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Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
1:46 am	When James told me about his blog, I wanted to do some Let's Plays for it—the first one I had in mind was Europa 1400, and I tried a few other—but I never managed to produce anything that would've been particularly fun to read, so that idea fizzled out (I might try again someday). After that happened, I decided that I'd just write a review for whatever I happened to be playing at the time, which was also Europa 1400, and I still haven't played that enough to write a well informed review about it. Now, I have to confess—I do on occasion tend towards hagiography of Tim Rogersian levels, and I also have a bad habit of not finish games. When it comes to writing reviews, I don't think this is actually a problem. For the former, reviews tend to be pretty one sided anyway. And for the latter, while I'm very much an advocate of playing a game for quite a bit before you pass judgment on it, you usually have seen most of what the game play has to offer within ten hours or so, and figuring out if you'd enjoy what you've already been doing for another thirty hours or so really isn't that difficult to do. Sometimes there are anomalies. The previously mentioned Europa 1400 is one of those, and the game I'm (going to be) writing about here is too. Which is a good thing, because otherwise the last four paragraphs wouldn't have much relevance and I would've succeeded in nothing but wasting both my time and yours, but I digress. Trying and failing at coming up with a better lead-in, the game in question is Dragon Warrior 7. In almost every town in Dragon Warrior 7, there's a well. Most of these wells don't contain anything. Some of them contain quite a lot. For instance, in DW7, there's an item called a Tiny Medal. These have been a staple in the series since the fourth entry, I believe. Anyway, you collect these, and eventually give them to a medal collector to get special items and equipment based on how many you've collected. It's sort of like the Golden Skulltulas in Ocarina of Time, or the little red gems in Illusion of Gaia. Sometimes you find these Tiny Medals in wells. Other times, you find a dungeon in a well. These are a bit rarer, and vary quite a bit depending on what the story's doing at that point. In two cases, you find a casino in a well. There's no indication that there will be a casino down there—you just need to explore on your own a bit. The first of these casinos is outside of an inn by a lake, which is near a placed called the Dharma Temple. The Dharma Temple is where you can change classes—or, at that point in the game, take on a class for the first time. Classes in Dragon Warrior 7 govern your stats and what skills and spells you learn, along with a few other things. It's a fairly big system. However, the first time you get to Dharma Temple, something's not quite right, and as soon as you try to change classes, you find out that monsters have taken over. They strip you of all your skills and spells at that point—the characters effectively have a default class, and keep learning spells up to about level fifteen or so—and send you into a dungeon. Skills in Dragon Quest 7 are very important. Status attacks actually work, for instance, like in the recent Shin Megami Tensei games. The game play mechanics, for this segment, change completely, as you have been, up to that point, relying heavily on your skills and magic. At the same time, though, you get two new and very useful things—a free, infinite-use healing item, and during this time you can also buy the thief key, which let's you unlock several chests you've already passed. As soon as you get out of the dungeon the invading monsters dumped you in, at least. Well, dungeon isn't really accurate. It's actually two or three—I'm not really sure if two of them were different dungeons or not—and then two different towns, also. And this entire sequence has its own self-contained storyline, characters and lasts about four hours, but also serves to reveal a lot about the plot at large and what's going on. It's also the hardest part of the game up to that point—as I already said, you can't use any skills or magic. Eventually, though, you succeed, drive the monsters out of the temple, and restore everything to order. At this point, you can finally change your class. And at this point, you're about thirty hours into the game, and the introduction of classes changes everything. Dragon Warrior 7 also has a variant on the monster collecting system that's been in all of the games since the fifth (including Rocket Slime, sort of), and even had its own spin-off series. In Dragon Warrior 7, you don't collect monsters to fight with you per se, but you can collect their hearts and use those on your characters to turn into a variety of monsters classes, and you can collect monsters for a sort of monster park side quest, which is quite similar to another town building side quest that gets introduced much earlier, and lasts for a good part of the game. I haven't seen either of