Category Archives: Cool Things

Cool enough to be a category and a tag.

Cool Things: Dominion

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I’ll admit it – I’m a card game fanatic.

Board games are fun but card games have this special appeal. It comes from the mix of available and hidden information, the randomness of the shuffle and the feel of the cardboard. Card games can run the gamut from something that you can play with your typical 52-card, four suited deck to an absurdly complicated, 12,000 plus card monstrosity that’s been growing for the last 20 years. Finding a card game among all those with depth and replayablity that won’t break your brain or your budget can be a real chore.

One game that I’ve found scratches the itch well is Dominion (specifically the Intrigue card set, but either version of the game is good.) The basic purpose of the game is easy – score the most points and you win!

Of course the real trick is in scoring those points. Dominion is what is known as a “deck building” game, a kind of game where everyone starts with the same basic cards but picks new cards to add to their deck every turn. Some cards are used to buy cards, some cards score points, some cards do other special actions. Easy, right?

Well, the real challenge of the game is long term planning. See, the vast majority of cards that score points don’t do anything else – you can’t use them to buy cards (and point cards have to be bought), you can’t do special actions with them, in short they’re dead weight until the end of the game. This means you have to spend time amassing resources to buy points with, and find ways to do it faster than everyone else. Each game is a race to find something that works well, rack up resources with it and then score points fastest.

Adding another layer of complexity is the fact that Dominion offers more cards than you can possibly use in a single game. The basic resource and point cards stay the same but you can change the special action cards every time you play, making the game fresh and different for a long time. And if you finally use every possible combination of special cards in your games you can always pick up additional card sets to keep things changing. While it’s not exactly a collectible card game the basic format makes expanding your game very easy to do.

Dominion is a game with a lot going on. There’s time management, resource management, opportunity management. It can be used to teach critical thinking, long term planning and the significance of opportunity cost. Like the best games, it can teach valuable life skills in a simple and engaging way. Or you can just play to show your friends who’s boss. Either way, win or lose, you’re probably going to have a good time.

Housekeeping just as promised!

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We’re going to use today to look at some of the housekeeping stuff that’s been put off a lot around the ol’ blog. I think this place is pretty cool and hopefully so do you, and there’s a lot coming in the Friday slot for the next month or so that I didn’t want to disrupt. So the update goes here!

First off, the Fiction Index page has been updated! Hooray!

I don’t think I’d touched that since the beginning of the year, possibly late last year, so this was long overdue. It now links to all chapters of Water Fall plus all the short stories published this summer. Hopefully it will stay up to date as we crash into Thunder Clap.  On top of that, all the “Next Chapter” links in Water Fall are now active, something that was not always the case.

You might have noticed that there’s a new page listed at the top as well – On Writing! No, it’s not a complete index to every post I’ve done on Fridays. That would just be way too much. But there are several features I’ve started doing that have grown to the point where I kind of feel they deserve their own complete listing, in case you read one as it goes up and don’t feel like archive diving to find them all. So which features are those, exactly?

Currently there are three – Author’s Obligations, a short series I did about a year ago, and the longer running Genrely Speaking and Writing Men series. Genrely Speaking in particular has gotten to be fairly large. I’ve listed the Genres covered in Genrely Speaking twice. Once in order they were published in, in case you want to read them that way, then again in alphabetical order (it doesn’t really make much difference what order you read them in, except that newer genres sometimes link back to older ones.)

Also, I’ve added (AT) and (CH) after the name of each genre to differentiate between Aesthetic and Characteristic Genres. What does that mean? Well, I’m going to go into detail on that with my next Gernely Speaking post a week from this coming Friday so hopefully you’ll come back then and find out.

In the mean time enjoy the updated features and I’ll see you this Friday to talk more about sliding scales!

Cool Things: Lindsey Stirling

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Okay, enough with the plots and the characters and the cultural tidbits. We’ve had four weeks of Japanese pop culture, how about some American pop culture?

I have just the thing!

Lindsey Sterling is a violinist and performance artist who specializes in an interesting blend of classical violin and electronic synthesizer (and dance). While it’s not for everyone, her music is fun, catchy and brilliant. While Sterling’s violin playing may not be as technically proficient as you might find in a Philharmonic in the big city of your choice it does have the energy and fun of a good fiddler and for many of us that’s more than enough. More than that, the blending of her electronically amplified violin with heavy synthetic beats shows that the instrument still has a lot to contribute to modern music.

