Game Time - April 2015

It's official, I'm playing too many video games at once. I am continuing to play Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate and Inazuma Eleven GO 2 Chrono Stones. I play Inazuma Eleven on stream every Wednesday. If you want to catch that head on over to www.twitch.tv/drac96

I am also continuing to play Bloodborne, but my feelings on it have shifted drastically. I am not having very much fun with it in the later sections of the game. I find it to be much more punishing in a bullshit way than the previous games in the Souls franchise. I'll end up doing a Game Time ID when I finish it. I'm still plucking away at it, but it will probably take me another month. I've been getting angry at it and have had to put it down several times...

I'm also playing Ori and the Blind Forest at a very slow pace, but that's not one of the games I'm going to talk about this month. The main "new" game I played was Mortal Kombat X. I played it very heavily the first few days after its release, but have not played it for at least a week as of this writing. It's a good fighting game with not enough content outside of the fighting to hold it down.

I've wanted to play Shovel Knight since its release and now I've finally done it. Never mind the fact that I bought it on the Wii-U and played twenty minutes of it. I don't count that. It was just released on the PS4 , Vita, PS3, and Xbox One. I purchased the Sony version and this time I actually played it! In fact, I liked it so much I did it in about three sittings. Man, Shovel Knight is a dope game.

The final game I'll be talking about this month is actually quite old. For some reason I started to think about the original Digimon World and determined that I needed to play it again. As a child I played it for a few hours and had no idea what was going on. The game seemed super lame at the time, but I now realize that it was actually super deep, unique, and original. It's insanely complex, but I'm having a blast figuring it out. I need to get back to playing it, so it's game time!

Mortal Kombat X

Note: Yes I realize most words are spelled with a K in this. That's how it's done in Mortal Kombat.

I've never been the worlds largest Mortal Kombat fan. Sure I've played almost all of them, but the series has never quite grabbed me like other fighting game franchises have. Well, that was until Mortal Kombat 9. That reboot brought me in and I played it a whole lot. It helped that I was living in college suite with friends who also played it a lot, because it was the time of the huge PSN outage. Outside of that though it had a ton of content to interact with. The story mode was a ridiculously well made retelling of MK 1-3, The challenge tower had hundreds of unique challenges, and there was a ton to unlock. Mortal Kombat X seems to have scaled that back quite a bit.

First I'll talk about the story. Once again the Mortal Kombat team has shown that they know how to make a fighting game story. You advance from one fight to the next with almost seamless transitions. Although they have now added in quick time events for absolutely no reason. So when you want to just be watching the story sequences you have to be constantly on the lookout for quick time events or you'll die. It detracts from the experience quite a bit, because you can never really feel at ease with paying full attention to the story. Now, I think the story of MKX was okay, but it was definitely not on par with MK9. I realize that MK9 was the retelling of three games, but the story of MKX feels super flat and by the end i was asking myself what the purpose of it all was? Not a whole lot happens. Sure, you get introduced to the new characters, but it all feels very low key. You get to learn all about Kenshi's son, Jax's daughter, Sonya and Johnny Cage's Daughter, and Kung Lao's descendant. They're all surprisingly well developed. There are a few other new characters was well, but most of them are overshadowed by the returning cast.

Everyone still picks Scorpion online...

In MK9 when I finished the story I went right into the challenge tower and started testing my luck. I was able to do that for a long time, but in MKX there was almost immediately nothing left for me to do. Well that;s not true. There is just nothing that I actually want to do. Instead of set challenges in a tower there are now multiple towers with varying objectives. The game throws random "Kombat Modifiers" at you and you have to persevere. There's never any rhyme or reason behind any of it, it's just a bunch of random toggles that the game is turning on and off. In one of the more frustrating towers I played the screen would flash black every few seconds like a strobe light. That's not challenging it's just super annoying. What really sucks is that the towers are truly random, because they cycle out on a daily and weekly basis.

Outside of that though you still have a ton of unlockables in the krypt, but it takes forever to earn any Koins. I have absolutely no desire to grind for koins and I'm certainly not going to pay an extra $20 to unlock everything. It almost feels as if the lack of koins you get was done on purpose to push the micro transaction aspect of the game. Hell, you can even buy tokens to do "easy" fatalities. You can pay real money to hold R2 and Square to do a fatality. Let me tell you, fatalities aren't that hard to do. I main Kenshi and his basic fatality is back, back, forward, back. I can literally push back and forth on the d-pad and it will come out. If you need to pay for a token to do that then you probably shouldn't be playing a video game in the first place.

The fatalities are brutal and easy to pull off.

With the rage out of the way I will say that the core fighting of the game is great. It feels much faster than MK9. For me faster fighting games tend to be more fun, so I enjoy the fighting quite a bit. What's even cooler is that each character has three variations. Each variation has a few of the same basic moves, but outside of that they have exclusive moves. This means that technically each character is viable, because if they're outmatched in a match-up one of their variations should be able to handle it. So now you don't have to stop using your favorite character if you're getting schooled and it makes everyone viable. That would be the case in an idea world if the game was balanced perfectly. As far as I've seen it seems to be fine, but I don't necessarily know how it actually is in competitive play.

So I played this game a few times and don't know if I will continue to do so. As you probably know by now I never really stick with fighting games long enough to get good at them. In this case no one I know other than my brother likes this game enough to keep playing it. That means that I don't really have anyone to play with locally who is around the same skill level as me. MK9 just seemed like a much more complete product for people who don't want to get super competitive.

Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight is a testament to what KickStarter games can be. A group of guys set out to make a love letter to 8-Bit platformers and they succeeded. I've seen numerous kick started games fail to live up to their original promise. Shovel Knight delivers exactly what it promised and it's incredible. The easiest way for me to describe Shovel Knight is that it's like Mega Man, Duck Tales, and Zelda all rolled into one. You play as the aforementioned Shovel Knight. He is a blue knight who weilds a shovel as a weapon! His best friend/girlfriend Shield Knight is taken from him while they are on a quest. She is believed to have been killed by an evil amulet. Crushed by the loss Shovel Knight decides to stop adventuring. During his absence the Evil Enchantress and her Order of no Quarter rise to power and are terrorizing the land. Shovel Knight decides that he must come out of retirement and defeat the evil that has overtaken his land!

You start the game and are immediately put into a stage. Shovel Knight has all the basic abilities you'd expect. He can run, jump, and kill enemies. As you may have guessed his shovel acts as his weapon. You can use it to hurt enemies and dig into the ground or walls. This is helpful for finding treasure and hidden areas. While jumping you can push down to have Shovel Knight pogo like Scrooge McDuck in Duck Tales. You can use the pogo attack to bounce on enemies and hurt them repeatedly, but it can also be used to make tough jumps as well. Other than that you can get special items similar to the powers from Mega Man that use magic to use. These items are not necessary, but you can buy them to help you out and complete optional levels.

This is the track from the first level of the game. It's amazing on every level!

Once you beat the first level the world map is opened up to you. It's a Super Mario World style map, so you can pick which level you want to go to. There are tons of optional levels, a few towns, and the Order of no Quarter levels. The town is useful for upgrading your health, magic, and buying items. There are also a few extra things you can do like turning in the collectible music sheets to the bard in order to get money. Other than that there are just a bunch of NPCs who will say random things to you. Later in the game there is also a town that sells armor and shovel upgrades, so you want to be collecting as much as possible.

The Order of no Quarter levels are where you'll be spending most of your time. They are similar to Mega Man levels in that they are themed around their boss. In addition they all have knight at the end of their names, just as all Mega Man bosses end with man. For example one of the early levels is King Knight and his level is themed around a castle filled with gold. One thing I like about these levels it that they're super long and quite challenging. They're not frustrating, but you do need a certain amount of skill to make your way through them. In order to ease the burden of dying there are various checkpoints throughout the levels. If you do die you'll go back to the last checkpoint you passed. Instead of losing a life as a penalty for death you'll lose a fraction of your money, which you can make your way back to and pick up if you want. However, if you want to prove how much of a badass you are then you can shatter the checkpoints for money. That means you won't be able to use it anymore.

The pogo attack is super handy.

Shovel Knight is the kind of game that needs to be experienced. If you have pretty much any modern console, or PC you owe it to yourself to play this game. The pixel art style and music mesh seamlessly to create a one of a kind throwback to the 8-bit games I used to love. I spent a majority of my time playing Shovel Knight with a stupid grin on my face that is coming back as I type this. I'm super excited that there is going to be DLC where you can play as Plague Knight coming out in the near future. I will definitely be down to play more Shovel Knight. Yacht Club games hit it out of the park with this one!

Digimon World

Recently I watched a video where someone was raving about how the original Digimon World was an amazing and original game. I did not remember the game quite as fondly as the madman in the video I was watching. Sadly I can't find the video I saw, but it did pique my interest, so I began looking up more on the game. What I found blew my mind. I guess Digimon World was a lot deeper than my childhood self could handle, so I decided it was time to give it another shot. Turns out Digimon World is an amazing game and I might need to make my own ranting and raving video about it!

The thing that upset me the most as a kid was that the game didn't follow the show. It was more based around the Digivice toys that were popular in Japan at the time. They came out in the U.S. as well, but were not nearly as popular. The intro shows two kids playing with their electronic Digimon toys and you as the main character look on in amazement. Later when he's home alone his Digivice glows and transports him to the digital world where he gets his very own Digimon. With very little explanation you're told that everything is not going super hot and you need to rebuild File City. That's pretty much the only stuff you're given to go on. Coming at this game now I have no idea how the hell anyone figured it out. Sure, some of the stuff is easy enough to figure out, but most of it is insane. I literally have a FAQ opened at all times while playing and I'll need to refer to it at least once every half hour!

Welcome to File City!

I know I'm talking this up, but it really is obtuse to start off with. So yeah, you've got your Digimon. Now what? Well, you need to train it so that it can take on enemies and you can explore the island. However, you have to worry about feeding it. In the beginning food is hard to come by. You get three pieces of meat a day in town, but other than that you need to forage for mushrooms outside the city. When your Digimon is hungry it will get a little bubble above its head with meat in it. After your Digimon has eaten it will eventually need to poop, which will be indicated by a thought bubble with poop in it. You then need to take your Digimon to a toilet so it can relieve itself. There are toilets scattered throughout the island. If you don't make it in time your Digimon will poop right on the ground, which isn't good. We'll get into why that isn't good later though.

The beginning of the game is super tedious, because all you can really do is train and scrounge for food. If you don't have a lot of food you can't venture very far and without training the enemies will trounce you. If you get beaten in battle three times your Digimon will literally die and you'll have to start training a new one from scratch. It's actually pretty brutal. In order to train the Digimon you take them to the Green Gym, which is on the outskirts of File City. There will be all kinds of signs, and each one if meant to boost a specific stat. You have Offense, Defense, Brains, Speed, HP, and MP to worry about. Each stat is self explanatory, except for brains. When your Digimon has high brains it will be more likely to learn new attacks in battle and will be able to accept more orders. When training you need to be careful that you don't make your Digimon too tired, because it can have negative consequences. So you need to rest every so often. Oh yeah, by the way there's an in game clock and a day night cycle. Each training session takes an hour, and each rest session takes an hour. At some point your Digimon will want to go to sleep, which passes six hours. When your Digimon goes to sleep is the only time you can save your game!

You need to feed your Digimon!

The purpose of training your Digimon is to get them strong, but you also want them to Digivolve so they look cool and get even stronger. This is where the game gets even more obtuse than it already is. In order to Digivolve into specific Digimon your Digimon must have certain stats and weight. Training, and pooping make them lose weight, while eating makes them gain weight. For example the other night I wanted to get the chamption level Digimon Leomon. In that case the Elecmon I was using needed to have at least 100 in Offense, Speed, and Brains. That sounds easy, but takes a crazy amount of training. On top of that you are only allowed one care mistake. That means can't miss feeding your Digimon, can't have them poop on the ground, can't train them too hard, and can't make them become sleep deprived. He also needed to be 20 pounds. The weight limit goes five pounds in either direction, so if my Elecmon had the stats, but weighed 14 or 26 pounds then I would get a terrible Digimon. See, because if you don't meet any requirements you get the terrible Numemon who has bad stats and eats poop (That's a real thing)! HOW WOULD YOU EVER KNOW THAT WITHOUT A FAQ!?

So once you figure out how the hell to digivolve your Digimon into something other than the terrible Numemon you then need to recruit people for File City. Out in the world you'll come into contact with Digimon who will fight you and then join the city, or join once you complete a quest for them. Once in the city they will serve a function such as an item shop clerk. You need to scour the land looking for these specific Digimon in order to bring prosperity to File City. You'd think that would be easy with a good Digimon, but much to my dismay your Digimon will eventually die of old age and then you need to train up another one. On top of that the game gives you no direction and you can explore anywhere at any time! It's a super fun game that has a lot of stuff you need to learn. With that said it's a highly original game that deserves more attention that it got.

The Hunt Begins Again?

I guess I'm going to keep playing Digimon World, because I have to see it through to its conclusion. Other than that the only full retail release I'll be purchasing in May is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Judging from the stuff I've seen on the game so far it seems like it's going to be a billion hours long. Hopefully I don't get tired of it like I did with Dragon Age Inquisition.

Well, it's been another month and I hope you enjoyed hearing me rave about Digimon World. I will see you all next month!

Game Time - May 2014

Finally the month of May is behind us, and it was just as good as I had hoped it would be. It all started off with Transistor the new game from Bastion creators Supergiant Games. I enjoyed Transistor so thoroughly that I beat it in a single sitting. Drakengard 3 came out the same day, but I didn't like that at all...

Then there was Watch Dogs. The game that everyone on the internet that everyone was so excited about until a few weeks ago when everyone started to hate it more than anything else in the world. I'm glad to report that once again people on the internet have overreacted. Sure, it's not as good as it could have been, but it's still a competent open world game.

I also played a whole butt load of Mario Kart 8, but we'll save that for the hot new edition of Party Game Sundays that will be up in a day or two. So without further ado, let's get right into talking about the sweet games of May 2014

It's game time!

Transistor

Supergiant games released Bastion in 2011 right around the time I started this blog. In fact, it was one of the first games I reviewed on this blog. Since then I've moved away from writing reviews, but that's not really the point. I absolutely loved Bastion and gave it a perfect 5/5 rating. It was a great RPG, and the way they had the narrator react to what you're doing was incredibly unique.

Now it's three years later and Supergiant has released their new game Transistor on the PS4 and PC. I pre-ordered it for PS4 and started playing it as soon as it became available. As I stated in this month's introduction I completed the entire game in one sitting. Well, I technically did it in one sitting, because I got up to go to the bathroom multiple times. Either way, I really liked Transistor, but not as much as I liked Bastion.

I also ate food during my very long play session.

