Akai_Shuichi's Blog

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Index:
- Bloodborne (PS4)
- Fire Emblem 9: Path of Radiance (GCN)
- Fire Emblem 10: Radiant Dawn (Wii)
- The Last of Us (PS4)
- Valkyria Chronicles 4 (PS4)

I am honestly not sure how many people visit my profile from time to time, and I'm even less sure about how many people actually read my blog entries. But if someone happens to fall under both, or at least the first category, you might have noticed I haven't been watching much anime lately. I can assure everyone that my love for anime is just the same as it was 2 years ago or 5, or 10 or even 20 years ago. But even before anime, my first love was always video games, which is what I've been dedicating myself to during the time I haven't been watching anime.

Anyways, to the point.

While I'll make this part of my blog for general gaming, I will admit that 95% of the games I play are RPG or things with RPG elements, hence, if you read my entries, the vast majority of them will be RPGs. Through time I will hopefully right small reviews/opinions about the games I'll be playing and maybe sometimes of games I've previously played, the later is more probable if a sequel is coming soon or something of the sort, but I might just write about them because why not, from time to time.

I'd like to treat everything I write as my personal opinion of the games, but I will use a bit of a review format in my texts and give a small evaluation to the games. This will be pretty subjective at times, but for both subjective and objective matters, I will try to explain the reasoning behind my thinking.

While I won't go exactly point by point in my writing, through every text I will try to assess a couple of different points:

Graphics: Let's start by saying that I'm in the group of people that thinks that graphics will never make the game. If I have to choose the single less important point in a game, it'll more than usually be graphics. That said, good graphics can enhance the experience of a game for sure. All of that said, graphics for me are not about how realistic something is, but about how the graphic aspects of the game work. All the things about designs, be it in a full-scale game of the last couple of years or in a 32 bits console. Character designs, use of the capacities at your disposal, design creativity, etc. I think of graphics as mediums to help represent the story and lore the game is telling, or even a way of making the gameplay more smooth and even make it a better experience.

Sound: Contrary to graphics, the use of sound is actually fairly important for me, since sound helps my immersion process in a game much more than images. Sound is obviously all about the soundtrack the game uses, which also happens to be the most used way for me to remember games, since I still go through some excellent really old soundtracks even to this day, giving a huge boost to the capability of a game of being memorable. I tend to link the sounds more than anything to different moments in the games, and through sound I remember these games, which would take a bit too long to replay them thousands of times. But sound is not only music. The use of sound effects, and sometimes even silence, is a great tool to create immersion. This is especially true for newer games that can create fantastic sounds and effects that were simply impossible 20 or 15 years ago, but even old games sometimes managed to get creative with sound with their limited tools.

Gameplay: At the end of the day, we are talking about games so naturally gameplay is a crucial aspect when talking about games. There's thousands of games out there, many with similar gameplay mechanics (especially among the same franchise), but usually, each game tries to have its own touch of creativity when working on the gamplay of a game. How creative are these games, how do these mechanic flow, how's the difficulty, makes it a fun or tedious challenge if it's difficult? Are the controls of the game confortable to use. Some games will test your wits, others your reactions, and some of them will try to test your creativity. Some will give you a lot of options of customization while others will give you less tools and challenge you to solve problems with those tools. There's a lot of different things here that aim at completely different things, and each game may be a completely different world from the others.

Lore: The lore for me is what makes the world of a game a, well, world. How is the world composed, why are the characters there, how does the world work, what is its history and what does this world has to offer. It's history, the NPCs, maybe some rui, the life or death that sorrounds the world and even the physics that work on it. No matter what RPG you play there is always some lore behind it, which includes the rules with which the world works. For all games with some form of story, the lore is an integral part in the creation of said story, the base on which it's founded. The interaction with the world and everything that sorrounds it is what makes the lore. This is the aspect that makes a game a world in its own.

Story: This is probably the most important thing for me in games usually. The story is what drives the plot forward. While the lore is in charge on setting the world, the story is what moves the world set by the lore. Here is where characters interactions and development take a big role and different events, usually caused by other characters (evil, good or whatever) take place. Especially when talking about RPGs, the story is what is constantly moving the characters, the reasons you have to do whatever you're doing in a game, the consequences of not doing something. If the lore is in charge in getting you interested in a world, the story is what makes you attached to it. Why do the character has to do something, why does he want to do something, or if he doesn't want to, what's forcing him into it. How has the character grown because of the events that have transpired through the game. Sometimes gameplay might be the reason by itself, but it's usually the story of a game what makes me want to keep playing and keep playing a game non-stop, like if I was marathoning a great anime series.

Extras: This is something that I will sometimes evaluate at the end for some games if I believe there's something important about the game that does not fall into any of the previously mentioned criteria.

I am not sure if this will be the final text of this small index for my posts, or if I'll eventually edit it to make it a bit better, but I've had the idea of doing this for quite a while, and between MAL demise and lack of inspiration for writing this index, this project ended up delaying quite a while.

This current paragraph will be deleted after a while. For now, there is no entry at all in this section, but I do plan to write my first entry today, or maybe tomorrow, this week for sure.