Games – Page 2 – THIRD HALF//

Posts about games. There’s bunches.

Big Adventures In Tiny Places

August 6, 2023 3/2 No Comments

Been thinking about game design again and navel gazing a bit about what it is I like about games in different genres. I’ve always had some games I latched onto to kill time, but there was actually a period of time where I kind of lost interest in gaming. Pause to let the reader finish gasping or fainting like a Southern belle. This phase came about from the first steps the industry started taking into 3D- awkward low poly models with low res textures, most devs not really having a base line of how controls should work in a 3D environment, and the awkward steps taken toward making games feel more cinematic. It honestly turned me off and even though I had a N64, there wasn’t a hell of a lot that really caught my eye as a must own. Even to this day I’d rather see nice hand drawn or pixelated sprite art over hyper realistic muddy shootmans and zombie games, but now I have the power to “hey man, that’s just your opinion” myself. Truly a great and terrifying power I use for good and also undermining my confidence and sense of self if left unchecked.

What brought me back into the hobby was the humble GBA. It was basically a portable SNES and since I get into basically everything late, it was an SP with the snazzy flip open lid. Black version because obviously, that was the coolest one. And the first game I picked out? Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. In itself, it was probably a weird choice since I wasn’t super into RPGs, for a variety of dumb reasons from short attention span to thinking it was kinda stupid for people in a fight to just stand in lines taking turns hitting each other politely. I loved Chrono Trigger and liked FF7 (on PC!) but tended to bounce off of others. But I’d seen the original FFT at a friend’s house and thought, “hey, you can actually do things like backstabs or take advantage of heights and obstacles? This is a GAME CHANGER.” So I dug in and I freaking loved it. Once I was in the post game I made it my mission to raise up an all Viera team, because I’ve always been like this. It was really the first time I realized how cool RPGs could be when freed from the TV or computer room and the whole idea of having an explorable world full of little dudes I collected and trained was also very, very cool.

(Never was much of a Pokemon kid, by the way. Picked Game Gear over Game Boy as a kid and looking back regret it a little, but I still loved the thing.)

The way the portable form lead to changes in game design and philosophy is pretty interesting too. Since battery life could still be a problem, some games added “suspend” modes I could never bring myself to trust and others started focusing on allowing more bite size sessions with generous save points or just letting you save whenever. Even getting away from RPGs, I gotta say Peace Walker is still probably my favorite MGS experience since it broke everything into mini stages instead of giving me a giant map to get lost in while resources dwindle. Then there started to be games made more simple, abstracted even more to focus on the core… RPG…ness.

SURPRISE I’M GOING TO GUSH ABOUT STING AGAIN

When my SO of the time and I went shopping on a trip, we each grabbed a GBA game to mess with on the trip; she went with Riviera: the Promised Land and I picked Sigma Star Saga since I’d been waiting on it and hoped it would be a worthy successor to The Guardian Legend. It wasn’t, really! But I checked out Riviera over her shoulder and started thinking “this looks cool but also kind of different.” Later, I got my own copy and was super into it. They stripped away free roaming and broke dungeons down room by room, littered with event triggers you spend points earned from performing well in battle to use. In exchange, they focused on story and presentation, with lots of splash art to really sell special events. It was basically heavily boiled down RPG concentrate and was both perfect for handheld and just plain interesting in itself.

I would keep up with Nintendo hand held systems over the years, eventually getting a PSP too to break things up a bit. As much as I love action stuff, I just couldn’t get enough oddball portable RPGs and tactics games. One of the standouts was Half Minute Hero, and something just grabbed me about the design of it- it’s almost more of a puzzle game challenging you to find the most efficient routes through a quest, unlock all the endings, and all done pretty tongue in cheek. The world is going to end in 30 seconds, so get going, hero! The Time Goddess can rewind things for you but charges increasing amounts per reset. Eventually, after completing multiple entire other game modes, the ultimate final stage appears: the heroes of each time period rush to the finish to save the day in five minutes while time itself unravels the world around them, and for something that’s basically a gag game, it’s a genuinely epic conclusion.

Now this might be surprising to you if this is the first thing you’ve read here but I’m kinda into mobile games lately. A lot of it is because cheapo gacha RPGs and strategy games do a pretty good job of capturing that “vibe” of the random RPGs I kept collecting. Maybe not so much your FFTAs as your Luminous Arcs and Wild Arms XFs. Second and third stringer franchises just always appealed to me, I guess. It’s part getting to explore something nobody else is really talking about and part getting to relay my experiences to my friends so they can go “hey, that sounds cool” then not play them later. Even if they do exist as a front for nickel and diming susceptible players to death and funneling money to China, they check a lot of my boxes for “actually good stuff,” the bite size sessions, interesting game mechanics (well, sometimes) and most importantly getting to carry lots of cool little imaginary people around in your pocket. To train and dress up and poke at and sometimes enter multiple surprisingly non binding marriages with.

