1970: Phoenix Down

We cleared The Final Coil of Bahamut, Turn 3 (aka Turn 12) in Final Fantasy XIV this evening. That means there's only one more boss left to go until I've officially cleared everything in the game at least once. Said boss is a biggie, however; I'd expect nothing less, both for the "true final boss" of the game and for the "true final boss" of a Final Fantasy game.

Turn 12 is an enjoyable fight, though. It took a bit of practice to get it right, but we eventually got there without too much difficulty and frustration. It's interesting in that it's quite unforgiving of any mistakes you might make, but also relatively straightforward and easy once everyone knows what they're doing. There's a lot less in the way of randomness than some of the other encounters (particularly in Coil) so there's a lot less in the way of unexpected things for the party to deal with — any unfortunate happenings can usually be traced directly back to someone doing something wrong somewhere.

Interestingly, a guildmate pointed out that the fight is very unforgiving because unforgiveness is an important narrative theme of the confrontation itself. I won't spoil the story context of it for those who are yet to clear and hoping to remain unspoiled — it's a significant narrative moment in the grand scheme of Final Fantasy XIV's overarching storyline, particularly the spectacular cutscene that follows your victory — but I found it really cool that the mechanics of the game mirrored the narrative themes so nicely. It's a subtle thing, but as someone who is very much interested in the different ways interactive entertainment can tell stories, I liked it very much.

I've been a little burnt out on the game recently, as prior to the imminent expansion Heavensward it's been going through its longest drought of new content since it launched, and it's been hard to motivate myself to keep running the same things over and over again, particularly as in some cases the things I "need" to run for various quests are things that have been in the game since launch, and as such I can probably do them in my sleep. (The Aurum Vale is a bit of an exception; I kind of like that there's a dungeon that can still kick the arse of an unprepared or complacent party, even if it can be frustrating to plough through sometimes.)

There's also the fact that with Heavensward comes a level cap increase, too, and as such a lot of the shiny, top-end gear that everyone's been stocking up on will probably be irrelevant in a matter of weeks following the expansion's release — though not much has been revealed about new gear as yet, so it will be interesting to see how they deal with the discrepancy between character level (currently capped at 50, rising to 60 with Heavensward) and gear level (currently capped at 130, with a couple of individual items being level 135) without revamping the whole system. (Or perhaps they will revamp the whole system, I don't know. Either way, I'm looking forward to it.)

Running T12 tonight, though, reminded me the main reason I play this game; it's not to always be running new and exciting things, it's not to bring down fearsome foes — though that's cool — and it's not to experience the story (which is also great) — but instead it's to have a good time with people who have become really good friends over the course of the last couple of years. The feeling of camaraderie you build when playing a game like this over a long period is unlike anything else in all of gaming, and it's a delight to be able to team up for nights like tonight, where everyone bands together against a common challenge and helps each other out.

So yeah. I may be a little burnt out on grinding for tomestones and the current gear treadmill, but there's still plenty of life in Eorzea's champion Amarysse yet; and I have no doubt whatsoever that Yoshi-P and his team will deliver a spectacular experience with Heavensward that will make me fall in love with the game all over again. Only 6 days until Early Access starts… man, I better finish Omega Quintet before then…

1964: 95 Hours With the Idols

My game clock in Omega Quintet now reads somewhere in the region of 95 hours. I'm now about three-quarters of the way through my New Game Plus run and attempting to get the True Ending, and then there's a bunch of post-game stuff, too, so that timer's going to tick well over 100 by the time I've finished, I'm sure. This officially makes Omega Quintet certainly the Compile Heart game I've spent the longest on, and probably getting on for the overall RPG (Final Fantasy XIV excepted, of course) that I've spent the longest on. The previous record holders were Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory from Compile Heart, and I think I took slightly longer than the 100 hours I took for Victory over Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii — and didn't see anywhere near everything.

Anyway. I don't want to dwell on how long this game is — I could have been done long ago, since I've technically already "cleared" it once and I'm doing all of the optional side quests — but rather on something that I noticed as I was playing today: after nearly 100 hours, I'm still spotting new things about the mechanics and working out ways to leverage them to my advantage.

Compile Heart games are often quite mechanically interesting. The original Hyperdimension Neptunia, for example, featured a combat system in which I spent hours assembling combo attacks that would neatly chain into one another, swap out characters mid-combo and do all sorts of other cool things. The later Neptunia games took a different approach to battle, with freedom of movement, area-of-effect attacks and different types of strike. Hyperdevotion Noire is a solid strategy RPG with easy to understand but tricky to master mechanics involving elemental affinities, range, height and areas of effect. Moe Chronicle — my copy of which arrived today, hooray! — sees you equipping stereotypically moe traits onto a range of monster girls to give them various special abilities. And there are a few I'm still yet to play, too.

One thing that the Neptunia series in particular lacks a bit, though, is customisation. The characters aren't completely fixed in their abilities — you have some flexibility in the combo attacks you can equip each character with, and it's possible to customise the special attack combo-finishers they use, too — but so far as their main special abilities go, they're fixed.

