Game Time ID: Grand Theft Auto V

Note: It took me so long to write this, because I was waiting to see what GTA Online was all about. As of writing this I still have not had a chance to properly do that. For some reason I can't connect to other players with any regularity. I can't tell if it's because it's still horribly busted or if it's because my internet connection is terrible. I'll keep trying it out every so often, because it seems interesting. It just isn't fun by yourself. Especially when almost any of the missions require 2 people to play. With that said this will only be about the single player.

Starting with Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PlayStation 2 Rockstar essentially created the modern open world sandbox game. With each successive entry in the series it got increasingly crazy and impressive. San Andreas was the last in the PS2 trilogy and it's still to this day one of my favorite games. When they moved to the current generation of consoles with Grand Theft Auto IV they also went for a more realistic world. Not everyone was very receptive to it, but that's the direction they went down. With Grand Theft Auto V Rockstar kept the realism of IV, while injecting the humor and zaniness of the PS2 iterations.

Somehow Rockstar always outdoes themselves with this franchise and I promise you that Grand Theft Auto V is no different. Initially I was expecting it to be earth shattering and filled with new ideas to reinvigorate the genre. That's what I thought I wanted. Instead what I got was what I essentially see as the apex of open world gaming. Rockstar has in my opinion perfected the formula for open world games and I don't know where they can really go from here. All I know is that GTA V was one hell of a game.

Epic Crime Saga

Unlike previous entries in the franchise GTA V has you take control of not one, but three main characters. When described it sounded like you would be able to seamlessly switch between any of the three characters at any time and they would be going about their regular everyday lives. In reality it doesn't work exactly like that, but it's close enough. Using the right stick you can switch to the character of your choosing. The camera zooms out above the city and within ten seconds it zooms back in onto your newly selected character. They'll be doing something random. They're all pre-coded events, but they give the illusion that the characters are living out their everyday lives when you're not using them. It's a really cool effect.

You take on the roles of Michael, Franklin, and Trevor. Michael is a middle aged man who lives what most would consider a life of luxury. He has retired from bank robbing, but longs to have that same kind of excitement in his life again. Franklin is young hood who wants to get into some legitimate crime and with the help of Michael he's able to do that. Last but not least there's Trevor and he's quite literally a psychopath. He used to run jobs with Michael before their whole operation was put to rest. The story revolves around these three characters and their series of elaborate heists. 

You get to know Trevor, Franklin, and Michael very well by the end of the game,

These three unlikely friends are amazing characters. They may be caricatures, but they're extremely well realized caricatures. I often find that when games try to tell this kind of story they fall flat. However, that's never been the case in the GTA games for me. I think that the high quality of the voice acting is one of the major factors that sets this franchise apart from so many others. You'll meet all kinds of characters throughout the game and very few of them even give sub-par performances. The story really drags you in and it's hard not to keep going from mission to mission just to see what's going to happen next. It's an epic crime saga that's truly exhilarating to experience. It has everything you'd want in a crime story. 

It also helps that the amount of detail in the game is unparalleled. The world is gigantic and every single nook and cranny of it is filled with minute details. There's a scene early on in the game where you go to a hackers house. You can walk all around inside and see readable papers lining the walls, anime figures, computer screens filled with information, and food littered all over the floor. It's all so intricately placed and it's only in the game for a scarce five minutes. I don't know if you can every go back inside the house, but regardless it's filled with a ridiculous amount of detail for such a short scene. That kind of thing happens all the time as well, it's not just that one scene.  

Look at the detail in that city!

With Rockstar's track record they can take as long as they need to make a game. They did take an awfully long time with GTA V, but you can actually see it. It's not like with most games where it's apparent that they were just throwing money at it to try and make the game better. They created a living breathing world heavily based off of California. Specifically the city of Los Santos is based off of Los Angeles. I've seen people claim that there are tons of landmarks, even tiny local restaurants in the game, which is a level of detail that most games just don't have. Hell, the venue for E3 is even accurately portrayed. What other games have full blown fake movies and TV shows you can watch? How about a fully featured fake internet that you can browse? The amount of content in the game is absolute madness. 

Open World Mayhem

One of the major issues with the GTA games in the past has been the gameplay itself. GTA games consist of two main activities, driving and shooting. Driving has always been fine, but in GTA IV they changed the handling to be closer to real life. In the end everything handled like an unwieldy boat and it was generally very unsatisfying. With GTA V the handling is much closer to what it was during the PS2 iterations of the franchise. It has a very arcade-like feel. You can get up to speed very quickly and the handling is loose, which makes it very easy to take sharp turns. 

Driving still takes up a majority of your time in GTA V. You'll have to drive to a mission marker, where you'll be given a mission and sent to drive somewhere else. More often than not you'll be sent to a location to shoot some guys. When you're done you'll then have to drive back. This didn't bother me so much, because I enjoyed the driving in the game. I know that some people do not though and it can get to be a bit tedious when missions are far away. Sometimes it can take upwards of ten minutes to reach your destination. In that case you can forgo driving yourself altogether and take a cab to your destination. It's not quite as beneficial though, because you won't be gaining any driving stat points.

