Since that time, Mistwalker have developed a range of titles, for different platforms, and their next release will be The Last Story for the Nintendo Wii, releasing 24^th February in Europe. This will be Sakaguchi’s first title as director since Final Fantasy V, way back in 1992. He has also enlisted the immense talent that is Nobou Uematsu, who also left Square in 2004. Uematsu has composed the score’s for all their games so far. Let’s take a look at what has been, and what to expect in the future.

Mistwalker initially signed up with Microsoft to produce Xbox 360 exclusive titles, of which there are two: Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey. Blue Dragon in particular helped boost sales of the Xbox 360 in Japan, at the time of its release (2006).

“Microsoft sold 35,343 Xbox 360s – an increase of nearly 90 per cent over the previous week’s figure of just over 4000 consoles. It’s likely that the rise was linked to the release of Blue Dragon, which was developed by Mistwalker, the studio led by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi.”
– Ellie Gibson, Blue Dragon release boosts Xbox 360 sales in Japan, GamesIndustry.biz

Blue Dragon is as traditional a JRPG as you’ll ever come across. A group of heroes set about to save their land from an evil ruler, traversing a massive world and using turn-based combat to defeat foes along the way. This may well be deemed old-fashioned in the western world of gaming, but it certainly still has its fans, including myself. Blue Dragon was one of the first 3D RPGs released for this generation of consoles. It boasted the unique art style of Akira Toriyama, creator of manga series Dragon Ball and whose style is also used on video game series Dragon Quest.

Party of Five, anyone?

The game itself is indeed very long. This was the first multi-disc Xbox 360 game released, encompassing the whole adventure on 3 discs. In my opinion, although I’m still making my way through it slowly but surely, it’s JRPG-by-numbers, but still enjoyable because I knew to expect that. There were some good touches. For example, the battles are not the often-loathed ‘random’ battles from past Final Fantasy games, but instead are induced or avoided by engaging/escaping the enemies on screen. Hitting them first also gives you the first hit once a battle is initiated. Blue Dragon is nothing new, but that does it no harm at all.

Mistwalker’s next big release was Lost Odyssey, again for the Xbox 360. Boasting incredible visuals, this 4-disc epic is still a favourite among many an RPG fan, both east and west. For those waiting for their Final Fantasy fix at the time (that never came), this more than filled the gap. While there have always been varied opinions of Final Fantasy XIII, Lost Odyssey still sits firmly on my gaming shelf where Final Fantasy XIII fell off, never to be touched again. Lost Odyssey may have reverted back to random battles, but the battle trigger system (pressing within a time frame to land extra hits) is superior to Blue Dragon’s old school ‘press A and wait’ system, providing more interaction and more reward for doing so.

The story and characters are excellent, providing moments of danger, fear, action, even comedy, and giving the gamer a great sense of empathy to boot. You really feel you are following the journey that Kaim, the lead character, is taking, and will be as determined as he is to find out about his past.

Following on from the success Blue Dragon brought (more so in Japan than here), a franchise was born. An anime series was created, and 2 sequels were also developed, this time for the Nintendo DS. The first was the unimaginatively titled Blue Dragon Plus. This entrant to the series was billed as a real-time simulation RPG – much more like Final Fantasy XII – and retains the Toriyama-style visuals that define the series. Blue Dragon Awakened Shadow soon followed also, continuing the real-time strategy experience, and adopting Dragon Quest IX’s route of allowing creation/customisation of your own lead character.

Following the Nintendo DS releases, Mistwalker stayed with Nintendo, culminating in the production of The Last Story. It may also prove to be the Nintendo Wii’s swansong RPG, with the impending release of the Wii U console. It looks fantastic, and is a release I was hoping for since it was announced nearly 2 years ago.

Since that time, The Last Story has been on release in Japan for around a year now, and was long thought to be only fit for the Japanese market.

“With all the conversions, when we do it in Europe we’ve got to do the whole of Europe,” Nintendo UK boss David Yarnton told Eurogamer. “So it’s multiple languages. It has to be viable.”

Thankfully, the game is viable for Europe. Considering how well Monolith Soft’s JRPG Xenoblade Chronicles has done on the Wii, The Last Story is certainly marketable. Like Xenoblade, it is a console exclusive. Details are still forthcoming, with no European version reviews emerging just yet, but UK magazine Edge did review a Japanese copy, which even for them is usually unheard of. From what reviews I have read, The Last Story is promising to be the most cinematic game the console has seen, with full voice acting throughout, beautiful cut scenes, and a narrative packed with action, romance and betrayal.

