Review #334: Liberation Maiden

 Because Suda 51 is god.

 And here we have another small, semi-experimentational game part of the 'guild' series that, for whatever reason, wasn't deemed worthy of a full, physical release over seas. In Liberation Maiden case, it's a 3D shooter by Suda 51 in collaboration with Level 5.

 The game doesn't do a good job of explaining the setting, but what you need to know is that you play as Shoko, new Japan's president, who must protect her country from invading enemies by piloting her humongous mecha. It's Suda 51 alright. The game is divided into 5 stages, which mostly consist of doing three missions and a sub missions before tackling the boss. It lasts about 1 hour on the Normal difficulty setting, but there's also an easy and hard mode, as well as an Stage Attack mode, if you care about any of those.

 On each stage you are dropped on a medium-sized area filled with enemies, and then you are told your first objective. While you can go fulfill it at any time, you are free to explore and destroy enemies, although the only reward will be more points, so there's no real rewards for exploring. The left analog stick is used to move around, holding the L button allows you to strafe and the Stylus takes care of combat. If you bought Kid Icarus, you'll probably want to use the Stand it came with, since I struggled with a few hand cramps as I played along.

 Interestingly, your offensive means are also your defense! There's two weapons, the Laser and the Gun/Missile. To use the gun, you hover the reticule, with the stylus, over the enemies and then let go, it can also be charged for extra damage, while the laser fires constantly as you move the reticule around. The 'ammo' for these weapons is also your shield, so depleting your ammo, which recharges once you stop touching the screen with the stylus, will leave you open to take damage. Still, getting hit while the gauge is fully loaded will penalize you by reducing its total capacity, which means less ammo for your weapons. You can recharge this capacity by defeating enemies. I don't usually play shooters, so I don't know how original of a mechanic it is, but what I do know is that I found it rather fun.

 There's not a whole lot of story to the game, but Suda 51's flavor can be felt on the gameplay. It's hard to explain the why or how, but you can tell that Suda 51 had to something to do with it, even the HUD feels very Suda 51. Still, it's far from his best endeavors, but I think that can be attributed to the game's original nature: This is a single part of a whole package. It wasn't meant to be a 'complete' game, which explains its simple premise and very, very short duration. Still, there's something to be said about them managing to make the gameplay so engaging when it was meant to be something so simple.

 As it stands, I feel the same way about this game as I did with Attack of the Friday Monsters: It's a great, small game considering what it was meant to be, but I'm sure it would've worked much better alongside the other two games it was released with, as a compilation of multiple games from multiple directors. Still, the small fee of admission is worth it, and it does have a broader appeal than Attack of the Friday Monsters.
 7.0 out of 10

Review #333: Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale

 It's so beautiful!

 Attack of the Friday Monsters! is... a bit hard to classify, but I guess 'a slice of life adventure game' fits the bill relatively well.

 You play as Sohta, the new kid on the block, who is sent by his mother on an errand to deliver the clean laundry to the baker's... something that Sohta forgets about very early and is never brought up again till the 'true ending'. Before leaving his home, his mother warns him to be careful, since Friday is the day monsters come out. And this is the game's first peculiarity, the nature of the monsters, of the town, is never made clear. Are the monsters real?  Are they partially real? Is this an elaborate prank by the adults? Is it a movie stage? The answer is left pretty ambiguous. The game is divided in 26 episodes, but they are more like 'tasks' or 'mysteries', they don't follow a numerical order, and you'll advance each at seemingly random intervals. To be honest, the story is relatively simple, but the cast of characters and the situations were incredibly charming, more often than not I found myself making the largest, dumbest grins as I advanced the plot.

 Throughout the entire ordeal you'll be doing three things: Walking from place to place, talking with NPCs and battling other kids with cards. As you walk around town, you'll come across shining spots, called 'Glims', collecting about 7 of them will grant you a card. These cards represent different Kaijuu, Japanese giant monsters like Godzilla, and they each have their own unique flavor text accompanying them, which makes collecting them a reward in itself. But cards are more than mere collector's items, they are used to play a game card game against other kids, by facing five of your cards against five of them. Initially each card has one of three symbols: Rock-Paper-Scissors, but later in the game you'll come across dual type, like Cutting Rock. After selecting your five cards, you'll be given two to three 'hints' on whether your card loses, wins or draws against the enemy card directly in front of it, and you are allowed to switch to cards. Who switches cards first depends on who's got the 'winning set up' at the start. I didn't much care for the game itself, but you'd do well to collect as many cards as you want, as there's a relatively challenging mandatory match near the end of the game.

