One of the things I tend to find pretty consistently appealing about the types of RPGs I enjoy playing is the fact that they're typically set in rather colourful places, even if the stories told in those places sometimes veer into dark territory.

It occurred to me during conversation with my friend Chris last night that this is one of the things that I'm finding particularly enjoyable about Pokémon Moon, too. Except in Pokémon's case, it arguably goes a little further: everything about that game is designed to make the player feel like they're special, like they're valued as a human being and like they're loved.

Although the game has its antagonists — mostly the entertainingly incompetent Team Skull this time around, who are channelling the attitudes of youths desperately trying to be "gangsta" — the emphasis is not on any great conflict. Instead, it's on your protagonist's journey across the islands of Alola, gathering Pokémon and growing in strength and confidence as a trainer.

The way the characters interact with your protagonist is endearing and warm. You're welcomed to the game as soon as you start, and in the early stages it feels like the game is "holding your hand" but not in an obnoxious way. After a certain point, it feels like it shakes you by the hand and invites you to explore more freely, but always wants you to know that "safety" is never far away. Your achievements are recognised and celebrated, and even your Pokémon act in ways that emphasise your bond with them — "[name] endured the hit so you wouldn't be sad!" is the one that tugs at the heartstrings the most as you see them cling on to consciousness at 1HP after taking a particularly heavy blow.

To put all this another way, Pokémon Moon is one of the most endearingly "Nintendo" games I've played for a long time. It's a game that invites all its players — regardless of their actual age — to remember the joy and wonder of being a youngster. It's a totally inclusive game that has something to appeal to everyone — and best of all, without any sense that it's either attempting to fulfil a "diversity quota" or frantically virtue signal about how progressive it is. It has cute girls and hunky boys; it has people of all manner of different skin colours; it has cool Pokémon and cute Pokémon; it has an enjoyable story and mechanical depth; and it has this all-encompassing sense that everyone involved with the project simply wanted all the end users, regardless of age, race, gender or any other characteristic that people like to divide themselves up by, to have a really nice time playing it.

At this time of year it's exactly the sort of thing I needed to play to forget about the cold, dark nights of winter and the increasingly exhausting debacle that is Christmas.

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I completed my first couple of Pokémon trades over the last couple of days, giving me all three of the "starter" Pokémon from Sun and Moon to add to my Pokédex.

Since Pokémon is essentially a well-disguised trading card game (and a not-at-all-disguised trading card game in its Trading Card Game format, but that's something else entirely) a key part of its appeal is working with other players to collect the things you want to collect.

This is an aspect of the game I always felt like I was obliged to miss out on in the earlier installments, particularly back in the Game Boy days when it was direct link or nothing. Although I had a number of friends who were big into video games, I didn't know anyone who had a Game Boy and a copy of Pokémon, so I was denied access to what I understood from the beginning to be a significant part of the experience.

This has all changed with more recent platforms and widespread access to the Internet, meanwhile. Using Pokémon Moon's Global Trade System (GTS) I managed to find a Rowlet that someone wanted a Pokémon I had for, and subsequently I listed another Pokémon I had and indicated that I was interested in acquiring a Popplio. The first trade was immediate, since the Rowlet owner had already listed the little owl for trade, and the second trade was complete within a day. As a relative Pokémon newbie, I wasn't familiar with what is apparently a widespread Eevee trafficking market, but it seems as if evolved Eevees make for pretty reliable trade currency, so I'm probably going to have to farm some of those at some point.

Dipping my toes into this side of Pokémon is helping me to further understand the appeal of the series. Although the main game is a single-player adventure and there's a significant amount of content to play through, both during and after the main story, a core part of the Pokémon experience as a whole appears to be the social aspect of it. And while Nintendo's heavy-handed approach to online safety and privacy means that it's literally impossible to communicate directly with another player — all communication is asynchronous, using a wide selection of preset words and phrases that auto-translate into different languages — there's still a surprisingly strong feeling of "interaction" with other players when you successfully complete something like a trade or a Festival Plaza mission.

To be honest, I think I kind of prefer Nintendo's way of doing things online these days — at least when it comes to playing with strangers. Playing with friends is a great laugh if you get on voice chat and indulge in some light-hearted banter, but when playing with strangers, there's a fairly high probability you will run into at least one insufferable arsehole during a play session. With Nintendo's approach, said insufferable arseholes are completely neutered and will never bother you or disrupt your enjoyment of the game. Of course, with Nintendo's approach, your friends are similarly neutered, too, though chances are if you're actual friends with those people you have alternative means of communicating anyway.

Meanwhile, my Pokémon Moon adventure is going pretty well. I'm onto the third island now with a strong team of Pokémon that cover a variety of different types, though I think I'll be needing to train up some Ground or Rock types next. I also have an outfit that I'm pretty pleased with for the moment — big love to Nintendo and Game Freak for providing the option to purchase thigh-high socks in the very first clothing shop you come to — and I feel like I'm deepening my understanding of the overall metagame with every hour I play.

So yep. Think it's safe to say I'm in this one for the long haul.

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When I've not been playing Final Fantasy XV, I've been giving Pokémon Moon a serious shot, as I'm determined to try and understand the obsessive appeal the series has. And I think, finally, I'm starting to "get it".

Part of this is, as I described a few days ago, the fact that Sun and Moon have refined their systems and interfaces to a level where I'm not frustrated by a lack of information any longer, although I do feel there's a certain amount of "assumed knowledge"; an understanding that many of the people who are playing this have previously played at least one Pokémon game to death. This leads to a certain amount of flailing around in the early hours as you try to figure certain things out — though pleasingly, the game does actually take the time to point out what common series abbreviations like "TM" stand for, which is something I don't recall X and Y doing.

Pokémon has evolved considerably over time. I played Red and Gold when they first came out on Game Boy, then set the series aside until X and Y which I gave a go for a bit but didn't really feel, although there were certain aspects I did like. Chief among these was the amount of customisation there is in the game, which has really come to the forefront in the 3D installments. I'm a sucker for any game that gives me the opportunity to play a cute girl and dress her up in cute outfits, and Moon certainly hasn't been disappointing in this regard, with plenty of hair and clothing options to choose from. (I actually found myself not wanting to customise X and Y's default female character because I liked her standard look so much, though I understand there was a similar situation here.)

Moon's online feature — the Festival Plaza — is a little peculiar in that true Nintendo "no direct online interaction!" way, but it's charming, endearing and friendly in, yes, that true Nintendo way. Not only do you get the opportunity to ogle the wonderful avatar creations of other players — both from your friends list and randomly gathered from online — but you also get to interact with them in various ways. Perhaps the most appealing part of all this is the fact that it's possible to populate your online profile with a questionnaire covering all manner of different topics, and there are a wide variety of different responses you can give to the prompts — some sensible, some nonsensical. This allows players the opportunity to express themselves and their personality without the potential for unpleasantness that unfiltered direct online communication often brings with it.

As for the main game itself, the setup has been enjoyable so far. In typical Pokémon fashion, you set out from your childhood home to have an adventure, largely prompted by the local crazy professor. Along the way you encounter a rival (who is more of a friend in this character than in some previous installments) and a recurring team of villains (who are, as usual, comedically incompetent in this installment, with the main difference being that the general populace of the Alola region knows how comedically incompetent they are rather than living in fear of them) as you seek to prove your might as a Pokémon master.

I like the fact the structure of the game has been shaken up a bit from "get to each town, visit gym, defeat everyone in there" from the previous games. The new "trials" concept covers the same basic ground, but seems to handle things more like a traditional RPG dungeon, with objectives to complete along the way followed by a boss at the end. I'm interested to see how this develops further in the game — I'm still on the first island at present.

I'm not yet quite sure if I'm "doing it right" with regard to my team makeup and levelling strategy, but I'm sure there are no mistakes I might make that can't be corrected with a little grinding or, if the worst comes to the worst, catching a fresh new Pokémon of a particular type. In the meantime, I'm genuinely enjoying Moon, and I'm keen to see how the game develops in its later hours.

