peffy

Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness Playing this on Vita.. it's also out on PS4 and I can tell it was optimized for PS4. The text can get really tiny... Anyway, I think this is based on an anime, I don't know anything about it. Only bought it because I wanted to support visual novels on Vita. The concept is very interesting.. cyberpunk-ish sci-fi about Japan 100 years in the future. Don't want to explain it, it's complicated. I've already gotten a few endings and I'm not sure how I feel about the actual story. The big "twist" was HEAVILY telegraphed from almost the beginning of the game, so I was not surprised at all when it happened. Also, to get the platinum trophy, you are required to grind out points in a Threes/2048-clone minigame. Weird.. Zero Escape series Finished both the Nonary Games collection and Zero Time Dilemma. Not sure what to say about ZTD. I was not a fan of any of the new characters, except maybe Carlos was ok. I found the graphics to be rather ugly. Plot-wise, definitely had a few WTF moments. It was a fun ride for the most part, but was left somewhat unsatisfied by the final ending. Felt like another "to be continued" kind of thing. Also, about that freaking dog... Other stuff I completed but don't need/want to talk about.. Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God Reine des Fleurs Lara Croft GO Tropico 5

oh, thanks, didn't realize this was announced that long ago..

LIRAIZO will release two albums on 2017.08.30, titled LIBERI and PARAIZO. Both albums are listed at 3000 yen each. No further details are available yet.

I'm slogging through Tales of Berseria.. I should be nearing the end of the story, but man.... I think my biggest issue with it is backtracking. So many instances of having to go back to a town or dungeon you've been to before. And progress is slowed by my insistence on picking up every glowy spot (random junk item), Katz spirit (junk currency), and randomly re-filled treasure chest. I can't just speed through an old area, I have to re-explore it fully to make sure I get everything. Also, I believe I've become a "casual" gamer in my old age. I can't bring myself to learn the battle system properly (and Zestiria/Berseria are both particularly bad about having overcomplicated systems), I just want the battles over with as quickly as possible. HOWEVER, I am seriously in love with Magilou <3 And maybe Rokurou too, he got pretty hot when I made him wear the slicked-back ponytail & glasses.. Also it's refreshing to play a JRPG where your goal is NOT to save the world, but rather to kill some people by any means necessary. Still maintaining a high level of hype for Dragon Quest XI, which is out at the end of this month. Very miffed that the price (9698 yen) is above the 9200 yen I have sitting in my Japanese PSN account, which means I have to buy another overpriced 1000-yen code. I'm surprised it took you that long. I haven't touched the game since .. December... in the middle of Chapter 3. I do "intend" to finish it, one day. You know, after they "finish" patching in story bits.. Also, I still haven't watched the movie. Hahaha.

It's telling that you wrote this 13 hours ago and I have no way of knowing which scandal or idiotic policy decision is being referred to. I've stopped visiting & posting on MH partly because reading about the latest daily American political travesty has consumed most of my at-work procrastination time.

