GTF234

I honestly wouldn't say the OG games are all that difficult, though they can be pretty imposing when you still don't understand how the game works, I won't deny that. Once you get into the swing of the series, you should manage just fine. Also, don't hesitate to use a guide for the secrets, the series is infamous for hidden secrets being REALLY well hidden- and by that I mean there is nothing hinted to you at all to do x and y to unlock z. If you can get the carts, I'd say get them. Like many Atlus titles, they didn't exactly see huge production numbers, so actually owning the carts (like I do) is a pretty cool thing. Not implying they're worth anything, far from it, just a cool thing to have. Those prices aren't all that terrible either and they're rather fun games, so I would say it's worth the investment.

Hit the nail on the head. Loathing sarcasm aside, there IS something akin to an RTS made with that source material, made by Twilight Frontier, who made the official fighting games as well as Higurashi Daybreak (which had 2 PSP releases). Patchcon Defend the Library. There's keyboard controls, but everything can be handled with its very simple point and click interface. It's a very small game revolving around using little mass produced squeaky clones of the characters from 6 through 10. Each character has a type: melee, bullet, and float, which have a triangular effective relationship- in addition to their own stats and special skills which increase as you purchase upgrades for them. The objective in any game mode is just to defend a bookshelf from any enemy horde approaching it- the shelf has 20 books, which function as a life meter for you. Lose all 20 points and it's game over. Waves of enemies will come at various time intervals over 12 hours of game time (represented by a clock in the top right corner of the screen), and you need to destroy them before they can get to the books. You can prematurely summon the next wave to acquire a score multiplier, the quicker you invoke them the higher it gets. You additionally have a set of spells, each one time use, to help prevent you from failing, though using one instantly ends your score multiplier. Difficulty settings increase the number of waves per game "hour" as well as adds in other effects like obscuring who the incoming horde is. I find that Patchcon is pretty fun in its simplicity. There are a number of alternative modes to alter the basics of the gameplay, including a Tower Defense mode, even a boss rush mode, where you fight nothing but the enormous boss class enemies. You shouldn't have any problem finding it and the English patch made for it, not that there's all that much text in the game in the first place. It's not anything like what one would normally consider an RTS since there's no real campaign or anything like that, but it's a good little time killer. Then again I still don't quite understand why one would specifically want an RTS presented with an anime-esque style over something else that delivers the same thing but lacking that aesthetic. I rarely care what the game looks like or is based on if it delivers what I want out of it, but to each their own I guess.

Just once I would like them to give us Zeta Toki wo Koete for Zeta the Zeta cast BGM in a modern game. But alas, it will only be in Compact 2, which makes me sad because that is my favorite- can't go wrong with Neil Sedaka. Also hoping Colors shows up for CG, I think that one just fits better as an actiony theme for the series. Previous Notice is powerful but doesn't really go anywhere, to me, it's more of a tune you'd get when you use the ultimate move of a character, like Joshua/Rim's final moves in D, or the V-MAX music for Layzner. Can't really complain about any of the others, all pretty standard choices. Though I do like Dreams better than Resolution, I can't be too picky, either one is okay.

At this point I'm just waiting for my preorder to arrive, which is expected to happen just after my birthday....yay. Been hoping for this series to get here for a long time and I'm happy the folks at XSEED are Falcom junkies (admitted by the president of XSEED in some very early press release when they first began shacking up with Falcom to get the last few Ys games over here) hardcore enough to actually tackle the massive script Sora no Kiseki has. Those guys have taken a lot of my money recently actually: Ys Seven (playable Dogi had me sold from day 1 of its JP announcement), Oath in Felghana, Ys Chronicles and now Sora no Kiseki. Yeah I've played and beaten Oath and Ys Complete more than a healthy amount of times on the PC, but I bought them out of principle. You know, if they don't sell then XSEED won't keep giving us new stuff and dammit, I will not tolerate Sora no Kiseki ending up like Shining Force 3, with us getting only 1 title of the 3 part game.

It's true Advance doesn't totally play by that rule of thumb, but it also kinda skips most of the Dinosaur Empire and cuts to the Hyakki really damn quickly. Musashi is axed mainly just because it's time for the Getter Dragon to be the main machine. Yeah he's missing for a lot of @G, but that was the case for a lot of people and him taking over Getter 1 after the upgrade to Dragon isn't all that out there either considering that was how he spend his last few moments anyway. I admit he generally has always served a more important purpose in dying in the games, but he's just as capable of contributing to the awesome, and I think Z2's providing the opportunity to capitalize on that that D let slip by. Come on, Stoner Sunshine Spark was an awesome combination attack, and I'd like to see the 4 original Getter team being even crazier together in the Last Day on Earth setting. Before they've always kinda phoned it in with him: often lacking cut-ins, few recorded lines, etc- he wasn't going to be around long anyway. But here, it really would be wasted effort to make the cut-ins, record lines for Shin Getter (since we see him in Shin Getter 3 in the PV, which is already twisting the source material quite a bit), and give him a two page spread if he's just going to be offed a few chapters in.

He also survived until midway through SRW3 in the classic timeline, where he basically went and died his TV version death. But yeah, he normally is a goner, but the biggest difference from then and now is that this is a version of Getter where Musashi's death is pretty much completely irrelevant to the story. The other games follow the original Dinosaur Empire stuff pretty closely, where Musashi's demise is instrumental in victory over Emperor Gol, with no other series interfering with the natural course of things (in contrast to how every other series steps in to make Shinn and SEED Destiny less horrible, or Evangelion to be less...Evangelion). One can deviate from his very unceremonious death in Last Day on Earth rather cleanly without any immense repercussions to the overall story. Thinking more about it, Z2 is supposed to be a two game thing isn't it? This first part is called the Break the World chapter or the world breaking part or something like that. It's probably a SEED Destiny reference in the making, but also I'd wager it means the apocalypse will happen at the end of the first game and pick up in a wasteland for the second game. So I'd bet only the initial scuffle with Shin Dragon and Saotome will be covered in the first game (which would really drag it out though since that's pretty much just the first episode)- the world gets destroyed in the ending, Musashi dies in that and Benkei picks up his place at the start of the second game.

I've been very curious as to what they will do with Musashi. Last time they used Last Day on Earth was in D and Musashi was killed immediately after Ch 1 in that. But here they've clearly gone through the effort into giving him a very nice cut-in and the works, which is kinda pointless when he doesn't really last very long in that one, nor does he get to go out like a total badass like his manga death (which Shin vs Neo recreated wonderfully) or TV death or even his SRW Alpha 2 death. He's saveable in Advance (and Portable) as well as in Alpha 2 on the super routes. So I wonder if he'll live through this one since they put the effort into graphics for him. Honestly, killing him off in D was a huge waste because you'd end up with 1 or 2 Getters forever collecting dust in the hangar depending on whether or not you got Shin Getter Dragon at the second route split. Getter 1 came with a ton of free upgrades and could at least survive better than other supers in that game due to Open Get and Mach Special- when lacking Shin Getter Dragon, it was probably the better thing to put the Neo Getter team into. But then Black Getter is useless, but still has very convenient and spammable combination attacks with Getter 1 but you'd be insane to not use Shin Getter just to take advantage of such a thing. If Musashi was alive, he'd be capable of using Black Getter and BAM, utility restored. It's not like his death is all that important in Last Day on Earth's plot- just a comparatively small guilt trip for Benkei. I'd greatly like to see this in Z2, letting Musashi live to help kick some ass, falling back on his Getter 3 or to Ryouma's Black Getter when he hops into Shin Getter 1. It's not like we don't have a precedent of Musashi being awesome in the Black Getter, friggin judo throwing a pair of cyborg brontosauruses (or whatever the Invincible Fortress Dai was made out of) in it.

