Sometimes the timing of particular real life events taking place seems to just be divine providence in action. As in, even god has to have a sense of humor. I was considering doing an ultra-sweet and cute blog going over in detail all the reasons I love ChiliDragon and how lucky I am to have her. But frankly, I did something like that for Thanksgiving. I think I only have the ability to be serious a couple of times each year. The rest of the time, well, there is a reason why I chose Stitch as my avatar. I appear to have digressed. Well, cupid's arrow sometimes strikes in the most unexpected and unusual places. Like, for example, in Texas. Happy Valentine's Day everyone, particularly you Texans out there.

I promise that I'll do a couple of blogs about something other than politics after this blog. This was just too damn Faustian for me to ignore. In 2000, Senator John McCain ran a much admired presidential campaign under the slogan "Straight Talk Express". In the process, he very nearly remade the Republican party before George W. Bush won the Republican nomination and anyone who hasn't been living in a cave the last eight years knows what happened since. But over the last few years we've watched a gradual devolution from "Straight Talk Express" to something that hurts to look at. In his quest to become president, John McCain has gone back on everything that made him a statesman, a great man, originally back in 2000.

The media hasn't caught up to this change yet, but I hope that they will eventually. I laid out a brief summary of some of the issues he has "evolved" on since his 2000 incarnation in response to a blog by ImaginaryFriend, but that is nothing compared to what he did today. As most of the civilized world knows, the U.S. has struggled with the "debate" on whether or not we should torture since the Abu Ghraib pictures emerged. As the Bush Administration repeated the transparently idiotic "we do not torture" platitudes that most intelligent people recognized as a blatant falsehood, Democrats in Congress have fought a mostly losing effort to stop "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" being conducted under the approval of "the leader of the free world".

With the November 2006 elections finally giving control of both houses of Congress back to the Democrats, today they voted on a bill that would have specifically limited interrogation tactics to what is outlined in the Army Field Manual. Senator McCain, despite the fact he is running for president, had an opportunity to vote on the bill. It would seem a nobrainer that a man who was a POW in a Vietamese prison camp for five years and has been, according a fawning media, one of the leading opponents of torture in the U.S., would vote in favor of this bill. Guess again. Faust. Before this vote I was actually considering voting for McCain if Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination. No longer. Edit: I'm a pretty even-tempered guy. It takes a lot to actually get me angry. Frankly, the only people these days who can actually manage to get me really furious are ChiliDragon and my family, because I care about their opinions so much. Well, I can tell you that I'm genuinely pissed off about this. A man who has actually been tortured cares about himself and his career so much that in an effort to appease the lunatic rightwing base he'd prefer to vote to allow others to be tortured as he was in order to further his ambition. I'm an agnostic when it comes to spirtual matters, but if I did have a strong belief in god, this is the sort of thing that I would think would land people in hell.

In politics, the art of twisting the interpretation of the facts or daily occurrences is known as "spin" and every politician who has ever been elected to anything does this to a greater or lesser extent. It is a necessary evil to the game. After all, as no less of a luminary than the renowned Obi Wan Kenobi once stated "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view". Or, to put it more bluntly, we, as humans, tend to subconsciously interpret things that happen in a manner that is consistent with our own worldview. We ascribe noble motives to people we like and ignoble ones to people we don't like. It is human nature to a certain extent. But the line between spin and outright, blatant falsehood is a fine one that is often times crossed in the heat of battle. Or, if you want more prose and less poetry, sometimes people blunder into unreality in the course of trying to put a positive interpretation on something that occurs. Reference Dick Cheney and "the insurgency is in its last throes" for further details on this practice. With that in mind, I think it is important to point out some of the spin that I have seen floating around the U.S. elections during this primary season. Since the Republican primary is, more or less, locked up by Senator John McCain, I'm going to focus on the Democrats. I'll begin with Hillary spin (since I'm not terribly fond of her and there is more of it for me to choose from) and then, with ChiliDragon's help, grudgingly, call out a couple of pieces of the rarer Obama spin. Author's Note: The art of spinning is a fine one. Really what a person is doing when they are spinning is taking two blatant lies, one half-truth and marinating it with a completely true fact or two artfully presented in order to get the whole meal accepted as true. You throw in just enough believability to make the entire package sound plausible and count on the inherent intellectual laziness that most people have to avoid having the whole thing properly examined. Hillary Spin #1: Barack Obama is a Muslim It is true that Barack Obama's father is a native Kenyan who was born a Muslim. (Fact) It is also true that, as a child, Obama attended a predominantly Muslim school as a young child (fact) that offered, along with Christian education, classes in Muslim theology (half-truth). The implication that has been nosed around is that Barack Obama was educated in a Madrassa (fundamentalist Muslim) school and that he is a closet Osama bin Laden sympathizer. He's a Manchurian Candidate if you will. (Utterly false) The truth is that, just like the talking point that Al Gore "claimed to invent the Internet", the reality is that it is a outright falsehood. Even putting aside the link I just provided, which goes over in detail why this is false, it is also false due to complete common sense. Senator Obama has been serving in public office for eleven years. Before that, he was a Constitutional Law professor at one of the country's top, and most conservative, law schools, the University of Chicago. Before that he was president of the Harvard Law Review when he was in college. Harvard is only, arguably, the most prestigious law school in the entire freaking world. Don't you think that, at some point, the fact he was a fundamentalist Muslim would have come out if it were true? Now, Hillary Clinton supporters might be calling foul at this point. After all, the chains of emails that claim he is a Muslim are, sadly, anonymous at this point. Nobody is 100% certain what the origin is. This is where logic comes into play. As in, logically, who is best served by these emails? For the sake of argument, if I'm a Republican, I consider spreading this particular narrative to be counterproductive.

