God damn it Jap-Wait, what? Okay, all is forgiven.
Deus Ex Demonbane. A VN with rather heavy Lovecraft theme and references.
I mean, it's set in an alternate Arkham City (the "REAL" Arkham. Not the Batman one :P) and the main character took the secret magic classes at Miskatonic University but dropped out, and so on.
Of course this is pretty awesome. But then things go into God Dammit Japan. For example, I've recently come to believe that there must be some sort of law that states that all games must have a fourteen year old who is over 18. This game is no exception.
But the thing is, they also have a fabulous tendency to take something that definitely never ever was in any way a little girl and make it that little girl. Again, this game is no exception.
Exhibit A.
Crash lands on top of the main characters after being chased across rooftops by weird cultists, blah blah blah, you know the drill.
Later introduces herself as, the God Dammit Japan moment, "Al Azif". Al Azif is basically the second most famous... Thing to ever come out of the Lovecraft Mythos (I consider Cthulhu number one because, I mean, it's usually known as the Cthulhu Mythos.)
Most people probably won't recognize the name Al Azif, though, since it's much more famous by it's Latin title.
The Necronomicon.
So yeah. God Dammit Japan.
But. They later do the one thing that nobody drawing inspiration from Lovecraft has ever done right before, and that's why I will forgive everything up to, and including, the inevitable loli-bibliophilia.
They used the term "euclidean" properly. Both grammatically and contextually. That's like Whoa!
Also, they get bonus points for when the main character find a bookstore that is suspiciously roomy and run by "Hmm... Well, you can call me 'Nya'", who then goes on to calmly talk about having a rather large number of books, after having collected them for a while.
"The Key of Solomon.
The Legemeton.
The Grand Grimoire.
The Black Pullet.
The Book of Dzyan.
This Book of Loagaeth, too."
Of course, the store is gone without a trace a while later. I mean, duh.
I've also started playing a few Visual Novel/Strategy games. First there's Eien no Aselia which I've started over with, and actually gotten somewhere this time.
And then there's Gadget Trial. It's basically like Advance Wars, with slightly less advanced units but more weird humor and a rather, ahem, interesting way to customize your units.
Basically, all the units are based on five different combat cyborgs, or something like that. It's the closest I can summarize it at least.
Anyway, the five different units are Infantry, Vehicles, Artillery, Air and Water.
Each has three roles (e.g. artillery has regular artillery, AA and rockets) which gives you a total of 15 units.
Each unit has the basic version, and then two alternate versions to buy with "experience" which have either one or two upgrades and an equal number of drawbacks. (E.g. you could make your APC move further but they have lower armor, or you could add more firepower and defense on the tank but they will lose movement and cost more to produce. The only exception is one of the artillery suits which has two drawbacks, but a huge advantage. Lower defense and higher cost, but can fire more often.)
These upgrades are in the form of costumes that you buy for the "soldier" who fills that combat role.
E.g. Izen, the "infantry specialist", can have a punk outfit as heavy infantry or Nei, the vehicle driver, can have a western style cowgirl outfit as a tank.
Each costume also has a short comment about it, and they really show that it's just for fun, instead of being the kinda creepy thing that Japan usually does. :P
E.g. one of the Bomber suits called "Warm Suit" is described as "A fluffy Santa outfit. Instead of presents, let's leave bombs by the enemy's pillowside. Bombs Away!" Or the Self Propelled Artillery "Waitress Suit". "An outfit that delivers love straight to the battlefield - by which we mean shells. Just picture how happy the recipients will look.
Here's all the costumes I've unlocked so far. I'm only missing some of the sea unit costumes. (So far I've only had the battleship for one battle, and the submarines are kinda slow to far exp with since they can only attack other sea units. I've had the transport hovercraft for a while, but I haven't been able to buy costumes for it yet.) I realized I was missing some artillery ones too, but I've unlocked everything now, anyway. Updating the gallery. <3
I also noticed you can basically cheat your way around a lot of the experience required for the suits. The game will save which suits you've bought, but if you load a save that is mid-battle, you get the experience again. As long as you finish a battle with a total of thirty experience (half the suits cost 10, and the other half costs 30) for the unit, you can buy all the suits for her by loading, finishing the battle and just loading again after shopping. The suit you bought is still unlocked since they're also available for challenge maps, not just for the campaign. You can only buy them in campaign mode, though.
