HIGH An exceptional narrative and combat system that builds upon years of experience.

LOW Some slowdown and visual quirks.

WTF I urge all readers to watch Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai before playing this game

For almost two decades, gamers have been well-acquainted with Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series. 

The first nine mainline releases saw players inhabit virtual recreations of historical settings in small-scale, open-ended environments that focused on stealth-based gameplay and stories that involve Dan Brown-esque shadow societies and conspiracies.

In 2017, Ubisoft changed directions and the series has since shifted into an open-world, action role-playing style, rivaling modern juggernauts such as The Witcher III and Red Dead Redemption II. As a longtime fan of the series, the current iteration is one I’ve grown fond of, with my own review of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla praising its deeper focus on exploration and strong combat suite. However, even after putting over 100 hours into Valhalla, I still felt that it (and the series as a whole) needed a little more to push itself into greatness and Shadows is that attempt.

Played from a third-person perspective, Shadows is an action-RPG set in feudal Japan. During this time (the end of the Sengoku period), conflicts have broken out while major advancements in wartime technology (like the introduction of guns) have turned the tide of battle. Players are introduced to the two protagonists, Naoe and Yasuke. The former is a ninja who’s been training her whole life among her people in the Iga Province. The latter, based on the real historical figure of the same name, is an African who was granted the title of Samurai. Without revealing too many narrative details, both characters meet in dire circumstances and form an allyship to liberate Japan from a wave of oppressors. 

The storytelling in Shadows is one of its strongest suits, providing a much darker and deeper narrative the series has seen in years. This era in Japan was known for death and destruction, and the story covers that with a gravity I wasn’t expecting. Themes center around the aftermath of war, the tolls that vengeance takes on people and how race and class affect worldview are all prevalent and handled well. It also helps that the two main characters are charming and fleshed out — Naoe’s brash attitude clashes with Yasuke’s more thoughtful personality, making their dynamic work.  

The grand scope and wonderful character of this piece recalls the likes of Akira Kurosawa’s oeuvre of samurai films (Throne of Blood, Seven Samurai, etc.) while the over-the-top violence reminded me of Kenji Misumi’s classic Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance or Takashi Miike’s excellent remake of 13 Assassins. Those cinematic allusions also play a huge part in the story’s presentation, as every cutscene is well-directed and featuring solid cinematography and the inclusion of black bars above and below the screen to add some flair, giving that “widescreen” look.

With the story being the best the series has seen in ages, I’m also happy to report that the gameplay is exceptional, with innovations and changes made to combat and stealth.

Players control both Naoe and Yasuke in their journey through Japan and are able to switch between them freely after an extended period with Naoe at the beginning. Rather than each character being a simple aesthetic choice, each provides a different style, different skill trees and different approaches to combat, allowing players to build Naoe and Yasuke how they want. 

For example, I decided that Naoe should be an excellent assassin and focused on those skills in her tree. She was able to perform a double assassination with a hidden blade, had an arsenal of tools like kunai (a small blade) that could be thrown to dispose of enemies quickly and quietly, and a smoke bomb to get out of dangerous situations. At one point, I even found armor that allowed me to inflict more damage at night, adding to my plan of sticking to the shadows. Naoe can also go prone and crawl on the floor, sneaking through bushes and under structures to catch enemies off guard.

If I did have to get loud using Naoe, I made sure she was an adept fighter and upgraded her katana skills. Combat as a shinobi is a fast dance of careful dodges, parries and quick sword attacks. The stamina meter from Valhalla is gone, allowing players to attack without the cumbersome feeling of managing a meter. 

Yasuke isn’t so graceful, but he brings a more brutal style of play. A trained samurai, Yasuke mostly uses weapons like katanas or kanabō (spiked clubs) in fights to delivers slower, yet more powerful attacks. His abilities include a kick that can send opponents flying or knocking them down after running into them. Despite not being able to sneak as easily as Naoe, I enjoyed walking into an enemy outpost and taking on a large group of enemies. This boldness pairs excellently with gnarly finisher moves, with plenty of heads and limbs being chopped off. 

Other major upgrades to combat include the importance of lights and sounds, as players are able to extinguish candles to conceal themselves in the dark and being careful when sneaking around to avoid creaky floorboards. After the last few entries in the AC series deemphasizing stealth in exchange for action, being able to play Shadows as a full-blown stealth title is a treat. Supporting this is that quests are dynamic, with many ways to complete them. For example, Naoe had to assassinate someone in a house. I managed to successfully sneak past the guards, find a suitable vantage point and threw a knife from a safe distance before anyone had seen me. I completed the quest and faced no alarms or opposition. 

As mentioned, Shadows does an excellent job in storytelling and presentation to make the experience feel cinematic, and it also helps that the visuals are gorgeous, with character models and facial animations looking good. However, the real star of the show is Japan itself.

Riding through winding hills on horseback is a treat, as mountains on the horizon paint a gorgeous picture. The same goes for standing in a dense forest full of bamboo. Shadows’ Japan is smaller than Valhalla’s England, which in turn makes it more dense with detail. The overall presentation is amazing and during my time, I only encountered minor moments of slowdown and a few weird clipping instances.  

Assassin’s Creed Shadows feels like the culmination of years of reworking the series into a full-fledged RPG. With smart changes to the overall flow of combat and a narrative that rivals some of the best triple-AAA experiences available today, Shadows is not only the best AC in well over a decade, but arguably one of the finest action-RPGs of the decade so far.

Fans and doubters alike owe it to themselves to take this trip to Japan.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10 

Buy Assassin’s Creed Shadows: PS5 – Xbox – PC

Disclosures: This game is published and developed by Ubisoft. It is available on PC, PS5, and XBX/S. This copy was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PS5. Approximately 30 hours were spent in single-player and the game was not completed (still playing). There is no multiplayer.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language. The site reads: This is an action-adventure game in which players follow the stories of a shinobi assassin (Naoe) and a samurai (Yasuke) as they navigate turbulent clan wars during Sengoku-era Japan. Players explore open-world environments while performing missions (e.g., searching for items, infiltrating enemy compounds) and using stealth to kill human targets. Players use swords, throwing/concealed blades, and occasional guns to kill various enemies (e.g., ninja, guards, soldiers, samurai) in melee-style combat. Battles are highlighted by screams of pain and frequent blood-splatter effects. Some finishing moves allow players to decapitate or dismember enemies, with brief slow-motion effects. Cutscenes depict further instances of violence: captives beheaded; characters shot at close range. The words “sh*t” and “a*shole” appear in the game.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present in the options menu.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are subtitles and visual options available in the game, all of which can be adjusted. This game is fully accessible. More on the accessibility can be read here.

Remappable Controls: The controls can be remapped.

The post Assassin’s Creed Shadows Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Disclosure: This is an article written and released by Ubisoft, and sent to GameCritics via Ubisoft PR. While we don’t usually run PR releases, given its focus on accessibility and our lifelong dedication to same, we’re happy to share this information. The article can be seen in its original format here.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows launches on March 20 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, Macs with Apple silicon via the Mac App Store, and Windows PC through the Ubisoft Store, Steam, and Epic Games Store. Set during the late Sengoku era in Japan, players will play as both the stealthy shinobi Naoe and the formidable samurai Yasuke. No matter who you’re playing as, the development team wanted to ensure that as many people as possible are able to enjoy everything that Assassin’s Creed Shadows has to offer. To learn more about the team’s approach to accessible design, we spoke with UX Director Jonathan Bedard.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is an evolution for the franchise, with many elements being rebuilt from the ground up. In what ways did that allow you to change your approach to accessibility?

