Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Ghost Trick, Baten Kaitos, AND the Return of Professor Layton?!

 Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Feb 102023
 

As I predicted, we’re talking a break from our romance celebration today because the Nintendo Direct on Wednesday was too exciting not to cover!

I won’t go over every game that was shown, but you can watch the entire Nintendo Direct here.

I went into the Nintendo Direct hoping for at least one of three things: the rumored Ghost Trick remaster, the rumored Baten Kaitos remaster, or Ace Attorney news.

Well, there hasn’t been Ace Attorney news yet, but otherwise the Nintendo Direct delivered more than I ever expected.

The first thing to catch my attention was the announcement of a February 15 release date for the third piece of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 DLC, along with a teaser for the story expansion that I tried not to pay too much attention to since I haven’t finished the game yet.

Then it happened: Ghost Trick.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is back! Capcom later released a full trailer confirming that Ghost Trick will be remastered for Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC (Steam) this summer. While largely the same as the original, this remaster includes a few bonuses (like sliding block puzzles for some reason).

If you’re unfamiliar with Ghost Trick, it’s a puzzle game from Shu Takumi, the creator of Ace Attorney. You play a ghost able to manipulate objects in the environment as well as rewind time to shortly before a person’s death, which you do while in search of answers about your own death.

It’s an incredible game and one of my favorites. Now that it’s coming to modern platforms, you definitely should play it.

(I was hoping to order a physical copy, but after mistakenly saying it would be available physically, Capcom corrected themselves and said it will be digital-only. Although I’m disappointed about that, I’m still getting it, of course.)

That was it, the Nintendo Direct was already won for me. I was so excited over Ghost Trick, I nearly missed the game shown directly after it, DecaPolice.

DecaPolice is an upcoming detective game, and it appears to be a combination of an investigation game and an RPG. Once I calmed down enough from the Ghost Trick news to pay attention, I realized it actually looks pretty cool.

What really surprised me was seeing the develop of DecaPolice. I actually missed it in the trailer (Ghost Trick hype), but then I saw people talking about it being a Level-5 game.

I’d more or less given up on Level-5 after their new content over the past few years consisted of unlocalized Yo-Kai Watch games, an unlocalized Megaton Musashi game, a couple mobile games, and an ever-lengthening list of delays for Inazuma Eleven. Things didn’t look good, especially with the reports that their North American offices had shut down.

So to see a new Level-5 game in the Nintendo Direct? That was quite a welcome surprise!

A few other interesting-looking games followed, including a narrative adventure game called Harmony: The Fall of Reverie, which I didn’t realize was from Don’t Nod until I wrote this post (and when did they change their name from Dontnod?), Octopath Traveler II and Sea of Stars, both of which look appealing to me as a classic turn-based JRPG fan, and a full-scale remaster of the first Metroid Prime game, which has me trying to decide if it’s worth playing over the Wii U version I already have.

The Direct included another trailer for Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, as well, which I’ve had preordered for a while now.

And then the trailer was shown for the Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster. That’s right, it’s real and it’s a collection of both Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean and Baten Kaitos Origins! I had a great time with the first Baten Kaitos, although I haven’t played Origins yet. I’m so happy to see these often-overlooked JRPGs return!

Who knows, maybe this will pave the way for the cancelled Baten Kaitos 3 to be revived?

Sadly, the Baten Kaitos remasters have been confirmed to have Japanese voice acting only. While this might be a good thing for the first game and its rather terrible English dub, I’ve been told the English voice acting in Origins was much better. Still, I’ll take no dub if it means a Baten Kaitos revival!

And then they immediately followed that with the headline “A New Fantasy Life Awaits,” and I spent half a second thinking, “No, they can’t possibly mean that Fantasy Life” before the trailer made it abundantly clear that yes, it’s that Fantasy Life!

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a sequel to the 2012 (2014 worldwide) JRPG life sim from Level-5. While it technically received a sequel before, Fantasy Life 2 was a short-lived mobile game that was shut down after a couple of years. Now this new game looks to be a full sequel worthy of the name and incorporates time travel into the gameplay.

Fantasy Life was a lot of fun, so I’m happy to see it get a true sequel at last (and disappointed at the number of online reactions I’ve seen where people see the title and dismiss it as just another farming game; you don’t even farm in Fantasy Life!) and hope it lives up to the original.

And then they followed that up a short teaser trailer that made me freak out the second I saw a top hat wearing silhouette… Professor Layton is BACK!

Professor Layton and the New World of Steam is a new entry in the series, and you know, despite my mixed feelings about the last game in the series, my excitement at seeing a new Professor Layton game announced was on the same level as if it was Ace Attorney.

(Maybe even more, since I’m not among the doomsayers who believe Ace Attorney is dead, but I did believe the Professor Layton series was probably dead outside of my faint hopes for a Layton Brothers remaster/sequel because of the manga.)

So yes, I’m thrilled beyond belief that Professor Layton is back… but since the announcement, my excitement has been tempered with caution.

A lot of fans seem to think that because this game stars Professor Layton himself (and Luke, as revealed by the official website), it will be a return to form. But I’m not so sure. Layton Mystery Journey’s problem was not the protagonist. Katrielle would have been fine if she had a better game around her. The low-stakes writing, lack of story, and weak puzzle direction were the game’s actual problems and won’t necessarily be fixed just because Hershel is back in the protagonist’s role.