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I decided to give Pokémon another go with the latest installments Sun and Moon, specifically Moon, since Andie picked up a copy of Sun.

I've only spent a little over an hour with it so far but already it looks as if Sun and Moon have addressed some of the things I found frustrating about the previous installments, and that, coupled with reports from friends who say it's a lot more story-heavy than previous Pokémon games, makes me think I'm probably going to enjoy it a lot more.

One of the things that always frustrated me about earlier Pokémon games was the fact that it was pretty vague about things like debuffs and suchlike. "Pikachu's attack fell!" the game would say. "How much?" I would want to know. "Does that debuff stack if the opponent keeps using the same move?" Neither of those answers were particularly forthcoming in previous installments — or if they were, I certainly didn't know where to find them.

In Sun and Moon, however, there's a handy mid-battle status screen that allows you to see that yes, debuffs do stack, and how many times your Pokémon has been inflicted with a particular debuff. (It still doesn't tell you how much your stat has been reduced by, but you can make an educated guess as to the impact according to the levels of your Pokémon and your opponent.)

Even better, Sun and Moon use information from the Pokédex to allow you to quickly see which moves are effective, super-effective and not very effective against your current opponent, negating the need for constant flipping back and forth between menu screens or keeping copious notes on what was weak and strong against what. Doubtless for some purists learning all this stuff was part of the appeal, but the way Sun and Moon does things is a lot more friendly to people like me who haven't invested thousands of hours in the series as a whole.

These niggly little features aside, I'm impressed with the overall presentation of Sun and Moon, a lot more so than previous installments. While X and Y had some reasonably nice character models, their proportions were a bit weird in comparison to the official art. In Sun and Moon, meanwhile, the characters look just like their hand-drawn counterparts and are animated well, to boot. The only sign it's running on the underpowered 3DS hardware is any time the camera gets a bit close to a character and you can see big jagged pixels on the textures.

I'm not far enough in the story to be able to comment on it as yet, but the early introduction of the character Lillie — current darling of the fanart community, from what I can tell online — gives the story some interesting momentum right from the get-go, and the incidental characters are appealing and fun. In particular, the protagonist's mother is extremely likeable, helping to make your character's home feel a lot more… well, homely.

I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops further; I'm going to give it a proper chance this time around, even if I am currently attempting to juggle it with Final Fantasy XV, which is monopolising most of my gaming time at present. Perhaps I'll finally understand why people go apeshit for each new Pokémon release.

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Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson is actually something of an increasing rarity in the modern games sphere: it's a sequel that actually rewards knowledge of its predecessors rather than acting as a standalone story or reboot. For sure, you can play through Deep Crimson without having played Senran Kagura Burst or Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus — despite the "2" in the title, this is actually the third in the series canonically, or fourth if you count the original Japanese release of the first half of Burst as Senran Kagura: Portrait of Girls — but you will get far, far more out of it if you have knowledge of the setting, characters and backstory of what's going on.

Senran Kagura as a series concerns itself with the happenings in the secret world of the shinobi. Trained in secret at specialised academies, shinobi are split into two main groups: "good" and "evil". "Good" shinobi follow orders, help people, Do No Wrong, that sort of thing. "Evil" shinobi do the more shadowy work that is more traditionally associated with those of the ninja persuasion — assassination, espionage and generally being a bit of a bastard without anyone finding out about it until it's much too late.

Life can't be interpreted in such black-and-white terms, however; there are myriad shades of grey, and this becomes particularly apparent over the course of the Senran Kagura series' overarching narrative threads and themes. In Senran Kagura Burst, the "good" shinobi of Hanzou Academy came to understand a little more about their "evil" Hebijo counterparts and that they weren't so different despite their theoretically opposing ideologies; in Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus, we learned the truth about this stark good-evil divide: it's an artificially created construct intended to provoke bloodshed between the two opposing sides, the net result of which lures horrific creatures known as youma out of the darkness so they can be slain by high-ranking shinobi.

In Deep Crimson, the questions over what "good" and "evil" really mean are further raised when the Hanzou students are tasked with initially capturing and then slaying a young girl called Kagura. Kagura, it seems, is destined to fend off the youma in particularly spectacular fashion, so surely the "good" shinobi want to keep her safe rather than splatter her over the nearest wall? Being good little, well, good shinobi, though, they set about making preparations for their mission, because good shinobi follow orders and don't question them. It takes the "evil" shinobi of Homura's Crimson Squad — the former Hebijo students — to convince them to think for themselves and realise that questioning this sort of drastic action is really probably okay if you stop to think about it for just a moment or two. And indeed, there's quite a lot more to Kagura than initially appears.

In Senran Kagura Burst, the relationships between the Hanzou and Hebijo girls was explored through each of them fighting one another and coming to an understanding with their opposing counterpart. It was revealed that "evil" is actually a more inclusive concept than "good" in the world of Senran Kagura, since "good" can turn people away for "not being good enough", while "evil" accepts everyone, no matter how nice or nasty they might have been in the past. Indeed, Burst's storyline — particularly the Hebijo-specific path — takes great pains to humanise the Hebijo girls and depict them as interesting, flawed and often tragic characters who all have their own reasons for turning to the darker path.

In Deep Crimson, these relationships are further explored in a number of different ways, both through the narrative and through the game mechanics. A significant addition to Burst's 2.5D brawling action is the ability to play missions in cooperative pairs, either with another player on a second 3DS system or with the AI taking control of the other character and you being able to switch the one you're in direct control of at will. The game's narrative makes a point of putting "opposing" — or perhaps it's better to say "complementary" — characters together; here, rather than fighting against each other, as in Burst, the girls come to understand one another better by fighting alongside one another against the shared threat of the youma. This doesn't, of course, preclude the fact that a number of comic misunderstandings lead to physical altercations between these pairs at several points in the story — Senran Kagura as a series has always known how to strike a good balance between pathos, drama and humour — but the net result of all the girls' battles right up until the end of the game is that they all come to understand, appreciate and like one another better.

This paired-up action is more than just a gimmick, too; the way it's presented really creates a strong sense of these characters being real people and having actual feelings towards one another. Whether it's the tomboyish, loudmouthed Katsuragi giving the emotionless Hikage an enthusiastic high-five after a successful combat or the dour but utterly besotted Yagyuu catching her darling Hibari in a perfect princess hold after a joint special attack, the game's beautiful animations are absolutely packed with personality, giving each character both a unique look and feel, making them all instantly recognisable.

This uniqueness extends to the way each of the girls plays as well. Far more so than in Senran Kagura Burst, at least, each girl has a very different fighting style, with their own unique button combinations required to unleash combo attacks and specific moves. While you can get away with button-mashing to a certain degree early in the game, once you start fighting more powerful bosses — and even more powerful individual enemies — factors such as positioning, launching, air control and dodging become significantly more important, and there are even some RPG-style status effects to inflict and contend with, just to make things that little bit more interesting.

Each character's three special moves are unique, too; while some are simple area-effect nukes around the character position, others are charge attacks across the arena, good for cutting through swathes of enemies, while others have more specialised uses that can turn the tide of battle in your favour. Of particular note is Haruka's "Death Kiss" move, which charms anyone hit with a large heart-shaped projectile and prevents them from attacking for a brief period; frustrating and combo-breaking when it hits you, massively useful when you're able to do it yourself.

Unfolding across five separate chapters — each with an escalating focus and scope from the previous — and culminating with some dramatic moments of personal growth and epic conflict in the final chapter, Deep Crimson's narrative is a strong one that is paced well and feels like it's the series really hitting its stride. While Burst in particular felt like it was more concerned with introducing the characters and their relationships with one another — no bad thing in a series as characterisation-focused as this — Deep Crimson feels like the overall narrative of the series is moving significantly forwards. The characters aren't treading water: their personal growth in the previous installments is acknowledged and used as a basis for this game's narrative to build on, and this is where the particularly rewarding aspect of complete series familiarity comes in. It has, so far, been an absolute pleasure to witness these girls growing up and finding out more about themselves, their place in the world as people — and their place in the world as shinobi.

