DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

The Short

Pros
- Well crafted murder mystery with just enough dark undertones
- Pacing is very well done; there's hardly a dull moment
- Doesn't fall into the trap of being overly wordy when it comes to inner monologues
- Cases rarely intentionally leave information out to make the ending more "surprising"
- That being said, there are plenty of red herrings, and most work very well
- Characters, despite being obvious caricatures, are genuinely entertaining
- Trial scenes are exhilarating and solving cases is satisfying
- Final scene is exactly what it should be for this story

Cons
- A few minor plot holes persist through to the end
- Some areas of the game could have been better streamlined
- It sucks when your character is like fifteen steps behind you during investigations
- Minigames in the trial start fun but get horribly obnoxious by the end (particularly NonStop Debate)
- Was released as a two pack in Japan for one price, split it up here for more dollahs. Second game is needed to fully understand the world and connections between the two stories.

Monokuma laying down some philosophical puns. 

The Long

I'm not the biggest fan of visual novels. There, I said it. While I was really into them in high school and early college, eventually the whole concept became somewhat taxing. While games like Persona 3/4 and Phoenix Wright managed to combine enough intrigue with their wordy stories, others like fan-favorite Katawa Shoujo, despite still being good stories, missed the mark. Often times these types of "games" boil down to one or two major "choices" over several dozen hours of reading through text, and often times the main character's over-abundant inner monologues completely kill the pacing for me. You can like them, I'm fine with that (and again, I think Katawa Shoujo in still an excellent story piece when it's boiled down), but the tediousness of these types of "game's" pacing often turn me away.

...so why did I even bother with DanganRonpa? Besides the fact that the "Vita has no games?" (it has plenty, by the way). Well, the promise of Phoenix Wright meets Battle Royale was too much for me to pass up, so I dove deep into this high school of despair and emerged...relatively unscathed? Let's take a look.

As a note: DanganRonpa is best played completely spoiler free. I take care in the review to not reveal anything that isn't said within the first 10-15 minutes of the game.

You know Leon? We gonna get along just fine. 

The plot of DanganRonpa is its main driving force, and it starts off with a bang. You play as Makoto, a regular-ass dude who just so happened to get invited to Hope's Peak Academy, a school where only "Ultimate" people get invited too. "Ultimate" in this context could be replaced with "World's Best." You have the Ultimate Baseball Star, Ultimate Programmer, and some other weirdos like the Ultimate Fancomic Drawer and Ultimate Fortune Teller. You and fourteen others all get invited to this school, but on your first day there something crazy happens and you pass out. You then awaken to find all of you have been transported to a hellish version of Hope's Peak, with all the windows and doors leading outside sealed.

While investigating, you come across a remote-controlled anamatronic bear named Monokuma (what is up with me playing games with evil anamatronics lately?). He then announces that he's taken over the school, and everybody is now trapped there forever. The only way they'll be allowed out is if they kill another student, and then get away with it. Once a student is murdered, a brief time for investigating will be allowed, and then a student trial will take place. If the murderer (called "blackened" by Monokuma) is correctly revealed, they are executed. If they aren't, they get set free and everybody else gets executed. So it's pretty freaking imperative that you figure out who killed who.

School's In. Prepare to have a bad time. 

The game's pacing is near perfect. While the intro sequence is a bit lagging, once it gets into the juicy character and plot moments the game blasts off and doesn't slow down. It's quite difficult to stop playing (as evidenced by the fact that I beat this game in under a week). The story takes some absolutely crazy turns along the way, with each of the murders escalating the stakes and being all the more shocking. The ending is a wallop of a reveal, made all the more satisfying by the fact that you use all the evidence you've gathered to break down most of it yourself. That being said, the large "twist" at the end is fairly difficult to predict, and the final ending scene (which has, not surprising to me, earned a lot of negative feedback) is actually perfect when it comes to closing out the story.

Before I go into the cases, it's important to make note of the characters. As stated there's fifteen students total and then Monokuma, the obnoxious bear that can not only show up at any time and in any place, but is also intentionally snarky and rude, trying to provoke you constantly. The rest of the cast cross a wide spectrum of characters, but they're all pretty nuts. I won't spoil it, but watching them interact is half the fun of enjoying the story as it unfolds, and despite being obvious caricatures of the "Ultimates" they're representing, several have surprisingly three-dimensional personalities. As the game goes on, people you first suspected to be scumbags you have second thoughts on, and people you felt were stable break down. Ultimately, the game's interesting premise lived or died on whether or not all these characters trapped in a school together had interesting chemistry, and I'd say it succeeded. Mostly.

Hiro may be dumb as a brick, but you can't say the guy isn't a bro. 

I won't dig into spoilers, but Kyoko is bland. There, I said it. They try to make her more interesting by tying her into more story bits, but she never really has that spark of life that the other characters do. Yeah, she isn't totally insane like the rest (which makes it easy to render opinions of them), but I really felt she didn't go anywhere.

The other big bland character is, oddly enough, the main character. Makoto is entirely uninteresting. While I understand he probably was meant to be a character one would project themselves into, the guy has no backbone outside of the courtroom, and is completely reactionary. Rarely is he proactive enough to investigate on his own (often times other people drag him along), and in general he just comes off as someone there for the ride. It's not gamebreaking, but being in his head means what he thinks is generally uninteresting and solely used for the plot (rather than developing and actual character out of him), and even by the end the guy felt totally empty.

Monokuma can say some outlandish and genuinely funny chunks of nonsense. 

But the meat of the game is obviously how it addresses the investigations and trials of the murders, and whether or not it knows how much information to dish out and why. In this regard, I feel the game is near perfect. In both the investigation and later trial instances, the game does very well in letting you connect pieces together and, if you are clever, figure it out before even going to trial. Unlike some other games (*coughPhoenixWrightcough*), DanganRonpa very rarely brings new evidence in during a trial sequence. This means you can usually get a grasp of who did it (or at least prime suspects) and form a full story in your head before going in, rather than having only part of the picture and relying on the game to decide when you get the whole story.

