Monthly Archive for December, 2011

Page 2 of 2

[12 days] Day 3: Revisitng Super Mario RPG

This is a crossover that needs to happen. Source unknown.

Super Mario RPG was a game that defined my childhood. It was my first RPG, and I remember playing through it when I was in elementary school. Many, many years later, during the Super Mario RPG fanfest this past summer, I got a chance to revisit the game.

To this day, Super Mario RPG stands the test of time as a solid, traditional-style RPG. Everything from its humor, to its action-based battle system, to its lively cast of characters, to its diverse, upbeat, selection of music continues to make this a classic game that I’ll be revisiting years from now. Mario RPG followed in the footsteps of EarthBound by not taking itself too seriously, an atmosphere which was aided by its cartoony graphics that still hold up to this day. It’s not a particularly difficult game. When I was a kid, I dumped all my points into health points instead of raising my attack or magic powers and struggled with it, but I noticed that knowing what I was doing, the game was much less challenging these many years later. But it’s still enjoyable, especially the battle system. The timed-hits system remains one of the finest game mechanics introduced into RPGs that many games have since emulated. It provides the player an additional level of interaction that helped make the battles more exciting. Playing through it again and discussing with our friends was one of the highlights of my summer.

Oh yeah. The Mario RPG fanfest also spawned @DatValentina.

[12 days] Day 2: Two Faces of Gensokyo

This post is kind of something I’ve been wanting to write during the Fall but never got around to sitting down and doing it.

It was… 2005-ish when I got into Touhou. My first exposure to the world in a serious manner was through the doujin “Spring of the Residents of a Touhou Town” by FLIPFLOPs. I’ve since observed, especially now that it’s been over five years since I discovered Touhou, that this is one of those things where my first impression of the world colors how I continue to view it. FLIPFLOPs is one of my favorite doujin circles, and during this year I finally got around to catching up on their entire works for Touhou. I want to explore the two of the many faces of Gensokyo through two of the doujins that FLIPFLOPs has made. The first is “Spring of the Residents of a Touhou Town” and the second is “Two Scarlet Sacrements Under the Starry Sky”.

Continue reading ‘[12 days] Day 2: Two Faces of Gensokyo’

[12 days] Day 1: Story of a Lost Sky Progress Report 2011

New title screen art (For 0.6.1) by Jamuko

Hi! I’m Fawkes. This is my second time participating in 12 Days of Anime. I tend to stray more into gaming than focus exclusively on anime since I’m somewhere between the two communities.

The Kino weekly blogging thing kind of fell through due to me getting really busy and not really having much to say. I’m planning on a Kino wrapup during the 12 days event however.

Same as last year, we’ll start off this event by reviewing the progress made in the last year on Story of a Lost Sky, our Touhou SRPG project. This year saw the release of 0.6.0 in January and 0.6.1 in August, the latter having our first appearance at a real life event, the AM^2 convention where we were represented by Jamuko.

Continue reading ‘[12 days] Day 1: Story of a Lost Sky Progress Report 2011′