It Changes Nothing : Phrolova Said So, So It Must Be True

Every post I write these days seems to begin with me talking about some "plan" or other that's either fallen apart or been abandoned or had to be changed to fit in with new circumstances. Once in a while I even open by saying I had a plan and now here it is, made real. When or why I started making all these plans escapes me, although I bet it had something to do with Blaugust...

And yes, I did have a plan for today. I mean, I didn't have it for long... Not that it's gone wrong, for once. No, it has come to fruition, which is something plans do according to convention, albeit not many of mine.

When I say I didn't have it for long, I don't mean I had it for a while then gave up on it. I'm back-projecting. I only came up with it a day and a half ago and now I'm done with it, so... I didn't have it for long. English is hard.

Although not as hard as biology. If you're a may-fly, I had that plan for a lifetime and then some. Any may-flies out there, reading this? No? Thought not.

So, what was this plan, then? I'm embarassed to tell you, now I've made all this fuss about it. It doesn't deserve to be dignified with the name "plan". It was just that I knew on Monday what I was going to post about on Wednesday, or at least what I wanted to post about then. Now. Whatever. Tenses are slippery.

Almost three weeks ago, I posted something about the latest update in Wuthering Waves. A week later I posted again to say I was finally, actually, for real this time, up to date with the storyline and ready for the next chapter. And now I'm posting to say I've done it. 

Well, I think I have. I got the "Quest Complete" screen for Rinascitta II: Act VIII, anyway. There's probably a coda or an afterword I haven't done yet and for all I know there might be a second installment coming before the next full update, like there was last time. But I've definitely finished the big storyline segment in the current update.

It took me over three hours, broken into three unequal session, and it was fricking amazing! Seriously, it was so good. Even though I kept getting interrupted by dogs and people at the door and Mrs Bhagpuss telling me lunch was ready and all kinds of real-world responsibilities, I was so deep into it it didn't break the spell. And what a spell it cast.

For once, I pretty nearly understood what was going on. Might be the first time since the original questline back in Jinzhou. I just about understand who everyone is now. I recognize all the factions and I have a general impression how each of them stands with the others.  I'm comfortable with the jargon and I get most of the lore references without having to look them up (Something you can do through in-game hyperlinks, an innovation I don't recall seeing anywhere else.)

Better yet, I'm finding I can follow the motivations of the characters, more often than not, which has certainly not always been the case. That's never been because their reasons for doing what they're doing are poorly explained. It's because most of them have secret agendas or multiple agendas, some of which they're keeping secret from some people but not others, or agendas they, the characters, do not fully understand or aren't even aware they have. Plus some of them are being mind-controlled, sometimes but not all the time, because of course they are.

To say there's some nuance involved would be like saying there's some vodka involved in a Russian wedding. (I don't know. I'm assuming? Anyone been to a Russian wedding? My first simile involved Ozzy Osbourne but I thought better of it. (It was complimentary so don't @ me!)) It's basically all nuance. Remember when we thought The Secret World had some elliptical writing? Bears and rats compared to this stuff.

After the current chapter, I think I do finally have some idea who The Fractsidus are. Is. Again, whatever. What they're up to still isn't entirely clear and neither do I know "who" they are as individuals yet, except for this episode's Guest Star - Phrolova.

Oh, I love Phrolova! It's not saying much because I love most of the characters in Wuthering Waves. Well, a lot of them. But Phrolova is especially wonderful because of her nihilistically monomaniacal dedication to a purely romantic cause. She's just... she'd burn down the world to have what she wants and all she wants is what she had when she had nothing. Nothing but love and a home, so, everything.

She gets some truly great lines and Rae Lim, the voice actor behind the English dub, delivers every one of them to absolute perfection. It's such a difficult read, too. Phrolova says things that on the page look to have "lack of affect" or "ennui" written all over them but which come freighted with a subtext of loss, defeat, depression and despair. 

Best I can figure it, Phrolova is a sociopathic empath. Or an empathic sociopath. She feels nothing except everything and none of it matters except at the core where it all matters too much. I screen-shotted some of her bleakest lines but I couldn't screenshot the delivery. 

Okay, I could have videoed it. But I didn't. I figured I'd steal a compilation of the best ones from YouTube. Only there aren't any. There are plenty of comps of her battle cries and lots of cut scenes and videos explaining why "JP VTubers can't stop crying during Phrolova's story" (Who can blame them?) and a ton of other stuff but nothing like I would have focused on. 

So you'll have to imagine the voicees for yourselves when you read her saying things like

or 

or maybe 

Or my absolute favorite

Phrolova stares into the void and the void won't make eye contact. Don't you just love it? 

Yes, well, maybe you don't. I'd have to admit it requires a certain sensibility. The whole game does.  One snarky YouTuber posted a nine-second video that sums up the WW gestalt very nicely:

And yes, there is an awful lot of that - the player-character standing very close to the guest star as they gaze meaningfully at - or more often past - each other. Also a very great deal of flirting on the part of the guest star, almost always received with complete incomprehension or just straight-up ignored by the PC. Except, to misquote Fcukers - Fuck, No. Phrolova Don't Flirt.

There's also a fair smattering of this:

The PC desperately and all too often unsuccessfully lunging towards the Guest Star as the Guest Star falls or sinks or vanishes into some portal.

And then there's the ever-popular 

Meaningful Hand-Clasp. 

Sometimes it's the Rassuring Hand on the Shoulder but the Clasp is More Meaningful.