It also promises to have a game length that is more flexible; unlike most JRPGs that last 60 hours plus, the main story is around the 20-30 hour mark, but, should you choose to complete side quests, this can easily double that. This, along with co-operative AND multiplayer deathmatch modes, Mistwalker are certainly trying to innovate the JRPG, more so than Final Fantasy XIII ever could, in my opinion. This could indeed be Sakaguchi setting the trend once again, as he did with the original Final Fantasy all those years ago.

The Last Story will be released only on Nintendo Wii in the UK and Europe, on February 24^th.

Instead of hoppers of scantily protected chocolate buttons and fizzy snakes there are three skill trees: Might (big swords), Sorcery (flashy spells) and Finesse (sneakystabby). You can invest heavily in to one tree or spread yourself liberally across two, or if you’re feeling indecisive… all three. Then KoA:Reckoning adds further Pick & Mix goodness with the introduction of Destinies. These are bonuses based on how many points you have in each tree. Destiny Cards, like the skill trees, can be based on a variety of class combinations so there’s plenty to experiment with. You can find more about the skills of Reckoning in Debbie’s previous interview with systems designer Will Miller.

Moving further into this increasingly tortured metaphor, we have the sour cola bottles and white chocolate mice, or loot. Equipment flows fast and with lots of particle effects and there’s a pleasing variety of weapons, even for the pansy spell-casters amongst us. Borrowing from the “green is good, blue is better, purple is bestest” school of design makes it reasonably simple to kit yourself but you can run in to problems if you’ve spread skill points across all talent trees. Top level stuff tends to have point requirements in specific talents.

Gameplay is a good mix of exploring, combat and RPG stalwarts like crafting. The world feels big; not Skyrim big but nor are you being led from one side quest to another and to be honest, having spent many hours trekking up mountains only to realise I’m in the wrong bloody Skyrim place, it’s a relief to have a little bit of the “on rails” feeling. Combat is fluid and good control mapping means you can easily swap between a primary and secondary weapon whilst flinging spells and trying to dodge. The greater the combination of your abilities used in each fight the more Fate you earn. As the pool fills up (think mini experience bar) you get closer to being able to unleash the mother of all quick-time events.  Fateshifting turns you in to a big purple angel of death and allows you to take down multiple enemies sharpish, earning extra bonuses if you tap the correct button like a person possessed.

So, that “All You Can Eat” buffet I mentioned – KoA: Reckoning not only lets you combine a mix of skills but once you get bored of them, encourages you to go back for a different helping. No more soul-crushing moments as you realise the talents you’ve chosen are as satisfying as nouvelle cuisine. Head for a settlement with a Fateweaver and pay to have everything wiped clean, I started out as a bad-ass Mage and after fifteen hours had reset myself four times and ended up completing the game as a Rogue. Same goes for the Crafting skills; get bored of being a top level Alchemist and just swap to something else for a while.

Sadly, into every tub of sweets some grubby fingers must fall and the game isn’t perfect. I didn’t have any major technical bugs but there were quite a few cut-scene tears and slightly odd enemy behaviour. NPC’s would just stand in the middle of the combat field without engaging. Whilst I appreciated the pick-pocketing opportunity, it seemed a little amateur for such a massive game. My only other big gripe is the storyline; yes it made sense and yes it gave me a few moments of “oooooh” but it was just tinged a little too much with fantasy-flavoured cheesiness for me.

Slightly odd characters aside this is a beautiful, varied and absorbing release from 38 Studios and Big Huge Games. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is easy to immerse yourself in and a welcome change from the gritty fantasy of games like the Elder Scrolls series. Once you start you’ll want to scoff the whole bloody lot in one sitting and will likely emerge Monday morning with feelings of shameful remorse at your gluttony. Happily this guilt will swiftly pass and you’ll be left with warm, fuzzy feelings as you remember just how much you enjoyed yourself.

Catherine is two games, kind of. It’s actually more like a game and a selection of things that feel a bit like they’re almost a game. For as much as it paints itself as a dating sim, that really is secondary to a more prominent puzzle system that involves moving assorted blocks around so that you can climb further up massive towers. In Catherine you control Vincent, an early-thirty-something in a relationship with Katherine (with a K!). She’s concerned that they aren’t moving forward and is looking for more commitment, but he’s overly self-absorbed, clinging on to his fleeting adolescence and peaceful bachelorhood. After a night of drinking, Vincent inadvertently ends up in bed with Catherine (without a K!) and begins having a series of horrible nightmares wherein, obviously, he’s a part-human-part-sheep scaling walls of movable crates.

