(Stella) Glowing Praise from RPG Rabbit

It’s not hard to find material online about the inevitable, impending death of the 3DS as a handheld console. After all, Nintendo’s got the Switch, their strange handheld/home console Frankenstein’s monster of a machine. The company has completely stopped producing New 3DS units in lieu of the somewhat cheaper 2DS, and the list of upcoming 2018 North American 3DS releases is woefully short. Myself, I hope it stubbornly clings to life for awhile longer, as the 3DS continues to be my favorite handheld console of all time, although the apparent abandonment of the 3-D part of the 3DS pains me greatly. While I understand that many eyeballs do not deal well with prolonged stereoscopic screen use, I have no issues with it, and I never play a 3DS game without the 3-D unless I’m running low on battery life.

Despite the fact that the 3DS appears to be nearing the end of its natural lifecycle, the sheer volume of amazing 3DS titles that exist means that I have a huge backlog of titles to work through, as does anyone else with the predilection to do so. Not even counting the games I keep meaning to buy (Boyfriend recently alerted me to the existence of Rhythm Thief & the Emperor’s Treasure, which will be my next purchase), I have a cartridge case full of 3DS games that I’ve yet to beat.

I’ve actually only beaten one other game in this case…

But that one in the middle there? Stella Glow? (A game I have been in the process of playing for over a year?) I can knock that off the list, because I just beat the hell out of it, and I’m here to tell you that you should do the same. It’s got a compelling story, interesting, sympathetic characters, and a turn-based strategy battle system that is comfortably streamlined without losing any tactical depth. It’s one of most enjoyable strategy RPGs I’ve played in years, and it may be the best one I’ve played since Level-5‘s masterpiece Jeanne d’Arc.

Stella Glow’s existence as a game is a bit of a tragic story. The studio that developed it, Imageepoch, imploded and filed for bankruptcy right as the game was about to see release, and the only reason it was released at all is that Sega bought the game and Atlus published it. (Heidi Kemps, a games journalist who blogs at GamingMoe, posted this fascinating article back in 2015 about the history of Imageepoch releases; it’s definitely worth a read.) I’ve never played a single other game developed by the studio, as pretty much all of them have received mediocre to downright terrible reviews. I don’t know what they did differently with Stella Glow, but it’s too bad they didn’t do it earlier, because it might have saved the studio. As it stands, Stella Glow remains as an unexpectedly excellent swan song by an otherwise forgettable RPG developer.

What most influenced my purchase of this game was its demo, which you can still download from the Nintendo 3DS eShop, and which basically allows you to play through the first hour or so of the game. That hour really sold me on the game’s interesting premise, excellent music, and colorful graphics with beautifully layered 3D effects. I am pleased to report that the rest of the game carries through its promising start.

Any RPG is only as good as its story and characters, and Stella Glow succeeds admirably in crafting an interesting setting populated by a variety of characters who are by and large appealing and well-rounded. The story revolves around a young, amnesiac man named Alto whose village is destroyed by the cruel and mysterious Lunar Witch Hilda.

Despite the fact that Amnesic Hero + Tragedy Befalling His Small Village = The Opening Premise for at Least Half of the JRPGs in Existence, Stella Glow manages to expand on this well-worn formula in some meaningful ways. This is not apparent at first. Alto has an Important Destiny (surprise!), and it’s soon revealed that he is the “Conductor”, a hero with the power to “Tune” witches. Evidently, at some point in the past, god took song from humanity as a punishment. Witches are the only people in the world of Stella Glow who can sing, and their songs create magic. Alto’s quest is to collect the witches, tune them, and save the world. This predictable plot seemed poised to deliver a steaming heap of irritating harem anime tropes. I fully expected to have to deal with playing a male protagonist surrounded by a party of sexed-up ladies constantly throwing themselves at him and saying suggestive things. This is not to say that this doesn’t happen.

Because it does.

And this is not to say that many of the women in the game don’t appear in weird, impractical, and needlessly revealing costumes.

Because.

They.

Do.

What keeps the game from descending into an uninteresting mire of regressive dating sim cliches is its surprising sense of self-awareness and the unexpected psychological depth of its characters. For instance, the game isn’t afraid to poke fun at itself.

And despite the fact that the characters are based on predictable stereotypes – the sweet girl next door, the sexy & sassy one, the womanizing rogue, the stodgy tank, etc – both the writing and the surprisingly excellent voice acting go a long way towards making these characters believable and sympathetic. Take, for instance, Popo.

