~The sea took his life, as lovers often do
Ultramega Ok! recording!
GearX2 - Chrono Trigger - Frog's Metal Trigger
DaMonz - Super Mario 64 - Medieval Koopa Jam
Nostalvania - Castlevania II - Simon Says: Let There Be Jazz
Jillian Aversa, zircon - Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Lullaby of the Sky
Hope Fails, Level99 - Xenogears, NiGHTs, Tales of innocence - Semper Saltare
Flexstyle, XPRTNovice - Super Mario 3D World - Caravan Bowser (Radio Edit)
Semper Saltare and Caravan Bowser are super fun, haha.
Man I just said I was having trouble making posts and woop, I end up going a bunch of days without making posts. WAY TO GO SELF. Motivation continues to be hard to come by, and also lately I've been having trouble sleeping for long periods. I keep waking up every couple hours (at least when something else doesn't wake me up, which has also been pretty frequent lately irritatingly enough) so it's hard to feel rested even when I budget myself time to sleep. It's very frustrating.
In recent news, I found a list of translated indie horror games I was flipping through the other night out of boredom. It has Yume Nikki and OFF and Ib and some other well-known ones like Ao Oni, but a lot of them I hadn't heard of. I gave them all a quick glance, but on the whole none of them really captured my attention. Looking at so many of them in a row really emphasized how frequently certain assets and bases are reused, particularly for sprites. But I'll get more into that later.
One of them DID catch my eye though, Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea. Mostly cause one of the intro caps had what was pretty clearly meant to be a seagull gijinka which was more interesting than anything else I'd seen on the list so far, so I ended up playing it through. It's a fairly quick game all told, leveling is probably pretty much optional (I barely did any and steamrolled my way past everything) so if I'd skipped that I probably would've saved a bunch of time, but it'll still probably take like 6-8 hours.
OH when I ran it at first after it got past the intro it dissolved into a cascade of error boxes (that said something like not defined? it was a very vague message i cannot recall now) that crashed the program, and the way to fix this if you run into this problem yourself is to go into the music folder and convert all the .mp3 files into .wav files. After that it worked fine.
Anyway, it was alright, I guess. The art and sprites and everything are pretty cohesive, and it was nice to see new assets and stuff instead of people reusing the same walls/floors over and over again, and the visual style is pretty consistent throughout. The music was alright for the most part, a few tracks were kind of pretty but most of it was fairly forgettable. A lot of it music box styled, which given a lot was in midi I can understand, but eh. For some reason the theme for the Deep Sea Town kind of bugged me, I couldn't tell you why.
SOME VAGUE SPOILERS AND ALSO GORE AHEAD
I totally got the genders wrong of like the entire party. I was so sure that Dolphi and Memoca were boys and Fukami was a girl, so I was super shocked to find out this was not the case in the BONUS ROOM AT THE VERY END since this was never mentioned anywhere. I guess it wasn't really important in the end, but to be fair the character designs in this game were so androgynous I just went off people's clothes.
Like here's Dolphi and Memoca, I totally thought they were boys, haha. Dolphi in particular struck me as a five year old boy, but I guess he's a five year old girl? Oh well.
Fukami's an octopus and a dude apparently. I SORT OF LIKED THE STORY BETTER WHEN I PICTURED HIM AS A GIRL THOUGH. It really looks like he's wearing a dress.
The game really suffers from... I think there's an awkwardzombie comic about this kind of thing, let's see. Aha! Here it is! Basically there are constant reaction shots from everyone in the vicinity, and it's annoying because a lot of the time they don't even say anything, they just toss some dots at you. THERE ARE SO MANY ELLIPSES IN THIS GAME. The text speed is nice and snappy so it doesn't add a lot of time but for a lot of conversations I was just like okay enough ellipses can we please say some words now
The talksprites have SOME versatility, but they're essentially a base with different features layered on top, so the pose never changes but like the eyebrows move, the eyes change, the mouth changes, that kind of thing. Certain combos can add up to different expressions and all but as a result things felt a bit... stiff. I mean technically you can express a fairly wide variety of feelings using the different talksprite pieces, but it feels kinda distant to me. Let me grab some quick examples. (SPOILERS?)
