Detroit Metal City

So what do you get when you combine the awesomeness of anime and the epic epicness of death metal? You end up getting Detroit Metal City (DMC), the anime I just finished watching. This was about one of the best I have seen yet (even though I haven’t claimed to have seen a lot – that’s a lifetime goal), for a long list of reasons; if you’re aren’t into metal, or are the faint of heart, then I would suggest possibly watching something else that is up your alley. This one will tear up those who don’t like metal and make them scream in pain – because that’s what Krauser, the main character’s stage identity, would have wanted.

It was Great!

I loved the very simple story of DMC. DMC stars Negishi, a boy who left his home to Tokyo to make his dream come real. He wants to be a guitarist and singer for a trendy band that plays Swedish pop music. But, to his dismay, he ends up being the frontman for indie death metal band DMC, a band notorious for their commitment to everything demonic and metal. Negishi’s onstage persona, Krauser II, is supposed to be a demonic emperor who claims to have raped, killed, and done everything wrong in the world to anyone who has crossed his way (including his parents). Yeah, this is not for those who like cutesy stuff in their anime. Negishi ends up touring across the country, trying to show his love to Aikawa (his unrequited lover), showing his supremacy as a musician, and prmoting his band as the best thing since sliced bread (since the president/manager forces him to). What was great about much of the story was that Negishi really wants to escape his current life, but whenever he tries to do so, hilarity ends up ensuing that pulls him deeper and deeper into the metal world, earning him thousands of more fans daily. Examples of this include: hanging himself, pseudo-humping everything, screaming curses, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. These funny moments I apprecaited very much, especially since I have been exposed to mostly action-based anime with very little humor these past months.

I must say one of the best parts of DMC was Krauser II (aka Negishi’s stage persona). I loved the fact that he would viscerally scream on and off the stage and would say the most insulting things to people. But as soon as he would say something awful, for example, to his unrequited lover, he would immediately try to cover it by saying something else. This type of situation played itself over and over again and I didn’t stop laughing the whole time. I also loved how he would just scream and try to relate everything that he was doing to the fact that he was supposed to be a demonic king from the underworld. Krauser II was the embodiment of everything I love about metal, and I see myself definitely making his costume in the future. I’m attached to the persona duality of Negishi, and I haven’t really let out my inner metal beast in a long time. Besides, it’ll be fun to learn how to do his facepaint and try to create a metal costume. And if people recognize me, I think it’ll be funny to try to say some of the stuff Krauser does, not to mention shredding the guitar with my teeth.

Another great aspect of DMC was that it featured everything that I enjoy about the metal world. It inculded all of the wonderful language: face melting, shredding guitars, double-bass drumming, swearing, demons, blood, sex, gore – all of these I find quite entertaining as a listener of metal. With an anime twist on this culture, it was even better and made me appreciate my love for metal even more. DMC also had all of the fashion of metal: armor, face paint, gloves, and all of the musical equipment. I wanna go out and buy a whole bunch of metal and goth-like clothing now to celebrate my love for metal and DMC. I’ll put some of that on my Christmas list.

I Need Moar!

The only complaint I have with DMC was that the episodes were very short and quick. Each episode was only around 12-14 minutes in length, much shorter than I am used to (but it did feel great to watch 4-6 episodes per night!). Every time I felt like I was getting into the flow of each episode, it would be over, and that made me sad. But I’ll definitely be going back to this anime – as, if you couldn’t tell – is now one of my favorites.

Overall, though, if you want some great laughs, comedy, and a heaping dose of metal in your anime, I’d definitely recommend this for your viewing time. Even if you aren’t into metal that much, I’d still say give it a time if you’re a fan of randomness helping the main character get through many of his troubles.

Gungrave

Another anime I finished watching this summer is Gungrave. This is an anime featuring the story of Brandon Heat as he adventures into the world of mafia, crime, and the afterlife. This story crafted a tale full of action, friendship, and gunfire – enough to keep most other gangsters at bay. I’ll hope to convey why I liked this story and the characters to you from this reflection of my anime experience, and the screenshots that follow. I hope you enjoy the story of this anime as well and come back and write some comments.


What I really enjoyed

In Gungrave, there’s a lot of action. And when I say action, I mean violence and fighting. Almost every episode, there’s people beating up each other (in a similar fashion to Fight Club), shooting tons of bullets, blood over the place, supernatural events, or gangs of mafia looting and killing vast amounts of people. If you like a lot of action, this will be your cup of tea (but be forewarned that you’ll have to wait to get satisfied – see below).

