The King of Fighters: Allstar Review

Every big franchise seems to have a licensed “gacha” game these days.  There’s one for Senran Kagura, Fire Emblem, Marvel, Love Live and Castlevania.  While some decry such games for being exploitative and microtransaction-ridden, I’ve always thought the collection aspects combined with a solid core gameplay looked fun, but both the licenses and core gameplay didn’t hook me most of the time.  There just wasn’t a gacha game I could get into unless you count Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links.

KOF Allstar got all the hooks to catch my interest: it’s a beat-em-up with collectible characters utilizing the KOF license developed by the mobile company Netmarble.  Obviously I’m a huge KOF fan, I’ve enjoyed action mobile games with touch controls in the past and I’ve read both good and bad things about Netmarble.  The idea of a beat-em-up based on a fighting game franchise where only two fighters are going at it at a time may seem like an odd idea, but KOF has always had characters fighting gangs of enemies, it was just rarely shown.  I had some careful optimism.

In preparation for the global version, I played the Japanese version for a couple of weeks, both because I was excited to play and so that I could write about any possible differences between the two.  I couldn’t utilize every one of the game’s features as my Japanese isn’t expert level, but from what I can tell the only substantial difference is that the new content for the global version is coming out much quicker because it has a year of updates from the Japanese version to work with.  Now that I’ve gotten to play the global version, this review can be written proper.

SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy Review

SNK has always admired its history and legacies, no matter how old or forgotten.  This is the company that brought back Hwa Jai for KOF 13 after being in just one game decades before and callbacks to the first Art of Fighting game are omnipresent, both visually and in gameplay. With SNK, you never know what they’re going to dig up next and I can definitely say I did not expect a follow-up to SNK Gals Fighters.

SNK Gals Fighters was a silly fighting game on the Neo Geo Pocket Color where a bunch of SNK’s girl fighters compete to win a wish in the girls-exclusive Queen of Fighters tournament, spearheaded by the enigmatic-yet-familiar-looking Miss X.

At first I thought it was Iori in drag wearing Eiji's mask, but she specifically says "私は庵ではない!"

The roster was mostly KOF girls like Whip, Leona and Shermie, but with other SNK characters like Shiki and Nakoruru from the Samurai Shodown games and Kyo’s largely offscreen girlfriend Yuki.

Everyone in the game was drawn as chibis, there was a mechanic in which the fighters clashed in a big ball of violence not unlike the Persona games post-2 and the new characters Yuki and Miss X had moves that included hysterical slapping, tripping and tearing apart the opposition with a fork and knife.

Needless to say, it was not a serious game. It was fun and silly with simpler controls.  It’s a breed of game we don’t seem to see as much of anymore since most fighting games want to be the newest competitive affair. That’s why the spiritual follow-up, SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy, being released on the PC was such a pleasant surprise.

Senran Kagura: Shinovi Masters Review

The first Senran Kagura anime is one of the worst game-to-anime adaptations I’ve ever seen.  It took what made the first Senran Kagura game such a well-crafted story and gutted it by taking out critical character moments and what was kept was changed enough to miss the point entirely.

Despite this, the announcement of the new Senran Kagura anime, Shinovi Masters, had me optimistic, and not from the more subdued trailer nor the presence of Bebe-tan (although that certainly helped).  I was convinced to watch it based on one name credited.  I’ll give you one hint as to what that name is.

I’ve said it once and will again: Yukinori Kitajima is the lynchpin of Senran Kagura.  He’s on the level of J. Michael Straczynski, Greg Weisman and Joss Whedon in writing talent.  He can make anything work and his writing for Senran Kagura is a key reason it’s as good as it is.  You could not convince me not to watch something with his name on it unless Kitajima himself told me not to.  Sure enough, Shinovi Masters has the writing you'd expect from him.

Digimon: Data Squad Review

In my review of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links I said Yu-Gi-Oh was an anime that stuck with me, but another franchise that defined my childhood just as much was Digimon.  The show was Fox Kid’s juggernaut back when it was around, almost like what Teen Titans Go is to Cartoon Network today.  In direct contast to Teen Titans Go, however, it was a well-written character-focused adventure with a lot of heart that many people, including myself, still love to this day.

The first two seasons are the ones the most people remember since they’re within the same continuity and hooked everyone to begin with.  Like some people, I lost interest in Digimon around the time Tamers came along because of the unfamiliar characters and tonal shift.  Then I missed out on the fourth season, Digimon Fronteir thanks in part to airing on a new channel.  I did catch up with the ones I missed on Disney channel re-runs and appreciated them on their own merits, but I still preferred the original adventure.  When I got to Digimon: Data Squad, the fifth series, I wasn’t able to catch every single episode, but what I did watch was interesting and possibly even darker than Tamers.  Fusion, the most recent one, I was able to watch in its entirety.  It was pretty fun, but certainly not my favorite.

For a long time Digimon was unlocky when it comes to home releases.  It was a very TV-only affair for a long time.  Some of the seasons got a few episodes on VHS or DVD if it was lucky.  You could only really watch the series outside of TV through recordings of the TV airings, which weren’t the optimum quality.  After over a decade of this, things changed around the 2010s when New Video Group released them all in DVD box sets for relatively cheap prices.  Crunchyroll also streamed the Japanese versions of the earlier series and Netflix added Digimon Fusion to their lineup.  Since it’s one of the more controversial Digimon seasons not enough people have seen, I thought it best to take advantage of this and get the box set for the season I don’t think enough people have seen: Digimon: Data Squad.

