Japan Gaming Guide

Missile Dancer 2 is an upcoming game from Japanese indie developer Terarin Games. There’s a new demo on Steam, which we took a look at.

The game plays like a combination of Afterburner and Space Harrier, with the emphasis on the former. You’re flying a combat aircraft into the screen and have missiles, which lock on to multiple targets, and a cannon, which shoots close range targets and enemy missiles.

As well as enemy planes to fight, there are also giant robots and other weird enemies more akin to Space Harrier. There are also obstacles to dodge, which we didn’t quite get the hang of in our brief playthrough.

Based on our first impressions the game will lead towards the tough side. It’s a lot busier and pressured  than the aforementioned Super Scaler games, and feels like a bullet hell game at times with so much going on. There are three difficulty levels, so you can keep things manageable, or make things even harder, if that’s your thing.

Missile Dancer 2 has bright, chunky graphics and gorgeous retro sound. Gamers of a certain age will love it. The demo includes a tutorial, and a 3-minute score attack mode, though the demo doesn’t include any of the arcade mode.

The final game promises 16 levels of arcade action on top of what you can try in the demo, and we can’t wait to check it out. Check out the demo now on Steam. Take a look at Terarin’s site for more info.

Want to support JGG? Great, that’s real nice of you. You can help us out by buying through our affiliate links. If you do this, we get a small commission, and there’s no extra cost to you.
Click here to buy Japanese games and goods at Play Asia, and help us out at the same time. Thank you!

We’re taking a look at an older Switch game today, in this Lumines Remastered review. Lumines is a puzzle game from the brilliant mind of Tetsuya Mizuguchi, creator of Rez, Space Channel 5 and the more recent Tetris Effect.

The original version debuted back in 2004. Since then it has been released on every platform under the sun. This new release features improved visuals and support for higher resolution screens, making the game look better than ever. We’re looking at the Switch version, but Lumines Remastered is also available for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

The game, like the best puzzlers, is simple in concept but hard to master. Blocks of four squares fall from the top of the screen to the bottom. Squares come in two colours, and if you can create areas of four small squares made up of a single colour, they dissapear.

Getting into it takes a little more time than Tetris or Puyo Puyo, but after a few goes you’ll be figuring out patterns and building your skill so you can cope with the game at faster and faster speeds. That’s the key to making it to the end of the challenge mode, the main single player game.

There’s plenty else on offer, with other game modes and rewards offered for completing its various stages. Rewards take the form of avatars and skins. Skins combine a music track with a graphical style. You’ll come to recognize these and love or hate them as you encounter them in the challenge mode. The changes in speed and tone that each introduce take time to deal with.

The challenge mode is the standard game, which has you trying to survive 100 increasingly tough levels. The pace increases as you progress, putting you under more and more pressure to build patterns before the play area fills up.

Away from the challenge mode there is a puzzle mode, which sets you different tasks, such as building a particular shape. The vs CPU mode see you trying to expand your territory, with an ever shifting line dividing the play area between you and your opponent. There’s also the skins mode, where you can set up playlists from the tracks you’ve unlocked.

This is a game where your memories of playing it will be forever tied up with its tunes. From the opening “mondo grosso” track to the relief when the game slows down two thirds of the way through, to the gradual ramping up of pressure until the end of the challenge mode, the game and its music are inseparable.

Mizuguchi san is known for his interest in synesthesia, making the sounds and visuals work in tandem to pull the player in, creating an almost trance like state when playing the game. Get sucked into Lumines and you’ll begin to understand just what that means.

The biggest downside is it takes a long time to play. Once you get good at the challenge mode it can take upwards of an hour for a single game.

That makes it perfect for switch however, as the system’s portability makes it easy to start and stop games in mid-play. While it looks great on the big screen it is also a perfect game to play on the go.

Overall, this is a brilliant puzzler, sure to pull you in and stretch your brain in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions. We’d recommend it to all puzzler fans and gamers in general.

