Legitimizing teaching

The ways in which Rome ran its state schools is indeed fascinating.

Though, more than anything, what had me widening my eyes as I read was how state funds were what legitimated the teaching profession.

As I've noted before, in Greece teaching was a last ditch career move (as it was throughout most of Rome's pre-fall existence). It was a poorly paid job and grouped with prostitution because teachers were being paid for a service. Land and goods were fine things to earn a living from, but services? Never!

Yet, it sounds as though Rome's designating things like academic chairs and having spots on the government payroll for a very small number of teachers made teaching enviable. Of course, these spots were truly far and few between - even Rome had a very limited number of such positions.

The whole situation reminds me of the current state of teaching in (at least) Ontario. There are just a few well-paying spots and thousands of people vying for them. Meanwhile, there are those teaching and tutoring on their own, just as there were in Rome, thus buttressing the comparison. Hopefully a barbarian invasion isn't what it takes to fix our current bout with employment issues in the teaching profession, though.

Throwaway characters

As I get further into River of Stars, I'm reminded of Infinite Jest. The plots of the two books are wildly different, their settings strike up a stark contrast, and the authors' writing styles are definitely at odds with one another (though also similar, at least in their using a distinct "oral storyteller" voice).

What really reminds me of Infinite Jest, though, is how Kay keeps introducing new characters (some of whom are only around for a chapter or less).

However, using these varied perspectives isn't working for me. As I read onward I'm interested in learning more about the world that Kay has created through the varied viewpoints in which he presents it, but aside from Ren and Lin I feel very little attachment to his characters. Conversely, I found myself getting invested in nearly all of Infinite Jest's characters.

The reason for this investment being that Wallace really shows you his characters' inner workings through the ticks and habits that each had. Unsurprisingly, Kay does that quite well with Lin and Ren, but the other characters that are introduced just aren't clicking with me. They are, however, building the book's world quite nicely. Though I can't say that it's a grand new world with interesting people in it.

A missing rite?

No doubt Marrou's guess that the divide between youth and adulthood goes back to Indo-European societies is close to the truth. It's not really all that curious as to why human life is divided into these two parts. Humans love stories, and stories always have turning points. Plus, the oldest stories that survive are predominantly heroic stories. Stories that fit Joseph Campbell's model of the Hero's Journey (a plot outline that fits very snugly over modern classics like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, and so on).

Campbell's model is also a map of the coming of age story, as the hero moves from his/her hometown towards the unknown, eventually returning to that hometown a changed person. Having left a child and returned an adult. The division of life into youth and adulthood is definitely deeply entrenched.

This brings to mind all of the rituals that cultures and civilizations practice to mark the entrance of a child into adulthood, and that the West really doesn't have any such thing. You might consider moving out of your parents' house the North American rite. It takes a person out of their comfort zone and faces them with a whole set of unknowns.

In fact, moving out could well be the ritual. Why else would there be such a reaction to the struggles of the millenials and their returning to live with their parents again? I mean, setting aside the concrete reasons people might give, moving back in with your parents could all too easily be seen as a refusal of the adulthood initiation ritual.

The calming of the river

Two chapters into River of Stars' second part, I'm feeling quite calmed. It could be that I simply didn't follow enough of the political goings on of the first part, or that the time jump that happened in the middle of it threw me for a loop, but the second part's big picture is clearer to me. That is, the second part's larger plot arc (which Kay is building up with several shorter ones, as he did in part one), is clearer to me than the first part's. In short, I'm pretty sure that Ren is planning to strike a blow for the peasants of the area.

Being able to see what's going on here has helped me to get over the shock of having the book's two main characters separated in this way. From what I'd read about the book before picking it up, I'd thought that Ren's and Lin's stories are tightly intertwined. This might be the case in the book's last section, or maybe this interconnection feeds into some larger reveal closer to the book's conclusion, but right now it still bothers me. Mostly because it forces one story to stop while the other catches up.

Actually, if Kay was trying to make the two characters' arcs seem like they were running temporally parallel, it seems like the goal is just too lofty. Both characters are from wildly different socio-economic classes, and, shy of some reference to the assassin that was sent to kill Lin, I can't come up with a tidy way for Kay to let the reader know that these two parts events are happening simultaneously. Currently the two feel worlds apart - and not in the same way Aomame and Tengo were in 1Q84.

I will say that leaving the time between Ren's joining the bandits and his becoming a respected member of their ranks unexplained is a good move. Whatever he experienced on the road to his present, seeing it come out in the way that Ren acts, reacts, and thinks is much more rewarding than being regaled with the tale of a swashbuckling young man fighting to gain the respect of his fellow bandits and the area's citizens.

A romantic notion

Influence is a curious thing. On the personal level, it's plain unpredictable where a person will gather it from. When it comes to larger trends and fields of study or art, it's still wild, but at least hemmed in by sheer size.

For example, just how much influence did Roman legal education have on medieval romance? From what he writes in the History of Education in Antiquity, you'd think the answer is "quite a lot." At first brush, this is a tempting idea, too. Practice cases in Roman legal training were paradoxical hypothetical situations that sound like arcs from modern soap operas (which probably grew out of medieval romances in some way).

