The X Button

Cat Fantasy

The newly announced Monster Hunter Stories may be the latest spin-off in Capcom's series, but MonHun Diary: Poka Poka Felyne Village DX predates it by a good stretch. It arrived on the PSP in 2010, and now it's back on the 3DS. And as the title implies, it's all about Felynes, the huge-headed catfolk who serve as Monster Hunter's most marketable creatures.

Poka Poka Felyne Village has players create a Felyne avatar and dress it in hunting gear, and the little munchkin gets his or her own house to customize like an Animal Crossing residence. The Felynes venture out on quests, most of which involve stalking monsters in cuter simulacrums of typical Monster Hunter hacking and butchering. Battles take a side-view angle similar to Patapon, as players give their Felyne hunters commands and try to arrange everything right. It's possible to befriend creatures as well, and you can ride a Poogie through the forest or race it against other cat-eared jockeys. Felynes also go fishing, catch bugs, and mine for valuable ore. It's a little like a National Geographic special about a native tribe of polygon cat-people and their watermelon pigs.

The DX version of MonHun Diary is mostly the same as the PSP edition, but Capcom wrangled some crossover trinkets for the 3DS outing. Felynes can wear outfits based on Mario and Animal Crossing characters, and in the latter case, it's entirely fitting.

Import Barrier: There's a fair dose of Japanese text, and you'll need to navigate some menus just to set up your character.

Domestic Release: Minimal chance, as it seems overshadowed by the major Monster Hunter games and the Stories spin-off. Capcom's more likely to localize those instead of an all-Felyne game.

Cats: Plenty of them.

Some will look at Tokyo Xanadu and see Falcom's mimicry of the Persona series, as both share modern teenage heroes and monstrous dimensional breaches in the heart of urban Japan. But Xanadu is an old, old hand at this. The original Xanadu sprang from Falcom's voluminous Dragon Slayer series back in 1986, well before Persona and its Shin Megami Tensei source came along. So who can complain if Xanadu wants to dress itself up as a modern RPG full of high-school demon hunters?

Tokyo Xanadu's lead hunter is one Kou Tokisaka, a helpful teenager who just so happens to witness his classmate Asuka Hiiragi battling extradimensional monsters one night. He soon learns that she's part of a larger organization that investigates Xanadu, mysterious dungeons somehow connected to a place known simply as The Other World. So Kou, apparently having no other extracurricular activities, becomes a Xanadu dungeon-delver alongside other teenagers who range from young geniuses to innocent martial artists. True to the Persona connection, the player builds up the bonds between characters with special scenes. Tokyo Xanadu unfolds in the fictional yet entirely familiar city of Morimiya, where kids have Xiphones instead of iPhones, but its setup may as well be in the same realm as Persona, Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters, or Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy.

As any Falcom fan will tell you, the real meat of the company's RPGs lies in gameplay. Tokyo Xanadu grants its characters Soul Devices as weapons, including grappling anchors, swords, and gauntlets. Each has three different skillsets: long-distance attacks, aerial moves, and charged-up strikes. Combat moves at a quick pace, and the Xanadu depths present traps and obstacles well beyond the typical angular dungeon hack. It's possible to swap characters in the middle of combat, and dodging, rolling, and mid-air attacking come easily. Even if those Xanadu dungeons lead to no interesting plot points, they're fun to explore.

Falcom's soundtracks usually stand out, though Tokyo Xanadu's elegant battle themes have to share space with the pop songs of Spika, an idol group that aids the characters on their dungeon dives. One of their songs even teases the Falcom connoisseur with a heavy intro. That comes with modern RPGs, I guess.

Import Barrier: The basics of battles aren't hard to grasp, but you'll need to know some Japanese to work out the storyline and the apparently important social-skill scenes.

Domestic Release: It's very possible. XSEED Games announced nothing so far, but they've helped themselves to a good chunk of Falcom's recent catalog, with several The Legend of Heroes games coming and a Xanadu Next license showing up. Tokyo Xanadu might take a while to get here, but I suspect we'll see it in English.

Cats: Not many, apart from some catlike monsters.