I need to vent. I've been playing Gravity Rush on Vita, and generally having a good time. Flying around collecting purple orbs is kinda fun. Until the game started making me do more and more combat, and introduced "sliding" which may be the worst-controlling mechanic ever. Whatever, it sucks but I can deal with it. And then came Episode #10: Curiosity Killed the Cat. Hey, awesome idea for a level. Let's severely cripple the main fucking mechanic of the entire game, the gravity powers. Then design a level wherein the player must jump up a series of platforms to fight a boss situated on a very narrow sideways lighthouse. While they are doing this, there are annoying flying monsters attacking them. Oh, if the player falls off the platforms, too bad, they have to jump all the way up there again. I jumped up those platforms like 10 fucking times due to accidentally falling. Finally got the boss down to about 1/4 health. Tried to use Kat's special move on the boss, while aiming the reticle directly at the boss's weak spot. Kat decides to completely reverse direction and target the 2 flying monsters instead. She kills them and then continues flying out into space, completely ignoring the boss. She runs out of gravity juice and falls back to the bottom. My HP is dangerously low at this point, and there are no health pickups around. Fine. One last time. I try to climb up there again. But the flying monsters have respawned and they kill me. Now I have to do the entire boss battle again. Oh wait, no I don't. I close the game. I'm fucking done. Moving on to something else. -- Oh, I should also talk about Yakuza 6. There's a lot of good things about it, which I wrote about at length earlier. Also the platinum was far easier, so it's the first Yakuza game I've platinumed. BUT....... - I have some misgivings about the story. Can't really complain about it without spoiling it. Overall, though, the ending was satisfactory. - Combat was somewhat disappointing. They removed the ability to buy/find weapons that you can keep in inventory. You can only pick up what enemies use/drop, and you lose the weapon after the battle is over. This means that there are WAY FEWER heat moves. Well, not just weapon-based ones. Even the bare-handed heat moves are fewer in number, unless I just suck at finding them.. Also Kiryu is stuck in one combat style (or, maybe 1.5 styles..) for the entire game, which was a huge letdown after Ishin, 0, & Kiwami. - The big minigames were disappointing. Gang creator and baseball. They are mostly simulations. You can only set up teams and send them to fight/play games, with very minimal interaction required. - Cat cafe was disappointing. Collecting them was kinda OK, but then there's not much you can do with them except sit down in the cafe and hope one of the cats sits on your leg and lets you pet it. There was only one animation for this, unless I was just unlucky at getting something different. Oh, the only other thing to do is buy expensive food for the cats. You get to watch the cats eat for 3 seconds and then you get a random item, which is most likely useless junk. - A lot of the series' staple minigames were removed. All gambling is gone (except Mahjong). UFO catcher is gone. Shogi is gone, not that I ever knew how to play it. Billiards is gone. Fishing was replaced with underwater harpoon throwing (plays like an on-rails shooter) that got old fast. It simply wasn't as satisfying as watching Kiryu whip a giant fish out of the water. - Karaoke was reworked into a much prettier presentation. However, during a particularly intense song, the framerate got pretty bad and made it harder to hit buttons on time. - Most substories were kinda unmemorable. ANYWAY in conclusion, it's a good game but really pales in comparison to Yakuza 0, in terms of combat styles, story, minigames, and substories. Imagine if we got Yakuza 0 in this game's engine. Wow that would've been insane. Imagine if we could've made ponytail-Majima take selfies despite that being anachronistic!! I hope all the removed stuff was just cut due to time constraints, and the next Yakuza game has most of it added back in.

I just got my copy of Ryu ga gotoku 6 (aka Yakuza 6)yesterday and played for about 2 hours before I reeeeally had to go to sleep. I also had a migraine while playing. After about 45 minutes of non-stop intro cutscenes (seriously...) I finally got to walk around some of Kamurochou. Holy hell, the changes & improvements in the graphics and menus are immediately stunning. Especially after being stuck with the same engine and similar-looking menus for the SIX previous games in the series I've played. (3, 4, 5, Ishin, 0, Kiwami). - They FINALLY added auto-saving. It's quick and seamless. No more running to phone booths (which, by the way, no longer exist), no more watching that save progress bar fill up TWICE every time you save. - There is literally zero load time going into battles. When you run into random thugs, the screen gets tinted blue for a half-second (to tell you you're entering a battle), and the punches start flying immediately. There is also zero load time when walking into restaurants and stores, it is all completely seamless. - They have re-arranged some places on the map, which is a shock since 3, 4, and 5 basically had the exact same Kamurochou map. - The main menu/pause menu is literally a Sony Xperia phone (looks exactly like my phone). If you get a text message (used for tutorial tips so far), you can read it and continue walking around at the same time. (Kiryu will look at his phone while walking) - You can now purchase drinks from pretty much every vending machine (these drinks will give temporary stat boosts). Kiryu will walk around holding the can, and if you hold down Circle he will drink it. You can also partially drink it and continue walking around with it because why not. - Apparently everything is voiced now. No more reading text boxes, or weird transitions between text-only and voiced dialogue. AMAZING THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN MY 1 HOUR OF FOOLING AROUND IN KAMUROCHOU - Some idiot wanted to fight me. I lured him INTO a nearby convenience store and proceeded to beat his ass INSIDE THE CONVENIENCE STORE. I knocked over some shelves (oops) and bashed his face into the checkout counter. Then I bought cup noodles from the poor employee who'll have to clean up that mess. - Kiryu will BREAK SHIT that's sitting on the streets, just by walking/running into them. Including bicycles, motorbikes, signs, trash cans... pretty amazing for a series that never let you touch anything if you weren't in combat. I spent a few minutes totally wrecking a side street just for the hell of it. - I walked into a cafe and discovered that Kiryu will also BREAK SHIT indoors, including tables and chairs. I destroyed this cafe and terrified the customers. Oops. I passed by this cafe a bit later only to find it "closed for repairs". Lol. I came back later to find it open for business as usual. Then I wrecked it again. Lol. - It seems like it's more common for thugs to attack you with weapons. It also seems easier to make them drop the weapons. Some fool came at me with a sledgehammer. I got him to drop it, then I picked it up and used it to destroy his buddies. BAD THINGS I NOTICED - Strangely, the default walking speed is just walking. Hold down X to dash, but stamina is limited. There's no default "jogging" speed. - I walked into one cabaret club, and was impressed that they gave me FIVE girls to choose from. However they weren't all that attractive.. in fact I would call a couple of them straight-up ugly. But that was just a still image, maybe they look better in motion? - I couldn't find the UFO catcher mini-game in the Sega arcades ?!?!?! Maybe it's somewhere else. - I haven't been able to knock over pedestrians yet. It's VERY IMPORTANT TO ME to knock over pedestrians. I hope it's still in the game. - Once again, Sega has blocked me from taking screenshots/videos. Sega pls. - This is "Kiryu's final chapter", but I really hope they keep making these games with another protagonist. Or more samurai-era games. I need this new engine to be used in more games. NEED. ~ tl;dr I want to take vacation from work just to play more of this. English-only Yakuza fans will likely be in for a treat when this comes out in English next year.