The connection between the roots of genre fiction and Roman legal training also make me wonder if that is why so many law students/lawyers get into genre fiction (Guy Gavriel Kay and Terry Brooks among them). Fantasy and science fiction are the modern day equivalents of medieval romance (knights, court intrigue, quests, magic, et c.) after all.

However. Given that many of Menander's plays have plots that are as closely knit as Rome's practice legal cases, Marrou is probably overstating the influence of Rome's legal training on medieval romance. Plus, ancient Greek and Roman novels are known to have existed, the plots of which could probably be revived in Greek soap operas without anyone noticing.

The reappearance of Ren

So Ren Daiyan finally reappears in the second chapter of River of Stars' second part. And Kay drops us right into the middle of his story.

Ren's a full-fledged bandit at this point, but retains his education and is still in touch with his father. Ren's also looking to right the world's wrongs, but in the more immediate present he and fellow bandit Ziji have gone to Chunyu to gather information. Kay doesn't explain Ren's trip beyond that. But such simple motivation is fine, since Kay continues to sketch wonderful characters as he guides his readers through this part of Kitai. Not to mention the chase scene that seems imminent.

From what I've read of him, one thing has become clear to me about Kay (and maybe fantasy writers more generally). Plenty of dialogue means plenty of motion. The reason why I feel that a chase is imminent as Ren and Ziji get help from two children is because this part of the chapter is almost entirely dialogue, whereas the rest of it is description. Alternating between these two does a lot for a book's pacing, it seems.

It might seem like I'm just stating the obvious here, but what the patterns of dialogue and description mean and how they affect pacing are small, but important things to learn. As a writer, pacing is essential for keeping your readers interested, and as a reader, more can be taken from a book if you learn how to read its signals. If you're reading a first rate author, most of the time those signals will prove true and your anticipations will be rewarded, and a few rare times, they'll not be and your sense of wonder will be fully engaged. I have yet to see if Kay can be considered first rate on this count, but it seems likely.

Nonetheless, Kay's holding Ren's story back until part two makes it seem that River of Stars' parts should instead be separate books. However welcome it is, the shift between characters is still jarring.

Words well used

As Marrou makes clear in his writing about Roman education, rhetoric continued to be based on hard and fast rules and formulae. A good speech had specific parts and those parts could be filled out with particular elements appropriate to the occasion, audience, desired tone, and so forth.

Such attention to detail casts a pall of the magical over rhetoric, at least in my mind. Curiously enough, the same sort of attention was paid to Roman ritualistic magic. Just as an effective speech was described as having various sections, so too did the prescribed ritual for convening with some spirit or deity so as to request some favour or other. What this leaves me wondering is which came first?

Was Roman ritual magic (and the Greek version before it), basically a way to hold a conversation with some supernatural force, borne out of the political use of words? Or did those who were born with gilded tongues take what they had originally used for religious or occult purposes and turn it to the political at some point in ancient history?

Given the sacred power of rulers, I also wonder if somehow the magical and the political weren't more closely related at some distant point in human history. Perhaps at one time having a way with spoken words was viewed as a gift that entitled its wielders to hold power over others, on both a natural (if someone's persuasive, they're simply persuasive), and religious (their quick wits being viewed as a sign of a close and open connection to the divine) level.

Maybe, at some point in history, ritualistic magic and rhetoric were the same thing, understood as simply the use of words to affect the world around you. This could be closer to the truth than you might expect. After all, studies have shown that swearing when you hurt yourself eases the pain, so maybe whatever magic there was around words themselves in that distant past has persisted in some small way into our own world.

Still waiting on a promise's fulfilment

I understand that Guy Gavriel Kay is working with some heavy Chinese influences in River of Stars. But, so far, one idea that he has made extensive use of has been to the book's detriment: using a multitude of point of view characters, no matter how socially small they are at the time.

This bothers me because since the first few chapters of part one, I've come across nothing else about Ren Daiyan, the son of small town official who runs away and becomes a bandit. Since then Kay has introduced (as perspective/major characters) a poet, another official, that official's daughter, her husband, the Emperor of Kitai, the Deputy Prime Minister, his wife, an assassin, and a servant girl who effectively copies what the Deputy Prime Minister's recently deceased wife did when interacting with him to seduce him. Those last two have been featured in an average of 8 pages apiece.

I, along with millions of others, am eagerly awaiting the Winds of Winter (the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire). As such, I've had some experience reading books with multiple viewpoint characters.

And, to be honest, there's nothing wrong with any of Kay's characters.

But if the books' different parts can be compared to the acts of a play, I feel like part one, looking back from where I am enmeshed in part two, did very little work setting up any sort of premise. In fact, the first section of part two, where we see the Xioalu emperor thinking his way through the various trades and political allegiances of the lands of Kitai, Xioalu, and Kislik, establishes the world much more effectively in two pages than the whole of the book's first part.

What frustrates me about this lack of events in part one is that it makes the book feel like it has no momentum whatsoever. For 150 pages, very little actually happens in River of Stars' part one. In it, we're introduced to major characters, we see them live on and struggle as time jumps ahead from when Ren and Lin are children to when they're young adults, and we witness some political manoeuvrings along with their ripples.

