Arc Style: San Goku Shi Pinball (3DS)

 In 2006, Nintendo released a strange samurai-themed voice-controlled pinball/strategy game called Odama. Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to play Odama, but it was in my mind the whole time I was playing San Goku Shi Pinball. It doesn't have any voice controls, and it's setting is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, rather than feudal Japan, but still: olden times battlefield pinball. I doubt it was made as a deliberate mockbuster anyway, coming out six year later than Odama, and Odama not being the kind of massive hit you'd bother mockbusting anyway.

 

That doesn't mean it's just a generic pinball game with a Three Kingdoms coat of paint, though. Instead, you go through various differnt stages, each followed by a boss. The stages are all different, though they all consist of a small battlefield area, littered with soldiers, battlements, and so on. The goal in the stages is to defeat all of the enemy officers who are commanding the endlessly respawning troops, while also lighting torches and finding hidden treasures and bonus stages to score more points. 

 

The boss fights are slightly different, and all take place in a little castle courtyard area. in that courtyard, there'll be a prominent figure from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and you have to defeat them by repeadly hitting them with the ball (the one exception to this that I've ecountered was Zhang Jiao, who is defeated by extinguishing his magic purple bonfires dotted around the place. Bosses can fight back by attacking your flippers and disabling them for a couple of seconds, which is something I always hate. Taking away the player's input just seems like a cheap copout form of difficulty.

 

San Goku Shi Pinball isn't one of the greatest pinball games you'll ever seen, and it has some stiff competition on the 3DS in the form of Pinball Hall of Fame, which contains recreations of Taxi, Pinbot, and a bunch of other real-life tables. But those are recreations of real tables, and San Goku Shi is a whole new pinball videogame with all the advantages and possibilities that brings. So it's fine. If you already have Pinball Hall of Fame, and want more, less realistic pinball on your 3DS, then you wouldn't be too disappointed if you went with this one.

Arc Style: Girls' Soccer 3D (3DS)

 This is a game I'd long thought I'd never get to play, but it seems that there are almost no lost 3DS games at this point, which is nice. It's a mostly normal soccer game, and it's also the Japan-only sequel to Arc Style: Soccer 3D, so you know, the series now covers both genders: default and girl. In seperate games, for some reason. It's also a nice, simple game, played with just directional controls (you can use the D-pad or the analogue stick), and three buttons: pass, shoot, and special move.

 

It's pretty fun to play, too! The game itself is just regular old soccer, and there's no superpowers or items or any kind of fantastical elements to make things more exciting, but it's still well-crafted and fun to play, and it doesn't fall into a trap I've seen in a lot of team-based sports games. That trap is the binary difficulty curve: in a lot of sports games (the ones I've played, at least), it seems like you can easily get through a few matches in single player mode against teams who put up a pathetic amount of resistance, until at some point a switch is flipped, and you face a team with all-powerful attackers and an impenetrable defense. Arc Style: Girls Soccer 3D, though, does things a little more smoothly, and the teams you play against in tournament mode gradually get more competent, and if you do get beat, it geels like you were beaten by a better team, not annihilated from orbit by cosmic sport gods.

 

The real draw, though, is the creation mode. It's no Soul Calibur VI or Fire Pro Wrestling, but it is a lot more versatile than I had expected, and there's not much competition on the 3DS for creation modes. You get to create your team's uniform, choose an emblem from a small selection, and then make the appearances and choose a special move (stuff like powerful shots, headbutts, overhead kicks, etc.) for each of your players. You'd expect a sports game to be limited to "normal" items and settings, but you can totally make a team of demons, robots, aliens and other demihuman types. It was also a nice surprise that there's a few body types to pick from for your players, too.

 

I'm not sure if it's even still possible to buy this game, and it was only released in Japan on the one handheld that Nintendo made the insane decision to region lock, but if you want a cute little sports game with a surprisingly decent character creation mode, this is a game that fits that description pretty well, and I'm sure most people still regularly using a 3DS can figure out a way to get ahold of it.

