PSP Game News

Namco Bandai Games weren’t content with just announcing Solarobo this week — the company also unveiled plans to release Tales of Phantasia X, a pair of remakes put together on a single disc. It’s set to hit the PSP sometime later this year in Japan; no US release has been announced.

TOPX consists of two titles. The first, Tales of Phantasia Cross Edition, is a remake (originally released on the PSP in 2006) of the very first Tales RPG in the whole series. The Cross Edition has a few small improvements from the previous fully-voiced remake, including a revised battle system and a selection of new story events, but largely it’s the same as before.

Completely new this time around is a full-on remake of Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon, an RPG released exclusively in Japan for the Game Boy Color in 2000. Set a hundred years after the original TOP, it tells the sale of Dio and Mel, two explorers who can change into a variety of outfits to transform their class and battle skillsets on the fly. The game largely revolves around exploring randomly-generated dungeons, and as you’d expect, the graphics and visual scenes have been completely redone from the ground up to modern PSP standards.

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The Monster Hunter Freedom series (called Monster Hunter Portable in Japan) is one of the few international “killer apps” that the PSP can lay claim to without sounding desperate. Every game in the lineup has shifted at least a million copies in Japan, with the most recent one — 2008’s Monster Hunter Freedom Unite — selling over 3.5 million units and sharing the 2008 Japan Game Award with Nintendo’s Wii Fit. It therefore makes sense that a new Freedom game announcement is huge news in Asia, as it became when Capcom announced Monster Hunter Portable 3rd at a fan event held in Tokyo on Tuesday.

The new PSP game, developed by a team led by producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and director Yasunori Ichinose, is meant to be a whole new experience for series fans. “This game doesn’t use Freedom Unite as a base; the majority of it is being built from scratch,” Ichinose said. “Thanks to that, the monster graphics and animation are a whole level better than before; we’ve got a broader range of expression to work with. It’ll feel different from both Unite and Tri on the Wii.”

MHP3 has a bit more of a Japan/Oriental feel to it than previous titles. As before, you’re a freelance hunter tracking monsters in the wilds and cooperating with other players to take them down, but your home base this time — the village of Yukumo — is modeled after a traditional Japanese hot-spring village in the mountains, complete with open-air bath. “Pokke Village from the previous game was meant to have a Japanese taste to it,” Tsujimoto commented, “but we brought that to the forefront this time. We didn’t want to have just another town that looks like samurai-era Tokyo, though, so instead we added Asian tastes to the town features shared across the series.”

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Sony Computer Entertainment America has announced that Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker — the PSP Metal Gear game that Hideo Kojima says easily could have been called Metal Gear Solid 5 — will be released in North America on June 8, and it’s coming alongside a limited edition PSP Entertainment Pack.

The pack will include the above-pictured “spirited green” version of a PSP-3000 (but not a PSPgo… how about that), Peace Walker on UMD, a 2GB Memory Stick PRO Duo, and a voucher for a free PSN movie (the title will be announced later), all for $199. This will be the first time this spirited green PSP will be available in North America. Additionally, this copy of Peace Walker will also contain exclusive in-game items like a camouflage pattern with FOX logos and a “Stealth Gun” feature that can be unlocked early in the game.

Naturally, Peace Walker will also be released digitally for the PSPgo, in case you happen to have one of those instead. For more on Peace Walker, check out our last preview to see what to expect.

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There are few things that an entertainment device can be called that are worse than “useless.” Codemasters vice president Gavin Cheshire wanted to make sure that he properly emphasized his disdain for Sony’s handheld in a recent interview, calling the system a “useless waste of space,” going on to also bash the user experience that it provides.

Speaking with Edge, he explained the impression he’s gotten of the system since buying one: “Well, speaking as a person who bought a PSP, the problem was that I always thought, because it was a better screen than iPod’s, that I’d be doing more with it. But it was such a bollocking useless waste of space; just getting stuff on it was ridiculous. That was its downfall.”

Codemasters actually released a game on PSP this past November, F1 2009 (pictured above), which Cheshire claimed they “didn’t do too badly” with. But with the way the system operates, he doesn’t appear to think too highly of its future. He continued, “But regarding the future, I think they’ve got — well… no. PSP Go’s a lovely device, really smart, but our senior VP bought one the day it came out and has a great story, because he ended up on some customer support line just trying to do basic stuff. He had to re-download his software, do an immediate firmware update, and that’s your user experience. Sony just hasn’t got it right. Stuff like that will make people leave it alone.”

