COMING SOON:

Uh, that says Clock Tower: Ghost Head. I guess the whole "other language" thing kind of spoils the reveal.

Anyhow: Yun Kouga's Clock Tower manga is winging its way to me! Let's hope I'm able to finish up Jen's novel before it arrives! (I'm halfway done with the last chapters.)

1. Live A Live: No, not every part of Live A Live works - it takes too many genuine risks for every punch to land. But, my God, so much does that even over 25 years on, it's still a revelation. Live A Live reexamines the RPG from every angle, from chapters hinging on taken-for-granted mechanics like searching the furnishings in a town for hidden items or the artistic challenge of emoting via overworld sprite art, to the typical assumptions that underpin the RPG itself. It does so, however, in a way that exudes love and respect for the genre and the story it's telling - it's not kneejerk ha-ha snarkiness or condescending finger-pointing but genuinely thoughtful and humanistic. The short scenarios give the gameplay and storytelling punch and variety; the graphics and sound are the pinnacle of the early-16-bit style they're evoking. Even the chapters that didn't work for me delivered sights and experiences far more indelible than any other RPG would dare to serve up: how many RPGs let you fight the toad shogun of Japan alongside Sakamoto Ryoma? It's really beautiful, a unique, special game that's clever and heartfelt. It's even encouraged me to look at life a little differently.

2. Tunic: I'm far from the first to say this, but: while "it's dangerous to go alone" references are thick on the ground in the world of indie gaming, Tunic is the first Zelda-alike actually to recapture what the original NES The Legend of Zelda felt like, focusing not on cheap dialogue pulls or visual quotes but that childhood sense of exploration and discovery. The techniques by which it accomplishes this - perspective tricks; images that can be taken one way but mean something else; the use of a fictitious system of writing that mostly obscures but, by dint of functioning linguistically, occasionally reveals - are supremely clever. It looks utterly fairytale and at the same time sleek and advanced. It is incredibly rewarding once you make those connections the game asks of you, and the revelations yielded are so often mind-blowing. It would be #1 in any other circumstance, but I'm afraid that games have to end well, and Tunic miscalculates and asks for too much - far, far too much - at the end. But for most of its length, it's the year's best balancing act: cozy, familiar, and fairytale, yet smart and shrewd to an unparalleled degree.

(I have more to say on this game, but a special note for the time being: disregard the opinions of anyone who complains about the combat. Yes, the combat has frustrations, but anyone who is still at the stage where combat is the primary concern has not progressed to the point where the game reveals its true focus, and issues.)

3. Loop Hero: I picked this up on impulse and had 50 hours of fun. You're probably familiar with it. Your little swordsman hero awakens in a void, devoid of civilization or life save for a little settlement at his starting campfire, and begins wandering. You repopulate the world, represented by the titular board game-like loop, with villages, ruins, swamps, meadows - and monsters will move in as well. As your hero fights them, he'll gain cards that represent not only scads of equipment but more potential locations to slot in on the loop.

Sounds somewhat standard, but your decisions are all strategic, none tactical. You choose what locations to place where on the loop, with what to equip your hero, but not his moment-to-moment movements: he moves relentlessly forward on his path and attacks automatically in battle. You have to place locations to ensure he gains the provisions and stats he needs to withstand the progressively-tougher enemies that appear each loop and the bosses that eventually rear their heads, but you also have to prevent him from being overwhelmed. Every location and piece of equipment has buffs and synergies, and the consistent flood of new cards ensures you're constantly active moment to moment and tripping upon new discoveries (uh, might not be a good idea to put that vampire manor next to a defenseless village). You also have to decide when to stop traveling the loop and get off at the campfire, as defeat mid-loop means the loss of almost all the materials you've gathered along the way to rebuild your settlement.

As you rebuild your home base, more people will reemerge, and the world will gradually remember itself. (The loop in the ever-transient outer world, meanwhile, will completely reset itself for your next expedition.) But how did everything disappear in the first place? The cornerstone to Loop Hero is the addictive gameplay that balances long-term planning, in-the-moment adjustments, and luck, but the (literal) worldbuilding plasters up the corners: with engaging writing in the worldbook or the conversations with newcomers, or some of the most beautiful pixel art anywhere.

4. Vampire Survivors: You know what this is. It spun stolen pixel art and mobile slot machine mechanics and lollercoaster XBLIG energy into sheer gold through sheer strength of gameplay and self-aware stupidity and actually leveraging some of the more dirtbag elements in gaming for unadulterated good. The dirt-cheap price and utterly constant updates were machine-gun kicks to the face of productions hundreds of times bigger and more expensive. It was brilliant, and there's no use in pretending it wasn't.

