Guess who still uses this account?
I decided not to go to Comicon after all. I can't stop lying to my parents. It's gotten to the point where I do it almost without realizing it, and it's not helping my situation at all, but that's not really what I want to talk about.
I want to talk about a lot of things. For instance, instead of going to Comicon I just hung out at Alexis Nihon and Angrignon mall all day. Had sushi for lunch, bought a bunch of novels, Fallout: New Vegas, and Tactics Ogre. I had to stay at the mall because I didn't want my parents to catch me in a lie, but it wasn't all bad. Except I lost my hat on the metro, but that would have happened regardless of where I was going. I keep losing my hats and this is very upsetting to me. When I realized I lost my hat I felt like I had lost my direction in life, lost my identity. I felt the same sort of unease I used to feel whenever I had misplaced my rune.
Anyway, I finished reading the Left Hand of Darkness again. It's a pretty short book, like most of the Ursula K. LeGuin stuff I've read. There were stains on the top of the book and even some leftover clay from when I had put it aside face down while I worked on a clay sculpture in 3D Composition and Design class. I like to talk about that paper on the treatment of sex and sexuality in science fiction that I got 100% on, but now that I've reread the book, I feel like I left out the most important thing. Which is silly, because the addendum I want to make is sort of irrelevant to the topic. The whole novel is built on Genly Ai's misunderstanding of the culture of the people of Gethen. If he and Estraven had been able to communicate clearly and effectively from the very first, they might have been able to avoid a lot of their problems. There's a part in my essay where I mention that Genly has a hard time seeing Gethenians as just people, rather than try to classify them as male or female, but I talked about his feeling of cultural and sexual alienation as if it wasn't central to the story. On the other hand, I was building my essay on a theme. First Flatland was utterly conventional and contemptible (if it was satire I didn't catch it), then John Varley's Eight Worlds series feels free to experiment but doesn't fully explore the ramifications of what it proposes, and finally The Left Hand of Darkness goes the distance and blah, blah, blah.
Estraven's death affected me a lot more profoundly this time through, although it may just have been that I've been feeling weird all week AND I had just lost my hat. I don't really want to think about it too much. Every time it occurs to me I get crestfallen all over again.
Then I played some Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor on the way home. Basically, you've got the hero (who has no canonical name), who is the cousin of this guy called Naoya. Naoya calls up your hacker friend Atsuro and gives him three DS-looking devices called COMPs, for you, him, and your waste-of-space childhood-friend-who-has-a-crush-on-you Yuzu, and then promptly disappears. Atsuro messes around with them and figures out how to use the COMPs to summon demons, and then suddenly Tokyo is in a state of lockdown, there are demons all over the place, some cult is going around helping people while being suspiciously religious, everyone's falling to pieces, and you've only got seven days to live before the world ends. At least I'm pretty sure that's what's going to happen. The world ends on a regular basis in SMT games.
It took me a while to get around to playing the game seriously, rather than just clearing the first few missions every once in a while and then letting the game sit so long that I might as well just start over the next time I started to play. Each scene and scripted battle takes place over the course of half an hour and apparently there are several endings depending on who you've befriended over the course of the game, and you can't hang out with everyone, so you need to manage your time properly. This is still my first playthrough, so I'm just soldiering on blindly depending on who I like or who I'm curious about at the time. I'll probably get the loser ending or something. And the battle interface is a little like Final Fantasy Tactics, except whenever you attack someone you're suddenly catapulted into a much more conventional battle system. Anyway, speaking of battles, this is one of the rare times I've gotten a real sense of the famed “ATLUS hates their fans” difficulty curve. Most of their previous games that I've played have had an “easy mode” that I automatically gravitate towards, and even they were hard enough for me. Especially Catherine. Catherine is the other game that I had trouble with. Even on the secret SUPER EASY mode they installed in the North American edition of the game. But actually, Catherine is different enough from the other ATLUS games that it doesn't really fit in the same category. It's a block puzzle game, whereas the others are RPGs. Anyway, yeah, the difficulty is getting more pronounced in SMT: Devil Survivor. But first, let's talk about Yuzu.
