You can kind of tell how busy my week has been or is likely to be by checking when I post to this blog. As I keep saying, two posts a week without guarantee of quality. If both of these appear on a Sunday, it is a sign that the schedule of my life is going to be a pain for the next two weeks, and I will have to post again on a Saturday.

I've been trying out roleplaying on a MUSH. A PersonaMUSH, as it is so named. The general world of the Persona-verse as described in Persona 3 and 4 (and only as described there, since I've never played any other Persona games) is one of those, like the Negima-verse and the Nanoha-verse and the ZKC-verse, where I like to create characters in.

I've never MUSHed before. This is a learning experience, and the lesson that is being pounded into my Skull Of +5 Thickness is that I am in entirely the wrong time zone.

Most of the basic character concept comes from one of those discarded bits of proto-characters that always turn up when I am in the midst of storycrafting. (I realize this sounds a lot more formalized that it really is, but I can't think of any other term.) A useful trait of all these settings is that it's all magic, even if it's actually science fiction or superpowers or whatnot. Essentially, things that cannot be done in Real Life, but can be done in that setting because it's cool.

Unfortunately, I have to keep the aspect of Coolness subordinate to the aspect of Consistency, mostly because I like characters who find new and creative ways to use what powers they already have, and I can't do that if I don't know what these powers actually are. This may be why I get accused of being too much of a killjoy when it comes to Cool Things Happening.

At least in this MUSH the powers are already defined, in that they are the best approximations the MUSH can do to the game powers. Everything else is roleplay.

I must admit that the primary reason I'm in PersonaMUSH is because I can't wait for Persona 3 Portable, and the opportunity to play a female protagonist. I have made this point before, but I can't quite be bothered to search for the relevant posts, so you're on your own there. But my character's appearance was first inspired by that of the female main character, popularly named "Minako" (or alternately "Misato"), and then altered to be less obviously ripped-off. Her personality gains some bits from both the proto-character (formerly a researcher from the Nanoha-verse), as well as the manga depictions of Minato Arisato (aka Male Main Character of Persona 3) translated into girl-form. Her character story arc stems from Doctor Faustus.

So it goes.

If you do wish to drop by PersonaMUSH, it is at rpg-works.net, port 2012. Shiori Hibiki will be there, likely whining to what few may listen about how annoying it is to have to live life Out Of Character at GMT+8.

While waiting for my Internet to get repaired (again), I've been marathoning Persona 4, which features, as one of its much-vaunted improvements over Persona 3, branching Social Link options. The overall difference is fairly minor, largely in the conversation options and incidental dialogue; the Social Link results are the same regardless.

Now, if you've never played either Persona 3 or 4 before, the idea behind Social Links is that you meet someone, and then you get to know them better through further repeated meetings, until you form "an unbreakable bond" of Really Close Friendship (and for female characters, possibly something more). Along the way, you help solve some problem or other they are facing in their lives. All of this gives you nice bonuses that help you in battle, or at least the preparations before battle, but that's beside the point.

The branching routes in P4 mean that I get to Socially Link with either one of two choices for each of the school clubs. Back in P3, this didn't matter that much, because the game refused to be clear on which club the Social Link character belonged to until you actually chose yourself (insert Schroedinger's Cat experiment reference here); whatever your decision, you'll be dealing with the same person. In P4, however, you deal with different people. So if you pick the Basketball Team instead of the Soccer Team, you'd be interacting with Kou Ichijo, rather than Daisuke Nagase. The same goes for the Drama Club's Yumi Ozawa and the Symphonic Band's Ayane Matsunaga.

But what about the other, unpicked route?

As I've mentioned before, I have problems with this sort of thing, which I call Visual Novel Route Regret. Basically, all these characters have their problems and worries, some of them really serious, and the game often implies that they will never be free from their woes without your assistance. In P3, it was actually possible, if very difficult, to max out every Social Link in one play-through, and thus solve everyone's problems neatly. But in P4, with the branching, this is impossible, even if the actual game mechanic Social Link maxing is much easier.