I also thoroughly enjoyed the main character, Grave/Brandon Heat. Brandon is a tough and physically fit man who is only motivated by a couple of simple stimuli: love for his girlfriend and the ability to protect his friends and the ones he loves (e.g. his girlfriend and Big Daddy). He also has the ability to completely decimate any enemy that comes his way with his fists and his pinpoint accuracy with any type of gun – whether that be his modified pistol/shotguns or a minigun. He completely rocks, and since I like to protect the ones I love and care for as much as I can, I have placed Grave on my list to make a costume for when I go to a con in the near future.

There were many elements of the main story and its theme that I also enjoyed a lot, too. I enjoyed how Brandon and many of the characters he met ended up changing their lives for the better through the power of protecting the ones you love and the friendship that is created through tight bonds and adversity. Just graduating from grad school and trying to pick up new friends here in Kentucky, and trying to maintain all of my friendships, this theme touched me on a very personal level. I’ll always have a place in my heart for friendship and anime that touch on these powerful themes. I also enjoyed how this anime blended mafia movies, action movies, gunslinging, and a love story (Brandon and Maria, his girlfriend). It was a unique combination that created a new experience every episode, and was interesting to watch and cheer on the main characters.

What I didn’t like as much

As much as loved this anime, which was a lot, there were some parts of this experience that I didn’t enjoy. For me, the biggest part of the anime that I didn’t like was the pacing. The frist episode featured a lot of great action, explosions, destruction, gunfire, and a whole bunch of epic epicness. Then the story did a very long backstory, which I understand why the writers did that, but there wasn’t much action during the revealing of the relationship between Brandon and his friend that would rise to power. At many times, it felt like going through mud, and I didn’t watch as much until the action picked back up within the last 10 episodes.

For me, I didn’t really end up enjoying the music in Gungrave as I thought I would. With a great mafia theme, I would have expected some great 1930s-style jazz or Italian music, but this wasn’t the case. There was mostly down-tempo ambient music with some bass and drums. Occassionally, they’ll slip in some fast drum beats during some of the action scenes, but mostly the music reflected the current flow of the anime: slow and steady, just like the revelation of the backstory. It kept me wanting more from the soundtrack.


Overall, though this anime took me a lot longer to complete because of the slow backstory, I’d still recommend it to you to watch. It had some great action and battles, and not to mention a great hero that I personally identify with. Look for some updates from me on creating his costume in the near future. I just love any anime and characters that embody what it means to love and protect someone near and dear to you.

Have a great one!

Saki

In addition to playing and finishing some new games, I also got the chance to finish a couple of anime series. One of these was Saki, an interesting take upon the game of Mahjong and the World Poker Tour. And it was all done in the traditional anime style. There was much to Saki that I enjoyed, but there were only a couple of things that took away from the great story, in my opinion. Overall, though, I think you should pick this up and enjoy watching some clever Mahjong action.



What was Win


In case you don’t already know, “win” is the internet term for awesome, great, or some other relative synonym. Anyways, there was a lot to like in this anime. First, the story was pretty good. This anime stars a first-year high school girl, Saki, who just recently got into high school and has found a mysterious building (and mysterious girl) on campus. It just so happens that this building is home to the school’s Mahjong club, and the mysterious girl is the reigning middle school champion of Japan. Saki, our main heroine, goes to this building after school, and decides to play Mahjong with the other club members (almost all girls, and 1 dude). Saki, although not winning, consecutively shows her skills by scoring +-0 every time (really, really hard to do in Mahjong). After the other members see her skill, they want her to join their club, and Saki eventually does. The group then decides to train hard to get to the prefectural qualifiers, the gateway to national-level Mahjong competition for both the team and individual versions. Along the way, the group ends up becoming close and pulls for each other.


What I really liked the best was the character development: there were around 20+ characters, all of which were multi-dimensional and quite relatable. For me, I related to Saki, as she originally didn’t play her best, as it took away the fun for others who were playing (and they would also get really, really angry). She ended up learning how to play well by keeping her score at +-0 to make sure everyone else could win and have fun. This was very reminiscent of how I try to play many games: to make sure others have fun. For the most part, there was a character in there almost anyone could relate to, which I feel helps to strengthen the anime.