There is a plus and a minus to this. The plus is that DanganRonpa knows how to stay one step ahead of you. On the second case, I was certain I'd cracked it. I'd dug extremely deep into the clues, found several layers underneath that worked together, and all my assessments felt just far enough from the initial evidence that I had to have outsmarted the game. Turned out that, during the trial, there was a twist that was not blatantly revealed but totally could have been called had I looked a little harder at the evidence. I hadn't been wrong in my assertions, the game had just thrown a brilliant red herring to make me stop digging, but if I'd kept going I would have found the error and solved it. The game intentionally tricks you into thinking you're ahead of it, when actually there's another layer in. That's pretty good writing!

Though, once it humiliated me on the second case. I was ready for it in the later ones. I successfully predicted the next two even before the investigations happened, though I will admit the way they happened was different than I'd concocted. But I still guessed the killer right in them, but it wasn't an easy thing. The game respected my intelligence, and if I was smart enough to figure it out, it rewarded me. Or I rewarded me, with the smug satisfaction I felt after watching someone I knew was the killer try and lie their way out of their situation while I completely destroyed their claims.

And the case is solved!

Without pushing too much further into the story, I'll just leave it at that. The characters do well at making you love or hate them, or be situated in some area in-between (usually resulting in massive distrust). The game starts off straight up flying in the face of your expectations and knowing it's going to mess with you, and it delivers. While I'll admit the two most shocking instances happen both at the beginning and the end, there's more than enough crazy in the middle to keep you going.

Oh, and the game is actually pretty funny. Despite adhering to it's dark premise really well (aka Hunger Games has nothing on this, especially after revealing what was really going on in the ending), the characters' play off each other enough to be genuinely entertaining (if some in more messed up ways than others), and the characters slowly becoming more and more mentally unhinged as the situation worsens makes them both funnier and scarier at the same time. Overall, solid stuff, and the story is addicting and certainly worth the read.

Hey, didn't they say this in Persona 3 too? What is up with Japan and sad rabbits? 

The actual "gameplay" of the game is divided into three main events. Aside from just general story stuff that happens whenever it feels like it, there are three distinct events you participate in: Free Time (read: social linking your friends), Investigations, and Trials. I'll break them down for ya (protip: Trials is longest).

People compared this game to Persona 4, probably because of both the game's bright, eye-popping style through its UI, and also because it had "social links" like the previous game. I'll just toss this out there right now: they aren't really as in depth as in Persona 4, so much so the comparison is hardly merited. While they do provide a good bit of humor and a little insight into the characters, next to nothing you find out during these events is valuable during an investigation or trial. In addition, the game straight up lets you skip Free Time if you want to just move the story along, so even it knows they're not that important.

All free time actually gives (besides a look into the character you are visiting with) is small passive power-ups that can be equipped during the trials (and a few other minor bonuses, I should point out). Some are better than others, but you could easily beat the game without any of them. Social links also require you to give the respective person presents they like in order to rank them up faster, which means either guessing or consulting a faq. As it stands, they're nice distractions (and there's some funny stuff hidden in there), but not as impactful as you might think.

There you go.

Investigations are very Phoenix Wright-esque, though they do a better job at helping you follow their rules. As mentioned before, you often have a babysitter as you move around, and the game won't let you leave a scene until you've found everything it's decided you should find. In this same vein, it's impossible to go into a trial missing information, so ultimately it's a limited-interaction Disneyland trip through a few crime scenes. Not that there's anything wrong with that; at least I'm not pixel hunting or totally lost (again, cough, Phoenix Wright's investigation scenes).

Now the Trials are where things get crazy. They're exhilarating, to say the least, mostly because of the sheer number of people. Again making the Phoenix Wright comparison, in that game it's essentially a throwdown of logic between two people. In DanganRonpa, you've got over a dozen (at least at the start...) tossing in arguments and opinions that you have to sift through. This is where the real "gameplay" emerges, for better and for worse.

OBJECTION!

There's four events that can happen in a trial, often multiple times: NonStop Debate, Hangman's Gambit, Bullet Time Battle, and Closing Argument. I'll go over the pros and cons of each in brief.

NonStop Debate is the most frequently repeated scene. In this, characters from around the group shout out opinions and speculations on the given topic at hand. As they're arguing, you load "Truth Bullets" (basically the evidence and facts you've found along the way) into your...truth gun? Gun of knowledge? Something? And take aim. When you find a statement that  your "bullet" contradicts, you fire it at the offending statement, obliterating it with Logic and Critical Thinking. Much like the entirety of graduate school.

The game mixes it up along the way, by adding both multiple options to choose from (and you have to cycle through to find the right one), "white nose" obscuring the topics (which you have to clear by tapping the back of the Vita or targeting it with the cursor before you can bullet it), and my favorite: you can take one person's statement and temporarily turn it into a bullet and then fire it against another statement. The latter of these is my favorite as it requires the most critical thinking (since often it just gives you the right truth bullet so you only have to find the offending statement; this requires you to find both the wrong statement and the one it contradicts), and so it's a pity it doesn't actually come up as often as you'd think. Most are simple and can be solved with basic logic.

That being said, this mode pissed me off to no end, mostly because near the end actually hitting the words becomes incredibly difficult. The location of the "white noise" blocking it is completely random, which means sometimes you don't have enough time to both clear the noise and fire the bullet before the statement moves on. There were times when I very clearly hit the statement, only to have the game decide it was "too late" and move on. Luckily the whole scene cycles if you fail to present an argument (and you can fast forward at any time to move things along quicker), but knowing the logical error only to be thwarted by bad shooting controls and the RNG white noise gods is straight up infuriating.