You do a lot of driving, but the handling makes it fun.

Just like in San Andreas you can level up your stats in GTA V. You may not have to worry about getting fat, but you can increase your skill at driving, shooting, and many other things. For example the more you drive the better your driving skill will be. Some characters are innately better at things than others are. For example Franklin is good at driving, so he will automatically be able to handle cars much better than Trevor can. To add a little bit more flavor to each character they have a special ability to complement their innate skill set. Franklin can slow down time while driving in order to make hair-pin turns, Michael can go into a bullet-time state in order to take down enemies, and Trevor goes into a rage state where he takes almost no damage. They're not game breaking, but the abilities are nice to have in a pinch and help differentiate the characters a bit.

The shooting mechanics have been tweaked in a way that makes the act of killing enemies trivial. Rockstar apparently got the memo that their combat wasn't exactly the greatest. Previously you could target an enemy and switch to other targets with the push of a button. You had to be facing the enemy though. In GTA V you can just push the button to target and your reticle will automatically snap to the nearest enemy. If you flick the stick in the direction of another enemy it will move to auto target that enemy instead. This makes it super easy to pop out of cover and mow down every enemy in your path with little to no effort. It's not the most satisfying system, but it takes away a great deal of the frustration from previous iterations of the franchise. You can also free aim if you like, which works fairly well, but isn't anywhere near as efficient. I probably would have used free aim if I wasn't trying to complete combat scenarios as quickly as possible to see the next story beat. Plus you go down pretty easy, so I didn't find myself aiming for very long.

The auto aiming makes it very easy to take down helicopters.

While it is true that most missions just involve you driving and shooting GTA V is actually good about mission variety. Moreso than in past games you're sent to do things other than shoot someone in the face. An early mission has you buying clothes so you can sneak into the San Andreas equivalent of FaceBook to plant a bomb in their new prototype phone. One mission, which I found to be quite disturbing has Trevor torturing a suspected terrorist. You're given a choice of what torture device to use and then you have to perform button prompts to actually do the torturing. It did an excellent job of making me feel super uncomfortable. One of my personal favorites had me repelling down a building in order to kidnap someone.

The missions that truly shine in GTA V though are the heists. Apparently Rockstar heard that everyone really liked the bank heist in GTA IV, so they made a whole game based around large heists just like that one. At first you'll be tasked to stake out the area so that you can formulate a plan. Once you have all the information the game draws it all out on a whiteboard and makes you choose one of two ways to go about the heist. You'll get the opportunity to pick crew members you think will be able to help you out. Each crew member has their own unique stats and will take different shares of the money you get from the heist. If the crew members live through the heist their stats will increase, or they'll die on the job and be gone for good. 

The heists are easily the best missions in the game.

When you select how you're going to go about the heist you'll be sent to collect the supplies needed. The heists are probably the best part of the game, which makes it a shame that there are so few of them in it. During a job there's a sense of tension unlike anything I've felt in a video game before. They're very exciting, because you took the time to get everything ready and can see it all play out. Supposedly GTA online will have heists at some point, so maybe I can get my fix there when the time comes.

Outside of combat and driving there are many activities you can take part in. The sad part is that I didn't really take place in all that many of them. You can dive for treasure in a submarine, golf, do yoga, run triathlons, base jump, and a whole slew of other side activities. The only one that I did end up playing was tennis, just because I had to see what it was like. Surprisingly it was actually a serviceable mini-game, but not anything to write home about. It's cool that the world is populated with all of these things to do, but there's really no incentive to do them. They're just there to fill up space and give you something to do outside of the missions. I don't know that I'd say content just for the sake of having content is the best thing in the world.

Where Can They Go From Here?

It's hard for me to imagine where the Grand Theft Auto franchise can go from here. Rockstar created so many excellent characters and a compelling story. On top of that they created a world so rich in detail that I don't even have the time or wherewithal to see it all. They've taken everything they've learned since GTA 3 and laid it all out there. The level of realism they've reached is both technically impressive and somewhat scary at the same time. 

I don't really know that I want another Grand Theft Auto game after this one. I'm sure that if they release another one I'll jump all over it though. It just seems like at this point there's nowhere for them to go but down. I've seen a fair amount of people who disagree with this sentiment, but the internet is full of complainers. 

Grand Theft Auto V is undoubtedly one of the best games of this console generation. If you haven't played it you definitely should. The gameplay isn't the most compelling out there, but it's well worth putting up with in order to experience the world class characters and writing.

     -Manny

Game Time - September 2013

It took me a little over a week to complete the story of Grand Theft Auto V. Just as I suspected I had an incredible time going through it. What's weird is that I didn't feel exactly how I thought I would about it. Instead of being a ground breaking game with tons of new ideas it instead perfected a stagnating formula. In my opinion Grand Theft Auto V is the peak of the open world genre at this point in time. Open world games have been getting old, but GTA V shows that open world games can still be improved upon, but better yet they can still be well produced. Open world games are always filled with a certain amount of issues due to the sheer amount of processes going simultaneously. GTA V takes previously made conventions and polishes them to a never before seen luster.

