Neck's blog

Danganronpa V3 is the best one

After over 60 hours of playtime, I have finally finished Danganronpa V3. I have… a lot I want to talk about.

I played Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc in early 2020, declaring it as one of my few “corona games” that I would play during the early stages of the pandemic. I came away from it with mixed feelings, the strongest of which was a craving for more. So naturally I played Danganronpa Goodbye Despair soon after, though this time on more of a slow burn, taking my time through the story. I began Danganronpa V3 Killing Harmony in December 2020, and finished it on January 24th 2021. I barely took any breaks from the game, and kept myself invested until the very end.

I have to say, that’s the way these games are meant to be played. Letting yourself get absorbed into the world of Danganronpa, lost in the complex relationships your favorite characters have with each other as they kill and accuse each other.

I liked Danganronpa THH. It’s veiled narrative always surprised me, and unraveling the deeper mysteries of Hope’s Peak Academy was the best part of the story. I remember being endlessly intrigued and always guessing what the big reveals would be as I played. Danganronpa 2 really didn’t suck me in as much as the other two games. It had it’s highlights for sure, but overall it’s the one in the series that I have the most conflicting opinions on. What hooked me for Danganronpa V3 wasn’t it’s epic scale like the second game, nor the compelling mystery like the first game. For me, Danganronpa V3’s biggest draw was it’s emotional tone.

If the first game was intriguing, the second game was epic, the third game was honestly fucking sad. The series has had a lot of shaky dialogue and character building in the past, but V3 was a huge step up for the writers, and an excellent send off for the series.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that V3 struck a chord in me. It’s not very often that a narrative touches me, and this game really made me feel something.

Past this point there will be spoilers.

Shuichi became the ultimate detective after solving a murder case faster than the police, but it wasn’t a case anyone wanted to be solved. As the culprit was apprehended, he glared at Shuichi, full of malice and hatred. The glare burned itself into Shuichi’s psyche, since later he would learn the culprit’s motive. The victim had tricked the culprits family into suicide, meaning it was a passionate kill of revenge.

Shuichi felt so guilty for “siding” with the victim, and felt that everything was his fault for exposing the truth. This led to Shuichi considering himself a lousy detective, and to him wearing a hat to avoid eye contact with people, still haunted by the culprit’s glare.

This is our protagonist for V3. In my opinion, he is the most character rich and emotionally complex protagonist in the series.

Enter: the killing game. 16 high school students all with “ultimate” talents find themselves on the campus of a huge school. They are locked inside the campus by a gigantic wall, and are threatened to participate in a “killing game” by Monokuma and the Monocubs.

You begin the game playing as Kaede however, not Shuichi. Kaede the ultimate pianist is as charismatic as she is playful, and quickly establishes herself as the role model of the group. She tries her best to bring all the students together and keep up morale, even with dissenting voices among them. Kaede and Shuichi have many scenes together where Kaede sets out to understand Shuichi, learns of his troubles, and genuinely wants to help him through his trauma. I won’t get into ships and all that stuff, but for the single chapter that Kaede is present, Shuichi finds it easy to confide his troubles in Kaede. They spend a lot of time together, and their smitten relationship is noted by other characters.

So, you can imagine what goes through Shuichi’s mind as he slowly realizes that Kaede was the killer during the first trial. It felt like history was repeating itself for Shuichi. The person everyone wants to look up to, the person he trusted and believed in, was the culprit. Shuichi stayed quiet most of the trial, naturally not wanting to accuse his friend of murder, even though his detective instinct was telling him it was correct.

This is a complexion to Shuichi’s character that comes out in every trial, though more so in the later ones. Shuichi is the ultimate detective. He can see things in cases that other people cannot, and because of this, everyone relies on him to flex his talent and reveal the murderer. It’s not fair for him. He hates his talent, he hates the game, he hates himself for revealing the truth, and his trauma never actually heals. For me it was so easy to put myself in Shuichi’s shoes. The awful feeling that your talent is only ever useful if one of your friends is dead, and the dread of using your talent to accuse another one of your friends and sentence them to Monokuma’s punishment would be unbearable.

After the first trial, Shuichi finds himself in Kaede’s lab, reflecting on the events leading to her execution. Kaede’s spirit consoles him, playing Clair de Lune by Debussy- which is an amazing piece by the way, and is an excellent reflection of Shuichi’s emotional state throughout the game. Shuichi finds the courage to go on without Kaede, and fulfill her wish of ending the killing game. To underline this, Shuichi takes off his hat, and never touches it for the rest of the game. From now on he would look truth in the eye and not back down, for everyone’s sake.

What I just walked you through was the plotline of just two characters in one chapter. There are 14 more characters and 5 more chapters I haven’t touched on that are just as rich and dripping with drama and weight as this.

I’ll go into a couple more of my favorite developments in the game, more so to gush about how good the character building is in this game than to prove any kind of point.

Kokichi Oma. Kokichi is one of the most beloved characters in the entire series, and for good reason. From the beginning, Kokichi is established as the “trouble maker” of the group. The first game had Byakuya, who was constantly ego tripping and generally being an ass despite himself not actually being all that smart. The second game had Nagito, who pressures the other students to harder and more difficult situations to see them overcome such obstacles. Nagito is also one of the most divisive characters in the series and deserves his own essay. Kokichi matches these two by being a compulsive liar, which is established from when you first meet him as Kaede.

On the surface, Kokichi in the early chapters is nothing more than a mischievous contrarian. In the first chapter Kokichi introduces himself as the “Ultimate Supreme Leader”, and quickly makes it known to Kaede and Shuichi that they cannot trust him, since half of what he says are lies by his own admission.

