Things I wish I knew before I started playing Red Dead Redemption 2

Hey gamers, here are some tips and tricks so you can finally join FaZe.

truly next gen

1. Early on, during the tutorial phase of the game, you'll come across a legendary bear. After defeating the bear, you'll gain a legendary bear skin. Legendary skins are for crafting clothing and so long as you've killed the legendary animal you're good, so you don't actually need to keep them around.
2. Legendary animal parts can be used to craft talismans and trinkets that unlock permanent bonuses, but they're all honestly really mediocre upgrades.
3. If you have a bounty and surrender to the police, the game deducts the value of your bounty from your wallet. If you have a bounty worth far more than you're willing to pay, spend all your money or donate all your money to the camp funds and then surrender. This will clear your bounty.
4. You can gain access to the fast travel function from your camp by upgrading your lodgings.
5. Your main horse will show up at your destination if you fast travel via coach or train.
6. Always carry a bottle or two of horse reviver. They can be bought at a stable or general store.
7. Wear a mask out of sight before committing crimes—for both free roam and during missions.
8. The deadeye ability becomes upgraded through story progression.
9. If you already have a handgun and still see it available in the gun catalogue, it's because you can buy two of each handgun for dual wielding purposes. The two guns can be separately customized and are denoted by a diamond and spade symbol after their name.
10. You can sell looted valuables at the fence. There's one in Rhodes, south of Valentine.
11. During chapter 3 you'll rob a bank in Valentine. After this mission, money won't be a problem for the rest of the game.
12. High honor gives store discounts and access to new outfits. Low honor increases the loot from dead lawmen and increases the drop rate of deadeye replenishing items. Other than that, it doesn't do anything.
13. Always carry a warm outfit on your horse.
14. The White Arabian, the best horse in the game, can be found on the west bank of Lake Isabella to the north. You can tame this horse right from the start of the game after you clear the tutorial.
15. If you focus on an animal, you'll find dots next to the animal's name. The number of dots tells you the quality of the animal's pelt where three is perfect condition. Study the animal to know what type of weapon to use. Kill the animal with a single shot using the correct weapon to get a clean kill and preserve the animal's pelt quality.
16. You don't need a clean kill on legendary animals to obtain their drops.
17. Camp upgrades provided by Pearson are all cosmetic.
18. Satchel upgrades provided by Pearson double your carrying capacity of a certain set of items, but it's rarely needed.
19. Fishing can be boring, but it's ridiculously profitable for the minimal effort it takes.
20. If you call out to a passing wagon or coach, you can ask for a ride into the nearest town.
21. Sneak up on someone while unarmed to perform a non-lethal takedown.

Happy Sugar Life

October means Halloween and boy do I have a scary story to share. Now get your sweet, sugary anime schoolgirl flavor on with a pink wig, your favorite kitchen knife, and heaps and heaps of traumatic experiences because this time around we’re going totally yandere within Happy Sugar Life.

don't let the titles fool you

Real quick: what’s yandere? The word yandere (ヤンデレ) is a combination of the words yanderu (病んでる) and the onomatopoeic word deredere (でれでれ). Yanderu is an inflection of yamu (病む), meaning to fall ill or to feel unwell. Deredere sounds like something thick and viscous slowly dripping around and so the word is used to describe laziness, or in the context a flirty couple, a sappy romance. With that, the essence of the yandere genre becomes clear. The yandere character is defined by a set of antisocial behaviors that points to a mental illness of sorts, manifesting from a zealous devotion to a targeted lover. The yandere character will oftentimes resort to manipulation, violence, and abuse outside of public view to safeguard and express their warped notions of love. What typically results is a horror stemming from dramatic irony where the audience is privy to the yandere character’s concealed psychotic capacity whereas other characters in the show only see a façade of an innocent person. It’s a kind of sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing story that points to the seemingly well-mannered people in the world and emphasizes the dark potential for evil within all of them.

Now, one important aspect to keep in mind is that yandere characters don’t act out of a senseless desire for evil or destruction of lives. The immoral acts that they commit in these stories are horrific to the audience, but from the yandere’s perspective they are all done out of a calculated necessity to preserve their ideas of love. Successful yandere characters are Machiavellian in nature as they constantly negotiate between their front stage social self and their backstage hidden self. Yandere characters are cunning, calculating, and strategic, until, of course, their actions catch up to them and they find themselves in a position with no escape as the people around them learn of their hidden aspect.

—

All of this brings us to the opening scene in Happy Sugar Life where we find ourselves atop a burning building. Two girls, one high school aged, another elementary aged, maybe, affirm their love for each other and jump. It’s a well executed in media res, combined with the show’s eyebrow raising OP, that invites us to speculate about who the two girls are and how they got to where they are.

