Shogi Is Impossible

 

Back when the Corona pandemic was in full swing there was a bit of a Chess boom.  A few content creators went hard during the lockdowns, some interest was whipped up and a bunch of people starting playing Chess a bit more seriously to pass the time.  Me and a few of my friends also go swept up in the Chess hype and now I like to fiddle with a few puzzles or a game of bullet pretty much every day.

On Stream, one of the segments that I am doing is playing every single Yakuza (Now "Like a Dragon", a lame, overly direct translation of the Japanese title) to at least 75%.  If you have played a Yakuza game then you will now that in order to score some of those sweet, sweet completion points you are required to engage with at least a few of the mini games.  Now I thought, with my new found 1000-ish rating Chess skills I might be able to adapt to Shogi pretty easily and score some easy percent.  Well I was very fucking wrong and Shogi is completely impossible.

On a surface level, the two games are extremely similar.  You have pieces that have different ways that they move, a king that you must lock into place in order to win and a system of upgrading pieces when they get to the opposite end of the board.  Well that's the first big difference because in Chess its only pawns that upgrade when they hit the back rank.  In Shogi, getting a piece, any piece, to the back 3 rows or so allows you to flip it and upgrade it.  These upgrades aren't just into higher tiers of pieces like pawns becoming queens or rooks, they gain a whole new set of movement and if it wasn't for the video game versions of Shogi that I stick to showing me the valid moves I think I'd have hard time remembering it all.

But the large amount of basic shit to remember is just the very tippy top of this fucking iceberg.  The thing that really makes Shogi impossible for me to comprehend, the thing that fucks me up basically every time I play, is the ability for you to play pieces that you have taken back to the board instead of making a move.  Losing a piece in Shogi isn't just you losing strength in your forces, you are handing your opponent ammo to use whenever the fuck they like, takes and exchanges have to be considered way more carefully than they do in chess.  It adds a layer of strategy to the game that is deeply fascinating and that I don't think I will ever be able to get my head around.

It's not just me that struggles with this shit either.  I have lost the link (if I find it I'll edit the post) where there was a Chess grandmaster talking about Shogi.  He said that Chess GMs usually end up eating shit if they try to play Shogi but Shogi players can adept to Chess pretty easily.  However though, apparently Shogi players giving chess a try will absolutely fall apart and shit their pants in Chess endgames because of the lack of ability to put shit back on the board.  It was an interesting chat and I wish I could find the video again to share here, maybe one day.

But this post isn't me complaining about Shogi as much as it's me sharing my reverance for the game and the people who are good at it.  I suck at it, I'm clearly too caveman to understand it on a deeper level but with that said, I sure as shit will keep trying my luck against the easy CPUs in the Shogi halls of the Yakuza games.

Grandia 2: A Deeply Flawed Classic

 

Not too long ago I finished Grandia 2 on the Dreamcast.  It was a game that I had beaten before a long time ago, probably during my high school days, on the PS2 and giving it a revisit in 2024 almost felt like playing it for the first time again.  While my memory of most of the story beats were pretty hazy, going in I remembered pretty vividly really being sick of it by the end and unfortunately by the time I reached the end of the game, that memory had turned out to be correct. 

The game follows the adventures of Ryudo, a "geohound" (a sort of monster slaying mercenary, I think) as he accompanies some chick from the Church of Granas as they go on an adventure to put an end to an evil god called Valmar.  On the way they meet a burly furry, a little boy and a robot and together they have to deal with all manner of evil as they go around beating up Valmar's individual body parts that have been locked away in seals.  It's a simple story with plot twists that you could see coming from several thousand miles away even if you had just suffered massive head trauma in a car accident but for the most part it gets the job of pushing the player from dungeon to dungeon fairly well.  