As I say, you can absolutely get some appreciation out of Deep Crimson if considering it in a vacuum, but the Senran Kagura series as a whole is at its most rewarding when you take in every piece of information available out there: creator Kenichiro Takaki and his team have created a very strong and believable setting and sense of context across these games, with some wonderfully human-feeling characters that interact with one another in relatable, believable ways — even when they're being silly rather than serious. Like other prolific Japanese series such as Neptunia, the cast has transcended its original context to become a convincing set of "virtual actors" who wouldn't feel out of place in situations other than fighting for their lives — indeed, we've already seen them put their weapons down and do other things in the immensely silly (but immensely entertaining) Senran Kagura Bon Appetit — and I sincerely hope that we see a lot more of these girls in the coming years.

Fortunately, I needn't lament that my time with them has come to a close with the conclusion of Deep Crimson's story, since Estival Versus has just released and is eagerly awaiting insertion into my PS4. More thoughts on that to come when I've spent some time with it.

Oh, hold on now, I didn't answer the question in the headline, did I?

YES

The post 2250: Is There Anything More to 'Senran Kagura 2' Than Big, Bouncing Cartoon Breasts? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My copy of Senran Kagura Estival Versus arrived the other day. I haven't booted it up yet, because I realised that I was yet to play through its predecessor, the 3DS-based Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson. Since the Senran Kagura series is heavily narrative-based and subsequent installments often make reference to events in their predecessors — even between the "main" series on 3DS and the Versus subseries on Sony platforms — I didn't want to jump into Estival Versus until I had, at the very least, beaten the main story of Deep Crimson.

I find the contrast between the 3DS and Sony incarnations of Senran Kagura to be quite interesting. The 3DS games, being the "canonical" storylines, for want of a better word, play like modernisations of 2.5D brawlers such as Streets of Rage, while the Sony games unfold with more of a sense of "3D", feeling more like a blend between Dissidia Final Fantasy and Omega Force's Warriors/Musou series. I'm torn as to which I prefer, to be honest; I've always had a major soft spot for 2.5D brawlers, and, upon firing up Senran Kagura Burst for the first time and discovering it was essentially a new Streets of Rage game, I was delighted. That said, the Versus series seems to be the one that tends to be more well-received, and I like the larger, extended cast that they incorporate.

I don't have to pick a favourite, do I? No? Then I won't. I love them all.

All right, Deep Crimson then. I'm coming up on the last missions of the game having blasted through the previous four chapters, and I've been really enjoying it so far. One thing that has developed considerably from Burst is the fact that each character feels very different to the others now. A lot of Burst could be got through by mashing the attack button and occasionally avoiding enemy attacks, though naturally you'd get more out of it — particularly in boss fights — if you learned some of the combos and when the characters' special moves are especially effective. Deep Crimson, meanwhile, roundly punishes button-mashing, since there appears to be some sort of attack priority system going on, where hurling yourself at the front of an enemy while flailing wildly is a sure-fire way to get yourself defeated swiftly. Instead, mixing up light and strong attacks with air attacks, launches and special moves is essential; it feels much more like a "fighting game" than a button-mashing brawler, which is both enjoyable and rewarding. (Not that there's anything wrong with a button-mashing brawler, of course; I still love me some Streets of Rage.)

Of particular note is the increased emphasis on special moves' usefulness. I got through a lot of Burst and Shinovi Versus without making heavy use of these impressive, powerful moves, but Deep Crimson makes effective use of them a necessity. In a nice nod to series narrative continuity, all the girls start with their powered-up moves that they learned in the previous games, too, providing three distinct, situational moves to unleash at the appropriate time — and if you've wailed on your opponent enough to charge up your ninja scroll meter too, of course. There's a nice mix between area-effect nukes, frontal cones, charge attacks and some outright bizarre abilities (Hibari's "now I'm a giant and I'ma stomp on you!" move is particularly peculiar) that means learning how each character plays is essential; you can't go in hitting buttons randomly and hope for the best, particularly in the tougher fights against stronger individual opponents or duos.

Narrative-wise, Deep Crimson raises the stakes significantly from Burst and even Shinovi Versus. Burst was, up until its final moments, heavily slice-of-life in nature, albeit slice-of-life with shinobi battles. There was a big, ridiculous final boss battle in its final chapter that teased where the series might go in the future, but then it ended. Shinovi Versus, meanwhile, again concentrated on the daily lives and backstories of the characters, but ended with an even bigger tease about the truth behind shinobi in the modern world: their mission to reveal and battle youma, hugely destructive evil creatures who demand blood sacrifices and generally fuck shit up.

After two games of us only ever seeing one youma though — Burst's final boss Orochi, whom you fight both on the inside and the outside depending on which of the two main narrative paths you follow — I was beginning to wonder if youma were going to be one of those threats that was always mentioned in hushed whispers but never actually seen. I thought it would be disappointing if we didn't get to fight some big slobbering monsters, though, because although it's fun to see some shinobi-on-shinobi action, some big slobbering monsters would mix things up nicely.

Deep Crimson is well aware that I probably wasn't the only person feeling like this, and opens with a retelling of Burst's final moments, and then only continues to escalate from there. It tells an interesting tale that delves further into the overall series mythology — particularly the role of the high-ranking ninjas and of Kagura, a mysterious young girl who shows up and appears to be destined to fight youma.

The particularly interesting thing about the narrative is how it plays with the concepts of good and evil. This is always something that Senran Kagura has been particularly good at, with the majority of both Burst and Shinovi Versus exploring the nature of what "good" and "evil" shinobi really mean, and how people can find ways to build bridges across the frothing waters of conflicting ideologies. With Deep Crimson, though, the Hanzou girls — canonically the "good guys" — find themselves confronted with an order that they're not sure is really the right thing to do. Meanwhile, Homura's Crimson Squad, the former Hebijo Academy students and the characters originally positioned as the "bad guys", are placed in the position of doing what you'd traditionally expect the heroes of the piece to be doing.

The other thing that's interesting — and the thing I love the most about Senran Kagura as a whole — is how it juxtaposes the heavy, violent and often philosophical shinobi drama with the breezy silliness of a bunch of teenage girls trying to figure out who they are and what their place in the world is. Every single character in Senran Kagura is a well-defined, interesting person with a unique and worthwhile backstory, and they all get their own time in the limelight. Some characters — Homura is a particularly good example — undergo a huge amount of personal growth and development over the course of the series, and it's been a real pleasure so far to watch these girls grow up, learn about themselves and their place in shinobi society.

This latter aspect in particular is what makes me so infuriated when people dismiss the series as "just boobs". There's some truly remarkable character and plot development going on in this series. Yes, there are big jiggly boobs; yes there are panty shots; yes, combat usually concludes with all the participants stripped down to their undies, but none of this takes away from the well-written, extremely well-characterised drama (and comedy!) that provides the context for the action. It truly is a series deserving of more credit than it gets, and as I close in on the end of Deep Crimson I find myself enormously excited to jump in to Estival Versus, whose core concept promises to tug at the heartstrings particularly strongly. But that's a story for another day, of course.

"Just boobs" my arse.

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It came to light today that Nintendo of America apparently hasn't stopped with the localisation edits to the upcoming Fire Emblem Fates that had already been revealed: it seems that the "petting" minigame, during which you can directly interact with the characters in your party — male and female — and improve your relationships with them has been excised completely. Kotaku described this as a "minor change in the name of localisation".