Editor's Note: I just now realized I never used the "slowdown" power given to you at the start of the game. Upon replaying it, even on the hardest difficulty, shooting the words down is a lot easier. So that last section was pretty much me being stupid, whoops. It's still challenging, but the ability to slow down time to line up your shots makes it much less painful. 

I swear purple text, if you get in the way one more time...

Hangman's Gambit is by far the easiest. Basically if someone asks a question that requires a word (or a combination of words) that you don't have evidence for, you jump into Makoto's head (which, apparently, is empty except for random floating letters, which makes sense now that I think about it) to figure it out. There is a random word spot (which gets a few letters filled in depending on your difficulty setting), and it's your job to fill in the remaining letters. They float randomly from the core of Makoto's thought processes, so you shoot 'em with your truth guns in the right order until the word is formed.

Again, not only is the game itself easy (just tap the right letters; a monkey could do it), but the words you have to find are extremely simple to decipher based on the context clues. I get they probably needed something else to do here, but it really is just kind of...there. And easy. Really easy. Did I mention it's easy?

Easy like your mom, HEYOOOHH

Bullet Time Battle is a...rhythm game? Yeah, it actually totally is. Which does an awful job of explaining how it works the first time (the only time I ever failed at a case was during the first two Bullet Time Battles), so I'll break it down easily here.

Basically when another character just won't shut up about something, you have to lock and load dem truth bullets to learn them how to be quiet. Essentially, a song with a beat plays, and a section on the bottom of the screen indicates when the beats hit. You can only press buttons on the beat (hey, it's like Crypt of the Necrodancer! ), and your goal is to shoot away the negative thoughts. Except they kind of suck at explaining exactly how to do it, so I'll tell you.

Pressing "X" on the beat locks onto a thought/word cloud. Once locked on, pressing Triangle to the beat shoots it. Later, when you have a limited number of bullets, pressing Square to the beat reloads. So once you figure that out, just press "X, Triangle, Square" to the beat, repeat, and you'll win. You can literally do it in your sleep.

The game tries to throw you off by making it so the enemy can block the visual indicator of beats, and also it increases/decreases the tempo depending on how you are doing, but if you have any musical inclinations whatsoever you can, again, do this in your sleep.

YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH, LEON!

The last segment is Closing Argument, which I won't find a screenshot for because they're all spoilers. Basically, your job is to fill in a manga-style set of pages that represent exactly what happened. Some are already filled in, but you have to figure out the empty spaces. These are generally ok, but the biggest problem is the parts you can choose from are very small circles on the bottom, with pictures that are both tiny when compared to the panels and also somewhat abstract representations of what happened. This means that I found myself more fighting the battle of "what the hell is this bubble trying to convey?" rather than actually piecing the murder together. It was fun when it worked (and when it plays out it's actually really well done visually), but it does lead to some unwanted confusion.

I think that, in a whole, sums up the gameplay aspects of DanganRonpa: it's fun, but has unwanted confusion. I'm glad the trial elements are there otherwise there would be no skill-based gameplay bits in the game, but as a whole they feel relatively unpolished and, frankly, tacked in just so the game could have something interactive. It's an interesting contrast to Phoenix Wright (which fully embraced it was a visual novel and you just straight up present facts without any nonsense), and I really like the visual styles during the different minigames, but when they started hindering me actually presenting what I knew was a counterargument I got annoyed.

There are a few other minor niggles I have, too. To get presents you put coins into a capsule machine, but there's no option to just dump them all in there and get a hundred presents at once. You have to do them one at a time (putting in more coins just increases your chance of not getting a duplicate), which is absurdly tedious. Burning though a hundred tokens can take 10-15 minutes of your time just cranking the knob, which is no fun. Last minor thing is the map. It does let you teleport (hooray!) but the cursor isn't free flowing (boo!) which means sometimes it would move or go somewhere I didn't want it to. Not a biggie, but this (and a handful of other things I just won't mention) are little gameplay issues that probably wouldn't have taken long to address.

I'm glad you can actually walk around the school, even if there isn't much to see. 

 Graphically DanganRonpa looks great. It's an up-rezed version of a PSP game, but you wouldn't be able to tell playing it on the Vita. The game has a distinct sense of style, from its menus to its character art. Even the school itself, with its bold colors lighting the hallways and odd colored doors, is like something out of a strange nightmare. Special note must also be made of the trial sequences (especially NonStop Debate), where the camera spins around the circle of students and the visual style becomes heavily stylized. It looks really good!

Characters and objects in the 3D environments intentionally look like 2D cutouts being propped up. It's a style choice so I get it (since they're 2D drawings they decided to just not bother rendering them in 3D), and while at first I didn't like it, it grew on me and fit the game. What I really didn't like was the poor draw distance for objects, meaning people (and lights, which are the most noticeable as you move) pop in only when you get close. It makes looking for people to social link with a pain.

The few animated scenes (usually the executions) are delightfully done in a pseudo 2D/3D style. And I just realized I used "delightful" to describe executions. I'm probably on a list now.

The music is solid. It isn't exactly...I dunno...memorable like Phoenix Wright was, but most provide proper ambiance and all fit a neat style. It's mostly standard visual novel fair (again, just there as background noise), so it's all good.

The voice acting is decent. Almost all lines are spoken during the trials, which I appreciate. Out in the world, only a few key ones are ever said. Most are simply prefaced with a "reaction" audio clip (such as "Oh!" or "What?") to match the tone of the text. It's fine, save the few characters who just have them cussing as part of their clips. There's only so many "You son of a bitch!" you can get totally out of context before you get bored of it.

Oh yeah, I didn't mention it before, but there's plenty of f-bombs in this game to earn it is M rating. Just tossing that out there if you thought this game was for kids for some reason.

Living cutouts. How...nice?

So after all this jibber-jabber, what do I actually think about DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc? Well...I liked it. Really liked it. Liked it so much I stayed up late almost every night last week because I had to see what happened (hurting both my sleep schedule and my productivity at work...). The game is actually fairly long (think ~20 hours), but it certainly didn't feel it. The story is so well paced and the characters so entertaining, you can't help but get engrossed. They do well on their bizarre premise (and equally bizarre characters), and the trials are exhilarating and nailing the culprit satisfying.