Theoretically at least, before Obama shocked the entire civilized world by revealing himself to be one of the most gifted politicians since Bill Clinton, these emails allow Hillary Clinton a much easier path to the Democratic nomination. Given that it is in the Republicans' best interest to make Hillary spend as much time and money and resources as possible before she gets to the general election fight against the Republican candidate, it seems unlikely that a Republican organized this particular bit of spin. I'd also add that the Hillary campaign has disciplined paid staff members who the press caught spreading these emails at least twice. Hillary Spin #2: Barack Obama is unelectable in a general election This spin actually covers several categories. It starts with Obama's admittedly thin resume in national politics (true), continues to the fact that he hasn't been fully subjected to the "Republican Attack Machine" (true) then continues by saying he lacks experience (misleading, he actually has more years in elected office and won more elections than she has) and is layered with a subtle appeal to old school racism by saying that the country isn't ready to elect a black man. (Potentially false...but also potentially true. I guess we'll see.) I want to begin shooting down this particular bit of spin with some blunt honesty: declaring your opponent as being unelectable in a general election is a tactic as old as time itself. It's probably older than my dad...and my dad is older than dirt. Primary elections in the U.S., until this year, were predominantly decided by very committed activists in the party.

These activists tend to be either the most liberal (Democrats) or the most conservative (Republicans) representatives of their party. Since most of these activists are also close followers of politics, they know that the fringe folks, the ones on either the far left or the far right of a party, tend to be unsuccessful in a general election where appealing to the center is usually a winning strategy. This creates the insane dynamic wherein a candidate in a primary has to do everything possible to secure the "base" (loosely translated: the extreme ends of their particular party who are actually motivated enough to vote in a primary) while simultaneously not saying anything that can be used in campaign commercials in a general election by their opponent seeking to paint them as being "outside the mainstream". If these two impulses seem to be contradictory it is because they are.

This is painfully evident in the current election. Senator John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, is in trouble with his base because they don't think he is sufficiently conservative enough for them. In order to satisfy them that he is a "true conservative" he may have to take positions on issues that will make him unpalatable to independents in a general election.

Similarly, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is widely reviled by liberal activists for authorizing President Bush to go to war in Iraq because they view that as a calculated political vote. In other words, she voted like that so she wouldn't appear to be "weak" on National Security when she was running for President a couple of years later. Relating this all back to Senator Obama's electability, Senator Clinton says that Senator Obama is unelectable once we get past the Democratic primary and into the general election. Like a lot of spin, this could potentially have some truth or be an outright lie depending on your worldview. My particular worldview is that Senator Obama's supposedly thin national resume is more than offset by his accomplishments. He looks like a prophet right now when, in 2002 with President Bush having 90% national approval ratings, he gave this speech. He also has more than proven his executive ability in my mind. As for the lacks experience argument, I submit to you that Hillary's "35 years" of experience that she claims to have really look a bit thinner when you take away President Clinton's coattails. I'm not sure how her being First Lady for eight years, for example, makes her more ready to be president.

That's like saying ChiliDragon can do my job because, by some bizarre osmosis, she obtains all of my experience in my particular field of expertise based on sheer proximity to me. It just kind of floats over to her while we sleep together. That strikes me as a bit implausible. Hillary Spin #3: Obama doesn't have any solid plans. He's just pretty rhetoric. The ironic thing about this spin is that it is one that was made about her husband Bill Clinton when he was running for president in 1991. It is predicated upon a linked pair assumptions that many people make. 1. Smart people cannot be charismatic 2. Charismatic people cannot be smart To put it another way, the star quarterback can't also be the smartest guy in all of his cla.ss because it wouldn't be fair. If you do a little digging, you find that Senator Obama has actually laid out his plans in mind numbingly boring and excruciating detail. The issue is that a lot of his speeches tend to be heavy on the "meta" ideas of change, hope and unity and don't get too bogged down in the details of what happens when the other side disagrees with his policy ideas. That's actually what makes him a good speaker. If he was to trot out a laundry list of proposals and dollar figures then he wouldn't be particularly interesting to listen to. People would call him Senator Kerry version 2.0: smart, but boring as all hell. There is no inherent contradiction between being smart and good looking/charismatic. In fact, that's a good description of President Bill Clinton. Hillary Spin #4: Caucus states are undemocratic and therefore don't really count. For my international readers, a "caucus" is not, as it sounds, a Roman phallus of some kind but rather an archaic voting process wherein you go to your designated voting area and publicly and openly declare your preference for a particular candidate. After the "first vote", campaigns are given a half hour to try and persuade supporters of another candidate to come over and join, or "caucus", with their candidate.