these things yet. Dragon Warrior 7, clearly, is a game that likes to take its time. And I mean that as a compliment. It's thirty hours in and I've just seen a new gameplay system. I've seen little changes and restrictions—such as the inability to use magic and skills for awhile that I mentioned, along with certain characters joining and leaving your party, plot events changing the way the gameplay flows. It's also a matter of balance. Getting new skills—and getting a new system to get said skills—matters because the game is balanced in such a way that using status attacks and strategy in general matters. One character named Gabo, for instance, has a base skillset that involves calling wolves to do his bidding, or acting wolflike himself. One of his skills is called Bark. Actually, it's the first skill he gets. Bark allows you to paralyze a group of enemies with fear. It doesn't always work, but does a good part of the time. Shortly after getting Gabo, you start seeing some enemies that are a bit stronger than you could normally take on. Instead of leveling up until you can kill them more easily—which would be quite boring—you can instead try paralyzing them with Gabo's bark skill—which, I should mention, is free to use—and picking them off in a more controlled fashion. Prior to this, you have the character Maribel, who has a sleep spell that does roughly the same thing (although sleep can last multiple turns and the effects from Bark are only one or two turns). Again, casting sleep on enemies—even regular ones—is useful. But now, Gabo has a free version of that spell, so you can free up Maribel to do other things. This is also about the time when you start finding whips for her, which attack an entire group of enemies. They don't do tons of damage, but they can make Maribel a decent fighter. Or, you can treat her more as a healer or a mage, as she has a defense lowering spell, a fireball spell, and a healing spell by this point. A skill Gabo gets much later, called Howl, allows him to summon a wolf pack, which does four attacks distributed to all of the enemies randomly. However, it doesn't always succeed—and from what I can tell, always fails in internal locations. Gabo also has another skill, though, called Rip, which attacks an entire group of enemies, and always succeeds. However, the damage it does is erratic—something like .8 to 1.4 percent of your normal attack value. Another option, of course, is to buy a boomerang for Gabo, which is a weapon that can hit every enemy on the screen. A nice feature DW7 has is that you can change equipment in battle, so you can keep multiple weapons on hand and change them as needed. Useful since Gabo can also equip claws and brass knuckle type weapons, which are generally more powerful. There are two other points I wanted to bring up. Originally I'd planned on writing this entire thing through smoothly so that I could move from point-to-point seamlessly and weave some sort of epic review-narrative. Unfortunately, I suck as a writer. Dragon Warrior 7's towns aren't huge. They only tend to have five to seven houses, and less than twenty NPCs. However, the towns are detailed. Even the generic, nameless NPCs feel like they have their own stories. See, each town in DW7 has a quest associated with it. There aren't any towns where you just stop through to buy some items and move on. These quests are also long, make up the bulk of the story, and start tying together. They also involve the NPCs in the towns—a lot. While Dragon Warrior 7 doesn't have a day/night cycle like 8, 3, and I believe 6, what the NPCs say, and where you find them, changes a lot throughout these quests. So what's effectively a small cast of characters seems a lot more important because of the amount of writing there is. Also, there's lots of treasure in DW7. This isn't something you really notice until you start playing a game where you can't break every jar, barrel and potted plant in town, or open every dresser, or look in every saddlebag, or find treasure chests, or dive into the aforementioned wells to see what happens. There's a huge emphasis on the towns in the game, basically, and the fact that their role isn't diminished makes them feel more like actual places and less like gameplay contrivances. Solving the quests also progresses the game in an interesting way. While within the quests, story events occur that propel you on to do the dungeons, or do something in town, or whatever else you need to do to finish that town's quest, finishing the quests themselves doesn't necessarily start any story event that forces you to go to another town. While, strictly speaking, the game is linear, the game progression is pretty subtle. In your travels, you pick up things called land shards, which can be arranged on pedestals in the first dungeon in a bit of a meta-puzzle that reminds me of The Fool's Errand for some reason. Each land shard, basically, shows a portion of an island's map. As soon as you complete that map, you're sent to that island, in the past, to do whatever quest is happening in whatever town is there. When this is done, you can go back to that island in the future and do something else. There's nothing in the game, however, to tell you which islands you can complete and when. You find the land shards as you go along, and it's up to you to go back to the pedestals and arrange them. It feels natural and transparent. You feel like you're in control of what's happening, even though the game is, as I said, mostly linear. The difference, though, and maybe this is the biggest feature of Dragon Warrior that separates it from most other console RPGs, as a series, is that you never feel like you're being forced to do something, but rather discovering it on your own. As I said, there's no way to tell what all those wells contain until you actually dive in. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
3:07 am	When James told me about his blog, I wanted to do some Let's Plays for it—the first one I had in mind was Europa 1400, and I tried a few other—but I never managed to produce anything that would've been particularly fun to read, so that idea fizzled out (I might try again someday). After that happened, I decided that I'd just write a review for whatever I happened to be playing at the time, which was also Europa 1400, and I still haven't played that enough to write a well informed review about it. Now, I have to confess—I do on occasion tend towards hagiography of Tim Rogersian levels, and I also have a bad habit of not finish games. When it comes to writing reviews, I don't think this is actually a problem. For the former, reviews tend to be pretty one sided anyway. And for the latter, while I'm very much an advocate of playing a game for quite a bit before you pass judgment on it, you usually have seen most of what the game play has to offer within ten hours or so, and figuring out if you'd enjoy what you've already been doing for another thirty hours or so really isn't that difficult to do. Sometimes there are anomalies. The previously mentioned Europa 1400 is one of those, and the game I'm (going to be) writing about here is too. Which is a good thing, because otherwise the last four paragraphs wouldn't have much relevance and I would've succeeded in nothing but wasting both my time and yours, but I digress. Trying and failing at coming up with a better lead-in, the game in question is Dragon Warrior 7. And, for the rest of this to make any sense, I'm going to need to point out a few key game play mechanics in the series. Also some history. Dragon Warrior 3 added in a class-based character-development system, which wasn't entirely dissimilar to Final Fantasy 3's (which came out a year or two later), although it's somewhat closer to five's in that class determines what skills you learn and a character keeps all their skills when changing classes. Still fairly simple, but it was a nice touch that added replay value and strategy and more control over how the game played out. Dragon Warrior 6 was the next game in the series to use a class system, although I don't know much about it. So far, I've played DW7 for over thirty hours. Thirty-four hours and three minutes, if we're being exact. I got access to the class system about two hours ago. The class changes are done in a place called the Dharma Temple. There's a little in somewhat nearby. This is pretty significant for a lot of reasons. The most obvious of these reason is that it adds a pretty huge new game play mechanic in at what's roughly the half-way point. This is usually where the players is going to start feeling a bit of fatigue, and when a lot of other RPGs would try throwing out a plot twist to entice the player into sticking around (or more typically, confuse them into being bothered enough by what just happened that they want to finish the game so that they can stop thinking about it). Dragon Warrior 7, on the other hand, gives the player something new to do. It's also important because skills in Dragon Warrior 7 tend to actually be interesting, and I don't think I've found a single useless skill yet. Status attacks works. Paralyzing attacks, sleep attacks, the sort of stuff we've seen recently in the Shin Megami Tensei series—it's all here. And the skills are varied, too. You've got a lot of spells that have their own rules, do different things, and generally succeed at not being endless chains of Fire 2, Fire 3, Fire 4, and so on and so for. But I think the biggest thing, with the class system and when it actually opens up, is how it all goes back to the sort of flow the Dragon Quest games have. It's a lot like Zelda, and the way that the rate that new roadblocks and problems are introduced at roughly the same rate that you find ways of dealing with them. In this case, it's more a very steady difficulty curve in regards to the enemies than dealing with environmental/inventory-based puzzles. There are some of those too, of course, but I'll get to them later. And let it be known that the pacing in this game is very deliberate. Even in the plot—every new town is its own side quest or three, every NPC has its own story and a sense of permanence, and a lot of the plot