Dear God, look at her. A green, frilly whirlwind of moe bullshit. She has a super kawaii animal mascot, a “migratory pig” (seriously) named BuBu. She talks with the peculiarly piercing tone of an obnoxious kid sister, and she speaks in the goddamn third person.

The most heinous of dialogue sins.

I was so prepared to hate Popo with a violent passion. But then, as the story advanced and I learned more about her, it turned out that she’d lived alone her entire life while being emotionally manipulated by a bully of a man who was taking advantage of her magic to further his illegal drug empire. Seriously. That’s some pretty heavy shit for what appeared at first glance to be a flirty and light-hearted MacGuffin hunt. In fact, all of Stella Glow’s witches and many of its other characters are made to endure and cope with a great deal of trauma during the course of the game’s 60+ hours of story, and the script treats this with a surprisingly earnest gravitas. People die. People grieve. It’s all very heartfelt.

Even Alto, who runs the clear and present danger of being the boring Everyman protagonist of many a waifu game, is unexpectedly endearing. He’s unceasingly and uncommonly kind to absolutely everyone, and it’s charming. He’s honest to a fault. He tries and largely succeeds at helping his friends through their various traumas with patient and supportive conversation. He attempts to talk opponents down before fighting, and he extends forgiveness unconditionally.

This is a legitimately supportive thing to say to someone in both video games and real life.

The larger story is interesting enough, and although the broad arcs of the plot are fairly predictable, the details are delightfully bizarre and I won’t spoil them here. But it’s the characters that really sell this game’s narrative, and it’s therefore appropriate that getting to know these characters is a key component of the gameplay.

The system borrows shamelessly from the Persona’s Social Links, albeit in a much simpler form of execution. You get a pre-determined number of blocks of Free Time in each chapter of the game, and you can use that Free Time to hang out with your party members. Each time you do so, you learn more about your companions, your relationships level up, and you unlock new bonus combat abilities for your team. For your knights like Rusty and Archibald, these affinity rank perks are things like movement and ability bonuses. Your relationships with your witches are a little more complicated. As you get to know them better and your affinity grows, you’ll have to help them address deep-seated insecurities and past trauma, and by entering the world of their souls and doing battle with their inner demons, you’ll help them learn more Song Magic. As you become closer to your party members, you unlock more possibilities in the game’s combat system. It’s a satisfying loop. Of course, in another Persona-esque twist, it’s impossible for you to max out the affinities of all your party members in a single playthrough. To unlock everything, you’ll have to start over in New Game+.

The battles themselves stand alone as an excellent centerpiece of this RPG experience. What starts out as very basic grid- and turn-based combat slowly morphs into a  series of satisfying strategic encounters that never become overburdened by needless complexity. Strategy RPG mainstays like Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, and Tactics Ogre are many wonderful things, but “approachable” is not one of them. I love RPG fiddly bits, but I also like to have fun, and in many strategy RPGs, combat can sometimes become an onerous chore. It’s not uncommon for SRPG battles to drag on for over an hour, and while there are some very long battles to be had in this game, Stella Glow’s combat system is refreshingly straightforward.

Each character learns a finite number of abilities over the course of the game, but each of those abilities have wildly different resource costs, areas of effect, damage outputs, and status ailment possibilities. Many area effects damage allies, so unit placement is key. MP is a finite resource and HP numbers stay relatively low (especially compared to those of your foes), but leveling up instantly restores a character to max HP/MP, so managing which characters deal killing blows when becomes a crucial part of your strategy.

The process of equipping your characters retains a similarly refreshing degree of simplicity. Buying each character the strongest weapon you can afford is pretty much the one and only consideration. I do enjoy the strategic wrinkle having to equip items for use in battle; each character can only take two items into each fight, and it will take some foresight to decide whether you want to have your tank carry two healing potions or one healing potion and a status ailment cure or one status ailment cure and one of your rare elixirs.

The one real option that you have to customize your characters is to equip Orbs on their weapons, jewels that do things like adding status effects to weapon damage or unlocking the ability to counterattack. Different weapons have different numbers of orb slots, and you can create and upgrade orbs in town. By the end of the game, I had tricked out my main tank with orbs that let him teleport around the battlefield, absorb some of the damage from his attacks as HP, and take another turn if he killed an enemy, making him into a nigh-unstoppable force of destruction.