Now many people are going to hear a sample of her music and won’t like the synthetic elements. That’s okay. Techno isn’t for everyone and Sterling’s music is much more techno than classical. At the same time, don’t reject it out of hand just because it’s techno. Many excellent piano pieces were originally written for the harpsichord, the piano didn’t exist until later. There’s a constant evolution of instruments available and there’s no reason to deny them a seat at the table simply because they’re new. Just like the violin still deserves a place in modern music so new instruments deserve to be taken out tested and allowed to find their place.

What’s most interesting about Sterling’s music, beyond its fusion of old and new, is that it is original. By that I mean it’s not a new arrangement of classical music or pop music. Sterling’s pieces are largely new pieces written expressly for violin and synthesizer. That’s exciting, because it shows that there is a place for this fusion of old and new instruments outside of the purely derivative. In this sense it’s ground breaking and, in my opinion as a music lover,  that makes it worth attention.

Of course, Sterling has done a lot of covers of all kinds of music. It’s only sensible to pay your respects to the successful while striking out on your own, after all. But on the whole, Lindsey Sterling is a nice new take on techno music that is well worth checking out. As always, though, try before you buy. A good selection of her music can be found on her YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/lindseystomp

Cool Things: Ghost in the Shell

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Welcome to our final installment of manga and anime month at Nate Chen Publications. So far we’ve examined a selection of what I would consider “entry level” series. They’re aimed at a younger audience but deep enough and well enough executed to be interesting to many people. Just like Harry Potter was aimed at young people but found widespread acceptance among people of all ages, so with Trigun, Rurouni Kenshin and Azumanga Diaoh.

The Ghost in the Shell franchise is not such a story. The story began with the work of author and illustrator Shirow Masamune. The original manga was published in the 1980s and became an animated movie in the 1990s. That movie is credited with codifying many of the ideas that would ultimately find expression in Hollywood with The Matrix.

While the manga and movie were engaging and interesting the ideas in them are so dense they didn’t really find full expression until a season length animated show was produced. That show was Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. As the title implies, this adaptation was not connected to the movie in any way – except, of course, for theme.

Ghost in the Shell takes place in a world where every part of the human body can be reproduced synthetically. The entire human body can be transformed into a cyborg and memories and personality transferred into an artificial brain. At the same time virtual reality has progressed to the point where it is almost indistinguishable from regular reality. Questions of identity, humanity and the nature of truth run throughout the series. Of course, the plot of the series has as much to with cyberterrorists, corruption and secretive government agencies as human identity.

Events revolve around Public Safety Section 9, which deals with counter-terrorism and particularly cybercrime. Led by Motoko Kusanagi, a retired JSDF Major and total conversion cyborg (meaning body and brain are artificial), Section 9 has to figure out the motives and goals of the hacker known as The Laughing Man. Their work is frustrated by his extreme skill and a number of copycats, and the fact that ol’ chuckles was partly working to uncover corruption in the government. A number of corrupt officials will interfere with Section 9 to avoid exposure.

It’s hard to explain exactly how The Laughing Man ties in with the themes of Ghost in the Shell without spoiling things. But I can say that a lot of time is devoted to the ideas of the Ghost – what defines human identity – and how much our body – or the Shell – defines it. At the same time no one attempts to hand the audience a pat answer, which is always nice.

Now if a story of corruption and the nature of human identity sounds too dark for your tastes be assured that there’s plenty of other things going on here. There’s a subtle romantic subplot between the Major and one of her colleagues, the diverse backgrounds and personalities of Section 9 are played for both laughs and insight and there’s plenty of well rendered action as well. It’s hard to believe the series was animated over ten years ago.

Oh, and there’s Tachikomas. Little blue, crab shaped mecha running AIs with the disposition of cheerful five year olds who are convinced they are RPG characters. The closest thing to dedicated comic relief, even these weird little AIs manage to be interesting characters and active participants in the plot. It’s an impressive achievement.

Serious sci-fi is as rare in anime as it is in any other medium but Ghost in the Shell manages to be serious and, at the same time, accessible and entertaining. That’s an impressive achievement in itself. But it also manages to do it in a context that will make sense to anyone from a modern developed country, not just people from the islands of Japan. And that makes it worth noting here.

Like many series licensed for distribution in America, you can find Ghost in the Shell on Youtube here.

Cool Things: Azumanga Daioh

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So we’ve covered gunslingers in outer space and Meiji era romantic swordsmen, what remains to give a full bodied, even handed overview of manga and anime, this month’s focus here at Nate Chen Publications? Oh, yes, of course.

