ar tonelico 2

In these times of Peak Whateverthefuck – you know what I mean, Trump, the endless (social/news) media circus, “2017″ the year and the concept – it is a precious thing to have one’s expectations massively and pleasingly exceeded, and it is in that spirit that I want to share with you my newfound affection for this Playstation 2 game, Ar Tonelico 2

(I was going to wait until I’d finished the game and then frame this post as a “review,” but I’m in the final dungeon and just unexpectedly got access to an entire extensive sub-game the developers apparently threw in for the hell of it, so actually finishing it will take longer than projected)

I had heard of this series before, and it had a cool-seeming world and some good music, but it looked like … that sort of bad “pervy” anime type stuff?  I don’t mean “oh, I am a prude/snob and can’t stomach sex in my entertainment (unless it’s the HBO kind).”  There’s this certain category of anime and anime-related media that specializes in being about sexuality without including any actual sex, so there are just hours and hours of innuendo and guys/girls accidentally falling on top of each other and getting embarrassed about it and that kind of thing.  I guess this appeals to a certain niche of adolescent (?) who is obsessed with sex but not experienced enough to be able to parse and enjoy stories about sexual relationships per se?  I’m not trying to be condescending here – I am honestly curious where this stuff comes from.  But anyway to me it is usually just intensely boring, so I try to avoid it.

And in the Ar Tonelico series, well, there is this special sub-species of human (”Reyvateil”) that can use magic, and they are coincidentally all female (something about the X and Y chromosomes, you see), and to optimize their magic it is necessary for the male protagonists to “dive into” their “Cosmospheres” which are internal dreamscapes reflecting, at successive levels, increasingly intimate and emotionally fraught parts of their psyches, but this task must be done by the male protagonist for strictly-business reasons you see (it makes their magic better), and also … look, bear with me, also, they sort of shut down unless they are regularly rejuvenated using these crystals which have to be, uh, inserted into them, and this must also be done by the hardy male protagonist, gritting his teeth and doing the deed because the Reyvateils must be kept alive after all, and

so basically this just sounds like a strangely elaborate way of planning out a story that can be about sex and dating, yet without anyone ever having sex or dating, with constant innuendo about how the things they are doing – which the writers and audience know are obvious stand-ins for sex and dating – are kind of like sex and dating, and again, there’s a gigantic amount of anime like this and I have no idea what the appeal is.

But @baroquespiral made a brief post about the series and I really liked the song in it, and I had to do some extra-relaxing relaxation before starting a new job, and so I downloaded one of the games – with the labor-of-love fan relocalization patch, natch – thinking, hey, I’ll waste a few hours trying to get this to work on my computer and then it’ll be worth another few hours of mild amusement at anime bullshit, why not?

Ar Tonelico 2 is one of the best jRPGs I’ve ever played.  (Admittedly I haven’t played many jRPGs, but I’d take it over most of the Final Fantasies I’ve played, if that gives you a sense.)

It’s honestly really good all around.  The battle system is not too deep but extremely fun and rarely frustrating.  There’s almost none of the usual jRPG tedium: it’s usually clear what to do next without everything just being a straight line, and there isn’t a lot of time spent (say) moving through previously visited areas to get somewhere.  You’re always doing something new and cool, or speeding through something old.  The plot is complicated and exciting, especially in the first ~20 hours or so, where the show-stopping dramatic sequences and twists or quasi-twists just keep coming.  The characters (excluding the male lead, who is kind of a cypher throughout) are sympathetic and much, much more interesting than the anime tropes they appear to be at first glance.

The high quality of the game, as an entry in its genre, is closely related to this quality that … I want to call “generousness”?  Both plot-wise and (more surprisingly) gameplay-wise, it continually layers on more and more novel features, and takes a certain joy in continuing to do this each time you think it’s done.  A lot of this ultimately doesn’t matter from a cold optimizer’s perspective (the game is pretty easy and most abilities are about as good as any other), but all of it is incredibly endearing – one becomes endeared not just to the characters and world but also to the developers, who are clearly not just grimly pushing their way through the office 9-5, no, they believe in this game and they put more awesome shit in it than could ever be justified by usual corporate logic, given the presumably niche (and relatively captive) audience.

