I have to admit, this one’s a little ridiculous, even for us. Ghostlightning, lelangir, Cuchlann, and I all somehow ended up in a chat a scant few hours ago. Initially, the topic was Kannagi, but, when matters of disparate theory arose, things got a little crazy. The title is apt; in fact, what you’ll see after the break is no less than 11,001 words of our discourse and debate. Is it worth reading? Absolutely.
It’s a good thing the concept of tl;dr doesn’t exist on Super Fanicom.
You may recall Cuchlann’s cryptic teaser from earlier in the month. Surely you’ve been puzzling over it since then, losing sleep, your sanity slowly seeping away — but tonight you can rest easily, for all is revealed: I present to you the Super Fanicom Voice Module, our epic foray into the world of podcasting!
In this inaugural episode, OGT joins Cuchlann and me for some commentary on the thirteenth episode of Toradora. If you’re watching the show, get the episode ready to run before you start the podcast, as we comment on the whole thing, and it’s meant to be watched as we talk (which will probably be a common theme in these podcasts). If not, there’s still a solid half-hour of content before and after the commentary, so listen anyway. And if you like it, or don’t, leave a comment on this post.
Super Fanicom Voice Module: Toradora 13 (46.23MB)
In our next podcast…well, I can’t just tell you. But rest assured that it does not end here. Oh, no indeed.
I woke up today thinking about the use of external aids in completing video games, and I wonder if we can fit that into our ongoing discourse about games, so allow me to throw a few random ideas at you.
My feelings toward player’s guides and the like are mixed. While I feel that they “ruin” the experience of a game’s central plot for me, I have no problem using them to find and obtain nonessential extras. The game I have in mind is Fallout 3; I completed the ten or so hours of my 60-hour file devoted to advancing the main plot without any external guidance, but I’ve made extensive use of The Vault in finding unique weapons and bobbleheads and such. Now, insofar as player agency results in the forward movement of the story, all 60 hours constitute the game’s plot, or at least the game experience’s plot; why do I approach one-sixth of that plot with a different attitude toward external aid than I do the remaining five-sixths? I don’t really know, but I doubt it’s indicative of some core difference between “main plot” and “side plot” in games.
Let me ask this: how might we best characterize external aid, anyway?
Is it a kind of criticism? After all, it details one possible playthrough of a game — ostensibly, one possible reading of a text. And I think that, like criticism, it’s certainly entertainment in itself. When I was younger, I used to read those Prima player’s guides for fun. I bought guides for games I didn’t own. I remember devoting hours to reading through The Mynock’s Guide to Final Fantasy III (back when FF6 was still called Final Fantasy III here…God I’m old) despite my near-encyclopedic knowledge of that game, and for no reason other than that I wanted to see how someone else experienced the game. It’s not that I felt I had something to gain, intellectually, from diverse readings, as I do now; I simply enjoyed it.
Can we say that my use of external aid to complete optional content in Fallout 3, the pausing and minimizing of the game and the perusal of websites throughout, helped define my gameplay? That it’s part of the human narrative of my playing, which the game narrative itself may well simply be a part of as well? I don’t hear such a thing often said of literature and the criticism thereof — that is, I’m not sure how many people would tell you that my reading experience of Ulysses continues to this very moment because I keep reading criticism of it and tying it into other narratives. But that’s not really what we’re talking about here; a more analogous situation would be reading Ulysses for the first time with a copy of Ulysses Annotated on hand. To what extent is Joyce (not Joyce the man, but Joyce the author-consciousness) responsible for that reading experience? To what extent are Don Gifford and Robert Seidman responsible? How much responsibility rests upon the sources they consulted when writing Ulysses Annotated? And can we answer these questions by way of addressing analogous questions in the largely unstudied realm of video games?
I’ve been seeing some meta-narrative stuff concerning blogging, anime, blah blah blah. As my father is currently watching a basketball game on our only tv — mine is in Memphis — I am stuck in my room, so here I am, doing some of this meta-criticism as well. Don’t expect anything amazing. My only real contribution, when I get around to it, is in bringing Stanley Fish to the party.
As we come now to the end of our twelve-day journey, my final moment feels sort of lame. I don’t have any strange metaphors for love, attempts at optimism, or in-depth analyses for you today. I don’t really have a good reason for my enthusiasm — I just have my enthusiasm, so I guess I can explain that much.
I will be honest with you. I am very tempted to just write about how awesomely funny episode nine, or episode ten, of Kannagi was and just leave it at that. I’ve actually been trawling the depths of my sick-addled mind for days, trying to think of anything I could use here other than, well, what I’m going to be using here. Because to tell you about the end of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, I have to tell you a story. My stories are usually about plucky, unprepared people confronting enormous danger, usually involving ghosts or giant clockwork machines. This danger is more pedestrian, but easier to relate to. I have to tell you about my first real relationship.
Funny story: Cuchlann and I chose the same moment again, and completely by accident. Unlike our Gurren-Lagann overlap, this one’s actually mildly obscure. If you didn’t believe me before when I said I was assuming his identity, you ought to believe me now.
But we’re taking different approaches to said moment, so you really should read both posts. Really.
Oh, Genshiken, is there no awesome you can’t handle? Yes, there is no awesome you can’t handle. Luckily for me this just happens to fall into 2008, as I bought the final volume of Genshiken just a week into January. The “moment” this is about is the point at which Madarame gives up, entirely, his ambitions to confess to Kasukabe.
I know there’s at least one Moments post out there about ef – a tale of memories 7, and for good reason. Who among us will ever forget that phone scene? I’ve hardly been able to look at text messages the same way since. But, as far as I’m concerned, Miyako’s falling apart takes second place to a scene in the following episode. I’m more of a Chihiro fan — see, I told you I like girls with problems, and I mean real problems.
Thought your bullets were clever? Fuck you.
This is entirely predictable if you know me pretty well. I fucking love thief stories; heists, medieval cat burglars, I love it all. Thief 3 is one of my favorite video games, and Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard books are like porn for me (there’s a weekend in February, by the way, during which time I’ll likely be useless to everyone — fair warning). So of course I loved The Daughter of Twenty Faces. I have yet to finish the entire thing, and the show does eventually transform into something more than a caper anime, but damn was it cool while it lasted. I’ve decided, Frank N. Furter style, to turn this moment over to pure pleasure. Because Twenty Faces is a thief with a fucking zeppelin.