In the second chapter Kokichi begins his off-hand remarks. The first few of which show that he understands the dynamic of the killing game and how Monokuma incites murders to take place in the school. He remarks that they should not cooperate with each other since when they do Monokuma will step in with a plan that will make them suffer, citing Kaede’s case as evidence of this happening.

After trial three, Kokichi points out that Himiko has been lying to everyone- especially herself. She had always been an emotionless character, and after two of her friends died in chapter three, she was going to bottle it up like everything else. By calling her out as a liar, Kokichi helps Himiko confront her emotions, resulting in her mournfully sobbing until she passes out. This seems to be Kokichi showing empathy, in his own peculiar way.

In chapter four, Kokichi seems to glorify the killing game and claim that killing someone to win the game would be worth it for him, if it came down to it. This contradicts what he said in chapter two about not wanting Monokuma to incite violence, and is an obvious lie. He says this to further antagonize himself. This comes to a head in the trial, where it is revealed that Kokichi manipulated Gonta into committing murder. After the trial, Kokichi begins to cry and protest against Gonta’s execution. He begged to be punished instead. However after Gonta’s execution, Kokichi flips his narrative, saying he couldn’t believe we fell for his crocodile tears, and that he would never care about that idiot.

But reading the scene carefully, the part that seemed more like an act was when he claimed he was only pretending to care about Gonta. Kokichi is not a heartless bastard. I think he really did feel something for Gonta, and truly felt disgusted with himself for sacrificing Gonta to further his plan. The claim that the crying was an act felt forced, almost comically evil.

During chapter five Kokichi gives electro hammers to everyone, letting them make their way to the end of the tunnel at the back of the school, where they open a door to the outside world to find it apocalyptical and their Oxygen running out. Kokichi closes the door and monologues about how he is the mastermind and he is ending the game out of boredom. This was his most important lie of the game.

I will state it once again; Kokichi is a compulsive liar. With the full picture in view, we see that Kokichi always had a plan, always knew what he was doing, and said the things he said at the times he did for a reason.

In case five, Kokichi is flattened by a hydraulic press by Kaito. This was Kokichi’s ultimate goal- to create a murder that not even Monokuma could solve. By using electrobombs to disable his cameras, and collaborating with Kaito to make the victim and the culprit unclear, he sets up a situation in which both Kaito and Kokichi could both be the culprit and the victim. After the trial we get a flashback to Kokichi talking to Kaito about his intentions-

Kaito: You kept saying how fun this game was.
Kokichi: …
Kokichi: That was a lie… obviously…
Kokichi: H-How could a game… that you’re forced to play… be fun…?
Kokichi: I had to think this game was fun to survive… I had to lie to myself!

In summary, Kokichi saw how the mastermind was manipulating everyone into killing eachother, and wanted to end it all along. To this end, he painted himself as the villain, convinced everyone else that he was the mastermind, and declared that the killing game would end because he was bored. For a moment, that almost worked. But, the events of trial 5 made it clear that he had to change his plan, and instead collaborated with Kaito to create an unsolvable murder that even Monokuma couldn’t solve in order to break the game.

Quite the misunderstood character, Mr. Ultimate Supreme Leader.

Side tangent: I remember a while ago, long before I played V3, and maybe even before I played the first game, I remember seeing photos of Kokichi. Strangely enough, in those photos he was titled the “Ultimate Rally Crier”. I played V3 waiting for a reveal that he was never in fact the “Ultimate Supreme Leader”, especially in chapters five and six. In chapter six Shuichi investigates Kokichi’s room and lab, finding the room to be a childish mess and his lab to be comically “evil organization”-esque, with a batmobile and everything. Shuichi notes all this, as if Kokichi was a poser. When we get our hands on his motive video from chapter two, we learn that his “evil organization” was pretty much a group of clowny pranksters who commit misdemeaners at worst. This further sold me on him being the “Ultimate Rally Crier”, but it was never confirmed. Even on the wiki, it says that he is the “Ultimate Supreme Leader”.

Throughout the game he manipulates everyone, and plays with their emotions, even if it is all lies. I think it would have been quite fitting for him to have a reveal like this. Food for thought.

Finally, I will cover my favorite scene in the entire series of Danganronpa. First you will need some brief context. After the second trial, Kokichi outs Maki as the “Ultimate Assassin”, not the “Ultimate Child Caregiver” like she had told us before. Maki confirms this, and for the rest of chapter three, everybody has a hard time trusting Maki. Maki feels melancholic about this, since deep down she just wants to get along with and work with everyone else. She may be the Ultimate Assassin, but she never had any plans to kill anyone, she wanted to leave just as much as everyone else.

Seeing how Maki has been shunned by the rest of the group, Kaito invites Maki to workout at night with Shuichi and himself, which was a ritual that the two of them have been doing since the end of trial one to work on Shuichi’s confidence. Hesitant to trust anyone, Maki attends the workouts. Through chapters three and four, Maki and the boys form a bond from hanging out so often, and are dubbed as the “Training Trio” by fans.

I can’t underline how important this bond is to all three of them, each for their own reasons. Shuichi has Kaito to boost his confidence and work on his fear, and he has Maki to relate with and confide his weaknesses to. Maki ends up falling for Kaito, looking up to his brazen positivity, and she relates with Shuichi to make sense of her own identity. Kaito is the glue of the trio, and helps the other two become their best selves, so that he can rely on them when he tries to break the killing game.

