1963: Cold Steel

XSEED Games, localisation specialists extraordinaire, made a number of delightful announcements for fans of Japanese games earlier today. Firstly was the entirely expected but now thankfully confirmed news that Senran Kagura Estival Versus is coming to Western PS4s and Vitas later in the year — I’m supremely happy about this, as Senran Kagura is a fantastic series with some of the best characterisation out there.

Secondly, the more “major” news for many was the announcement that Trails of Cold Steel — known to Japanese fans as Sen no Kiseki or its previous unofficial English moniker Trails in the Flash — is also coming West. Not only that, the first of its two chapters is pretty much finished and almost ready to go.

For the unfamiliar, Trails of Cold Steel is part of the Legend of Heroes series by Falcom, a long-running and deeply, deeply respected series of role-playing games. We haven’t had a lot of them over here in the West, but PSP (and later PC) installmentTrails in the Sky First Chapter came out a few years back to critical acclaim — I wrote some words about it here — and its own Second Chapter is coming shortly having nearly killed poor Andrew Dice of Carpe Fulgur, who worked on the mammoth job of translating its extremely substantial script.

After the initial joy at the announcement came some concern from long-standing series fans who had played Trails in the Sky’s follow-up games Zero no Kiseki, Ao no Kiseki and Trails in the Sky Third Chapter. Unlike many of the previous Legend of Heroes games, the Kiseki games have a deep relationship with one another, with each of the three “groups” of games (Trails in the Sky, Zero/Ao no Kiseki and Trails of Cold Steel) unfolding on a different part of the same continent. The games all refer to one another and act as “prequels” to one another, so some fans were concerned that newcomers to Trails of Cold Steel would be thrown in at the deep end having missed three whole games’ worth of lore and background. And the Kiseki series is not what you’d call light on lore; in fact, it features some of the most well-realised worldbuilding of any RPG I’ve played.

Brittany “Hatsuu” Avery of Xseed, one of my absolute favourite people in the games industry, took to the Xseed blog to address some of these concerns. And she’s certainly set my mind at rest.

To summarise, the reasons why we’re not getting Zero and Ao — yet, anyway, since there’s a strong suggestion that they will come at a later date, probably on PC — is partly due to technological and marketing concerns. Zero and Ao are PSP games, you see, and while there are still a few PSP games trickling out here and there due to their Vita compatibility — Trails in the Sky Second Chapter will be one — the PSP as a platform has technically been “dead” for some time. As such, it makes sense to push out Trails of Cold Steel for PS3 and Vita, since both of those platforms are still relevant at this time — PS3 is on the decline somewhat, but while developers such as Idea Factory/Compile Heart, Nippon Ichi and Square Enix have made the transition to PS4, there are still a number of PS3 titles incoming for the next year or two at least. Vita, meanwhile, for all the press’ attempts to declare it “dead” every few weeks, is enjoying a small-scale but successful existence as the go-to platform for fans of role-playing games and other Japanese fare.

Hatsuu also notes that Xseed took this decision with the full approval of the games’ original developers Falcom, whose original intention was always that the three sub-series of the overarching Kiseki storyline could stand on their own and be played in any order. In fact, what you’d get from playing them “out of order” would be an experience and perspective on the overall story unique to Western players and different to what Japan had. Kind of like the difference between watching the Star Wars films in chronological order of release or watching them in “canonical” order from I-VI.

Trails in the Sky First Chapter was a stunning game that I enjoyed very much, and I’m glad to see the rest of this highly regarded series is coming West. It may not be in the “right” order and that may have a few snooty fans being a bit salty, but I’m more than happy to support Xseed taking on ambitious projects of this magnitude and delivering them with aplomb. Xseed are one of my favourite developer-publisher-localisation outfits right now, and they deserve the support of anyone who loves Japanese games.

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.

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?

