Tag: Nintendo DS

#WeeklyGameMusic: To Catch an Owl (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Welp, this writer didn’t have a festive tune in their backlog of video game music, but this #WeeklyGameMusic, composed by James Hannigan comes close enough. To Catch an Owl is a video-game-original track for the book-to-movie-to-game adaptation, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, developed by EA UK. It’s a magical and celebratory tune fitting of the upcoming holidays, and manages to capture the movie soundtrack’s spirit.

Note: this writer does acknowledge the author of the Harry Potter series is notoriously transphobic. While the composer of this track is completely unrelated to J.K. Rowling, it should be stated that transphobia is immoral and wrong. This writer does not intend to promote such a position.

Within a few chapters of the fifth entry in the seven book (or eight movie) series, titular character Harry Potter and his non-magical cousin Dudley get attacked by the depression-inducing Dementors, well outside of the wizarding realm and within our realistic one. Thus setting the tone for what’s going to be a dark entry amongst the series, Harry uses magical spells Dudley can’t perceive to ward off the Dementors in self-defense. The problem? It’s illegal for an underage wizard student (which Harry himself is just into the fifth year of a seven year long career) to use magic in front of muggles, or normies by wizard lingo. This immediately kicks off a number of lawsuits Harry is forced to navigate, and while the ruling manages to fall into his favor, puts Harry into a legally precarious position as he enters Hogwarts wizarding school for the fifth year.

While story-wise, the video game adaptation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix doesn’t stray from this story, it’s gameplay takes a much more interesting approach to the politically oppressive atmosphere the book presents. In short, Order of the Phoenix is an open-world game where players utilizes gestures on the right-stick of the controller to cast various spells. Said spells are used to handle various tasks given by minigames, or simple environmental puzzles to unlock new secrets in the labyrinthine Hogwarts. Exploration is key to both progressing the story and unlocking new abilities and upgrade to our hero as he navigates this magically dangerous place.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released for the (wait for it…) Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Wii, Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation Portable, PC, and Mac (phew!)

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Give Me a Chance (The World Ends With You)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. This time we’ll cover Give Me a Chance, composed by Takeharu Ishimoto and sung by Ayuko Tanaka and Mai Matsuda. It’s a composition from the cult-hit Square Enix game, The World Ends With You, an almost trading card game (TCG) JRPG and a banger soundtrack.

You can tell The World Ends With You is created by the same company famous for their Final Fantasy franchise when it stars an anti-social, brooding teen named Neku. This insufferable jerk eventually learns to get better when he’s suddenly pitted in a life-and-death game about fighting sound-based monsters and lazy grim reapers using a deck of shirt pins. To survive this terrifying game, this loser must make a sacrifice arbitrarily chosen by the game master (in this case, his memory, of course) and pair with a partner to fight together with. Did I mention this all makes sense in context?

Anyway, where The World Ends With You best shines is its real-time combat. Originally developed for the Nintendo DS, this game utilizes nearly every single feature in the portable console, including — get this — the closing-the-lid sleep function, as part of combat. Unfortunately for this blogger, his introduction to the game was on iOS, so he’ll describe how the combat works there instead: The World Ends With You TCG-like battle system operates by having each pin execute when a specific touch or swipe gesture is made. Multiple pins in a deck may share the same gesture; the pin placed on the top of the deck gets prioritized first, until it hits a cool-down state, in which the rest of the pins takes effect. Partners can also be summoned, using yet another gesture assigned to them: this helps build both a combo meter, and a super attack. It’s super fun, and I highly recommend checking it out!

The World Ends With You is available on Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Nintendo DS.

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