But there is one genre that is perfectly suited for playing in 15 minute spells when you’re in Mexico’s City world-leading horrible traffic and moving at a rate of a metre per minute. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen and inbetween, gacha. This is the year I hit that gacha pipe so hard I can’t ever go back and no, I swear I do not have a problem.

Dishonorable Mention: Atelier Resleriana

Let’s take out the rubbish for a start, I really wanted to like this game. The Atelier games suffer from just about every malady in the JRPG world and yet they have cultivated such a unique identity and atmosphere that each time they cross into my orbit I am happy to have them crash land right into my schedule.

The series has been going through something of an identity crisis ever since the Mysterious series with each new set of titles trying to put their own spin on the 20+ year old formula. I would be remiss to ignore that the main takeaway Koei Tecmo took from the success of the Ryza series was “fanservice, and lots of it”. This isn’t necessarily bad, but I always thought it was a poor fit for this series.

Resleriana is more or less a direct offspring of this line of thinking, in which having your favourite characters all meet up and make nice, and occasionally wear revealing outfits, was supposed to carry a mediocre package through.

This isn’t the first time Atelier ventured into the Gacha space, but their intentions with this one were clear from the start. Resleriana might just be the prettiest game I’ve ever played, with the best looking models, animations, shaders, and even facial expressions I’ve seen in an anime style game. Not through fidelity, but artistry. Even the routine crafting of items was a veritable audiovisual experience that still makes me smile when I think about it. If you were a fan, you were being serviced, even if you weren’t a pervert.

And yet Resleriana could not escape the most basic traps of the Gacha genre: Overly simplistic gameplay, encounters tuned to be cleared with auto-combat, massive grind requirements early on, and a sharp drop on the presentation after the opening chapters.

What’s more, Resleriana stumbled on obstacles that one would imagine were already solved issues in the gacha space, like the lack of a decent monthly pass. As of the time of writing, the global servers of Resleriana have announced an EoS and I am not in the least surprised. I wanted to like this game but it just gave me nothing to hold onto. Don’t jump in before the EOS, but I highly recommend watching the cutscenes on youtube. 

5: Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage

Many years ago when I was a different person altogether, I carefully schemed for this game to be the destruction of my erstwhile past-self. 

Don’t get me wrong, I still installed the JP version on launch night but try as might I could not carry my dekinai ass through the original 8 stories at launch. So Project Sekai, as it was then known, stayed in my pocket as a supplemental piece to the Project Diva releases. I ignored the story, and whenever I felt like playing a song not in the diva series, I would return to it, ignoring all gacha aspects. This relationship remained largely the same when it was released globally as Colorful Stage, apart from me occasionally using the free rolls they give out for events like Christmas, New Years, and Anime Expo of all things.

No routine survives contact with the Mexico City streets, and I quickly found myself in great need of activities that would kill 5 to 15 minutes at a time, so I finally delved into the game quite seriously, and as expected: I fell in love. 

There isn’t that much to say about Project Sekai, because as both a rhythm game and Visual Novel it is perfectly adequate. Superb, even, but there is no masterclass of anything here. I have to confess to my attachment being purely sentimental. I have truly come to love the Sekai Kids, the often derided show-stealers that make this not so much a Hatsune Miku game as a game featuring Hatsune Miku.

Crypton knows their audience, perhaps all too well, and these kids are pretty much all made mould perfect to draw out maximum sympathy from anyone who’s allowed a big part of their life to be occupied by Miku’s songs. Even the white-bread-with-whole-milk band, Leo/Need get a lot more fun to be around when you realise their most defining traits as a unit is just how much they all love Miku. Which is about as relatable as you can get in a game like this.

And once you start dealing with much more immediately grabbing ensembles, like eccentric theatre kids WonderlandsXShowtime, and perpetually-online and mentally-troubled girls Nightcord at 25, it’s hard to imagine a better set of characters to represent a musical scene such as vocaloid. Especially over last year, all these kids have finally taken huge strides and began to evolve past their initial goals to progress onto new stages of their lives. And I’m just so happy for all of them. The Miku Gacha did, in the end, consume my life like I always wanted it to, and I’m very happy for it. 

4: Punishing Grey Raven

Never let it be said I am not perfectly predictable in my eccentricities. Those in the know are already laughing at my transparency, but if you aren’t, let me fill you in: Punishing Grey Raven had a collaboration with Black Rock Shooter last year, at least in the global servers.

