Now Playing: Tales of VS

 Oh boy, what have I gotten into?

 I have played tons of Japanese games, games that didn't require you to actually know Japanese, mostly fighters. But Tales of VS is a whole different beast, try to play Dissidia in English. JUST TRY TO. What makes it so hard? The fact that it's not just a fighter, it tried to add RPG mechanics, namely stats, customizable equipment and moveset. I tried doing Arcade Battle and I got wrecked so hard, I could barely dent Farah and she'd just heal back up every wound I'd make. I wanna blame my equipment, but I can't buy any, yet. Oh well, I'm going to try my hardest with this one. I will.

Archile's Grab bag: Tales of Thursday edition

 It's here! 

  Open up!

 Tales of VS: I've been a fan of the Tales of series ever since I played the translated ROM of Tales of Phantasia for the SNES. I love SNES RPGs almost as much as Playstation 1's, and Phantasia mixed the real-time battles from Seiken Densetsu 3, my favorite SNES RPGS, with the time travelling aspect of Chrono Trigger. Unlike Chrono Trigger, there were only two time periods, and you couldn't switch at will until the very end. Tales of Phantasia was a fantastic game and I fell in love with it, playing as many games as I could in the series. I've finished most of the games that made it state-side(Destiny(Which I need to buy!), Phantasia(GBA), Abyss(PS2), Graces F, Xillia, Symphonia and Symphonia Dawn of the New World), plus, I'm now playing Destiny 2(Eternia for Japanese players), only missing are Vesperia(Don't have a 360), the PSP one(Which I am gonna get ASAP!) and Legendia.
 I love the Tales of Series, and them making a fighter out of it was a dream come true. Kinda...

Gundam Extreme VS Full Boost Impressions part 8

NEW Strike Noir Gundam

 Good at any range, and very fun to use. For a 2500 unit, it seems a bit lacking on the damage department, but it looks so good at everything it does... and he loves to play with its guns when it goes idle!

Exia Gundam

 It has more HP and a new Extreme Attack. It's especially good at close range, lots of melee combos and cancels, but its long-to-mid range game is a bit lacking. Its main beam rifle has little ammo and needs recharging, so every shot must count. For what it's worth, it does a ton of damage, for a 2000 unit.

Dynames Gundam

 Got very minor buffs to its subweapons. It has a ton of projectile tools and a shield mode that blocks a bit of damage, reduces mobility by a lot and turns melee into a weak kick, but changes the missile subweapon into a Gerobi beam.

Susanoo

 Upgraded to 2500, with the needed buffs to mobility, boost and HP, among other minor buffs and cancel- possibilities. Has a new move that dashes forwards and can be cancelled into melee, I didn't find much use for it. Susanoo has a fantastic close-range game, with combos that move him all over the place, but his projectiles are few and incredibly weak, making him a hard to recommend.

Gundam 00 + Raiser

 Has a new assist and a new Extreme attack, Raiser Mode lasts longer and it can now use the beam boomerang like Normal 00 Gundam. 00 has very slow projectiles, but shines everywhere else, its mid range and close range games are pretty strong, and Raiser Mode makes it faster and enhances all his moves. Very good choice.

Cherudim Gundam

 Got a lot of buffs for its subweapons. Cherudim is a great long range and mid range unit, but since it lacks any form of melee, unlike other ranged units, it really doesn't want to get close to anything. What makes it different from the other units, is that its melee attack is a projectile weapon that doesn't consume ammo,  but on the flip side it's really slow, so you have to be smart about it.

NEW Arios Gundam + Archer Gundam

 Pretty strong  for a 1000, and quite the extensive moveset. What makes Arios unique is that it is constantly accompanied by Archer Gundam, who shoots with it, and you can order it to shoot as an assist attack. Furthermore, they can fuse together for a Mobile Armor mode that has quite the moveset, not many MA modes get as much care! Arios' only weakness might be its close range game, but it really shouldn't need to engage that close.