 After you clear the game you are free to search for missing glints, complete unfinished episodes and challenge a new kid to the card game. If you want to 100% the game you are going to need to collect every card, which means challenging the new kid. Not only is she the hardest opponent in the entire game, but the chances of her dropping the glints you need are entirely random. This was the only thing I found annoying in the game, and honestly, the ending you get after getting every card isn't really worth it, so after you clear the game just finish every episode but the fourth one(The one that requires all cards). Unless you really enjoy the card game, in which case you've a reason to keep playing it!

 And that's all there is to say about Attack of the Friday Monsters! It's a simple, but wholly charming game, filled with entertaining moments to keep you smiling all the way through. And as with any game of this kind, it's not for everyone. The card game is almost entirely optional, there's no puzzles whatsoever, so the only thing you'll be doing is walking around and talking with NPCs, which probably doesn't sound very appealing, and it certainly will only appeal to a few. But for those few, the game is incredibly worth it. The game was originally released alongside four other games in Japan, as 'guild 02' or something like that, but all us westerners got was a digital release of each game individually. Regardless of how cheap you may get it for, if the game doesn't sound like something you'd be interested in, then chances are you probably won't like the game at all.
 8.0 out of 10

Review #332: Earth Defense Force 2025

 EDF! EDF! EDF!

 It's been, what, about four years since I played Earth Defense Force(USA) back in the day? Often lauded as the worst in the franchise, it was an american take on the series, and I liked it a lot, but then again, it was the only EDF game I had played. Earth Defense Force 2025 was the last EDF game released on last gen consoles, now left obsolete by the PS4 enhanced rerelease. Regardless, current-gen still hasn't managed to pique my interest, scummy DLC practices and incomplete games(I believed in Street Fighter V, and it failed me! DAMMIT, CAPCOM.) doesn't help, so this'll have to do.

 The game's story is as follows: Giant alien insects invade the Earth, Storm Team is the Earth's mightiest defense against these evil aliens, so they do battle with the aliens. And that's it. There's a tiny bit more to the story, which progresses through audio communication while you play the 85 missions, which last about 15 hours, but it's not meant to be taken seriously. You'd do both yourself and the game a disservice if you played it for the story, Shakespeare this is not.

 The game is a traditional third person shooter, so no fancy 'over-the shoulder' aiming, in which you have to kill giant ants. And then giant spiders. And then giant Bees. And then flying space ships. And then alien bipedal robots. And then H. G. Wells-inspired robots. And then dragons. And it's as fun, chaotic and ridiculous as it sounds, and it's amazing. Most of the missions take place in city-like arenas, filled with buildings and bridges that probably won't survive the whole ordeal. As fantastic as it sounds... the game runs like crap. The framerate in single-player is acceptable, it dips a lot, but it can be tolerated. But when playing split-screen... it's awful. But it's also when the game shines the brightest, I played the entire 85 missions in split-screen co-op, and it was a riot, so much so that it was easy to ignore how frequently the framerate went into the single digits. It's that bad. But it's also so much fun.

 There's four different classes, each one with specific weapons and attributes. Honestly, if you are gonna play by yourself, you are better off sticking with the average, all-around Ranger. The Wing Diver is fun, but it's a bit too fragile, the Fencer packs quite a punch, and the only class that wields four weapons, but it's very, very slow, unless you bring a melee weapon, that allows it to dash, so it'll be an eternity as you move from area to area, and the Air Support class is built around co-operation, which makes it a terrible character for solo play. And it's a shame, because the other classes are so much fun to play, in a co-operative environment! Each character also gets dozens upon dozens of different weapons. Sure, a ton of them are simply higher-level versions of other weapons, but there's probably 12-20 different weapon models for each different class, which translates into a lot of weapons and a lot of set-ups.

 And I bet all those weapons sound oh so appealing, don't they? It's a bit of a double edged sword. Weapons are found on green crates, randomly dropped by enemies. What weapon you get is entirely random, and it may even be a weapon you already own. This also means that if you like a particular set of weapons, you may be stuck with low-level weapons until you finally get weapons that suit your style. Since I was so fond of my Fencer's 900 damage cannon, I wound up with 3 different level 15-20 weapons and my level 10 cannon, since I couldn't find its enhanced version or a weapon that could take its role in my arsenal.

 Another issue with the game, besides the terrible framerate, are the long, looooooooooong loading times. And then there's the camera... Sometimes it tends to get stuck on debris behind you, or for whatever reason, your character itself. It's not unusual to be aiming at something only to suddenly get a close-up on your character's behind. Now couple this with single-digit framerate moments and it can get quite annoying.

