The end of the month, and the year, is drawing near, so it’s time to make a recap for PlayStation TV compatibility.  I normally do this on the very last day of the month, in case some compatibility information comes in the last few days.  However, I have another article planned for the 30th, so I’m doing it now.

This month began pretty spectacular with PSTV Compatibility.  The first half of the month barely had a single day pass where we didn’t find out new compatibility information for new and upcoming games.  It’s slowed a bit in the later half, but this still wasn’t a bad month.

So, here are all of the North America region games, out and upcoming, that we have confirmed compatibility for the month of December!

Assassin’s Creed: Chronicles
Bastion
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth
Earth Defense Force 2: Invaders from Planet Space
Last Blade 2, The
Legend of Heroes, The: Trails of Cold Steel
Megatagmension Neptune + Blanc vs. Zombies
Nuclear Throne
Stranger of Sword City
TowerFall: Ascension
Trillion: God of Destruction

As I said before, it’s not a huge list, but it’s still been a good month.  I’m constantly on the hunt for more compatibility information, so check my list frequently and if you find any info I don’t, feel free to reach out!

It’s the end of the year and it’s definitely been a long trek.  However, we’re finally here, looking towards the new year.  In that regards, I’ve decided to do the same as I did last year and pull together a list of all of the best reviews from each month.  This kind of list was even requested by a forum member not too long ago.

How these games are decided is mainly on review score.  I go through every review for any specific month and put together the games that got the top scores.  Since the highest I’ve ever scored is a 9/10, I basically pull those together and pick a game out of those.  To keep things out of bias, I use a random number generator when there are several 9/10 scores in a single month, and will put the others in the “Runner Up” section.

Also, now that I’ve expanded, these future lists will vary a bit.  Since I do more platforms now, each month will have a Top Review/Game for each platform.  You won’t be seeing a lot of that this time around, but it is thrown in at the very end.

Enough of this talk.  Let’s see the Top Reviews of 2015!

January 2015 – Dead or Alive 5 Plus

Dead or Alive 5 Plus brings the entire console experience of DoA5 down to the handheld market with its own selection of exclusive game modes.  On the downside, the difficulty can get very frustrating towards the end of the Story Mode and some of the combos are difficult to pull off.  However, with the exceptional presentation, DoA5+ shows just how well a handheld fighter can be done.

http://www.reviews2go.com/dead-or-alive-5-plus-review-video-review/

Runner-Up: Ys: I + II Chronicles

February 2015: – Minutes

Minutes is a good choice if you’re looking for a fast-paced pick-up-and-play game.  On the downside, the game only takes a couple hours to completely finish.  Otherwise, you will find a fun and fast-paced game that not only will challenge your patience but is also one of the better-optimized games on the Vita as of late.

http://www.reviews2go.com/minutes-review-video-review/

Runner-Up: Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed, HtoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary, Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart

March 2015 – Scram Kitty DX

Scram Kitty DX is an enhanced version of the same game for the Wii U.  On the downside, the game doesn’t tell you what the story is or how to play the game, requiring you to look at the manual.  Outside of this is a cute and well-optimized arcade platformer that will keep the kitty fan busy for a good while.

http://www.reviews2go.com/scram-kitty-dx-review-video-review/

Runner-Up: La-Mulana EX, LEGO Ninjago: Shadow of Ronin

April 2015 – Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight is a fun throwback to the games of the NES era.  On the downside, some of the controls are not explained to you.  Outside of this is an addicting platformer game that looks good, plays good, and is a fun experience, whether it’s on the go or at home on the PSTV.

http://www.reviews2go.com/shovel-knight-review-video-review/

Runner-Up: Toukiden Kiwami

May 2015 – Rayman Legends

Rayman Legends is the newest entry in the Rayman franchise and a lengthy platforming game for the PS Vita.  On the downside, there is some slowdown in a few areas.  Outside of this is a beautifully crafted platform game that series fans and newcomers can dive into and enjoy.

http://www.reviews2go.com/rayman-legends-review/

Runner-Up: L2/R2 Trigger Grip, Persona 3 Portable

June 2015 – Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 3: V Generation

Hyperdimension Neptunia Rebirth 3 is a faithful remake of Victory and improves on many things from the previous Rebirth games.  On the downside, some of the voice-work is incomplete and there are still sections where there are frame drops.  Past this is a cute and colorful RPG that will make you laugh but also challenge your mind.

http://www.reviews2go.com/hyperdimension-neptunia-rebirth-3-v-generation-review/

Runner-Up: Badland: Game of the Year Edition, Invizimals: The Resistance, Mega Man 8, Sword Art Online: Lost Song

July 2015 – Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions

Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is a successful and strategic twin-stick shooter.  On the downside, the game will constantly keep trying to sign you into PSN, which can be disruptive to you navigating the menus.  Outside of this is a shooter that plays well and will challenge you from start to finish.

http://www.reviews2go.com/geometry-wars-3-dimensions-review/

Runner-Up: The Sly Collection

August 2015 – Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls

Danganronpa: Another Episode is another great game from Spike and NIS.  On the downside, there is a small glitch in the dialogue audio.  Outside of this is a casual shooting game that will give series fans much-needed answers about the world of Danganronpa and the history behind Monokuma.

http://www.reviews2go.com/danganronpa-another-episode-ultra-despair-girls-review/

Runner-Up: Actual Sunlight

September 2015 – Amnesia Memories

Amnesia: Memories is the western debut of Otome games on the PlayStation Vita (outside of PSP games).  On the downside, a lot of the controls aren’t explained to you, leaving you oblivious to many features.  Outside of this is a visual novel with enough story elements to make it stand out as more than just a dating simulator for female gamers

http://www.reviews2go.com/amnesia-memories-review/

Runner-Up: Persona 4 Dancing All Night

October 2015 – Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy comes to the Vita in all its disturbingly-cute wonder.  On the downside, the game has a nasty habit of bombarding you with network pop-ups.  Outside of that is one of the most well-done indie ports the Vita has seen in its lifetime.

http://www.reviews2go.com/super-meat-boy-review/

Runner-Up: Corpse Party Blood Drive, Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax

November 2015

Nintendo 3DS – Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Animal Crossing: New Leaf is a simulation game that really can change a gamer’s perspective on how to play games.  While it does get a little repetitive with gathering currency, it’s a game that simulates town life well and has near limitless options of what to do all year round. 

http://www.reviews2go.com/animal-crossing-new-leaf-review/

Runner-Up: Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, Super Smash Bros.

PlayStation Vita – Superbeat XONIC

Superbeat XONIC is a new music game exclusive to the PS Vita and PlayStation TV.  With a large soundtrack and very challenging gameplay, it’s a game DJ Max fans will fall in love with, despite its tendency to crash while loading the Leaderboards.

http://www.reviews2go.com/superbeat-xonic-review/

Runner-Up: Killzone Mercenary

December 2015

Nintendo 3DS: Pokemon Picross

Pokemon Picross is just as it sounds.  It’s a Pokemon-themed picross game.  On the downside, the game’s micro-transaction model really puts you in a tight spot if you don’t want to pay-to-play.  Still, at its core, it is a charming and challenging game that is worth 732 blocks of any picross fan’s memory card.

http://www.reviews2go.com/pokemon-picross-review/

Runner-Up: Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

PlayStation Vita – The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Second Chapter

Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC is something many people have wanted in the West for a long time.  On the downside, it still has a bit of blurring from the presentation.  Outside of that is an RPG just as grand and deep as its predecessor, and in some ways, even more so.  If you’re a fan of the first game, this will not disappoint.

http://www.reviews2go.com/the-legend-of-heroes-trails-in-the-sky-second-chapter-review/

Runner-Up: Earth Defense Force 2 Invaders from Planet Space

Well, that’s all we have!  I hope you enjoyed the list, reviews, and everything I’ve done this year!  I’ll be back in just a few days with a new review to kick the new year off!

Title: The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
Developer: Falcom, XSEED
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Game Type: Vita
Download: 2.7 GB
NA Availability: Digital Download | Retail
EU Availability: Digital Download | Retail (Late January 2016)
PSTV Support: Yes

When you look at reviewers, you’ve got a few different types with how they tackle reviews when they have an embargo date.  Before going on, let’s define what an embargo is.  Embargo is the day you’re allowed to start posting your review.  In simple terms, you’re not allowed to post your review before that date.

Reviewers with embargo in mind fall into a few categories, especially when a game is too long to realistically complete before the embargo day.  Some will release a review on the embargo day, even if it means only playing through half, or even a third of a game and hoping that nothing happens later that would change their review.  Then you have the insane people that stop sleeping in order to beat the game by that time.  Finally, you’ve got the more relaxed people who spend a lot of time with the game, but aren’t stressed about getting their review out exactly on embargo day.

That third option is me.  I do want to get reviews out as soon as I can, but if it means only playing half the game beforehand, it’s not worth it.  I’ve played many games where problems that I’d deduct points for don’t show up until the finale of the game.  If I’d only played half of it, the review would be incomplete and misleading.  So, my position is that a reviewer should always complete the main story of a game before writing their review, even if it means not posting it on embargo day.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about today’s review.  I’m sure you all have been anxious to see my thoughts on the newest PS Vita RPG, and the newest localized Legend of Heroes game.  This game has quite the shoes to fill, after the stellar success and quality of the Trails in the Sky games on the PSP.  So, here we go.  This is my official review of The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel!

Story

Trails of Cold Steel takes place in the political country of Erebonia, where political tension is high and two military groups have very high political opposition of one another.  In the midst of this, our story is around the nine students of a special class at the Imperial Thors Military Academy, known as Class VII.  This new class is consisted of both noble-born and common-born students, a first and a clear taboo among the importance of Erebonian social class.

As Class VII goes through school as well as visiting major areas of Erebonia in what are called “Field Studies”, they learn of the history and future of Erebonia.  Not only do they familiarize themselves with different towns and cities, but they also uncover and become involved in much bigger political activities as a major crisis unveils itself in the country.

As a part of The Legend of Heroes, Cold Steel is a standalone title as it’s the beginning of a new subseries.  However, fans of the series will be happy to know that there are dozens of references to previous games, particularly the Trails in the Sky series.  Players of the first Trails in the Sky won’t recognize many of these, as most of the references come from Trails in the Sky SC (Second Chapter).  Not only are the events referenced, but a handful of major characters from that game appear in this one.

One last thing to say is that the game is very plot-heavy.  This is a given for fans of the series, but newcomers should know that the story has just as much focus as the gameplay.  It’s a long game, and the majority of that length is taken up by story scenes.  If you’re not one for getting into storyline (or don’t like cliffhanger endings, as this is the first chapter of a new sub-series), you should be careful about your purchase.  However, if you’re a fan of stories, you’re in for a treat.

Gameplay

Trails of Cold Steel is a turn-based RPG with strategy elements as well as some light school sim and other elements thrown into the mix.  As you’ll find out from what I’m about to tell you, it’s an RPG like Trails in the Sky, but with many different elements, making it a bit more than just an RPG.

Each chapter of the game progresses between two sections.  The first section consists of school life at Thors Military Academy.  Then, after a few days, scenes, some side-quests, and a story-based boss and dungeon exploration, you’re sent on a Field Study to a city where you have your own set of objectives.

School Life isn’t all that different from that of Persona 3 and Persona 4.  You have scenes of classes that are taking place, along with the occasional trivia question and exam, where you’ll have a few choices and the choice you make will affect points you can get towards leveling up your rank.  I would directly compare that to the quizzes in Persona 4, but appearing far less often.

Once that’s over, you get a Free Day, where you run errands for the Student Council.  These tasks are like side-quests that involve a certain NPC and you do something for them.  It could be hunting down a student for the Photography Club that is taking candid pictures of the student body or testing out some new equipment or vehicles for the Engineering Department.  It’s pretty varied, but they all take you to many places around the school grounds.  Finally, there’s always a task that takes you through a new dungeon underneath the school grounds that modifies and changes each month.

The other part of Free Day is bonding with your classmates.  Not unlike Social Links from Persona, you can spend time with other playable characters to learn more about them as well as increasing your Link Level with them.  This affects some story events as well as some abilities they can do with each other while in combat.  You have a limited number of Bonding Points each month, though, so you can’t spend time with everyone every month.

Once the Free Day is over, you have your Examination Test of fighting a customized boss monster under certain conditions and then you go on your Field Study for a weekend.  Field Studies have you paired in specific groupings of characters (clearly to help you familiarize yourself with each person’s abilities as well as learning their own story background), and sent to a town to learn about the town and run many quests through the town.

These Field Studies also have a schedule to them.  The first parts will have you going through story events and doing these quests and tasks given to you by an official from the town.  Then, towards the end of that weekend you will have some major story events happen and be sent to fend off a major boss associated with the political plots developing in the area.

Running tasks while on Field Studies is very similar to how side-quests worked in Trails in the Sky.  There are required tasks and optional tasks for you to complete each day.  These can be as simple as finding a mini-boss and defeating it, hunting down a specific material or sales item for an NPC or shop, or escorting and protecting an NPC out in the field.  Much like the quizzes during school life, doing more of these will earn you more AP, or Academic Points, pushed towards increasing your Rank.  Similar to how side-quests gave you experience towards upgrading ranks in Trails in the Sky.

The Field Studies are also unique in that you have a bit of a hub world and free roam through fields and dungeons.  The school has a lot of area, but only has one area that spawns monsters.  There’s a much bigger sense of freedom when you’re out in the field.  This is also where all of the major shops are, where you can upgrade your weapons and equipment.

The equipment system is also something to go into.  You have weapons, armor, and accessories, which is standard RPG stuff.  Better equipment increases stats.  You know the drill there.  What is different is the Orb/Skill system.  You have a battle orbment, or accessory that you can equip orbment quartz into to enhance your stats as well as give you more skills to use both in the field and in battle.  I would compare this system to the Materia system from Final Fantasy VII..

This system is a bit simplified from its form from Trails in the Sky.  It is much easier to manage opening slots, equipping quartz, and managing skills.  It was quite the task in previous games, but it’s been simplified and not as daunting of a task this time around, which is a welcome change to the formula of the series.

When you’re in combat, you play like you do in Trails in the Sky.  Your party and an enemy party are on a relative-large map.  Your abilities have limited range, so you may have to take some time moving around for a turn or two before you can be at the point where you can even attack enemies.  This is where the strategy elements are thrown into play, just as they were in the last Trails games I reviewed.  The rest of it is about the same, like having normal attacks, artes that take time to cast, earning CP as you attack or are damaged to use CP Skills or ultimate attacks.

