Added: 04.03.2015 3:10 | 3 views | 0 comments


illgrillchill writes "After nearly a decade, the spiritual sucessor to Kirby and the Canvas Curse for the Nintendo DS has arrived in the form of Kirby and the Rainbow Curse. With beautiful visuals, simple gameplay, and intricate mysteries, Kirbys debut on the Wii U is a beautiful rainbow that was worth the wait. "

Added: 04.03.2015 2:34 | 1 views | 0 comments

We're currently in a place with the Playstation Vita where every great game that arrives brings an air of sadness equal to its joys. Each artistic success is a reminder of how much of a portable paradise the system can be with even the most basic amount of love and attention. In the case of Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines, we get to see the traditional turn-based role-playing game get a serious injection of innovation that fewer and fewer developers are attempting to bring in favor of desolate open worlds and unworthy side missions.

The core of Oreshika is a traditional one. Four characters wait their turn to attack a horde of enemies by unleashing simple attacks, performing magic, or defending. A summon mechanic opens up later on. Much of your time is spent grinding through a relatively small number of dungeons, fighting many of the same enemies over and over, and bringing the spoils back home to divvy among your playable characters but offering bonuses based on certain conditions. In combat, it's a fine example of its genre, all things considered. But Oreshika brings a new mechanic to the table that makes the game its own compelling beast.

The story is this: It's medieval Japan in the time when the gods controlled every aspect of life. When six holy artifacts go missing, the gods' powers go a little haywire, and natural disasters start tearing the country apart. The emperor, under the advisement of his right hand, a sorcerer named Seimei, decides that the only way to appease the gods into sparing Japan is a massive human sacrifice: the complete decimation of a clan. Your clan. It mostly works, aside from the occasional wild storm or plague, but the gods most certainly don't approve of Seimei's methods, so they decide to pull themselves together and intervene. The gods resurrect your clan and set them on the course to gain enough power to exact some good old-fashioned revenge on Seimei.

There's one major problem, however: Seimei's human sacrifice left the clan stricken with the Curse of Broken Lineage, which means that the newly resurrected clan members can only live for two years, and they cannot reproduce with other full-blooded humans. The gods are at least willing to help there. In exchange for enough of their devotion (earned by slaying demons), members of the clan are allowed to mate with a god/goddess of their choosing to produce offspring who grow at an accelerated rate. It doesn't rid the clan of the curse--the offspring have two years to live, as well--but it allows your family to carry on your work, as well as bringing a whole host of supernatural powers and traits into the bloodline.

And so your clan's quest for revenge begins. After going through an extensive character creator, in which you make a family name, select a few common hereditary physical features, and pick classes for an initial generation of three siblings (fencer, martial artist, or gunner), you spend most of your early time with Oreshika running your clan every month through beautifully rendered labyrinths based on Japanese art, myths, and legends. In addition, you slaughter the demons who live therein, leveling up clan members as much as possible, grabbing as much loot as you can, and making them powerful enough to kill the labyrinth's bosses for massive amounts of power and glory. Once a year, in every area, an event called the Feast of All Demons takes place. During this event, the demon world is accessible from a portal deep in a specific labyrinth, and you have a shot at taking out Seimei, though he's always too strong and often just sends a giant monster to play with you while he laughs the laugh of the criminally insane.

Beating the beast allows you to grab one of the lost artifacts. Losing, or not being able to find the demon portal before a member of your family gets too old/sick to fight, means waiting and training another year to make another attempt. And unfortunately, time is quite literally of the essence, especially in the labyrinths, where it moves on Inception rules (one month = around 10 minutes, with the clock slowing but not stopping while you're in fights). Thankfully, the gods grant you a helper, a weasel who can morph into a bouncy, happy, anime girl at will, who makes up for her grating anime-ness by being a ridiculously useful personal assistant who keeps you on task for the month. She automatically buys new armor and weapons if you let her, organizing your items, telling you everything that happened last month/will be happening in the next, and essentially operating as a quick reference guide for any of the game's mechanics you still don't grasp. There are at least a baker’s dozen of games that could use such a character, just minus the weasel outfit.

If the game was just this, it'd be a fine, fun, slightly more self-serious twist on the tried something similar on a smaller scale, for example--it does feel like the first to completely bet the farm on that idea and succeed. You're compelled to take inexperienced children through an old dungeon to get them learning new skills. You're compelled to spite disloyal teenagers by letting them leave, casting them out, or marrying them off. You're compelled to have a dying mother train her child before the curse takes its toll. And when you're strong enough, you're compelled to take a family into the fray and lay waste to your enemies like no generation had prior. The Vita isn't dead yet. Turn-based RPGs aren't dead yet. Oreshika makes the strongest argument in a long time that developers should be taking advantage of those two facts.

