AJ 12/11/20 AJ 12/11/20

Chrono Trigger - Masamune

Once the monster in the cave is vanquished. Crono is supposed to explore the rest of the cave and find a pond. Jumping into the pond brings the party to the familiar present. I completely forgot all about this and went out of the cave. Then I just roamed around in the pre-history, trying to figure out how I could get back home. After a futile search, I ended up looking online. Only then I was able to make my way back to my familiar neighborhood.

Once back in the present, it is easy to find the gate back to Queen Leene’s time. Things are dire here. The castle is bare. All the beds are filled with injured soldiers, and the rest of them are on the floor. There is not enough food. The commoners and the army go starving while the head chef is preoccupied with getting the best meal prepared for the king. He has to be shamed into doing something for the soldiers.

The army is making a last stand on the bridge. Magus and his forces clearly have the upper hand. It does not help they are well fed while the Guardian army is starving. They are all waiting for the prophesied Hero to come turn the tide of the war. The Captain asks Crono to go back to the castle and see if enough rations can be arranged to feed the army.

I vaguely remembered the Chef and the Captain being related but could not recall where I had heard that. This is where we find out about them. These two guys are siblings. Their rivalry has devolved into enmity over time. The Chef see the Captain being too full of himself. Chef’s main gripe is the Captain thinks only the military is making sacrifices for the country while all others just reap the benefits. He does carry himself with and air of self-importance that lends credibility to Chef’s accusations. When the Chef is told about how his brother’s life may be in jeopardy, his heart melts in the fire of brotherly love. He gives some jerky to feed the army. How we are supposed to feed the whole battalion with one jerky, is something the Captain will have to figure out on his own.

Ozzie is made in a typical Toriyama mold

Back at the bridge, the last stand is broken. The Captain is gone. A dying soldier lets us know he went ahead to fight the fiends. As Crono and his friends make their way over the bridge, fighting off the Magus’ minions, they have their first meeting with Ozzie. He is one of the three generals of Magus. This is not an actual fight. Every time the Heroes get a few hits in, Ozzie runs away. Once at the end of the bridge, he leaves the party a giant skeleton to fight off. This can at best be described as a mini boss. Not exactly a hard fight.

Once over the bridge, there are some new towns and forests to explore. The people in these towns are excited because they have seen the Hero with Medalion return to them. Surely, he will be the one to save them from the fiends. How can they not trust him? He has a medallion and a cape! At first, I thought it was Frog they were talking about, but this is an entirely new person. Upon further investigation, Crono find out this Hero is a young kid named Tata. He used to be a troublemaker but turned up with the medal one day. People identified the medal quickly and recognized him as the long-prophesied hero. Trying to get a chance to talk to him, the adventurers go to his house.

Tata is not there but his father is. He is happy about the new rise in status his son has, although a little baffled by this turn of events. Like any narcissist, the father makes this about himself. He is happy that people think of him as someone who raised a Hero.

Let’s take a peek in the Cursed Woods before we go on to the mountain. At the end of these woods is a giant bush covering the entrance to a hideout. And inside we find Frog! He has become a hermit and nothing we can say or do will bring him back to save the kingdom he swore to protect. If there was any doubt about him being Tata, it has gone out the window by now. Not much else to do here, might as well go up the mountain and see if we can recruit this Hero with the medallion and cape to our cause.

Making the trek up the mountain, Crono comes by a cave. A kid is playing in here, but he is clearly not the one we came looking for. But while we are here, let us just see if we can pull the sword in the stone. Maybe Crono is just King Arthur and we can have our own Round Table going. The kid tries to warn Crono off of messing with the sword. When Crono does not take heed, this kid calls his brother in for help. These two are Masa and Mune (get it? Masamune?) and we must fight them to prove our worth. After getting their butt handed to them, Masa and Mune come to realize how worthy Crono is. They transform back into the sword. Although we have the blade (and the hilt from Frog), the sword is not whole. Maybe there is a swordsmith somewhere in one of these timelines we can go to and have Masamune mended. The blade carries the inscription MELCHIOR, and we definitely know someone who goes by that name!

