Podcast Episode 14 - Stardew Valley

It's the end of the month, so that means it's time for a podcast!

In this episode I discuss the farming game Stardew Valley. It's a love letter to classic Harvest Moon games that improves upon them in almost every facet. Let me tell you all about why farming is super fun.

Memorable Melodies: The Legendary Theme from Gitaroo Man

Song: The Legendary Theme

Game: Gitaroo Man

Composer: COIL (They're a Japanese band)

I love most rhythm games, but I especially loves the ones that have crazy stories. When I think of crazy rhythm games Gitaroo Man is one of the first that comes to my mind. You play as a young kid named U-1, who is kind of clumsy. He has very low self confidence, but he's super thirsty for a local girl.

Somehow this transitions into his dog giving him a "Gitaroo," which allows him to transform into the legendary Gitaroo Man. He basically has super musical powers. U-1 then finds out that the planet Gitaroo is under the control of an evil overlord and he is the only one who can save it! It sounds insane, because it is insane. 

When you do well jammin' guitar happens. This means that most songs in the game are super up-tempo guitar solo heavy songs. That's why when U-1 busts out the Legendary Theme it's an amazing moment. It's a super chill song that still has all the guitar solos you can handle. The song is actually played twice in the game. The first time it's acoustic, and the second is the one that is featured above.

Note: If for some reason you're sensitive to Gitaroo Man spoilers then don't read below this line.

You may notice that there are two guitarists playing in the song, and that's true in the game as well. When he first lands of planet Gitaroo U-1 meets a girl who looks exactly like the girl he's in love with back on earth, They play the acoustic version of the song there. U-1 finds out that the cool girl he met is actually evil, but he brings her over to his side with the power of music! The two then join together to rock out this amazing version of The Legendary Theme. It's a really powerful moment that caps off an exceptionally weird game. 

Memorable Melodies: Victory Fanfare from Final Fantasy VI

Song: Victory Fanfare

Game: Final Fantasy VI

Composer: Nobuo Uematsu

This week I'm bringing one of the most iconic video game composers of all time into the mix alongside one of the most iconic video game tracks ever conceived. If you've ever played a Final Fantasy game, then you have undoubtedly heard some variation of the Victory Fanfare. Once you take town a squad of enemies in battle this triumphant tune plays as you bask in your glory.

What's interesting about this song is that there are so many different versions of it. Each main line Final Fantasy has its own spin on the song. They all have different feels. I chose the version from Final Fantasy VI, because it's the most upbeat. Some of them like the one in Final Fatasy IX start off up-tempo, but quickly bring it down. The version in Final Fantasy VII isn't very upbeat either.

Each different version has its own unique feel and that's an impressive feat considering just how many variations there are. 

Note: Final Fantasy VI is my favorite Final Fantasy game.

Memorable Melodies: Jake's Theme from Advance Wars Dual Strike

Song: Jake's Theme

Game: Advance Wars Dual Strike

Composer: Yoshito Hirano

When people think of Intelligent Systems they tend to only think about Fire Emblem. I'm going to sound like an asshole here when I say that I wanted Fire Emblem Awakening to be the last Fire Emblem game. Instead it was a huge success. I, and many others loved it. Within the past month we got three new Fire Emblem games. That's cool and all, but I personally would have preferred a new Advance Wars game.

I feel like Advance Wars has been forgotten by everyone but me at this point. That's something I cannot allow. Its gameplay is somewhere in between a turn based tactical RPG and a real time strategy game. You as the player are the commanding officer, so you create units and tell them where to go. Each officer has different abilities and powers that they can activate under certain conditions. You use infantry to take over buildings. Those buildings determine your income each turn, and what units you can build. So unlike Fire Emblem you keep making new units each turn. While not ideal, I tend to make a butt-load of tanks. Taks are cool.

I'm not here to say that Advance Wars is better than Fire Emblem. I am however here to say that the music in Advance Wars is vastly superior to the music in Fire Emblem. Sometimes during tactical combat you need to get amped up, and the music in Advance Wars totally does that. Advance Wars: Dual Strike, the third game in the franchise, introduced a new character named Jake. He loves rock music, so obviously his theme would be totally jammin'. 

Not only is Jake's theme awesome, a majority of the music from the franchise is top notch. If you're a fan of tactical video games this is definitely a series you should check out. It's got great gameplay and music. What's not to love?

Memorable Melodies: Katamari on the Rocks from Katamari Damacy

Song: Katamari on the Rocks

Game: Katamari Damacy

Composer: Yu Miyake

Note: I was sitting here on this beautiful Saturday afternoon listening to some hot video game jams and I realized that the memorable melody for the week wasn't up! I've been writing these ahead of time, but for some reason they refuse to auto post. I apologize for that. I have learned my lesson and will not start posting them on my own and not trying to rely on an auto posting.

