Game Time - August 2012

Now that it's the end of August I have returned to tell you all about my various gaming exploits. I managed to fit in a decent bit of gaming despite the fact that I started and finished watching Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood. It was surprisingly good, but this isn't a blog about anime. It's all about the video games.

As you already know I played a fair bit of Persona 4 Arena, which you can read about here. Even though I played it a whole bunch more my thoughts on it didn't change a whole lot. So if you want to hear about it go read what I already wrote.

The games I spent the most time with were Kingdom Hearts 3DS, and The Last Story. That's right, The Last Story finally stopped getting delayed long enough to come out! Since these are both fairly sizable games I have a lot to go off about.

I haven't done one of these in a long time, so I'm anxious to get all of these thoughts out. Let's not  waste any more time. It's game time!

Kingdom Hearts 3DS

I've been a fan of the Kingdom Hearts series since its inception. I really liked it back then, but with each passing game I find myself growing more apprehensive about the series. For some reason Square thinks it's a good idea to keep releasing non numbered Kingdom Hearts sequels. I understand that the series makes them a literal ton of money, but now it's getting out of control. It wouldn't bug me so much if each new entry in the game didn't seem to factor heavily into the overall plot of the series. To make it even worse they're all on different consoles.

Originally it seemed to me that Nomura had an overall plan for the series that he was following very closely. With each passing game however, I feel that he's making everything up as he goes along. A lot of the time it's not even necessarily making the overall plot better, but more convoluted. That's where the true issue with all of these non-numbered sequels lies. How the hell is anyone going to know what's going on in Kingdom Hearts 3 if and when it ever comes out if they haven't played all these games? I've played most of them and read wiki pages on the games and I still barely understand what the hell is going on half the time.

A lot of the Kingdom Hearts 3DS story is kind of like a fever dream.

I liked Kingdom Hearts 3DS, but it took the plot of the series and made it infinitely more convoluted. I'd go into more detail about it, but it would basically spoil the entire game and I never want to do that. On top of that the story itself is told in the most convoluted way ever. Instead of showing things linearly a lot of the important cut scenes are shown as optional flashbacks, which could have easily been shown chronologically. On op of that you're switching between two plot lines every twenty minutes against your will, but more on that later.

So it probably sounds like I hate everything about this game right? Well now that I got all of my grumpy complaining out of the way I'm glad to let you know that I actually did like it. What's it all about you ask? Here, I'll let you in on the basis of the plot.

Yen Sid thinks Sora and Riku suck, so they need to become TRUE keyblade masters.

Turns out Sora and Riku aren't strong enough to take on Master Xehanort (See, if you didn't play Birth by Sleep on the PSP you don't even have any idea who that is). Since his impending return is short at hand they need to take every chance to power up. In order to do that Mickey and Yen Sid have decided that they must take the Mark of Mastery Exam in order to become true Keyblade masters. In order to do this they are sent into a dream world to find the keyholes of sleeping worlds in order to awaken them. This is pretty much old hat in the Kingdom Hearts universe.

As you may have guessed you will be travelling from world to world fighting monsters. This time they're rainbow colored things called Dream Eaters. Since you'll be playing as Sora and Riku in a dream world they don't have partners. In order to remedy that you'll be crafting your own Dream Eaters, which is where you'll be getting your skills from. If you want to get extra crazy you'll be able to pet and feed your Dream Eaters much like Nintendogs.

The Cyber Yog is just one of many Pokemon knock-offs you can pet.

The gameplay itself doesn't stray much from the rest of the series, but it most closely resembles the gameplay in Birth By Sleep. Sora and Riku each wield keyblades, which you can swing with the push of a button. Chaining hits together will get you into a combo. When you add skills into the mix the combat gets a fair amount deeper. A set amount of skills can be equipped to your command deck, which you will be able to cycle through in battle. Some of them are special keyblade attacks, while the others are magic. Combining all of this stuff together makes for a fun combat system that has a reasonable amount of depth for those looking to find it.

Sora and Riku don't fight very differently, but have totally different plot lines that end up converging in the end. In an attempt to have two simultaneous stories someone came up with the drop system, which absolutely sucks. Every twenty minutes no matter what you're doing the game forces you to switch between the two characters, which makes the story even harder to follow for absolutely no reason. When this happens in battle you'll have to do the entire thing all over again, which is a serious pain in the ass. Sure, you can up the time limit a little bit, but it never stops it from getting in the way of the experience. I don't see why they couldn't do what Birth By Sleep did where you just do one story at a time. Then again, I'm not a game designer.

