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!

A Bizarre Adventure into Importing: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle

I've been a big fan of Japanese games for as long as I can remember. Over the years there have been numerous titles I've wanted to play, but had no way of doing so due to a lack of localization. A combination of the language barrier and high cost has kept me from importing games. It's especially a problem since the majority of games I would want to import are all heavily text based. On top of that most consoles are region locked and I'm not totally irresponsible with my money, so I can't justify buying a Japanese console.

This past June however, I imported my first game. It was Captain Rainbow for the Wii. The Wii is region locked, but if you use the homebrew channel you can play games from other regions. While I may have imported it I still have not played it. Captain Rainbow is very story based and pretty much incomprehensible without English text. The reason I got it was because there is an English fan patch in the works and the $20 price tag was too cheap for me to pass up. Hopefully I'll get to play it in early 2014, but that's not why we're here today.

Some time within the last year I began to see trailers for an all new Jojo's Bizarre Adventure fighting game developed by Cyber Connect 2. They're the studio behind the incredibly animated Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm games. Something about the trailers caught my attention  and I hoped that it would be localized here. After a bit of research I found out that it had/has little to no chance of ever seeing a release outside of Japan.

What is it?

When I made the decision to buy Jojo's Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle I knew very little about the franchise it was based on. I had played the original Capcom developed fighting game on the Dreamcast, but it was just a weird novelty fighting game to me. I have now consumed a fair deal of the Jojo universe and know a whole lot more about it.

The series is a still ongoing manga (Japanese comic book) written by Hirohiko Araki that began in 1987. There are 8 parts each with their own protagonist. They all focus on the eternal battle between the Joestar family and the immortal vampire DIO. Each part takes place in the time frame when it's written, so the current part 8 was started in 2011 and that's when it takes place. For some reason each main character's name has Jojo in it somehow. For example the original main character's name is Jonathan Joestar. Both names start with Jo. It's a really weird series. Who knows why that's the case.

These are the 8 protagonists. They are all part of the Joestar bloodline.

Recently a new anime was started that has gone on for two seasons. It covered the first two parts of the manga. These are the two least known entries of the entire series. The characters use a special energy called Ripple (Hamon in Japanese) in order to do what are essentially magical karate attacks. The series started to gain most of its popularity during the third part. This is the part that the Dreamcast game was based on. Chances are if you've seen any Jojos it's from the third part since it's the only part that was translated to English in both manga and anime form.

Instead of using ripple the characters instead began to wield stands. Technically though stands are the manifestation of an individual's ripple. You could even say that it's their persona. A stand is essentially a ghostly figure that gives the user supernatural powers. So yeah, they're basically ghosts that stand behind a person and help them pummel others. It's all pretty confusing, but that hasn't stopped me from diving head first into the series. I've now watched the first season of the anime and just recently finished reading the third part of the manga in its entirety.

This is my favorite character Jotaro. He's the main character of part 3 Stardust Crusaders.

I really find the series to be interesting, because it's so off the wall crazy. DIO threw a steamroller on top of someone just because he could! That's why it saddens me that there is such a slim chance that the series will ever make it outside of Japan. It's quite literally a copyright nightmare. Perhaps you noticed that the bad guy of the entire series shares his name with the band DIO. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Characters throughout the series and their stands share the names of famous western bands and musical acts. These are just a few of the ones I can think of : Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Pearl Jam, Cars, Doobie Brothers, Lisa Lisa, Devo and Vanilla Ice. No joke, one of the villains in part three is named Vanilla Ice. Part three of the manga was translated into English by VIZ Media, but almost all of the names had to be changed. Araki the creator of the series is strictly against name changes, which is one of the main reasons why no other Jojo related things have left Japan. If they can't change the names then they're going to get their pants sued off.

Hong Kong Dollars

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle came out on August 29th. I had the game that same day. Leading up to the release I began to watch every single video about the game that came out. Everything about it was so unknown to me, which made it supremely interesting. The animation was gorgeous and the characters looked so weird. At that point I had only watched the first season of the new anime and had never even looked at any of the manga. It was about a week before the game came out that I made the decision that I had to have it.

This is the video that put me over the edge.