Fuck it - 5. Black Wolf: This is a little two-dollar platformer on Switch. It doesn't even have a title screen. I, am, as of this writing, the only person to log a time for it on How Long to Beat. And yet: It took a difficult genre and made the heart of it accessible yet understood what was limiting and unfun about it. It's a Meat Boy-alike, but the levels are bite-sized, revealing them as puzzles with a reflex component, acute tests of physical and mental agility, and eliminating the mind-numbing boredom that comes with doing kaizo bullshit over and over again. Hey, a game in this genre dared to ask the question: What if video games were fun? A basic run through Black Wolf lasts a little over an hour, but it's pretty and entertaining and respected my time, which is a far higher bar than most games clear nowadays.

So I was browsing Yahoo Japan at one of those sporadic times I remember I'm supposed to be looking for the Clock Tower: Ghost Head/The Struggle Within manga that was published in '98 but never preserved in a compilation, and I run across this:

Not the right year of GFantasy, but hold on:

There was an ActRaiser manga?

A look at the images on display suggests that ActRaiser, like other epic '90s SNES properties, got the generic "teenage boy with sword adventure" treatment. A bit more of a downgrade in the case of ActRaiser, where you're literally playing God.

Additional pages give a glimpse of other renowned ActRaiser characters:

  • heroine in maid outfit
  • goddess in '80s power suit
  • guy with '90s round pince-nez sunglasses who should have a rattail if he doesn't

The manga hasn't been fan-translated yet, apparently.

Hmm.

ETA: OK, I've ordered the manga; we'll get to the bottom of this.

(Now expanded with my invaluable commentary!)

I've been systematically translating the Lunar interviews from Beep21, but there's news that I think can't wait. In the second part of his Eternal Blue interview, Kei Shigema talks about having drawn up a treatment for another Lunar - and it's not the story you might first think:

- Do you think you'll be able to be present the tale of the Four Heroes era (the so-called Lunar 0) touched upon in the PSP version of Silver Star in a game or other media?

Shigema: Lunar 0 has become a story of a bit different era!
As for the tale of the Four Heroes: the emotions and conflicts and fated bonds involved are released and resolved in Alex's story, so I don't think there's any need to depict it independently.
However, I'd like to write a little bit about Laike's story after the end of the game.
- Be honest: is there even a 0.1% chance of Lunar 3 in the future? I'm on pins and needles!

Shigema: I think the statute of limitations is up, so... (Actually, about 21 lines of grown-up stuff was deleted here...)
...So several years after the above was suspended, there were talks about whether we could now create a Lunar 0 about the details of how humanity moved to Lunar, and for consideration, we created a simple plot and characters. Mr. Kubooka even drew up rough sketches of the main characters.
These were just for consideration; they didn't go to production.
That means that, as for as the 0.1% chance goes: I don't think it's zero.
However: an extraordinary amount of manpower and funding is necessary to create an RPG from scratch in this day and age, and when I think of getting to the point of getting that all together, I think it would be enormously difficult.
I myself still want to hold out hope, so let's give Game Arts our support!

He also talks about his ideas on what may have happened after EB, which include a number of surprising concepts...

- What happened to Hiro and Lucia afterward?

Shigema: Welllll, I don't know—I suppose they went on a variety of adventures together?
Lucia may have awakened the Blue Star, but I don't imagine it would have revived immediately just like that. I wouldn't be surprised if an exhausted Hiro & Lucia had two or three more adventures on the level of Eternal Blue! Making new comrades from people sleeping on the Blue Star—maybe everyone on Lunar coming to help, of course. I also kind of doubt whether that would've really been the last we saw of Ghaleon-sama. And perhaps at the end of Hiro and Lucia's adventures, the frozen earth would have changed to green...

Shigema also thinks that the spiritual successor to Lunar has already been made:

Incidentally, while it's not a sequel to Lunar, Tales of Destiny 2 (TOD2) is its spiritual successor—its emotional heir.

I'd wanted overseas Lunar fans to play it, too, but, alas, there was no overseas release!
Abroad, Tales of Eternia was sold as "Tales of Destiny 2".

The role of TOD2's lengthy animated cutscenes; the expressions; the characters and story construction; the thematic material; the position of the heroine; the music production; and on and on—I think they're all connected fairly directly to Lunar. The element of romance between the characters etc. too is that way.

Particularly thematically, Lunar is, as an action-adventure tale, thoroughly about how the hero fights to save the girl he loves and saves the world in the process. With TOD2, we tried to go further and depict the decisions and growth of a hero forced to choose between the girl and the world.

Shigema is credited as a "script producer" on Tales of Destiny 2.

My response to all this can be summarized by this splendid editorial cartoon edit by political cartoonist pandorkful:

Going point by point: