Express Yourself: Being a Fashionista in the Gaming World

 This feature is also available at n-Europe, found here.

Self-expression is an inherent part of almost all video games. By simply being a medium where the audience can interact with the work, they're allowed to make an impact within the game. Even doing nothing at all is technically an expression.

But that viewpoint is pretty pretentious and nebulous. In a practical sense games have two ways most people consider outlets for expression - building environments and player customisation. There are deviations of course, but what you come across in mainstream titles will boil down to one of those two.

To be hyperbolic, building (or destroying) environments doesn't give me much joy. I know there are plenty of people who spend countless hours crafting the perfect urban environment in SimCity or constructing a golden, penis-shaped fortress in Minecraft, but it's not my thing.

What I can burn hours on is thorough character customisation - perfect for my egoistic nature. Most games are very mechanical about this (will you put points into attack, defence or custard pie resistance?), but the real draw is the fashionable side.

It's the perfect way of showing how painfully unique and stylish I am. I have an avid interest in fashion and subculture - though since the general demographic target for mainstream games  is not... shall we say 'particularly sartorial', games that let you choose your fashion choices stand out as special.

It's all well and good to have a robust character building system in a game, but if it's all impossible fantasy armour or tattered brown military gear then *snore* - let me wow crowds with sharp suits and bold patterns.


Which, coincidentally, had me all kinds of hyped for New Style Boutique earlier this year. I had much enjoyed the original DS game (to the raised eyebrows of almost all my male peers), and having my fashion tastes not only fully expressed but at the gameplay forefront seemed like a dream.
Funnily enough, it didn't fully meet up to my expectations.

New Style Boutique is a fun and well-produced game, don't get me wrong. But, in order to give something as subjective as fashion tastes win and lose states, the game has a hidden set of rules for  what works and what doesn't.

It's surprisingly restricted. For example, I personally hate wearing too many things from the same brand at once (it makes you look like a walking billboard). But because each brand in the game is dedicated to a single 'look', hardcore brand loyalty is the stairway to success.

I had to form an uneasy balance between experimentation and ticking all the invisible boxes the game required. This wasn't punk in the slightest, no matter how much Stage Dive-brand clothing I wore.
Where I found a far better style experience on the 3DS was, surprisingly, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. Now, MH3U has more than its fair share of overly-bulky, ridiculous armour sets, but it's sprinkled with some real flair.

Every enemy you fight in the game can be turned into items to wear, and it takes a few kills before you have enough materials to make the full suit. This has the great side-effect of making you work hard for your fashion. When I first started playing, and found I could wear a suit and top hat made from butterfly wings, I was totally blown away.

But the bugs that the suit was made from were delicate, and shattered into dust against my weapon, denying me a carving opportunity. Working out how to reliably get the carves (the trick is to poison them) and gather all the parts took me hours. But the result was pure joy and a fabulous, lustrous sheen.

Even though the different armours are tied to mechanical benefits (each armour set gives a bunch of skill bonuses) crafting an outfit that both looks cool and gives skills you want is a test in lateral thinking.
 
However, my customisation ideal is the ability to design clothes myself. It's not an impossible task (the Sims modding community has been doing it for years), but the Animal Crossing series makes it breathtakingly easy.

The simple, low-poly style of the game means making patterns is a painless process. Spending years of my teenage life doing (mediocre) pixel art as a hobby meant I could go to the Able Sisters tailoring shop and churn out clothing like a Primark sweatshop.

Animal Crossing New Leaf takes the extra step and allows design of clothes of three different styles - as well as making trousers and shoes separate items, so you can create an ensemble from top to toe.
July can't come fast enough. Look out for Nathan Blades Summer 2013 clothing range in an Animal Crossing town near you.

Hyper Japan 2013 report

This feature is also available at n-Europe, found here.

Nerd conventions aren't too common in the UK – at least not compared to the US. The biggest one, the MCM Media Expo, draws ridiculous numbers of nerds, thirsty for cosplay and overpriced merchandise.

