Resident Evil

It is time for Jill to head back to the mansion. Almost at the end and I’m finally getting the hang of the controls. The trick is to not touch the second joystick. Once inside the residence it is a pretty straightforward path without too many branching pathways.

There are a few moments where the game feels like it is being padded. The back and forth with the keys is clearly done to increase the game times and make the residence feel bigger than it is. This area has another one of those jump scares this game is famous for. Jill steps into waist deep water. I initially thought she was going to get electrocuted when she steps into the water, but it is far worse. There are two sharks in the water. Once Jill steps in there they come for her. And then it is a race to get to the platform before getting eaten by the either one of those sharks.

Jill then has to climb down a ladder, and she is underwater with only glass between her and the sharks. These sharks are getting unnaturally aggressive. They keep running into the glass until it cracks. I don’t think the glass ever actually breaks, but it sure felt like it would when I was playing it. At the same time something else has gone wrong and it looks like the water pressure is increasing. Jill must override the emergency shutdown protocols to bring the iron curtain down before the water or the sharks burst through and drown and/or eat Jill. All this while an alarm is blaring to raise the player’s blood pressure.

Once done, Jill drains the water and steps out. One of the sharks is on the ground looking pretty dead. But once Jill gets close to, it flails arounds. This jump scare really got me. I had to stop playing for a bit because of how mad I was that it got me with this dumb scare. When I started again, I had the volume down and listened to a podcast instead. My stress went down to manageable levels after this. The sound design is a major portion creepy ambience of Resident Evil. There is one more instance when the shark can get Jill. The trick here is to turn on the electricity and fry up the shark. By this time I’ve had my fill of sharks for all of 2020.

Jill passes by a door and hears somebody talking inside. She opens the door to see Barry, but there is no one else in there with him. When asked, he says he has been talking to himself. Either Barry is losing his sanity or lying. It is more likely to be the second one. He does seem more guilty than scared. When Jill walks out of the room, Wesker is looming on the other side of the door. Where these guys are popping up from? The whole mansion feels empty when I’m playing, and then all the survivors show up at the same time. Wesker also comments on Barry’s erratic behavior. I’m pretty sure Wesker is working for Umbrella Corp. His detached, cool under pressure attitude feels off, but I think I might have heard “Wesker is evil’ on a podcast too. I’d much rather cast my lot with Barry than Wesker.

With Jill run coming to an end, I’m sure I will at least play a little bit of Chris run, too. But the game is barely different between the two characters. I don’t think I will finish the Chris run all the way through. Even though it will probably be faster to get through I’m kind of ready to move on to a new game.

I appreciate the subversion of boss battles wherever I can get them. Plant 42 is the second plant we have to get past. This first one Jill unloads poison into and there is no need to actually fight it. The second one is a puzzle about making a new batch of poison and killing off the plant 42. Something that is tangential to the game, any time I see the number 42 I always wonder if it is an allusion to Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Maybe this plant was supposed to be the answer to every question in the universe and I fed it home made weed killer. Even when I give it a vegetarian Raid, Barry has to come in and use a flame thrower on it to put it down. I’m sure this is how a physical fight with Plant 42 would have also ended. The devs didn’t make two different cut scenes based on how the player decides to tackle this boss. As a result, the cut scene feels disjointed with the poison strategy. I think it would flow more smoothly with the actual fight. Once this whole ordeal done Jill gains a Helmet key. This will open up any doors that remain locked by now. And I don’t think there are too many of those anyway.

6/5/20

Chrono Trigger - At the Fair

I started Chrono Trigger finally. The swinging pendulum, the music, the seagulls screaming as the world comes into view. All of it was a nostalgia kick to the chest. I was in Guardia immediately. Chrono’s mother wakes him up and opens the curtains to let the light in. She announces today is the opening of the fair. Time to name our Hero. I think we will stay with the default names so he will be Chrono. He is up and ready to go. As Chrono comes downstairs, his mother reminds him that his friend Lucca will be setting up a demonstration for her latest invention. We don’t want to be late for that.

