minna ni naisho dayo

New Game: Catch! Touch! Yoshi! (JP)

Title: Catch! Touch! Yoshi!
Platform: Nintendo DS (JP)
Publisher: Nintendo

Where: (I'd better not say -- I don't want this guy to stop selling early) :)
When: January 24
How Much: 4,480 yen (4,704 yen w/tax)

How strange. I just finished dinner and was heading to the coffee shop to grab a drink when I noticed a sign outside one of my local game stores advertising Biohazard 4 -- which goes on sale this Thursday in Japan -- for sale today. Sometimes you can find new games a day early in Japan, but to find a store breaking a game's street date by three full days is pretty much unheard of. Intrigued, I went inside to survey the scene, and sure enough, there it was: Biohazard 4, along with the limited edition bonus DVD (which is apparently a lot better than the crappy US bonus DVD), on sale at the front counter. Even better, right next to it was this game -- Catch! Touch! Yoshi!, aka Yoshi Touch & Go in the west -- also on sale.

I already own the US Resident Evil 4 so I didn't care all that much about that one, but Catch! Touch! Yoshi! is one of the few DS games I've been really interested in, so naturally I had to pick it up. In all my years of buying games in Japan, I've never seen anything go on sale this early -- I wasn't about to pass up the opportunity.

I'm busy with other stuff today (like winning 300,000 coins from a slot machine at the Casino Ship in Dragon Quest V, OMG), but I did manage to squeeze in about 10 minutes of playtime before writing this up. Early impressions are definitely positive; the game controls very nicely, and the gameplay seems simple and fun so far. In the first part of the stage, you draw platforms to navigate Baby Mario to the surface without losing all of his balloons. You draw circles around enemies to turn them into coins which you can then drag into Mario's path, and you basically try to pick up as many coins as you can on the way down. Once you're down, Yoshi nabs Mario and it turns into an auto-scrolling side-scroller, with a similar goal of guiding Yoshi through the stage. Here you make paths and encircle enemies as well, but you can also jump (tap Yoshi), hover (tap him again mid-jump) and hurl eggs anywhere on the screen (simply tap the screen in the direction you want to throw). Yoshi has a limited number of eggs (my stock was 25 last I checked), but you can replenish them by eating pieces of fruit scattered along the way.

I haven't read the manual yet, but it seems like the two main gameplay modes are "Score Attack," where you gather points from beating enemies and collecting coins to go for a high score, and "Endless," where the goal is to get as far as you can without losing a life (think Mr. Driller). I'm not sure how you progress from stage to stage in either mode -- after finishing the first stage in Score Attack, my only option was to replay it or go back to the title screen -- but I suppose we'll figure that out soon enough. I'll try to play some more tonight after work if I can pull myself away from Dragon Quest V for a little while. :)

EDIT: Quick update, courtesy of JonnyRam: according to the manual, to open up the "Time Attack" and "Challenge" modes, you need to top the high score charts in Score Attack and Endless modes, respectively. Thanks, Jonny!

New Game: Dragon Quest V: Tenkuu no Hanayome (JP)

Title: Dragon Quest V: Tenkuu no Hanayome
Platform: PlayStation 2 (JP)
Publisher: Square Enix

(The subtitle can be translated in several ways, but within the context of the game, the best translation would probably be "The Celestial Bride" or "The Bride of Heaven." But "The Bride of the Sky" would be fine as well.)

Where: Shibuya Tsutaya
When: March 25
How Much: 7.020 yen (7,371 yen w/tax)

It's been a while, but I'm back and ready to start updating again. I got back from Japan in early January all set to start writing, only to get hit with a wicked cold and some kind of stomach virus which knocked me out cold for the better part of a week. I'm finally feeling better now, though, so let's get started.

Funny how my first update now that I'm back is from a game I actually bought 10 months ago: Dragon Quest V, for PS2. I played about 8 hours when it first came out, but then I got sidetracked and never got back to it...until about two weeks ago when I got the sudden urge to start raising my Slime again. I've been playing it a ton since then, and I'll probably finish it sometime in the next few days -- I'm at 36 hours now with only a few dungeons left to go before I can head to the final area.

