Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS

 

It has been 6 years ago, and now it's time for the next generation of Super Smash Bros., and this time, a portable edition is available for the first time, and amongst other new features, feels like everything clicked.

For 3DS, or cleverly also known as Four 3DS, is the first edition available which I have been playing more or less for 1.5 hours each day for a month now. The roster having almost 50 characters, and the vast amount of stages, music and trophies means that the content is bigger than ever.

Familiar gameplay will be recognized by veterans of N64, Melee or Brawl where your objective is to smash opponents out of the stages. The online connectivity can range from being playable towards being unplayable, but it's addictive to encounter strangers who especially stick around longer for more matches.

The connection does not end there, because the Wii U version can also link with this in order to transfer Mii Fighters most of all, a new personal way of customizing 3 specific fighters towards your own liking, using clothes which can be collected plus of course your own Mii, or the ones of others.

Exclusive towards Super Smash Bros. for 3DS is a mode called Smash Run, which is inspired by the City Trial from Kirby Air Ride, where in both examples, you must collect stats and fight it out in the end using that which was collected.

As far as content and gameplay go, both are outstanding and offer deep amounts of replay value. The core gameplay in particular will be interesting to keep playing because for the first time, Nintendo has decided to bring out balance patches, which will make the tournament scene also more notable.

Super Smash Bros. for 3DS is one of the best multiplayer games of 2014, one of the best found on the 3DS and will be enjoyed most of all portably on holidays for example, because unfortunately, the superior version has also arrived around the world by now.

Rating: 9.0

Pokémon X & Y

The sixth generation has been upon us for over a year now, and it seems that this franchise is as popular as in the beginning, therefore making it unlikely it will go extinct any time soon. Pokémon remains a powerful simple to learn, hard to master concept.

With Pokémon Y, the 3D graphics have drastically improved from the previous 2 generations, as character and Pokémon models have all been enhanced by this, including animations and fluent movements.

As always, the multiplayer is robust and seems more connected than ever, and the amount of depth regarding battle strategies provided remains what really keeps me coming back towards the franchise for replay value and competition.

A new type called Fairy is introduced, spicing up the battles a bit more. The EXP. share item, crucial for grinding sessions in previous adventures, has been adjusted so that the whole team gets a 100% of battle experience points regardless of who did the final blow.

This means that the core gameplay of Pokémon Y has largely been streamlined and sped up, lowering the challenge significantly, but to me is a positive development because this means that the overall way of primarily playing for battles has been made more efficient.

What remains dissapointing is the bland and dull conversations of ordinary people, and the main story continues to use the formula of a professor calling you up, an insidious team bent on domination and a rival regularily challenging you.

I don't mind the 8 gym leaders, the elite four and the champion at all, because those are enjoyable traditions since Red and Blue. Perhaps the main stories are always doomed to be repetitive and annoying, but maybe they should attempt to hire different writers for once.

Pokémon Y is anyhow an old recipe of not fixing exactly that what makes Pokémon popular and continues to be promising purely for it's core gameplay alone. Graphics are a huge improvement, the soundtrack is largely a remix celebration and as always, the Pokémon collection keeps growing.

Rating: 8.3

Animal Crossing: New Leaf

 

Since importing the American GameCube version back in 2003, I haven't touched Animal Crossing after I did not understood the goals of the game, nor it's replayability. Anno 2014, my approach and perspective have changed, and I have seen the highlights of New Leaf.

Players take control of a villager who is moving into a new, randomized town. There, your character assumes the role of mayor, thus creating responsibilities for the town, it's citizens and the projects you shall be working together on.

Public Work Projects are constructions as chosen by the other villagers in order to be implemented while using donations to manipulate the time cost. These can range from camps and bridges, to fountains and stop signs.

Ordinances are basically game laws that you can customize for your town, so that your personality will work smoother with what you find to be effective, such as changing the opening hours of shops, or letting citizens be more aware of their flora activities.

New Leaf offers a lot more customization than previous entries, including the above mentioned, deciding your own clothes, deciding which villagers are staying and being able to hang furniture on walls now inside your house.

The core gameplay aside from the social aspect of connecting with the villagers but also with players from others towns is to gather resources in order to obtain enough value so that money oriented goals can be reached.

Using your shovel, rod, axe, can and net, you are able to collect lots of stuff such as bugs, fossils and sea creatures. You can either admire and keep them, or primarily, you can start selling them at the various shops in town, which usually offer special actions in accordance to what you bring.

There is also Tortimer Island which you will unlock a bit later once you get the hang of what is required from you as a mayor looking out for the town. The island is basically a mini game location which has more valuable resources to collect, and it was featured in the original Animal Crossing too.

After playing on a daily basis of 15 minutes for about a month, I think that I have seen the majority of the main features, excluding collecting all those furnitures, fossils and such plus seeing special events happen.

