Trabia Garden

I invited people on Tumblr to ask me questions about videogames; here are my answers!

As these answers were originally written for an audience that didn't necessarily read my Dreamwidth, I may repeat some sentiments I've already expressed here.


Questions from th_esaurus:

Hardest game you’ve played?

Probably Celeste! It was worth the struggle. I crawled through the main storyline, inch by inch, with ferocious determination, and then I replayed it three times afterwards because I was so delighted to see how much I'd improved.


( And lots more rambling about videogames. )


Finally (we're still on keltena's questions):

If you could immerse yourself in any game for one day, which game would it be? What would you do?

A lot of my favourite games would be too dangerous to visit personally, I think! Or I love them on the basis of their characters, and I'd never actually manage to have a conversation with those characters if I spent a day there. Final Fantasy VIII? Good luck talking to Squall Leonhart. Final Fantasy X? Yuna would absolutely talk to me if I approached her, but she's a very private person, so it'd never get beyond surface-level polite conversation about the weather.

Fortunately, I have the perfect answer to this question! I would go to the Pokémon world and admire all the Pokémon and maybe cuddle a Bulbasaur if I'm lucky.


If you have any videogame-related questions of your own, feel free to ask in the comments! It may surprise you to learn this, but I like to talk about videogames.

I just finished replaying Ghost Trick, for the first time since my first playthrough three years ago, and spent the entire final chapter sobbing my heart out. I remembered it as a cute, fun game filled with great characters; I'd forgotten that it's actually a cute, fun game filled with great characters and also heartbreak. I went into the bathroom afterwards and saw myself in the mirror and had a moment of 'wait, why are there bits of tissue all over my face?' before remembering I'd spent the last twenty minutes mopping up my tears.

I don't remember crying this much at the ending the first time around, possibly because the ending hits you with fifty ridiculous plot twists (I do remember shouting 'WHAT' at the screen a lot). I suppose knowing about the plot twists in advance meant I was better able to take in what was actually happening, rather than spending all my time going '????????????'

(A bizarre realisation on this replay: the ridiculous plot twists are extremely thoroughly foreshadowed! I thought at first that the biggest revelation sort of came out of nowhere, but it's clear now that the entire game was written with it in mind.)

If you're curious about Ghost Trick and you can't play it on DS or iOS, there's a screenshot Let's Play over here which looks nice and in-depth! It's one of the most charming games I've ever played. It makes me cry, yes, but it also fills my heart with warmth. I love Sissel. I love Lynne. I love Missile. I love everyone. And the graphics, and the music, and the dialogue! And all the stupid plot twists! (Please don't spoil yourself, because becoming increasingly bewildered as everything gets weirder is an absolutely essential part of the experience.)

Something I really like about Shu Takumi games - Ghost Trick, Ace Attorney - is the number of central, meaningful, completely platonic relationships between male and female characters. The female characters in question all tend to fall into the same category ('energetic, quirky teenage girls'), but they're all well-drawn and likeable (Lynne is so great!), and I'll happily accept 'endless friendships with eccentric teenagers' as a temporary alternative to 'endless romance'.


In news that is inexplicably not about Ghost Trick, my Harry Potter reread continues!

I think Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a better book in the series than I gave it credit for. The Ron/Lavender subplot could be cut out with absolutely no loss, and the question 'why is Voldemort evil?' gets the rather uninspiring answer 'because he's evil!', but I liked the Harry/Ginny relationship a lot more this time around. Slughorn's a much-needed addition to Slytherin, and I really like what the book does for Draco; it doesn't redeem him, but it shows that he's redeemable. Dumbledore is fantastic throughout. And the tone of the ending is perfect. There's a strangely detached, melancholy beauty to the entire final chapter.

I've always thought of Neville/Luna as quite a cute potential pairing, but in my head they didn't actually have much canonical interaction. I was surprised and pleased to realise that they actually seem to be quite close in Half-Blood Prince. They're with each other when they meet up with Harry on the Hogwarts Express; they fight together; Luna is helping Neville into a chair at the end. Presumably they bonded during the Ministry escapade in Order of the Phoenix.

However, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince can be rightly criticised for not containing enough adorable ghosts. Yes, there are ghosts, but none of them are Sissel, are they? Rubbish.

I'm really disconcerted by the fact that occasionally characters in Ace Attorney seem able to hear Phoenix's thoughts. Are the (blue bracketed bits) muttering or whispering, rather than, as I assumed, thinking, or is everyone in this game just psychic?

I was enjoying Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, but I wasn't really interested in Edgeworth and didn't really understand why so many people seemed to 'ship him with Phoenix. That, of course, was before he performed an about-face mid-trial, helped Phoenix's case and then came up to Phoenix afterwards to say 'YOUR PRESENCE SADDLES ME WITH UNNECESSARY FEELINGS, PLEASE GET OUT OF MY FACE FOREVER'.

