Game Time - April 2014

This past month I played a whole ton of Dark Souls 2, and I was finally able to complete it. I haven't written anything on it yet, because I've been debating whether or not I want to do a new game plus run. Turns out I've had my fill of Dark Souls 2, so I can lay it to rest for a little bit. Sometime within the next week or so I'll definitely try to write something about it. I really liked it, but not nearly as much as I liked the original.

Going against my predictions Namco Bandai localized Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, which was released here in the U.S. last week. I don't know why, but even after playing the Japanese version for a ridiculous amount of time and buying all the DLC I'm more than happy to go through it all again now that I can actually read what everything is saying.

The other two games I played were both oddly enough made by Ubisoft. I finally broke down and bought the PS4 version of Rayman Legends, which I absolutely love. Ubisoft Montreal's weird JRPG inspired RPG child of light came out as well, which is not so amazing, but I am enjoying it.

In terms of reading this month's edition may be a bit light. I need to pace myself if I want to write about the insane amount of games coming out in the next two months. It's game time!

Rayman Legends

I always wanted to buy Rayman Origins, but I never got around to it. Then when the sequel Rayman Legends came out I passed that up as well. Back in February Ubisoft decided to use Snoop Dogg to announce a PS4 and Xbox One version of Rayman Origins. It took me a while, but I finally decided to buy it, and I'm angry I didn't buy it sooner. It's legitimately amazing.

I like platformers that give you unparalleled control over the character and Rayman Legends certainly brings that to the table. The last game that felt like this to me was probably Super Meat Boy, which is still one of my favorite platformers. There's something about the way Rayman moves that just feels right. When running and jumping he gains momentum as you'd expect, and actually feels heavy. It's ironic, because he can hover with his hair and has no limbs. He just has his floating hands and legs.

I wish more than anything that this was in the game.

The game starts with this weird alien looking dude waking Rayman up from a long slumber. The dark teensies are causing trouble and they need to be stopped. Rayman begrudgingly wakes up and then you're in the game. That's the whole story. You're thrown into a hub area with a whole bunch of paintings. You jump into a world painting and you're taken to a separate room with a whole bunch more paintings for levels. There are a ridiculous amount of levels in this game. It helps that at least half of the levels from Rayman Origins make an appearance, which is cool because I never played it.

The game overall just has a ton of content and replayability. Every standard level has ten teensies to rescue. Each level also has a bronze, silver, and gold trophy. In order to get the gold trophy you need to have 600 lums at the end, which are the Rayman universe's equivalent of coins. Upon completing levels you earn scratch-off tickets, which can get you lum spawning creatures, Rayman Origins levels, lums, and extra teensies.

Even without limbs Rayman kicks ass.

The replayability in my eyes mainly comes from the challenges. There are daily and weekly challenges, and extreme daily and weekly challenges. These have you fulfilling various tasks to see how you rank against everyone else in the world playing the game. There are two variations. One has you trying to get as far as you can in an endless level, and the other has you collecting a set amount of lums as fast as you can. Every day I end up playing these challenges over and over until I get the best possible score I can. When you start playing there are five or six ghosts of other characters on your screen as well so you have something to compare yourself to. At the end of the day you'll either be ranked bronze, silver, gold, or platinum depending on how well you did in comparison to everyone else. You might stop playing when you have a silver medal, but if more people play you could go down to bronze.

The next day the game pops up a message saying what you won and how many lums you were awarded. The lums are added to your running total. Various lum milestones will unlock new characters for you to play as. Sadly there is so Snoop Dogg character.

You have to rescue all the Teensies!

There's something special about Rayman Legends. It has a crazy amount of charm and I hope that they continue to make these types of games. Rayman took a long break, but he's back and better than ever now.

Child of Light

Child of Light has grand ambitions, but in the five hours I've played it hasn't fully realized them. As you may have heard I like my JRPGs to be grandiose and filled to the brim with side content and unlockables. I personally play RPGs for their story though. Generally they are able to build a very well realized world. While a large part of that comes from the writing, the ridiculous play times they tend to have help as well. The more time you spend in a world the easier it is to throw out more bits of story and information to help build that world. Sadly Child of Light falls short in both of these departments so far.

The exact time the game takes place is never said, but we can assume it's in the Victorian era. A young princess Aurora falls ill and is transported to a magical world, which she must save from the evil witch who is terrorizing the land. She finds out that the plight of this new world she finds herself in is having adverse effects on the real world. In order to help out and eventually get home she embarks on a grand quest filled with whimsy and adventure. All of this is well and good, but so far the story seems like nothing more than a bare outline used to throw the player into this world.

Child of Light looks like a watercolor painting.

All of the characters talk in Rhyme, which is cute at first, but quickly becomes annoying. It seems to me that the quality of the writing was sacrificed in order to have all the lines rhyme. Very little information is given and a lot of lines seem to be spoken just so that there is something to rhyme with. That alone wouldn't be terrible, but the characters don't really interact with each other often either. There are a ton of characters that can join your party, but they don't really have outstanding personalities. Your party members only interact with each other once, which happens after the first battle they've joined the party. You fight five or six battles in order to see the characters interact for about three lines and it never really has any meaningful impact. It's just things like "Oh damn, you're good with a bow. Is it true that your name is Moe?", and other such idiocy (That's not an actual rhyme from the game).

