For those that remember, Space Channel 5 started off as a Dreamcast title way back in 1999. For those that played it, the game itself hasn’t changed very much. In some areas I would even say it looks and performs worse than its first iteration. Button presses have given way to motion controllers, that’s probably it’s biggest departure. A mixture of a short experience, poor character movements, and several quality of life issues make for a rough time.

Dance the Night Away…for about Half an Hour

I’m just going to go ahead and get this one out of the way. The SC5 will set you back around $25 for the PSVR. The “campaign” will last you right around the 30 minute mark, spread out over four levels. So the core of SC5 will cost you just under a dollar per minute. There are a few additional modes to pad out the game play, like an arcade and exercise mode. However, I wasn’t able to find anything that could redeem it.

Overall the motion works…except for when it doesn’t. One or two of the primary dance moves never consistently translated through the motion tracking reliably. This in and of itself wouldn’t be too bad, however when you couple this with the 3 strikes and your out play style and the intros that can’t be skipped, the frustration begins to build rather quickly.

In addition, the visuals are subpar at best. Character lines are harsh, and character models are just bad. The animations aren’t much better, if in fact at all. In many instances, the background dancers have the same issues that many other older/cheaper games do. Those awkward moments where the NPC’s movements don’t align with the game’s design happen far too often.

The entire game consists of watching several alien invaders dance in front of you. Your task is to memorize their patterns, then repeat them at ever increasing speed. Completing this efficiently saves all of the innocent humans being held hostage in an everlasting dance routine. That’s pretty much the extent of the background, but I suppose for a dance routine game not much else is needed.

Around the Rough Edges

SC5 does do a few things well. The campiness is very well done. Everything that occurs and is stated in the game fits the overall tone and not much strays from that path. If saving humans from being doomed to a life of being a dance slave doesn’t drive the point home nothing will. Another plus being that in some sections you are required to move your entire body to match the movements seen on screen. Side stepping left or right in order to dodge incoming alien lasers seems overly simple, but when 90% of the game is moving your hand left or right the variety really helps to freshen it up.

The feeling of stepping back in time 20 years is a big bonus as well. The main character in the original, Ulala, is now your mentor as you become a fledgling journalist that must learn the ropes. This set up allows for an easier way to keep track of movement cues, as she acts as your guide throughout each level. For the most part this works, save for a few instances when you’re first learning the moves and her guidance leaves a good bit to be desired.

Dancing with the Past

There isn’t much I can recommend within SC5. The few positives were all brought from twenty years ago and haven’t been improved upon. There was a lot that could’ve been done, but it seems like a cash grab on the franchise instead of a passion project from lifelong fans. If you were fans of the previous entries, by all means go for it, but I would not make this a jumping in point for any newcomers.

The sporting world may have had to make some noticeable adjustments over the last year, but in the world of Football Manager 2021 (FM21), its business as usual. The latest instalment in the beloved franchise from Sports Interactive, FM21 promises to build upon the series’ success with a host of new features, revamped match engine, and the all-important inclusion of Brexit’s impact on the beautiful game. Much like previous entries, players can make their choice between three versions of the game – FM21, FM21 Touch, and FM21 Mobile – with many of the new (and old) features being watered-down for the latter two options. In addition, this year Football Manager makes its long-awaited return to Xbox with ‘FM21 Xbox’, sharing many similarities to the ‘Touch’ Version. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this review, I will solely focus on the full game, as it provides what I consider to be the full FM21 experience. Of course, players may wish to opt for the more streamlined versions, however you may find some of the subsequently-mentioned additions absent from your game. For those seeking the full managerial experience though, tracksuit-and-all, let’s dive right into what you can expect from this year’s release.

Before getting into the new, let’s first take a look at old. For the most part, anyone familiar with the series will likely feel right at home in FM21. Your social feed, tactics menu, and more are all still present in FM21, with some minor adjustments to the UI here-and-there. For example, players’ role familiarity is now hidden away in their profile menu, rather than directly on the tactics board. The changes are relatively unnoticeable though, and seasoned veterans will likely already know multiple ways of assessing the various aspects of their chosen club. Indeed, the series continues to do a fantastic job of providing depth and complexity to its gameplay loop, helping give a real sense of agency and accomplishment to players. Overall, on the surface, there are no noticeable absentees from FM20, and so you can expect just as rich of an experience this time around.

Well then, what’s new? The addition that will probably stand-out most to players in FM21 is the changes to the interactions system. Quick chats with players, agents and staff are all useful in making informed decisions, and improved conversation UI and dialogue options certainly add to the experience of haggling down wage demands (and more). However, it is the new gestures mechanic that offers the most noticeable change to interactions in FM21. The implementation of gestures to conversations with your players, staff, etc, can feel a bit gimmicky at times, however for the most part helps create a greater sense of immersion. Deciding to throw a water bottle before demanding improvement during your half-time team talk, for example, can make the difference needed to ensure your players clinch back their two goal deficit. Conversely, you might have just pissed off the entire team. Although these gestures largely don’t make a massive difference to your interactions, I can certainly say they are a welcome addition. I had endless fun demonstrating my stance in contract negotiations with stubborn players by kicking a chair halfway across the room. It is the combination of these gestures with the existing dialogue system that goes a long way in creating a greater sense of realism in FM21, even if the effects of such can seem minimal. Ultimately though, Sports Interactive have done well to add greater depth here, without having to change the fundamentals.

However, what really drives the experience of playing FM21, as opposed to its predecessors, can be found under the hood. Sports Interactive has decided to make some significant changes to the match engine in FM21, promising much more varied gameplay, as well as greater success with different tactical systems. Previous instalments have often been overshadowed by overpowered tactics, which can almost guarantee success, and an easy ride to the top of the footballing world. Subsequently, players can feel limited in their options, and for the game that offers so much, only having a small fraction of it worth exploring is a significant issue. However, with FM21, there is a much greater balance between different tactics, and how your choices impact what happens on the pitch. Player AI has a significantly greater element of randomness (within reason) in all areas of the pitch, meaning that copying-and-pasting tactics you’ve found online isn’t as cut-and-dry as it once was. This is something I welcome with open arms, as one of my gripes with the series has been the sense that if I set things up a certain way, I can let the game manage itself. FM21 encourages you to pay closer attention to your individual players, and ultimately gives a much more satisfactory pay-off for the decisions you make. Although this doesn’t come without its flaws (bizarre player animations can make deciphering play somewhat difficult), FM21 does offer players a much improved experience on matchday.

Speaking of matchday, there are changes more visible to players whilst managing their team from the side-line. Changes to the matchday UI are welcome, and offer a smooth, sleek experience. Similarly, pop-up advice from your staff is far less intrusive, and significantly more helpful. One of the reasons for this is the inclusion of Expected Goals (xG) in your match analysis, which goes a long way in helping breaking down what is going wrong (or right) with your team. Anyone familiar with the Football Manager series knows how overwhelming the plethora of text boxes, stats and graphs can be for those unaccustomed to them (more on this later), and so small additions like this help bridge that gap between being a complete novice, and an expert data analyst. Again, much like the new features previously mentioned, what makes FM21 shine is the attempt by the developers to create a more digestible, engaging experience.

This is evident in other areas of the game too, such as the inclusion of recruitment meetings, aiming to help streamline the scouting and transfer experience. As someone who often gets lost in the immeasurable number of responsibilities held by a football manager, having opportunities to break down one of the most essential elements of this experience with your staff helps enormously. Similarly, when scouting a player, you now have the option to quickly contact their agent, which can provide a host of useful information, such as their expected transfer fee and more. Again, having greater access to this information is invaluable, not only to new players, but those who have been with the series for several years. Nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, I do want to discuss the overwhelming nature of FM21, as despite the successes in improving accessibility, I think offering a more comprehensive tutorial would be incredibly useful for new players. Something akin to being taught how to catch your first Pokémon, having a step-by-step guide BEFORE entering a new save would allow players to experiment with the game’s many features without potentially making a slew of season-ending decisions in their first month in charge. Of course, there are many tutorial just like this online, but having them in-game is something I feel Sports Interactive should consider implementing. Nevertheless, I certainly applaud their attempts to improve the experience for new players in FM21.