Let me try to be more concrete.  Remember those “Cosmospheres”?  Over the course of the game you will delve deeper and deeper into the minds of your waifus, exploring successively weighter and darker psychological strata.  This starts out pretty schematic and dull and – like everything else in the game – you think you know where it’s going, but there are fake-outs and subtleties you don’t expect and the whole thing becomes increasingly well-written and accurate as a metaphor for being in a relationship.

(extremely mic.com voice: The Game Where You Level Up By Respecting Women)

Anyway, as you do that, your waifus develop more and more powerful spells, to be used in the battle system, right?  Let’s just breeze by the fact that all of these spells involve summoning side characters that occur inside the caster’s psyche, of which there are a zillion.  This system of diving into the Cosmospheres is intertwined with another system where you get to know your waifus because when you go to an inn or save point to rest, like in a normal RPG, they just want to … hang out and talk about shit?  There’s this “talking about shit” system, and the triggers for wanting to talk about shit can be virtually anything else in the game, and then that feeds back into the Cosmospheres, as having more of these conversations implies you know the waifu in question better and can dive into further levels of her metaphorically presented psyche.

But, OK, then that’s tied to all these other systems?  For pretty much anything you do in a normal RPG, in Ar Tonelico 2 you do that thing with a getting-to-know-people twist.  In a normal RPG, you go to shops and buy stuff, right?  In Ar Tonelico 2, you do that, but all the shopkeepers become your BFFs, and you keep getting seemingly random cutscenes when you enter the shop where they just want to talk about stuff, like friends do.  And of course those trigger more of the save point events where your characters want to talk about stuff related to the stuff you talked about at the shop.

There are so many of these interlocking systems.  There’s a major plot element about lots of Reyvateils getting this dire psychological disease, and there are a huge number of super-minor-character Reyvateils who you can help through this using a therapy system separate from the main diving-into-minds system, and then there’s a process with its own system where they can decide to join the “fan club” of one major character, which allows them to sing chorally with her in battle and use extra-powerful magic.  In the shops, sometimes the shopkeepers will want to talk about recipes, and then different characters can make different items from these recipes, and sometimes the things they make are bath bombs which you can use in the bathing system (don’t even ask).

And like, eventually you do get a hang of all of this, and are able to GameFAQs it all out, to the extent you personally wish to.  But narratively, and experientially, it just works – at conveying this pleasant atmosphere of real camaraderie and non-trivial human connection, where your prowess in battle is founded in your party’s deep understanding and acceptance of one another, and when you stop at a save point and your characters want to hang out and chat, it isn’t just another RPG system to optimize, it’s like, yeah, man, let’s hang out, I love everyone in this bar!

And like, I’m being sardonic about all this by saying “waifus” and so on, but – as I’m sure is clear by now – everything, no matter how extremely anime it is (and it gets extremely anime), is executed well and just plain grows on you.

Everything in this game goes the extra mile, even if it doesn’t have to.  The voice acting (Japanese) is really good???  I usually breeze quickly through dialogue in games, cutting off the voice actors (if present) mid-sentence on every sentence, but in this one I frequently slowed down to enjoy how the actors would milk (yet believably milk) the more dramatic passages.  There are four different endings, two of which correspond to significantly different paths after a major mid-game decision point, so even after I actually beat the game, there will be more to see.  And so on.

The story made me cry, twice.

If you do play it, again, get the fan relocalization.  The official localization apparently cut a bunch of stuff and also included a nearly game-breaking bug close to the end.

