It’s been nearly three years since I stumbled across an Otomedius machine in an Akihabara arcade, two and a half years since it got a home release, 15 months since it got a budget price re-release, 10 months since I hand-imported a copy of the budget re-release and a Japanese 360S to play it on, and barely over a month to go until the sequel is released, localized, in North America.

So getting around to spending some serious time with it now is, well, actually for me that’s almost timely.

But what IS Otomedius?

Well, basically, it’s a game where you defend yourself after wave after wave of murderous penguins.

Sunbathing penguins, construction worker penguins, penguin mummies, penguins floating from balloons and dropping explosive watermelons… penguins.

OK, so there are some other enemy types, but they don’t stand out as much.

It’s got character designs by Yoshizaki Mine, which means that you can expect a certain top-heaviness to the main characters.

This is not the main character.  I don’t really care.

If the homicidal penguin thing hasn’t already sold you, I will add that it features well-timed, but barely-comprehensible strategy tips from time to time, such as when a boss appears on screen and you are instructed to “shuuto itto in za heddo”

It’s a glorious thing.

Here, watch a few minutes of it:

I have actually tried a few times to get into it and have been roundly thwarted on all previous attempts because I didn’t really understand the power-up system and because I was dumb and – not understanding the power-up system – tended to select the “automatically assign my power ups as you see fit” option, which tended to result in the game selecting SPEED SPEED AND MORE SPEED, meaning that my on-screen character tended to zip around the screen like a hummingbird on acid at the slightest jiggle of the directional stick, which is not very conductive to long-term survival in a game where you’re often trying to fly between laser fire with a very small margin of error.

Once I figured out that the auto-power-up feature was killing me and turned it off, I actually started to do fairly well, by which I mean that I can almost complete the game on one credit on “easy” except for the last boss which is a real pain in the arse.

The game has several difficulty levels above “easy”, but let’s not talk about them right now.

Anyway, it’s bloody unlikely that the original game will ever be released outside of Japan, but at least the sequel is coming out in the US.  Whether I buy it or not will be highly dependent on whether it’s possible to use the original voices, of course.

And for just a second, in a crazy fit of exuberance, I got called “Producer-dono” and we had this touching flashback to our first introduction…

…and then things were back to normal and I was getting abused again.  I don’t know if ALL the characters are quite so, well, strict with the player, but if they are, I think the popularity of Idolmaster says something about men.  “Closet Masochists”, I think, is what it’s saying, but who am I to talk?

As an example: After beating the game, which involved winning tons of auditions to get enough fans to qualify for ranking auditions that would let me advance to the next rank, wherein I had to accumulate MORE fans to enter tougher auditions and so on and so forth, and after WAY too many little mini games building up Ritsuko’s stats. she asked me “What was the one thing you brought to this?”

I had three possible answers. Two of them actually represented positive characteristics, like “Experience”.  One of them was “I’ve been your straight man”.  This was, of course, the right answer.

…

Anyway.  One thing I thought was particularly interesting was the endgame, specifically the very last audition.  Spoilers below, just in case you didn’t catch that bit.

See, throughout the game, you’re constantly chasing one particular rival idol, and she is WAY better than you.  I’m talking, whenever you’re in a competition together, she comes in first, and you’re nowhere close; her scores are at least 50% higher than yours even if you have max skill.  This is fine most of the time, because most competitions have two or three winners, so even though you’re doomed to second place you’re still getting fans.

The final audition pits you up against her, and there’s no prize for second place.

Unfortunately for your rival, HER producer isn’t very nice.  He’s kept her working so hard that she hasn’t slept in three days.

So, for the final audition, her scores are, well, they’re still very good… but they’re not quite up to her usual standards, and that gives you the chance to get the win you need.

I’m not sure the message there.  I mean, your final victory is at least partially your own doing, but it’s not that you really got BETTER than your rival – you just happened to catch her on an off day.

So, anyway, it was one of the more habit-forming games I’ve played on the PSP since I bought the thing, and it’s going to be a little weird for the next few days as I have to remind myself that, no, I don’t have any appointments to keep with my PSP lest a virtual character get mad at me.

