Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - Heart ToHeart in Lumiose City
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Hal14
 Posts: 745 Location: Heart of africa |
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Personally, the real-time combat reminded me of NiNoKuni rather than Xenoblade. Regarding starters, i'm fine with the choices. I believe they'll get regional forms so it makes sense gamefreak wants to complete the johto set quickly. Totodile will probably be my pick on a first playthrough. Poor totodile, chikorita is more popular amongst anime fans while cyndaquil is more popular amongst game fans.
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malvarez1
Posts: 2253 |
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Samurai Pizza Cats sounds like a real labor of love. I’ve never seen the show myself, but this makes it tempting.
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AiddonValentine
 Posts: 2417 |
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Yeah, anyone hoping that China was going to bring Japanese back to the "good ol' days" was just huffing nonsense. They're just doing the same capitalist crap America was doing and they don't care how much damage they do. Y'all got punked.
As for Z-A (side note: I find it find it funny that it shares a subtitle with the Twin Peaks Blu-Ray boxed seat), looks cool, I like the idea of going Like a Dragon with keeping largely to one metropolis and exploring parts of the city unseen in XY. I expect a showdown at Prism Tower where the opposing Pokemon tear their shirts off that they were wearing exclusively for tearing off. As for the "performance" dweebery, I say let them sulk in their obsolete tech wankery. Hey guys, unless a game is genuinely, completely busted, most people don't care. Especially now that Game Freak has shown not just one but TWO updated versions of the Hex Maniac. You are powerless before the yandere Goth girls! Currently I'm just dissecting the latest Xenoblade X trailer and stuff shown on the website getting into the new epilogue story. One particular clip on the website confirmed what I always suspected about the Ghosts spoiler[that they're substitutes for the Gnosis from Xenosaga]. Definitely lots of implications going on |
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EmeraldSaucer
 Posts: 39 |
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One of the biggest things to come out of Scarlet and Violet were the performance hiccups, and that wasn't just from people too into Pokemon. Regular people were posting how (sometimes hilariously) messed up the game was And now that they are going with a more real time battle system where you're expected to dodge attacks and time cooldowns, I think people are perfectly in their rights to question performance and expect something more stable |
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Juno016
 Posts: 2455 |
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I'm a classic To Heart fan who played the original game in my teens in high school, and it solidified my interest in dating sims that I hold to this day. I bought the disc release years ago in Japan. The 3D of the remake is off-putting to me, sadly. I'd have been fine with 2D moving sprite portraits with an upgraded design, but every time a VN tries to "modernize" itself with 3D, the standard I hold to that 3D shoots up exponentially. There's no drive for me to play a visually aesthetic game I used to love at a visual downgrade when I can just go back and play the original. I do want more remakes of VNs, but this trend is worrisome...
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FishLion
 Posts: 363 |
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Legends came after and it ran pretty perfectly for me. My impression is they got really ambitious with the large open world of S/V because the performance is always worse in areas with a large number of assets displaying at once and that they will better understand how to optimize it in the next one like that. Since the last Legends game ran perfectly and this is a Legends game though I feel like they won't have the same issues. I will say I would rather a game swing for the fences than remain a repetitive iteration on the exact same gameplay even if there are hilarious glitches though. Speaking of which, I am so hype for Legends ZA! Pokemon towns have always been shrunk to fit better with the overworld. This is the only time I can think of where an entire game is dedicated to a single location, seeing the city in full size so you can explore it like a real visitor and not a cross country trekker sounds amazing. I also feel like such a game could have a lot of neat side stories that are focused on everyday life since there is less of a focus on traveling to new cities. I do really hope there's customization though, you can't have a fictional Paris without clothes! |
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EmeraldSaucer
Posts: 39 |
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Arceus was before SV and also ran at a fairly inconsistent 30 FPS. Which is fine when you're just running around and then getting into turn-based battles, not so much when you're expected to perform specific actions like in a more action-oriented battle system. There's a reason why all the boss fights in Arceus were in closed off sections, and even then they could get really choppy |
