Game Title: Ys Origin
Developer: Falcom, Dot Emu
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Download: 1.3 GB
Availability: Digital Download (Europe, North America), Retail (Coming Later 2017 from LRG and Play-Asia)
PSTV Support: No

The Ys series has quickly made its home on Sony’s handheld systems since the PSP era. Counting today’s review and the upcoming Ys VIII from NIS America, there are a total of 7 different games from the Ys series you can play on your PS Vita. In short, if you’re a Ys fan, there’s a lot here to be played.

I view the Ys series in a special light. Not only do I love the series, but Ys: Memories of Celceta was the first review I posted on this website way back in December 2013. Having new Ys games to review only makes the progress I’ve made since then more rewarding.

As such, here is my review of the PS Vita version of Ys Origin!

Story

700 years before the events of Ys I & II, the world of Ys was invaded by a horde of demons. In order to escape the onslaught, the two Goddesses of Ys brought their Priests and Citizens into the Solomon Shrine and used their magic to raise it high into the sky, away from the rest of the world and the invading demons.

Some time later, the two Goddesses disappear from Solomon Shrine and a task force of Holy Knights and Priests descend to the land that used to be their home and venture into a massive tower the Demons have been using to try to reach Ys. The plot revolves around a young Knight Apprentice named Yunica Tovah and a Sorcerer by the name of Hugo Fact as they venture into the tower in search of their missing deities.

The plot of Ys Origin is much more in tune with recent games in that there’s a lot of story and lore shown. Origin really is here to set up the events of Ys I and II, but it also has a strong plot on its own, divided into 3 separate stories for each playable character. If you’re into Ys lore, there’s a lot to be learned.

Gameplay

Ys Origin is an Action RPG in the same vein as games like Ys: Oath in Felghana with a bit of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. You roam around dungeons, fighting off enemies in real-time, but the environments are more expanded and larger than they were in Felghana. Just imagine the graphical style of Trails in the Sky but with Oath’s gameplay.

When you go into the game, you play the story with one of 2 playable characters with a 3rd to be unlocked once the first 2 are cleared. Yunica has a melee playstyle, much like series protagonist, Adol Cristin. Hugo plays more of a ranged magic fighter and provides a very unique play style compared to what series fans are used to. Past the Story, you’ve also got Boss Rush, Arena Mode, and Time Attack Mode, but you need to beat the story with Yunica and Hugo in order to unlock these game modes.

Playing through the game is like fighting through a giant dungeon. Unlike previous games that have you exploring towns and huge worlds, the entire game takes place in the massive Demon Tower as you search for the Goddesses of Ys. Each area is a dungeon in and of itself and will have story events spawn as you progress up the tower as well as many puzzles and a Boss Fight to complete that section of the game. If you’ve ever played Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky 3, it’s essentially the same concept, but in the Ys series.

The main gist of things with progression are combat, puzzles, and upgrades. Combat is like it was in Oath. You have melee attacks as well as skills you can combo into. Skills can be used as a single attack or a charged attack and use up points, so you can’t just endlessly spam your favorite elemental skill over and over. You have to find combinations of fighting, dodging, and skills dependent on your current situation.

Puzzles are simple enough. Most puzzles are just a matter of finding a key to open a door, fighting off special enemies to unlock a chest that contains a key item for reaching the area’s boss, or using your new skills to affect and change the environment. The game showcases these features for you and it doesn’t take long to really get into the groove of how things progress.

Upgrades are the bigger focus, though. In the game, you can upgrade your weapon with special Ore found in treasure chests and can use any Save Point to upgrade other aspects of the game in the form of Blessings. These can do a lot of things from simple upgrades to increase armor effectiveness and SP gained from enemies to use for Blessings to resistances to terrain and status ailments or reducing MP usage with skills. There are a lot of upgrades to be had, and the weapon upgrades are absolutely crucial to being able to take on bosses.

That brings us to difficulty. Normal enemies are normally pretty manageable, but once you start finding Bosses, things get very difficult very quickly. As always in the series, bosses have patterns you need to learn, but a lot of bosses in Origin cannot be damaged until certain conditions are met and, even then, require specific skills to create those conditions. Even if you want a casual run on the Easy Difficulty, don’t expect bosses to actually be easy. The first one is, but the rest will undoubtedly give you loads of trouble until you actually learn their patterns and how to get around them.

As far as time goes, each run for each character will likely take you around 8-10 hours, depending on your difficulty setting. Across all 3 characters to see the whole story (especially considering the 3rd character is the real “canon” storyline), you can expect to spend at least 30 hours on this game. Past that, there’s Arena Mode, Time Attack, Boss Rush, and Leaderboards, plus a plethora of unlockable characters both for Arena and Story Mode to be unlocked after that. There’s a lot of content crammed into this game, despite each story run not lasting terribly long for an RPG.

The one thing I will say was a dislike with this game is that Ys Origin for PS4 and PS Vita is based on the original PC build. On Steam, the game was updated so you only needed to beat the game with a single character to unlock the 3rd, canon storyline. But on consoles, you have to beat both and seeing the same story but with a different character playing the MC role did seem a bit repetitive, despite their playstyles being drastically different.

Controls

First of all, no PlayStation TV Compatibility. I’ve spoken with the publishers. They said back in December they were going to inform the development team about making it compatible, and it’s still not compatible. It may become compatible in the future, but as of launch, it cannot be played on the PlayStation TV.

Controls are simple. The D-Pad and Left Analog Stick are used for moving around and the Right Stick doesn’t really do anything. The L and R triggers are used to cycle your current skill without having to go into the pause menu. Then, face buttons. X is used for jumping, Square is used for normal attacks, Triangle is used to activate your Boost/Burst Attacks, and Circle is used for activating or charging skills.

I don’t have any complaints here. Everything works well and the controls are explained very well as you progress and unlock new abilities.

Presentation

Visually, the game looks good, but as the same time, they’re flawed. The graphics, themselves, do look just as nice as they do on PC, but I do have a couple nitpicks. First, the CG/Movie scenes are a tad on the blurry side, looking like they were just copy-pasted from the PC version onto the Vita version. Second, the text in the Save Menu is extremely tiny and hard to read. Whenever I check my save files for play time, it’s difficult to actually read what my playtime is.

Outside of this, there’ve been a lot of reports about the PS4 version having crashing and sound issues. I’ve spend a lot of time in the Vita version and have yet to encounter any crashing/freezing or sound issues. The sound never cuts out. The music stays on the full time, and the game has never crashed on me. I’m not sure if these have been fixed on PS4, but they are not present on the Vita.

Only thing about performance to note is that there are frame drops here and there like the PS4 version had. These are all localized to boss fights, most of them localized to cutscenes. But, there are a few boss attacks that will cause the frames to drop down below 30 fps and down in the low mid-20s for a few seconds before the attack ends and it comes back up to 30. It’s easy to work around, but it’s there.

Game Title: Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas
Developer: Cornfox & Bros, FDG Entertainment
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Download: 200 MB
Availability: Digital (Europe, North America)
PSTV Support: Yes

If you’ve ever been looking for a Zelda-like game on the PlayStation Vita, you won’t find a whole lot out there. There’s Adventure Time: Secret of the Nameless Kingdom, but not much else. Not until this past month, anyways. It’s been a long time coming, but a critically acclaimed Zelda-like adventure game has come to proper handhelds in the form of the PlayStation Vita.

A game with its own sequel on the way, and most compared to The Legend of Zelda:Wind Waker, here is my review of the PS Vita and PlayStation TV version of Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas!

Story

The story revolves around a young boy, whose father left on a quest across the known world some time before the events of the game. In an effort to find his lost father, he sets sail on a ship to the islands of the world, aiming to recover elemental islands lost during a great Catastrophe and retract his father’s steps until he finds him.

The plot of the game doesn’t show itself in a very cinematic fashion but once or twice during every “chapter” of the adventure. Most of the story is talking with NPCs regarding places you’re visiting and what your current objective is. It ramps up towards the end, and very in tune with the story showcasing of most Zelda titles, but nothing more than that.

Gameplay

Oceanhorn is a 3D Action-Adventure game presented at an isometric angle. As you travel through the various areas and dungeons, you’ll be exploring, attacking enemies, and solving puzzles.

Progressing through the game is exploration and location-based. When you start, you’ll only have a couple different islands you can visit. As you explore these islands, you gain access to hidden bottles that unlock new islands. You then explore those islands and, while some of these islands are completely optional, eventually find where you need to go for each of the sacred emblems you’re trying to restore and collect.

Exploring is simple. You roam around areas, talk to NPCs, attack enemies, and solve puzzles. Some islands are towns full of NPCs and Shops while others are solely dungeons full of enemies and puzzles to solve. NPCs will hint you towards what’s going on and where you need to go, such as stating that you need a certain item to access a certain island’s center and that island containing a note about where you might find said item. It’s all about exploration, finding hidden areas, leaving no stone unturned, and all that jazz.

As such, you can expect about as much difficulty in exploration as you can with a Zelda title, but a little less so. When the game starts, you unlock the first town and are just given “Go find the Earth Artifact”. None of the NPCs in said town even mention said Artifact and I found it by accident by saving an NPC about 3 or 4 islands later after doing a few hours of exploration in finding bottles that unlocked said islands.

Once you realize that’s how the game progresses, you’re pretty well-prepared, but the game doesn’t really tell you that. You just go at it and find it yourself.

Combat and Puzzles are about as you’d expect from a game trying to mimic Zelda. You do straight slashes in front of you with your sword, can hold the attack button for a charged swing attack, and can use items like bombs and arrows to attack far-away enemies. It’s pretty much exactly like 2D Zelda games aside from magic spells you learn for fighting far-off enemies and solving puzzles like using a fire spell to light torches.

Puzzles are very simple. Push blocks out of the way to move forward. Push blocks onto switches to open doors. Bomb cracked walls to find hidden chests with keys. Use keys to open doors. Find Master Key to open Boss Room. All taken from Zelda, and even on the simpler side of Zelda. You won’t find anything remotely difficult like the shrines from Breath of the Wild here.

Bosses are the biggest note-worthy point of the game. All of them have a pattern to them, requiring you to damage them or parts of them before the core is revealed for you to attack. These start off very easy, but will quickly and easily get hard when you get to the 2nd of the 4 major bosses of the game. I had to think pretty hard about how to tackle each boss once the difficulty of the 2nd hit.

Despite there only being 4 major bosses in the game, it lasts a good while. Each of the 3 Artifacts took me about 3-4 hours to find, and getting to the Last Boss is pretty quick. I would gauge a single run through the game to be around 12-15 hours. Not bad considering the Vita version is $12.99, cheaper than the Steam/PC version.

Controls

Nothing too major to say about controls. Oceanhorn is compatible with the PlayStation TV, but contains no special controls for when you’re using it on the micro-console. No touch controls. No motion controls. So, you don’t need to worry about having special alternatives if you want to play it on the big screen.

Moving around is done with the Left Analog Stick and the camera can be panned around with the Right Analog Stick. The D-Pad is used to cycle items if you don’t want to have to go to your inventory every time you wish to change your sub-weapon . The R trigger is used to raise your shield.

Finally, the face buttons. X interacts with objects like chests and crates. Square is used for sword attacks. Triangle is used for casting spells. Finally, Circle is used for your sub-weapon, like throwing bombs or shooting off arrows.

It’s pretty simple. The only awkward thing about the controls is the fact that the Left Analog Stick is used for navigating the pause menu, rather than the D-Pad. Not a huge deal or anything, but something you may not be used to.

Presentation

Visually, I don’t have any complaints. There are some jagged edges here and there, but on the Vita, you can barely even tell they’re there. Even on the PlayStation TV, it looks pretty good. I don’t really have any complaints as the game showcases the art style really well.

Performance is also something I have no real issues with. The initial load time for the game is pretty long, being over a minute in length. Once you get the game loaded, though, the longest loading sequence will be around 4-5 seconds. Frame-rate stays nice and smooth for the entire game as well, so there’s really no reason to complain. The developers took the extra time to optimize the game and it really shines because of it.

Game Title: Ultra Street Fighter II – The Final Challengers
Developer: Capcom
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail (Europe, North America, Japan), Digital (EU, NA, JP)
Battery Life: 4.5 – 5.5 hours
Game Modes: TV, Tabletop, Handheld

The Nintendo Switch has loads of fighting games, thanks to the Neo Geo titles that have been releasing nearly every week since March. Even with all of those, notably Garou: Mark of the Wolves, there haven’t been any –new- native titles that aren’t just emulated. Last month changed that. Capcom had promised to bring a Street Fighter game to the Switch, and that they did.

Although not a very recent game in the series, Capcom took one of the most popular games in the series and remastered it once again with some new added game modes. Here is my review of Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers!

Story

Street Fighter II has very little story to it, and the new version doesn’t change that. In reality, there are a lot of character backgrounds and storylines through the main “Arcade” mode, but you only get about 60 seconds of story after the game is actually over. Be it Chun-Li as a crime fighter or Cammy’s true origins, you will get a little story at the end, but nothing substantial to be worthy of the game actually having plot, as the game was meant to be played in Arcades rather than on home consoles.

This ties into an element I’ll explain later, but the lack of a Story in all of the re-releases of this game really affects its longevity. More on that in the next section.

Gameplay

Ultra Street Fighter 2 is a 2D fighting game, just as all versions of SF2 have been. Although there is new content hidden here, you’ll still be going through 2D fights against opponents, be it online or offline. That much has not changed all that much.

The big question here is this: The game costs $40. What do I get here that I don’t get in Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix on PS3 and 360 and 1/4th the cost (and even cheaper during this week’s Capcom Sale at only $2.49)? Basically, there are 2 new characters (Evil Ryu and Violent Ken), Gallery which contains a digital copy of Street Fighter Artworks: Supremacy that released in Japan and is now Out-of-Print, and the new Way of the Hado Game Mode that lets you play in 3D First-Person battles with Motion Controls. That begs the question. Are 2 characters and a new game mode worth the extra $30?

That’s up to you. If you haven’t played older games, there are several game modes you can go into. Arcade lets you play a gauntlet of fights and see each character’s “story” scene. Buddy Battle lets you use Local Multiplayer. Versus lets you play in custom fights against the CPU. Online lets you play against other players over the Internet. Training lets you test and learn combos against a motionless CPU. Way of the Hado lets you play First-Person battles. And then you have Gallery for artwork, Color Editor for palette swap edits, Player Data for your play stats, Game Manual for the game’s instruction manual, and Options for changing game settings.

Now, that sounds like a lot to take in, but it’s not as much as you’d think. The interactive modes are basically Arcade, Multiplayer, Training, and Way of the Hado. It’s pretty simple as Street Fighter 2 is a gameplay-focused game rather than a balance between Story and Gameplay like modern fighting games. You go for gameplay, so you just quickly choose which way you wish to do it.

The biggest star here is Way of the Hado, the new way to play the game. When you play it, you are shown 3D graphics and waves of enemies appear in front of you. You have to use the Joy-Con’s Motion Controls to perform special moves. One thing to note is that Motion Controls are the only way to use Way of the Hado. Unlike ARMS, there are no button alternatives. It will not allow you to go into this mode unless you detach the Joy-Cons and use them separately.

