Project Diva: Dreamy Theater 2nd

Project Diva: Dreamy Theater 2nd

Dreamy Theater 2^nd is more of the same, perhaps unsurprisingly – but also everything its predecessor was but much more. Indeed, every song from the first game is included in this one as an extra, which is nice (though makes the trophies take longer to get) – the only reason for me to keep the first game, which unlike this one still needs the PSP attached to even start, is that I have a nice collection of edit songs on it.

The gameplay is much the same, only now there are doubled notes and held notes. The doubled ones require you to not only press the right button but also the d-pad button that is its equivalent – up with triangle, right with circle and so on. The held notes were the bane of my life getting perfects in this game – they not only register your timing when you press down but also when you release, which for whatever reason I found that much harder to do accurately, making for many an annoying moment. If there were one part of this game I would change, it would be this.

The graphics are even nicer than before, and of course there are more characters, with more outfits, and the chance to have two on the screen at once, which the first game lacked. Edit mode is thus more fun to play with and this time I really enjoyed making a video of my own.

The game is also much more fun because it’s much more challenging. The first game was really too easy, with only the Christmas Song’s fiddly solo proving hard to perfect. This one has an ‘extreme’ mode that is way more fun than anything the first game offered, and though some tracks were frustrating and needed several tries, the thrill of getting through a tough song and getting a perfect on your first attempt was as much fun I’ve had with a rhythm game since Technika.

It took two long sessions to get a perfect on the very last song, the 32^nd-note-plagued ‘Hatsune Miku no Gekishou’, and the reward, criminally, is only a gold trophy and not a platinum, but it’s a challenge I’m very pleased I undertook and managed to overcome. It was the hardest gaming challenge I’ve tried in a very long time, certainly harder than hidden RPG bosses or ‘Through the Fire and Flames’ on Guitar Hero 3 (though if the challenge were to get a perfect on that it would have been much harder). That’s enough now, until Extend goes to PS3, if it ever does. My next rhythm game will probably be Rhythm Thief on 3DS!

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Professor Layton and the Lost Future / Unwound Future

I thought that Unwound Future was likely to be my least favourite of the Layton games. They’d had some far-fetched concepts before, but usually confined to the ends of their games, but this one looked likely to have the silly idea of time travel throughout, which always ends up with plot holes and usually contradictory theories coexisting. Besides, it seemed the most surreal effort yet – sure, there was a hamster with a funny voice in the last game but that was confined to a minigame and you sort of thought that Luke could just be interpreting the voice internally – but this one not only had a talking parrot minigame (fair enough), but a genuine talking rabbit with a tale of woe to unfold and an annoying talking bee that gets swatted halfway through and is presumed dead right up until the credits.

And yet – it’s actually turned out to be my favourite of the trilogy. The essential gameplay is of course the same – you go from place to place solving puzzles that are by and large only tricky enough to divert the player for a few moments, but still hard enough to give a sense of satisfaction. So that leaves the overall story.

I like the setting the most of the three – the first’s village was cute but limited, the train of the second rather repetitive, leaving a strange but very much recognisable London for this one, which works well. Some way through, Luke had a little scene in front of a statue that was very subtly done (if you didn’t stop to watch his standing animation before clicking him with your stylus, and didn’t read the journal entry afterwards, you may not have realised what he was doing) that made me think this might be my least favourite Layton game with my favourite scene in it, but then the final twists came. The final twists have rather been the weaknesses of Layton games. The first game’s makes sense within the world in hindsight, but at the time I was hoping for something that required much less of a sci-fi leap of faith to believe, while the second relies on everyone affected by hallucinogenic gas to perceive the exact same hallucination – not just for a moment but long-term. This one, aside from a rather mawkish bit to try and have the traditional tearjerking ending, actually went in reverse: it twisted an unbelievable supernatural premise to one that again required absurd sci-fi, but at least made everything logical.

The series continues to be one of the best handheld games around, and obviously for a relatively low budget – I’m annoyed at the next game excluding ‘London Life’ for the UK release (but having it on the US cart) so for the first time will likely not buy a copy, but I’ll certainly be playing it. I’d just get the US version – but then I’d have to put up with that awful voice they have for Luke. And it doesn’t even have the advantage this version’s US release had – a rather better title.

