The X Button

Disposable Heroes

DoraMoji also targets young audiences, as it's a guide for writing hiragana and kanji. The player (or rather, student) can test his or her writing in simple tasks or a more elaborate story mode where Nobita, Doraemon's young and frazzled charge, has to perfect his calligraphy in order to defeat monsters and solve whatever problem his blue cat-bot guest has caused. The 3DS stylus and touch-screen tests are timed and measured, but Doraemon isn't so harsh a taskmaster.

Import Barrier: While it's not hard to draw the lines needed, you'll need a little knowledge of Japanese to know what Doraemon wants you to create…and what you've done wrong. The 3DS also has a regional lockout.

Domestic Release: Very slim odds there. If any Doraemon game were to be localized on the 3DS, it'd be an action game like last year's movie-base Nobita in the New Haunts of Evil.

Usefulness: If translated, DoraMoji might provide a fun way for young players to learn about kanji. Of course, the Disney XD version of Doraemon has the usual mild Americanizations in its animation and character names, so it's not exactly out to promote Japanese language.

Usefulness: Dragon Quest traditionally isn't a huge hit in the West, but a massive brawler might be a good introduction to the series.

Why do these Atelier games invariably put cute young heroines on their covers? If they're about ateliers, the box art should show nothing but the spread of an alchemist's workshop, with tinctures and phials and decanters bubbling in catalytic fervor! That's what the fans want to see! Or so I assume. Why else would they buy things with “atelier” in the title and alchemy in the gameplay?

Yes, I know that the Atelier games are about more than that. They're RPGs heavy on the item-crafting, and Atelier Shallie has a crisis more pressing than most of its predecessors. It finds the Dusk World caught up in a rapacious drought, and small bastions of civilization are worn down by doomed crops and famine. Here the player controls two heroines. Shallistera hails from a beleaguered clan and seeks an end to the suffering around her, and her story is a more grave quest that reveals mysteries of the world. Shallotte is an energetic alchemist who hunts for success and fortune, so her arc puts a more comical spin on a parched and dying land. The two meet eventually no matter who the player first selects, and their ing cast includes warriors, thieves, magicians, a pilebunker-wielding girl, a foxlike homunculus, an even a thirty-something mother. Atelier Shallie is also the third game in a sub-trilogy, so one might see characters from Atelier Escha & Logy and Atelier Ayesha. I expect that the game will end with the heroines brawling over who gets the title of Shallie, much like the finale of Double Dragon.

Atelier Shallie sends its heroines out to wander fields, finding items and fighting monsters as they go. Shallistera uses a dowsing relic to locate treasures while Shallotte just pushes a broom around, and both of them drag their retinues into battles. Six characters can in the turn-based battles, assisting other fighters and boosting their stats with that temporary Burst Mode that other RPGs seem to enjoy. Naturally, there's an elaborate system for crafting items, including weapons and armor, and that's once again a major draw of the game. So there's no need to stick it on the cover, I suppose. Fans know it's there.

A special unit of historical and literary figures fighting aliens in a steampunk 19th century? That's not massively surprising, since you can find steampunk overhauls everywhere in comics, science fiction, video games, and webcomics that outfit Thomas Jefferson with a gear-powered helicopter backpack and call it a day. Yet Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. comes from Nintendo and Intelligent Systems, a team known for making decent strategy-RPGs and rejecting the trendy, begoggled, come-hither gaze of steampunk. So it was an unexpected sight at last year's E3.

Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. takes players to a Victorian London where steam technology ushered in an age of automobiles and airships several decades early. After an alien invasion disrupts teatime, President Abraham Lincoln, complete with eagle-adorned battle garb and a looming zeppelin, recruits Captain Henry Fleming (from Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage) to head up an anti-alien task force. His fellow soldiers are heroic, clockwork-armored extractions from popular fiction: a cowardly lion-man, a combat falconer version of Tiger Lily from Peter Pan, and a kid named Tom Sawyer. I hope the final boss is The King in Yellow, but I doubt we'll go that deep.

There's greater promise in the gameplay. Instead of the battle-grid movement that Intelligent Systems used in Fire Emblem and Advance Wars, the soldiers of S.T.E.A.M. move freely within a limited range. Steam power (of course) determines just how characters maneuver or attack or use special abilities, and it's easy to take back moves before ending your turn. The game's Overwatch feature tracks the Steam that troopers still have after concluding their battle turns; should they have enough, they'll automatically strike at enemies within range. It's all dressed up in comic-book effects and cel-shaded graphics, and the game's steam-tech environments play into the flow of battle. The good designers of Intelligent Systems know their way around a strategy-game, and the Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. demo is promising. And perhaps there'll be some subtle satire in all the steampunk trimmings. Lincoln's eagle chestplate almost looks like a Nazi standard.

In fact, Ori and the Blind Forest is not so heavily inspired by Ueda's games. One gets a distinct Shadow of the Colossus sensibility from the giant, steel-masked owl glimpsed in the trailer, but other sources come through much stronger. The creators cite Ghibli movies and The Iron Giant in their inspirations for the game's glowing forest environments, where a foxlike forest spirit sets out to find his proper place in the world.

Ori and the Blind Forest is a side-scroller at heart, and there it leans toward the Metroid formula. As its hero traverses caverns and treetops and labyrinths, new abilities present themselves and open new venues to explore. Ori can race up walls, deflect projectiles, and launch radiant beams at enemies—though his most useful ability may be a mid-air move that launches him off of hanging gems and enemy projectiles. The gameplay has a spritely, acrobatic look, and it seems to seldom break into long cutscenes. Perhaps it's not a Fumito Ueda tribute. That won't matter if it lives up to its looks.

Ghost hunts present a grid map of a building floor, and players have to arrange their characters to predict just when and where the spirits will strike. Once battles begin, the party faces down monsters in first-person combat. If the fights are more simplistic than other RPGs, the overriding strategic element seems stronger, and much of the challenge comes from positioning characters so they won't get slimed get the best possible angle of attack. It'll remind many people of Persona, but I suspect that's what Aksys wants.