The 2006 Archive

This makes it all the more disappointing that Gonzo just canceled what might well have been their next decent series: an OVA called Mardock Scramble. It had the sturdy source of an awarding-winning novel and an interesting premise involving a weirdly high-tech floating city and a once-dead prostitute named Balut tracking down her murderer and former boyfriend. It also had big names attached: writer Tow Ubukata (who penned the novel), artist Range Murata (whose vaguely uncomfortable sad-lolita-girl art actually fits the story), and even Gankutsuou director Mahiro Maeda, who did weapon design. I like it when there's a credit for “weapon design.” It lends a sense of class to the whole production.

Mardock was Gonzo's 15th anniversary series, and though it existed in some vague planning-stage limbo for a long while, it seemed to be moving toward completion. The latest issue of Newtype USA even has a half-page feature on it.

It's even sadder to think that Mardock might not leave any traces behind. The trailers and text are gone from the official website, and there's now just an apology for the series' cancellation and a shot of Balut looking depressed.

Or looking like she's about to take a massive shit all over the Gonzo logo, whichever you think more appropriate.

So I'm off to see if anyone saved the official Mardock Scramble trailer, and to screencap the website for the Romeo and Juliet anime, just in case.

December 21, 2006
Vacation time here. I'll be gone for the next week.

Since that's a really pointless update, here's an explanation for the less-than-current reviews that have shown up over the past month: they're essentially leftovers that I never got around to posting, mostly because their subjects were either troublesome or, in Tristia's case, hard to sit through without losing interest. But with that out of the way, I can get back to being only mostly irrelevant.

December 19, 2006
I didn't really like its last outing, but I generally enjoy the Pocky and Rocky series, or Kiki Kaikai, as it's known in Japan. This leads to some confusing nomenclature, as Starfish recently announced Kiki Kaikai 2. Many know that Natsume made a Pocky and Rocky 2 on the Super NES, but this new PlayStation 2 title is actually a direct sequel to Taito's original arcade game, and not Natsume's SNES revision.

For this outing, the new version of Pocky (left) looks less cute than her old-school incarnation (right) and more like the heroine of some trite “adventure” PC game consisting only of text, still images, and pornographic interludes. But we should be grateful that she at least isn't spilling out of her robe like Koyori from Sengoku Cannon.

This is Konkon, the game's other playable character and possibly a future mascot for some cell phone company. Rocky the tanuki/raccoon and the rest of the Pocky and Rocky 2 characters aren't around because they weren't in the arcade game in the first place. And don't even ask about Becky.

Most of the screenshots released so far look no better than the 16-bit Pocky and Rocky titles, but at least Pocky (who I refuse to call “Sayo-chan”) can jump now and, thanks to PS2 controller's analog joysticks, move one direction while firing in another.

That looks like a scene from that above-mentioned adventure game, where Pocky's learning that the demon-winged guy is her childhood friend driven to evil by a lifetime of tragedy.

That, however, looks awesome.

And that is just disturbing.

Upon looking over the screenshots available so far, it's hard to rationalize paying sixty bucks for something that has less visual panache and fewer characters than the twelve-year-old Pocky and Rocky 2. So we can only cling to the hope that Natsume will release it over here as a budget-label title. That's probably not going to happen, but I still remember how Natsume came through with Lufia 2 back when everyone else gave up on the SNES. For that I'll never write them off.

December 14, 2006
Romeo and Juliet: The Anime. It's not a joke. It's an upcoming TV series from Studio Gonzo.

On the one hand, Gonzo's best series, Gankutsuou, was based on classic fiction, and their other decent works have similar roots. Even Blue Sub No. 6, their crude yet gripping breakout creation, had its origins in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

On the other hand, this shares few, if any, names with Gankutsuou, and Gonzo's two reliable directors, Mahiro Maeda and Takeshi Mori, are nowhere to be seen.

And while Gankutsuou was a dizzying, futuristic take on The Count of Monte Cristo (and Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination), Romeo and Juliet seems a fairly mundane retelling.

Aside from the winged horses, that is.

Oh, and the floating city of Verona.

And the fact that Juliet runs around with a sword, which is actually a plus in my book.

What's more, the composer for Radiant Silvergun, Vagrant Story, and Final Fantasy XII is doing the music, which alone is worth some guarded enthusiasm.

Watch the trailer here, and note the hilariously bathetic kissing-as-they-fall sequence. Oh well. At least it's not another season of the Witchblade anime.

