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Hiragana Boss

March 12, 2018 by Belghast

Saturday night on the Podcast we talked a bit about the things that were announced during the recent Nintendo Direct. This caused me to veer off topic a bit and talk about Phantasy Star Online 2 that was announced during the Japanese only segment of the show. There is apparently a new version of the game coming to the Nintendo Switch which I guess makes sense given that the game currently runs on the PS Vita as well as PC and PS4. Since the Switch is a region free console… it made me wonder if maybe just maybe we would finally get to play this game. Unfortunately though there would still be the language barrier and I somehow doubt I will be learning to read and understand Japanese before the release of the game.

Phantasy Star Online is an important game to me, because more or less I consider it to be my first real MMO. I remember playing it for hours on the Dreamcast hooked in over the rather crappy dial up connection, eventually replacing it with the network adapter and a 50 ft ethernet cable run into my office. I was serious about this game, enough so that I had a keyboard hooked up through a janky adapter to allow me to communicate with other players more easily. If you are curious about where this screenshot comes from, there is another post on Aggronaut talking about getting the PC based Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst up and running. That was another nonsense weekend project that I did some time ago and was able to flip back into playing a Cast Ranger almost as though no time had passed.

I have known for awhile that there was a way to play Phantasy Star Online 2 on the PC and that there was even the option of a good english patch. However I was under the false assumption that it was complete insanity to get up and running. It was around this point that Thalen reminded me that I did in fact go through some absolute insanity to get the Chinese exclusive Monster Hunter Online up and running on a whim, and that surely nothing else would be that amount of silliness. I mean for that setup I had to fake a Chinese regional ID card… so he had a point. Probably unintentionally he started a thread in my mind that ultimately lead to me figuring out how to get PSO2 up and running yesterday morning shortly after editing the podcast.

The truth is it is pretty straight forward. You need a couple of things to get it working and I will quickly run down those and how to actually make it work. I highly suggest using Chrome for the right click translate option on pages… which will get you part of the way but will not help at all for images.

Direct X 9.0c – if you do not for some reason already have this.
A Sega ID – will talk about this more in detail.
Phantasy Star Online 2 Setup – straight forward install that is unfortunately in japanese
PSO2 Tweaker – assists in configuration and applies english patches
You Need 53 GB of Space – this game is huge
Choose Ship 2 – this is the unofficial English community

The Hiragana Boss

The most crucial step here is setting up your Sega ID. There are numerous resources that walk you through the process, for example I watched this video to get me started. The truth is google translate can get you through most of this, but as the final step you are going to have to face what I call the Hiragana Boss. The page has a captcha on it, but said captcha is not surprisingly in hiragana given that this is a Japanese market exclusive game. They present you a sequence of handwritten characters and you need to respond in kind… and for me at least I do not have my keyboard or windows configured to do this. This mean’t I had to leverage a website that offered a keyboard and the ability to copy and paste characters from it.

I thought I was reasonable at pattern matching, and managed to get through the equivalent Chinese boss while doing my Monster Hunter Online nonsense. However what makes this one so much more difficult is that people write characters slightly different than the perfect keyboard version. Look at your own handwriting, when you create a lowercase h for example… it is always going to be significantly different than a serif or sans-serif h on a keyboard. It took me roughly fifteen attempts before I finally got the character sequence correct with a lot of trying to figure out where the “signpost” character was or which “L with an accent” was the one I needed to match up to the one I was seeing in handwriting.

If you can pass this test however you are essentially there. The install itself was relatively straight forward and my only suggestion is to ignore the text on the install buttons and just pretend it is any other windows installer. The final step is to install the PSO2 Tweaker pictured above and let it patch your game. It runs through a long file system check and then prompts you asking if you want to install the English patch, which you likely do given that you have gotten this far in the guide. The only thing of note is… this is a volunteer fan patch and as a result not every possible instance of Japanese is swapped to English, however from my experience the critical path seems to be allowing you to progress and even enjoy the story bits. If you run into issues there is a fairly active Discord community where you can ask specific questions.

