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Video games rarely dig into the roots of the Madonna-Whore Complex. Most of them mollify it into a less judgmental relative: the good girl / bad girl dichotomy. The Awakened Fate Ultimatum embraces that idea from first blush. Go to the official website, and you're faced with an impromptu decision: click on a sweetly smiling, frills-coated blonde girl or a feistier, more suggestively clad redhead. Not since Grandia II has an RPG laid its women cards on the table so quickly.

Of course, The Awakened Fate Ultimatum dresses up the player's decision with more than a website click. It follows Shin Kamikaze, a grouchy young man who meets an end worthy of a Shin Megami Tensei protagonist. Demonic forces murder him on the way home from school one day, and he awakens as the prime deity in a war between demons and angels (the denizens of purgatory are apparently either neutral or apocryphal here). He owes his life and his new powers to two women: the angelic, studious blonde Jupiel Soraumi, and the self-absorbed, red-haired renegade scientist Ariael Agarie. Shin meets other angels, demons, and assorted oddities as he joins the conflict, and it resembles a straighter-faced version of Disgaea. It's also staged just a few years after the original The Guided Fate Paradox, so there's ample potential for cameos. And since Noizi Ito is the character artist, you'll also see the heroine of Shakugan no Shana and that Haruhi girl from that one protest poster.

The Awakened Fate Ultimatum uses a dungeon-hack approach, tracking characters around labyrinths filled with unpleasant monsters and power-ups. Aside from touching up his stats behind the scenes, Shin can “deitize” into two different alter egos: Jupiel's soul grants him more powerful close-up strikes, while Ariael's gives him better attack spells. Despite the promises of extensive mazes and abilities, the game makes plain that it truly hinges on the choices Shin makes. The most important determines which of the two heroines will die. It's like The Granstream Saga's ending, only this time the conundrum itself is not a surprise. The player's decision is.

For the special-edition collector, The Awakened Fate Ultimatum offers three options, one more than our hero gets. Angelic and Devilish versions come with a soundtrack, a box, an artbook, and a corresponding five-card set. The Ultimate Fate Edition, priced at five dollars more, has both card sets and a special-edition coin.

By the way, the game's website showed Ariael leading Jupiel by about 4000 votes at this writing. I approve, but I'm also mystified. I always thought people preferred Betty to Veronica.

Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War is a notable game in at least one way. Released in 2007, it turned the collected 14th and 15th conflicts between England and France into a tactical action title full of wide-scale horseback duels, battlefield carnage, and corny accents. It gave the likes of Christine de Pizan and John Talbot and that weirdo Gilles de Rais the Dynasty Warriors treatment, and taught impressionable youth everywhere that Joan of Arc escaped immolation and drove England out of France, provided that you're playing as her.

Nightmare enhances the original game for the newer consoles, though it's less a cosmetic upgrade than a larger gameplay expansion. The new version doesn't look all that much better than it did eight years ago, and the rhythm of battle stays largely the same. Players lead their troops, balance out varying units from archers to cavalry, and reap the strategic benefits of victory. More options await when creating lead characters, and a two-player mode allows both co-operative play and competition. The tactical element also benefits from new Guardian soldiers, a skill-point system, and the ability to switch between four large battalions in the midst of combat.

The true reason for this semi-sequel's existence is the actual Nightmare campaign. While the original Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War is absurd and melodramatic, it sticks to historical bedrock at many points. Not so Nightmare. The new storyline finds England and France besieged by a demonic army of skeletons, dragons, giant ogres, and other creatures. At the head of this unspeakable tide is an evil version of Joan of Arc, complete with revealing evil-empress attire. Call it absurd, but you'll find stranger things in the fantasy pits of Barnes & Noble.

Is Type-0 destined to be a forgotten Final Fantasy? It's certainly spent enough time backing from the spotlight. At first it was the least prominent part of Square Enix's big Fabula Nova Crystalis Final Fantasy experiment, but the contentious Final Fantasy XIII quickly unraveled that and set Type-0 off on its own. Though the game emerged on the PSP in 2011, Square Enix declined to release it here, and only now does it arrive—for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, no less. Final Fantasy Type-0 also comes with a demo download for Final Fantasy XV, so this prettied-up PSP game may endure the same fate as Tobal No. 1. You remember Tobal No. 1, right? The fighting game that absolutely no one played without first trying the Final Fantasy VII demo that came with it?

Final Fantasy Type-0 at least deserves to escape Final Fantasy XIII's shadow. It tosses aside the garish metaphysical futurism of its now-distant relative. Instead there's a world closer to the early 19th century mixed with Final Fantasy catalysts. Airships soar overhead, chattering newscasts play to both sides of a war, and one bellicose nation tries to grab world-sustaining crystals from its three neighbors. It's also a little harsher than the bloodless Star Wars overtones of Final Fantasy XIII. Even Type-0's introduction is full of gory city invasions and a poor doomed chocobo steed.