I absolutely loved GTA V, but I'm not going to talk about it in depth here. It deserves its own special time, which it will be getting some time in the next few days. I have to gather up my thoughts, because I have a whole lot of them.

Other than that I only really played two games for any reasonable length of time. I made the mistake of buying Pokemon Rumble U, and I had $60 of PSN credit so I ended up getting Dragon's Crown for free. I actually like it despite how some aspects of it make me sigh in disappointment.

Without any real GTA talk this edition will be a bit light, but that's okay. Video game talk is still video game talk. It's game time!

Pokemon Rumble U

Every time a new Wii-U game comes out I hope that my buyers remorse will go away. Pikmin 3 was a great game, but it left me wanting so much more. I really don't know why I was expecting anything different from Pokemon Rumble U.

Pokemon Rumble is now apparently a spin off series of Pokemon. The first game titled Pokemon Rumble was a downloadable title on the Wii. It introduced the concept that there are Pokemon Toys that come to life when no humans are around kind of like Toy Story, except with way worse animation. Also every one of them is windup and looks kind of like a blob. Anyways, it was a fun little co-op game. Each player controlled a Pokemon and could do one of two moves. As you progressed through the stages you would  randomly get new and more powerful Pokemon.

A 3DS sequel Pokemon Rumble Blast came along as a full blown retail release. It had a lot more content and an actual plot! Now we're here on the Wii-U and Pokemon Rumble U is stuck somewhere in-between its two predecessors. You don't traverse through levels. Instead you fight hordes of Pokemon in different arena settings, which isn't very exciting. None of the levels are very challenging either.

I don't really get what's ascetically pleasing about this art style.

The story exists, while simultaneously barely existing at all. In the beginning you're treated to what can barely be called a cinematic. Some Pokemon toys were dropped in the river on accident and they need to find their way back to the toy store where they belong. However, along the way they'll encounter Pokemon who have been brainwashed and don't want them to go back. These later scenes are played out by showing a picture on the screen with text that scrolls so slow it's painful.

I did have fun playing co-op with some friends. If I had played the game solo I don't know that I would have finished it. What blows my mind is that the game is $18. Let me be the first to say that, that's way too much money for the game. It's still a downloadable title like the original, but it costs more and has far less content. Sure you can play as every single Pokemon, but that doesn't matter if all you need to do is repeatedly use the same attack at the center of an arena. At least traversing the levels gave the feel of more interactivity.

Ohh nooo she dropped the Pokemon!

Maybe I would have liked the game a lot more if I had bought some of the NFC toys. Apparently you can pay in game money to level the toys up and buy them new moves, which you can not do with any of the in game Pokemon. I'd consider buying the Lucario figure, but putting down another $6 dollars to a price tag that's already way too high doesn't seem logical.

Things like this make me feel like the Wii-U is going to continue to flounder.

Dragon's Crown

Perhaps you've seen Dragon's Crown before. The game is entirely hand drawn and animated. It looks gorgeous both when it's still and in motion. Perhaps you've also seen the female wizard character with comically large breasts, or the Amazon warrior with the worlds most gross looking thunder thighs? Yeah, the art direction of this game is a little questionable.

Dragon's Crown was developed by Vanillaware. All of their games are hand drawn and beautifully hand drawn and animated just like Dragon's Crown. Muramasa, and Odin Sphere are just two examples. What's weird is that neither of those games have the insanely sexualized characters that this one does. I would forgive the game if it were just the two playable characters that were hypersexualized, but it doesn't really stop there. The game is set in medieval times and it does a very good job of setting that vibe. The narrator is amazing and gets you right into the correct mindset. Then you enter the magic shop and the shopkeeper's boobs are taking up over half the screen as she moans asking you what you'd like. It's not even funny, it's just kind of gross. Weird things like that happen in levels as well. A full screen mermaid appears at one point. She's half fish, but she still has a normal human butt. Also she's naked?

Is it safe to have boobs that large!?

It all comes across as immature. Most of the women in the game have a huge rack, or a huge butt. It's like what would come out of a middle school kid's mind. I'm also well aware that there are people who are way into that kind of thing. That would be fine and dandy if it weren't at odds with the rest of the game. That is to say it's a very well done loot driven, side-scrolling, beat-em-up game with many RPG elements thrown in for good measure.

I personally play as the archer, who is oddly the only female who looks like a normal human being. She has reasonable proportions and is covered up by a cloak. That's not really the point though. As a game Dragon's Crown is actually very fun. Yes it's a beat-em-up, but it's not the kind where you can really mash attack until everything dies. Technically you could do that, but it wouldn't end up working out very well later in the game. Pushing the attack button with different directions will result in different attacks. They can be chained together to juggle opponents. The better your combo the higher your score. Since score is your experience you want to get as high a score as possible. When you throw in different skills and characer specific abilities there are a ton of ways to mangle your foes.

