Bioshock Infinite

While I very much enjoyed the first Bioshock, I still haven't played the second one - put off by its terrible reputation. Similarly, Bioshock Infinite, though I very much liked the concepts revealed in the development process, was low-priority. But hey, it was free for PS+ members this week, so why not?

Ultimately, it's not a game I would recommend, especially beside the far better original. There are some fine ideas, and the basic concept of taking a series known for being set underwater and taking it instead up into a floating city is a nice idea. Unfortunately, it also means they swapped claustrophobic, dank, creepy tunnels for wide open spaces and bright colours, noir-ish art deco for idealistic Americana - horror for cartooniness. And a whole lot is lost in terms of atmospherics as a result. 

Bioshock Infinite follows grizzly but heroic Wounded Knee veteran turned potboiler detective Booker DeWitt (geddit? Like Bryce DeWitt?), who has a chance to wipe away his gambling debts by recovering a girl from the floating city of Columbia, run by a prophet in a monumental cult of personality. Along the way, he has to contend with the local law enforcement, including people with bizarre powers that he can then take on himself much like in the first game, plus sentry turrets, goofy-looking 'handymen' and the best idea of the game, the iconic 'Motorized Patriot'. Later, there are also the utterly pointless Boys of Silence, who are supposed to encourage stealth but do nothing more than set weaklings on you anyway, and the game's beefed-up version of the Big Daddies, the massive Songbird, which it is only possible to defeat through the power of plot progression. 

In terms of gameplay, it's like playing the original in the sunshine, only with a lot more limitations on guns. You can only carry two at a time, and ammo is limited - though in massive supply. It was a mistake to put it on 'normal', because it was extremely easy, with no strategy needed except for one annoying ghost battle. My biggest problems came from poor QA - twice I had to restart my game because of bugs, once when Mrs Lin refused to move out of the way and once because I charged at the ghost and got stuck inside a pillar. Great. I suppose that's the trouble with playing the free games - I normally want to get as much time as possible out of a purchase, but free ones I want to rush through. 

Once DeWitt meets Elizabeth, the girl he's been charged to rescue, the main thrust of the plot begins - not only is there the question of why the 'prophet' Comstock has locked her up, but the fact that she has unusual powers. The city floats thanks to advanced quantum engineering, which also hints at multiple worlds. Though the title is 'Infinite' and the story hints at infinite possible universes, that's not the route it goes at all. The plot relies heavily on the idea of constants - there is apparently 'always a man and always a lighthouse', which allows for a nice trip to Rapture that unfortunately is only a keen reminder of how much better the first game was, and though I like the way DeWitt is led to make the decision Elizabeth is leading him to from the start, without some very iffy reasoning on how constants then exclude the possibility for infinite worlds to come about and awful Back to the Future paradoxes with people able to make themselves disappear by altering past events, the ending just doesn't work - and in any case certainly isn't compatible with the idea of infinite universes of the 'quantum tears' crossing time as well as space - which it does. We should be used to bad sci-fi writing on time travel by now, sure, but Bioshock is known for its clever writing and intelligent twists. So the disappointment was far worse.

There are some bright ideas and lovely visuals here. But the precedent made me want a game that was fun to play, frightening, creepy, intelligent and had a good twist. And it kinda fell short in every one of those aspects. 

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

(Fanart by yami-izumi on deviantART)

I could have expected this acclaimed ‘art game’ to get dark, really. It starts with a child at his mother’s grave, thinking about watching her drown and being unable to help her. But hey, plenty of Disney films have that sort of death scene and mourning afterwards. After the twee first hour or so of this, I was totally unprepared for just how dark things would get. It’s less the larger events, the traumas and the losses, and more the details. No young Disney hero has to choose whether or not to save a grieving father from hanging himself, cause the dead bodies of giants to hack one another’s limbs off so they can get past or bathe in blood to interrupt a cult from sacrificing a young woman. As to that oft-seen trope where a boy becomes tempted sexually, is implied to lose his childhood and then immediately pay a dear price for it…well, there’s a lot psychoanalysts can say about it, I’m sure.

