Taro Omiya

Taro Omiya

Software Engineer, Game Designer

  • #WeeklyGameMusic: Snowy Valak Mountain / Night (Xenoblade Chronicles)

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    #WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.

    A bit late, but this week’s (last week’s?) music plays on Valak Mountain during night in the cult classic Xenoblade Chronicles. ACE+’s composition is simple, calming, almost silent tune that fittingly brings awe to a snowy mountain lit by glowing crystals. It’s one of the many beautiful pieces cleverly placed in the game that can be described as Nintendo’s answer to Skyrim.

    In a very unique premise, Xenoblade Chronicles‘s world is actually two massive giants that stands still after a long battle eons ago. In the present, the denizens of one giant, the Hums and Bionis respectively, is defending against the Mechons from the other giant, Mechonis. While the majority of the Hums cuddle at the back of the leg of Bionis for safety, the bookworm Shulk discovers how to utilize the magical sword, Monado. Not only are Mechons weak against the Monado, it also doesn’t physically harm Hums, and even provides the user the power to see the future. Feeling powerful, Shulk and his best friend, Reyn, attempts to defend their colony from a surprise Mechon attack. Naturally, by JRPG logic, this causes their next-door neighbor/girlfriend(?) to die, leaving the two in grief. Thus, the duo to go on a long journey in a revenge mission against the Mechons.

    Exploration is the highlight of this real-time action JRPG where taking on over 700 side quests, fighting area-specific enemies, or even just walking up to a check point gives you experience points. In battle mode, standing close to an enemy causes your character to automatically attack them in regular intervals. More important are the magic system: every playable character can use their magic as much as they want, as they don’t have an MP gauge, but every magic suffers from a cooldown where they are rendered unusable. This allows for a surprising amount of magic combos your party can dish out. For example, Reyn uses a lot of defensive and attention-seeking magic that causes the enemies to focus on him, while Shulk has a lot of position-based magic that are more effective on the sides or backs of enemies. Certain status effects, such as stuns, require a certain sequence of moves to be executed as well, requiring one to carefully configure their party for optimal use.

    Xenoblade Chronicles was originally developed for the Wii. There is a port available for the 3DS, and a Switch remake is in the works.

    Read more: #WeeklyGameMusic: Snowy Valak Mountain / Night (Xenoblade Chronicles)

  • #WeeklyGameMusic: Temple of Rain (Guacamelee!)

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    #WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.

    http://youtu.be/YZGrI4NI9Nw

    This week’s music, Temple of Rain, is mucho Mexican composition by Rom Di Prisco. It’s a bueno piece that makes you excitado for the majesty that is temple número uno. ¿I mean, what were you expecting, señor luchador? ¡This! ¡is! ¡The pun-filled! ¡Guacamelee!

    Guacamelee! is a metroidvania beat ’em up starring lone farmer Juan Aguacate in a pursuit to save El Presidente’s Daughter (the game reveals her name only after completing it; I’m unfortunately not that bueno). He also gets killed by the skeleton Carlos Calaca within the first cinco minutos. ¡Ay! Fortunately for Juan, he is sent to the parallel universe where the dead lives, and finds a legendario luchador mask that lets him travel between the living and the dead. With his newfound powers, he heads straight towards Carlos’ base to beat him once and for all. But first, he needs to break that Choozo statue. ¡It’s importante!

    Unlike the common metroidvania tropes, Juan doesn’t use weapons to fight against enemies. Like a true luchador, he fights with fists and kicks, leading to some surprisingly deep combat system. Each power he gains can be used not only to smack harder on his enemies, but can also increase his combo and reach to higher and/or farther ledges. A huge amount of focus in the game is in teeth-gritting hard platforming and gauntlets, and boy is it satisfying to get through this game’s many challenges. Combined with lots of universe-hopping, genuinely useful dodges, and a grapple & throw move that adds more to both puzzles and combat, and we have a winner.

    Guacamelee! was originally developed as a downloadable for Playstation 3 and Playstation Vita. It is also available of Xbox 360, Xbox One, Playstation 4, Wii U, and Steam for PC, Mac, and Linux.

    Read more: #WeeklyGameMusic: Temple of Rain (Guacamelee!)

  • Help Support Indies Need Booze Patreon Campaign!

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    Taro Omiya
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    Hey, all. I wanted to give a shout-out to a great friend who regularly sets up events called Indies Need Booze, allowing both fans and indie developers to have a great, casual time to talk each other and laugh out loud. These guys has helped me a lot, and it only seems fair that I return them the favor!

    indiesNeedBooze

    They recently started a Patreon campaign to help sustain their blog, and it’s an amazing deal. Starting at just $3 a month, you’ll receive a free game every month. Sounds excellent? Here’s the link to their campaign:

    http://www.patreon.com/indiesneedbooze

    Read more: Help Support Indies Need Booze Patreon Campaign!

  • #WeeklyGameMusic: Sunny Side Up (Toki Tori 2+)

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    Taro Omiya
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    #WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.

    Wait, a simple, jolly music in this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic? What is this madness!? Yup, it’s time to enjoy an easy-on-the-ears music called Sunny Side Up, composed by SonicPicnic and featuring the Royal Eggbert Choir. I’m glad relaxing tunes and cute graphics define Toki Tori 2+‘s presentation, because the game’s puzzles are incredibly difficult. Gah! You thought those later levels in Candy Crush Saga are hard? You’ve seen nothing.