 Despite being such a technical mess, the game is undeniably fun. It can get a bit repetitive, sure, but trying new weapons is always fun. That said, the game is obviously meant to be played with other players, going at it solo is decent, but when you've got different character classes co-operating with each other, there's were the game shines... and it's also when the game runs the worst! It's definitely not a game for everyone, it's a very campy game, and it knows how ridiculous it is, and it makes the most of it. It also runs like garbage, has a ton of technical issues, so it takes a special kind of person to put up with them and appreciate the game for what it really is.
 7.0 out of 10

Now Playing: Stella Glow

 Because Luminous Arc isn't dead. Kinda...ish.

Imageepoch had a little franchise, Luminous Arc, on the Nintendo DS. It was a trilogy of quirky Strategy RPGs that were pretty decent. As a matter of fact, I remember getting 100% on Luminous Arc 2, which meant a lot, and I do mean a LOT of playthroughs. Sadly, we never got Luminous Arc 3 over here.

 We did get Arc Rise Fantasia, though, which was amazing, and I covered on this blog a couple of times already, and putting it over Xenoblade on my favorite Wii games. Actually, there was a fourth Luminous Arc game on the Vita, but it looks nothing like previous games and was developed by another company...

 ...'Cause, y'see, Imageepoch went bankrupt after releasing this game, and their CEO went missing(True story). So what we've got here is Imageepoch's very last game, and while it doesn't carry the 'Luminous Arc' name, it very much is in spirit.

 So, the good, the bad and the ugly:

The Good:
- Production values are through the roof. 2-D character portraits are very crisp and clear, the anime cutscenes are fantastic and the 3D in-game graphics are gorgeos.
- Gameplay is very simple, and works just like any other SRPG, but why fix what isn't broken?

The Bad:
- The story... It's as anime as it gets. Childhood friend-romantic interest-who can't cook? Check. Her food even turns purple, like 90% of every female love interest ever. The mysterious voice-power benefactor that appears mysteriously when the situation gets dire and offers the main character powers? Check.
- It also rips off from the Luminous Arc franchise itself! This Hilda witch seems to have the exact same role as the Twilight Witch from Luminous Arc 2. She's the game's 'mascot', featuring heavily on most official art pieces, wields a scimitar-like weapon, wears black and has white hair, is evil but will obviously join the good guys. Then there's the Knight Klaus, who looks almost exactly like Luminous Arc 2's token blonde spearman.
- And it's also very predictable. The fact that Lisette would discover her witch powers so early and in that manner was incredibly obvious.
- The first chapters also reminded me a lot of Jean D'Arc. Having the main characters start off as villagers, having one of the characters being accepted into the village after having been found suffering from amnesia/not knowing who he was. Even the early hunting missions and visual style, not to mention having the village attacked. And I know that it's a very common set-up seen in many games, but it reminded me of Jean D'Arc the most due to the visual style.

The ugly:
- You can't turn the camera during battles! Although to be fair I didn't really need to.

 Basically, it's really good, at least so far, with the only shortcoming being the story. Sadly, Japanese RPGs aren't just what they used to.

Month Overview: June 2016

 Tally:
999 - Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors                         7.5
Professor Layton VS Phoenix Wright - Ace Attorney            8.0
Danganronpa 2 - Goodbye Despair                                         8.5
Danganronpa Another Episode - Ultra Despair Girls             6.5
Lord of Arcana                                                                        2.0


 Now that's a lot of visual novel-style games! Not that I mind, they were pretty good. Even Danganronpa AE was good at what it wanted to be, although it wasn't too good at what it was. Anyways, 999? Pretty good, although I disagreed with a few design choices. Professor Layton VS Phoenix Wright? Now that's a crossover. Danganronpa 2? It starts of very disappointing, but it turns around on its second half and becomes amazing. All in all, I'm pretty satisfied.

 Except with Lord of Arcana, that game can burn in hell for all I care.


Game of June:

 Man, I had a tough time scoring Danganronpa 2. The first 10 hours of the game I was feeling so let down. Fanservice was rampant throughout the entire game, the cast just wasn't very likable, and while the story behind the trials was pretty good, the gameplay was even more annoyingly convoluted. And then I got into the second half, and man, does the game pick up. Most of the fanservice is gone, by this time you've invested more time into the surviving characters and you realized that they had hidden depths, and the story gets SO good. SO. GOOD. I wanted to score it above Danganronpa at times. But there was my issue: Danganronpa 1 was consistently amazing, while Danganronpa 2 does get better than Danganronpa 1, the first half is rather bland. Still, it's a solid game, but lacks the consistency that made the original so good.