But I was left deeply impressed by Brothers. It is indeed an art game in the same vein as Journey, short in overall length but unhurried, deeply influenced by fantasy writing, mature in presentation and emotionally heavy-hitting. Telling the story of two boys in a world of mythology that draws many comparisons to Fable but with a more Scandinavian twist to it – trolls and all – it intentionally starts with low-key puzzles like chasing off a village bully by setting free a silly little yappy dog and transitions through an episode of wolves and graveyards to the far darker themes of the later chapters…though always with touches of light, usually revolving around making animals happy. One of the good things about trophies and achievements is that a game like this, full of sweet little touches, can guide you to seeing the scenes put in just for fun, and several of them are very rewarding – and one pretty heart-wrenching. If you’ve seen it, I’m pretty certain you know which I mean.

The brothers themselves, despite have Sim-like speech, grow well over the course of the game. The earnest one learns to be a bit less blinkered (though perhaps to his peril) and the younger one, who starts out incredibly obnoxious even for a ‘prankster’, has to mature very fast. The game itself is a pleasure, with simple controls facilitating some ingenious puzzles, all of which are easily figured out but often raise a smile with their cleverness. I wasn’t stuck once, but had to pause to think – and admittedly had to go back for several trophies. And though it seems like the only way to die at first is to fall from a great height or to get attacked by something and fall over, but there are some moderately brutal death scenes here, especially when you first meet the girl and have to escape a mysterious threat. Gameplay-wise, there were several puzzles that reminded me of the co-op in Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, but mostly it reminded me of the old PC puzzle game Gobliiins, another European game with a medieval setting and lots of creatures from mythology wherein a single player controls multiple characters so that when they interact they get through puzzles. This is over 20 years later, though, and things can be done on a more epic scale – and the grandiose view is something this game does very well.

I would like to have seen multiple possible endings, though I guess that if there was a statement to be made, the writer wanted to keep it consistent. Besides, this sort of downloadable game is generally considered a single unified playing experience that may be brief but is affecting. It certainly is that, and I will watch with interest for any sort of follow-up, and beyond a doubt play it through again sometime that I want to be a little moved. 

The Last of Us: Left Behind

It’s only a short DLC, sure – though a 5GB download – but Left Behind is worth a little entry here.

This is the first time I've bought DLC to continue a game, and that's really because what was most striking and enjoyable about The Last of Us was its story and its characters.

Not a whole lot happens in Left Behind, in all honesty - the side-story jumps between two different time periods while drawing parallels between different events in the difficult life that Ellie has led. One part fills in the blank between Joel's injury and Ellie caring for him in the isolated hut - just how did she get him there? The other, perhaps providing more of the heart of the piece, is the flashback to Ellie before she met Joel - and her entirely adorable relationship with another rebellious girl called Riley, who has come back to see her after having become a Firefly, filling in some blanks such as who the dog tags in her backpack from the main game belonged to. 

The actual game portion is really centred on the midquel part - there, Ellie is armed and capable and has to deal with some quite tricky situations, including some incredibly annoying stalkers. On the other hand, I was slightly disappointed because I kept trying to play the game with stealth and finesse, only to keep failing and to realise it was a lot easier to kill one enemy sneakily, then just go ham and shoot everyone very loudly. The parts where you set the infected on the 'Cannibals' was quite enjoyable, but the combat segments were few and far between, and not the focus at all. 

Because this DLC is here to tell a little story, the story of Ellie and her sweet little romance with Riley as they run about a mall, having water gun fights, taking photos together (that, sweetly, get posted onto your real Facebook) and dance to Riley's mix tape up on a counter. Of course, it inevitably ends badly - otherwise how would we get to the story proper? - and there's a definite tear-jerker element, but I have to say that in the tradition of the game, the most harrowing parts are actually left unsaid. 

Incredibly cute, cleverly-done and interspersed with a lot of fun details - especially in the Hallowe'en joke store - this was also a pleasant reminder of just how superb the game looked and how well-crafted its characters are. Great stuff. 

Assassin’s Creed IV

Assassin’s Creed IV is my first Assassin’s Creed game. Well, strictly that’s not true, as I’ve bought a couple of the others but never actually played them. It is the first one I have any experience with beyond seeing various pictures of Ezio and, no doubt, various others I couldn’t name. So the fact that it is apparently quite unlike the other games in the series, as well as a return-to-form for the series is possibly fortunate, but not the reason I got it. That reason, in truth, is that it looked like the PS4 launch title I would enjoy the most, with Knack looking to actually be clunky and uninteresting and the rest being the kind of pseudo-macho brainless FPS regurgitations that seem so in vogue but hold no interest whatever for me.

