November was a big gaming month, but not so much for me. I know the current generation of consoles has been the longest lasting ever, but I’m not really ready to move on. Maybe that’s not right. Its not that I’m not interested in new hardware; I’m just not interested in any of the games for those consoles. As this generation has gone on, my tastes have drifted further and further from the mainstream. Again, that’s not quite right. I still like the same kind of games I’ve always liked, they are just not the mainstream at all anymore. So I am not likely to drop the big money on a PS4 or an XBone any time soon. I’m more than happy with my 3DS and WiiU. Plus, there are still plenty of good PS3 games I haven’t had the chance to play yet. Luckily for me, Nintendo keeps pumping out games that are right in my wheelhouse. So let’s rundown what I played last month.

Beaten

Super Mario 3D World: I’ll try to have a full write up of this soon, but suffice to say I liked it a whole bunch. It is the best Mario game since Super Mario Galaxy 2 and is maybe better than that. Maybe.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Dual Destinies: I’ve already wrote this game up. It is an excellent entry in this series. I haven’t got around to the DLC case, but I’ve powered through the rest and loved it.

Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages: Another game I’ve already written up. It’s good, not great.

Ongoing

Final Fantasy XIII-2: I’m making progress. I’m still liking it, despite the story being, amazingly, worse than the first FFXIII game.

Pokemon HeartGold: I’m steadily making progress in the only Pokemon game I’ve never beaten. It is hard to go back to the DS games after playing the 3DS one. Its slower and uglier. The other problem I’m having is that I’m having trouble building a team that fits my style. I like fast, hard hitting Pokemon and there just don’t seem to be many of those around early in HeartGold. Maybe I’m just making bad choices, but everything seems to be slow and /or defensive. It’s just not my style.

Pokemon Y: I am so close to finishing up my competitive team. I’ve been making really slow progress on this. Still, until recently this has been the game in my 3DS cartridge slot.

Etrian Odyssey Untold: I finally maxed out my team on the Demo and moved on to the full game. I’m trying it with the story team, and it is a different experience. Through the first Stratum, I’d say not as good an experience. It still fun, but I miss being able to truly customize my party. Right now it feels limiting, though the personalities are a fun addition. I expect my progress to be slow, but steady.

Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons: I’m about halfway through this already. So far I’m finding this game much better than the other Oracle game. Its just faster, more compact. I might like it more than Link’s Awakening.

Wii Fit U: I got the free version of this, through Nintendo’s deal for people who own a balance board and are willing to buy the pedometer. It is a useful tool if not a true weight loss answer in itself.

Upcoming

Ratchet and Clank All 4 One: I really want to finish this up soon. Me and my brother are real close to the end, though we haven’t played since summer.

Pikmin 3: It’s in my WiiU right now. I just need to turn it on.

Earthbound: I promise this time.

Super Princess Peach: I tried to buy this off of ebay a few years ago, but ended up with a bootleg cart. I’ve kind of realized I’m never going to see this in the wild, so I’m just going to play that bootleg.

Rocket Knight: I bought this when I first got my PS3, played about 2/3s of it but then kind of lost track of it. It shouldn’t take me too long to finish.

It took a few months, but I finally finished up Oracle of Ages. I then jumped right into Oracle of Seasons. I’m also working on Majora’s Mask again. Hopefully I’ll have this series replay finished up in the next few months. Though Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword are both lengthy endeavors, so that could slow things down again. And I guess I’ll be adding A Link Between Worlds to the list, since I am sure to get it by the end of the year. Now, on to Oracle of Ages.

If anyone remembers, assuming that anyone actually read it, I was not too impressed with Link’s Awakening. I thought it was too simple and hampered by the limitations of the Gameboy. Playing Oracle of Ages has helped me appreciate just good Link’s Awakening really is. Because this game has many of the same flaws but is all around less charming. Most of the problems have actually grown worse. It is still a Gameboy games, the limitations of the system are still in place.