events are spread out over several game days and real time hours. But there's a huge level of detail, here. As I said, every NPC has their own story. Even the nameless guys. What they say at any moment during the little side story they're in might change. You don't get any NPCs magically popping up or disappearing. And even the most generic NPCs seem like they're more than just signposts. And of course this applies to the game play too. I've spent—well, I haven't been counting, actually—several paragraphs talking about how one of the biggest systems doesn't get used till you're thirty hours into the game. But it's more than the. You gain levels fairly slowly and money is hard to come by, and all of the hidden treasure there is to find—and there's a lot. But again, more on this later—and NPCs there are to talk to mean you'll be spending a lot of time just wandering around and busting open jars to see if there's a Tiny Medal or some sort of armor inside. But these means you'll always have something new to do. Not everything is thrown at you from the outset, and when you actually can afford that new weapon, it really means a lot more. In almost every town in Dragon Warrior 7, there's a well. Most of these wells don't contain anything. Some of them contain quite a lot. For instance, in DW7, there's an item called a Tiny Medal. These have been a staple in the series since the fourth entry, I believe. Anyway, you collect these, and eventually give them to a medal collector to get special items and equipment based on how many you've collected. It's sort of like the Golden Skulltulas in Ocarina of Time, or the little red gems in Illusion of Gaia. Sometimes you find these Tiny Medals in wells. Other times, you find a dungeon in a well. These are a bit rarer, and vary quite a bit depending on what the story's doing at that point. In two cases, you find a casino in a well. There's no indication that there will be a casino down there—you just need to explore on your own a bit. The first of these casinos is outside of an inn by a lake, which is near a placed called the Dharma Temple. The Dharma Temple is where you can change classes—or, at that point in the game, take on a class for the first time. Classes in Dragon Warrior 7 govern your stats and what skills and spells you learn, along with a few other things. It's a fairly big system. However, the first time you get to Dharma Temple, something's not quite right, and as soon as you try to change classes, you find out that monsters have taken over. They strip you of all your skills and spells at that point—the characters effectively have a default class, and keep learning spells up to about level fifteen or so—and send you into a dungeon. Skills in Dragon Quest 7 are very important. Status attacks actually work, for instance, like in the recent Shin Megami Tensei games. The game play mechanics, for this segment, change completely, as you have been, up to that point, relying heavily on your skills and magic. At the same time, though, you get two new and very useful things—a free, infinite-use healing item, and during this time you can also buy the thief key, which let's you unlock several chests you've already passed. As soon as you get out of the dungeon the invading monsters dumped you in, at least. Well, dungeon isn't really accurate. It's actually two or three—I'm not really sure if two of them were different dungeons or not—and then two different towns, also. And this entire sequence has its own self-contained storyline, characters and lasts about four hours, but also serves to reveal a lot about the plot at large and what's going on. It's also the hardest part of the game up to that point—as I already said, you can't use any skills or magic. Eventually, though, you succeed, drive the monsters out of the temple, and restore everything to order. At this point, you can finally change your class. And at this point, you're about thirty hours into the game, and the introduction of classes changes everything. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
11:06 pm	I'll do my non-nano progress updates elsewhere ;) So, tonight I started working on Swedish. German and Russian will wait till class starts again as I am taking them. I've played with swedish some in the past, so it's not really unfamiliar to me. I used FSI a bit but that's pretty out of date. My current method is to just read music news articles in Swedish, and wikipedia articles. I bought a copy of Lifsens Rot av Sara Lidman for about 83 cents, but it's rather difficult. I'm basically reading these with the lexin dictionary. I'd like to work on pronunciation more but I'm lacking resource at present. I also drew some pictures. Which I might upload to FA. (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 20th, 2007