1919: #WaifuWednesday – Shin (Criminal Girls)

The temptation to pick another Senran Kagura girl this week was very high indeed — I’ve just finished the main story of Shinovi Versus and there are, after all, 25 very interesting female characters in that game. But since I’m planning on doing a more comprehensive Senran Kagura writeup over at MoeGamer later this week when I’ve finished all the side stories in Shinovi Versus, I thought I’d mix things up a bit and show a bit of appreciation for the girl who currently graces my Windows wallpaper on my living room PC: Shin, from Criminal Girls on Vita, which I beat a few weeks back.

Spoilers ahead.

Shin, real name Makoto, is based primarily around the commonly used anime trope of the hikikomori, or shut-in. A renowned, well-known and somewhat notorious MMO player who was viciously bullied in real life for her interests and passions, Shin had, over time, retreated from society to live in her own private world where she felt safe. She’d done this to the exclusion of everyone around her — going so far as to lock herself inside her room and only eat whatever food had been left outside for her.

When you encounter Shin for the first time in Criminal Girls, none of this is apparent. She simply seems like an overconfident “leader type”, wanting to boss everyone around and, as the oldest member of the group, believing that her opinion carries a considerable degree of weight. Her “leader type” personality is even reflected in her game mechanics; by herself, she’s not very formidable, but most of her power comes from her “Operation” skills, which partner with at least one other party member to effectively deliver multiple special attacks in the space of a single turn.

Over time, her facade slips, however; she continually makes poor decisions that put the group in danger, and throwaway comments she makes gradually reveal her otaku side. It eventually becomes very apparent that she’s trying desperately to be someone that she isn’t, and that by hiding herself away she’s hurting the people around her.

The main thrust of Criminal Girls’ story surrounds the player’s attempts to “redeem” the titular girls from their past sins, to prevent them being incarcerated in Hell and giving them another chance at life. Shin’s sin, then, is that of neglecting others; she personifies the Deadly Sin of Envy. She envies those who have a normal life and is embittered by her drop-out, shut-in existence; the arrogant persona she initially displays is both a reflection of the character she played online and of who she thinks she “ought” to be — a persona she believes to be more likeable.

As the girls and the player character come to trust one another more, though, Shin starts to open up. She’s more honest and less confrontational, though she still bickers with the rather spoiled Kisaragi; the two are more similar than either of them would care to admit. Most importantly, she learns through others accepting her that it is also possible to accept herself without being ashamed; there’s no need for her to cut herself off from her problems and hide away. In doing so, in fact, she had simply made matters worse; the longer she was alone, the more she believed she needed to be alone, and so her resentment and envy towards “normal” people grew.

Those of you who know me well will surely not be surprised to hear that I found Shin to be one of the most relatable characters in Criminal Girls. While I haven’t gone to the lengths she has — I’m fortunate enough to have a good circle of friends (both online and off) and a wonderful fiancee who tolerate, understand and accept the things I’m interested in — I can very much empathise with her feelings of isolation, the suffering she endured while she was being bullied and her envy for people who seem to be able to go about their business “normally”. I’ve been through some of the things Shin has been through — though fortunately in my case it didn’t involve a literal trip to Hell and back — and as such she occupies a special place in my heart.

A toast to you, then, Shin; you were one of numerous reasons I’m glad I made that journey through Hell.

1912: #WaifuWednesday (special guest: #BoobsNotBlood)

So Wednesday rolls around again, and as we established last week, that means it’s time for Waifu Wednesday.

Before that, a ~~short~~ hefty preamble, though, because it’s being discussed as something of a hot topic on the social media Interwebs at the very time I type this. I refer to the issue summarised under the Twitter hashtag #BoobsNotBlood, in which a number of people have begun pointing out the hypocrisy of popular media in being absolutely fine with graphic violence — the most recent example of which being the new Mortal Kombat game — but immediately shunning anything that has even the slightest hint of being sexual. (Unless, of course, it’s being used for advertising, in which case it’s fucking everywhere, no play on words intended.)

