I need to insert a plug for www.kiva.org because it is the greatest idea ever. I am very much interested in the haves helping the have-nots, but I’ve been pretty disappointed by most aid organizations such as the Christian Children’s Fund. A lot of that money goes to cover overhead, because they are massive organizations with television commercials to pay for and helicopter pilots to employ. Furthermore, they center around giving food and shelter to individuals, which is a fundamentally flawed way to rebuild a broken society. I’d like to invoke an old saying about teaching a man how to fish. www.kiva.org differs from other aid organizations in basic way:
The organization does not center around giving.
The money that you give to www.kiva.org is a loan. It is not a donation– whatever money you give will eventually be returned. Whether or not individual lenders collect interest is not something I am clear on, but I’m assuming that interest earned is either collect by kiva or by the banking partner in the region, and not by individual lenders like me. Furthermore, the money is provided to entrepreneurs and not individuals and the money is to be used as business capital rather than used to buy food or meet some other basic biological need. Building economies in third-world countries is much more effective than simply feeding hungry people, because a functioning economy can feed its own people without needing any outside input. In this way, the money that is given to www.kiva.org goes a bit further than money given to aid organizations that simply feed people.
The best thing about Kiva is that, eventually, you’ll get your money back, because it is a loan and not a gift. You are free to lend the money to someone else or put it back in your pocket, but the basic idea is that individual lenders do not actually lose any money. There is always the risk of a loan going into default, approximately less than 1% of the loans on Kiva ever do — that’s a much better rate than the average loan in the United States.
None of the money given to Kiva funds the organization. The group asks for a donation, apart from the loan that you give, in order to cover their operating costs. Whether or not you want to give up the extra money is your decision, but it’s good to know that they aren’t skimming anything off the top to pay their own salaries (again, I want to compare it to the Christian Children’s Fund). The average loan given to Kiva is about $25, but you can give whatever you want. Keep in mind that $25 goes a long way in Guatemala.
I’ve only made one loan to www.kiva.org, and it was to a man in South America that wanted to buy an extra dairy cow as well as a calf for breeding. He had owned one cow previously, but could not afford another one, and I think he wanted to mate some of his animals and eventually raise a herd and sell beef – which is an extremely profitable business in his region. He’s made three repayments so far, and all of them have been on time. I get my money back, he gets some cows, and his village gets some cheese or whatever. The money I lent to this entrepreneur will produce much more food than it would have if it had simply been used to buy the wheat gruel that third-world children are so familiar with. Who knows: some day, that farmer might raise an impressive herd of beef cattle and need to employ a few ranch-hands! Creating jobs in the third world is really the only way that we can make the world a more comfortable place for everyone.
I think everyone should sign up at www.kiva.org and lend whatever they can.
This sounds a lot like an advertisement or something, and I think it’s really too bad that it isn’t. But I guess what separates Kiva from other aid organizations is that they don’t waste their money on ads!
Anyway, this is a blog, so:
It’s really depressing that I get about 5 comments per day advertising penis enlargement pills, free fetish porn videos, and secret deals that promise to reward each of my visitors with a free XBox360. They all get eaten up by the spam filter (AKA I delete them before they get posted), but it still makes me die a little bit inside each time I see them. I wish that spambots were programmed with some sort of basic intelligence that could determine when it would be a good idea to stop generation spam because it’s getting deleted constantly.
In other news, my life is much better now than it ever has been in the past. I have a bit of money in the bank, an internship that I really do like very much, and an apartment with enough space in it that it is actually possible for one to hide somewhere and not be immediately found. I also have a healthy supply of sweaters that I look absolutely gorgeous in, and, as everyone knows, I very much value the way I look in a sweater. College makes me want to quit, sometimes, because it’s asking for a little bit more than I have to give, but I think that’s true for just about everyone in college these days.
Sometimes I have a hard time falling asleep, because I have money in the bank, and I worry that, if I am not careful, I will someday not have money in the bank. This is a completely irrational thought because I do have a job that pays my bills (barely), and I earn enough interest that my pleasure purchases are basically gifts from the bank. And even if I were to try and squander the money I have available I’d have a really hard time doing it because I already have everything I could ever want — this list is limited entirely to three video game consoles, a nice TV, and lots of tight jeans. It’s a weird experience, really, to realize that my base materialistic personality type has been completely sated and that, until the next wave of video game consoles are released, I have everything I would ever want.
As for video games, I haven’t been playing as many as I would normally hope to. The most significant recent additions to my collection are Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, Super Mario Galaxy, and Mass Effect. All three are probably the best games I’ve ever played for each of the consoles they were released for. Since I’ve played through most of DQ:J, I’ll write about it a bit.
Because of Square-Enix as well as the original Metal Gear Solid, I’ve come to associate sparse, white box-art with quality.
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker for Nintendo DS is a Pokemon clone set in the Dragon Quest universe. The basic mechanics of a monster-collecting Japanese RPGs are all in place, including exploration of sprawling fields and damp caves, turn-based battles pitting one team against another, lots of statistics and healing potions to juggle, and a game world whose sole concerns revolve around an annual monster gladiator tournament. You’ve probably played at least one game like this before, such as Pokemon, Digimon, Jewel Summoner, or whatever else, so you’re probably familiar with the basic idea. What sets this game apart is that, in its niche genre, it’s probably the best game available.
This game plays a lot like Dragon Quest 8; you spend a lot of time outdoors, running around open fields and over rolling hills and such, with the camera positioned squarely a few yards above your main character. The environments are varied, and each area comes with a unique theme, and the graphics are pretty good. The draw distance is enormous, and I don’t think I once saw any pop-in or fogging on the environments. There are countless treasure chests hidden around, and because battles are activated by touching monsters on the map rather than by taking a certain number of steps, it’s a lot of fun to run around and explore. Once you’ve cleared an area of monsters you can explore without harassment for awhile, which is a definite plus.
Being a Dragon Quest game, there are a number of dungeons. These are reasonably well-designed, with little puzzles to solve, switches to push, and everything else one would expect from a Dragon Quest game. They aren’t the fantastic dungeons you’d find in a Zelda title, but at the same time they’re a lot more interesting than the ubiquitous mazes of Brave Story. Because the outdoor environments themselves are compartmentalized (DQM: Joker takes place on an archipelago of small islands), they, too, feel like dungeons themselves, and the separate dungeons almost feel like the final floor of some larger dungeon scenario. It’s an unusual game rhythm that feels a little more fresh than I was expecting from this title when I bought it.
Expansive outdoor 3D environments. Also, this screenshot is hilarious because it has TWO watermarks. It’s obvious that Gamewatch nabbed it from Square-Enix’s press kit, so why do they even bother?
Being a Pokemon clone (which was oddly a Dragon Quest clone) monster breeding is a big part of DQM: Joker. Any monster you meet in the wild or fight in a competition can be recruited to your team. This is achieved by trying to impress the monster; basically, the game checks the attack power of all the monsters in your team, compares that to the power level of the monster, converts that to a percentage, and then rolls a check to see if you are successful. Generally, you’ll have a 20% chance of catching a monster outright if it is the same power level as you, but if you use buffs that make your characters have higher attack power, you can increase that number considerably. You don’t need a high percentage to capture a monster, but it definitely helps — while I captured a level 20 She-Slime with only a 2% chance of success, I once failed to capture a Mimic when I had over 80%.
Once you’ve captured a monster, your main goal is probably to get it to level 10 or higher (very early in the game every monster you meet is at least level 10 so you will skip this step), and fuse it with another monster. When levelling up, your monster will acquire skill points that are used as currency to buy skills. Once you fuse two monsters together, you choose from three of the available skill categories from the two parent monsters, and you’ll get the result — a new monster at level 1 with the combined abilities of the two monsters you had just fused. Since you can get the monster’s level back to up to snuff extremely quickly, it’s fun and easy to quickly powerlevel, if you feel so inclined. It’s possible to get through the entire game with a team of basic monsters or by capturing monsters from each area as you go along, but fusing monsters is where the game starts to get extremely fun; this game gives me feelings that remind me a bit of all the strange combinations of abilities in Final Fantasy Tactics. Really, when you think of monsters as character classes, the system is much more similar than you would first think.
What I do notlike about DQM: Joker is that the interface is ridiculously bad. Every menu is clunky and slow, and it’s a huge pain in the ass to perform basic actions such as swapping equipment from one monster in my reserve to a monster in my front line. I have to scroll through pages of menus to look at all of my monster’s basic abilities, and there are some statistics, like “Trait”, which are extremely important, but have their explanation listed about 14 button presses away. I can guess how traits such as Health Professional benefit the monster’s ability, but I still have no idea what benefit the Psychotrait provides — and it’s a unique trait possessed only by the main character! I believe that commands and information are all spread out so far because the game offers stylus support. But, it’s really impossible to play the game using the stylus, so the end result is that there are button-navigated menus that are simply very bad.
The interface is pretty bad. As an aside, I think it’s interesting that this game’s team put as much effort into the monster menu portraits as the Pokemon team put into the monster’s entire graphics set.