December 12, 2006
Behold the biggest gaming news of the year.

In truth, it's only big if you like Dragon Quest, or live in Japan, or follow that nation's game industry with all the zealotry due a resurrected world savior. I'm not really party to any of the above; I thought Dragon Quest VIII got boring after the initial atmospheric kick, I live in New York, and my insane fascination is reserved primarily for Final Fantasy games.

However, Dragon Quest IX represents the Japanese market's undeniable shift toward handheld systems. It's hardly surprising for an industry where the surest bet was the Game Boy not so long ago, but many have seen fit to declare this the end of consoles in Japan, much in the same way that street prophets declare the end of days after a particularly bad thunderstorm or yellow lobster sighting. Home consoles doomed? Right. They said the same thing about arcades back in the mid-‘90s and….oh.

I prefer something more sedate: a greater divide between the console and the handheld in Japan, with the expensive home system buyers/eBayers still numerous enough to get their exclusives. In other words, I don't think I'll be playing Final Fantasy XIV on the bus.

Final Fantasy XIV: Acheron Soul Crystal Blitz Revenant Crisis Spin-Off? Maybe.

November 26, 2006
I don't have a PlayStation 3 and probably won't until 2008 or so, but at least I can use Sony's online database to gauge the system's backwards compatibility with PSone and PS2 games.

Well, that's a relief.

November 7, 2006
So I callously disparaged the Final Fantasy XII Collector's Edition in my last update. And then I went and bought it anyway.

As I thought, most of the extras are engaging, but not really memorable. Instead of a making-of-the-game feature, there's just a load of developer (and translator) interviews, and a half-hour “History of Final Fantasy” overview that does little more than run down the plot of each game and point out the many incarnations of Cid and the Chocobos. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't mention the god-awful Final Fantasy Mystic Quest or the planned Famicom version of Final Fantasy IV. A few interesting details pop up, but if you're a big enough Final Fantasy nerd to pay extra for a bonus disc, you're probably a big enough Final Fantasy nerd to know everything that disc could possibly tell you.

However, it's nice to confirm that Akihiko Yoshida doesn't walk around in the same medieval bondage outfits he uses in his character art. He just looks like he belongs in one of Japan's few Weezer cover bands, a proper calling for anyone.

October 28, 2006
Final Fantasy XII comes out this Tuesday, but actual copies have already trickled out to magazines and some rental stores. After seeing both the regular edition of the game at the office and handling the two-disc special edition at EB, I prefer the former. The special edition is metallic and regal, but the two discs are packed halfway on top of each other in a manner ripe for scratching, and an extra ten bucks is just ridiculous for a documentary and some interviews (none of which is likely to detail how director Yasumi Matsuno went nuts and left the project).

Besides, the regular edition has much nicer cover art.

October 16, 2006
After much consideration and many desperate attempts to enliven it, my writeup of Final Fantasy XII Day is here, as the event was a bit too dull for me to sell a summary of it anywhere else. But I wrote about it anyway, and it'll come in handy if you ever need to prove to someone that they really did run Final Fantasy XII ads in Times Square.

Also, that name-the-gif contest is over, with two prize packages of dubious quality headed out to the first-place winner and a runner-up. The correct answer was, of course, Sonic the Hedgehog.

October 10, 2006
Tomorrow, Times Square will host the greatest thing ever to happen in New York City.

The press release doesn't describe any actual events, so I'm betting we'll just see some Square-selected cosplayers handing out free game demos in front of that huge Toys R Us, with the Ashe and Fran costumes possibly getting their wearers arrested for solicitation.

And I want to be there. I like the idea of Final Fantasy promoters competing for space with the Scientologists' stress-test tables and the angry Jews for Jesus representatives. Plus it's a city-wide FINAL FANTASY XII DAY. Hilarious.

October 3, 2006
I don't care what you might think of the rapidly blurring line between advertising and entertainment.

This is awesome. And it will remain so until everyone starts joking about it being Game of the Year, but for the next day-and-a-half, it's awesome.

October 2, 2006
Okay, this site's been dead too long. It's time to bring it back in the laziest way possible: a contest.

This weekend, I was struck by an unpleasant realization: in all my years of using the Internet, I've never made an animated gif. This obviously had to change.

So I made one. It's linked because it's huge. And that's because I just threw some screengrabs together and didn't resize them.