You can see it's basically the same pose with different expressions. This is how it works for all the characters really. The main world sprites are those tiny squat little things, they don't really do much at all beside move around. I was comparing this in my head to the sprites from Chrono Trigger (or Secret of Mana or FF6) wherein there are no talksprites or portraits at all, and all emotion for a scene has to be expressed by the main sprite.
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So during dialogue, instead of having a talksprite express the emotion, the sprite itself on the screen would do something. They didn't have a huge amount of sprites to work with, but it was pretty impressive how much you could accomplish just by being creative with a laughing sprite. As limited as the sprite movement was, I prefer this kind of method for conveying cutscenes and such in an RPG I think. There's something about it that feels more immediate and real to me. The talksprites in Wadanohara are fine, they do their job, but I feel like I would've felt more connected to what was happening if instead of tossing "........" at me with a blank looking talksprite, they had the sprite on the screen walk off to one side and do it, if that makes sense. That's just my preference though. The tiny squat sprites in Wadanohara fit the general look of the game, and big sprites like Chrono Trigger's are still to this day something of a novelty and pretty hard to do well, but hey.
(the tiny sprites in wadanohara also made everyone look kind of fat, which was a bit odd for certain characters)
As a bit of an aside, as I mentioned I flipped through a bunch of the games on that list, and as I said, quick glances at the characters if listed or screencaps of the game shows a ton of similarity between each, presumably because the creators are using the templates that RPGmaker provides. Off the top of my head... the character sprites in Ao Oni are all the same with slight changes here and there. The sprites in Re:Kinder seem to be recolors of each other. The Crooked Man's all look similar. Anyway you get the idea.
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Check out how detailed the walk cycles were in Chrono Trigger, and they're specialized to each character (run cycles were too). I get that a lot of these indie games are made by amateurs for free and expecting stuff at pro level is unreasonable and all, but after a while it gets hard to tell games apart. Wadanohara at least does have a unique look to it, so there's something for it.
Anyway, the game is really pretty sparkly and happy and fluffy for a good chunk of it, which made me suspicious given the warnings that were on the download page. The one about sexual violence in particular kept me looking at characters going so are YOU going to rape wadanohara, or is it going to be YOU, when is this going to happen, I know it's coming
It's fluffy as mentioned and not particularly memorable until the big bad reveals themselves and you get to the Sea of Death, THEN things start getting interesting.
Whole bunch of eyes everywhere. The rest of the game was fairly forgettable all things considered, but as set up for the sudden tonal shift of the Sea of Death, it worked pretty well. So there's bits of blood here and there and I'm thinking alright so I guess this is where the 18+ rating would come in, though I don't think it's SO bad.
Anyway then this happened.
And I was like alright I see where the 18+ rating is coming from now. Although it's a pretty creepypasta level edit on the sprites there, haha. YOU GOTTA BLEND THE GORE IN, IT LOOKS PASTEDE ON
But some of the creepy bits were creepy enough, couldn't really complain there.
There are TWO rape scenes, believe it or not (I guess you can interpret one as being interrupted before the rape actually occurs though, it's vague, but the other one is pretty clear... actually, possibly three if you interpret that one that way, but it's an optional scene you may miss). Most of the game looks like this.
It's pretty sparkly and fluffy as mentioned, with vague allusions to some bad things happening, with these tiny little fat sprites and such, so you know, rape seems pretty jarring. I mean would you look at that screencap and go "yeah this game'll probably have rape in it"? I wouldn't. BUT I KNEW COMING IN IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN THANKS TO THE WARNINGS so
Anyway, the rape scenes weren't exactly gratuitous I guess, mostly done through dialogue and one or two uncomfortably dodgy shots, but I don't really think either of them were that necessary. The first one could've been any other type of violence or threats of homicide, and the second one could've been replaced with some other brainbreaking type of trauma as well. I mean, it's not like there isn't a huge shortage of traumas you can inflict on a character that'd break their brain! There are options! Even straight up magical braincrushing could have happened. Going to rape just seems kind of lazy to me. As I said the scenes could have been handled worse though, but still, I feel like you could've cut or reworked either of them into something else without losing anything from the story. Which, when it comes to rape, is a question one should always be asking. There are very few stories that suffer from taking rape out. But eh, my guess is it was supposed to be an edgy dark thing in contrast to the happy sparkle funtimes of the first chunk of the game, but who knows.