The gameplay itself is pretty mediocre as well. It's a turned based system very similar to Grandia for the original PlayStation. Your character's heads are all on a line. The first 70% of the bar is blue, and the remaining 30% is red. When they get to the line 70% through the bar you get to choose their actions. Once you do that, it takes the remainder of the bar for them to complete their action. The enemies are shown on the bar as well. If you attack them while they're trying to complete an action they'll get interrupted and have to start over. There's an added strategy element to the battles as well. Aurora has a little sprite that follows her around, which you can control with the right stick in battle. If you send him over an enemy you can puff him up with L2, which will slow them down so you have more chances to attack and interrupt them. It works well, but there's very little challenge to the battles, so it gets stale quickly.

Ughhhhh.

Most of the time games like this can fall back on their shortcomings with loot, but Child of Light doesn't have that to fall back on. You don't get new weapons, or armor. Yes, you can collect gems that give minuscule stat buffs, but if you never equipped any of them it wouldn't really matter. Maybe later on everything gets much more challenging, but judging by the way I steamroll everything it probably won't. I'm already five hours through what is supposed to be a ten hour game.

The thing the game does have going for it though is that it looks amazing. The entire world looks like a watercolor painting. If I had to guess this game is a proof of concept for Ubisoft's Ubi Art Engine that Rayman runs on as well. They originally announced it as an open source engine that people will be able to use to create games, but prior to this only Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends have used it. Now they've shown that any type of game can be made with the engine, so perhaps we'll get to see a bunch of cool smaller games coming out of Ubisoft. Child of Light is interesting, but it could have been so much more. It just doesn't reach its full potential, which is a shame.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle

I finally decided to import a Japanese game and then it ends up coming out in the U.S. To be fair I think my reasons for doubting a localization were sound, which you can read all about in the piece I wrote when I initially imported the game. As I predicted they changed almost all the names that would cause them legal issues. The work they had to do for that was minimal though, because they left all the spoken dialogue in Japanese and just translated all the text.

I tend to only play as a character who doesn't have any musical references associated with him, so I don't know if Akira Otoishi still screams Red Hot Chili Pepper every time he summons his stand. It definitely doesn't say it in the text though. Once of the more annoying name changes is to one of my favorite characters. His name is Jean Pierre Polnareff, and that was also his name in the English translation of the part 3 Jojo's manga. For some reason they changes his name to Jean Pierre Eiffel, which just doesn't seem right at all. These are just name changes though, which is a small price to pay for the game actually getting a release outside of Japan.

This is the majesty that is Jojo's Bizarre Adventure!

There is one major thing I don't like about it though, and that's the way the English text looks. The font of the Japanese text is very obviously stylized to be exactly like the text in the manga. The English font looks super boilerplate and out of place almost everywhere it's shown. It's weirdly large and doesn't look good at all in contrast to everything else. I don't know if they even tried to stylize it, but it certainly doesn't look like it. Other than that though the game only has one difference from its Japanese counterpart.

They added arcade mode, so if you want to fight against terrible AI opponents for little to no reward you're more than welcome to do so. If you don't have the Japanese version of the game and you like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure then you should definitely pick this up. Getting a physical copy might be rough, because you can only get them from Amazon and Namco Bandai's store. There's always the chance to snag a digital copy off the PlayStation store though, which I highly recommend. Also, if you want a much more in depth look at the game check out the article I wrote when I initially imported it, which can be found here.

It's heating up!

At the end of May a bunch of stuff I want to play is coming out. Watch Dogs will finally be released, which should prove to be very exciting. It could be amazing, or the more likely scenario is that it will be super average. Transistor comes out as well, which looks incredible. I'm on board with anything Super Giant Games is going to put out there.

Then in June Tomodatchi Life will be dropping for the 3DS. Murdered: Soul Suspect the weird murder mystery game being published by Square Enix will be hitting the PS4. Then of course E3 will be happening the second week in June, which is always great.

Look forward to a whole lot of awesome stuff coming up. See you next time.

     -Manny

Top Ten Games of 2013

2013 is over and done with, which means that it's time for yet another top ten list. I have made a sweet list of what I believe to be the top ten games released in 2013. Every game on this list was released this year and I played and beat each one to completion. Keep in mind that this is just my opinion, so we may disagree. A lot of great games came out this year and I had to make some hard cuts, but that seems to happen every year.

As always we'll be starting with number ten and working our way up to the prestigious number one spot. If you want to read my more in depth thoughts on each of these games just click on their names (Except Fire Emblem). See you at the top.

10. Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V may not have been the greatest story ever told, but it sure was ambitious. The new Los Santos Rockstar created is one of the most elaborate open worlds ever seen in a game. It doesn't have quite enough to do in that open world, but it sure is detailed. On top of that you play as not one, but three characters. Each of which is very memorable in their own right.

I don't really know where open world games can go from here, but I hope that Rockstar keeps trying to take them to the next level.


