Azure Flame

“The spirits forgive everyone they love- and they love everyone!”

In times gone by, when I didn’t have access to nearly as much anime, I used to watch the Arc the Lad anime on the Sci-Fi channel. It was far from the best of series, but it sparked an interest in the franchise, and in time I turned my attention to importing the by-then increasingly rare six-disc collection of the first three games. It was the beginning of a year long occupation with the games that stretched across bits and pieces of my spare time during the final year at university, and now, for some reason, I feel compelled to write about this oft-overlooked but sometimes worthy SRPG series.

Continue reading Arc the Lad: A Love-Hate relationship…

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly disillusioned with gaming. I had reached the stage where I was collecting games just for the sake of having them, and either put them straight in the cupboard or played them routinely and dutifully as if they were little more than a tedious chore. In the end, the outcome was inevitable- I packed up my consoles and did not look at them for months. As far as I was concerned, the gaming era was over. Continue reading Star Ocean 2, or how I reopened the gaming era…

It was something of a disappointment to find that anime episode seven wasn’t as good as imagined; the episode that introduced Nao wasn’t exactly poor, but as far as RPG material goes, it wasn’t the best I had to work with. The result- a lot of fiddly and troublesome scenes that took an age to complete (and if I’m perfectly honest, still contain a few bugs). Continue reading Mai-HiME the RPG: Episode 7…

When I first decided that I wanted to write this article (somewhere back in May/June), I knew it would be difficult. A quick flick through my rants section will show how easy I find it to rip certain series to shreds, but when it comes to unashamed praise, it becomes that much harder to write something positive without sounding like a witless and incoherent idiot. Nonetheless, if only for an excuse to include the grunty section at the end, I knew that no matter how long it took, I would have to create this article eventually.

Continue reading .hack//INFECTION to QUARANTINE: a fangirl’s journey…

Episode six turned out to be a particularly complex one to create; not only did Midori have to be transformed into a playable character, but every scene seemed to require some trick or another. Oddly enough, the section that required the most work was the seemingly simplistic ‘rocks falling in a cave’ event towards the end- it took me all evening to create the perfect falling rock animation and then dig out my old first year computing lab skills to get it looping correctly (even now, I’m not entirely satisfied with it, but that’s probably more to do with the limitations of RPG Maker than anything else). Continue reading Mai-HiME the RPG: Episode 6…

Are you so addicted to Hikaru no Go that even the anime and manga in their entirety can’t satisfy your needs? Have you discovered a new love of Go but want to hone your skills against a computer before you completely embarrass yourself against a human opponent? If, like me, you find yourself answering yes to both those questions, then help is at hand- in the form of the Hikaru no Go GBA game (in actual fact, there is more than one game, but for the purposes of this review I’m only covering the first one). Continue reading Hikaru no Go GBA…

I wasn’t particularly looking forward to doing episode five; in my mind I think of it as the ‘angst episode’ in which nothing really happens- not to mention the fact that it required no small number of new sprites and locations. Fortunately, it all went better than expected, and thus I can present to you the RPG version of episode 5.

I’ve also continued to clean up a few things from earlier episodes, whilst fanboys will be pleased to hear that Midori is almost ready to make her debut as a playable character. Continue reading Mai-HiME the RPG: Episode 5…

RPG Maker is a minefield of subtle traps, all designed to ensure that the event you planned doesn’t work as you had envisioned. In episode four, my problem was that characters weren’t moving the way they were meant to after they first appeared on the map; fortunately, sticking in a short wait (my answer to everything) between the time they appeared and the time they started moving solved the problem. That’s the trouble with RPG Maker- it isn’t always clear which events will try to run simultaneously and thus mess up your carefully laid plans.

As well as tidying up a couple of things from earlier episodes, I’ve decided to alter my Kagutsuchi and Dhuran animations. I’ll also be attempting a tentacle attack animation which hopefully won’t look too awful. Continue reading Mai-HiME the RPG: Episode 4…

Episode three presented one of my greatest RPG Maker challenges yet- creating a sprite of Mashiro sitting in a wheelchair. For some reason, the RPG Maker world seems to eschew sitting in favour of continual standing up, and so without a reference sprite to work with, I was left to mess up all by myself. Fortunately, the resulting creation, whilst hardly good, was at least not too hideous. I’ve also edited my first tileset, if by editing you can count resizing a few tiles.

For now, I haven’t got to adjusting the monsters’ strength and the items they drop after battle; that’s something I’ll probably go back and do once the basic flow of events is done and the battles are set. Continue reading Mai-HiME the RPG: Episode 3…

Making an RPG is an arduous task. Before even opening RPG Maker, you may find yourself spending hours in a graphics program trying to make the perfect sprite, tileset, animation or battle graphic. Once that is complete, you have to load your game project and start making some area maps, all the while trying to ensure that they don’t look completely awful (map-making is an art, and I’m sad to say it’s one I seem to lack). After that comes event creation, in which it takes half a page of instructions just to get your party to walk across the map and talk to someone; with that in place, you can move onto battles, and the tedious task of deciding which monster to have, how strong they should be, what abilities everyone should have, and what items they should drop. Continue reading Mai-HiME the RPG: Episode 2…