It was also pretty weird since Wadanohara is a pretty powerful witch so it's like darn it WHY CAN I NOT JUST USE MY POWERFUL SEA SPELL ON THIS GUY, WHY DOES IT NOT WORK ONLY IN THIS CUTSCENE
the aeris-phoenix down question
The basic heart of the game itself though isn't really the plot, it's the relationship between Wadanohara and Samekichi. Which is kind of cute I guess, although some part of me feels a bit uncomfortable about it (not just because Wadanohara looks like, eight, although that is a factor). Samekichi is her familiar and is straight up a shark. But in this world all animals are sentient and can talk and think, and he can also take on human form, so is it still weird for a human (if Wadanohara is human? she apparently hatched out of an egg, but everyone just calls her a witch and i don't think that's a species but I could be wrong? for all intents and purposes though she reads as human to me) to fall in love with a shark at that point?
Aside from that though like I said I guess it's cute but I couldn't really get very invested in it. It's sort of a by-the-numbers het pairing, if you know what I mean. Wadanohara is sweet and polite and compassionate and caring and demure and yada yada, and Samekichi is tsundere and dumb and you've seen this before, I guarantee it. If it wasn't het, it might have caught me more (MAYBE), but as it is there's a pretty limited set of het dynamics that interest me, and the two of them didn't slot into it. It's not bad though if you're into that kind of thing I guess.
Most of the characters are pretty one-note, but I wasn't going into this expecting like high literature or anything, so I'm not complaining really. They're amusing enough and serve their purpose in the story. And I liked the giant lobster lady and her tiny shrimp husband.
I kept thinking of things in a way more metaphysical sense than the game intended, haha. The prologue mentions "not knowing something within yourself" and I thought that meant a dark evil side or something like that, and later on when someone mentions someone else is their other half or better half, I thought it was some sort of split personality/projection kind of situation to tie in with the beginning, and I was completely off base with both guesses, haha. The latter turned out to just be brothers, and the former to feelings. I WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING THAT WAS NOT THERE I GUESS.
Oh yeah, the encounters are handled well too. The enemies just chill on the map, and they're not hostile. So you can choose if you want to fight them or not. Because the game is so easy, you can easily zip through areas you're not interested in, or sit and level a bit if you're bored or curious. Combat is VERY MUCH not the point of the game, but it's handled well enough. The battle music's pretty lackluster though. Anyway, it's very low stress and there's tons of healing items and such everywhere. Honestly I think you would seriously have to try to get stuck in this game at some point, even without leveling at all.
When I started the game though I did immediately start attacking dudes to level just because that's what you do in RPGs, which seemed pretty weird after I thought about it because the enemies weren't hostile and left me alone until I attacked them. WADANOHARA IS JUST THIRSTY FOR BLOOD but it was a sort of Shadows of the Colossus situation where I was just doing things because games have ingrained that reaction in me without actually thinking about it in terms of the game world. I attacked those dudes to level because in an RPG leveling is important (it's not important in this one) even when they weren't doing anything to me! I feel like you could do something with this concept, someone's probably already messed with it but eh, it stuck out in my head.
You also get to pick up lots of armor that's pretty amusing (some are a bit eyebrow raising?) so you get the satisfaction of better armor without the drag of actually getting into battles if you don't want to. Which was a pretty satisfying combination actually. Also the spells have some fun animations.
Anyway, if you want to burn some hours you can give it a shot. It's not a bad game really, just sort of forgettable in the long run. The graphics are nice and a lot of work went into them, and some of the characters are fun. The music's alright at points (sometimes the midi gets a bit too bombastic for the scene - one at the end comes to mind). The battles are SUPER EASY so you don't have to grind or do anything like that. And the Sea of Death is kind of cool. But if you've got to play an indie game, I'd recommend OFF or Yume Nikki over this one. It's definitely a lot more polished than most indie games, but there are better ones.
WHY DID I TYPE SO MUCH ABOUT THIS
I also posted this at dreamwidth with reluctant ambivalence. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!