This is what it's all about. Wailing on enemies and getting sweet sweet loot.

On top of being a competent playing game it looks incredible in motion. Juggling foes has never looked this fabulous with all of it's hand drawn goodness. Normally these types of games get stale after a few hours, but with all of the loot to collect and quests to complete there's a lot to do in Dragon's Crown. I haven't done it yet, but I can see myself continuing to play even after the main quest is over. It's a fun game. In fact I'm going to be playing it with some friends tomorrow.

What drags me down is how immature the designs of the women are in the game. I know I sound like some white knight protecting the sanctity of women, but that's not what I'm trying to say here. It's just a bad design decision that is at odds with the rest of the game tonally. It makes it seem like an immature waste of time and I bet a lot of people dismissed it when they first saw the sorceress character. People wonder why video games aren't taken seriously, and character designs like that certainly aren't helping. It can't even really be defended as a stylistic choice, because so few characters in Vanillaware's other games look like that.

The art looks insanely good in all Vanillaware games.

So yeah, the character designs aren't the best, but the game itself is superb and I recommend it, especially if you like playing co-op with friends. Surprisingly the online works well too if you want to play with some strangers.

The Holy Grail

I'm going to be typing up my thoughts on GTA V later this week, so look forward to that gem. This month was a bit light in terms of the games I played other than GTA, but that's okay. Next month is basically the holy grail for me in terms of video games.

Somehow three franchises that I love unconditionally all have games coming out in October. Disgaea D2, Pokemon X/Y, and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies will soon be in my hands. I don't even know how I'll be able to choose which one I want to play at any given time. Just thinking about it makes me giddy.

All three are undoubtedly going to be awesome, but I'm looking forward to Pokemon the most. In case you haven't seen it there are some major leaks happening. People have gotten the game a few weeks early and are posting things at an alarming rate. The time before new Pokemon games always gets me so excited!

I promise you next months edition of Game Time will not be light on content. In fact it might be too long for its own good. Perhaps I'll have to make a few separate posts. I'll think more about that when the time comes though. In the mean time thanks for joining me for another installation of Game Time. See you next time.

     -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

Game Time - August 2013

Guess what? This installment of Game Time is a few days late and I apologize. However, you will now be able to enjoy hearing all about my gaming exploits in the month of August!

So, I made an impulse decision to buy the Wii-U on launch day. I deeply regretted my purchase until I began what could be referred to as my Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate addiction. After about 300 hours of play I weaned myself off of the game and left my Wii-U to collect dust. Normally I'd say that's hyperbole, but the thing does get dusty pretty quickly.

This past month I actually booted it up once again in order to play the highly anticipated Pikmin 3. I had a delightful time playing the game, even if it was far too brief. I'm going to be honest when I say that I don't think that even first party Nintendo games are enough to save the system anymore, but that's not the point! The point is that I booted up my Wii-U to play a first party Nintendo game that wasn't a mini game collection!

Other than the mini-gameless fun I had on the Wii-U I also played the PS3 a fair bit. Tales of Xillia came out at the beginning of the month, so I got my Japanese action RPG on for about 50 hours. The game was good, but I was disappointed. Get ready, because I'm going to complain about it quite a bit.

Last but certainly not least I had a lot of fun playing Dive Kick. The ridiculous fighting game parody finally got released. I dove, but I also kicked.

I have new September games I should be playing right now, so let's get on with it. It's Game Time!

Pikmin 3 

Nintendo hasn't exactly been churning out quality products on the Wii-U, but they promised me that Pikmin 3 would be worth the wait. It was even delayed, because it needed more polish. Now we're almost a year into the system's life span and Pikmin 3 is the first real game Nintendo has released for the thing after its initial launch. They seem to think that Pikmin 3 is going to lead the charge into this coming holiday season and boost the Wii-U's sales. I don't want to be a downer, but I don't think it's going to.

I really liked Pikmin 3, just as I liked the previous two games in the franchise. If you also enjoyed those games then this one will be right up your alley as well. That's because it isn't a whole lot different than its predecessors. You still gather up the cute little plant critters and throw them at things in order to complete tasks. You can have 100 Pikmin following you at a time, but more can be stored in the spaceship known as "The Onion" in case you ever need to pull some out. When the Pikmin defeat an enemy or find a colored pellet they will bring them back to the onion in order to create new Pikmin for you.

Pikmin like to chill out in the Onion.

The main difference in Pikmin 3 comes from the fact that you now have control over three characters. They crash landed on the Pikmin planet while searching for a way to save the denizens of their starving planet. It just so happens that the planet Pikmin 3 takes place on is rich with gigantic fruit that they can use to make juice. You are tasked with gathering fruit while trying to find the necessary parts to fix your spaceship and return home. These are three new characters Charlie the captain, Alph the engineer, and Brittany the biologist. If you liked Captain Olimar do not fear, because you still get to hear about him and Louie in diary entries scattered throughout the world.