Before I finish, I just wanted to mention a couple of things in regards to visual and audio design. Much like its predecessors, sound is almost completely absent from FM21. Unless I missed a memo, the ONLY option I saw was for switching on/off matchday SFX, which is basic at best. Similarly, although the visual design for a majority of the game is perfectly acceptable, matchday animations and visuals are in serious need of improvement. I understand that these two elements will always take a backseat in the series, as developers prioritise gameplay enhancements. This is great actually, as I, and I’m sure many others, would much prefer excellent gameplay with lacklustre visuals/audio, than vice versa. However, I feel like this is an area that should Sports Interactive focus on, would lift the experience of Football Manager to new heights.

So to conclude, FM21 offers a bit of something to players both new and old. Largely a familiar experience to previous entries, fans of the series will find all the fundamentals they already know, with a few bells and whistles thrown on for good measure. The improved matchday engine provides the most significant of the changes noted in FM21, and this goes a long way in creating the sense of immersion and agency the series is known for. New players are given more of a helping hand with features such as recruitment meetings and matchday xG, but Sports Interactive still has someway to go in making the game more accessible for these players. I have noted some minor gripes with the visual and audio design, however I can appreciate that these will remain secondary to the core gameplay loop. Overall, FM21 offers a familiar, rich and enjoyable experience, and one that keeps the series on an upward trajectory towards greatness.

Sakura Wars: For when you want a day off from feminism

Sakura Wars is the sixth entry in the Sakura Wars franchise because games companies are terrible at naming games sequentially. Although, the lack of number or subtitle does make some sense because Sakura Wars serves as a soft reboot to the franchise. I’ve not played any of the previous games so I’ll be reviewing this from the point of view of a reboot and as a jumping-on-point for the franchise. So, if you’ve never played a Sakura Wars game and want to know whether to give this game a shot, this might be the review for you.

Sakura Wars is an action role-playing dating sim. It takes the genres of action-adventure game and dating sim and slams them together with the ferocity of two particles in the large hadron collider. I personally find dating sims quite hard to review as they are, in general, terrible. Their portrayal of women as ditsy, weak girls who were completely lost until you, the strong male protagonist came along and solved all their problems is problematic at best. Getting romance as a reward for some basic human decency feels very icky. I understand that’s part and parcel of the dating sim genre but I’d like to make it clear that Sakura Wars in no way subverts that particular expectation of the genre, with the player character, Seijuro Kamiyama, eyeing up every woman he comes into contact with.

The premise of Sakura Wars is, to put it lightly, mental. It’s set in an anime-styled alternative Tokyo with a heavy steampunk aesthetic. The world is plagued by demons who regularly attack populated areas and wreak havoc, manipulating the fabric of the world and attacking anyone in reach. To protect the people of Tokyo, there are ‘Imperial Combat Revues’ who use giant mechs and even giant-er swords to fight off the demon invaders. So far, so sane, but this is where the weirdness is dialled up a bit.

From what I can tell, the combat revue that Kamiyama has been made captain of, The Flower Division, is 90% theatre troupe and 10% demon fighters. The all-female troupe (no point in any superfluous characters our straight male protagonist won’t be able to romance) spend most of their time as a theatre, selling tickets and putting on plays, with the rest of their time spent preparing to fight demons. Unfortunately, they are absolutely appalling actors so don’t make any money from their plays and can’t afford the upkeep and maintenance of their mechs, meaning they are also relatively ineffective demon-slayers. Gambling the safety of the population on your soldiers’ ability to run a successful theatre seems like an absolutely insane way to run a state military organisation to me, but I do find the way Sakura Wars leaves sanity at the door quite charming.

