After waiting patiently for almost two months, my most anticipated music purchase in a long time has finally arrived; Sekaiju no Meikyuu Piano To Gengakki No Namaensou Ni Yoru (Live Music by Piano and Strings: Sekaiju no MeiQ I & II Super Arrange Version), music from the game better known to English audiences as Etrian Odyssey, has finished ripping, and I am listening to its absolutely beautiful arrangements as I write, it (and Amarok) filling the room.

My love of Etrian Odyssey is well documented, so suffice it to say that if you are done hearing about my crush on this series, you can just stop reading now, but hopefully anyone with an appreciation for music can find something to love here.

Live Music by Piano and Strings is simply stunning. The album is thirteen lovely performances by a small ensemble (Chieko Amano, violin; Yuichiro Oonuki, piano; Minori Yamazaki, cello; Shuji Narikawa, guitar; Naoko Sato, percussion), which brings to life Norihiko Hibino’s arrangement of the Yuzo Koshiro compositions. Much more evenly than the recent Super Arrange Version of the second game, the album puts a very calming instrumental touch on the “retro” soundtrack, and the performances are noticeably emotive.

Nietzsche wrote that without music, life would be an error, and these are the class of albums that remind me, a gamer to the bone, of that fact — organic, live performances, nuanced in their composition, combining the theme of an original song with the love of an appreciative interpretation. For me, among video game albums, this is up there with Xenogears Light.

Someone was kind enough to upload one of the tracks, battle themes from the first and second games, made calming. I was sold on the album before I heard a note of it, but that preview made it a must-have, and now, as the album nears its end, I confidently say that it is one of my favorite albums. As I said when I was similarly (although more verbosely) gushing over Xenogears Light, these are the releases that prove video game music is, without a doubt, “real music,” and more ultimately, important as its own class of art.

Oh, and it comes with PDFs of the handwritten arrangements, sometimes appearing as little more than note scribbles and clues to the performers, which seems fitting in an ephemeral way. I find I can’t recommend any one track, but rather all of them. Every single one, in addition to standing on its own as a wonderful piece of music, serves another purpose — that being tickling my desire to play one of my favorite games all over again.

So, after having completed the Item Compendium as mentioned as the last accomplishment remaining in my last Etrian Odyssey lovefest, I fired up Etrian Odyssey II and began anew adventures into the unknown.

After spending roughly an hour weighing my party options, deciding on what kind of party I wanted and where to focus my guild members’ attention (and then changing my mind at least three times), I stepped foot into the labyrinth with a War Magus, Ronin, Gunner, Medic, and Alchemist. I was then reminded what pain felt like, needing to take the shortest path possible from the start to the stairs returning me to Lagaard’s safety.

It was comfortable.

In the past couple hours, I’ve mapped the first floor and have been soundly beaten by a FOE whose warnings from the game I gleefully ignored, not at all surprised by the resounding rhythm of my party dropping one by one. I’ve determined where to send my farmers on my next pass, and I’ve come across a couple of EO’s classic “your curiosity will hurt, but the payoff is good” events (including one designed to remind you of your early days in EO). And I’ve run to town with a shattered party and very little money more than once.

Thoughts on the game (in the scarce couple hours I’ve played it) include a couple expediencies in the interface and gameplay pacing (always welcome), a more consistent (by my memory, anyway) difficulty, a tuning of almost every class with more customization options and, in some cases, removal or revision of the überskills. Another welcome element is the game’s enjoyment in reminding you of the past — the event mentioned above, the presentation of the password import feature, and the reaction from the townspeople when it’s soon known that, yes, you are that guild from that place called Etria. It’s a nice little touch.

I’ve decided that I’ll make these little journal entries semi-frequent (so you may see one or two more before I forget and stop updating the site again), and in adding an Etrian Odyssey category to the hierarchy of my nonsense, I noticed that it has been roughly a year since I started EO. Hopefully it will not take me that long to complete the sequel, but even if it does, it’s looking to be just as enjoyable.

I finally beat the ultimate boss of Etrian Odyssey today, meaning I’ve finished the Monstrous Codex and just have the Item Compendium remaining… but, that’s not the point of this post.

I’ve been slowly working more people down and getting them to play the game, and in doing so I’m reminded of what makes it such a great game. I think that some time in the past, I’d said that “the game hates you", and time has led me to reconsider that statement.

The game respects you.

Sure, maybe an aspect of it (primarily the narration, for me) is a bit steeped in nostalgia, but the game knows what you want (or what it thinks you deserve) and presents it to you as clearly and easily as it can — it leaves you with a dungeon and a myriad of options for tackling it. But, practically every step of the way, you’re in control of the progression — how fast you advance, how gut-wrenching you make the FOE battles, how much focus you put on your favorite party members and how rounded your guild becomes. It sets the stage and lets you be the players, without latching itself onto your experience by burdening you with high fantasy plot and saving the world for love. Other RPGs can and do provide you that; Etrian Odyssey is around to relieve you of it. It is pure, as only RPG-fundamental water can be.

