Entry 136: "Four Faultless Felons"

Dear Internet,

                Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a writer of paradoxes.  The various novellas, novels, and short stories he penned are filled with them.  Just about anything that you pick up by the man has a paradox at its core.  Not to be confused with the oxymoron which is more a contradiction in the purest form, Chesterton's paradoxes require the two things that they present to be both true yet seem like they contradict one another.  For example, the courage of a soldier when caught behind enemy lines can only save his life by throwing away his concern for his life and risking death.  If he stays still, he will surely die, but if he risks his life, he may save it.  Another example would be Chesterton's arguments for the smallness of man against God yet hugeness to that of the rest of the universe.  But I will not go on and on since you are most likely wondering what any of this has to do with "Four Faultless Felons."  The title of the book probably holds a clue.

                "Four Faultless Felons" is a collection of four novellas or shorter tales telling of four individuals who are more than mere criminals.    Each of the four men tells his tale to reporter Asa Lee Pinion, an American reporter gone to England to find a story on Count Raoul de Marillac.  Pinion goes to London hoping to learn about the extravagant lifestyle of the count.  In one way, he is not dissapointed.  The count frequently eats expensive dishes and goes out to see the newest bawdiest plays that are being produced.  It is only when the reporter is left alone with the four men that he learns the truth.  The count is in fact living a rather penitent lifestyle.  All the dishes he eats are counter to his tastes, and he goes to the plays because they are boring and uninteresting.  The men that tell Pinion this truth about the count have each committed a crime of sorts, but there is obviously more to each tale.  The crimes committed are murder, fraud, theft, and treason.  Like the count, each man is counter to what he originally appears.  Together, the men form the "Club of Men Misunderstood."

                The stories are told in a classic detective manner with the catch that there is usually no crime being committed.  The reader is privy to this understanding just from reading the title of the book.  It is understood right from the beginning that there is going to be mysteries that go beyond the immediate ones being told, but that does not mean that those mysteries are going to be easy to solve.  I do not wish to even go into the details of each story since doing so will end up giving away a clue or two.  So, you will just have to take my word that the tales are each riveting and play out well.

                The book is less like a detective novel than I might be leading on.  A normal detective story flows in a rather strict formula.  The various characters are presented, giving each just enough of a presentation that the audience can understand them in an instant.  The setting is likewise given such treatment.  Afterwards, the crime is committed.  The clues are presented either at this point or in the following moments.  Depending on the length of the story, a number of false accusations and incorrect attempts to the solution are presented.  Eventually, the mystery is solved with the truth being presented to the audience at least and the various characters at most.  In "Four Faultless Felons," just one of these elements is skewed.  The crime itself is given scrutiny.  The crime itself is called into question.  The crime itself is brought forward to testify in the witness chair.  If anything, the book is more of a vanishing act.  The crimes, not the criminals, pull escape acts.

                I have already done a review of Chesterton's more famous mystery stories, the Father Brown books.  It would be probably best to compare this book with those stories since the Father Brown stories are more widely recognized.  In the same way that the Father Brown stories center around the criminal rather than the crime, "Four Faultless Felons" center on why the individuals act in the manner that they do rather than merely figuring out how they pulled off their actions.  It is not enough to know how the action is committed but to figure out why it is committed in the first place.  The motive is what lays down the groundwork for each tale.  Without motive or intent, a crime is usually just an accident.

                Unlike the Father Brown stories, which are usually less than twenty pages, the stories here average near the forty five page mark.  Also, the four stories are broken into subsequent chapters.  This means that each of the stories is given a wide birth to be built, examined, and solved.  This of course leads to a number of notable characteristics.  With the lengthening of the story, there is much wider chance for the audience to solve the mystery before the solution is revealed.  Yet at the same time, the story can become much more intertwined and complicated.  Chesterton walks right down the middle without leaving the reader ensnared in the thicket of connecting lines.  The added lengths do not make the stories convoluted.  They allow the stories greater depth and life, but they also allow Chesterton a greater ability to explore a specific theme.  In the Father Brown stories, most of the themes would end up being a short speech delivered out by the amateur sleuth at the end each story.  They were very much "and the moral of the story is" type of deliveries.  This was due to the brevity of the various stories.  Here, Chesterton is able to dig into the themes well before the solution is presented.  He is able to have the characters expand their positions well before the curtain is going to set.  The antagonistic characters are even able to express themselves without being curtly cut off or summarized.  