This mode is interesting not only from the novelty of using Motion-Controlled Hadouken blasts, but because there’s more to it than just the novelty. As you play through stages, you earn Experience and Level Up in an RPG-like fashion. You can then set Growth Points to increase your stats across Attack, Vitality, etc. It’s actually an interesting and smart way to make this mode much more than just “Novelty Motion Controls”.

The main issue here is that it is very difficult to get the motion controls to work correctly. The Hadouken is just a matter of getting the groove right for the motion controls to pick up the moves. Other moves, though, seem to be half and half with it actually registering. I can do the same motion 3 times for one kick move and have it only register it once, despite moving the Joy-Cons the same way every time.

And that’s really the biggest flaw of the game. The First-Person Mode is a ton of fun when it’s working correctly. Kind of like the First-Person Mode in Dead or Alive 5 Plus on the PS Vita. It’s just getting it to work correctly because you’re forced to use motion controls when in this mode.

The other game modes are the same thing you’re already used to. 2D arenas and you use intricate combos to fight your opponents. Street Fighter isn’t known for being “easy” so there’s a pretty big learning curve to it, unless you’re a series fan.

Or you can just switch Controller Mode to Lite and map Supers to the face buttons or touch screen and spam supers to cheat your way through the game. This is a bit of a major handicap as you can use this in online mode as well. It’s similar to the touch controls of Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 on the PS Vita for instant combos, but instant Supers seems a bit too much of a handicap, especially when you’re playing against legitimate players who use manual controls and use actual skill to win.

As far as longevity, it really depends on what you want to do. There’s no real sense of unlocking content, outside of titles to add to your Online Profile, so it’s basically just open the game and play what you want, and that’s it. If you really want a number on that, each arcade run might take you around an hour or so for one run through Arcade and about the same if you’re good at Way of the Hado for a long set of games. If you’re into experiencing story or unlocking content to use, you’ll be disappointed.

Controls

There are a few different ways to control this game. As said above, First-Person fights can only be done with motion controls. And the touch screen can be used in the Lite Control Setup with supers that are assigned to areas on the touch screen.

With button controls, you move with the Arrow Buttons and Left Analog Stick. The Right Stick doesn’t do anything. Then you’ve got different kinds of attacks, each set to a face button as well as the four triggers. Punches are done with X, Y, L, and ZL, and the rest handle kicks. That is assuming you don’t have other moves mapped to those buttons. It’s pretty simple to learn if you’re used to fighters. Nothing terribly awkward about the control setup.

Presentation

Visually, the game looks really nice. The 3D Way of the Hado fights look beautiful (and showcase a question on why Capcom decided to put a 2D Street Fighter on the Switch rather than a 3D game like Street Fighter V. The 2D visuals also have upgraded. You have 2 graphic styles. You can use the original graphics from when the game first game out or you can use the refined graphics that look really smooth and vibrant with color.

No performance issues, either. Online matches are stage, no fps drops, and load times are nice and short, be it in 2D battles or 3D battles.

Battery Life

Since this is mostly a 2D game, I had high hopes for the Battery Life, and got some pretty nice results. Here are the Battery Times from 100% to 0%:

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 09 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 15 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 33 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 41 minutes

I would say those are good times. The more Switch games I review, the more I see getting into the 4-6 hour range than the lower 2-3 hour range that Zelda fit into. You’ll get a good 4-6 hours of the game, Wi-Fi or not.

Game Title: Shantae Half-Genie Hero
Developer: WayForward
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Download: 1.6 GB
Availability: Digital Download (Europe, North America), Retail (TBA 2017 from XSEED Games)
Battery Life: 4-5 hours
Game Modes: TV, Tabletop, Handheld

I never imagined I would return to cover the Shantae franchise only a year or so after I covered the entire series. Half-Genie Hero released on the Vita and I enjoyed it so much, I went on to review the first three games on the 3DS. But Shantae Half-Genie Hero isn’t over. Not only is the new Story Campaign DLC launching this Summer, but the Half Genie’s newest adventure has come to new platforms.

So, let’s talk about it. Half-Genie Hero was pretty great on the Vita and now it’s time for me to be able to actually do a Video Review on it. Here is my review of Shantae: Half-Genie Hero for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Half-Genie Hero takes place some time after Pirate’s Curse. After a foreboding dream, Shantae is forced to defend Scuttle Town from an attack by Risky Boots, the series’ long-time villain. After the attack, she gets fired from her job as the Town Guardian (again) and is sent off on a quest to help create a device to protect the town.

The story of HGH is very comical as all of the previous games have been, and features a cast of characters from the entire series. Just like I said with the Vita version, the game pays no attention towards introducing each character to you. It assumes you’ve already played previous games and know who each of these characters are. It’s certainly enjoyable with no prior knowledge, but it is far more enjoyable with it.

Gameplay

Just like previous games of the series, Shantae: Half-Genie Hero is a 2D Action-Platformer. Across the entirety of the game, you’ll be traveling through multiple side-scrolling levels filled with enemies to fight, secrets to find, and bosses to conquer. It’s very similar to previous games, most notably Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse.

First of all, there is some confusion going around the net as XSEED has sent out some PR emails claiming the Nintendo Switch version of the game comes packed with the upcoming Risky Boots Story Campaign DLC, but my review copy (which was provided by WayForward) contains no such game mode. So just note that Half-Genie Hero on the Nintendo Switch will be getting the DLC when every other system gets it, as far as I know. (I have 100% Completed each existing Game Mode, so I can rule out an Unlock Condition).

Outside of that, the game has 3 Game Modes you can play through. Shantae Mode and Hardcore Mode are unlocked at the start, which are the default game mode and a Hard Mode that plays much more like the older Shantae games with more enemies, stronger enemies, different boss attack patterns, and less items to stockpile. There’s also Hero Mode, which is unlocked upon beating the game. Hero Mode is essentially Speed-Run Mode, giving you all Story-Unlocked Powers from the start of the game.

Progression in Shantae is a mix of exploration, Item Quests, and the actual stages. Whenever you finish a part of the story, you’ll have new NPCs in the Scuttle Town Hub and quests to do, normally associated with obtaining a specific item. Finding this item will be a mix of exploring stages, getting hints from NPCs, and then delivering the item once you find it. It’s pretty simple as you do have a Bathhouse that will point you in the direction of the newly-unlocked hidden items you need for the story.

Exploration has always been a big part of Shantae and the exploration is utilized by transformations. Each time you defeat a boss, you get an animal transformation. These allow you to reach new areas, like the Monkey’s ability to climb walls, the Harpy’s ability to fly, or the Mermaid’s ability to freely swim underwater. Every stage has hidden areas you can only access with a specific transformation, so most new items needed for the story involve using a recently-acquired power in a previous stage to find hidden items.

That’s really the fun in it as well, because there are many Story Items hidden but many others as well, from Max HP Increase Items to New Transformations that aren’t acquired from Story Bosses. It’s really a big feeling of “New Transformation. Let’s see what new stuff I can find” and is absolutely crucial when you’re playing Hardcore Mode.

Outside of exploration, you have combat. When fighting enemies, you use a mixture of whipping your hair for physical attacks and magic spells you can buy in the Item/Upgrade Shop like throwing fireballs, summoning storm clouds, or creating a shield around you to protect you from damage until your magic gauge depletes. You collect gems from fallen enemies, which makes combat important not only for moving through a stage, but collecting currency so you can upgrade your damage, attack speed, and more in the Item/Upgrade Shop.

And, of course, you have Bosses. Each Boss has a specific pattern to it, and some aren’t just “Attack the Boss”. The 2nd boss, for example, has a phase where you free them from chains and you don’t start hitting them to calm them down until the second phase of the battle.

Across the entirety of the game, length is definitely a factor here. I went into this game, having already played it once on the PS Vita and PSTV. With that knowledge, it took me around 6 and a half hours to complete Shantae Mode, 3 and half to complete Hero Mode, and 4 and half hours to complete Hard Core Mode (in that order). For reference, my first run through the game on the Vita took me around 8 hours, so you should expect it to last around that long your first time.

Controls

Nothing too fancy about the game’s controls. No touch controls in handheld mode and the scheme almost precisely mirrors the control scheme used on the PS Vita.

The Left Analog Stick and Arrow Buttons are used for moving Shantae through areas and the Right Stick doesn’t do anything. The L and R triggers are used for activating spells and the Z triggers are used for cycling currently-selected spells. Then you have the face buttons. A is used for activating spells and B is used for jumping. X is used for Dancing to Transform and Y is used for normal attacks. Aside from there being multiple triggers, players of the PS Vita version will have little to no transitions in the control scheme on the Switch.

Also, for those who enjoy the HD Rumble feature, WayForward has added 150 events in the game that utilize the Rumble feature.

Presentation

The visual presentation looks absolutely incredible. The Vita version looked really nice for a Vita game, but the Switch version looks that much more great. On the Vita, you had a colorful presentation but you did have that occasional jagged edge on environments. On the Switch, everything looks perfect. Docked or Handheld, the game looks like a true “HD Adventure” as WayForward advertised. The visuals have no blemishes or flaws that I ever saw.

Performance is up there as well. The Switch version loads a little faster than the Vita and sticks to a nice, solid 60 fps from start to finish, as opposed to the Vita’s fps that mostly stuck around 30 fps.

Battery Life

With 2D visuals, I was expecting a good bit of Battery Life.  Although the game doesn’t give off as much battery as games like Disgaea 5 or Kamiko, here are the times I got from 100% to 0%:

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 52 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 02 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 43 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 00 minutes

Not as high as I was expecting, but still a pretty good amount of Battery Life.  At the very least, you’ll be able to get through roughly half the game on a single charge, with it averaging around 4-5 hours.

Since the Nintendo Switch released, I’ve wanted to get some grips for the Joy-Cons. Single Joy-Con Play is awesome for the games that support it, like Fast RMX and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but unless you have small hands, it can feel a little cramped with the sort of lightning reflexes needed for racing games.

Without the access to the Racing Wheels that Nintendo released, I hunted on Amazon for some reasonably-priced grips made for Single Joy-Con Play. What I found was a product that I’d seen mixed reactions to, by a company called Avidet.

After nearly a month of waiting for the shipped product to arrive, here is my review of the Avidet Control Grip for Switch!

Design

The Grips, themselves, has a typical controller shape. The outside has the normal hand-holders on the bottoms, like PlayStation Controllers and curve up to the triggers. The top has two clickable triggers for the L and R buttons, along with a clear rectangle between them to let you see the battery-level lights between each Joy-Con’s triggers.

Then you’ve got the holes that you use to put the Joy-Cons into the grip and to take it out. On the front, you have a snug Joy-Con-shaped hole that it slides into. This is accompanied by a round hole in the back that you use to push it out when you want to stop using the grip.

The design is pretty simple and actually looks pretty slick. It looks just like a tiny controller and the Joy-Con looks pretty nice when you have them in it. Although the Neon colors do look a bit contrast to the black color of the grip, the Black Joy-Cons would actually look pretty great in it.

Performance

The performance of this set of grips is really the problem. While they do look slick, there are a lot of problems. One thing that isn’t a problem is the truth behind the claim that is it Wear-Resistant. As you hold the grip, it doesn’t wobble or creak. It feels extremely stable and comfortable in your hands. That is one thing that the grips really excel with.

The only problem is almost everything else. First of all, it is very difficult to get both Joy-Cons in the grip “just right”. Among the dozens of times I’ve slipped them in and out of the grip, only the Red Joy-con snuggly fits into place. When you put the Blue/Left Joy-Con in, it feels like it’s not quite in all the way. The bottom feels like there’s just that one tiniest bit of room it can go in further, but won’t latch and stay there.

Once in, though, it feels nice when you’re using the Analog Stick and the buttons on the Joy-Cons. Although the Red/Right Joy-con feels odd since its Analog Stick is in the middle of the “controller” rather than on the left, but that is fairly simple to adjust to. Playing games like this does feel much more comfy than only holding the Joy-Con.

The Triggers, however, are a major flaw in the design. When you press down on the trigger buttons, you can see them pressing down on parts of the trigger buttons on the inside of the Joy-Cons. However, it doesn’t push them down enough for recognition. When you’re in the middle of a race in Mario Kart, you have to push down on the triggers significantly hard to get it to recognize the inputs. Every time I even try to pair the Joy-Cons, I have to push down as hard as I can and even then, it’s a good second or two before it recognizes the input.

Motion Controls, however, it does well. When I’ve used Tilt Controls in Mario Kart with a loose Joy-Con, it feels really strange and hard to get into a groove. With this grip, it’s very simple and easy. It’s stable, stiff, and very easy to make controlled turns. Although you are hindered with using the triggers for Stunt Jumps and Items, it is very Motion-friendly.

Game Title: Plantera DX
Developer: Ratalaika Games
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Download: 60 MB
Availability: Digital (Japan, EU/NA Coming Later)
Battery Life: 4-5 hours
Game Modes: Handheld

Do you ever get that odd craving to play a clicker game on a console, as much as it doesn’t make sense to do so? To be honest, it’s surprising that there even are clicker games on consoles, but with the introduction of touch screens on handhelds, and the touch pad on the PS4 help to make this doable.

My experience in the genre mostly can be explained with 2 words: Cookie Clicker. That’s a big game that I was borderline addicted to on PC. In fact, in a previous technical support job, most of my off-duty time at work was spent doing random plays of Cookie Clicker. I never went back to the genre, but thanks to a nice little 5-dollar game on the Japanese eShop for Switch, I have now. Do note that the Japanese Version of the game has a full English translation, so there’s no need for Japanese knowledge.

Taking the farming genre and applying it to the clicker genre, Plantera was made. Although it was recently-released on the PS Vita, here is my review of the enhanced “remake” of sorts for the Nintendo Switch, Plantera DX!

Story

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

Gameplay

Plantera DX is a farming-themed clicker game. Across the game, you plant various types of food, hire workers to help you pick said food, and continue to do this as your farm slowly grows in size, workforce, and more.

The Nintendo Switch version is called DX because it is enhanced from the other versions of the game. New content in the DX version includes new animals, notably horses. The Map can be expanded wider than any previous version of the game. There is new background music in this version, and the graphics have been slightly enhanced for the Switch’s display.

Now, the point of Plantera is to plant crops, pick them, plant more crops, and repeat the process infinitely until your curiosity and boredom is satisfied. There really is no story, no end-game, no “goal” to reach. It’s just a fact of planting crops and watching your farm grow.

That isn’t to say that the game has no sense of accomplishment or progression. It has the same sort of progression as any other clicker game. For every crop that either you collect via the touch screen or your AI helpers collect, you gain currency (imagine it like money you make off selling your crop). This currency is used in the game’s Shop to purchase seeds for other crops, animals for your farm, and various other enhancements.

The Shop is the main longevity point of the game. You use currency to buy new items and you unlock new items by continuing your farm. As you collect crops, you gain experience and Level Up in an RPG-like manner. Each level introduces either New Helpers, New Items, or both. If you use a better type of a certain crop, you gain more coins per pick. This leads to an increased gain in currency, letting you buy more expensive crops and items, and the process repeats itself since the price for a crop doubles every time you buy it.

