Jump Festa 2003 Report
by Chuck Franklin - 12.26.2003
Ahh, Jump Festa, old Jump Festa put together by the folks at Shonen jump(you know them as the makers of such popular mangas as Naruto and Dragon Ball Z). It’s an annual free convention which just happens to bring together strange cosplay action, 3 hour lines to buy anime goods, lots of manga autographing and a few gaming companies that come along for the ride, making this one of the smallest gaming conventions known to man.
Jump Festa 2003 wasn’t much different from the norm: lots of anime fans took the time to come to the Makuhari convention center on dec. 20th – 21st and sit in crowds of thousands thick screaming cosplay tennis players dying to see the creator of their favorite tennis anime, or to watch the preview of the musical version of their favorite tennis anime or to go to one of the other FIVE booths on the show devoted to just that one particular anime/manga. Yes this was most definitely a Prince of Tennis convention. As for gaming; well, Sega was there!
With Puyo Puyo Fever coming out soon, Sega decided that it was as good a time as any to promote a miniscule update of an 11 year old game and also make a booth structured entirely around it. Sega pulled out all the stops in promoting it. If you played all the different Puyo Puyo Fever stations, you even got a free Puyo Puyo figurine! Of interesting note is that this has to be one of the last games to come out for Dreamcast, with the Dreamcast release of feb.24th coming out a month and two months, respectively, before the Xbox or GameCube version. Hidden away in the back behind all the Puyo-Puyo playing was what we were looking for: Sonic Heroes.
The complete and final version of Sonic Heroes, scheduled for release in Japan on dec.30th, was on display for PlayStation 2 and GameCube. Strangely, unlike Tokyo Game Show, no Xbox version was shown. In fact, not a single Xbox was present anywhere on the convention floor. Suspicious or is this merely a complete lack of acceptance of the Xbox amongst Japanese? Heroes is looking like a solid follow-up to the series, with new features shown on the floor being the two-player mode (only race to the end of the level mode was available) and the casino level. Keeping the system pretty much intact from how it was in the Sonic Adventure GameCube games, two-player mode features you trying to get to the end of the levels faster then your opponent, while being able to hinder him with attacks that will cost him rings or slow him down. This will be familiar to fans of recent Sonic games.
The casino level was where brilliance and some of that old Sonic charm showed through. Remember just roaming around Sonic 2 playing the pinball mini-game and not really caring about completing the stage, but merely having fun bouncing up and down trying to win the slots? Sonic Heroes finally brings those levels into 3D, with Multi-Ball Action this time. For those who’ve missed the previous coverage on Sonic Heroes, you have three characters and can switch among them at any, each of them with different abilities. The non-selected characters stick with you at all times. You control each individual character in the pinball machines but have to switch between all 3 simultaneously to make sure nobody is just roaming off the edge of the board, and without constant supervisions they sure do like to go off of the stage. All this has to be accomplished while pressing the pinball flippers, controlling the shooters, and trying to get yourself into slots for those rings. If every character falls off, it’s Game Over.
Sega really shouldn’t have had the PS2 two-player mode sitting right next to the GameCube two-player mode though. The PS2 is starting to show it’s age in truly poor taste with the PS2 two-player mode having sub-Dreamcast level graphics and ridiculous slowdown that simply boesn’t belong in a Sonic game. All of this is sitting next to a hip little GameCube that is hardly breaking a sweat in rendering the same quality graphics as one-player mode with the same speed as the one-player mode.
Sitting right next to Sega was Tecmo, which had absolutely nothing of interest on display besides a Monster Farm guy in a furry suit for those of you intrigued by that type of thing.
Head on over to the Nintendo booth (this being the only game show in Japan where Nintendo has a presence) and we see Nintendo showing off 4-month-old games and handing out prizes to whoever waited in 10-minute lines for games, played the game and won. After two tries I had a Donkey Konga banana and a Mario mug won, so I was satisfied with my journey there.
The next booth over was the biggie of the show, the booth that actually had big-name pre-release games on display, and the one that we came to the show for. Yes, it’s the Square Enix booth, adorned by slime and chocobos in collusion against the other software companies of the world.
