I am a musical theater buff. I grew up in the nasty end of the theater district as a kid and used to enjoy the cheap seats on Broadway from as far back as I am able to remember. No Cats though. Cats can go to hell.
The other day my friend mentioned she had to learn to sing Shall We Dance for a chorus thing. She didn't remember the lyrics... I remembered them all! Good musicals cannot be forgotten. I used to have the old double VHS edition of the King and I with the musical intermission too. I miss those. Those were awesome!
Deborah Kerr has left the building.
Excuse me why I try and go find a copy of the old King and I in Yamada Denki and wallow.
Today is what it is. 6 years and not a day different. My thoughts are with everyone back home in New York. To anyone who reads this, I hope you remember, mourn, but not dwell. Dwelling is really getting us nowhere. I can attest to that.
Is it just one of those months?
Most of my friends are having work weeks from hell... the kind of hell we don't experience normally in sequence.
So I have to ask myself.. is it cosmic? Or is it simply that when one of us begins to complain the others will freely confess to unhappiness as well?
If it is cosmic then I ask the milky way to stop turning because I want off. The snowball of relatively medium to small sized inconveniences is becoming the size of a boulder and its going to crush me soon.
I also ask that the Gods of Brompton find me a specialty bike store in Gifu that has my kevlar tires because I have worn mine so thin its going to pop any day now.
I also ask the that the guy who stole my good desk at work and relegated me to one of the worst desks in the office be smote upon the Chubu Interstate.
m( _ _)m
No Spoilers! (I hate spoilers.)
I merely wanted to complain that in the act of finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows... I have basically ended my childhood. Yes I am 23 and well beyond "childhood" but I always felt like I could go back to it. I began reading Harry Potter when I was 13 or so which means that it took 10 years to take the journey with Harry. Albeit he did it much slower than I did. :P And now that it is done... I dunno... it felt so final? I feel old.
So on Kotaku Brian Ashcraft put up a rather amusing post on why the xbox 360 cannot sell in Japan explained by the comments of Japanese message board "2chan".
I found the comments on Kotaku to these comments be rather inane. I tried to comment myself but I still felt too annoyed by the entire matter so I am going to put up my 2cents here in the ever loving need to vent. Also maybe someone here on Vox will give intelligible commentary to my comment and thereby increasing the commenting on comments chain to an absurd length.
So here is what I said...
"I think a great deal of you are missing the point.
Isn't there some sort of pride for American gamers to play games by CliffyB or Jaffe? I have to say in any country there is going to be a homecourt advantage. Also I think this comes with cultural bias, we always like our stuff best. (Unless you are a self-hating American Otaku who decides Japan is the golden country you have no frame of reference to understand except through Anime like those pundits at 4chan.)
Another huge problem is FPS games are associated with giant beefy men with grizzle and whatever. How can you relate to that as a Japanese gamer? Have you guys seen the photos of people in Akiba? These are scrawny dudes who don't have to shave.
Look at Kingdom Hearts or FFX... incredibly successful titles with rather scrawny guys who don't know what they are doing at first but eventually become the hero. There is a lot of transformation mythology in successful Japanese RPGs which is exactly what that audience wants; the guy who can't do anything becomes the hero. At the end of the day there is a lot of self projection in gaming. YOU want to win and be the hero.
Also, I know Marcus Fenix is a badass and what but they can't relate to him. The West seems to lean more towards the Rambo, Rocky, Die Hard stereotype which has no place in a "wow was that guy over there actually a guy" place like Japan. The badass cool guy here looks like a girl. So do you think the Japanese audience wants to be Cloud Strife or Marcus Fenix?
The Otaku is the core audience that spends large sums of money on buying new games constantly at a markup that American games have only recently have had to experience. (Hello 8,000 yen PS2 games) There needs to be a constant flow of appealing Japanese games... not first person shooters. That genre just is not popular here, get over it everyone.
Marketing isn't Microsoft's problem though it is an obstacle. Microsoft's problem is they have only bothered to get Sakaguchi to make games for them. They need the Nippon Ichis, the Level 5s, the smaller (hate to say it) hentai game developers to realize that X360 is a viable market with the added incentive of Western sales."
