Well, since the entire world has been abuzz over the recent announcement of Apple’s new iPad yesterday (which, by the way, I am totally buying as soon as it comes out). I decided to finally sit down with the latest official anime iPhone app and put it through its paces. After all, this app will also be available on the iPad in a few months.

The Fullmetal Alchemist State Alchemy Exam (iTunes link) is the second anime franchise coming to the iPhone from Japanese developer Appliya. A year ago, they released a series of novelty Evangelion apps, such as a clock and sticker app I was able reviewed on this blog last February. Now Appliya has partnered with FUNimation Entertainment to bring a number of the company’s top properties to the interactive small screen, and the first one up to bat is the very popular FMA franchise.

The State Alchemy Exam is essentially a trivia game that combines questions about the first FMA anime series (“What is the last name of Edward and Alphonse?”) with questions about Physics (“What is the process of changing a liquid into a gas?”) and Chemistry (“The bubbles in soda are caused by what gas?”). You begin at the easy level and when you can answer all 10 out of 10 questions correctly, you can move on to a more difficult level.

I have to admit that the geek in me actually had fun combining my knowledge of the fictional FMA universe with my knowledge of real world science. It adds a much needed hook to the generic trivia game formula, and it sort of made my year of 10th grade Chemistry not feel completely worthless in the long run.

The problem with the trivia questions is that you cannot move on to the next level unless you score 100% on the exam. One slip up and you are forced to go back and try again. This meant that I had to retry the same level again and again, and the questions began repeating themselves far too often, which quickly took away the fun and spontaneity of the game.

I did like Appliya’s integration of the OpenFeint score-keeping system. By signing up with the third-party service, you are able to participate in the world leaderboard and compare your stats with that of your friends. The set up was plainness and I was able to login using my Facebook account. Could not have been any easier to utilize this fantastic service.

But like I did with the Eva apps last year, I seriously have to question Appliya’s choice of pricing the app at $1.99, breaking that 99 cent threshold held by a majority of programs in the app store. The State Alchemy Exam is a novelty app and nothing more. You will play it for a round or two and have fun doing it, and then you will probably never touch it again after beating the hard level.

Is that worth 99 cents? Absolutely.

Is it worth twice that price? Well, that’s pushing it.

If you are a hardcore FMA fan, than you have probably already downloaded this app, and by all means, you should. This game is perfect for that kind of fan. But if you are just a casual fan of the series, then use a little digression before forking over the two dollars. The State Alchemy Exam is fun, but it is not particularly that amazing.

Review copy provided by Appliya.

I love visual novel games. It’s an unique genre that is hugely popular in Japan yet is only known in America by otaku. It’s probably because of this cultural oddity that I find myself fascinated with the genre. Since learning Japanese, I would occasionally import a game and play through them in their native language. Just recently, I’ve been playing The Idolmaster SP import on my PSP system. In college, I gave my final presentation in Japanese pop-culture studies about this genre of video game. I even wrote an essay about the Phoenix Wright series and its impact on American otaku culture on this blog a year ago.

We very rarely see visual novels translated into English and released into the US, so when one does come around, I usually play through it with a lot of praise and fanfare. So when I was offered a review copy of Ignition’s American release of the Nintendo DS game Lux-Pain, I gave them quite an enthusiastic “yes!” at the opportunity.

Lux-Pain puts you in the position of a paranormal investigator in search of the truth behind a series of unexplainable murders and suicides in the quiet Kisaragi City. Your special weapon, Sigma, is the ability to erase through the physical world and uncover the Silent, little psychic worms of tragedy and despair. Going undercover as a typical high school student, you search around the city for these worms left around the crime scenes or buried in the psyche of your friends and classmates.

The game play is a rather passive experience, but that’s common with the genre. As the term “visual novel” would imply, you spend most of the time reading dialogue between you and the other characters. It’s like reading a manga where you see the story through the eyes of the protagonist. The story is a typical murder mystery, so it is not particularly deep or meaningful. But because it is so detailed and gives you that first-person perspective, you do find yourself being drawn into this fictional world. That way, the little interactions you do encounter while playing only serve to drive you deeper into the story.

* Screenshots taken from the Japanese version. US version is in English.