Much like Bastion, Transistor has a narrator. It takes the form of your sword, the Transistor. You play as a woman named Red, a singer, who has had her voice taken from her. In the opening scene you pull the Transistor out of a man's body and are immediately thrust into the game with little to no explanation. I'd set the game up more, but that would take away from the game quite a bit. All you really need to know is that there is an evil force known as the process, which is taking over the city.

The way Transistor presents its story is odd. Little to no information is given to you up front and it's not ever really thrown at you either. If you want to get a feel for the city of Cloudbank you need to go looking for its secrets. Since Red can't talk the Transistor has to tell you the story, but since he's a direct participant in what's happening he doesn't necessarily have all the answers. One of the ways you learn about the world is through combat and it's technically optional.

This is the menu where you mess around with your functions.

Battling in Transistor has you wielding the Transistor, because it's a sword. As you progress through the game you'll earn various functions, which are the games equivalents of skills. Each function is a different ability, but it also has to do with a person from the game. My favorite part of the game is how much customization there is. You can use each function as an ability, but you can also use it as a modifier for other abilities, or use it as a passive buff. This allows for a ridiculous amount of combinations, so in theory everyone could be using their functions completely differently. In order to get all the information about a given person you have to use the function in all three ways to see all the information about them. This is how the game encourages you to experiment. It allows you to figure out how you like to battle, and find out more of the worlds story in the process.

The combat never got old for me. You can walk around and hit enemies with button presses, or you can stop time in order to enter a string of commands and then watch them play out. Figuring out how to chain functions together was one of my favorite parts of the game and doing so was extremely satisfying.

Combat in Transistor is very compelling.

What's kind of unfair is that I can't help but compare this game directly to Bastion. They both have music composed by Darren Korb, which is incredible. They also both have Narrator figures, which makes it easy to draw direct comparisons. In that way I think that Transistor has a weaker story, because a lot of the information isn't readily available and you have to go looking for it. Even when you find it all the world still leaves a lot to the imagination. The plot in Bastion came together on its own, which was something incredible when it happened. With that being said Transistor is an incredible game, and it shows that Supergiant wasn't just a one hit wonder. They sure know how to create beautiful worlds that truly draw you in.

Drakengard 3

I'm always down to play niche titles, which is one of the reasons I bought Nier on the PlayStation 3. It had weird characters and gameplay, but had a special charm to it. It was super weird and rough around the edges, but I enjoyed the living hell out of it. I was trying to unlock all the endings, but in order to do so I needed to find rare crafting materials with a super low drop rate. Instead of searching the same bush over and over for a large egg, I decided to put the game to rest and remember it fondly.

I played Nier years ago, so when I found out that Drakengard 3 would be coming to the U.S. and that it was a prequel to the other games in the series I was ecstatic. See, one of the many endings in Nier leads to the creation of the Drakengard world. I also know that people really liked the first two Drakenhard games for the PS2, which I've seen likened to Game of Thrones. I guess they both have tons of violence and deal with what are considered taboo themes. Needless to say I was excited ti play it.

I like nothing about Zero as a character!

Upon playing the game all hope I had that I would enjoy it was quickly smashed into oblivion. I've played my fair share of bad games, but this one was almost immediately unbearable. It begins with a fairly cool pre-rendered scene that sets up the main character Zero and her dragon Mikhail. Right off the bat Zero is not portrayed as a likable character. She is an intoner, which is basically a god-like figure that is meant to keep balance in the world. For some reason she wants to kill all of her sisters and be the only intoner. This is all fine and good, but there's really no reason for it. It definitely doesn't help that she just seems like a bad person. She swears a lot and most of her dialogue is what I would refer to as insufferable. I think it's supposed to be funny, but it just seems like the writing is trying way too hard.

Granted I only played about two hours, so maybe Zero gets better as a character. What's the most upsetting is how inconsistent she is. One second she's sweetly telling her dragon not to roll around and the next she's screaming about how she wants the dragon to shut up with a whole lot of obscenities thrown in.

Scenes like this often destroy the frame rate.

Sometimes for games like this I can try and look past the story if they have decent gameplay. Unsurprisingly Drakengard 3 doesn't have that either! It's basically Dynasty Warriors with like three enemies on screen at once. You have strings of square and triangle that differ depending on your weapon. You can switch to a variety of weapons, but so far that hasn't proven to be very beneficial. I'm sure there are various enemy types each weapon is good against later in the game.I might even enjoy the combat if the entire game didn't run like total garbage. For starters the game looks pretty terrible graphically, so I don't have any idea why the frame rate slows to a crawl if there are more than two things on screen. It's mind blowing, because all the locales are essentially barren wastelands with crates in them.

I've been reading that the game gets a lot better around halfway through, but I just don't know if I'll be able to get there. Everything about the game so far has put me off to it. It just seems like a bad game, and not in an endearing way like Deadly Premonition. It just seems poorly optimized and generally bad.

Watch Dogs

When Watch Dogs was first shown I pretty much lost my mind. The concept of an open world game where you played as a hacker was something I was very much interested in. It helped that the graphics looked insanely good too. I, and many other people at that time thought that this was going to be one of the first true next generation games to come to the PS4 and Xbox One. Over time more footage of the game was shown, and it was clear that the graphics shown at the original E3 event were a thing of the past. They still looked fine, but were nothing spectacular. I feel like this is the point where a lot of people turned on Watch Dogs.

Somehow people got a wee bit too hyped up for this game, because the backlash it's seeing across the internet now is mind boggling. There are numerous reasons people are freaking out about it, but the graphical downgrade is a very prominent one. I guess people feel like they were lied to, which is a semi-legitimate complaint, but it's nothing to condemn the game over. It still looks perfectly fine for an open world game. I feel like that's where the legitimate complaints stop though. Now people are upset because it's an open world game that isn't much different from all the others. You still get behind cover to shoot people, find collectibles on the map, and drive around a whole bunch. What really gets me is that the game was never advertised as anything else. Hell, this type of gameplay was even shown in the original E3 demo everyone was losing it over in the first place.

I think the game still looks fine graphically.

Yes, Watch Dogs is an open world game that has you hacking the objects around you to make them do things. You hack everything with the push of a button, which is the main thing that makes Watch Dogs different from other open world games. I've said it once, and I'll probably say it many more times, but Watch Dogs is a fine game. It's nothing spectacular, but it's not the kind of thing that you immediately condemn either. It's a perfectly competent game. The hacking actually adds to the gameplay in a meaningful way. It allows for combat to be done stealthily, as opposed to going in guns blazing. Sure, I went in guns blazing 90% of the time, but at least I had the option not to.

You play as the vigilante Aiden Pierce. His goal is to get revenge on the people who killed his six year old niece. Throughout the game you'll work with various people in order to find out the truth behind the savage murder. It's not exactly the most compelling story, but it does have it's interesting points. The main issue I had with it, is that about 3/4's of the way through the game there are some plot events that seem to only happen so that the game is longer. The game is already long enough, due to the fact that collectibles and side missions are literally everywhere, just as they are in other Ubisoft open world games. Most of the stuff is totally pointless and not very fun. The rewards were definitely not worth completing everything in my opinion.

Watch Dogs is another open world game, except that it has hacking.

Watch Dogs was fine. It probably took me around 30 hours to complete, and that's with me mostly main lining the story. I ended up doing a fair amount of side stuff on the way, but I'm sure if I wanted to keep playing I could go for another 20-30 hours to collect the rest of it. Overall it's just an average open world game with a whole lot of third person shooting. The hacking element is very interesting though, even if it does just have you pressing a single button. I feel like Watch Dogs is a proof of concept that can be expanded into something much better the second time around. Hopefully it makes an amazing transformation like the Assassin's Creed franchise did between its first and second games. Despite all the backlash from the gaming community there will almost certainly be another one of these games. It around 4 million copies worldwide already, which is nothing to sneeze at.

