Tag Archives: the world ends with you

Sword Art Online: Culinary Arts Online

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「もぐもぐ」/「にぃと」

I started cooking out of necessity in my second year of undergrad, when I moved out of residence. So I started off with things that would minimally impact my time for more important things, like school or WoW raiding. I mean, the time investment in making better food just didn’t seem worth it. If I really wanted something particularly delicious, I’d just go out and buy something. All I needed out of my own skills was to be able to create enough to sustain myself and go meet up to try and down Vashj to save the World of Warcraft to save the world. And study, I guess.

But then, I eventually got tired of doing that. Or rather, I got tired of eating the same thing over and over and over again. It sounds like a brilliant idea at first, to min-max your cooking like that, but there’s only so much you can do with limited skills and constraints on your resources. Not soon after, I quit WoW for unrelated reasons and I took some of my newfound free time and to learn how to cook. It turns out cooking has the dual benefits of being pretty fun and improving your quality of life because you’re not eating crap every day. It’s the difference between cooking to not starve and cooking because it’s fun and to make something tasty. Nowadays, I split my meals evenly between buying because of time and trying to cook new things. It feels great to successfully make a thing.

The first time we’re introduced to Asuna after the real story (read: vol. 1) of SAO starts is after Kirito is trying to figure out what to do with a delicious rare rabbit that he can’t cook. Kirito mentions offhandedly that cooking is a pretty useless skill, so who in the world would max it? After all, what’s the point? The food that you eat isn’t real and if you’ve got time to waste on cooking, you should be putting more effort into levelling and clearing. Well, it turns out Asuna would, but why? Why would Asuna, famed progression raider/frontline clearer, max cooking?

Remember, when we first saw Asuna in Aria of a Starless Night, she was chewing away on crappy bread until Kirito shared that cream to put on it and make it less awful to eat. Look at her attitude when she comes across Kirito lazing around in A Murder Case in the Area. Her attitude is familiar: why is he taking a nap when he should be levelling and clearing? Why is he doing pointless things when he has something way more important to do? It’s this little anecdote that sums up her attitude to life in SAO until she met Kirito, which she relays to the fisherman. Before, she was caught up in working relentlessly to achieve her freedom. But a person can’t do that indefinitely and at some point she realized this. And so she maxed cooking. Why? Because she likes cooking. And she likes it because she’s finally learned to enjoy her time in SAO.

It’s kind of interesting that something like the sense of taste would get translated into SAO. And apparently, high-level food drops taste better. There’s not much that we know about how food actually works in SAO, but given Kirito’s flippant dismissal of it, it seems like it doesn’t really serve that much purpose. Or maybe the return on investment in spending the time to level it up isn’t worth it.

In contrast to SAO, there’s WoW, where food does have some slight benefits. I remember back when I was progression raiding in WoW (during TBC), cooking was a pretty useful thing to max out for the food buffs. By the time TBC rolled around, Blizzard had overhauled the buff system for consumables so that the total number of buffs you could get was limited, in order to bring down the exorbitant costs of raiding. You could have either one flask buff or two elixir buffs and one food buff in addition to those. For me, it was the Blackened Basilisk’s 23 extra spellpower. Farming basilisk meat in Terokkar to cook myself was way cheaper and easier than buying Blackened Basilisk off of the AH.

But my favourite modelling of how food works in a video game is in The World Ends With You. There’s not much cooking in TWEWY, but there is a lot of stuff to eat. The neat thing about it is that, like WoW, eating isn’t strictly necessary, but eating could confer some useful perks. How it works is a lot more involved than WoW’s simple consumable and buff effect, though. For one thing, the rate at which you can consume food is limited. You can only eat so much at a time. Your characters have different tastes which affect the effectiveness of the buffs you get. And you get temporary buffs, which are kind of like increased productivity from having eaten well, and permanent buffs, which are kind of like the long-term nutritional benefits of food.