Added: 04.03.2015 2:34 | 1 views | 0 comments

We're currently in a place with the Playstation Vita where every great game that arrives brings an air of sadness equal to its joys. Each artistic success is a reminder of how much of a portable paradise the system can be with even the most basic amount of love and attention. In the case of Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines, we get to see the traditional turn-based role-playing game get a serious injection of innovation that fewer and fewer developers are attempting to bring in favor of desolate open worlds and unworthy side missions.

The core of Oreshika is a traditional one. Four characters wait their turn to attack a horde of enemies by unleashing simple attacks, performing magic, or defending. A summon mechanic opens up later on. Much of your time is spent grinding through a relatively small number of dungeons, fighting many of the same enemies over and over, and bringing the spoils back home to divvy among your playable characters but offering bonuses based on certain conditions. In combat, it's a fine example of its genre, all things considered. But Oreshika brings a new mechanic to the table that makes the game its own compelling beast.

The story is this: It's medieval Japan in the time when the gods controlled every aspect of life. When six holy artifacts go missing, the gods' powers go a little haywire, and natural disasters start tearing the country apart. The emperor, under the advisement of his right hand, a sorcerer named Seimei, decides that the only way to appease the gods into sparing Japan is a massive human sacrifice: the complete decimation of a clan. Your clan. It mostly works, aside from the occasional wild storm or plague, but the gods most certainly don't approve of Seimei's methods, so they decide to pull themselves together and intervene. The gods resurrect your clan and set them on the course to gain enough power to exact some good old-fashioned revenge on Seimei.

There's one major problem, however: Seimei's human sacrifice left the clan stricken with the Curse of Broken Lineage, which means that the newly resurrected clan members can only live for two years, and they cannot reproduce with other full-blooded humans. The gods are at least willing to help there. In exchange for enough of their devotion (earned by slaying demons), members of the clan are allowed to mate with a god/goddess of their choosing to produce offspring who grow at an accelerated rate. It doesn't rid the clan of the curse--the offspring have two years to live, as well--but it allows your family to carry on your work, as well as bringing a whole host of supernatural powers and traits into the bloodline.

And so your clan's quest for revenge begins. After going through an extensive character creator, in which you make a family name, select a few common hereditary physical features, and pick classes for an initial generation of three siblings (fencer, martial artist, or gunner), you spend most of your early time with Oreshika running your clan every month through beautifully rendered labyrinths based on Japanese art, myths, and legends. In addition, you slaughter the demons who live therein, leveling up clan members as much as possible, grabbing as much loot as you can, and making them powerful enough to kill the labyrinth's bosses for massive amounts of power and glory. Once a year, in every area, an event called the Feast of All Demons takes place. During this event, the demon world is accessible from a portal deep in a specific labyrinth, and you have a shot at taking out Seimei, though he's always too strong and often just sends a giant monster to play with you while he laughs the laugh of the criminally insane.

Beating the beast allows you to grab one of the lost artifacts. Losing, or not being able to find the demon portal before a member of your family gets too old/sick to fight, means waiting and training another year to make another attempt. And unfortunately, time is quite literally of the essence, especially in the labyrinths, where it moves on Inception rules (one month = around 10 minutes, with the clock slowing but not stopping while you're in fights). Thankfully, the gods grant you a helper, a weasel who can morph into a bouncy, happy, anime girl at will, who makes up for her grating anime-ness by being a ridiculously useful personal assistant who keeps you on task for the month. She automatically buys new armor and weapons if you let her, organizing your items, telling you everything that happened last month/will be happening in the next, and essentially operating as a quick reference guide for any of the game's mechanics you still don't grasp. There are at least a baker’s dozen of games that could use such a character, just minus the weasel outfit.

If the game was just this, it'd be a fine, fun, slightly more self-serious twist on the tried something similar on a smaller scale, for example--it does feel like the first to completely bet the farm on that idea and succeed. You're compelled to take inexperienced children through an old dungeon to get them learning new skills. You're compelled to spite disloyal teenagers by letting them leave, casting them out, or marrying them off. You're compelled to have a dying mother train her child before the curse takes its toll. And when you're strong enough, you're compelled to take a family into the fray and lay waste to your enemies like no generation had prior. The Vita isn't dead yet. Turn-based RPGs aren't dead yet. Oreshika makes the strongest argument in a long time that developers should be taking advantage of those two facts.