E3 Hype Train!

This coming Monday, June 9th, E3 2014 is taking place. I'm very excited as I tend to be every year. This year is kind of weird though, because so many game announcements are happening prior to the show. Hopefully there are still a bunch of Surprises left to be unveiled, because with almost every single cool game being delayed to 2015 the gaming community could use a little bit of excitement.

As for games that come out in June I'm kind of drawing a blank. Tomorrow I'll be picking up Tomodatchi Life for the 3DS, which should be pretty fun. I'm also currently playing through Murdered: Soul Suspect on the PS4, which has been being completely blasted in reviews. So far I think it's actually pretty good.

It's probably good that I won't be getting much this month, because I'll be going on vacation from the 16th through the 27th, which should prove to be very exciting. I'm sure I'll cook something up for the blog though.

     -Manny

Game Time - April 2013

April was not nearly as insane as March, but I still played quite a few games. Unsurprisingly I played a bunch more Monster Hunter, but this is no longer the place to talk about that. Hey, I killed a whole bunch of monsters and loved every minute of it!

Last month I played some Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, but ended up completing it this month. It wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but I still had a good time with it. Maybe next month I'll actually be able to dive into Luigi's Mansion.

As for new April releases I played both Guacamelee and Injustice: Gods Among Us. They were both games. I played them. Let's find out what I thought. It's Game Time!

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon : Gates to Infinity

Nintendo is known for their family friendly games. Most of the time they're very upbeat and filled with sunshine and rainbows. At first glance Pokemon Mystery Dungeon seems just like that, but then when you move on in the story a bit it's true nature shines through. Turns out it's incredibly dark and depressing. Don't believe me? "Trying just makes everything hurt worse," is a literal quote about saving the Pokemon world. There's a Pokemon who refuses to make friends, because she thinks no one can be trusted. Those are the only examples that come to mind right now, but there's a whole lot of stuff like that throughout the game. It surprised me multiple times with just how dark it gets.

I'd say it's not for kids, but that's not necessarily true. While there may be some dark themes the issues are almost always overcome in a positive way. At the beginning the game has you choose from a few Pokemon to determine who you want to play as. You are a human who was turned into a Pokemon so that they could save the human world. Along with a sidekick, which you also must pick, you try to create a Pokemon Paradise while simultaneously trying to save the world. Your partner is super upbeat and wants to believe that there is still kindness in the world. No matter what the situation they will be positive, which can be kind of annoying. However, if that role was not filled this may have been the most depressing game ever. There are a variety of characters that you'll meet over the course of the game and they're all incredibly well developed.

The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games are well known for their characters.

A few years ago I played the DS entry in this series and liked it quite a bit. The story and characters were incredible, so I was hoping for the same thing from this game. What I got was something much different, but it was still pretty good. The story isn't the only thing that's not quite as good though, which is a shame. The overall gameplay has been taken down a notch in a way that makes it far less fun. Mystery Dungeon games are essentially rogue-likes. You control a group and take them through totally randomized dungeons. The goal is to get through the dungeon or complete specific objectives. You go through narrow corridors fighting enemies and looking for stairs to get to the next floor. In previous games there was a hunger element as well. In this entry hunger was removed, and the enemies were made to be much easier (As far as I could tell). There also seems to be much less to do post-game.

I did enjoy my time with Gates to Infinity, but I couldn't help but compare it to the previous DS entry in the series. This entry is easier and has far less Pokemon in it. The previous game had every single Pokemon available that existed at that time. Gates to Infinity has all of the fifth generation, which is arguably the worst selection with a few others added in for good measure. From what I saw fans of the series were not overly pleased with this, despite the fact that it was still enjoyable. It's worth playing for the story alone, but if you have the opportunity you should go back and play the previous games.

Guacamelee

The term Metroidvania has been thrown around a lot in the past few years, but I think it's safe to say that most people who play video games know what they are now. In case you don't know they're games that are remarkably similar to the early Castlevania and Metroid games. They're sidescrolling adventure games that have you freely exploring a grid based map. Guacamelee is the most recent of these types of games released on the Playstation Network.

Guacamelee takes place in a world inspired by Spanish culture. For starters you play as Juan Aguacate, a farmer who has been brought back to life by a mystical luchador mask. At the very beginning of the game Juan is killed by the evil skeleton man Carolos Calca who is trying to become all powerful. In order for him to do so he must sacrifice the president's daughter in a sacred ritual. Juan must travel the land to master his luchador powers in an attempt to stop Calca's insidious plot. Since Juan is a Luchador he beats his enemies down with savage melee attacks. Surprisingly the melee combo system is very deep, but it doesn't really reward you for doing well, so mashing the attack button can get you through everything just fine.

It's easy to get away with mashing in Guacamelee

Traversing the world isn't exactly how I expected it to be. Like most Metroidvannia games there are colored barriers that you must break through. By breaking statues, which are very similar to the Chozo statues in Metroid Juan will gain new powers. Each power corresponds to a different color barrier. For example if you uppercut you can break red blocks. One way I feel that Guacamelee is different from other games of this type is that it has a very strong emphasis on platforming. The main mechanic in the game allows Juan to switch between the land of the living and the dead with a single button press. Certain platforms are only solid in one world, which can make getting places very tricky. You'll often find yourself jumping to a non-corporeal platform and then switching the world mid-jump so that you can land. At first it's not very tough, but to find all of the secret treasures it takes a ridiculous amount of precision and skill.

The controls are very responsive, which makes the difficult platforming sections seem fair instead of frustrating. The motion is all very fluid in a way that reminds me of Super Meat Boy. The games both get challenging, but I knew that any mistakes were entirely my fault.

The visuals in Guacamelee are very striking.

In terms of visuals the game looks amazing, especially in motion. The colors are extremely vibrant, which fit with the Spanish theme that the game has going on. The way everything is drawn and colored makes me think about the candy skulls or calaveras, which are most often seen around the day of the dead. Furthering the atmosphere is the constant mariachi music playing in the background. It all comes together to make a very specific feel.

It took me about seven hours to finish Guacamelee, and that's with 98% completion. All of the secrets are fairly obvious, or hidden in plain sight. There isn't a whole lot of replay value unless you're shooting for every trophy, which requires the game to be beaten again on hard. It's an interesting experience to go through once, because Drink Box had a specific vision that they brought to life quite well.


Injustice: Gods Among Us

Have you ever wanted to see Batman use two tasers on Superman and then hit him with the Batmobile? Well then, Injustice is the game for you! All of your favorite heroes and villains, possibly your least favorites as well are available to duke it out in this NetherRealm Studios produced DC fighting game. When I first saw gameplay for it I was a bit disappointed by how much it looked like Mortal Kombat. After seeing it a whole lot more and playing it, I can now say that it is actually a whole lot different.

The most noticeable difference in gameplay videos is that it runs at 60 frames per second as opposed to the 30 that most modern games run at. This change makes everything look insanely fast. Youtube videos don't output at 60 fps, so if you want to see true Injustice play I recommend looking elsewhere. Upon playing fans of Mortal Kombat will notice almost immediately that you need to push back to block instead of holding a button. This change sounds minuscule, but it's actually a huge deal. Now cross-ups can actually be a thing, so it changes up the way you need to guard against jumping attacks and things of that sort. Mortal Kombat has always been a 4 button fighting game, while Injustice is technically 3. There are three attack buttons, light medium, and heavy. The 4th button isn't necessarily an attack for each character, it activates their trait. Solomon Grundy's does a chain grab, Superman's gives him an attack buff, and Aqua Man's makes him get wet so he can pop out of combos. It's fairly different for each character and adds a lot of variety to the cast outside of their basic move sets.