So how was Assassin’s Creed IV? Well, I’m not sure I would call it a good game, but I certainly enjoyed it. It was exceptionally well-presented, had a decent amount of depth, was enjoyable almost throughout and did a superb job with its angle on a very popular historical period – the years leading up to 1718 and the end of the Golden Era of Piracy. Yes, this is not a game of sneaking about crowded cities killing Templars, but of sailing the high seas, visiting early colonies in the New World and…well, sneaking into camps and mansions and killing some Templars.

Edward Kenway, who has no historical basis but I suppose has some bits and pieces in common with Walter Kennedy and, at least ultimately, with Long Ben. He is a well-spoken Welshman from a poor family who leaves his wife to seek riches on the high seas but ends up largely alone and impetuous. As a crewman on a pirate ship, he is washed ashore along with a mysterious man in what the player knows as an Assassin’s uniform. When the Assassin tries to kill him, Edward retaliates, hunting him down and taking his identity along with his life. Hoping to take on a ‘commission’ this Assassin mentioned, Edward goes to Havana, where he discovers that the man he is imitating was defecting to the Templar cause, and learns of a mysterious and ancient ‘observatory’ that houses the power to see through others’ eyes, just the sort of thing a hidden order wants in order to manipulate the world from behind the scenes. Of course, he doesn’t last long in his false ruse, and is clapped in irons, which of course were fairly easy to escape from, and the ship easy to capture to begin a true pirate career.

A chance encounter with the bumbling Stede Bonnet, just starting out on his quest to become the most middle-class pirate in history, makes it easier to join up with other pirates in Nassau, including Benjamin Hornigold, his one-time protégé Blackbeard and the apparent son of Captain Kidd (from whose mythos also comes a black quartermaster). Through Kidd, he learns more about the Assassins, and eventually of course is tangled up in their power struggle with the Templars and the race to the Observatory, which the ‘sage’ – an imposing Bartholomew Roberts with a wonderful Welsh accent – is key to operating.

Tied up with this is the modern-day storyline, apparently running through the games, of the struggle between Templars and Assassins continuing in now – or in the very near future. There is a company that can use a person’s DNA to view the memories of their ancestors, which they use to create interactive experiences – but of course the Templars want to use the technology to locate things like the Observatory, and to bring back the ghostly techno-organic creature called Juno…or something like that. It’s frankly horribly lame and the low point of the gameplay, with cringy ‘hacking’ minigames and a stupid subplot about getting manipulated by some nutcase from IT. The game would be far better without this guff.

But it does allow some things to make more sense. It makes more sense of some of the challenges – there’s no reason otherwise that a game should end if you fail to overhear an entire conversation of it you are spotted by people you can very easily dispatch anyway. The idea of ‘desynchronisation’ means some of this makes sense, as does limiting parts of the otherwise open-ended world so that you can’t go off exploring them too early. It also allows for some acknowledged historically inaccurate buildings and suchlike for the sake of an impressive setting, though the little email discussions included in the building descriptions also inspire some cringing. On the other hand, without introduction I didn’t know what on earth ‘synchronising’ did at the start of the game (lovely though it looks) and there never was any material point to collecting ‘animus fragments’, a miniature collection quest that pads out the things to do in any given (beautiful) location.

The main game is flawed but fun. Like so many similar games, it’s a stealth/action game in which you can quietly dispatch your adversaries, creep around them to your main target or just attempt to kill everyone at once, which frankly was usually the quickest and easiest option. Indeed, the game was sadly much too easy, never challenging and often with laughable AI, the very final task nothing more than timing when to climb and jump. Thankfully, the sailing is rather brilliant – it’s extremely satisfying to duel with other ships, cripple and board them for loot and repairs, and taking forts is even better. It’s also where things actually get challenging with the rather ridiculous legendary ships. Shanties were annoying and got shut off every time, but largely travelling from place to place was easy and the simplistic whaling minigame was also strangely addictive.

The story began very well, but fizzled out. The pirate fantasy is strong, and they do a brilliant job with making Blackbeard both fearsome and intelligent. Though it gets a little annoying when ‘James Kidd’ is supposed to be convincingly a young man, with all the characters failing to notice that this is very obviously a woman – made worse by the fact that (at least for 99% of it) this game only has adults, which would make ‘Kidd’ the only adolescent in the entire game universe. Nobody is surprised when she turns out to be Mary Read, with Ann Bonny and Calico Jack soon showing up too. The problem then is that Kenway sort of drifts, the Templar threat is very distant, and then all of a sudden, with a feeling of ‘there must be more to see’, it all ends.

