The X Button
Strike Through
by Todd Ciolek,
Let's talk about witches. Not real-life Wiccan ones or whatever, but the pop-culture witches that turn up in videogames with magical powers and giant hats and broomsticks. They're rarely given the spotlight, and they're all too often generic enemies or capriciously neutral characters like Deneb from Tactics Ogre.
Witch heroines aren't terribly common in games. In days of the NES, one could try the not-quite-classic The Krion Conquest, though Vic Tokai removed the Japanese version's story scenes and pentagram symbols. Perhaps they were afraid that the antics of a Mega Man-like witch named sca would drive the youth of America to forge pacts with the devil. The same era also saw the witches of Magical Chase and the Cotton series, but neither caught on.
In modern times, Doki Doki Majo Shinpan games.
This brings us to the latest NIS venture, an PlayStation 3 action-RPG called The Witch and the Hundred Cavalrymen. The above art is the first glimpse of the game, and it's described as a violent open-world experience with 3-D graphics. The player controls a cavalry soldier in service to a blonde witch named, it seems, Metallica (I hope that's true, and I hope it stays that way in the English version). Moral decisions play a role in the story, and the game's portrayal of witches may be all up to the player. So there's another new take on video-game witches.
NEWS
GRAND KNIGHTS HISTORY COMING HERE, PHYSICALLY AND OTHERWISE
Some North American companies have forsaken the PSP, but XSeed Games isn't one of them. On top of the graphic adventure PlayStation Network release—and a boxed, retail-shelf version that you can walk into the store and buy, just as nature intended.
Grand Knights History explores a war among three nations: the religious empire of Union, the magically active land of Avalon, and the mountain dictatorship of Logres. While there's a host of characters caught up in bloodshed, the player creates a personal knight as an avatar, choosing everything from a hair color to a specialized weapon. Alongside a squire named Lisha (Ricia?), players explore the conflict through broad strategic maps and menu-driven battles. It's all covered by Vanillaware's signature look, with large, ted, highly detailed characters. XSEED hopes to have it out this winter.
PROFESSOR LAYTON HAS BONUS RPG, LOOKS FAMILIAR
Professor Layton and the Curious Specter for the DS has the usual round of puzzles and conveniently puzzle-related plot twists to confront Layton and his assistant Luke. It also has one of the coolest bonus modes in ages: a 2-D RPG called London Life.
London Life lets players create an avatar and roam around a version of the city peopled with various Professor Layton characters. Nintendo claims that the game has over 100 hours of play in its many subquests and unlockable London areas. If that's exaggerated, there's surely a good RPG's worth of time in London Life. And if it looks a lot like Mother 3, that's easily explained: developer Brownie Brown also crafted Mother 3 for Nintendo.
The main storyline in Professor Layton and the Curious Specter is a prequel to the original Layton game, detailing just how Luke and the logical professor met. Their first adventure involves a town built on allegedly haunted ancient ruins, with the specter of the title controlled by a mysterious flute. The game's due out on October 17, and the London Life bonus mode will be available from the start.
YS IV REMADE YET AGAIN, THIS TIME ON VITA
It's hard to believe that Falcom was dormant for a while back in the late 1990s. They're downright aggressive with their games now, as evidenced by Ys Celceta: Sea of Trees showing up as a PlayStation Vita title. It's technically not another Ys sequel, but rather a reimagining of Ys IV by Falcom proper. There were two separate versions of Ys IV made back in 1994, but Falcom didn't handle either: the TurboDuo version, known as The Dawn of Ys, was a Hudson project, and the Super Famicom game, the canonical Mask of the Sun, was made by Tonkin House. Neither game came to North America, but Celceta stands a better chance of that, what with Xseed and Falcom's partnership.
Ys Celceta: Sea of Trees takes a few cues from Ys Seven, mostly in the game's combat system and the player's ability to command a party of characters instead of just boring ol' Adol. Of course, the redheaded warrior Adol is still the focus of the game, which finds him stricken with (surprise!) amnesia and forced to rebuild his adventurer's experience. Ys Celceta is scheduled for a 2012 release in Japan.
ROUNDUP: SEPTEMBER
BASTION Bastion's look suggests a typical anime-inspired action game, with a silent, white-haired young hero treading through diagonally arrayed levels and uncovering new weapons along the way. But it sure doesn't sound like the typical fare, as a narrator describes the player's every major action. Plot twists, weapon acquisitions, enemy introductions, and even falls into bottomless pits are accompanied by the wry gravity of newcomer Logan Cunningham's voice. It's a novel approach that alleviates the need for tepid tutorial modes or frequent melodrama, and it turns Bastion into a rare experience. Bastion isn't lacking in the rudiments of an action game, either. The Kid, as the hero is known, snaps up a wealth of interesting armaments with customizable effects, and players can enhance The Kid himself with RPG-like efficiency. The game also expands at the player's discretion, as a massive hub world grows with optional discoveries. And it's built with colorful style, resembling some high-gloss mixture of the Old West and a Final Fantasy netherworld. Isometric action games are rarely done so well—or even done at all—and that's another reason to give Bastion a shot. |
| Hitoshi Sakimoto's soundtrack. It's all an impressive package, and if it's not the best shooter ever, it's a steal at fifteen bucks. |
STREET FIGHTER III THIRD STRIKE ONLINE EDITION |
Developer: SuperGiant Games
Developer:NEXT WEEK'S RELEASES
DARK SOULS  Developer:From SoftwarePublisher: Namco Bandai Platform: PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 Players: 1-multiplayer MSRP: $59.99 Demon's Souls was the rare RPG that bridged the considerable divide between Western and Eastern design philosophies, and it proved easy for anyone to enjoy, so long as they liked dying constantly. Frequent player demises come standard with any respectable dungeon-hack, but Demon's Souls put several creative spins on the idea. Most intriguing was the online interaction: players could leave messages for others to read or even see how previous adventurers had perished. Dark Souls is the successor to this hazardous action-RPG, and some s suggest that it's even harder. There's a tale of ancient gods and doomed dragons behind the labyrinths and bleakness of Dark Souls, but it's mostly there for mood's sake. Player characters are once again customizable to suit many designs and job classes, which range from typical pursuits to the fire-wielding pyromancer and the “deprived” warriors, who barely have shirts on their backs. Other choices influence the play of Dark Souls, as adventurers make pacts with certain entities, both humans and not, from the game's backstory. These pacts affect online multiplayer, both in cooperative and contentious modes, and there are many more opportunities to screw with other explorers. An untimely demise leaves a player's character as a wandering phantom, one that can hide in unexpected (or expected) places and ambush players who are still living and human. And that's to say nothing of the game's built-in assortment of monsters. At least there's a new respawning system that lets players pick just where they'll reappear when they're killed by a trap or a phantom or a zombie dragon. That's “when.” Not “if.” |
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