Still, Oracle of Ages manages to have some really good dungeons. Many of them are simply great. They are complex mazes that require both skill and logic to complete. Any time you are in one of the eight dungeons the game is simply great. The available tools are very limited, but they are all good for multiple uses. The game also trusts the player to figure it out on their own, which is always good in a game well enough designed that the player can figure it out.

Where the game falters is in the overworld. That is one of the most tedious, boring things ever put in a Zelda game. There are some interesting characters, Ralph, Queen Ambi and Nayru, but most of them are just generic villagers. To get into each dungeon the player needs a key and to get it the player must solve some problems in the world, usually by warping back and forth through time. A lot of it is needless filler just there to pad out the game. It is what made me put down the game for so long and by the time I finished I began to dread completing a dungeon because I would have to go do stupid stuff like dance with Gorons or barter with Lizards to get my tools back. It is not fun.

What it feels like is Oracle of Ages is an attempt to bring the 3D style Zelda game to 2D, without the creators realizing that just like some things had to change to make the game work in 3D, so must some things change to make it work in 2D. I found myself voicing a lot of the complaints that many people have about 3D Zeldas, ones that I don’t tend to agree with, while playing Oracle of Ages. It really feels like a game made out of the worst parts of the Zelda series.

Still, the game isn’t that bad. It’s passable. Uneven is probably the best descriptor. When the game is good, like in the dungeons, it is really good; when it is bad it is truly bad. Link’s Awakening looks better in comparison, but it is still an enjoyable experience. If the first half of Oracle of Seasons and my memories of Minish Cap are true, this is the weakest Zelda on a Gameboy.

Playing Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies has shown me just how much I’d missed this series. Sure, I’d played Ace Attorney Investigations earlier this year but that game is a pale shadow of the real thing. It’s mostly a different beast altogether. It has been a long time since the last real Ace Attorney game. It is really good to have the series back. I hope there is more after this.

Dual Destinies has all the Ace Attorney stuff one would expect, diabolical criminals and crazy weird witnesses and an even more crazy weird legal system. There are five cases of increasing difficulty and complexity and this time you jump between three different lawyers. Apollo Justice is back, and thankfully so is Phoenix. New to this game is Athena Cykes, who can detect emotions and use that to get more out of testimony. The only thing it is lacking is a good sidekick, since the other lawyers tend to play that role. It works, but I liked Trucy and Maya.

The return of Phoenix to the courtroom is a big deal for me. I liked the last game; I liked Apollo and Trucy. However, I was never comfortable with how the game treated Phoenix. They broke him down as a part of someone else’s story instead of his own. Here, Phoenix is still not the main character. He takes a back seat to both Athena and Apollo. But he is allowed to play the thoughtful mentor and go about his own business when they are out on cases. The next game could easily use any of the three lawyers as its main character should they choose. Phoenix doesn’t need to be broke down so Apollo or Athena can rise up.

I don’t want to spoil the game, so I’ll just say that I liked all the cases and I liked that they fixed some problems. The biggest change is adding a to do list to the investigation portions, so you will always know where you need to go to advance the story. And the stories are largely good. If anything they are all too personal. All the cases have a personal tie for at least one of Wright Anything Agency team.

The only real downside is Athena. She gets better as the game goes along, but I didn’t initially like her as much as Phoenix or Apollo. A big part of that was how bad a lot of her dialogue is when pressing witnesses. She reacts like a sidekick, often arguing on tangents instead of sticking to the case. I know the other lawyers did that too, but I found Athena to be worse. She seemed to forget what she was doing. I also wasn’t too big a fan of Prosecutor Simon. There’s just not a lot to his character. I hope the next game a truly great adversary, on the level of Edgeworth or Godot. Also, I would be remiss to not mention that there are tons of spelling and grammatical errors. This is a big problem in a game that is 80% dialogue.

