Being able to play Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice is actually one of the main reasons I bought a PS3 and, to this point, I’ve invested about 30 hours of my life to it. At the rate I’m going, the game will probably claim another 20-30 before I get to the end of the main story, let alone the post-game side quests and power levelling. That’s considerably longer than the offline, single-player experience of most of the PS3′s top titles… combined.

The protagonist for this chronicle of the Netherworlds is Mao, the son of the Overlord (and Dean) of Evil Academy. Mao has been consuming everything imaginable about “Heroes”, humans who according to legends told in the Human World have gone toe to toe with Overlords and prevailed. He hopes that this research will eventually lead him to the power to kill his father. Why? Because Dad stepped on his “Slaystation Portable” and he lost 4 million hours worth of save data.

That’s just the beginning of Disgaea 3′s relentless mockery of stale Japanese RPG conventions. Even more than the first two games, Disgaea 3 is filled with irreverent humour, game and pop culture references… I even found a nod to a Japanese Internet video meme the other day. (Link goes to NicoNico Video, which is in Japanese and requires a login. Sorry but 4Kids had the original video taken down on YouTube). Most of all, Disgaea 3 is very much willing to poke fun at itself and its predecessors, with characters often breaking the fourth wall to get a chuckle out of the fans.

To balance with the humour, Disgaea 3′s story explores interesting grey areas in the ideas of “Good” and “Evil” through the mixed-up morality of the Evil Academy. Unlike schools you and I know, honour students of the demon school actually never attend class, instead plotting various evils to unleash upon their classmates while avoiding doing “good” things like greeting each other, following proper etiquette, and doing volunteer work. But yet Mao desires the power of the Hero to crush his father, which requires him to reconcile his desire to be the Netherworld’s greatest honour student with his desire to open his heart to friendship, love, and justice, the cornerstones of a hero’s power but also of the lifestyle of a delinquent.

While Disgaea fans do love the stories and characters, the true source of the series’ staying power is its incredibly deep strategy RPG gameplay. The format is fairly simple: you deploy a group of up to 10 demons, humans, and monsters and position them on a 3D map to deliver some serious hurt to your enemies, ganging up on them with Team Attacks, unleashing devastating special moves, and taking advantage of special properties of the terrain to gain unfair advantages. But all of this has been seen before. Here’s the special Disgaea twist: the game provides a number of ways of greatly increasing the levels and stats of your units and there’s virtually no cap on the power that you can gain as you cheat the system to become more and more powerful. Even when the main story is finished, there are still plenty of challenges left to test your mettle and let you prove that you have indeed become the most powerful demon of all. Characters can reach as high as level 9999 and individual stats can reach into the millions. The most devastating single attacks on record are on the order of hundreds of billions of points of damage. Hundreds of billions.

Disgaea’s “Item World” allows you to delve inside of one of the vast array of items that you collect throughout the game to play randomly generated maps against increasingly powerful enemies. While some might find this to be an absolutely appalling instance of grinding as a game mechanic, the Item World solves a problem that many strategy RPGs have: levelling up your characters and making money can be incredibly tedious and demoralizing. In the Item World, each map that you clear raises your item one level, raising its power well beyond its base stats. So now you’re not just making money and levelling up your characters, you’re also making the items that they use much more powerful to gain a distinct advantage against your enemies! Ten maps inside of a 30,000 Hell (the currency of the Netherworld) sword can make it even more deadly than one you’d buy for 100,000 Hell.

That’s just one of a number of elements you must master to gain ultimate power. Tens and even hundreds of hours can be spent after the credits roll to create your ultimate team. And once you do, there are more than enough nasty side quest bosses to try them against? How nasty? Try 400 million HP and about 75 million in every stat nasty. It’s a long climb to the top, if you want to take it. Or you can just enjoy the main story and move on to something else afterward.