After that there is a second vote. Any candidate who does not get a minimum 15% of the votes in the second vote is considered "non-viable" and their supporters are ignored when it comes to assigning delegate voters. Unlike in a regular primary where you can show up, cast your vote, and leave, a caucus more or less requires a couple of hours of time commitment. It is argued that this is undemocratic because it disenfranchises voters who have to work, cannot make the limited caucus time, or don't feel comfortable expressing a preference with everyone and their grandmother watching them do it. Remember what I said about spin? Well, like most good spin, this contains an element of truth. All of these things are true. Caucuses are inherently less democratic than other forms of Democracy. For example, older people find going to caucuses difficult because, well, they're old! Transporting themselves and then waiting in line in cold weather isn't an old person preferred activity.

Senator Obama tends to do very well in caucus states because his support is made up of, largely, very enthusiastic, motivated voting demographics with some time on their hands. For instance, college students are one of his largest voter blocs. So are people who are economically well off. He also does well because he has organized heavily in conservative, or "red", states like Idaho which Democrats usually ignore completely because they are considered unwinnable in the general election. But here is why this qualifies as spin: this is the same electoral process that has been in place for, literally, centuries in the U.S. in certain states. Senator Clinton's husband was elected to be the Democratic nominee with this system in place. To say that is unfair now, after she has lost numerous primaries, is disingenuous. Furthermore, most successful campaigns anticipate difficulties in caucus states and put in a support system on the ground to account for it. For example, they offer a phone number to call where people without transportation can call in and obtain a campaign sponsored car ride to the caucus location. Obama spin: A ChiliDragon written section. A. Hillary is the establishment. She is the bad people in Washington. Based on: 1. She's been in the senate longer than Obama has. 2. She's married to a former president (after he publicly cheated on her!) 3. Uses her husband's experience and connections, and popularity in some states, as basis for her campaign 4. Because of all the above, Hillary will turn out to be just as bad as what we have in the White House right now, or at the very least as bad as Dick Cheney B. Establishment in Washington = BAD Based on: 1. They took us to war in Iraq and have kept us there ever since 2. They cut taxes only for their rich friends 3. Lobbyists have more say than you, the voter Conveniently ignores: Obama will have to work with this establishment if he becomes President. He knows it, but seems to go to great pains to avoid reminding his supporters of this fact. With thanks to ChiliDragon for contributing and Monco59 for assisting me in locating the source of an early HTML problem, I'm going to cut off this blog here since I'm rapidly approaching the word limit. Feel free to submit other Obama spin if you choose in the comments.

I've got a nice, fun 2259 word blog post that I'm trying to post but Gamespot won't let me because it hates HTML in general, and my HTML in particular. I'll replace this blog with the originally planned blog post when I finally get it to work.

A little while back, the shoe company Adidas ran a series of commercials featuring professional basketball players with the tag-line "Impossible is Nothing". I've always wondered why an 81 point game featuring an absolutely inconceivable array of rediculously difficult shots didn't make their commercial list. The video is worth a watching even if you aren't a sports fan, for the same reason that people watch the Olympics. It is an opportunity to watch one of the greatest athletes in the world performing at the absolute apex of his powers. Alternatively, here is a musical version of the same thing. I prefer the non-musical version because it has the nifty counter in the corner.

A friend to everybody is a friend to nobody. -Spanish Proverb Since I began my blog back in April, I've accumulated over 50,000 page views (52,491 as of this writing) and 279 people tracking me. This is far more of both than I ever anticipated back when Monco59 and ChiliDragon were the only two people reading. Back then, it was very easy to automatically "track back", that is, to track all the people who were tracking me. However, were I to attempt to do that now, I would very rapidly go insane. (Or "more" insane, depending on how you choose to look at it.) With this in mind, I think it is time that I laid out some understanding of how I choose to track certain people and not to track others. Randomly. Very randomly. Obviously that comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I don't select completely at random who I'm going to track, but I am very convinced at this point that I am undoubtedly missing some very worthy people to track.