                "Four Faultless Felons" is a great small collection of mystery stories.  The only thing that I wonder is why it went out of printing for so long.  The most immediate answer in my mind is that it is so similar to another book by Chesterton.  "Manalive" is right next to this book in how it handles crime mysteries.  Unlike this book, "Manalive" attributes all the crimes to a single individual instead of four.  "Four Faultless Felons" can be considered a continuation of the same themes, but the breaking up of the crimes allows a small variety of settings and characters to be created.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next week is "The Worm Ouroboros."

Log 005

Dear Internet,

                When I last I left off, I was going to talk about voice acting.  It is safe to say that my project will have none of that fluff.  As a one person team, I would have to do every single voice.  While this would no doubt be quite humorous, it would alter the mood of most scenes.  Let me say that I am not an individual of a hundred voices.  I barely have a single voice, and it would make things quite strange if that same voice acted out a number of parts, many of which would require a pitch that I just cannot throw.  Maybe for a short comedy visual novel I would, but not for this.

                I do not mind voice acting in visual novels.  The only problem is that the only time I have heard it done well is with the Japanese voices.  That itself is a problem because I am mostly unable to tell if it is even being done right in Japanese.  They may be doing a horrible job at it, but I cannot tell.  Either way, I usually just let the voice acting play out as long as it keeps up with my reading speed.  If the reading of the lines get too long and the text is just sitting there, I will go ahead and keep reading without waiting for the voice to catch up.  But this is only when I have the Japanese voices on.  I treat it as background sounds at best.  

                English voice acting for visual novels falls into two categories.  Either a voice acting veteran or a horrible amateur is doing it.  In the case of the veteran, you will end up thinking about all the other characters that the actor has played, making your mind wander away from the scene and words.  In the case of the amateur, you will get a refreshing and new voice at the cost of, well, a high chance of wanting to mute the whole thing altogether.  If you cannot mute the voices specifically but want to listen to the music, you will end up reading the text as quick as it can display, jamming the advance button, and forcing the speech clips to shorten into lengths of two words apiece.  It creates a mildly amusing sound as everyone sounds like they are gargling marbles.

                Then there is the worst case scenario.  That is when the voices do not even match up to the text.  "Lux-Pain" is the greatest example of a visual novel kind of game where the localization went absolutely down two dead end streets.  From what I could gather messing around forum boards, the translation had been split up between two to three teams.  This meant that location names not only were different in one half of the game as compared to the other half, but the voice acting did not even match up to what was being displayed.  I think there was even a section where the player had to answer questions, recalling information that had been relayed to them.  Those questions asked about some of these mixed up translation errors, which left the player not even knowing whether the info they were told was accurate.  

                There is one thing that I want to mention concerning voice acting in a visual novel format.  Line length when using spoken dialog needs to be properly balanced out to ensure proper pacing.  This falls back into the pacing issue when using just text that I mentioned in an earlier Log.  If the spoken text is excessively long to the point that it slows down a fact paced scene, it needs to be reworked.  If the spoken text hurries onward when the scene needs to be stretched out, it needs to be reworked.  The best instance I can think of when this gets done poorly is when a character has to scream or cry.  What happens is that the voice actor has to make a long cry or yell when the text that is being displayed is vastly shorter and gets displayed quickly.  The reader ends up sitting there with a fully displayed text bubble and has to wait for the exceptionally long moan has to be delivered.  The scene's flow has to instantly stop while the voice actor finishes a single line.  There has to be a middle ground where the scene continues its flow without compromising the two elements, text and sound.

                Thankfully, having none of this in my project means that I do not have to worry about it.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Current Assets

Writing: ~650 lines

Coding: ~35 lines

Art: 0%

Audio: 0%

Entry 135: "Nier" Pt.3 End

Dear Internet,

                Well, I am a day late and a Gald short.  I said that I would usually post these reviews on Friday, and here it is Saturday.  I was up late yesterday in an attempt to finish off "Nier" so that I could write a full review.  By the time that I had finished "Nier," it was too late to write a final review.  I think we can all learn something from this experience.  I need to start these reviews earlier so that I can make sure I have enough time.  And you need to remember the definition of "usually."  But I jest, unlike "Nier."

