The PlayStation classic Persona 2: Eternal Punishment finally made its way to the PlayStation Network last week. Atlus sent over a code, presumably for reviewing purposes, but I felt there was something odd about using our modern(ish) rubric to evaluate a game in the exact form that it arrived in over a decade ago. Eternal Punishment isn’t, however, unworthy of discussion.
There’s some weird history behind Persona's lineage. Following the 1997 PlayStation release Revelations: Persona, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment was the second Persona game to come stateside. When it was released in Japan a year earlier, however, Eternal Punishment was born a follow-up Persona 2: Innocent Sin. Both games came with the Persona 2 label, but were essentially opposite sides of the same coin. Less savvy North American gamers were ignorant to this fact, but still managed a beloved appreciation of Eternal Punishment anyway.
2007's Persona 3 and 2008's Persona 4, despite being very different from their predecessors, thrust the Persona brand back into the limelight. Atlus responded by issuing an updated version of the first title in the series, Revelations: Persona, for Sony's PlayStation Portable in 2009. More than a traditional port, the PSP iteration restored significant content that had been cut out of the initial release, updated some of its music, and gave it a fresh (and somewhat less racist!) localization. With 2010 came a PSP iteration of Persona 3, dubbed Persona 3 Portable, ensuring Atlus' Persona series had found a welcomed home on Sony's portable machine.
Later in 2011, Atlus delivered a fully localized and somewhat updated version of the proverbially long lost Persona 2: Innocent Sin to the PSP. Resurrecting a niche title, attaching a first rate localization, and delivering it to a content-starved machine was a brilliant move on Atlus' part and gave a whole new generation of fans an easy (and legal!) way to play a forgotten classic. Finally, Innocent Sin had come stateside.
Naturally, when a similar PSP revamp of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment was announced for the Japanese market, the North American Atlus faithful were waiting with baited breathe. Unfortunately it started looking like that particular iteration of Eternal Punishment would never make it over here. Atlus has stated vague, "unusual circumstances" surrounding its appearance, or lack thereof, but the writing seems to be on the wall: (1) It's 2013, (2) the PSP software library (despite an attractive digital presence for Vita) is pretty much dead, and (3) the financial success of a retail PSP release is doubtful. Take your pick, but it's probably a combination of the three.
Releasing a the original Eternal Punishment as a PS1 Classic on PlayStation Network seems like a safer bet, and that's exactly what Atlus did. It lacks the modern amenities we were granted in the updated ports of Revelations: Persona and Innocent Sin and it doesn’t quite mesh with Innocent Sin’s updated localization, but it's fundamentally content-complete and makes good on the dream of owning literally every Persona game on one portable console.
Well, sort of. As of this writing Eternal Punishment can neither be downloaded on nor transferred to a PlayStation Vita. It can only be played on a PlayStation 3 or PSP. This is a huge god damn bummer, but SCEA claims to be working on it and it will very likely be updated in a few weeks. Update! It's now transferable to Vita! Then, my friends, then we can have the PSP iterations of Revelations: Persona, Persona 2: Innocent Sin, Persona 3 Portable, Eternal Punishment as a PSone Classic, and the Vita exclusive Persona 4 Golden on one portable device. That in itself is a machine for the ages and the collective pinnacle of interactive entertainment known as Persona (please note possible hyperbole).
Oh, right, the actual game. I've put an admittedly shallow ten hours into Eternal Punishment (and employed my PSPgo for the first time in three years), and, yeah, it sure is Eternal Punishment. Those only familiar with Persona 3 and Persona 4 may be in for a rough transition. Early Persona games, with their penchant for demon negotiation and dungeon crawling, were closer to traditional MegaTen games than their more accessible later entries. They were remembered more for their narrative, a high school setting is still relatively unique in gaming, rather than their gameplay. It's still fun and engaging, but as I noted in my old review of Innocent Sin, somewhat out of step with modern design sensibilities.
