In recent years the distinctions that once separated videogame genres have blurred and faded. Is Mass Effect 2 an RPG or a third-person shooter? Is Heavy Rain a point-and-click adventure or a QTE thriller? Puzzle Quest is as much a Tolkien-cliché RPG as it is a match-three puzzler, while Peggle is Pachinko meets NBA Jam meets LSD rainbow unicorns. Blockbuster series such as BioShock and Uncharted are slippery in the hands of genre, borrowing as they do elements and ideas from a broad lineage, while WarioWare and Retro Game Challenge boil down gaming’s first principles into a hotchpotch stew that defies easy classification. Systems ooze into systems, enriching one another, and so the old videogame terminology becomes obsolete through promiscuous evolution.

Nevertheless, this diversification works best through osmosis, not Frankenstein-style stitching. In the case of White Knight Chronicles, the bolting together of a traditional single-payer JRPG with an MMO-lite multiplayer component is somewhat awkward. The first 20 minutes of the experience are spent designing an avatar who takes at most a secondary role in the main bulk of the adventure, only slipping into the protagonist’s shoes when taken online to engage in multiplayer side-questing.

Of course, RPGs have always expected their players to assume a transient role controlling a group of characters, but the disconnect between the character you create as your likeness for White Knight Chronicles and the character who drives the narrative forward is a little too jarring for comfort. It’s best approached as a game of two halves then, despite the fact that your character’s weapons, skills and competence carry back and forth between the two modes, and achievements reached in one area are relevant to the other.

As a single-player RPG, White Knight Chronicles continues Level 5′s breezy, fairytale approach to the form. As with the company’s work on Dark Cloud and Dragon Quest VIII, a grand yet bubbly orchestral soundtrack fills the warm air of some of videogaming’s most welcoming vistas. Rolling hills seasoned with flowers in full bloom connect the game’s expansive, enchanting towns and cities, and you’ll often pause to admire the rickety wagons winding their way along sunset-drenched pathways in between clobbering the local hostile wildlife. It’s a sentimental rendition of countryside living, for sure, but no less engaging for it and, for a genre that’s perhaps grown too po-faced in recent years, White Knight Chronicles provides a breath of fresh air.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here

Nathan Copeland, a 7-foot African-Irish breakdancer voiced by the bastard child of Liam Neeson and Samuel L. Jackson, slouches heavy on a leather couch. He is framed centre of a widescreen window in an office apartment at the top of a skyscraper in which people who earn more money than you go about earning more money than you. On either arm purrs a lithe, olive-skinned twin. They have matching afros, skimpy swimwear and the sort of high heels that make you proud to be a biped.

The lift doors carrying Travis Touchdown to the unlikely scene tsshck apart, and he steps out, aviator sunglasses masking quick eyes. Nathan Copeland holds the silence for a second before rising to his feet and using the momentum to lift the twins into the air. In a single arcing motion he hurls them at Travis Touchdown, who steadies himself against the incoming fleshy projectiles by placing his weight onto his back foot and firing his beam sword to humming, luminous readiness. Catching the twins mid-trajectory, Travis flurries his weapon back and forth across their twitching bodies, each suspended in midair by anime cliché.

Nathan Copeland leaps in slow motion towards the scuffle, his arms turning into two oversized ghetto-blasters as he does. The scene freeze-frames for a moment and the orchestra ducks sheepishly under the silence. Nathan and Travis catch eyes and the camera drops like a yo-yo to the floor, just in time to catch the coconut donks of two identical lipstick-wearing heads drop torso-less in front of it. Beat.

The world un-pauses and No More Heroes 2′s director Goichi Suda presses the beam sword into your palms. Three minutes later, or however many continues it takes you, Copeland is vanquished. Travis Touchdown has cleared the second boss on the road to revenge and, perhaps more pertinently for his pubescent players, to the knickers of the pretty French girl who’s promised you maybe-sex should you defeat them all.

If Dante’s Inferno sought inspiration in 14th Century Catholic nightmares, then No More Heroes 2 peers into the wet dreams of every 14-year-old boy with a boner and a power fantasy. The result is no less fearful, but, if approached as a celebration of juvenility rather than evidence for its condemnation, far more enjoyable.

It mixes toilet humour with lightsabres, decapitation with banal one-liners, themes of stiff-lipped revenge with themes of pet care, Telecaster riffs with violin soliloquies and John Woo action mechanics with Famicom-aesthetic mini-games. And somehow, in amongst all of the confusion and tension and mess, a videogame of coherent vision and engaging execution emerges.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

The Westerners saving the Japanese games industry from within.

James Kay decided at a young age to turn his hobby into a vocation and design games instead of merely consuming them. It was a dream he realised quickly, working at a clutch of British developers in the late nineties. But despite succeeding where many others have failed, Kay wasn’t satisfied with his lot. Mario, Sonic and all of the other icons of his childhood were Japanese, their prominence in gaming’s canon matching Japan’s seemingly inextinguishable dominance of the global games industry.