Perhaps it is "minor". Perhaps it is an unnecessary part of the game. Perhaps those who are unaware of the Japanese version won't even know it was there to be missed. But none of this changes the fact that a feature of the game — with this being the first Fire Emblem game where you could directly interact with party members in this way — has been removed entirely from the Western release, giving English speakers a version of the game which is comparitively gimped when placed alongside its original Japanese source material.

Before I go any further, I'd like to talk a little about my general views on localisation. In short: localisation can be helpful and sometimes necessary to ensure that the right audience can access a work. The Ace Attorney series, for example, benefited considerably from its rather drastic localisation, opening it up to a much broader audience than those who would have been comfortable with a protagonist called Naruhodo Ryuuichi rather than Phoenix Wright.

For me, the key thing when considering how drastic localisation changes should or could be is the question of cultural context. Sometimes the inherently Japanese context of a work is important — key examples include titles like the Persona series, which is set in and around Japanese high schools; the Shenmue series, whose entire first game was set in a few lovingly rendered regions of a Japanese town; the Yakuza series, which is about as accurate a simulation of Japanese nightlife as you're going to get, regular street brawls aside; the Senran Kagura series, which is steeped in both Japanese mythology and cultural peculiarities such as student rivalries and, you know, being a ninja; and any number of visual novels you'd care to mention, which often rely heavily on conventions of Japanese culture, particularly with regard to interpersonal relationships.

For other titles, though, it's less important to keep this authentically Japanese feel to it. Something like my perennial favourite the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, for example, works well with the breezy tone of its localisation, though more diehard fans remain dissatisfied with character traits introduced through NIS America's original translations of the PlayStation 3 games prior to Idea Factory International taking matters into their own hands. Likewise, the localisation of Final Fantasy XIV was excellently handled, featuring some well-done and deliberately flowery — almost Shakespearean at times — dialogue that many have noted added considerable depth to the original source's writing. Indeed, in Final Fantasy XIV's case, many of the things introduced through its localisation have found themselves "backported" to the Japanese version, so well-received were they — though I will admit if you know even a bit of Japanese, playing the game with Japanese voices and comparing to the English subtitles can be a little jarring.

Anyway: the point is, I'm not opposed to localisation where it's appropriate or necessary to broaden a work's appeal, and particularly if said work is aimed at mass market but is still riddled with Japanese cultural references no-one but 1) Japanese people and 2) weeaboos will recognise. Where a specifically Japanese tone and feel is necessary to an authentic translation of the work, though, I'd rather the translation be as literal (but readable) as possible where it can.

And so we come to Fire Emblem Fates. What we have here is a title that isn't particularly Japanese in feel or tone, since Fire Emblem has always erred on a stereotypically Western approach to fantasy at times. As such, I wouldn't be opposed to localisation changes that help a broad audience to access, understand and appreciate the work as a whole by toning down its "Japaneseness".

That's not what we're getting though. Fire Emblem Fates' most drastic localisation edits are nothing to do with helping people understand and access the work, but they are everything to do with minimising offense. Take the notorious "gay conversion" scene, for example: the original hoohah over this came about as a result of some Tumblrina spilling her spaghetti everywhere over what she perceived to be a male protagonist spiking the drink of a lesbian character and "converting" her to being straight enough to marry him. In actuality, the scene is about nothing of the sort: not only is the "magic powder" used to improve her battle effectiveness rather than get her into bed — fainting the moment you get close to a man isn't a good way to wage war — but the female character in question, Soleil, might not even be gay in the first place, if the Fire Emblem Wiki is to be believed: all Soleil's romantic interests are male, making the matter perhaps more one of something related to androphobia rather than homosexuality.

And as for the removal of the "petting" minigame, it just feels like a "mother knows best" moment; like we Westerners are somehow expected to be shocked and appalled enough at the prospect of physically interacting with a video game character and faint on the couch in protest.

I don't like this trend. It feels like a reversal of all the good work that was done in the late '90s and early '00s, where games were regularly praised for having the guts to include adult content other than the "usual" violence. I vividly recall Sierra's adventures Police Quest 4 and Gabriel Knight being highlighted as examples of the medium maturing because of their willingness to include the word "fuck" in their scripts, previously never heard in a game; and likewise I remember PC Zone magazine running a feature in one of its early issues about Megatech's hentai games, noting that their willingness to tackle adult themes — just like anime, which was starting to become popular and fashionable in the UK around the same time — was a sign that some game makers were finally starting to acknowledge that games weren't just for kids.

I'm no fan of Fire Emblem generally — largely due to a lack of experience with the series rather than an actual dislike of it — but these types of big changes made for the wrong reasons make me somewhat uncomfortable, because they're sanitising works of art in the name of appeasing small but loud groups of people, many of whom likely wouldn't have played the game in the first place. It's babying the Western audience, protecting them from things that might "offend" us, whereas one of the best things about art — any form of art, whatever the medium — is its ability to challenge us and get us to think about things in a different way. If you wipe out everything that might offend someone somewhere from art, you're left with a castrated culture that increasingly wants to retreat into its "safe spaces" rather than explore the strange, wonderful, terrible and fascinating things writers come up with.

Not to mention the inherent hypocrisy: Western games don't get butchered in this way in the name of "think of the children". Grand Theft Auto features strip club scenes where you can have a first-person view of a lap dance, which provides no gameplay benefits whatsoever. The recent Thief reboot featured a level where you could peek through a hole in a wall and witness an explicit BDSM sex scene — again, for no real reason other than for background decoration. One of the Far Cry games from a while back opened with a first-person sex scene. And there's the multitude of banging scenes in the Witcher series.

I don't object to any of the above — I'm of the opinion that it's nice for games to treat me like an adult who can handle seeing sexual material. But when Western games get away with stuff as explicit as this, whereas Fire Emblem Fates gets butchered for something far tamer than anything the aforementioned games included, I cry foul. It makes me particularly uncomfortable as a fan of Japanese games to feel that titles from certain publishers or localisation teams aren't providing me with an experience that's completely true to the source material. It may still be great, sure — and everything seems to indicate that Fire Emblem Fates is an ambitious, excellent game — but the experience is somewhat marred by the knowledge that I'm missing out on something that other regions are more than happy to include.

I hope this is a trend which fizzles out quickly; the sooner we get over this inane desire to "protect" people from content they might want to see, the better; in the meantime, I'm more than happy to continue supporting developers and publishers who bring titles over mostly if not completely unscathed: groups like Idea Factory International, Marvelous Europe, Koei Tecmo (with the exception of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, of course), XSEED Games and latter-day NIS America.

"Gaming needs to grow up," the argument frequently runs. Well, for that to happen, you need to start acknowledging players like adults first.

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Been playing a little bit of one of my Christmas acquisitions recently: the intriguing The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes. This isn't a "mainline" Zelda game in that it's not particularly narrative focused and is instead a largely cooperative multiplayer affair, but I've been very pleasantly surprised quite how playable it is — and how it very recognisably has that Nintendo "magic" about it.

Triforce Heroes casts you in the role of a Toon Link who may or may not actually be Link and throws you into the town of Hytopia, which is currently undergoing something of a crisis: the local evil witch is apparently cursing everyone who is getting a bit too fashionable, and thus it's up to the local heroes (for whom the populace have very specific requirements) to sort things out once and for all.

It's an eminently stupid premise, obviously, but in a way that works in the game's favour, because the lack of focus on a coherent narrative allows the game to instead concentrate on gameplay, and in a multiplayer-centric affair, this is by far the best approach.

Triforce Heroes unfolds over a series of discrete levels, each of which makes up a number of different regions in the Drablands, the area the witch calls home. As you complete the various levels, you'll acquire materials and Rupees, both of which can be used to create new costumes for maybe-Link and confer special abilities and bonuses — or, in some cases, penalties. You then repeat the process, gradually increasing your completion and/or grinding levels you've already done for more materials. That is, so far as I can determine, it. But rather than being a throwaway affair, it's actually rather compelling.

