Mind you, in an effort to sabotage the studying I need to accomplish between now and then, I finished off one game (Boing! Docomodake) and started another, that being Muramasa the Demon Blade.  This is a Wii game, and I don’t play many of those, so it’s a nice change of pace.

Honestly, though, after the last few weeks of school, anything would be a nice change of pace.

I haven’t gotten very far into it, but it’s awfully pretty.  It really does show off how impressive hand-drawn sprite animation can be.

SPEAKING of hand-drawn sprite animation, there’s a character named Kongiku in the game.

She’s a fox spirit and seems like she’s got the hots for your character, who is an ancient evil blahblahblah demon thing currently inhabiting the body of a cute and heavily armed girl.

Kongiku has an idle animation that deserved sharing.

Ahh, Japan, you warm my perverted heart.

Boing! Docomodake, by the way, is a pleasant enough puzzle/platform combo.  It’s not a terribly challenging or terribly long game, but it’s a good pick-up-and-play-for-10-minutes game featuring, well, mushroom mascot characters.

So, back in August, I switched over to a new computer – a shiny new 13″ Macbook Pro – went on vacation, finally broke a six-week long moratorium on game buying, and started some new projects.  Hence, a 3 week gap between substantial posts here, not that anyone other than my regular readers – both of them – will have noticed.

Getting used to a laptop as my main PC hasn’t been that bad.  It’s a move that my wife made about a year ago, but I’ve been a bit hesitant – to be blunt, I like tinkering with the guts of my PC, and that’s something you really can’t do on a laptop.  I replaced the pitiful 160GB drive Apple puts in their laptops with a 500GB drive the same night I got it home, but that – and, I suppose, a RAM upgrade – is about all you can do with one of these.

Still, since my ultimate goal here is to be able to fit into a smaller space, laptop it is.  I’ll just have to deal with letting my Newegg account go fallow.

In the last few weeks, I’ve gone through a bunch of games.  Unfortunately I also bought, like, seven new ones when I broke my moratorium, but what the hell.

When we went on vacation, I took The World Ends With You along.  I’ve heard it described as a JRPG for people who don’t like JRPGs, and I think that’s a fair description.  In my case, it’s a JRPG for people who actually DO like JRPGs but who also don’t have 80 hours to spend playing through one.

I really can’t praise it highly enough.  It throws a lot of fairly complex mechanics at the player, but it’s kind enough to let most of them be optional; you CAN spend hours on picky character customization and getting used to the game’s weird two-characters-at-once combat system, or you can ignore most of the customization and let the AI handle your support character.  I went with that path, and was happier for it.

Yeah, the story veers a little into the hopelessly emo now and again, but I never found myself groaning too hard; it had some good twists and shocks in it and I enjoyed the whole thing.

The soundtrack is also highly recommended; I felt compelled to drop 10 bucks on iTunes to score myself a copy and I’ve been listening to it a lot over the last couple of days.

After finishing that, I tackled Plants Vs Zombies, feeling a little dirty in the process.  After all, what sort of Real Gamer plays PopCap titles?

Then I remembered that I’m actually pretty lousy and pretty far from being a Real Gamer, so I got down to the, uh, planting.

Playing through the main game took two fairly long sittings, and the only reason I broke it into two was because it was starting to cause me physical pain. I think the last big click fest I played was The Witcher, but there were enough breaks in the action that I was able to recover.  PvZ is pretty much non-stop.

I don’t have much to say about the game that hasn’t been said before; it’s really fun and straddles the border of casual fare and more serious stuff neatly.

It was also the first attempt at gaming on the Macbook.  I felt a little silly booting into Windows to play it, since it’s also available for the Mac, but it’s $20 for the Mac version at retail or from PopCap’s site and $10 for the PC version off Steam.  Basic economics won out.

Since I’d already loaded boot camp and installed one game, I decided to go all out with the huge stash of doujin games I brought back from Japan in 2007.