The biggest actual improvement in the game are the graphics. The new 3D models turned out fantastic and they animate really well. I was concerned because I didn’t think Professor Layton’s conversion to 3D worked out at all. The art for that game did not translate to 3D well at all. However, here it worked out perfectly. Things look just as crisp, but now there is a wider range of motion. They characters are even more expressive. The graphics are very good.

Dual Destinies is still largely the same game the rest of the series. It is a visual novel with some trappings of an adventure game. It lives or dies on the writing. Fortunately, typos aside, the writing is really good. The new characters aren’t the best, but that is made up for by not including a lot of the tired gang from the first three games. Still, I’d to have a Gumshoe or especially Maya appearance, but I’m glad they stuck with a mostly new crew. I don’t see this game changing the minds of anyone who didn’t like the series already, but it is a treat for fans and likely to draw some new fans. It is the best thing Capcom has done is some time.

I get this urge when I play a new Pokémon game to play other Pokémon games. Sometimes, like with White, I don’t get around to it but usually I feel a desire to play older Pokémon games I haven’t played or haven’t played enough. While I make a decent effort at completing the Pokedex in Pokémon Y, I decided it’s finally time to play the one Generation of Pokémon I’ve never really played. So I started up the copy of Pokémon Heart Gold I bought a year or so ago.

The most important thing with Pokémon games for me is the experience of playing. While they all play largely the same, somehow I get vastly different things out of them. Nothing has matched my first encounter with Pokémon Red. I got into Pokémon early, using the money from my 13^th birthday to buy a copy just a few weeks after it was released. I was already savvy to the whole RPG thing, having played Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger among others on my SNES, but seeing an ad for it running on the kiosk at Wal-Mart convinced me to splurge with my birthday money.

While not as complex as those SNES games, the first time through Pokémon Red was a revelation. There were no guides and no previous games to base my expectations. Each new area was a discovery. First there are just simple animal Pokémon, birds, rats and bugs. Then it gets to the more outré ones, poisonous rabbits and electric rodents and the like. I was hooked. My already well trained video games sense paid off. I just knew the useless fish Pokémon would turn out to be useful. I played that game forever and came as close to completing the Pokedex as a boy without a link cable could.

Then came Silver and Gold. I was excited. My brother and I pooled our money and bought a copy of Silver as soon as we could. Unfortunately, sharing a copy of Pokémon game worked out about as well as one would expect. Which is to say one player got left out. That player was me. I was annoyed, but I was getting too old for Pokémon. Or so I thought. I sat out Ruby and Sapphire. I never really considered buying it. I was too busy with “mature” PS1 RPGs to waste any time on that kiddy stuff. The same went for the remakes of Red and Blue. I was done with Pokémon. Sure, I’d spend hours playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, but not Pokémon.

Then in college, my roommate bought a copy of both Diamond and Pearl. I thought he was stupid, so I took Pearl and starting playing it. And didn’t stop, not for almost 400 hours. Maybe it was just enough time had gone by, maybe I was just eager for an excuse not to do my homework. I also bought copies of Fire Red and Emerald, just to help me complete my Pokedex. So I played through those as well. Pearl was the only game since Red to really pull me in like that. I nearly completed the Pokedex again, coming up just short a few stragglers and a depressing number of event only legendary Pokémon. It also was the source of my proudest Pokémon memory, beating the Champion with a team a full 15 levels lower than hers.

But then I was out again, again skipping the Gold and Silver games, as well as the improved Platinum. I did hop right on Pokémon White and enjoyed it for the fresh experience of playing through a game with no guide and all new Pokémon to use. While Pearl was the culmination of three generations worth of cruft, White cleaned it all away for a fresh game. White 2 brought all that stuff back. Now Pokémon Y gave the whole thing a seismic shock.

High off that experience, I am finally jumping into HeartGold. I am two gyms in and … it’s Pokémon. It is a little slower than I’m used to, the leveling up a lot more difficult than Y, but still fun. It definitely has a much better selection of starters than Y did, that’s for sure. Cyndaquil and Totodile are both awesome through all three evolutions and Chikorita is okay. It will feel good to finally have played every generation of the series, but the main draw is to build up a stable of Pokémon to transfer into the Pokémon Bank and fill out my Y Pokedex.

