Pulled back into Pokemon Diamond

Pokemon Diamond holds a special place among RPGs. It's just got this power to draw me in after only a few minutes of play. I think a lot of it has to do with the game's variety. 

Most RPGs allow players to customize their party members, but the Pokemon games actively encourage you to get as many party members as possible. But, unlike RPGs with huge playable casts like Chrono Cross, party members in Pokemon Diamond have no backstory and are invested with only as much personality as players give them. 

Whether you give your Shinx a nickname or not, it'll always be your Shinx and it's quite easy to build an impression about its personality from how it fares in battle. Not to mention the traits and skills mechanics that the third generation games introduced make each Pokemon just a little bit more unique, leaving players even more to work with when it comes to building their party members' personalities. Though, aside from players projecting personality onto their Pokemon, these mechanics have just a minor impact on the core game.

Anyway, there's enough to do in Pokemon Diamond to make it interesting. And it's refreshingly different from the Red and Blue versions that I'm so much more familiar with. I haven't even gotten to the underground part of the game yet. 

Though I have more or less built up the party that I'll keep until the end of the game: A Machop, a Buizel, a Magikarp (eventually a Gyrados), a Shinx, a Monferno, and a Staravia. The Buizel might get switched out for a ghost, dragon, dark, or psychic type Pokemon, but whether or not that happens will depend on what the game throws at me. En route to badge number two, it just seems that my party is merely under-levelled and not at all unbalanced.

Zelazny as character builder

Well, I've just read through the scene depicted on the pulpy cover of my edition of The Changing Land. The one where Dilvish and his metal horse Black are depicted riding over a multitude of grasping violet hands. It was definitely as epic as the cover suggests.

But what's more enthralling about this section of the book is its character development. We see Dilvish and Black working together and get a strong sense of their history as partners. By chapter's end, it feels like they've been through countless adventures and seen many wondrous things before they even came to challenge Castle Timeless and the sorcerer Jelerak. Giving readers that sense of such a strong bond definitely shows Zelazny's skill.

Doing so also makes the chapter's end a real nail-biter.

In fact, though Zelazny litters Dilvish and Black's path with a host of obstacles that would be right at home in a fiendish D&D campaign, it's that character building that's much more enduring.

The trouble with invisible portals

Maybe I've been working at this, Pandora's Tower's final major dungeon, for too long, or playing with the lights off increased my focus on the screen, but tonight's session was really immersive. Powering down my Wii and switching to my netbook to write this post made me feel as if I were coming back from some place far away.

But while in that place I broke the last of the Dawn and Dusk Towers' chains.

In the end, I did have to use a guide, but it was worth it. Since the game had resorted to invisible portals near the Towers' end I would've taken even longer to finish them without any sort of assistance. But that's not what bothers me. Pandora's Tower involves a great deal of lore that's learned through the various books that you find and texts that Elena translates.

However, in the single book about the Dawn and Dusk Towers and their portals that I've come across there's no mention of or hint towards any sort of invisible portals.

There are very subtle clues about such portals near the top of each of the Towers, sure. But to me these clues come across more as puzzles than clues And the sort of puzzles you try to solve, fail to solve, walk away from frustrated, and then return to and almost immediately realize the answer to rather than a more direct hint. An additional clue about the existence of these invisible portals in one of the game's many books would have been much appreciated.

I suppose that every adventure game's last proper dungeon does need to have some ultimate challenge, though. Hopefully those invisible portals (and not the Towers' twin Masters) are just that.

Mackay's skepticism goes too far

As if it weren't already obvious, Mackay is a pure skeptic when it comes to alchemists. Though he's not deaf to their stories. In fact, he extracts Denis Zachaire's entire story from his own autobiography, a story that ends with Zachaire's reformation.

After a lengthy search for the Philosopher's stone Zachaire isolated himself to studying the alchemical classics rather than following the trends of his day. Then, as the climax of his story, he transmutes gold on Easter Sunday, thanking god before he decides to sell all he owns and disappears.

Now, transmuting gold on the most sacred day in the Christian calendar does seem very convenient. His solitary study leading up to and solitude during his transmutation also sounds like an embellishment. All of these details suggest that his success was the reward for some sort of increase in holiness.

