I finally got my hands on Tokyo Jungle, One Piece: Pirate Warriors, and Borderlands 2. All of which I had been looking forward to for months. I still haven't beaten Tokyo Jungle, but it's interesting enough that I think I'll end up coming back to it. One Piece is like every other Dynasty Warriors game, so you probably know how that it. I enjoyed playing both of the games quite a bit.
Borderlands 2 on the other hand I may have enjoyed a little too much. I guess you could say I lost my fair share of sleep because of the all-night co-op sessions I was having. It met and exceeded my expectations for what a new Borderlands could amount to. Let's just say I really like it. Due to the fact that I like it a lot, I also have an extraordinary amount to say about it. That means I won't be talking about it much here, but I will be doing a Game Time ID dedicated entirely to my love of Borderlands 2.
Every time I write a new one of these I become more aware of how terrible I am at writing intros for them. So without further adieu let's get into the discussion so I can cause minimal intro pain to both you and myself. It's game time!
Tokyo Jungle
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| Yeah, the game's just as crazy as this image. |
Crazy Japanese games are nothing new, but they've been few and far between lately. Lucky for everyone Sony decided that they wanted to bring back the crazy by releasing Tokyo Jungle. Have you ever wanted to see a Pomeranian savagely kill a hyena in a single blow? How about a deer wearing some hot Hip-hop clothes? If either of those things sound like something you'd be interested in Tokyo Jungle has you covered.
The world is in a post apocalyptic state and animals have become feral. Now they all run amok on the streets of Tokyo which has become not unlike a jungle. Oh yeah, there are also Dinosaurs. The gameplay is focused around this idea. You choose an animal to play as and try to survive as long as you can.
Everything about the game is very arcade-like. You can choose either survival mode, where you survive for as long as possible, or story mode where you have set objectives. The story mode missions can only be unlocked by playing survival, so it's the mode you'll be playing the most. You start off by picking what animal you'll play as. Initially you can only play as a cute little Pomeranian, but completing specific challenges will net you more animals. Once you have picked your animal of choice you'll be thrust into the wilds of Tokyo.
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| Sights like this are commonplace in Tokyo Jungle. |
You'll either be a carnivore, or an herbivore. As an herbivore you'll only be able to eat plants randomly generated throughout the world. The attack of herbivores is often very low, but they can double jump and move very quickly. You can still kill other animals if you want, but you won't be able to eat them. Then as a carnivore you have to viciously attack every animal you see and then eat their corpse. Eating keeps your hunger gauge filled up, while giving you calories. Certain calorie milestones make the animal rank up, so they become stronger. If you let it empty your health will start to slowly drain until you die. If there's nothing around to eat there are sometimes pools of water to stave off the hunger for a little bit.
Much to my surprise the controls of Tokyo Jungle aren't terrible. In fact, I think they're excellent and that mainly stems from the fact that they're simple. Movement is done with the right stick, but if you flick the left stick in a direction the animal will make quick movements. It's all very twitch. Moving around an enemy rapidly is easy, so you can get in to attack them a few times and get out before they even notice what's going on. This makes combat quick and exciting. Alternatively you can sneak up to an opponent and score a clean kill. If you wait near an unsuspecting enemy for long enough fangs will appear on them letting you know that you're ready for a critical strike.
An average round of Tokyo Jungle takes around twenty minutes to a half hour, but can end up going for an hour or more. A minute of real time is equivalent to one year. As time goes on the animals around the world get tougher and tougher, so you really need to push to get that next high score. In order to make the game have an even deeper challenge animals can only survive for fourteen years before they die, making it crucial to reproduce. In order to reproduce it's necessary to mark all points in any one territory by peeing on them. Once every spot has been "marked" mates will show up on the map. There are three levels of mate which are prime, average, and dirty. Prime mates require you to have eaten enough calories to get to boss rank, and average requires you to be a veteran. Dirty mates don't require a rank, which is why they will give you fleas. The better the mate the more babies they will make. When you get a mate you have to take them back to the nest, where you will mount them as the game fades to black. When everything comes back up you will be in control of a baby animals with some others following you. The other animals amount to extra lives.