The great thing about doujin soft… Ok, that’s needlessly limiting and will wind up being all Spanish-Inquisitiony, so let’s jump to “among the many great things about doujin soft…”

…are:

They’re usually pretty cheap.  I think most of them were between Y500 and Y2000.

The system requirements tend to be extremely reasonable.  Most of them could be played on a 10 year old machine.

Most of them have a limited number of continues and lives, etc, so you can’t see the end on the first play-through.  This is both a plus and a minus; some of them are way too hard for me, and I have to face that I’ll never beat them, but it improves the ones that hit my sweet spot for difficulty level.  There’s a tremendous motivation to try “just one more game” that really tickles the old pleasure center.

The bullet-hell-style shooter is well represented, and while I AM crap at bullet hell shooters, I love playing them.

They frequently parody other games & anime, so they can be funny as all get out.

Oh, and there’s an awful lot of naughty mahjong games, which, again, I’m a big fan of the jubblies genre.

So anyway, I bought a ton of various doujin games a couple of years ago and now I’ve gotten around to trying some of them.  I’ve been kind of focused on sorting them into “worth trying to get good at” and “I really wish I could get good enough to beat this game, but it’s just not going to happen” and “not worth even regretting the fact that I’ll never play this one again”

Honestly, the only one so far that’s hit the last category was a dodgeball game that had Kanon and Air characters.  It was cute and all that, but it was, well, a dodgeball game and one that I didn’t really understand how to play.

The Big Name Developer in the doujin bullet hell shooter genre is Team Shanghai Alice, or Zun, or Touhou or, well, I’ve never been straight on how exactly to refer to the guy – he’s a one man developer / art / music team who’s amazingly popular and so on and so forth.

His games are, well, they’re pretty hard.  He’s fond of painting most of the screen with fairly slow-moving projectiles and it gets quite tough to dodge them.

Fortunately, he has an “easy” setting and allows you to continue a few times, so I played through two of them:

Imperishable Night

The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil

Now, obviously, when I say “played through”, I don’t mean played through in the sense of actually being any good; more in the sense of jamming the bomb button whenever it looked like I’d get hit and using continues.  They’re pretty cool games, but they would require actual commitment to get any good at and I wasn’t drawn in enough to decide to put in the time.

I had rather a better time with Gensou Shoujo, a Clannad-themed bullet-hell cute-em-up from tenkuu dokei.

I couldn’t find any convenient video links, unfortunately, but the developer does make a free demo available.  I haven’t managed to clear this one yet, but it’s a) cute as all hell, being that you’re mostly fighting dango and carved wooden starfishes and violins and teddy bears and the like, and b) just hard enough to present a challenge but not hard enough to make me give up.  So far I’ve managed to get to stage 4 without using a continue, and to the end of stage 5 – the final stage – with using the two continues provided.  I WILL beat this one.

I also played through a Haruhi-themed mahjong game from LooseWords.

Yes, it’s as naughty as it looks.  That was about the most work-safe picture I could steal from their pages.

It’s very much simplified mahjong.  You have a nine tile hand instead of 14 and there’s no concept of “chi” or any advanced hands; your only goal is to collect three “pons”, with an ultimate goal of running one of your three opponents out of points, at which point they have to ditch a bit of school uniform and the process starts all over again.  Since everyone starts with a good sized bankroll and it’s a four-player game, this can take some while.

It was pretty fun.  It doesn’t feel like the developers spent much time on the AI, which is probably why it’s such a simplified version of mahjong, but there’s a lot of conversation between the characters and the art is good.  The game ends when any one of your opponents runs completely out of school uniform, so in theory it would take three passes to play through – I played through it once and called it beaten; I may go back to it at some point.

Those four were the ones that didn’t immediately crush my spirit; I tried a bunch of others but honestly this post is rambling on long enough.