There was a lot I didn’t do. I lost interest in getting the platinum when I saw multiplayer trophies were required. I only found a few buried treasures and a handful of alternate outfits (some of which mess up hood animations). But I bought the game to wow me until there were PS4 games I really wanted, and in that capacity, actually enjoyed it more than expected. 

Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix (Part 1 – Kingdom Hearts Final Mix HD Remix)

Well, I had to replay it three times to get the pesky platinum trophy, so I feel I can say this with certainty: everything bad that happens in the story of the first Kingdom Hearts is the fault of Donald Duck.

Why? Because when Riku and Sora are reunited, Sora asks him to take Riku into their gummi ship. For no reason other than that he’s a goddurn stubborn nitwit (that IS what he called Daffy in Roger Rabbit, right?), Donald Duck flat-out refuses. When Riku slinks away and Sora doesn’t flat-out abandon his new friends, Maleficent is able to use this apparent betrayal as the leverage she needs to start manipulating her new protégé. If Riku had gone with Sora and co, it would have been far harder for the incompetent baddies to kidnap the princesses, Ansem wouldn’t have had his access to the world and any alternate plans could have been easily foiled by Riku and Sora together. So…well, yes, it’s mostly Riku’s fault for being a sensitive little priss who has such a hissy fit over not getting his way that he ends up doing the bidding of evil-doers, but without Donald acting the way he did, none of what happened would have happened – at least not in a way so difficult to stop. That darn duck.

Anyway, yes, I was very happy that Square decided that to mark 10 years since the release of the original game, they would re-release these HD remixes. I have the original Final Mix – and the second game’s – but never got around to playing in Japanese, and now I don’t have to!

It’s true that this is quite a lazy port, despite the protestations from Square that they had to rebuild a lot from scratch and used models from the other games. There have been pretty comprehensive lists of the things that they should have done – put the more complicated, far better-looking hi-res models into all cutscenes rather than keeping the original game’s usage of the in-game model when they could get away with it, chiefly. But also they should've added a theatre mode to watch all the extra-good-looking cutscenes – including good ole Another side, another story, the lovely CG animation they made as a fun contrast to the colourful game and then had to painfully spend 3 more games trying to force into the actual story.

Yes, it’s a story that gets incredibly convoluted, so it’s quite nice to go back for a refresher. Even leaving aside the things we know from future games – that there have been countless keyblade masters, many hundreds of them at once; that within Sora’s heart there’s already the fragment of Ventus’, stuck in there fast enough that it didn’t show when Kairi’s heart came out along with the six other fragments apparently in Riku’s keyblade; that Ansem isn’t Ansem after all – it’s worth recapping what actually goes on in this game, before things get really convoluted. And also to remember some of the things that have never really been resolved – what do Sora and Riku’s parents think about their absence of a year or longer? What exactly is Kairi’s background in Hollow Bastion? What exactly were Maleficent and ‘Ansem’ planning to do with their power from Kingdom Hearts, given that it would essentially rip apart everything else in existence? Given what happened when the Door to Darkness was actually opened, was there any point at all to Sora’s quest? Since the same result would have come about given the true nature of Kingdom Hearts…

Beyond the untangling of the of the overcomplicated plot, though, this is a simple story of a sweet young boy named Sora – somewhat jarringly little in this game compared with his KH2 incarnation – who when his world comes to an end is chosen by a mysterious ‘keyblade’ to seal locks through which monsters come, and to defeat the evil masterminds behind the plot. Usually by hitting them a lot. The real hook was that his adventures brought him into contact with not only Disney characters, but also characters from Square’s Final Fantasy series. The choices are somewhat limited – the Disney films are mostly old-classic or renaissance, emblematic or from way back at the start of Disney’s feature film production, and except with Vivi in Kingdom Hearts 2, the only FF characters we get are ones Nomura designed, limiting us to VII, VIII and X, which is a real shame. I’d love to see more obscure Disney and a much wider Final Fantasy net. I’d be thrilled to see Sora fight with Taran, and hey, in a future KH we could see Hope tagging along with a bossy Larsa, hooking up with Bartz and the Dissidia Onion Knight to take on a rampaging Kefka. But I suspect these things are all a pipe dream.