Everything is peachy with the trio up until trial four. During the trial, Shuichi has no choice but to suspect Gonta as the blackened given the evidence. Kaito is enraged by this, since Gonta was always a friend to everyone and would never hurt a fly. Kaito debates Shuichi until the bitter end, where it’s revealed that Shuichi and Kokichi were right about Gonta being the killer. After Gonta is punished, Kaito and Kokichi have a scuffle, which results in Kaito’s illness acting up in front of everyone. He pukes blood on the floor before leaving, glaring at Shuichi. Of course, after that trial things are a bit awkward with the trio.

Throughout chapter five, you don’t have the option to spend time with Kaito, and every time Shuichi and Kaito are in the same room there is a really awkward air. Maki tries to amend this by forcing the three of them to hangout together once again, resulting in a really awkward scene where Shuichi is just third-wheeling while Maki teaches Kaito how to assemble a crossbow. After this scene, the moment with Kokichi pretending to be the mastermind happens, and Kaito is imprisoned by him for the rest of the chapter. Though there is one last scene, in which Kaito and Shuichi somewhat make-up through a bathroom window.

Before his execution, Kaito says his last goodbyes to Maki and Shuichi. At this point his illness has gotten way out of hand, and he his covered in blood for the entire scene. Kaito tells Shuichi that-

Kaito: Your detective skills kept us alive…
Kaito: You were just way too cool, and I got frustrated…
Kaito: So that’s why I was so harsh on you. My bad…
Shuichi: …

In a flash of anger, Maki pulls out her knife and declares that she won’t let Monokuma kill Kaito-

Maki: I’ve always fought to kill, but… this is the first time I’ve fought to protect someone!
Maki: I’ve never felt this way before! I’ve never…
Maki: …been given a nickname like “Maki Roll” before, either.
Maki: And… I’ve never…
Maki: …fallen for someone before.
Maki: I… don’t want this to end. I just… don’t…
Kaito: Maki… Before… you hated yourself so much. You didn’t even like yourself a little…
Kaito: But not anymore, huh? You’re alright now!
Kaito: You fell for a guy like me! Now you can learn to like yourself!
Maki: …
Kaito: Hey, hey… don’t cry. Can’t you send me off with one last smile?

I don’t know how Kaito expected Maki to smile given the situation.

Now, as great as trial five is, the scene I wanted to comment on takes place after it, but before chapter six begins.

After the trial, Shuichi finds himself in the courtyard where he, Maki, and Kaito used to train at night. He reflected on the trial, thinking about how they lost someone they all trusted, and someone that nobody trusted in the same event. As he is reminiscing, Maki finds herself at the courtyard as well-

Shuichi: Ah, Maki…
Maki: …So, you came too.
Shuichi: Yeah…
Shuichi: …
Shuichi: Maki… I’m sorry.
Maki: For what?
Shuichi: I was the one who drove Kaito into a corner…
Shuichi: Just like Kaede, I… I end up betraying everyone important to me…
Shuichi: It’s all my fault.
Maki: …
Maki: …Are you feeling lonely?
Shuichi: Huh?
Maki: Are you lonely… now that Kaito is gone?
Shuichi: …
Shuichi: Yeah… lonely.
Shuichi I… I feel so lonely, and so sad I… I don’t know what to do…

The gentle awkwardness of this dialogue speaks a million words. Shuichi is once again burned by the truth, and once again blames himself for the death of his friends. Maki just watched her best friend and first crush die in front of her, and was powerless to stop it. She is experiencing a lot of heavy emotions that she has never had to deal with before in her life.

Maki attempts to comfort Shuichi, but her lack of experience practicing sympathy makes it awkward. But she tries, and in her own way, she is able to console him. I can’t stress enough how good this dialogue is. These are characters that have been built up for multiple chapters, and have been to hell and back together. Their friend that acted as their glue just died, and knowing their personality problems, this is exactly how I would have imagined this scene going. It continues-

Shuichi: The only reason I’m still alive right now is because of Kaito.
Shuichi: If he hadn’t been my friend, I would be…
Maki: …Me too.
Maki: I can’t remember the last time I ever cried that hard. I wonder how long it’s been…
Maki: But, I won’t cry anymore.
Maki: I’m sad, but… I’m grateful to Kaito.
Shuichi: Grateful?

From here, the two are joined by Himiko and Tsumugi, and the four of them work out together to remember Kaito.

For me, V3 was the swan song for the series, and I think it would be fine to let it rest as it is. Oh, right the developers are burnt out anyway.

I suppose I should touch on that before I finish this piece. Well, here goes.

A subtheme to the third game that goes with as much subtlety as a Monokuma execution is that sequels get tired eventually. Ask the right person and you will learn that the entire third game is about how the developers are sick of making Danganronpa games, and don’t want to milk the series to death like what has happened to other titles. This is an understandable notion and I empathize with the developers, but oh my god do they beat you over the head with it.

It is /somewhat/ subtle throughout the game, like small comments the player character will make when examining certain pointless objects or Monokuma theater bits about commercial success.

This ends in the sixth trial however, where the big reveal is that Danganronpa V3 is not the third killing game in the canon. According to Tsumugi, V3 means 53, and Danganronpa is a television show watched all over the world. The killing game in the third game is the 53rd season of that show. Even the previous two games, Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair, were supposedly part of this television show.