Generally speaking, the people I have chosen to track fall into multiple categories below: 1. They're on the tracked blogs of people I already read, which exposes me to their writings. (Met PAJ89 this way.) 2. They're very active. I see their comments frequently on my blog or other blogs. (xboxrulze is a good example. So is veni-vidi-vici) 3. I've read one or more things that they've written, and liked it. This can be either a blog of theirs, a forum post, a blog comment, etc. (yeah_write or Bozanimal are examples) 4. Someone has recommended them to me. (raven28256 came with ChiliDragon's recommendation, so I started reading his stuff and liked it.) 5. I got into a debate with you during a time of disagreement and was impressed enough that I started tracking. (Monco, GabuEx or Vainn are good examples) 6. They're soapbox bloggers. (Sad but true that this is a great way to get people reading your stuff, since it has a broad reach.) 7. They sent me an example of their writing and deliberately asked me to come read it, and I did and liked it. 8. I'm friends with them offline. (Dawngrrl and ChiliDragon for example) Now this isn't automatic. I've added people in the past based purely on a whim at the time, but usually I try and only add folks who are in more than one category up above. But one thing that I won't automatically do is track back someone who is tracking me, for the simple reason that I take it as a serious responsibility if I choose to track someone. It is an implicit way of stating that I intend to read the majority of what they write in the future and try and comment frequently. In other words, I'm committing myself to actually spend time and effort on following what that person does. This is where my proverb at the top comes into play. The true meaning about the proverb is that people, having finite time, who try and be friends to everyone end up being bad friends because they just can't spend the amount of time, effort and energy that true friends who keep their circle relatively small can.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was likely going to post a "Super Tuesday" breakdown of what happened in the Democratic and Republican primaries on Feb 5th. Since then, I've reconsidered a bit. My hunch, and it is only a hunch, is that the majority of my readers probably don't want to see my blog space become a political blog. If they want blog related political thoughts, there are plenty of other places that they can go to. Feel free to correct my thinking in the comments if you disagree.

However, I did get selected to be one of the Idaho delegates who will attend the state convention. At the state convention I'll be among a couple hundred people from all across the state who were selected to attend. Out of this number, roughly 18 (don't know the exact number off the top of my head) will be selected to attend the National Democratic Convention. If I go to the National Democratic convention, I'll be one of those "delegate" votes that you keep hearing about on TV who will directly select the Democratic nominee. Pretty cool huh? Anyway, it will be an interesting learning experience and maybe I'll blog a bit about it if people are interested.

And I'd join the movement If there was one I could believe in Yeah I'd break bread and wine If there was a church I could receive in U2, "Acrobat" The eternal question everyone always finds themselves asking whenever they listen to a politician on TV is this; are you for real? As in, are you for real or only telling me what you feel I want to hear? In a way, states like Iowa and New Hampshire, the earliest states to vote in the primary calendar season in the U.S., to select the candidates who will be torch carriers for the Democrats and the Republicans are extremely lucky. Not only do they get absolutely carpet bombed with the candidates for months while the rest of us in the U.S. barely pay attention, most of them get to meet the candidates in person at some point. In swing districts in the states in question, they often get to meet the candidates multiple times. Of course, an argument can, and oft-times is, made by the people of this states that this blessing can be a curse in disguise. They get subjected to an astonishing number of phone calls, TV commercials, etc. during an election year. It can be a terrible burden they argue. Of course this terrible burden always carries with it a huge economic benefit for the states involved so they always fight tooth and nail any suggestion that they should yield their positions as the first states in the U.S. to pick between the candidates fighting for the major party tickets. Well, this year's election is shaping up to be slightly different for both Republicans and Democrats. Not only have many states moved their primaries/caucuses forward in the calendar year so they can have more of a say on who the people who win their respective party nominations are, but this year's lack of clear front-runners on either party ticket have created a dynamic not seen in many years. Certainly both parties started off with front runners. Hillary Clinton and "America's Mayor" Rudy Giuliani were both front-runners for their party's ticket. Now though, Rudy Giuliani has dropped out of the race after spending approximately $50 million dollars to win one, yes that isn't a misprint, one electoral delegate vote. Similarly, Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side has also stumbled. Once considered to be completely inevitable, an audacious challenge by a young up and coming black Senator named Barack Obama has her in, and I've always wanted a chance to say this, in a "battle for her political life". A couple of people may have wondered why this blog space was so very silent over the last several weeks. Normally, I am a fairly prolific blogger, both in posting my own blogs and placing comments on the blogs of people I track. As xboxrulze IM'd me, I have been much more silent lately. This is because I have a confession to make, I have been an unpaid volunteer for Barack Obama in the state of Idaho for the last couple of months.

This was a huge shock for me. I've never voted in a primary before, let alone tried to get other people to come out and do so. However, when the Democratic party chose a "skinny kid with a funny name" as Obama refers to himself, to give the opening speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, I stood up and took notice. This was a guy who hadn't served a single term in the Senate to date, but the party was selecting him to be their standard bearer for one of the most important speeches every four years? Some people may recall a little known southern governor named Bill Clinton making a similar speech before deciding to run for president. Well, when I listened to the man speak I understood. The man has a gift. He has such a gift for public speaking and rhetoric that a man whose full name is "Barack Hussein Obama" is now a hair's breath away from being the first non-white person of either major political party in the U.S. to be chosen to represent them in the general election. Think about it, a man who Republicans have repeatedly "mistakenly" called Barack Osama is in a virtual dead heat in national polls. That accomplishment is almost entirely tied to his extraordinary gift in public speaking. It doesn't show up in short commercials or sound bites or in brief debate answers, but when this man gives a speech all sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. get chills. Here are some examples. Do yourself a favour and don't just listen for a couple of minutes. I mean really listen to the whole speeches. If nothing else, it will likely make you better writers if you do so.