To put it briefly, if you’re a fan of the series, Disgaea 3 is hands-down the best Disgaea ever. That is, until Disgaea 4 hits shelves I imagine. Each instalment of the series has come with improvements to the formula to streamline the experience and make it even more fun to play than the last and Disgaea 3 is absolutely no exception. For the same reason, if you’ve given Disgaea a miss until now Disgaea 3 might be your best point of entry to the series. Here are some of the things I appreciate that Disgaea 3 has tweaked from the previous two games:

• The game ramps up much faster than the previous two in terms of levelling up. This lets you progress through the story and get newly created characters up to speed more quickly, which used to be an absolute chore in Disgaea 1 and 2.
• The master/pupil system has been replaced with participation in school clubs. The leader of the club receives extra gain to his/her stats from the others in the club. This is slightly less tedious than the previous two games, where the relationship is set from character creation and can never be changed. The clubs system also helps with character development and levelling, as some clubs confer bonuses to the experience points, Hell, and mana that its members gain.
• Mana is much more useful. Before it could only be used for proposing various topics with the assembly, for creating characters, and for reincarnating yourself. Now mana can be used to learn new skills, boost old ones, and learn character- and class-specific traits called “Evilities” that open up a whole new dimension of character development.
• Geo crystals are now geo blocks. There are now many more ways to interact with geo effects, including placing same-coloured geo blocks together to cause them all to disappear and standing on geo blocks (even without an associated coloured panel!) to take advantage of their effects.
• The Item World has never been so interesting. “Mystery Rooms” appear relatively often to add variety to the otherwise monotonous dungeon crawl. These include one-time opportunities to shop for very rare items, jumping around a map to collect treasure chests, fighting a powerful monster to gain its valuable treasure, recolouring your characters (no need to reincarnate!), and an old fortune teller who further increases the potential of the item you’re exploring. It also seems as though the random map generator has been improved. Disgaea 3′s Item World maps seem to have less of the undesirable features that made the Item Worlds of previous games tedious to play, like completely unreachable areas/monsters and incredibly high peaks to climb.
• This is an incredibly personal point but getting an Archer is no longer as tedious as it was in the previous two games and with some retooling of their special attacks and stats, they are much more useful than before. Archers are my favourite female class in the series, your mileage may vary.

Really, the most scathing criticism that could be made of Disgaea 3 is that while it has definitely updated the gameplay and story-telling elements, the graphics are still very much like the previous entries in the series, despite the massive processing power of the platform. Really, I don’t even consider that a fault of the game as I appreciate its retro sprites-on-3D style, but Disgaea 4 is planning to introduce HD sprites which will considerably improve the look of the game (apparently with the option to switch to the “old” style, just in case).

In short, if you like Japanese RPGs, try this game. If you like Disgaea games, this one is an absolute MUST. Seriously, I had trouble pulling myself away from the game for long enough to write this.

My love affair with JRPGs started with the purchase of my Playstation and a copy of Final Fantasy VII. It was the first disc-based epic in a series that I’d largely ignored to that point. I bought it because it came highly recommended by the owner of the video game shop where I purchased my system. I hadn’t been an RPG fan previously (at all) but I trusted the man’s opinion and decided to give it a chance. Well, it goes without saying that I was incredibly impressed at the game and the ball just started rolling from there.

But looking at the current generation consoles, it seems that the Japanese RPG is becoming an endangered species. The Wii library has very little in JRPGs, though based on the mass exodus of third-party RPG developers from Nintendo after the jump from SNES to N64 — to say nothing of the jump from N64 to Gamecube — that was to be expected. While the PS2′s library is filled with many JRPGs, the genre has much less representation in the PS3 library. There are a few notable titles (which is more than I can say for the Wii) but in particular Final Fantasy XIII has left a rather sour taste in my mouth. The Xbox 360 is not even on my radar largely due to my seething hatred of almost everything Microsoft but also due to the fact that I see the library as basically an extension of PC games, which I’ve had little to do with. Apparently improvements have been made here, but I wouldn’t be able to say for certain.