I can see it might not be to everyone's taste but it is to mine, probably because, as Mrs Bhagpuss has so often informed me, I'm basically a teenage girl. Emotionally, anyway.

So much for the story and characters which are all A+ as usual. Plot, too, for a change. Also, for the record, my character made choices in this one that I wouldn't have made. And said things. Boy, she can be harsh, sometimes...

Gameplay continues to be all but non-existent although there were some good mini-games this time. All very easy but I found them entertaining. Less walking-and-talking than usual, more standing around and lots and lots of flashbacks, dream sequences, still images with voice-overs and various other engaging ways of presenting a passive narrative as if you had some say in the outcome.

As for combat, it genuinely does get less and less every time now. A handful of tiny fights with trash mobs, for which I always used the extremely OP Phrolova, so they lasted mere seconds. One final boss fight that came with a load of instructions about special abilities and how to counter them but which I aced on the first try, using nothing more skilled than some slightly enhanced button-mashing. I watched my cooldowns and swapped characters a few times to get some heals but other than that, no tactics used or required.

And that, I imagine, except for cleaning up whatever decompression and debriefing mini-quests may remain, will be it until the next, big content drop in a few weeks. I feel emotionally drained. I'll need that long to recover. 

As for the Gacha elements... there are none. Seriously, I don't even use the free draws. I did ding Union 40 today, which got me some message about having to do a quest before I can level up any more but I'm not convinced even that will be needed for the story. If it is, I'll handle it when I have to but no money will change hands.

I mean, I would pay for this game. It's totally worth paying for. But so far I haven't needed to and I'm sure Kuro can manage just fine without my contribution. In Phrolova's words (Or nearly...), Gacha rolls "aren't of concern to someone like me".

Wouldn't mind having her on my team, all the same. Maybe I'll at least have a few free pulls and see if I can get her...

Sweet Poison or A Girl's Story

In writing about Wuthering Waves, I find it very hard to avoid repeating myself endlessly. It's staggeringly gorgeous to look at, the storytelling is excellent and the voice acting is top-notch. There's an extraordinary amount to do, the gameplay is varied and wide-ranging and the whole game feels welcoming and comfortable throughout. Yada yada yada...

Also, as I say every time, I find it exhausting and overwhelming to the point where I need a good lie down to get over it every time I indulge. It's like a delicious but extremely rich dessert, something you crave but know, for your own good, you can only indulge in every so often.

That cadence makes it very tough to write about, too. Because I've fallen into this pattern of leaving a couple of weeks between each session, biting off a complete chunk of story every time, I'm stuck with reviewing each chapter without trying to get too spoilery, while using a selection of screenshots I took along the way as illustrations and maybe dropping in a critical comment or two about anything that strikes me as being particularly notable, unusual or well done.

I'd add "or that could have been done better" to that last but honestly, there's not very often much that I feel could be improved and there seems to be less every time I play. Wuthering Waves feels very "finished" compared to just about all the games I'm used to or that I've played over the years.

It wasn't always that way or I don't believe so. I seem to remember at the start there were a lot more translation issues and plenty of times when what the voice actors were saying didn't match what I was reading in the subtitles. This morning I saw just one example of that and even then it was only a single word that differed.

Contrast that to Once Human, another relatively slick, well-funded and successful game which, as I recently noted, gets a five star rating from me in most departments. Even there, the tendency, as it is in many games I've played, is for the words you're hearing not to match the ones you see. 

I was playing OH last night. I did a couple of new quests and the words the voice actors were speaking barely resembled the text at all. The weirdest part about that wasn't that the production team couldn't get it right, it was that both versions were coherent and well-written, so either of them would have been fine. How they ended up using both is the mystery. Just pick one, guys!

I suppose it's a minor issue anyway. There's no real reason to read along with the actors after all, even if having subtitles on for everything, all the time, is the current fashion. I do find it distracting, all the same. I wish production teams would talk to each other now and again and settle on a final version. Or at least listen to the QA reports when they tell them "The words don't match the voices". I mean, it's not like its a hard error to spot. Maybe it's intentional, I don't know...

As I said, that wasn't a problem for me this morning, as I played through the quest that came up top of the list when I logged into Wuthering Waves for the first time in a fortnight. I had kind of half promised myself I wouldn't do that - just blindly follow the prompts. I was going to go off and do some exploring, open up the map a bit, do my own thing but it's so easy to just slip into the old habit of going where the quest-marker tells you. And when what you find when you get there is often so compelling, why would you want to stop?

In this case what I was being led towards turned out to be a Companion Story. There's one of those for all the main Resonators, I think, not just the leads but the co-stars, too. I haven't done very many of them. I think this might have been the fourth. Maybe the fifth. I should check sometime because they've all been excellent so far.

This was no exception. Cantarella's horror-inflected tale is chilling, even disturbing, but ultimately joyous. It also stands well inside the boundaries of the primary storyline, adding some depth and texture to the core narrative, rather than simply filling out the biography of the character herself.

And it's long! Boy, is it ever! It took me at least two hours which, judging by the full play-throughs on YouTube, seems to be about average. The huge majority of my time was spent, as always, watching animated characters act and listening to their voice-actors speak. I watched an anime movie, basically. 