GearX2 - Chrono Trigger - Frog's Metal Trigger
DaMonz - Super Mario 64 - Medieval Koopa Jam
Nostalvania - Castlevania II - Simon Says: Let There Be Jazz
Jillian Aversa, zircon - Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Lullaby of the Sky
Hope Fails, Level99 - Xenogears, NiGHTs, Tales of innocence - Semper Saltare
Flexstyle, XPRTNovice - Super Mario 3D World - Caravan Bowser (Radio Edit)
Semper Saltare and Caravan Bowser are super fun, haha.
Man I just said I was having trouble making posts and woop, I end up going a bunch of days without making posts. WAY TO GO SELF. Motivation continues to be hard to come by, and also lately I've been having trouble sleeping for long periods. I keep waking up every couple hours (at least when something else doesn't wake me up, which has also been pretty frequent lately irritatingly enough) so it's hard to feel rested even when I budget myself time to sleep. It's very frustrating.
In recent news, I found a list of translated indie horror games I was flipping through the other night out of boredom. It has Yume Nikki and OFF and Ib and some other well-known ones like Ao Oni, but a lot of them I hadn't heard of. I gave them all a quick glance, but on the whole none of them really captured my attention. Looking at so many of them in a row really emphasized how frequently certain assets and bases are reused, particularly for sprites. But I'll get more into that later.
One of them DID catch my eye though, Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea. Mostly cause one of the intro caps had what was pretty clearly meant to be a seagull gijinka which was more interesting than anything else I'd seen on the list so far, so I ended up playing it through. It's a fairly quick game all told, leveling is probably pretty much optional (I barely did any and steamrolled my way past everything) so if I'd skipped that I probably would've saved a bunch of time, but it'll still probably take like 6-8 hours.
OH when I ran it at first after it got past the intro it dissolved into a cascade of error boxes (that said something like not defined? it was a very vague message i cannot recall now) that crashed the program, and the way to fix this if you run into this problem yourself is to go into the music folder and convert all the .mp3 files into .wav files. After that it worked fine.
Anyway, it was alright, I guess. The art and sprites and everything are pretty cohesive, and it was nice to see new assets and stuff instead of people reusing the same walls/floors over and over again, and the visual style is pretty consistent throughout. The music was alright for the most part, a few tracks were kind of pretty but most of it was fairly forgettable. A lot of it music box styled, which given a lot was in midi I can understand, but eh. For some reason the theme for the Deep Sea Town kind of bugged me, I couldn't tell you why.
SOME VAGUE SPOILERS AND ALSO GORE AHEAD
I totally got the genders wrong of like the entire party. I was so sure that Dolphi and Memoca were boys and Fukami was a girl, so I was super shocked to find out this was not the case in the BONUS ROOM AT THE VERY END since this was never mentioned anywhere. I guess it wasn't really important in the end, but to be fair the character designs in this game were so androgynous I just went off people's clothes.
Like here's Dolphi and Memoca, I totally thought they were boys, haha. Dolphi in particular struck me as a five year old boy, but I guess he's a five year old girl? Oh well.
Fukami's an octopus and a dude apparently. I SORT OF LIKED THE STORY BETTER WHEN I PICTURED HIM AS A GIRL THOUGH. It really looks like he's wearing a dress.
The game really suffers from... I think there's an awkwardzombie comic about this kind of thing, let's see. Aha! Here it is! Basically there are constant reaction shots from everyone in the vicinity, and it's annoying because a lot of the time they don't even say anything, they just toss some dots at you. THERE ARE SO MANY ELLIPSES IN THIS GAME. The text speed is nice and snappy so it doesn't add a lot of time but for a lot of conversations I was just like okay enough ellipses can we please say some words now
The talksprites have SOME versatility, but they're essentially a base with different features layered on top, so the pose never changes but like the eyebrows move, the eyes change, the mouth changes, that kind of thing. Certain combos can add up to different expressions and all but as a result things felt a bit... stiff. I mean technically you can express a fairly wide variety of feelings using the different talksprite pieces, but it feels kinda distant to me. Let me grab some quick examples. (SPOILERS?)
