There was no way that Virtue’s Last Reward could surpass 999 with the bar set so high to begin with. It just couldn’t happen. After having completed literally everything in this game, I can say I was right. However, the developers of Spike Chunsoft have definitely taken lessons learned from 999 and improved these things in VLR. As a direct result, the game comes very close to 999 in terms of excellence. I should note that while I could give a lot more detail to support my claims here, I intend to make this review as spoiler-free as possible. This means I will be rather vague when speaking about the plot in an effort to ensure that those reading this review will enjoy the same experience as I had when they play it.

Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward
Systems: Nintendo 3DS (reviewed), PlayStation Vita
Developer: Spike Chunsoft
Publisher: Aksys Games
Release Date: October 23, 2012
MSRP: $39.99

Much like the first game, VLR revolves around large amounts of exposition and 16 puzzle rooms. The main character, Sigma, and 8 other participants have been kidnapped; they must accrue a total of 9 or more points to open the number 9 door and exit the facility. The nonary game is back, but in a slightly different form than before: VLR uses the additive color system and mixtures of colors to determine who may pass through the chromatic doors into each puzzle room. Completing a puzzle room rewards the participants with a keycard to the AB rooms, in which they must play a game-equivalent of the prisoner’s dilemma to obtain points, sometimes at the risk of their lives.

For all intents and purposes, the game is a visual novel with a puzzle game mixed in. Choosing different puzzle rooms and AB game decisions results in different outcomes. There’s a total of 9 true endings, 11 bad endings, and a single hidden ending which is received for beating the game after completing all archives and (gold) secret files. Each pathway results in a different ending, making this game much closer to a visual novel than its predecessor. This is also where the game shines most: your progress in the storyline is tracked by a flowchart accessible via the “FLOW” button at the bottom of the touchscreen. Using this flowchart, one is able to skip to a completely different section of the story.

This greatly expedites the process of playing out a path made by a different decision. When you wanted to make a different decision in 999, you were forced to start from the beginning and use the skip function to quickly pass through already-viewed text until you reached the decision you wanted to make differently. While the skip function still exists in VLR and becomes very useful when the overlap in text is high between two decisions made in the same path, the flowchart allows you to instantly skip to the decision rather than waiting for tens of minutes. Spike Chunsoft also did a much better job ensuring that puzzles are not repeated for different paths in VLR. Whereas in 999, puzzle rooms were often repeated on the way to different endings, VLR has been designed so that changing a decision will nearly always lead to a different puzzle, resulting in a more diverse experience.

Likewise, solving a puzzle room ultimately leads to receiving a password for a safe that contains the key to exit. This password does not change for this room no matter what decisions are made. While for the most part, this isn’t particularly helpful due to reasons explained above, it does occasionally come in handy. This is an improvement obviously made in the shadow of 999. One of the most bothersome things in 999 was having to re-solve a puzzle, especially when you forget a small detail. Given that the passwords in VLR are recorded as part of an in-game “file”, this makes it easy to skip through a puzzle you’ve already solved once. It is also worth noting that a few of the puzzles feel more challenging than those in 999. Combined with the extra difficulty of obtaining the secret files, there is much to be had for those who enjoy the challenge. Plus, if you’re having trouble, you can always switch the puzzle to easy mode to obtain hints.

You can see the Archive, Memo, and Flow buttons here, as well as the hard/easy mode switch. Using the save button here is a bad idea, but the Log is helpful.

Like its predecessor, Virtue’s Last Reward excels in its writing – well written with the amazing plot twists I’ve come to expect from this series. However, one caveat is that as much as the title tries to be insular from the previous title, it fails in this respect. There are often plot devices, people, and other references that only truly make sense when viewed with knowledge of the first game. While as a sequel it performs well, I am simply unable to recommend playing this title without playing 999 first. Another caveat is that the title does not provide nearly as much closure at the very end. While the events surrounding VLR‘s nonary game are fully explained, doing so reveals the game as part of a larger story that is not yet resolved. As it has already been revealed that Spike Chunsoft is working on a sequel, this leaves VLR as an in-between title; unfortunately, this forced VLR not only to expound on the after-events of a game that was never guaranteed to have a sequel, but also to build the foundation for the following game.

Simply put, VLR falls short of 999 due to lack of focus. While it is still by far an excellent title worthy of being named one of the best games this year, by design it is unable to encapsulate its story well enough to give the same emotional response evoked by the ending of 999. The intelligent story design is still there and I personally found myself once again playing for long hours each sitting due to the compelling narrative, but in the end we’re given metaphorical blue balls at the climax of the story, with an obvious nudge towards the plot of the next game.

There is one facet of storytelling that VLR actually surpasses 999 in: character development. Because there is a true ending for each character and side characters have much greater importance, I actually developed a much stronger attachment to each character by the end of the game. This is a pretty important change from 999, where some of the side characters, while important, did not have quite enough development to them. The decision to make particular endings revolve around particular characters was definitely a good one.

Finally, there is one major problem with this game that needs to be addressed: saving in a puzzle room can corrupt your save in the 3DS version of this game. It’s a well-known bug by this point and will hopefully receive a patch in the future, but the gist of it is that while particular rooms such as the Crew Quarters and PEC may have a highly increased chance of corrupting your save, it appears to be a problem in any puzzle room. Thankfully, I was not affected by this, although when I first created my save file I did receive a “game save corrupted” message. I have found that as long as your are in a narrative portion of the game, you may save without a problem. But the fact remains that this is a game-breaking glitch, and not everyone is aware of it. It is also important to note that the Vita version of the game does not experience this same issue.

Overall, the game is fantastic and well worth the time I put into it. It does fall a bit short of my expectations, but 999 set the bar much too high. Combined with the game save bug, that renders this merely an excellent game, rather than a phenomenal game. Let me be clear: this game would have a higher rating were it not for the game save bug. That said, it is worth the time and money of anyone who played the first entry in the series. If you have yet to do so, I highly recommend picking up 999 and playing it before venturing into this game. Both games are relatively short: 999 averages around 25 hours, while VLR averages around 30. This means it wouldn’t take any longer than your average RPG to play through both. I just pray the eventual sequel makes its way stateside when and if it is finished. Aksys’ localization was overall great and if we eventually do see another game, they would likely be the ones delivering it.

PROS
* Excellent storyline
* Fantastic character development
* Challenging puzzles
* Good soundtrack
* Flowchart to skip to crucial decisions
* Good in-game tools to aid with solving puzzles
* Text-skip function
* Diversity of puzzles

CONS
* Save corrupting glitch
* Text-heavy: May discourage some gamers
* Story lacks closure; sort of a lead-in to the next game

FINAL SCORE: B+

Disclaimer: This game was purchased by the reviewer and not provided by Aksys Games. At the time of writing, the reviewer had played 34 hours and 15 minutes, achieved all the endings, and fully completed the archives and gold files.

I have fond memories of the hundreds of hours I spent leveling my Paladin, Sorceress, and Barbarian in Diablo II. When I was given the opportunity to review Torchlight II, I jumped on it, hoping to relive a bit of that time given that Torchlight II is very much like Diablo II.

Torchlight II
Systems: Windows (Steam)
Developer: Runic Games
Publisher: Runic Games
Original Release Date: September 20, 2012
MSRP: $19.99

Having not played the first Torchlight, I did not know what to expect when I first entered Torchlight II. I had been told by countless friends when Torchlight came out that the game was very much like Diablo and was loads of fun; unfortunately, I never got a chance to try the first game as I was far too busy with college. Starting up the game, I found myself presented with 4 classes: the Embermage, a heavily magic-based class; the Berserker, a melee class with animal-themed skills; the Engineer, a melee class that uses magic technology; and the Outlander, a ranged class that also uses a limited amount of magic.

For reasons I’d like to think are obvious at this point, I picked the Engineer. I found my initial weapon to a giant wrench. This pleased me greatly. I was likewise pleased by the fact that I could pretty much kill anything with one hit. Unfortunately, this did not last long; fortunately, the plethora of stats, skills, equipment, and gems served as a quick remedy. The primary stats are Strength, Dexterity, Focus, and Vitality. In general, it seems that the classes primarily focus on two of the four stats. While it is somewhat important to ensure that the non-primary stats are not too low, these can largely be ignored while you pump your 5 points-per-level into the two primaries. Equipment follows this logic in that there are two requirements for every piece of equipment: a level requirement and a stat requirement. If you meet the stat requirements, you can equip a piece of armor far before you’ve met the level requirement. However, if you’re consistently having to wait to meet the level requirements, it’s a good sign that you may not be putting enough points into your primary stats or that you may be equipping the wrong things.

The game is, much like Diablo II, divided into 4 Acts. The jump in difficulty between the acts is pretty noticeable: by Act III I found that were I not careful, enemies could easily overwhelm me. Even when fighting with groups of people, it only took a single moment of being in just the wrong place to rapidly lose all of my health and die. As it turns out, the reason for this was because I was hanging on to unique equipment for a little too long. While uniques are incredibly powerful at the level they’re designed for, they do need to be eventually replaced. Sometimes, if a suitable replacement unique item is not found, you have to settle for replacing it with a rare.

On the subject of equipment, each piece is colorized in a fashion similar to both Diablo II and World of Warcraft. Commons are white, enchanted items are green, rare items are a light purplish-blue, and unique items are a goldenrod hue. Set items are indicated with dark purple text detailing the bonuses for wearing multiple items of a set. Items can also have sockets, which a gem of sorts can fill. Gems generally give good bonus stats to an item; the rarer the gem, the better. Equipment can also be improved by enchanting. There are a variety of enchanters in the game, some better than others, but the basic idea is that they can add additional bonuses to your equipment. There are also special enchanters that can add more enchantments than usual and another that adds sockets instead of bonuses.

