FrostedMiniWheats

@believer258: Poor Gamestop guys have probably had to learn what SMT is and learn quick. Getting word that they've got a giant book/game case/CD package coming in to fit somewhere on their shelves is an irregularity and a nuisance of such a degree I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the game sticks out in many of those employees minds.

The bad news is no, Shoji Meguro who handled primary composition for the Persona soundtracks you like is not working on this game.

This good news is that the Ryota Kozuka fellow who is handling this game did contribute to both the Persona 3 and Persona 4 soundtracks. His past works can be viewed here: http://vgmdb.net/artist/5293

The other good news is that Shoji Meguro did music for SMT Strange Journey (the previous installment in the main SMT franchise) and the music actually wasn't particularly remarkable. It was certainly functional and unique, but it's nothing I imagine anyone ever listens to outside the game. So having someone else on the SMT IV job is not a bad thing.

@creamypies:Just because it would be awfully nice for them to have a new Zelda game at this juncture doesn't mean that the game exists in a form that's ready to show. We already know there are two Zelda games in development for release this holiday season... that's almost unprecedented already. Sure, Square Enix would show a trailer to impress crowds while the game is still in pre-production just to make headlines, but Nintendo generally doesn't operate like that. I mean, they held out on freaking Link to the Past 2 until six months before launch!

@the_nubster: Well this seems to fit into your timeline then. The last time any Ratchet game came out was their experimental MOBA spinoff in 2012, and this is scheduled for 2015. No other products have been announced that will release during that gap. So there's your three years.

The "Tales of" link leads to the Howling Dogs page. And the Howling Dogs link also leads to the Howling Dogs page. Could you please change it so one of these leads to the Tales Of retrospective?

@patrickklepek - Just in case you scan these comments before jumping into Monster Hunter, take note. That is a multiplayer game. It absolutely does not stand up by any standard as a single player adventure. Everything from character progression (all loot based), to the narrative (barely there), to the controls (looong attack animations) are designed around getting three or four like minded people together to hunt down a giant dinosaur or three. I can't imagine that anyone else in the Giant Bomb editorial staff will be playing this but maybe you could track down some community members to play with?

It's not that I'm worried you won't like Monster Hunter, I don't much care for it myself. But I do really want you to continue breaking out of your comfort zone and diversifying Giant Bomb's coverage and I would hate for this to sour you on the whole notion.

Wow! I've been cruising the internet a little and there are some people upset about this game! Too much combat, floaty jumping, falling damage... that last one in particular is apparently quite an affront to some enthusiasts. I played the recently released demo of the game before reading all this vitriol and I came away with a very different impression. I feel like a lot of the criticism out there is only criticism to a person who has specific expectations for what a Castlevania game should be... the style and features of this game are very unlike recent handheld Castlevania games, but quite good regardless! Let's break it down.

Graphics and Sound

Are awesome, just like they were in Lords of Shadow. Putting this gothic action game in the hands of a Spanish development team is a gamble that's paid off very well - the art in these games is distinctly European and captures gothic stylings far better than any of the Japanese developed games ever did. There's an authenticity of design here that helps these games stand out not only from other Castlevania games, but from other games period. Very good stuff. The environments steal the show, and playing with 3D on is an absolute necessity. Even indoors the way the setting falls back into the background is really well done. It achieves the effect that the old parallax scrolling layers would pantomime in the old 2D games.

The music sounds like Lords of Shadow music. Did you play that game? Hop onto youtube for a listen if you feel the urge. LoS opts for a theatrical style soundtrack instead of looping level songs as past Castlevanias always have. I'm sure this is something Castlevania enthusiasts aren't happy about, but don't listen to them. It's a good theatrical style soundtrack, whether it fits with tradition or not is far less important than that.

