I was down there these past two weeks for Noogler orientation — yes, they call new Googlers “Nooglers”. It was quite a rush; there are so many things to learn at once and two weeks isn’t nearly enough to get a grip on it all. It’s pretty much like this. And by most accounts, it will probably continue to be like that for the next couple of months. But it’s also incredibly exciting. As Ilya writes in the PostRank blog post, this is our chance to really push the boundaries of social media analytics and bring our groundbreaking work in the field to millions and millions of users. While I can say nothing of what we’re cooking up at the moment, I assure you (perhaps just as everybody else is) that it will be truly awesome.

This week, I am putting my life in order and getting it ready to be packed up and shipped across the continent and my cat and I will be flying over on July 1. Yes, the irony of leaving Canada on Canada Day is not at all lost on me. It’s the way the timing worked out: flying out on a Canadian holiday and landing close to a U.S. one will make the entire transition much easier. The company has been quite generous in helping me with my relocation which is the only reason I can even imagine getting myself over there in the span of a month (the acquisition deal closed at the beginning of June).

While I am very excited for this new opportunity, I am also sad to be leaving friends and family to take it. While I have gotten a bit used to moving where my work takes me, it never gets much easier. And this is not just a new chapter of my life; it’s a whole new story. I am starting completely anew, armed only with the knowledge, skills, and experience I have picked up along the way. I wanted my youth to be an adventure and I don’t think it gets much more exciting than this. Or maybe it does. I’m about to find out.

So, before I jump on a plane to California, goodbye Canada. I’ll be back, I promise.  =)

Tanto Cuore: A Deck-Building Card Game

I recently pre-ordered the first English printing of Japanese deck-building game Tanto Cuore, which was slated to come out in May. Much to my surprise (and delight), it was actually released much sooner. To start from the conclusion (as the Japanese would say), it has proven to be an excellent addition to my collection so far.

The original game, released in December 2009, was created and published by Arclight Games and illustrated by a veritable dream team of Japanese illustrators. Since its release, fans have translated the rulebook and card text and have provided “paste-ups” which can be printed out and attached to the cards. Now, Japanime Games has released an official English printing which can currently be ordered online through CardHaus. It made its debut at SakuraCon in Seattle (some photos can be found here) and is scheduled to appear at a few other anime conventions throughout the United States.

Tanto Cuore is, by all accounts, the most popular deck-building game in Japan, and currently has two stand-alone expansions. The base game comes with 280 cards and is packaged in a relatively small and elegant box that manages to leave just enough space to sleeve all of the cards if you take out the spacer (use standard M:tG sleeves). It also comes with larger cardboard dividers that are labeled to make the game easy to organize.

In case you are unfamiliar with the genre, deck-building games are similar to collectible card games (CCG or TCG) like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh, but rather than spending exorbitant amounts of money on boxes of booster packs to collect all of the cards you need to build your perfect deck for tournaments, all of the cards you need to play are right in the box and players construct their decks during the course of the game from a shared pool of cards. Some types of cards in that pool give victory points, and the player who has collected the most points by the end of the game is declared the winner. This differs from the more adversarial mechanic of CCG’s, in which you are usually trying to attack opponents directly to bring their life points down to 0.

A deck-building game always comes with more types of cards than are actually used in one game. Some of the types of cards that will be available in the shared pool are chosen at random, others are always available. Each player uses the cards in hand to generate some value, which can be used to add one card of that purchase cost or less to the deck. The purchased card and all of the cards from that hand (played or not) are placed in the discard pile at the end of the turn and a new hand is dealt. When the draw pile runs out, the discard pile is shuffled and becomes the new draw pile. Some cards may allow the player to draw more cards, generate more value, or purchase more cards, so players need to create a strategy for their deck that gives them consistently good hands for buying the cards that are worth points (which are usually more expensive).

In Tanto Cuore, the deck is your “house” in which you employ “staff” (all cute maids) by paying “love” (because actual money would not be nearly as cute). You start your turn with one “serving” (playing a maid card as an action) and one “employment” (purchasing a card). Being served by a maid may allow you to draw more cards, provide you more love, allow you to employ more staff, or give you more servings. After your serving(s), you may use the accumulated love from maids you played and cards in your hand to employ one or more cards from the “town” (shared pool).