(If you’d like to prove me wrong, I would love to see an annotated list of your favourite Japanese-developed RPGs for each of these systems, but I think the point still stands that none of the current generation systems have as plentiful a selection as the PS2. And for the record I’m willing to admit the Strategy RPG genre, too.)

So what was happened to this fan-celebrated genre?

The video gaming market has shifted significantly. The Japanese used to rule the industry with an iron fist but looking at some of the best titles of the current generation, more and more of them are being produced by Western studios. Nintendo has had a great deal of success handing some of their franchise titles over to a Western studio but the one they developed in tandem with a Japanese studio got some terrible reviews over the pond. Some of the best titles in PS3′s library are developed by Western studios. There has been a shift and Japanese developers are finding themselves scrambling to catch up on the world stage.

Why the sudden shift? Co-worker and best friend @maplealmond offered a very interesting theory: while Japanese developers have definitely ruled in the console market (which they also largely created), Western developers have always done better in PC gaming. As gaming consoles are now very close to PCs, those PC game sensibilities translate over to console gaming much better. Consoles have incredibly powerful graphics and processing power, Internet connectivity, and even hard drive storage. While Fallout 1 and 2 couldn’t have possibly been ported to the NES or SNES due to the large amount of storage needed just to save, Fallout 3 stands as one of the very best titles in the PS3 library and has won a number of “Game of the Year” awards, leading to a special “Game of the Year” edition with all of the downloadable content bundled in. The games are now being made on Western turf, so to speak.

Also, it is possible that the tastes of the market have changed, too. While I do love Valkyria Chronicles and the Disgaea series, I haven’t finished any of those games yet. Why? They all take way too long to get through, and it’s not even all the fun stuff. Japanese RPGs suffer from a “grinding” problem, sometimes requiring a great deal of repetition and administration to train your uber squad of heroes to own that boss who keeps on handing you your spleens on a silver platter. That might’ve been quite acceptable to me when I was young but as I’ve accumulated more responsibilities and obligations, it has become harder and harder to justify allocating precious leisure time to killing the same group of monsters over and over again to farm experience points.

(Valkyria Chronicles 1 suffers from a different problem: it won’t give me enough game to play, so I get inclined to switch to something else for shorter gaming sessions. If I’ve got an hour to spend gaming, I’m sure as hell not spending 30 minutes of it watching cut-scenes.)

Grinding is so endemic to the Japanese RPG experience that Disgaea’s main selling point is that it places almost no limits on how much you can grind to create the ultimate killing machine. Level 99? Try level 9999! Much of the “fun” of playing Disgaea is finding new and interesting ways of “cheating” the system (i.e. exploiting loop holes that developers purposefully left in the game) so that you can achieve your ultimate killing machine in 70 hours instead of 100. Really? I’m lucky if I can squeeze an hour or two of gaming into my day now. Games I want to play are released at a rate much higher than I can actually finish them and that means I’m inclined to play games that give me much more for my commitment. Is it possible that has the audience has grown up, they’ve also grown tired of the grind?

There are probably many more factors at play here. What do you think has affected the success of the JRPG in North America?

For those of you who weren’t following Scott Pilgrim, let’s recap the basic premise. Scott Pilgrim is 23 years old, member of his own indie band, the Sex Bob-ombs, and a loveable loser. He meets Ramona Flowers, a girl that he literally sees in his dreams. He falls in love with her and she falls for him too, but there’s one small problem. If he wants to date her, Scott Pilgrim must fight and defeat her seven evil exes. Thus begins the greatest battle in Scott’s life for the love of his life.

The usual tactic would be to go for a direct adaptation, making the game as close to the movie as possible. That leads us to an HD and 3D rendering of Michael Cera awkwardly fumbling with Mary Elizabeth Winstead‘s bra strap. And honestly, who wants to see that? Well, OK, I would. But that wouldn’t necessarily make for a fun game.