But if you were to ask me what the book's plot is I would have to say that it's about an empire that is changing and how these changes effect people and politics. Anything that goes deeper will no doubt be dredged up later in the book, but aside from the characters and Kay's descriptive passages, I'm not sure that I would feel interested in reading on.

So far, if this book were a ring, it would be a lovely ring with a finely handcrafted setting complete with scrolls and tiny flowers, but the stone on it would be pyrite.

While things change, things stay the same

Literary scholars of Rome were the ancient analogues of modern day mega fans. The way Marrou notes these scholars' knowledge (including knowing the life of a character who appears in two lines of the Aeneid (Marrou 377)), they sound like they would have been trivia buffs extraordinaire.

But Marrou doesn't explicitly state that these scholars love their minutiae. Instead he frames their extensive knowledge as something that's the result of their love of learning for its own sake. This quality is admirable, but the sense that I get from Marrou's notes is that the majority of Romans frowned upon such practice. Why? Because it did nothing for the State.

I know that this is a relatively small point, but it sounds like this is another inheritance of the West care of Rome. Today, as then, it's easy to dismiss English Lit as just learning for learning's sake (and not so easy to defend your choice to get two degrees in it). But studying literature now, as then, imbues people with a greater sense of humanity. But my fellow arts majors and I don't need to sound this cry alone, Science is finally standing up for her older sister as more and more studies show the psychological and social benefits of reading fiction.

A broken promise?

I'm still not sure if River of Stars has a single narrator that simply speaks in a different voice for different characters, but I realized something while reading today. The way that Kay slips between perspective characters reminds me of R. Scott Bakker's work. Maybe this shuffling POV is just a trait of contemporary Canadian fantasy. Whether it is or isn't, though, it's greatly appreciated.

The mark of a great storyteller is his or her ability to bring a story's characters, setting, and plot to life. The narrative style that Kay uses does this excellently. Though I worry that by the end of the book it will have become too exhausting or overreaching, leaving the story's delivery overwrought. So far there aren't any concrete signs of this sort of overloading of perspectives. However, the way that the book starts makes it seem that it follows a boy and a girl's life. At this point though, the girl has received far more attention.

My problem with this isn't that there isn't a gender balance (there isn't) or that the girl's plotline isn't very interesting (it is). My problem with the current pacing of the two intertwined stories is that at this point in the story Kay's promise of two main characters (a promise I found implied in the book's first two chapters) does not look like it's going to get fulfilled. Of course, 400+ pages do leave a lot of room for it to be.

Origins of the Western canon

The root of the Western canon is discovered! Like so many other aspects of modern curricula and modern modes, it goes back to Rome. Specifically, first century Rome when the fashion in literary circles swung from studying living poets to looking much further back to the early Latin poets (your Virgils and your Terences).

As I noted before, there's a certain arrogance inhering in studying works of your own time. As I type that, the fact that modern education actually teaches a lot of contemporary writing comes to mind. But under current circumstances and in our current system, it's not arrogant to use modern writing in teaching. Why? Because there's just so much of it.

Antiquity was a great stranger to the printing press. Scrolls and codexes took time to make, along with various resources of great value. People had to be sure that they wanted to write down what they were writing down because it might well cost them an otherwise valuable sheep or scroll of papyrus (not to mention the ink and time needed).

In a way, then, authors had to have a high opinion of themselves (or others had to, at least) to go ahead and write. It could be argued that the "traditional" publishing model is a continuation of this sort of valuation before writing, only the value isn't necessarily of the materials it takes to make a book, but rather the returns that a third party can expect on the content (and context) of a book.

Because we have so much writing in print and publicly available today, I think there's an unspoken understanding that no single perspective can be privileged over another (the foundation of any literary canon).

All writers (and all perspectives) worth studying have insightful things to say, and so the onus of arrogance is really taken off of the society at large and put onto the individual instructor when modern works are taught. Of course, at this point in the conversation "arrogance" becomes the wrong word. "Confidence" or "interest" are better - "passion," even.

After all, the massive variety of great works across genres and forms works as a silent rust that's settled onto the Western canon. And rust never sleeps.

Who's telling this tale anyway?

Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars is difficult for me to judge. It's a fantastic book, as of page 150, but I'm not sure about the book's narrator. That is, I'm not familiar enough with Kay's books to say whether or not this narrator is especially tailored to his attempt at Chinese history-inspired fantasy, or if it's just how his narrator always is.

Based on what I recall of the first few chapters of Kay's Tigana, this narrator's quite different. If memory serves, Tigana was written in the same way that most epic fantasy is written now. It has various point of view characters and the different characters each have their own voice come through in their respective chapters' narration.

To some extent, the same thing is happening in River of Stars, with one twist: the book reads like it's narrated by a single person who imitates the point of view characters' voices. The difference may be subtle, but the impression that I'm left with is that of a well-versed story teller putting on voices for each member of its cast of characters instead of one who gets lost in those characters and their points of view.