For those of you who missed it back on my previous site, here's a snippet from the entry I wrote the day after this was released, talking about why it's such an important game to me:

As it turns out, Dragon Quest V was the first import RPG I ever played, and the main reason I bothered to learn Hiragana and Katakana, the two simple forms of the Japanese alphabet. I had just finished the English version of DQIV and I was fiending for more, so I decided to buy a copy of DQV from Japan and play through it in Japanese. I ordered the game, went out and bought a Japanese dictionary and a blank notepad, and got to work. Seeing as how the game was pretty massive for its time (around 40 to 50 hours), I decided to write everything down -- the places I went, the items I found, the stuff they sold at the shops, etc. -- so I could get around more easily. In doing so, I literally taught myself how to write Hiragana and Katakana (and a few of the more common kanji), and in the process, realized how fascinating the Japanese language was. This was one of the catalysts that got me seriously thinking about studying Japanese and going to live in Japan someday. It also turned me into a big-time importer; after getting DQV, I pretty much never looked back, importing almost every major release that I was interested in that wasn't guaranteed to eventually come out in English (and even some that were -- I mean, who had the patience to wait an extra two months for Street Fighter II? Not me!).

Of course, it wasn't until 1997 that I finally got to visit Japan, and I didn't move here until 2000, but I eventually made it. So, now, a dozen years later, I'm sitting down again with this game that meant so much to me back then, and I can't help but feel a little nostalgic about the whole affair. It doesn't hurt that it's a superb RPG with a really touching story, but that's not even the point, really. :)

So there you have it. I'll try to get around to posting about all the other games I've picked up in the past few weeks -- Resident Evil 4, Tales of Rebirth, Metal Gear Solid 3, Metroid Prime 2 and Final Fantasy I&II, among others -- very soon.

In other quick news, congrats to 222b for getting quoted in a Japanese Metal Gear Solid 3 ad that showed up in the new issue of V-Jump magazine yesterday. The ad features quotes from US mags and web sites regarding MGS3, and one of the quotes is from Ben's MGS3 preview feature on GameSpy:

Click on the scan above to see a close-up of the quotes portion. The Japanese text at the top says something like "At last, the excitement from all over America comes to Japan" and then underneath it has the actual quotes along with their Japanese translations. (Please note: if anyone wants to use this image on their own site, feel free; however, I ask that you please host your own copy as my bandwidth is extremely limited. Thanks!)

So why would they include American quotes in a Japanese game advertisement? Probably because MGS3 came out first in America, so they had more reviews to pool from. Another reason could be, as ferricide so eloquently pointed out, because Japanese magazine quotes usually read something like this:

ferrisighed (18:34:36): It is very good. The game is the feeling of playing Metal Gear Solid, and I feel satisfied.

Sad, but true. Weekly Famitsu may get more scoops than any other games mag in the world, but they're not exactly known for spitting out the most enlightening prose in their reviews section. :)

Stage 3: PSP > *

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I really, really love this thing. :)

I'm heading back to Tokyo tomorrow -- I'll be back with several new updates starting sometime early next week. Happy New Year everyone!

New Game: Taiko Drum Master (US)

Title: Taiko Drum Master
Platform: PlayStation 2 (US)
Publisher: Namco

Where: Best Buy
When: December 30
How Much: $49.99 ($52.99 w/tax)

When I came home for Christmas break, I had no intention of buying Taiko Drum Master. I figured I'd be busy enough playing through all the new PSP and DS games, as well as Metal Gear Solid 3 and Dragon Quest VIII.

Of course, these things never go as planned. So far, I've spent about 85% of my time with Minna no Golf Portable (MinGol King status, everything up to Bronze Rank cleared 100% including the first eight characters), and the other 15% playing this, a game I picked up on impulse when shopping at Best Buy the other day. Go figure.

As of this morning, I've managed to clear all of the songs on Easy and Normal, and a few on Hard, but I think I'm about to hit a wall soon. Unlike Donkey Konga, which was ridiculously easy, this game requires some serious skill to clear songs on the Hard and Oni levels. Even if I can't clear everything on Hard though, I think I've gotten my money's worth; practically everyone in my family's been playing it, and so far, everyone's loving it -- myself included.

I do have two minor complaints, though. First, the drum is cheap. After playing Donkey Konga, it's really hard to come back to a drum that's got so many dead spots. You can't just hit it wherever you want -- you have to find the sweet spots and then stick to them for good, which can be really tough when you're trying to get big combos on difficult stages. You'd think they would've invested a little more time perfecting the thing, considering how important the issue of control is in a game like this. I can't understand what these companies are thinking sometimes.

My other complaint is really small: I wish they had more unlockable songs. Unless I'm missing something, I got all of the extra songs unlocked (and the extra difficulty level) in about an hour. It would've been better if they spread them out a bit more to give you more incentive to keep playing.

In any case, Taiko is a lot of fun and I highly recommend it if you're into music games like Bemani and DDR. If anyone out there comes across a better, third-party drum, definitely let me know!