MS Saga: A New Dawn (Playstation 2)

MS Saga: A New Dawn is a 3D turn-based RPG that uses elements from the early Universal Century Gundam, Gundam Wing, and G Gundam series. It puts you in control of a young orphan boy named Tristan and his best friend Fritz, who are on a quest to find a mysterious group of Mobile Suits that laid siege on their orphanage and killed all of its inhabitants (including their matron.)

The game is your standard JRPG fare, with combat being completely turn based as your group of Gundam and enemies take turns launching various attacks at each other. If you’ve played any Final Fantasy game older than XI, you know what this is all about. The main draw of MS Saga: A New Dawn is the ability to mix and match different pilots with different mobile suits, while modifying and upgrading said suits outside of battle, including swapping parts (which changes not only their stats but their appearance.)

Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 (Playstation 2)

Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 is the second Gundam-themed crowd-brawling game on the Playstation 2, from the company that made the genre popular – KOEI. It’s basically Dynasty Warriors with the historical theme replaced by a mish-mash of all the Gundam licenses at that point – from the original Mobile Suit Gundam all the way to SEED, with each franchise lending two to four suits from its roster.

Visually, the game looks decent for a Playstation 2 game but pales in comparison to other Gundam games on the system (particularly Mobile Suit Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam,) as the suits look particularly tiny and the sparse environments do a poor job of providing a sense of scale. Additionally, many of the textures look muddy and the variety in environment design leave a lot to be desired.

Gameplay and combat is exactly what you’d expect from a Dynasty Warriors game – you pick a pilot, a mobile suit (you can mix and match, btw), and run around a map killing random enemy mobile suits along with the occasional boss suit. There’s a lot of stuff added to give the gameplay more depth - like the ability to boost dash and block, the ability to launch different types of attacks depending on button combinations and sequences, the gundam’s equivalent of a musou super attack, and for some suits – a transformation. However, the sum is less than its parts as they all result in combat that is clunky and imprecise.

The main trouble has to be with targeting. Pressing one of the shoulder buttons allows you to keep the camera steady so that it doesn’t rotate all over the place while you’re running around and wading through hundreds of enemies, but there’s no way to lock-on to a target. When you’re blasting and slashing your way through a ton of enemies, it shouldn’t be a problem, but when you’re trying to hit a specific mobile suit (particularly a boss), you’ll find yourself hitting thin air a lot of times as your enemy is thrown away from the path of your attack. The auto-combo feature further compounds this problem.

Mobile Suit Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam (GC/PS2)

There’s a port of Mobile Suit Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam for the Playstation 2 and the Gamecube, with the Playstation 2 receiving both an English and Japanese version. This review will apply to both since there’s very little difference between them outside of what the hardware entails (e.g. the GC version naturally has better loading times.)

Now for the skinny: Mobile Suit Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam is a third person action game based on Yoshiyuki Tomino’s iconic mecha franchise. The game puts you in control of a mobile suit, drops you and a partner in a large expansive stage, and pits you against enemy mobile suits.

The choice of mobile suits and armors is limited to the ones you’ll find on the original series, Zeta Gundam, Gundam ZZ, and the movie Char’s Counterattack. You won’t find any suits from the Gundam Wing or Seed franchises in here, and you won’t find any from the Unicorn series either even though that’s set in the same timeline.

Rurouni Kenshin: Enjou! Kyoto Rinne (PS2)

Rurouni Kenshin: Enjou! Kyoto Rinne is a 3rd person action adventure game for the Playstation 2, based on Nobuhiro Watsuki’s popular manga and anime franchise, Rurouni Kenshin. The story follows the series closely, taking you from the start of the series (with Kenshin’s fight against Jin-E serving as the tutorial) all the way to Makoto Shishio’s defeat.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Rurouni Kenshin: Enjou! Kyoto Rinne is quite possibly the best Rurouni Kenshin title to date (even besting the two PSP fighters) when it comes to adapting the series into game format. However, it can also be inaccessible to people who can’t read Japanese, despite being an action title. The reason lies in the fact that the fights are framed by a story mode that requires you to walk around town and talk to people, with some parts of the story requiring you to talk to the right NPC and say the right thing in order to advance. Saitou Hajime’s story mode, for instance, will stump non-Japanese speakers because it requires you to solve a murder mystery.

Thankfully, there are translations and FAQs floating all over the net, or if you just want to unlock the survival and boss rush mode, you can just download/copy a save with all the characters unlocked (since the game is playable on PCSX2, this becomes an easy task.)

When it comes to gameplay, once you get past the story parts, you can start enjoying the meat of the game. As mentioned above, it’s a third person action game that puts you in control of either Himura Kenshin, Saitou Hajime, or Sanosuke Sagara (with Aoshi Shinomori also available as an unlockable character.)

Soul Eater Battle Resonance (PS2, PSP)

Atsushi Okubo’s Soul Eater manga and anime franchise is very popular. Not on the same level as the current big WSJ trinity (One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach), but one of the many franchises that shared the distant second or third spot. One of the possible reasons cited for this is that the story’s unique blend of comedy, fan-service, action, and goofy art style takes some getting used to and requires patience before it starts to pick up. The same can be said of Soul Eater Battle Resonance, which was released for the PS2 and its little brother, the PSP.

A little backgrounder first: Soul Eater is set at the Death Weapon Meister Academy, a school and training facility for humans with the ability to transform into weapons and humans who are training to wield said weapons, called meisters or technicians. The franchise focuses on a group of students, faculty members, and the head of the academy itself, the actual Grim Reaper, Death.