Crazy Construction (3DS)

 This was one of the first games I got on my original 3DS, and I'd actually completely forgotten about it until pretty recently (I replaced my original with a New 3DS a few years ago, lured in by the system's potential as an emulation device). You might think that any 3DS game would be too recent to feel nostalgia towards, but once I loaded up Crazy Construction (also known as Choukousou Kenzou Keikaku Buildinger) really made me feel something for those halcyon days of seven years ago.

 

It's a falling stuff puzzle game with the reverse goal compared to most: you have to pile items up until they go past a certain height, and maintain that height for three seconds. The challenge comes from the fact that the items are a wide range of objects with many irregular shapes: furniture, junk, vehicles, moai heads, and so on. You can also rotate them a full 360 degrees, rather than just through ninety degree increments. So you have to pile these items up high, balancing them on top of each other, trying to avoid them falling off of the platform on which they're being stacked.

 

Of course, there's also a score to chase, and this comes in the form of item weight. Every item has a weight, mostly around two-to-four, and you have to have a pile weighing at least forty to clear a stage, with better grades being awarded for going beyond that. As well as that, each set of stages has obstacles, like wind, thunderclouds, birds, as well as an enemy character, who will periodically appear to use their power and hinder your progress. The problem with all of these things is that basically do the same thing in slightly different ways: they take away your ability to control the falling items as well as you like. It's a boring way to add challenge, and I would have vastly preferred something like changing the goals for each set of stages, adding objects that are harder to balance, and so on. Just taking away the player's ability to control the game is just no fun at all.

 

Crazy Construction isn't a bad game, just a flawed one. Just kind of mindlessly stacking items on a handheld while you watch TV is pretty nice, it's just a shame the challenges they added tend towards the mean-spirited and player-unfriendly, rather than actually being challenging. Also, the plot is about a bynch of construction androids rebelling against the evil corporation who made them, and the corporation sending other androids to bring them back under the heel, which I'm pretty sure is a Kamen Rider parody. Which is nice.

Of Mice and Sand (3DS)

 I first became aware of this game when it was originally released in Japanese as Sabaku no Nezumi Dan, and though it looked interesting, I just assumed it would never get an English release of any kind and forgot about it. More recently, though, I was browsing 3DS releases, and found that it not only has an English release since I last saw it, but also a bunch of ports to different formats! Despite that though, I haven't seen anyone talking about any version of it, so I guess I'll do it.

 

The game's set in a post-apocalyptic desert world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals (mainly mice, though you do encounter cats and just regular old humans, so there are presumably others out there, too), and you take charge of a small group of mice journeying in search of the mythical paradise of El Dorado. it's a big journey, too: I've been playing for several hours at the time of writing, and I'm not even half way across the world map. They do this in a big armoured vehicle that starts out looking a lot like a Mad Max tour bus, and gradually gets bigger and more formidable. You control any of them directly, though, you just move a cursor round, giving them orders. Build this room, craft this item, drive to the next town, and so on. 

 

At the basic level, Of Mice and Sand follows a classically compelling formula: get the ingredients to craft the items to build the rooms to get more ingredients to craft more items and build new rooms. Unfortunately, there's not much more than that. The problem coms in the way that new locations are added to your vehicle's navigational computer. When you get to a town for the first time, you can pay to hear rumours, which includes rumours of nearby undiscovered locations. The problem is that the prices of these rumours increases pretty quickly, and your main source of income is fulfilling requests for crafted items. So you spend a lot of time driving back and forth between towns gathering resources or parked up next to towns waiting for your mice to craft the items you need.

 

I'm not too disappointed with Of Mice and Sand. I'm not sure I'll have the patience to continue playing all the way to the end, but like I said, I have had hours of play over the past week or so since I got it, so it's not like it's totally worthless. Maybe a kind of Cookie Clicker-esque version that let you just set things up and have travelling and crafting happen while you're away would be more palatable? Maybe if it ever gets a sequel, that's how it'll go? As it is, it's no classic, but it's worth a look, at least.

