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Import Roundup With Digimon World

Bandai Namco likes to keep slightly older Digimon fans in mind, as they aimed the recent Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth at those teenage-and-above types who liked Digimon in their youth but since drifted away. Aptly enough, that's a fair description for Takuto, the male protagonist of Digimon World: Next Order. Once a champion-level Digimon trainer, he's now occupied by teenage concerns. Yet both he and female protagonist Shiki are ideal for buying new Digimon ga…er, raising Digimon in the computerized lands of Digimon World: Next Order.

Upon choosing a protagonist, the player gets two starting Digimon: Takuto gets Agumon and Gabumon, while Shiki gets Biyomon and Palmon. Those are just the introductory pairs, of course. Soon the heroes roam fields and cyberscapes to meet dozens of Digimon and their human companions. They can even recruit characters to people a player-created town, growing it from a few high-tech huts to a full Digimon metropolis.

Digimon World: Next Order offers many creatures, including the catlike Meicoomon from Digimon Adventure tri, and two of them accompany the player's avatar when wandering. Raising them proves more complicated than Cyber Sleuth's Digimon-tending system, as it relies on a web of stat requirements and possible evolutionary paths. Digimon never were low-maintenance pets.

Import Barrier: Not so bad for Digimon fans, though the story's all in Japanese.

Domestic Release: Very possible. With Cyber Sleuth just out, Bandai Namco is no doubt watching its reception closely, just to see how well Digimon does in North America.

Best Detail: Meicoomon's slightly deranged cat eyes.

There's something amusing about a game called Gundam Breaker dealing largely with the art and culture of Gundam model kits. One might assume it's all about the disappointment of accidentally snapping a Gundam piece in half when you're trying to fit the arm into the torso just like stupid instructions said.

But no, Gundam Breaker is all about Gundam models and virtual combat as seen through the innocently obsessive eyes of adolescents. Gundam Breaker 3 casts you as the new kid in town, and you soon fall in with a girl named Misa and her Gundam-fixated friends. As since this is the near future, your town has robot assistants and virtual Gunpla Battle arcades. Here you're dropped into Gundam arena battles where your assembled battle-mech roams around with melee weapons, firearms, shields, and other Gundam accoutrements.

You start off with a basic GM, but the game's toy-store selection of machines ranges everywhere from the Universal Century Gundams and Zakus to the comical Street Fighter-ish machines of G-Gundam and the mechas of poor neglected Gundam X, plus a bunch of little SD Gundams. And it's possible to customize them even more than Gundam Breaker 2 allowed. Arms and legs and heads are still interchangeable, and players can now mount weapons to just about any part of a Gundam's frame.

Import Barrier: There's some text to get through if you're playing the Japanese version, but you needn't bother. There's an Asian release of Gundam Breaker 3 with English menus and subtitles for the story scenes.

Domestic Release: Bandai Namco seems to favor Gundam Extreme Versus Force for now. It's due out here later in the year, and they don't want another Gundam to distract from it.

Best Detail: The arcade-owning old woman who uses Asimovian laws to rip off little kids at the prize-catcher machines.

I like some things about htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary. It has a frustrating trial-and-error mindset, but it casts a compelling atmosphere over its tale of an antlered girl and her firefly companions treading through a dilapidated factory. The creators liked the idea so much that they returned to it in the slightly more conventional Rose and the Old Castle of Twilight.

As in Firefly Diary, Rose and the Old Castle of Twilight finds a silent girl with strange surroundings and stranger powers. She has thorny vines growing from her back, and she's stuck in a mysterious castle seemingly leached of all color. Her only ally is an egg-shaped stone creature with a swirly emblem on it. I'd say it represents the Dreamcast, but this isn't a Neptunia game.

Rose and the swirly giant make their way through the castle's mist-shrouded confines in a side-scrolling fashion. Rose can drain the blood-red energy from certain things and give it to others, thus slowing down enemies or powering dead machines. The giant can't do that, but it can lift heavy objects and tote Rose around undamaged. The castle environs reveal little vignettes, and everything's wrapped in an eerie, abstract aura that enhances the somewhat mundane pull-this-lever puzzles. It's creepy and compelling, even if the slow pace leaves it far from Mario or Sonic's antics.

Import Barrier: The gameplay itself relies little on text, but the backstory's revelations need some knowledge of Japanese. And the Vita's still region-free.

Domestic Release: Likely. Nippon Ichi hasn't announced any plans for Rose and the giant, but they believe in Firefly Diary enough to port it to the PC.

Best Detail: A little crown on the giant's head in promotional artwork. It doesn't have one at the start of the game, so questions arise.