Runner-up:

 Alright, so the trials weren't as in-depth as they normally are, but it was understandable considering the target audience. Besides, it made up for it with the addition of Layton's puzzles. The end result is a Phoenix Wright game AND a Professor Layton game at the same time, without one franchise overshadowing the other in terms of presence. Although, y'know, I felt kinda sad that Pheenie was the butt of the joke the entire time, while Layton got nothing but praises. Which makes sense considering that's how both characters are treated in their respective universes, but still!

Review #331: Lord of Arcana

 Ooooooooooooooooooh boy...

 You know what I like? A good Monster-Hunter clone. Monster Hunter Tri? Loved it. Gods Eater Burst? Adored it, and pre-ordered the sequel. Toukiden Kiwami? 9.0 outta 10, still playing it nowadays on my spare time(The sequel, at least on Vita, isn't looking so hot though). Do you know what I also enjoy? Games in which Swery65 worked on. And you're telling me that Swery65 worked on a Monster Hunter clone? Sold. And then I played and.... full disclosure, I did not finish the game, and frankly, I'm not planning on doing so any time soon. Lord of Arcana is terrible, terrible.

 So, story, seven beasts are sealed in coffin-like things, and as you hunt stuff the seals break and you have to hunt these beasts. That's it. There's no memorable NPCs, no memorable moments, no nothing. I mean, I only got up to the third sealed monster, but it's pretty much just like Monster Hunter: The story is just an excuse to have you hunt things with your created character, who is pretty much a blank slate, personality wise. As per the norm for these games, you have a small town-like hub were you can craft items or equipment using pieces you've scavenged from monsters and accept quests. There's also a store, but they don't sell anything useful.

 And then we get to the gameplay, and where to start with... So, you created your character, picked a weapon, equipped an special attack, and you are ready to do some hunting, right? Well, the first surprise coming your way is how the hunting pans out. In these games you are usually let loose on an area, search enemies and fight them in real time. Here... you will come across enemies on the field, but these represent enemy encounters, as if it was an RPG, meaning that touching them shifts the action to a round arena in which the actual fight takes place. It's as annoying and time consuming as it sounds. Now, you know how these type of games can get very grindy very fast, as hunting for specific enemy parts can get grueling, it's not unusual to have to fight the same enemy over ten times in order to get that specific thing. Well, this game manages to make it even more tedious. There's certain enemy parts, 'cores', which are required for almost everything worth a damn, that can only be harvested at specific times.

 And this works very... randomly. After you've been on the field for a while, the game will randomly pick a specific area, and killing enemies in that specific area lets you harvest the cores of fallen enemies... if you are lucky. You see, there's an RNG to the RNG. You see, you might want Goblin cores, but the game will suddenly decide 'Hey, see this area filled with Skeletons and not a single Goblin? YOU CAN HARVEST CORES HERE NOW. ENJOY'. And killing enemies grants you the chance to get the core, more often than not you'll get nothing. And bosses, the strongest, most time consuming enemies? They might not even drop their cores as well. SO. MUCH. FUN. And the enemies are so lame, and their animations are lackluster as well. The first boss looks laughably dumb, at least the Bahamut was kinda coolish.

 The combat is simple and boring. You have a normal attack, on square, and a special attack on the triangle button. X is used for blocking and rolling. The combat feels very clunky and stiff, it simply isn't a fun game to play. But the cherry on top? Boss encounters. Do you know the best part about them? In order to kill them you have to engage in a sequence of QTES, and QTES are SO. MUCH. FUN. I can't stress enough just how lousy this game is, it's filled with baffling design choices, lame enemies and lame combat. There's dozens upon dozens of Monster Hunter clones out there, something this horrid just won't cut it.

 Now then, when I play Monster Hunter or Gods Eater, and a boss annihilates me, my immediate thoughts are to claim revenge. Revise my strategy, maybe even my equipment, and I try to tackle the boss again as soon as possible. In Lord of Arcana, Bahamut creamed me and... I just didn't want to try again. About a week later I tried again, and lost again, so I searched for Bahamut online, turns out he is kind of a roadblock for some of us, but, apparently, there's a spear-type weapon that completely wrecks him. But... I just couldn't be bothered to get that weapon. I wasn't having fun with Lord of Arcana, the game is tedious, is clunky and is anything but fun. There's so many other, better, more competent games, so why bother?