Beyond The Labyrinth (3DS)

 

Unfortunately, this is a game to which I've had to concede defeat. I really wanted to get further into it, if only take screenshots of more areas, since it is a visually beautiful game, but the first boss is just too hard for me. My save file says it has a little under three hours of playtime, but I've played at least that much again in failed attempts at beating that boss. There's still a lot to say about it, though, so let's go!

 

Its official title is Labyrinth no Kanata, and unusually for an RPG in the (relatively) modern era, it never got an official English release, though there is an unofficial translation patch. It's a dungeon crawler that recognises the old-fashioned nature of the genre, but at the same time, brings a lot of new ideas to the table. The game starts with you playing a faux-online dungeon crawler with kind of MSX-looking graphics (that is, if the MSX was capable of full-colour texture-mapped 3D mazes). As you make your way through the maze, other players join your party, and there's a little banter between them, until you're suddenly taken away to another world: one that not only has more modern graphics, but also a cute silver-haired girl who instantly befriends you.

Your presence in this world is a bit of a mystery, even to the characters in-game: it seems that "you" are actually present in the world, while your party members are still just at home, watching everything through their screens. They can talk to each other and you using the game's text chat, but they can't talk directly to the girl, even though she can somehow see them (or is at least is aware of their presence), and they can attack monsters, since all the combat is done through the medium of magical projectiles.

The combat itself is fairly original. It seems simple at first, as there are only three elements (working in a rock-paper-scissors kind of way), very few different types of items, and no spells or special attacks. Things mainly hang upon the interplay of the three elements, and the order in which everyone takes their turns. If you attack an enemy with the element that's their weakness (or vice versa), not only do they take double damage, but the damage is stored in the corner of the screen, and the next time a character (good or evil) of that element attacks, they'll absorb all the stored damage of that element as recovered HP. So it's not always the best option to attack the enemy upon whom you'll deal couble damage, if they're just going to re-absorb it on their next turn. Furthermore, when you attack, you can choose the strength of your attack, with stronger attacks putting you further back in the turn order. During battles, you can see where everyone is in the turn order, and exactly what damage you'll do when you attack, so though there aren't a lot of options like you'd see in most RPGs, there's still a lot of strategy involved.

 

As for the girl (as far as I've got in the game so far, she hasn't been named, and is literally referred to ingame as "the girl"), right from the start, she takes a place in the turn order, though at that point, every time her turn comes around, she just picks up a pebble off the ground and throws it at an enemy to deal one point of damage. After a few floors, though, she has magic powers awakened in her. Her turns don't come around as often as everyone else's, and the damage she does is non-elemental. The damage she does is also based on a equation involving the percentage of her own HP she has remaining multiplied by the amount of damage all of your party memebers have inflicted on enemies since her last turn. If you plan things well, she can do pretty devestating attacks, though you don't get to choose which enemies she attacks, unfortunately.

In summary, Beyond the Labyrnth is a game that's very beautiful (it's been on my radar for almost a decade, since the first promotional screenshots were released) and also very interesting. It's just unfortunate that it's a bit far outside my usual wheelhouse, and as a result, way too difficult for me to get very far into. But if you are a big fan of dungeon crawlers, even I can tell that this is one made to a very high standard, and definitely worth your time. And if anyone I know does play it and get further than me, please show me your screenshots of later areas when you get there! One final tip: if you're playing the translated version, then you probably can't speak Japanese, and the subtitles for the girl's voice aren't switched on by default, so go into the menu and do that.

Accel Knights 2: Full Throttle (3DS)

First, I'll point out that though this is a 3DS game, I haven't bothered to stitch the top and bottom screenshots together, since the bottom screen is mostly unused and doesn't have anything interesting on it. But anyway, Accel Knights 2 is a game with an amazing premise: it's about knights on motorbikes jousting in a fantastical future world. Also, the motorbikes can transform into power armour. Obviously, this game never got released in the west, presumably due to some market research by the publisher that told them that people outside Japan weren't interested in buying games where awesome stuff happens. It's also the sequel to a Japan-only DSiWare game, but getting hold of such a thing in this day and age  is currently beyond me.