More than that, Tsumugi also shows that all characters in every game were technically fictional characters, since they were prewritten personalities that replace the memories of whoever signed up to be on the show. Every character is fake. Shuichi’s backstory never happened. Maki’s love for Kaito was never real. Kokichi’s compulsive lying was fabricated. Hell, even further than that, Mondo’s jelousy of Chihiro’s bravery wasn’t real. Sayaka’s idol group was never in any danger since they never existed, because she wasn’t an idol. Nagito’s perversion of seeing hope overcoming despair wasn’t real. Fuyuhiko and Pekoyama were never raised together.

I could go on, but my point is that this changes everything in the series. Every Danganronpa story and character you know and love was all a fabrication, created by writers to be portrayed by actors who have their memories replaced to believe that they are those characters.

Oh wait, isn’t that just what it is though? Danganronpa is a video game IP, with a studio of writers and voice actors behind it all. Haha, very meta well done Spike Chunsoft you really stuck it to those fans of yours.

But seriously though I don’t know how to feel about it. I appreciate the meta message, and it did make me think for a bit. But it comes off sort of… pissy? I’m not sure if that’s the right word.

Either way, I have come to terms with 3-6 being the canonical ending to Danganronpa. It doesn’t soil everything that came before it, but it doesn’t really wrap everything up very neatly either. I suppose it could have been worse, remember 2-6? Jesus.

Danganronpa is a series I will hold close to my heart for some time. Everything about the games strike something within me. Compelling mysteries, a slow burn narrative with clear themes, amazing characters with complex relationships, superb design for those characters, and an iconic villain as the face of it all. I’ll even mention that these games have some fucking good music, even though I am vastly underqualified for appraising something like that.

Do I recommend Danganronpa V3? Yes. However, you need to play the first two games in order to get to it. Like many other things I seem to get into, Danganronpa is a commitment. All or nothing. If you want to play (in my opinion) the best game in the series, you need to play the entire series.

Please, play this fucking game. Play Danganronpa.

Mortal Shell doesn’t take itself seriously enough

I don’t know if I’ve stated this before, but I am an absolute sperg for FromSoft games, like everyone else, apparently. Generally accepted to be some of the best games to ever be released in triple A fashion, Dark Souls and its constituents have captured the hearts of many a gamer. There really isn’t anything I can say about the series that hasn’t already been said.

To the suprise of my peers, I am pretty good at these types of games, and I have put my time in. Recently I made it my goal to obtain every Steam acheivement in Dark Souls 3 in a legitamite fashion, and I finished it on stream. I now use that as my badge of gamership, since it took me two months to complete and I now have over 320 hours in the game.

Anyway, this post is about Mortal Shell, not my godly gamer status. Mortal Shell is the debut game of Cold Symmetry, and was released to quite some hype, as I and lots of other people were looking for something to scratch our “souls-itch” in this long downtime waiting for any more news about Elden Ring.

I’d like to say that Mortal Shell carves out its own identity in the sub genre but it has some problems with doing that. I felt like the game had a good tone, especially with Fallgrim, however samey every area looked in that area. I went in to Mortal Shell expecting a pitch black Dark Souls, I was hoping it would be scary, and shake up the souls formula. Unfortunately it didn’t do enough for me. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the game, but I currently cannot tell you a single piece of lore from the game.

Now, that’s in jolly good Dark Souls fashion, leaving the world building up to interpretation and dropping it in small lines of item descriptions. Mortal Shell does this, but it feels like it is going through the motions, like the game shrugs it’s shoulders and admits that it is a souls-like. You are a withered corpse-type of being and the world is dreary, fucked, and everyone and their dog wants to kill you for some reason.

I’m sure the lore is deep and all, but I can’t really care about it if the game doesn’t take itself seriously either. It may seem like it is trying hard, but let’s be real it is only going through the motions.

Mechanics wise, the game innovates by giving the player the ability to “harden” themselves, nullifying damage taken for an instance or two and staggering enemies who attack. I thought this ability was just kind of cute at first, then I learned that it is pretty overpowered, and exploiting it is how you are meant to beat bosses in this game. You also pop out of your shell upon death, and have to scuttle back inside, which will fully heal you.

To balance this the game has not estus-type of item, and the bonfires are spread out so there is only one in each major area, which I like actually. But really, there is not a lot of innovation here, it is just re balancing of how Dark Souls already operates, like they just moved some numbers around.

Now, this is no criticism of Cold-Symmetry here, but I feel like there is more shaking up of the formula that could have been done with this game. I always thought a souls-like that leans more into horror would be cool to see, and I was expecting that from this game, but I was jebaited. For a quick example, there is a nosferatu monster enemy in the game, and when you first find one in a cave protecting a “Shell”, a boss health bar appears and it jumps at you and tears out your throat like you are a kebab. Initially it scared the shit out of me because I was not expecting the pseudo-cutscene at all. Fast forward later in the game, this enemy type is not only a common enemy with no boss health bar, but they absolutely fucking flood Fallgrim when your game is in a certain world state. The charm of this enemy is quickly lost, and they are just annoying now. I thought it was a bit of lost potential to totally gameify this initially scary enemy, but that’s just me.

One more thing on the horror souls, wouldn’t it be cool to be chased around a level by a slow enemy, like in Resident Evil? That’s the sort of burning dread I was expecting from this game, but I had the wrong expectations. I did like what they were doing with making the world go dark when you are holding a sacred gland, and that’s what I want more of, because it was frightening knowing that enemy placements have changed, I need to go through the level backwards now, and I can’t see shit.

