Hemispheres – March 8, 2011

It’s been a busy week this week, what with the Game Developer’s Conference and Dengeki Game Festival 2011 taking place almost at the same time. Lots of fun news on the import front!

• Just about anyone familiar with unusual overseas gaming trends is familiar with Konami’s LovePlus – basically a portable girlfriend simulator. People take their digital girlfriends everywhere. They buy them gifts. Some people marry theirs. Well, now it’s available in an arcade size, too, and one thoughtful arcade is providing a little privacy.
• Yakuza of the End was everywhere this week. Want a demo? The demo dropped 5 days ago, so go get it. Want to tweet about it instead? There’s an app for that, literally: Ryu ga Gotoku for Twitter is a Yakuza-themed Twitter app for iOS devices, featuring… basically everything you expect in a Twitter app.
• Europe, your wait for Persona 3 Portable won’t be much longer – and you can expect to be rewarded for your patience. The P3P Collector’s Edition features six art cards (no Koromaru, a tragedy), an art book, and an A3-sized poster. Reserve the game at Ghostlight, and you’ll also get an awesome t-shirt, too.
• Square-Enix, as they are wont to do, is compiling Final Fantasy IV, all the episodes of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, and a brand new interlude chapter covering the time in between into Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection. Siliconera has a few neat factoids about it, including the fact that you can jump anywhere into the sections of the story and go (although you will need to finish the first chapter of The After Years before the rest of them are available). Also of note: you can switch the game’s language to English. While I’m sure we’ll see it here – they keep releasing remakes, and we keep collectively snapping them up – this definitive collection of one of the better console RPGs of the early 90s looks like it’ll be import-friendly if we don’t see it. (Also: you are now realizing Final Fantasy IV came out in 1991 and feeling very old.)
• The 3DS roundup: Megaman Legends 3 and Resident Evil: Mercenaries will both be having a playable demo event in Akihabara this month, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclock‘s new chapter features 5,000 words of fully voiced dialogue all on its own – a fourth of the total content of the game, an overview of Steel Diver, Tales of the Abyss 3DS comes out in May and we’ll probably never see it here because Namco Bandai hates you, the 3DS has already had a firmware update, and Big Nintendo is watching you, citizen. Whew.
• While we finally, finally got confirmation that Atlus’ Catherine will be making its way to the US, there wasn’t a whole lot of info on how it plays. Well, that difficulty patch is almost complete, and Destructoid’s Dale North has a bit of info about how the game plays, what it’s really like, and whether it’s nearly as sexy as we’ve been lead to believe (spoiler: not really).
• Dynasty Warriors 7 screenshots!
• If Ryota Niitsuma was already making a sequel to MvC3, he’d include more Darkstalkers characters, someone else from the Mega Man series, and the Rival Schools franchise. Who would you pick?
• A sequel you won’t care about to a game you didn’t play: Sony teases a new Oreshika game, an RPG with strategy elements based around ridding your family of a curse that causes them to age 50 times faster than usual (so they’re dead by the age of two).

And last but not least: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3DS will include the Master Quest, previously only available on a bonus disc on the Gamecube. YESSSSSSSSSS