Happy Sugar Life is a self-labeled psychological horror with driving themes related to different ideas or models of what love really means. Satou Matsuzaka, our pink-haired yandere protagonist, regularly muses about love. Orphaned at a young age and raised by a deranged aunt, Satou grew up surrounded by her aunt’s masochism. Although her aunt never physically hurt her, Satou watched on as her aunt took in man after man, listening to the sounds of beatings and more from the room down the hall. Later, sitting on the floor of a small, dark, sparse apartment and eating from a jar of colorful candies, Satou meets her aunt’s distant, glassy gaze. Her bandaged and bruised aunt explains to her in a disturbed, singsong voice, “This is love too~”

Satou rejects her aunt’s notions of love as she grows older, but this leaves her with a void as to what love is. Satou’s aunt is more neglectful than abusive and so Satou never had a chance to experience motherly love or any other kind of love for that matter. Ironically, this rejection lead to Satou becoming similar to her aunt as she garnered a reputation for being easy to get, dating many boys during high school in an effort to try to discover what love means, only to break up soon after being dissatisfied with each new date’s shallow ideas of love. In an early scene in the first episode, several guys talk about Satou, commenting, “She’ll do anything if you just ask her.” It’s a love-seeking behavior that’s also reflected in her job at a maid café where she tirelessly acts out the maid service fantasies of the faceless patrons. Each encounter, be it with a new boyfriend or café customer, is marred by a short-lived, artificial, plastic love that could never satisfy Satou’s search for true love.

However, that was all before Shio, the other girl atop the burning building in the opening sequence, came into Satou’s life. The Satou that we see now has stopped dating around, much to the disappointment of Shouko Hida, her best friend who she used to share dating adventures with. “I’ve fallen in love… we’ve even started living together!” Satou tells Shouko, who just thinks Satou has finally settled down on someone. It’s the sort of half-truths that Satou is so adept at spinning to hide her true nature. Little does Shouko know, Satou is of course talking about Shio. While we don’t know what kind of relation Satou has with this seven, eight-year-old looking girl, the nature of their bond becomes a powerful mystery and key plot point that drives the show’s intrigue. Just how did Satou come across Shio? We’re in the yandere club after all, so thoughts of kidnapping or worse naturally float around Shio’s blissfully naïve, sickly-sweet character. These thoughts are quickly justified after we see someone putting up missing child posters with Shio’s face on them.

The show nudges us to anchor ourselves to Satou, albeit in an apprehensive manner, because the other characters we initially meet are despicable people. For example, Satou’s manager is envious of Satou’s charm and frustrated that everyone loves Satou instead of her. The manager’s had her eyes on an underage worker named Mitsuboshi for a while, but it pains her to see Mitsuboshi fawn after Satou instead. When Satou rejects Mitsuboshi’s advances, the manager decides to rape Mitsuboshi in a bid to show him what her idea of love is. Then there’s one of Satou’s high school teachers who turns out to be a stalker and dangerously obsessive man. He’s had his sights on Satou since the day she walked into the school. Despite having a loving wife and daughter, the teacher explains that he lusts after women no matter what and can’t sate himself, implying he’s targeted other students before.

Although we might be quick to interpret Satou’s stance against people like her manager or her teacher as her standing with righteousness, Satou really couldn’t care less about what’s actually right or wrong. We’re talking about a yandere-chan who may have kidnapped a little girl, never mind the fact she’s already murdered someone prior to the first episode. Satou sees the world in two flavors: the love exemplified in Shio as sweet, anything else that detracts from that as bitter. Satou’s morality is defined purely by her idea of what love is and that makes her a dangerous antisocial person. She has no qualms or hesitations with outright killing people if they stand in her way and if she deems it a necessary action. So we’re put in a tailspin as we applaud Satou as she confronts the corrupt and perverted, but she’s only marginally any better herself.

To Satou, love is a jar that one puts little sweets in to hold onto forever. In her case, Shio is the little pieces of candy in the jar that is her heart. But that imagery alone already puts her next to people like her manager or her teacher. The one thing all of them have in common is that they each view love as a kind of zero-sum currency to be quantified and distributed in some kind of warped economy of affection. To the manager, love is an exchange, or equivalent, for sexual services (“If I have sex with him, he has to love me!”). To the teacher, love is something to greedily pursue, like money (“I lust after so many people, look how rich I can be!”). We can even look at Satou’s aunt, who accepted any kind of distorted desires from anyone as something to hoard and bottle up. To Satou, love is finite, but she only hoards all the best parts of it by concentrating it from Shio, concealing her to the outside world out of fear of losing her. She isn’t interested in Shio’s childlike innocence; she only cares about the unconditional nature of her love. So now we have to go back and revise our understanding of Satou’s relationship with Shio and I repeat it here for emphasis: Satou wasn’t in love with Shio’s purity or innocence, she was only in love with the unconditional nature of a love outside of the economy of affection that she sought to selfishly transform into a commodity for herself.