I remember Utawarerumono among those anime series that American companies bought for no apparent reason during the waning years of the past decade's anime bubble. Like Gad Guard or Innocent Venus, Utawarerumono had little cachet among Western audiences. It had grown from a visual novel and strategy RPG hybrid into a little series of drama CDs and spin-off games, but none of them ever came to North America. And yet Utawarerumono stuck around longer than most of its questionably licensed contemporaries. It has a sequel in Itsuwari no Kamen, and an anime series to go with it. As before, you can see the anime show in English while the actual game sits in Japan.

Like its anime counterpart, the Itsuwari no Kamen game begins with an amnesia-plagued dope wandering a snow-covered fores. A beastlike woman named Kuon narrowly rescues him from monsters. She takes him in, names him Haku, and introduces him to Utawarerumono's world, where Ainu-like villagers with big furry ears and tails live in a monster-populated ancient Japan. Of course, Utawarerumono isn't really set in old Japan, and Haku gradually meets more allies…including one in a familiar-looking steel mask.

Itsuwari no Kamen remains a mixture of visual-novel conversations and strategic battles, but it's noticeably tilted toward the former. The combat proceeds on grids where characters position themselves, attack, and perhaps add extra moves during their turn. For every enemy encounter, you'll sit through a half-hour of dialogue and character cutouts. Some might prefer that sort of thing in full anime form.

Import Barrier: For all practical language purposes, this is a full-blown visual novel. Enter with some Japanese proficiency or risk button-mashing through reams of chatter.

Domestic Release: There's little to no chance of a company officially localizing the console and Vita versions of the game, but fan translators took on the original Utawarerumono game. Maybe they'll tackle the sequel.

Cats: The beast-folk of Utawarerumono have catlike tails, but their ears might remind you more of dogs. I'm sure there's a forum debate about that someplace.

I'd devise some metaphor about how Corpse Party, a series that chronicles restless spirits and dark magic, turned itself into a paper-thin ghost by revisiting the same characters. But I'm not that clever. Besides, horror movies get intrusive, dubiously merited sequels all the time. Why shouldn't horror games go through the same?

Blood Drive picks up two months after Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, drawing occult aficionado Ayumi Shinozaki back into unpleasant things. Her family apparently protected the titular Book of Shadows from falling into evil clutches, so Ayumi's compelled to visit her great-aunt's home and set things to rights. Yet she's also plagued with guilt over the deaths of her friends in previous games, and she learns of a spell that might bring them back to life. Ignoring just about every implicit warning from stories about resurrecting the dead, Ayumi plunges into Heavenly Host Elementary, and most of the surviving characters from previous Corpse Party games are along for the ride.

Blood Drive follows the earlier Corpse Party games in its viewpoint, as players navigate Ayumi and other characters from an overhead perspective. Yet it's much darker here. Floorboards turn into pulsating viscera with eyes, monstrosities creep just outside of your flashlight's beam, and your best defenses are hiding, running, and perhaps defusing a trap. This is a horror game all about unarmed frailty, and the desperation comes from running helpless through a hall of blinking arterial hellslime, not from having only one shotgun shell left when three zombies crash through a garage door. Even if Blood Drive treads on the thin logic of a sequel, it offers plenty for fans: eleven main chapters, eight bonus stories, and unlockable interviews. And then they can move on to Corpse Party 2: Dead Patient.

Well, Dragon Quest, you beat Final Fantasy to the punch. Your prime RPG rival put out plenty of action games over the years, but never was there a Final Fantasy adaptation of the Dynasty Warriors style. So Dragon Quest is first to turn its history of heroes and monsters into a huge battlefield brawler. Well, Gundam and One Piece and even The Legend of Zelda did it before this, but at least Final Fantasy didn't.