The game puts a few twists on the basic deck-building mechanic that make it slightly more than just Dominion with cute art. Some maids can potentially become “chambermaids”. After employing the maid, when she is in your hand you may choose to be served by her as usual or you may spend some number of servings (usually one, sometimes two) to play her in your “private quarters” (the area in front of you). A chambermaid in your private quarters is not discarded at the end of your turn. The base set lacks any cards that allow you to fire a staff member, so this is one of the few ways of getting cards out of your deck, but there’s also an interesting decision element at work. Chambermaids are usually worth some number of bonus victory points for having sets of them in your private quarters at the end of the game, but being served by them during a turn confers benefits which you can’t get if they are in your private quarters. So each time a chambermaid card appears in your hand, you have to decide whether you want to play the card as an action to get those immediate benefits, or play the card in front of you to get end-of-game bonus VP.

Maids in your private quarters may be subject to illness; one of the cards that can be bought in town is an “illness” card that is played on any maid in any player’s private quarters instead of being added to the deck. A maid who is ill does not have any effects and is not counted for purposes of calculating victory points and victory point bonuses. She is essentially not in the game until all illness cards have been removed from her — and it is possible that she could have more than one! Another of these types of cards is “bad habit”, which is played in a private quarters in general rather than on any particular maid. These reflect general disorder within the house and are worth negative victory points at the end of the game. These two types of cards give the game a bit more of an adversarial feel.

On top of this, there are private maids. These cards are all unique, each giving a different number of VP at the end of the game and having a different effect which applies for every turn that they are in your private quarters (and not sick). At any given time, two of them are face up in the town. When one is hired, another is drawn from the facedown private maids pile and placed face up in the town. A player may have one private maid at a time; the next private maid hired is stacked on top of the first and the new maid’s effect is now applied instead of the old’s. But all private maids hired over the course of the game are counted for the purpose of calculating VP (except ones which are ill). Illness cards may only be played on the most recently hired private maid in a player’s private quarters.

These elements give the game some depth, creating different ways to win than just consistently buying the cards worth the highest VP by generating as much love as possible per turn. Sometimes, you can benefit just as much from buying a lot of cheaper chambermaids and playing them to your private quarters to collect big VP bonuses in the endgame, and spending some love on illness and bad habit cards may allow you to throw a wrench in somebody else’s strategy.

The game is missing any components for helping to choose random combinations of cards for games (I’m working on a little something for this, so stay tuned!) and there are a few private maids that are either confusing to use or just don’t seem to be worth as much as their purchase cost but perhaps I’m still a little green on the strategy. But overall, Tanto Cuore is an excellent game and I would recommend it to anyone who likes cute maids, CCGs, or deck-building games. It’s also not too tough to teach once you’ve gotten a handle on the rules yourself and I don’t find myself going to the card glossary or FAQ too often.

I’m a bit late to the party but I had a chance to see Disney’s 50th animated feature, Tangled. As you might expect, it’s 3D animation. Disney seems to be moving away from traditional animation though apparently cells (or at least a digital form of them) aren’t quite dead yet. Their forays into computer animation have usually been aided by Pixar, such as the Toy Story series, and it seems to have become trendy to point and laugh at Disney and how creatively bankrupt they’ve become.

Well, if Tangled is any indication, Disney hasn’t quite reached bottom. Perhaps it’s because it was their 50th animated feature, but Disney reached deep to bring back the magic of the classic 90′s flicks we all grew up with and loved. And you know what? I think they managed to do it with Tangled.

As you might be able to tell from the title and image, Disney has decided to do its thing with Rapunzel, the story of a young girl with incredibly long hair locked away in a tower by a witch. But to add a little more magic, Rapunzel’s real parents are a king and queen, and the witch is interested in the girl because her hair holds the power of a flower that provides healing and perpetual youth. She takes the girl by cover of night and raises her as her own daughter, trying to convince her that it is in her best interest to stay cooped up because the outside world is too nasty and terrible. But like any teenage girl, she becomes curious and rebellious. To commemorate the lost princess, the citizens float bright lanterns into the night sky, and having seen this from the window of her tower on her birthday every year, Rapunzel is determined to see it in person for her 18th birthday.