High school.

Now many Americans have fond memories of their high school days. But in our culture college is probably the more important educational milestone. While fewer people go to college, it is where a lot of people seem to form their first meaningful lifetime relationships outside of their birth families. Roommates, sports teams, fraternity or sorority friends or just people who took the same classes you did, college is where you meet them. Sure, you have some friends from high school who might stick around, if you’re lucky. But for the most part, in America, college is where independence really starts and tends to be our high water mark for growing up.

In Japan, it’s high school. College admission exams are exponentially more difficult there, often consuming most of a student’s free time in their last year of high school so, at least in pop culture, the first two years become a frantic rush to accumulate experiences and meet those people sharing your interests. Then you bond together and set your sites on a life path and work towards it as a group.

This theme is made so much of in Japanese pop culture that I have to conclude it’s what actually happens on at least a semi-regular basis. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to sell it so frequently. But the way it’s typically presented in Japanese pop culture is probably not the way it really is.

There is one work I’ve ready that has the ring of truth to it, though, and that’s Azumanga Diaoh by Azuma Kiyohiko.

If you’ve read/watched any manga/anime at all you know that the Japanese have a slightly higher tolerance for abnormal elements like superhuman martial arts, mind readers, spiritualists and the like in their entertainment and fusing these elements with high school is a very common approach to story telling. Azumanga Daioh is not that.

High school manga or anime are also considered a great format for stories of all out competition with sports teams or game clubs or even movie making groups doing all in their power to win a major competition before exams crash down and end their high school days. Azumanga Daioh isn’t that either.

Lastly, even in America we recognize the unique romantic atmosphere of high school. There’s cute members of the opposite sex all over the place to be chased, gossiped about and rejected by. The Japanese are just as fine writing high school romances as Americans. But Azumanga Daioh doesn’t waste its time with romance.

Azumanga Daioh is what’s known as a slice-of-life drama. It follows its central characters around as they arrive in high school, get to know each other, do funny, stupid or otherwise entertaining things and eventually graduate.

I know, I know. This sounds boring. Somehow, it isn’t.

I really wish I could explain this manga better. It’s roughly the equivalent to a comic strip, what’s called “4-koma” in Japan. Most of the stories are told in a series of four panels that serve to basically tell a joke. But in each of those jokes a surprising amount of character development goes on.

This is significant since Azumanga Daioh (and slice-of-life in general) is not a sitcom. The genre is driven by its characters and not the situation they are in. What Kiyohiko does is he builds a set of very understandable, deep and relatable characters and then lets us live with them for three years until they graduate (high schools in Japane have a 3 year curriculum spanning 10th to 12th grade, just one of many differences between Japanese education and the U.S.) By the end we really feel like people like Osaka, Chiyo and Sakaki really were our classmates. That’s a particularly impressive achievement if, like me, you were homeschooled…

The Japanese pop culture obsession with high school may not always make sense to Western readers. But it is that very fact that makes Azumanga Daioh a great example of it for people dipping their toes into manga and anime. It seems as if this is what they’re really expecting to get, what they really want out of high school. It’s an idealized take on the formative years of young people, from the perspective of Japanese culture.

Plus it’s consistently funny, occasionally heart touching and not that hard to get a handle on. Maybe saying it’s a story about girls who go to school for three years, become fast friends and graduate to move on to bigger things doesn’t inspire you. But all dreams need foundations. And, in a very real way, that’s what Azumanga Daioh is – a foundation for bigger things.

Rurouni Kenshin

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Manga is more than just a variation of comics – it’s a learning experience! A great example of this is Nobuhiro Watsuki’s classic Rurouni Kenshin. The title character is an Issin Shishi veteran of the Meiji restoration, one who lived as a killer, an elite fighter sent to eliminate the most dangerous opponents of the revolution. What’s so interesting about this story is that it doesn’t take place during the Bakamatsu, but rather afterwards.

All soldiers need somewhere to go when the war is over but people rarely plan that far ahead. The Bakamatsu was no exception. So when the long days of fighting are over Kenshin is left with nowhere to go and no idea how he goes from a hardened killer to the citizen of a peaceful country. Like many long veteran soldiers, Kenshin finds he loathes fighting and sets out to live in peace. He exchanges his katana for a sakabato and vows to never kill again.