But somebody was thinking outside the box. Somebody looked at the source material and its occasional nods to old-school gaming and decided that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game needed to be a completely different beast. The result is this:

In possibly the ultimate nod to the various 80′s and 90′s video game references in the original books, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game is a classic arcade-style 2D side-scrolling fighter for up to four players, chiptunes (by Anamanaguchi, no less), pixel art, and all. You can play as Scott, Ramona, Kim, Stiles or one more surprise character as you fight your way through countless minions to defeat Ramona’s seven evil exes to help Scott win her heart.

What I like about it

The game manages to perfectly recapture the feeling of classic 2D side-scrolling fighting games from the 90′s. For that alone I give the developers a standing ovation. The game could sell itself by pure nostalgia factor alone but it also delivers a quality experience on top of that.

The controls are fluid. I’ve found the analog stick to be best, since smashing it left or right will cause your character to start dashing. I quickly found myself able to land multi-hit combos and even juggle enemies, which was intensely satisfying. The controls are also fairly simple to pick up. I dropped friends into it without any introduction and within seconds they pretty much had the hang of it.

As you progress through the game, your characters gain levels, improve their stats, and learn new moves. Those new moves give you even more options for combos (see above) or otherwise make your character just that much more efficient and deadly. Again, intensely satisfying and I like the way it serves as a balancing mechanic for the game’s steep difficulty curve. Keep trying the stage again and again and eventually you’ll level up enough to make it through.

There are many cute little touches that make every moment of the game amusing. For example, the Subspace Highway is littered with glitches that are reminiscent of an NES cartridge that needs a good blowing to get the dust out of it. Some of the mundane objects that can be used as weapons or thrown have little smiley faces on them. Toronto’s Shopping District, featured in the first stage, is lined with hipsters hanging out by the shops and sometimes TTC buses pass by to drop off troublesome passenger. Little emoticon speech bubbles convey emotions for the various minions, particularly amusing when you knock one down and he makes a little angry face.

What I don’t like about it

I often find myself not quite lined up with the enemy I want to hit or the item I want to pick up, which gets frustrating after a while. The shopping mechanic is interesting, but navigating it is both slow and annoying, particularly with multiple players. Only one player can be up at the counter making orders at a time, which leaves the others impatiently milling about.

The game has a mechanic which allows you to trade Gut Points (used for special attacks) for Heart Points (if these go to 0 you die). This is a fantastic way to get just that little bit more out of your last life, but during the time that you’re getting up you can still get hit. This can sometimes lead to having you watch your character get hopelessly thrashed about.

In summary

If you pine for the good old days of gaming and have fond memories of 2D side-scrolling fighting games like Battletoads, Double Dragon, River City Random, and many more like them, this game is for you. If you also love the books or film, it’s even more so. This is one of the best PS3 games I’ve played to date and I’d recommend it to anyone.

Image courtesy of Kotaku

I recently received Mirror’s Edge in the mail from GameAccess.ca, which is where I’d borrowed Final Fantasy XIII from — it would be the very definition of “unwise” to buy a game I’d heard so many bad things about. So, in my grand tradition of reviewing games based on only a couple of hours of gameplay, today’s post will be about Mirror’s Edge. Mirror’s Edge is, by and large, a running and jumping game in the first person. If you like parkour, the game is pretty much like extreme parkour where every so often people with guns are trying to kill you as you run along the rooftops.

Synopsis

For some reason, every time I see the intro, I can never retain any of the information about the background for the plot. It must be all of the empty metaphors and flowery wording that Faith uses. My brain just tunes out and doesn’t catch any of it. What I did catch is this: the city’s police force has become incredibly corrupt and controlling. In this new regime, “Runners” form something like a small delivery network that runs along the rooftops of the city. For the most part, they stay out of the way of the police and the police stay out of their way. Until today.

You are Faith. You’ve just gotten back on the job and your first gig back is supposed to be low-key. However, the “Blues” start firing guns on you immediately and you are instantly a fugitive on the run. There’s a conspiracy plot, with ringleaders trying to maintain the status quo and a project known by the codename “Icarus”. Your sister is even being implicated in the death of an important candidate for mayor. You must dash through the city, climbing, jumping, and sliding between rooftops and into and out of buildings as you try to reach the truth.

