The Story Line and Characters

Laharl, Flonne, & Etna

The storyline, on the surface, is pretty simple. After waking the prince from his two year nap, Etna informs the prince that his father’s been dead for quite a while. The kingdom lacks a ruler. She and Laharl then go on a quest to regain the title of Overlord and fend off all of the greedy demons clawing at the kingdom.

Etna’s more devious than she lets the prince know initially. But, this is no surprise. They are demons, after all.

Celestia also sends an Angel Trainee into the Netherworld to assassinate the already expired Overlord, and she naturally gets roped into the party.

Laharl, Your Pissy Prince

Laharl

The main character of this entire fiasco is known as Laharl. He is the son of the now dead Overlord King Krichevskoy and carries with him all the baggage a royal father seems to bring teenage boys. He’s arrogant, rude, and easily stirred to anger.

In battle, Laharl is your standard ‘swing a sword until the damned thing dies’ sort of character, which seems to suit him just fine.

Etna, Monologue Champion

Etna

I’m pretty sure that Laharl’s vassal Etna is why I adore this game’s characters. For starters, she’s outspoken. Secondly, she’s ultra violent in an odd way. I’m not sure if she aims for causing severe bodily harm, but she is not shy with her spear.

Flonne, Wayward Angel

The third main character is the ever cheerful Flonne. Her optimism and odd vapidness is enough to make you heave. According to Etna, her head is full of flowers, and Flonne didn’t seem to have much of an objection to this assessment.

On her own, Flonne seems pretty useless in battle.

The Game Play

The game is a tactical one, which borrows heavily from Final Fantasy Tactic’s gameplay style. You move your members around a square-filled playing field attempting to wipe out all of the enemies.

You’ve got a load of different types of characters to create, mentor (which allows the teacher to gain abilities native to the student’s job), and level-up. Certain jobs only become available after arduous tasks, special existing combination, or having one character leveled up enough.

Beyond that, the storyline is hilarious.

What Happened…

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I adore the game. When I heard that it was out for the DS, I jumped on the bandwagon and purchased it. I wanted to make sure I had it for my flight down to Austin for SXSW. When I started playing it, something felt wrong.

Had… had they really changed Etna’s voice actor? My favorite character’s lines weren’t being delivered in the same, snarky ways as before. She almost had whiny, rather than a jeering lit to her voice. Oh, no… What had I bought?

So Much For That

SXSW didn’t give me much time to enjoy my new game, but I also didn’t have much desire to pick up the game and run with it. That single change killed much of the game for me. I suppose it’s a word of warning for users to get attached to a single character like that.

Did this sort of thing ever happen to you? Did you ever get completely attached to a single character and have them changed just enough to kill your love in a sequel or re-release?

These following concepts I find are largely valid in Final Fantasy 7, 8, most of 9, 10, and now (about half of) 13. I don’t count 11 as an MMORPG, and FF12 never quite felt like a Final Fantasy to me. It felt like a robust version of Vagrant Story. While that, too, was an awesome game, it had a different feel.

There will be spoilers bellow. If you haven’t played FF13 and would like to go ahead unspoiled, stop reading now. So, without further ado…

Denial Is Just One Of The Stages

Squall's a Sad Panda

This is one of Hero’s Journey staples, and rings just as true in Final Fantasy. First, the hero figures out what he has to do. Then, he refuses it. His friends try to encourage him to continue forward.

When he runs out of options he breaks down. Most of the time, this takes the shape of an admission of a fear of losing the friends he’s not willing to get close to. When his friends are still there, he takes back up the quest and we’re all good to go!

The Rule: Cloud, Squall, Tidus, and Lightning
The Exception: Zidane (except for when he learns what he is)

Minorities Are Hilarious!

Sahz and his chick.

What would a Final Fantasy be without a character to poke fun at? Unfortunately, the culture seems to dictate that these characters look different from everyone else. Can’t have it cutting too closely, can we? Barret and Sazh (who is less heinous) are larger-than-life versions of the stereotypes they represent. I really think we can do better than this.

Quina would be an exception except for the fact that s/he has no determinate gender.

