The X Button

Formative Fears

No, this technically isn't called Style Savvy 3. That's the North American title for the Girls Mode series, and the third game doesn't have a localization ticket just yet. However, most of us here came to know the series as Style Savvy, and some of us came to respect the two previous games for their surprising depth. They're all about forging a life in fashion, and they keep things simple enough for a ten-year-old girl in any nation to understand. And if you want a game about managing a clothing shop, you won't find anything better than Style Savvy.

Style Savvy 3 doesn't stick to a single path, either. Its two predecessors had the player working at a fashion boutique, but that's merely one of the five jobs available in the latest Style Savvy. Store owners try to keep customers happy with new selections and trendy outfits, beauticians give clients hairstyles suitable to their requests and overall lifestyles, makeup artists match customers' looks to their photo references, designers create new fashions, and models pose and pick out suitable attire. Granted, real-life models usually wear whatever the producers, photographers, and wardrobe people tell them to wear, but Style Savvy has to balance out the vocations here and there.

In sheer volume, Style Savvy 3 has more to it: 19,000 clothing options, plus 1,300 hairstyles. That provides plenty for players to discover in the game's five jobs, and those who excel in all of them can combine their work into one huge fashion show. The game's spare-time attractions follow the same path, as players can customize their rooms with various trinkets and décor, sharing the results online. Of course, Nintendo added Amiibo support. Figures of Mario, Peach, Kirby, and Yoshi create in-game items for the player's shop, presumably inspiring consumerist frenzies and thefts. Just like real life.

Import Barrier: The 3DS remains region-locked, and you'll need to know Japanese to understand customers and the game's fashion trends.

Domestic Release: Nintendo remains strangely quiet about a North American version—an actual Style Savvy 3, in other words. The third game and its five jobs perhaps present a heftier localization task.

Controversy: Does Style Savvy 3 glamorize the fashion world a little too much? Should its designers have their work stolen by senior executives? Should models be dumped by their agencies just after their 28th birthday? Should beauticians and makeup artists have to deal with rude customers who aren't satisfied no matter what miracles of style the player pulls off? Probably not.

Super Robot Wars strikes the same iron as those childhood memories of mixing all of your robot toys together with friends and neighbors. Most of the '80s brats in North America pitted Transformers against Voltron or Go-Bots or perhaps even Robo Force, but the idea remains the same. Super Robot Wars merely uses more robots from the larger pantheon of the anime industry ('70s brats even saw some as Shogun Warriors in America), and its reasons for the matchups are slightly less farfetched than Optimus Prime being Vehicle Voltron's long-lost brother.

Not that Super Robot Wars needs airtight logic in its storylines. The Z sub-series started off with dimensional barriers breaking down so much that the sky-surfing robots of Eureka Seven might share a world with the maid-pilots of Gravion Zwei, plus Gundams and Mazingers and dozens of other giant robots and combat mecha. We're now at the second part of the third Super Robot Wars Z game, and the storyline is a mass of subplots about dimensional invasions from Gundam's Neo Zeon and Gurren Lagann's Anti-Spirals, plus a cosmology powered by 12 spheres coded as a Chinese Zodiac signs. It's all excuses for familiar robots and their pilots (plus some originals) to pair up and face down equally familiar enemies (plus some new goes) on strategic maps. The two-machine teams can vary their attack ranges, and a Tension gauge builds up and eventually grants extra turns, stat boosts, and Maximum Break attacks.

The real draw is, once again, the lineup of robots and characters who show off their anime recreations in side-view battles and elaborate cutaways. Super Robot Wars Z3 – Heavenly Prison plucks from Zeta Gundam, Char's Counterattack, Gundam X, Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, Gundam Unicorn, Gundam SEED Destiny, Turn A Gundam, Zeta Gundam, Votoms, Godmars, Macross 7, Macross Frontier, Code Geass, Dai-Guard (why?), Daitarn 3, Zambot 3, Tetsujin No. 28, The Big O, Shin Mazinger Impact, Full Metal Panic, Gurren Lagann, the Evangelion movies, Robo Trider G7, Dancouga Nova, Aquarion, and the newcomers Gargantia and Diebuster. It's high time Diebuster ended up in this, even if it wasn't the first giant-robot anime to slice a planet in two.

Import Barrier: Many of the menus are in Japanese. Once you're past that, however, it's not hard to gorge on the buffet of robot warfare.