Watch as all your favorite DC characters pummel each other!

One of the cool things new to Injustice is that all of the stages can be interacted with. When your character nears an object they can interact with the R1 button appears near their health bar. Different characters interact with things in different ways. For example in the Atlantis stage there are valves on each end. If you interact with someone like Batman, then they will turn the valve and shoot out water at the opponent. If you use someone with super strength like Superman then they will smash open the glass to flood the opponent with water. Aside from these interactions most stages have multiple areas. Performing a strong attack at the correct end of a stage will send the opponent flying to a new area for a ton of damage. These things look cool and help out a lot in battle, but there are a lot of people in the fighting game community who are against them. Some of the stage interactions are unblockable and they do a ton of damage. You can turn all the interactions off from the options menu, which I can see a lot of tournaments doing. It's a shame though, because it's a really cool feature.

Oh yeah, the fighting feels good too, which is pretty important. Everything feels very fluid, which makes it easier for me to find combos on my own. Normally that's something I have a very hard time with in fighting games. That's not to say that I'm very good at the game, but I've only lost a handful of times online. I believe that's because I use Raven and she has a bunch of moves that magically pick up the opponent from half a screen away. People tend not to block when they're not near you, or they're trying to do ranged shots that leave them open. There is a large focus on ranged attacks, because almost everyone has them. However, if you want to rush your opponent down and pummel them into a bloody pulp that's always still an option as well. It's just that in this game it happens a whole lot faster and you're a DC character.

I like using Nightwing, but he has trouble dealing with ranged attacks.

Since the game revolves around comic books it would be woefully incomplete without a totally bonkers story mode. Much like Mortal Kombat 9, Injustice has a fully animated story mode. The cutscenes transition instantly into battles and then back out again, which still continues to be awesome. Hopefully other companies will start to take a cue from NetherRealm and make their fighting game story modes worth playing. Even if you're not huge into fighting games you will still be able to find enjoyment in the story of Injustice. Unless you really don't like DC comic book characters, in which case maybe you shouldn't play Injustice at all. However, I do recommend Injustice. It's fun to play and it's different enough from Mortal Kombat to stand on its own. NetherRealm has shown once again that they know what they're doing and I'm glad they were picked up by Warner Bros.

Release Dates Are Stupid

According to every possible outlet I've ever seen Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut was supposed to be in stores today, but it isn't. Hopefully it will be there tomorrow so that I can lose myself in it's complete and utter madness.

There are no new releases I'm looking forward to in May, so I'm going to get a chance to save some money for once. I am however going to go to the fighting game tournament ECT (East Coast Throwdown). My brother and my friend are entering a few games. I'm super excited to go and watch. This will be the second major tournament I've attended

Perhaps I'll crack into my backlog, or maybe I'll just get stuck playing only Deadly Premonition. Find out on the next amazing installment of Game Time.

     -Manny

Game Time - September 2012

September is over! It was an action packed month for me in terms of video gaming and the new releases are only going to keep coming. Now is not the time to look to the future though, it's a time to reflect on the games I spent the most time with this past month.

I finally got my hands on Tokyo Jungle, One Piece: Pirate Warriors, and Borderlands 2. All of which I had been looking forward to for months. I still haven't beaten Tokyo Jungle, but it's interesting enough that I think I'll end up coming back to it. One Piece is like every other Dynasty Warriors game, so you probably know how that it. I enjoyed playing both of the games quite a bit.

Borderlands 2 on the other hand I may have enjoyed a little too much. I guess you could say I lost my fair share of sleep because of the all-night co-op sessions I was having. It met and exceeded my expectations for what a new Borderlands could amount to. Let's just say I really like it. Due to the fact that I like it a lot, I also have an extraordinary amount to say about it. That means I won't be talking about it much here, but I will be doing a Game Time ID dedicated entirely to my love of Borderlands 2.

Every time I write a new one of these I become more aware of how terrible I am at writing intros for them. So without further adieu let's get into the discussion so I can cause minimal intro pain to both you and myself. It's game time!

Tokyo Jungle

Yeah, the game's just as crazy as this image.

Crazy Japanese games are nothing new, but they've been few and far between lately. Lucky for everyone Sony decided that they wanted to bring back the crazy by releasing Tokyo Jungle. Have you ever wanted to see a Pomeranian savagely kill a hyena in a single blow? How about a deer wearing some hot Hip-hop clothes? If either of those things sound like something you'd be interested in Tokyo Jungle has you covered.

The world is in a post apocalyptic state and animals have become feral. Now they all run amok on the streets of Tokyo which has become not unlike a jungle. Oh yeah, there are also Dinosaurs. The gameplay is focused around this idea. You choose an animal to play as and try to survive as long as you can.

Everything about the game is very arcade-like. You can choose either survival mode, where you survive for as long as possible, or story mode where you have set objectives. The story mode missions can only be unlocked by playing survival, so it's the mode you'll be playing the most. You start off by picking what animal you'll play as. Initially you can only play as a cute little Pomeranian, but completing specific challenges will net you more animals. Once you have picked your animal of choice you'll be thrust into the wilds of Tokyo.

Sights like this are commonplace in Tokyo Jungle.

You'll either be a carnivore, or an herbivore. As an herbivore you'll only be able to eat plants randomly generated throughout the world. The attack of herbivores is often very low, but they can double jump and move very quickly. You can still kill other animals if you want, but you won't be able to eat them. Then as a carnivore you have to viciously attack every animal you see and then eat their corpse. Eating keeps your hunger gauge filled up, while giving you calories. Certain calorie milestones make the animal rank up, so they become stronger. If you let it empty your health will start to slowly drain until you die. If there's nothing around to eat there are sometimes pools of water to stave off the hunger for a little bit.

Much to my surprise the controls of Tokyo Jungle aren't terrible. In fact, I think they're excellent and that mainly stems from the fact that they're simple. Movement is done with the right stick, but if you flick the left stick in a direction the animal will make quick movements. It's all very twitch. Moving around an enemy rapidly is easy, so you can get in to attack them a few times and get out before they even notice what's going on. This makes combat quick and exciting. Alternatively you can sneak up to an opponent and score a clean kill. If you wait near an unsuspecting enemy for long enough fangs will appear on them letting you know that you're ready for a critical strike.

An average round of Tokyo Jungle takes around twenty minutes to a half hour, but can end up going for an hour or more. A minute of real time is equivalent to one year. As time goes on the animals around the world get tougher and tougher, so you really need to push to get that next high score. In order to make the game have an even deeper challenge animals can only survive for fourteen years before they die, making it crucial to reproduce. In order to reproduce it's necessary to mark all points in any one territory by peeing on them. Once every spot has been "marked" mates will show up on the map. There are three levels of mate which are prime, average, and dirty. Prime mates require you to have eaten enough calories to get to boss rank, and average requires you to be a veteran. Dirty mates don't require a rank, which is why they will give you fleas. The better the mate the more babies they will make. When you get a mate you have to take them back to the nest, where you will mount them as the game fades to black. When everything comes back up you will be in control of a baby animals with some others following you. The other animals amount to extra lives.

You'll need to procreate in order to survive the harsh jungles of Tokyo.