The Rule: Barret, Quina, Wakka, and Sazh
The Exception: Zell

Not Enough Coffee To Deal With You

Selphie's Hairflip

Right on the heels of the comedian is the girl who I’d like to drown in a shallow pool. They’re irrepressibly cheerful, always bouncy, and usually perky enough to send most rational people screaming in the other direction. And yet, they never seem to get on the nerves of those around them. It’s interesting.

The Rule: Yuffie, Selphie, Eiko, Rikku, and Vanille
The Exception: None.

We Don’t Serve Your Kind Here

The cutest outcast around.

We frequently run into some sort of segregation in the game. Many times, the source of the hate and fear in the game is misplaced, but there’s always one race that carries the brunt of it. In FF7, you’ve got the Ancients some of whom are revered. It still makes Aerith one hell of a target.

In FF8, it was sorceresses. Naturally, Rinoa manages to become one. Handy, isn’t it?

Garnet and Eiko are the last two surviving members of a race that could summon beings and rock the very foundation of what we call ‘war’. There’s a reason why you don’t see Summoners on every street.

Rikku is an Al-Bhed. What’s more to say? These people keep tampering with a power that knocked us back into a primitive era. Blasphemers.

Fang and Vanille are from Gran Pulse, the terrible place underneath Cocoon that is the source of all the habitat’s woes. We might as well string them up right now for the crime of being born.

The Rule: Aerith, Rinoa, Eiko, Garnet, Rikku, Fang and Vanille
The Exception: None

Stay Tuned…

This will be a three part series. Want the remaining 9? You’re going to have to wait!

The game is pretty simple… You start off by controlling what appears to be a gust of wind.

This gust of wind is far from ordinary, however. Your main objective is to brush various flowers that litter the scenic landscape. When you touch a flower, you receive a petal from it and get to watch it burst into full bloom. The more flowers you come into contact with, the longer your petal train becomes.

Pastoral Beauty

Simple, no?

Despite the lack of dialogue, it’s not difficult to figure out what is happening in the storyline. For one, you’re no mere gust of wind. Touching the blooms coaxes spring itself to enter the little valleys you call your stomping grounds. What was once brown is now green with life… and tinkle noises. Did I mention that every flower you bloom makes a noise?

They even give you an antagonist halfway through the game. Evil electricity monster…

Each level has three secrets that you reveal by exploring the level, touching certain flowers, or playing with your environment. The flowers in the pots in the level selection area get healthier as you collect these secrets. Apparently they’re like fertilizer for your levels.

I’d seriously suggest getting this game for those of you who are thinking about it. It’s a wonderful little adventure that offers more replay time than I would have originally thought.

Gowalla's Mascot

The Skinny

When you sign up for the service, you receive a passport. As you go about town and check in at various user-created locations, you gain stamps in your passport.

Every stamp is a theme centric icon of the category of place you’re at. At a theater? Well, you’ll get a set of curtains. Coffee shop? You get not one cup but two! The icons seem to be where the root of my love for this app is.

Trips seem to be an integral part of the app. They’re essentially a list of locations put together to form an interesting little walk-about in your area. Currently, these include campus tours, pub and club crawls, and guided tours (or scavenger hunts) of places like zoos and parks.

It even integrates with Facebook and Twitter, which ensures my mom feels included. She gets to think she knows what I’m doing and where I’m going.

Opinions and Such

Look! We're on Gowalla!

The app seems neither competitive nor cooperative. The ideas they present are enjoyable and fun, but a lot of the features could be expanded to give the game more of a draw. Neither items nor trips pull in the users to participate in any particular way.

Trips could be expanded to include not just the largest of the US cities, but all US cities. These, just like spots, could be user-generated. Perhaps they would only show up online after a certain amount of people voted for the trip or checked into the locations on the trip.

Appropriate finds ftw.

The items are a wonderful idea and have great implications. When you look at an item, the item detail shows you the number of unique owners and where they picked the item up. Users should be encouraged to drop an item everywhere they go, trading items out for others. Having an item where the first user was halfway across the United States (or better yet from another country entirely) just seems like an awesome idea to me. It would help illustrate how the ease of travel and connections in the internet age have changed the way we do things.

Where to Give Feedback?

