Dark Awake -The King Has No Name- (PS3)

So, this is a fighting game that was originally released on Taito's Type X arcade hardware as "Chaos Breaker" in 2004, with this, the only home port, coming six years later. It's a fantasy-themed 2D fighting game base around team battles, kind of like a combination of Golden Axe: The Duel with the King of Fighters series, but with a few interesting little gimmicks to call its own. As far as I can tell, the home version is pretty much a straight port of the original, with the only addition being online play (which I'm fairly certain is no longer available).

There's eighteen characters, divided into six teams, all of except one of which is racially homogenous. So there's a team each of humans, elves, dwarves, sea demons, and undead, as well as a team that's made up of a goblin, an orc, and a troll. Though the designs do lean heavily on typical fantasy tropes, there's still some cool ideas in the designs. One of the dwarves, for example, comes with an entire artillery cannon, and there's members of the monster and undead teams riding mounts of their own. And even the more cliched characters are cool enough to be appealling, too. Though it's a straight KOF-style team battle arrangement with no tagging, you can call the still-concious members of your team in for assist attacks, and this plays into the game's main unique gimmick.

When you pick your team, you see, you get four slots to fill. The first three are for your characters, and the fourth is for an item. There's a ton of items to choose from, and they do various things like healing your health or super meters, increasing attack or defence for a few seconds, summoning a monster to attack your opponent, and so on. This ties into the assist system in a couple of ways:assists are called by pressing a combination of two attack buttons, and your item is listed among your team memebers and used in the same way. Where things get more interesting (in a single player game, at least) is when, after defeating a team, you get a few more items to pick from, and you can choose to use them to either replace the item you picked at the start, or if you're feeling brave, to replace up to two of your characters, giving you a disadvantage in terms of the number rounds you can lose, but also giving you a bigger choice of usable items.

So, is the game any good? Yes! It feels good to play, all the attacks look and sound good, it's just all-round a pretty good game. It was never going to have an easy time, being a post-2000 2D fighting game with no ties to existing series, and it definitely can't have been helped by the fact that it looks a lot better in motion than it does in still screenshots, either. In motion, it looks great, with big sprites and expressive animation, but in stills, the sprites tend to look a lot more blocky and ugly. If you have the means to play a Japan-only download-only PS3 game (or, for that matter, a Taito Type X game), it's definitely worth your time.

Other Stuff Monthly #6!

Like me, you've probably been curious about all those Chinese Lego-alike brands on Aliexpress, especially since they all have their own unique and original themes, along with the clones of official Lego sets and minifigs of characters to whom they don't own a license. These themes are pretty wide-ranging, too, with fantasy, sci-fi, historical, military and other sets. Recently, I gave into the curiosity and ordered one to see what's what. Specifically, I got Sluban set 0615, from their "The Assassin Legend" theme.

All the sets in this theme seem to feature a smallish medieval building, two combatant minifigs and one civilian minifig. In this case, it's a dwarven blacksmith and his shop providing the backdrop for a fight between a female ninja and an androgynous knight. The shop itself is really nice: it's got two floors and a roof, and both floors actually have stuff in them. There's a little forge and hammer on the ground floor, while upstairs has what appears to be a kind of medieval bathroom, with a barrel and trough. Outside, there's a table, a rack and a training dummy.

As for the minifigs, they're very different in look and construction to official Lego minifigs, with slightly more articulation on the necks. They do look a little odd, but that's probably just in contrast to a lifetime of seeing the original design. They're well-equipped too, as the set comes with three blisters full of swords, halberds, axes, and a bow. Another win for Sluban!

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with this. I'd heard that these sets sometimes have missing parts, but I actually had a few pieces left over when I was done! There was an absent sticker sheet, but to be honest, it's not missed, as I hate applying stickers. It was also shipped without a box, but that was made clear on the seller's page, so it's not like I was deceived or anything there (but it might be a problem if you were intending to buy something like this as a gift).  I'll probably get some more sets at some point in the future, after what a success this one's been.