Before time travelling once more, Crono decides to go check up on Tata one last time. Crono finally gets to meet him at his home. Tata has had enough of this Hero business. He had found the medal after a green looking man dropped it. When Tata tried to return it, this green man told him to keep it. At first, all the attention felt good. Tata loved pretending to be the Hero. Being a troublemaker, he had not felt much adulation from people around him. Especially with his father being self-absorbed, Tata rarely felt important. Adoration that came with this medal was addicting. But then he started getting some unwanted attention. The fiends came looking for him to make sure they could put a stop to him before he fulfilled the prophecy. This was more than Tata could handle. Crono is the first person who has truly listened to him, and Tata cannot help but open up to him. He hands the medal over to Crono so he can be done with this hero business. He will definitely not be joining our band of time travelling adventurers.

**Melchior instantly recognizes his creation**

Past Medina village lives an old man who has helped us in the past. He goes by the name of Melchior. When Crono shows him the blade and the hilt, Melchior instantly recognizes it. He was the one who made this sword. So many questions I had about his methods. The biggest one being what did he do to make it sentient and who are the two kids fused with it. But this is not the time for curiosity. Melchior has some bad news for us. To mend Masamune he needs Dreamstone, which has long been extinct. The good news is, Crono can go really far back in time and find some when it was readily available. We know where we are going next.

11-30-2020

AJ 12/10/20 AJ 12/10/20

Resident Evil - Ending Jill’s Run

I have finished the Jill Valentine run of Resident Evil. Only 24 years after it was originally released. The controls took a little getting used to, but in the end, they felt as natural as any modern game. That being said, over the course of playing the whole game it becomes readily apparent the game is intended to be played with tank controls. The updated layout is easier to get used to but there are still hiccups that probably cannot be removed without reimagining the game (kind of how RE 2 Remake does). When pressing up always moves the player forward, the abrupt changes in camera probably don’t appear as jarring.

Barry’s betrayal starts out being dramatic, but by the end he has let Jill down so many times, it just becomes funny. Oh no Barry is saying he got our back. Can’t wait to get left out in the cold again by him. Still, I ended up giving him his gun back, since I knew that was necessary for the good ending. I think that might have been the only time Barry was not lying to Jill. Playing a game that is almost two and a half decades old means, there are some spoilers I will not be able to avoid. This holds more true of a game as popular as Resident Evil. Barry, Wesker, Jill, Chris, etc., are common names to anyone who has played video games in the past two decades. Instead of detracting from the game, prior knowledge of the game gives more context to some of the plot points. I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing firsthand some of the situations I had heard about so much. The dogs that jump out the windows only when you go in one certain direction gave me a good scare even though I knew it was going to happen one of the times I walked through the hallway. The anticipation of when it will happen kept me on edge. The first time I saw the angry red zombie got my heart pumping. And then there were things that happen as a part of the metagame. Running out of the ammo at inopportune moments. Not having antidote when Jill gets bitten by a snake, having full pockets when trying to pick up key objects. Those things are not explicitly commented upon, but they are just as essential to Resident Evil.

Resident Evil continues its commitment to subverting boss battles. Lisa is another example. She is still invincible so there is no use attacking her directly. Nothing happens to her that makes her vulnerable to any of Jill’s weapons. Instead, we need to be using the environment to neutralize her. Here it translates into Zeldaesque pushing of the statues to open up a coffin. The mental anguish of seeing her dead family finally pushes her off the edge, literally. According to the lore of Resident Evil Lisa Trevor is the daughter of the owner of this mansion. The whole family was held hostage by the Umbrella Corp. and experimented on. The parents succumbed to the experimentation, but Lisa survived. She has become invincible from all the viral infusions she has gotten, but it has also turned her into a hideous monster. She roams the mansion looking for her parents now. I think the coffins either contain her parents or help her realize they are dead. It is enough to drive her to jump off the platform into the dark depths below. While Jill tries to move the statues around, Barry keeps Lisa’s attention by constantly shooting her. Man was I glad I trusted him one last time and gave him his gun back.