As such, I was slightly wary of Hyper Japan. Technically, it's not a convention for nerdy interests, but because Japanese entertainment and culture has such a heavy overlap, I was expecting it to be a similar affair to MCM or London Film and Comic Con, but with superhero capes being replaced by the super kawaii.

But I was wrong – kinda. While there were a myriad ways to spend your money on authentic (and not-so-authentic) Japanese products, there were also panels on aspects of Japanese culture, music performances, and tea and sake tasting.

As for broadening my own cultural horizons, I found that I hate takoyaki (did you know they put mayonnaise directly into the batter? Disgusting), that hakama are super comfortable but not built for someone who's 6ft 5, and a cute purple bento box that will store my lunches for months to come.
There was also a very large section devoted to Nintendo's upcoming and latest releases, including a few things I wasn't expecting to see just yet.

Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies

After Ace Attorney Investigations 2 not being translated into English, the news that Dual Destinies was making it over here brings me great relief.

They've cranked things up for the 3DS – everything is now rendered in 3D, but the art direction of the originals is still intact, right down to the goofy freaking out animations when you expose a flaw in testimony.

As the name suggests, there are two stories afoot – in a direct continuation of Apollo Justice, both Apollo and Phoenix Wright stand in court to fight for the truth. The demo looked at both a court and an investigation scenario; neither of them differ much from the rest of the main Ace Attorney games, but there's a new feature added to court proceedings.

Phoenix's new assistant, Athena, is a behavioural psychologist, and carries some snazzy software what will give you readings of feelings from the witness on the stand. Some parts of the testimony might have an emotion you don't expect to see, and pointing them out is the way to progress.

Finding these inaccuracies is easier than the body-language reading in Apollo Justice, but it could still be employed in complex ways. Only time (or a play through of the Japanese version, which is already out) can tell.

Shin Megami Tensei IV

The SMT series has kind of a cult following (and most of the recent fans are of the Persona spinoff series), but Atlus have not been great at getting its instalments out to Europe.

Yet, there's a whole lot of RPG goodness heading our way on Nintendo formats. Including this game, four SMT titles are set to have an European release. Dollars-to-doughnuts most of them won't arrive here for some time, but SMTIV is bound to tide you over in the meantime.

You play as a trainee Samurai – a member of the police force for a medieval kingdom with some really serious class divide issues. In order to keep the peace (and follow your directives), you're given an arm-mounted computer that will let you summon demons. A difficult adventure into dungeons, morality issues and gateways to post-apocalyptic Tokyo follows.

The battle system is very similar to other games in the SMT series (and if you're not familiar with that, Dragon Quest and Earthbound are close matches), and is quick to punish careless players. In the demo, there were fights with demons that could clear out my party in one turn if I didn't get the upper hand.

Fortunately, SMTIV will let you resume your game from where you died at the cost of some in-game cash or Play Coins. It's a feature a lot of other games in the series lacks, and comes personally as a great relief.

The Wonderful 101

It doesn't take long to identify a Clover Studios/Platinum game when you come across one. It might be a focus on grading your combat prowess, it might be the flying kick attack they seem to work into every game, and sometimes it's just the the hyper-passionate energy they put into making you feel like a powerful badass.

On in this case, up to 100 powerful badasses.

The Wonderful 101 is partially a technique-heavy hack 'n' slash, partially an action puzzler. Playing as a superhero with the power of 'unity', you use it not so much in a 'power of friendship' way, but more of a 'chaining people together to make giant weapons' kind of way.

Tailed by an ever-lengthening crowd of people you find in the stages, you can suspend the game action to draw a shape on the Wii U Gamepad or with the right analogue stick. The shape you make will determine the weapon. A straight line for a sword, an L shape for a gun, an S shape for a whip and so on.

The longer you draw the line, the more people you use to make the weapon and the larger it gets. Joy is swinging a massive sword made from 50 people. Heaven is plunging it into a gelatinous space monster.

The character design and sense of humour reminds me heavily of Viewtiful Joe, and considering the superhero theme, I will be distraught if he doesn't cameo in some way. The battles, though chaotic, rely on a mastery of dodges and parries, just like Platinum's other works. Getting hit doesn't just mean damage, but scattering your amassed horde.