There are a lot of ways to improve your equipment and stats, which in turn can make you more powerful. I found that keeping up to date equipment on was incredibly vital to my success. However, it can be hard to get equipment you need. The easiest ways to do this are to either spend gold on a gambler NPC or to trade. Trading in this game is relatively simple: You can trade up to 6 items at a time, plus some gold. There are often games made explicitly for trading and these are often a good way to get equipped for the later acts. In the event that you don’t like interaction with human beings you can always spend money on the gambler. While this sounds like a terrible idea, you tend to get a lot of gold in Torchlight II (especially if you are wearing items with gold find on them), so 2-3 expenditures of 4000-5000 gold can easily net you a set item you need or a unique. Unfortunately, magic find items do not affect your luck with this (proven by a bug that has long since been patched – gambler items are predetermined before you buy them), but the chances of getting something good are rather high, so I end up spending a lot of gold at the gambler. This leads me to my next point.

While gold is relatively easy to gain, it does suck when you run out. From my experiences, the best way of getting gold prior to getting access to the Mapworks (more on this later), is to run a friend through a ton of the earlier quests. Because of the rate you’ll kill things, you get about the same amount of gold (or maybe a little less) than you would by progressing through your own quests in about the same amount of time. Your friend will also gain the same amount of experience that they would have if they had completed those quests with someone of their own level as well. Torchlight II doesn’t appear to impose experience gain debuffs for questing with someone well above your own level.

Obviously, this isn’t the best way to get gold in the game, but it’s the best option prior to beating the final act your first time. If you’re having trouble with your current level quests and you need to buy better equipment to truly progress, then your choices for gold find are definitely limited. However, after you’ve beaten the final act your first time, you gain access to the Mapworks. The Mapworks are a series of maps that have different bonuses ranging from increased gold find to decreased monster damage. They also range in level anywhere from the 50s to level 100. This creates a lot of replay value, as you can fight through all of these maps for a small bit of gold after beating the final boss. You can also farm better equipment in these maps by equipping increased magic find items and going to a map with a magic find bonus.

If perpetual dungeon crawling doesn’t suit your taste and you want something more, there’s a new game+ option that will allow you to restart the game with all the monsters scaled to whatever level you currently are at. This allows you to replay the game with the same kind of challenge as there was before. Failing this, the game officially supports player-created mods, so between everything there are a large variety of ways to replay and enjoy the game after beating it the first time.

The game’s storyline is decent. It’s nothing spectacular, but it gets the job done and is at least slightly interesting. I may be a bit biased in this regard as I did not play the first Torchlight, so that may render the story less interesting to me. The online play also has functional social options for adding friends and such, which help in accumulating people to play with. Although good alone, the game is most fun when played with others, so this is a boon. Finally, there were a few times that the game crashed on me. This happened very rarely, but it’s worth noting.

Overall, the game is fun and well worth checking out. It’s doesn’t take too long to play through the game the first time and it’s easily a game you can play on your own time without having to worry about grinding. The game also supports offline and LAN play – a major plus for a title like this. In a day where these functions are being removed from many online titles, their inclusion is refreshing. The top things off, the game is a steal at a measly $20. However, I feel it should be noted that if you burned yourself out on Diablo II years ago, you may bore of this game more easily than most. It’s still fun to play for short periods of time occasionally, but it may not be very appealing to play for long periods of time, several days in a row.

PROS
*Good Soundtrack
*Decent Storyline
*Fun Gameplay
*Good Replay Value
*Good Social Options

CONS
*Might be a little too much like Diablo II
*Equipment becomes sharply antiquated at the start of a new Act
*Dungeon crawling may not be for everyone
*Occasional game crashes

FINAL SCORE: B
Disclaimer: This game was provided by Runic Games for review. At the time of writing, the reviewer had played over 28.4 hours, completed the game, and gotten 47% of the achievements.

As a result, when our editor-in-chief Christopher Bowen asked if I would review the game, I said, “Sure.” I knew it would be a long game as JRPGs are traditionally a minimum of 60 hours but closer to 100 if you’re going for true endings or other extra achievements. However, I didn’t expect how much I would desire to seek revenge on our editor-in-chief after playing this game.

Record of Agarest War 2
Systems: PS3, PlayStation Network (reviewed)
Developer: Idea Factory, Red Entertainment
Publisher: Aksys Games
Original Release Date: June 26, 2012
MSRP: $49.99

Starting the game brought forth the first surprise this game had in store for me: none of the cutscenes, with the exception of three entirely story-unrelated events (more on that later), are full anime-style animation, nor are they CG animation. Instead, they’re mostly a collection of layered 2D images that include slight animations. Given the type of budget a game like this has, especially when developed by a relatively small developer, I was willing to overlook this. After all, these same slight animations were also included in the 2D character portraits when storyline dialogue was taking place and I found that a nice change from the still-frame portraits that most games like this have. Unfortunately, the next thing I was greeted by was the battle system.

At first, I felt some similarities between Valkyrie Profile‘s battle system and Agarest War 2‘s. However, those feelings quickly faded after a few hours. Record of Agarest War 2 immediately starts throwing tutorials at you, which is fine; I’m used to this. The problem lies in that they are way too many in number, and I was still being hit with very, very lengthy tutorials regarding the battle and skill systems more than four hours in. To the game’s detriment, the skill system is also downright unintuitive. If each phrase of the tutorial is not read at least three times, the reader will outright not understand it. Even if they do manage to do this, the reader will likely hold only a very coarse understanding at best.

The skill system uses a particular type of points for determining what skills you can set, and then a separate category of points determined by what normal skills you set that, in turn, determine what combination skills you can use. The skills you learn are determined by which skill books you pick, but characters also need certain stats to learn particular skills. There are also different elements and properties to every skill, which makes planning for what skills you’re going to teach the characters all that more frustrating. If you’re confused by this, it’s worth noting that the explanation given by the in-game tutorial is actually worse; the tutorials in-game are, for the most part, poorly written and hard to decipher. I had to actually read summaries and guides made by players (shoutouts to Khentai and MasterLL) in order to understand this system. Plus, after playing enough of the game, you figure it out well enough to at least get through the game.

A screenshot of the skills recommended by MasterLL’s lifesaving guide

The battle system itself uses four characters each with four different types of attacks (every skill falls into one of these categories) that expend a stat pooled from each character called Attack Points, after which you can continuously chain more attacks until they fully deplete your AP. Monsters are generally weak to one or two different types of attacks, but they also can have elemental strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, there’s a gauge called the break bar. A certain percentage of this needs to be depleted before achieving Guard Break status, which enables you to inflict full damage on the enemy. Additionally, the more of this bar you deplete, the closer you get to obtaining Ultimate Points, yet another type of point that allows you to utilize super-powerful moves called Original Skills. On top of this, if you manage to deplete the guard bar fully during one set of attacks, you instantly gain an ultimate point and can use an Ultimate Strike, a crudely animated series of attacks done by button-mashing, which do a lot of damage.

Later on in the game, you’re introduced to Finish Strikes, which are yet another follow-up attack that can be done after an Ultimate Strike—provided you have the correct amount of SP and the proper characters on the field at the time. SP is a type of point-currency that’s generated by using skills that switch from one attack type to another. This can be used not only for the aforementioned finish strikes, but also for EX Skills, which are very powerful support skills that are very necessary for beating the game. Finally, using a character to attack or otherwise do anything useful fills up yet another gauge called the Wait Bar. Once this bar is full, the character is then forced to sit out of any attacks and cannot be used until the bar decreases slightly. This effectively means they sit on the field, utterly useless, and take any damage they’re hit with.

Confused yet? It only gets worse. You can reduce the amount of increase to each character’s Wait Bar when they use an attack by achieving Wait Bonuses. This is done by timing your inputs so that you’re pressing the button to make the next character attack just as the icon prompting you to do so appears. The problem with this is that the game has massive slowdown issues at times, which completely throws off the player’s timing. You can’t include a timing mechanic if the game will slow to a crawl when the player doesn’t expect it. Worse yet, pressing the button early because of this locks you out of the Wait Bonus until the next character attacks. The slowdown issues are bad and very, very noticeable. They only occur during battles, but the game completely froze on me once due to this issue. Unfortunately, this was during a three-hour grind for affection rating (more on that later).

The battle system

In general, the idea of the battle system is to kill as many enemies as possible at once and as fast as possible but also to put out as much damage as possible. All enemies have an item that they drop only if you overkill them. Generally, this means doing damage equal to about a third of their base HP on top of the damage you did to reduce their HP bar to zero. This is an absolute requirement to do in order to fulfill a large portion of the game’s quests, called commissions, which need to be fulfilled in order to get events that lead to the true end.

That’s right. Doing a massive amount of sidequests is a necessity if you want to see the true ending. This is made inherently worse by the reinforcement mechanic used in random battles. There is a Next section of the screen that lists new monsters that will spawn if you kill some or all of the current ones on the field. However, these reinforcements are semi-random and some of the mobs are quite rare to run across. This means you may have to run into thirty or more battles before finding one with the reinforcement mob you have to kill for a commission, whether it be a straight-up kill or an item you need to overkill the monster for. To make matters worse, there are specific criteria for making many of the reinforcement mobs actually spawn during battle. If the player doesn’t know these conditions beforehand and kills the wrong monster, the reinforcement may never spawn. Additionally, if the player kills all the mobs in a single turn, reinforcement monsters will not show up. This is a pretty sadistic mechanic, especially when you’re already requiring the player to jump through hoops to find this monster to begin with. There was a particular time I spent three hours on one commission because of this reinforcement mechanic. That’s just wasting the player’s time. The problem is amplified by how the level-up stats and experience gain screen are shown regardless of whether or not you ran from the battle immediately. This means if you run from thirty battles, you’re wasting a good five to ten seconds with each one watching this screen because it isn’t completely skippable.