I've noticed this tendency in SMT games. The first two party members you get in any SMT game where you have human party members are a guy and a girl. The guy is nerdy or nebbish or the class clown. Basically, he's your sidekick, and he's there for comic relief. The world tends to shit on him. Atsuro fills that role in Devil Survivor, although he's more of a straight man than the other examples. The girl is generally... well, the token girl. She might be a little tomboyish, but mostly she's there to be your love-interest, and she puts down the comic relief whenever she gets an opportunity. That's Yuzu. Yukari was like that too, in Persona 3, and I didn't like her, either. Her abuse of Junpei seemed mostly undeserved on his part, she took herself too seriously, and, well, I thought she was just kind of a bitch. I've got a problem with Yuzu. I don't think she's a bitch, though. Not yet. But I have zero respect for her.
This girl complains ALL THE TIME. Thing is, I can sort of get where she's coming from. I mean, demons are pretty scary. But, like I said, she doesn't stop. And because it doesn't stop, she gets to be pretty annoying. Yukari might have been a bitch, but at she took things in stride. Another thing that struck me as weird was the way she complains when Atsuro technobabbles. Except, he generally keeps it to a minimum, and I understand it fine, even before Yuzu asks for the translation. And the hero seems to understand what he's talking about. Which leads me to wonder: is she really that stupid? Or is she just pretending to be for some arcane reason, possibly having to do with her crush on the hero? If the former, it's kind of pitiful. If the latter, it's contemptible. Either way, I can't really respect her. The reason I'm talking about Yuzu's behavior is because there's this scene on Day 3 where the main party runs into Kaido and Honda. It doesn't really matter who Kaido and Honda are, but Kaido's frantic. He wants to kill demons and collect the funds to summon more powerful demons because... I'm not quite sure yet. It probably has something to do with his dead brother or the girl he has a crush on or something. Pretty much all the named characters have one or the other, if not both. Anyway, they run into him and there's a shitload of demons and Kaido rudely says out of the way, me and Honda got this wrapped up. Yuzu takes offense to his comment, and calls him a rude name that I can't recall, and then Kaido challenges her to a contest. Whoever kills the most demons wins, and the losers have to hand over their COMPs, and Yuzu brashly accepts without deliberation.
Now, the main characters have been warned that an invincible demon called Beldr is about to be summoned, and he will personally kill the hero's party if they can't find a way to defeat him. Beldr's coming has been hanging over their heads for 3 days, like the sword of Damocles. At this point, they have scant hours left before his arrival. So what does Yuzu do? She picks a fight over nothing, wasting valuable time. Let me remind you that the COMPs are the tools they use to summon demons, and also the sole protection they have against them. Beldr's coming to kill them all unless they find some way to beat him, and Yuzu just gambled their one means of defeating him OVER A POINTLESS PISSING CONTEST. WHAT A FUCKING IDIOT. To add injury to insult, this was one of the hardest fights in the game, so far. Kaido is equipped with a demon which allows him to attack twice per turn, and he and Honda start out much nearer to the demons than your party does. And if you lose, it really is game over. Apparently he doesn't care that you're about to die, and he does actually take your COMPs, and this is a pity because I kind of like him and didn't think he was the type to leave people to die. I had to start the battle over several times before I finally managed to tie with him, and that triggered the end of the battle. Apparently, Kaido's sheer despair at losing a pointless contest summons a demon from the Ars Goetia, and he's so desperate to get more powerful he strikes a deal with it and he and Honda teleport away. And do you know what Yuzu says when they're gone? No, it wasn't “Gee, we sure dodged a bullet there.” It wasn't even “Wow, that was harder than I expected.” It was “HEY, they didn't leave their COMPs behind!” She didn't even realize that she was in any danger, nor what a monumental fuckup she just committed.
