The General Purpose Japanese Games Thread!

I liked Trails in the Sky but my Vita died before I started Cold Steel. I then decided to wait until the whole set came to Switch. As they decided to only port 3&4 I have decided to skip Cold Steel and wait until the next Trails series.

Boss fights in Fuga are agonisingly tense. "Don't murder a child to power your main gun. Don't murder a child to power your main gun. Don't murder a child to power your main gun. Don't murder a child to power your main gun. Don't murder a child to power your main gun."

The Tales of Arise demo is live, if you are a New Zealander.

Gave it a quick try - but as usual, Bamco can't be bothered with a decent tutorial, so I dropped it pretty quickly. Scarlet Nexus was much better on that regard.

I was able to check the graphics out at least. On Series S there are two modes, either 1080p and 60fps, which feels very good, or 1440p and somewhere between 30fps and 60fps, which feels pretty terrible.

I have so many Ys games to play! /o\ So tempted by IX...

Pro, I assume? I suspect the PC version will be easy enough to drive given other Unreal titles. It's also cheaper at GMG.

On the subject of Ys, Ys IX ran extremely well on PC too even with the ridiculous graphics options they let you activate. You can tell it was ported by the Cold Steel guy, he's very very good at getting the best out of Falcom's engine on PC.

File this one under 'silly boy didn't do their homework'. Last year, I saw there's a Sakura Wars game on the PS4. I buy it and there it sits innocently for the better part of a year.

It seems that Sega made some changes, it's Valkyria Revolution all over again. The Sega brain trust thought there was a massive untapped audience just out of reach, all they needed to do is ditch the turn based strategy of every other game in the series and replace it with unrefined and clumsy musuo style gameplay. Even better it also has platforming, it's bad, they know it's bad, so you don't lose health when you inevitably fall because of a camera that's ill suited to platforming and struggles with the musuo sections.

The end product is hard to pin point as appealing to anybody in particular, not enough musuo for an action game fan, no RPG or SRPG elements for the JRPG fans. Visual novel and dating sim fans probably don't want the action elements that drag on and the story and characters are some of the most unbearable cringe I've encountered in years... Note I've played Idea Factory games, you have to go subterranean to get under that bar. The female lead is a the most unlikable, emotionally unstable bitch I've encountered in a game. To create a fictional character this annoying is actually genius. They're emotionally engaging me, negatively unfortunately. You can't avoid Sakura, all the most annoying interactions are mandatory.

One positive? The game taught me how to play hanafuda, by mercilessly beating me again and again, the tutorial is incredibly scant, anybody unfamiliar with a hanafuda deck is left to figure it out as they go.

If you like hurting yourself, Sakura Wars is highly recommended.

One of Sakura Wars other egregious infractions has to be mentioned. It totally goes against the face layout button we've all been used to for years.

In general for Playstation games it normally goes like this:

X = Jump or action/interact
Square = Light or standard attack or menu
Triangle = Heavy or alternate attack
Circle = Grab or alternate attack

Sakura Wars for no reason other than wanting to be a pain in the backside transposes square and circle. Triangle is heavy attack but circle is the light attack. So what's the problem with constantly hitting square instead? That button is mapped to your special gauge which you end up wasting on jobber enemies so you don't have it when you need it. You can't overcome the habit of a lifetime for just this one game.

Of course you guessed it's one of those games where you can't remap anything.

I was about to ask what Fantasia was then saw it's the Mistwalker Apple Arcade game. I have nothing Apple related so nothing on it has to wait for a port

Any good?

I went into Secret of Mana Remake expecting a crime against humanity due to it's initial reception at release, maybe it's due to low expectations but it's not bad at all.

There are some issues due to it being basically a reskin of an incredibly old game, plus the remake was clearly developed with the Vita in mind, complaints about the graphics are understandable. I actually like a lot of the 3D characters they really evoke 1990s Squaresoft artwork that you might have seen in the manual or on the box, but now rendered in 3D it's nice to have stuff like this in a style not really used by Square Enix anymore.

Entrances and exits from areas remain narrow as they originally did so an NPC can block you and keep you from where the designers don't want you, but just like it originally did it sometimes happens when when it's not supposed to. One guard in particular constantly prevents me leaving a town northward. You either have to wait for them to walk away or leave from another exit or enter a house then hope he's not there when the area 'reloads'.