I had a fun time playing Birth By Sleep and it got me super pumped up for Kingdom Hearts 3. What I had issues with were all of the things that the series seems to be actively doing to make itself obtuse. Let's just hope that Kingdom Hearts 3 is the next game and not another random non-numbered sequel.

The Last Story

Earlier in the year we saw the release of Xenoblade Chronicles here in the U.S. Now, a mere four months later we are finally seeing another Wii title targeted by Project Rainfall. Once again, we don't know if the release of the game and the mass outcry related to Project Rainfall were related, but I'd like to think that they were.

I'm going to go on record here and say that Xenoblade wasn't exactly all it was cracked up to be. Sure it was a pretty good game, but it wasn't some super next level game or anything. Yes, it did do some awesome ideas on how to make JRPG gameplay better and more efficient and I appreciate that.

Considering the way I feel about Xenoblade I wasn't expecting a whole lot from The Last Story, but what I got was pleasantly surprising. The plot is that of a standard JRPG, but the gameplay is something else entirely. By that I mean that the combat is interesting, but not exactly super great. Have you ever wanted to play a third person cover based shooter, but instead of having guns all of the characters have swords? Perhaps you wanted some of them to cast magic? If so, then The Last Story is the game for you.

You'll be in cover often during battle.

Yeah, that's right. The Last Story is a third person cover based JRPG. You control the main character Zael who has gained the mysterious power of The Outsider. In battle the power allows him to glow blue, which pulls all aggro towards him. In the beginning all you can do is attack with your sword, duck behind cover, roll, shoot a bow, and use the power of The Outsider, which doesn't really leave room for a whole lot of strategy. Therefore you have to go buck wild on the enemy with your sword until they die.

As the game progresses Zael will gain abilities that make the battles much more interesting. Your magicians, along with the enemies leave behind magic circles when they cast spells. If you hold down the attack button you will be sent to a bird's eye view of the battle, where you have been turned into a targeting reticle. If you target a magic circle Zael will use his Gale Slash to break it. Depending on what type of magic was cast various buffs and debuffs will occur.

Eventually you'll be able to issue orders to your party members. It's a shame that you can't give them strategies, because you can only have them use skills or run away. Zael gets more skills, but none of them are super useful. He is able to run up walls, but I think I only ended up doing that a total of three times in the game and it was during a boss fight where I had to. The reason I say the gameplay isn't super great is because it shoots for strategic combat, but misses entirely. Strategy is very rarely, if ever required to win a battle. I often found myself mashing my sword attacks until the enemy was dead, while occasionally breaking magic circles. It's weird, because there was a lot of setup for a very strategic game it's just not executed properly. Almost as if the designers didn't know how to make the battles strategic.

Should we break the magic circle, or break the magic circle? Strategy!

I had a lot of fun fighting battles in The Last Story, although I guess a lot of people didn't. The game defaults to having you auto attack as soon as you get near an enemy. I did that for the first battle, and it sucked. It made it feel like I had absolutely no control over what was going on. That's why I think that anyone thinking about playing the game should switch the controls to manual. It makes the game a whole lot more enjoyable.

Outside of the battle system I really liked the first half of the game. For some reason the chapter format and color scheme reminded me a lot of Resonance of Fate, another JRPG with interesting battle mechanics. However, unlike Resonance of Fate the story of The Last Story makes sense. Zael is a part of a band of mercenaries. It's their overall goal to become knights. Early on in the game Zael falls in love with a mysterious girl (SURPRISE!) and from that moment on his life changes. The game's plot eventually sees Zael and crew entering the castle and mingling with all of the nobles. Also there's war (SURPRISE AGAIN!).

The plot starts off innocent enough, but then like most JRPGS the plot gets needlessly convoluted and totally stupid near the end. This is something I've been noticing a lot lately and it's really starting to annoy me. Where the plot of The Last Story does right is in it's characters. They all feel very real and that's not something you get very often in games these days. It sort of helps that they all have british voice actors, because just like in Xenoblade it makes everything feel more foreign than it actually is and that's refreshing. To top it off the game looks incredible for a Wii game, but the frame rate is a total disaster. So maybe it wasn't worth having it look so good?

The Last Story could have benefited from the higher specs of the PS3 and the 360.

Oh yeah it's also got some multiplayer.... It's uhhh not so great...

NEXT MONTH IS GOING TO RULE!