That brings me to my next point: the commissions are boring as hell. I’m already forced to do about two-thirds of the nearly 400 commissions in the game if I want to get the best ending, and the game makes this excruciatingly painful with the most mindless and boring battle system ever. The skill system is overly convoluted, but when combined with the battle system, it boils down to this: get the strongest skills you can, any way you can, and then mindlessly push buttons until things die. As long as you don’t use moves that heal the enemies, you’ll kill everything this way, provided that you grinded enough and have strong enough equipment. To make the matter even more abysmal, there are actually mistakes in the commissions: for example, commission 116 asks for the player to defeat eight earth spirits, but at the point in the game this is required, the player doesn’t have access to these mobs yet. Instead, the commission is fulfilled by killing eight thunder spirits, and the commission listing is outright wrong. Likewise, commission 150 asks for thunder spirits when it should be earth spirits, commission 142 asks for a Cryptic Fish Fin and the item name is actually Babelfish fin, and commission 381 asks for three of an item of which only one exists, and the commission is fulfilled by obtaining only one. There are also two mobs in the game named Titania, and two commissions, 122 and 234, that require you to kill two and twelve respectively, without specifying which ones are needed. Many of these commissions are required to get events on time that boost affection ratings to the needed levels for particular points during the plot, and many also provide you with needed materials to make or improve vital equipment.

Speaking of equipment, this game is also a subscriber to the pay-to-win business model. The game includes massive spikes in difficulty, and grinding in this game quickly becomes unfeasible without DLC. The problem with early-game grinding without any form of DLC is the cost of grinding versus the profit from winning a battle. In the early stages of the game, a Blessed Leaf (resurrects a character with 25% of their health) costs 1000G. Winning a battle with a decent amount of experience gain earns me about 900G. Unfortunately, each of these battles generally has at least one character die, so you’re stuck in a loop where you don’t have enough money to grind efficiently and you’re not high enough in level to progress and earn good money. So your options at this point boil down to DLC or grinding for many hours on weaker mobs until you can gain enough money or experience to take on stronger ones. Because I wanted to move on with my review playthrough, I bought DLC to avoid a lot of early game grind. In fact, after buying enough DLC, I didn’t need to grind until the very end of the game outside of the amount that would be necessary to fulfill the commissions I needed to obtain the true ending. But the fact of the matter is, unless you’re masochistic, the game is designed to force you into buying DLC to progress.

Unfortunately, even if you do have decent stats and equipment, the game finds alternative ways to screw over the player. Later in the game, Generation 2 and onwards, many bosses have a mechanic where they use a skill once they’re below 30% health that boosts their defenses enough to make them as close to invincible as possible. Once they reach this point, you can no longer defeat them and instead have to restart the battle. This is made even more annoying by the long loading times when you initially start the game and the lack of a reset button. Due to this, you have to completely quit the game and restart it. This means even more wasted time before your reattempt. Because there are no real numbers on the HP bar for enemies, you have to be very careful when approaching the 30% mark, and it’s easy to accidentally go a little too far. I did this quite a few times during boss fights I would’ve otherwise won normally. This continues to be a problem up to and including the final boss fights.

At this point, I’ve mentioned affection ratings and events several times without explaining their use or why they’re needed. The game includes an affection rating system, where it tracks how much all of the characters like the protagonist across all three generations. Agarest War 2‘s generation system works like this: In order to get the true ending, you are required to get the three main females of each generation to be at the second-highest affection level. The males and other supporting characters generally have their own requirements as well. However, the stats of the next generation’s protagonist are directly tied to how strong your relationship is with the female you choose to be your wife at the end of the generation. This means that a max-level affection rating results in more S-ranked stats (the ranking determines the growth in that stat), while the lowest affection ratings will actually lower the stats for the next generation’s protagonist.

Additionally, at the end of each generation, the protagonist and the three main females leave your party. Thankfully, the game automatically unequips them before removing them, but you don’t regain access to using these characters in battle until about halfway through the next generation. You can acquire an item called a Forbidden Tome, which allows you to pay in-game money to re-add these characters to your party. However, this means that if these were your strongest characters, you’re left with an underwhelming party at the start of the next generation. I like generation systems, but I don’t feel this one is executed in quite the best way. If you know to also build up your other characters to carry you through the first part of the next generation, you’ll be fine. But the game isn’t altogether clear how the generation system works and you don’t truly find this out until the start of generation 2.

As I’ve already mentioned, the affection ratings are mostly controlled by events. Events are bits of dialogue that may or may not be storyline related. You aren’t ever given any indication of whether or not an event, indicated by the large EVENT pointer above the location, will progress the story or not. This can cause problems as some non-storyline events disappear once you move too far along in the plot. Additionally, events can raise or lower character affections. This means you have to carefully pick your answers in order to raise everyone’s affection levels to the proper levels. Just picking whatever answers you please will likely lock you out of the true ending and make a good portion of the characters hate you. However, there are two ways to compensate for this. The first is by the minute affection increases you get by using a character in battle, every five battles. Raising affection levels this way is arduous and inefficient as it takes well over 100 battles to increase a character’s affection by one level. Unfortunately, if you’re trying to fix a male character’s affection level this is the only way. However, if you’re trying to increase a female character’s affection level you can do it using the bathhouse minigame. The number of times you can use this minigame are limited per character, so if you use them all but still need more affection, you have to grind for it. This happened to me, and it took me three hours of killing the weakest monsters available in the game to get enough affection to fix it. To top that off, during one of the regular slowdowns that happen during battle, the game froze and I lost about thirty minutes of grinding as a result.

One of those “special” CGs.

The bathhouse minigame is one of the many ways Idea Factory tries to use sex appeal to make this game palatable. This shameless breast-jiggling is abundant throughout the game; in fact, for the female characters that have them (i.e. the non-lolis), nearly every dialogue starts with their animated portrait making like jello with their mammary glands! To top this off, there are events achieved by having a high enough affection rating by a certain point that are nothing but shameless softcore (no full nudity) ecchi catering to a particular fetish, including BDSM, phallic imagery, tentacle rape, bukkake, and others. I’m not exaggerating. To make matters even worse, these images are accessible later in a menu called the Special Gallery. In this menu, you can view all of these images and more, with an extra feature added that allows you to press the X button to jiggle their breasts.

These examples are just the first of many. There are also obligatory hot springs images and the marriage images that range from essentially rape (when you pick a wife that had very low affection ratings) to pre-sex bedroom images, both of which are guaranteed to make you feel uncomfortable were anyone to walk in on your playing the game. Not only that, but Idea Factory also thought it prudent to waste all of their animation budget on a full-CG idolm@ster knockoff concert for Fiona and Eva rather than give the storyline better cutscenes. They couldn’t even be arsed to use more than one song for all three concerts! However, my personal opinion is that the fetishistic DLC costumes are the worst part about the game’s appeal to sex. Especially Liel’s.

On the bright side, the music in the game is very good. This is one of the few things in this game that actually have remarkably good quality. To Agarest War 2‘s credit, the storyline isn’t terrible, either. The plot is a little weak at points and can also be confusing at times, but were the numerous problems with gameplay fixed and the game not so intent on trying to use sex to sell, I could see this being a decent game. Unfortunately, it looks like Idea Factory just tried to cut too many corners in an effort to make some revenue and it really shows.

There’s a very short list of things this game does right: it has good music, the storyline is half-decent, characters are actually unequipped prior to leaving your party, you can initiate random battles at will by pressing R1 on the map, and you can skip the lengthy battle animations by holding R2. That’s about all I can find. It’s truly a shame because I really wanted to like this game, but there’s so little of it that I enjoyed.

For comparison’s sake.

Ironically, some research I did after I finished the game revealed exactly why it was so terrible. Apparently, the gameplay is over all very, very similar to another Idea Factory game called Cross Edge. Yes, that same collaboration game that thought putting all of the character you love into it would overshadow its horrendous gameplay. The battle system UI looks nearly identical, as do the menus. The gameplay is very much the same with only a few changes. Agarest War 2 is essentially Cross Edge with a few new coats of paint and a lot more boobs. Honestly, reading reviews for Cross Edge make me realize just how similar these games are. Money problems? Check. Huge difficulty curves? Check. Horrible convoluted battle system? Check. Shitty menus? Check. Honestly, the only real improvements it looks like they made were with the animations, making events obvious on the overworld, and a couple of other things.

I normally like games that Aksys localizes. They do a solid job of localizing a lot of niche titles that normally wouldn’t make their way to the U.S. otherwise. And honestly? I can’t blame them for the majority of problems with this game; those are solely to be attributed to Idea Factory and Compile Heart. Aksys took the safe route when localizing this game by not providing a dub, and with the exception of the LE, releasing it only for PSN. The reasons for this are obvious: this game is only for the most masochistic ecchi lovers. The target audience for this game is so small that there’s no real money to be had with a normal release, boxed with a dub.

However, there are a couple things that Aksys could’ve fixed: the mistakes with the commissions are one of them, although it should be noted that these same mistakes were in the Japanese version as well. Apparently, Idea Factory couldn’t afford both idolm@ster knockoffs and play testers, so one had to go. However, the most annoying part is that when bosses are defeated in battle, they often say relatively long monologues before the end-battle status screen. The problem is that these are entirely in Japanese with no subtitles whatsoever, so I can’t understand them. This may not have been as easy to fix as the commissions due to limitations when subbing a game, but I still think this is a major issue with a sub-only game. But over all, Idea Factory is the culprit here for assuming they could pass the same game off twice when the first one got bad reviews as well.

The main thing you should take away from this review is that Record of Agarest War 2 is not worth the trouble it puts you through, especially if you’re playing for the questionable images. You’d do yourself a favor with a two-second search on gelbooru instead. That said, I’m still not sure how the game maintains a Teen rating with some of the images it contains. If you’re looking at the game as a potential candidate for your next JRPG to play, I simply cannot recommend it. The game is not worth the $50 it costs, and you’d likely spend even more money just to get through the damn thing.

PROS
* Great soundtrack
* Decent storyline
* Party members auto-unequipped prior to leaving party
* Ability to engage in battles at will
* Interesting use of 2D animation

CONS
* Boring, gimmicky battle system
* Convoluted skill system
* Cheap bosses
* Massive spikes in difficulty
* Slowdown issues and game freezes
* Over-the-top appeal to sex
* Clone of Cross Edge
* Many mistakes in Commissions
* Mistakes in skill descriptions
* Very bad tutorials
* Endless commissions required for getting the best ending
* Reinforcement mechanic makes finding particular monsters more of a chore than normal
* Game designed to make the player buy DLC
* Budget spent on idolm@ster ripoff instead of more useful things

FINAL SCORE: D

Disclaimer: This game was provided by Aksys Games for review. At the time of writing, the reviewer had played over 90 hours, acquired the true ending, and gotten 34/38 achievements.

