When Level 5 announced that the PS3 version of 二ノ国 (Ni No Kuni) was going to be released in the US, they conspicuously avoided mentioning the DS version. Which I have lusted after ever since it was released (Ghibli! That book!), so I figure: if I’m going to play it, I may have to play the Japanese version. And there’s a decent chance that my Japanese is now good enough to do that, and in fact that playing through the game would be actively helpful for my learning, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

The game arrived on Friday; I’ll eventually put unboxing photos on my main blog. (It turns out that the book is even more gorgeous than I expected: really, it’s almost worth it even if you can’t read any Japanese.) But I’m planning to put a diary of my experiences playing through it on this blog, in case anybody else is curious about the game. I’ll tag them all with “ni no kuni“, so you can avoid my endless Rock Band puffery should you prefer.

Rather than actually start the game this week, though, I started reading through the manual. (The regular manual of a sort that comes with any DS game, not the special book.) Partly because, well, that’s the sort of person that I am, but also partly so I could get a feel for the difficulty of the game, maybe get introduced to some of the vocabulary that I’ll need? I made it through 17 pages of the manual this weekend, which I’m actually rather proud of; though, given that the manual is 65 pages long, I would seem to have at least two weeks of manual reading ahead of me. (Nothing but the best, most vibrant blog content for you, my readers, I assure you! Though I may actually start playing the game before I finish the manual.)

It turns out that the manual is written at a level that I can deal with pretty well. There were a fair number of words that I didn’t know, but it also wasn’t a surprise for me to make it through a sentence without having to look up any words, and several of the new words were repeated multiple times. They put furigana readings over all of the kanji, so that helped when I had to look up words; though I’ve memorized enough kanji that almost all of the individual characters were familiar even in compounds that I didn’t know, so I wouldn’t have been completely at sea without the furigana. (Just as well, I assume the screen resolution won’t allow furigana in the game? Though for all I know the game will largely avoid kanji as well.)

The manual starts out by introducing the story. You play a boy named Oliver, living in a city called Hotroit. His mother died recently; and he was visited by a fairy named Shizuku who comes from 二の国. (Which means “second country”, the first country being the normal world where Hotroit is located.) That country is beset by a dark wizard named Jabo, and apparently Oliver can save the country from Jabo, and Oliver’s mother will be restored to life. So: not the best plot in the world; then again, I could describe Spirited Away in a not-too dissimilar fashion, and that’s an amazing movie, so I will remain optimistic.

You apparently will have sidekicks Maru and Gyro; Maru likes to sing, I think Gyro is a thief, but I could be wrong. (And Oliver likes machinery and cars? That makes sense with his Hotroit origins, which is labeled as “The Motor City” in one of the pictures.) There are also pictures of the rulers of some of the kingdoms in 二の国.

After that, it transitions into “how to use your DS” stuff: put the cartridge in the slot, select the appropriate place in the start menu, etc. And an introduction to all the buttons, including their use in menus, in fields, and in battles. Looks like we’ll have standard cities / dungeons / overworlds, there’s a “bag menu” referred to several times that seems like your general inventory screen, and also a separate menu for magic? And I’ll be drawing runes on the lower screen at various times, I guess. Seems like pretty standard RPG stuff; I should learn more about those menus and about the combat system next week.

I spent a decent amount of time in the middle of the week playing through music outside of Rock Band. On the guitar, I continue to try to learn 風の丘, and that continues to be like pulling teeth. But I am doing a slightly better idea at seeing the chords in the piece; I’m also using it as an excuse to learn how to play an E minor scale on the guitar, though that’s not well enough ingrained to have any effect on my playing of the piece yet. And I’ve been playing piano some, mostly the first five parts of Pictures at an Exhibition. Which, it turns out, Miranda rather likes; I’m toying with the idea of trying to learn more of the piece, not sure which way that will go yet.

On Saturday, I decided to go through some of the Yes DLC on Rock Band. I got side-tracked, though, because when I sorted the keyboard songs by artist, the first artist was A-Ha, and I decided to go through Take On Me first. Which turned out to be super fun, albeit slightly frustrating: catchy tune to play on keys, and there’s no individual note in it that I should miss, so why can’t I get five stars on it? I don’t know, and I tried over and over again, but failed; grr, except I had enough fun in the process that I didn’t really mind.