For its respect, it demands the same in kind. Having spent countless hours on the game, I’ve come to see my guild as a living thing — something I have grown and nurtured from its nascent stage to its present near-god state, the characters’ skills and names (my retired characters were replaced with those of the same class and name, with a “II” suffix) acting as personalizing scars and records, a sort of living history of thirty levels of dungeon exploration. It’s fun for me to watch other people start their journey.

And how it encourages exploration. The first task, even, is to map the first floor to an acceptable degree, and it sets you up for what the game expects of you — to make something with the blank slate it has presented you. Learn the way that is right for you to map, to equip your party, to set your expectations for the venture into the Labyrinth. There are completion benchmarks, of course, but Etrian Odyssey is wonderfully content to refuse to rope you along in plot or in archetype, to the point that the former is bare and the latter is entirely up to you. Create a traveling party of Medics (a challenge I would expect is only slightly less hardcore than the Final Fantasy four white mage challenge — but primarily so because Etrian Odyssey gives its Medics more options) if you so choose. Ignore the sidequests for a while? Fine. Arm yourself to the teeth by creating a party of farmers to compliment your adventurers? Great!

As my time in Etrian Odyssey comes to close with the last dozen or so items left to discover, I’m looking forward to the sequel. Not because there are unanswered plot points in the first, or a new earth-shattering game mechanic or killer class, but because, absent being able to bottle the experience of progressing through Etrian Odyssey for the first time unaided, I want to relive those first timid steps into a dungeon adventure that, if nothing else, became mine as I was given the freedom to write its story by my actions.

I really believe this is a singular experience, and that console or computer, eastern or western, this is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played.

Taking a lazy Sunday to play around with the website. Finally installing Planet, which I plan on making my front page once it’s ready — the idea is it can assemble all of my RSS feeds, so the front page has a rolling view of everything I’ve deemed important enough to promote, like the blog, but for all of my updates.

After that I don’t know what I’ll do, but on the list is fixing some minor CSS quibbles here and there.

Oh, and on a totally unrelated tangent, I haven’t beaten Final Fantasy IV (DS) yet, but I’ve gone and picked Etrian Odyssey back up, trying to get everything completed.

GamePro:

“Ultimately, Final Fantasy IV remains the same epic experience it was 17 years ago, and improvements on the DS are a welcome treat for fans of the series and newcomers to the franchise.”

I’m excited about playing a new version of a game that I first played almost two-thirds of my life ago. And I still need to complete Etrian Odyssey…

Been playing Nexuiz semi-regularly (for me, anyway) lately. Good way to blow off steam, even if I’m not conscious of it. Anyway, I was thinking about how bots are named for first-person shooters. Names like Death, and Paranoia, and Roadkill (okay, not so sure about the last one). Dark names, that invoke emotions of rage and fear. That’s good and everything, but I was thinking that maybe they should be named a bit more accurately.

I can almost imagine it now. “Walks Backwards Way Too Much has joined the game.” “cUrIoUsLy InEpT aT rOcKeTs has exploded.” “bss was fragged by Gerald Ford.” “You fragged The Bot Who Can’t Seem to Comprehend Gravity and Really, It Just Walked Off the Platform, but You Shot It Last, So Here’s A Point.”

It’s possible I don’t really buy into the atmosphere of these games as much as others, though.

Celebrated the migration of emptymatter.org with a long-overdue session of Nexuiz with the #lh fellows, served by the new version of my favorite (well, only) VPS. Pings were low, as intended by the move, and Xen handled the dedicated server’s load (mostly network traffic) like a champ. Very awesome. emptymatter.org has of course hosted Nexuiz in the past, so this is nothing surprising, but an actual appreciable improvement is worth being excited about.

Also fun: decided to upgrade my DS experience, bought a CycloDS Evolution and EZ Flash 3-in-1, so that I can have more storage (currently 8 GB), and play around with GBA homebrew as well. The CycloDS Evolution is much more polished than the R4DS, and I’ve been very pleased with my purchases thus far.

The real excitement for the past two days has been the Linode, however. The conversion was a bit bumpy, at first, but everything seems good now. I almost wish I had an excuse to buy a second, or at the very least throw more at my current one. Maybe I’ll concoct some scheme and bring up yet another service…

Two or so weeks ago, I finally finished the climax of Etrian Odyssey (commonly known as the “end boss"), in the sense that I saw the ending for the game, not conquered the game — there is still another stratum and a couple quests left to topple. All in all, it was a very enjoyable (and enjoyably frustrating, at times) experience, and the game has left me with a small sense of real accomplishment. I did not beat it, so much as I did pass its trials, and Etrian Odyssey II sounds like it will be just as enjoyable as the first.

In the end, EO is probably one of my favorite RPGs, which is saying a lot. There are of course the common favorites: Baldur’s Gate II, Final Fantasy VI, etc., but Etrian shines for what it isn’t. It is not a glossly conglomoration of drama, overpowered combat with spiky-haired, pencil-thin kids, and card games. It isn’t action intermingled between cutscenes. It doesn’t hold your hand through half of the game. It uses the DS’s stylus in a goddamn reasonable manner.

