vampyrichamster

One of my favourite activities in MMOs is gathering and crafting. I suspect this is mostly because I am terrible at crafting in real life, and outside of my stabs at gardening, not really the gathering type either. Most MMOs offer crafting systems as an afterthought—since everyone offers at least something basic, they stop at the basics. Usually, the sum of crafting anything is click on a name in a list, press a button and the item is made. Older MMOs show that this was not always so and didn't have to be so. My favourite gathering and crafting system came from a now dead game called Vanguard. It gave you the option to gather items in the open world as a single player or with members of your party. More people cooperating usually led to better grades of materials (they weren't just one of each type!). When you got to a crafting hall in each city, you had the choice of using your mats to make personal items like armour and weapons, or fulfil orders from the local faction. In the second option, the faction provided you with the materials. The crafting process was not the "factory line style" familiar to say, WoW. You had an array of skills that grew as you levelled. During crafting, a variety of random conditions would happen as you went through each stage. You had to figure out how you wanted to react based on the skills you had. Depending on which you used, the item you made could have different grades of quality, traits and styles. Apart from solo-crafting, there was apparently cooperative guild projects I never got to try out because I joined the game nearing the end of its life (around the mid-2000s). But these let you build ships and houses, with lots of people contributing. I spent hours of time in Vanguard just making or gathering stuff and loved it. For a very long time, no other MMO even came close to level of granularity or group cooperation. Enter Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.

We began playing this during its beta test in 2013, and stuck around for the next 7 years. We haven't stopped. The first thing to know about FFXIV is that it is a very story-driven game. Everything has a quest to get you started, from how to use the market board (auction house) to dyeing your armour. All the zones and content are in fact locked behind how far you are into the Main Story Quest (MSQ), which ties together all the different mini-stories you encounter along the way. Again, everything has a story. There are individual storylines for every single adventuring, gathering and crafting class, which you encounter when you reach set levels and complete to gain new skills. The game has 3 gathering classes (called Disciples of the Land): Botanist, Miner and Fisher. There are 8 crafting classes (called Disciples of the Hand): Carpenter, Armourer, Blacksmith, Weaver, Leatherworker, Goldsmith, Alchemist and Culinarian. Considering that this game has now had 3 expansions, with the latest, Shadowbringers, that's a lot of stories. The game likes to return to NPCs you may have met once somewhere else and completely forgot about, to help you connect to the lore and the things you've accomplished. For example, a random pirate you may have done some brief quests for when you first started playing might suddenly matter again 7 years later when you help a faction develop trade routes in new lands. I love this sort of thing and genuinely liked a number of my class trainers and their stories. The Goldsmith story from level 1–50 is by far one of my favourites, as it involves a mammet (essentially a type of clockwork robot used to perform menial tasks) that the Goldsmith Guild keeps around because it is an old faithful. The mammet gives no fucks about anyone or anything around it and is not afraid to say so. I got really fond of that cranky old bastard, looking forward to what new, terrible thing he had to say about the world around him in his discordant voice. I mean, it was darn near close to calling us flesh bags. In comparison, the Culinarian quest between level 50–60 throws you into an Iron Chef-style battle. I laughed hard when we got to the obligatory food critic who swoons in a whole animated sequence over the sublime tastes he is presented with. Then I laughed again when my husband went through the same quest and I saw his reaction to the surreal spectacle.

The second important thing to know about FFXIV is that there are no restrictions on the number of classes you can have or how far you want to play them per character. In fact, back at release and for at least the next two expansions, the only way you could get some important cross-class skills and take certain classes was to first level other classes. So for adventuring classes (called Disciples of War or Disciples of Magic) and DoH, you actually needed to try other things until you got to the level you needed. One of the aspects that really bugged me about other MMOs is that usually you are restricted to just 1 to 3 crafting class, maybe 1 gathering class and only 1 adventuring class unless you make an alt. Being able to dabble in a lot of different things and seeing what stuck was a real game-changer for me. Because I love crafting, I wound up specialising in 5 of the 8 DoH and all 3 DoL, although I levelled all the 8 DoH classes to max cross-skills and for materia-melding (think WoW gem slot). They've streamlined skills a lot in the latest expansion, doing away with the cross-class skills and cross-classing in general to access other ones. This has definitely reduced barriers to entry for newer players. I think the overall result is that crafting is more fun to do. You're not worried about having to level up something you don't want to, you get all the useful skills that make crafting interesting and it feels less restrictive even if you have only 1 class.