Enter Omega Quintet, then, which offers more customisation than I think I've ever seen in a Compile Heart game, with the possible exception of the original Neptunia. And it's far, far slicker than that game — much as I love it, it was very, very flawed in many places.

The early part of the game sees you assembling the titular Quintet, and various mechanics are locked out until you've assembled them all and you've read all the tutorials (which are thankfully skippable, so you don't need to read them again on a second playthrough). When the team is assembled and all the mechanics are in place, the default setup gives each of the five girls a different weapon and a basic few skills that they've already learned.

Skills fall into three broad categories: Elemental Skills (or E Skills) are magic-like abilities that either attack with elemental affinities or provide beneficial effects such as healing or buffing. Mic Skills — the weapons are known as "Mics", because they're idols, after all — are attacks that are tied to an individual weapon type, so the character must have the appropriate weapon equipped in order to use them. And Special Skills are character-specific attacks that require "Voltage" built up through performing well in combat to be able to pull off.

Of these abilities, only Special Skills are fixed on a per-character basis; everything else is fully customisable. The girls each clearly have a favoured weapon — the one they start with — but there's nothing stopping you from levelling their proficiency in other weapons, too. In fact, it's beneficial to do so, since levelling up a weapon proficiency provides you with additional "Disc Analysis" points besides those you already get from increasing the character's overall level.

Disc Analysis is Omega Quintet's main progression and customisation system. Each character has a large diamond-shaped grid with lots of nodes on it. Each node represents a new skill, an upgrade to an existing skill or a buff to the character such as additional E Skill slots or increased stat growth when levelling up. Spending the Disc Analysis points acquired through levelling and increasing in proficiency unlocks new abilities and opens up new nodes, since some nodes have prerequisites before you can use them or require you to "approach" them from a particular direction on the grid.

In my first playthrough, I wasn't terribly careful with how I organised my characters' development. I kept long-term goals in mind — "I want that ability that's all the way over there" — and attempted to take the most direct routes across the grid to where I wanted to go, picking up any necessary prerequisites along the way. This mostly worked, but it left each character feeling fairly "generic", since a lot of them had ended up learning the same or similar skills, and none of them were particularly playing to their strengths.

This second playthrough, I've been more focused, since I'm playing on the Advanced difficulty. (It hasn't been too difficult yet, but that may be something to do with the fact I carried over my weapons and items from my first playthrough, making me a powerhouse in the early game) I've been specialising my characters and paying more attention to the "Chain Skill" system, which allows multiple characters to trigger more powerful special attacks if they perform the right skills in the right order using the "Harmonics" (simultaneous turn) system.

Kyouka, for example, has high Vitality — Vitality in this game is your speed stat, for some reason, rather than its more common usage as "ability to take punishment" — which means she usually acts first in a fight. This puts her in an ideal position to be a "buffer", so I've given her all of the stat-boosting spells and, using her four actions per turn, she can increase any four of the party's Song Power (physical attack), Stamina (physical defense), Knowledge (magical attack), Divinity (magical defense/healing power), Technique (accuracy) or Vitality (speed). Alternatively, she can use her spear skills to attack; she has a couple of useful area-of-effect attacks as well as one which draws enemies closer, helping to negate the damage penalty for attacking something at the "wrong" range for your weapon or ability.

Aria, meanwhile, has high Divinity, putting her in a good position to be a healer. So I've given her the healing spells. Her high Divinity also means that she can shrug off magical attacks quite easily — sometimes they even miss her altogether, and she has good resistance to status effects. When she's not healing, her combat fan skills have some large area-of-effect attacks as well as two skills that steal items from enemies, making her very useful indeed for farming items.

Nene has the highest Knowledge in the party, making her the "mage". Most of the other characters have fairly woeful Knowledge stats, making their E Skill attacks next to useless for anything other than the status effects or stat penalties most of them come with. Nene, however, probably does more damage with her E Skills than with her gun, so I've given her the most powerful, most costly area-of-effect offensive E Skill spells, making her a powerhouse for blowing things up. She's also very useful for item farming, since her Special Skill comes with a "Rare Steal" effect attached, allowing you to acquire items that you can't get otherwise. In the case of the powerful bosses in the Training Center optional dungeon, these rare items are extremely profitable, though you can seemingly only fight each of these bosses twice before they're gone for good, so no endless farming!

Otoha and Kanadeko are more "average" characters, with their main strengths stat-wise being Song Power, Stamina and, in Kanadeko's case, Vitality. This makes them solid physical attackers, and in Kanadeko's case, her high Vitality means that she usually acts immediately after Kyouka, allowing for some quick hits before the enemy gets started on pummelling the party. The two of them are distinguished by their Mic Skills, however; Otoha has two large area-of-effect attacks and a huge area-of-effect Special Skill, while Kanadeko has some smaller area-of-effect attacks and a single-target Special Skill, but does considerably more overall damage and also has the ability to delay enemy turns with many of her skills.