Apart from items, you can also use currency to expand your farm, making new plots you can use to plant more crops. Since each plot can contain one of each crop type (Underground Plants, Trees/Bushes, and Orchard Trees), each new plot means several new crops being picked up, which further increases production. The more you have, the more you get, as they say.

Eventually, it gets to the point where you can’t keep focused on the game long enough to gain the money needed to buy more crops. The Special Part of the shop is for that. In this part, you can get Dogs and Scarecrows to keep nefarious animals from destroying your crops, but also Alarm Clocks and Multipliers. The Multipliers are important because they multiply your currency gain, starting with 2x Coins and up from there. To go along with this, you’ve got Alarm Clock upgrades to let your workers keep working even when you close the game out for a certain amount of time. So, if you have the 8 Hour Alarm Clock, the game will run itself for up to 8 hours after it is closed, or even the Switch, itself, is shut off.

All of this is very basic, since you’re essentially just tapping on crops, tapping on shop items, and watching everything unfold from there. As such, there isn’t that much longevity in a single run. If you want numbers, I reached Level 20 and unlocked the final Shop Items after around 2 hours of gameplay. Although there are achievements all the way up to Level 100 and beyond, the upgrades there are just enhanced versions of already-existing shop items. So, if you just want a single run, 2 hours.

Now, is that really worth it? The Switch version costs 500 yen in Japanese, so will likely cost $4.99 in the West. That’s not a lot, but you’re not getting a lot, either. (Plus the Steam version is only $2.99). You do get exclusive content, so it’s not like it’s an exact copy of other versions.

Controls

Controls are strange, but the first thing you should know is that you cannot play Plantera DX in Docked Mode / TV Mode. It can display in Docked Mode, but there are many touchscreen-only controls, so controlling the game in Docked Mode is not an option unless you’re just wanting to sit and watch the game gather currency.

Now, this doesn’t mean there aren’t any button controls, because there are. The Arrow Buttons and Left Analog Stick move in menus and move the camera around your farm. The + and – buttons open up the menu, and the A/B buttons allow you to confirm or cancel placing shop items and confirm/cancel when cycling through menus.

The biggest problem about this is the fact that it could have more button controls. It just doesn’t. There could be a cursor system with the Directional Buttons moving the camera and the Left Stick moving the cursor or just focus on each crop so you could claim it with A. I’ve contacted the developers on this and they said they’re looking into it and if they find a way to do it, they will implement it in the West. But, just know, right now, it doesn’t work.

Presentation

Not a whole lot I can say about presentation. As much as the description of the game says the graphics are enhanced, I don’t really see any difference between the visuals of Plantera on 3DS and Plantera DX on the Switch. It’s got a very simple 2D style. The renders aren’t perfect and you can see some blurring here and there. It’s a blemish that definitely shouldn’t be there and isn’t there in the PC version. In actuality, it’s odd that Plantera on Steam actually looks better, visually, than DX.

Performance, though, is flawless. There is virtually no time at all with loading your farm, and everything plays smoothly.

Battery Life

Being such a simple 2D game, I expected to get mad battery life out of Plantera DX. You actually do get a lot of life out of it, though not as much as I thought. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%:

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 09 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 18 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 00 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 07 minutes

Now, I’m not gonna complain about 4-5 hours of battery life, because that’s really nice. But, considering its 2D style, I would honestly expect it to get more Battery Life than games like Disgaea 5. It’s good, but not as good as it probably could be.

Game Title: Mighty Gunvolt Burst
Developer: Inti Creates
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Download: 31.6 MB
Availability: Digital Download (Europe, Japan, North America)
Battery Life: 4.5 – 6.5 hours
Game Modes: TV, Tabletop, Handheld

Mighty No. 9 was set to take the world by storm, creating a new evolution and series to replace gaming’s current empty space where Mega Man once stood. Instead, it invited ridicule and the game can be bought brand-new for as little at $8.00 on the web. The idea that was meant to bring new life into the Mega Man slice of the platformer genre ended up being anything but.

Beck has been known to come into other games that aren’t nearly as “terrible”, though. After Azure Striker Gunvolt on the Nintendo 3DS breathed new life into the genre, Inti Creates decided to take things one step further. Originally an idea and a very small and flawed game, known as Mighty Gunvolt, the developer has expanded the formula and made it into its own fully-fledged platformer.

Breathing new life into both Azure Striker and Mighty No. 9, here is my review of the Nintendo Switch version of Mighty Gunvolt Burst!

Story

The story of Burst takes place after the events of Mighty No. 9 on Beck’s side and Azure Striker Gunvolt. Beck is uploaded into a Virtual Reality simulation and Gunvolt is pulled into a strange world that he is unfamiliar with. They are then forced to travel through stages of the corrupt world, seemingly controlled by corrupted versions of Beck’s siblings, Mighty Numbers 1-9. As they each fight their separate paths, they seek to find a way out of this strange world.

The plot of Mighty Gunvolt Burst isn’t too heavy. You get a scene or two at the beginning, once you clear the 8 main stages, and during the ending. About what you’d expect from a modern Mega Man platformer. Beck and Gunvolt have their own story scenarios and, while similar, they do stand on their own enough to showcase references and love for their respective games.

Gameplay

Mighty Gunvolt Burst is a 2D Platformer in the vein of the old, NES Mega Man games. Whether you go through the game as Beck or Gunvolt, you’ll be tackling 8 main stages, along with several “final” stages until you find and defeat the final boss and see the game’s ending. It’s typical Mega Man format.

First off, this is more or less a large remake of Mighty Gunvolt, so what’s different here? Beck and Gunvolt return as playable characters (with more on the way as Updates/DLC), and there’s more than twice as many levels. The original Gunvolt barely had 4 levels to go through. Burst has 13, so the content has tripled from level count alone. The other additions I’ll get to in a moment.

The main concept is simple enough. You go through your intro level, beat its boss, and the 8 “Main” levels appear, which can be completed in any order you wish. Typical Mega Man-type game, right? Well, that’s about all that is there in your “typical” Mega Man formula. The way you unlock levels.

Once you complete a level, you are given a reward, one of 3 you can choose from. It will always be a CP Upgrade, an Elemental Attack, or a Sticker for your game’s profile. This, along with all of the hidden upgrades hidden in each level, gives the game a “Collectathon” feel to it. You’re meant to beat a level, getting whatever hidden goodies you can find, and then replay the level for the other Level Completion rewards while also hunting for those other hidden upgrades.

CP is the way upgrades work. You collect all kinds of Upgrades you can equip from each level, but they all have CP Usage and your CP Max can’t go over. So, to use more upgrades, you need to beat more bosses and find more CP Up items hidden in each stage, which further pushes you to redo levels instead of just clearing them once.

The beauty of this is that the Upgrade/Customize system is so deep. Some Mega Man games allow you to equip mods to your armor, but I have never played a game that has upgrades to this level. To be more precise, you can unlock and modify Bullet Types, Projectile Types and Trajectory, Bullet Speed, Piercing to have bullets pass through enemies or environments, how they dissipate, elemental properties, auto-fire, charge shots, etc.

And that’s just for your bullets. There are other upgrades that can be used to increase/descrease your attack power, damage you take, how many aerial movements (Jumps/Air-Dashes) you can perform, how effective items are, resistance from instant-death traps, and you can even enable the HD Rumble feature to go off when you’re near a hidden item. The amount of customization and modification you can do in this simple Mega Man-like platformer is staggering.

This amount of customization also makes this game perfect for any type of platforming fan. If you’re having a hard time, you can use some CP to reduce damage taken to 25% of what it was, or increase it to up to 300% if you find the game too easy. Of course, you could also just not use the customization system for a true challenge, though some modifications are required to finding all of the hidden items.

There are also a few things here and there to make Beck and Gunvolt unique. While they both get the majority of the upgrades, Beck gets shot types that resemble those used in Mighty No. 9, while Gunvolt is able to use Septimal Abilities much like those used in his original game. Their air movements are also varied, with Beck using Air Dashes while Gunvolt has double-jumps and triple-jumps.

Outside of this Customization feature, the other “new” feature here is the Burst System. As the game showcases, you will start a Burst Combo if you kill an enemy when you are right next to them, Bosses-included. If you keep killing all enemies after in close proximity, you will increase that combo and increase your High Score for that stage.

While this is a very interesting play style, it is solely there for people who want High Scores. The Burst Combos increase your score at the end of the stage and that’s it. No stat boosts. No special attacks or anything of that sort. Considering that High Scores are the only perk you get for the Burst Combos, many people will simply look past it and not care. And considering Burst is part of the game’s name, it seems more like a neat idea that is greatly over-shadowed by other features.

As far as difficulty goes, it can be hard or easy, as I explained earlier. Left alone, I wouldn’t put it any harder than any other NES-style Mega Man game. You learn attack patterns and learn to dodge them. And the Customize options can make this a lot easier or a lot harder. There is still some skill involved, but given how you can exploit the Customize option, it’s not too high on my “Tough as Nails” platformer list.

With time, it really depends. If you utilize the collectathon aspect and go for getting all of the upgrades you can actually use (CP Up items and Customize Options), a single run with a single character should take you around 5 hours, give or take. That puts the entire game up to around 10 hours, if you wish to play through as both of them. There’s also the fact that completing the game once unlocks Hard Mode, so time can also go up if you utilize that. Considering this is a $10 game, I think it’s a fair trade between money and completion time.

Controls

Controlling the game is nothing out of the ordinary. You don’t need to worry about anything special, as the control scheme is very basic. In fact, the X button and 4 triggers aren’t used in actual gameplay. Even X is only used in the menu when you wish to save your customization settings.

Moving around is done with the Directional Buttons or the Left Analog Stick. Jumping is done with B, Skills with A, and shooting with Y. It’s very basic and the controls, themselves, feel more in tune with PlayStation Mega Man titles than anything else. It’s very easy to use.

Presentation

Visually, I don’t have many complaints, but I do have one. First of all, you will see borders around the game and those cannot be taken away. Although they are there, the game looks very nice and makes good use of the borders being part of the HUD for healing items and current CP.

The one thing I dislike about the visuals is one stage that uses a diagonal section. It is merely zoomed out and rotated, but it makes the graphics look, quite honestly, terrible. Pixelated, Blurry, and all around hard to look at. The first time I played that stage, I got a headache, just from looking at it. More polish would have been appreciated there.

Performance-wise, I have nothing bad to say. Load Times are near-instant. Frame-rate is steady from start to finish. In that regard, it plays wonderfully.

Battery Life

2D Game, so I expected great things. While this isn’t superior to Disgaea 5, you still get a lot of Battery Life out of the game. Here are my times from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 30 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 51 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 08 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 32 minutes

I’m not about the complain about 4.5-6.5 hours because that’s really nice. My expectations were just a bit higher, mostly due to games like Kamiko and Disgaea 5 Complete.

Game Title: Nurse Love Addiction
Developer: Kogado Software, Degica Games
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Download: 1.8 GB
Availability: Digital (Europe, North America)
PSTV Support: Yes

I love to play Visual Novels, but it’s very seldom that I get so absorbed into it, that I literally feel like I am the Main Character. Sure, Amnesia: Memories got pretty emotional and Hakuoki: Kyoto Winds was a fantastic learning experience about Japanese History. But, it’s rare that there’s a game where the emotional events of a VN character tug at my own heart, or heighten my own anxiety level as I’m playing/reading the game.

The funny thing is, it was a Yuri VN that did that to me this week. The game has actually been out in Japan for 3 years now, and has been released in English on Steam for almost a single year. Now that it’s on the Vita and PlayStation TV, console gamers can experience an emotional rollercoaster of a Visual Novel.

Here is my review of Nurse Love Addiction!

Story

The plot revolves around a young girl named Asuka Osachi, whom just entered into a Nursing Academy with her younger sister, Nao. The game revolves around the first 3 years of her Nurse Training, as she learns the skills of the trade, interacts with other students and professors, and learns about the passion of Love.

The game offers 4 different women that can end up as her lover. Nao, her younger sister that Asuka heavily depends upon for daily life. Sakuya, a tall woman whom dresses like royalty and seems to harbor a deep hatred for our heorine. Itsuki, an introverted and often flirtatious woman whom is Sakuya’s current lover. And finally, Kaede, their clumsy homeroom teacher and Asuka’s picture of “The Perfect Nurse”.

There are two joys about the game’s plot. Although it is very much a Yuri Romance Sim, there is a lot of plot unrelated to romance. As you dive deeper through the different chapters, there are a lot of deep and even dark backstories for each of the characters, all revolving around Asuka, herself. Even the Loner Path where Asuka ends up single at the end of the game is full of a lot of deep and dark backstory and lore.

The other things I love about this game’s story is how unpredictable it is. IN nearly every anime-like game I’ve played, there are plot twists that I can see coming from a mile away. Nurse Love Addiction has dozens upon dozens of huge and chilling twists to its story, but none of them I could guess. I had ideas in mind, and the game always surprised me by doing something completely different from what cliché anime/manga would expect. It’s a wonderful trait, as the story is constantly bringing you surprise after surprise. Along with this, each “Bad” ending route is filled with jaw-dropping content that is very dark and shows why the game is rated M despite having no visual sexual content.

I’ll explain this later as well, but the length and diversity of the endings add a lot to the game as well with replay value. Some endings are relatively short, while others are nearly an hour long, themselves, and they each will dive into different aspects of the world and reveal different backstories for different areas, groups, and side characters. You never can see the whole picture unless you go through all of the different paths.

But to conclude this story section, it’s just a huge emotional rollercoaster. When I was near the end of the Kaede path and there was a lot of tension with Asuka, I felt tension, myself, and was almost afraid to make a choice with how delicate and how bad the situation could go. Plus, all of the Bad Endings are so extreme and off the wall that they’ll just leave you speechless. The story starts off like any other VN, but it is thrilling and heart-pounding once you get past the “Introducing the characters” chapter.

Gameplay

This game is a Visual Novel, so gameplay is very light. You read through story scenes and interact with dialogue choices when they pop up. It’s very simple and very in tune with what VN players will be expecting. The focus is more on the plot that develops as you play the game.

With Game Modes, though, you have only Start Game, Load Game, and Settings when you begin the game. When you finish one route and see the credits, you will unlock Photos, Memories, Music, and messages, which allow you to see CG scenes, Unlocked Endings, the OST, and Character Profiles for each character whose route you’ve cleared.

As you play the game, it is as I explained above. You go through scenes of dialogue until you come to a section with Dialogue Choices. These Dialogue Choices can either result in slightly different scenes right after or can affect which Character Route you end up branching into in the second half of the game. But even the smaller ones do give you different dialogue and scenes, and the game’s hidden trophy is tied to one of these smaller non-route-altering choices so it’s important to be careful what you choose and save when you believe you’re at an important choice selection.

2 things about the game really help to cater to those who will want to do different character paths and keep specific save files for future routes. First, the game offers you 8 different pages of save slots, each with 8 different slots within. This essentially allows you to dedicate each page to a different category. I used the 1st page for the first half of the game, before the character paths branch out. Then, I used each page after for a specific character’s Routes. Considering there are PSN trophies for Good and Bad endings for each Route, it’s important to have all of these slots readily available.