On a level sometimes it feels like I’m drawn to RPG things in Not RPGs. The aesthetics, theming, the character building, taken away from the normal format. Like say, Caladrius Blaze, the top down bullet hell shooter where you gather XP items from destroyed enemies and redeem them to increase your stats for each skill (read weapon) between stages. Or World Flipper, the surprisingly neat Pinball RPG where the heroes hop between themed worlds, solving their problems and making all sorts of friends. Bite sized. It’s got leveling and team building. There are Lots Of Dudes in it, and they all fit in your pocket. I love it.

I think another angle to all of this is how to take advantage of the language of tropes. Tropes aren’t necessarily a bad thing for you to click a Cinema Sins dinger at. They’re a writing shorthand and can be useful for saving time or grabbing attention. Anime does this a lot. Especially lately. But that’s a rabbit hole for another day. (Maybe.) There’s a quest in Half Minute Hero where Hero meets, befriends, then has to kill a girl which, like everything else in the game, happens in the course of a couple minutes tops, and it’s genuinely pretty emotional. with minimal dialogue or even screen time. Your mind is filling in blanks and thinking back to other times you’ve seen a scene like this, but it’s being presented in a new and interesting way. That is to say, very fast.

Most of the pen and paper game designs I’ve attempted over the years have come from a similar place. I like designing characters and want people to enjoy them on a level past going “hey that looks neat” and scrolling along to the next. Irrgarten was a dungeon crawler card game that more or less came about because I wanted a simple game that gave people a little fantasy gaming “fix” with minimal setup and the early concepts of Critical Heaven were to basically combine the interesting battle gimmicks from Rondo of Swords and Yggdra Union. I kind of wanted to keep them as card gamey as possible but they keep turning out more and more like board games. What can I say, I just really like the idea of having a whole deck of planegirls or adventurers y’know…

In your pocket.

A Question of Value(s)

October 2, 2022 3/2 No Comments

*Overwhelmingly positive with mechs AND anime girls? But…*

This is one of those thoughts that has percolated in my dysfunctional little brain for a while now, but when I was idling scrolling through the Switch eShop sales page looking for interesting indie stuff to impulse buy and probably play five minutes ever, it jumped back out and now it’s blocking the bathroom door, so I guess it’s time to address it before the situation escalates. A new shmup, Moon Dancer (which looks pretty dang cool) is on sale, but squinting above it, I see the original price is $18.99 USD. The Steam version is $14.99 regular price with the option of a soundtrack bundle.) Now, I’ve seen the sentiment crop up in reviews that the price of a game shouldn’t affect its rating, and as someone who is into kind of nichey stuff, it’s a factor I get stuck thinking on a lot.

I like a lot of smallish studios’ work, the indie scene feels like the place to find titles that are either imaginative or at least similarly cozy to the stuff I grow up with, with a dash of excitement of discovery on top from finding something quality that hasn’t been completely overhyped and overexposed online. I don’t honestly know if WayForward and Inti Creates are considered indie anymore, but they’re at least able to keep their own identity and mostly avoid the big trends that make high profile companies’ outputs feel so bland and samey. I also personally know a few people home-brewing their own passion projects and/or self-publishing and the amount of work that goes into it is huge and admirable. Major props to people who spend years going “I’m making a game!” and banging at it ’til it actually happens.

The thing that gets me is that game pricing feels like it’s just all over the place. Honestly, most feel ridiculously generous, like full length RPGs with original art and engines selling for $20 or less. My beloved ZeroRanger is still technically under construction after four years while keeping the same $12.99 price point, and it’s probably my favorite shmup. So when you get a release like say, Darius Burst CS, which isn’t quite mainstream but well regarded in its genre, releasing for $50 (base game, it has/had numerous $4.99 DLCs), it’s kind of a tough sell for me. (Also it seems to be delisted now? I went to check the price and I can no longer add to cart on Steam.) And the hell of it is like, I still kind of want it, in a “gotta support the scene!” kind of way. I was willing to buy it on a steep sale one of the few times it did and I burned some Amazon credit on Deathsmiles 1+2 since I like 1 a lot and never played 2, but they were both a bit beyond an impulse buy for me. I have a similar problem with fighting games, I love both genres and appreciate the replay value your get out of replaying them and improving over time, but at the same time, they’re both kind of a short experience by default, and if it doesn’t click, then I’m going to probably get each character’s ending and shelf it forever.

