#jackkel rants

[jackkel-dragon]

I'm starting to get really tired of looking for Dead Patient news only to find people begging XSEED for Vita/Switch/PS4 ports of the game. (Decided to put the bulk of this under a read more, since it turned into a rant.)

The reasons:

XSEED does not traditionally do ports. They do localizations. The ports they have done are ports to PC, and have historically taken a long time due to having only one programmer at the company. (Examples: Trails in the Sky FC and Corpse Party BC. The latter was announced for 2014, came out in 2016.)

GrindHouse/Team GrisGris generally consists of 4 permanent members: Kedwin/Kamishiro (Story and Art), Hamamoto (BGM/SE), and Ogawa (Programming). Having only one programmer means the likelihood of in-house ports is near zero. (Especially after they moved away from Unity, which is the "official" third-party tool for Switch development.)

The game only has one chapter right now, and has been in development for at least 5-6 years. The team's focus is surely on finishing the game, not porting it to other consoles.

This is a niche indie game series that probably lost at least half of its fanbase years ago. In addition, the Western releases are generally cheaper than the original releases. (Example: Corpse Party BC was roughly 20 USD (2000 yen), but sells for 15 USD on Steam.) The team probably doesn't have the funding to outsource a port. (And XSEED has had to convert originally free updates into paid DLC in the past just to pay off costs in niche series. Example: Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns.)

I'm not pleased that so many people expect the game to make it to consoles by default when the games that were on consoles also had far larger budgets, larger teams, and shorter deadlines. Yes, it has become much easier for indie studios to get their games on consoles these days. But that's not the default, even if previous games by that studio were on consoles. It costs a lot of money and work hours to get your game on a console.

Honestly, I'm getting a lot of fuel for an inevitable dose of schadenfreude in the response to Dead Patient's localization. And that's actually starting to worry me. I should be happy the game is going to be released in English, not creepily awaiting the disappointment of others...

At this point, I might need to find someone who keeps track of all of the released information and have them filter out the new/important information to tell me. It's getting too stressful to look up this information myself.

[jackkel-dragon]

Saw a Star Wars article while checking my email that managed to annoy me with how ignorant it sounded while trying to denounce ignorant people. Gonna put my rant/nerd out behind a read more to spare people who aren't interested in Star Wars.

The title of the article I saw is [316 days until Star Wars: Lucasfilm quietly confirmed Stormtroopers aren't clones]. Tense issues aside (the article is about seeing female stormtroopers in an advance copy of a book coming out later this year), anyone even vaguely knowledgeable about Star Wars already knew that most stormtroopers weren't clones by the time of A New Hope and beyond. The original Jango Fett clones from the Clone Wars would have an effective age of 60-70 by the time of A New Hope. That's why the Purge Trooper project (forcing old clones into cyborg bodies, the predecessor to the droid-based Dark Trooper project) and the hunt for new cloning methods are such a big deal in the old Expanded Universe stories. There was even a time when someone tried to make test-tube clones that were old enough to fight in a year by implanting memories, but the clones went insane under most circumstances due to Force backlash or something. So of course the Empire recruited from ordinary humans: how else would it have a standing army?

If that wasn't enough to clue people in that stormtroopers weren't all clones, the EU from before the prequel movies came out specifically had ordinary humans enlist to be stormtroopers. I believe a character in the Jedi Knight novelizations thought that Kyle Katarn would become a stormtrooper at one point (a bit of a hyperbole: Kyle was going to an Imperial Academy, so he'd probably be an officer if he didn't defect to the Rebellion).

Anyway, seeing that while trying to check my messages really annoyed me. I'm pretty much the quintessential "nerd" that hasn't read everything in the series but has read enough about the series to get the gist of what's going on. If even someone like me knows that stormtroopers post-Revenge of the Sith aren't clones, why is yet another piece of evidence worth a headline article? It's like someone going on the nightly news and saying "Did you know that The Hobbit is based on a novel? We just got confirmation from the credits of the third movie!"

Well, enough ranting. I probably look really silly now, but having such ignorance not only thrust in my face but to be about something I'm interested in is really annoying.

[jackkel-dragon]

So I found a BGM track I commissioned for my original project in a game that was made *before* I commissioned the track, and with no indication in that game's readme that it was made by the person I commissioned.

If I find that I spent money on a scam, I'm going to be... "upset."