The other is a setting in the game. Since there is a ton of filler between actual romance events, you’re going to be skipping through a lot of the game when repeating Routes. The game has a Skip Option called “Previously Viewed”, which will only skip dialogue you’ve already seen. This allows you to essentially just turn Skip on and wait for the game to stop when it reaches a sentence you have yet to experience in the game. It makes doing these other paths so much easier than repeating the entire game every single time you go back for a different Route.

This also affects Play Time. Nurse Love Addiction is $39.99 on the PS Vita (and the same price on Steam when not during a sale like the Summer Sale), and has 9 different endings to go through. Although the game has no Play Time timer, based on when I’ve been playing, I guess that from the start of the game to the time I unlocked the 9th Ending, I had played the game for around 28-30 hours total. That’s quite a long time for a VN, so you could see the validation of the full price tag for how much content you’re getting. But note that a single character’s path will probably take you around 10-15 hours. That extra 15 hours comes from doing other Routes for different Endings.

Controls

Controls. Considering how sudden the release of this game was, I fully expected it to not work on the PlayStation TV and, just like the game’s story, the devs and publisher proved me wrong. Nurse Love Addiction is fully playable on the PlayStation TV but you can also enable touch controls when you’re playing on the go.

The control scheme is simple, but deceptive. You can use the touch screen or the X button to advance dialogue. You can also advance dialogue with the two triggers. The L trigger enables auto-advance and the R trigger toggles the Skip option. Also, the Circle button is used to make the dialogue disappear if you want to see the artwork or take screenshots.

The Square button is there for most other parts of the menu. It has the Save, Load, Settings, and Return to Title options as well as the Auto-Play and Skip options. This is where things are deceptive. Like so many other Visual Novels, the game doesn’t tell you how to open this menu. You have to just start tapping buttons and hope it was the right one. Nothing on the HUD. Nothing during load screens.

Nothing anywhere to tell me how to do this and I had to repeat a lot of the introduction of the game because I hit Start and used Quick Save, thinking it was the only way to save. Then, when I restarted my PSTV, I had no progress because I didn’t save properly.

This is just another example of gamers’ notes to VN devs: Dear Developers, please give us a button tutorial outside of a digital manual. Even if it’s just a loading screen, let us know where the Save Option is.

Presentation

Visually, the game looks nice. The game has a unique art style and a ton of CG scenes to show the passion of the characters. From Asuka and Nao’s failed attempts at bed-making to the heart-throbbing kissing scenes, there is a really nice art design for this game that puts it aside from other VNs on the Vita.

Performance is no issue, either. There pretty much are no load times once you hit the story and there aren’t any sound issues or fps issues. The game is optimized exceptionally well.

Game Title: Tokyo Xanadu
Developer: Falcom, Aksys Games (Publisher)
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Download: 2.2 GB
Availability: Europe (Digital), North America (Digital, Retail)
PSTV Support: Yes

Falcom has made quite a few different games for handhelds, most prominently of the Legend of Heroes series and the Ys series. What the West has not seen much from Falcom is new IPs. They tried to do this with a new series that didn’t leave Japan for a long time. It was called Tokyo Xanadu.

Now that it is coming West, the situation is a bit strange. The PS Vita version of Xanadu is coming out now, while the PS4 version is coming later in the year, packed with new characters and story content. Aksys did this in a smart way with spreading the releases out to not completely burn off Vita owners with the “definitive” version being out right away.

But, let’s not focus on that. Here is my review of the PS Vita and PSTV version of Tokyo Xanadu!

Story

Unlike Ys and LoH’s fantasy setting, Tokyo Xanadu takes place in present-day Tokyo. Kou is a student who tries to save a classmate from some muggers and ends up knee-deep in a battle between underground Japanese groups and an alternate dimension called “The Eclipse”, which caused a disaster that killed thousands in Tokyo years prior.

The plot follows Kou as his friends and family become victim to this “Eclipse” and the monsters within, slowly forming a group that can fight back to prevent a second Disaster from coming and hitting Tokyo.

Tokyo Xanadu is one of those stories where you go in and think you’ll never remember all the names or roles of the dozens of characters thrown at you, but before you know it, you don’t even need their dialogue up to know who is who. It’s a charming game that gets more so the further you play.

Gameplay

Tokyo Xanadu is an Action-RPG with School Sim elements in the mix. Picture it like Trails of Cold Steel but with a modern setting and easier access to dungeons.

Your main progression in the game will be between moving around the city to spawn story scenes and dungeons to navigate and “Free Time” days, where you can revisit dungeons, do side-quests, or use Affinity Crystals to experience Friendship Bonding scenes with many of the other characters. These Character Scenes are similar to Social Links from Persona, and exactly like Character Bonding from Trails of Cold Steel 1 and 2.

One last thing on my current point. There are also shops around the city, where you can spend money on items and equipment, or Exchange gems dropped by enemies into money. If you’ve ever played a Legend of Heroes game, the shop system and Exchange System is just like the system from that series.

And that really drives a bit point with me. Tokyo Xanadu borrows a lot from the Legends of Heroes series. In fact, the Friendship Events, NG+ options, Towa being a character, the shop system, navigating the town, having to exchange gems for money, and even the way the customization menus look and the orbs you use in that menu look almost copied-and-pasted out of Trails of Cold Steel. For a game that Falcom aimed to have a different feel than their other flagship series, they failed. Tokyo Xanadu is unique in dungeons, but everything else feels like Legends of Tokyo: Trails of Xanadu Steel. It feels like they borrowed far too much from Cold Steel and not enough in the “new systems” department.

As I just said, dungeons are where the game becomes unique. Being an Action RPG, enemies spawn in the dungeon and you fight them in real-time. You’re able to use melee attacks, ranged and power attacks that use up MP, and swap out between party members according to the situation. This is very simple, yet strategy manages to creep in anyways.

Fighting enemies is a battle of weaknesses. All characters have elements tied to their attacks and all enemies have elemental weaknesses. Exploit the weakness and you do more damage. The same with physical and ranged attacks. Some enemies are immune to ranged skills, forcing you to fight them up-close. These can also result in special kills, which should be your goal as they affect the Rank you get for completing the dungeon.

Rank ties into your Wisdom, Courage, and Virtue stats. By S-Ranking Dungeons, answering story questions correct, and completing side-quests, you increase these stats. When you reach the final dungeon, these stats affect whether you are able to get the True Ending path and playable Epilogue, or you get the short, saddening Bitter Ending. The nice thing is that getting the Bitter End will tell you how to obtain the True End and give you the chance to restart before the final dungeon, but only certain aspects of those stats will still be available as side-quests expire each chapter.

Now, length. We know the PS4 version will have more content, but Tokyo Xanadu is a lengthy game on its own. When I finally finished the game up with the True Ending and Playable Epilogue, I had logged over 37 hours. I had not done about 90% of the side-quests, though, so if you stick to all the side quests, it would likely last 40 hours or more. For anyone debating getting on which version to buy, you’ll still get a good 40 hours out of the PS Vita version of the game.

Controls

The game isn’t hard to control, and is also compatible with the PlayStation TV. Everything is done with the actual buttons on the system, so there’s no need to worry about touch or motion controls coming into play. If you want to play the whole thing on your TV, you can.

Controls are simple enough. The Left Analog Stick moves you around dungeons, and the Right Analog Stick moves the camera. The D-Pad is used to swap characters and use special combat modes. The L trigger is used for locking onto enemies, and the R trigger is used to dodge. Start lets you open the menu and Select lets you see the mini-pad. Then, we have the face buttons. You use X for normal attacks and Square for Ranged/Power attacks. Triangle is used for switch your current two characters.

Not a hard way to play, and the game does a nice job explaining it all to you.

Presentation

Visually, I can’t say it looks awful but I also can’t say it looks wonderful. It uses the same graphical engine as Trails of Cold Steel, but there are more jagged edges on the character models. It doesn’t look quite as smooth as Cold Steel aside from when it is zoomed in, when character models smooth out more.

Performance is something that needs to be discussed, though. Load Times aren’t very long, but frame drops do tend to happen. Like in Cold Steel, many story scenes have frame drops that are definitely down beneath 20 fps, and combat does as well. The frame drops in combat are the same. Whenever a large enemy is defeated or a large AoE attack is used by the enemy, the fps tanks well under 20 fps. Most of the time it doesn’t affect your flow with an enemy death sparking it, but the final boss has a few large attacks they frequently use, so one of those fights will have a lot of drops. Still manageable, but it is quite frustrating.

Game Title: Valkyria Revolution
Developer: Media.Vision, SEGA
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Download: 2.8 GB
Availability: Digital Download (Europe, North America)
PSTV Support: Yes 

Among SEGA franchises, I’ve always loved the Valkyria series. I played a lot of Valkyria Chronicles II on my PSP and thoroughly enjoyed the animated adaptation of the original game. I actually still have an original Valkyria Chronicles disc for the PS3, but somehow have never actually played through it.

The new game in the series, or rather, new game in a reboot of sorts of the series, coming west was big news for me. I love Valkyria and I enjoyed the Japanese demo of this new game. So, to help show my love for the series and commemorate a great milestone in the website, here is my 500th review since starting this website, for the PS Vita / PSTV version of Valkyria Revolution!

Story

The plot of Valkyria Revolution takes place in an alternate timeline of the Europa we all know from the Chronicles series. Instead of being in the World War II era, Revolution takes place in the era more in tune with the European Revolutions. When an ore called Ragnite is discovered, it is used by the masses as an energy source. Rather than solely being fuel like in Chronicles, it is used to make infused and special weapons to be used by the military.

The story revolves around a small group of militants, dubbed the “Anti-Valkyria Squad”, as they lead their country through a revolution to overthrow the tyranny of a neighboring country. As they fight for their own freedom both against the opposing country and a fearsome enemy known as the “Valkyria”, the plot weaves a very different type of world than Chronicles did.

The story, itself, is very nicely done and well-told. From the Princess running with the Anti-Valkyria Squad to the mysterious group manipulating events of the war, it is a very enjoyable Sci-Fi Military plot.

Gameplay

Unlike the Chronicles games, which were Third-Person Shooting Strategy RPGs, Valkyria Revolution is an Action RPG with light strategy elements thrown into the mix. Picture a free-roam action game like Dynasty Warriors, but with more of an RPG focus and a skill system with SRPG-like attack ranges and you’ve pretty much got this game in a nutshell. In short, it is an Action RPG.

Playing the game is pretty simple. The story drives you forward and eventually lands you in a hub world with various facilities, such as a Command Center for taking on missions and buying supplies, a town-like “Promenade” for seeing optional character scenes and buying equipment, and a Factory, where you can upgrade your weapons and make more advanced guns for your characters to use in combat. There are others for story purposes, but those 3 you will be spending a lot more time in.

When you’re not in these places, you’re on a mission. From the Command Center or just “Headquarters”, you can take on Story, Battle, and Free Missions and each have their own affects. Free missions are there to help you level characters for Story Missions, Story Missions advance the plot, and Battle Missions are randomized missions that will affect the overall war and territories.

Now, let’s talk about these Battle Missions for a moment. The game emphasizes that not partaking in these affects the war, and it does. If you do not do a Defend This Area Battle Mission and skip to do Story Missions instead, you will lose that territory. On top of this, there are normally many of these missions on the map at once and more that respawn later, having you do many of these missions for each Story Mission. It sounds quite repetitive and after some time, it is. These missions are often copies of one another, right down to the enemy groups and spawn points.

These are optional, but at the same time, they’re not. If you choose to skip these Battle Missions, you’ll eventually hit a wall in Story Mode and be underleveled, even in Easy Mode. But if you do these missions, the game will start to feel repetitive very, very quickly. It’s really a lose-lose situation overall.

Now, what you do in each mission is where things really get a tad unique and more solidify this as something of a reboot of the series and setting as a whole. This is an Action RPG, so you have free roam around the battlefield (unlike the Chronicles games where you could only move so far each turn). To fight off enemies, you run up to them and either attack them with a melee attack or open up the Command Menu to use a Skill, Item, your Sub-Weapon, or give orders to another party member.

In this system, the strategy starts to come into play, along with one element that was taken from Valkyria Chronicles. Let’s go into that first. One of the options from the Command Menu is your sub-weapon, which is a firearm. When this is selected, you go into a third-person shooter aiming mode and can fire off shots that have accuracy and damage, depending on the type of gun you’re using and how far away the enemy is. This is similar to how shooting worked in Chronicles.

The strategy comes in the form of elements. Every skill has an element tied to it. Many enemies have elemental weaknesses that you need to exploit to defeat very easily (unless you play on Easy Mode). Each skill also has a range. You might need a long-range ice attack that appears at the enemy when fighting flying airships, while large mobs you may need a long wind-elemental charge attack that can defeat several enemies at once. It takes a lot of playing around to really figure out what is effective against what.

But that’s also the shining part of the game. This isn’t Valkyria Chronicles and, gameplay-wise, it’s clearly meant to be something else. Considering how the enemies come together, the fact that you take over bases, enemy reinforcement types, and how boss fights work, I believe the developers wanted to take the idea of Valkyria Chronicles and mash it up with Dynasty Warriors because in each mission, it feels like you’re playing a Musou RPG that makes you think about proper characters, attacks, and more.

Across the entirety of the game, Revolution keeps you busy. The game’s 11 Chapters can be cleared in around 30-40 hours, depending on your difficulty. So it’s quite a long trek, adding onto many of the other longer RPGs released on the Vita lately, like Tokyo Xanadu and possibly Accel World vs Sword Art Online.

Controls

Controls for this game are off, and that’s one reason I recommend the PlayStation TV for playing it. Not only is if compatible with the PSTV, but the controls seem to be mapped a little smarter.

Basic movement and whatnot is easy enough. The Left Stick lets you move and the Right Stick moves the camera. The L and R buttons are used mostly in battle for locking onto enemies (though the bottom-right corner of the touch screen does this on the Vita). X lets you talk to NPCs or perform melee attacks. Triangle opens the Command Menu, and Circle lets you cancel out of options and menus.

You also have Start, and Select. Start opens the Save Menu and Select opens up the customization menu outside of missions. However, this only uses the Select Button on the PSTV. On the Vita, you have to tap the center of the touch screen to access this, which makes it a bit strange, considering the Select Button on the Vita doesn’t do anything in the game and could easily have been the same feature.

Presentation

Graphically, the character models look nice and detailed, but the environments don’t. In this game, the devs did the same think Omega Force did with the Vita version of Berserk and the Band of the Hawk. They significantly reduced the detail of environments for the sake of game performance.

Thankfully, this move does pay off. Across the entirety of the game, there are seldom situations where the frames actually drop under 30 fps. It may not look super-HD, but it plays nicely.

Game Title: Skylanders Imaginators
Developer: Activision
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Download: 432 MB (Size of current patches)
Availability: Retail-Only (Europe, North America)
Battery Life: 3-4 hours
Game Modes: TV, Tabletop, Handheld

There’s a funny thing about physical-only games in today’s gaming world. When the Nintendo Switch hit the world, a lot of people were talking about what games were available at launch. Zelda, of course. Fast RMX. I am Setsuna. But there was also a physical-only (Not available as a digital download) game that virtually no one talked about at all. And it was physical-only because it was a toys-to-life game, the newest entry in the Skylanders franchise.