By far the most unique thing about Stella Glow’s battle system is your ability to use Song Magic. Song Magic abilities are governed by the song gauge in the top right corner of the battle screen.

Here, it’s almost completely full.

The gauge fills when you damage or defeat enemies, and your witches can spend the gauge to power their Song Magic abilities. Each witch learns several songs during the course of the game, and some of them are little songs that use one or two points of the gauge to do things like healing surrounding allies or damaging nearby enemies with fire. However, the real muscle of the song gauge comes in the form of the super moves that each witch can perform in conjunction with Alto in his function as the Conductor. This requires some strategy to pull off because the song gauge has to be nearly or completely full, Alto and the witch in question have to be positioned adjacent to one another on the battlefield, and Alto must take his entire turn to activate the ability, but the results are more than worth it.

In this trailer released by NIS America, Alto Conducts the Fire Witch Sakuya in a rendition of her song, “Cherry Blossom.” For her next three turns, Sakuya’s song grants all allies a significant boost in critical hits. Each witch’s songs do different things — one heals all allies for three turns, another cancels all enemy actions for one round — and each one is a game-changer that has the potential to turn the tide of a battle. From a mechanical perspective, it’s a really fun addition to the game, but more importantly, it means that Stella Glow’s soundtrack is fucking amazing.

Each witch has two song-based super moves, and instead of, I don’t know, just playing a clip of music over the animation of a singing witch and then returning to the regular battle theme, Imageepoch instead decided to record an entire J-pop song for each super attack. So presumably they either hired someone to write these or they licensed close to a dozen unique and enjoyable full-length songs that loop while the witches sing during battles. And because you have to max out a witch’s affinity in order to unlock her second song, unless you play this game through twice, you’re not even going to hear most of these songs. For instance, I never got to experience Popo’s second song “Volt Shower” during the course of my game, but now that I’ve been listening to the soundtrack, it’s one of my favorites.

The soundtrack of this game represents a staggering amount of effort that baffles me even as I enjoy it. This cannot have been a cheap design choice, and I wonder if the decision helped the developer towards bankruptcy. The rest of the game’s music outside of the song magic is also amazing, probably because the fabulous Yasunori Mitsuda served as head composer. Mitsuda is one of the JRPG music greats, right up there with Uematsu himself, and he’s most famous for his work on Chrono Trigger and the Xeno series. I absolutely love Mitsuda’s music, and while it’s not clear how many of the vocal tracks were his doing, his hand in some of the boss themes is characteristically unmistakable and awesome.

As a woman who is still playing the boringly easy Blue Dragon off and on solely because of the quality of Uematsu’s score, I’m definitely guilty of occasionally playing games just for the music. Stella Glow’s fantastic soundtrack is a thick layer of high-quality icing coating a rich cake of enjoyable game play and exciting story, an admittedly labored metaphor that is making me hungry. It’s an easily-missed gem of a game that I worry many people won’t even think to try playing. Do yourself a favor and don’t miss out.

RPG Rabbit Discovers a Platformer That She Can Actually Play

So like…I suck at platformers. I suck at platformers more than you can possibly comprehend. There’s a reason that my blog is called RPG Rabbit and not Platformer Rabbit or Shooter Rabbit (I mean, beyond the obvious and unfortunate lack of alliteration that those blog titles display), and that reason is that I am really much better at turn-based games that require thoughtful strategy rather than lightning reflexes.

It’s not that I’ve never played platformers. For much of my childhood, platformers were some of the only games available to me. My only console for most of my young life was a battered old Atari 5200 that my dad had picked up at a garage sale for $1.00.

Really, someone should have given me a dollar for every time I suffered through playing a game with these terrible controllers.

It came with a shoebox full of random games, some of which were repeat copies. For instance, I owned three Super Breakout cartridges. For some reason.

Want one? I have extras.

I also owned two copies of Mario Bros, which was sort of a platformer, if you squinted and didn’t think about it too hard. It had platforms, anyway.

It also had turtles and pipes…and pretty much nothing else.

I almost exclusively alternated between playing Mario Bros and Vanguard (a surprisingly awesome side-scroller), so you’d think I’d have gotten really good at Mario Bros. Alas, you would be incorrect. I sucked at Mario Bros. I could last maybe a minute before getting slaughtered by deceptively cute murder turtles, and that was on a good day. This was despite hours of frustrated practicing. Now, while I might attribute part of this lack of skill to the absolutely awful input device with which I had to work…

Because seriously, fuck these pieces of crap and their sticky-button bullshit. They are essentially glorified TV remotes.