Mortal Kombat, to put things in context for those who are less familiar, is a series that has always prided itself on being graphic. Back on its original release, it was one of the first games to use digitised real actors as its sprites, and one of the first arcade fighting games to feature blood and gore splattering around the screen as the fight continued. Its most notorious feature, though, was the ability to perform a “Fatality” move on a defeated opponent — by entering a convoluted series of button inputs, you could kill your opponent in an assortment of overblown and violent ways, ranging from ripping out their heart to pulling out their spine. The latest Mortal Kombat continues this tradition, even going so far as to provide some of the most obnoxious microtransactions I’ve ever seen — the ability to buy tokens allowing you to perform these Fatality moves more easily without having to learn the button inputs. That’s a whole separate issue, though, that I’m sure we’ll talk about another time.

Anyway. I have absolutely no problem with Mortal Kombat, or indeed pretty much any violent game or piece of media. Violence has become so normalised in modern popular culture that, for the most part, people tend not to bat an eyelid at it any more. (There are exceptions; very realistic gore, torture and any form of depicting realistic violence against women still tends to make people uncomfortable at the very least.) That, in itself, is perhaps a concern for some people, but so long as you’re able to distinguish fantasy from reality — and pretty much everyone is, with the exception of people who already have some pretty severe mental disorders — it’s not a problem as such for your average adult human. (We could get into the whole “think of the children” thing here, but again, that’s probably an issue to tackle another day; I’m primarily concerned with people old enough to make their own decisions here.)

So violence is, for the most part, A-OK in the eyes of popular culture in the West. Sexuality, though, is a big no-no. And this is where the primary resistance to modern Japanese games tends to come from: because the otaku market in Japan — who enjoy fanservice and sexualised content — is a sizeable one with disposable income to throw around, that is the market that many anime and game creators choose to focus their attention on. And with good reason: you go where the money is. It’s the exact same reason we have so many annualised sports games and dudebro shooters here in the West: they sell.

You may not think that otaku games and dudebro shooters have much in common, but there’s one very important aspect in which they’re very much alike: people outside of their core demographic seem to wilfully misunderstand and misinterpret them, and then make a point of talking them down — in the process alienating the people who do like them — at every opportunity. I’ve been guilty of this myself over the years, but since throwing myself more into the things I love to the exclusion of things I didn’t like but explored because I felt I “had” to, I’ve become more content to simply live and let live: I’m never going to play, say, Halo 5 because it just doesn’t appeal, but I certainly don’t begrudge anyone who will enjoy it the experience of playing it.

A key difference, though, is that otaku games are a relatively small market in the West, while dudebro shooters make up the majority of the market. This is the complete inverse of the situation in Japan. The otaku games are seen as a minority, so they’re an easy target; I don’t know if their critics are simply trying to outright get rid of them altogether — I suspect there are at least a few people out there who wouldn’t mind if we never saw a doe-eyed moe girl ever again — and so it’s their controversial aspects — their sexuality — that tends to inflame the ire of critics who, generally, have absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about.

And yet, as Mr Matt Sainsbury of Digitally Downloaded said during a Twitter discussion yesterday, sex has been a crucial part of artistic expression since… well, forever. And yet the moment we see a flash of panties, a bit of cleavage, a provocative pose or a bit of dialogue about boob size, that seemingly invalidates the whole experience in the eyes of some critics. It’s painfully inconsistent and hypocritical to completely devalue an experience on the grounds of sexualised content when extreme violence passes without comment. (To clarify: I don’t have a problem with either, and believe that content creators are free to make whatever they like — or what they feel will be popular — without external pressure from people who speak from an ill-informed perspective.)

So with that in mind, let’s take a conspicuously sexy character for this week’s Waifu Wednesday.

This is Katsuragi from the Senran Kagura series. She’s a member of the Hanzou Academy, a school that trains “good shinobi” — ninjas who supposedly do work for the benefit of all, rather than individual self-interest.

Katsuragi is an interesting character in a number of ways. She’s arguably not the most explicitly sexual of the Senran Kagura girls — that honour probably goes to Haruka, who I’m sure we’ll talk about in the near future — but she is certainly one of those who is most comfortable with her own body, personality and sexuality.