NEW Reborns Gundam

 This one is so good. It has two modes, can be changed at will and neither have a timer, Normal mode is good at any range, plenty of projectile tools, an assist and some pretty good close-range moves. Gunner Mode has a pathetic excuse of a melee attack, but it can stun, and has some fantastic long range and mid range projectiles. I wasn't expecting to like this one, but it's really good.

NEW Arche Gundam

  Has a lot of bit-based tools, most of them track a, pardon the pun, bit. Arche wasn't made for long-range skirmishes, he wants to get close and personal. I actually like its melee tools, but it could've benefited from a bit more variety on its subweapons.

NEW Throne Drei Gundam

 I didn't like it, but I think that it's a really good unit. Its more important tool is the red field, that turns all locks on friendly units into green locks, at the cost of making it a sitting duck. It's also a bit of a Assist unit, it has four different assists!, but the rest of its moveset feels pretty... vanilla.

Mobile Suit Gundam 00 The Movie

Raphael Gundam

 A two mode unit, it received minor tweaks on both modes. Raphael is a unit that shines at long range, but shouldn't get into mid or close range unless it's on Separated Mode. Separated Mode actually turns Raphael's melee into some very fun to use combo strings, but it makes it a bit of an easy target, still, being able to attack from two different directions while Separated is very neat.

Quanta Gundam

 It got tweaks everywhere, and I think, think that the melee combos in Quanta Mode are new, I don't remember it having melee combos. Quanta is a bit complex to use, it has many modes and tools, but i think making the most of it requires experience, heh.

BONUS

Gundam Unicorn

 Received a ton of minor buffs, the one I like the most? Destroy Mode lasts about 5 seconds longer. Unicorn Gundam is an all-purpose suit, very straight to the point and easy to handle, it's particularly devastating at mid and close range, especially while in Destroy mode.

Review #101: Shinobi

 Oldschool goodness.

 Shinobi is a series that's sadly underrated, to think that it once was one of Sega's flagship titles! Curiously enough, three games, counting this one, share the "Shinobi" name, but I digress. Developed by Griptonite Games, Shinobi on the 3DS is a callback to the games of old, tough as nails and as unforgiving as it gets.

 The story.... makes no sense, but it all boils down to time travel, seriously. You play as Jiro Musashi, father of the legendary Joe Musashi(The hero from the first games), who during a invasion on his village gets sent into the future, for mysterious reasons, and must now battle Zeed in the future. The story never, ever makes much sense, and you do get cut-scenes before, and sometimes during, each level, but don't expect them to make much sense, at least you get to battle a mechanical shark!

 This is a platformer styled after the games of old, which is to say, memorization is a big part of the game. Plenty of times you'll be hit by stuff you weren't expecting, or maybe you won't be able to react fast enough to an obstacle after you've seen it, and that's alright, by your next run you'll be, hopefully, be able to deal with them. The game starts out hard and only gets more challenging as it goes on, having some very hard platforming segments on the last level. You'll have to jump, double jump, wall jump or hook to the roof in order to get through the game, but you'll also come across various enemies. Enemies are, on paper, the least of your worries, as they run on patterns, but the game loves mixing different kinds of enemies together so that you have to plan on how to get through them, sometimes with a little platforming on the mix. Combat is a no thrills affair, enemies go down after a couple of swings from your blade or Kunais, but you can actually juggle their corpses in order to raise the combo meter, which in turn gives you more damage and more points per hit, get hit once however, and your combo meter drops down to 1.

 Jiro has a couple of other tricks in his bag in order to make his journey easier, though not by a whole lot, in the form of four different spells and a parry. Y'see, blocking is too mainstream and a coward's move, instead Jiro can only parry, and you have to time it right unless you want to look like a fool and receive damage, although you can parry at, basically, any moment, and if you got your parry right, Jiro will automatically parry anything that tries to harm it soon after, meaning that enemy combos get parried automatically if you parry the first hit. As for spells, all of them are a one-time affair, unless you find a scroll lying about or respawn after death, and they provide many different bonuses, but lightning will be, by far, the most useful, making you invulnerable for three hits.

