This month I'm a bit behind schedule, because I went on a short trip and streamed for Extra Life. For the trip I visited a friend halfway across the country which gave me a few hours on airplanes to play World of Final Fantasy. During Extra Life I played a bunch of multiplayer games with my friends, so nothing new to report there. We did however end up raising $269.69 for the Upstate Golisano Children's Hospital in Syracuse, New York. That's over double what we did last year! I always have a lot of fun doing it. The archive will be up on YouTube eventually, but I have to do some magic to get a 24 hour video up there. If for some reason you still want to donate it should still be up through December at www.extra-life.org/participant/gtwm.
Now let's talk about the hot new games I've been playing! I started off the month with the always hot Yo-Kai Watch 2. Level-5 churned out the second game here in the U.S. less than a year after the first one. It's a marked improvement over the first in almost every way. I played it way more than the original because of that.
Then a few weeks later I jumped right back into single player Rock Band, with the release of Rock Band Rivals. I still play multiplayer almost every week with a few friends, so the new modes were cool to check out. I do think that the single player additions are the true draw with this expansion though.
Finally, against my better judgement I ordered World of Final Fantasy on the Vita. I have been trying to be better with saving money recently, but I really wanted something new to play on the plane to my friend's house. I played the demo on PS4 and caved almost immediately. I think the game has a lot of charm, but the Vita version is pretty rough in spots.
It's game time!
Yo-Kai Watch 2
As most people know by now Yo-Kai Watch took Japan by storm a few years ago. It's popularity has waned a little, but it's still popular on a level that most games can only dream of reaching. For those who aren't familiar with the series you are a child with a magical watch (or pendant if you're playing as a girl) that allows them to see Japanese ghosts known as Yokai. The game revolves around you befriending the Yokai and using them in battle against other Yokai.
This game got railed in reviews for being too similar to the original game, which is certainly a valid criticism. In fact the first few hours are almost exactly the same as the original game, which is kind of a bummer. For the sake of this post I will be referring to the main character of the game as a male named Nate, because that's what I played through the game as. To start off, Nate gets the Yokai Watch stolen by two evil witches. He then forgets everything he knew about Yokai. In a strange turn of events he gets the watch back and relives the first few hours of the original game. He befriends Whisper the Yokai butler, and Jibanyan the cat who has a personal vendetta against cars. It's frustrating, because I just wanted to get to the new stuff. It's definitely good for people who have not played the series before though, because it allows you to get used to the town. You're forced to learn your way around, because you have to hoof it around town on foot until you unlock fast travel quite a ways into the game.
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| There are trains now. They're painfully slow! |
The play area in Yokai Watch is the town of Springdale. It's not an exceedingly large area, and you get used to it quickly. Each area is very memorable and filled with detail. That's one of the things I love about Level-5 games. The places they make are just as big as they need to be and aren't filled with useless fluff. There are a few new areas in the game, but I didn't think they were super great. The crux of the story revolves around time travel, so you have access to almost every area in both the past and present.
While most people disagree, I actually like the combat in Yokai Watch, and the second game makes that a bit deeper. You have six Yokai in battle at a time. Three in the front and three in the back. The front row is attacking, while the back row is doing nothing unless they have special abilities. Your Yokai will attack and do spells on their own based on their personality and abilities. They're all on a wheel which can be rotated to fit the situation you're in. Bosses are my favorite part, because they test your mettle in ways the regular battles do not. You have the ability to place pins on specific enemies or boss parts, which makes your Yokai focus their attacks wherever the pin is. In boss battles this system is crucial, because you need to attack specific parts to stop special attacks or open up weak points. During the story your watch gets upgraded and adds some new abilities. Normally you can do special moves called soultimates, which expend a Yokais soul gauge to do a special attack. You have to successfully complete a mini-game in order to do the attack. With the new watch you can choose to do a moxie attack, which makes you complete the same mini-games but it expends the soul gauge of the two surrounding Yokai as well in order to power up the attack. I'm going to be honest, I never did this a lot. What I did end up doing is poking the enemy a whole bunch. If your enemy has a status effect you can poke it to do any one of the following: Increase affection, get more money, or do damage. These may seem like small additions, but they add a lot to the gameplay.