HEAD PHONES PRESIDENT

John Wick 2 .. fun action movie. It occurred to me while watching it that Keanu Reeves still can't act. He's just as stoic and wooden as ever. Or is the wooden-ness an intentional part of his acting? The contrast between his monotone speech and his awesome fighting made the movie funny. I would love to see Logan. Didn't really know about it until I saw the trailer before John Wick 2. Probably gonna see it this month.. or next month.. X-23 (well, at least the Kyle/Yost X-Force version of her) was one of my favourite comic characters, so I'm really happy to hear that her actress is good.

I had put 9000 yen into my Japanese PSN account in preparation to buy Ryu ga gotoku 6 (which is listed at 8800 yen or so)... only to randomly click on my Play Asia bookmark and find out they were selling it for $40 US as part of their weekly special sale.. so I jumped on that.. Then I got upset because I had no idea what to use that 9000 yen on.. most worthwhile Japanese games are being localized into English relatively quickly.. BUT! Today I was reminded of the existence of Dragon Quest XI. It's supposed to come out this year and I'm pretty sure the Western version hasn't been announced yet. Prime candidate for buying on Japanese PSN. I'm not sure I'll ever get used to the brown-haired dude being the hero, and not the way-cooler-looking spiky-blue-haired dude. Please share your hair gel with the hero, his hair is flat af. Also, not sure about the somewhat-jarring dissonance between the cartoony characters and the approaching-realistic-looking environment. Some of the ladies/kids especially look weird, with their huge Toriyama anime eyes. But look at those cute kitty monsters!!! And that attractive purple-haired lady! I hope she joins the party.. Anyway, regardless of artstyle issues, still really pumped for a real mainline turn-based Dragon Quest game on PS4. .. I just hope the price is 9000 yen or lower..... FFXV is 9500 yen on PSN.. stupid non-standard Japanese pricing... I'll be PISSED if I have to get another PSN card. (interesting side note.. the official site still makes zero mention of the already-confirmed Nintendo Switch version.. only shows PS4 and 3DS.. weird. maybe it will come much later)

It's been awhile.. Dragon Quest Builders I beat this on Jan 22.. hmm from what I remember, I had quite a good time with it, aside from some slightly annoying quirks. Also, it helped that I knew ahead of time that your progress is basically not carried over between chapters. It sounds like a weird choice, but sort of makes sense in the context of the game and the way crafting is set up. Gone Home This will be THE LAST first-person game I ever play. Omg I felt so sick about 5 minutes into it. Thankfully it is a short game, and I managed to rush through it until the ending. But I had to spend a couple of hours after that trying not to puke. I guess I am just not cut out for first-person. Lego Ninjago: Shadow of Ronin Had no idea what Ninjago was, I just got this cuz it was cheap and an easy platinum. It was fine, typical Lego game, whatever. Azkend 2 Fairly crappy "puzzle" game, free with PS plus. Meh. I beat the story and put it away. Ryu ga gotoku Kiwami (Yakuza Kiwami) Finally got around to this game. I got super pumped for this after seeing the amazingly positive Western reaction to Yakuza 0. I'm sad to report that it felt more like a poor man's copy of 0, but I guess that's to be expected since it's just a remake of the original game (though I assume it had some extra substories patched in). The battle mechanics are basically the same as 0, except you don't get to play as Majima this time. Instead, Majima harasses you every 5-10 minutes and you have to fight him a million times. Now, I love Majima, but this got kind of annoying towards the end of the game, especially cuz he gets like 6 health bars. Felt so sad when my reaction to hearing "KIRRRRRYU CHAAAAA~~N" deteriorated from "YES MAJIMA!" to "shit, run away run awaaaay". Except in some cases you cannot run away. Also felt bad to make Kiryu stomp on his face 400 times.. No wonder Majima is insane. The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone/Blood and Wine This is what I'm playing right now. The amazing adventures of Geralt, who opens and loots every sack/box/chest possible. Geralt, who is carrying about 800 mugs of alcohol for no apparent reason. Also has 200 chicken legs that miraculously never spoil (gonna assume that's sorceress magic). It will take me weeks to finish this, after which I will purchase and play the shit out of Ryu ga gotoku 6 which I am sure is one of the greatest games of all time. .. ? I hope.

