Results tagged “ds games”

Wait, was that the ending?  It can't be.  Wow.  Not only was this a short game, but it didn't feel like it should've ended that way.  I'll elaborate.

This game has been linked closely to Xenogears by both the creators and the fans.  Many of the people behind Xenogears played a part in the making of this game, and considering that it took most people between 80 and 100 hours to beat Xenogears, the 25 to 30 hours that it takes to beat Sands of Destruction seem like a gyp in comparison.  There don't seem to be any minigames either (none that I found, anyway), and any bonus side quests that exist are hard to find, since the game is largely linear.  It's so linear that the characters openly objected whenever I tried to go where I wasn't supposed to, to the point where they refused to take another step in that direction.  This applied to both areas that I wasn't allowed to explore yet and areas that I'd already been.  It's possible that there's a point or two where I could've gone back to explore further, but the game does a very good job at discouraging you from taking a break from the main story.

It's not like you'd have much opportunity to explore your surroundings anyway.  The world map is, as is the norm these days, a point and click interface.  With the lack of minigames and extra features, the majority of your time will be spent in battle anyway, and most of the rest of your time will be spent exploring the various dungeons scattered throughout the world.  Occasionally, you'll spend a few minutes in a town, but only long enough to purchase new weapons and armour, sometimes visit a smithy if one is available, and talk to the one important NPC in the entire city.

Those few minutes in town will mostly be taken up by the various plot events in the game, sometimes centered around the one important NPC.  True to the usual modus operandi of the developers, plot events can take a while to get through, but that's alright.  Only some of the scenes are voiced, and it seems random which ones are and which ones aren't.  Most of the voice actors seem like they were cast well, except for the occasional ham (one such character whose voice actor I didn't like was reduced to sand anyway, so it's all good), but overall, I had no objections with the voice work... that is, when I could actually hear it.  The music and spoken dialogue are not balanced well, and at some points, I could hardly hear what the characters were saying over the sudden swelling of music.  There is an option to change the levels of both in the settings, but gamers shouldn't have to do the developers' work for them.


Controls, like in Xenogears, are confined to the X and Y axes and their diagonals only.  The dungeons, however, seem designed for an analog stick or some other dynamic movement system, as opposed to the stiff movement present in this game.  There are times when your characters are forced to zig zag when taking curves, rather than just taking them naturally.  It doesn't help that the camera also moves a set number of degrees every time you move it, so you can't try to compensate for the movement system with the camera.  There is one thing to be grateful for: you don't have to make awkward jumps like in Xenogears.  It seems that they learned an important lesson from making that game.

It would've been nice to control the movement through the touch screen instead, because then it might've been a little easier, but there was absolutely no touch screen support present in this game.  It was like playing a PSP game, but with two screens instead of one.  In fact, it would be easy to throw away the dungeon maps on the top screen and just port the game to the PSP, if not for the battle system requiring both screens.  It's probably possible, though, to port it to the PSP without losing any of the dynamics of the battle system.  Square made flying enemies out of reach of normal attacks in Final Fantasy VII, but didn't offer any alternatives other than equipping long range attack weapons and using magic.  They did, however, show this all on one screen.  The same could be done with this game, except better, since a character has two different sets of attacks depending on whether an enemy is on the top or the bottom screen, so if ported to the PSP, a flying enemy should suffice to signify a "top screen enemy".

Speaking of the battle system, it will be confusing at first.  It seems like, the way it's set up, timed button presses are important.  They are, but only to a point.  To chain together your attacks, you do have to select your next attack right after the previous one ends, or else you lose out on a large chain bonus to your CP; CP are points you can spend to level up your various attacks and spells.  Also, you can only have up to six BP in a turn; BP are the points used to determine how many times you can attack.  Confused yet?  There's more: your first critical hit on the enemy will add one BP to your total for your turn, and ten consecutive hits upon the enemy will add another BP.  Your various skills can hit more than once, and once you've earned enough CP, you can level up your skills and set them up in chains to get the most out of your BP, so it's not like you're at a complete disadvantage.  Certain characters, though, are worse off than others.  While your best characters can set up a chain of 12 hits on one BP, there's another character that can only go up to 7.  This wouldn't be too bad, if the developers had stopped there.  Apparently, certain characters can have their morale affected by the story, rendering them suddenly useless in battle.  Ordinarily, a character receives 2 BP at the start of their turn, which is more than enough to make up for a deficiency in hits.  But a depressed character becomes less effective in battle and only receives 1 BP at the start of their turn.  If the character only has a chain that hits 7 times, then they'd better hope they can crit on their first turn, or else they're going to be pretty useless against a boss.  There is nothing you can do to change this, either.  The developers have apparently decided that certain characters must be rendered completely useless during certain sequences in the game.  It does help that sometimes, characters will have high morale and therefore receive 3 BP; it doesn't help that the Quip system adds an extra layer of luck into the battle system.  Occasionally, your character will spout a line that somehow affects the outcome of battle.  Either they'll gain an extra BP, or they'll boost their defense.  At the end of battle, gold or experience may be doubled.  And so on.  There's no way to increase how often these quips activate, and it seems like each quip has its own frequency associated with it: an experience doubling quip will definitely not activate nearly as often as a gold doubling quip, for example.