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| There are tons of new Yokai to befriend. Lie-in-Heart is my favorite. |
The story is what doesn't really do it for me. The first quarter is a rehash of the original game. Once it moves to the time travel stuff it ends super quickly. It then transitions into a bunch of filler until you randomly have to go back in time again, which quickly leads up to the final boss who has no real motivation to be evil as far as I can tell. What bothers me about the story of Yokai Watch is that there are never any great interactions. Yes, Nate can talk to Yokai and control them , but there is no one else like him. Nate is experiencing all of this stuff and no other human (with a few rare exceptions) knows what's going on. I'm pretty sure something along these lines happens in the third game, so I'll have to wait for that.
I like Yokai Watch 2, but I now more than ever don't think it'll catch on in the U.S. like it did in Japan. It's a cool game, but I feel like a lot of the designs are holding it back. One of the main reasons I feel this way is that I don't remember most of the Yokai's names other than the main story related ones. The names are often lame puns that just didn't stick with me. I think that Yokai Watch has a lot of charm, and a great amount of detail, but its frustrating elements outweigh the positives a lot of the time. It's a pain in the ass to befriend Yokai, post game leveling takes too long, and the story is about as lame as it can get. Perhaps the third game can change all the issues I had with it and elevate it to a whole new level of popularity.
Rock Band Rivals
I've been playing Rock Band 4 on an almost weekly basis since it was released. Every Friday a few of my friends and I get together and rock out. For the past few months I've really only been playing the multiplayer with them and given up on single player. Rivals added a whole bunch of awesome features that got me right back into single player.
I'm going to be honest here. I love Rock Band 4, but it was a technical mess. Menus stuttered and everything took way too long to load. I literally couldn't stay connected to the in game store for more than five minutes and the leaderboards wouldn't update with my score half the time. When I first booted up Rivals my mind was absolutely blown. Everything ran silky smooth! The menus and in game store worked as intended, and even the animations when playing a song were smoother than they were before.
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| Getting together a crew is my favorite part of Rivals. |
So previously I had beaten every show in the career mode, so there was literally no other content for me to play alone other than playing songs for high scores. I do enjoy that, but it eventually wears thin. With the Rivals expansion everything I do earns me EXP which is the best way to get me more interested in something. Now I level up just for playing songs! That's cool! The game also now measures your skill level on an instrument from 1 to 1,000. It made me feel good when my rating on guitar was 850. You can also now make a crew and gain experience by completing certain challenges and playing certain songs. These Rivals Crews give new life to the competitive Rock Band scene. Now people can recruit up to 29 other players for their crew and compete to get high scores every week. It gives new reason to try and get good scores on songs, which is really cool.
There is also a new story mode called Rockudrama, which I didn't end up liking very much. It's a documentary about the band you've created that follows their beginning to their eventual fade out from glory. It's presented in FMV sequences that are supposed to be funny, but I rarely laughed. There's something about FMV that really rubs me the wrong way. In old games it was trying to be serious, but since it was so low budget it ended up being hilarious. When it's in modern games I feel like it's often trying way too hard to be campy and funny, but it never really lands for me. Rocudrama is no different. It's a long series of people trying to make jokes work, but instead I found it to be really painful. At least it was fun to have a goal and unlock new venues and items.
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| This is Cool Terry. He's a character in Rockudrama. This is what you can expect. |
Overall Rivals has impressed me a lot, except for the issues I've been having in multiplayer. The game ran and still runs perfectly for me alone. However, once we add in more instruments everything goes to shit. In case you've never played a rhythm game before, being on rhythm is very important. You know what ruins that? Constant hitching! For some reason the game randomly begins to hitch in multiplayer! We'll be playing, then the graphics will just freeze up and then skip ahead a little bit. This is absolutely unacceptable in a game where timing is literally everything. It makes the game unplayable. Restting the console works for a little bit before it starts happening again. I asked on the Rock Band Reddit if this was happening to anyone else, and it absolutely is. I really hope they fix this soon, or no one is going to want to play this with me anymore, which is a total bummer.