I doubt that if you cut all the gameplay and just strung the cut-scenes together you'd get a cut lasting less than seventy-five minutes, a very decent length for an animated film. There was a fair amount of fighting this time but it was all so easy, none of it took very long. Ditto the puzzles, which mostly involved not too much more than following the visual prompts and pressing a few buttons at the appropriate moment. There's even a potentially terrifying jumping puzzle that the game just takes over and does for you.

In keeping with what has been the very welcome trend in the past sessions I've played, even the final boss fight is both easy and partially completed through cut scenes. I sincerely hope it's a trend that continues. As for the narrative, without giving any spoilers, I'd say 90% of Cantarella's story was clarity itself, without any of the confusing technobabble just about all the characters are prone to. 

The wrap-up, though, did its best to make up for that with a flurry of lines about frequencies and sonoro spheres that I'm a little concerned to say I mostly understood. I worry I may have been assimilated.

And then there was very final coda, because no Wuthering Waves story is ever complete without at least three or four false endings. That was... odd. One aspect of the game I do my best not to mention is the ever-present, free-floating sexual charge that seems to hang in the air around some of the main characters like the opiated miasma across the poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz. 

Nervously passing over Cantarella's distracting personal appearance, which gives me disturbing of Eurotrash as presented by Antoine de Caunes and Jean-Paul Gautier back in the 'nineties, in this case I'm talking about the almost predatory way she looks at, talks to and occasionally even touches the player-character. She's by no means the only NPC to have clear and obvious designs on "Rover" but she's the first one to try to put her intentions on a co-habitational basis.

All of which might be uncomfortable if my character wasn't so very much the alpha in every situation. I'm used, as we all must be now, to having the character I'm playing be treated as some kind of famous hero or maybe even a demi-god but in Wuthering Waves it's quite self-evidently true. When NPCs act awe-struck or honored to meet her, it's with palpably good reason and they, frankly, do not know the half of it. 

With that level of authority, I'm pretty sure she can handle a few over-familiar flirtations, not that she ever seems to notice there's even a subtext. She tends to look, at most, slightly baffled by the attention but by and large it just seems to fly straight over her head. 

As I've often said, if I'm going to stick with a game for long, I really need to feel an affinity for my character, something that's almost inevitably going to be harder to achieve in a game where the player gets no choice at all in who they play, other than to pick a gender. Add to that a complete inability to affect what your character looks like (Seriously, are there no cosmetics in the game at all outside the cash shop?) and then to add insult to injury, dress the main character in the worst outfit of anyone on the team and it's surprising I've been able to bond with her at all.

That I have owes a significant amount to the skill of the actor who voices her and also to the way that vocalization is handled in production and writing. I generally prefer the good old "Silent Protagonst" approach, so I was happy enough when all my character did was nod and gesture, which was all she did for a long time after I started playing.  When she suddenly began to speak, I was first astonished and then delighted at how much I enjoyed hearing the sound of her voice.

There are two reasons for that. Firstly, I really appreciate the way she doesn't speak in every scene, only when she has something worth saying or to give her internal monologue an airing. It makes the times when she does speak up feel much more significant. Secondly, and much more importantly, I love the way the actor voicing my character handles the dialog. I like her voice, which obviously helps, but mostly I love her phrasing, which is reliably close to the way I hear the lines in my head. 

You'd be surprised how often that doesn't happen. Lots of actors seem to have very different ideas to me about cadence, emphasis and even interpretation. It's jarring to hear them stressing the wrong syllables or drawing attention away from the subtext, which is why, on balance, I like my characters not to speak. If they all spoke up as eloquently and authoritatively as this, though, I'd be happy to sit back and enjoy the show rather than imagining I could do a better job myself.

With Cantarella's story told I imagine a return to the main storyline will be next. As usual, I'm going to need a while to decompress before I take that on. I'll at least try to make it a shorter break than last time. It's hard enough to remember the plot as it is.

You Can Always Trust A Man In A Hamster Costume

Five hours into Wuthering Waves and I have a lot to say about the game. And to show. I've taken so many screenshots, some for the pure pleasure of looking at them, others to use in posts like this one.

It's a familiar process. Some new games just spark a huge desire in me to analyze, discuss and deconstruct. It's part of Bartle's Explorer archetype, which apparently covers much more ground than the merely geographical.

Let's start with the thorny question of sound quality, as discussed at some length in the comments by myself and Naithin, to whom, incidentally, many thanks for drawing my attention to this really rather good game in the first place, although how the heck I hadn't heard of it before, since it seems to be a Really Big Deal, I can't quite figure out.

By the way, did you know all the voice work was done in the UK? I didn't until I saw this video. It explains a lot!

I don't know if that's a factor in the less than perfect recording quality. Naithin's investigation into the Japanese original suggests not. I'm not bothered by it the way Naithin is anyway. Although, now I'm really making myself listen to it with recording fidelity in mind, I can hear the over-tuned top end, which does occasionally remind me of the sibilance and hiss of the cheap microphones my band used back in the 'eighties.

The aspect of the voice recording in Wuthering Waves that dominates my attention, however, isn't its quality but the sheer quantity of it. I can't readily recall the last game I played that had this much talking. Or, I should say, the last game I played that had this much and wasn't a visual novel.

Wuthering Waves calls itself an open world RPG and it certainly sits comfortably enough within that genre. It's very likely that after a few more hours gameplay will open out to reflect that description more closely. Thus far, though, it feels a lot more like a visual novel than anything else.