As you might also have discerned from the above, every single class in FFXIV has a skill set and rotation to use in their various tasks, although specifically all the DoH share the same skills. For DoL, Botanist and Miner share the same skills but Fisher is a totally different kettle of, well, you know. (I intend to write about FFXIV's secret history as a fishing MMO in its own post later.) The major reason I have been crafting and gathering in this game for 7 years is precisely because it's fiddly and random. And it's not an assembly-line, one-button job! FFXIV takes some of the detail of Vanguard-style crafting and streamlines it for a modern audience. Just like Vanguard had stages of crafting, in FFXIV, each crafting session is determined by the Durability score of the item you're making, say a Durability of 50. You also have a Quality meter that starts at 1% and goes up to 100%, which determines the chance your final product is Normal Quality (NQ) or High Quality (HQ). In general, you want everything to be HQ, as it increases the stats on the piece of gear you're making or the buffs if its food or potions. Taking as an example my previously cited 50 Durability, your job is then to achieve 100% Quality (or as high as you can manage), while also moving the Progress of that session to 100% (i.e. you successfully make the item) without getting to 0/50 Durability (a critical fail). During crafting, random conditions might occur that affect how far you can move up Progress or Quality, or affect Durability. The skills you are given and how you wield them are your tools in determining the outcome.

For DoL, your skill sets are used to determine how high quality the materials you gather are. Again, like crafting, HQ is always better. The Quality meter during crafting is pre-filled based on the amount of HQ materials you used to make the item. This in turn determines how difficult a time you'll have getting a HQ final product. End-game items are not just harder to harvest and make as HQ. Frequently, the amount of Progress/Quality you can raise per move is also exponentially lower. I won't lie. Until Shadowbringers, when they increased the amount of quality you got upfront from using all HQ materials in a crafting session, end-game crafting used to be intensely masochistic. The most Quality you got pre-filled was around 17%. The skills you have usually have a percentile of how frequently they succeed in doing what you expect. For example, Hasty Touch is a skill that has a 60% chance of increasing quality by a set amount when executed. The conditions you encounter during a crafting session and whether or not your skills work as intended are dictated by RNG (random number generator—the computer rolls your dice for you). Just because something says it has a 60% chance of successfully going off doesn't mean in any shape or form it will go off. Your level and crafting statistics (yes, we have crafting-specific statistics just like adventuring classes) can help mitigate some of the damage. But as anyone who has ever failed Hasty Touch 7 times in a row will tell you, the RNG of FFXIV is the stuff that makes you question your sanity and your grasp of basic mathematics. This was immensely improved in Shadowbringers...somewhat. If you use all HQ mats, the starting Quality percentile can be as high as 40%, which makes crafting a much easier and shorter process. It's not brainless and RNG can still kick you in the balls, but it definitely feels more rewarding to put the effort in. End-game crafting and gathering isn't for everyone precisely because of how nitty it gets, but if you love this stuff, and I do, it's just nice to see the armour you make on yourself or your friends, or see the furniture you made in your house after grinding an Extreme-mode (that's highest difficulty) boss that took you 2 weeks to learn and get the key component (randomly) from. (Note: Since some of the rarest end-game materials come from equivalently end-game fights, many of the most dedicated crafters actively pursue at least some end-game content.)