Innocent Sin seems attractive; it's the long awaited opposite half to a cult classic, and it comes with a few bells and whistles to ease it into the 2011 landscape. While I adore the soundtrack and can appreciate the effort put toward a great localization, actually playing the game made me feel like I was trapped in some of the worst parts of 90's era game design. Interesting systems are in place but it’s slow, aimless, and, and most of it has done much better in Nocturne or newer Persona games. Of course this is a known quantity to the Atlus faithful who will buy (and love) Innocent Sin anyway, but I'd caution an approach from a newcomer.
Those words got me annihilated on forums! What I didn't understand at the time, and still don’t really get, is why it upset people. Persona fans knew what game was and likely didn't require analysis from a critic. It’s for everyone else who may not know what they’re getting in to. Eternal Punishment follows the same playbook. It doesn't arrive with the tender loving care of its made-over predecessor, but it’s also $30 cheaper at $9.99. If you can accept Eternal Punishment's understandably dated systems and pacing, you'll find a game that's just as engaging, deep, and rewarding now as it was a decade ago. $10 is fair trade for a great game – provided you know what you’re getting in to.
The year of 2013 is getting real! This week, we've got Metal Gear Rising, Antichamber, Little Inferno, Dead Space 3, and other conduits to burning and maiming. As per usual, we act like we know what we are doing, but introduce a late plot twists that is designed to confuse the listener. The Retroactive Shitstorm is back, with the wonderful and wild year of 1995, otherwise known as the year that Chrono Trigger existed. Come enjoy!
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Like 500,000+ others, most of us at Digital Chumps spent two hours glued to our chairs watching Sony's PlayStation 4 reveal. What follows doesn't represent the opinion of Digital Chumps as a whole, but rather my haphazard, rambling speculation based on my relatively informed opinion. This guarantees you, the reader, that after reading my opinion you'll feel at least 20-25% more informed than you would at our competing sites.
I'm kidding. Probably. The big thing to remember is that we still basically know nothing, and armchair criticism is all we've got until real people starting getting hands on with some of Sony's impressive tech. Here we go!
Seeing Sony immediately pawn off the Vita by acknowledging its assumed importance and then literally nothing else seemed like a brief admission of a global failure, honestly (especially after that Vita specific event earlier this week failed to announce anything of remote importance). It felt like a nervous laugh, a warm-up joke before the big reveal. It did make an appearance later when it was shown working in tandem with the PlayStation 4, but I'll get to that a bit later.
And yeah, hats off to Sony for going with their gut and titling their machine, "PlayStation 4." That wide font P S 4 logo looked slick as hell, and the very act of seeing it in an official capacity actually gave me goose bumps. Gone is completely baseless speculation, and seeing that text on screen gave the remaining two hours an air of legitimacy I hadn't considered beforehand. Finally, it started feeling real.
Mark Cerny out on stage was great, as was the name drop for Marble Madness. His resume speaks for itself, and allowed him to speak with a believable air of authority on the PlayStation 3's architecture. In the past we've always heard the PlayStation 3 (and to a lesser extent, PlayStation 2) were relative hell to develop for. Cerny's messaging repeatedly telegraphed the PS4 would be more of a traditional, developer-friendly experience for small and large teams alike. Announcing that the PS4 would be packing 8gigs of memory was perhaps a more impressive announcement, or at least that's what systematically detonated my Twitter feed.
The DualShock 4 was leaked by Destructoid nearly a week ago, but it was still need to see in three dimensions. The glowy bits at the top were sort of assumed to be a Move controller, but the bigger surprise in terms of motion technology was Sony's Kinec...ah, ahem, I mean stereo camera motion sensing device. They pulled the curtain on that thing almost as soon as they brought it out, so hopefully we'll get more information on it later in the year. In any case the remolded analog buttons look more comfy, and the elongated form factor (hopefully) won't matter very much.
Knack, Cerny's project, looked alright. In the absence (and relative stagnation) of Ratchet and Clank, it certainly captured that cutesy feel of latter day PlayStation platformers. It didn't look dramatically different than what we're seeing on our current gen consoles, however the amount of activity on screen were vaguely impressive.
Suspending and resuming play sessions sounds simple, but it felt huge. I've always held an appreciation for sleep modes in portable devices, and it's a fantastic feature to include in consoles. I do wonder, however, whether it will persevere through unexpected power outages. Along similar lines, titles being playable while they're downloading is a great idea - and hey maybe it'll be fast enough for buyer's remorse not to set in when we all effortlessly blow $180 downloading three retail games at the same time.
