Next-Gen's Top 20 From Tokyo 78
Next Generation has a rundown on the 20 games they think defined TGS 2006. Leading the pack is Microsoft's double-barrel RPG action, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, their current great white hope for the Japanese market. From the article: "The weight of the bigger names involved -- artists Takehiko Inoue and Akira Toriyama, and writer Kiyoshi Shigematsu -- might even draw in completely uninitiated gamers. Blue Dragon, coming this year, as a pack-in with the console, will help make the machine a more familiar sight in homes that purchase PlayStation 2s for Dragon Quest; Lost Odyssey, coming next year, looks like something that could be advertised in cinemas." White Knight Story clocks in at number 3, and everyone from Ars Technica to Tycho is praising this Level 5 game as being the first PS3 title they're really getting excited about.
One Thing I hate about Console battles (Score:4, Interesting)
I miss the time I could go on with only one console. Unless the 360 folds and Blue Dragon/Lost Odyssey either suck or come out of the ps3 I can't seem myself without it.
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Thankfully, I actually don't care about Final Fantasy (or most of these new shiny-shiny RPGs) anymore, so I should be all right.
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I just wish I had a chance (and time enough) to play DW VII.
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However, lately I've been playing Star Ocean: 'Till the End of Time and it has the same basic system, you control one character and the other two just go off and do their thing in a live-action combat system. And I'm not particularly enjoying it. Granted, Star Ocean really fucked up in having an incentive to keep your character out of the line of fire so that that damnably fragile "Bonus Battle Guage" doesn't get broken, thus encouraging the p
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I'm not sure if that's a stab at me or at PA or me for agreeing with them... I just want to clarify that I've played the demo of FFXII and I really didn't like it. It's been a while, but I didn't like switching between charecters, selecting an action or two, unpausing the action, waiting for the chareter to actually do something, then starting the process again. It was tedious in the firs
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Uh, it's neither. It's total agreement with you. RPGs have gotten eaten by the "real time" buzzword, even though the idea really stinks. You just can't control multiple people in realtime. Don't try. If you want to do that, your "party" needs to be just the one character. That has been done successfully.
Same thing happened to strategy games. Try to find a turn-based strategy game. (I know of Civ. Any others that are still around?) P
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Advance Wars is the ideal; slow eye candy on one end of the options, dropping down to a quick blip and numbers changing on the other. FFX-2 actually did pretty well in this department, too, with the fancy battle animations that FF is known for being reducible to momentary blips inline with the rest of the battle.
(Not having endless random battles is beginning to factor in there
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Fire Emblem has the same set of options, allowing you to turn off all battle animations.
You can also press start to skip cutscenes - useful when you are re-playing a chapter so that your Pegasus Knight doesn't die.
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Grandia (Score:2)
Star Ocean 3 was rediculous...ly bad. It got so much hype an praise, and having loved SO2, I was really hoping for something special. Instead, the battle system, which really is the only reason for playing a SO game, was incredibly badly designed, combersomb, and frusterating. On top of that, the story was shit (hackneyed cliche after cliche, and not even done well), the dialog was cringe-worthy, the characters were flat and didn't exude any feeling, and worst of all, the camera angle made navigation so con
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Thanks.
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I highly recommend trying out DW IV, it's incredible. DW II was really good too, from what I can remember. DW III had a pyramid that really pissed me off as a kid - if only there was gamefaqs back then.
Hopefully I'll be able to get these on Virtual Console.
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I wouldn't worry. Or worry that much. Either the PS3 or the XBox 360 will succeed in Japan (and Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey probably makes it the XBox 360), and all the RPGs from the losing console will be ported over to the winning console in order to make sales.
You'll probably need to get a Wii to play RPGs released for it, though, since the Wii controller can't be replicated (no matter how much Sony tries) on the other consoles, so expect Wii games to be fairly unique to the Wii.
In the end, they'l
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You're probably right about the porting, but I wouldn't bet on the 360 winning the race. Maybe if those games had been released 6 months ago it might of had a chance, but as things stand now, both Sony and Nintendo have highly anticipated launches coming up. That's a lot of momentum and with the 360's sales dead in the water here, I doubt It'll beat the PS3 in Japan. NA and Europe on the other hand are another matter.
I'm more interested in how the wildcard, Nintendo's Wii, will fare here myself. It's small
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Microsoft bought out Hironobu's or payed them a truckload of cash
No, they gave him fat sacks full of money, so he can use it to make himself some money hats [penny-arcade.com].
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well... (Score:3, Insightful)
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And I think that Nintendo has proven it's abilities with both. Super scope and Wavebird anyone?
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Wow, using a color name in an abstract phrase is racism, people!
Oh did I say 'people', I don't wanna insult the rest of the animals!
And plants!
And inanimate objects!
Aaaaaa! I just can't do it, I guess I'm a racist, shoot me!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_White_Hope [wikipedia.org]
The implication is that "white" needs to somehow gain superiority, as if there is something inherently wrong with some "other" color having gained an advantage.