The Mansion is the representation of Jill’s mental state. When she walks into the front hall after surviving the attack in the jungle, she is a little scared and out of breath but still alert. She has not been exposed to the horrors that lurk here and for the most part still holds strongly to her sanity. The mansion is a little old and unused, but it still looks magnificent, untouched even. As Jill struggles to survive the night, she sees the monsters Umbrella has created. She sees her colleagues die and disappear. Even worse, she comes to realize the ones remaining alive cannot be trusted. At the same time the player is moving through the mansion and into the residence. The sheen of the mansion gives way to the unkempt gardens, and then to the dilapidated shack. This is followed by a broken-down residence. As we move through the game, environment gets worse and worse. The residence is followed by narrow, incomplete tunnels, and the labs full of shattered and broken things. Jill does not talk much in the game. And it would definitely be impractical to have her break down in the middle of the game. Instead, the developers choose to represent the decline in her mental state by showing the progressive deterioration of her surroundings. The insanity effects of later survival horrors (like Eternal Darkness and Amnesia) were not possible on the Playstation, but I really enjoyed this workaround. The player feels things getting worse further the game goes. Whenever faced by limitations of the hardware, the developers at Capcom came up with genius workarounds that ultimately made Resident Evil a better game.

The mansion is also symbolic of Umbrella Corporation. They present a clean image to the world and manufacture family products for everyday use. When you dig a little deeper, the sheen of wholesomeness rubs off and the ugliness of the company comes into full view. There is something sinister about how there is no face of the company. We never see a spokesperson, CEO, or the owner. Other than the logo there is nothing representing Umbrella Corp. All the villains and goons are taking orders from someone higher up. Who these decision makers are is never shown. I can just imagine a board of directors who meet to discuss how the stock is doing and what government contracts they can get for weaponizing a virus. Then going home like they have not just played with numerous human lives. It is more believable and ultimately much more evil than believing Wesker did everything out of his own accord.

Speaking of Wesker, he is apparently at his most subdued in the first game. I have been told he gets flanderized as the series goes deeper. He tends to double cross everyone in his path. Umbrella human resource department will do better to remember not to trust a man who wears sunglasses at night. What he does later on, I will hopefully find out as I play through the rest of the series. Here, Wesker is forcing Barry to do his bidding by keeping his family hostage. At the same time, he has been screwing Umbrella over by releasing the Tyrant. Barry has had enough. He decides to stop shafting Jill and comes back to shoot Wesker, but he is too late to stop the Tyrant from being released.

Jill makes a run for it. On the way she sees Chris locked in one of the cells, and she has the MO disks to get him out. When they have all made their way to the surface, Tyrant shows up again. He is the final boss, but he is promptly dispatched with a rocket launcher.

To say the game holds up is a massive understatement. The survival horror genre was made popular by this game and it still shows. It is a truly enjoyable experience. Every door being opened made me think about what may be behind it. I was always counting my bullets, doing the mental math on how far I was from my stash. I found myself trying to keep track of where I saw each zombie. And then the game threw new enemies at me to mess my count. Every lunge a zombie took made my heart jump to my mouth.

I will have to take a break before I can start the next run. I think playing with Chris is mostly the same as playing with Jill. I don’t see myself finishing a Chris run right now, but I will definitely play to see how much it differs. I can see myself coming back to Resident Evil in the future. At the same time, it really makes me want to play the rest of the games in the series.

06-07-2020

AJ 12/9/20 AJ 12/9/20

Chrono Trigger - Medina Village

Once all four friends travel through the gate, they come out in an unfamiliar place. This is the end of time. When too many people travel through time together it creates stress on the fabric of time. Instead of creating more rifts, these people automatically follow the path of least resistance and end up here. This is a clever diagetic reason to restrict the party to only 3 people. But if these characters really wanted to be together, they could travel in groups and then meet up at the destination. We used to that all the time when a bunch of us would go watch movies together (ah the pre-COVID days). As Crono goes forward, he meets an old man who explains to him how this place works. He can also leave his extra companions with this old man here when he goes forth on further adventures.