On the Enix side of things, we saw a whole bunch of kids and their parents lying amongst 7000 yen(ED. $65) beanbags playing the already released Slime Gameboy Advance game, Slime Mori Mori Dragon Quest.
Right next to that were more kids playing Kenshin Dragon Quest, which has been released for quite some time. Imagine Duck Hunt except with the game being Dragon Quest and you’re hitting at lots of slimes and go to towns and have a story... and your using a sword instead of a gun... you get the idea.
At the edge of the Square Enix booth was the Christmas portion of the booth, which housed my personal favorite playable non-released game of the show(out of about 6). It was the Dragon Quest 5 PS2 remake portion!
The demo featured 10 minutes of play time with two choices: start from the beginning of the game and roam around your village talking to people and get on the ship before your time ran out; or start much later in the game at the casino town, with a party already present, roam around town and then go fight some monsters before your time ran out. As for how the game plays and looks, it’s quite nice. With a souped-up Dragon Quest 7 engine that takes advantage of the PS2 graphical processing to give you overall better looking environments and now features battles that although are in the same perspective as all the previous 7 Dragon Quest games, they are now rendered in full 3D. Besides that, the game looks to be a faithful recreation of Dragon Quest 5, while adding in a lot of the more advanced features from Dragon Quest 7.
Heading on over on the Square side of the booth, you had a 120+ minute line, at times too long for them to allow more people in to get in line (this line being the only line on the floor above 25 minutes) to play Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories for GBA
KH:CoM is a new card-battler action game (think play mechanics wise: Lost Kingdoms) where Sora has lost his memory and has to complete the same story as the original Kingdom Hearts. This also happens to be one of the first GBA games to utilize “state of the art” GBA technology and feature F.M.V. (Nintendo executives to Bandai: yeah, you take That Wonderswan, and your no longer exclusive technology).
Square also had present Front Mission 4, which was released the same day as the show. Considering the success of the tactics games in the U.S.A, FM4simply must be released in America (not to mention the battle menus and voices are already all in English). Square really had booth attendees getting into it too, featuring A “super-hard” mission that had you with 20 minutes to complete it, where a victory meant a Front Mission medallion, a loss meant a postcard. The booth was all about planning out and discussing your strategy while waiting in line, and laughing at the stupidity of the people in front of you. Then getting to try it yourself and watching you, and all the other people you were strategizing with, get blown away with long-range bazooka shots and receiving a touching game over screen. Oh well; the medallion at least got us excited about the game.
FFX-2 International + Last Mission, the American version of FFX-2 plus new features and one final mission, was also playable. Although, on the show itself there wasn’t anything new shown besides the monster arena. Just a heads up for everybody though, you have the options to set all the voices and text in English, including the special features (albeit not last mission), so this should be a good importers delight.
And in the middle uniting the two forces of Enix and Square was Square Enix Christmas Masterpiece Theater(actual title).
I came out of there with one conclusion (after collecting my free postcard set they gave to everyone who watched and not getting the Square goods package they gave to one person in the audience): boy, oh boy is Final Fantasy Advent Children looking amazing.
Square teased us early on and gave us some quick shots of cloud on his Harley riding on that neo-futuristic highway while being fired out. Then they made us sit and watch videos (a lot of which were the same ones shown at Tokyo Game Show) of Dragon Quest 5, Front Mission 4, Dragon Quest Slime Mori Mori, Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts 2, Final Fantasy X-2 International + Last Mission, Star Ocean Till the End of Time: Director’s Cut (the special edition released 3 months before Americans will ever see this game, can we say another 3rd Star Ocean: Till the End of Time International release in Japan?), and Front Mission Online. Incidentally, FMO looks to be, unlike the rest of the series, a chance to design your own mech and take it into battle in a massive mech action game.
