​Because buying new video games each week is expensive, I’m back to talk about a game that won’t be released until 24 weeks after this school year ends!

Pokémon was first introduced to the world in 1996 with the video games Pokémon Red & Green (released everywhere but Japan as Red & Blue) and since then has spawned six sequels (not counting special editions of the same games and counting each pair of games as one), three remakes of said games, several spin-off games, a trading card game, an anime spanning 19 seasons and counting, 20 theatrical movies, like nine different manga series, a live musical, an orchestra, whatever the heck you would call this, and so many other things that I don’t even know about!  Presidential candidates have quoted the movies in their campaigns, there was a scene in Paper Towns where they just randomly started singing the theme song, everyone knows about Pokémon! Go up to anyone and ask them if they know what Pokémon is, and they will most likely at least know who Pikachu is. Do you know who Pikachu is? Of course you do! And now to celebrate the 20th anniversary of this multi-billion dollar franchise, Nintendo is making yet another Pokémon game, because twenty-six isn’t enough. And since they’ve apparently run out of colors, the new games will be called Pokémon Sun & Moon!

We don’t know a whole lot about the game, but there are some things we do know. Some of these things can be found in the official Japanese trailer… that doesn’t really show the game until one minute in and the rest of the trailer is about some kid moving to a new school in Hawaii or something, I’m not sure. There’s also the the 20th anniversary video from the Nintendo Direct that happened earlier this year that gives a bit of information.

​This new adventure takes place in the Alola region, which seems to be a tropical location based on Hawaii, and it looks amazing. We also see our basic avatar selection, which has four male choices and four female choices, which is a whopping two more choices than the last games! In the last game, character customization happened more after the starting screen because you could buy more clothes for your avatar, so I assume it’s no different here. In the 20th anniversary video everything goes by really fast, but by slowing down to 0.25x normal speed (thank you, Google, for making that an option) you will see some concept art of vehicles like trucks and cars that appear to have both humans and pokémon riding in them, leading people to think maybe vehicle riding will be a thing in the game.

​Well, we don’t know a whole lot about Sun & Moon so far, but from the little we do know it looks like this is shaping up to be an amazing game! I haven’t been able to really get into the Pokémon games themselves before, but maybe this will be the one to finally capture my interest. It’s coming in November, and I can’t wait for that time to come around.

What do you get when you combine Mega Man, Contra, and the old west? Two game cartridges smashed together and sent back in time to be crushed into the earth of 19th century America. But if you take that question way less literally, you’d probably get something like Gunman Clive!

Gunman Clive HD Collection is a collection of the two independent video games created by Hörberg Productions, Gunman Clive & Gunman Clive 2. These games are basically what would happen if you took the classic gameplay of Mega Man and put it in the old west (I know I said that already, but there is no better way to describe it.) You play as Clive, a… man with a gun… and that’s all we really know about him. Right at the beginning of the game it becomes clear that his mission is to rescue Ms. Johnson from a bunch of bandits. Gunman Clive 2 has Clive traveling the world to find the leader of the bandits, also. The story of this game is not important in the slightest, so I don’t really care that it’s absolutely nothing more than a cliche “save the person who happens to be in danger” story. The real important part is just about everything that isn’t the story!

The gameplay is very simple. Clive can run, jump, shoot, and climb up ladders. You shoot enemies to kill them. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done by quite a lot of 8-bit era video games, but why fix what isn’t broken? Clive also can pick up special powerups that make the gun act differently until Clive gets hit. One of them shoots bullets in three directions, one of them shoots slower but more powerful bullets, one of them shoots slow homing bullets that look like tomatoes, one of them is a laser beam that shoots a fast beam through everything (Wait, THEY HAD LASER GUNS IN THE 1800s? WHERE WAS THIS IN HISTORY CLASS?!)

