Baud Attitude

Backlog reduction project continues.

With most everything I play on PC coming from Steam this days, it’s easy to forget that I picked up quite a few indie games on various trips to Japan, which have wound in a box “for later”, particularly as that box got put on the bottom shelf of a set of shelves and then pushed to the back of the shelf.  Fortunately I have backloggery to remind me of things like that.

So, I hauled it out and picked a couple of bullet-hell shooters and a visual novel to look at.

The Touhou series of shooters is one of those things that has transcended its roots; it started off as just this one crazy guy doing his own indie shooters and doing all of the art and music and coding himself and now it has a massive and rabid fan base and has branched out into all sorts of other games and merch.

I don’t really know much about that fandom.  I just own three of the shooters, and I’d played through the other two thanks to credit-feeding, so I thought I’d give this one (“Unidentified Fantastic Object”, which I must credit as being a great name) a try and see why I hadn’t played it as well.

It turns out that it’s because I’m not very good at it, and while it DOES allow you to continue, it starts you at the beginning of the stage, so you need to play through the stage again, get to the boss again, die again, repeat.  I got a couple of stages down and realized that it just wasn’t grabbing me enough for me to want to get better.  It’s an older game and really not particularly attractive.  So that leaves the backlog in shame.

Alternative Sphere, on the other hand, is a bullet hell shooter that I WISH I could get better at, because it’s gorgeous to watch.  Playing it is like maneuvering through a fireworks display.  Example screens, below, stolen from the internet as I am playing these on a Mac through Boot Camp and one thing that the Mac keyboard lacks is a PrtScr key.

Sadly I am not GOOD at maneuvering through fireworks displays and felt really quite overwhelmed, even on Easy.  I managed to cheese my way to the end but won’t be going back to it.

I find that the biggest challenge in 2D shooters comes from how much of the playfield you’re denied at any given time, and I’m realizing that the shooters I like enough to get better at are ones that deny you that playfield through terrain and enemies that you need to avoid.  There’s a solidity to the world, the level designers need to pay at least minimal lip service to it, and you actually see the enemies as more than just the origin points for a spray of fiery death.  Bullet hell shooters like these two constrict your motion by filling the screen with, well, bullets in a variety of gorgeous patterns, and the actual opponents are just things that will hopefully die while you’re dodging all of the electric doom with the fire button held down.

A fewdevelopers pull off a decent balancing act – Cave most notably, and I’ve played a bunch of their games and enjoyed them enough to want to improve.  I also quite enjoyed Triggerheart Excelica and Ikaruga, by Warashi and Treasure respectively. I should probably stick to those couple of developers instead of beating my head against the more obscure games. 🙂

The visual novel was a short affair called Fukigan na Natsumi-San, which according to vndb is a < 2 hour read, presumably if you’re actually fluent in Japanese.  I am NOT fluent in Japanese and needed to have two dictionaries handy to get through it in four hours with a ton of skimming.

It had a pretty decent hook to it.  The main character is a bit messed up because his mother died a few years ago, his father remarried two years back and now he has a new mother (and a sister, who hates him.)  So, he withdraws from the world in general.  The story is about him connecting with his new sibling and realizing that they both have a lot they’re going through, that she is likewise dealing with the loss of a parent, and becoming friends…or at least friendsish.

The hook is that after you play through his story, it flips around and you then get to see things from his sister’s point of view – her father didn’t die; he left.  So she’s dealing with massive abandonment issues and the whole you’re-not-my-dad thing with regards to her brother’s dad.

So a little more dramatic than the normal very fluffy VNs I read. And I took some discs out of a box! So woo progress, as I have become fond of saying.

One of the first manga series I was introduced to, wayyyyy back in the early 90s, was “Ushio and Tora”, a series about a young lad who is supposed to take over the family shrine and who has to put up with his annoying grandfather who won’t shut up about spirits and curses and other superstitious nonsense. Naturally enough, they turn out NOT to be superstitious nonsense, and hijinks ensue.

“Sakura Shrine Girls”, then, is basically the exact same plot, except the main character doesn’t wind up fighting off hordes of demons with a tiger-like spirit companion helping him and occasionally threatening to eat him. Rather, you have to deal with the capricious demands of a pair of buxom shrine maidens, who you can tell aren’t precisely human thanks to obligatory cat ears and tails.

It’s a pretty lightweight plot, mostly dealing with the fact that your new friends do NOT get along and you need to balance your sudden exposure to the Realms Beyond with the responsibility of constantly trying to keep the peace between these two natives of said realms.

In the process, there’s a lot of flirting and accidentally walking in on other characters in various stages of deshabille. It’s drawn by Inma, however, who doesn’t do full nudity, so there’s nothing here that you couldn’t comfortably have up on your screen at work.

Mind you, that implies a very relaxed work environment. Err. Maybe you shouldn’t go taking my advice on that one.

To back up to where we were before I tried to get you fired, I was first exposed to Inma’s art with “Sakura Beach”, which I think was her first VN for Sekai Project, and I wasn’t a huge fan of her style to start. It’s kind of grown on me, though, and I really like the depth of facial expressions shown in more recent VNs.

Anyway, it’s a good-natured romp, even if the plot never gets particularly deep, the art is pretty and there is ample … ampleness, and if you pay attention to the backgrounds behind all of the ample you may notice that some of them even change to reflect time of day, which is a new level of detail for the series.

Also you should really check out Ushio and Tora because it’s pretty amazing too.

Right, then.  Something a little different from the norm to talk about tonight.

“One Last Chance” is a bit of an odd duck as visual novels go.  It’s originally in English, features voice acting, has characters who are actually in their late 20s as opposed to still in school, and has a plot line revolving around trying to land a contract to sell pipe to a construction company.  It’s also set in Martha’s Vineyard, and all I know about Martha’s Vineyard is that it’s where “Jaws” was set so I kept waiting for someone to get eaten.

Oh, and there’s absolutely no nudity, no skimpy outfits, no prurient aspects of any sort.  You can play this one in public without the slightest shame.

I will allow myself to be just a little snarky at this point and say that the thing that REALLY sets it apart from your average English-language VN is that the artist appears to know how to actually draw; there’s no “so… you bought a couple of How To Draw Manga books, huh?” sensation about it.

To sum it up; you’re trying desperately to save your company by landing a contract, and you run into your high school crush.  Complications ensue, and this is where the characters being a little older is a nice touch because the complications are actually significant.

You’ll hit your first ending in probably 45 minutes or so, then maybe take a look at the achievements and try to get the other five endings.  This is where things go a LITTLE south because the “Skip” feature is very poorly implemented – it keeps the fast-forward on even after you make a choice, rather than reverting to normal speed.  You need to get good about turning off skip mode before you hit choices if you want to actually read the changed dialogue, and it feels a bit clumsy.

It also doesn’t have a way to go full-screen, at least not on a Mac.  You can drag the window to be bigger, but you’re still going to see the dock and menu bar.

So, it’s a super short VN with some rough edges to the presentation and a little bit of a pain to replay for different endings.  Fortunately, it was also only a buck on Steam during the last sale, and that makes it really hard to complain.  Hopefully the developer does well enough to put out future VNs, because this one had a lot of promise.

(And maybe there will be a shark in the next one)