I have to say, this game does not make good first impressions. With the first 8 chapters being quite possibly the worst told and most inane storyline I’ve had the displeasure to meet in a game. It looked like butt, it sounded like butt, and it read like butt. 

But I kept trudging through it, because I wanted my Black Rock Shooter, and was surprised to learn that this game does reach much higher peaks than its troubled beginnings might suggest. 

It’s all in the presentation.  The format, tone and simple preferences of the imagery do not lend themselves to particularly heady or complex discussions. It does have some pretty interesting ideas for an action story, and when it pulls its head out of its tacticool camouflaged arse, the presentation can actually be quite stellar. 

Like a lot of gacha, to talk about the combat is fairly difficult because though there are underlying systems, the characters all have their own unique features to incentivise rolling. In my case, I got very lucky. The Home Team player for PGR during the Black Rock Shooter crossover was “Lucia: Crimson Weave” and I have to admit to have absolutely fallen in love with this woman’s sword style.

I could care less how to optimise her damage or do her optimal rotations, but just the very act of switching through her stances, using her dodge-into-riposte at max charge, and firing dozens of sonic blades at my enemies is addicting and dozens of hours later I still take her into every stage with me. Even after rolling a much more powerful DPS character with all her gear, she remains my favourite in this title. And she is one of very few gacha characters I’ve played that translates “having movements that look cool” into movements that actually feel incredibly cool to be in control of. 

And now they’re getting Dante as a collab next year so they got me in good, folks.

3: Wuthering Waves

Kurogames cannot get the beginning of their games right to save their lives. I had been looking forward to this game since roughly 2022 when I first saw gameplay of it, and had it summarised to me as “Genshin Impact with better combat”.  I would posit it’s more like, Genshin Impact with faster, but more conventional combat, but that’s neither here nor there.

At its core, this game is Genshin Impact, so I should have taken to it immediately. And yet the first few hours are so torturously boring, from the dialogue that suffers from both too-much and not-enough explanations, courtesy of too many rewrites, to being saddled with two characters that together roughly make up one whole personality. 

I dropped this game roughly 6 hours in after I felt no compulsion to log in the next day, and forgot about it until the release of Camylla, whom I felt compelled to roll for purely because she kinda looks like my beloved Herscherr of Sentience.

Once I jumped back in and made my way through the 1.0 storyline I found out it does not get better. At all. At most the original package of the game contains a couple of cool but meaningless setpieces, and two conversations that threaten to get interesting and have more to say but never quite get there.

Still, I persevered into the further patches. Onto the area called “Mt. Firmament” where the visual presentation takes a fairly large leap, and the stories actually latch onto and develop a character (albeit with some slightly odd timing). Accompany it with a pretty cool and fairly massive dungeon, a cool ending sequence and some SSX-like sliding action, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Pushing further into the area known as “The Black Shores”, Wuthering Waves was ready to make me feel ridiculous for ever doubting it. Not only taking some really cool set piece and presentation tips from Nier’s constant perspective changes, but refining its visuals even more, and pretty deftly weaving some honest-to-god sci-fi bullshit into what had been a mostly fantasy setting until now. 

The plotline also got a lot more interesting, tackling some pretty basic philosophical questions in an actually grounded and thought-out way. At this point it sort of starts to overplay the trope of the woman who loves you in a way that is more poetic or religious than sexual but of all the ways I’ve seen that play out in anime before, I’ve never seen one quite like the shorekeeper. So while it might be a little on the poor taste side, I can’t deny it’s interesting.  Though it probably says a lot that such an esoteric relationship is kind of just a mainstay of anime tropes now. And even stranger that it appears twice in this game, back to back, and both women have blue hair. 

By the end of the “Black Shores”, my thought was that Wuthering Waves might have exhausted all its ideas for setpieces, as the ending sees a couple of repeats, but also that they had exceeded themselves in almost every way, and by the end my feelings on the game were unrecognisable from that bitter taste at launch.

At time of writing, Wuthering Waves is riding high on critical praise on the back of its “Rinascita” 2.0 patch, which is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread you can gamble for, and while I think most of the people singing its praises are doing a very poor job, I have no trouble believing Wuthering Waves could push that envelope. I will see for myself soon enough. 

2: Granblue Fantasy: Relink

The older I get the more games reside in my memory and heart more than my hands. Whilst playing it, I did like Granblue Fantasy: Relink but didn’t think it was anything too special. A dungeon crawler, a little clunky, a little unfocused, and a little janky that served as Cygames’ very-troubled first step into traditional gaming. 

And yet with the passing of the months it just makes me smile. I can picture its cities and hills a lot better in my mind than I can locales, real and digital, that I’ve traversed way more, and find a lot of its encounters have such well-designed sets and memorable scores that I can’t forget experiences as mundane as fighting a bunch of goblins in an Arena.

I can’t really recommend this to many people, because in truth, it is incredibly flawed, and it places so much of its stock on back-loaded endgame content that is now virtually impossible to do without a dedicated group of friends, and yet, it made me happy.

If its job was to carry me further into the Skydoms of Granblue, I have successfully been lifted up to those clouds and I’m happy to remain here if CyGames will toss me some more bones. I am not playing that gacha on a browser though, I am just not.

1: Bang Dream: Girls Band Party

I know, I know, I know. Hear me out ok? Alongside my metamorphosis into a cockroach that will eventually be found dead in my room, you know, because of all the gacha I play, I further specialised my bug-like qualities into some rhythm gamer specialisation. The reasons are simple, and go hand-in-hand with the gacha turn: Mobile friendly, and playable in very tiny intervals. After a long day, playing 3 to 5 songs feels like a much more complete game loop than dedicating 15 to 30 minutes to just about any other genre.

Bang Dream was not originally a title I had much interest in, with Colorful Stage already having my bases covered on this type of rhythm game. But somewhere last year I discovered the beautiful anime Bang Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! and became a fanatical convert. I installed the game somewhere in the summer, and idly tapped away at challenges and dailies, waiting for the story of the MyGo!!!!! girls to make it into the global release.

Sure enough, it was fantastic all over again, I cried. I’m not ashamed to admit it, this is almost entirely a story pick, but it is a really good story, and one that has breathed new life into Bandori in its native Japan as well as conquered neighbouring China for a good reason.

Story is not all that Bandori has going for it, though. The UI and UX is by far behind ProSeka, and MyGod that optimisation is so bad it will make you cry —seriously, around September this game was being held together by sticky tape and hope— but if you can run this without it crashing at every turn, it’s actually a really good rhythm game.

In some ways, though they are incredibly similar, I think it might be better than Proseka. For once it does demand a hell of a lot more precision with your inputs, which made it pretty humiliating to have to crawl my way through the difficulties all the way back down from “normal” just because my butter fingers couldn’t tap quiiite perfectly in the designated spot.

When it does work it nails that “dancing with your fingers” feeling a lot better than Proseka does, at least for me, and for the settings I settled in for both games. And let us not forget, Bandori has a rehearsal mode, something Guitar Hero had in 2009 but in 2020, android diva Hatsune Miku could not spring for.

For a genre of games so utterly rooted in both repetition, and perfection, the fact that this is not in ProSeka is kind of an outrage, and it makes Bandori just far and away the better choice for anyone that really wants to get good at the rhythm game parts of these titles. And believe me, someone like me needs all the practice they can get.

The post Walker’s Favourite Games in 2024: Oops all Gachas appeared first on Gamesline.

John and Maverick convene to discuss the officially revealed Switch 2, which had been leaked in its entirety before so it’s not a big surprise or anything. Plus, Maverick has some thoughts on Adios and Helskate, John reviewed Blade Chimera and is messing with Pokémon romhacks again, Katsuhiro Harada gave everyone a fright, Sony is canceling live service games, Miku’s in Fortnite, and there’s an update on the Punch-Out!! rumors.

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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Ep. 47: Nintendo Showed It appeared first on Gamesline.

She’s an Icon, She’s a Legend, and She Is the Moment

Confirming leeks leaks, Hatsune Miku officially joins Fortnite as the Festival Season 7 Icon.

The virtual singer will not only arrive to the stage with appropriately themed outfits, instruments, and even more songs, but she will also be joining the game at the same as the arrival of a pair of iconic kaiju for an upcoming Godzilla x Kong collaboration.

Ubisoft’s Unending Issues

Ubisoft announced another delay for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game, originally due out November 15, 2024, was initially pushed to February, and is now rescheduled again to release on March 20, 2025.

