Tanto Cuore: A Deck-Building Card Game

I recently pre-ordered the first English printing of Japanese deck-building game Tanto Cuore, which was slated to come out in May. Much to my surprise (and delight), it was actually released much sooner. To start from the conclusion (as the Japanese would say), it has proven to be an excellent addition to my collection so far.

The original game, released in December 2009, was created and published by Arclight Games and illustrated by a veritable dream team of Japanese illustrators. Since its release, fans have translated the rulebook and card text and have provided “paste-ups” which can be printed out and attached to the cards. Now, Japanime Games has released an official English printing which can currently be ordered online through CardHaus. It made its debut at SakuraCon in Seattle (some photos can be found here) and is scheduled to appear at a few other anime conventions throughout the United States.

Tanto Cuore is, by all accounts, the most popular deck-building game in Japan, and currently has two stand-alone expansions. The base game comes with 280 cards and is packaged in a relatively small and elegant box that manages to leave just enough space to sleeve all of the cards if you take out the spacer (use standard M:tG sleeves). It also comes with larger cardboard dividers that are labeled to make the game easy to organize.

In case you are unfamiliar with the genre, deck-building games are similar to collectible card games (CCG or TCG) like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh, but rather than spending exorbitant amounts of money on boxes of booster packs to collect all of the cards you need to build your perfect deck for tournaments, all of the cards you need to play are right in the box and players construct their decks during the course of the game from a shared pool of cards. Some types of cards in that pool give victory points, and the player who has collected the most points by the end of the game is declared the winner. This differs from the more adversarial mechanic of CCG’s, in which you are usually trying to attack opponents directly to bring their life points down to 0.

A deck-building game always comes with more types of cards than are actually used in one game. Some of the types of cards that will be available in the shared pool are chosen at random, others are always available. Each player uses the cards in hand to generate some value, which can be used to add one card of that purchase cost or less to the deck. The purchased card and all of the cards from that hand (played or not) are placed in the discard pile at the end of the turn and a new hand is dealt. When the draw pile runs out, the discard pile is shuffled and becomes the new draw pile. Some cards may allow the player to draw more cards, generate more value, or purchase more cards, so players need to create a strategy for their deck that gives them consistently good hands for buying the cards that are worth points (which are usually more expensive).

In Tanto Cuore, the deck is your “house” in which you employ “staff” (all cute maids) by paying “love” (because actual money would not be nearly as cute). You start your turn with one “serving” (playing a maid card as an action) and one “employment” (purchasing a card). Being served by a maid may allow you to draw more cards, provide you more love, allow you to employ more staff, or give you more servings. After your serving(s), you may use the accumulated love from maids you played and cards in your hand to employ one or more cards from the “town” (shared pool).

The game puts a few twists on the basic deck-building mechanic that make it slightly more than just Dominion with cute art. Some maids can potentially become “chambermaids”. After employing the maid, when she is in your hand you may choose to be served by her as usual or you may spend some number of servings (usually one, sometimes two) to play her in your “private quarters” (the area in front of you). A chambermaid in your private quarters is not discarded at the end of your turn. The base set lacks any cards that allow you to fire a staff member, so this is one of the few ways of getting cards out of your deck, but there’s also an interesting decision element at work. Chambermaids are usually worth some number of bonus victory points for having sets of them in your private quarters at the end of the game, but being served by them during a turn confers benefits which you can’t get if they are in your private quarters. So each time a chambermaid card appears in your hand, you have to decide whether you want to play the card as an action to get those immediate benefits, or play the card in front of you to get end-of-game bonus VP.

Maids in your private quarters may be subject to illness; one of the cards that can be bought in town is an “illness” card that is played on any maid in any player’s private quarters instead of being added to the deck. A maid who is ill does not have any effects and is not counted for purposes of calculating victory points and victory point bonuses. She is essentially not in the game until all illness cards have been removed from her — and it is possible that she could have more than one! Another of these types of cards is “bad habit”, which is played in a private quarters in general rather than on any particular maid. These reflect general disorder within the house and are worth negative victory points at the end of the game. These two types of cards give the game a bit more of an adversarial feel.

On top of this, there are private maids. These cards are all unique, each giving a different number of VP at the end of the game and having a different effect which applies for every turn that they are in your private quarters (and not sick). At any given time, two of them are face up in the town. When one is hired, another is drawn from the facedown private maids pile and placed face up in the town. A player may have one private maid at a time; the next private maid hired is stacked on top of the first and the new maid’s effect is now applied instead of the old’s. But all private maids hired over the course of the game are counted for the purpose of calculating VP (except ones which are ill). Illness cards may only be played on the most recently hired private maid in a player’s private quarters.

These elements give the game some depth, creating different ways to win than just consistently buying the cards worth the highest VP by generating as much love as possible per turn. Sometimes, you can benefit just as much from buying a lot of cheaper chambermaids and playing them to your private quarters to collect big VP bonuses in the endgame, and spending some love on illness and bad habit cards may allow you to throw a wrench in somebody else’s strategy.

The game is missing any components for helping to choose random combinations of cards for games (I’m working on a little something for this, so stay tuned!) and there are a few private maids that are either confusing to use or just don’t seem to be worth as much as their purchase cost but perhaps I’m still a little green on the strategy. But overall, Tanto Cuore is an excellent game and I would recommend it to anyone who likes cute maids, CCGs, or deck-building games. It’s also not too tough to teach once you’ve gotten a handle on the rules yourself and I don’t find myself going to the card glossary or FAQ too often.

I’m a bit late to the party but I had a chance to see Disney’s 50th animated feature, Tangled. As you might expect, it’s 3D animation. Disney seems to be moving away from traditional animation though apparently cells (or at least a digital form of them) aren’t quite dead yet. Their forays into computer animation have usually been aided by Pixar, such as the Toy Story series, and it seems to have become trendy to point and laugh at Disney and how creatively bankrupt they’ve become.

Well, if Tangled is any indication, Disney hasn’t quite reached bottom. Perhaps it’s because it was their 50th animated feature, but Disney reached deep to bring back the magic of the classic 90′s flicks we all grew up with and loved. And you know what? I think they managed to do it with Tangled.

As you might be able to tell from the title and image, Disney has decided to do its thing with Rapunzel, the story of a young girl with incredibly long hair locked away in a tower by a witch. But to add a little more magic, Rapunzel’s real parents are a king and queen, and the witch is interested in the girl because her hair holds the power of a flower that provides healing and perpetual youth. She takes the girl by cover of night and raises her as her own daughter, trying to convince her that it is in her best interest to stay cooped up because the outside world is too nasty and terrible. But like any teenage girl, she becomes curious and rebellious. To commemorate the lost princess, the citizens float bright lanterns into the night sky, and having seen this from the window of her tower on her birthday every year, Rapunzel is determined to see it in person for her 18th birthday.

And then there’s Flynn Rider. He’s a bandit of some renown, though they can never seem to get his nose right on the “Wanted” posters. And this time he has stolen a crown from the royal family. In his frantic struggle to lose his pursuers, he scales Rapunzel’s tower. But it’s out of the fire and into the frying pan, half-literally, as Rapunzel clocks him on the head with the cast-iron fry pan she keeps handy. She takes his satchel, containing the stolen crown, and strikes a deal with him. He takes her to see the lanterns at the kingdom, and she returns his satchel. Thus begins their adventure and their romance as they outrun thugs, kingdom guards, and the insidious plotting of Rapunzel’s “mother”, who is determined to turn the pair against each other and convince the girl that she really should stay in the tower after all.

The animation is extremely well done here. I was actually incredibly surprised to find that Pixar wasn’t involved. The character designs are beautiful and Disney gets extra credit for Rapunzel herself. I haven’t seen a Disney heroine as lovably adorable as Rapunzel since The Little Mermaid. And the music is fantastic, as you might Alan Menken‘s work to be. Don’t recognize him? He has arranged music for almost every other Disney feature, including beloved classics The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

But it’s difficult to articulate what I really feel is this Tangled’s greatest asset: the magic. Somehow, the elements blended together and I felt like I was watching a Disney piece from the 90′s, the classics I grew up with from a time when Disney was the name in animation and there were less caricatures of Michael Eisner driving the company into the ground. In some ways, it was formulaically Disney, right down to the funny animal sidekicks and powerful romantic ballad. It is, in short, classic Disney for a new audience.