With three characters at your disposal the game places an emphasis on multitasking, but not enough of an emphasis to make it a necessity. Like the previous two games you are given a time limit for each day. You have until the sun goes down before you have to get back on the ship and fly into orbit. There will often be numerous things you want to get done in a day and while three characters makes it easier I often found myself only using one at a time. You can have someone get a fruit, while someone else is destroying a barrier.

Even though you have three characters you probably won't use them all.

At the end of each day the game will show you all the fruit you acquired and then squeeze it into juice. Depending on the size of the fruit it will make a certain amount of juice. In order to continue playing the game you need one jar of juice per night for your characters to consume. This is supposed to add a sense of urgency, which is why you would want to be multitasking. However, you become overrun with juice very quickly and it doesn't really matter if it takes an extra day to complete a task. I beat the game in around 40 days and I still had a ridiculous amount of juice left over.

Pikmin 3 tries to move forward, but it's ultimately stuck in the past. There really isn't any reason that the game should have the day night cycle anymore. All it does is artificially gate your progress. To make it a bit more annoying you have to go through all the fruit squeezing and hear one of the crew members diary entries every single night. It's cool at first, but it gets a little tedious after a while. One thing I will say is that the graphics are amazing. Well, not all of them. The main thing that impressed me was the fruit. Whenever you get a fruit you can rotate it around and look at it, and they all look amazing. Something about them looks so real and delicious, while the rest of the game just looks average.

The fruit in Pikmin 3 looks ridiculously good.

I don't really know how I feel about Pikmin 3. It's a fun game and I liked it while I was playing it, but that was only for around 13 hours. The game was super polished, but there isn't a lot of reason to go back and play any more of it. On top of that it's almost the exact same game that the previous ones were. I normally don't care about that, but there just wasn't a whole lot to get really excited about. I can't tell if I'm getting old and jaded, or if Nintendo isn't releasing the kind of magical console games they used to. Their handheld games on the other hand are still out of this world so I don't know what they're doing,


Tales of Xillia

The first Tales game I played was Tales of Phantasia on the PSOne. I never finished it, but I thought it was pretty good. The first Tales game I played to completion was Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube and to this day it remains one of my favorite games. For one reason or another I didn't really continue on the Tales train so I missed out on all the PS2 iterations. I've read a lot about the series and I've played a bunch of the more recent installments. Xillia looked to be one of the best in the series, so I went ahead and picked it up.

I'm not going to say that Xillia is bad, because I enjoyed it. However, I was certainly disappointed. It starts off very strong. You can choose to follow the story through the eyes of Jude the medical student, or Milla Maxwell the lord of spirits in human form. I chose Jude, because in battle he uses his fists and that's badass. However, shortly after I left the first town I stopped thinking that everything was so great.

I like punching stuff in battle

Tales games are known for being filled to the brim with content. You can get tons of sidequests and most of them are actually worth your time. The battle systems are action oriented and very fun. Tales games tend to have have fairly similar anime-esque stories, but the characters often overshadow the played out plot. Xillia does have a fun battle system, but I can't really say it was filled to the brim with content, or that the characters were very good.

Something about Xillia made me miss the way JRPGs used to be, or more specifically I wanted this game to be more like Tales of Symphonia. I've seen a lot of people say that Xillia is their new favorite Tales game, which I just can't understand because it seems like a stripped down version of what these games used to be. There is no overworld map. Instead you travel from town to town by going through huge wide open plains inhabited by way too many monsters. Sure, you can battle the monsters, which is fun. It just gets annoying after a while, because the battles are so stupidly easy. Even boss encounters were a walk in the park the entire way through the game. I could have turned up the difficulty, but the normal difficulty should not be the easiest thing in the world. If I changed the game to easy I probably could have smashed my face on the controller to get through the battles!

The battle system in Xillia is great.

Hardly any of the sidequests were worth it and the game lets you know every time you can do a new one. Despite that I still missed quite a few. The game also marks off whatever NPCs you can talk to on a map making exploration in towns mean absolutely nothing. Upon completing the game all I had left to do was beat the secret dungeon and secret boss. I had done every other thing available to me. This all wouldn't have been so bad if the plot and characters hadn't worn me down by the end.

I tried so hard to like Jude as a character, but I just couldn't do it. The entire time he tries to define his purpose in life, but just ends up coming off as a wishy washy tool. He follows Milla, because he feels obligated to take responsibility for his actions despite the fact that there was nothing to take responsibility for in the first place. Oh yeah, he's also inexplicably in love with Milla even though she's a freaking spirit and he knows that... Then you have my favorite character Alvin who was pretty cool for most of the game until about halfway through when they take his character and smash it to pieces. I won't bore you with the details of that though. What sucks is that there were parts of Xillia's plot that were genuinely surprising, but I just couldn't get behind any of the characters to form a bond with the plot.

Oh Alvin, why did they have to ruin you?

