So, I made an impulse decision to buy the Wii-U on launch day. I deeply regretted my purchase until I began what could be referred to as my Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate addiction. After about 300 hours of play I weaned myself off of the game and left my Wii-U to collect dust. Normally I'd say that's hyperbole, but the thing does get dusty pretty quickly.
This past month I actually booted it up once again in order to play the highly anticipated Pikmin 3. I had a delightful time playing the game, even if it was far too brief. I'm going to be honest when I say that I don't think that even first party Nintendo games are enough to save the system anymore, but that's not the point! The point is that I booted up my Wii-U to play a first party Nintendo game that wasn't a mini game collection!
Other than the mini-gameless fun I had on the Wii-U I also played the PS3 a fair bit. Tales of Xillia came out at the beginning of the month, so I got my Japanese action RPG on for about 50 hours. The game was good, but I was disappointed. Get ready, because I'm going to complain about it quite a bit.
Last but certainly not least I had a lot of fun playing Dive Kick. The ridiculous fighting game parody finally got released. I dove, but I also kicked.
I have new September games I should be playing right now, so let's get on with it. It's Game Time!
Pikmin 3
Nintendo hasn't exactly been churning out quality products on the Wii-U, but they promised me that Pikmin 3 would be worth the wait. It was even delayed, because it needed more polish. Now we're almost a year into the system's life span and Pikmin 3 is the first real game Nintendo has released for the thing after its initial launch. They seem to think that Pikmin 3 is going to lead the charge into this coming holiday season and boost the Wii-U's sales. I don't want to be a downer, but I don't think it's going to.
I really liked Pikmin 3, just as I liked the previous two games in the franchise. If you also enjoyed those games then this one will be right up your alley as well. That's because it isn't a whole lot different than its predecessors. You still gather up the cute little plant critters and throw them at things in order to complete tasks. You can have 100 Pikmin following you at a time, but more can be stored in the spaceship known as "The Onion" in case you ever need to pull some out. When the Pikmin defeat an enemy or find a colored pellet they will bring them back to the onion in order to create new Pikmin for you.
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| Pikmin like to chill out in the Onion. |
The main difference in Pikmin 3 comes from the fact that you now have control over three characters. They crash landed on the Pikmin planet while searching for a way to save the denizens of their starving planet. It just so happens that the planet Pikmin 3 takes place on is rich with gigantic fruit that they can use to make juice. You are tasked with gathering fruit while trying to find the necessary parts to fix your spaceship and return home. These are three new characters Charlie the captain, Alph the engineer, and Brittany the biologist. If you liked Captain Olimar do not fear, because you still get to hear about him and Louie in diary entries scattered throughout the world.
With three characters at your disposal the game places an emphasis on multitasking, but not enough of an emphasis to make it a necessity. Like the previous two games you are given a time limit for each day. You have until the sun goes down before you have to get back on the ship and fly into orbit. There will often be numerous things you want to get done in a day and while three characters makes it easier I often found myself only using one at a time. You can have someone get a fruit, while someone else is destroying a barrier.
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| Even though you have three characters you probably won't use them all. |
At the end of each day the game will show you all the fruit you acquired and then squeeze it into juice. Depending on the size of the fruit it will make a certain amount of juice. In order to continue playing the game you need one jar of juice per night for your characters to consume. This is supposed to add a sense of urgency, which is why you would want to be multitasking. However, you become overrun with juice very quickly and it doesn't really matter if it takes an extra day to complete a task. I beat the game in around 40 days and I still had a ridiculous amount of juice left over.
Pikmin 3 tries to move forward, but it's ultimately stuck in the past. There really isn't any reason that the game should have the day night cycle anymore. All it does is artificially gate your progress. To make it a bit more annoying you have to go through all the fruit squeezing and hear one of the crew members diary entries every single night. It's cool at first, but it gets a little tedious after a while. One thing I will say is that the graphics are amazing. Well, not all of them. The main thing that impressed me was the fruit. Whenever you get a fruit you can rotate it around and look at it, and they all look amazing. Something about them looks so real and delicious, while the rest of the game just looks average.
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| The fruit in Pikmin 3 looks ridiculously good. |
I don't really know how I feel about Pikmin 3. It's a fun game and I liked it while I was playing it, but that was only for around 13 hours. The game was super polished, but there isn't a lot of reason to go back and play any more of it. On top of that it's almost the exact same game that the previous ones were. I normally don't care about that, but there just wasn't a whole lot to get really excited about. I can't tell if I'm getting old and jaded, or if Nintendo isn't releasing the kind of magical console games they used to. Their handheld games on the other hand are still out of this world so I don't know what they're doing,
Tales of Xillia
The first Tales game I played was Tales of Phantasia on the PSOne. I never finished it, but I thought it was pretty good. The first Tales game I played to completion was Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube and to this day it remains one of my favorite games. For one reason or another I didn't really continue on the Tales train so I missed out on all the PS2 iterations. I've read a lot about the series and I've played a bunch of the more recent installments. Xillia looked to be one of the best in the series, so I went ahead and picked it up.
I'm not going to say that Xillia is bad, because I enjoyed it. However, I was certainly disappointed. It starts off very strong. You can choose to follow the story through the eyes of Jude the medical student, or Milla Maxwell the lord of spirits in human form. I chose Jude, because in battle he uses his fists and that's badass. However, shortly after I left the first town I stopped thinking that everything was so great.