From here the game takes on three parts. During the day you’ll be treated to cutscenes that further expand on Vincent’s relationships with the two girls. In the evening, Vincent goes out to a bar to drink and chat with other people that are experiencing the same nightmares. After you turn in to sleep you play through a few challenging block puzzles.

Catherine’s narrative is absolutely detached from the gameplay in a way that seems almost inexcusable after Portal so effortlessly blends story into the playable sections. The disconnection makes both parts seem like they’re the least important part of the product. The story seems as if it’s getting in the way of a game being a game; the game seems as if it’s getting in the way of a narrative being delivered like an anime series. Atlus could, in theory, have released these halves entirely separate and we would have never considered they were once part of the same licence.

On occasion during sections in the bar or between puzzle stages, you’ll be given totally binary options that govern how you’ll react to different characters or odder choices about your own relationship hang-ups. Some of this is interesting as the game will often show a graph of what other people said in reaction to the same question. This interactivity is novel, but is awful in some sections. As much as you (and by extension, Vincent) make decisions about what to do with Catherine’s interruption into your life, this isn’t reflected in his attitude toward her. You could be entirely cold and uninterested and she’ll still be a part of the story until the end. This makes your choices seem meaningless throughout and even your ending might not reflect the direction the narrative has been propelling toward.

Unfortunately, as it’d be much easier for me to explain, it’s difficult to call any part of Catherine particularly bad. Certainly in some cases it’s unenjoyable, but there’s always a saving grace. The block puzzles get a little tiresome and frustrating – perhaps as a result of being jackhammered into the middle of the story as if they’re work you have to complete before reaching the good part – but they’re deep and interesting enough to take pleasure in. The story sections are too small a part of the whole experience and your input far is too minimal. Still, the supporting cast are layered enough to be compelling and you’ll be interested to see how the plot progresses.

If Catherine is anything, it’s a step forward for games using relationships in a more adult way. Catherine definitely is a game for adults, not just in the sense that there’s some extreme violence and almost constant alcohol abuse, but it’s really one of the first mainstream titles to put growing up and finding your place in life as the core struggle. If it were a more cohesive package, one that paid more attention to either of the ideas it sets up, this would be an amazing title. It just doesn’t excel enough at any one thing.

SoulCalibur V sees the long-running series undergo a serious makeover to the core gameplay. The major changes centre around the new Critical Gauge meter. Most of the moves you do consume some of your Critical Gauge: Critical Edge moves, the game’s flashy super moves, cost one bar of the gauge, while Brave Edge attacks power up regular attacks and cost half a bar. Even counters come at the expense of your Critical Gauge. Traditional parrying has been removed from SoulCalibur V, and replaced with a new Guard Impact system, which requires a sacrifice you to sacrifice half your Critical Gauge to deflect an enemy’s attack, allowing you to turn the tide of a match.

I could talk endlessly about the ins-and-outs of the new combat system but the important thing to note is that even in what is the most mechanically complex SoulCalibur in the series, there isn’t a decent tutorial mode to help explain all of these details to new players. The training mode offers character move lists and a brief explanation of tactics, but nothing like explaining the actual inputs themselves, or telling you when your timing’s off.

Despite the lack of a decent explanation for newcomers, the game is still fantastic no matter your skill level. Each match is intense and thrilling, with fast-paced action taking place in stunning arenas and supported by a beautiful soundtrack. Matches feel absolutely epic. The new Critical Edge moves really add something special to not only the gameplay, but also the presentation, allowing you to see the game’s detail up close in a series of quick, cinema-esque camera shots. The focus on block-counter-attack as opposed to all-out attack means matches can go down to the wire, and with all the tools at your disposal, you rarely feel completely overwhelmed.

Sadly, there is a lack of variety in the matches themselves. While there is a good amount of game modes, with Arcade, Story, Legendary Souls as well as online and an offline mode that replicates the online experience, there is nothing that adds something different to fights.

Where games like Mortal Kombat and even SoulCalibur IV excelled was in the different types of fights they offered. Some fights gave characters 50% health, poisoned, or even an inability to block. None of these are present here. The lack of fight variation is disappointing and would have been a nice twist to the already great fighting.

