What Are You Currently Playing? 6.65: Neighbor of the Beast

[gunswordfist]

I finished Freedom Planet (Carol) on New Year's Eve. If you remotely like 2D Sonic games, then get this title.

[gunswordfist]

I played a little bit of Xenoverse about a week about. It's a pretty fun game.

Today I played Castle Crashers online with my brother. Now that was entertainment!

[Spark Of Spirit]

I played a bit of Paper Jam so far. This game manages to highlight my exact problem with Partners In Time's battle system and successfully worked out the kinks. Paper Mario's addition adds enough complexity to make battles feel different from every other entry while not being a convoluted mess of figuring out the right combinations like Partners In Time was. I heard this is the hardest Mario RPG by far and so far I'm definitely seeing how it can go that way.

The writing has been very clever so far though I haven't really gotten into the story yet, it is typical Mario RPG goodness. Music is typically great of the series and everything feels like Mario & Luigi at it's best. So far so good. Oh, and it's nice being able to play as Paper Mario in a proper RPG. It's been about 12 years. He's been due this.

Glad I pre-ordered this with amazon's E3 deal. Not playing Dream Team, a lot of this is new to me, though in a good way. So far I'd say if you're unsure about trying the Mario & Luigi games, this would be the one to start with.

[Nel_Annette]

Great to hear. I loved Dream Team and I'm glad the M&L series seems to finally be back on its feet.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I got to play some J-Stars recently with a friend of mine. We played through the Road to Victory mode him as Kenshin and me as Yusuke. The game is a lot fun if a bit repetitive and J-Adventure was incredibly boring due to the lack of characters to play as. A bit more polishing like more variety in moves and more characters and objects on screen and it could be as good as Power Stone.

Still, there was a lot of fun to be had beating up Sasuke with the Spirit Shotgun and smashing his head through buildings. The fact that it plays the charging sound effect from the anime when I'm sprinting toward my surrounded ally to fire a Spirit Gun in my enemies' faces sure was satisfying. Shame I could only use his Dark Tournament attire, though.

There's a good base for a better game in here. I hope they are eventually able to make it.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I tried a demo of J-Stars before. The game felt really messy to me. The camera was all-over the place, the combat system seems to encourage spamming attacks over utilizing strategy and timing, and it's actually hard to appreciate all of the character animations and (admittedly great) fan-service and Easter Eggs in the stage backgrounds due to way too much happening on screen at any given time. I suppose I could see it as a fun novelty, but nothing that I'd personally want to revisit after a day of playing it.

To me, there are three fighting game templates that would likely be a better fit for a Shonen Jump All-Stars-type game. The first would be to have it set with fixed camera angles where all players are on screen at once, like in Power Stone, with optional moving stages just like in the sequel. This would still keep the game feeling casual-player friendly, but also a lot more coherent in terms of gameplay. The second would be a Super Smash Bros. style fighting game, which has been done before on the Nintendo DS, where it's a 2D fighting game with up to four playable characters at one time. If handled by a good developer, it could be a lot of fun. The third option would be a 3-on-3 Marvel Vs. Capcom format (King of Fighters also has 3v3, but lacks tag-ins, so MvC would be preferred), which would personally be my ideal set-up for a WSJ fighting game, but that format may turn off some more casual gamers.

[Rynnec]

Considering how wildly popular UMvC3 is, a WSJ game styled after it would arguably draw in the biggest crowd.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom is the best evidence of something similar working. I have to imagine it was proposed at one point, but probably turned down. Jump is probably too expensive for them.

I wonder if they tried a proposal for Shonen Sunday or Weekly Shonen if they would have an easier time.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

It's probably not that Jump is too expensive for them (if they could make a deal with Marvel, they could do it with Jump), but rather that unlike with Marvel, it'd be hard to distribute the game outside of Japan, and they make most of their profits from worldwide sales, as opposed to just Japan alone. You see, Marvel was pretty good about setting up their own branches in foreign countries with most if not all of their properties distributed by the company itself. On the other hand, WSJ doesn't really have any foreign divisions to my knowledge, or at least doesn't license all of its properties to a single distributor per country. The result is a huge jumble of different WSJ properties licensed under numerous different foreign companies in almost every major country, and thus it'd be a nightmare to get their games releaed outside of Japan and certain other countries since the licensing dilemma would make it a nightmare. It's a miracle that we even somehow managed to get J-Stars officially localized in North America, and that's after at least two previously failed attempts to get English releases of the DS Jump crossover games released over here.

With Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, most characters were from older series for which no active companies currently held any license to, and even if they did, the game was too niche for them to bother fighting over getting a cut of the profit from its release. That's why it was able to reach our shores without so much as a hitch.

So, in other words, the most likely reason that we'll probably never get an MvC style WSJ crossover game made by big fighting game developer is because of lots of boring technical legal, business, and marketing issues.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Well, if they can do it for J-Stars, I guess there's a chance they can do it for future games. I do know it was a lot of work just to get this one out. Hopefully next time it's for a game more worth the effort.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Oh, the one positive thing that I will say about J-Stars is that it has a really great, well-balanced character roster. There's a good mix of modern hit series and iconic classics being represented among the list. Sure, there are a few crappy choices here and there like Medaka Kurokami or Madara Uchiha, and personally I find it strange to feature supporting One Piece characters like Akainu and Boa Hancock over main protagonists like Zoro and Nami, but on the whole I find a good majority of the roster appealing. That's not an easy thing to do with such a huge pool of characters to pick from. It's just all the more of a shame that these characters aren't better supported by a much more well-designed combat system and better refined gameplay mechanics.

[Spark Of Spirit]

The roster is great considering it was compiled in 2012. Playing as Yusuke, Hiei, Kenshin, Jonathan and Joseph, Gintoki, and Killua, was a pretty fun treat. The One Piece choices are flat out bizarre, though.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

For the series that were lucky enough to get three representative characters in, the general theme seemed to be featuring two popular main characters and the most popular villain from that series. Thus we got Goku, Vegeta, and Freeza from Dragon Ball, as one example. Another one is Yusuke, Hiei, and Younger Toguro from Yu Yu Hakusho, which may not be my preferred choices (I'd personally have taken Kurama and Sensui for the latter two spots, myself), but it still makes sense. One Piece had four characters, but only one of them is a main character; and the villain they chose, Akainu, while certainly a big deal seeing as how he was behind a lot of major events in the series and also

Spoiler

killed off Luffy's brother, Ace,

[close]

still seems a bit baffling seeing as how he's neither the most popular nor the most important character of the One Piece Rogues Gallery. Sir Crocodile easily takes the title of the former, and I've always seen Blackbeard as a better fit for the latter. Boa Hancock in place of Nami or even Robin is more baffling, though. She's only prominently featured in two arcs of One Piece and has barely made any appearances since then. Nami is one of the original three Straw Hat Crew members, so you'd think that she'd get top billing in the roster for this series. Ace on the whole just seems strange as well considering how many other characters they had to pick from who are both more popular and more prominently featured in One Piece's story than he is.

The only real rationale that I can possibly see for those choices is that all three characters are major players in the Whitebeard War Saga, which itself is arguably the most popular and beloved story-line of One Piece among most fans (including myself).

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I was playing Street Fighter V for hours on end with my older brother. It was so awkward playing with a PS4 controller instead of a fightpad, especially with a standard d-pad as opposed to a floating one, but I sort of got used to it.

Anyways, the gameplay itself is amazing. It may even be better than SF4, which I already love, and it's probably one of the most accessible fighting games to newcomers that I've ever seen. That's why the fact that it's incomplete hurts so much more. I want to recommend it to as many people as possible, but just can't unless they don't mind a game where a majority of the content comes from its online multiplayer component.

It also made Vega, a character whom I found nearly impossible to use in SF4, into one of my favorite characters to play as in this game.

[gunswordfist]

Sounds like how Foggle described MGSV. Good thing it'll be at least a year until I get SFV.

I played some of Freedom Planet again for the first time in a long time. I'm still trying to get the hang of playing as Lilac. I think Carol plays so much better.