Forum - View topicThe X Button - Dual Divisions
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 545 Location: PA / USA |
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I'm a bit torn on the eShop-only announcement for Phoenix Wright. I totally get that it's one of those games you can beat & never really have any reason to play through it again (thus landing it in Gamestop's used section.....losing money for Capcom), yet I'm not looking forward to the higher price tag & being forced to use my sister's 3DS to play instead of my own (Nintendo's eShop DRM).
Darn....someone mentioned Nier again - my PS3 died before I ever got to play my copy. I think the Ouendan thing is a really great example of a game being a victim of its own success. The original JP version had an almost-perfect pacing to it that included great songs (that never leave my MP3 player) & funny comics/stories to go with them. The whole thing has a fair anime-fandom vibe to it. The playlist for Elite Beat Agents on the other hand......it's all over the place by comparison. It just completely gives off the impression that the devs/Nintendo didn't know why anyone liked the first game (or what American audiences liked it for). The tracks in the game are so varied in origin that it seemed like they were trying to have a game based off of a NOW## CD you see advertised on TV that would catch a really broad audience.......and the gameplay crashed and burned fast. Ouendan 2 ~seemed~ to have a similar problem for me in that a LOT of the songs on it sound like really generic pop or something. I think there are a few notable tracks on there, but none of them really flowed anywhere near as well as the original's music did for me. The whole thing gave me the impression they were trying to hit a broader/female audience with the music included.......I just couldn't bring myself to keep playing past the 5th or 6th song. If I was told that Ouendan 2 used a mix of songs that were ultimately cut from Ouendan 1 & others that were scored in a shiny deal with a music company, I wouldn't be surprised......it all just lacked soul & personality. I'd be really interested in whether or not anyone agrees/disagrees with the Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents stuff. ~Still singing Melody & Linda Linda to myself sometimes~ |
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Paul Soth
 Posts: 142 Location: Columbus, Oh |
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I do own a copy of Card Fighters DS, and it's an awful game. The AI is dumb as a brick, the cards are unbalanced and the translation job is one the worst since the 16-bit era... but I can't put it down. There was also the mess with the first wave of carts having a game-crashing bug that made a second playthrough impossible. Since I got the game early, I was able to exchange it for a patched copy, and they gave me a few KoF trading cards as well.
However, a friend of mine picked up a copy much later. As in "they should of recalled the faulty cartridges from major retailers by now" later. And naturally, he got one of the bad copies. Well, he did his best to contact someone at SNK Playmore's USA offices over the course of several weeks, with no real luck. It got to the point where he started to leave messages to anyone with voice mail at the place, including the regional president Ben Hermann. Eventually my friend got his problem fixed, but not before Ben Hermann left him a message which included the very unfortunate phrase "We don't pride ourselves on customer service." The story made its way to the game news sites, where it may of hastened the demise of the already dying SNK Playmore USA. So yeah, Card Fighters DS. Awful game, yet can't put it away. |
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Hardgear
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Man, why did you have to go and mention Infinite Space, now I'm all depressed again knowing that we probably wont get anything else like it for a good long while, if ever. That was by far my favorite game (on any console/PC) released in the past few years. And despite apparently performing well, it wasn't well enough for SEGA to interrupt their nonstop Sonic revival attempts to make another one...
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Mr Adventure
 Posts: 1598 |
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Fascinating article about the DS. I actually got a DS near its launch, but never really got full use out of it. Now that I have a 3DS I've actually been going back and examining a lot of what I missed from DS era. There sure were a lot of RPGs on the system. Not my favorite genre, but I am trying to get into them more.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey while you were rattling off Atlas DS RPGs. While its brand is much more well known then some of those others you listed, it still strikes me as a bit of a quirky and niche brand. And we're probably pretty lucky every time a new title makes it out in North America. I'm currently playing Soul Hackers on the 3DS, but plan to finish Strange Journey next (I was a few hours into it when I decided I wanted to play some actually 3DS games on my 3DS). Atlas is a bit of a funny company. As a developer/publisher they've always seem to have been around since the earliest days of Video Gaming. But it wasn't until recently I really started to notice their existence, and what they bring to the table compared to other long time companies. |
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gatotsu911
Posts: 457 Location: US of East Coast |
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I'm loling hard at all the otaku claiming offense at the Drakengard 3 thing. Sexually assertive women are some shocking shit, apparently.
