Stars Fell Like Rain or Two On A Tower

Want to know how many screenshots I've taken in Neverness To Everness so far? A tad shy of a hundred and fifty. I'd say I've been quite restrained. I thought it would be more than that but I just counted them and it's not, so pardon me while I give myself a cookie.

I've been out and about some, that's for sure. All over the place. Opened all the map now, by visiting each of those big, golden spikes that let you see what's around you. Lift the fog.

They do something else, as well, I think. Something much more important to the welfare of the city than just making it easier to get around. Mint explained it to me but I forgot what she said the moment she stopped talking. I kind of tune her out, sometimes. You have to, really.

Mint hardly ever stops talking. She's hyper-excitable. She loves her work, she loves to chat and she loves to eat, too. 

Don't they all? Not just in NTE. It's all the open-world gachas. It reminds me of how, in The Beano I read as I was growing up, when every character seemed to be obsessed by food. 

For readers who grew up deprived of the output of Dundee's unlikely publishing giant, D.C. Thompson, The Beano is a comic aimed at children aged from maybe five to ten or so, although plenty of readers stick with it for a lot longer than that. 

Then again, who isn't familiar with The Beano? I just learned - from Wikipedia so it must be true - that The Beano is "the best-selling comics magazine outside of Japan, having sold more than two billion copies to date. Wait, how did we get onto The Beano? I don't even like the fricken' Beano that much! 

Oh yes, I remember. Characters being obsessed with eating... 

It makes sense that child characters in a publication aimed at children would be crazy for candy. Children have a limited number of objects of desire and the subset deemed acceptable by parents is likely smaller still. Even with the fashions in parenting that roll relentlessly through the culture, kids always want sweets and savories, even if they're not always allowed to have them. It makes sense there'd be a craving fiction could exploit.

So, I get why all kids in all comics seem to have the appetites of cavemen, treating every taste of sugar and salt like a drug hit, but it makes a lot less sense to see the same behavior in self-directed, independent twenty-somethings in the games I'm playing. But it's there.

I've already been out for ice-cream with Mint and she ate so much she got stomach-ache from the cold, the cure for which was that we both went to a different cafe for hot chocolate! Mint and Flora are bonding over food. They might even be flirting. It's hard to tell.

Flora is my character's name, by the way. Does everyone find it as hard as I do to keep the names and pronouns straight in posts about what they've been doing in the games they play? 

I've long claimed I don't identify with my characters in that way people do when they try to make all of them look as much like they do as possible and on one level that's true but on another, quite possibly a deeper and more significant one, it's really not. My confusion of identity leeches out in posts, where I tell stories about what "I" have been doing, then have to stop myself and reframe it as what my characters have done.

It hasn't helped that until very recently I had a policy of never naming my characters in posts. That's because back when I started blogging, when I was much more sociable in games than I am now and MMORPGs were much more sociable places, and when people who played them occasionally read blogs, there were a couple of occasions where someone recognized one of my characters in game from reading the name in a post and sent me a /tell about it.

Being noticed made me feel a bit uncomfortable so I stopped outing my characters by name and took to referring to them by their classes or races or some similarly impersonal designate. Then, as time went on and the games I played became less and less social, often to the point of being single-player, or if not then feeling like they were, and as the number of people reading what I wrote drifted down and down, it started to feel like mentioning character names was probably going to be less of a problem than it had been, assuming it ever was one to begin with. 

Using proper names certainly made it easier to structure the sentences, so I slipped into doing it and now here I am, although as you can see from the rest of the post, I still have trouble separating myself from my characters.

So, Flora and Mint... 

I'm not a fan of dating in games. I've said that before. I mean, if it's a dating game, sure, fine, go for it. I just won't play it. 

I think of dating as a genre not a feature. Except that's just me, I guess, because it's clearly both, just like PvP. You can have a game where the whole point is to kill other players or you can have one where it's just one of the many things you can do. It's only when you can't play the game at all without engaging with it that it becomes a PvP game.

Until recently, dating hasn't really been a thing in the kinds of games I play, even as an option. I can't think of an MMORPG that has it although I'm sure there must be some. Mabinogi comes to mind for some reason...

