The Ragey's 2015: The Rage Quitter Year End Wrap Up.

This years Ragey's will be a tad different because honestly this was a short year for games, and with the X+Y thing I didn't get as many written as I would have liked to. Still though, this year had its series of ups and downs and while all of them might not have gotten site reviews, I still played an awful lot of games. Hopefully I'll have a slew of games to review in January, but  until then, please enjoy.....

The 2015 Ragey's
Maybe I can get Clover Valley to sponsor me, At least they have a 100% happy guarantee

10: The "Professional Esports Becoming a Thing 15 Years Too Late" award for "Game I wish I got to play" goes to....

Silent Hills (PS4)

After a long grieving period, I have come to accept that probably the game that would reinvent the horror genre probably isn't going to ever happen.... But that doesn't mean I don't want it to...  I don't know what the hell Konami is thinking by trying to burn everything they built to ash, but if there is any sign that the series that I love is truly dead for good, this would be that sign (well, that and the new Silent Hill game was a pachinko machine). 

Rest in piece Silent Hills. You had the potential to be something truly special, and now it seems we will never know.

9: The "Konami 2015 Business Strategy" garbage award for "Biggest Disappointment" goes to.....

Dead Rising 3 (PC)

During the big releases of the two major consoles, it became apparent that exclusive titles wear going to be a big selling point, and as you all could tell my lot stood with sony. But Microsoft did have one game I really wanted to play, and that was Capcom's zombie filled ho-down Dead Rising. When I saw that a 3rd installment of the game was going to be released on PC, I excitedly jumped at my chance to download it. And with my shiny wired 360 controller I finally got to sit down to play it.

And then after that first hour, I put it down and never picked it back up again. Maybe I don't give a shit about the new character, or how washed out brown and boring the color scheme is, or maybe the series didn't do enough new to keep my interest. But if I shill for a game I have very excited about and then put it down almost immediately and not go back to it? That wins biggest disappointment. 

8. The "Holly Holm Embarrassingly Knocking Out Rhonda Rousey" award for "Biggest Surprise" goes to.....

Child of Light (3DS)

On the other end of the spectrum, Child of Light was a game I thought was good in the demo, but not enough to buy the game immediately. Two years I waited because I didn't think I wanted to pay 15$ for it. So when I get it for like 3 bucks on steam and realize that I should have paid the 15 for it, that is an incredibly positive sign.

Aside from bad prose in limerick form, this game had an incredibly fun combat system, and absolutely beautiful soundtrack, fun characters, stylish art design, and a reasonably short play time to make this an incredibly worthwhile experience. I didn't think that I would have liked it as much as I did, and the soundtrack of this game is part of my regular work playlist. This game wins my biggest surprise.



7. The "Virtual Reality Movement in Games" award for "Most Overhyped game" this year goes to.....

Metal Gear Solid 5

So ok, probably not going to have the most credible opinion on this one. But because this is the 3rd point in this list where I'm referencing the Konami debacle, I felt the game deserves mention. I liked Metal Gear Solid, Solid 2, and Solid 4. I never got around to 3, and at one point was looking forward to playing 5.

But with each article I read, each story about how Konami was being a dick to Kojima, each post about fans putting stickers with Kojima's name on copies of the game, each parody video about the situation, each restriction the Konami lawyers enforced, I became exhausted. After a while, my interest started to fade. Downloaded that prequel demo chapter thing, and bought the game used instead of new after the holiday. And both of them have just been sitting there.

It's probably the first time I ever have gotten so tired of hearing about a game I wanted to play, that I ended up not wanting to play it anymore. I have it now, but who knows when I'm going to get to it. Hype has never killed my interest before, so I felt that merits my most Overhyped award. Sorry MGSV, I'm sure you're great and I'll get to you sometime.



6. The "Smart-Watch Fad" award for "Flash in the Pan" game of the year.

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Always can appreciate when someone learns from their mistakes, and in the case of Dragon Age: Inquisition, they certainly learned theirs. Taking a step back and re-evaluating the cash grab they made with Dragon Age 2, they rebuilt and remolded DA: Inquisition from the ground up and produced a much more enjoyable experience because of it. Hearing people complain that they were boxed in a small number of maps, DA: Inquisition blows the up the world to an massive scale, with people literally playing the first section so long that it knocked the steam out of them to keep playing. That is a total 180 of philosophy.

While it didn't seem to really connect to the Dragon Age canon that was set before it (although it did bring back Morrigan *swoon*), it weaved a tale with some seriously difficult moral choices for me to make as it unfolded. With lots of different character building potential it gave me lots of ways to play the game, and this time produced a very interesting and fun set of characters which blow the last game out of the water.

I just wish the character creation wasn't ass. 

5. The "Full Price Early Access Alpha Build" award for "Worst Value" goes to....

Persona 4: Dancing All Night (Vita)

I hate putting a game I liked in a negative category, but I have to call a spade a spade here.  Persona 4: Dancing All Night is a fantastic game. It continues the Persona 4 canon which I love, let's me revisit some of my favorite characters, and despite having a goofy dancing theme to the game the story still somehow managed to be awesome, harrowing, and interesting. My love for Persona 4 is unshaken here, that much is obvious.

But when the game is only out for a month and has over 70 fucking dollars of DLC, that shit is completely unacceptable in my book. Even to something I love as much as Persona 4. It's just another case of a company withholding completed content to charge me a little more for it later.  Go to hell Atlus, I thought you would above this money grabbing bullshit. I've never felt so betrayed. I want to play all the extra content, but you won't get an extra cent from me for that shit. Fuck you.