What I like about it

When you’re doing it right, Mirror’s Edge has very fluid gameplay. There’s something immensely satisfying about sliding under a low clearance obstacle, running along a wall and kicking off of it to climb up a rooftop so you can dash across it and vault yourself into the air towards the next building, bracing yourself to roll when you hit ground. In short, Mirror’s Edge is “Parkour: the Video Game”. You just keep running and running and running, and don’t let anything stop you from doing so!

There are usually a couple of ways of doing the same thing, so you can replay a level to try and race through it for a better time or try to get through it without getting so much as grazed by a bullet. The game provides plenty of trophies to go for, some of which award some very specific chains of moves. I managed to nab “Free flowing”, which is awarded for chaining a wallrun with a jump and a speedvault.

The graphics are pretty good and the game makes interesting use of the colour red as a cue for various things that Faith can use to her advantage. A couple of small objects on the ground may glow red as you get closer to them to signal that you can use them to vault over the barbed fence ahead.

What I don’t like about it

The game demands the utmost precision, even for a normal play-through of the story mode. Be prepared to just miss grabbing the edge of the next building because you weren’t running very fast and you hit the jump button just a bit too soon. There are many spots where I’ve died over and over again because I was turned just a bit too much to the left or a bit too much to the right. I’d watch Faith bump into or otherwise pass through the thing that she was supposed to be grabbing next and hang my head in sadness before tightening my grip on the controller to try it again.

Sometimes, details that really should be made clear are not so. I’m not sure if this is intentional or not but much of the time I can’t tell the difference between a normal fence and a fence that has incredibly high voltage passing through it. Jumping into an electrified fence isn’t necessarily an instant kill if you get away fast enough (suspend your disbelief) but it’s still quite a pain.

I can’t get myself to care much about the story. The conspiracy plot has a bit of intrigue to it, but it’s pretty much a frame around which levels are placed. It’s like the story willfully bows out of your way so you can get to the running and jumping again. You can tune in if you want, but it isn’t incredibly engaging in its own right.

The control scheme can be somewhat confusing at first. Most of your actions are actually on the trigger buttons rather than on the main four buttons, which might be counter-intuitive if you’re used to pressing X to jump. L1 and L2 perform jumps/climbs and slides/rolls, respectively, while R1 spins you right around and R2 executes attacks (including firing a gun if you have one).

Summary

Mirror’s Edge is a neat little concept and I would definitely consider adding this to my collection — particularly because it’s one of the cheapest disc-based PS3 games out there now. If you like parkour or running, you’ll probably really like this game. If you get really frustrated in platformer games when you just ever-so-slightly miss the platform over and over again, this game probably isn’t for you.

Plot Summary

In a dystopian future, the population of Earth has exceeded 10 billion people causing the struggle for the planet’s natural resources to be even greater than it was before. The US builds and launches a space colony to harvest energy from the Sun, and Russia takes control of the colony. Their goal? To use the microwave energy array as a weapon to wipe out entire large US metropolises and give the superpower no choice but to surrender unconditionally.

You are Sam Gideon, a member of DARPA assigned to a research project to create the Augmented Reaction Suit. The ARS is lightweight and incredibly agile, has intense firepower, and has the ability to replicate weapons found on the field and switch between programmed weapon configurations to give operatives more tactical options. It also includes a boost system for high-speed maneuvering and, as its name suggests, an Augmented Reaction system that elevates synaptic responses in critical situations. In short, the ARS is the ultimate weapon, and you have been asked to don it for its first mission: to stop Russia from using the captured space colony to take out their next target, New York City.

What I like about it

Vanquish is a thrill ride with all of the eye candy of a major Hollywood action flick. It pretty much has two states: cutscene and being under fire, with some notable exceptions. I feel the adrenaline rush each time I push through enemy lines, putting Sam’s life on the line to gain crucial ground and turn the tables in a seemingly hopeless battle. And to my mind, that’s the ultimate goal of a shooter and Vanquish absolutely does not fail to deliver.

