This is a column by Kat Bailey dedicated to the analysis of the once beloved Japanese RPG sub-genre. Tune in every Wednesday for thoughts on white-haired villains, giant robots, Infinity+1 swords, and everything else the wonderful world of JRPGs has to offer.
Next week, representatives from Nintendo and Sony will take the stage at E3 with the goal of fostering excitement for the Vita and 3DS. When it comes time for the sizzle reels and the assurances of publisher support, watch closely. For Japanese RPG developers, the time is now to make a splash.

By any measure, Japanese-developed RPGs play an important role on mobile devices dedicated to gaming. It's not just that Monster Hunter dominated the PSP. Many of the best Japanese-developed RPGs of the past few years, The World Ends With You and Dragon Quest IX among them, have been handheld. With the 3DS exploding in Japan, there's little reason to believe that will change any time soon.

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A new trailer for Jet Set Radio features the remix of Rob Zombie's "Dragula" featured in the US-exclusive levels from the Dreamcast game, indicating that Sega has acquired the rights to more music for the HD re-release than previously announced. Whether that's good news depends on the balance of your desire for a more accurate version versus your desire to never hear "Dragula" again.

The end of the trailer exhorts us to "Stay Tuned" for more music news. This can only be good, unless it refers to the removal of every song but "Dragula."

Sony may be prepping a new and improved version of PlayStation Plus for E3 – one that PS Vita owners will be able to sign up for. Sources close to Eurogamer have said it will be one of the surprises announced during Sony's E3 press conference.

The new version will supposedly offer free top-tier titles to subscribers in addition to PS Vita functionality. PS Vita users will also get platform-specific perks, apparently – exclusive games, DLC and cloud functionality. Sony's press conference kicks off on Monday, June 4 at 9pm ET.

Finally, the Vita followup to the best game of 2009 is coming stateside. New Little King's Story, a new game based on the Wii action/strategy game, will be released as a download this summer by Konami.

Featuring a less cutesy art style and a new storyline (and lacking the hand of creator Yoshiro Kimura), New Little King's Story sees King Corobo trying to reclaim his lost lands from the Demon King. Players will recruit and grow their Royal Guard from their own kingdom, and then basically throw all those people at enemies.

We might admit to being a bit ... cautious ... about the new art style and loss of Kimura's guidance, but at least with this announcement, we'll have the opportunity to judge for ourselves.

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Warner Bros. has announced a new Spy Hunter game for the 3DS and PlayStation Vita. It's in development at TT Fusion, which was previously Embryonic Studios, a smattering of key staff from Gizmondo – who made the Gizmondo – and Warthog, a UK studio who has done a lot of licensed titles. TT Games snatched up the studio in 2006 before being bought by Warner Bros. a year later.

This Spy Hunter reboot will be available this fall, and ... well, it's Spy Hunter. You drive a transforming car to take down evil dudes. This latest installment adds an aerial support drone and will let users customize the Interceptor (the official ride of spies everywhere) through tech and weapon upgrades. The car is also red now, which seems like the worst color for a spy car but that's just our two cents.

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Guacamelee, the game blessed with the World's Greatest Title, as well as an interesting combination of world-shifting mechanics and luchador sensibility, is now a PlayStation exclusive.

Developer Drinkbox Studios finally alleviated our curiosity about the platforms for the action platformer, revealing that Guacamelee is under the wing of Sony's Pub Fund, and will be released exclusively for PS3 and PS Vita – the homes of Drinkbox's last two Mutant Blobs games.

Drinkbox will show both versions at E3, which means we'll get to play Guacamelee again.

GameSpot reports that UK retailer Play.com posted a listing for an unannounced Vita game called Ghost Recon: Final Mission, which has since been removed.

Concurrently, retailer Zavvi posted a listing for a Vita version of Assassin's Creed 3 – Ubisoft announced an Assassin's Creed game being in the works for Vita last August, alongside games like Dungeon Hunter, Lumines, and Rayman Origins that have all since been released. The Zavvi listing remains active.

We'll check with Ubisoft; however, for an actual status update about these games, we're sure we'll need only to wait for E3.

We hope you've kept your Vitas charged, because this week, there's stuff you can do with it. Resistance: Burning Skies is available on PSN, as is the demo for Gravity Rush. Try it and see what we were talking about!

Speaking of excellent games, Rayman Origins is now available digitally on PS3 for $29.99. It's joined by the PS2 party game Rayman Arena, which is ... maybe not quite the classic Origins is. See everything that's out today on the PlayStation Blog.

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Snapshot isn't a new game, though this may be the first you've heard of it. Nope, Snapshot's been kicking around indie game festivals and such for quite some time (since at least 2009, if not earlier), though we now know that Snapshot's being developed for PSN on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita.

In Snapshot, you follow a little robot named (appropriately enough), "Pic," as he ventures across a puzzle-filled 2D world. By snapping square photos of the environment, Pic can alter the world around him – "taking photographs of light and using it to interact with physics" and momentum-based puzzles are both given as examples of Snapshot's gameplay twist.

The game's a Sony exclusive (at least for now), with cross-platform save functionality built-in, and it's expected some time this fall. Check out the latest trailer just above – it's quite pretty!

Hey, in case you didn't know, that Smash Bros.-esque PlayStation 3 game, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, is very likely also heading to PlayStation Vita. How likely? Pretty freakin' likely, especially considering the recently discovered group of domain registrations from Sony Computer Entertainment of America tied to URLs like "PlaystationAllStarsVita.com," "PS-AllStarsVita.com," and "PSAllStarsBattleRoyaleVita.com."