This is an important and interesting point about most of the cast of Senran Kagura, actually; while the series is most widely renowned for its exaggerated jiggling boobs — indeed, the series creator has gone on record as unashamedly saying the reason the series exists at all is because he wanted to see pretty girls with jiggling boobs in 3D on the Nintendo 3DS — the girls aren’t simply well-stacked stick-figures, as sometimes seen in other anime-inspired work. Rather, in most official artwork — and indeed in the game, too — they’re depicted as having healthy curves and, in most cases, being happy with their bodies. (The couple of exceptions to this — Mirai and Ryoubi — have their dissatisfaction with their bodies explored as part of their own personal story arcs.)

Like most of the cast of Senran Kagura, it was not happy circumstances that drew Katsuragi to the Path of the Shinobi. I shan’t spoil her personal plot here, as it’s explored in more detail than I can give justice to in a few short paragraphs in both Senran Kagura Burst and Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus (and, presumably, the recently released Estival Versus, which is currently only available in Japanese). Suffice to say, though, Katsuragi has a fair amount of personal demons to take on, and a lot of sorrow to deal with.

She has two main means of dealing with these things: firstly, by acting as an “older sister” figure for many of the other group members, who recognise this and refer to her as “Katsu-nee”, “-nee” being a Japanese suffix to denote an older female sibling, but also often used in contexts like this where intimate personal relationships take on a “sister-like” quality. She is a character that her friends in Hanzou look up to and trust greatly, and often confide in.

Her second means of dealing with the emotional baggage she’s been dragging around with her is being a complete pervert, and it’s this aspect of her personality that is more obvious from the start. It’s also this aspect of her personality that cause many people to write her off as little more than a shallow, fanservicey character, but it goes much deeper than that.

Katsuragi’s perversions — particularly her habitual groping of her peers’ breasts — are a form of self-expression for her, and a reflection of the fact she has had to, to a certain degree, bring herself up without some of the normal “boundaries” set for youngsters. She herself refers to her behaviour as sekuhara (sexual harassment) and confesses in Shinovi Versus that she uses it as something of an icebreaker. Her peers don’t always see it the same way, of course — it’s a rather intimate invasion of personal space, after all — but as they — and the player — come to understand Katsuragi, it becomes more and more apparent that this exaggerated behaviour of hers is simply a front for how she’s really feeling inside; she maintains the facade of an energetic, enthusiastic, overly sexual young woman in order to avoid having to burden others with her own emotional turmoil; while others are happy to confide in her, she has some difficulty in being truly honest with them.

Katsuragi develops something of a rivalry with Hikage from Homura’s Crimson Squad. In many ways, Hikage is the polar opposite of Katsuragi, in that while Katsuragi is vibrant and, at first glance, extremely open about her feelings and passions — although as we’ve just talked about, the truth becomes apparent over time — Hikage is dour, emotionless and seemingly unable to enjoy anything. Katsuragi makes it her mission to try and get Hikage to “enjoy” a fight between the two of them, even though they are technically on “opposite” sides of the good/evil divide between shinobi. The two eventually strike up something of a friendship as a result; opposites, as they say, attract.

Katsuragi is an unashamedly sexual character who likes to show off — she explicitly says so when she performs her Ninja Transformation sequence in Shinovi Versus. Where critics tend to habitually misunderstand her — and the Senran Kagura series as a whole — is that this isn’t just there “for the sake of it”. It’s part of who she is, and that should be acknowledged — without shaming it — but, more importantly, it’s not the entirety of her being. She’s a complex, interesting character, and very much one of my favourites in the series, and that’s why I’ve devoted so many words to her today.

Thank you.

1895: More Noire

Been playing some more Hyperdevotion Noire today, so I make no apologies for spending another post talking about it.

I am enjoying it a whole lot so far, and although I’m still relatively early on in the game, the interesting mission and map design is starting to shine through as the game adds more and more map gimmicks and mechanics to take into account while playing.