So what can you craft in FFXIV? Armour, weapons, furniture (outdoor and indoor for your personal house), minions (pets), food and potions, and their component parts. If you are part of a Free Company (FFXIV's version of guilds), you can have an FC Workshop. Here, your whole FC can contribute to projects like crafting an exclusive skin for the outside of your FC house, 24-hour FC-wide buffs or airships and submersibles, which are used for Exploratory Missions. The first and last type of projects are the most labour-intensive. It frequently requires days or even weeks of gathering and crafting the requisite parts, so it encourages people to work together to make something cool. The Exploratory Missions send craft out by air or sea to "explore" unlockable zones and come back with loot. This can be rare materials to power further FC projects, as well as rare minions, music and even furniture. Crafted end-game gear in FFXIV is usually a good starting point to qualify for raids, if not the equivalent of some raid-level gear itself. Any crafting/gathering-related tools, armour and buff potions/foods are things you have to either craft yourself or get others to make for you. These items are all sellable, so it is also possible to buy things off the Market Board. If you're a high-end crafter and gatherer, this is a great way to make gil (the in-game currency).

Which is a good segue onto my next subject, the game's first crafting raid.

The Ishgardian Restoration

In most games, you save the world, and that's the end of it. Even in MMOs, which may have continuous expansions to bolster their content, it's a matter of going to some new continent somewhere, saving that, then moving on to the next one. You might help people along the way, but once you are done saving them, that's that. As I said earlier, FFXIV likes to re-insert the people and places you meet on your journey back into the plot, which to me is important. It's not like these NPCs you saved a few years ago stopped their lives right there. More importantly, many of the places you saved are war-torn regions with a lot of infrastructure in ruins. These NPCs still need homes and jobs. In fact, dealing with the humanitarian needs of refugees is a long-standing issue the main plot of the game likes to address. Take for example, Ishgard. The city of Ishgard was the main city for FFXIV:ARR's first expansion, Heavensward. This was a city run by a lying, corrupt church that was trapped in a centuries-old war with dragons. Its people were strictly defined by class and rank. Upward mobility was practically unheard of, and the poorest people were often desperately so. As you might expect, your job as hero was to end the war and expose their false gods. This broke down some of the city's classism, creating new opportunities for a more egalitarian society, and also meant more attention to serving the most needy. Thus, in 2019, the heroes that saved Eorzea several times over (namely, us players) were tasked with rebuilding Ishgard to create homes for its displaced citizenry.

The Ishgard Restoration project was added to the game's content as a means of engaging the crafters and gatherers of FFXIV in server-wide city building. Each server (a World in FFXIV parlance) was responsible for progressing its own rebuilding of Ishgard. Players contributed to the rebuilding by crafting Ishgard Restoration-specific items or gathering its materials in a special open sand-box zone just for gatherers called the Diadem. Since this was designed partly to help players level DoH and DoL, anyone could take part from the lowest levels to max. Contributions were titrated to different tiers of player levels, so low-level players could hand in something relatively easy for them to gather/make and max level players got rather more difficult tasks.

A brief note from Expert-crafting hell

Hardcore end-game gatherers and crafters could enter a server-specific Ranking season held in 3 of the 4 Ishgardian Restoration phases released, i.e. a leaderboard battle for each DoH and DoL class. Players were "scored" based on the amount and quality of max-level items they contributed to the Restoration in a specific DoH/DoL class over each 9-day Ranking season. Items that gave the biggest scores per turn-in were called Expert-crafted items. Previously, I talked about how end-game crafting in FFXIV has always been to me somewhat on the same difficulty as an end-game fight. Expert crafting is the special tier of hell created for people who spend most of their time in MMOs crafting. Just like in an end-game raid, your gear and crafting stats had to first meet a minimum threshold to even begin. This helped restrict competition to people who specialised as a specific DoH/DoL and was therefore geared just for that. To submit an Expert-crafted item, it has to be of a minimum quality percentile, which is usually about 75% or so of the Quality bar. The RNG for Expert crafts is exceptionally brutal. Moving up Progress/Quality is nightmarishly hard. Unlike regular crafting, Expert-crafting introduces a bunch of new conditions specific to it, so figuring out how to deploy your skills on the fly and being deeply familiar with what each thing does is crucial.It takes hours of practice and wasted mats to learn what you're doing. Every crafting session was a complex puzzle that had no guarantee you'd succeed, but made you feel super competent if you did. Naturally, I loved every minute of it. (Full disclosure: I ranked in the top 100 of at least 3 DoH in all 3 seasons.)