To concretize this a bit, what makes River of Stars different from, say, one of the books in A Song of Ice and Fire is that its narrator seems to have some sort of motive. Whomever Kay's narrator is, it relates everything as if he or she was there and watching, observing, as if it were some omnipresent entity who will later use its observations to judge those it observes.

Slaves, students, and you

Although he doesn't come out and say anything about it plainly, I'm starting to wonder where Marrou stands on the matter of slavery. When he writes of Roman slavery practices he seems to romanticize them. As he describes it, the Romans treated their slaves fairly well, though covering them extensively isn't part of Marrou's work in the History of Education in Antiquity.

Nonetheless, that slaves and their masters would share common interests and hold conversations on these topics, that they would take on the role of teachers (again, a profession despised and of low esteem, as in ancient Greece), and get to be close enough to their charges to be their moral instructors makes Roman slavery sound not half bad. Of course, slaves would have had no rights, owned no property or land, and been largely disregarded in public forums. I'm sure a fair few members of Generation Y feel that they can relate.

This romantic image of the slave and master getting along swimmingly is bolstered by the romantic passage from an ancient Roman text book that chronicles a day in the life of a Roman student. The account has some large silences and the student it chronicles is almost as upbeat about things as announcers in 1940s PSAs.

What's a little worrying, though, is that Marrou doesn't analyze this account as much he should. Though, writing in those same 1940s no doubt meant taking historical evidence at a much cleaner face value than historians are expected to today. This slips in analysis is still troubling, though, since everything else that I've come across in the book is quite firmly grounded.

Notes on alchemy

Strangely, the work of finding alchemy recipes in Dragon Quest IX is quite streamlined. The first batch of them are found in Coffinwell, a town that you access after you can first get the alchemy pot (the "Krak Pot"). I was completely expecting that you'd find all sorts of recipes in all of the game's towns. Though I was also expecting the recipes to be found individually. Instead, when you find a book of alchemy you get anywhere between three to six recipes. This really speeds up their acquisition.

It's also interesting that the majority of recipes that I've found so far are for items that can be bought. Maybe this is just because I was a bit slow in getting the Krak Pot, just picking it up after arriving in Alltrades Abbey. That is, the part of the game's world where the first fygg is found.

Instead of offering a way to get ahead with your equipment, from the recipes I've seen so far, alchemized equippables seem primarily to be another way to customize your outfits. Though it's also how you get the best equipment in the game - some way down the road, of course.

Item

Aside from the three weapons you find in the towers, I'm not sure why Pandora's Tower has treasure chests. Their contents are rare items, sure, but I can't see why those items couldn't just be dropped by enemies on very rare occasions.

Actually, when I was last in the Ironclad Turret I fought enemies that dropped nothing at all.

I'm  not sure if this happened because their carcasses vanished while they were off screen, or if they were just item-drop duds. Not getting anything for my troubles (this was in the room with those wall-crawling, salamander-like creatures and an armoured servant beast) was mildly annoying, though. Especially since one of the deadbeat dead beasts was the servant beast - so I may have lost out on some quality beast flesh.

At least it turned out that the chest I had missed in the Crimson Keep was a Shard of Divinity. I'm down to my last one, and have almost nothing in the way of curatives. As a result of this state of my inventory (and my reluctance to back track for more curatives) quick escapes are going to be a major part of my strategy as I make my way through the rest of the Ironclad Turret.

The size of the world

Now that the game's opened up to some extent, Dragon Quest IX feels almost overwhelming. 

When I was given Xenoblade Chronicles as a gift and played a few hours into it, I was floored. There's just so much stuff in that game. There's an unbelievably huge world to travel, a whole network of relationships to tend to, and an item system that's simply extensive. At least, that's the impression I was left with after those first few hours of play. 

Dragon Quest IX now feels similar, but mostly in terms of the size of its world. I am definitely glad that the teleportation spell "Zoom" costs 0 MP. 

But Dragon Quest IX also has an alchemy system. So, as seems to be the case with Xenoblade Chronicles, and is the case with Pandora's Tower, inventory management is likely to make up a considerable chunk of the game. So far, alchemizing things simply gets you stronger items, and helps you to solve some quests. But I wouldn't put it past the game's developers to get you to combine items to move the plot forward at a point or two down the road.

Aside from that vague sense of fetch quest-foreboding, the game really feels vast. The cause of this sense of enormity is the way that the overworld is broken into several separate maps. This, along with the Starflight Express' basically being a warp point rather than a proper vehicle, works to make the world feel huge. It's not just something that can be contained in one map screen, or trudged across, oh no. 

It's likely that this overworld sprawl was necessary to keep within the DS' limitations. But, those limitations paradoxically give rise to a game world that feels much larger than it would were it just another of the continuous, rolling overworlds featured in most 16-bit era J-RPGs.

One good playwright brings forth another

After reading through Norma Miller's collection of Menander's plays I feel like I need to brush up my Shakespeare.

Both of these authors' plays are still relevant, in spite of time. But both also have elements that seem odd or even uncomfortable to us.

Shakespeare has his tween-age weddings and near cast-wide die offs. Menander has a whole other culture's references (are cooks still stereotyped as thieves?), and quite a bit of casual rape.

