Our second playthrough of Warriors All-Stars gets well and truly underway as we get to grips with Sophie’s moveset, and look at expanding Tamaki’s forces.
On today’s agenda is Mitsunari Ishida, a vibrant-haired, brilliant tactical mind with his own strong opinions on how best to wage war. How will he get along with the rather flighty Sophie… and the somewhat more grounded Plachta?
Better punch a whole load of dudes in the face to find out!
Sometime in 1997. I am in my last year of compulsory education. My brother, ten years my senior, has come home from America to visit, on vacation from his job on Electronic Gaming Monthly and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine. I always enjoy this, because he tells me all about the interesting new games that are coming out for exciting new platforms like the Sony PlayStation.
“Have you heard of Final Fantasy VII?” he asks. I respond in the negative. I had a feeling I’d heard the name Final Fantasy before, perhaps in the Super NES magazine Super Control that his ex-girlfriend used to work on back before they split — and before he left our green and pleasant isle for pastures new — but I’d never really paid it much mind. He seemed excited, though — and given that his position meant that he saw a lot of new games each and every day, this was enough to make me pay close attention.
“It’s the only game that I’ve ever seen make someone cry,” he said. I knew immediately that I had to play it. And thus a switch flipped, and what would become the Pete of today was born.
Having beaten the game last week, today it’s time to start a whole new Warriors All-Stars adventure!
This time around, we’re taking Sophie from Atelier Sophie as our leading lady, which puts us into Tamaki’s story route rather that Setsuna’s, which we explored last time around.
This should mean we get the opportunity to encounter and recruit some different characters and see some brand new story scenes… as well as getting to throw Punis at people. What’s not to like?
And so, we reach the conclusion of our Warriors All-Stars adventure. Or, well, the first conclusion, anyway; this is a game with multiple endings, and a variety of paths through its overall narrative.
The ending we achieve today is not the “true” ending, but it forms a suitable conclusion to the narrative path we’ve been following. Plus you get to see some absolutely disastrous attempts at a “one-hit kill” mission; things get real messy for poor old Honoka for a while there.
This may be the end of our first playthrough of Warriors All-Stars but we’re far from done yet! There are more characters to unlock and play as, more narrative paths to explore and more hot furries to lust over. Fight. I meant fight.
This post is one chapter of a MegaFeature!
Contents | Next >
We’re trying something new here on MoeGamer for 2020: something I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to do for a while. How, exactly, to tackle a series of significant length — both in terms of number of games and the sheer amount of time it takes to play them?
I was initially prompted to think about this by Falcom’s Trails series, which I’d very much like to cover when (if?) it’s finished. Each of those games are upwards of a hundred hours, and their narratives are interlinked, so they’re not things you can easily analyse in isolation. Or rather, given that interlinked nature, they’re not things I want to analyse in isolation.
That’s not the only series I wanted to explore in depth, though. One that’s been steadily filling up my shelves for the past few years is Gust’s long-running Atelier series… and given that the series as a whole is subdivided into smaller trilogies and duologies, it seemed like an ideal opportunity to experiment with the format.
And thus, I welcome you to the first MoeGamer MegaFeature!
Drama and intrigue in today’s episode of Warriors All-Stars as Kasumi and Arnice attempt to save Setsuna from the trap he’s fallen into.
We also run into Marie Rose, subject of last week’s Waifu Wednesday, and discover that she’s a more powerful weapon than anyone could have possibly imagined… and she doesn’t even need to touch anyone.
While we’re on, we have a nice chat about what’s coming up here on MoeGamer, too. Why not stop in and hang out? We have swords and cute girls.
In today’s episode of Warriors All-Stars, we start to get a hint of what Setsuna’s up to — and why the war among the furry siblings kicked off in the first place.
Setsuna hasn’t been entirely forthcoming with Arnice, Kasumi and his other allies, however… and as such they’re finding it somewhat difficult to trust him, as his true intentions remain somewhat murky. Can you truly be someone’s comrade if you don’t really know why they’re fighting in the first place? Can you trust an ally if you learn more about their philosophy from your supposed “enemies” than from the ally themselves?
These are all big questions that will need to be answered eventually. For now, though, let’s continue racking up those monstrous KO counts!
Hey, so remember back in July of 2019 when Bethesda suddenly and unexpectedly released Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth and Doom III on PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch?
Remember how it took barely a few minutes for this exciting announcement to be considerably dampened by the terrible discovery that these new ports had some sort of God-awful implementation of an “always-online” system in place for no apparent reason? Remember how this made the Switch version completely unplayable on the go if you weren’t connected to the Internet?
Yeah. Well. Not only has that been fixed, these ports have been given a considerable upgrade… plus a bunch of awesome bonus content, too. So it’s probably time to take another look, no?
One of the interesting things about Warriors All-Stars is that its structure changes and varies according to the battles you participate in and the characters you unlock.
Today we investigate a “Dramatic Battle”, which is a story-based battle with some specific unlock requirements — in this case, the presence of several particular characters in the party at once.
Follow along with the fortunes of three amnesiac young ladies as they attempt to track down their missing memories the only way they know how: by racking up an enormous KO count.
The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards I’ve devised in collaboration with the community to celebrate the sorts of things that never get celebrated in end-of-year roundups! Find out more here — and feel free to leave a suggestion on that post if you have any good ideas! We’re fast running out of time for this year, but leave a suggestion anyway and I might use it next year!
–
You know how sometimes you see a game and you think “that looks like fun, but it probably doesn’t have a whole lot to say”?
I should know better than to think like this by this point, as I’ve had my expectations subverted more often than not over the course of the last decade or so, but nevertheless, it still happens; I still sometimes end up surprised by getting both exactly what I expected and a whole bunch of other stuff besides.
Today’s award celebrates a specific game that I took a long time to get around to actually playing… but I’m really glad I finally did.
And the winner is…
Continue reading The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: The Unexpectedly Meaningful Award