Regular enemies in battle aren't too bad.  Bosses, on the other hand, can be hell if given a chance.  They possess skills that are mysterious and apparently boost their stats and abilities.  This seems to extend to their BP, which is on a hidden meter and I swear it goes to eleven.  Occasionally, bosses will suddenly draw upon an infinite pool of BP to completely fill their meter up, spam skills that delay your characters enough that you'll die before you can take another turn, and in extreme cases, they'll start hitting characters one at a time and keep going until they kill the character (which should ordinarily end their turn), then will move on to the next character until you've suffered a complete party wipe, often from as much as full health, especially if you've just healed everyone.  The only thing I can think of is that maybe the speed boosting skills that bosses use can stack, but there's no indication that this is the case.

When it comes to music, the game seems to straddle the line between modern full orchestral compositions and old school style tunes that you can actually make out.  Although you might not end up humming the songs from the game, they do have tunes you can hum.  Although I know that Yasunori Mitsuda composed some of the music for this game, it seems like he's long over his Celtic period, so I only partially recognized his style.  In a way, it helped to distance myself from any expectations I would've had for the music.

To further the comparison with Xenogears, I would say that the music was a little more light hearted this time around, especially near the beginning.  But then again, there was a lot less Man Vs. Everyone in this game, and although the theme of the game is world destruction, the story treats it with a more romantic angle than most would.  Although you fought a bunch of enemies that were oppressing your race, none of them really stood out as a big bad, so there wasn't an epic feel to the game either.  The majority of the game was spent in a Man Vs. Himself mindset, kind of like if Fei from Xenogears was allowed to be angsty about Id for the entire game.  The main character, Kyrie, finds out in the first hour or so that he's a weapon meant to destroy the world.  He's activated by a mysterious bell during a confrontation, and his power goes out of control and reduces the nearby landscape and all the people within to sand.  From there, he is forced to join an organization whose goal is to destroy the world, and finds himself nursing a crush on his female companion.  The character that ends up being the bad guy is subtle and doesn't really count since he's not visibly hounding you during the game.  He doesn't lift his hand against you, nor does he send any minions to kill you.  In fact, while most RPGs put your characters on the defensive for the majority of the game, Sands of Destruction breaks the mold by having your characters seek out and kill most of the powerful enemies present in the world.  Also unlike most games, recurring villains are very scarce.  There was only one that I could recall, and you dispatch him for good about a third of the way into the game.

When it comes to graphics, the designers went with the style they employed in Xenogears, placing low-detail sprites in a 3-D environment.  If I didn't know better, I'd suspect that these sprites were leftover from Xenogears, since they're about the same quality.  Although I've seen better on the DS, the graphics do get the job done, especially since most of the game is spent in a rather drab, sandy world anyway with four continents themed after the seasons.  I guess if the winter continent is perpetually winter and the summer continent is perpetually summer, then the autumn and spring continents are always autumn and spring?  However that works.  Meanwhile, you sail around the world (presumably, since it's point and click) in a ship that somehow sails upon the sand.  And this is no ordinary sand.  It's sand that magically will not clog engines, unless it's required by the plot that it does.

By the time I was a few hours into this game, it was clear that, although there were some similarities to earlier games made by the same team, I was playing something completely new and different.  Although there were a few missteps (sound balance needing work, occasional unfair advantage of bosses in battle, initially confusing battle system, too linear story), I would say this was an enjoyable 30 hours.  Take the above criticisms with a grain of salt.  Chances are, anyone who plays this game will enjoy their experience as much as I did.

Screens stolen shamelessly from RPGamer.com

Before video games came along, card and board games were king.  Simple games like Monopoly and Poker were invented and families had hours of fun playing them.  Fast forward to today, and it's like you can't be bothered to bring out your chess set or your go board or even a simple deck of cards.  Maybe you live alone, or no one else likes to play against you anymore because you always win (or you always lose and you complain bitterly because of it).  So it seems the logical step to digitize these popular board and card games so that you can play against the computer or against someone over the Internet.  Of course, this means you have to buy a game you probably already own, but it's worth it.  Or is it?

There have been versions of Scrabble released before, including multiple versions and variations for the PC, the most recent of which, Scrabble Journey, features varied boards with differing requirements on each of them.  There's even been a game show that ran on NBC, hosted by Chuck Woolery (who later went on to host another word game, Lingo on GSN). Scrabble as a game has proven so popular that other companies and websites have come up with their own versions, the most notable of which is called Literati, and is featured on Yahoo Games.