4. The "McDonalds Dollar Mozzarella Sticks" award for "Best Value" goes to....

Bloodborne (PS4)

Is anyone really surprised that Bloodborne is my game of the ye... wait.. It's not? How is that possible?! Yes, for the first time since I've started doing this charade, the current "From Software" game is not my game of the year. Believe me, I wanted it to be.

Bloodborne shook up the regular "souls game" rigmarole by picking up the tempo of the fights and removing your ability to block. The game rewarded aggressive gameplay, and managed to continue to punish me for hesitation. The Gothic scene fit in quite nicely and had some excellent monster design. The only problem was the game was kind watered down with skills and equipment which only really allowed for like 2 or 3 build types.

But the recently released "Old Hunters" added a meaty chunk of locations, bosses, items, weapons and armor to an already lengthy experience. It provided more variables and different ways to build the character, and since I've rolled through it with 3 different characters at like 70 hours a piece, That wins best value.... Actually, there is one other that is a better value but we'll get to that in a little. 

3. The "Boom: Butterfly Effect" Honorable mention goes to....

Until Dawn (PS4)

I love that the games landscape is awash with new horror IP, but this one had me worried. The more I saw gameplay and trailers, I was very worried that this would just be another Heavy Rain or Beyond: Two Souls. On one hand, it was. But on the other, it totally wasn't.

Yes it followed the cinematic story style of play I've gotten bored with in the past. But in this one it forced you to make split second decisions often, and many of them had the potential to hurt or kill your characters. The cheesy horror movie story helped this, but rung to me as one of the first proper implementations of this gameplay style. This was fun, playing a sad Ellen Paige getting harassed at a party was not.

While I'd say you won't get much replay value more than 2 plays by yourself, I will say this is a great game to have some friends over and let them make the decisions. Knowing whats gonna happen and seeing what choices your friends make made this an incredibly social game for me. Ended up being the one of the most multiplayer games I've played in a while. Until Dawn was absolutely worth the purchase to me. 

2. The "EVO Grand Finals Controller Malfunction" award for "Worst Game of the Year" goes to.....

Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (PS4)

Capcom, I think it might be time to put this series to bed. It had a great run, but the magic just isn't there anymore. Even getting to finally play again as my favorite character in this series again, Claire, didn't motivate me enough to get through your episodic installment of this game.

Each installment of this story becomes more watered down and less interesting to me. There is no new mainstay baddie that feels like a credible threat to the growing cast of protagonists. Forcing me to control 2 characters who are pretty much useless didn't endear me to the system. Moira and whoever the fuck the little girl was could have been NPCs for as useful as they were. After 2 or 3 chapters I became disenchanted enough to not care how the story turned out, put it down, and never went back.

I'm glad I waited for for this to come down in price, because even the discounted amount wasn't even worth it to me. While we are saying our final goodbyes to Silent Hill, we should move a plot over and say ours to Resident Evil as well. Even the idea of a remake of Resident Evil 2 doesn't have me excited anymore.

1. The "Woshige Premature Celebration" Award for "Best game of the year" goes to...

Smite (PC/Xbox One)

I wanted to give this best value so Bloodborne could be my game of the year, but I have to call this like it is. For a guy who has been pretty lukewarm to the MOBA genre as a whole, no game has held my attention this year longer than Smite has. 

Some games I play like 3 times through, some games I have a 400+ hour save. Smite has somehow gotten me to play a strictly online multiplayer game, going against all convictions I have, nearly every night for at least two or three hours since I installed it. It's caused me to host my first all day lan party (of which only 2 other people attended but it was good enough for me). And despite not being good at the game, not knowing the difference between an ADC or a Mid Support pusher, and multiple nights of rage fueled profanity, I somehow keep coming back for more. 

Switching from overhead map view to 3rd person makes Smite feel much faster paced and more skillful, the gods from actual religious pantheons scratch my love of mythology nicely, and although it was free play I had no problem plunking down the 30 bucks for all of the characters to be unlocked. I might put down the other games after a while, but I see no signs of me putting down Smite any time soon. Rage Quitter Game of the Year, hands down. 

Can't believe I'm still writing on this thing considering how little traction it gets. Here's to the next year of it.

Dragon Quest Heroes (PS4): An homage of a different color.

I, like everyone else in the united states who owned an NES got their JRPG roots by playing a few franchises. Final Fantasy obviously needs no introduction and it paved the way for me, but there was another then competing title that went by Dragon Quest, or as we knew it in America Dragon Warrior. I really liked this series. I liked it a lot. Specifically Dragon Quest 4.

The problem is the original NES was a fickle mistress, and she would sometimes outright delete your games if she so chose. She chose often. Despite it all I have stuck with the series playing them off and on through its many iterations through the years. So when I heard they were doing a Dynasty Warriors style game featuring this universe I was intrigued. 

It had potential, but it also had some pitfalls. I love the idea of going back to visit some of these characters, but I'm not a huge fan of crossover games as their stories tend to suck. Also, I've never been a huge fan of the Dynasty Warriors series as a whole. Would I be getting a re-skinned copy of that game? Guess we'll find out. 

DRAGON QUEST HEROES:

The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below (PS4)

The story in this iteration picks up in the Kingdom of Arba. Differing from most Dragon Quest worlds that the nature of this one is peaceful. Humans and monsters lived in harmony with each other and this has been the norm for a significant number of generations.

In Arba we meet our protagonists Aurora and Luceus, a pair of soldiers to the kingdom and clearly a set of longtime friends. Aurora is headstrong and impulsive young girl, Luceus is cautious and tactical and suffers from a horrible case of DBZ hair. They are out and about enjoying a festival with their friend Healix the healslime. As they engage in some cliche character banter the screen cuts to a dark robed figure doing what appears to be a similarly evil ritual. A wave of darkness spreads over the land and every monster it touches then goes berserk and starts attacking people.

