Sekiro Only From Software Game I'm Not Pre-Ordering (Monday Musings 73)

In general, it's always best to wait until the about to be released game comes out much later with a complete bundled package, including all the DLCs, because at that time, the price comes down from $60 to the more affordable $20 or $30. Further, patches would have been out by now that will fix the glitches. 

Therefore, not only will the game be cheaper in price, but you get more content for less money, and a more polished experience! Additional benefit is, during that period of time, you can watch others play the game, to make sure you really want it.

However, there are some games that I have to pre-order and play right away, and those are the From software games. I played and fell in love with Demon's and Dark Souls years after release, Dark Souls being my favorite game. Therefore, I had to pre-order Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, as I played them on day of release. It was worth the full price, even as Bloodborne eventually became free for Playstation Plus (PS+) subscribers.

The only other thing I can think of in terms of pre-ordering is to get the preordered bonus content, but usually the bonus content doesn't justify buying the game now, rather than waiting for the complete and more affordable game to come out.

Sekiro just didn't appeal to me, as it won't have the RPG elements and character building that I've come to love in video games. This has gotten to the point where it was hard for me to play games other than RPGs.

I know I've been whinging about Sekiro since it was introduced back in E3 2018, but I hope that I'm 100% wrong about this game. If my friends really love the game, I'll be sure to wait until the complete bundled package arrives - usually From Software comes out with future DLCs.

What are your thoughts about pre-ordering and will you pre-order Sekiro?

The How of Happiness Review

Storium Theory: Get Emotionally Invested

I've finished up my Storium Basics articles, so now, I'd like to take a little time to write about one more thing. This is something that I think is important for anyone playing Storium, or indeed any sort of RPG or storytelling system. Heck, it's important for general writing as well.

You have to let yourself feel.

If you want to tell powerful stories, you have to let yourself feel.

If you want to truly portray your character, you have to let yourself feel.

If you just want to have the best time you can roleplaying, to have an experience you'll remember and look back on fondly, you have to let yourself feel.

Some people can do this really easily. Others, myself included, have a tougher time with it.

I have a tendency to get pretty mechanical when I'm writing, particularly in RPGs, storytelling games, or the like. I find that I distance myself from the events of the story, from the emotional impact of what goes on, in a way that I don't if I'm just watching a movie or reading a book or playing a video game. When I'm not participating in the writing, I can get involved in the emotion of a story easily. But when I'm participating...

When I'm participating, I spend more time thinking about what should happen next, or what I'm going to do, or what cards I'm going to play, or what my strategy should be for the next step, what abilities I want to use, how my tactics will affect my dice rolls...any or all of that, depending on what sort of writing or gaming we're talking about. It's really easy to distance myself from feeling what's happening in the story, and look at things as the basic exercise of writing or gaming rather than the full-fledged emotional experience of a tale.

There's a social aspect, too, though that's less of a concern in a play-by-post sort of game like Storium. But still...I'm not a guy who likes to have his emotions on full display. I'm not that open, really, and so I tend to consciously or unconsciously resist letting myself react to story events emotionally when I'm writing or playing with others.

I've learned that I have to try to break out of that shell.

The best moments I've had in Storium, in tabletop gaming, in online roleplaying, in MUXes, in any kind of collaborative writing experience...those moments have all been when I let my walls drop. Those are the moments I remember most fondly.

The moments when I let the tears come while I read and wrote.

The moments when I felt anger at the deeds of a villain.

The moments when I worried for a hero who had disappeared.

The moments when I dove into my character's mindset and felt the fear he would about the monster lurking in the dark.

It's so very easy to separate ourselves from the tale. Sometimes we do it because we'd be uncomfortable otherwise. In a horror game, for instance, we'll crack jokes or make table talk about the real world, reemphasizing the unreality of the horror. In the midst of a tragedy, we'll have our heroes stand bold and proud, brushing off the sorrow and just going on being heroes. We can't have them break, because someone might think we've broken too.