Part of the reason THQ experienced such heavy losses was the expansion of the uDraw tablet to the 360 and PS3 platforms. The original uDraw was for the Wii and sold over 1 million units during the 2010-2011 holiday season. THQ expected to duplicate this with the 360 and PS3 platforms, but instead met with highly lacking demand. The result left them with 1.4 million unsold units and they subsequently announced plans to drop all hardware and software development for the uDraw.

This led Holzer Holzer & Fistel, a law firm, to begin an investigation into whether or not THQ violated federal securities laws by making “false and misleading” statements about the expected demand for the uDraw in the 360 and PS3 markets. Immediately after, on June 15th a class-action lawsuit was filed against the company on behalf of Khalil Zaghian by law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP in the United States District Court for the Central District of California (Southern Division) for “recklessly disregarding”:

“(a) that demand for the Company’s uDraw was well below internal expectations and the Company would have to take back, or provide price protection, on hundreds of thousands of uDraw units that it had sold; (b) that the uDraw for the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 was a failure and not being purchased by owners of those gaming systems; and (c) as a result of the foregoing, defendants lacked a reasonable basis for their positive statements about the Company and its prospects.”

Contrary to other reports located across the web, there is in fact only one lawsuit against THQ. Various law firms dealing in securities have made announcements regarding the case, but are not actually involved in it. This is a good way to get publicity and to let one’s own clients know about something that may potentially concern them.

The court filing has been embedded at the bottom of this article.

Analysis: Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen – THQ is utterly screwed at this point. Their stock wasn’t even 2/3 of the required $1/share when they filed that SEC notice, although the reverse split has been approved by now and their stock is resting at $5.30/share. This class-action suit is only going to serve as a reason for their stocks to plummet more and I’m having a hard time seeing them surviving the year, especially if they are forced to pay damages. Their market cap is currently only $36 million, which means the entire company is valued less than the budget for many games developed in the industry. That says a lot about the possible future of the company. Forcing them to pay damages now is all but impossible, unless they want to pay their investors in uDraw tablets.

The move to bring Jason Rubin aboard was a wise one, as was the decision to stop developing the uDraw. The only way THQ will survive is by cutting their loses and not taking any big risks. It is apparent that they have begun to do this by the closing of their San Diego studio and dropping Devil’s Third from their lineup in favor of staying with their already known and profitable IPs.

Despite the fact they are now making the right choices to recover, I think this suit will kill them. The legal costs to fight against it will be as hard of a blow as a settlement to pay out would be. They simply don’t have the money to spare, so their best option may be to try and stall for time as much as possible. This is a good example of what’s wrong with the gaming industry: Investors aren’t happy that the uDraw flopped on the other 2 systems and lost them money, so rather than wait for a while to see if the company recovers, they’d rather kill it and suck it dry to recoup their money.

THQ Class Action Suit Case Filing

I definitely wouldn’t call myself a veteran of fighting games as I only truly have been learning the genre for about eight months now, but I’m definitely more familiar than most gamers nowadays. The game I’m most solid in is BlazBlue, as is apparent from the review I did for Continuum Shift EXTEND. Because of my familiarity with ArcSys games and my love of Persona, I have been highly anticipating Persona 4 Arena. Over the weekend, I attended the Evolution Championship Series in Las Vegas, a ten-year-old fighting game tournament that’s currently the largest in the country. There, Atlus was awesome enough to bring six setups with playable versus on them, and I had the opportunity to play a decent number of matches and give myself a good idea if the hype surrounding the game is all that it’s cracked up to be.

Surely enough, the game feels solid. It seems easier to pick up than most other fighting games because of the way the inputs are. First of all, there are no truly difficult inputs; pretty much all normal attacks are a direction and a button, or just a button. Additionally, the properties of these attacks are mostly the same across the board for all the characters; in general, down and A will be a low attack, down and B will be an air-unblockable attack, jumping B will be an overhead, and so forth. “Dragon Punch” moves, or those with startup invincibility, are a simple press of the B and D buttons in tandem rather than the zigzag motion that most fighting games use, including other games by ArcSys. Special moves are a simple quarter-circle and a button, while supers use double quarter-circles. There’s also the A button auto-combo which executes a small combo just by repeatedly pressing the A button. This combo doesn’t do much damage, but it can be cancelled into other moves and supers. Ultimately, these things combined make it not only easy to pick up the game, but also make it much easier to play multiple characters.

The game also contains more advanced mechanics, such as the ability to pass through the opponent by pressing the A and C buttons, being able to manually turn the character around midair after crossing over, spending meter to cancel any move immediately, and much more. Some things are holdovers from BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, while others are new to ArcSys titles. In general, these things make Persona 4 Arena appeal to people like myself that want to play the game competitively. There’s also a relatively large roster to start with, totaling thirteen characters, that will likely expand in future patches and DLC. When playing the game, I didn’t notice any huge difference in strength between the current characters. Even those that have already been labeled as S-tier in Japan don’t feel truly overpowered. From what I played and what I saw, the game seems pretty well-balanced, and it’s apparent by the release of a patch for the Arcades that ArcSys does plan on keeping the game this way.

Over all, the game is promising and many people appear excited to play it. This is important because the more interested people  means the larger the community for the game, which ultimately means more people to play with. Atlus is also pushing for the game pretty hard; the U.S. release is about a mere week after the Japanese one, and Atlus seems set to support Persona 4 Arena as much as they have King of Fighters XIII. Unfortunately, because Atlus USA also pushed for dual audio, some of the Japanese executives mandated a region lock to prevent reverse importation. This is the first time a game available on the PS3 will be receiving a region-lock, and I personally hope it’s the last. However, at the end of the day, it does seem that the game’s hype is well-deserved.

Hundreds of hours, several servers, and many structures later, I still find the game infinitely fun. This is a rather overused analogy, but Minecraft is like playing with Legos, except that you have to go find and collect the particular Legos you need, and the right Legos can be combined to make even better ones. Oh, and you have an infinite number of Legos to work with. That last part is what makes the game appealing. There’s an infinite horizon to explore, and the game will remain interesting as long as you can use your imagination to think up more creations. It is the epitome of the Sandbox-building game genre, and although others like Infiniminer came first, this one seems to have done everything just right to garner widespread appeal.

When I heard that Minecraft was going to be ported to the 360, I was highly skeptical at first. I’ve had bad experiences with ports in the past, and given the way Minecraft is intended to be played, I doubted that the game could be anything less than awkward to play on a console. For the most part, the 360 port has rendered my fears moot. The gameplay is nearly identical to the PC version and is even better in some respects. However, it does have a few key things that are not quite up to par.

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
Systems: PC, Xbox Live Arcade (reviewed)
Developer: Mojang, 4J Studios
Publisher: Mojang, Microsoft
Release Date: May 9, 2012
MSRP: $19.99 (1600 Microsoft Points)

The first thing I noticed when starting the game was the difference in interface compared to the PC version. In the 360 version, the title screen includes options for checking leaderboards, achievements, help and options, and downloadable content, in addition to the option to begin playing the game. Currently, there is no DLC for the game, but the option is there for future purposes. Interestingly, when I first started the game, I checked out the leaderboards. There, I was able to check who had mined the most blocks or farmed the most plants in all of Xbox LIVE. However, as of this writing, I can no longer do this. I’m stuck viewing only those on my friends list because if I try to change the filter, the next setting is My Score, and this setting completely freezes my Xbox for some unknown reason. This has been happening to me for about a week and is the only glitch I’ve found in the game, aside from those present in the PC version. Research has told me there are others like this, however.

When the Play Game option is selected, the game asks you to select a storage device. The game is able to save to either the Cloud or your hard drive, making it easier to access your world when you’re away from your own Xbox. Given the size of the worlds on the PC version, this surprised me. However, I quickly discovered that the ability to do this stems from the 360 version limiting the world to no more than 1024×1024 blocks, about the same size as an in-game map. This limits not only the size of the world, but also the size of the save file. This number may make you think that the worlds in Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition are small, and they are. The world is small enough that I can explore until I reach the end of the world. However, I have not yet encountered the end of the world while digging and it hasn’t imposed on my creative works. It may bother those that like endlessly exploring the world, but it’s not too troublesome to live with. At this point, I don’t know whether or not the world size will be expanded in future updates.

Behold! My home upon the mountain high!

When creating a new world or playing in an existing one, the game gives you several options: you can select the difficulty, whether or not it’s an online game, and whether or not the game will be invite-only. These options make it easy to adjust the difficulty or make your world visible or invisible to those that may wish to play with you. The game supports up to eight players via online multiplayer split-screen. Locally, the game supports up to four players via split-screen.

For the most part, the split-screen multiplayer functionality works pretty well: a player can join at any time by pressing the start button on a controller and selecting one of the local profiles on the 360, and options can be changed to choose between either horizontal or vertical split-screen.

However, there are a few issues with multiplayer that I found particularly annoying. First, I must note that I play my console games on a 42″ plasma TV that I sit approximately ten feet away from. When I’m playing a singleplayer game this is fine, and for most multiplayer games, it causes no problems, either. Unfortunately, Minecraft‘s menus have a lot of text. It can be hard to tell sand from sandstone given the similar colors and shapes of the icons, so reading the tooltip text is necessary. Unfortunately, when I was playing with my girlfriend, I found it impossible to read the menu items at the normal distance I sat. The smaller partition of the screen I was given also reduced the menu sizes by the same ratio. For the items on the HUD, this caused no problems, but for navigating inventory or chests, this was painful. I had to halve my distance from the TV to read them. I can only imagine this problem becoming even worse in a four-player split-screen multiplayer game.