What could be better for Kay than working at a Japanese studio, making the best videogames in the world under the leadership of the medium’s best-known auteurs? In 2001 he emigrated to Tokyo, landing a job at a prestigious Japanese developer, working alongside his idols. Kay had made it big in Japan.

But the reality fell some way short of the dream. As one of only a few foreign game developers in Tokyo, work was lonely. Moreover, he found the salaryman studio culture that demanded employees work long hours into the night wearying and infuriating, perceiving the practice to be merely for show and not endeavor. Partly to vent his frustrations, and partly to expose the grim realities of life at a Japanese games developer, Kay assumed the penname JC Barnett and started blogging his experiences at Japanmanship.

“I hope my writing didn’t come across as disillusioned so much as unapologetic,” he says today. “Too many people were still enamoured by Japanese games and would hear no wrong about the system that produced them. People dreamed of working in Japan without really understanding what that entailed. I hoped that I could offer a realistic view of the situation, and I was always sure to encourage people to make the move, so long as they were fully informed.”

The site fast became the go-to place for young men who, like Kay, dreamed of working abroad on the sort of games that had enriched their childhoods. But the timing of the site’s popularity ensured Japanmanship became far more than just a travel guide-cum-careers advice column. As the industry collapsed around him Kay became a reporter on the frontline, offering a window into a secretive industry in decline. With the keen, raw insight of an insider, Kay offered a glimpse of how and, perhaps more crucially, why the Japanese games industry was coming apart at the seams.

“I do not, as they say, have what it takes [to work at large Japanese games company],” he wrote in December 2008, soon after leaving to set up his own Tokyo-based company, Score Studios. “I blame my low bullshit threshold and my desire to have professional, rational work practices… I still care deeply about my work and the final product, which is why I let things get to me so easily.

“It’s not that I always know best, but I can recognise disaster… Japan has been getting away with too much for too long. Because Japanese games enjoy a certain amount of adoration, people have been too ready to forgive the many little issues that have been growing over the recent generations, and now things have come to a head. With even big-name Japanese products being technical disasters, [we have] to come to terms with the idea that, well, Japan isn’t the Mecca of video games… not any more.”

While the rest of the world watched, Kay’s posts charted the last days of an empire.

You can read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here

The pressure to reinvent is the curse of every one-time maverick. Find success in tearing up the rulebook with bold originality and it’s only too easy to merely iterate on that first idea or innovation for the rest of your life. So the idea becomes a series, becomes a franchise, becomes an institution. And the young, brash innovator finds herself head of a new establishment, replacing that which she came to undermine.

So it is with Nippon Ichi, the diminutive Japanese developer who in 2003 reinvented the strategy RPG with Disgaea. The game’s irreverent approach to both narrative and mechanics took apart the genre’s stagnating, Chess-like elements and put them back together as something at once fresh and familiar.

And while Nippon Ichi’s unconventional approach has continued to be expressed in new IP, its flagship Disgaea series has shifted only in subtle ways across its trilogy. Now, as the developer ports each title to handheld formats, it’s that much harder to search out the nonconformist heartbeat that gave life to the first game.

All of which is not to say that a handheld version of this sequel is unwelcome. Few games suit portable play so well as Disgaea, which can be savoured equally in nibbles or gulps of time. And the ability to dip in and out of a particularly tricky stage with a flick of the on/off switch makes the journey through the game immediate and smooth, even it’s a staccato rhythm.

Moreover, Nippon Ichi has lifted a number of the new character classes and systems found in the most recent PlayStation 3 title and reinserted them into this older game, changes that ensue this is undeniably the definitive version of Disgaea 2.

However, it’s hard to shake a sense of re-release ennui. Disgaea games aren’t taken on lightly and, for those who have plunged into the time-sapping depths of three distinct yet similar titles now, no amount of tweak and polish can freshen the formula. This isn’t helped by the fact that Disgaea 2′s story is the weakest of the trilogy, lacking the style and pizzazz of the first game, which remains the series highpoint. In both the first and third games, you play as an anti-hero, a likeable Netherworld dweller whose moral vacuity plays off the traditionally conscientious RPG plotlines to great comedic effect.

In Disgaea 2 you play as Adell, a typically upright Japanese RPG protagonist on a quest, not to save a princess from a castle, but to return her. Her father, the Evil Overlord Zenon, has turned Adell’s town, which forms the hub of the game, into a netherworld and its inhabitants into monsters. Rozalin, the Dark Lord’s daughter, summoned to the village by mistake, agrees to convince her father to reverse his spell, if Adell can return her home safely.

While the premise gently turns convention on its head, in the context of Nippon Ichi’s irreverent world-building playing as a good guy simply isn’t as fun as playing as a hapless demon. Numerous PSP-exclusive cameos from characters from the first game including Etna, Fallen Angle Flonne and, of course, Laharl only reveal how memorable the original cast is by comparison.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here