SoulCalibur has taken a leaf out of Street Fighter IV’s book by including a reward system for everything you do in the game. You earn points for every fight you compete in, both online and offline, which increase your overall level, and allow you to unlock different titles and player cards to customise your own playercard, as well as new characters, arenas, and customisation tools.

The large character roster sees a number of new faces, most of which are just slight alterations of older characters. The two brand new characters, Viola and Z.W.E.I (I have no idea what it stands for either), feel fresh and offer something new to the game. Each character feels strong and well balanced. Unlike other fighting games, there don’t seem to be any clear weak-entries on the roster. Ezio Auditore, the latest guest character, is a perfect fit. His move set employs all of the weapons you see in the Assassin’s Creed series, and his backstory slots in well with SoulCalibur lore.

The only filler are a few of the unlockable fighters, who act as copycats, replicating the move-sets of other fighters and changing style between rounds. If you get bored of the roster that Project Soul have provided, you can always make your own in the extensive character creation mode. You can lose hours creating the perfect incarnation of your favourite character in this mode, which is the best seen in the series yet.

Patroklos and Pyrhha, a brother and sister duo, and children of Sophitia, act as the core of the game’s story mode, which is sadly lacking in all areas. Most of the cut-scenes are presented in charcoal-drawn stills on parchment, which is a shame considering this is a graphically stunning game, and it would have been nice to have fully rendered cut-scenes. Considering the story takes place in 17th century Hungary, the voice acting hardly helps create the sense of the setting, and is dull at best. The very odd (and slightly incestuous) relationship between Potroklos and Pyrhha certainly raises an eyebrow at one or two points, and it sounds as though the majority of the male characters were voiced by the same guy. It also doesn’t help that for the first half of the story, Patroklos is an ignorant arsehole, and you not only have to fight as him, but win also. Luckily the disappointing narrative only takes around an hour or two to complete, and doesn’t detract from the fighting.

Online has been fleshed out to cater for all types, including a new Global Colosseo, which allows players to group together in large parties and take part in player matches. Text chat is supported, as well as spectator mode and the ability to upload replays of your fights.

This is a great game. It would have been nice to see more spice in the matches, but the thrilling combat, excellent roster, and stunning presentation make this a worthy purchase for anyone with a taste for fighters.

The Western Europe map that will be available is 4-player co-op and if you want to complete it on Hard as we did, you’ll need to be incredibly focused on teamwork and tactics. As Mat Jones pointed out in his own Syndicate preview, we dropped straight into MMO jargon from the outset. The level of co-operation required to complete this map makes it feel an awful lot like a small 4-man raid, clocking in at roughly 30 minutes per session.

In the world of Syndicate, you play as an Agent; a member of the Syndicate squad with a Dart 6 weaponised chip implanted in your skull. These brain enhancements let you get up to all sorts of remote shenanigans like causing your enemies’ guns to misfire, commanding computers without using your hands and healing your squad mates. No, I have no idea how a skull implant can repair bullet holes in other people’s bodies but there it is. You can also offer your team buffs in the form of shielding, breach enemies’ armour to make them vulnerable and, if you die in the field leaving one of your team-mates still alive, they can resurrect you when they get close enough. Very MMO-ish indeed.

The tactics our group used on this map were very much around teamwork. In one section with distant snipers and rocket launchers, we’d send out one player to snipe while the others heal and generally try to stay out of rocket blast radius. In another section, we’d split into pairs and have one group draw the boss over to one side of the map while the others engaged additional enemies on the other.

If even one team member lost focus and failed to heal their buddy or to keep their assigned enemies at bay, the battle was over, so good communication was paramount. The HUD design is very helpful with this, showing the health bars of all your teammates at the top. There’s no excuse for letting someone die through ignorance. Thanks to the checkpointing system, having the entire team wipe was frustrating but not the end of the world. The checkpoints we needed to use were perfectly placed, so dying usually meant that we’d spawn at the entrance to a section. We never had to repeat more than one real firefight.

The game had no avatar customisation that I could see but you do get to define your own set of three loadouts named Defense, Offense and Support. These define the equipment you will have at the start of the mission. Each loadout has a free choice of primary and secondary weapons and a chip ability or “application”. These names are purely for convenience and don’t restrict your options – if you want to set up your “Defense” loadout aggressively with sniper rifles, assault rifles and, say, a chip ability that causes your opponent to commit suicide with a grenade, you go right ahead. You’ll also have the option to unlock a second remote ability once you grind enough points to upgrade your chip.