New Leaf is perhaps the best entry in the series yet, as each title seems to improve. This time, being able to connect to Miiverse, share snapshots and write letters to each other, Animal Crossing seems to be more social than ever, which coincidentally happens to be it's main success.

I am not sure if I would buy a new title for Wii U. I understand what Animal Crossing is all about now, and I acknowledge it's positives, but I don't see myself returning unless Nintendo innovates, like they always do.

Rating: 7.5

Bravely Default

 

The widely acclaimed JRPG on the 3DS with fresh and interesting original features has a familiar problem and ultimate letdown I had with a previous JRPG, which is Terranigma for the SNES. The first half of BD is welcoming, but starting at Chapter 5, the repetitive nature of the game lurks and enters the gamers, and from that point, I was ultimately dissapointed by this.

Although it's an old school based JRPG very similar to Final Fantasy III and V with the implemented Job system, the story was a chore, the writing was shallow and I disliked the chibi art.

However, the Brave and Default options during battle add new interesting tactics, and the option to speed up battles and even tweakening random encounters makes general grinding much less tedious.

Japanese and English voice acting are available which is good, and the backgrounds are beautifully hand drawn. Although the difficulty is customizable, such as the encounter bar rate, gaining EXP and setting destination markers, the challenge itself can be very annoying when speaking of certain bosses, especially at the end.

The second half of Bravely Default is painful to traverse because of general backtracking, and it definitely did not have great pace. Bravely Default is a huge hit and miss for me, featuring new ideas, but otherwise very stupid design decisions elsewhere, and recycling bosses and events is not cool at all.

Not even a true final boss and ending could save this new IP.

Rating: 6.5

Senran Kagura Burst

 

I thought I would try it out since I saw the hype and humor for it online. As Japan continues to be very liberal in regards to oversexualized fictional females, as opposed to how males are portrayed in Western games, I gave Senran Kagura Burst a chance.

After I completed the recommended first play, I can easily confirm that the game is very shallow, very repetitive and it has awful inappropriate and ineffective writing. As a beat em'up, while choosing between 10 different characters, there was only 1 combo I constantly used.

That combo was hitting the Y button, then flipping the enemies in the air, continue hitting the Y button, flip them again using the A button, and finish of with a diving X attack until your ninja energy bar was enough raised to use each of the shinobi's special attacks, which are all AOE and invincibility based.

Fan service is the main selling point for this game, and it's pretty exaggerated, but also entertaining. The ninja's for instance will burst out of their clothes slowly each time they are dealt a significant amount of damage from enemies.

Then there are numerous unlockable clothing and a specific dressing room where you have all the leisure of observing the girls at first for fashion reasons, but there are also hidden ones. And the most obvious fact is that all except for 1 female having gigantic round breasts.

The story itself alongside the writing is not inspiring, fun and way too much text. It's an insane bowl of trying to be serious while the game isn't interesting in a humorous way either. Personalities of the characters have variety, but are simple minded and easily recognizable as stereotypes.

Senran Kagura Burst's horrible gameplay, where ALL of the missions are practically the same mindless business, reminded me of a long clusterfuck beat em'up on the SNES, which is The Tick, of which it's main problem was the endless amount of enemy waves and the tedious long parts of defeating each enemy.

These negative factors are almost the same found here, but atleast SKB's structure is better if it counts. So, this turns out to be my next dissapointing 3DS title in my collection, and it's easily the worst one. And the best news is that many Japanese games never released outside of Nippon have the same quality, and I am not necessarily talking about beat em'ups then.

This is not how you do a beat em'up properly, and it was a breeze playing from start to finish. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. That is the game's motto. It also has horrible lag or slowdown most of the time which is the result of too many characters appearing on the screen at the same time.

Rating: 4.0

Kid Icarus: Uprising

 

At first, I was disappointed by Pit’s return and new approach. Around chapter 7, I felt like I had seen it all regarding single player. But starting from chapter 10, well, the game turned out to be much larger than I thought.

In fact, it is the longest on rail shooter I have played yet, and even more than that. Kid Icarus Uprising combines air and ground combat with touch, 1 button and circle pad gameplay, which let you shoot plenty of things, move around, aim, dash, roll, use powerups and change the camera.

The controls were definitely an issue at first, but I simply needed time for me to grasp it and get comfortable. Once you get used to them, the game is easily enjoyable for many of us. It has a clever Intensity difficulty system that lets you gamble with currency in order to get even more and therefore get better gear, but to be able to do so, you must set the intensity higher, making the game much more challenging.

This is not a cake in the walk, so at first, I beat the game on the very normal setting. If you want to get stronger in this game, you should set the intensity higher, but make no mistake, this will challenge you in every way possible when looking at so many different kinds of enemies Pit will have to face.

The story has become much better than the old platform games, as the lore has expanded with plenty of new characters, as well as many mythological beings returning and making their debut. Most surprisingly, although the dialogue might come off as very annoying at first, it swiftly becomes a very humoristic ride throughout the chapters while gaming.

