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Final Fantasy XVI Review

[I’m not sure which of the two disclaimers to start with so I’m just go with this one: nothing in this review says you have to dislike something you like. No disagreement about the quality of something encourages or invites you to get mad, you can just shake your head and move on.]

[This review contains spoilers for Final Fantasy XVI and I’d suggest you either finish the game completely or decide you don’t care about finishing the game before moving on.]

I went through all of Game of Thrones in about one month.

When I say all of Game of Thrones, I mean all of it. The first new episode I watched as it broadcast live was the final one, a misguided attempt to grip the zeitgeist firmly with both hands before it fully escaped into the realm of Starbucks cups and memes. While this all made sense at the time, trying to cram seasons of that show into a smaller package did not create something tighter and denser, it forced you to see precisely where it goes off the rails with stunning clarity.

It was hard not to think about that when playing Final Fantasy XVI. The title wears its Game of Thrones influence on its sleeve, but that’s not why it’s good or bad. The title’s misunderstanding of what made Game of Thrones work, while simultaneously following it into an equally baffling denouement, is worth examining, but the game’s failures are because it doesn’t understand what makes a story work. It stumbles into an accidental theme of flailing wildly against deeper, abstract ambitions and then falls back on to easy tropes to avoid actually saying anything.

Final Fantasy XVI is a beautiful disaster in many ways.

If You Have Act Three Problems, You Have Act One Problems

To get to how badly FFXVI disappointed me, I have to start with why it started off so good.

When writing the TV show Lost, showrunner Damon Linelof had plans for how some of those early mysteries were going to be solved. However, as it became clear that the show was going to outlive those mysteries, he started planting seeds for further questions to hopefully sprout answers deeper into the show’s inevitable hospice years without a concrete plan. This obviously did not work out as eventually the audience realized they were passengers in a car with no clear direction but forward, but that initial thrill of enigma is something that seemingly stuck with people over time.

Final Fantasy XVI has this same problem/virtue. The opening act leaves you with such an exciting premise you do not really notice the shaky edifice it’s building to support the rest of the game. An early chapter transports Clive back to his teen years where he remembers being betrayed by his mother, turning into the Eikon of fire, seeing a hooded man, and killing the Phoenix — his brother, Joshua. It’s compelling and creates a clear structure for the game to follow through on. You’re entirely too dazzled to ponder whether this chapter was unnecessarily long or really needed a pointless jaunt through the swamp before anything imperative actually happened.

But all these things happen and you’re waiting with bated breath for the game to catch up to these mysteries. How did Clive not realize that he was the Eikon of Fire and was actively killing the Phoenix? What were his mother Annabelle’s deeper motivations? Why did the antagonist Ultima appear to Clive as a hooded man, an appearance Joshua also adopts after the timeskip? What secrets did the Phoenix Gate hold?

And you’re gripping the edge of your seat patiently bit-by-bit for these things to resolve with solutions that satisfy not only what you can imagine but what you could not imagine. You sit there, pushing through boring subquests and linear levels, anticipating pulling back in the trawling net and seeing what you captured, only to realize by the end of the second act that the game has no real interest in subverting or even meeting your expectations.

How did Clive not realize he was the Eikon of Fire and was actively killing the Phoenix but was somehow watching it happen as a third party? Dunno, denial I guess. What were Annabelle’s deeper motivations? She didn’t really have any, she’s just kind of evil. Why did the antagonist dress as a hooded man, despite having the ability to look like anyone or anything and appear solely to specific people? So they could confuse the player into thinking it was Joshua. What secrets did the Phoenix Gate hold? Eh, the same stuff that’s in like ten other places in Valisthea.

These are reductive answers, but the fuller scope of them — Annabelle really believes in the divine right of nobility — are not really any more interesting than the abridged ones so much as they are convenient excuses from the writers.

Final Fantasy XVI charts a middle ground between not feeling confident in its own storytelling and also exhibiting mounds of unearned confidence when it comes to presenting it. It wants to just show you things, like a dog running back and forth to pick up toys to present to you but isn’t sure what to do once you see them.

A Liberal View of Slavery

There’s no better example of this than the bearer-slavery world building, which states that people born with magic powers are treated as subhuman workers and are forced to work until they turn the stone. The game frontloads the inhumanity of this with tales of cruelty — a father and son that watch bearers get fed to a pet monster for sport, a little girl that forces her bearers to use up all their magic and then throws them away, a mother that cheerily gives away her cursed newborn, etc. But eventually the story loses interest in this framework as anything other than a dismissive wave to the oppressed that Clive must save by saving the world.