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2352 Location: Online Terminal |
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For all of the doom that makes up the current games industry (and anyone with eyes can see that it's bad out there) SPC feels like such a genuinely positive thing. The mood just immediately improved. |
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FishLion
Posts: 363 |
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You're so right on the release date, I honestly don't remember performance issues at all though. Of course, I have never cared about FPS, I only really notice it in games where it drops incredibly low (mostly at brief times during loading in resource heavy games, such as very brief moments in S/V) or in games like Elden Ring/Smash Bros. where those milliseconds are life and death. Games like Ni no Kuni (which people compare the gameplay to) originally came out at much less than 60 FPS and I never noticed them being slowed down by not having enough frames. Hopefully they optimize better and it isn't a concern regardless, but people assuming that Pokemon games are so busted a real time battle system will never work are probably worrying too much. Game Freak has always made gameplay that hits for me despite the code being held together by duct tape, I trust them perfectly to create a fun to play experience no matter how hilarious the visuals get at times. |
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An Unchosen One
 Posts: 61 |
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It's kinda funny to see ToHeart being remade in 3D when TokiMemo's botched transition to 3D was so bad that it practically killed the series, though Aquaplus does at least seem to be avoiding the most common criticism of TokiMemo 3 by not just using the same base model for every girl. Also, the producer means it when he says it needs to sell well, as according to him, they actually lowered the price from what was originally planned, meaning it probably needs to sell at least as much as the second Utawerumono did.
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2456 |
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Life is a series of choices. Sometimes that choice is between forcing your way up a cliffside with Wyrdeer, catching a bunch of Pokemon two to three times your team's level, and snapping Legends Arceus's difficulty curve over your knee or leaving an area unexplored. Anyways, I'm super excited for Legends Z-A. Meganium has long deserved justice and I pray it gets it here. I'd like for the starters to get Kalosian forms, but I assume they'll just get Megas. Hopefully we get Mega Charizard Z and A for the sole reason that it'd be really, really funny. The presence of Zygarde implies a hunt for Zygarde Cells which I really hope is less torturous than the search for Spiritomb wisps. I'm curious how much variation there will be in Wild Zones since they're all in a city. We see an alley and some sand and can easily imagine some parks/groves and ponds, but what about other biomes? It's hard to imagine a tundra or a volcano in the middle of Lumiose City. Perhaps they'll just handwave it away with forcefields. It'd be really nice to have zones based off of the Paris Catacombs for Ghost types or maybe sewers/subways for Poison/Steel/Rock/Ground types. |
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Traptrix Lover
Posts: 125 |
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I don't know anyone who thought that but what I did see and also believe myself is China (along with Korea) are replacing Japan on the video game front and doing what Japan would have done only a decade ago and has since stopped doing. Back in the day it was Japan making Marvel characters look cool with games like Marvel VS Capcom. Japan used to be the ones making those kick ass action games dripping in sex appeal. Now it's other Asian developers doing all those things. NetEase pulling support for Japanese and American teams makes sense like the article said since they don't need them anymore. They knocked it out of the park recently so it makes sense they want to consolidate things back into China and keep things in-house. I'm interested to see if Nagoshi and Suda51 managed to put out greatness under NetEase's investment but it sounds like Chinese companies are a lot stronger now than they were back when they poached these Japanese developers so they may not need them anymore. Personally Hotel Barcelona does not look good to me so so I'm a bit wary. I don't know if any one country or company can bring Japan back to their glory days but I've seen it happen a little. Saudi Arabia's Prince's investment in SNK was a great move and acted as a revitalizing shot in the arm. I imagine it'll take people with deep pockets and a particular love for Japanese games to do it. I wouldn't count on it being a regular thing but in this case I'm glad it happened for SNK. |
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An Unchosen One
Posts: 61 |
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That's not what happened, though; if you actually, you know, read a little on what's happening, people at Netease are not happy with the latest developments, and are claiming that the decisions being made are due to the CEO being extremely impulsive. It's not that Netease is in a better position, but more that the one calling the shots is overestimating its position, on top of other issues with how he's trying to run things.