Both SCRABBLE and LITERATI are in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 4th Edition, and are worth 14 points and 8 points respectively.*

So why buy the DS version?  Well, portability for one.  For another, the touch screen is as close as you can get to using a mouse, unless you play the PC or Mac versions, and helps immensely during games when there's a time limit involved.  And for a third thing, Training Mode will help you grow as a player without having to write out all the good words on flash cards to memorize them.  Soon, you'll be using two and three letter words like a pro.

And yet, famous professional Scrabble players like Joel Wapnick have their own methods to memorize words and they've won official tournaments at the world level.  So the question becomes, what use is the software, when there are plenty of other methods to become good at the game?  Why should you buy the DS version if you'll benefit more by developing your own method of becoming a good tournament player?

The answer is: if you're training to be a tournament player, you have better options than this software.  Other than Training Mode, all this software really offers is the game itself.  Software like Scrabble Journey is good because it offers something different from the ordinary Scrabble game, and Scrabble Rack Attack takes the tiles from the original game, and uses them in a completely different way.  Scrabble on the DS, however, only offers the touch screen as an advantage over other console versions.

DS, by the way, is not in the OSPD4.


As for how the software itself runs, it's alright, but it probably could've been better.  At least there's no bugs.  Young gamers like me will have no trouble seeing the board on the tiny touch screen, but older gamers and gamers with sight impairments would have to use the magnification feature.  Unfortunately, only a portion of the magnified board can be shown on the screen; this hinders the development of a player's strategy.

Difficulty levels are very borked.  While there are supposedly six difficulty levels in the game, affecting the vocabulary of the AI, difficulty can be skewed depending on tile distribution, as it would in a normal Scrabble game.  The problem is that the AI will choose to either play all the tiles at once, or if it can't, it'll play the best scoring small word.  Intelligent strategies seem to be lost on it.  I played a level 4 AI one time and was smoked as the AI played bingo after bingo and accumulated over 400 points to my paltry 200.  Then I played the exact same AI in the next game without adjusting the difficulty level and smoked it, scoring over 450 to its paltry 150.  Instead of managing bonuses, holding certain tiles back to save for later and trading problem tiles like most human players would, the AI was just playing for points.  I should at least be thankful that the AI will only play real words, and won't try to sneak something by me like OMG RACECAR BLING BLING!

OMG, RACECAR and BLING aren't in the OSPD4.

The DS cartridge also includes Scrabble Slam, the card game based on Scrabble where the object is to place cards upon a four letter word, one at a time, to change it into other words (for instance, RACE becomes RACK, then LACK, LUCK, BUCK, etc.).  As before, there are six difficulty levels you can program into the software's AI, but in the case of Slam, if you're quick enough, you can run circles around the AI, and win each and every game, no matter what, because even at the most difficult level, level 6, the AI plays slowly, like a blindfolded, handcuffed, arthritic old man.  With rickets.  And Parkinson's Disease.  And who has lost all his fingers due to frostbite and/or gangrene.

RICKETS is in the OSPD4, worth 13 points; GANGRENE is in the OSPD4, worth 10 points; FROSTBITE is too long for the OSPD4, would be a legal play anyway, and is worth 14 points.

Chances are, though, that if you have friends who also enjoy Scrabble, one or more of you will already have a physical copy of the game, and would be more than willing to set it up and have a game or two with you.  It's also a lot more fun to play in real life, because if you're playing the AI, or playing someone on the Internet, you wouldn't get to participate in any fun arguments over vocabulary.  At a recent Scrabble Night I attended, I argued that NE is a word because it's the masculine form of NEÉ, while the other person argued back that you wouldn't use NE because it's the woman who changes her name when she's married and so you wouldn't have a use for the masculine form, therefore it's not a word.  Later on, another player proposed MILF as a word (it's an acronym, and therefore not a legal play).  Unfortunately, this sort of fun is missing from an electronic version.

FUN, of course, being worth 6 points.


This software, unfortunately, is largely useless to anyone but the most casual of players who don't already own either the physical game, or another version of the software for a different system.  There are probably enough versions of Scrabble out there that we don't need any more copies of the game floating around in bargain bins across the continent.  EA probably makes enough money from their sports titles that they don't have to scrabble for more money by porting board games to every single device with the capability of executing game software.  And it's not like they have a monopoly on board games either.  Other companies are at fault too, and I wish they would get a clue: we don't need a million versions of a game we already own.


*It will be assumed for the purposes of scoring that blanks aren't used to make the words; all scores listed do not include bonuses, for it is unlikely but possible within the rules of the game to play eight and nine letter words without landing on a single bonus square.

I don't know if you've been keeping up with the Shin Megami Tensei franchise (aka Megaten, for short), but there have been a lot of games released in the franchise for the last half-decade. There's been enough that it's almost tough to keep up with all of them, especially when it's a niche franchise from a niche company, which pretty much demands that you have to buy their games right away lest they go out of print quickly. It's almost bad enough that you don't want them to announce another one!