I don't think it would be much of an exaggeration to say that more than three-quarters of the time I've spent with the game so far has involved listening to NPCs talk. Of the remaining twenty-five per cent I'd estimate ten per cent has been devoted to traveling, ten per cent to making dialog choices and the final five per cent to hitting things with a stick. Okay, a sword.

Rover Speaks!

Every storyline NPC is fully voiced with the exception of the player character.  Who, by the way, no matter what the player might have wanted or chosen - absolutely is going to be called Rover forever after by everyone she ever meets until the end of the game and most likely the heat death of the universe. (Not that I'm bitter...). 

That doesn't mean the PC never talks out loud at all. I thought it meant that but I was wrong. When I posted yesterday, having played for a couple of hours, I was under the impression the PC (Or Rover, as we shall now call her, since why fight it?) was one of the genre's many Silent Protagonists. She'd shown a nifty line in nodding and head-shaking but up to that point hadn't made a sound.

Imagine my surprise then, when in the middle of a conversation she suddenly began to speak out loud in a husky, vaguely American-accented drawl. It made me jump. After that, she went back to being silent for long enough to make me think it was an isolated outburst until, once again for no particular reason and no warning, she suddenly found her voice again.

Now I never know whether she's going to speak or not. It's disconcerting but also quite exciting. And honestly it's a bit weird she doesn't talk all the time because even background characters not directly involved in the storyline sometimes have conversations out loud. Long ones, too.

I'll give you an example. When Rover and the gang (Did I mention she travels in a pack? And they all chip in with comments whenever they feel like it? It's like a road movie, sometimes.) went to see a big shot scientist, they found him already in conversation with two of his investors. 

You're asking for a slap, girl!

I think I could have interrupted them and got straight on with the plot but I wanted to see how long they'd go on without me. A long, long time is how long. Long enough to go through an entire sub-plot that told me quite a bit about the character of the guy I was about to do business with (Spoiler: he's a bit of a dick.) 

Someone had to write and record all of that dialog. There must have been several minutes of it. All for a bit of character-building that most players probably click straight past.

So far, the whole game is like that. There are plenty of NPCs out and about in the city and every one with a name talks. Not aloud. They haven't voiced every last one of them. But they all have dialog, some of it quite extensive. And often interesting. 

I have seen this sort of thing in other games but Wuthering Waves really goes for it. I think I'm noticing it more because of the quality of the translation, too. Five hours in, it remains well above average, although I have noticed the odd verbal infelicity now and again. It does make me wonder how good the stories in other imported games might have been in their original languages. 

Some rando wanted to talk about his dreams. You know how that goes.

I suspect many of them were much better than their terrible translations made them appear. I'd say I couldn't understand why companies are so willing to skimp on the translations except I think I know the reason: most players will just click straight through the talking to get to the fights anyway, so why bother spending money on getting the nuances right?

I'm not one of those players and I've paid for it time and again in games where I could barely work out what the plot was supposed to be, let alone extract any sense of characterization or world-building from the gibberish I had to plow through. It's a real pleasure to be able not just to follow the storyline but to gain some insights into the culture and circumstances in which the narrative takes place.

How much of what I'm hearing and reading has any meaning or significance beyond building ambience and atmosphere is a lot harder to say. Some of it seems quite surreal. 

I spoke to a young girl who wanted to tell me in considerable detail about "the hamster at Lollo Logistics". At first she seemed to be talking about a real hamster but she went on to describe how someone in a hamster suit "saved" her. She ended up proclaiming "People who wear hamster suits are always good people!"

 

Is this relevant? Do I need to know it so I can react appropriately when I meet someone dressed as a hamster somewhere down the line or is she just rambling on about some TV show she likes? Maybe it's special pleading from a writer who likes to dress up as a hamster on weekends. I mean, I'm fine with that, if so. I'd just like to know.

I only heard all that hamster stuff because I randomly chose to go up to that girl and press F. And I only did that because I happened to land next to her when I jumped down off of a giant statue of a temple dog that had had its head replaced with a security camera. And I was only on top of the statue because I'd climbed up there to take a selfie next to a white cat that was up there already.

Of course, I'd only done that because I was taking selfies next to all the cats and dogs I passed. The cats roll over or stretch or skitter around chasing something only they can see. The dogs you can pet or tell to sit. You can feed them if you happen to be carrying a hambone, which so far I have not been.

I might one day, though, because I found the cooking station and the food vendor. I said yesterday the game has crafting and now I know what one of the crafts is: cookery. You can make food that gives various buffs to Rover and her pals. Since I've also seen ore nodes and wood I'm guessing there are more crafts than just cooking but so far I can't prove it from personal experience.

Changing topic, because why even pretend there's any through-line here, another thing I like very much about Wuthering Waves is the way it contextualizes routine RPG behaviors and thereby makes them feel less insane than usual. I alluded yesterday to the Magistrate's extreme youth for someone holding the position she occupies. I just took it for granted it was a genre trope but apparently it seems as strange to some of the citizens of the city as it would to us:

La La La ! Not listening!

What's more, if you take the middle dialog option, the one that puts the best possible slant on the Magistrate's position, Yanyyang comes back at you, suggesting you may be overly invested in not hearing anything bad about the town's senior administrator.

Administration is something of a theme here, too. The city is under military protection, if not direct control, and the need for documentation, permits and authorization comes up repeatedly. 

