Housework

Yesterday, the three of us ended up cleaning the house. I vacuumed. And cleaned my bath. The vacuuming took me around two hours, not counting my break about halfway through. Mom said it would take one. But, Mom is happy with it, and so I suppose it can't be helped. I just hope I don't have to do that every Sunday.

Devil survivor

So, as I've decided to start to review all of the old or not-so-old games in my collection, I figured I may as well go by difficulty. That is, I start with the hardest ones and work my way down. And I can think of no harder game that I have in my possession than Shin Megami Tensei (Alternate Tale of the Goddess): Devil Survivor. With that, here is my review.

First things first, and I might as well get this out of the way now: This game is hard. This game isn't even N+ hard, and from what I've heard, that's pretty hard. No, this game is Meatboy hard. And the basic premise to Meatboy is the following:

"Meatboy is hard."

That is what you are looking at. The game's story, while interesting, as well as having probably some of the best narrative in a game that I've played, and is good enough to make the difficulty worth it, punishes bad mistakes just as much as the battles themselves. With that out of the way, let us begin.

The basic premise for the story is as follows: You are a group of 'ordinary' high school students who are just meeting up shortly before school starts after summer break. You, and your two friends, Atsuro and Yuzu, recieve a call from your cousin telling you to meet up in a specific location. You and Atsuro arrive a little late, and Yuzu apparently runs into your cousin, Naoya, who hands her three modified COMPs (which look suspiciously like a DS). As soon as you turn on your COMPs, you each receive an E-mail, containing ominous predictions:

Good morning. Here is today's NEWS.

➀ At around 16:00, a man will be killed in a Shibuya-ku Aoyama apartment. The wounds on the corpse are consistent with an attack by a large carnivorous beast.

➁ A large explosion will occur in Minato-ku Aoyama at 19:00. The cause is unknown.

➂ At 21:00, a blackout will affect the entire Tokyo metropolitan area.

Have a nice day.

This email was called the Laplace mail, and they will guide your activities throughout the game. All of the parts in yellow are actions that can be altered by your party, although the first day, the "DAY BEFORE" is linear in nature. After talking, Atsuro, who is a skilled hacker (a fact which will help you a lot later on), as well as Naoya's self-proclaimed apprentice, tries to hack into his COMP, while you and Yuzu wander around. After a couple of in-game hours (which take about ten minutes real life time), you two, realizing it to be 16:00, decide to visit the apartment where Naoya lives, which is in Aoyama. After Naoya gives you the ominous warning "What are you two doing here? Get back to Atsuro! It will start soon." and leaves, you get a call from Atsuro, who says that he's found something, but he needs you two to be there, too. Once you go back to where he is, Atsuro reveals that the COMPs can't be hacked unless all three of you, or rather, all three of your COMPs, are present. He boots them, unlocks them, and you see a run of text flashing by, with the ending:

Demon summoning program booted. Running...

And then demons come out of your COMPs. This is your first battle. After you defeat the demons, you form a "contract" with them, allowing you to summon them under your own control. Yuzu has a meltdown. Her first of many. Meltdowns that, after the first playthrough, especially if you chose her ending, where you escape, will make you hate her. More and more. But I digress.

The first couple of days aren't so hard. I mean sure, you have to kill a level 19 enemy at level 10 or so, but that's nothing compared to the third day. You have to kill an enemy that is immortal to all attacks but your main character's basic attack. You'll see why this is not fun in a little bit.

Continuing, the basic battle system works as follows:
You go to your team menu, and assign skills to your human characters, assuming they meet the stat requirements for the skill. Melee skills cost HP, magic skills cost MP. You get three active skills, three passive skills, and one auto skill that activates at the start of every battle, so long as you have enough MP for it. You can only assign one copy of each skill to your human allies- it is to your advantage to not have any skills on your inactive party members.

Each character can be assigned two demons, who each three active skills and three passive skills, but have a unique racial skill for what race they are. Effects vary from increased movement to being able to attack or move twice in a single turn. Demons gain new skills by fusing them with other demons to create a new demon that can be taught all of the skills of both of the other demons, as well as any skills that that kind of demon would naturally know.

When you go into a battle, you can assign four 'teams', groups of two demons and a human party leader, to go into the battle. The maps for battles are standard, grid-based fares, but the combat inside of battle is a more traditional turn-based RPG style. Characters normally get one turn to attack or heal each, but by landing a critical hit, certain passive skills, or striking an enemy's elemental weakness, you gain a chance to get another turn to attack. Conversely, if an enemy lands a critical on you or strikes your elemental weakness, you can lose your extra turns. Also Dragon and Vile demons increase your attack range, but remove you from gaining extra turns.