There appears to be no set time limit on how long each server's rebuilding can take, although new phases of reconstruction are generally released once all servers have completed the previous phase. Each phase of the reconstruction in turn is broken down into stages. These are open call periods for materials (gathered and crafted) divided by Concerted Works—a kind of public quest in the Firmament (the instance where reconstruction happens). The Concerted Works last for around 15 minutes. Any player in the Firmament may join at will, solo or in a party, doing small tasks like breaking up rubble and carting it off. Once completed, the reconstruction moves onto its next stage. Each Concerted Works causes a new part of the housing district to be built up. Players can actually see the results of their labour take shape around them and that's a really cool thing. Balmung, my server, has consistently led the North American servers in finishing their construction first. We completed building the whole of the Ishgard Restoration project last week. I was there the night we did the last Concerted Works. People were genuinely hyped just running around seeing the NPCs move into the houses, parks, stores—even a public bath—that we built. They congratulated each other on a job well done and completed that took thousands of us. 

Because FFXIV is story-driven, the Firmament had its own set of stories highlighting the NPCs who toiled alongside you and live there. Each new reconstruction phase revealed a little bit more of the story through quests and interactions between NPCs in the open world. For me, it really made me care about the place I was building and I'm sure it did for others too, since after every Concerted Works ended, everyone immediately looked for specific NPCs they liked, yelling out coordinates for where they were and how to find them. It was just nice.

I contributed to all four phases of the Restoration on Balmung over the past year and I think my favourite part about this experiment was the sheer kindness of everyone involved. Throughout the frenetic crafting and endless gathering of materials, people put out PSAs reminding others to get up and walk around, drink water, rest and even take their meds. There were shouts of encouragement to everyone involved. Some gatherers gave away lower-level materials for free to crafters who needed them for levelling. Others gave away free copies of gifts they won in the Restoration lotteries. Taking part in a massive community-building project, whether you were participating individually or as a group, it always felt like you were included. 

Finally, as a kind of "thank you" to players for contributing to the Ishgardian Restoration, the last thing built in each area is a monument to the topmost contributing crafter of each server. This monument does not name the specific player, which I think was a smart move that reduced the chance of envy. But it does show a stone carving of their DoH class. If you're wondering, on Balmung this was a set of frying pans, so the top contributor was a Culinarian. I have a day job—I didn't stand a chance in hell at being a top achiever, but I 'm proud of that person, whoever they are. 

I really hope we get to rebuild more places in the future. There's plenty of potential locations in the game's lore, and I do think the process brings out the best in each server's community. It gives people a reason to talk to each other (even if that's only if they want to) and support each other. Given just how 2019 and the beginning of 2020 has been, we needed that. As someone who does love gathering and crafting in this game as well, it gave players like me a big piece of exclusive content for my non-combat classes. This was a change from just doing what I do to gear myself or friends up, or building things to showcase in our FC house. We were building something everyone could walk around in and enjoy. The game already has many options for every kind of adventurer, but this is the first time gatherers and crafters really had something raid-like only they could help with. I want to see where we go next.

I finally got together all the materials I needed to solder the new capacitors and utterly failed in every respect. To be precise, I tried soldering and re-seating the capacitors some five or six times, and each time it was clear the board shorted on startup. In case you were worrying, by "short", I don't mean sparks and smoke, simply that electricity was not flowing between all four capacitors correctly, resulting in a failure to start up the PS3 on testing. It looks just like the same red light of death (RLOD) that I'd get from the PS3 anyway and it is utterly depressing.