In the main room, there is a save point and something shiny that helps the party recover HP and MP. On one side there is another shiny thing. As Crono approaches it, the old man warns him to not touch it. It is dangerous. If Crono insists on messing with it, the man explains this portal goes to the instance when Lavos destroys the world. If we go through, we will suffer the same fate as everyone else present there. The choice is ours. I am very sure, if the party is powerful enough you can take a run at Lavos and beat him here. This unlocks a different ending.

There is one more room here. Inside is a guy who changes shape depending on how strong the party is. He also bestows the ability of magic on the characters present here. Robo doesn’t have a soul so he cannot do magic. Everyone else gets the gift. Detroit Become Human is not going to be happy about this. Once he gives Crono and Marle magic, he proceeds to beat the party down to assert his dominance. As we are leaving, he tells us to bring any new friends we make to meet him and he will give them the power of magic. Right away I went outside, got Lucca and got her magic. Then took Marle and Robo with me to go to the present time.

With everything in order, Crono steps through the portal to get to present day. Something is wrong. Our friends end up in a cupboard. As they fall out, the first thing they notice is the presence of fiends. These fiends probably lean liberal, so they are more tolerant of humans. They inform Crono he is in Medina village, a community of fiends. The humans lost the war a while back and were driven back. Now only human in this area lives in a lone house by the caves. There is also a giant fiend in the cave who exists to destroy humans.

As Crono is leaving, the fiends warn the adventurers to not wander into the village because they don’t take too kindly to our kind over there. I’m still not sure where this village exists. Originally, I thought this is an alternate timeline. I changed too much of the past and caused the humans to lose the war. But it might just be a different continent where the fiends won, but the humans won over in Guardia. This does make sense because one of the common complaint from the fiends is they didn’t push to eradicate humans when they were winning the war.

Completing disregarding the advice he got, Crono goes into the village. It is full of fiends who are going about their lives. One of them offhandedly mentions the monster in the caves is impervious to anything but magic. There is a shop too. The heroes walk in there, but the owner would not sell them anything because he is a specieist. He tells the guard to attack the heroes. After seeing his guard go down, the owner reluctantly decides to sell to the heroes, but his prices are too exorbitant to be affordable. He is still too racist to give humans the same prices he gives to his own kind.

There is no hope for this ignorant trash, so Crono and his friends decide to go to the only other human in the vicinity. This is an old man who lives in a house by the mountain. He introduces himself as Melchior and he has wares. Crono buys some items and rests before going to the cave. This boss was the first one I had difficulty in this run. By this time, I had been thinking how little grinding I had done this time around. This fight was the one where I sorely missed not levelling up. It didn’t help I did not have Lucca either. Since the magic is the only way to hurt this guy, having Robo in my party felt like fighting with a hand tied behind my back. I took my team back to the End of Time and got Lucca. Then I got a level or two under my belt. Only then I was able to beat this guy. Since the fiends I have taken out don’t respawn in this cave it was much easier to get back to the boss. The fight was still a little tough but manageable.

As the monster lays dying, he laments Lord Magus did not wipe out all humans when he summoned Lavos all those years ago in the middle ages. Our party takes the hint. Magus is the one responsible for the ultimate destruction of the world. Now Crono and friends can go back to the middle ages and find him. Once he is stopped, they can rest easy.

I completely forgot where to go at this point. Went back in time to prehistory but could not figure out how to get to the Middle Ages. After looking it up it came back to me. Had to make my way back to the cave and jump into the gray pool.

After jumping in there, the party comes out in the familiar time. We are back home. Feeling a little homesick, we visit Lucca’s mom and dad. There is some good armor here. Then Crono visits his mother. Sadly, Marle can not go visit her dad in the castle. Only if he wasn’t so whipped by his Chancellor. Back to the fair, the team enters the first gate and into the Middle Ages again. Oh, I really hope the war has not worsened here.

11-27-2020

AJ 12/8/20 AJ 12/8/20

Persona 5 - Nijima’s Casino

I am about to close the framing narrative loop. The story is about to catch up to the time when Joker got caught. As we get closer to the end, railroading has become more blatant. I got a little frustrated with not being able to use the days as I want, especially since I am so close to maxing out so many of my confidants. First the game kept trying to push me into the Mementos. Since I did not have any requests, I’m not sure what the game wanted me to do in there. Once I got about five requests, I went in to complete all of them at the same time. This is when the game decided it did not want me to go to the Mementos anymore. Instead, I got pushed towards the Casino.

