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akari-thoughts-blog · 7 years

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Guide to the Monado 漢字

So, I looked at some random fanart the other day, and I was a bit annoyed at some of them for having the Kanji looking completely wrong.

So, here I am, writing about how each kanji is pronounced, stroke order, all those things

(Xenoblade spoilers, obviously)

Vocabulary:

漢字 - Kanji

音読み - Onyomi (Sound Reading)

- You use this when the 漢字 is surrounded by other 漢字

訓読み - Kunyomi (Meaning Reading)

- You use this when the 漢字 is alone

モナド・アーツ - Monado Aatsu (Monado Arts)

機神兵 - Kishinhei (Mechon)

Ordering of the Kanji:

Xenoblade Print 行書草書

(If you’re wondering why I’m not writing entirely in Roumaji, it’s because Japanese words then to be shorter, so I get to be more lazy)

Anyways, the first Kanji!

Misc

読 - Read 「リード」

This 漢字 appears when you’re at the loading screen

(Reading the disc, haha)

音読み：　ドク (Doku)

訓読み：　よむ (Yomu)

Stages of the モナド

機 - Enchant 「エンチャント」

Meaning: Machine

The first symbol to appear to appear (In-game). This signifies the モナド I can only hurt Machines （機神兵）

Also, the same symbol used in the エンチャントアーツ which let other party members hurt 機神兵 without having special weapons to pierce their Armour.

音読み：　キ (Ki)

訓読み：　はた (Hata)

人 - Human 「ヒューマン」

When Zanza upgraded the モナド I to the モナド II during the event’s of Prison Island, he let the sword capable of harming live on the Bionis.

(Don’t ask me why the first モナド is perfectly capable of hurting wildlife on Bionis but not Homs.)

音読み：　ジン (Jin)

訓読み：　ひと (Hito)

神 - God 「ゴッド」

Finally, in the second phase of the Final fight with Zanza. With the power of friendship, Shulk creates the モナド within him. The モナド III, which is capable of harming gods.

(I realise the sentence sounds silly, since the replica モナド and other weapons can already damage Zanza)

音読み：　シン (Shin)

訓読み：　かみ (Kami)

モナド・アーツ

盾 - Shield 「シールド」

The second art that Shulk receives during the events at Tephra Cave with the fight with the Arachno Queen. It protects all party members from receiving fatal damage by a Talent Art.

音読み：　ジュン (Jyun)

訓読み：　たて (Tate)

疾 - Speed 「スピード」

Meaning: Rapidly

「『モナドにまた新しい文字が―！』

『―やれろのか？』

『出来るさ』」

Shulk receives this art when he receives a vision about Sharla’s death. With it, his movement speed (Only in cutscenes and not in-game for some reason) and dodging ability

音読み：　シツ (Shitsu)

訓読み：　はやい (Hayai)

破 - Purge 「(Breaker) ブレーカ」

Meaning: Rip, Break, Destroy

This art is actually created by Alvis, when the Telethias attacked him and Shulk at the coast near Great Makna Falls. With this power, the モナド can temporarily stop an enemies aura or spike.

音読み：　ハ (Ha)

訓読み：　やぶる (Yaburu)

轟 - Cyclone 「サイクロン」

Meaning: Roar, Thunder

Now, this 漢字 is actually an onomatopoeia (The actual 漢字 for cyclone would be 飃) which in context is quite fitting as it’s the roar of a cyclone. And, cyclone’s typically then to blow and topple things~. Anyways, you get this power after beating the Apocrypha Generator robot guard.

音読み：　ゴウ (Gou)

訓読み：　とどろかす (Todorokasu)

喰 - Eater 「イーター」

Meaning: Eat, Receive (A blow)

The first optional art. This lets you removes any buffs on your opponent while simultaneously inflicting bleed them. Shulk receives this after doing a series of side-quests at Makna Forest. More, specifically the ruins near the landing side. You get this art after obtaining a book from King Agni’s Tomb.

(Not sure, how reading a book let you acquire a new ability for a mythical sword, but sure)

訓読み：　くう (Kuu)

鎧 - Armour 「アーマー」

The second optional art. This art reduces physical and ether damage for every party member by at most, 75%. You acquire this art after doing the Stop the Mechon Rampage! sidequest given at Machina Village.

音読み：　カイ (Kai)

訓読み：　よろう (Yorou)

Smash Exclusive アーツ

Nope, still not done! In Smash 4, Sakurai (Or, Alvis/Machina, I guess) added two new arts to Shulk’s arsenal.