I’ve actually wanted to try out the game for some time now, especially after they’d announced the Crash Bandicoot pack for this new game. Thanks to the fact that all figures are not platform-specific (ie Crash Bandicoot can be used in any version of the game) and the fact that the Switch Starter Pack is now under $40, I’m ready to give you a review.

Here’s my review of the Nintendo Switch release of Skylanders Imaginators!

Story

If you’re new to the series, Skylanders is about Skylands, a world once inhabited by a powerful, ancient civilization. Now it is inhabited by heroes known as “Skylanders”, who have come to Skylands from many different worlds, mostly brand-new creations for the series but occasion other characters appear, like Spyro the Dragon from his series that originated on the original PlayStation.

When Spyro the Dragon and Stealth Elf are in the middle of a personal race around Skylands, the villain Kaos unlocks an ancient magic that uses the power of the mind to create matter. In response to Kaos’ plan to use Mind Magic to create an army of “Doomlanders” to take out the heroic Skylanders, Stealth Elf calls upon the “Portal Master” ie the Player, to bring in Sensei Skylanders to assist in taking down Kaos.

The story is really cute and the voice-acting really matches it. When I first heard the villain have the same English VA as Zim from the Invader Zim TV series, I knew it would be really enjoyable. From start to finish, the game really plays out like a cartoon you’d see on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon, making it a great form of entertainment for the family.

Gameplay

Skylanders Imaginators is a toys-to-life game, but also a 3D action-platformer. To play, you essentially sync a character figure up and you’re able to use said character to go through the stages of the game, while fighting enemies, navigating platforms, and reaching boss fights. Very different from the sandbox nature of the Disney Infinity games.

First off, this is a Toys-to-Life game, which means you cannot play the game without Skylanders figures. When you go into the game, you must either scan a Skylanders Character figure or a Creation Crystal figure to play. On the nice end, all previous Skylanders from past games can be scanned into Imaginators. And the great thing about the Nintendo Switch version is that you don’t need a huge portal to carry around with you. You simply scan the figure with the Switch’s Amiibo NFC Reader on the Right Analog Stick.

On top of this, the portability is showcased by the fact that once you scan each character a few times, the game saves them in its memory, allowing you to freely switch back and forth without re-scanning the figure. This works for several figures, as I have all of the characters from the Starter Pack and Crash Bandicoot pack easily-available at any time when the figures aren’t around to be scanned.

Finally before getting to how the game works, let’s talk about the biggest new feature for the series: Character Creation. When a Creation Crystal is scanned (like the one that comes with the Starter Pack), you can create your own character based around the element of the crystal. You’re able to use unlocked body parts to customize your character, and there are a lot of different choices you can make. You’ve got basic parts, like Head, Chest, Arms, and Legs, but more advanced parts are available from Ears and Eyes to Backpacks and Job Classes.

Now that the new features are out of the way, how does the game work? You basically go from a Hub World to a Stage. When you’re in the Hub, you have different areas you can go to. There are Story Missions, Battle Arena for fighting enemies, The Arcade to play a card game that’s similar to Tetra Master from Final Fantasy IX, and unlockable content like the Crash Bandicoot-inspired Thumpin’ Wumba Islands. You basically just choose an area to go to and you enter it, be it a mission or just a small shop.

That brings up another thing. This is a toys-to-life game, and that brings this genre’s biggest gimmick. Areas are locked to certain character figures. Want Thumpin’ Wumba Islands? You have to go out and buy the Crash Bandicoot set and can’t get all of its collectibles without using both Crash Bandicoot and Neo Cortex as characters, so you can’t just scan a friend’s figure to unlock the level. You need to be able to own it. And there are a few other stages that require specific sets.

That also goes for all of the elemental stages. They’re optional, but they require a sensei character of a certain element. In the starter pack, you get an Earth elemental and Water elemental, which means you cannot enter the stages for Fire, Life, Undead, etc. That content is all locked until you enter it with a character of that element you’ve gone out and bought.

But that’s just to teach you about the genre. When you go into a stage, story or otherwise, you basically navigate platforms, fight off hordes of enemies, and solve puzzles in order to reach the end and beat the level. I really can’t think of anything to compare it to outside of Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, as they fit into this genre so well and that’s probably also why Spyro is the main protagonist of the series in general and why Crash has been offered as a new playable character in Imaginators. Think of it like a 3D Crash game, but not branded as such.

Completing levels or just finding collectible chests rewards you with parts for custom characters. So, aside from story progression, you’re playing to make more advanced and powerful custom characters with whatever Creation Crystals you have. Kind of like this game’s alternative to Disney Infinity’s decorations you unlock.

As far as length goes, don’t expect a long game. For story completion, each game in the Skylanders series has been around 8-10 hours long. Solely going off the content in the Starter Pack, Base Game, and the Crash Bandicoot pack, the game took me around 12 hour to beat. Once the story is done, there’s not much to do but replay stages and train up other characters. Although it would probably be more like 20-30 hours with all character levels, that would be a lot more money gone because of them being tied to certain figures. If you just buy the game, about 10-12 hours until the story is done.

Controls

Controlling the game is pretty simple. Move around with the Left Analog Stick. The L and R triggers (as well as the ZL and ZR triggers) are used for taking screenshots of yourself in the stage and for using Ultimate Attacks when the gauge is all the way up. You can pause with the + button and the – button lets you customize your character’s skill tree.

Then the face buttons. You can use the B button to jump and the A button to slide, both for attacks and for dodging. X is used for secondary attacks and Y is used for melee attacks, which differ by character. To give an example, Crash Bandicoot throws exploding barrels with X and punches/spins with Y.

Not a bad control scheme, overall. Explained well and I had no problems getting used to it.

Presentation

Graphics really depend on what mode you’re in. If you’re in Docked Mode / TV Mode, the game looks really great. The CG graphics look flawless and the gameplay graphics look nearly-so. If you’re in Handheld Mode, though, there’s a lot of blur to the game. If you recall what Snake Pass for the Switch looked like in Handheld Mode, you get the same effect. Not that it’s terrible and awful, but it’s really blurry when it shouldn’t be.

The rest I have little to no complaints about. Load Times can be a tad on the long side, but the game is smart enough that it loads stages while playing the pre-stage cutscenes, whether it’s a Story Mode stage or a Level Pack stage. The only downer about this is when you replay stages, you have to wait for it to load before you can skip the scene.

Performance is great as well. The fps is nice and smooth and never really drops at all.

Battery Life

So, this is a 3D Launch Title for the Nintendo Switch, so how are we doing on Battery Life? It’s better than Zelda, but far from the best the Switch has to offer. Here are the times I got from 100% to 0%:

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 07 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 15 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 28 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 45 minutes

This is a very weird amount of battery life. With most games, there’s a substantial increase from having brightness on max and on low, but here, it’s 20-30 minutes at best. Still, 3-4 hours isn’t terrible and you don’t ever need Wi-Fi for Skylanders, so it works.

Game Title: Accel World vs Sword Art Online
Developer: Namco Bandai
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Download: 3.0 GB
Availability: Digital Download (Europe, North America)
PSTV Support: Yes

There’s been a running theory about various anime franchises about VR video games actually being linked to the same timeline, showcasing the growth of VR over different times and eras. Obviously, the big hitter when it comes to VR Gaming Anime is Sword Art Online, outside of other franchises that have adopted VR and AR like the critically-hated Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal.

It’s no surprise that the developers of the SAO games would eventually want to cross SAO with another franchise, and the Accel World series was the perfect match. If you watch the anime series or read the manga, you’ll see hints and references that directly connect the two franchises. One episode explicitly talks and shows the Nerve-Gear when Accel World’s MC is researching the history of VR Gaming.

The fact that this cross-over utilized the gameplay engine from SAO: Lost Song got me even more excited about it. So, here is my review of Accel World vs Sword Art Online for PS Vita and PlayStation TV!

Story

The plot of this game takes place some time after the events of Lost Song. While wandering around Alfheim Online, Kirito, Asuna, and Yui notice a massive tower appear in Svart Alfheim, followed by a strange villain known as Persona Vabel. After Kirito locks horns with known other than Black Lotus from the Accel World series, Yui is captured and they are all locked out of the majority of Svart Alfheim when the entire game starts to warp and the system goes into emergency maintenance mode.

After finding out that Black Lotus and others from Brain Burst have arrived in ALO due to a strange portal that appeared in their world, the trio begin searching for their allies from ALO and Brain Burst alike to re-unlock the islands and stop Vabel from hurting Yui.

The story of this game is interesting because 1) it goes on the widely-spread theory that Sword Art Online and Accel World take place in the same timeline and 2) it contains a mash-up of both franchises warping and melding with one another in the form of the new ALO. The entire cast returns from Lost Song, and a good dozen or two Accel World characters join up, so the game really pulls about the same, reference and otherwise, from both franchises instead of just being “Let’s put Accel World characters into SAO for the lulz”.

The main thing is the required knowledge for Accel World. The game does a wonderful job of explaining how Accel World works, from Brain Burst and Legions to the Time Travel and how Burst Points work. What it does not do, however, is explain much about the characters coming from Accel World. Because it takes characters from the part of the AW timeline that only the AW manga has covered, even having watched the anime will not prepare you for every background story and story spoiler the game throws at you.

Gameplay

Like SAO: Lost Song, this is an Action-RPG with flying elements. Although there are several new systems, such as teleportation and enhanced jumping mechanics, the basics of navigating Svart Alfheim remain mostly the same. If you play as an SAO character, then it will be identical, right down to how flying works.

But what’s different here? As far as ALO enhancements, you can now fly in dungeons instead of being stuck on foot and the physical attack skill system has been enhanced to give you one “cinematic” skill and then other skills you can link to shortcuts. There’s also a much shorter recharge time for most skills than before.

The largest changes are the roster and how Brain Burst’s own gameplay elements are incorporated into ALO’s. Counting SAO characters, Accel World characters, Accel Assault characters, and Multiplayer-only characters, there are over 40 different playable characters to choose from. Whether you want to traverse the skies as Leafa, Sinon, and Rain or rush through stages as Silver Crow, Lime Bell, and Sky Raker, there are tons of party combinations that you can use. And because only one or two fights require specific characters, you can use your own party of choice for nearly the entire game.

Duel Avatars and Burst Points are the other major enhancements. Duel Avatars are the Accel World characters and they play and get stronger different from the ALO characters. First of all, only a couple of them can fly, keeping up with Accel World canon. Silver Crow can freely fly while Sky Raker’s Gale Thruster is a timed jetpack for flying. To accommodate, all of them have extreme jumping abilities so they can still reach those high islands as well as the ability to “accelerate” and teleport to locked-on enemies to fight in the air or on the ground.

Now, Burst Points are far more interesting and do stay in-tune with Accel World lore. When you defeat enemies, complete quests, etc, you gain BP (Burst Points) to use at a Burst Point Shop in the hub world. You pay in BP to level up characters (This works for all characters. Not just those from Accel World), buy materials, Buy Playable Characters once you beat the game, and Power Up your Duel Avatar characters. Since there are no “weapons” for Burst Linkers, you increase their power by leveling them or using BP and materials to power them up, as opposed to ALO characters that gain power based on their currently-equipped weapon.

Exploration isn’t a whole lot different, but the island areas are considerably larger. There are now areas underground and much higher than in Lost Song, which easily doubles the amount of space you have to explore. On top of that, a lot of the “Stage Transitions” from Accel World appear as explore-able areas in this game. One in particular, Purgatory, is strikingly-similar to how it’s shown in the anime, right down to the hospital bed where Silver Crow gained his unique ability to fly.

The rest of the game is all down to combat. You fight enemies the same way you did in Lost Song, and many of Lost Song’s enemy and boss types re-appear (but not as Main Story bosses. Those are all new). However, due to all of the new skills available and balancing, it feels easier to play and get fast-paced combos going. In Lost Song, it seemed like you had to always play it safe and carefully throw out skills, while in AW vs SAO, you can really just dive in and lay the smack-down with a string of skills so long as you watch your health.

Now, as far as time is concerned, this game isn’t a massively-long RPG. I reached the end of Story Mode after about 30 hours of play, which comprised of mostly Main Story progression, and a bit of the Side Story stuff you are able to do. That’s also on Normal Mode. On Easy, it might be possible to beat it in as little as 25 hours, or up to 40 if you play the game on Hard.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too hard. First off, the game is fully compatible with the PlayStation TV, making it the 4th SAO game that can be played on the micro-console, and many controls are different when playing it on a PSTV. Most notably is shifting characters and locking onto enemies. On the Vita, you use R + Touch for switching characters and Bottom-Right-Touch for lock-ons. On the PSTV, you just tap R2 for a lock-on and L1 + R1 for switching characters. And yes, the game will give you different button prompts depending on what system you’re playing on.

The rest is simple and almost mirrored from Lost Song. Left Analog moves you around and Right Analog moves the camera. D-Pad lets you use flying controls (Up for forward flying, Left for Hover, and Down for disabling flight). The L and R buttons can each be held to access shortcut skills for easy use in battle. Then we’ve got Start, which opens the customization menu and Select, which brings up the Commands Menu to issue commands during Multiplayer.

Finally, the face buttons. X is used for jumping and Circle for dodging. Square and Triangle are used for light and heavy attacks. Pretty simple stuff.

Presentation

Here’s where things get dicey on the Vita. If you recall, SAO: Hollow Realization had the devs cutting a lot of corners and the initial Vita product was a mess that ran poorly. A similar situation has happened here.

With graphics, the character models are detailed, but most of them are a bit under Lost Song’s level. Some of them do look nice, like Lime Bell, but most just look decent. Environments, however, took a massive downgrade. Just like Valkyria Chronicles and Berserk, environment details were dropped to bare minimum for performance.

Except, it didn’t work. The game is filled with frame drops, whether you have a 1 or 3-member party and whether you’re in an open-world island or an enclosed dungeon. You wlll see frames drop not in the form of slowdown, but in the form of the game just freezing for a split-second before resuming. This is far worse in a certain Story Fight at the very end of the game after the Credit Roll where it will start to affect your battle flow. All before that aren’t as bad, but it’s still noticeable and bad, considering how well Lost Song played and it’s supposed to use the same engine.

The only other performance complaint I have is about sound balancing. There are many story-based areas where the music suddenly gets extremely loud and easily over-powers the voice sound. Every time this happens, I lower the BGM volume, but then it happens again and the voice-overs are drowned out again. While it’s true that the audio is Japanese, it’s still a strange problem that shouldn’t be there.

Game Title: Vaccine
Developer: Rainy Frog
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Download: 308 MB
Availability: Digital Download (Europe, Japan, North America)
Battery Life: 2.5 – 3 hours
Game Modes: TV, Tabletop, Handheld

There are a lot of games in the indie world that have taken on the “random-generated dungeon” aspect into various genres. The first game of this type I played was The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. Others have adopted this as well. A First-Person Shooter did on the PS4 and PS Vita, and tons more have done it on PC. But you know what hasn’t been done before recently? A Resident Evil-like random-generated dungeon crawler.

The game we’re going to talk about I didn’t find out about until I was hunting around on the Japan eShop for the Switch and saw what appeared to be Classic RE screenshots, but under a different name. Upon further inspection, that game quickly came under my radar as I’ve always been a fan of Resident Evil and consider myself exceptionally skilled at the classic styles of RE1-3.

