The X Button

Pirate License

Well, Fantasy Life is finally out. Level-5 announced the game for the DS way back in 2009, when it was still a viable platform. While it's switched over to the 3DS, Fantasy Life hasn't changed all that much in its premise: you're a humble citizen of a fantasy kingdom, and there you'll live out your life in one of two dozen different professions. Many of your fellow commoners are worried by an inauspicious shadow seen on the moon, but you can't fret much about that when there's a job to do. And that job will be chosen from an extensive list that includes knights, students, postal carries, hunters, fishers, tailors, fortune tellers, farmers, merchants, alchemists, miners, cooks, loggers, ruin explorers, blacksmiths, and acrobats. It's a bit like the Fable series, though your customizable Fantasy Life avatar is a bit cuter and less detailed. Like a Mii or a Professor Layton character, the people of Fantasy Life are little munchkins of all capabilities, and they can be customized to suit any calling. It's appropriate that their world is a uncommonly charming place of watercolor-like backdrops and Nobuo Uematsu music.

Fantasy Life mixes the familiar pursuits of a video game with more intriguingly mundane ideas. Taking on the role of a warrior leads to relatively simple quests and battles with monsters, while adopting a farming life results in a Harvest Moon experience. Yet Fantasy Life isn't about the complex mechanics so much as it is the little details: customizing an avatar, raising pets, and building up “Happiness Points” while gaining rank and money. The game also allows four-player quests, bringing to mind Dragon Quest IX more than anything. Despite all of the comparisons, however, Fantasy Life has its own little style, and open-world experiments in games rarely come cuter.

Import Barrier: There's a good deal of Japanese text to get through, and then there's that region-lock that the 3DS has going.

Chances of a Domestic Release: Despite Level-5 promoting the game with English press releases, there's no sign of a North American version of Fantasy Life.

It's time to check in with the Inazuma Eleven series. Along with the Professor Layton franchise, Inazuma Eleven ensures that Level-5 has enough money to throw at potentially unprofitable projects like Guild01 and the above-mentioned Fantasy Life. Inazuma Eleven's expanded well into anime and manga, and it's now launched its second generation of soccer-centric melodrama with Inazuma Eleven Go. Set ten years after the original series, Go (or GO, as it's capitalized) introduces a new protagonist in Matsukaze Tenma. He's inspired to take up the sport after witnessing one of the original Inazuma team using his soccer skills to rescue a puppy. The second Go game, Chrono Stone, finds Tenma back at his junior high, where all is not well. The school no longer has a soccer club, and Tenma soon learns that it's part of a mad scheme hatched by a cabal of time-traveling villains who want to erase the sport of soccer from the very fabric of time. Of course, this can only be countered by Tenma and his teammates playing soccer games throughout different eras of history.

It may be the first soccer game to feature Oda Nobunaga and Joan of Arc, but Chrono Stone's still an Inazuma Eleven title. This means that it follows the conventions of a soccer RPG as the player recruits new team members and manages their tactics. It also means that all of the characters pull off ridiculous special moves, and it's not uncommon to see Tenma armor up like some Saint Seiya superhero when he takes a goal shot. As with many games pitched for the younger set, Chrono Stone comes in two varieties, with certain teams, players, and special moves available only in the Neppu or Raimei edition. If it works for Pokemon, it can work for soccer games in the age of dinosaurs.

Import Barrier: Relatively high, considering all the text-intensive commands and customization. Oh yeah, and the 3DS region lock.

Chances of a Domestic Release: Slim. None of the previous Inazuma Eleven games was released here (though the first made it to Europe), and Chrono Stone probably won't go against that trend.

Early reports had it that Romance Dawn would adapt the One Piece prototype manga, a test-drive that author Eiichiro Oda called Romance Dawn. This would've been an interesting concept and a first among anime-derived games, but such was not to be. Romance Dawn is just another One Piece game.

Well, let's be fair. Most One Piece games are action-adventure titles, while Romance Dawn frames the manga's earliest story arcs as an RPG. It's also voluminous in its scope, apparently using the lengthy genre-favored format to include every One Piece plotline from the East Blue Saga to the Paramount War. That's about sixty volumes of manga and several hundred anime episodes. The game opens with Monkey D. Luffy's first steps as a pirate, and his party grows to include Nami, Usopp, Franky, Zoro, Sanji, Nico Robin, Brook, and the various forms of Tony Tony Chopper. Their story is accompanied by half an hour of new animation, and much of it involves characters crying, from a young Luffy to a slightly older Nami.

Romance Dawn follows modern conceits in turning One Piece into an RPG. Enemies are visible outside of combat, negating any random encounters. The game's battles are turn-based and menu-driven, with an understandably heavy emphasis on special attacks that recreate characters' signature moves. So it follows that the game's character models all look fairly sharp. Romance Dawn is a basic attraction as far as RPGs go, but it may well be one of the longest One Piece games on record.

Import Barrier: There's no region lock on PSP games, and I'm confident in saying that anyone who brings a copy West already knows the One Piece story by heart.

Chances of a Domestic Release: Minimal. The game's done well in Japan, but there's little interest in late-stage PSP/Vita games based on anime. We might well see the upcoming One Piece: Pirate Warriors 2 over here, but not Romance Dawn.

Anarchy Reigns walked a rough road. It arrived in Japan under the name Max Anarchy back in July, but Sega curiously delayed its North American and European releases until 2013 (despite the Japanese release being region-free and translated). Daunted by the game's low sales in Japan, Sega dropped the price of Anarchy Reigns to thirty bucks and positioned it as the first big release of the new year in North America. Such hardships often befall Platinum Games, whose stretch of underappreciated fare goes all the way back to their Studio Clover days of Godhand and Okami. No flowery endeavor, Anarchy Reigns is a follow-up to the hyperviolent MadWorld, and it plants itself in the lawless urban expanse of Altambra. The game's single-player mode bifurcates, focusing on MadWorld's vicious Jack Cayman in the Black Side and the somewhat more moral Leonhardt Victorion in the White Side. They're both in Altambra to hunt down a gentleman named Maximillian Caxton; Jack at the behest of Max's daughter, Leo as part of a murder investigation. Finish the game with both, and a Red Side opens.

The storyline of Anarchy Reigns merely frames the real attraction: a whole bunch of multiplayer modes. There's a standard selection of tag-team deathmatches, cage matches, survival modes, the sportsmanlike Death Ball, and a 16-player brouhaha. All of this makes thorough use of the game's extensive cast. Alongside Jack and Leo, you'll see MadWorld expats Blacker Baron, Mathilda, Rin Rin, and Big Bull, the latter two of whom apparently survived their gruesome demises. The newcomers run the gamut of MadWorld-inspired outlandishness: silver-clad Sasha Ivanoff uses ice in her attacks, Nikolai wears and wields Tesla coils, cyborg Durga packs a revolver-like cannon in his knee, Garuda transforms into a jet, the ninja Zero is…well, comparatively generic, the unflatteringly named Oinkie morphs into a were-lizard, the mutant Douglas (yes, Douglas) carries two pilebunkers, Rin Rin's older sister Fei swings a trident, and her younger sister Ai packs electric nunchucks. Bayonetta's witch-gunner heroine also appears, though she's initially available only with GameStop reservations.