Let’s talk about bosses. Dark Souls mixes up humanoid and monstrous enemies and bosses all the time. Dark Souls one was a nice mix, DS 2 leaned heavy on the knights in shining armor, Bloodborne was really into messed up monsters, and Dark Souls 3 combined monsters and knights quite literally, given Vordt and Gundyr. Oh, and Sekiro was mainly all samurai, a cousin to the Dark Souls 2 problem. Mortal Shell has five main bosses and two mini bosses. 3/5 main bosses were just dudes with swords, the other two were charging beasts, one of which is a re skinned mini boss. This is a fine ratio, I just wish there was more in total. My real problem with the bosses, is that they were fucking EASY. Every single main boss I killed in one go, except for the Siamese twin, but that was unfair because the cut scene takes away a third of your health before the fight even begins.

In terms of mood, Mortal Shell had the ability to totally make it’s own niche, but it feels like it held itself back and wanted to be more fantastical like Dark Souls when I really felt like it didn’t need to be. In terms of mechanics and polish, the game felt sluggish sometimes, like my character wouldn’t roll when I wanted him too, of course at points that were the most inconvenient for me. I also felt like the innovation wasn’t enough, and after the “Shell” idea they just hoped that it alone could carry the game mechanically. And finally in terms of bosses and difficulty, I found the game lacking. The bosses were too easy and hardening was just way too powerful, especially with consumables and skills that let you just spam it and take the game on easy mode.

6/10, closer to a 7 than a 5, but there is much to be desired. Great work for a debut game though.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc isn’t just for weebs

Dear reader, have you ever dabbled in “that weeb shit”? I promise, anime and Japanese culture isn’t the amorphous black blob of cringe and sweaty neck beards on the internet like you think it is. You can be a fan of things like anime and manga without even talking to a single frothing fanboy. To be perfectly honest, it seems like anime and appreciation for this kind of stuff is becoming more and more mainstream by the week. With popular figures like Elon Musk coming out and just saying that they are an otaku and feeling comfortable with it, and things like Dragonball coming up in conversation easier than it ever has before.

This post isn’t really about anime or even trying to change people’s views on Asian entertainment, but I can take a moment to grandstand if I want to, this is my post dammit. And Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is a fun game. If you will just bear with the anime aesthetic for at least a half hour to give the game a chance, you will find yourself getting absorbed into one of the best narratives I have seen unfold in a game in a long time. Yes, I know it is pretty late to be reviewing Danganronpa, but so was reviewing Sleeping Dogs, so I don’t really care.

My problem with reviewing this game is that I find that there isn’t much to say that hasn’t been said already. The mysteries are well made, and the mechanics of the class trial reward the player for being astute and cracking the case with their own logic. Though there are a few hiccups like some pieces of logic not exactly making sense, until they are explained afterwards. The ongoing mystery of Hope’s Peak Academy was surprisingly intriguing, and I was trying to piece together all the hints at the true nature of the school the whole duration of the game. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.

What is Danganronpa? It’s a mystery game/visual novel. The two main game play points of Danganronpa involve walking around a large empty school finding clues and talking to classmates to build friendships, and using your logic to match phrases in a “class trial” at the end of the story arcs to call out bullshit in a Phoenix Wright type of way. I’d say what you need to invest yourself in is the mysterious narrative and characters, rather than the game play itself.

The hook is rather fucking strange, but very anime at the same time. You can really tell that the game was written in 2013 by a mangaka. After you meet the player character, who is a living anime troupe being a “Totally average high school student”, you pass out and find the school you were standing in completely different, with all the windows and doors leading out boarded up and only 14 other students in with you. You are then told by a mean looking teddy bear that you are all participating in a killing game, in which you must kill a fellow student in order to leave the school, at which point everyone else will be killed. However, there is a “class trial”, where all the living students stand around and discuss who could be the culprit behind the most recent killing. If they get it right, only the killer is killed.

Pretty crazy, right? Each other student is a ludicrous character, each falls into at least one of their own Japanese troupes, and all of them have their own lovable quirks and its legitimately hard to watch them get killed, and wondering which one of them could have the heart to do something as awful as killing another person. Your interactions with these lovable characters all take place in this dingy, creepy school, clouded in mystery and a dark atmosphere. Later into the game I think the atmosphere reaches it’s peak, especially when room 5-C is made available to the player. All this sickening intrigue must have a good payoff to make this game the perfect well rounded narrative, but that is where I think it falls a bit flat.

Without spoiling anything, I deduced the big late game identity twist about an hour before it was revealed, and while I felt super smart, I did feel a bit let down. Sort of like a “That’s it? Huh…” kind of feeling.

Unfortunately, I can’t really talk much more about this game without getting into spoilers. Since it is so narrative heavy, and even talking about the characters is treading a line on spoilers since there is so much depth to them. And the game play is pretty unremarkable, other than I applaud the game for finding a good method for rewarding the player for their logic without feeling like it is spoon feeding them the answer.

Mystery or detective games have this fine line to stay on. On one side, you want the player to feel smart for figuring out your mystery by being challenging. On the other side, you don’t want any players getting lost or left behind on the mystery just because they missed a piece of evidence or something. Danganronpa leans a bit more into the latter than I’d like, soft locking the player in certain rooms until each piece of evidence is uncovered. Though, finding the evidence can be fun in itself, ruling out the red herrings the game throws at you in each room. And the challenge of using your evidence to debate your class mates can prove difficult if you haven’t been paying attention to what your evidence means, and how it checks out with the accounts of your classmates.

Anyway, I’d recommend this game to anyone who wants to read a mystery novel but thinks that books are for nerds. I rate it a good 8/10.