If everything went smoothly, you will be staring at the Character creation screen in no time. I wound up creating a Cast Ranger like I played in PSO on Dreamcast, but you have a bunch of options that did not exist back then including the Summoner class. At some point I plan on playing other things, but for the moment I am having a lot of fun with the Ranger which has a much wider skillset than the original. Right now I have three weapons that I can swap back and forth between… the very familiar Assault Rifle, a semi-sniper/semi-rocket-launcher “Launcher” weapon, and an energy gunblade of sorts that lets me upper cut mobs into the air… and shoot them before they land. I believe Ashgar was going to also do this nonsense and had planned on playing a Hunter so I will be curious to hear what his experience was as well.

For a game that released in 2012 it still holds up graphically pretty well. There are scenes like the above screenshot that are just gorgeous… and then there are scenes that absolutely feel a little dated. In some ways I think the fact that they have tried to make the game feel so familiar to PSO1 players is what is holding the graphics back. It is very much the same sort of game where you explore a closed circuit map that is connected to other maps by for lack of a better term zone borders. If you played the original game it will be deeply familiar to you, and if you didn’t… it is going to seem a bit limited. So far there seems to be a big boss battle at the end of every “zone” which maps up pretty closely to the way the original PSO was as well. I remember fighting some big dragon thing at the end of the forest area for example, and this time around it is a giant rock ape thing.

The game seems to have a ton of systems that I do not fully understand. For example in the above image you see a blue and a green icon hovering above the ground. These are harvest points… but I am not entirely certain yet what I do with the things I harvest from them. Some appear to be materials and others just ended up being food that I could get a buff from. All in all though I had a lot of fun yesterday and now have PSO2 installed on both my gaming rig upstairs and my laptop downstairs. I particularly like that you can shift the ranger into over the shoulder shooter mode which seems to fit most of the weapons available for that class turning it into a corridor shooter . The nonsense wings I am wearing are from augments that the game gave me… and thankfully the later upgrades I found were a little more low key.

I am sure over the coming weeks I will talk more about this game because the story is interesting… but also a little crazy in that Persona series sort of way. This morning I largely planned on writing out how I went about getting connected for all the folks out there that are not a big fan of digging for information in YouTube videos. It is not as silly a process as I feared and in truth other than the Hiragana boss it really is no harder than getting signed up for any other online account. If I had even the most rudimentary understanding of Japanese it would have been significantly easier. I have a feeling Ashgar for example… who has actually taken some courses will be able to breeze through the part that stalled me for a bit. So far it appears to be a really fun game that is free to play, and while I see places where I could be spending money I have not really encountered the need to (nor do I think I can even figure out how to put money on my account).

Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle

March 6, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was all about Monster Hunter World as I had made plans ahead of time to run around with Grace and do the various events. First out of the gate we worked on the Wiggler quest that grants this truly questionable helm. It truly is the stuff of nightmares and honestly would have been a pain in the butt had we not realized that you could register multiple wiggler catches at once. We quickly fell into a pattern of sneaking up on the wigglers and getting one in our sights… then coordinating over voice a 3, 2, 1, GO! to capture both at the same time. Sure it took three shots at the quest to get all of the tickets needed to craft this monstrosity but here we go… I have a goofy helm that I wasted some zenny on crafting and will likely never actually use.

From there we spent some time doing the “The Proving” quest that involves killing a fairly beefy high rank Anjanath. We ran into all sorts of problems with PSN connectivity which made it significantly more challenging than normal. Throughout the night I kept getting disconnected from the quest with a “Left Quest” message. At first Ash suggested that Grace was just going off and leaving us… but I think it was more than that considering Ash and Mor both got punted out of the mission after having successfully joined with no ability to get back in. We struggled through two kills and called the process done for the moment moving on to other things.

Grace is in that awkward in-between step where she is officially a High Rank player… but still is using a significant amount of low rank gear. Considering her next quest is the Pink Rathian, that is probably something she needs to fix and as a result we farmed Zorah Magdaros a bit for parts. I am still to this day wearing the Zorah gloves for the hidden element ability, and honestly its an easy farm considering the event mostly just finishes itself. Now when I was farming this I SOS Rouletted my way into full groups that allowed us to quickly complete the event which for those who need Zorah bits is a completely viable option. The biggest challenge I ran into… and why I kept running it was that Zorah is super stingy with gems which are unfortunately needed for the gauntlets.