But I've learned that when I allow myself to feel, when I allow that fear or horror or sadness or pain or joy or hope or dream or love to affect me, and then allow it to affect my writing, I get an experience I can remember, and an experience others can remember as well.

I've learned that I can best write a character who has gone through struggles and pain when I let myself feel the sadness, just as I would if I weren't participating in the writing. I've learned to force myself to treat roleplaying and collaborative storytelling just like watching a movie or reading a book or playing a video game with a great tale - I've learned to drop my guard and let things hit me.

Because when I let things hit me, I let them hit my character, and when I let them hit my character, my character's reactions are more honest, more powerful, more raw and pure. It makes the character feel like a full-fledged person, with hopes and dreams and fears and pain, who is affected by the tale, driven by the tale, pushed to react and to experience emotion and to be changed by those experiences.

For me, it's hard. It's honestly hard. It's so easy to slip back into just thinking, "Well, what should happen next?" or "What card should I use here?" or "What tactic seems best?" or "What would be a cool thing to do?" or "What's my next one-liner?" And look - all of those questions can be, frequently are good things to ask. But not if they separate you from actually feeling. And for me, they can, unless I force myself to into the right mindset. For me, they can, unless I specifically connect myself with the heart of the tale.

This isn't something I can tell you how to do. Everybody's different. Everybody reacts to a story differently. For some of you, this isn't even something you'll have to think about. Some of you are reading this article and thinking, "Wow, I mean, I just get in my character's head and I feel this stuff anyway." And that's great! There are people who can just do that, who can just feel like a character, get in their head, think like they do, and feel like they do. It's something you hear about from great actors all the time, and it's something I've heard from great roleplayers as well.

But if you're like me, and you find yourself thinking clinically about stories, thinking about plot designs, thinking about cards or dice or what-have-you, thinking about character motivations from a distance...I can't tell you how to do it, but I encourage you to try to break that. Think like a reader, think like someone who is experiencing the tale. Don't think what your character should do, feel what your character will do.

If you're like me, that isn't going to be easy, and you aren't going to succeed all the time. But those moments where you do succeed? Those are going to be the moments you remember, the moments you deeply treasure, the moments you look back on years from now and relive in your mind.

When that happens...you see the true treasure that roleplaying, that collaborative storytelling, that writing in general can be. You leave a part of yourself in that story. You become a part of it, and it becomes a part of you. It is a beautiful, wonderful experience.

So...let yourself feel. Open yourself to that experience. Let the story in.

---

This will be the final weekly article of Storium Theory. I'm not going to say that I'm solidly done, that there will never be another article, but I've said just about everything I can think of to say at present. I've written one hundred and thirty-three articles about Storium, counting this one, and I've written about it since November 2015. That's...probably more than I've written about anything else in my life, ever. And that's not counting my participation in Storium Arc, where I've spent many hours talking about this great system and community as well.

It's amazing to me the level of depth that a system like Storium has turned out to have...the fact that I could find so much to write about it, the fact that I could write for such a long time on it and it alone...that honestly surprised me. When I started this out, I didn't initially set it up on my blog. I was just going to have four or five little articles on a webpage somewhere, just a quick little guide of sorts for new Storium players or narrators.

But Storium was deeper than that. Storium was more than that. Exploring Storium took longer, took more thought, became more interesting to me. I found myself exploring the ways the system could be used, the ways you could use challenges to do interesting things, and that got me thinking about how things could work in my own games or with my own characters, and those fed back into articles here.

Now...again, I can't say I'm done. I'm still playing Storium, and topics will still likely arise. But for now, this is the end of weekly articles, of regularly scheduled articles.

I hope that those of you who have read these have found them useful. I hope that I've helped you get more comfortable with the Storium system, and to learn to use it in creative ways, ways that can enhance your stories and lead to memorable and fun games. I hope that I've helped you get into your characters and explore them more deeply.