But being formulaic is a double-edged blade for Tangled. In some ways, it is too formulaic. It’s too easy to constantly draw comparisons to The Little Mermaid, and while I don’t think Mandy Moore as Rapunzel was a bad casting choice, she was the same character in this movie as she is in almost every other movie she has ever done: teenage girl (often) rebelling against an overprotective parent and falling in love with the first boy to come along who is willing to put up with it all (A Walk to Remember, Chasing Liberty, Saved!, …need I go on?). The romance is also very standard for Disney: they meet, have adventures together, there’s a betrayal that splits the two apart, and they manage to push through it and prevail anyway. Sometimes, while I was watching it for the first time, it felt like I’d seen this picture before.

But overall, Tangled was worth the time I invested in it and more. It’s a great film, even if it’s sometimes a bit cliché. But at the same time, the blending of classic elements with modern technology and writing contributes to the feeling that you’re watching a true successor to the Disney features you loved growing up. If you think that Disney has entirely lost touch with its creative past, you might want to give this film a shot. In me it inspired some confidence in Disney’s potential to turn around from darker times.

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.

Here’s the summary of the film as I reproduced it for The Japanese Learner:

A young man, Teppei Kaneko, has been accused of groping a woman on a crowded train in Tokyo.  He is arrested and forced to sign a false confession.  If he chooses to fight the charges, he will be held for three weeks just for the investigation. If he is prosecuted, the case will take up to a year in court. An indictment of Japan’s troublingly labyrinthine legal system, in which defendants are often coerced into signing confessions and criminal cases go on for years, this film was Japan’s official 2007 submission for Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards.

The story itself is, as I expected, a social commentary on Japan’s criminal justice system. The film starts with a scene of an older salaryman getting caught red-handed groping on a different train. The victim manages to grab his hand by the wrist and holds onto him firmly, confirming his guilt for the audience. He is brought to the police station where he is very aggressively questioned and then has a large, clear adhesive strip placed over his hand. The police claim that with this they might find fibers from the victim’s underwear which would be decisive evidence. At this point the salaryman prostrates himself and begs for forgiveness.

At around the same time, in a different place, Teppei is shuffling through his rucksack looking for something. Not finding it and hearing the chime of the train doors about to close, he rushes to get onto the train and is pushed in by a station worker. His jacket becomes caught in the door and he tries to free it using his right hand; his left hand is carrying his rucksack. Partly by the sway of the train and partly by the person to his left, he’s pushed into a woman on his right, who gives him a dirty look. He apologizes to her and glances at his jacket to indicate what he’s trying to do. Later, just before the train doors open at his station, the meek voice of a school girl pleads “stop that.” After he has exited the train, she grabs onto his sleeve and accuses him of groping her. Another man corroborates the story as a station guard takes everyone to the office to discuss the matter and calls in the authorities.

Teppei denies the allegations quite strongly as the police attempt to coerce a confession out of him and he initally calls for the “public defender”, a lawyer who offers his services pro bono to clients who have never before needed a defense attorney. The lawyer very strongly suggests a plea bargain but Teppei refuses to confess to a crime that he didn’t commit, even if doing so would be easier in the short run.

“I Just Didn’t Do It” is one of the most subtly powerful films I’ve seen in a long time. The actor who plays Teppei does an excellent job of portraying the desperation and determination of a man fighting to prove his innocence. Even in scenes that might appear to be incidental, like being shuffled between one place and another for questioning, Teppei’s face shows an indignant expression. While the transitions are subtle, there is a great deal of emotional range in the character.