Time for another month’s worth of miscellaneous gaming thoughts. I played a lot of games in October and made some progress in clearing out my backlog. About the only thing I didn’t get to where the Halloween games I wanted to play, like RE: Revelations. To be fair, though, of the six games I beat, three only took a couple of hours and two of the others I was well into when the month began. October was a month for draining my gaming budget. Pokemon X/Y, Etrian Odyssey Untold and Ace Attorney all came out, and Zelda hit just before the end of September. Those three 3DS games are about the end of my gaming purchases for the year. I want the new Mario game and will likely buy it, but the new Zelda can wait. Maybe for Christmas, maybe until I start running out of 3DS games I’ve already purchased to play.

 

Ongoing

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages – I made very little progress on this last month, what with all the Pokemon and Ace Attorney I was playing. I hope to finish it in November

Ace Attorney 5 – I jumped on this as soon as it was available and through the first two cases I couldn’t be more pleased. It is great to have Phoenix Wright back.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 – I’ve barely gotten started with this, but it will be the console game getting the most of my time until Super Mario 3D World hits. Its … something.

Pokemon HeartGold – One Pokemon game wasn’t enough for me, I decided that I needed to finally beat the one set in the series I’ve never beaten.

Finished

Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble – Om paper this looks like it should have worked great, transplanting Viewtiful Joe’s stylish 2.5D brawler action to the DS. However, while everything seems to have made it pretty much intact, the whole thing feels lifeless. The level/encounter design is lacking and the touch controls require too precise motions to use effectively. Still, it’s not a bad game, just one that is no comparison to Viewtiful Joe 1 or 2.

Punch Out!! Wii – another game I’d started years ago and just now got around to finishing. It is amazing just how engrossing this game is, when it is essentially the NES game with a fresh coat of paint. It is different enough that a player can’t simply coast through on old knowledge, but it still familiar. I love the new look and the old gameplay. It is more Punch Out!!, which I’ve wanted for years. Thank you Nintendo for giving it to me.

Final Fight 3 – The Final Fight series is one that I’d missed out on back in the day. I played a lot of brawlers, Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, River City Ransom, etc., but I never encountered Final Fight. I filled that hole in my gaming knowledge with what was recommended to me as the best game in the series. I didn’t much care for it. It may have a deep combat system, but its pokey and cramped and relies too heavily on inflated lifebars for difficulty. Not for me.

Pokemon Y – For more indepth thoughts see my full post on this. I might get into competitive play. Someone kill me.

Lunar Silver Star Harmony – I love Lunar. The PS1 Lunar and its sequel are some of my favorite games. At is core, this PSP remake is the same game. I simply don’t like it as much. Every individual part of the game seems improved, but the whole is not better. It is as though the game were disassembled, each part fixed up and then put together again. However, one reassembled it doesn’t quite fit together right. It is improved, but not as good as it used to be. While this version may be less than the sum of its parts, it’s still Lunar. It’s just not the version I’ll put in when I want to replay the series.

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker – I have a Second Quest on this coming soon, but that’s not really about the improvements. The swift sail changes the game significantly. Sailing is so much faster. I liked the game before and I like it even more now.

Upcoming

Super Mario 3D World – This hits near the end of the month and I am super excited about it.

Earthbound – I am determined to get to this soon.

The Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask – I’ve got this on the VC and I need to get it beat for Second Quest.

 

The Pokemon series is often criticized for its glacial evolution. In many ways the newest versions of the game are just like Red and Blue were way back in the day. This criticism is misguided at best. While the basics remain the same, every generation brings plenty of new and different things to the series. Every generation of Pokemon is more different the average releases in series like Halo or Call of Duty. X and Y may bring the biggest changes the Pokemon series has seen yet. With Pokemon, they got the core right the first time, all the changes happen on the periphery. Until this game, the graphics have largely tried to stay true to the original games, echoing them in look. But while the look and rules of combat have remained the same, the stuff under the hood changes quite frequently.