*hey wait why does this image follow that sentence? weird*

I realize that shifting from talking about indie projects to ports of existing games to home console or updating them is a different ball game, but it’s hard for me to separate the two when I’m scrolling through the listings. Ultimately, they’re both a product and an experience, and when I see someone pouring their blood, sweat and tears into something then selling it for $3.99 or giving it away for free out of love for what they’re doing and another listing is a decades old arcade game, optimized for current systems for $7.99, it feels kind of off to me. Arcade Archives does do great work, and I nabbed some of their ports in spite of being really easy to just emulate the stuff, but at the same time, I’m thinking “this is a good port, but they didn’t make this.” And where do you even place things like the Pixel Game Maker series of releases or commercial RPG Maker projects? There’s effort there, in the writing, graphics, generally, though there are some games that just do the bare minimum and release it to Steam because they’re allowed to. There are some really impressive games coming out of Maker engines, and you definitely can’t knock them making game development more accessible to people who otherwise couldn’t (hell, I purchased Pixel Game Maker myself recently hoping it clicks and I can make something some day.)

*Pixel Pirate Pack, featuring Popeye and Blutus*

I’m not really saying that indie devs are underselling themselves or that porters are gouging their audiences here, more that ‘value’ isn’t entirely about cost but a factor I can’t entirely ignore when I’m game shopping or reviewing something. I’ve dropped ten or fifteen bucks on more duds than I can remember but also gotten hours of fun from games in the same bracket. I’m also guilty of overpaying for weeb trash games because, well, that’s just how niche things go. Sometimes you have to bite that bullet if you want to play Darius Burst CS badly enough or want to import a Super Robot Wars or tiddy ninja RPG. When something enters niche hobby territory, there’s usually a price hike, look at photography on real film. You used to be able to get disposable cameras for cheap at any drug store, now it’s basically a hipster luxury territory.

Let’s step away from the cozy side of the games market for a bit here. I know, I don’t do it much either, but it’s okay. Just hold my hand and don’t follow anyone from Blizzard anywhere. I love my Switch, ok? It’s probably one of the top three consoles I’ve regretted least buying. But Nintendo continues its proud tradition of pricing everything at $50-$60 and never budging from launch price and that makes buying into first party games really tough for me unless peer pressure is involved. I play Mario Kart pretty regularly with friends after finally caving on it, and Smash Ultimate is a good time even if I rarely do multi player with that one, but I’ve been kind of hemming and hawing about Breath of the Wild for years at this point. I don’t play a lot of open-world games, and I honestly haven’t played much 3D Zelda, but the near universal fellating of BOTW has me wondering, like- is this the one? Is this going to be the open exploration phenomenon that makes me not mind forgetting what the hell I’m doing while wandering around lost in the woods? Genshin Impact sure wasn’t. I got super into Honkai Impact, its stage based brawler cousin, and after a while I thought “Hey, maybe it would be fun to go back to Genshin and see how much these two games have in common.” Since I haven’t gambled myself into a cardboard box as of writing this, I think you can guess how well that went. So, I haven’t pulled the trigger on BOTW. Splatoon always looked kind of neat, but I don’t really want to pay full Nintendo price on a ‘maybe,’ especially knowing that they have something of a shelf life with finite Splatfests. Also Inklings keep cutting me off in Mario Kart offline circuits and I’m kind of developing a grudge. It just irks me that Nintendo never cuts the price on these games unless they make it to best-seller status or completely fucking bomb (I got Other M for 12 bucks new at GameStop back in the day) when most companies would give it a break a few months or a year out.

This has all been kind of a roundabout way of saying “I don’t like paying more than $20 for short games but also don’t want them to stop making them.” So many indie games sell low it kind of feels like being spoiled, but as an artist I’m also pretty painfully aware that selling low is an easy way to get takers, period. I’d hate to wind up as the equivalent to one of those assholes who gets a quote from an artist and insists “no way it should be that much, anyone can draw if they try and if you do it for fun why are you charging me at all?” So, love and respect out there, earnest indie devs and those of you out there who bust your bottoms making quality game ports and collections.

*I didn’t even get into this shit, huh?*

To The Third Power

March 31, 2022 3/2 No Comments

Hiiiii, absentee internet guy here! I actually started a bona fide article back in December then didn’t finish it because it was pretentious as fuck and now isn’t even topical! So I just thought it was a good time to check in and report on some games I’ve enjoyed recently, dump some sketches, then come back in another three to four months. You’re fine with that, right? I like that about our relationship.