The main addition here are Link Attacks.  Unlike how Trails in the Sky SC implemented team attacks, Linked Attacks are a story element as well as an attack that allows two party members to attack together under certain conditions.  All enemy types have weapon strengths and weaknesses.  Rean’s sword has more strength against certain enemies than, say, Elliot’s Orbal Staff.  This strength increases the chance of doing a super-powered critical attack, called a Smash Attack.

When a Smash Attack hits, you gain the ability to do a link attack.  Whoever your character is linked with can follow up with another attack.  Level up those characters with bonding events, interacting on train rides to Field Study locations, or having them in battle together opens more attacks during a Linked Attack, like being able to do finishing strikes, or even being able to attack a group of enemies instead of just the one that was attacked to begin the link.

When you win a battle, you gain experience points that goes towards leveling up as well as Link Levels.  You also gain Sepith of various variety, used for creating and buying new types of Quartz or being exchanged for money.  This is pretty much the same system as previous games, though there is now a special type of Sepith not used for Quartz that is solely used to be exchanged for cash.

Difficulty is something that’s there in the game but isn’t something that’s going to be constantly getting your Vita thrown at the wall.  I won’t say the game is easy.  Even if you choose the Easy difficulty, there will be many bosses that will test your skills.  But I wouldn’t say that you’ll need to do a lot of excessive level grinding to get through the game.

As far as length is concerned, prepare for a long game.  With each game’s chapter being many hours in length, I would expect you to spend no less than 50 hours in the game.  If you’re a fan of longer RPGs, then this will be a nice treat for you.

Controls

Moving around in the game isn’t all that hard to do.  But first thing’s first.  As long as you download the Day 1 Patch, you can play this game on the PlayStation TV.  However, you don’t get any special controls on the micro-console.  XSEED did not throw in any L2/R2 or L3/R3 controls.  Not that this is bad, but just something to note.

Moving around is done with the Left Analog Stick and moving the camera is done with the Right Analog Stick.  X is used for interacting with menus and NPCs and Circle is used to go back in menus.  Triangle brings up the customization menu and Square will pull up your current objective.  Start will pull up your Map and Select will pull up your notepad of story progress.  Finally, R is used to run instead of walk.

I wouldn’t worry about how the controls work.  They all work well and the game explains it to you well.

Presentation

Is there such a term as “Console Quality RPG” here?  As far as presentation goes with graphics, the game looks really nice.  The cel-shading looks very smooth and the environments look as detailed as can be.  The graphics engine is quite comparable to the PS3 version of the game.  Other than playable characters having orb shadows instead of accurate ones like enemies and environments, there’s little to no different in the graphical quality between the Vita and PS3 versions of the game, which is a pretty big feat.

The music, just as the series is known for, is varied and enjoyable.  If you’re a fan of game music, you’ll be humming the battle theme to yourself by the time you reach Chapter 3.  I haven’t found anything yet to quite rival “Fate of the Fairies” from Trails in the Sky SC, but it’s a pretty good soundtrack.

Performance is the only place this game has a fault.  Load times aren’t bad.  I never saw loading sequences that went over around 7-8 seconds, which is about the same as you have on the PS3 version.  The only problem are some slight frame dips.  The vast majority of these take place in scenes and have no impact on gameplay.  Some environments get a tad shaky, though.  I can’t say numbers, but I would say maybe around the same kind of drops as Sword Art Online: Lost Song saw.  Nothing major at all.  Just a minor annoyance to anyone who is picky about the frames constantly being the same.

One thing I may note, though, is that a lot of these I didn’t notice until after I downloaded the Day 1 Patch.  Whether that is the issue or not, I don’t know.  But, just stating an observation.

Title: Rodea the Sky Soldier
Developer: Kadokawa Games, NIS America
Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Game Type: 3DS
NA Availability: Digital
EU Availability: Digital
Block Usage:  10500

Rodea the Sky Soldier is a game that has been around a lot of confusion.  There are two main aspects that have been confusing people.  The first is the systems that it was developed for.  Rodea was originally developed to be a Wii game.  Then, while in development, it was also made for the Wii U.  Then later on, it was also developed for the 3DS.  It was a Wii game made past the Wii’s time, and it ended up being a multi-platform release even though the Wii version was developed by a different company than the other versions.

The second is fan interest and reception for the game.  Before its release in the West under NIS America, the internet was hyped for the game like crazy.  It was before I expanded, and even I had interest in the game from the 3DS emails I’d been getting from my NIS Press contact.  Then it released and it’s almost like it dropped off the face of the planet.  Very little of it is talked about and most of it is negative.  Particularly towards the Wii U and 3DS versions of the game.

So, here we are.  I saw and grabbed the 3DS version from Amazon US for a measly $22.  Considering how scarce 3DS games drop in price, I went for it.  So, after playing around with the game as well as doing research in the online world, we are at the point where we are.  Is the 3DS version of the game really that bad?  Is the game in general bad enough that it would be hyped and then just drop off the radar?  Let’s find out.  Here is my official review of Rodea the Sky Soldier for the Nintendo 3DS!

Story

Our story takes place in Garuda, a continent-based kingdom that floats in the sky.  Rodea, a robot soldier given a human heart, fights to protect Garuda as the neighboring kingdom attempts to invade.  He ends up fighting off their army of robots with the help of Princess Cecilia.

1,000 years later, Rodea awakens having been repaired by a young traveling inventor.  At the same time, the 1,000-year peace he had helped create is disrupted when the robot army returns, once again making an attempt at conquering Garuda.  Rodea then takes to the skies to fight off the army and protect Garuda once again.

The story of the game is something I somewhat enjoyed, but certainly wouldn’t be up in my Top Stories of the Year list.  It’s enjoyable during the experience, but it’s not something fans will be hounding the developers to continue in a sequel.

Gameplay

Rodea is a 3D action game with platforming and flying elements thrown into the mix.  Despite being published by an RPG company, this has very light RPG/Upgrade elements.  More or less, it’s a 3D action game where you fly around and platform as you go across each stage.

First of all is the big question many people ask, and that is how different each version of the game is.  Our main question is how the 3DS version stacks up against the console versions.  The answer is that it looks surprisingly just like the console games.  The 3DS version is basically a straight port of the Wii U version but with downgraded visuals.  No altered camera perspective.  No cut content.  It’s the Wii U version, but not as pretty and on a handheld.

Progressing through the game has you going between stages and a world map.  In stages, you’re flying and fighting enemies and going through check-points and whatnot.  But the World Map is just like a 2D World Map where you can select an area to move into as well as using gears and other items you collect during stages to upgrade Rodea, be it adding new weapons and skills or increasing his base stats.

During missions/stages, you are set in 3D environments as you explore to get to the end of the stage.  This involves platforming, fighting enemies, collecting items, and flying as you hear dialogue being sent to you at certain points of the stage. The dialogue just proceeds as you go along, like how it does in games like LEGO Jurassic World or Tomb Raider: Legend.  This pertains to actual story but also pertains to areas and acts as tutorials of sorts for types of rooms.

Flying is the main driving point of the game.  It is called Rodea the “Sky” Solider, after all.  Vita fans should be a little familiar with these mechanics as they gave me a bit of a “Gravity Rush” feel.  To fly you jump and then hit the flight button.  To determine where you fly, you have to actually aim your HUD in the general direction.  I would directly compare this to going from the floating state to the moving/falling state in Gravity Rush.

Flight can proceed in a few different ways.  In some areas, there are routes that you can fly into that act as rails.  Once you hit them in mid-flight, you are taken to where they are, around corners, curves, etc.  These take the control away from you and give it to the rails.  You also can fly into various objects and doors to take you to other areas, though the main flying sequences will be flying in straight lines to get to the next areas or fighting enemies by targets them in mid-flight.

Flying is not endless, though.  You have an energy meter that depletes as you fly.  Just like how you have to collect Gravity Energy or land to recharge in Gravity Rush, you have to collect energy or land in this game to recharge your flight gauge in order to start up again.

The last part of gameplay I should mention are the most fun; Boss Battles.  Rodea sports some pretty huge bosses as you play the game that you must use your flight capabilities to tackle.  While normal flight can be fun in and of itself, the boss fights are really where the game’s fun factor goes up.

As far as length goes, Rodea lasts around 8-9 hours, maybe 10 if you don’t progress very quickly.  Most of the stages aren’t very long, with the first few only lasting around 8-10 minutes a piece.  For an action game, it’s not a bad amount of length.

Controls

The control scheme is what makes people talk badly about the 3DS version of the game.  Actually, many of the folks over at r/3DS told me not to buy the game at all when I posted a sale over there because of the controls and how much superior everyone makes the Wii version out to be.  Obviously, it didn’t sway me, but you will see a lot of that across the net.  And the 3DS’ controls are the main complaint.

Once you start to play the game, you can really see why.  But I’ll complain about that in the next paragraph.  To move Rodea around, you use the Circle Pad and moving the camera is done with the L and R triggers.  The ZL, ZR, and C Stick buttons are not used for the camera controls, or anything for that matter.  The A button is used for jumping and flight targeting and B is used for attacking.  X and Y are used for other skills like a super jump and power-ups.

So what makes this so bad?  The first problem is the camera controls.  While C Stick camera options in 3DS games do work the best, L and R camera controls have been working well since the DS era.  However, when you hit L or R in this game, the game rotates the game in fixed locations.  You tap L or R and the camera does a 90-degree flip.  You cannot move the camera in any other way.  It’s the kind of clunky camera controls that makes you wonder what the developers were thinking.  This is a PSX level of camera controls.

The flying controls are pretty clunky as well, but the biggest issue with controls is the system’s random lack of responsiveness.  When I did the tutorial level, the jump button wouldn’t do a thing unless I hit it three or four times.  Once I got through that, it was fine for most of the game.  Every so often, though, it acts up and won’t do anything unless I hit it a few times.

Presentation

To add onto the issues with controls, the presentation took a pretty substantial hit on its trip from the Wii U to the 3DS.  Even considering the standards of the 3DS, this doesn’t look good.  Most of the environments don’t have much detail in them, most of the backgrounds are static images, the list goes on.

My first thought on the presentation being taken down was that they did it to help the game run well on the 3DS since it is the entire console game in a portable package.  Unfortunately, that didn’t pan out, either.  The frame-rate is pretty shakey for the majority of the game and some areas have some pretty substantial drops, especially when the game tries to have interactive backgrounds past the islands you go through.  In short, the game does not run well.

On the flip side, load times are pretty short.  Most loading sequences are only about 4-5 seconds long.  Not that it makes up for the other issues the game has.

Title: Atelier Ayesha Plus ~The Alchemist of Dusk~
Developer: Gust, Koei Tecmo
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Game Type: Vita
Download: 2.9 GB
NA Availability: Digital Download 
EU Availability: Digital Download
PSTV Support: Yes

Atelier is a name and franchise that is very controversial across RPG fans.  It’s a niche franchise, but when you’re concerning the RPGs on the Vita, what isn’t?  Atelier is a special breed of niche, though.  Lots of RPGs can be considered niche because very few RPGs are mainstream like Final Fantasy.  Even among RPGs, Atelier is a bit of a niche brand, much like Hyperdimension Neptunia can be at times.

Atelier is niche because it has a very different take on the genre, and it’s in a way that a lot of RPG gamers don’t like.  Most RPGs are about exploration and combat, especially on combat, party formations, skill trees, etc.  Atelier is a game that has combat, but focuses more on other areas, like item creation as well as time limitations.  The latter is the biggest reason a lot of RPG fans try Atelier and put it down a few hours later, not wanting anything to do with the franchise.

I’ll admit that the time restrictions in Atelier Totori really pushed me away from completing that title.  I hated that the game constantly reminded me that I was running out of time and that I couldn’t go and explore at my own pace.  Thanks to a recent bit of funding thanks to my Fullscreen partnership, though, I’m giving the series another shot.  Here is my official review of Atelier Ayesha Plus: The Alchemist of Dusk!

Story

The Atelier series is known for its casual and light-hearted stories.  Unlike games like Final Fantasy, Tales, and Ys, Atelier is never about a world-ending conflict.  The stories are more condensed around the main character’s personal life.  In Atelier Totori, it was about the character being licensed as an adventurer and discovering the past of her mother.

This game follows a young apothecary named Ayesha, whom works in a small workshop near a set of ancient ruins.  As she travels to collect herbs for the medicine she makes and gives to the nearby town, she happens upon flowers with an unearthly glow.  Before she can muster up a question, an apparition of her sister appears, whom had been “spirited away” some time before, presumed dead.

With the knowledge that her little sister is still alive somewhere, Ayesha embarks on a journey to research more into the glowing flowers that enabled their communication and to find her sister.

The story and plot are pretty light-hearted and less serious than you’d expect from most RPGs.  Many of the character interactions are more friendly and less “we have a serious threat on our hands”, so those not used to the series may be in for a fresh change of pace with this, along with all of the other Atelier games the Vita has to offer (Totori, Rorona, Meruru, and the upcoming Escha + Logy).

Gameplay

Atelier Ayesha Plus is a turn-based RPG mixed with an item synthesis game.  It’s hard to just call it a turn-based RPG because of how the focus is divided between combat and item creation.  So let’s just call it both an RPG and Item Creation game.  It is also an enhanced port of the PS3 title, Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk.

There are two things we should go over before describing how the game works.  Since this is my first Atelier review, let’s talk about the business model of Atelier.  A friend of mine asks every so often if Atelier is just a rehash of the same gameplay system with new story.  For all intents and purposes, it’s not far from the truth.  Atelier runs the same basic formula of exploring, time restrictions, dungeon crawling, synthesizing, etc.  There was a ton in Ayesha that worked exactly the same way in Totori, and that’s 4 Vita games back.

What makes Atelier unique is that it constantly adds new features to the system.  A little extra combat skill here, some extra synthesis options there.  What makes Ayesha Plus unique is that the time restrictions are much more lax this time around and the inclusion of the Memory system.  The Memory System is from Atelier Escha + Logy, the sequel to Ayesha, which lets you use points to unlock memories based on story events to give you extra stats and gameplay enhancements, like extra Experience in battle.  Speaking of the sequel, Ayesha Plus also has a couple extra bosses from said sequel.

What this boils down to is that all of the changes in each new game are small, but they can modify the feel enough that it seems like there’s more than just some minor gameplay changes.  Playing Totori and then Ayesha really shows how lax the time restraints are.  There are still time restraints but there’s a huge amount of excess time, so there’s plenty of room for error and getting side-tracked.