Let's have some fun. The first person to tell me the game's title and the character's original Japanese name gets a prize. It might not be a good prize, but it'll have something to do with games. Not necessarily good games, but...well, you get the idea.

September 15, 2006
Holy shit. So he's not dead or locked away at a mental institution or living in the subway and strumming out Queen covers for change.

Word is that Matsuno's working with Cavia, the people who made Drakengard and Bullet Witch, but I hope that's just a lie spread by the two or three people who pretend to like Cavia as part of some experiment in gaming memes.

Cavia aside, this means that I'll get a Wii eventually.

September 5, 2006
Hey, Arc System Works, Sammy, or whoever's in charge of Guilty Gear at the moment.

This is just ridiculous.

Yes, it's Guilty Gear XX Accent Core, it's out on location test in Japanese arcades, and it's yet another upgrade. Tweaked moves. Re-recorded voices. A new defending-and-counterattacking sub-system. Maybe some new art and one more character who's just an alternate version of an existing fighter. And all this mere months after Guilty Gear XX Slash hit the PS2. But hey, new backgrounds.

This is the best possible proof that Sammy really has no idea what to do with Guilty Gear. They're supposedly caught up in debating whether the series' next major step will be 3-D or not, but whatever the delay, the company's still desperate to keep the franchise above water. That's why Sammy wants it on every system, even if it means putting out the unimpressive experiment called Guilty Gear Dust Strikers on the DS and the port-and-a-half that's Guilty Gear Judgment on the PSP. The latter comes out tomorrow and is supposedly quite solid, even if the new side-scrolling brawler mode will likely suck.

In all fairness, Sammy doesn't seem to be getting much help from Guilty Gear's creator, Daisuke Ishiwatari. While he designed, scored and crafted the characters for the original game, he's done less and less for each new Guilty Gear title over the past three years. I assume he's too busy listening to Queen and trying to feel pretty.

Judging by the low-grade footage seen so far, Accent Core may well be the first Guilty Gear that wears out even the most insane fans (in other words, the people who bought and still own Isuka). And yet I want to play it anyway. Maybe they added a move where Millia forms her hair into an outboard motor or something.

August 23, 2006
Yesterday saw an important event in the world of videogames and largely unjustified nostalgia. I'm speaking of the DVD release of the Fred Savage film and notorious Nintendo vehicle The Wizard.

It's not a good movie. In fact, it's not even a particularly engaging bad movie. It's really quite routine and dull, outside of a few wonderful scenes: the Power Glove's sole moment of greatness, Christian Slater and Beau Bridges reluctantly bonding over an NES, the future lead singer of Rilo Kiley falsely accusing someone of molestation in an arcade, and, of course, the insanely extravagant unveiling of Super Mario Bros. 3. Once you get past the stupid kick of seeing a film that revolves around Nintendo games, there's not much else to do, other than point out the script's parallels with The Who's Tommy and spot Tobey Maguire's first on-screen role.

But it's an important movie, dammit. If you grew up in the shadow of Nintendo and were any sort of normal kid around 1990, there was surely a moment when your ambition in life consisted of trekking across several states, meeting a cute redheaded tomboy (or being that plucky tomboy, if you were a female Nintendo brat), and taking your quasi-autistic kid brother to the fictional equivalent of the Nintendo World Championships, all in the glorious name of videogames. It may not have lasted long, but that moment was there. Don't deny it.

For those film history nerds among us, The Wizard also concluded the short trend of '80s movies that dealt with videogames as a wondrously juvenile subculture. Like Wargames, The Last Starfighter and the legendary Joe Don Baker satire Joysticks, The Wizard envisions a world where playing games, getting high scores, and beating Mecha-Turtle will somehow help you overcome your crippling insecurities and change your life for the better. As the ‘90s started up, this fantasy gave way to films that occupied themselves with the actual games instead of their broader implications. It wasn't a change for the better, perhaps because it's easier to make a cohesive film about young game nerds hitchhiking to Los Angeles than it is to turn the backstory of Double Dragon or Super Mario Bros. into any sort of decent movie.

So it doesn't really matter that The Wizard's DVD release is astoundingly bare-bones, lacking any special features, trailers, or commentary tracks where Christian Slater gets drunk while Jenny Lewis moans about the film and Brooklyn Bridge robbing her of a childhood. It's enough that the now-grown Nintendo kids of 1990 can watch their youthful ambitions played out in some Reagan-era fever dream, where a large corporation could back a film just to show off Raccoon Mario and kids could apparently catch rides across Nevada without ending up in shallow graves by sundown.