…but I wasn’t any better at platformers when I used a legitimate controller, either. My cousins owned a Sega Genesis, a fact of which I was eternally jealous. Every summer, my entire extended family rented an enormous, rambling beach house at the Jersey Shore, and the beach was honestly much less of an attraction for me than the Sega Genesis. I would commandeer that console every chance I got.

I mostly wanted to play Sonic the Hedgehog, because it was SO COOL. It was so fast and so shiny and so 3D! Unfortunately, I was awful at it. I could rarely make it past the first stage of the Marble Zone. Once I made it all the way to the Labyrinth Zone, only to immediately drown. Mostly I played the Green Hill Zone. Over. And over. And over. To this day, my mother complains that she gets the song stuck in her head.

Now it’s stuck in your head, too! You’re welcome.

Despite all of this practice, I still sucked at Sonic. I suck at Sonic to this day. I own Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection for my PS3, and I can’t even make it through the Marble Zone any more. I have tried (and sucked at) many platformers in my time: Mario, Kirby, Metroid, Mega Man, Cave Story, Castlevania…the list stretches out to the crack of doom.

Most recently, I have been sucking at Rogue Legacy. Now, while I am aware that the point of a roguelike is constant death, it’s generally expected that at some point during this gameplay loop, a player’s skills will improve and they will begin to survive for longer periods of time. This is not the case with me. I survive for two minutes, max. My genealogical lineage of short-lived heroes always die with absurd, embarrassing quickness. The first time my boyfriend saw me play this game, he went quiet for a moment. “Wow,” he said, deeply serious. “You are really awful at platformers.”

I admit these things, not so you, dear reader, will shame me for my lack of competence, but so that you may understand my delight and surprise in encountering a platformer at which I do not completely suck, perhaps the first to exist in this world. This platformer, friends, is HarmoKnight available in the Nintendo eShop for my favorite handheld, the Nintendo 3DS.

I read a positive review of this game ages ago, but I didn’t bother picking it up until Nintendo just gave it to me for free this past summer, presumably as an apology for closing Club Nintendo. (This didn’t make it better, Nintendo. I’m still upset.) It was listed as a platformer and a rhythm game, and I’m pretty damn good at DDR, so I thought that maybe my rhytym game skills might balance out my profound platforming failures.

The fact that this game prominently features a rabbit named Tappy has nothing at all to do with my fondness for it. None.

We at RPG Rabbit never allow our opinions to be influenced by rabbits. Somebunny might question our ethics in games journalism.

The rabbit in question is the sidekick of Tempo, a young warrior of Melodia, a land made of beautiful music. Unfortunately, one day, Melodia is invaded by evil aliens called Noizoids, whose evil, world-destroying plot involves…making a lot of annoying noises, I guess? Worst world domination plan ever, really. But it’s a platformer, so the plot serves only as a vehicle through which to drive a great deal of jumping and attacking.

What makes this a rhythm platformer is the fact that every action happens to the beat of the surprisingly catchy music. You have only two inputs – hit A to attack and B to jump. Tempo runs forward through the level automatically. While this sounds simplistic (and it is), it quickly becomes tricky, because every attack and jump must be precisely timed with the beat of the music in order to be successful.

Jumping at the correct times lets you follow the path to collect notes, and whacking enemies on tempo nets you yet more notes. Collect enough notes, and you are rewarded with a Royal Note – essentially a currency that allows you to unlock the next area on the world map.

The music isn’t amazing, but it’s catchy enough, and it gives me enough rhythmic guidance that I can play this game almost competently. I’ve never aced a level, but I can at least get through them enough to play the game, which is really a first for me in a platformer. I can’t tell if that is because this game is incredibly easy, or if it is because the addition of musical timing gives me enough of an edge to almost cancel out my abysmal lack of platforming skills. Either way, I’m enjoying myself.

The game is admittedly a little repetitive. It breaks up some of the monotony by having a variety of game “Worlds,” each with a distinctive musical and visual flair. My favorite so far has been the rock n’roll-themed world. Several of the worlds feature recruitable party members who occasionally replace Tempo for brief sections of a few levels, adding in a unique twist to the basic formula of the gameplay.

For instance, Lyra here shoots enemies with her lyre-shaped bow, but the basic mechanic remains exactly the same — A attacks, B jumps — so the difference is merely cosmetic. Also, these alternate characters are only swapped in once every several levels, so it’s not really that much of a change.