Progression in the game is divided up between three main areas: Story Events, Exploration, and Item Creation.  You will always have some sort of objective that progresses the next story events, and these objectives are always spawned by story events.  Because of this, and because of how varied these can be, it’s a good idea to keep a constant eye on your Notebook to look at what objectives you have and what they unlock.  I say the latter because many objectives don’t unlock more story and you could be wasting precious time on a dozen side missions not realizing that they’re side missions.

Exploration is done in towns as well as dungeons.  Almost every point on the map is a dungeon filled with monsters and harvest points.  Monsters you can fight for item drops as well as experience towards leveling up and getting stronger.  Harvest Points are for collecting materials for item creation.  Each dungeon has a set number of encounters and harvest points and once they’re used up, you have to leave and come back to collect from them again.

Item Creation is the basis of the entire series, and that is the lovely craft called Alchemy.  All side-quests and many story objectives require you to create items.  You do this in your workshop by combining materials into new items using recipes that you learn from story events or from Alchemy Books you can buy in the shops in certain towns.  The more you make, the higher your Alchemy Level rises, and that further increases what you can make.

Aside from quest and objective goals, you also have to make pretty much everything you use in battle.  Healing Items, Attack Items, Support Items, etc.  You can register these items in shops and then buy in bulk, but you have to be able to create them yourself before you gain access to that option.  The heart of Atelier has always been the item creation system, and that’s a huge part of this game as well.

Now let’s talk about what everyone doesn’t like, and that is Time Management.  You have 3 years of in-game time to find and rescue Ayesha’s sister.  Getting there is playing the game.  Time is taken up by pretty much everything you do.  Traveling across the map, using harvest points, fighting battles, creating items, leaving and re-entering a dungeon.  All of it uses up time and if you don’t make it to the final area before the end of the 3 years, the game will end and you’ll get the bad ending.

The good thing is that the game gives you a ton of extra time.  If you follow everything by the book or follow a guide, you can get to the final dungeon barely halfway into the second of the 3 years, nearly giving you half of your total time to explore and do side-missions.  That is not to say it’s impossible to get the bad ending without trying to, but there’s a lot more freedom than in past titles.  Enough that you don’t have to constantly worry about it.

Combat is less of a focus, but still here.  You have turn-based battles against enemy parties, with the main unique aspect being team actions.  As you fight, each character’s assist meter will go up.  Once you have enough, they can interact and add extra actions to a turn.  These can range from having a certain character shield someone else from an incoming attack, or having them perform follow-up attacks when an ally strikes at an enemy.  When you win, you gain experience towards leveling up along with money.  It’s a pretty standard RPG formula.

With the base game along with the extra bosses, you’re looking at around 25-30 hours of game time.  Once you beat the game, you can play again with New Game Plus.  With this, though, you don’t get to carry over much.  All that carries over to a new game is equipment on your characters.  No ingredients, money, leveling, or anything like that.  Equipment aside, it’s like just starting a new game.

Controls

Controlling the game is no hard task.  You don’t need to worry about the Vita’s special features as it does not use them.  Touch controls are not present, nor are motion controls.  It may also be worth noting that the game does run on the PlayStation TV, but doesn’t have any special controls for the extra buttons on the DS3 and DS4 controllers.

Moving around is done with the Left Analog Stick and the D-Pad can also be used to move, but only on the map.  The Right Analog is used to zoom in and out in dungeons and in scenes.  The L and R triggers are used to access various systems, like saving the game or your notebook.  This varies depending on whether you’re in a dungeon, the map, or a town.  Then the face buttons.  X handhelds choosing options or interaction.  Circle lets you cancel a menu option or jump in the field.  And triangle pulls up the customization menu.

Presentation

The Atelier games have always been known to be visually beautiful, and Ayesha is the same way.  It looks like a PS3 game and not much downgrading was done to make it work on the Vita.  This is the way all Atelier Vita games have been.  The visuals are nothing less than gorgeous and put many other Vita games to shame.

The visual detail of more advanced Atelier games do come at a price.  Ayesha Plus has a clear struggle with running on the Vita.  There are many areas with slowdown and lag as you are running through various areas.  Many environments are small, which helps, but there’s a clear sign of struggle for a fair amount of the game.  The game also fidgets and gets jumpy when loading certain areas or battles.

Next is the voice-work.  The game has dual audio options, which is great for those of you that do not like hearing English dub in your RPGs.  There’s a weird aspect of this, though.  The Japanese Voices cover pretty much every scene in the entire game.  The English Dub barely covers half.  I did some research and, as far as I know, this was the same in the PS3 version of the game.  The game is far from the max file size for a game, so why would the development team only dub half of the game in English when the entire game is dubbed in Japanese?

Title: Dementium Remastered
Developer: Renegade Kid
Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Game Type: 3DS
NA Availability: Digital
EU Availability: Digital (Q1 2016)
Block Usage:  1,022

Handhelds and the horror genre have a very short history.  Even throwing the DS, 3DS, PSP, and PS Vita together, you don’t come out with an abundance of horror titles.  In this gen, sure, you’ve got horror indies plus Resident Evil: Revelation 1 and 2 which were shooters in horror settings.  Then you have Silent Hill Origins, Resident Evil Deadly Silence, and a few others.  But for a single system, there just isn’t much out there.

Back in the Nintendo DS and PSP gen, a horror game came out for Nintendo’s console that helped to push along the idea of horror games working on handhelds.  That game was called Dementium: The Ward,  and was originally an idea pitched at Konami for a Nintendo DS Silent Hill game.  However, Konami rejected it and it became Dementium: The Ward instead.

The game did well enough that it got a sequel, both on the Nintendo DS and PC.  Past that, the developers deemed it fit to be remade and remastered onto the Nintendo 3DS.  So, here we go, horror fans.  This is my official review of Dementium Remastered!

Story

The plot of this game follows a man that awakens in a strange hospital.  As the game begins, you’re given no background information, so you just awaken in a dark hospital full of gruesome monstrosities.  It isn’t later that the plot is revealed to you, which I will not reveal because it will give you lots and lots of end-game spoilers.

For overall plot, there barely is any.  Even when you get to the end and things are explained, there is a lot that is not explained.  This is a pretty common thing in the horror genre, but I couldn’t help but feel like there should have been more.  The lack of more story gave it a “This was just a test to see if we could make a horror game work on a handheld” game.

Gameplay

Dementium Remastered is a first-person horror game with some first-person shooting games thrown into the mix.  It could be labeled as either one, but I think there are more horror elements in play than shooting elements.  For the sake of the horror genre, let’s call it a horror game with shooting elements.  The gameplay mirrors how it was on the Nintendo DS.

Since this is essentially a remake, let’s talk about the changes they made.  The original Dementium was a very hard game to get through, and it’s been balanced to be more doable.  Enemies no longer respawn when you leave rooms, there are manual save points and there are now dual analog controls, thanks to the New 3DS.  In short, it’s been improved by a lot.

As you play the game, you walk from room to room, hoping to eventually find your way out of the hospital you wake up in.  To get around, you have to go through doors as well as solve mild puzzles to get key items and fight against enemies and bosses that stand in your way.  The majority of the game will be going from room to room and avoiding or fighting enemies.  Puzzles and Bosses appear much less often.

Since this is a horror game, the big question on your mind is this: Is the game scary?  The answer to that is yes.  The game’s environment is very dark and impossible to see to navigate without a flashlight being turned on.  You can see what’s right next to you, but everything a few feet in front of you and beyond is pitch black without a light shining on it or lightning from a storm temporarily lighting it up.  You have to rely on your flashlight to navigate or sound if you don’t have the flashlight equipped.

This is where some of the tension comes from.  The flashlight cannot be equipped at the same time as a weapon, so if there are enemies in the room, the flashlight goes off and you’re left in the dark as the enemy works their way towards you.  Enemies hide in secret rooms, in plain sight, or can spawn directly behind you.  Because of this, the game has a bunch of jump scares built in.  You’re walking along and hear an enemy, not realizing he’s two feet behind you until you turn and see him clawing at your face.

The game’s environment is set in a way that it remains creepy throughout the majority of the game.  Every time I was playing for a bit at night (the only proper time to play horror games) and felt like I got a handle on the environment, a new kind of jump scare was thrown in that made me jump.  I know some horror fans aren’t into jump scares, but if you play the game in a proper horror setting, you’ll definitely be on edge once you get into it.

One thing that I’ll say about the game that isn’t so bright is that it is repetitive, and this is kind of both a gameplay and presentation thing.  The environments are very repetitive because almost every hall in the entire game looks exactly the same as every other hall in the game.  The hallways at the beginning of the game and the end of the game are identical.  It really feels like there should’ve been more than one type of hallway built into the game.

Now we get to length.  Over the course of the game, you’ll be spending around 2-3 hours, depending on how quickly you can progress through it.  For today’s age, that isn’t a great amount of length, but given how repetitive the environments are and how little story there is, it’s not a bad balance.

Controls

Controls get a little tricky in this game.  If you’ve got a Circle Pad Pro or a New 3DS, you’ll have the delight of using the dual analog movement and camera controls.  Moving is done with the Circle Pad and the C Stick is used to move the camera, which is a wonderfully comfortable way to play the game.  You can also use the face buttons to move the camera.  The D-Pad and touch screen can be used to change weapons.  Finally, the L and R triggers are used for attacking and interactive with items and doors.

The Z buttons are incorporated into the game as well.  The L and R features of attacking and interaction are doubled to the ZL and ZR buttons.  Nothing too major for this part, but every New 3DS button is used in this game.

The controls get a little wonky, though, when it comes to switching weapons.  You use the D-Pad or the touch screen to switch weapons.  Since the game doesn’t pause when you use the D-Pad, you have to strategize where you are or move your right hand away from the controls to use the touch screen when you want a specific weapon equipped.  It’s not a terrible hindrance, but it is a bit awkward.

Presentation

Visually, Dementium has had a nice amount of smoothing happen.  There are far less jagged edges in the presentation and, while it wasn’t a complete visual overhaul, it looks really nice.  That is tied with the very smooth and flowing frame rate.  It’s a flowing 60 frames-per-second, I might add.  Quite a nice touch for a handheld game.

With all of its charm, though, there is one downside to the presentation, and that is stability.  A few times as I played the game, I had it freeze on me.  The game refused to respond to any sort of input.  This never froze the entire 3DS system, but just the game.  Just be sure to note and think on this as you play the game.  Never pass up a single save point as you never know when the game may freeze on you.

Title: Riviera: The Promised Land
Developer: Sting, Atlus
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Game Type: PSP
Download: 477 MB
NA Availability: Digital Download
EU Availability: Digital Download
PSTV Support: Yes

Riviera: The Promised Land is a name thrown around with RPG gamers and in most high esteem.  This is more common in the handheld world as Riviera has always been a handheld game.  It originally released back on the Game Boy Advance, and got a lot of fans, then.  Sting has a lot of reputation as an RPG developer, and a great deal of it came from this game, back on the GBA.

We aren’t going to talk about the GBA game today, though.  I may be covering all handhelds now, but maybe that should be all “current” handhelds.  After all, there’s no way for a 3DS or PS Vita to play this particular GBA game.

That’s where today’s game comes in.  Riviera was ported and enhanced onto the PSP during last generation, and that is a game that both the PS Vita and PlayStation TV can play.  So, that’s what we’re going over!  Here is my retro review of the PSP version of Riviera: The Promised Land!

Story

The plot revolves around the war of Ragnarok, where two entities fought to the death.  This war was between the Gods of Asgard and the Demons of Utgard.  After a long war was fought, the Gods sacrified their lives to create the Grim Angels to fend off and eventually defeat the demons.  Afterwards, the remains of Utgard became known as Riviera.

A thousand years later, an angel named Ein is traveling under orders to attack Riviera, but is instead swept away into the land on his own.  After awakening and exploring the land and learning of its true history on his own, he works against both surviving Demons and others to stop a greater evil that threatens the world.

The story of Riviera has long since been praised.  It has a typical Good vs Evil story that heavily takes inspiration from Ragnarok from Norse Mythology.  The bright spots of the story are that it takes this typical black and white plot and adds a lot of grey to it.  Much of the story has you discovering grey areas of the story that shows that it’s not as black-and-white as he was led to believe.

Gameplay

Riviera is very difficult to place and describe other than by calling it an RPG.  But just calling it a normal RPG really doesn’t do it justice.  It’s like a Strategy RPG, but it’s kind of like a normal turn-based RPG.  And it’s also kind of like a grid-based RPG like the original Fallout.  It’s a bunch of RPG elements thrown into one with a bunch of ideas and a system that RPGs rarely visit and implement.

Exploration is kind of like a grid where each chapter has several stages you can visit.  Exploring them is done by a more of point-and-click menu style than free exploration.  On each stage, there’s an area you can move to or investigate by hitting a button.  And they’ve also got a discovery feature built in where you can use Trigger Points you earn from combat to find optional locations, battles, and items.

Some of these locations also have puzzle elements thrown into the mix.  Some locations will hurt you or help you, and you can choose what to do, like whether or not you save a fairy or not can affect your stats.  You also have quick-time events that appear very quickly in certain areas.  These have button inputs that you put in very suddenly for various reasons.  It could be to avoid a guard and skip a battle or avoiding a trap in a chest that you find.  For those that know, I would directly relate it to the input style of Firion’s EX Burst from the Dissidia: Final Fantasy series.

Then comes combat.  Combat is interesting from the start.  You can take 4 items into battle with you, including weapons.  Ein’s weapon is a special weapon that can be used an infinite number of times, but most others’ weapons instantly break upon use.  These weapons serve as items and come in bulk.  So for a 3-character party, three of the four items you can bring into battle could be weapons for each character, leaving only a single item for support, armor, offense, etc.  That’s where the first part of the strategy comes from.

When combat starts, it plays out like a normal turn-based RPG.  Your party can be arranged in two rows: Front and Back, and you take part in turn based battles with enemy parties where no one moves around.  The only exception to this is when certain attacks are used that can flip the arrangement and formation of a party.

Fighting is in the form of choosing an item to use during your turn, including weapons.  If you choose another character’s special weapon, you’ll instead try to cast a spell.  The idea is to know what to give to what character each turn based on their position and the enemy they choose to combat each turn.  That issue is in and of itself more of the strategy.  You can’t manually choose which enemy gets attacked.  The game chooses that for you.

You don’t gain experience in battle for level ups.  Instead you gain more points for each weapon as you fight and you’ll eventually gain new skills.  When this happens, your stats will increase, so this is the game’s version of leveling up.  The same type of outcome happens, but there aren’t really “Level Up” screens.

