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Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land Have you ever had your intelligence insulted or your time wasted by a Japanese role-playing game? This one won’t do either. Half-Minute Hero, XSeed and Marvelous Entertainment’s unusual, experimental role-playing game is smart, sharp, surprisingly long—given its title—and sloppy in a way that somehow doesn’t break the game but instead makes it all the more charming.
Thank goodness the new Wizard of Oz game for the DS doesn’t closely follow the movie’s plot, because this reporter, who played the game recently, could never get through that movie.
This was the most pleasant surprise of my week.
Imagine, if you will, a flying game called Sky Crawlers controlled by Wii remote and nunchuck. Guess the control scheme. You probably guessed wrong.
Namco Bandai and tri-Crescendo’s role-playing game Fragile is coming to North American Wiis later this year, thanks to publisher XSEED. If you were a fan of Baten Kaitos or Eternal Sonata, this one’s for you.
XSEED has teamed up with developer GungHo Works to bring the Nintendo DS version of popular 2D online game Ragnarok Online to North America this winter.
Game Center CX is a fantastic reality TV show with a couple of fantastic DS games. The first game made it to the US with a localised version. That doesn’t mean its sequel will.
What is it with Wii games losing publishers? First Fatal Frame, now Muramasa – which was about the best-looking thing due on the console in 2009 – finds its American release up in the air.
Marvellous Entertainment USA and XSEED games are teaming up for E3, showing off their line up of upcoming titles together as one united force of goodness. While the focus is mainly on the Nintendo DS and Wii, there is a PSP game in the form of RPG sequel Valhalla Knights 2 to spice things up. The name of the game here is RPGs, and the two combined have them in spades. For the Wii they’ve got three outstanding offerings – Rune Factory: Frontier, which takes the RPG/farming sim combo from the DS games to the console market, Avalon Code, a new RPG from the team behind Rune Factory and the Final Fantasy III and IV DS remakes, and the recently announced Little King’s Story.
For those of you with a low tolerance for hit points, the dynamic duo will also be showing off XSEED’s first DS games, Populous DS based on the classic PC game, KORG DS-10, a music creation program, and Retro Game Challenge, a mini-game title based on the Japanese Game Centre CX TV series. Perhaps these three non-RPG titles will calm me enough to keep the Rune Factory fan in me from dry-humping their booth.
So the other day when I was visiting Xseed, checking out Valhalla Knights 2 and Little King’s Story, I espied this sweet The World Ends With You DS. My photo quality is poor, so the little caption beside it says “It’s A Wonderful World”.
Turns out that Square Enix’s Tetsuya Nomura gave the TWEWY DS as a.gift to Xseed’s company president, Jun Iwasaki, who was Square’s CEO before he left to found Xseed. Nomura also gave Iwasaki one of those Crisis Core PSPs, but apparently, while Iwasaki decided to keep the TWEWY DS, he gave the PSP to one of his colleagues.
The DS is even more awesome-looking in person; it’s gloss silver, and the logo is nice and shiny.