And then there’s Flynn Rider. He’s a bandit of some renown, though they can never seem to get his nose right on the “Wanted” posters. And this time he has stolen a crown from the royal family. In his frantic struggle to lose his pursuers, he scales Rapunzel’s tower. But it’s out of the fire and into the frying pan, half-literally, as Rapunzel clocks him on the head with the cast-iron fry pan she keeps handy. She takes his satchel, containing the stolen crown, and strikes a deal with him. He takes her to see the lanterns at the kingdom, and she returns his satchel. Thus begins their adventure and their romance as they outrun thugs, kingdom guards, and the insidious plotting of Rapunzel’s “mother”, who is determined to turn the pair against each other and convince the girl that she really should stay in the tower after all.

The animation is extremely well done here. I was actually incredibly surprised to find that Pixar wasn’t involved. The character designs are beautiful and Disney gets extra credit for Rapunzel herself. I haven’t seen a Disney heroine as lovably adorable as Rapunzel since The Little Mermaid. And the music is fantastic, as you might Alan Menken‘s work to be. Don’t recognize him? He has arranged music for almost every other Disney feature, including beloved classics The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

But it’s difficult to articulate what I really feel is this Tangled’s greatest asset: the magic. Somehow, the elements blended together and I felt like I was watching a Disney piece from the 90′s, the classics I grew up with from a time when Disney was the name in animation and there were less caricatures of Michael Eisner driving the company into the ground. In some ways, it was formulaically Disney, right down to the funny animal sidekicks and powerful romantic ballad. It is, in short, classic Disney for a new audience.

But being formulaic is a double-edged blade for Tangled. In some ways, it is too formulaic. It’s too easy to constantly draw comparisons to The Little Mermaid, and while I don’t think Mandy Moore as Rapunzel was a bad casting choice, she was the same character in this movie as she is in almost every other movie she has ever done: teenage girl (often) rebelling against an overprotective parent and falling in love with the first boy to come along who is willing to put up with it all (A Walk to Remember, Chasing Liberty, Saved!, …need I go on?). The romance is also very standard for Disney: they meet, have adventures together, there’s a betrayal that splits the two apart, and they manage to push through it and prevail anyway. Sometimes, while I was watching it for the first time, it felt like I’d seen this picture before.

But overall, Tangled was worth the time I invested in it and more. It’s a great film, even if it’s sometimes a bit cliché. But at the same time, the blending of classic elements with modern technology and writing contributes to the feeling that you’re watching a true successor to the Disney features you loved growing up. If you think that Disney has entirely lost touch with its creative past, you might want to give this film a shot. In me it inspired some confidence in Disney’s potential to turn around from darker times.

Smaller ISPs buy network resources wholesale from the big players (Bell/Rogers/Shaw) to resell to us. This arrangement was put into place because, as I understand it, those resources were subsidized by our tax dollars and because the massive telecom companies needed some competition. Previously, a decision was made to allow the big ISPs to impose throttling (based on the type of traffic) on the resellers, which was met with a great deal of disapproval from consumers. The big telecoms seemingly backed off of this, or at least they don’t explicitly state that they practice it. As a Rogers customer I’ve seen no evidence of throttling of specific types of traffic on my cable internet connection. But that was apparently not enough.

Now, the CRTC has decided that the large telecoms are allowed to impose usage-based billing on the resellers. This means that ISPs buying wholesale network resources from the big guys have a cap on their usage of those resources and overage is charged at rates similar to what is charged to consumers. Naturally, the smaller ISPs must pass those costs on to their customers.

For example, TekSavvy is announcing that they must drop the cap on their 5Mbps “High Speed Internet Premium” plan from 200GB to 25GB and that overage will be charged at almost $2/GB. Their unlimited plan will be no more. This pretty much puts their pricing in lockstep with plans from Bell, which illustrates the consequence of the CRTC’s decision: mandating usage-based billing on the reseller ISPs effectively eliminates competition for the large ISPs. Providers like TekSavvy can no longer differentiate themselves from the big boys in any significant way.

