News by Matt S.
Welcome to Digitally Downloaded’s regular catch-up news feature. With each issue we will bring you the best news that you may have missed. Grab the biggest mug you’ve got, fill it with your favourite brew, and catch up with us (and our favourite news anchor, Dee Dee)!
Who wants to see more Yakuza (we all do!)?
Yakuza Kiwami isn’t far away now, and SEGA has provided a new trailer that shows off the game’s ever-popular gameplay. The remake of the very first Yakuza looks like it will play exactly how the other recent games in the series – Yakuza 0 and 5, for example, played, and that’s a very good thing indeed.
Related reading: Matt’s review of Yakuza 0.
It’s not just about fighting, though. As anyone who has played a Yakuza game knows, there’s so many minigames and side-distractions that you can forget about the main quest for hours at a time. This game will include hostess dating, Majong, pool, karaoke, pocket circuit car racing, and plenty more besides.
If you’re not sure about whether now’s the right time to step into the Yakuza series – and for such a heavy narrative series that is completely understandable – remember that this really is the first game made in the series, so you’ll be starting fresh. With the next release after this one being Yakuza 6, you can then jump onto the Yakuza website and read a series of comics that will catch you up between what happens in Kiwami, and the start of that game.
Kadokawa Games has a Pokemon/Persona style dungeon crawler on the way
Who know if The Lost Child will get a release in English, but it looks so good that we just had to mention it. Kadokawa Games, the same talented publisher that brought us God Wars and Root Letter, has partnered with Crim to develop a game that’s all about Wizardry-style dungeon crawling, but with Pokemon or Persona-style monster collecting and raising thrown in.
The trailer explains what’s going on (in Japanese), but it’s quite easy to follow along. The narrative setup is as follows: you play as a reporter chasing down a story who is saved from certain death by a beautiful girl that hands him a briefcase. Inside that briefcase is the ability to see, and enslave, demons. And so starts his quest.
We’re always excited by the dungeon crawler genre, particularly on PlayStation 4, where there aren’t that many of them just yet. This game will release in Japan, in August, for PS4 and Vita. Hopefully NISA (which has collaborated with Kadokawa frequently to localise its games) picks this one up too.
One of the smartest shoot ’em ups ever launches for modern consoles soon
Goichi Suda’s Sine Mora is a horizontally-scrolling shoot ’em up, like Gradius. Unlike Gradius it’s also a super-smart shoot ’em up. It’s over the top and crazy like only Goichi Suda can be, but it has got a strong story to tell, and that’s rare for the genre.
Related reading: On Liberation Maiden, Sine Mora, and invasion fiction; Game Theory by Harvard L.
Now the game is coming to all the modern platforms as Sine Mora EX, so you don’t need to bust our older hardware to experience it on the big TV. The game launches on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on August 8, and there’s a Switch version that won’t be far behind.
More than a straight port from the previous versions, there’s a couple new versus modes to enjoy in multiplayer (Race, Tanks, Dodgeball), and some new challenge levels. Additionally, on PC and PS4 Pro, you can enjoy the game at 60 frames per second in Native 4K if you’d like.
TAIKO THE DRUM IS FINALLY BACK IN ENGLISH
We love Taiko the Drum here at DDNet. The adorably insane series of rhythm games is, in fact, one of the first things we head off to do when we make a trip to Japan, because who doesn’t like beating along to JPOP, Anime, vocaloids, and so on as the screen fills with the most incredible overload of colour and energy?
For the longest time, Taiko games have been exclusively released in Japan, meaning you needed to either import them and struggle through the Japanese text and so on (not recommended for people who can’t speak Japanese since they games have a habit of doing crazy things like putting actual JRPG modes into them). But no longer! Bandai Namco is releasing the game in English into the Asia region. You’ll still need to import, but you’ll be able to play Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum Session!, in English, sometime this year.
After the success of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 and the Summer Lesson games, Japanese publishers have apparently realised that releasing an English version into Asia is a cheap, and relatively risk-free (less media throwing a tantrum about the game) way of servicing the English-speaking market. Here’s to more of this happening down the track.