That battle was hard, and what made it all the more galling was how completely and utterly pointless it was. Fighting Beldr was exponentially harder, but at least it was something I was supposed to be doing. He was a nasty surprise, let me tell you. Broadly, the solution to defeating Beldr is through the use of an item called the Devil's Fuge. It's the only thing that can harm him. Now, the way this usually goes in RPGs, when a villain is completely invincible except for this one thing, is that you get the plot-related item, and just having it your inventory makes your attacks normally effective. Sometimes you actually have to use it in battle, and it brings down a force field or a magic shield or temporarily lowers their resistance. The Devil's Fuge doesn't do any of that. When I first played this battle, I had the hero use the Devil's Fuge and all the others attack. No such luck. When ATLUS say a villain is invulnerable, they don't fuck around. What's worse, only the Hero has the Devil's Fuge. Of the twelve beings, demons and human, that you can bring to the field of battle at a time, only one has the ability to harm Beldr. All the others are only useful for keeping the Hero alive. And damn, is it hard. Beldr has probably about a thousand hit points, he hits like a truck, and he has an ability that hits every one of your fighters for 50 HP apiece and heals him for 150 HP. If he was all I had to deal with, that would be easily remedied. But he's got an army of tough customers to protect him, this supposedly invulnerable demon, and they will keep him healed and deal death to your party before your hero can even reach him, if you let them. The three Cait Siths situated directly in front of their lord and master are especially tough. And I did. I tried and I tried to defeat him, and I got real tired of seeing that game over screen. Even after I consulted a walkthrough I had to start over three times before finally defeating him. (The strategy suggested by the walkthrough? Instead of eliminating the weaker monsters nearer to the party's starting location, smash the Cait Siths blocking the way and start whittling at Beldr's hit points as soon as possible. Equip a demon on the hero with the ability to attack twice per turn, make sure at least two others have reviving abilities, and divide and conquer.) This was fun, if frustrating, because I knew that it was a mission objective and it hadn't just been caused by Yuzu being stupid. I hope there's an option to call her on her bullshit later on, or replace her with someone I don't hate quite as much. Or a nice hat.
There's something to difficulty in games. I generally don't like to bother because I'm more interested in the story, but beating a really tough enemy or level does get you more of a sense of accomplishment. That's something that was missing from a lot of the games I've played recently. Beating Portal and Portal 2 the first time was satisfying because it wasn't easy, but I did it anyway. It got easier after I learned the trick, but then being on a timer also makes things more frantic.
Maybe I'll turn the difficulty up next time I play Mass Effect or Dragon Age.
I am seriously bummed about losing my hat.
Also kudos if you actually read all that. That was seriously a lot of crap and talking about nothing. And the formatting was weird. Sorry. You probably won't hear from me again for several months, so I hope that makes up for it.
I want to talk about a lot of things. For instance, instead of going to Comicon I just hung out at Alexis Nihon and Angrignon mall all day. Had sushi for lunch, bought a bunch of novels, Fallout: New Vegas, and Tactics Ogre. I had to stay at the mall because I didn't want my parents to catch me in a lie, but it wasn't all bad. Except I lost my hat on the metro, but that would have happened regardless of where I was going. I keep losing my hats and this is very upsetting to me. When I realized I lost my hat I felt like I had lost my direction in life, lost my identity. I felt the same sort of unease I used to feel whenever I had misplaced my rune.
Anyway, I finished reading the Left Hand of Darkness again. It's a pretty short book, like most of the Ursula K. LeGuin stuff I've read. There were stains on the top of the book and even some leftover clay from when I had put it aside face down while I worked on a clay sculpture in 3D Composition and Design class. I like to talk about that paper on the treatment of sex and sexuality in science fiction that I got 100% on, but now that I've reread the book, I feel like I left out the most important thing. Which is silly, because the addendum I want to make is sort of irrelevant to the topic. The whole novel is built on Genly Ai's misunderstanding of the culture of the people of Gethen. If he and Estraven had been able to communicate clearly and effectively from the very first, they might have been able to avoid a lot of their problems. There's a part in my essay where I mention that Genly has a hard time seeing Gethenians as just people, rather than try to classify them as male or female, but I talked about his feeling of cultural and sexual alienation as if it wasn't central to the story. On the other hand, I was building my essay on a theme. First Flatland was utterly conventional and contemptible (if it was satire I didn't catch it), then John Varley's Eight Worlds series feels free to experiment but doesn't fully explore the ramifications of what it proposes, and finally The Left Hand of Darkness goes the distance and blah, blah, blah.
Estraven's death affected me a lot more profoundly this time through, although it may just have been that I've been feeling weird all week AND I had just lost my hat. I don't really want to think about it too much. Every time it occurs to me I get crestfallen all over again.