While the official line is that this is a measure to prevent “bandwidth hogs” from congesting the networks, there is speculation that this is actually the big telecoms attempting to tighten their grip on old media business models. After all, these companies also own companies that produce content and provide satellite and cable TV services. It’s not hard to see that Rogers, for example, might be interested in pulling the plug on Netflix’s on-demand TV and movie service. Why pay for deluxe digital cable plans with HD channels ranging from $50-100 (separately from any Internet plan and with the cost of the receiver) when you can pay Netflix $7/month to stream a growing library of shows and movies in HD (plus many, many more in SD) over the Internet connection you’re already paying for?

(Oh, hey, did you know that Rogers has an online on-demand service? Did you know that Bell’s got one too? How very interesting… I wonder if they’ll apply the caps and usage billing to those, too. Food for thought.)

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Netflix is worried about this. But Netflix is just the tip of the iceberg. Video and teleconferencing via Skype, iChat, and Facetime. Software delivery via Steam, Playstation Network, and the shiny new Mac App Store. This decision will have a greatly negative impact on innovative Internet services and threatens to set back our technological progress by at least a decade. We can literally get better prices for data transfer by putting our data on expensive solid-state hard drives and shipping it to its destination, even if we throw out the hard drives afterward!

So what do we do? I’ve written my MP. I’ve signed the “Stop the Meter” petition, which has soared into the hundreds of thousands of signatures. You should do the same. This nonsense cannot be allowed to continue. We already pay some of the most exhorbitant rates for some of the worst Internet plans in the developed world, mobile and broadband. We cannot let ourselves fall behind while the rest of the world, with access to the seemingly unlimited potential of the world’s high-speed Internet infrastructure, dances circles around us.

This is an anti-competitive cash grab and must be stopped.

Being able to play Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice is actually one of the main reasons I bought a PS3 and, to this point, I’ve invested about 30 hours of my life to it. At the rate I’m going, the game will probably claim another 20-30 before I get to the end of the main story, let alone the post-game side quests and power levelling. That’s considerably longer than the offline, single-player experience of most of the PS3′s top titles… combined.

The protagonist for this chronicle of the Netherworlds is Mao, the son of the Overlord (and Dean) of Evil Academy. Mao has been consuming everything imaginable about “Heroes”, humans who according to legends told in the Human World have gone toe to toe with Overlords and prevailed. He hopes that this research will eventually lead him to the power to kill his father. Why? Because Dad stepped on his “Slaystation Portable” and he lost 4 million hours worth of save data.

That’s just the beginning of Disgaea 3′s relentless mockery of stale Japanese RPG conventions. Even more than the first two games, Disgaea 3 is filled with irreverent humour, game and pop culture references… I even found a nod to a Japanese Internet video meme the other day. (Link goes to NicoNico Video, which is in Japanese and requires a login. Sorry but 4Kids had the original video taken down on YouTube). Most of all, Disgaea 3 is very much willing to poke fun at itself and its predecessors, with characters often breaking the fourth wall to get a chuckle out of the fans.

To balance with the humour, Disgaea 3′s story explores interesting grey areas in the ideas of “Good” and “Evil” through the mixed-up morality of the Evil Academy. Unlike schools you and I know, honour students of the demon school actually never attend class, instead plotting various evils to unleash upon their classmates while avoiding doing “good” things like greeting each other, following proper etiquette, and doing volunteer work. But yet Mao desires the power of the Hero to crush his father, which requires him to reconcile his desire to be the Netherworld’s greatest honour student with his desire to open his heart to friendship, love, and justice, the cornerstones of a hero’s power but also of the lifestyle of a delinquent.

While Disgaea fans do love the stories and characters, the true source of the series’ staying power is its incredibly deep strategy RPG gameplay. The format is fairly simple: you deploy a group of up to 10 demons, humans, and monsters and position them on a 3D map to deliver some serious hurt to your enemies, ganging up on them with Team Attacks, unleashing devastating special moves, and taking advantage of special properties of the terrain to gain unfair advantages. But all of this has been seen before. Here’s the special Disgaea twist: the game provides a number of ways of greatly increasing the levels and stats of your units and there’s virtually no cap on the power that you can gain as you cheat the system to become more and more powerful. Even when the main story is finished, there are still plenty of challenges left to test your mettle and let you prove that you have indeed become the most powerful demon of all. Characters can reach as high as level 9999 and individual stats can reach into the millions. The most devastating single attacks on record are on the order of hundreds of billions of points of damage. Hundreds of billions.