Unfortunately, back in the day Kenshin had quite the reputation and a decade after disappearing into the mists of history Kenshin finds that someone has stolen his name and is using his old reputation for their own ends. Living in peace is not enough to satisfy, it seems. Kenshin must ultimately seek redemption for his misdeeds. He will find it only in humility, service towards others and diligently performing housework for women who will never learn to do it on their own. Everything from the way he lives to the way he speaks, referring to himself in a diminuitive fashion and addressing most other people with the highly respectful “dono“, point to the change in Kenshin.

Rurouni Kenshin is a shonen manga to the core – it has lots of action, lots of humor and an emphasis on making the community you live in a better place.  Every time Kenshin swings his blunted blade he does so in the hopes that the ideals he fought for during the Bakumatsu will be upheld in the new era but, unlike many works about the past, Watsuki makes no attempts to sugarcoat the reality of the Meiji era. Yes, there were patriots out there on both sides of the conflict. But by and large most people were seeking their own gain.

As a weekly comic that ran for five years, Kenshin had a lot of time to look at the various forms that took. Disreputable merchants looking to buy power over people, disreputable teachers looking to play the wealthy and well intentioned for their own ends, well intentioned men branded criminals so others wouldn’t take the heat, virtuous men who turn to violence and crime in the search for petty revenge. All these and more are things that Watsuki and Kenshin stare down through the pages of their manga. Each one is overcome by relying on three simple rules:

  • Serve humbly.
  • Fight for the oppressed.
  • Teach others to do the same.

Rurouni Kenshin is a great yarn about a country, an era and the people that made it. It’s not going to give you anything like a comprehensive idea of what the time was like but it will give you a starting place. None of the historical events mentioned in it are made up, although much of the story taking place around those historical facts is pure fantasy. But there’s still one thing beyond sketchy that Kenshin teaches.

Heroes, it seems, look the same no matter what the culture or the era.

Cool Things: Trigun

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Okay, I’ve hinted a few times that I like some elements of Japanese culture. Not just the classic stuff like Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai or calligraphy, the pop culture that has produced things like Astroboy or Dragonball. The question I so often get when people find this out is… why?

It’s hard to just sit down and say, “Well, you see it’s this and this and this that make it all so interesting.” Have you ever tried to explain your favorite band to someone who’s never heard their music? If so, you understand what I mean. Even if you have a well reasoned, even handed argument for why you like them it doesn’t mean much unless the person you’re talking to has heard their music. (If they haven’t you’re probably ready to subject them to a few dozen bars of off key singing that will fail to make you any friends. Unless, of course, you’re one of those people and you can actually sing.) The fact is, it needs to be experienced, as often as not.

Anime and manga, the elements of Japanese culture that I get the most, are the same way. I can’t really pour the experience straight into your brains but I can recommend some places for you to start. Thus and so I proclaim July 2014 to be Japanophile month here at Nate Chen Publications and I’m going to use these here Wednesday segments to talk about some of the things that drew me to the twin mediums of manga and anime.

A quick aside on terms. Rather than write out everything here, I’ve made a separate post where several words that are used in this month’s posts will be defined. And from here on out I’m going to link to it every time I use one of these terms with the exception of anime and manga. Just so you know. Shonen will like to the Japanese Terms Cheat Sheet every time it’s a hyperlink. If you remember what a given term means you don’t need to click on it every time. Or just keep it open in another tab while you’re reading this.

So. Pretty much the first anime I ever watched in its entirety was Trigun and it still has this special little place in my heart even though, looking back on it, it only accomplished so much narratively or artistically.

Trigun is a good place for the anime novice to start for a number of reasons. For starters, it’s one of the three anime Space Westerns created in the 1980s and 1990s. If you’ve seen Firefly you have a good idea of the aesthetics of these space westerns, although the exact balance of elements varied between the three.

Trigun had the most western and the least space. As a result it’s chalk full of imagery that will be familiar to Western audiences in general and us Americans in particular. Gun slingers, taverns and great sprawling deserts are all a part of the scenery in Trigun.

At the same time they’re on another planet (which I don’t believe we ever learn the name of.)

Basically, the people there were part of a colonization project gone awry that crashed on planet hundreds of years ago. The details are fuzzy at start but are explored in more detail as the series goes on, point is the disaster set humanity back but more due to a lack of resources and infrastructure than a loss of information. And the planet is a desert so it’s not like it’s a hospitable environment, either.

There’s still some high technology running around, cyborg arms, futuristic power plants and even the rotting, semifunctional hulks of old colony ships. But at the same time most people exist in a world where what’s generally available wouldn’t be out of place in the 1890s and wound up looking like they belong in the old west.

