When it came time to make up a “Best of 2011” list at the end of last year, a little PSP horror game from Team GrisGris, 5pb, and XSEED called Corpse Party was my #2 game for the year. My #1 game was Dark Souls—a choice that really required little justification, even among those who chose something else for that particular spot. Putting Corpse Party at #2, however, seemed crazy to many. First of all, it was on the PSP—and wasn’t that thing dead? Second, it looked like something from the 16-bit era of gaming—and gameplay-wise, played like something even older. Plus, not only was it on the PSP, but it was a horror game on the PSP. Does that concept even work?
Category: PlayStation Portable
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My Pick-Ups From Japan!
I went to Japan recently, and this is what I bought! Usually I just spend a lot of money on games, and come home with a bunch of stuff but kind of meh overall. This time, I bought things that were really fun and/or that I really wanted. I spent less, but felt far more satisfied with my purchases.
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Corpse Party
It was just shy of 1am when I finally finished Corpse Party—or, should I say, finished it with an ending I could be satisfied with, versus the one I had received a few hours earlier that left me starting over the game’s final chapter. Having put off a necessary trip to the supermarket in order to correct my prior mistakes, I let the credits play until their end and then rushed out to my car to brave nighttime L.A. for milk and bread.
As I sat there in the driver’s seat, guiding my car along the nearly deserted road that lead to my closest shopping option that was still open, my mind drifted back to the game. I thought about its characters—who they were, what they had experienced, what horrors they had endured in trying (and, for some, failing) to survive what the game had put them through. Or, more precisely, what I had been forced to put them through.
I then realized something—this small wave of panic and despair was welling in my chest, all for some characters in some video game.
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Final Fantasy Type-0 Still Looks Good
Yes, alright – there’s a lot of reasons we can ridicule Square Enix these days. A lot. One thing you can’t say, however, is that the folks at SE don’t know how to make them some PSP games. Title after title, the publisher continues to release titles for Sony’s handheld that seem able to do things graphically the hardware was never, ever meant to do.
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Atlus Announces Persona 2: Innocent Sin for North America
Over on NeoGAF, member creid noticed something strange about the Atlus Faithful email newsletter he received today: it has a most peculiar date.
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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona
In 1988, I played a relatively unknown Master System RPG titled Phantasy Star, and it forever changed me as a fan of video games. Then, eight years later, another Japan-born role-playing romp would come along and leave an equally impactful mark on my life; the similarly obscure Atlus release Revelations: Persona.
Phantasy Star taught me that I loved JRPGs; Persona taught me what I wanted from them.
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Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble
Yankii (or, depending on how you romanize it, “yankee”): A slang term sometimes used for Americans outside of the States, and people from the Northern U.S. by, well, us Yankees. It has also, however, come to be a nickname for delinquent youth in Japan, specifically those that skip school, get in fights, don’t care about social norms, and do such unspeakable things as dying their hair to a color other than black.
What is it about this lifestyle that is so interesting, and at times almost romanticized, as we might do here in the West with the “greaser” subculture from the 1950’s? Whatever it is, there’s no denying it: the life of a yankii is a whirlwind of adventure and excitement.
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Half-Minute Hero
When 2009 comes to a close and we look back to reflect on the year now behind us, a countless amount of lists will emerge that attempt to run down, in order, the “best” or “worst” of varies things over that past year. This will, of course, also happen in our little video game industry, and while not all of the nominations or winners may yet be clear, it isn’t hard to make an educated guess (or two) at what may be up for awards.
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Valhalla Knights
Though survival horror may have swept into my life and stole away my heart, there is no genre of video game that I have loved longer or more completely than Japanese RPGs. Almost twenty years ago I first set out into the world of Phantasy Star, and from that moment on, I knew the genre was for me. Unfortunately, the love affair has been a bit rocky as the years have gone on. I still love JRPGs, but there’s just no getting around it; the genre, in my eyes, just hasn’t seen the kind of gameplay progression that other genres have seen, and has suffered because of that.
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