Originally I had pre-ordered a physical copy of the game, but as of the release day it still had not shipped. I cancelled my order and decided to purchase a digital copy. In order to do that I had to buy some digital PlayStation Network cards, because US credit cards don't work on the Japanese PlayStation Store. I quickly realized that Japanese PlayStation cards were ludicrously overpriced and bought some Hong Kong PlayStation cards instead. They were a fair amount cheaper and for some reason the Hong Kong PlayStation Store is in poorly translated English. It may have been one of the shadiest things I've ever done on the Internet.

A friend instructed me to go to the website Pcgamesupply.com, because he had purchased Hong Kong PSN cards from them before. I bought two 200 Hong Kong Dollar cards and an 80 Hong Kong Dollar card. This gave me enough to purchase the game for 449 HKDs. I gave the site my credit card information at which point they charged me the $79 for the cards. Yes, I paid $79 for a $60 game. That's how overpriced the stupid PSN cards are. Not even ten minutes later I was able to view pictures they had taken of physical PSN cards in order to get my codes. I punched them in and began downloading the game. I've had the game for around two weeks now and I regret nothing.

It's an All-Star Battle

I didn't read the third part of the manga until this past week. Despite a lack of knowledge I still managed to fall in love with the game.

All-Star Battle is a straight up fighting game. It is almost void of all story and the main menu is entirely in English. That means I can navigate to where I want to go fairly well and learning how to play isn't too hard because it's fairly similar to other fighting games. The weird game specific things I figured out as I went along. What's crazy is that it's not a very good fighting game. It's fairly unbalanced and broken in a myriad of ways, which makes it pretty fun. It probably helps that I'm not good at fighting games, so I'm not good enough to have issues with specific characters and game mechanics. It's an ignorance is bliss type of scenario. All I know is that it's fun to hit the other character and it's even more fun to hit them with a crazy floating stand.

The character doesn't even need to punch the enemy themselves if they don't want to.

As I said previously the game is beautifully animated. What makes it even better is that something insane happens all the time. When I was messing around with the game at first almost every single attack was mind blowing. I now know just how insane everything in the series is and this game captures that very well. Everyone makes super flamboyant poses and screams out craziness. It's especially weird to hear someone yell Red Hot Chili Peppers in English during a constant stream of Japanese. The entire game is pure unadulterated Japanese madness in a way that I haven't been able to experience in years. This kind of stuff doesn't usually make it's way to the West anymore.

There are just over 30 characters in the main game with more coming as downloadable content. It's nice that each character feels unique, so I might actually buy the additional characters. Apparently I'm not the only person who thought it was a good game either. In its first week over 400,000 copies were sold in Japan.

The characters and animation in the game look beautiful.

That isn't to say that there haven't been any complaints about the game. The story mode is terrible and I'd probably be more upset if I could read or speak Japanese. You basically go through a series of fights with spoken text in between. You can beat it in two hours maximum. It's kind of disappointing considering how much effort CC2 puts into the story for their Naruto games. The killer for a lot of people is the campaign mode though. In campaign mode you can unlock alternate costumes, colors, taunts, and poses for the characters. At first it sounds awesome, but for some reason progress is gated like a free to play game. You fight against computer controlled versions of other people playing the game and computer controlled bosses in order to unlock everything. Each battle uses one bar of a battery and when that battery runs out you have to wait real time for it to refill. As of right now it takes 55 minutes to refill the whole thing, but eventually that's going to turn into 3 or 4 hours, which is far too long.

These things don't bother me very much, because I don't know any better when everything is in Japanese. Sure it's annoying that I can't unlock everything all at once, but it's keeping me playing the game. Plus it's not like I'd be able to sell it back since I got a digital copy. For my first imported game I think that I did pretty well. I didn't have any problems getting it and I am totally on board with everything it has to offer. It was my gateway into the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure universe.

I think this game is fun. You should check it out.

If you find any of this interesting I highly recommend you check out videos of the game. It's complete and utter madness, but it's surprisingly fun to play and even watch. I'm going to be purchasing all the DLC and since this is an import game I might write up something new for each piece I download. People need to know if the characters are worth downloading or not!

Update: During the Toky Game Show it was announced that Jojo's All-Star Battle would indeed be coming to America. I can't wait to see what they change. I'm generally intrigued to see how well it will sell here. Looks like I'm going to have to buy it again. At least now I can get a physical copy.

     -Manny