RPG Rabbit Fightsticks It to Amazon

I didn’t post anything last month because August was Persona Month. And oh, what a month. I had trouble doing anything with my free time that was not playing Persona. And then, at long last…

That’s a lot of goddamn hours. I’ll probably be up to 200 after New Game +.

Now that I’m done with this mammoth undertaking, I seek to tackle my considerable backlog of games. There’s just one problem:

Oh. Right.

Persona 5 was pretty easy to play with the controller on my lap, but there are a lot of other games I’m hoping to play (or finish playing) that would be very difficult to manage. Besides this, a DualShock 4 isn’t really designed to sit on a lap. Well, I thought, they do make controllers designed for laps. Maybe I should get one.

Thus did I enter into the confusing world of arcade sticks. Or fight sticks, as they are also called, since they are primarily used for fighters. I don’t play fighters often, and I’m bad to mediocre with them (though it might be cool to finally play my Persona Arena games), but it occurred to me that you don’t HAVE to play a fighter on a fight stick. It is just a controller, but bigger. And for laps. That about sums up the things I knew about fight sticks.

I have now learned that fight sticks are really expensive. Like the cheapest one I could find was $60. Most are in the $150 range, but a few strayed into $250 territory. I also learned that arcade sticks do not have all the buttons that one might desire, but each arcade stick also seems to have a different number of buttons. In addition, some fight sticks have “square gates” and others have “octagonal gates.” Some fight sticks have parts that can be swapped out for “Sanwa parts,” which are apparently very exciting parts. I was more than a little bewildered.

After collecting a variety of opinions from the Reddit hive mind, I settled on the Mad Catz Street Fighter V Fightstick Alpha, not because I particularly care for Street Fighter, but because it is the only entry-level option that comes equipped with a stick toggle switch, three buttons that allow you to tell the joystick to function as the left analog stick, the d-pad, or the right analog stick. While switching the stick function would be cumbersome, I reasoned, it would still be less cumbersome than holding a DualShock on my lap. Best of all, the model was available refurbished on Amazon with Prime shipping, so I could save sixteen bux and have it in my malfunctioning hands within two days. I ordered it.

It arrived in a very colorful box festooned with some very angry Street Fighter combatants.

Chun-Li’s legs always seem to be twice as large as the rest of her, which seems anatomically problematic. I mean, her feet are bigger than her head.

The box was labeled on the bottom with an official-looking Amazon inspection label, which I expected to guarantee some level of quality.

Just gaze upon that super official check mark!

The thing was even packaged in what looked like the original plastic, complete with instruction pamphlet.

It also came with a set of different-sized Mad Catz stickers, I guess so you could put more logos on your arcade stick if you wanted to do that for some reason?

I just stuck the big one on my bike instead.

I wasted no time in plugging it into my PS4 to try it out. No fight stick under the $250 price point has a wireless connection, but the Alpha comes with a fairly lengthy cord. My living room is pretty big, so it reaches my couch, but just barely. This creates a very exciting trip wire booby trap for Boyfriend to navigate while I’m using it, but I prefer to think of this as a feature rather than a bug, as it’s very funny. (He has long legs. He can deal.)

The PS home button doesn’t turn on the PS4 like a DualShock does, but that’s a minor quibble. I fired up the system and got ready to try out Exist Archive with a fightstick. But when I tried to navigate over to the game’s icon in the menu, nothing happened. I wiggled the stick in all directions, and I got no response. I tried it in every mode. Nothing. I plugged the thing into my PS3 and then my Steam Link. Nada. I sighed in resigned irritation. Apparently that Amazon “INSPECTED” sticker doesn’t mean very much.

Luckily, Amazon’s returns process is fairly straightforward. I packed the fightstick back in it’s colorful little box, hoping they wouldn’t mind that I had already used one of the stickers. The UPS man came to my door to pick it up the next morning. It took about two and a half weeks to process the damn refund, but I got it, and then I used it to buy a brand new stick of the same make and model. It arrived, oddly, on a Sunday afternoon (has Amazon somehow bribed the postal service to deliver its shit on Sundays, too?).

 

They didn’t bother sending it in a separate box this time around. A greener choice, I guess?

Finally, almost three weeks after the initial purchase, I had a completely functional stick.