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Super Mario 3D Land

The 3DS is now generally considered a success after a difficult period after its launch where there weren’t really many games to play. In Japan, it’s Monster Hunter that took it from a portable it was possible to ignore to must-have. Here, what really boosted the Christmas sales were the release of the two updated in-house classics, Mario Kart and Super Mario Land. Mario Kart is a very addictive game that’s the best in the series for a while, if slightly frustrating. What, then, of Super Mario Land? I just finished it yesterday, getting four stars in the end. To get five I’d have to redo all the levels with Luigi, which I have no interest in doing, and to make them golden I’d have to start all over again, so I feel I’ve finished with the title.

First impressions were great – lovely slick graphics, smooth gameplay and the charming old world full of things that remind me of the first time I turned on my SNES with the Super Mario All-Stars bundled with it in the cartridge slot, and I was forced to accept that it was much better than The Great Giana Sisters. The 3D effect, still somewhat iffy in the cinema, works superbly on my 3DS and the subtle ways it enters into the gameplay pleased me. I spend a while around Christmas getting through a world each evening, and though it was all a bit easy, I felt sure that there would be harder levels to come.

Unfortunately, it was the bridge between silly, hand-holding casual game to challenging brain- and reflex-tester that let the game down. I’m happy that the whole game wasn’t easy, but where the game became more challenging, I found it only irritating to play, fiddly and with many instances of artificial difficulty.

The last Mario game I played with any seriousness (at least as a platformer) was probably Super Mario Bros. 3 in that compilation, when I was still a pretty small kid. Since then Mario has always been there on the gaming scene, but I’ve paid little attention. Super Mario 64 was heralded as a great advance in gameplay, one magazine I read keenly back then going so far as to award the game an unprecedented 100% in the reviewing system of the time, which made a bit of a mockery of percentage reviews thereafter. I never had an N64, so played the game only a few times, and thereafter wasn’t very interested in the likes of Sunshine or Galaxy, which dispensed with the open level design, preferring more direct and clear-cut level goals, which carried over to this version. It wasn’t that I disliked the games, I just never felt very attached to the properties and had started to prefer games with very strong plotting and characterisation – most of Nintendo’s in-house titles, including the Zelda games, have an archetypal plot and extremely simple characters, focusing on gameplay, and at the time that just didn’t appeal.

Well, this copy came with my 3DS, and it seemed a great way to get used to the system. As usual, Mario discovers that Peach has been abducted by Bowser, so goes to get her back with the use of various mushrooms, fire flowers, super leaves and little boxes. During the easy first half of the game, if you die five times you get given a power-up leaf that makes you totally invincible, while after ten deaths you can be teleported directly to the end of the level.

It’s totally understandable that games reviewers give the game such high praise – they have deadlines, and the first few days of gameplay, even if intensive, are going to be incredibly good fun. This game is excellent for people who don’t care to finish what they’re playing and casual gamers. The problems come much later on, when a bit of precision is needed, or an evil Mario clone three times your size is chasing you all through the level.

It’s then that the inadequacies of the controls are highlighted: you are expected to perform jumps with great precision, to land on little platforms and get moving before your clone lands on you, or to land on little ledges that switch every time you jump. Sometimes the fake difficulty is ramped up by making you jump towards the camera, especially if you want to collect all the bonus coins that give you starred ratings. And the controls are just made that bit too fiddly. The amount of run-up it takes for Mario to jump farther never seems well-defined. Often it’s just very hard to see where he’s going to land. The collision detection is often highly suspect, especially when it comes to the large Mario shadow clone, and generally making little corrections to your jump as a 2D platformer may be used to will ruin your momentum and result in pathetic little jumps that end with you dying horribly. If there’s a use for that stupid backflip move Mario does if you change your direction after running and press jump, I have no idea what it is, but all it ever did was get me killed by my clone.

Ultimately, it held my interest almost long enough to get me to the very end, where your only reward for perseverance is a final level that’s just the (spectacular) final level of the first half again, only with no chance of getting the items that make it incredibly easy, and then the same ending with one extra image of Peach in a Tanooki outfit. It just got that bit too annoying at the end by being tricky in the wrong way, by testing my luck rather than skill, or simply annoying me by killing me off when I didn’t feel it had any right to. It was also bad when a level was very hard without a super leaf but could be breezed through in moments with one, especially since they were almost always readily available in toad huts.