Try standing about 10 feet away and reading that. I sure as hell can’t.

Another slightly less annoying problem was the inability to play with local and online friends at the same time if the local friend didn’t own an Xbox LIVE account. Apparently, if the game is set in online mode, only Xbox LIVE players can join. While on the one hand, I can see this as understandable, on the other I don’t feel it’s fair to force everyone in the house to open a LIVE account if we want to play together with an online friend. On the bright side, 4J has managed to make the process of playing with other people online relatively easy. You can see if other friends are playing games when they’re on the world select menu, and you can also invite people to your game through the Xbox LIVE menus if you so desire.

Despite the issues with the game, it’s a very good port. The controls map to the controller very well; the left analog stick is for movement, while the right is for looking around. Y is inventory, X is crafting, B is drop, and A is jump. The shoulder buttons are used for rotating through your quick item bar, while the left and right triggers are use and mine/hit, respectively. You can sneak by pressing the right analog stick and change your perspective between first-, second-, and third-person by pressing the left analog stick. The controls are all very intuitive and easy to get accustomed to. One of the best parts about the controls is how well the inventory navigation is. I discovered during my second day playing the game (since I don’t like to read instruction manuals) that the directional pad can be used for refined cellular movement through your inventory, while the left analog stick acts more like a mouse cursor. The Y button’s quick move function helps a lot, making it far easier to move things between your inventory and other places.

The new crafting system tell you what you need to make something. It’s similar to Terraria.

Although I skipped all the tutorials when I first started the game and discovered how to do everything manually, I went back and played through the tutorial mode included with game. The tutorial mode truly does a fine job of walking the player through the process of learning how to play Minecraft. Although I feel the controls are intuitive, I’m also an experienced Minecraft player. I’m certain I would’ve appreciated this tutorial mode far more when I first started playing the game back in the very start of beta.

Some people have said one of the best parts about Minecraft is not having an instruction manual or walkthrough and discovering how to do things on your own. For the most part, I agree with this; however, I find the inclusion of the tutorial helpful for those who don’t share in this sentiment.

The tutorial isn’t mandatory, and the small explanatory bits in the game when you first play it are also skippable. The only feature of the game I feel truly tramples on this ideal is the crafting system. The 360 version includes a very helpful and efficient crafting system, which allows you to scroll easily to whatever you want to make and craft it, provided that you have the materials. It’s fantastic. But that’s the problem: in the PC version, you have to look up or discover recipes by yourself; while the 360 version essentially hands them to you on a silver platter and says, “Go to town!” This would bother me far less if you had to discover a recipe first before having it appear in the super awesome crafting menu, but this isn’t the case. I feel like they tried to make the game more casual than it’s supposed to be.

Like a boss.

Despite the issue I take with the new crafting system, it does speed things up quite a bit. At the end of the day, the game is just as fun as the PC version is. It’s important to note, however, that the 360 version is missing a lot of features that the PC version has. The 360 version is based off the 1.6.6 PC beta version, so it’s missing many blocks, biomes, and features that were included in the later versions of the game. One notable feature that I missed was sprinting. Sprinting wasn’t included until the adventure update, which was version 1.8 of the beta. The lack of this feature made it much slower to get around and also made it take much longer to reach the ends of the relatively small world. 4J Studios has already promised that they’ll update the game as fast as possible in an effort to catch up with the PC version. The end goal is to make the 360 and PC versions compatible so that players can play with each other regardless of the system they’re using to play the game. I don’t know how long it will take for this to happen, but the game is fun regardless of how up-to-date it is. The down side of this being unavailable at the moment means that all worlds you can connect to have to be based locally; if the host of the world is offline, you can’t join it.

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition is a great game that comes very close to the original. It’s definitely worth a look if you don’t own a gaming PC or any other computer, and it might be worth the buy even if you already have the PC version. The modified crafting system is definitely worth a look either way, so give the trial version of the game a spin at the very least.

PROS
* Good tutorial
* Intuitive controls
* Good music
* Creative
* Fun gameplay
* Easy crafting system
* Gameplay is nearly identical to PC version

CONS
* New crafting process removes some of the fun of discovering recipes
* There are some console crashing bugs (although few)
* Based on an older version of the game
* Currently no way to connect to dedicated servers

FINAL SCORE: B

Disclaimer: This game was given to Gaming Bus as compensation for being part of Raptr’s program. At the time of writing, the reviewer had played about 20 hours and gotten 15/20 achievements.

BlazBlue is a new-style “air dasher” type fighting game. Guilty Gear was really the first of its kind in this area, but since then, games like Melty Blood and BlazBlue have proven to be quite popular. Because of their anime graphical style, these games do not enjoy the same popularity as they do in Japan, but they’re nevertheless solid games with dedicated fanbases. In fact, Dustloop members were the ones that provided video tutorials for all of the characters on a Blu-Ray disc included with the Limited Edition release of Calamity Trigger. Despite its smaller fanbase, BlazBlue is included in a number of Tournaments around the world, including the U.S.

BlazBlue: Continuum Shift EXTEND is the second revision to the second title in the series. Because Arc System Works actively balances the game on Arcade systems in Japan, the console versions generally receive free version updates. However, Continuum Shift has introduced a number of additional characters and new modes, enough that it warrants their releasing a new version of the game. Over all, the game is a well-balanced fighter with solid game mechanics and an exceptionally good storyline for a fighting game. The latter is very important to note as this genre tends to be plagued with bad writing. Thankfully, the initial storyline in Calamity Trigger was written by Nitro+ and has since been extended and elaborated on by ASW staff. Because of that, the Story Mode of the game provides enough draw that those not normally interested in fighting games may find themselves compelled to play this one.

BlazBlue: Continuum Shift EXTEND
Systems: PS3, Xbox 360 (Reviewed), PS Vita
Developer: Arc System Works
Publisher: Aksys Games
Release Date: February 14th, 2012
MSRP: $39.99

As mentioned before, this is the second home console revision of the title. Thankfully, DLC for the previous version is included on the disc and is unlockable via points earned in-game by playing one of the various modes. The previously DLC-only characters are available from the start as well as a new character, Relius Clover. This means that you don’t have to repurchase content if you bought it for a previous version, and you don’t have to unlock any characters.

For those unfamiliar with the game, the mechanics in BlazBlue are pretty easy to pick up. It’s a 4-button fighter that works around Light, Medium, and Heavy attacks in conjunction with character-specific stylized Drive attacks. These are labeled A, B, C, and D buttons, respectively. Combos utilize a chain system that allows the player to link many moves together; they also go into a cancelling system that allows you to link together moves that would not normally link if you had simply entered the inputs. The types of cancels utilized by this system are the self-explanatory dash cancel and (super)jump cancel, along with a less obvious one called a rapid cancel which uses up half of the super gauge (called the heat gauge). There are also various tools for offense and defense provided by barrier bursts, counter assaults, guard primers, barrier blocking, instant blocking, and standard blocking. The game includes a tutorial that works through all of these mechanics and teaches the players their uses and methods of execution. Additionally, a challenge mode shows the player some decent combos and challenges them to learn and execute them.

No better way to discipline your child than to smash him in the face with a giant mechanized fist. Relius Clover: Family Man Extraordinaire!

The characters in BlazBlue all have unique play styles; none of them feel like clones, which is impressive considering the roster totals nineteen characters. While light, medium, and heavy attacks are mostly similar between characters, the drive attacks wildly vary. This creates a unique experience for each character, allowing for a variety of play styles when choosing someone. A few characters are harder to learn than others, with Ragna and Jin being the easiest to pick up. The movesets for each character are relatively small compared to other fighting games, but the combo system allows for a pretty large variety of uses.
 
 
The supers and instant kill moves—known as Distortion Drives and Astral Heats, respectively—are also rather flashy, making the game as much fun to watch as it is to play. Finally, each character has a relatively well-developed back story that’s told through Story mode.

Story mode is very interesting in that it’s told from the perspectives of each character, but they all mesh together well in the end. The downside to this is that you may not understand the plot without playing through nearly half of the characters’ storylines. Prior versions of Continuum Shift may have also left the player at a bit of a loss as the story is nearly incomprehensible without having played Calamity Trigger. Continuum Shift EXTEND remedies this by adding in a new feature called “Calamity Trigger -Reconstruction-” which covers the storyline from the first game, enhancing the already strong Story Mode the game possesses. While Reconstruction doesn’t allow you to play through all of the individual stories from each character that were available in Calamity Trigger, it serves as a good summation route for understanding the events prior to Continuum Shift. EXTEND also adds new storylines for the three previously DLC-only characters as well as one for Relius Clover, adding a good reason for returning players to play through story mode again. Over all, the localization is pretty good, although for some reason Aksys has flip-flopped between using the terms Azure Grimoire and BlazBlue. This may cause some confusion, but the former is never used in the Japanese scripts. Finally, for those only playing the game for the story, a beginner mode called “Stylish mode” allows you to play the game decently by more or less mashing buttons. It won’t ensure you win every fight, but it takes the guesswork out of what button to push next.

One of the new scenes added in Calamity Trigger Reconstruction.

Arcade mode is much the same from other versions, except that Makoto, Valkenhayn, Platinum, and Relius are now playable. It’s essentially a semi-randomized ten or eleven match game, where the AI gets progressively smarter and harder as you go along. The difficulty of this and of other modes can be adjusted in the game options. There are six difficulty settings: Beginner, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, and Hell. These settings mostly adjust how long the AI’s combos are and how well they predict your moves. Whether or not the AI blocks or counters you based on your input is dictated by a probability function: the higher the difficulty, the higher the probability. On Hell mode, the AI will always block and can usually tell what move you input. I usually play the game on Very Hard and Hell, and while most of the fights are relatively winnable, the Arcade mode Bosses are extremely difficult. I can’t relate through words the anger I felt when I lost repeatedly against Unlimited Ragna on Hell because of his life regeneration.

