The Wonderful One

On the dawn of Platinum 10th Aniversary, let's talk about The Wonderful 101 which I just finished recently.

Even after getting the U, I was lukewarm about this game as it seems more 'viewtiful' than 'stylish hard action'. H.Kamiya has made many great games but it's his Devil May Cry style which appeals to me the most. Fortunately Club Nintendo rewarded me this game so I didn't have to make the choice of buying.

This is a hard game to describe, it has a realistic cartoon visual style but a less than friendly learning curve. The heroes looked like old-fashioned superheroes and they have a lot more personality than the average hero. This is probably H.Kamiya best writing work so far. I laughed a lot at the banter between the heroes because it's just so sharply written. The localisation team did a great job on this one, it reminded me of the Ace Attorney humour. Apparently S.Takumi from the Ace Attorney series is close friends with H.Kamiya during their Capcom days.

It's easy to say this now but this game was doomed for commercial failure and I don't think releasing it on a more popular system would have made a difference. Like most Japanese games, it gives you all the tools you need and expect you to learn everything on your own. At times, I feel like I need 4 extra mechanical arms from Doc Ock to play this. I struggled with when to block and when to dodge, apparently you need a bit of cartoon logic which I certainly lacked. 

Things eventually clicked and I started to enjoy it a bit more. There is certainly no other games out there like this. Some games try to be different for the sake of being different however this one feels genuinely unique. It's probably Platinum games best game so far and that is not an easy feat considering the competition. It's an amalgamation of everything H.Kamiya has done. There is a bit Okami (formation attack), a bit of Devil May Cry (Wonder-Blue) and a lot of Viewtiful Joe (Wonder-Red).

If you love video games, it's hard not to like The Wonderful 101 at all. Well unless you are some kid who grew up on mobile games that requires only one finger to play and minimum amount of attention.

Greatness in Half

Bayonetta 2 is a game that nearly never got made and you have to wonder why Sega felt lukewarm about publishing the sequel. It does feel like a lower budget game than the first game for sure, clocking in about two-thirds the length of the first Bayonetta. You could make the case that the first game was a little too long but the way Bayonetta 2 ended left me feeling like THAT WAS IT? Ok the ending was nice and wrapped the story up nicely leading to the events of the first game even if it's way too similar to DMC3 ending.

The story of Bayonetta 2 does not revolved around Cereza, her story arc was done in the first game and here she is just dragged into the thick of things. A bit like how Kiryu story was completed in the first Yakuza and every installment of Yakuza games is not really about Kiryu. I was playing Max Payne 3 recently and I didn't like how the story narrative shifts from the wealthy family Payne was protecting to human trafficking. Bayonetta 2 has the same type of narrative shift, first the story is about Cereza trying to rescue her friend Jeanne and then suddenly, it's about time travelling and trying to get to Fimbulventr. I supposed you can't expect much of a story when the game starts and ends with Bayonetta shopping in a high end district.

The fighting mechanic is very much the same as the first game except now you can use a widespread climax attack instead of one torture attack on a single enemy. It's useful when you are fighting in a big crowd especially if you don't want to waste the torture on the wrong enemy in the midst of the chaos.

Platinum Games are learning from their western counterparts, you can see them trying to create these cinematic interactive experience like the Uncharted games. When you fighting a boss sometimes the background shifts and your summoned is fighting the other summoned in the background. It's frantic and looks really good but having to juggle combos while being distracted by all this is sometimes a bit too much. Go back to the first game that is included in the packaging and you can appreciate some definite graphical improvement.

In the end this doesn't feel like a full fledged sequel to me more like, Bayonetta 1.5. All the players that made the first game great are back but constraints held this one back a bit.

Keep The Home Fires Burning

This mobile strap comes with first edition copies of Devil May Cry 3 JP Edition

The Devil and Bayo series shares this weird symbiotic relationship. They obviously have the same fanbase (me being one) but coincidentally the games never competed head on. 

The Devil series did their thing and faded away for a bit then the Bayo games came and kept the fires burning. I don't think it would be too far to say that if it wasn't for Bayonetta, DMC4SE would never have happened. 

One man that has a hand on both series is action director Yuji Shimomura. He crafted the cutscenes in both the series, making the games just as fun to watch as it is to play. Yuji started in this genre with DMC3 which is probably still his best work if you asked me. His work on the Bayonetta series has been less impressive perhaps because the Devil work were so outstanding.

I can't pick out a single impressive scene from Bayonetta 2. That creative energy that I expect from Yuji just isn't there, not sure if the story and characters just didn't suit his strengths. Bayonetta 2 felt like a lower budget game to me and considering how hard Platinum fought to make that game, I believe that to be the case. The cutscenes felt just as long as the first Bayo but less impactful, there isn't much scenes of showing off that you come to expect. 

DMC4SE new scenes looked very promising, I can't wait to see what Yuji has cooked up as it certainly looked like he found his vigor again. 