Chrono makes his way to the Fair. There are quite a few people here enjoying themselves while some festive music plays. As he walks around at the fair, Chrono quite literally runs into a girl. Both fall down and something flies off of the girl. There are few action choices available here which are not readily communicated. The way Chrono acts in the fair towards this girl (who we will introduce momentarily) will decide if Chrono is acquitted at a trial or not. Even though end verdict of trial does not change the direction of the game, it is always fun to try to get as many of these actions right as possible. First part of it is to check on the girl before rushing of to pick the pendant that flew off her. Later on, waiting when she wants to choose some candy also helps. But I did eat somebody’s lunch accidentally and didn’t find the kitten so my Chrono is probably getting hanged anyway.

I was in as soon as I heard those seagulls screaming.

I wonder who this place is named after hmmmmm!

When we get the pendant to her, the girl introduces herself as Marle. She is at the fair by herself and would very much like to hang out with Chrono to enjoy herself a bit more. Lucca is still setting up her machine, so both of us go around playing some games at the fair. I have forgotten what we could buy if Chrono earns enough points here and I didn’t try to figure it out so that mystery will be left unsolved.

Once Lucca is ready, Chrono and Marle make their way to her. Chrono volunteers to be the guinea pig in her transporter machine. When he is successfully transported from one booth to the next, Marle also wants to give it a try. Everything begins normally but Marle’s pendant reacts to the machine and opens a rift into time. Instead of being transported to the other booth she falls into the rift and disappears. Everyone starts freaking out and the audience starts filing out of the demonstration area. Chrono picks up the pendant for the second time and goes after Marle. He goes through the portal and comes out on the other end. He is still in Guardia but everything is just a little different.

Chrono makes his way through the jungle, fighting off Walmart brand Piccolos. He heads to the inn, where he finds out he has travelled back in time. What is worse, Guardia is at war. There are soldiers everywhere, nerves are frayed, and the tempers are running short. At least they found Queen Leene so they have that going for them. Chrono makes his way towards the castle.

At the castle, before he can be thrown out unceremoniously, the Queen comes out and orders the guards to treat Chrono well because he is a dear friend. Well that is odd. Chrono does not know Queen Leene. Mostly because he was born 1500 years after her rule. Not the one to look the gift horse in the mouth, he sets about exploring the castle. The ravages of war are evident here even more clearly. There are wounded soldiers filling up the beds, while the fit ones are hungry due to the head chef waging his own wars. Everything is in turmoil. The King is happy his Queen is back, but she appears to be behaving in an unusual manner. Our first clue something is not right is when the chef confides in us that Queen wants ice cream. A dessert he knows nothing about since refrigeration has not been invented yet.

The Chancellor seems oblivious to the concerns of the King and lost in his own thoughts. He is acting really shady and becomes very jumpy when Chrono sneaks up on him.

Finally, we make our way up to the Queen’s chambers. After she asks to talk to Chrono in private, she reveals herself to be Marle. For reasons that will become clear soon, Marle is a carbon copy of Queen Leene. She has been mistaken for her and now holds the title of the Queen. While we are talking, Marle begins to be ripped apart. And just like that she is gone again. This will be a good time for Chrono to exit as quietly and quickly as he can before he is blamed for rekidnapping the Queen.

On his way out, Chrono runs into Lucca. She made her way here with some urgently grave news. Marle is Princess Nadia, a descendant of Queen Leene (which is why she resembles her so much). In the Guardian history, Queen Leene was abducted but later found. When Marle showed up here, the rescue party which found her was called off, thus changing history. If real Queen Leene was never found, she would never give birth and her lineage would end with her. In short, Marle is being erased from reality because the history has been changed. Before this becomes permanent, we have to go find the real Queen Leene. With Chrono and Lucca joining forces, we will find her in short time. Hopefully.

11-21-2020

Persona 5 - Meeting New People

            After not getting a chance to play for almost the whole week, I finally got to turn my PS4 again. No story cinematics, no dungeons, it was time to level up my confidants. Although I did have to do a trip to Mementos, but quickly ran through three requests and got back to hanging out.