Oh, but Clive isn’t the only player on the roster, there are three others. You can also play as Ms. Johnson (which turns the story into a role reversal of Clive’s story), who moves a bit slower and can’t run while shooting, but she can also hover in the air for a short amount of time like Princess Peach in almost every game she’s ever been playable in (though strangely not Super Princess Peach. You give the princess her own game and don’t let her use her most famous ability? Oh right, this isn’t a Super Princess Peach review. Sorry.) Next up there’s Chieftain Bob, who uses a slow-moving spear to attack enemies up close. This character tends to be the game’s hard mode. The final playable character is not one of the game’s heroes, but one of the most deadly enemies in the entire game. THE DUCK. It’s a duck. Why wouldn’t it be a duck? The duck moves as fast as Clive, can jump in mid-air multiple times, is always at ducking height, and cannot attack in any way, meaning this mode also skips all boss fights. It is a really bizarre and random way to play, and I’m not entirely sure why it exists. When I first unlocked the mode my thoughts were basically “Wait, what? WHAT?! WHY?! Eh, who cares, it’s hilarious and fun.”
The art of this game is one of the greatest parts. The art style has this cool cell-shaded sketchbook kind of feel to it that especially looks amazing in the HD remake. The color scheme is mostly sepia-tone, while certain objects are different colors to make them stand out, like how the bandits are blue to see them better and tell them apart from Clive and how Ms. Johnson is pink… because potatoes, I don’t really know why. The soundtrack is mostly really nice and calming western-style music, and that combined with the color scheme and art style makes this a really relaxing game.
​
Honestly if you’ve played any 2D-platformer with the abilities to run, jump, duck, and shoot, then you’ll not find a whole lot new from Gunman Clive. But the gameplay that’s been done before combined with everything else makes this a really fun and well made game that I’d say deserves my rating of 8 out of 10.

Now the main purpose of this article is just gushing over how awesome virtual reality is and how excited I am that virtual reality is happening, and it’s not very difficult to get. I mentioned the cardboard thing, that’s the Google Cardboard, which is basically a pair of goggles that you put your phone in that can make it into a rather basic VR headset, and this is absolutely incredible! I’ve heard that a lot of people are skeptical of the idea of paying 700-something dollars on a huge VR headset that doesn’t have a whole lot of already compatible games compared to just about every other console out there. Though according to this graph, almost 207.2 million people in the US alone have smartphones, and nearly 80% of those play games on their phone. They’ve pretty much got the device already, they just need to put down $15 extra for what is essentially a cardboard box and download some apps. It’s rather simple when you think about it.
​
Another incredible bit of technology that has convinced me that after I fell asleep last night my parents shoved me into one of those hyper-sleep chamber things from Futurama and I woke up this morning in a future where the laws of probability caught up with everyone and created exact copies of the people alive in 2016 and the year counter just rolled over back to 0000 after 9999 because they never bothered to fix the far-future version of Y2K(I’ve put way too much thought into this, haven’t I?) is 360 videos. A 360 video is essentially a video that you are able to rotate in any direction! This is technology that previously could not be imagined outside of a Star Trekepisode. Now it’s a standard feature on YouTube! If you have a Google Cardboard you can even make it move with your head, which is an amazing use of virtual reality. Now we can be fully immersed in the timeless tale of the pop-tart cat who flies through space on a rainbow set to annoying music. Or less stupidly, being able to see a live performance of The Lion King at every angle!  This could revolutionize how movies are made, how did I somehow miss this when it became a thing?!

So Nintendo just announced that their latest console, the Nintendo NX, is planned to be released in March 2017. Even though March is only ten months away, we still barely know anything about this device. We honestly don’t even know if that picture up there even is the NX, that’s just a patent Nintendo filed that people think is the controller. Nintendo has said they are going to announce news about the console later this year, yet nobody knows exactly when that will be. As somebody who is extremely excited about this machine that may just be the future of gaming, I’ve decided to compile everything we know so far about the console and try to make sense of things.