Jonathan Bedard: Having changed the way we built the game, we had to redo many things, and it allowed us to revisit some elements that weren’t working as well as we’d hoped. Certain features benefited from this by being retooled or by simply changing the interface itself – or in some cases, the functionalities – to elevate our offer and our experience to higher standards. One example of that is our input remapping. Not only can you adjust the inputs of any of the buttons, but you can adjust the action of that input, whether you want it to be a hold or a press.

What was the collaboration like with the development team at Ubisoft Quebec?

JB: With every project, we have more and more people interested and invested in the different topics related to accessibility. This was especially true for Shadows; for instance, the audio team was really invested and proposed ways to innovate and push the boundaries of what we do in accessibility.

The unflinching involvement of our dedicated accessibility teams in Ukraine, mixed with the enthusiasm in our different studios, made it so we were able to propose new innovative features like audio descriptions for in-game cinematics, which is something not often seen in games.

Are there any new features you’re particularly proud of? Or that the community has been requesting for a while?

JB: Audio descriptions for cinematics is something that really made me happy to see come to the game.

Fun fact, while in a director meeting, reviewing the game, we ended up encountering that feature, in a scene that was used as a benchmark for this. It was not supposed to be enabled for that meeting, but we ended up really impressed by how many emotions and actions were transposed through it. It helped me project how this could change the perception of many motivational levers for many of our players needing this because of how well it came out, and how good of a job it did to express the events in the game in a way that really conveys the emotions and subtleties of our scenes.

It also made me happy to see an initiative coming from the team’s passion and making its way into the game. This shows how far we’ve come along in the last few years, in terms of people being aware of and caring about accessibility at Ubisoft. I am proud to see this evolution, awareness, and care spreading and making our games more accessible every time.

ACCESSIBILITY FEATURES LIST

Visual

• Colorblind options – Ability to change colors for certain gameplay elements from a list of presets
• Screen Narration – Not only most menu items, but also many HUD modules and time-sensitive elements can be narrated
• HUD Customization – Ability to turn all HUD elements on or off either all at once, or individually, either with shortcut or using presets – increase opacity, resize text, resize Icons or add background to increase readability
• Screen shake on/off toggle

Audio

• Subtitles – Better color modifications, speaker directions and speaker emotions
• Gameplay Captions – Surfacing stimuli and points to their origins
• Audio Description for Cinematics – Cinematic will be audio descripted
• Audio Cues/Audio Glossary – New signs and feedback allowing navigation and path finding with non-visual cues
• Separate, isolated audio sliders

Navigation and Guidance

• FTUE – First time user experience flow is back, offering first-access critical options
• Guided Mode – Offer streamlined systems and remove part of the gameplay to alleviate the requirement for player engagement in exploration and finding content
• Tutorials Section – Tutorials can be found in the Codex section at any time
• Menu Tutorials – Always alerts when there are new menu functions
• Conversation Log – Every line can be perused from the start to the end of a dialogue

Controls

• Control Remapping – Remap gameplay inputs, and their action (hold, press, double-press)
• Many inputs devices – Mouse and keyboard, controllers, combinations
• Lock-On Camera – Lock the camera on an enemy
• X and Y axis inversion – Ability to invert the axis for aiming actions
• Stick inversion – Invert the analog-stick behavior

Gameplay

• Stealth and combat each have four separate difficulty settings
• Guided Mode – Offer streamlined systems and remove part of the gameplay to alleviate the requirement for player engagement in exploration and finding content
• Canon Mode – Enable automatic selection of narrative decisions for the “canon” story to unfold
• Melee Attack Mode – Simplifies the combat by using a single input instead of multiple buttons or complex combinations
• Quick Timed Events – Type of input required to complete Quick Time Events can be simplified, or skipped entirely
• Aim Assistance – Four levels of aim assistance are offered (off, light, moderate, full)

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is available for preorder now and launches on March 20 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, Macs with Apple silicon via the Mac App Store, and Windows PC through the Ubisoft Store, Steam, and the Epic Games Store. The game will also come to iPad at a later date.

— Youssef Garcia-Maguid

The post Assassin’s Creed Shadows Accessibility Spotlight appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Soulslike combat with a minimalist art style and a pacifist narrative.

LOW Tedious waves of the same enemy types and harsh penalties for missteps.

WTF Why have different buttons to talk, pick up and read instead of one ‘interact’ button?

Recently, publisher 3D Realms released developer Point N’ Sheep’s Bloodless — an intense isometric action-RPG in which the player must have impeccable timing as they block, disarm and pacify rather than attack their enemies.

The player controls Tomoe, a ronin formerly known as “The Slasher” who has, for reasons yet to be seen, forsaken her murderous ways in pursuit of a peaceful life. She wanders in a land known as Bakugawa seeking to make amends, but inevitably finds more enemies and fewer friends as she travels.

Between its female protagonist, nonviolent combat, and themes of mercy and redemption, Bloodless presents a welcome change from other titles in a similar vein, such as action-heavy soulslikes and metroidvanias.

As she makes her way through Bakugawa (a fictional substitute for feudal Japan) Tomoe must deflect attacks after seeing either a red or white ‘tell’ from enemies. A white reticle indicates that an incoming attack can be parried, and the player must press into the enemy to disarm them. Red reticles cannot be parried, so the player would be wise to back off. While this combat is fairly simple, appropriate response times and speed are crucial, as is management of stamina.

Besides parrying, another strategy that can be deployed to repel an opponent is a ki “attack.” These can be used whenever a pink spot appears during a red attack, and these ki abilities allow the player to gradually wear an enemy’s stamina down until they simply give up and run away.

As examples, the first ki ability the player acquires allows them to release a wide pink arc that chips away at an enemy’s stamina, but it costs a lot of ki. A ‘cheaper’ but less powerful ki ability allows the player to sprint repeatedly at an enemy while engulfed by pink flame. As much as I appreciated the layer of complexity provided by ki abilities, I found the glacial speed at which the ki bar recharges to be so frustrating that I eventually gave up on using ki at all.

While this ‘pacifist’ combat setup seems like an interesting divergence from traditional fare, one aspect of Bloodless that I found annoying was the inefficient design of the controls. For example, the player must use different buttons for doing essentially the same thing: one button for reading signs, one for talking to a person, and a third for picking up items. All of this could easily have been accomplished with just one ‘interact’ button, and there’s no option to remap the controls.

While that was a bother, a more serious issue is that Bloodless requires near-perfect reflexes for success.

For example, one huge, tanky enemy can drop boulders from the sky. This would be a standard sort of ‘tough guy’ encounter in most games, but here it was nearly unbearable — boulders were not only falling out of the sky but also hurtling toward me as he hit more boulders with his massive spiked club in an arc wide enough to hit me at the same time.

As for the bosses, they don’t have HP in the traditional sense, just a certain amount of hits they can take before they’re defeated. Players can’t level up or upgrade to do more damage, they just have to learn how to time their parries perfectly and in fast enough succession to defeat them.

Even after learning how to navigate this, I struggled to time every movement exactly right to make it through all of their various phases, or risk starting from the beginning. When I finally brought one of the later bosses down, I was overcome by such a wave of relief that I knew I needed to stop playing for the sake of my own sanity.