There were twelve colony ships that crashed and each one had a city built around its ruins. These twelve cities, named after the months of the year, were the centers for human culture, learning and progress – at least until a lone man completely annihilated one of them over night using methods no one quite understands. Since this is a space western the man who is blamed for the incident had a price put on his head. Like all great outlaws he’s best known by the name they put on his wanted poster and that name is Vash the Stampede.

If you think that sounds dumb you don’t know much about the kinds of names people used out on the range.

Although it is an odd choice of a name since there’s no herd animals to stampede anywhere on the planet, at least so far as we see, so it’s not like people are going to have vivid images in their minds of what a stampede looks like…

Anyway, Trigun revolves around Vash and what people do about him. It’s got a very distinct story structure with beginning, middle and end, themes of learning to correctly evaluate people and a story of truly epic sibling rivalry plus some really weird names, slapstick comedy galore and gunfights to put The Matrix to shame. It’s fast, frenetic and fun, at least most of the time. That said, to really get what drew me in about the series you only have to watch the first five episodes.

(ASIDE – Trigun, like many anime series of its day and even some now a days, aired 26 episodes. Since one of those episodes was a mid-season recap it essentially had 25 episodes of plot development. The first 20% of the series is, in my opinion, the best part from a storytelling perspective. Not to say the rest isn’t good stuff, but it’s what really grabbed me.)

We start off by meeting Meryl Strife and Milly Thomson, insurance adjustors from the Bernardelli Insurance Company. They’re looking for Vash not for the bounty on his head, or even to try and claim damages from him, but because his tendency to leave chaos in his wake ever since he wiped a city off the map is costing the company money. Meryl and Milly are supposed to try and keep other people away from him, thus hopefully preventing further incidents that will cost the company even more money.

These two women are following rumors of Vash and are stymied when they encounter not one, not two but three men who match the description. They eventually write off all three as not Vash and continue their quest – but we, the audience, see enough of one of them to draw three conclusions:

  1. He’s really Vash the Stampede, just keeping a low profile.
  2. He’s very laid back for a coldblooded killer and, in fact, seems intent on avoiding conflict, passing off his considerable abilities as bumbling.
  3. He loves donuts.

Over the first five episodes Meryl and Milly watch Vash wrap up one incident after another – mixed-up bounty hunters, greedy land owners, bank robbers and a hostage situation – all without getting anyone killed. Each time the stakes get a little higher and it gets harder to hide the fact that under that sunny disposition and carefree attitude there’s steel and courage and possibly even something a little darker.

Episode 5, “Hard Puncher” is where it all comes together. Vash wanders into a town that has a failing power plant. Without power to keep things running the town will loose access to water and machinery to keep the desert at bay and it will quickly die. Getting an engineer to fix the plant is incredibly expensive – but Vash has the highest bounty in history and it’s more than enough to set things right.

Except Vash will not turn himself in quietly. He is, in fact, willing to fight the whole town.

And he does.

It’s not the first time Vash has done this. Obviously it didn’t work before but this town has a secret weapon. After all their efforts to catch him themselves they fall back on the old maxim that to catch a thief… And so they turn the biggest criminals they have on hand, a steam powered cyborg and his mad scientist “father” known collectively as the Nebraskas, loose on Vash.

This proceeds to backfire within fifteen seconds. (Surprise!)

The Nebraskas show no concern for the wellbeing of the townfolk and smash the place up even worse trying to catch Vash. In turn Vash busts his butt trying to keep the townspeople who are trying to throw him in jail safe. Finally the Nebraskas grab the villain ball and try to kill some townfolk just to prove they’re bigger than Vash (which is literally, if not figuratively true.)

In the end Vash beats the Nebraskas and saves the townfolk – even though they were determined to throw him in jail just hours before. Our lacksidasical, donut eating protagonist may be more of a hero than we thought, ruined cities or no.

Now this may not sound like anything special. But what impressed me at first and still impresses me now is how we learn about Vash. He never flat out says he’s Vash the Stampede, to keep a low profile, sure, but even when situations have already gone south he doesn’t trot out his reputation to try and scare off enemies. In fact, he doesn’t ever try for any kind of recognition – well, other than maybe some attention from the ladies.

We learn about Vash by what he does, not what he says or even what other people say about him (except for how it contrasts with the character we see.) It’s very strong writing like you don’t see much in any venue. Yes, the series doesn’t entirely live up to its early promise but it always does an excellent job with its character building and that’s why it still has a special place in my heart.

