The X Button

Disposable Heroes

A simple kanji-tutoring game normally wouldn't demand much notice. But this is a Doraemon kanji-tutoring game, and I always notice Doraemon. I realize that the Doraemon franchise is aimed at children, but I like the underlying ideas. It amuses me that Doraemon himself is a benevolent screw-up version of the Terminator (predating it, even), as he's a bargain-bin robocat sent back in time to help a pathetic boy become a better person. And now that Doraemon is airing on Disney XD, kids all over this nation can delight in Doraemon's trans-dimensional robot pouch and the inevitable minor chaos he creates. If I had children, I'd sit them down with Doraemon. They'd probably turn it off to watch Johnny Test or play Angry Birds, but at least I'd have tried.

DoraMoji also targets young audiences, as it's a guide for writing hiragana and kanji. The player (or rather, student) can test his or her writing in simple tasks or a more elaborate story mode where Nobita, Doraemon's young and frazzled charge, has to perfect his calligraphy in order to defeat monsters and solve whatever problem his blue cat-bot guest has caused. The 3DS stylus and touch-screen tests are timed and measured, but Doraemon isn't so harsh a taskmaster.

Import Barrier: While it's not hard to draw the lines needed, you'll need a little knowledge of Japanese to know what Doraemon wants you to create…and what you've done wrong. The 3DS also has a regional lockout.

Domestic Release: Very slim odds there. If any Doraemon game were to be localized on the 3DS, it'd be an action game like last year's movie-base Nobita in the New Haunts of Evil.

Usefulness: If translated, DoraMoji might provide a fun way for young players to learn about kanji. Of course, the Disney XD version of Doraemon has the usual mild Americanizations in its animation and character names, so it's not exactly out to promote Japanese language.

It's strange how Nintendo's Zelda series beat Dragon Quest when it came to exploiting the market's fondness for Dynasty Warriors beat-'em-ups. Zelda always was a relatively straitlaced series, while Dragon Quest, the older of the two, had a broader history of enabling spin-offs like Torneko: The Last Hope and Rocket Slime. But Zelda sank teeth into the Dynasty Warriors developers first and tore off Hyrule Warriors last year. So Dragon Quest Heroes: The Dark Dragon and the World Tree Castle has to make up that lost ground.

Dragon Quest Heroes plays catch-up by imitating Hyrule Warriors and every anime given the Warriors treatment: draw favored characters from throughout the series and dump them into battlefields spilling over with easily pulped enemies. This being Dragon Quest, the enemies are the same monsters players encountered many times before in menu-driven battles. They'll face merry drackies, grinning slimes, squarish golems, goofy-eyed demons, leering cyclopses, and skeletons who dress pretty well for entirely defleshed corpses. And there's a lineup of playable characters with the same appeal. Warriors Act and Meya (Meer?) headline a list of half a dozen original new faces, but the lineup fills out with past characters. Martial-artist princess Alena, warrior-priest Kiryl, demonic swordsman Psaro, and dancer Maya hail from Dragon Quest IV. Archer Bianca and gentle rich-girl Nera were possible wives for the hero of Dragon Quest V. Swordsman Terry showed up in Dragon Quest VI and a Monsters spin-off. Lastly, sorceress Jessica and adorably loutish club-wielder Yangus come from Dragon Quest VIII. It's strange that the game skips Dragon Quest VII, less strange that it ignores most of the Dragon Quest protagonists. They didn't have much personality, anyway.

Heroes stocks itself with the same brand of excess seen in Dynasty Warriors, tuned for a Dragon Quest audience. Characters take on routine throngs as well as towering cyclopean giants in city streets, and their special attacks all seem extracted from the prettiest possible versions of their respective games. It's not uncommon for Maya to morph into a dragon and set a city block aflame, or for Yangus to whirl through several dozens slimes at once. Players can choose a party of four characters and switch from one to the other, and their assistants include monsters as well as privileged humans. Oddly, there's no multiplayer option.

Import Barrier: The battle gameplay requires little language comprehension, but the customization behind the scenes proves a little more complex.

Domestic Release: The PlayStation 4 version will arrive here later this year, but the PlayStation 3 game stays in Japan. Square Enix mentions that a localization would take longer if both releases were brought over. I wonder if similar reasons kept them from putting Final Fantasy Type-0 on the Vita.