After doing that for most of an hour, I decided to switch over to vocals; also super fun, and it turns out that the top note in the song (which shows up several times) is also the top note in my vocal range. Which, honestly, made me glad nobody else was in the house at the time—to hit it, I really had to belt out the note, and while I was in tune, my timbre was less than wonderful. Still, a nice exercise in stretching my range, I should return to the song and practice it some more. In fact, it turns out that the bottom notes in the song are either right at or right below the bottom of my vocal range, so it’s great for stretching in both directions!

After that, I did move over to Yes, going through I’ve Seen All Good People. Which was also extremely entertaining, on both keys and singing. I did rather better on the keys that time, not making nearly as many stupid mistakes; Liesl was home by then, so we did harmonies when it came time to sing, and I managed to hit harmonies beneath the lead several times, which I’m normally pretty bad at. Not sure if I’m getting better or if the increased separation between the vocal parts helped; I won’t complain either way.

Today was a guitar day. I’d had Modern Love running through my head constantly since last week, so I decided to make it my inaugural Pro Guitar upgrade purchase. And I’m happy with that decision: simple chords coming slowly enough to make the transitions fairly straightforward, but there’s definitely something satisfying in playing a fun piece that I should be able to do well on and actually doing well.

After that, I went back to the on-disc content, going through Viva La Resistance, The Look, Walk of Life, and One-Armed Scissor. All of which but the last I like quite a bit, and even the last one was interesting from a didactic point of view. As were several of the earlier ones: e.g. the repeated notes in Viva La Resistance were a useful thing for me to work on. (Great song that, too.) I played through all but the last of those songs (including Modern Love) plugged into the amp, and they actually all sounded pretty credible: nobody is going to confuse me with a serious rock guitarist yet (not by a long shot!), but at least I didn’t feel that I had to apologize to everybody in earshot for any of those four songs, as happens sometimes.

(The one weird thing about playing unmuted: I’m surprisingly bad at tuning guitars. You’d think that, given that I had a part-time job tuning harpsichords while I was in high school, that I’d be better at that? For whatever reason, though, I have a somewhat hard time hearing the beats when testing a plucked guitar string against the sound of a piano; maybe I’d do better if I plugged the guitar into the amp and skipped the piano?)

Very pleasant week musically; and I strongly suspect that this week’s earworm will be Take On Me, which I’m okay with. (Though I don’t like it as much as Modern Love; hmm, maybe I’ll try to convince my brain to obsess over Viva La Resistance instead?) I should be able to finish the Moderate songs this week; I still have at least a couple of months of Hard Pro Guitar ahead of me, but the end is visible in the hazy distance?

This week’s VGHVI game was Rock Band 3, with a Billy Joel focus. Four of us were there, and none of us were in the mood to play drums (I would have except for, you know, Billy Joel), so we had to split into two pairs; a real shame that the game doesn’t allow online Guitar + Bass + Keys groupings. I certainly enjoyed playing with Sarah Elmaleh (me on Pro Keys, her on Bass), though! Aside from the pleasure of playing through the music, I had my sights set on achieving score goals by playing through Captain Jack, since it contains a bunch of repetitive chords that it’s easy to get a good multiple on. And achieve score goals we did: we managed to get 1.39 million points, with just the two of us! (Sarah is obviously a quite credible bassist.) Makes me wonder how well we could score on that with a four-person band; I’d have to think 2 million at least, but probably noticeably more.

Eventually, Roger bowed out, and we’d made it through enough Billy Joel, so Jonathan came over to join our band and I switched to vocals. Which was also fun (I’m enjoying singing these days a lot more than I used to); my favorite bit there was that I got 100% for the first time on non-harmony vocals (I do harmonies most of the time), and the song in question was Blondie’s Heart of Glass. Yay for singing in falsetto!

I also spent a fair amount of time this week trying to memorize 風の丘 (from Kiki’s Delivery Service) on the guitar. Which is a lovely song, and I quite enjoy playing it, but it’s like pulling teeth. Enough so that I’ll probably write about it on my main blog, so I won’t go into details here.

On Saturday, Miranda and I went violin shopping: she’s moving up to a full-sized violin. Nice to have an excuse for me to play violin, so she could hear differences between instruments and bows when somebody other than her was playing; I’m a pretty mediocre violinist (though still much better than I am at guitar), but at least I’m good enough to be not completely useless as an example.