2:42 pm	i had the most amazing dream that bowling green was warm and had an ecology like that little town in indiana where we went to the outlet mall, and bowling green aslo had an outlet mall -- well no; it was a real mall -- underground, between Kohls and a, oh, JC Pennies. it had sort of a figugre 8 shape, and a big... varoety store thing like biggs or ames. there were a few protein stores (i have no idea what... ohh) pardon. PERFUME and clothing stores, a smoothy joint, and FYE going out of business, a gamestop, a hallmark that sold games. also in the center was an olive garden that was kinda like the thing in the middle of union station in dc -- just in the middle of a plaza, risin' up, ba-si-ca-llllly. we ate their with friends. it was really beautiful on the top floor cause the light looked... old; and maybe medieval. There were hills outside too. and on the opposite windows i couild see tall grass flowers. i hate the city now. i guess my only consolation is that the above ground mall in cinci is identical in feeling, almost. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 17th, 2007
12:11 pm	alternate harry potter ending dream --- after HP7, harry decides to go back intime and prevent voldemortfrom ever happening. he does this by stopping him from casting evil spells in a moment of self-sacrifice and the basilisk comes through the wall and kills harry. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
11:51 am	dream. i found this cute red centipede in my basement and moved it to my shower so it could eat something in there. i also found this shrimp outside that was green and thought they'd do well together but the shrimp ate the centipede so i had to reverse time and put them in seperate aquaruia. (Comment on this)
Friday, August 10th, 2007
12:15 pm	dreammmmm i had several last night. this is the most recent and remembered. we're going to gatlinburg with my cousins. my dad wants to stop at this weird, standalone JC Pennies (probably outlet). we approach it, though i don't really wanna go. there's this little western theme stripmall/store compound, then the pennies, then the hotel. we stop and getout. i look at a clearance rack outside. there's stuff on it obviously, one of which is this orange-bound book that i think is by grisham. I don't know. It's only forty cents. I head inside up this metal staircase/ramp that's short. I tell my mom I'm gonna look at mens clothes. i end up walking back to toys for some reason where my cousins are looking at this box of dino blasters, which consists of strangely colored dinosaurs and plastic balls. I think it's some sort of game. anyway, I oddly want it, but like the book, don't get it. Conversation Cousin: You could have a "dinosaur name" claw "dinosaur name." Me: Or have "Squidlike dinosaur name" tentacle "something" This might've been about a sloth, cause there was this odd looking sloth thing, with its arms up in the air and bent (like the monkeys in simearth snes) getting eaten by some tentacled thing in the swamp. I think it was actually the G-something Evaporator dinosaur, which was a sharkthing with a huge bottom jaw that jutted out, and I guess held water for evaporation purposes. I look in the backroom. It's dark and has another metal staircase going up to some second layer walkways (which I think go through the whole place. Barring that, the entire thing consists of a front room, the back room with the toys, and then a dressing room or two. The place creeps me out. Too dark inside or something or apocalyptic feeling. We leave. I regret not getting the book and the dinos and ask if we can come back on the way out of town. Dad comes back. Dad: Well, that'sn ot much anymore. They still haven't fixed the backroom. It's just the four colored tabled. Me: Did it used to be anything? Dad: Well no, not really. Some kids come out, all with similar faces, and a similar basic haircut of about one or two inch long, forward swept spikey brown hair. One has big sidebrowns. One has the addition of a mullet. I think he's wearing an orange shirt and riding a bike. One is, at least. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 9th, 2007
10:56 am	also the songtitles on the dream cd were in icelandic or something (Comment on this)
10:33 am	in my dream, it's about 6:00 and my m om said get ready to go. I did, thinking we were going to the state fair, when in reality we're going to celina's fair. So I get ready and at about 6:30 I look some band up online cause they sell music CD in big, plastic jugs of soda or tea at this fair. Dunno what the band's called. They have a newalbum thougth, with a red cover. Pitchfork gives it a 9. AMG gives it a 0 (or maybe a 1), actually.) in any case, next memory is at the fair and im looking at the table of stuff and considering which to buy. prior to that dream, i think i had a similar dream abuot this fair, or some other fair-like dream, 'cause it was at night and we're just walking through some dark town with brown buildings and street lights. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 7th, 2007
2:47 pm	Selbst wenn/selbst + subjunctive == Even if. Thanks, TR! (Comment on this)