The boss battles are actually mechanically different from the rest of the game. These levels function as cinematic chase sequences in which you must correctly enter in a Simon Says-esque sequence of timed hits and jumps, again to the beat of the music. I found these levels to be pretty easy once I got the hang of them, and certainly really visually impressive, particularly in 3D. However, if you mess up and fail the level, you have to sit through every bit of the cinematic again, which becomes quickly tedious.

I’m enjoying the game very much, and not only because it makes me feel slightly validated as a gamer to finally find a platformer that I can actually play. It’s brief, but quite entertaining, and it’s highly polished. I would expect no less from Game Freak, the development studio behind the vaunted Pokemon franchise. The game was evidently initiated as a side project, and I’m glad that the studio is letting its people do something other than eat, sleep, and breathe Pokemon occasionally.

Though that doesn’t mean that the game is completely without Pokemon.

While the game is steeply priced for an eShop game (it will set you back $14.99), I think it’s worth picking up for fans of the rhythm genre. Obviously, I’m a little biased towards it, because I got a cool game for free (though I am still bitter about Club Nintendo, Nintendo), but there’s a free demo available for download in the eShop if you’re on the fence about shelling out $15. If nothing else, the game may bolster your platformer self-esteem.

Something that some of us may need more than others…

RPG Rabbit Has Arrived Rather Late to the Fire Emblem Party

Fire Emblem is one of those classic RPG franchises that I have somehow just never gotten around to playing. I don’t really know why. My ex-boyfriend once owned Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Wii, a game I remember picking up and attempting to play, but quickly becoming lost in the particulars of the plot and getting rather bored (which is hardly surprising in hindsight, given that the game is a direct sequel to the GameCube’s Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance). I played the 3DS demo of Fire Emblem: Awakening soon after acquiring a 3DS, and while I remember being quite impressed with both the gameplay and the graphics, I did not immediately go out and purchase the full game.

This is a decision that I now regret, because this game is fucking awesome.

Don’t make the same mistake. If you see this game, buy it immediately.

While I don’t feel like I’ve played enough of the game to write a full review as of yet, here are just a few reasons that this game is amazeballs:

1. The gameplay is simple to learn but tricky to master.

There are no menus to navigate. You move your party members where you want them to go, and you attack. The strategy comes from party placement and judicious use of items. Sometimes less is more.

2. The story so far is engaging, political, and full of interesting characters who say interesting things.

Localization company 8-4 did a superlatively excellent job with the translation of this game. The character interactions are frequently amusing and sprinkled with puns. Also, the vocabulary used in the dialogue is impressively extensive. I’m no slouch when it comes to obscure words (I am a Shakespearean scholar, after all), but Awakening has thrown some wonderful locutions my way.

Have so far learned two new words from #FireEmblem Awakening: grandiloquent and thew. Can't think of the last time a game expanded my vocab!

— Yanna Usagi (@RPGRabbit) July 28, 2015

The game does a great job of making you feel inordinately attached to each and every one of your party members, both through the excellence of the writing and through adorable little touches like including amusing factoids about each character in your barracks roster. For instance, stoic and competent Great Knight Frederick is “the fondest of starting fires.” Virion, the vain and flirtatious Archer, is listed as “the most prolonged primper.”

An appellation that more than makes sense. I mean, look at this guy.

I suspect that the game expends so much effort to get you to really care about your soldiers so that it absolutely destroys you when one of them dies, because one of the franchise’s staple mechanics is true permadeath. If one of your party members falls in battle, they are gone forever. I expect that there are appropriately dramatic death scenes when a character dies, but I wouldn’t know, because every time one of my party members falls, I immediately reset the game, stricken by guilt because I know that Miriel is “the most superfluous packer,” and I let her die.

You asshole.

I mean, yeah, I could play the game on Casual mode, thereby avoiding the threat of party-member  permadeath, but where’s the fun in that? It’s hard to beat the feeling of satisfaction when a character with 3 hit points remaining successfully dodges a killing blow and instead dishes out a deadly counter-attack. It’s clearly how the developers designed the game to be played, and it raises the stakes of each battle considerably.

3. There are as many female characters as male ones, and nary a one of them is running around in her underwear.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much this pleases me. I’m about four hours into the game, and I already have five women in my party, six if you count my custom avatar.