Ubisoft also stated that they have “appointed leading advisors to review and pursue various transformational strategic and capitalistic options to extract the best value for stakeholders.” This sounds like a good thing a healthy company does (John writes with sarcasm).

Because meanwhile, Indonesian support studio Brandoville Studios, who have been instrumental in Shadows’ development, have been outed by allegations of workplace abuse in a report by People Make Games. The support studio ultimately shuttered in 2024, and an Ubisoft spokesperson otherwise expresses their vague “condem[nation]” of the accounts.

The Los Angeles Wildfires

The ongoing Los Angeles wildfires have destroyed numerous homes and displaced hundreds of thousands of individuals. With LA being a sprawling point of the United States’ entertainment industry, a few celebrity homes and landmarks have been destroyed, and several anticipated events have been postponed.

Located near an evacuation warning zone, Riot Games has closed its Santa Monica office for all but “critical functions”. CEO Dylan Jadeja writes that, “Riot will be ready to stand up for Los Angeles and give back in every way [they] can.”

Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role has also postponed broadcast, with many of its performers based in impacted areas. The company has donated to a wildfire recovery fund.

As the path of the fire continues to be actively monitored, neighboring communities also continue to be subjected to smoke and strong winds, as Insomniac Games senior writer Nick Folkman comments.

This is a list of several funds you can donate to that aim to help support the victims of the fires.

For Californian residents, here’s a spreadsheet compiling numerous resources and local community hubs that are offering free necessities and shelter. Sorted by location, some of these spaces are seeking volunteers as well. The sheet is being updated and maintained by the Mutual Aid LA Network and are receptive to feedback.

Medical suppliers like Planet Halo Health are also taking requests for free respirators and face masks for community-based or individual distribution.

Through 211 LA, Airbnb is also providing temporary housing for those displaced.

In other news…

A remake of The House of the Dead 2 has been announced. Due out in Spring, the latest return to the light gun franchise will release on Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and GOG.

Splash Damage’s co-op shooter Transformers: Reactivated has been canceled.

Sony has announced Horizon: Zero Dawn and Helldivers films, which means they’re pretty much just remaking Starship Troopers at this point. The second season of HBO’s The Last of Us series is also starting in April.

RetroRemake has announced the “first affordable FPGA gaming console” with the SS One, a device modeled after the PS One. The console will support PS1 games, memory cards, and controllers, and can also do anything the MiSTer can handle. The first run will cost $149, and future runs will be more expensive, but with a promise it will be at or under $220.

FuturLab, developers of PowerWash Simulator, has announced that support for the VR version of the game is going on indefinite hiatus. In the post announcing this, their CEO Kirsty Rigden said that the VR version wasn’t breaking even, and when job openings for the non-VR version became available, the decision was made to move the VR team over to those jobs so they could have job security.

This year’s Evo lineup has seemingly leaked thanks to an accidentally uploaded YouTube thumbnail. The games this year will be Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, Under Night In-Birth 2, Mortal Kombat 1, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, and Marvel vs Capcom 2. The thumbnail may have been out of date, so this may not be 100% accurate, but it makes sense.

And finally, bunch more of Switch 2 leaks happened, and Nintendo still hasn’t announced the friggin’ thing. Sources are claiming the console will be announced on the 16th, with a release sometime in May or June.

They did, however, announce that a LEGO Game Boy kit will release in October.

The post The Bulletin: Miku Monday appeared first on Gamesline.

As always, you can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @VGChooChoo, @john_michonski, and @mavsplaniamania

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As always you can support us on our patreon, and follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @john_michonski, @Solonface, and @SolaireHazard.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to our ask box at videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask.

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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

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As always you can support us on our patreon, and follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @SolaireHazard, @lvmaeparian and @John_Michonski.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com, via twitter with the hashtag #AskVGCC or into our ask box at videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask

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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

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Miku is joining the cast to sing her own version of the classic Heaven song from Persona 4. She will also be playable to some degree, but I’m not sure if she’ll be available in all of free mode or just on her own songs. Miku must have a very hard to parse contract.

Miku will be available sometime in August for Japanese players. Who knows if we’ll get her over here, but I bet we will. I mean, we got those hologram concerts, why can’t we get some DLC? Plus, I hope this means that Sonic’s gonna be in Persona 5. Here’s some more pictures so you know I’m not making this up.