The man, who if news reports are to be believed, writes his own speeches, has an amazing gift for rhetoric.

The really great speeches in the world have a common theme: they start small and build. Go read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Marc Antony's speech at Caesar's funeral. He starts small, saying nice things about Brutus and Cassius, but by the time the speech is over he's managed to incite a crowd full of Romans to a fever pitch desire to sink their teeth into the necks of both men. Iowa Caucus win South Carolina win Faith issues Iraq War But I'm a cynic. Speeches are all well and good, but I'm a grown up and I know one immutable, historical fact: politicians lie to get elected. They say what they think you want to hear. How was I to know that Senator Obama wasn't just saying what he thought we wanted to hear a heck of a lot better than anyone else was saying it? That's why I was looking forward so much to the Senator's visit to my hometown of Boise, Idaho - a state that hasn't voted for a Democrat in the general election since 1964 when Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republican party decided to start pursuing its "Southern Strategy" of appealing to fear of black people to get low income whites to vote against their own best interest. Well, with doors opening at 7:00 AM on a Saturday morning, the Taco Bell Arena that seats 12,400 people was not only filled to capacity, but roughly 3000-4000 people stayed outside in freezing temperatures to listen anyway. This is for a Democrat in Idaho. Idaho gave Bush its largest margin of victory out of any state in the United States in 2004 except Utah. It is one of the reddest of red states. I wanted to watch Mr. Obama in person and judge for myself if he was for real. I wanted to use my BS detector and decide if he really meant what he said. I wanted to know if he was a truly gifted demagogue or the rarest of quantities in politics: a man who is truly inspired. Well, I got my answer. Senator Obama is for real. He believes what he says. I know coverage of U.S. primaries is not extensive outside of the United States, but if Democrats are smart enough to put this man on the ticket in the general election in 2008, then we're going to have a landslide. It isn't a given. Not only are Hillary and Bill Clinton resilient enough that it will probably require a wooden stake through their hearts to finally bury them for good, but Democrats have a well documented and frustrating history of doing the stupidest possible thing at the worst possible time politically. The only Democrat left in the race who could unify the currently fractured Republican party is Senator Hillary Clinton, admittedly a good and impressive woman but hated like no others by those in red states. Feb 5th, the majority of the states in the U.S. vote in their primaries. To my U.S. readers I urge you to find out where and when your primaries are at if you do not already know, and vote for Senator Barack Obama.

Jim, Jim's Mother, and ChiliDragon in a photo with Senator Obama

Fixing what is wrong with JRPGs A long while back, I wrote a blog stating that I felt that JRPG's were in a state of decline. Or, if I am to be completely honest, I stated that I thought that they were "dead" and had lost huge amounts of ground to their Western counterparts like Bioware. Since then, Gamespot awarded a JRPG its RPG of the Year award.

Now, this is a decision that roughly 97% of Gamespot users disagreed with. The runaway top two RPGs according to the voters were "The Witcher" and "Mass Effect", developed in Europe and Canada respectively. Given that Gamespot nominated three different JRPGs for the Best RPG of 2007 award compared to only two WRPGs, and the WRPGs garnered roughly 88% of the total vote, I think I may have had a point somewhere in that previous blog entry of mine. (Although a number of the comments stated, correctly in my mind upon further reflection, that I could have written my first blog better than I did.) Of course, I should mention a caveat that Japan's best known and most respected RPG factory, Square-Enix, did not put out another title in its signature Final Fantasy series last year. This needs to be taken into account. They did, however, put one out in 2006, and that one came in well behind an RPG created by American developer Bethesda called Oblivion in both Gamespot user and editor minds.

I'm old enough to remember a time when JRPGs ruled all. If someone had predicted ten years ago that video game voters in the U.S. would overwhelmingly prefer RPGs developed in Europe and America to their Japanese counterparts multiple years running you'd have been laughed at, and then probably had things thrown at you for your audacity. But that is where the JRPG genre now finds itself, growing progressively more marginalized in the world market. Sure, JRPGs may still be an overwhelming numero uno in Japan itself, but frankly, there are a lot more video gamers outside of Japan than there are inside of Japan. So with that in mind, I think it is time that somebody helped Japanese developers join the 21st century. I nominate myself for this thankless task. First things first though: Spineless Disclaimer: The opinions contained within the blog are just that, opinions, and are not worth getting upset about. Feel free to disagree, but it is preferred that you do so in a rational manner. In other words, attack my arguments and not my mother and/or questionable parentage please. Remember that I'm only about half-serious about what I am about to say, with the rest of it being a bit tongue-in-cheek. Thanks! And now, without further ado, here are my extremely simple suggestions for fixing JRPG games. Stop having fifteen year old kids with zero formal combat training running around saving the world. Armies in developed nations have age limits for good reasons. Let's set aside the moral reasons for a minute to talk about the purely logical ones.