Being knights in service to the king, our heroes rush to defend him with Healix in tow. Once they know he's safe they intend to find out why the monsters have gone violent and to see if there is any way to for them to be restored to their normal friendly selves while at the same time coming to the protection of the rest of the world around them.

As somewhat expected from a game that was developed by the same group who made Dynasty Warriors the story to start was pretty much non-existent and basically used was used to give a very brief justification for why it was time to wail on baddies. Pretty much from the word go they let you know that this is not a traditional and proper Dragon Quest title. This game is going to be more in the vein of Hyrule Warriors where you job is to kick ass and kick a lot of it. 

I expected this going into the game, which honestly is probably why I was more receptive to the game. Anyone who was expecting this to be like a proper Dragon Quest is more than likely going to be disappointed. What did surprise me however, is how much care the developers took to make this feel like a proper Dragon Quest game.  Almost every single little nuance to it made me think of the old NES Dragon Warrior titles. Black boxes with iconic white type, still needing to talk to the priest to save, hunting for small medals for top class items and so on. Everything is laid out in a way to homage the Dragon Quest games of old.

Although I will say, for reasons that I do not understand, a number of the monsters names were changed. This for whatever reason threw me completely off kilter and it actually took longer to adjust than I thought they would. I guess some of these changes happened in earlier iterations of the game and I'm just now getting them. Christo becoming Kiryl I can accept, but Liquid Metal Slime? Fuck you, it's a Metal Babble and that's all I will accept is as.

One thing this game can give you that the JRPG usually doesn't is a sense of scale
because now you get to see how big specific monsters are in relation to a human.

The music I feel deserves special recognition for both good and bad reasons. This was one of the many things carefully tailored to be new yet still feel classic. Although none of songs use chiptune, the short play of the notes some makes it feel like it does. a number of the most notable songs from the series make and appearance, and a lot of the 4 catalog specifically. Which is great because Dragon Quest IV was the best.

The problem is the thing that caused the biggest stink in the media, which is just another example of the game company that just doesn't get why people like streaming video game content. So Squenix said you can totally stream the game, you just cant stream the music. What the fuck? I get that there has to be some kind of licencing issue. But I mean what the hell. So instead of trying to figure out what the fuck I was supposed to do to make my game stream-able, I instead just opted not to. Swing and miss there Square.

Terry's abilities allow him to constantly barrage attacks while healing himself
as he does, which makes him a great character to switch to in a pinch.

So my greatest concern going into this game was: "Would this play exactly like Dynasty Warriors?" and by that I mean would I pick a single character, be dropped into in giant map full of baddies, and then trudge through them to get to the one specifically harder enemy at the end. The short answer is no, because it does try to maintain some of its JRPG roots within it so instead of one grand scale battle you fight on a series of maps smaller in scope and usually with objectives.

Although I use the term objectives loosely, since they usually fall under the blanket goals of: "Beat all the enemies", "Defend this place from all the enemies", "Find and Defeat this specific enemy", or "defeat the boss". I appreciate that they took some effort to try to make the questing feel different but it kinda fails on that front since generally the objective is pretty much the same. But hey, there is also sidequesting to do too at least right?

Well sort of. There are tons of quests you can take but almost all of them are just re-defend this position, beat all the enemies, or grind them till they drop a specific item. This last one is exceptionally annoying because sometimes there are not an abundance of a specific monster type around and trying to grind them is hard enough, but then if you need like 5 of a specific RARE drop then you are just up fucked river and can expect to find yourself grinding for hours. Some teammates help with this more than others, so play around with everyone to find who you like best.

Because when I think timeless JRPG franchises, I think Andrew Lloyd-Webber.

I feel they went with a pretty strong line-up of selections for the cast list that spans over the extent of the game. Many of them where characters I knew, most of which I liked, and the ones that I didn't know all that well were still good additions. My problem with it, is it was VERY easy to lock into who stays with the party. For example, Alena is the first non-original character to appear in the game after the new characters have been introduced. And from the moment she introduced, she instantly becomes a party staple, (or she should, if you aren't an idiot).

Alena was known for being a physical powerhouse in Dragon Quest IV and when she appears here that mantle is immediately resumed. She fast moving short range combos, and her multifist smashes for several seconds of continuous damage. Which is them amplified as she can break into clones that widen her range and deal even more hits. If you take the time to build your stats right and boost her strength and defense, and give her abilities that restore MP with critical hits, she basically can't be stopped. She is totally broken.

Build Alena right, and no monster can stand against her nonstop barrage of fists.

There were points in the game where I felt I was just using the Dragon Quest IV cast, but by the end of the game I found the most solid team to be your hero (because you have to), Alena & Terry (for relentless offense), and then either Maya or Bianca (for magic or ranged). It gives you some massively damaging characters, 3 of them have a big area of effect skill, and if you are grinding items, Bianca's "rain of pain"  just mows down enemies like nobody's business.

Speaking of the combat, It is an absolute necessity to TURN OFF EASY MODE. It pitches it as a way to simplify the game so you can play easily and then enjoy the story for what it is. The problem is it turns the game into repeatedly mashing one button, and I won't lie it made me almost stop playing the game because it got repetitive and boring. Turning the game off forced me to learn how to use specific attacks and when to time them. Suddenly the combat became more engaging and skillful, and therefore way more fun to do. Eventually I got to the point where I was railing huge combos and thing switching to a new character on the fly to keep it up and then finishing with a massive Coup De Grace when you max out your tension gauge. It feels bad ass to mow down a massive crowd that way.

A number of Dragon Quest's signature monsters make an appearance in the game.
Some of them just as tough as you remember.