All right, I'm intrigued. I'm not actually 'shipping them (yet), but I certainly want to know more about Phoenix's relationship with Edgeworth.

(And then I played through the fourth case, and... all right, I can see it. You win, fandom. Although I did at some point stop to write 'Forget Phoenix/Edgeworth; does anyone write Gumshoe/Edgeworth? I think that has more basis (on Gumshoe's side, at least) and would probably also be hilarious.'

Gumshoe is, incidentally, adorable.)

...I've just realised that Miles Edgeworth has Squall Leonhart's hairstyle. THIS IS WEIRD. Squall Leonhart: prosecuting attorney? Perhaps Rinoa is a defence lawyer? Perhaps this is a terrible idea.

I like the relationship between Phoenix and Maya a lot! There's a lot of affection there, which I think quietly sneaks up on Phoenix. He cares a great deal about her, but he doesn't realise how much until the end of the fourth case. The beginning of the fifth case rather warmed my heart, when it became clear that he hadn't been taking on any cases recently. I do like Ema, though.

Speaking of the fifth case (I'm currently on the second day): objection! Your Honour, what do you mean the angle at which the witness saw the crime wasn't relevant? She presented us with a supposed photograph of the crime taken from a completely different angle! The defence demands a retraction of your highly unfair penalty and further demands that you have squirrels installed in your beard as punishment.


Switching to Ghost Trick, a thought that occurred to me: when you first go back in time to save Lynne, you can see yourself manipulating the crossing gate and guitar. You can't get close enough to interact with yourself in that particular case, but would that theoretically be possible? If Sissel happened to be involved in the four minutes before someone's death, and then went back to relive those four minutes, would he be able to converse with himself?


ENTIRELY UNRELATED TO ANYTHING ELSE IN THIS ENTRY: I just came across this gifset of Derren Brown hammering a nail up his nose on tumblr. I don't think I'd realised before quite how intense his expression of sexual ecstasy was during this trick. GET A ROOM, DERREN BROWN AND SHARP OBJECTS.

(Something Wicked This Way Comes was actually the first Derren Brown-related thing I ever saw. That's right: the stage show in which Derren Brown shoves a nail up his nose, asphyxiates himself, asks someone to slap him repeatedly in the face, lies down on broken glass and gets a man to stand on him, all whilst obviously enjoying himself a little too much. I did rather come in at the deep end.)

I just pulled open a door to an empty room. As I did so, a greeting card inside the room flew off its ledge and fluttered to the ground.

My second thought was 'well, obviously it was caught in the rush of air displaced by the door'.

My first thought was 'Sissel?'

Speaking of Sissel, I have now finished Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective! It is a fabulous, fabulous game. It also holds the distinction of making me shout 'WHAT' at a screen more than possibly anything else. In retrospect, a lot of things suddenly make sense in the light of various WHAT-inducing revelations! Regardless: what?

One of the many things I like about Ghost Trick is that you can rewind time in your efforts to save someone as many times as you like. In most games, if you fail, you fail, there's no hope left, and if you try again you're trying again in a new universe. Is that completely incoherent? If you have to go 'forget that, that never happened, restart' every time you get something wrong, you ultimately succeed in a sort of false universe in which you do everything perfectly the first time. The other universes, the ones in which you failed, are abandoned at the point of failure and left to fend for themselves. You get something wrong and you leap to a new universe, leaving the old one behind.

I AM MAKING NO SENSE AT ALL.

What I mean is that I like how your failure becomes part of the narrative in Ghost Trick. You're not scrubbing out your error entirely and pretending it never happened; you're rewinding time to have another go. Your failures become learning experiences, not only for you-the-player but for the characters. The universe in which you fail is the same universe as the one in which you later succeed, not some doomed universe left drifting and abandoned because you got something wrong.

I am not, of course, saying that every game should implement time travel as an explanation for why you get to retry things. That would be silly. But I do like the use of time travel in this particular game.

What on Earth am I talking about? I think the gist of this entry is 'I AM OVERLY CONCERNED ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS TO FICTIONAL UNIVERSES WHEN YOU HIT THE RESET BUTTON'. Ghost Trick is, I suppose, an appropriate game to inspire ridiculous existential musings.

I want to play it again immediately, even though I now know the answers to all of the puzzles. I love everything about this game. Apart from the stealth escort mission in the dark. That can go away, please. But I love everything else. Especially Sissel.

(On the subject of my ridiculous concern about fictional universes: part of the reason I want to play it again is so I can use the phone to hop around more. The time restriction imposed in the game meant that I always felt I had to go straight to the next objective, even though most of the game isn't really timed. So I'd like to explore more, find more optional scenes and so on. But there's a point towards the end at which you no longer have access to the phone lines. And I can't just stop playing then, because that means Sissel will never discover the truth.

I can't explain how my mind works.)