It helps that the levels are well designed to necessitate cooperation. Unlike, say, Super Mario 3D World, where additional players were more of a distraction than anything else, Triforce Heroes' levels are specifically designed with three players in mind. Most of the cooperation involves picking up and throwing around the other two players to reach out-of-reach platforms — not-Link, as ever, can't jump — but also making use of the "totem" ability to create a stack of up to three people in order to shoot at/smack/bomb/collect things that are too high off the ground for a single player.

One particularly charming aspect of the game is that as with most Nintendo online games, Triforce Heroes has no means of directly chatting with other players. Instead, you're given a set of endearing emotes ranging from "Over here!" to "Noooo!" that you can spam at will. Most players have already developed a means of "communicating" using these emotes creatively — and, indeed, it's a heartwarming moment when you come together with two strangers all spamming the "cheerleader" emote to signal your joy at having completed a particularly difficult area of the dungeon you're in.

Perhaps best of all for those who have friends with 3DSes, though, is the fact that the game supports Download Play, meaning that only one person needs to actually own a game cartridge for a group of three to be able to enjoy some cooperative fun. Obviously this doesn't apply when it comes to online play, but for local multiplayer sessions I can see it being a riot — I'm looking forward to trying it sometime.

It's not the sort of game I see being a thing you'd spend hours on at a time. But as something to while away a few minutes with at a time, Triforce Heroes is an impressive achievement: a cooperative game where yelling at each other is kept to a minimum, and where the whole experience just feels so delightfully wholesome that you can't help but enjoy it with a big smile on your face.

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I finally got around to firing up Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson today and so far I'm already very impressed — both with how it's a significant improvement on the 3DS original game, and how it's a markedly different experience to both its Nintendo-based predecessor and its Vita-based spinoff Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus.

For the uninitiated, Senran Kagura is a series involving two rival ninja schools, one of "good" shinobi and the other of "evil" shinobi. The Versus spinoff series introduces two additional groups into the mix, each with their own narrative, but the mainline series focuses on the conflict — and, at times, cooperation — between the Hebijo and Hanzou academies, and their respective elite classes.

Senran Kagura tells its stories via several forms of media within the game itself: narration-heavy visual novel sequences delivered from a first-person perspective by one of the characters, allowing us insight into how that particular character thinks, feels and responds to the situations in the narrative; more "game-like" talking head sequences between characters, involving animated, very expressive character models; and dialogue during gameplay itself. The series is noteworthy for its depth of characterisation, relatable casts and total lack of shame when it comes to discussing everything from the philosophy of "good" and "evil" to sexuality.

The first Senran Kagura game we saw in the West — actually a compilation of the first Japanese Senran Kagura game and its follow-up, which made the original "villains" of Hebijo playable and provided them with their own story — played out like a modern version of Streets of Rage. Unfolding from a side-on 2.5D perspective, you (usually) ran from right to left, beating up everyone who got in your way until a big flashing "GO" sign appeared indicating you should move onto the next area and repeat the process. Many levels concluded with a boss fight against one of the shinobi from the opposing school, and there was a bizarre final boss fight that kind of saw Shit Get Real just before the credits rolled.

Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus, meanwhile, eschewed its predecessor's 2.5D nature in favour of something more akin to a scaled-down Dynasty Warriors. Battles now unfolded in full 3D arenas, though the basic structure of the game remained the same — fight enemy group, proceed to next area and/or wave of enemies, fight boss, win. The shift to 3D gave the game quite a different feel, but the combat was tight and responsive, and every character felt very different.

Senran Kagura 2 shifts the style of play once again, blending elements of the original game and Shinovi Versus to create something that — so far, anyway — seems to be a lot of fun. Rather than providing the full freedom of a 3D arena, Senran Kagura 2 instead unfolds from fixed camera angles, mostly presenting a vaguely side-on view, but with considerably more depth than the first game. The game actually makes very good use of the 3DS' stereosopic 3D visuals to allow you to judge depth, range and distance, and, given the 3DS' lack of a right stick to control the camera, this more "controlled" perspective on the action makes a lot of sense.

I've only played a few of the introductory levels so far, but already the game feels a lot more challenging than its predecessor, too; while button mashing will get you through trash enemies reasonably reliably, bosses no longer respond to such simple tactics, instead demanding that you position yourself carefully, wait for a suitable opening and then use an appropriate attack to get within range without putting yourself in danger. I can see the Super-Secret Ninja Arts being Super-Secret Ninja Useful too, since these are often a good means of throwing an enemy off balance as much as dealing significant amounts of damage to them.

I'm pretty excited about the new structure of the game, too; as well as the main story, Senran Kagura 2 features a couple of additional modes. Youma's Nest sees you working your way through a "pyramid" of challenge levels and attempting to complete as many of these as possible without healing in order to earn rewards; Special Missions, meanwhile, allow you to earn new equipment for your shinobi as well as presenting you with challenges under various conditions.

There seems to be a whole lot more variety to the experience, and lots of things to unlock. I'm excited to get stuck in, because I both enjoy the Senran Kagura games as old-school brawlers, and enjoy spending time in the company of these lovely characters, too.

Hidden Nin-Po!

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Closing in on the end of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and I've really enjoyed it — quite possibly more than A Link to the Past, which was previously one of my favourite Zelda games alongside Majora's Mask.

I haven't quite finished it yet so I'm not sure of the complete "truth" behind everything, but I'll comment on what I have seen so far, which is up to about halfway through the eighth dungeon, Turtle Rock.

One of the things I like a lot about Link's Awakening is its strange blend of melancholy and silly humour. This is something that Nintendo has been quite good at with the Zelda series in particular, but it's particularly pronounced in Link's Awakening. The frequent suggestion that everything that is going on is a dream of the "Wind Fish" — and whether or not this is the case is yet to be revealed to me, so no spoilers, please! — allows the game to throw in peculiar and unconventional things along the way, as well as cameos from numerous other Nintendo characters.

Pleasingly, these cameos don't feel overly forced and, in most cases, aren't shoehorned in — they're just there. For example, there are characters who look like Mario and Luigi, but they're never referred to as such. There's a Yoshi doll in one of the shops that kicks off one of the major sidequests in the game. Mr Write from the SNES version of SimCity is there, indulging in a romantic, long-distance letter-writing relationship with a young goat-woman, who is misrepresenting herself using a photograph of Princess Peach. Goombas show up in several dungeons as enemies, as does a monsters that looks and acts remarkably like Kirby. The list goes on.

Another thing I like is how the game blends elements of the original Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past. There's the stronger sense of narrative from the latter coupled with the challenging but satisfying exploration of the former. Dungeons incorporate the side-view "cellars" from the original Legend of Zelda, but in a more fleshed-out manner — rather than simply being somewhere that you either get an item or find a route to another part of the dungeon, these cellars are often mini platforming challenges in their own right that make use of the "Roc Feather" item that allows Link to jump manually for, so far as I can remember, the only time in the series.

The dungeons are beautifully designed, too. While their layout is simpler than their counterparts in A Link to the Past, being single-screen rooms rather than larger, scrolling rooms, navigating them is a pleasure, and very often the game rewards experimentation with its mechanics, and even demands it in places. This is not a game that holds your hand in the slightest, which I appreciate, but I also very much appreciate that the game does have the facility for you to get a hint or two to nudge you in the right direction if you're really struggling.

For me, the only slightly underwhelming part has been the bosses, which, although decent enough, don't seem to be quite as interesting and challenging as those seen in some other Zelda games, and several of them are reused once or twice in later dungeons. At least they're better than the ones from the original Legend of Zelda, mind, and there are a few interesting mechanics to play with on some of them. I also like the use of "mid-bosses" in dungeons as well as the big bosses at the end; I'm a fan of boss fights in general, so getting more than one per dungeon is something I enjoy.

