Catherine - thoughts

So I bought and played Catherine a while back and frankly, I love it about as much as I hoped that I would. For you who don't know what the game is about it's the story of Vincent and his girlfriend Katherine who are starting to get serious, but Vincent feels the pressure of growing up and feel them moving too fast. One way to drunk night and he ends up in bed with the beautiful and easy going Catherine. At the same time he starts getting weird nightmares where he moves blocks to climb up and escape whatever's hunting him. This is the part of the games that you actually play, the rest of the game is interacting with friends and dealing with the fact that you just cheated on your girlfriend. The story and script is done perfectly, and the moral dilemmas of cheating is done so good it's really scary at times.

The problem is two, and is quite common when it come to Atlus' games. One is the fact that the game, even on normal, is really hard. Too hard actually, there is a stage I can't get through, and it's frustrating. But still, when you do get through a stage you feel you've spent hours on, it's rewarding.

But the big problem, as usual, it that the game itself is not that fun, or at least not as fun as the things you do when you're not in the nightmare stages. And when those stages are as difficult as they are, it becomes a real problem. I'll hope to finish it as soon as I can, but at the time, I just don't have the drive. Maybe after I'm done with Mass Effect 3. But I still love this game, and I highly recommend if for anyone who want a more grown up game, just, play it on easy if you don't like to get frustrated.

Review - Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4

It sometimes happens that you become totally surprised at how incredibly good a game is. Games where you initially thought "This seems like a good game" and then gets totally knocked out by how good it actually is. Last time it happened to me it was with Shadow of the Colossus, and now it has happened again.

I came for the first time in contact with Shin Megami Tensei series when I played Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call. The fact that it seemed to focus on older players instead of the teen group most other Japanese role-playing games seemed to focus on, was a surprise, a positive one. You felt that you didn’t have to suffer with the annoying teenage hero, but got something more adult (though the hero was a teenager), and that is what makes Shin Megami Tensei special. It doesn’t treat us like 15-year olds.

In Persona 4, you play as an unnamed protagonist who moves from the big city to his uncle in the quiet little village of Inaba. He begins his new life in Yasogami High School and meets with a few friends who will follow him through his adventure. One day he hears a rumour that if you look into a turned off television at midnight, on a rainy night, you shall see your soul mate. It doesn’t take long until horrible things start happening in the form of murder victims that are hung upside down from telephone poles and roof gutters, and it seems that there is more to the so-called Midnight Channel than meets the eye.

To say that Persona 4 is an ordinary Japanese role-playing game is a lie, straight through. The game mixes usual RPG elements, such as cave exploration, with a bit of Pokemon collecting (but not as cute) and a huge chunk of dating simulator. When you encounter enemies you fight partly with a weapon and partly with a so-called "persona”. As the protagonist, you have ability to change your persona to the personas you get by cave exploring or personas that you get by fusing two or more personas with a mysterious man named Igor.

The combat system has been improved from the already very good combat system in third game to almost perfection. You may, as usual, attacking an extra time when you get a critical hit, or if you use magic that the enemy is weak against, and can thus finish a battle without getting any damage at all. Meanwhile, an attack from the rear from the enemy to make your life short, if they happen to have magic that you’re weak against. As usual, it's game over if your protagonist dies, which is something that makes you put down the controller for a while. But not for long, because you are so curious about what will happen. What is new with the battle system is the fact that now you can block and thus prevent a critical hit or a weakness from making you fall down. This makes the fighting tactics become even more fun. The difficulty has also been lowered, from the outrageous hardcore level of difficulty that often accompanies a Shin Megami Tensei game, and is making the game more mainstream. However, there is still a expert difficulty for those who feel that they haven’t had enough.

But what makes the whole game so wonderful is, well, the rest of the game, when you’re living and working on your social life. You can meet your friends after school and that way increase your social link with that friend. This is important later when you merge personas. They will then be stronger if you have a high social link that fits that persona. When your social link is about to increase, an interactive sequence will take place, where the right choice will make it easier to level up your social link next time.

What makes social links, and even the rest of the game, so very good, is the script. All dialogue is written in a wonderful manner. You really feel for people you hang out with. The story each character has to tell feels so real that you are drawn to find out more about it, which means that you often get stuck on one person and won’t leave it until you’ve finished it. This often means that you do not have time to level up the social link to the max with all the characters before the year is over. However, you feel pretty quickly after finishing the game, the need to play it again, to learn about the history of others. From tough guy Kanji, who is unsure of his sexuality, to superstar Rise, who’s tired of her life as a celebrity and is looking for her real identity.

