Diary: Good things in May and such
I'm going to write an article about the things I enjoyed interacting with in May. Music, manga, and various other things...
Summarizing things like this is good because it helps me pay attention to the little things I tend to overlook. I want to keep this habit going, just like last month.
This time, it got a bit scattered and long again, so please just read the parts you want to. Thanks~~~.
Music
310PHz
An album that reflects the artist's wishes strongly, with Mito Tsukino taking the lead in appointing composers and lyricists. It features tracks themed around "secrets."
"Aren't people just tubes?" is a title that already gives me chills. It's a song that brightly sings about the absurdity of a cynical, cold-hearted attitude in a pop style, making fun of it.
Even though the tune is so cheerful, the lyrics themselves are terrifyingly cold and dark when you read them. The frequent use of the word "secret" makes me think about the voyeuristic consumption by viewers who want to dig up the secrets of streamers, and I think the title also contains a backlash or counter to cynicism. It feels like it's quite satirical, or rather, it has that kind of aspect.
When I listen to this song, I inevitably think of the word “picture-beast”. It's a derogatory term used to mock VTubers, but...
I really hate the people who started using this word and their followers, so I don't really want to touch on it, but the internet inevitably has a bottom-of-the-barrel, slum-like place where people mock and ridicule others. Sometimes that vulgarity leads to creation, but after all, a bad environment can also lead to pulling others down or creating discrimination.
I think it was around the time this word became popular. While the Committee Chair (Tsukino) was playing a gal game on stream and talking about how "VTubers have hearts that can get hurt too!" while mixing in some jokes, a viewer jokingly threw in a prompt saying, "(VTubers) are just pictures, right?" The Chair immediately retorted with “You guys are just text! What is a 1D saying to a 2D!?”I remember laughing so hard at that pro-wrestling-like comeback. Then, continuing by using the flower from The Little Prince as an example, she said, "It's true that I'm a picture or text, but to me, you are all listeners and I think of you as something special. To you listeners, I'm not just a picture, right?Once a relationship or emotion is born, it doesn't just stop at being an object; it becomes something special.”
Her reflexes to throw a verbal lariat at a jab to get a laugh are amazing, but she also immediately comes up with an excellent analogy and talks seriously, so I remember thinking, "This person is amazing... She's funny, but she's a decent human being." It was a scene that made me wonder if maybe she had been thinking about that for a while...
I feel like this song contains the essence of that.
If you start saying it, humans are just tubes. VTubers are just pictures. We are just text. Thoughts are nothing more than weak electrical signals. Emotions are just the ends of synapses passing neurotransmitters, with endorphins and oxytocin moving from top to bottom.
And then...what is born from lining up those facts and smugly sneering at them?That's the point. We nerds tend to do that harmful move where we line up what we know, act cynical, destroy someone's romance, and then fail to sense the freezing atmosphere of a place where everyone has left, thinking we've won by debunking them. Nothing remains there except for one creepy person who thinks they've had a self-satisfied, intellectual masturbation session. Showing off your knowledge is fine, but if your heart that feels a sense of wonder has withered, then as an animal that engages in intellectual activity, you're finished!! That's what it means.
It doesn't matter if the shell is a picture and there's no meat inside; isn't it fine as long as it's filled with joy and surprise? Even if you're just patching up the exterior or appearance, it's fine to start the substance from there. ...I think there's a message like that in it.
Still, the fact that she doesn't leak this as a grudge on social media or say it directly, but brings it out as entertainment in the form of music or fablesmakes me think she's a creator to the core...
I think Tatsuki Fujimoto also had a part where he sublimated the unreasonable complaints he received when "Look Back" was published into his work and creative theory, turning it into "My Eri," and Mito Tsukino is similar to that, or rather, she has excellent self-management skills to cool down painful events and the magma in her heart once and turn it into lava art.I think.
I ended up talking about something with a strong ideology. Let's switch gears.
As for other songs, "Koiboshi Periko" also made me laugh because it was just too much of a "zero-nineties internet" trope. At first, I didn't know the background of this song, but when I found out that a listener's letter was the source material, I thought, "Periko-chan definitely played MapleStory for this," and when I went to watch the original video, I was right, and I couldn't stop laughing. Yes, if you're talking about an online game that a girl in the zero-nineties plays, it's nine times out of ten MapleStory.