Reader Participation Requested! Are you 22 years of age or older? If so, then go dig out your old high school year books and take a look at your cla.ss pictures from when you were fourteen, fifteen or sixteen years old. Now invite your largest friend over and show him the picture. Then claim that the fifteen year old version of you could kick your friend's hiney. After he's done either laughing at you or punching you, depending on how close you two are and how volatile your friend is, return and read the rest of this blog. I don't know about the rest of the people reading this, but I was a scrawny little wimp at fifteen years old. If the fifteen year old version of me challenged the 28 year old version of me to a fight, I'd annihilate the impudent little weasel. Yet, fifteen year olds in JRPGs routinely swing a sword hard enough to cut through everything ranging from a dragon to a tank.

But Jim, what about the Great Equalizer, A.K.A. "Magic"? Okay, now your fifteen year old JRPG character uses magic and that is the reason he or she can save the world. This does level the playing field a little bit. Unfortunately it also requires a gigantic leap of faith. Let's use a modern analogy and assume that magic represents heavy artillery. Specifically, depending on how strong the magic spell you're using is, it can be represented by somewhere between a rocket launcher and a tactical nuclear strike. So how do a bunch of teenagers with no military or close quarters combat training manage to use their magic without killing each other on accident in the process? Even the best armies in the world in modern times still have causalities from friendly fire, and they sure as heck aren't using their rocket launchers and nuclear bombs at sword-strike range! Hell, I still sometimes cut the wrong way on a basketball court and run into my own teammate. I can't imagine how hard it would be to get out of the way of the "fireball" spell from the mage in my party 100% of the time when the mage is casting the spell at the very same beastie I'm currently swinging my sword at. It just stretches the boundaries of disbelief that fifteen year olds can save the world. Where do we draw the line? Should a ten year old Anakin Skywalker flying a fighter ship against the Trade Federation be our line in the sand? A strategy based on wearing down your opponent's fist with your face doesn't really work in real life. Translation: Limit breaks need to go. Anyone ever seen the "Rocky" movies with Sylvester Stallone? The best examples of what I am talking about occurs in Rocky 3 and 4 where Rocky is taking on Mr. T in number three and the invincible Russian boxer Ivan Drago, played by that Swedish actor, in number four. Ivan Drago literally killed Rocky's buddy, and former world champion, Apollo Creed in an earlier fight. And yet, when Rocky is getting hammered on and his trainer is screaming about how he's getting killed out there, his buddy Paulie counters by saying, "No he's not! He's getting mad!"

The idea that somehow absorbing huge amounts of punishment can make a person stronger rather than weaker is just plain silly. It is nothing more than an excuse to throw out an astonishing amount of special effects. JRPGs often remind me of 1980s era professional wrestling. Specifically, the heroes remind me of Hulk Hogan. If you've ever watched the Hulkster over the past couple of decades you know exactly how each and every fight is going to go. Hulk Hogan is going to get pounded on, continuously, for around ten straight minutes by obscenely large and strong men. After enduring a beating that would, literally, kill anything short of a demi-god, Hogan will appear to be completely done for.

Suddenly, just before he's counted out, he'll experience a miraculous recovery as the crowd goes wild. He'll "Hulk Up" with a bunch of muscle flexing and acknowledgment of the crowd's adoration. After beating on the other guy for roughly thirty seconds, the Hulkster will deploy the leg drop on his nearly completely fresh opponent and win the match. Reader Participation Requested! For any reader who merely skimmed through the last couple of paragraphs so they could hurry down to the comment box to disagree with me and tell me how stupid I am, I want you to try something first. Stand up from your computer, walk over to the nearest wall, and then slam your head into it as hard as you can ten to twenty times. Once you've done that, if you're still conscious, evaluate how you're currently feeling.

Do you feel that if you were to get into a fight with a huge dragon right now you would be more or less likely to be able to hit it with a sword harder than you normally would? Are you even able to read the words on your screen right now or are they bouncing around too much? Well, regardless, if you still feel like disagreeing with me then be my guest. I've already gotten my vengeance. Yo! Now you understand how stupid Limit Breaks are and well, if you don't, then I think you can safely skip the rest of this blog because I'm just getting warmed up and you aren't going to agree with anything else I'll say from here onwards. I survived the apocalypse out of sheer manliness, and, of course, the love of a good woman. Another oddity in JRPGs is just how amazingly durable these youngsters are. Towards the end of many of these games both the villains and the heroes gain cosmic level powers capable of tearing the world apart and snatching passing meteors out of the sky to drop on tender young skulls. Those must be some truly special suits of armor and helmets to stand up to such awesome attacks. A meteor of any significant size penetrating the atmosphere would be the equivalent of numerous nuclear weapons being dropped at the same time and in the same spot.