Of the last few missions, I’ve played, for example, one saw my party of four (Noire, Neptune, Vert and Blanc) fighting against the emphatically-not-Chun-Li-oh-wait-she-clearly-is “road pugilist” Lee-Fi. She was on the far side of a large arena whose walls were electrified, which means that knockback attacks had a use beyond simply getting enemies away from you. Some of the floor was electrified, too, necessitating careful route planning and an understanding of the game’s “orientation” system, whereby the direction a character is facing when they start moving (you can change it freely) determines the initial direction they move if the target space is not in a straight line from their current position.

This was followed up by a fight against the emphatically-not-Solid-Snake-with-tits-oh-wait-she-clearly-is superspy Lid, whose battlefield was riddled with booby-traps, necessitating, again, careful navigation while fending off her supporting units. Two strips of the battlefield are also covered by large, heavy damage-dealing cannons, too, though once you notice that they can only fire in a straight line immediately in front of them it’s easy enough to avoid them.

This was then followed by a battle against the Agarest-inspired character Resta, who was on the other side of a huge chasm, the only means of traversing which was a rickety railway carriage that could only hold three of your four party members at once. Resta also has an absolutely devastating super-move which obliterated my party in a single turn by dropping giant explosive bunches of bananas on their heads, so after my second “Game Over” of the game (the first being not paying attention to the cannons in Lid’s stage) I realised that it was essential to take her down in a single turn and not get distracted by her supporting units, since the mission objective was simply to defeat her, not everything on the map.

Thus far the game has put up a reasonably stiff challenge. The first couple of missions are deceptively simple, but beginning with the Lee-Fi fight, things have been getting noticeably more difficult — and a little more gradually than most Neptunia games, which are somewhat notorious for inconsistent difficulty spikes throughout most of the experience, then becoming ridiculously easy once you pass a particular level threshold. The difficulty hasn’t been insurmountable, though, and the new mechanics have been introduced gradually enough that I haven’t felt as overwhelmed as I have done in similar games like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem, where I often can’t work out why my strategy failed when it inevitably does. Here, failure seems to generally be the result of not paying enough attention — and given that you can examine all the units on both sides of the battle before you start fighting, there’s really no excuse for the mistakes I have made up until this point; I’ve certainly learned to carefully survey the battlefield before charging in now!

I’ve always quite liked tactics games and even finished Final Fantasy Tactics way back in the day, but Hyperdevotion Noire is the first one I feel like I’m understanding a little better. It’s designed well, plays well, looks great and features probably my favourite cast of characters in gaming. What’s not to like?

1894: Goddess Black Heart

Finally got around to firing up the rather grandiosely titled Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart today, and I’m pleased to report that thus far it appears to be excellent.

For the unfamiliar, Hyperdevotion Noire is another installment in my perennial favourite game series Hyperdimension Neptunia, or more accurately, it’s one of several “spinoff” games that have broken free of the main continuity… not that Neptunia has ever been a series particularly concerned with internal continuity. In other words, it stands by itself as its own self-contained story, though naturally you’ll probably get more out of it if you’re already familiar with the characters and concepts involved.

Unlike most of the Neptunia games, Hyperdevotion Noire puts, oddly enough, PlayStation personification Noire in the leading role. Unfolding in a separate, parallel setting to the main Neptunia games (the land of “Gamarket” instead of “Gamindustri”), Hyperdevotion Noire opens with Noire dominating much of the world with her superior military might, army of generals (each of whom represents a well-known game series, such as the Metal Gear-inspired girl named “Lid” seen in the screenshot below) and overwhelming support from the people. Unfortunately, her position as top dog isn’t to last; after being tricked into releasing the power of her “Shares” — the source of a Goddess’ power in the Neptunia universe — monsters run amok in her city, people disappear and her once-trusted generals start fighting among themselves. It’s up to Noire — along with the rest of the Neptunia gang, who show up pretty near the beginning of the whole affair — to sort out the mess she had a part in creating, find out who the mysterious woman “Eno” who set these events in motion is (hint: she looks uncannily like recurring series villain Arfoire) and ultimately unite Gamarket.