Now that I’ve had lots of time to dive into this game, it’s time for a review. Here’s my review of Vaccine for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

The story of Vaccine is a tad confusing. The basic premise is that your friend is infected with some sort of disease and you, donning a gas mask to protect yourself, set out through a mansion where a Vaccination is supposed to be hidden. You have 30 minutes before your friend turns, so you must navigate the mansion and other Infected before time runs out or your friend will permanently be ill and die.

The neat thing is that it gives you enough to go off of, but there’s a whole different, hidden storyline behind the place you’re at that relates almost directly with today’s real-world science. While the whole infection thing is a little wacky (it has to do with the Particle Colliders), it’s got that interesting “Oh there’s a pretty decent backstory here if you read all of these files”.

The story is a bit out of tune with today’s storytelling, but with trying to recreate Classic RE, it does a pretty nice job.

Gameplay

Vaccine is a random-generated survival horror game with shooting and RPG elements thrown into the mix. For an easier way to explain it, it’s Classic Resident Evil in a randomly-generated dungeon. You run around to collect items and weapons as you navigate pre-rendered rooms that spawn random items and enemies every run you play.

I say “run” because you have to think like The Binding of Isaac. There are no Ink Ribbons. There are no Type Writers. You have one chance and if you die, you start over from the beginning. Lose all your progress. Lose all of your items. Lose everything and start from scratch.

Now, as I said before, the dungeons are randomly-generated. At the start of a run, you spawn in a room with your sick friend with a note and knife nearby to be picked up and equipped to defend yourself. You then venture out into the mansion to navigate your way to the teleporters that will eventually let you reach the vaccination to save your friend.

While that sounds easy, it’s far from it because there are a bunch of monsters and Infected roaming around just waiting to kill you. Zombies. Bats. Rats. Four-Legged Infected that move like Lickers from RE2. Etc. Have you ever played a classic RE game with nothing but the knife? I have, and I still have a hard time with Vaccine’s difficulty.

The random-generated element applies to all items and all weapons and all enemies. That means you might get a handgun in the first room on one run, but never find any firearms your next run. So, how well-equipped you are to fight off the hordes of the Infected depends solely on how good your run is. Also, on how well your stats are.

As I mentioned earlier, there are RPG elements in the game. Every time you open a door or damage an enemy, you gain XP towards leveling your stats. Each stat has different XP costs to level and affects the game in different ways. One stat increases your damage while another increases your luck when picking up items. There are a lot of stats to level individually and the character you choose when you start also affects what stats you start out with.

The stats really help, but the main problem is the difficulty. I’ve gone through RE1 with only the knife dozens of times and am pretty decent at most of RE2 doing the same. I’ve even done most of RE4 with no guns. But this game is difficult because of the random items. There are a couple enemy types that are just not doable with the knife. The Licker-like enemies on all fours move a lot faster than you and hit faster than you. Even with the handgun, you likely won’t get out of the encounter unscathed, and if you run into 2 in the same room, it’s almost a guaranteed Game Over unless you have massively leveled the Damage Resist or found an amazing weapon earlier in your run.

Being hard isn’t the problem here. It’s being hard to the point where you literally can’t do it with only the knife if you get one of those runs that never gives you a gun before you find these enemies. Lickers in RE2 can be taken down with the knife without much difficulty, but there’s virtually no knock-back here, so imagine a Licker that attacks twice every second that doesn’t get knocked back by your knife swings.

Aside from enemies, there are some light puzzle elements, too. There are color-coded locked doors and keys you can find to unlock those doors, so those old days of RE1’s Sword and Shield Keys return here, though it’s far less difficult to find the keys since the mansion is considerably more linear than the Spencer Mansion was.

As far as length, that is a really good question. Obviously, a single run cannot take you more than 30 minutes or you automatically lose. But the time it takes to learn the system, try different things out, and try to get lucky on runs will make that little 30-minute venture to winning just once easily 5-10 hours. While each run before dying probably won’t be more than 10 minutes, the random aspect and learning to use stats correctly takes a very long time to learn, even for an RE veteran. And even with that, RE veterans will keep coming back like I did, refusing to believe the objective is impossible.

Controls

Controlling the game is pretty simple. Simple, but aged and nostalgic. This game tries to mimic the gameplay of the original Resident Evil games (Not REmake), so it comes with Tank Controls in tow. That means you press up to move forward and hit left or right to manually turn your character. It works a little better here than in Classic RE because of the Analog Stick presence, but it’s still that same, clunky control setting that Classic RE fans remember.

So, you use the Arrow Buttons or Left Analog Stick to move around. You can draw your weapon to fire with any of the 4 trigger buttons (L, R, ZL, ZR), and the + button is used to open the menu to equip items and level up your stats. You can use the A button to interact with objects and B to run. X reloads your weapon if you’re using a firearm, and that’s pretty much it. Pretty simple control scheme.

Presentation

First of all, the graphics of this game look about like a PS1 game, which it is meant to. All environments are pre-rendered with 3D-rendered items, enemies, and the player character on-screen. The models have jagged edges right where they did in the original games, and the items are just 3D enough to recognize by looking closely. They really nailed the look of the old RE games.

Another interesting feature is that they added a TV Graphics Mode that shows random static across the screen like you’d see from a 1990s TV to further simulate what the RE games actually looked like on a TV.

Performance I have no real issues with. It plays at a nice, smooth frame-rate and the loading sequences are practically non-existent. The real surprise is coming in the next section of the review.

Battery Life

This is a game with PS1 graphics. I expected the Battery Life to be stellar, but I was very, very wrong about that. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%:

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 21 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 36 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 54 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 03 minutes

Read those again to make sure they really settle in. 2 hours and 21 minutes with max settings for a game with PS One graphics. Do you know how long Zelda: Breath of the Wild lasts on Max Settings Battery? What used to be the biggest battery-eater of the Switch? 2 hours and 36 minutes. How does a game mimicking PS1 visuals use more battery than Breath of the Wild?

What kind of accessories do you need for a handheld? Obviously, if you want to do anything extensive with said handheld or don’t have a heavy-duty computer case for it, you need a nice protective case. Something to protect your system from falls, hold some game cartridges, power cords, etc. Basically to throw everything you need for it into a nice little inexpensive baggy.

I’ve been pretty light on Nintendo Switch accessories thus far, outside of that stand for Tabletop Mode. I do plan on getting more, especially the Pro Controller for console play, but I’ve put far more money into actual games to review than accessories. Well, that and there are 2 hardware reviews coming this next week or two so that took a bit of cash.

Since Splatoon 2 just came out at the same time as a beautifully-splatoon-themed travel case that has room for the system, games, and more, I decided to grab it for my travel. Here is my review of the Nintendo Switch Game Traveler Deluxe Travel Case!

Design

The design is pretty simple, overall. The outside of the bag is shaped like the Switch in Handheld Mode, but covered by rubber padding on the bottom, and a nice, felt front with the box art of Splatoon 2 plastered onto it.

The rest of the outside design is mostly how you handle and interact with the case. The top has a handle for you to carry it with, and the border has a zipper which closes and opens the case. To add onto the Splatoon 2 theme, the zipper is actually made as a rubber Squid-Form Inkling. It doesn’t add more protection or features, but just something cute.

The inside is what’s more important for efficiency. In my opinion, every handheld device needs to have room for 3 things, with a 4th as a maybe-maybe-not. And we’re going to look at what this case has for each of those things.

First of all, you need room for the unit itself. Once the case is opened and a small pouch is lifted, there is a soft area that the Switch in Handheld Mode will perfectly fit into. Now, I said in Handheld Mode, not Tabletop Mode or TV Mode. This case is meant for Handheld Users, so you need to have your Joy-Cons attached to the console for it to fit in here. It fits in quite snugly, with the rubber underneath it to protect it from falls and the soft pouch above to protect the screen.

Second, you need room for games cartridges. Beneath where the Switch rests in the case, there are two square indents with two plastic game holders. These open up and can hold up to 4 Switch Game Carts a piece, meaning that you can have a maximum of 9 different games in the case at once (8 in the cases and 1 in the Switch, itself).

This aspect has an extra surprise, though. Each of these cases has a plastic case the size of a cartridge that opens up to reveal two areas for Micro SD Cards. So, even if you’ve gone all-digital, there’s plenty of space here for up to 4 separate memory cards. I was expecting game cases, but not cases for MicroSD.

Third, you need room for a charging cable. This is especially important for the Nintendo Switch, given it’s low battery life for most games. If you’re going on a trip and want to play Zelda, you can’t go without a charger or your Switch will die within just a few hours of play. This case has a spot for this, but at the same time, it doesn’t have a spot for this.

The soft pouch I mentioned earlier has a zipper and it actually meant to hold extra cartridges and an extra set of Joy-Cons. Obviously, it’s way too thin to hold the hefty AC Adapter that comes with the Switch. But if you have a small USB-AC Adapter and a separate USB-C cord (like the one that comes with the GPD Win Handheld PC), you can slip those in the pouch and have everything you need. Just make sure you’ve got a decent AC Adapter so you get a substantial charge gain to be able to play and charge at the same time.

Performance

The case performs well, overall. There’s just a couple things to mention.

First of all, the Switch and Games fit into the case perfectly. It feels snug and secure every time I put it in there, and the handle on top makes it extremely easy to carry around. The fact that everything is so lightweight makes it even better, cause I’ve got something that weighs very little and is guaranteed to have lots of padding to absorb falls in case I drop the case.

The only thing is that pouch. Technically, the case doesn’t have any compartment for a charging cable, but the method I mentioned above makes it so you can. But considering it’s only deep enough for the Joy-Cons, you need a very, very thin AC-USB adapter to make this work. I have a pretty thin one and it still sticks up a little past what the case is supposed to do. Granted, it still zips up easily and snugly, but there really should’ve been a place to put a charger, considering this case is clearly geared towards handheld environments and not places where you’d use it as a console.

Game Title: Splatoon 2
Developer: Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Download: 3.3 GB
Availability: Retail, Digital Download
Battery Life: 3-3.5 hours
Game Modes: TV, Tabletop, Handheld

Among the online communities, there was a lot of hype out for a few of the Switch’s games, most prominently the new Legend of Zelda game. Among the rest for this year, one of, if not the most-watched game was Splatoon 2, the sequel to Nintendo’s hit Third-Person Shooter on the Wii U featuring Squid-like humanoids shooting each other with colored ink in what looked to be some form of party-level paintball.

Since the game’s release last Friday, the internet communities have exploded with Splatoon 2 talk. People making games with others, people criticizing parts of the game, and all around just having some Splat-heavy conversations.

Although I did not receive a review copy of the game from Nintendo, I was set on getting the game and getting a review out as soon as I could. Having just beaten the Story Mode yesterday and spent a lot of time in the Multiplayer today, I’m ready. Here is my review of Splatoon 2 for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Story-wise, Splatoon 2 takes place 2 years after the events of the original Splatoon. The Great Zapfish disappears (again) and Inkopolis is in danger of running out of power. Along with the Great Zapfish being gone, Callie of the Squid Sisters Musical Group has gone missing as well.

Among the other Inklings, you are sought out by Marie of the Squid Sisters and recruited to go after the Octarian Threat beneath Octo Valley and rescue both Callie and the Great Zapfish.

The story aspect of Splatoon was the most interesting to me and, while I do love the colorful society the game shows, I dislike the lack of explanation and backstory behind the Inklings, Octarians, and the Zapfish. I researched this and it seemed to be the same for the first Splatoon. The Single Player campaign just kind of teaches you the controls, gives you the plot I wrote above, and off you go to save Callie and the Great Zapfish.

When the story does show itself, it’s pretty interesting, but for a game advertised as being friendly with those who know nothing of Splatoon, I had a severe lack of knowledge of what was going on without doing research on the Splatoon Wiki. This will likely be easier once the Splatoon Anime comes out, but still. If you want to go through Story, you’ll be left in the dark on a lot of things.

Gameplay

Like Splatoon, Splatoon 2 is a Third-Person Shooting game with a large focus with Online Multiplayer and Co-Op Play. There are also Puzzle and Platforming elements thrown into the mix when you’re diving through the Single Player campaign, but all around, Third-Person Shooter.

Since the beginning, there’s been a large number of vocal people on the net thinking that Splatoon 2 isn’t a new game at all, but just a straight port of Splatoon 1 for the Nintendo Switch. So let’s start this section by diving into what’s new in Splatoon 2. The core gameplay is mostly the same, but as with many shooting sequels, there’ve been new features added in.

In Splatoon 2, the following is new:

• The Single Player Campaign, which takes place 2 years after the events of Splatoon 1
• 6 New Weapon Types and 3 New Sub-Weapon Types
• Gear can be ordered by viewing Player Gear, rather than waiting for the shop to cycle
• Salmon Run, a sort of Horde Mode that is separate and has separate ranks from the main Multiplayer Mode
• League Battle – A New Online Mode that resembles a long-term Team Deathmatch Mode
• Local Multiplayer is available for up to 8 different players

Aside from the above, there are also a lot of revamped and newly-added Stages, Gear Sets, and Styles to choose from with Character Customization. There’s enough here to note that this is a true sequel and not just an enhanced port of Splatoon 1, as if the new Story Mode didn’t already make that apparent.

Game Modes are all unlocked from the get-go. Once you make your character and do the tutorial, you can dive into Story Mode, the Lobby for Multiplayer Battles, or Salmon Run, the game’s new “Horde Mode”. Although many weapons and shops are locked until you level in the Lobby, the major aspects of the game are already unlocked.

The way you progress in the game, however, is different based on what mode you go into. Story Mode has you navigating 3D levels towards finding Callie and the Great Zapfish, the Lobby has you doing online multiplayer with people around the net in Turf War, Friend Battles, and Ranked/League Fights, and Salmon Run has you teaming up in Co-Op against hordes of enemies and bosses.

Each Mode feels different and has different rewards. Story Mode is like a Mario game, but a shooting game at the same time. You go through 5 worlds, each comprised of several levels leading up to a Boss Fight, which opens the next world. These stages have a distinct platformer feel and gives the game a very different feel from typical shooting games. Even the bosses have a very Nintendo Feel in that they all have weak points you have to exploit to damage them.

The Lobby feels like a very casual multiplayer experience, across Random Games, Ranked Matches, and Friend Matches. Splatoon’s flagship game mode is here, Turf War, which emphasizes much more on teamwork to paint the area rather than to just run around, mindlessly shooting and killing everyone. Although many in the online communities may mislead you into thinking this is a brutal, competitive game mode, every time I lose, I still gain experience towards unlocking new content, so even with many losses, I can never really get mad or upset at this game.

Salmon Run is even more on the casual side because it’s a Horde Mode, so you’re not fighting other players. Every game of it has you fighting off hordes of enemies along with Bosses that hold special eggs you have to collect and return to your base to meet your objective and just keep going through waves until your team is wiped out. It has its own rank and reward system in the form of Tickets you can use to gain temporary boosts during multiplayer, from Double XP and Double Money for Gear to specific abilities and traits that would normally be learned by leveling up your Gear.

