Making Anime Robot Fights Boring

 I had a series that I did over on YouTube for a while that I called "Battle Against the Backlog" where the idea was that I'd sort of vlog the progress through my insane 1000+ game backlog.  However thanks to an obsession with Dead by Daylight and some life things getting in the way, finding time to write a script and then edit all the footage together, even for videos as simple as that, was proving far too time consuming.  So I thought since the blog has been neglected for a while in favor of Twitch and YouTube, I will move the backlog stuff here so that there's at least a new post once a week and then I'm freed up to either play more games or work on bigger projects I have flying around my big dumb brain 

Anyway, like I said I've mainly been playing Dead By Daylight as opposed to making progress in anything that actually has an ending.  I don't know what it is about that game considering it has exactly 1 mode of play and it's essentially, when you boil it down, just freeze tag but it's a weirdly compelling experience.  You might think that the one mode thing would make it get boring pretty quickly, it does it other games after all but I like to think that Dead by Daylight is the Ichiran Ramen of video games.

In case that reference went over your head let me explain.  Ichiran is a chain of ramen stores here in Japan but unlike every other ramen store that have menus of different kinds of ramen, Ichiran has one thing.  They do that one thing SO WELL that no matter how many times I eat it, I never get bored of it and I quite often get urges to go back. That's what Dead by Daylight did, they picked one thing and have done it so incredibly well that I don't seem to ever get tired of it.  No matter what side I'm playing on I'm just constantly hankering for more.  It's even gotten to the point where I'm looking up DbD content while I'm working and listening to pros talk shop.  Maybe once I get better at the game and I start hitting the higher ranks more consistantly the allure might wear off but for now I'm absolutely HOOKED (haha)

Anyway, onto the actual subject of the blog post because I did finish one thing recently, a big thing, and that was Daemon X Machina.  Daemon X Machina on paper sounds like it should be cool because it's a mech combat game made by some of the same people that previously worked on Armored Core but the game is just awful.  It's fine for the first handful of missions where there's some mystery regarding and apocolypse and you're blowing stuff up but then you quickly come to realize that all the missions are the same.  Every mission involves either blowing stuff to or preventing something from being blown up by blowing stuff up which sounds like all you'd need from a game about giant robots but the enemies barely fight back and every enemy can be killed by just locking on, holding down both mouse buttons with rifles equipped and spamming the Q key to fire extremely powerful homing rockets.  There where even a number of instances where I didn't even have to move to fight bosses and other mech-style enemies, it was an actual joke

The story isn't much better either because the game throws way too many characters at you all at once, none of them are fleshed out and you don't care who anyone is or where their allegiances lie and then near the end of the game it starts killing a few of them off in heartfelt death scenes but instead of having any emotional impact I was sat there saying "who was that again? have we even been in a mission with that guy yet?" 

You can tell as well that the developers just completely ran out of ideas by the end because the final 4 missions all take place on the same stage where you do the same thing.  You fight 4 different characters as boss fights but all the enemies fight in the same way pretty much so it's literally just the old double click spam Q song and dance for half an hour while the AI partners babble on coms and not help with the combat

It should be impossible to make anime mech fights boring and some how this game did it, so hats off to the developers for doing something that I thought was impossible. 

Anyway, that's about all I've done recently.  I've also been playing Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch but I got to this place called Makna Woods and have been bogged down in side quests for many hours now so not a lot to say there really. I'll try to put DbD down for a while so I have something interesting to say next week!

Shouldn't Digital Cost Less?

Before I make this post I'd just like to clarify that I am not a businessman and I know very little about business.  However this is something that has been bothering me for a long long while and I can't help but feel that there's a little bit of bullshit involved.

So, when I used to only buy hard copies of games a brand new game would set me back about £40.  For this £40 I would get the game, a box to keep it in and an instruction manual to tell me how to play.  Now, a brand new big title game on Steam will STILL cost £40 but all I get is a digital version of the game and nothing else.  Now I'm sorry but since I'm getting less stuff for my money shouldn't digital distribution cost less?!

When you're making a hard copy of a game you have to make the disc, make the box, print a manual, ship it to a retailer and a bunch of other shit that would be a cost to the people publishing game.  But with digital you aren't doing any of that so shouldn't the costs to the producer be less?  If that is the case shouldn't the cost of the game be less?  Why am I still being charged £40 just for the games data, it seems like a bit of a con.

I've even come across examples where the digital version of a game was MORE EXPENSIVE than the fucking hard copy.  Xenoblade X came out recently in Japan and if I go down to my local game store to pick up a copy it would set me back around 6000 yen.  However if I go on the Nintendo E-Shop it costs fucking 8000 yen!  What the fuck is that?!  where is that extra 2000 yen coming from?  I'm getting significantly less for significantly more money

Maybe there's something I'm missing and digital copies of games are actually more of a cost to a company than producing a hard copy.  I'm hoping that if this is the case then someone can explain it to me because right now I feel like I'm being fucking ripped off!

Won't stop me from buying digital though, it's just so damn convenient.....

Japan dropping the game ball?!

So I was talking with a buddy about some of the latest releases as we were sweating our balls off in the Japan summer when he said to me "Yeah, Japanese devs have really dropped the ball with game releases over the last few years" and while we moved on from that point fairly quickly at the time, it got me thinking about if that's actually the case or not?

Sure, if you're a fan of Japanese games and you live in the UK or America, you may find that the latest releases from the land of the rising sun have been a bit lack luster, and sure, you're probably right there, but to say that the Japanese aren't producing good games anymore is a bit unfair.

You see, the problem is that Japan actually has a shit ton of good games.  Walking around the various game stores I always find something that piques my interest and has me wishing my pay day would come sooner.  Plus you see all these booths for stuff coming out soon and it looks like there is some quality stuff on the way too.

So really, it's not a case of Japanese developers dropping the ball, but it's a case of Joe Bloggs westerner just not being aware of most of the quality Japanese titles!  That's not a case of me being "oh the uneducated masses aren't aware of the gems to be found in glorious nippon", it's more the fault of the big companies here than it is the consumer.  You see, Japan makes all these really cool looking games, then gives them no exposure or no mention in the west at all, and it's a bit bullshit really.  It's a shame that there is this huge selection of games to be found that most people will never even hear of due to this fact.

So why is it all like this?  I'm no industry expert, but my guess is that they just don't have the staff for put this stuff into English.  I mean, it's not like it wouldn't sell, I think the whole Xenoblade Chronicles thing proved that there is a market for Japanese games, but I think the amount of people who know enough Japanese to translate these games for a western audience are just far too few.

I mean I studied Japanese for 4 years, and right now, the best thing I can think of doing with that ability is to come here and teach English.  The work isn't too taxing and the pay is pretty good and I think this is the view that a lot of Japanese language students end up having, but the reason for that is something else entirely.  The people who do decide to push themselves into more language heavy work, aren't going to use those skills to translate video games, they will want to work for big companies as interpreters or whatever and earn metric craptons of money that way.

So to sum it all up, Japanese games are as good as they always were, if you enjoy the kind of stuff that comes out of this country, then you'll still love it now, but the people willing to bring you that stuff are a minority, I think.

As a disclaimer, this isn't really based on facts I've been looking up, this whole post is me basically musing to myself, but you never know, maybe I'm right....but I could also be completely wrong and the above text just makes me look retarded, but whatever.