Alchemy Stars: Aurora Burst (Mobile)- First off, yeah, a lot of these are going to be mobile games. I’ve played entirely too many of them lately, and keep trying new ones just to see what looks promising and which turns into a dull slog of daily quests and template generated moeblobs and/or gijinka. Alchemy Stars is really cool, though, since it has a unique battle system involving drawing a line through like-colored tiles to move your squad around and attack enemies. It’s goofy as hell watching a conga line of characters run in awkward panels to either do a hit and run or just burn up tiles on the far end of the map, but I love the ‘gameyness’ in the same way I love STING RPG’s. It’s simplistic, yet has some nuance in how you build your teams and trigger your active skills. I broke my rule about joining games for collaborations since a Dragon Maid crossover was going on at the time, but I like the game itself enough to keep picking away at it a while every day.

I give it a 3 out of 2.

Guardian Tales (Mobile)- Okay I broke the rule again with this one due to peer pressure: there was a Slayers collab going on and other members of the fan discord I’m on were really enjoying it, so I bit. Guardian Tales is a surprisingly fun sort of Zelda-like title that gets bogged down a bit for me with Gacha Things. Overall, I’d say it’s worth a play but I prefer the bite sized stages, puzzles and exploration parts of it to the resource grinding, active and passive PVP, and vestigial but compulsory co op elements that every mobile game (or ‘mobage’ if you’re like that) and kind of wish it was just a stand alone thing that was just that. It’s got an interesting sense of humor and likes to casually slide dark notes in your way, which really made that Slayers crossover make sense.

I’d call it a 2 out of 2. Fun, nothing glaringly bad but I wouldn’t say I’m hooked.

World Flipper (surprise, it’s also Mobile)- I’ve always kind of had a soft spot for video games that take a physical game and do things with it that you couldn’t do on a real pinball table/race track/line at the urgent care. World Flipper is a pinball RPG where you build teams of adventurers then fling them violently at enemies and obstacles to score points and charge up for Power Flips and active skills. I love the presentation (tiny sprites for the actual game, colorful clean character art for dialogue and menus) and it’s pretty easy to get a fix in short bursts since each stage is usually just a two-screen ‘table’ that can be beaten in a couple minutes. The flip (heh) side of the whole thing is it’s a very light, fluffy kind of experience so don’t go in expecting LORE! or anything especially deep. It’s just a really good game to toss on when you’re in ‘head empty, actual RPG take too long’ mode. Given that’s been the philosophy of most of my attempted game projects myself, I can’t help but love it. Also worth pointing out the game just automatically ticks off daily quests and achievements as you hit them, so you’re never consulting a checklist and being compelled to do all of the menial bullshit on it on a daily basis, so it is a surprisingly guilt/FOMO free experience for what it is.

2 out of 2.

Final Gear (Mobile)- I like mechs. This shouldn’t be remotely surprising for long time readers, new readers, people I’ve sat next to on a bus, or those who quietly just stop responding on Discord after several paragraphs explaining the different VF-1 Valkyrie variants and who used them in Classic Macross. Final Gear is a mecha RPG that plays a bit like a side scrolling beat em up with guns added, until you can turn on Auto battle and much like Azur Lane, there’s rarely a reason to go back. Of course, these mechs are piloted by cute, merchandisable anime girls. They seem to have pretty frequent collab events, which could be a selling point if you’re into mecha because if there’s anything we mecha fans love is seeing a mecha we know in something else. The guest character art seems to be all done by their own staff though, which isn’t outright *bad* so much as kind of uncanny in some cases. A smiling, moe-fied Major Motoko Kusanagi is one of the more cursed examples. (Original characters look fine though.)

Final Gear is a tough recommend for me. I like mecha, the construction system is cool (if you get the full parts set and pilot for a Custom unit, you can transform it into a cooler looking, more powerful version) but resources for upgrading can get really grindy and as far as I can tell, whaling is about mandatory for some machines (you get points from making gacha pulls on a banner which can be used to buy parts of a character’s Custom from the banner, but going through the Eva collab f2p only ended up giving me enough parts for Eva-02’s backpack and arms.) It’s worth playing if you just can’t get enough robots in your life, but it has a lot of annoyances that might dampen your enthusiasm including crashes, typos, and a high maintenance base that seems to consume a baffling amount of system resources when you visit.

If I gotta be real, this is a 1 out of 2 but has potential to improve if it survives. On the other hand, my Research on -booru sites has yielded mostly official art rips and barely any risque fan art so that may not bode well for its popularity.

Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack (Switch)- I bought the individual games at launch on my 3DS, plodded through them, then never touched them again, but I’ve been on a major Inti Creates fanboy kick lately and decided to go back to the beginning of the series to see how I like them now. And, as happens to me a lot, really, I enjoyed the replay a lot more. I’ve heard that some tweaks were made to the collection, like additional platforms in Zonda’s upside down flipped sequences and the script to GV1 was essentially de-4Kids’d, but I barely remember the first time around so I got to just appreciate it as is. Hunting for jewels for… Joule was less obnoxious than I remembered, but the bosses remain as tough as I thought. I think I’m just more welcoming of challenge than I was back than- at least not counting attempting the good end- fighting those bosses a second time without prevasion on sucks. I like GV2 more overall, due in no small part to just liking Copen’s play style a lot. Gunvolt’s tag and zap mechanic is neat, but physically ramming enemies to tag them, ricocheting off walls and air dashing is just plain fun. I jumped at his spinoff when it came out. Overall, it is two good games bundled together, so it’s easy to suggest.