 As hard as the game is, you do get four different difficulty settings: Beginner, which grants you infinite lives and plenty of checkpoints, so you will, eventually, get through the game. Normal gives you five lives, but infinite continues, losing all your lives means starting the level from the very start. Ouch. Was Normal too easy for you? Hard limits your lives and continues to three each and you only get checkpoints on level transitions. Finally there's very hard, which I didn't even try. Each of the nine levels lasts about 20 minutes most, but getting through the game on Normal, blindly, took me six hours plus, and doing it on hard, knowing what to do, took me about three. Regardless, you also get unlockable Challenge Maps(One hit kills you!) by finding every Bonus Token on each level and by spending spotpass points on them. It doesn't end there, there are loads of achievements to unlock, and each one grants you a little something, from to Cheats to use in Free Mode(Which, sadly, don't let you earn achievements), costumes, Weapon skins, hats or a character that plays completely different from Jiro. The game might be short, but it's very high on replay value.

 Platformers this hard need spot-on controls, and the game more or less provides. Controls are pretty tight, most of the time, but wall-jumps and double jumps could've used some tightening. Plenty of times you'll need to double jump out of a wall-jump, if you double jumped before the wall jump then you'll only be able to perform a single jump, the issue here is that unless you press the direction opposite of the wall, and jump, Jiro will double jump instead of wall-jumping, how is this annoying? If you double jumped before the wall jump, pressing jump will automatically perform the wall-jump, which can get confusing later on. Furthermore, movement is done with the analog stick, instead of the digital pad, which on a game played on a 2D plane isn't the best choice, when you need to fall down beneath the platform you are standing on, it can sometimes prove troublesome, due to the analog's stick nature. One thing to keep in mind, is that the hit boxes are a bit bigger than what you might expect. Hit detection is alright, but some projectiles have rather big hitboxes, so you'd better get used to them.

 The game's worst aspect is, easily, its presentation. The game is fully 3D, but on a 2D plane, graphics are very lackluster and just plain looking. Still, the game manages to impress thanks to its setpieces. Y'see, the game never lets up, on the very first stage you'll go through a horseback section, then there's a section that takes place above a warplane, as enemies in jetpacks board your plane, how about the segment when you are on-board a truck and must go from truck to truck since missiles are targeting you, which sounds rather tame when compared to a mechanical shark trying to take a bite out of you while you are freefalling on a cascade.... only to be later fighting a chopper as another mechanical shark tries to destroy the solid magma you are running on.... the game is impossibly exciting and imaginative, specially for a 3DS game, easily making up for how lame it looks on a technical level. Cut-scenes between levels are made in a hand-drawn style that looks very cool, even if the animation itself is very lame. As for the music... it's very "ninja-like", very fitting, but not terribly exciting or memorable

 Shinobi on the 3DS is a bit hard to recommend, not because it's bad, on the contrary it's really good, but because its target audience is rather small. If you are looking for oldschool games, this is what you want, but if you can't stand old platformers that require memorization, skip this one.
 8.0 out of 10

Now Playing: Dissidia 012 - Final Fantasy

 Finally a good game!

 My first PSP game was Darkstalkers 3, and it was a fantastic game, but a game I had played before plenty of times. It's the best version of said game, but I repeat, I had played it before. Little Big Planet was fair, but it didn't click with me, and Mimana was downright terrible. Dissidia is pretty dang good for a change.

 I've wanted to play Dissidia ever since I heard of the first installment, Cloud? Final Fantasy fighting game? Characters flying around? I SO WANT. I waited and hoped for Squeenix to make a PS2 or PS3 HD port, something so that I could play it. Well, since it won't come to me, I will go to it, via PSP.

 I like it, I like it a lot. The one thing that doesn't click with me is how you have to equip characters with moves, and while I'm sure most players enjoy the customization, I am a Fighting game fan, screw customizable movesets, I want balanced, determined movesets for the whole cast without having to grind for it, there's 20 plus characters, surely they don't expect me to grind everyone's levels just so that I can enjoy 1 on 1 fighting, do they? They do, but that's besides the point, it seems the unlockable Lv 50 and Lv 100 presets are just what I want.