But now, as ever, I want to emphasize something: My way to play Storium is not the only way to play Storium. My way to write is not the only way to write. As I close up this post, and with it, the regular Storium Theory articles, I want to encourage you to look not just here, but to the community in general, to other Storium games, to other resources. If you need help, ask for it - the community is willing. If you need examples, look for them among the other games out there. See how things have worked. Explore. And come up with your own methods, your own interesting ways to use the system, your own house rules.

Storium is a simple system in concept, but a deep one at heart. Take the time to get to know it and it will reward you.

May the future bring you friendship, great stories, and treasured memories.

Exploring Monster Taming Mechanics In Final Fantasy XIII-2

Let's just get this out of the way. I'm a huge Final Fantasy fan. I adore the original game even today, Final Fantasy VI is definitely the best of the franchise, and I've found things to enjoy in every one that I've played, which is nearly all of the main-line games. (I still haven't managed to crack open FFIII, but I plan to soon.) Even each of the games in the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy had something that drew me in and kept me going through the game, wanting to learn more. These games get a lot of flack for being sub-par installments in the Final Fantasy franchise, and some of the criticism is warranted. The story is convoluted, and the plot is as confusing as quantum mechanics.

That debate, however, is not why we're here now. We're here to look at one of the great aspects of FFXIII-2: the monster taming and infusion system.

This system is deep and complex, but not in the off-putting way that the plot is. The amount of variety and configurability in the monsters that you can recruit to fight alongside Serah and Noel is astonishing, which is nice because those two are somewhat lacking in that department. Their development paths are fairly linear. There are a few choices about what strengths to give them as they level up in the "crystarium," but it's mostly a matter of ordering the abilities they learn and doesn't make much difference in the end. The monsters, on the other hand, allow for huge variations in development that results in a system with fascinating choices for optimization and prioritization. Figuring out how to capture and develop powerful monsters early in the game is great fun, and its this characteristic of Final Fantasy games—of finding ways to build a strong party early in the game without tedious grinding—that I really enjoy.

On a totally different note, I've been considering different ways to practice using databases and building simple websites, and the monster taming system is complex enough and interesting enough that it would make for a good collection of content to use for that practice while having some fun in the process. So, the other goal of this series, other than exploring the monster taming system in FFXIII-2, is to explore how to get a data set into a database, put it up on a website with Ruby on Rails, and experiment with that data set in some novel ways. Before we get into all of that, however, we need to understand what the heck we're putting in the database in the first place, and to do that we need to understand this monster taming system in detail.

Monster Taming

Okay, what is this monster taming, and why is it so complicated? We'll have to start at the beginning and work our way through the system. At the start of the game there's just Serah, trying to stay alive. (Actually, the very start of the game is a flashy battle sequence and confusing plot points with Lightning, but let's ignore that.) Pretty soon Noel shows up and decides to help Serah out, so now it's a party of two. This setup goes on for a couple levels, but it's pretty weird for a Final Fantasy game. Normally there's three or four characters in a party. Then we come to a pitched battle with a Cait Sith and a Zwerg Scandroid. There will be a lot of weird monster names throughout this series. You're just going to have to roll with it. Anyway, after creaming the cat and the droid, they turn into monster crystals, which are basically the essence of monsters. These crystals are stored in your monster inventory, and you can assign three of them to coveted spots in your "Paradigm Pack" (not the name I would have picked). These three monster spirits will fight with you in battle, and so begins your long and precarious journey as the monster whisperer.

Monsters come in six basic varieties, conveniently matching the six roles that Serah and Noel can assume. These six role are briefly explained as follows:

• Commando - The Arnold Schwarzenegger role, plenty of strength, short on finesse.
• Ravager - The mage role, uses attack magic.
• Sentinel - This is a tank role, not many attacking options, but it absorbs damage like it's nothing.
• Saboteur - Weakens the enemy by removing protections and inflicting ailments like poison and slow.
• Synergist - Strengthens the party with offensive and defensive enhancements. Also moonlights as a business executive.
• Medic - Heals the party, and possibly the only obvious role name of the bunch.