Undeniably true, there is very little that won't get a touhou spin to it. However, that in of itself doesn't mean the resulting product is bad. There is a lot of effort put into this one to keep it in line with what it is a huge homage to, such as the sprite work and animations pretty much being intentionally designed as a throw back to to PSX Alpha standards. It's also not like BMW and GSW are doing anything completely out of line with mainstream SRW anyway- the series always was a giant pile of fanbait in turnbased strategy format with flashy effects and fireworks. Similarly, Twilight Frontier's New Super Marisa Land is an amazingly fun and well put together game, dismissing it because it's "Touhou + Super Mario Land would certainly be a shame and waste. Same goes for Touhou Labyrinth, it's a pretty damn good dungeon crawler with some mercilessly brutal but fun gameplay that would be missed out on if you roll your eyes and don't give it the time of day just because it's "Touhou + RPG".

Yo everyone. Don't intend to be a phantom member, but life happens. Well here's something I've been meaning to share with you for a while: Gensou Shoujo Taisen It's a touhou themed doujin game based on Super Robot Wars by the circle calling themselves Sanbondo. While many of you who are interested in that stuff are probably already aware of WERK's similar Type-Moon themed project, Battle Moon Wars, GSW takes it even further. The interface is practically identical to the old Alpha and Alpha Gaiden games in both the battle and intermission menus. But the biggest kick is the music, primarily made up of amazing remixes of Touhou music that is remixed to blend in Super Robot Wars themes. This results in some brilliant things like a fusion of Casket of Stars with Time to Come, or Wind God Girl with Neppu! Shippu! Cybuster!. ...actually the one that will make you eargasm the most is probably the most hidden one, which is a fusion of U.N. Owen was Her? and Violent Battle. It only plays under very specific conditions in Ch 13Marisa and was left off the official OST for reasons Sanbondo never really clarified. You have two main routes Reimu and Marisa, as if that wasn't going to be obvious. Having a clear data for both routes will unlock a short 4 chapter route with Sakuya as the main heroine- assuming you have the game properly updated. For the most part, the paths send them to very different scenarios, bringing different characters to you sooner, but the chapters based on the more important events are combined scenarios. While the spells and most of the skills all function like classic SRW spells and abilities, there is one new system they put in, the curtain fire fields and grazing. Enemies can put out a field around them in various shapes and ranges, representing the danmaku style of the source material. Unique to each enemy type, the fields have varying penalties to your movement, defense, and evasion, as well as possibly having another special effect. You have the ability to put your characters into focus movement, which will grant +10% accuracy and negate the movement, defense, and evasion penalties, but not the special effects. Focus has its own movement pace, generally 50% of normal movement, but it's independent of that as some characters like Marisa have really high normal movement but can barely any move while focusing. The drawback to focusing is that you get 10% more exp and money while killing things unfocused, but more importantly you cannot dodge anymore. Instead of dodging you have to graze, which makes you take damage equal to the damage you would have taken, multiplied by your evasion chance. So you'd graze a 1000 damage hit for 300 if the enemy had a 30% chance of hitting you, when you dodge- you might still end up actually getting hit by that since the chance of hitting wasn't 0 after all. This system adds a rather interesting layer to the game since it now forces you to balance focusing and not focusing as you try to reach timed battle masteries, get more money and exp, etc. The plot picks up as a re-imagining of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, with the first 15 chapters, dubbed GSW Kou or Scarlet, being about the scarlet mist incident. It begins with Reimu revealing she's just learned to fly without Genji in response to fairies attempting to exploit her old handicap, assuming you picked her as your main heroine. Old things are brought up a lot and things from beyond TH6 are introduced much sooner as well. The game currently only has the Kou chapters, as the next installment is not out yet,Gensou Shoujo Taisen Phantom. They're taking the same approach WERK did and release things in batches, which I approve of because it gives me something to have rather than just wait for years. http://www.sanbondo.net/ Go here for their website, where they have quick links to GSW Scarlet and Phantom's websites as well as links to their newest trailer for all the improvements they made for Phantom. The website for Scarlet has the links to the update patches. I know it's not all that hard to find...digital copies...of the game on the web, but I do highly recommend buying the actual game, and OST because damn is it good. They do sell it on W-Canvas, which does to international shipping last time I checked.