It's still a lousy movie, but I think that's the point.

July 26, 2006
For those still reeling (or laughing hysterically) over the unfortunate news surrounding the Valis series and its clearly unsafe-for-work descent into porn, here's some shred of comfort: last year, Telenet made a Valis title for mobile phones. It's a side-scroller very much in the style of the 16-bit Valis games, with a gallery of all the outfits Yuko wore during the franchise's more pleasant days. It probably wasn't much of a hit, otherwise Telenet would've made another one instead of whoring out the Valis name to a porn developer.

Cute and innocuous, the portable Valis: The Phantasm Soldier's homepage shows no signs of tentacles, violently coercive lesbian trysts, or horribly misplaced swords. Taking the current advancements of Japanese cell phones into account, I do think this could be a decent game.

But I also think that we should never, ever trust Telenet again.

June 21, 2006
Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria comes out tomorrow, so it's probably time to admit that I tried to order one of those Artifact Boxes. Yet last-minute price spikes stood in my way, and I went with the regular release instead. It made me realize something: buying an Artifact Box probably wasn't a good idea in the first place.

It's not a bad little clump of merchandise: there's a CD with about ten tracks from the game's soundtrack (which will supply four separate albums), a figure of Silmeria herself, and a replica of a ring worn by Rufus, one of the game's many recruitable Einherjar. Upon consideration, however, I can't imagine what I'd do with it all, apart from putting the limited soundtrack on iTunes, sticking the figure on a bookshelf, and looking at the ring a good minute before throwing it back in the box. It'd be the Lunar 2 pendant all over again.

In cynical fact, the key selling point of an Artifact Box would be its resale value. Few on eBay will want the standard-issue Japanese release once the American version of Silmeria ships, but those pricey, short-run box sets usually hold their value. Even that MOK-KOS thing hasn't dropped in price, perhaps for the same reason people pay more than five bucks for the uncut version of Manos: The Hands of Fate on DVD.

Yes, I'm missing out on some decent collectibles, but it's all for the best. Thanks to a local Suncoast's closing sale, I found a valkyrie figure that improves on that skirt-lifting Silmeria trinket in every way.

I needed a moment to recognize her as the eponymous heroine of The Legend of Valkyrie, Namco's 1989 arcade shooter-adventure game. Part of a recent Namco Gals line that was actually sold in doomed American video stores, Valkyrie serves as proof that Japanese gashapon design knows no logic and is all the better for it. Valkyrie in a maid outfit would be repulsive. Valkyrie in the Ridge Racer girl's costume would be stupid. But Valkyrie in surfer garb? Fucking awesome. It's like the strangest Apocalypse Now reference ever.

Better still, the surfboard's other side has a picture of Tekken's Heihachi Mishima for no reason, making it look like a strangely legal version of some Hong Kong knock-off toy. I'll admit that Valkyrie's eyes aren't quite straight and the paint job can't touch the nicer Japanese mini-figures, but that's beside the point. And the point is that Valkyrie cost me all of four dollars, which'll prove important when the time comes to pitch her in the closet next to my Dreamcast and teddy bear. I give her about five months.

April 19, 2006
It looks like that 3-D Metal Slug game, announced long ago by SNK, is still in the works.

I'd just as soon not talk about it. The images say plenty.

With that out of the way, let's all get excited about Metal Slug 6.

March 25, 2006
Wow, they're making a new Valis game! Remember Valis, the 16-bit action series about a schoolgirl named Yuko turning into an anime version of She-Ra and saving an alternate dimension several times over? Yeah, the games are mostly average, but they were fun back in the days of the Genesis and TurboGrafx, when we could be entranced by a plucky female warrior, decent Castlevania-style play mechanics, and cinema sequences that used "amazing CD technology" to mimic those then-novel Japanese cartoons.

The series quietly died around 1993, but now we have Valis X (or Valis Cross, as it's pronounced) for the Japanese PC. Here's the official website.

I don't remember the original games showing Yuko with quite such large breasts or an expression that mixed drugged stupefaction with a dawning sense of terror. Still, this is an official Valis title—there's the Telenet copyright in the corner—so we should be interested. Let's look at the screenshots and see just what sort of game this is.

Yes, it's a lesbian porn game. A lesbian porn Valis game. I'd make some joke about Philip K. Dick spinning in his grave, but he never had anything to do with the Valis games in the first place. Besides, he might have even endorsed lesbian anime sex in his unhinged later years.