Anyway, these jousts don't take the form of real time action, instead being a kind of strategic rock-paper-scissors arrangement, albeit one where you can see what your opponent is picking. The battles take place in rounds, and each round has two parts. The first part is the RPS bit, where each knight decides to charge a low, middle, or high attack by holding X, A, or B to fill a meter. High beats middle, middle beats low, and low beats high, and you can see what your opponent is charging. However, you can change which one you want to charge at any point in this very short sequence, and I think the last one you press is the one that you use. It's really best to just pick one and charge it all the way, which gives you a two-out-of-three chance of winning.

The second part of the round is a much simpler rhythm-based affair: there's a bar with some lines along it, another line moves along the bar, and you press A whenever the moving line meets one of the stationary ones. Being successful in either part of the combat builds up your MP, which you then allocate between rounds. The aim of the battle is to be the first one to fill up your final charge meter, which transforms your motorbike into power armour so you can dleiver your final attack and win the fight. You can (and should) also use MP to charge up your two engines (one for each part of the combat round), though, as doing so significantly increases the amount of MP you build up in future rounds, and charging the final meter takes a lot of the stuff.

Accel Knights 2 is definitely a case of style over substance, as the battles are very repetitive, and once you've won a few and figured out how it all works, it's also incredibly easy. But, the game's style is cool enough to make up for the lack of substance, and it's definitely an enjoyable experience (for maybe two or three battles at a time, at least). If you are able to attain access to this game, I'd recommend you do so.

Nyoki Nyoki Tabidachi-hen (3DS)

The developer/publisher of this game is a company named Compile-O, who are apparently made up of former members of Compile. Considering that this is a colour-matching versus puzzle game, that must be a good thing, right? At first glance, the little multicoloured blobs look a lot like Puyos, too. Luckily, though Nyoki Nyoki Tabidachi-hen manages to be both a good game, and an original enough concept to avoid being trapped in Puyo Puyo's shadow.

Like in Puyo Puyo, you put the same-coloured blobs next to each other and they merge, but unlike Puyo Puyo, you can keep doing this with as many of them as you like, and they won't disappear on their own, they'll just keep merging into bigger and bigger hattifattener-like blobby towers until you're ready to make them pop. The process of making them pop is a little like Super Puzzle Fighter, or Baku Baku Animal, in that you accumulated tower of blobs has to be touched by an activation blob of the same colour to vanish. The difference being that in this game, rather than waiting around for the activator to be given to you, at the touch of a button, you can change the piece you're currently controlling into an activator, and you can do this whenever you like, and how often you like.

Obviously, getting rid of lots of blobs at once means giving your opponent lots of junk blobs to get in their way, but even this is subject to the same kind of player choice as the activator blobs. All the junk pieces you create by destroying the coloured blobs on your side are stored until you want to use them. Once they're there, you can drop them at any time you like, though a maximum of 40 can be dropped in one go, after which there's a few seconds of cooldown time. These two mechanics, the player-summoned activator blobs and the player-launched junk blobs work together to create a unique kind of tension not usually seen in these kinds of games: you might be tempted to build up huge piles of blobs before you get rid of them, or huge amounts of junk to pummel your opponent with, but you have to be careful and keep an eye on what they're doing too, as if you're not, just a few well-timed junk blobs dropped into your field could ruin all your plans.

So yeah, Nyoki Nyoki Tabidachi-hen is a decent game, that proves that there's still new things to be done with the competitive colour matching puzzle genre. And by the people who started it, no less! Of course, it's a Japan-only 3DS game, so actually getting to play it might be difficult for some people, but I'm sure you can figure something out if you want it.