If Arcade on Hell mode isn’t enough of a challenge, Continuum Shift EXTEND has introduced a brand new Unlimited Mars mode. This mode pits the player against extremely intelligent AI that control unlimited versions of all the characters. Every character has an unlimited version that essentially takes their moveset and makes it horribly unbalanced and overpowered. While you can play with these versions of the characters in online and offline versus for fun, they’re very brutal to fight against when you’re forced to play with a non-unlimited character. Some are more broken than others: Ragna comes to mind since he has a very strong combo that chops through nearly half of your health, and his vampiric abilities are buffed so that he gains his life back very quickly.

In this new story mode scene, Relius screws with Makoto’s mind, quite literally.

Unfortunately, Unlimited Mars seems to have taken the place of Legion mode, which hasn’t been included. However, Abyss Mode remains with more items and new modes. Abyss mode allows the player to progress through 100, 500, 999, or infinite levels by fighting opponents. You move deeper (higher) the better you do against opponents, but you only have one life bar that refills every time you win a fight. In Abyss mode, you have four stats: Attack, Defense, Speed, and Heat. Attack and Defense improve your damage output and reduce your damage taken, while Speed allows your character to move faster, and Heat allows you to start off each fight with part of your heat gauge filled. Every time you move 20 levels deeper, you’re challenged by a stronger opponent. In general, these opponents are about five points higher in all four stats than the rest of the enemies you face. Winning these fights allows you to choose from one of five items that will either grant you new abilities, improve your stats, or give you more points when you beat the mode. When you begin a new game of Abyss mode, you can purchase the items you’ve unlocked during previous runs using the points collected from playing the various modes within the game. Finally, you can save your progress after a fight in case you don’t have the time to finish everything in one sitting. However, if you lose a fight after you continue, the save will be deleted.

Score Attack remains largely the same, pitting you against computer opponents until you lose, with the primary objective being to obtain the highest score possible. Although I couldn’t test this, there are online rankings for Score Attack and Unlimited Mars. I was also unable to test the Online Versus over netplay as the game had not been released in the U.S. at the time of writing. In addition, all of the rooms created by Japanese players required a low latency connection, which is impossible when you’re trying to connect from Florida. However, the previous titles have had exceptional netcode, so I don’t expect the U.S. 360 release to be any different. New to netplay is team battles, which can be up to a max of three-on-three and either winner goes, where each team member plays until they lose; or individual one-on-one matches.

Over all, the game is good. It’s a solid fighter with a good tool for every situation, so you should never feel like it’s impossible to beat a certain move. The story mode is one of the best I’ve seen in a fighting game, and I truly think it’s worth checking out. I also really enjoy the music. It’s all written by Daisuke Ishiwatari, the same guy behind the Guilty Gear soundtrack. While I enjoyed the Guilty Gear soundtrack, I think his work with BlazBlue is even better.

One gripe I have with the sound in the game is the announcers. For some reason, the default announcer, and many of the DLC ones, have the worst Engrish I’ve ever heard in a game. Granted, they’re all Japanese voice actors, but some, particularly the default one, are absolutely horrid: I have no idea what a “whale of fate” is and I’m not sure I want to find out. Abyss mode is incredibly fun; while Arcade, Score Attack, and Unlimited Mars can be a little too frustrating to play more than once in a while. Suffice to say, Unlimited Mars can probably result in broken controllers, as can Unlimited Ragna on Hell difficulty in Arcade.

If you don’t play fighters often but would like to play this one for the story, or if you’d like to ease your way into this game, the large number of difficulty settings will help with that. If you end up liking the game enough to want to improve your skills at it, there’s a thriving community for it, and Netplay makes it easy to find good players to practice against. ASW has also taken every measure to help those new to the game or genre break into it via the tutorials and challenge modes, and that’s a highly valuable asset to any fighting game.

PROS
* Great tutorials
* Abyss Mode is very fun
* Good storyline
* Fantastic gameplay
* Good difficulty adjustment
* Stylish Mode makes game accessible to players new to the genre
* Has online gameplay
* Balanced versus mode
* Amazing soundtrack

CONS
* Unlimited Mars isn’t really accessible to newbies
* Requires much faster reaction times than Marvel or Street Fighter
* Learning curve can be a bit steep when learning to play against humans
* SNK Boss Syndrome
* Will not appeal to those turned off by anime character designs

FINAL SCORE: B+

Disclaimer: The reviewer was given a temporary review copy of the game for the purposes of this writeup by the publisher, Aksys Games. At the time of writing, more than half of the story mode had been completed, Arcade Mode had been beaten, and a decent amount of time was spent on attempting Unlimited Mars, Score Attack, and Challenge Mode.

Above is a graph of the weekly 3DS sales in Japan since launch; and below it is a graph of first year weekly sales for the original Nintendo DS, also in Japan. Both of these graphs show common traits: first week sales started very high and then dropped afterwards, and a large peak starts around December (although this is not visible on the NDS graph, the data that follows the end indicates a spike in sales at Christmas time). What’s interesting about this data is that the 3DS is actually performing better than the original DS did in the same time frame. The 3DS hasn’t even been out for a year yet and it has already sold nearly 1 million units more than the original DS did in Japan. Even more interesting are the reasons why.

You’ll notice on the 3DS graph that there are two very large peaks at mid-August and near the end of December. The reasons for both of these spikes are the price drop that occurred in early August and Christmas, respectively. Interestingly, the week preceding the price drop had a record low of 4,132 sales, which is indubitably due to the announcement of the drop. After the drop, there was a large spike that gradually decreased and averaged out; however, the average after the drop is approximately double what it was in the months before. The peak at Christmas is somewhat of a given, but there is something very important about this spike: where it begins. You’ll notice that the increase in sales begins in the very first week of November. This is important because that’s the week when Super Mario 3D Land was released in Japan. After this release, average sales doubled for the entire month. In the first week of December, sales doubled yet again, this time likely due to a combination of the release of Mario Kart 7 and the impending Christmas season. The result was that, in the month of December alone, the 3DS sold more than 1.5 million units in Japan.

To get an idea about the significance of the above numbers, one must first be aware that the 3DS has sold a total of 4.5 million units in Japan. The 3DS is still about one and a half months away from having been out for an entire year, and in turn, this means that 35.47% of the total sales the 3DS has accrued in Japan are from one month. Extrapolating further, 45.78% of the sales can be attributed to a timeframe of two months. This information points to two things: First, the initial price for the system was too high. The fact that average sales doubled after the price drop means that a large number of people were waiting for one. Secondly, and arguably most important, was the severe lack of software catalogue at launch. Most of the good games for the system were straight-up ports and remakes of pre-existing games, although most included some additional content or features. Unfortunately, remakes are not enough to sell a system, and the 3DS lacked original IP as well as new games from very popular existing franchises.

Looking at the original Nintendo DS, it initially sold well because it had Super Mario 64 DS and WarioWare: Touched! as launch titles, as well as the promise of an original Metroid game presented in the Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt demo included with the system. Sales petered off after the holiday season, but not before selling 1.4 million units in Japan. After that, the release of Kirby: Canvas Curse, Harvest Moon, and Nintendogs gave sales a small boost, and the price drop in August gave a larger one. However, over all the original DS averaged a little less than 50,000 units per week outside of the holiday seasons. Strictly speaking, the 3DS so far has done much better than the original DS. The DS averaged only 70,000 units per week over the course of its first year, while the 3DS has averaged nearly 100,000. What’s most important is that the DS didn’t really take off until the start of its second year. At that point, it started selling really well (600,000 the week before Christmas; 400,000 the next; and so on) due to the Christmas season and releases like Mario Kart DS and Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. Soon after, Nintendo announced the DS Lite to ease availability problems. Unfortunately, the popularity of the DS had grown so much that even the new models were selling out, and the problem continued for well over a year after the release of the DS Lite. While I certainly hope this doesn’t turn out to be the case with the 3DS as well, it’s certain that the declaration of the 3DS’s failure so soon was a mistake. Although Nintendo may be taking a loss on its hardware now, they’ve established a consumer-base with the product and will likely succeed with it in the future.

So what of the Vita? The Vita has already outsold the PSP in terms of first-month sales. On launch week, the Vita also sold nearly twice the amount the PSP did during its launch week, selling 324,859 units compared to the PSP’s 166,074 units. However, after that first week, sales fell much more sharply than normal: a 77.79% decrease in sales the second week compared to the norm of about 50%. It’s still far too early to tell, but I’d be willing to wager that the Vita is going to have the same issue as the 3DS did with its price. $250 is just too expensive for a portable gaming console. People aren’t going to pay that unless the handheld has a fantastic catalogue of games available. Currently, the Vita doesn’t. In fact, the best-selling title for the console right now is Everybody’s Golf 6 (named Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational in North America), which isn’t even a big AAA title. Outside of a few niche titles, the Vita also doesn’t have much to offer at the moment.

It’s important to note that, while the PSP has had a rough shelf-life, it has done well over all. Above is a chart of the system’s first year sales. Note how much lower the sales are than the DS overall. Most concluded that this was because the system failed. However, despite the fact the system has only reached about half the sales numbers as the DS, this is impressive for Sony’s first-time entry to the handheld market. Most previous handheld consoles failed when pitted against Nintendo’s handheld line, notably Sega’s Game Gear and the Atari Lynx. That Sony pulled enough profit from it to justify a second entry to the market in the Vita is enough to vouch for the success of the PSP. Given that, I can’t imagine the Vita would become a huge flop; and as long as they improve their catalogue soon, they will likely see an improvement in sales figures. In the meantime, Sony is well aware that the handheld market is still viable. SCEE President and CEO Jim Ryan told MCV the following when asked about the success of their competitor’s product:

“One of the encouraging things about 3DS’ sales performance at Christmas is that it is confounding the naysayers who say that there is no room in the market for a dedicated handheld gaming device and to that extent we were encouraged by how 3DS did over the last month.”