Large enough meteors are referred to as global killers because they are sufficient to end all life on the entire planet. This is another example of Japanese developers wanting an excuse to show off special effects at the expense of story cohesion. If you're going to smack around the heroes or the villains with such monumental attacks, then at very least give us some sort of reason why either side can survive such attacks. Incidentally, more information on global killers can be found at one of my all-time favorite site links. Click here for about three hours of super high quality entertainment. You're not Japanese, so you won't understand. Often times, things that happen in JRPGs seem a bit counter-intuitive to western culture. I'm going to use Gamespot's RPG of the year, which I personally thought was very good, as my source of a couple of examples. I refer to Shin Megami Tensei (Persona 3), which I would rate somewhere between a 7.5 and an 8.0. Example Number 1: You play as high school aged students who are tasked with saving the world (of course) and yet, no matter how urgent the situation at hand is, you never actually skip school. Think about this for a second. You are responsible for saving the entire world and yet, no matter if you know for a fact that you've got a major battle that evening, you don't take the day off to rest up and prepare. I've been a high school student. I can tell you that if I knew I had a fight later that night that would mean saving the world, I can guarantee you that I'd skip school. I'd probably also try and get a little nookie ahead of time just in case, well, in case it ended up being my last chance to do so. Example Number 2: In Persona 3 answering questions correctly in cla.ss increased your "Charm" score. It must be a Japanese thing, because when I was in school answering questions correctly in cla.ss didn't make you more popular with the ladies.

Example Number 3: The hottest girl in the school, Mitsuru Kirijo, wouldn't date you until you are one of the top students in the school. Now, high school was a long time ago for me, but I was one of the top students in my school and I don't recall that being a turn on for the hot girls I tried to get dates with. It was in college, but certainly not in high school. Now, some people who respond to this post will no doubt argue that JRPGs are developed with Japanese audiences in mind and therefore it is only natural that, culturally, the games would be developed to be consistent with what Japanese players expect to see. Further, a substantial amount of western players are "Japophiles" who are very familiar and love Japanese culture. But I think that the popular vote on Gamespot over the last couple of years will attest to the fact that the true growth area is the western audience. Now keep in mind, I'm not arguing that one culture is superior to another. I'm saying that, thinking only about economics, broadening the appeal of JRPGs to a wider audience is the right thing to do. At one time people who like rpgs, like me, had no choice but to buy JRPGs if we wanted to enjoy the RPG genre. That isn't the case now. Now Japan has competition, and they need to adapt their games to appeal to a wider audience if they want to be the cream of the crop once again. I want to conquer the world because I am, well, you know, evil…and stuff. Most of my previous comments have focused on the heroes in JRPGs, but what about villains? A good villain is a severely underrated quality for a game to have. What makes a good villain is a blog unto itself, but a huge part of it is having some context around what motivates the villain in the first place. Why does the villain do bad things? What makes the villain power hungry? How did they turn out the way they did? Was it because their mothers didn't hug them enough when they were kids? How did they turn out so bad? The truly interesting villains are ones where you get glimpses into their motivations and desires. JRPGs are hardly alone in the fact that their villains are not always fully fleshed out, but, frankly, they are often among the worst culprits. Often times, even in the very good JRPGs, the villain's motivations, background, character traits, etc. are depressingly underdeveloped. The good news is that I think that at least one major JRPG factory recognizes this fact. Square-Enix's latest villain offering in Final Fantasy XII was surprisingly well developed and three dimensional, to the point where several times during the game I found myself actually thinking the "bad" guys had some very good points. In reality, most of my suggestions boil down to one thing: realism. When I say realism, I'm not arguing that we need to abandon magic, or futuristic science or all the other make believe things that make video gaming great. No, I use the word realism to refer to the social dynamics of a game. Is it realistic for fifteen year olds to save the world? Is it realistic for them to not only survive being hit on the head with a meteor, but also to emerge stronger than ever specifically because they were hit on the head with a meteor? The more realistic future JRPG games are in terms of human motivations and behavior, the better those games are going to be.