BECAUSE, OH, BY THE WAY, YOU CAN PLAY AS A WOMAN IN THIS GAME.

I’m always pleased when I get to customize a character in an RPG, because the game then feels just that much more immersive, and Awakening has handled that customization beautifully. Check this out:

The character on the left is the default male, and the character on the right is the default female, and they are wearing the same thing! It’s almost as if clothes don’t have to be gendered! WHAT A CRAZY IDEA.

In fact, I have only seen a single instance of cheesecake armor in the whole game so far, on a clearly evil character named Aversa, and while, yes, her tits are totally hanging out and nothing she is wearing looks terribly practical or necessarily conforming to the laws of physics, at least it sort of works for her character.

How are her boobs staying inside of this outfit, you ask? A WIZARD DID IT.

I have nothing against cheesecake armor per se, but I have quite a lot against designing almost every female character in a game to look like she escaped from a soft-core porn. (Magna Carta, I’m looking at you.) Some women do dress like that, and that’s awesome, but not all women dress like that all the time (especially, you know, ON A BATTLEFIELD), and many women have literally zero interest in ever dressing like that. It’s nice to see a video game that explores the many ways in which women might like to dress themselves…

…from skirts, ruffles, and lace…

…to ultra-practical heavy armor…

…to something in-between.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over and over, the game goes out of its way to point out that women can be just as badass as men and to highlight the fact that men who think otherwise are a little bit doofy. As a person who loves JPRGs as a genre but who is often disappointed at how sexist the genre can be, that is more than enough to cement Fire Emblem: Awakening as one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played all year.

(And the gameplay is pretty rad, too.)

So what are you waiting for? Go pick up this game! Seriously. Before it becomes as unobtainable as the previous two installments:

$100 for a Wii game? That’s ridiculous! I could get a whole Wii for that price!

AND I COULD PROBABLY GET FOUR OR FIVE GAMECUBES FOR $299. WTF.

 

RPGRabbit Mourns the Passing of Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata

Look, guys, I know that I talk a lot about PS3 games, but I really do have a soft spot Nintendo. They are such a lovable company. I mean, have you ever watched their version of a press release?

THAT IS SO SILLY. Everything about that video is silly. Playstation would never do something like that. Xbox would never do something like that. Playstation and Xbox would make a video with a bunch of driving metal music and a deep-voiced announcer would tell you how EXTREME and MIND-BLOWING their new games are. And I mean, don’t get me wrong, that’s also cool, but it is infinitely less charming.

While Playstation and Xbox have been busy competing to have the best hardware, graphics, and online multiplayer experiences, Nintendo has been derping along their own delightful, wacky path, creating technology for gamers that we didn’t even know we needed. A handheld with two screens, the lower of which is a touch screen? Whaaat? A motion-controlled console with PlayStation2 era graphics? Whyyyy? A handheld with glasses-free 3D? Crazypants!

As weird and unnecessary as these ideas sound on paper, in practice, and paired with Nintendo’s constant commitment to making amazing first-party games, the success of the company is hard to match. Even if the Wii U’s sales haven’t been as strong as Nintendo hoped, they are improving now that Nintendo has started releasing more of those excellent first-party games for which the company is known. Nintendo even recently announced their intention to enter the mobile market, resulting in an immediate and significant uptick in stock prices.

From my personal Nintendo experience, I can tell you that while I no longer play my Wii as much as I ought (especially given that I have not yet beaten either Skyward Sword or Xenoblade Chronicles), my 3DS XL is my constant companion. The very first review I ever posted on this blog was of A Link Between Worlds, the superlatively excellent 3DS Zelda release. The 3DS is a perfect handheld for a busy professional, as I can whip it out and play it for five to ten minutes while waiting in line, eating my lunch, or sitting at the doctor’s office. Just carrying it my purse is a form of gaming, as I earn Play Coins for every step I take and Streetpasses for every other 3DS I pass.

All this is to say that the modern Nintendo is a charming and wonderful company responsible for a great number of recent gaming innovations, and I feel that many of these innovations can be directly attributed to this charming and wonderful man:

LOOK AT HIM. JUST LOOK AT HIM. He is STUPIDLY ADORABLE. Look at his LUIGI HAT. I want to give that man a hug and drink tea with him. He is literally the cutest CEO that has EVER EXISTED.