The dual focus on theatre and combat carries over to the gameplay, which is split into two alternating sections. The first section, which I’m going to refer to as Hugo Talkingsworth for brevity, focuses on the dating sim and role-playing genres. In Hugo Talkingsworth you deal with the theatre side of things, building relationships with the women in the Flower Division. Relationships are built using a LIPS system where you are presented with a situation and then have a few seconds to chose one of three options to respond with, usually one positive, one negative and one unbelievably sexually intimidating. If you chose the correct options in these conversations with the members of the division, you build up your ‘trust’ with them which determines their effectiveness in the combat sections.

The LIPS system is a little bit unpredictable, à la Fallout 4, where you’re only given a short, somewhat unrepresentative preview of what Kamiyama is going to say. It gives you some of the words but not the tone. The preview might say something like ‘It’s going to be okay’ where he actually says ‘Of course it’s going to be okay. What are you, some kind of moron? Why the hell wouldn’t it be okay? You should be ashamed of yourself.’ Hugo Talkingsworth is really a glorified cutscene where you occasionally have to walk from one place to another so the game can give you some more exposition or give you a LIPS choice. There is very little real gameplay in these sections so you’re really pining for the combat sections when they come along.

Unfortunately, the combat sections, which I’m going to refer to as Margaret McStab, don’t quite live up to the excitement you might expect from the ‘fighting demons in giant mechs’ promise made in the game’s description. They’re fairly generic hack and slash affairs which present you with several waves of enemies to fight. There’s nothing particularly unique about any of the enemies so all of Margaret McStab feels very repetitive and uninteresting, almost like she was added as an afterthought to fulfil the ‘action’ part of the brief when the game actually wanted to go down the route to being a full-on Hugo Talkingsworth. All in all, Sakura Wars’ approach to combat is similar to my mother’s approach to fixing any IT issue, you just mash a button until all the bad things go away.

The sensation of Sakura Wars wanting to be a pure dating sim that has completely done away with the combat is reinforced by the time balance given to the two types of gameplay. The first Hugo Talkingsworth section is a full 90 minutes long, which is a harrowing thing to sit through when it’s literally all cutscene. Compare this to the first Margaret McStab, which is only about 20 minutes long and not particularly engaging. The situation is compounded by the way the game constantly takes control from you to do a bit more cutscene-style exposition and dialogue, even in a Margaret McStab.

Considering the focus on Hugo Talkingsworth, I also found some of the voice acting choices a bit bizarre. The game is entirely in Japanese with English subs and for most of the cutscenes and in-game dialogue that’s how it’s presented – a character’s model is animated to be talking in Japanese, with Japanese voice acting over the top and English subtitles. Apart from sometimes. Sometimes there just isn’t any voice acting. The characters are still animating as if they’re having a conversation and there are subtitles but the exchange is completely silent. This is especially jarring when the change happens mid-interaction with a few minutes of a conversation being voiced, the next few minutes being silent and the final few being voiced. I thought this might be a glitch in my version of the game so I looked up some Let’s Plays, but, nope. It looks like it was a conscious choice to have some sections unvoiced, for some reason.

Overall, I think Sakura Wars just isn’t for me. If you like a game that’s framed as a long anime TV show with the occasion interactive section, this game is 100% for you. If you like dating sims for their depiction of ‘healthy’ relationship building, this game is 100% for you. If you’re more interested in a game’s aesthetic theming, art style and soundtrack than the gameplay, this game is 100% for you. Unfortunately, I’m none of those people so the appeal of Sakura Wars passes me by. If you’re a veteran of the genre, I’m sure Sakura Wars is a great example of an action role-playing dating sim. However, as a layman with no history with the franchise, Sakura Wars looks to me to have very little going on and what is going on is slow, drawn-out and low-key misogynistic.