The original capacitors on the PS3's motherboard are these eclair-sized squares that connect on two metal 'rails'. I'm trying to replace one capacitor under the graphics processor first and was hoping to go from there based on whether the PS3 would start up and stay up. Part of the issue is that the replacements comprise four small tantalum capacitors, each about the size of a ladybug. In order for this to work, you need two capacitors on each rail with their positive and negative poles aligned correctly at a 65-degree angle. Because the tantalum capacitors are so small, it's really easy for them to inadvertently move during the soldering process, which would be the first cause of why they would short, because the poles weren't aligned correctly.

My first try, I thought I had some fairly neat connections for each tantalum and failed. When I opened up the PS3 again, one of the tantalums just fell right off. After playing whack-a-mole re-seating individual tantalums I thought might be loose, I just took off everything and figured I ought to start again. None of this worked. Here, I wondered if maybe I had accidentally left some of the old capacitor on the board, which I took off using a mix of melting the plastic case and a small Swiss Army knife. Mind you, I was probably as appalled as you are now reading about removing a capacitor with a knife. But it turns out, this was ridiculously effective and provided you're careful, not too dangerous to the board or yourself.

I decided I would strip off all the tantalums I tried to use before, wick up all the solder and carefully clean the rails as best I could. I'm about 85% sure the problem was my soldering and not the tantalums (the old batch look okay, no weird melting), but using new capacitors meant I was going in with a clean slate. Luckily, I had bought 32 tantalum capacitors in advance. I was really hoping I wouldn't waste any of them, but I figured there was a good possibility I would make a mistake. Looking up best practices on how to keep a tantalum still during placement, I saw an ingenious illustrated example about pressing down the tantalum with a blunt object like a cotton swab and allowing the flux to help flow the solder under the connection points. This was way easier and cleaner than fiddling about with tweezers.

Armed with even more knowledge, I set off to try this whole thing again. Using a cotton swab definitely offered better control and stability in holding down the tantalums. I thought I made an even neater set of connections than before, loaded up enough bits to power up the PS3—and failed and failed again. Worse, the last time I tried re-seating all the capacitors, I managed to break the Power/Eject ribbon cable again and caused a problem with the Blu-ray ribbon cable. Because of the constant fiddling I had to do to open and rebuild enough components for the power test, the little plastic tab that you use to guide the Blu-ray ribbon cable into its connection broke off. This shouldn't otherwise be a problem except our Blu-ray ribbon cable was also oddly loose to begin with. Without the layer of plastic on top, the cable has a real tendency to slide out of its lock by itself. I'm not sure we'd get a stable read from our Blu-ray drive even if I could run the PS3 perfectly. My first response, which was trying to super glue the tab back onto the cable, just resulted in a sticky cable.

I fully admit I'm out of practice, but surely my soldering can't be this bad? Drifting about the Internet in a gloomy haze, I looked up what I could be continuously doing wrong. A couple of things stood out as possible reasons. The first and most major issue occurred to me while watching videos of people doing the same repairs. The PS3 motherboard has a tendency to dissipate heat quickly, which makes a lot of good sense. Unlike a desktop computer, the PS3 as retailed has no room for additional fans or radiators. There's in fact a whole genre of people who home brew their own cooling strategies out there because of it.

The heat loss issue dovetails with something I had noticed while soldering the capacitors in, which was that even after I thought I had a good connection and tested it for movement, if I left and came back later, the capacitor would still come loose because the solder hadn't stuck correctly to its legs. These capacitors are flat rectangles with small metal tabs at each pole, not 'legs' you pull through a hole in the board and solder in. There's very little margin for error because in spite of being tiny, the metal rails on the board are slightly smaller than the body of each capacitor. And since they're flat, trying to make sure the poles are touching the rails (and not somehow also soldered together by accident) is hard—if I had a standing magnifying glass, this would be a good place to use it. To make matters worse, because you're soldering it at an angle, the capacitors have to be so close they nearly touch. More than a few times I was terrified I'd melt something essential by mistake even with a very fine nose on my soldering iron.