That's it. The kind where a kid who longs for a long-distance internet romance falls in love with love and exchanges numbers on Eden. Since you can't see their face, you tend to project ideals onto people you're close to on the net, and you become even more blind to the person you're in love with. My boyfriend is the cool-voiced †Kirito†, and by the way, my girlfriend looks like Asuna. You fall in love with the other person, but children's love isn't about understanding the other person, but about getting excited about the extraordinary nature of love,so the fact that you don't actually know the other person well feels like it has high resolution and is based on a true story. "Come to think of it, I don't know the other person's real name" is a situation that still applies to the modern internet, and it was a good song that made me laugh out loud while also being impressed.
The punchline, "A real ring was put on my ring finger, but the other ring is a secret just for me," is a lyric that makes me admire her. Having grown out of that time when she was a child, you can feel the growth of a woman who has become a little devilish and shrewd as someone who holds secrets.As past experiences and secrets fill up inside, people become adults and their view of life gains depth...
......Speaking of love on the internet, when I was in high school, I had an embarrassing period where I set my handle name to †Morichika Rinnosuke† and wrote a diary on GREE acting like an adult, but a girl who read it seemed to have a misunderstanding or an excessive fantasy about me, and there were various things like being asked out by her...
No, let's keep this story a "secret" after all. Following Periko-san's example, it's a case of "some things are better left unsaid."
Event
For Whose Sake the Eyes Open (Trial Version)
There was an unofficial web-only event for Toshikai, so I went to see it. It was my first time using something called Picrea.
The exhibition of various novels and illustrations, and the distribution of bromides and stickers using web prints were very interesting, and I had a good time. For the next few days after this, I became a phantom who occupied the convenience store printerthough...
I've been putting illustrations I printed via net print into frames and displaying them. I generally don't care about furnishings and live in a dark room like the Tachibana Research Institute, filled with nothing but Lain posters, so this was a good opportunity to display some bright and fun pictures.
I tend to like characters who are vengeful spirits, and in Urban Legend Dissolution Center, XXX is my favorite character. I was happy to find web prints of illustrations imagining the times when OOO is in XXX's personality state.
Visiting an exclusive event like this, I thought, 'Everyone really loves this work,' and I was simply moved by that.
If I may say so, Urban Legend Dissolution Center is the kind of thing that... well, it's divisive, isn't it? Plus, there are many people who have a strong allergic reaction once they decide they don't like it, and some even go out of their way to try and deny it...
So, when talking about Toshikai, I felt a bit hesitant, or rather, negative opinions would inevitably cross my mind and get stuck. But the obvious yet unshakable fact that 'everyone participating in this event loves Toshikai in some way' made me feel relieved and saved. I'm grateful to the person who organized and created a place like this.
Also, it's trivial, but it was interesting how people tended to gather in the corners at the Picrea venue. ──Otaku tend to hang out and rest at the walls or corners of conventions, whether online or in reality───
Guitar
Stickers
I put stickers I bought at Comitia on my guitar. I'd been meaning to do it for months.
Putting stickers on a guitar that costs 70,000 or 80,000 yen makes me want to scream, 'Whoa!!!', but this is a cheap guitar, so I don't mind. It's just an entry-level Fernandes guitar, not some Japanese vintage or anything, so it doesn't have any resale value anyway.You're going to spend your whole life with me...
I'm a person with too many hobbies, so I have so much to do that I tend to put things off, but I want to touch the guitar little by little.
Amplug 3
I bought a VOX Amplug, which lets you listen to sound directly through headphones when plugged into a guitar.
Electric guitars use electricity to amplify and produce sound, so they don't sound very good on their own without power. You connect a cable called a shield and plug it into an amp to make it sound.
I practice guitar while listening through headphones using a BOSS mini-amp or a multi-effects pedal with an amp simulator, but this is just so troublesome. You have to plug in the shield, then the headphones, and play while worrying about the cable. Besides, multi-effects pedals are meant to be used on the floor, so the unit itself is too big.
I bought it with the intention of reducing the wiring to lower the hurdle for practicing, and thanks to that, it's become much cleaner and easier to use.
There are several types of this Amplug, and they are designed with tones that evoke various amps.