I’d give the Striker Pack a 3/2 but the limitations of my forced point scale means I can’t give iX a slightly higher score, I guess.

Luminous Avenger iX (Switch)- Gunvolt’s edgy boi rival Copen gets a spinoff where it turns out he was right to want to kill all the ~~Mutants~~ Adepts, actually, because in the future they’ve taken over the joint and hunt the surviving humans through their ruined cities. This game is a joy, it’s all about mastering Copen’s movement and weaponry to rack up combos and score, and it’s been polished and streamlined a lot since the 3DS entries. Since I didn’t get too deep into it before, basically the GV series are Mega Man X-likes as they appear, but designed more around getting through stages quickly, untouched, and chaining up points. Survival itself is actually pretty easy since both characters have an ability called “Prevasion” that basically trades their electric gauge or bullets to take a hit before you start losing health, and either of those things can be reloaded by double tapping down at any time. So if you play deliberately, it’s usually pretty simple to get out of the way and quickly reload before going on the offensive again.

Also, considering Copen’s play is based around different kinds of dashes, combos, and the bosses in iX2 are more or less expies of Mighty Numbers, the entire thing kind of feels like a big flex on Mighty No. 9 and I love passive aggressiveness in the games industry.

Luminous Avenger iX gets a 3 out of 2 in my book, nudged slightly higher than the previous games as mentioned above, though honestly, play ’em all!

Gal*Gun 2 (Switch&Steam)- Yes, I own this game. Twice. If you have to pick, I would pick PC for mouse aim. I don’t know where to really begin breaking this down while still keeping things kind of snappy since this list is getting longer than I planned, but do you like rail shooters like House of the Dead or Lethal Enforcers? It’s like that, but horny. You play a nondescript loner boy who is given a Pheremone Shot and Pheremone Goggles that will help drive out and defeat the mini-devils serial prankster Korona is spreading to cause mischief. The side effect of this demon busting gear is it makes every female member of the school irresistibly, violently attracted to you, so you must take them down by ‘satisfying’ them with Pheremone Shots to their weak points. It is exactly the kind of game you think it is assuming you know they stop short of actual nudity because it’s a console game for Grodd’s sake. GG2 has a surprising amount of content in it though, in the form of numerous side missions, different types of stages including defense stages (which suck), hidden object searching (which kind of sucks), and the route-ending Doki Doki stages where you just get right in there and drive the devils out of your chosen gal pal’s body at point blank range while they writhe and my friend judges me and tries to think of an excuse to go home.

Really, it’s just a goofy as hell anime fanservice game that’s more fun than it has any right to be. I was laughing my ass off when it gets to extremes like the girl next door revealing her pet project of an Anti-God Laser or classmates chasing you in the air vents like Xenomorphs. If you miss light gun or shooting gallery type games, it’s a pretty fun one though it feels like a missed opportunity to let you use the detached joy-con to aim like a pistol instead of doing the awkward Splatoon whole-Switch tilt on console. Steam’s port has mouse aiming which makes things much easier (much, much easier- they probably dumbed things down a bit expecting console aiming response times.)

I give it a solid 2/2. I had a blast playing through it (Chiru best gal, classic gaming five-ever) but I’m not really itching to return to it any time soon.

I think that about does it for stuff I want to dish on right now, I’ve been in aggressive CONSUME MEDIA mode for the past month or so and felt like sharing. I haven’t gotten as much PRODUCE CONTENT done as a result unfortunately, but hope to turn that around once things stabilize a bit. Had a lot of vet trips for Nia over the past couple months and work is jerking my schedule around for the first time in a good while, so here’s hoping it’s stable hours even if they’re not the ones I prefer to work. Friday Raffles have also been getting back in swing over on RGL, so I can be caught there most Fridays when an event isn’t going on. But I’ve been thinking lately, I really need to just nail down a project and get it out there instead of talking endlessly about My Game that doesn’t actually exist as yet so I can’t show it off.

Until next time, adios.