To counteract the heat loss, the successful videos I saw all heated up the board before and during work. One guy even had a table grill he set to low and placed the board on—as much as I could conjure up many wonderful uses for a tabletop grill outside of heating up circuit boards, this was perhaps a little too hardcore. My choice would be a heat gun, but I'd have to be careful because I need to use it near constantly to maintain the right temperature. It's worth a shot though. I mean, anything is worth a shot at this point to get the capacitors working.

The second mistake I am probably making is overestimating how much flux is released by my flux pen. The same guy who has the table grill drowns his capacitors and everything around it in flux. This approach might be too enthusiastic (imagine the cleaning afterwards?). I could do better about really wetting the connections and keeping it that way during soldering. In fact, a good idea, I think, is to apply flux generously, get the tantalum on the rail, apply solder, apply more flux, then use the heat gun to re-melt the solder while adjusting the tantalum into position so I know the solder is connecting. 

Finally, there is a nuclear option I could try if none of the above works. This involves scratching off the plastic coating of the motherboard to expose the negative poles between the rails. Then, I could solder on the tantalums straight instead of angling them. It would take away the worry about positioning, but then I'd probably be terrified abut wrecking the board!

I was able to re-order the Power/Eject ribbon cables, two this time, from the same place I did before, but the Blu-ray drive cable was almost nearly beyond my Google Fu to find. I really hoped I could find some sort of generic cable based on the model number, but while places seemed to carry the cables for its control board, the actual cable connecting the drive onto the motherboard barely exists. I put in an order for a used cable from an electronics project supplier in HK hoping it's really the right one. I could likely test my motherboard-warming theory with just the small button controller cables while I wait for the Blu-ray cable (being from HK, this could take about a week). I'm excited but also deeply terrified I'm setting myself up for failure. On the other hand, thinking about how this puzzle works has at least been educational and interesting. It would just suck if the entire project ultimately goes nowhere.

Every so often, along comes a game that captures our attention and lead us down a rabbit hole of unexpected wonder. The last time we felt that way was after finding Eternal Poison (Poison Pink in its original Japanese release), a punishingly hard turn-based strategy RPG with many interlocked replayable stories, each told from a different character's perspective, each going into increasingly dark places that added depth to the wider context and narrative. Eternal Poison was the sort of game that someone going in blind could easily find frustrating and the story confusing. It didn't outwardly encourage you to figure out the many different endings, or explain why the ending you first got seemed to be missing something. You had to find the missing part yourself, and whether you did or not hinged very strongly on how intrigued you were by the character-driven narrative. 

We actually found Labyrinth of Refrain by total accident, happening to see it on the day it came out on the PSN Store. Labyrinth of Refrain was made and released by Nippon Ichi Software, perhaps most well known for its Disgaea series. Seth and I are both long-time Disgaea fans—to absolutely no one's surprise, Disgaea is a punishingly grindy turn-based strategy RPG with deliberately over-dramatic and overly complex storylines set in interlocking visions of hell. It's over-the-top, colourful, campy and has a weird sense of humour. The big gimmick with Disgaea games, compared to other strategy RPGs in its genre, is that not only are the many classes of your different units fully customisable, everything (characters, weapons, armour, jewelry, consumable items) can be leveled up to some insane string of 9s, i.e. level 999, 9,999. So when NIS unexpectedly releases a Wizardry-style dungeon crawler in the art style of Disgaea, we were all about trying it. 

Labyrinth of Refrain's basic premise is that you play Dronya the Dusk Witch, who with her child apprentice Luca, are invited to the town of Refrain to explore the town's magical well, which appears to be a portal to other dimensions. You do this by sending a magical journal, the Tractus de Monstrum, along with a party of magic puppets, through each portal and exploring the connected dungeon realm. The journal records everything that happens during the journey and is sentient, containing the soul of you the main character. You create the puppets by inserting souls you discover into them, reanimating and repurposing the dead.