World of Final Fantasy
When I first saw World of Final Fantasy I convinced myself that I hated it. There's something about weird little chibi characters that really rubs me the wrong way. Then I found out that it's basically Pokemon, but with Final Fantasy monsters and fan service. Much to my chagrin I played the demo on PS4 and really liked what I played. You play turn based battles where two sets of three monsters are stacked on one another. The main characters are twins Lann and Reynn. They can be regular human size, and weird chibi size. There are three sizes of monsters you can get, small, medium, and large. When the twins are small they are medium size, and when they're big they are large. Each monster stack consists of one small, one medium, and one large monster. When the monsters are stacked they are stronger, because their skills, stats, and resistances pool together. The enemies are also stacked on occasion, so certain skills can be used to knock them down and attack them individually. The monsters can do the same to you, so you need to be careful.
In terms of combat it's pretty standard JRPG fare. I guess even the collecting of monsters is pretty standard now in most games. They're called mirages, I guess I should have mentioned that before. Collecting them is actually the entire goal of the game. Lann and Reynn wake up to find that everyone in their world is gone and they are alone. A god-like figure comes and tells them that they're lost their memories. In order to get their memories back she tells them that they have to go to another world called Grimoire and collect as many mirages as they can. Apparently they used to be crazy powerful mirage masters. I don't know if that's true or not, because I haven't beaten it yet.
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| They're so cute it sickens me! |
So, most people in Grimoire are small. but the mirage masters are bigger and are referred to as Jiants. Yes, with a J. This means that the main characters often hide their true form, but you can switch between the two whenever you want. It's weird, because this game reminds me a lot of Kingdom Hearts, but with just Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy characters are scattered throughout the world, and they help out the twins in many different ways. Certain characters can actually be called upon in battle to perform powerful attacks. Generally a piece of music from their game plays when they show up, which is awesome as a fan of the franchise. Most monsters will be familiar too, which is always fun to see.
I don't have a lot to say about the game, mainly because I don't feel very strongly about it. I'm kind of shuffling through it in small chunks just to get to the end. I think it's interesting and I occasionally get pangs of nostalgia, but it's just alright. The plot isn't very interesting to me yet, but I'm also only a handful of hours in. Hopefully it ends up blowing my mind, but right now it just seems like standard JRPG fare.
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| You battle as sweet stacks! |
The thing that does drive me nuts is how bad the Vita version is. Man, does it not run well. Initially I played the demo on PS4 and it was totally fine. The Vita demo came out a few days later and it was noticeably not fine. The models are a lot more jagged as you'd expect from a Vita game, but it also doesn't run at a steady frame rate. In most parts of the game it runs at below 30FPS, and it gets even worse when your characters are big. It's nothing too horrendous, but it just doesn't feel good. What really bums me out is that the menus run slow. Often times I'll want to pop in and look at something only to have it hitch for a bit longer than it should. I get it, because it's on Vita, but man this should run better. However, the most egregious thing to me is that the voice acting isn't on the cartridge. That's right! You have to download the voices! For getting the day one edition you are given a code to download the Japanese voices. I was fine with this, because VO takes up a lot of space. Lots of games only offer English voices to save space. I booted up the game and quickly discovered something was wrong. Turns out you had to download the English voices too! Yes they're a free download, but I wasn't warned before starting the game that there would be no VO and to make it even better the download wasn't available on the store yet when I started playing! AGHHH! The download is just under 1GB, and Vita memory cards still cost a ridiculous amount. Do yourself a favor and buy the PS4 version.
It's happening!
I don't really know what I'll be playing this month, but I do know that Final Fantasy XV comes out on the 29th. To be honest I might wait a week into December and just write a thing about Final Fantasy XV, because man does it look awesome. I've tried so hard to keep my expectations down, but everything I've seen recently looks very impressive.
EDIT: I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT POKEMON! MAAAN, POKEMON IS GOING TO BE DOPE!
I am also getting the PS4 Pro on the 10th, so I can tell you all a little bit about that as well.
See you next time!