You see, the characters in each chapter have such cheesy conversations with each other most of the time, that it added up to the quality of this large game, which by the way has a huge achievement system that is similar to Super Smash Bros.’s trophies and achievements.

Which is no surprise, seeing as this is coming from Masahiro Sakurai after all. The same could be said about the GUI. The soundtrack was very good and quite heavenly, and the new Pit has become likable for me. It’s a game not to take seriously, but as far as entertainment goes, this is once again top notch and quite original, combining some of the best ideas from past games.

Rating: 8.2

Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies

 

After what felt like a very long time, Phoenix Wright has finally returned to bring the legal law system back from the dark ages! With a new nifty gameplay mechanic called the Mood Matrix, you will have to observe a witness's emotions carefully during their statements in order to bring out their true feelings.

In the first 3D entry, the writing style and comical animations are still in effect. Adding to the interesting Mood Matrix, exciting new characters such as the likable Athena Cykes who has an unusual background and the cool new convicted samurai prosecutor Simon Blackquill, alongside the case related characters of course, Dual Destinies is a blast to play, as the writing, plot twists and courtroom drama's are as sublime as ever.

There's not much else new to the series, but fans of it will be delighted, either by the quirky new cases, or seeing old faces return. The overall theme of Dual Destinies also seems to be that corruption is a huge factor in the judicial system nowadays and that the end justifies the means.
 
Also, the bonus DLC case was a very nice bonus indeed, with a weird defendant and another strange tale playing out! The future of Ace Attorney also seems to continue, as the earliest prequel has been announced to come out next year.

Rating: 8.2

Sonic Generations

Technically my third entry of the whole franchise, Sonic Generations is a pleasant throwback to both 2D and 3D generations of Sonic the Hedgehog. The 3DS version however features more 2D levels even from the 3D stages than the console version, and I can confirm this because I witnessed the console version elsewhere.

Nonetheless, I could still see notable differences between both kinds of levels, although they were barely different in regards to available moves and tactics. Because I am not common with the 3D generation yet, I felt more at home with the classic 2D levels such as Green Hill and Casino Zone, and I was satisfied with the boss fights as well as the length.

Although it's a short experience, it's designed in such a way that it encourages you to get higher scores on each challenge, plus there are also special missions, a versus mode and a few other extra's to tackle on.

Sonic Generations is both a pleasant entry and a reminder for myself to discover at the very least the other Sonic titles worth playing, like Sonic 3, CD and Adventure. I also beat the console version a few days later, and that one's much better than the 3DS version regarding graphics, frame rate and entertainment. I would have to give that version an 8.0 instead!

Rating: 7.4

Mario Tennis Open

 

My second Mario Tennis, after the 64 version 14 years ago I was ready for a new incarnation. Open introduces to me a convenient touch pad to use the specialized techniques with, but it also lets playable characters automatically move when the opponent strikes the ball.

This makes the game more easier, but with 8 cups and 5 different AI settings, it's not a toddler journey either. I don't remember that the cast was small unlike the 64 version, they must have deleted some of them. Unless I simply did not unlock anymore.

It also comes with local multiplayer and online multiplayer, enhancing replayability, and it has some special games as well involving playing tennis against a visualized wall depicting Super Mario Bros. and another one aiming for the rings at the net.

The core of the gameplay remains at playing singles or doubles, and Mario Tennis Open does a fine job in my opinion for presenting exactly what the Mario Tennis series is all about. There's not a real complaint to talk about if you ask me, unlike the negative reviews it got.

Rating: 7.5

Kirby Triple Deluxe

After the literature and horror months of september and october, I will now switch over to a month of 10 3DS reviews. Triple Deluxe is the latest traditional Kirby game which is as suspected a breeze to play through, but enjoyable.

There are still several past Kirby games I have yet to even play, but for now, let's take a quick look at our pink sucking neutral gender friendly's latest adventure. In Triple Deluxe, the levels have background stages playable as well, so that you will be teleporting between both sides quite often, reminiscent of the Wario game for Virtual Boy.

It plays similar to the other Kirby platformers, but once again offers a few new copy abilities, 2 new mini games of which one is a micro based Super Smash Bros. one, an Arena and a secondary altered playthrough, mostly similar to Kirby Super Star Ultra and Return to Dreamland.

Also returning from that latter example are super powered segments, giving you the excuse to rampage through the rest of the levels. Controls are furthermore tight and the graphics are colorful while the music offers many remixed songs.

Triple Deluxe is easy like others in the franchise, but Kirby continues to be appealing not only for being cute and child friendly, but just being pleasant platformers to play through. You can also collect keychains representing characters and enemies from previous adventures. In overall, Triple Deluxe is a welcome addition, but not creative enough.

Rating: 8.0