A number of sites got their greasy, keyboard crippled hands on early scans of the latest Weekly Famitsu yesterday, and revealed Yuusha 30, thus spoiling all the good fun of Marvelous’ countdown clock. A “new feels RPG” — no comment — according to Famitsu, Yuusha 30’s hook is having four playable characters that you only control for thirty seconds at a time. Each character corresponds with a different game genre. Yuusha’s princess has you playing thirty seconds of scrolling shooter, its demon you play a strategy game, and with the token warrior, a side-scrolling action game. Right now, that’s about all the information there is about Yuush 30 for PSP. But it’s enough to get me chomping at the bit to try it out.
While it isn’t widespread enough to call a trend, the micro game is starting to spread beyond its WarioWare confines. You can see Yoshio Sakamoto’s fingers in a number of recent games, and not just WarioWare clones or rhythm games like Sakamoto’s own Rhythm Tengoku. This sort of quick style play is starting to show up in more traditional genres, much like it is here in Yuusha 30. Treasure’s Bangai-O Spirits is the very definition of a hardcore game: a two-dimensional shooter that requires you memorize a ridiculous amount of information, from stage layouts to weapon effects and enemy patterns. But most challenges in Bangai-O take little more than thirty-seconds to complete, and often times less.
The micro game, as it were, might just be the next great hope for hardcore Japanese games. If Sakamoto’s style of burst gaming can be turned into a successful shmup or RPG, where will we see it next?
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