No, see, Nintendo finally launched their Club Nintendo points-for-rewards scheme, and it was even thoughtful enough to let me migrate over my “MyNintendo” account and gave me points for the games I’d already bought and registered…

…some of them, anyway.  Which is to say, I got points for the Nintendo-branded Wii and DS titles I’d registered, but absolutely nothing for the long list of Gamecube and GBA games I’d registered.  I understand that I bought them an awfully long time ago and that they represent the Old Nintendo, back when it was a distant also-ran in the console market as opposed to an all-crushing juggernaut, but it would have been nice to get some credit for them.

Anyway, I wound up with about 15 games that were worth “coins”, which is their pseudo currency, and in all I wound up with 600 “coins” with which I could buy…

…well, not a lot, really.  Some bits of fluff that are interesting until you work out that, at 600 coins, you’ve bought approximately $700 worth of DS games to get a Mario-branded DS game rack that looks to hold about a dozen DS boxes.

On the other hand, the coins don’t expire for two years, and they’ve already confirmed that there will be special merchandise around the end of the Club Nintendo year, which is in June, so I’ll just hold on to my coins until then.  The Japanese club gets neat things like Super Famicom-style Wii Classic Controllers, and I wouldn’t mind something of the sort.

One negative side effect of this – now that those little registration cards have actual value, I wouldn’t go buying any “It’s our last copy!” games from Gamestop, unless I wanted to see a lot of “this registration code has already been used!” when I went to go and register it.

It’s been a bit over a decade since my wife and I played through Final Fantasy VII, but one thing sticks with me.

Well, a few things, really.  Chocobo racing, giant nasty sandworms, flower girls meeting unfortunate ends… but mostly what sticks with me is the frustration factor involved with maneuvering Cloud around some of the spiffy pre-rendered backgrounds.

When you got to a new screen in FF7, you could press a button to see where all the exits were on the current screen, and this was a big help since they weren’t always obvious.  The problem was that, once the exits were pointed out, you then had to maneuver Cloud to get to them, and the game got awfully finicky at times.

This lead to occasional shouts of “go where I want you to, you spiky haired freak!”

“Spiky haired freak” has become one of those phrases that’s outlived the game.

This brings me, somewhat awkwardly, to the latest game I borrowed off her DS shelf, Phoenix Wright : Ace Attorney, which features a spiky haired, sometimes-clueless,  lawyer and endless variations on the old adventure-game play mechanic of “I have a dozen things in inventory.  One of them MUST be the thing I need to proceed.  Oops, that wasn’t the one, is it this one?

I will be pedantic and nitpicky here and point out that it’s actually not an adventure game, but a “visual novel”, a genre dominated by the sorts of games you probably wouldn’t want to be seen playing in public. This, however, is one of the rare non-adult examples of the genre, though I’m sure you can get no end of Phoenix Wright doujinshi, if that’s your thing, and who am I to criticize you if it is?

But I digress.

Phoenix Wright, surprisingly enough, manages to make being a lawyer look kind of fun.  You get to go out and question people and gather evidence and break into safes and all sorts of things that I’m not actually sure lawyers do, and then you get to take all this information to court and try to pick holes in testimony with it, generally in order to prove your client innocent and coincidentally convict the Real Bad Guy.

Fortunately, the Real Bad Guy is usually a thoroughly vile person and your client is usually innocent.  I’m not sure I’d like a game where your goal was to get your obviously-guilty client off on a technicality.

It does sometimes veer into “damnit, I KNOW this is the right evidence, why are you not letting me present it, you spiky haired freak?” territory, particularly at the start of the final case, but the ratio of “time spent nailing people to the wall with evidence” compared to “time spent trying to figure out what the heck I need to do to next” is favorable on the side of nailing people to the wall, and if you like the sound of that, this is a good game for you.

And, yes, the fact that it has three sequels and a fourth on the way DOES sort of suggest that it’s a decent game, but now you have my word for it as well.

Just don’t let the final case grind you down too much when you start on it.  There’s a sticky point you have to get past pretty early, and then it’s pretty much smooth sailing until the end credits.