Talking of reloading, another issue is that they've kept the same area transitions that were there because the SNES was out of RAM but they don't make sense anymore when the whole map is there in 3D. Every time you transition all local enemies respawn so you can end up getting bounced back and forth at the transition point just dodging an enemy because you can't see the transition point in this rendering of the overworld since you're not walking off the screen anymore.

Inventory, weapon and magic management really needed modernisation, it ignores decades of improvement and advancement and really takes some adjusting to.

With those complaints out of the way it's a fun little action RPG adventure from a time when it was okay for RPGs to be simpler and 10-20 hours long. I have to wonder why we're getting so many of these 90s RPG reskins now. We've also had Saga Frontier (Twice), Legend of Mana, Trials of Mana, Langrisser I & II plus probably many others. Maybe it's just they're relatively cheap to produce and don't need the best development talent.

Re: the 90's remakes, we have 2 Romancing Sagas but only Saga Frontier 1 so far (I imagine 2 may be sooner rather than later and with how well LoM was done it could look very nice). I would like to see Front Missions 1-3 including 2089 done too.

As for Arise, it is a bit iffy if the buyable upgrades actually feel necessary this time around. I haven't bought it yet as not sure PS4 will be the ideal format.

One more week until Lost Judgment...

Kuro no Kiseki unlocked a couple of hours back so I've been playing it a bit.

The new engine gives a really bad first impression. It now runs at 30fps and they've introduced a bunch of realtime graphics effects like ambient occlusion but they all look really bad and whenever the camera cuts they all take half a second or so to catch up - cue cutting to a street light which slowly leaks out light into the surroundings. Text rendering's as bad as we've seen from Falcom as well which is a shame for a game with so much reading in it. Playing on a PS5 it was a genuine shock; you can't accuse the previous games of looking amazing but they ran at a good resolution, loaded quickly and were smooth. This new engine feels like something one of the programmers was working on as a personal side project for a hobby or something and has now been dropped in at the deep end trying to extend it out to a game.

I'm not convinced by the new battles either. In the turn-based mode the time gauge is no longer in order but has each 'side' with character icons approaching the centre at seemingly different speeds. Good luck working out if an art will cast before an enemy moves away! There's no more battle speed option that I can see, you can't skip animations and there seems to be an AI pause for about two seconds on every enemy turn which means it feels very slow. In return for this you get a realtime combat mode which for now seems like something they wanted to add just so they could add it. You can only do normal attacks, dodges or a 'charge' attack which stuns enemies; it's seemingly only intended for very weak enemies or trying to pressure enemies into a stun for when you hit square and activate the 'shard' for turn based mode. As the game runs at 30fps it also feels pretty bad compared to recent efforts. It's surprisingly half-baked for a realtime Falcom battle system, I was expecting something more like modern Ys where you could bind special moves to button combinations. Maybe we'll get arts and crafts on the buttons later but looking at a couple of guides that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm quite liking the way the story's going so far, complete with Takaya Kuroda getting mixed up in some mafia business, but since pretty much every character's been introduced by interrupting someone from off screen, by talking with the camera cutting off their face or a combination of both, I wouldn't expect any revolutions. Or that much voiced dialogue, it's already really spotty. I'm still in the prologue though so hopefully things will improve once we have a bigger party and options expand. For now though I would be lying if I said I wasn't quite disappointed.

I guess Falcom are still adhering to 'old school' Japanese development methods where they create their own engine and tools for specific games or series in-house, it can have disastrous consequences. The Last Guardian probably took SCEJ down with it, years wasted on a specifically tailored engine that ended up delivering nothing special when any number of middleware solutions would have got them started and given them more time to actually focus on the game itself and address rough edges etc.

Played Scarlet Nexus for about an hour so far. Freed from the boundaries of the in-medias-res action chapter of the demo, you can see the story for what it really is, aka constant infodump, liberal use of "as you know", and free action talking during super cheap stills.

I see basically all the typical anime characters tropes so far, but it's not wholly unenjoyable. In fact, combat seems a more approachable than modern Tales. At least so far, I still haven't got to the attack link thing or whatever. If combat remains relatively accessible, there are no cheap difficulty spikes, and the story or characters don't start going in some eyeroll-worthy directions, I might actually stick with it.