Sadly, I will never get the chance to give Iwata-san a hug or have tea with him. Satoru Iwata died on Saturday. He was only 55. Iwata’s deep, honest, and cheerful excitement about all things gaming was an incalculably valuable asset to Nintendo as a company. Whomever Nintendo selects to fill Iwata’s position has enormous shoes to fill.

Enormous, banana-shaped shoes.

Not to mention an enormous mustache.

His best bros, Mario and Luigi, will also miss him.

I hope they have a Wii U for you to play in the afterlife, Iwata-san.

Rest in peace, Satoru Iwata. Gamers will miss you.

RPG Rabbit Continues to Chronicle the Weird Life of Burn Victim Spree Killer

Burn Victim Spree Killer, aka “Your Death,” has been pretty busy since we last checked in on him. He’s made a few friends, and he’s trying really hard to integrate himself into the community.

Your Death won a decisive rap battle against the Doctor.

Your Death was interviewed for a morning talk show.

Your Death volunteered to be part of a magic show!

Your Death joined a cake-worshiping cult.

One might almost think his spree-killing days were over!

…almost.

 

RPG Rabbit Acquires Bravely Default, Beats A Link Between Worlds, Neglects Pokemon

Guess what came in the maaaaail?

ITEM GET!

Started it on Sunday. Man, is this game gorgeous. And gloriously complicated! I’ll write up a full review after I’ve played more and sorted out the many, many interlocking systems at play here.

But even at only five hours in, I can whole-heartedly recommend this game.

(This next bit is mostly spoiler-free, but if you haven’t beaten A Link Between Worlds yet, you might not want any of this information about my impressions of the endgame, fair warning.)

In other news, I finally beat A Link Between Worlds a couple of weeks ago. I actually kept putting off beating the game because I was enjoying it SO MUCH, kind of like a book that is so good, you simultaneously can’t put it down and dread the end. I finally ended up staying up until about 2 in the morning one night to beat the Treacherous Tower mini-game and find all the MaiMais. I would actually highly recommend beating the Treacherous Tower before going into the final boss fight, just an FYI.

The final confrontation was incredibly satisfying. I was actually not expecting the twist, though it should have been pretty obvious in retrospect. The thing with Ravio? BLEW MY MIND. I was SO HAPPY about that.

(End potential spoilers.)

I can’t actually remember a Zelda game that I enjoyed more than this one. A Link Between Worlds may have to go down as my favorite Zelda game of all time, and that is saying something. It just did its job so well, and everything clicked perfectly, everything from the music to the dungeon design to the characters, even the 3D ended up being a really excellent addition to the game. This game is THE reason to own a 3DS.

Not that there aren’t a bunch of other awesome reasons to own a 3DS, which is quickly becoming my favorite system right now (not sure if it will ever beat out my much-beloved PS2 and the golden age of JRPGs, but hey, it got Bravely Default and Dream Drop Distance, so who knows?). Another reason, one I recently acquired second-hand from a friend (Will, I still owe you money!), is Shin Megami Tensei IV.

If you’re not familiar with the numbered Shin Megami Tensei games (which are distinct from the Persona and the Devil Survivor games), think evil Pokemon meets Etrian Odyssey. I’m about ten hours into this game, and it’s a really solid dungeon crawler. I’ll have more to say about it once I’ve played more of it.

Check back later this week or early next week for my full review of Ni No Kuni, because that’s the other game I have been playing the shit out of. I think I’m a little over halfway through the game, and I absolutely love it, weird quirks aside.

Sorry, Eevees. Pokemon X just isn’t as interesting to me right now…

Yes, Eevee, I still love you.

…just not as much as Bravely Default or Zelda… ^^;

RPG Rabbit is Still Playing the Etrian Odyssey Untold Demo

I was really prepared to be bored by this game.

But then I was sent to investigate a mysterious ruin full of ancient technology, where I found…

…a mysterious amnesic girl in a spacesuit…

…who fights with guns even though it’s a medieval fantasy setting…

…and then a doctor, an alchemist, and a knight appeared…

…and we were attacked by an angry camel chocobo.

This all happened in less than ten minutes, mind you. Oh, and then I found fat bunnies in the forest.

FAT BUNNIES!

…Damn it, I don’t want to buy another game…

RPG Rabbit Plays the Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl Demo

I have heard of Etrian Odyssey and its dungeon-crawling goodness for some time now. It’s been through several iterations on the DS now. Wikipedia tells me that this is the fifth game in the series, and the second for the 3DS, although apparently Etrian Odyssey Untold is sort of a remake of the first game.