We’re taking a look at Mario’s latest, greatest adventure today, in this Super Mario Odyssey review. Yes, we know. It’s been out a while, but we’ve just gotten around to playing it through. We’re very glad we did, as it is a stonking return to form for the little plumber after a couple of good, but not that good outings on Wii U.

The headline feature, of course, is the hats and the ability to body swap with various creatures. There is a surprising range of these. Right from the start you’ll be inhabiting frogs, dinosaurs and chain chomps and as the game progresses the feature is used extensively.

Soon, it will be second nature to take over your enemies and exploit their unique abilities to overcome the game’s many challenges. Seasoned players may well find themselves banging their heads against a brick wall trying to reach a hidden item, only to find it can be acquired easily by taking over the appropriate creature.

There are all sorts of hidden things scattered around as you’d expect. 2D murals of old Mario games are painted on walls and in a lovely touch you can jump into them and start playing retro style. This feature is used to climb walls and hide a few cunning secrets, too.

It does look slightly technically dated in places, with limited textures and occasional frame rate drops, even when docked. At first it gives you a sense that Nintendo aren’t quite as perfect as usual.

Artistically though, the graphics are phenomenal, and that’s what matters. Insects flit about here and there, rainbows shimmer in the spray from waterfalls. Flying from place to place in the Odyssey is a joy too. Nintendo have packed the game’s worlds with little details and added a sense of spectacle, with grand vistas and epic sights appearing regularly.

Mario’s new move set can feel a bit clunky at first, but soon starts to gel. The different play styles have been exploited in full by Nintendo and allow the designers to mix up the gameplay. Odyssey feels like more of a departure from the formula than recent entries, the quirkiest game since Mario Sunshine in some respects, though it deviates from the formula more successfully.

The gameplay of course, is second to none. There are plenty of surprises which we’d love to talk about, but feel they’re best left for the player to discover themselves. At times it recalls Sonic Adventure, Majora’s mask and Mario 2. Ideas old and new are packed side by side and cast into a huge range of challenges. Mario games are never short of things to do, but this one is more crammed than ever with hundreds of moons to collect.

There are some surprises in tone, not least of which is the presence of other human beings. Curiously, these look, well, like normal people in contrast to Mario. When you arrive at New Donk City, you’ll find it full of suited citizens going about their business. It feels unusual but is more interesting than weird and makes a nice change to the mushroom kingdom we’re so familiar with.

As well as people you’ll also travel to a level that looks like Dark Souls, a food themed area and many other weird and wonderful locations. The game feels more experimental than the last few entries in the series but the weird diversions never undermine the solidity of Mario’s universe.

The game offers a decent amount of challenge too. Recent Mario games have seen Bowser fall very easily with the challenge for older players coming from unearthing the game’s well hidden secrets. It may be old age creeping in, but we found ourselves dying a few times, even in the game’s early sections – a welcome change from the overly easy opening levels of Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D World.

Post game there’s plenty to do too, but again, we’ll leave you to discover that for yourselves.

The game also has a rather nice snapshot feature, which enables you to position the camera independently of the game and apply a range of impressive filters. Cleverly, these include a few based on old Nintendo consoles, so if you want to see how the game would look using the Gameboy’s colour palette, you’re covered.

The map is presented as a travel guide, with the Dark Souls like area’s entry reading like an affectionate satire of From’s epic series.

The levels contain a number of hidden moons, which you collect to power your ship and allow it to reach the next stage. Moons are easier to come by than the stars and shines of Mario’s previous adventures, but there are more of them to collect.

There are two currencies in the game, which allow you to purchase extra health and a moon for each level, as well as a selection of clothing. Some puzzles need to be wearing the appropriate outfit so these aren’t just cosmetic. Each level contains a shop for standard coins and one for the purple collectable coins unique to each area. There are a fixed number of these, and you’ll need to find them all if you want to buy everything.