When you get to talk to the Magistrate, the most helpful thing she does is to give you a Pass that authorizes you to visit all parts of the region, many of which are currently off-limits due to the ongoing war. That explains how you can travel freely wherever you need to go but a later conversation with two gate guards, the first time you present your authorization, goes further, explaining the restrictions in place and the reasons for them, as well as the limitations on your own authorized movements (Spoiler: there are none!)

Cultural and societal explanations for game mechanics crop up repeatedly. I've seen that in other games but this goes further than most, sometimes subverting or over-turning expectations. For example, I can't remember seeing another companion NPC who not only can't always go adventuring with you because she has a job but who leaves in the middle of an adventure because she needs to start her shift. 

It didn't happen just once, either. It's almost like these people have lives that don't involve being at your beck and call 24/7.

I'm standing right here, guys...

I'm not suggesting Wuthering Waves is unique in any of these respects or even all that unusual but it does seem to be willing to go the extra mile and then some in making everything feel... I want to say realistic but I think the word I'm searching for is convincing.

It often surprises me just how much background detail games developers feel worth putting into their work. I wonder who they think sees it all and why they do it? 

My guess it's partly because it's expected of them but mostly because they get so caught up in their creations they find them endlessly fascinating. Whatever the reasons, this kind of world-building does contribute hugely to the sense of investment I feel in so many games when they're fresh and new. If they're there, I find myself getting drawn into the complexities but if  they're missing I feel loose, untethered, disconnected. Sometimes I end up wondering why I'm there at all and that's the kiss of death for engagement.

Good world-building is likely why I end up writing far more about games at their beginnings than through the middle or, especially, the end. The interesting stuff, to me, is often heavily front-loaded, not just in all the systems and mechanics that need to be understood but in the wealth of cultural cruft that collects around the big, starting cities and the opening stages of the storyline, the time in the game when all the main players need to be introduced and the stakes made clear.

Peace and quiet at last!

Later, things tend to thin. The storyline condenses, the narrative threads cohere. Regions and cities begin feel less vital, less complete. Things in general seem to be there more because they serve a purpose than that they simply exist. It's no longer a world but a gameworld.

At least, that's how it goes in the games that don't take off commercially. Three to five years of development and resources go into the base game, especially the opening stages, the sales window as it often needs to be, making those aspects feel so much more finished than what comes later, especially when diminishing funds and resources mitigate against maintaining the same level of effort after launch.

It does make starting new games a more appealing prospect than sticking with them, something that's often raised as a problem for the industry. Not so much for me, though. If they keep making games like this, I'll keep trying them, getting excited about them, writing about them, then dropping them when I've seen as much as I want. 

I've only been playing Wuthering Waves for a couple of days. I think I'll carry on for a while but for how long I wouldn't like to say. It's hard to predict. I only lasted about a month in Genshin Impact but I played Noah's Heart for over a year. Clearly quality isn't the only factor in play.

Thus far, though, the indications suggest I'll be sticking around for a while. And posting about what I find, no doubt. Always a bonus!

Back To Back To The Future, Again.

As promised, here's my review of the seventh and final demo I chose to try during the recent, now ended, Steam Next Fest. It's called Unusual Findings and the bland, bleh name is about the only thing about it I didn't like.

That's may be a little surprising, given my previous comments on the 8-bit revivalist movement. As someone who suffered those tawdry graphics purely by necessity at the time, the incessant harking back to an era where everything looked blurry and pixelated mystifies me. By this logic, there should be a boom in 14" CRT monitors right now and we should all be spending our evenings watching network TV shows on the black and white portable TVs in our bedrooms.

The thing is, I've now played so many of these things I feel I must be getting Stockholm Syndrome. My brain is filling in the visual gaps and adding detail that was never there so they look almost attractive at times. They're not, of course. They're functional at best. I'd far rather have better graphics, by which I mean ones in which objects are recognizeable by their appearances rather than just by the labels that pop up when you mouse over them.

What I would say in favor of the better among the 8-bit nostalgia trips is that modern design sensibilities and a strong sense of historical irony does mitigate considerably against the self-imposed limitations of the form. Some games lean heavily into making the look do the work; this one plays with the knowingness of the audience.

Let's be clear; Stranger Things Season One is the model here. Set in the 'eighties, Unusual Findings rings every bell it can find to start your nostalgia glands drooling. And it works, even on me. When the first cut scene opened to the sound of Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round I was right back there, watching Pete Burns camping it up on Top of the Pops in 1985.

Kudos to developers ESDigital for licensing an actual eighties classic. It really adds... well, I was going to say gravitas but I guess I mean authority. One thing that really has changed since the 8-bit era is the dominant role popular music played in the culture. Back then, the charts were the unavoidable gateway to acceptance as part of the zeitgeist. You might have been the gothiest goth in gothtown but you still knew what was Number One. Everyone did. These days? Yeah, me neither.

So, Unusual Findings is set in the 1980s and does it's best to look as though it was made then, too. It's a very specific version of the 'eighties we're talking about, naturally; the decade that gave us Weird Science, Back to the Future and The Goonies - because of course it fricken' is! Funny how it's never the 'eighties of Delicatessen, Jean de Florettes and Paris, Texas, isn't it? Or even Duran Duran, Thirtysomething and Magnum P.I.... at least there's a nod to The Blues Brothers in the opening credits.