                "Nier" is a game that takes itself too seriously.  From the story to the message that it wants to impart on the player, "Nier" does not know how to lighten up until it absolutely has to.  Everything is taken with the same layer of dark narrative and done so poorly at that.  Take how the game handles the quest to cure Yonah and how it attempts to force the audience to care.  We know as an audience that Nier cares deeply for his daughter.  He is constantly trying to find a way to save her from a death sentence.  That is the whole point of the quest that he sets out on from early on in the game.  However, there is little to no emotional bond that occurs between the character of Yonah and the audience because there is little to no attempt to create that bond.  Early on in the game, there is next to no interaction with her as a character.  We only get a few lines of dialog here and there with a few fetch side quests thrown in.  We are meant to care for her not because we have grown fond of her from a depth of interaction with her but because she is a plot item.  She is there as a reason to go around and explore.  The player does not have to even interact with her at all beyond a few forced dialog bits.  We know she is most likely going to be OK by the end of the game in one way or another since denying this would be one amazing anti-climax.  There is not a real threat of losing her at all, just missing her a little while.  Unlike a game like "Valkyria Chronicles," where having one of your soldiers fall in battle can risk them dying permanently and you will never use them again, "Nier" cannot reproduce this effect by just telling the audience that they are supposed to care about the plot character.  I cared more about the super minor characters in "Valkyria Chronicles" way more than Yonah because there was a real threat of losing the character.  It made me want to protect and keep those characters safe because it would have been my own fault for losing them.

It does not help the fact that the game openly denies interaction with her.

                There is a scene in "Nier" where a certain character permanently changes their physical form significantly, to the point that they look more like a monster than human.  They naturally freak out at such a change, breaking down and crying a little.  Less than two minutes later they say about the transformation, "I was terrified at first, but I think I'm okay with it."  This kind of turnaround of emotion within a short amount of time and with so little force to do so is a reflection of the game's poor story pacing.  The character lost their mortal body but was perfectly alright with it mere minutes later.  The whole transformation felt unneeded to the plot, instead feeling as if the development team had created a character design that they did not want to go to waste.  In fact, Nier himself receives a redesign after a time skip in the game which feels more like forced implementation of unused art assets.  I say this because prior to the time skip he receives immensely physical wounds through his upper body and abdomen, but after the time skip he is wearing an eye patch.  His eye had not been damaged.  Is the eye patch supposed to illustrate how battle weary he has become since before the time skip?  It only brings forth the question of how he lost his eye since it was not injured when we last saw him.  If the aim is to show the character's culmination of his battle exploits that have formed him into the character that we see after the time skip, how about we see him with the scars of the battle that we saw him fought, not the ones we did not see?  Every time we would then see those scars, we would remember the incident that formed them, reminding us of a specific even in the game's story.  Instead, we get an eye patch because eye patches means he is a tough guy.

                Then there is the death of a side character that cannot be avoided no matter what which should come as no surprise to anyone who plays the game.  I say this because the opening movie that plays every time the game is launched clearly shows the character dying.  This is not the only spoiler that occurs within the opening movie.  All one has to do is watch the movie just once for a number of images to keep popping into their heads as they play the game to have a number of plot points lose their impact when they finally occur.  This is not something that is unique to "Nier."  A number of Japanese games that I have played like to do this.  They take all of the game's highest quality cinematics and mash them together to form an opening movie.  This is not something all that bad in upon itself.  One usually wants to put their best foot forward when showcasing the game in an effort to pump up the player and get them excited to see what the game has in store for them.  However, when the game throws together the most pivotal scenes into that mash up and includes plot hints as well, it becomes a ruining experience that devalues the game's story.  

                I said last about mentioning the game's fishing and farming aspects.  Let me just say that there are extensive fishing and farming mechanics.  You can fish in a number of locations that even include quicksand.  You can farm anything from wheat to flowers.  It can even be enough to be a game on itself, especially considering that there are a few difficult goals within those aspects of the game.  I only have one problem with these things.  What in the world do they have to do with the core game?  Absolutely nothing I tell you.  You only have to fish once in the game, and you do not even have to farm to complete the game.  Neither of these things have got anything to do with the core game mechanics.  Reeling in a major catch does nothing to make you hit harder.  Growing a tulip will not make your magic any better.  Or at least I am not aware of such things.  I do not mind a small diversion in some games, even if it is to break the monotony that some can fall into.  But when there is such a large side game that does nothing to correlate itself to the main game, it just feels silly to include it.  I would rather go play a "Harvest Moon" game or "Fishing Resort" at that point.  If the diversion is to the point of being another game itself then it would be better to just go play a game that does that diversion much better.

                I will end just saying that the game world is recycled fluff.  There are only about five or six dungeons that get revisited a number of times, too many times in my opinion.  Sure, when you revisit one or two, you will get an added room or corridor to explore but this is the same problem that "Skyward Sword" suffered from.  Both games have a few giant worlds that take a while to get from one end to another, which highlights their size, but both games end up feeling empty due to a limited number of locations that matter which are visited way too often.