EO knows what it is and embraces it. There is a dungeon, and apparently you’ve assembled a gang of people who consider themselves adventurers and dungeon delvers, so what you have to do is obvious. Round peg, round hole.

That reminds me of a sentiment sprinkled here and there in the press for the game — the game keeps plot sparce and PC character development nil so that the player can imagine their own stories and motivations, however reasonable or not. In my game, the guild was named after the gaming group, and the characters were all friends from the group. In my mind, their motivation was simple, and as just described — much like how we get together to play D&D, the quest for the group was running head-first into danger together, sharing in accomplishment and defeat, the joy of a close battle and the fear of an even closer one. And I pictured myself as the guildmaster; not a participant, but the orchestrator, the one getting the party into the messes they so gleefully got themselves out of.

It sounds hokey, but it worked for me. I catch myself every now and then, seeing friends’ D&D characters in a slightly EO light: Mark’s cleric a stalwart center for the party, Aaron’s exemplar brute force in combat. Granted, the class selection for the characters were inspired to varying degrees by their then-current D&D characters, but nevertheless, EO had no small part in making the characters of both games feel a bit more real.

Off that, however, and back onto the actual game. The supplied plot is decent, but low on surprises; surprising, however, is the writing supplied for the town’s NPCs, a couple being presented well enough that you can become momentarily attached to their unanimated, never-leaving-the-shop lives. But, in the end, it’s all about exploration and combat, which it delivers superbly. The game is one that dials into its desired formula (backs-to-the-wall difficult dungeon diving), assembles it into an old-school feel what with the first-person view, the mapping, and the PC-88 original soundtrack, and supplies it throughout, without distraction or deviation.

Not incidentally, I think this may be the first RPG I’ve beaten since Neverwinter Nights, another favorite. Currently competing for the next slot is any of The World Ends With You, Rondo of Swords, and Final Fantasy III. Hopefully, those won’t take me five+ years…

Software deploy Tuesday went horribly. That’s not why I’m writing, though.

American video game commercials suck.

Nothing exciting here. Got my tax refunds. Might build a home-made NAS with a couple terabytes of disk and put it in the basement.

On the DS, I’ve been playing Rondo of Swords and The World Ends With You. Rondo is a pleasant find, a difficult but still reasonable strategy RPG that makes one think and plan ahead, unlike games such as Revenant Wings which are much more “bring a healer and just mob everyone at the thing they’re strong against!” Also, I have a crush on Atlus by this point. There’s no denying it now. I draw their name with little hearts all around when I’m in meetings.

The World Ends With You is refreshingly original, one of those games that, even with it being Square Enix, is a bit surprising that it made it to the States. Very Japanese, and the game makes few concessions to the English audience. Sure, long gone are the times of gratitutous name changes, but even the j-pop/j-rock soundtrack remains intact, and that is, to my slightly jaded mind, a bit commendable. Now, if only the main character didn’t suffer from two vile Square Enix staples: unimaginable thinness and nearly sickening teenage angst. Neku is supposed to get better with the latter; I hope it is soon.

My games to beat are now Etrian Odyssey and Rondo of Swords, one I must beat before Etrian Odyssey II (guess which one) is released here, and the other before the Final Fantasy IV remake reaches the States. I’m excited. If I have time before those, Final Fantasy III and The World Ends With You are my RPGs to beat. FF3 is a cakewalk thus far, but its ease and its crude mechanics compared to Final Fantasy V make it hard to stay with for long.

I didn’t really intend this to become all about video games. I’ve been working on a Gentoo Wiki page for the HP 2133 which has kind of slowed down as most of the parts I’m interested in are supported as best they can be without new versions of drivers, I think. There’s some other hardware that I need to try out (the webcam, for example), but I don’t really care that much, so it’s low priority. Notebooky stuff works.

I have a Waterfield Designs bag coming soon, which I’m excited about. Don’t think it will be suitable for gaming books, but I still have that backpack which is going on 5+ years. The little trooper.

I’ve been meaning to survey the gaming group and associated friends to see what they’re using for IM these days. I think the answer for some is “nothing", with a couple saying “AIM on occasion” or “I idle on Google Talk", so I’ve not really been motivated to test those waters. I want to get a private Jabber conference room running for the group, since the IRC thing kind of sputtered off and died (I still idle there!), but I know it means getting people to switch to Jabber (or at least Google Talk) and then getting them to use a non-Google Talk client (Pidgin, I bet, but maybe Trillian would work). Sigh. If anyone has interest in switching to one network (I highly suggest a Jabber-like ["XMPP” for the techies]), or trying out conferences, or whatever, email/IM me and we’ll play around.

This really is getting rambly, and people might expect me to write long posts all the time. So I’m wrapping this up by saying that spring is finally here, and that’s why it snowed yesterday.