Things get even more interesting when you throw the Chain Skills into the mix. Because Chain Skills necessitate each "step" being performed by a different character, this makes each individual character's arsenal of E Skills important to consider to give access to the widest possible variety of Chain Skills at any given moment. But then you need to consider that character acting by themselves, too, since you can't always guarantee you'll be able to get the turn order to line up just the way you want it in order to pull one off.

Then you have the Neptunia-esque guard break system, whereby each enemy has a "magnetic field" surrounding them that weakens to varying degrees with each hit they take, and which replenishes fully when the enemy's turn next rolls around. When the field is broken, not only does the enemy take more damage, but certain abilities — particularly Chain Skills and Special Skills — activate a special mode called Pursuit, which extends the usual animation for the skill and does additional hits, usually for quite a bit more damage. As such, it's in your interest to try and batter the magnetic field down as efficiently as you can with low-cost skills, then unleash the powerful Chain Skills and Special Skills when the field is already broken, since Pursuit will only activate if the field is broken at the start of the move in question.

Sound complicated? It kind of is; the game does explain each of these individual elements to you on your first playthrough, but it doesn't really tell you how to apply them to your advantage. That part is entirely up to you to figure out, and after nearly 100 hours I think I've pretty much cracked it. We'll have to see if these tactics will take me safely to the end of the game and beyond, or whether I'll have to have a strategic rethink at some point!

Anyway, I've been playing the damn thing all day so I'm going to bed now.

1961: Sound Shapes

I remember first seeing Sound Shapes at a Gamescom I was covering for GamePro back when GamePro was still a thing. I found it immediately intriguing — partly because it was a game on the then-new-and-shiny Vita, but also because it looked to have some interesting ideas. Now, some several years later, thanks to a significant PlayStation Plus discounted price, I've finally played it. And I've been quite surprised by what I found.

Sound Shapes, if you're unfamiliar, is ostensibly a platform game, but with a few peculiar twists, the first of which being that you don't play as a "character" as such, instead this weird sort of ball thing that can switch between "sticky" and "non-sticky" states at will. When in its default sticky state, it can stick to certain walls and even ceilings; when in its non-sticky state, it moves faster and can jump further. These are the only controls you use in Sound Shapes; where the game gets interesting is in the sheer variety of ways it uses these very simple mechanics.

The "sound" part of the title comes from the fact that the game is heavily music-based. Elements of each screen you visit — no scrolling here; only old-school 8-bit style flick screens — move in time with the music, and the collectible objects in each level are "notes" that affect the soundtrack once you've picked them up. Indeed, when you make use of the level editor, you're not only putting together some fiendish platforming puzzles, you're also composing a piece of music.

And there's a surprising amount of variety, too. Shipping with a number of different "albums" and providing plenty more to explore online, Sound Shapes sees you exploring a number of different environments according to special guest musicians and artists. The first "world"'s art is done by Capy, for example, while the second is a collaboration between Jim Guthrie on music and Superbrothers on art. The two contrast hugely; Capy's world is very organic and smooth, looking like it's been drawn in flat-shaded vector graphics. Guthrie and Superbrothers' world, meanwhile, looks very much like their well-known game Sworcery, but appears to be some sort of introspective reflection on the futility of modern everyday office life.

What I like about Sound Shapes is that it's arty without being pretentious about it. You can treat it as a straightforward platformer if you like, or you can treat the stages as works of interactive art, where the overall multimedia experience has been crafted to put a particular image in your mind, or make you feel a particular way. Some are more successful than others, but all are satisfying and fun to play.

I've been really surprised at quite how good Sound Shapes is. It's a shame I didn't pick it up sooner, really, but I'm having fun with it now, at least; I can recommend it if you're in the mood for some straightforward, pick-up-and-play platforming with a very distinctive, striking audio-visual aesthetic.

1957: More Than a Demo

Out of curiosity, I downloaded Dead or Alive 5: Last Round – Core Fighters on PlayStation 4 this evening. Aside from having one of the most cumbersome titles in recent memory thanks to its string of unnecessary suffixes, DoA5LRCF is actually a really good example of something I hope we'll see more of in the near future: cut-down, free versions of games that are more than just demos. The modern equivalent of "shareware" versions, I guess.

For the unfamiliar, Dead or Alive is a fighting game series that has been running since the PS1 era. It's most notorious for its big jiggly bosoms on the female characters — the jiggle factor of which has always been adjustable, and indeed DoA5 is no exception to this — but it's also one of the best 3D fighting games out there, and one of my favourites. I suck at it, of course, but it's a game that I enjoy sucking at, whereas many of the current crop of 2D fighters are now so completely overcomplicated that I just get frustrated at not understanding why I suck.

Anyway, Core Fighters is a special free version of Dead or Alive 5: Last Round that includes just four of the characters from the full version's rather large cast, plus occasional rotating extras every so often. Core Fighters also lacks the full game's story mode, but other than that it is a complete game — you can play arcade mode, survival mode (a long-standing favourite of mine in the series) and even online. It's even got the full suite of tutorials in it, which seemingly do an excellent job of explaining exactly how the game works — something that previous installments have lacked.