What they need is a FAQ for the intended use of the different aspects of the game. Thankfully, their support via Get Satisfaction is monitored. It can be difficult to find their account from their main Gowalla site. They’ve neglected to put a proper link there, and instead have opted to put one on the main marketing site for the development company. I don’t think their intention was to hide it, but they could have been a bit better about the linkage.

I’m looking forward to when users will be able to easily find one another based on where they frequently go. All in all, this is a beautiful and greatly interactive program. It’s based on a growing community of users that input their own data. We just need a way to truly customize our cities.

A ghost morph with chameleon skin that shows up in the book.

The game boils down to a few things:

• The human consciousness and personality have been digitized. You are now software.
• Your bodies are interchangeable cases for your personality. You will now be put into a body that fits your job description perfectly.
• Transhumanity (for that is what we are now called) has created artificial intelligence that managed to wipe out most of the population. One in eight survived the culling down on Earth, which is now a blasted, infectious ruin.
• Your basic interaction with the world of information is filtered by an AI known as a Muse which essentially acts as a personal assistant.

In most senses, the people of Eclipse Phase are immortal. If you back up your ego, you can start from where you left off, even if your body is unrecoverable from whatever mission you’ve managed to die quite inconveniently during. Unfortunately, there’s no real way of telling whether you were unrecoverable or you’d happened upon some information in your mission that you really shouldn’t have.

My Opinion

The idea is rock-solid. The world is expandable via the Pandora Gates, the fabricators, and the limitless habitat combinations.

The habitat that our GM has created for us is Appleseed meets Ghost in the Shell. There’s nothing quite like an apparently utopian world where you can switch out your bodies but the Hypercorp rules all.

A few of my favorite things about the system are the successes, failures, excellent successes/failures, criticals, and moxie points.

The game uses a d100 system where you roll against the stat. If I have a 65 in the skill Free Running, I have to roll 65 or lower to succeed the check. Naturally, there are modifiers and certain things are much harder than others. If I roll doubles (11, 22, 33), I get a critical success or critical failure. Now, if I succeed or fail by 30 points, I have managed to be excellent at either doing what I meant to do or failing spectacularly. I don’t need to tell you that if you roll a 00 you’ve pulled off a feat. 99, needless to say, sucks.

Moxie points are essentially your “oh shit” button. They allow you to swap the positions on the dice (93 turns into a 39), ignore all modifiers to a roll, go first in combat, upgrade a regular success making it a critical, or downgrade a critical failure into a regular face-plant. My two points are precious, but they’re important to utilize in appropriate situations. They only refresh after your character gets sufficient rest.

I Hate…

The bloody character sheet needs so much work it’s not funny. There are so many little flaws in that two-sided piece of paper that I’ve managed to list out 20 things I need to change. These are not small changes, either. I’ll lay a few on you, though:

The offending skills.

1. The skills feel squished. The ones that require specificity (like Hardware: Armorer, Piloting: Ground Craft, or Exotic Melee Weapon: Morning Star) don’t give you enough room to write that modification to the skill. You get the name and less than a finger’s width to scribble in.
2. The psi skills (which are obtained via a virus you contract) are squished in with all of the regular skills. There’s nothing demarcating them from the regular skills.
3. The Muse area has a full stat block. The problem with this is that regular Muses only have a single stat. There isn’t even upgrade information for these standard Muses. You can have AI’s and infomorphs (people who don’t have corporeal bodies and live purely in the digital world) acting as your Muse, so the section makes sense, at least. The skills for the Muse are all crammed together in paragraph format. You get to write them.
4. Gear is crammed into a paragraph like section.
   

   Morphs, Muses, Gear, and Traits.

5. You only have two spots for weapons: a single ranged and melee. My character has three ranged weapons and two melee weapons. The other player is in a very similar position. Where do we put those stats? It’s not like we’re not going to use the weapons.
6. There’s no apparent spot on your sheet for your money.
7. Positive and Negative Traits are not only in paragraph form, they occupy the same little block!

In the next few weeks, I’ll be building a new character sheet, and I’ll likely submit it to Eclipse Phase themselves. The ones I can find on their site don’t quite hit my design requirements.