The animation and humor also kept me watching the anime. The anime was vivid, and contained tons of color. They also transitioned from traditional drawing to the humorous type of drawing multiple times, which helped to reinforce the humorous aspects of the anime (like the tacos one of the main characters liked to eat, or how they always made the one dude in the club grab all the food). Not only was the animation done well, but they also included special effects like lightning and angel wings, which related to the type of player each character was (e.g. stealthy, attacking, defensive, demonic, etc.). This was pretty darn cool. Oh, and they also did some cool 3D animation of all of the Mahjong tiles when critical times in the game and the story took place.


In addition to the great animation and drawing style, the designers of this anime also implemented a World Poker Tour (WPT) type of style for looking at all of the Mahjong tiles. The camera would zoom in and reveal the tiles for each player as the camera would pan and track to each of the different characters. The characters would also think aloud their strategies so that the viewers could have a better idea as to why they were playing the way they were (and I don’t have a clue about Mahjong, but after this anime, I would like to learn how to play!). Also, they had two commentators that would try to hype up the action of every tile, which was quite funny and distracting (though none of them commented like Vince Van Patten or Mike Sexton, the WPT commentators) at times. It felt like I was actually watching the tournament on the TVs at the tournament, and that also was a critical piece to why I really enjoyed the anime. I also really enjoyed the bright and up-tempo music, too.

I could have used less of…

Fanservice. Apparently I’m not the targeted type of viewer for this anime. There was a lot of jiggling. And there were many, many shots of legs and short skirts. Whenever a person was scared, a camera would instantly cut to legs, short skirts, and sweat. Or, when some of the girls would start running, the camera would cut to their short skirts or their anatomy jiggling. Some of the girls would also try to heckle the most endowed character by making her feel bad about her “fat”-ness. Yeah – not needed, in my opinion. There was all of the above to make the anime really fun to watch. But then again, like my friends at work say, I’m not 13, or watching anime for this type of pleasure.

So if you like that type of action as well, then this anime will have everything you’ll ever want. Even still – I’d say go grab this one and enjoy the epic Mahjong action. I’m waiting for season 2 to come out as see what happens next.

Final Fantasy 13

As a gift to myself after I finished grad school, I ended up buying myself Final Fantasy 13. I really, really enjoy RPGs and the Final Fantasy series in general, which also helped me to see buying this game as a no-brainer. After completing it this past week, after playing it for almost 3 months, I want to share my thoughts and feelings about the experience of playing FF13 with you. Hopefully, after reading this, I hope you get the game and also send your thoughts my way to help propel gaming and design for games and experience forward.

A Great Story and Epic Epicness


I enjoyed a lot of the experience of FF13. I loved all of the character designs and the depth of the characters. Lightning, Snow, Fang, Hope, Vanille, and Sazh all had interesting and beautiful costumes. The designs outdid themselves in their visual design of these characters, and the fully animated cutscenes looked beautiful and polished. It was VERY pretty. My favorite character was Vanille: not only was she the most well-rounded attacking character (she could debuff and attack – any time I had trouble with a boss, which happened a lot more than I expected), but she also was one of the characters who cared most about her friends in the main group and about protecting the world for the today, and for the future. The environments were also beautifully rendered, and I enjoyed going through all of them and trying to find all of the hidden items. They also ended up using a very good cuing system that would help me find all of the items, know when bosses were coming up, and also when I should be leveling up (which was quite often – any time when I got to a new environment, had enemies that just wouldn’t go down, or when there was intense music on). All of these small, subtle aspects of gameplay I still take for granted: without these small details that take into account the human aspect of gaming, I’d be remarkably less happy with this game.


I also really liked the crystarium. Much like the sphere grid of FF10, which is what I call the crystarium much of the time, it was a great way to entice the player to keep grinding to get to the greatest of rewards: the power to wipe any baddie off the screen as fast as possible through tons of HP, attacks, and abilities. The crystarium also had different sets of spheres to let the player know what is coming up to work for, which was great for me, as it helped me plan my playing sessions around how far I could get my characters to evolve during the current session. The crystarium also was beautiful visually to look at, which was a step above the plain sphere grid of FF10.


The Mixed Feelings of the Paradigms and Battle System


I did like a couple aspects of the battle system. The paradigm system was very flexible, allowing a player to create a setup to attack almost any type of situation. On the flip side to this, though, if the player wanted to switch out characters to better adapt to upcoming battles, the player had to reset everything over and over again. Setting up paradigms does take a little time to do, and it would have been more convenient for the game to keep your paradigms, regardless of the characters in the current party. With the flexibility of the paradigms, it allowed me to take advantage of something new to Final Fantasy: the chain gauge. The percentage reflects how much damage the player will do to the enemy, and repeated attacks can make the enemies become staggered, preventing them from attacking many times and also yielding higher and higher percentages of damage (but caps at 999.9%), which is essential to utilize against bosses and enemies with high HP, otherwise you’ll get completely decimated.