Aimless Muttering About the Thing I Totally Don’t Have A Problem With

October 14, 2021 3/2 No Comments

Girl Cafe Gun taught me that waitresses don’t like 18 hour shifts but a probably racist penguin plushie will cheer them right up and also you only need to make 2 cups of coffee and the shop just runs itself for 4-6 hours

As part of an on again off again ‘thing’ to do on my Twitch channel, I’ve played a handful of different mobile games to see which ones are actually fun as games and which ones are just kind of mindless clickers and Adventure Quest looking cash-ins. Girls’ Frontline remains my favorite overall, but Honkai Impact is mashy and engaging enough I’ve stuck with it even though it’s probably the worst time sink of the lot. But I’m not really here to talk about specific games right now, I thought I would take a bit to dump some thoughts I’ve had about mobile games (or ‘mobage’ if you’re… like that.)

When smartphones were propagating and the first mobile hits started spreading around, I wasn’t really impressed, and didn’t really mess with them until Fallout Shelter came out and my device could actually run it. My first droid was actually a burner I bought so I could test projects for an app development course so it had minimal onboard storage and stubbornly refused to use the memory card to install anything. Shelter was fun, but beyond that I got the impression everything was shallow puzzle games that occasionally liked to cozy up and ask for twenty dollars to go to the malt shop, daddy. Even the first one I actually enjoyed is basically a simple SRPG that happened to have a story and setting that jibed with me well. As time and technology waltz onward, though, and games look more and more like they’d be at home on a console, and stuff is coming out that *actually looks good.* I’m still kind of processing this as a thing that is happening, in the actual world. I routinely leave my Switch at home when I visit my dad less to travel lighter and more because that day, maybe I’m in more of an Arknights mood.

At some point I’ve kind of come to realize being a snob about mobile games was kind of a dumb thing for me to do given that I like simple, creative games more than cinematic AAA eXpErIeNcEs. Maybe some of the What Happened? binge watching and mentions of Konami and others switching focus to pachinko and mobage sparked the realization that “wait, they’re not just being stupid trend chasers, these games are making mad bank on smaller budgets.” I like indie games, they’re done on small budgets and are the closest thing creatively to what we saw in the olden days, so what’s the difference?

Weeeell… there are differences.

As alluded to before, there are a lot of ones I’ve tried that felt kind of like cookie cutter RPGs without a real hook, or even worse, like low effort asset recycling when they come from larger companies. There’s also no denying the array of psychological tricks and manipulative design elements they employ to try and loosen the wallet. When I find a game I really enjoy, I don’t mind sending a bit of money their way to keep things running, but in most of those cases, the key phrase there is ‘I don’t mind’ doing it vs basically needing to do it to progress. For example, one of the first games I got into was an Armored Core ripoff of sorts called Destroy Gunners that kept closing and reopening as new versions which always felt kind of suspicious. It was a pretty fun game and the touchscreen controls didn’t ruin it, but what did was the occasional boss appearances, Devil Mechs. They’re unreasonably tough and the only way to take them out at low levels is basically to bring out a limited use laser weapon given for free to new players and sold at a premium afterwards. A lot of games I’ve tried do a less drastic version of that where the early game is super generous with gacha pulls and other resources at first, then as you clear early game achievements and such, the rewards slow to a trickle and you’re still kind of riding the high of the initial shopping spree… It’s rough, buddy!

I think I’ve identified my personal weakness in these as that I really like playing from a “gotta catch em all” angle and just want as many shiny new units as possible. After all, who knows if there won’t be an event in like three months where the pigtailed can opener woman with heterochromia has just the right combination of skills to break the difficulty wide open even though she kind of sucks now and I already have a full party of max level, max promoted characters that clear everything just fine? I can resist cosmetic items and skins pretty easily, and equipment I usually can wave my hand and go “as long as my characters are good, I can make up for the gear, right?” but when an actual character is paywalled or worse, RNGwalled, boy that does a number on my resistance. Honkai 3rd especially has my number because I enjoy character action games and each suit has a pretty unique fighting style. Very early on, I spent an embarassing amount of (gift card) money to be sure I got Herrscher of Reason because she was a blast to play with in demo levels. Later I also splurged on Flamescion, but didn’t get her, only to actually pull her on a handful of free tickets that were given out the next morning, which made me go “wait, this is actually stupid.”

I’d probably forget how to speak English if I walked into a coffee place and this happened.

I’ve kind of scaled back the amount of gacha game streaming I do partly because they’re not especially popular most of the time, and also, as both hypocritical and cheesy as it feels, sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t encourage others to pick them up. Some are definitely more susceptible to blowing large sums on a game and almost all of them are designed specifically to waste your time. I never even really thought about *why* so many of them have daily task lists and/or shitty UI’s, until my friend Sophie pointed out that if you’re playing one game longer, it’s more or less physically preventing you from doing something else. Time is precious, and normal games can already help waste it just fine. I’ve dropped a couple regulars recently and frequently go into ‘bare minimum’ mode with the ones I do keep playing because I’ve been in more of a mood to create than absorb recently.