Akechi has finally joined the party. He has figured out who the Phantom Thieves are. He decides to help the Thieves as long as they promise to hang up their lockpicks after defeating Sae. Considering Akechi is threatening to tell the police about the Phantom Thieves if they don’t, Joker really does not have much of a choice. Either way, Sae Nijima’s palace is a priority right now. We will worry about Akechi after we are done with this. Sae is Mokoto’s older sister and the prosecutor leading the Phantom Thieves investigation. Which is why she is interrogating Joker in the present. Her palace is a Casino, where all the games are rigged. Only the house wins. It is symbolic of the justice system in Japan. Those who have been accused of a crime have the whole system rigged against them. When the prosecution brings a case against someone, it is a slam dunk. Always. Even though the defendant has recourse in theory, to be acquitted if they are innocent, it is almost never possible in reality. These poor people end up, at best ostracized, more commonly ostracized and in jail.

No one knows this better than Joker. He was trying to save a person from being raped. Instead, he ended up in the criminal justice system because the assailant was a powerful man. To add insult to injury, the woman he saved testified against him. His family abandoned him and forced him to go live with a stranger in a different city. Joker has seen the vagaries if Japanese criminal justice system firsthand. Sae Nijima is a tool of this rigged system. Bringing down her palace is more personal to Joker.

Makoto also has personal stakes in this heist. Sae is her sister. She raised Makoto after the father died. She has pushed Makoto to study hard and become a successful person. She has been harsh on her and told her Makoto has been holding her back. Even then, she is family. Makoto would very much like to save her. But her moral compass will not allow her to do so at the expense of justice.

Akechi is very strong. Stronger than someone who is coming here for the first time. He is also very good at understanding the nuances of the Metaverse for someone who is completely new to this place. Maybe he has not been honest with us all along. The palace itself did not give me too much trouble, although I have not finished it yet. The puzzles are really fresh in my mind since I had just played through this one not that long ago. The only area I had trouble with was the one without any light.

I don’t think I have enough time left to max out my confidants. I will most likely play one more time just to max those out. If so, I want to do separate entries on each confidant. They are interesting short stories that explain the motivations of Joker’s friends.

The flu season is about to start in-game. I want to use the flu-exploit on that one enemy who only shows up when you stay on one mementos level for too long.

This is the palace we see in the intro sequence of the game. I like everything about this dungeon. The design is great. It has lights and gaudiness which reminds me of Vegas. The music is infectious. The traversal is ok but still better than some of the previous dungeons. There are multiple minigames. The design of the dungeon is different enough to feel fresh compared to some of the previous ones, too. This place invokes the memories of Ocean’s Eleven for me. When I think of Persona 5, this is the place I think of.

5-18-2020

AJ 12/7/20 AJ 12/7/20

Chrono Trigger - The Darkest Timeline

Our friends in the overworld our stressed out when the see the future

People at the second dome are surprised someone could travel through the dangerous ruins and get to the other side unharmed. All these people have given up on life. Feeling of learned helplessness pervades in this dome just like it did in the other one. These people have only known ruin and destruction so they do not even know what better times they can strive for. There is on old man here who implies that, too. He says something to the effect of how refreshing it is to see hope in young people. This is an unusually dark timeline for a game that is usually very colorful and peppy. Having said that, there are instances of darkness peppered frequently in the narrative. The only difference is the game tends to not dwell on them for long. This is the only time (as far as I can remember) where the story explores in detail the consequences of the destruction. Actually, check that, I think there is at least one more event later in the game where the game makes the player face the questions of mortality. But we will talk about that thing later.

There is food stored under the dome, but no one has the courage to go retrieve it. There is a giant robot that guards the store. These warehouses were created to help the people in case of a calamity (you know, like Lavos destroying the world). But something happened and the AI malfunctioned. Now it guards the food stores the way a dog guards hay from the cattle in that one Aesop’s fable. So people up here are starving, but not dying because they get healed. They stay in a constant state of hunger without succumbing to it. A very Promethean end to humanity.

