If there's one thing to love about E3 -- even the all-new, scaled down E3 -- it's the flood of new game announcements that tend to come with the show. On that front, Atlus has certainly not disappointed us; this morning, they let fly with a bevy of localization announcements. One -- Touch Detective 2½ -- we expected, but the announcements that Draglade and Ontamarama are headed to English-speaking gamers are news indeed. For rhythm game enthusiasts, those last two are very good news indeed.Ontamarama follows the story of Beat and Rest, two "Ontamaestros" who discover an evil demon (as opposed to all the good ones) is cajoling villagers into trapping Ontama, the sound spirits who bring music to the land. Of course, that means our heroes have to get their rhythm on in order to save the day. Also, the word "Ontamaestros" demonstrates why we love Atlus-style localizations. We've been cooing excitedly over this game for months, so unless you've been living under a rock that didn't have wifi, you've probably seen a screenshot or two.
Draglade is the intriguing mix of rhythm and fighting that the world has been waiting for. Well, we've been waiting, at least. In the world of Draglade, the premier spectator sport of the day is "Grapping," which sorta makes us think of breakdance fighting -- just with more potential violence. The game tracks the rise of four hungry Grappers, Hibito, Guy, Kyle, and Daichi, and their struggle to make it to the top. Can someone get us a hip hop version of "Eye of the Tiger" up in here?
Obviously, Touch Detective 2½ is the sequel to the BeeWorks game released last year. We have such a love-hate relationship with this game that we can't help but look forward to the sequel, if only because we're masochists.
[Via press release]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-10-2007 @ 6:04PM
MattMN said...
Can you provide a link to the press release and/or a release date for Touch Detective 2.5?
Reply
7-10-2007 @ 6:25PM
Alisha Karabinus said...
The full releases were not posted online at the Atlus site (but rather e-mailed to us), though there were clips put up at NeoGAF. None of the releases had dates, either. Ontamarama and Draglade just said Fall/Winter '07. Touch Detective had no time frame at all. The releases were simply confirming non-Japanese releases.
clips at GAF: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=170356
Reply
7-11-2007 @ 11:14AM
k0sm0s said...
shall give my impression for Ontama and Draglade
Ontama is a pretty good music game.. the game trains you in multi-tasking..
there is one line where you have to tap your d-pad (or left handers, the buttons) according to different colored notes.. but before you can tap the buttons, you muz tap the appropriate color bugs on the screen, so the buttons get activated..
the bugs also comes in various patterns, and you can draw a circle around a group to capture several simultaneously.
But the game's difficulty is that you must focus on both bug catching and pressing the buttons.. music wise it's quite ok.. not as good as Ouendan (or elite beat agents), just simple tunes
the game didn't really hook me for long anyways
Custom Beat Draglade: Despite the description of a music fighting game.. no, it is not.. the music thing seems pretty small in the game to me..
basically it's a 2D fighter with 4 characters to choose.. it's quite a decent fighter.. the music comes from the ability to trigger a mode where you must tap the rhythms correctly for 3 seconds to do a series of combos, and it doesn't matter if you missed them, just lesser damage.. that's the only rhythm aspect i found while playing the game..
so, it's not really a music game.. more like the rhythm is a sub-ability of the game.. it's quite a decent fighter though..
Reply