I am going to say something remarkably stupid here: I love the art, but hate the character design. Again, everything in this game goes to the painstaking detail of and old Dragon Quest title and monsters are no exception. Many of the most iconic and notable make an appearance and it always made me happy to see which new one got introduced that I recognized, and the maps are brightly colored and vibrant, which I always appreciate in a game more than a dark washed out pallet.

But I just can't look at these characters and not think Dragon Ball Z. It's 100% the most noticeable with Lucius because he suffers from Goku/Crono hair from the start, but then when you use his tension gauge to hit your Coup De Grace, lo and behold his hair does the dumb spiked up Super Saiyan thing. Because I couldn't take it seriously, Lucius rode the bench the whole game. Lucius sucks.

Stupid. Fuck Lucius on his hair alone. 

I will say that there is a significant amount of fully rendered and voice acted cutscenes which somewhat caught me by surprise because I didn't remember Dynasty Warriors having all that many of them. It was here I noticed they did a very cool thing by giving each of the cast members different accents to sort of represent the differences between then. The main cast of this game are primarily European English, Alena and Kiryl come from land with a Tsar so naturally they a more Russian sounding accent, Maya is a darker skinned character who is dancer (of the seemingly belly variety) so she has a more Indian/Punjabi style accent to go with it, and I'm going to mess this up but I believe that Nera and more specifically Bianca have Irish accents.

I sort of brushed it off at first but as I played through, it really did find it added some originality to all the characters. If I had any complaints about it, it would be that Alena's voice is incredibly high pitched and doofy sounding, she sounds way better in the original Japanese vocals. And King Doric.... ugh, this guys voice. Ok I get that he's supposed to a boisterous and good spirited medieval king but this guy seriously hams it up for every single line he delivers, even when he's supposed to be emoting sadness or grief, he's still loud and boisterous. It's incredibly annoying and even more so when he has a significant amount of lines in the story.

Almost as if she knows she's not dressed for battle, Maya has a series of Area of Effect
dance spells that push enemies away. She was my magical powerhouse on the team.

And while this game has the cliche story arc of "Dark Lord summons Dark Monster, hero of light must fight them" I have to say that I was actually pleasantly surprised with how the story actually unfolded. Mash up games have a pretty common track record for having generally garbage story lines. There are only a few games where they mix characters and the story generally works well.

This is one where everything felt natural together. I think the reason for this is they don't really focus on WHY all these characters from other worlds are here. The characters explain things about the game they came from and reference story points that occur in them, but the overall narrative focuses on things happening in this game and characters respond as if it is their problem as well. It holds together surprisingly well and even manages to tug at the heartstrings at pivotal moments. I was pleasantly surprised with how it all unfolded.

Psaro was a bad ass villain ruining shit for the human race
long before Sephiroth was even grown in a a test tube.

Once you develop a rhythm for the controls, I wouldn't say this is a very difficult game. The majority of the levels don't much change in strategy, so it can be paced by running the maps as you normally would with some occasional side questing. The levels really only started to challenge me near the very end of the game when I would have some protection missions and a very stubborn set of enemies would hunt the target down. It was hard to keep them off of my ward.

There is a New Game+ but honestly by the time I finished the game I was feeling pretty fatigued with it. Perhaps there was extra post game to do but when I finally brought the story to a close I was ready to move onto something different. If there is any one pro-tip I can give you, its save your medals until you can get Alena's best weapon in the medal shop. It will run you about 70 medals but if you do sidequests and kill hordes, it shouldn't take you too long to do. It just makes her even more unstoppable.

Seriously, eat a dick Dragon Quest. This cutscene was so sad for literally no reason.
Poor little happy looking Healslimes should not allowed to be so sad.

There is also a crafting mechanic in the game that I used maybe twice. I didn't use most of them because it seems like the things I was able to craft were only situationally useful, not useful at all, or only had a marginal effect. It just seemed like the resources I was gathering were put to better use outfitting my characters. Which honestly I was probably wasting my time doing it, there are a handful of character specific quests you have to do to finish the game, but ultimately you can roll with the same party for most of it.

I ended up grinding the game for close to 70 something hours so I can certainly say I got my money's worth out of it. If you are fan of Dragon Quest's lore and stories then this is a fun little homage to their entire series. But if you are looking for a game that's a proper Dragon Quest this more than likely is not going to be it. However, It manages to shine well as merging of two different genres of game to put together a competent and enjoyable experience. I liked Dragon Quest: Heroes way more than I thought I would and I can give it a recommendation.

Seriously Alena, You have to ditch that awful hat. 

Persona 4: Dancing All Night (Vita): That's it. I will apparently buy anything this franchise puts out.

When they announced Persona 5, it came with a handful of other announcements that were coming out, a number of them dealing with Persona 4's  universe. One of them, was a very stupid idea I felt didn't need to exist. My friends hassled me about how great it would be though, and I swore to them that I was not going to buy a Vita for a single rhythm game.

Flash forward a few months, I did cave and get a Vita but not for this game. However, of the purchases I made with the system, one of them was Persona 4, which I had already bought twice as is and the one game for the Vita I bought that I didn't already own I haven't started yet. I am fucking weak. Let's get on with this.

PERSONA 4: DANCING ALL NIGHT(Vita)

The story of P4:DAN takes place after the events of I assume Persona 4: Golden after the Investigation Team solved the Inaba murders (but apparently not before that game's epilogue). Yu Narukami is now in a new school but is still with the old gang because the team's resident starlet and idol, Rise Kujikawa, is on her comeback trail to come back to showbiz. Nervous about her return, she convinced her friends to join her on stage as her backup dancers (because why the fuck not?), and the team has been practicing both in studio with her and back home in Inaba.

