House of the Dead Scarlet Dawn Gameplay Footage

Sweet Language Based Vindication

Hell is about to freeze over.  The dead are about to rise from their graves.  The moons have aligned.  The Elder Gods are on their way.  Dogs and cats living together, MASS HYSTERIA!  There's an article on Polygon I actually think is really good!

https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/20/15356026/persona-5-translation-localization

Now granted it was written a year ago but I stay away from games "journalism"  so hard that it flew right under my radar.  Read it, now, it's really good.

Just for some context on my end, I played Persona 5 in Japanese roughly around the time of release here.  When the English version came out and I watched some of my friends play it I remember pointing out certain bits of the game didn't really match up with what was being said in the Japanese or that certain lines of dialogue were a little "off".  The nicer people that I know were willing to brush it off as just "oh well Localization!" and others responded by calling me a shitty weaboo piece of shit.

Turns out though I'm not the only one who felt this.  That Polygon article is just one of MANY if you Google it.  I think the one take I get from having a quick look around all the other articles (which I'll read in detail after posting this) say kind of the same thing.  It's not that it's outright bad (mostly) but it's amateurish and filled to the brim with stilted dialogue.

Take that line above for example.  It's a throw away comment in the middle of a fight that you might not really notice when you're playing it but if you take a moment to stop, slow down and think about it, it's a bit strange.  It's not "wrong" per se but it's a bit unnatural.  It's the kind of translation you might expect from an anime fansub group or a small group of passionate fans working on it to bring it to a nice western playerbase.  But Persona 5 isn't that, it's a full priced game (Costing 2000 yen more than your average new game here in Japan, by the way) that had a large team of translators and editors behind it and THIS is what we got. 

One thing that a majority of people still might disagree with me on, a topic I might go into in a later article is the voice work.  Not only was the localization bad but the performance was also atrocious.  I guess it's something we've come to expect with western anime voice actors but while in Persona 4 it was just a bit cheesy and campy in P5 it really ruined some things for me.  For example, in the English version of Persona 5, Ryuji doesn't sound like Ryuji in this game.  It sounds like a guy who played P4 and then tried to do a Kanji Mk2 rather than actually stay true to the personality of the character.  But Japanese voices were an option from the get go with P5 so I guess that's why no one gives a shit.

A good script and a good delivery of that script are important parts of story heavy games like this.  People shouldn't just settle for bullshit just because it's sort of expected of the genre.  ESPECIALLY from a company like ATLUS which we have seen do absolutely incredible jobs of localization with a lot of their other games.  Demand better quality for your hard earned money, goddamnit.

Earth Wars

Here's a game I'm still playing but it's taking me so long to finish it I felt like I'm just going to go ahead and talk about it now.  It's also not very good

Earth Wars, also known as Earths Dawn (I discovered literally just now as I tried to Google information about the developer) is a 2D side scrolling action game about people beating up aliens.  I lost interest in the game so quickly that I now just skip all the cutscenes but from what I can tell aliens came out of the Earth and now you have to retake what was destroyed as part of an elite squad that all decide to use swords instead of guns.  You have to battle your way across North America killing big bads and doing other random missions such as saving soldiers or finding items until the problem has been solved. 

The first thing you'll notice right off the bat is the art style and game play are extremely reminiscent of games such as Odin Sphere or Muramasa but sort of like the poor mans version of this style.  The visuals are sort of "chunky" and nothing animates very well.  Couple this with the fact that combat is very busy with explosions and particle effects flying everywhere and what you have is a very visually frustrating title.

But I didn't download this game for free of PSN just to look at it, dangit, I came to play!  Unfortunately the game plays like a pile of rotting assholes and is generally frustrating and just flat out not all that fun.  It's again, trying to imitate the fast melee type fighting that you find in games like Muramasa but it's clunky and quite often the character doesn't quite do the exact things you want them too.  Also there's no "impact" when attacks connect and you have no real feel for exactly how much damage you are doing.  Also there's no variation in attacks or combos, you just mash attack on the thing until it explodes into tiny pieces and then dash to the next guy to repeat the process.  I'm even at a point now where my weapon has a death effect on it so I just mash until I see the icon and then run away until it the death kicks in and I get to move on.

Speaking of a lack of variation the missions are absolutely abysmal.  You get the main story missions which have you fighting through a map to fight a big enemy which are kind of cool but these sections are always book ended by pointless "free missions".  The free missions have you running through the same drab environments again and again to do such exciting things like "Kill X of Y", "Find Z of this item" or "reach location with time limit".  Once you've done enough free missions to run down a timer you get to do another cool mission but these last about 5 or 6 minutes before it's back to the boring grind again.  The game seems to have an embarrassingly small amount of content but just has you do boring shit on the same 4 or 5 maps to pad things out and make you think that you got your moneys worth.