Now, I’m not saying Shio isn’t happy or that her happiness with Satou is wrong. However, just because the two are seemingly happy together doesn’t mean we are supposed to accept Satou’s selfish idea of love without at least sucking some air between our teeth. Remember, Satou will do anything to preserve Shio’s unconditional love by stripping her freedoms, controlling and stemming her growth to keep her as she is, forever. Forever. Satou will commit any evil to continue to indulge in Shio’s unsoiled virtue. This quest for eternal, immutable, unconditional affection is ultimately immoral and self-destructive, as we’ve seen from the introductory sequence to the show.

I want to back up a bit now and return to Shouko, Satou’s best friend from work and at school. She is the only sense of normalcy in this entire show filled with dark and perverse outlooks on people. When Satou asks Shouko if she still wants to be her friend even after learning about how she was raised by a mentally disturbed aunt, Shouko wanted nothing more than to say “Of course, you silly!” but she knows it's a lie. Satou feels a sense of judgment by association to her aunt. In the end, Shouko’s hesitation gives her away, leaving Satou with a sense of betrayal and a deepened justification that any kind of love outside of Shio’s is false. Shouko is heartbroken at losing her friend, reflecting on her inability to fully love Shouko unconditionally and blames herself for not having the strength to pursue love the same way Satou does.

When Shouko discovers that Satou’s lover is indeed the girl from all the posters around town, she resolves to learn from her earlier mistake of rejecting Satou and decides to confront her in an attempt to change Satou’s heart. Still, this is yandere-chan we’re talking about. The flip inside Satou’s head has already switched Shouko from sweet to bitter and she deems it necessary to kill Shouko to prevent her from going to the police. Despite the outpouring of emotions from Shouko, who longer holds anything back out of shame or embarrassment, Satou is unconvinced and unable to empathize with her. Forgiveness is outside of Satou’s perspective and Shouko’s death by kitchen knife underscores how emotionally stunted and lost Satou truly is underneath her cool and unfeeling exterior. Shouko’s death isn’t horribly vulgar but it’s probably the most horrific moment of the show for its build-up and final execution. The sequence also marks a hard transition for the plot into something that squanders all of the potential directions the show could’ve taken.

Beyond Shouko’s death, the show struggles to wrap its horror story up nicely. The worst offender here is actually Shio. The way she mentally matures ten years ahead of her curve in the span of ten minutes is full of whiplash. Shio doesn’t repeat the mistake that Shouko made. Even after facing all the horrible things pinko has committed, Shio immediately accepts Satou in her entirety, even going as far as wanting to be her “partner in crime” if the police ever apprehend them. This is crazy because just not long ago Shio was starting to express some self-awareness when she becomes angry about all the secrets Satou was keeping from her, claiming she was no better than a doll to Satou in her current situation. This leap in development for Shio is absolutely unreal, even for the show’s standards. It’s jarring to hear someone Shio’s age suggesting suicide in order to be together eternally. All the depth of emotions the show sets up is tossed out in favor for a hastened ending. It’s a move that dehumanizes Shio and sets her up to be exactly this object for Satou’s search for pure, unhindered love. Shio represents this object of unquestioning love, but it just happens so quickly and without any further reflection on her part because at this point she’s so far from being a believable person. Long story short, Satou makes uncharacteristic mistake after uncharacteristic mistake. What results is an ending with very little payoff as Satou is simply absolved of her crimes through suicide.

In the twist ending, Shio is revealed to have survived the fall because Satou covered her up to take the brunt of the force. This poses some unanswerable questions that can dramatically change the interpretation of Satou’s actions. In the arc of a lover’s suicide, this is perhaps the most selfish thing Satou could’ve done, denying the death that they both sought so they could be together in the next life. So was Satou actually in love with Shio or was she, for lack of better words, simply in love with being in love, selfishly to the end? Did she maybe have a change of heart mid-fall and realized that it was wrong for Shio’s tender life to be cut so short? There’s nothing in the show that really support either view and so we’re simply left with the question. At the very end, we see a grown up and possibly institutionalized Shio, awake but with the thousand yard stare, muttering to herself about how she’ll always love Satou-chan.

—

And that’s the wrap on Happy Sugar Life, which aired as part of the summer 2018 season. To be honest, I was quite pleasantly surprised at the show’s imagined depths, even if they didn’t stick the landing towards the end. It’s a show that combines the cutesy with the grotesque and it all culminates in a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of visual techniques and storytelling methods that manage to maintain the integrity of the show’s identity.

I’m also a bit surprised that the show labels itself for the shounen demographic, though I also increasingly believe that the seinen and shounen distinction is becoming more and more meaningless in the amount of information that they actually provide. Happy Sugar Life is decidedly mature in its themes but it does manage to keep one foot in the bubbly world of easy-going fantasy in spite of it all. It’s the kind of disconnect that makes it difficult to pin the show down exactly, not that that’s a bad thing.

