The X Button

Lumine Nation

Great art survives its creators. Luminous Arc is a series of strategy-RPGs that couldn't be called great art on any scale, but the DS outings caught up some fans of anime-infused tactical games. More to the point, Luminous Arc has outlived its developer, Imageepoch. Burdened by debt and its CEO's curious absence, Imageepoch shut down earlier this year. Months before, Felistella and Marvelous announced Luminous Arc Infinity, a Vita release that preserves the longstanding traditions of colorful strategic battles and bevies of magically empowered heroines.

Witchery played a major role in past Luminous Arc outings, and Infinity envisions a world preserved by the Nine Pillars of Lapis. They're actually young women with magical affinities, and their prayers maintain a supernatural power called Lapis, a vague plot device worthy of a Tales RPG. Our hero is a warrior, or rather a Tone Echo Specialist, named Seed, and an afternoon nap in a castle leads him to rescue a young woman and launch himself into a full-blown RPG quest. The cast soon fills up with women, ranging from the antlered warrior Jioka to the android C-9 (who looks a lot like Aigis from Persona 3). All of them have sorcerous methods and personality quirks, whether it's the worldly, playful Violet's drinking habits, innocent Feilang's superstitions, or the knifefighter Hisoka's practical jokes and endurance tests. This being a modern RPG, the player can socialize with the voluminous female cast whenever free time arises.

During battle, the game follows strategy-RPG conventions in its grids, its special attacks, and its squat, large-headed representations of the characters. In an unsurprising stroke, combat revolves around the song-spells of the party's various maidens. They can enhance other allies, team up for special attacks, and join together in harmony to multiply magical effects. The more elaborate moves seldom want for flash, as the heroines summon giant tanks and dive-bomb enemies from far above. When not in the midst of combat, Seed can roam the halls, gardens, and swimming pools of the hovering city Floatia, which is powered by Lapis magic. Enjoy that while you can, I say. Floating cities often don't last long in RPGs.

Import Barrier: Luminous Arc Infinity may not be as complex as Tactics Ogre in storyline or gameplay, but it still requires some language ability. At least the Vita has no region lockouts on physical cartridges.

Domestic Release: No word on one yet, but it's not out of logical bounds for Atlus, XSEED, NIS America, or any other Western publisher with a grounding in cult strategy-RPGs.

Extras: The first edition of the game includes a CD soundtrack and a volume of background materials, as these RPGs often do. And to think that some people waste their time collecting first-edition books. Did the initial print run of Catcher in the Rye come with an artbook or soundtrack? I don't think it did.

Like a lot of RPGs on the PlayStation Vita these days, Ray Gigant is a dungeon crawler. Players shuffle through angular labyrinths, maintain maps to guide them, and meet monsters in menu-driven battles. It's all very much like Experience's prior RPGs, including Demon Gaze and Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy. The difference lies in how it all looks.

Ray Gigant unfolds in a future where cities are overrun by enormous monsters called, aptly enough, Gigants. One seemingly ordinary Tokyo kid, Ichiya Amakaze, defeats a Gigant—with a power that levels the entire city. This pyrrhic victory gets him recruited by two other powerful Gigant-slayers, the British Kyle Griffen and the unplaceable Nil Phineas. The game's told in chapters focused on one of the three characters, though they always have two sidekicks to fill out the adventuring party. Nils wades through half-submerged Caribbean labyrinths, Kyle raids a computer-run military base in Europe, and Ichiya hangs out with his childhood friend and rival. The characters also ally with Yorigami, nether-beings that chat with their human avatars and allow different combat specialties.

Battles play out with menu commands and special attacks, but they seem more vibrant than the usual static combat imagery of a dungeon hack. Enemies twitch and breathe before the party, and the characters are rendered with shading and fluidity that resembles actual anime. Combat also has three different scales depending on the player's distance, and battles against Gigants pull back for that impressive kaiju atmosphere. Unfortunately, the above-average animation isn't uniform. Characters and enemies don't really move when they attack, and there's even less motion during cutscenes. Perhaps it's a matter of pacing, but it detracts from the grim overtones and detailed style that Ray Gigant first shows the player.

Import Barrier: It's a dungeon-crawler, so be prepared to memorize menus and spell names if you want to survive.

Domestic Release: Western companies are surprisingly quiet on that front. Fingers point toward NIS America, which localized Demon Gaze as well as Operation Abyss.

Extras: Reserving the game got you a download code for the soundtrack. And it's a decent soundtrack, too.

My apologies to those of you who didn't grow up U.S. Air Force brats, but I can't see the suffix BX on the new Super Robot Wars game without envisioning a saga of miniature Gundams and Mazingers and Aestivalises shopping for shoes and cookware tax-free at their local Base Exchange. A lot of those robots are in the military, you know.

Super Robot Wars BX follows the massive crossover theme of prior games, and it crams a lot of robot-anime pandering into a small 3DS screen. Players guide the machines on grids during battle and manage their stats, but the real attraction lies in the fighting. While the robots are super-deformed little machines when in battle and tiny when in the field, their attacks explode into fully animated cutscenes as their theme music plays and their pilots spout catchphrases and helpfully recite the names of their weapons.