It all sounds complicated, but it isn't in practice. Tokyo Jungle is an arcade survival game. You start off weak, but as you change generations and advance you become stronger. You can become even stronger than that by unlocking new animals (There are a TON of animals). That's actually my main gripe about the game is that it's a total grind to unlock more animals. Every animal has a specific challenge to unlock one other specific animal. It can end up taking a while to complete what you need to do, so it can become a bit tedious. It takes a whole lot of play time to get to the crazy animals like dinosaurs, so it really depends on how much fun you're having.

Lucky for me I do have a fun time playing Tokyo Jungle. There's something about trying to survive longer each and every run that I find to be entertaining. It helps that each subsequent animal is stronger than the last so you feel like you're actually advancing. It's just a super weird fun game, which helps overshadow the fact that it looks like a launch era PS2 game that barely has any music.

Weird games like this have been few and far between and it's even more rare for a  game like this to actually be any fun. It was a retail game in Japan, but you can download it for $15 on PSN here. I highly recommend you check it out.

One Piece :Pirate Warriors

I don't know what it is about Dynasty Warriors, but somehow I keep buying more games in the series.

Well, not exactly. I refuse to play any more actual Dynasty Warriors games, but I have been known to play it's anime spin-offs. Specifically Dynasty Warriors Gundam. As I've written about in the past I hate them, but at the same time I have an indescribable love for them. There's something about the totally mindless action that I can really get behind. So when I heard that they were going to be releasing a Dynasty Warriors One Piece game I basically lost my shit. To top it off, it was actually going to get a U.S. release, and it did!

I don't think I've ever mentioned it on this blog, but One Piece is one of my favorite TV shows. In the middle of high school I saw clips from the CP9 arc and decided that I needed to watch the entire series in it's original Japanese. I ended up doing that and I've never looked back since. Needless to say I love the show, so the ability to play as it's characters as they completely annihilate everything in their path sounded very appealing.

This is basically my reaction to the U.S. release of Pirate Warriors.

I'm happy to say that reality actually met up with my expectations on this one. I wasn't expecting anything ridiculously fancy, because well, it's a Dynasty Warriors game. A Dynasty Warriors game with One Piece characters is exactly what I got. There's a whole lot of mashing square while occasionally throwing in triangle or circle. It's not saying much, but this seems like the most advanced Musou game to date. Since all of the characters have moves from the anime they have most of them in the game, which makes for great combo variety. I think it also helps that there are only thirteen characters instead of the usual hundred or so. This means that each character has a chance to be unique instead of an exact copy.


Pirate Warriors also switches it up with the single player, but it isn't necessarily for the better. At times the maps will turn into a third person action/adventure game. Every level like this you'll be required to use Luffy, since he's the main character. You'll go around and obliterate all of your enemies like normal, but sometimes you'll have to swing around with Luffy's rubber arms or solve puzzles. At first it makes for a nice change of pace, but after the second or third time it starts to get in the way of what I expect from a game of this type. It becomes especially tedious, because Luffy says the same thing every time he does an action. It's fine every so often, but it happens constantly in these sequences, which is enough to drive me mad. It's easy to see where Namco Bandai was going with this, but it definitely didn't come out as intended.

At it's core Pirate Warriors is just another Musou game.

In case you couldn't already tell One Piece: Pirate Warriors isn't for everyone. For starters it's pretty much necessary that you like One Piece. This game targets a very specific audience and Namco Bandai realized this. Here in the U.S. it was only released as a downloadable with just the Japanese voices. So when I say you have to like One Piece, you have to REALLY like it. Even with that extreme love it's still kind of hard to justify even at the discounted price of $40. The single player campaign is only around eight hours long and there isn't much to do after that.

All I know is that I had a fun time playing this game.

Borderlands 2 addiction?

I still have to beat Tokyo Jungle, but I think it's going to be a while before I get around to it. Borderlands 2 has basically been consuming my life. Normally when I beat a game I throw it to the side and move on to the next thing, but I can't do that with Borderlands 2. There's something about it that keeps drawing me in for more. There are a lot of people who don't seem to like it very much, but I can't really understand why. It improves on the original in almost every way possible.

Next month is another big month for releases. I'll be getting Pokemon White 2, Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracles, and Asaassin's Creed 3. I've already pre-ordered all of them thanks to the magic of Amazon Prime. Maybe I'll be over Borderlands before Pokemon comes out, but at this rate I highly doubt it.

Well, that's all for this edition of Game Time. See you all next month.

     -Manny

Game Time - August 2012

Now that it's the end of August I have returned to tell you all about my various gaming exploits. I managed to fit in a decent bit of gaming despite the fact that I started and finished watching Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood. It was surprisingly good, but this isn't a blog about anime. It's all about the video games.

As you already know I played a fair bit of Persona 4 Arena, which you can read about here. Even though I played it a whole bunch more my thoughts on it didn't change a whole lot. So if you want to hear about it go read what I already wrote.

The games I spent the most time with were Kingdom Hearts 3DS, and The Last Story. That's right, The Last Story finally stopped getting delayed long enough to come out! Since these are both fairly sizable games I have a lot to go off about.

I haven't done one of these in a long time, so I'm anxious to get all of these thoughts out. Let's not  waste any more time. It's game time!

Kingdom Hearts 3DS

I've been a fan of the Kingdom Hearts series since its inception. I really liked it back then, but with each passing game I find myself growing more apprehensive about the series. For some reason Square thinks it's a good idea to keep releasing non numbered Kingdom Hearts sequels. I understand that the series makes them a literal ton of money, but now it's getting out of control. It wouldn't bug me so much if each new entry in the game didn't seem to factor heavily into the overall plot of the series. To make it even worse they're all on different consoles.

Originally it seemed to me that Nomura had an overall plan for the series that he was following very closely. With each passing game however, I feel that he's making everything up as he goes along. A lot of the time it's not even necessarily making the overall plot better, but more convoluted. That's where the true issue with all of these non-numbered sequels lies. How the hell is anyone going to know what's going on in Kingdom Hearts 3 if and when it ever comes out if they haven't played all these games? I've played most of them and read wiki pages on the games and I still barely understand what the hell is going on half the time.

A lot of the Kingdom Hearts 3DS story is kind of like a fever dream.

I liked Kingdom Hearts 3DS, but it took the plot of the series and made it infinitely more convoluted. I'd go into more detail about it, but it would basically spoil the entire game and I never want to do that. On top of that the story itself is told in the most convoluted way ever. Instead of showing things linearly a lot of the important cut scenes are shown as optional flashbacks, which could have easily been shown chronologically. On op of that you're switching between two plot lines every twenty minutes against your will, but more on that later.

So it probably sounds like I hate everything about this game right? Well now that I got all of my grumpy complaining out of the way I'm glad to let you know that I actually did like it. What's it all about you ask? Here, I'll let you in on the basis of the plot.

Yen Sid thinks Sora and Riku suck, so they need to become TRUE keyblade masters.

Turns out Sora and Riku aren't strong enough to take on Master Xehanort (See, if you didn't play Birth by Sleep on the PSP you don't even have any idea who that is). Since his impending return is short at hand they need to take every chance to power up. In order to do that Mickey and Yen Sid have decided that they must take the Mark of Mastery Exam in order to become true Keyblade masters. In order to do this they are sent into a dream world to find the keyholes of sleeping worlds in order to awaken them. This is pretty much old hat in the Kingdom Hearts universe.

As you may have guessed you will be travelling from world to world fighting monsters. This time they're rainbow colored things called Dream Eaters. Since you'll be playing as Sora and Riku in a dream world they don't have partners. In order to remedy that you'll be crafting your own Dream Eaters, which is where you'll be getting your skills from. If you want to get extra crazy you'll be able to pet and feed your Dream Eaters much like Nintendogs.