Here’s what I didn’t like about the battle system: I didn’t appreciate having to have my characters “locked in” to the different roles (commando, ravager, sentinel, medic, saboteur, synergist) and having to devote time to switching roles with paradigms. There were many times in this game where many of my characters would die because they would get hit during the paradigm switches or right when they were about to save themselves. The last part is sort of expected with gaming, but, at least on the 360, pressing the left-bumper, along with the directional pad, wasn’t very responsive, so I would lose even more time pressing the same buttons over and over again trying to get my team to switch to healing or back to attacking. That is totally aggravating. I also didn’t like how, for every battle, that the first switch of paradigms took forever, but all the rest were quick. This is a classic “cool” thing we get taught in design school: it may be cool to put in for an effect that’ll be used a couple of times, but it quickly loses its charm when it’s repeated thousands of times. And it was repeated at least a thousand times. And then another thousand. While it fits in the realm of Final Fantasy, it does pretty much nothing to help the player, and that’s what I don’t like.

A smaller, yet just as annoying aspect of the battle system, is that you couldn’t tell the characters where to stand during battle. You can help tell them what they should be doing, but pretty much they are glued to the same spot the whole time. And, conveniently for the player, all the characters happen to stand in the same location, making it super-easy for all the enemies to unleash seas of AOE (area or effect) attacks on you, without pretty much any way to defend against them. That causes a lot of unnessecary deaths and a lot of frustration.

A Lot More of the Same


While I do enjoy the ability to jump into a game and the battle system, I have to say there’s a lot of the same. The same grinding experience. Over. And over. And over again. I was able to clear the game in a little over 70 hours, which is about par for a long RPG (it’s 3 discs, after all). But, for more than half of them, I was sitting in the same parts of the world, whether on Grand Pulse, in the mountains, on flying ships, or in fantastical realities just walking around and waiting for monsters to respawn. That’s because the characters I control didn’t have enough abilities/HP/attack to be able to take down a good proportion of the monsters. I got killed – a lot – because either they would 1-shot me, debuff me completely, or just have too much HP and outlast me. And I take care to max out my characters whenever I can, and when this happens, I know that the balance is tipped against the player; this is especially true when most of the monsters have 6 and 7 digits worth of HP. And don’t get me started about the final boss run – it was the first Final Fantasy bosses that actually gave me trouble, even when I was as maxed out as I could be; the designers did a very, very good job at knowing how to make the end as tough and as infuriating as possible.

I also am still contemplating about trying to 100% the game. Evaluating how much I have left to do – maxing out the crystarium (which is about 30 million or so points left to go for me), getting the best weapons and leveling them up to maximum level, and going after all of the hunts on Grand Pulse – will take me, at a conservative estimate, around 70 or so more hours. Before grad school and being at work for most of the day, I could be able to do this in around 2 weeks. Now, with the ability to play about an hour or so a day, and wanting to invest my time in other activities, I’ll probably get to this in about half a year when I’m really bored. Sorry, Square, but that is just a huge wall to complete, and the experience of the battles in this game and the extras is compelling enough for me to come back. I’d come back to make Hope’s costume, but that’s about it.

And this game used the typical bad guy motivation I’ve seen over and over again in many RPGs to destroy the world. While not writing this down to spoil the game for you, I’m really getting tired of this same motivation. Whatever happened to psycho bad guys, homocidal maniacs, or just the most evil people that we have ever seen? I’m hoping those return soon, as I don’t want to be able to guess how the story ends from the moment the final bad guy appears one-third through the game. I think this is one of the elements of many games that pulls me out of the experience of being absorbed in a great game and story and into just a regular game with different characters in it.

I may be a tough gamer, but I really want to help push the medium and the design of games forward. They rely upon building and delivering great experiences, but many times fail to deliver. I would hope they try and use more human-centric means to help build these experiences, and not what technology and sales say games should be.

Even with this in mind, the overall experience of FF13 was quite enjoyable, and I’d recommend it to you. Just make sure you have the time to put into the game, as I’d say you should be able to devote at least 2 hrs per session to get the most out of this game. That’s both its greatest power and weakness. And how to make this game even better? I’ve put hints at what I would have liked to do to help the player: take advantage of how the player wants to play through the battle system, help the player utilize their time better in a game full of grinding, and provide more cues to the player to help him/her not die as much.