It’s up to you, meanwhile, to take care of Noire and help her out as she goes about her business. Yes, like fellow spinoff Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection, Hyperdevotion Noire puts the player in the game as a first-person protagonist rather than simply telling the story of the main cast. Recruited as Noire’s secretary shortly after meeting her, you’re tasked with managing the party, strategising in battle, renovating and decorating Noire’s headquarters and helping her make appropriate policy decisions as the citizens of Lastation come to her with requests.

The meat of the game comes in the battle sequences. Rather than being a dungeon-crawling, item-gathering/crafting RPG as the mainline Neptunia installments are, Hyperdevotion Noire is a strategy RPG, developed by Sting (of Gungnir, Knights in the Nightmare and Yggdra Union fame). Mainline Neptunia games have always had a slight element of tactics to their battle sequences thanks to positional bonuses, cleaving attacks and formation skills, but battles in those games are generally pretty short; punctuation to dungeon crawling. In Hyperdevotion Noire, a single battle represents a complete encounter and provides you with specific objectives: sometimes you’ll simply have to defeat all enemies; sometimes you’ll have to defeat a specific enemy; sometimes you’ll have to complete objectives before a specific number of turns pass.

The game does a good job of introducing concepts to you gradually, and there’s a bunch of interesting systems at play. Core to the game is the “Lily Boost” system, whereby characters can power up their relationship values with other characters, earn “Lily Points” and reduce the cost of their special moves by triggering their skills when adjacent to other characters, which causes the supporting characters to give the acting character an adorable little peck on the cheek. Chu! Although cheeky and flirtatious, the system adds an interesting dynamic to battles: you have to think very carefully about both turn order and formation when setting up attacks, especially when you’re dealing with enemies who can hit several tiles at once. It’s no good getting all set up for a four-way snog if an enemy with a massive cleave is just going to kill all of you at once when it comes to their turn, after all.

That’s not all to think about, though. Battle maps include treasure chests in awkward-to-reach locations, which you’ll need to acquire before completing your objectives if you want the goodies therein. A Final Fantasy X-style “Overkill” bonus rewards you with rare drops if you defeat an enemy with far more damage than you need to. Maps have variable elevation and environmental hazards — both of which can be conveniently bypassed if you switch the goddess characters into their flying “HDD” forms, but in order to do this you’ll need to build up the Lily Points gauge first, and then it only lasts for three turns, so you need to make the most of it. Setting a specific character as the “leader” of the squad confers special bonuses (and, sometimes, penalties) on the group as a whole. Characters each have their own array of “challenges” to complete, each of which rewards them with significant stat bonuses.

There is a hell of a lot of game here. This is nothing new for a Neptunia game — I’ve easily spent over 100 hours on the last few installments in an attempt to get the Platinum trophies and hidden goodies — but considering this is a “spinoff” game and not technically part of the main series, it’s impressive. I’m only a short way in to the overall plot so far, but I’m already enjoying both the narrative and gameplay sides; it’s shaping up to be a fine installment in a favourite series, and all the more noteworthy for doing something a little bit different.

1889: My Dear Ninjas

Having finished Criminal Girls, I was all set to make a start on Hyperdevotion Noire, a game that I’ve been very excited to play for quite some time. But I didn’t; I decided I should try and clear out some of the games I’ve left half-finished first, the main one being Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus.

Shinovi Versus is an underappreciated little diamond in the Vita library. It’s an enjoyably over-the-top 3D action game vaguely in the vein of Dynasty Warriors (in that in a number of levels you hack and slash your way through hundreds of enemies, and your combo count frequently reaches the thousands) but also providing a fun take on fighting in 3D.