You can see it's basically the same pose with different expressions. This is how it works for all the characters really. The main world sprites are those tiny squat little things, they don't really do much at all beside move around. I was comparing this in my head to the sprites from Chrono Trigger (or Secret of Mana or FF6) wherein there are no talksprites or portraits at all, and all emotion for a scene has to be expressed by the main sprite.
So during dialogue, instead of having a talksprite express the emotion, the sprite itself on the screen would do something. They didn't have a huge amount of sprites to work with, but it was pretty impressive how much you could accomplish just by being creative with a laughing sprite. As limited as the sprite movement was, I prefer this kind of method for conveying cutscenes and such in an RPG I think. There's something about it that feels more immediate and real to me. The talksprites in Wadanohara are fine, they do their job, but I feel like I would've felt more connected to what was happening if instead of tossing "........" at me with a blank looking talksprite, they had the sprite on the screen walk off to one side and do it, if that makes sense. That's just my preference though. The tiny squat sprites in Wadanohara fit the general look of the game, and big sprites like Chrono Trigger's are still to this day something of a novelty and pretty hard to do well, but hey.
(the tiny sprites in wadanohara also made everyone look kind of fat, which was a bit odd for certain characters)
As a bit of an aside, as I mentioned I flipped through a bunch of the games on that list, and as I said, quick glances at the characters if listed or screencaps of the game shows a ton of similarity between each, presumably because the creators are using the templates that RPGmaker provides. Off the top of my head... the character sprites in Ao Oni are all the same with slight changes here and there. The sprites in Re:Kinder seem to be recolors of each other. The Crooked Man's all look similar. Anyway you get the idea.
Check out how detailed the walk cycles were in Chrono Trigger, and they're specialized to each character (run cycles were too). I get that a lot of these indie games are made by amateurs for free and expecting stuff at pro level is unreasonable and all, but after a while it gets hard to tell games apart. Wadanohara at least does have a unique look to it, so there's something for it.
Anyway, the game is really pretty sparkly and happy and fluffy for a good chunk of it, which made me suspicious given the warnings that were on the download page. The one about sexual violence in particular kept me looking at characters going so are YOU going to rape wadanohara, or is it going to be YOU, when is this going to happen, I know it's coming
It's fluffy as mentioned and not particularly memorable until the big bad reveals themselves and you get to the Sea of Death, THEN things start getting interesting.
Whole bunch of eyes everywhere. The rest of the game was fairly forgettable all things considered, but as set up for the sudden tonal shift of the Sea of Death, it worked pretty well. So there's bits of blood here and there and I'm thinking alright so I guess this is where the 18+ rating would come in, though I don't think it's SO bad.
Anyway then this happened.
And I was like alright I see where the 18+ rating is coming from now. Although it's a pretty creepypasta level edit on the sprites there, haha. YOU GOTTA BLEND THE GORE IN, IT LOOKS PASTEDE ON
But some of the creepy bits were creepy enough, couldn't really complain there.
There are TWO rape scenes, believe it or not (I guess you can interpret one as being interrupted before the rape actually occurs though, it's vague, but the other one is pretty clear... actually, possibly three if you interpret that one that way, but it's an optional scene you may miss). Most of the game looks like this.
It's pretty sparkly and fluffy as mentioned, with vague allusions to some bad things happening, with these tiny little fat sprites and such, so you know, rape seems pretty jarring. I mean would you look at that screencap and go "yeah this game'll probably have rape in it"? I wouldn't. BUT I KNEW COMING IN IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN THANKS TO THE WARNINGS so
Anyway, the rape scenes weren't exactly gratuitous I guess, mostly done through dialogue and one or two uncomfortably dodgy shots, but I don't really think either of them were that necessary. The first one could've been any other type of violence or threats of homicide, and the second one could've been replaced with some other brainbreaking type of trauma as well. I mean, it's not like there isn't a huge shortage of traumas you can inflict on a character that'd break their brain! There are options! Even straight up magical braincrushing could have happened. Going to rape just seems kind of lazy to me. As I said the scenes could have been handled worse though, but still, I feel like you could've cut or reworked either of them into something else without losing anything from the story. Which, when it comes to rape, is a question one should always be asking. There are very few stories that suffer from taking rape out. But eh, my guess is it was supposed to be an edgy dark thing in contrast to the happy sparkle funtimes of the first chunk of the game, but who knows.