While Serah and Noel can switch between these roles, the tamed monsters have fixed roles. Switching the monster's role switches the monster, and there are three role possibilities for any given battle corresponding to the three monsters that are on deck. The monster's type is only the beginning of what a monster is, though. There is so much more.

Monster Training

Monsters can gain experience just like Serah and Noel. Both the humans and the monsters have crystariums where they advance along a path to gain abilities and increase their stats. While the humans have a crystarium for each of their six roles, the monsters each have one crystarium, possibly with multiple levels, where they gain their abilities and stats. Because the crystariums of the monsters are more unique to the monster itself, each monster type will learn a unique set of abilities and end up with different stats. Additionally, while the humans can move through their crystariums by spending crystarium points gained from winning battles, monsters can only advance on their crystariums by using various types of monster materials that are dropped by defeating monsters in battle. This seems to be some form of cannibalism, but it's pretty mild because the materials are bolts and orbs and other things like that. Monsters require different materials for their crystariums depending on what level they're on their crystarium, and if they're biological or mechanical monsters. Different materials will also give different bonuses to the monster's health, strength, magic, or all three stats.

Following so far? Because we're just getting started. This monster whispering is intricate stuff. On top of the unique upgrade paths, abilities, and materials, each monster spirit has a set of characteristics that relate to how they will develop as they level up. A monster can be a "late bloomer," meaning it may be weak to start with, but it can reach the upper levels 70-99 of its crystarium. Maybe the monster is "brainy," meaning that it will learn lots of abilities, or it's "flameproof," which is pretty self-explanatory. There are 29 characteristics in all, and any given monster can have up to four of them. Monsters will also come with some initial abilities, whether that be actions like casting certain spells and attacking or passive abilities like "armor breaker" that allows it to penetrate an enemy's physical defense. Taming and training monsters are not the only ways to get monsters with certain abilities, however. This is where things get real, as in real complicated.

Monster Infusion

The third way to give a particular monster new and wonderful abilities is to take another monster that has the desired ability(ies) and fuse them into the desired monster through a magical monster infusion process. How does this work exactly? Who knows! How did materia work in FFVII, or guardian force cards in FFVIII? It's a Final Fantasy game; some things you just have to accept without question and move on. The source monster spirit is lost in this process of infusing the target monster with new abilities. It's a destructive process.

Losing the source monster is not the only cost, though. There are restrictions as well. The first restriction is that a monster can only have 10 passive abilities. If a monster accumulates more than 10 passive abilities, some of them are going to have to go. These abilities all have a rank, and higher ranked abilities will stick to a monster better than lower ranked abilities. Also, newer abilities are stickier than older abilities, according to when the monster learned them. The lowest ranked abilities will get the boot first, with order of acquisition being the tie-breaker—first in, first out.

The next restriction is red-locked abilities. These are abilities that cannot be transferred to or removed from a monster, ever. This restriction is pretty simple, unlike the next one.

Monsters can also have yellow-locked abilities, although these locks never exist by default. Yellow locks can be created, propagated, and destroyed by infusing abilities of the same type in various ways. Two abilities are the same type if they modify the same attribute. For example, HP +10% and HP +25% would be of the same type. Also, HP +10% is a lower rank than HP +25%. That's important for yellow locks because if you infuse a monster that already has a lower rank ability with an equal or higher rank ability of the same type, the infused ability comes with a yellow lock and will stay put when the monster's abilities overflow. Generally, if an ability of higher rank is added to a yellow-locked ability of lower rank, the yellow lock is kept. If an ability of equal or lower rank is added to a yellow-locked ability, the yellow lock is destroyed. It's a bit more complicated than that because there are about a dozen different combinations, but this summary should be sufficient for the purpose of setting the requirements of the database. Basically, we want to make sure we know the rank of each ability so that we can figure out the best way to develop monsters' abilities.