Video compression and constant streaming sounds incredible. That was actually a small feature of Just Cause 2, a game particularly prone to outrageous hyjinx, and personally I think I wound up with a ton of YouTube videos because of it. If there's true live streaming through a reliable and accessible web interface then that might actually earn the overwrought "gamechanger" title, earning the Dual Shock 4's "share" button as perhaps the PS4's secret best feature.
They mentioned this a couple of times, but taking over your friend's games via Gaikai's cloud service sounds absolutely insane. Do you have to both own the game, or just your buddy? Do you earn trophies, or does he/she? Is there a time limit on how long you can assume control. Like anything else it raised more questions than answers, but the potential and intrigue it left behind are both tantalizing.
Declaring that games would be preloaded on your system after Sony's network "learns" your tastes sounded like a fancy way of saying, "Hey prepare for a ton of ads so we can sell you things you didn't even know you wanted." After undergoing an insufferable bombardment of focus-group demo'd content every time I turn on my Xbox 360 I can firmly say both, "ugh" and "no thanks" to that feature. Perhaps I don't speak for gaming as I whole, but I certainly know what I want, and that's not it.
Gaikai appears primed to break out. Instantly being able to play any demo is a huge get for Sony, though it was disappointing to hear that their backwards compatibility solution had yet to be realized. I'm personally skeptical, cloud based gaming just seems too unreliable, but Sony's huge financial investment in Gaikai surely means they're on to something. Right? Guys?
Remote play to the Vita was expected, but if it's anything like remote play from the PS3 to the PSP or Vita, count me out. Lag is a serious issue, and it renders almost every game that supports that feature thoroughly worse than its console counterpart. If Sony and Gaikai can figure that out, as they implied with that "closer response time" (paraphrasing) slide, then it might pose a significant challenge to the Wii U, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Killzone: Shadow Fall certainly looked pretty. It was great to see bright, beautiful colors in a world that's usually drenched in muted colors. Too bad it seemed to play like every other shooter out there.
Driveclub was a surprise. I always assumed Evolution Studios would focus on racing games, but the social, car porn territory they've decided to enter always seemed like Gran Turismo's territory. Either GT6 won't be coming for a very, very longtime, or Driveclub is going to be something else entirely.
Infamous: Second Son didn't show actual gameplay, but it looked intriguing. Could have done without the oppressed white dude talking about how bad police are, but hey at least the concept looked interesting. If we're lucky Cole and crew won't have a major role, as I thought that storyline went out with a whimper at the end of Infamous 2.
Getting Jonathan blow out on stage represented the first and only time I said, "holy shit" in my chair. Something of a tortured genius, his annoyance and criticism of the console space is well known to people who follow his work. The Witness, Blow's game, sounded interesting when he was talking about it, but when it came to footage it looked like a Myst homage with puzzles from an iPhone game. That, and 30+ hours with, quote, "no filler," is a bold claim. Hopefully this will be one of those times where I'm intensely wrong about an observation; I loved Braid so very much and I've been dying to see and play his next creation. He said it would be exclusive to the PS4 at launch, which means we'll play it on other devices sooner or later.
I can respect David Cage's passion, but I refuse to believe anything he actually says. It was weird for him, of all people, to be touting the technical prowess of the PS4, but hey that real time render of David Carradine's head was sort of neat.
I love Media Molecule, but I have no idea what their presentation was about. That sculpting tech demo is fuel for a million penises, and its follow-up demo produced flashbacks to Wii Music. Not a good place to go, but little of what they showed was from an actual game, so we'll have to wait and see with them.
Capcom's Yoshinori Ono is one of my favorite human beings and I was tickled to death (almost literally) when he came out on stage. He immediately said he wasn't going to be talking about Street Fighter, which was a drag, but hey at least he was honest. Their CG target render for Deep Down (probably Dragon's Dogma 2) looked okay, but after the Killzone 2 fiasco it's best to not believe any of those until they start hitting in-game footage.