This is a Mario game with a whole lot of charm, with great 3D effects, a beautiful world, great use of familiar Mario elements and a few inspired bits of level design, especially when it came to levels with Boos and large rotating platforms. But it just wasn’t quite as playable as it ought to have been when the second half of the game, the game actually aimed at people who like a challenge, opened up and made things that little bit more difficult.

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Mario Kart 7 (3DS)

It’s often hard to know when to consider the one-player part of a game like this finished, but now that I’ve got 3 stars for every cup, including the mirror ones, and now that I’m a little sick of it, I think that’s enough time. It’ll remain a fun multiplayer game, but that’s the only way I’ll need to play it now. It got a lot of hours of play out of me in a short time, though, and is definitely the racing game I’ve enjoyed the most in many years…probably since the first WipEout.

Though I’m not a big racing game fan, the original version of Mario Kart was a fixture of my life on the SNES, one of the few fun things that brought all the boys in my least fun secondary school together. The older boy who had brought it with him was a real expert, knowing all the shortcuts and having a grasp of the powerups that still amazes me today. He could hit you going around corners with a thrown banana every time, he could shoot you backwards with a green shell while going around a corner with perfect aim and red shells almost never worked against him because he knew exactly when to hop. I learned from someone very, very good.

And then I never liked another Mario Kart game until this one. The N64 one was fine, but the controls felt so different. The Gamecube one I only just tried and utterly hated, expecially how you cannot hop. The Wii one with its wheel controls is a totally different thing. And I just got my DS too late to be very into that version.

This one, though, I played at just the right time thanks to a timely gift, and got a bit obsessive over. It has its significant differences from the SNES original – on the negative, there’s no feather for super-jumping, you can’t hop over shells if your timing is great and the infamous blue shell is of course an element of random luck that ruins many a three-star run on a cup. On the plus side, the tanuki tail you get from the feather is useful, the drifting mechanic works well and it’s nice to be rewarded rather than penalised for longer, sharper drifts, coins are no longer necessary for maximum speed and of course the thing is beautiful to behold, especially in 3D.

I have to say I’d like a version that plays exactly like the SNES version. I’d like to be drifting only in short, sharp bursts. I’d like to be able to hop red shells and bananas again with good enough timing. I’d like to be able to hop over the right brick wall with a feather if I had it at the right time, and I’d like to no longer drop from first to fifth moments from the finishing line because of a lucky blue shell. But this comes much closer than any other version, and I’m very happy with it.

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Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep Final Mix

I think it’s fair to say I’ve played this game to death now. I’ve seen the Japanese-only secret episode that ends with the enticing prospect of ‘Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep 2’ (though I would’ve preferred it to be labelled ‘Kingdom Hearts 3’). I’ve gotten all the trophies, collected all the ice creams and beaten all the hidden bosses – the one that seemed so hard in the original, the one that seemed so much harder in the international release, and the new arena bosses that make how the arena was before this seem like a joke. And all on critical mode. Yup, I’m done. The only thing I could do to get any further than this would be to beat the extra bosses again with Terra and Aqua, but I don’t really have any inclination to do that: once is enough, especially when it comes to the Mysterious Figure.

Of course, the core of the game is the same as it was before – the epic fantasy of Terra, Aqua and Ventus and how they come to be totally and utterly screwed over, which is actually my favourite Kingdom Hearts storyline so far, though the original still has the most charm. As I’ve said before, I thought aiming for too much seriousness would be the death of the franchise, but I was wrong and the concept works so, so much better than the main titles have since the introduction of Organization XIII. Of course, learning that most of the events of the main series were preordained when the main characters were very young and why exactly they’re so ‘special’ takes away a little of the impact of their stories, but makes for a more believable and complete world overall.