While the demanding gameplay is a bit much, artistically, there are many bright spots. The music suited each area well and dialogue was well-written. The top-down, pixel art presentation opts for minimalism — the landscapes tend to have muted colors, and character models are rendered in stark black and white, similar to how they might have looked running on a GameBoy. This relatively simple look is effective, using color sparingly as a way to distinguish between enemy types or to accentuate the atmosphere of dimly-lit castle grounds littered with corpses of enemies , or eerie green forests teeming with bandits.

Bloodless is a great game for players who enjoy high intensity, well-timed, precision-based combat, but it is definitely not for everyone.

As much as I like a good challenge in games — including soulslikes — I have little patience for tedium. The world was engaging and the graphics stunning, but the dearth of ways to try different ideas in combat dampened my resolve to see Tomoe’s redemption arc through to the end.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game was developed by Point N’ Sheep and published by 3D Realms. It is currently available on PC and Switch. Code for this review was obtained from the publisher and reviewed on Switch. Approximately 10 hours were devoted to the campaign mode. The game was not finished. There is no multiplayer mode.

Parents: This game is rated T by the ESRB for Blood and Violence. There are pixelated splashes representing blood as Tomoe is slashed by enemies and there are some disturbing images like the remnants of a battle including corpses left to decay in the city streets and so on.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game features voiced NPC dialogue accompanied by text. Due to the isometric presentation, all incoming threats can be observed from far away and the different types of attacks (whether or not they can be parried) are always indicated by color which makes it fully accessible.

Remappable controls: The controls cannot be remapped. A selects/unleashes special ki abilities, B closes/dodges, X uses items, Y ki jabs/interacts, left trigger/right trigger sprints, right/left bumpers switch ki abilities, switch items, – accesses skills, techniques, etc. and + opens menu.

The post Bloodless Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH A riveting supernatural story with a legendary legacy.

LOW What do you mean the other half is still in production?!

WTF The tonal shifts when encountering a bad ending and reading the cast commenting on your failures.

Frankly speaking, the mere thought of being able to draft a review of the official English-language international release of Tsukihime feels unreal. For nearly 24 years, it seemed like Type-Moon’s legendary visual novel would forever be Japan-exclusive, never to appear in English without the help of fan translations — but it’s here now, and all is well.

To be accurate, the subject of this review is not, strictly speaking, the Tsukihime that I first played a fan translation of in high school. Instead, I’m reviewing Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-, a remake developed by Type-Moon and released in Japan in 2021. It features a fully rewritten story and new original art from Type-Moon co-founders Kinoko Nasu and Takashi Takeuchi.

Though the story has been rewritten, the core premise hasn’t changed. As before, the narrative is told almost entirely in the first person, experienced through the very special eyes of Shiki Tohno, a young high school student.

Shiki possesses the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, causing him to see supernatural “lines” drawn all over everything around him. Cutting along those lines instantly kills almost anything… or anyone, unless Shiki wears a pair of special magical glasses that hide the lines from his sight. After years living in exile away from his aristocratic family, Shiki is called back to the massive Tohno mansion following the death of his father. A shockingly violent encounter with a mysterious, beautiful woman named Arcueid kicks off the story proper, drawing Shiki deeper into a mystical world that lies just beneath the surface of the urban ordinary. It’s a world where vampires war in the city streets under cover of night, all the while dodging monster hunters empowered by the church itself, and where seemingly anyone, from the family doctor to one’s own classmates, might be hiding some kind of supernatural secret.

Adventure stories with a horror twist aren’t new, but it’s notable that Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is also, at its core, a romance.

Alongside the vividly rendered passages describing magical battles and vampire hunts are meet-cutes straight out of a romantic comedy playbook. In these instances, the writing bubbles with a sweet puppy-love vibe, full of dramatic teenage infatuation rendered in flowery, heartfelt passages. Thanks to an top-class English-language localization, the mood of reckless teenage romance is perfectly captured. It’s even thanks to this localization that segments where Shiki essentially ogles his female conversation partners come across as cutely awkward, rather than creepy — immensely helpful considering the large number of pretty girls that interact with Shiki. That said, the story of Tsukihime does focus on two main narrative branches, each centered around a different heroine.

One of the biggest departures A piece of blue glass moon makes from the original Tsukihime is in the writing of the second branch, which focuses on Ciel, Shiki’s mature, reliable, enigmatic upperclassman.

The original game presented Ciel as an alternative romantic “route,” as is the custom for games in the genre, though the bulk of written material and development was clearly concentrated on Arcueid as the “main” heroine. The result was a Ciel route that felt like a variation of Arcueid’s — an alternative path included less as an equally valid option than a value-add for players seeking replayability.

By comparison, Ciel’s route in Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon– truly feels distinct, with its own plotting, cast of characters, and and exploration of a different side of Tsukihime‘s setting and lore. If Arcueid’s story route largely involves vampires and other supernatural kindred, Ciel’s dips heavily into the holy church, a vaguely Christian organization that defends human society against supernatural threats and violently suppresses the ones that come too close to revealing the magical world’s existence to mankind at large. In their way, the two main routes in Tsukihime‘s remake feel like genuinely equal options, fitting well with Type-Moon’s permissive attitude towards what counts as “canon” in its various properties.

With that in mind, players must read through Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- multiple times to get the most out of the story. Thankfully, it includes plenty of tools to ease exploration. Players can save and load anytime, and a handy “flowchart” system not unlike the one seen in Vanillaware’s 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim allows players to jump back and forth in the timeline, checking the results of choices at their leisure. The main routes and their endings are also unlocked sequentially, so there’s no danger of making the “wrong” choice and being forced to reload or wait until the next playthrough.

There are even more than a dozen different “bad endings” to acquire for completionist players. Bad endings are very much the “wrong choices,” usually in the sense that picking them results in Shiki’s death, described in gruesome, embarrassing detail. These are usually played for laughs, though, and invariably conclude with a post-credits classroom sequence where the characters discuss what just happened and advise the player on what choices to pick after they reload.

Outside of the occasional typo and an odd bug where a small amount of voiced Japanese-language lines aren’t properly subtitled in other languages, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is larger in scale than the original, polished to a mirror sheen, and convenient almost to a fault. Its writing expands the story in an appealing way that’s conscious of Type-Moon’s status as a company at the top of its field managing its own multiverse of related stories and projects (such as the Fate/Grand Order mobile game and more besides). It doesn’t supplant the scrappy, rough-hewn, original Tsukihime, but rather compliments it, presenting the visual novel equivalent of a breathtakingly costly but inimitably entertaining triple-A blockbuster to contrast with the original’s history as an out-of-nowhere indie hit.

The only wrinkle in this otherwise perfect remake story is that A piece of blue glass moon is just the first entry of the Tsukihime remake project. The two routes contained in this release are just the “Near Side” routes. The original game’s three other “Far Side” routes — routes that were more psychodrama-focused and starred supporting characters like Akiha, Kohaku, and Hisui, are due to be included in another installment, Tsukihime -The other side of red garden-, which is still in production. This isn’t to say that the experience feels incomplete without the additional routes, but it’s an acknowledgement that those who want to know more about certain other characters and see how Type-Moon will address their respective stories may end up waiting a while for the second half of the remake project to release.

