The Nippon Line 15/12

15 Dec 2008 at 11:29:01 by Jake Kawaguchi

Welcome back to the Nippon Line – please form an orderly queue for your new Japanese gaming information. Worth waiting for this week: the Nintendo-oriented future of Dragon Quest, and nice review scores for Dissidia: Final Fantasy and Gundam Musou 2, and more. Get!  


Dragon Quest X for Wii

So, Square Enix announced last week that Dragon Quest X will be a Wii game. It won’t make much difference to the Wii’s performance in the US or Europe, but DQX on Wii spells BIG THINGS for the console in Dragon Quest-mad Japan. I’m not surprised that Square Enix has decided to go down this route with its celebrated RPG series – Xbox 360 doesn’t have the kind of user base in Japan to substantiate a Dragon Quest release, after all, and PS3 development seems to be too expensive. Wii is the happy middle ground: relatively cheap development costs, massive sales potential. 

This was actually quite an inevitable move once Dragon Quest IX was confirmed for the DS and Monster Hunter 3 for the Wii. Nintendo platforms are again becoming synonymous with Japan’s most popular franchises. This was the case before the 32-/64-bit era, of course – Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and their ilk were the preserve of Nintendo’s Super Famicom console just like they had been geared towards Nintendo’s original Famicom in the generation before that.

Now Japan’s leading third-party developers are crawling back to Nintendo’s hospice and asking, “Can we come inside, please? It’s freezing out here!” Quite sensibly, Nintendo is willingly accepting them and their games back. The Wii has done very well for itself in Japan so far, but next year it will go to the next level. Mark my words with a fluorescent green highlighter.


Dissidia: Final Fantasy popular

The latest Final Fantasy game – Dissidia, an action/battle game on the PSP – gets a predictably high score in the newest issue of Weekly Famitsu. The mag’s four reviewers give it ratings of 10, 9, 9 and 8 (36 out of 40). They seem chuffed to bits with it, noting that the game offers more than 100 hours of play, including a single-player story game that lasts 40 hours.

One reviewer says: “The characters you can play with don’t get caught up in a big festival of cameos: instead, the production enables you to follow each character’s individual story. The cutscenes are awesome.”

Another reviewer adds: “The battles are really quick. There are infinite possibilities with the character customisation options. The more you play and the further into the game you get, the more new features appear and the more enjoyable it becomes.”


Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 just as popular

If you’re looking for omens in Famitsu scores, you can find the exact same ratings for Koei and Bandai Namco’s collaborative Gundam Musou 2 as for Square Enix’ Dissidia: Final Fantasy. These two games will be at the top of the charts in Japan this week, but I’m not sure in which order. Probably Gundam will be in second place…

Anyway, why is Gundam Musou 2 deserving of a 36/40 review score? Because it’s great, obviously! Here’s what Famitsu has to say: “There are so many Mobile Suits here and they’re so well realised. The blend of the Musou series’ features and the original Gundam atmosphere, which is retained intact, make for a tremendously satisfying game. It’s great that there are so many Mobile Suit parts and skills to collect and develop – there’s enough here for you to play the game for ages.”

To be precise, Famitsu reckons Namco Bandai has crammed 80 hours of gameplay into Gundam Musou 2. Sounds like a bargain. Definitely look out for the Anglicised version when it arrives next year. 

 
ADK exhumed for new SNK compilation

You’ve probably never heard of ADK, but back in the day it was one of Japan’s highly respected arcade game developers and a close friend of Neo-Geo Company SNK. Continuing its recent policy of committed videogame archaeology, SNK Playmore has announced ADK Spirits, a PS2-bound collection of five classic Neo-Geo games from the dead developer that will launch in Japan on the 18th of this month.

And why should you care? Well, assuming it eventually makes it to your part of the world (or assuming you have the will to import it from Japan), ADK Spirits contains a few awesome games, including the incredibly rare and expensive Twinkle Star Sprites – a game you’d otherwise have to spend £100 to play in its Saturn or Dreamcast guise.

The other four games in this package are: Gangan (aka Aggressors of Dark Kombat, a mediocre fighter), Ninja Masters (a solid Samurai Shodown rip-off), Ninja Combat (another mediocre fighter), and Ninja Commando (a mediocre shmup that’s already available on the Wii’s Virtual Console). And Ninja Tennis… only kidding!

So that makes three mediocre games, one decent game and, in the aforementioned mega-bloody-expensive Twinkle Star Sprites, a work of genius that blended the 2D shooting and puzzle genres long before Treasure got around to releasing Bangai-o Spirits. Split-screen competitive shmupping, anyone?

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