If your interested in checking out Trigun Funimation, the company that owns the license to distribute Trigun in America, has made the series available on Youtube. If you enjoy animation or character building it’s worth looking at.

Anime/Manga Month Cheat Sheet

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(Scroll down for new terms from the 7/16/2014 post!)

These are some commonly used terms when discussing anime and manga. Note that not all of these are Japanese words, for Japanese, just like English, is a language all too happy to straight up steal words from other languages and give them new meanings. Let confusion abound.

Anime – This is one of those stolen words. It comes from French and it means animation. Oddly enough it’s used in a straightforward fashion – it refers to any kind of animated story, much like we’d use the term “cartoons” except that it never refers to pictures that don’t move only ones that do.

–Dono (see also Honorifics) – Not used much in modern times, this was the term you would use when referring to the person who was your direct superior in the feudal structure. If it is used in modern times it is often done in a joking fashion.

Honorifics – American culture is, by world standards, fairly informal. But by Japanese standards we’re downright hicks. The Japanese language uses a set of honorifics to define relationships and I’ve included a few of the more important ones here. These titles would usually be used after a person’s name almost like a suffix. Thus if I was your writing teach I would be Chen-sensei. These honorifics serve to set some social ground rules between people and generally say a lot about the structure of a group, plus they’re considered polite. Most Americans will get this. What they might not realize is that not using any honorific at all is considered either A) a sign the speaker knows the person he’s addressing very intimately or B) the speaker intends to be very rude. Something to keep in mind should you ever visit Japan.

Manga – This is a very broad term in Japan that refers to pretty much anything that’s been drawn. But for our purposes it covers the things American audiences would refer to as comic books, comic strips and graphic novels. The two are very similar but manga tends to be more image focused where American comics are very dialog heavy. The differences are very stark if you take, say, a page from DCs New 52 and place it next to a page from Shounen Jump…

–San (see also Honorifics) – This is the catch-all, general purpose, polite honorific you use if you and the person you’re talking to are equals or your relationship is as-of-yet ill defined. The rough equivalent of Mr. or Mrs. in English.

–Sama (see also Honorifics) – This term refers to someone more important than you. Your boss, the mayor, the Prime Minister, it can be pretty broad and how important the other person has to be before the speaker uses it varies, assuming it gets used at all.

Shoujo – This word basically means “young girl” and means a girl between the ages of 12 and 16, dealing with the new complexities of interpersonal relationships that define that age. It’s also a genre of entertainment. Shojo entertainment tends to focus on… well, romance. But also the societal pressures girls face in what Americans would view as highly regimented school systems play a major role. Gossip, appearance, grades and the like are very, very common themes.

Shounen – This word basically means “young boy” and refers to a man on the cusp of adulthood, somewhere between 12 and 16 years old. Anime and manga called “shounen” are just what you’d think – aimed at boys in that demographic.However shounen also tends to be the best selling and most popular genre in Japan, so this may be a bit of a misnomer. Shounen Jump, the most popular shounen publication in Japan, has the motto “hard work, friendship, victory” and that may be the best summation of the genre there is.

As the month goes on I will come back and add to this page as needed. Of course, I don’t expect you to read this straight through, although some of you might be doing just that right now, but rather look up the correct entry whenever you encounter something you don’t understand in the course of one of this month’s posts. So be aware that the contents of this post will be changing over time.

7/16/2014 Update

Bakumatsu – A roughly three year time period from 1866 to 1868 when the Japanese Shogunate was overthrown and the Emperor restored to actual leadership of Japan. While it’s sometimes compared to the American Civil War the only real similarity is the time period and that a formerly unified nation divided into factions that fought with each other before being forced back together in a sometimes uneasy peace. In truth it might be closer to the American Revolution, as it overthrew one kind of government and instituted another… but in all truth comparing the history of one nation to another is kind of futile. The Bakumatsu was a civil war that changed the government of Japan and ushered in the Meiji era. It is one of the most often romanticized periods of Japanese history. ‘Nuff said.

Ishin Shishi – The faction of the Bakumatsu set on overthrowing the Shogun and restoring the Imperial form of government. The ultimate victors of that conflict and, oddly enough, often cast as villains in stories set during that era.

