy Gnostic traditions, various mythologies, and legends really damn soon at this rate. Because I had the brilliant idea of adding a tenday on top of plotting the aforementioned P3/P4 apocafic. Why is the tenday add to that load? Because the last time I wrote a tenday, every corporate research project in game was organized via mythological tradition by company (one named all their projects after Norse, another from really esoteric Jewish tradition, etc).

I am insane.

Title: Zero Failure Modes
Author: ultranos
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3660
Prompt: 28. Remove the ladder when the enemy has ascended to the roof. With baits and deceptions, lure your enemy into treacherous terrain. Then cut off his lines of communication and avenue of escape. To save himself, he must fight both your own forces and the elements of nature.
Fandom: Persona 4 (bonus appearances from Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor)
Characters: Yosuke Hanamura, Naoto Shirogane
Notes: Written for the 36_stratagems ficathon. Thanks to shanghairain for the extensive beta work, and for being the poor man I poked at 3am on multiple nights trying to plot this thing.
Summary: Yosuke Hanamura is 21 and single. He resolves to fix this, and he ropes Naoto Shirogane into helping him. This plan has Zero Failure Modes.

( Zero Failure Modes )

One day, I feel like I should write the Big Damn Shin Megami Tensei/Persona Post about why I love this series and spin-off series so much, about the characters and plots and mechanics and gameplay and philosophy and everything else. Because it's at the point where I'm contemplating the prices on the Persona 1 PSP remake, because that's about the only way I can still throw money at Atlus (other than buying SMT: Strange Journey).

I have also realized that I have bought P3 3 times, in 3 different forms. I don't actually regret this at all.

I guess it's because where lots of other people pick up TV shows to sink time into and find glee in, I do it with games. And if I've seemed a bit distant lately, it's because I don't know how to talk to people on my flist about this. I can post about it, but it's not...I don't know. I want to make people understand, because yes, I love them, but I also think other people would too. I dunno. I guess I can't see much difference in time commitment to spending 60 hours on a game and watching 60 hours worth of TV. :/

Maybe my brain's wired strangely.

Finished Persona 4 earlier tonight (like I said, January 31, 2010 is really the perfect day to beat a Persona game. Only thing better would have been if it were Persona 3). Now I'm kind of sifting through my feelings for it while listening to the soundtrack on iTunes.

Which is causing interesting feelings in my chest as my heart clenches at certain moments with the music as I remember key plot points and battles. (Shoji Meguro absolutely outdid himself on this soundtrack. "The Genesis" is some of the most epic music ever.)

It's interesting, you know, how music can be tied into events in visual media, and how it's used to hammer home an impact. And how if it's used badly, it can totally ruin everything. P4's the latest in this string for me, but I can't help but want to kick some serious ass whenever I hear "Libera Me from Hell" (Tegan Toppa Gurran Lagann) or "Battle for Everyone's Souls" (Persona 3), or straighten up a little when I hear the "Imperial March", or a hundred other little things. (Oddly, I can't recall a leitmotif from the 'gateverse that really has the same effect.)

I don't know if that's a remnant from my (very slim) music training as a kid. Or rather, whatever that music training I got left is that I react very well to crazy electric guitar chords. I do wonder how it is for other people.

Anyway, I know that this seems odd for most people on my flist, to have such an emotional response to a video game. To a lot of people, it probably doesn't make much sense. I can argue that it's very much like TV shows or movies or books, that the games I'm fond of (RPGs, especially Eastern RPGs) can have engaging characters and stories, but it's possibly outside the realm of easy comprehension for a lot of people. How in the world can I have an emotional reaction and get attached to characters who exist only as a series of 1s and 0s on a disc? It's not the printed word, nor is it actors on a screen, or animation.

Maybe it's because video games are still a young industry. And that it's only been within the last 20 or so years that RPGs have really been trying for stories (Eastern, at least. Western still is more sandbox-y, but that's changing too). That's not a long time. And it's very different from other game genres, like FPSes (Half-Life) and platformers (Mario, Sonic).

But I just finished spending over 100 hours of my life with a group of characters, who were fleshed-out and had character development and grew as people over the course of a year in-game. 100 hours. That's more hours than Stargate Atlantis has.

So when I put down the controller and watched the ending, since the Protagonist is such a blank slate in this game, he really pretty much is you...I felt like I was leaving Inaba myself. And all my dear friends who'd been through so much with me, and grew stronger as people, were saying good-bye to me as well.

Damn if that doesn't hurt.

I haven't had this feeling from a game in a very, very long time, if ever. (Maybe the closest was Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete) In fact, I don't recall having this feeling for any form of media in a long time.

Well done, Atlus. You now own my soul.

If you thought my last entry on P4 was bad, I was cursing out Atlus EVEN MORE last night. Seriously. I was almost crying. That company is seriously good at making me flip the hell out. Well played.

(Er, I hope I'm not bugging the hell out of people by just posting about video games lately. I suppose if you don't want to read, you don't have to. My love of games is incomprehensible to people, I know.)

Speaking of companies making me flip out, who the HELL at Sega decided that releasing Resonance of Fate on the SAME DAY as Final Fantasy XIII was a good idea? Seriously, are they TRYING to make me not graduate?

As a bonus addendium to Atlus's ability to create stories with characters you care about:

GOD DAMN YOU, ATLUS! WHY DID YOU DO THAT TO [REDACTED]?! ARGH! I'M FLIPPING OUT HERE!

*ahem*

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you write compelling characters.

Atlus is Bringing P3P to the US

AND the release date is after graduation, so it's not going to freaking tempt me to ditch work. Hells yeah! This literally made my day.

Thing is, now I'm going to need to buy a PSP. I've been putting it off, but there are some games I've been wanting to play that have been tempting me.

Persona 1, Valkeria Chronicles 2, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep...Hell, even Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, for sheer nostalgic value.

(Because clearly I need to play the remake [Silver Star Harmony] of a remake I played [Silver Star Story Complete] of a remake I didn't play [Silver Star Story] of a game I didn't play [Silver Star]...)

P3P just was the absolute deal-breaker.