As far as starter High Rank gear goes… I am way more in favor of the Alpha Bone set because it has a lot of good stuff as well as 10 fire, 10 dragon and I believe 10 lightning resistance. All total to craft the full Bone Armor set you need… 12 Quality Bone, 10 Monster Bone +, 2 Warped Bone, 3 Monster Bone L, 3 Boulder Bone, 3 Coral Bone, and 3 Ancient Bone. Basically you need to kill a few big monsters and run amok harvesting bone piles in most of the zones to get it. The end result gives you a set with Health Boost, 3x Attack Boost, 3x Entomologist, Slugger, Horn Maestro, and Master Fisher. Not all of those are winners… but Entomologist can be super useful if you are farming bug parts. All of that said I still think its a great starter set for High Rank shenanigans.

The highlight of the evening however was getting a Tailrider Safari with Grace’s Neutrino and PizzaMaid’s Aria. Normally I just send Tailriders out from my room back in Asteria, but for this combination I made the trek to the Research Base so I could get the cutscene. I am also realizing that I need to trade cards with Pizza and Grace because neither of them are actually using these outfits anymore. The PS4 always has a bit of a delay when you attempt to take a screenshot so I am super happy that I was able to catch a decent one of this party going out to fight.

Tonight however I am thinking about kicking back and streaming some Final Fantasy XV on the PC… all depending on how well today goes. I will be in training and in theory will have homework tonight because I am going through one of those cram session courses. As a result my brain may be too broken to do anything interesting.

Bunny Fail Tank Returns

March 2, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve talked about this a bit in the past, but I have struggled with Final Fantasy XIV since finishing the Stormblood main story. I am not exactly sure why, but after leveling my Warrior through the questing process… and then grinding up a Samurai I bounced. When I say I bounced… I bounced hard. I just stopped logging in entirely and even didn’t care enough to log in for most of the major holiday events that have gone on. At one point I made an attempt to get back into the game and pushed through the new MSQ content right up until I reached the Drowned City of Skalla. I could not bring myself to tank that with a random group and I told myself… I would wait until I had friends around to run it with me. That event never happened and I got distracted by a bunch of games in the meantime.

The problem with this is that it sort of set up an artificial barrier between me and the content. It was as though I had some sort of a mental block preventing me at just throwing myself at content the way I used to be willing to. I knew I needed something severe to get me off high center and back into caring about what was going on in Final Fantasy XIV. There used to be a time when I willing to log in each night and run experts with completely random groups of players from the roulette system. However I developed some sort of barrier against doing that… one that I think was slowly chipped away given how freely I am willing to do my “SOS Roulette” nonsense in Monster Hunter World.

Watch Sleep Deprived Bel tries to remember how to Fail Tank in FFXIV from Belghast on www.twitch.tvAs a result last night I used the presence of an audience as a bit of a kick in the butt to get me back into Final Fantasy XIV and doing dungeon content again. I streamed for a little over two hours and in that time I believe I ran four dungeons and made some progress in the MSQ afterwards. In truth were it not for the MSQ slowing the pace down significantly… I might have streamed longer throwing myself at more dungeons for gear currency. I managed to pick up a chestpiece with tokens and now feel like maybe I can do this thing and catch my gear levels up to something reasonable. At the start of the night I was 313 item level and by the end I edged it up a bit to 315. Skalla and the next set of patch dungeons all drop gear that is an incremental upgrade, as well as some tasty tasty currency. Basically at this point I need to reach a state where I can start doing expert roulette again to play catch up.

After taking a break from streaming and FFXIV I hopped over to Monster Hunter World for awhile and spent some time running nonsense with Grace. I have been mostly running hammer when we are doing stuff, because it is a weapon that I like quite a bit… and one that I want to get better at using. There are definitely times when I am fighting something that it feels like having something more than a longsword in my arsenal would help greatly. We took down a Squirrel Blimp and I managed to unlock the third of my elder dragons while she ran around trying to find the Great Girros. I was not in terribly long as I was already in a fairly sleep deprived state from the previous nights fragmented sleep schedule due to the launch. All in all though it was a pretty great night and I want to thank everyone that stopped by to tune in and chat with me. Also huge thanks to Solaria who actually joined my discord and hung out with me while I eased my way back into Final Fantasy XIV. It’s fun lobbing comments at text messages scrolling across twitch chat, but it is even more fun when you have someone hanging out in chat to talk to over voice as well.