Pokemon X/Y changes are numerous and surprisingly all quite good. First of all, they’ve added a new type for the first time since the second games. The new Fairy type is a needed change. It really helps balance the overly powerful Dragon type. Dragon being so powerful may have worked when Dragons and Dragon moves were exceedingly rare, they have proliferated and are some of the most powerful Pokemon. Now there is a surefire counter to them. Plus, it goes back and changes some old Pokemon to be Fairy type. Most of them really make sense, like Clefairy and Jigglypuff. There has also been some rebalancing to the type chart, but I’ve actually learned the type chart, so I’m not sure how that went exactly.

Another big change is to the presentation. The graphics are fully 3D now. And they look good. Pokemon Y is a genuinely good looking 3DS game. The Pokemon are no longer static sprites and animate in battle. Maybe the best part of the new graphics is the ability to customize the player character’s clothes. Being able to change anything other than gender of the player character is big change in and of itself. You can now play as a reasonable facsimile of yourself. Then there are the tighter integration of online features. No longer do you have to go to the Poke-Center to trade or battle, you can do it anywhere, anytime. It really helps make battling online easy. Plus, the new Wonder Trade feature, where you choose a Pokemon and trade is randomly with someone online is a lot of fun. It is a big step closer to the Pokemon MMO everyone always thinks they want. I’m not even going to go into Mega Evolutions, since I couldn’t care less about them.

Despite all these changes, Pokemon Y is still Pokemon. You still travel the country catching every new monster and fighting every other prospective master. You still collect gym badges and beat the Elite 4 and Champion. There is still and evil gang out to control or destroy the world. It is an addictive formula. Like I always do, I burned through the game as fast as possible. I fell in love with a handful of the new Pokemons, specifically Hawlucha and Pancham. It doesn’t have the draw of Pokemon White’s all new Pokedex for the main game, but it makes up for it with a staggeringly huge Pokedex. In fact, it is three Pokedexes taped together.

For Pokemon, the changes to X/Y are seismic. But I don’t think it is enough to convince people who don’t like the series. It’s still more Pokemon. The core is not going to change, not as long as the games still sell like crazy. And honestly, it doesn’t need drastic changes; it works as it is. Pokemon has always been really good, and it still is.

Hideki Kamiya consistently directs games that I absolutely love: Viewtiful Joe, Okami, Bayonetta, etc. They are all inventive, deep games that positively revel in being video games. Instead of trying to hide their gamey-ness and present themselves as an “experience,” Kamiya’s games keep it up front and center, with visible high scores and level breaks. The Wonderful 101 is no different. It is a capital V video game. And it is amazing.

The Wonderful 101 is unique. There really aren’t any games that play like, though many of its individual elements can be found elsewhere. However, the combination of those elements is refreshingly original. Many of those elements come from previous Clover Studio/PlatinumGames games. Aesthetically, it looks a lot like Viewtiful Joe. It is mining that same Power Rangers/Super Sentai look, with lots of brightly colored heroes and gross alien monster villains. Like Joe, W101 has a ton of great characters and the story doesn’t take itself too seriously. W101’s cast is more expansive, from the serious, verbose Wonder-Red to the idiot surfer dude Wonder-Blue to the pop-star Dracula Wonder-Pink. Not all of the titular 101 are fleshed out characters, but a good dozen are. The story is a great winking Saturday Morning Cartoon. The stakes of the fight between the heroes and the alien invaders starts ridiculous and rises from there.

