Jump Festa 2007 Special

Jump Festa is an annual show hosted by Jump Shueisha, the publishers of the incredibly popular Shounen Jump magazine, a collection of Japanese manga, or comics, such as Naruto and Bleach that comes out in both weekly and monthly editions. Jump Festa is primarily an event intended to showcase popular manga and characters, and provide an opportunity for some fan interaction with cosplay exhibitions, but videogame companies usually make a strong showing as well since they're aiming at the same demographics. In fact, the Jump properties feature prominently in games across nearly all the different consoles.



This year, Jump Festa took place at the Makuhari Messe auditorium in Chiba prefecture, on Saturday and Sunday, December 16th and 17th. I made it out to Chiba to cover the event and it turned out to be an awesome day. I woke up early on Saturday morning in order to make it on time for the 9AM opening. When I stepped off the train at the Kaihin Makuhari station, within walking distance of the auditorium, I found myself already being ushered along by an enormous crowd all headed in the same direction. Luckily, when I actually arrived at the auditorium, it wasn't even close to packed. Calling the Makuhari Messe center an auditorium is an understatement. It's more like a series of three football field sized showfloors, dotted with gigantic inflatables of Naruto, Goku from Dragon Ball Z, and other famous Jump characters. The cosplayers were still just filtering in, but by lunchtime I found myself crouched on the concrete, eating soba noodles next to Cloud and Reno from Final Fantasy 7 in a forest of gargantuan, brightly-colored, inflatable people. This is exactly why I came to Japan.


Videogame booths were everywhere on the showfloors, and appeared to be the main attractions. In fact, it looked as if no expense had been spared in constructing these enormous, flashing mini-habitats to grab your attention. For the Wii, Nintendo constructed a series of living rooms for you to wait in line by, while a strange man in a bright green suit randomly accosted the diligent to play Magic Taisen, a game for the DS that lets you perform magic tricks. The most enormous and overdone booth was without a doubt Square-Enix's, though. Less a booth than a series of several enormous booths each staffed with their own attendants with separate uniforms reflecting the clothing style from some Final Fantasy game or another, two movie theaters, and an enormous marquee sign flashing text taller than me all day. To top it all off, they threw in a giant inflatable Chocobo and a Slime from Dragon Quest to sit on top. If there hadn't been a roof over us, I'm sure this would have been the first videogame booth visible from space.



Jump Festa 2007 being a huge event, there were a lot of big announcements that are probably just now filtering out to the internet. Square-Enix really took advantage of this opportunity with news of a Final Fantasy: Tactics remake for the PSP, a sequel to FF:Tactics Advanced showing up on the DS, a mysterious, unnamed project marked for 2007, the original Front Mission game for cellphones and the DS, an updated version of the movie Final Fantasy Advent Children, a trailer for Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, a remake of Kingdom Hearts 2 for the PS2, and updated trailers for Final Fantasy XIII and others. The real draw though, was the set of games playable by the public for the first time ever. Here are some first impressions.


Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 (PSP) – Crisis Core is incredibly polished. Everything looked great, the story seemed to already have all of the voice-acting in place and the game looked mostly finished. In the demo I got to play, I played as the character Zack, a friend of Cloud's that appears in Advent Children. The demo allowed you to walk into town and fight Ifrit. The battle gameplay was good, with the ability to move Zack at will and execute commands such as using spells or items. When you choose the fight command though, Zack makes a beeline towards the enemy in which you can't control him in any way, so if you execute the command from far away he will definitely get hit. In the middle of the battle, Ifrit did an attack that seamlessly switched to video of him punching things wrapped in flames. Unfortunately, he did this move twice against me and I couldn't skip the video the second time around. Overall, though, Crisis Core looks amazingly good. This game may provide an enormous boost to PSP sales in Japan, where the system is very weak.


Seiken Densetsu 4: Dawn of Mana (PS2) – Dawn of Mana was looking really good. In the demo I played you start off in this brightly-colored paradise, populated by cute hopping bunnies and 3-legged wooly horse things. The paradise was shattered as I immediately set to destroying everything that moved, an act which was made easier by the main character's whip that allows you to grab and manipulate objects, spinning them and sending them flying into groups of enemies or just launching them straight out at the adorable, unsuspecting inhabitats. I can't wait to get this game. With no bunny rabbits left to smush, I headed out to fight the boss monster, an enormous creature that whipped me with his long arms. The attendant kept telling me to do something with the pumpkins all around him that I couldn't translate completely, but everytime I touched them they blew up on me, so I ended up running out of time before beating the boss.


Subarashiki Kono Sekia: A Wonderful World (DS) – This handheld game features a semi-realistic Tokyo in which you play as a character that travels around using psychic powers to defeat strange creatures that happen to just be hanging out. There are two main characters, and you primarily control the boy, although in some battles there is secondary action going on on the upper screen where you must occasionally manipulate the girl to enable you to fight the enemy in the lower screen. The gameplay consists of you using the stylus to perform pyrokinesis to burn enemies, shock the enemy with lightning bolts, hit them directly, or use telekinesis to fling objects around. Sometimes it seemed as if the game was difficult to get to respond right, where I continually casted fire when I just wanted to hit the enemy, but overall it seems like a promising title.

Dragon Quest Sword (Wii) – Dragon Quest Sword is a first person Dragon Quest game where you travel along a more or less linear path with occasional branches, defeating enemies by using the Wii Remote to swing your sword, block with your shield, or shoot balls of magic. The game was very responsive and looked decent, if a bit simple. All the enemies were standard Dragon Quest fare, such as the Slime, the Golem, etc. The game was fun, but the girls in the booth were distractingly hot, so I may have missed a few things.

Lost Odyssey (360) – This Mistwalker title looked promising from a distance, but up close the game failed to impress. There wasn't much of a crowd gathered at all, at any of the 360 booths really, so there wasn't much of a wait to play. Lost Odyssey is an RPG set in a strange alternate universe of technology and magic where you play as a silent warrior sword-fighting with an entire army, apparently by himself. You end up fighting a giant machine that shoots flames, but the combat was a bit slow and I don't think many of the players at the booth figured out how to use the Power Drink item, as most of them ended up just walking away early on. I stayed and beat the machine to get treated to Lost Odyssey's partially broken texture-loading on the world map. I then encountered some other soldiers in absurd helmets that ushered me on to a town of some sort, before getting booted off the machine due to time limits.

Strange Dragonball Z Game (I don't know the name of the system) – I was walking around and I saw a bunch of little kids spazzing out playing some sort of Dragonball Z game where you wore little sensors on your hands and opened and closed your fist in front of a camera to attack. The attendant there must have confused my confusion with interest, because he gestured for me to come give it a try. Luckily, I have a strong ability to turn off my embarassment reflexes, so I, of course, agreed. All in the name of journalism! Unfortunately, the camera was set at the height of children, so I had to half crouch to play, but the game consisted of me opening and closing my hands to launch little energy balls at the enemy while he flew around and attempted to hit me. You use your energy balls to deflect his shots or pinpoint his weak spots to halt his attacks. I'm proud to say I utterly crushed my opponent. Piccolo would be proud.

There were many other games, but I only got to play them briefly. A Chocobo game for the cellphone seemingly instantly imploded from my touch, so I quickly fled. Then the attendants began closing everything up by around 5PM. Jump Festa 2007 turned out to be a lot of line-waiting punctuated by a few minutes of gameplay, but the spiky-haired cosplayers made the waiting bearable, so the event was pretty enjoyable. Hopefully these first impressions will give everybody some new games to eagerly anticipate heading into 2007.