Okay, to quickly get things out of the way, I'm a film student who has finally almost finished his last year of university to realise that actually the course has strengthened his appreciation of games as a medium and utterly smashed any interest he had in film when he first started studying 5 years ago. It's a pleasure to meet you.

Moving on! I wanted to come up with a nice relatable topic for a first post, and thanks to the brutality of JRPG's I have a pretty decent one to start with.

Today's RPG in question is 'Valkyria Chronicles', which decided on its 7th Chapter to shove a difficulty spike into my otherwise comfortable progression through the game. Or at least it would've probably looked more like a spike in the days of Battlezone. Now thanks to the power of the Playstation 3 it was more realistically depicted as a giant tank. Either way, that thing destroyed my team and prompted a restart. After getting further the next time I was faced with another harrowing obstacle in the same level and completely obliterated thanks to it. And then I turned off the console and played in the snow.

I haven't picked up the game since because this was such a MASSIVE jump in difficulty that honestly it's robbed me of the enjoyment I used to get out of the game. Another game that pulled a similar stunt on me was the Bases segment of 'Last Remant', which demanded at least an hour for each of the six battle-pairs you have to blitz through including an army style fight and a smaller scale boss battle which even after that amount of effort you have no chance to save nor a guarantee of your safety. At the time this honstly wrecked me, and I felt so close to just giving up the game altogether.

So thanks to these scenarios I have reached something I'm not that used to when playing games. 'The point of no continue'. The question of whether or not I should try to struggle on through a section of a game which I'm just not enjoying, with the promise that it might get back on track afterwards. First and foremost I see games as a form of entertainment, and the idea of playing for hours without actually enjoying myself seems completely ridiculous. And yet it isn't simply the challenge that's the problem, because I honestly love challenging games. Back on 'The Independent Gaming Source' I sang the praises of 'I Wanna Be The Guy' even though it had me gargling on the fluids it sadisticly fed to me through a gramophone horn. It was constantly frustrating, but the point was that even though it featured Chris Hansen-baiting levels of predatory violation of my body and soul (It's hard) if I was able to just push through a screen or two I would eventually find a checkpoint, thus making one successful attempt all that was neccesary to simply kick my morale back up and carry on with the game. They were hard challenges, but they were delivered in such a way that it felt like a massive series of challenges I could do one after the other rather than an endurance test.

So clearly the issue isn't actually the challenge of these stages from Last Remnant and Valkyria Chronicles, but the relentlessness of them. Last Remnant feels like such an arduous grind to get through each one of those damn bases, and Valkyria Chronicles introduces extra elements of the battle you couldn't have predicted on your earlier attempts which are almost guaranteed to force a restart straight from the start of the battle. It seems like if I am going to be suprised by an attack like this (which I admit definitely fills me with a fearful respect to this enemy) then I should be able to try again without going through the crap I've already done. It doesn't prove anything to me or the game if I'm able to succeed at the same task multiple times. If I managed it once I can manage it again. I guess my real grievance is that my success at both of these stages revolves around knowing what will happen and then strategising around that, rather than my ability to predict how the battle will progress, and the make matters worse I then have to spend time repeating the same ground I've already proven I can cover before I get destroyed by an enemy I'm either too battle weary to fight or I just haven't had enough time to learn how to fight them because I spent so long retreading old ground.

I guess that about wraps it up for this post. For anyone who reads this I would really appreciate any and all comments and criticisms you have, since this really shouldn't be about me writing whatever the crap I want to write, my aim is to reach kind of a nice middle ground where I can write what I want to write about, but in a way that you would enjoy reading. So yeah, please leave feedback and I'll check back often.

Next on 'The point of No Continue'; Arcade games! Where pride comes after the fall?