 Gameplay was a bit hard to grasp at first, I could get the gist of Circle attacks take away Bravery, Square attacks take away health, but the whole dodging/chasing mechanics, plus platforming and EX-Cores? It was a lot to take in at first, and the tutorial could've been a little more in-depth, but I think I got the hang of it. I approve of this game.

Review #100: Mimana: Iyar Chronicle

 Awful. Terrible. Happy 100th review, eh?

 I've been playing RPGs ever since I first came across Quest 64, and I've been enamored with the genre ever since. I've seen JRPGs evolve into fantastic games like Wild Arms 3 or the modern Shin Megami Games, and I've also seen them devolve into a nische genre, character development is not as important as it once was, no, now we get the equivalent to junk food of JRPGs, stuff like Ar Tonelico or HyperNeptunia that appeal to a very particular audience that like their games raunchy and with fan-service as its focus. Or we get games that just try to hard to innovate where there was no need to, like Final Fantasy XIII and it's sequels. My point is, I love RPGs, both Western and Japanese  My point is, RPGs are my jam, my thang, and I was actually looking forwards to Mimana, and while on the surface it looks like just another Ar Tonelico, it actually avoids most of its worst qualities, yet falls flat on is face when it comes to everything else.
 Meet Crais, the character that you'll be playing as, a mercenary that has a problem when it comes to gambling, and hates kids, don't worry, he loves reminding everyone about his hatred every chance he gets. He soon gets hired by Sophie, a little girl, and must aid her in finding seven orbs scattered through the country(Yeah, no world-wide adventure for ya). Alongside the way he'll come across four other dames, each with a defining character trait that will aid them on their journey. Yes, it's one of those games in which you can somewhat romance one of the girls, and whichever your romanced, gets a bonus extra scene at the end. Surprisingly, while character development is almost null or incredibly forced, the five female leads are actuall well designed, with almost no fanservice in their design, props to the character designer. However, there is a slight problem with the plot, this game was meant to kickstart a series(which it didn't), and they never came to be, so the game hints at many things that will never be explained, and leaves a couple of threads hanging. Not cool.

 As previously stated, the scale of the adventure is very small, after you gather each gem you'll have to return to the game's only town, well, there's another one but there's nothing to do in it, trigger the next scene in which they'll tell you where to go and so on. That's, basically, it. Combat in the game comes in the forms of random encounters as you travel through the dungeons, get used to them as the encounter rate is pretty high, which brings us to the first annoyance: Load times. Load times are long, pretty long, and the encounter rate is through the roof, unless you resort to walking around, so if you wanna get anywhere fast, your best course of action is, probably, walking. Even better, there are loading times after each battle, so running away solves nothing. Annoyingly so, you'll have to go through Tanis Woods in order to reach any other dungeon, later in the game you'll be assaulted by unavoidable(Unless you walk) low level encounters that don't even give any experience points turning it into a very annoying time sink, it's so incredibly annoying. It doesn't end there, every dungeon is like a labyrinth made up of similar looking rooms with no landmarks, except the blue healing circle at the start of the dungeon and the pink one before the boss. It's impossible not to get lost in the latter dungeons, and there is no map available, it's even worse when switches are introduced into these mazes, now couple this with the high encounter rate and you are in for a very, very annoying experience.
 Combat fares better, if only because you can't get any worse than the lame dungeon design. It takes a page from the "Tales" franchise in that it takes place in real time, you take control of Crais(And only Crais) and the CPU takes control of three of the ladies. Now then, you can set, only outside of battle, how these character will behave by adding or substracting points into "Attack", "Magic" and "Recovery", which translates into how often they will do each action... yeah, it's awkward and too vague. It gets worse, the AI is incredibly stupid, often times staying put in place as enemies get close to her and attack her, and only then will they move away... a few inches. If you want to make the most of your spell casters, manually tell them to cast each spell, as they love to just stare at nothingness. As cool as the combat sounds on paper, casting magic as Crais is pretty dang useless, as you stay in place and hope not to get hit so that the spell goes off. Your casters get it easier since you can protect them from harm, but guess what, since you get free movement, evading non-targeted spells is as easy as moving two inches up, and the enemy's spell will miss completely(The AI is not that smart, sadly, but it applies to enemies too, who will happily stand in the way of a spell). Crais does get a couple of special attacks in the form of spells, but why waste mana on them if your basic three-hit combo is so good and useful? Mashing that X button quickly became a chore, but it got me through the game just fine. Even through that last boss that can 1 hit KO you even if you are at max level.