Disgaea’s “Item World” allows you to delve inside of one of the vast array of items that you collect throughout the game to play randomly generated maps against increasingly powerful enemies. While some might find this to be an absolutely appalling instance of grinding as a game mechanic, the Item World solves a problem that many strategy RPGs have: levelling up your characters and making money can be incredibly tedious and demoralizing. In the Item World, each map that you clear raises your item one level, raising its power well beyond its base stats. So now you’re not just making money and levelling up your characters, you’re also making the items that they use much more powerful to gain a distinct advantage against your enemies! Ten maps inside of a 30,000 Hell (the currency of the Netherworld) sword can make it even more deadly than one you’d buy for 100,000 Hell.

That’s just one of a number of elements you must master to gain ultimate power. Tens and even hundreds of hours can be spent after the credits roll to create your ultimate team. And once you do, there are more than enough nasty side quest bosses to try them against? How nasty? Try 400 million HP and about 75 million in every stat nasty. It’s a long climb to the top, if you want to take it. Or you can just enjoy the main story and move on to something else afterward.

To put it briefly, if you’re a fan of the series, Disgaea 3 is hands-down the best Disgaea ever. That is, until Disgaea 4 hits shelves I imagine. Each instalment of the series has come with improvements to the formula to streamline the experience and make it even more fun to play than the last and Disgaea 3 is absolutely no exception. For the same reason, if you’ve given Disgaea a miss until now Disgaea 3 might be your best point of entry to the series. Here are some of the things I appreciate that Disgaea 3 has tweaked from the previous two games:

• The game ramps up much faster than the previous two in terms of levelling up. This lets you progress through the story and get newly created characters up to speed more quickly, which used to be an absolute chore in Disgaea 1 and 2.
• The master/pupil system has been replaced with participation in school clubs. The leader of the club receives extra gain to his/her stats from the others in the club. This is slightly less tedious than the previous two games, where the relationship is set from character creation and can never be changed. The clubs system also helps with character development and levelling, as some clubs confer bonuses to the experience points, Hell, and mana that its members gain.
• Mana is much more useful. Before it could only be used for proposing various topics with the assembly, for creating characters, and for reincarnating yourself. Now mana can be used to learn new skills, boost old ones, and learn character- and class-specific traits called “Evilities” that open up a whole new dimension of character development.
• Geo crystals are now geo blocks. There are now many more ways to interact with geo effects, including placing same-coloured geo blocks together to cause them all to disappear and standing on geo blocks (even without an associated coloured panel!) to take advantage of their effects.
• The Item World has never been so interesting. “Mystery Rooms” appear relatively often to add variety to the otherwise monotonous dungeon crawl. These include one-time opportunities to shop for very rare items, jumping around a map to collect treasure chests, fighting a powerful monster to gain its valuable treasure, recolouring your characters (no need to reincarnate!), and an old fortune teller who further increases the potential of the item you’re exploring. It also seems as though the random map generator has been improved. Disgaea 3′s Item World maps seem to have less of the undesirable features that made the Item Worlds of previous games tedious to play, like completely unreachable areas/monsters and incredibly high peaks to climb.
• This is an incredibly personal point but getting an Archer is no longer as tedious as it was in the previous two games and with some retooling of their special attacks and stats, they are much more useful than before. Archers are my favourite female class in the series, your mileage may vary.

Really, the most scathing criticism that could be made of Disgaea 3 is that while it has definitely updated the gameplay and story-telling elements, the graphics are still very much like the previous entries in the series, despite the massive processing power of the platform. Really, I don’t even consider that a fault of the game as I appreciate its retro sprites-on-3D style, but Disgaea 4 is planning to introduce HD sprites which will considerably improve the look of the game (apparently with the option to switch to the “old” style, just in case).

In short, if you like Japanese RPGs, try this game. If you like Disgaea games, this one is an absolute MUST. Seriously, I had trouble pulling myself away from the game for long enough to write this.

My writing seems to have improved considerably. I’ve found some styles and approaches that suit me and by all accounts my blogging has never been better. My mother recently urged me to write a book, though I really have nothing I want to publish and distribute to the world at large — that is, nothing that I’m not already publishing and distributing to the world at large right here. Improving my writing was my main goal in taking on this commitment and I’m happy with how I’ve progressed.