But you know what? I want to believe. I want to believe they saw the mixed reception and sat down to write a solid Professor Layton story again. I want to believe they brought in a good puzzle designer to make this game’s lineup of brainteasers. I love this series so much that I want to believe in it again, with as much excitement as I felt when Layton’s Mystery Journey itself was first teased.

The Nintendo Direct continued after that and closed with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but I don’t care about that nearly as much as the other games here.

Ghost Trick and Baten Kaitos remasters, Fantasy Life and Professor Layton sequels… I can hardly believe all of these things happened in the same Nintendo Direct. (Also, is it just me, or did this Nintendo Direct have an unusually large number of mystery/investigation games?) It was an incredible Direct, and 2023 is shaping up to be an amazing year of games.

What did you think of the games shown in the Nintendo Direct?

Celebrating All Things Romantic: Doodle Date

 Celebrating All Things Romantic, Reviews, Video games  15 Responses »  Tagged with:
Feb 082023
 

Today we’re going to talk about an unusual indie game I picked up in a bundle, Doodle Date.

Doodle Date has a unique central gimmick: you draw the character you’re dating.

After being pulled into the world of your sketchbook, you are asked to draw your ideal date. You draw several different expressions/poses for this character, who is then named Sketchy and goes on a date with you. At certain points in the game, you have to draw other things, as well, like your waiter at a restaurant.

The drawing gimmick is entertaining, and I liked seeing how it was implemented at various points. My terrible artwork just made it funnier.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d actually call this a romance. It’s a short game, taking about 30 minutes for one playthrough, and the romantic development generally consists of being told you’re going on dates with Sketchy and growing closer. Instead of developing a romance, it spends more time playing into the darker implications of entering a world of sketches and creating someone to fall in love with you.

Click for Doodle Date spoilers
In the Sketchy route, you become upset that Sketchy won’t have sex with you and learn that Sketchy is distressed over every aspect of their existence being created for your benefit. You get a divorce.

It’s also possible to instead end up with Claire, the pre-existing sketch who tells you how the sketch world works. In that route, you get her pregnant, and the implications of a human-sketch hybrid baby are apparently so horrifying that she tries to kill you, so you kill her. Then the baby shows up years later and kills you in revenge.

Doodle Date is a romance game in the same way Doki Doki Literature Club could be seen as one, except that game devotes a greater amount of time to developing the character relationships first.

That’s a shame, because drawing your own love interest for a visual novel is a fun idea that I would have liked to see played out in earnest instead of from this meta perspective. It’s still interesting, but not what I was expecting.

Update: By popular demand, I’ve uploaded my drawn Sketchy.

So far this February I’ve reviewed a Nekopara game that focuses more on personal growth, and now a meta horror take on visual novels. At least Wintertide Miracles was a good romance story! Friday’s post has a good chance of being supplanted by Nintendo Direct news (fingers crossed), so let’s hope I manage to find another genuine romance for our review on Monday!

Celebrating All Things Romantic: Code Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~

 Celebrating All Things Romantic, Reviews, Video games  5 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Feb 062023
 

After discussing the otome visual novel Code: Realize two years ago and its fandisc Future Blessings last year, now we’ll be talking about the second fandisc, Wintertide Miracles.

(As a reminder, a fandisc can be seen as an extended epilogue game, or a sequel that builds on your happy ending.)

Like its predecessor, Wintertide Miracles contains several different types of stories.

One entertaining inclusion are the “triangle dates,” scenes that feature the main protagonist Cardia with two of the other characters. While not explicitly dates like the name would suggest, most of them feature the love interests vying for her interest with some comedic antics along the way.

The triangle dates aren’t just restricted to love interests, though, and those additional scenarios might be the funniest of all.

(Nemo is a treasure, and he’s at his best in Wintertide Miracles.)

Now let’s talk about the character routes, the game’s core content. These are set at Christmas, making this otome a great choice to read around the holidays. Instead of following each character’s ending from the original game, however, all the Christmas stories follow the ending of Finis’s route from Future Blessings. Essentially, it treats that as an extended common route so that the romances can develop from there.

They’re quite cute and sweet, with an emphasis on romance and holiday cheer instead of high stakes, a lovely way to revisit these characters.

But if you need a break from the winter setting, each character also has a bonus short story set at the beach that unlocks when you complete that character’s route.

Since Future Blessings included a new route for Herlock Sholmes, as well as the platonic Finis route, both of those characters get their own follow-up stories as well, with higher stakes and more dramatic plotlines than those found in the Christmas stories. There is also another side story set during the original game’s common route, in which Cardia befriends a songstress named Cantarella and becomes entangled in a new plot. Despite its slow start, I ended up enjoying this story quite a bit.

Finally, once you finish playing everything else (except the beach stories, which are optional), you unlock special epilogues for each of the main love interests. These do follow their individual Future Blessings routes and are fairly low-stakes stories showing the characters happy and in love.

I greatly enjoyed Code: Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~. Going into it, I worried it might feel stretched for content, being the second fandisc. However, I enjoyed it just as much as Future Blessings. Maybe it’s heavier on the fluff than on serious conflict, but there’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re a Code: Realize fan, you definitely should check out Wintertide Miracles – especially around the holidays.

(Personally, I wouldn’t mind a third Code: Realize fandisc. Maybe with Nemo and Hansel routes? I can dream.)

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