I realize this has been a largely unstructured ramble, because it’s a largely unstructured ramble patched together from thoughts rattling around in my head for several weeks. It probably comes off as half starry eyed “golly, the world of tomorrow is here, and if you’re lucky, you can put a maid costume on it” and half DARE program. I think the mobile format has a lot of advantages as well as things that I don’t see it doing better than PC/console. High action games on a touchscreen which means your big meaty thumbs are covering a portion of the action are horrible, and few things take me out of a moment faster than Messenger popups or YouTube notifications sliding into view. Not all designers seem to handle the problem of “what if someone playing on their phone actually gets a call?” equally either. Things that I do enjoy though, are the smaller scale and simplification that portable platforms call for. It’s actually probably why Peace Walker is my favorite Metal Gear. The gachas I play have also probably been the best application of episodic content I’ve seen since updates come regularly and automatically, instead of having to remember to go back to Steam or whatever and see if Episode 3 of Polygon People Sure Love To Talk has dropped. It’s more of a drip feed of new story and game content than having an expansion dropped on your lap to finish in one sitting. Personally, I like that, though I also don’t like that many such events are limited time and prey on people’s fear of missing out. Basically, if there’s a game I’m enjoying enough for free, I’ll show my support with a monthly gem pass or something like a tip jar every now and then.

Enjoy responsibly, like the beer commercials always say, I guess.

Building Character: Tomcat

October 17, 2020 3/2 No Comments

I decided it would be fun to go back and look at the evolution of original characters I’ve been using for a while, show off how their design changed and why, and just generally hear myself talk. Hopefully, you find the process interesting as well, maybe it will even help some of you in some way. For this first installment, I ran a Twitter poll and was actually sort of surprised Critical Heaven’s Tomcat beat out my de facto mascot Eishi, but there’s a lot of stuff to say about her character and design over time.

You could almost say that Tomcat’s design began with an Arwing girl I drew ages ago during my daily sketch project. Of course, she would be a fox rather than a ‘cat,’ but the brown hair and white streak were already there to mimic Fox McCloud’s hair. It’s also pretty obvious I’ve been into the “anime girls as planes” thing for a very long time at this point. The design was actually designed to work best as a chibi with her toting a rifle shaped like the Arwing’s nose so the overall shape of the ‘sprite’ would look like a chunky version of the inspiration. I’d done plenty of designs like this for kicks in the past but didn’t have much idea what to do with them until I started getting into mobile games like Girls’ Frontline and something… clicked.

Earliest version of Tomcat was very… Anime American

Really, breaking down Tomcat will say a lot about the project overall since she was the first ‘plane girl’ I started working on. A-10 sprung to mind more or less fully formed, but Tomcat is more of a guideline for the rest of the conventional strike fighter class. The very first take on Cat was kind of a cynical “what would an Eastern-made video game do with a personification of an iconic US fighter,” so she’s a top heavy, blue-eyed blonde. Several early takes use a more drab jacket which was inspired by Tom Cruise’s Top Gun flight suit- but a flight suit isn’t really that fan servicey, so…

The twintails were actually probably about the most clever part since the F-14 *does* have two tails (thrust nozzles and rudders that is.) Her ribbons carrying Jolly Rogers was kind of intended to be a deal where if she was deco’d as other units their logo could replace it, but I went with those since they looked cool and it sort of doubles as a Macross ref. The aviators stay a constant through basically all versions.

I decided to change her to brown hair pretty early on for no particular reason other than a preference for redheads and brunettes. I wanted to give her cat ears in some form or another but shied away from giving her *actual* cat ears in favor of her headset including them. Another idea was putting small copies of the tail fins on her headset positioned like cat ears, but they don’t look much like a pair and having them sideways creating drag is basically the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Looking back at the second draft I think I like having them smaller like this than what she currently has, especially since giving her kind of a pixie cut instead of twintails makes *anything* on her head stand out more. The armor isn’t more than hinted at but early on I was planning to have everyone wear their wings at hip level so I could do whatever when posing the upper body. The Jolly Rogers scarf is probably a little too on the nose GFL-ish but it looks cool, dammit.