Soul Eater Battle Resonance does a good job of adapting the content and aesthetics of the early parts of the manga. The characters and their weapons look exactly like their manga counterparts, the attacks on the game are based on their attacks in the story, and the stages are straight out of the locations in the story. There’s nothing to complain about with the visuals. Graphics are sharp and mimic cel shading, the animation is fluid, and the use of framebuffer effects lead to bright, beautiful, and devastating-looking special attacks. The PS2, for its part, runs at a smooth buttery 60 frames per second (the PSP version runs at 30 fps, like many PSP games. It still looks fluid, though, thanks to the small screen.)

Yu Yu Hakusho Forever (PS2)

Yuu Yuu Hakusho Forever is a cel-shaded VS fighting game for the Playstation 2 based on Yoshihiro Togashi’s hit manga and anime franchise. It’s a Japan-only release so you’ll find that the menu will require a little bit of exploration before you find out which one will get you to the story mode and which one will let you just goddamn fight already! (you know what I mean. Sometimes you don’t want to bother with the story mode in a fighting game.)

The visuals and audio are top-notch in this Yuu Yuu Hakusho Forever. The developer’s decision to go with Cel-shaded polygons paid off. Not only does the game provide a look remniscent of the anime, it also means that the graphics age well compared to other 3D titles on the PS2. Audio is also what you’d expect – the sounds seem to be taken straight out of the show, and seeing the intro get recreated using the in-game engine is all sorts of awesome.

Content-wise, there’s nothing to complain about. You need to unlock most of them, but once you do you’ll have access to majority of the important characters in the series starting from the first major story arc to the last. This means you get the Toguros, Sensui Shinobu, and the four rulers of Makai. Additionally, the game also provides an alternate costume for most character instead of being mere palette swaps. You don’t have to contend with Yuusuke Urameshi’s ugly martial arts costume – you can play using his cool-looking school uniform.

Dragonball Z Budokai 3 vs. Infinite World: Which One Should You Choose?

Dragonball Z Budokai 3 and Dragonball Z Infinite World may look like the same game if you’re just looking at screenshots and videos, but the truth is that there are major differences between the two and you may end up enjoying one over the other, depending on your priorities and preferences. The question is: what exactly are the differences?

First things first: one thing that both Budokai 3 (whether plain or collectors/greatest hits edition) and Infinite World have in common is that they make Budokai and Budokai 2 unnecessary – they vastly improved the gameplay, added more content, and even polished the visuals (especially when you compare both against Budokai’s crude graphics.) They’re also both exclusive to the PS2, barring the HD re-release on the PS3. Budokai 1 and 2, on the other hand, were also released for the Gamecube.

Now, let’s get back to the differences:

Super Dragonball Z (PS2)

Super Dragonball Z is a fighting game on the PS2 that was developed by people who were part of the original team responsible for Capcom’s Street Fighter II, which explains why the game does not feel like a Dragon Ball game, but more of a 3D fighter that uses Dragon Ball skins. Don’t take that to mean that this is a bad game, though – it’s perfectly playable and enjoyable enough. It’s a very good fighting game, it’s just not a good Dragon Ball game. There is a difference.

Graphics-wise, Super Dragonball Z is a treat. Using the manga as inspiration instead of the anime, the visuals are crisp, bright, and do a good job of bringing the Dragon Ball manga to life. The beam attacks are a disappointment though, as they look like crude mode 7 effects from the SNES era, which is inexcusable considering that the PS2 is perfectly capable of producing decent looking beams using the framebuffer, as proven by other Dragon Ball games like the Budokai and Budokai Tenkaichi series.

Battle Stadium D.O.N. (PS2)

Battle Stadium D.O.N. is basically Super Smash Bros. with anime characters. What makes it special is the franchises that were included in this crossover fighting game – D.O.N. stands for Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto.

Don’t expect accurate representations of power levels, as the game is balanced so that no single character will be overwhelmingly stronger than the rest (which is what would happen if they stayed true to the power levels in their respective franchises – characters from Dragon Ball will destroy everyone else). But the visuals do look like they came out of the series (though they are modeled more after the manga than the anime), as the characters use their trademark screen-filling attacks and all have transformations. The stages may be constrained but they do capture the look and feel of their respective franchises.

Bleach Blade Battlers 2nd (PS2)

Bleach is one of those anime franchises that is practically made for fighting games. Virtually every single character is a swordsman with flashy moves, with distinctive designs and their own specific transformation. Bleach Blade Battlers 2nd TRIED to take advantage of said rich videogame-oriented designs and somewhat succeeded.

The Game and the Story

If you searched for this game, chances are you are already familiar with Tite Kubo’s Bleach manga and anime franchise, and it’s one of the most popular shonen franchises today so there’s no need to provide the backstory. As for the game, it takes the characters from the Soul Society arc all the way to the first appearances of Grimmjow, Yammy and Ulquiorra, and puts them in a Super Smash Bros-type game.

Let’s get this out of the way first: the game is Japanese, but it’s a fighting game so you can play it even if you can’t read nor understand a single word. Besides, the menu has English text so you will be able to navigate it well enough to get into a match.

It does the characters justice – the moves are true to the series, and this is one of the first Bleach games to have actual transformations (as opposed to transformations that only occur during cinematic super moves ); Ichigo and the shinigamis that have bankais can go bankai, Shinji can use his hollow mask, and Grimmjow can use resurreccion. Of course, around the time that the game was made, many of the characters like Yammy and Ulquiorra have yet to show their transformations so you won’t find it in this game.