The Cyber Yog is just one of many Pokemon knock-offs you can pet.

The gameplay itself doesn't stray much from the rest of the series, but it most closely resembles the gameplay in Birth By Sleep. Sora and Riku each wield keyblades, which you can swing with the push of a button. Chaining hits together will get you into a combo. When you add skills into the mix the combat gets a fair amount deeper. A set amount of skills can be equipped to your command deck, which you will be able to cycle through in battle. Some of them are special keyblade attacks, while the others are magic. Combining all of this stuff together makes for a fun combat system that has a reasonable amount of depth for those looking to find it.

Sora and Riku don't fight very differently, but have totally different plot lines that end up converging in the end. In an attempt to have two simultaneous stories someone came up with the drop system, which absolutely sucks. Every twenty minutes no matter what you're doing the game forces you to switch between the two characters, which makes the story even harder to follow for absolutely no reason. When this happens in battle you'll have to do the entire thing all over again, which is a serious pain in the ass. Sure, you can up the time limit a little bit, but it never stops it from getting in the way of the experience. I don't see why they couldn't do what Birth By Sleep did where you just do one story at a time. Then again, I'm not a game designer.

I had a fun time playing Birth By Sleep and it got me super pumped up for Kingdom Hearts 3. What I had issues with were all of the things that the series seems to be actively doing to make itself obtuse. Let's just hope that Kingdom Hearts 3 is the next game and not another random non-numbered sequel.

The Last Story

Earlier in the year we saw the release of Xenoblade Chronicles here in the U.S. Now, a mere four months later we are finally seeing another Wii title targeted by Project Rainfall. Once again, we don't know if the release of the game and the mass outcry related to Project Rainfall were related, but I'd like to think that they were.

I'm going to go on record here and say that Xenoblade wasn't exactly all it was cracked up to be. Sure it was a pretty good game, but it wasn't some super next level game or anything. Yes, it did do some awesome ideas on how to make JRPG gameplay better and more efficient and I appreciate that.

Considering the way I feel about Xenoblade I wasn't expecting a whole lot from The Last Story, but what I got was pleasantly surprising. The plot is that of a standard JRPG, but the gameplay is something else entirely. By that I mean that the combat is interesting, but not exactly super great. Have you ever wanted to play a third person cover based shooter, but instead of having guns all of the characters have swords? Perhaps you wanted some of them to cast magic? If so, then The Last Story is the game for you.

You'll be in cover often during battle.

Yeah, that's right. The Last Story is a third person cover based JRPG. You control the main character Zael who has gained the mysterious power of The Outsider. In battle the power allows him to glow blue, which pulls all aggro towards him. In the beginning all you can do is attack with your sword, duck behind cover, roll, shoot a bow, and use the power of The Outsider, which doesn't really leave room for a whole lot of strategy. Therefore you have to go buck wild on the enemy with your sword until they die.

As the game progresses Zael will gain abilities that make the battles much more interesting. Your magicians, along with the enemies leave behind magic circles when they cast spells. If you hold down the attack button you will be sent to a bird's eye view of the battle, where you have been turned into a targeting reticle. If you target a magic circle Zael will use his Gale Slash to break it. Depending on what type of magic was cast various buffs and debuffs will occur.

Eventually you'll be able to issue orders to your party members. It's a shame that you can't give them strategies, because you can only have them use skills or run away. Zael gets more skills, but none of them are super useful. He is able to run up walls, but I think I only ended up doing that a total of three times in the game and it was during a boss fight where I had to. The reason I say the gameplay isn't super great is because it shoots for strategic combat, but misses entirely. Strategy is very rarely, if ever required to win a battle. I often found myself mashing my sword attacks until the enemy was dead, while occasionally breaking magic circles. It's weird, because there was a lot of setup for a very strategic game it's just not executed properly. Almost as if the designers didn't know how to make the battles strategic.

Should we break the magic circle, or break the magic circle? Strategy!

I had a lot of fun fighting battles in The Last Story, although I guess a lot of people didn't. The game defaults to having you auto attack as soon as you get near an enemy. I did that for the first battle, and it sucked. It made it feel like I had absolutely no control over what was going on. That's why I think that anyone thinking about playing the game should switch the controls to manual. It makes the game a whole lot more enjoyable.

Outside of the battle system I really liked the first half of the game. For some reason the chapter format and color scheme reminded me a lot of Resonance of Fate, another JRPG with interesting battle mechanics. However, unlike Resonance of Fate the story of The Last Story makes sense. Zael is a part of a band of mercenaries. It's their overall goal to become knights. Early on in the game Zael falls in love with a mysterious girl (SURPRISE!) and from that moment on his life changes. The game's plot eventually sees Zael and crew entering the castle and mingling with all of the nobles. Also there's war (SURPRISE AGAIN!).

The plot starts off innocent enough, but then like most JRPGS the plot gets needlessly convoluted and totally stupid near the end. This is something I've been noticing a lot lately and it's really starting to annoy me. Where the plot of The Last Story does right is in it's characters. They all feel very real and that's not something you get very often in games these days. It sort of helps that they all have british voice actors, because just like in Xenoblade it makes everything feel more foreign than it actually is and that's refreshing. To top it off the game looks incredible for a Wii game, but the frame rate is a total disaster. So maybe it wasn't worth having it look so good?

The Last Story could have benefited from the higher specs of the PS3 and the 360.

Oh yeah it's also got some multiplayer.... It's uhhh not so great...

NEXT MONTH IS GOING TO RULE!

Thus concludes another segment of Game Time. I hope that you enjoyed my complaint riddled descriptions. If these games weren't exciting enough for you, then perhaps September will have more to offer. I know for certain that I'll be playing an obscene amount of Borderlands 2, along with Tokyo Jungle. I'm most certainly going to throw in some One Piece Pirate Warriors for good measure. So look forward to that.

See you in a month for another one of these and probably before that with something entirely different.

     -Manny

Max Anarchy (Anarchy Reigns) Demo Impressions

Over the past few years PlatinumGames and Sega have partnered to bring us crazy games like Mad World, Bayonetta, and Vanquish. Platinum has proven that they know how to put on the crazy while still creating engaging gameplay to go along with it.

Platinum's new game Anarchy Reigns (Max Anarchy in Japan) continues their track record of sheer craziness. Much like Bayonetta and Mad world Anarchy Reigns is a brawler/action game. Interestingly enough it takes place in the same universe as Mad World and even focuses on some characters from that game, like the main character Jack. 

Anarchy Reigns was set to drop in the U.S. July 3rd and Europe a few days later, but now it's TBA in both territories. Just like all of Platinum's previous games Sega is publishing this one as well. It's no secret that Sega is in dire straights financially, so it's entirely possible that the game will only be released in Japan now. Platinum has stated multiple times that the game has been localized in it's entirety, so that information is keeping my hope alive.

Lucky for Japan their release date has not changed and the game will be released there on July 5th as planned. It's lame that it may not come out here, but the Japanese version is ripe for importing if you're into that kind of thing. For some odd reason the game will have the option for both English voices and text. Much to my surprise the demo that was put up on the Japanese PSN today had those English options as well. I immediately downloaded it, because I had to find out what it was all about.  

You can change it all to English!

Combat

First and foremost Anarahcy Reigns is a brawler, so the first thing I did in the demo was rush over to the training mode. I've watched my fair share of gameplay videos and I was eager to find it the gameplay felt as good as it looked and in my opinion it does.