All of the red lock and yellow lock stuff has to do with passive abilities, but there are two other types of abilities that come into play with monster infusion: role abilities and hidden abilities. Role abilities are the actions that the monster will take in battle, and there is no limit to the number of these abilities that a monster can have. When a source monster is infused, you can choose from its role abilities up to the number that its crystarium stage is at, which will be 1-5 depending on how much you can level up the monster and how much you actually leveled it up. The disadvantage of infusing too many role abilities on a monster is that you don't have control over what it does in battle, and if it has too many options, it probably won't be doing what you want it to do when you need it most. Decide what you're going to use a monster for, and then don't give it choices. You can't remove role abilities once they're infused.

Lastly, hidden abilities are learned by a monster when it is infused with 99 levels worth of monsters of the opposite role. Commando and Ravager are opposites (makes sense), Saboteur and Synergist are opposites (makes even more sense), and Sentinel and Medic are opposites (the leftovers, I guess). For example, you could infuse nine level 17 Zwerg Scandroids onto your Red Chocobo, and it'll learn Jeopardize, which boosts the bonus the chocobo gets when attacking a staggered enemy. Each role has it's own hidden ability that it gets when those 99 levels of monsters of the opposite role are infused into it.

Acquiring the Data for the Database

Okay, that was a bunch of intricate, complicated stuff, but it gives us a good idea of what kind of data we want to put in our database so we can link it up and ask interesting questions about monster infusion. 

First, we want to know all about monsters:

• What's its name?
• Is it tamable? We might have a separate tamable monster table since most of the following properties wouldn't apply to non-tamable monsters.
• What materials does it drop in battle?
• What's its role?
• Where in the game can we find it?
• What are its characteristics?
• What's its max level?
• What are its starting and ending stats (HP, strength, and magic)?
• What are its starting abilities?
• What abilities does it learn and at which crystarium levels?
• How many crystarium stages does it have?
• What is its feral link? (We didn't talk about this. It's a special action that can be triggered when the monster gets hit too much.)
• What does the feral link do?
• We could also include pictures if we want to get fancy.

We also want to know about abilities. This will be a separate table:

• What's its name?
• What's its rank?
• What does it do?
• Is it passive, role, or hidden? These may be separate tables, since they're different enough to warrant it.
• Which role is it associated with?

We'll be interested in at least one aspect of the areas in the game:

• What's its name?
• How early can we reach this area? I.e. which area unlocks this area?

Since there's a fair number of monster materials, we'll want to keep track of those:

• What's its name?
• Is it biological or mechanical?
• What stage of the crystarium is it for?
• Does it boost HP, strength, magic, or all three? (The name does give this away, but let's be thorough.)

We'll also want to know a little about the monster characteristics because the names are not self-explanatory:

• What's its name?
• What does it mean?

This is shaping up to be a reasonably complex database with 5-8 tables interlinked by these different items' names. The relations in the database will happen through IDs, but everything does have a name as well. The names will be what appears in the tables presented as views of the database, likely with hyperlinks to their information in their own tables. So how should we get all of this data into a database? I certainly don't want to enter it by hand. There's over 150 monsters, dozens of abilities, and dozens of properties for each monster. 

Luckily, some ambitious people have already done the hard work of writing out all of these things in an FAQ, and it's available on gamefaqs.com. The Monster Infusion FAQ by sakurayule, BMSirius, and Taly932 contains almost everything we want to put in the database. It also contains example builds for post-game super monsters, but we're going to look at something a bit different with this series. We want to figure out the best monster builds we can do during the game in order to have monsters that can help us through the game without the need to do any grinding. All of the necessary information is in that FAQ. We just have to write a script to parse it and put it in a form that's easy to import into the database. That parsing script is what we'll figure out how to write in the next episode.