    Toki Tori 2+ tells a simple tale: dark, evil matter encompasses the world, and you have to save your flightless friends and bring back peace to the world. What, were you expecting something more than that? Hey, I like this simple story structure, and how the game actually narrates through gameplay instead of giving you huge chunks of text. Anyway, Toki Tori 2+ uses a simple platformer-like control scheme: arrow keys to move, a button to sing, and another to stomp. The latter two are critical for solving puzzles, as they have various effects in the environment. Singing for example, attracts platform crabs, while stomping repels them. Using this simple system, Tori has to navigate through complex platformer puzzle without jumping once. And it’s insanely good at making your head scramble. I highly recommend it for puzzle lovers.

    Toki Tori 2+ was originally released on the Wii U. It is also available on Steam for PC, Mac, and Linux.

    Read more: #WeeklyGameMusic: Sunny Side Up (Toki Tori 2+)

  • #WeeklyGameMusic: Anna (Device 6)

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    #WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.

    Anna opened her tablet, launched the web browser, and clicked on a link. It was a blog post, first starting with a nonsensical sentence, “#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.” What followed immediately after that was a Youtube video. And right below that? A paragraph, describing exactly what she did, five seconds prior to her reading this sentence. Now it’s describing what she’s doing right now. That’s weird, she thought, but didn’t think twice about it as she clicked the Youtube video, Anna by Jonathon Eng. As she listened to its jolly and romantic tune, she heard a doorbell ring outside. Excited, she jumped up, answered the door, and carried her new package back to the kitchen: Simogo’s award-winning game, Device 6.

    Anna wakes up. She’s not in her kitchen anymore. In fact, she doesn’t even recognize this small, circular room. How did she get here? How much time has passed? Where did her phone and tablet go? Before going to full-panic mode, Anna stood up from the dusty wood-plank floor and thought carefully. “I was playing Device 6,” she recalled, “an interactive fiction that uses the most of my tablet’s capabilities.” Indeed, Device 6 was a fascinating mystery nove-, er, game. The word often twisted and turned, like shape poetry, requiring the player to turn their phone/tablet to read further. Every once in a while, old vintage photos and sound effects would pop-up to help the reader’s imagination. Most important of all were the puzzles. “Oh, the puzzles,” Anna thought, “like that part where there was a yellow frame with a 4-digit number on it! The minor detail seemed unnecessary until the game revealed an image of an electric safe — locked by a 4-digit password — that you can interact with. It was a wow-moment, where I realized the clues to the game’s puzzles were scattered around in the story’s text itself.”

    “But wait, I feel like I’m forgetting something important,” Anna pondered, “how did that game start? What were the first few sentences?” She closed her eyes, pushed hard on her forehead, until finally, it came to her. “Yes, the game started like this:”

    Anna wakes up. She’s not in her kitchen anymore. In fact, she doesn’t even recognize this small, circular room.

    A few, silent moments passes before Anna exclaims, “well shit, this is creepy!” Shaken and confused, she scans around the room until she find a large, wooden door. “Gotta start somewhere,” she told herself, and carefully approaches the door. As she grabs its doorknob, she notices a yellow frame hanging next to the door, with the number, “2006” imprinted on the bottom. “That’s going to be important,” she noted, and pulled the doorknob open.

    Notice: Bowler Cap, Corp. would like to kindly remind you that Device 6 is available for iPad and iPhones. Please enjoy, and have a nice day!

    Read more: #WeeklyGameMusic: Anna (Device 6)

  • #WeeklyGameMusic: Unreasonable Behaviour (Off)

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    Taro Omiya
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    #WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.

    This week, we listen to yet another sad music, although it’s a rather different kind of sad compared to Gone Home. I’m also going to be unconventional, and select a dark track, Unreasonable Behaviour by Alias Conrad Coldwood for this week’s cult hit freeware game, OFF. Compared to the more popular Peper Steak — an offbeat swing music that plays during the normal battle sequences — Unreasonable Behaviour brooding tone better fits with the actual mood and narrative of OFF: dark, twisted, and a terrifying deconstruction of JRPG tropes.

    Developed by yet another one-man team, OFF is a very French take of JRPG (FRPG?). You, the “puppeteer,” are suddenly dropped into an unusual world where you take control of the Batter. A quick walk leads Batter to a Cheshire cat named Judge, who politely introduces both the Batter and the player to a world composed not of earth, plants, wind, and water, but rather, metal, meat, gas, and plastic. What is there to do in such a bizarro world? Simple: do what the main character says, and purify the world from evil, first starting with the ghosts, and eventually to the violent guardians of this universe.

    Much like the older Final Fantasy games, OFF uses random encounter and an archaic turn-based battle system where the party attacks after their cooldown time is over. This does mean that while selecting an attack, enemies can attack your party as well. That said the battle system isn’t exactly known to appeal the fans. Rather, it is the fourth-wall breaking story that progressively gets more complex and violent that turned this game into a cult hit. Much like Spec Ops: The Line, the player’s action is constantly in question as he or she blindly follows the Batter’s direction…and watch in horror as the world steadily loses its unique colors.

    OFF is a free PC game that was originally written in French. A translated version is freely available at Starmen.net.

    Read more: #WeeklyGameMusic: Unreasonable Behaviour (Off)