WhooooPersona!!!ooooo!

Spoilers through the end of July!

So last week I finally decided "screw it, who needs a car", and walked down to my local Gamestop to purchase a used PS 2 and a copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. I then carried it home in my backpack and spent a while trying to find a working TV to set up in my room to play this, as it is something I do want to play alone, without interruptions, and in my room.

And it's just as fucking awesome as I had hoped. I mean, dude, it's awesome. I've logged more than 30 hours on it in one week, and I'm worried that I'm burning through it too fast. The dungeons all seem a bit too short for my liking considering how few of them there seem to be. (You can cover one floor in a little over five minutes, and with ten floors in a dungeon, that's an hour plus the boss.) The dungeons themselves are pretty cool- Yukiko's Castle has some awesome music, as does the Bad, Bad Bathhouse (Kanji's), and Rise's is a freakin' strip joint for crying out loud! But the best has got to be the one I...was in last night....alright, I did something incredibly retarted when I was playing last night. My only excuse was it was around 2 A.M. So around 10 I sit down and start playing- I had just beaten Rise's dungeon last night (It wasn't hard when Shadow Teddie gives you that much warning on his attacks and only casts Mabufu occasionally- I was all set up with an ice-draining persona, too- gotta love a ridiculously high Priestess link, but more on that later. Should've substituted Kanji for Chie, but I like the original gang too much.), and played straight through all the stuff that happens between that and the next dungeon- finals, social links, and the ridiculous amount of stuff you have to do to find enough info for Rise on Mitsuo (creepy bastard). So I finally get into his dungeon, and it's ten kinds of awesome- it's modeled after an old 8-bit RPG! I felt like I was going on some kind of real D&D dungeon crawl, or playing Final Fantasy or something. And I get to the second floor, and let an enemy get the advantage on me. Stupidly, I had switched to a Persona weak to lighting. Mazionga. Teddie and I go down. Mazionga. Now we're dizzy. Enemy turn. Mazionga. I'm dead. And I had just switched off an item I had that would have let me survive (wasn't really thinking, there.) OK, no problem. You saved before you entered, right Rogue? Nope. I didn't. In fact, I hadn't saved once that entire session. Yeah.

But anyways, the game is still awesome. I maxed Yukiko's social link around the beginning of July. And remember how I said that I thought she looked very cute when I first mentioned the game?* Well, that stuck. It's full-blown Perverse Sexual Lust, now, and I don't find myself particularly ashamed. A girl with long, black hair and a very nice figure (OK, now I feel slightly ashamed), who is also smart, very nice, caring, and has a...well, I won't say she has an awesome sense of humor (my taste runs more towards the sarcastic), but she's not afraid to laugh. So yeah, I'd fall for her in real life in a heartbeat. The max scene features you two hanging out in your room. While the scene goes black, I don't think I succeeded in getting laid, especially considering how short a time we'd been going out (It's rank 9 in the link, 1 below max, IIRC.). Just lots of cuddling and makeouts, I suspect. But earlier you were presented with three options. Yukiko had been scrounging for conversation and the scene was getting a little awkward. Your choices: "Is the Futon good with you?" "Is the sofa good with you?" "Is the floor good with you?". Yeah. I literally sat there for a minute or two just staring at the screen saying "really? Is there any option there that wasn't made by my...0ther...head?" and dreading which one I'd actually have to pick, because dude! My character isn't like that! I went with the sofa option, hoping she'd interpret it innocently, and thank god, she did. If I was playing this for shits and giggles, I probably would have gone with one of the other two, but I'm not, so I didn't. Anyways, yeah, not going to do the dating thing with any of the other girls, since even though you can't hang out with her, you still interact a ton with Yukiko. So I'll roleplay it like she's my girlfriend (I'm particularly looking forward to the confrontation with Mitsuo, seeing as how you met him when he was asking Yukiko out out of the blue. My girlfriend! Mine!

The battle system is fun, I find, even if it's turn-based and can get a bit repetitive. And fusing personas is awesome. I just fused Yamato-no-Orochi, this giant, 8-headed snake, just because I could. Hmm. Maybe I should actually start the Moon social link even though I find Ai to be a total bitch.
*Crap, I just lost the game.

TV TROOOOPPPPPEEESSSS!!!!

I have a shitton of work to do. I am massively behind. But I need to write this.

Why the fuck are some people so adamant that anything the least bit creative and inventive immediately be given the axe solely for clarity? I mean, what the fuck? Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night was a fucking amazing name. I'm linking it and clicking it so that they can't just cut it. That little bit of a poem was great, but some people (looking at you, DQZ, you SOB) are just so damn insistent that anything the slightest bit "unclear" be purged and done away with. Hell, the trope itself was merged! I don't get it. It was a wonderful name, evoked the image of the trope beautifully. And now it's merged into "Rousing Speech". How dull.

And the natter-patrol also bugs me. It's admittedly not terrible, but the idea of going through and just axeing natter solely because it gets in the way of the message is stupid. TV Tropes isn't about the message. It's about being fun! It's about creative wit on the trope pages! A bit of natter helps that. Justifying Edits, "Actually", and all that stuff does serve a purpose. But the people doing the natter thing seem to be at least marginally sane.

TV Tropes is fun because it's so damn unserious and loose. It's a place for bad puns, fanboy gushing, and other shit like that. And trying to make it all serious and clear to boost the userbase, which is the argument those morons have been making is retarded. That's not what gets people here, it's not what keeps 'em, and it's not gonna grow the wiki. It's just going to drive people off and leave a few diehard editors if everything is all serious and dull and literate. So I'm going to combat this however the fuck I can.