[jackkel-dragon]

After wasting a total of 5 hours of my life trying to get Tumblr Savior to work (and failing), I'm finished dealing with it. If there isn't a way (that works) to block tags on Tumblr from Internet Explorer by the end of the week, I'm going to need to stop checking Tumblr or start unfollowing people. Since I only follow like 16 people I hoped it wouldn't come to this, but I'm getting tired of not being able to block tags of things I don't want to see.

I wonder how many people that use Chrome have "jackkel rants" in their Tumblr Savior blacklist.

[jackkel-dragon]

If I weren't so tired, I'd probably rant about not being able to get Tumblr Savior to work for me despite trying multiple workarounds and spending a lot of time trying to make it work. Not only is there no way to get it to run for Internet Explorer, but even when Firefox deigns to run for me it doesn't work there either.

If I can't find a way to get Tumblr Savior working, I might have to start unfollowing people or disappear from Tumblr for a while. I don't really want to do either of those things, but lately I've been seeing a few things on my dashboard that I'd rather not deal with and I can only imagine things getting worse in the near future.

So much for being too tired to rant.

[jackkel-dragon]

I'm really not amused by the hatred and mocking of Visual Novels on the Steam forums. Here I am desperately searching for good VNs to play, and when finally some VNs dare to show up on Steam and Steam Greenlight they get mocked to hell and back for being "weeaboo garbage" (even the one made by a Japanese company) or for their lack of gameplay. There's a difference between having an opinion on a game genre and being an asshole, and these people aren't on the right side of that difference.

Despite having many things I should be doing instead, I think I'm going to have to work on my own VN project to calm down now. It's been a while since I made real progress on Zero Hope anyway...

[jackkel-dragon]

I've been feeling kind of down lately and feel the need to vent. Doing it behind a read more so I don't clog up anyone's dashboard...

I've been having a lot of doubts about Fatal Operation lately. I've tried to shake off the nastier bits of criticism about Depths of Despair because, to be fair, I *did* write the main plot of that game over the course of two weeks. A lot of the things I've seen have been misconceptions of what I was trying to accomplish or were addressed in later versions but were still considered part of the game by the critics, but there ARE some valid points about the quality of that game since it was so rushed.

Thing is, I've been seeing a higher ratio of criticism for Fatal Operation so far than I'd seen for Depths of Despair at any point in its development. It hasn't helped that I've seen people that wish a certain character wasn't in the game and hope they die early when the plan is for them to become one of the most important characters later in the story. It really hurts to spend over six months drafting, outlining, writing and re-writing a story to then find a comment like

A fight to the top, eh? Well I can say for sure that Jackkel Dragon’s games won’t be winning the fight. 

With all the other Corpse Party fangames coming out soon, maybe the world doesn't need Fatal Operation. Even though I maintain that a lot of criticism for Depths of Despair is based on people misunderstanding what I meant, that still means that I failed to present the story in a way that can be understood. I shouldn't need to spend time explaining the story for people to get what's going on. If I can't tell a story properly, maybe it'd be better if I didn't tell the story at all.

[jackkel-dragon]

For whatever reason, finding out that I can't agree with either side of an argument feels really alienating. (Even more so when I realize how silly I must be to get worked up over the arguments I do.)

What triggered this is my stance on Seiko Shinohara's personality. On the one hand, I'm annoyed by people who simplify her to "ass medicine girl." On the other, I accept scenes like that as an established part of Seiko's personality and defense mechanisms. I also get kind of annoyed when people blame the translator for the English version of Seiko's lines. On the old XSEED forums Tom specifically explained that he changed Seiko's lines to be more silly than a direct translation to keep with the crude manner she spoke in the original Japanese. Thing is, I can't use this in an argument because that forum (and all its information) no longer exists.

All that said, I'm too obstinate to change a thing in how Seiko will be portrayed in Fatal Operation. Without spoiling anything, all I can say is that people that have either of the opinions I don't like about Seiko will really dislike her personality in Fatal Operation. People expecting her to remain little more than a joke character or comic relief will not like how serious her story becomes, and people who dislike Seiko being typecasted as the silly one will not like how I kept that aspect of her personality in the story and continue to highlight it.

In less whiney news, Fatal Operation's first demo will be coming out soon. I'm looking forward to seeing how the first chapter of the story is received...