The film makes some interesting points about the legal system. During a cross-examination the defense asks a detective called as a witness if he has ever successfully obtained evidence of a groping crime by using the aforementioned large, clear adhesive tape. He admits that he has not, which is an implicit admission that the whole thing is just for show, another tactic to coerce confessions out of the not-necessarily-guilty.

The man who is shown begging for forgiveness at the beginning of the film is released within hours after agreeing to pay a summary fine, while Teppei engages in a legal battle that spans over a year with twelve public hearings. A couple of characters (including Teppei himself) comment on this point, that the real gropers are confessing, paying a summary fine, and going free again. Groping cases are presented as a critical weakness of the justice system, a peculiar scenario in which the innocent face (much) greater or equal punishment as the guilty.

And the last point that the film drives is that judges have some very good reasons to be very, very careful about every acquittal. If the state presses charges and the defendant is found to be innocent, this means that the prosecution (including the police) did not properly investigate the case and they would lose face. At one point during Teppei’s trial, the case is actually handed over to another judge. To push the point further, the new judge appears very agreeable to the prosecution; a few times when the defense raises an objection or asks for a piece of evidence, the prosecution claims that they don’t see why it’s necessary and the judge immediately agrees and denies the request (even when the request/objection seemed very reasonable).

If you’re interested in knowing how the trial ultimately turned out, I highly recommend you see the film. It is excellently executed, intelligent, and intensely engrossing.

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.

The Girls of Amagami SS (Rihoko, Tsukasa, Sae, Kaoru, Haruka, Ai)

I’ve been holding off on doing this one because Amagami SS isn’t technically a Fall 2010 series; it started in Spring 2010 and is continuing its run this season. But I still like this show enough to give it a nod and, unlike many other shows, you don’t necessarily have to start at the beginning to enjoy it because of its particular format.

Amagami SS is based on Amagami, a PS2 dating sim produced by Enterbrain in 2009. If you liked KimiKiss Pure Rouge, you’ll like this one too since Enterbrain also produced the KimiKiss game. My review comes with a bit of context: I’ve played at least one route in both games as well as watched both series (though Amagami SS isn’t finished its run quite yet). So now that I’ve proven to you beyond shadow of a doubt that I’m otaku through and through, let’s talk about Amagami SS!

Synopsis

Junichi Tachibana hasn’t been the luckiest in love, though that may be in part because he has been scared of it since he was stood up for a date on Christmas Eve two years ago.

To give some context, Christmas Eve in Japan could probably be considered more romantic than Valentine’s Day. While Valentine’s Day in Japan is pretty much a fabrication by Japanese chocolate companies to drive domestic sales (seriously), Christmas Eve is considered a holiday for couples rather than for family… couples and cake.

Junichi was really looking forward to this date, she never showed up, and he thinks that she must have actually hated him and decided not to come. He drifts along and broods for the next two years — sometimes shutting himself into a closet that he has drawn stars and planets on the inside of with glow-in-the-dark markers — supported by his little sister Miya (who can be all kinds of trouble when she tries) and Masayoshi Umehara, who is the stereotypical odd-and-slightly-perverted best friend character from every dating sim ever (can you think of a dating sim game that doesn’t have one of these? I can’t).

Two years after that fateful Christmas Eve, Masayoshi convinces Junichi that maybe he should give the whole love thing another shot and find himself a date for Christmas Eve. Of all of the girls in his life, who will Junichi spend his next Christmas Eve with? Will she actually show up this time?

What I like about it

Amagami SS is cute and adorable without also being incredibly over the top. That’s fairly standard for dating sim adaptations, particularly ones with a normal high school setting. But what makes Amagami SS stand out is the format that the producers have decided to use to tell the story.

The game has a route for each of the six girls pictured above. Haruka is the “main” one but you can, of course, choose to go after a different girl instead or replay the game over and over to see all of the endings. There are even multiple endings for each girl, depending on the relationships you build and choices you make throughout the game. Usually, dating sim adaptations pick one route and ending or tell a story that kinda integrates elements of a couple of routes into one plot but still uses one ending for one character (or some ending of its own creation to support the mish-mashing of elements from the game). The other girls show up, but they end up as supporting characters rather than as the heroines they are in their respective game routes. They get a nod and then they bow out so the main relationship that the writers want to focus on can bloom.