Every 15 minutes or so, you go into Sigma mode to search for a worm by an echo location-like technique. Once you spot them, you destroy the worms by exposing and attacking them with your DS stylus. When you’re done, an alphabet soup of words and phrases appear to show you a stream of consciousness of some unfortunate past event, giving your character new information to unfold the story. While these alphabet soup moments might be a little hard for the player to take in, I think it’s a very clever way of showing the chaotic nature of the mind and feelings.

The one aspect that Lux-Pain shines at for being a “visual novel” is in the visual department. It looks fantastic. The game contains lots of characters – at least 40 from what I can tell. Each one of them is drawn perfectly to portray a uniquely charming personality, taking away the cartoon goofiness of the Phoenix Wright series and replacing it with a more conventional style of anime. The prettiness of all the character designs are highlighted in an extra art book that comes with the game.

One of the first characters you’ll encounter in the game Natsuki, a fellow psychic decked out in a hot Gothic Lolita outfit. There’s the sophisticated look of the local bookstore owner Ryu. The mischievous look of computer hacker Shinji. The down-to-Earth look of the art teacher Aoi. Or the cute kid-sister look of Nami.

And with those charming personalities comes a feature that really blew me away…

There’s English dubbed voice acting in the game!

Whenever I’ve played these type of games before, they are either in English with no voice acting (Phoenix Wright) or they’ve been in Japanese with Japanese voice acting (Idolmaster SP). This is the first time I’ve ever played a visual novel with English voice acting, and I must say, I like it very much.

Given the size of a Nintendo DS cartridge, only selected scenes are actually voiced over. But the quality of the acting was so good and added so much more to the game that I started every scene hoping it would be voiced over.

The voice actors are the typical voice actors you’ll find in the “Texas Dubs” of FUNimation and ADV, like Monica Rial and Greg Ayers. While I’m particularly not a huge fan of their dub work for anime, their quick single-line delivery in this visual novel style of game play is fantastic. This is some of the best work that these actors have ever done, and it is a shame that they go uncredited for it.

But maybe there’s a reason they keep their name on the down low with Lux-Pain. This fantastic game does sport it’s own Achilles’ heel. Well, maybe that’s not the right metaphor to describe it. Achilles’ heel was not huge, throbbing, and had a million neon signs pointing to it saying, “Here! Hit this! It’s an easy kill!”

So what is the game’s fatal weak point? Well, have you ever watched an anime DVD with both the dub audio and the subtitles on at the same time? Notice how the subtitles are basically saying the same thing as the dub actors are saying, but using different words here and there?

That’s the entire localization of Lux-Pain. For a text-based visual novel, the only thing that’s wrong with it is.. well… THE TEXT! It’s crappy. It’s horrible. It’s a complete and utter embarrassment!

More often then not, the text you are reading on the bottom of the screen differs from the words you’re hearing over the speaker. Being well-establish professional anime voice actors, the dub team improvised a little from the script in order to make the language sound more natural and to sync with the lip flaps of the sprite.

In some ways, this is the reason why the dub works so well with the game. But unfortunately, the game’s localization team never adjusts to these changes. They keep the literal translation of the original text in the game, making the text impossible to read along with the voice actors.

Just for a random example, when the character of Rui is describing a vision she’s seeing,

You hear: “A happy family… Your mom is beautiful.”

You read: “Your family seems happy. Your mom… She’s beautiful.”

Again, that happens in almost every scene containing voice overs. You’ll rarely find an example of the text and audio actually syncing up like it should be. It’s unbe-freaking-lievable! You’re left with only two options:

1) Always read the text with the sound off

or

2) focus completely on listening the audio without ever looking down at the text.

You can’t do both at the same time or it’ll drive you nuts. And since the voice acting is so good, I highly suggest going for the latter. (-_-)

But on top of that, there are bits of the text that are filled with grammatical errors and embarrassing typos. The localization team have seemed to run into some technical space limits that come with translating the condense characters of Japanese to the wide letters of English. But instead of graphically adjusting the width limitations, they squeeze in as much as they can and put in inappropriate hyphens if they run out of line space.

