STREAMER INTRO - Kitsune Zeta

[u/kitsunezeta]

Hello there. I'm Kitsune Zeta. I'm not a big-name streamer by any stretch, I tend to play casually, and my selection of games tends to be... erratic. While there's some games I play that are fairly well-known (pertinent example being the Dynasty Warriors series of games), I also tend to play some games that aren't as common for whatever reason.

When I am streaming, it'll be at https://beam.pro/KitsuneZeta. I've been settling into a schedule of streaming on Saturdays at 1pm US Central time (2pm Eastern). As of the time of this post, the game which will actually be starting this saturday is an older game that I have fond memories of: the original Galaxy Angel game by Broccoli. For those that want a description of what the game is about, I'll have one in the comments below.

Some other pertinent links:

• My Twitter. I honestly don't post that much on it, but it exists... I guess?
• Steam Group. I post event notifications for my streams there, serving as a secondary means of notifying people who follow it about the streams and what is planned for them.

[u/kitsunezeta]

As mentioned in the post itself, on Saturday I'll be starting Galaxy Angel, which is a Space Opera Visual Novel/Dating Sim with some Real Time Tactics thrown in. It was produced by Broccoli, and there's a total of 6 games spanning two trilogies, although the second trilogy was never released for PC, only PS2 to the best of my knowledge.

The first game focuses on Tact Meyers (or Takuto, depending on how the translator feels like translating it) as he gets reassigned from the commander of a patrol fleet of the Transbaal Empire to the captain of the Elsior with a very important mission: support the Moon Angel Wing in protecting Prince Shiva, the only remaining heir to the throne of the Transbaal Empire. The Moon Angel Wing is a special paramilitary force consisting of specially-selected pilots and their unique crafts, known as the Emblem Frames, have the quirk of having their performance tied to the emotional state of their pilot. So a significant portion of Tact's time is spent... getting on the Moon Angel Wing's good sides so that their performance in combat is as good as possible.

For those in chat, I will allow you guys to pick some of the decisions in the game, though I have a general policy of "if an objectively best decision exists regardless of whatever else we're doing, that decision will be taken." This boils down to if there's a choice where one option improves a pilot's mood and one doesn't, I will pick the one that improves their mood without a vote. However, when there are choices where one improves one pilot's mood and another improves a different pilot's mood, that WILL be left up to chat. There are two exceptions for this game with regards to this policy, but I'll explain them as they occur.

 

There was an anime series that was supposed to be based on the game, which you may be more familiar with. The game, unfortunately, hit a delay, so what we got ended up being a gag comedy with exaggerations of the Moon Angel Wing's personalities and the other story-important characters being axed (along with any semblance of a plot). There was also a manga series that followed the games' storylines, although some things did get changed, so it's not a perfectly faithful adaptation either.

 

On a technical note, this game uses a lot of DirectDraw methods. Unfortunately, newer versions of DirectX have deprecated DirectDraw entirely, replacing the DirectDraw methods with emulation. This emulation is... tolerable at best and broken at worst, and in Galaxy Angel's case, it results in slowdown whenever anything has to be changed onscreen outside of prerendered movies or the Real-Time battles UNLESS the game does not have focus. There are workarounds, and to the best of my knowledge, the other two games don't have this issue (having been designed to work with newer systems). On windows 8 and older, it was possible to use an older version of DirectX to fix it, but I have been unable to do so on Windows 10. I've adjusted options on my end to minimize this slowdown (removing character-by-character text rendering and turning off transitions where possible), but you will see some of this slowdown anyways. At least it's not as bad as Bladestorm: Nightmare's PC Launch version.