This is a problem I have when I play a lot of modern games. I get stuck thinking about how much better games used to be, or how the last iteration of a game was in comparison to the new one. This game made me think that maybe I had just grown out of the Tales series. In order to test that I fired up the Xbox 360 and started to play Tales of Vesperia. I am now near the end of Vesperia and I think that it is better than Xillia in every possible facet except the battle system. Vesperia may in fact be better than Symphonia, which means a lot coming from me. Xillia wasn't a bad game by any means I just didn't connect with it at all. It's a fun JRPG on a console that hasn't seen a lot of them.

DiveKick

When I first saw DiveKick I knew it was supposed to be a joke, because that's what it was conceived as. It's still pretty funny to me, but I think that at some point it evolved into something much more than a joke. For anyone who doesn't know what DiveKick is I'll explain it, because it's a fairly simple concept.

It's a stripped down fighting game. Each fighter starts on the opposite end of the screen. Like all fighting games the goal is to defeat your opponent, but the catch is that there are only two buttons. One is used to dive into the air and the other is used to kick down. If you push the kick button on the ground you can push yourself backwards. If you kick the opponent then they die and you win the round. All it takes is one kick.

This is a real video game.

See, DiveKick started off as an inside joke of the fighting game community. Some of the characters in the game are even based off of prominent people in the fighting game community such as Madcatz community manager Markman and CEO tournament organizer Alex Jebaily. Hell, the games creator "Keits" runs Shoryuken one of the main fighting game websites on the internet.

Seeing the game in action is even a joke. It looks like a bad flash game. All of the characters say stupid things and the announcer is downright hilarious. In spite of that somehow the game transformed into something amazing. I don't know if it was intentional or if I'm just looking too deep into the game, but it's basically a fighting game distilled down into a form that anyone can enjoy.

At some point the characters in DiveKick got a little out of hand.

I like to watch fighting games, because I find them exciting. Playing them on the other hand does not always feel the same way. I'm not as good as a lot of the people I play with, which can take away a lot of the fun. That's not to say that I've never had fun playing fighting games. It's a thrill when you're having a close match and one more hit could decide the match. That moment is literally all DiveKick is. If you get hit you lose the round. More than that it takes away all the bullshit systems that most fighting games have and is just pure mechanics. Well, not exactly you still have super meter and can do special attacks by pushing both buttons, but it's still almost just pure mechanics.

DiveKick is an interesting game that doesn't seem to be getting the attention it deserves. It's a fascinating concept and it could be a bridge that gets people into more involved fighting games if seen in the right light.

GTA is coming 

Recently I feel like all I do is hate on the games I've been playing, but that will certainly not be the case next time I write one of these.

On September 17th I will be playing Grand Theft Auto V. There is no question in my mind that it will be incredible. I have some pretty bold statements I could make about it, but I'll save those for the next installment. Rock Star seems to be making something special and it could be a game that people will look back to as one of the finest games this generation.

Other than that you can look forward to hearing all about the stupid amount I played One Piece Pirate Warriors 2.  I started playing it last night and it sure is another Dynasty Warriors One Piece game. I might play some other games too, but GTA V is most likely going to consume every waking hour of free time I have. I can't wait to get back to Los Santos!

See you next month.

    -Manny

Mega Man Battle Network 4 Typo Picture Gallery

I've been replaying the Mega Man Battle Network series with a friend. Together we're on the third game, but in my impatience I began to play the fourth game as well. For the fourth game in the series they decided to employ a new art style. Apparently when they were employing new techniques they decided that a horrible translation was also in order.

There are some pretty bad translations out there, but this one is just inexcusable. Especially when you take into account how there were very little problems with the previous three games in the series. The only typo I remember was in the second game and it was easy to miss. I'd give the fourth game a pass also if it weren't for the fact that there are so many errors it's bananas. Don't get me wrong the writing itself in these games is nothing special, but they should at least have proper grammar.

Since there were so many typos I decided to take a picture with my phone every time I noticed one so that I could share them here. Yes, the quality is terrible, but you'll at least be able to see the text.

Enjoy!

These are just the ones I specifically noticed or thought were worth taking a picture of. One of the ones I left out was that every time virus should have been singular it was the plural viruses instead. EVERY SINGLE TIME! They say viruses a lot in this series, because every enemy is a virus...

 I realize we're all prone to making typos of this nature, but it's just bananas that a game was able to be put out like this. I'm on the final boss of the game now, but there should be a lot of extra stuff to do afterwards. Perhaps I'll have a chance to share even more ridiculous typos.

Game Time - July 2013

July was pretty dead in terms of new releases. As always though I was resilient and found something to play in the absence of brand new video games for me to consume. The one new game I played was a 3DS downloadable title, which was surprisingly good. Attack of the Friday Monsters is surely one of the best downloadable offerings that the 3DS has at the moment.

As for the oldies I took the plunge into the critically acclaimed Saints Row the Third and didn't find it to be very enjoyable. Alternatively I played the not so special Warriors Orochi 3, but had a ton of fun.

I played some Mega Man Battle Network as well, but probably won't write about it until I finish all 6 games in the series again. I'm at the end of 4 already, so that time is close at hand.

