NIS America aims to sweeten your weekend by ending off the week with a barrel full of videos for Prinny 2: Dawn of Operation Panties, Dood! Yes, I still feel awkward writing that title, but don’t let that stop you from overdosing on footage from the game, which should start 2011 off on the right note when it releases January 11th.
Catch it after the break dood!
Housewives and children set aside their chores and Government’s watch with bated breath as the battle to determine the fate of the world is broadcast live on television. But for all the fanfare, the fated showdown between Demon General Darkdeath Evilman and the invincible Unlosing Ranger is so one-sided, with the Unlosing Ranger being invincible after all, that many simply carry on with their day, even if it includes running over said Ranger on his way to the fight.
NIS has crammed so many bits of cult love into the first ten minutes of Z.H.P. that, perhaps for the first time ever, I laughed like a lunatic at the play of it all before any actual game even begins. The game finds the means to scream at you before you even press start, warning players that there will only be one fight, but that it will be an epic and long one. From there it grabs at super hero tropes and Power Ranger oddities, 80’s apocalypse anime doom, and quick editing that offers cameo appearances from completely random characters, simply because it can.
This is NIS off their medication, with another PSP game with a very strange name (Z.H.P.: Unlosing Ranger VS Darkdeath Evilman) – though this time it isn’t just a case of being crazy for the sake of it, though that is ever present. There’s fertile ground for the character customization to feed naturally through the parody and knit a sweater of awesome out of the cultural threads on hand.
That the game offers customization options for the “me! me! me!” swarm I often catch myself belonging to, helps invite me into an strategy game with a wealth of customization options – without hammering me over the head at the outset, or in simpler terms, not being nearly so stuffy about it as the genre generally is.
Who doesn’t want to play a hand at customizing the ultimate hero?
As for the game that unfolds beyond the first ten minutes, stay tuned. Or if for some reason you’ve no idea what game I’m talking about, catch up with the trailer after the break.
It’s fair to say that one never knows what to expect from any new game release, despite the availability of news and early views to encourage plenty of expectations or hesitations. And yet never have I flown so blind into a new title than with NIS America’s new deviation for the Disgaea series.
I was aware of the term “visual novel” prior to pressing start for the first time, and somewhat prepared for a significantly larger portion of narrative authority versus interactive playtime, but I was gleefully ignorant of any real idea toward how it all might unfold across my PSP screen.
On the surface there’s only so much to be said about a game that puts players in the role of a pick-axe. Fortunately there’s plenty stewing beneath the surface here, much like the plot and play of a release that wears that simple guise only to quickly birth a complex Eco-system. Life spreads swiftly through the twisting tunnels players rush to create, seconds before the tropes of the RPG genre ruin the best laid plans of civil engineers with full on trench warfare.
Though NIS America had to drop half of an impressively long title in bringing another dose of dungeon building 101 to the PSP, What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord? 2 returns the equal share of love and frustration the original offered to give a definitive disc based release to the series.
The sequel to the mobile ant-farm of evil simulator is something I’ve been playing in small doses over the last month. It’s really the only means I have of tackling a game that offers plenty of elements to engulf the player and drag them deeper down their own tunnels, but with end goals that make frequent breaks from the experience necessary for my sanity.
Within an alternate and slightly steampunk infused depiction of 1920’s New York City, the Little Lips Theater serves as a cover for an elite force of agents known as the STAR Division, who use mech suits to battle evil while also performing in musical dramas to raise the spirits of the city they defend – rounded out with a Samurai and a Cowgirl searching to find their place within the city and that group of heroes.
I’ve really come to savor telling people about this game over the past few weeks, because they can’t help but laugh and scratch their head over how a structured game would even begin to make unifying sense of those ideas with any degree of success. Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love is a game exploding with ideas, a late to the party visitor from Japan that has curiously shown up on North American shores exactly when titles of this kind are needed most – hard pressed as we’ve been for new releases that don’t wear their glib intention entirely in the straight-to-the-point box title making them 90% marketing, 9% entertainment, and 1% any of the fanciful things we’d like to say about the medium’s artful possibilities, were we not generally sick of kicking that dead horse.
Sakura Wars opts for putting the horse in an apartment, and brings an energy that succeeds in blazing a path free of any genre binding obligations or easy explanations – great for gamers, bad for indexing.
And in a rare twist Sakura Wars isn’t one of those games where I laud the ideas and forgive the actual playing of the game. I don’t need to make any excuses for a game that’s every bit as fun to play as it is to talk about, I just have to try and clear up what the hell is going on when playing it.
I’d lean toward saying that the art direction is what first attracted me to NIS America’s latest PS3 RPG outing, but it’s more a case of art promotion. The game’s two central characters, Aisha and Nine have had some extremely note-worthy artists give their own take on portraying the pair. Within the game proper, both characters possess a hand-painted edge that cuts them free of the barren and brown landscapes players tread across while leveling up, fighting monsters, and all the other many splendid things one expects to do within an RPG.
As I’ve come to expect from titles NISA publishes, Last Rebellion cuts its own path as if there were no standards for the genre. I respect that resistance to the “me too” illness quite a bit, but my respect for an approach does not inherently make Last Rebellion a good game – that and there’s always the possibility Hitmaker couldn’t afford fancier presentation for the title. The game lacks the CG sequences expected from the genre, offers up monotonously bland landscapes, and serves it cold with voice acting that is every bit a set of freshly painted nails running across a chalkboard.
At times the dialogue seems to hit inadvertent spots of humor, at other times making little sense at all, but more often than not leaving me convinced that when the voice actors asked for motivation, someone simply shrugged at them.
But I can get past those issues so long as the game beneath the dressing, or lack thereof, offers something interesting. So I guess we better talk about the battle system, since that’s all we’ve really got to work with in the attempt to back up the title of this post.
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