They will be participating in the "Love Meets Bonds" festival with friend and rival idol Kanami Mishita and her group Kanami's kitchen. However, its been a bumpy road as the festivals website supposedly shows a video of a dead idol dancing at midnight, and those who view it get taken away and never wake again. Sure enough, the other members of Kanami's Kitchen go missing, and the investigation team checks the site to find out. Naturally, the site indeed does something strange and they ensnared by ribbons and pulled into another world.

This world is referred to as the Midnight Stage, and it functions similar to the TV world in some regards but is different otherwise, most namely you can't resort to violence here. The ribbons in this world drain you of your personality and force you to be something you aren't, but the team figures out you can fight back through expression of yourself and your meaning, so since they have been practicing dance, they use this as their weapon to try to save the taken members of Kanami's Kitchen.

What in the blue goddamn fuck??? OK, I get that this is a franchise that stems from a base of JRPGs so obviously story is kind of an important role to its universe, and its a story I love but that was in a 60+ hour RPG. Even the fighting game that hooked me on this series had some incredibly wordy story to all of it, but it's a fighting game and even those sometimes have a bit of a story. But this is a rhythm game, and sans a few exceptions rhythm games almost never have a plot to them. So much like Persona 4 Arena if you venture into the story mode, expect a substantial amount of (well voice acted) text.

So the inherent problem with the story was this: I powered the game up, got through the initial couple of lines to get the premise and by the first playable portion my first thought to travel through my head is "Oh my god, this is fucking stupid." Now let me be clear here: I love this universe, and I love these characters, but it only took one line of "We can show them how we feel with the power of our Dancing!" to make me shudder in sheer douchechillery and almost turn the game off. It's nearly impossible to take this game seriously.

Ugh, it's so painfully uncomfortable.

But if there is one thing Atlus and the Persona 4 dev team knows how to do, it's weave a good story. As stupid as the idea that a professional idol would insist on group of amateurs without a dance background as her back up on her first show back in show business is, as soon as they transport to an alternate world (as they do in Persona) it didn't take me long to get wrapped back up in the story. Interestingly enough, once I can get past the idea that they are fighting by dancing, the narrative is actually still really good.

They introduce a lot of new characters to series, and a handful of old faces poke their head in as well. Smartly, aside from a handful of a small references, they keep the extensive back history relatively out of the plot for the most part. They make a few references to the TV World from the other games, but ultimately they stick to their own story, which means new players who picked up a rhythm game without no prior Persona experience won't be totally lost. A lot of the new characters are fun, and while the main cast deals with the other world, new protagonist Kanami fits the mystery together with Nanako and Dojima in the real world to keep things interesting both sides.

I will say that though, that this is probably the most "bondagey" Persona since I discovered the series in Persona 2. See, the story mode plays in the Japanese visual novel style of story where character stills talk to each other, much like you have seen in many in this series to come before it, but much like Persona 4 Arena they show you a still image to sort of set the scene.

Well, without getting to in depth as to why it's happening, the captured idols will find themselves bound in ribbons. Some of them are more suggestive than others, and one of the idols is like..... really young. Not that I don't appreciate an out of the blue bondage scene (because who doesn't amirite?), some of them felt really out of place.

The first time it happened, I quirked a brow. This time, it was less subtle and they only
get worse (better?) from there. Although the one of Sumomo is a little rough, she can't be "of age".

The story actually gets really dark as fuck too, this isn't outside the norm for this series but for a game that's focused on lighthearted dancing, it's a very sharp contrast. I mean the story mode starts off with a pretty brutal tragedy, and as Persona 4 likes to do they focus on the characters insecurities and self perception, which is something everyone has to deal with thus making it very relate-able. And that's probably what made the ending that much more satisfying when I finally pushed to the final songs.

And I admit it, the longer the story stretched the more completely enamored I got, pretty much completely forgetting it was a rhythm game until an actual playable section came up. While long winded, if you buy the game, you have to play the story mode. It's a fun followup to end of Persona 4 Golden and lets you catch up with the old gang (and totally affirm where my head canon is taking the story). Honestly they can do this every year and I'll probably love it.

Kanami is mentioned in the other games and the show. but this is the first time we
actually get to see her. I have to say, she wasn't what I was expecting, but still a welcome edition

Christ almighty, 900 words in and I haven't even talked about the game play yet. So looking at the trailers, I was really confused on how the game worked, but once it was in my hands it actually could be simpler. for lack of a better term it is a bit DDRish in nature. you have a series of notes that appear from the middle of the screen and move outwards, when playing you need to use the corresponding directional on that side of the system: Up Left and Down, or Triangle, Circle and Square.

Obviously, hitting notes is easy, so they also have hold notes where you tap at the start and hold it, and then release at the end. No big, like DDR's freeze notes I can handle this. They also have Pair notes where you have to hit two at a time, these are usually marked by a long pink line connecting the two notes. Most of time these aren't too bad but I sometimes get confused if another note is following the same line.

As you can tell, there are a significant number of costumes to unlock.
And yes, I unlocked all the maid costumes first. Eff you. 

The last mechanic is "scratching" where a circle comes outward. if you move an analog it continues your combo and boosts your gauge but they aren't mandatory to do, and thank god because moving the analog while trying to keep the beat was nearly an impossible task for me to do. I would constantly miss other notes trying to move to the analog. Thankfully, you can turn on a feature that allows the shoulder buttons to scratch which felt way more intuitive to me. It's not super comfortable to hold the Vita that way, but I will say that it's pretty much necessary.

While scratching doesn't count against your score if you miss them, it does provide a boost to your gauge at the top of the screen. 5 shadows sit at the top of the screen and if they aren't happy and dancing by the end of the song, you don't clear the stage. Honestly, I have never fully understood where the line is. I've they flashing and jumping around I know I'm doing well, but I've finished stages with all of them white and smiling, which I would consider good. But when the screen fades it says I didn't clear.

