Random things: 2/28/15
Another catch-all post.
Playing: Hyperdevotion Noire for the PS Vita.
Story is simple. Noire is on top of the battle for shares in Gamarket, and it’s not going to last long. She gets tricked into depowering everyone through doing something to the main power crystal that converts people’s faith in their nation into shares, and the now de-powered goddess needs to put everything back together again. She has the help of the other three goddesses though, her generals, and you, a random human who walks into the middle of everything and is drafted into being her secretary.
This game is different from the main series because it’s an isometric strategy roleplayer similar to Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. You maneuver the goddesses on a grid and take turns beating up on whatever enemy force happens to show up this round. Your units are strengthened by the “lily” mechanic, in which close units will power up your skills in battle by…kissing you on the cheek.
Yeah, it’s about as lame as sounds.
Unfortunately this shares the same problem as the other Hyperdimension Neptunia games. It’s a chore to play. Oh, it’s not bad, per se; the turn-based action is decent, the story is serviceable, and there’s a mini-dating sim in the middle of the game focused around you helping to answer letters from Noire’s subjects. But the encounters are just long enough and just hard enough to make it not all that fun. Battles as early as chapter two quickly involve crawling up the field, taking one group of enemies on at a time, and inching to the boss who will unleash some absurdly powerful attacks on you. It doesn’t feel all that flexible, and you get the sense of slowly figuring out the sole correct path the devs want you to take to finish the level. Expect to retry battles the first few times when you realize how hard normal is. Tip: anything with a lot of HP will also hit you like a truck. Don’t run up to it if it’s in a group with friends.
It’s pretty much a fan-service game, and expect service shots of Noire as the game progresses. Honestly if you have a Vita, you probably bought this out of sheer lack of games, but it’s not really worth picking up unless you love Neptunia, and you probably already did that if you do.
Reading: Boys Be.
This was part of a huge stack of manga I found for sale at the local Goodwill. I had read the series before, back in the day when Tokyopop was the top manga company in the USA. I was glad to pick it up again.
Boys Be is unusual is that it’s a book of love stories told from the male perspective. High school boys meet high school (and older) girls, and crush on them, fantasize about them, and maybe even declare their love for them. It’s not moe, and while it can be ecchi at times, it’s sort of a realistic type that you don’t see much of these days.
Stories involve a judo student who gets in an accident with a club-hopping fellow student, and falls in love, an otaku who finds love when a girl in his class needs to find a certain manga, a boy in love with a girl a full foot taller than him, a pair of friends competing over the waitress in a local restaurant, and a high school kid who becomes the subject of three vacationing office ladies’ gaze.
It’s nice to see a manga that tries to get inside the romantic life of guys, and while there’s sexiness, there’s also a fair amount of love and romance too. It’s not all that heavy-there’s no Flowers of Evil here-but it’s probably more of a healthy fantasy than a lot of the ecchi harem shows that have been coming out recently, cough, Testament of New Sister Devil, cough.
There’s also an anime out based on it, but it’s bad. Avoid it.
I still have a pile of other manga to work through. I find that I liked Shugo Charat more than I should have, and it was great rereading Full Metal Panic again.
Disliking: Catwoman’s Bisexuality.
Yeah, apparently she likes girls too.
I try not to talk about politics here on my blog. This is the internet, and people do debate a wide variety of things while treating people with consideration and kindness in real life. This, though, annoys me some.
I’m not a fan of retconning characters into new, more controversial forms. I’m really not a fan of how homosexuality is getting pushed not because the average liberal cares about it, but because approving of homosexuality is a cultural marker that separates them from us. If they really cared, they wouldn’t be doing these sort of “shock” reveals and berating people who dislike the change. They’d be making new heroes and legitimately exploring the life of an LGBT person given superpowers.
When they do stuff like this, or in video game culture, or in other geek areas, it’s really not to help people. It’s to score points off of others while reinforcing in-group solidarity. I think it’s getting to a point where people are starting to notice, especially considering how often homosexuality is present in respect to the percentage of people that actually are LGBT. I think the biggest sign of this was gay marriage; considering the total failure of gays to actually get married (the numbers are infinitesimally small) it’s obvious that the desire for it is more or less being pushed by straights. Why? What better way to marginalize your opponents than by branding them bigots?
It’s starting to make geek culture suck. Gamergate (at least the sane side of it) and the reaction against Social Justice Warriors in general is really driven by this. People are not liking their favorite media being used as a stalking-horse to score points off of others with, and we’re starting to see geek culture decline as a SJW elite takes over and tries to use geek media as a new front in the battle.
I’m Christian and conservative, so I can’t view homosexuality as anything but sinful. That doesn’t mean I should be telling unbelievers what to do or how to live their lives, though. But the geek in me hates the new gotcha culture of point-scoring, and as one of the comments pointed out, DC already has close to 90 characters that are LGBT already, throughout its multiple imprints. It’s like the junk happening with Archie Comics right now; watching hipsters transform something that used to be a gentle, dorky series for kids into the second coming of Love and Rockets can be painful.
The next front seems to be polyamory and the various -sexuals. Pansexual, Asexual, Demisexual, whatever errors smart, clueless people hear in the herd-mind’s call.
Ending on bit of a cynical note, I guess. Hopefully all of your lives are doing better.