Watched “Tokyo!” last night, which is a collection of three short films set in, well, Tokyo.

The first of the three, titled “Interior Design”, was pretty good, though I thought it played up the “uncaring big city where everyone lives in rabbit hutches” stereotype a bit much.  The second segment, “Merde”, was, well, not just a clever name, if you’ll pardon the Wayne’s World reference.  It started off with an interesting parody of kaiju movies but quickly spiraled off into left field, culminating in a Dramatic Courtroom Sequence that I think I actually dozed off during.  Fortunately, I woke up in time for “Shaking Tokyo”, which was a surprisingly touching story about a veteran hikkikomori, the events that drive him out of his house, and the things he discovers when he sees the world for the first time in ten years.

Have also been re-watching Escaflowne with my wife.  While we don’t always agree on what Good Anime is, we do have some shows that we both love; this is one of them and it’d been a few years since we last sat down to watch it together.  It’s a little like Gundam Wing in that it was an early attempt to create a show that straddled the traditional shojo/shonen divide; you have your Big Damn Robots fighting but you also have your Impossibly Pretty Boys and Forbidden Romances.  It’s making me realize that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a show in the “Perfectly Normal Japanese Schoolgirl Gets Sucked Into An Alternate Dimension” genre… I don’t know whether that’s because there haven’t been any recent ones or whether I just haven’t been noticing them.  It seems like it’s much more popular, these days, to have an entirely alternate universe, or to have a show that takes place in the normal world but adds fantastical elements or alien princess harems.

It’s also a little nostalgic to watch the end credits and see Dave Fleming credited for the translation work; I used to get Nadia fansubs from him back in the early 1990s and Escaflowne was the first show where I saw him doing professional work; now I see his name everywhere.

One of the computers in the language lab at school had an incredibly cute Firefox theme installed, so I tracked it down.  Objectively, it’s nothing special; just a weird bean-shaped character on a green background, but for some reason it pushes the D’Awwwww button and pushes it hard.

The theme name is “mameshiba”, and one of the search results that popped up when looking for it was this blog, which turned out to be a fun if occasionally cringemaking read.  (I can’t help it.  I physically twitch every time someone drops “kawaii” into the middle of an otherwise English sentence.)  It’s bizarre to think that someone from the Cartoon Network wave of fans is now a fully functional adult, so it made me feel a little old, but it has some nice photos of Tokyo and it makes me want to check out Ueno Zoo the next time I visit.

Lastly, thanks to Namco putting their PSP Idolmaster games out on the PSP The Best label, I finally own an Idolmaster game.   This comes after several years of being vexed because the 360 games were region locked, then being too cheap to order the PSP games because spending $60 on an import PSP game just seemed wrong.  $33 was a much better price point.

It should surprise nobody that I went with the Missing Moon version, because, well…

…yeah, it’s the “Ritsuko” version.

It’s not an easy game at my level of Japanese comprehension.  It has a lot of text, and the text doesn’t wait for you to press a button to continue; it automatically scrolls.  Two years ago it would have been completely unplayable – nowadays, it’s, well, sometimes I know what’s going on and sometimes I’m just hoping that I’m not missing anything important.

Ritsuko turns out to be quite the taskmistress.  After our first practice session, which went poorly, she canceled the afternoon session and called me into a meeting where she chewed me out and asked if I was serious about her career.  She’s also taken to scheduling play sessions – when I saved the game last night, she made me promise to come back at the same time tonight.

To be fair, I haven’t tried playing the game with any of the other characters yet, so I don’t know if this is actually unique or if all the characters are this strict.  It’s a little weird being bossed around by a video game, mind you, but it adds a bit of personality that I didn’t expect.

Besides, I don’t HAVE to turn on the PSP at 9:30 tonight.  I could totally skip our appointment.

But I might get yelled at for it.