Nevertheless, as it is, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- remains a superlative visual novel, and a must-read for any fan of Type-Moon’s work, as well as a great potential entry point for those looking to get into visual novels as a medium.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed Type-Moon and published by Aniplex. It is currently available for the Switch and PS4. This review is based on a paid download and reviewed on Switch. A PS4 code provided by the publisher was tested. Approximately 47 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode and acquiring all main endings. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game is rated M by the ESRB, with content descriptors for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, and Suggestive Themes. The rating description is as follows: “This is a visual novel in which players follow the story of a high-school student who encounters vampires and ghouls in Japan. As players progress through the narrative, they view stylized story sequences (mostly still images), some depicting violence and blood: blood splatter; pools of blood; characters killed off camera; a character’s hand repeatedly stabbed. The text includes descriptive details of violent acts (e.g., “I stab, I cut, I slice, I carve. Severing piece after piece until nothing is left…”; “After listening to the weakling beg for its life, she begins her meticulous work…Once the other arm is gone too, she swaps her tools and sets work on its inside.”). Some sequences depict severed limbs and dismembered body parts in large pools of blood. A female vampire is depicted partially nude, with exposed pelvic area (no genitalia), and her arm covering her breasts. The words “f**k” and “sh*t” are heard in the game.”

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The gameplay is not reliant on audio cues. All voiced dialogue is represented by on-screen text. There are no options for text size or readability configuration, but detailed options exist to manage text display speed. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: This game’s button controls are not remappable.

The post Tsukihime -A Piece Of Blue Glass Moon- Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The bosses, who appear to have been pulled out of a From Software game.

LOW Trying to puzzle out how the ‘ugly bear doll’ sidequest worked.

WTF Yay! My pocket monster grew up to be prime minister of the monster cave!

When metaphor meets text, it can be in intriguing combination. Many stories about super-powered youth trade in heightened examinations of adolescent anxieties and problems, so it’s refreshing to encounter a game that tosses all artifice aside and announces that it’s going to be, literally, about the thing that other stories imply. Blue Reflection‘s heroines don’t fight monsters meant to represent the emotional challenges that high school girls face — they fight monsters built out of those emotions.

Set in (where else?) a Japanese high school, Blue Reflection is the story of Hinako, a morose freshman whose dreams of becoming a top-tier ballerina have been shattered by a career-ending knee injury. This setback has led her to drift through life as a mediocre student until she discovers that she has the potential to become a ‘Reflector’ — essentially, a Magical Girl capable of jumping into the collective unconsciousness made up of all sentient humans’ minds.

Once transported to this supernatural plane and clad in a preposterous costume that satisfies the time-honored Magical Girl tradition, Hinako and her two sidekicks fight beasts that are formed by the negative emotions of the schoolgirls that surround them. They then draw power from these newly-stable classmates in order to fight the Sephira — horrifying beasts planning to end the world using the endless font of negative feelings that is an all-girls high school.

The game uses a fairly basic JRPG structure. Players wander around the school, completing sidequests and leveling up their characters before taking on harder and harder main quests.Over time they gradually work their way through a series of boss fights against giant monstrosities that look like they belong in a Dark Souls title.

There are a number of interesting departures from standard RPG systems, though. Rather than leveling up by killing enemies, stat improvement points are offered for increasing friendship bonds with other characters. As Hinako makes friends by either diving into their subconscious to battle bizarre energy golems or just by hanging out at lunchtime, she grows more powerful – the school’s collective good vibes are what empower her to become a more fearsome warrior, and it’s only by being a decent person that she can she can save the school, and eventually, the world.

The turn-based combat system is largely standard for the JRPG genre, but it also has a few interesting tweaks. Other than bosses and key enemies for quests, one twist is that all combat is optional. Dead enemies offer only items that can be used to make consumables or to level up combat techniques. It’s as if the developers want the players to understand that the combat is secondary to the narrative.

Also, many moves have the ability to knock enemies back and delay their attacks, increasing their wait times as they’re jostled around on a literal timeline visible at the top of the screen. This creates a system where a canny player can control when each enemy gets to attack, allowing them to better prepare for the assault. While the combat certainly isn’t the most important part of Blue Reflection, it’s nice to see the developers adding strategy to keep it interesting.

Blue Reflection is incredibly upfront about what it’s trying to accomplish here — it’s explicitly about the real dangers to life and limb that can be caused by depression and negative emotional states, and it’s also about the importance of reaching out to those who are suffering and trying to make their lives better. I can’t say that I’ve seen many games with the same goal, but I enjoyed making the world a better place. The experience is sweet, funny, intense, and one of the most fundamentally good-hearted titles I’ve seen in ages. Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Gust and published by Koei-Tecmo. It is currently available on PS4 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately 35 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated Teen and contains Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Partial Nudity, and Suggestive Themes. Well, it’s a girl’s high school, so there are bathing, changing and shower scenes. Why? Because it’s a game about pretty girls from Japan — we’d be crazy to expect anything else. However, there’s very little overtly salacious content, and some fairly serious issues are raised by the plot – characters stalk and peep, suggesting truly unpleasant situations that the game doesn’t explicitly show. So while it comes with a T rating, expect kids to have some questions about its content.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Everything is subtitled and there are no audio cues of note! It’s fully accessible!

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

The post Blue Reflection Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

This article is the second installment of Darren-Kun’s Magical GungHo Adventure! If you haven’t read the introductory piece, you can find it here.

In this column, Darren sat down with Kazuki Morishita, President and CEO of GungHo Online Entertainment. Known for taking a very active, hands-on role in game development, Morishita-san was kind enough to set aside several hours for interviews with us to get his thoughts on a wide range of topics ranging from GungHo’s particular approach towards creating entertaining videogames, the differences between developing for mobile and console gaming, and the challenges involved with targeting global worldwide releases for their IPs.

This roundtable interview was translated by Tyler Inouye of GungHo Online Entertainment America, and was also attended by Darren, Mike Rougeau (Playboy), and Dan Feit (USGamer)

Mike Rougeau: We were discussing this in the lobby, but where did the GungHo logo come from and what does it represent?

Kazuki Morishita: It’s in the shape of a person’s mouth. The first thing you notice is the shape of the mouth, how it’s smiling. Then comes the laughter, because we’re a game company. As a game company we want people to have fun, and that’s why we have the smiley mouth as our logo.

Initially it was going to be red, but then we realized that with the red coloring it might have been a little too similar, or not able to stand out against other companies’ logos, so we decided to make it purple. Depending on the country of course, there’s a differentiation as to whether purple’s a good or bad color, but here in Japan it signifies a high class or quality and that’s why we chose it.

Dan Feit: I’m just curious, what games have you been playing recently? And do you have a preference in regards to mobile, console or PC?

KM: Good question… I’ve been playing a lot of the Switch, and a lot of Zelda. Out of the systems you mentioned, I personally prefer consoles. To tell the truth, as far as mobile games go I’m only playing GungHo’s games. Not so much in the traditional ‘gamer’ sense, more in a debug or quality assurance style. I’m looking for potential things that we might need to fix. That sounds better, doesn’t it? (Laughs)

Darren Forman: What’s GungHo’s overall philosophy on making games? What is it that really sets GungHo’s games apart from other companies?