The game has a number of cool things going for it, mainly in the combat department with one of the most interesting implementations I've seen of the standard ATB that I've ever seen.  Instead of just waiting for a bar to fill and then taking a turn, all enemies and party members in Grandia 2 share the same ATB meter.  The meter is split into two sections with a wait mode and a command mode.  When your character reaches the command line you tell them what to do and then they will either execute right away if you're doing a basic attack or there will be some charge time if you're doing a spell or special move.  What makes this so interesting is that both you and the enemy can knock you out of your command with certain skills so aside from the usual strategizing that one does in every RPG of what to use and when, there's also a timing element to all your decisions.  There was one major boss fight, which I won't spoil, where it had an extremely damaging attack that could bring all of my party members to near death in one go except he was never able to pull it off after the first time because every time I would see him charging it up, I would knock him out of it.  The move I would use to do so would deal less damage, but not having to waste time healing up every time he did it made the fight, overall, much more efficient.  Grandia 1 had the same battle system and the only game I can think of outside of these two examples that does something similar is 2014's Child of Light that basically ripped off the battle system wholesale from Grandia.  

Usually I like to shit on English voice acting in modern games because most of the people that seem to work in that field have about as much vocal talent as a used up kitchen sponge but Grandia 2 has some decent performances going on in the dub.  Mainly because the majority of the main cast is made up of Metal Gear Solid voice actors such as Cam Clarke and Kim Mai Guest as well as many others so even though the script in the latter half of the game is so painfully cringe-worthy I nearly turned myself inside out, its softened by at least having voice actors that are easy on the ears.

But Grandia 2 also suffers from a lot of issues.  The writing is a big glaring one where it seems OK at first but then turns into a 14 year olds first story in the latter half but the gameplay is where most of the bullshit in this game goes down.  The dungeons are short, boring and uninspired.  There's a few cool ones but the vast majority of them require no thinking and don't even have that much in terms of explorability so after 5 or 6 of them they just become sort of grating.  Not to mention that whenever Ryudo has to climb a ladder or push a block the animations for these things are PAINFULLY fucking slow.  You can go and find a life-partner, have a child, raise the child and watch your child graduate university in the time it takes for Ryudo to push a cube a few inches or in the time it takes for you to watch the party climb up or down a ladder one by one.  Thankfully its not to prevalent throughout the game but any dungeon with cubes or ladders can go fuck itself.  

Another big issue is the grind.  You don't NEED to grind to get to the end, for the most part you can just get a couple of things and get to the end if you want but who plays RPGs like that really?  The game throws so many skills, spells and passive abilities at you that all need to be upgraded using coins you get from combat that if you wanted everything you would be grinding for HOURS.  At first I was trying to upgrade everything to max before moving on but the amount of coins needed to stay up to date was so insane that I ended up just finding one battle strategy that worked and then telling everything else to fuck off.  I didn't even unlock a single one of burly furry mans skills except for his first one that could knock enemies out of there charge time because the amount of coins I needed for Ryudo's "win the game" button along side the passive skills to make sure he doesn't eat shit was just too much.

The combat though is where one of the games biggest problem lies though.  As interesting as the battle system is, almost every skill and spell in this game is accompanied by a long, unskipable cutscene of the magic flying around the battle field doing its thing.  I was playing via an emulator for the Retro Achievements and even with the power of emulator speedup, by the time I was at the end of the game I was about ready to eat buckshot for breakfast if I had to watch that fucking ZapAll spell effect again.  This is true for enemy skills too so while you can kind of make regular combat not as tedious by only spamming regular attacks and the early skills with short animations, if an enemy wants you to watch a 90 second cutscene of the sun exploding then you better hope to fuck your cancel skills are ready or your time is being well and truly wasted.   It's a fun bit of spectacle at the start but by the end of the game you'll be begging for a way to skip them.

But despite all of those complaints I did genuinely enjoy my time with Grandia 2.  It's deeply flawed in a lot of ways but its charming and cozy.  Maybe it wouldn't appeal to todays RPG fans who are far more used to either extremely dull real time combat found in the likes of modern Final Fantasy or snappier turned based systems found in games like Persona 5 but if you're willing to exercise a bit of patience then Grandia 2 is a generally pretty good game that's worth checking out.