Conveniently, Core Fighters includes my favourite game mode — Survival — and my favourite character — Kasumi — and as such it's a package that I'm eminently satisfied with even in its free incarnation. What's nice about it though is that despite the lack of characters, it doesn't feel especially "limited"; it gives an excellent taste of what to expect from the full game, and does a much better job that your typical demo at convincing you to part with your cash.

I'm not sure if I'll pick up the full version of DoA5 at any point — though I do very much enjoy the series — but Core Fighters is a great means of helping me come to a decision one way or another. I'm looking forward to giving it a shot in two-player versus mode at some point, since I splurged on an extra DualShock 4 controller today. Perhaps I'll even be able to drag Andie away from Final Fantasy XIV for five minutes to fight me. Fight me!

Koei Tecmo has also done a similar arrangement for the PlayStation 4 version of Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires. Given that this is a series I've also enjoyed a great deal over the years, I'm thinking I may well check this out now. Well, tomorrow, because it's nearly 1am now and I need to sleep.

1956: Diving into Hell

I grabbed a copy of a game I've been curious about for a little while today: Helldivers, from Arrowhead.

Helldivers is a PS3, PS4 and Vita game (cross-buy, cross-save and cross-play, thank you very much!) in which you take on the role of one of the titular dropship troopers, blow shit up and then get extracted. Except it's rather more likely that you will die in the process.

Arrowhead, you may recall, also developed Magicka, which is a gloriously chaotic "cooperative" multiplayer shooter in which friendly fire is well and truly turned on. In Magicka, a significant part of the fun comes from seeing what happens when your spells interact with other players' spells — there are often unexpected consequences. Helldivers is less explicitly ridiculous than Magicka is, but there's a lot of the same magic — no pun intended — in there.

Yes, friendly fire is turned on in Helldivers. Yes, things that you do supposedly to benefit the group can end up killing them. Yes, it's a rather good time despite the somewhat generic premise of "space marines go places and kill stuff" — the mission objectives and maps are varied and interesting enough to keep things enjoyable. Or so it looks, anyway; I've only played for about half an hour so far, but I enjoyed it a lot.

The interesting stuff in Helldivers, it seems, will come in the form of "Strategems". These are a rough equivalent to the spells in Magicka in that using them requires you to input a particular string of button commands, but the difference is that they don't take effect immediately. Powerful attacks like air strikes take time to reach your location, for example, meaning you'll need to hold off enemies while you wait for support. And then when support arrives, you'd better make sure you're not standing where you dropped the beacon, otherwise the thing you requested will indeed drop on your head and kill you.

There's something understatedly ridiculous about the multiplayer that makes it a joy. Earlier, I played a game with two random people in which one of our objectives was to disarm some unexploded armaments. No further information was given than that, aside from a location on the map that didn't seem to have anything there. Then several of us realised that we had a "metal detector" strategem available, allowing us to call in a supply drop containing a metal detector. When we'd acquired this, we could then sweep the area for the (apparently buried) bombs. Unfortunately, while we were doing so, our beacons attracted the attentions of the Bug hordes, so my two comrades had to fend them off while I was methodically searching the area for unexploded bombs. The juxtaposition was hilarious.

There's also a really interesting metagame going on, too. The concept puts the Helldivers at work in wars on three fronts, with control of sectors and systems being determined by players succeeding in missions they challenge. When the player community as a whole has pushed the front to the alien homeworld, the ability to assault it becomes available, and consequently an opportunity to win that particular war. Then every so often things reset and start again, from what I understand; I'm interested to see how the current war (the 4th, apparently) unfolds over time — it's a really cool idea and a great use of online.

So yeah. Helldivers. It's a good time. And if you're a PlayStation Plus subscriber, it's cheap right now, too.

1939: Ah, So That's What PlayStation Plus is For

Up until now, I've been a bit resistant to PlayStation Plus, the subscription service that Sony provides for its PlayStation platforms.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't been outright against it or anything; it's more that I've never really seen the need for it in my life.

A bit of context for those less familiar with it, then: PlayStation Plus is required for you to play online multiplayer games on PlayStation 4. (It is not required to play online with PlayStation 3 and Vita.) This aspect of it I can take or leave, since I don't play a lot of online games — Final Fantasy XIV is the only one I play with any regularity, in fact, and I play that on PC.

PlayStation Plus also allows you to upload save games to "the cloud" so that you can easily, say, transfer them between different devices or delete a game and restore your progress later on. Again, I haven't had much need for this; the one and only time I wished I had it was when I had a downloadable review copy of Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection on Vita, subsequently got a physical copy (because I like physical copies) and discovered that it was impossible to delete the downloadable version without also deleting its save data due to Vita's somewhat restrictive file system. If I'd had PlayStation Plus, I would have been able to back up my save, delete the downloadable version then bring it back in to play with the physical version.