Dragon Quest Heroes begins in the nation of Arba, where the local monsters suddenly ran amok and threatened the populace…and the terribly important World Tree. Players pick heroes, outfit them, and set them loose in cities and fields teeming with recognizable Dragon Quest beasts: slimes, drackies, skeletons, bubble slimes, giant cats, golems, cyclopses, actual dragons, and many others. The playable characters include newcomers like guard captains Luceus and Aurora, the sturdy King Doric, and inventor Isla, but these games are all about giving fans their old favorites. So the roster has Dragon Quest IV's Alena, Kiryl, and Maya; Dragon Quest V's Bianca and Nera; Dragon Quest VI's Terry; Dragon Quest VIII's Jessica and Yangus; and…well, a healslime named Healix, who's technically a new character. That's not a particularly large lineup when you consider Dragon Quest's expansive history, but we'll see more in the sequel. It'll arrive in 2016.

For this year, however, Dragon Quest Heroes is a nice-looking playground for fans of the series. Characters band together in parties of four, and it's possible to switch between them whenever you like. Their attacks specialize in scattering legions of enemies before them, and the game plays true to Dragon Quest with its status ailments, weapon upgrades, and habit of resurrecting comrades at churches. Heroes is also fully voiced, marking the first time that characters like Maya and Bianca haven't been silent. It's a little unfair that Square Enix didn't bring over the PlayStation 3 edition as well as the PlayStation 4 release, but at least the PS4 handles the hordes of monsters with less slowdown.

All right, I think we can dispense with the cute titles that poke fun at Final Fantasy in both contradiction and alliteration. The Last Story gets a pass, since it actually was a self-contained tale from the creator of Final Fantasy. The Legend of Legacy, however, sounds like a disposable parody instead of an actual game. And it has more in common with Square Enix's Bravely Default and SaGa games than it does modern Final Fantasy.

In appearances, The Legend of Legacy indeed looks like Bravely Default, as they share the habit of making elaborate character illustrations into squat in-game munchkins. Here it's Tomomi Kobayashi's artwork that turns into the game's noseless, big-headed heroes. Players select a protagonist from noble adventurer Liber, amnesiac milquetoast Bianca, elementalist Meurs, single-minded paladin Garnet, elite mercenary Owen, frog prince Filmia, and scheming, vain alchemist Eloise. The actual story seems closer to the wide-roaming approach of the SaGa games. A mystic isle called Avalon appears and numerous travelers head there, but the plot focuses less on a strong, straight-line narrative. Pick a lead character and his or her story will unfold, with the other cast members encountered as allies here and there.

Emphasizing exploration, The Legend of Legacy opens new areas as the player purchases new maps, and Avalon's only town provides a base of operations. Monsters are visible on the overworld, and touching one brings up a combat system where players direct party members and their stances. Characters can switch between eight different weapon types and forge contracts with elementals, and both figure heavily into battles. The whole thing could be a fun bracer for RPG fans waiting on an English version of Bravely Second, but the SaGa games always were...acquired tastes, to put it kindly.

The cover of Yoshi's Woolly World has an adorable yarn version of Yoshi riding an even more adorable yarn version of Poochy, Yoshi's loyal pet. It's pretty much the cutest thing you'll see on the shelves at any game retailer this year, and it's not deceptive about what lies within.

Yoshi's Woolly World envisions the happy isle of Yoshis in yarn, with everything from the clouds to the mountains to the capering Yoshi dinosaurs themselves cast in crocheted style. The nefarious Kamek appears one day to turn the Yoshis into little yarn packs, with only one or two Yoshi adventurers surviving to rescue the others. It falls in line with the Yoshi's Island series, as Yoshi trudges through levels, using yarn balls as weapons and squeaking with each jump. The side-scrolling stages challenge Yoshi to ride platforms, outrun giant yarn monsters, solve puzzles, cling like a ninja to fuzzy conveyor belts, defeat regular enemies made huge by Kamek's magic, and transform into a race car or an airplane or even a mole machine. Nintendo promises a great amount of bonus items to find in every stage, and two players can tackle them together. Putting an Amiibo on the Wii U gamepad will give Yoshi the palette of Samus Aran or Donkey Kong, and the game comes with its own woolly Yoshi figure.

It looks charming, but Yoshi's Island sequels have disappointed before. Yoshi's Story was one of the first major letdowns on the Nintendo 64, Yoshi's New Island is just average, and even the considerably better Yoshi's Island DS has some annoying hiccups. Will Woolly World be the best Yoshi's Island game since the original? I'd hate for all of that yarn to go wasted.