翔 - Jump 「ジャンプ」

Meaning: Soar, Fly

This art, judging by it’s self-explanatory name, let’s you jump higher with the added bonus of giving Shulk’s recovery move slightly increased height. Oh, and giving Kirby the most broken recovery game ever.

音読み：　ショウ (Shou)

訓読み：　かける (Kakeru)

撃 - Smash 「スマッシュ」

Meaning: Attack, Defeat, Conquer

The final art, Smash *roll credits* gives Shulk horrendously bad damage output but in return giving him quite a knockback boost. (The good kind, not the stupid kind like in old games where it somehow always gravitate you into the nearest instant death pit.)

音読み：　ゲキ (Geki)

訓読み：　うつ (Utsu)

With every 漢字 covered (Until Xenoblade 2), this wraps up this guide on the 12 漢字 that appears at the centre of the モナド

See you until the next time, I post something, I guess.

―　スカイ

#japanese #games #xenoblade

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pixelpoppers · 5 years

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Super Mario Maker 2 showed me why I don’t like 2D Mario

In short: its high strictness and punishment plus its regressive difficulty and locking mechanics behind power-ups make it frustrating to learn to play.

I've never really gotten into mainline Mario games, but I was intrigued by Super Mario Maker 2's story mode, which apparently serves as a sort of extended level design tutorial. It features 120 levels each themed around particular level pieces or combinations thereof, showing you how to use them in play and hopefully providing inspiration for how to use them when creating your own levels. I find tutorial design really interesting, and Mario famously teaches through level design, so I checked it out.

It starts well, with a focus on new features that the original Super Mario Maker lacked. The first level ("A Downhill Battle") teaches you to slide down slopes and shows some interesting ways to use that in a level. Next comes a level similarly demonstrating clever use of the ON/OFF Switch (called "ON/OFF Switch Research Expedition"), and then a level ("Hello, 3D World!") using the new 3D World theme and showcasing climbable Super Bell Trees and the corresponding Super Bell power-up that turns Mario into Cat Mario.

The latter half of this level is where I ran into trouble. There's a large coin worth thirty normal coins suspended over a pit. It's not in the main path and not required to complete the level - it's clearly a bonus reward allowing you to test and show off your mechanical mastery. It's worth noting that coins are actually valuable in Story Mode - they're a key part of the progression. So - I didn't have to get that 30-coin pickup, but I absolutely wanted to.

Now, I never played Super Mario 3D World. I'm not familiar with Cat Mario's physics and controls. The level to this point had given some opportunity to practice, but with setups that did not resemble this coin floating over a pit. Plus, there was a platform nearby that could be manipulated into one of several positions and it wasn't immediately obvious what position would make it easiest to safely collect the coin. Overall, this was clearly an opportunity to grow my skills with the game - to experiment and practice until I could safely pick up the 30-coin without falling into the pit.

So I tried, did the wrong thing, fell into the pit, and died. I was sent back to the mid-level checkpoint, erasing all the coin collecting I'd done since then. I made my way back to the 30-coin, re-collecting all the coins along the way, and tried again. I did a different wrong thing, fell into the pit, and died. I made my way back to the 30-coin again, collecting all the coins along the way again, and tried a different thing which actually worked and enabled me to safely collect the 30-coin and proceed.

Now, I absolutely don't mind that it took me a few tries to figure out how to properly collect the 30-coin. This was me learning how Cat Mario works - in particular, my instinct was to use the jump button to wall climb when it actually sends you leaping away from the wall. Trying this out and seeing the results and failing to get the reward and then succeeding enabled me to overcome that bad instinct and was more effective than something like a "Hold forward to wall climb!" dialog box would have been.

My problem is that the game punished me for trying to learn. The 30-coin was an isolated test of skill. The "too lazy to git gud" thing to do would have been to just skip it and finish the level. Only players who actually want to engage deeply with the game's systems bother trying to get the coin - and to these players, the gameplay between the checkpoint and the 30-coin is likely not particularly challenging. But if you try to get the coin and fail - because you are actively engaging and experimenting with the game's systems in order to master them - you are penalized with a time-wasting retread of unrelated content you've already done.

This was frustrating, and is not how people learn best. But it only took me a few tries and I can forgive anything once, so I moved on to the next level - "Under the Angry Sun." This level introduces several new things - it's an auto-scrolling level in which you ride a moving platform. The Angry Sun is a persistent hazard and you need to jump over it every time it crosses the screen without falling off the platform. But you're also given the Propeller Mushroom that enables super jumps and gradual descents - and with skilled use of this ability, you don't just have to hop over the Angry Sun (which by itself gets old fast) but can actually collect a whole bunch of coins that are otherwise out of reach.