KM: Whether it’s something that’s good or bad compared to other companies, from the very first steps of development during the initial design stages of new titles I’ll take a role in creating them personally. So after I make the basis, or the beginning stages of what kind of game I’d like to create next, I’ll then see what staff are available, or not too busy with other projects, to come in and then help brush up the ideas I came up with to see if we can make it even better.

It’s a very top down style, how we make games here at GungHo, because I make the basis of it first – the original design document. That’s where a lot of the games come from. Maybe Level 5 does something similar in that sense. It’s kind of like Hino-san who has the idea and then creates the game from the top all the way down to the lower levels. At least in Japan, this isn’t really a common style of game creation here.

So I guess our philosophy is not to have a philosophy at all. If you have a philosophy you tend to stick to it or try to stick to it too much, and if you try to stick to it too much then you’re kind of ‘stuck’ because that’s it’s like, ‘oh well, that’s the philosophy’. That’s why we don’t have one – so that we can be openly creative.

Something close to a philosophy that we have however is that we want our products to feel new and fresh, something that hasn’t been done before and not just do the same thing again. We’re always looking to make new things, continually taking on new challenges and results. Of course, there are still a lot of other titles that never saw the light of day in the middle of development.

MR: What do you feel are the perks of being a game developer in Japan versus in other countries? What do you enjoy about being a game developer here?

KM: I think it’s mainly a question of how work is done here. So for example, I’m not necessarily saying that it might be a good or bad thing but in Japan, being very detail-oriented here, it’s the way that we work. I think it helps us and I think I enjoy doing things that way. You know, paying attention to a lot of the detail. So for example, a lot of action games have come out of Japan, and our offices as well, but if you look at Puzzle and Dragons, for example, it’s not just a puzzle game. We never made it to be just a puzzle game. Here’s a very important example…

(Morishita-san starts up Puzzle and Dragons on his smartphone and shows it to us)

So, for example, you’re looking and can see the drop. You can touch it and move it, but you can move it freely. Now, this is a very important detail here that we’ve been paying attention to, keeping our focus on. So if you look to see when I moved it, it looks and feels really good moving it anywhere that you want to, and there’s no real delay that stops you from doing so or gets really ‘sticky’ here, right? So when we were planning this, to plan that part in general, it took a lot of work and effort and we really stuck to these details.

Another example is with Let it Die. One of the things we agreed on in the very beginning, in the early stages of development, was that it was going to be sixty frames per second. For the most part it was always going to be sixty frames. It’s an action game, so all the actions that you do such as making contact with characters, there’s a lot of detail that really needs to be put into it that we had to focus on so that it looked and felt really good, and this is all very necessary – especially for an action game like Let it Die. We had to pay attention to a lot of detail there.

So for us paying extremely close attention to detail, we really kind of get ourselves into a spot where we have to stick to it, ‘it has to be this way and can’t be any other way’, and we get into this kind of mode where it has to be that way for the end product. Ultimately it doesn’t mean that this is going to be the most efficient way to do things, so this is also a style of work but it’s also something we take pride in doing to work towards an ultimately great end product.

So being here in Japan, this kind of work style and work ethic… because it’s Japan we feel that we’re allowed to pay attention to detail and stick with it even if it’s not the most efficient method, because that’s how we work here in Japan. So even when we have deadlines, or have to have things created in a specific amount of time – for example, even the drop moving that we showed you earlier – we’ve revamped that so many times.

Recently that work style in Japan… we’ve been told that it’s not efficient and not very good. It is in our minds that we hear that and we do understand that it might not be the best way, but we do things the way we want to. We are trying to get things a bit more westernized in that sense, with the way we’re trying to do our work style. It is in our minds, so…

For example, Japan is known for quality and for NASA there is a small company, and small factory that makes these very important cylinders for their spacecraft. With an excruciating amount of detail and quality… I feel this kind of product could only be made in Japan due to this work ethic, these professionals that just make amazing quality.

So for the iPhone, you see that round area for the touchpad, the touch button. Apparently, Japanese people are making this part of the phone. Just this little small round section. Why in Japan? Because it has this extremely small area for what it has to do, and you have to make a lot of these. Without making mistakes, to make a lot for mass production, and we don’t hear about a lot of problems regarding this part of the phone. Especially for the amount of detail, we’re very detail oriented and get our way of focusing on even the smallest things. It’s kind of that professionalism, that all that focus has been put into, something that’s Japanese working style. Not to say that if it was America or another country they wouldn’t be able to do it as well, but I just feel that in Japan where we’re so detail oriented and very proud of the work that we do, we want to give the best products and greatest quality there and pay attention to all that detail here… I think it’s something that we can be proud of.

I’d love to work in Hawaii, actually. I could make games, and I would love to do it in Hawaii… but I think if I went to Hawaii I probably wouldn’t get anything done, so… (laughs)

DF: At Tokyo Game Show 2013 you were one of the keynote speakers that year and you said that console and mobile games should complement each other, and I just think that now we’ve had a few more years to look at console games and mobile games, how things may have changed, do you think that what you said still stands, or do you think that they’re moving further apart?

KM: So in that statement I said that they should support each other. I still believe that this is true. As the years have gone on they’re still on very different paths since they way you play console games and the way you play mobile games is completely different, so the opportunities for them to complement each other still exists, but in regard to gameplay they’re completely different, so they’re still on a split path if anything.

So, console games are like breakfast, lunch and dinner. Smartphone games, mobile games, they’re more like snacks. Like potato chips, and people go back to them for more. Dinner, you won’t just eat it and leave it, you’d rather sit there and have a nice meal, right? So mobile games are more for killing time when you realize you have some free time.

We have heard from our users, in Let it Die for example, that it would be possible to raid or send your fighters on expeditions from your phone. I guess it’s more like a pending app where you could be away from your Playstation 4 and do certain things on your mobile that would then be applied to the game. That sort of thing would be supportive, but it doesn’t mean that we’re going to be making a mobile version of Let it Die. Even if I thought it’d be good to have something like that, it’d be a pain in the ass to make, so I’m not gonna do it. (laughs)

MR: What about the Switch though? The Switch is both…

KM: So, you know, we love Nintendo – I’ve said so many nice things about them that I’m pretty sure I could be confused as a spokesperson for Nintendo! How the Switch is able to fit within your everyday life is amazing. This piece of hardware is amazing. So, for example, you have your living room. At least a Japanese living room. A lot of time games on console are played in the living room, but if you have your kids there you can’t always be playing specific games there. With the Switch though, I could pick it up and hold it out of view, or take it to my bedroom and play it there. That’s why I have two AC adapters for my switch, on in the bedroom and one in the living room.

From a development standpoint for a games producer there are things you’d like to stick to and of course there are technical differences for the hardware, so if you want to stick to something like, say, 60 frames a second then that’s when things become a little more difficult based off the different hardware that we already have things on, if we’re looking to make a port Maybe you’d want us to, but we just can’t bring it there, so…

MR: It’s just that Dan’s question was about the differences between mobile and console but the Switch is kind of bridging that gap, so I just thought it be interesting to…

KM: We’re in agreement, it is kind of in that space, I guess… So we’re looking at the Switch. It’s an amazing piece of hardware. It’s not fully mobile, for taking everywhere, because mobile games have their own limitations, and it may not have the strengths of certain other consoles like the PS4 in regards to technical specifications. It lies in between, but it definitely provides new ways to offer players new experiences while playing games. And speaking of the Switch, we are developing some things for it. Of course, we’re still making things for PS4, and the Switch, and mobile.