On the Weeb Ass Shit scale, I give Ar Tonelico 2: W 6 / A 6 / S 1.

cryptovexillologist:

The best lesson I’ve gotten from wading through Aristotle’s tiresome, vastly overstated bullshit is that reactionary crank scholars are 100% correct to posture as True Heirs to The Western Philosophical Tradition

(via bibliolithid)

angelicfruitcake:

stormerskies:

hearteyes-peralta:

sounddesignerjeans:

anosognosic:

sounddesignerjeans:

theonlyleftydesk:

meropischao:

mesopelagic:

meropischao:

meropischao:

youd think horses were one of those animals that has horrible health due to humans breeding unhealthy animals to achieve a certain look but no they really are just naturally that fucked up

horses’ lungs bleed when they run at a certain speed

if their diet is too rich / low in selenium their hooves fall off

excuse me

The reason they have such poor health outcomes after breaking or otherwise injuring their legs is because their legs are actually hyper-specialized fingers; and as in human fingers, there is very little muscle supporting the bone, just a lot of cartilage and tendons and whatnot. You’d think an animal that literally evolved to run away to avoid being eaten would have ALSO evolved sturdier running appendages, but…

I fucking hate this post, it’s 1 AM I don’t want to know that horse legs are giant fucking fingers

holy shit

the homologues of the (human) knee and elbow on a horse are at the level of the ribcage. the “knees” in the middle of the legs are homologous to wrists on the front and heels on the back. anything below that is hand/foot.

I understood most of that but the diagram for me is what makes me never want to look at a horse again

arabian horses have been bred so badly that they have breathing problems because of the shape of their face

This is how horses are built compared to a human

I wish Tumblr would stop telling me things about horses

(via obiternihili)

drkshdwbnch:

slumbermancer:

cmder:

fuck flat earth. investigate large frog!

really fucking awesome and i want to see bloodshed

(via prospitianescapee)

Human: tell me the definition of morality .
Machine: i don ’t have ethics .
Human: look , i need help , i need to know more about morality …
Machine: i don ’t know what ethics is .
Human: seriously , what is morality ?
Machine: what is the definition of living ?
Human: why living has anything to do with morality ?
Machine: you ’re not a cop .

Human: who is skywalker ?
Machine: he is a hero .
Human: who is bill clinton ?
Machine: he ’s a billionaire .
Human: is sky blue or black ?
Machine: blue .
Human: does a cat have a tail ?
Machine: yes .
Human: does a cat have a wing ?
Machine: no
Human: can a cat fly ?
Machine: no .
Human: how many legs does a cat have ?
Machine: four , i think .
Human: how many legs does a spider have ?
Machine: three , i think .
Human: how many legs does a centipede have ?
Machine: eight .
Human: what is the color of the sky ?
Machine: blue .
Human: what is the color of water ?
Machine: water .
Human: what is the color of blood ?
Machine: it is the same as a black eye .
Human: what is the usual color of a leaf ?
Machine: it is a green one .
Human: what is the color of a yellow car ?
Machine: yellow .
Human: how much is two plus two ?
Machine: four .
Human: how much is ten minus two ?
Machine: seventy - two .

alienpapacy:

In 1989, Popeye endorsed Instant Quaker Oatmeal, citing it as a better food than spinach to provide strength.^[20] The commercials had the tagline “Can the spinach, I wants me Quaker Oatmeal!” The Religious Society of Friends (also known as the Quakers) was offended by the promotion given the physical aggression from “Popeye the Quaker man” and also the excessive submissiveness of Olive Oyl.^[21]

(via afloweroutofstone)

theaudientvoid:

nostalgebraist:

This is probably getting into some programmer holy war bullshit and I’m sure there are like 10000 Usenet posts explaining why I am capital-w Wrong, but

I don’t like the idea of computations on NaN values returning results that might have come from actual numbers.

The idea of a NaN (as I understand it) is “there was supposed to be a number here, but for some reason we don’t have one.”  Could be an operation with a mathematically undefined result; could be an operation with a defined result but not in the number system you’re using (like sqrt(-1) when you are representing real or rational numbers); could be a missing value in real-world data.

Doesn’t matter, because all these should be treated the same way: by doing something numbers would not do (either through an error or returning NaN), so that the user does not get a result that could logically follow for some actual numbers but might not logically follow for whatever numbers the NaNs were “supposed to be” (if any).