The trouble is, collecting the coins also requires avoiding spikes, in ways that are difficult if you aren't an expert with the propeller jump. As you might have guessed, I'm not - I've only played a little of New Super Mario Bros. Wii. So while I was able to get most of the early coins, as the hazards became harder to avoid I eventually hit a spike and took damage. And that means I lost the propeller.

As a result, I wasn't able to try again to collect those particular coins. And then I couldn't try at all with the next set of coins. I was penalized for trying to master the game's mechanics by having those mechanics removed. All I could do was wait on the platform, periodically hopping over the sun, watching coin challenges scroll by out of reach, until the game gave me another Propeller Mushroom.

So there had now been two levels in a row where there was a safe, easy, boring path and a path that allowed the player to test, improve, and show off their mechanical mastery - but if you weren't already a master and were trying to learn, you were punished by having to spend time playing the boring way. And it was becoming clear that this pattern was a natural result of elements core to the design of 2D Mario games. Instant-death pits with sparse checkpoints, mechanics enabled via power-ups which are lost when you take damage - add these up and it's almost impossible to avoid punishing players for trying to learn.

Realizing this, I understood why I was quickly turned off by most Mario games I'd tried - and I also lost interest in bothering with the admittedly incredible range of user-created levels. No matter how you combine your blocks, you can't change these core factors of Mario's design. You can paper over it by having no pits or instant-death obstacles and showering the player with power-ups, but it's ultimately just a band-aid over an outdated design.

Other franchises have mostly evolved past these kind of mechanics, but Mario is so iconic that it can't really escape its own legacy. If a 2D Mario game changed these systems, it wouldn't feel like Mario and that'd be a big problem.

The only time Mario games can escape these issues is when they're doing something different already. Like in the only 2D Mario game I've actually gotten into: Yoshi's Island, where taking damage doesn't cost you an ability and is recoverable if you can catch Baby Mario in time. In the mainline Mario games, it's only possible when transitioning to 3D: even in the very first 3D outing, Super Mario 64, Mario has more health and the power-ups that are present are more like vehicle or mini-game mode changes than extra abilities that are easily lost. Failure is more of a recoverable range than a punished binary, which is much more interesting and a better way to teach.

#gaming #video games #Super Mario Maker 2 #sequels #punishment

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pixelpoppers · 5 years

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Dominant Mechanics in Kao the Kangaroo: Round 2

I can't stop thinking about this weirdly self-defeating segment I played in Kao the Kangaroo: Round 2.

Kao 2 is a PS2-era collectathon platformer that was recently ported to Steam. Early in the game is a level called "The Great Escape," which is one of those something-big-is-chasing-you-so-run-toward-the-camera sequences where you can barely see what's coming. (Here's someone playing it if you want to see it in action.) You are told that to outrun the bear that's chasing you, you'll need to pick up the speed boost power-ups that are littered on the path ahead, and that you'll be able to find them because they are preceded by trails of coins.

So, even though you can't really see what's coming, you're still given some advance warning so you can get to the right place to collect the speed boosts - and the pickup radius on the coins and speed boosts is quite generous. Also, each speed boost pickup lasts far longer than the amount of time it'll take to get to the next one - you can miss a lot and as long as you don't miss too many in a row you'll be fine.

In principle, this seems basically fine and roughly in line with the relatively low level of challenge on offer for the first portion of the game. There are, however, a few problems with this setup. The first issue is that coins stay collected even if you die, so on repeat attempts any trails you've already picked up are no longer there. The second problem is far worse.

The path features bottomless pits and bodies of water. Stepping into any of these is instant death and they are not foreshadowed the way the coin trails foreshadow the speed boosts. As a result, they completely dominate this section mechanically. I died several times from pits and water and never once came close to running out of speed boost - it was only after several attempts that I even noticed there was a speed boost meter in the corner of the screen that drained over time and was refilled by picking up the boosts. The speed boost mechanic could have been removed completely without really changing this segment.

The way the speed boost system is set up makes me think this was intended to be a fairly forgiving level (which feels appropriate to me for an early level that's the first use of a gameplay style that also is inherently more difficult than what's previously been on offer). But the instant-death obstacles you can't really see coming turn it into a strict and punishing memorization gauntlet that's a huge difficulty spike compared to the surrounding levels - and they render pointless the mechanic created specifically for this type of level.

I'd love to know how the developers felt about it, but as a player it feels like design by committee where a lack of unified vision lead to compromised mechanics. It's like taking a driving lesson with an attentive instructor with their own brake pedal to protect you from any mistakes, but then having the lesson take place on narrow platforms suspended over the grand canyon.

#gaming #video games #kao the kangaroo #incoherent design

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