Grind. Remember that word. It will come up later.

When playing on hard mode, loadouts are more about customising for your own play style than trying to build a balanced team. In a traditional MMO raid, you’d need to make sure you have at least one healer, one “tank” to soak up damage and draw attention, and maybe someone set up for crowd control. Syndicate co-op needs people to do all those jobs yet doesn’t force you into specialising for any one role. This is just as well because, as with most games, the XP system is heavily biased towards killing.

I spent one of our four play-throughs spamming heals on everyone else while a specialist sniper took out distant targets and the remaining two took care of close-quarters fighting. This left me trailing at the bottom of the leaderboard with 10,000 XP while the sniper took home 23,000. In another play-through we all took sniper rifles as our primary weapon and clocked in with a respectable 15,000 XP each. The fire rate and low recoil of the basic sniper rifle do mean that a quick double-tap to the torso will kill most enemies as quickly as single headshot, so I fear that this weapon is rather overpowered. However, you get points for kill assists and achieving objectives as well as heals, so there’s little danger of sessions turning into a race to be the fastest sniper. I hope.

XP is important for a number of reasons. Yes, you need it to level up but you also use it in research to unlock new abilities. This is where things gets weirdly complicated.

• Killing, healing and completing mission objectives will get you XP.
• Levelling up though gaining XP will earn you chip points.
• Completing challenges will win you application tokens.
• Completing certain objectives will give you blueprint tokens.

Spend chip points to upgrade your implanted brain chip and gain new applications like the aforementioned shield buff. Spend application tokens to enhance existing abilities – for example, the basic Backfire will do some damage to a distant opponent when he next tries to shoot you. Upgrade that with the Chamber Patch and Backfire will happen earlier and cause extra damage.

But here’s the catch. You can’t use your application tokens to purchase Chamber Patch unless you’ve already spent a chip point on the ROM 1 upgrade. Even then, once you’ve purchased the Chamber Patch, you still need to unlock it by setting it as your research project and earning 5000 XP in a map. Blueprint tokens work in the same manner but for grenade and gun upgrades. To put this another way, the team have built an RPG-like technology tree but spread it across 3 different menu screens for an awkward-as-hell interface.

The upshot of all this is that unlike an MMO where you’ll run a raid time and time again in the hopes of getting a rare or epic drop from the boss, your incentive to repeat maps in Syndicate’s co-op mode is to grind your research for weapon upgrades and abilities. You can queue up multiple research projects so if you want a fairly cheap ability, any excess XP earned in the session won’t go to waste.

Having played through the demo level four times in a row on hard mode, this worries me a little. I honestly feel like I’m done with the Western Europe map already. I’ve proved that my team are good enough to beat it on the hardest difficulty available. Where’s the incentive to earn new abilities? I could speculate that this might lie in other maps, with certain bosses requiring specific abilities to beat but as yet, that has no basis in fact.

If you have a group of friends you trust, or a clan, then Syndicate’s co-op will be great fun on hard mode. Everyone else will enjoy running and gunning their way through the normal difficulty. Abilities are fun but long cool-down times meant that we hardly used them and we really didn’t need to. As such, even though I really enjoyed our sessions, I have my doubts over the longevity of this mode without a steady churn of new maps. You should definitely try it for yourself when the demo is out this week.

Syndicate will be released on 24th Feb on Xbox 360, PC and PS3.

After playing through the demo three times for your benefit I can safely say FFXIII-2 appears to fix the few issues that XIII had. Combat is faster and more involved, cutscenes shorter and the corridor issue I talked about in my XIII post-mortem? All but gone. Sadly it seems to throw in a few new issues that upon initial playthroughs left me slightly stunned.

The demo throws you straight into the deep end, fighting the floating hand of an invisible giant. Combat seems much smoother and is still based on the paradigm feature of XIII yet one of the new features is quickly apparent in the form of Quick-Time Events. YAY! See I love QTEs as much as anybody, when they directly involve your character [You mean not at all? - Ed.] but when you have to time a QTE to make sure a helicopter lands a strike on an enemy? Urgh. Perhaps I’m being picky but I don’t need events like that scattered here, there and everywhere to keep my attention during short cutscenes in battle.