            Since I’m fast forwarding though the story beats, there isn’t much new information I’ve learned. Maybe I should at least read the dialogue for all the confidants I’m levelling up. Kaneshiro had a change of heart and confessed to his crimes in front of the police. The police are really not happy about it. They are angry that they got upstaged by vigilantes. It makes the police look a bit useless. I guess law enforcement is the same everywhere. They do not do their jobs and then get angry when someone does their work and hands it over to them.

            I talked to the fortune teller and initiated the confidant event with her. The disgraced politician who gives speeches near the train stations, and the airsoft weapons dealer are the other two people I met and talked to. I did not know they had confidant options last time I played. The teacher and the shogi player are also available now.

            As much as I like the sound design of Persona 5, it has now become my podcast listening game now. I have already “heard” the game, so I don’t feel like I’m missing much when I play it. Most of the new game “sheen” is gone for me. As much as I like the game, I don’t think I will do much more than finishing through the NG+ for now. This is exactly why I can never care enough to get platinum on any game. I will only play something until I’m having fun. And trophy hunting is just not fun for me. I don’t get any sense of achievement from trophies.

            Fishing minigame is now available as well. Another mechanic I did not engage in last time. There is more depth to fishing in Persona when compared to Animal Crossing, but it just is not as much fun. It also serves no purpose other than completing it for the fishing trophy. I don’t think I can sell the fish and they aren’t useful as weapon or health item.

            To fish you point to where the fish are and cast. The different types of bait allow the player to catch different types of fish. The goal is to ultimately catch the Guardian of the Lake. It nets the player another achievement but not much else. There are prizes that can be gotten from points earned from catching better fish. But I did not see anything that catches the eye. I would rank the Animal Crossing fishing above Persona 5 fishing.

            The back-alley doctor (Takemi) confidant is maxed out. All the confiandts are short stories that are only tangentially related to the main story. Takemi used to work at a hospital and was a very competent doctor. She became the target of envy of one of the senior doctors. He set her up to hurt one of the patients and lied about the patient dying. She lost her job and came here to work. The Hero finds out the patient is alive and forces a change of heart in the senior doctor. He confesses to his sins and Takemi’s name as well as the job is restored. She figures out the Hero is a phantom thief who has helped her out.

            Ann has her confidant almost maxed out too. It is related to her guilt over not saving her friend from Kamoshida. Last time I went with the romance option for her, but this time it is going to be strictly platonic.

            In the meantime, a hacker group called Medjed has also figured out who the Phantom Thieves are. The person or group of people are now blackmailing the Hero and his friends. They want to cause a change of heart in someone, but they don’t really understand how the process works. They vow to out the Thieves if the demands are not met. This feud has gone very public with The Phantom Thieves losing popularity because of the negative publicity coming with it.

            It turns out Futaba is the original Medjed, a name that has been co-opted by other hackers. Futaba is Sojiro’s daughter, who as you might remember, is the guardian for the Hero while he is in Tokyo. She seems to have been suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after having seen her mother getting run over by a car. She stays inside her room and seems to have very stunted emotionally. She wants to cause a change of heart in herself to become a more adjusted person. Her palace will be a pyramid. It symbolizes her sense of being trapped. She feels trapped inside her room because that is the only place where se feels safe. At the same time she resents her room and feels it is a tomb in which she has been buried alive.

            I have been enjoying Persona 5 less and less, but I don’t think it is because I’m bored of the game. I have a feeling it has more to do having stressful workdays and running out of energy to enjoy things I would love normally. I have wondered many times before how much our enjoyment of media is a function of our general mood and how much of it is due to the innate “goodness” of the work.

            I’ll be tomb raiding next time, but not the Lara Croft kind.

5/13/2020

Chrono Trigger - Retro blast

               I have a road trip coming up soon, which means for the next few day my gaming choices will be limited to portable games only. I thought what systems I can take with me. There is the Switch with a whole host of games I have not even touched yet. I also have a 3DS chockful of games I have been meaning to play. I do not have a Vita, but I still have an old PSP with long forgotten games. Some of them I have still plans for playing one of these days. More importantly PSP gives me access to GBA, NES and SNES games in the form of emulation. In all those choices I did not even consider phone as an option. Not having landed on anything in particular, I was listening to a podcast where one of the hosts was also trying to make a similar decision. She ended up deciding to play Chrono Trigger because she had never finished it. I immediately knew that was what I had to play too.  