There are two… well, maybe three core appeal elements when we’re talking about Senran Kagura, and Shinovi Versus in particular. The first is, of course, the fanservice element; let’s not beat around the bush here, it’s the reason the series exists in the first place. The girls are pretty, their boobs are jiggly, the costumes are sexy and as you fight, they get ripped. Despite the girls technically being ninjas and using a variety of rather painful-looking implements to battle one another, no-one ever seems to really get hurt or killed; the main damage anyone suffers is to their pride, since a well-timed Ninja Art at the conclusion of a bout can cheerfully whip off the underwear of your opponent, leaving them in no doubt as to who is the winner.

But anyway. The two main things I wanted to talk about were the narrative and the mechanics. The narrative I’ve already talked about in past posts: considering the game is regarded by outsiders as little more than gratuitous fanservice, if you’re unfamiliar with it you may be surprised to note that the series features some excellent characterisation, including characters with genuine development and growth over the course of their stories. It’s a game that’s not afraid to juxtapose the serious and the absurd, either; while the main storylines for each of the four “schools” involved in the overall plot are fairly serious in tone, the girls’ individual stories are more light-hearted in nature, leading to some ridiculous situations. It effectively allows us to see the cast “at work” and “at play”, and it gives us a pretty good picture of who they all are as people.

Mechanically, the game is a delight. The control scheme is simple to understand, but the depth comes from the wide variety of characters and how very differently from one another they all handle. Some are friendly to simple button-mashing — Asuka is a good example, particularly once she unlocks her spinny death tornado move — while others demand mobility, observation, timing and sometimes unconventional tactics. By the end of your time with the game, you’ll have at least one “favourite” character, both in narrative terms and mechanically, too.

It’s a game bursting with content. There are four separate “episodes” to the story, each focusing on a different main cast, and each has a different tone. The scenes involving characters returning from Senran Kagura Burst on the 3DS are heartwarming, while the scenes involving new characters give us a good idea of what makes the newcomers tick. Depending on which order you choose to play the stories, you’ll meet all the characters from several different perspectives, and between all these angles — and side missions like the girls’ individual stories — you’ll get a solid understanding of who everyone is and how they all relate to one another.

Not bad for a fanservice-heavy hack and slash. I’m pleased to be rediscovering it now that Criminal Girls is done and dusted, and looking forward to spending some time with the characters I don’t know all that well yet.

1881: Path to Redemption

I’m in the process of finishing up Criminal Girls: Invite Only on Vita, and I’ve been really pleasantly surprised how good it ended up being. I’m planning on writing something a bit more in-depth for MoeGamer when I’ve beaten it properly, but I thought I’d share a few thoughts on here for those who don’t visit MoeGamer, or for those who just want to hear some disjointed ramblings about it now.

It’s easy to write Criminal Girls off as an oversexualised mess of an RPG, with a gratutiously exploitative minigame in which you spank, electrocute, drip liquid on and tickle a series of young women posing in suggestive positions. And indeed, even with the “pink mist” censorship introduced in the Western release of the game (and the loss of the girls’ voices in these sequences) these sequences are pretty clearly sexual in nature: everything from the poses they’re in to the provocative outfits they wear and their reactions after you’ve, uh, finished — all point to something that while it isn’t outright explicit, is certainly rather close to the, if you’ll pardon the expression, bone.

But, as with most material of this nature, it bears further exploration, and doing so reveals something a lot more interesting. Why are these sequences there in the first place? From a gameplay perspective, you’re expected to complete them in order to unlock the girls’ new abilities through five different “tiers”, with each tier involving a slight variation on the touchscreen-based minigame. From a narrative perspective, you’re “motivating” these girls — who are dead and in Hell, but being given a second chance — to try harder in their struggle for redemption, though in the original Japanese script, still audible through the Japanese-only voice acting, the wording was おしおき (oshioki: punishment) rather than “motivation”. If we’re being super-picky, we’re not actually spanking, electrocuting, dribbling on and tickling the girls themselves; in the minigame you’re removing “temptations” from their bodies via various means, and the removal of these “temptations” allows them to take a step closer to being free of sin and becoming “Blameless”.