Psycho le Cemu - Roman Hikou (2003) First "VK" song I actually liked (PV is great too), and was sort of into the album FRONTIERS. However I pretty much hated any other VK I tried at that time... stuff like Luna Sea, X Japan, Dir en Grey.. (actually, if you consider Janne Da Arc/Gackt/L'arc~en~Ciel circa 2003 to be VK, they'd probably be first, but I would call them J-rock at that point..) So, aside from Psycho le Cemu, I continued to ignore all VK until 2009 when I chanced upon exist†trace's VANGUARD. They helped me get over my aversion to growling/screaming. I listened to them extensively for nearly a year until I discovered D'espairsRay's LOVE IS DEAD, which I paid attention to mostly because I thought the "You Spin Me Round" similarities were hilarious. Thus began my VK obsession.

WTF Nintendo... $400 price tag in Canada. Plus $90 (!!!!!!!!!!) for a pro controller. Paid subscription required for online play & 1 free NES or SNES game per month. Only 32 GB hard drive so you basically have to buy/use an extra micro SD card. Good luck with that. (and yeah, I still hate the name) For comparison... current prices on Amazon Canada: PS4 Slim with Uncharted 4 = $329 PS4 Controller = $61 Xbox One S with game = $358-380 Xbox One Controller = $65 And current Nintendo console MSRPs: New 3DS XL = $240 2DS = $110 Wii U with Mario Kart 8 = $330 And the software... As usual, their big budget first party games look promising, but the third party support is mostly laughable. Skyrim, lol. So many ports of old games. ... I'm sure the Nintendo fans will buy this console and love it. There isn't much here to convince an ex-fan, though. This kind of feels like a Wii U situation all over again, except they're not going to have a popular handheld to fall back on this time.

Halloween kei is best kei ... maybe second-best kei Preview sounds great, Ikuma looks beautiful, new drummer looks pretty cool. Count me in.

.............................. WHAT??? Was that part of the "road trip" thing? I didn't bother with that because it looked like it was for US only. I pre-ordered from Amazon Canada. The only things I got were a Chocobo skin for the car, and Masamune (which became useless after about 30 minutes, or is there something good about it that I don't know?) God damn it But thx for the tip. I stopped playing just after I got the chocobo. Yes, I put down FFXV and will probably not play it again until they release the "story" update and the Chapter 13 fixes. I am not a happy customer, especially when even the freaking PSN store has already put it on sale for slightly less than what I paid for it ($53 vs $56). Never pre-order, indeed. So instead of FFXV, I went back to Divinity: Original Sin and finished it. The final boss battles were not too hard (well, it was on Easy), but somewhat nerve-wracking because I encountered a save bug early into the final dungeon, which prevented me from saving... I could've "fixed" it by loading an earlier save, but by the time I realized it had happened, I didn't want to re-start the dungeon. Annoying puzzles in there, even with the walkthrough I was following *smirk* Over in Vita land, I got platinum trophy for Hitman Go (had to look up Youtube solutions for some levels... no shame), and also got platinums in Code Realize and Amnesia: Memories. Those 2 are visual novels that I imported from Japan and finished, only for both of them to get translated to English and put on Playstation Plus in short order. You damn right I got the 2nd platinum for both of them by skipping all dialogue. I paid like $50-70 for each of those games (and I didn't really like either of them), I'm gonna get my money's worth. Also I played, got addicted to, finished, and got all trophies for Letter Quest Remastered in 3 days. I will probably start Dragon Quest Builders on PS4 next. Very excited. On Vita, I have returned to Reine des fleurs, this time armed with a guide. I had been trying to play it on my own but kept getting the same bad ending. Apparently it has a lot more non-obvious choices and bad endings than all other Otomate games I've played, and I must've fucked up some choice prior to my earliest save. Also, the level of Japanese vocabulary used in the game is sometimes over my head... I should really look up the words instead of just shrugging it off, maybe I'll learn something...