Connecting short stories

I can’t help it. I know I said I shouldn’t world build too much and I should focus on story telling, but I’m a slut for expanding on sandbox settings. I’ll keep it to a minimum, but sometimes I have to treat myself.

The first short story I am working on follows a self proclaimed “anti-mage” on his hunt to purge the land of foul magic users. I will go into more detail in another post later. Another idea of mine involves a different take on the “princess in the tower” troupe. My goal with that idea is to sort of deconstruct the steryotype of that fantasy plot. Which I know is a really popular plot to deconstruct, but I think I have a fresh take. Instead of the princess being a “strong independant wahmen” like Tangled, I think it would be cool to have the twist be that the princess was the monster all along. Not gonna go more into that right now, since I need to elaborate it more in my own time. Yet another idea I have floating around is one where a story follows a merchant in a fantasy world who is a (cruelly stereotyped) jew type money grabber. I will probably tone the real life connection back with that for controversial reasons, but it is meant to be a bit of offensively humourous tale. The character will lie, cheat, steal, and put others into debt like Tom Nook.

Now, notice how these all take place in a non descript fantasy world. Who is going to stop me from making them all take place in the same land! Nobody! Hahahaha!

Writing shorter, better stuff

I’m not a prolific writer, and I don’t really claim to be all that great at it either. I begin a lot of stories and never end up finishing them. I’ve been doing that since like my first year at high school. I used to have the naive idea that I could write a novel and be a reknown author or somthing like that, but reality shook its head laughing. I seriously can’t focus on a project for very long, and it has been a problem for a very long time. Not to mention that in high school I had so so many extra cirricular things going on that I never had time to sit down and really piece together anything that resembled a novel outside of just a few neat ideas.

I always have cool ideas that I want to get down on paper, so I made a habit of always writing down my neat ideas in a vacuum on some notes app in my phone for later use. Recently I have been scanning those notes for anything that I can take and bloom into something interesting. Something I found out very quickly is that there was no way I could ever write an entire novel out of random scraps of ideas. And besides, I don’t think that my writing is actually any good in the first place. So, for the last stretch of quarantine, I decided that I am going to practice writing stories. They will be short, and will help me accomplish multiple things at once.

For one I can finally put some ideas to rest by fleshing them out and seeing how they would work in a story. Also writing these ideas out as short stories with a full arc in them will let me practice story telling. Instead of doing the thing so many young people do, which is hold onto ideas and slowly paste them together in a novel without working on anything else, I will be actually honing my skills as a writer. Of course I can’t help the world building side of me to want to draw out kingdoms that won’t be visited in a short story but I will be trying to keep that stuff to a minimum.

On the subject of me being very sparratic in what I am an am not interested in writing, my solution recently has been adderall. I unironically am medicated for it nowadays and it helps me focus on one thing at a time.

Sleeping Dogs and “clones”

The first game I dipped a toe into during quarantine was Sleeping Dogs, developed by United Front Games. Of course by “dipped a toe” I actually mean I did a swan dive and got as immersed in the game’s world as I could over a week’s playtime. If United Front Games doesn’t quite ring a bell, that’s because they went under a few years after this game was released. In my quick search, it seems like they never gave an official reason for announcing their closure.

Sleeping Dogs is a “GTA clone”, which I really do hate saying. There are a lot of things that separate the two games, but no matter what I come up with, “GTA clone” will always be the label that the gaming community has branded on it’s forehead like the sparrows from Game of Thrones. Unlike those religious fanatics, Sleeping Dogs is a very misunderstood game, since it actually has a lot more influence taken from the earlier True Crime series, in fact it is a spiritual successor. But alas, the True Crime games themselves are seen as GTA clones as well. Well, shit.

I’d say the biggest difference between True Crime + Sleeping Dogs and GTA is that the player character is not an outlaw or “gangster” blowing shit up and punching NPCs for the hell of it. Instead, you are placed in shoes of an undercover cop, whose mission is to uncover deeper secrets of the local crime syndicates by gaining their trust and working your way up their ladder, while also taking part in police work in your downtime. Also you still blow shit up and punch NPCs for the hell of it.

Sleeping Dogs had some pretty cool ideas for mechanics in an open world game. For one, since you play as an undercover cop posing as a gangster, you have two different experience bars. One is your “triad experience”, and the other is your “cop experience”. Both of these bars will give you skill points to invest in respective skill trees once they fill up. Most triad skills are related to fisticuffs combat and the cop skills related to gun play and quality of life stuff like the slimjim, a tool that allows the player to break into cars without their alarm going off.

A simpler, but still cool idea Sleeping Dogs had was the ability to open your door while driving, making a shield to splat people against as you drive next to them going over 40 mph. Additionally, if you have your door open while tailing a car, a quick time will trigger, and you can jump from your car to the one you are tailing, which will land you on top of it like an Asian Spider man. From here you can hijack cars while still on the move. Of course, some small bugs occur with this mechanic, and half the time Wei feels like jumping to cars that are in a completely different lane.

The aesthetic of Sleeping Dogs the whole game is that of the crowded, smoggy city of Hong Kong, and it’s dark underbelly of organized crime. Something about the game’s consistency in setting really immersed me. No matter where you traveled in the game, there was never a building or area that made me think “Huh, is there really something like this in Hong Kong? It feels out of place.” I don’t know much about Hong Kong, and I think the game sort of guessed that, so it took no risks by presenting something niche that only a local would know about. Every place in the game made sense and felt natural even to an uncultured American like me.