First of all, Nintendo claims that their new console will be very different from their previous systems. This is definitely a good thing to note because their current claims to fame, the Wii & Wii U, are so similar that from its announcement a ton of people just thought the Wii U was a controller for the Wii. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the DS, the DS Lite, the DSi XL, the 3DS, the 3DS XL, the 2DS, the New 3DS (that is seriously the name they went with,) the New 3DS XL, and the Ultimate New 3DS XL Turbo Encore HD Remix & Knuckles Featuring Dante From The Devil May Cry Series: Game of the Year Edition (okay I made that last one up, but you get the idea.) Even their first two home consoles were the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, because adding “super” to anything automatically makes it sound cooler. It’s become an inside joke at this point that Nintendo is getting repetitive with their products, but they plan on this new console being completely new, which is definitely nice.
​
Nintendo has also said that their console will have “industry-leading chips” that could compete with the Xbox One and Playstation 4. This is interesting because Nintendo always seemed to try and stay one generation behind the competitors in terms of technology in order to reduce costs. The Nintendo 64 was even still using cartridges when everybody else switched to discs in the fifth generation. Japanese business newspaper Nikkei Shimbun also speculated that the NX might run on an Android operating system.

But honestly the most important thing about these new consoles for me are the games, but we don’t know a whole lot in that department. The only two confirmed titles so far are Dragon Quest XI and the new Legend of Zelda game, which will be released on both the Wii U and NX, much like how the launch ofTwilight Princess was. Even as someone who isn’t a huge fan of The Legend of Zelda or Dragon Quest I am rather excited about both games, but I kind of wish we knew more about the launch game library this console will have.
​
I feel like we knew a lot more about the Wii U ten months before its launch than we know about the NX right now. I’m honestly confused why we don’t know more, especially since in some stores you can already preorder it. Nintendo says they will release more information about it later this year, but not at their E3 conference for some reason (you know, the most important event of the year for game developers and publishers?) I really do look forward to hearing more about this console, and I have high hopes that it will live up to Nintendo’s legacy.

There are many questions that many people have asked over the years and were never given answers to. “How did our species get to where it is?,” “Are we alone in the universe?,” and “Why are so many people still voting for Donald Trump?” are only three famous questions that may ever be perfectly answered in our lifetime. Yet there is one question that many people have had different answers to over the years that we might finally have an answer to. “Why did the chicken cross the road?” For many years people have pondered this question, yet I believe this question has finally been given closure. The answer? It didn’t. Mickey Mouse did.

Disney Crossy Road, created by Hipster Whale, the same company responsible for Pac-Man 256 which I’ve previously reviewed, is a spin-off of the popular mobile game Crossy Road, with one notable addition. All of the characters are from Disney (yes, shocking, I know.) The characters range from a rather wide selection of characters from the most popular Disney franchises, includingMickey Mouse & Friends (it just isn’t a major Disney crossover without them,)The Haunted Mansion, The Lion King, Toy Story, Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, Inside Out, and Zootopia. In these franchises we have representation from basically every character in each of them that you paid attention to for at least thirty seconds in each film (or in The Haunted Mansion‘s case, amusement park ride,) so you have a lot to choose from. Although this does seem like a very small range of franchises in Disney’s history which will hopefully be expanded upon in the future. I mean, were those really the only great Disney franchises they could think of?

Alright, game devs, for your orientation I’m gonna clue you in on the history of this company. As I’m sure you all know, it all started with a mouse {blah, blah, blah} and then in 1969, The Haunted Mansion was opened and became {blah, blah, blah, blah, blah} most of the top animators expected The Lion King to fail in comparison to {blah, blah} we partnered with Pixar and made Toy Story, the first fully CGI {blah blah blah} Jackson, have you just been playing Crossy Roadthis whole time?
JACKSON: Ummm… maybe?
Pay attention or you’re being transferred to Junction Point Studios.
JACKSON: I thought they didn’t exist anymore?
Exactly.