                "Nier" is not a bad game.  It is just generic.  It is another one of the multitude of Japanese games that have got more angsty and brooding characters than substance.  There is even the token city that gets destroyed completely.  The central gameplay is fine, just underdeveloped for the most part.  I looked forward to some of the enemies whose attacks made the battlefield resemble a bullet hell game.  The multiple endings are not all that interesting other than the extra backstory of Kaine.  The only thing that I would say is worth its weight is the game's soundtrack.  The soundtrack alone is worth listening to even without playing the game.  But I cannot go recommending a whole game on just one single aspect.  The game is an alright diversion for a while, but I cannot think of dumping more time into it.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S.  Next will be "Four Faultless Felons."

Frontlog 001: "The Body Changer"

Needs a better title card.

Dear Internet,

                Well, this is an unusual type of post, is it not?  I will admit that it is not the usual header that I have for this little experiment of a website.  So far, I have only written with two types of letters, not considering the ones titled "Announcement."  Either I am writing about one of the hundreds of entries that I have accumulated or I am writing about visual novels in general in an attempt to collect my thoughts about how I am approaching my own work.  So, to try and take one of those entries and bring it all the way to the front of the line without even having added it to the pile seems unusual in the very least.  Nay, it is downright rule-breaking if you think about it.  What can I do then, Internet?  There is only one thing I can do, Internet.  I have to make a new category of posts.  The Frontlog will be for games that are removed from the Backlog at an exceptional pace for one reason or another.  The reason that "The Body Changer" is getting the first of these types of posts is due to what I assume is a mass-email.

                About three or four days ago, I got a message from one of the developers of the game, asking for my impressions and what I thought of the game.  I am not sure how the developer knew I even had this game, but I suspect it had something to do with the fact that I got it from the "Be Mine 11" bundle from Groupees.  Maybe Groupees gave the developer contacts for all the purchasers of the bundle so that they could get feedback.  Maybe the only way at the time to get "The Body Changer" was from Desura via the Groupees bundle and by activating the code I was, by default, showing where I got it.  Or maybe mrKaizen of TheShortAndTheTall figured out that I write reviews too much and wanted my opinion.  How in the world that he would know this, I am not sure, especially considering that the email was through a Desura account that was not even remotely associated with this blog.  Chances are that it was just an en mass email, and now mrKaizen stumbled upon asking someone with a little too much time to review a game that is still in its alpha stage.  But, hey, no one else asked me to review their game or some other game either through personal message or by bulk mail.  So, let me get to it.

                "The Body Changer" is a third person shooter that is heavy on puzzle aspects.  It gets pretty down the half way point between the two genres, which is refreshing considering that I am like a knife at a gun fight when it comes to shooters.  The player controls a set of humanoid robots, the "SynB"s, that have to fix a broken facility, specifically reactivate a series of purifiers for the water pumps.  Doing so will allow the facility to be operational again.  Beyond that, the story does not matter much.  The specifics are so scant that it is almost forgettable.  What matters is the gameplay.

 

                The player begins by controlling only one android at first, figuring out how to move properly and aim with the camera.  Eventually the player gains the use of a second android and more after that.  Each of the various androids has specific abilities that allow it to specialize in a certain task. So far, there are three primary types of androids.  There is the combat unit, which can use a selection of lethal weapons.  There is the non-combat colored type that is more used for the game's various puzzles.  And there is the primary one that the player starts off with, which is somewhere in-between the other two.  Once the player has activated another android, they can switch between the two bots seamlessly to be able to tackle the game's puzzles.  

                As, I said before, "The Body Changer" is also a shooter game.  Whenever the player has to control the combat android, there is most likely going to be something that is due for its daily regimen of vitamin lead.  Some of the androids in the facility have gone haywire and begun to roam about, wildly attacking anything they come across, mainly the player.  They are rather simply identified as zombies in the game, something that gives the player a hint as to where to aim with the guns.  In the game's two levels, there are about three types of these malfunctioning robots, maybe four if the lizard men are mechanical.  Some stumble, some run, and some lunge.  No matter what, they need to be killed to advance forward.

Proof that successful enemy naming can give clues to strategy.

                "The Body Changer" has got a few things going for itself despite being only in early alpha.  The puzzles are interesting to say the least.  They were at least able to make me forget the obvious.  A good puzzle game can make the player forget about an earlier rule or solution.  If the game ignores the solution to a previous puzzle for a period of time, the player can end up completely forgetting about that certain situation.  In turn, when the solution repeats itself, the player needs to remember all that he has learned to continue onward.  The game's puzzles are not all just static, allowing an unlimited amount of time to find the solution.  Some of them must be solved while under a time limit or while being attacked by the previously mentioned malfunctioning robots.  The player even has to bounce between two androids during such scenes.