PlayStation Plus also provides you with discounts on games from the PlayStation Store each month. These are often quite significant discounts, but you do have to bear in mind that you're paying the subscription fee each month, so you're perhaps not saving quite as much as you think you are.

And finally, PlayStation Plus provides you with "free" games each month. I put the term "free" in quotation marks because you don't own them in the same way as you would if you'd actually bought them outright, either in physical or downloadable form. Rather, you have unlimited access to them for as long as you continue to subscribe to PlayStation Plus; they're effectively extended rentals, if you like.

Now, this latter aspect had been the part I'd probably been most "against", because I like to own my games, preferably in physical format, and PlayStation Plus didn't seem especially compatible with that mindset. What I hadn't counted on, as I've discovered since I signed up for my trial period on my new PS4, was the fact that PlayStation Plus actually provides you with a risk-free means of trying out some things you'd perhaps found interesting, but didn't really want to hand over the money for in case they weren't all that good.

This month, for example, one of the "free" games on PS4 (and PS3 and Vita, for that matter) is a title called Race the Sun. This is an independently developed game in which you fly a low-polygon spaceship across a randomly generated low-polygon world that changes every real-time day, attempt not to crash into anything and usually fail. It starts extremely simple, almost insultingly so — I nearly put the game down a few moments after starting it because it seemed so bare-bones and simplistic — but gradually grows in depth and complexity as you complete objectives and "level up", with new mechanics gradually unlocking as you progress through the levels. Now I'm about halfway through the unlocks and finding it an addictive little affair; the somewhat Star Fox-esque aesthetic is appealing, the music is good, the gameplay is frustrating but addictive and it has a somewhat more satisfying feel than your average mobile phone endless runner — which, let's face it, is basically what it is, with a few extra knobs on.

Would I have spent money on Race the Sun? Well, I certainly wrote about it a bit when I was still working at USgamer, as I thought it looked interesting. It had never quite looked interesting enough for me to actually want to hand over the cash for it, though, and as such it initially passed me by, though I still contemplated it every time I saw it in a Steam sale.

Here's the power of PlayStation Plus, then; it allows me to investigate these games that I've found interesting but, for one reason or another, never bought my own copy of. There's no risk in me doing this, and I get a decent selection to choose from each month. It's more effective than a demo because you get the whole game. And it's less morally questionable than piracy because you're still paying for the game and the devs are getting a cut — it's just getting to them via different means.

And if I end up actually really liking something I've got through PlayStation Plus? There's nothing stopping me actually buying a copy to keep permanently in my collection even if I let my subscription lapse.

So okay, I admit it; I should have probably checked PlayStation Plus out sooner. But better late than never, huh?

1936: Modern Old-School

One of the games I've been playing a bunch on my shiny new PlayStation 4 is Resogun, a game that I was previously moderately excited about, and which, prior to Omega Quintet (and, arguably, Final Fantasy Type-0, which I'm interested to try at some point in the near future) was a game I often cited as the only (then-current) reason that I'd be interested in a PlayStation 4.

But it wasn't enough by itself to make me want to buy one. For a new platform to be truly compelling for me, there needs to be some long-form games that I'm interested in, whereas Resogun is an arcade game, intended to be enjoyed in relatively short bursts. This isn't a criticism of it, mind, but I'd have had a tough time justifying a PlayStation 4 purchase to myself purely on the strength of what is, essentially, next-gen Defender.

But oh, what a game Resogun actually is! I'm still skeptical of whether I'd have found it worth buying a PS4 for by itself — although in retrospect, I bought an Xbox 360 primarily because of Geometry Wars, which is even more simplistic than Resogun — but I'm absolutely in love with it, because it represents a true fusion between classic old-school arcade-style gameplay and modern presentation.

At its core, as previously noted, Resogun is similar to the classic arcade game Defender. You fly a little ship that can move and fire left and right at will. Like Defender, the game unfolds on a scrolling, wrapping stage, though here it's represented as a cylinder that you fly around the outer surface of. Like Defender, your job is to save little green humans from being abducted by invading alien flying saucers. Unlike Defender, there's significantly more to it than that.

For starters, the humans are held in captivity before you can rescue them. In order to do so, you need to destroy "Keepers" — special enemies that show up every so often with a green glow surrounding them. You'll get an audible announcement when some Keepers show up, but not a visual indicator showing where they are if they're around the other side of the level, so you'll need to find and destroy them quickly to save the human in question, because if you miss any of them — or, in some cases, destroy them in the wrong order — the human will immediately die. Succeed, however, and the human will pop out of his little prison box and start running around on the ground, at which point he becomes vulnerable to being abducted, falling into holes, drowning and being splattered by unpleasant things. He also becomes available to be picked up by your ship and transported to one of the rescue pods at the top of the level.

