John Zeitler

This week, in lieu of actual content, I’m going to give a quick set of overviews of some– but not all– of what I picked up during my recent trip to Tekkoshocon. I got games, manga, and a couple of sets, so there’s plenty to cover here until I can get some life stuff back in order and some time together to start writing again. We start off with a look at what I’m already sure is the jewel of the haul, Nanoha PSP.

Nanoha A’s: The Battle of Aces is, in some respects, very similar to the last import PSP game I snagged, Fate: Tiger Colosseum. It takes a familiar set of characters– in this case, the cast of the anime’s second season (A’s)– and puts them in a fighting game. The game itself bears resemblance to another game I’ve played and enjoyed, WarTech: Senko no Ronde. This should be unsurprising, because Nanoha is basically Mobile Suit Gundam reskinned so that the giant hulking mecha is replaced by little girls (and the occasional boy), the tremendously powerful weaponry replaced by cutesy plasticy magical wands, and the massively overpowered laser beams of pure, unadulterated death left completely alone. Battle of Aces appears to take place after the events of the anime series, but before the time-skip in that series’ final episode– which nobody reading this really cares about but me. (To be fair, Nanoha has a really good story, but I’d be lying if I claimed that the primary draw for me wasn’t watching one tiny girl lay down enough firepower to sink every aircraft carrier ever built. At once.)

Combat in the game takes place in an aerial battleground, but by and large it’s just a featureless plain with a pretty background. Characters have close-range attacks and longer-range attacks, depending on where you are in relation to your foe. Each character, more importantly, has a specialty: Nanoha herself specializes in shooting magic, including spamming Divine Buster on a ranged foe, while Signum is far more gifted in a stand-up fight, and will close in on her opponent to finish them off with her sword. As per usual, characters have dashes and shields. However, the game also allows characters to cast Binding spells at range, temporarily freezing an opponent and potentially setting them up for a massive attack. I’m not sure if this is something specific to Nanoha or if all characters can do this, but charging an attack makes it stronger; Nanoha’s standard Shooting Mode shot tosses out three arcing projectiles by itself, but it can be held to add up to four or five more before it auto-fires, and Divine Buster just gets more and more wicked if you hold it down, but it takes just ever so slightly longer to make a full charge than the Bind spells will hold.

Aesthetically, the game is wonderful. Character models aren’t chunky or pixellated, and the sounds and voices are clear. I’m not able to follow the story too well– I can pick up bits here and there– but overall it’s probably just a standard excuse plot. This one, really, I’m not terribly concerned on the story for, so much as the fighting. And that’s really hard to mess up, given that it’s a formula I liked before (WarTech’s hybrid fighter/shooter-style setup) and a developer that knows what they’re doing (Namco was the lead on this one). So yeah, if you happen to enjoy the Nanoha series, and come across this in your travels, I’d say it’s worth a look.