DQM: Joker is pretty short. I haven’t finished it, but I’m barely over 20 hours in, have wasted plenty of time and therefore could have gotten to this point much faster, and I’m fairly certain that I’m currently enjoying the end-game. This may or may not be a problem for some gamers. In my opinion, this game would get pretty dull if it were any longer, and starts to wrap up just around the point that the gamer is having the most fun. I’m not sure which sorts of high-level challenges await high-level monster breeders, but being that this is a Dragon Quest title, I doubt that there are very many sidequests or optional bosses.
It’s also important to note that DQM: Joker will probably start to get very very easy by the end of the game for savvy players. It’s pretty easy to fuse monsters together until you have monsters much more powerful than anything you would normally acquire at that point in the game, which then gives you an enormous advantage in battle. The backwards difficulty curve, where the game becomes progressively more easy as time goes on because of an exploitable character-growth, reminds me much more of a Final Fantasy title than of a Dragon Quest title. Nevertheless, the only reason the game becomes progressively easier is because the player is directly responsible for making good choices when customizing their characters, so it’s still pretty rewarding. It’s a nice feeling when your prize monster team, whom you’ve put a lot of thought into developing into a powerhouse, is able to wipe out the competition.
I like the music in DQM: Joker, but just a little bit. Sugiyama is my favorite composer in gaming, and maybe my favorite living composer overall. It sounds like he totally mailed this one in, though. There are only five or six tracks in the game, and while some of them are excellent (such as the overworld theme, which you’ll hear the most), some of them are decidedly bad. The boss music is so bad that I have to turn the volume off for fear of being embarrassed. The boss music in this title, with its awful MIDI electric guitar and nonsensical melodies, has drawn the line and then promptly crossed it. I’m pretty sure that this is the worst Dragon Quest soundtrack yet, but it’s still a cut above your average handheld video game track. That overworld theme sure is catchy!
There’s one small thing about this game that I noticed that might please any Dragon Quest 7 fans. If any of you played DQ7, you’ll remember that the player had to collect dozens of magical shards in order to complete the game. These were always in very weird places, and it was really easy to miss one of them. The problem was that the player might not even know they had missed a shard until thirty hours later, when they needed it, and with no real clues as to where the overlooked shard was hidden, it was easy to get stuck. DQM: Joker has a similar setup where the player needs to collect 10 pieces of a type of crystal throughout the game in order to advance to the monster finals (e.g., the end of the game). These are often in very weird places and are easy to miss. However, there are more than 10 pieces of crystal in the game — I found 11, and I saw another one on the world map somewhere that I never figured out how to reach. So, while it’s easy to miss a few pieces of crystal in DQM: Joker, since there are more pieces in the game than the game requires the player to collect, it’s unlikely that the player will find themselves at the end of the game without a lot of crystal. I thought that this was an extremely classy move.
One small gripe I have with this game is that there is some conspicuously bad grammar in parts. It’s inconsistent — for the most part, the translation is perfectly average and readable Occasionally, though, and especially during battle sequences, messages will have in correct grammar, and it is usually associated with pronoun use. I think this has something to do with British English its tendency to refer to a group as a plural (I.E., Brandon’s team have won the battle! rather than Brandon’s team has won the battle!), which I’m not sure is a colloquialism or is just technically correct in the alternate dialect. Either way, it pops up occasionally and makes the game seem a little amateurish.
I had written quite a lot comparing this game to Pokemon and explaining why I think it’s the better game, but I think I’ll leave all that out. It is a hot question, of course, so I still feel obligated to answer it. Basically, all of the annoying things about Pokemon games – static sprites in battle, boring dungeons and boring overworld exploration, limited strategic options in combat, limited feeling of control over development of statistics — are handled a little differently, and a little more competently, in this title.
I think that he’s just scored a critical hit or something, but it’s hard to tell. Also, it would probably be impossible to emulate the conditions in this screenshot without cheating for certain reasons relating to that dog on the right. I always think it’s interesting when official screenshots depict events in a game that can never occur during normal play.
If I were to rate DQM: Joker out of 5, I’d give it a perfect score, but since I’m not IGN or whatever I’ll just say that I absolutely recommend this game and you need to buy it if you like RPGs at all. It’s a really good game that nails the core elements of an RPG really well (exploration, dungeons, battle system, protracted boss fights), but also happens to be a Pokemon clone that is quite a bit better than the real thing. In my opinion, Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker is the best Nintendo DS game available.
EPILOGUE
So, I’ll upload some music sometime. I still insist on putting up a complete soundtrack before anything else, but since the Dragoon Legends soundtrack is finished and just requires minor editing at this point, I don’t think that will be too far off.
Also I think Wilfred the Hero is cancelled again because of issues with the development team. Ahem. I need to find a new artist or do the art myself, but I don’t want to worry about that right now. Sorry guys. I’m still committed to the project, though, and haven’t given up.
