Blog: Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 22)

This volume of my favorite YouTube videos includes some cool music, some cool writing and some cool costumes.

• The first video this volume is Bill Withers singing "Ain't No Sunshine". This is an incredible performance with so much passion. I'm not sure where it's from, but it's worth taking the time to enjoy.
• The next video is Alex Day and Bryarly Bishop, singing "Under the Sea" from Disney's "The Little Mermaid".
• The next video another vlogbrother video, this one with John and Hank together (which is the best kind of vlogbrother video). Beyond that I'm not sure why I favorited it, other than the generally entertaining insanity and possibly The Katherine hiding in the bathroom (spoilers). Plus Ellen Hardcastle is my favorite album by Hank so far.
• The next video, again from the vlogbrothers is the first part of the nerdfighter book club on "The Great Gatsby". Whenever John talks books it's interesting, but now I'm especially interested in this one because he has returned to it on their Crash Course channel. The concepts are the same but the presentation has changed.
• Finally we have a lipdub of cosplayers from the London Film & Comic Con in July 2011 by Cosplay Fever.

Blog: Thoughts on Tales of Graces f

I recently finished playing Tales of Graces f. Which is a PS3 expanded port of a Wii game (Tales of Graces). It's a jrpg that is part of the long running Tales series. Quite a while ago I played through the GameCube Tales of Symphonia, but other than that I haven't played other games in the series.

Tales of Graces f (via GameFaqs)

This game is an action rpg, in which you run around on the world map and then when you run into enemies (which are visible in the world) you enter a combat environment where you can move around the enemies and use different combat commands which are bound to the different controller buttons. The rest of the time you run around the world and talk with people and try to avoid TOTAL ANNIHILATION OF THE PLANET (as I said, it's a jrpg). Interestingly the game is also set over 3 (well 2 and a half) different time periods where you play first as a child and then later as a young adult. The last section of game takes place about six months after than the main story line and gives you an extra adventure and a bit of a "where are they now" section.

I'm very charmed by this game. Objectively, it would be hard to rate it as especially good since it has some design and technical problems that hold it back from being excellent, equally it would be hard to consider it bad since none of its problems are game-breaking. Overall it's average, however I enjoyed playing it and as I said I was really charmed by our encounter (which lasted 50 or so hours).

Some of the visuals are pretty cool. (via GameFaqs)

I'll talk below about the things I liked, didn't like, thought about and would include in a game of my own. As always please be warned since there will be spoilers.

Things I Liked

Many of the things I liked I only came to like after a lot of time spent playing the game. By the end of the game, I came to really like the characters, but in the earlier parts of the story they felt flat and a little unpleasant. As you spend more time with them and as the story lets them develop they become a lot more lovable and entertaining.

While the characters got better overtime I think I may have enjoyed the story a little less at its end than I did at its beginning. In the earliest phases we play a local lord caught in a greater conflict between three greater kingdoms who are all suffering a shortage of the magical go-powder that makes all the magic and technology work. Later the game shifts to more of standard, chase down the giant evil and kill them (although it is actually more nuanced than that). Overall the story was still a good part of the game.

Another thing I liked, although I don't know that it's the kind of thing I want included in every game, is the aging up structure of the narrative. Playing the first few chapters as kids lets you be bad at the game while your character is still young (which makes more sense than why a 20 something year old soldier is not quite sure which end of the gun/sword/gunsword should be pointed at the rats). It also offers more narrative options than keeping the time in the game continuous, so you're able to be a kid, have a tramatic event happen and then runaway to clown school (by which I mean the knight academy). I don't know that they implemented it quite as well as they might have, there are things that might have been done better and worked into the story (you lived two blocks away from your friend for 7 years and never talked to him?), but overall I think it made the story work in this game.

Hey we're just kids right now! (via GameFaqs)

I also liked getting an extra mini-adventure at the end of the game. This was added on for the PS3 version and lets you return to your main characters six months after the end of the main quest. It's nice to get a calm way to transition out of the game at the end. The story was less intense, but still interesting and lets you see the characters returning to their real world jobs and sorting out their real world relationships. As with the rest of the story it could be slightly better and less melodramatic but it was a really nice way to finish the game.

Things I Didn't Like

For some reason the developers created an artificial intelligent for the camera and made it terrified of the main characters. It was difficult to see things in many areas of the game because the camera was so far away from the action. Some of this might be in the nature of PS3 games (and my having a not-quite-actually-hd television, it was also somethings difficult to read the type) and it did make it easier to see the enemies around you, however at first at least I found it really disconnecting. I understand that the models and textures might not be at the top of the line for the PS3 but it would have been nice to actually see some of what was going on.

I also found that the difficulty on the bosses was way harder than any of the mooks in the area. I guess the intention was that I should grind more, but I (for some crazy reason) didn't want to grind. It's especially frustrating since the difficulty shows up at strange times in the game (you might get five boss fights in a row that are easy and then one that's nearly impossible). Other than an attempt to boost the hours that the game takes, I suspect that some of the difficulty imbalance is due to the fact that single enemies are at a great disadvantage of groups of enemies (since they are easy to stun-lock and simply can't move as fast as your party of four fighters), however for story reasons some bosses need to fight alone and so they ramp up the difficulty to keep things "balanced".