Since you don’t really get to explore (unless you’re in a town) and every new stage advances the story, you don’t have the opportunity of exploring dungeons and grinding for levels if things start to get hard.  This is noticeable pretty early in the game as the difficulty for some battles increases pretty quickly.  Thankfully, the game has a Practice Battle option in the menu that you can use to fight previous battles.  In these battles, you still gain points towards Skill Learning and status increases, but items don’t diminish as you use them here.

The only problem here is that stages give you prompts when you’re headed towards bigger battles to save your game.  This can help but also hurt.  Some stages have large boss fights or harder fights in general that you may not be prepared for.  Some of these stages allow you to return to previous stages before the battles spawn.  Many do not, and spawn the battles whether you’re ready or not.  There are many areas where you can get stuck with no way to go back from a save file and in a battle you’re ill-prepared for to either restart the game from the beginning or hope you get extremely lucky after failing so many times.

The only other thing to say about progression is that each chapter is basically a set of these stages.  Once you finish them, you get a little screen about your scores regarding discovering items and Trigger Points earned.  Then, you’re set to go to the next chapter.  You continue this until the end of the game.  Overall, I would wager the game lasts around 30-35 hours, give or take.

Controls

Point-and-click progression.  How hard can it be, right?  It’s not all that hard to navigate the game and the intro chapter does a really nice job of explaining it to you.  Now, this is a PSP game, so don’t go in and expect touch controls or anything.  Just the normal controls.  And the R and L trigger buttons working on R1, L1, R2, and L2 on the PlayStation TV.

Whenever a button is required, the option will have a little symbol by it to clarify which button is needed.  During exploration, the D-Pad will be used for selecting where to go and what to investigate.  It’s also used for navigating the menu.  The face buttons are more or less used for battle menus, but you can also use X and Circle to navigate different types of Exploration Menus, like investigation and moving.  The L and R triggers are used for pulling up enemy information as well as skipping text in scenes.

Presentation

The visual presentation of Riviera holds up surprisingly well.  My first thought on a GBA to PSP game would have low enough visuals to be a blurry mess on the Vita and especially the PlayStation TV.  To my surprise, it still looks quite good.  Obviously, it has 2D visuals, so those not a fan of those may turn away, but for those that like them, it looks quite good.

I have no quarrels with the performance of the game.  The load times are longer than the GBA release, but never exceed a few seconds.  By PSP and Vita standards, it runs quite well and there’s nothing to really complain about here.  It even has a bunch of Voice Acting that the original didn’t have.

Title: Slice It!
Developer: Come2us, Arc System Works, Aksys Games
Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Game Type: 3DS
NA Availability: Digital
EU Availability: Currently Unavailable
Block Usage:  468

A lot of times, there are certain types of games you expect from certain developers.  Take a moment and think about it.  With Square Enix, I expect games to mostly be RPGs (Outside of them having acquired Eidos Interactive).  With TT Fusion, I expect platforming and puzzle games.  The list goes on.  There are just specific genres that certain developers do best or some publishers generally always go for with localizations.

Every so often, you get a game from a developer or publisher that is completely outside the norm for them.  I had that happen this past week with a game I was given to review by Aksys Games.  When I think of Aksys and Arc System Works, I think of games like BlazBlue, Sorcery Saga, and Xblaze.  What I got was something very unexpected.  It was a puzzle game, and not only that, a very Mobile-like puzzle game.

With the idea of unexpected games in mind, here is my review of the Nintendo 3DS version of Slice It!

Story

Due to this game having no story, this section shall remain blank.

Gameplay

Slice It is a geometry-based puzzle game.  I’m not sure if this is actually a known genre, but that’s the best way I can describe it.  In the game, you solve puzzles and the theme is very much based on basic shapes and geometry.

You play through the game in stages.  You have 3 basic game modes you can do.  The first two are Episode 1 and Episode 2, which function as the main game.  They each feature 100 different puzzles to go through.  Then you have the Quick Mode, where you basically do endless puzzles, trying to solve as many as you can in a certain timeframe.  It’s pretty much the same amount of content that there was in the original Mobile version that this was ported from.  This is both good and bad.  The good is that there’s a good bit of content.  The bad thing is that it hardly justifies paying a lot more money for the game for the near-non-existent price tag on Mobile.

Playing the game is a pretty basic idea from Geometry: Symmetry, for lack of a better term.  Each stage shows a certain shape or collections of shapes that connect together.  Your task is to divide said shape into a certain number of shapes of relatively equal size and you also have a certain number of lines (turns) to do this.  You may be presented with a triangle with 3 “pencils” for turns and will be required to divide it into 5 different shapes of relative size.

The premise of the game, as you can see is extremely simple.  You make lines to divide shapes, and that’s all there is to it.  No story.  No status elements.  Just dividing up shapes.  While there is a Hint system where the game will help you with each puzzle, it’s an incredibly simple Mobile game and that’s exactly what it still feels like when playing on the 3DS.

That’s not to say it isn’t a fun game, though.  While each puzzle is simple and short, the harder the game gets, the more satisfying it is to eventually solve it.  I consider myself fairly good with math and I was getting challenged less than 40 stages into the game. Without a guide, it will definitely challenge you, and the game encourages you to figure it out yourself.  The in-game hints run out quickly and you have to play Quick Mode to be able to get more.

As you play the game, you can also work on unlocking more content, mostly in the form of different color palettes to use while you play the game.  You won’t be working towards a lot of unlockable extras, but more or less playing the game as more of a pick-up-and-play experience.

Considering there are more than 200 stages to go through, it’s got a fair about of length to it.  If you get one right the first try, you could probably beat the game in less than an hour.  Given the fact that a lot of them are very hard, I would increase that to at least 4-5 hours.  That is assuming that you figure each out yourself and don’t use Google to find a guide to tell you the answers for each one.

Controls

Controls for the game are good and bad at the same time.  First of all, there are almost no button controls in this game at all.  The only button feature to know of is moving your line with the Circle Pad while also holding the touch screen to make a line.

The rest of the game is completely touch-based, just like the Mobile release.  The lack of button controls can be forgiven with the fact that the game’s requirements for lines are very precise.  One of the lackluster features in the Mobile version is that it was hard to make precise lines.  Thanks to the 3DS’ stylus pen, this is no longer an issue.

Presentation

Visually, the game looks really nice and crisp.  That’s not the interesting part of the presentation, though.  This is a 3DS game that uses portrait orientation, similar to Sunflowers on the PS Vita.  This means you actually have to hold your system side-ways to be able to play it.  It works, but it’s definitely a little weird at first.

I don’t have any complaints about the sound or performance.  Everything runs really well and the music is pretty nice.  I won’t say it’s overly memorable music, but it has a very family/children tone to it, which is clearly how this game was made and the audience it is intended for.

Title: Xenoblade Chronicles 3D
Developer: Monolith Soft, Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Game Type: 3DS
NA Availability: Digital | Retail
EU Availability: Digital | Retail
Block Usage:  28,800

Xeno is a series that has been around since the days of the original PlayStation, but it never stays in the same series.  Xenogears came out on the PlayStation, thanks to Square Enix.  It’s highly regarded as one of the RPG Gems of the PlayStation and is also on PSN as a PS One Classic.  Then came Xenosaga on the PlayStation 2, which was more of a spiritual successor to Xenogears than an actual sequel.  This lasted 3 individual episodes that released as separate PS2 games, but the same overall story.

Then came the Xeno series that modern gamers are all aware of: Xenoblade.  On the Nintendo Wii, Xeno was brought to the gaming world as Xenoblade Chronicles.  It was a different release, for many reasons.  First is that it came late in the Wii’s life cycle and an open-world (in a sense) RPG isn’t exactly the genre the Wii is known best for.  Tied with the fact that GameStop claimed retail exclusivity of it in North America, it quickly became scarce.  Still, its popularity went up very quickly.  When the new Smash Bros was first announced, Shulk, the main character of Xenoblade Chronicles, was one of the highest demanded playable characters.

Bringing the game to a more wide audience and fixing the retail problem, Nintendo decided to port the game to the Nintendo 3DS.  This was also coinciding with the launch of the New Nintendo 3DS, the new model with extra CPU power (for games that are programmed to use it).  This game remains the main reason to buy a New Nintendo 3DS, since it won’t launch or work on the older models (3DS, 3DS XL, 2DS)  So, here is my official review of Xenoblade Chronicles 3D!

Story

The story takes place on top of two giant mythical creatures, the Bionis and Mechonis, that fought a great war in the distant past.  Now their bodies are homes to two races of people.  Humans live on the Bionis, having made villages and settlements on parts of the body.  The Mechonis is home to the Mechon, villains that have raided and attacked the Bionis’ inhabitants on multiple occasions.  You play as Shulk, a citizen of one of the Bionis Colonies, whom comes in contact with a magical weapon known as the Manado, which is tied to the old war.
After his colony is attacked by the Mechon and the Manado comes to him, he travels the world to track down the Mechons that attacked his home, unknowingly getting wrapped up in a much bigger plot than petty revenge.  The story is one of the strongest points of the game.  There is some really nice writing and dialogue here as well as the overall story and story flow.

If I were to compare it to anything, I would directly compare the progression and feel of both the story and the game to Final Fantasy.  Not to modern Final Fantasy, but the feel just has that Final Fantasy RPG feel, like the feel you get when you play the PS1 FF games.  It’s just got a feel that just feels “right” to me and gives me the same feeling I got the first time I went through Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX.

Gameplay

Xenoblade Chronicles is an RPG that is another that doesn’t fall into one subgenre.  It’s an Action RPG, but also has strategy elements.  In other ways, the combat feels like a normal turn-based RPG but with free roam around the field.  Kind of like Neptunia, but more action-oriented.  It’s very hard to define as a single genre.  Let’s just call it an RPG for now, with emphasis on Action RPG mechanics.

Progressing through the game has you exploring the world in a similar sense and style as you do in Final Fantasy X but not as linear.  You run from place to place and the sections between areas is freely explore-able.  While you do have quick travel to go to places you’ve already found and discovered (a little Bethesda element thrown in with discovering locations), everything you can explore, unless they’re locked until a certain story event happens.

As you explore, story events will spawn automatically, but you’ll also have NPCs all over that will give you side quests that you can do.  While all of these are optional and small tasks, they’re worth looking into.  It could lead you to get a material you need for an upgrade or much-needed equipment upgrades.  Again, you don’t have to do any of these, in favor of keeping on towards story objectives to advance the story to the next area.

The rest of the game will basically be spawning story events and fighting enemies, both random encounters and scripted story fights.  When combat starts, you get access to the unique battle system that makes me at a loss to define this game as a specific genre.  Enemies are set on the field already, so you can avoid them if you don’t want to fight them.  You can also sneak up on them to initiate a pre-emptive strike.  The nice thing is that the battle starts in real-time.  You don’t have to go to another screen for the stage.

In combat you have free roam to run around the area and several skills equipped that can be used for attacks and support.  Using up one of these skills will disable it while it recharges.  This requires you to switch to other skills while you try to move around and avoid enemy attacks.  (Avoiding isn’t as easy as other RPGs since there’s no dodge button)  Since there is a recharge time, you will likely find many situations where you’ve used all your skills and are just running around, waiting for them to recharge so you can attack again.

There are special skills you can use every so often as well.  Chain Attacks are one of these attacks, letting time stop and each party member initiate one skill while the enemy is helpless to evade.  The other kind of the Monado skills, which are essential for specific boss fights.  Many bosses require you to attack them enough to stagger them and then again to take them to a disabled state.  Before that you can barely do any damage to them.  This is very similar to staggering enemies in Final Fantasy XIII.  Some of these bosses can only be staggered by being hit by the Monado, which brings quite a bit of strategy to the table.

After battle, you have experience to level up and increase your stats.  With this, you also have skills and arts you can learn.  Skills are passive skills like increasing stats, starting battle with buffs, etc.  Each person has a skill tree and you can equip one and they’ll work towards each skill as you fight.  Arts, however, are learned via story events.  Enhancing these is a matter of getting points as you fight and dividing the points to leveling up each art.

This continues for the majority of the game, while other effects will also add themselves later on, as the Monado grows.  These can be useful, like seeing enemy attacks before they happen so you can avoid them.  Over the course of the game, you will also spend quite a bit of time.  We’re looking at 30-40 hours, at least.  So, it’s a pretty long trek for a handheld RPG.

Controls

The controls in this game are plentiful.  There are features for every button, including every new button included on the New 3DS.  Both Z buttons and the C Stick are used.  ZL is used to swap menus on the touch screen and ZR brings up the full map.  Finally, the C Stick is used to move the camera.

Moving around is done with the Circle Pad and the D-Pad is used for navigating both the customization and battle menus.  The L and R triggers will let you lock onto a nearby enemy and open the menu that allows you to initiate combat.  Then the face buttons.  A and B are used in menus, but B is also used for quick-time events in combat.  X and Y and used for other features, like pulling up menus while roaming the field.

All in all, it’s a good control scheme, and the first to “officially” begin the twin-stick feel with the C Stick as a camera control.  (Although many previous titles have utilized this, like Kingdom Hearts 3D and Resident Evil: Revelations).

Presentation

Visually, the game doesn’t look bad, but I won’t say that it looks fantastic, either.  It’s a huge game, so visual downgrade was pretty much a given.  I would put the visual level of Xenoblade 3D around mid-tier PSP graphics.  There’s also a bit of blur on the character portraits.  Whether that is because my unit is an XL or not, I’m not sure.  There’s some detail, but honestly, I was expecting it to look better than it does.

The actual game engine runs quite well.  The physics engine is nice, for you can see hair and weapons falling and swaying back and forth as you run.  So there’s kudos for that, and the game runs pretty well.  There are some slight frame drops from time to time, but negligible.

Title: Baseball Riot
Developer: 10 Ton Games
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Game Type: Vita
Download: 28 MB
NA Availability: Digital Download 
EU Availability: Digital Download
PSTV Support: Yes

When indie game, Tennis in the Face, came to the PS Vita, I found a surprisingly large amount of fun in it.  It was like a little mobile game with a simple premise, yet it was addicting.  I kept playing and playing and wanted to get high scores on every stage.  It’s not every day I get into a game like that, let alone a smaller indie game.

When I heard about Baseball Riot last week, I was very intrigued and interested.  By the looks of the game, coming from the same company, it seemed to be a baseball themed game of the same type.  I ended up contacting the developer about PlayStation TV compatibility and also got a review copy to try out and play.  So, that’s been my gaming for the past many days.