You see...trademarks in the electric guitar world are cleverly avoided while still getting the job doneEach company does various things while playing dumb with 'that thing that looks like that thing.' For example, 'Stratocaster' and 'Telecaster' are trademarks held by Fender, so other companies can't claim them, but other guitar manufacturers solve this by manufacturing guitars with extremely similar shapes using abbreviations that evoke something or other like ST-type or TL-type.
VOX has also racked their brains for this Amplug. There is a famous manufacturer in the UK called Marshall that makes cool black amps that distort (drive) well, and they just happened to line up a black Amplug that coincidentally produces a similar sound as the UK Drive model. Huh...? What exactly does UK stand for...? (feigning ignorance)
I've been practicing Franz Ferdinand's 'This Fire' little by little lately, so I chose the US Silver model. By the way, Franz uses American Fender's silver amps, but this is just a coincidence and has absolutely nothing to do with it. Yes, that must be it.
Hmm... this reckless approach of pushing the limits of trademarks is just like Edgerunners, isn't it? I'm curious what kind of recipe a cocktail named after VOX would have.
Manga
This Communication
I finished reading This Communication, which I had left halfway through after the first few volumes. It was incredibly interesting.
Late 20th century—mysterious creatures called 'Iperit' suddenly appeared on Earth. Most of humanity, recognized as enemies, were wiped out, and the surface became a wasteland. Deluha, a survivor, chooses to end his own life in despair, but his life is saved by people at a research facility. At that facility, there were girls created to fight against the Iperit!
The story begins with the protagonist, Deluha, wandering the snowy mountains in search of food. Because mysterious invaders called Iperit have been slaughtering humanity and continuously spraying poison gas over the Earth, all the lowlands have been devastated. Believing that human communities still exist in the mountains, he came all the way to Kamikochi in Nagano Prefecture, Japan.
The "bread and salted meat" that Deluha mentions here is interesting because that is truly all he is looking for. This man honestly lives only for bread and salted meat, so if you give him food, he will listen to anyone and do heavy labor. What an honest man.
Deluha, who was picked up by a research facility and had his life saved, learns that immortal huntresses, the Huntresses, are defending against the Iperit. These ideal vanguard soldiers, who can regenerate their bodies to the state they were in an hour ago even if they die and possess enough brute strength to tear an Iperit apart, were guarding this place.
However, because these Huntresses have lived their lives drugged and separated from their families as subjects of human experimentation, and because they possess monstrous strength, their mental states are unstable and their teamwork is catastrophic. They even end up slicing their own allies in half while trying to defeat the attacking Iperit... So, the story follows Deluha as he reveals his background as a former soldier and volunteers to be their instructor to train them as soldiers.
Hearing the synopsis so far, you might think, "Even if it's to counter the Iperit, isn't it cruel and inhumane to modify humans?" While taking on the role of instructor, Deluha also struggles with that...
...he does not.
That is because Deluha is an unbelievable piece of trash and a heartless monster.
This is where the fun and the essence of the manga "This Communication" are packed. This work is a comedy where Deluha's trashiness is hilarious. He is a realist who throws ethics out the window in favor of rationality, and he is a terrible soldier who is incredibly competent but has a bad habit of killing his own allies.
He is a man with the ultimate Bethesda-game brain who, if he thinks "Wouldn't it be faster to just kill that guy?", immediately kills them to solve the problem, so he is a piece of scum who has killed countless allies on past battlefields. Even when he heard about the Huntresses' characteristics, he was happy, saying, "Yes! Isn't it great to have soldiers you can reuse as much as you want!!". Wh... what trash!!!!
Focusing on the fact that the Huntresses regenerate to their state from an hour ago, Deluha begins to produce them, thinking, "Let's create the best army by killing them whenever something inconvenient happens to reset their memories and adjust human relationships!" If a problem occurs, he kills them and rewinds time so it never happened, and he only needs to convey information that improves Deluha's impression or increases the bond between allies. Since he is training a unit of girls, it is essentially like Idolmaster. Well, it's a situation where the producer has become GLaDOS from Portal, but...
With that in mind, Deluha spends his crazy life cycle killing them efficiently like an RTA runner while considering the one-hour constraint and the eight-hour cost for regeneration to gain the Huntresses' trust and deepen their bonds.
However, although the idea was good, our Deluha-dono is a soldier and, so to speak, a strategy sim runner, so unfortunately, he is not a gal game pro. He can brilliantly sense and handle the schemes of enemies and the Iperit's targets, but he is a layman when it comes to the behavioral principles of girls his age. The sight of Deluha stepping on landmines for girls and trying to correct his course by activating his original character is also a highlight of this manga.
