TFW FTW

That feeling when you know you've seen/heard something before, but you knew basically nothing about it so you might as well not have.



Of course, even if you've only heard it once it's pretty hard to forget a song like that.

-Signing off.

OFF Again

Have a remix of Pepper Steak from the OFF OST.



No particular reason why, besides the fact that I've been thinking about it again because part of Undertale (the bad ending, specifically) reminds me of it rather strongly* and I've seen fanart that tells me I'm not the only one.

(The only reason OFF has its own label/tag, incidentally, is because it's bloody hard for me to find my own posts on it otherwise, "off" being such a common usage word. As far as I know, I only have one other post on it, but it's possible there are more back there that I just can't find because there's tons of casual usage of the word "off.")

*SPOILERS: Both OFF's official ending and Undertale's bad ending involve the protagonist destroying the world. For OFF, it's actually the "true ending," and unless the player decides to side with the one person standing against the Batter (since I haven't clearly stated such, the Batter is OFF's protagonist), he'll just nearly effortlessly walk over the one person trying to stop him. A far cry from Sans stomping the hell out of you, though if the player turns against the Batter, the player still wins easily because said character is weak stats-wise but has a powerful status effect he can use that trivializes the fight... and the Batter's "party"** disappears for no clear reason.

**A thing I like about OFF is that it really shows how far one can abstract certain RPG concepts. What keeps you from filling out a party with circles that have the abilities of support party members and no real story role? Nothing, and that's exactly what OFF does. They're even just called "add-ons."

Of*** course, the game also gives the abilities used by the add-ons strange, abstract names (which can make it a little hard to remember what ability does what), but it fits the strange tone of the game.

***Worth noting I mistyped "of" as "off" twice in a row.

-Signing off.

Probably Not The Most Surreal Moment From This Game

Although it's giving it some serious effort.



I'm not absolutely sure on this, but I think the playthrough I watched featured the player going even further than this one did (skipping ahead a bit first).

-Signing off.

LAZY POST

Here, have a (video embed of a) half-hour version of the boss theme of that guy* I talked about on Wednesday.



Because it's awesome.

*I hadn't quite looked into things enough; turns out that Sans, the guy this is sort of the theme for**, [Undertale SPOILERS, obviously-sorry for marking them poorly in the other post] isn't even necessarily the most fourth-wall-breaking character in the game. Characters attack buttons, there's at least one other character who supposedly had access to the save system before the player did, and quite a few other things of that sort.

**It's been suggested that Megalovania isn't Sans' boss fight theme, but the protagonist's, because the song's been used by the game's creator elsewhere, and it's apparently associated with people fighting to save their worlds.

And the protagonist, when fighting Sans, has long since jumped off a slippery slope, and Sans is basically the only thing standing between the player and the end of the world. (There's another boss-type character you fight later, but he goes down in one hit because the Genocide Run makes your character unstoppable to basically everyone but Sans. Because he is an hero [GRAWLIX]ing badass.)

-Signing off.

A BAD TIME

So I've been hearing about the game Undertale lately, and while it's a game I have doubts I'd be able to play much (even though it's a turn-based RPG, the player still needs reflex-based dodging skills to avoid the minigame-like attacks... and as I've said quite a few times, I really stink at that), I have to say that the story, characters, and aspects of the engine sound like fun.

Especially the brutally powerful boss who, despite having one hitpoint and only being able to do one damage per attack, is dangerous because he exploits the engine through medium awareness (i.e. breaking the fourth wall).

Noticeable in the following video if you know what to look for: This character* particularly knows when he's beaten you before and keeps track of how many times you've fought him across your saves.



Now, a game where your saves have obligate effects on each other (which is a thing this game has) can be a bit... trollish, but it's a neat thing to see, and in particular I think it's neat because it reminds me of a character from the poorly drawn webcomic Adventurers!, which is probably more responsible for my love of CRPG/JRPGs than any other single thing but the game Septerra Core.

(Said character was stated to be free of the in-universe normal flow of space and time, and claimed that he was going to start hunting the party back to their save points and killing them there. It kinda makes me happy that something a bit like that is something that's been done in an actual game now.)

*Who comes across as a sweet-natured goofball despite being one of the strongest characters in the game, and only fights the protagonist when the protagonist kills enough people to trigger the Genocide Ending.

-Signing off.

Probably Waiting For DVD This Time

Darnit, I should wrap up my Star Wars article series before this thing hits.



I think I actually would only have one, maybe two regular entries left, but that'll probably change when that movie comes out.

...Also, "they're real?" People have stopped believing Jedi are real or something in this continuity?

That is so stupid.