My exposure to the system, then, mostly came from seeing the DS software boxes next to the GBA section in stores, and being rather unimpressed with the lineup offered – titles like “Sprung” and “Ping Pals” and the like.  I lumped them into the category of “launch year crap”, which is harsh but after you see a few console launches you get a bit jaded.

Anyone arguing that the first year of a console’s life is NOT 90% crap, I invite you to go and pay $60 for Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game and get back to me.

There was also a game called “Feel the Magic”, which I wrote off as probably just being more-of-the-same.

Fortunately, my wife isn’t quite so jaded. She bought it, tried it, determined that it was way too weird for her, and told me to play it.

That was a year or so ago and it’s been on my list as “at least try this once so she’ll stop asking me if I’ve tried it yet”.

After finishing Izuna 2, but not quite wanting to dive into The World Ends With You, I figured I’d at least give it a few minutes.  I gave it those few minutes, and then every other spare minute I had over the next day, until it was finished.

It turns out that, kind of like I’d figured, it’s just a collection of stylus-based minigames, with occasional use of the DS microphone.

That having been said, it’s also hella fun, mostly because the minigames are so damn bizarre.  Spray painting giant rabbits onto buildings, calming rampaging bulls, saving pedestrians from man-eating ant lions, bowling for humans with live bowling balls…  And it’s all just to get a girl’s attention.

You are aided in this quest by a performance arts group called the “Rub Rabbits”, who wear bunny ears, ride unicycles, and apparently build Voltron-esque robots in their spare time.

There is a little bit of frustration in the aptly named “nightmare” level, but that is the only blemish on an otherwise glorious game.

Strongly recommended: A screen protector.  This game abuses the touchscreen like nothing I’ve seen since Ouendan’s spinners.

There is a particularly effective tactic in Everquest called “kiting”

No, really, this is about Izuna, I’ll get back to her in a second.

The tactic involves fighting something by hitting it with ranged attacks while running away from it fast enough that it can’t get you.  The thing you’re fighting follows after you like a kite on a string, hence “kiting.”

Most MMORPGs since Everquest have some sort of mechanic that makes kiting a less-powerful tactic, and EQ has gone back and added anti-kiting mechanics to most significant NPCs.

OK, now back to Izuna.

One of Izuna’s main points – and here I mean the game, not the character’s “main points“, you perverted bastards – is that it’s turn-based; every time you take a step or attack, everything else on the screen gets to take a step or attack.  This means that you can, for example, run away from things, but you can’t run away AND attack because that would take two turns.

This little bit of balance got thrown right out the window when they added “haste boots” to Izuna 2; they allow you to take two steps for every one step everything else gets to take.

These aren’t much help in most dungeon environments, because it’s very common to get surrounded in the cramped and narrow corridors that represent most of your dungeon-crawlin’ experiences, and then you’re pretty much done for.

On the other hand, they turned every boss fight into me running circles around the boss and peppering him with shuriken at range while he followed me, like the aforementioned kite on a string, until he fell down.

ONE boss was a bit of a worry, because she actually had a ranged attack, but she used it rarely enough that I was able to heal up between her attacks.

On the other hand, even though the bosses themselves became non-issues after I scored a pair of haste boots, the dungeon grinding to GET to the bosses was pretty consistantly challenging, and I went through an awful lot of escape talismans and near-death experiences getting leveled up adequately.

End result: Approximately fourteen hours of button-mashing, item collecting, and light side-questing culminating in a glorious, if seriously cheesy, victory with an enjoyable story payoff and a few bonus dungeons opened for me that I am going to ignore because they’re for the Hard Core Roguelike Fans and I am not a Hard Core Roguelike Fan.

Mind you, my normal playtime was on the order of 15 minutes per session, so 14 hours took me 20 days to play through.