Touch options seems to be working fine

               Unlike the podcast host who gave me the inspiration, I have finished Chrono Trigger before at least once and I have played it multiple times without finishing it all the way. But I never got a chance to play it on the original SNES. I only started playing video games in 2000, which is also when I got an SNES for the first time. Chrono Trigger was already rare by then. Not that it mattered since I knew next to nothing about RPGs at the time. Once SNES emulation became stable, I found myself with a half decent PC and a folder full of SNES roms. By this time, I had played Final Fantasy VII and had decided I was in love with the JRPGs. For me, the SNES roms were a treasure beyond imagination! There were so many turn based games; I did not know where to even start. In the end, I went with Mario RPG. It was a familiar IP with a simpler mechanics and beautiful graphics. This further cemented Square (or Square Soft, today’s Square Enix) as a seal of quality. I was willing to play anything coming out of that studio.

              Further down the road I played Chrono Trigger, almost a decade after initial release in fact. Even by that time I knew nothing about it, not having looked up any information on it. I vaguely remember it being featured in EGM’s best 100 games list. Which is probably why it caught my eye. I immediately fell in love with it. The sprites were beautiful, the music was catchy, and the battle mechanics were deeper than anything else I had played until then. There was a sense of epic adventure that came with it. Chrono and his team moved through time to save the world. It was more sci-fi than fantasy, which is an all too rare setting in JRPGs even now. But I did not finish it at the time. I would start a new game in my free time. Inevitably I would stop when school demanded more attention. Only to forget where I was in the game or lose the emulation game save.

                I finally finished it few years ago and jumped right back into the New Game Plus Mode. Chrono Trigger might be one of the pioneers in popularizing the NG+ modes. I do not find many games prior to it with the option to carry your progress into a new game after finishing a run. I think I saw a few more endings before school got in the way again.

                Ever since I played Chrono Trigger, I have wanted to buy a legit version of it. I don’t have an SNES anymore and I don’t think my Playstation works so it isn’t worth getting it on those two systems. DS copy is also a little expensive . Which leaves the mobile version. So today I decided to bite the bullet and get it on Android. Only to find out that I have already bought it on there. I guess I will be playing it on the phone on my trip. Catching the rat in the future is going to be tough but other than that I can not think of anything that will be problematic on a touch screen. I will be playing with the Active Time Battle turned off, but I mostly do that anyway. The mobile version is notoriously buggy though, but I’m hoping the upgraded version has fixed most of those problems.

                Chrono Trigger is a relatively short for an RPG. According to HowLongToBeat it is about 25 hours long. That is perfect length for me to finish on my trip and back. Maybe I will even see all (or most) of the endings too. My bare minimum aim (as always) is to roll credits on it.

                Since the first-time playing Chrono, I have learned a little more about it. This was the first time Square and Enix came together with the intention of making a perfect RPG. This was almost a decade before the two companies would merge for good. Enix had the wildly popular Dragon Quest series under their belt. To this day no other RPG has found the kind of success Dragon Quest commands in Japan. Square had Final Fantasy series to their name. Even though it was not as popular in Japan as Dragon Quest, it had found more success internationally. In short, both the companies had the track record of being able to build well balanced RPG systems.

                Legendary manga artist Akira Toriyama was brough on to consult on character design. I am not sure how much work he did consulting on the game, but you can find some of his influence on the games enemy character design. Those familiar with Toriyama’s work will be able to see the similarities between enemy design in Chrono Trigger and some of the character design in the Dragon Ball series.

                I remember being blown away with the battle systems. Once I am deeper into the game and have had enough time to refamiliarize myself with the systems I will talk more about it. I am really looking forward to playing Chrono Trigger one more time!