The moral compass of the game never seems sure whether it should convince you slavery is wrong (an opinion players come into the game with anyway) or that it’s standard in the world and we should view it within that context or that taking it away will cause a rocky period for society. I could buy all these options as possible lenses with which to explore any terrible thing and give it layers, but also like...you visit a town with four windmills. Clearly they’re not luddites to the point where society would collapse if you ended the institution, thus ensuring the wobbly point the game is making will feel fake.

Moreover, Final Fantasy XVI will occasionally introduce equivocation as attempts at shades of gray without realizing how deeply it undermines its central point. At the end of one side quest, slaves that Clive had been trying to rescue for several quests already were put on another boat heading to a country that ostensibly treats its slaves better, eliciting little more than an “All’s well that ends well” from the firebrand revolutionary Clive.

In another jaunt, as part of a much-longer series of quests about your hideout’s blacksmith, Clive returns the blacksmith to his former village and sees that they’re using fire bearers to make hotter flames until they themselves burn out. The ethical conundrum then isn’t whether to stop them or whether that’s wrong, it’s whether to provide them with Cid’s intellectual property for fire-burning engines. Of course, Clive simply does, and then it’s never made clear what happens to the slaves there. Maybe they’re treated as well as slaves in the other country, thus making it morally okay.

The game tries to have it multiple ways on the slavery subplot and then more or less drops the zoomed-in story to zoom out to an uncaring God and a traditional “fight against your fate” theme. The writers really want you to care about something, even if they often confuse cruelty with debate, and then do not care about it themselves by the end.

I do not wish to endlessly harp on the slavery aspect as I never really expected them to handle it deftly, more because it is a AAA video game than anything else, but it’s emblematic of how Final Fantasy XVI just loses interest in itself over and over and leaves the player holding the bag. I badly wanted the game to nail the strike it was perfectly positioned to hit. Instead, it sets up bowling pins and, while the ball slowly rolls down the lane, calls your attention to the vending machine so you don’t notice the ball slowly veer into the gutter midway through.

Lights, Camera, Action

I want to be clear that my distaste for Final Fantasy XVI has nothing to do with it being enough of a RPG or not. While obviously it’s trying to reach for a new audience that Square does not think cottons to turn-based battle anymore, I have no issue with it trying to pursue a character action mold to shape a new gameplay system around. And by and large, the game mostly hits the notes it’s trying to hit. The battle system in the game is perfectly serviceable, it just does not aspire to anything more than that, and that lack of ambition is disappointing.

A lot of Final Fantasy XVI’s marketing wanted to compare it to contemporaries like Devil May Cry 5 and Bayonetta and that comparison absolutely does Final Fantasy a disservice. As action games, those games are just better. They’re not better in all aspects, but game development is also not a zero-sum game and better production values does not necessarily mean you had to pull away from, say, combo variety.

Final Fantasy XVI gives Clive multiple abilities in the shape of absorbed Eikon powers — taking Garuda, for example, gives Clive four optional abilities that focus on Garuda’s claws and wind powers. With the exception of Odin, none of these really affect Clive’s bread & butter combos, but they offer more customization than none. The problem is that the game does nothing to encourage you to vary it up after you find what works. It does not stop you from doing it, sure, but the loadout you use to handle one enemy will work exactly as well for any other enemy in the game.

This ends up exasperating, or maybe is actually a symptom of, the game’s encounter design problem. Every non-Eikon fight in the game is either with a small group of enemies, a small group of enemies with one big enemy with a stamina bar, or a single larger enemy with a big HP bar. If you have fought one of these types of encounters, you have fought them all, and no aesthetic design variation on the thirteenth style of Big Guy With Large Weapon is going to make him feel any different to fight than the 300 before him.

It is not terrible, it’s enough to keep you going for 60 hours to see what’s next, but it feels like the bare minimum is done to just keep the treadmill moving. The battle system’s biggest moments, the hunts, are undermined by the enemy variety making it so you’re never fighting anything unique and they are dealt with in the exact same way as the previous times you have fought this enemy. They are poor emulations of Final Fantasy XII’s execution of the same concept, which forces you to rethink your gambits and strategies for each kind of enemy.

I speculate that some parts of the battle system shipped in a diminished capacity, as there’s allusions in the game’s ability tree to elemental changes between Eikon types. There’s no evidence of elemental weaknesses at all within the game and if that system exists, it’s diminutive at best. I wonder if there’s a version of this game that was more complicated before it had to comply with the mission statement of broadening its appeal. Maybe that extra layer of complication would not have made it any better, maybe it would have made it worse, who knows.