Let’s start in December of 2006.  I drove up to Seattle to take my very first crack at the JLPT, and while I was there I met up with a friend and went to the Books Kinokuniya inside Seattle’s Uwajimaya.  It’s a pretty good Books Kinokuniya, by the way, much bigger than the fairly anemic one in Beaverton and possibly even better than the one I used to go to in Los Angeles.

Anyway, while I was there, I bought a Full Metal Alchemist calendar as a Christmas present for my wife, and I bought a couple of artbooks for me.

One of them was Etsu’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” artbook, cover reproduced below:

The title is Truth In Advertising, and since Truth is Beauty, this represents a Thing of Beauty.  Irrefutable logic, there.

It’s actually a (as such things go) fairly classy book, with no nudity.  Cute girls with glasses are well represented:

Some time later, I found a wallpaper that featured the cover image from “Girls, Girls, Girls”, but with the background text chopped out and replaced with a mansion (or maybe restaurant?) background.  Which made sense considering the whole maid thing, I suppose.  Anyway, I thought it looked a lot better that way.

I put it up on my desktop for the sole reason of making my wife roll her eyes when she walked by the computer, and I was actually a little disappointed when I DIDN’T get an eye roll, or even a sigh of resignation.  Apparently she’d become immune.

She did say that the girl on the left looked decidedly uncomfortable, and I have to admit that she has a point

I left it as my desktop wallpaper for a while, failed to elicit any eye rolls, and then changed it out, defeated.

Anyway, that’s not the point I meant to arrive at.  The point I DID mean to arrive at was that I ran into the same image when looking for a wallpaper recently and it was tagged “symmetrical docking”, which I thought was just the goofiest, and possibly greatest, descriptive term ever derived by man.

So I threw “symmetrical docking” at Google Image Search just to see what would come back, and it brought me to One Man’s Quest To Assemble Images Of Girls Standing Too Close Together.

It truly warms the heart to see devotion to a cause.

(Actually, he has a fair number of well-written articles on “serious” topics like analog synthesizers and astronomy mixed in with the cheesecake, so don’t get me wrong, it’s a neat blog, I just came to it down a sordid path.)

I finished Mahoromatic a couple of weeks ago and liked it; the last episode was a series of “HUH?” moments but the actual conclusion was quite satisfying.

Thing is, though, I watched the first half of the show and then there was a month-long break while I was waiting for the priced-down release of “Something More Beautiful” to be released.

In that month, I started on Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, then took a break for Something More Beautiful, and I’ve now gotten back to it.

I haven’t finished it yet – I still have four episodes to go – but I rather expect that the show, which went to 11, as the kids say, VERY early on, will make it to a solid 15 or 16 by the time the end credits roll, finally putting an end for all time to the idea that the dial should stop at 10.

Right now, I think it’s at a 14.  I’m just saying, that’s all…

Anyway, the whole thing about having a new hero has nothing, in fact, to do with the actual characters of the show, no matter their assorted heroic traits.

I don’t even know the name of my new hero, but I will describe them for you:

My new hero is whichever hard-working Gainax animator took a character who typically dresses like this…

…and decided to put her in THIS outfit for an episode:

Allow me the luxury of going into full-on-Bette-Midler-mode when I say the following:

You, sir, YOU are the wind beneath my wings.

Granted, most of them are cell phones, so they wouldn’t work in this country, but what the hell, I still have gadget lust that can be slaked by pawing photos of shiny things.

This magazine also has a monthly feature called “BijyoMegane”, where they devote 3 or 4 pages to glamour-style photos of a – clothed, mind you – model.  Having a few pin-up-style pages is pretty common in Japanese magazines, actually, it’s sort of like Page 3 girls but a little more tasteful.  The name of the feature may clue you in to the particular spin Digimono Station puts on the topic.

In my defense, I DO buy the magazine for the gadgets.  It wasn’t until I’d purchased a couple of issues that I realized, hey, there’s a pattern here.

Anyway, it’d been a while since I’d bought an issue so I thought I’d see if they had a web site, and they do, and it’s actually really light on articles because, presumably, they want you to go and buy the magazine.  It was a little disappointing because I was hoping to get my gadget fix.