Yet I will continue to suck up anything Squeenix gives me under this banner, because the games are not only fun, but challenging. Honour binds me to get the challenge trophies on Proud Mode rather than beginner, and I wouldn’t rest until I got 100 hits on the Pink Agaricus despite now having to get Donald and Goofy stuck somewhere. Plus I saw things I’d never seen in the original to get this platinum – largely because I’d never otherwise bother with Gummi missions and completing Synthesis. And hey – I’d until this run-through never even noticed Gepetto opens a workshop in Traverse Town.

Nostalgia, affection for the characters and a fun world made this a game I was very happy to replay in HD. 

Tales of the Abyss

I liked Tales of the Abyss. I really did. The character designs are the best in any Tales Of game other than Symphonia, and arguably the development they get is better...and this game doesn't have Regal's stupid little shirt-thing holding it back. But while the characters are some of the most likeable and multifaceted in the JRPG world, within their series or not, the unfortunate fact is that they're in a bloated, overlong, self-important and really rather dull game, and that is why it has taken me very nearly two years to play this game through. So many other 3DS games became the ones I wanted to play, and I ended up only crawling through Abyss when I wanted a long soak in the tub. 

In a bit of a twist on the usual two-worlds theme of Tales Of games, Abyss deals with a fantasy world in which technology has allowed the perfect replication of not only objects but people and even whole countries. The two worlds thus co-exist, but are divided into real and replica. Well, there's also a vast underground segment of the planet that's a little closer to the more typical Tales Of divisions, but that's the less interesting part. Alongside this idea of replication, the central question of Tales of the Abyss is about free will and predetermination: a series of predictions called 'The Score', discovered through study into the elementary particles of sound, have been so accurate that the world of Auldrant essentially adapted so that all human life adheres to it. The story revolves around those who struggle against this predetermined path and the right and wrong ways to resist a higher will. 

Central to it is Luke von Fabre, initially a very irritating, spoilt young man who has the most effective coming-of-age through guilt and angst that I've yet seen in a JRPG, and believe me, they do that bit of plot contrivance a lot. He is barely tolerable initially, but - symbolic hair-cutting and all - eventually becomes an admirable protagonist, if a little whiny around Asch. He is joined by a very colourful cast: the stony but soft-hearted Tear, adorable and precocious little Anise, handsome but detached Guy and of course Jade, the sarcastic and cold-hearted but quite brilliantly cutting scientist who I have to say is the character I've found most uncomfortably like myself in quite some time. The bad guys were also a good mixture of formidable and ridiculous, and I very much liked the Ion/Sync dichotomy. The voice cast, featuring some of the big names of dubbing (for what that's worth), have fun with their roles and often hit just the right notes, and most of the really hammy performances suit their characters, especially with Dist and Natalia, though Mohs really just sounds absurd. Mieu is intended as an incredibly annoying cutesy mascot, and the balance is just right for a character you love to hate. 

Gameplay-wise, the system builds upon Symphonia's layout, adding the ability to move in all directions. It's nicely playable, though I ended up liking to play Anise the most because (a) she was great at keeping a single target pinned and (b) the AI was a bit less terrible at controlling Luke and Guy than the rest. Plus Anise's fighting style is just far more entertaining than the others'. It's not as polished as Tales of Graces F, of course, but it was totally playable. 

And while more or less a straight, lazy port from the PS3, I very much enjoyed playing on the 3DS. A lot more could have been done than adding some shortcuts to the touchscreen, and the fact the anime cutscenes were 2D was a bit of a slap in the face (as was the fact that the skits aren't voiced as they are in the original Japanese version, but that's down to the original port), but the fact that this whole thing could be squeezed onto a cart was brilliant and it was a game I was very happy to see on a portable console. Really puts the suggestion that the whole One Piece game couldn't fit on the cart with extra translation in place into perspective. 

So with all these positives, why did it take so long to play through? And why don't I ever want to go through it again getting all the extras? Well, the fact is that it just drags on for way too long. There's too much plodding back to some city you've been to a dozen times just to trigger the next part, and what feels like the game's natural ending is actually only about two thirds of the way through the story. The last act devolves into a sequential culling of all the antagonists one by one, soon becoming repetitive and uninvolving, and the story itself is just too full of the convoluted jargon of fonons and hyperresonances for the much more interesting personal journeys to come through. Tales of the Abyss commits the cardinal sin of not refining its story enough to keep it gripping, leading to boredom and the feeling of artificial padding. And for a story-led genre like RPGs, that is crucial. 