Though, more than its being full of such embellishments, I think that Zachaire's story signals a shift in the culture of alchemy.

Around Zachaire's time the spiritual dimension of alchemy was picking up, and so Zachaire's story makes sense. Plus, if there is a moral to the man's tale, it's that alchemy can only come to a true end if an alchemist practices without greedy intentions. When Zachaire was working up to his final transmutation he wasn't doing it for gold or any sort of gain - it was just to prove to himself that it could be done.

Mackay, in his blind skepticism, misses this. He obviously has made himself an observer of crowds' madnesses by making himself insensitive to them. His dismissing them all as ridiculous and the worst kind of folly. It may be a fine way to go about writing such a book as his, but being so skeptical is as bad as being entirely credulous.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy finished (spoilers below)

The last section of Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy is strange. It's sort of like a boss rush but with a few screens of enemies and a puzzle scattered throughout it. Also, what I mentioned as a worry in my last entry on the game wasn't too far off the mark. The game's final boss was easier than those who came immediately before. Sort of.

After reaching the very last stretch of the game Ed faces off against Dante. However, this fight is easier than you might expect since it hearkens back to the game's very first fight. Yes, just as in the battle against Cornello, you just need to guide Ed through the obstacles and enemies that Dante conjures up. The difference being that two of the things she conjures (a series of falling rocks and a wave of fire) are very difficult to avoid unless you keep to the middle of the arena. These obstacles provide some frustrating moments, but otherwise Ed just has to outlast Dante. There's no context-sensitive alchemy, no impregnable defense, nothing. Just outlasting her.

Thematically, this is great. Cornello and Dante both wield a form of the Philosopher's Stone so it makes sense that these fights share a process. However, the game's final fight (if you can even call it that) is an experiment that fails.

Instead of running the game's story while the game's gameplay is on hold, the final fight against Envy involves a steady stream of dialogue that takes the place of Ed's alchemy on the Touch Screen. Envy's only attack is a simple jab, but because the dialogue is on the lower Touch Screen and the fight is on the upper screen it's difficult to follow both simultaneously.

If the game had done more that required you to pay active attention to both screens simultaneously (since the dialogue scrolls by quickly), I don't think this final fight/character building would be a problem. But as it is, it's too clunky to be effective (especially when Ed's down to a sliver of health and you're in no mood to test to see if you're invulnerable for the sake of the scene). Watching for context-sensitive alchemy works, however, because it's something that you can flick your gaze from screen to screen to do. The areas in which such alchemy is activated are fairly obvious after all.

All of that said, the game's final cutscenes reminded me of watching the series. In fact, even though these cutscenes involve nothing but a series of images, they were quite engaging. As the credits rolled, I definitely felt satisfied.

So then I peeked into the game's "Character Mode." Apparently you can play through the story mode's levels as a number of characters from the show. Though there are no cutscenes (aside from the opening) in this game mode. No doubt finishing it with all the available characters unlocks another.

But the game's content doesn't end there. Keeping true to this game's implicit m.o. of frequently using the Touch Pad, there're a bunch of mini games that are entirely Touch Pad based. They're fun little distractions, too.

So, having seen a fair chunk of Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy think that it's more than a beat 'em up usually is because of the Touch Screen. Though it is, by no means, a classic of the genre. Fights can be reduced to speed button pressing if you corner most enemies, and more often than not enemy attacks are easily avoided unless they're alchemical in nature. My playthrough was in "Normal Mode," though.

Overall, Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy is definitely a game to check out for fans of the series and for fans of the DS' Touch Screen. Beat 'em up lovers should look elsewhere.

On sorcerers and alchemists

From Mackay's collection of biographies it sounds like alchemists took a turn for the worst in the Late Middle Ages. From the late fourteenth through the fifteenth centuries in particular, the alchemists that he describes are truly deserving of his scorn. Specifically the child-murdering Gilles de Rais and coin debaser Jacques Cœur. 

Their crimes aren't exactly on par with each other, but both are terrible reprobates that hid their wrong doings behind a screen of being alchemists searching for the philosopher's stone. 

And this apparent state of things makes me wonder.

In the case of Roger Bacon, his grand intellect drew claims and accusations of sorcery. His contemporaries (and many later generations) regarded such claims as a great blow to his reputation. Currently though, and even in Mackay's day, people are much more able to regard Bacon's discoveries as quietly revolutionary, at least in so far as they ran far ahead of what science was doing in his time.

Now, turning to the groups of alchemists motivated by greed and a lust for power, covering themselves with the name "alchemist" (or, more accurately, "alchymist"), it's interesting how the same thing happened.

Most modern readers and Victorian skeptics like Mackay aren't fooled by such titles. Instead, they're able to see past them and to the bearer's crimes. Yet, it's not that the label "alchemist" has many negative connotations, it's that it has hardly any now. At least in the sense that anyone claiming to be an alchemist these days is likely to be dismissed out of hand (and the same could be said for someone claiming to be a "sorcerer").

And that's just what happened in both cases.

The negative label didn't turn into a positive one. Rather, it lost its adhesion and just fell off, revealing the terrible stain that it had been covering over.

When stories and difficulty curves alike are linear

I'd played Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy before, but I'd never gotten quite this far.

Since the game's keeping pace with the show, the best way to put my current position is thusly: I'm right in the middle of episode 36. (Spoilers: so at this point in the game, Ed and Al's dad has returned only to leave again, Al's armour is currently the Philosopher's Stone, and Ed has vowed to destroy the homunculi).

Needless to say, there've been a lot of cutscenes in the last 40 minutes of the game. That's definitely one drawback to making a game with so much story into a beat 'em up. Text becomes the only way to really convey it. Also, because beat 'em ups are a very linear genre, the storytelling becomes the same. And viewers of the show will know that Fullmetal Alchemist is a series that follows more than the adventures of Ed and Al Elric.

Nonetheless, the parts of the story driven by their father will likely get put into the next part of the game. I'm also guessing that that will be the final section.

Both because the game's story is only a few episodes away from finishing off the anime series and because the difficulty has increased substantially. Not so much in the sections where you're beating up troops of enemies, but more so when it comes to bosses.

For the most part, up until the fight with Greed, you'd do fine if you watched for a context-sensitive technique to come up or discovered which of your basic techniques is most effective. But from the fight with the diamond-shielded Greed onward, bosses get tougher. At first because you need to wait for the context-sensitive alchemy to show up rather than simply move to where it is, and then later (in the fight with Wrath, for example) you need to survive long enough to get through the boss's defenses often enough to lower their health to 0.

I can't help but feel worried, though. With the final boss just around the corner will that be the roughest battle yet, or will it feel all the easier after the tough fights that precede it?

Our hero (?): Dilvish

The introduction of Dilvish in The Changing Land is pretty incredible. He leaves an impression and Zelazny manages to maintain the air of mystery about him despite his origins being spoiled on the back of the book.

We readers might know that he's escaped from Hell, but exactly how isn't just left unanswered, based on what information we're given about Dilvish, it's also left sounding a little ridiculous.

Though Dilvish appears to be completely comfortable being out of place.

One of the elements of my first impression of Dilvish is that he's barely even aware that he's escaped from Hell. Dilvish's dedication to hunting down the sorcerer Jelerak seems so complete that nothing else matters - aside from remaining inconspicuous.

For all of his powers, there's definitely some element of self-consciousness that comes across when Meliash points out that his counter-greeting is out of date, as well as his referring to "the Society" as the more sexist "the Brotherhood."

Thus, Dilvish hardly seems the marauding badass type. Though there's a ton of potential for that to change.

Stepping into The Changing Land

Roger Zelazny is credited as a master of fantasy and science fiction. Though he wrote when the genres were still very new things. The Changing Land makes this quite evident (in its first chapter).

His characters read like they're building on templates made by Tolkien (elves, scheming magic-users, etc.). His setting gets little description.

Since the plot is being trickled out, there's no heavy exposition as of yet. Another weirdly modern note is the apparent lack of dialogue tags. I've not yet come across a single "[character x] [word for spoke+past tense modifier]."

Though those latter two qualities are the mark of good writing in any genre. And from any point in time.

Yet, Zelazny's tone in The Changing Land reminds me of Eric Rücker Eddison's in The Worm Ourobouros. Eddison's book was published in 1922, and Zelazny's came out in 1981, but there are still tonal similarities. Both share in a writing style that comes off as pulpy and have similarly fantastical content.

I still need to find Nine Princes in Amber to complete the first part of Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber, but The Changing Lands has opened up as a fine introduction to this icon of an author.

Dawn and Dusk nearing their ends

My trudge through the endgame of Pandora's Tower is one step closer to being finished. Both the Dawn and Dusk Towers now have but one chain anchor left to break in them.

Yet I can't help but wonder if I really only need to break one more anchor in either of them to get into the Masters' room.

I mean, that is where the two towers connect, and it wouldn't make much sense if you had to unlock both doors just to get in through one of them. But we'll see.

The trick now, though, is climbing up to the fifth floor in the Dawn Tower and then descending in the Dusk. Why? Because the last chain anchor in the Dusk Tower is somewhere between the fifth and third floors. Alternatively, I could just try to figure out the portal puzzle that stands between me and the last chain in the Dawn Tower.

This final dungeon — there's just no end to its generosity.

Trying to save Roger Bacon's bacon

Mackay's survey of alchemists across the ages continues in The Madness of Crowds. Over the course of twenty pages he wends his way from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. And most of the alchemists he covers have their alchemical deeds neatly covered.

His coverage of England's own Roger Bacon, though, offers a curious case.

Mackay makes no attempt to hide his contempt of alchemists. Each and every biography thus far has included some sort of reference to the alchemists being misguided or having wasted their lives. Roger Bacon's entry in Mackay's collection includes this treatment but it comes primarily through an apologist lens.

No mention is made of Bacon's famed bronze head, imbued with life and the wisdom to answer any kind of question put to it. Neither is there any reference to Bacon's idea of walling up all of England through magical means. Instead, the bulk of this particular biography is all about Mackay lauding Bacon's intelligence and his claims that superstition rose around his reputation because his peers simply couldn't comprehend the extent of his genius.

In fact, rather than Bacon's alchemical deeds, Mackay chronicles his general scientific accomplishments (like his understanding of convex and concave lenses). Mackay's Victorian English pride certainly shines through.

Fullmetal touch screens and recovery times

After another half hour of gameplay, another 15 or so episodes of Full Metal Alchemist have played out (so I'm up to about episode 33 of 51). Full Metal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy does a pretty good job of keeping pace though. Instead of highlighting every battle from the series, the major ones from the main plotline are emphasized and the game is otherwise filled out with little minigames.

In the section of the game I played through tonight (Warehouse 5, and Ed and Al meeting with their teacher Izumi) there were three such games. One is a memory minigame, another a rhythm-ish minigame, and the third a stealth minigame. All of these used the touch screen. As someone who doesn't play that many beat 'em ups, these breaks from mashing the attack buttons are very welcome.

Especially since Ed can beat up chimeras ranging from lizard-lions to dragon-gryphons in ten blows or less without so much as a scratch if you mash those buttons quickly enough.

That's not to say that the beat 'em up portions of this game are broken because Ed's overpowered. It's just that enemies have a very slow recovery time. If you manage to catch them in a combo (get within brawling range and mash those buttons!), then there's little chance they'll break free. Though the same thing goes for Ed.

Not in that enemies launch combos and those can catch Ed in a rain of pain. No.

But in that environmental hazards like retracting spikes are perfectly timed to match Ed's post-hit recovery time. So if you're hit by a such spike once, you'll likely be hit by it again just as Ed's getting up. And again before you manage to jump (or have the damage dealt throw you) out of harm's way.

Tonight's session also saw the first appearance of necessary alchemy in a battle. While fighting the living armour named Number 48, you need to transmute giant stones into statues. Number 48 then attacks these statues and while it's mid-blow you need to knock its head off so that you can fire off some of your offensive alchemy. Otherwise, when it's got a cool head about itself, Number 48 just blocks everything.

What I like most about this sort of necessary alchemy is that you aren't really told about it going into the battle. You either need to remember the fight from the series and watch for your cue to copy what Ed did in it, or just watch for when your currently available alchemical skills change. Forcing the player to keep an eye on both screens like that is something I enjoy because it brings an element of discovery into an otherwise dull and straightforward genre.

The madness of alchemy

Mackay is quick to state that all alchemists through the ages are quacks of varying degrees. Though he also mentions the very important point that in their fumbling about for the philosopher's stone and elixir of life they made several important scientific discoveries.

After a little bit more of an introduction, he then proceeds to give a brief biography of every known alchemist from the earliest record to the most recent (as of the 1850s). As of twenty pages into this section, Mackay is up to the early thirteenth century and looking at Roger Bacon.

Though, having read the play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay which is about Bacon, it seems that it could have also been about Albertus Magnus and his apprentice Thomas Aquinas. Mostly because the play's centerpiece is Bacon's animated, question-answering bronze head and Magnus and Aquinas apparently brought a bronze statue to life. A living statue that the two men set to doing menial household tasks and that was, according to Mackay's report, so chatty that Aquinas smashed it to bits. I wonder if the statue ever shrugged and sarcastically remarked "It's a living" while it was up and about?

The other thing that's grabbed my attention from the first few alchemists that Mackay's covered is that he's pulled a lot of his information from French sources. I know that Orleans in France was a center for magical practices, but even so, is there some propensity towards the wondrous unknown in France?

The Dawn and Dusk Towers, one Gordian Knot

I've finally set up my Wii in my new place and so I've finally returned to playing Pandora's Tower. Normally time away from a game in which I'm stuck helps me to work through whatever Gordian Knot I'm trying to undo. However, such wasn't the case with the Dawn and Dusk Towers.

It's not that these towers, which I hope and believe are the final two in the game, are particularly difficult. Really, they're among the more straightforward of the towers as far as actual in-tower mechanics go. What's giving me so much trouble in them is that they're too similar.

Warping between the Dusk and Dawn Towers is necessary to get around debris in the one or to access a higher floor in the other. But this warping is only viable because the two towers have nearly identical floor plans. Often in tonight's play session (hunting for those last few chains that need breaking), I found myself going through familiar doors over and over again. In different towers. Or I stumbled into one or the other of the towers' slightly different rooms.

What makes my situation still worse is that the guides that I've found for the game describe these towers in a very linear fashion. Shy of working through those guides from their beginnings, they won't be of much help. Nonetheless, doing so is probably the fastest way for me to clear these towers and finally move on in the game.

And that state of affairs in itself is proof of the difficulty that adding a timer to dungeons offers. Were it not for Elena's imminent transformation (and for enemies respawning after you leave their rooms), getting through the Dawn and Dusk Towers would just be a matter of brute forcing my way through with relentless exploration. In other words, I could just chop this Gordian knot in two.

Finishing Breakfast

What a compelling, yet clinical, ride.

After Dwayne's rampage the final event of Breakfast of Champions is, weirdly, Vonnegut's meeting Trout. they converse, Vonnegut departs, and is left feeling a sort of sadness. Maybe because meeting his creation has changed something in him, or because he makes a point of mentioning that he is now fifty years old and Trout's final, fading request is "Make me young, make me young, make me young!" (188).

It's an odd detail that ranks up there with the constant noting of penis and hip-waist-bust measurements.

The author's meeting his main character is definitely pure quirk, but the anatomical statistics that Vonnegut notes definitely give the book its clinical tone. Yet, despite that tone it's still fairly incisive.

Vonnegut does come out against contemporary society on some fronts that definitely seem damning (people giving companies names simply because they 'like the sound of [the word used for the name],' and Kilgore's noting that people's conversation is mostly quoted lines from television shows).

And I think that's the main thing to take away from Breakfast of Champions. Characters that appear in other works (like Trout and Rosewater) are empathetic, but for the most the book is about Vonnegut toying with the very idea that makes Dwayne snap: Everyone else is just a pre-programmed machine.

It's definitely possible to feel for Vonnegut's characters. But not with anywhere near as much investment as that which is placed on most characters from more recent fiction. It seems that no one's really writing in the same clinical vein these days, and I can't decide if that means we're all working empathy machines or broken critique machines. Or both.

Whatever the case, Breakfast of Champions is definitely a book worth imbibing (and definitely one that goes down quickly, though its effect is lasting).

Starting into Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy

Until reading through some early in-game text I'd completely forgotten that Al and Ed are 10 and 11 respectively. So kids that aren't even pre-teens are running around laying the smack down on guys who're wielding curtain rods, knives, and guns. Just like in the hit anime series, y'know?