Now is the time to tell you all my thoughts on the game, though.  Those who played Tennis in the Face may know what to expect, and the person that redeemed the code of this game I sent out on Twitter definitely knows what to expect.  For everyone else, here we go.  This is my official review of Baseball Riot!

Story

The plot of Baseball Riot is about a baseball player that gets gravely injured while playing a game, suspecting foul play is involved with someone intentionally wishing to disable him.  After his old team is taken over by the Explodz company of energy drinks, he seeks revenge on being forced out of his career.  So he heads out, bat in hand, to take down Explodz, investors, players, and anyone else he needs to.

The story of the game really is just there for props, and was made quite similar to how Tennis in the Face was.  It has a sport, a player forced out of a career, and taking revenge upon Explodz.  What I feel about how the story is will be explained more in detail when we get to the Presentation section.

Gameplay

Baseball Riot is an arcade-style puzzle game that proceeds in stages as well as an overall world map.  Puzzle is definitely the right genre, but it’s got a bit of an action element to it as well, since some stages do progress in a bit of a fast-paced type of action.  But, it’s a puzzle game that proceeds in stages.  As much as handheld gamers may not wish me to make the comparison, the base genre isn’t all that different from games like Angry Birds.

The game has an overworld map that is kind of like a grid.  There are 8 sections to the map, with only the first being available to you at the start.  Each grid has about 13 stages for you to play through.  The more stages you play, the more stages you unlock.  Finally, you’ll need to amass enough points from playing the stages to unlock the Airport that takes you to the next area.  This progression continues throughout the entire game.

Each stage has you and enemies set up on a stage of platforms.  You cannot move from where you are, but you can set up your aim from any angle you want from where you start.  You then unleash a baseball that will then ricochet off any wall it hits, taking down any enemy in its path until it is expended and disappears.  Then you use another, and another.  You keep doing this until you run out of balls or you defeat all enemies on-screen and collect all stars in each stage.

The biggest different between Tennis in the Face and Baseball Riot is the inclusion of Stars.  In the prior game, all you had to do was defeat enemies in a certain number of moves.  To get stars in this game, you have to collect them as you play, which makes it considerably harder to get high-rank scores in each stage.  Tying this with the fact that airports only can be used when you get a certain number of stars in each area makes this a much more difficult game.

This is actually something I liked about the game.  I flew through almost all of Tennis in the Face without much difficulty at all.  This game, however, I started having issues and having to back-track for stars within second and third areas.

As with the previous game, though, you should watch for it becoming repetitive.  You are essentially just doing the same thing over and over and over again.  I would suggest this be played more casually and not tackled all at once.  When I played it, I did some stages in the morning and some at night after work and it never got dull.  But if I’d tried to tackle the whole thing in one day, I doubt it would’ve been that way.

Speaking of doing the whole thing, let’s talk about length.  There are a little over 100 stages across the game.  Each stage can be tackled in a minute or less when you know what to do.  Considering this and time for replaying stages and backtracking, I would say the average length would be about 4-5 hours, give or take.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t very hard to do.  You can do this with either touch controls or button controls.  Obviously, button controls is preferred if you’re using a PlayStation TV.  But, if you have a Dual Shock 4 controller, they might be worth looking at, regardless.

With touch, it’s simple.  You just tap on whatever options or menus you want to go to.  Then, in a stage, you just hold and slide your finger on the screen as you aim and let go to fire.  With button controls, you use the D-Pad to navigate menus and the X and Circle buttons to enter or go back in menus.  In the stages, you use the Left Analog Stick to aim and then X or R to fire.  Finally, you can use Triangle to restart a stage.

With this game, touch controls are a little better to use because it is easier to set up precise angled shots with it.  Some stages require you to aim at a specific area and it’s a little easier to do with touch than with the analog sticks.

Presentation

Visually, the game looks good.  Everything is drawn and represented well and full of color.  The performance also runs quite well.  The save screens sometimes hiccup with frames, but nothing worth noting that would make someone change their mind about a purchase.

What I don’t like about the presentation is recycled content.  This is essentially a baseball version of Tennis in the Face, and the sounds and some enemy types make it very well known.  A lot of the sounds, music, character models, and even enemy types are taken straight from Tennis in the Face.  Sometimes it takes some time before you can get to the point of actually hearing a sound effect that wasn’t used in the previous game.

It works, but you cannot help but wonder why they decided to use a lot of the same resources.

Is it really the 28th already?  The month sure has flown by and I was hoping to get more done by its end.  I can’t believe I only got 8 reviews done this month.  But it is what it is, right?

So, I’m here to give you my Review Recap for January 2016.  There are only 8 reviews in it, but I am currently working on some games and reviews for the beginning of next month, including Atelier Escha & Logy Plus and a few others from both the Vita and 3DS sides of things.

Here are this month’s reviews:

Nintendo 3DS Reviews

Dementium Remastered
Rodea, the Sky Soldier
Slice It! 
Xenoblade Chronicles 3D

PlayStation Vita Reviews

Atelier Ayesha Plus: The Alchemist of Dusk – Video Review
Baseball Riot
Riviera: The Promised Land
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel – Video Review

Really a weak month on reviews, though a lot of it is due to me getting into a new job and adjusting to the schedule.  Hopefully I can get more worked out next month and have more for you guys, in terms of reviews.

See you in a couple days with the PSTV Recap for January!

It’s that time of the month, isn’t it?  This is actually a very exciting part of the month for me.  The PlayStation TV is something I love supporting and I always love both updating my compatibility list and doing these recap posts.  I may be a review site but the PSTV List was the best idea I ever had.  It does wonders for the site’s success.

This month is a real treat for the PSTV fans because there were a ton of games confirmed or released as compatible with the micro-console.  Importer-friendly and not, here are the games that were added to the list this month as PSTV-Compatible, divided between Japan region and North America region games:

Japan

*131 Japanese Titles not to be listed to preserve article space

Asterisk War: Academy City on the Water
Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book
Haiyore! Nyaruko-San: Nafushigatai Game no You na Mono
Harvest Overlay
Love Revenge
Metropolis Defenders
Natsumego: Precious Last Summer Party
Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir
Parfait
Promise in This Blue Sky
Ray Gigant
Taisho Mobius Line Vital
Time Travelers
To Bloom in the Next Empty
White Robe Love Addiction
Wonderland Chronicle

North America

2D Adventures of Rotating Octopus Character (PS Mini)
Aegis of Earth: Protonovus Assault
Attractio
Babel: The King of Blocks (PS Mini)
Baseball Riot
Boy and His Blob
Breath of Fire III (PSP)
Croixleur Sigma
Hero of Sparta (PS Mini)
Hitman GO
Kaleidoscope (PS Mini)
LEGO Marvel’s The Avengers
Organ Trail: Complete Edition
Saturday Morning RPG
Stick Man Rescue (PS Mini)
Volume
We Are Doomed

That’s one heck of a monthly update, right?  I chose not to divulge the entire list of Japanese titles I overhauled the list with at the beginning of the month so this wouldn’t be incredibly long.  Even aside from those, we’ve got 33 new titles in the list this month, half of which were North America titles and half Japanese titles.

In short, this was a fantastic month for the PlayStation TV.  I hope you guys enjoyed the article and keep tabs on my list!

Title: Atelier Escha & Logy Plus: The Alchemists of the Dusk Sky
Developer: Gust, Koei Tecmo
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Game Type: Vita
Download: 2.6 GB (Plus 659 MB for Japan Voice DLC)
NA Availability: Digital Download | Retail (Limited Edition Only)
EU Availability: Digital Download
PSTV Support: Yes

The Atelier series is often a source of debate among JRPG fans.  Some love it and for different reasons, be it the time restrictions, alchemy, story and cutesy characters, and some even for the combat system.  You also have a lot of gamers who hate the series because of the time restrictions and some for how cutesy and “girly” the story and characters look.  The time restrains are a big thing that have turned off dozens of RPG fans for not being allowed to freely roam as they please.

Last month, I began my own journey into Atelier with Atelier Ayesha Plus.  Truth be told, I also own Meruru Plus and Totori Plus, but never finished them.  After playing and loving Ayesha, though, Koei Tecmo decided that I was worthy of getting a press copy for the next.  Originally a PS3 title, here is my review of Atelier Escha & Logy Plus: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky!

Story

Sometime after the events of Atelier Ayesha, an alchemist from Central City by the name of Logix, otherwise known as Logy, travels to a hub town near a set of ancient, floating ruins to find work.  The city’s Research & Development division was expanding and recruited two different alchemists, him and a local named Escha.  After being brought in and taken from his high-tech machines to a base cauldron, Logy settles in while Escha adjusts to working with a man from the big city.

The story in this new game is very different from Ayesha because of two things.  The first is Logy, whom is the first non-female main character in the Atelier series.  Not a lot of fans are happy about this so this is a big change for the series.  The other is the setting.  In Ayesha, you were traveling the world in search of your sister.  In this game you’re based around the hub town performing duties as a job.  As such, you’ll be traveling to locations and then back to town, which is a bit of a different pace.

The story isn’t bad, because it’s very entertaining.  But I wouldn’t go as far as saying it is superior to Ayesha.  I definitely like the “traveling the world” thing better than this R&D Job situation, but I was still full of laughs from the get-go.

Gameplay

Atelier Escha & Logy Plus is an enhanced port of its PS3 counterpart, and is a turn-based RPG with time management and item creation elements thrown into the mix.  You’ll be doing the typical progression of creating items with alchemy, fighting monsters, and exploring dungeons and environments to unlock new story events.

The game is an enhanced version of its PS3 counterpart, so there are some new features added in.  First of all, there are some new playable characters, including Nio.  There is also some extra story content thrown in at the end of the game that is built around Nio as a character, as opposed to focusing on Escha and Logy.

Progression in the game is set in Assignment Periods.  You have ten of these, and you have an assignment to complete that is linked to the main story progression.  You could have this be repairing a windmill in town, exploring ruins, or something else.  You will have 3 months to complete this objective and the game will end if you fail to complete it.  There’s no need to worry about completing it on time, though, because the time restraints are extremely lax.  You’ll be able to complete your objective each term before even the first month is over.

Once you complete your objective, you get Free Time until the end of the month.  During this period, you can do whatever you want and a lot of character-based story events will spawn.  Knowing this, the game’s built around you being able to complete your main objective quickly.  There are also two large sets of minor objectives for you to complete that you will likely do on your own, regardless.  These are towards the overall score at the end of the assignment phase that affects your pay and upgrades.

Map progression is the same, but is different.  There is far less for you to go and each dungeon area goes into its own map.  You don’t pass time running back and forth on these mini-maps, but they can get quite extensive as you explore.  This is similar to before, but more of a way to clean up the overall World Map to not look as cluttered.

Combat has been changed as well.  The combat is mostly the same with turn-based battles, but the party size has been greatly expanded.  You can now take 6 party members into battle.  Three of them participate in the battle while the other three are available for assist attacks and defending actions.  If you choose to defend, the members will swap out bringing the reserve member into the combat for the next turn.  You also get characters automatically switching if a party member is knocked out by an enemy.

What I will say is that monsters get stronger faster than in Ayesha, putting a bigger emphasis on combat in this game.  You’ll be spending more time fighting and have more emphasis on training your levels to always be one step ahead by the next assignment period.  This is something that some RPG gamers will enjoy, as Atelier normally has very light focus on combat.

Alchemy has been switched up this time around.  You still gather materials and combine them into new items, but you also get equipment from Central City as you play for Logy to use, which increases what you can do.  Some of these items allow you to use alchemy to upgrade everyone’s weapons.  This will allow you to add various effects to them as well as increasing their power.

One thing I will mention is that since the time restraints are so lax, many people think that game is far too easy.  Many Atelier fans like the strict restrictions.  So if you want strict time restrictions, you won’t find it here.  But for everyone else, there is a level of needing to get it done, but even newcomers shouldn’t have any issues.  This is a lot easier to achieve than past games have been.  The combat however, is where things get harder.

Over the course of the game, you’ll likely be spending at least 30-35 hours with the base game as well as new content.  A good bit longer than Ayesha, plus multiple plays since you can choose to play as either Escha or Logy when you start the game.  Some items are only available when you choose one or the other.

Controls

Controlling this game isn’t all that different from playing Ayesha Plus.  You won’t need to worry about tough controls, and it’s also worth noting that there are no special controls when played on the PlayStation TV.

Moving around towns and dungeons is done with the Left Analog Stick, while you can use this as well as the D-Pad when you’re out on the World Map, though Analog on the map will move the cursor anywhere, be it on the roads or places you cannot travel.  The face buttons are pretty universal throughout the game, with the exception of using Circle to jump and you can’t really do that in menus or battle.  But X can be used to talk to people or confirm menu options.  Triangle can pull up the customization menu, and Circle cancels out of menus when not in the field.

The L and R triggers have a few different uses.  In town, you can use L to look at your assignments and R to use Quick Travel.  In the field/map, you use R to access the system options to be able to save your game.  Then start and select can be used to access other menus, like a quick button to hit for requests or seeing past dialogue in your current game session.

I don’t really have any quarrels with the controls and the on-screen prompts make it easy to remember what does what.

Presentation

As with all of the Atelier Vita games, it is gorgeous.  The cel-shading is beautiful and every environment looks really detailed.  There are some more details than in Ayesha as well, just with the environments as a whole.

Performance is what you’re worried about.  The game doesn’t run perfectly and many areas do have some chopping in the frame-rate.  There were worse drops in Ayesha, but the game struggles in some areas.  They improved town exploration and alchemy frames, but combat and dungeons have some struggling going on.  They’re improving, but it’s not perfect yet.

Just like the last title, though, Escha & Logy suffers from a lack of complete voice-acting.  While Japanese audio lovers need not worry, as the free DLC for Japanese Voices has voice work for every scene, the English dub has a lot of scenes where there is text-only and no voice-work done at all.  This won’t bother many of you, but it is unfortunate to see one side of the game being done to completion and the other not be the same.

Title: LEGO Marvel’s The Avengers
Developer: TT Fusion
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Game Type: Vita
Download: 1.3 GB
NA Availability: Digital Download | Retail
EU Availability: Digital Download | Retail
PSTV Support: Yes

Lego games have long been debate among handheld gamers.  Lately, it’s been to the point where a lot of handheld sites don’t even bother getting coverage for LEGO games right away.  In the Vita community, a lot of the games are first covered by me, even if I don’t do the coverage on release day.