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| You'll need to procreate in order to survive the harsh jungles of Tokyo. |
It all sounds complicated, but it isn't in practice. Tokyo Jungle is an arcade survival game. You start off weak, but as you change generations and advance you become stronger. You can become even stronger than that by unlocking new animals (There are a TON of animals). That's actually my main gripe about the game is that it's a total grind to unlock more animals. Every animal has a specific challenge to unlock one other specific animal. It can end up taking a while to complete what you need to do, so it can become a bit tedious. It takes a whole lot of play time to get to the crazy animals like dinosaurs, so it really depends on how much fun you're having.
Lucky for me I do have a fun time playing Tokyo Jungle. There's something about trying to survive longer each and every run that I find to be entertaining. It helps that each subsequent animal is stronger than the last so you feel like you're actually advancing. It's just a super weird fun game, which helps overshadow the fact that it looks like a launch era PS2 game that barely has any music.
Weird games like this have been few and far between and it's even more rare for a game like this to actually be any fun. It was a retail game in Japan, but you can download it for $15 on PSN here. I highly recommend you check it out.
One Piece :Pirate Warriors
I don't know what it is about Dynasty Warriors, but somehow I keep buying more games in the series.
Well, not exactly. I refuse to play any more actual Dynasty Warriors games, but I have been known to play it's anime spin-offs. Specifically Dynasty Warriors Gundam. As I've written about in the past I hate them, but at the same time I have an indescribable love for them. There's something about the totally mindless action that I can really get behind. So when I heard that they were going to be releasing a Dynasty Warriors One Piece game I basically lost my shit. To top it off, it was actually going to get a U.S. release, and it did!
I don't think I've ever mentioned it on this blog, but One Piece is one of my favorite TV shows. In the middle of high school I saw clips from the CP9 arc and decided that I needed to watch the entire series in it's original Japanese. I ended up doing that and I've never looked back since. Needless to say I love the show, so the ability to play as it's characters as they completely annihilate everything in their path sounded very appealing.
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| This is basically my reaction to the U.S. release of Pirate Warriors. |
I'm happy to say that reality actually met up with my expectations on this one. I wasn't expecting anything ridiculously fancy, because well, it's a Dynasty Warriors game. A Dynasty Warriors game with One Piece characters is exactly what I got. There's a whole lot of mashing square while occasionally throwing in triangle or circle. It's not saying much, but this seems like the most advanced Musou game to date. Since all of the characters have moves from the anime they have most of them in the game, which makes for great combo variety. I think it also helps that there are only thirteen characters instead of the usual hundred or so. This means that each character has a chance to be unique instead of an exact copy.
Pirate Warriors also switches it up with the single player, but it isn't necessarily for the better. At times the maps will turn into a third person action/adventure game. Every level like this you'll be required to use Luffy, since he's the main character. You'll go around and obliterate all of your enemies like normal, but sometimes you'll have to swing around with Luffy's rubber arms or solve puzzles. At first it makes for a nice change of pace, but after the second or third time it starts to get in the way of what I expect from a game of this type. It becomes especially tedious, because Luffy says the same thing every time he does an action. It's fine every so often, but it happens constantly in these sequences, which is enough to drive me mad. It's easy to see where Namco Bandai was going with this, but it definitely didn't come out as intended.
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| At it's core Pirate Warriors is just another Musou game. |
In case you couldn't already tell One Piece: Pirate Warriors isn't for everyone. For starters it's pretty much necessary that you like One Piece. This game targets a very specific audience and Namco Bandai realized this. Here in the U.S. it was only released as a downloadable with just the Japanese voices. So when I say you have to like One Piece, you have to REALLY like it. Even with that extreme love it's still kind of hard to justify even at the discounted price of $40. The single player campaign is only around eight hours long and there isn't much to do after that.
All I know is that I had a fun time playing this game.
Borderlands 2 addiction?
I still have to beat Tokyo Jungle, but I think it's going to be a while before I get around to it. Borderlands 2 has basically been consuming my life. Normally when I beat a game I throw it to the side and move on to the next thing, but I can't do that with Borderlands 2. There's something about it that keeps drawing me in for more. There are a lot of people who don't seem to like it very much, but I can't really understand why. It improves on the original in almost every way possible.
Next month is another big month for releases. I'll be getting Pokemon White 2, Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracles, and Asaassin's Creed 3. I've already pre-ordered all of them thanks to the magic of Amazon Prime. Maybe I'll be over Borderlands before Pokemon comes out, but at this rate I highly doubt it.
Well, that's all for this edition of Game Time. See you all next month.
-Manny