Darren: Okay. GungHo’s not actually tied down to any platforms and I’m just wondering how you determine what the best format for any given game would be. I mean, mobile games are obvious because they have certain touch capabilities. Something like Let it Die though, I could see that working on PC, PS4, Xbox One… even the Switch so long as it has access to wifi. So I’m just wondering how you determine what the best course for a game would be.

KM: So back when we’re talking about game design and development, bringing it from the very early stages of thinking ‘all right, let’s start putting this together’, of course the platform is not decided then. So after considering what kind of game it is, and what kind of experience we would like the player to have, then we decide what kind of platform we would like to put it on.

After we figure out which platforms we’d like to consider, we than have to move on to a business standpoint and determine what platforms make sense from that perspective. That’s when the final decision is made. Say we’re thinking about making a game for the PS4, but then a new piece of hardware comes out like the Switch. We’ll consider whether or not it would play better on the Switch due to the new features and capabilities that may match more of the ideas for the game that we had. So things like that certainly could happen, and do happen, when new things come out while the game is still in development.. Not so much when we’ve released a game, see a new piece of hardware and decide that we want to port it.

So in the end it really depends on what kind of experience we want our players to have. That’s what mainly determines what platform we’d like to bring it to.

DF: Just going with your analogy of the console as a meal and mobile games as snacks, because you’ve got so many games out there how do you avoid competing with yourself? If you’re selling potato chips, and Puzzle and Dragons in this case is the potato chips, how are they going to have room left for the Let it Die… hamburger? (laughter)

KM: For example, Puzzle and Dragons has a very specific way that we decide how we’re going to develop it as a brand. For Let it Die, that sort of thing really hadn’t been decided as much. So if you’re worried about us competing with ourselves or having any overlap in that sense, that doesn’t really tend to happen. Puzzle and Dragons tends to have somewhat of a younger audience, even elementary students play – if you saw the tournament at GungFest, one of the competitors at the finals was a sixth grader, so you can see the range at which Puzzle and Dragons reaches. Then Let it Die goes for more mature audiences so we had it in mind that it aims more at a higher average age of users.

As an example, you can see that Puzzle and Dragons Cross has a TV animation aimed more at twelve-year-olds, the average age that it’s targeting. I help out with the production, and oversee a very important part of development for the scenarios in that show. Then when I have to swap over to Let it Die, I have to switch over to a very different sense of self that I have when going into the development process of that because they’re so different. No one will ever die or get killed in Puzzle and Dragons, and in Let it Die… people fucking die. (laughter)

I think you can see that the stress of coming up with scenarios for the Puzzle and Dragons anime was released in Let it Die. In the lines for the Puzzle and Dragons anime I would never put the words ‘die’, ‘kill’ or terrible things like that on the show… so that’s kinda stressful! (laughs)

MR: So, what do you think accounts for the kind of differences in the kinds of games that people are attracted to in Japan versus the West? Like how Puzzle and Dragons is big over here but not so much in America, or how shooters aren’t as big in Japan?

KM: Shooting, for example… Japanese people don’t really have any familiarity with that concept. When I was in junior high school, airguns were hot. Futons, Japanese bedding, people would hang outside their windows. So when we saw this across the street we would aim at it and shoot at it with our BB guns. Sometimes we would reload these guns and they were the type that would… well, burst. and stain them with color… yeah, paintballs! We got into a lot of trouble.

So yeah, back then we’d have a lot of fun, but I think a lot of kids don’t really play with airguns these days so I don’t think there’s a lot of familiarity with shooting and guns. If you’re talking about Japanese steel though, y’know, katanas? That’s a different story. Or with their fists.

If you look at the users who are Playing Let it Die for example, when you look at Japanese users they’ll have… well you know how the left and right hand has three weapon slots? They’ll have physical striking weapons , but when you look at western users they’ll have all six slots just full of guns. So when we’re looking at that we’re thinking ‘oh, okay, that makes sense’ due to a lot of Japanese not having familiarity with shooting and guns.

Looking at things like Call of Duty and Halo, which are much more popular in the West, when you look at something that comes from Japan that’s a shooting game, you’d be looking at something more like Splatoon which is a lot more… I guess it’s not quite as graphically intense but it’s something that came from Japan and maybe gave them a little more familiarity with shooting from a Japanese aesthetic.

As for Puzzle and Dragons, yes it is a puzzle game, but when you look at it a lot deeper, because of the motions you’re able to do with it, with this extra range of motion you can make combos. And when you think of combos, you usually think about an action or fighting game. In most puzzle games I guess you just move things and try to figure it out, but in this one it requires skill for you to play and get good enough to get further in. So in that sense it’s a lot more action oriented, and not just a puzzle game.

So that concept, I believe, is worldwide. Anyone in any country can play it and enjoy that aspect, but if you’re looking at it when it comes to the art style and how it looks, it is a bit more Japanese. So from now on we’re thinking of changing it up a little bit, because until now we’ve been making our titles to be aimed at a Japanese audience first. So for example, from Let it Die and onwards, we’ve been looking to make our titles more global. So… global first! Focus on a worldwide audience, and you may have noticed that some of our largest announcements have been aimed at or done in the US, not in Japan.

So now we’d really like to look at a worldwide initiative to release our titles at the same time. Not released in Japan, then released in North America and then Europe. We’d like to release in all regions at the same time, but if anything we’d like to release in the Western markets first and then release in Japan after like we did with Let it Die. On that note, the games that we’re developing in house right now are definitely global first, global oriented titles.

So in regards to these new titles that we’re working on right now, the game’s setting, world setting, character design and all the art is to be less for a Japanese audience and more for a global audience, a more universal aspect.

Darren: So when it comes to Lily Bergamo changing into Let it Die, was that a big part of that decision?

KM: There were a lot of reasons, but that ws one of them. So even though Let it Die does take place in Southern Tokyo, it doesn’t really mean that the game is very Japanese oriented. As to your question, there were many reasons, and that was one of the many reasons.

Darren: I’m wondering what your approach to acquiring a subsidiary company is, picking up another game studio? Because in the West, quite a lot of acquisitions end up with anything that makes them unique getting squeezed completely out of them. You’ve definitely not done that with Grasshopper, so I’m just wondering how you approach buying a new studio?

KM: So for example, the reason that I guess you’re seeing in Let it Die that it’s still pretty Grasshopper-esque is if we’re looking at the main parts of making a game you have the game design, and then you have the world setting and characters. These are two different things, quite separate. So a lot of Grasshopper games have very distinct characters and world settings, and we wanted to make sure that we did not ‘kill’ any of that or put on restrictions on it because that’s what makes a Grasshopper game a Grasshopper game.

However, in regards to the game design, I took the lead of that to make sure that the game systems and whatnot were specifically like this or like that, and worked with Grasshopper to keep those world settings and characters together and made something quite incredible, as we’re sure you’ll agree – a kind of Grasshopper game that has never been seen before. It’s like we’ve come together and created an all new chemical reaction that no-one has ever seen and it’s quite an amazing game from Grasshopper – nothing like what they’ve ever made, but it still ‘tastes’ like Grasshopper, right?

So that’s how I approached making Let it Die. I didn’t want to remove everything that made it Grasshopper, but I did want to make sure that the game systems were to my liking, to make sure that this game was great.