                One thing that I found really intuitive was the control method for crouching.  Most games have one dedicated crouch button that is usually mounted to either the "C" or "Ctrl" key for example.  Games that are made well will allow the player to choose which key they want to crouch.  "The Body Changer" goes one step better.  To crouch, the player can press the "Z," "X," or the "C" key.  Any one of the three buttons can be used.  This means that the player can use any one of his three fingers that are reserved for movement to crouch while still being able to move.  Since crouching is not used long enough to warrant a toggle switch, this is one of the best solutions that I have seen.  Maybe it is not as revolutionary as I want to think, but it makes easy movement while crouching a possibility without having to lose a finger over it.

                Another thing that the game does well is difficulty.  You have the usual bullet sponging from enemies and tighter restrictions on ammo, but changing the difficulty up higher goes one step further.  The waves of enemies that bombard the player change to fit the difficulty.  Instead of facing a lone heavy type of enemy, now you have to dodge his attacks while trying not to dodge into the arms of a zombie.  This simple change means that you have to change your strategies when increasing the difficulty rather than just refining the old ones.

                On the other hand, there are a number of things that "The Body Changer" does that seems like a shot in the foot.  Predominantly is the slow movement of the androids.  While it can be argued that the slow movement is a mechanic to force the player to think out their actions when in combat, it becomes frustrating when just trying to make the android search around for clues to the puzzle.  One or two times, I found myself stuck on a puzzle.  So, I decided to backtrack a little in hopes of a clue.  It was then that I realized how slow the robots moved.  It was just plain frustrating.  The robots can only run forward or in a forward diagonal direction.  That leaves five other of the eight directs to be an abysmally slow walking pace.  Not even the side to side directions get decent movement speeds.  This leads to a limited amount of movement abilities that can be used when fighting enemies.  Forget about trying to run circles around your enemies or even just moving side to side.  Most of the time, you are going to be standing very still and lining up headshots, which would not be so bad if it was not for the barrel roll dodge.

                The game places heavy emphasis on a side roll that allows the player to quickly dodge enemy attacks.  Basically, the player has to crouch and move the mouse in the direction that they want to roll.  While I find it en interesting mechanic, the problem is that once the roll is finished, the player is right back to the frustratingly slow pace that prevents more complicated movements that can take advantage of the space that the player has made away from hostiles.  The roll is mostly used against the lizard men enemies who rush the player.  The player is supposed to roll out of the way and shoot them in a specific way.  This would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that the game gave no hints as to how to fight them other than to tell you how to roll.  The first lizard man is supposed to be shot in the back, but I could not get around him.  Eventually, I think the AI lagged and started to walk away from me.  It was then that I shot him.  The second lizard man is supposed to be fought in a similar manner.  Roll out of the way and shoot him in the face.  The problem here is that doing so for the first five or so times does not indicate that you are doing it correctly.  He does not flinch at your shots.  He does not have any sort of indication that you are doing it correctly.  The only indication that the attack is working is that his health bar makes a minute decrease.  It is so negligible that the first two successful attacks make it seem like you are not doing anything at all.  When this lack of response to the player's actions occurs, the player is likely to attempt another strategy after another, never realizing that what they were doing at first was actually the right way.  Eventually, the lizard man does flinch and even stall, allowing a melee attack to knock him down, but the only way do so is to attempt a strategy over and over, hoping that it will eventually work.

So satisfying.

                There is also the quick turnaround move that is done by double tapping the "S" key.  It is a bit annoying since using the mouse to spin the camera around feels much more natural.  

                On the technical side, the game still has a number of flaws that I hope will be cleared up in the months ahead.  Whenever I took a screenshot, a window would appear that would tell me where the image was saved.  It would make a ticking sound effect when the text was appearing, and then keep making the sound well after the text finished appearing.  As of now, there are no manual save slots, which means that you either play from all over from the beginning or you carry off near where you left off.  A means of manual saving would be nice since both checkpoints and automatic save points feel a bit sporadic in their placing.  Also, if you launch the game under a different difficulty and then load the save file, you will be playing under the new difficulty rather than the previous difficulty.  The melee attack looks really stiffly animated, especially in the joints.  

                Overall, "The Body Changer" is an interesting game that still has got a way to go.  Some things work while others feel plenty clunky.  With only two levels in the alpha build, it is hard to even judge such a game.  I suspect that it will have another eight levels in the end to round it up to ten.  Usually with my reviews, I try and hide a star rating in the bottom with the tags, but I cannot do that this time.  How can I rate a game that is not even done?  All I can do is hope that the words I have here mean something when being read.  Sure, I look forward to playing this game again when it gets a full release, and I may even come back to it for a full review.  Until then, I withhold a final judgement.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop