Operation Backlog Completion 2025
Jan 062025
 

Since we had all of our end-of-year / start-of-year posts to go through, I held off on discussing this until now, but it’s been on my mind ever since I saw it.

Each December, many video game developers and publishers make a short statement about what they have planned for the next year. These are often vague, but sometimes they offer intriguing hints about upcoming announcements.

From this year’s messages, translated here by Gematsu, there was one in particular that caught my eye.

You see, 2025 is the 10th anniversary of The Great Ace Attorney.

It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole 10 years since The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures first came out in Japan on the 3DS. We had to wait all the way until 2021 to finally get an official localization! Now the second game in particular has become one of my all-time favorites, and there’s nothing I’d like to see more than more Great Ace Attorney games.

Anyway, Kei Hashimoto, a programmer with Capcom, said that they’re “making preparations to ensure everyone can enjoy the 10th anniversary” of The Great Ace Attorney.

That statement doesn’t necessarily mean they’re making a new game. It could be anything. It could just be merchandise, or even a special event in Japan. It’s too early to get excited.

On the other hand, we still don’t have a satisfactory explanation for the mysterious Van Zieks captions, and I still hope they were misplaced dialogue from a Great Ace Attorney Investigations game. Between the captions, the 10th anniversary, and this statement about celebrating, I can’t help but feel a little more optimistic.

Click for major The Great Ace Attorney 2 spoilers
Also, 2025 is the Year of the Snake, and Kazuma’s prosecutor design has snake inspirations/motifs, so basically this would be the perfect year for a game with him as a central character.

I remain hopeful that a new Ace Attorney game will be announced this year. I’d assumed it would be Ace Attorney 7, but if we get a new Great Ace Attorney game instead, I certainly won’t complain.

How do you think Capcom intends to celebrate the 10th anniversary?

Oct 212024
 

Four years ago, we talked about Spirit Hunter: Death Mark.

Two years ago, we discussed its sequel, Spirit Hunter: NG.

So it’s fitting that one of this year’s games is the third entry in the series (despite any confusion that might come from its English title), Spirit Hunter: Death Mark II.

Death Mark II follows the protagonist of the first game, who has been called in to a high school because of his experience dealing with supernatural occurrences. The school has seen several disappearances at the hands of malevolent spirits, all announced in advance by a spirit called The Departed.

Other returning characters from the first game show up as well to assist with the investigation, which was a nice touch, even though new characters take central stage for the story.

Gameplay has a few major changes compared to the previous games, the biggest of which is that exploration is handled in a side-scrolling format. Certain areas still shift into the first-person adventure game view, but for the most part you’ll be walking across each area. As you move through an area, key points to investigate will be highlighted for you to find the clues you need, as well as a type of collectible that you can trade for items that make spirit encounters easier.

Encounters with spirits are more RPG-like than ever. You and your partner each have a stat that decreases as you take damage – and as you choose actions. On each turn, you’ll need to select an item and an action you want to use it for, with a percentage chance of success.

To be honest, the percentage system feels like a waste of time. Choosing the wrong item/action causes you to take damage from the spirit’s attack, but the few times I actually had my action fail, that didn’t happen, so a failure only costs you the health you expended to attempt it. Between that and how rare failures actually are, it just feels like a completely pointless system.

It was probably added to balance out how these encounters have been simplified. Picking the wrong item won’t put you on track for a bad ending like in Death Mark or lead to a game over like in NG, although the threat posed by the spirits still makes encounters tense. It definitely gives it more of an RPG-like feel.

The biggest focus here is on the story, and I’d say that’s where Death Mark II shines. I think I enjoyed the story of the first Death Mark the best still, but this one comes in second. It’s a dark story with some interesting twists, the individual spirits’ stories are also good, and it highlights everything with some truly unsettling deaths. They went all out on the body horror for the victims.

Unfortunately, it’s not very scary. I know I said that about NG, but Death Mark II is even less scary than that. Despite the game having a warning about jumpscares and the option to turn them off, the jumpscares pretty much always happen when you load a new area and become sadly predictable. I miss the scares of Death Mark and NG, and I can’t help but think the switch to side-scrolling contributed to their loss the most.

One more gripe before I move on – the title. From the moment it was announced as Death Mark II, I criticized the name for being confusing since it’s the third game in the series. Now I think I understand why they went with that title, first because it stars the same protagonist as Death Mark, and second because it’s set before NG. Chronologically, it’s the second game. But it bugs me that the term Death Mark referred to something in the first game’s plot but doesn’t really have anything to do with this game’s plot at all. I wish they had gone with a different title. (During one of the voice acted parts, I’m pretty sure I heard a character say “shibito” at one point, which got me thinking about its Japanese title Shibito Magire and how different its English title is.)

Anyway, it is what it is. Death Mark II. I devolved into complaining near the end here, so I want to repeat that I enjoyed this game. Investigating and finding the hidden collectibles was fun, I enjoyed the story and seeing the old cast again, and I appreciated how getting the good ending was a lot more straightforward this time. I even went through the final couple of chapters a second time to get the true ending as well.

If you liked the first two Spirit Hunter games, it’s worth playing Spirit Hunter: Death Mark II. It’s probably the weakest of the three, but it’s still an enjoyable, spooky adventure – and a perfect one for Halloween.

Now, the real question is if we’ll have a fourth Spirit Hunter game to to review two years from now. One can only hope.

Oct 142024
 

For our next spooky game, let’s face off against more yokai – excuse me, Yoki – this time in a survival horror game.

Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~ is inspired by the classics, complete with fixed camera angles and the option to play with either tank controls or modern controls.

I played the Switch version, although it’s on PS4 and PC as well.

You play a young woman training to be a Hoshoshi, someone who drives off evil spirits. When she and her mentor learn Azuma Manor has been overtaken by Yoki (why they didn’t call them yokai remains a mystery to me), they head in to handle the problem.

Now, Kwaidan has one weird quirk, which is its inclusion of point-and-click adventure controls. For the most part, you run around and fight enemies like you would in any game with 3D exploration, but when you want to interact with something in the environment or your inventory, you have to hover over it with a cursor first instead of just pressing a button. This is unnecessarily awkward, particularly since you need to be right by an object to interact with it anyway.

Your inventory also remains on-screen at all times, and you use the cursor to interact with it as well. While you have a limited inventory, resource management never really comes into play.

Combat in Kwaidan is a bit unusual for the genre. You have three weapons, one to attack right in front of you, one to attack enemies low to the ground, and one to attack enemies in the air. The latter two consume energy, which you can build up again by defeating enemies or defending against attacks. This makes it tilt slightly more toward action, a bit closer to Onimusha than Resident Evil.

Enemies respawn, which I found annoying at first, until I realized it’s almost a necessity because of the small game world. While it has the usual sorts of item-based puzzles I love from this genre, with backtracking requires to unlock doors and solve puzzles once you find the key items, it’s pretty small-scale. If enemies didn’t respawn, you’d soon spend most of your time in safety.

Most of the puzzles are straightforward, although one requires you to run around the manor to to look at spots in a first-person view to work out a code told to you in a document in a completely different location, which felt tedious. I would have preferred to have that information recorded in memos.

But my bigger criticism is that you only have one save slot. As such, if you save yourself into a situation where you really could use more healing items, you’d need to either start over or try repeatedly until you manage to scrape through.

Overall, the occasional frustrations in Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~ weren’t enough to stop me from enjoying the game. The developer’s next game is about luring devils up a railway to seal them away, which sounds significantly different, but I’ll be interested in seeing what it’s like.