This sort of thing turns up all the time in unlicensed gaming subcultures, where you can find just about any porn based on just about any game. It's truly rare, though, for a company to put out fully authorized smut about their most recognizable character, and that's precisely what's happening here. Telenet was a major Japanese game developer during the early ‘90s, but the days of Valis, Cosmic Fantasy, El Viento, and all those shooters are long gone. Like an actress whose career evaporated a decade ago, Telenet's doing porn. And so is Yuko, whether she likes it or not.

That's the disturbing thing about this: Yuko doesn't seem to be enjoying it at all. If she was going about things with a huge orgiastic grin on her face, there'd be far less cause for offense. But no. We can't have harmless, consensual lesbian stuff, because Japanese porn-gamers won't buy it unless a woman is cringing, blushing, sobbing, or dying.

Telenet's actually endorsed a series of Valis X games, with four more titles that focus on other characters like Cham, Valna, and Yuko's stupid classmate Reiko getting sapphic with each other. Telenet also has the temerity to charge about $25 for every game, and they're download-only. You don't even get a DVD copy with special-edition packaging, which would come in handy when you wanted people to leave your apartment. The upside? Someone might swipe the games and slap them into a torrent for all the Internet to see. And though I normally don't promote that sort of overt thievery, people shouldn't pay money for something like Valis X, because that'll just encourage more of it.

March 10, 2006
Between the lesbian-themed promotions and the lack of other high-profile Xbox 360 releases this season, Rumble Roses XX actually looks like it might sell someone a system, perhaps even here in America. I won't be that person. It's not my deeply ingrained moral objection to wrestling games that focus on women in fetish-friendly outfits moaning with embarrassment as they're exposed to a cheering and entirely male audience. It's just that Candy Cane doesn't look right.

That's Candy as she appears in the original Rumble Roses, wherein she is a petulant rocker who ignores her education to the point where she conveniently becomes both a schoolgirl and a legal adult (which would be disturbing if any of this were taken seriously). She also enters a wrestling tournament so she can save an orphanage, and her pre-match intro is full of camera punching, guitar smashing, and general faux-punk hilarity. In ideal circumstances, the rest of Rumble Roses would be the same way: loud, stupid, and harmlessly enjoyable. It's not, but Candy is amusing. Or, at least, she was.

That's Candy in Rumble Roses XX. Granted, this is the least flattering screencap I could find, but she really does look strung-out and creepy in most of the footage I've seen, as though she's nearing the end of amphetamine-fueled touring and will either find Jesus and become a dull motivational speaker or kill herself and become an idol to thousands of soon-to-fail garage bands.

But there's a bright side: she now fronts a band somehow linked to a Sex Pistols verse. After beating the game, you might see her stab her girlfriend in a half-successful suicide pact and then, decades later, piss all over the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. For that alone, I'd buy Rumble Roses XX the same way I bought the first, which involved ten bucks and a Circuit City clearance sale.

The alternative: I'll get one of those figures and stick it next to my television while playing something other than Rumble Roses XX. I'm not sure which option would destroy my soul faster.

March 5, 2006
Well, that settles it. The PSP has won. At game shops across Japan, social retards and vapid schoolgirls alike are standing in line for the next available shipment of Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth. At every Gamestop and EB Games and doomed mom-and-pop gaming store across America, clerks are shoveling through piles of newly traded-in DS systems. At Nintendo's headquarters in Redmond, Reggie Fils-Aime is sitting dejectedly behind his desk with tears rolling down his face and bouncing off his enormous chin.

The only part of the above that might be true is the line about Japan, where the PSP port of Valkyrie Profile is in high demand, even though the PlayStation version costs about half as much and isn't hard to find. Then again, these were the same people who stood in queues for slightly improved versions of the Nintendo DS.

From what I've played of it, the port is accurate, except for one problem: everything goes slightly out of focus during close-up scenes, especially when you're inside a small room in a house or dungeon. It could just be my copy, or it could be the result of Valkyrie Profile getting reformatted for the PSP's screen. The rest of the game looks fine.

As promised, the PSP port has new movie clips that crop up at dramatic plot points, and while they're pretty, they're not really necessary. You know how Lenneth Valkyrie has stood as one of the rare video game heroines who wasn't saddled with a revealing outfit? The first cinema sequence shows her transforming into her valkyrie armor at Odin's palace, and the process involves lingering glimpses of her naked body. However, I'm not the sort of guy who gets legitimately offended over bare flesh in video games, and it's amusing that the scene also shows Odin and Freya with knowing expressions, suggesting that they're aware of Lenneth's secret. Or that they just like hot nude valkyrie action.

Unfortunately, I didn't get Visual Profile, the promotional artbook that was given out with pre-orders in Japan. It's some consolation that the manual for Lenneth has most of the character illustrations as well as this ad for Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria. The woman inside the ice crystal actually looks like Lenneth, and I wonder if Silmeria will explain why.

Pull your skirt together, you Nordic hussy. We've got to salvage some dignity for the game.

There's no reason to own the PSP port if you already have the PlayStation version of Valkyrie Profile, but I couldn't resist the chance to play one of my favorite games in Japanese and on a handheld. Flawed or not, Lenneth has me digging out my PSP whenever I won't embarrass myself by playing a video game in public. That isn't very often.

March 2, 2006
To continue my coverage of even the most insignificant news about Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria, I must note that a new set of screens revealed something Valkyrie Profile fans have long suspected: Lezard Valeth, the rat-bastard wizard from the original Valkyrie, is a playable character in Silmeria.

As Silmeria's a prequel of sorts, Lezard is younger and now vaguely resembles Harry Potter, who was, as some fans have joked, the inspiration for his character. Perhaps Square Enix will play up the resemblance in their American advertising and provoke a hilariously unfounded lawsuit from J.K. Rowling. Viral marketing and all that.

We also have this nice in-battle screenshot, which fills in the names of the rest of the party: the big dude's Dylan, and the somewhat androgynous archer is Rufus, a name that's usually used for comical effect, outside of Final Fantasy VII. But I expect no joke characters in Silmeria. It's going to be a serious game, and I won't hear anything to the contrary.

Silmeria's hitting Japan in June, which means that a delay-free translation could put in our oversized American hands by the end of the year. Hell, they're already putting the names in English.

One more thing: this site's terribly delayed exploration of ugly game box art has a new entry from the guy who previously rambled on about Light Crusader. It's required reading for anyone who wondered why no one from Sky Kid made the cut for Namco X Capcom.

February 3, 2006

Part One
National Console Support stocks a new model of Koyori from Sengoku Cannon. For reference, this is Koyori.

In characteristically delightful NCSX prose, the store's website reveals that the Koyori model's clothing can be removed. NCSX reportedly expects the figures to sit on hand for several months.

Part Two
NCSX sells out of the figures within a few hours.

Personal Opinion
Sengoku Cannon, being a side-scrolling PSP shooter from Psikyo, sounds cool at first, but not after you've seen the boring screenshots and read the unflattering reviews. Given the choice, I'd sooner have a Koyori figure, which could at least lie sealed in a safety deposit box until the day it's worth a grand on eBay.

Oh yeah, and buying frenzies surrounding naked toys are hilarious.

Author's Note
Images of the disrobed Koyori model may be seen here, you lonely fucks.

January 5, 2006
Valkyrie Profile fans most likely have seen the latest trailer for Lenneth and Silmeria a dozen times over, but it's also of interest to anyone who enjoys live-action footage that unconvincingly tries to recreate a video game.

In an opening shot, an old lady cradles the head of a young warrior who appears to have fallen asleep. This image would fit right in with some low-level historical drama if it wasn't for Lenneth standing back there in full cosplay regalia. Now it's good only for the Sci-Fi Channel.

The trailer then shifts to gloomy shots of a graveyard and a candle. I might buy a candle like that if it had the Valkyrie Profile logo on it somewhere, just because there aren't enough game-themed candles.

The last live-action shot features a woman in a Lenneth Valkyrie costume roaming a hillside. This is what Valkyrie Profile looks like in a parallel universe where full-motion video titles took over the gaming industry and everything is made from jittery, embarrassing clips of actors bumbling around in gauche outfits. In this dimension, Valkyrie Profile was still overshadowed, but by Corpse Killer 4.

Fortunately, the rest of the trailer is excellent, and it's apparently the source of many Silmeria screenshots leaked before the game's official announcement. I even like the rather basic GC footage from Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, though the potential for upskirt shots of Lenneth would pretty much ruin her status as a non-sexualized gaming heroine. This would leave me with even fewer counterexamples to name whenever someone proposes that the gaming industry exists just for the sake of 12-year-old boys and their disturbingly unmatured older equivalents.