Happy Sugar Life left enough of an impression on me to write for as long as I did. It’s nowhere near perfect, but it’s absolutely solid, only hindered by its weak ending. I appreciated the show’s dedication to building upon its themes, adding layer after layer, even if the story does waste almost all of it in the end. Happy Sugar Life is a horror story steeped in a delusional, idealized romance that earns its place among other titles of the psychological horror genre.

Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon essentially adds one more layer to the familiar RPG dungeon crawling experience: stress. Thematically dark and inspired by Lovecraftian horror, the game will have players juggling not only the traditional health and mana, but also the mental well-being of party members. In a setting full of eldritch horrors, the fear of descending into the dark depths and never coming back is real in the minds of our digital fodder adventurers. Darkest Dungeon is aesthetically solid and builds around this stress mechanic, but it's a mechanic that fails to carry the game through to a satisfactory experience.

none of your heroes have eyes

The premise of the game is simple: there's a dungeon, it's pretty dark, it's full of crazy stuff, you gotta go clear it out. The story is mostly revealed through journal scraps that you'll find while exploring dungeons and, to be honest, isn't all that compelling. To that end, the meat of the gameplay centers around building a party of four from a handful of different classes and then running them through a gauntlet of trial and error to figure out what works. The game also takes pride in its difficulty as perma-death is the norm and the game comes out frankly and tells the player that Darkest Dungeon isn't so much about winning as it is about damage control and minimizing loss.

So what does that mean exactly? Well, if you enter Darkest Dungeon seeking perfection, you're in for a rude awakening. Whereas other RPGs might see the accumulation of resources and wealth that never gets used, every little bit counts when you're trying to pass an encounter in Darkest Dungeon and oftentimes this comes down to a form of damage control. The element of uncertainty gives even mundane actions a sense of tension, more so manifesting in disbelief. Sometimes there will be a crucial 97% success that simply fails and hey, that's just how the dice rolls sometimes. It's up to the player to really cover all the bases and consider everything that can go wrong and it's simply better to just assume that everything will go wrong.

And believe me, things will go wrong. It's important not to get too attached to any single character because you never really know when an unexpected enemy ability will wipe out your party. What results is a filtering effect: you'll start out with a giant roster and bit by bit that list will shrink as characters die, go insane, become incapacitated by disease, etc. You can pay to remove negative effects or lock in positive ones, but the price of treatment will increase dramatically as the party member becomes more and more powerful. With this, the game places players into a balancing act: do I cough up the gold to treat a lightly injured hero and risk him straight-up dying in the next delve or do I invest that money in another promising hero?

The game features your standard fare turn based combat but there is one aspect I really want to emphasize: the lighting mechanic. Give-and-take is the theme of Darkest Dungeon—it's rare to come across a scenario where you only stand to benefit. In line with this, there is a lighting mechanic during dungeon delves. Torches are consumed from the supplies inventory to light the way for your party, staving off stress and helping gain the initiative on the dark dwelling monsters. As torches run low and the light diminishes, stress buildup can lead to mental breaks in party members and monsters will be more powerful. However, all of the negative effects come with a savvy increase in loot. In some instances, it's advantageous to let the light flicker, keeping your party members at just the edge of madness. The light mechanic is an aspect of difficulty control within the confines of an already set difficulty that gives players a chance to seek greater rewards without having to completely change the difficulty setting. It's a good way to give players a temporary challenge that they don't need to totally commit to if they feel they can't pass.

Your hard earned loot then funnels back into building up your party to confront the namesake final dungeon. Darkest Dungeon boasts fifteen hero classes, each with seven combat skills, upgradeable equipment, and unique stat modifying trinkets. Each hero also come with specialized camping skills that allow for buffs and bonuses during moments of respite in the dungeons.

I think Darkest Dungeon has a strong presentation and it had me hooked for a good number of hours, but that was before I began to really see the bones underneath the mechanics. For every one hero that makes it to the maximum level, you may need to go through three or four, maybe even six fodder heroes to reach that stage. All that time, you'll be investing and losing, only to try again with the next poor sap who comes along. With this, the game becomes repetitive, grindy, and loses a lot of its agency. It's fun to theorycraft strategies and lineups but it won't take long for you to realize that the variety that 15 classes offers is mostly superficial.

Again, the underlying philosophy with Darkest Dungeon isn't for the players to optimize for success, but to have them prepare to stem the losses. The RNG elements of the game sometimes makes encounters feel more cheap than challenging as a single miss can quickly cascade into a catastrophic defeat. Tactics rely on maximizing probabilities, but there are scenarios where you can make all the best possible moves and still lose. It's frustrating and those moments reveal the shallow mechanics underneath the game.

Although there wasn't much to keep me coming back to Darkest Dungeon, the game itself was wonderfully presented with a great deal of initial theorycrafting and unexpected outcomes. The game plays like a smaller, more punishing version of XCOM with less tactical decisions available overall. Nevertheless, Darkest Dungeon is a fairly solid game, one worth looking into if you're curious about the game's artistic presentation and its employment of mental health management in an RPG.

