PSP Game News

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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The PlayStation Network boasts some great RPGs, but Grandia has been a notable omission up until now. That won’t be the case starting tomorrow though, as Sony has confirmed the PS1 port for an American release.

Originally released for the Sega Saturn back in 1997, Grandia made it to the PlayStation two years later. It received considerable acclaim on both consoles, and eventually picked up two sequels. It’s arguably downhill from the first game, but the combat is a high point through the entire series.

Grandia has been available on the Japanese PlayStation Network since last year, so it’s nice to finally see an English release. It will be joined by the turn-based strategy game Greed Corp and the PSP Mini Age of Zombies.

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Nobuo Uematsu is 50 years old. 51 in a month. He can’t really believe it, either — but what’s even more unbelievable to him is that he’s spent nearly half of his life composing music for video games.

“I wanted to be a composer, but I had no way of becoming one,” Uematsu told Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week. “I had no connections, so I just bummed around my hometown of Hiyoshi [in Kanagawa prefecture]. This was before video games were really a part of most people’s lives. It just happened that Square’s office was in the neighborhood, and a friend of mine working part-time as a designer asked if I wanted work composing PC game music. I said yes and that was it. So you had someone who never had his music appreciated by anyone suddenly getting paid to compose music from dusk ’til dawn! It was so much fun that my twenties just whizzed on by.”

Uematsu, of course, would eventually find his name becoming synonymous with the Final Fantasy series — which had its up and down sides. “My quitting Square Enix [in October 2004] was one of the turning points of my life,” he said. “It’s true that commuting to their new offices in Shinjuku was annoying, and it’s also true that I was getting sick of working in an office. Really, I felt that people were putting me up on this pedestal as ‘the man behind Final Fantasy’ or something, and I didn’t like that much.”

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In addition to David Jaffe dropping more hints about his next game, former 1upper and now Director of Business Development at Ignition Shane Bettenhausen spoke a bit on 4 Guys 1UP about what he expects to be the big battle at E3: new handhelds from Sony and Nintendo.

“I think the big story of E3 is DS 2 and PSP 2,” he stated. “I’m really excited to see that.”

And though he didn’t offer any details about what he knows about the platforms just yet, he did say that “the two products will be very competitive, which is something that no one experienced [before].” Meaning, in terms of their feature sets — such as whether they’ll have dual screens, touch control, etc. — they will be very similar. “DS and PSP both existed in completely different sides sides [of the spectrum],” he said. “If those two put out similar products at the same time, it really evens the playing field.”

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If you haven’t purchased a PSP Go, Sony is launching an incentive to try and get you to take the plunge. Over on the PlayStation Blog, they’ve announced that customers will be able to get a free game with the system for a limited time.

Purchasing a PSP Go will earn you a voucher code, which can be exchanged for either a copy of Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines or Little Big Planet. To get the voucher, you’ll have to login to your account directly from your PSP Go, at which point Sony will email you the code.

This deal will be available until March 21 for residents of the U.S. and Canada. They’re currently retailing for $249, but you can find them for considerably cheaper at outlets like Amazon.

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We already know all about the sale on Capcom games, which begins today with a 50% discount on Marvel vs. Capcom 2 ($7.49). But that’s not the only discounted downloadable game or piece of downloadable content on the PlayStation Store. Topatoi has had its price permanently slashed (from $9.99 to $7.99) and there’s a handful of Ubisoft games and DLC that’s on sale from now until March 4, including TMNT ($9.99) and Shaun White Snowboarding.

Demos of Yakuza 3 and Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing are among the new downloads available on PS3, along with the new downloadable content for Resident Evil 5 and Assassin’s Creed 2. You can also now find the premiere episode of Sony’s new reality show, “The Tester,” and three PS1 Classics: Mass Destruction ($5.99), Magic Carpet ($5.99), Sorcerer’s Maze ($5.99).

On PSP, in addition to the new helping of comics, there are two new downloadable games available: Puzzle Chronicles ($29.99) and SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3 ($39.99), the latter of which was made available earlier this week.

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