Frying Pans and Nora Braves

February 28, 2018 by Belghast

Over the last few days I have had a hankering to play some State of Decay. This was a game that I originally started playing on the Xbox 360, then picked up when it was eventually released on the PC. When the Year One Survivor Edition came out I picked that up too… as well as buying it for a friend that I thought would enjoy it. Since I had not actually tried streaming from my Xbox One, I decided to pick the game up on that platform and give it a go. Basically Undead Labs is an awesome developer and I have no problem supporting them by picking it up on multiple platforms. We don’t officially have a release date for State of Decay 2… but based on the trickle of activity I am hoping we get some more news soon. My hope is the sequel takes everything that worked well about the first game, but adds in the ability to hang out and explore the zombie filled landscape with friends.

Watch Hanging out playing some State of Decay YOSE on Xbox One from Belghast on www.twitch.tvSo as a result last night I fired up the stream while testing out a few new screen elements and bashed some zombies. If you are for any reason interested you can check out the Twitch VOD here (or click the embedded player above thanks to Jaedia), but it involved a lot of me stumbling around trying to figure out what to do and a few gloriously brutal deaths. I also may or may not have run over the NPC that was following me around and bashing things with a frying pan. The kinda cool thing last night is I had a bunch of folks that were completely different from what I would consider the normal crew of people who take pity on me and hang out while I stream. It’s really bizarre for me to have someone pop in the channel that I don’t actually know. It was a surprising amount of fun to just hang out and publicly fail at playing a video game.

Right now I don’t have much in the way of stamina as far as “being on” goes. I lasted a little bit over an hour before needing to go do something else with less of an audience for a bit. I am not sure if it was just that I was tired dying in State of Decay and wanted to play something else for awhile, or if I was tired of interacting. I need to sort out a proper way to swap games when I am just not feeling the one I am playing, because in truth I wound up logging into Monster Hunter World and farming content and it would have been nice to have a little company doing so. I originally logged in with the goal of doing a little SOS Roulette, but noticed a note in the Login Bonus about the Aloy event going live. For those who are curious, the quest is titled “The Proving” and shows up under events as a 6 Star High Rank mission that requires the player to be Hunter Rank 11, so you may need to do a little bit of progressing to get there.

There are two pieces to the set, a full suit of armor similar to the Ryu gear that literally transforms you into the Aloy character model. Additionally there is a version of Aloy’s bow that can be upgraded to a Rarity 7 weapon with some elder dragon bits. The gear can be upgraded a total of 10 times allowing it to remain fairly relevant for a long while. If you want to craft the gear you are looking at collecting the following….

Aloy Armor

Nora Brave Trophy – 4 – Obtained from Event Quest
Anjanath Pelt+ – 14
Anjanath Nosebone+ – 6
Anjanath Gem – 1
30,000 Zenny

Aloy’s Bow

Nora Brave Trophy – 2
Anjanath Fang+ – 3
Monster Keenbone – 5
Anjanath Plate – 1
16,000 Zenny

Aloy’s War Bow – Upgrade to Rarity 7

Nora Brave Trophy – 3
Anjanath Scale+ – 7
Elder Dragon Bone – 3
Wyvern Gem – 1
32,000 Zenny

Now it should be noted that the only part of this that you absolutely have to collect during the event are the Nora Brave Trophies which drop at least one per mission… and there was one time I lucked out and got four in one shot. The rest of the bits can be gained from either normal High Rank Anjanath hunts or in the case of the upgrade by taking down Elder Dragons to get those bones. I ran the mission a total of five times last night and got everything I needed to craft both the base rarity 5 bow and the rarity 5 armor. The cool thing about this is that it not only makes you look like Aloy… but you also MOVE like Aloy. Not really sure how to describe it other than that, because it feels like you are playing Horizon Zero Dawn set in the Monster Hunter World setting. I have no clue how long this event is going to run, but personally I knocked mine out doing good ole SOS Roulette. That said more than willing to help folks get their parts if they need them. Honestly I might farm it a bunch while it is available because it seems to be a really good way to get High Rank Anjanath parts.