But, enough bitching for now. Game on!

Acelynn

Currently a denizen of the server Steamweedle Cartel, Acelynn has been around for a while. Her previous incarnation, known as Annia, lived since the inception of the Burning Crusade (she is a blood elf, after all) on Moon Guard. Her story is one of the most interesting backstories I’ve had in WoW.

Demonologist, at your service.

Her sisters, a younger set of twins, were trained by their parents to follow in the family footsteps. One became a mage, frost instead of fire (scandalous, I know). The other trained in the arts of the priesthood.

Acelynn, by virtue of the only proficiency she had, became an accursed warlock. Instead of reveling in the power such summonings could grant her, her grandfather (the other black sheep of the family) trained her instead to revile it. The demons were to be learned from. They were to be examined for their weaknesses for the inevitable return of the Burning Legion who had twice before tried to summon their foul master Sargeras.

Asenka

This space-goat calls Steamwheedle Cartel home. It’s my first RP sever since my migration to Norgannon, which should prove interesting.

My very own space goat!

I haven’t gotten very far on her story yet. As the Draenei have crash-landed on the world, it allows me to approach Azeroth with a sense of morbid curiosity. “That does what… and you can eat that?”

A friend has decided to come and play a space-goat with me on the server, so we may entwine our stories a bit. Beyond that, I haven’t worked much on her personality or storyline much. I’m watching the storyline of her people plan out and learning more about the Draenei as I go.

Understanding the race your playing goes a long way into making a believable and entertaining backstory. You have to know what to adhere to and what to take over your knee and break to bits.

Folpest

Along with her sister, Filpest, Folpest wreaks havoc on Steamwheedle Cartel.

Folpest is a rogue. There’s nothing quite like a short, black haircut and a long, steel dagger. Unlike her sister, Folpest enjoys slaughtering and dissecting various creatures to see where exactly their various organs are. Filpest prefers to find if they have any inherent magic ability by pumping them with as much magical energy as she can to see what they do with it.

Her story line will be interesting once she realizes that Gnomeregan cannot be reclaimed.

The Run Down

As our resident game master said, there are many ways to lose, but only one way to win. You win by exposing all of the Old God shadows before the victory counter at the edge of the board reaches the corner and by closing all of the portals before that same counter gets to the end of its walk as you hold off the sixth shadow.

At the beginning of each full circuit, an event and two monster cards are drawn. When you draw a monster, if there’s a space for it it goes on the board. There are two of each regular monsters in the deck. If you pull a monster that’s already on the board, the effect on the bottom of the card gets activated. Some force every player to loose two sanity, some eat a vast amount of items, and others slide the victory counter up closer to your doom. Sometimes, you can fend off the slide by sacrificing items.

I hope you didn't need this item to kill that monster.

The turns go like this:

1. You play a location card and travel there.
2. You get to trade with players at the location.
3. You get attacked if there’s a monster at the location and then destroy the monster if you have the appropriate items.
4. You get to use an item.
5. You get to pick up an item and pay for it.

The game seats up to four. Each character receives a stack of cards with all of the seven locations on them plus the Secret Passage which allows you to go fight the sixth Old God. You’ve also got a sanity counter (which starts as six and steadily goes to zero as you run into the terrible things the portals are spitting out).

The character card has spots for three items and an artifact. There are four different types of items in the game. Glasses allow you to peak at the portals which reside face down at the locations. The Necronomicon allows you to expose the Old Gods one at a time. The dagger allows you to slaughter one of the monsters if the Witch of Salem (who the game is named for) is on the same location. The potions allow you to regain some of your sanity back, which is always a good thing.

The whole thing seems to take about an hour and a half.

My Experience

This game was completely brutal to us. Out of the six times we played, we only won once. The funny thing is, our death was never a slow decline into the deep. With a final flourish and a neat stab, we’re all dead and the Old Gods have slipped into this reality. That never makes for a good day, I assure you.

The first few games we played with one of the most frustrating rules I’ve run across: you cannot communicate with your fellow plays on which portal tiles are actually portals. You can’t return a location card you’ve already used to your hand until you’ve traveled to the University. This created an interesting play style that seemed contrary to the cooperative nature of the game.