The demo only allowed for 10 minutes of play, but in that time I ran down a water slide trailing rainbows, cranked a Ferris Wheel into life with a giant fist, ripped the armour of a giant robot with a whip, and got swallowed whole by the aforesaid gelatinous space monster. Awesome.

Wii Karaoke U

It is exactly what it sounds like, though that's not a complete cause to write it off. Arguably, it was the most appropriate game to be demonstrated at the event! The Wii U Gamepad is great for queueing up songs on the fly, and the game boasts that thousands of songs will be available from the eShop.
There's an almost even mix between Japanese and Western songs, meaning I had the pleasure of seeing countless white girls butcher Japanese pop songs the lyrics of which they could barely pronounce.

I myself sung Beyonce's 'Ego' - an excellent (terrible) match for my incredibly bass-heavy singing voice. A refreshing change to the repeated requests for 'Hare Hare Yukai'. It was only one of two Beyonce songs offered though, which is a grave, grave error. 



A special note has to be made for the large Animal Crossing area that was set up, complete with a photo booth and fish catching competition (which almost immediately devolved into a Whale Shark-catching competition). For the tons of people going through their Street Pass data, there was a cushioned area complete with a bunch of charge points (and a profoundly irritating Emcee who's constant humming of the Luigi's Mansion theme made me want to lodge my 3DS in his trachea).

Really, it was the most ambitious Nintendo stall I've seen at a convention in a long time. They'll be holding a convention entirely by themselves soon, just you wait.

MCM Media Expo 2013 round up

 This feature is also available at n-Europe, found here.

The MCM Media Expo, while increasingly turning into an outlet for bad cosplay and overpriced merchandise every passing year, it's one of the better opportunities for members of the public to try out upcoming releases without paying through the nose.

Nintendo has a rather hefty stall every year, and this time around was no exception. Here's a quick round up of the new content that featured last weekend.

Rayman Legends (Wii U)
Having seen severe delays, you would hope that Rayman Legends would be brimming with content and gleaming with polish. Well, it's impossible to judge content from the demo, but the game definitely feels weighty, retaining all the charm and animation quality of the prequel.

What's different for the Wi iU is the ability for the GamePad user to act as a helper, tapping on scenery to reveal hidden objects and stun enemies. It's definitely functional, but like the helper mode in the Super Mario Galaxy games, its inclusion is entirely incidental, and not a patch on running around the levels yourself.

Thankfully, the game still supports 4-player co-op, and now there's a new character - the axe-hefting Barbara. Considering most of the female characters in Rayman Origins were inside cages, this is a nice change.

Game and Wario (Wii U)
Arguably existing to fill a quota of a Wario Ware game on every Nintendo console, the Wario Ware series have been great for demonstrating how to use the hardware's quirks for interesting ideas.
As such, Game and Wario plays like a halfway house between the structured, controlled fun of Nintendo Land and the meta, inter-personal fun of Spin the Bottle.

The minigames on offer - now too robust to really be 'microgames' - balance using the technology of the GamePad (its tilt-sensor, its touch screen, that it's a screen other people can't see) with getting other people involved in a way that doesn't necessarily require hardware.

Of the games shown, 'Fruit' stands out as a Where's Wally style game where one player pretends to be a single character in a crowd of NPCs, stealing fruit without other players noticing.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf (3DS)
The first public showing of the game in Europe, Animal Crossing New Leaf's release date crawls closer and closer.

The formula of the game definitely hasn't changed, but a graphical update, a torrent of new content to fill your house with, and countless tweaks for convenience make this version of AC smoother to play and set to get fans hooked all over again.

The added element of being the mayor of your town doesn't change to much of what you'll be doing day-to-day, but the ability to add in custom features and pass town altering 'laws' (the law that makes your villagers clean your town for you is going to be definitely useful) adds a new facet of game to throw your precious bells at.

Project X Zone (3DS)
A spiritual sequel to the Japanese-only Namco X Capcom, Project X Zone (pronounced "Cross Zone") takes iconic characters from the franchise histories of Sega, Namco, and Capcom and has them fight to save the say in a very flashy turn-based strategy game.

