Kestrel

I a, very skeptical he has an Okami 2 in him, or at least an Okami 2 worthy of that name. Platinum's made some great games, sure, but none of them have really excelled in the same areas as Okami, which makes me think some of the people most responsible for that game didn't wind up following Kamiya after.

@LikelySatan I've never heard of an enhanced PS5 version, but there was some pre-order exclusive stuff for the original release, most notably the remasters of AC5 and AC6, for digital pre-orders on PS4 and XB3, respectively. I think they later changed that to make them free to anyone who purchased within a year of release, though.

They had to be locked behind a pre-order because licensing agreements prohibit their sale — the same reason none of the older AC games are available for purchase, and the reason why anyone who wants a digital copy of AC7 (on any platform) would be wise not to sleep on it, because those licenses are likely to expire in a year or two.

I'll believe it when I see it.

That said, if and when this story does end, I hope they don't decide to just abandon the setting. It be really cool to see them start out a new series in Zemuria set a few hundred years later.

Given how the Kakarot DLCs have been far more miss-than-hit, I won't be expecting much.

May also be worth noting that Sparking Zero has already announced that it will have Daima DLC.

The only reason Pokémon is as big as it is now is because they were fortunate enough to be the first ones out the gate on handheld. The core concept of the games is lifted straight from Dragon Quest 5, which itself borrowed from the older MegaTen games. All series that have continued to do well, before and since, utilizing those same "Collect-Em-All" mechanics. But none will ever achieve the ubiquity of Pokémon because that was a zeitgeist thing.

The lesson to take from Pokémon isn't that it's some inimitable aberration — it's not — but rather that for games like these to succeed, you need to give players a reason to **want** to collect a bunch of interchangeable digital trinkets in the first place. A strong art style and cute monsters can do the job (in fact, I'd say this is the one area where Pokémon falls flat, as their designs seldom have that same sort of **character** as Toriyama's creatures) but so can a good story, or interesting context. After all, in the MegaTen games and their spin-offs, you're gathering up various deities from a dozen or so different pantheons. You could just as easily orient a game around collecting characters from classic Victorian literature, or horrific, Lovecraftian abominations. If I had to guess at any one reason for why most Pokémon-imitators fails, it's because they don't provide players with anything meaningfully different to collect — and players are only gonna be able to care about generically cute anime-styled monsters so many times before they get bored.

Retro doesn't simply mean "old," it means out-of-date, so pretty much any game from before controls were standardized along the DualShock gamepad qualifies as retro, to my view. So that's everything up to the PS2 and GCN generations.

Anything from those generations or later can be an old game, but because they're in effectively the same style as modern games, I don't think they can be considered retro.

It's like the WiiU era all over again. Surprised they're not claiming XCX2 as a launch title — or even ports of the HD Zeldas.

I don't understand why anyone would be concerned about XII having a darker tone. The best games in the series, V and VIII, both had darker tones than the rest. And DQXI was — by far — at its best in Act 2, the one time it tried to go just a bit darker.

The juxtaposition of these "dark tones" with the bright, cheery visuals is kind of one of Dragon Quest's biggest strengths. The more the games try to lean into those aspects, the better they tend to be.

I really like the umbrella, but I don't really use umbrellas, unfortunately.

I think Engage was going to have problems selling no matter what social or narrative elements it did or did not focus on. Do y'all remember when it was leaked, and ,after announced? Fire Emblems fans weren't excited: they were literally incredulous. They dismissed the leak as "obviously fake," and then once they game was properly announced it just confused people, since the whole aesthetic and premise just screamed "mobile game."

Engage never really did anything to make it stand out as more than a disposable spin-off game, and after it came out... the reviews did nothing to change that perception.

@wuntyme8 There aren't enough islands in the sky to make a loftwing worth it, sadly. I'm still hoping we'll get an improved version of TotK for the NS2, that restores a lot of the sky islands that were videntky cut from the game, but I'm not gonna be holding my breath.