To that end, Super Robot Wars BX is stocked with anime headliners. In the returning column, we have Aura Battler Dunbine in the original and New Story forms, Mazinger Z: The Impact!!, Mazinkaiser SKL, the Macross Frontier films, Matchless Raijin-Oh, Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, the Mobile Suit Gundam 00 movie, and Martian Successor Nadesico. The newcomers are Panzer World Galient, SD Gundam Gaiden, Mobile Suit Gundam Age, Giant Gorg, Panzer World Galient, and that Macross 30 game. And we have the obligatory original characters with the headstrong Youta Hiiragi, who pilots the Falsaber, and his amnesiac adopted sister Yuki Hiiragi. No points for guessing that she has a mysterious past.

It's a formula that's fed mecha fans for over two decades. While the strategic element is clearly there, this always was a series less for RPG enthusiasts and more for fans who want to see Giant Gorg toss huge boulders, or the Nadesico spew a massive gravity beam, or Mazinger launch his “Breast Fire” without sanitized Western renaming.

Import Barrier: Japanese proficiency is needed to get the most out of the storyline and battle system, but it's not hard to figure out the attacks and general strategy. By the way, the 3DS is still region-locked.

Domestic Release: Unlikely, due to the confluence of licensing requirements and general apathy toward mecha anime. If a company was to take another chance on Super Robot Wars, however, they might go for a smaller-scale 3DS game like this.

Extras: Bandai Namco doled out pre-order bonuses, including 3DS background themes and extra maps, based on how many orders the game received. The top reward is a download code for 2nd Super Robot Wars, the Famicom game that helped establish the series in the early 1990s.

You might upbraid Nintendo for not offering Super Mario Maker decades ago. Games presented level editors as far back as Lode Runner and Nuts & Milk, so why didn't Super Mario Bros. go that route during the Super Nintendo era? The system even had a mouse for easy level-building, after all. Yet an earlier Super Mario Maker wouldn't be as elaborate as what Nintendo has right now.

Super Mario Maker makes good on those childhood ambitions of creating our own Mario levels. Most of us got as far as graph-paper layouts or ROM hacking, but Super Mario Maker can make them official, like a king legitimizing all of his bastard children. Through the Wii U touch-screen, players can use enemies, power-ups, and stage décor from various points in Mario history to craft their own stages. Those envisioning setpieces based on Paper Mario or Hotel Mario may be disappointed that the selections stick to Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros. U.

Even within that framework, there's a wealth of experimentation. Level designers can manipulate just about anything: the layouts, the foes, and, of course, the music. It might be as mundane as an airship where cannons fire Buzzy Beetles. It might be a harrowing gauntlet of Thwomps and Bob-ombs and a version of Bowser's helicopter shielded by spikes and piloted by bullet-spitting piranha plants. It might be a stage with hundreds of coins that you'll have to ignore to reach the end in time, symbolizing the fatal pursuit of wealth.

Yes, Super Mario Maker players can delight in forcing their friends and strangers to endure pretentious layouts or spin-jump across a field of Spiny turtles and straight into a sudden barrage of magma balls, though any course shared online must have a reachable ending…technically. It's also true that the design elements aren't all available from the start, as players earn them by spending time in the course-maker each day. And Nintendo employs the Amiibo in Super Mario Maker. Certain figures unlock new characters, including Link and Kirby, though they still behave like Mario. And there's a pixel-like 30th Anniversary Mario figure who unleashes a giant Mario in the game. Nintendo couldn't pull that in the Super NES days, either.

False alarm, folks! Sega's all right! They may cancel E3 showings and roll back their operations and lay off perfectly decent employees, but at least they've got Hatsune Miku! Sega doesn't need fancy trade-show booths or good Sonic games when they have Japan's hottest virtual idol! Actually, that's not sarcasm alone. It's heartening to see Sega release something that isn't as commonly known as Total War or Alien.

Not that Hatsune Miku is an underground artist or anything. For newcomers to the burgeoning industry of non-existent virtual pop stars, one might introduce Miku as “that green-haired anime thing from the Letterman Show” or “some computer singer who started off as a Vocaloid mascot.” Yet she's a full-blown idol in Japan, and she appears on pizza boxes, in concerts, and in all sorts of merchandise and video games. Unsurprisingly, those games are rhythm-action titles that guide Miku and her Vocaloid friends through music videos as players match beats. When not staging dance-offs or whirling through a neon wonderland, the chipper pop starlets sit around in rooms that the player decorates.

Project Mirai DX is actually Project Mirai 2 in Japan. Like the original, it casts Miku and her fellow stars in big-headed mode (all the better to push Nendoroid figures) instead of their slightly more realistically proportioned forms. The song selection remains extensive, though, and of the 47 total tracks, 19 of them are new. The Vocaloids go through their home-designing modes, and there's a new Puyo Puyo mini-game for them to play. Project Mirai DX also uses the 3DS's Augmented Reality feature to put Miku in footage of the tangible world—as though it's a good idea to make her any more real.