Images courtesy of Capcom.

NIS America just released Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis in April, right around the same time we discovered Gust was developing a PSP port. Mana Khemia Portable Plus is scheduled to come out on August 28, over a year after Mana Khemia came out on the PS2 in Japan. We haven’t heard anything concrete about a North American release, but it might be coming out sooner than expected. Gamefly has a listing for Mana Khemia in their PSP section with Koei as the publisher.

Koei not NIS America? Oh, Koei helps distribute NIS America’s games! Anyways it makes sense for NIS America to release the PSP port since they already has a working translation of Mana Khemia and they’re a licensed PSP developer.

Images courtesy of Gust.

If all goes according to plan Japan will get five Tales games in a single year. Tales of Destiny: Director’s Cut (PS2), Tales of Rebirth (PSP), Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (Wii), Tales of Vesperia (Xbox 360), and Tales of Hearts (DS). Five games for the fifteenth anniversary of the Tales series. Mathematically broken down 1/6 of the Tales of games for consoles will be released in 2008. Wow that’s a lot and I’m including fan discs like Tales of Fandom in this calculation.

Images courtesy of Namco Bandai.

The ever growing Marvelous Entertainment group has a new line up of mobile phone games in Japan. Along with a Zero no Tsukaima horizontal shooter and a mobile Fish Eyes Wild there is a series of cheap, 100 yen No More Heroes flash games. In one game you drive the Schpeltiger and in the pictured game you take on the UAA with the beam katana. Each game notably has budget graphics, which are strangely appealing to me. The controls haven’t been announced either, but I wouldn’t expect Travis, Schpeltiger, or Glastonbury to be anything more than rudimentary. Still neat to note since, technologically speaking, the No More Heroes flash games for cell phones could come to North America.

Images courtesy of Marvelous.

Aboard the stranded airship your party will discover the source of the malfunction.  It turns out that the Nu Mou responsible for the sabotage is one of the marks on the list of the sky pirates Vaan and Penelo, who soon arrive on the scene.  A long way from their Rabanastre origins, the treasure-seeking outlaws more closely resemble their appearance in the previous Ivalice Alliance title Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings.  With the mystery behind the grounded airships solved, the clan can head off to the continent of Fluorgis with Cid finally joining you as a playable character.  The sky pirates meanwhile head elsewhere on their airborne adventures.

In Grimoire of the Rift there are a slew of interconnecting pathways to boosting the statistics of your party members beyond the traditional mode of leveling up by gaining experience on the battlefield.  Among the paths to shifting the odds in your favor includes choosing the bazaar option in the shops found in every town.  The game has done away with the conventional approach of having the most valuable armaments on sale in far flung corners of the game world.  You will find the same inventory in stock in every location on the map.  New items become ready to purchase by collecting a set of three objects gathered from quests and sending them to the bazaar. 

Over the course of the missions you will gather handfuls of miscellaneous and seemingly meaningless loot like gems, flowers, blocks of wood, powders, even cooking utensils.  Each belong to one of the categories of magicite, metals and flora.  In the bazaar you will be alerted to whether you have three of a kind.  Match a fire stone with a zirconium and whisperweed… and a staff icon will appear on the screen.  Send the items to the bazaar and the driud mace will become a weapon purchasable at any shop from that time on in the game. 

Checking out the druid mace's unique characteristics, you can find that the staff confers special abilities when equipped by different job classes.  If you give it to an alchemist, they can cast poison.  Use it in battle long enough to accrue 150 ability points, and the alchemist will add poison to their black magic spells even while the mage is unequipped.  Give the mace to a green mage and they can learn blind.  This offers you an incentive to hold on to many of your weapons rather than selling them, as they can be swapped between characters to learn abilities.  It can even be necessary to carry your less impressive weapons and armor into battles in order to gain the skills required for new jobs.  Simply gaining ability points for your favorite job without having donned the right outfit will not get you far.

Learning jobs to tackle the greater challenge of the new continent opened up by the aerodrome requires some preliminary planning.  Certain classes are race-specific, like the dragoon job for Bangaas.  Others require multiple abilities to be learned before becoming available.  To pick up the assassin job class, you must first master one action ability as a sniper and two as an elementalist.  By taking loot to the bazaar, you can eventually pick up the Hunting bow, along with the Djinn Flyssa and Estoc rapiers.  The bow will allow your sniper to master the wallet shot ability.  Equipping the rapiers to your elementalist in turn, you can master the shining air and boulder crush attacks.  The assassin job only then becomes available, endowing you with a new set of long-range weapon attacks.

Upon arriving in Fluorgis, you will have the opportunity to meet a moogle in the pub who is a wandering bard.  Not only can the winged creature play a song that captures the attention of all the bar dwellers, Hurdy turns out to have earned a reputation for being a skilled fighter.  Though his only recourse in hand-to-hand combat is to batter his opponents with his stringed instrument, at a distance he can perform songs that boost the defense of allies and lower the stats of foes.  Asking your assistance in procuring a rare variety of wood in a haunted forest for the purpose of creating a stellar new instrument, Luso and Adelle set out to gain the support of this powerful new recruit, your third with a unique identity and backstory.

Images courtesy of Square Enix. 

It sounds like you get to do more than thrash a virtual room with remote shakes in Elebits: The Adventures of Kai and Zero. It looks like it too since you’re going to be exploring wide open areas and competing with up to four friends through Nintendo Wi-Fi. We’ll see Secret of Elebits: The Adventures of Kai and Zero in North America this fall. While you’re waiting speculate when Konami will officially announce Time Hollow. You know it’s coming out in North America too.

Images courtesy of Konami.

I’m sure everyone is jumping up and down to spend 2,100 yen ($20) to play Hearts online or try another shake the remote with another party game. However, this PS2 to Wii shovelware strategy may bear fruit. The Simple 2000 series is home to Earth Defense Force, the Oneechanbara, and many other strange titles. It’s unclear if D3 Publisher plans on porting Simple 2000 hits or if they are specifically aiming at the Wii Sports audience with the Simple 2000 Wii series.

Images courtesy of D3 Publisher.

Japan gets it on July 22^nd and it’s a good reason for me to dust off my Wii Zapper. After an influx of light gun games last holiday season publishers seem to have forgotten the plastic shell. Nintendo doesn't announce WiiWare games in advance, but Wild West Guns is clearly getting an international release.

Images courtesy of Gameloft and Famitsu.

Images courtesy of Atlus.

In the winter Square Enix will release another DS game starring the Chocobo in Japan. Chocobo to Mahou no Ehon Majiyo to Otome to Gojin no Yuusha (loosely: Chocobo and the Magic Picturebook: The Witch with Maiden and the Five Heroes) sounds like a sequel to Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales. The genre is “Chocobo and Adventure”, whatever that means. While Square Enix USA has not announced game either I wouldn’t be surprised to see it released under the Final Fantasy Fables brand sometime in 2009.

Update: Square Enix members can vote on a new class for the DS port of Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon. From left to right they are:Red Mage, Engineer, Summoner, Hero X, and Minstrel. Go Hero X!

Images courtesy of Square Enix.