I say “sort of” because the developers added a story this time around. This is the first Etrian Odyssey that has any kind of story. When you start a new game, you are presented with the option to play either “Classic Mode” or “Story Mode.” Classic Mode lets you create a party of characters and explore the vast Yggdrasil Labyrinth. Story Mode, however, has cut scenes! And characters! A STORY!

I actually didn’t know this when I downloaded the demo. I just figured out where the demos are located in the Nintendo eShop last night, so I went on a demo binge. I hesitated over this one briefly, because I kind of thought it would be boring, but then threw it in the queue with the others. Because it’s free! Free downloadable demos are one of my favorite things about an internet-enabled console.

I haven’t bothered with any of the Etrian Odyssey games prior to this precisely for their lack of story. Story is a big reason for me to keep playing a game, and a hack n’ slash RPG needs to give me some motivation other than “Explore this dungeon! Get some treasure! Upgrade your items! Repeat ad nauseam!” So even though I love me some Atlus, I hadn’t had a reason to pick one up.

You play as a nameless Highlander.

The game starts out with a really nice anime cutscene, showing said nameless Highlander arriving in Etria. The animation is smooth and very detailed, quite beautiful for a handheld. I still haven’t gotten over how nice the video quality is on the 3DS XL. You see some shots of a burned village, probably the Nameless Hero’s tragic past, and then his grizzled old mentor, sending him to Etria, where he is immediately tasked with the heroic task of…drawing a map?

Yes, apparently a huge part of Etrian Odyssey is cartography, something I never really considered wanting out of a game. Nameless Hero is tasked with drawing a map of the first floor of the Labyrinth, accompanied on this first mission by two level 30-somethings. But first, into the town to stock up on supplies and save at the inn!

You don’t actually get to walk around the town, but instead select places to visit from a list. Selecting “Shilleka’s Goods” takes you to a still, 3D image of an item store, where you are waited on by a black girl dressed kind of like a Disney Native American who speaks in an outrageously bad Jamaican accent. For some reason.

I suspect that reason is “because Japan.”

Even though I appreciate having an actual town to actually explore rather than a static menu of destinations to choose from, the three dimensional images of the locations are really very beautiful and the hand-drawn character portraits stand out like a pop-up book. It’s really pretty cool looking.

After gearing up, it’s off to the forest to draw a map!

The top screen shows a first-person view of the forest labyrinth that you are to navigate. It’s gorgeous, this forest, vividly green, and the 3D effects are very successful at making you feel like you are actually wandering through forest paths. The bottom screen is your map, which you are expect to actually draw with your stylus. This was completely unexpected to me, and kind of an amazing use of the DS touch screen.

Each square you traverse is automatically filled in with green, but it’s up to you to drawn the walls in with your stylus. The lines auto correct to utter straightness, so even though you are actually drawing, your finished product looks very nice and neat. The map making tools are very detailed, with little icons you can drop in and a tool to make notes about features of the area. For instance, I found a spring of water at the end of one path that healed my party, so I marked it on my map and made a little note: “Healy water here.”

Every ten squares or so, you’ll be beset by monsters, which drop items you can sell to the shop that they will make equipment out of. Clawed moles drop soft hides, for example. Beetles drop beetle whiskers. Which Shilleka the Jamaican will make into swords. The battle system is a very simple turn-based affair, which will probably be more exciting once I’m not adventuring with two outrageously over-leveled party members. Each character has a simple skill tree that they can feed their skill points into, points earned one at a time for leveling up.

It looks pretty basic at the outset, but maybe it expands more after I level up a lot. The demo only lets you level up to ten. This first adventure into the woods got me to level five. I was surprised how much I enjoyed making my little map, but I don’t know that I’ll buy the whole game. So far, it feels like the most elementary kind of Dungeons and Dragons campaign, where some generic Adventurers get sent into a Dungeon at the behest of a King, Mayor, Grand Vizier or, in this case, Radha to explore and loot and destroy whatever monsters are lurking about. So while there IS a plot here, it looks pretty boring. And I don’t think I’m going to want to draw maps for the sake of drawing maps for upwards of 30 hours.

For someone who loves dungeon crawlers, though, this is an exceptionally polished example. I’m definitely going to at least play the demo to the level cap. Maybe some more exciting story will pop up in the next five levels. If not, I do get to draw another map!

Man, I never thought I’d enjoy drawing maps.