Once the intro battle is out the way, Noel and Serah set off with a moogle in tow to explore the town they have found themselves in. That’s right folk, a town! With people and treasure and shops and everything! If you’ve played FFXIII you will know that lack of freedom is something in XIII that really started to grind. Towns give life to worlds – the movements of people, the ability to explore and talk to folk really adds energy to a game and stops it from just being a linear romp through a series of backdrops with artificial life.

Upon beating your first standard enemies, you are introduced to the Paradigm Pack feature. The Paradigm Pack is like a Pokemon game crammed into a full-scale RPG. Defeating certain enemies grants you with crystals representing that enemy, which can be upgraded and then mixed into your paradigms to fight alongside you.

In theory this works well but micromanaging an ever-growing list of animal comrades could become a tricky and rather dreary task. The pack works as a third member of your team would; different animals naturally have different roles such as Ravager or Medic. Three animals can be added to your pack at once with the creatures swapping round depending on how you set them. All good, if a little cheesy and odd for an RPG.

Other than an odd minigame set that involves solving puzzles inside the Paradox by working out the best route around a level without crossing your own path, everything seems standard fare. The soundtrack has been thrown forwards a little and doesn’t follow the classical roots of the series. Instead it opts for a faster-paced electro style. FFXIII-2 does feel like a true FF game and despite a few odd choices designed to add variety, it is well worth a look-in.

Of course we can’t base our opinions solely on the demo alone but it’s free so go give it a try on XBL or PSN and see if Square can’t re grab your attention. Keep an eye out for our review of Final Fantasy XIII-2 when it goes live.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 will be out in the UK from 3rd Feb on Xbox 360 and PS3

Get used to this. You’ll be hearing it a lot, at least if the tournament I played is anything to go by. The development team at THQ have worked hard on making the commentary system sound natural. “You’re actually getting live broadcast feeds,” I was told by senior designer Wes Bunn. “The UFC gives us all their mic feeds and our sound team chop up every bit of commentary from every fight and incorporate it into the game. So when you hear a guy say ‘Oh, nice left head kick’, that came from a fight somewhere.”

Led by Antoine Peltier, the audio have actually done a great job, especially with the contextual commentary. Turn off the main VO and you’ll hear your coaches shouting at you to get your guard up or protect your head. Still, when certain submission positions like the Kimura are easier to get into than others, you’re bound to hear some lines repeated over and over (and over) again.

The team had to use a different approach for the new PRIDE mode in this game, since PRIDE matches no longer take place. “We’ve added a whole new commentary team with the PRIDE Fighting Championships so everything you have in the UFC had to be mirrored for PRIDE. We did that with Bas Rutten and Stephen Quadros who were two of the commentators at the time. It’s a little more WWE-ish – they’re making jokes, they’re talking about the sport and the history as opposed to technical descriptions of what’s going on in the cage.”

I also spoke to Bunn about the game’s controls. “One of the big pillars that we wanted to do for this game was accessibility. We kind of fell into a lull with [UFC Undisputed] 2010 after 2009 came out. We just assumed everybody knew how to play our game and what we found was that the new players who picked it up were getting lost and frustrated and didn’t understand how to do things. We went back to our roots with 3 and brought back more of the tutorial aspect so whenever you jump into a fight for the first time, you’re gonna get these pop-ups that come up and tell you how to play the game.”

The last fighting game I played was WWE ’12 and the contrast between controls for the two games is obvious. Where W’12 requires frequent and confusing shifts between the face buttons and the thumb sticks to pull off a single move, UFC3 splits control-sets into a number of different “modes”.

Loosely speaking, you focus on the face buttons for out-and-out combat and the thumb sticks for grappling and movement. You’ll have access to different types of punch, kick and motion (or “transition” in UFC parlance) depending on whether you’re standing, in a clinch or on the ground but the controls themselves remain consistent. With the help of the initial tutorial pop-ups, this separation makes the system much easier to learn and modifiers like the left stick, bumper and trigger add depth and variety for the more experienced fighter.

