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I recently discovered that playing Street Fighter Alpha 2 on GGPO is pretty much the best thing. I also discovered that my Internet is pretty much the worst thing. I’m not happy about this.

Turns out learning how to play fighting games is really hard. It’s like learning to play the damn piano or something, except you have to play the piano against other dudes, and they’ve all been playing for fifteen years, and they whip out Rick Wakeman shit on you while you “Three Blind Mice” as furiously as possible hoping it does something (it doesn’t.) I can’t do combos or special moves for shit so my strategy is to pick Chun and attempt to c.MK my opponent into submission. It rarely works, but I can take rounds off of guys from time to time so maybe that’ll turn into actual victories at some point. Right now my biggest obstacle is my shitty Internet: Nobody wants to fight a guy who lags all the time, so my playing time is limited to the very few times of day that my connection behaves itself, and as a result I can’t get many matches in. Unfortunately it’s the only provider in this area, so I’ll just have to stick it out and hope it gets better eventually.

I bought Persona 3 FES back when it first came out but, for some reason or another, I never got around to actually playing it much. I had already sunk about 80 hours into the original P3, and while it was a great game I guess I didn’t feel particularly motivated at the time to play through it again. A few days ago I hit a gaming lull, having just beaten a couple mediocre old FPSes I had never gotten around to beating, and figured it was finally time to dig out FES and give it a try. Maybe I’d try out this Hard mode thing. I mean, it’s a JRPG. How hard can it be?

See the title for the answer to that one. When Atlus says “Hard” they aren’t fucking around (ask anyone who has played Nocturne on Hard and brace yourself for ranting.)  Enemies now do something like 4-5x their original damage and you can be killed by random mooks in three or four hits. Bosses and strong normal enemies can one-shot characters easily with critical hit, or sometimes even with a special attack that hits normally. Dumb or unlucky moves are almost inevitably disastrous, and your party members no longer get automatically revived after a battle.

Funnily enough all of this doesn’t make for a radical change in your playstyle.  P3 was always primarily about exploiting your enemies’ weaknesses while doing your best to safeguard your own, and Hard mode simply reinforces that by not letting you get lazy and tank hits if you don’t feel like playing strategically. I’ve always enjoyed how combat was generally a fast-paced, high stakes affair in SMT games, with both you and the enemies doing large amounts of damage to each other rather than grinding away. Since Hard mode just heightens that feeling, I’m going to press on with it.

I promised Dan that if he put me on Gaming Journals I would write about JRPGs until he banned me, or at least deeply regretted it. Well, he did anyway, and now I’m going to write about a JRPG. Since I’m playing Mana Khemia I’ll go ahead and talk about that.
Mana Khemia is about a guy and his cat. The guy is studying alchemy because he can’t think of anything better to do, and the cat might be his dad. I haven’t been paying much attention to the story because, really, who cares about story?

Here are things I like:

1. It’s turn-based. RPGs should be turn-based. Turning them into low-grade action games is stupid; there are already plenty of real action games that do it much better (Final Fantasy 12 gets a pass because the Gambit system lets you strategize almost as much as a turn-based system would.) Mana Khemia also makes use of all the modern features a turn-based RPG should have: You can see whose turn is coming up, you can see monsters before you encounter them, and you can call in your reserve characters at (almost) any time.
2. Fairly streamlined stuff-getting. Although you have to spend a lot of time gathering ingredients for your various alchemical endeavors, there are no asinine minigames, nor do you have to breed any goddamn Chocobos. You simply find them lying around while you’re out killing monsters, or you cut down grass with a simple half-second animation, or you harvest them in various ways with other simple half-second animations.
3. Prevents overleveling. Your characters’ levels are determined by what items you’ve synthesized, and what items you have available to synthesize are largely determined by where you are in the story. This means you can’t ruin the game for yourself by accidentally overleveling, something that has happened to me in other games without even trying.

Here are things I don’t like:

1. Fetch quests that are dumb even by fetch quest standards. So far the game has yet to rise above “go to a place, kill a thing, get another thing.” Most of the time it doesn’t even bother with the things and just has you go to a place and watch a scene.
2. Unbalanced day/night system. Time passes while you’re out killing stuff/gathering stuff, and at night monsters get more powerful. This is reasonable enough, except they get much too powerful; defense increases by something like a third and attack power nearly doubles. Combine this with their drastically increased overworld speed and going out at night becomes flirtation with death. This wouldn’t be such a problem, except that the sheer size of the maps means that being out at night is impossible to avoid, forcing you to either wait it out in a safe spot or slog on through very dangerous enemies.
3. Running away is goddamned useless. I swear it fails 9 times out of 10, or at any rate often enough that I don’t even bother trying. This is especially annoying coupled with #2 above.

On a scale of 1 to pi Mana Khemia gets one thumb up at a 72° angle.