Here's the plot as revealed in the demo: Vinny, a boy in his early teens, is home, grounded, because he and his pals, Tony and Nick, somehow managed to blow up a neighbor's garden doing "research". After a tough love lecture from his dad, who tells Vinny how proud he is of him for acknowledging his mistakes then locks him in his bedroom anyway, Vinny shows just how much he's learned from the experience by escaping via a zip-line from his window to the treehouse, where his buddy Nick is waiting. Together, the two kids jump on their bikes and cycle to Tony's house, where he convenmiently lives with his stone-deaf grandma, all of them willing to break every rule in the book for a chance at a night of "free adult cable".  

Tony, the real boffin of the gang, has already done all the complicated, technical stuff off-camera, so all the guys need to do is switch on the set and tune in the aerial to make their hormonal dreams come true, only instead of naked girls, all they get are some weird flashing lights - on every channel. Just then a flaming object plunges past the window and crashes somewhere in the depths of Green Woods, just outside town. Guess what happens next?

Well, I didn't expect a pack of wolves, I'll tell you that. Nor the shocking thing that happened after. 

Based on the demo, Unusual Findings has a good plot and a better script. Those are both fairly standard in point and click adventures, I'm pleased to say, but it also has excellent direction, which is a lot more unusual. As a game that pays homage to movies, this does a pretty good job of feeling like one. The opening credit sequence, which runs immediately after you solve the simple problem of the first location and get Vinny out of his bedroom, is particularly well done.

Less impressive is some of the voice acting, although not for the reasons you might expect. The three leads are all competent enough and the line readings are mostly convincing but there's an occasional tendency towards hysteria that doesn't sit all that well with the source material. A couple of lines come across awkwardly, very much an adult play-acting a teenager getting over-excited rather than a convincingly hyped-up teen. 

The weirdest thing, though, especially since all three voices sound authentically American, is the moment when one of them namechecks "Wile E. Coyote" and calls him "Willy E. Coyote". It's not some kind of in-character joke, either, as the subtitles make clear and the tone of the actor suggests the name means absolutely nothing to him.

Leaving aside how that ever got past the edit, it's not even a native speaker's misread. Assuming you'd never seen a Roadrunner cartoon and had no idea who Wile E. Coyote was, you still wouldn't say it like that. "Wile" is never pronounced "Willy" in either standard British  or American English. It's a second-language error.

Other than a few nit-picks, the voice acting is fine and anyway the game is fully titled so if it gets on your nerves you can just turn it off in Settings. All the controls are eminently sensible, with a single left-click on any interactable object bringing up a tripartite menu allowing you to Search, Look At or Talk To whatever you have targetted. If you Search and there's something you can use, the game automatically pops it into your inventory.

There are only a handful of puzzles in the demo, all of which are easily solved. There's barely even any Adventure Game Logic to handwave away. I could imagine doing the things that have to be done in the game and doing them the way they're done, which is highly unusual. Granted, they'd be more likely to happen in a movie than real life but they're certainly possible.

The demo took me almost half an hour to finish and the time flew by. I enjoyed some of the knowing period references, which seemed to me to have a little more irreverence about them than these things often do. The scene where Tony unknowingly outs himself as a future Brony is particularly sweet.

As always, a plea from the developers to add the game to my wishlist appeared at the end, a request with which I happily complied, only to find the game has already been released. It's currently on sale with a launch discount of 15%. Full UK price is £15.99, which seems very reasonable. 

Even so, I think I'll wait for a bigger discount in a later sale. I seem to have something of a surfeit of  point-and-click options right now.

Noah's Heart: First Impressions

Noah's Heart is a brand-new, open world mmorpg, developed and published for Android, iOS and Windows by Archosaur Games, best known (If at all.) for Dragon Raja. It uses Unreal Engine 4 and has server clusters in the EU and North America.

The game launched on mobile only in Europe a couple of weeks ago and globally on all platforms yesterday. It uses a free-to-play payment model and currently ranks #2 in the Free Role Playing category on the Google Play Store and #4 in Role Playing on the Apple Store, with ratings of 4.6/5 on both.

I've played the PC version for a little over three hours, including pre-launch character creation. My character is Level 31and some way into Chapter Two of the main storyline. These are my early impressions: 

It's good. I like it. 

Oh, you want more? Okay. 

It's hella similar to Genshin Impact, for a start. Remember when it came out and everyone went "Wow! That really raises the bar"?  We were right. GI went on to make an absolute fortune and it's clearly the benchmark now for any developer hoping to be taken seriously in the all-platform-F2P-Open World-RPG stakes. That's something we should all celebrate.

That said, Noah's Heart isn't as instantly impressive as Genshin Impact and not only because it didn't come first. The aesthetic, while delightful, is less well-defined and the graphics, while gorgeous, aren't as sharp. 

Whether the world is as deep and fascinating, it's a little too early for me to judge, not least because at Level 31 I've seen barely any of it. The world is, presumably, vast. A tool tip on a loading screen mentioned eight continents and hundreds of islands. So far, all I've seen is some random countryside, a city and the inside of several very small instances.

I'm coming for you, Heidi!

The reason for that is the story, not that it's especially compelling, thrilling or even interesting. It's definitely not. So far, it's very much a by-the-numbers anime mmo plot, involving the usual princes, kings, charming rogues, handsome officers and an unfeasible number of very young women in unsuitable outfits running every which way whenever you turn around.

The dialog is nothing out of the ordinary, either. I've played quite a few imported titles where I got the strong impression the writing would have been laugh-out-loud funny in the original language. I doubt that's the case here although the translation is just shaky enough cast some doubt. 