Engagement with my blog has increased. I work for a company that measures engagement with blog content via social media, so naturally I’ve been using our analytics product to measure engagement and our Facebook app to publish my content to and collect metrics from the lovely blue walled garden. Although by some standards it may be very small, my modest blog has received a great deal more engagement this month than it has in the last couple of months. In particular, I’ve seen more of my posts receive at least one comment. I love hearing from all of you and I hope you’ll continue reading my posts and sharing them with others in the future.

I really enjoyed it. I couldn’t get myself to blog much before because I rarely felt like I had anything worth publishing. But by committing to writing something everyday, I’ve realized that I had a lot more to write about than I thought, I just needed to put it all out there. For the first time in a long time, I really enjoyed blogging this month because I was doing it for my own sake and not as part of some “personal brand” or whatever marketing yourself to other people on the Internet gets called these days. I feel like what has come out of this month is a lot more genuine and I hope it shows.

What happens to this blog now? Well, it was difficult to squeeze it into every single day. Sometimes I’d be up past midnight writing a post and I’d back-date it to the previous day to keep it in sequence. I really shouldn’t do that anymore but at the same time I don’t want to go back to updating only very rarely. I’ll be looking for a happy medium. What this exercise has given me is momentum; I still have a couple more ideas for blog posts and I’m sure that once I write those there will be more. In short, I probably won’t update every day but expect to see new content considerably more often.

Thank you for reading.

Every so often I’ll pass by an EB Games or GameStop just to see what’s there, to see if they’ve got something that I really badly want to add to my collection. It is through this small ritual of mine that I’ve realized that the business of used games at these stores is truly sinister.

Firstly, let’s look at the price of used games to the end customer. If you look at a relatively recent title (one released in the past couple of weeks), you are saving maybe $3-5 off a new game. The used product tends to be in relatively new condition so that you almost can’t tell the difference (PROTIP: look for yellow tags). If you don’t think about it too much it’s actually a pretty sweet deal. Save a couple of dollars here, a couple of dollars there, and it adds up to big savings eventually. With the discount card, you can even get 10% off of used games.

I recently grabbed a used copy of “Tomb Raider Underworld” for about $10 (oh Lara, how far you have fallen). At that time, I got handed a little flyer with the store’s most wanted list. This was a list of games that EB Games and GameStop locations would pay top dollar for, where by “top dollar” they mean roughly a third of what you paid to grab it when it was brand new and just released, maybe even less. I even vaguely remember getting a phone call from an EB Games location after picking up a copy of Samurai Warriors 3 I’d pre-ordered to tell me about some trade-in offer. Really guys? I just bought the damn game! And I usually don’t buy something unless I intend to keep it for a long time. After all, there’s such a thing as game rentals. I’ve rented a couple of PS3 titles by mail with GameAccess. Why buy something that I don’t want to keep?

And let’s not forget that when it does come to new product, the stores have created a culture that pressures you into pre-ordering by selling only pre-ordered copies on the launch days. There have been many episodes of people walking into a store and seeing a copy of a game sitting right on the shelf but being told they can’t have it because somebody put down $5 (possibly less) about six months ago. That’s their copy sitting there, taunting you for daring to walk in on launch day without a pre-order.

So let’s connect the dots shall we? The stores are encouraging you to trade in games that were released merely days ago to give you a pittance (in comparison) of store credit towards other games, and they can sell those games that you give them at almost new prices. Combine that with the Cult of the Pre-order and you’ve got a clever business model: buy as few copies of new games from the manufacturer as you could possibly get away with, encourage people to trade those copies back in, which you buy from them for considerably less than the unit price you initially got them for. Then, sell those back to other gamers at “almost new” prices.

It’s an perpetual profit machine that is powered by repeated undercutting of new product. That being said, I don’t consider these practices to be unethical; it’s actually incredibly smart business that I just happen to strongly disagree with because when I truly love a game, I want to vote with my dollar. That means making sure that my dollars go to the people that matter, not into an infinite profit loop for large video game store chains. And even if I’m not the first one to say it, I think it’s worth saying again: if you truly want to show your love for the developers and publishers of the games you collect, buy them new and/or online so that the people who brought them to you are getting their cut. Used games aren’t bad for the industry, but their low prices might cause us to forget for a moment where those dollars are actually going and who truly profits off of those lower prices.

