For a while now, I’ve been thinking about phasing out my current site in order to establish a new place to host all of my gave reviews, rundowns, and other writings, without the excess baggage that comes with a blog that one has been working with for about five years. I feel that I have become substantially better as a writer, and have a lot of things on this blog that I don’t really want to attach myself to. However, if I do switch over to a new site, I want it to be something very nice and more professional than a free WordPress blog, and feature a higher standard of writing quality than I currently have. So the idea is on the backburner until I am done with school and, presumably, have more time to devote to projects like this. I’d also need a better name for the site.
Anyways, time to talk about some cool games that were announced in some capacity this past week, because everything that caught my eye was actually pretty nifty looking. Starting with two licensed games based on Cartoon Network shows that are coming to PC and consoles. The first being a Japanese styled RPG, Steven Universe: Save the Light from Grumpyface Studios, who previously made a critically acclaimed Steven Universe mobile RPG. While the second being OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes, an action brawler based on the show of the same name from none other than Capybara Games from Super Time Force and Below fame. Only a few details were revealed, but they both seem like properly developed licensed games, have striking art styles, and are based on shows I rather enjoy quite a bit.
Everybody has heard about Steven Universe by now, so I will just say that while the show is a very appealing adventure that manages to succeed as an action oriented show, a drama, slice-of-life, and feel like something that came from the minds of a bunch of big 90s anime dorks, never before have I hated so much of the supporting cast of something by proxy. Seriously, whenever humans are the focal point in this show that should be about friendship, intergalactic conflict, and gem fusion, I get super annoyed. While OK K.O. is a series of shorts that are basically everything fun about 90s fighting games, beat ‘em ups, and Dragon Ball rolled together with modern cartoon sensibilities and a new art style for every short. It only recently started airing, and if the phrase “my soul burns with justice” resonates with you at all, you should give this show a watch.
Now that I’ve taken care of that, it’s time to once again talk about my favorite subject. Niche Japanese games coming to PC. Starting this week’s installment with something of a doozy, in July of 2016, Aksys Games announced that they were bringing Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters: Daybreak Special Gigs to PS4, Vita, and PC. Only for Aksys to then say that there was a communication error and there was, in fact, not going to be a PC version of the game. Only for PQube, a publisher best known for handling the European distribution of certain niche games and localizing GalGun: Double Peace in the west, to appear out of nowhere and announce that they will be publishing the game on PC via Steam This is certainly odd, but ultimately means that another interesting looking niche Japanese game will end up on Steam, which is a good thing. After all of this confusion most will likely never notice, the game is coming out on March 17th.
Continuing their efforts to appease to a western audience on their own, Spike Chunsoft has announced that they will be bringing over the visual novel 428: Shibuya Scramble. Originally released in 2008, the game is a murder mystery investigation sort of affair centered around a small group of playable characters with an abundance of branching storylines that are arranged in a way not dissimilar to the Zero Escape series. Also, it has full motion video. From that description alone, I am both curious and excited for check this game out when it releases in spring 2018 for PS4 and PC.
As should come across as no surprise, the most recent title in the Neptunia series, Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online, will indeed be coming over to the west. The game will release sometime this winter, and will release simultaneously on PS4 and PC, a first for the series. For those unaware, this iteration is an action oriented spin-off of the series developed by Tamsoft, best known for Onechanbara and Senran Kagura titles, who also worked on the alright Neptunia U: Action Unleashed along with the rubbish MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune Vs. Zombies. Based on that track record I’m not very excited for this game, even though it looks far better than the prior iterations, and that’s mostly because, despite my fondness for it, the Neptunia games are not all that great, and their flaws become very apparent after playing through seven of them in two years.
Regardless, I know I am going to eventually play this game when it comes out, but likely after the supposedly good Superdimension Neptune Vs Sega Hard Girls, which should be coming to PC, which it totally is because there’s an ESRB rating for it, and rating boards rarely ever lie.
There were a few other stories that caught my eye, but if I’m going to talk about small independently developed games, I’d much rather do that in the form of a proper review that I would surely end up publishing long after the game’s launch, as I don’t play games at launch all too often.