I think I wrote too much for a comment and it will be flagged down. Oh well. XD
Btw.. sorry 4chan users... I hate rabid fanboys of Anything and ignorant fanboys are even worse. Living in Japan for too long has made me even more bitter. I am sure some of you are nice and smart.
I wonder if some of my comments also apply to Gaming Girls?
So... I haven't really posted in a while but... blame the day job. However, FolksSoul (or Folklore as it has been
renamed for the West) on the PS3 has given me something to talk about. I am not editing at all as I don't have the time. I live in Japan...I know my English has gone to hell... forgive me.
First of all, this game is NUTS. Its one part Fatal Frame, one part Pokemon, a taste of the original Onimusha Warlords, and lots of weird. This game is also the best non FPS offering yet on the PS3 and could easily be a big seller if the word gets out...
Basic Premise:
The setting? Some sort of English Irish blur. The characters? Ellen is a 22 year old girl that lost her memory and her mother 17 years ago in an accident she doesn't remember. One day she mysteriously receives a letter from her "mother" that she is alive and living in the seaside down of Limerick. Keats is a reporter for an occult magazine who receives a strange phone call from a woman in Limerick who insists she is going to be killed. They both show up in that town at the same time and happen to find a dead woman sitting on a cliff... It also happens to be the one night of the year where the living can visit the netherworld (land of the dead) using the ancient stone ruins which happen to sit right outside of town. Lots of coincidences in this tale...
At heart this story is a murder mystery... where you gain a lot of your clues from talking to the dead.
Keats vs Ellen in Terms of Story:
Keats and Ellen are distinct playable characters with their own play styles but sometimes work together plot-wise. The story is presented in chapters and when you finish each chapter you are kicked back out to a screen where you can choose to do the next chapter of either character as far as you have progressed in their respective stories. This means you can completely ignore one character or try for the more sensible trading of chapters. Doing the respective chapters of each character back to back is a good idea because they revolve around the basic same set of events. After doing Ellen's Chapter 1 if you do Keats' Chapter 1 it will give insight and added dimensions to the events of Chapter 1 and different clues towards resolving the mystery.
Basic Explanation of Play Modes:
Daytime - You run around asking questions and looking for objects of the dead that will allow you to find them in the netherworld and ask more questions about that fateful day 17 years ago. You can also pick up side quests call "Quests" from the Master at the pub. Daytime is the majority of your detective work.
Nighttime - This is when you get to Play. Head to the pub to talk to the Half-Living Ghouls that hang out in there for clues or a different set of side quests from nighttime master of the pub. Nighttime is the only time you can enter the netherworld and then the action begins. Using your recently acquired magical powers you defend yourself while looking for the soul in question you want to interrogate.
Action Sequence:
You start with 2 "ID" (how Freudian... basically souls) that get popped out of the "Folk". (Hence the rather lame FolksSoul name) Folk are magical monsters/goblins/spirits that I won't explain what they are for the sake of the story plot. Suffice it to say they try and kill you whenever they see you... so you beat them up... and as you do attacks that actually damage them you see their soul begin to pop out. (Helps you figure out what damage type is actually succeeding since there is basic elemental forces at play in this. fire, wind, etc) Once you have them at critical HP their soul will pop out red and you use R1 to tractor beam lock and flick the controller to rip out that soul. Multiple lock-ons will put a multiplier on the EXP you get which is good because Ranking Up is slow in this game otherwise. Instead of levels you get ranks... as far as I can tell this merely increases your HP. Stronger souls or boss souls will require waggle control mini games to rip out. From timing short tugs according to soul color to tilting your controller side to side like you are wiggling a cork out of a bottle. The game lets you know which type you are dealing with and they are easy enough to master once you figure out the finer points. If you don't... you are running the risk of some serious Wii Wrist.
At this point I should note that Folk will eventually pull their souls back in if you leave them alone for too long trying to get a lot of souls together at once. One or two more hits will cause it to pop back out, but if you take them to zero HP then they will disappear and you lose the soul.