Now, keep in mind that when I refer to "Shin Megami Tensei," I'm referring to all of the games released in America with that name. Most of them weren't released in Japan with that name, actually. Devil Survivor was released as part of the "Megami Ibunroku" sub-franchise, which was also a branding given to the first Persona game (but just the first). They were all released with the SMT name because of its marketing possibilities, since Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne -- the only game released in America that's actually part of the direct Megaten franchise -- was such a sales success. Sure, it's ticked off some dedicated fans, but I think marketing to achieve higher sales is a tad more important than that kind of frivolity.

And guess what? They've just announced another Megaten game for an American release: Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. It was pretty inevitable, given the franchise's pedigree, that it would be announced soon; but man are these games piling up. I envy the person who has enough time to play through all of these games, along with others on the side, because these games can get pretty long. Thus far, I've purchased almost every Megaten game released since Nocturne (I believe Angela has me beat as far as a collection of those), but the number of them I've actually played is pretty distressing. Still, I can rest easy when I consider how much some of these games are worth. I could sell the first Devil Summoner for three times the price I paid for it presently, for instance.

(Not saying I would, though.)

Strange Journey is similar to Nocturne in that it's a real Megaten title. Anyone who read the paraphrased version of a blog post on the developer's Japanese blog saw that the game was made to appeal to a worldwide audience, and therein lied Atlus' grand intentions with the project. It's already getting positive reviews from importers, so worrying about its quality is fruitless at this point. But what about people who have too many of these games to go through? And what if they spoil it to add extra incentive to purchase it? Uh oh!

We may have a lot of Megaten now, and we'll undoubtedly have more on the way when Persona 3 Portable is inevitably announced. I'm sure they wouldn't pass on localizing a portable version of their best-selling game, right? Good luck finding the time to play all of these!

When you think about it, box art has really come a long way, mainly in territories outside of Japan. The world of the east has always had it good from days dating back into the NES and SNES era (well, Famicom and Super Famicom, to be specific). For everyone else? Well, we'd be glad if we got box art that was actually good. And by "good," I mean something that actually represented what the game was supposed to be. Unfortunately, they were incredibly spartan, and you could classify it as a sort of dark ages for covers.

Well Sega doesn't! Because with the cover for Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer nearly set us back about 15 years because of how bad it is, and how much it misses the point. See, Shiren is a roguelike; it has the benefit of being in a genre that's more niche than the genres the more dedicated gaming crowd classifies as niche. It's the kind of game that needed every element of its marketing to be perfect so it would find an audience, the majority of which would undoubtedly find the game their entry barrier to the genre.

But not with a cover like this. I don't know what they were thinking, to be honest. This isn't one of those cases where I turn into a moronic internet weaboo for the sake of liking all things Japanese, and moronically declare that Japanese covers are always better. But there are quite a few people who like Japanese anime and its art these days, and therein lies the reason why their  decision for this art was so poor. Back in the 90s, no one knew that this stuff was, and a person's reaction to a cover like that would've been one of sheer, utter bewilderment. Now, though, people think it's neat, and it's accepted as something unique. And if you think that your average person who browses the video game aisle would express incredible befuddlement at that now, well, these are people who've probably seen stuff like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Dragon Ball Z. So even they're used to it.

So yeah, it would've been nice to see this cover along the aisle. Roguelikes are a damned tough sell in any territory, even in Japan sometimes. But it's overseas where it really needs the help. Your average person who also watches anime doesn't need that much of a description of what the game is actually about. They'll find the RPG-esque anime style appealing, and decide to give it a curiosity purchase -- we are talking about a $30 DS game here. I like Sega of America's output recently, and they've been taking a lot of chances with some, but not all, of their niche titles recently. So seeing this bomb kind of bites.

Fortunately, it's not over for Shiren in the US. Around the time of E3 (not at E3, because then no one would know), Atlus announced that they're localizing Shiren 3 for Wii, which is due for a US release sometime in 2010. As good as Sega is, I think Atlus will be a little more successful at marketing it simply because of their experience with appealing to an audience that adores games like this, like with Izuna (which is in the same genre). If it's successful, it's possible that they'll also localize the second DS game -- unless they plan on releasing them simultaneously, but let's not get ridiculous here.

Of course, if you want to buy Shiren now, it's available in budget bins nationwide! Check your local retailer, folks.

So hey! It looks like we have a new feature here. Oh boy. With this feature, I'd like to examine the differences in box arts from different regions. But that won't be all; I'll be sure to merely examine certain box arts and point out anything that's particularly interesting about them, or any inconsistencies. For this, I'm starting with cover art for the recently announced Nostalgia, which is actually your boring ol' region comparison. Yeah, bummer.

You can pretty much guess what a game called Nostalgia is going for. These days, a good portion of the Japanese RPG genre is seeking to capture an audience that was lost because of its "evolution" not being something most fans in Japan could adapt to. That's the reason why so many publishers are embracing the past, eras where the genre was in its supposedly greatest form. Well that, and current generation JRPG development is pretty darn expensive.