Even some of the choices of characters within those franchises were strange to me. For example, the Haunted Mansion cast of course includes famous characters like the hitchhiking ghosts and Madame Leota (you know, that head inside a crystal ball who summons ghosts,) and also includes the old groundskeeper with the dog that appears right when you enter the graveyard jamboree (odd choice, but makes sense) a maid (…I think the movie might have had one, but the ride didn’t,) and … a spider. Not a special spider, just a normal spider. … Why?

The gameplay is mostly the same from Crossy Road. You move one space at a time on the grid and have to move as far along the road as you can before you’re squished by cars or whatever obstacles happen to be blocking the road. There is some variety depending on what world you’re in. For instance, in theToy Story world you will have to dodge bouncing balls (well, more like blocks, thanks to the voxel-based art style) that bounce on springs, adding more challenge. Also some of the coins which earn you more characters if you collect enough of them are in harder to reach places, so you can’t just only move forward and side-to-side anymore if you want to get more cool stuff.

The art design is really great looking. The characters and locations are all represented in an 8-bit voxel-based style that looks amazing. They also did a great job of making each character and object recognizable even though they are rendered completely differently than normal. Some of the characters also have some parts of how they work that make them unique, like how the Imaginary Boyfriend from Inside Out creates clones every step he takes (and can even jump on top of them!) All of the worlds in the game also look completely unique and look like they’re supposed to, all the time set to chiptune remixes of famous Disney songs.
​
Disney Crossy Road is fun, but not perfect. The characters and environments are great and give a lot of variety and the levels don’t just feel like Crossy Road with different characters, but the small number of franchises represented is sort of distracting. The graphics and music on the other hand are very good. I give this about a 7 out of 10.

I sat down and talked to Alec Wong, Rancho Cotate’s top tennis player, who has recently committed to SSU, to talk about his season and experiences with tennis thus far.

I asked what his favorite thing about tennis is and he had this to say: “Just the competitive spirit. Being by yourself and not having to rely on somebody else, that’s probably my favorite thing about tennis.”

I asked Wong how he prepares for the game of tennis and his answer sort of surprised me. “Probably like, a summer normal day, would probably spend, 8 to 10 hours a day. … I probably wake up at like, 4:30 in the morning, have breakfast, leave by five, and then I’ll be out there ’til about 10:30. … On a school day it would probably look like, five hours sometimes. Like before my mornings usually start pretty early and after school I’ll still have to do it.” In all honesty I don’t know a whole lot about real life tennis, so I was surprised that you need to practice so often. I guess getting up at 4:30 AM is just something I don’t normally do… I’m not sure if I’ve ever done it actually.

He says that his biggest challenge in the sport is “finding the right way to play against certain people, and not getting mad to the point of wanting to break my racket every single time.”

Something else that somewhat surprised me is that tennis can actually come with severe injuries. “I actually partially tore my shoulder muscle. I was out for a good six months.” For some reason tennis always felt to me like one of the safer major sports, without any of the intense physical contact of football or the sticks that could easily shatter human bones being swung at high speeds of baseball.

James Henry, who was also there, asked Wong “When you’re on the tennis court, what goes through your mind?” Wong responded “Half the time I’m halfway playing mad, ’cause you play better when you’re mad!” I can definitely say that when you get angry during a game then at least I usually go into a phase I like to call LDTM (Let’s Do This Mode™) and do a lot better through sheer determination… usually. Of course, some skill is required to be there in the first place.

I definitely learned a bit about tennis from this interview, and understand how Alec Wong became this school’s best tennis player.

DISCLAIMER: “Let’s Do This Mode” is not currently trademarked, so feel free to use it if you want.