The time has finally come. For the past few months I've been posting relatively tame music. That time has finally come to an end. We're going to turn the weird knob up to eleven with this entry. 

I discovered the Katamari franchise during my high school career. My best friend was borrowing We Love Katamari from his cousin and he brought it over to my house. He let me play and my mind promptly exploded. For the uninitiated the Katamari games have you playing as a small alien known as The Prince. His father, The King of All Cosmos, accidentally destroyed all the stars in the sky. Oops! It is your job as The Prince to go to earth and roll up tons of objects in your Katamari.

What is a Katamari? Good question. I'm still not too sure myself. It's basically a super sticky ball. The gameplay consists of you rolling it around earth and picking up anything that isn't glued down. Once you complete a level the Katamari is thrown into the sky and made into a star or planet. Yes, it is just as weird as it sounds.

Every time I think about this franchise I get excited. It's so god damn weird, and I love everything about it. To go along with the out of control gameplay the soundtrack of each game is equally ridiculous. It's mostly Japanese, and it's all weird. The song I chose for this week is probably the most well know song from the franchise. I mean come on, it's the theme song.

Katamari on the Rocks opens Katamari Damacy, and it definitely sets the tone for what is to come. It's insane. The lyrics are all in Japanese, but the vocalist occasionally says Katamari Damacy. This song along with most songs in the franchise are very energetic and have a decidedly jazzy feel. If you like this jam, then you'll probably like the rest of the songs in the franchise. 

Game Time - February 2016

February happened, and I am somehow still standing. I played a few of my most anticipated games of 2016, and had a wonderful time. Sadly I didn't end up beating any of them yet, but I will get there eventually. I am right at the end of Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, and I guess you can't really beat Street Fighter V. Well, I did beat the story mode, so I guess that counts? Who knows!

Cyber Sleuth came out at the beginning of the month and I streamed it a whole bunch, so if you want to see any of that check out my YouTube channel for all kinds of Digimon content. 

Right now I'm playing Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest and it is kicking my ass. They weren't kidding when they said it was hard. It's especially rough, because I never want to let anyone die.

Street Fighter came out too and I've been playing that at least once a day. I'm trying to get moderately good at it, but I am not quite to that goal yet. Spoilers, it's a fighting game!

Okay, let's talk about video games now!

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth

Digimon is one of my favorite franchises of all time. I love the anime series, and a majority of the games have been pretty good. At some point Namco Bandai stopped localizing the titles, so here in America we missed out on quite a few solid Digimon Games. One of which was Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth on the Vita. Fans started a petition that got a crazy amount of signatures to bring it out in English. Now a few years later it has finally come out on both PS4 and Vita.

Digimon games have changed a lot over the years. On the DS they began to take the form of something more like Pokemon than previous iterations. You run into Digimon in battle and scan them. Once you've run into them enough you can reform them and have them as your own. Once you have them in order to Digivolve them you have to meet specific stat requirements. If you reach max level and can't meet the requirements to digivolve you can de-digivolve them. This makes it so that they have a higher max level.

I've been grinding to get these guys. I'm so close!

Combat is turn based, and uses a similar weakness system to Pokemon. There are virus, vaccine, and data type Digimon that all have their own respective weaknesses. Cyber Sleuth follows the same pattern as the 3DS games, but the requirements to digivolve are way less annoying. They are exclusively based on stats and not how many battles you've fought. There are a ton of Digimon to collect, and the battles are fun.

The core gameplay is fine, but the rest of the game doesn't always hold up. The game starts very stylishly, and moves along at a decent clip. However, after the first few hours the pacing begins to fall apart. Many chapters don't involve any tie to the main story, and instead have the main character running around doing pointless garbage. It doesn't help that almost all of the games environments are introduced fairly early on, and then are repeated for the rest of the game.

Every area in the game looks like this.

It's a solid game, but the repetition of areas and random quests can be a little grading. It doesn't help that the translation is a bit spotty, so when the story does happen its not always the best. Seriously, the main character is only a silent protagonist sometimes. They make jokes about him being silent and not talking very much, but there are numerous scenes where he talks to people directly. What!? It's a good thing that the battling and collecting Digimon aspect of the game is good, or I don't know that I would be as into the game as I am.

Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest

Fire Emblem games are always very similar. They are turn based tactics games with tons of generic anime characters. The reason I come to FE games is the combat. It's challenging and fun, and to me the permanent death of characters adds an extra layer to that. I personally have to restart every time someone dies. I don't care that people say this is cheating, or "un-pure." I want to do the best tactically, so when someone does die it's enough punishment to start the map over again.