I'll start by saying LoR very clearly is NIS's attempt to be as different as possible from pretty much anything else. Most of these dungeon crawler games have very basic plots. The classes your party members can be are often recognisably D&D-like, spells and attacks run along the same five elements, slash/blunt damage and status attacks. They're not terribly interesting mechanics-wise, even when the game's premise is otherwise fascinating (our favourite staple, the Shin Megami Tensei series, comes to mind).

LoR immediately throws you under the bus at the first fight—and that fight was the tutorial! Apart from slash/blunt/pierce physical damage, the magic damage is split into Flame, Mud and Fog (fire, earth and air?). Status attacks have out-sized roles in this game, and are divided between Confuse, Startle, Stench, Poison and Abyss. Each weapon and attack basically has one or a combination of these damage types. It's not clear what most of these attacks do upfront. To be quite honest, even after Platinuming this game I'm not 100% sure what some of the damage types really do. Then there's your party members' classes, none of them with normal names. Six classes are available at the start of the game: Aster Knight (frontline/long-range dragoon), Peer Fortress (dual-katar wielding tank), Shinobushi (dual-sword wielding fighter), Mad Raptor (a crossbow ranged DPS), Marginal Maze (frontline/long-range lamp-using mage) and Theatrical Star (long-range bell-using 1001 Nights-style mage). Two additional classes are unlockable as the game progresses, Gothic Coppelia (hammer-wielding gothic lolita tank) and Demon Reaper (homicidal scythe-dancing girls).

I'll be the first to say that I appreciate any game that loves its exotic weapons. Scythes? Gothic Lolitas? Dual-katar and dual-swords? All for that. Just like the Disgaea games, you can reincarnate each party member to improve and increase their stat growth. Max level in LoR is 99. Reincarnation is very important to increase your party's longevity. In fact, it's impossible to access and do the post-game content without reincarnation. Apart from this, your party is divided into brigades called Pacts. Each party comprises one to four Pacts. Each Pact can hold between one to eight members, usually one to three active members and varying numbers of support members. Different types of Pacts are found through exploration. These may differ in what bonuses they grant to each member and confers different attacks/spells to use. In theory, you can make and deploy up to 40 puppets concurrently, but I stopped at 29.

Refrain starts off as your typical, kooky, Transylvania-esque town, complete with freakish inhabitants. There's the perpetually drunk shepherd, the blacksmith who is clearly a cross between Igor and Frankenstein and lusty one-eyed nun. At dusk, the townsfolk lock their doors and bar their windows against the undead who roam the night. Every morning, a Town Crier announces the names of people who died overnight, captured by the undead. Witches are persecuted by the superstitious locals, so Dronya and Luca mask their operations by pretending to be a troupe of travelling puppeteers. Throughout the game, the cutscenes segue into some of their puppet shows that all seem to tell a variation of two brothers enslaved by a terrible monster who try to escape. Their escapes always fail, their punishment always ending with one brother losing a leg and the other blinded. Dronya noticeably has wooden leg, so it's clear this story has something to do with her past.

The big conceit about Refrain is that it is really Purgatory. Its townsfolk are really the souls of sinners doomed to live forevermore. Those ghastly undead that roam the night? Being killed by them is explained as a mercy, the only way to escape the lives they aren't even aware they're living. An overarching theme in LoR that affects its characters personally is one's capacity to continue with the hand you're dealt, no matter how terrible or awful that hand is. Refrain's inhabitants, by simply being human, develop relationships with each other that they weren't able to when they were 'alive'. This balances their personalities and stops them from repeating the sins they can't remember they committed. There's even a whole dungeon based on the town when it goes to hell (literally), and the townsfolk you meet die off one by one. As each person dies, the personality of the companion they supported decays. You learn what sins they did to land them there, so that not even the most seemingly banal side character lacks a story to tell. All the stories are interconnected. Every person matters and comes into play.

