On The Inadequacy of the Silkworm: my trip to Takayama

Spring! It's actually warm here in Nagoya and my coat is nestled away with the spiders. After a chaotic few weeks I'm settling into part-time work and starting to plan all the things I want to do with my newfound free time. First on the list is conquering my backlog of blog posts I want to write. Theoretically there are things I want to write about that happened as far back as last January, but realistically I'm not sure I ever will. Instead, I'll tell you about the trip I took back in February, so take off all your clothes and stand in front of an open fridge so you can better imagine the scene.

A couple of hours north of Nagoya lie the mountains of Gifu Prefecture. Whilst my home prefecture, Aichi, is mostly known for car manufacturing and rudeness, Gifu is known for its skiing, hiking and hot springs; think of it as the clean-living aunt to Aichi's quietly angry uncle. Nestled obscurely in the mountains you'll find historical villages which are famous for their gassho houses, with their trademark steep triangular rooves. You might have seen them on some Buzzfeed list or other, looking like the Frosty Village track from Diddy Kong Racing:

Nick and I had wanted to visit for a long time, especially during the snowy season (which, to be fair, lasts about eight months of the year in north Gifu). Finally, towards the end of winter, we had four days off in a row, and were able to book a hotel to spend a couple of days in Takayama, the biggest town in the area, and Shirakawa-go, a famous traditional village where the houses have been preserved for visitors.

From Nagoya, you can get to Takayama via a special train called the 'Wide View', which funnily enough gives you a wide view. The windows are floor-to-ceiling length so you can best admire the scenic route through the mountains. Above you can see the incredible teal colour of the rivers that pass through Gifu (and maybe, if you look closely, my scrunched-up little face in the reflection of the window).

Takayama itself was bigger than I expected; I'd imagined a village but it's actually quite a large town. It was fairly quiet when we went - peak season was over - but there were a few restaurants and shops that were used to catering for tourists, and a fair amount of English around.

Although I would argue they haven't really understood what 'a lot of pizza' is supposed to look like.

After lunch at a burger place that had been highly recommended, we traipsed up to our ryokan (Japanese traditional-style inn), trampling our way through perfectly white, crisp snow. By coincidence, there was a lovely folk village/museum just five minutes' walk from the ryokan so we decided to have a look round before check-in.

The first thing we noticed in the folk village was a massive lake, completely frozen over, with a suspicious trail of footprints circling aimlessly about the fresh layer of snow that topped it. Specifically, bird prints. We were visiting out-of-season and our only fellow guest was a swan, who seemed uninterested in the local history. We learned a few things at the village, mostly about the local silk industry and how completely useless silkworms are at surviving without human help.

A resolution to carve "about 120,000 statues". I didn't know lifelong goals both so bold and so vague.

The answer is: laaaaaame.

Back in the ryokan, I spoke a handful of Japanese to our hostess, who responded by explaining all the ryokan's rules to me in fluid native-level Japanese. Somehow I understood the majority of it and grinned proudly at my beloved, like a toddler that's managed to use the toilet for the first time. Unfortunately it turned out that after (correctly) taking my shoes off in the lobby, I'd (incorrectly) put on some wooden clogs that were only supposed to be worn in the bathroom, and was traipsing around all the lovely rooms getting poo germs everywhere. The hostess was very nice about it.

We ended our evening with a delicious dinner at a nearby noodle bar. It was the kind solely inhabited by elderly locals with voices like Rizlas, who consider the patron at the end of the bar of fifteen years' standing to be suspicious because he's too new. Happily, they weren't unkind to the two young foreigners suddenly in their midst, just a bit shocked that we'd managed to appear there. A few of the typical questions came up and we gave typical answers - we're from the UK, yes we can eat noodles, yes we can use chopsticks. (There was all-round amazement at the fact we could eat noodles, but seemingly no concern that we wouldn't be able to understand all the Japanese that was being spoken.) Our fellow customers even took our side against the proprietor when she got our order wrong - the proprietor being part of that eccentric breed of elderly Japanese restaurant owners that take your order by barking questions at you repeatedly, disappearing halfway through the order and coming back with a dish chosen at random. The random dish was very tasty.

The following day we took a bus to Shirakawa-go, the village famous for its wintry beauty and perfect gabled houses. The main thing I can tell you about Shirakawa-go is that it's really bloody cold. The next, perhaps less obvious thing I can tell you, is that it's really bloody difficult to see because the bright sunlight reflects off the snow and directly into your bloody eyeballs. Usually I carry my sunglasses in my handbag all year round, but I'd just emptied it recently in an attempt to ease my constant shoulder pain. So I can't tell you much more about Shirakawa-go, except that it's extremely beautiful and looks like the northern end of the universe - when you actually brave snow-blindness and dare yourself to look at it.

The Last Express Could Have Been Amazing So Why Didn't I Enjoy It As Much As I Should Have

Unedited, vaguely stream-of-conscious-ish review today. The Last Express is an adventure game published in 1997 and played by me, your blogatrix, in 2015. In some corners of the internet it is still much-loved, with many people even calling it one of the best adventure games of all time, and I'd heard about it from a few people before I decided to purchase and play it myself. I have a bit of a weakness for point-and-click adventures, despite lacking the unique brain-wiring which allows me to successfully work out that you need to hit the sandwich with the balloon to open the fourteen-sided codex, so I usually need a walkthrough and a fair bit of patience to get through them. I'm also a sucker for anything that seems to have a compelling or unique setting, so this game seemed perfectly positioned to charm me. So why did find myself getting so angry at it? Why did I have to drag myself through it over a period of about a month when it shouldn't have taken half as long?