The plot of Sleeping Dogs is it’s real bread and butter. You play as Wei Shen, an undercover cop who is tasked with gaining the trust and climb the totem pole of the Sun On Yee, a massive and elaborate gang that operates right in the center of Hong Kong. Throughout the game we discover more and more about Wei’s past life and how much the task he has means to him, and several times he finds himself stuck balancing his new gangster life and his police morals and directive. I am not going to spoil anything, but there are many twists and turns as you find out who is and isn’t a prick, who is double-crossing who, and where your loyalties lie.

For that last bit, I’d like to call back to the two experience bars I brought up earlier. If the player depreciates their triad experience in exchange for cop experience, it would be cool to see that play out in the game’s major events and cut scenes. Unfortunately there is no such mechanic in the game. Which is such a shame because it really felt like the game had something going there. It could have been a cool twist on the good ol’ multiple endings based on player actions trend we have been seeing for the last several years. If Sleeping Dogs was made today, I think something like that would be implemented, but we live in the world where Sleeping Dogs came out too long ago for a current trend like that to permeate into it’s narrative.

Instead, in every cut scene involving an interaction between Wei and a cop, Wei is treated like he is letting his assignment get to him and is always on the brink of having it terminated. It doesn’t help that Wei is also always a jackass to every cop he talks to. After a while I started feeling bad for the middle man, Raymond, who was just trying to do his job. Meanwhile in the first half-ish of the game, Wei is is treated like a potential rat (which I guess he is) in every scene involving him and someone in the Sun On Yee. This changes into respect for Wei at a certain point in the game, but still how cool would it have been to have your experience bars influence Wei’s temperament and interaction with different characters in these scenes? Survey says: very cool.

Some more smaller points before I wrap this up. Sleeping Dogs has a very good wardrobe system, which is nearly identical to GTA, though I have some major gripes with it. For one, every single line of clothing is only sold at one or two vendors in all of Hong Kong, because apparently there are no chains of apparel or even brands in Hong Kong. This means you are going to have to hunt down clothes that you want, or if you want to just browse what the game has to offer, you are going to have to drive from store to store around the map like Wei is off his medication for impulsive behavior. For me, I knew there had to be a medicinal mask somewhere in a game that takes place in Hong Kong, and since I was playing during the corona pandemic, I knew I had to have it. I spent literally an hour searching every clothing store for it, only to find it back outside of the night market in Northpoint, right back where I started.

Also, why do I need a certain level of face to buy certain clothes? And if you are going to put an arbitrary condition on clothes, why not just make it so that I don’t get to reap the benefits of a certain clothing set unless I meet that arbitrary condition? Many nice looking clothes are literally unpurchasable until you do enough menial “deeds” around the map to level up your face meter. These range from beating sense into someone, smashing a cheater’s race car, and getting jumped (?). I don’t know, I just hated this design. Luckily it’s a nitpick, and didn’t matter to my overall enjoyment of the game.

This game also lets you date I think like five different girls, which I thought would lead to a fun string of missions to do in my downtime during the game, but unfortunately, you can only go on maximum two “dates” with each girl. One when you meet them, and one more later. Unless they find out about each other, which I think is guaranteed if you go on a second date with any of them. Another missed opportunity, though the whole idea was just for fluff, and each first date was used as a tutorial for a different mechanic like hacking cameras, and finding where the dojo is. Once again, a nitpick.

The real strike against the game here is not making Jane Teng a date-able character. Though, I would have turned the game into a dating sim trying to court her, so maybe it’s a blessing in disguise.

Anyway, the game does have two DLCs, both of which are included in the definitive edition on Steam, which I think is the only purchasable copy of Sleeping Dogs on the Steam store anyway. I say don’t even bother with the DLCs. One is a cheesy zombie apocalypse version of Hong Kong, and the other is a fighting tournament. I don’t know if the DLC have their own interesting story lines or if they are related at all to the main story, since I didn’t play them. I’m sorry, they just looked too dumb. Maybe the fighting tournament one had potential, but I had enough of the combat after I completed the main game anyway.

Sleeping Dogs is an excellent game, and it is really a crime against humanity that we never got to see it’s sequel, which was confirmed to have been in the works before United Front pulled the plug. From what I read, they were going to keep leaning into the “GTA clone” label and have the player be able to control three different characters during the story, much like GTA 5. Of course, one would be Wei Shen again, but then I read that one of them would have been Jane Teng, so that makes the sequel’s cancellation even more of a fucking tragedy.

Anyway, Sleeping Dogs is an amazingly immersive game with a great story and cool ideas fit into an intriguing and believable world that fits together quite nicely. Aside from its missed opportunities and small hiccups like not letting me date Jane Teng, this game was an incredible experience. Not once did I feel like I was playing GTA, or even a game that wanted to be GTA. I recommend waiting for a sale of at least 20% before buying this game but don’t worry the definitive edition is almost always on sale it’s basically the fucking poster boy of Steam’s clearance isle.

Oh yeah, rating out of ten. I give Sleeping Dogs an 8/10, it’s closer to a seven than a nine, but yea it’s an eight.

Corona games

The COVID-19 virus is really going wild at the time of this post, and the future is uncertain in a lot of ways. All anyone can to is self quarantine, stay safe, and stay clean. Along with a pandemic comes classes being transferred to an online format, and that has been a rough transition for me and my professors to say the least. The amount of work I do for school has more than doubled, or at least it feels like it now that I have to take the classes on my own time.