And so I have to weigh the Seriousness of the characters' problems against each other. Is Kou's insecurity about being adopted more or less debilitating to his future prospects than Daisuke's inability to get over his old rejected crush? Both have let it affect their performance to the point of depression, so it's not a given that they'll be able to get over it themselves. The Cultural Clubs are a little easier to pick: Yumi's angst about her estranged but hospitalized father, leading to her nearly severing links with her mother, is probably more serious than Ayane's basic lack of confidence in herself. Sorry, Ayane, but Yumi's case is more likely to make her suicidal.

At least the Social Link problems in Persona 4 are not as drastic as in Persona 3, which is a bit of a relief. If you haven't been following a Max Social Link guide but know what is in store for the characters, it's hard to decide between helping Yukari get over her father's death-by-corporate-murder, or comforting Mitsuru after her father's death-by-actual-murder and her arranged marriage to an odious man she hates. Compared to that, Chie's search for a good reason to protect people is a little less world-shattering.

This is a bit of why I'm not very keen on playing the more Dramatic sorts of visual novels: the girls tend to have incredibly depressing (and often supernatural) backstories, which may very well lead to their deaths or spiritual discorporation or whatever. The viewpoint character may or may not know the reason why, in a given route epilogue scene, certain members of the old gang appear to be missing, but the experienced player knows. And that makes it all the more depressing.

On a vague tangent, I have this incredible urge to go write some lyrics for the Junes jingle.

Why do so many bishoujo games have a token cute animal (for varying degrees of "cute")? The Key anime adaptations featured theirs, with Piro in Kanon, Potato in Air, and Botan in Clannad. Nursery Rhyme has Azu, and Heart de Roommate had Toshibo. I first noticed this during the fake opening for the last Haruhi-chan episode, where apparently Muu-chan (a Haruhi-chan original) and Shamisen double-team this role.

I've not had much time to play Coming x Humming, and I swear that this is actually the name of the visual novel. I have no idea what it's about, except apparently some sort of local goddess from the shrine taking human form to… I don't know. Boink the player character, maybe. Characters in visual novels seem to have a surprisingly blase attitude towards plainly supernatural phenomena; it's hard to tell if this is something generally Japanese, or if it's just easier to tell a bishoujo game story like this, without having to explain all the plot contortions.

I wonder what the first bishoujo game to utilize all these conventions was. Probably something relatively old and familiar, since when I encountered them in Coming x Humming, they had this comfortingly familiar feel. Token cute pet, token childhood friend, token MAGIC… all is well with the world.

Perhaps late to the much-vaunted party, but I have been very slowly working my way through Persona 3 FES. I didn't exactly plan on it (I still have Freespace 2 to work on, courtesy of Good Old Games), but after spending a fruitless span of time attempting to articulate my thoughts on Spice and Wolf, I popped the disc into my PS2 for a break.

As the story usually goes, it became rather more than a break.

It's certainly one of the more anime-related games I've seen; now I understand the excitement among other, more timely anime bloggers, when the sequel anime was announced. (I don't remember what their reactions were after it aired; I need to start keeping track of that sort of thing, I think.) Even apart from the art style, there's plenty of anime-familiar dialogue choices, which would probably not make much sense to anyone who has never heard the "-tan" suffix before.

All the names are also in Japanese, and when faced with the Enter Name Here screen, I felt compelled to follow suit. So far, "Akira Hirazawa" (I wanted "Hiiragizawa" ie Eriol for various poorly-thought-out reasons, but the first and last names can only allow eight characters each; I hear his unofficial official name is "Minato Arisato") has struck me as the sort of laconic asocial JRPG player character (see: Neku Sakuraba) who probably has a snarky running commentary in his head on the various absurdities occuring around him. Since the game does not provide this, I've supplied my own.

The game is broken into two simultaneous phases, where the player party has to deal with school in the daytime, and fighting evil eldritch abominations in the night. Cram things together too much, and you get tired and sick, which interferes with both phases to a severe degree. Along the way, the player must deal with incredibly clingy friends, of whom one (of the females) will end up being the player character's girlfriend. Keeping everyone pleased will take up most of your time, and you'll end up actually grinding levels maybe once every two weeks in-game time or something.

