Masem’s Gaming Blog

The World Ends With You is a non-traditional RPG from Square Enix and Jupiter for the Nintendo DS that uses a battle system that involves a lot of use of the touchscreen.  There are a lot of gameplay aspects within the game, but the game itself is wisely crafted around those elements to allow you to use as many or as little of the elements as needed, effectively letting you drink as much of the game as you want but tempting you with better rewards if you take on the added challenges.  This approach, as well as the overall combination of tight gameplay, interesting story, and outstanding design, make this one of the most impressive RPGs that I’ve seen in a long time.

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Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a mix of a puzzle and adventure game from Level-5 and published by Nintendo for the DS.  The game is basically 120 brain teasers of various difficulty, wrapped in a well-presented story that helps to encourage progression through the game. Though there are a few small problems with the game and it lacks some replay value, it is definitely a nice title that can appeal to a wide range of gamers.

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Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is the fourth game in the laywering adventure game series by Capcom, and the first game in the series specifically developed for the Nintendo DS, such that it incorporates DS-unique features in part of the investigation and trial phases that were introduced in the DS remake of the first game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. The game definitely is a step up from the previous entries; the DS graphics are much more vivid, the added investigation methods work well, and the cases are much tighter and make more sense, though to some extent, this makes the game somewhat easier. However, it is still a good play and requires only minimal familiarity with the previous works to appreciate.

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I would almost call this an RTS-lite game - at least where I am about 25% of the way through the game.  The game is after FFXII (which, note I have not finished, but was able to pick this story super quick, as it relies little beyond characters and the Ivalice setting), with Vaan and gang now exploring a sky-based group of islands.  The game is a series of RTS games; you control up to 5 party members, and you gain access to Espers - creatures that you summon at the start of each match and, when available through summoning points on the map.  A special Ring of Pacts is set up like the skill tree in FFX, in that you can get new Espers after unlocking other specific ones.  Espers themselves are based on the standard four elemental magics as well as healing/special or no magic ability at all, and you can only take 5 into a match (though you can alter their configuration as needed).  It’s a pretty nice system though I’ve yet had to worry too much about making sure I have elementals to deal with weaknesses the other side has or to prevent being hit by a large advantage.  In fact, the game to this point has basically been “select all, fight here”, though I see this strategy easily being defeated where I am now if I’ve not gotten appropriate new equipment or done side tasks to level up enough.  So I am expecting at some point to have to split my attention.  However, for being one that doesn’t play RTSs much, this is a very gentle introduction that yet still captures the FF game flavor.  And of course, using the DS helps with a lot of the controls.

Hudson Soft’s Mario Party series has had several poor outings in the last few releases. Mario Party 7 on the Gamecube was rather uninspired and while the microphone use was new, didn’t add much. Mario Party 8 for the Wii used the Wii remote fine, but the minigames were uninspired, and for a next-gen title, it really didn’t look like next-gen that much. Fortunately, Mario Party DS does attempt to correct those poor titles – the gameplay has a bit more strategy to it despite still being based on a lot of luck, and the minigames are enjoyable, and having multiplayer over local wireless is a nice feature. However, it is still a Mario Party game, and will not change your opinion about the series if you dislike it already.

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Consider this as Squenix’s first venture in the Pokemon-type RPG.  Basically, you go around, collecting monsters to fight together monsters in order to get them into your party.  While there’s less about competing against other “scouts” (aka trainers), and much more in terms of visible random encounters that you see.   Where it is better than Pokemon is that it is much easier to work on convincing a monster to join you: you “scout” it and then let your monster party do one round of attacks to accumulate a percent of a chance to turn the monster to your side.  A weak part will only gain a few percent while a powerful one can get close to 100%.  No more carefully waiting until you’ve poked the monster enough to weaken it to capture.  The other aspect I’ve yet to get to is that one can then synthesize monsters together to make stronger ones — my monsters are too low level to do this, but it seems to have standard aspect of the DQ games that make them interesting to experiment with.

Unfortunately, the game is done in 3D mimicking DQ8 in art style and approach.  While it may look ok, the 3d movement is just too klunky to really work well - I’d much rather have seen them go all 2D sprites like in Rocket Slime, or a fixed top-down 3D angle like Pokemon Diamond/Pearl.

I’m pretty impressed with this game - while we’ve had at least one FPS on the DS before (Metroid Prime: Hunters), this is a little different as, so far, the shooting aspect isn’t much (though I know I get more guns later in the game), but for that, it works nicely.  Exploring the abandoned mental hospital that is crawling with monsters, you move with the dpad, look around with the stylus on the screen, and then use your currently selected object with the left shoulder button - this requires you to hold the DS in the right way but definitely feels more comfortable on the Lite than the old DS.  The game uses darkness effectively - you pretty much have to walk around using a flashlight all the time, and need to use sound to listen for certain monsters that lurk the halls - including little ankle-biters that easily can sap health.  There’s a few puzzles so far (eg a numeric code written in blood on the wall that you need to enter into a number pad to open a door) but otherwise outside of that is not much more different, gameplay, from a usual FPS - it’s all about the atmosphere which is done pretty well on the limited DS hardware.

I started this game a while ago, and I think other things came up that I didn’t get back around it. But I’ve been working on it more, and while there some interesting elements to the game, it seems very esoteric in its approach.

The game uses a minimalistic interface, with the top screen (generally) showing a professor and his dog in a typical pixel graphic (with black outlines), while the character you control and most of the rest of the game world is closer to watercolor without such outlines shown on the bottom. Furthermore, the game puts you as a third entity that the professor character talks to, and that is in vague control of the main on-screen character. There’s minimal background of the story and most of it seems to be given as the story unfolds in the game. You move the on-screen character around either through dpad or via stylus, and when you come to a creature to fight, you have to put the character in a fighting stance and then let him duke it out, hitting automatically without your intervention — sort of a one step away process like controlling a Sim. There’s a lot of stats that basically grow with repeated use; do a lot of fighting and you’ll gain strength, for example, but there’s not much explanation of these. Fortunately, while having the on-screen character fall in battle will happen a lot, you only have to restart back from the beginning of the level, and it’s not a game-over type situation.

It’s just a weird game, and I’m more interested to see how it will end up then the actual rest of the mechanics.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is the first game in the Zelda series for the Nintendo DS, and, as with other top-tier Nintendo titles for the system, it has been eagerly anticipated to see exactly how the gameplay of Zelda translates to the DS controls. The game does not disappoint - the purely touchscreen controls are quick and intuitive to learn, and the use of the touch screen as a way to keep notes and other methods of path control needs to be a ubiquitous addition to any other adventure game. While a few elements see slightly out of place in the game, Phantom Hourglass is still a worthy Zelda title for everyone to get.

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While there are a lot of unique puzzle and strategy games for the Nintendo DS, there are times where having some of the classics to play is not a bad thing. Clubhouse Games developed by Agenda and released by Nintendo is a welcome addition to the DS library for those that still want to play solitaire or other card and strategy games while only toting around one system. While the AI may not be the most challenging throughout all the games, the game definitely fills a good niche in the DS market.

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