Showing posts with label Vita. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vita. Show all posts
Titan Souls
Salt and Sanctuary
If I told you to image a 2D version of Dark Souls, you’d probably come up with something extremely close to Salt and Sanctuary. It’s hard to give a more concise summary of Salt and Sanctuary, because “2D Dark Souls” really sums it up. But what makes Salt and Sanctuary special is that it isn’t just Dark Souls flattened into two dimensions, but a conscious conversion to take advantage of the changed context while maintaining the spirit of Dark Souls.
Special Report Division / 特殊報道部
The First Hardship of Nagomu Ichiyanagi - The Rain-Lattice Mansion / 雨格子の館 一柳和、最初の受難
An isolated house in the rain... A series of gruesome, themed murders... And a wimpy kid who has to solve them all.
These are the elements that make up Nagomu Ichiyanagi.
Chaos;Head Noah / カオスヘッドノア
Takumi Nishijou is just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill reclusive socially anxious MMORPG-addicted anime-obsessed self-absorbed rude cowardly acerbic loner Japanese teenager that lives alone in a storage container on top of an apartment building. Y'know, the usual. One day weird things start to happen, and Takumi wants them to stop, and... that's pretty much the entire plot of Chaos;Head. (I'm not calling it "ChäoS;HEAd," sorry not sorry.)
Exile Election / 追放選挙
Progress does not happen in a vacuum. Every so often we get a groundbreaking, massively influential video game, and while such masterpieces might have plenty of originality, they’re never completely original, and always build upon previous works in some way. For example, take Dark Souls, which formed the bedrock and namesake of the Souls-like subgenre, and has been used as a point of comparison so often it’s become a meme. It’s arguably the most influential game of the past decade (if we exclude the mobile market). But neither Dark Souls itself nor the underlying ideas that led to its success and influence popped up out of nowhere. Dark Souls very clearly inherited a lot from Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware’s previous game. And if this was an essay on video game genealogy and not a review for a game that I haven’t even mentioned yet, we could dig even further and identify Demon’s Souls’ influences.
My point is that for every massively popular, genre-defining game out there, there are going to be other games that laid the groundwork for it. And that means that other games need to actually lay the groundwork. They won’t be highly-polished pinnacles of perfection, but a unique idea or two in an otherwise ordinary package with an execution that will range from flawed to decent. And that’s what I feel like Exile Election is. It introduces some original ideas to the death game subgenre, but they just... aren’t very good. They’re not bad, but not very good, either. Exile Election seems to me like a game that is underwhelming on its own, but will someday serve as a reference point that someone will use to identify, analyze, and rectify in their own game in order to make it fantastic.
Missing Parts: the Detective Stories / ミッシングパーツ the TANTEI stories
Most murder mystery video games tend to be pretty silly. Maybe it's because, compared to mystery novels, they generally have a younger target audience, or because the visual element requires some extra pizazz, or some combination of the two along with some other things. While there are some novels that are out there, generally they're more restrained than video games.
But then we have a game like Missing Parts: The Detective Stories, which is about an ordinary guy, Magami Kyousuke, investigating ordinary murders in an ordinary city during his ordinary life. While there are some flavorful characters, there aren't any hyper-talented high schoolers or spirit mediums. These murders take place in apartments and alleys, not secluded islands or space stations.
And it's sooooo good.
Death Mark / 死印
Hey, hey... Have you heard the rumors about that weird review blog? It’s about some weirdo who keeps on writing about all sorts of obscure and gross murder stories. They say that if you read the intro to one of his posts, you’ll die just like the people in the story that post is about, unless you read the rest of the review as well...
Steins;Gate / シュタインズ・ゲート
In my Raging Loop review, I said that one of the things that I thought made the game work so well was that the protagonist was intelligent and approached the situation in the same way the player would, creating a narrative flow that was engaging, natural, and aligned with what the actual player wanted to do even though there was very little direct control.
Steins;Gate is not like that.
Raging Loop / レイジングループ
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’m back, and hopefully I’ll last longer this time!
A few weeks ago, I finished... “Raging Loop” is what the English version will be called, so I guess we'll go with that. (If you look at the Japanese title in the picture above, you can see that the Japanese version calls itself "REI-JIN-G-LU-P".) Anyway, I finished Raging Loop a few weeks ago. I thought it was a pretty neat game that would never see the light of day in America, since it was extremely, extremely Japanese, plus it had already been out for several years, so the time for a translation had passed.
Naturally, the English localization was announced the next week.
So here we are! Since the game is coming out in English, and it’s a pretty niche game that people probably don’t know much about, I figured I may as well get reviews going again and help people find out about this game. (Of course, I’m not the first person to review this, but I may certainly be the least-known person to do so! Also, since I'm basing this just on my experiences with the Japanese version, I may end up using different terms than the official localization ends up using.)
New Danganronpa V3 / ニューダンガンロンパV3
Hoo boy, it's taken me quite a while to finish this game, but... here we are! I played most of the game months ago, and only did the last chapter recently. It's a bit difficult to talk about a game like Danganronpa without going into spoilers, but... I'm going to try my best!
Mind Zero / マインドゼロ
Today, I'm going to be talking about a JRPG about a group of Japanese high schoolers that each bond with a unique magical being, allowing them to fight alongside said being, prompting them to venture into an alternate, twisted version of our own world to fight other magical beings and get to the bottom of what's going on. And if the title of this post and image right above this paragraph didn't give it away, I'm not talking about Persona. No, I'm talking about the Persona knock-off, Mind Zero!
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