Niahak's Place

Wow.  This game looks and sounds really nice.  It gets sci-fi right, with hints of anime and traditional JRPG style here and there.  Unfortunately, the translation is pretty bad (especially for a modern game), for example “Star” and “Planet” used interchangeably (almost always here, “Planet” is meant, whereas in Japanese these are both “Hoshi” and use the same kanji).  Maybe Koei can finally do an entirely new game right.

I played this game over five hours straight after I bought it.  Part of this is because it’s got a great style and good music, but part is because there’s a strong variety of minigames – some tedious, but most quite manageable.  Unfortunately it’s a bit easy to get lost in the first city.

The battle system is neat but so far I’m not sure it will hold up over the course of the game.  You basically “flick” your ball of energy at enemies, and you can arc it to hit through others, for example.  If combat (even boss battles!) lasts over 2 minutes, you automatically lose.  I have lost 3 battles, of which only one was a boss battle – difficulty is definitely up there.

I apologize as these are a bit raw.  The game looks much smoother in motion.

The “big bad weapons” are lightsaber-axes that can apparently fire small bullets as well.  Nifty!  All poor Opoona can use is his ball of ancient holy power.

This blue desert is amazing to behold when exploring it.  It also apparently contains sand weasels, but I never saw one.

Even the interior of this spaceship has all kinds of moving widgets.

More will eventually follow.