On Thursday, I realized that I’d somehow missed playing through three of the Billy Joel songs on Pro Keys; not sure how that happened, but I fixed that lapse on Saturday. Good stuff, as always. And then today I went through three more songs on Hard Pro Guitar; we’re definitely getting to a level where my lack of skills are showing. On two of the three pieces, I only managed two stars on my first playthrough (and this was after spending a good amount of time on training mode); while I got three stars on both eventually, I’m not reliably hitting the chord transitions, especially ones that mix barre and non-barre chords. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a lot better at that than I was a few months ago, but there’s clearly room for improvement, and I imagine my progress will slow down further as songs get harder.

Despite my difficulties, those three songs were a lot of fun; I only stopped when I did because we needed to make dinner fairly soon and because each song takes quite a while to go through on training mode and then play it several times. But we had a little bit of time left, so Liesl and I went through five or six songs on Vocal Harmonies. Which was super fun: like I said above, I’m enjoying singing more and more these days, especially when singing with Liesl. My favorite song today was Modern Love, both because I really like it and because I can hit the harmonies pretty solidly on that; the other highlight was trying Expert difficulty and finding that we could actually do fine at that level. In fact, we got gold stars on one of the songs; I think Expert vocals must be easier in this iteration of the game than previous ones, though I’m sure the fact that we were both trying to sing the non-harmony bits helped as well.

Good times; I’m still not sure why I’ve been on a musical binge for most of the last month, but I’m not complaining at all.

I wasn’t feeling nearly as manically musical this weekend as last weekend, so while I did play an unusual amount of piano this week (and started learning a Ghibli song on the guitar), this weekend I mostly focused on writing blog posts about Catherine instead of spending all my time playing Rock Band. (Oh, and I went violin shopping with Miranda and accompanied her on the piano when she practiced today, both of which were fun.) I did put in two and a half or three hours of Pro Guitar practice today, though, going through the last four Solid songs and the first two Moderate ones.

I don’t remember too many details; somehow I got 58th place on the Werewolves of London leaderboards, which makes absolutely no sense given that I didn’t feel that I did a surprisingly good job there. I Can See for Miles was quite a bit of fun to play (and sounded not completely horrible plugged into the amp, even); there was one other song that I rather enjoyed, but I’ve already forgotten which one it was. And I’m a lot better at shifting quickly between barre chords than I used to be: there’s still huge amounts of room for improvement, but there’s also absolutely no question that playing the game is improving my guitar skills substantially.

Almost halfway through the songs on Hard. Though I imagine the second half will take longer than the first! A long journey, and I imagine Expert will raise the stakes quite a bit, but I’m still managing to make progress.

This weekend was an interesting one: I was going through a manic bit, and it expressed itself by making me feel very musical, in a scattered fashion. After the previous weekend, I’d bought some Billy Joel sheet music, so as soon as everybody else was awake I went through that on the piano. (With occasional singing and whistling.) Then, to work off some energy, I switched over to Rock Band drums; I was pleased to be able to make it through the Warmup songs on Expert, and while Killing Loneliness defeated me on the next tier, it has the rhythm pattern that I need to work on (regular yellow notes with red and pedal alternating, the latter on the off-beats). So I’ll probably return to that one the next time I’m in a drumming mood, it’s definitely good practice. Also, inspired by Kirk’s comment on the Experience Points Podcast, I gave Vaseline a try; a pleasant challenge on Hard but not quite as good for me to focus on as Killing Loneliness, and way too hard for me on Expert.

After that, Liesl and I did some vocal harmonies; and I put in my Pro Guitar practice, going through (I think) another four songs there. Also, that evening, we went through some recent DLC (me on non-pro Guitar, Liesl on Bass); mostly Yes, which I wasn’t thrilled by, though I’m hoping I’ll like it more on Pro Keys.

We had friends over on Sunday, so I didn’t play any Rock Band that day; I did find time to bang out some Ghibli music on the piano, though. On which note, later that week the song 風の丘 got stuck in my head via the excellent Brasta Ghibli album; it wasn’t in my piano book, but I found a quite nice guitar version, so I’m trying to learn that now.

This week’s VGHVI game was Shenmue II. Which I hadn’t replayed since I finished it almost six years ago; Roger never played either it or the original.