I’ve never been a big fan of shooters. I played FPS’s way back in the DOOM/Quake days but after the original Half Life and Quake III Arena, I pretty much never touched shooters again. In that time, the genre largely evolved, and cover-based gun-fighting has become a bit of a meme in the third-person shooting genre. It’s a bit difficult, if you’re not used to the tactics, to really sink teeth into the genre.

This brings me to the next thing that I really like about Vanquish: some of its gameplay elements are designed to help the more casual gamer. When you’re under heavy fire, the suit’s AR mode will automatically turn on for a short time, during which you can take out enemy infantry before they know what hit them, counter missile attacks by shooting them out of the sky, and dodge through slow moving bullets and projectiles to find cover. Once that period of time is up, the augmented reaction mode turns off and the suit takes time to cool down, during which that mode can’t be engaged again.

You can also trigger the AR mode manually while performing rolling dodges, rolling out of cover, or using the boost. This gives you increased ability to get the jump on enemies as well as allowing you to score some very epic kills. Between the AR mode and boosting, the player is given some decent advantages over enemy forces, but the overheating/cool-down mechanic prevents this from being abused to make the game too easy. Also, there are a number of attacks that are straight-out instant kills, so the player still pays the price for a critical mistake.

Vanquish manages to strike a good balance between helping players out and giving them incredible challenges to overcome, particularly in Normal and Hard modes.

What I don’t like about it

It’s really rather short. It’s pretty much like a roller coaster; incredibly thrilling for about a minute or so and then you’re getting off the ride, possibly readjusting the contents of your stomach, and looking for something more. The game tries to give itself some replay value by ranking you on various aspects of your performance in each mission, including time spent, friendlies KIA, friendlies revived (you can revive fallen friendly troops by administering an injection from a stimpack), cover usage (I found this one a bit odd), and many other criteria. So you can replay the same levels over and over again to get better scores and there’s an online leaderboard so that you can rank yourself against the world.

There’s no multiplayer whatsoever, not even a co-operative two-player mode. This is perhaps because Vanquish’s AR mechanic involves slowing down time for everyone but you, which to another player would look incredibly weird. It’s a very nice game to watch though, if you’re into watching people play video games. It’s almost like watching Transformers except the robots don’t transform as much (and usually don’t talk), the dialogue is slightly more “ha ha” funny, and the camera doesn’t shake all over the place (unless the player makes it do that, I guess).

Vanquish’s visual polish is unevenly distributed. In some parts, the photorealism is turned up just about as high as it can go. In other spots, the art department phoned it in. It might have been less jarring if the visual style of the game were a bit more consistent. The writing is also a little sub-par and the voice acting feels a bit lacking compared to other PS3 titles.

The limited weapons configurations can be a bit awkward on first play-through. You see a sniper rifle. Should you pick that up to replace your rocket launcher? You can only guess what’s coming up next and hope that you made the right choice. Of course, it would be even worse if the game simply gave you all of the weapons and let you use them all whenever you wanted. Picking up a weapon that’s already loaded into your suit’s memory will refill the ammo for that weapon. If that weapon already has full ammo, picking up another one will progress the weapon on its upgrade path, increasing its ammo capacity, firepower, and accuracy.

In short

Japan makes a third-person shooter for PS3. A bit of an unusual move but the result is quite thrilling to play and I would recommend at least renting it to give it a try. It does fall into some of the not-so-awesome tropes of Japanese games — being linear, putting too much emphasis on the cinematic story-telling, and doing some hand-holding in terms of where to go next and how to engage the enemy. Overall, Vanquish is an excellent title and would make a good additional to your library if you’re looking for something fairly short.

