Gamerscore, or Someone Help Me

My name is Jonathan Singer and I have a problem.

I'm totally addicted to collecting Gamerscore. I know this is bad. Everything about it feels wrong. My recent readings on Buddhism have been telling me that collecting things is a bad thing, representing the attachment which leads inevitably to suffering. (More on Buddhism at some later time.) But it's a little sick, the time and effort I will put into eking out just a few more points in a game.

Case in point: Eternal Sonata.

I have had this game out from Gamefly since 2/21/08. I realize that it is a JRPG, and those tend to take a long-ass time to finish. But I should have long since sent this game back to the hell from whence it came, freeing up that spot on my Queue for other, better games (like the recently shipped Orange Box, though I question whether I will play any of Half-Life 2. I tend not to like getting involved in things part-way through, hence my not watching season 4 of BSG when it starts this Friday, because I'm still not done with Season 2, let alone started and finished Season 3). I mean, I already wrote about having finished Eternal Sonata and gotten the 300 and change achievement points that are possible on a first playthrough.

Of course, the game was made by a bunch of sick Japanese sadists, who require you to play through the Encore mode (basically New Game +, except you start back at level 1, with none of your equipment and the enemies all have twice the HP and 1.5 times the strength and defense) in order to get the other 600some points. This is awful. Who thought of this?

[Ed. note - At the same time, I have to grudgingly give the developers respect for making the second playthrough punishingly difficult. Once you got the timing of counterattacks and blocks down in the first playthrough, it was childishly easy. I could wipe out even the bosses that my walkthrough told me were really challenging. Really challenging for people who suck at video games, but not really challenging for me. I am a master. Well, this was before I played Encore and had Captain Dolce (oh the names are so awesome, so awesome. {cf. Polka}) sweep the floor with my bloomer-covered ass. I find myself again looking at how the course of the game has been changed forever, which is how I felt every time I got a new party level and found that the battle system was upgraded with some new quirk or other, that totally made things fresh and clean again. It's quite nice to find a game that I've spent so many damn hours on continue to surprise me, even if part of that surprise is discovering the inner depths of anger as I shout obscenities at the TV screen.]

Anyway, basically I've spent another 10 hours or so on this game, after having completed it once, just to get to the first of the second round of achievements, which was worth 79 points. So that's cool, but brings the time vs points ratio to like...7.9 points an hour. Hard math that. I actually busted out a calculator. No, really. I feel I can admit this to you, friendly reader types.

Now, the next few achievements will be easier to get, as I near the end of the game. And one of them is worth a cool 321 points, which is hott as Paris says, but really, it's a bit sick. I've pretty much lost enjoyment in the game and am now playing solely to get the achievements and send the bitch back to Gamefly, never to grace my sexy black Xbox ever agains! My replay(s) of Mass Effect will be far, far more enjoyable, because at least in that game, there are no children at all (yes!) and the adults are, on the whole (Preparation H feels good...), pretty sexalicious. And there is interactive sodomy, as they say.

Irregardless, I feel myself coming close to the end of Eternal Sonata and already, my spirit feels lighter and free. I don't even know what I'm going to do with myself when I don't have a bunch of Japanese schoolchildren babbling at me about Piu Grave and Shade Cometu. I'll miss you kids!

Impressions: Eternal Sonata

I know I promised a while back that I would post my impressions of this game when I finished it, and while I did finish it a few weeks back, I have not yet managed to get 1000 gamerpoints from it. Damn you, New Game +!

Anyhoo, I'll go ahead and post what my thoughts are, since the encore mode doesn't add anything new to it. Darn, I just realized that I had totally begun writing a post the other week about gamerscore and Eternal Sonata and then forgotten about it in the blur of a bunch of Japanese people taking over my every waking moment. Now that's over, I find myself to be not quite as un-busy as I suspected I would be. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, the farmer next door always used to tell me.

Regardless, Eternal Sonata. So, I got this game probably 2 months ago now from Gamefly, the greatest invention since Netflix. Ok, well it would be if things did not take like a week to ship to me and if they ever gave me the game I actually wanted rather than things I added months ago, on a whim, like Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker. WTFBBQ, I say to that? Why did that ever look appealing to me? My least favorite part of Dragon Quest VIII was the whole monster trainer aspect of it. Ghey. Anyhoo, sent that shit back.

So I get this game and decide to delve into the lovely world of JRPGs. I think this may be my first super Japanese JRPG. I mean, sure, I played Chrono Trigger/Cross and all of the Final Fantasy games, but they aren't quite as insane as this game is. Close, but not quite.