The game plays like a mix of Bayonetta and Okami. The general mechanics of combat are much like this teams previous action games. It features small, discrete fights and a flexible deep combat system based on switching weapons to maintain combos. It is fundamentally similar to Devil May Cry and Bayonetta. The wrinkle added to this system are the unite morphs, where the heroes team up to make giant weapons. Making these morphs is not unlike the brush powers of Okami. If you want a sword, draw a straight line, if you want a fist draw a circle, etc. While the action slows while you are drawing, trying to draw while continuing to fight makes for some tense combat. It is not an entirely intuitive system and the game’s biggest flaw is how awkwardly it eases players into a mostly new experience. Still, once it clicks there is nothing like it.

Where the Wonderful 101 shines is in how it keeps things moving. One minute you are exploring a lost city in the jungle, the next you are piloting a giant robot and having a Punch-Out!! style fight inside an erupting volcano and then you are shrinking down to fight viruses inside the body of your rival and then you are being aided by an even more giant robot to fight and entire armada of aliens in a shooter level. It never stops giving you something new to do. All the craziness would be distracting if the base game wasn’t so excellent. It all just meshes together so perfectly. The Wonderful 101 is at its heart a celebration of video games. Going over all the references to other games, but from Kamiya and Nintendo’s game could be a series of posts in itself. Some are little gameplay bits, like the Punch-Out!! fight, some are names, like the Lost Kingdom of Lowrule, but it adds something special to the game

The Wonderful 101 is the best game of the year so far and one of my favorite games, ever. From the look to the gameplay to how much it just loves being a video game, it seems made just for me. If you even remotely like video games, you owe it to yourself to buy this game.

My attempt to beat all Zelda games last year, my 2nd Quest I called it, stalled out after about five games.  I burned out playing Majora’s Mask and writing about Link to the Past.  Well, lately I’ve been playing Wind Waker HD and Oracle of Ages and they’ve got me wanting to complete this replay.  So 2nd Quest is back with a long delayed look at A Link to the Past.

A Link to the Past is the game that really codified what a Zelda game is.  Every game after it, both 2D and 3D, has used a similar framework to LttP.  It is the original game on steroids.  It does all the good thing the first game does, but better and without many of the warts.

One thing A Link to the Past doesn’t do is waste the players time.  Some people, foolishly, judge Zelda games on how long it takes to get the sword.  By this incredibly flawed measure, LttP fares well.  The game gets the player from waking up in the rain to grabbing a sword and rescuing the Princess remarkably fast.  A first time player might take some time to find their way underneath the castle, but replays take no time at all.  Once you get past the intro part, the game lets you go free.  There are tons of things to do on the overworld and the next dungeon is rarely more than a couple minutes away.  The game is just snappy and while environmental hazards bar your path, there are no arbitrary barriers.  

As far as the gameplay goes, it is great.  Familiar to fans of the NES Legend of Zelda, but the small flaws in that game are sanded off.  Now bombable walls are hinted at, no more bombing everywhere to find secrets.  There are more buttons to equip weapons and tools.  It’s just a lot smoother than the somewhat stilted first game.  There is more structure to the dungeon set up. There are the first three dungeons, which allow Link to get the Mastersword. Much like nearly every game after that, the first three dungeons are an intro to the game. They are not necessarily too easy, but they are all about teaching players the rules as they go, without tutorials. After that the game gets serious, and dungeons are out to beat the player. It never gets too hard, but the series has rarely approached this level of difficulty since. The world of Hyrule is much more realized in this game. It is not just a hazard filled wasteland like it was in the first game. It is also not the RPG approximation that was Zelda II. There are forests and deserts and mountains and even a town, but present in that same top down view of the first game. It is magical and unforgettable.

A Link to the Past is widely considered one of the best games of all time. It definitely deserves to be in that conversation. This game hammers home to me not only just how great this series is, but how few games there are that try to out and out copy them. There are tons of platformers cribbing off Mario, but surprisingly few Zelda-clones. The only games I can think of to compare Zelda games to are other Zelda games (and Okami). The series could do with some clones, I think. Especially if they brought something new to the table or challenged Nintendo.

Since I don’t have the time, or really the inclination, to expound in depth on all the games’ I’ve been playing recently, I am just going to do a monthly rundown of what I’ve been playing like the ones I do for what I read.