Finally, after all of that we began to see on that big screen a cannon; a large cannon that we all vaguely recognized (recognize as being a lot less detailed and grainy then was) and it quickly zooms out to a beautiful post-apocalyptic, completely destroyed Midgar. Cut to quick shots of Cloud standing on a ruined highway, then cut to Sephiroth looking menacing and then back to Cloud now on his Harley being fired at. Sephiroth and two others that look exactly like him with different hair cuts are shown firing at Cloud (those that remember FFVII’s plot, will remember that there were hundreds of various Sephiroths created). Following that, cut to one of the Sephiroths quickly jumping through the air wearing something eerily reminiscent of a Batman cape. Sephiroth is then seen in his evil flame burning town pose and then a quick flash of Vincent (apparently he’s in Advent Children also) jumping thorough the air. Jump back to Sephiroth going to a robed white figure and finally ending with pure beauty, the Aerith death scene entirely redone (flashback) and rendered with Square’s most advanced technology today.
Advent children, is without a doubt, looking to be what Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within should have been, not to mention all of what was described looks better than any part of Final Fantasy: TSW. V-jump had in its most recent issue a few pictures of this issue, take a look at it by clicking here.
Right next to the Square Enix Christmas Masterpiece Theater was the line for the smaller, more cozy feeling Final Fantasy XII trailer booth.
There my party got in the 40 minute line to enter it, and when we got to the front of the line, we witnessed the Square Enix booth completely break down. The door to let us in to the FFXII trailer wasn’t working and simply would not budge. We sat and watched while Square Enix employees looked funny beyond the semi-see-though glass wondering what in the world was going on, banging with their fists on the door and generally being upset. 30 minutes later and lots of confusion on their part, they realized how to get us in there! In we walked through the exit! At this point, we were told what had to have been informed of at least 6 times: “DO NO FILM THIS” (that didn’t stop other sites from filming the video though, ahem... Quiter...) They showed us the trailer and then told us to get up and gave us a survey and one of two FFXII jigsaw puzzles on the way out.
Exiting out of the Square Enix booth and entering into the Bandai booth, you start to remember that you’re at an anime convention, and there are sure are a lot of generic anime games out there; Dragon Ball Z and Naruto fighters and Digimon GBA cart racers abound.
Pick up a Special Edition Shonen Jump cup and a 400 yen(ED. $3.60) KFC sandwich at the Jump Café and onwards to Capcom it is, where one also realizes that there is nothing new on display at Capcom’s booth. But now is a good of time as any to remind you that Gotcha Force really is a fun game, independent of the fact that Capcom gave me a free toothbrush for playing it! And also at the Capcom booth: they held a Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting Edition tournament, which on the dec.21st day Tim Rogers, of the InsertCredit.com Continuum, won and got himself a (too small for his gaijin body) t-shirt while the Chun-li announcer booth babe was exclaiming “SEE STREET FIGTHER 2 IS A WORLD-WIDE TOURNMENT, people in America like it too!
We’ve reached the end of the hall, so we head back and spot the Sony booth! It contains the EyeToy on display and strangely dressed EyeToy Booth hunks, all of which had absolutely no lines! That’s enough of that.
Forward! To Konami! Konami had what seemed to be the biggest booth there, at least in terms of crowd size. People really demanded their Prince of Tennis bowling games.
Housed snugly in the side of the booth was a little gem of a game though. This would be Konami’s just announced Kappa-raising sim, How to Breed Kappas.
Think Tomogachi, a Kappa, the power of the PS2 plus 10 years of game design advancement and you have an idea what it’s like. You control a boy in charge of teaching your Kappa what is right and wrong in the world and what is good and bad for him. Though the 10 minute demo only had you telling your kappa “it normally isn’t the nicest thing to stand in front of the TV and claw at it” and “biting an electric cord probably won’t be good for your health”(or you can tell him it’s great to do, and watch him get electrocuted, which in the full game, if you keep telling the kappa that electric cords are good to bite, eventually the kappa will start not to trust you, and might even run away, shaming your family’s kappa breeding-skills forever!), the game showed a lot of potential in the quirkiness area.
And that is pretty much all the booths. Most of the rest of the attendees would now spend the time they have left over to sit and look at a bunch of cosplayers for a few hours, but I instead have come home to write this article!