In conclusion, the market for handheld consoles is not dead. In fact, given the availability of game guides on the Internet, I’d wager that smartphones are more of a supplement to handhelds rather than a replacement. Smartphones are great for casual gaming, but without a good control mechanism, they fail to position themselves as a replacement for portable consoles. The day that portable game consoles and smartphones merge may one day come, but I don’t believe we’ve reached that point yet.

The bill would also allow the court orders to impose a mandatory censor on search engines, forcing them to remove any pathways to the infringing web sites, and force domain name registrars to take down the infringing domains. Furthermore, the bill seeks to also enable the DoJ to mandate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block subscriber access to the sites in question by preventing domains from resolving the correct IPs. This means that the default DNS servers provided by your ISP can be censored on mandate by the Department of Justice. The best solution to this would be to use an alternate DNS such as OpenDNS, but as many DNSSEC experts have mentioned, moving towards alternative DNS can easily open up unsuspecting users to malware. In addition to the stipulations the bill provides for enforcement, the bill also grants immunity from suit to entities acting on court order.

The term “foreign infringing web site” is a very important one as it highlights one of the core issues with the bill. The bill forces U.S. law onto foreign entities by inhibiting any business interaction with them. It seeks to cripple infringing web sites by use of an Internet embargo, effectively starving it of payment services, search queries, and domain access. Although this is in itself questionable, matters are made worse by the definition of foreign infringing web site, in which the words or portion thereof allow for an entire web site to be labeled as infringing if only a small unspecified portion actually infringes.

Finally, the bill also makes the streaming of copyrighted works without permission a crime with a first offense punishable with up to five years in prison. This has far-reaching consequences as there’s no way for a service like YouTube to screen everything uploaded to it. Having even a portion of its streaming content infringe on the rights of copyright holders can easily lead to the entire site being taken down. For the gaming community, this is downright fatal. The streaming of gameplay footage, whether live or recorded, is so commonplace and necessary that making it a crime is blatant lunacy. Because of our live streams and images, it could even lead to this very site being taken down, not to mention fan sites which often have even more incriminating content on them.

Interestingly, Activision Blizzard and Vivendi Games have both been completely absent from the list of supporters, likely because these companies actually rely on the streaming of their games as a form of advertisement and community involvement. For instance, StarCraft II relies on player videos to communicate strategies and teach players, and World of Warcraft does much the same. Activision’s Guitar Hero franchise also had an abundance of players recording their gameplay sessions with high scores. In addition to these, Ubisoft has also been absent among supporters. This is particularly notable because Ubisoft has a habit of using highly restrictive DRM practices with many of their titles. Sadly, this is likely a PR ploy as they are a member of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), which is still listed. Previously EA, Nintendo, and Sony had been listed on the list of primary supporters for the bill; however, it has come to the attention of the press that they have now disappeared from it. Unfortunately, all three of these companies are members of the ESA as well, not to mention that Sony’s music subsidiaries are still listed as supporters. Given this, I have no doubt they did this to save public image.

Thankfully, SOPA is gradually losing supporters among companies with a highly technological consumer base. Initially, the Business Software Alliance also supported the bill. This alliance included big names such as Adobe, Apple, Dell, Intel, McAfee, Microsoft, and many others. It also included the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab, which threatened to leave the BSA over their support of the bill. The founder of the company, Eugene Kaspersky, notes in his blog that, although he does not support piracy, he cannot support a bill that so blatantly forces the interests of the U.S. onto other countries (due to virtually all DNS servers being located in the U.S.) and is mostly a result of the incompetence of the business world to keep up with the technology world. He states the following:

“If we accept this law, hundreds of thousands of lawyers will suddenly appear out of the woodwork because almost any website can be accused of copyright infringement! This law will lead to major legalized extortion. The Internet business faces hard times – look at those who do not want to join SOPA: eBay, Facebook, AOL, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Yahoo, Wikimedia, etc. And the list of SOPA’s supporters? Well, there’s the aforementioned BSA (including Apple, Microsoft, SAP, Symantec and other software developers – this time without us) and, most importantly, this law is being promoted by:

RIAA – the Recording Industry Association of America,
MPAA – the Motion Picture Association of America.

That’s where SOPA stems from!”

The result of this threat was that the entire BSA has removed their support of the bill and Kaspersky Lab remains part of the Alliance.

The BSA is not the only defector on this matter. Go Daddy, a large domain name registrar and hosting service, was initially in support of the bill as well:

“Go Daddy has a long history of supporting federal legislation directed toward combating illegal conduct on the Internet. For example, our company strongly supported the Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act of 2008, the Protect Our Children Act of 2008, and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PROTECT IP). Go Daddy has always supported both government and private industry efforts to identify and disable all types of illegal activity on the Internet. It is for these reasons that I’m still struggling with why some Internet companies oppose PROTECT IP and SOPA. There is no question that we need these added tools to counteract illegal foreign sites that are falling outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law enforcement. And there is clearly more that we could all be doing to adequately address the problems that exist.”

However, this support prompted backlash from their consumer base. A reddit user organized a boycott on December 29th, labeling it “Move Your Domain Day.” Though this campaign proved successful by resulting in the registrar changing its position, the exact totals for transfers and deletions on this day is uncertain. The transfer process can take up to a day or more to process and CNET noted that many were experiencing issues transferring their domain, with the receiving registrars being sent incomplete WHOIS information by Go Daddy.

It’s clear that Go Daddy felt the impact: according to data on DailyChanges, starting from the day the boycott was started to the day this article was written, Go Daddy suffered 128,328 domain transfers and 275,038 deletions, for an average of 14,258.66 and 30,559.77 domains, respectively. It’s important to note that these numbers do not take into consideration normal business operation, but to compare, these same numbers one year ago averaged 9,023.44 and 24,513.88. From this, it’s easy to conclude that approximately 100,000 domains were likely lost from this debacle, resulting in a yearly loss of about $1 million if we are to assume an average price of about $10 per domain. In a press release, Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman related the following:

“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation—but we can clearly do better. It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”

Piracy can be a problem, but as Eugene Kaspersky mentions in his blog, it can easily be minimized by changing business models. Many of the large groups and corporations in support of SOPA can afford to do this but are generally unwilling out of greed or incompetence. The fact of the matter is, Internet piracy started because business models weren’t up to speed with technology. CD prices were high, and they weren’t as convenient as downloading the one song from the album that you really wanted but couldn’t justify buying the entire album for. The result of that was Napster, and although it fell in the end due to legal issues, it paved the way for a market like iTunes. Unfortunately, the iTunes business model is somewhat imperfect as it does not offer the same quality as a CD does. There are few options to legally purchase lossless quality music and even less options to legally purchase DRM-free lossless music.

Similar issues are happening now with movies. It hasn’t always been feasible to download high quality movies via the Internet, but now that it is, the MPAA hasn’t progressed with the times. The only way to purchase and view a movie is to order a disc through the mail or going to a store and buy one. It’s wholly inevitable that web sites exist for the explicit purpose of downloading them. Hell, renting movies hasn’t progressed with the times either: Netflix has encountered many problems with getting licenses to stream movies for their service and is one of the major factors that led to their price increases and the eventual backlash over them. Even when they do obtain a license to add it to their streaming catalogue, oftentimes it doesn’t possess the same quality that a Blu-Ray or even a DVD would have. Countless are the times I started to stream a movie only to find the aspect ratio in 4:3 or the audio in a meager stereo.

I believe video games are on the right path. Valve has made a big push in the PC world for digital downloads and corresponding lower prices, punctuated by their insane sales and the data to justify them. PSN and XBLA are making better progress in this area; and I think that by the time the next console generation is released, digital distribution will be in full gear. However, the ability of the end user to modify or use their hardware in whatever way they wish has been increasingly threatened by the likes of the major console manufacturers, and I believe this to be a major detriment to progress.

The bottom line is that SOPA is a piece of legislature borne by greed and supported by those in government who don’t truly understand what they’re agreeing to. The contents of this bill label the owner of every gaming stream, fan site, or gaming journal a felon. Not to mention that a single user who made an avatar or signature out of official art could theoretically cause an entire web site to be taken down. All this is to simply sate the greed of corporations who would rather destroy the Internet than develop their business practices to adapt to it. Those in Congress who support it do so because of campaign donations and personal investments with no real understanding of the consequences beyond what can benefit them. The ESA’s support for the bill should come as no surprise, however. Michael Gallagher, the president of the ESA, has always opposed moving the Domain Name System away from U.S. control. This bill legally secures total control of the DNS for the U.S., a viewpoint that he could probably agree with.

Today, Editor Jim Sterling of Destructoid posted an open letter to the ESA:

“Dear Entertainment Software Association,

Last year, when free speech in the videogame industry was threatened, you asked for help from gamers. The famous Brown vs. EMA/ESA case provided a landmark ruling that protected videogame content under the First Amendment. You appealed to gamers for their support and coverage, and many gamers rallied around the industry.

Now, when free speech at large is threatened, you not only refuse to fight the threat, you actually join forces with it. You operate a group that claims to protect free speech — the Videogame Voters Network — and pretend to champion the rights of gamers, but until you stop supporting the Stop Online Piracy Bill, that’s all the VGVN is — a pretense.

It is hypocrisy on a most despicable level to continue supporting SOPA after asking gamers to fight for the rights of the game industry. You are sending the message that you want exclusive freedom for your stable of publishers, while the freedom of others means nothing. You are sending the message that the ESA is an organization that begs for help from a community, only to abandon and betray that community at the earliest convenience. You are the Starscream of trade associations.

I find it wholly disgusting that you support SOPA in light of what you pretend to fight for, and what you asked of us all just months before. As other companies dissolve their allegiance with this poorly written, glaringly broken bill, I ask you to do the same. Do not be Starscream. Do for the Internet what you asked the Internet to do for you.

Thank you,
Jim Sterling
Reviews Editor, Destructoid.com

P.S

In using an image of Starscream for a blog header, I could risk becoming a felon. What fun!”

