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So I recently heard that last month yet ANOTHER royal YouTube screw up has made tons of people really mad. Yet another example of the automated system screwing up and screwing a lot of people over. Some big name people even. And people complained again loudly with seemingly little effect, until some of it was cleared up without even a peep of an apology or even any explanation for what happened. Same old story. This wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last. This isn't going to change. YouTube will continue to screw with people and people will complain but they won't really do anything to change it. They certainly won't leave YouTube or anything. They aren't going to risk their livelihood or audience and will continue to implicitly support the broken system even knowing that it is broken and knowing they are doing nobody any good supporting it. Because when it comes down to it, YouTube is a monopoly that can get away with anything. Except it doesn't have to be. See, this is the Internet. This is a system where anyone can, if they wish to, install Apache on a old computer and get their own web site online from their own homes. Not the best way to do it of course, for that you need either money enough to rent a server or to find some free web hosting site, not to mention DNS registration fees. But you CAN do it. Thanks to WebM and HTML5's video tag you can even host videos there, though again it would be slow and a hassle and no one is likely to find it. Of course, since it is slow and a hassle and no one will be able to find it, no one does that stuff anymore (except for "dark web" stuff I guess"). The thing is though, even big things like Channel Awesome which DO have their own site have always relied on external video sites for hosting videos. And I mean, fine, I understand why. WebM is a relatively new technology for one thing, and most sites just can't handle the type of load videos get. But the weakness of not hosting their own videos and ads and stuff is they rely on external sites for their content, and any problem or change will effect them and tfhey can't do much about it. They were counted with the ones who were having problems with YouTube's latest round of bullcrap after all. Ideally, what would be best is to have a YouTube-like site API that can work both as a host for people who can't do it themselves, and as a search engine/cache system for videos on external sites. A decentralized cache would speed up most videos while allowing everyone to host them where ever they want wouldn't it? There would be no need for any one corporation to control the whole system. Heck, it's likely this will happen to YouTube if an antitrust case is ever successfully built to challenge it, since this is kinda what happened to the bell system. The thing that sort of annoys me though, is that it's not just video that this trend has effected. All of a sudden, most people seem to have flocked to a handful of sites for everything. Facebook, DeviantArt, Twitter, Tumblr, and so on. These few sites seemed to have gobbled up most of the content on the web, and all are controlled by centralized corporations with their own rules and very little competition allowing them to do what they want how they want. Am I the only one who thinks that the "good old days" where everyone had their own little server somewhere where they could host whatever they wanted was a better system? Maybe, but we can't go back can we? I would like to see more general APIs and decentralized systems and less monolithic corporations. I do kinda think the time where corporations can thrive and do whatever they want is slowly slowly coming to an end, but they are not gonna go down quietly, and not without people who are willing to trade a bit of convince for freedom, at least in the short term.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne…or how I made a pretty powerful “heroâ€. I don’t really think it’s too much of a secret of how much I adore the Shin Megami Tensei series. My love for the series doesn’t really stem much for anything mechanical from the franchise – while Shin Megami Tensei, Persona, Devil Summoner, etc. offered some pretty unique mechanics in its combat and field gameplay, I wouldn’t call it anything super stellar or legendary. The Press Turn battle system that was most prevalent in Nocturne, IV, and both Digital Devil Saga games is definitely a turn-based battle system that I love, because of how simple it is to grasp and how much depth of strategy it can offer, especially in random encounters. However, ultimately it’s a turn-based battle system, and I wouldn’t call it the main trademark of the game. My history with this particular title of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise isn’t a super interesting story, but it does paint the sort of person I was growing up. I didn’t really get money from parents too often, and it didn’t help that when I entered middle school, I really got in jRPGs – the length and the epic scales of the games really drew me in, and I developed the only method for me to try and play as many as I could: I traded games, whether it was from the local game store or with people I knew. As such, I never really kept most of the games that I even enjoyed until much more recently, where I actually have money I can just spend on games. However, because of this, I had the opportunity to play A LOT of jRPG and horror game titles, and some memorable ones that come to mind are Rule of Rose, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, Skies of Arcadia, and of course, Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. From what I remember about playing this game back then, I got the True Demon Ending during my second cycle – the first ending was Musubi, I think. YEAH, I was a moody, edgy, and totally cool twelve-year-old who liked to be alone. Eventually, Nocturne was also traded in, and I didn’t really explore too much of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise until I got to play Persona 4 a few years later – courtesy of a senior of mine in high school, who was kind enough to loan me her copy for a few months. Anyways, as I type this, I realize that I’m mainly writing this because after beating the final boss of this title, all the thoughts I’ve collected over the weeks suddenly exploded. The NPC dialogue and overall exposition of this game is nothing impressive, but fuck if Nocturne didn’t deliver the dialogue in such sparse and yet appropriate moments. Even if I understood the mystery of the Conception long before I played this game again, I was still drawn in, wanting to learn more, to see what I actually missed. A somewhat big complaint for many people in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise is how bullshit the boss fights could be. Especially in the titles that uses the Press Turn System (I speak mainly for Nocturne and IV, because Digital Devil Saga is arguably a pretty easy set of games). Shin Megami Tensei IV had the Minotaur, and Nocturne had the Matador. The Matador as a boss was interesting, because it taught players what to expect in the future – that buffs and debuffs, whilst not super useful in other jRPG titles, can make or break the boss fight, and that the game was going to throw curveballs at you. Honestly, I remembered the Matador battle well, even though it’s been nearly a decade since I last fought him. Some opponents never really disappeared from view even after you defeated them, so I prepared. I bought the magatama (which function as spellbooks/equipment in this game) that I needed for the battle, and fused the right demon (Uzume), and then I went in to battle the son of a bitch. I expected to take a few tries, but surprisingly, I defeated the Matador on my first try this time around. I was really happy – Matador was the first boss in a string of opponents of what people considered to be the toughest battles in the game, known as the Fiends, and then I made a goal for myself. I wouldn’t lose to a single Fiend, and I wouldn’t die once. I prepared accordingly, and hunted those bastards down as I trekked through Tokyo. I’ve had a few game overs, mainly because I was stupid and attacked a boss that would reflect my super-charged attack back at me and therefore one-shot me (I pressed the auto button, and it was too late). That said, not once did I lose to a Fiend, and soon I began to entertain the idea of not beating the game, but conquering the game. I would complete everything the game had to offer me, and when I reached the ending of the journey, I would fucking obliterate the final boss. To say the least, it’s pretty obscene for my character to do 11612 damage to the final boss when most demons would deal around 200-400 damage with their best abilities on an enemy in a random encounter. Needless to say, the final boss didn’t take too long, and I beat the game in about 70 hours. And it felt good. Nocturne has some unique things going about it – a lot of people who made videos on this game often compare the setting and theme to that of other jRPGs. A fantasy jRPG like, say, Chrono Trigger and/or Breath of Fire IV, would deal with the themes of friendship, of the righteous defeating the villainous, and ultimately saving the world – although sacrifice is always prevalent. Nuh-uh, this isn’t happening in Nocturne because the world ends in approximately twenty minutes after you start the game, and the city of Tokyo rounds itself up into a gigantic egg with a gigantic, bright light hanging in the center of this “eggâ€. Your friends are your worst enemies, and the only person who never betrays nor deceives you, and honestly cares for you in this demon-infested world, is the woman who arguably brought you into this mess in the whole place. Pretty different from your typical jRPG, that’s for sure. While the setting is pretty unique, and the philosophical themes are interesting (if you spend the time to understand the schools of thought behind each one), Nocturne suffers from a real lack of a clear story – it’s often considered minimalistic, but because Nocturne still shares traits of a linearity commonly seen in jRPGs to begin with, it can come off as missing direction. A lot of the characters are often just vehicles for the philosophical themes to be shared to the player, and their personalities are shaped around that, not making them incredibly likeable to begin with. So, Nocturne lacks a lot in the story element – it definitely will not appeal for everyone. The gameplay is incredibly solid, but it’s just that – solid, not stellar. The music is pretty cool, but honestly, in a lot of jRPGs, the tracks are pretty amazing in general, and it’s really hard to make a case where Nocturne really stands out as a title, even in the music department. So why the fuck do I love this game so much, to the point that I was willing to spend my time trying to complete everything I possibly could, and make myself super powerful by the end of the game? I think because the inherent selfishness of the game drew me in – unlike other RPGs, Japanese or Western, it struck me that the protagonist reminded me of one other figure in gaming. If you ever heard of Level-5’s White Knight Chronicles, playing that game was just an average experience. White Knight Chronicles was so unbelievably average in the elements that mattered, but it had one redeeming factor: the avatar character you’re allowed to make. The avatar character of White Knight Chronicles has little role in the story – he/she has no reason for taking part in this adventure, other than the fact that he/she wants to help his/her companions, for literally no selfish reason. And everyone else refuses to even glance at the avatar for most of the story in both of those games! However, if you did certain side quests, the avatar would become the unsung hero of the story, capable of doing what no one else was capable of doing. Considering he/she used to be just a simple villager, to arguably the greatest hero in the entire setting, with unselfish motives and power that was not given to him/her, but gained through hard work – well, that stands as the uniqueness of an otherwise average jRPG experience. The protagonist of Nocturne, the Demi-Fiend, is a lot like the avatar. The idea of the Conception in Nocturne is that a human, not a demon, would survive the initial purging of humanity, and develop an ideology (Kotowari, or Reason) as to how the new, reborn world should be. Out of three ideas, one wished for a world of silence, another wished for a world of isolation, and the last wished for a world where only the mighty reigns supreme. The Demi-Fiend, who was formerly human, was transformed into a demon because of a certain figure’s nefarious plans, and therefore lost the right to creation. Must be a pretty stinging feeling, I would think. The Demi-Fiend, while prophesied in the setting’s Scripture of Miroku, ultimately held no rights to take part in the purpose of the Conception. He would just wander, being manipulated by everyone around him to do their shit and be the pansy, and that made me decide that there was only one path to take – become the strongest protagonist in jRPG history, and make sure that nothing in this “difficult†game could stand in my path. And the end result was that I beat the final boss in half the time it should’ve taken me. Anyways, I guess I’ll share some more real gameplay material in a future post or something, I only wanted to get this out of my system. I’ll be honest where I say it’s difficult for me to do absolutely everything in a game – getting that platinum trophy for my PSN account is such a grind, but I think outside of getting all six endings of Nocturne, I pretty much did the platinum requirements. I’m pretty proud of that.