I understand that it’s pretty small for a fightstick, but I’m a pretty small human, so I prefer to think of it as RPGRabbit-sized. Reviews online complained that it was too small to fit comfortably on a lap, but it does pretty well on my lap. I do think that a larger person might not find this model very comfortable to use. I like the pleasant clicking noises that the stick and the buttons make when I press them. I wasn’t allowed to visit many arcades as a child, but my favorite part was the big, clicky buttons on the machines, and this brings back some of that nostalgia. The matte finish on the surrounding surface has a nice tactile feeling to it, and it has the bonus effect of likely remaining smudge- and finger-print free.

Conveniently, the thing includes a color-changing lightbar that corresponds with player (ala the DualShock4) and even a share button. The toggle switch gives me right and left stick and d-pad function and there’s two small buttons to the right of the lightbar for R2 and L2, but I’m missing R3 and L3 inputs, and there’s no touchpad.

Experimentation has taught me that the fightstick is perfect for Exist Archive. While it’s going to take a little time to get used to the button configuration, navigation through the world is much easier, and I only need to toggle the stick function when I have to use the menu. It’s also great for platformers, and I can use it in Persona 5 if so inclined, though swapping to the right stick for camera function in dungeons is something I’m not sure I can get used to. I tried to play Final Fantasy XV, and it kind of worked okay, but since the touch pad is what opens the damn menu, that seems like a no go. I’m not actually sure I can play FFXV at all now, but I also wasn’t actually sure I wanted to, so that’s probably not the end of the world.

The stick functions perfectly well on the Steam Link, though I’m still trying to figure out if I can make Steam recognize the stick toggle switch function. I can play Hyper Light Drifter again, but the learning curve is going to be high, especially when it comes to aiming the gun. I expect it’s going to make playing Overcooked much easier. I’m looking forward to trying out Transistor and Bastion with the fightstick, and maybe I could even pick up Pyre. I haven’t tried the stick on the PS3 yet, but I know it’s going to be great for the P4 Arena games, and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to pick up Dragon’s Crown (aka The Quest for Lady Bigboobs) and play more of that with Boyfriend.

Dealing with slightly crippled hands as a gamer is a huge pain in the ass, but I think this fight stick will help me get back to some of the games I’ve had to avoid. Overall, I’m pleased with the purchase.

TL;DR – The Mad Catz FightStick Alpha seems like a pretty good entry level fightstick for relatively small humans, but don’t buy one Amazon refurbished, no matter how many “INSPECTED” stickers they slap on the damn box.

Update 9/23/17: Playing Dragon’s Crown with the fightstick is a blast. It took me a few dungeon runs to get used to it, but once I did, I think it’s actually more fun with the stick. I can’t cast rune magic, since that requires use of R3, but since I only play the game co-op with Boyfriend, I can make him do all the rune magic. I played some Persona 4 Arena, too. I still have no idea what the hell I am doing in that game, but button mashing is a lot more fun when you have big, clicky buttons to mash.

Update 9/29/17: Amazon dropped the price of this stick about a week after I purchased it to around the price of their refurbished model because Amazon is made entirely of butts.

 

RPG Rabbit Plays Too Many Games at Once

I am just the worst about buying games and then never getting around to finishing the damn things. Adulting takes up distressingly large chunks of my day, so I no longer have the copious amounts of free time that once I had. This is a problem for all adult gamers, but it is especially a problem for me because my favorite genre, the RPG, is famous for being incredibly long. It’s not uncommon to have to sink over 100 hours into a good, meaty RPG in order to experience all of the content. This means that I have a bunch of RPGs that I have started and am still attempting to finish. Since I don’t like to write up a full review of a game until I am at least halfway through it, I haven’t talked about many of these in-progress games yet on this blog. So here, in no particular order, are my initial impressions of the RPGs that I am currently playing.

Fire Emblem Awakening (3DS)

I’ve already talked a little bit about my first thoughts on this excellent game. I’ve yet to be disappointed in a single aspect of this RPG. The battles are strategic and exciting, the voice acting is top-notch, the graphics and cutscenes are expressive and stunning, the 3D effects are well-executed, and the music is appropriately stirring and cinematic. I haven’t yet gotten around to the “tactical shipping” aspect of the game, but I am looking forward to it. I think? It’s got to be less creepy than Conception II.