Since the Huntresses' memories only return and the real-world time does not rewind, it is painfully annoying that he cannot re-run when he steps into a blunder. For example, he cannot erase memories if physical phenomena have already occurred or if people at the research facility have learned something inconvenient.The fact that there are parts that can be corrected by re-killing the Huntresses and parts that cannot is also an interesting point.
Deluha is such a sloppy RTA runner and a man of the lowest scum, but he is also a character who will seriously talk about his own views when you consult him in earnest, and he is also charming.
Of course, there are plenty of times when he is lying or trying to deceive you, so you cannot trust anything he says, but he does not neglect the basics of communication: "listening to the other person's story without disgust and responding with his own words". He chooses the option of killing them in seconds if things seem like they will drag on or if it is inconvenient, but he tries to settle things properly through conversation if they can be solved easily. Even just "pretending to listen" leaves a much better impression on the other person than being ignored or treated like a leper.
Even though he is a huge piece of trash, he is obsessed with food, has the strong willpower to handle troublesome things for that sake, and has a flexible side, such as adopting the Huntresses' opinions if they are efficient because he does not cling to his pride. There is no doubt that he is actually an excellent commander.
In a way, this work is a manga where a "villain who is a scoundrel but has a backbone, has beliefs, and you can't help but like," often found among enemy executives, is somehow playing the protagonist by mistake. Of course that's going to be interesting.
I've only shown you the heroines as corpses so far, but it's also good that they are cute.
It was a truly interesting and chaotic manga that asks, "What will become of Deluha-dono, who is tossed around by the Huntresses, encounters trouble, and has to deal with the Iperit?" I recommend it.
Game
April Detective Agency
A mystery game that was supposedly built in a rush, sparked by an April Fool's joke.
Your assistant, Joshua-kun (yes, -kun. I won't say what, but he's got it), who is dressed as a bunny girl, goes around handing out flyers and runs wild at the local detective agency, causing chaos to snatch up cases. Let's use your superior gray cells to lead us to a solution.
This game, believe it or not, has no evidence-gathering part. Just listen to the suspect's testimony and decide if they're guilty or innocent based on your gut feeling. In fact, you can even skip listening to the suspect entirely, so you can just decide everything based on your intuition. Are you even human for doing that??
There are some people who don't even need to be heard, or rather, I'm surprised you managed to get here from the crime scene through the main road in that state types, but naturally, for most suspects, you won't be able to tell if they are guilty or innocent. You'll probably finish your first playthrough without understanding anything.
Yes, that's the key point, but this game is a game where the truth becomes clear through repeated playthroughs. Was there anything suspicious in the suspect's story? What happens if I try treating them as guilty? What was the date the incident occurred? As you try various things and take notes, the connections between each incident will gradually emerge.
It's also a multi-ending system where it's not just about guessing guilty or innocent, but letting someone go even if they are guilty might cause something to happen... so there's the fun of repeating playthroughs to collect endings.
Mystery games are only fun if you solve them yourself, so I'll avoid saying anything more, but it was a very, very solid deduction game that I can't believe was made quickly starting from a joke. Once I understood the causal relationships, it became fun, and I sat down, opened a text editor, and organized the information to solve it.
There are some elements you won't understand without repeating playthroughs, so it takes a bit of time, but the cuteness of the characters and the mystery references hidden in the character names made me chuckle; it was a charming game.
ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! (splat splat splat splat)
Nightreign has been the talk of the town lately. It's debatable whether I should count it for May, but since it was released in May, I will.
I managed to defeat Gladius, so I'm running around the lands of Limberd with all my might while trying out various characters.
Nightreign is a new standalone game that, as a spin-off of Elden Ring, has been boldly reforged into a co-op game with completely different gameplay. While some enemy characters and items are shared, it's a different story in a different place.
Or rather, it's almost the exact opposite game design, isn't it? It's the polar opposite of the FromSoftware ARPGs we've known, where you carefully think through every move, develop your character, hone your own skills, and unleash those results on the boss. It's built as a system of how fast can you build and overpower them with brute force?
When you're told to build a character at super speed, you naturally need knowledge. You have to think in reverse from the stats, like whether to give a greatsword to a strength-based character or give a quality-type weapon that scales with both strength and dexterity to a jack-of-all-trades character...