I ought to make it clear at this point, in case anyone reading this is unfamiliar with my established perspective, that I tend to think of shaky translations as a feature not a bug. The nuances of language exposed that way are endlessly fascinating. 

You don't get out much, do you?

I'd take just about any limping, broken-backed attempt at rendering one culture's demotic take on familiar fantasy tropes into the vernacular of another over the dull, plodding, worthy Heroic Prose of many a game's native English text. Your mileage, as they may or may not say in Seoul, may vary.

By similar inductive reasoning, I also have considerable time for voice actors who give oddly-inflected line readings, which is just as well. I'd rate the voice acting in Noah's Heart as competent at best, pedestrian for the most part and occasionally downright peculiar. 

At one point I was all but convinced one of the NPCs was being voiced by some kind of text-to-speech app, the inflections were so robotic. Then, in the next scene, the same character began speaking with recognizeable and appropriate emotional emphasis. Did the director have a word with him or did someone tweak the settings on the AI? We'll never know.

Ya think?

 

If the plot isn't anything special and the acting isn't either, why have I done virtually nothing other than follow the storyline for the whole three hours I've been playing? Oh, several reasons...

1. There's one holy heck of a lot of it.
   
2. It's relentless.
3. Seriously, it never stops.
4. And its all cut scenes.
5. So. Many. Cut scenes.

Even so. Surely I could have just ignored it and done my own thing? Well, yes I could. There's nothing to stop you doing that, if you want. Only I didn't want.

Drama! Excitement! Threat! I was there! (Watching)

The fault is entirely my own. I feel quite guilty about it. In former days, I would never have allowed a game to direct me so forcefully. I'd have veered off the intended path and made my own way, ignoring the story altogether if need be. 

In those days, though, there wasn't a single button that played the game for you. In Noah's Heart there is and I love it.

I've always apreciated mmorpgs with an autoplay function. Who wants to find their own way to anything, amiright? I mean, you guys have satnavs, don't you? The problem with automated questing systems tends to be that they only do half the job. They run you to where you have to be next but then they leave you to do all the work. 

Noah's Heart has possibly the best autoquesting I've seen. I've used it for the whole questline so far and it hasn't made me irritable once. All I do is click on the quest in the onscreen quest tracker and my character trots to the next NPC and opens the dialog window. If there are teleports to take, she takes them. If it's a long way, she summons her horse, jumps on and rides. 

Speaking of horses, whoever came up with those names deserves a raise. Either that or they need to go back on their meds. I'm not sure which.

It's slick, smooth and strangely soothing to watch. Let's be honest, it's fricken' addictive. Given the extreme quantity of cut scenes and the paucity of combat quests, it feels less like playing a game and more like watching a somewhat shambolic anime - from the inside!

Sometimes you even get to "control" the characters within the cut-scenes, something I can't recall ever doing before. There was one part where my character and three of her pals had escaped captivity and were running through a castle courtyard and a button popped up on screen for me to press so each of them in turn could somersault over a barrel or slide under a haywagon. 

It felt like we'd segued into some sort of make-your-own-movie game and, honestly, it worked really well. I'm not sure what would have happened if I'd declined to press the button at the appropriate moment but it never even occcured to me to find out. I was sufficiently invested to want everyone to get away, which I guess means the story's better than I thought it was.

Although who I'm supposed to attack in here escapes me.

Mention of on-screen buttons brings me on to the UI and the control system. It's good, or at least it's good for me. 

In these days of center-screen targeting and action controls, new mmorpgs where you can do everything with the mouse are hard to come by. Noah's Heart is one of those, not because Archosaur has gone full WoW-style for the PC release (Although it does have tab tagetting.) but because all they've really done is kept the mobile controls and mapped them to the keyboard as an option.

There are large circles or icons for all the relevant actions on screen in the lower right corner, where your thumb would go on a tablet or phone. They're all neatly labelled and swap themselves in and out according to context. 

If you play by keyboard you might find the key choices a little weird. I know I've never seen K and J as primary and secondary attack before. They're all remappable, though, and you can just click the on-screen buttons with the mouse pointer if you prefer - which I very much do.

Every instance boss takes a moment to pose for photos just before the fight begins.

As a result, I was not only able to win every fight in every storyline instance so far, I was able to do it while meeting all the requirements for all the bonuses. Such a thing may never have happened before, although it may also be because the fights so far have all been incredibly easy, even the bosses. The bonus criteria specify "No more than two heavy injuries" (Or something like that. It means getting knocked out after losing all your HP, I think.) but so far I've yet to go under about 90% health at any point.

I seem to remember Genshin Impact was also easy at the early stages but that's presumably to boil the frog. Like GI, Noah's Heart is a gacha game, where the company hopes to make a fortune by leading you into a debt spiral of purchases, in this case of "Phantoms", the collectable NPCs who fight alongside you. 

Unlike Genshin Impact, however, so far there's been very little combat at all. The whole "kill ten rats" part of the package seems to be entirely absent. I've barely seen an attackable mob outside of the storyline instances, far less been sent to kill one. Even inside the instances there have only been one or two groups of enemies, easily disposed of, before the boss.

One of the very, very few mobs I've had to kill for a quest.

Presumably things will get harder - much harder - as the game progresses, although I kind of hope not. It's been a charmingly laid-back experience so far and I'm in no hurry for that to end. 