Since people probably want a Phoenix Wright comparison, I'll toss this out there: I liked it better than the Phoenix Wright games I've beaten (which is just the first two, mind you). The pacing is brisker and the investigation and trial portions faster and funner. It's got a black sense of humor (unlike Phoenix, which thrives on it's charming goofiness) that works well with the story, and has quite a few "adult" jokes that caught me off guard. I still think the Phoenix Wright games are phenomenal, mind you, but DanganRonpa takes those ideas and streamlines them in all the right ways.

If you like a good, bleak story and enjoy deciphering mysteries, DanganRonpa is quite a good time. The somewhat lackluster minigames and overall strangeness may turn a few people off, but you came for the ride, and it's absolutely a ride worth taking.

Oh yeah, and just because I had to say it: no duh DanganRonpa is a game. Why is that even being brought into question? It's a game. QED.

Four out of five stars. 

It's the trial of the century. 

Lumines: Electronic Symphony

The Short

Pros
- Pretty, HD Lumines action
- Addition of "character powers" adds a bit more control and variation to the game
- Powerups seem to drop more frequently. I'm ok with this.
- Probably the best soundtrack out of all the Lumines games
- Is on PSVita, a portable system, which is where it plays best

Cons
- It's...just more Lumines.
- They still haven't found out a way to make any crazy modes or something with this puzzle concept
- Oh wait, there's touch screen controls. Don't use them.

Shapes and a beat line, huh? Must be Chime! Wait...

The Long

I'm gonna save you some time and link you to where I already reviewed Lumines on the PSP. And I just now realized that in that review I sort of semi-promised to review Lumines 2 and never did. Oops.

Anyway, it's another Sony handheld, which means ya gotta have Lumines. After a brief diversion onto Xbox Live, Lumines is back where it started, and upgraded for the Vita. What new tricks does Lumines have? Is it mixing up the beat (hur hur) in some wacky ways? Is this the Lumines gritty reboot?

Well...no, not really. But it's still a blast to play. So I guess it's still ok.

For some reason, my brain can't process these circles. I always do worse on this theme. 

I'll be brief on how Lumines works since I already went over it before. There's 2x2 squares full of two-colored...more squares (or sometimes circles, see above). When you get at last four of the same color in a big square together, it connects and can be deleted. Until it is deleted by the moving beat line (which moves with the tempo of the song), you can attach any more 2 colors to that chain, which means latching as many squares (or circles) to your cluster before the beat line eats it for dinner is imperative. You can chain these together for Mad Points, or just play really badly like I do and frantically scramble to not completely fail before the next song happens. Up to you.

What sets the game apart is not only its simplicity, but its reliance on soundtrack (it seems to be a theme this week, me reviewing musical-type games. Weird). Since the bar moves with the beat, your time to expand on your clusters varies depending on the song. The game also moves through songs at a pretty decent rate (each song is usually around 2-4 minutes), which causes both a style change (still a nice touch) and a tempo change. So basically you try to survive for as many songs as possible in the "Bon Voyage" mode, and when too many squares/circles reach the top you lose.

Gotta keep with the beat.

There are two key powerups you can get. One makes it so every piece touching it of the same color becomes deleteable. This is a great powerup if you play like me: badly. I somehow play this game like Magical Beat or Puyo Puyo, where I think attaching tons of the same color together in a snake-like line is a good way to play. It isn't. It's a good way to lose. But luckily this power up let me eliminate whole chains of these things, leaving only the other color behind to become a Massive Awesome Combo which I totally planned and it was my strategy all along.

The other powerup does something. I don't know what. I know, I should probably research this, but I can't be bothered. Sometimes it makes clusters where there weren't any, so I'm thankful to this powerup. But not as thankful as the chain one. It's my favorite.

A big change to the Vita version is the ability to have an Avatar ability. Basically you can pick from five "characters" to go into the game with, and each has a rechargeable power. The one I use most is the one that gives you a free snake-chain-powerup thing, as you can imagine based on my playstyle above, but they do a large variety of different things to mix up your game. These powerups recharge as you play (they recharge pretty dang slowly, though), so they're mostly used if you get in a tight spot.

It's a block party, ha ha ha. 

The other major Vita change is touch screen controls. I am going to cop-out and just say: don't play with touch screen controls. It's a nice novelty early on, but the later levels get crazy frantic fast, and it's just not possible to use a touch screen for it. I imagine Sony made them put this in so it could be a bullet point on the box, but it adds nothing to the game.

It also has it's usual multiplayer, which in turn has these power-up avatars, which gives you a bit more flavor to your matches. But in the end, it's basically just the same multiplayer as all over versions.

...which is the only real complaint I have with Lumines: Electronic Symphony: touch screen controls and avatars aside, this is the exact same game as Lumines. Well, I guess power-ups do seem to drop more frequently, but that's hardly anything to write home about. There's no new modes, no variations or a "puzzle mode" (which I think this game could use), and as a bonus you have to navigate the menus with touch controls (...why?). They literally sold me the same game I've bought four times already on PSP and Xbox.

They've got my number. 

And yet, for some reason, I'm totally ok with this. Why? Well, the game is like $10 on Amazon, and it is still probably the best handheld puzzle game since Tetris made the Game Boy cool. The new graphical style is really slick on the Vita's screen, with the cubes exhuming just the right about of weird bright glow and rapid changing style to keep you interested. It's a really pretty game, and really really addicting, the kind you feel you're never quite good enough at but just good enough to have fun. You know. That kind.

The soundtrack is probably my favorite out of all the Lumines games. Rumor has it this was originally going to be a "reboot" of Lumines (yes, a reboot of a puzzle game) called Daft Punk: Lumines. I swear I'm not making this up. They enlisted Daft Punk to write all the songs, but they ended up being too busy with both the Tron: Legacy soundtrack and the album Random Access Memories.