Fuck you, DQZ, for killing an awesome trope and starting to ruin the Wiki. I'll fight you every step of the way.

And this is why you will never see this linked on my Facebook.

When I started this blog, I had the general idea that I was going to keep it separate from my "Real" life. By which I mean that the people I encourage to read it (and by "encourage to read" I mean that I have a link in my forum signature) are not those I interact with face to face. I've never been particularly ashamed of my geekdom, hell I'd shout it from the rooftops, but I also know that a lot of folk don't want to hear about it, for one. For two, there's a few things I really enjoy that are...difficult to explain to normal folk*, and I'd honestly rather not go through all the trouble. Trying to explain why I enjoy Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha or Mahou Sensei Negima without coming across as a huge pedophile/pervert** tends not to work the entiere time. However, I still try when I'm feeling optimistic.

But This? Dude, I'm not gonna even bother. Katawa Shoujo is an Original English Language Visual Novel. Visual Novels, for those of you not in the know, are a rather odd form of video game. Essentially, there's no game. Even in the rare case of the games where you are fighting monsters (the most famous of these being Type-Moon's Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night. If you want to see them without bothering with downloading/patching/whatever, check out Seorin's Lets Plays for added snarky commentary. You've got to be a Goon to see the Fate/Stay Night one for a while), you don't actually control anything about the combat. There's no party management, no level growth, no FPS action, nothing. You sit back and read what's going on, and occasionally you're offered a choice. In essence, I think something like 95% of these games are dating sims. Boy is pushed into a situation with inordinate numbers of attractive single women, player makes various choices that hopefully lead to boy picking one girl, boy has a substantially high chance of getting laid and/or falling in love. If he's really lucky, he can pick the harem ending and mack on all of 'em. Depends on the game, really.

Aaaanyways (I have a ton of work to do, I really should keep this brief), Katawa Shoujo was spawned in the dark, dank sewers of the internet called 4chan. Ok, Ok, 4chan's not that bad. /b/ is the board that gets all the attention, but there are a fuckton of other ones, and from what I've seen, most of them are your fairly typical internet board, just bigger. I still don't plan on visiting (largely because I've got enough to distract me for one, and for two I don't like anonymous posting), but they're not the true evil. As this product proves. Anyways, a few years back, some japanese doujin artist posted up a brief page with several girls with disabilities- one blind, one deaf, one chick with burns on half her face, a girl missing her lower legs, and a girl with no arms. He mentioned that if someone made a dating sim about this, he'd be on it like white on rice. Somehow /a/, the anime board, got enamoured with the idea and actually put serious thought into the entire concept. They formed their own boards to discuss the idea, and, as of a few days ago, posted the first act, which they say is roughly 15-20% of the game.

So this is a game about disabled people. Your main character's got arrythmia, so he can't do too much strenous physical activity, or take a hit to the chest, or else his heart will explode. He ends up at a special school for folk with various problems, and from there, he meets several girls. There's the tsundere-esque deaf, mute chick and her bubbly friend who try and rope you into the student council (consisting solely of the two of them). There's the legless track girl*** who doesn't let anything, not even her conspicuous lack of feet, slow her down, and her friend, the enigmatic, absolutley crazy painter with no arms. There's the serene, aloof, kindly blind chick, and her friend, a girl with burns on her face from a terrible accident who's so shy and scared of people that she makes early-Negima Nodoka look extroverted. You take the dude through his first week at the new school, up to the school festival, where you either get to hang out with one particular girl (in essence, I assume, selecting her "path" and eventually getting to the whole dating/sex and whatnot) or you fucked up royally and go get drunk with your blind, misandrist roommate and then fall to your death. I did that the first time out of a couple of mistakes, and grumbled a bit that I wasted so much time.

And you know what? This is really good. I admit to not having played a visual novel of the high school dating sim variety (closest I've come is watching the first season of "Clannad"), but I really liked playing it. I admit, some of it's the whole wish fulfillment thing that comes from the scenario of having a large number of attractive anime girls to pick from whom you know are going to fall for you eventually (I've been single for YEARS, man.) , but the writing is really good- funny at times, the art is great, and they handle the plot with seriousness and realism. And the girls are really cute, too. Shizune, the deaf girl, has an awesomely cute tsundere vibe coming off of her, but my god, despite the burns, Hanako is so goddamn Moe that it hurts at times. You just want to pick that girl up, give her a great big hug, and say something to the effect of "You're beautiful. I love you." and then go take her off to a carnival or something and have fun.

And with my enjoyment of this game, I'm realizing that I am turning into one of them. A stereotypical moe fanboy. The sort of sexual pervert who has an unrealistic view of women, and who, as a consequence, is never going to get any and lives in his own little fantasy world, and not to mention is ten kinds of creepy. When you stare into the abyss for too long, it stares back, man. I need to be careful about this.

*On a random tangent, I find myself using the word "Folk"- singular- as an all-purpose substitute for "people". I think I picked it up from Firefly.
** I am quite obviously not a pedophile, but I'd probably be lying to myself if I said that none of the whole "nekkid bits" of Negima were ever appealing.
*** Honestly, that isn't very surprising. I've read an article about how a dude with no legs was banned from racing in the Olympics- and not the para- or special Olympics, because his mechanical legs gave him too much of an edge. Take from that what you will.