First of all, its premise centers around Chopin dying in his bed of good ol' Consumption. (Side note #1: No one ever looks sick in the game. They are all healthy looking six-twelve year olds.) As Choppy dies, his mind transports to a mystical, cel-shaded world where the terminally ill are granted magical powers. (Side note #2: There is never any explanation of why this is or what it accomplishes. Most interesting about this is that those who can't use "magic" can still, say...shoot arrows into the sky that rain down and heal your group. Or swing a giant 40' sword that has green-glowing chains hanging off of it. Not magical at all.) So Choppy insists that the world is all a dream, and naturally, in the end, it pretty much turns out that it is a dream and he simply needed to accept death in order for the dream to continue on without him. Of course!

So the chapters in the game are named after famouse Chopin pieces. (i.e. - Raindrops, Revolution, Fantasie-Impromptu, etc.) At either the intro or the end of each chapter is basically a slideshow presentation on the period in Chopin's life during which he wrote the piece that accompanies said chapter. This slideshow includes images of various locales in France (where he lived), Poland (where he was from), Austria (where he went to school) and Spain (where he died). I'll take a moment to note here that prior to playing this game, I knew absolutely nothing of Chopin and have not even gone and researched him on his wikipedia page. (Side Note #3: I totally want to do this now, but I'll wait so that my knowledge of his life in this post is based solely on what I learned in the game.) During this slideshow each chapter, the piece is played while subtitles explain what they believe his mental state to have been while he wrote it. For instance, Chapter 2--"Revolution"--in the game is about the main cast of characters going to visit Count Waltz (the big bad) to get him to stop raping the environment and his people (figuratively). In reality, Chopin wrote Revolutionary Etude while at school in Vienna in response to the revolution going on in his homeland. He was always a sickly child and felt a strong connection to the freedom fighters of his homeland. He wrote the piece as a show of his support for them, despite his physical incapabilities.

Now, Chopin's music (as I discovered over the course of the game), hardly needs a personal history for you to feel his emotions through it. A tribute, I suppose, to his insane musicianship. His pieces are brilliantly evocative in and of themselves, but I must say, it's nice to be able to understand a little more about where he was coming from.

The best part for me, is that this was explained to me through a video game. And at that, a JRPG that has some of the cheesiest plot and characters evs. I just can't really picture the last time a video game taught me anything. Well anything of factual reality.

Anyway, it compelled me to go buy an Essential Chopin cd on iTunes, to which I am currently listening. I always talk about wanting to get acquainted with other composers and such, but find it difficult to go out and just blindly buy something of theirs and get into it. Maybe this sort of game would work well to get the average person interested in amazing music. Chopin has the benefit of composing solely for the piano, so there's a lot less happening at the same time than in orchestral music. At the same time, the piano is second only to the voice in my opinion for conveying emotion. All in all, I encourage anyone to at least give the game a try. I realize I didn't write about gameplay at all, but it's actually pretty nice. The battle system is quick and efficient, not wasting any time with unneccesary loading times and it evolves over the course of the entire game up until the very, very end. So at least it always stays fresh and interesting that way. There are far worse ways to spend 20+ hours, and you always have Chopin.

Forum Trolls and Onion Knights

Journalman,

We meet again. You come here often? My place or yours? Rawr.

In a fit of RPG-mania I purchased a Nintendo DS over the weekend, in addition to three RPGs on Amazon.com (Final Fantasies IV, VI and Tactics Advance) and one with the DS (Final Fantasy III DS). Now, some might say that that is a mite excessive with the RPGs. After all, a good RPG takes anywhere from 50-70 hours to finish in a reasonably completionist manner. That's a significant number of days of my life slated for brain-rotting enhancing my strategery strategy.

I began with Final Fantasy III, as the other games have not shipped to me yet. This game hearkens back to the Ye Olde Dayes of White Mages and Black Mages, but they re-vamped it to be 3D and they gave the heroes personalities. Go figure. Way to ruin it!

Anyway, liking as I do to be absolutely perfect in RPGS, I read every single FAQ I could get my hands on and discovered a secret class obtainable only through use of the DS's stupid Wi-Fi system. Now, since I have about four friends total, and I'm the first to own a DS, this is clearly an impossible feat. Fie on the DS people. Or is my fie premature?

I decided to do a little trolling of the message boardsat GameFaqs to discover a solution to my seemingly insurmountable problem. It turns out, people exchange Friend Codes ALL THE TIME! So, I made a little account and posted asking for some friends. Two people replied, so we added each other and when I approached the moogle mail system next time, I had a letter awaiting me from Jeff. Jeff sent me a stamp for Master Devout (I've yet to discover what that means/does for me, but I'm excited regardless). So now, with a few more Moogle Letters and some hard work, I may just unlock the Onion Knight class for my dear sweet party. Granted, the Onion Knight supposedly sucks until you reach level 94 or so, but I'm diligent and hard-working and I will make it through the rain.

Love,
Henry A. Tilney