Because if there's one thing I remember while Fullmetal Alchemist completely mesmerized me when I first started watching it, it's how the brothers Elric battled hordes of enemies. 

To be fair, though, as little sense as the "beat 'em up" genre might make for the game adaptation of a series that complicates its share of fantasy/adventure anime tropes, the text between levels helps. Actually, its being in Al's voice explains the simplifications that help to keep the game's action-driven pace going, too. 

The dialogue on the other hand is merely all right. It's definitely a stark reminder that Ed's much older than his age, and that there's some truth to what a friend of mine (whose music blog you can find here) said on the matter of "subs v. dubs:" (to paraphrase) 'Dialogue always sounds cooler when you can't understand it aurally, since when it's in English it just sounds like the same trite stuff that's in every other show.'

Thus far, the game's relegated the series' alchemy to special attacks and touch screen events. Short of turning the game into an RTS a la Lost Magic, I think that Natsume took the middle road in terms of bringing alchemy into the game itself. For better and for worse, since it seems underused thus far.

Though there's still quite a bit of game left. The game covers the entire original series and I'm hardly through the first 10 episodes (after about 40 minutes of play time). So there's still another 41 or so episodes' worth of game content to go.

A brief and prosperous trade in tulips

Mackay moves from stock schemes to tulips without batting an eyelash. The apparently unexplainable madness around tulips does relate to commerce, though. Specifically, throughout the middle of the 1630s the now iconic flower was a hot commodity in the Dutch market.

Mackay is sure to note his surprise that such mania could seize "so prudent a people as the Dutch" (93). A detail that once again dates his miscellany.

Nonetheless, moving past the Victorian English perspective of Mackay, The Madness of Crowds' value is made clear in this brief chapter.

This book's not just a relic of another century; this book is a memento of a Europe more extrinsically drawn in deep and differing colours.

Not to mention Mackay's propensity for flashing his vocabulary. I'd nearly forgotten about good old "repast," surrounded as we are in the everyday with the salt-less "meal."

Forget all the new corn that comes from old fields, sometimes that old almost forgotten corn from those same fields is even more interesting.

Dragon Quest IX finished

Bringing everyone's level up to 45 did the trick. I finally beat Corvus. Dragon Quest IX is over.

Looking back, the shape of the successful final battle was weirdly by the numbers. 

It had its first act, in which things were going well for my party of Minstrel, Thief, Mage, and Priest. Then, the second act rolled around when Corvus recovered his HP and his MP and it reached a climax after Corvus knocked out Nizk the Minstrel and left everyone else with just a few HP. Finally, the third act kicked off with Peridot the Priest successfully healing everyone over the course of a few turns and then climaxed with the final blow to the big bad. 

I know that much of the battle wound up as it was largely because of chance, but still. Its shape is perfectly that of a grand cinematic battle. 

Unfortunately, the game's ending doesn't share that quality. 

After a pseudo-anime sequence in which Corvus is appeased and reminded of his true Celestrian nature, the standard RPG "what are they doing now?" scenes play over the credits as each major area and character is revisited. Scenes that are rendered in the in-game graphics. 

What makes this so disappointing is that it feels like the developers forgot to replace the in-game graphic scenes with their animated counterparts. Unless, simply because it directly involves a dragon (and this is a Dragon Quest game after all), Greygnarl's fight with Barbarus was meant to be the only animated cutscene.  

Overall, as an RPG, Dragon Quest IX is, for the most part, a bog standard J-RPG.

Its story is interesting, if spread a little thin from the start of the fygg quest to the discovery of Corvus. Actually, the game's characters are much more interesting than most of its story events. 

The game's job system holds potential for those who don't mind grinding as a matter of fact, but is quite frustrating for those who would rather grind with broader goals in mind. 

The game's music is quite grand, but lacks variety. 

And the game's combat system is simply that of a classic turn-based RPG.

Anyway, despite the shortcomings listed above outnumbering the game's strengths, I find myself interested in the promise of the post-game's being its "mortal" phase. It feels like a shorter, perhaps deeper, adventure is about to start.

Yet, I can't say I'll be dedicating myself to finishing what's left on the Dragon Quest IX cartridge before moving on to something else. I have other Dragon Quest games to check out after all, not to mention other games that are much much shorter than this grand adventure proved to be.

