The Shining Nexus

Another week, another update to my journey with mapping the Shining games. This session went a lot smoother and I was enjoying myself greatly as I listened to some great podcasts. For those wondering, the podcasts I listened to were  Axe of the Blood God , which is about RPGs, and  Retronauts , which is about retro video games. Unfortunately, I was not able to work on this project very long, but I do plan to work on this throughout the week so I could make more significant progress. Goal right now is to finish Shining in the Darkness  in about 3 months and move on to Shining Force . This might be wishful thinking, but we'll see. I've also been thinking about how to layout all the maps. One version would be to create individual maps to view separately and the other version would bunch them up together to create a poster. Regardless, the goal here is to create a digital version of my maps so that people can print them out to use as they play the game. I'll probably end up

Unfortunately for this session, I was not able to make progress into the next trial. Here's why... Ay caramba! So as I was mapping out the new area past the false wall on the first floor, I noticed the path in the upper right corner was going to travel along side another path. This triggered an "uh oh" in my mind because I knew I messed up the space count somewhere. I traced back to my recent drawings, but found no issue with it. I decided to consult a guide and found two problems I found on my map... Those two red circles indicate a miscount in space and caused the map to extend one space to the left and right. Doh. Sadly, trying to fix this mistake would essentially make me re-do 90% of the map, so I decided to start this floor from scratch with a new fresh coat of paint. Behold, my new monstrosity! It's alive! So yes, I re-drew Level 1 with updated icons and fixed the spacing. All is well now. I do plan to create a separate notation sheet and

Welcome to the Shining Cartography series. In this series I will be mapping out selected games in the Shining series:  Shining in the Darkness, Shining Force, Shining Force 2, Shining Force CD and Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict. I've decided to include SitD because of its first-person dungeon crawler design, which makes good practice to improve and standardized my mapping aptitude. Also, its story is closely tied to the Shining Force  games and finishing these games are on my bucket list. I'm a huge Shining Force fan and these games are the reason why I'm obsessed with strategy RPGs. Mapping out video games is an interesting and enjoyable hobby of mine and I genuinely look forward to drawing and playing these wonderful games. This is a huge project to embark on, which will essentially take me quite a bit of time to finish, especially with my limited free time. The plan is to work on this project a couple of hours one day per week and update this blog along with it.

Good year, good games, good times. Here's a list of my favorite games of 2018. ---- Octopath Traveller A JRPG that returns to it's 16-bit roots, Octopath Traveller is a wonderful adventure that hearkens back to a SNES era of sprite based graphics and turn based combat mechanics. There are many components about this game that just breathes nostalgia and improves upon them. Its cast of eight playable characters offer unique talents to build team compositions with and it becomes important to build thoughtful compositions as the difficulty ramps up. And boy does it ramp up. Bosses are fierce and unforgiving that punishes the player for making the slightest mistake. The turn base combats are fun, complex, and rewarding. Mashing the "A" button won't take you very far, that's for sure. The story was good and I enjoyed all the individual character arcs, but it's lack of significance in the overall scheme and an absence of meaningful interaction between

Octopath Traveler (Nintendo Switch) was recently released and had very good reviews from critics around the world. It was such a surprise to Square Enix on how well it was received that they underestimated sales of its physical version and had to put out apologies in Japan for selling out its units. Twice. After putting a chunk of hours into the game myself, I can honestly say it is one my favorite RPGs, next to such classics as Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6. What I want to talk about in this post is the music, which is absolutely amazing. Music in video games play such an important role in setting the tone and mood, that without it, or if poorly composed, can essentially make the gameplay experience worst. One of my most beloved music tastes stem from RPGs, particularly JRPGs. Yasunori Mitsuda from Chrono Cross and Nobuo Uematsu from the Final Fantasy series to name a few composers whose music I adore. What makes Octopath Traveler so special is that it's roots is hea