So I’m poking around what little content they DO have and I wind up in the “store” section of their site, with the featured product being gravure-style photobooks of their BijyoMegane features.

Now, I’m not actually going to drop Y1700 per to OWN these, mind you, it just warms my perverted little heart to know that I could, if I want to, buy books – three volumes, in fact – full of nothing but pictures of cute girls wearing glasses.

Here, have a Yomiko Readman wallpaper:

That should do the trick.

As far as rewards go, it’s turned out to be way better than the old “high score” concept at keeping us gamers pushing the buttons.  It’s that whole positive-reinforcement thing, with shinier outfits, faster cars, or new songs taking the place of food pellets.

Visual novels are really big on the unlockables; pretty much every one I’ve ever seen has a sort of stamp-card menu where you can review significant scenes from the game after you’ve seen them the first time.  This also encourages multiple playthroughs, since there’s no way that you’ll see everything on the first pass.

This, though, is a new one on me.

Since visual novels are pretty much choose-your-own-adventure books, it’s really tempting to hit “save” every time you get to a point where you’re asked to make a decision.  If you’re trying to go through the visual novel several times to see all the endings, it’s much faster to restore those save points instead of going through the whole story again from scratch.

Enter Omegane Teacher’s way of discouraging this, which is to give you, for every time you start a new game and finish it, your choice of one more style of eyewear for Sakurai Saya to wear:

It’s good to be pandered to, but this might be pushing the limits. 

With that in mind, I’ve bumped “Lego Batman” and “Bioshock” from their priority slots in the “hey, play this next” queue, in favor of a couple of titles that have more potential for making my wife shake her head in disbelief and resignation.

On the portable front, I’ll be tackling Izuna 2 : The Unemployed Ninja Returns.  The first game featured bespectacled shrine maidens, which is pretty much my definition of Quality.

I will admit that I am easily bought.  Now I just have to hope that Tsubaki appears in the sequel.

I know, I know, there are other, you know, MAIN characters, but if it’s wrong to play through an entire RPG just because one of the minor NPCs is a cute girl with glasses, I don’t want to be right.

Speaking of which… The other thing I’m trying out is a visual novel called “Omegane Teacher”, which I couldn’t avoid buying.  It’s by Studio Miris and, well, it’s a game for boys who like girls with glasses.

Let’s just imagine I’ve raised my hand here.

It is, of course, an almost entirely text-based game presented in a language I don’t understand very well, so I am expecting a certain degree of difficulty.  I’m hoping that familiarity with the thematic stereotypes will compensate, somewhat, for the lack of language skills.

For example, it took only knowing a few kanji to get the fact that the main character doesn’t have parents at home because they’re “working overseas”, which is a genre stereotype second only to, I don’t know, the whole “perfectly ordinary school girl turns out to be the only hope for the universe and truth and justice and stuff” stereotype.

So far, I’ve only played for a few minutes, enough to find out that it starts on Valentine’s Day. Traditionally, this is when women give chocolate TO guys in Japan, with the guys expected to reciprocate a month later on “White Day”, and I have in fact already gotten some chocolate from one of the other characters, with a second character obviously wanting to give me chocolate but too embarrassed to do so.

I’m guessing that the story will be based around the period between Valentine’s and White Day, leading up to the main character making a confession on the Day Of Truth and getting either a) lucky or b) rejected.

Just in case you were curious, here’s the character breakdown:

Sakurai Saya:

It wouldn’t make much sense to have a game called “Omegane Teacher” if it didn’t prominently feature a cute teacher with glasses.

Sakazaki Ami:

Every High-School-Guy-Whose-Parents-Are-Working-Overseas needs a Little-Sister-Who’s-Not-Related-By-Blood character.  Ami fills that role.  She’s also evil – Sure, she spends an entire day slaving away in the kitchen to make you a nice yummy chocolate cake for Valentine’s day, but it’s drugged as part of her – would it be redundant to say evil here? – evil plot to make you fall for her.

Takamisawa Kaoru:

Kaoru is the Childhood Friend Who’s Too Embarrassed To Admit Her Feelings character, rounding out the stereotypes nicely.