Interestingly, the girls’ reactions to this treatment changes significantly throughout the course of the game. Early on, they react with fear and anger when you approach them with the intention of indulging in some “motivation time” and clench their teeth in pain afterwards; by the end of the game, however, they’re starting to sound like they’re actually enjoying themselves, even going so far as to praise you in some instances.

This can be interpreted in a number of different ways, not all of them positive, but given the themes of the game’s narrative as a whole, it’s pretty apparent that this is symbolic of the growing level of trust between these “delinquents” and the player-protagonist self-insert character. By the end of the game, they trust the player-protagonist completely, and are aware that the removal of their temptations brings them closer to redemption, in turn making them more powerful and more likely to succeed. A turning point in the story comes with all of the main cast confronting the sins that landed them in Hell in the first place, and it’s only through the bonds of trust they’ve built between one another and with the player-protagonist that they’re able to make it through this experience unscathed.

I’m yet to see how the story reaches its several conclusions, but I’m very interested to find out. It has been, for sure, one of the most unusual role-playing games I’ve played for a long time, both in gameplay and narrative terms, and one that I feel I’ll be remembering for quite some time after it’s left my Vita.

And no, not just for the kinky pictures.

1859: Invite Only

Been playing a bit more Criminal Girls this week, and I’m enjoying it a lot, despite its flaws. (Said flaws, if you were wondering, include somewhat repetitive dungeon design, an encounter rate that is a little too high to be comfortable, battles that take a little too long/move too slowly/both and the strong necessity for grinding that will be required to unlock all the girls’ abilities.)

The absolute best thing about it is its atmosphere. Although the in-game visuals are PSP-level pixel art (sharply contrasting with the high-resolution character portraits, battle graphics and other visuals), they’re evocative and distinctive, and the individual sprites have a lot of character about them, particularly in idle animations. When combined with the music and background sound, the game has a wonderfully palpable sense of menace about it — entirely appropriate for a game set in the depths of Hell.

In fact, the atmosphere and presentation bring to mind another game: Corpse Party. Criminal Girls is a (relatively) traditional RPG compared to Corpse Party’s visual-novel-that-looks-like-an-RPG nature, of course, but in terms of atmosphere the two are quite similar. There’s a sense that something unpleasant could happen at any moment, and a lovely juxtaposition between the often light-hearted banter between characters and the unpleasant things that are going on around them.

The characters keep things interesting, too. At the beginning of the game, you don’t know anything about them, aside from their personalities. Initially, there’s Kisaragi, who is seemingly full of rage and obsessed with materialism; there’s the shy, childish Alice, who is one of the most adorable characters I’ve ever had in my party in any game ever; there’s the determined, tomboyish Sako; and there’s the obviously older, man-hating Ran. As the game progresses, additional girls join the group, and they each have their own distinct personalities — and, presumably, dark pasts — to discover.

The setup is immediately intriguing. Why are these girls in Hell? Why are they getting a chance to redeem themselves? Why have you been brought in to lead and “motivate” them? What do you get out of the whole situation? (Aside from being able to perv at the girls in a variety of costumes while you spank, electrocute and do various other S&M-ish things to the “temptations” that infest their bodies, of course, which is probably reward enough in itself for many people.)

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions yet, but I’m enjoying the process of discovery. And this is one thing Criminal Girls does well. The dungeons may be somewhat blandly designed, but it’s satisfying and fun to explore them and find their hidden treasures. Discovering how new skills work after a successful “motivation” session is enjoyable and interesting — particularly with the game’s idiosyncratic battle system, in which you simply take suggestions from the girls rather than micromanaging them. And discovering more about what is shaping up to be a very interesting cast of characters is providing plenty of incentive for me to want to push onwards and find out the truth.

I’m enjoying it a lot, then. It’s keeping me entertained enough that I now have copies of both Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth2 and Hyperdevotion Noire — both highly, highly anticipated games for me — and haven’t yet popped them in my Vita for even a quick look yet. And I fully intend to see it through to the end before I indulge myself in more Neptunia than I know what to do with!