As things went on, I decided on more of a “cool big sis” image for her and ditched the twintails and knotted undershirt. She looks so dependable in this stage! She also lost the Jolly Rogers imagery around here since I sort of started to get an inkling of saving some of the cooler themed paint jobs and stuff for variant costumes and the like and also wanted room to figure out an original look for the squadron. (In the end they all kind of just do their own thing, though…)

The white streak found its way into Cat’s hair at some point (I honestly forgot it left other than her blonde phase!) I think it helps a bit to make her look more like an alley cat if her ‘coat’ isn’t all one color. I also made her a little younger looking since the fighter line she and her team are inspired by are collectively known as the “Teen Series” and I wanted her to be more in line with them in appearance. Her outfit became something more like a street racer’s and is supposed to be covered with patches and logos, even if I leave them out of a lot of sketches. I think sporty clothes suit her well, I love outfits that have a sexy side and a practical side to them. Since the other Heavens Squadron members have a dominant color, eventually I decided that Tomcat’s should be white but she has light greys with black and gold for emphasis here and there so it doesn’t look too sterile. She also gained a little cat bell alongside her dog tags about here.

The NO STEP warning and the number 6 patch on her bottom are some of my favorite parts of her outfit. Put together it kind of comes off as “Stay off my ass,” which fits her attitude nicely.

I think this is about where I was pretty satisfied with her basic look.

The girls’ armors in general have gone through a few changes, as mentioned above the original idea was to have the wings and engines around waist level but it sort of felt like they were just riding their armor instead of wearing it. The current general arrangement is for the engines and tail to rest at the small of the back with a ‘spine’ piece running the wings up to the shoulder area. In earlier takes the plane parts were spread out a bit more and Tomcat had a sort of unique arrangement where her intakes and wings were affixed to the shoulders themselves (the note about the shoulder clamps being padded and ‘comfy.’) Since Azur Lane and Girls’ Frontline were big inspirations, a lot of these designs sort of minimize the armor in favor of showing off the outfits underneath. In older sketches, the leg armor in particular is mostly limited to some straps and braces with big thigh panels and boots with landing wheels incorporated into them and the arms are basically bare. Alternative wing arrangements included them floating just outside the arms ‘anchored’ to upper arm braces and briefly, as forearm shields since wings both tend to house weapons and they’re just such nice big ‘shieldy’ looking bits. I was more or less approaching them from the angle of “how annoying would this be to pose with a toy?,” so a lot of the concepts were centered on how to leave the arms as free as possible.

Some of the broader ideas regarding what Sprites are and how they should look and act were gelling around here, which is when I began drawing them with light-up pupils instead of normal eyes. It’s an idea I’d sort of kicked around for another project but made more sense for a total non-human to have eyes that work differently than a person with nanomachines. Eishi’s have been missing for a long time so I’m considering retconning her into being a Sprite. The earliest concept when I sat down and went “I want fighter jets to turn into cute girls” was having them be ghosts or angels that emerged from the wrecks of downed aircraft, maybe even restless dead pilots wanting a second chance. Another idea was just plain androids, but a certain part of me just wasn’t satisfied with that. So, kind of cannibalizing an idea from a shmup concept, it was decided that they would be servants summoned from ancient relics- basically walking generators with a lot of power they weren’t able to actually use without human masters to give them devices to channel it through and/or permission to tap into it. This also provides a good excuse for them to have quirky personalities that a military/pseudo-military group would be willing to tolerate. So the final form of the Sprites ended up being ‘data beings’ of unclear origin brought out of black slabs from an old civilization that used them as some sort of archives.

Worth pointing out in the original blonde ‘Cat, it’s partially visible she’s wearing gauntlets with pylon attachments on them so she sort of got downgraded then gained them back later. The arm bracers the girls wear both function as deflector shields and hardpoints for weaponry. The leg reinforcements were originally intended to be specifically for carrier-based planes’ use but seeing as how all Sprites are small enough to work on one they basically all get some kind of leg armor.

Currently, Tomcat (and everyone else) are being steered in a more typical mecha musume-ish style but most of the outfits are being kept as ‘civvies.’ I had a few people wondering why I wasn’t drawing them more in the style of all the Guardian Legend stuff I used to post, and I didn’t have a particularly good answer seeing as how I love that stuff. The current iteration of Tomcat keeps a lot of her older design aspects but streamlined a bit to go with the form-fitting body armor. The skintight leotard parts are called Insulators- since the Sprites are effectively solidified data clusters, the most practical kind of armor they equip would be something that keeps their ‘signal’ from leaking out, right? Just don’t think too hard about how much skin some of the suits leave out. I just had to leave her her jacket though, it just doesn’t feel right without it there.

In short, I feel like the most drastic changes happened early on but once I settled on a personality I liked, her appearance settled in pretty solidly. She’s the sort who comes off as reckless, careless, maybe even a little dumb, but with sharp instincts and a lot of experience to back up her lack of taking things seriously. Tomcat is also infamously hard to keep track of in her off duty time, often wandering off into unexpected places looking for some kind of entertainment. At times, she’s been known to wander into enemy territory from time to time just to have lunch or mingle with off-duty rivals, generally to their annoyance. Despite that, she’s fiercely loyal to her squadron and sees them as her family.

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