I didn’t own a PS3, so my first exposure to the Valkyria Chronicles games was the demo of the sequel for PSP. I bought Valkyria Chronicles 2 soon after playing the demo. When I purchased my PS3, I bought the first game and finally had an opportunity to play it. Fans were largely disappointed at seeing the sequel on the portable system because they felt that in many ways the game had been scaled back. The maps were smaller, deployments were smaller, the story was phoned in and the visuals weren’t quite as stunning. I still very much enjoyed playing Valkyria Chronicles 2 and I wondered if everybody was finding fault with it just because it wasn’t what they were expecting it to be.

To be certain, Valkyria Chronicles and its sequel are very different games, despite having some common core elements.  While I understand where the fans are coming from regarding the story-telling and visuals on the PS3 title versus the PSP title, I also came to appreciate all of the ways in which the sequel improved on the gameplay. To start, here are all of the criticisms of Valkyria Chronicles 2 that I agree with:

• The story-telling is poor. Absolutely. While the story of the first game is compelling and engaging right from the get-go, the story of the second is ho-hum. The main character is incredibly uninspired and develops very little through the course of the game, to say nothing of the rest of the cast.
• Maps/deployments are smaller. Yep. That’s partly a limitation of the system that it’s on and perhaps partly an experiment with the gameplay formula. It looks like Valkyria Chronicles 3, soon to be released in Japan, will have deployment sizes on par with the first game. Not sure what to say about the map sizes. I do appreciate that I can run through a VC2 mission in very little time, even story missions, making it much easier to squeeze into bus rides between Kitchener and Toronto. Being smaller isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I can understand the griping about it.
• Character progression is more complicated than it has any right to be. This is a bit more of a subjective point, but the Credits system in VC2 is difficult to keep track of. You can either memorize/record all of the different credits that different characters need to get to the next class you want to assign them to, or you can randomly run lots of missions until you coincidentally have all of the credits you need. Neither is a really attractive option. That said, I like that VC2 gives us a bit more meat in that department than the first game, even if it is slightly poor in its execution.
• Some of the classes are ultimately useless (e.g. Anthem Corps). Can’t disagree with you there. The Anthem Corps even sound useless from their description. Besides, you can’t even get them unless you’re deploying your engineers a lot but a bunch of what engineers were really useful for got moved to the new armor techs class. VC2′s engineers are pretty much heal bitches, so if you never do poorly enough in a mission to need to heal troops and repair your vehicle, you have little use for engineers.
• There’s no option for Japanese audio. Valkyria Chronicles does give you this option, but it’s absent in Valkyria Chronicles 2. That being said, most games don’t give you this option anyway. It actually says something about the amount of game content in Valkyria Chronicles that they could still fit the Japanese audio track on the disc. I might’ve preferred that they used that space to add in more game instead (I touch on this below).

But here are the things I dislike about the first Valkyria Chronicles game that were much improved in the sequel:

• Hold right to level up. Unnecessarily tedious. Assigning only some of the XP needed to level up a class earns you absolutely nothing, so why give me the choice? VC2 instead allows you to gain multiple levels in multiple classes at once, and doesn’t require you to hold down a button to do so. Just press right and left to adjust the XP distribution by adding levels or retracting them again until you get what you want and press X to confirm. This is so much better.
• The tank grid system. Totally unnecessary and another instance of making it more complicated than it needs to be. VC2 instead turns it into a linear thing: each part takes up a number of units in your total capacity. It accomplishes roughly the same thing but makes it easier to conceptualize.
• One group, one tank. If you want to adjust for a particular mission, you have to go swap people out, put people in, change your tank setup, and then go to the mission. VC2 allows you to save multiple groups and configurations. You can have one team for missions that require speed, one team for missions in the jungle, one team for missions in snow, each with their own vehicle configuration. Choose your mission, choose your pre-built group, and deploy. Again, so much better.
• Are you sure you want to see this cutscene? Yes, I’m sure! It’s not like I get to proceed to the next mission until I watch it! Oh, this one’s over, better go click on the next one. Oh, still two more to go until I get to actually play. Again, this is unnecessarily tedious. VC2 greatly improves on this by not asking you whether you’re sure you want to see an event when you click on it, by making less of the events mandatory, and by giving you more than enough missions that if you’re sick of the story, you can go and play a couple and come back to the story when you feel like it.
• Do I get to play now? An extension of the above, I found myself wishing many times that Valkyria Chronicles would let me play it more. I love the story, but the game doesn’t offer nearly enough missions. Not only that, but story missions can’t be repeated, so only the “skirmish” missions that are unlocked every so often (which look suspiciously like the story missions) can be played for XP and better rankings. By contrast, VC2 offers about 200 missions or so, only a fraction of which are required to advance the story, and you can play all of them at any time. That’s much more game to play.