It was also pretty weird since Wadanohara is a pretty powerful witch so it's like darn it WHY CAN I NOT JUST USE MY POWERFUL SEA SPELL ON THIS GUY, WHY DOES IT NOT WORK ONLY IN THIS CUTSCENE
the aeris-phoenix down question
The basic heart of the game itself though isn't really the plot, it's the relationship between Wadanohara and Samekichi. Which is kind of cute I guess, although some part of me feels a bit uncomfortable about it (not just because Wadanohara looks like, eight, although that is a factor). Samekichi is her familiar and is straight up a shark. But in this world all animals are sentient and can talk and think, and he can also take on human form, so is it still weird for a human (if Wadanohara is human? she apparently hatched out of an egg, but everyone just calls her a witch and i don't think that's a species but I could be wrong? for all intents and purposes though she reads as human to me) to fall in love with a shark at that point?
Aside from that though like I said I guess it's cute but I couldn't really get very invested in it. It's sort of a by-the-numbers het pairing, if you know what I mean. Wadanohara is sweet and polite and compassionate and caring and demure and yada yada, and Samekichi is tsundere and dumb and you've seen this before, I guarantee it. If it wasn't het, it might have caught me more (MAYBE), but as it is there's a pretty limited set of het dynamics that interest me, and the two of them didn't slot into it. It's not bad though if you're into that kind of thing I guess.
Most of the characters are pretty one-note, but I wasn't going into this expecting like high literature or anything, so I'm not complaining really. They're amusing enough and serve their purpose in the story. And I liked the giant lobster lady and her tiny shrimp husband.
I kept thinking of things in a way more metaphysical sense than the game intended, haha. The prologue mentions "not knowing something within yourself" and I thought that meant a dark evil side or something like that, and later on when someone mentions someone else is their other half or better half, I thought it was some sort of split personality/projection kind of situation to tie in with the beginning, and I was completely off base with both guesses, haha. The latter turned out to just be brothers, and the former to feelings. I WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING THAT WAS NOT THERE I GUESS.
Oh yeah, the encounters are handled well too. The enemies just chill on the map, and they're not hostile. So you can choose if you want to fight them or not. Because the game is so easy, you can easily zip through areas you're not interested in, or sit and level a bit if you're bored or curious. Combat is VERY MUCH not the point of the game, but it's handled well enough. The battle music's pretty lackluster though. Anyway, it's very low stress and there's tons of healing items and such everywhere. Honestly I think you would seriously have to try to get stuck in this game at some point, even without leveling at all.
When I started the game though I did immediately start attacking dudes to level just because that's what you do in RPGs, which seemed pretty weird after I thought about it because the enemies weren't hostile and left me alone until I attacked them. WADANOHARA IS JUST THIRSTY FOR BLOOD but it was a sort of Shadows of the Colossus situation where I was just doing things because games have ingrained that reaction in me without actually thinking about it in terms of the game world. I attacked those dudes to level because in an RPG leveling is important (it's not important in this one) even when they weren't doing anything to me! I feel like you could do something with this concept, someone's probably already messed with it but eh, it stuck out in my head.
You also get to pick up lots of armor that's pretty amusing (some are a bit eyebrow raising?) so you get the satisfaction of better armor without the drag of actually getting into battles if you don't want to. Which was a pretty satisfying combination actually. Also the spells have some fun animations.
Anyway, if you want to burn some hours you can give it a shot. It's not a bad game really, just sort of forgettable in the long run. The graphics are nice and a lot of work went into them, and some of the characters are fun. The music's alright at points (sometimes the midi gets a bit too bombastic for the scene - one at the end comes to mind). The battles are SUPER EASY so you don't have to grind or do anything like that. And the Sea of Death is kind of cool. But if you've got to play an indie game, I'd recommend OFF or Yume Nikki over this one. It's definitely a lot more polished than most indie games, but there are better ones.
WHY DID I TYPE SO MUCH ABOUT THIS
I also posted this at dreamwidth with reluctant ambivalence. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!