I put in WORK and got my shiny platinum for World of Final Fantasy. Took about 75 hours. Great game, except the last boss is kinda bullshit and I had to look up a cheesy strategy to beat it. Started playing Hitman Go, it's a pretty cool puzzle game. Also inching my way through FFXV. My desire to play took a big hit when I saw the news about the upcoming patches. I'm only in Chapter 3 (just reached the city) and wow they really did drop the ball with storytelling. And the game has that open-world problem of the main story not gelling with sidequests. Early spoilers: Anyway, I get it, it's a video game. Feels like they really took the criticisms of FFXIII to heart, in that being a group on the run means they can't visit towns and the dungeon design absolutely MUST be straight hallways. So they went in the compete opposite direction. Fuck story, let's just make this a fun game to play. Looks like a lot of work went into the bromance aspect, and I do appreciate the 4 dudes' relationship, but it kind of doesn't make sense to be happening with the main story stuff hanging over their heads. ... well, I'm still early in the game, maybe my view of this will change. Also I want to mention how the game is kind of scary. The first dungeon was a little creepy. Much creepier than anything I remember in other FFs. And the "Arachne" monsters that pop up at night sound like women getting murdered. WTF. I didn't want to camp cuz I was saving up experience, so I decided to run to a fishing spot and fish all night. I passed some Arachne on the way there and they were just SCREAMING the entire time I was fishing. .... I had to mute the volume...

Sounds kind of like a Christmas song, but the preview cuts off at a weird spot. Maybe shit really pops off at that moment. I hope. Because I hate Christmas music. Also, I really liked Hedoro =p

This look seems to be for their current tour, not for the new single, but I'm just posting it cuz I think it looks cool. (despite the hat guy, and despite the feeling that I've seen 10 other bands use this antique couch + deer skull + framed photo setting)

How? Well, many of their songs sound like copies of their other songs. Quantity > quality. (I do really like ~10-15% of their songs) Also it would not surprise me if most bands had ghostwriters writing at least some of their music. Kiryu's pace is not as high as I expected. Surprise. ... Here's some new-ish bands that I cared enough to think about. Obviously these are "young" bands and I'd expect the average to drop as they age. Or they could pull a Mejibray, who knows. I might have missed some live dists in the song count.. dunno, I don't really follow that stuff closely Liraizo years: 2 years (debut Oct 2014) songs: 22, plus 12 monthly 1-song live dist singles which I'm assuming are new full songs, so 34 avg: 17 Arlequin years: 3 years (debut Oct 2013) songs: 50 ? avg: 16.7 Pentagon years: 2 years (debut Feb 2015... or a few months earlier if you count their time as "Call Me"?) songs: 36 ? 35 if you don't want to count "FRONT" avg: 18 Avanchick years: 2.5 years (debut June 2014) songs: 30 ? avg: 12 ... wow that's much lower than I thought. Probably because their album only had 4 new songs. yeah i'm still mad.

http://www.last.fm/user/peffy/listening-report/year It's a really cool idea. I still scrobble almost everything I listen to, despite last.fm becoming an undeniably shittier website. Unfortunately my year end page is all skewed towards REIGN because on May 18 I decided to delete all my REIGN (in full unicode letters) scrobbles and re-scrobble them as REＩGN. It was a dumb waste of time. Next year's page will actually show me some real statistics, hehe.

I haven't really been keeping up with non-Japanese music, but here goes Chinese: 王菲 Faye Wong 蕭亞軒 Elva Hsiao 陳慧琳 Kelly Chen (... though I think much of Elva & Kelly's music is, like most Cpop, super boring) Korean: BoA English (so much 90s): Fiona Apple Shirley Manson (Garbage) Aaliyah Lauryn Hill ... my non-Japanese male vocalist list would be a lot longer.. interesting

tbh Shiki's vocals are something I just tolerate, I wouldn't mind seeing the band continue with a slightly better vocalist. But they're going on "hiatus" so they might just never come back. *sigh* I'm a big fan of their stripped-down garage band party rock style, which is unique in my limited stable of VK bands I like.

Interesting. I noticed that ソノココロ (the b-side from their last single) didn't have any Japan-esque sound to it. If that's an indication of what their new band+sound will be like, I'll be kinda disappointed...