Katana – This is the Japanese equivalent of the long sword. The blade has a slight curve to it, so that the force of impact is focused in a smaller area than it would be with a straight blade, and it is forged and tempered in such a way as to withstand incredible impacts without breaking. The weapon is sharp on only one side. The Japanese consider them works of art and those forged by Japanese smiths in the isles of Japan are actually national treasures that cannot be exported legally. There’s a lot of other technical stuff but basically all you need to know is they’re pretty and deadly.

Meiji Restoration – A period of Japanese history stretching from the late 1860s to the early 1910s. The samurai and other deposed ruling classes were still around and both causing and solving problems but, on the whole, the imperial government, along with growing militancy and modernization that would characterize the nation until the end of the Second World War, were the driving forces of the times. While the Bakumatsu wasn’t really anything like the American Civil War there are a lot of similarities between Meiji and the American West, particularly in how they are romanticized.

Rurouni – A samurai with no master and no place to call home. Samurai were the backbone of the Shogun’s feudal system and, with that system overthrown, all samurai were essentially homeless. To carry the analogy between Meiji and the Old West one step further, rurouni would be the Virginians of the era, part of a dying breed who still held just enough power in the minds of the people to have an impact one last time.

Sakabato – Roughly “a reversed blade” a sakabato is a katana with the cutting edge and the blunt edge reversed so that striking with it in the normal fashion hurts like the dickens but won’t kill you (much). In theory, this allows a trained swordfighter to enjoy the balance and heft of his normal weapon without running the risk of randomly chopping someone’s head off. He can just leave them crippled for life or something.

Shinsengumi – Literally “newly chosen group” these people were the elite of the Shogun’s defenders, a special police force pulled up to defend Kyoto (then the capitol of the nation) against Ishin Shishi activities. Historically they were about as nice as you’d expect hardline police to be during wartime but they were exceptionally good fighters and popular culture has romanticized them a lot. In fact, if there’s an elite fighting group in a Japanese work of fiction there’s a 50/50 chance both it’s structure and leadership are modeled on the Shinsengumi.

Cool Things: Child of Light

Posted by natechen on

It’s time for the rare video game review! Child of Light is a 2D Adventure RPG developed by Ubisoft Montreal that is notable for three things – it’s sense of whimsy, it’s beautiful presentation and a new twist on old game elements. Some people are going to call this game retro. I’m going to say they’re wrong. This game is, in fact, classic.

There’s a trend towards “realistic” or “mature” games among so-called hard core gamers these days. Usually what this means is an emphasis on first person or close third person viewpoint with a heavy dose of carnage and very little attempt at a higher ideals. Most modern games are, in fact, low fantasies with different varieties of window dressing and little attempt at creative gameplay. Child of Light is a refreshing change from all of these things.

As the name implies, the game approaches its story in a very childish fashion. The whole game is hand drawn and painted in watercolors, the character’s speech (with one exception) and the game narration are set in rhyme and meter and the story feels like it has been ripped straight from the pages of the Brothers Grimm. Aurora is the daughter of an Austrian Duke who’s mother is dead and who’s father has married again giving her, you guessed it, an evil stepmother.

When Aurora catches a cold one evening she winds up At the Back of the North Wind and finds herself in Lemuria, a land with talking mice and a race of people that have angler fish style lights sprouting from their foreheads. Once there she is issued fairy wings and a broadsword as long as she is tall and instructed to find her way home and set things aright.

Interestingly enough, I cannot think of a single video game I’ve played that has so blatantly stolen so many fairytale elements and woven them together and that’s a shame, because Child of Light does a good job juggling all the disparate threads and weaving them into a solid whole. I don’t know if the writers were inspired by George MacDonald but it sure feels like it. At the same time this is not every fairytale you’ve ever read, Child of Light stands on it’s own merits yet still does its source material justice.

What really makes things work is the game’s artwork. Layer on upon layer of beautiful watercolors and carefully measured water and cloud effects give Lemuria a feel of beauty and wonder. It seems totally natural that this is the kind of place where statues come to life, talking mice live on the back of a mountain man (no, not a lumberjack or trapper, he’s a huge man made of stone and the mice are human sized) and you can be asked to catch a wayward flying pig for a village lady.

The game could have stopped there but it also has a beautiful classical soundtrack and, while only the narration is voiced, the voice work is very good. It’s the kind of game you want to spend most of your time wandering around in, and possibly, occasionally, moving towards what is, in theory, your goal.

That brings me to the third aspect I love about this game, namely the unusual gameplay. Most video games that use flight as a mechanic use it either as the focus of the game, complete with complicated controls and often frustrating tests of skill, or just use it as a way to handwave getting from point A to point B most of the time. But Aurora can fly across all maps for most of the game.

