Nier Replicant Impressions

It’s the new academic year here in Japan now, so I’ve been a little busy lately and neglected blogging again! This post doesn’t involve uploading dozens of photos though, so I found the time to write it.

As readers following video games might know, new Square Enix titles Nier Replicant and Nier Gestalt were released in Japan a couple of days ago, with the latter seeing a US release within the next few days as well, I think. I got my copy of Replicant on release day, and have had the chance to try it out a little. I haven’t finished the game yet – not even close, but I can give my initial impressions of it at least. I probably won’t do a full review because I don’t have a lot of time for video games so I rarely finish them in good time, but I can give an overview of the gameplay and early story.

Note: as mentioned, this is based on Nier Replicant, the Japan-exclusive PS3 game. I have no idea the extent to which it differs from Gestalt, although it’s pretty safe to say the basic game system, dungeons and bosses will probably be the same, so I can’t say how much use this will be to anyone looking at Gestalt. This will contain spoilers for the earlier sections of the game, but I’m not far enough to have uncovered anything drastically spoiler-y.

Tokyo Game Show 2009

Since it was my only opportunity to do so in my year-long trip, I went with some friends to the Tokyo Game Show this weekend and it was quite an experience. It’s definitely one of the most crowded events I’ve ever been to – it was vast and yet still completely full of people. Actually trying out most of the games was practically impossible as many of them had wait times of well over an hour, and some over three hours! There were a variety of different companies showing off their future releases, and there were a lot of interesting things to see, though.

Pokémon Soul Silver

As I’m sure many DS users will know, the Japanese release of Soul Silver and Heart Gold, remakes of the Silver and Gold versions for the Gameboy Color, was today. I know some people managed to get their hands on a copy early and so there have been details surfacing for the last few days, but I picked up my copy in Tsukuba this morning. I wasn’t sure how many people would be buying it, so I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get a copy, but there were still enough left when I arrived at just after 10.30 this morning (the shop opened at ten so I made sure to go soon afterwards).

Golden Sun DS

Click for huge version

Nintendo announced earlier today at their E3 press conference that Golden Sun is officially coming to the DS in 2010! Rumours and occasional comments had emerged from time to time, along with that hoax a couple of years ago, but this time after six years it’s the real thing. It looks to feature at least some 3D elements, although obviously there are no concrete details yet. You can take a look at a short trailer from the event here! The summons look fantastic!

The two Golden Sun titles from the GBA were my favourite games for the system, and probably my favourite RPGs, so I’m really excited about this. Presumably the story will be carrying on from the somewhat open ending of the second game. I wonder how many of the original cast will be making an appearance in it? Given the ending, it could conceivably be set quite a way into the future. I suppose the most likely scenario will be having the descendants of the original cast as the main protagonists please don’t kill my ship too badly. Hopefully data from the previous game will be transferrable through the GBA slot (which will put DSi owners out of luck) because if I have to enter one of those passwords manually again I will cry.

EDIT: Replaced the image with a gorgeous piece of character art released by Nintendo. The main character is an earth user as is typical for the series, and looks very much like Isaac so he’s presumably related. The guy in the back resembles Garet a little, but seems to be a wind user? The girl looks to be a water user. There are only three characters shown though, which potentially raises some questions. Hopefully it’s just because it’s the first bit of art we’re seeing.

Some screenshots have also been released, you can take a look at them over here. The backgrounds look like full 3D, and look very nice for a DS game, although I’ll miss the stunning pixel backdrops of the GBA games. The sprites look like a mixture of both – it’s hard to tell. Either way it’s looking good, and I can’t wait to see what other details are going to be announced for it.