Me (left) and Dad (right), proudly wearing our mo's

On this day three years ago, not long after I’d started to settle into my cozy place in Mississauga, I received an urgent call from my mother. My father, who had long been fighting against esophageal cancer, had passed away. There is nothing, nothing in the world that prepares you for a moment like that. Even if you know that your loved ones have fought long and hard but that their strength won’t hold out and it is only a matter of time. Even if you know that all treatment options have been tried and have failed, and all that’s left is to care for and love them in their final days. Nothing prepares you to finally be cut away from them for good. The scar that leaves on your heart can take weeks, months, even years to heal.

That picture up there? That’s me on the left and Dad on the right, both wearing our moustaches proudly. He started growing his when he was 17 and he never stopped wearing it until chemotherapy tore it away from him. In a way it was his trademark. In the span of a month I could not possibly grow a moustache that epic. But dammit I’ve tried. I participated in Movember, so for this entire month I’ve been growing a moustache (and only a moustache) to raise awareness of and funds for research into prostate cancer, which according to many sources affects 1 in 6 men.

When you fight for a cause, it helps to remind yourself of what you’re fighting for. Yes, prostate cancer is not esophageal cancer, but let’s not split hairs here: I lost my old man to cancer and I wouldn’t wish the sadness, anger, frustration, and despair that moment filled me with on my worst enemy. And so, on the third anniversary of his passing and close to the end of the month of November, I implore you to please donate generously to my Mo Space and to those of all of the friends and family around you who are participating. We have come so far in understanding and developing advanced treatments for many cancers but even so we still have far to go.

Until we get to that point, I will don this moustache on this month every year, both for Movember and to keep my father in my heart, whose moustache was a symbol of his vitality, manliness, and prestige.

I previously mentioned that Final Fantasy VII sparked my love for Japanese RPGs. The game’s music was an integral part of that experience. I was so moved by the soundtrack that although I hadn’t been a fan of much music at all up to that point, I absolutely had to have a copy of it. I still own a copy of the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack and Reunion tracks, which were imported from Japan at considerable cost. I even decided at that time that I wanted to become a composer of video game music, to create something just as beautiful. I neither compose music nor develop video games; I’ve carved a much different path for myself. But that does not at all diminish the feelings that Final Fantasy’s music invokes for me.

Being a fan of video game music was a much weirder concept about 10 years ago, when I first fell in love with it. Video game music was just nonsensical bleeps and bloops to most people, which is ironic because some of the most memorable songs of our generation come from video games. Music from Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda is immediately recognizable. The director of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is rumoured to have written directly to Nintendo to ask permission to use Zelda music and sound effects in the film, calling them “the lullaby of our generation.”

And now there is a concert. Actually, not just a concert, a tour across the world. The Sony Centre was packed with people who, just like me, wanted to fully appreciate the music from this excellent series. The programme for tonight’s show featured songs across the entirety of Final Fantasy, from the very first game for NES all the way up to the latest online RPG, Final Fantasy XIV. Final Fantasy VI and VII, fan favourites, were very well represented but Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X also got some deserved nods (including a very well-executed arrangement of “To Zanarkand”). For a final special surprise, Nobuo Uematsu himself (who had been in attendance) was asked to join the choir to perform One-Winged Angel, the intense theme of the final battle with Sephiroth in FF VII. It was worth every dollar I paid for the ticket and worth every dollar I paid for the concert merchandise: two CDs and a poster (there was a T-shirt but I decided I didn’t really need one).

If I had to absolutely identify one bad point about the concert, it would be that Final Fantasy XII was left out completely. I can see why that might be the case: the soundtrack for FF XII is already very much orchestral, so there isn’t as much value in arranging it for live performance. I do hope that the game gets a couple of nods during other parts of the tour, though. Hitoshi Sakimoto did some excellent work there — coincidentally, he worked on Valkyria Chronicles as well.

And it isn’t just Final Fantasy’s music that has gotten broad enough appeal to warrant orchestra performances. Video Games Live is another tour featuring music from many other video games and will be in Toronto summer of next year (which I think will be their second or third time). Video game music has definitely come to be much more appreciated, just one more aspect of the shift in our society that has in many ways turned “geek” into “chic”.