Anyway. I'm hoping I finally beat the game this evening, because when I get home from holiday, it's going to be Xenoblade Chronicles X time for the foreseeable future, and I'd just feel bad if I got this far in Link's Awakening and didn't see it all through until the end!

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I remember a while back hearing a lot of people being surprisingly enthusiastic about a Nintendo-published handheld game called Style Savvy, but I never really got around to looking into it. Recently, however, I downloaded the demo of the somewhat cumbersomely named Nintendo Presents New Style Boutique 2: Fashion Forward — the European name of the third Style Savvy (or, in Japanese, Girls Mode) game — and have found myself surprisingly involved with it.

For the unfamiliar, New Style Boutique 2 (as I shall refer to it hereafter) is a game in which you play a young woman on holiday in a hip, fashion-conscious town. Through a series of somewhat improbable circumstances that only happen in slice-of-life video games, you find yourself assisting a local clothes shop, hairdresser and beautician with the requests of the town's apparently exclusively female population. In doing so, you earn money for the shop and yourself, and can subsequently afford to do yourself up better as well as your customers.

This is as far as the demo goes, but the full game has a story to follow as well as a number of different "professions" to explore, including modelling, fashion design and even interior design. Just the demo is an enjoyable enough experience, though, since it's essentially a game in which the whole point is to piss around with the character creator in order to create various different looks, and subsequently be rewarded for it.

The exact way in which you go about creating these looks differs slightly depending on which aspect of the character's appearance you are working on at the time. If you're putting together an outfit, they'll give you some vague guidelines — "I want a girly outfit, and I have about £700 to spend" — and you can put together an outfit according to those specifications, either through browsing manually or making use of the helpful search function. If you're designing a hairstyle, meanwhile, you're given the opportunity to ask the customer a variety of questions before beginning the styling process, which will give you a checklist of things to include in their haircut. Finally, designing makeup requires you to look at a photograph and attempt to recreate it as closely as possible, perhaps with the assistance of a memo scrawled on the back of the photograph giving you some suggestions of which colours to use in which areas.

What's nice about the game is that unlike many "business" simulations that attempt to capture the feeling of, say, running a shop or office, New Style Boutique 2 has plenty of personality. Its characters all have names and profiles, and they all display their personalities through dialogue — though there is a bit of stock dialogue for things like them accepting outfits and suchlike. They also have distinctive, unique appearances, and it's undeniably satisfying to see a character wandering around wearing an outfit you put together for them.

I don't know how much the other elements of the full game add to the experience as a whole, but based on the demo, I'm actually surprisingly interested in playing it, and I understand now why so many people have had positive things to say about the Style Savvy series as a whole since it first appeared.

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I'm referring to the question of game length.

In an age where the public are seemingly ever more likely to rate interactive entertainment in terms of a "money per hours" ratio — look at the drubbing Gone Home got from certain quarters who felt that $20 was too expensive for the 2-3 hours of gameplay it offered — it should be abundantly clear to anyone who plays them that Japanese games, for the most part, consistently offer the absolute best value in terms of bang for your buck on the market.

Take Senran Kagura Burst, for example, which I finally pummelled into submission and 100% completion over the weekend during downtime between activities. This is a game that is essentially a spiritual successor to the arcade brawlers of yore — games like Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Asterix: The Arcade Game and The Simpsons Arcade Game, to name but a few favourites from my own youth.

Unlike those brawlers, however, which typically tended to be no more than four or five levels long — they needed to theoretically be completable on a single coin credit and in a single sitting, after all — it took me in excess of 50 hours to complete all the levels in Senran Kagura Burst, and there's plenty more I could do after completing all the levels once: try for an A-rank on all of them; try and level up all the characters to 50; try and unlock all the characters' "balance" modes through using them in different ways; try to complete all the levels in the challenging "Frantic" mode; try to beat all the bosses with special moves; and try to see all the bosses' special moves without dying. Were I to tackle some of those additional challenges — and I'm not ruling out the possibility, as I enjoyed Senran Kagura Burst one hell of a lot — I'm sure that could easily put a significant number of extra hours on the clock.

Notably, though, a lot of this "extra" stuff is optional. You can romp through the main storyline of Senran Kagura Burst, ignoring all side missions and some of the clever things you can do with the characters, in probably about 10 hours or so, if that. (Most of that time will be reading the game's lengthy visual novel sections, which are skippable after you've completed that mission at least once.) And in doing so, you'll have had a satisfyingly complete experience from start to finish — particularly as the game's structure effectively feels like you're getting two (rather similar) games for the price of one thanks to the story unfolding from two different, parallel perspectives that meet up at various points.

The same is true for many other Japanese games, with RPGs being the clearest example. Your average Japanese RPG these days will take anywhere between 20 and 100 hours to clear first time through, assuming you don't just plough straight through to the ending, and that you take on a bit of side content and spend a bit of time fine-tuning your characters. After that, though, you have a choice: set it aside, satisfied that you've seen the conclusion to the story, or continue playing in the hope of enjoying everything else the game has to offer — often referred to as "post-game". Many modern RPGs also offer a "New Game Plus" mode, in which you can carry across certain things from your previous playthrough into a new run — the exact things you can carry across vary according to the game, but often include things like character levels, unlocked skills, equipment, secret areas uncovered and all manner of other goodies. This tends to turn you into a satisfyingly unstoppable powerhouse at the outset of your second playthrough as your buffed-up character cuts through enemies like butter, but is often necessary to take on some of the biggest challenges the game has to offer. Some games even withhold their toughest bosses and dungeons until post-game or New Game Plus, providing you with an incentive to continue playing even after the credits have rolled.

Even seemingly "short" Japanese games have a massive amount of longevity, too; take your average "bullet hell" shooter, for example, which typically follows the arcade machine structure of theoretically allowing someone to clear it on a single credit and in a single sitting. The true challenge of these games, however, comes from perfecting your game — achieving that single-credit clear (often known as a 1CC — 1 Credit Clear), beating your last high score, topping the worldwide leaderboards. The latter aspect in particular can become enormously competitive, and in the case of many shmups, requires you to fathom out an initially Byzantine-seeming scoring system in order to take maximum advantage of it.

And this isn't even getting into the truly, directly competitive titles such as fighting games, which have potentially limitless replayability if you're actually any good at them. (I am not, so I tend to play through the story mode, if there is one, and then be done, perhaps with an occasional two-player local match with friends if they're up for it.) Or driving games with ongoing online competition. Or all manner of other joyful experiences.

I'm not saying Western games don't offer any of this longevity — anyone who's super-into Call of Duty's multiplayer mode is doubtless raising their hand and going "Um…" right now — but for my money, and particularly in the single-player space, Japanese games can't be beaten for value in terms of how much entertainment you'll get for your £40.

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The Hanzou side of the story, which focused on the life and times of a group of female classmates in the Hanzou academy for "good" ninjas, was a lot of enjoyable fun, helping to make the already visually distinctive characters into interesting individuals that the player would want to find out more about. There's the leader of the group Asuka, who gradually grows in confidence and assertiveness as the story progresses; class rep Ikaruga, who is initially portrayed as the more "motherly", sensible figure of the group, but gradually steps aside as Asuka grows in strength; Katsuragi, who is very much the "older sister" of the group — and a character unabashedly comfortable with both her own body and her seemingly somewhat fluid sexuality; Hibari, who is immature and filled with self-doubt until she goes on a significant personal journey — an important part of the overall plot; and Yagyuu, whose quiet, understated love for Hibari is extremely touching to see.

Over the course of the Hanzou story, the girls encounter the girls of the Hebijou "evil" school for ninjas on several occasions, culminating in a final conflict against them at the conclusion of the story. Initially set up to be complete antagonists for one another, the final chapters of the Hanzou storyline take steps to humanise the Hebijou, showing both the player and the Hanzou girls that despite being on "opposite" sides, it's possible to find common ground and be friends.