Then I played some Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor on the way home. Basically, you've got the hero (who has no canonical name), who is the cousin of this guy called Naoya. Naoya calls up your hacker friend Atsuro and gives him three DS-looking devices called COMPs, for you, him, and your waste-of-space childhood-friend-who-has-a-crush-on-you Yuzu, and then promptly disappears. Atsuro messes around with them and figures out how to use the COMPs to summon demons, and then suddenly Tokyo is in a state of lockdown, there are demons all over the place, some cult is going around helping people while being suspiciously religious, everyone's falling to pieces, and you've only got seven days to live before the world ends. At least I'm pretty sure that's what's going to happen. The world ends on a regular basis in SMT games.
It took me a while to get around to playing the game seriously, rather than just clearing the first few missions every once in a while and then letting the game sit so long that I might as well just start over the next time I started to play. Each scene and scripted battle takes place over the course of half an hour and apparently there are several endings depending on who you've befriended over the course of the game, and you can't hang out with everyone, so you need to manage your time properly. This is still my first playthrough, so I'm just soldiering on blindly depending on who I like or who I'm curious about at the time. I'll probably get the loser ending or something. And the battle interface is a little like Final Fantasy Tactics, except whenever you attack someone you're suddenly catapulted into a much more conventional battle system. Anyway, speaking of battles, this is one of the rare times I've gotten a real sense of the famed “ATLUS hates their fans” difficulty curve. Most of their previous games that I've played have had an “easy mode” that I automatically gravitate towards, and even they were hard enough for me. Especially Catherine. Catherine is the other game that I had trouble with. Even on the secret SUPER EASY mode they installed in the North American edition of the game. But actually, Catherine is different enough from the other ATLUS games that it doesn't really fit in the same category. It's a block puzzle game, whereas the others are RPGs. Anyway, yeah, the difficulty is getting more pronounced in SMT: Devil Survivor. But first, let's talk about Yuzu.
I've noticed this tendency in SMT games. The first two party members you get in any SMT game where you have human party members are a guy and a girl. The guy is nerdy or nebbish or the class clown. Basically, he's your sidekick, and he's there for comic relief. The world tends to shit on him. Atsuro fills that role in Devil Survivor, although he's more of a straight man than the other examples. The girl is generally... well, the token girl. She might be a little tomboyish, but mostly she's there to be your love-interest, and she puts down the comic relief whenever she gets an opportunity. That's Yuzu. Yukari was like that too, in Persona 3, and I didn't like her, either. Her abuse of Junpei seemed mostly undeserved on his part, she took herself too seriously, and, well, I thought she was just kind of a bitch. I've got a problem with Yuzu. I don't think she's a bitch, though. Not yet. But I have zero respect for her.
This girl complains ALL THE TIME. Thing is, I can sort of get where she's coming from. I mean, demons are pretty scary. But, like I said, she doesn't stop. And because it doesn't stop, she gets to be pretty annoying. Yukari might have been a bitch, but at she took things in stride. Another thing that struck me as weird was the way she complains when Atsuro technobabbles. Except, he generally keeps it to a minimum, and I understand it fine, even before Yuzu asks for the translation. And the hero seems to understand what he's talking about. Which leads me to wonder: is she really that stupid? Or is she just pretending to be for some arcane reason, possibly having to do with her crush on the hero? If the former, it's kind of pitiful. If the latter, it's contemptible. Either way, I can't really respect her. The reason I'm talking about Yuzu's behavior is because there's this scene on Day 3 where the main party runs into Kaido and Honda. It doesn't really matter who Kaido and Honda are, but Kaido's frantic. He wants to kill demons and collect the funds to summon more powerful demons because... I'm not quite sure yet. It probably has something to do with his dead brother or the girl he has a crush on or something. Pretty much all the named characters have one or the other, if not both. Anyway, they run into him and there's a shitload of demons and Kaido rudely says out of the way, me and Honda got this wrapped up. Yuzu takes offense to his comment, and calls him a rude name that I can't recall, and then Kaido challenges her to a contest. Whoever kills the most demons wins, and the losers have to hand over their COMPs, and Yuzu brashly accepts without deliberation.
