Game Time - July 2015

We're less than a month away from video game releases blowing up again, so in the meantime I've been playing some odd games. In fact, two out of the three are Japanese. One is a new release for July, and the other is one I've wanted to play for years now.

Oh yeah, I also played Godzilla on the PS4. It's not very good, but I think it's kind of fun. Check out a bunch of videos of it on my YouTube channel if you're interested.

It's been a weird month, so let's get right into it. It's game time.

N++

I played a bit of N+ on the PSP, but that was before I had gotten into twitch platformers. What I mean by that is that platforming games like N++ have become much more common since I was in high school. Games like Super Meat Boy have since come along to make the sub-genre much more appealing. I'm not saying that N+ wasn't appealing, but I just wasn't prepared for it's demanding jumps and precise timing. I've always liked platformers, but never been super interested in getting infuriated by intense difficulty. I think what Super Meat Boy prepared me for this type of game by giving me fluid controls. That way you know the game is hard, but fair. When you mess up it's your fault and not an unfair thing done by the game. N++ is the exact same.

What's cool about N++ and its predecessors is that the level layouts are very simple. They're something that I'd expect to see in a very basic flash game. Most of them are inside a small shape with only one or two jumps, but as you go it ramps up quite nicely. On average a course only lasts ten or twenty seconds, so the pace is breakneck. You play as a ninja who apparently loves gold. So your goal is to make it through each course and collect as much gold as possible, as fast as possible. The gold starts off easy, but now that I'm further along I hardly ever collect any gold, because it's set up to make you die.

This is one of the easier stages

Like Super Meat Boy, N++ doesn't want you to stop for a second. Once you die, you're right back at the beginning of the stage to try again. There is almost no break/ I think there's a setting you can change to have it take longer, but I don't know why you'd want that. The thing that makes or breaks these types of games for me is the control, and N++ has excellent control. The Ninja floats through the air with a solid weight to him, and gains tons of momentum on ramps. There's a great sense of speed.

I brought the game over to a friends house this past week to try out the multiplayer race mode. We ended up having a great time. You can have up to four players racing to the exit, with increasing difficulty. You have infinite lives until one player reaches the finish line. After that the other players only have their current life to finish. To make things more interesting whenever a player finished they get to control a missile in order to try and kill the other players. It's interesting that race mode has its own unique levels and there are a ton of them.

How do you even get all that gold?

N++ is fun, and even though it's tough I haven't found myself getting frustrated. As you play you unlock more levels, and color schemes for the game. It starts as black and gray, but you can get a whole bunch more. Some of them are cool, but a lot of them are too crazy for my eyes to handle. On a lot of them it becomes too hard for me to keep track of the ninja. There are a whole bunch to unlock though, but I doubt I'm good enough to get them all. I'm going to try my best though, so we'll see.

Taiko No Tatsujin: V Version (Taiko Drum Master)

I'm a big fan of rhythm games, in case you didn't know that. Much to my dismay very few new ones come to the U.S. and if they do they're far and few between. Due to this fact I get upset when I see how many games in this genre come out in Japan that I'm not able to play. Sure, Persona 4 Dancing All Night is coming out this fall, but I decided I wanted to play a new rhythm game this summer! In order to do that I pre-ordered Taiko No Tatsujin: V Version, or as it's known as in English, Taiko Drum Master V Version.

I actually have a U.S. Taiko Drum Master release on PS2 that came with a sweet drum peripheral. You had to use the drum sticks that came with it to hit on the left or right side of the head, and hit the sides for rim taps. It worked quite well, but I never got very good at it. These games are the same in Japanese arcades, which I hope that someday I'll be able to try out. Newer games in the franchise, like this one on the Vita obviously use the buttons. Like other rhythm games a note highway appears on screen where blue and red smiling drum heads appear on screen. When they reach the white circle at the end of the screen you need to press the proper buttons. Red buttons are head hits, while blue are rim taps. If it's a big blue or red icon, then you need to hit two head buttons at the same time, or two rim buttons. There are various button layouts you can use. The one I prefer has head hits on the face buttons and the d-pad, while rim hits are set to L and R.

The songs start easy like this, but get much more difficult.

As you may have guessed since I imported the game it isn't in English, but that doesn't usually matter for rhythm games, because you just have to push the buttons at the right time. Playing the actual game is no issue at all, but I did have some issues with the newly introduced RPG mode. Since I can't read Japanese I'll try to explain the plot to the best of my ability. You play as one of two living Taiko drums. The two read a book and get transported into a musical world that is being overtaken by evil. In the town they're transported to they meet a young girl who is fighting to save the land. They team up and begin to beat down monsters, This is all I've got. I did beat it, but there are villains who are introduced and other characters who I have no idea about. It actually has a lot of dialogue. That's not the part that caused an issue though.