This turns what could have been a rehash of most platforming games into something a little more interesting. Yes, Valkyrie Profile did this and it was interesting. And I originally thought adding an element of flight would make the overworld of the game less interesting by making the map more accessible. To my surprise, Ubisoft manages to keep things interesting by adding hazards, flying enemies, and violent winds to keep getting around just difficult enough to pose a challenge without being obnoxiously difficult. Add in all the interesting tricks you can do with your firefly familiar and exploring is rewarding enough that you’ll want to just poke around the map some and take in the sights from time to time.

Of course, when you’re not there are dark creatures out there that need dealing with. Yes, it’s a delightful fairytale flavored game. If you know your Brothers Grimm, though, you know the origin of the word “grim” and that fairytales are not all sugar and light. But on a more fundamental level, the potential for harm befalling your characters is one of the ways you, the player, are inspired to take care of them and get connected with them. As such, it’s hard to cut it out of games with a storyline.

(If the subject of violence in video games interests you David Baumgart of Gaslamp Games has written an interesting and thoughtful meditation on the subject which expands on this idea more than there’s room for here. Tags and comments on that post are not guaranteed to be interesting or thoughtful.)

Much like Aurora’s quest itself, fighting in the game is more about timing and disruption than outright contests of power. While the “active battle” system has existed in RPGs since the early days of the Final Fantasy franchise Child of Light tweaks it so that, in addition to having to wait between each character’s action, you must also wait a brief time between choosing what action you take and when that action occurs. In that short period of time enemies can take actions that interrupt you and, by the same token, you can interrupt enemies while they are preparing their own actions. Winning is often as much about orchestrating a clever series of disruptive moves as it is raw number crunching or twitchy reflexes. All in all, a nice change from most games produced of late.

So. If you like story driven games with a strong sense of whimsy and don’t mind reading in rhyme for a while, check out Child of Light. It’s both fulfilling and fun, something very few games can claim.

The Daedalus Incident

Posted by natechen on

A “mashup” is where you take two things that seem totally unrelated and blend them into a seamless whole. The term doesn’t imply it but the blending has to seem natural to the point where the two things you’re working with almost look like they were always meant to go together. The term seems to have originated in contemporary music, where homages to previous musicians or blendings of styles seem much more common. But that doesn’t mean it can’t apply to other things.

The Daedalus Incident, by Michael J. Martinez is a great example. It takes fairly hard scifi and smashes it together with alternate history and low fantasy to get a story that is unique and charming.

We start on the venerable planet of Mars, where mining operations are interrupted by an unexpected and theoretically impossible earthquake. (Yes, technically it should be a marsquake but apparently that’s not a word.) As the multinational space command overseeing things there struggles to find a good explanation it quickly becomes apparent things are getting worse.

Meanwhile, Lt. Thomas Weatherby of the British Royal Navy is bound for Mercury. In the late 1700s. In a sailing ship equally at home on the sea or in the sky. And the story hasn’t even gotten weird yet.

The Daedalus Incident is everything you ever wanted if you’re into scifi with an X-Files twist. It’s got everything, from ancient alien astronauts to weird alchemy and beyond. The science here is pretty solid, to the extent it goes (and that may not be as far as you think) but more than that it takes pains to be believable enough to keep us from questioning it without demanding too much of us. There’s a very real element of believability to the nature of Weatherby’s ships – all the old-fashioned nautical terms are clearly well researched and consistent and the made up stuff is blended in seamlessly.

That said, if you’re one of those people who cannot stand, for whatever reason, anything that smacks of handwaving in your scifi this is not the story for you. (Honestly, I’m not sure how you can stand reading scifi at all.) Because frankly there’s a lot here that’s vulnerable to fridge logic and is liable to leave you with an upset stomach after you try and digest it. You’re better off leaving it on the shelf and admiring the pretty colors, because not everyone can handle that.

The plot here is suitably complex – there’s stuff going on in both narrative threads and a good pace and points of view are juggled to keep you interested in what happens next. Suspense is maintained quite well – I figured out who the mole in the ranks of the good guys was about half way through but I was still interested in how it would play out and there are enough other plot threads at work to keep you interested even if you figure it out, too.

All in all, this story is great fun and shows a creativity sadly lacking in a lot of politically or conspiracy oriented scifi these days. There’s a total of three books planned, the second of which is already out, and I plan to chase them all down. It’s probably worth your time, too.