My love affair with JRPGs started with the purchase of my Playstation and a copy of Final Fantasy VII. It was the first disc-based epic in a series that I’d largely ignored to that point. I bought it because it came highly recommended by the owner of the video game shop where I purchased my system. I hadn’t been an RPG fan previously (at all) but I trusted the man’s opinion and decided to give it a chance. Well, it goes without saying that I was incredibly impressed at the game and the ball just started rolling from there.

But looking at the current generation consoles, it seems that the Japanese RPG is becoming an endangered species. The Wii library has very little in JRPGs, though based on the mass exodus of third-party RPG developers from Nintendo after the jump from SNES to N64 — to say nothing of the jump from N64 to Gamecube — that was to be expected. While the PS2′s library is filled with many JRPGs, the genre has much less representation in the PS3 library. There are a few notable titles (which is more than I can say for the Wii) but in particular Final Fantasy XIII has left a rather sour taste in my mouth. The Xbox 360 is not even on my radar largely due to my seething hatred of almost everything Microsoft but also due to the fact that I see the library as basically an extension of PC games, which I’ve had little to do with. Apparently improvements have been made here, but I wouldn’t be able to say for certain.

(If you’d like to prove me wrong, I would love to see an annotated list of your favourite Japanese-developed RPGs for each of these systems, but I think the point still stands that none of the current generation systems have as plentiful a selection as the PS2. And for the record I’m willing to admit the Strategy RPG genre, too.)

So what was happened to this fan-celebrated genre?

The video gaming market has shifted significantly. The Japanese used to rule the industry with an iron fist but looking at some of the best titles of the current generation, more and more of them are being produced by Western studios. Nintendo has had a great deal of success handing some of their franchise titles over to a Western studio but the one they developed in tandem with a Japanese studio got some terrible reviews over the pond. Some of the best titles in PS3′s library are developed by Western studios. There has been a shift and Japanese developers are finding themselves scrambling to catch up on the world stage.

Why the sudden shift? Co-worker and best friend @maplealmond offered a very interesting theory: while Japanese developers have definitely ruled in the console market (which they also largely created), Western developers have always done better in PC gaming. As gaming consoles are now very close to PCs, those PC game sensibilities translate over to console gaming much better. Consoles have incredibly powerful graphics and processing power, Internet connectivity, and even hard drive storage. While Fallout 1 and 2 couldn’t have possibly been ported to the NES or SNES due to the large amount of storage needed just to save, Fallout 3 stands as one of the very best titles in the PS3 library and has won a number of “Game of the Year” awards, leading to a special “Game of the Year” edition with all of the downloadable content bundled in. The games are now being made on Western turf, so to speak.

Also, it is possible that the tastes of the market have changed, too. While I do love Valkyria Chronicles and the Disgaea series, I haven’t finished any of those games yet. Why? They all take way too long to get through, and it’s not even all the fun stuff. Japanese RPGs suffer from a “grinding” problem, sometimes requiring a great deal of repetition and administration to train your uber squad of heroes to own that boss who keeps on handing you your spleens on a silver platter. That might’ve been quite acceptable to me when I was young but as I’ve accumulated more responsibilities and obligations, it has become harder and harder to justify allocating precious leisure time to killing the same group of monsters over and over again to farm experience points.

(Valkyria Chronicles 1 suffers from a different problem: it won’t give me enough game to play, so I get inclined to switch to something else for shorter gaming sessions. If I’ve got an hour to spend gaming, I’m sure as hell not spending 30 minutes of it watching cut-scenes.)

Grinding is so endemic to the Japanese RPG experience that Disgaea’s main selling point is that it places almost no limits on how much you can grind to create the ultimate killing machine. Level 99? Try level 9999! Much of the “fun” of playing Disgaea is finding new and interesting ways of “cheating” the system (i.e. exploiting loop holes that developers purposefully left in the game) so that you can achieve your ultimate killing machine in 70 hours instead of 100. Really? I’m lucky if I can squeeze an hour or two of gaming into my day now. Games I want to play are released at a rate much higher than I can actually finish them and that means I’m inclined to play games that give me much more for my commitment. Is it possible that has the audience has grown up, they’ve also grown tired of the grind?

There are probably many more factors at play here. What do you think has affected the success of the JRPG in North America?