I'm saying this because I've been starting over in Conquest a whole bunch. In case you don't know about Fire Emblem Fates it comes in three versions. Birthright is supposed to be the easier game for newcomers. You can level up your units easily by completing challenge maps. Money is also easier to come by. Conquest is meant for veterans of the series and is very challenging. There is limited money, and the experience you get in each chapter is all you get. There is a third version called Revelation as well, but I don't know what's different about that. Obviously with each version you get different characters, but I don't have any idea what the gameplay difference is in Revelation.

Which game will you be playing?

 It's odd, because the last FE entry was originally going to be the last in the franchise due to poor performance of previous entries. The development team put every popular feature in the game as a sendoff to the series. It ended up selling very well, so Nintendo decided to keep the franchise going with Fates. Instead of adding anything new to the game they kind of just decided to make three games instead of one. Sure, weapons don't have durability and you can change the field a little bit with weird dragon magic, but it still feels like Fire Emblem. It's not "new." I like FE in general, so I'm okay with this, but it might be why I feel so underwhelmed by the game.

The tactics you know and love are still there, but some of the charm is gone. It doesn't help that all of the characters are boring to me. Normally FE characters are generic anime archetypes, but they have interesting quirks. Everyone in Fates is generic and that's it. I don't really have any interest in any of the characters. It feels like Waifu Simulator 2016. It's a game about tactics, not anime wives. 

Waifu simulator 2016.

The tactical portion of the game is genuinely good from what I've played in Conquest. The maps aren't all the generic kill everyone maps that I've become accustomed to from the series. There are actual different objectives that make combat feel a lot more varied. I've had to survive for a set amount of turns, defend a point, and escape the field. It's not all good though, because it makes some of the stages feel gimmicky. Like right now I'm stuck on a chapter where wind blows my guys around. People keep dying because they get blown into a group of enemies. I'm sure there's some strategy I haven't thought of yet, but as of right now the map just seems shitty for the sake of killing your units. 

Street Fighter V

I like fighting games, and I love Street Fighter V. I knew months before the games release that I loved it. I played every single beta for hours. It's a Street Fighter game. It's faster than Street Fighter 4 and adds in some new mechanics. V-skills are used by pushing medium punch and medium kick at the same time. Depending on the character it does something cool. Ryu can parry, Birdie eats food, and Ken can dash. Once you use the V-Skill enough you can push both heavy punch and kick to activate V-trigger. Once again it does something different depending on the character, but it's always cool. Ryu, Ken, and Cammy power up, while characters like Nash teleport around. It's an interesting mechanic that makes the characters feel way different than their SF4 counterparts,

When the game came out the servers crashed under the load of people who were trying to access the game. This happens quite frequently to online based games when they launch, but people always forget that. This means that the backlash to the game has been quite strong. People weren't able to play the game online for a whole two days! I understand why this upsets people, but local play is where fighting games shine anyways. There's no input delay at all! Where SFV gets a little rough is that if you're connected to the server while in an offline mode and lose connection you are kicked back to the main menu. Seriously, I was in a local versus match and the game booted us out of it. That was shitty,

Cammy activating her V-skill.

Since the first two days of the games release it has worked flawlessly for me. I've fought hundreds of online matches, and none have had a bad connection. The net-code is very solid. It's based on rollback, so if the connection is rough the characters will teleport around a bit. You definitely want to be wired in to the router if you're going to be playing SFV online.

The main gripe people have with Street Fighter V is that there is almost no single player content whatsoever. Story mode is a series of fights that took me about an hour to beat. All you do is see some poorly drawn art and then do a one round fight where you have full meter. It's lame. Other than that you can do training mode, or survival. In survival you fight against the AI, and keep the same health after each round. You can spend points after each round to get stat bonuses, and regain health. It's also lame!

Play fighting games to fight, not for single player story.

Street Fighter V is amazing. The fighting is incredible. It's easier to link things, so doing combos isn't as ridiculously hard for me as it used to be. I am also a huge fan of the new V system. I get why people are upset the game has no single player content, but they also probably weren't super into Street Fighter to begin with. It's a fighting game. You are supposed to fight other people. I get that not everyone wants to do that, so if you don't want to do that don't buy the game.

March

Pokken Tournament comes out next week, I feel like I should be super excited about a Pokemon fighting game, but right now I'm not excited at all. Hopefully I get more hype as the date gets closer.

Before Pokken, the Division comes out. I played the beta and liked it a lot. I'd describe it as a more enjoyable version of Destiny. The final release could deliver on what the beta promised, or totally ruin everything. I guess we'll just have to find out!

See you next month!