Let it Die itself… the team that created and brought Let it Die together was not only the Grasshopper staff, we pulled in staff from Game Arts as well. So apparently the level design and a lot of the level balancing… we got a lot of help from the Game Arts staff. We have someone in there who can tell the difference per frame in a fighting game. He might be one of the top three in a very specific fighting game that I won’t mention – and yeah, I could never beat him. (laughs)

In regards to the network capabilities, connectivity and settings in Let it Die, that’s definitely all GungHo. So we made Let it Die with mainly Grasshopper staff and then we added in GungHo and Game Arts staff as well for this initiative. So the flavor that Grasshopper has, that edge that they have, we didn’t feel that we ever had to smash that or get rid of it.

For me personally, Puzzle and Dragons, it’s something that even kids can play and enjoy, so… all ages, right? That’s something that I’m more in tune with. So for me, approaching Grasshopper, I wanted to do something new and challenge myself and if you look at what Grasshopper does it’s completely different from anything near Puzzle and Dragons, the kind of things that they do. So that interested me and I wanted to take on this new challenge for myself, and that’s when I approached them. Even the director Shin, we’re pretty close, pretty tight, and we hang out in our own time outside work and get some drinks, play some golf… so we got a good relationship there.

At this point the current interview wrapped up, a short break ensued and Hideyuki Shin and Shuji Ishikawa were brought in for the Let it Die interview. (Coming soon!)

The post Interview With Kazuki Morishita, Pres. & CEO of GungHo Online appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Sometimes, good things just sort of land in your lap.

You might be walking down the street and see a dollar just laying in your path. Maybe a barista asks if you’d like a drink for free that she made and nobody wanted. Other times, it might be something more substantial, like visiting a foreign land to attend a game convention and getting to interview some of the most important and well-recognized names in the Japanese games industry.

In my case, that last one is exactly what happened to me.

GungHo Online Entertainment recently offered GameCritics the chance to to visit its Japanese corporate headquarters and sit down with some of the creative minds behind games such as Let it Die and Puzzle and Dragons. While there, why not attend the final stage of Gungfest 2017 at the Makuhari Messe near Tokyo? Toss in some karaoke and drinks, and that would be a great trip, right? Naturally, they wanted the best writer for this event, but it turns out that Brad Gallaway was unavailable, so the offer trickled down to me instead.

…D’oh.

Now, it should be mentioned that I did give some serious thought to this offer before accepting. Since it was an all expenses paid trip, would anyone be able to trust a single word I said in regards to GungHo’s output ever again? Or should I just tattoo the words ‘corporate shill’ to my forehead and be done with it? I pondered the implications to my future trustworthiness for somewhere in the region of five whole nanoseconds before accepting the offer, and almost blasted a hole in my keyboard as I hit ‘send’ with great velocity.

Darren-kun was going to Japan!

It’s important to note that at thirty seven years of age, I’m officially a gaming dinosaur and mobile gaming has a hell of a lot to prove to me. Since GungHo’s bountiful fortunes are primarily tied to the runaway success of mobile hit/ridiculously successful cultural phenomenon Puzzle and Dragons in its native Japan, I thought this would be a good time to educate myself a little on the matter and see if maybe – just maybe – some mobile games deserved their acclaim. Even if they failed to convince me, the promise of a visit to Grasshopper Manufacture‘s studio was enough to get me salivating at the prospect. The free-to-play Playstation 4 exclusive Let it Die seriously impressed me when it released at the end of last year, and the opportunity to get some face-to-face time with the minds behind it was simply too good to pass up.

After a day of travel, things really kicked off for me in Japan. This was when the GungHo Festival was scheduled to take place at the Makuhari Messe. A celebration of all things GungHo related, Gungfest promised to be an interesting experience full of live music, stage shows and a colossal crowd of fans moseying around soaking it all in. We got up early, met up in the hotel lobby and swiftly headed on over, arriving in plenty of time to get set up to chronicle the event.

I’m no stranger to the Makuhari Messe, having visited multiple times in the past to attend the Tokyo Game Show. Needless to say, it’s a pretty big venue – and this was only further emphasized when viewing the exhibition center for the first time without a ton of massive, overbearing videogame booths scattered throughout its rooms. It soon struck me that there were a hell of a lot of people here for Gungfest.

Whilst walking through the corridors connecting each of the large main halls, one of the guys walking in our direction suddenly caught my eye for some unknown reason. There was something familiar about him that didn’t quite click initially, so when he stopped and greeted us I rapidly tried to determine just who this mystery man was.

My guide, Tyler, beat me to it. “This is Akira Yamaoka“, he said as he introduced us for the first time.

‘Holy Fucking Shit,’ I replied. Not out loud, thankfully, but the surprise was real. I’d be interviewing Akira in the days to come, and as much as I enjoyed the music and sound design he’d worked on in the past, when it came to music as a whole I had no real clue about what I should be asking about. I resolved to give the matter some additional thought.

Whilst walking around the event, I saw plenty of interesting things. There was a Virtual Reality spinoff of Puzzle and Dragons which seemed to involve grouping as many bubbles together as possible before casting them into the face of a gigantic drooling hellbeast, the player being cheered on all the while by a cute mascot. There were also ‘tainted’ bubbles, however, so it’s important to maneuver around them or they’ll burst all the bubbles currently collected. The project looks a little limited in scope right now, but it’s clearly aimed at younger players and seems like it could still be fun for a while – or perhaps there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye, and that was only what they were showing on the show floor.

Other games and attractions were in attendance too, including merchandise for something called ‘Divine Gate‘ which I’d never heard of but has some pretty cool artwork. I grabbed a couple of Let it Die T-shirts and snagged myself a neat Uncle Death poster at the same time, then hopped over to a UFO catcher dispensing – yes – Puzzle and Dragons merchandise. I opted to try for the Arbiter of Judgment Metatron figure as she looked the coolest one out of the lot, and I triumphantly walked off with my prize! Mainly because after one failed attempt the attendants reshuffle it so that it’s almost impossible to lose on a second attempt, but what the hell. A winner is me!

In this merchandising area I heard that around 5000 fans were initially waiting in line to go on a spending spree before it opened, and it was an easy figure to believe. The place was bouncing with people aiming to snaffle up game-related goodies, but not quite so packed that we had to force ourselves through the glut of humanity pressing against us – it wasn’t as hellishly busy as the Tokyo Game show could be, and it seemed like Gungfest was better organized than TGS traditionally is.

The finals of the Puzzle and Dragons championship also took place during the afternoon, though my unfamiliarity with the title somewhat crippled my ability to relay the events in a coherent fashion. The finalists were all given the same problem to solve, speedily moving their bubbles around onscreen to set up massive combos that would wipe out a pretty substantial looking boss character lurking at the top of the display. Bubbles sped around the screen faster than I could follow, and an extremely large and responsive audience cheered as the contestants on stage did their thing. I resolved to actually give the game a real shot once the trip was over just so I could make sense of what it was all about.

While the rest seemed great, the Let it Die section was naturally of most personal interest to me, given that it’s one of my favorite games from the past few years. I snuck up as close to the stage as I could without being physically on it, and fortunately one of my interpreters was on hand to provide translation for what was being discussed.