Ready Player One, a book report

Probably one of the worst books I've read in a long time.

Ready Player One takes place in the near future of around 2040. Humanity has been casually ravaged by a host of dystopian science fiction clichés: energy crisis, climate change, nuclear war, global economic spiraling, the whole gamut. I say casually because the circumstances aren't really explained with much detail by our first person narrator, a high school senior by the name of Wade Watts. Not missing a beat, Wade tells us more about how specifically his life in this near future sucks: he lives in abject poverty like the majority of humanity, his parents are dead, he's with an aunt that doesn't care about him, and life would simply not be worth living if it weren't for one thing: the egg hunt.

Enter the OASIS, the virtual reality novum of this story. The OASIS is a video game that's permeated just about every aspect of life in this imagined future. It's where Wade and much of the rest of humanity find solace from the dirt and rust colored world that is their actual reality. People go questing, hang out in virtual chatrooms, conduct business transactions, get an education in virtual schools, and is really just an analog of the internet if everything you did on the web had an experience bar attached to it.

James Halliday, the creator of the OASIS and its virtual reality hardware, is this game developing Willy Wonka-Bill Gates-Rockefeller hybrid figure. Before his death, Halliday hid all his fortune in One Piece an easter egg and whoever finds it within the OASIS would behold unimaginable riches: (1) becoming the heir to Halliday's company that manages the OASIS, (2) a fortune of about $240 billion, and (3) becoming a god within the OASIS itself. Spurred on by the life purpose this contest gives him, solo player Wade Watts, aka Parzival, sets out on the ultimate fetch quest, assembling a wacky team, going head-to-head with an evil dystopian mega-corporation, and learning the true values of going outside by the end of it all.

Now, if you think the premise is overtly childish, even for a YA novel, I'm right there with you. Unfortunately, this is the initial buy-in, the price of admission to this story, so you have to play along and bear with me.

I think virtual reality stories are hard to pull off because the author is responsible for not only crafting the fantasy virtual world, but also the fantasy reality that contextualizes it. Ernest Cline does neither of these two things with Ready Player One and any world building details he provides is done so haphazardly and out of a sense of weak, knee-jerk sociopolitical commentary without any thought or research. The majority of Cline's world building comes from what I imagine was him reading the headlines and the first two-and-a-half paragraphs of articles from his default Apple News feed and extrapolating a world from BuzzFeed's reasons-why-humanity-is-doomed list. The entirety of Cline's discombobulated imagined reality and its relationship to the enshrined OASIS exists to reinforce one catatonic, uninspired message that sets the tone for the whole novel: real world sucks, video games cool.

More important, probably, are the characters that have been tasked with operating with and within this book's slogging message. Unfortunately for us, the cast for this book are soggy homunculi made up of the cheapest plaster and crappiest marker-drawn faces you can imagine. The characters have so little convincing personality, I can summarize our protagonist's existences in less than twenty seconds:

• Wade, our authorial self-insert god of the geeks;
• Art3mis, the short, "Rubenesque," flawed-but-perfect dream girl love interest;
• Aech, the black lesbian girl with a Cheshire grin;
• Daito, honorable Japanese hikikomori #1;
• Shoto, honorable Japanese hikikomori #2.

These characters are just personified quirks rather than fully realized people. I'll give more points to Wade's character only because readers are intrinsically stuck with him as our narrator, so we're more privy to his thoughts. Still, moments of introspection are so mundane and so few and far between, all we're really left with is a staggering amount of superficial characteristics in an overwhelming amount of telling over showing. This is a problem when Wade's perspective is the only window we get into the other characters. Art3mis is primarily there for a horribly cringe-inducing teen romance fueled by pathetic desperation and what I imagine is what Cline thinks teen romances must be like, having seemingly missed out on the experience himself. At least she has a relatively meaningful set of interactions with Wade, unlike Aech, who's really just there to tick off the black and lesbian checkboxes for Team Token Diversity. Underneath her, however, are Daito and Shoto, the absolute case in point of Cline's ignorance and whose dual stereotyping acts as a paired example of what cultural appropriation really is.

The book's antagonists don't fare much better. Innovative Online Industries, the big bad EA dig, just exists as the corporate straw-man. IOI is a company openly dedicated to winning Halliday's contest and taking over the OASIS so they can monetize it more than it already was, as if the profits that generated Halliday a personal net worth of ~$240 billion wasn't somehow enough for the board of executives. I understand that a corporation's bottom line is generating profit, but a profit motive alone makes mega-corporations extremely boring entities. "Ah, but that's missing the point!" a fan of the book shouts out loud. "IOI are greedy fucks with no morals or sense of ethics! IOI look to the OASIS and slobber at the thought of charging monthly subscriptions and plastering ads on everything!" Oh my god, the horror! What Machiavellian machinations! What truly dark and dystopian dispositions! The spirit of the game will be ruined! Oh the humanity! What stakes!

