Operation Backlog Completion 2024

The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is Here!

 Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 062024
 

Today is the day. The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is now out for all modern platforms.

Investigations and its sequel were the only games in the series that never made it to the 3DS, which made it feel a bit like Capcom had left them behind. And Investigations 2 had never received an official translation.

That makes this collection a momentous release, much more so than the Apollo Justice Trilogy earlier this year.

I already played the Investigations Collection and reviewed it over at MonsterVine, so you can head there to read my thoughts on this excellent remaster. I’m so happy this collection exists, and I’m thrilled that more people will get to play these games at last.

(Rest assured, I preordered a physical copy of the collection as well and it arrived today. There’s no way I was missing out on that!)

I’ve been waiting for this day for a long, long time.

All the way back in 2012, I blogged about the fan movement “Operation: Objection!” that hoped to show Capcom we wanted Investigations 2 localized. Two years later, we were holding a write-in/call-in event. A few months later, I was still at it. By the next year, we had a newly-revived movement to show our support.

I eventually put Investigations 2 localization on my list of pipe dreams, where it remained year after year after year…

By 2022, I had all but given up. I wanted to believe the Investigations duology would be remastered, but we’d had no new Ace Attorney announcements since The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (which itself felt like a miracle to have translated). I told myself that if there was no Ace Attorney news by the end of the year, I would finally give in and play the Investigations 2 fan translation. So the following May, I finally played the fan translation and came out of it hoping for an official translation harder than ever so that more people could play.

And now it’s finally here.

I’ve spent so long going into every single video game event hoping for an Investigations 2 localization announcement that it feels strange to no longer have to. What will I pin all my hopes and dreams on now? I guess I’ll just have to double down on wishing for Ace Attorney 7.

In the meantime, I can’t wait to see reactions from people playing these games for the first time. Are you planning to play the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection?

---
If you want posts like this delivered straight to your inbox, enter your email in the box below to subscribe!

Level-5 Vision 2024 Scheduled for September 24

 Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 042024
 

When we discussed the Fantasy Life i delay a couple weeks ago, I mentioned that Level-5 had yet to announce a date for their showcase that was delayed from April to this summer.

However, we now have a date!

The rescheduled Level-5 Vision 2024 has been announced for September 24 at 5 AM PT / 8 AM ET. It will have English and Chinese subtitles.

So… that’s not actually “summer” anymore, but at least it’s not too far off.

Titles featured in the showcase will be Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, Fantasy Life i (including information about the delay), Decapolice, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, and a brand-new title.

Now, with the delays we’ve seen so far, I don’t know how I feel about them announcing a new game before any of those four are even out. It’s probably going to be the maybe-Yokai-Watch-maybe-spiritual-successor teased last year, but I just wish it didn’t feel like they were taking on too much all at once.

But who knows? Maybe this was the final stumbling block and things will finally get moving. Hopefully we’ll get a release date for both Inazuma Eleven and Fantasy Life i. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if at least Decapolice has now been bumped to 2025, and I worry Professor Layton could get pushed even further off as a result.

(Hey, what ever happened to Ushiro? We never heard anything after it was un-cancelled, although it amusingly keeps showing up on Famitsu lists of Japan’s most-anticipated games.)

Level-5’s resurgence still has me worried, but here’s hoping we get some good news. What do you expect from the Level-5 showcase later this month?

---
If you want posts like this delivered straight to your inbox, enter your email in the box below to subscribe!

Atelier Yumia Live Stream Reveals Party Members, Combat, and More

 Video games  No Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 022024
 

Heads-up: if you’re a blog subscriber, it may be a few days before you get email notifications again, as the service I was using shut down.

All right, now let’s get into today’s topic – Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land and the unanswered questions we had about it after its announcement trailer.

This morning, Gust and Koei Tecmo held a live stream at which they revealed new information about Atelier Yumia, followed by a 10-minute English trailer.

Now, the stream wasn’t translated, so I had to pick up what I could just by watching it and then fill in some details with the English trailer later. Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to see that the next trailer they showed was featuring party members. I don’t know if they saw fans jumping to conclusions that there wouldn’t be party members or if they always intended to introduce them during this live stream, but they showed off five party members.

Their next focus was on field exploration. It looks like you can shoot enemies and materials in the environment. They showed some crafting after that and then moved onto combat.

Combat was the other big question from the announcement, and I watched the combat section over and over to try to figure out if it’s action combat or very fast-paced ATB. They show the character moving right at the start, but for the most of it they stay more or less in one place aside from movement related to the attacks, and there’s a “range” button that changes what range you’re attacking at, so right now I’m leaning toward it being a highly fast-paced ATB system like in the Ryza games. You can also switch characters on the fly.

Base-building also looks like it’s going to be a big deal, as you not only can create and arrange furniture, but also construct entire buildings?? I’m really curious about how much that’s going to play into it.

The story does seem darker than usual for the series, but it also looks like a beautiful game. The environments they’ve shown so far have been breathtaking!

(Oh, and they’re definitely aiming for fanservice again with some of those designs. They know it worked with Ryza and want to keep that momentum.)

Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land will be out on March 21, 2025. I still have not played most of the Atelier games in my backlog. I promise to get on that! In the meantime, are you looking forward to Atelier Yumia?

---
If you want posts like this delivered straight to your inbox, enter your email in the box below to subscribe!

 Older Entries