The inside of the strap has a different color depending on which character

This is for Vergil. There is also one for Dante and Lady

The Art of Remastering

Bayonetta Wii U and Resident Evil HD are two recent high-profile ports that really show you the different philosophy adopted by its publishers/developers.

Nintendo could have easily slap a Definitive Edition label to Bayonetta and charge $30 for the port but instead they decided to bundle the game free with every purchase of the sequel.

Of course, Capcom is infamous for making a quick buck off everything they can find in their vault so no one was expecting them to give RE HD away for free. 

The issue here is the level of effort put into the port and despite charging for RE HD, Capcom's effort on RE HD remains subpar as usual. Early on Capcom announced that Chris and Jill BSAA costumes will be new additions to the HD Remaster. The logical assumption would be to have the young Chris and Jill wearing the BSAA costumes of their older counterparts. That would be the ideal case except it required a lot more work than simply pulling the BSAA models from the RE5 DLC and sticking it in HD remaster. Which of course, Capcom did so in the end. 

I wasn't very surprised with Capcom's efforts on RE HD Remaster but I was surprised with what Nintendo and Platinum Games did on Bayonetta Wii U. Now when the Bayonetta port was announced, the Nintendo costume were highly publicized and were directly supervised by original director, Hideki Kamiya. Recently, the concept artist revealed sketches of the costumes on Platinum Games blog and divulged that Kamiya insisted small details like the Samus suit had to be the classic original from the NES Metroid. 

Nintendo and Platinum games did a fine job on the Nintendo themed costumes. If they had delivered just a steady port with no additional costumes, a lot of gamers would have been more than satisfied. What I didn't expect was that these concept drawings also made their way into the bonus gallery after you completed the game. Clearly one publisher went the extra mile with the small details while the other was quick to call it a day. 

Labels like Remaster really don't mean all that much anymore and in the end, you got to walk the talk or risk becoming easy target for obsessive fanboys. Sure Capcom are patting themselves on the back because RE HD broke all sorts of digital sale records while Bayonetta 2 probably sold a criminally obscene amount. But passionate gamers care and so do passionate developers, some of which used to work in Capcom and are now working in Platinum Games.

Tough Guy Talk

The general complaint is that Vanquish is too short of a game but I found the length to be just nice. The game could really use some neat bonus to enhance the replay value but unfortunately there is little offered here. I didn't unlock the skill challenge yet perhaps it requires a higher difficulty level as I decided to start the game on casual auto. I wanted to be a bit more creative about adding replay value to the game so that's why I intend to work my way up from the easiest difficulty all the way to God Hard mode. Hopefully that will gently ease me into the game enough to earn all the trophies and just give me the general satisfaction of mastering a notoriously hard game. On the bright side there are six voice-over track included on the game so you can always have a little fun with listening to the tough guys talk in German or French. All in all I had a lot of fun with this game, I wasn't itching to play it everyday like Dead Rising 2 but I end up liking it a lot more than when I first tried the demo. In fact the second demo featuring on the skill challenge had me in real doubts about getting the game at all but fortunately I decided to take the risk and give the game another chance.

Can Dead Rising Really Vanquish Resident Evil?

Despite being the biggest creative force at Capcom right now I have never taken a liking to Keiji Inafune. His choice of projects and lack of involvement with the Resident Evil series made me think there's more to this man than meets the eye. Now his recent bold declaration of what he has planned for the Dead Rising series to ultimately displace Resident Evil as Capcom top IP merely confirms my suspicion that this guy is an ego maniac. You see Dead Rising is Keiji's own labour of love, a zombie game that has more to do with Romero's zombie movies than Capcom's Resident Evil.

For the longest time I have always had a sneaking suspicion that Inafune has distanced himself from the Resident Evil series because it's Shinji Mikami's legacy at Capcom not his, contributing to the series will only further Mikami's legacy. Now Keiji's influence in Capcom has grown to the point that his name pops up on every Capcom project yet Capcom's biggest creative head has little to do with Capcom's biggest IP. All he has done is serve as the promotion producer on the original Resident Evil 2, probably to work with Romero on those TV commercials and later doing the devil's work on the playstation2 port of Resident Evil 4. Now that his intentions are made clear about what he has planned for Dead Rising and Resident Evil it's plain obvious what kind of person Inafune is. I was planning to get Vanquish all along instead of Dead Rising 2 but now I detest the man to the point where I will not buy his zombie game.

A Witch's Job is Never Finished

It's been a while since I last played Bayonetta and while I long to play that game again there are always issues preventing me from doing so. For one thing there are other games waiting to be played (though the reality is I'm also replaying some other games at the moment) and then there is also the 'fragility' of dualshock3 controller i have to be concerned with.