Platforming

is kinda weird. The jump arc is pretty stiff, reminding me of Super Castlevania IV. But unlike that game everything here is pretty easy - ledges are set aglow for the player when they're at all less than obvious, and Trevor can grab onto edges from a decent distance away. Falling damage is the penalty for failure if you miss a big jump, but from what's been shown it looks like missing platforms isn't gonna be a huge issue. It seems more like a tool to encourage the player to actually follow the intended level design rather than just shortcutting around by falling three stories. As long as the level design is good, this won't be a problem. If the game forces the player to backtrack through tedious and/or very hard sections just to avoid falling damage, then this will be a problem. On it's own falling damage is neither good nor bad, it is the level design that will make it one or the other. I really do like the stiff jump arc though, all the animations in this game feel deliciously heavy.

Combat

seems to be the focus of the game. Which shouldn't surprise anyone who played Lords of Shadow, this new Castlevania franchise is a franchise of action games. I'm not an action game enthusiast so I can't talk about frame canceling or move balance or anything, but it was surprisingly hard. Enemies will take a chunk out of 'ya if they hit, and very few moves stun them. I ended up using the dodge roll and air dash an awful lot just to stay alive. The whip felt good and heavy to swing around. There's a move list with two pages of unlocks as you level up, more than half were unlocked already for the demo. I couldn't figure out uses for all the moves, but I'm sure for the guys who break down combat systems and really get into that they're all valuable.

So in Conclusion

The game reminds me of pre-Symphony of the Night Castlevania in a lot of ways. Enemies take multiple hits, jumping is pretty stiff, dying is a real possibility. Real challenge has been absent from this franchise for quite a while (though Order of Ecclesia should be lauded for beginning to re-introduce the threat of death) so getting a brand new difficult 2D game with a lot of the stylistic trappings of the original formula is pretty exciting! It's also exciting to get a well produced 2D action game from a Western developer - these games have been almost solely the realm of the Japanese for far too long. This game isn't trying and failing to be a Metroidvania, it's trying to be something new.

This is a really great article! That block quote from Dave Lang was solid gold in how it broke down costs specific to the genre from a perspective other than the Skullgirls team themselves. This does lead to a followup question though... why do so many things in games need to be outsourced? It makes a certain amount of sense in something like Assassin's Creed where Ubisoft is trying to create one of the biggest games of the year every single year, but why can't the Skullgirls developers draw and animate their own art? How big does a studio need to be before they can support their own dedicated artists?

Voice acting in video games. It's dicey. An awful lot of video game voice acting is... not good. And even if the voice acting is good, often times the writing is not good. And even if both the voice acting and writing are good on the same project, if the voice is presented simultaneously to written text it often becomes a drag to wait for the voice actor/actress to catch up with my reading speed. And even if all of that is gotten right, it can still go sour if voice clips are re-used too frequently through a game (I want to find out who had the idea that JRPG characters need to shout the name of their attack every time they use it and strangle him).

I would also submit that recent games have proven that voice work is absolutely not necessary to do decent storytelling. Be it the comedy of Mario and Luigi RPG, the melodrama of Ace Attorney, or the mystery/conspiracy story in 999. These games are all best in class in their genres, and I'm not sure that any of them would benefit from dialogue being read aloud to the reader.

Also consider entering a new hardware cycle which will drive AAA development costs up yet further. The Japanese side of the industry is also feeling a pinch, less because of high spec hardware but instead because the handhelds that are so successful in Japan aren't as big in the West. Many of their biggest localization projects these days are for handheld games which they're forced to sell for less money than console titles which require, from a localization perspective, similar investment.

So my conclusion is that maybe we should start asking for less voice acting or at the very least place less importance on the feature. It can easily go wrong, narratives can work well without it, and at a time when the market is so tough we see more studios close every week cutting out this extra development cost could lead to more developers staying above water and quicker development/localization periods. Which seems like a lot of benefit to us consumers.

Certainly I wouldn't take this to an extreme - some games really need voice acting to work well (can you imagine DmC without it?) - but maybe we got a little focused on getting voice acting because we can have it rather than because projects necessarily need it.

Thoughts?

I like the new Demon designs! Past time there was some new blood drawing this stuff up. For a franchise that purports to draw from mythologies all across the world, the artistic styling is surprisingly uniform. Wouldn't it be cool if demons had been drawn by different people as they were added all through franchise history, and then just kept on in whatever form they first entered in? Lost opportunity now... but if this marks the beginning of artistic diversification for the franchise them I'm all in!