But the worst part is you MUST do these free missions because they get you skills which you have to activate on your, quote from the steam page, "Massive Skill tree".  The only thing massive about this skill tree is the size of the interface that you have to scroll through to get to each skill to activate them but the skills you get are all samey drab bullshit.  Most of the skills are stat increases or passive bonuses and the "active" skills that you get are all dumb shit like "Guard".  That's right folks, I'm 8 hours in and JUST got the skill that lets me block attacks.

Now I'm being very harsh but it's easy to see that Earth Wars had a lot of ambition behind it.  Clearly, the developer oneoreight has some good ideas but due to a lack of time/money/talent, whichever, the game just turned out a bit crap.  Of course, I'm not one to give up so I'll play it through to the end and if my opinion changes I'll be sure to make another post but I very much doubt it.  Even though I got it for £0 off PS+, I feel ripped off.  Don't spend £25 on Steam or whatever for it, just go and buy literally ANY game made by Vanillaware instead.

Tau Plays Lone Survivor Part 2

Dragalia Lost

So this is a game that came out last month for mobile devices that kept popping up on my Facebook feed after a few of my friends started playing.  The first thing I noticed is that it's an original mobile game that has a big fat Nintendo logo on it and along side that a big fat Cygames (Shadowverse, Grandblue Fantasy) logo.  After umming and arring about it for a while thanks to it's MASSIVE 2.5gb download size from the app store I decided to just give it a go.

Dragalia Lost has absolutely NO BUSINESS being this good of a game since it's just your typical mobile gatcha affair but for some reason I just can't get myself off the damn thing.  I have no idea what the story is since following a mobile story is like choosing to eat a bowl of shit but the game play is fun and the amount of stuff there is to do is just staggering.  The sheer amount of content is important considering the games recent release since usually newly released mobile games are a little thin on the ground at first and flesh out later but Dragalia is going all out right out of the gate.

The game itself is the same gatcha bullshit you see on the app store all the damn time.  Pull stuff, power up stuff, do dungeons to power up stuff even more rinse and repeat and grind grind grind ad nauseam.  There's two cool things about it though that set it apart from other games in the genre which is one, combat that's actually more interesting than just tapping until everything falls down and two, a level of polish that is rarely seen in the entirety of mobile gaming.  The combat has you using the touch screen to actually move characters and have them hack, slash and dodge through the environments.  When enemies attack the game will put these sort of markers on the floor, something I've seen done in other MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 which means that paying attention to things like positioning is very important. 

There's a lot going on in Dragalia that would take far too much time to type out so instead I'll just recommend that you go download it and give it a whirl.  It's free so worst case scenario is that you'll just be unimpressed by yet another gatcha title and best case is that it drags you in and holds your attention as violently as it has mine.

Tau Plays Lone Survivor Part 1

Nihilumbra

So here's another one of those games I got for free as part of my PS+ subscription.  When I downloaded it and fired it up I had absolutely no idea what to expect but what I got was pleasantly surprising.  At time of writing I'm on the final world and I've not finished it but I was so elated to play this game that I had to talk about it early. 

Nihilumbra is a puzzle platformer developed by BeautiFun Games and was originally released for iOS back in 2012 but later ported to Windows, Vita, WiiU and Android.  The game follows the adventures of a little creature as he tries to run from an all consuming void.  The character itself is mute but bits of story are given to you by a narrator as you travel from screen to screen and I'm dropping that voice actor along side the guy from Bastion in my bag of "sexy narrators".  The game itself revolves around using colors to solve the various puzzles in each world.  For example the first color you get is blue which makes the surfaces slippy allowing for faster movement and increased jumping to scale large gaps.  As you get further and further you have to use all these colors together to defeat enemies and make it through the traps that stand in your way.  At the end of each stage you get a sequence where the void chases you.  In game play terms this is a auto scrolling section which tasks you with solving puzzles on a strict time limit.  These sections are probably my personal favorite parts of the game since they create a sort of intensity and pressure that I really enjoy.  It's also got a really nice soundtrack composed by Álvaro Lafuente which is worth going and looking up even if you haven't played the game.  It's ambient and I can see myself using the tracks from this game to accompany my study or writing.

My only real complaint about Nihilumbra is that it's WAY too easy.  I don't want to toot my own horn and say that I'm some kind of big brain Mensa bad ass (because I'm not) but none of the puzzles in Nihilumbra really taxed me.  The solutions all seem extremely obvious and when it does throw a difficult section at you the checkpoints are disgustingly nice and will never set you too far back.  There was an extra mode which I've not tried out yet so I'm hoping that there will be some more challenge there but the main story is VERY easy.  The game is also quite short which may be a put off for some but considering it's only £5 on Steam it's a reasonable length for the price.

If you're into your dark indie platformers and you're looking for something new then absolutely give Nihilumbra a try.  It's a short, sweet and satisfying experience and given you can get it for a series of portable systems it suits short commutes perfectly.  Pick it up and give it ago, jump into the void.