Thus concludes another segment of Game Time. I hope that you enjoyed my complaint riddled descriptions. If these games weren't exciting enough for you, then perhaps September will have more to offer. I know for certain that I'll be playing an obscene amount of Borderlands 2, along with Tokyo Jungle. I'm most certainly going to throw in some One Piece Pirate Warriors for good measure. So look forward to that.

See you in a month for another one of these and probably before that with something entirely different.

     -Manny

Game Time ID - Persona 4 Arena

Who can't think of good names for features? The answer is me! As I mentioned in the previous post I wanted to change up the Game Time feature a bit, while still keeping it's original form as a monthly thing. I am now going to attempt to do that. 

This new incarnation is called Game Time ID, or in-depth if you want to get a little wild. This week I'll be sharing my thoughts on the time I've spent with Persona 4 Arena with you. Will this new iteration of Game Time stick around? I don't really know, but let's find out together.

It's Game Time!

When I first heard that there was going to be a Persona 4 fighting game I didn't really know what to think. My skepticism subsided as soon as I heard it was being developed by Ark System Works. I love Persona, and I love Blazblue as well as Guilty Gear, so Persona 4 Arena naturally started to sound like a great idea. Persona 3 and 4 characters in a fast paced anime fighter? I was ready to take the plunge into whatever AKSYS was going to offer me.

This past Tuesday Persona 4 Arena was released in America and I have barely stopped playing it since.

Round 1...FIGHT!

I'll admit I went into Persona 4 Arena expecting it to be Blazblue with a Persona skin over it, but that definitely isn't the case. Sure, it's still a fast anime fighter with a bunch of odd systems thrown on top of it, but it doesn't feel the same to me at all. For starters it's much more accessible.

Everyone wants to do a cool looking combo when they're playing a fighting game, but it's not always super easy to pull off. In P4A they make sure that you can do at least one. By pressing square repeatedly you can do a pre-set auto combo, which is actually pretty good. At first it takes a while to get used to that concept, but after a while it becomes an integral part of the game. Another option good for beginners is pushing L1. It will do your DP attack, which is almost always invincible on start-up and it happens instantly. For those of you who don't know what that means, it's basically a move that makes you invincible while it's starting and it happens instantly. It comes in handy, but it is often abused. It can easily be overcome once you know what to look for.

I know that when some people hear the words auto, or easily accessible in conjunction with fighting games they cringe. However, those things are not at odds with the skill level that can be achieved in this game. Sure it's easier than most AKSYS games to get into, but it can get insane pretty quickly. If you want to practice up and do some super long combo that takes away half your opponents health then you can still do that. What I'm saying is that you'll probably get decimated during online play at some point unless you practice up on your Persona skills.

This is Mitsuru's DP. AKA the bane of my existence.

P4A controls slightly different than other AKSYS fighting games and I guess any other fighting game except Jojo's Bizzare Adventure. That's because each character in the game is a Persona user (Kind of like Stands in Jojo). Everyone has a normal and a heavy attack with their weapon, but they also have a normal and heavy attack with their Persona's. AKSYS characters tend to have a lot of variety, but because each character has both a Persona and a weapon this game seems to stand out even more. 

All special moves in the game are done using one or two quarter turns forward or back. Some of Mitsuru's moves need to be charged, but she's an exception. This makes everything relatively simple to pull off as opposed to the 360 degree rotations and half circles these kinds of games often get crazy with. 

I could go on for a good long while about all the other crazy systems this game has going on. In fact most characters have some special bar or meter involved with their moves. However, I'll settle for describing for a few of the overall systems. The burst from Blazblue makes a return, but with an interesting variation. If you're in a combo you can press square, triangle, and circle at the same time to burst out of the attack. Once you burst a B will slowly start to charge up underneath your characters health meter. If it refills you can burst once again. In a Persona reference you can also burst in order to cancel your own moves to continue on a combo. This is called one more burst, which is a reference to the one more attack you get in Persona when you attack an enemies weakness.

There are 13 characters in P4A and they're all unique.

Another reference to Persona is the all out attack. Your character will rush towards the enemy and if they hit you'll enter a cartoon-like scuffle. Mashing buttons will increase the damage, but when you push triangle you can launch the enemy into the air. This allows for some pretty good combos and it's a reference to the source material, so it's doubly cool.

P4A plays great. Like all AKSYS games the animation is outstanding and the movement flows so nicely. Everything happens super fast and still controls great.  

Story Mode

I come to the Persona series for it's strong characters and plot lines, so I was naturally excited for the story mode in Persona 4 Arena. Like Blazblue P4A takes the visual novel approach to story telling. P4A leans much more heavily on the novel part of visual novel. I'm not kidding, it's like reading a novel. It's actually to the point where there is too much text to read.