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| I like punching stuff in battle |
Tales games are known for being filled to the brim with content. You can get tons of sidequests and most of them are actually worth your time. The battle systems are action oriented and very fun. Tales games tend to have have fairly similar anime-esque stories, but the characters often overshadow the played out plot. Xillia does have a fun battle system, but I can't really say it was filled to the brim with content, or that the characters were very good.
Something about Xillia made me miss the way JRPGs used to be, or more specifically I wanted this game to be more like Tales of Symphonia. I've seen a lot of people say that Xillia is their new favorite Tales game, which I just can't understand because it seems like a stripped down version of what these games used to be. There is no overworld map. Instead you travel from town to town by going through huge wide open plains inhabited by way too many monsters. Sure, you can battle the monsters, which is fun. It just gets annoying after a while, because the battles are so stupidly easy. Even boss encounters were a walk in the park the entire way through the game. I could have turned up the difficulty, but the normal difficulty should not be the easiest thing in the world. If I changed the game to easy I probably could have smashed my face on the controller to get through the battles!
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| The battle system in Xillia is great. |
Hardly any of the sidequests were worth it and the game lets you know every time you can do a new one. Despite that I still missed quite a few. The game also marks off whatever NPCs you can talk to on a map making exploration in towns mean absolutely nothing. Upon completing the game all I had left to do was beat the secret dungeon and secret boss. I had done every other thing available to me. This all wouldn't have been so bad if the plot and characters hadn't worn me down by the end.
I tried so hard to like Jude as a character, but I just couldn't do it. The entire time he tries to define his purpose in life, but just ends up coming off as a wishy washy tool. He follows Milla, because he feels obligated to take responsibility for his actions despite the fact that there was nothing to take responsibility for in the first place. Oh yeah, he's also inexplicably in love with Milla even though she's a freaking spirit and he knows that... Then you have my favorite character Alvin who was pretty cool for most of the game until about halfway through when they take his character and smash it to pieces. I won't bore you with the details of that though. What sucks is that there were parts of Xillia's plot that were genuinely surprising, but I just couldn't get behind any of the characters to form a bond with the plot.
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| Oh Alvin, why did they have to ruin you? |
This is a problem I have when I play a lot of modern games. I get stuck thinking about how much better games used to be, or how the last iteration of a game was in comparison to the new one. This game made me think that maybe I had just grown out of the Tales series. In order to test that I fired up the Xbox 360 and started to play Tales of Vesperia. I am now near the end of Vesperia and I think that it is better than Xillia in every possible facet except the battle system. Vesperia may in fact be better than Symphonia, which means a lot coming from me. Xillia wasn't a bad game by any means I just didn't connect with it at all. It's a fun JRPG on a console that hasn't seen a lot of them.
DiveKick
When I first saw DiveKick I knew it was supposed to be a joke, because that's what it was conceived as. It's still pretty funny to me, but I think that at some point it evolved into something much more than a joke. For anyone who doesn't know what DiveKick is I'll explain it, because it's a fairly simple concept.
It's a stripped down fighting game. Each fighter starts on the opposite end of the screen. Like all fighting games the goal is to defeat your opponent, but the catch is that there are only two buttons. One is used to dive into the air and the other is used to kick down. If you push the kick button on the ground you can push yourself backwards. If you kick the opponent then they die and you win the round. All it takes is one kick.
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| This is a real video game. |
See, DiveKick started off as an inside joke of the fighting game community. Some of the characters in the game are even based off of prominent people in the fighting game community such as Madcatz community manager Markman and CEO tournament organizer Alex Jebaily. Hell, the games creator "Keits" runs Shoryuken one of the main fighting game websites on the internet.
Seeing the game in action is even a joke. It looks like a bad flash game. All of the characters say stupid things and the announcer is downright hilarious. In spite of that somehow the game transformed into something amazing. I don't know if it was intentional or if I'm just looking too deep into the game, but it's basically a fighting game distilled down into a form that anyone can enjoy.
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| At some point the characters in DiveKick got a little out of hand. |
I like to watch fighting games, because I find them exciting. Playing them on the other hand does not always feel the same way. I'm not as good as a lot of the people I play with, which can take away a lot of the fun. That's not to say that I've never had fun playing fighting games. It's a thrill when you're having a close match and one more hit could decide the match. That moment is literally all DiveKick is. If you get hit you lose the round. More than that it takes away all the bullshit systems that most fighting games have and is just pure mechanics. Well, not exactly you still have super meter and can do special attacks by pushing both buttons, but it's still almost just pure mechanics.
DiveKick is an interesting game that doesn't seem to be getting the attention it deserves. It's a fascinating concept and it could be a bridge that gets people into more involved fighting games if seen in the right light.
GTA is coming
Recently I feel like all I do is hate on the games I've been playing, but that will certainly not be the case next time I write one of these.
On September 17th I will be playing Grand Theft Auto V. There is no question in my mind that it will be incredible. I have some pretty bold statements I could make about it, but I'll save those for the next installment. Rock Star seems to be making something special and it could be a game that people will look back to as one of the finest games this generation.
Other than that you can look forward to hearing all about the stupid amount I played One Piece Pirate Warriors 2. I started playing it last night and it sure is another Dynasty Warriors One Piece game. I might play some other games too, but GTA V is most likely going to consume every waking hour of free time I have. I can't wait to get back to Los Santos!
See you next month.
-Manny
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