newly playing: the PSVita

2026/07/02

once again, i've had a busy busy year so far working on video projects and class assignments. the TETRIS 2 video i released in may was an intensive process, and while i was writing & editing it all i began this ritual of playing a handheld game every morning. i own multiple handhelds, but the one i've gotten the most use out of in the past few months is the PSVITA.

you may have heard varying reports on the quality and variety of the vita, which mostly depends on who you're talking to and how they choose to use it. while it was still actively supported by SONY, it was maintained by its appeal to fans of RPGs and visual novels. i recently came to understand it as a particularly feminine-leaning platform for its wide array of games about datin' cuteboys, but if that's not your thing the vita was also kept afloat by its support for games by independent devs, whose games could be easily ported and maintained for the faux-HD handheld. it's super strong for these categories, but when i picked up a psvita slim model last year, my goal was to check out just about anything this thing had going on. i've also just been using it to play a lot of PSP games, too.

by far the game that's trapped my attention the most is PATAPON 2, the second entry in a series of music-action-strategy games about a buncha little guys. i can easily tell you i've played a LOT of games, and patapon has succeeded in sincerely being nothing like any of them.

ages ago i played patapon the first when i bought it digitally, but at the time i didn't know how to strategise and didn't get very far. PATAPON 2 is very similar to the first game but expands on it just enough to have kept me coming back, featuring new evolutions of these PON guys (including a rabbit form!) that allow for more experimentation. the basis of these games is that you're guiding an army from left to right by using rhythm-based commands mapped to the face buttons. i'm a huge fan of music games where the rhythm takes centre-stage as opposed to pre-determined input maps, so PATAPON's reliance on raw rhythmic input appeals to me a whole load.

even if, in the overall game, i might not have made it far and got stuck at one of the snow stages, it was delightful to make steady progress each morning. while the PSP was more powerful than its predecessors and competitors, its games did not fail to appeal to the understood structure of handheld games. going one stage at a time, each being about 10 minutes long, perfect for a routine that involves breaks or transit or some other form of downtime. this style seems to have died out with the advent of the nintendo switch -- though nintendo's own switch games tend to thread the needle here -- and now only persists on a game-to-game basis, so returning to games that capitalised on the format is always nice.

alongside patapon, i got really REALLY into lumines during this time. it's a game i cannot shut up about, having found a way to bring it up in two videos in a row and telling all my friends about it. i tried multiple versions, including the original and a remaster of the original for switch and the vita-exclusive ELECTRONIC SYMPHONY, each of which have their own unique mechanical traits that set them apart.

another music-oriented game, LUMINES adapts the synaesthesia of games like XEVIOUS and REZ into puzzle game form, the devs' innovations laying the groundwork for the later famous TETRIS EFFECT. as a PSP launch title, the game naturally makes strong use of the handheld's audio capabilities with a healthy lengthy soundtrack of tunes.

each stage (or "skin" which is a pretty gross sounding name for it i think) is accompanied by a different song, and since i haven't gotten far in challenge mode (for ANY version) i still have yet to see, hear and play the full extent of lumines. the urge to reach as far as possible in challenge mode and unlock everything is so strong that it kept me coming back for a while, and as of writing the furthest i've reached is 15 stages. because of the repetition of this process, and the requirement to start from the beginning each time, the music from the first 5-10 stages is now seared into my head for eternity. thanks, mizuguchi!

when i first got my slim model last november (i've been a vitahead since 2012 but i've had terrible luck with the original model), i wanted to load up a variety of games and see what the platform had to offer past what i was already familiar with. this included finding stuff that might appeal to my sickest twistedest gremlinesque interests, so SHIN GUNDAM MUSOU was an easy pick.

i haven't covered the musou series much on this site but i fell in love with it when i checked out the 3DS version of HYRULE WARRIORS back in 2024. i later tried the switch version, and spent a bunch of time playing it and completing its story mode, being nearly the only thing i did for a week or two last spring. that was the MOST obsessed i've gotten with a game in a good while, so it was easy to feel my love for zelda's musou spinoff and redirect it to the earlier GUNDAM variants of the same koei-built series.

SHIN gundam musou is not the first game in the franchise based on gundam -- it follows a series of PS2 and PS3 games, all adapting various gundams with a focus on the UC timeline. i'm certain any of these would appeal to my obsessed ass but SHIN received the privilege of a psvita port, making it the only handheld gundam musou and a pristine downtime game. the catch, though, is that this port is untranslated and i've gotta scrape together my minimal japanese literacy skills to read the menus. i can tank it, it's worth it.

i've been playing it on-and-off since i got my vita slim, so i haven't really gotten far but i like that you can play as the TURN-A gundam in ultimate mode. my biggest issue is that the zeta gundam storyline is inexplicably based on the 2000s "new translation" movies, a confusing stipulation when those movies are 90% reused from the TV show anyway. the game lacks the same finesse of HYRULE WARRIORS but i can still boot this thing up for a guaranteed good time. folks, they got me GOOD.

for a bonus, i haven't played much of the game yet as of writing but i impulsively picked up falcom's TRAILS OF COLD STEEL because i saw a screenshot and i thought it looked pretty. early in, i was continuously proven right, with this gorgeously rendered town you arrive at by train. it shows off a lot of the strengths of the vita's temporal position in visual fidelity, requiring certain limitations that manage to support the art design here. the use of colours and reliance on pre-baked shadows and faintly blurry textures make the whole thing so dreamy, like an anime background converted perfectly to 3D, and i'm excited to see more as i play the rest of the game.

i'll inevitably report back with more of my Vita Findings, including some games i'll be talking about in future videos. if it wasn't clear, i'm a huge fan of this thing, and it's as important as ever to reminisce on its strengths. while i was writing this article sony announced that they'll be shutting down the PS3 and psvita's digital stores, limiting options for what's (GENERALLY) playable on them. it stinks, because the vita absolutely has more games than the PS5 lol.