While I can't say I was ever all that fond of Donkey Kong as a 3D platformer in the past, it's hard not to feel pretty sad about all this. 3D platformers are, or can be, a really fantastic genre that has been sorely underrepresented in the past two decades.

@Hinade Same, and I've played 'em all. Minstrel's Song towers over the other, IMO. Hell, it'd deserve to be in the top three for its soundtrack alone.

Funny, I am confident fans will not be happy. And not just because they're fans. Zelda can be a great story when the player is Link, and I don't think any Zelda media without that interactive element has any real appeal, beyond base novelty.

Gotta give it to Minstrel's Song, owing mostly to the stellar presentation, which does a lot to make the more frustrating aspects of the game tolerable — frustrations largely shared with all the other entries in the series. As far as I'm concerned, it's not just the top contender, but the only contender.

Would love to see RS2 and RS3 remade someday, with a similar level of love and care... but that's not something that will ever happen in this world, with this Square-Enix.

Not surprised. Koji Kondo is frighteningly brilliant.

@roy130390 Unfortunately that is not the case. See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2024/02/21/gundam-breaker-4-announced-but-likely-wont-be-very-good/?sh=33b2a0383460

@betterthanvegas Maybe don't get too excited. GB4 is being made by the same developers as NGB.

IMO the biggest problem with the Switch concept is that the Joycons are just... too small to be comfortable as individual controllers. A larger tablet necessitating slightly bigger Joycons may fix that, and maybe even reduce or remove the need to add those clumsy button cap-things to them when used separately.

And also, if the Switch successor is going to be backwards compatible... it's gonna have to support Joycons. Ain't no way around that.

Pure nonsense. The only reason FF7R is as expensive and time-consuming to develop as it is... is because it is very emphatically not a remake. Or, rather, not a faithful remake — or even close. Well, that and the typical SE mismanagement, which at this point we pretty much just have to accept as the house style.

If they wanted to, they absolutely could remake FF6 — or FF7, for that matter — at a fraction of the cost of the 7R trilogy, in a fraction of the time, provided they were faithful to the original game. It's not like FF6 represents a bigger challenge than Star Ocean 2 did last year — or Live A Live or Dragon Quest 7 or Trials of Mana or any of the many other big, expansive RPGs of that type that they've remade before.

This is why, really, the Final Fantasy series has lost so much of the prestige and respect it used to enjoy. SE cannot even imagine a Final Fantasy Game as anything other than overproduced pablum. Not even a little.

It's fair to say the series will continue, I guess, but not stopping? It's already stopped. Hasn't been a new game in nearly a decade.

Well, I'm still collecting Amiibo. --Or I try to, when I can get them cheap. But I don't care at all about the game functionality — they're just cool little display figures that look really nice, and doubly nice for the price point. Like if you want a Toon Link figure, the nearest ones to Amiibo are several orders of magnitude more expensive.

Also kinda shocked that THIS is the Ace Combat game we're getting on Switch, and not ports of AC5 — or 0 or 4 or even 6.

This is cool, but... yeah, I just cannot imagine it would run well on the Switch. I'm definitely a big enough AC fan that I'd buy it anyway... but not at full price. Especially when they can't be bothered to bundle in all the DLC (which could easily wind up doubling the asking price).

Here's hoping we get some AC8 news soon. It's been... so long.

I still don't really get what this game is. A 2.5D platformer? An action game? A bunch of QTE mini-games? And Adventure game? What is it?

I'd gladly pay $400, maybe even $500, just to be able to play regular Switch games at a stable 30fps/1080p. That's all I want from the next generation – the bare minimum.

That and maybe an XCX expanded remaster as a launch title.

If Ghost Trick counts, then so does Trails to Azure; and if Trails to Azure counts, then the best character of the year is no contest at all — it's Estelle Bright.

lol, yeah, the Gothic series can be a lot of fun... but also very janky, even by contemporary standards. They're definitely worth playing if you're fond of the genre and want to play some forgotten classics, but otherwise... yup, I don't see anyone playing Gothic in 2023 for the first time having a good time, either.