Final Mix, like the other final mixes, basically takes the international release and builds upon it. Thus, all the cutscenes but the new ones in the secret episode are delivered by the English voice cast, who I’ve never liked nearly so much as the originals – but thankfully, all cutscenes can be watched in the ‘theater’ menu in either language. The only disappointment with this arrangement is that the ice cream minigame carries over from the international version – which is to say, more songs but no ‘special’ mode, which is the only time the extra little game actually got challenging and fun. Other things that were added are mostly cosmetic – a fun new ‘rhythm mixer’ command style that gives you very satisfying DJ scratching noises as you zing about, new keyblades and a fun little world for Aqua at the end where for some reason it’s oddly thrilling to fight heartless instead of unversed.

Other than little additional cutscenes, it’s really the hidden bosses that get the attention – and took the most hard work! The Unknown Figure remains easily the hardest of them, with so many ridiculous attacks that will kill you instantly. What was really annoying about him was that he made the limitations of the PSP more obvious – the vast majority of times I died were when I was trying to change what spell I had selected while having to keep the analogue stick held in a direction, or because my thumb slipped slightly on the grip there. One tiny moment of not rolling one way or another and you die. No exaggeration. Luckily, I eventually found that fire surge is far more effective than thunder surge and won through.

The armoured forms of Eraqus and Xehanort are more interesting, but also much easier. They were fun, though, even if the latter is a hard slog if you haven’t levelled like crazy. They were far less frustrating than the Unknown Figure, though, because dying was usually something that made you realise you’d made a mistake, rather than because the hardware made things stupidly hard.

It’s been well worth getting everything possible out of Birth By Sleep – it’s easily my favourite PSP game, and favourite Kingdom Hearts title. I’m also very happy it has such an active fanscene, and modding my rom to have English text, Ventus wearing Sora’s clothes and Terra in constant ‘Terranort’ mode made everything that little bit more satisfying!

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Final Fantasy Tactics

Final Fantasy Tactics has got to be the most disappointing game I’ve ever played. I’d heard a lot about it, recently as well as when it came out, and with the FF name attached, I had high expectations. But the game was awful.

I quite liked the unusual battle system – as the title suggests, more tactical than in most FF games. With a team of (usually) five players, you traverse a large playing area and defeat large numbers of enemies, adapting to their different powers. The trouble with this is that (a) it’s piss easy, since you can level up by attacking your own team-mates, so you can just wait until you have a weak enemy and level up to high heaven killing and healing yourself while the enemy chips ineffectually at you, and (b) if you leave a character knocked out for too long, they die and become unusable for the rest of the game. My characters I’ve spent hours building up? Uh-uh. I don’t think so. I’ve never reset a game so much in my life, usually simply because my revive spell didn’t work, since the ground was a bit slanted next to the body. Ugh.

Still, it’s quite fun, and the different job classes keep things interesting. So all could be forgiven (in this particular case; Wild ARMS’ deathly slow battles killed it) if the story was good. And I’d heard good things. It starts out well - a young noble called Ramza fails to prevent a kidnapping, and sees that one of the enemies is his old friend - but soon spiralls out of control, with a convoluted story of political intrigue where most of the large cast is totally flat, stupid McGuffins in the form of balls of power that turn you into a monster and then get swept under the carpet when they get in the way of a tacked-on ending, and characters who don’t develop at all, but just go through the motions. Not all of this can be blamed on bad translation, though I’ve never seen such a poor rush-job in an official release.

And Cloud? Totally not worth the 5 minutes or so it took to get him.

What a waste of 60+ hours. Oh well, it was fun getting a mime, and developing my magicians to take everyone on the field out on the first turn. But please, please let the next game I play be more interesting story-wise.

You could see that Suikoden II had been influenced by this game, and it in turn by the first Suikoden, but both were SO much better than this in story terms.

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Narutimate Portable

The second game wasn’t nearly as fun as the first, half because you only got three characters (and I only really liked playing as Jiraiya) and half because two of the most fun game modes (copying Shikamaru and tree-climbing) were absent. Plus towards the end the fighting got quite dull; once you and the computer were adept at defence all that happened would be that you kept swapping places with the kawarimi no jutsu ad infinitum until one of you left an opening and got hit with a combo. Plus the story wasn’t as interesting in the second part. Still, a fun game. Not much replay value, but I enjoyed it while it lasted, and it was good for my Japanese practice.

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