428: Shibuya Scramble Review

Most visual novels don’t capture my attention.  I can read an ungodly amount of text in games, but that’s only when they’re accompanied by gameplay and visualized with detail.  I can read all those files describing monsters and biological functions in Resident Evil’s history, but that’s because you get to see those aspects in practice.  I love the Ace Attorney games and Zero Escape games, but those are broken up with puzzles and interaction on the player’s part (and in 999’s case, the long-winded text did wear on me).  I couldn’t even get an hour into Doki Doki Literature Club because it’s so visually uninteresting.  I know I can’t expect much from that example since it’s a free game, but the majority of visual novels are made like that.  Too much telling, not enough showing.

This is all a preface to why I bothered with the visual novel 428: Shibuya Scramble.  The game has long walls of text and essentially no gameplay so there would have to be something major to set it apart and at a glance that something isn’t apparent.  There is one very important person who made this a must-buy: Yukinori Kitajima.

I’ve mentioned Kitajima more than once on this blog.  He’s the writer of the excellently written Senran Kagura games, the 3DS Ace Attorney games (including working with the Professor Layton writer in their crossover), the underrated Okamiden and at least contributed to the aforementioned 999.

Before all of those, Kitajima’s claim to fame was 428.  It was originally released on the Wii in 2008 and was showered with praise, being one of the very few games/visual novels to ever get a perfect score in the Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu.  After the initial release it was ported to the PS3, PSP and iPhones to reach even more players.

In Japan.

And nowhere else.

It took a full decade for it to finally come out in America and I wanted to play it for about half of that time after being exposed to Kitajima’s genius.  It was finally translated and localized by Spike Chunsoft in 2018.  For reasons I’ll get into, it’s kind of understandable as to why it wasn’t originally released.

Hong Kong 97 Review

There’s something that piques my interest about games that are hard to find.  Obviously they have collector’s value and that almost makes playing them feel like a privilege, like getting to see one-of-a-kind artifacts in person.  I have a few games myself that are considered pretty rare, like One Piece: Unlimited Adventure and Dokapon Kingdom, but for some of the obscenely rare ones like Limbo of the Lost, which was taken off store shelves within a week and only in another country, you pretty much have no choice but to pirate them.  Such is this case with Hong Kong 97, probably the single rarest game I’ve ever heard of.  It was released only in Japan on floppy discs for the Super Famicom, but they’re impossible to actually find.  Even pictures of physical copies online are hard to find and stores refused to sell it when it first came out.  After playing it for myself, I think I have an idea as to why.

Resident Evil 2: The Board Game Review

Video games making a transition to tabletop games is as old as the games themselves, dating all the way back to the Pac Man board game.  With enough effort into the design, some of them work really well, like the Doom board game (both the old one and the one based on the remake from Fantasy Flight Games) or the Exceed system putting Street Fighter and Shovel Knight characters in the game.

Being a Resident Evil fan, I’m fond of the Resident Evil Deck Building Game, a highly customizable card game about inventory management featuring screenshots, characters and monsters spanning all the Resident Evil games up to 5.  I have 4 of the 5 sets available and it’s a great game I never run out of new ways to play with.

After seeing how well Resident Evil could be made into a deck builder, I was really intrigued about the Resident Evil 2 board game by Steamforged Games, who previously made the Dark Souls board game.  I haven’t played that one, in fact I haven’t played any of the Dark Souls video games either, but from what I can tell audience reactions were mixed.  Looking past that, the developer’s blog detailing the way the RE2 board game translates the video game as well as how they balanced and tested it really drew me in with the level of detail and thought they were putting into the board game.

I wanted to contribute to the Kickstarter, but was only one week late for the deadline by the time I even found out it existed so I ended up getting the core game and the “B-files” expansion at retail prices online because it doesn’t seem like any game stores are selling it yet.  Being a highly detailed board game, it costs a premium.  In total those two boxes cost me $130 dollars and that was after I found lower prices and got some shipping and tax off.  How much it’s really worth will vary from person to person, but even if it’s a bad game, it might be worth it for the collector’s value.  It’s a good thing then that it’s a great game as well.

MDK2 Review

[Note: This review was written way back in 2011 before this blog even existed, though a few minor grammar mistakes have been changed.  Thought it might be neat to share one of the oldies.]

One thing I have always wanted out of Wiiware and the Virtual console is more games from the late 90s, the N64 era.  Being a kid raised on the system, I’ve never been bothered by their now-primitive technical capabilities, and having a game in 3D allows for better immersion and emulation of modern day games.  Unfortunately, most of the N64 games on the virtual console I either already have or didn’t really interest me, so it was a breath of fresh air to finally get the kind of game I was looking for with the Wiiware release of the 1998 PC game MDK2, and while the game certainly shows its age, it’s still a fairly enjoyable experience.

YIIK: A Postmodern RPG Review

While I am definitely a fan of JRPGs (I seem to be one of the only people who likes the original Persona’s remake), I’ve never played some of the more talked-about ones like Earthbound or, even still, Persona 5 (that will be a while).  I’ve also never been into what’s called “post-modernism.”  I guess I interpret things too logically.  I didn’t take much interest in Undertale and the apparent metacommentary in the Danganronpa games and Metal Gear Solid 2 fly right over my head.  I may not be the target audience for a game that calls itself a “postmodern RPG”, but I keep an open mind and I can get behind a game made by 90s gamers full of strangeness and references.  Plus I can recommend practically anything, even a little bit, if the writing’s good, no matter how dreary the rest of it is.  As for whether or not it deserves any recommendation at all, that’s what we’re here to find out.