This is super frustrating because on easy and normal I am fine, blowing through levels with ease. When I bumped up to hard though is where the game really knuckles down with you, When you miss notes you get big knocks to your not all that clear gauge, and it's very difficult to repair the damage so if your game starts to go south you have to get on a hot streak to bring it back, or restart the level. On the "All Night" difficulty setting missing a small streak of notes can kill you in seconds.

Thankfully, the game has you covered on this front as well. As you play through the game you earn money that you can use in the shop. This can be used on costumes or accessories for your characters, but the real use is the item section where you can get items and books. These affect the game by giving you bigger boosts during parts of the song, let's the off timed "goods" not affect your combo, lets you continue the song if you fail and others. Each of these help, but as you would expect they remove a percentage of the points and money you earn at the end of the stage.

Sorry, Couldn't find any English game play videos.

This is where the books come in, because they add some effects that make it harder and boost your score and money. So I played to the point where I would get Random note orders, Macho speed, and some other effect I can't remember, and even with the helpers set I'm still getting like 275% increase to my earnings. This made clearing out store a breeze. Inside of one power outage in my house and less than a week since its release, I've pretty much all but cleared out the store because you can pull in nearly 100,000 in one go one the All Night setting.

I only have a small number of issues with the game. Some of them are minor, one is major. First off aside from the goofy premise for the story, one of the hardest adjustments when I started the game was that Laura Bailey didn't voice Rise Kujikawa in this one, so there was a bit of shock in adapting to the new voice. At this point the characters are sacred to me so when you change a voice, like every other douchebag probably did I got really upset about it..... for about 2 hours, and by that point I barely noticed the difference anymore. Pretty much the same thing happened when Matt Mercer started voicing Kanji over Troy Baker.

When Naoto "girls" it up, she's actually super cute. No wonder people love her.

The aforementioned scratching issue persistently bugs me. because there is no real fix to this solution. Holding my vita with my fingers on the shoulder buttons is an awkward hold, and it's not very comfortable. But the only other alternative is to use the analog sticks which make sense for the motion of "scratching" but I feel my performance in the game is significantly weaker by trying to shift to the analogs. I don't think I could do it from the hard mode and up.

Something that surprised me was a complete lack of Multiplayer mode. Even if there wasn't some kind of cooperative play, they could have easily put in some kind of vs mode where you could compare the scores. Hell, in the fever times of the songs two of the characters dance on screen at once, so they could have whipped up something to that effect to help in co-op or something. I don't know. It was just surprising to me that the game was totally devoid of multiplayer. Even something like Final Fantasy:Theaterrhythm's battle mode would have been appreciated here.

Don't know when it's happening in the timeline, but I'm calling it right here:
Chie and Yousuke will get married at some point in the Persona Universe.

And despite this series having a fantastic set of music to it, the music selection in the game could be better. The game itself features 29 tracks, but 9 of them are remixes of other songs and some of them have 2 different remixes. Yeah it's cool that Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka remixed a song for this game, but I've already played two different versions of this song already. The game had a very deep soundtrack so it surprised me that more of it wasn't used.

Not only that, but they used "Maze of Life" which was one of my favorite songs from Persona Q. If you were going to borrow songs from other games, why was there not more representation from that? "Light the Fire up in the Night" or "Laser Beam" would have been fantastic additions to this soundtrack and would have given us some different songs to play instead of remixes of ones I've already done. Or to go even further why not grab tracks from other Persona games? This probably won't be a long running spin off, so I would have loved to hear "Mass Destruction" or "Burn My Dread" in the track listing.

I found it odd that although Rise is the only professional idol in the group,
she seemed to take the stage the least out of the whole story mode...

But we know why they aren't in there, don't we? Of course we do. Because if you put the full version of the game out there, you can't land that sweet sweet DLC money now can you? Fuck you, Atlus. Looking on their very own website, By the end of October (remembering this came out on Sept 29th), there will be over SEVENTY FUCKING DOLLARS of DLC content ranging from songs, costumes, characters and accessories. This is completely unacceptable and shame on you for it. You used to be one of the good guys.

Let me ask you something: Say the game came full of all of the content that they were promising but they then slapped the full price of the game on the label, how well do you think this game would do? "Persona 4: Dancing All Night available now for only 120$!!" Maybe, MAYBE a handful of the die-hards would buy a copy but ultimately the sales would be crushed because nobody wants to pay 120 dollars for a game. So why do they feel it's OK to gut the content and charge me more later? It's absolutely insane, and I can't believe that after the Streetfighter X Tekken and Mass Effect debacles that this is still fucking happening, and people keep letting it. It's fucking insane to me.

It's barely been a week and there is already enough DLC for a 3rd of the price
of the full game. Fuck you. I hate this money grabbing bullshit.

When this game was first announced, I thought it was a stupid idea. Shifting a JRPG to a 1v1 fighter didn't feel like much of a stretch to me and I ended up loving it so much that it made me go back to the RPG. But a rhythm game? Why a rhythm game? Well, in retrospect I hold Shoji Meguro on the same tier of  amazing video game composers like Akira Yamaoka, Nobuo Uematsu, and Daiskue Ishiwatari. So once I realized that the soundtracks are really one of the strongest aspects of the series, making a game focused on them didn't seem all that far fetched to me.

And despite the fact that I felt it was a stupid premise for a story and found it unbelievably difficult to swallow the image of some of my all time favorite characters goofily dancing around, Persona 4: Dancing all Night delivered pretty much exactly what I expected it in a rhythm game experience for me. Is it a system seller? Probably not, but it certainly was entertaining and it feels like a game that I will be playing for a while until get a let a level of mastery on the top difficulties. If you are a fan of the Persona series or just rhythm games, this one absolutely satisfies.