I, Ifrit

The most lauded part of Final Fantasy XVI is its gigantic boss fights, where Clive transforms into the Eikon Ifrit and does battle with other enemy Eikons. These battles show influence from fighting games and action games with massive cinematic QTEs to birth an explosion of particle effects. It also takes heavily from games like Asura’s Wrath including adherence to beat-by-beat setpieces that follow roughly the same but with the names changed.

I think, for a first-time playthrough, these fights are visually interesting and cool. I also think they’re mostly non-interactive, not at all challenging, and entirely too long. Both these things are true. I genuinely enjoyed my time playing through these boss fights, but I dread ever doing them again.

The QTEs should have been varied up, as they only come in two varieties: press R1 to dodge, mash Square to hit. At some point I would have rather they just sit back and let me watch the movie instead of trying to pretend that I was a part of the fight. The QTE attacks also should have taken off significantly more health from the bosses than they did because battles where I dash in for the 20th time to use my two Eikonic abilities and then just wail on the enemy until I get pushed away again wore thin.

I do not expect most boss fights to age well through repeated playthroughs — though I might argue that doing so is a hallmark of better character action games, but that clearly wasn’t the aim here — so I don’t hold the decaying of FFXVI’s boss fights against it. They are, however, entirely too long.

Timeskip

So, according to Google docs, it’s been roughly three months since I started working on this review in fits and starts. Most likely I was never going to finish it, but as I have been playing all these incredible games that have been coming out this season, I can’t help but let my mind drift back to Final Fantasy XVI and whether it holds up to what the rest of the gaming industry brought forward this year. In that framing, it’s impossible for me to feel that FFXVI has done anything but disappoint.

Recently, I saw a friend tweet “Press R3 + L3 To Accept The Truth,” referencing a pivotal moment in the game where Clive accepts that he killed his little brother and that he is Ifrit. It’s a poignant moment in the game that I can see affecting people, but it was lost on me because by that point the player already knows it’s not the truth. They undermined the moment before it ever happened and Clive is wrestling with a dramatic irony that the gets cut off at the knees again and again throughout the story. When this truth he accepts gets fully proven wrong in front of his own eyes, a timeskip happens where you never see the fallout. Instead, he casually mentions it seven years later — the same physical features, the same clothes, the same attitude — as a mere curiosity that he would love to see the conclusion of one day.

In essence, while writing this review, I have taken that same kind of timeskip. But unlike Clive, those nagging threads keep bothering me. I cannot bring myself to love Final Fantasy XVI because it gets so close to nailing something and then will back off because of a lack of courage or ambition or something to see it through. It crosses a threshold for being too good to ignore all the things wrong with it.

When Clive accepts the truth about himself, it involves defeating a dark version of himself lying within his psyche. Thematically, the game wants to insist that accepting the truth means overcoming your darkness, which sort of makes sense though does not apply holistically throughout the game. This review is me accepting the truth about FFXVI. It’s a game that should be a homerun, but instead stalls out on third base. It builds toward something and then suddenly forgets what it is building toward.

There are games out there that I like significantly less than Final Fantasy XVI that I think were more willing to finish their thought than this game does and unfortunately that is going to be the game’s legacy for me.

6/10

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (9/15/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. A lot to talk about this week and I have a plane to catch in a few days and I’ve not packed at all, so let’s get into it.

Unity Blows Itself Up with New Fees

This week, game engine Unity — on which games like Hollow Knight, Cuphead, Beast Saber, Among Us, and many others are built — dropped a new fee structure on all licensees. Previously, developers could tool around with Unity for free with a personal license, but paid for subscriptions and yearly costs to keep the tech company improving the product. Now, Unity said, they wanted to charge a 20 cent fee per game install, a demand that is on its face egregious and made even more ridiculous by the lack of any other details at the time.

After significant consternation in the game development community, all of which was directed at Unity and entirely deserved, the company came out with caveats that it seemed like they had only just thought about: exceptions for charity bundles and Game Pass, distributors paying the fees, Unity would investigate fraud in the form of malicious game installations, etc. It was as if they had been woken up from a drunken stupor and were just saying anything to get people to stop yelling at them.

There’s a lot of already good writing on why this is a terrible idea, but I want to hit on a few notes that have been brought up less.