Of course, again, SAO doesn’t seem to have much of that. It does do one interesting thing with food, though, and that’s bothering to translate the sense of taste at all. The obvious things, like carrots and fish, probably taste like you’d expect them to, but then you have things that don’t have a one-to-one correspondence between SAO and the real world. You have things like Asuna being able to somehow engineer something that tastes like soy sauce.

So maybe food doesn’t really have any game mechanical benefit beyond filling a meter, but there’s still taste! How taste functions is interesting, because while hunger is governed by meters and internal mechanics, taste is something that’s purely personal. The game is telling you that you’re hungry and you need to refill you meter. But it’s you who really wants a friggin poutine with crisp hand-cut fries and the squeak of fresh cheese curds covered in gravy.

This goes back to the main question that Kirito, Asuna, and most of the players stuck in SAO are dealing with. Do they have time to be enjoying life when they should be working their hardest to escape? For me, this question isn’t that alien even though I’m not trapped in an MMORPG. It’s really easy to ask myself whether I should be cooking or blogging when I’m still stuck on a problem I can’t solve or if I’ve still got studying to do.

Working tirelessly for a few days might be fine, but when you start coming up to two years, it gets tiring. It’s doable, but it comes at the cost of not enjoying anything you do. Both Kirito and Asuna seemed prepared to do this at the beginning of SAO. Over the course of the story, they realize that they can’t and don’t want to. And so they try to make the most of their time in SAO and taking the time to enjoy things.

This is a big reason for why they’re cool with playing VRMMOs after they get out of SAO. The expectation that we have is that they’d be so traumatized by the experience that they’d never want to put on a NerveGear again. But to Kirito and Asuna, it’d mean denying a part of their life and experience because they tried to really live while they were there. And of course, it’d be doubly meaningful for them because it’s how they met each other.

Game of the Year, 2008 Edition

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I’m going to get a start at these year-end retrospective posts. This one is pretty easy for me because I’m limited by the hardware that I own. If I had one of a Wii, 360, PS3, or computer with a video card, this will likely have been very different. After all, 2008 saw the arrival of Spore, Fallout 3, LittleBigPlanet, GTA4, MGS4, SSB: Brawl, Left 4 Dead, Fable 2, Rock Band 2, and a long list of other solid games.

But the game that I chose is one that I’ve been playing since I got it at the end of April, after finishing up my last WoW raid. The 2D, handheld action-JRPG, released Stateside as The World Ends With You (?????????? in nihongonese, Subarashiki Kono Sekai in weeaboo) has dominated my time like no other game has except WoW. That’s right, I’ve spent more time in Square Enix’s funny little handheld project than in a Final Fantasy.

This game came out of nowhere for me. I found out about it looking at Wikipedia’s list of DS games shortly after getting a DS. I noticed it among Square Enix’s army of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest remakes. The concept sounded fresh and the battle system looked interesting, so I decided to give it a chance. The very first intro cinematic was kind of lol. It featured the young protagonist being an annoying antisocial whiner, but once the second intro cinematic rolls along, the style of the game will grab you.

The style is amazing. The game is set in Tokyo’s centre of pop culture and fashion, Shibuya district. The style needs to fit and it does so perfectly. This game proves just how good 2D can look. The attention to detail in the game is ridiculous. The game features 304 different pins, each of which have really neat designs, many of which form sets and share thematic elements and motifs. The backgrounds are stylized and match locations in real-world Shibuya. The sprites and animation are fantastic.

The combat system is one of the most innovative, making full use of both screens. Because of this, it has a slight learning curve to overcome, but once you understand it, it makes battles incredibly fun. The immense amount of pins and accompanying gestures takes the monotony out of battles and gives you incentive to try different attacks. There are certain monsters that require taking advantage of both screens to beat.