Also, from the “relevant-to-my-interests” category: If you’ve helped a couple of minor NPCs out with side quests on your way through the game, they wind up building an onsen in the last town, which of course means a mildly naughty all-the-girls-in-the-onsen picture.

I would like to point out that, when I was helping out the NPCs, it wasn’t because I knew what the final result would be, just that helping them out seemed the nice thing to do.

Honest.

Addendum: 20 minutes of googling fails to turn up the reward image for finishing the onsen side-quest, so I can’t share it with you.  I am shocked, shocked I tell you.

This was telegraphed far enough in advance that I really can’t fault the designers too much, but it means that I have had to schlep my tuckus back to the beginning dungeons and get some grinding on a new partner.  If THIS one ditches me, I’m going to be seriously vexed.

On another note, Bioshock continues to entertain.  The detail in the environments is nothing short of extraordinary, and I’m enjoying the relative freedom of choice I have when trying to accomplish things.

That is to say, it seems like a very linear game – you go from level A to level B to level C and so on – but on each level, you’re free to get through it in several ways.  Personally, I have become a huge fan of hacking security cameras and turrets to do my dirty work, and fooling Big Daddies into protecting me is one of those videogame moments that belongs on anyone’s list of Good Times.

Oh, and whoever scripted the first time you run into a Houdini Splicer is one sick bastard; that was one of those bits that reached right through the rational part of my head, grabbed hold of the lizard brain, and gave it a good squeeze.

It’s a good thing that I seem to be able to make do on 5 hours of sleep most nights; it’s the only way I can balance work, school and actually having leisure time.  Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, it means that MMORPGs are more-or-less impossible; I’m on Pacific time and if I boot up Everquest at 10PM on a weeknight, my entire guild is already in bed or heading there.

Amazingly, it’s not that I bought Bioshock at launch for full price and am just now getting around to it – I actually didn’t buy many of last year’s MUST PLAY games.  I saw that there was an absolute flood of really cool titles being released and thought to myself, self, you’d be better off if you waited until May, when all those really cool titles are going to be 20 bucks.

My timetable was a bit off there. 

Bioshock waited until last month to finally drop to 20 bucks – for PC, at least.  It’s not like the four extra months I waited made that much difference, I suppose.

Waiting a year to play it also means that they fixed the widescreen issues it had at launch and toned down the absolutely moronic DRM scheme it shipped with.

I’ve also managed not to have the plot spoiled for me, which is pretty much the only reason to buy a game at launch these days (let’s ignore my impulse buy of Soul Calibur 4, please), so I’m going through it blind.

For double fun, I’m playing it at night with the lights off.  That is to say, except for the bit with Stallman.  I was WARNED about that, and that was played in the morning with the lights on.

It looks really pretty running in 1920×1200, even in dx9 mode, so I don’t need to upgrade my 7950GT JUST yet, which is nice, and it supports the Xbox 360 controller quite nicely.  It’s probably made a little more difficult by using the controller instead of KB&M, but I’m still getting along.

I’ve just taken out my first Big Daddy, after a half-dozen tries or so, and it was a deeply satisfying thing to do.  The ones in Neptune’s Bounty seem to be a lot tougher, though, I’ll need to score some upgrades before I give them another shot.

About the only downside to playing the PC version seems to be that I won’t be getting any achievements.  Since a friend brought over his Xbox360 version of Bioshock a few months ago to show me, I DO have the “Toaster in the Tub” achievement, so I’ll be stuck at 10 gamerscore until the end of time.

I AM still playing through Izuna 2, when I’m out and about and have a few minutes to spare.  I hit a really annoying bug today, but, as much of a pain as it was, I think I’ll be able to go back to it tomorrow.

See, Izuna is pretty hardcore.  It assumes that, if you turn the DS off without saving, you’re trying to get out of dying, so it penalizes you as if you’d died.  I’m OK with this; it’s a part of the game, it’s quite forgiveable.