That is, rapes are central to quite a few of his plots, and more often than not the raped woman ends up  marrying her rapist. But she does so silently - neither she nor the society within the plays comment. If anything, this scenario is practicallly presented as the norm. It's as if it were an ordinary way for people to wind up married. That makes it especially disconcerting.

That's what makes me curious about Shakespeare's plays. They were written hundreds rather than thousands of years ago, but Elizabethan culture is quite different from our own. Surely, Shakespeare's plays have something of their own that makes us truly uncomfortable.

As per this specific collection of Menander's works, it was definitely made with specialists in mind. Miller constantly references scholarly works, and subjects the odd part or two of a play to a general cultural/histotical analysis. She clearly put this collection together for those who already know Menander, but if you just want to read his plays then using this book is a fine way to do so.

A literature of one's own

Rome's pride can't be underestimated. But, the concept of living writers of classics - at least in the ancient world, where the term carries real weight - is downright arrogant. That there were such writers really underscores how Rome raced to catch up to the Greek culture it so secretly admired and sought to imitate. Marrou doesn't mention anything about the Romans seeking to outstrip Greek literature, but they clearly really wanted their own.

Part, if not all, of this desire stemmed from the Romans' project of developing a uniquely Roman literature. It simply would not do to have Rome's heroes quoting the Greek classics when they did momentous things, after all.

In some ways a national literature is definitely appealing. All the more is a worldwide literature. But the latter is far less possible than the first when literacy isn't a close guarded trait of society's upper echelons. Though any literature coming from just one part of society isn't likely to be that resonant with the whole.

In so far as his focus is education, and the working classes of people didn't usually get much of that, Marrou's book is free from having to react to any calls for social history. Nonetheless, I can't help but wonder what the common Romans thought of the importance of Roman literature. Did they even care?

New tower, new arms

When I first played A Link to the Past, I was terrified of fighting the Grey Ball and Chain Trooper that guards Zelda. An enemy with a ranged attack that I can't block or effectively dodge? That's madness! Then I discovered that a few hurled jars put the fiend to rest. Unfortunately, in the Iron Turret there are no jars.

The Iron Turret is the next tower in Pandora's Tower. So far, it seems like a bit of a retread of the first tower, at least in its look. Though there are the added mechanisms and gears. It's not quite a Steampunk tower, but it comes close. Along with the new look, comes a new breed of beast.

By this point in the game you've already encountered armoured servant beasts. However, up to this point they've just come in groups of one and have a harmless, melee-range, lance hand.

In the Ironclad Turret these armoured servant beasts get a bit of an upgrade.

Now, they're packing morning-star-like weapons - weapons with serious range. Plus, they seem to come almost exclusively in pairs. Needless to say, there was some trash talk when I faced off against the first couple.

However, along with trapping you in a narrow area with this ball-on-chain-swinging duo the developers over at Ganbarion give you one bit of slack. In the far corner of the room is a chest. In that chest you'll find the "Military Scythe." Its range doesn't quite match the beasts', but it's a welcome cross between the Athosian Sword's power and the Twinblades' speed with a bit of reach thrown in for good measure. Plus, because it's a scythe, Aeron swings it in arcs - meaning that you can hit both beasts in one go.

So that scythe is a very welcome scythe indeed. Maybe it'll even figure into this tower's master. Though that might make it too easy to compare this game to those in the Zelda series.

'Gotta heed the call/of magic Dragon Balls shiny Fyggs'

I'm sure that Dragon Quest IX has more in it than what now seems like its prologue showed, but the story's taken a turn for the predictable. It's become the plot to Dragon Ball - I need to go around the world (or, as the game's angels call it, "The Protectorate") to collect the seven lost fyggs of Yggdrasil, the world tree.

Nested within this plot downturn, is promise of something twisty and cosmic down the way though. For your main character has a dream while sleeping under the world tree. In this dream you see two forces battling for the fate of the mortal world - and it seems that one of them has implored you to collect the seven fyggs. So, at some point, you might wind up fighting god, or whatever the game's "Almighty" really is.

At any rate, the game does a nice job of keeping the enormous feeling of the mortal world once you return to it. You're given a spell that teleports you to previously visited towns. And you're more or less given a vehicle - except that where it can land is extremely limited. Once again, promises are being made. Hopefully the game makes good on them.

Taking it to the streets

I know that ancient Greece regarded the home as private space and the marketplace, the street, as public space. I know that these divides were fairly strict. I also know that along with the house being regarded as their realm, popular thinking dictated that children and women were best neither seen nor heard.

Despite all of this, it still seems weird to me that the settings for all of Menander's plays seem to be streets. Specifically, they're mostly streets just out front of two central characters' houses. Ancient Greek theatre was minimalist (as far as I know), but even so it's downright distracting that simply a street in front of peoples' houses could be the setting for so many plays.

Yet, considering the content of these plays, I find myself less and less surprised. Public spaces are spaces in which news trades hands and people from different houses interact and conflict. Those are the essential elements of all of Menander's plays. Thus, Menander's setting his plays on streets makes sense. Not to mention the importance of misunderstanding to most of the comedy of his works and how much of that can be had when news and gossip trade hands.