So yeah, I played some video games. Let's get into it. It's game time!

Attack of the Friday Monsters: A Tokyo Tale

Recently I was made aware of the series Boku no Natsuyasumi, which is a Japanese series exclusive to the PlayStation. Each game in the series focuses on the summer vacation of a child. Needless to say it's very much based around Japan and Japanese culture, so none of the games in the series have been released here. Then there's the fact that there isn't exactly a lot of gameplay. You walk around and play a few mini-games. From what I've seen the series basically amounts to a visual novel where you get to walk around, which sounds awesome to me. Which is how I ended up playing Attack of the Friday Monsters. The series creator of Boku No Natsuyasumi became part of level 5's Guild 05 project where developers make smaller download games for the 3DS. Seeing the game I got excited, but thought it would never see a translation. Much to my surprise the last time I booted up the 3DS store it was on there, so I purchased it immediately.

Attack of the Friday Monsters is just like the games in the Bolu no Natsuyasumi series. It's more or less a visual novel. However instead of focusing on summer vacation it revolves around a boy named Sohta who has moved to a new town. This new town has a television station where they film monster movies every Friday night. The kids and adults all gather at the top of the nearest hill and watch the battles play out, or at least that's what Sohta has heard. Since this game is only a story I won't give anything away. I will say that I think it was very well written though. The entire time the game keeps you guessing as to whether or not the monsters the villagers are talking about are real. Yes, there is a TV station, but that just makes you think the monsters are fake by default. As you progress you'll start to doubt that and ultimately find out what's true at the very end of the game.

Who could forget that the monsters come out on Friday!?

While the story is very well executed that doesn't mean this game was without flaws. All you do is walk around the town and talk to its various residents, which I loved doing. You get a sense of who everyone is and it's actually quite refreshing to be able to just leisurely stroll around. You need to find certain things or talk to certain people to advance the game, but the town is small enough where that's never an issue. Despite that the game gives you a glowing indicator of where you need to go at all times on the map which takes away any challenge. You're always going to know exactly where to go.

Apparently walking around and being immersed in the town wasn't enough for a downloadable title so they threw in a monster card battling game. That's all fine and good, but I feel that it actually takes away from the game. The way you collect cards is by finding a certain number of glowing "glims" on the ground. Once you have enough of the same color they'll form a card. When you have five cards you can battle the kids in town. If you lose to them you'll become their servant. They can cast weird spoken spells on you, but really all they do is make you fall down and stand back up if you lose or decline their invitation to battle. If you win however, you can do the same to them with the added bonus of them giving you any information you want.

Card battles are pretty boring.

The way you play is painfully simple. The game is literally ro-sham-bo. Each card is either rock, paper, or scissors with an attack value assigned. Each player throws down 5 cards face down. The game will tell you if two of your cards win, lose, or draw and give you the option to switch the places ot two of your cards. When both players do that all the cards are flipped over. If there are any draws the monster with more attack power takes the win. The person with more wins is the winner.

The card battles end up padding out the game unnecessarily. It's especially dumb, because if you yourself use the same magic spell as your opponent then they'll go easy on you, which basically means they let you win. Other than the card battles I really liked the game. It's not the kind of thing that gets released in the US often, so I was more than happy to support it. I could use some more visual novels that are more game than novel.

Saints Row The Third

This past year it was impossible to go without hearing how awesome Saints Row the Third was. Everyone seemed to love its stupidity, but seemed to agree that there was something special about the game. However, my brother who absolutely loved Saints Row 2 did not and still does not share that same opinion. He says that the campaign is too short and none of the jokes are funny. If prompted I can get him to go off on quite a rant about just how bad he thinks it is. He tends to exaggerate quite a bit and I think his hatred of this game is a bit too strong, but I do agree with him when he says he doesn't think it's anything special.

A lot of people were upset when GTA IV was a great deal more realistic than its predecessors. I was not one of those people. I liked the fact that GTA wanted to be taken a bit more seriously, but kept true to its kind of goofy roots. GTA IV still has its fair share of weird and childish stuff in it, but it takes a little more digging to get to. Saints Row on the other hand starting with Saints Row 2 went in the complete opposite direction. They threw out almost any realism the series had in favor of pure ridiculousness. What I do like about Saints Row the Third is that you're basically invincible in order to make the game more fun.

Right from the start you're more or less invincible. As the game progresses and you do side missions you'll earn money and respect which you can use to gain more abilities. I'm not at the end of the game yet, but I'll bet that by the time I am it'll take a serious amount of enemies to even make a dent on my health. I can rocket out of a car's windshield and walk away basically unscathed already.

Yeah, this is basically what the game is all about.

The issue I have with Saints Row the Third is that I don't have fun while I'm playing it. I might be a fool for feeling this way, but I play GTA games to go through the story. I usually don't mess around and cause as much destruction as possible. Saints Row the Third let me know right off the bat that it wasn't really the game for me though. It starts ridiculous and continues to gets even weirder. They do an amazing job of setting the tone. In fact some of those moments are the ones I enjoyed the most. Shooting up a mansion full of enemies while Kanye West's Power is playing is actually pretty funny. The fact that there is a pimp who speaks exclusively in an auto-tuned voice is probably my favorite part of the game. These things alone can't make me truly enjoy the game though.