Anyways, IOI is an insipid body and just as unconvincing as our protagonists. Their employees are dehumanized, soulless drones who Cline seemingly write as if they deserve no sympathy or compassion. Quite ironically, this kind of treatment from Cline made me more sympathetic towards the faceless, nameless corporate lackeys, more so than the protagonists. IOI's workers and slaves at least felt like real people who were trying to get by in a harsh world, people who weren't just neon colored cardboard cutouts of people with an unfair reserve of plot armor. I can tell Cline tried for some kind of anti-corporate, net neutrality, freedom of the web kind of message with the hostile position that IOI takes versus the OASIS players, but none of it really comes to fruition as any semblance of an attempt at commentary is dwarfed by how comically evil  IOI is. Cline incorporates militarized corporate policing, employee slavery, prison imagery—and Christ, Ernest Cline—"indentured servitude" processing that clearly mimics Nazi concentration camps, all to remind us that subscription fees are the end of the world as we know it. 

Looking past the dull setting and its ill molded characters, we're left with the words themselves. At this point, I have to bring up what I've been trying to avoid this whole time, which is the book's '80s decor, of which Cline wastes no time or space to remind you of, every third sentence. Fans will say that detractors from the book simply "don't get it" or "missed the point" of the book, which is that the book is an homage to '80s pop culture. I understand why these references appeal to people because it's like that feeling of elation you get when you hear your favorite song come on the car radio. You perk up in attention and afterwards fall back into the doldrum of listening to background noise that you tune away from. Cline's references to the '80s are just like that, nothing more than distractions from the underlying sophomoric writing that it tries to keep afloat. To Cline's credit, the writing gets the job done, moving the plot forward in the sense that he's formed sentences out of words. The entire book reads like a gray sludge with little to no discerning features.

Halliday created the contest to spread his love of the '80s to the rest of the world; he only wanted for people to love what he loved. Ernest Cline, with Ready Player One, works towards the complete antithesis to Halliday's wish, showing off his broad knowledge of '80s trivia without any of the spirit or substance of the decade. The repeated reminders that we're in a world obsessed with the '80s fails to act as any kind of meaningful world building and, again, just serves as fluff in Cline's one-trick pony show. It reaches a point where you can skip three to five pages, read a paragraph, repeat, and still understand what's going on. The details are misplaced, uninformative, and serve no aesthetic or practical purpose. To Cline, the world found perfection within the '80s and never moved on. That, perhaps, is the real dystopia in the story: the death of creativity and imagination that bores itself out of Ernest Cline's mind and onto Ready Player One's pages.

Battlefield V Reveal Trailer: Enticing while raising a lot of questions

Inappropriate content for children. Xbox. EA. DICE. Frostbite. Low, muffled tones of the countryside, birds chirping in the distance. An odd assortment of items, revealed to be strapped on the side of a tank. Tense sharpening, the loud sound of a body hitting metal. Then a yell: Find cover! A squad of British and American soldiers moves into heated close quarters combat against the enemy. A Cockney female fighter with a crude prosthetic arm. A commando with a katana. A man in need of a corpsman. Movement up to the second floor, tanks in the distance. The narrow setting then explodes into the wider battlefield, the tanks crash through the house, showcasing the game engine’s destructive capabilities. Destructible buildings, hulking vehicles, crashing planes, incessant gunfire and artillery, the familiar colorful orange flames and sparks contrasted with the soft, melancholic blue tones, a hallmark of the Battlefield series. The drone of a V1 rocket. Deafening explosion, the knockback. Suddenly, the face of an enemy, the viewer being choked, a brief struggle. Rescued by a comrade, “Hello, old friend.” The same Cockney lady, armed with a cricket bat lined with nails. Looking up, transport planes and paratroopers in the sky, the sirens of an air raid. Battlefield V.

but can they stop the progress of machines?

It’s a scripted, delightful, and exciting sprint through a chaotic and dazzling presentation of the latest upcoming game in the renowned shooter franchise. Admittedly, the trailer is rather confusing. The action is disjointed, ridiculous, and far from anything resembling an actual WWII battlefield. It doesn’t dawdle so much in context, perhaps because WWII is such an enshrined and familiar setting in the FPS genre, not to mention all the films we’ve all seen. Instead, the trailer spends time focusing on the spectacle of what players can expect, presenting the game less as an homage or tribute to WWII and more as an Inglorious Basterds style, fictionalized rendition of WWII set with Battlefield mechanics fans know and love. There’s a kind of tone deafness with so much happening and crammed into such a short reveal, but it certainly incites interest and curiosity as to how the whole game will pan out. What we have so far is a brief look into a journey through familiar territory with a no-holds-barred attitude exercising some big creative freedoms.