(Seriously, there are multiple species with lifespans ranging towards thousands of years, the lifespan in-universe is probably longer, digital media is a fricking thing in the Star Wars universe, and the Jedi Order existed for at least four thousand years as a hugely powerful group of public servants. Even if you discount some of that as probably-not-entirely-canonical material because of the stupid Legends retcon, the Jedi Order was still over a thousand years old, and Yoda talked about being many centuries old. Those things are irrefutably canon. Luke not knowing much about the Jedi Order could easily be attributed to living on a backwater that had never seen much Jedi presence. Seriously, Tatooine was basically the armpit of the galaxy.)

-Signing off.

This Whole Week Has Been Fairly Pointless Final Fantasy Videos

Have a guy swinging from a rope while shooting some poor mook with a machinegun.



And being a bit bored with things.

-Signing off.

Titles Are Annoying*

If I suddenly seem a tad obsessed with JRPGs, there's a reason for that: A while ago, my sister and I bought one of the RPGMaker programs, and I've been looking into the genre that the engine is technically designed to emulate. (Frankly, it can be a little frustrating reading about neat game mechanics and knowing they're well beyond my limited programming capabilities, but them's the shakes.)

Anyway, it's kind of funny to read about these games, because some of the newer ones are talked about as being super serious business. And then...



...there's a battle where you can shove a monster off a cliff and it'll pratfall on the way.

I mean, that's exactly what happened here.

And yet this is a game where (SPOILURZ) one of the characters has a job whose description is essentially "die to give the world another ten years of peaceful life," another character is basically a ghost who kept moving to have a chance to keep a promise to his dead best friends, and another character turns out to be imaginary and will cease to exist if they save the world.

*And I forgot to add one at first.

-Signing off.

Goofy Giant Cactus Monster

Final Fantasy VIII is a serious game*.



Hence the goofy giant cactus monster that does a weird dance when it gets the stuffing kicked out of it.

*Thus, it deserves to be picked on and picked at to some degree.

-Signing off.

It Did Take A Bit of Search Refinement

So I was listening to a piece of music I've had for ages (since long before I've had this blog, which is what, going on seven years or so now), and thought "I ought to check and see if it's still floating around on the Internet."

Happy day, it is!



Yes, it's music. The popularity of "Taking the Hobbits to Isengard" validates this as a music genre (though this obviously predates that by quite some time).

-Signing off.

Castlevania Has Great Music

Well, yesterday was a rough day for me, and it kind of made it so that I couldn't properly blog in a timely fashion. (Some jerk[s] slashed my tires the other day, and I spent a lot of yesterday getting them off so they could be replaced, and did a decent amount of work getting them back on. Plus some other junk having to do with the fact that my dad's truck I was borrowing got stuck in our driveway and is... still there, unable to be moved, because it's kind of a piece of junk and I didn't know that it wouldn't be able to shift out of park if it was on an incline.)

So here's not one, not two, but three pieces of Castlevania music, including my personal favorite piece thereof (Cemetery) and two covers by that guy who does awesome acapella covers.





I... don't like the Castlevania games, mainly because I'm bad at platforming and I will never forgive that one sequence in the first game that introduces the world to the Medusa Heads, but they've got some pretty great music overall.

-Signing off.

Probably Shouldn't Be So Amused

There's something very fundamentally amusing to me about the descriptive terminology used by the Dragon Quest game series for its battle system. The humor value is kind of exacerbated by certain kinds of enemies, at least for me.



"God appeared!"

"God was defeated!"

And also in that vein, from the YouTube description left by the video poster:

"God was going easy on me." Really.

-Signing off.

MAXIMUM UNFAIRNESS ATTACK GO

(I apologize in advance for the rather painful NES soundtrack.)

There's apparently an enemy from the Dragon Quest RPG series called the Dead Ringer, which is a bell that can summon more of itself and is fairly tough, and which is prone to rapid chain-summoning until there are eight of them (a full octave-cute), which causes them to play the Game Over music and cause, well, a game over.

I once described the enemy to my sister, and she made a face and complained about how it sounded unfair.

However bad you might think that is, it's actually fairly tame; older Dragon Quest games laugh at your concept of fairness.



From what I hear, this enemy can use the Sacrifice spell (which the party in the game finds utterly unblockable and invariably lethal when used against them, but when using it themselves discover it to be completely ineffective against any enemy of consequence) any time it feels like it, including on the first turn before the party can act. Granted, especially when you're only a couple steps away from the save point (as appears to be the case here) it's barely even a slap on the wrist, because you keep your experience and loot when this happens, but the enemy's clearly common enough, and nasty enough to kick you back to the save point a high proportion of the times it appears, to be a frustrating roadblock-there will apparently be times it catches you basically immediately before you reach a save point.

-Signing off.