It came as a surprise to most people when it was announced that Nintendo was going to be making smartphone apps, considering that the last time they released their games on a non-Nintendo system ended up with… less than great results (But that was all just a horrible nightmare that some Nintendo fans had all at once and accepted as fact even though it wasn’t real, right? Right, it never happened. IT NEVER HAPPENED!!!!) Although when Nintendo also announced that their first app was not exactly a game as much as a social media app, people were even more surprised. I am not known to be of the social butterfly type, but I am known to be of the Nintendo-is-awesome type (and also the how-did-I-miss-that-360-YouTube-videos-are-a-thing-seriously-have-you-seen-this-we-are-in-the-future type, but that’s getting off topic), so it was of great importance that I downloaded the app. Let’s see how Miitomo turned out.
​
So when you first start out the game you have to create a mii, basically an avatar for yourself. You have the option to either create one from scratch or let the game generate one based on your face. It will create a lot of different options and it is somewhat accurate, a definite improvement over the facial recognition of the Wii U and 3DS. I still decided to create my own, but the ones they gave me were mostly okay. The character creation options are rather extensive, but nothing new from the Wii U and 3DS Mii Maker. After that you choose your voice (though no matter what you choose for that you’ll inevitably end up sounding like Siri) and personality, a feature and interface taken straight from one of Nintendo’s previous games Tomodachi Life. A lot of things in this app were taken from Tomodachi Life actually, from the robotic voice to the clothing shop to the apartment your mii lives in. This made a lot of people think this was just an HD mobile remake of Tomodachi Life when it was first announced (for the record, Nintendo, I would be totally down for an actual Tomodachi Life HD. Just saying.)

Your character starts off with a basic white shirt and gray sweatpants, but with the in-game store you can buy new clothes to make you stand out from everyone else. Speaking as somebody who absolutely dreads having to try on new clothes in real life, most of my time in this game has been spent trying on outfits for my avatar! Mostly because just about every option is amazing and only a few coins can be earned by answering questions and hearing friend’s questions, so I have to be careful what I buy or else I’ll need to use real money to buy more coins. Oh right, answering questions! I didn’t mention that yet. Well…

Once you’re done creating your character, they step into their apartment and ask you questions. Stuff like your favorite food, your favorite TV show, what you’re favorite thing about cats is, what the last thing you bought was, what you did last weekend, what you did a few minutes ago, at which point you realize you are being stalked by yourself. But wait, there’s more! If you connect the app to Facebook and any of your Facebook friends use the app, you can send them friend requests so you can stalk them and vice versa! I say this but I realize that it doesn’t really do any worse than Facebook or Twitter. This app is also how I’ve actually learned a lot about my friends that I didn’t know before. I never would have guessed that one of my friends really likes Courage the Cowardly Dog, but Miitomo let me find that out without having to do any of that pesky “actually interacting with other human beings!” I joke about that but it actually is a good thing for anti-social people like me. You aren’t technically asking the person, you’re just asking a weird video game version of yourself.
There’s two other features of the app: Miifoto and Miitomo Drop. Miifoto is basically a mode where you can use miis to create different photos. You can also add them into photos on your camera roll so you can see your miis in real life, in case you want to add your digital self to vacation photos or high five yourself. Miitomo Drop has you basically playing human pachinko to win outfits for your mii, but it costs game tickets or coins to play.
​
So far this app is surprisingly fun, though there isn’t a whole lot to do. Nintendo has said that in the future there will be more content than at this moment, so it could get better. I rate this a 6 out of 10.

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars was a collaboration between game developers Square and Nintendo that resulted in a well-beloved game that was praised for the vastly different gameplay than any other in the Mario franchise as well as including a large cast of new characters, giving existing characters their own personality, and giving it a story far beyond the basic “the princess has been kidnapped by Bowser for like the fifth time this month! You need to save her because after all these repeated kidnappings the kingdom still hasn’t increased security in the slightest for some reason!”