This theme is explored in greater detail in Hebijou's own story. A key concept when considering Hebijou is the idea that the concept of "good" is selective and has stringent criteria to be accepted, while the darkness of "evil" will accept anyone. Consequently, a significant part of the Hebijou story that I've played so far centres around a disparate group of girls from wildly different backgrounds — most of whom have some sort of difficulty or tragedy in their past that they're trying to escape — coming together and finding this common ground; this reason to work together, even though they're "evil".

In fact, throughout the Hebijou storyline, it's easy to forget that these girls are supposed to be "evil" at all, and that's entirely the point the game as a whole is making: regardless of what "side" you're on, it's important to surround yourself with people that you trust and love. People that are true friends; people that can help you through your problems; people that, in some cases, know you better than you know yourself.

Hebijou's cast are an interesting bunch — perhaps even more so than the Hanzou girls. Leader-type Homura — a rough analogue to Hanzou's Asuka — is a girl of relatively few words who is good at being serious but tends to try way too hard when attempting to be "fun". Hikage, meanwhile, is a mysterious young woman who claims to have no emotions — so, as you might expect, cue plenty of scenes with the other girls trying to make her feel things. Mirai, on the other hand, is a young, painfully insecure girl who believes herself to be inferior both physically and in terms of ability to her peers. Next is Yomi, who uses the mannerisms of a privileged rich girl, but actually grew up in poverty, tends to have little to no money even now and who refuses all but the most very basic of charity. And finally Haruka, who is one of the most overtly sexual characters I think I've come across in any game in recent memory, aptly demonstrates that being "sexy" doesn't necessarily mean you have to sacrifice the elements of your personality that make you into a normal human being. You can embrace your sexuality and your own particular tastes without letting them define you, in other words.

I've been really enjoying the Hebijou story so far and I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops. Rather than simply presenting the events of the Hanzou side from an alternative perspective, it's an enjoyably distinct story in its own right, and, like its Hanzou counterpart, gives us an enormous amount of insight into some of the most well-defined characters I've come across in recent memory. I'm glad there's plenty more adventures of the Senran Kagura girls to come in future — in the immediate future, there's Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus for Vita, Senran Kagura 2 for 3DS and rhythm game spinoff Senran Kagura Bon Appetit. And you can bet your life and hometown I'll be playing them all.

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I've really enjoyed what I've played so far, and I'm a particular fan of how well the package as a whole caters to different play styles. If you have a few minutes, you can pick up and play a level or two without worrying about plot; each level takes no more than a minute or two to play, and is a lot of fun, particularly with how different all the characters play from one another. If you have a longer period of time available, however, you can play through the story levels you haven't touched (with accompanying, lengthy visual novel sequences), or concentrate on trying to perfect a particular level for an A Rank, or levelling up a favourite character until you have her best moves.

I was impressed with the story, which was enjoyably mundane throughout despite being about two clans of warring ninjas. The most interesting moments were the ones where the characters were just hanging out eating sushi or chatting among themselves; the most meaningful moments as the "good" shinobi of the Hanzou Academy come to realise that their "evil" counterparts from Hebijo perhaps aren't as different from them as they all once thought.

Perhaps most notable, though, and I'm aware I've touched on this before, is the fact that throughout the story, the characters are treated with the utmost respect by the scenario writers. The game may be notorious for its gelatinous breasts and panty shots and it may be true that beating the story allows you to blow into the 3DS microphone in an attempt to peek up the girls' skirts, but as characters, Asuka, Katsuragi, Ikaruga, Yagyuu and Hibari are well-defined individuals, each in possession of a decent character arc (particularly so in the case of Hibari) and each designed to "feel" very much like a real person. There's a few recognisable tropes in there — Ikaruga's class president and Katsuragi's perverted older sister nature spring immediately to mind — but the game is set up in such a way that they all feel like much more than just eye candy or pure fanservice. I have no doubt that the Hebijo story path will be much the same when I come to it.

I'm looking forward to the possibility of the other games in the series making it to Western territories, and very much hope that they do. There's a strong cast of loveable characters here, and it would be great to see them explored further. Whether or not that happens will presumably depend on sales of the first, but the fact that Xseed localised it in the first place (and Marvelous AQL Europe brought it to Europe in physical format) gives me a considerable degree of hope. As "niche interest" as games like Senran Kagura Burst are, they fulfil an important role in the industry and give people like me that pleasant feeling of "yes, this is a game for me" rather than the dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator nature of a lot of mainstream titles.

Now I'm feeling a bit shitty (yes, still) so I'm off to bed to snuggle up with the ample bosoms of Hanzou Academy, and there isn't a thing you can do to stop me!

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(Yes, as promised, I finished Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory earlier, and it was awesome. But I'll save further discussion of that for another day.)

Bravely Default, meanwhile, has been a very pleasant surprise so far — though at least part of this is due to the fact that, as I mentioned before, I knew very little about this game going into it.

Bravely Default, then, is a new Final Fantasy game. I don't just mean that in the "it's a bit like Final Fantasy" sense, I mean that it is Final Fantasy — right down to the item names, abilities and Job system. Quite why it doesn't carry the Final Fantasy name is anyone's guess — perhaps Square Enix wants to continue to take the Final Fantasy brand in a different direction, while Bravely Default will pick up where the more old-school installments in the series left off? I can't say I'd object to that situation all that much; I like the new Final Fantasies for sure, but playing Bravely Default has reminded me somewhat that the older entries had their charms, too.

It's closest in execution to Final Fantasy V, in that you have a four-character party, each of whom has a character level and a Job level for each of the available Jobs in the game. Both level up independently; levelling up your character improves your base stats, while levelling up your Job gives you access to better abilities and passive skills. You can also make use of the abilities or passive skills from Jobs you're not currently equipped with, but there are limitations and the stat changes that come with a Job change may make some abilities impractical — while it's cool to have a heavily-armoured knight that can fling black magic spells around, for example, he'll never be as good at magic damage as a dedicated black mage.

There's some interesting modern systems at play amid the traditional RPG mechanics, too. The game's use of the 3DS StreetPass system allows you to summon other players' characters and make use of them, and to "link" with your 3DS friends to borrow their abilities — particularly useful if they've levelled up a Job you haven't and unlocked access to a useful special ability.

Less thrilling is the "Bravely Second" system, whereby you can tap the Start button in mid-battle to interrupt whatever's going on and sneak in an extra turn, with actions in this bonus turn costing "SP" rather than the usual "BP" to perform. You can only "carry" up to three SP at once, and they're acquired at the rate of one every eight hours you have the 3DS asleep and running Bravely Default — or, alternatively, you can pay for them. Ugh. Fortunately, so far I haven't seen any need to make use of this system; it mostly seems to be a "panic button" system whereby you can get yourself out of a sticky situation should the worst happen. If you play well, you shouldn't need to use it at all, I hope.

There's also a strange real-time building minigame where you reconstruct a village, and the more players you StreetPassed with, the more workers you have to devote to projects and, consequently, the quicker they can complete their work. Working on the village unlocks shops, special abilities and new items; it's a neat use of real-time mechanics without it feeling like a means of extracting money from you, because there's mercifully no monetisation option to speed things along. What it does mean is that you can make some sort of "progress" on the game even if you don't have a lot of time to play; simply flip open your 3DS, start your workers on a project, then put it to sleep and come back later — when you do have time to play the game proper, you'll have some handy extras.

Mostly, though, the emphasis is on a beautifully presented old-school role-playing game with some excellent mechanics, some stunning music and a pretty cool augmented reality opening cutscene. I'm looking forward to playing more, and I anticipate it stealing a significant proportion of my time from hereon.

Lucky I finished Neptunia Victory, then, huh?

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I'm not saying it's bad, per se, more that I just don't really understand the appeal of it. For sure, it does what social gaming companies like to call "invest and express" gameplay far better than any of the shite churned out by Zynga ever will — and without continually begging the player for money, more to the point — but the trouble is that what Animal Crossing offered just wasn't enough to hold my attention.

