The News-Gazette.com: Tokyo Game Show 2009: Great things are coming our way

Tokyo Game Show 2009: Great things are coming our way

By Joel Leizer

Saturday, October 10, 2009 3:09 AM CDT

From Sept. 24 through 27, I was at the Tokyo Game Show 2009, held at the Makuhari Messe convention center just outside Tokyo, experiencing some of the many games that will be coming our way in future. The following are my impressions of just a few of the games I saw, and more is on the way.

"Final Fantasy XIII" (PS3, Xbox 360) I was a bit trepidatious stepping up the "Final Fantasy XIII" kiosk at the Tokyo Game Show. This is a game, after all, where players pick actions from various lists strewn about in several text menus – and all these menus were in Japanese, which I can't read.

But my worries were for naught. After a moment's experimentation in battle, it was easy to figure out what went with what and fly through the demo.

The world of "Final Fantasy XIII" is beautiful to behold, with bright bold colors and fantastic architecture thrilling the eye. Plus, there's the usual assortment of motley characters that breaks down generally as follows: beautiful, competent women; cute teen girls; and frighteningly androgynous men.

Yet the picture is incomplete this time around, in my humble opinion.

First, the camera you can control in order to gape at all this enticing scenery is stiff and unwieldy, making it a pain to look around and, sometimes, navigate.

Alan Wake, the protagonist of survival-horror game 'Alan Wake,' dodges a policeman's flashlight as he runs through the woods. By Microsoft

Worse, they've taken the wonderful real-time combat system from "Final Fantasy XII" and tossed it on the ash heap. While you can still see – and potentially avoid – enemies as you run through your environment, the moment you actually encounter them for a fight, the game pauses for a moment, the screen fades out, and then you are cast into a separate battle stage.

The reason why they backslide on this, returning to a system reminiscent of earlier "Final Fantasy" games, is to accommodate some new ways of doing battle. For instance, the standard "attack" command no longer executes a single attack; instead, a launches a combo of actions – after it takes a moment to "optimize" the sequence.

You can also create your own combos, stringing together a series of moves that appears to be limited only by a type of point value. (Imagine you have four combo points. You could do a combo using four one-point moves, or two one-point moves and a two-point attack or just two two-point attacks, with each action having a different specific purpose as you attempt to exploit an enemy's weakness.)

Summons are still here, too. And once again, they join you on the battlefield, acting as a partner for your character, rather than a replacement.

I'm pretty sure this game will be another hit for the folks at Square-Enix. I simply wish they had kept a little more of the previous combat system in this latest iteration.

"Forza Motorsport 3" (Xbox 360, PC) For many years now, the makers of car-simulation games have talked about building "real" physics into their games.

"Forza Motorsport 3" appears to get us closer to that mark. Yet it also endeavors to be user-friendly to those of us who aren't too race savvy.

Let's talk about the physics angle for a moment. If you are familiar with the "Forza" and "Gran Turismo" games, you already know that designers have gotten better and better over the years in making simulations more and more accurate in accounting for a car's weight, handling, acceleration, tire traction and all that jazz.

Yet for all the improvements, there's always been a bit of the unnatural involved. For instance, drift racing – a concept popularized in Japan, where a combination of braking, acceleration and cornering is used to cause a car to slide the car around curves – has always been a separate mode you have to turn on or off in games where it's present. That's even though drifting is something you can do in any real car whenever you want, if you know how of course.

Guess what? You got it; you can drift at will in "Forza Motorsport 3." It has a "drift mode," but all that does is turn on a set of indicators to tell you how well you're doing slipping and sliding. Even when it's off, you still earn "drift points" for how well you stick to the optimum path or whip your car around dangerous curves. Those points determine your spot on the drift leaderboard. (In fact, pretty much anything you do in "Forza" has a separate leaderboard, including racing, designing car paint schemes, taking in-race photos, even tuning vehicles.)

Just to be completely forthright, I'm never going to be anywhere near the top of any of those rankings. I've seen the talent that's out there for designing paint jobs and posing vehicles for pictures, and I don't compare; I know nothing about tuning; and as to racing itself ...