This game’s American production looks more like some fan translation hack rather than a professional video game release. It simply reeks of laziness, and it’s an insult that they expect you to pay full price for a game that’s only haft-baked.

If there’s one thing that I can give the localization credit for, it’s that they translated the game specifically with American otaku in mind. When Capcom localized the Phoenix Wright series, they tried to make it speak to a more mainstream audience by changing the names of the characters and eliminating many Japanese cultural elements. There’s none of that in Lux-Pain. All the Japanese names remain the same and certain jargon is used that would only be understood by American anime fans.

It’s a faithful adaptation, and it would have been perfect if only they had taken the time to completely proofread it.

Who was the QA person over at Ignition who played the final beta of the game and gave it the final OK to go gold? That person needs to be fired because this game was clearly not ready. For a text-based adventure game, screwing up the text completely kills the player’s experience.

The Good: Charming characters, otaku-friendly adaptation, visually stunning game play elements, great artwork, and anime dub actors putting through their best work yet.

The Bad: The localization is an embarrassing distraction for the player. Game was rushed and released before it was ready to go.

Final Verdict: A poor localization job completely ruins what could have been the best visual novel game ever released in the US. If you’re a fan of the genre, then do try to seek it out in a bargain bin sometime in the future. But don’t pay full retail price for a release of this amateur quality.

Manga artist Akira Toriyama must have some strange fetish for dragons. If you are an American anime fan and you haven’t been living under a rock for the past decade or so, you are probably familiar with his Dragonball manga franchise. But video game fans will also be familiar with him providing the character designs for Dragon Quest, a Japanese RPG franchise that has been around since the mid-80’s and still continues to be produced to this very day.

In late 2006, Toriyama provided his familiar character designs to Blue Dragon, a new RPG for the Xbox 360. This was significant for two reasons. 1) It was one of the first Japanese RPG’s on the Xbox 360 and 2) the Japanese don’t play the Xbox 360.

But the game sold moderately well in Japan, which lead to the need to expand the franchise to be just as popular and have the same longevity as Toriyama’s previous Dragon projects. Along with a shonen anime series (currently available for free on XBM and iTunes), Mistwalker studio teamed up with Brownie Brown to put together Blue Dragon Plus, a sequel to the original game. However, this time around they are going portable by releasing the game on the Nintendo DS.

Plus takes place a year after the events of the original game. Shu, the game’s main protagonist and young-Goku doppelganger, is living in peace with his friends after they have defeated the evil villain Nene. However, Nene is not actually dead, and when he takes away the soul of Shu’s robotic friend, Shu is once again on the quest to get his old pal back. He’s joined up all his other friends from the first game, and they split up to fight all the evil monsters and robots that stand in their way.

At its core, Blue Dragon Plus is a completely different game from its Xbox predecessor. While the original utilized a turn-based fighting system that is common in Japanese RPG’s, this version becomes a real-time strategy game, which are much more common in war simulation game.

But much to my surprise, this genre mash up actually works very well.

You start off each battle with a party of your allies. Each character has their strength and weaknesses, which the game will explain to you as each ally is added to your party. You can then command one, some, or all of your characters to move around the battle map area. Once a character is within range of an enemy, they begin attacking the foe. At that point, you can cast spells, heal, use items…. all the things you’d come to expect from an RPG . You can move around the battle map to collect items and coins, or you could go back to past battles to do some “grinding” and level up the members of your party.

I did find one major issue with the touch screen controls. After you select a character, you could either a) click on the screen to move him to that spot on the map or b) click on an icon to cast a magical attack on the enemy. However, if you miss clicking on an icon even by a little bit, it assume you meant to move the character to the area next to the icon, and he will start moving there.

This happened to me a lot in the game, and if you are in the middle of a battle, this blunder could force your character to turn his back on the enemy, leaving them prone to attacks. This was incredibly frustrating, and does leave a very poor mark to an otherwise fun gameplay combination of two different genres.

The story is also surprisingly good. While the DS cannot render the characters and cut-scenes in the same 3D way as the original game did on the Xbox, the designers decided to pre-render the characters using 3D CGI animation rather than using the same 2D anime style of the TV show. For every FMV cut scene and in game dialogue moments, you see a 3D character instead of a 2D drawing, which is a little unusual but I gradually found myself enjoying as the game progresses.