For out of battle events, the game gives you an extremely large amount of options for what to do. You only have to do about a quarter or less of the events that you can access, but doing optional events can get you characters, teach you more about he story, or even effect the ending that you could get in the end. Especially in days four, five and six, you have an extremely large amount of flexibility and probably won't be able to do all of the events that you want to. Because of the limited time that you have, this also renders it important to choose what you do carefully.

Overall, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor is a fun game, if you can get past its high level of difficulty.

Um...

What can I blag about? I can't think of anything. Nobody can. Um... I'm hungry. That's three words. Not even close. What can I blag about? I don't really know. I guess I am not that good at coming up with blag entries. I'm feeling tempted to review a game from my collection. I remember doing that for like, my second and third posts. There are a few that I've been wanting to write up for a while, and if I did one a day it should keep me good for around ten weeks or so. I guess I could do that. Probably my next post will be it. Sometime today-ish.

orchestra

Yesterday was our orchestra concert. Dad said that the senior cellos sounded better than the camarata cellos did. That is a good thing, although, while I didn't notice, Dad said that the camarata wasn't sounding as good as they usually did. The senior sounded good, though, and since I am in the senior orchestra, that is what's important. Although, the concert did make me decide that I want to be in the camarata next year.

LARP

LARP with Tony yesterday was a lot of fun. The first mission that we did was against some sort of giant kobold. Kobolds are normally about size one or so, but this one was size five, which is about the size of a centuar. We went to investigate. You drew cards from a deck that Tony had. Red meant that you were a baddie, black a goodie. I was really hoping to be a baddie for the first part, because I have really bad equipment. I had no such luck. I was a goodie. More to the point, I was the only goodie that managed to survive the initial onslaught. I ran back to town. All of our other goodies didn't. I survived, the others didn't. Then a rescue mission was staged. It went well, I think. I can't remember. After that, we went to a council hearing on the brackmarket. The vote on whether or not to ban it outright was postponed, but a 40% tax on all of its sales was agreed upon. After that, it was agreed to investigate the ships with wings. That was an interesting little adventure, during which I played as a baddie for the entire time. First I was a wave, then a storm mage. Waves are fun. You grab onto people and try to drown them, or you try and destroy the masts, depending on what you crash into first. The storm mage part, however, didn't let you fight in the end, as a truce was negotiated. The last part of the first session was small things, where I worked as a blacksmith and one guy ran around knocking people out and performing surgery on them and nearly killing them. Another mission we were looking for the chief reviver, who was missing. I was a baddie. I got to be a shark. It was a lot of fun.

After the first session before lunch, all of us who came to all of the Sunday sessions and didn't lose any levels hit level six and chose our classes. I became a storm mage. I have become more than a little trigger-happy with my ice ball. After the first session, the second session we essentially set ourselves up to do three missions at once. First, we would sail down to these thumb lava tunnels, to try and find the chief reviver. After that, we would sail up and let some people investigate the town of bracknick, while another group goes to Mt. Skillhaven. The people who go to Mt. Skillhaven will get four gold, with the person who finds the item has the option of either gaining 50 gold for themselves or having the guy donate 10 equipment sets worth of stuff to the party. I'm going on that mission, as between that and what everyone got from the tunnels, I'll have enough money for almost two equipment sets.

I'm rich!

Well, not rich. But I got a really nice paycheck for my gigs that I did on December and November. It pretty much doubled the amount of money that I have ever made from gigs. It was awesome.

Japanese

Today I have my first Japanese class of the new year. Hopefully I'll get in. School, otherwise, proceeds as normal. Last Saturday, Gabriel (who tends to antagonize me anyway) attempted to remove the endpin from my cello without my permission. To make matters worse, he couldn't remove it, but somehow managed to make it so that my cello didn't tighten on the endpin properly. (if your endpin doesn't tighten, you can't play your cello. Period.) Thankfully, Mr. Kroboth, by some random chance, managed to fix it because he had seen something similar happen before (minus the removal of the endpin by another party part), but it was close. I thought I told Mrs. Murray what had happened when I was asking her to fix it, but I guess she had other stuff on her mind or something. I don't know. Anyway, Mom ended up telling her Saturday, and boy was she pissed. Mom mentioned that Gabriel had been doing similar things to other members of the class as well, and so yesterday, after orchestra was over, Mrs. Murray said:

"Bring me Gabriel!"