Compare NaN to anything else and get False?  Nope, for all you know the number that was supposed to be there equaled the other guy.

Compare NaN to NaN and get False?  This is legendarily confusing, which would perhaps be defensible if it were a downstream consequence of the confusingness of NaN itself – but no, for all you know those numbers were supposed to be equal.  (Tell me sqrt(-1) is not equal to sqrt(-1), I dare you)

Convert NaN to boolean and get True, because you have to equal zero to be False, and (NaN == 0) == False?  How many times do I have to tell you there isn’t a number there, we don’t know what it is, we don’t know what ought to happen when we put it through your function

No no wait, to be fair this doesn’t always happen!!  You could be in JavaScript, where if convert NaN to boolean, you get … False, because NaN is “falsy.”  No it isn’t, it isn’t “falsy,” it isn’t “truthy,” it isn’t anything-y, we don’t know what it is okay

Stata thinks missing values are smaller than any numeric value.

oh my god

(via theaudientvoid)

This is probably getting into some programmer holy war bullshit and I’m sure there are like 10000 Usenet posts explaining why I am capital-w Wrong, but

I don’t like the idea of computations on NaN values returning results that might have come from actual numbers.

The idea of a NaN (as I understand it) is “there was supposed to be a number here, but for some reason we don’t have one.”  Could be an operation with a mathematically undefined result; could be an operation with a defined result but not in the number system you’re using (like sqrt(-1) when you are representing real or rational numbers); could be a missing value in real-world data.

Doesn’t matter, because all these should be treated the same way: by doing something numbers would not do (either through an error or returning NaN), so that the user does not get a result that could logically follow for some actual numbers but might not logically follow for whatever numbers the NaNs were “supposed to be” (if any).

Compare NaN to anything else and get False?  Nope, for all you know the number that was supposed to be there equaled the other guy.

Compare NaN to NaN and get False?  This is legendarily confusing, which would perhaps be defensible if it were a downstream consequence of the confusingness of NaN itself – but no, for all you know those numbers were supposed to be equal.  (Tell me sqrt(-1) is not equal to sqrt(-1), I dare you)

Convert NaN to boolean and get True, because you have to equal zero to be False, and (NaN == 0) == False?  How many times do I have to tell you there isn’t a number there, we don’t know what it is, we don’t know what ought to happen when we put it through your function

No no wait, to be fair this doesn’t always happen!!  You could be in JavaScript, where if convert NaN to boolean, you get … False, because NaN is “falsy.”  No it isn’t, it isn’t “falsy,” it isn’t “truthy,” it isn’t anything-y, we don’t know what it is okay

the-moti:

nostalgebraist:

argumate:

nostalgebraist:

nostalgebraist:

Reading up on the Perceptrons controversy.  It seems just totally petty and anti-intellectual – one group of researchers think another group’s approach is unpromising and getting too much hype and funding, so they write a book actively trying to “take down” that approach, even though all they really have are proofs of well-known limitations the other group is already moving beyond

– and they spin it in the community so that it does get seen as a definitive takedown, which was the point of writing the book, to take them down

There is a lot of this kind of think in academia, I think, and it isn’t unrelated to the production of knowledge, but it’s related only in a weird indirect way

Oh and then later everything surrounding the word “backpropagation” – now the neural net people want to say that in practice gradient descent works fine despite the lack of theoretical guarantees, but instead of just saying that, they give gradient descent a fancy new name, so it looks superficially as if they have defeated the other guys with a new specific innovation

science! inevitable progress in hindsight, but complete lunacy at any given time.

The second part of this old post is embarrassing because no, backprop is not just another name for doing gradient descent, it’s a fast algorithm for gradient descent, smh @ old me

I think your original point is basically correct in essence though. Saying “we discovered backpropagation” is a bit facetious because, as the source you link states, the backpropagation algorithm is pretty obvious once you decide you want to train feedforward neural nets by gradient descent. The real insight is that “in practice gradient descent works fine despite the lack of theoretical guarantees” but it’s impossible to give this insight a fancy name that impresses people like “backpropagation”.

(via the-moti)