There are no lives in the game. Fall to your doom and you simply lose 10 coins. This is the first time we can remember this happening in a Mario game, but it makes more sense than lives, which end up being fairly meaningless in long form games, where you rack up dozens of them fairly early.

Adding further variety are the skill challenges, with online leaderboards. These include jump rope, speed running and others. As well as being able to see your world ranking, you can win power moons by hitting particular times.

There is also the balloon hiding minigame, which has you hiding balloons round the level for other players to find and hunting the balloons hidden by other players. Coins are awarded generously for completing these challenges, giving you added motivation to play.

If you’re playing with a friend, then the second player takes control of your hat, making you a real team. This isn’t quite as effective as the multiplayer in Super Mario 3D World and is perhaps the only area where Odyssey is weaker. It’s still good fun though, but player two can feel like a passenger at times.

Control wise, the joycons, which we tested, work well, despite the disconnection issue occasionally rearing its head. One minor frustration is that in portable mode the game’s motion control features aren’t available. These can be seriously useful, especially in the game’s tighter moments, so losing out on them can be annoying. It isn’t a game breaker though.

Portable mode also looks fantastic, with the graphics looking more or less perfect on the small screen. This is by far Mario’s most visually impressive portable incarnation yet.

Is Odyssey Mario’s finest moment? It’s certainly up there. It can never be the game changer Mario 64 was, but it certainly feels like the most different Mario in a long time and Nintendo have drawn all their experience to produce this game that combines the epic with an eye for detail that few outside Kyoto’s finest posses.

A real Odyssey then, and a must buy for Switch owners.

10/10

Mario Odyssey is available to buy and download and is currently 6458 yen on the Japanese Nintendo e-shop.

The Switch debuted last Friday and it looks to have launched with an instant classic. Zelda:Breath of the Wild has picked up rave reviews being described by some as the best game in the series. Edge magazine awarded the game a coveted 10/10 score, and Eurogamer ranked it as essential. Breath of the Wild is also available on Wii U, which owners of the older console will be pleased to hear, runs the game without any major compromises and only marginal changes in graphical quality.

The Switch itself had a decent opening weekend, outselling the Wii U launch and shifting 80,000 units. We’ll be watching it closely over the next few months to see how it performs. The new Mario game later in the year will surely give it another boost.

Nintendo just revealed details of their new hybrid console and in good news for expat gamers, the system will be region free, meaning you’ll be able to buy games from wherever you like.

We got a look at several launch games, including a long trailer for the impressive looking Zelda – Breath of the Wild. A new Mario game for the system, Mario Odyssey, looked intriguing, appearing to be set in an open world city with realistic citizens walking around. Grand Theft Mario, anyone? We also saw footage of Splatoon 2, which looked good. Other confirmed games included Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Skyrim, FIFA soccer, Ultra Streetfighter 2, Steep, Minecraft, Arms – a motion controlled boxing game and several others.

Just five titles will be available at launch, Zelda, 1-2 Switch, Super Bomberman R, Skylanders Imaginators and Just Dance 2017.

Launch price will be Y29,980 which has raised a few eyebrows, but is slightly less than the Wii U Premium bundle. Peripherals do seem expensive with the pro controller going for $70 and the Joy-Con going for $50 each ($80 for a pair).

There will also be a subscription model for online play which is a shame, but it is worth pointing out that Wii U multiplayer performance is rock solid and the infrastructure for that doesn’t come cheap. There was some mention of a smartphone or device being used for online features, but we’re not yet clear on how that will work. Apparently subscribers will be entitled to play a single NES or SNES game each month, but it isn’t clear they’ll be able to keep it. Compared to the generous bundle of games offered with Playstation and XBox subscriptions this does sound somewhat Scrooge like. Overcharging for their retro content on modern system has always seemed a bit of an own goal for Nintendo but we’ll have to wait to see exactly what’s on offer before passing judgement on this.

All in all though we’re pretty pleased with this. The games look good, it’s region free and it seems to have a bit of third party support. Roll on March 3.