I love the game, but of all those "forgotten classics," the early-era 3D ones are among the hardest to appreciate anew today, I think. At least short of the even older DOS and early-windows RPGs that lack mouse support (what a nightmare).

RPGs are one of my hyperfixations, so I've made an effort to play... pretty much every single one that was ever worth playing — or, if not, plan to in the future. The Gothic series is one I definitely wouldn't want to play on consoles... do that on PC, where you have so many more options to make the whole experience easier on yourself.

Though if you DO want to play classic RPGs on Switch, I can say that the NS ports of the old Infinity Engine games are a surprisingly excellent experience, though it is a bit of a shame not to have access to mods, especially BG1's NPC Project.

Can't say that teaser makes me feel very optimistic... a big part of what made the Tenkaichi games so great (beyond the enormous character rosters) was how closely they replicated the look and feel of the anime. Whatever art style they're going for here... ain't that.

Cool that Street Pass will still work, guess I might still have a chance.... bought a 3DS at launch and never got even 1.

Hm... I dunno. Feels like the series has been sliding downhill since D4. Maybe I'll pick it up on a sale? Demo certainly made it seem more playable than D6, but I can't exactly say anything about it hooked me.

@MattmanForever Still not sympathetic. Don't preorder games, don't preorder DLC, and if you do, don't be surprised if you wind up getting ripped off.

I get where they're coming from, but at this point I have very little sympathy when people buy something that does not exist, based on the promise that it will eventually exist, getting upset when said thing stubbornly persists in not existing.

I'm a bit confused about the premise for Origins. You're framed for a crime you were planning to commit anyway? Why would that be a big deal? Why would they care about clearing their name if they were going to kill the guy themselves, anyway?

Also, minor correction: MonolithSoft isn't really known for open-world JRPGs. They only ever made exactly one of those, and statistically very few people are likely to have ever played it.

You know how after every big, successful gaming console, Nintendo gets super arrogant and then their next platform flops?

Apropos of nothing, I'm sure.

Too many games this summer. I can't keep up.

I just want some mechs again....

Very well deserved, but it won't last — like TotK, it's gonna wind up getting come contrarian takes, too, to lower the metascore.

@Astral-Grain Hope you didn't sprain anything moving those goalposts so fast.

@Astral-Grain I mean, I don't know what to tell you. Other than, you know, to point out the obvious: that you clearly haven't been paying attention if you never noticed all the people complaining about the Zelda remasters being obscenely overpriced.

@Maulbert This is a laughably ignorant take. I don't even know where to begin. I assume what you meant to say was that you don't care for his character design. Which is fine. That, at least, would be a valid opinion.

I'm not a huge fan of the DS remake's visual style, but looks pretty damned good for an NDS game in 3D, so it's hard to complain about. But the main thing giving the remake the edge over the original, or the remaster, is the simple fact that it's actual, physical proof that Square-Enid is fully capable of faithfully remaking a game. Fully revealing everything they've done with FFVII for the marketing-driven BS that it is.

I haven't used any glitches, but I do kinda resent Nintendo patching them out, especially if they're not doing anything to fix the game's economy. Grinding for resources and money is so incredibly tedious that I don't think I'll ever replay the game — and if I do, it'll only be on an emulator if and when I can cheat a bit.

Like fully half my playtime so far has been spent either farming Zonaite in the depths for auto-build, or farming prime meat in Hebra for rupees.

It's not hard to be the "best Star Ocean game) when the average quality is so, so low. Only two of 'em are any good.

@Picola-Wicola They're at the Zonaite Forges in the Depths. The forges are great big structures, you can't miss them. You also have several boss fights at them in for the Yiga quest.

Did you know that you can use Recall to freeze time and reverse the motion of any object?

130+ hours in the game so far and I keep forgetting that ability exists.