In the Kingdom Hearts series, the player character often teams up with two other party members as you explore the game’s various Disney worlds. In Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance however, players use friendly versions the game’s monsters—called “Dream Eaters”—as party members instead of the usual Disney characters. Besides leveling-up through battle, your Dream…
Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance plays a lot like past titles in the series, especially Re:coded and Birth by Sleep, however there have been a few major changes. The first is the “free-flow” system which allows you to perform special attacks by interacting with enemies or the environment in certain ways. These attacks are…
The characters of Theatrhythm Final Fantasy—both ally and enemy—come from across all thirteen Final Fantasies. Yet instead of mixing and matching art styles, Square Enix Japanese graphic designer Monster Octopus to re-create all these Final Fantasy characters in their own cute, doll-like style. This is far from the only time Monster Octopus’ art style has…
The Final Fantasy series as a whole has the best original soundtrack in gaming. While many series have a standout song or two, Final Fantasy has thirteen games—and many spin-off titles—brimming with instantly recognizable tunes. Whether written by Nobuo Uematsu, Masashi Hamauzu, or other composers, these memorable scores have captured the souls of gamers for…
Earlier this month to celebrate the Kingdom Hearts 10th Anniversary, Square Enix held the Kingdom Hearts Premier Event in southern Tokyo. Yesterday, to celebrate the release of Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance, they put footage of the event up on the official Kingdom Hearts 3D website. The best video shows the game’s intro movie as…
When the 3DS was announced in March 2010, I knew it was only a matter of time before I bought one. It wasn’t the wonder of 3D or even the games Nintendo was sure to release that gave me this moment of clairvoyance. It was the simple fact that eventually, I buy every system. The…
The Final Fantasy series has been renowned for excellent soundtracks since back in the 8-bit era. So it’s really no surprise that Square Enix would release a game like Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy. Despite hitting the streets in Japan back in February, it has only recently been announced for Western release. There are five songs from…
Theatrhythm Final Fantasy is a music game much like Oendan/Elite Beat Agents where you tap the 3DS’ pen on the touch screen in time with the beat. There are three different types of stages (four if you count the unfailable opening and ending bonus songs): 1) Event, where the song path can move anywhere on…
During the course of my recent interview with Colin Noga and Aaron Lindsay about their experience creating an English patch for Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, I learned about another fan translation in the works. While the pair was working on a translation patch for Tales of Graces (which was sadly canceled…
When Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was first announced at the Tokyo Game Show 2007, horror fans rejoiced. When the E3 gaming expo came the following year with Fatal Frame 4 conspicuously absent, they got worried. And when Nintendo finally announced that the title would not be leaving Japanese shores, they despaired.…
We’ve already taken a look at the tactics-style gameplay and use of historical figures in our coverage of Pokémon + Nobunaga’s Ambition on the Nintendo DS. But when it comes down to it, was Poké-fying the world of feudal Japan a bold new step for the future of Pokémon, or would Nintendo have been better…
While Fatal Frame spin-off, Spirit Camera: The Hidden Memoir will be coming to 3DS next month, one major iteration of the series remains a Japan-only title. Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was released on the Wii back in 2008 and shows no signs of ever leaving its haunted homeland even now. But…
Pokémon + Nobunaga’s Ambition is no doubt one of the strangest crossovers we’ve ever seen. This is not only because it’s crossing a feudal Japanese war strategy game with Pokémon, but also because all the characters in Nobunaga’s Ambition are based on real people. So let’s take a look and see how these real historical…
Pokémon + Nobunaga’s Ambition is the strangest crossover this side of Kingdom Hearts. Not only does it mix a historically-inspired series with a monster-catching one, it also mixes a team-centric strategy game with a one-versus-one traditional RPG. And how does this odd combination work out? Pretty well, actually. As you can see in the game’s…
Written and directed by No More Heroes mastermind Goichi Suda and part of a popular horror series, it’s still a mystery why Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was never released outside of Japan. Maybe it’s because it didn’t fit the Wii’s family friendly image, or maybe Fatal Frame III didn’t sell as…
When one great RPG was released only in Japan, people were annoyed. When two great RPGs were released only in Japan, they became legitimately upset. But when three great RPGs were denied to them, they got organized. This was the birth of Operation Rainfall, a public—and as it turns out completely successful—petition to get these…
The Wii has a family friendly image to the point where you almost expect every Wii game to be appropriate for all ages. Sure there are games like House of the Dead: Overkill and MadWorld, but they are rarities. Who would expect any kind of questionable content in a Zelda-esque adventure game? And then Pandora’s…
Games have long been included as extras on Blu-rays/DVDs—though the quality of said games tends to rank somewhere between the worst Facebook game and shovelware flash titles. But when Macross Frontier The Movie: The False Songstress was released on Blu-ray in Japan back in 2010, Artdink and Bandai-Namco went a few steps further to create…
While it was once one of the most popular and well received series in gaming, Dynasty Warriors seems to receive more and more negative feedback with each iteration. This is not due to radical shifts in gameplay and/or tone—as many game sequels are accused of doing—but rather the exact opposite: Negative comments center around Tecmo…
As a game journalist living and working in Japan, the question I’m most commonly asked is, “What game can help me learn Japanese?” The answer: Slime Forest Adventure. Set up like a traditional JRPG, you go around the world, battle monsters, and try to rescue a princess. The story is simple and the graphics are…
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