Amagami SS is told in an “omnibus format” and includes arcs for all six girls from the game. Each arc is four episodes, so that makes 24 episodes, standard for a two-season run. Though some fans may disagree, I personally like this style. It gives a chance for each of the girls to shine in their own way instead of just focusing on the main one like many dating-sim-turned-anime shows do.

Compared to KimiKiss Pure Rouge, I feel like the characters are more compelling and less cliché. They each have their own peculiar quirks rather than being entirely flat stereotypes. For example Rihoko is Junichi’s ditzy childhood friend who often tries to go on diets but can never seem to reach her weight loss goals. She’s a member of the Tea Ceremony Club and although her arc hasn’t ended in the anime yet, in the game she becomes an idol and there’s a hint that she might aspire to become one in the anime as well. I’d say she has much more flavour than KimiKiss’ childhood friend character, Mao Mizusawa.

There are neat touches in each arc where another of the six girls shows up and you get a glimpse of what she’s currently up to, which is an interesting analogue to how events sometimes unfold in the game.

What I don’t like about it

Like many dating sim heroes, Junichi doesn’t have much of a personality and can sometimes be annoyingly vacant. There are a couple of episodes where he’s actually interesting in his own right but most of the time I just want to throw something at him. He can also be rather perverted (also standard for dating sim heroes), which makes some parts of the series very awkward. This is another show that you’ll probably want to watch either by yourself or with friends who appreciate the genre.

The omnibus format has its advantages, which I outlined above, but it’s not without disadvantages. It’s difficult to tell a very complex story in just four episodes, so the story is definitely distilled compared to the game. If you’re not particularly interested in an arc it’s over soon enough, but if you’re really interested in an arc it can feel like it finishes way too soon.

Sometimes the writers have chosen to take elements from other endings from the game for the same girl and mix them in. They usually end with the “best” ending from the game with a few exceptions (described in this page of TV tropes). I didn’t find this jarring but if you’re a hardcore fan of the game, you might. It basically suffers from the usual problems of a dating sim adaptation, only this time repeated over many smaller stories.

Summary

If you like dating sims, see this one. As mentioned before, you don’t need to see it from the beginning because each arc is completely independent of the others. The arcs that have currently aired are (in order): Haruka, Kaoru, Sae, Ai, and Rihoko (currently 3 of 4 episodes aired). Of those, I really liked Ai’s and Kaoru’s, and Rihoko’s is looking very good so far as well. Haruka’s arc is a good start but I find her to be way too childish for my tastes (which is ironic, since she’s actually the oldest of the six).

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.

There are a couple of different ways to translate the title of this cute up-and-comer from the Fall 2010 anime season. Since the title is super long, I’m going to abbreviate it similarly to how I did KamiNozo and call it OreImo. However you find it and whatever it has been translated to, it is one of my top recommendations for this season.

OreImo is another series that gives a nod to the otaku in a very novel and tasteful way. As I usually do, let’s get right to the premise:

Kyousuke and his sister Kirino don’t get along very well at all and he often feels like he’s in her shadow. She gets excellent marks in school, she does part-time jobs to pay her way, she’s (usually) very polite and cheerful, and most of all she’s incredibly cute. But one day, after accidentally bumping into her in the hallway of their typical Japanese-turned-Western-style home, he finds a DVD for a magical girl anime. Even worse, he looks inside and the wrong disc is in the case — the disc seems to be a 18+ visual novel/dating sim game.

It couldn’t be hers… could it?

One day, Kyousuke catches his sister snooping around in his room. She was looking for the disc after all and very quickly snaps it away from him before storming out of the room. Unfortunately for him, that wasn’t the end of it.

In the middle of the night he’s woken up with a slap to the face. His little sister would like to talk to him about something and she hopes that he won’t judge her harshly when she’s finished. It turns out that the disc was hers and is part of a large collection that she’s been hiding in her room.