Domestic Release: I'm going to start calling these games Super Robot Wars. Atlus used “Taisen” instead of “Wars” for their Original Generation localizations, but the anime series stuck with “Wars” over here. I don't think it matters, of course, because the odds are greatly against anyone licensing another Super Robot Wars game. The Original Generation titles weren't massive successes, and no one wants to bother with a big pile of anime licenses, several of which never came out in North America.

Controversy: Some anime series appeared in Super Robot Wars Z2 but didn't make it into Z3. For example, Baldios, Xabungle, and God Sigma got the boot. And why? Has that 2chan meme with Baldios' Torinomias finally petered out? That can't 'be true. Memes never fade.

Terra Formars courted video games from the get-go. The earliest chapters of Yu Sasuga and Kenichi Tachibana's manga introduce a Martian expedition staffed by a multinational panoply of warrior-astronauts, and each of them has a distinct power based on some sort of animal (mostly bugs). Once on Mars, nearly all of them meet nasty ends at the hands of hostile, hyper-evolved cockroach humanoids…who look a little too much like grotesque caricatures of black people. That design choice smacks of racism, intentional or not, but it also provides the heroes and their insectile powers with masses of enemies to face. So there's your video game. Your possibly offensive video game.

Now Terra Formars has that video game. It's a brawler that sticks the manga and anime's roster of bug-powered battlenauts into melee combat in the hostile terrain of Mars. As most of the original team members die quicker than Attack on Titan extras, players can select from hornet-based Shokichi Komachi, general Aryan ubermensch Joseph Gustav Newton, moth swordsman Akira Hizamaru, explosive ant-woman Michelle K. Davis, crablike Sylvester Asimov, beetle-fueled Alexander Asmiov, spidery Marcos Eringrad Garcia, mantis-shrimpy boxer Keiji Onizuka, bird-based Kanako Sanjo, orca-ish Jared Anderson, tentacle-sprouting Liu Yiwu, eagle-esque Alex Stewart, plant-derived Ivan Perepelkin, and eel-powered Adolf Reinhardt. Yes, we have a character named Adolf in a story with blatant racial overtones. Tread carefully, Terra Formars.

Fierce Battle on the Crimson Planet revolves heavily around the characters' special powers and flashy deployments. The stages keep up a supply of cockroach-people to be diced, pounded, and otherwise destroyed (and a DLC code lets you play as one of them). Yet it's all primitive. The character models are basic, and the gameplay rarely progresses beyond punching unintelligent foes until a better attack presents itself. For further evidence, consider that Famitsu gave the game a 26 out of 40. That's pretty much one of GamePro's blue, unexcited faces.

Import Barrier: The 3DS region-lock remains in effect, though the gameplay presents few challenges.

Domestic Release: There's minimal chance of seeing this here, and not merely because the Terra Formars anime is unlicensed.

Controversy: Those cockroach-men haven't kicked up that much mainstream objection so far, but the more general exposure Terra Formars gets, the more people will notice what's wrong with it.

Let us all make a pact. We will not buy Devil Survivor 3 upon its release. We will wait for the inevitable enhanced remake of the game, with its extra storyline and new characters and whatever else Atlus decides to include. We shall abstain from buying Persona 5 as well, because it'll see the same sort of reissue as Persona 3 and 4. Yes, we will make a stand and delay gratification. That will work, and we surely aren't lying to ourselves.

Those who waited on Devil Survivor 2 will find it a traditional Shin Megami Tensei recruitment video at first: three students, including the player's puppet protagonist, are rescued from a subway crash (seemingly predicted by a strange website) and turned into Devil Summoners. They're at the fore of a battle between humans and an invading race of demons called Septentrione, their battlegrounds the handful of unconquered Japanese cities. The cast of squabbling teenagers, accomplished agents of the JP's group, and sidekick monsters carries out their battles on strategic grids. Each human (or humanoid) party member commands two demon familiars at a time, and the actual fighting shifts to a first-person struggle between the targeted creatures and the chosen character's monster team—much like the older Shin Megami Tensei RPGs, in fact.

Record Breaker actually takes it easy on players who went through the game before. The new story arc unfolds directly after the original Devil Survivor 2's plotline and introduces the Triangulum, a new trio of Septentrione. And you're free to jump into that bonus plotline right off the bat. Record Breaker also has much more voice acting, more music, and the option to switch between two difficulty levels at any time (something I hope the next Fire Emblem allows). And there's a new character, one Miyako Hotsuin. She dresses a little like a regular JP's agent and seems to be yet another soldier on humankind's side, but the newcomers in these expanded games are rarely what they seem.