Dronya herself personifies the "keep going" attitude. As you learn about her past, it's clear why she disdains others who simply give up when life sends them lemons—this is no shrinking violet. The main story's twists and turns start out necessarily slow (remember: the mechanics of this game are clear as mud, so the learning curve takes time), but doesn't stop once it heats up halfway through. It is very dark, very unforgiving, and it's clear the development team were fully allowed to experiment and take everything to their natural conclusion. It's what makes this game great. There are consequences for people's actions, but just like real life, following the good way doesn't necessarily mean you'll be rewarded. 

I'm the sort of person who believes in a one-pass play through—seriously, multiple replays of the same game to see different endings drive me nuts. LoR mocks those types of games openly. You will die in weird and really distressing ways, and each time, you will see the credits and ask your spouse what the hell just happened. That is part of the main story. Remember "keep going"? If you die and see the credits, open your Clear Data save. Keep going.

I wouldn't recommend this game for the young 'uns, by the way. The story has strongly mature themes, even without any graphically depicting actual sex or gore. The sense of humour is cheeky and black. While the first dungeon starts off as your typical slime-and-stone-corridor affair, the second dungeon puts you in a kind of Lilliput. When you first arrive, the resident gnomes pretty much announce that the "Kaiju are coming!" It soon becomes apparent you're not even the first kaiju to turn up, since among the cutesy snail-drawn cannoneers and hot air balloon bombing units you fight are previous kaiju encased in iron maidens prodded on by attendant gnome handlers. Switches, the bane of all dungeon crawlers, are essentially stone blocks with a gnome chained to them. You open doors by pushing in the stone blocks, in the process leaving behind a tell-tale splat of blood where the gnome was.

Just when you think you've got this, you wind up in a dungeon that is basically a bordello decorated with cat girls in shadowed relief, some in cages, there's an NPC all chained up who will reward you in loving caresses, distressingly plucked fowl carrying whips and succubi as viewed from the tail end peering evilly back at you. To put it lightly, monster designs range from the disturbingly lovely to proof that the dev team were in fact given all the freedom to do what they want. Meat statues? Scorpion-tailed squirrel "neck biters"? A gigantic head of a lovely maiden in watercolour spewing out a slimy slug-like creature from her mouth? If they could think it up, it's in there.

The art is good though, even when it's distressing. Backgrounds are pretty but not mind-blowing. Wizardry-style dungeon crawlers don't generally have the best background art (it is a giant tunnel, after all), but the different worlds in LoR are varied and the change of scenery is attractive enough to be noticeable yet not distracting. The reason I'm mentioning this is because those same backgrounds will consume at least 60 hours of your time, and then repeat (albeit on different maps) if you're into the 20+ hour post-game content to see the true ending. If you will forgive this pun, tunnel vision is the least of your worries.

How hard is this game? Punishing but fair. You'll know why your party wiped each time. Your gear is upgradeable by mashing it with other gear (preferably of the same type) and reincarnating so you get higher soul clarity (the multiplier for how much your stats grow per level) is worth it. Use every tool at your disposal and don't be afraid to experiment with different Pacts until you find a play style that fits. Status effects, as I said earlier, are a major game changer and everyone including the penultimate optional boss is susceptible to them. Equip those attacks as much as possible. 

I would recommend this game to people who like great, gloomy stories, character-driven narratives. If you don't mind that the world isn't saved every time, like fantasy settings in general and believe characters should grow rather than be rewarded, this is worth the try. The voice acting in English and Japanese for Dronya is great, but I couldn't tolerate the English voices for either Luca or Neldo. English voice is good to try in scenes with Marietta in it, whose French trollop accent adds something the Japanese voice acting lacks. If you are prepared to sink the time and see the true ending, brace yourself for some hard grinding. That said, the main game does a noteworthy job of scaling difficulty in tandem with the story, so you won't feel like you need to run around the parking lot to level up between fights. Nor will you feel like you've lost out even if you just complete the main story—it's a tale well told and ends satisfactorily. 

For me, personally, I hope NIS makes more of this series. If this is what happens when the devs are set free, I'm happy to see what they do next.