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Sony announced the release date today for ModNation Racers: May 25. If you’re wondering whether that goes for the PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Portable version, the answer is “both.” As previously reported, the title is set to launch on both platforms, simultaneously, and with similar feature sets. The title is carrying the torch of Little Big Planet’s “Play, Create, Share” model, with the ability to create and share custom tracks.

The blog also outlined the pre-order incentives for the game, which vary according to retailer. Each of the “Modded,” Mighty-Mugg-style racers hails from a well-known Sony franchise (above). GameStop pre-orders will receive Kratos and his “Kart of Chaos.” Those who pre-order from Amazon will get Ratchet or Clank, though the blog is unclear on how the game will determine which. Finally, Best Buy purchasers will get Nathan Drake and the “Jungle Jeep.” Each of the pre-order bonuses also includes one of four “Mystery Mod and Kart” packages, which includes an additional character, kart, and accessory. Check out the blog for more detailed pictures of the various incentives.

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If The Lord of Elemental wasn’t enough “strategy RPG prequel coming out May 27 in Japan” excitement for you, your prayers have been answered — also hitting PSP shelves that day is Blaze Union, a brand new Sting-developed tactical RPG that, story-wise, is a prequel to GBA and PSP hit Yggdra Union.

Set in the Bronquian Empire before Yggdra came along and unified it for herself, Blaze Union’s story is centered around the Blaze Knight Corps, a rogue army fighting against the land’s corrupt emperor. You control Garlot, leader of the corps, on a series of campaigns against the evil empire, the story branching this way or that depending on your decisions.

Like with Yggdra, Blaze’s battles are a mix of strategy-RPG and card action. Before a battle scene begins, you’re tasked with selecting which units and “tactical cards” to send out to the field. The subsequent fighting proceeds a bit like a sword-and-sorcery Advance Wars, with you forming multi-unit Unions to beef up your position and using special charged skills to wipe out enemy advances.

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Sega announced this week that Hatsune Miku: Project Diva 2nd, a new music game starring the popular line of Vocaloid characters, is currently under development. It’s due to come out for the PSP July 29 in Japan for 6090 yen; no US release has been announced.

Like the previous Project Diva, the game’s a basic sort of button-tapping rhythm title where you have to help virtual idol Miku and her friends sing all kinds of songs, both original and taken from the world of Japanese pop music.

The new game offers a few duets between different Vocaloid voices, as well as a fully refurbished song-edit mode that allows you more space to work with.

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Some of the highlights from next week’s crop of Japanese console game releases, courtesy of Famitsu magazine’s review pages:

- Yuusha no Kuseni Namaikida 3D (8/9/8/8, 33 points): The new game in the recently-renamed What Did I Do do Deserve This, My Lord?! series is a pretty standard update. “The additional water element adds some more depth to dungeon building,” one reviewer said. “Thanks partly to that, the difficulty level’s higher than before, but get to grips with the system and you’ll progress well enough.”

Another editor thought a bit better of the challenge level: “The kind tutorial, an instruction manual that could be mistaken for a strategy guide, and adjustable difficulty settings make this addictive even for beginners.”

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Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is instituting a few intriguing new ideas for the MGS series, and according to recent tweets from Hideo Kojima (yes, Hideo Kojima is tweeting now), they may be the precursors to what could eventually be another new Metal Gear Solid game on a different platform.

“It’s not that PSP is the main platform for the future MGS series,” Kojima wrote (via Andriasang). “Peace Walker is a test to see what type of expansions are there if MGS is brought to a portable. We’re not just rising vertically with development on next generation systems, but also horizontally, trying to expand gameplay.”

So no, Kojima never out-and-out says it, but the implication is clearly that new ideas in Peace Walker may evolve into a new MGS possibly on current-gen hardware (or maybe they’ll end up in Metal Gear Solid: Rising, which we still no so very little about?). Among Peace Walker’s more intriguing new features is four-player co-op, where gamers can give each other various kinds of support by “synching” their characters together (check out our last preview for a more in-depth explanation).

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Dead or Alive: Paradise is not softcore pornography or degrading to women, director Yoshinori Ueda says, responding to criticism of the upcoming PSP game. Instead, it’s all about “beautiful women.”

“From our perspective, we’re trying to make beautiful women, that has been the focus - we want our characters to be beautiful. The DOA characters are strong and that they look the way they do is based on trying to bring out the beauty of women,” Ueda told Eurogamer.

“We’re certainly not trying to degrade women. They have beautiful bodies. We’re trying to show off the beauty of their bodies but we’re not trying to be degrading about it - we’re trying to show that they are beautiful characters.”

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