Like most other brawlers Anarchy Reigns uses two main attack buttons. If you push square your character will bust out with a weak attack and if you push triangle they'll go with a heavy  attack. Creating combos is easy and they can get up to what seems like four consecutive hits. One, two, or three weak hits and then a heavy hit will make up a majority of what you're doing. You can vary the timing of the button presses and add directional inputs to change the attacks even further. This is basically how all brawlers work, but it's similar to Devil May Cry and Bayonetta in the way that your skill matters. If you get good enough you can do some really cool stuff. Learning to juggle opponents and how to get them into aerial combos seem to be a key parts of developing skill.

This video shows off a bit of training mode.

When you're fighting normal enemies you pretty much tear them apart. After two or three hits they'll explode and you can turn your sights to the next target. However, when it comes to fighting other characters and bosses it gets a whole lot more complex and fun. They won't just sit there and take your beatings. They'll hit you back and they'll hit hard. Blocking works well and it doesn't seem easy to abuse. Holding down R2 will set your character in place and they'll block incoming damage from the front. If you take too many hits the guard will break and you'll be susceptible to a lot of damage. If you notice your opponent start to block you can grab them out of it as well. 

The battles in Anarchy Reigns can get pretty hectic and blocking doesn't always work. In fact if an enemy hits you from behind you can be in pretty serious danger. Platinum took this into consideration and added a few things to help deal with those hectic situations. The first is the ability to do an area attack in exchange for some of your characters health. The attack will blow away all enemies around you so that you can escape and potentially avoid a great deal of damage.

If you're doing well enough in the battle an aura will appear around your character. If you then click in both sticks you'll enter rage mode. When in rage mode you'll attack much faster and be allowed to use your killer weapon without penalty. To use your killer weapon you'll need to hold the L2 button in conjunction with the light and heavy attacks. Attacking with the killer weapon is way more powerful. You can also use the killer weapon without rage mode, but it will take away your health.

Each character has a weapon. Jack uses a chainsaw, while Leo uses crazy leg swords.

The combat is well done and it seems like Platinum is trying to promote skilled play. Mashing buttons will do some damage, but if you time your hits and know what you're doing you'll kick some serious ass.

Single Player

I'm going to be honest when I say that I don't know what the hell was going on in the story of Anarchy Reigns, but I didn't care at all! It was straight up insanity. 

The game is going to feature two different campaigns, white and black. In the black campaign which I tried out first you play as Jack the main character from Mad World. It began with a ridiculous FMV video which looked beautiful. Blacker Baron, the pimp from mad world, and his consort Mathilda have tracked down Jack in order to take him down. 

This might sound a little bad, but I feel like this game is how Japanese people imagine American culture. Blacker Baron has an oddly high pitched voice and he says mother fucker, or fucker almost constantly. To top it off he has a grill that says fuck you on it. It's all ridiculous, but I love it. To make things even more odd almost all of the in game music is rap. With how weird everything is it all fits together well. The world they've created feels unique and definitely shows off a very Platinum style.

Jack is the main character if the black side, and Leo is the main character of the white side.

After a bit of talking a fight between Jack and the Baron takes place. It's what you'd expect, a battle. Near the end an event occurs that has bombs dropping down onto the stage. When you win you'll be given a score, which will translate into what level of medal you get. Platinum medals are the highest honor and it seems that the more points you get the more stuff you'll unlock in the game. 

On the white side you play as the cyborg Leo and his story is a lot less ridiculous. He walks out of a bar with his friends and is ambushed by a bunch of thugs. You then transition to gameplay, which allows you to roam around the immediate area. There are enemies to fight in order to get points, but the true goals are the pillars of light. Each pillar is a mission. Green pillars are free missions that you can do over and over to get points, while red pillars are main story missions. In Leo's he fights a weird lizard man. 

The look into the campaign isn't very deep, but what they showed has me very interested. Like all of Platinum's work the story seems to be bat shit crazy and I can't wait to see what else it has in store.

Multiplayer

I thought it was weird that Anarchy Reigns was going to have a large focus on Multiplayer when I first heard about it. Now that I've played it I still feel that way.

Games like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry need precise timing to pull off the more advanced maneuvers and Anarchy Reigns is absolutely no different. When you introduce lag into the equation it loses some of it's functionality. Then when you add in four opposing players it loses even more than functionality.

I realize that I'm an American playing on a Japanese demo's server for an unreleased game, so I'm willing to cut the multiplayer a little slack, but I wasn't too keen on what I played.

The demo has two available modes for play. Death match, which has four players in a free-for-all and team death match, which has two teams of four players. I only played a few games of team death match, because that's what quick match throws you into. I played five matches and in four out of those five matches my team was mercilessly slaughtered. 

This was basically happening to me the entire time I played multiplayer.

Whenever I would spawn I'd find the nearest player and try to attack them. It almost never worked out in my favor. I'd try to block, but the delay made it so I didn't start blocking before they got me into an insane combo. There were times when I'd get into a fight with someone and it would go fairly well, but then I'd instantly die when someone attacked me from behind. Since the camera is positioned behind the back it's almost impossible to tell when someone is coming up from the back. 

To add to my woes I would get double teamed a lot. If two people attack you at the same time you're screwed. As far as I can tell there is no way to get around it. One person will combo you, then the other and it'll continue in an endless cycle until you're dead or they choose to leave you alone. This wouldn't be a problem if each team member fought someone, but I had a lot of people disconnecting. People were also using items to instantly kill me, which was getting extremely frustrating.

Before I played the game I expected the multiplayer to be pure chaos and it is, but not really in a good way. I kept getting super frustrated, because it felt like there was absolutely nothing I could do. The same solid base mechanics were still there, they just weren't working at the speeds I needed them to. 

The last match I played I ended up doing fairly well, but that was because half of the other team dropped out for some unknown reason and were replaced with computers who didn't move at all. When I was fighting people in that match everything seemed to be going well. At first I thought that the problem was just me, but it seems to be that whatever team gets a kill first either shuts out or decimates the other.

A lot goes in in a match of Anarchy Reigns.

In each multiplayer match you'll accumulate points, which seem to go towards some type of unlock system that isn't really present in the demo. At the start of a match you can pick an ability for your character that modifies something about their moves. There are only a handful to choose from in the demo, but there are a ton of locked boxes that I assume you get by gaining a whole bunch of points in the retail version.

I know I sound fairly dismissive of this, mainly because I am. The concept of a multiplayer brawler just doesn't play in my mind. The fact that I'm an American playing on a Japanese server doesn't help at all. If the game ever does come out in America I'll give the multiplayer a fair shot, but right now it's not looking too hot from my perspective. I'll try it out some more later this week to see if my opinion changes any. If it worked properly it could be super fun, because the core gameplay is fun.

Conclusion

I've been looking forward to Anarchy Reigns for a long time. I wasn't expecting it to be anything spectacular, but I came away from the demo liking it a whole lot. The combat is simple, but seems to have a lot of depth to it. It's not exactly like Bayonetta and DMC, but it's similar. In fact it reminds me a lot of God Hand. Even the overall style of the reminds me of God Hand. 

It sucks that it's not coming out here in July anymore, but it sucks even more that it might not come out here at all anymore. Sega isn't even going to be showing the game at E3 and it's completely finished. This may be the first game I ever import, because I just have to see what the final product is like.

The demo is definitely something you should try out if you've been interested in this game at all. It's really easy to set up a Japanese PSN account for free and you'll have no problem finding the demo. On the 360 the demo is restricted to Gold users right now, but tomorrow a free weekend is starting so you'll be able to pick it up then. 

I recommend giving it a try. It's fun at the very least. 

     -Manny