One, while Unity doing this is obviously bad for them, it’s also just bad in general for all engine licensors. They’ve effectively burned a bridge of trust between game developers and the for-profit engine creators that they license from. It won’t change anything overnight, but it’s now apparent that companies like Unity or even say Epic could just completely change the deal in which their engines are used one morning out of nowhere. Tim Sweeney could, if he really wanted to, wake up and demand that all UE licensees have to give 75% of their gross to Epic. It wouldn’t work, but in the best case scenario that he’s not tackled to the ground before he announces this, the most you could hope for is that there’s an alternative engine that isn’t doing this to you that works similarly. And as a general rule there probably isn’t.

This isn’t to say Epic will or would do this, but the possibility they might or could has now entered into people’s brains in a way that previously would have been unfathomable. And that’s bad for Epic, because now they have to make overtures they previously would never have to acknowledge.

That also puts a lot more attention and pressure on open-source engines like Godot, which has become the alternative of choice for a lot of developers fleeing from Unity’s new rules. These engines, by virtue of not being for profit like their more popular alternatives, are funded primarily through things like Patreon and goodwill, which means they’re always probably going to struggle when it comes to being reactive and agile. But on the other hand, by definition no one can come down and change the rules on you one day.

It’s also important to note that Unity has not, and seemingly will not, explain what their methodology is for quantifying the number of game installs and also then carving out exceptions for things like charity bundles. Moreover, the idea that Unity will work with developers to determine outside fraud is straight up laughable. They’re going to sit there and try to say they’re going to be proactive rather than reactive, judicious, and fair about a thing that gives them money. I’d have a bridge to sell you if Unity hadn’t burned them all.

The bit about distributors — Nintendo, Valve, Microsoft, Sony, etc. — being the ones to foot the bill is also a particular bit of pure lunacy. I cannot imagine any result other than Valve getting a bill from Unity because a game on the store that sold well uses the engine and then just crumpling it up and throwing it in the trash. None of the distributors are going to agree to pay Unity for a contract they never signed and Unity is completely nuts for thinking they would or should.

As for why Unity is doing this, there’s a lot of theories out there. Money is obviously the major motivator, but it begs the question of why push an initiative that will drive away most developers and lessen their overall revenue in exchange for massive administrative overhead. The answer is that Unity doesn’t see the Team Cherry’s or the Innersloth’s of the world as their customers. They see the copy-and-paste mobile games that have offbrand Elsa playing Match-3 to not crush a king who is drowning in lava as their customers. They want money from those people and will do anything to cut a slice off Hoyoverse’s block of cheese.

I spoke with a few people who work at Unity this week and was informed that this plan was brought to employees a month or so ago for feedback, which was unanimously panned within the company. The executive team took that feedback, decided it was worthless, and went ahead with it.

Anyway, John Riccitiello is a hack and I think I, with no business experience whatsoever, could probably run Unity better than him. But in Unity’s defense, I think I could have also run EA better than him.

New Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Trailer

At the State of Play this past Thursday, Square Enix showed a new trailer for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second installment of the FF7R series for modern platforms. This trailer focused mostly on things you remember from the post-Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII Remake, with director Tetsuya Nomura confirming that the game ends where Disc 1 of the original game ended.

The first Rebirth trailer, beyond the initial announcement footage of Cloud and Sephiroth walking into Nibelheim, seemed to have a theme of “You don’t actually know what is truth and what’s false,” a message that makes sense considering the ending of the first game. This trailer, however, decided to go full nostalgia and showcase a number of moments fans can point at and remember, from awakening Vincent to climbing mountains with chocobos.

Which makes me suspect that the things they aren’t showing us are going to be wildly divergent and weird.

In addition, Square Enix also revealed that Final Fantasy VII Remake in both its original and Intergrade forms sold a combined seven million copies since launch. I think Square Enix is hoping for more of that from the new title. That it’s only exclusive to the PlayStation 5 for three months might be an indication that they’re looking to get it to PC sooner rather than later this time around.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is releasing on February 29th, a date that perhaps reinforces the ephemeral message the game is trying to convey. Or maybe they just wanted to get it in before March, who knows.

Other Things:

• Would there be interest in me taking videos in Tokyo and posting them on the Patreon?
• I’m absolutely baffled at how the new Pokemon DLC runs. It somehow looks worse than the main game and I cannot understand why.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (9/08/23)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. This’ll be a shorter one this week as I’m between both announcing the game I’ve been working on and also going to Tokyo next week to help market said game. Still, there’s a few stories I definitely wanted to hit, so let’s get to it.

E3 Not Returning for 2024, Reinventing for 2025

The Entertainment Software Association — the ESA, a lobbying group made of major western publishers that also puts on E3 every year — has explained that once again E3 will not be doing a traditional summer show. They are planning a reinvention for 2025, but their partner Reedpop, the company behind PAX, is exiting as their partner. Reedpop was supposed to help put on 2023’s show before it was canceled and the split suggests it and the ESA have parted acrimoniously.