As anyone who’s ever watched an E3 developer conference will know, these things are usually little more than sordid public circus acts hell-bent on seeing which studio can fellate itself the hardest in front of a crowd of whooping, hollering onlookers, but this Let it Die panel was remarkably different from that sort of self-congratulatory nonsense. It was a relatively relaxed affair with a ton of guests from various corners of the industry cosplaying as characters from the game discussing the things that pissed them off about it. Make no mistake, it takes some guts to publicly laugh at the aspects of your game that turn its player base red in the face.

Whether they were chortling over the intentional control choices that cause sprinting players to dropkick the air instead of speeding up an escalator to safety (somewhat inconvenient whilst being pursued by a howling mob of lunatics armed with machetes) or discussing the finer points of heading into the wrong lavatory in the waiting room, it was clear that they were all having a good time talking shit about a game they genuinely adored.

The major news out of this stage event for Let it Die was that it had a few upcoming collaboration pieces up its sleeve which they showed off in trailer form. One of these collaborations was unexpected to say the least – only a madman would ever imagine Gravity Rush and Let it Die would be doing crossover content, though there weren’t many details yet. The other announcement involved a Japanese band called My First Story creating an exclusive song for the game, who were also the band scheduled to close out Gungfest 2017. I’d already seen a bunch of their fans walking around on the show, so it seems safe to assume that they’re reasonably popular.

The third day was a little less busy, so we took time to go sightseeing in Tokyo. Despite the excellent efforts of our GungHo guides, I wound up breaking away from the group after some decent tourist shots in Akasuka and the Tokyo Skytree since I was slowly but surely burning to a crisp. It was hellishly hot, though — I’d say it was sweltering at somewhere in the region of five million degrees and many of the stores seemingly had no air conditioning.

After spending an hour or so convalescing in some shade, I made my way to Akihabara for souvenirs then headed off to Shinjuku – perhaps it’s because this is the first place I stayed in Japan all those years ago, but the plaza and immediate area off the main Shinjuku station is easily my favorite spot in Tokyo, especially at night. It’s close to an awesome Club Sega location and some damn good eating, so by the time I was ready to leave I was in high spirits for a visit to GungHo’s offices the next day.

It turns out that GungHo’s corporate headquarters are located in a massive skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo, not that far away from the grounds of the Imperial Palace. The main reception area has a couple of figures and trophies related to GungHo’s past games and achievements, but the rest of the office complex is almost clinically sterile. The hallways connecting the various rooms reminded me on nothing so much as a slightly glossier hospital, though the place where we conducted our interviews -CEO Kazuki Morishita‘s office, I believe – is a more impressive affair with a substantial central table of treated wood, brickwork walls and various knickknacks that set it apart from the rest of the building.

I won’t go into the meat of those interviews here — the lot’s been lovingly transcribed by hand and will be available in their entirety on GameCritics.com very, very soon -so check back for those shortly.

Soon after this batch of interviews were concluded, we were invited to check out Grasshopper Manufacture’s development studio. Although this was one of my most anticipated moments, it turns out that their studio is certainly less off-kilter than might be expected from the minds behind such games as No More Heroes and Shadows of the Damned. It opts for pretty standard office design with lines of tables all packed in together so that the staff can be in close proximity to one another – staff who eyed us curiously for all of three seconds before getting back to work.

That’s not to say that there was nothing worth checking out, mind. As someone who gets into the artistic and world building aspects of games, I spent a couple of minutes soaking in the concept and key art they had on one side of the room. There’s a particular piece there of Let It Die’s Jackals that made me start drooling uncontrollably, horrid fanboy that I am. It was totally badass, Senpai.

As for Grasshopper memorabilia, I came perilously close to pocketing a No More Heroes 2 Sylvia Christel PVC figure made by Yamato. Sadly, the figure was too big to squirrel away without even the most oblivious passerby spotting it jutting out from my pockets, so I wound up buying one for almost a hundred bucks on ebay instead. Dammit.

Something very unexpected happened on the way out too. As we all hopped into the elevator to leave, we descended a couple of floors and then – boom! A wild Suda 51 appeared! Goichi Suda, one of the most recognizable names in the industry and a man known for making some of the most batshit crazy stuff in gaming just happened to hop into the same elevator as we were leaving.

Now, this certainly didn’t seem like a scripted moment for our amusement during the trip — it was more like a random encounter, and he seemed as surprised as we were. In just a few moments, the elevator doors blew open and he quickly escaped back into the wild almost before we could process his presence. It was a surreal, thrilling occurrence, and a curiously beautiful and poetic end to my trip to the offices of GungHo Entertainment and Grasshopper Manufacture.

Certainly more poetic than the rest of the night, where I promptly got smashed on half a bottle of Japanese whisky before belting out terrible karakoke that bordered on being an international incident in the company of Kazuki Morishita, Let It Die director Hideyuki Shin and Akira Yamaoka. In retrospect, this would have been a pretty good time to coax information out of our gracious hosts, but for some reason I decided that bellowing out The Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 miles) like a drunken Scottish stereotype was preferable instead. Then, my brutal and unprovoked assassination attempt on that song was loudly applauded (out of politeness, I’m sure) and so, like a complete bastard, I sang some more.

As we ate, small talk continued throughout. Morishita-san casually mentioned that the Koi carp in the pond outside our room were worth somewhere in the region of a million dollars apiece. It’s a pretty sobering thought to consider that a fish swimming around in circles is objectively worth more than you are, but maybe not quite sobering enough to actually keep me sober given how much whisky and sake was heading down my gullet. I’m not gonna lie – the lack of sleep over the past week was starting to catch up with me by this point, and the booze was only making it worse. Or better. Much, much better.

Even in my state at that moment, Akira Yamaoka did a seriously good job of keeping the conversation going. I’m pretty sure that I failed to convince him to check out the delectable Scottish cultural cornerstone known as Haggis, though — it’s amazing how difficult it can be to convince someone how delicious a sheep’s liver, heart and lungs boiled in its own stomach can be. I asked Shin-san about his favourite goretastic execution in Let it Die, and it turns out that he’s quite keen on blowing opponents into tiny little chunks via sustained bouts of machine gun fire.

At the end of the night (actually the early hours of the morning) we all gathered in the lobby of the watering hole we wound up in to say our goodbyes, clambered back into our taxis, and that was effectively the end of my time in Japan. I made some brief considerations towards ‘accidentally’ missing my flight and hunting for more videogame paraphernalia in Akihabara, but finally decided against it.

My final thoughts on the trip overall? As might be expected, the GungHo staff were unflinchingly awesome throughout, and there were certainly plenty of interesting things to be seen at the GungHo Festival. It certainly drove home just how big Puzzle and Dragons is in Japan, and cements GungHo’s status as one of the premier gaming brands in the country’s industry.

While it was disappointing not to get any hands-on time with the upcoming Let it Die content (new floors, bosses and weapons are scheduled to be landing shortly alongside the ton of smaller updates that are continually added to the game) it was great to get some insight into the thought process of how it was designed, the approach to creating a free-to-play game that could easily pass as a full-priced title, and their plans to expand upon it substantially.

In fact, discussing the future is where I got the strongest sense of GungHo’s ambitions. It would have been easy for them to simply ride the wave of Puzzle and Dragons popularity until it finally became a desiccated husk some years down the line, but their willingness to take risks on all manner of new projects and a laudable refusal to bank their fortune on one single IP convinced me of one thing. Even if GungHo never again achieves the breakout success associated with Puzzle and Dragons, it seems clear that they’re just getting started.

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