Nonetheless, I'm left amazed that someone who reused an aspect of successful plays was able to remain popular. Nowadays, if we find a lack of imagination in an author's works we call him/her out on it, myself included.

Theories rising from the ashes of the Crimson Keep

Aeron's footsteps as he races up the path to the observatory entrance sound like the ticks of a clock. Since the last few times I've run that way, the curse's gauge has been under 1/4 and the time in the towers beforehand was harrowing so his footsteps had my heart racing. I was also playing in the dark which may have drawn me into the game's atmosphere a bit more than usual.

Not that the fight with the Crimson Keep's master could do anything but.

When you come across the note about it and find out that it's invincible when it has its flames you know you're going to be hard pressed throughout.You know that you'll be sweating it - for sure. I definitely did.

But, aside from the appropriately frantic nature of the fight, it was much more straightforward than previous masters have been. You toss the chain into either of the master's arms or head, pull until it snaps back (somehow extinguishing the flames) and repeat until the beast's been put out. At that point you rush in, hook into its exposed flesh and pull for dear life. The master's ability to re-ignite in the middle of this process nicely complicates things and nearly brings the battle to where it would require you to execute your tactics nearly perfectly, but the battle's pace never gets to that point. The fact that you can stop the mid-bout reignition processes has to be thanked for that.

What comes next is the usual stuff. Elena has her dream, wonders what it means, and then you get the chance to gear up before heading to the next tower. My theory about the family that Elena sees in her dream is that the parents have sold their son to be made into the final master. Horrible, yes, but not outside the realm of this game, I think.

There is an additional scene wedged into that series of events, though. Late at night we see Elena waking from a nightmare, counting herself lucky that she didn't hurt Aeron. The camera then shifts over to him and we see him wince and grit his teeth before the scene ends and the game jumps to morning.

Sadly, there's been no other mention of the "Other World" below the towers. Currently, my theory is that it has something to do with the old homeland of, or possibly was/is the land promised to, the wandering Vestra. Apparently these people were exiled from their homeland centuries previous to the game's action and Elyria made a contract with them, promising a new homeland.

Only time - or the ticking of Aeron's footsteps - will tell whether my crazy theories are right or wrong.

A Roman extrapolation

If what Marrou writes of in regards to the Roman tradition's single-mindedness and practicality still holds water then it says a lot about modern culture. Particularly, it says a lot about the sort of Christianity that took root in most of Europe and later spread through the rest of the world and why it's so slow to accept social change and progress.

Apparently, much of the education in early Rome concentrated on practical things. There was no high-falutin ideal that students were chasing, nor were students being raised into men rather than nurtured as children as was the case with the ancient Greek systems. Instead, Roman pupils were taught about things like husbandry, medicine, and law. They were instructed in subjects that pertained to the everyday and to the sorts of problems that those who were formally educated ("squires, gentlemen farmers," as Marrou calls them on page 323) were likely to face: How to make money from the land you owned, how to treat slaves and underlings to maximize the work they could do, and how to deal with other members of society.

These subjects were apparently steeped in tradition, ways that worked in the past were handed down as, well, law.

Marrou doesn't get much into the "why" of Roman moral education beyond simply noting that it rose out of the practical. But whatever its origins, the early Romans seem like they were much less concerned with moral abstraction than the ancient Greeks were. Now, since this moral practicality is to be found at the outset of Roman civilization, and Rome (if Marrou still holds true) held tradition in the highest esteem it makes sense that Christianity as adapted by Rome would hold to the same sort of morality.

I can't help but wonder then, if after existing in this traditional society for centuries what would later become Western Europe's Christianity was just too single-minded to change and instead had to splinter to cater to changes in society.

Forced into a new tack

Round two with the Ragin' Contagion saw me put it to rest. With the sickness sealed, Dragon Quest IX continued onwards. Now I'm back up in the Observatory - the game's sub-heaven. That is, the game's cosmology is laid out in a way similar to Norse mythology where there's the earth below (Midgard), the realm of the gods (Asgard) and then a realm between them (Alfheim). There are six other worlds in Norse mythology, but just between the three in Dragon Quest IX (the world below, the Observatory, and realm of the Almighty) the game gives me a feeling of enormity all the same.

Backtracking a bit, though, the second fight with the Ragin' Contagion got me thinking. I can't tell if my level grinding helped since the battle seemed as long as it did before. However, that time spent away from the boss fight got me to change my strategy. Rather than going all out offensively, I distracted the two-turn-in-one having monster by upping my own stats, forcing him to use one of his turns to bring them back down.

Disappointingly, the whole tension and "Coup de Grace" things remain mysteries to me. I guess it's a number that goes up as characters are attacked, but my main character definitely took enough damage to merit such an attack, yet it never opened up.

Nonetheless, I count a game successful if it forces me to shift my battle strategy - especially since Dragon Quest IX has been a mostly classic J-RPG experience thus far. Plus, given that the game pretty much spells out the need to distract the Ragin' Contagion from his set strategy when it teaches you to provoke enemies with a book written in a Cajun accent, it's great that an alternative strategy works just as well.