Chrono Trigger (DS)

This game was one of my earliest RPG experiences. Soon after I beat Final Fantasy X and VII, one of my friends lent me the PS1 port. I really liked the game, especially the time travel, but I remember having a lot of trouble with the active-time battles. Now that I am a hardened RPG veteran, though, the battles are incredibly fun. I love that you need to take enemy positioning into account while quickly selecting the most appropriate techs. The DS port is excellent and having the menus immediately accessible on the touch screen is incredibly convenient. I had forgotten what an tightly plotted and stunningly beautiful game this is. I had also forgotten what a badass Lucca is. A younger me was most interested in the princess, but now that I’m older and wiser, it’s clear that bespectacled, super-genius Lucca is the most awesome character, an extremely positive representation of ladies in STEM fields since 1995.

Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster (PS3)

I was very excited when this remaster came out, and it helped me update my very useful blitzball strategy, but I’ve only made as far as the Lightning Plains so far in this playthrough. I am very pleased with inclusion of the expert Sphere Grid, which makes leveling up the characters much more interesting, though completely mystifying to anyone without an already-clear grasp on how the basic Sphere Grid works. The updated graphics and UI are excellent, but the voice acting is more grating and awful than ever (even if I now recognize the mind-blowing fact that Wakka and Bender are voiced by the same dude). Would it have been so hard to include the Japanese voice tracks on this re-release? That might have put this remaster over the edge into the realm of excellence rather than mere competence.

Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth (3DS)

This really is an awesome dungeon crawler, mixing oddly-addictive Etrian Odyssey-style touch-screen dungeon-mapping with Persona’s turn-based, elemental weakness-exploiting combat. This fusion creates an unexpectedly satisfying gameplay loop of exploration and combat that stays fresh throughout the long game because each dungeon is stylistically and mechanically unique. The story is interesting enough, but so heavily dependent upon an encyclopedic familiarity with the story content of Persona 3, Persona 4, and every single one of their spin-off games that it can be a bit challenging to figure out what the hell is going on. Also, you’re going to have to read a surprising amount of really terrible poetry.

Persona 4 Arena (PS3)

Do you like fighting games? Do you also like visual novels? You will need to be a fan of both of these somewhat disparate genres to enjoy this very odd game. As much as I enjoyed Persona 4, I didn’t ever feel the need to pick this particular spin-off, as I am not very good at fighting games. However, when it became clear that I needed to know at least a little bit about the characters in this game to fully understand what was going on in Persona Q, and when some perusal on the internet seemed to suggest that the game actually had a very interesting story mode, I went ahead and picked it up on the PSN. I was very surprised to discover that the story mode consisted of fully-voiced short story-length visual novels broken up periodically with one-one-one fights. But it’s way more reading than fighting. Like way, WAY more. Every character in the game has a chapter, and in true visual novel-style, it’s all told from the first-person perspective of each one in a literary mode that rather reminds me of overly-earnest fanfiction. The fighting mechanics are fun and easy to pick up, but require good timing to make your combos land. If you like reading stuff for ten minutes, then taking a two-minute break to beat up on someone, this is a great game for you. I’m kind of enjoying it.

Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance (3DS)

I have been eyeballing this game ever since the 3DS debuted and this was advertised as one of the earliest blockbusters for the system. I spied it used at my favorite local game store and finally picked it up a few months ago. I must say, I am extremely impressed by the depth of this game. It looks and plays so much like its classic PS2 predecessors that at times it was difficult to believe I was playing it on a handheld. The 3D is so complex and the battles so frenetic that it can be hard to keep the system lined up properly with your eyes, but when you can keep the 3D in focus, it’s stunning in its depth and detail. There is something really magical about seeing familiar Disney locales utterly transformed by the three dimensions. The touch screen controls are well-implemented and interesting, and there’s even an undeniably Pokemon-esque battle-creature aspect of the game, which uses an interface suspiciously similar to Pokemon X/Y’s Pokemon-Amie, which is odd, because Dream Drop Distance came out over a year and a half before Pokemon X/Y. It’s a really fun interface, though, and any game that lets me have adorable creatures as pets makes me happy. But I’ve just got to say: the Tron levels are fucking creepy. The odd photo-realism of the characters in the Tron levels is weirdly unsettling in three dimensions, especially in its stark contrast to the much more cartoonish look of Sora and the other levels in the game.