The Japanese cover certainly represents this. I think it has a little homage to a lot of epic anime series and movies, mainly some of the classic Miyazaki movies. It manages to fuse that with the feeling of a classic RPG from either the SNES era or the PSX/DC era, most particularly Skies of Arcadia, which itself is fitting for what the actual game is going for. With that, there's no need to change this for America given the audience it's targeting, right? Well, uh....

Yeah, I don't know what they were thinking with this. It eschews the feeling the Japanese cover in favor of something that looks like....well, a video game cover. And that's just boring. If they were going for Nostalgia, they could go for the look of a classic 90s cover; you know, the covers that told you virtually nothing about the game and even went as far as to use a different character designer solely for the cover. This particular one kind of misses the point if it wants to send a message about the scope of the game.

(Or maybe it is sending a message! Nah, probably not.)

Though there's still time to fix the cover, I doubt they'll actually go through with it. And that's a shame, because I'd love to see something that differs from the norm and stands out within the customers' view as something unique. And when you have a niche property in a semi-niche genre, isn't that the point? It's disappointing for a company that put together such a great site and trailer for the game.

Square Enix is slowly revealing more information on Final Fantasy Gaiden: 4 Warriors of Light via the main website, and one of the updates consists of new videos now on the official website. One rather lengthy one depicts what the game looks like while you're navigating towns and the field, while the other gives a short preview of the battle system. The game looks great in motion, and it makes anyone who initially shunned the game look silly. Also, battles definitely look to be an improvement over the "oh, come on" slowness of Final Fantasy III DS and the "well, this is better, but still" battles of Final Fantasy IV DS.

Sure, I could just link you to the individual videos to show you what I'm talking about, but those exist on Youtube, whose format consists of a stretched aspect ratio to fill its screen. The result is a blurry mess and videos with an unstable framerate. Not ideal at all.

Also, some of the first outfits for job classes were revealed in last week's Japanese Shonen Jump. Some of them are pretty neat, and go beyond the usual look for RPG classes. I love the Zorro-esque one, and I could tell you what class that went with if I could read Japanese. So you'll have to wait until someone translates it. Someone probably already has, but this scan isn't widespread yet for some reason. Maybe we'll know when this week's Famitsu comes out.

Anyway, this game really seems like a 3D version of Sega's 7th Dragon. And thinking about that made me wonder where that game is. I'm not sure if Sega will localize it, but I think it would be right up Atlus' alley given how it's similar to their own Etrian Odyssey -- and by the same creator, Kazuya Ninou, no less. Atlus is no stranger to localizing Sega games (they localized three Shining Force games), so it's possible.

No one could successfully guess what game, or what kind of game, was being teased in Square Enix's countdown, which started a week and a half back. All that was familiar was the beautiful art style of Akihiko Yoshida (Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story), and a different-though-familiar musical tune, which invoked senses of nostalgia. And though fans of the company didn't know what it was for, there sure were some interesting guesses. SaGa 4? A new Romancing SaGa? Final Fantasy V DS? It turned out to be none of those, and was something entirely different from everyone's expectations. But it was welcome one nonetheless.

By the way, I'll admit that I'm guilty of thinking it was a Final Fantasy V remake, and I was kind of disappointed to learn that wasn't it. Kind of, until I learned what the new game was. That game, Final Fantasy Gaiden: 4 Warriors of Light for DS, is one of the most interesting looking -- and hopefully playing -- games I've seen come from Square Enix. It's basically a new Final Fantasy title that will be in the style of the older games, complete with super-deformed characters and a class system similar to Final Fantasies I, III, and V. It's a representation of the "everything old is new again" approach that's grasped Japan by the gut, but it's certainly nothing to complain about if it has a good degree of heart to it. The use of the "Final Fantasy Gaiden" title is also a nice touch, which hasn't been used since the original Seiken Densetsu (actually the first Mana title, localized as Final Fantasy Adventure).

I also like the look of it. I decided to wait until the official website was up (which has a great music track accompanying it, though it's currently sparse on information), so I could see what the game really looked like before jumping to inane conclusions about its aesthetics like too much of the internet. What it has is a fittingly classical pseudo-cel-shaded style rather than the pure 3D look that the DS versions of Final Fantasy III and IV adopted. We'll still have to wait to see it in motion (and hopefully not until the Tokyo Game Show), but I think it'll work in its favor.

Hopefully the team behind it can put together a great game with this, though I'm pretty optimistic given the team behind it. Sure, Matrix may have some slight missteps at times, but they have Final Fantasy III and IV behind them, along with Avalon Code. It's definitely aimed at anyone who openly shuns the futuristic over-the-top approach Final Fantasy XIII has. It's due to hit Japan by the end of the year (the same time as FFXIII), and I'm sure it will get an overseas release given what it's called. I'm going to guess that will be around summer 2010.