Now, the main characters have been warned that an invincible demon called Beldr is about to be summoned, and he will personally kill the hero's party if they can't find a way to defeat him. Beldr's coming has been hanging over their heads for 3 days, like the sword of Damocles. At this point, they have scant hours left before his arrival. So what does Yuzu do? She picks a fight over nothing, wasting valuable time. Let me remind you that the COMPs are the tools they use to summon demons, and also the sole protection they have against them. Beldr's coming to kill them all unless they find some way to beat him, and Yuzu just gambled their one means of defeating him OVER A POINTLESS PISSING CONTEST. WHAT A FUCKING IDIOT. To add injury to insult, this was one of the hardest fights in the game, so far. Kaido is equipped with a demon which allows him to attack twice per turn, and he and Honda start out much nearer to the demons than your party does. And if you lose, it really is game over. Apparently he doesn't care that you're about to die, and he does actually take your COMPs, and this is a pity because I kind of like him and didn't think he was the type to leave people to die. I had to start the battle over several times before I finally managed to tie with him, and that triggered the end of the battle. Apparently, Kaido's sheer despair at losing a pointless contest summons a demon from the Ars Goetia, and he's so desperate to get more powerful he strikes a deal with it and he and Honda teleport away. And do you know what Yuzu says when they're gone? No, it wasn't “Gee, we sure dodged a bullet there.” It wasn't even “Wow, that was harder than I expected.” It was “HEY, they didn't leave their COMPs behind!” She didn't even realize that she was in any danger, nor what a monumental fuckup she just committed.
That battle was hard, and what made it all the more galling was how completely and utterly pointless it was. Fighting Beldr was exponentially harder, but at least it was something I was supposed to be doing. He was a nasty surprise, let me tell you. Broadly, the solution to defeating Beldr is through the use of an item called the Devil's Fuge. It's the only thing that can harm him. Now, the way this usually goes in RPGs, when a villain is completely invincible except for this one thing, is that you get the plot-related item, and just having it your inventory makes your attacks normally effective. Sometimes you actually have to use it in battle, and it brings down a force field or a magic shield or temporarily lowers their resistance. The Devil's Fuge doesn't do any of that. When I first played this battle, I had the hero use the Devil's Fuge and all the others attack. No such luck. When ATLUS say a villain is invulnerable, they don't fuck around. What's worse, only the Hero has the Devil's Fuge. Of the twelve beings, demons and human, that you can bring to the field of battle at a time, only one has the ability to harm Beldr. All the others are only useful for keeping the Hero alive. And damn, is it hard. Beldr has probably about a thousand hit points, he hits like a truck, and he has an ability that hits every one of your fighters for 50 HP apiece and heals him for 150 HP. If he was all I had to deal with, that would be easily remedied. But he's got an army of tough customers to protect him, this supposedly invulnerable demon, and they will keep him healed and deal death to your party before your hero can even reach him, if you let them. The three Cait Siths situated directly in front of their lord and master are especially tough. And I did. I tried and I tried to defeat him, and I got real tired of seeing that game over screen. Even after I consulted a walkthrough I had to start over three times before finally defeating him. (The strategy suggested by the walkthrough? Instead of eliminating the weaker monsters nearer to the party's starting location, smash the Cait Siths blocking the way and start whittling at Beldr's hit points as soon as possible. Equip a demon on the hero with the ability to attack twice per turn, make sure at least two others have reviving abilities, and divide and conquer.) This was fun, if frustrating, because I knew that it was a mission objective and it hadn't just been caused by Yuzu being stupid. I hope there's an option to call her on her bullshit later on, or replace her with someone I don't hate quite as much. Or a nice hat.
There's something to difficulty in games. I generally don't like to bother because I'm more interested in the story, but beating a really tough enemy or level does get you more of a sense of accomplishment. That's something that was missing from a lot of the games I've played recently. Beating Portal and Portal 2 the first time was satisfying because it wasn't easy, but I did it anyway. It got easier after I learned the trick, but then being on a timer also makes things more frantic.
Maybe I'll turn the difficulty up next time I play Mass Effect or Dragon Age.
I am seriously bummed about losing my hat.
Also kudos if you actually read all that. That was seriously a lot of crap and talking about nothing. And the formatting was weird. Sorry. You probably won't hear from me again for several months, so I hope that makes up for it.