Nintendo later tried to make a game like Super Mario RPG themselves, resulting in Paper Mario, which included partners for Mario that you have different abilities and you can swap them out at any time, as well as a modified battle system that keeps the ‘timed hits’ feature and adds badges that give you extra moves in battle, modify your stats, or just make your hammer sound like a frog.Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door took these elements and improved them, as well as having one of the best and most complex stories in the entire franchise. Super Paper Mario decided to return to the classic platformer gameplay of previous Mario games, but still included elements of the previous games like the partner system, badges to increase stats (in the form of cards that let you deal more damage to certain enemies) growing stronger as the game goes on, and of course an original and entertaining story. So when it came time to create the next installment in this series known and praised for a complex battle system, partners with special abilities, growing stronger as you level up, great characters, and an original story, what did Nintendo decide to do? They of course made the most logical decision of all. Get rid of all of it.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star was very disappointing to just about everybody who liked the previousPaper Mario games, mostly because they ditched the battle system, partner mechanic, any sense of progression beyond stages on a world map, and last but not even close to least the great characters and story, for… stickers. They also specifically made a point to only include characters from the main Mario games. Their thought process sounded somewhat logical on paper (no pun intended), as most other games in the Mario franchise can get along just fine with little to no story and only preexisting characters. Though they apparently completely forgot that one of the greatest things about the other Paper Mario games is that they go outside the normal boundaries of classic Mario elements.
​
Many fans, including me, hoped that Nintendo would fix these problems in the next Paper Mariogame. Things looked promising with the well-received crossover with the Mario & Luigi series,Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam (only Nintendo can find a way to make a crossover with yourself work. Well, besides SEGA). Though with the announcement of Paper Mario: Color Splash, people feel like history may be repeating itself.

​The new gimmick in this game is the paint hammer, which I’m sure they came up with by looking at the success of Splatoon and then saying “Let’s make a Mario game like that!” The paint hammer is used to spread paint across color-less objects to reveal characters and items, including cards, which seem to give you an attack to use in battle. At the moment, the cards seem like a repeat of the stickers from the previous game. As far as partners go, they have a paint bucket. So far it seems they might just serve the same purpose as Kersti in Sticker Star, who was pretty much Little Miss Exposition. There is talk about a story where the color has been drained from from the island, so maybe there could be something there. No signs of leveling up stats existing, but we haven’t seen a whole lot of the battle system in general.
​
So, will Color Splash be worth buying? At this point, I don’t know for sure. I mean, there’s only so much you can really show in 1 minute of footage, and that’s all we have so far. I will be looking for new information on the game. I’m looking forward to it. Maybe Miyamoto learned something.

I don’t know about you but I love musicals. I honestly have no idea why. Another thing I love is video games (yes, I know this is a shocking development.) Unfortunately, video games are not a medium that really does musicals very often, and most musical video games I can think of are rhythm based. I actually googled musical video games, and I saw things like Guitar Hero, PaRappa the Rapper, Bit.Trip, Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA, and Alvin and the Chipmunks, but no normal games that happen to be musicals. Yet I have found a game that is not a rhythm game, but a collection of mini-games that just happens to be a musical. Where did this rather fun and unique idea come from? Adult Swim Games, of all places.

Our player character, Peter, wants to be a director at his childhood theater, only to find that it’s about to be shut down due to a production of Peter Pan turning out worse than Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. So Peter goes on a quest to save his local theater, and eventually uncovers the full story that was much stranger than he originally thought. How does he plan to do this? Through the power of spontaneously bursting into musical numbers! (well, that and playing micro-games, but the music is awesome, man!)
​
The gameplay is heavily inspired by Nintendo’s WarioWare franchise, the creator even saying he made the game to be what he imagined WarioWare was as a child (unfortunately, WarioWare does not have nearly as many musical numbers. Although it did have a few now that I think about it.) Each level you play a selection of micro-games that each run on a timer of usually five seconds. The games are very fun and each micro-game goes along with the theme of the level. There’s a set number of micro-games you need to clear before moving onto the next level. Of course before and after every level you get to hear what’s happening in the story via MUSICAL NUMBERS! Have I mentioned how much I love the musical numbers? The people they got to sing aren’t just average everyday voice actors. They actually got real Broadway talent for this! One of the characters is apparently voiced by Emily Skeggs who was in a play called Fun Home and I don’t really recognize most of the cast because I don’t know much about Broadway actors… but I do know Grant Kirkhope was in this and he’s a famous video game composer that did a bunch of stuff for Rare in the mid-90s to early 2000s including Banjo-Kazooie which is cool and apparently also did CityVille 2 and YOU CAN BUY THE WHOLE SOUNDTRACK ON iTUNES HERE IT’S SO AWESOMEasdfghjkl;’456+ I really need to calm down.