Away game special: Matter for a retrial?

What I wrote yesterday about Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies still stands. It's one stylish game that really makes great use of the 3DS' capabilities. Except for the 3D. That's just a bit above the standard.

However, there's a recurring issue with the game's substance.

As an interactive novel, two elements essential to this game's success are how the story develops through dialogue and its words themselves. The former element is fine: The game's dialogue is what you'd expect of a fine anime's great translation. However, the game's text reads like it was rushed through editing.

In some blocks of text words are repeated, verbs are doubled, or auxiliary words are outright missing. What's particularly disappointing about the game's text is that these errors recur with enough regularity to notice them. But, they're also rare enough to not detract too much from plain enjoyment of the game. This is especially true if you're a huge fan of the series, as my co-player is.

Nonetheless, it's disappointing that these errors exist in such a text-heavy game. The fact that Dual Destinies is an eShop exclusive doesn't help. If this game's text is representative of what we can expect from future text-heavy, eShop exclusives, then maybe Nintendo (or maybe just Capcom) isn't ready for the speedy publication that digital games entail.

Agriculture and aristocracy

Reading that Roman culture grew out of a community of farmers, as opposed to ancient Greek culture's growing out of the aristocratic/heroic tradition really makes me wonder. Did the Romans create such a vast empire because their culture's origin was simply more vulnerable than tghe Greeks'?

Maybe the Greeks of antiquity just weren't cut out for such an empire because of their focus on the development of a "whole man." That is, a person who was both physically and mentally fit - but not with one or the other at the fore. No, their ideal, according to Marrou, was to have these two aspects of the human person in balance. In short, the Hellenistic Greeks wanted to transcend the mundane and waken from the world of shadows to the world of Forms. Though, that transcension was regarded as an end in itself. The Romans on the other hand always had their eyes on the Empire and Rome's glory (and, later, early Christian ideals).

Once again, maybe that difference comes from the two's very different origins. With origins in agriculture and labour the early Romans would be interested in keeping their traditions alive and sticking close together. As those who lived without the luxury of slaves or a lofty social position, they would likely be left feeling quite vulnerable otherwise. Such values would then make their way into the Empire because of its emphasis on maintaing tradition.

So perhaps, however cyclical the process, the Romans were simply bound from the start to achieve what they did.

Away game special: A stylish turnabout

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies is an incredible improvement over the first few entries in the series. It looks really slick with all of its 3D sprites and hand-drawn cutscenes. Its music sounds smooth. But its voices don't really match what I'd expected of recurring characters like Phoenix Wright himself.

The game still plays like an interactive novel, but because of its 3DS sheen, it comes across as much more of a game. That graphics and sound can transform something as simple as a story told linearly with periodic breaks for interaction really says something about the power of what makes a game a game. On the one hand it makes things like ebooks with soundtracks seem like the first step towards a branch of interactive storytelling that could see things like Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Arthur C. Clarke's Stranger in a Strange Land get turned into novel-like games.

Of course, Dual Destinies is also a reflection of the power of the 3DS. Most of the games in the series that came before it were up-ports from the GBA to the DS so their graphics and music were less than impressive. Plus, they were also rather short. If the first case in Dual Destinies is any indication, then the rest of the game will be pretty lengthy - a quality that's also thanks to the game's being made for the 3DS rather than the GBA.

Away Game Special: Comet Comments

The prankster comet system in Super Mario Galaxy 2 is something of an improvement over the first game's. I don't say this because the challenges they offer are any more balanced, but because you need to actually collect an item to activate them and they stick around until completed. It's not just a matter of them appearing and then rushing off.

However, in Super Mario Galaxy 2, where these comets appear seems to be entirely random. I mean, you'd think that once you find so many of the comet medals they'd start appearing in the worlds in which those medals were found. Instead, the comets appear to just pop in wherever and whenever they please. Maybe there's some sort of esoteric calculation involved - some formula that takes in how many stars you've collected, how many galaxies you've completed, and how many of the comet medals you've found that determines where they pop up. Such a thing might indeed be necessary to properly balance the game, but I still don't see why the prankster comets couldn't show up more frequently.

Perhaps a more organic reason for time between these comets' appearances is to be found in-game. Each level that you stop at is called a "galaxy" and several of these galaxies are lumped together into "worlds." At some 46 stars, the game can't be more than half way over and yet we've only seen four of these "worlds." That means there could be, at most, another 28 galaxies to visit.

Earth is just one planet in the Milky Way Galaxy - but here's this game that (potentially) boasts over 50 galaxies. I know each one seems to contain around three stars, but even so - 50 galaxies makes for a spatially huge game universe.

So maybe there isn't some sort of esoteric calculation to blame for the prankster comets' apparent rarity. Maybe the Super Mario Galaxy 2 universe is just too large for them to quickly make their rounds.

Away game special: When two yarns spin together

Even in Kirby's Epic Yarn ice physics are terrible. By which, I mean that they are spot on. Whenever you land on a platform, you don't just stop but instead skate along with your momentum. This adds a welcome element of challenge to the game. One that's compounded by playing the game with two players.

