After initially being blown away by the screen shots of Odin Sphere (though I never got around to playing it), wanting something visually stunning for my eyes to enjoy since gorging themselves on Okami and needing to give my long neglected Wii some love, I took the plunge and bought the Japanese version. While the visuals drew me towards this title the language barrier was always lurking in the background reminding me that this version of the game isn't actually meant for me. I remember playing through Zelda: Twilight Princess and feeling waves of sorrow each time a character enthusiastically told me their unintelligible tale.
So it was with some trepidation that I blew the dust off my Wii, grabbed a Gamecube controller and slipped in the disk.
Thankfully its a really beautiful looking game as I'm sure you've seen from the videos, the colours and the detail in the 2D animations along with the parallax scrolling give the feeling of a magical puppet show. Characters flip when you walk past them, the scenery spins as if on a giant wheel when you run. While areas are often repeated they're mixed up nicely with different weather effects, coming out of a rainy section into a foggy wood and then onto a bright beach - its like the colour levels on the TV get turned up and everything pops! Also the music, while a little repetitive if you stay in one area for a while, is quite strange and always interesting.
When starting the game you get the choice of two difficulty settings, one is Blue and one is Pink. Describing the difference between the "Musou" and "Shura" modes, Nakamura said that the Musou system is for people invigorated by raising levels, and the Shura system is more for action gamers who "have the habit of saying 'I am a god,'" and can play at godlike levels. I mistook the pink to represent the female character Momohime being as she is dressed in pink so my first play experiences were on the hard as nails setting playing as Momhime. Going the pink route also meant that I had chosen the RPG version of the game (instead of the pure action version which is blue like Kisuke the boy ninja). At the time I hadn't realised this and was wondering why the second boss encounter was handing me my arse on a plate over and over again. Once I switched the difficulty to blue I took him out without taking any damage, my skills had of course been greatly improved through this baptism of fire but also I was now back down at the start of the difficulty curve!
Playing as the girl character Momohime, you jump (and double jump) using the stick and double tap down to leap though a tree branch. When falling you can hold diagonal up and she will use her kimono to float. All these movements however are handled with the swiftness you'd expect from a ninja and watching her run is a joy!
Initially it was a little hard to follow where exactly my character was in the melee, but once I stopped button bashing and took a more considered style it all fell into place. The A button acts as attack and defence which works very well. Juggling a pack of enemies high into the sky, dashing between them rinsing every last green soul from their shadowy corpse before down spin attacking a lone enemy deflecting their throwing star as you descend looks incredible. You can only draw your weapon when enemies attack you so these moments become rather precious bursts of beautifully choreographed violence. You get rated after each fight but I've not worked that out yet. Had an epic boss encounter on a beach with a samurai, he was throwing all sorts of special attacks at me, like sending giant pink swipes across the screen to break my sword and vertical beam attacks to try and juggle me. It was during this fight that I realised that I too had special attacks, some the same as his, some far more deadly depending on which sword you have equipped. There is a Dante-style sword stab that once I'd broken his attack brought serious drama!
The sword tree is huge (found in the start menu), I just went through buying up everything it would let me, but then had to play around with the equip screen for a while until I had the three that seemed most deadly! You need to build up stamina to unlock these swords by eating different foods at the various restaurants along the way (a very nice break from all that combat).
The best thing so far is that I've managed to work out how to save me progress. LOL! The game is text heavy and looking at the description of items available in shop made me cry a little bit until I found this translation - http://ameblo.jp/koulinovesperia/
The items are colour coded:
Health - Green
Special Item - Purple
Food - Yellow
Power ups - Blue
which makes searching through the translation much quicker.
While the game is exclusively in Kanji with accompanying Japanese dialogue there are no lengthy cut scenes to speak of, you trigger dialogue by approaching a character and hitting A so you can take it or leave it in most cases. You get a nice interactive cut scene once you've ordered food at a restaurant however! Dipping dumplings into sauce while your character make satisfied noises for example...
The map is really nice, you can click through from having it placed in the top middle of the screen to a large view overlaying the whole screen or remove it completely. Each box on the map is an area (roughly 10 screens wide) and they are connected together by going left or right as you'd expect but also down and up paths that require the A button entry (at a bridge for instance that branches down to the bottom of the screen). It has a real old school feel to it which compliments the scrolling 2D nature of the game. It kind of makes it feel dungeony, plus there is a really stunning world map that pops up when you travel to a new area and you can also request to be carried by two characters to certain parts of the map. Plus there is an item that will allow you to jump back to the last save portal. Knowing which part of the map to aim for is always obvious due to a flashing gold symbol so I've yet to get lost or frustrated despite coming up against a few impassable barriers.