This First Impressions post is going to stop now, though. Not because I don't have anything more to say - I have plenty. Barely scratched the surface! I'm just going to save it all for Blaugust, which starts on Monday. New games always give me a ton of ideas for things to write about so the timing couldn't be better. 

With luck, Noah's Heart might last me all month. I played Genshin Impact longer than that and this feels like a rerun. Or maybe a cover version. And I do love my covers.

The Ghost Of Henry James

There are times when I can see the value of Twitter. Little things pop up all the time, none of them worth a long discussion but all too weird, worrying or just plain funny to leave alone. A quick couple of sentences, a picture, a link would do it. Just what Twitter was made for.

Things like this, for example. I mean, it's not something I'd normally get into. I'm not a big Final Fantasy fan. I've played three titles in the series: VII, XI and XIV. There's no chance I'm going to play the upcoming XVI so why would I mention it at all?

Well, because these days, when Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yakuda makes a pronouncement, it has the potential to unbalance equilibrium across the entire mmorpg gamespace. He's not just the producer of the latest instalment of the long-running franchise, he's also the much-revered savior and showrunner of Final Fantasy XIV, arguably now the pre-eminent mmorpg in the West and certainly one of the most influential. People listen when he speaks and not just fans.

I'm already on record as not being a Yoshi-P cultist. I've always found him to be a difficult figure, my wariness going all the way back to the FFXIV: A Realm Reborn relaunch, when he consistently made statements I found to be uncomfortably paternalistic and patronising. 

I still have issues with a good deal of what he says although I am now willing to ascribe some of that to cultural and language differences, some to issues of my own. I broadly approve of much of what he's actually done with FFXIV. It tends to be more the way he talks about it that sets my teeth on edge.

In this case, though, my reaction was more a dumbfounded "Wha...?" Judge for yourself:

"Yoshida stated that the motion capture and voice acting are all done by Europeans. He went on to say that they purposely did not include any American accents in the game. “However, even though the script is written in English, we made sure not to include any American accents. We decided to do this to prevent Americans from playing the game and getting mad by saying something like, “I was looking forward to playing a game set in fantasy medieval Europe, but why are they speaking American English?” To prevent this, we made sure all dialogue was recorded using British English.” "

Unpack that, if you can. 

Maybe some American of my readers can add a gloss. Do people in the States really find hearing an accent similar to their own in a video game set somewhere other than the USA disappointing or confusing? I would have thought it was so universal an experience as to be entirely unremarkable. And even if it's true, is a British accent somehow more acceptable, even when it's no more appropriate to the setting?

Seriously, there's so much going on here it's hard to get your head around it. At the most basic level, none of the characters in the proposed setting are going to be speaking any kind of recognizeable English to begin with so why are we even giving the accent consideration? 

You might want to argue that, as is routinely the case in movies,various moderrn accents could stand in for contemorary ones but this is "medieval Europe" we're talking about, a place and time where people would have been speaking in dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of languages and dialects, almost all incoprehensible nowadays to anyone other than a scholar of the period. How can it possibly add authenticity, even spurious, fictional authenticity, to have every one of them speaking "British English", whatever that even is?

What's more, it's not even the historical Europe. It's "fantasy Medieval Europe". There will, one imagines, be magic and non-human races at the very least. Even if anyone was worried about linguistic authenticity in the first place, something that seems exceedingly unlikely, those concerns are going to crumble into irrelevance the first time an elf or a goblin opens their mouth.

My strong feeling is that it's a made-up problem to begin with but even if Yoshi-P has demographic research or metrics from previous Final Fantasy games to back up his belief that Americans get mad if they hear their own accents in medieval fantasy games, it's really the assumption that using "British English" is somehow going to fix all this that floors me. 

I'm going to take it that a century of jobbing British actors prostituting their accents in Hollywood, aided and abetted by a seemingly endless stream of artistically dubious but commercially successful television series exploiting the supposed nostalgic charm of a rigid and hierarchical class structure have somehow conspired to imprint a particular set of aural tropes, now conveniently labelled "British English" on the rest of the world.

I can understand, albeit with some embarassment, how such expedient choices have led the world to believe Britain is nothing more than a Victorian\Edwardian theme park, held in perpetual temporal stasis for their entertainment, but how and when did the elongated dipthongs of a public school educated, drama school trained, upper-middle class voice or the dropped consonants and glottal stops that pass for working-class diction come to represent the authentic sound of "medieval Europe?"

All I can say is that I hope Yoshi-P has thought this through. Even if he's right about American sensitivities, something I very much doubt, has he given due consideration to the sensibilities of his European customers? How do they feel about British accents? Do they prefer them to American ones? Are they "looking forward to a game set in medieval Europe" where every cut-scene sounds like an out-take from Downton Abbey?

I suppose there's a chance French and German speakers may get their own localized versions but there are more than forty countries in Europe and hardly any of them have English as a first language, British or American. As for we Brits, I suspect most would be fine with a mix that included some regional American accents. It would certainlybe preferable to some of the supposed "celtic fringe" tones all too often assigned to the shorter fantasy races.

It's hard to see this idiosyncratic solution suiting anyone other than, perhaps, Yoshi-P's home audience, who might, for all I know, find British accents more authentic to the period and the setting than American. But won't there be a Japanese-voiced version for the home market, anyway?

All of that and I haven't even touched on the even weirder revelation that all the motion capture work has also been assigned to European actors. Americans apparently can't even get the fantasy medieval European moves right.

And... that was eleven hundred words. I guess Twitter wouldn't have helped after all.