In the RPG mode you play songs to complete quests. Upon completing quests you get items, which you can activate while playing songs. The weapons I could figure out. They had elemental icons, and stats that were easily discernible. You could also equip special attacks, and healing items and those I have absolutely no idea about! For example in my playthough I unlocked Lili, and Kazuya accessories. Yes, characters from Tekken. I found out that using them as my special attack will do damage. Those were the only ones I figured out. I got at least 40 other ones that seemed to have to effect. The Tekken characters made it easy to win quests involving monsters, but are not so much help on quests where you need to play so many notes in a row. It's hard to gauge, but I still managed to complete the game.

See, I have no idea what this special is doing!

There are still a ton of sidequests I can do, but I think I've reached me skill ceiling. There are four difficulty levels in the game, which are easy, normal, hard, and oni. I can trounce songs on easy and normal. Hard is a mixed bag. Some stages are fine, but others are nigh impossible for me. Then there's oni, which my mind can't even begin to comprehend! The notes come out so fast I can't keep up and my fingers certainly can not move that quickly. The main issue is that the game wants the equivalent of drum rolls, which require you to push the buttons super rapidly in succession. I can't do it to save my life if there are more than three hits involved.

It's a super fun rhythm game with an extreme variety of music. There are songs from a lot of Namco Bandai games and a few Sega ones. I really like all the J-pop though. It's all super upbeat and very catchy. There's a lot of vovaloid stuff like Hatsune Miku as well, which may be my least favorite songs in the game. It has a total of 88 songs in it and a bunch more as DLC. While the Vita isn't region locked for games, DLC is. So I can't access any of the free DLC I got for pre-ordering the game, which kind of sucks. I'm still having a lot of fun though.

Phantasy Star Online 2

Phantasy Star Online 2 was supposed to get a U.S. release. It was never outright cancelled, but it's been years since Sega has said anything about it, so we can assume that it will never receive a release in this country! To make matters even worse an English translation of the game was released in Asian territories, but U.S. IP addresses are blocked. Much to my dismay that IP ban was let down for a few days. It was long enough for one of my friends to convince me to play it and get hopelessly addicted to it before the servers were fixed and I was banned once again. The Japanese version is much farther along than the Asian version, but obviously not in English. Well, not in an official capacity anyways. There is a very dedicated group of individuals who run a proxy and translate as much of the game as they can. So now I'm a level 40 RaCast in the Japanese version of PSO2!

Let's back up a bit though and give some context. When I was twelve I saw Phantasy Star Online advertised in a Nintendo Power magazine for the Gamecube. It looked cool and I wanted it. There were also a few other games I wanted around that same time. On my thirteenth Birthday we celebrated my brother's baptism and my birthday with a party. I convinced my brother he really wanted PSO so he could get it as a gift and I could play it. It worked and I still own that copy to this day. I don't even think he knows it's his game.

Man, robots in the PSO universe look so dope.

So what is PSO you ask? Well, it's a pseudo mmo that's more of a loot driven action RPG. At one point it was online, and still technically is. You can play the PC version for free on a private server, which I did for a long time during high school with some friends. I don't know what it is about PSO that draws me to it, but I just can't get enough of it. You essentially play as a mercenary who is hired to get rid of monsters in order to make planets inhabitable. You have an attack that if timed perfectly can be made into a three hit combo. There are swords, lances, dual pistols, rifles, rocket launchers, wands, magic, and much more. There are various classes you can play as and each have a very different style. The main component to the game is collecting sweet loot to improve your character. With your loot you travel through various areas and defeat enemies on a quest for greatness.

PSO2 is very similar, but takes some aspects of the game that came before it Phantasy Star Universe. PSU was a very short lived game that didn't receive as much love as PSO. It took the same basic concept and added special moves called Photon Arts to the equation. PSU was still active my first semester of college and I played it a little bit. As far as I know there are no private servers for that game.

Monsters can get to be pretty big.

Now we're here in the year 2015 and I'm playing a sequel to my beloved PSO. It's largely the same as the original, but now there are many more MMO like elements, because it's a free to play game. You can pay monthly if you want in  order to get special access to things, but it's not required. It's still the same type of action RPG loot grind goodness I crave. Oh yeah you can also still feed your mag, which is a little robot that follows you around and boosts your stats. I love pet things like that in video games!

The best part about PSO and PSO2 is that you can easily get together with your friends and complete a quest while having a good time. It doesn't take a huge time investment, and it's fun. You can do a quest real quick with a friend, or just do the entire game by yourself. There are quests in PSO2 meant for larger groups of people, but you don't have to do them in the regular progression of the game. I've been playing it a lot as my favorite class the ranger. I go around and blast people with my sweet rocket launcher and it's a whole lot of fun. I'm thinking about doing a feature about my adventures in PSO2, but we'll have to wait and see.

30 minutes left

As I'm typing this it is 11:30 PM August 3rd, which means that Galak-Z will unlock on PlayStation 4 in 30 minutes. You can bet that I'll be writing about it in the August edition of Game Time. My hype for this space shooter is unreal. Then tomorrow the Rare Replay collection for Xbox One will show up, and on the 20th Little Battlers Experience for the 3DS will show up.

I'm getting some pretty solid games in August and I'm very excited to play them all. Watch out for all of this and more in the August edition of Game Time!