The demo, offered at the event is also available on the eShop right now, so you can already give it a whirl! The stage maps and basic rules aren't too complex, but the battle system is where the game stands out. Battles are executed manually, each attack hitting with different timing and heights. Winning battles requires timed attacks to juggle foes into oblivion.

As with previous games by Monolith Soft (They also did Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier on the DS), the sprite work is gloriously detailed and cleverly animated.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Wii U)
One of the handful of games demonstrated at the Nintendo booth that are ports of an existing titles (Resident Evil Revelations and The Cave were also available), I bring it up Deus Ex for the unique way it uses the GamePad.

While the game itself was unchanged from the 360/PS3 release (the dialogue and area layouts are all the same) all of the menu functionality has been moved to the touch screen.

So your standard inventory management is now touch-operated and a lot more intuitive. Better yet, the hacking minigame is also now on touch screen, and in dialogue sections where your aim is to persuade your conversation partner, you get a rudimentary psychological profile of the subject, and a visual indicator of how close you are to changing their mind.

Considering the game's cyberpunk aesthetic, the GamePad feels much more engaging, as if you're using the technology in real life. Here's hoping the Wi iU version of Watch_Dogs will incorporate similar ideas.

The Solution is Fisticuffs

This feature is also available at n-Europe, found here.

The Menu-Based RPG. Iconic for the games that come under it, the way it changed perspectives on game design, and the impact it had on gaming culture. It's also a genre that's fallen almost entirely out of favour with the present gaming scene; all due to two common design features.

The first is grinding, a concept that - if you're reading this - is most likely known to you. The process of doing a task over and over until you're in the condition to progress. It could appear in subtle fashions, but because grinding can lengthen a 10 hour game into 20 hours, the games of old used it to make the title worth the high sale price, and the games of today use it to keep you firmly glued to your screen.

The second is something I call 'Stats as Progression'. It's something also familiar to RPG players, but it's less commonly discussed. Since the classic definition of the RPG is based around concepts of pen and paper games like Dungeons & Dragons, RPG characters have their abilities quantified. I'm talking about Health Points, Defence, Agility... Let's just call them your 'Numbers'. As a shorthand for your character growing stronger, these Numbers increase as you fight and win battles. The player can feel as though progress is being made, but in games without an action element, they can remove 'agency' from the player a little. It's frustrating to have an attack miss, just because a hidden calculation dictates so.


Combine these two ideas in one game, and you have a system where progression through the game is dictated by how high your Numbers are. And to get your Numbers to a level where progression is possible, you need to grind – most likely through killing enemies. But if this was just a flat proportion of Numbers Required to Time Playing, the game wouldn't feel like it's increasing in difficulty. So to combat this, the time grinding to get to the target Numbers gets progressively longer.

Does this sound like a game you've played before? I'm sure you can name a few. The thing is, when that's all that there is to a game's progression, the only aspect of a player that's being challenged is their patience. In an action-oriented game, to progress requires a steady increase in skill. Here, the player's skill need never improve.

Honestly, it's the number one reason why I, personally, will stop playing a game. Grinding is not fun by itself, and if the process isn't made engaging, or the reward doesn't feel worth the effort, then it's time to move on to greener pastures.

To avoid a game where winning is simply a matter of having the biggest Numbers, game designers need to look at what exactly their barriers to progress are, and how they can give the players more agency. It's almost like... a puzzle.

Puzzling Punch-Ups Performed on Paper

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is my favourite title on the GameCube. Its aesthetics were top-notch and would be enough for me to love the game alone, but it was the gameplay that sold me. PM:TTYD turned combat into a performance, figuratively and literally. To defeat enemies by just selecting your strongest attack was inefficient, and in some cases outright impossible – success came to those who mastered the infamous 'timed hits'.

And it wasn't just about attack execution – many enemies were designed with a puzzle-solving element. Beyond Mario's skill-set of stomps and hammers, he gets an entourage of partners who each have their own special skills. Koops the Koopa Troopa is immune to damage from spikes. Vivian the Shadow Siren can pull Mario into the ground, avoiding attacks that would otherwise be unblockable. As your partners are introduced to you, the fights get more demanding, requiring you to use your new abilities effectively.