Staying entertained during quarantine has proved easy for me, since I can use the virus as an excuse to play more games until later into the night. Specifically, games I bought a long time ago and haven’t gotten around to playing quite yet. I have made a new category of games in my library called “Corona games”, which includes many single player games that many people claim to be “classics” or “the most immersive out there”. At the time of writing this I have found my way through two of those games so far, and I have begun my third. I know this isn’t a particularly interesting development, but these games are what I decided I will be doing (for the most part) in my down time during the quarantine. Expect some reviews of these games in the future.

Besides the corona games, I have been spending my hours with my family, whether that is watching movies or doing yard work, and biking. Biking is a hobby I picked up a couple years ago and every time the weather is over 50 degrees Fahrenheit, I tend to go for a ride if I have an hour to spare. I would like to get some work on my creative writing done during the quarantine, and I think late this week may be the time I can start that up again, since it looks like my classes will be lessening their hold on my free time then. I’ll give an update when that comes around as well.

Something about 2020

2020 has been here for a few months now, and with it has come big changes for my day to day routines, and it has taken a bit of time to adjust. Going to a new university has proven a challenge for me socially, not knowing anybody at a school as a junior makes it rather difficult to make new friends, especially when I commute to school just twice a week since I live an hour away.

On top of social stress, a new university comes with new challenges in the academic sphere, and I have been struggling a bit to prove myself as a competent scholar. My major is accounting, and god damn is that getting involved, especially for me, who dislikes most math classes (I know, that seems counter-intuitive given my major, but accounting is fake math and we all know it).

Anyway, things have begun to chill out. My first wave of exams have come and gone, and I have come to terms with my grades and made plans for improving through the semester. With that solidified, I should mention that new interests and old hobbies have arisen in my free time, so I think I will discuss what they are in future blog posts, just to start making some content so I don’t have to call this site a waste of effort.

Nanowrimo 2019

Well, here I am at the end of another November and a goal not met. I’m not even disappointed this time, I’m actually feeling quite optimistic. For the uninitiated, Nanowrimo is a yearly event in writing communities online in which amateur and professional authors race to see how many words they can write in the month of November. The goal of it all is to write a novel’s length in the month, or springboard the words you write into something longer in your own time. There is nobody to enforce the rules except yourself, so if you don’t meet your goal, it isn’t too big of a disappointment. Plus, you can always use the words you wrote for something bigger.

The upper goal that most authors strive for in the month is 50,000 words, which is about the length of a novella or a short novel. To reach such a goal, you would need to write about 1,600 words every day. For this year, I lowered my expectations to half this goal, a meager 25,000 words. I had no intention of finishing a story in that length, just get something rolling for a longer story that I am going to try and get to a presentable point by Summer of 2020. I only ended up writing about 8,000 words, November being just too busy of a month for me to be able to write daily, or consistently at all. Between classes and work, I had no free time that I wanted to dedicate to writing something for no grade.

But like I said, what I wrote is part of a bigger picture, and I may update my progression on that story on this blog at a later time, when I think that it is clean and free enough of cringe to share with anyone. I recommend trying Nanowrimo next year if you are at all interested in flexing your creative muscles. There is also such a thing as Nanowriyear, if that sounds easier.

The Pokemon game with the big brother complex

I was a big fan of Pokemon years ago, inheriting Red/Blue from my older siblings and owning Pearl as the first I could call my own. Me and my friend broke the game with my action replay but we had great memories. I played Black as well, but I missed every generation since then until now.

I know the new game got a lot of grief from the Reddit karma whores but I think that it is genuinely a fun game. It is very much on the easy side, and holds your hand through way too much of the game, but for me a game can be fun as long as I vibe with it, this being a such a case. Also, people had lots of problems with the #dexit, where Game Freak decided to remove several hundred Pokemon that were in previous games from the pokedex. If I’m honest though, I don’t really notice the purge or miss the cut Pokemon, since the ones that were cut were Pokemon that I probably wouldn’t catch anyway.

It has been a while since I last played a Pokemon game, and the gameplay cycle is just how I remembered it, which is a big plus for me. Catch Pokemon, min/max a good team, beat a gym, change up team to counter the next gym’s typing. My biggest gripe with the game is dynamax. I just think it is kind of stupid and I don’t know how to elaborate on that. I thought that Z moves looked stupid and so did mega evolutions (though of these three “super” moves I prefer mega evolutions the most).

Another problem I had with this game is Hop. The other two rivals, Bede and Marnie were just OK. Hop however, is such an annoying over-energetic shitter. I hated every dialogue scene with him in it and I can’t help but mock him and call him Hau (I tried Pokemon Sun and quit very early because of Hau). He does become more bearable after the fourth gym, and for the rest of the game he has a sort of redemption arc with how I saw him. But man, he really made the beginning excruciating. The other two rivals, Bede and Marnie I thought were actually somewhat thoughtful characters who had more enjoyable personalities. Bede generally was a hate-able character, but not annoying like ~~Hau~~ Hop. Marnie is a much more low key rival, challenging you a lot less than the other two in the early/mid game. She isn’t some overly evil or annoying girl, just a fellow competitor who has ridiculous followers.

I am giving this game a 5/10, which is what I consider just average. Not a bad game. Worth $60? Probably not but I got it anyway. This post didn’t start as a review but I’m going to call it one anyway. Initially I was going to just gush about the game but I thought that would be boring and I ended up having some criticism as well anyway.

Bonus points: The playable characters are adorable and I like to think that the girl is an angry Irish and belittles other trainers. Added .1, making the game a just above average 5.1/10.