The other game mechanics are really interesting too. Being able to adjust the difficulty on the fly is great for everyone. The leveling and stats system is interesting and well thought out: levels only increase your maximum HP pool, while stats are gained through eating food, which requires time to digest and is measured in the number of battles you fight in. The equipment system is just as interesting: equipment comes in the form of clothing, which comes in different brands. Different brands are more popular in different sections of the city and the more popular a brand is, the more bonuses you get.

The wireless features are also interesting. You can use wireless to level your pins. You can also visit other players’ shops so you can pick up pins or items you’re missing. But the most interesting features is multiplayer Tin Pin Slammer, a minigame that puts your pins to use in an entirely different context. Tin Pin Slammer might seem retarded when you encounter it in the single player game, but it is hilariously fun with three other people.

Finally, the story is excellent. TWEWY’s story takes up about 12 hours. Compared to a Final Fantasy, it’s really short. But, it’s also really tight and it’s not long before you’re learning about what’s going on. The twists come and don’t really let up throughout the entire game. Even after you finish the game, going to collect secret reports gives you more detail into the world that the writers have created and delivers a few more twists.

If you don’t have a DS but enjoy JRPGs, you should consider picking this up along with a DS. Besides TWEWY, there are some really good JRPGs on the system. If you do have a DS and you don’t abhor JRPGs, there should be no reason at all for you not to pick this up. Basically, if you don’t like TWEWY, you are a bad person and why in the hell am I still talking to you?

The World Ends With You

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I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this excited about a game. It’s funny because I hadn’t heard about it until a few days before its North American release. But, it’s become my favourite game as of late, and is definitely one of the stars in the DS library. It’s made me drop Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations in order to get through the story.

TWEWY is an action RPG by Square. If it looks really familiar, then it’s because the character design was done by Tetsuya Nomura, of FF7 and Kingdom Hearts fame. Unlike many RPGs before it, the game is set in an alternate dimension modern-day Shibuya, a district in Tokyo that happens to be the hippest place ever.

TWEWY is one of those games that does things right and blends it into something awesome. The concept is unique. The art is stunning and very stylized, and matches the atmosphere perfectly. The soundtrack, made up of J-pop, electronica, and hip-hop, is a departure from other RPGs. The plot is paced really well and the characters are developed really well in a fairly short period of time.

But even more innovations abound! The combat system is something very DS-centric. Battles take place simultaneously on the two screens, and you have to control one character on each screen. On the bottom, you’re using Neku with the stylus, and on the top, you’re controlling your partner with the d-pad. Neku uses a variety of attacks with stylus gestures while the d-pad follows a series of panels, a lot like DDR. To mix things up even more, there’s a light that gets passed around when the character that has it completes a combo which gives a damage bonus.

The types of attacks that Neku can use are determined by the pins he’s wearing. Different pins have different gestures; you could be dragging Neku around, slashing on enemies up or down, pressing empty space and firing lightning at them, or dragging obstacles and whacking baddies. The top character has a different minigame, where you’re matching things, and when you do, you can use combined attacks. As you can tell, the combat is involved, but damn, it is fun.

The pins, and other gear that the characters wear, are branded. There are several different brands and each part of Shibuya has brands that are cooler than others. Brands that are cooler receive bonuses, while brands that aren’t get penalized. But, you can influence which brands are hip and happening by fighting with pins of those brands.

Food is something that I found very well done as well. Your character eats food that gives the a buff while they’re eating it. They digest food in x number of battles, after which they receive a permanent buff. But, they can only digest 24 battles worth of food per real day. Each character also has foods they like or dislike, which affects how much the buff actually helps them.

Finally, the game has a ridiculous amount of replay value, where after the main plot is finished, there are so many things to collect to 100% it. You can adjust your difficulty and handicap yourself by lowering your level to fight things, which yields larger and better drops.

Just about the only reason not to get this game is if you can’t get the combat system. Otherwise, it’s brilliant, has really unique and hot art and graphics, has a compelling story, and is really, really innovative. Super fun, amg go get it nows. And I will go back to slashing my DS touchscreen franticly now.