To have battles be 'perfect' puzzles, the abilities of the player have to be known at all times. This can be a hard thing to incorporate into the normal RPG style. While this works for Zelda games, where access to every weapon is carefully timed with what dungeons and bosses you'll be fighting; imagine if Pokémon limited the monsters available to you for Gym battles! It would definitely be more challenging, but a lot more restrictive.

Examples off the Beaten Path

Some titles get around this by making the method of combat puzzle-like, rather than detailed strategies to defeat specific enemies. Puzzle Quest immediately comes to mind (though I find it a bad example, as the computer tends to cheat), but if you take a dip into the esoteric there are some good examples.

The 2009 DS title Radiant Historia was, in many respects, generic. The setting, characters and writing were entirely uninteresting (at times painfully so). However, it had a fascinating battle system. Enemies you fight hang out on a 3x3 grid, and can be repositioned by your party's attacks. Consecutive attacks will chain together, so with some careful planning you can force all foes onto the same panel, taking heavy damage with every attack.

Baten Kaitos was a beautifully weird GameCube game that featured cards as your means of attack. While each card had its own ability, they also came marked with a number; creating 'chains' of cards with incrementing numbers was vital to dealing good damage. As such, building your deck of attacks was a very involved and careful process.
Final Fantasy XIII (forgive me for not using a Nintendo example) was heavily criticised for being linear, but that meant the game ensured that each fight would be a worthy challenge – and its battle system (which revolved around changing team tactics on the fly to keep up with fast and vicious enemy strategies) made for some of the most intense fights I've played in a main-series Final Fantasy.

The Paper Mario of the Present

With the release of Paper Mario Sticker Star, fans everywhere fiercely compared it to the lofty heights of Thousand Year Door. Unsurprisingly it doesn't hold up, but not because it's inherently bad... just different.

With the sticker gimmick that Sticker Star is based around, it takes the idea of battles being puzzles to extremes. The puzzles outside of battle have direct impact on your progress in battle, and vice-versa. For those who aren't familiar with the game, Mario's abilities are taken from an inventory of stickers. Solving puzzles in the field and attacking in battle uses the same resource, and stickers are single-use.

This turns Sticker Star into a giant resource-management puzzle. Every battle forces you to decide between using your best skills now or later – but hoarding stickers results in dead weight. Running out will cost you time and money to replenish your stocks (so failure isn't crippling), but you're gently encouraged to collect any stickers you find – even if they appear useless.

This is all well and good on paper (har har), but for those expecting a more tried-and-true RPG experience, the different approach to battles has proven a little off-putting. Still, this shouldn't dissuade any Paper Mario sequels – or the Menu-Based RPG genre as a whole – from getting wild and experimental with their enemy slaying. 'Solving' a battle brings out a sense of satisfaction wholly different from sweeping digital vistas or satisfyingly chunky gun feedback.

In a gaming climate where the big-name RPGs are action-oriented, open world affairs; the Menu-Based RPG is slowly being forgotten. While no one will be too sad to see rigid, grind-heavy affairs fall by the wayside, there have been innovative puzzle-like experiences through the console generations. Who knows, maybe the next big RPG title of 2013 will challenge our minds in unforeseen ways.

A Professor Layton RPG, maybe? Hmm.

Why You Should Play Virtue's Last Reward

This review and eulogy for my game save was originally posted on n-Europe, and can be found here.

Virtue's Last Reward is outstandingly fresh, gripping and challenging. It's by far the most interesting 3DS game I've played. But you shouldn't buy it; at least, not yet.

To explain why you shouldn't buy it is relatively simple, but explaining why the game is so good is more involved – and involves a small history lesson. So without further ado:

Once upon a time there was a company called Chunsoft. They produced a game in 2009 called 999: Nine Hours, Nine persons, Nine Doors for the DS, and it was incredible (see my personal review). While the Visual Novel genre was (and still is) a staple in Japan, the closest many western consumers got in the genre was the Ace Attorney series.