Regardless, the soundtrack consists of mostly licensed electronic music, and I like pretty much all of it. There's no real duds that I can think of, though a few certainly stand out more than others. I'd tell you which one, but I have no idea what any of the song names are, even with the robot girl voice speaking their names before each level. I'm too busy looking at colored squares, man!

All these screenshots are starting to look really similar. 

In the end, those looking for some sort of huge mix-up to the Lumines series aren't going to find it here. But they will find is a rad puzzle game ported to their new handheld, waiting to suck up hours and hours of their time on the bus. It's still fun, easy to pick up but hard to master, with great music and vibrant colors and a real slick style that makes it memorable. While Avatar Powers are a step in the right direction (and touch screen controls are not), I still feel a bit miffed at the lack of modes here. But hey, again, it was like $10, and I've probably sunk a good dozen hours into it already just commuting. So I think I'm ok with it.

If you have a PSVita, let me know because none of my friends seem to own one. But seriously, if you have a PSVita, this game is pretty much mandatory if you have any affinity for puzzle games. Get it, and be iLUMINESinated. Illuminated. Ilum...you know what? I quit.

Four out of five stars. 

And here's a photo of a guy playing it. Isn't he having FUN? Can't you tell from his hands how much FUN HE IS HAVING?!

Magical Beat

The Short

Pros
- Fast, easy-to-pick-up puzzle game
- Rewards aggressive play and encourages fast, frantic matches
- Having to move pieces to the "beat" adds a new layer of spice
- Seventeen songs initially, with songs from Blazblue and Guilty Gear available for unlock
- Lots of DLC songs and characters available for cheap
- Quite addicting

Cons
- A veritable dearth of modes
- With no online play, the Vita version is essentially single player only (you can Ad-Hoc and that's it)
- Computer is incredibly challenging and the difficulty ranks up too hard too quickly
- Seriously, on normal stage 10 it moves like a superhuman
- Characters are cute and different, but don't actually change the gameplay at all

It's time to get yo beat on.

The Long

I'm gonna admit: I downloaded the demo to this game because I thought it was Magical DROP. Reading comprehension, you've failed me yet again. 

Magical Beat, on the other hand, isn't a bubble-busting blaster like the game I confused it with. Oddly enough, this small puzzle game was created by none other than Arc System Works, the guys who mostly stick to hardcore anime fighting games (Guilty Gear, Blazblue, Persona 4 Arena). Apparently this game creeped out on Japan's PSN a while ago, and nobody expected it to make it stateside. Well...it did, and here it is. So is this puzzle game made by fighting game guys any good?

The characters look like they took inspiration from Cave Story. I'm ok with this. 

Magical Beat is a fairly standard action puzzle game with a few minor twists. The game itself plays a lot like Puyo Puyo. Your goal is to get combinations of three or more blocks (or Puyos) of the same color next to each other. By positioning blocks specifically, you can set up chains, which will clear your board faster and drop obnoxious black blocks (or Puyos) on the enemy screen. If your opponent's screen crosses the top before yours, you are the winner.

The trick to Magical Beat vs a regular Puyo Puyo type game is the second part of the title: the beat. The game draws a bit of inspiration from that other music puzzler I'm hopelessly addicted to, Lumines. Rather than have the pieces fall automatically like in most top to bottom puzzlers, Magical Beat has you holding the three square L piece at the top of the screen, allowing you to position and flip it until you are ready to drop it down. The catch is that next to every player's side is a line moving up and down with the beat of the song. You have to drop the piece with the beat (or within a small range of error), or else instead of falling where you want it, the piece will explode and the squares fall wherever they feel like it. 

It's a simple idea but quickly becomes addicting, mostly because of the range of BPMs across songs. Some are very slow, which means both you and your opponent have more time to think, and makes specifically placing pieces all the more important. Others are balls to the walls fast (like...seriously. So fast a normal person couldn't wisely drop a piece on every beat hit), which makes the competition absurdly frantic. Note that you aren't required to drop a piece every beat, but the computer probably will, which means you'd better be thinking quick on those hard songs.

Blazblue characters and songs are available as DLC, which is a fun nod to the designer's other games

When combining pieces into clusters, they don't disappear immediately (like Puyo Puyo), instead waiting a few beats before disappearing. This gives you time to build up the cluster, or make other clusters, as all current clusters will be removed at the same time, regardless of when they were made. This is similar to the line that crosses the screen in Lumines, erasing finished clusters in that game too, except in Magical Beat there is no such indicator. You do get a sort of "intuition" about when your clusters will be removed after a few games (and if a cluster would have caused you to lose, it is removed immediately to free up screen space), but some sort of visual hint wouldn't have hurt.

Modes are, unfortunately, this game's biggest problem. In that, there aren't many of them. At all. You have three arcade style modes, a beginner round that's 5 matches, a "normal" round that's 10, and a "Hardcore Hell" one which is also ten but the robots are Skynet, Deep Blue, and Hal rolled into one. Aside from that, you can play a single song vs a computer at the difficulty level of your choosing, and...that's it. Not a whole lot here.

This game screams to have multiplayer. The frantic, manic games would make for some hilarious online play with friends. Unfortunately, there is no online multiplayer in the game. In the PS3 version you have the option of local two player puzzle-battling (which I would imagine is fun; I got the Vita version), but for the Vita owners you're pretty much boned: Ad-Hoc is the only way to play, and both of you have to be in the same room and have a copy of the game. The fact that a game was released in 2014 without online play at all completely baffles me, and actually makes me really sad because I wanted to play this game with a friend (or two).

At least I'll always have the computer...right? Maybe?