Unlike the main game, where you start with 'I want to use this weapon!' and build from there, the structure here is 'The stats are already decided, so let's equip a suitable weapon!' Because of this, it's difficult unless you are familiar with the vast number of weapon types and know 'this is suitable for that kind of thing,' so I think it's a challenging game with a slightly high barrier to entry that will select its players.
The fact that they solve this problem of requiring Elden Ring knowledge with the brute force of 'Elden Ring itself has sold like crazy, so there are too many gamers with Elden Ring knowledge, so it's fine' is hilarious. It's a feat that can only be accomplished because the customer base (pie) is so huge—a 'big pie' game, if you will.
Furthermore, as an additional element, they've incorporated hack-and-slash elements that make you farm for items in the form of relics, and roguelike elements where clearing becomes slightly easier by repeating playthroughs, which is truly ambitious and innovative.
Even so, it's a good impression for fans that it retains some of the 'looseness' that has continued from the Souls series. Communication is limited to things like pins and gestures, and there's a certain degree of freedom, as character roles aren't strictly bound, allowing for intermediate builds that are 'a bit tanky' or 'a bit caster-y'.
To be honest, I was thinking of 'grading Nightreign quite leniently'.Miyazaki-san, who loves poison swamps! wasn't involved, and he had said in advance that he left it to the younger staff, so I was watching over it with the temperature of 'I hope it works as a game!' like watching over young children, but...
Then, didn't a genuinely interesting game come out? I was surprised. I was shocked, thinking, 'The young staff at FromSoftware have grown this much!' and I was ashamed of my own shallow assessment.
I suspect that the current young staff at FromSoftware are not the second generation who joined because they loved the original PlayStation games made by the first generation, but rather the third generation who joined FromSoftware because they loved Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. In other words, it's a structure where fans of the Souls series are making the Souls series. There is a jinx that when fans of a series get involved in the production of the main work, they can't maintain a very high quality, so I had quite low expectations for Nightrain for that reason too. There is a phenomenon where people admire the great original, try to make a dead copy of it, their field of vision narrows, it becomes an echo chamber, and they end up repeating a boiled-down reproduction... Yoshiyuki Tomino also said something like, "If you're going to make anime, don't just use anime as a reference, absorb things from outside of anime too," and it's pretty much like that.
So, if they had just mindlessly imitated past works, I would have tried to gloss over it with a forced smile like Hifumi, but I want to applaud Nightrain for properly researching the industry, referencing other interesting games, and blowing a breath of fresh air into it.
For example, in hack-and-slash games, as you collect items and become ridiculously strong, you start to be able to do naughty things that break the game balance depending on the combinations, and it's known that in this game too, if you stack stamina consumption reduction and stamina recovery, you can do naughty things like firing daggers and arrows in rapid succession. In the case of PvE games, it seems that often the developers actually know about this and leave in broken builds to entertain the gamers. There have been some minor updates so far, but if they leave it as is or settle for very mild nerfs (to expand the range of builds), I think the members must have a very high resolution for hack-and-slash games.
It's amazing that they incorporate elements from other genres like that, but they also grasped the essence of "what was good about the Souls series?" and kept it properly, so they have a good sense of balance. I feel a brightness for the future, knowing they can properly research and create new games.
In terms of evaluation for this work, it seems the initial reaction on Steam reviews was mixed, but it is currently mostly positive, so perhaps players' understanding has progressed and they have come to understand the appeal.
Well, in the first place, there's no way a decent review can be written in the first day or few days of release. It's common for low ratings to pile up on the first day of a major game. Sane people know that you can't write an evaluation that understands everything about a game in a few hours of playing, but people who try to write one anyway are just "that kind of person"...
As for whether I personally recommend Nightrain, it's like, "If you played Elden Ring or Soulsborne and enjoyed putting down signs for co-op play, wouldn't you find it quite interesting?" It's a bit tough if you're a complete newcomer who hasn't played the series, but I think it's fine if you're the type of person who can look up theories and game information and stick with it.
The game itself is definitely interesting, but I think it's the type of work that requires a bit of jaw strength to keep chewing until you understand the flavor of this game.
This is trivial, but the fact that the Nightrain, who is supposed to save Limberd, is acting like a barbarian rampaging through Limberd is like a Yakuza Tengu donationand I think it's funny.