I’ve talked a lot about the game modes, but let’s touch on how you actually play the game. Your arsenal is comprised of your equipped weapon and your bombs. Both of these use up ink to damage enemies and “paint” the map around you. This ink is also used for cover, escaping from enemies, and refilling your ammo gauge. But, the thing is, it has to be ink the same color as your team. If you get into ink the color of the opposing team, you are damaged instead.

Now let’s talk about the Online Mode. There have been many complaints about this, so here are my thoughts on it. In terms of stability, my Splatoon 2 Online experience has been pretty much perfect. I’ve played more than 40 matches online thus far and have never gotten disconnected from a match.

The only thing I do dislike is how Nintendo has done Salmon Run. It’s a really fun game mode to play, but Scheduling is your worst enemy. Unlike the Lobby, Salmon Run is only available to play during set intervals each day. One day last week, it was available from 5 am to 5 pm EST. This causes issues for people who want to play Salmon Run. You might be working the entire time it’s going on any given day, or you might be too wiped out after work to boot up your Switch. The basics is that it should be available all the time, instead of forcing us to only play it during set intervals.

As far as length goes, here’s where things get confusing. If you noticed IGN’s review of Splatoon 2, they claimed the Single Player Campaign only lasts about 6 hours, and I heavily disagree with that. I played Single Player mostly with a little Multiplayer between Worlds and I finished the Story after playing for about 15 hours. I imagine that less than 3 of those hours were multiplayer, so whether it’s because I’m new to Splatoon or not, the Single Player easily took me 12+ hours to finish, and I plan on spending many more hours collecting everything and unlocking the Hero Weapons for multiplayer.

Controls

Controls are very versatile in the game, mostly being the fact that you are able to play with Motion Controls on or off. A lot of players prefer Motion Controls for this game, though they can be a bit awkward to get used to as motion only controls half of the aiming while the other half is with the Right Analog Stick.

With controls, you use the Left Analog Stick to move and the Right Analog Stick to move the camera. The Arrow Buttons are used for in-game dialogue prompts. The ZR trigger is used for firing your weapon and ZL is used for diving into Ink. R is used for throwing bombs. Finally, the face buttons. B is used for jumping and Y is used for centering the camera behind you. X is used for the menu, and A is just used in menus for confirming options.

Presentation

All around, the presentation is great. In TV Mode or Handheld Mode, the graphics look very colorful and smooth. All of the environments are smooth and it’s been stated that the character models have even more detail than they did in the first Splatoon. From the rippling effects of the ink to how you can swim and change forms, everything looks great.

Performance is just as great. Load Times are nice and short, and the game’s frame-rate is perfect from start to finish. You get a solid 30 fps in the hub world and a solid 60 fps in actual gameplay that never drops or falls. The devs did an amazing job of optimizing the game for the Switch.

Battery Life

With Battery Life, I didn’t have extremely high expectations, especially considering this is not only a game high in graphical quality, but also one that you’ll be using Wi-Fi a lot with. Here are the times I got, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 51 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 05 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 28 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 37 minutes

This isn’t bad, I guess. Not as much as Mario Kart, but still a good 3-3.5 hours or so

Game Pad Digital has been on my Watch List, so to speak, ever since I accidentally found the announcement of the GPD Win back years ago. I have always loved portability with my technology, and the idea of a handheld PC was beyond awesome. As you saw with my coverage of that, it provided an interesting experience for handheld gamers.

Not long after the Win released, GPD had reached out to me on YouTube about a new small PC they were making, this time a traditional laptop, but small enough it could fit into a decent-sized pocket. I could not deny I wanted one, but I never imagined it had a lot of practicality for this website.

Thanks to the website, Gear Best, I was able to receive one of these $500 units for free to make videos of. So here I am, providing content for a device I did not think I would be able to provide content about. Here is my review of the Laptop with a 7” screen, the GPD Pocket!

Design

The basic design of the Pocket is pretty simple. You have basic laptop design with a keyboard on the bottom half of the device and a hinged screen on the top. To provide specifics, the screen is a 7” touch screen, allowing for touch interactions as well as traditional interactions.

The top is just the screen, so let’s talk about the bottom. All buttons are on the keyboard, itself. While the keyboard is a full QUERTY keyboard, it also has a power button in the top right corner and a mouse nub, similar to the ones found on old IBM laptops to move your cursor, This is paired with two buttons for mouse clicks.

And the ports are on the side of the device. You have 1 USB 3.0 port, a headphone jack, a Micro-HDMI port for video-out, and a USB-C port for the charger. It is a pretty simple design that does not have a lot of ports. Granted, you have a keyboard so you may not need more than one USB port, but GPD marketed this as being paired with a thin USB Hub that would go alongside the Pocket to allow for multiple USB connections.

Not much else can be said about the design. It is pretty simple and there are a lot of sections to be made in this review, so I will quickly move onto the next.

Software

By default, the Pocket comes pre-loaded with Windows 10 Home Edition. Unlike the Win, the Pocket already has its copy of Windows 10 authenticated, making the setup process very simple. You just start it up and Cortana guides you through the Windows setup.

It is worth noting that the device also supports Ubuntu. So if you are more of a Linux person, you have that option when contacting and purchasing this device.

As far as specifications go, some basic info is the following:

Processor – Z8750 – 1.66 ghz base clock speed
RAM – 8 GB
Screen Resolution: 1920×1200

You will notice that the Ram and Processor are both ahead of what the GPD Win used. 8 GB of RAM is great and more on today’s default above low priced computers. The higher resolution is also nice when you are using the HDMI port for bigger monitors.

Gaming Applications

Since this is a website about handheld Gaming, we need to look at the Pocket from a gaming perspective. There is no controller/gamepad like the Win, but how game-worthy is this device? It is worth noting that the processor here is a bit better than the Win’s as the Pocket sports a Z8750. The specs are supposed to be comparable to the Surface Pro 3.

In my testing of PC games, I ran into a few problems with enhancing performance. On the Pocket, there is almost nothing you can edit in BIOS, and there is no Intel HD Graphics application for you to modify to improve game performance, so in actuality, the Win can play games smoother than the Pocket. However, given how many cases there have been with GPD Win units frying and bricking from people pushing the temperature settings too far for performance, it is no surprise that GPD is restricting those options this time around.

What is left to do is mostly prioritizing game applications and using Low Settings in PC games. I tested a lot of games and they always had High Priority set for the application in Task Manager to make sure I had the highest FPS I could get, without diving into software that would force it to run better and possibly hurt the computer, itself.

The results were decent, but nothing great. A few examples of FPS I got are the following

Doom 3 – 40-60 fps
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – 30-45 fps
Fallout 3 – 30-50 fps
Fallout: New Vegas – 20-25 fps

Those I felt are the most important, as the aspect of Fallout and Skyrim in portable form was a huge thing with the GPD Win. While New Vegas plays under 30 fps, you can get Fallout 3 and Skyrim running very well. It is also worth noting that you could use the ~tll command from the console in any of these Bethesda games to further improve the fps.

Emulation I have been light with this time around. I have tested a few simple emulators, like SNES, GBA, and N64, all of which run flawlessly. Just not a lot to see here as I lack the requirements for most of the heavier emulators like PS2 and such.

All in all, it has some gaming application. Obviously, Bethesda games running well is great in such a tiny form factor, but due to the restrictions, you will not be able to push it as far as the GPD Win could be pushed. Granted, you have a much smaller chance of your system overheating, but from a gaming perspective, it is a little inferior to the Win.

Computer Use

I have had the GPD Pocket for nearly 2 weeks and since receiving it, I have been using it as if it were my only computer. I have written reviews, watched all of my favorite channels I keep up with on YouTube, played and tested games, and all in all, just done everything on this that I do with a computer. The only thing I have not done on this is video editing, as Sony Vegas Pro is installed on my Surface Pro 2.

So, how usable is this as a computer? First, let us talk about the keyboard. GPD had mentioned the keyboard they used with this had won a bunch of awards. And I will not lie, it is a pretty comfy keyboard. The Pocket is only 7” in size and the keyboard types much more comfortably and less cramped than the Logitech iPad Mini Keyboard, which is a fair bit larger with less keys

It is not all good, though. I have 2 major issues with the keyboard. The ‘ key and the Power button. If you type fluently, you will be used to having your apostrophe key to the left of your Enter key. On this keyboard, it is below the right-side Shift key, which makes for very awkward keystrokes. At first, I had learned to just stop using words with apostrophes, but over these 2 weeks, I have adjusted to moving my fingers towards that lower key.

The other issue is the Power Button. It is easy to find, being in a corner of the keyboard, but it is directly above the backspace button. There have been more than a few times where I have gone to hit backspace and accidentally tapped the power button, putting the device to sleep.

Next up is Battery Life. GPD claimed the Pocket would last 12 hours on a full charge. This is not entirely accurate. With Wifi on, the battery lasts more like 7-8 hours. Granted, that is amazing compared to the pitiful battery in the GPD Win, but it is not quite on par with what they claimed.

The only other thing I would complain about is the mouse. Nubs are entirely out of tune with today’s technology. They worked well back in the IBM days, but today, the cursor just moves so sluggish and slow that you are better off just plugging in a USB Mouse or using the touch screen. I think the keyboard could/should have just been a tad moved around for an actual touch-pad, even if it was tiny.

Overall, it is not bad for computing, really. The Battery Life is pretty nice, and they keyboard just has a couple mishaps. With some adjusting, I have really gotten used to the device and am liking using it as my main computer.

Game Title: Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star
Developer: Marvelous, XSEED Games
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Download: 3.0 GB
Battery Life: 3-4 Hours
Game Modes: All

Ever since starting my coverage of Nintendo Switch titles, I have slowly realized there will be many games I will be reviewing more than once, or “re-reviewing” so to speak. It is interesting to see many PS Vita titles releasing on the Switch and nice to see may of the Vita’s publishers and developers also making Switch games, from games you would expect to games you would not expect.

Today, I am going to review a game that I honestly did not expect to see come to the Switch, or to Nintendo platforms at all. A game in the Fate/Stay Night universe that released on the Vita and PS4, and a sequel to a PSP exclusive RPG.

As many of you would expect, it is the famed Fate Musou game. Here is my review of the Nintendo Switch version of Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star.

Story

The story of Extella takes place not all that long after the Moon Cell Holy Grail War ends, which was the storyline of Fate/Extra, With the war won, the territories of the Moon Cell are now up for grabs for all of the Servants and Masters left there after the war.

The plot revolves around the Saber and Caster servants from Extra as they, with their Master, or what is left of them, fight over territory, unknowingly walking towards a catastrophe that ravaged the Earth hundreds of years earlier, now back to destroy the Moon Cell.

The story of Extella gets really good towards the end, but it is an issue mostly due to the fact that it references a lot of plot points from Extra/CCC which is not only exclusive to the PSP but never came out in English. Also, the dialogue in the game from Saber especially takes too much from the serious tone of the war and makes it out to be almost like you are playing a dating simulator.

Gameplay

As I stated in my previous review, Extella is a musou action game set in the Fate universe. You’ll be controlling characters from the Fate series, like Saber, Rider, and Archer while running around large 3D arenas, fighting against hordes of enemies, taking over territory, and fighting bosses in hack-n-slash gameplay.

Across the entire game, you have access to a few different game modes, notably Story Mode, Side Stories, and Free Battle Mode. Story Mode has you going through various chapters with the 3 main Servants of the game, showcasing the main story of Extella. Side Stories are smaller scenarios around each of the non-major Servant characters, like Lancer or Rider. Finally, Free Battle allows you to choose a character and stage and play through a battle of your choosing.

The bulk of the game will be played in Story Mode and Side Stories. As you play through the game’s story mode, you will go between Missions and “Your Room”, your base where you have conversations with your Servant, the story progresses, and you’re able to customize your characters, from creating armor for your own character to equiping new abilities to your servant to enhance their abilities, such as raising attack power or how the different gauges fill during combat.

Outside of that are actual missions. When you spawn in the battlefield, there will be over a dozen different areas you can travel to, each allied with either your own team or the opposing team. Your goal is to invade areas and fight off enemies to claim them as your own. You keep doing this until another objective appears for the mission. Eventually, you’ll gain enough territory to spawn the Final Objective, normally a boss fight with another servant, so you can finish up the mission and claim victory.

Actual combat is where things are interesting. If you know Koei Tecmo, then you know there is no shortage of Musou games out there. Dynasty Warriors, Warriors Orochi, and Samurai Warriors are all over the gaming world, and all of these “Named Franchise Musou” games are gaining numbers as well. Hyrule Warriors on the Wii U and 3DS, the upcoming Fire Emblem Warriors for Switch and 3DS, and the two Dragon Quest Heroes games that are available on the Switch in Japan. Even Koei Tecmo’s Attack on Titan game is very musou in nature (with the recently-announced Attack on Titan 2 continuing that). As such, combat in Fate/Extella is similar to the combat of all of those games.

You have Normal and Heavy attacks and can combo them in different ways, depending on how many weak attacks you string into a combo before using heavy attacks. That’s typical Musou gameplay, but Extella does have a few unique elements to add to the mix.

First, your character will level up from winning missions and gain new and more in-depth combos. You also have your Command Seals, which allow you to revive or temporarily raise the stats of your Servant 3 times per mission. Finally are your “Ultimate Skills”, the Moon Drive and Noble Phantasm. As you fight, your Moon Gauge rises and, when full, you can temporarily transform into a higher form with different attacks and significantly higher stats. Finally, your Noble Phantasm is your Ultimate Attack, only accessible by searching for and finding 3 special items in a mission and then using them for said attack.

These extra features help the repetitive nature of musou games to not be nearly as heavy in Fate/Extella. Across the fact that the story has you moving between the 3 lead characters, the story, the combo growth, and being able to use different battle styles, the game is a 20-hour journey that mixes things up enough to be repetitive throughout.

Controls

If you’ve played Extella on the PS4 or PS Vita/PSTV, the control scheme is the same. All of the controls are in the same position on the Switch they were on the Vita and such. So, veterans of the game will find no adjustments necessary when playing this on a Nintendo platform.

Moving around is done with the Left Analog Stick and moving the camera is done with the right. L and R are used for guarding and dashing. And then the face buttons. X and Y are used for Heavy and Light attacks, and A/B are used for jumping and dashing in the air.

It’s a pretty simple control scheme, and the tutorial level does an excellent job of explaining and teaching you, just as in the other versions of the game.

Presentation

Graphically, Extella looked pretty good on the Vita, even though there were the occasional jagged edges here and there on the character models. On the Switch, those jagged edges are gone. Every character model, animation, and scene has smoothed out graphics that are rendered perfectly without blurring going on. Although the Vita did look good for a handheld version, the Switch just looks that much better.

Everything else is great. The Switch version runs a solid, smooth frame-rate and the loading sequences are all pretty short. Not a huge amount shorter than on Vita, but you won’t have any issues when playing through the game. For XSEED’s first venture into Switch Land, they did a nice job with the optimization.

Battery Life

Since this is a 3D title with a lot going on, I didn’t expect Battery Life to be amazing, but I’m not too disappointed with how it turned out. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%:

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 54 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 03 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 36 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 45 minutes

So, you’ll get about 3-4 hours out of the game. That isn’t the best out there, but is easily right there in with the average, overall.