Developed by: Monolith Soft
Genre: Tactical role-playing game
Game System: Nintendo 3DS
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Crossovers are an opportunity for several franchises to merge into one work. There are many ways that this can and has been done, although quite a lot of these ways are stuck to the realms of fan-fiction. This makes things all the more special when the companies that own those properties actually come together to make something of their own. Bandai Namco, Sega, Capcom, and Nintendo have all come together in the past in different combinations, but it’s happened relatively rarely that they all work on one game together. Now these four famous video game companies have come together once again in this… honestly rather strange crossover event.

The story goes, as much as I understand, that portals have been opening up throughout the world. These portals have been causing parts of the past, future, and alternate dimensions to merge into one time and dimension. So the people from all of these different franchises, including but not limited to Resident Evil, Mega Man X, Namco x Capcom, Soul Calibur, Virtua Fighter, Ace Attorney, Fire Emblem, Street Fighter, Tekken, and most excitingly for me the long awaited return of the greatest commercial mascot of all time Segata Sanshiro, are trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
​
The gameplay of this game is pretty simple. Players and enemies are set out on the map in different places. Each character takes its turn moving around the map. If a player and enemy meet they have a fight, which basically consists of mashing buttons while the player does really cool looking attacks that appear to happen at random. These attacks do damage depending on which direction you attack at in the overworld, the front being low damage, the side being medium damage, and the back being high damage. If two player units are nearby they can help each other in battle with assist attacks. This gameplay is fun and means that strategy is required to play it correctly, but that is when the story isn’t getting in the way. There is a lot of dialogue between the characters before and after enemy fighting missions, although the dialogue is very entertaining. They also did a good job of mixing the different writing styles of the franchises. The goofy characters are still goofy and the more serious characters are still serious, and they work really well in this game.

Let’s talk about the characters that have participated in this crossover for a second. Just the concept of these characters coming into contact with each other is just hilarious. On one side, we have Mega Man X, a super fighting robot from the 22nd century, then we have Segata Sanshiro, a martial artist who will throw you so hard you explode twice if you are not playing a Sega Saturn when he sees you, and also there’s Phoenix Wright, a lawyer who uses mystical powers to figure out when somebody’s lying and can also fight monsters in this game by pointing at them and yelling “OBJECTION!” Those aren’t even the weirdest combinations, that’s just the ones from the franchises I knew about beforehand! I can’t tell whether the feelings of ridiculousness and awesomeness are stronger in my mind right now. I should mention that no company got more representation in terms of characters than any other as that completely pointless graph on the right shows, aside from Nintendo’s very small cast of three characters. At least Nintendo has an excuse because everybody in this game talks, and as everyone knows it’s a capital offense to make most of Nintendo’s main characters speak in complete sentences ever since the… Phillips incident {internal shudders}. We do not speak of that game. Although I find it interesting that Capcom was the only company that brought out their most famous mascot franchises, Mega Man and Street Fighter. With all these characters you couldn’t make room for SEGA’s Sonic the Hedgehog or Namco’s Pac-Man? Oh wait, they already had a crossover. Multiple times in fact.
​
Overall I really enjoyed this game. it had fun gameplay and entertaining dialogue that made for an enjoyable experience even if I honestly don’t recognize half the characters. I give this game a 7 out of 10.