I got the majority of my DS library stolen from me about a year and a half ago, including a copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey with over 150 hours logged into it. Fortunately I didn't lose some of my rarer games, including Deep Labyrinth, Contact, and Flower, Sun & Rain (the former two of which, incidentally, have some of the best soundtracks on the DS). I've also recently rediscovered Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (specifically, I've discovered that the game is a lot more fun if you don't make any attempt to roleplay and just play it as a complete psychopath doing ridiculous shit). I owned that Guilty Gear game at one point, too. I don't remember what happened to it, though - I either traded it in or lost it. Probably my worst DS game was Luminous Arc. It was an appealing buy at the time it came out, because there weren't many other strategy RPGs on the system back then and it was promised to have a score by Yasunori Mitsuda (somewhat misleadingly, since he only actually composed one track). In retrospect, though, it was a pretty mediocre SRPG (vastly overshadowed by subsequent offerings on the system) with a bunch of tired anime cliches standing in for its story and art design. Actually, scratch that: my worst DS game was Sands of Destruction (one of the ones which got stolen). I was looking forward to that game for years, because I heard it was made by veterans of Xenogears, including Yasunori Mitsuda and writer Masato Kato. Turned out to be an awful game in absolutely every respect, from the story to the voice acting to the graphics to the level design to the interface to the battle system. Even the soundtrack was way below par for Mistuda & co, aside from the title theme at any rate. I couldn't even force myself to play up to the halfway point. I never did get my hands on Covenant of the Plume, though I considered buying it at several points. I still might, I suppose. I was also curious about Lunar Knights, that Kojima Productions game that was I guess some kind of spiritual successor to the Boktai series? (Which I also never played.) Was that good? I think I was the only person who didn't like The World Ends With You. I found the battle system frustrating, the characters annoying, the game world cramped and the soundtrack intolerable. I traded it in to a disbelieving Gamestop employee. Same with Radiant Historia, which I looked forward to but ended up just finding boring in every respect once I actually played it. Only that was another one of the games that got stolen, rather than traded in. The two Japanese DS games I'm most bitter about not getting were the Xenosaga I & II collection and Soma Bringer. XS I&II sounds like a genuinely interesting idea, in that it condensed the disastrous first two episodes of the series on consoles into a single narrative (as was originally intended) and more tightly-composed game, and scales them back technologically to a presentation closer to the original Xenogears than the PS2 games. While I was playing - or rather, watching - those games, I very frequently thought that replacing the long, static cutscenes of stiffly animated 3D characters delivering wooden dialogue to each other with old-timey sprites and textboxes would be a huge improvement. I wish I could have seen if it was. As for Soma Bringer - it's a Monolith Soft game helmed by the Takahashis and not tied into a big-budget franchise, with music by Yasunori Mitsuda. Really would've liked to play that. I hope their future handheld games don't get similarly stiffed by Nintendo. Oh yeah, does anyone remember that Hironobu Sakaguchi Mistwalker game that was published by Nintendo - ASH, I think it was called? It got rated by the ESRB and seemed to be on schedule for a release here, and then it didn't happen. Weird. Also on the subject of DS games that never materialized, I wish we could've gotten that port of Grasshopper Manufacture's The Silver Case that they were working on. According to Suda 51, the port was finished late in the DS's lifespan but never released, because they thought it needed more modifications to be presentable to a contemporary audience. There's been some whispers over the years of the port getting a digital release on the 3DS, but nothing has materialized, and given Grasshopper's new direction over the last few years I'm not optimistic that they'll be willingly revisiting their earlier, riskier games any time soon. |
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Pleinair92
Posts: 50 |
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@Swordmaster: I never played Elite Beat Agents (or Ouendan, for that matter), just heard that it was good. Apparently, it managed to be fairly popular with Japanese import gamers and many said it changed just enough to be both faithful and unique.
I'm curious, though, about your criticisms. You say it missed what people liked about Ouendan. But many critics praised EBA for its pop music and quirkiness, which were in Ouendan. So, what were people looking for? Though, I have heard people say the gameplay "crashed and burned", because of "spinners". I'm also wondering why the writer for this article considers Sk8er Boy to be "odious". |
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sepherest
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Every time I hear "You're the Inspiration" on the radio at work I think of that one stage in EBA.
It's disappointing that the series wasn't continued overseas but on the plus side the english-speaking Ouendan community is still thriving on the internet, not to mention with the original DS not having a region lock it was much easier to play the untranslated games. I'm hoping in the future Nintendo might try to bring the franchise back over. I'm also kind of surprised some of the European only/Non-US licenses weren't mentioned in the DS article, such as Inazuma Eleven and Jam With the Band |
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belvadeer
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I'm afraid you'll have to count me among the number then, because from what I'd seen, that reboot should never have been green-lit.
Episode I was disastrous? That adjective goes to Episode II. While I don't own a DS and therefore can't offer much insight, I can say that what we did receive for the system was nice. It's a shame that so many games were denied, like the second Endless Frontier (I can't understand the thought process behind that choice, besides the obvious "It doesn't bring in enough money!" crap that the publishers cry out). |
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gatotsu911
Posts: 457 Location: US of East Coast |
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Episode I was disastrous, Episode II was apocalyptic. |
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belvadeer
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Personally, I found Episode I very enjoyable. II was what tanked the series honestly. I couldn't figure out what they were doing with the story most of the time. XD |
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LinkTSwordmaster
Posts: 545 Location: PA / USA |
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A dictionary would probably explain why~! :B I don't think either myself or Todd actually said that the games "missed what people liked" & such. Without actually having played it yourself, the critics are probably a wonky way of perceiving the game. |
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Pleinair92
Posts: 50 |
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You very clearly said it. |
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Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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I wish I could say that the worst DS game in my library was Windy X Windam, but I never bought it--and I kinda do, in a morbidly-interested way, because I love Izuna that much.
I think Guilty Gears: Dust Strikers is the worst DS game I have, if only because Square Enix at least tried making some new content for Final Fantasy III. |
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