Her money from modelling jobs has been going to, among other things, anime box sets, collector edition 18+ games, figurines, manga, and light novels. Kirino is secretly an otaku! Weirder still, she seems to have a fixation for the “little sister” genre but insists that it’s just because she thinks the heroines are cute.

Kyousuke is blown away but true to his promise he doesn’t judge her harshly (though admittedly her obsession with “little sister” games does creep him out a bit). And so starts a series of episodes in which, in her own catty way, Kirino asks for guidance and advice on troubles in her “second life”. As her older brother and the only other person who knows her secret, it’s quite a burden for him. Can he bear it?

What I like about it

As I wrote above, the show once again gives otaku a nod in a very novel and tasteful way. Considering the recent deluge of “moeblobs” targeting the same market, OreImo is a breath of fresh air. The character designs are really good and Kirino is super cute. The message that otaku come from many different places is endearing and the show treats some topics regarding how society sees otaku and how they see themselves.

What I don’t like about it

I’m just as creeped out as Kyousuke is sometimes, and find myself thinking “is this really happening” every single time Kirino’s relationship with her older brother and her “little sister” games fandom are juxtaposed. The show remains tasteful but every so often it skirts the line.

In summary

Strongly recommended, particularly if you like otaku stuff but have gotten tired of moeblobs and harem shows. Unlike KamiNozo, OreImo is less focused on particular clichés and tropes of otakudom and more focused on the bigger picture.

The objective of Power Grid to is connect cities to your power grid and use the power plants and raw materials that you purchase to supply power to those cities and collect money to do it all again. Power plants use four different resources: coal, oil, garbage, and uranium. As well, there are power plants that require no resources (wind/solar power). Players auction off power plants, buy materials to stock them, and fire each of their plants once at the end of each turn to determine how many of the cities in their grid they can supply power to. As the game progresses, power plants become more efficient and the dynamics of the supply of resources changes. The game ends when at least one player has 17 cities in his network. At that point, all players fire their power plants and whoever can supply power to the greatest number of cities wins the game.

What makes this game most interesting is that the resources system has been pretty well designed. A power plant can stock double of the type(s) of resources it uses. Only a certain number of units of each type of resource is restocked at the end of each turn, so over time resources that are getting bought up a lot will become more expensive while resources that aren’t will get cheaper. In short, the resources follow the principles of supply and demand pretty closely.

Should you buy up a particular resource while it’s cheap, or save your money to build connections? Do you need to replace one of your power plants with a more efficient one? These are all questions that players must ask themselves as the game progresses.

One downside of the game is that it does run somewhat long, particularly if you’re used to shorter board games like Ticket to Ride. I’m still getting used to the rules, so games of Power Grid I’ve played have run about 2 hours on average. When I played it for the first time at one of TAG’s events, a much more experienced player was running it and it was over in about an hour to an hour and a half. The rulebook isn’t laid out very well and fans of the game have created their own rules reference sheets to help them run the game, which I consider absolutely indispensable.

Power Grid can also get quite swingy; the phases of each turn are designed to give players who are behind a sort of advantage so that they can catch up (trailing players are first to buy resources and connections), but that means that sometimes you can take advantage of being in last for a while to build up massive resources and then ambush the other players to take the game.

There are a number of expansions available for Power Grid, mostly maps of different countries/regions around the world to play on, some with their own special rules. The main game comes with a two-sided board which has the United States on one side and Germany on the other. I recently bought another game board that has France and Italy, and I’ve also seen China/Korea, Spain/Portugal, and a couple more. You can also buy another set of power plant cards to give the game a bit of a different flavour; for instance, in the new power plants deck there are more efficient wind/solar plants to make the “no resources” strategy more effective (though you will still pay through the nose for the plants compared to other power sources).

Overall, Power Grid has become a favourite of mine even though I’m still getting the hang of the strategies. I would recommend this to anybody who loves board games and is looking for something with considerable depth that isn’t too hard to teach. While it’s certainly not as simple as, say, Ticket to Ride, it has still been a hit with many of the players I’ve taught it to.