So collecting souls will give you new summons that are basically all different attack types (I have only seen one defensive shield summon and you get it right at the beginning) with different elemental types, range, etc etc. Certain souls can only be defeated by other specific souls so there is a lot of collecting Pokemon style gameplay in this respect. However there aren't so many soul types to drive you nuts but rather just enough to keep it interesting and diverse. To compensate for keeping the types down in each respective area they give you 3 or 4 tasks per Folk-type to accomplish that will power up said summon in some way. This can be as simple as picking up 5 more souls of that type to defeating another monster type several times with that summon. Also Folk can drop items that you use to accomplish tasks as well. Completing these tasks are crucial because they can lower MP requirements, increase damage, or even the amount if attacks you can do with one summon. However most talks aren't a chore to complete and can be done along the way as you progress through the netherworld.
Keats and Ellen's play styles:
I mainly have been playing Ellen due to the fact that Keats irks me. That aside, they have the same basic array of souls to summon and the differences are really in the little things.
Ellen's power comes from the fact that she wears the clothes of the dead. (Queue Japanese love of making pretty costumes.) You can find different versions throughout the game that give you certain advantages. The first chunk of the netherworld you visit is Fairy World and you can unlock the the Fairy Clothing that will increase your resistance to holding effects such as sleep attacks and sticky goo attacks.
Keats' has a 3rd bar unrelated to HP or MP that when it fills he transforms into a crazy blue skinned white haired demon-like thing that reminded me of the 3rd Onimusha game for a second. Power up and all that.
Thoughts of plot and tone...
The plot seems simple at first, but it really begins to grow and tangle as you go along. If you are a plot nut and want to figure you the mystery before Ellen and Keats do then you are going to be the type that wants to play through each chapter for Ellen and Keats getting the most amount of clues possible. This can also drive you mad at some point with having to recapture and task finish some of the same souls all over again. I guess this is why they didn't make it mandatory. On the Japanese box there was a sticker that said "This game is recommended by the creator of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure" and you can really see why. Its bizarre. I wouldn't call it a horror or suspense game but it has elements of both. I would simply say it is a very strange detective murder mystery with a playful romp through the land of the dead.
The demo only took you through the first part of the Fairy World which while being very pretty does not really grasp the mood of the whole game. The designs at first are very fanciful with an air of Nightmare Before Christmas but then they progressively get a bit more creepy. Each world is more dangerous and deadly than the last and reflects that in its design. The second world is war world which screams "small European town in the middle of fire bombings" and can really put you on edge. I would warn people not to think this is a Kiddy game. It has lots of murders and plenty of scary.
Recommendations...
I don't know who I would recommend this to except for anyone dying to play something Good on their ps3 that isn't Resistance. Its such a weird game that you really have to know whether its your kind of thing or not. I hope some of my explanations helped with that. Feel free to ask questions in the comments if you want to know anything about the game.
It might just be me/Japan but right now it feels like all workplaces are in some sort of ugly March crunch that makes you want to beat your head against a bathroom stall door during your afternoon break.
After working at this Japanese desk job of mine for half a year, I finally got my first good thumbs up. I suggested a rename for a new project and it got picked up. :O The name will be used in public things like a website so it feels particularly neato keen. That and my coworkers never ask my opinion for anything bigger than looking for an English typo on an email.
A NYTimes article from last year really had it right when they said that burnout isn't a product of hours worked but rather expectations/effort divided by rewards/results. Its an amazing feeling when you get results in a situation where you simply expect to get nothing. I have been running on an empty tank of desk work boredom for so long that it was really a surprise.
I hope anyone reading this gets some unexpected rewards/results at their workplaces too. It really is a battery recharger. Otherwise here is a thumbs up from me to you for sticking it out like a champ. *thumbs up* Lord knows that is hard enough.
What is one of your favorite poems?
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.
Ulysses by Tennyson. Yeah I know I am a freak and what. I was forced to read it in one of my various high school English classes but it was one of the first pieces of poetry that really hit home with me and stuck in the back of my head.
"Made weak by time and face, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Who said no one enjoyed high school poetry classes?
I also tend to be a sucker for LONG poetry... epic poetry... in its native languages... Virgil's Aeneid in its original Latin... yeah... thats my stuff right there. Though you know reading and actually getting haiku in Japanese is pretty neato. Shoving all that meaning into such few syllables. Trixy poets.
That movie with Bruce Willis where the kid says "I see dead people" and Million Dollar Baby. Both due to being out of the country and having my friends all go without me. :P At this point it is just being too stubborn to jump on the band wagon.
Add any currently Oscar nominated films. Living in the Japanese boonies means we rarely get anything and the ticket is 15 bucks.