The Neptunia games are parodies in theory, and nothing parodies pop culture trends these days like sticking zombies somewhere for no good reason. Of course, one could easily argue that Megatagmension Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies wallows in the trend just as much as it satirizes it, but this wouldn't be the first time a Neptunia game tried to double dip. It's a series where anime heroines transform into sexed-up high-tech goddesses that symbolize game systems, and it mocks as much as it exploits.

MegaTagmension takes place at Game Academy, where the heroines of the Neptunia series try to prevent their school closing amid declining attendance and plummeting nationwide birth rates (timely, no?). Goofball heroine Neptune decides to make a zombie movie to get attention, with the normally distant Blanc deigning to write and direct it. Yet an actual zombie outbreak occurs, and the Neptunia heroines are left fighting for their comical lives while trying to make a horror flick turned documentary.

Like Neptunia U Action Unleashed, MegaTagmension sheds the RPG mechanics of the central Neptunia titles. Instead, it's a brawler where heroines roam arenas thronged with a mixture of undead beasts and typical Neptunia series enemies—such as blob-bears with zombie makeup and stitches. The playable cast is large, including everyone from twins Ram and Rom (they're the DS) to Peashy (who's the TurboGrafx/PC Engine), and it's possible to switch between two character mid-battle or tag-team with four players (hence the “tag” part, I presume). Sadly, the zombies in question don't include game-system metaphors, so you won't get to hack away at a legion of brain-eating Atari Jaguars or Bandai Pippins. These zombies appear to be ashen-skinned ghouls resembling obese otaku or apelike version of Large Marge from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

If nothing else, MegaTagmension is a small victory for those who still consider the PlayStation Vita and the Nintendo 3DS at war. Blanc is the avatar of Nintendo consoles, but the game with her first starring role lands on the Vita. Good for you, Vita.

I'm not one to pretend that games were uniformly better in eras past, but I will say that the years ate away at a Raiden game's appeal. In the 1990s, Raiden was a quarter-sucking ubershooter, luring us with the spectacle of blue lasers and machine guns destroying flights of jets and tanks and aerial battleships all more detailed than any other shooter at the arcade. And even if you died on the first stage, your ship at least burst apart with a dramatic crackling explosion that destroyed nearby foes. Very satisfying.

Twenty-five years and dozens of imitators later, developer Moss remembers a lot of the traditions for Raiden V. It has the tiny jet fighter navigating a storm of projectiles, the little medals (and Miclus dragon) that appear in wreckage, and the straight blue laser and tangling purple beam (and the red gattling barrage that I always avoided getting). And while it's still a vertical shooter with the usual doses of perspective twists, Raiden V evolved to match modern genre fixations. The weapons now upgrade extensively as the player gathers power-ups, and they can assume new targeting methods, like the purple lasers homing spheres. There's some minimal attempt at a storyline, as your commanding officers perpetually stare at you from one of the game's border displays.

The other side of the screen might prove more interesting, as it has readouts for the mission's progress and a section where fellow players can cheer each other on in a social-media simulacrum. Of course, they need to be playing at the same time to take full advantage of that system, and Raiden V seems a niche title. So shooter fans should stick together.

Experience Inc. is a force in dungeon-hack RPGs, and Ray Gigant may be their most ambitious yet...at least in appearances. It unfolds in a world that's once again laid waste by enormous monsters and once again given its only salvation through young man with a mysterious power. His name is Ichiya, and he soon meets up with like-minded saviors of the world, including the rough-edged Kyle and the gluttonous Nil. The storyline spans three different arcs, each focusing on one of the three protagonists and a new assortment of supporting characters.

Ray Gigant follows the Experience template for dungeon-crawls, as the player's trio of explorers forages through angular mazes and endures turn-based battles with various monsters. Yet it all looks sharper this time around: enemies show more detail, characters look like anime cutouts, and the titular Gigants get utterly enormous. Battles revolve around managing action points, and if you can't destroy foes within ten turns, Parasite Mode will deplete your life energy with each action. Faced with such a choice, you can ignite Slash Beat Mode, a rhythmic mini-game involving music-matching and self-mutilation. Fun times for all.

The more elaborate visuals of Ray Gigant come with a price, as it seems a little easier than Experience's previous RPGs. Still, it's an attempt at bringing dungeon hacks to an audience that demands more striking melodrama with their RPGs, and at that it may yet succeed. Ray Gigant is technically out already, but it's one of those games that tends not to get noticed. It's a digital-only release from Acttil. Or is it acttil? Either way, they're a small, quiet publisher.