I'm a lead-foot. Not in daily life really, but in race games, yeah, I put the pedal to the metal and don't let up. That tends to do pretty well for me in off-road games, but on tracks I'm the guy stuck in the back, careering wildly into the barriers anytime I'm supposed to be turning.

Which brings me to some of the features in "Forza 3" that are supposed to help out weaklings like me: One option you can set is supposed to automatically brake for you on turns if you've got the hammer down and aren't letting up. That would be me. Another option will let you rewind time while racing to fix a mistake.

And the game will be helpful in many other ways. For instance: It will suggest tracks suited to your currently selected car and the vehicles you've got in your garage; and it can automatically upgrade your rides for maximum performance in your event (you can also view and override any of the changes it wants to make, if you'd like).

Some more info:

– The designers say they've redone the graphics so that there's 10 times more detail this time around.

– About 400 different cars are available, and every one of them has an interior view.

– There will be 100 tracks, and some of them exist in the real world. Plus, a few old favorites are returning. For instance, Fujimi Kaido is present; it's a complete circuit winding near Japan's Mount Fuji, about 10 miles in length with 100-some corners.

– The career mode is calendar-based, taking place one race season at a time over the course of six seasons. You start in the small car class. It's estimated that it will take 40 to 50 hours to play through a career, and even then you'll only have raced in a fraction of the 220 available events.

"Alan Wake" (Xbox 360) I've got my fingers crossed regarding this survival horror title.

It's fantastically creepy, fraught with tense action and steeped in foreboding, don't-play-with-the-lights-off atmosphere.

Yet I'm more terrified that the story will play out in by-the-numbers, cliché ridden fashion.

I mean, based on the tiny bit I've already seen, I'm already halfway predicting that the end-of-game revelation will either be that we find out Alan, the protagonist, is already dead (a la "The Sixth Sense"); is in a coma and hallucinating; or having a J.R. Ewing dream. Really, they keep repeating the line "Alan, wake up" in all the footage they show. Seems a bit too obvious (and potentially disappointing) to me.

The game will be structured like a TV series, which action playing out in episodes. Quite cannily, the developers refused to say if these "episodes" would be similar in length or widely varying.

The game revolves around a light/dark dichotomy, where the light is your friend most of the time – It's the only way to protect yourself from the darkness that's hunting you – but it can turn on you, too. For instance, imagine that the police think you're a killer and are using flashlights while scouring the woods for you. Light is your frenemy, in other words. (OK, I deserve to be hunted through the woods for that one.)

But to back up the concept, they've come up with a ton of great lighting effects: Flashlight beams are wonderfully diffuse despite their central bright spot, creating shadows to haunt the imagination on the periphery of your vision while still clearly illuminating what you're looking at directly. And road flares sear your vision with their incandescence, spark profusely, then slowly fade.

Even if "Alan Wake" can't manage to tell a completely original tale, it still looks to be fun to play. But I'd really like to see them break away from the conventional conclusion.

"Valkyria Chronicles 2" (PSP) It's a bit disappointing that this sequel to one of my favorite PlayStation 3 games will be exclusive to Sony's hand-held. After all, the fantastic animation of the original – and the overall watercolor-painting aesthetic of its graphics – just doesn't look as good on the PSP's tiny screen.

Don't get me wrong; it still looks goods. But it's just not the same.

What is the same is the BLiTZ combat system ... I think. Hey, cut me some slack. Almost everything was in Japanese, so I couldn't really pick out any new features. You still use movement points to individually select your soldiers and maneuver them around the battlefield. Enemies still get to fire on your character while you are marching them around. The unit types haven't changed, and neither have their weapons. And it's still a little too easy to accidentally end a character's turn before you've had them shoot back.

It's been promised that "Valkyria Chronicles 2" will have co-op and multiplayer gameplay, in addition to the single-player campaign. I didn't see any evidence of it at TGS, but again, I can't read Japanese.

I'm pretty sure I'm still going to love this game, even though it's not on the system I want it to be on. And as an advocate for great games, I implore you to try the PS3 original if you haven't already.

Joel Leizer is The News-Gazette's assistant news editor and video game columnist. Contact him at jleizer@news-gazette.com.