It was very interesting listening to Roger run into the warts in the game; there was a lot of stuff that didn’t bother me but that bothered him, from bad (default) movement controls (I’d completely forgotten the Dreamcast didn’t have a right thumbstick) to strange game mechanics (wandering around trying to talk to people to trigger the next event) to quicktime events to a hard-to-control job minigame. I wondered (and still wonder) how different it would have been if we’d played the original Shenmue instead, because my (perhaps flawed) memory is that that game did a better job of ramping you up; but it’s very interesting to reread my notes and see me complaining about the start of Shenmue II despite my having played (and loved!) the previous game.

That was Roger’s experience; mine was rather more positive. Things I noticed:

• I love the lighting and coloring in the game. It uses sunlight in an unabashed way that I’m not used to in video games, and the coloring is bright without quite slipping into garishness.
• I love the game’s embrace of mundanity: lots of unhelpful people to talk to, lots of stores that don’t serve a game purpose, the fact that you have to get a job, the fact that you have to buy maps (shades of Majora’s Mask…), the divorcing of martial arts training from the traditional RPG combat grind.
• The controls are odd, but get quite a bit better once you realize you can reassign the thumbstick to movement; even so, there are some interesting quirks, like the ability to follow people, the “look around in a room you’re standing in” controls.
• Ryo is rather a jerk to Joy, isn’t he?
• Appropriate that a game set in Hong Kong is so devoted to commerce.

But, most of all: it felt like coming home. I haven’t touched the game in six years, but every street was familiar, every face was familiar. Yet another sign that I should fix my Dreamcast: several games that I should replay, and Shenmue is top of the list.

Well, Shenmue or Jet Grind Radio…

I’m still playing Ascension a fair amount, and still trying to figure it out. I went through a big “trash your cards” binge, and in general that’s clearly a good idea. I had a game recently, though, where I managed to get a bunch of cards that let you draw more cards: after five or so rounds, I had two cards that let you draw two cards, one that lets you draw three cards, and as the game went on I got a few more that let you draw a single card. (And I also got a card that lets you draw two cards and banish one.)

In fact, such a high percentage of cards in my hand let me draw other cards to replace them after playing them that, as the game went on, I ended up going through all of my hand (or almost all, maybe all but two cards in my hand was a little more realistic) in most of the rounds in the second half of the game.

And, as you might expect, I steamrollered my computer opponent—I could buy or (usually) kill whatever I wanted every round, so I ended up with high value card after high value card. If I’m remembering correctly, the final score was 104 to 52, which is a ridiculous total and a ridiculous margin of victory.

Clearly I can’t count on such luck at the start of the game; but at least now I realize the potential when the possibility appears. And it’s yet another reminder of the value of dense hands. In fact, I’m thinking now that I should experiment more with not buying cards even when I have the opportunity to do so: yes, I’ll lose a few victory points in the short term by doing that, but the density benefits could easily outweigh that.

What I don’t have any feel for at all is how to balance profit versus capabilities. In general, I lean towards purchasing power rather than killing power, but ultimately killing monsters is the easiest way to rack up victory points, and they have the advantage that they don’t clog up your hand. Something to work on…

Last weekend I was pretty busy, so no Rock Band. This week, though was different: it was a three-day weekend with no plans outside the house, so I got in some playing every day!

On Saturday, I tried out a few more of the Expert Pro Guitar training lessons. Without a lot of success in general, though I think the alternating strumming ones should be doable and will be useful practice for me. And I went through three songs; I don’t remember the details, but I did enjoy the Doors one. (Not one of the on-disc songs, it was part of the free launch DLC.)

On Sunday, I decided to work through more of the Billy Joel DLC on Pro Keys. And that was super fun: I don’t think that Pro Keys stands up to Pro Guitar in general, but playing through Billy Joel can be pretty amazing. I’m not sure how many songs I went through on Sunday—maybe six or seven?—but I was very glad to have taken a guitar break and gone through those. Liesl started singing along, and that sounded like fun, so we ended up going through some of them on vocals once I was done practicing the keyboards; it turns out that his vocal range even matches mine pretty well! (Though I didn’t get to sing in falsetto as much as I prefer…)

I had two Billy Joel songs left after Sunday, so I went through those two today. And they were both quite something in their own way: Scenes from an Italian Restaurant has a couple of sections that are pretty ridiculous, but the song as a whole was a good deal of fun. (At least when I was getting the timing right on the off-beat chords—that song would be rather different with two hands, one of which was actually playing on the beat…) And She’s Always a Woman was one arpeggiated chord after another, which turned into quite an experience: the structure is there, just a bit harder to see because of the arpeggios than it would otherwise be, and revealing that structure in my playing felt great.