The multiplayer's not as bad for co-operative play as New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Nonetheless, when the platforms get small and the surfaces get slippery, then it's easy to get into each others' way. But that's the greatest source of difficulty in the game. Plus, levels and their secrets are designed in such a way that they reward people playing together.

Sometimes there are things hidden so high up that one player needs to leap off of the back of another while they're in mid-jump. Or, in other cases, you'll need something to throw into a block but your partner will be the only thing around. So the game's multiplayer may well be its strongest feature.

When pacing and plotting were pushed

It seems that the Greeks of the Hellenistic period had tastes quite apart from ours. Almost all of the Menander that I've read so far has involved children thought lost who later have their identities revealed. If it works, it works, right?

From what I've gleaned in the notes to his plays, his audience had no problem with such repetitive use of a device. Instead, they were more interested in what he had to say about human nature and life and how his plotting and pacing went. So he could just focus on changing things up in those regards and still win accolades.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for most modern sequels and remakes (and even a handful of loosely original features) where old ideas are reused. Ideas are retreaded and the majority of big productions are cast in the same mould when it comes to pace and plot.

Of course, the Greeks regarded their drama with an eye towards a more or less agreed upon ideal. Modern audiences aren't so united when it comes to standards. No doubt that's just Hollywood's game: cast a light net so widely that those who are wary of it can avoid it while those who don't care and those who are looking for the same old fix get caught.

Feeling the heat of the fryer

Elena recently admitted that her cursed transformation into a monster doesn't just affect her body, but also her mind. This makes me wonder if, eventually, one too many close calls will lead to a terrible ending in which Aeron has to fight her transformed self. Finding out about this other aspect of the transformation also lends credence to my theory that she's starting to get a taste for the flesh that he brings her.

More to the point, the Crimson Keep is starting to heat up. The giant tigers that appear in certain places when you're carrying dripping or pulsating flesh aren't tough to topple, but all of the grappling required to climb the tower is proving quite challenging. Of course, this is at least partially because of the game's fixed camera. It's not easy to figure out just where you can swing when you can only see slices of certain platforms.

Yet, another thing that's making the Crimson Keep in particular difficult is that it doesn't jive with my play style. When I play a game, it's always been my habit to be as thorough as possible - to exhaust all possibilities before going forward for example. But in a fire-themed dungeon that sort of patient play doesn't really work; it's especially ineffective when you've got a timer to worry about, too.

Still, this game has secrets, and I will ferret them out. I just hope it doesn't lead me to the game's potentially worst ending.

Chariot, rider, and all

While I wrapped up my level grinding session in Dragon Quest IX (for now), I noticed something peculiar. The enemy known as "Chariot Chappie" is a complete entity unto itself.

First off, there's its magical propulsion. A chariot usually requires some sort of animal to pull it. But this chariot is arcanely animated, complete with a monstrous face across its front.

Then there's the fact that it doesn't appear to be whip-operated in any way. Going back to the usual animal form of chariot power being some sort of four legged animal, a driver would use a whip to control speed and direction. Along the same line, the imp doesn't appear to hold any sort of rein. It's as if the imp inside the magical chariot shares some sort of symbiotic bond with the chariot itself, ala James Cameron's Avatar.

The strangest thing about this monster, though, is that when it's defeated, the chappie falls back into the chariot box as the wheels and poles fall away. What's left before the destroyed enemy fades into oblivion is an imp laying back in a box looking very much like he's ready for a good old fashioned casket burial.

Akira Toriyama may have trouble drawing distinct faces, but there's definitely much more than fine lines at work when so much detail goes into a monster's design.

Away game special: A thought passed on the street

What makes The 3DS' street pass feature so fresh is that its inputs are user generated content. Sure, the minigames that you play with other people's Miis use the mechanics of their various genres, but there's a much bigger element of randomness involved. After all, there's no telling what you'll wind up having to work with.

As an example, Find Mii is a game that uses standard turn-based RPG mechanics. At the same time, your heroes' abilities depend entirely on the colour of their shirt. However, you have no control over their shirt colour. As such, the most important variable in the game is what colour the people you street pass prefer.

Given the technology behind the recent Skylanders games, it's easy to wonder if we might one day see a game that allows people to trade customized NFC figurines. Even further, if some day a game might exist that could integrate such custom figurines into a pre-existing story or experience.

Away game special: 'Where the Xerneas and Yveltal play'

So Pokemon X (and Y) have integrated farming into their gameplay. Not the sort of farming you usually find in an RPG - fighting monsters to fatten your wallet or collect items - but actual farming. We're talking Harvest Moon-style here.

Adding this feature makes sense. Berries have become prrretty important to the Pokemon games. Being able to grow your own definitely puts more agency into the players' hands. Is that a good thing, though?

Giving players more agency also gives them more responsibility. When you had to find berries in Pokemon games all you had to do was remember where the bush was and return to it every now and then. But growing them yourself means you need to mulch the soil, water your plants, pluck out weeds and shake out bugs.

How far can such a feature go before something like farming berries becomes more chore than play?