It has been a thing in RPGs for a while, though. I think there was something of the sort in the first Dragon Age, which must also have been the first time I became aware the concept even existed. Not the concept of dating itself. I knew that existed. I wasn't raised in a monastery! Player-characters in video games simulating courtship rituals with NPCs, I mean. That sort of dating.

I found it very weird at the time, I remember. Creepy, really. I'm not sure I can articulate why but I suspect it's an analog of the uncanny valley idea, the way the appearance of something can be just slightly off in a way that triggers some lizard-brain warning. 

As with many unfamiliar ideas and experiences, time and repeated exposure has normalized dating NPCs for me to the extent that I now mostly think of it as just something I could do but don't, as opposed to something I'd never do. 

Except I said yes to Mint's offer of ice-cream and I said nice things to her about the time we were spending together, so I guess that means it's just something I don't usually do now, not something I never do. Even when it's not necessary to the plot.  

But then, I've been doing a lot of things in Neverness To Everness that have very little to do with the plot. Assuming there is a plot. I think there's a plot? I'm not entirely sure.

If there is, I certainly haven't seen much of it. I've been far too busy, and not just out getting ice-cream with Mint (Hmm. That makes me think of King Krule's classic Out Getting Ribs...) or putting my palm on tower touch-plates. Just exploring, really. There's so much to see. And I've seen so many things. I've seen stars falling like rain...

No, really, that's a thing I saw! And an achievement I got. Stars Falling Like Rain (Witness a meteor shower.) Except when it happened I thought it was something else. And maybe it was.

I was up a tower at the time. Not one of those stubby golden ones that are really public art not architecture. No, this is the truly towering tower that rises into the clouds over Heathereau. It has a name but I can't remember it offhand and it doesn't come up in any of the forty screenshots I took while I was climbing.

I've climbed a lot of things in video games. I've written before about how climbing used to be a thing people did in MMORPGs before the developers even began adding climbing skills to the games. Back then, climbing was as much about breaking the game as it was seeing the sights.

With the coming of the current wave of whatever we're calling the genre that started with Genshin Impact, climbing has turned into something of a focus feature. I bet all the games have it now. Wuthering Waves certainly does. I've never had a climbing experience quite like this one, though.

The tower goes up and up and up. It feels like it's never going to stop. There are big observation platforms with telescopes (That you can't use - they missed a trick there.) then smaller railed rings clearly meant for maintenance workers and then nothing but the pure climb, up an ever-narrowing column studded with projecting spurs you can rest on if you're careful, until  one, final, tiny railed platform barely wide enough to walk around before the last stretch to the very top, where you can haul yourself up and stand on the beacon-light that shines over the city, the highest thing in the world. 

All of which would be too terrifying to contemplate, much less attempt, if it wasn't for being able to stick to sheer surfaces like Spider-Man and glide like the Falcon if you fall. But I didn't fall. I flew. 

At the end, when there was nowhere else to climb, I launched myself into space and glided all the way down to the second-highest tower in the city, far below me. And there was a story all its own when I got there, let me tell you! But It'll have to be a story for another day because I'm not finished with this one yet.

When Flora got to one of the higher platforms - not, I seem to remember, the last one - that achievement popped. I thought at the time it was for reaching a certain point in the climb and it may have been but if so it was also trigger for something much more spectacular. 

I'd started climbing in the late afternoon and now night had fallen and suddenly the sky was full of blue fire. A meteor shower, processing very slowly across an arc of the heavens, moving not at all like falling stars. Over the course of several minutes the sky lit up from side to side in a great, glowing arc, a rainbow made out of only indigo and blue.

It's one of the more memorable events I've seen in gaming, all the more so for being both unexpected and understated. It felt like it just happened and I just happened to be there. Perhaps it was linked to my climb (I just googled it and it seems you have to be up the tower when the meteor show happens to get the achievements but whether being there also causes it is unclear.) but even if it was, Flora doesn't know that. 

For her it's just a thing that happened. Lucky for her she had her camera.