I guess it is what it is, I'm sure I will do this dance again when they come out with Persona 4: Cooking Battle, Persona 4: Kart Racing, or Puzlsona 4.....  For the love of god, when will you people realize I NEED HELP? *sob*

I might be the only person in the world who is lukewarm to Nanako.

Child of Light (PC): Wait, Ubisoft made this? There must be something amiss.

Sometimes I need to trust my instincts better. This game showed up on the Playstation Store fairly early in the life cycle of me owning a PS4. It had a downloadable demo and a cute aesthetic to it. And the demo had a cool battle system. I thought was an interesting demo, but in my head I was like "That's not bad. If that comes out on the PS+ freebies I'll snag that one." It never did.

Almost 2 years finally passed and I realized I could get PSN cards from my gas station with points. So I did, fully prepared to pay the 15 dollars they were asking for it since it was summer and there weren't a lot of PS4 releases. But as I was doing this, the Steam summer sale happened, and I'll be damned if that very game didn't drop to 3 bucks. There was no reason not to jump on that deal. So I did. I took my sweet ass time getting to it, but now that I have I am glad that I did. 

CHILD OF LIGHT(PC)

The tale of Child of Light opens with a limerick telling us that in Austria, there is a place called Five Hills that is ruled by a beloved Duke, and his wife. They bore a daughter named Aurora, but while Aurora was still very young, her mother passed. The Duke raised Aurora alone, but was still very happy. He fell in love a 2nd time and remarried to a mysterious duchess. On the Friday before Easter however, Aurora went cold in her slumber and was found dead by morning. The Duke was utterly distraught and became bed ridden.

However, Aurora found herself waking up in a curious place called Lumeria. Thinking to be in a nightmare she is found by a firefly named Igniculus who guides her to an alter where a Sword lies. She frees the sword and challenges the guardian there and rescues and old sage who informs her Lumeria was once bright, but a dark queen named Umbra has take over and banished the light. She has a mirror that can return her home, but can only do so if she returns the light of the sun, moon and stars. Aurora is reluctant, but has no other choice.

Sounds kind of like a children's story book doesn't it? That is probably the most apt comparison for Child of Light when comparing most of the aspects of this game. Its entire design is meant to emulate that of the children's story book from the language, to the character and art design, the presentation, and honestly even how the story plays out. 

At it's heart the game is a JRPG. But I hesitate to rush the comparison because it blends a number of elements of different styles. For example, My brain wants to say it reminds me of classic Final Fantasy, but if I wanted to be accurate, it would say its more akin to the 2D MMO Maple Story. All of the maps are 2D sidescroller, but very early on you gain the ability to fly on the map, so it actually blows up the various locations pretty significantly. It sometimes suffers from invisible wall syndrome but it the maps never lock you in a box.

Enemies are scattered around the map so encounters aren't random, but you will need to do some minor grinding. This is where the game really shines because I loved this combat system. So you fight either alone or with a teammate and it follows your pretty typical timed battle system, but instead everyone shares the same wait bar. Depending on character or monster speed they move up the wait timer at varied rates, but when you reach 10% left you get to choose your action. This section of the timer is the Casting bar and your action affects your speed for the remainder of your wait before wailing with that attack or spell.

But this is where fights get interesting, because if you manage to attack an enemy when they are in the cast timer, they get interrupted and knocked back down the wait timer. So depending on your attacks and how fast they cast, you can constantly prevent your enemies from attacking you. However, this is a double edged sword because the enemies can do the very same thing to you, and nothing can swing the momentum of a fight than having one or both of your actions interrupted and allowing the rest of the baddies free shots at you.

This is where your firefly buddy comes into play. You can control him with the mouse, 2nd thumbstick, or additional controller (so yes, this could technically be played co-op). All he can do is fly around and flash but he is more useful than you think. In Battle, if you hold your flash on an enemy, it slows down his wait timer and allows you to play catch up, which can be incredibly handy in interrupting an enemy's attack. For many boss fights, this is pivotal. You can also use him to hover over one of your party members, and if you hold his flash on them, they recover a small amount of HP every second or so.

This is not infinite however, so on each battle you will find two plants with "wishes" on them. You can collect these to give your characters a small HP and MP boost, and completely refill Igniculus' flash. It forces you to be strategic about manipulating the time in your favor and using your free healing opportunities at the right moment to not be wasteful. In some of the boss fights proper time manipulation is almost a necessity because a poorly timed interruption can result in a massive chain that paralyze and damage you, allowing them to land even more free hits.

Inniculus' flash is also usable in the map as well. You can use him to stun enemies you pass to prevent them from harming you, or if you wait you can get behind them and set them up for a surprise attack. This usually will give one of your characters a free action to start, and your teammate not that far behind. It also can be used to collect hard to reach treasure chests and items that Aurora cannot reach on the map, and he is also used for a handful of locked door puzzles. 

So let's just get the biggest flaw of the game out of the way now, because its a pretty persistent issue and will probably turn a number of people off to the game. The prose in this game is not great. When you make the decision to do the entirety of the games story and dialog in limericks, you are truly handcuffing yourself to conversations that do not flow naturally.

In some cases it can get tiresome, but as people who watched me steam it noticed, there is a significant number of instances where they either use the same word twice to make it rhyme, or they use two words that sound similar but don't actually rhyme. I may be an English major, but I wasn't good at it and even I know that isn't how it works. The geniuses who write Critical Miss touched on this beautifully.