 As far as minor complaints go, I've a couple more. For instance, every time your party gets disassembled and reassembled, you lose your party configuration and battle positions, very annoying. Then there's the fact that enemy design is incredibly lame, you get roosters of various colors, beetles, then there's sheep and jelly, that come in the form of cones or cubes. The game does include a couple of sidequests... but they are very well hidden, easy to miss as you only get one and one opportunity to trigger them at specific times and the rewards are not worth it. There's a new game plus that let's you carry over your levels and ups the maximum from 50 to 99. Supposedly there's a hidden boss if you grind up to level 99, but that would take weeks, as enemies give you less and less experience as you level up.
 Presentation is the game's strongest quality, but that's not saying much. Sprites look pretty nice, while not in motion, but the animation is a mixed bag. Some animations look pretty nice, but other could've, nay, should've used more frames. Backgrounds look very low quality as well. On the flip side, voice acting is fantastic, with a plethora of well known Voice Actors... but then again, the music is pretty forgettable and short on quantity. Dungeons have no music at all. Those long, maze-like, random-encounter infested time sinks have no music. NO MUSIC. This game is terrible.
 I've... I've nothing else to say. This game is awful, it has a bunch of neat ideas when it came to combat, but it's so poorly implemented. While it looks like just another harem game, the female leads are actually pretty well designed, it's a shame that they star in such a bad game. There's almost no redeeming qualities, good ideas executed poorly don't really save a game.
3.0 out of 10

Gundam Extreme VS Full Boost Impressions part 7

Gunner Zaku

 Has a new attack with stunning properties, still, it's the same unit as before with little changes. It's very strong at long range and mid range, and can hold it's own at close range, not bad, but a bit slow.

NEW Gaia Gundam

 I wasn't really looking forwards to this one, luckily, as I don't like it at all. It's gimmick is it's mobile armor mode in which it changes into a dog-like form, like the LaGOWE. Unlike the LaGOWE, this one is pretty dang hard to maneuver around. There's also a couple of moves that turn you into MA mode, but not the other way around. Yeah, I'm not using this one any time soon.

Destiny Gundam

 It received minor tweaks, most noticeable a small buff to its health. Strong all around Mobile Suit, very solid pick and easy to use.

Infinite Justice Gundam

 Poor IJ Gundam received a ton of nerfs, but on the bright side, it's still a very strong unit, even with nerfs to its mobility, it's still really, really fast. It also got a new assist attack, not that it really needs it. Works best at mid-to-close range, it's got some stylish melee attacks.

NEW Impulse Gundam

 Ever since it was revealed it was gonna be on Full Boost, I been looking forwards to this one the most. Why? Impulse Gundam(Sword pack) is a Mobile Suit I adore, and it was announced that it was gonna play just like Strike Gundam, the unit I loved the most in vanilla. My opinion? I love it. It's a stronger Strike Gundam, everything Strike it does, it can do better. There is one slight downgrade, lack of IWSP pack, but since it's a 2500 unit, as opposed to Strike's 2000 cost, it has the benefit of a longer health bar and other enhanced stats. I adore this one.

BONUS

Gundam Seed Stargazer

NEW Stargazer Gundam

 This one's a very unique mobile suit, it possesses a remote-controlled bomb and some very unique melee properties. For instance, it only has two melee combos, but makes up for it by having a very strong and long ranged, but very slow, melee attack that hits everything on a radius around the Stargazer. This also means that you have to be wary of your ally's position. StarGazer also possess a timed mode that changes it's long ranged melee attack into a comboable long range move that doesn't hit around it, your ally should be glad! I'm not a fan, but I'm intrigued, I may play it more later in order to decide how I feel about it.