During this time Platinum Games has released a 5-disc soundtrack album and artbook to complement the game release with the Best of reprint of the original game for Japanese market scheduled for release later in September. Looks like a witch's job is never finished surely this won't be the last we see of her as Platinum Games is set to unveil some Bayonetta-related news really soon according to the game's producer. While I would love to add both the 5-disc soundtrack and artbook to my collection it stills burns that I wasn't given the pre-order soundtrack sampler when i purchased the japanese copy of the game from a local dealer. Having the 5-disc soundtrack might just be a painful reminder of that so the artbook is certainly much more tempting to me right now. Now if only I was done going through the last artbook I got I won't feel so guilty about getting this now.

Black Humour

I'm not very demanding when it comes to action movie or action game plots, usually even the cliche works for me so when i heard that Platinum Games had roped in Final Fantasy XII's Yasumi Matsumi to pen Madworld scenario, i wasn't sure what to expect. Sure enough Madworld made little sense at the end but the cutscenes are slick and exciting enough to keep things interesting. The final boss is a bit of a joke but fitting considering the game's dark humour, in the end i'm not even sure who the real villain is. The game is just long enough so things don't become too repetitive but Madworld still works best when played in short bursts rather than one long sitting.

Hopefully Platinum Games will come up with a sequel without the Final Fantasy plot and introduce more new creative kills.

Word Gets Around

I got (coaxed into getting) Bayonetta over the weekend, laying to rest any earlier doubts seeing the negative comments surrounding the ps3 version. I guess it was inevitable that I would purchase the game regardless of how it turned out and which version was better. At least according to others.

Having failed to seriously get down to playing a string of action games of late, I was having doubts about whether I could sustain my interest and commit myself to Bayonetta. Especially since the Japanese import isn't exactly cheap. But perhaps that's exactly what I need right now and if any game possess that ability to keep me hooked until the very end, it's a Hideki Kamiya game. The last I heard of the game was the rather entertaining Q&A video session with Kamiya at Platinum Games official website where he was doing a gravure idol pose at the end of the session.

I do know that the Japanese version will ship several months earlier than other versions to give the game a better chance to perform overseas once the holiday seasons is over. I also know that the Japanese version will have a different cover art compared with the US version. All that remains is whether the Japanese version was import-friendly or not to seal the deal. Once the word got around that it was, I really had no excuse not to. The timing of it being just two weeks after my birthday didn't hurt either. And so it begins, the road back to gaming and hopefully the reboot of my good ole gaming blog.

Violent Reaction

While i was at Borders earlier today after meeting up with the gang to pass Andy his Okami book, i noticed the Borders there had a hell lot more gaming magazines than the other branches. One particular magazine caught my attention, vol231 of Nintendo Power featured a cover story on the upcoming Platinum Games' Madworld. What caught my attention wasn't the cover story of Madworld but the fact that Nintendo Power discreetly hid the cover behind a bagged cover featuring Mario and company celebrating the 20th anniversary of the publication. Coincidence? Maybe but i have a strong feeling Nintendo Power didn't want to scare away their audience by featuring a prominent blood red cover focusing on an ultra-violence game. Oh well, Nintendo Power has consistently been one of the better Nintendo-publication around, they have great taste when it comes on cover stories and reviews so i'll just let this one slide.

Now as much as i dig the guys over at Platinum Games, i can't really say i feel the same way about Madworld particularly because i feel that any game shouldn't have to rely on excessive violence as its main selling point. I could be swayed by the fact that Platinum Games happened to have other games in development that are far more exciting and Madworld is helmed by a relatively newcomer. Also with my comic book background the art direction of Madworld just doesn't sit too well with me, it's highly reminiscent of John Romita Jr and Frank Miller and i wasn't never into those guys. On a postive note, given the competition on the Nintendo Wii from third-party developers, Madworld does have a pretty good chance of being a big seller.I just hope its got something else apart from blood & gore to back up those sales figures.

It's a Mad Mad World

It took the guys at Clover studios a while to realise but eventually they finally got around to realising the cold hard truth, sex and violence sells even more so in video games. Developers are still very cautious when it comes to pushing the envelope for sex in video games but they are certainly not shy of pushing the level of violence in video games. While everyone applaud and sing praises for Viewtiful Joe and Okami, there is no denying that the lack of violence in those games was what led to the lack of interest among the general gaming community and ultimately, their poor sales.

Now the newly reformed Platinum Games seems to have abandon their previous approach and have decided to follow the trend of the market by doing exactly what the public wants, more violence action games. The first two up are Madworld and Bayonetta, with the latter being a return to the action genre for hideki kamiya since his last foray being the first Devil May Cry. I personally am pretty excited to see Bayonetta though it would have been nicer if it came out before Bulletwitch because the early concept of the lead female character looks awfully lot like her. It remains to be seen if these games will go down well with the critics but one thing's for sure, better or worse, these games look to sell bucketloads more than Okami or Viewtiful Joe.

Kinda sad when you really think about it don't you think?