The story takes place two short months after the Story of Persona 4. The main character Yu Narukami has come back to Inaba for Golden Week. As you can imagine things don't exactly go as planned and everyone ends up in the TV world again. The midnight channel started airing again and all of the playable characters from Persona 4 were featured on it. For some reason they were all said to be taking part in a tournament, which is what ends up happening in the TV world.

They're all ready to take on the P-1 Grand Prix.

This is where the problem I have with the story mode comes into play. It's only been two months since the events of Persona 4. Not a whole lot has changed, so they have to rely heavily on the use of internal monologues for each character. As events happen text will load up the screen with each individual story characters thoughts. Have you ever wanted to get inside Chie's steak filled mind? Well now is your chance! These internal thoughts are broken up by a whole lot of voiced dialogue and around six fights per story.

That sounds pretty awesome right? Well, it starts to grate on you. As interesting as each character's internal thoughts are there are only so many times a different take on the exact same situation can be exciting. Each character goes through four fights in the P-1 Grand Prix, and then there are three fights after that, which I don't want to spoil. The problem is that the same thing happens every single time. There are some slight variations, but none of them are interesting enough to go through multiple times. Blazblue gets away with this style, because the same thing is happening over and over, but it happens differently every time. 

Can you handle this for around 20 hours?

Each character's story took me around an hour and a half to complete when I was actually paying attention to what I was reading. That time inevitably sped up as I began to care less and less. Overall the story will take around twenty hours, which is huge for a fighting game. As I said though it's not exactly the most exciting thing you can do with your time, but it does have some interesting parts and there are certainly some implications about what Persona 5 could be. 

I'm going to go ahead and say that if you don't have a vested interest in the Persona universe, then there is absolutely no way you should play the story mode in Persona 4 Arena. The enjoyment you'll get out of the story completely depends on how much you care about the universe.

Persona references for everyone!

Persona 4 Arena is an interesting game. It will obviously appeal to people who are invested in the Persona universe. It will also appeal to avid fighting game fans who have no knowledge of the characters and world. Then you have people like me who are fans of both and in that case the game is amazing. I honestly have no idea how people who aren't very fond of either would feel about it.

In that case I'd have to guess that it wouldn't be very great. The story would be super boring, but the fighting could still become a draw. It's odd, because a few years ago this would have been a very niche title. It was only within the past few years that the Persona franchise skyrocketed in popularity.

As common sense would dictate people who are into Persona will derive much more pleasure from this game. ATLUS made sure that this game was chock full of the stuff you want to see. It's basically made of fan service (No, not nudity). I main Yosuke and in his opening animations he falls down from a rope, and crashes his bike. People who haven't played Persona 4 would have no idea why I smile every time those animations happen. It's little things like that, that make this game so special to me. It feels like ATLUS is really in touch with it's fans. AKSYS translated that love and made an amazing game.

This kind of game doesn't normally turn out as well as P4A. Everyone should check it out, unless of course you don't like the Persona franchise, or fighting games. In which case you would be CRAZY!

     -Manny

Possible Changes To Game Time

As you may have noticed I haven't done an installment of Game Time in two weeks. Now it is a brand new Sunday and I haven't yet made the new installment either. This mainly stems from the fact that I don't think my weekly game time segments should continue to exist as they do.

For those who don't know for the past few months I've been describing my gaming exploits week by week. While it's interesting as a sort of time capsule for myself, I feel like that's all it is. I want to be able to give people interesting and informative looks at games. The way Game Time is set up now I don't get to go into a huge amount of detail. It works sometimes, but I want more out of it.

I'm going to take some time off from doing Game Time in order to figure out what exactly needs to change.

I do know that I personally still enjoy doing Game Time in it's current form, so I will continue to do it, but on a less frequent basis. I don't always have a ton of time anymore, so doing it once a week can sometimes become tedious. I don't always play different games from week to week, so there tends to be some overlap. Now I'll be doing it at the end of the month. That way I can pick and choose what games I played that I think would be cool to talk about.

As of right now I'm thinking that I'll have two versions of Game Time. The monthly version I just mentioned and another weekly one focused on a single game. Now that big new releases are starting to trickle out again  I think it would be much more informative to give my impressions on one of those each week.

So let's recap

-No Game Time this week
-Game Time in it's current form will return once a month (So at the end of August)
-A new version of Game Time focused on a single game will most likely start up next week

Thank you to anyone who's been reading

     -Manny