The robot battle was a little tedious but not frustrating. Once he is defeated we have access to the food stores. There is a rat here Crono has to catch and get the code which lets us enter the room with the computer. I remember having quite a lot of trouble getting him when I last played on a touch screen device. This time around, I did not have as much trouble with it. I wonder if the touchscreen version has intentionally made it easier, or I was just doing something wrong last time.

Right as we enter the storage, the party notices a strong smell. As Crono takes a look at the food he realizes the refrigeration has failed and the whole store has spoiled. There is a dead body here, too. This person holds a note explaining the only thing he could save from the store was a seed. Everything else is gone. In the computer room Lucca is trying to locate the portal to go back home. Just like the princess, it is in another castle. Guess we will have to move on from here. Before we can go, Marle taps a button on the console and the end of the world starts playing on the screen. We can see Lavos coming out from underneath and raining fire on the whole world. People die, buildings crumble and despair reigns. The first time I played, this scene gave me genuine chills. It is terrifying to be going about your life one instance and see the whole society fall away right in front of your eyes in the next. Everyone in our party freaks out as well. The journey from denial to despair to resolve is a quick one for our friends though. They vow to put a stop to Lavos before he can come out and destroy their future.

If one is willing to draw parallels it is not hard to see this as a prophecy of our imminent future. I’m sure I am not the first person to make the connection between our reliance on drilling for petrochemicals and resulting climate change. A monster that comes out of the ground and causes the world to burn is symbolic of the oil that comes out of the ground and results in the world getting hotter. In the 90’s, when Chrono Trigger came out, the issue of global warming was already relevant. Final Fantasy VII came out few years after and the themes of climate change our even more obvious in that narrative. It is not too huge a leap to think, the issue of our relationship with our planet was on the minds of those working at SquareSoft.

The team starts making their way back up. Everyone here is expecting us to come back with food. The tempers expectedly start getting high when they realize no salvation is coming. The old man comes to the rescue when he sees the seed Crono brought with him. They will plant the seed and from that rebirth of the land will start. And hopefully some time down the road they will have better things. In the meantime, they can keep using the Enertron. They could also eat the spoilt food to get rid of their hunger and then use the Enertron to get better, but no one makes that suggestion. Better for them to come up with it on their own.

In the long term it does not matter any way. Crono and his friends will be going back in time to defeat Lavos. This timeline will not exist once that happens. Most of the people who we see here will disappear with that timeline. I wonder what those people would think of our plans to end Lavos. Would not existing be better than this existence? Would they be willing to not be if it is for the greater good of the world? Chrono Trigger, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is an exercise in existentialism. It constantly makes me think of the consequences of the choices Crono and his friends are making.

Regardless, whether they will exist or not, these people are happy right now having found some hope. The old man gives Crono the key to his jet bike. We can use it to go to Porto Dome, our way back to our own world. Once we get to the Jet bike, Crono gets challenged by someone to a race. He has to win this minigame to move on to the next destination. I feel like I also did something similar in Final Fantasy VII. Something to do with Cloud riding a bike away from Shinra, but I haven’t played it in so long, I may be misremembering.

Johnny is as fabulous as he is a good racer

Once in the Porto Dome, we find a disabled robot, which Lucca is quick to fix. There is a security door between our party and the portal and there is only one way to break in. The newly fixed robot tells us he can disable it, but we will need to go to the factory to do so. In the factory, our robot friend doesn’t have too much trouble disabling the security. He has much more difficult time getting over the fact his robot friends think of him as defective and beat him down. This betrayal triggers another existential crisis (did Camus write the story for this game). We drag his metal carcass back to the dome where Lucca fixes him again. The robot starts to question is his purpose in life. He doesn’t know where else he can go if he is not wanted here. He is our new friend, his name is Robo from now on, and he will travel with us. There is nothing left here for him. Will he disappear if we succeed in putting a stop to Lavos? Or will he be here with us? Will the dark timeline cease to exist, or will our success create a new stream of time? Is a 16-bit cartridge big enough to provide answers to such complex question? Let’s play and find out.

11-26-20

We are going to have to lug his shiny metal carcass back