That changed with this newest LEGO game.  Thanks to the developers giving out more handheld information, a lot more sites and the community in general are looking into the newest game that game out, particularly the handheld release.

This new game is an important factor for me as well.  This past month was the first time I ever got in contact with and started press relations with the Lego developers.  As such, I received a retail review copy from them, along with a cool little Lego toy set.  So, here’s my review of LEGO Marvel’s The Avengers!

Story

The plot of LEGO Avengers is a bit different from the past LEGO Marvel game.  This game focuses around the plot and story of the first two Avengers movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  We follow the steps of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye through their exploits in The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron.

The plot isn’t completely those two movies, though.  The handheld version also has a flashback scene that you can play from Captain America: The First Avenger.  So, you can look forward to doing a bit outside of just the two Avengers movies.

As you may know, The Avengers movies aren’t exactly G-rated movies.  To accommodate for this, many “mature” lines were opted to not be in the game, like the swearing sections of Age of Ultron.  They’ve done this to make the movies child-friendly, even with having audio taken directly from the movies.

Gameplay

Like games in the series before it, LEGO Avengers is a 3D platformer with action and puzzle elements thrown into the mix.  Due to what I am about to reveal, there are also sandbox and adventure elements thrown into the mix as well.

First off, we need to compare the handheld version to past handheld versions.  LEGO Marvel’s The Avengers is the debut of open world sandbox gameplay to the handheld Lego world.  Between missions and during some, you will be placed in a large sandbox version of Manhattan as well as explore-able hub worlds of Avengers Tower and the Heli-carrier.  You can also access the sandbox at any time by quitting the mission you’re on.

Next, let’s compare the console and handheld versions.  TT Games made LEGO The Avengers will the idea of buying both the console and handheld versions.  The base gameplay is the same between the two, but each version has exclusive playable scenes.  Some movie scenes are only available in the console version, while others are only available in the handheld version.  To answer everyone’s question, it’s not watered down in any way.  Aside from the fact that the handheld version doesn’t have multiplayer.

Other small additions are party size and team attacks.  In most LEGO games, there are only two characters on screen in your party at once.  In this game, I’ve seen as much as 4-5 characters, including you, just on your party.  This may have been to more accurately depict the movie, but it’s really nice.  Team attacks are also incorporated by movie events, but part of puzzle-solving.  Like having Cap throw Black Widow into the air with his shield.

Progression has you constantly going between the sandbox and hub worlds and stages as you play out movie scenes.  For example, you will guide Nick Fury through the sandbox to a heliport to take a helicopter to the Project Pegasus facility where the intro of the first Avengers movie will take place.  Later on, you may be strictly in stages until you take over as Phil Coulson in the sandbox as he drives to Stark Tower to recruit Iron Man and then continue to the Heli-carrier.  Some story sections play in the sandbox and some in actual stages.

What you can do depends on what type of stage you’re in.  In the sandbox, you can jump into any vehicle you come across and drive around.  It even replicated getting in a vehicle to Triangle, much like how that works in the GTA franchise.  As you move along in the story sections, you can run to your objective.  You can freely explore, but you have to be outside of the story mode to have spawn-able events in the sandbox.  For fun, you can run through anything, be it NPCs and other vehicles.

In stages, you will be driven across a linear stage as you play out scenes from the movies by solving puzzles, platforming, and fighting off enemies.  These environments could be a rail-shooter style flying scene (Iron Man flying around Strucker’s Base in Age of Ultron is like this) or a 3D arena you can freely roam around in on foot or flying with a flying character.

Each stage will have various challenges you can do to unlock extra content, like playable characters or red bricks that add special effects.  The challenges are normally having you either collect a certain number of studs or collectibles, but others are directly reflecting movie events.  Like Captain America hitting both Iron Man and Thor with his shield in the Shakespeare in the Park stage.

Collectibles are also something interesting that I should mention.  Many of the unlockable characters may be characters that you are not expecting.  For example, you can unlock newly-created Marvel characters like the Jane Foster rendition of Thor and the Sam Wilson rendition of Captain America (Captain Falcon?).  Another that I especially loved was that you can unlock and play as the Lou Ferringo rendition of The Hulk.

Across the game, you can beat all of the story stages in about 4-5 hours.  After this, you can work on getting all of the challenges to unlock everything but also events in the sandbox.  These events include Time Trial and Hulk Smash mini-games as well as other events that are character-specific.  Another thing of note is that the sandbox also has areas where you can spawn different vehicles.  Across the game, there are dozens of different vehicles and aircraft that you can unlock and use, from the Quinjet to Coulson’s corvette, Lola, from the Agents of SHIELD TV series.

All in all, it’s about 4-5 hours for the main story and more like 10 hours for 100% completion.

Controls

Like past handheld games, you can play with either the touch screen or the buttons.  The PlayStation TV can play LEGO Marvel’s The Avengers, but there aren’t any special controls when used on that system.  As far as touch goes, it does everything.  Swiping to move.  Tapping to attack.  Tapping icons on the screen for menus.

You can move your character around with the D-Pad and/or Left Analog Stick.  The Right Analog Stick is used to rotate the camera (3D game.  No isometric angles here!).  The L and R triggers are used to cycle your current character party in Free Play mode.  You can also use L for team attacks.  Then, we have the face buttons.  You can use X to jump, double-jump, and fly.  Square is used for attacks.  Triangle is used for the character wheel, and Circle is used for interactions.

I don’t have any complaints about the control scheme.  It works quite well and the tutorials also do a nice job of explaining what you can do.

Presentation

Visually, I have no complaints.  The game looks great and there’s a lot of detail going on here.  Even in the open world, the draw distance is pretty fair for a handheld game.  As far as music goes, you can expect to hear about a million different remixes of the Avengers movie theme and other music from the movies.  This is done well, especially with the more comical remixes when some of the entertaining sections come up, such as Hawkeye assembling a DJ booth.

Performance is quite good as well.  I saw frames dip maybe once or twice across the whole game and that’s more in scenes than in gameplay.  Even in the sandbox, everything runs very smooth so you don’t need to worry about a console LEGO title struggling on the Vita.

A big thing around the PS Vita and PlayStation TV both for quite some time has been PS4 Connectivity.  This is a feature that a lot of people love using, but also that a lot of PS Vita gamers hate.  This is due to many people buying the Vita and/or PSTV just to use PS4 Connectivity/Streaming, as in Remote Play.  A lot of Vita fans are disgusted by people who buy a game system with no interest in its games and just want to use it as a peripheral for their PS4.

I’ve also noticed a lot of hate around the PSTV for this.  On Twitter, it’s nearly daily that I see people talking about buying a PSTV and hating it because Remote Play lag was unbearable.  Since I had no PS4, I had no way of assisting or advising them, otherwise.  I just had to either not pursue to help that individual or make theoretical guesses based on what I knew about Remote Play.

As of last week, that is no longer the case.  I finally bought a PS4 and have been testing Remote Play every night.  Now I can come out and make a review on this for you all.  So, let’s make an app review.  Here is my review of the PS4 Link app!

Functionality

The first thing we should go over is what the app does.  PS4 Link allows a Vita or PlayStation TV to connect to a PS4 system in a variety of ways.  These two different features are called Remote Play and Second Screen.  Before we go about explaining the differences, we should note that only Remote Play is available on the PlayStation TV.  It does not get the Second Screen option like the PS Vita does.  Just something to note.

Remote Play is the main feature, and that basically streams the PS4’s video and audio to the PS Vita / PSTV system.  This requires both systems to be connected to the internet and has the Vita/PSTV search for a nearby PS4 and then connect to it.  Once connected, you’ll see the PS4’s Home Screen and be able to take over.  At that point, the controller on the PS4 shuts off and complete control is given to the Remote Play device.  However, one touch on the controller’s PlayStation/Home button will revert control back to the PS4.

Once connected, you can do pretty much anything.  Browse the PlayStation Store, change settings or your theme, open up and play games, etc.  Essentially, you’re streaming your PS4 to your Vita and that gains control of the system.

Once you get into a game, functionality varies from game to game.  The PS Vita doesn’t have the same number of buttons as the PS4, so the touch screen sections are given access to functions for the extra triggers.  I’ll explain more about this in the next section.

Second Screen pulls up a second screen for games that support it.  This could work as a map for some PS4 games or a mirror in driving games  This also has functionality as a keyboard for the PS4.  You can switch to the Vita whenever text input is required and it’s a bit easier to type with the Vita’s touch screen than navigating the keyboard with the Dual Shock 4’s buttons.  There are also little buttons for moving through some menus.

One other thing about functionality worth mentioning that I think is particularly convenient is that it runs in the background.  Unlike some other apps, you can pause a Vita game, go into Remote Play, and it won’t make you completely close the Vita game you were playing.  You can quite Remote Play and go right back to the game you were playing on your Vita / PSTV.

Interface

The initial window of the PS4 Link screen has 2 options on screen and a settings option in the bottom-right corner.  You just tap or select each icon based on what you wish to use the app for.  One is for Remote Play, the second is for Second Screen, and the Settings lets you change video quality as you stream.

When Remote Play begins, you’re just taken into the PS4’s stream and the interface is pretty simple.  Just hit the PlayStation/Home button on the Vita and you’ll get a little interface on the button of the screen.  This allows you to go to the Home screen of the PS4 or hit the Live Area icon to disconnect from the PS4 and go back to the Vita’s home screen.  Many games also have a “Button” icon on the bottom screen that allows you to pull up and see Remote Play controls for the game you’re playing.

When you’re in the middle of a game, controls will be a little different.  As I said above, the Vita doesn’t have as many buttons as the PS4 controller does.  The extra triggers are extended to sections of the touch screen.  You may have to use the corners of the touch screen or rear touch screen to use L2 and R2 features.  This makes games fully playable, even though you’re on the Vita.  Not to extend this further, but the next section will have my final bit about the Remote Play controls.

When you’re in Second Screen mode, there are controls all over the touch screen.  The center gives you navigation controls for what’s shown on the screen.  On the bottom, you have a bar with options for moving through menus and the start/options button.  Then on the right side-bar, you have icons to enable the keyboard controls, toggling the second screen function, and disconnecting from the PS4.

Performance

Performance is what everyone complains about.  Since you’re streaming a game from your PS4, you’re essentially having your PS4 upload stream and then transmitting it to the receiving device.  Because of this, streaming isn’t always flawless.  In all honesty, there are rare times where it does look perfect.  But we’re not to that part of the review yet, so let’s hold off on that.

Connecting to the PS4 system is quite painless and worked very well.  If you remember PS3 Remote Play, you may remember a tedious registration process.  There is no manual registration.  The Vita connects to the PS4 automatically.  The first time I connected my Vita to my PS4, it took maybe 10 seconds for it to start looking, find it, and load the stream.  This works really well.

The actual streaming quality will depend on two things: Internet Speed and Settings.  Remote Play can be set to various resolutions for better quality video.  The Vita can be set to 360p and 540p, whereas the PSTV can be set to 540p and 720p.  This is very important if you don’t have incredibly fast internet, because it will dictate how good your stream is and how far away you can go from the PS4 to keep your stream going.

My case is about the bare minimum for this type of streaming.  My internet connection is about 17 Mbps down and 1-2 Mbps up.  This is pretty low-tier for high speed internet and Remote Play can work on this, but only to a point.  If nothing else is using a lot of the internet, I can connect to my PS4 without issues on both the Vita and/or PSTV.  Because of my connection, though, I start at 30 fps streaming and things run fairly well.  However, this also leads us to our next topic, which is PS Vita vs PSTV.

On the Vita, Remote Play runs pretty nicely.  The first time I tried Resident Evil Revelations 2 and Fallout 4 on it, it ran smooth.  Some very slight input lag but no major problems.  When I switched to the PSTV however, things changed.  The PSTV clearly struggled to keep the stream smooth.  I saw a lot of pixilation and breaks in the stream.  There was also a lot more input lag on the PSTV.

I tested this several days in a row, and it was different depending on the day.  On Monday night this week, the PSTV stream worked pretty magnificently and when the internet was strained by my LEGO Marvel’s Avengers review was uploading to YouTube.  But when compared to the Vita, the PSTV’s stream was still less smooth, even when both systems were set to the same resolution.  However, with PSTV being set to 720p to default, the PSTV owner’s first move should be to be to change the res down to 540.

When I moved around the house with this, though, things got ugly.  I started losing the stream even on the Vita as little as 20 feet away from the PS4.  Due to this, I would suggest that you not try Remote Play at all unless you have at least 20-30 Mbps down and 3+ Mbps up and that’s when the PS4 and Vita/PSTV.

Second Screen had nice performance.  There was never any lag on the Vita at all, and all of the buttons and options worked quite nicely.  It was just in full Remote Play where latency can happen.  So if you just want Second Screen capabilities, then you’re good, even on a lower connection speed.

Title: Mario & Luigi Paper Jam
Developer: Alpha Dream, Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Game Type: 3DS
NA Availability: Digital | Retail
EU Availability: Digital | Retail
Block Usage:  4,100

The Mario franchise and the RPG genre are no strangers to one another.  Super Mario RPG back on the Super Nintendo is one of the highest praised games in the franchise.  That’s not what I think of when I think of Mario RPGs, though.  There are two more recent franchises that I think when I put Mario in with my favorite genre.  One is Paper Mario, which began on the Nintendo 64.  The other is the Mario + Luigi franchise.

Mario + Luigi started on the GBA with what I would argue to be the greatest game to ever hit the handheld.  The initial game was Superstar Saga and incorporated not only RPG elements but made base elements of the Mario franchise, from jumping to hammers work, and very well within the RPG formula.  It went on to inspire two sequels on the Nintendo DS and two sequels on the Nintendo 3DS, one of which I’m about to talk about.

Paper Mario and Mario + Luigi have crossed over for the first time, and that’s today’s review.  Thanks to the ever-supportive crew at Nintendo of America for providing me with a review code, here is my official review of Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam!

Story

Paper Jam starts out like any Mario game could.  Luigi is trying to do some cleaning and gets scared because he’s in the dark.  In a stumbling chase with a mouse, he knocks over a secret book within Peach’s castle, which holds the world of the Paper Mario universe within it.  As the book opens, people, enemies, and more start shooting out and filling the 3D Mushroom Kingdom with 2D, paper copies from the other dimension.  Among these are Paper Mario himself and, of course, his equally-flat nemesis, Paper Bowser.

Before long, Mario and Luigi are sent off to collect all of the paper people and return them to their world.  However, as much as you’d expect, Bowser meets his Paper double and they team up to take down Mario once and for all.