I really, really, really wanted to enjoy this game. I hate doing all the background info because I struggle to write about it without sounding clunky, but essentially the game is set on the Orient Express just prior to the outbreak of the First World War. Tensions are high among the guests, and within the first few minutes your character, a mysterious American who boarded the train without a ticket, discovers his friend murdered in his compartment. What follows is the gradual unfolding of a mystery, featuring romance, gold and anarchists. (I'm sure saying this will get my blog put on a list somewhere, but I think there should be a lot more anarchists in things. I like any time period where there's lots of anarchists hanging about.) The most notable thing about the game is that all the train's passengers and staff live their lives in real-time, wandering about the carriages and hanging out in their compartments, having dinner and chatting. Your job is to solve the murder and work out what strange things are taking place on the train, by exploring, eavesdropping and interacting with guests. All in all, it's a brilliant concept.

First of all, I want to say that despite coming away from it with some negative feelings, the game is a pretty impressive feat and I feel quite bad for being harsh on it. It's easy to pick on the flaws of a twenty-year-old game, especially one which aims so high and therefore has a long way to fall if it misses. My knowledge of game design is pretty basic but the real-time mechanic must have been difficult to handle, and anyone who at least tries something interesting and new gets an eager thumbs-up from me. The art is beautiful and the setting enchanting. The voice acting is pretty decent for videogame voice acting. When I wasn't getting frustrated at the various issues I'll talk about in a second, it was really nice just being there. Sitting in a train car and watching a Russian noble sit down for a cigarette with an uninterested French lesbian. Listening to a chef and his apprentice bicker in the kitchen. Finding the attendant's secret drawings of all the passengers whilst he nips off to check the compartments. There's also a couple of newspapers you can find with full stories you can read, which gives an insight into the complicated political situation you are perhaps unwisely wading into. Some have complained that if you solve the train's puzzles quickly, you are left with a lot of downtime where you just have to wait for stuff to happen, but I liked having this breathing space. I liked knowing that I didn't have to rush, and that there was no problem with me just leaving my character in the smoking car and hearing the chit-chat of the characters around me. For its flaws, it is truly beautiful.

The flaws though. Grnnn.

The most immediate thing that strikes you is that the controls are like using your nose to guide a slice of wet bread through lumpy custard. You play from a first-person perspective, and the point-and-click mechanics feel especially clunky when you have to use them to turn yourself around or look up or down, which you often have to do when sneaking into people's carriages and looking through their baggage and whatnot (all in a day's work for a totally legit amateur detective). There can end up being a lot of "no SHIT no I didn't want that door I wanted the other door no oh wait what wall is this do I go this way NO I WANTED THE OTHER WAY". There are also a couple of fight scenes, which feel equally awkward. I initially bought The Last Express on my phone so I could play it on my commute, but had to switch to playing it on PC because the controls were so bumworm.

There are also a lot - a lot - of dead ends. If you don't do things right, your character will be killed or arrested and you will have to rewind, taking you back to the last time the train stopped at a station. This could mean you lose up to an hour's worth of playtime because of something you did, or didn't do, that you have no idea about. Fair enough, you need a bit of trial and error to work out what you need to do, and it is sometimes nice to get to replay bits so you can discover new things happening that you didn't catch last time around. However, the deaths feel a bit too random and caught up in adventure-game logic and these restarts just feel infuriating as a result. At one point a woman ended up clobbering me to death about five different times for reasons I had no idea of; furthermore there weren't any obvious connections between her and what I'd been doing so I didn't know how to get out of that dead-end. Using a walkthrough I didn't have to waste too much time on these mistakes, but without help I think I would probably have given up. One time I found an object which was then taken off me by another passenger; the game doesn't end when it happens, but apparently if you continue the game there is just no way of winning and you would have no idea. In order to actually finish the game you also need to do something small and seemingly insignificant halfway through the game, and again there is no way of knowing this. I don't need to have my hand held all the way through a game, but I think there's a certain level of obscurity where it's unfair to let someone play all the way through to the end of a game without letting them know they've prevented themselves from actually finishing it, due to not giving the whistle to the balloon vendor between 3.15 and 3.30. Maybe it's just the nature of adventure games but the things you have to do often seem artificial and like you're just trying to get the game to progress rather than actually solving a mystery.

I really wanted to at least enjoy the ending, but unfortunately the ending is awful and for me almost ruined the story. I won't spoil it, but basically it adds in a bizarre psuedo-magic element that was totally unexplained and completely unnecessary, and introduced it in the context of a stupid quick-time event. (The most radically world-changing, brutal war to ever take place on the face of the Earth is about to start! You don't need wizardry to add drama!) Still, now that I've had a little bit of distance from it, I look back on it with more fondness. I prefer to remember those bits in the middle, just idling up and down corridors and chatting with chubby true-neutral arms dealers.

So, should you play it? Erm...yes. I think so. For a bit. With a walkthrough. Maybe. Sorry, I really still don't know. Leave me alone.

Welcome to my exciting new year of part-time work!

First day of part-time: it rained. We went to a friend's house and annoyed another friend via text, messaging them pictures to show how much we were enjoying not being at work. It got elaborate - there were shadow puppets and handicraft involved - and then it all got a bit exhausting and we went home. 

I wore some very blue eyeshadow, and realised that if I now have the freedom to wear whatever makeup I want four days a week, I'm going to have to wash my brushes a lot more frequently. 

I also just remembered I have to do laundry.

See you tomorrow.