The post Hatsune Miku DLC Coming to Persona 4: Dancing All Night appeared first on Gamesline.

The Project Diva f series is a popular series of arcade, handheld, and home console games based around songs created using the Vocaloid software. For those that do not know, Vocaloid software is a text to speech program where the user can create and customize vocals for their own music. Each unique voice has a character associated with it, with Hatsune Miku being the most widely recognizable Vocaloid of the bunch. The Project Diva games are rhythm games based on songs created by fans of the software.

The gameplay of the rhythm sections is relatively easy to understand. Different symbols appear on the screen and the player must press the corresponding button on the console in time with the music. The more accurate the button press is to the beat of the music, the more points are awarded. Each song also has special bonus point opportunities in the form of “Technical Zones” and “Chance Time.” Technical Zones are segments of gameplay where you must maintain an unbroken combo of a specified number of notes. Chance Time is slightly more lenient, and only requires that you earn a certain number of points in order to receive the bonus.

One unique aspect of Project Diva f is the “scratch” input, where the player must swipe their finger across the touch-screen as if they were scratching a record. The front screen and the rear touchpad on the vita can both be used for this feature, with options to disable either touchpad or enable them both at the same time. I found the scratch input to be slightly unreliable, and would have preferred an option similar to the PS3 version of the game, where the player flicks one of the analog sticks to perform a scratch. Players that prefer the physical feedback of a tangible button input over touch-screen inputs might have some trouble with the scratch mechanic, at least at first. It is a minor issue that is entirely up to personal taste, but it is worth mentioning.

When a player successfully completes a song, they are awarded with DP, or “Diva Points” (It’s much more fun to pretend that they’re Drebin Points from MGS4, though.). Higher scores means more Diva Points are awarded, naturally. The Diva points can be spent in the Diva Room, which is, for lack of a better term, a waifu simulator.

In the Diva Room, the player can spend wholesome quality bedroom time with their favorite performer. The player can buy and re-arrange the furniture, buy gadgets and toys for the performer to play with, buy alternate costumes and accessories, and play with the performer in a mini-game not too unlike Pokemon X and Y’s Pokemon-amie feature. You can pat the performer’s head to raise his or her affection level, and sometimes they’ll play a simple rock-paper-scissors type game with you. It’s all very silly, but admittedly there is something kind of charming and relaxing about it. No lewd activities can take place in the bedroom, and shame on you for even thinking of that.

My absolute favorite part of the Diva Room, however, are the unlockable utilities. These include but are not limited to an kitchen timer and an alarm clock. The alarm clock functions like any normal alarm clock, where it puts the PS Vita system in to a hibernation mode and sets off an alarm at the set time. When the alarm goes off, Miku wakes up and sleepily wishes you a good morning. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. You can now officially set your time and live your life by Miku. What a time to be alive.

You can also create, share, and download your own custom songs, augmented reality concerts and videos. Sadly, because Project Diva f is a digital-only release, you have to print off your own AR card, so I cannot speak to their quality. From what I can tell, it works about as well as to be expected. You place down the card and it’ll look like Miku is dancing on your desk, or you can have her pose in your room and pretend to be sleeping in your bed. If you have a friend to get in on the action, you could even take pictures with Miku. You hear that? That sweet, melodic voice whispering sweet nothings in your ear? That’s the sound of the future, and it’s happening right now.

All in all, Project Diva f is a solid rhythm game with some fun collectible elements to provide incentive to keep playing and to beat previous high scores. Fans of Vocaloid will be perfectly happy with the game, and if you’re in to J-Pop or just have an open mind and don’t find the animes to be unsavory, I recommend giving it a shot.

Fans of the Persona series looking forward to Dancing All Night may also want to check out Project Diva f, since Dancing All Night will feature identical gameplay to the Project Diva series. There is a free demo available on the PS3 that should give you a good idea of what the gameplay is like. The Vita and PS3 versions have an identical core, but the PS3 version is missing the AR functionality. If you are a fan of rhythm games, a fan of Hatsune Miku, or if you’re just looking for a cute and silly time waster, I would highly recommend Project Diva f.

The post Hatsune Miku: Project Diva f Review (Vita) appeared first on Gamesline.