8:15 am	also in this dream, someone -- fry from futurama!? lloyd irving? -- was keeping us locked up in some Kohl's from like, 1 pm to 4 pm because he didn't want us to feel better than him. in any case I snuck out. BG was that weird columbus/chicago hybrid I'd seen in a previous dream. at one point i meet up with my mom and we walk towards a river. she asks where the stairs are; i say just ahead. we take them up to the next street level . we do, and there's some festivel going on. quick aside: i remember after escaping kohls or something, there's a wendys or a drink place or something we could go to. i dunno. anyway, so we go to this organic restaurant and I order a sandwich without meat. the interior is: vinyl seets, a lot of white, i think neon lights, well lit, cactuses? (Comment on this)
4:55 am	dream walking through downtown BG. set soem guyys setting up sound equipment outside a restaurant of glass rocery cfeteria with green stuff and plants cartman thing, southpark had different alphabet (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007
2:55 am	were going to either state fair or jungle jims but mom wants to see a movie on the way so we do but it goes to long and we have to go home afterwards. then i go to an antique store, look around, and don't see the 11 dollar entrance fee, so I think if I buy 11 dollars of stuff i;ll be good but there's nothign i want so i just fork over the cash. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 27th, 2007
11:16 am	Dream. I'm in some place. It's like a dark town or something I guess and vaguely resembles that apple barn in gatlinburg, or maybe it's a city. there's an anthrocon there, i think, or maybe i'm going to school. we have a car and it takes us places but doesn't always work. i find a box of figurines which i think are mine. some ae in various places. there's ten in this set, and then maybe another ten by the company that id on't have. three are missing. one's this green alien thing which we find pretty soon. two aer these midgety looking fuzzy things named after the dewalts' characters. is this in a service merchandise? i find the other two in a theatre. i think we need to go to a hospital for someone. the theatre hasa tunnel in it i follow, it is like a funhouse. there is also a red guy figurine. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 23rd, 2007
3:52 pm	possibly i was also on the top floor of some fucked up ikea (Comment on this)
2:26 pm	xant remember this much im at a mall somewhere. in one part i guess i'm on a skybridge or something. the part i remember the most is going into a kb toys and seeing an old super nintendo hooked up and playing yoshi's island. it is a red SNES (or maybe blue!?) and shaped funny.t hey have lots of old nintendo games and many imports. it is dark and crowded inside and the kb is off some odd corner of a mall with a lot of escalators. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
3:07 pm	im back at school. they've changed all the stairwells. they look nice now. on one there's this big gaping drop down. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 16th, 2007
11:51 am	i was trapped somewhere with a bunch of people and i don't know why. some (driving in a van with aunt somewhere?) (inside mall) (it's an oceany place) of us escape. i pair up with hippies to look normal. one s(goats)treaks and gets locked in a house soi take him out and the woman glares. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 14th, 2007
11:54 am	also i dream of getting gingerale out of the drigfe i think. (Comment on this)
11:42 am	dream: still jully, but i have to move back to scjoll early because i'm taking a plane to sweden. waiting at some... restaurant thing (that maybe was driven too. I remember a roadtrippish bit sort of) I hear that flights are cancelled and all shoes on planes will be confiscated as a "chemical object" because of recent terrorist activity. parents want me to wait and go anyway. i'm decided that i'm afraid of flying and that a 30 hours indirect flight doesn't sound fun. so i go back to the campus. i move in. apparently i don't have a roommate but an RA is still living with me. I tell them to leave or someting. Or not. I go to get food. See sean. jake's still in line at wendy's. they drive us back. some girl asks me if i m actually taking swedish. i said i didn't think it was offered. she says it is. I meet a bunch of people that look like digimon characters. Some younger looking people, one of which had really odd hair and vaguely resembles jaden yuki or that guy from that one webcomic. there's also some human form of 'vincent' that dog furry, and uh a black guy. these two are the oldest. there's also some older girl. also velma lives in the dorm, along with some poorly drawn kid or something (?) one of the girls has powers to like, faize doorsz/walls. she has bklue hair and is small. the dorm catches on fire and it is smoky and she helps rescue everyone (except poorly drawn kid who's apparently not real). we have to band together and go on an adventurefor some reason... some japanese girl (also a bit older, but still HS aged) is like, talking to someone on a cellphone or somethng. trying to mimic her I do, and when I spout out random japaneseish sound frazes into the fone, i'm in my favimly room being stared at by parents and things. (Comment on this)