As a 26-year-old I'm old enough to remember older technology and life before the internet, but young enough to easily embrace new technology. That said, if someone offered to trade me their old Sony Walkman in exchange for my (barely working) iPod for a week I'd probably utter an incredulous "Hell no, I wasn't born yesterday!" followed by an inquisitive frown. If the said person was my parent I'd be mindful of profane utterances and politely decline the offer. Even if the offer consisted of just using the Walkman for a week without an exchange I'd still decline. After all, cassette tapes are a pain compared to the ease of CDs and digital files. In the case of 13-year-old Scott Campbell, he found the offer to be too intriguing to turn down. His detailed account of the events begins with the line, "My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day," and goes downhill from there. To Campbell's credit, he did attempt to make a fair comparison between the devices and found the Walkman had some advantages over typical MP3 players. I'd be surprised if he wasn't happy to have his iPod returned after such a week.

The Sony Walkman may have been great decades ago, but the iPod reigns supreme at the moment.  And we all know the iPhone 3GS is hot stuff right now, but perhaps it's a little too hot for its own good. I'd hate to have been the one to discover an overheating issue with the 3GS while in the middle of a phone conversation. Ouch. But MP3-loving anime fans definitely have more to look forward to on iTunes, with the upcoming addition of anime songs from Bandai Visual. Thankfully with the doing away of DRM on iTunes songs can be converted and enjoyed on any MP3 player.

While on the subject of digital music, while it was already confirmed at E3 that Last.fm would be coming to Xbox Live, more details have emerged. Joystiq is reporting Last.fm will be free for Gold subscribers and just $3 dollars a month for unlimited advertising free access. Silver members would have access to the service for three hours per month with advertising.

Last week it was announced the upcoming Nintendo DS RPG, Sands of Destruction will be accompanied by a 13-episode anime release via FUNimation. The news is notable, considering the game itself isn't due out until sometime in 2010. The Anime News Network states the DS game's North American release as Spring 2010, while Amazon.com lists January 2010 as the release date. The anime itself is produced by Production I.G and aired on Japanese TV from July to September in 2008 under the title World Destruction. It is unclear if the release is simply just a box set, or if an online video stream will be present prior to a DVD release. In other news, Watchmen was dethroned from its 11-month reign as the best-selling graphic novel in North America by volume 27 of BLEACH. Awesome.

The popular illegal file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay plans to go legal thanks to some new ownership, and rumors of a slim PlayStation 3 continue to proliferate online.

E3 2007 marked the appearance of a different form of Nintendo, much to the chagrin of internet-dwelling gamers. It was there when their focus began to shift from a gamer-centric audience to a much wider one, which entailed that the products displayed would have more "casual" appeal (using that word for simplicity's sake). A sound business decision, sure, but gamers felt a little left out in the cold after witnessing a Nintendo that had, as they believe, sold out to their mothers and grandmothers.

These days, though, it's getting a little better. Nintendo is at least starting to understand that they have the potential to bring all sorts of gamers together with a variety of games on both the DS and Wii. They only decided to focus on a few titles at the show itself, but Nintendo fans knew that after E3 2007, all of the surprises for them are buried within the press packet (both online and off). Usually there were only one or two games, like Professor Layton and the Curious Village in 2007 or Rhythm Heaven in 2008. This year, however, there were quite a few; enough that I had to split this into two entries! This one will focus on the DS games, but you probably already knew that:

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

Also known as "IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME." The second Layton game is finally leaving Japan, and it only took a year-and-a-half for Nintendo of America to localize it. This is also happening after rejuvenated sales of the first game after NoA decided they should start advertising it efficiently. But yeah, it'll be here come August 24, and in Europe around a month later. Don't try and think about the fact that the fourth game is on the horizon in Japan. Judging by the time it's taken to release this over here, I'm sure we'll have the fourth game sometime in 2012. But that might be acceptable, because you're guaranteed to be solving this game's brain teasers until then.

(No actually, that wouldn't be acceptable. But if that's the excuse Nintendo gives, remember that you heard it here first!)

Oh, and don't even ask when Sloane and McHale's Mysterious Story is coming. I hope someone else can localize that, unless Nintendo really decides to pick up the pace.

Glory of Heracles

Of all the previously unannounced DS games in the pack, this one confounded me the most. Glory of Heracles is actually a revival of a classic RPG franchise that never found much notoriety outside of Japan -- and even in its home country, it wasn't cited as a stunning example of the genre. Yet this one is being localized for a US release, and it's coming from Nintendo? Color me shocked. They're also just announcing this game now, though it released in Japan in April....of 2008. I happen to like RPGs, especially portable ones, so I'll definitely give this one a try when it releases between the end of this year or early next year.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky

This one is probably the least surprising given how anything even remotely Pokemon related is guaranteed to sell. Explorers of Sky is a new version of last years Explorers of Time and Explorers of Darkness, much like Pokemon Yellow and similar products. You could describe the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon as roguelikes, but that wouldn't be very precise. The games contain all of the conventions from the genre, but they're also incredibly easy, which kind of misses the point of the genre. They're still enjoyable games though, so if you're in for some roguelike-lite (roguelite?) dungeon crawling, it will be out this fall.