Child of Light (PS3)

I love this game so much. Playing it is like a meditation; the smooth, watercolored world of Lemuria is an interactive children’s picture-book wonderland. The music is absolutely gorgeous and I could happily listen to it for hours. I think I drive my roommates crazy, though, because I often can’t help but sing along. The protagonist, Aurora, can fly on gossamer wings, so moving through the maze-like forests, cliffs, and caves of Lemuria controls like a dream. The style of locomotion and general overworld movement seems strongly reminiscent of indie game Aquaria, but the turn-based battle system is all its own. The battles are unexpectedly challenging (though that may be because I am playing on “expert” difficulty) and the story is engaging and interesting. While I love that they wrote every word of the dialogue in rhyme, I really wish that the rhymes were, you know, good. The writers can’t seem to stick to any one meter, and many of the rhymes are terribly skewed slant rhymes. It’s a little painful to read at times. I wish they’d hired a proper poet to do the job and made the game’s linguistics as stunning as its visuals.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call (3DS)

I would have loved to be present for the concept pitch for this game. “Well, you see, it’s a casual Final Fantasy-themed dungeon-crawling DDR game that you play with your DS stylus!” That’s the whole game. And weirdly, it works really well, mostly due to the brilliance of Nobuo Uematsu‘s music. There are so many classic, wonderful, moving, beautiful, badass songs to choose from over the life of the franchise that it seems entirely appropriate to have an entire game about it. In fact, they should have just named the game Final Fantasy: Nobuo Uematso Is Amazing instead of making up a nonsense portmanteau. The game play is really fun and very tricky at higher levels, too, but let’s not kid ourselves. We’re here for the music. Play this one with headphones for sure.

Broken Age (PC)

I both love and hate this game. I love it for its quirky style, its fascinating world, its hilarious and well-voiced dialogue, and its satisfying story. I hate it for its unrepentant adventure game non-logic. While I understand that this game represents a tremendous leap away from the bat-shit crazy puzzles of the previous generation of adventure games (for some impressive examples, see Cracked’s latest article about terrible video game puzzles), there are still some pretty nonsensical things you have to figure out. I have been pleasantly surprised at how many things I have been able to figure out on my own, but some of the puzzles are just irritatingly complicated or vague. For instance, the knot puzzle (a puzzle that is coincidentally one of the puzzles featured in the aforementioned Cracked article) has kept me stalled in this game for over a month. I know I will eventually go back to it, because I really want to find out what happens, but I’m too frustrated with it for the moment. Stupid, awesome game.

Life Is Strange

I’ve only played through a few hours of the first chapter of this game so far, but I already like what I see. The time-traveling mechanic is very intuitive and cleverly designed, turning the protagonist’s life into what is essentially a video game that she can reset at will. This gives the player free reign to try every option in a given situation – if you don’t like where the story is going, you can rewind time to take a different path, and choose the one you like best. What’s fascinating is to see how your choices affect the world around you. The game’s settings seem fully realized, and the voice acting is uncommonly excellent. I am looking forward to seeing how this story turns out.

And there you have most of what I am playing. The most interesting things I am playing, certainly. I really just need to pick one, buckle down, and beat it. I’m just easily distracted.

RPG Rabbit Accidentally Buys the Wrong Game Because of Inconsistent Naming Conventions

I was very excited to get a call from my local game store this afternoon, telling me that a copy of Persona 4 Arena Ultimax had finally come into the store. It was even the collector’s edition! Needless to say, I was stoked! I had a whole free evening in which to play it! I got home and opened it! I looked at all my neat collector’s goodies! I opened the manual!

Wait, what now? General Teddie? P1-Climax? I don’t remember any of these things from Persona 4. Damn it, is this something else I missed from Person 4: Golden? Or..oh. Oh wait. I see.

Despite the fact that Persona 3: FES is an updated, expanded version of Persona 3 and Persona 4: Golden is an updated, expanded version of Persona 4, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is not an updated, expanded version of Persona 4 Arena. No, it is instead a direct sequel. To a game I have never played. Because, SILLY ME, ATLUS, I should have totally expected you to switch up your naming conventions.

So now, instead of playing this awesome oh-just-kidding-i-am-a-sneaky-ninja-sequel of a game, I am patiently waiting for the original game to download. Thank Dionysus for the good ol’ PlayStation Network! Saving my uninformed gamer ass!

Oh well, at least I have this sweet Teddie punching bag to kick while I am waiting.