The story of the game is quite comical and will definitely keep you entertained.  There are some overused Mario cliché, like Luigi’s fear of, well, everything.  However you’ll be laughing from seeing Paper Peach easily escape a 3D cage to Bowser and Paper Bowser exchanging insults.

Gameplay

Just like Dream Team before it, Paper Jam is a 3D turn-based RPG with platforming and adventure elements thrown into the mix.  The graphics system is comparable to Dream Team, and the world progression and all around looks of everything look very similar, aside from the Paper elements.

Basic progression has you roaming from area to area, looking for story events to spawn and Paper Toads to rescue.  It’s got a similar amount of progression as previous games, though with one change.  You will occasionally get to a roadblock, requiring some new item or equipment to get past.  In games like Superstar Saga, you would go on a side-quest across the world, dungeons, and bosses to acquire items, much like how you got stones to make Hammers in SSS.

This game, however, has you doing Toad Missions every time this happens.  Basically, the idea is that you rescue enough Paper Toads that they can be used to create whatever equipment or item you need.  This is a nice idea of blending the Paper Mario elements in, but it does get a bit excessive over time.  By the time you do your second or third dozenth mission, it’s really tiring to go and do the same kind of thing again and again.  In other words, the Toad Missions easily get repetitive.

Whenever you encounter an enemy, you take part in turn-based battles.  How these progress anyone who’s played a Mario + Luigi game will recognize.  You take turns and can do actions that require button input and timing.  When enemies move, they will move and you can dodge and counter attacks with good timing.  The exception with this game is that Paper Mario is with Mario and Luigi, and he adds some new elements to the gameplay system.

First is Paper Mario, himself.  All of his abilities relies on him either making a dozen copies of himself and going into an extensive combo or getting special abilities where all three characters go into mini-games in order to fight off bosses.  These mini-games could range from playing tennis with the enemy plastered on the wall or a boss doing a chase sequence where Mario and Luigi use Paper Mario’s airplane form to avoid attacks.

The next big element he adds are Papercraft Battles.  In these battles you are riding on a giant Papercraft Mario in a 3D arena fighting other giant Papercraft enemies.  This has a much more fighter feel to it.  You run up to enemies and attack them until they fall over.  Then, you can do a finisher move where you throw your papercraft onto them to do HP damage.  You then retrieve your Papercraft and continue until all enemies and bosses are defeated.

The final addition and thing that you may not enjoy are Cards.  You can use Cards to enhance battle and it really helps you easily become quite powerful in combat.  The problem is that a lot of cards are only obtainable by using Mario-themed Amiibo figures on your 3DS.  There are two bad things about this.  First of all, not all 3DS models use Amiibo, and not all people have Mario-themed Amiibo.  This is somewhat of an exclusive feature that requires you to buy Amiibos for.

The first time you do this, it’s a lot of fun.  However, this is another thing to note.  Papercraft battles get very long very quickly.  When you get deeper in the game, the battles can be so long that it turns into a chore just to get through them.  If you enjoy them, then it’s not a problem, but if you don’t absolutely love this type of combat, you’ll be dreading them by the end of the game.

Speaking of the end of the game, Paper Jam will last you around 30 hours, which is a very nice length for an RPG.  It’s not too short, but not too long, either.  Granted that you might be sick of the Toad Missions by this point that you just want it to end, it’s a good RPG length.

Controls

The game isn’t very hard to control.  First, let’s go into the New 3DS buttons.  ZL and ZR are both used, and both do the same thing.  These extra triggers can be pressed for a prompt to use items you have to restore your party’s HP.  Then, we have the C Stick.  This is for camera control, sort of.  The map on the bottom screen can be moved around with the C Stick.  It doesn’t affect the top screen where you’re exploring, but just that mini-map.

The D-Pad is not used for movement outside of menus.  The Circle Pad is used for moving around both during mini-games and in the field.  Then you’ve got the L and R triggers that are used to toggle the lead character between jump and hammer mode when you need to use your hammer to solve puzzles.  Then, the face buttons.  A, B, and Y are used for actions for Mario, Luigi, and Paper Mario, respectively.  X is used for using all three of them in a jump or a dash.  Finally, the Start and Select buttons open the customization menu.

I’ll admit that using Y for Paper Mario did take some getting used to, but overall, the control scheme worked nicely.

Presentation

Visually, I would say there’s virtually no difference between this game and Dream Team.  Not that it’s bad.  The visuals look really nice, especially with how they differentiated and made the paper characters and environments look so out of place in the 3D world.  Music is about on par with what you’d expect as well, from either franchise that this cross-over shows.  Lots of remixes of older Mario music along with new.

Performance, I have no issues with.  The game doesn’t struggle, nor does it have long load times.  This is pretty much expected out of a Mario game, but worth it to mention, all the same.

It’s not exactly common to see media apps release on the PlayStation Vita anymore.  However, the good thing is that most of the apps that do release end up being compatible with the PlayStation TV, along with being void of any finicky touch controls.  To clarify, I’m talking about streaming services when I say “Media Apps”.  I’m talking about apps like Hulu Plus, Crunchyroll, and Netflix.  No, the Netflix app still doesn’t work on the PSTV, but the newest app does.

The newest media app is something I’d not heard of before and didn’t release but a week or two ago.  I’ve never heard of it before because it’s not a Western service.  It’s actually a Korean streaming service, which will undoubtedly make this review more interesting.  So, let’s go!  Here’s my review of the PS Vita app for the streaming service, Drama Fever!

Functionality

Drama Fever is an application that connects to the DramaFever streaming service.  Basically, it is a streaming service that allows users to stream and watch Korean drama TV shows.  Everyone should already be familiar with the idea.  It’s basically a Korean version of Hulu Plus.

As far as streaming services go, Drama Fever is very similar to Hulu.  You open up the app and can scroll/search for the show of your choosing.  You can use the search feature to find something specific or you can scrolling through the main page, which separated them into categories and genres.  Obviously, everything is drama but some have different sub genres like fantasy among others.

One thing to note is that there is a membership feature present here but it is more of a “premium” type of feature. Being a paid user allows you to save shows to your favorites, much like Netflix can do.  It also gives you a wider library to choose from.  Being much smaller in higher library size compared to other streaming services, the cost of being a premium member isn’t very much.  For United States users, it’s about $12/year.

That’s not very much at all.  Hulu and Netflix are almost as much as that for just one month.  But there lies the size. Drama Fever has about 15,000 episodes at its disposal. That’s not all that much compared to other services but could be worth he money.  On the flip side, some of that content is available to guests that don’t have an account.  Aside from content, paid users have ad-free streaming.

That’s about all there is to it.  There is also the ability to do free trials of the premium accounts, but it’s nice to see a streaming service that also has some nice options for people who don’t want to pay.  If you like Korean dramas, though, it’s only twelve bucks for a year.  That’s cheap.

Interface

As far as the interface is concerned, anyone who has used Hulu on the Vita should be very familiar with the format.  A lot of it is practically copy and pasted from that app and it’s not a bad thing.  The way these streaming services are designed on mobile and handhelds work well.

You have options at the top of the page with the login and search options.  In the body of the screen you have rows of shows you can choose from.  Selecting any of these will open a similarly-designed menu with episodes of that show.  You can then just navigate and select something to watch.  If it is exclusive to premium, it will you as you try to launch it.

Once an episode loads, you will have a little navigation bar at the bottom of they go stream that disappears once you start watching for a few seconds,  when you hit a button, it will come back up.

As you can speculate from the intro of this reive, there are no touch controls for the app.  Everything is handled by the D-Pad, face buttons, and triggers.  The directional buttons can navigate menus, the face buttons for selecting, canceling, or adding shows to your favorites, and the triggers for fast forward and rewind en you in the middle of streaming.

I honestly don’t have any problems with the interface. It’s a bit cliche, because it looks exactly like some of the others streaming apps on hitherto Vita, but it works quit well.  Even better than other apps, as the next section can explain.

Performance

It’s no exaggeration to say that a lot of media apps don’t run that well on the PS Vita.  The MLB TV app runs streams fine, but the actual interface is a little glitchy, and Hulu Plus has a ton of lag in the menus.  Netflix has similar lag in the menus, and it can get pretty severe at times.  So, the first order of business is finding out if this app runs well or if it struggles.

The answer is a little different.  Does it run great?  No.  Does it run bad?  No.  Does it run good?  Yes.  Here’s the run-down of the situation with how the app runs.  The initial boot time is about 10 seconds, which is pretty good for this sort of thing.  So we’re looking pretty good there, at least in terms of it being a PS Vita app.  Sure, some more impatient gamers won’t want to wait 10 seconds, but there are far worse wait times for Vita software.  So 10 seconds to boot is a nice job done by the Drama Fever team.

Cycling the menu is where the main mishap is, and it’s not a big one.  The menu lag that was in Hulu Plus and Netflix are here as well.  However, it’s not nearly as severe in Drama Fever.  There is about a half-second lag between putting in a command to cycle the menu and the cursor moving to that next section.  Whether this is the app struggling or input lag, I don’t know.  It’s very slight, so it’s pretty hard to tell.

Actual streaming runs nicely.  You don’t have to wait more than maybe 5 seconds before the streams start, and they have a nice quality about them.  Really, the only complaint I have about the performance is that slight menu lag.

Title: Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth
Developer: Akiyoshi Hongo, Toei Animation, Bandai Namco
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Game Type: Vita
Download: 1.5 GB
NA Availability: Digital Download
EU Availability: Digital Download
PSTV Support: Yes

One franchise that many people have compared to Pokemon in the past is Digimon, if not by name alone.  Digimon also has a place and presence on Sony devices, which are sometimes in direct competition with Nintendo, where Pokemon resides.  Monster-catching franchises often fall into this, but because of Digimon’s popularity, it is the most well-known.  Even though, before video games, Digimon wasn’t about monster-catching at all.  It was an anime series about a group of kids becoming trapped in an alternate dimension made up of digital data, using a partner Digital Monster, or Digimon, to help protect them and get them home.

In games, though, few non-Pokemon monster-catchers quite live up to the impact and depth of the Digimon series.  Ever since the PS1 era, the series has had a place in gaming, mostly in the “Digimon World” series of games.  I was a pretty big fan of the first two DW games back on the original PlayStation, and played quite a bit of one of the games from last generation on the Nintendo DS.  In this generation, though, we are a bit limited on Digimon games in the West.

At least, until now.  Not long ago, a Digimon game released in the West on the Sony platforms.  Originally a PlayStation Vita exclusive but not a PS4 and PS Vita game, it’s reached the West and is the talk of the Vita community.  So, how is it?  Let’s find out.  Here is my official review of Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth!

Story

The story takes place in Tokyo as well as a virtual world known as EDEN.  Using Virtual Reality technology, Eden is basically a huge virtual world comprised of web sites, message boards, online communities, etc.  Picture forums as large rooms and environments you can freely walk around while in a VR environment.

While in EDEN, you come across hackers as well as monsters once thought to be illegal programs, in the form of monsters called Digimon.  In the midst of your first trek, you not only find a Digimon to travel with you, but encounter a data-devouring monster and are left back in reality with a half-cyber body while your real one is in a coma.

As this crisis settles in, you’re recruited by a local detective agency to investigate cyber-crimes as a “Cyber Sleuth” and look for a way to cure yourself of what is called “EDEN Syndrome” and return to your own body.  Little do you know you will uncover a plot revolving around Digimon, EDEN, and a plot of epic proportions.

The story of the game is pretty in tune with what you may expect from a Digimon game.  While it is a little out-of-the-ordinary for a Digimon game to not take place in the “Digital World”, it’s still what you may expect from the franchise.  It plays out very much like an anime, and is quite enjoyable and comical.

Gameplay

Cyber Sleuth is a dungeon-crawling and monster-catching RPG with turn-based battles as well as party and time management systems thrown into the mix.   Throughout the game, you’ll be moving around dungeons and environments to do quests and story events, while you’ll also be encountering enemies and bosses, and catching/creating new monsters to recruit as party members.  To not be entirely confusing and flood you with technical terms, it’s a monster-catching RPG.

Each chapter of the game will have you in set phases.  You’ll have phases where you need to solve side-quests to spawn story events or simply locate an NPC in a certain area, be it in Eden or the real world.  Your main goal is to do what you can to spawn the next story event and advance the plot, which can be hinted upon both by your boss at the detective agency, and your advisor at the Digimon Lab you’re introduced to early in the game.

Now let’s talk about locations.  You have three main locations you can move around in.  There’s The Real World, EDEN, and the Digimon Lab (Digi-Lab).  The Real World has different sections around Tokyo for you to find NPCs in and do quests.  While most of these are small, the Detective Agency’s building has quite a bit to it, with the agency, an arcade for optional mini-games, as well as shops and individual stores that you’ll need to explore as you go further into the game.

EDEN is a set of locations you can teleport to on a point-to-point map/menu.  It has NPC areas like an Entrance and Community area.  It also has forum locations with NPCs and dungeons that you can run through.  These locations will expand and become available upon story progression.  However, to get to Eden, you must find a TV or terminal in the real world that gives you the option to go to EDEN.  Some allow only the Digi-Lab, so you have to make sure you know where the right terminals are.

Finally, the Digi-Lab.  The Lab is a place where you manage, train, and grow your Digimon that you’ve been collecting.  It has several different services.  First of all, it has the Management area, where you can move Digimon in and out of your party, Digivolve or De-Digivolve them if certain requirements are met to make them stronger or weaker, create new Digimon from data recovered in dungeons, or even letting Digimon absorb another for experience gain.

The Farm is the other big area in the Lab.  This lets you place Digimon on virtual islands to interact with one another as well as train to increase their stats, find items, among other things.  The training is something I’ll touch on later when I get into the evolution and combat systems.  Other services include a shop for Farm Items, the multiplayer area for Local or Online Multiplayer Battles, and an area to let you re-visit some story dungeons again.

Now let’s go to dungeons and encounters.  Dungeons proceed in normal RPG fashion.  There are maze-like areas you travel through to find story events as well as fighting battles and getting treasure from chests.  The battles you find and fight through take place between your party of Digimon and an enemy party of Digimon.

The combat in the game has you going through turn-based battles, similar to previous Digimon games, like Digimon World 2.  Like most RPGs, there is an order to combat and each time a Digimon’s turn comes up, you’re able to put in a command, from normal attacks and skill attacks to using items, guarding, or swapping Digimon out between your battle party and reserve party.  Then, once you win a battle, you get experience to level up your Digimon.