11-21-20 

Persona 5 - Kaneshiro’s Bank

            This is where Persona 5 starts giving of those Ocean’s 11 vibes, which will only get stronger as we move closer to our final heist target. This is also where the alter egos of the villain depart from looking distinctly human to something other. It symbolizes the corruption of the villain to the point where most of humanity seems to have left Kaneshiro. His greed and hunger has transformed him into a pig. Kamoshida took pride in his physical appearance and appeared mostly naked inside his palace. Madarame carried delusions of grandeur that manifested his appearance to be that of a great benevolent artist in his museum. Deep down Kaneshiro knows he has succumbed to his baser instincts. So he appears as a pig in a suit when inside his bank.

            When we first enter his palace, it is all of Shibuya in there with a giant bank hovering overhead. All the people here are just ATMs. Some have been completed tapped out of all their cash and dying by the side. Subtle as a hammer. Kaneshiro sees people only as the money dispensing machines. Once they are empty, they are discarded by the wayside. He sees all of Shibuya as his playground, while he sits in his bank above all the people.      

Even as a human Kaneshiro is not exactly a model

Man he really falls apart inside his bank

       Even though I did not like it as much on my first run, it is not as bad once I got lay of the palace better. It also helps to be a little bit overpowered when coming in here because those guard dogs take a chunk of HP out of the party. The fact that I have loaded up on the SP regenerating items allows me to be more liberal with the use of spells. The buffs, debuffs and the weakness exploitation is where Persona 5 truly shines. Having figured out most of these makes it easier to chain attacks with the “1 more” and attack handoff mechanics. I have a better idea of how to use the battle mechanics this time around which is probably why I’m enjoying the Bank more. As far as the lay of the land aspect, I had missed flipping one of the switches in my last play through which had me fumbling around the whole place for hours. Knowing where all the switches were in advance made the traversal smoother than last time. Even so, I find myself more interested in the social simulator aspect of the game more than the battle aspect. Dungeons feel like a chore I must complete so I can go back to making friends in high school.     

        I am about halfway through the palace. The second part is a giant bank vault. There isn’t much to the palace other than a series of corridors patrolled by guards and their dogs. Fight them and get to the switches to turn off the security. Few hallways also have security spotlights that can be avoided by hiding behind cover and moving into the space when the lights move off. At least the music is still amazing.

05/08/2020 

Finished with the Bank and it is the third palace where I got through in single in-game day (took me a few real-time days though). Coffee and curry really help make dungeon traversal smoother. Only using one day on the palace makes more time available for all other aspects of the game. Considering my social stats are all maxed out, this mostly translates into hanging out with friends.

            Atlus studio is now owned by Sega. While selling some of my items, I noticed a nod to Sonic. One of the accessories is named Sonic socks, description of which says, “socks that lets one run as fast a hedgehog” (I wonder what would be the average running speed of a hedgehog in real life).

            Dehumanization of Kaneshiro continues. As an end boss he transforms from a pig into a fly. Distraction is a boss battle mechanic I don’t think I have talked of yet.  During the boss battle, Hero gets an option to send out some one from the team to cause a distraction for major damage to the boss. Some members are able to cause distraction while others don’t escape notice. For the most part the boss is beatable without this trick too, but it does make short work of them. The downside is we have to fight one player short for a few turns. With Kaneshiro dropping an item causes him to try to scoop it up. More expensive the item is, more he is tempted to expose himself to damage in effort to get to it. I have not been able to figure out an item that will tempt him enough. In the end I beat him without resorting to the distraction.

            Akechi pops up right before the boss fight. He probably took pictures of the Thieves here which will come into play soon. Now knowing his true nature, all the conversations with him take on a more sinister meaning. Right now I’m role playing Joker as someone who already knows the truth about Akechi and only playing dumb to lure him into a false sense of security. None of it changes the narrative of the game but it is fun to have that story in my mind. There was an earlier event at a school trip where Akechi tripped up and let us know that he can understand Morgana. Since only those who have been inside the Metaverse can understand her, he is at the very least lying about not knowing anything about the alternate universe.

05/07/2020