 For what it's worth, I looked at Lord of Apocalypse, a Japan only sequel that was released on both the PSP and the Vita, and it looks leagues and bounds better than this game. For instance, Agni, the first boss, while he is a tiny, pathetic creature on Lord of Arcana, in Lord of Apocalypse he is four times as tall, and both of his arms sport the flame gauntlets. His animations and patterns are just as pathetic, but at least he is looks imposing. They got rid of the 'encounter'-based combat, so that you engage enemies on the field itself, as it's meant to be, and you get CPU allies as well, which are bound to make the Single Player campaign more tolerable.

 Lord of Arcana is a terrible game. It's kinda sad, because it's not broken buggy. But the game is undeniably boring and tedious. The game is dull to the point of soullessness, and it makes me incredibly sad to say that, because if Swery 65's games have something, it's a soul, as derivative as they are. They tried to change the Monster Hunter formula, but change for the sake of change is not a good thing, which is why all of its original ideas fell flat on their face, which is why they got rid of them on the enhanced sequel, Lord of Apocalypse. The Monster Hunter-clone market, while still relatively niche, has dozens of fantastic alternatives: The PSP and 3DS have the Monster Hunter franchise, the PSP and Vita have the God Eater franchise and the Vita and PS4 have Toukiden. There's absolutely no reason to play this game.
 2.0 out of 10

I flippin' adore Orcs & Elves

 This little gem deserves way more exposure than it gets.

 Let me take you back in time, circa 2009ish, back then Mobile games were a tad more rudimentary than they are today, but at least they didn't have microtransactions. Back then we didn't have fancy touchscreens on our cells, or weren't as widespread, so games suffered due to poor controls, so mobile games were little more than novelties or diversions.

 And then I discovered Doom RPG. Hot. Damn. The game was amazing, not in small part due to how it made the most of its medium. You couldn't have games that required twitch reflexes back then, there were some, but they sucked. Doom RPG dealt with this by making the entire game turn based. The world of Doom RPG was divided into an invisible grid, every time you moved from square to square a turn would pass. It sounds very slow paced, but the game never felt slow. And it was a blast to play, there were dozens of weapons, enemies and secrets to find!

 The game could last you anywhere near 10 hours, and it was glorious, I must have played through the game countless times, and back then I already grew out of replaying games I would've beaten recently. Life was good.

 And then came Doom RPG II. And... I don't have many memories of it, for whatever reason. But there was another game released by ID Software that used the same engine: Orcs & Elves. It had everything that made Doom RPG so good, but transported to a fantastic medieval setting. And the game benefited from it. Having flaming swords over pistols, a bow over a shot gun, a warhammer over a bazooka made it much more exciting. And Doom's enemies might be cool, but the new monsters were badass.

 And almost as soon as I found out about Orcs & Elves, a Nintendo DS port was announced, I remember watching the reveal trailer over and over again on Gametrailers.com. And I eventually bought the game on the day it was released. And there's no two ways about it, Orcs & Elves on the DS makes the Mobile version completely obsolete. That said, I would eventually return to this version, since I kinda never leave my home without my phone, while the DS usually stays at home.

 Orcs & Elves on the DS is everything Orcs & Elves was on the Mobile phone but better. The additional screen helps to make the interface friendlier, although to be honest, it takes a bit of time to get used to it, but once it clicks, you'll be using potions and toggling the map on and off with ease. The entire graphics were remade, the various environments now pack even more detail than before, and it looks glorious, not to mention the new enemy sprites; I thought the sprites on the mobile version were badass, but I was awestruck the moment I saw an Orc on the DS version for the first time.

 This port was a faithful remake of the Mobile game, but they didn't stop there, as this port features two new areas. I'm not gonna lie, the cavernous labyrinth area is a bit of a drag, but the new underground cave was a fantastic addition.

 Eventually, Orcs & Elves II would be released, and it was a step up from the first game in every single way. New enemies, new weapons, a longer storyline. It was also a bit ambitious, featuring towns and friendly NPCs. While I was a bit apprehensive of the game at first, since I didn't like the new protagonist: Valin, a Thief who stole the talking wand from the first game's hero, but the interactions between him and Ellon the wand eventually won me over. It was fun how Ellon would refuse to attack at first, but eventually warmed up to Valin, while Valin grew into a hero himself.

 Ah! How I remained hopeful that O&E2 would receive an enhanced DS port as well! But sadly that never came to be. And it's a shame, since the franchise died after that. I think there was a third entry on the Doom RPG series, and there was also a Wolfenstein RPG, but by then my phone was too outdated to play them... and nowadays, the games are so outdated for my phone that they are incompatible!

 Here's to you, Orcs & Elves, you were a fantastic two-game franchise that made the most of its platform to deliver an excellent game that worked perfectly around the limitations of its medium.