Exhibition matches are your quickplay option to fight as a professional UFC competitor like Anderson Silva and this is what’s available in the demo that came out this week. As a mixed martial arts competition, UFC is more brutal than its entertainment-focused contemporaries. There are two ways to win a match: tire out or beat your opponent to a bloody pulp until he can no longer intelligently defend himself; or hold him (and it’s always a him) in a submission pose until he “taps-out” and admits defeat. In Undisputed 3 you’ll find that fighters have noticeably different strengths and weaknesses. Swinging punches with a kickboxer will deplete your stamina faster than it should and trying to throw an experienced wrestler to the ground while playing as a boxer will get you on the wrong side of a submission. Knowing your individual fighter’s skills is key. This is where Career mode comes in.

Supposedly the mainstay of UFC Undisputed 3, the Career mode is where you design and train your own fighter to battle your way up the ranks. In focusing on accessibility for new players, it seems to me that the team have erred too far on the side of education. Creating the avatar for your new fighter is easy enough. The problem starts when you choose your fighter’s specialities.

Everything seems to require half a dozen button presses to either select something, learn about it or skip the annoying verbal history. Once you finally navigate through the maze of menus you’re forced into a sparring session to determine your level of skill in that particular discipline.

This is fine for the first couple of rounds of just mashing the punch/kick/grapple button until the sparring meter fills up. When 15 minutes later you’re still struggling through menus and tutorials, it’s very tempting to just put the controller down and walk away. Sure, you can skip the sparring matches (after sitting through the loading screen) but you won’t get the stats boost for your character. Given that there are 62 individual tutorials you can choose to play through from a separate menu, forcing this seems like an unnecessary hindrance for those who are experienced or want to just get on with it.

When you’re in the cage, this game can be great fun. Pounding away on your opponent as he lies dazed on the floor triggers an incredible endorphin rush of satisfaction. Even watching other people play is entertaining. Matches are brutal and quick and I guarantee that any spectators will let out a collective “Ooo” of anticipation when you successfully daze your opponent with a solid blow to the head. It’s what happens outside the cage that lets it down.

UFC Undisputed 3 will be released on 17th February for Xbox 360 and PS3. The demo is available for download now.

In putting so much effort into creating an epic tale worthy of the FF title, its creators at Square decided it might be a sensible idea to place you on a leash. I’m not sure where that idea came from. Of course with a FFXIII game or indeed any RPG you expect a certain level of linearity as it guides you round the locales and introduces characters and skills. Even so, one of the staples of the FF series has been its sprawling towns and villages, full of denizens to talk with and treasures to hunt down. These hubs make a quiet retreat for our usually busy heroes and offer a place to learn more about the world you have been placed in.

XIII has its fair share of towns and villages to visit yet when you do, you are rushed through. Ushered to the next objective with very little room to stray. Hand-in-hand with its linearity came a yo-yo-ing story. Hours could be spent with very little information on what is happening and why only for you to be bombarded with cutscenes and text documents to read in the next 5 minutes.

I struggle to call XIII an RPG. To me RPG involves character progression, the ability to craft your party into a team you feel can tackle the inevitable big bad that is threatening the world and still have time to hug a moogle but more importantly, to become as close to this virtual persona as you can get. Characters in this game chop and change here, there and everywhere but thanks to the levelling system granting points to the whole party rather than just those in combat, there is no danger of underlevelling when being thrown into another character.

However, thanks to this constant rotation I never really felt like I had become attached to any character. In FFX I became the blonde haired Tidus, battled with his emotions and experienced his wonder as he travelled a new world he had never seen before. By the end of the game I cared what happened to him. I tried as hard as I could to feel the same way about Lightning – the heroine of XIII – as she fought to save her sister and her world, or empathise with the woes of young Hope whose long cheese filled speeches always made me want to die a little inside.

I couldn’t.

XIII always snapped them away from me just as I was starting to grow towards each one and by the time I was handed back the full reins of my team, I just wanted to finish the game. There it is; despite the problems with endless corridors and lack of control I still wanted to know what happened next. I cared more about the world my people inhabited then the heroes themselves. It’s a strange contrast to the love I felt for FFX which will still be the best Final Fantasy game I have played in my years of gaming. Like LA Noire was more of a film than a game, FFXIII is more akin to a storybook; one you read that drags you from place to place and shows you wonders and marvels. Like all good storybooks it leaves you wanting to know more.

I asked around to see what others thought of this fanbase-splitting title and whether they will be buying XII-2 on it’s release next month. Here are a few responses.