9. BioShock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite seems to have lost a lot of support since its initial release, but I for one will not abandon this great game. Yes, the combat wasn't the greatest, but it certainly wasn't the worst. In fact it improved upon the combat of the original in some very meaningful ways. Plus jumping around on the sky rails is pretty freaking sweet.

I came to Bioshock Infinite expecting an interesting story and that's exactly what I got. If you think about it too much everything completely unravels, but that's the case with almost any science fiction. The ending of Infinite continues to blow my mind months after having completed the game. If you haven't you should really check it out.

8. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle Royale

This was the first game I have ever imported and I couldn't be more happy about that. The cel shaded graphics make everything look ripped straight from the manga. Cyber Connect 2 put so much care into every single aspect of this game's animations in order to keep them true to the source material. This is a must own game for fans of the Jojo series and in my case made me a fan.

The fights are fun, but not super deep. It may not have a long life on the tournament scene, but Jojo's ASB is still one of my favorite fighting games of all time. If you're not crazy enough to import it you can just wait for the US version to come out later this year. I will definitely be buying it again.

7. Super Mario 3D World

Super Mario 3D World is the best looking game I have played this year. Mario has made an amazing transition into HD and I couldn't be happier. This game is actually innovative in a way that many Nintendo games just aren't anymore. I don't really know why Mario and friends can don a cat suit, but it's certainly an excellent addition to the Mario suit repertoire.

Super Mario 3D World is just plain fun, which is something I can't say about a lot of games these days. If you're one of the three people who have a Wii-U this is something you have to buy.

6. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies

Phoenix Wright has returned to the court room once again and I couldn't be happier about it. This is coming from someone who actually really liked Apollo Justice. The game is largely the same as it was before, but with snazzy new 3D models and fully voiced anime cutscenes. I could do without the voice acting, but other than that everything is streamlined for the player's convenience.

I loved to hang out with Phoenix and Apollo again. It seems like Capcom is already hard at work on the 6th entry in the series. Hopefully this one sold well enough in the US to make them keep bringing these over here. I love this series and it seems to only be getting better.

5. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

I didn't understand the Monster Hunter craze before I played this game. Somehow it sucked me in and I got lost in my hopeless Monster Hunter addiction for hundreds of hours. I have finally escaped, but I still get that sweet craving sometimes.

There's something magical about hunting a fearsome beast with your friends. Even though the game is very unforgiving to new players if you take the time to figure the game out it's a whole lot of fun. You just have to know what you're getting into. Perhaps someday you too will be one of those crazy people who understands the seductive power that is Monster Hunter.

4. The Last of Us

I will never forget the ending of this game. Naughty Dog created some of the most memorable characters ever seen in a video game. Joel and Ellie feel like real people. Their voice acting is impeccable and their facial expressions and movements are very lifelike.

The survival gameplay is serviceable and really makes you feel like you're living in a post-apocalyptic zombie mushroom world. It's a horrifying place, which is backed up by brutal depictions of violence. If you haven't played this game you need to. I wasn't into it at first, but once you start to see the relationship between Joel and Ellie unfold you'll be hooked.

3. Pokemon X/Y

Everyone always complains that Nintendo never changes anything, but this time they have. The world of Pokemon on a handheld has been brought to the third dimension. Battles look great, because each Pokemon has their very own detailed 3D model.

It might not seem like a big deal, but the introduction of fairy Pokemon completely changes the way Pokemon's battle system works. On top of that some Pokemon can even mega evolve now to become super powerful. This iteration changed so much. Hell, you can move diagonally for god's sake! Nintendo has finally changed Pokemon in some very meaningful ways and I can't wait to see where they go next.

2. Fire Emblem: Awakening

I really like strategy RPGs. One of the things that always bug me about them is that you get so many characters and never really get to know any of them. That's not the case with Fire Emblem Awakening. The excellent translation paired with the social system makes each character feel like they have an identity.

Awakening takes all of the best elements from each Fire Emblem and mashes them all into one game. You can get certain characters married and then use their children in battle. The children inherit skills and have increased stat gain, so they tend to be super beastly. It's a really cool feature. Fire Emblem Awakening is a truly deep game with a whole lot of content. I fully recommend it to anyone who owns a 3DS.

1. Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

The days of the 50-80 hours RPG are almost dead and gone. Ni No Kuni however allowed me to revisit the days of old when RPG worlds felt magical and full of whimsy. Everything about Ni No Kuni is very charming and it does an incredible job building its fantasy world. The Wizard's Compendium is a literal book inside the game that's chock full of information about the world.

Ni No Kuni is one of those games with a ridiculous amount of side activities to do and secrets to find and I did almost everything. The monster collecting aspect had me hooked immediately and the lively battles kept me interested. At first glance it seems like a game for little kids, but the combat gets to be quite challenging.

Ni No Kuni is a special game to me, because it made me feel like a kid again. It made me feel like there's still hope that the type of grand RPG adventures I used to have as a kid will keep coming out. I loved Ni No Kuni and I hope that you'll check it out as well.

     -Manny

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