I’ve begun playing Knights in the Nightmare, at my friend Jake’s behest.

Jake has been many things to both me and the site over the years- a connection to warez, Japanese food, comic strip cameos, and so on. And now it’s quite apparent that he’s NOT HUMAN.

Knights in the Nightmare is not designed for human brains to process. The Japanese, maybe. But not the average person. Day one of playing this thing and trying to absorb the mechanics makes me feel like I’ve glimpsed a black monolith and and being filled with advanced knowledge that will lead to the next stage of human evolution, which if the movie is correct, means space babies.

I may post something more coherent about the game later, but for now I’m still kind of levitating slightly above the couch cross legged and I’m trying to un-enlighten enough that I can reach my lemonade again.

I can’t help but think that at least some of the challenge is coming from Sting’s visual designs. Yes, they make very pretty games about Norse gods who happen to resemble toddlers in armor. But they’re just utterly in love with cramming the screen full of text elements that have little or nothing to do with gameplay, and the fact that Sting has a DS game now just doubles the pleasure. The story unfolds on the top screen while an endlessly filling and refilling bar that looks like it’s telling me I’m on a loading screen, accompanied by the message ‘The Wisp Approaches…’ and I’m pretty sure that there’s little blurbs in the corners that say something like “READING STORY NOW”

(Yggdra Union literally had a caption in dialogue scenes that said “NOW TALKING…(Character Name)”)

Sting deserves credit for doing something different with RPG’s instead of making an engine once and running with it. But getting back to the point- the way they make their games makes me wonder how they function in real life. How do they view eating, for crying out loud?

“Okay, we’re going to have pizza. But this time there’s a twist! I ordered it special, uncut, and you have to cut it! But in order to do so, you have to have Tanaka and Nobu stand one floor tile back and to the right or left of you, in order to be sure to do maximum damage with the cutter. Also, there are small pressure sensitive mines in the pizza. You have to quickly run around the room catching the pepperoni before they hit the floor. Because the floor has demons growing out of it.”