It gets a LITTLE less forgiveable when you’re 12 floors down in a dungeon, both of your characters have gone up 2 or 3 levels, you’ve picked up a ton of loot, and the game crashes when you try to do a pair attack.

I didn’t know it was possible to crash a DS this hard.  The screen went completely black, but the game music kept playing – and it kept on playing even when I closed the lid. I had to power the console off to get it to stop.

Oh, and of course I lost all my levels, loot, and equipped gear when I got the game booted back up again.

Something I didn’t realize when I was buying Izuna 2 was that Atlus bundled a mini-poster with the game if you bought it from Gamestop or Amazon.  I didn’t realize this for a couple of weeks after purchase, so it was a neat little surprise.

Unfortunately…

…I bought it from Gamestop.

OK, OK, so at least I got the mini-poster that I could actually display without feeling TOO ashamed about it, if I were the sort of guy who was likely to go putting up mini-posters, anyway, but I just feel like I let the pervy team DOWN.

One final note about Izuna 2 before I close up this post:  YES, Tsubaki IS in the sequel, so all is well.

Izuna 2 certainly tries to live by it, and I’m trying to decide whether that’s a good thing or not.

Only controlling one character in the first Izuna had a couple of drawbacks, the biggest one being that, if you got killed in a dungeon, you lost everything you had in inventory.

There was also a slightly more subtle problem resulting from its system of weapon affinity.  See, the game rewarded you for always using the same weapon – the longer you had something equipped and were using it to hit things, the better you got with it.  You could, at least according to the manual, transfer affinity from one weapon to another by using a talisman, but I never figured out how to do it.

Unfortunately, this also meant that I had to pass up all the assorted bane-type weapons I found in later dungeons – bane weapons being those that were weaker against most critter types but strong against one particular one.  It was better just to keep an all-around-average sword equipped.

Izuna 2 introduces the idea that you’re going to bring a partner with you into dungeons – not that you’ll be controlling them both at once, but you can switch who you’re controlling and if the character you’re controlling gets killed the other automatically comes into play.

This has a lot of potential.  First, it means that one “oops, I was trying to run away from monsters and ran in to some other monsters” isn’t necessarily a crushing defeat.  Since “oops, I was trying to run away from monsters and ran in to some other monsters” was my normal death in the first game, this is a Good Thing.  When Izuna hits the deck, I’ve got someone there to carry on – or, at least, use an escape item before both characters eat dirt.

AND it means that I can give the “backup” character a bane weapon, switch to that character whenever I’m fighting something of the appropriate type, and get the double benefits of high weapon affinity and enhanced damage from the bane weapon.

Also, as long as both characters are still alive, they are charging a “tag attack gauge”, and when that fills you can perform pair attacks that hit everything in the room for, as the kids say, MASSIVE DAMAGE.

I quite like the pair attacks.  They’ve got a little animation sequence associated with them – Izuna 2 really does raise the bar over the first game in terms of art – and they’re flashy.  Flashy is fun.

On the other hand, the two-ninjas-one-dungeon approach does have a big drawback: only the character actually in use at any given time gets experience.  The backup character just kind of follows you around without learning anything from it, which is really pretty unusual for RPGs.  Usually, your “B” team gets at least a little experience so they’re not completely useless if you decide to switch them in.

So, if you want to use both characters and actually have the second one be worth half a darn when you’re using them, you have to level them individually – pretty rough considering that the original Izuna already had a ton of grinding and you were only leveling one character.

Your characters also all share the same amount of inventory space, which is a very harsh constraint.  You get twenty inventory slots total, which includes both equipped items and general inventory, so if your backup character has one weapon and one defensive item, that’s two less pieces of loot you can pick up in the current dungeon.

I think the only sane thing to do is to pick one backup character and try to keep them roughly level-equivalent, while leaving the rest of the backup characters back in the caravan.  It’s a shame – I’m deliberately passing up the chance to have a ninja maid tag along – but it’s much less painful than trying to keep everyone up to par.

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.