If you have a PS3 and a significant other, this game is a blast. If you like games like Puyo Puyo or Tetris Attack, this will provide a good deal of competitive, frantic fun. Single player, however, it's a much harder sell, especially considering what you see is basically what you get. If you download the demo, it literally is just the Beginner mode pulled from the game and put on PSN (the 5 stages on an easier difficulty), with the only difference between that and the main game being 12 more songs (vs 5 in the demo) and the 10 person arcade and hell mode. 

The computer, also, is a bit of a problem. True to Arc System's past games (I'm looking at you, Blazblue), your enemy AI goes from "Good" to "Really good" to "Impossibly fantastic" over a matter of just a few rounds. I kid you not that I just sat back and watched it on Arcade Round 8 (not even on Hell mode) and it was moving blocks at a speed literally impossible to do if you have to physically push a button. I guess it means the game will last longer since you'll be butting your head against a cheating computer for a while, but it feels like a cheap way to lengthen the game.

Gotta stay in tempo!

The graphics are fairly simple, using a pixel-art motif that seems to be all the rage these days. The blocks reminded me a lot of the blocks in Tetris Attack (for better or for worse), including visually changing when you have two next to each other and need only one more to finish a chain. The game plays a satisfying "SHISSH!" sound if you manage to drop a piece exactly with the beat (which I assume means more points), and the characters are all over the place in terms of awesomeness. Regular anime style characters meet up with a ghost called G-host, a potted flower, an alphcha with an eyepatch, and a blob of pixels. Yeah, just a blob of pixels. His song is nuts. 

The music is also a lot of fun, a mix of techno and vocaloid that is never grating and reminded me a bit of DDR style music...if it had been bitcrunched a bit. Fans of Hatsune Miku may noticed some of the vocaloid software used is the same kind used in her voice, though it's never similar enough to be distracting. You can also unlock a handful of heavier techno songs from Blazblue and Guilty Gear, or just buy them on the market for a couple of bucks. 

"Egg shaped chicken in a frying pan" is obviously my main. 

When I first played the demo of Magical Beat, I was set to recommend it to everybody. The game is exactly the kind of puzzle game I like: absurdly fast, rewarding those who are aggressive (when I play fast in Tetris I just lose earlier...), has very fast and crazy matches, and looks and sounds great. After getting the game, however, I couldn't help but feel disappointed. Sure, the core gameplay hadn't changed, but the unfortunate lack of variety and modes coupled with the massive oversight of not including online play is genuinely disheartening. It's especially worse for a Vita player, as the game isn't cross-buy, so if I want to play it with my wife on the PS3 I'll have to shell out another ten bucks. Which makes me even sadder, because this game is a perfect fit for handhelds and playing on the bus, if only it had more content (or the computer weren't so impossibly good) to keep it floating.

As it stands, I still think Magical Beat is an awesome puzzle game. I'm crossing my fingers that it sold well enough to merit either a sequel or some free DLC in the future to include more modes and an online option, but considering almost nobody knows this game exists that probably won't happen. Still, if you have a PS3 and love competitive puzzle games, this one is an absolute treat. It's got fun music, cute characters, exciting gameplay, and an unfortunate lack of content on Vita. Ah well, maybe next time.

Oh, and you can buy Blazblue characters. That's pretty good.

Three out of five stars. 

These guys know how to party. 

Persona 4: Golden

The Short

Pros
- Upgraded version of an already phenomenal game
- Improved, widescreen, HD graphics look stunning on the Vita
- Two new social links that are entertaining and do well supplementing the plot
- Tons of new scenes interspersed within the main game, in addition to an entire new endgame and two extra months
- New dungeon and boss, with the dungeon having it's own unique twist on the gameplay
- Improvements to both the Skill Card system from P3P and Persona fusion in general massively empowers those trying to make the "ultimate persona"
- Nearly every aspect of this game has been touched on or changed for the better
- The definitive version of one of the best, if not the best JRPG ever made

Cons
- Marie (one of the new social links) has most of her more interesting plot points at the tail end of the story
- Hot springs and the more egregious bathhouse scene's fanservice feels out of place in an otherwise tactful and mature game
- New additions make the game considerably easier (though there's more difficulty modes to make up for it)
- Changes buffed Naoto to where she is totally broken and overpowered
- Money is more important, but the game hasn't been scaled for it, meaning you're gonna be poor
- Chie and Teddie have new voice actors. The former's is more noticeable.
- Doesn't offer an entirely new route (Female Protag) like P3P did

I'm gettin' fired up just thinking about Persona 4!

The Long

Wow, people really like Persona 4 huh? The little PS2 game that could (coming out a good deal of time after the PS3 had arrived) has quickly garnered a massive cult following, prompting Atlus to release a plethora of spinoff games (Persona 4 Arena, Persona Q, Persona 4: Dancing All Night) and merchandise to keep the hype train going. As someone totally on board for the Persona 4 love, I'm glad to see more content, but was most excited to see that the game was getting a remake on the PSVita. Atlas had taken great care in porting Persona 3 over (though some compromises had to be made given the system's limitations), so I was pumped to see this game being rebirthed on a more portable platform (these games are perfect for portable). So pumped a bought a stupid PSVita pretty much just to play this game. Which I guess is fair; I bought the PSP to play P3P, so I guess I'm not exactly somebody to look to for sound financial advice. 

Anywho, Persona 4 Golden. What's good? What is bad? If you've beaten Persona 4, is it worth spending another 80+ hours revisiting Inaba and cracking the case you already know the answer to?

Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Absolutely yes. 

Teddie is keeping it classy. 

Replaying Persona 4 Golden after being away from it for about 3-4 years, I was first struck with how damn funny this game is. Seriously, it's so entertaining it's unbelievable. Now you probably didn't expect that to be the first thing I'd say in this review, but too bad: I said it. For not being a comedy game per say, Persona 4 Golden excels at it's witty, character driven humor. And while Youske may somehow be at the butt of even more jokes over the course of the game, this game never ceases to surprise me at the lengths it goes to be silly and entertaining.

So...what's new? Well, a lot actually, so I'll try to not take forever.