Project Diva f

I bought a Vita a tad prematurely. It was a good few months between buying it and there actually being games I wanted to play. But Technika Tune and this game soon put paid to that, and now I’m very happy I own it – even if my 3DS does tend to take precedent.

I had a bit of an obligation to spend a whole lot of time on Project Diva f, because after all it’s the third game in the series I’ve owned – or fifth if you count the Dreamy Theatre extensions. I’ve played all the games except Extend, as I was waiting for Dreamy Theatre Extend when this game appeared. With Project Diva F now bringing the series to Western shores, with a UK release supposedly today (but, crappily, only online) and the game already available Stateside (physical copy), it’s likely I’ll never get around to getting Extend to work. Ah well!

Yesterday, I finally got my platinum trophy for the game, many moons after my purchase, ironically after perfecting every song in the game - what was required for the old gold trophy – when finally one random loading screen popped up and completed my collection. I can firmly say that it’s complete now, and I must say I hesitate to buy the PS3 version if all I’ll be doing is repeating the same songs and having to get trophies for things like stroking Kaito’s cheek for hours.

As an instalment in the series, it’s a good one, but I’m glad it wasn’t my first. The previous games had so many of the big-hitting tracks, including more or less the entirety of the Supercell album – though Black Rock Shooter finally made it with this instalment – that without playing them first I’d feel there was a whole lot missing. The track listing here still had some highlights, though, with ‘Fire◎Flower’ a highlight for me, and ‘Sadistic Music Factory’ graduating to a favourite thanks to the exposure it had here. 

‘Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!’, famous as the ‘Nyan Cat’ song, got included, sadly not in the ridiculous endurance style of the edit mode song I had, but with a strange remix with a variety of style changes I quite enjoyed (but wouldn’t listen too as music!), and more fun with Rin and Len in the form of ‘RimoCon’ and ‘Kagamines’ Hachi-Hachi Flowery Battle’. Oster Project’s chameleon act is represented with the 50s ‘Summer Idol’ and Dixie Flatline’s ‘The Dream Continues’ is a lovely hummable anthem. Meiko’s inclusion was quite enjoyable this time, with the breathy and fun pop of ‘Megane’ and the cool-sounding and utterly hilarious-to-read-the-subtitles-of ‘DYE’. It’s a bit of a shambles for the older-generation Vocaloids, though: Meiko is sadly represented by the screeching ‘Stay With Me’ and equally irritating ‘Nostalogic’, which I managed to make enjoyable only by giving her a hideous mask, making the video much funnier, and Kaito’s voice is notably daft on ‘Acute’ and ‘Ashes to Ashes’, despite two of the best, most over-the-top accompanying PVs. It’s also hilarious how he’s presented in the intro – while the twins are making art or playing guitar and Meiko is onstage performing, Kaito totally looks like he just got on the stage to dance along without anyone asking him to or wanting him there. Bless his idiot heart.

The quality of videos is much-improved. We can now have a number of background characters, much enhancing group songs, and there’s much more scope for moving between scenes. There’s also a clear attempt at variety, with one video mostly in anime style, lovely contrasts between fluffy light idol stuff and some of the darker concepts of the Vocaloids, and even the chance to put Shiteyan’yo on everyone’s heads (mostly Meiko). There are also some adorable little narratives, like the one for ‘Time Machine’, evidently about a brief summer romance between your Vocaloid and the viewer. It’s total fanservice, but the bittersweet goodbye is totally irresistible. Then there’s Ryo’s ‘ODDS&ENDS’, with its oh-so-subtle narrative of ‘this otaku’s life is utterly worthless, but now he’s discovered Vocaloid, started being productive and turned his life around into something wonderful!’ which would be a hideously transparent marketing ploy if it wasn’t preaching to the choir. Still, watching the lovely hi-res graphics is a huge step up from the PSP versions, and a pleasure distinct from playing.

I’m happy I’ve played F, but the tracklisting could certainly have been better, and that’s part of the reason the PS3 version may be on the back burner for me for a while. And I do wonder what’s left for future versions…apart from ‘Trick or Treat’ by Oster Project, there aren’t many songs I’m that keen to see included – though if they surprise me and put in something pervy like ‘Kagamine Len no Bousou’ or something extremely dark like ‘Gomen Ne’, that would be a huge plus. Neither are ever likely to make it, though. I suppose they could start including more peripheral Vocaloids more…