It's also, as previously mentioned, not quite serious as many of the scenes between battles will show.
Things like Hisoka (the water unit specialist) complaining about how she would prefer if they never have to use battleships. Because she's more of a submarine fan. Or when she accidentally kills a few dolphins during a diving test with the submarine. With the sonar.
Basically, the sonar was set to a too high power, which caused damage to anything that was swimming too close to her at the moment.
The thing about the scene is, though, that she's the classic "emotionless girl" and she just comments with a perfectly flat voice:
"Ping. One dolphin.
Ping. Two dolphins.
Every time I sound the sonar. Ping. A dolphin dies."
This, understandably, upsets their commanding officer/military instructor(/babysitter).
She also likes torpedo fishing, although she claims it was an accident. ;)
My favorite scene so far, though, is when Izen (genki girl, and a bit of an airhead) is is in the cafeteria eating snacks. At first she's just munching on potato chips, but then it turns out that she's also eats dynamite because she likes the taste of nitroglycerin, which, according to her, tastes like bean paste.
Well, that or when their CO finds them in the library on their break. They were planning on studying, but in the end they just started reading whatever they felt like or watching movies. At first he thinks it's okay because it's their own free time.
Then he starts checking what they're actually doing.
Yu-Ri, the artillery expert, is reading Jules Verne "Facing the Flag" because it has missiles. She also likes All Around the Moon, because it has cannons.
Hisoka who is a submarine maniac (and seems slightly proud of submarines having a bit of an image as weapons of terror) reads, what is implied to be, "The Hunt For Red October" and he is forced to confiscate that book because she was starting to get weird ideas.
Souka (air units) is reading another Soviet/USA theme novel about some high tech spy plane. That book is also confiscated when she asks for a mind control device.
And Izen is a fan of The A-Team. The CO comments that it might actually be the most useful to learn something from so far (infantry tactics), but according to her the highlights are, in her own words, "40% [sic] from the ace pilot and the ways in which they keep breaking him out of mental institutions and another 40% as to how they get the black guy with the mohawk onto the plane, despite his reluctance. The rest is in how although the fight scenes are outrageous, no one dies. Thanks to that, I can be at ease while watching it."
So yeah, Izen doesn't quite have the right attitude for war. She even mentions in the intro that she doesn't quite like being in the infantry (although that's just because everything else seems more glamorous).
The CO explains why she's in the infantry, though, by quoting her results on an aptitude test they all took earlier.
"...Ability to instinctively grasp spatial relationships: Insufficient... Information processing ability: Insufficient... Mathematical fundamentals: Lacking. [sic] There are good bits, too.
Reaction time: ...Excellent. Vision/Hearing: ...Good. Physical strength and endurance: ...Superb."
"... So, what does all of that mean?"
"Do you want me to tell you?"
"Please do---!"
"... It means that you're a musclehead who can barely manage to count using her fingers!"
She mentions liking jungle warfare, though. But that might just be because she wanted to learn more about "100 Kinds of Emergency Food in the Jungle".
The only thing I don't really like about the game is how the AI is pretty much retarded. (It's used the AAA, which is a move-or-fire artillery unit, as if it was a direct combat unit, it has no idea what air superiority means, and has even less understanding of target priority.) Basically every battle starts with the AI in a superior position with more money and factories, but once you've managed to survive the initial assault the tide will slowly but surely turn in your favor. You just have to creep forward and steal cities to tip the economy in your favor and you've all but won.
If they had the AI and a few more units in this game (and rebalanced the missions to be more fair. There's no way to handle the AI having such an advantage if it ISN'T retarded :P), it would have been glorious. As it is now, it's just really fun.
...I just realized that this is a lot of text. I'm gonna add a few lj-cut tags.