To complete a level, you need to proceed through three "phases". Each phase requires you to destroy a certain amount of enemies represented by a bar filling up at the bottom of the screen. When you complete a phase, you get a brief "time out" where you can still move and fire, but you're invincible and the enemies move in slow-motion. This allows you a moment to compose yourself and get yourself into an advantageous position before proceeding. The end of the third phase, however, jumps directly into a boss battle, with bosses taking the form of various peculiar geometric shapes that warp and twist before your very eyes as you shoot chunks off them and chip away at their energy bar. When the boss is dead, the whole level explodes and you move on to the next one. Repeat for five levels, beat game.

Except that's not all that there is to Resogun — at least not with the excellent DLC packages that have been released since it originally came out. Between these two packages (available as a bundle or individually) there are several new modes, including Survival, which places you on a single level and tasks you with surviving through a series of increasingly difficult days, acquiring power-ups by picking up humans; Protector, which requires you to deliver humans to cities to rebuild them and subsequently defend them from giant alien flying saucers; Commando, which casts you as a human attempting to protect his house from falling meteors in scenes somewhat reminiscent of Missile Command for a new generation; and Challenge, which gives you a series of unconventional ways to play the game and tasks you with completing some generally pretty fiendish objectives.

Resogun is unabashedly a score-attack game, and consequently it naturally comes with online support, allowing you to compare your scores both to your friends and the rest of the world's players. You can also filter these scores by time, allowing you to challenge friends each week or month to see who is truly the best (this week/month), and scores are tracked completely independently for each mode and difficulty setting.

Combine this with a robust ship editor, allowing you to create your own custom ships using the 3D "voxel" pixels from which the entire game is built (and which it is very fond of exploding things into at a moment's notice) and the ability to share said creations online and you have a remarkably "complete"-feeling package that, now I've spent some time with it, I'm pretty confident in recommending as an essential purchase for anyone with a PlayStation 4. (Assuming you like shooting things and watching numbers go up. And who doesn't like shooting things and watching numbers go up?)

So yeah. Buy Resogun. You won't regret it.

1932: Life with No Guide

It's not that often I play games shortly after they've been released, but starting Omega Quintet on literally the day it came out in Europe (physically, anyway; the digital version is out tomorrow, apparently) has reminded me of one interesting thing that you can only do in the moments after a game has been released: play the damn thing without a guide.

GameFAQs is such an ingrained part of gaming culture now that it's very difficult to resist its allure, particularly when playing a complicated, sprawling game like an RPG. It's natural to want to track down every single little secret and see every possible hidden scene, and GameFAQs provides a valuable service to people who feel this way but don't necessarily want to have to put in the hard work to figure things out for themselves. (This isn't a criticism, by the way; sometimes game secrets are so incredibly obtuse it's difficult to fathom how anyone ever discovered them without assistance directly from the developers, and in these cases your average player has little choice but to rely on a guide.)

But playing Omega Quintet before seemingly any guides have hit the Internet is proving to be a pleasurable experience. It's intriguing and fascinating to discover the intricacies of the game system for myself rather than relying on someone else's interpretation. It's satisfying to discover things that work well, and also the things that don't work so well. And, the more I discover about the game — I'm sure I haven't even seen all its mechanics yet, even as I approach the 30-hour mark — the more I'm actually quite grateful for one of the game's most common criticisms: the fact that it doesn't explain a lot of things immediately. Because without the game explicitly setting some things out for you, you have to make use of what information it does give you in order to extrapolate the rest for yourself. And that's enjoyable.

Take today's discovery, for example: a means of acquiring over 200% more rewards at the end of a battle than normal. The game gives you a few brief tutorials in its early hours that mention "bonuses" at the end of battle, and hint that things like your combo hit count and something about "linking" will increase this bonus, but it doesn't sit you down and say "Now you try!" like so many other modern games do. As such, it's possible to forget all about this bonus system and enjoy the combat on a fairly superficial level. But start to delve into it and suddenly it becomes a much more interesting, complex experience, and consequently far more rewarding as a result.

I went from using the same skills in every battle to attempting to make as long a chain of "linked" skills as possible, because the longer this chain, the more significant the bonus you get after battle. This involves looking at the skill information when you select one and taking note of the "link" type marked; in the case of weapon skills, it's inevitably another weapon type. Kyouka's spear skills, for example, link to Otoha's hammer skills; Kanadeko's gauntlet skills link to Aria's fan skills. Where it gets interesting is in the few instances where a character like Nene has some skills that can potentially link in several different directions — one skill might link to Kanadeko's gauntlets, for example, while another might link to Kyouka's spear. In this way, it becomes an interesting challenge to try and optimise the sequence of skills you use in order to link as many as possible without breaking the chain. I haven't quite figured out if it's possible to link everyone's skills that I have so far together into one long sequence yet, but I'm coming perilously close to getting a piece of paper and drawing flow charts to try and work it out.