Jim brings up the First Amendment rights issue behind the concerns about the bill, but the ESA has never truly stood for protecting First Amendment rights. Granted, they did use that as a defense for why violence in video games is okay, and I fully agree with them on that point. However, it’s important to take into consideration that the ESA is a collection of video game corporations, and this means that they only seek to protect what makes them money. They see piracy as a problem (and to an extent, it is), but fail to grasp the root of the issue. They neglect to see that piracy is rampant due to failures in their own business models and their own draconian DRM practices. Instead, they seek to disable the result of that rather than fix the problem. In a message to Develop, the ESA stated the following:

“Rogue websites, those singularly devoted to profiting from their blatant illegal piracy, restrict demand for legitimate video game products and services, thereby costing jobs.”

This statement indicates that they truly fail to understand why piracy is so commonplace and fail to recognize the job creation opportunities that fixing their business models would entail. Furthermore, their support of the bill shows that they don’t understand the devastating effect it could have on their own consumers. They seek to protect their IP, and that’s fine; but nobody will be left to purchase their products if they’ve all been labeled felons and thrown in prison or fined an exorbitant amount of money. They practically flaunt this ignorance with a statement regarding the community dissent over the bill:

” [The ESA] understands the importance of both technological innovation and content protection, and does not believe the two are mutually exclusive.”

They are, in fact, right. The two are not mutually exclusive. However, they seek to stifle innovation rather than progress with it by introducing draconian law that is tantamount to Internet censorship. Google’s CEO has even agreed on this point, saying “The solutions are draconian. There’s a bill that would require ISPs to remove URLs from the Web, which is also known as censorship last time I checked.” When taking this statement into consideration with the time that Google tried to fight censorship in China, it becomes apparent that what this bill intends to do is exactly the same as China. This bill could actually be worse than the great firewall of China simply because the U.S. is in control of the DNS system that underlies the entire Internet. This means when we censor it, we censor it for the entire world. Making this legal will end up spurring an increase of use of the Deep Web and Darknet, something that certainly would not be good for the free flow of information, and also has severe repercussions on Internet security.

Vanguard Bandits, known as Epica Stella in Japan, is a PS1-era mecha strategy RPG. The game introduces some interesting and unique mechanics into the SRPG genre and has a decent amount of replay value for a $10 game on the PlayStation Network. The plot of the game is rather clichéd, but fortunately, the gameplay is solid.

Vanguard Bandits
System: PlayStation Network (Reviewed), Sony PlayStation
Developer: Human Entertainment
Publisher: Working Designs/GaijinWorks, Monkey Paw Games
Release Date: November 15th, 2011 (PSN)
MSRP: $9.99

Vanguard Bandits tells the story of a land filled with constant battles and tragedies. The continent of Eptina was in constant turmoil until the Pharastia Kingdom discovered the mecha known as All Terrain Armored Combatants (ATAC) via an archaeological excavation. The Kingdom united the entire continent using the power of the ATACs; however, after a while, the infighting and battles resumed. Several countries exist on the continent, but by the time the game starts, the Junaris Empire is by far the largest and is presented as the main evil force in the game. The plot follows a young boy named Bastion in his fight against the Empire.

Unfortunately, just about everything to do with the plot feels clichéd. The characters fall into pretty clear archetypes as well, from the young male main character who learns of his ultimate destiny, to the bossy princess, the childhood friend, the old Yoda-grammar using character, the young super-genius mechanic boy, and the food-brained fat kid. If I had a dollar every time I saw Barlow say something about food… though, I suppose it could be worse. The strategy guide provided by Monkey Paw Games notes that, in the Japanese version, Barlow spoke of literally nothing except cake. There’s also the fact that literally every female except Ione have a thing for the main character; it’s as if he has so much testosterone that his mere presence is enough to impregnate women.

TMI, Halak… TMI.

Aside from being clichéd, the dialogue also feels rushed. There are some dark moments in the game, but they don’t have the emotional weight they potentially could have had if they’d been given more than just a single dialogue box of text. It almost feels as though there isn’t enough dialogue to make it seem realistic. Over all, I can’t really bash the game too much for having a subpar plot: this is a product of the 90’s and is about par for the course. The game is also of the SPRG genre, and let’s face it: 90% of SRPGs are somewhat lacking in the plot department. However, I will say it’s actually not hilarious to hear Halak talk about how she “filled her Depends with joy.” There are some things that go better left unsaid.

Although the game does not possess a fantastic plot, it does excel in gameplay. Vanguard Bandits has quite a bit of depth, and this proves to give the player a chance to be as meticulous as they want to be with their characters. When the game initially starts, you have two characters. You gradually acquire more, and the number of enemies you face continually increases. However, I did not expect the game to allow you to switch ATACs between characters. Although there are a few characters that cannot have their ATACs exchanged, the majority can. This provides some great flexibility with your characters as they’re not locked in to one set of attacks or weapons. New and more powerful ATACs are also “excavated” throughout the game, allowing you to upgrade the machines of the characters you get early on in the game.

Barlow’s snacking even in his character portrait.

The battle mechanics are simple yet surprisingly good. The gameplay revolves around two types of points: Action Points (AP) and Fatigue Points (FP). Action Points allows you to move, attack, or use a skill and is consumed by these actions every turn. Each character has his/her own AP bar that starts at 100 AP each turn, which usually leaves you enough to move and attack in the same turn. The possibility exists to move twice in the same turn, but because of how much AP attacks consume, you’d likely not be able to use this after a very strong attack. Fatigue Points are also important: Each action, whether attacking or defending, gives fatigue points. The bar goes up to a max of 100, and when it reaches this bar, the character in question is “dizzied.” Stars appear around the character’s head, and any attacks on this character will have a 100% hit chance. This prevents you from attacking and defending with a character at every opportunity as doing so will make the character highly vulnerable.

The subject of vulnerabilities brings another mechanic to the forefront: positioning. When you move a character, you’re given an option to pick the direction they face. This is important because being attacked from different sides limits your defensive options and gives bonuses to the attacker. In general, there are four options for defense: attack, defend, avoid, and counter. The attack option does just that, allowing your character to attack back. On the other hand, the defend option allows you to mitigate most of the damage being done at the cost of being able to deal return damage. Avoid allows you an increased chance to dodge the incoming attack, taking no damage at all. Counter provides a chance to parry the incoming attack, dealing quite a bit of damage to the attacker in return. Being attacked from behind allows you to only avoid and gives a huge hit chance bonus to the attacker. The rule of thumb in this game is to always protect your backside. Failing to do so can easily cost you a character and quite a bit of morale. Morale is important, but I’ll touch on this later. Being attacked from the side only eliminates the Counter option, which means this option is only available when being attacked from the front.

Feel the power… of CHEESE! With lines like that, you get all the cheesy goodness.

I really enjoyed the battle mechanics; I’m used to not being given much in the way of options when being attacked in SRPG games. Unfortunately, I found the RNG to be pretty far off from the hit chance occasionally. This is the only game I’ve seen in which a 100% hit chance means you can still miss. This happened to me not once, but twice. Bandits manage to freshen things up a bit by allowing you a variety of options in this scenario, adding much to the general tactics of the SRPG genre. The use of positioning mechanics also adds to the challenge of the game, which is greatly appreciated. Although character “deaths” are not permanent, the game encourages the player to avoid losing characters by use of morale ratings. In order to get the best endings, one must keep the average morale rating of their team good or above. This presents a challenge to the player because some characters’ morale is easier to raise or lose than others. Devlin is a good example of this: he has somewhat of a rivalry with the main character, so if he is destroyed in battle, his morale drops faster than a lead balloon. I was personally lucky enough to be able to keep Devlin’s morale good throughout the entire game, but the one or two times he lost in combat, his morale did drop quite a bit.

Another challenge presented by the game is the inability to heal any of your units until about halfway through the game. Up until this point, you really need to be careful about how much damage the characters take; otherwise, they will get wrecked by the opposition. In general, the game presents a lot of tools, mechanics, and challenges for the player to indulge in and develop strategies for. It is in this manner that Vanguard Bandits excels in gameplay.

The soundtrack for the game is nothing special. For the majority of the game, tracks are consistently recycled. In fact, even now as I write this guide, I can’t recall particular tracks. The endgame provides more as far as soundtrack is concerned, but over all, the game is completely average in this area. However, I will mention one thing that drove me crazy regarding sound: the sound effect utilized for the use of skills is obnoxious and almost painfully loud and high pitched. I play my games on a 9.2 (via an Onkyo receiver) surround sound system, and although the extra speakers are not utilized with an older game like this, this particular sound effect was LOUD. I found myself covering my ears every time I used a skill, and considering the ability to heal your characters is a skill, I did this quite often. There is no reason that such a noise should have been used as a sound effect. I imagine this isn’t an issue on lower-end systems without a fantastic high-frequency response, so take it with a grain of salt, but by the gods this was awful for me.

The replay value of the game is pretty good. There are five endings to the game spread across three paths and fifty-six missions. Each of these paths provide a better perspective from each side involved in the story, and two of them have a good and a bad ending. Unfortunately, one problem with this is that the method of choosing one of the alternate paths is not obvious. One of these is activated by getting Bastion to a high enough level by a particular chapter, but you’re never given any hints about this. Thankfully, Monkey Paw Games provides a free guide downloadable from the Working Designs web site, so this mitigates the issue as long as the player is willing to utilize this.

Overall, the game is good. It’s got its problems and suffers from mecha-anime-plot-cliché syndrome, but over all, the far superior gameplay makes up for it. Additionally, although the majority of the plot is clichéd, it’s an interesting world and is somewhat intriguing to view it from different perspectives; the three paths provide this. All in all, if you’re into SRPGs or retro games, Vanguard Bandits is worth a look. The dialogue may also prove quite amusing if you like cheesiness.

PROS
* Great gameplay
* Good length
* Decent replay value
* Good character customization

CONS
* Cliché plot
* Inability to equip items as you buy them
* Forgettable soundtrack

FINAL SCORE: B-

Disclaimer: The reviewer was provided with a copy of the game by Monkey Paw Games. At the time of writing, the reviewer had completed the game and received the good Kingdom ending. A second playthrough had been started to attempt the Empire route.