999 offered a suspenseful and harrowing plot; nine people find themselves trapped on a sinking ship and tasked with playing the 'Nonary Game'. The road to escape is filled with puzzle rooms, odd discussions about metaphysics, and the occasional spot of chilling gore. Even though 999 never saw a release in Europe, the title proved to be popular enough for a sequel to be made: Virtue's Last Reward.

In 2010, a separate games studio called Spike released their own Visual Novel for the PSP: Dangan Ronpa. It had a distinct, yet similar theme to 999; A murder mystery involving 15 students trapped in a high school of despair, headmastered by a psychopathic talking teddy bear, Monobear. The title was only ever released in Japan, and was an unknown in the West, until the game was covered as a 'Let's Play', translated into English by Orenronen, a member of the Something Awful message boards.

In early 2012 Spike and Chunsoft had a merger into, er, Spike Chunsoft. They had been owned by the same conglomerate as far back as 2005, but this merger seemed apt; Virtue's Last Reward takes on many thematic elements from 999 and Dangan Ronpa. It has an outstanding pedigree, and it shows.

You play as Sigma, a seemingly ordinary university student who, on December 25th of 2028, finds himself suddenly kidnapped and trapped within a giant warehouse with 8 others. The reason? To play the Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition. Escape will only be granted to those who can successfully amass 9 Points, gained by allying with fellow players... or betraying them.

As with its prequel, Virtue's Last Reward is incredibly verbose, but offsets its novel sections with 'escape the room' puzzles. However, this time everything has been kicked up a notch. There are so many possible branching paths to the plot, a function to jump between checkpoints in the game was mercifully added. Puzzle rooms have bonus challenges that give secret files. They explain the game's backstory, in a... disarmingly casual fashion. Getting these bonus rewards requires some lateral thinking, and are definitely rewarding to solve.

The characters are also a joy to get to know. The character designs have a mixture of hits and misses (the character artist, Kinu Nishimura, often adds fanservice to her art, and some of VLR's characters get more than their fair share (as seen to the left); but all of them grow over the course of the game, some in unexpected ways. The voice acting for the European version is Japanese-only (the NA release had an optional English dub), but they all suit the characters well; especially the evil AI that hosts the Nonary Game, Zero III (his inclusion is very similar to that of Monobear in Dangan Ronpa).

The challenging puzzles and compelling plot had me playing every night; staying up until ridiculous hours finding my way out of a locked pantry and deciding whether or not to betray my team mates on this play through. But as I progressed, cracks began to appear in VLR's veneer.

At first they were silly, easily ignored things. The localisation of the text often strays from what's said in Japanese, and noticing when the two don't match up is a little jarring. During puzzles, the framerate stutters when you rotate the camera. The script insists on writing 'donno' instead of 'dunno', along with a number of silly typos in general.

And then there were the save corruption issues.

It was a problem known about in the American 3DS release. There was a bug that could corrupt your save file if you saved in the middle of certain puzzle rooms. This was annoying, but easily avoided. After the EU release, that warning was extended to all puzzle rooms. This was considerably more concerning; but still avoidable.

But then, after around 20 hours of playtime, I decided to take a break. I was nowhere near a puzzle room, so I felt I was safe. Not so. When I next boot up my game and try to load my save, I was greeted with a black screen. My 3DS had crashed. Two-thirds of the way through a great game, and my journey was over.

It brought about an odd feeling inside me. I had pre-ordered and happily laid down my £30 to play a game that would unlikely see Europe's shores. The game was engrossing and compelling enough to lose many, many hours of sleep. I would have given the European publishers, Rising Star Games, money up front if it guaranteed games like this to be consistently released over here. But at the end of the day, I had paid £30 for a game that didn't work.

I'm still not sure how to make peace with that. At time of writing, Rising Star Games have gone on record to say that they are aware of the problem; but nothing regarding what they're going to do about it. 3DS games can be patched (It happened with Mario Kart 7 not too long ago); but who knows if the same will happen here. Until some concrete action has been taken, please hold off on enjoying Virtue's Last Reward. Getting obscure releases is wonderful; but only if they actually work as intended.