Ongoing:

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD – I’ve just started playing this remake of one of my favorite Zelda games. I’ve made it to Dragon’s Roost and I’m loving it. It looks even better than before. I’ll be playing this for a while.

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages – I started this way back when the two Oracle games were released on 3DS, but lost track of it around the fifth dungeon. With no game being currently played in my 3DS, I figured I’d try to beat it before Pokemon X/Y hits. I’ve made it through the fifth dungeon now and should make it.

Lunar Silver Star Harmony – With a new PSP and a stack of games to play on it, my sudden cravings for the anime stylings of the Lunar series was serendipitous. I don’t know if I like this version better than the PlayStation one, despite it being objectively better in several ways. I just have a lot of nostalgia for the first remake and nostalgia is Lunar’s biggest selling point. It’s still Lunar though, so I’m having fun.

Finished:

Bit.Trip Saga – I picked this up on the cheap from the eshop and have had my fun with it. I beat Beat and Void, both of which I greatly enjoyed. I was completely stymied by Core and gave up and I still absolutely detest Runner. The other two I didn’t play enough to from much of an opinion on them. It’s on my 3DS permanently and all of them are the sort of game that work great just randomly playing on occasion. I will probably do so for a long time.

Toki Tori 2 – Another game I started months ago and just now got around to finishing. I did right as they released a patch, making it Toki Tori 2+, so I only got to experience the fixes right at the end. It is a terrific little puzzle platformer. You are a bird who can tweet and stomp and you must solve some pretty dastardly puzzles with those few abilities. For such a cutesy game, it does almost no hand holding. Loads of fun.

Valkyria Chronicles II – The first game I tried out in my new PSP. It should be right up my alley; a strategy game with a focus on getting to know your army. That is formula Fire Emblem rode right into my heart. But in VCII, you army is a group of unlikable imbeciles. The gameplay is excellent, it is that gaggle of braindead “characters” that killed my interest in this game. Not a single one of them does anything but grate on my nerves. I might come back to this later, but I’m done with it for now.

Attack of the Friday Monsters – This is a charming little adventure game, set in a town used to shoot monster a monster TV show in the ’70s. As the young boy protagonist, you make friends with neighborhood kids, play card games and run errands. There really isn’t much game here. That doesn’t stop Attack from being wonderfully charming all the way through. I’m not sure there is a better way to spend three hours.

The Wonderful 101 – I will have a full review of this at some point. This is another game from genius game director Hideki Kamiya, the man behind classics like Viewtiful Joe, Okami and Bayonetta. It is just as excellent as his previous offerings (I know it is disingenuous to suggest that a video game is the product of one man, but the games this man directs are uniformly awesome). It looks like Viewtiful Joe and plays like Bayonetta with a little dash of Pikmin. I am in love with this game. I will likely keep playing it after I finish with Wind Waker. It is probably the best game released all year. Buy it. I don’t care if you even have a WiiU, you should buy this game.

On the Horizon:

Pokemon X/Y – I am inordinately pumped for a new Pokemon game, even though we got new ones each of the last two years. I am ready to catch them all again

Ace Attorney 5 – No matter how pumped I may be for Pokemon, it pales in comparison to how pumped I am to return to the world of Phoenix Wright. I had all but given up hope of seeing more from this series, but it is coming and soon.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 – I enjoyed FFXIII more than most and have had the sequel sitting on my shelf for more than a year. With the third part of this trilogy coming soon, I feel the need to play this game. I am at least certain it will be pretty. Maybe I’ll get started once I finish a Zelda.

Earthbound – I was so excited when this came out on the VC, but I only played it for an hour or two before promptly just leaving it sit on the WiiU. I really need to play it, it has been too long since I’ve done so

Resident Evil: Revelations – This will go in my 3DS around the end of the month; it seems like a good Halloween game. Or course, that is only if I am done with AA5 and/or Pokemon. Still, I will at least pop it in for the holiday.