The board has some great detail.

If you had glasses or an artifact to start the dance was easier. Otherwise, you had to find glasses, look at a portal, find the appropriate artifact, and then seal the portal. This required at least one trip back to the University. We decided early on that the best way around this was to allow communication. But, there was one trick. You could trade information only with people at the same location you were at (much like trading items).

The Witch of Salem, by virtue of the event cards we pulled, managed to be useless more often than not. In theory, he (yes, he) allows you to avoid damage from monsters, slaughter monsters with a single dagger, and to regain sanity points via potion at twice the going rate.

The only time we won we aggressively picked up items, attacked monsters, and revealed Gods. The portals were almost secondary. Every turn was planned out meticulously, and no monsters came out that truly decided to give us what for.

All in all, the game is more than willing to give you a delicious beating. When we beat it, we were shocked, and I wasn’t entirely sure we’d won. I look forward to finding other strategies to winning.

Just Real Quick, The Rules:

Each player has four attributes: Industry, Culture, Finance, and Politics. Each of these effect a different part of the game. Industry dictates what type of buildings you can create. The higher your score, the better the buildings. Raising your culture alters the amount of people you get in phase two of any turn. Finance changes the amount of people you buy back from the buildings as you use abilities. Your politics score indicates how many cards you can hold in your hand.

The turns go clockwise around the board, but happen in phases:

1. Choose a building to create.
2. Get your new influx of people.
3. Buy back your people that were in use.
4. Use your actions.

There are several common actions that you can use in Phase 4: attacking, occupying, drawing a card, and sailing. You must have a way to make every action you partake. You get actions in one of two ways. You either have a building that allows you to use the action, or you have a blue token captured from the board that allows you to use one of the abilities without having the corresponding building.

The game and all its bits.

Every action utilizes some of your population. Drawing a card only takes one person, but you have to have the appropriate amount of people inside of any given territory. Occupying and shipping take two each. One of them is required to activate the ability. The other poor sap is sent to either take the city or is shipped off to one of the new territories.

Attacking is the only way to occupy a city that’s already been taken. This takes three men. One is used to take the city. One is lost in the ensuing battle. The last man is used to occupy the newly liberated city.

The fourth phase happens repeatedly in any individual turn and continues until everyone passes.

What Happened…

What is most interesting to me is how the game ramps up. The first few turns are quick, with little more than a few seconds thought put into any one action. The entire game is played in seven full turns, so the last four are taken very seriously.

I won in such a way that made me the European based USA. I was the might of the area, slaughtering those that got in my way of taking over Europe but caring little for the other areas. I’d send a single ship out, perhaps take over a city or two if it was connected via an obvious trade route. Otherwise, foreign territories were ignored.

It was an awesome game. I look forward to playing it again and discovering other viable strategies. Maybe England is a good way to go.

My first drawing with my new tablet... Yay!

Meet Miriya. She’s an unhappy sort. Then again, if you were part of a mutation of the human race that was reviled and utilized like your standard wrench, you’d be unhappy too. Miriya is the character I play (to varying success). She’s cold, keeps to herself, enjoys incinerating other psychers with her favorite deathtoy, and long walks on the beach (assuming she’s seen one before).

I’ve not played in the 40k universe before, so I’m having some difficulty getting used to the ruleset. Beyond that, I don’t know quite enough about the world to be truly useful beyond the obvious. What’s even more fun is that I have abilities I don’t quite know how to use (see the above ruleset statement).

What I am doing, though, is having a crapton of fun. It’s been a while since I’ve played a game with a bunch of people who were in the game just to have fun. The gents there go for the story. They go for the way that the DM plays the NPCs. They’re there for the problem solving and tactics of a thing.

Unless I ask a spesific question, we’re progressing our characters, or getting ready to fight some nasty thing or another, the game’s books don’t even get cracked. They sit on the sidelines, waiting to be needed. The rules are not the focal point of the game. I can’t even explain how awesome it is that I don’t have to deal with rule pandering and min-maxing.

I’m learning that my head may only have so much more room for lore… but playing again, being immersed in a real story… I’m starting to write again, and that’s always a good thing. More about that later, though.