A Mish-Mash of PSP/Vita Things

It's rare, or at least fairly uncommon, when I find that there's actually a few things I can talk about in any one night, and less so when they all concern the same general subject.  So when that happens, I really have to jump on it, and when it's about the PSP and/or the Vita, I'm certainly more than happy to do so.  Because with every day that passes, I love my PSP more and more, and my excitement for the Vita grows and grows.  I just hope that the memory sticks for it won't be super expensive, since I'm likely going to need a few.  (I know I have at least three 4 gig sticks for my PSP floating around.)

Which, as a quick side note, I'm actually kind of amazed at how much 4 Gigs can actually hold whenever I load up my PSP as of late.  I usually always have a UMD in (Lately, Valkyria Chronicles 2, clearly), and then on the stick, I have:  Three Minis (Young Thor, Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess, and Dracula - Undead Awakening), A PSN Game (Patchwork Heroes), Two PSOne Classics (Front Mission 3 and Alundra), Two Demos (No Heroes Allowed! and Yakuza:  Black Panther or whatever it got translated as.  Japanese-Only Demo I got from some Japanese website (legit) a while ago) and a full PSP game (Phantasy Star Portable 2).  On top of that, I have save data for all the aforementioned, plus other games, and quite a bit of downloaded content for LittleBigPlanet PSP.  (Free costumes and a couple handfuls of downloaded levels).  On top of that, some videos (a couple of them being ~30 Minutes long), and some Music that's likely uncompressed.  And I still have 198 MB left.  If I got rid of my videos, I'm sure I'd be able to download Xenogears, which I need to do at some point.  (Y'know, after I buy it.)

Anyways, first up for the PSP news is something rather unfortunate, of course.  I can't ever start these things on good notes, apparently.  In a Playstation Blog post about White Knight Chronicles 2, "Miki", someone working for D3 who's publishing White Knight Chronicles 2 here in the states let it be known in a comment that there are "Currently no plans to release White Knight Chronicles:  Origins for the PSP" in the west.  Which isn't surprising, nor is it particularly damning, but it's not pleasant, either.  The possibility is there, of course, for someone else to publish it, but it's hard to figure out who would.  I guess, if nothing else, I can always look into importing from Europe (since it, you know, won't be in Moonspeak then), but I'm not sure how Online would work then, if at all.

I'll just go ahead and state it here, rather than wait til the end to bring it up:  I honestly have no idea why all these developers don't just go PSN-Only release for some of these games they're worried won't sell.  If you only do digital (which, I prefer physical copies, but I'll take what I can get at this point) you save a lot in costs from not having to produce the physical components (manuals, disks, etc.), and in this case, your game won't just be selling to the PSP audience, but the future Vita audience.  You can't say that in the first few months of the Vita's launch, people won't be heavily using the Vita's PSP Backwards Compatibility with PSN titles.  I guess there's a chance everybody's waiting for the Vita to get closer in launch so it's 'fresher' in everyone's minds, but there seems to be very little point in that.  Get your shit up early and wait for the adopters to come your way.

Moving on to stay within the PSP spectrum for now, let's touch on Final Fantasy Type-O.  I'm not going to lie, until today, I gave less than a shit about the game, simply because it's a Squeenix product and, well, I haven't been up on those too much lately.  Between the fact that Final Fantasy Versus XIII is still in Pre-Production despite being, y'know, six years old, Final Fantasy XIII having absolutely no draw on me to buy it yet (even though I've seen it at my impulse price - $20), and Final Fantasy XIV tanking, Squeenix has pretty much fallen off my radar.  Well, except for one other thing, which I'll point out next.  However, a post at Siliconera detailing a few aspects of Type-O has taken it from "Meh" to "Holy shit, what" in four videos that only amount to a minute and a half of footage.  I won't bother linking them; they're all embedded in the Siliconera post.  I will, however, speak on my reactions to them.

The first video shows off a fairly impressive battle system that serves by showing that you'll be able (be forced?) to have a party of three that you can switch dynamically between, infusing a bit of strategy into the game as, of course, all three characters have their own strengths and weaknesses.  It's not an original concept by any stretch, and has fairly recently been utilized in the Tecmo-KOEI developed Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll.  Still, always a fairly neat little thing.  The second is neat in its own right as well, showing off the "Kill Sights" mechanic that will allow most enemies to be OHK'd if you attack at the exact right moment, which will assuredly be useful.  The third is a bit confusing to me because of the language barrier, but it's mostly just showing off getting mini-missions every now and then.  But the fourth is likely the one that instills the most "WANT" in me of them all.

I don't know what it is about Overworld maps, be it the general lack of them in recent years, a nostalgic feel from it since they were in all the older games, or what, but for whatever reason, that's what really amped me up.  Three methods of travel are provided in the video:  On Foot, Chocobo and Airship.  It's hard to say if there's going to be others (perhaps a boat or something for the bodies of water) but that alone is quite enough really; just enough to get us all (or at least me) thinking about Final Fantasy VII when similar travel methods were included.  Hopefully Squeenix figures out how/when they're going to localize this one, since I'll likely be buying it early; something I never thought I'd express for the game until now.

Moving on to Vita news, recently, Hiromichi Tanaka who is involved with Final Fantasy XI (you know, the Squeenix MMO that isn't hemorrhaging money) recently said they're investigating a Straight-Port of FFXI to Vita.  Wait, what?  That's about all that was said about it, honestly, which, my taking of "Straight-Port" means "Let's reuse as many assets as we can" before they have to, inevitably rewrite and reconfigure a good portion of things to get it running.  Which isn't a bad idea and, provided there's cross-play with PC/Vita, would probably be pretty fun for the ones playing.  Of course, if Vita owners could only play with other Vita owners, it's hard to say if they could make it worth a subscription, which hopefully means there wouldn't be one!  Hahaha, right, right.  It's not even a 'project' yet, as far as we can tell, so maybe it's not even worth touching on.  But hey, it could be cool.

Shinobido 2 has been mentioned a couple times recently, getting a brief mention at Andraisang for the rename of the game in Japan.  The Japanese title will simply be Shinobido 2: Sange, which is all the information they mentioned.  Siliconera, however, has a bit more news namely that the game's taking a page from the other "Way of the" game series (Way of the Samurai, of course; Shinobido 1 was subtitled Way of the Ninja) and will feature a branching storyline that can end in a multitude of ways, depending on the player's actions.  Which, given how much replayability that adds to Way of the Samurai games (granted, most of it is repetition), it's likely that you'll get quite a bit of bang for your buck with Shinobido 2.  (Interested more or less, Chance?)

Ahh.  That was a satisfying post.  Now to kick back with Valkyria Chronicles 2, grind on Killer Assault some more to unlock the last two Classmate Missions, and see how willing I am to grind on the map that is recommended for post-game grinding.  Grind, grind, grind.  But still fun!