Picross 3D

If you were a recent victim of addiction to Picross DS when it released last year, well I have bad news for you: Nintendo is localizing Picross 3D (or "Rittai Picross" in Japan). Hope you weren't planning on having pesky things like a live and obligations anytime in the near future, because this newest iteration in the logic puzzler franchise is sure to suck it up completely. The game doesn't have a release date at all, but it'll definitely be localized since the screen shots are in English, and since the game's online packet includes specific information about it.

So there were a few nice surprises in the packet for DS games, a far cry from both E3 2007 and 2008's packets. I'd also like to point out that Nintendo is really carrying the DS lineup this fall, something they haven't done since 2006. They didn't really need to in 2007 due to plenty of third-party titles in their stead, but they were in total cruise control in the latter half of 2008, which wound up being OK for the DS but horrible for Wii. It's nice to see that Nintendo seems intent on balancing the lineup now.

By the way, I wasn't surprised at this point to see ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat or Soma Bringer in the packet, because I think they're a lost cause at this point. There also seems to be a new Tingle game in the works, and like the last game it'll probably miss America entirely; though it may make its way out in Europe. Thankfully the DS is region free, and with that I'm hoping DSi releases don't become too prevalent (since they're not region free).

The PlayStation 2 is so last generation, but that doesn't mean good games are no longer being made for the system. Case in point, within the last month the PS2 had two notable releases. Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus released on April 11th and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon released yesterday (although it didn't hit most stores until today). The franchises themselves in which the games hail from are notable for the small but dedicated following they've garnered over the years. For the sake of this swag editorial I'm only going to focus on the extras that were included with the games.

First up we have Devil Summoner 2, which just came out. Atlus had been promoting the bundle for months now, but pictures really don't do it justice. The box is extremely impressive in person.

Yeah, something else I forgot to talk about last week.

Though Tecmo decided to pass on it for unknown reasons, it looks like Wind of Nostalgia (or "Nostalgio" or "Nostalgeo," take your pick) is making its way overseas after all courtesy of Ignition Entertainment. They're simply going to title it Nostalgia when it releases in the US in September. Kind of an odd name for a game, though I understand why they're calling it that.

From its appearances, Nostalgia is a game most certainly aimed at a set audience. Sure, you could say that for any game that releases these days, especially the more niche ones, but Nostalgia's intended audience is more defined than that. It's for an older set of gamers who fondly remember both 80s anime and JRPGs of the 90s, as evinced by the character art and game aestetics. For this purpose, they chose the right artist: Yoshiteru Tsujino, who was also known for the art in the Tengai Makyou titles (raise your hands, the three of you who recognize that name).

The games 3D graphics look pretty good as well if the screen shots above are any indication. Not surprising at all, seeing as how the game is handled by Matrix Software, which were also responsible for the Final Fantasy III and FFIV for DS. It also gives me a real Skies of Arcadia vibe from the looks of it, so it would be great if it could capture the sense of nostalgia and adventure that game did so well. After all, that's one of its intended purposes for existing, right?

Imagine that you are at a flea market, and someone sets up a stall.  They have bags of shit, literally shit, sitting upon the table for sale.  It's somehow understood that if these bags of shit sell, that the next time the merchant comes and sets up a stall, maybe there'll be diamonds for sale instead.  But he will have found that shit sells, so he will continue to sell shit.  No matter how much his shoppers hope for diamonds, he will continue to sell shit.


The shit for sale is Lunar: Dragon Song, and the shoppers are Lunar fans.  I don't say this lightly.  This game, honestly, contains so many otherwise good ideas that clash with each other that it renders the game very nearly unenjoyable.  It seems that when Working Designs folded, the Japanese studio that made the first two games in the series decided to give up as well.  The first thing that went with Working Designs' demise was the possibility that the games would get a good translation.  When Ubisoft took over, not only were their English translations void of most of the humour the older games had, but this game in particular contained so many typos that it seemed like no one even tried to proof-read the English script.  It is a sad day when you are supposedly fluent in both English and Japanese, and yet can't spell.  I would expect such a thing from someone involved with numbers, not words.

People Say I Look Like A Bad Game.  That's Not True.  Bad Games Look Like Me.

But speaking of numbers, I have always found that including certain spells or effects that always deal an exact amount or exact percentage of damage each time was a boring design choice in any game I've played.  Case in point: in this game, certain cards will help you determine exactly how much HP a boss has by dealing poison damage to him, and so you will be able to predict when you'll be able to forget about healing your nearly dead party and just go ahead and slaughter the enemy.  As such, using cards makes the game entirely easy to beat, if not for the tough random enemies you have to face on your way to the boss.  The random enemies seem to level up with you, which means you will almost never get the upper hand against them.  It's the only way I can explain why you can almost never seem to kill enemies faster by leveling up a few times.  The only way you'll ever be able to increase your damage versus anything would be to equip more powerful weapons and armour.

