If you’ve been looking forward to checking out Yuji Naka’s Ivy the Kiwi?, but been stuck waiting until the game releases for the DS and Wii on August 24, don’t cry, XSEED and Nintendo have you semi-covered today.
Until August 15 you can grab a demo for the DS version via the Wii Channel – so you know, get cracking!
It only takes a few quick minutes to be bitten by and become smitten with Little King’s Story. Words like magical and charming get tossed around plenty with videogames, and certainly I’m as guilty as anyone in generating hyperbole when the right title sways me. This time around I want to suggest that both those words apply, insomuch as Cing offers an earnestly heartfelt passageway into the storybook premise, preying on the lingering traces of childhood imagination by not drowning the player in cuteness. It’s a fine line, a complete matter of opinion, a general sense of using only so much narrative tradition as is required to feed the play of the game itself, and allowing space for results and rewards that help the narrative and play blossom together to put an earnest smile on the player’s face.
A young boy follows a pack of pastel colored rats into a ragged kingdom, sparsely populated by a handful of idol subjects and a few cows. It’s a tiny Kingdom for a tiny King, captured in scenes of colored pencil sketches that curiously remind me of the shorts the National Film Board substituted for cartoons during my early morning Canadian television years. The result is an introduction I immediately wanted to show to others, and I certainly dragged more than a few people to watch it, after taking so long to finally dive into the game myself.
Like plenty of others, I allowed Little King’s Story to pass me by when it originally released for the Wii late last year. I’m at a loss for a good reason aside from the sheer volume of titles vying for attention, but recently I’ve wondered if the cute aesthetic played into it – that the visual style that proved love at first sight didn’t punch through the box art hard enough to mark the importance of the title.
Despite the dismal sales associated with third-party Wii releases, the game is already on plenty of must play lists, and all I can do is add a voice to the choir, affirming the game’s worthiness of that praise, and perhaps alleviating a bit of guilt for not having done so sooner.
While perfectly suited to quick traveling bouts of play, it wasn’t hard losing an entire day to Half-Minute Hero when I finally caught up with the 2009 XSEED PSP release last week. The game offers four primary modes of play, allowing it to boast a marketing pitch that unites a shooter, RPG, and RTS on a single UMD, all thematically tied together by the thirty-second hook that makes this release the bat-shit crazy and addictive game it is.
Evil Lord 30 mode sunk its teeth in the deepest, an RTS campaign wherein players partake in a summoning spree while guiding the vainest Evil Lord in existence toward returning the only woman he may love more than himself back to human form after being transformed into a bat.
Each quick stage along the path to victory allows players to summon four monster types and seek out elemental gods to overcome armies while blood crazed techno-rock music breathes heavy in the ears – I want to suggest it’s that heavy sort of breathing you get when more familiar gaming tunes go bar hopping with the Future Sound of London.
[podcast]http://www.gamesugar.net/podcast/e32010/e3ysaudio.mp3[/podcast]
Since Aileen was already checking Ivy the Kiwi?, it made sense to stick around and find out more about the games spewing from XSEED’s new arrangement to stock the PSP with Falcom titles.
I’m going to say that the games are probably in the best hands possible, because it didn’t take her long to find a very enthusiastic Falcom fan among the XSEED ranks.
Give a listen to hear about skill items, deadly yellow gauges, gathering materials, and many more bits from both Ys Seven and Ys: The Oath in Felghana.
You can also catch the latest trailer for Ys Seven after the break.
[podcast]http://www.gamesugar.net/podcast/e32010/e3ivydemo.mp3[/podcast]
Aileen caught up with XSEED Games this week to try out Ivy the Kiwi? on Wii, but also found out plenty more about the DS version as well as some info about the digital versions in the works for DSiWare and WiiWare and how they differ from the retail copies.
Thanks to the magic of audio, you can hear about it straight from XSEED Games at the show. You can also check out some video of the game after the break.
Skeptical Cat feels very ignored with all this E3 business going on around the office. All Skeptical Cat has heard this week is bullets and swords and something about the three d’s of gaming – meanwhile only Skeptical Cat seems to realize that the litter box doesn’t clean itself.
Skeptical Cat isn’t very interested in these things, but was bribed to pitch in with a shiny Natal experience pass to replace his old collar. Skeptical Cat feels that gaming needs to connect with its roots, especially in offering us more games about delicious characters – and maybe more Chu Chu Rocket, Skeptical Cat approves of more games where foolish mice are eaten.
Skeptical Cat feels that Ivy the Kiwi would taste very good, maybe even more so than a Kolibri, but Skeptical Cat feels catching one requires careful planning because Kiwi’s seem tricky.
Skeptical Cat remembered the nice XSEED rep he met when that game about cats inheriting the world came out, and went for a visit to learn more about Kiwis.
Wandering through the decaying monuments to civilization that litter the world of Fragile like dead museums, Seto attempts to give words of justification to his obsessive search for a survivor, Ren, the girl with silver hair, who leaves a trail of cave art chalk drawings on the crumbling walls like breadcrumbs meant to lead the player toward understanding the abandoned landscape.
Reflecting on the sight of a pale moon against Fragile’s chilling sky, Seto realizes that if he can never tell another human about that sight, never share the feelings it stirred within him with another living person, that the memory and moment will never achieve meaning and ultimately be lost.
Fragile Dreams is a game possessed of a goal, a hope of making a connection with the player. And while this is ideally the goal of any release, this particular title continually reflects upon this need as the only way in which the experience of the game can achieve a sense of meaning that extends beyond the disc containing that hope.
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