As with so many of these discoveries, Superannuation spotted the URLs – URLs that pretty clearly identify a Vita-based version of the brawler. We'll be saying this a lot this week, so get used to it: we've reached out to Sony for more info, but only got "we don't comment on rumor or speculation" in return. We expect more info next week during E3.

You're always in a hurry to learn the controls of a new game in the bustle and din of a press event. You might pick a few things up from a tutorial card resting near the screen, from a patient developer stationed nearby, or through one of those loading screens that can barely contain a controller and 29 labels, bursting out of it like informative tentacles. When Vikings Attack, a new party game for PlayStation 3 and Vita, stood out at recent Sony press event because it's filled with clutter, yet wrapped in the simplicity of two-button play.

Presented with vibrant, cel-shaded aplomb, When Vikings Attack is essentially a game of crowd-versus-crowd control. You maneuver a cluster of portly citizens, brought together in the face of an inexplicable, anachronistic viking invasion of 1970s England. The number of people in your crowd is an indicator of your speed, health and strength, and more able bodies can lift larger and heavier objects.

That's right: the secret to thwarting the Norsemen of the apocalypse is to pick up the manufactured detritus of civilization, such as benches, cars, ambulances and phone booths, and hurl it at incoming streams of invaders. It's a bit like bowling, with mismatched, costumed people for pins, and balls coming in every shape, size and seriously you can throw everything at everyone.

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Side-scrolling twin-stick shooter Really Big Sky is making its way from PC to relatively smaller (and bigger!) screens. Developer Boss Baddie, collaborating with Voofoo Studios and Ripstone Publishing, is working on a new version for PlayStation Vita and PS3 called Big Sky Infinity.

Details of the new version are more ... finite, but Boss Baddie promises "new modes and enemies, and touch controls" (the latter for the Vita version, of course). You can get a broad sense of what Big Sky is about by watching the trailer for the PC version above, trying the demo at the website, or checking out Really Big Sky on Steam, where it's currently on sale for $2.50.

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Generally, having a magical wizard in your pocket would either be incredibly uncomfortable for one (or both) of you, or prohibitively expensive. Wizard upkeep costs an arm and a leg as it is, and with the money you'd spend on the reagents needed to concoct a shrinking potion, you could buy an entire mage. It's a pain, and usually not worth it.

There's is, however, a more humane, cost effective solution on the horizon. WizOrb, the pixelated, chiptuned indie block-breaking/RPG hybrid from Beatshapers and Tribute Games will smash through geometrically perfect arrangements of blocks and onto your friendly neighborhood PS3, PSP and/or Vita next month, when it launches as a $3.99 PlayStation Mini.

A patent filed by Sony Computer Entertainment America in 2011 describes an advertising system in which a game would be "suspended" during play, an advertisement would come up, and then the game would continue – much like TV commercials interrupt segments of programming. According to the patent, ads would be preceded by a warning and a slowdown of gameplay, with another warning displayed when gameplay is about to resume.

The mere filing of a patent is no indication that this will be implemented, simply that the idea came up. Now, while we primarily work as journalists, we consider ourselves reasonably industry-savvy, and can thus be trusted to provide game industry analysis, pro-bono, in an advisory capacity.

It is to that end we present the following advice to Sony:

DON'T DO THIS

You'll be able to listen to Professor K and his circa-2000 futuristic pirate radio station anywhere. Sega's updated version of Jet Set Radio is coming to PlayStation Vita alongside its PS3, Xbox, and PC releases, the publisher announced today. It'll include "Vita camera integration" in an unspecified capacity, and touchscreen graffiti mechanics.

The summer release will be playable for the first time on Vita at E3. Will we take time out of our packed E3 schedules to play an old game? Of course we will.

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During the week of E3, on June 6, Video Games Live will take over the Nokia Theater L.A. Live arena. Being E3 and all, and L.A. being one of the most frequently played venues for Tommy Tallarico's live video game concert, this year he wanted to add some special scores – like Austin Wintory's Journey score, conducted by Wintory himself.

It's just one of the more recent audio accompaniments added for the June 6 show. There are also select tunes from Skyrim, which will be handled by a secret guest conductor; composer Russell Bower will conduct some Diablo 3 tunes. Donkey Kong Country, Star Fox and even a Street Fighter segment – to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Capcom's fighter – are planned. Akira Yamaoka will also play guitar at some point.

Finally, there's Earthworm Jim to consider, a game that Tallarico himself worked on. Apparently folks have been asking him to add it to Video Games Live for quite some time now, which we're totally in favor of – as long as we get that thrash metal remix of "Use Your Head" we've been waiting our entire lives for.

Gravity Rush for PS Vita is a particular kind of superhero simulation I can't recall seeing before: not only is it an excellent approximation of what I imagine it's like to be a superhero, it approximates the life of a new superhero, with all the awkwardness that entails.

Protagonist Kat, who wakes up with no memories and a starfield-patterned cat companion that allows her to alter her personal gravity, is not terribly graceful with her abilities, as befits someone who just gained the power to fall in any direction. She is, however, immediately willing to help save her new friends from mysterious "gravity storms" eating away parts of the town, and the "Nevi" monsters that start creeping in, and her enthusiasm makes up for the growing pains.

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