I’ll keep you posted on how it works out.

I don’t really use it for its intended purpose, though – I’m not pimping it around to friends and relatives as a “gosh, if you ever needed a gift idea”.

What I mostly use it for, instead, is watching stuff that I’d like to buy but don’t really want to pay full price for – I don’t pretend to understand how Amazon’s pricing and inventory work, but they DO have a tendency to occasionally discount something heavily for a day or two and then put it back up to full price.

One of the things on my wish list was a DS game called Ontamarama, which I’d seen in the stores last fall and filed under the “music based puzzle game with cute characters; I will probably like it” category.

But it WAS thirty bucks, and for some reason it didn’t seem like a $30 game.

It stayed at full price for several months, and then for some reason Amazon priced it down to $10.04. I saw that as a sign.

Not, you know, a really IMPRESSIVE sign. We’re not talking meteor showers, ethereal voices telling me to take my family to high ground, burning bush kinds of signs. Just, you know, a sign that I should probably buy the dang thing so I could see if it was as cute as the case implied.

And yeah, it’s pretty cute. It’s got a plot which can charitably be described as wafer-thin: there’s a Bad Guy who’s collecting helpless innocent creatures to use their energy to become the Ultimate Bad Guy, and you’re the plucky young pigtailed schoolgirl who’s got to stop him.

Oh, there’s a guy character too. If they’d put HIM in a plaid skirt, I might have played through his story.

But probably not.

It is MOST regrettable that you cannot play as the third of the main characters, that being the music instructor who helps you through the training levels; she’s got the quiet-type-with-glasses thing going on and I’m completely helpless in the face of a cute girl with glasses.

Leaving the main characters aside, there’s a handful of enemies to battle on your quest to defeat the Bad Guy and free all the helpless innocent creatures. Most of them are either under the Evil Mind Control of the Bad Guy, or fighting you because they mistakenly think that you are, in fact, working FOR the Bad Guy.

The enemy character designs are pretty decent. None of them wear glasses, though.

Considering that your opponents are mostly innocents, it’s a good thing that you’re not actually subjecting them to any harm. You meet them, you have a short conversation which consists of either 1) your character denying any culpability in the Evil Events Unfolding, or 2) your character telling them that she won’t let them get away with their evil plans, and then you have a musical battle.

Afterwards, you either make up (if they were being controlled, have mistaken you for a bad guy, etc) or they tell you that you were stronger than they expected but it doesn’t matter because the Bad Guy is INVINCIBLE Muha ha haha ahaha hah ahah ah…

hah?

So, summing up: Nice character designs, not much plot, uh, I’m missing something.

Oh, yes.

How it plays.

If you can run your left and right hands out of sync – the pat your head, rub your belly thing – you can play this game. You use one hand to burst bubbles on the touch pad, you use the other hand to select notes from a scrolling bar as they pass a particular point. While you’re doing this, your character and your opponent engage in a cute animated battle which you won’t be able to watch because you’re basically focusing all your attention on the upper left 1/16th of the DS’s bottom screen.

This is Ontamarama’s biggest flaw, in my view; there’s stuff going on that you would love to see because you can tell that it’s probably funny to watch, but at the same time you can’t watch it because you have to be ready for the next note. Ouendan has the same problem, but at least it includes a replay mode so you CAN watch all the animations after a song ends.

Another complaint, less important, is that because the two actions you have to perform – bubble popping and note selection – aren’t really synced up, there’s not a feeling of playing along WITH the music, like you get in Ouendan or, say, Guitar Hero. It doesn’t really feel like a rhythm game when all is said and done, despite all its musical trappings.

After you play through the story mode, which takes an hour or so, you unlock the ability to buy new songs, play in harder difficulty levels, play 2-player vs games, blah blah blah. If you feel the need to squeeze more life out of the game, they give you plenty of ways to do it.

Final verdict: I like cute games with lots of charm, and this has that going for it. I don’t regret having picked this one up cheap. If I’d paid full price or it, I think I’d have been a bit disappointed.