Let there be JRPG.

First off, a ton of lines of the game have been changed. Most have to do with Chie and Teddie (since they both have new voice actors; more on that later), but others are there to provide better hints for later plot points as well as make segues into new conversations seem more natural. It isn't just Chie and Teddie, though; tons of lines from "Vanilla" Persona 4 have been twieked to just generally work better. A small change, but as someone who has beaten P4 several times already, you notice it.

Next up is the absolutely atrocious amount of new story scenes. The big ones (the ones they mention in the promo materials) are obviously the added scooter beach trip (which happens during the summer) and the later "snow" portions (which are extension past when Persona 4 Vanilla ended originally). And while those two bonuses are completely fantastic and downright entertaining, tons of other small scenes have been tossed in as well. I won't spoil any, but just know if you've played this game to death you'll find lots of silly, charming interactions that pop up when you lest expect it, further solidifying your bonds with these characters and making you feel like you have an actual group of friends. 

If only I had this many friends in real life :(

The two biggest story additions are the new social links, namely Adachi (who was already in the game before as your cop-uncle Dojima's witless partner) and Marie. Adachi's social link is played mostly for laughs, revealing a sort of apathetic douchebag side to the guy but still showing he has some heart, especially for Nanako. Marie is the real meat-and-potatoes content here, though, and is probably my new favorite character in the game. Besides maybe Kanji. Ok, new favorite female character in the game. (Unrelated: why can't I Lovers Route Kanji again? Come on Atlas! It's all I want!)

Marie is a resident of the Velvet Room, the place where long-nosed Igor and his assistant Margret hang out talking about Personas and playing cards or something. Her past, however, is unknown, so your job is to take her around in the human world (of which she has no knowledge) and teach her stuff. It's an obvious parallel to the Elizabeth (or Theodore) activities in Persona 3, and while those were totally awesome, Marie's are even better. This is mostly due to the fact that her social link is perhaps the only one that heavily relies on interaction with your friends, allowing more of the fun group scenes that are really the heart of Persona 4. Marie is blunt but not intentionally mean, but always speaks her mind, which basically means she and Rise compete for the Alpha Female in the group, to hilarious results. Marie plays solid foil for Rise's flirtatious charms with her unhindered bluntness, making for some hilarious interactions throughout (plus anyone who can piss Rise off is ok in my book).

Marie also ties directly into the new "Hollow Forest" dungeon, which is a sort of bonus dungeon that happens just before the end. You only have one day to do it (meaning no backing out) and it had some tricky rules (all your gear and items are stripped, and your SP is halved after every battle, making it pretty tough), but overall it's a fun dungeon that mixes up things quite a bit. It's not a substantial amount of content (plus you don't keep anything you find after clearing it, which kind of sucks) but it's nice to have another place to test my skills and Persona building. 

The only downside to Marie is that, while she plays a rather significant role after solving the case but before the "true" final boss, all the big reveals about what she really is seem to happen all at once. It hints during her social link at solving a mystery, but unfortunately you never get any trickle-down of knowledge, it's just kind of all thrown at you at the end. I do like that her story helps lead you towards the true ending (which is super obscure in Persona 4 Vanilla), and her endings scenes are entertaining, but I felt she could still have been woven into the narrative a bit better. If she's your love interest she doesn't show up for the Christmas Eve scene, and is just tacked on to the end of the Valentine's Day scene (so be sure to romance somebody else too for maximum sceneage! Get your playah on, you dirtbag!), which makes her feel less involved.

Oh, unrelated, but the game actually punishes you now if you make everybody your girlfriend with the hopes they don't find out. They do. It's painful. 

Oh Marie, you hate because you love. But mostly because you hate. 

The last big change I'll mention is the voice actors. Both Chie and Teddie's original voice actors could not be found, so they brought in replacements. Teddie's sounds almost identical, but Chie's is significantly different. I mentioned this a bit in my P4A review, and I was worried that I'd end up disliking her because of her new voice (not that the old one was perfect). While it grated on me at first, I was completely sold by the end. The new voice actress has a different take on the character's voice that fits the personality woven into the dialogue better (more tomboyish and less like a thirty-year-old woman) and tends to read the majority of her lines more naturally as well. Not as big a deal as I thought it would be, but worth mentioning. I guess. 

Point being: Persona 4's characters and writing are excellent. While the underlying story (a murder mystery) and it's somewhat abrupt escalation into "we gotta save the world!" might not be as smooth or well crafted as Persona 3's, Persona 4 Golden's strength lies in it's entertaining characters, and putting them in as many scenes together as they could stuff into the game. Atlus knew what the game's strengths were, and completely supplemented them perfectly. I can't give the writing and voice actors here enough praise. 

If you wanna break the game, you can now totally break the game. 

Gameplay-wise the core system is still the same. That is: get social links, get Personas, raise social links for better personas, raise stats, level Personas, fuse Personas, win. It's still split between the three core activities: your time management/social life, Persona fusion and management, and battling in traditional turn-based JRPG dungeons. There are, however, a few changes that seem minor on the surface, but actually mix up the game a lot.

The biggest improvement is the ability to choose what skills Personas inherit when they're fused. For those unfamiliar, you can combine 2-8 Personas to make more powerful ones as your Social Links improve. As part of this fusion process, the new Persona inherits skills/spells that the old ones had. Before the selection of skills was completely random, forcing you to cancel back out and go back in over and over until you got the skills you wanted before committing to the fusion. Now, however, you just straight up pick the skills. Does it break the game because you can fuse an unstoppable monster? Maybe a little. But does it get rid of a lot of the obnoxious tedium tied with fusing? Yes, absolutely. 

