Niahak's Place

So it’s been a long time since I wrote up anything here.  More than two months, in fact.

My main purpose in posting here is to point out the nice swath of RPG/strategy (or in one case, just incredibly interesting) games that are coming out in March.

Infinite Space is a Sega RPG on DS that looks to have more breadth and depth than most of Sega’s fare; I’m hoping it turns out as good or better than Valkyria Chronicles.  From what I’ve heard so far, you get to do some exploring reminiscent of Skies and command a fleet of ships, assigning roles to various crew members and such.  It sounds very interesting, and I haven’t read anything negative about it yet – but it’s a bit early for that, obviously.  It’s out 3/16.

Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is an adventure / survival game for the Wii where the main character wanders alone in a post-apocalyptic world filled mostly with ruins.  Although it has combat, it sounds like the focus is more on puzzle and story elements.  I love any game with a somber or lonely tone (if only because they’re so rare).  It sounded for a while like this was going to be yet another Japan-only game, but XSeed picked it up and it will also release 3/16.

Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love is appropriately titled, given it is a PS2 game.  It will also release on the Wii in a less-deluxe set.  It’s the first game in the much-vaunted Sakura Wars series to reach our shores.  Other games in the series routinely find their way to the top of fan-voted lists, so even if this game is a pale shadow of the best games in the series it will probably be worth it to see what all the fuss is about.  The series is sort of relationship-RPG-strategy, where how well you get along with your companions affects their performance in battle.  It will probably be at least partly Guilty Pleasure genre, but still should be a good time.  It comes out on 3/23.

Finally, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey will be coming out for DS.  The SMT series is so consistently solid mechanics-wise and intriguing story-wise that it would be hard to pass this one up.  Particularly after Devil Survivor was so good, Strange Journey should be one hell of a trip to the Antarctic.  It will also release 3/23.

January and February look sort of slow – the actual US release of White Knight Chronicle aside – so I’m hoping to knock my current set of games well out of the way so that I can start in on these entries once they arrive.

Lately I’ve been playing Eternal Sonata and Civ 4: Colonization.  Eternal Sonata is pretty and sounds very nice, but the difficulty is just short of crushing.  If it gets much worse, I might not end up beating it.  Story-wise it’s like a standard JRPG interrupted briefly by History Channel-esque segments on events in Chopin’s life.  I’m not even seeing much in the way of allegory here.  As far as Colonization goes, I enjoyed the original a lot and this is just more of the same – slightly improved, spiffier-looking, and more expensive.  Can’t really complain.

Projects are trucking along as always – sometimes more, sometimes less, including some minor work continuing on Jesus.  There’s not much to show at this point – or more accurately, what there is is hardly mine to show, as I’m just retranslating.  Stardust Crusaders of romhacking.net offered to take a look at expanding things, so he’s doing the hard part.