So while I agree that Valkyria Chronicles 2 doesn’t have the same feel as the first game, I think it’s important to note that it has made some serious improvements to the formula as well, many of which will carry over into the third game, which also seems to promise more improvements of its own.

Fans, it only gets better from here. But I’m also hopeful that after all of this experimentation and improvement on the portable system that we’ll see at least one more Valkyria Chronicles game for the PS3.

Therefore, I’ve decided to write about all of the things I like about FFXII based on what I’ve seen so far.

It’s really, really pretty. Among all of the games I’ve played in the disc-based PS3 game library, FFXIII is by far one of the prettiest. It is truly a testament to the skilled graphics artists and programmers employed by Square-Enix. The details in hair (including facial hair), eyes, and clothing textures are excellently executed and the cutscenes lack the jarring transition between FMV and dynamically rendered scenes that previous Final Fantasy games have always suffered from. At this point, I’m not entirely convinced that FFXIII even has FMVs. For all I know, it could be being rendered entirely dynamically (which would be totally sick).

The voice acting is pretty decent. I wouldn’t rate FFXIII’s voice cast as better than FFXII’s, but they certainly aren’t as poor as the casts for FFX and FFX-2. But like many other PS3 games, FFXIII suffers from having way more lines of audio than are performed by the actually-talented members of the cast. The beginning of the game is dominated by second-rate voice acting, with brief bits of much better performances by the main cast.

The combat system is incredibly fast paced. This is both a good and a bad thing. Having to think quickly means you don’t get as much time to figure out your strategy and you may find yourself retrying a fight if you lose track of the HP of your party, particularly the party leader. FFXII tries to release some of the cognitive load using its Gambit system, which essentially allows you to “program” your party and issue manual overrides as necessary. FFXIII takes a slightly more hands-off approach with the Paradigm system, which assigns particular roles to particular party members to create different battle styles.

But the upside of this is that fights are over very quickly, which makes each of them slightly less annoying. Getting into yet another fight with a ghoul gets less old when you’re in and out in about 10 seconds. They also aren’t triggered randomly which means that, with some craftiness, you can avoid some of them if you really want to, though I hear the game becomes quite nasty later on if you’ve been skipping too many fights. There is still a battle transition, which I feel is a step slightly backward from FFXII, which plays more like an MMO where the other members of your (small) party are computer-controlled.

The standard “let’s get to know each other” character development lines don’t bring the game to a halt. FFXIII instead plays them as you’re exploring around. Sometimes this happens slightly too often and doesn’t quite match what you’re doing, but it’s still a lot better than stopping everything so that one character can say some other little quip that isn’t absolutely crucial to the plot but develops the character a bit more. Case in point, the party members I have right now introduced themselves while I was walking Lightning over the crystallized Lake Bresha. Much less tedious.

The camera controls don’t suck. I’ve had issues getting used to camera control in many other PS3 games that I’ve played, particularly since most of them also put your aim right in the center of the camera when you draw your guns. FFXIII’s camera just feels natural. Something about the way it swings and pans around in response to the slight presses on the right analog stick is aesthetically pleasing.

So those are some of the things I like about FFXIII. Perhaps I might be scraping the bottom of the barrel a little bit, but it certainly wasn’t an easy task. I could probably go on for hours about all the things that have irritated me in this game so far. And maybe I will…  tomorrow?