Dogimegi Inroyku-chan (3DS)

The first time I played this game, I was impressed that there were still people able to come up with new mechanics for a Bubble Bobble-style platform game focussing on defeating multiple enemies in a single attack. As I played it more and more, I also got frustrated with the awkward controls, and I also came to relaise that the game's real focus is figuring out the exact right way of defeating all the enemies in a stage without dying: a test of smarts, rather than skill. I should really have realised sooner, since the game doesn't have any kind of scoring system, which is one of the two main keystones of a Bobble-like (the other being secrets revealed only through Druaga-esque byzantine methods).

So, you're a rogue cupid who has been causing havoc on Earth by setting up ridiculous couples that don't fit together at all, and God has seen an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by sending you to hell to bring peace there by making all the demons fall in love with each other. How this actually works is that you shoot an arrow at an enemy, then shoot another arrow at something else, be it another enemy, or the wall, ceiling or floor, and the two will smash together. If two enemies smash together, they'll both disappear, as will any enemies they hit on the way to each other (does this mean they all became a polyamorous unit together?). If you hit an enemy and an inanimate object, the enemy will fly towards the object, and receive damage based on how far they had to go. Hit two inanimate objects and a temporary trampoline will appear, which is necessary for getting to places slightly out of reach of your normal jumps.

It's an okay game, the biggest flaw is its controls. Everything feels very awkward, especially jumping, over which you have no control after leaving the ground, with all jumps being an exact distance. Of course, I eventually figured out that it is the way it is because it's a puzzle game, and if you can't make a jump, you're meant to figure out a different way to get to where you want to be. The problem is that I just can't get past the fact that it looks like an action-platform game, and it's so frustrating that it doesn't work that way. I guess that's more my fault than the game's, though.

Even with that in mind, I find it hard to recommend Dogimegi Inryoku-Chan. It's not very exciting to play, it's even less exciting to look at and solving the stages isn't at all satisfying.

Beast Saga Saikyou Gekiotsu Coliseum (3DS)

There's a fondly-remembered 80s toyline called "Battle Beasts." They were simple figures with a simple concept: little rubber figures of anthropomorphic animals wearing armour that was an aesthetic mix of medieval knight's armour and futuristic power armour.For some reason, though, it never got the big relaunches that lots of other 80s toylines did, until 2013, when the new toyline Beast Saga debuted in Japan, along with a new cartoon to promote it. I don't think either of them ever reached the west, though apparently the cartoon did get an English dub that aired in parts of Asia.

So, not only is this game a toyline/cartoon tie-in, but it's a modern one, too, and neither of those things bode well for its quality. It's an arena-style fighting game with a setup that's vaguely similar to some of the Gundam arcade games, whereby each fight involves two teams of fighters. The teams might not have the same number or strength of members, but both team has an equal value of battle points, and each member is worth a different amount of said points. When a character is knocked out, they're out of the battle for a short time, and their team's BP is reduced by that member's value. When a team has no BP left, they lose. Some stages in story mode also feature monoliths at either end of the arena, which result in instant defeat if destroyed.

It's very simple to play: you have buttons for chain attacks, strong attacks and projectile attacks (which can be charged), as well as a button for rolling/dodging, and a button for utilising super attacks once your meter is full. The story mode has an interesting layout, being made up of several multi-part arcs, with more being unlocked as you finish them. There's a main storyline with numbered arcs, as well as side stories in which you play as villains and such, which is a cool addition.

I've mostly been positive about this game so far, but I have to break it to you that that most hated bugbear of the modern action game rears its head: levelling up. It's not too bad, though, as levelling up doesn't appear to have too massive an effect on your character's performance, and from the few hours I've played so far, the game does still seem to be getting harder rather than easier, as is often the case in action games with levelling. Plus, levelling doesn't affect anything in the game's free battle mode, which presumably is also the multiplayer mode, so that's a plus too. Though another negative is that even after a couple of hours' play, more than half the characters in free battle mode are still locked. That's incredibly annoying, though I guess it's better than locking them behind a paywall.

Despite its faults, I still like this game. It's a fun little casual knockabout of a game, and the characters are mostly really cool-looking, which I guess they'd have to be ifthey want to sell any toys. If you have the means to play it, and you can track a cheap copy down, I'd say Beast Saga is worth a look.