Combat is also how you can “catch” and recruit new Digimon to your team.  Every time you encounter a Digimon, you scan it and receive a percentage of its data.  When that data reaches 100% (Max of 200), you can go to the Lab and create that Digimon from that data, which can then be placed into your party or the islands on the Farm.  On the opposite of that, the farm also allows you to return Digimon to data that you already have.

Getting the Digimon you want in your party comes from this.  Every Digimon has an In-Training,  Rookie, Champion, Ultimate, and Mega form, and many Digimon can branch out into different kinds of each tier.  To get these Digimon, you have to look at what you can get the data for and then train them to Digivolve them into higher forms.  You have to level them because there are level and stat requirements for each Digimon you can digivolve into.

Level requirements are pretty straight-forward.  You can only Digivolve into this Digimon if you’re at or above Level 30.  Stat requirements may require you to go past it, though.  If your Augumon has an Attack stat of 50 at Level 18, and Greymon requires an Attack value of 65, you have to keep leveling Augumon until he meets all requirements.  This can go even as far as breaking the base stat barrier or obtaining story-based items to make some of the harder-to-get Digimon.

That brings us to the Ability, or ABI stat.  ABI is also a requirement for many high-tier evolutions, and it’s a very tricky stat to train.  Basically, ABI only increases when you de-digivolve from one tier to a lower tier.  In many cases, you have to train to one tier, de-digivolve to increase ABI, and then re-train until you’re back up to those original requirements.  For many Mega tiers, you have to do this several times.  If you only get 12 points of ABI per de-digivolve and you need ABI to be 80 or more, you’re going to be training and re-training for quite some time.

The more in-depth part of this is that ABI also is used for bonus stats.  You can train your Digimon in the Farm and the amount of ABI determines how many bonus points you can add to your stats that go beyond the limitations of their base stats.  So, if you have ABI at 100, the max, you can distribute 100 extra points to any stat you want, assuming the leader of the training session has a personality matching the stat you wish to increase.

There is only one thing I’ll say about this.  Since your Digimon will return to Level 1 every time you digivolve or de-digivolve, this is definitely a game for people who love to grind for levels.  I’m definitely not gonna lie about that.  I’m a good 63 hours into the game and I’m sure at least 10 of those hours, if not more, are solely from grinding to get certain Digimon and maxing out the ABI stat on my battle party.  If you’re not one for lots of grinding, even getting a normal version of the Mega you want can take a long time and be a very daunting task.  However, seeing 100 extra stats to your Attack or Magic Attack can be well worth the effort.

Speaking of time and length, don’t let my 63 hour save file fool you.  Unless you want 100% completion, you’ll probably only spend about 40-50 hours on the main story of the game.  That’s still quite long for a handheld RPG, though, so you’re in for a nice, long trek through the world of Cyber Sleuth.  You can also use New Game Plus, which allows you to re-play the game but starting with all the enhancements from your first play-through.  Just don’t expect any extra content to appear during your second run.  Unless, of course, you wish to play as the other gender option for the main character.

Controls

The controls for the game are pretty easy to wrap your head around.  While the game works on the PlayStation TV, there aren’t any special L2 and R2 controls.  Just the same controls that are present when you’re on the Vita.  As such, the entire game is controlled with the buttons.

The Left Analog Stick is used to run around dungeons and menus, and the D-Pad is used for walking instead of running.  The Right Analog Stick can be used to zoom in or out of the camera perspective.  The L trigger doesn’t really do anything, while the R trigger is used for the Escape option in combat.  The X button chooses menu options and talks with NPCs.  Square brings up the hack menu for using field skills.  Triangle pulls up the customization menu.  Finally, Circle is used to cancel menu options.

I would call this a pretty standard RPG control setup.  The lack of touch controls is a nice touch as well.  While the Vita is useful for touch controls, not using them also opens up much less work for the developer to do to make PSTV play as smooth as possible.

Presentation

First of all, this game is gorgeous.  The cel-shading the developers did on this is top-notch and the game looks like it was taken right from an anime.  All of the character models are done with great detail and proportioned exactly as they are in the anime series.

What I, and fans, will really like about the presentation, is how faithful it is to the anime.  Anyone who’s watched the anime will have a moment of excitement when they see that pretty much all signature moves have animations that perfectly match the animations from the series.  The developers really went beyond their required task to make this not only a visually pretty Digimon game, but a very faithful Digimon game.

Performance I have no issues with.  There are very few frame drops as you play the game, and the load times never normally exceed 4 or 5 seconds.  From the first day it was available, people were saying it had a high production value, and it does.

Title: We Are Doomed
Developer: Vertex Pop
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Game Type: Vita
Download: 29 MB
NA Availability: Digital Download
EU Availability: Digital Download
PSTV Support: Yes

There are a lot of things that you can take points off when you review games.  The story isn’t good.  There is no plot.  Lag.  Long Load Times.  Needless Repetition.  No background music.  The list goes on and on.  This is pretty black and white in some cases, but not all.  Every so often, a reviewer will find a game that is very difficult to review, because it’s not black-and-white.  Because it has gray areas that are difficult to tackle.

Let’s say you get to a game that has no story.  Your first thought is to take a point off because there wasn’t effort put in to make a story.  However, as you research the game, you find out it has no story on purpose.  The developer went to not making a story because they wanted an experience that wouldn’t need a story.  They wanted something that didn’t have any story.  Would it still be fair to take points off for no story?

I have thought long and hard about this regarding today’s review.  Even now, I’m still not entirely certain I’m clear on this, but I’ve gotten some ideas.  So, let’s get started.  Here is my review of the twin-stick shooter, We Are Doomed!

Story

Due to this game having no story, this section shall remain blank.

Gameplay

We Are Doomed is an arcade-style twin-stick shooting game.  The game doesn’t have a lot of elements from other genres.  It is quite simply a twin-stick shooter played in a very arcade-like sense.

The basic run-down of the game is that there are two different game modes you can play: Wave Mode and Endless Mode.  In Wave Mode, you’re tackling enemies that come in progressively-harder stages with checkpoints every ten stages all the way through Stage 30.  Endless Mode is a little different, as it is just shooting endless hordes of enemies at you, having you duke it out with them as long as you can without dying.  As the game suggests, Wave Mode is for beginners and Endless is for expert players.

Gameplay has you in a top-down environment, like most Twin Stick Shooters.  You are a lone ship wandering a 2D plane armed with nothing but a beam-like weapon to fend off hordes of enemies coming at you.  When each wave spawns, enemies will spawn that you need to take out with your beam weapon (that honestly looks more like a flamethrower) to make the next wave spawn and move forward.

Enemy types will vary, and others will not show up until you get further into the game.  Some enemies just wander aimlessly around the stage, waiting to be vaporized.  Others will have homing capabilities and work with one another to rush around you.  As you play the game, you’ll also have objects flying around you have to avoid while fighting enemies and even enemies that aren’t part of that wave that will endlessly respawn around the stage for you to fight alongside the ones you need to go to the next wave.

Fighting enemies is pretty simple.  You have your main beam weapon and then the Super-Beam.  As you fight enemies, they will drop energy you can pick up.  After getting enough energy, you gain access to the Super-Beam for a short period of time.  Once you execute this, the beam weapon will have an exponential increase in power and range, making large hordes very easy to manage.  This only lasts about 10 seconds or so, though.

Really, that’s all there is to it.  You only have one weapon and one super-weapon.  In all honesty, the game doesn’t have a whole lot of depth to it.  The game does have some difficulty to it, but it’s pretty easy to adjust to it.  I’d gotten up to Wave 21 of the 30 total waves in less than an hour of picking up the game for the first time.  I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s not hardcore like other twin-stick shooting games.

As far as length, I’d say this isn’t a factor you should even worry about.  We Are Doomed was clearly made to be a quick-play game that you don’t power-play to finish to completion.  An expert could beat the game in as little as 30 minutes, but I’d give it at least a couple hours for Wave Mode if you’re familiar with the genre.  But, again, this isn’t something you power-play to complete.  It’s something you boot up when you’re wanting something nice and quick to play and enjoy.

Controls

There are virtually no controls to the game at all.  First of all, there aren’t any special controls on the PlayStation TV.  You also don’t need to worry about touch controls.  Things are pretty simple, just as they are for the rest of the game.

You move around on the stage with the Left Analog Stick and shoot your beam with the Right Analog Stick.  Finally, you can pause with the Start button and enable the Super-Beam with the R trigger.  Apart from this, there really isn’t anything else, control-wise.  D-Pad and face buttons in menus, but nothing as far as gameplay is concerned.

Presentation

Visually, I think this game looks quite interesting.  It has a very “retro” look to its visuals, and everything flows over quite well.  The only problem with the presentation is the lack of other environments.  Through all 30 waves, you’re going to be on the same background you were on during Wave 1.  It’s not a huge deal, but it feels there should have been some more variety in environments and not just one for the whole game.

Performance is really nice for a Vita game.  You can boot to the title screen in as little as 5 seconds (How many Vita games have ever been able to do that?) and there is virtually no wait time between the stages.  Some may complain about the mandatory PSN Sign-In when you first boot the game for Online Leaderboards, but it only happens once, so it’s not a big deal.

Title: Super Blast Deluxe
Developer: Raptus Games
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Game Type: Vita
Download: 231 MB
NA Availability: Digital Download
EU Availability: Currently Unavailable
PSTV Support: Yes

A lot of indie games have adopted the progression type that games like Angry Birds made popular.  The model is that a stage-based game has score-based requirements for unlocking future stages.  You play a stage and are awarded points or “stars” depending on how well you did.  Future levels then require you to earn a certain number of these stars to be able to unlock and play them.  I’ve seen a lot of games use this model, and it’s really not a bad one.  It helps you train and get better at the game, particularly in harder games.

Today’s review is about a game that utilizes this model.  It’s not Angry Birds or any game that I’ve played, for that matter.  You like barrels like the entire cast of the Atelier series?  If so, check this out.  Here’s my review of Super Blast Deluxe!

Story

The storyline takes place around a race of beings called Imps.  They have been watching the human race ever since they discovered their existence.  Our story begins with the Imps becoming aware that humans are very bored at night.  Their boss decides that it is their duty to fix that issue.

Essentially, the story is that the Imps are launching themselves through barrels and making fireworks in the night sky, racing against the rise of the sun to make as much commotion as possible.  It’s a pretty silly story, but it works out fairly well as a setup to the actual game.

Gameplay

Super Blast Deluxe is a side-scrolling puzzle game with time management and RPG elements thrown into the mix.  The overall flow of the game is that of a puzzle game with very precise timing-based inputs to get from one end of the stage to the other.

The game progresses in various worlds.  The Hub World has you in a 3D environment you can openly walk through with your character.  The idea of this is to walk around to find a gateway to each “world” that contains a set of stages.  There are gates that lock new worlds, requiring you to finish each prior world before the next is available.  There is also an area to go to the Endless Mode world and the Imp HQ.

First of all, Imp HQ is where you go to customize and change characters.  There are over a dozen different characters that you can unlock, each with their unique traits and effects that can change how your score is calculated at the end of each stage.  You also obtain skills to be used in stages when you complete each world.  You can come to HQ to equip and upgrade those skills to enhance their abilities and effects.  These could be as simple as re-doing a move if you have a fast enough finger or slowing down time to help you get through tricky parts of the game.

Each world has 10 stages and they progress in a very side-scrolling fashion, despite having 3D visuals.  In the game, you are launched into barrels and your goal is to get to the end of the stage by launching yourself from barrel to barrel and reach the end without hitting any of the obstacles.  This is a pretty simple idea, though I can’t really give it a genre.  Actually executing this plan is much more difficult than it may seem.

There are different kinds of barrels and obstacles.  Some barrels constantly move, requiring precise watching and timing in your launches.  Others need you to aim a specific way to find the next barrel (with the analog, D-Pad, or Touch Screen).  Then, you have obstacles.  All obstacles instantly kill you, so you cannot hit any obstacles or you will respawn and have your score and time penalized.

Time is another thing to note.  In this game, you have a constant timer going down and when it hits 0, it’s Game Over.  The idea is to get through it as quickly as possible to get a better score.  Apart from this are Chili Pepper items that increase your score, but also require more precision than simply clearing the stage.  Once you finish, you’re scored based on your combo of barrels without dying, the pepper items, and time remaining.  It’s easy to get under 3 stars, so the idea is to as best as you can as quickly as you can.

This is part of where the difficulty comes in.  There are a lot of situations later in the game that require absolute precision.  That means that if you hit the input half a second too early or too late and you hit the obstacle and get penalized.  Tying this with the fact that some stages have several jumps like that in succession for a good 5 seconds or more can make the game extremely frustrating.  The Slow-Down-Time power does help a lot with this, but you’re on your toes constantly in the later areas of the game.

That isn’t to say it isn’t fun, though.  It is quite rewarding to finally finish that stage you’ve been working on for so very long.  Many of the harder stages are set in a way that finally beating it will almost always get your 3 stars, and that is very rewarding.  Many times, I barely got through a stage and was expecting a low score and got a high one instead.

One thing is that the game isn’t very long.  A trek across the entire game without messing up can probably be done in a couple hours.  Given for retries which you absolutely will be doing, I would give it at least 3-4 hours.  I’ll leave it to you to decide if it’s work to pay $8.99 for 3 hours of gameplay.

Controls

I have no real complaints in the control department.  You won’t be using a lot of controls as you play the game.  As for usual, there are no special controls when the game is played on the PlayStation TV.  Since L and R aren’t really used in the game, there’s no need for it.

Moving in the hub world is done with the D-Pad and Left Analog Stick.  You can also use X to jump and Square to interact with a world or gate to unlock a new world or enter an unlocked world.  In the stages you will be using X to launch from barrel to barrel, and the other face buttons for skills.  The D-Pad, Analog Sticks, and Touch Screen for aiming with the purple barrels.

As I said before, I have no complaints.  The controls work pretty well.  The more major issue with the game is in the following section.

Presentation

Visually, I have to say the game looks quite impressive.  The visuals look like they have not been really altered from the level of a PS3 or PS4 game.  That is an exceptional feat, but it also comes at a price.  That is to say, the game lags in its frame-rate.  There is also a good amount of blurriness and distortion during cut-scenes.

When you’re in the hub world, there’s a pretty noticeable amount of frame-lag.  This isn’t as much of a problem in the stages since you don’t freely walk around there.  It’s there, but in much smaller increments.  However, it is certainly noticeable and if you don’t like a game not having a smooth frame-rate through and through, you’ll want to know.