The combat system was also quite complicated (or I was fairly dumb). After 40 hours of play time I was still learning how the game worked. While I certainly take some of the blame, having not played a "modern" jrpg (the last I think I played was Final Fantasy 12, which isn't modern or at all the same) and having not played a tales game in a very long time. On the other hand the game was still giving introductory tutorial messages during a boss fight more than 30 hours into the game. At the end (especially in the future section) I felt good with the combat system and got better at winning fights, but it certainly took me a long time.

The combat system ... of course we know what's going on here. (via GameFaqs)

The crafting systems was frustratingly complex for very little pay off. Craftable things seem to come in three types, food (and items), gear and valuables. The valuables system was fairly straight forward, but required you to go through the list of every item you have available and see what it can be crafted with, then you can sell the outcome (or save them to see what you can combine them with). The actual utility of this never became clear to me other than to have a bank of spare cash and it took more time than I'd really have liked.

The food system basically works the same way. When you have food as an item you can use it to heal the whole party for some percentage of their HP. More interestingly if you use the crazy inexplicable object creator thingy to make food, it can produce effects in the battle environment (like reviving dead characters, yay cheeseburgers). While this is cool, the fact that no food items are not actually usable to produce effects makes the whole system less helpful.

The gear system is where the problems really stood out to me. As far as I can tell there were at least four different mechanics that affected the creation of gear. Some of them augmented gear and others gave you new types of gear and then somehow you could get things back from gear without losing the augments and then ... you could do something with them. Unfortunately this is not at all intuitive or explained well in the tutorial text and I was never able to understand it. (And I'm willing to admit that it might be me as much as it's the game).

Things I Noticed

Back in the days of the Super Nintendo, on the the things I enjoyed about many RPGs was the sudden access to flight, freeing you up to travel around the world anywhere you want to go and to do anything you want to do. In particular the mode-7 airship from Final Fantasy VI (3) and Flammie the Mana Dragon from Secret of Mana hold a special place in my heart.

Now however, most games don't allow you to fly around the world. In Tales of Graces f you can't even pick your destination from the map, you have to pick it from a list beside the map. Given that it's tough to remember where you want to go by name some times this isn't an ideal solution to the going places problem. It's also much less immersive and fun than getting to fly yourself

Things I'd Include in a Game

One of the interesting things about this game is that I don't feel like there are any components I'd really chose to integrate into a game. Basically, while I enjoyed the game, I didn't feel that any of the novel parts of the game were actually things I'd choose to play.

Final Thoughts

Overall it's a little difficult to talk about  this game. I definitely enjoyed it and will probably play bits of it again at some point in the future, but overall it didn't stay with me the way some games do. I also think that while it's a fun game it's not a great starting point either for the series or the genre. Tales of Graces f is a solid game but nothing to really shake up your world.

He has crazy eyes, but it's only because someone crazy got in one of his eyes ... (via GameFaqs)

Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 21)

This volume of my favorite YouTube videos contains some thoughtfulness, some music, some video games and some laughs.

• The first video in this volume is from Corning, and (this might shock you) it's about glass. On the one hand it's a pretty standard corporate puff piece about how awesome they'll make your future, but I was mostly interested in it because it's a pretty good illustration (in my opinion) of how our technology should work for us over the next 20 years. I favorited this one because I thought the concepts were really interesting.
• The next video is by vlogger/designer Karen Kavett. These are her reflections on her time at RISD as she graduates. It's a cool, well produced video with a lot of heart and interesting reflections on her time as a student. It's nice to see someone who's education went so well and was so in line with where they wanted their life to go. 
• The third video in this volume is composer/pianist Laura Shigihara playing an improvised arraignment of music from Secret of Mana. It's a very restful piece and Secret of Mana's music always makes the hair on my arms stand up.
• The next video is a recording of a panel from the Calgary Comic Expo 2011, featuring the voices of the childhood of anyone of my generation, Rob Paulsen, Maurice LaMarche and Jess Harnell. I was lucky enough to attend this panel and I thoroughly enjoyed it and am glad the chance exists to relive it through YouTube.
• The final video for this volume is another video song from Pomplamoose, their original song River Shiver. 

Project 6 : 100 Sketches

Over the years I've taken a few drawing classes and other kinds of art class. I've reached the point of being not terrible, but I'm never going to get better without practicing regularly which I haven't found the time and motivation to do. To give myself a kick to practicing more I'm starting a new project. My goal for this project is to practice sketching for at lest 15 minutes a day for 100 days in the next six months.

A sketching of things, using Paper on the iPad.

I'm not going to share all my sketches, since most of them probably won't be that good and I don't want to stress myself out about quality. If there are some I feel like showing off then you might see them in an update here.

The deadline for this project will be July 1, 2013 and I'm going to try to have 100 days of sketching between then and now.