So a little bit of effort and patience is certainly paying off as I'm completely in love with this wonderful game.
So it was with some trepidation that I blew the dust off my Wii, grabbed a Gamecube controller and slipped in the disk.
Thankfully its a really beautiful looking game as I'm sure you've seen from the videos, the colours and the detail in the 2D animations along with the parallax scrolling give the feeling of a magical puppet show. Characters flip when you walk past them, the scenery spins as if on a giant wheel when you run. While areas are often repeated they're mixed up nicely with different weather effects, coming out of a rainy section into a foggy wood and then onto a bright beach - its like the colour levels on the TV get turned up and everything pops! Also the music, while a little repetitive if you stay in one area for a while, is quite strange and always interesting.
When starting the game you get the choice of two difficulty settings, one is Blue and one is Pink. Describing the difference between the "Musou" and "Shura" modes, Nakamura said that the Musou system is for people invigorated by raising levels, and the Shura system is more for action gamers who "have the habit of saying 'I am a god,'" and can play at godlike levels. I mistook the pink to represent the female character Momohime being as she is dressed in pink so my first play experiences were on the hard as nails setting playing as Momhime. Going the pink route also meant that I had chosen the RPG version of the game (instead of the pure action version which is blue like Kisuke the boy ninja). At the time I hadn't realised this and was wondering why the second boss encounter was handing me my arse on a plate over and over again. Once I switched the difficulty to blue I took him out without taking any damage, my skills had of course been greatly improved through this baptism of fire but also I was now back down at the start of the difficulty curve!
Playing as the girl character Momohime, you jump (and double jump) using the stick and double tap down to leap though a tree branch. When falling you can hold diagonal up and she will use her kimono to float. All these movements however are handled with the swiftness you'd expect from a ninja and watching her run is a joy!
Initially it was a little hard to follow where exactly my character was in the melee, but once I stopped button bashing and took a more considered style it all fell into place. The A button acts as attack and defence which works very well. Juggling a pack of enemies high into the sky, dashing between them rinsing every last green soul from their shadowy corpse before down spin attacking a lone enemy deflecting their throwing star as you descend looks incredible. You can only draw your weapon when enemies attack you so these moments become rather precious bursts of beautifully choreographed violence. You get rated after each fight but I've not worked that out yet. Had an epic boss encounter on a beach with a samurai, he was throwing all sorts of special attacks at me, like sending giant pink swipes across the screen to break my sword and vertical beam attacks to try and juggle me. It was during this fight that I realised that I too had special attacks, some the same as his, some far more deadly depending on which sword you have equipped. There is a Dante-style sword stab that once I'd broken his attack brought serious drama!
The sword tree is huge (found in the start menu), I just went through buying up everything it would let me, but then had to play around with the equip screen for a while until I had the three that seemed most deadly! You need to build up stamina to unlock these swords by eating different foods at the various restaurants along the way (a very nice break from all that combat).
The best thing so far is that I've managed to work out how to save me progress. LOL! The game is text heavy and looking at the description of items available in shop made me cry a little bit until I found this translation - http://ameblo.jp/koulinovesperia/
The items are colour coded:
Health - Green
Special Item - Purple
Food - Yellow
Power ups - Blue
which makes searching through the translation much quicker.
While the game is exclusively in Kanji with accompanying Japanese dialogue there are no lengthy cut scenes to speak of, you trigger dialogue by approaching a character and hitting A so you can take it or leave it in most cases. You get a nice interactive cut scene once you've ordered food at a restaurant however! Dipping dumplings into sauce while your character make satisfied noises for example...
The map is really nice, you can click through from having it placed in the top middle of the screen to a large view overlaying the whole screen or remove it completely. Each box on the map is an area (roughly 10 screens wide) and they are connected together by going left or right as you'd expect but also down and up paths that require the A button entry (at a bridge for instance that branches down to the bottom of the screen). It has a real old school feel to it which compliments the scrolling 2D nature of the game. It kind of makes it feel dungeony, plus there is a really stunning world map that pops up when you travel to a new area and you can also request to be carried by two characters to certain parts of the map. Plus there is an item that will allow you to jump back to the last save portal. Knowing which part of the map to aim for is always obvious due to a flashing gold symbol so I've yet to get lost or frustrated despite coming up against a few impassable barriers.
So a little bit of effort and patience is certainly paying off as I'm completely in love with this wonderful game.
bought and then decided id rather wait and know whats going on.
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