And speaking of weapons and armour, guess what happens when an enemy gets lucky with a hit?  A piece of equipment breaks!  If the game wasn't hard enough already in between the boss fights, I might've let this feature slide.  But it just makes playing the game even more frustrating because by the time you get back to town, you might've lost half your equipment and you'll need to somehow come up with enough money to purchase your armour again.  It doesn't help, later in the game, when an enemy takes out a piece of equipment that was providing a significant boost to your stats, and now you must waste lots of magic and items on keeping this character alive.

Money itself is very hard to come by, especially since enemies only drop experience and items, and even then you can only choose one or the other, you can't receive both experience and items from the same battle.  It may have been an unrealistic trope to always have enemies carrying around big bags of money wherever they went, but at least it made games somewhat playable.  In Lunar: Dragon Song, you can only get money from selling items and making deliveries.  Deliveries require you to take a job from someone and then bring items or packages to someone in a different town (which also requires you to go all the way through a monster-infested forest or two over and over and over).  What makes this method exceptionally cruel is that often times, you must hunt down this material yourself, and in some cases it was hard to find, since you have to fight many monsters that drop many random items before they'll drop the one you need.  Then once you've found it, you have to go and deliver it halfway across the world map.

Wandering around the world of Lunar this time around wouldn't have been bad if the music had at least been good.  Instead, it sounds like someone tried to mimic Iwadare's style from the first two games and failed.  I wouldn't have minded, since running everywhere would've shortened the amount of time I'd spend listening to each piece... except that I wasn't allowed to run, or else I'd lose HP.  The option was there, but it was like giving someone chocolate flavoured rat poison.  It tastes good, but you'll lose health and possibly die if you eat it.  If I'm going to be told I'm not allowed to run, I'd better be allowed to enjoy the walk, or else I'm not going to want to take the journey.


Speaking of death, here's a spoiler for you: one of the characters dies, and the other characters hardly react in any way during or after the scene.  It makes me wonder if the translation team dropped the ball on the entire scene, or if the original writers were the ones who didn't know enough to give our hero time to grieve his fallen comrade.  If this is what it means to be in the Dragonmaster's party, then I want out, now.  I know there was a battle right after your comrade's Heroic Sacrifice, but after the battle...

Battles themselves were also rather annoying.  When fighting, you could only choose what action you wanted to take.  It was as if the team who made the game didn't know how to make your characters target enemies on the DS, because your actions were always taken against random enemies.  All battle strategy, therefore, went out the window.  You no longer could count on eliminating your enemy in a well planned out manner.  Instead, sheer luck determined who lived and died in battle.  It was an awful system of game play that somehow fit right in with an awful game.

Battles, and especially boss fights, take up both screens.  Unfortunately, and this is a design choice I hate in DS games, the two screens are meant to be seen as one during these battles.  A boss will naturally appear on both screens with a gap in the middle where his top half is supposed to join up to his bottom half.  And sometimes a random enemy will slightly overlap onto the other screen.  It's more of a peeve than an actual design flaw, but it's one that I will complain about in DS games when applicable.

Now not all of these flaws are bad.  Forbidding a character to run might've been a good idea if it was implemented in a game that made you want to explore your surroundings.  Instead, it draws the game out and is another example of a poorly designed way to keep you playing the game for longer than you wanted to.  Breaking a character's equipment might've worked in a Final Fantasy game where everything, including money, is easier to come by and yet it would happen with enough frequency that you'd have to decide whether you want to buy a couple extra weapons or a few extra potions with your last gil.  Even the choice between items and experience might've been better in a game where your enemies didn't automatically match your own level.


...Because The Future Can Take It All Away From You

In the end, all of these features, combined with the shoddy translation and already horrible music, combined to form a bag of complete shit called Lunar: Dragon Song, and if you ask me, this isn't a good way for such a glorious series to end.  It feels like they took their beloved pet out back and shot him, then tossed him to the pigs to eat.  Bag of shit indeed.

Actually, there was one diamond waiting for me at the bottom of my bag: the end credits rolled and I didn't have to play the game any more.

Images stolen from LunarNET

Treasure Hunter is a new column that will cover my swag purchases, swag alerts, toys and anything of a collectible nature (that I can think of). This column will replace the swag alerts that previous fell under my Geek Babble columns. For the time being Treasure Hunter has no set day of the week. As for the name, it comes from one of my favorite abilities in Final Fantasy Tactics. Enjoy!

Unfortunately, I have nothing to contribute to Geoff's Ten Days of Street Fighter articles. Anyone who knows me knows that Street Fighter isn't my flavor when it comes to fighting games. Not because I hate SF, but I'm one of those very people who were alienated by the franchise back in the days of Street Fighter II. With that said, I do enjoy some fighting games, but for the most part I'm an RPG gamer. Which is why on Tuesday I was probably the only one at my local GameStop buying Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon instead of Street Fighter IV. Though the staff were kind enough to tear themselves away from SFIV so I could pick up my pre-order. I also managed to acquire a laser cel with my copy of Fire Emblem, and it looks pretty good.