Did I mention that you only have one year total to save the world?

Normally, I try to collect everything I can in a game, since I'd rather not have to find out three hours to the end that I missed a certain crucial item or procedure five minutes after the start. With P3F, though, I welcomed the news of a New Game Plus option which carries over at least all my non-combat stats, since grinding those have proven to be the most tedious part of the game. I would probably not mind as much if my goal were to live an everyday school life, or defeat the shadows and save the world. Both at the same time is a bit much, and my fellow NPC allies join me in bemoaning precisely that. I'm currently concentrating on Academics (for exams and such) and Charm (for a certain requirement), in that order; Courage can wait until the next playthrough.

And then there's the romantic entanglement aspect of the game. I kind of know how the main character in a harem comedy anime feels now; all (well, almost all) the girls are in some way desirable, in the sense that if they were actually in a harem comedy anime that I'm watching, I'd be switching loyalties pretty often. As it is, I'm probably going to stick with Yukari Takeba (the first girl you meet at the dorms and designated battle healz0r) this playthrough, if I can meet the minimum requirements; otherwise, Chihiro Fushimi (the shy bespectacled student council treasurer) seems like a choice I'd stereotypically make. I get the feeling that being greedy will likely result in what is generally known among certain anime fandoms as an ending worthy of a pleasant sea-going vessel.

The story itself is very… well, anime-serious is about the best I can put it. There's a great deal of introspective dialogue about the nature of self as we relate to others, as well as how Making Friends and Connecting With Each Other is the answer to all your stat-grinding needs, which strikes me as sort of a common theme among anime which purport to be "deep" and "complex". Maybe they're trying to tell us to stop playing games so much and go out into the world or something.

Of course, this kind of veers into surreality when the primary method of evoking one's Persona is to shoot yourself in the head. Repeatedly.

Being that I'm only a short way into the game, I have to admit that I'm enjoying it so far, but I'm well aware of the tendency of such games to turn out to be grindfests near the final boss. This is like stopping the plot just before the final episode, and inserting a 156-episode filler tournament arc. You'll eventually finish the story, but the payoff never seems worth it.

When I get a new toy to play with, especially if that toy allows me to make new toys, I tend to obsess over them. Such has been the case when, after sufficient prodding from a variety of sources, I bought the PDF version of the Maid RPG sourcebook. Yes, you read that correctly: it is a tabletop pen-and-paper roleplaying game involving maids.

Anime maids, that is. With everything that entails.

I've chronicled the creation of a basic cast of characters on my Livejournal, as posted in five parts. So far, at least; it is only on subsequent read-throughs that I realized how remarkably filling the game can actually be, despite its fluffy, light exterior. This is a game which can be adapted to a vast number of settings and situations, often in the same campaign. In fact, if you use the Random Events table, this is most likely going to be the case.

So far, the most fun I've had is in rolling up new characters. Unlike the HERO System, this takes something like ten to fifteen minutes, or maybe five minutes if you don't bother to write everything down longhand. Justifying the rolls may take longer, depending on how long you've been doing this sort of thing, but when you end up with a loli vampire maid with an affinity for magic and a great big axe for a weapon (the character I'm currently playing in a play-by-post, at least until the GM vetoes me), the justification may take strange forms.

Actually playing the game probably depends on how good at roleplaying everyone is, as well as how secure everyone is in their manhood. This is not a game for minmaxers, or those who prize an unsullied character concept above all. This is the sort of game for people who're willing to just go with the flow and play something, possibly because the designated cleric is a no-show.

And if, like me, you are a fan of moe harem comedy anime, with or without maids, this is perfect for you.

You can, if you want to, play as a butler, but then butlers are basically a side-show to the maids (automatically losing any challenge against a maid character), even if they are more accurately combat butlers. You can also play the "master" of the house, but you'll be stuck with even worse stats, and nothing to do except dispense Favour (the experience points of the game) like a particularly sad and geeky vending machine.