That said, the protagonists are mostly teenagers, and the game still sticks them with that “l'Cie” nonsense from Final Fantasy XIII. The fourteen playable heroes form Class Zero, an elite unit trying to fend off the brutal advances of the Militesi Empire, and they're distinguished less by their uniforms and more by their weapons. Some are conventional, such as the spear-toting Nine and the sword-carrying Jack and Queen. Others get more elaborate arms, like Seven's jointed whip-blade and Ace's playing cards. Only the gunman Cater seems sensibly outfitted to go against an empire that totes artillery and automatic weapons, but if you want purest realism in your game, a Final Fantasy is delicious poison.

The battles of Type-O also ignore staid menu-driven methods. Players directly control the leader of a three-character party while the other two are guided by AI routines, and the lead can switch off at any time. Combination attacks and timed moves present themselves, and magic spells can take varied arcs when reaching the target. From what I played of the PSP original, it's a fluid and promising battle system. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions are prettier, even though they lack the older game's multiplayer options. Why didn't Square Enix bring the PSP version to the Vita? The long of it is that director Hajime Tabata and the rest of Square Enix prefer the home consoles when it comes to realizing the best version of Final Fantasy Type-0. The short of it is that a three-year-old PSP game won't make as much money on the Vita, even if it has Final Fantasy in the title.

I suspect that Mario Party 10 will be a big deal. That's not so much because it's another appealing multiplayer game from the Hudson Soft expats and other staffers at Nd Cube. It's not because it'll have a variety of mini-games and boss fights designed to have players at each other's throats. It's not because it introduces playable versions of Rosalina, Bowser, and Spike (that little green turtle who disgorged barbed balls and threw them in Super Mario Bros. 3). And it's not because the playable version of Bowser is a destructive monster that one player controls with the Wii U gamepad while the others try to survive. Those are all good points, but they're not the most important thing about Mario Party 10.

No, Mario Party 10 is important chiefly because it gives maniac collectors another reason to buy Amiibo. A new line of electronically coded figures will accompany Mario Party 10's release, and already the Amiibo hunters are scrambling to get their fill. Previously released Amiibo of the playable characters will work with the game, allowing access to special power-ups. Yet the hordes will not be stopped in their quest to buy the first-ever Toad Amiibo or a Luigi who isn't posed like he's ski-jumping or wafting around in a Krazy Kat strip. Nor will they believe rumors that these new Mario Party Amiibo won't be all that rare.

Materialist crazes aside, Mario Party 10 has the same overall attraction as previous games. Up to four players (five in Bowser Mode) trek around a game board and launch themselves into mini-game duels. These little challenges range from item hunts and raft races to submarine duels and enormous roulette wheels. The Mario Party games are often stable sources for casual multiplayer enjoyment, and now they evolve. Instead of half-playfully, half-bitterly arguing over a round of Boo Burglars, you can argue over Amiibo toys.

Resident Evil protagonists tend to blur together for me. They're all cut from the same action-hero pulp, and they share a penchant for staring down horrors and reciting shocked lines of varying hokum levels. If I had to pick a favorite, though, I'd go with Claire Redfield. I liked the Ripley-Newt dynamic she and Sherry had in Resident Evil 2, and Claire was a little more relatable due to her lacking the police training of just about every other Resident Evil lead. What's more, Capcom kept Claire from overexposure by sidelining her after Code Veronica, restricting her to remakes, spin-offs, that unnecessary CG movie, and the even less justified live-action Resident Evils.

No longer playing surrogate mom, Claire starts Resident Evil 2 Revelations as a big-sister figure to Moira, daughter of burly goofball Barry Burton. They're both members of the global network TerraSave, but a drably pleasant company reception is soon interrupted by armed men and slow-motion. Claire and Moira end up on a dilapidated island facility, with a bizarre woman called Overseer watching their journey. Meanwhile, Barry heads off to the isle and encounters a girl named Natalia, orphaned by the events of the first Resident Evil Revelations.

The pairings back the more interesting points of Resident Evil Revelations 2. You're free to switch between characters the while solo and share them in multiplayer, and only one partner is armed. Claire and Barry use firearms and other weapons in the Resident Evil tradition, while Natalia shows off helpful psychic abilities. Moira? She has a flashlight, a crowbar, and a supply of improvised profanities that recalls Angel Cop.

Capcom released the first episode of Resident Evil Revelations 2 in February and doled out a new entry each week. Now we're facing the last episode and the all-in-one package deal. If you nab it off the PlayStation Network early, you can reserve the whole thing for $24.99 and get some extra episodes and a Raid Mode version of Hunk, the faceless special ops soldier. Like Claire, he's underused.