I'm actually reminded somewhat of the original Hyperdimension Neptunia; perhaps unsurprising, since that was also an Idea Factory/Compile Heart game. The original Neptunia didn't have a particularly popular or well-regarded combat system, but I actually rather enjoyed it for much the same reasons I'm enjoying Omega Quintet; Neptunia, too, had a distinctly puzzle-esque strategic element to how you set up your skills, with much of the challenge and interest coming from setting up your characters with combos that flowed well, maximised the amount of damage you put out and made efficient use of your available action points in a turn. Omega Quintet's combat is considerably more elegant than Neptunia's — IF and Compa have learned a lot since then! — but, to return to the original point of this post, I'm pleased to discover this depth for myself rather than reading about it in a guide.

I'd say I fully intend to try and play the next few games I tackle without looking at a guide at all, but we all know that isn't true. For now, though, I'm greatly enjoying "flying blind" in Omega Quintet, and I feel I have plenty left to discover.

1930: Fun with Harmonics

Spent some more time with Omega Quintet today, and I am, as I may have mentioned a couple of times already, absolutely thrilled with how enjoyable it is — and that it's much more than a reskinned Neptunia. Don't get me wrong, you know how much I love me some Neptunia, but I'm glad that Compile Heart and Idea Factory weren't resting on their laurels with this one; it would have been very easy indeed for them to simply lift Neptunia's admittedly very fun combat system and plonk it in Omega Quintet, but instead Omega Quintet has something all of its own.

Perhaps "all of its own" isn't quite the right description, mind, since Omega Quintet's combat is executed as something of a curious blend between the battle systems from the Atelier series, the Ar Tonelico series, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XIII. That's quite a mixture, but it works really well, particularly when you pull off something as enjoyably silly as this:

The above sequence was recorded at just level 20, by the way; I shudder to think what numbers the girls will be putting out by the end of the game.

Interestingly, the game doesn't bombard you with the complete combat system right from the get-go; it gradually increases in complexity over the course of the first few chapters at a fairly sedate pace, allowing you to get comfortable and familiar with each new concept before a new one is introduced. Ultimately, by the time the complete battle system has unlocked, you should be well familiar with all the possibilities it has to offer. At about 15 hours or so in, I haven't seen everything the system has to offer, yet; for some, this may draw unfavourable comparisons to Final Fantasy XIII, which was lambasted for having a "20 hour tutorial", but it's worth noting that Omega Quintet does sidestep this issue a little by being somewhat less linear than Final Fantasy XIII was; at any given moment, there's a bunch of sidequests to do, hidden treasures to find, new areas to open up, items to craft, special items to unlock and all manner of other things to do. (And besides, there was nothing the fuck wrong with the way Final Fantasy XIII did things, anyway. So there.)

Here's roughly how the system works. Like the Neptunia games, you can get the advantage at the start of combat by attacking an enemy before they come into contact with you; conversely, letting an enemy touch you from behind will give them the advantage. How battle begins sets the opening initiative order, and from there the game follows a clear to understand turn order system, reflected by a graphical representation down the side of the screen.

Each party member has a number of actions per turn, increasing as they increase their overall proficiency with each of the game's five weapon types — axe, gun, spear, fans and gauntlets. These actions can be used to attack, use a skill or use an item, and when all the actions have been chosen, the party member performs each of them in sequence before the turn order moves on to the next combatant. Of key consideration when choosing skills is the "wait time" — more powerful skills will push the party member's next turn further down the turn order, potentially giving enemies the opportunity to attack several times before she can go again. Conversely, certain skills increase the enemies' wait time when they successfully land, so you can manipulate the turn order yourself to a certain degree.

Attacks, skills and even items have an effective range, represented by coloured lines on the ground. Do something to someone in the green area and it will be most effective; then comes blue, yellow and finally red, which means you either can't do the action at all, or it will be at severely reduced effectiveness. Certain attacks and skills also have a radius, either circular or a range of "tiles" horizontally, vertically or both, meaning you can hit multiple enemies at the same time. At the start of a party member's turn, you can move them forward or backward in the formation, allowing you to manipulate the positioning to your advantage. There are also "knockback" skills, which are self-explanatory, and "reverse" skills, which… uh, I'm not entirely sure what they do.

Here's one thing I have to nitpick slightly; there are certain aspects the game doesn't explain very well or, indeed, at all in some cases. The stat names, for example, don't take the usual Attack/Defense/Magic Attack/Magic Defense/Accuracy/Agility format from other Compile Heart games; instead we have Song Power/Stamina/Knowledge/Divinity/Technique/Vitality. You can work out what they are from a bit of experimentation, but it takes a bit of adjustment. Likewise, some of the status effects and added effects (such as the aforementioned "Reverse") aren't made very clear at all, though again, you can probably work these things out for yourself.

Personally, I'm actually all for games encouraging you to figure out some of their mechanics for yourself. You don't need to understand these things to get a kick out of Omega Quintet, but if you're the sort of person who likes to min-max your characters and have them fighting at maximum effectiveness, be aware that you'll need to get your hands a little dirty — particularly as the characters in Omega Quintet are significantly more customisable than, say, the Neptunia girls, who don't allow you to take any control over their development at all, though they do allow you to set up your own custom combos according to how you like to fight. In other words, Omega Quintet's apparently deliberate obtuseness at times will be a turn-off to some people, but personally, I actually like not being spoon-fed absolutely everything.

