Operation Backlog Completion 2024

Let’s Talk About the Kaito Files

 Video games  No Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Mar 232022
 

Back ahead of Lost Judgment’s launch, we talked a bit about its DLC.

I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of side content being locked behind DLC, especially when that includes side cases as part of the day-one DLC.

But the one piece of DLC I had no problem with was final piece, a story expansion DLC set for spring 2022 called the Kaito Files.

Spring is here, and the Kaito Files has had its release date announced: March 28.

The Kaito Files begins with Kaito watching over the agency alone while Yagami is on a business trip, when he accepts a missing persons case that ends up tying into his own past. Several tweets have shown off new characters, Kaito’s combat, and more. Apparently he can also look, listen, and… sniff for clues.

All of this sounds great, and plenty of screenshots have been shown off as well.

Now, it seems that the Kaito Files will cost $29.99 on its own, in addition to being included in the Season Pass. The Season Pass costs $34.99, though, so it almost seems like it’s not worth getting on its own when you could get all that other extra content for $5 more.

Since I’ve had mixed feelings about the other DLC content from the start, that makes me wonder if it’s a ploy to get more people to buy the Season Pass.

More importantly, at that price, it costs half what the full game did when it first came out. So will the Kaito Files provide half a Lost Judgment’s worth of content? Back when it was first announced, it was said to be 10 hours long. That’s a hefty amount of playtime for DLC, but perhaps not for DLC that costs half as much as the whole game. On the other hand, maybe it’ll have its own side content that expands it further.

By the time I’m ready to even consider playing the Kaito Files, I’m sure I’ll have answers to all these questions. There’s a reason we haven’t talked about Lost Judgment yet despite how hyped I was for it when it was announced, and for once it’s not just that I didn’t get to it yet.

No, it’s because I decided to finish the main Yakuza series first, to avoid spoilers. So I have 3 whole games to go before starting Lost Judgment, let alone its DLC.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on the Kaito Files?

Eternia: Pet Whisperer is a Strange Little Game

 Reviews, Video games  No Responses »  Tagged with:
Mar 212022
 

On the weekend, I decided to take a short break from dying incessantly in the Lands Between to instead play a bite-sized visual novel called Eternia: Pet Whisperer.

It was described as being inspired by Hatoful Boyfriend, a favorite of mine, and I got it as part of a bundle, so why not?

You have decided to adopt a pet, so you head to a special animal sanctuary, and the animals living there start talking to you.

I felt like this could have been expanded a bit more, since it seemed to me I went from the protagonist denying the possibility of animals speaking, to happily wondering what a koala will enjoy talking about, without anything in between to bridge it.

Anyway, the visual novel takes place over a series of days. Each day, you can pick an animal to talk to from the animals that are currently around. Once you’ve talked to an animal enough times, they’ll start showing up more and more, until the possibility of adoption comes up.

Once you adopt an animal, it’s effectively the end of the route, but you’re given an option to loop back to the start.

The loop being built into the game if you choose to take it means you don’t have to skip through dialogue you’ve already seen, because only the new conversations are available for you to choose from. That’s convenient, although it does make subsequent routes feel shorter and shorter.

Each animal has their own little story, although the stories are nothing exceptional. I also wished the ending had a bit more content, since it felt abrupt even for what it was. Eternia: Pet Whisperer is a short (less than 30 minutes for me) game about talking animals with some wacky humor. I don’t necessarily recommend you rush out and buy it, but if you do end up getting it, it should bring a few smiles.

Jack Jeanne Localization Confirmed

 Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Mar 182022
 

We have yet more unexpected localization news to discuss!

Yesterday, during the game’s 1st anniversary live stream, Broccoli announced that Jack Jeanne will be translated into English and Traditional Chinese.

Jack Jeanne (which I’ve also seen written as JackJeanne) is a Nintendo Switch game that comes up quite a bit in discussions of otome games people want localized, and now it’s finally happening.

There’s been some disagreement about whether or not Jack Jeanne is an otome game. As far as I can tell from what I’ve read, it is, just one where the romance is lighter and starts as friendship that grows into love. That, together with the developer not marketing it as otome to try to draw in a larger audience, seems to be where the confusion comes from.

(This brings to mind my personal “Is Steins;Gate a galge?” debate while I was tagging posts. I concluded it is.)

Anyway, Jack Jeanne is a visual novel about a young woman who gets permission to attend a prestigious men’s-only opera school on the condition that she star in the final performance of the year and hide the fact that she’s a woman.

In addition to the visual novel gameplay, it also has some form of stat-building as well as rhythm game segments during performances. Stat-building elements in visual novels aren’t my favorite thing, but I don’t mind them if the game sounds interesting enough, and this one definitely does.

One of the key people behind the game is Sui Ishida, the creator of Tokyo Ghoul, so that has drawn a lot of attention to it as well.

No release date has been given for Jack Jeanne yet, so we’ll have to wait and see. We don’t know who is handling the localization yet, either, so it’s up in the air as to whether or not this could be IFI’s mystery announcement or what PQube was teasing.

Meanwhile, apparently this is a big deal because no game developed by Broccoli has ever been localized before, so I’m adding this to the list of games no one thought would be localized that are being localized. Kenzan and Ishin must be next.

Are you looking forward to Jack Jeanne?

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