You can also, and this is allowed in the rules, pick and choose your desired character traits from the many (many many many) tables, but this kind of takes some of the fun out of it.

A great deal of the charm of the rulebook is the presence of the example characters, who do not just show us how the rules work, but enact little skits where they actually apply the rules directly, rolling their own dice. This is a great help in explaining the sometimes complex interaction of rules, as well as providing a decidedly moe heroine in Bashful Demon Maid Hizumi, who has no idea how she managed to roll a Demon trait.

This is a fun, light rules system, made for playing fun, light games. The best word I can think of to describe Maid RPG is "charming"; it's not perfect, but it's hard to fault it for its flaws. We have the core rules weighing in at about thirty pages, and then one hundred and eighty pages of optional rules that add a great deal more depth to the game.

At eight dollars for the PDF of 223 pages, this game is incredible value for money. There is even a little note from the translator telling anyone who pirates the game that the most important thing they should do is to play it, not just let it sit and rot on the hard drive. I cannot think of better advertising than that.

I've picked up 3D Custom Girl from somewhere (don't ask me where, I really haven't a clue; that DVD had been sitting forgotten in my collection for who knows how long), and on a whim, I decided to install it to see what it's like.

The basic idea is that you get to dress up a faux-3D anime-style girl (with limited variation in body shape, sadly) in various clothes, starting from a base of no clothes at all. After you're done (or if you want to just jump straight into it, I suppose), you can boink her. Supposedly the main appeal here is the cosplay boinking, although I have my suspicions about that.

This is because I have yet to even really explore the boinking parts of the game, apart from clicking on the icons and going "oh, so that's what those are", and then ignoring them for more important decisions: loose or ponytail?

To me, this isn't so much a game as a dress-up doll simulator. The idea of "so after you're done, you can boink her" feels somehow tacky, like the embarrassing end of a quest that everyone would rather not talk about. But I started at nine pm trying to decide what hairstyle to give the girl, and when I looked up again it was four in the morning, and I hadn't even finished with the costume yet.

I don't even care much about fashion in Real Life, with a closet full of near-identical plain black or dark blue shirts. And my sister's Barbie dolls held no fascination for me, mainly because the possibilities inherent in Lego blocks seemed so much more boundless.

But set me in front of something like 3D Custom Girl and give me a wide enough (and anime-esque enough) selection of impossibly cool clothes to create anything I like, and I will spend hours happily trying to replicate various original characters of mine. (The title image is the closest I can get to my Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS Original Character Ivey de Lorien. Still needs tweaking.) All the (allegedly) erotic squeaks and yelps when you (accidentally) click on any part of the model's body just seem like a distraction: "stop twitching, girl! I'm trying to design here!"

Tangentially, this is a large part of why I'm still playing City of Heroes/Villains. It still surprises me that over four years after the game has come out, character creation in most other MMORPGs still seems so limited.

Since I'm medicated and not in the mood for anything more strenuous than vegetation in front of cute anime girls, this seems like a good way to fulfil the post quota.

Last time, we decided to continue on the Rin route. Let's see where it leads.

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A shorter update this time.

Of course, we're going with Rin. If it helps, I might do a few other run-throughs next time to showcase the other characters, assuming I don't forget about this in the near future and lose all interest.

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Generally when I get a new idea for a project, I run it into the ground until I get bored of it (which happens quite quickly), and then I leave it on hiatus indefinitely. Until I suddenly get another burst of inspiration, and then start up all my old projects again.

Anyway. Previously on Nursery Rhyme, Shizuma got conned into a date with Yukina, or at least what amounts to a date. This doesn't actually have much to do with the plot, since it's not like the player can choose to get out of it.

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But I have this blog entry to do.

When last we left off, our protagonist Shizuma had been accused of a Humourously Embarrassing Peeping Incident, involving what is obviously the tsundere option Tita Flawless Brandt. A d2 flip made my choice for me: Shizuma tells all.

So it goes.

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