(By the way, here's a great site that covers Japanese arcade stuff at length. Just saying.)
A little while back I was into Examu's moe fighting game Arcana Heart. I won't defend its, shall we say, uncomfortable character design and blatant otaku pandering, but the game itself was unexpectedly deep and solidly made: kept me coming back to the arcade for some time. Publisher Examu, on the other hand, has never quite acted on the level, which is ultimately why we're here tonight. When tournament season got going on the first Arcana Heart, Examu responded by tossing out a $1500 upgrade kit six months after the release of their game. With the big national tournament coming up and Arcana still very popular, arcade operators couldn't afford not to be running the new competitive standard, because their serious players couldn't afford to be playing the obsolete version. So they all got ripped off.
To nobody's surprise, Examu had a less severe bout of the same bullshit earlier this year with Arcana Heart 2, releasing Sugoi! Arcana Heart 2 (I wish I was kidding) not long after AH2's release. But the game isn't nearly so big anymore: remember that there's been an absolute flood of new fighting games in the Japanese arcades, not the least of which are Blazblue, the Tekken 6 upgrade, and Street Fighter 4 (which I should note is doing only slightly better than Third Strike, according to Arcadia rankings). This was a stupid asshole move before as it is now, but it must be working.
I give you this short history because Examu has now moved from the lucrative business of ripping off arcade operators to the possibly more lucrative business of ripping off the players directly. The PS2 port of the first Arcana Heart was an entirely faithful port of the arcade game. It's a rare case that a fighting game port isn't exactly the same, as this would negate much of its usefulness as a practice tool and a means to play at home that doesn't cost a dollar a go. We're past the days of scaled-down Street Fighter ports or SNK games that took an hour to load up. When people buy a PS2 port of a fighting game, they expect to have the damn game.
So nobody really expected, when they opened up their new PS2 copies of Sugoi! Arcana Heart 2, that the game would be a fucking atrocity. I don't really play Arcana anymore, so I wasn't following this closely, but I heard quite a bit about it anyway. Things sounded dire, and you probably already know how attracted I am to trainwrecks. There was only one thing I could do:
Pirate Sugoi! Arcana Heart 2.
What? These guys definitely don't deserve to be paid for this game, and you're about to find out why. Examu did not use real screenshots of the game when promoting it: they used screens from the arcade game. We know this for sure because the PS2 port's graphics are, for lack of a better word, busted-ass ugly. The effect varies from one character to the next, but you're going to notice constant pixelation, as most animation frames have been stripped of all detail. What used to be sharp is now fuzzy and goopy, as if they ported this game to a Super NES, or even a Game Gear or something. The bigger the character, the worse the effect is: the biggest sufferers are usually the heavy characters, like Catherine the girl in a robot, or Kira, the girl who rides inside of a giant Dragon Quest slime.This isn't to say that you can play the other characters and it'll be just fine: the worst is actually Petra the gun girl, an average-sized character whose every action is pixelated and blurred beyond recognition. The huge backgrounds have taken similar hits: they used to be impressive, but as unrecognizable masses of pixels... not so much. The screen is also constantly shaking and shimmering, particularly when the big characters appear.
Speaking of Petra, this game can't handle too much going on on the screen at once. Petra's guns in particular slow the game to a halt. 3D effects and fast, successive hits cause the game's framerate to take a major hit. Obviously, there are a lot of 3D effects and fast hits in this game: seasoned players say that just doing basic combos for many characters will cause giant slowdown. Slowdown is fatal for any fighting game because fighting games are about timing: matches can literally be won or lost in a sixtieth of a second. Slowdown like this wrecks the natural rhythm of the game and disorients both players. We want our home fighting game to be consistent with our arcade fighting game: a game with added slowdown is actually going to mess up players who play it and then go to the arcade, where the feel is a little different. In this case, the arcade game is a lot different.
But hell, it's not even the arcade game in the first place. Examu ported a version that was out of date in the first place: the current version is 2.6, only in the JP arcades. So even if the port had been done right, it'd still be out of date. As it is, it's just out of date and, more importantly, the port is irredeemable shit that never should have made it out of testing, much less sold to unsuspecting nerds for $60. A theory that immediately comes to mind is that Examu wanted to make some side money off an arcade release, but didn't want the home release to hurt their arcade business, so they tossed off this shitty port to sell a couple of copies and keep the arcade players in the arcade. It's likely!
Some of the Western players are trying to play this game, as it's the only way they can right now, (and a fast PC can emulate the game without the speed problems) but as far as I'm concerned Examu can fuck off. There's a pretty good fighting game buried under all this crap, but I'll be damned if I'm going to put up with this gigantic, hysterical insult just to find out. Even my DVD-R is ashamed.
If AH2 comes to America, I hope we don't end up with this problem too. That would be complete bullshit.
Posted by: Wolf Nanaki | May 12, 2009 at 10:27 PM