The official reveal trailer for Battlefield V on YouTube sits at 6.1 million views with a polarizing 50:50 split on likes and dislikes as of writing. Vocal fans have taken to online forums to express their dissatisfaction that stems from the game’s more unrealistic qualities, chief among them the presence of a female soldier in frontline combat. Although women served in the armed forces during WWII, they were generally barred from frontline combat in both the UK and US militaries. This generalized historical inaccuracy has prompted members of the Battlefield community to see an overt and unwanted exercise of political correctness, and just about everyone has something they want to say regarding the issue.

It’s amazing how a single trailer can rile up so much discussion and protest about gender politics and the gaming world. It’s not anything new by a long shot—remember when Call of Duty: WWII featured black female German soldiers? The Battlefield V trailer is short, but it does raise some questions. Does the inclusion of women in such a gung-ho, fictionalized manner dilute the actual contributions of women during WWII? Is it fair to rewrite historical moments to promote a modern sense of diversity and inclusion when doing so may mask the discrimination and injustices of the past?

I think what we have so far is promising of an exciting title, but of course, we only have a brief and narrow look at what the game will entail. DICE have stated that they want to focus on the untold stories of WWII, the less familiar aspects. It remains to be seen precisely what kind of game they’re able to ship and how they handle representation of women.

Persona 5

Before we get into more detail, I want to say that it has been a long time since I've played an RPG that was as charming, stylish, and fun as Persona 5. Developed by P-Studio, a subsidiary team within publishers Atlus, Persona 5 was released in September 2016 in Japan and April 2017 internationally. I've never played the previous titles or know anything about them, but Persona 5 got my attention with all the positive reviews and its distinct art direction. I knew it was a fusion of a daily life simulator and dungeon crawling featuring turn-based combat with JRPG elements. What I didn't know is that I would become totally absorbed by the world of Persona.

you'll never see it coming!

You'll play as a nameless, nearly mute main character as he tries to live an honest high schooler's life after being placed on probation for a falsely reported crime. At his new high school, rumors about the transfer student with a criminal record abound. A few spins on the wheel of fate plus some awakenings of the soul and, what do you know, our protagonist finds himself with the power to wield Personas, familiars conjured from the psyche, and the ability to dive into the Metaverse. In short, the Metaverse is the cognitive world, one that is formed by people's distorted perceptions of reality. By traveling through the minds of people and stealing the source of their distorted thoughts and desires, the protagonist and his recruited band of misfit friends seek to reform society through their newfound powers. There's a bit of a Psychonauts flavor to it all.

click to enlarge pictures

Persona 5 is a quintessential Japanese game not in the sense that it uses anime stylization or carries forward some JRPG tropes, but because it reflects on Japanese culture and society. Simply put, it is a game from Japan about Japan. That isn't to say the issues the game identifies are limited to Japan. Katsura Hashino, the director for the Persona series since Persona 3, views each Persona game as a way to "'address a problem... in society at that time, especially in Japan.'" Freedom and inner identity are some of the keywords I would place next to Persona 5. The game's themes juxtaposes the real world and the Metaverse, in which the real world is a place where societal and cultural norms rule and the Metaverse is a place for rebellion and inner expression to physically manifest in the form of the various Personas and enemies encountered within the cognitive world. What results is a supernatural fantasy story that is anchored in the real world—not just the real world in-game, but in our world as well.

welcome to the shadow realm, jimbo

The first societal issue Persona 5 brings up is also how the game is framed: Japan's criminal justice system. The game begins in media res with the protagonist, codenamed Joker while operating in the Metaverse, fleeing from a heist after being separated from his group of accomplices, the Phantom Thieves. You see, as the Phantom Thieves go around changing people's hearts through the Metaverse, the results are felt in the real world and have lead the Japanese government and public to think of the Phantom Thieves as threats. Think, "Who watches the Watchmen?" and you're about there. Anyways, Joker is captured as he makes his exit and is placed into police custody in the real world. The game then begins as a series of flashbacks that has the protagonist recollecting the events leading up to the formation of the Phantom Thieves and his eventual arrest.

combat is a badass, super animated version of pokemon

When the player is prompted to name their character, it is done through signing a confession in the interrogation room after being psychologically and physically tortured. The scene may look like something out of a police drama, but it is very much a reflection of how criminal cases are sometimes handled in Japan.

Japan has an unbelievable conviction rate, greater than 99%. Compare that to Britain's Crown Court in 2009 with 80%, America's 93% in 2012, and the Chinese Communist Party court's modest 98% [EDIT: That Chinese conviction rate figure was from 2013. China is now harmoniously up to par!] How is >99% conviction rate possible? After all, prosecutors are human and thus prone to error sometimes, right? J. Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School and Eric B. Rasumesen of IU Kelly School of Business authored a well-cited paper in 2000 examining this very question in depth. Confessions are a big part of handling a criminal case. Plea-bargaining isn't allowed in Japan, but confessions are pretty analogous to that. Japanese defendants are far less likely to contest prosecution and rather just confess. However, when you see how the protagonist is beaten and threatened behind closed doors with no record of the events inside the room, its hard not to wonder about the coercive tactics prosecutors may use to extract a confession regardless of the detainees innocence. It makes you wonder just how many innocent people have been arrested and made to confess, all for the sake of prosecuting in order to save face rather than for a sense of justice.