Saudi investments are a travesty when you consider that it's an authoritarian state looking to both diversify economically in the face of oil's inevitable decline and rehabilitate the country's image over atrocities like dismembering a journalist critical of the royal family. It's not out of love for video games, it's a calculated move that way too many people are taking at face value. |
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Stelman257
Posts: 326 |
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I am absolutely LIVING for the Pokemon news. I've been saying for aaages that as the main games innovate more and more, and try to deliver more on the singleplayer experience department, that they should give us a new Stadium game, maybe even a pseudo live service one, that they can update regularly and use as their go to battle simulator for any tournaments and so on, and to let players mess around and use their favourite Generational gimmick. Also make it look really pretty and have the fanciest attack animations possible!
Pokemon Champions is exactly that and I couldn't be happier. It lets Legends Z-A, and presumably even the next Generation of Pokemon games, do their own thing, while we continue to mess around and play the multiplayer battle system we've come to know and love. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 698 |
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Yeah, I think the performance matters in Scarlet/Violet were definitely beyond the pale and Game Freak deserved the heat they took for it. But Legends: Z-A is such a marked improvement at an immediate glance that I think people are just ragging on it because bellyaching about Pokémon is just how too many people engage with it. Too many people focus on Pokémon as a franchise having grossed $90 billion and think it means Game Freak is sitting on a treasure trove richer than most Southern countries (again: that's gross profits, across the whole franchise--not net profit, for the individual games). That, and it doesn't seem to occur to people that a game produced on the cheap will have a higher profit margin than a game with AAA budget. Yeah, I want a Pokémon game that runs well, same as anyone else, but it's exceedingly popular to complain that Pokémon isn't like some other flavor-of-the-week goldenboy of the industry instead.
I'm in a weird position because I'm not as big of a fan of ToHeart's designs compared to ToHeart 2, but the more I see older fans wrinkling their noses at the new design the more I have to hand it to them. I appreciate the effort on Aquaplus' behalf, but it's really not landing with folks. And I get it, it's always a shame when a seminal game with an iconic art style changes artists between games. Let's at least hope the game itself is able to win people over; over the time I've been covering Aquaplus' recent efforts, they seem genuinely comitted to putting in the work needed to regain some of their reputation
This is, of course, a load of BS. Part of the fun of playing Path to Nowhere is seeing how the game is handled in its native China versus its other regions; the foreign releases of Path to Nowhere (specifically, the versions released in Japan and the United States) would be "sexier" than the Chinese one because something as basic as cleavage is apparently too much for the lesbian-coded pseudo-BDSM game in its home country. Nothing is more hilarious than looking up the alternate costumes or key art for one of the characters (like Eleven, who I'm obsessed with) and seeing that the Chinese releases slaps huge blobs of stylized censorship pixels under their necks because of cleavage. This goes for her summer outfit, too--because apparently, zipping down your lifeguard one-piece a little is also taboo. The US version is this more sexually explicit than the version released in it's native country. And it's not exclusive to Path to Nowhere; the Chinese release for Goddess of Victory: Nikke also completely redesigned a large number of the Nikke to cover them up. So Red Hood's leather spats lose their gaps and her leather jacket gets zipped up, Alice's entire outfit is changed from a latex bodysuit to a pink oversized hoodie and shorts... This is a really weird thing to fixate on across your posts because it's demonstrably wrong. Japan is still making games like the Lollipop Chainsaw: RePOP remake just last year. Hell--did you not see the new Hex Maniac?!
An Unchosen One beat me to replying with how much of an abomination this is, given the blood money involved. But since "censorship" is your concern, I'd like to point you to how Final Fantasy XVI was banned from release in Saudi Arabia because Square Enix refused to remove or obfuscate one of the main characters being openly gay. Saudi Arabia involving itself more with Japanese game releases would mean they'd have the ultimate control over matters like that, and with their hardline stance against queer themes that means no games like Valkyrie Drive (lesbians kissing) or J.J. Macfield and the Mysterious Island (transfemme protagonist). Also, how are you gonna bemoan the loss of "sexy Japanese games" and then hope NetEase lays off the guy who made No More Heroes or Killer Is Dead? Let this be the end of the subject, this is not an invitation to soapbox about the dreaded Censor Ships. |
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