Usefulness: Dragon Quest traditionally isn't a huge hit in the West, but a massive brawler might be a good introduction to the series.

The God Eater games remain my favorite things inspired by Monster Hunter. There are many multiplayer action games that pit friends and nearby strangers against lumbering creatures, but God Eater Burst (known as Gods Eater Burst to those of gentle religious constitutions) mixes everything just right. It frames its monster battles with a modestly compelling post-apocalyptic world, it introduces actual characters and plot twists alongside the player's avatar, and it moves everything along with a crisp pace. It alsI gives you a giant weapon that can change from a cannon to a blade to a huge pair of monster-jaws. That helps a lot.

God Eater 2 debuted on the Vita in 2013, and it enhances a lot of the original game's strengths. New weapons arrive, old ones improve, Blood Arts amplify combat, and sidequests develop specific characters in greater detail. It picks up three years after the original, introducing new characters (including some downright ugly designs) alongside the old ones. It's still not particularly deep in plot, but as a Monster Hunter clone it's among the best.

Rage Burst packs in the entirely of God Eater 2 and adds an extra chapter for the story as well as campsite scenes where characters chat (possibly about fate and time, as in Chrono Trigger). In gameplay, it offers customizable God Arc skill slots plus a new Blood Rage technique that lets characters move faster, hit harder, and sprout glowing wings. Technically, they activate Blood Rage by defeating enemies and building up a meter, but in narrative terms, they boost their stats by making contracts with their monstrous God Arc weapons. Fiction has taught us that we can trust inhuman, fang-sprouting creatures with our legal agreements.

Import Barrier: Aside from menus and dialogue, Rage Burst isn't hard to figure out if you survived the original Gods Eater Burst.

Domestic Release: Its chances are slightly better now that God Eater is on the PlayStation 4 as well as the Vita. Bandai Namco has said nothing, however.

Usefulness: It's an expansion pack, and thus a lesson in how the game industry works.

Why do these Atelier games invariably put cute young heroines on their covers? If they're about ateliers, the box art should show nothing but the spread of an alchemist's workshop, with tinctures and phials and decanters bubbling in catalytic fervor! That's what the fans want to see! Or so I assume. Why else would they buy things with “atelier” in the title and alchemy in the gameplay?

Yes, I know that the Atelier games are about more than that. They're RPGs heavy on the item-crafting, and Atelier Shallie has a crisis more pressing than most of its predecessors. It finds the Dusk World caught up in a rapacious drought, and small bastions of civilization are worn down by doomed crops and famine. Here the player controls two heroines. Shallistera hails from a beleaguered clan and seeks an end to the suffering around her, and her story is a more grave quest that reveals mysteries of the world. Shallotte is an energetic alchemist who hunts for success and fortune, so her arc puts a more comical spin on a parched and dying land. The two meet eventually no matter who the player first selects, and their supporting cast includes warriors, thieves, magicians, a pilebunker-wielding girl, a foxlike homunculus, an even a thirty-something mother. Atelier Shallie is also the third game in a sub-trilogy, so one might see characters from Atelier Escha & Logy and Atelier Ayesha. I expect that the game will end with the heroines brawling over who gets the title of Shallie, much like the finale of Double Dragon.

Atelier Shallie sends its heroines out to wander fields, finding items and fighting monsters as they go. Shallistera uses a dowsing relic to locate treasures while Shallotte just pushes a broom around, and both of them drag their retinues into battles. Six characters can join in the turn-based battles, assisting other fighters and boosting their stats with that temporary Burst Mode that other RPGs seem to enjoy. Naturally, there's an elaborate system for crafting items, including weapons and armor, and that's once again a major draw of the game. So there's no need to stick it on the cover, I suppose. Fans know it's there.

A special unit of historical and literary figures fighting aliens in a steampunk 19th century? That's not massively surprising, since you can find steampunk overhauls everywhere in comics, science fiction, video games, and webcomics that outfit Thomas Jefferson with a gear-powered helicopter backpack and call it a day. Yet Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. comes from Nintendo and Intelligent Systems, a team known for making decent strategy-RPGs and rejecting the trendy, begoggled, come-hither gaze of steampunk. So it was an unexpected sight at last year's E3.

Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. takes players to a Victorian London where steam technology ushered in an age of automobiles and airships several decades early. After an alien invasion disrupts teatime, President Abraham Lincoln, complete with eagle-adorned battle garb and a looming zeppelin, recruits Captain Henry Fleming (from Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage) to head up an anti-alien task force. His fellow soldiers are heroic, clockwork-armored extractions from popular fiction: a cowardly lion-man, a combat falconer version of Tiger Lily from Peter Pan, and a kid named Tom Sawyer. I hope the final boss is The King in Yellow, but I doubt we'll go that deep.

There's greater promise in the gameplay. Instead of the battle-grid movement that Intelligent Systems used in Fire Emblem and Advance Wars, the soldiers of S.T.E.A.M. move freely within a limited range. Steam power (of course) determines just how characters maneuver or attack or use special abilities, and it's easy to take back moves before ending your turn. The game's Overwatch feature tracks the Steam that troopers still have after concluding their battle turns; should they have enough, they'll automatically strike at enemies within range. It's all dressed up in comic-book effects and cel-shaded graphics, and the game's steam-tech environments play into the flow of battle. The good designers of Intelligent Systems know their way around a strategy-game, and the Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. demo is promising. And perhaps there'll be some subtle satire in all the steampunk trimmings. Lincoln's eagle chestplate almost looks like a Nazi standard.

I have some bad news: The Last Guardian probably won't come out this year. We can hope for some surprise E3 unveiling that puts Fumito Ueda's elegantly restrained title as a September release, but the odds of that remain hazy. However, we'll see a number of games that give off that same ornate simplicity and gentle visual storytelling. Ori and the Blind Forest is the first of them.

In fact, Ori and the Blind Forest is not so heavily inspired by Ueda's games. One gets a distinct Shadow of the Colossus sensibility from the giant, steel-masked owl glimpsed in the trailer, but other sources come through much stronger. The creators cite Ghibli movies and The Iron Giant in their inspirations for the game's glowing forest environments, where a foxlike forest spirit sets out to find his proper place in the world.

Ori and the Blind Forest is a side-scroller at heart, and there it leans toward the Metroid formula. As its hero traverses caverns and treetops and labyrinths, new abilities present themselves and open new venues to explore. Ori can race up walls, deflect projectiles, and launch radiant beams at enemies—though his most useful ability may be a mid-air move that launches him off of hanging gems and enemy projectiles. The gameplay has a spritely, acrobatic look, and it seems to seldom break into long cutscenes. Perhaps it's not a Fumito Ueda tribute. That won't matter if it lives up to its looks.

As I continue seeing influences where they might not lie, I detect more than trace amounts of Persona within Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters. True, Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters directly descends from director Shuho Imai's earlier Tokyo Majin games (you might remember the anime series if you have a penchant for obscure ADV Films licenses). Moreover, its kids-fight-demons premise was around in the larger Megami Tensei series well before Persona spun off. Yet I suspect that Persona's cult success made companies far more willing to localize unconventional games that pit teenagers against the supernatural. So you should thank Persona, Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters.

You, or at least the protagonist you'll name, are a new student at Kurenai Academy, and it takes little time for you to discover that two of your classmates work a ghost-hunting trade. Class President Sayuri Mifune and academic genius Masamune Shiga are members of Gate Keepers (there's another flashback to forgotten anime series). They stake out haunted buildings and defuse the apparitions there. A good chunk of the game finds you talking with characters through the Sensory Input system. It adds emotional options as well as one of the five senses to your replies, and the combinations involve everything from collecting evidence to the inevitable romances. For their part, the character portraits show more vivid animation than the usual visual-novel cutouts, and some of the soundtrack comes from Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu.

Ghost hunts present a grid map of a building floor, and players have to arrange their characters to predict just when and where the spirits will strike. Once battles begin, the party faces down monsters in first-person combat. If the fights are more simplistic than other RPGs, the overriding strategic element seems stronger, and much of the challenge comes from positioning characters so they won't get slimed get the best possible angle of attack. It'll remind many people of Persona, but I suspect that's what Aksys wants.