Skill cards are back from P3P, and are even better. Before you got a skill card when a Persona reached a certain level. Now they can be picked up via the improved Shuffle Time after a battle (more on that later), or by extracting them from a Persona using...magic coffee. Yes, really. It's great. Cards can either be used to teach a skill once, or given to Marie who will then sell you an unlimited number back at an absurd cost. Seriously, they're hyper expensive; Cool Breeze is like 200,000 bucks here. They're less necessary now that you can pick your skills, but if you really want to have every Persona learn Victory Cry, now you can. It's less earth-shattering as it was in P3P considering the new fusion inheritance system, but it's nice it's there. 

It looks tricky, but you just gotta know when to hold 'em, and also when to fold 'em. 

Shuffle Time, the random game to win new prizes after certain battles, has also been revamped. In addition to Personas, the bonus cards from Persona 3 have made it in (healing, bonus money, bonus xp, etc.) in addition to some negative cards. However, the trick now is that you're dealt a hand of cards and have the choice to pick up one. Negative cards, though, will give you more pickups. Chain negative cards and you can eventually walk away with an entire dealt hand, earning you a sweep bonus, which guarantees a Shuffle Time after the next battle and an additional two pickups. Savvy players can chain Shuffle Time together for some mad bonuses, and use it to pick up Persona's they were missing. Oh, and it also now tells you if you've already picked up or banked a Persona in Shuffle Time. A small change, but a good one.

There's tons of new combat crap I could mention but this review is too long already. Social Linking party members now teaches them unique moves on the side (Yukiko with Mudo? Whaaaaaaa), and after you max them and enter the final portions of the game you have the option to do one final Social Link that makes their Persona uber and teaches them an ultimate move (Yukiko's Burning Petal's is so powerful it should be illegal). They also twieked mana costs (mostly making Almighty spells cheaper) and buffed the instant-kill Light/Dark spells, which had the hilarious side effect of making the previously situational pick Naoto (who had a scattershot of abilities but mostly was focused on the low-priority Light/Dark skills) a gamebreaking master. With Mudo Boost (basically a boost to the chance that your Dark Spells will instant kill an entire group of enemies) and Invigorate (free SP every turn) and Rise's massive buffs to HP/SP regeneration after a battle ends (a passive on all the time), Naoto can basically one shot entire mobs and recover all the SP after. It's also a problem that only enemies at the very end of the game have resistance to Almighty spells, meaning if you fuse a Persona with one (and then use a rare card drop in Shuffle Time to boost the skill up to a super advanced version) or level Naoto up so she has it, you can rain the Wrath of God on everybody without consequence throughout most of the game. Yeah. It's broken. Be sure to play on Normal or Hard, ok? 

There are a lot more animated segments this time around. 

Graphically, this game looks really good. Persona 4 was already a great looking game, not necessarily for graphics but for it's striking art style. The tv aesthetic and the bold, solid colored menus and text really popped out (especially since they were bright yellow) went a long way to make up for the PS2's graphical limitations, and they've all received a stunning transition to the pseudo-HD of the Vita's screen. Having an OLED Vita means this game looks downright phenominal. The sprites and backgrounds have had substantial upgrades, all the animated cutscenes and character portraits have been bumped to a higher resolution, and the game is now widescreen. While it may not push the polygon power of the Vita to it's limit, the framerate stays rock solid regardless of how flashy the spells are, and the game still exudes enough graphical charm to make up for it not being "next-gen."

There are a few new songs, though not as many as P3P saw. There's a new battle song that honestly kind of sucks (it's just straight up dull). There's also new town music for winter as well as a phenomenal arrangement of I'll Face Myself (the boss theme) that plays during the new optional boss. Persona 4 already fully embraced it's weird, poppy Japanese soundtrack that wasn't quite as weird (or, if we're being honest, memorable) as Persona 3's, but minus that one dud the songs and sound are fantastic.

And I already rambled about the voice actors, but seriously...Youske and Kanji steal the show. It's freaking Yuri Lowenthal (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) and Troy Baker (The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite) for crying out loud! Not to mention the always excellent Laura Bailey (Nier, Saints Row 3/4, like every anime ever) on Rise. Top notch stuff.

Arguably my favorite song in the game. Pure Boss Excellence. 

I suppose the ultimate question is this: if I loved Persona 4, is it worth replaying on the Vita? Is it worth buying a Vita (which isn't exactly doing well) to see all the new stuff? My answer is this: if you loved Persona 4 enough that you might have said "Greatest RPG of all time" at some point about it, then yeah...you should probably get Persona 4 Golden (and a Vita. They're actually not all gloom and doom like people make them out to be!). If you haven't played a Persona game and want to take the plunge into 4, this is by far the best version. Unlike P3P, where the altercations might have hindered a wholehearted recommendation vs FES, Persona 4 Golden is by far the definitive version of this game. It is so good it makes the original game obsolete. And it has enough new content that even people who know Persona 4 backwards and forwards will still find tons of new content and a good deal of fun here.

If I weren't completely blinded by rose-tinted goggles, I'd probably say something crazy here like "I know I said Final Fantasy VI is my favorite game of all time, but I'd be lying if I didn't say Persona 4 Golden isn't the best JRPG ever made." Maybe I'll just say it anyway, since I already just freaking wrote it. Whoops? Whatever. Hyperbolic statements aside, Persona 4 Golden is Really. Freaking. Good. I went in fully prepared to declare Persona 3 the better game, and came out not so sure anymore (more on that in a later article? Maybe?). Point being is that if you have any affinity for JRPGs whatsoever, you must play Persona 4 (and 3, but I'm not reviewing 3 here). And if you have a Vita, this is by far it's best killer app. Even after putting 83 hours into the game on a first playthrough, I very nearly started up New Game + immediately after beating it. It seriously is so good you get depressed afterwards because all other games suddenly seem weak in comparison.

Wow, this got into overarching statements fast. I'd better shut up now and end with this:

PERSONA 4 GOLDEN IS GREAT. 

BUY A VITA AND PLAY IT.

EVERY DAY'S GREAT AT YOUR JUNES. 

Five out of Five Stars. 

You tell 'em, Kanji.