There's lots to do in Animal Crossing, for sure, and the game drip-feeds you new things happening in your town every few real-time days to keep you coming back. MMO-style special events allow you to compete against your friends at catching bugs or whatever, and the game world expands a little over time — though not by much.

Trouble is, most of the stuff to do in Animal Crossing wasn't very interesting or enjoyable to me. By my last few days playing, I had settled into a tedious routine of picking fruit, going to the island, catching as many bugs as I could put in the box, selling them all, then paying off part of my loan. I'd then close the game because I'd found the experience so mind-numbing that I didn't really want to play any more. It was feeling more like a job than a game; I was feeling obliged to earn money just to give to Tom Nook, and it just wasn't enjoyable. By the time I'd done my daily "chores" I just wanted to turn the game off and do something else — usually go to sleep, since I inevitably put off said chores until last thing in the evening.

This is, of course, arguably the whole point of Animal Crossing. It's a reflection on modern life and the joyless things we do to get ourselves through the day with enough money to put food on the table. Of course, in Animal Crossing you can't actually starve to death or be turfed out of your house for being unable to keep up repayments on your mortgage, but the feeling of guilt is there — that feeling that you should be doing something more, that feeling that you should be pursuing your ambitions but instead you're trapped in a rut barely scraping by unless you make some sacrifices in the name of being more profitable. (In Animal Crossing's case, the sacrifices I was having to make included "playing games that I found more fun," which was ultimately not something I was willing to give up.)

Multiplayer, too, was confusing. While it was neat to be able to invite friends over, ultimately all I found myself doing when I visited a friend's town was admire how their trees and houses were in slightly different places to my own trees and houses, and nod knowingly if they had discovered how to make "paths" using designs printed on the floor. I never knew what I was supposed to do when I was in someone else's town; there was no structure to it, and no real incentive to actually play together beyond pinching each other's fruit and planting it, or occasionally doing that hilarious thing you can do with Pitfall Seeds. The only multiplayer stuff I found enjoyable were the structured "tours" on the island, and even those weren't all that interesting or competitive to me.

I certainly don't begrudge people their enjoyment of Animal Crossing. I just… don't get it. And I'm cool with that; time to move on.

Pokémon, on the other hand, that I'm starting to come around to. But that's a story for another day.

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Firstly, the single-player mode has a very strong "adventure game" feel about it. Specifically, it features frequent occurrences of getting "stuck" — something which is not altogether common in modern games that hold your hand quite a lot. Luigi's Mansion, though, despite appearing quite tutorial-heavy in the first couple of levels, very quickly turns into a game where you're expected to work things out for yourself, to remember things from earlier and to explore thoroughly rather than just following the handy glowing trail of breadcrumbs on the map.

Secondly, the multiplayer mode is awesome. It hadn't occurred to me that multiplayer in Luigi's Mansion 2 might actually be good, but by golly, it really, really is. I've only tried the "Hunters" mode in Download Play so far — this apparently means it's a "limited" form of the full multiplayer experience — but it was a blast by itself.

Essentially, the multiplayer mode is a cooperative ghost hunt for up to four players at once. Before starting the game, the players choose how many floors of a mansion they want to tackle and must then clear each of them against a strict time limit. Each level is randomly generated, requiring methodical exploration to locate where all the ghosts are and then to take them down. Communication between players is also helpful, but for those who don't want to actually talk to each other — or those who are unable to due to playing online, for example — there's a handy little "quick chat" thingy on the D-pad, allowing you to make Luigi say various things, but more importantly, display a callout on the map indicating that the other players' attention is required in a specific location.

It's a really interesting mode because it's simple but extremely flexible. If you want a short game, you can play just 5 floors. If you want a longer game, you can play up to 25 floors, and successfully clearing this opens up an "Endless" mode, which sounds like a lot of fun. Within the individual play session, players earn points towards upgrades that are valid just for their single play session, making a single multiplayer game feel like a microcosm of the main game's upgrade and reward structure. It's really, really neat and I can actually see myself playing it quite a bit.

The Download Play functionality also reminds me of one of the great unsung features of Nintendo's handhelds. It is absolutely awesome to be able to wirelessly beam a limited version of a game over to your friends and play them without them having to own the game. Wireless multiplayer on its own is great — remember the awkwardness of hooking up link cables? — but when your friends don't have to have their own copy of the game? Brilliant. The only thing about this that I hate is the fact that the 3DS' stupid region locking prevents handhelds from different regions downloading these multiplayer-specific packages. Sometimes. (If it was consistent, I might not be quite so mad about it, but still.)

Anyway. Luigi's Mansion continues to be an entertaining experience, and I'm looking forward to investigating it further. For now, however, I bid you good night!

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And, as predicted, just a short period of time with the 3DS has reminded me once again that people who claim traditional handhelds are on the way out and that mobile phone/tablet gaming is the future are talking out of their arse. Yes indeed.

The quality of the experiences on the 3DS and Vita is just in a completely different league to that you get on a smartphone. Completely. It also makes the rapidly-widening schism between free-to-play/"freemium" and traditionally-sold "pay once, play forever" games extremely apparent.

Today, for work (last day! Woo!) I reviewed the new Transformers game for iOS and Android. Said game is the latest in the interminable string of "card battle" games that are available for those two platforms, which means it's a monotonous, tedious, strategy-and-gameplay-free experience that has only the most tenuous link to its source material. It is, in short, designed as little more than a means of getting people addicted enough to the sight of little bars filling up to want to pay money to "collect" virtual cards that don't actually exist. "This is a super rare card!" they'll say, failing to point out that it is data rather than a physical object and is thus only as "rare" as they decide it should be at any given point in time. There's no joy in playing that game; it's mindless busywork — something to do for the sake of having something to fiddle with rather than something that actually engages your brain and makes you interested in what's going on.

The phrase "mindless busywork" describes probably 90% of the new mobile and social games that are released every day. Which is why I have no desire whatsoever to play them in my free time.

Compare and contrast the crap that is Transformers Legends to Fire Emblem: Awakening on 3DS, then. Ostensibly, the two games are of the same genre: RPG. And yet the difference in quality is apparent from the moment you fire up the game. And it only gets more painful to even contemplate this difference as you go on.

Fire Emblem is a game designed to entertain you and challenge you. It's not designed to massage your ego through giving you tasks to do that are completely free of any sort of challenge, and then extract money from you while you're feeling good. It has the means of extracting money from you through its paid (optional) downloadable content, but the experience in and of itself is complete, and it doesn't nag you at any point to do something that will cost you money. It doesn't tell you how long you can play before you have to either stop or pay, it doesn't tease you with "if you pay $5 you might get this awesome hero" nonsense — note, "might" — and it doesn't thrust gigantic screen-filling adverts in your fucking face every five minutes like most modern mobile games do. Nothing breaks immersion for me more quickly than happily playing a game then suddenly everything stopping and the device on which I'm playing said game asking me if I want to download another, completely unrelated free game. The answer is, without exception, "no, fuck off."

And if the adverts don't break immersion, the "user retention" strategies certainly do. "Play the Daily Spin now!" announces a game that is attempting to be a gritty depiction of medieval life, failing to see how completely inappropriate a slot machine is in this context. "Spin the wheel for prizes!" barks Gollum in the official mobile game of The Hobbit. "Get free coins every day!" bellows whatever shitty puzzle game has ripped off Bejeweled and monetized it out the arse this week.

No. So long as mobile phone gaming is the preserve of sleazy chancers who prey on the weak and stupid, traditional handhelds have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Were you an advocate of mobile and tablet gaming, you may well point to the disparity in price between mobile games and 3DS/Vita games and make some sort of non-specific sneering noise at this point. My response to that is very simply "you get what you pay for."

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