On that same note, Square-Enix had the worst showing of the evening. They brought a year old trailer and seemed to imply it was PS4 footage, which seemed disingenuous. They actually had me on the edge of my seat when I thought they were finally going to announce Final Fantasy Versus XIII, but instead all we got was the promise of something Final Fantasy related at E3. I'm glad Square was there, honestly, but given their in-house development on PS3 has been a massive letdown, it's hard to expect much.
Ubisoft's Watch_Dogs continues to look neat. The new demo featured a more traditional (and realistic looking) chase sequence, but absent was most of the future-tech that made 2012's demo so intriguing. Still, that's a small slice of what's in store - and the potential of the game, how far it goes to let the player explore its take on Chicago, is what'll reel me in. If it's a heavily scripted affair then count me in as disappointed.
Blizzard was huge. The words, "strategic partnership" were huge. Diablo 3 on PS3 and PS4; probably not a huge, but definitely a step in the right direction.
Along similar lines, public footage, exclusive content, and a tangible commitment from Activision and Bungie for Destiny was perhaps the biggest statement of the night. I've never considered Bungie or the Halo games to be extraordinary, but Destiny looks primed to take over the world. I'll take ambition over iteration any day, and that's exactly what it looks like Destiny is prepared to embrace.
And there you have it, a brain barfed analysis and observation of the PlayStation 4 reveal. Of all that we now know, remember that there's quite a bit we don't. Missing details include:
- Price
- Used game strategies
- Whether or not games will hit retail and digital day and date
- What the damn thing looks like
- How much of that amazing social content will be locked behind a pay gate
- The fate of PlayStation Plus
- A solid answer on backwards compatibility
- How much of that hardware will be in the box
- The Last Guardian
- The Last Guardian
- The Last Guardian
(that's like Beetle Juice, right?) Four months until E3.
Set your posi-forks and eat your peta-balls, we're taking on the early stages of 2013 with a look at some of the early and quirky games we've been tinkering and tailoring. We're talking Don't Starve, Dark Souls, Metal Gear Rising, EscapeVektor, The Cave, and Spaceteam...as a spaceteam!
Battle Royale is a kind of insane Japanese novel where a junior high class goes to a remote island, each student receives a random weapon, and then they all have to kill each other. It's not as sadistic and exploitive as one might expect, instead employing its premise as a means to contextualize survival, isolation, and loyalty amidst absolute chaos. It's powerful, haunting and only a little goofy, and the 2000 cinematic adaptation is reasonably faithful to its source material. It also contained a small scene that perfectly encapsulates my entry point into Dark Souls.
In Battle Royale, survival packs are distributed at random - and not all are created equal. One student unzips his and finds a sword while another discovers a machine gun. Another unfortunate son of a bitch gets a garbage can lid, and the wave of panic and dread that washes over him is palpable and terrifying. He's fucked. Hopelessly fucked, and if memory serves me right he got an arrow through the face after about ten seconds. He wasn't prepared to deal with what was about to happen.
This is exactly what happened to me in the first few hours of Dark Souls. I had a weapon, but any potential threat took advantage of my inexperience and relieved me of everything I had. By design, Dark Souls forces new players to risk everything they have with every foot step. It's an intimidating premise because for the last fifteen or so years games have transitioned from this obtuse thing you figure out and have fun with to a routine event with familiar structures. Especially (but not only) if you play a lot of games, it's not hard to figure out what's going on and plow through content.
It's like being a math prodigy when you're a kid but then relying on calculator for so much of your adult life that you've forgotten basic computation operations. Dark Souls knows players aren't challenged like this anymore, but it's also aware and confident that a smart player can evoke a dormant ability to press forward and adapt to his or her surroundings. It's a significant risk in game design, and certainly one that would have been focus-grouped straight to the dumpster had it been developed in North America. Everyone who pays for modern game X is supposed to get an A to justify their purchase whereas Dark Souls forces the player to earn their grade (and show their work in the process).
Dark Souls' deliberate obfuscation of its systems doesn't make this easy but the potential of any gratification makes it possible. No matter what, you're the kid with the garbage can lid lost in a world of violent monsters. You fold either in cowardice or indifference, or you can rekindle your latent ability, turn garbage into gold, and then wield it to victory.