From the point-of-view of an anime fan, I also really enjoyed seeing Toriyama familiar looking character designs within the game. Even if you are unfamiliar with the original game, the story will slowly reintroduced to you each of the characters and provide for you their background story. There is great level of character development and plot twists to keep you interested. While the cast grow fairly large a few hours into the game, you do find yourself enjoying the company of humans, aliens, robots, cute talking animals, and pink piles of poo.

Yes, pink piles of poo.

And that would be the only downside to the story that I can find. For humor and comic relief, the story often turns to immature potty humor. While others might find this funny, it left me with a feeling of disgust. I would be okay with it if this was an infrequent occurrence in the game, but eventually the Poo become one of your alleys and you have no choice but to study his character to determine how best to use him in battle.

The Good:
Toriyama’s familiar character designs, engrossing storyline, pre-rendered CGI cut scenes, and interesting real-time strategy game play.

The Bad:
Childish toilet humor and frustrating touch screen screw-ups that always seem to come up the heat of battle.

Final Verdict:
A real-time strategy take on a Japanese RPG makes Blue Dragon Plus a much different experience from its Xbox predecessor, but I am very surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I can fully recommend it to fans of the previous game or to fans of either video game genre.

Well, we didn’t have to wait for long to see what coming out. Tokyo software company Appliya, makers of the feline attention-grabbing app Meow Cam, released two Eva-inspired creations into the apps store earlier this week, the Evangelion Clock (iTunes link) and Evangelion Picture Stamp (iTunes link).

The clock app is exactly that – a clock modeled off the iconic countdown clock in the NERV control room. There are two modes to this program: one that shows the current time, and the other that counts down from any minute to 0 in typical Eva fashion.

I decided to give the countdown mode a whirl by starting that clock at one minute. An electronic noise signals the seconds slowly passing by. But at the 10-second mark, the screen turns red and alarms start going off. Ten…  nine… eight… My heart starts pounding. Seven…. six.. Oh shi- I start to find myself getting antsy and agitated. Five… four…  Can Shinji make it in time? Three… two… one…

And then I laughed.

I laughed really freaking hard. Partly for the anti-climatic result of the clock timing down, but mostly for the pressure and anticipation that this simple program created leading up to it.

But that’s about all that the program is really good for, ten seconds of intensity. I can easily see this coming in handy at an anime club meeting or any other gathering of Eva fanboys. Hold a contest with a set time limit, and see how the peanut gallery reacts as the clock counts down to zero.

The Eva Photo Stamp app is a little more complicated, but much more fun. It allows you to get any photo from your iPhone’s library and overlay some Eva “stickers” onto it. After playing around with it for some time, I was able to come up with some funny pictures.

My cat Mimi trying to break through the AT Field:

Reverse Thieves‘ Narutaki thinking of something sinister for Pen Pen:

And yours truly getting Rei’d:

Although the selection of stickers could be better, the major downfall of this app is the limited ways of modifying the overlays. The app allows you to “pinch” the sticker to make it bigger or smaller, or rotate the sticker clockwise or counterclockwise with two fingers. That’s it. I wasn’t able to flip Pen Pen to face right in my pictures, which limited my selection of images that had people facing the penguin. I also was not able to adjust the Rei wig to properly fit my head.

When it comes down to it, both apps have very simple functions, but that’s not that uncommon in the iPhone app store. One of the good things about the app store is that that Appliya could update these programs in the future with new features or stickers, and that would become a free update to anyone who has already bought the programs. So it is always possible that all the things I found lacking in these apps will be fixed in a future version.

However, what is uncommon for the iPhone app store is the relatively high price point for these Eva apps. Other small niche programs like this are usually sold for only 99 cents or are just simply given away for free. However, Appliya currents has the Clock and Sticker app priced at $2.99 and $1.99 respectively. I think that this is too expensive, and I would suggest holding out buying them until they drop the price to under a dollar.

The Good:
Both apps are fun for Eva fans and will probably get you laughing.

The Bad:
Even at $2 and $3, both apps are too expensive for their limited features.

Final Verdict:
They’re cute, but hold off until these programs are updated with more features or until the price drops to under a dollar.