Anyway. It's good. Real good. And I can't wait to play more. So I'm probably going to do just that right now; I've got a combo record to beat, after all.

1928: Verse Maidens

So, I've spent the majority of my evening playing Idea Factory and Compile Heart's first PlayStation 4 title Omega Quintet. And I'm absolutely in love with it.

Omega Quintet, lest you don't follow Japanese games with the same borderline obsessiveness as I do, is a role-playing game in which you take on the role of Takt, a rather sullen young man who occasionally has trouble with demonstrating the personality trait that he shares his name with. He has fairly good reason to be sullen, however; he lives in a dystopian future in which some sort of lurking unpleasantness called the Blare keeps showing up, driving people mad and turning animals into monsters. (Aside: In the Japanese original, it was called the Beep; I kind of wish they'd kept that name, particularly as the Japanese voices still use it!)

So far, so post-apocalyptic. It wouldn't be a post-apocalyptic JRPG without a band of plucky heroic types to save the day, however, so enter the Verse Maidens: young women who have the power to drive back the Blare with the power of their songs. Takt and his childhood friend Otoha get swept up in the world of the Verse Maidens as the "ever-17 Momoka" (who is actually 37, and starting to feel it) stumbles across them after exhausting herself clearing out a particularly nasty batch of Blare. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances, Otoha awakens to her potential power as a Verse Maiden, leading Momoka to reluctantly retire and make way for Otoha and two other young, inexperienced Verse Maidens called Kana and Nene.

Idea Factory and Compile Heart have proven themselves to be talented at satirical games with the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, which pokes fun at the video game industry and video games in general. Omega Quintet, meanwhile, tackles the Japanese idol industry, a subject that Idea Factory has previously explored in Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection, and something we don't have an exact analogue to in the West. The closest equivalent we have is the phenomenon of "manufactured pop groups" like the boy bands of the '90s and the few examples of groups that have made successes of themselves following talent shows such as The X-Factor and its ilk, but neither of these go anywhere near as far as the Japanese idol industry.

Japanese idols have to contend not only with the most crazy, obsessive fans, but also with their management pretty much taking control of their entire life — including personal relationships, socialising and all the sorts of things that young girls should probably discover and explore for themselves in order to grow up as well-adjusted individuals. Omega Quintet reflects this through Takt gradually being trained up to become the Verse Maidens' manager and sternly told in no uncertain terms at regular intervals that he absolutely, positively must not do anything inappropriate with any of these girls, lest he tarnish their pure image and anger the fans — because Verse Maidens draw their power from their fanbase.

The character of Momoka is also used as a means of reflecting the falseness of the idols' lifestyles. We're initially introduced to Momoka as a young, beautiful, heroic woman whom everyone looks up to and depends upon, but as we see her exhausting herself on what turns out to be her last mission and subsequently revealing her true, rather abrasive personality, we come to understand that she's been playing a part — for twenty years, in her case. It will be interesting to see how the titular Quintet, once they assemble, will come to terms with this existence, and I suspect it will be an important part of the overall narrative.

Mechanically, Omega Quintet is fairly similar to other Compile Heart titles: there's a lot of standing around talking with some well-written, witty dialogue, punctuated with dungeon-crawling and snappy combat. Rather than repurposing the Neptunia combat system, however, Omega Quintet has its own rather deep and complex system that encourages you to be as flashy as you can while maintaining control of your characters' resources. There are some really interesting mechanics in there, such as characters being able to obtain bonus actions for their next turn by fulfilling particular conditions, and a Final Fantasy X-style "turn delay" mechanic allowing you to manipulate the turn order to your advantage. The protagonist also plays an interesting role by not directly participating in combat, instead offering passive support effects to the party and having a limited number of action points to be used throughout the fight either for follow-up "Pursuit" attacks after his current partner has performed an action, or stepping in to soak some of the incoming damage on his partner.

There's also a frighteningly deep-looking character customisation and advancement system that involves unlocking abilities on a "disc" that works a little like Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid, choosing abilities carefully for a limited number of slots, weapon proficiencies, equipment, outfits with upgradeable durability and "amp" slots for bonus effects, formations, chain skills and all manner of other things. I'm only about 5 hours or so into the game so far and it's clear there's a lot of systems I haven't been introduced to yet; it looks like the complete picture will be quite complex, but the game has proven very accessible so far, gradually introducing concepts and giving you ample time to familiarise yourself with them in practical situations before throwing something new into the mix.

Oh, and the soundtrack is amazing. Which you'd sort of hope for a game ostensibly "about" music. And, as usual for the genre, it's the battle theme that presents one of the best examples, featuring a distinctly Final Fantasy XIII-esque feel with its use of solo violin over driving rhythms. So what better way to wrap up these first impressions with said piece? Here you go.