It's definitely a racist term. Racism still exists, but pointing it out isn't very popular.
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At least until we genetically engineer ourselves to become hermaphrodites to get rid of the social interraction required for reproduction. Then someone will ask why we didn't simply go with cloning, and we'll feel very stupid. But hey, the telekinetic transducer lobes will make up for it.
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The term Great White Hope is used today to describe something which people are hoping for and putting all their weight behind (in this case Microsoft with these RPGs) but that has little chance of succeeding (I assume because Japan is Sony land).
The original Great White Hope was any white boxer who could beat black Jack Johnson. It carries racist implications becasue
a) It was a racis
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Go ahead, mod this down too instead of arguing. Coward.
White Knight (Score:1)
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I think the reason why that video worked so well, is that it showcases the gameplay. Too many game previews are all about the movie-esque flashy graphics, jump shots, and plot. I want a game that's fun to PLAY, not to watch.
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I, for one, would like to play an RPG, even a japanese style one, where the character was an adult! Seriously, I'm fed up with those angsty kids.
When looking that video I was thinking "Can I skip that animation? Oh, I like this character. Oh noes! The main character is surely that other one that is a Cloud-Clone. The fighting is half nice and half phony. What is that? A Dragon? Ah, it must be the fire invocation that is in every game. Oh, in this FF the invocations are transfor
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The drunken wobbling they were doing in the battle preparation sequence was pretty unintentionally funny, too.
Article-on-a-Single-Page Link (Score:4, Informative)
Some tidbits: Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon (both XBox 360) share first place, and of the 20 (21 counting both first placers) 7 are for XBox 360, 1 PC, 4 NDS, 2 PS2, 1 Wii, 5 PS3 (I keep recounting and still get 20 - clearly I keep missing an entry). -Trillian
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As much as I dislike some things MS does, I can't help but feel a little sorry for them in Japan! =D
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Uh, no... because this list is compiled by westerners, for westerners.
I would bet that any "top 20" list generated by a Japanese publication would look a lot different. And it would surprise me if the 360 had more than 2 or at most 3 titles on such a list.
Regardless, it has always been a myth that any single game or any single genre sells consoles in Japan. The truth i
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Wow, 20 games which are exactly like all the other games around at the moment, but with slightly fancier graphics.
Where is the next ground-breaking playable game I can play with my friends, like Katamari Damacy or Super Monkey Ball or Mario Kart?
Rich.
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Food for thought. (Score:1)
1 PC game.
1 Wii game.
2 Ps2 games.
4 DS games.
5 Ps3 games.
7 xbox360 Games.
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But...your comment about not buying it unless you rich, or have no responsibilities....wrong.
I've commented before that it seems like a lot of poor people are on Slashdot. But remember, we aren't all poor.
My wife and I both work, neither of us makes a ton of money. But, our combined salary is about $125,000/year. So a PS3 would be
Not a big deal- you don't have to be ric
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I'm with you, and honestly you seem to be in pretty much the exact same boat as me (similar combined income, but with a house, car, etc. to take care of).
My theories on the Slashdot crowd:
1. A lot of them are still college students (or younger). I remember those days well - I sometimes went weeks eating nothing but Ramen because it was 25 c
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You don't have to be poor to not want to spend $600. My wife and I are grad students, so we're not exactly rich (although, we also don't qualify as "poor", which is to say, I don't get food stamps or anything like that). But we have enough that I can pretty much afford what I want. I've plunked down way more than $600 for what are essentially toys. So when I say that $600 is too much, it's not like I'd be starving if I bought it. If some bastard took $600 out of my figurative pocket, I'd be more-or-less fin
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White Knight video (Score:3, Informative)
Be excited. Oh yes. I just wish I could be arsed with consoles...
Article illustrates 360's lack of good PR in Japan (Score:1)
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It's hard to have good PR in Japan when your console's name is written as × (×-hako — for some reason, Japanese unicode isn't showing up), which essentially means no-good box in Japanese.
Blue Dragon ads were everywhere, but not LO (Score:2)
But yeah, it looks like Lost Odyssey didn't get too much love for some reason. My guess is that Mistwalker/MS wants to put all their eggs in one basket, promote Blue Dragon (especially since it'll be a pack-in game
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I'm the guy who wrote the article.
. . . Ahem.
Anyway. Yeah, they're not pushing Lost Odyssey at all. Either that, or the fact that the chairman of the jury who selected the top games of the show is none other than Yoichi Wada, president of Square-Enix.
Hoho!!
Maybe a little jealousy, hmmmm? The CESA organization also selected Final Fantasy XII as one of the two "Grand Award" winners for the 2006 Japan Game Awards.
Hmmm!!
Either way, Blue Dragon is the big hope. It's the one they're pa
Blue Dragon a nice "consolation prize" ... (Score:2)
I was surprised by how many J-RPGs are being released for the 360. Sure, many of them may end up being rather mediocre, but that's certainly more than 0. (And Japan has its fair share of
Another set of opinions (Score:2)
It's obvious that the person who submitted the story has an XBox bias. I'm thinking