“As much as it got bashed for being linear, I enjoyed every minute of it, still great story telling and I shall very much be buying XIII-2” Iain McDougall

“it’s boring? Linear, too. But, the battle system is great, and does open up big time for whoever sticks with it long enough” Kevin Kissane – The Average Gamer

“I didn’t like how the control was ripped from the player. I’d like to control every team member not just the leader. Amazing visuals though, when my GF was playing it through i watched it a lot but couldn’t play it past the first area” Samuel Curd – Fusion Gamer

“FFXIII while I have yet to finish it, I did enjoy. It just felt too different to the FF series before it. I’m a wee bit of an FF fan so naturally I have FFXIII-2 on preorder, Can’t tell if the change is good or bad as it is nice to see them take some risks” RidentFFXI

I can understand why the changes were made. Final Fantasy is a decades-old series and is now an institution that sits proudly next to Dungeons & Dragons. Perhaps in focussing more on continual action and beautiful graphics Square hoped they could draw in a new generation of RPG players and hopefully bolster what is classed as a specialist fan group.

Final Fantasy XIII has me torn. On one side I hate it for its problems but on the other I can see what they tried to do. I can appreciate how and why they switched characters so often. I can understand the choices in leading you by the hand to learn a completely new combat system. As a Final Fantasy game, XIII does deserve to be played. It deserves to be loved despite all its flaws and it comes into its own after the first 14 hours. Sadly most players, like myself, will have lost faith in it by then.

Final Fantasy XIII is available now.

I tested out preview of Grand Slam Tennis 2 using a standard PlayStation 3 and a Move controller. From the perspective of someone who wants to feel like they’re playing tennis, the Move controller wins hands-down. The game’s Total Racquet Control system made it easy to perform loads of different shots using either the right stick or tilting and twisting the Move controller. The game was fun to play until I increased the difficulty level to hard and then got absolutely hammered by the AI. Yep, back to the practice courts for me.

I questioned Singleton about the differences between the control methods. “It all depends on how you want to play the game. If you want to sit down and relax on your couch and have a very rewarding, intuitive experience with total racquet control on the right stick, then go for it. If you want to re-enact your childhood and literally perform tennis strokes live in your living room from a gesture standpoint then Move is where it is at.”

The game features commentary from legendary ex-tennis players John McEnroe and Pat Cash. Singleton said “We hire the talent to be the talent and do what they do best and that’s call matches live whether that’s in FIFA, Madden or in this case Grand Slam Tennis 2. So what we did was we set up live matches prerecorded and had them call matches as they would in real life, making sure that we get all the scenarios that we want to make it authentic and sound realistic.”

Lets hope that this approach overcomes the problem of in-game commentary quickly becoming repetitive and stale which has plagued every sports title I’ve played.

Grand Slam Tennis 2 is released on the 10th Feb 2012 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Why do you play games? If you said for fun then you can pin that gamer lanyard on to your chest and wear it with pride. There were only a handful of games last year I would have counted as fun and Rayman Origins is right at the top of my big list of Games That Did Gaming Right.

Rayman Origins drags us kicking and laughing right back to the bare roots of platforming. There is a screen and it scrolls to the side as you jump around avoiding enemies or happily punching them in the face with your giant white fists. Why? Because Rayman and his pals were attacked by a mean witch-lady and her shadow minions. They were making too much noise with their snoring. What more do you need? Worlds include underwater caves, floating sky castles made from musical instruments and even see you flying through red hot kitchens on the back of a mosquito.

The art and sound direction of Rayman Origins is one of its main attractions. Beautiful cartoon graphics blend seamlessly with a soundtrack that sounds almost as frivolous. Every world has its own feel beyond the unique enemies or powers you gain from the rather well endowed maidens in distress you save. Often I revisited a level just to hear the music again.

Along with the straightforward reach-the-finish style of gameplay you expect from the humble side-scroller you have a horde of extras including unlockable characters earned by collecting the respective number of lums, medals and trophies for collecting high number of lums or beating time challenges. For the super-hardcore among you there is even a set of bonus levels that sees the difficulty skyrocket if you can find the required items to open the way. What’s that? It also has multiplayer, so now you can have fun with your friends. The wonders of gaming technology today.

Rayman Origins is pure, simple, unadulterated, brightly coloured fun. The type of fun that tickles you instead of punching you in the face with your own fist and telling you to stop hitting yourself. Unless of course you hate FUN or COLOR, reading this and all its mentions of FUN and COLOR must have been painful, I hope you hate yourself, you tyrant. The best part is, if my ramblings haven’t convinced you then go download the demo on XBL and try it for yourself.