But if you can look past some of the rough prose in this game, almost everything else about it shines beautifully. I mentioned the art style emulates children's story books, which gives it a nice watercolor pallet that compliments the overall design. This also allows it to give you a pretty diverse cast of characters. Which might I add, has an insane number of characters for an RPG that plays as short as this one. On top of Aurora, other playable characters include Rubella the jester, Finn who is kind of a gnomish mage, Genovefa the.... lizard, swamp thing, and a massive daruma-like ogre called Oengus just to name a couple.

It's strange that the game gives me so many characters to pick from considering I can only have two in the party. You can switch them on the fly, and the game doesn't require you to have Aurora actually in the fray. But I tend to dump all my stat raising items onto the hero, so she seldom left the front line. And once I got Oengus, I basically was shredding through fights. But to be fair, all of the characters have pretty varied skill sets so you can use them as the situation arises.

In addition to each character having a pretty deep skill tree (generally 3 paths you can fill out), you also collect gemstones called occuli that give you various stat boosts. These can be combined to make bigger gems, or new types of gems. Once I realized that a diamond gave you an experience boost, I pretty much dumped everything into making a the largest diamond I could so I was raking in 25% bonus experience for Aurora all game. I also loaded her up with increased dodge when casting and high powered Light attacks (since little seems to be immune to light).

If you manipulate your crafting right, you can make something called a
Princess Stone. I never did, and it didn't seem to affect me finishing the game.

But out of everything that I loved about this game, I think the music is what hit me the hardest. The game's score was produced by the lovely and extremely talented Cœur de Pirate. Again fitting for the stage it has set, much of the game is accompanied by chime, flute, string, and piano melodies. Most of them are primarily a variant of the "Theme of Aurora" which pretty much had me hooked at the opening title screen, and this style worked well for me when I played Atelier Ayesha because the song was fresh in my head, so when it changed in feel to match the scene at hand, that subtle difference felt powerful.

And standing tall amongst the soundtrack to this game, is a song that didn't even get sold on the OST. The battle music is appropriate and there are various different battle tracks throughout the game, but there is one boss theme in particular that feels truly epic. I don't mean that in the slang,"holy shit that's awesome" style of epic. I mean how the orchestral music raises and falls, accompanied by an operatic chorus that remains uptempo. This song pretty much constantly kept the heart rate up and made each boss fight where I heard it feel truly important, and when they started to go bad, it felt that much better when I overcame it. I am a huge advocate of proper score to compliment a game and on this one Ubisoft nailed it.

Wait, Ubisoft? The same people who pump about a billion Assassin's Creed games? Far Cry, Rainbow Six and every other Tom Clancy game? I didn't believe it either. Ubisoft Montreal put this game together and asked famed Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano to produce a promotional piece for the game that was equally gorgeous. Who would have thought they could break away from the Triple-A money generating machine to make something different and beautiful. Honestly, I was shocked. 

So if I have to nitpick some complaints about the game outside of the excessive use of limericks, it'd have to say I was disappointed by the length. It took me only 10 hours to level up to 50+ and completely shred to the ending. And after a bit of necessary questing, the game moves kinda breakneck to the finish basically skipping having one last final dungeon and tosses you into the final boss fight. To be honest I wasn't ready to leave that world yet. I wanted there to be more.

You get Rubella first. Her Tumble ability isn't strong, but her sheer speed and cast
time basically lets you control the timeline. She is an invaluable teammate.

They provide you a new game plus so you can play it again on a harder difficulty and keep your levels, items, and occuli but the game really doesn't change. So unless you love gathering collectibles (you weirdos), you probably won't feel the need to go through it a 2nd time soon. I tried to and inside a couple of fights I didn't really feel the need to continue. Gathering collectibles sucks.

And honestly, items in this game seem pretty pointless too. Throughout the adventure you will constantly find yourself picking up potions with various effects. Some restore health, magic, some cure status affects, boost your attack or defense, hasten you up the timeline, give you immunity to things. And every single one of them means exactly dick. Unless I needed to revive a party member (which happened rarely in my case), every other item in the game didn't seem as a important as knocking  a baddie down the timeline was to me. So for a large portion of the game, the items went completely unused.

At least Quicker and Bicker rhyme.

There is a degree of sidequesting to do in the game, but I hesitate to call it "sidequesting" since most of them seem to be able to be done as you continue on with the main story of the game. There were only a few of them I actually had to backtrack for, and only one them I actually missed (which would have given me another party member, but that dounk would have just ridden the bench anyways).

And this is nitpicky, but I wish I had a clearer explanation of the crafting system when I started because had I known I could use my small stones to make bigger stones, I wouldn't have wasted time mixing things early. I use 3 difference colored stones to make a diamond. I use 3 diamonds to make a bigger diamond. But had I known I coulda just mashed all my colored stones together to make bigger ones, I probably would have saved a lot more resources making big valuable stones faster.

But ultimately, as I said prior these are pretty nitpicky complaints to a game that I thoroughly enjoyed. To say I blew through this game wouldn't be an exaggeration. I played it in like 2 or 3 hour chunks but honestly if I probably could have smashed this game in a sitting if I had the day off. Everything about it kept me totally immersed in this world and I loved pretty much every moment of it.

To that regard, I am disappointed that I had waited so long to give this game its proper chance. Among a slew of mediocre reviews, lukewarm responses, and complaints about the language used I fell victim to hearsay instead of just getting it when I enjoyed the demo. I wish I had sooner. Child of Light isn't going to shatter the gaming industry and revolutionize how RPGs are played, but it gave me a wonderful 10 hours of a children's story to get lost in. It would have been nice to be my PS+ freebie, but it is absolutely worth the 15 bucks they are asking for it.

I wished I wasn't right about Norah...