Like Full Metal Alchemist: Duel Sympathy.

Breakfast's climax is charged but not emotionally so

After Karabekian's really effective (and affecting) speech, Breakfast of Champions comes down for what is more technically its climax. Weirdly.

As mentioned before, Vonnegut writes this book in a strangely clinical way. As such the emotional impact of Dwayne's climactic breakdown and rampage is lost in the mix. We can see the way that the man showing us snapshots of psychotic Dwayne and providing explanations becomes agitated as Dwayne tears into his homosexual son Bunny and his secretary Francine, but that emotion doesn't come across in the text.

Yet, even without much emotion in this highly charged moment of the book, it's still compelling. This is what the book's been building to, after all. But I think the shocking nature of Dwayne's actions is what does it more than the way that those actions are described.

Dwayne's beating his son and secretary is affective not because they're characters we've come to learn deeply about and love, but because Dwayne himself is established as such a buttoned-down character. Even though we've been told all book long that Dwayne goes crazy in the end, the extreme nature of his actions still shocks.

In a way then, Vonnegut might not tug heart strings directly, but his distance makes all more the tragic the state of human madness and its ripple effects.

History's role revisited

So the problem with the South Pacific scheme in 1720s England wound up being one of demand outstripping supply.

The price of the company's stock, at a time when many of its holders were selling, was such that the country itself nearly ran out of cash. As a result, and unlike a similar situation with actual goods, England's credit was called into question - a state of affairs that's as perilous on the international level as it is on the personal.

What happened with the banking crash of 2008 wasn't as cut and dry as a single company over-valuing its stock, but the same greed, pride, and desire of the low to better their quality of life were at play. Not entirely rotten motivations, though the power players in both the 1720s and 2008 had no real need to improve their lot in life.

I'm not trying to say that history repeats itself, only that knowing about things like the South Pacific scheme show history's value. This Victorian miscellany of madnesses has got value.

And, running with Einstein's definition of insanity, there's the implication that humanity on the whole is a little insane.

Grinding for two

Though easier metal slime battles would be welcome, Dragon Quest IX's levelling system is far from broken.

Yet, based on a suggestion from the GameFAQs forums my level grinding just got faster.

Reducing my party to two members gives both far more experience than they'd get as members of a four person party.

Nonetheless, the  game's experience divvying is weird. It doesn't give more experience to the lower level character. Instead, the lion's share of experience goes to the party member who does more. So Nizk, my main character, is going to be a few levels above 45 when my grinding's done.

At least the Bowhole's Liquid Metal Slimes give about 20,000 experience per party member. It's just a matter of defeating them with only two. A feat that'll be all the trickier while bringing up my Mage's level.

Twin Breakfasts

Reminding me of Infinite Jest is one thing. Bringing Twin Peaks to mind is something completely different.

Yet, Rabo Karabekian's speech about his abstract painting shares a tone and purpose with Albert Rosenfield's explanation to Sheriff Truman about being a man of peace. Both are delivered to an antagonistic audience, spoken by someone defending a higher ground, and come across as perfectly sensible though outside of what might seem like common sense.

A yellow piece of tape on a canvas painted green being about the divinity of awareness is, after all, definitely outside of common sense's perception of such a thing. And Karabekian's calling the rest of the human person nothing more than a meat machine drives home his no-nonsense, I'm-saying-something-very-important tone.

And it feeds into the book's true climax. Not to mention affects the author himself, who just so happens to be present for Karabekian's speech.

Yeah, Breakfast of Champions is that kind of book. And I'm loving it.

Facing Dragon Quest IX's final boss once more

Well, in this case, the third time was not the charm. My latest battle against Corvus was going well until he kept using breath attacks turn after turn.

If only you could lob breath mints at monsters in Dragon Quest IX.

On the upside, I can't fault the game's AI for its random factor.

Just as Corvus went heavy on the breath attacks for the first time in our latest match two monsters in his realm nearly slaughtered my party on its way up. Who knew that they could use the spells Kaboom and Kacrack?

Corvus will be tried again after another round of level ups. And maybe a wardrobe change. But not a shift in trades; my party of a minstrel, thief, mage, and priest seems quite effective. Its three loss streak notwithstanding, of course.