Once the Nintendo Switch released, it felt like there would be very few big news bits about the Nintendo 3DS Family of Systems, but Nintendo proved everyone wrong. They announced something I’d always said I would want, but no one expected to ever be a real thing. They announced a Nintendo 2DS system with the hardware advancements of the New Nintendo 3DS line, allowing for a cheaper system to play exclusive games like Xenoblade and SNES Virtual Console games.

I’ve had the system for quite some time, and it’s way past due for my thoughts to be made clear. So, here is my hardware review of the New Nintendo 2DS XL!

Design

Unlike the previous 2DS, the New 2DS does not share the hinge-less form factor. Instead, it has a hinge and is built much like the New 3DS. The system closes and has a top and bottom. If you’re unfamiliar with the design, the top part, or the “lid”, holds the system’s LCD screen while the bottom holds the controls, touch screen, and various ports and compartments.

However, Nintendo has made some changes to the New 3DS design for the New 2DS. Aside from a different material and being significantly lighter than the New 3DS XL, the New 2DS has a couple changes on the bottom of the device. By bottom, I mean on the panel underneath the screen, where the power button is. Underneath the power, wi-fi, and charging lights.

On the New 3DS, down here is the 3DS cartridge slot, headphone jack, stylus, and power button. All of those are here on the New 2DS, but a significant improvement is that the cartridge slot used for Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS games has been widened and now includes a flap to close it up as well as a port for the system’s Micro SD memory card. This is a vast improvement over the New 3DS, which required some disassembly to access said memory card.

Aside from that, there are a few cosmetic changes that can be seen, such as the area around the touch screen all being part of a single panel covering the entire system instead of a grooved square around it, which makes the system look a little more slick. This has no effect on performance or efficiency, but it does make the system look a bit newer.

Performance

So, we know that it does have a couple hardware enhancements over the New 3DS, so how well does it perform? For this, there are three main points to be made. Because the handling and buttons are identical to the new 3DS, there’s little point in going into detail here. The buttons feel as comfortable as they did before, from the Circle Pad to the new ZL and ZR buttons.

First of all, I’d like to talk about the screen on the system. It is significantly larger than the screen on the normal-sized 2DS, and that would mean games and the OS in general would be upscaled a bit. That was my impression, anyways. But, when I first booted up the system, something was strange about the screen. It didn’t take me long to see a noticeable blur on pretty much everything that was being displayed.

Once I started playing games, this didn’t seem to be an issue anymore, but when I was playing Hyrule Warriors Legends, I looked closely and could definitely see blurring in the game’s text and UI in general. I tested some other games, from Pokemon: Soul Silver to Ocarina of Time 3D. Although in some games, it wasn’t as apparent, it was still there if you looked closely. I do not remember this being an issue with the New 3DS, so I’m curious as to why this blur is here on the New 2DS. It’s just a slight blur, but a blur all the same.

Now let’s balance that negative point with a positive one. I’ve always noticed that with each new 3DS system Nintendo has made, the touch screen has improved slightly, and the New 2DS is the best 3DS touch screen they’ve made to date. Outside of the on-board keyboard, I can confidently say that the New 2DS doesn’t even need a stylus pen. The screen has become so sensitive to the touch of a finger that you barely even have to touch it for it to respond. This is a huge improvement over previous 3DS systems and a feature I am very grateful for.

Let’s add to that positive thinking with Battery Life. With all of the criticism towards the Nintendo Switch’s Battery Life, many people often forget that the 3DS did not have very good Battery Life, either. Let’s start with the New 3DS XL, which is supposed to have around 3.5-6.5 hours of battery life across various types of games.

The New 2DS improves on this slightly. I did 2 tests for this. One was playing Super Mario 64 DS with the Wi-Fi constantly on, and the second was playing Ocarina of Time 3D with the Wi-Fi constantly on. Here are the ranges I got:

Nintendo DS with Maximum Brightness – 5 Hours
Nintendo DS with Lowest Brightness – 7 Hours

Nintendo 3DS with Maximum Brightness – 4 Hours
Nintendo 3DS with Lowest Brightness – 6 Hours

I’m not saying 30 minutes is a drastic improvement, but it is an improvement, all the same. That raises the New 2DS Battery range up to 4 – 7 Hours.

Game Title: Ys VIII Lacrimosa of Dana
Company: Falcom, NIS America
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Availability: Retail, Digital Download
Download Size: 3.3 GB
PSTV Support: Yes

The Ys series is a special focal point for my website. The very first review I published here was for Ys: Memories of Celceta, and I have been a fan of the series for long before that. Across 3 PSP titles, and now 3 PS Vita titles, there is a lot of the franchise to go around. It was only a matter of time until I got dragged back into the adventures of Adol Cristin.

In an odd turn of events, the new Ys game for the PS Vita is coming West from NIS America rather than XSEED Games, whom had previously published all of the Ys games in the West aside from Dot Emu’s PlayStation 4 and PS Vita ports of Ys Origin. After getting through the twists, turns, and emotional episodes of this new adventure, I am ready to give you a review.

Here is my review of the PS Vita and PSTV version of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana!

Story

Lacrimosa takes place an unexplained amount of time before Ys Seven with Adol and Dogi serving as temporary sailors on a ship. On their voyage, the ship is attacked by a giant squid-like monster, tossing Adol and the rest of the ship’s crew and passengers plummeting into the sea, only to be washed up on a nearby deserted island, filled with giant monsters.

With the Squid roaming around in the sea, Adol begins exploring the island to rescue the missing passengers and make preparations to escape the island. Unknown to him, the island holds a secret about the beasts wandering around and the world itself that he is pulled into.

The plot of Lacrimosa is one that really has that big JRPG feel, and also the feel that you could take its plot and expand an entire franchise just off of it. It takes very little from the franchise to back itself up and creates a story that not only fits within the Ys franchise but is full of backstory and emotional tugs that even someone unfamiliar with Ys can really get into and enjoy.

Gameplay

Lacrimosa is an Action RPG with exploration elements as well as some light Tower Defense elements thrown into the mix. Despite its looks, it retains the core gameplay set in stone with Ys Seven and Memories of Celceta, so if you’re familiar with them, the way the game handles and plays should feel right at home.

First off, I want to say that Lacrimosa is a perfect example of how changing the camera angle of an experience can drastically change the feel of it. The game plays very much like Celceta, but due to the camera angle being behind the characters instead of above them (on top of the graphical design being much more life like in terms of character size), it gives the entire experience a much larger and grander feel, from exploring areas to the actual gameplay itself. It is the same, yet it feels totally different.

Now, game progression. You main task when you start the game is to develop your “Castaway Village” and explore the island to find and rescue more passengers of your ship. The latter is very similar to the exploration of the forest in Memories of Celceta, though this island is far larger.

The exploration is pretty simple. You move from area to area, fighting off monsters and collecting materials while looking for castaways. For the sake of game progression, a lot of areas are initially locked behind obstacles that require you to get help from your fellow castaways to get past. While most of these areas are optional, some are required and are set so you cannot access them until you get to a certain point in the Main Story.

The game’s most unique aspect, though, is the Village. A lot of features are built around this Village Building process. Every time you rescue a passenger, they join your village and add something, be it a farm where you can grow fruit or building a smithy so you can synthesize and upgrade your equipment. You, more or less, create a base of operations and all of the standard facilities that you need for combat.

The second side of this is the Tower Defense element I mentioned earlier. Once you start increasing your village’s population, monsters will begin targeting the village, aiming to attack it. Whenever this happens, you will be recalled from your explorations to take part in a Raid Battle, where you fight off waves of enemies, protecting the village gates.

There is good and bad to this. The good is the level you can customize this experience. You are able to place and upgrade various types of defenses and equipment for these Raid Battles, and further enhance the placement and strength of these defenses with materials you find out on the island. You can simply put decoys to attract monster attention or can even put a large Battle Gong that will stun enemies if you hit it with your weapon.

The bad part is that this feature is very over-used. While the first half of the game is pure exploration with rescuing castaways, the second half is where the story takes over and you are introduced to the game’s female lead and the ‘real’ story begins. There are dozens of times where a crucial story event will happen and as soon as something big is about to occur, you get a notification to come back to the village for a random Raid Battle.

At first, this was alright, but the more it happened, the more annoying it got. Towards the end of the game, it felt more like a nuisance than a feature and often got ignored by me for the sake of seeing more of the story that was unfolding.

Now aside from exploration and the village, combat is pretty similar to Seven and Celceta. Each character has a specific type of attack (Slash, Pierce, or Smash), and all enemies have a weakness, so you need to cycle your party members around to take advantage of different situations. The skill system returns as well, with Skill Points being gains by attacking enemies and creating combos through the skills your characters learn as they fight through the game.

Finally, Ys VIII introduces Character Approval and Multiple Endings to the series. When you do a Quest for a certain character or give them a Gift Item they like, their approval goes up. You get a different Ending depending on your Approval Ratings between all the different characters.

Speaking of ending, how long is the game? The developers claimed it was 40-60 hours long, and they are not correct in that claim. It took me almost 30 hours to go from Start to Finish while doing a few of the side quests, but mostly just sticking to exploring along the main story paths and getting to the end of the game’s plot. I then took another 5 hours or so doing other quests and working on approval for the True Ending. So, the game is around 30-35 hours.

Once you beat the game, you can either reload your Clear Data at the final boss to work on your approval for better endings or do New Game + where you can bring over your data for a new run. Unlike the Trails of Cold Steel games, you are not restricted with what you can take over, Character Levels, Items, Skills, etc. All of it can be pushed over, a great way of handling a Normal Playthrough leading into a Nightmare Difficulty playthrough.

Controls

Controls are pretty simple, but also pretty nice/ Unlike Origins, Ys VIII is fully compatible with the PlayStation TV and has a couple nice additions for the micro console. In addition to the normal buttons, you can click the R3 button to center the camera and the R2 button to access items rather than using the D-Pad.

The scheme is, as I said above, simple. Move around with the Left Analog Stick and the Right Analog moves the camera. The L and R buttons are used for dodging and guarding and Start for pausing the game. Then the face buttons come in. While all of these are paired with R for shortcut battle skills, they have functions on their own.

You use X for physical attacks and Circle for jumping. Square switches your controlled party member, and triangle is mostly there for skills. It does not do anything by itself.

Pretty simple, really. The game does a nice job of presenting and explaining it, too.

Presentation

Graphically, Ys VIII looks good and looks not so good at the same time. If you have ever played a game where the character models look better the closer they are to the camera, this is one of those games. When you see characters really close to the camera, they look really good. During gameplay, it looks a bit grainy with jagged edges all over the place.

Performance is not without its share of flaws as well. While the loading sequences are not very long, the frame rate is steady, but not quite at 30 fps. Over the course of the game, I would guess that the average fps of the game is around 25 or so. Smooth enough to be playable and enjoyable, but not smooth like 30 fps is.

DLC Title: Pirate Queen’s Quest
DLC Type: Story Campaign / New Playable Character
Platform: Nintendo Switch (Also available on Steam, PS4, PS Vita, etc)
Download: 400 MB (Raises base game’s total download to 2.0 GB)
Game Modes: All

I’ve reviewed a lot of games since I began work on this website. 509 games, to be precise. One thing I have never reviewed before is a single DLC package. While there have been story enhancements to many games I’ve reviewed, like the Epilogue DLC for Atelier Sophie that connects it to Atelier Firis. But I’d never given much thought to actually reviewing DLC before.

This week, that changes. I was approached by WayForward about reviewing the new story expansion for Shantae: Half-Genie Hero. So, without further ado, here is my very first DLC review, for Shantae: Half Genie Hero’s new Story Campaign, Pirate Queen’s Quest!

*Note: If you’d like to read my review of the base game, you can read my reviews for them below:

Nintendo Switch Review
PS Vita Review

Story

**Spoiler Alert. If you have not played Half-Genie Hero in its Completion, skip to the Gameplay section**

Pirate Queen’s Quest is a semi-canon story scenario that begins about halfway through Half-Genie Hero. Right after Risky Boots steals the Dynamo from Scuttle Town upon its completion by Shantae, she sails off to gather the parts needed to finish her -version- of the device, in order to rip open a portal between the Mortal Realm and the Genie Realm.

Story in this DLC pack is fairly light. You get some scenes at the start of each stage, during each boss fight, and after, though the post-stage cutscenes are more or less just Risky reacting to the new gear she is given. It’s not as light as just strictly gameplay, though, so there are a lot of laughs and jokes thrown in to keep you entertained (especially when Risky finds Squid Baron).

Gameplay

Gameplay remains the same from Shantae’s campaign, but I think it’s important to note what kind of differences there are in Pirate Queen’s Quest, as there’s been a lot of buzz around Reddit about whether or not it’s literally just doing the same game all over again with a new sprite.

There are two things to talk about, in terms of differences: Risky, herself, and Stages.

Risky plays a little different from Shantae. While her sword slash is exactly the same as Shantae’s hair-whipping, she also comes with a pistol and various ammo types that change projectile type, trajectory, and affects puzzle-solving. Although this isn’t a huge difference, Risky also utilizes Pirate Gear to move around stages instead of transformations.

This Pirate Gear is a big thing, as both Way Forward and others have compared this DLC expansion to the feel of Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse, widely regarded by fans as the best game in the series. All of the Pirate Gear from Pirate’s Curse returns in Pirate Queen’s Quest, meaning that you get around the same stages with gliding hats and grappling hooks instead of monkey and harpy transformations.

Stages are just as big to talk about. Although there are no new stages to play through, the existing stages have been significantly altered with different puzzles and means of getting around so you don’t progress the same way with Risky as you did with Shantae. There are also a few new enemy types in each stage, mostly returning enemies from previous games in the series, like the ever-frustrating Scorpion Gal.

But beyond these changes, it’s hard not to notice that apart from the Final Boss, there aren’t any new bosses here. You still fight the Giga Mermaid, Wilbur, etc at the end of each stage that have coincidentally been placed right back to where they were when Shantae progressed and fought them. Because of this, the bigger moments of the campaign feel like more of the same, especially considering all of the stages the same as in the vanilla game.

The final thing with gameplay is length. You cannot help but wonder just how long this $10 DLC Campaign will last you. From the start of the campaign until I had unlocked all but 2 upgrade items and beat the story, I’d logged between 3 and 4 hours into Pirate Queen’s Quest. Considering I’ve had almost 3 months to get the stages out of my head, I would put the length of this DLC around half the length of the game’s main story, which isn’t a bad trade-off especially considering that the DLC is half the cost of the actual game, so that balance is consistent.

Controls

We all know the control scheme for the game, but there is one thing I cannot help but stress and talk about here. You get all of the Pirate Gear as you play through as Risky, and all of those pieces are either set to buttons or set as ammo for your gun. So first, let me explain those controls to you.

You use R to glide with the Pirate’s Hat and X to activate your Grappling Hook. You hit B after you’ve already jumped to use your Cannon Double-Jump, and you can use ZL/ZR to set your Bombs as ammo for your pistol.

While this is not hard to figure out, the campaign doesn’t do a thing to show you how to use any of these. While 3DS players will note that the control scheme matches that of Pirate’s Curse, there’s a severe lack of explanation. Not even the item descriptions for the gear tells you how to use it. You just sort of randomly press buttons in stages until you get it right.