Hi folks, Sorry it took so long to reply to the comments. I've been busy with offline activities all morning. Since I am so far behind there is no way I'll be able to answer everyone's comments individually, I'm going to pick out a couple of common themes in the comments that I see and address those instead. I'm putting this here in addition to down below to try and address the very good points that some people made below. Theme #1: Your "fixes" are just describing a WRPG - Therefore you don't like JRPGs. I admit that there is some truth to this argument. I do think that WRPGs have progressed beyond JRPGs in recent years. In fact, I openly admitted as such. It is one of the primary basis for my post. So the folks who are saying that I'm just trying to tell JRPGs to be a little more like WRPGs have a valid point. But having said that, numbers don't lie. For two years running, even though extremely popular franchises like Final Fantasy and Persona have released games, the overwhelming number of people voting in the Gamespot awards have said that they prefer the WRPG games like Oblivion, The Witcher and Mass Effect. Now, I understand that true fans of the more hardcore JRPG games like Persona 3 like the genre and don't want anything changed. However, what I am saying is that the broader RPG genre audience seems to prefer some of the traits that WRPGs are adapting. I'm not arguing that JRPGs need to completely abandon their roots. I am arguing that they need to widen their horizons, try out some new formulas, in order to appeal to the wider audience or they're going to gradually continue to decline into a niche market. (Of course when Final Fantasy XIII comes out I'll probably look pretty stupid with that last statement.) Theme #2 - It is a game. Realism is unimportant. Also, it is just as unrealistic to expect a small number of grown ups to save the world as it is a number of kids. There are two different things to discuss here. First off, when I use the word "Realistic" I am referring to behaviors and motivations behind how the characters who are written into the game act, not the level of magic and/or scientific advancement present in the game. For example, in Persona 3 you're forced to attend summer school at some point in the game because, as Mitsuru explains it, eventually everything will end and you'll go back to being normal kids and she doesn't want you to fall behind in your studies and ruin your post-superhero futures. Okay, that makes sense from a certain point of view, but lets look deeper for a moment. Her family is fabulously rich and well funded and you're in the middle of saving the world. Don't you think that saving the world should be a full-time job? The Kirijo Corporation could probably afford to arrange for private tutors, full-time cushy jobs, or even just give each of the kids $5 million dollars each as a reward for saving the world when everything is all over with. In other words, it just stretched the boundaries of realistic human behavior, even in a Japanese culture that admittedly values education and learning more than an American one, that they would prioritize school over world saving. So again, I'm not talking about whether or not having shadowy "Persona" based magic powers is realistic. Obviously it is not. But a character's actions and motivations based in response to what is happening in a storyline should be realistic to how a real person in similar circumstances would act. This brings me to the second part of the point : that it is no more realistic to expect a small group of grown ups to save the world as it is a group of kids. This is true...to a certain extent. The difference lies in the background of the small group involved. Someone mentioned Mass Effect and the odds that the hero and his crew have against them in the game. The difference between you, as Commander Shepard, and a few random teenagers are dramatic. Not only are you and all your crewmembers elite military operatives (think Green Berets) but you yourself are, specifically, the very best combat/military/espionage operative that the entire race has to offer. That's why you're made a Spectre. You are James Bond. So while the odds would still be stacked against you, the degree in which is stretches credibility is substantially smaller.

Theme #3 - They aren't realistic, but that doesn't matter. They don't need to be in order to be fun and interesting. I don't play them with the intention that they are an accurate reflection of real life This is the third theme that I saw among the comments of those who disagreed with my blog, and, frankly, the one I am most swayed by. This is an emotional argument that boils down to, "who cares if everything you say is true, they're just plain fun anyway". I can't really argue with that. I still enjoy JRPGs. I played Persona 3 for over 100 hours. I played Suikoden V last year, played around with Eternal Sonata, and just recently finished replaying Dragon Quest VIII. There is just something to be said for games not needing to be realistic. While I don't agree completely, as I think that the RPG genre in particular - literally "playing a role" - should be as realistic a representation of human behavior as possible, I can certainly see how some would disagree with this.

In my last blog I had a video of a baby playing with a cobra and said it was the scariest, most creepy thing I could imagine. Well, I stand corrected. Yeah, this goes real well with ChiliDragon's quote during the Wedding Crashers about cutting things off. Full disclosure: these last two blog topics have been inspired through reading Andrew Sullivan's political blog. I'm a liberal by nature, but Andrew Sullivan is proof that not all the smart people in the world are liberals and so I read him to get "the other point of view" so to speak. It's better than listening to Fox news. Sample of linked article: Is it possible to shave something off by mistake? Jesus Christ … What if I get an erection? Would it be my last? Maybe I should pop one off, just for old time's sake. My next blog will be something a bit more substantial. I've been busy in real life lately with work. I'm currently applying for a promotion and been doing my best to look good while they make up their minds on the matter. I've got my fingers crossed, but out of the 60 people who initially applied for the promotion I'm one of five who made the final cut. With regards to my "Advice for Fixing JRPG" blog that I've been promising forever, it is nearly done.

I confess that it has, in fact, been fully written for a couple of weeks now. However, when I wrote it when I was in a grumpy, stressed out mood. So when I went back and reread it in anticipation of putting up on the blog here, I found that maybe my "tone of voice" wasn't the kindest, most patient one that I have ever used. I was in the mood to pick a fight when I wrote it and the writing reflects that. I've just been trying to find the right time to go in and soften it up a bit.

I've seen some scary things in my day, but this video is without a doubt the freakiest thing that I have ever seen. This one is not for the faint of heart.