Then there's the game's depiction of issues Japanese women face in the professional workforce and as victims to a culture of harassment. Doctor Tae Takemi and prosecutor Sae Niijima are characters that depict the minority of women in their respective fields and how women struggle against conservative Japanese gender roles. As the story progresses, the player learns that Takemi was made a scapegoat to a failed medical trial by her superiors and Niijima is later similarly dismissed by her bosses, having her authority in the Phantom Thieves case removed and being sardonically told to use the down time to find a husband.

Women face tremendous social barriers in Japan. Of course, women have all the legal rights as men as per the Japanese constitution, but women in Japan will find a much harder time finding good economic opportunities in the workforce. According to Seeker Daily, Japanese women hold less than 10% of leadership positions in businesses. Only 66% of women are employed and and almost 60% of those working women aren't even in full-time positions. Women aren't afforded the same level of opportunities as men are because of the conservative, traditionalist values that have confined women in the domestic sphere.

comes with a killer soundtrack

The last thing I want to mention regards what the game has the player doing in between fighting monsters from within the minds of twisted people: going to high school. I think Japanese high schools have really become a cultural set piece of their own. You've got the uniforms, the school culture festivals, the variety of clubs, the senpais and kouhais, all wrapped and exported to the rest of the world in the form of anime, manga, and light novels. There's a focus on high school in the daily life simulator portion of the game because, as Hashino states, "'For good and bad reasons... the school-life experience deeply affects many Japanese people.'"

School is stressful anywhere, but Japan has really captured the attention of the mass media when it comes to just how tragically the stress can build up in students. The situation in Japan is so bad, 500 students under the age of twenty turn to suicide every year. In fact, the World Health Organization reported in 2014 that Japan's suicide rates are 60% higher than the global average. There is such a pressure not only to perform well academically, but to conform to social norms that students feel there is no escape, no out to their situation. Physical bullying, vicious rumors, and the terror of confronting such daunting aspects of school life absolutely cripples people, making them believe they somehow do not have any value or anything to offer society.

Going through the daily life portions of the game, both in and out of school, you'll meet some pretty ordinary people that each have remarkable stories. Much like real life, you can never guess what kinds of backstories characters have gone through just by looking at them. You begin with a small and unlikely grouping of friends which quickly branches out to people like Takemi and Niijima mentioned earlier. It's such a simple message, yet so solidly conveyed: everyone has their own story, everyone is unique. The hardships the characters go through are all different, but the way the characters end up as social outcasts is cast as a binding quality. Persona 5 features some of the most well-rounded characters that make it way too easy to cheer them on. Through their stories, the characters each uniquely show how individuality doesn't mean exile, that conformity to expectations is not the only measure of a person. In a twist of irony, the game shows how everyone is, in one way or another, a social outcast and that society is nothing more than a bunch of social outcasts that have come together.

Persona 5 gives us a taste of what it feels like to have the power to change the hearts and minds of people for good (plus the ability to romance any, ANY, girl with a few silent nods, soft grunts, and generic hand gestures).

It seems like an overly idealistic, opportunistic message, but maybe that's the kind of story we need most about these tumultuous and troubling times. Persona 5 may be set in modern Japan, but its themes championing determination against great odds are timeless. Symbolism and imagery within the Metaverse show how people think of the real world as a kind of prison, a seemingly safe place where all of your needs can be met so long as you never act up to attract trouble from the authorities despite adverse conditions. It's easy to think that so long as we do what we're told and don't try to change anything, life will get better. The Phantom Thieves, however, are the embodiment of a will to seek change in the world the best they can. The Personas each member of the Phantom Thieves wield are born from an inner sense of rebellion. Persona 5 reminds us that we are, every one of us, a part of the world ourselves. By realizing that we're not as helpless as we think, by realizing that we have the power to enact change in our own ways, we can begin to do great things.

some star wars kinect flashbacks

Persona 5 is riveting, heartwarming, surprising, funny, and all-around just charged with a great sense of life. The gameplay elements and narrative mesh seamlessly into a fluid experience. Starting with a high school scandal, the stakes will keep climbing to exciting, ludicrous levels as the player makes progress, all the while polishing the game's core focus without losing sight of the central themes at play. Persona 5 was an absolutely delightful experience, one that emulates the voice of a generation.

Further reading/viewing:

• The Whole Story on Japan's 99% Conviction Rate, and the Corruption that Follows (Sept. 2013)
• Japan's program to boost senior women in work is a dud (Sept. 2015)
• The mystery behind Japan's high suicide rates among kids (Oct. 2015)