Something else that builds on the need to replay is the fact that there are different endings. One tip, if you can’t manage to play it again, is to save the game and restart, if you do not get the good end. It was extremely annoying when I got through the first time with a bad end, where nothing really worked out, and happened to save over my save file with a new game + file. Only the so-called "true ending" should be good enough, and it’s so incredible it's worth all the hard work.

The only thing that there really is to complain about is the fact that people often are reluctant to bother to explore the caves thoroughly and choose to run past enemies, for the game is much more fun when you walk around in your social life, and just want to clear the "cave" as quickly as possible to go back to your social life. This in turn means that it may be too weak to continue later on in the game, making it necessary to spend a lot of time on training and lose lots of time with your friends anyway.

The theme of this game, just like the theme of the third game was self-sacrifice, is not to believe that you hear and see on television, do not swallow it all hook, line and sinker. This is represented by the glasses that the heroes wear in order to see clearly in the fog found in the caves, just as the third games theme is represented by the gun pointed at yourself when you attack. There is so much to this game that you could squeeze in a review, but I think it's better if you play the game yourself. A wonderful and deep game that leaves no one untouched. Without hesitation, the best game I've played, ever, I think.

2011 I long the most for....

During 2011 a lot of games are going to be released, but the question is, what should you buy, and what should you avoid? The question is in itself difficult to answer when the games are not yet to be released, but that doesn’t mean I can’t tell you about the games I think is most interesting and I look forward to the most in 2011.

In 2011, many interesting releases made. 2011 is the year when the threes are released. Just around the corner, we have Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Killzone 3, we yearn after Gears of War 3 and Uncharted 3 sometimes later in the year, and when the year draws to an end we get Mass Effect 3 and Diablo 3 I hope anyway.

My three threes is probably Gears of War 3, Mass Effect 3 and Diablo 3. The latter I wonder whether it will be released this year. However, I hope so. Gears of War looks just as rudely good as their predecessors did. Co-op for four is something my friends and I will have lots of fun with. Mass Effect will be just as epic as its predecessors, this is something I'm convinced of. And I like the fact that the third game will vary more depending what you do in the second game.


Another game I'm terribly keen on is LA Noir. It looks so fantastically designed. It can be fun for once to play policemen in a Rockstar game. The whole concept of hearings, how they play on facial expressions and the fact that I just want to be Willem Dafoe's character in the Boondock Saints, makes LA Noir a definite buy once it comes out.

I own an Xbox 360, no Wii, no PS3. In 2011, mainly two games, one for each console, makes me very eager to acquire me the consoles. For the PlayStation 3 The Last Guardian is such strong momentum that it’s only surpassed by the second game. Aesthetics, the graphics... Yes, we don’t know terribly much more about the game really. The reason for the attraction of this game lies rather in its predecessor. Both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus is fantastic games and I don’t see how Ueda can fail with this.

The second game is, of course, Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, a game that is what we wanted Twilight Princess would be. Don’t misunderstand me, I loved that game, but it just makes me even hungrier for what's coming. So here I really have no doubt it will be yet another Zelda success.

But which game do I look forward to the most? You how know games and happened to have seen my background may be able to guess. In 2009 I fell in love with a game called Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. Now that same team releases the at least as adult, somewhat sexual, and equally twisted Catherine, a story about a man who cheats on his girlfriend Katherine, with the woman Catherine, I can not help but just long. Be prepared for remorse and probably the best written story in 2011. Released in February in Japan, we in the West can only hope that it will hit us this year, if it gets here at all. Not convinced of its greatness? Check out the trailer below.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiuPt-xv4Pg

I haven’t even scratched the surface of what great games gets released in 2011, Bulletstorm, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Ocarina of Time 3D, Dragon Age 2, Okamiden, Pokemon Black/White, Brink, Portal 2 (The cake is a lie!) , Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Shadows of the Damned, El Shaddai, Rayman: Origins, Duke Nukem Forever (!), Rage, and last but not least, a game I like to talk more about, DMC. To say nothing of 3DS, and the platform as the iPhone and Android is the indie games. 2011, here I come.