The story missions revolve around trying to take down an evil syndicate that for some reason has it out for the Saints. What I really don't like is that so far I've been playing for around six hours and almost every mission is just an introduction to one of the far too many side activities. I have no problem with side activities it's just that I don't find any of the ones in this game fun. So learning how to do them just to unlock another mission where I do the same thing isn't very rewarding. Perhaps when I'm no longer relegated to this side mission tutorial hell the missions will begin picking up.

I feel like I don't need to say that the combat isn't very great, but I will anyways. It's the same type of third-person shooting that these types of games have always had (GTA included). I feel like there should have been some kind of vast improvement to the system by now, but there really hasn't been. You auto-lock on to your targets until they're dead. Or if you want to kill everyone way faster auto-lock and then flick the stick up a tad to aim perfectly for a headshot. It's something that I really hope is better in GTA V, because I don't find the combat to be any better in GTA.

Zimos is the best character in the game.

Saints Row the Third just isn't really the game for me. As I said it made it clear right from the start. Regardless I still don't think it's the masterpiece that everyone made it out to be, but that's just my opinion. But hey, if it's the kind of thing you're into the fourth one is coming out in a few weeks and it seems to be basically the same game but even more insane.

Warriors Orochi 3

I was trying to get my mind off of a few things, but didn't want to concentrate on what I was doing too much. What better way to play a game, but not have to pay attention than to boot up a Musou game. I quickly realized that I had Warriors Orochi 3, but had never played it.Knowing nothing about it I booted it up, because I thought it was just another Dynasty Warriors clone. Little did I know it literally was a Dynasty Warriors that crossed over with the other musou games like Samurai Warriors. You know what, this game is not good, but I had a damn fun time playing it.

As I've said many times in the past I really like Musou games. They're kind of mindless, but for some reason I find them to be fun. I don't really like Dynasty Warriors itself though. The character designs of the ancient three kingdoms just aren't outlandish enough for me. I don't want to beat down thousands of enemy soldiers with normal swords. I want something that's a little more crazy. So what if you added in Samurai Warriors? Apparently that's exactly what you need to get me on board. Warriors Orochi doesn't just bring the Samurai Warrior franchise on board though it also brings in the likes of Ryu Hyabusa from Ninja Gaiden and even Ayane from Dead or Alive. There are a ton of characters made just for the Warriors Orochi series as well. There are well over 100 different fighters in the game and most of them have insane weapons.

Her sword is electric. I'd say that's insane enough.

Unlike other Musou games this one lets you use three characters at a time. You can switch between the three at any time by using the triggers. If any one of the three dies you lose. When not being used the characters will restore health and constantly generate energy for their special attacks. It doesn't seem like a huge change but it makes the gameplay a bit more fast paced and exciting. With this new gameplay mechanic the ways you can beat down your enemies become so much more varied in a single combat scenario. They try to get change your character up in battle, because each character needs to actually participate in order to get experience.

Oh yeah, there's a story too I guess. The evil Hydra has killed almost everyone, except for the three main characters. They magically get sent back in time by this creepily pale girl in order to save all the other warriors and find a way to win against Hydra. You get to go through a bunch of huge battles where you fight all the characters because they either hate you, or are being possessed by demon magic. Once you defeat them they will usually join your cause. Sometimes you have to go back and beat the same exact map again, but it's been altered slightly. All that matters is that you have a ton of characters to choose from and most of them are pretty interesting.

Why wouldn't Ayane be in the game?

It's not a good game by any means. It's pretty tedious and barely has a story. Regardless I enjoy beating down thousands of soldiers with a single warrior. It's satisfying. Another version of this game is coming out later this year called Warriors Orochi Ultimate. They're adding even more characters to the mix, so I might have to pick it up if it comes to the US. By then though I may have had my fill since One Piece Pirate Warriors 2 is coming out on the 20th of August, which I'm unrealistically excited for.

Summer is Ending!

This summer was front-loaded with games and it seems that the back end is going to be pretty game heavy as well. Next week I'll be picking up the first true Wii-U release otherwise known as Pikmin 3. I hope for Nintendo's sake it's as good as they've been hyping it up to be. The Wii-U is already selling like a pile of poo though, so I'm sure the release of a unique first party game will do nothing but increase the consoles sales.

On the 6th Tales of Xillia will arrive at my door which is awesome, because I could use a solid JRPG. At the end of the month both Dive Kick and One Piece Pirate Warriors 2 will be on the PlayStation store, so look forward to hearing about the stupidly fun time I plan on having with both of those.

I'm getting hyped up just thinking about the coming month. If I start to think too far ahead though my brain might explode, because we've got GTA V and new consoles just around the corner! It's an exciting time!

Peace out.

     -Manny.