And had a talk with him. I can't wait until Saturday.

Today

I am going with Mom and Dad to visit Dad's doctor. He has to fast for a blood test, and then we are probably going to do a small amount of running around. Not a whole lot, because Mom graciously did a vast majority of the shopping yesterday, but we probably will need to get at least a little bit.

Today

Amazingly, I do not have to go anywhere. Nor does Dad. Or Mom, even. She's not going to art class. We can all crash. Maybe take down the tree, too.

Orchestra

Yesterday was orchestra day. We are getting ready for our second performance of the school year. Next week we're having orchestra at the church, because it's a school holiday. After that, it's the concert. In the concert we are playing dia de los muertos and that's it.

LARP

I am never doing a vampirism sacrifice with Stone ever again. I'll back up a bit first. So, at first, everything was going fine. It was simple. We were doing small things, and were going to do a group sacrifice for Stone and one other guy to go half-vampire. (His old half-vampire character got jailed by paladins.) Reese, Kate, another girl, and I were going to sacrifice some stuff for them. I sacrificed my spare spear. The other people sacrificed a bunch of other stuff, Reese sacrificed his hair, most of them sacrificed their shadows and their reflection as well. Stone and the other guy also sacrificed two mana. (you have five normally, and mana fully regenerates every day. You can safely use two any day. If you go down to two, I have no idea what happens. If you go down to one, you go insane. If you hit zero, you die.) Stone said that it would be really annoying if I got all of the powers. I didn't. Instead, Kate (who I think was already some sort of vampire, but I'm not sure) was temporarily turned into a greater vampire. Everyone except for Reese are now officially her servants for the rest of their lives. It's kind of like being charmed, except it's a part of your very being. She then mana drained me, stone, and the other guy. Except, she only drained four mana from each of us. And I had five. Stone and the other guy each had three. They both died. I didn't. I got to go insane. Temporarily, until I went to sleep. Or died. If I died, I would be permanently insane. But, thankfully, it was the second to last mission, and the last one I went to was a safe lecture by mages.

It was kind of funny, actually. One person was like: "I hope the lecturer isn't Melissa. Her definition of a lecture is to teleport you off to some faraway place. With monsters. And if you die, oh well." The lecturer was Melissa. Thankfully, however, her lecture was on vampirism (Gee, I wonder why...) As we were getting ready to go, I asked Chris what my insanity was. Apparently, I thought I saw demons rising up from the ground, the end of the world was coming, and that I was an oracle. It was kind of funny, actually.

Other than being turned into some weird vampire-servant thing, the first adventure that we went on was going up against a bunch of goblin tortoise riders who were slowly attacking crops. I found a wandering tortoise that was just kind of standing there. I picked it up a carried it back to town as my pet tortoise, Bitey. Except I'm going to sacrifice Bitey to my goddess, along with some mana, in hopes of gaining a familiar. I can't sacrifice my reflection or my shadow, since I lost both as part of the ritual.

Then we did a thing with a well in town. I found some guys trying to seal it, so we drove them away and then I stood guard around the well. Then one NPC voluteered to jump into the well. I told him as follows:
"If you scream once, there's undead. Scream twice, something's pulling you under the water. Scream three times, and there's nothing."
The response:
"What happens if I don't scream?"
"There's undead and it's pulling you into the water."
After he jumped in, we were told we heard one bloodcurdling scream.
"Alright, there's undead in there. What do we do now?"

Today...

I have my gig. AAAAHHHHHH!! Thankfully, I have been informed that we will be doing selections from the christmas gig book as well as the regular gig book, which is very good. That means that we not only have extra pieces to play, but we also have easier pieces to play.

Game night.

Today is game night, and a normal day of school otherwise. Tomorrow, however, I have a gig. A two and a half hour long gig. With just my quartet playing it. I'm feeling rather scared.

Today.

I am going on a field trip in the evening. We are heading to the de young museum in san fransisco. First field trip of the year, on the first school day of the year! (Mom forgot that I didn't have school until today- I had Monday and Tuesday off. Granted, I forgot too.) So, here I am. In my first school day of the year. I feel complete again.

New year

Today is the third day of the new year. I have school. Oh god! Where did 2010 go? Where did my time until my concert go? It's the end of this month! AAAAAHHH!!!