So I am now a complete Billy Joel convert. I’ll stop by a local music store on the way home from work tomorrow to see if I can pick up some sheet music, because I’d like to go through that on a real piano. And the singing was fun, too: I should spend more time doing that than I have been over the last year. Maybe Liesl and I will go through the harmonies for the on-disc Rock Band 3 content?

Last month’s VGHVI Minecraft session had us complete a pretty epic building project, so I was curious what we would feel like doing this month. And the answer is: not so much building.

At least I didn’t feel like so much building! At first, I wandered around, looking at some of the old sights.

Clearly our fences need some work

Midair ice

Skull mountain in snow

But then, once I’d reached the end of the familiar territory, I decided to just keep on going north, taking pictures along the way.

A beach with a squid-filled lake-

Close-up view of squid

Torches on ice

Clearly that last one was a previously-explored area of the world, but that was the last familiar sight I saw.

Looking down into a deep cave

Looking up from the bottom of that cave

Steep cliffs

Overhang, river, and cave

Hazy ocean view

A bizarrely bumpy valley

Bright ocean sun

Ocean stripes

Anybody know what’s going on with the strips in that last one? I assume it’s some sort of chunk-related territory-generation artifact, but I don’t really know.

Sheep in the rain

Sunset and island in the rain

Eventually, the scenery started taking a while to load, so I decided to mark the end of my journey by dropping off my torches and teleport back home:

Chunks are now taking a while to load

The end of my journey

I wasn’t the only person who spent much of the time traveling north; here are some of the pictures that Eric took:

Field with animals

Rain at night

Ridge, trees, and water

Lake with sandy beaches

Lagoon and ocean

Tree-filled valley

Here’s what the world map looked like once we were done exploring: pretty obvious which way we went!

World map

Anyways, enough travelogue pictures, now for some construction. Miranda started off by building another house, though I didn’t manage to get a picture of its completed state:

Building another house

Working inside the house

The beach near the house

Somebody (I don’t know who) also built a diving pool on the Acropolis. If you aimed right, you could go down into it from the skybridge, but if you were a little off, doom awaited:

Diving pool

Roger's remains

I took the dive myself, with a happier outcome:

That's a long way down...

Geronimo!

Sploosh

Miranda decided to build a smaller, less user-hostile pool, with its own diving tower:

Smaller pool

The diving tower

The view from the top of the tower

And Adam decided to smooth out the underwater train tunnel: the floor had been pretty bumpy from all the flood barriers I put in, but it looks a lot nicer now.

Smoothed out underwater tracks

The middle of the tunnel

Finally, a few last bits of scenery:

Tracks near the mega tree

The acropolis at night

I’ll be out tomorrow, but I made sure to get some Pro Guitar practice in today. Nothing huge to report; I did another one of the Expert instrument lessons (two down, I think four to go?) and played through four songs on Hard.

I did the last two Apprentice level songs; they’re probably my two least favorite songs in the game, both to listen to and to play on Pro Keys, but they’re not so bad to play on Pro Guitar. Well, maybe they would be once I got used to them, because they’re repetitive, but right now the repetitive bits are things that I could stand to work on. Antibodies had the surprise that I ended up with not only a higher score than Dan Bruno but a score almost ten times as high as his; I’m used to that happening in the other direction! (I assume he was having very much an off day and that it’s much harder to get a long streak on Expert on that song than on Hard.) And Du Hast had one short repeated alternating strumming bit, which was useful reinforcement for that. (And reminded me that I’ve been lax about practicing outside of game…)

I then moved up to the next tier of songs (I forget the name of that tier, Solid maybe?), and did Centerfold and Twentieth Century Boy. Both of which were pleasant enough to play both muted and plugged in; I still have a lot of work to go on my fast chord shifting, but it could have been a lot worse.

So: slow progress this weekend, but that’s better than no progress. Next weekend will be busy, too, but I should have more free weekends in September, I hope.