A lack of a 2024 show, especially announced this early, is not news. That’s not to say the lack of a show isn’t significant, but what I mean is that E3 is assumed dead. A 2025 show would not be a revival as much as it would be an entirely new thing that calls itself E3. I don’t want to be overly harsh here, but the E3 people think they remember is never, ever coming back. The world just does not work that way anymore and even if the ESA cobbles together some kind of celebrity-activated gaming-themed show in 2025, it’s only going to be E3 in name.

I’ve banged on this drum before, but the idea of “gaming Christmas” was always going to be ephemeral. It spoke to a consumer-centered marketing plan where people thought they were getting all the benefits, but it could only last so long until everyone woke up and realized that consumer attention only works when it translates directly into spending. Making E3 still do that is damn near impossible. Making Summer Games Fest do that is also likely impossible, which is probably why it will always be a weaker show than the E3 from ten years ago.

This isn’t to say the show never had benefits, as it was a great place for networking. Going to E3 could be that thing that took someone from an amateur to a professional or connected developers together for new publishing opportunities or jobs. But also, like, man the ESA doesn’t really care about that. A “fixed” E3 might only fix that as a byproduct of whatever the hell it’s trying to do these days. And if the publishers aren’t on board, then the consumers aren’t on board, and then everyone in the middle like journalists and developers outside the AAA space are stuck in a limbo of waiting for everyone else to figure out their shit and no one really benefits.

All this to say, we can save the headline ink on E3 being gone, it’s already etched on a tombstone.

Switch 2 Supposedly Shown with Comparable Graphics to Modern Consoles

The “throwing cold water” on things conga line continues. This week, Eurogamer reported that the successor to the Switch — which we’ll just call Switch 2 for expediency’s sake — was demoed to developers behind closed doors at Gamescom in Germany. VGC then added that sources told them the Matrix Unreal Engine 5 tech demo was part of the presentation, with results comparable to PS5 and Series X.

If you’re asking me if I think the non-speculative and non-opinion parts of these reports are true, I’d lean yes. Putting some video files on a laptop and showing them to key European partners, like say a Ubisoft or CD Projekt Red, likely makes sense. I doubt they took hardware with them to Germany, but some footage of Breath of the Wild running at a higher resolution? Yeah, I can buy that. I’d also buy that the Matrix tech demo was used and probably did look pretty good. Unreal Engine was a weakness for the Switch and Nintendo is probably pretty eager to future-proof compatibility with it, especially with how scalable UE5 seems to be.

When you get into comparisons, though, I feel like we need to pump the brakes a little. At some point, this thing is going to need to be in hardware that runs on a battery and won’t melt your hands to use it. Is it possible? Sure! Should we keep our expectations in check on possibilities, though? Yeah!

Moreover, I think adding more power does mean more headroom rather than guarantees that your head will hit the ceiling. What I mean by that is, even if that were true, I suspect Mario will still largely look like Mario does with some more bells and whistles rather than itself becoming comparable to high-budget AAA games on PS5 and Series X.

But time will tell.

Aonuma Denies Tears of the Kingdom DLC

Eiji Aonuma said this week that the team is looking to move beyond Tears of the Kingdom and does not expect more content for the game. For people still hoping for more DLC for the game akin to Breath of the Wild’s new modes and story content, there’s a few ways to look at this. One, his statement does not necessarily preclude a hypothetical Switch 2 version with more content, a tactic Nintendo has used before with Wii U ports and even Zelda games like Link’s Awakening. Another is that they could just straight up be lying and they’ll do DLC and announce it when they’re ready and no one will care that they ever denied it.

If you take him at face value, though, the team is ready to move on to a new game with a new Hyrule. Considering how long these games take, that could put the next major Zelda game at roughly 2028 or 2029. Hope you don’t mind a long wait.

Other Things:

• I’m playing Starfield. I don’t dislike it, but I see why people are disappointed. I was hoping for a game that felt twelve years better than Skyrim and I don’t think Starfield is that. I don’t think any individual game is, to be clear, but I think there’s a lot of games that run circles around what Starfield does in terms of mechanics and writing. Obviously I’ll play more and we’ll see how that feeling changes.
• I realized I’m going to be out of down the weekend Mario Wonder and Spider-Man 2 come out, so please send me all your condolences.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (9/01/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week.The discourse is genuinely pretty rancid this week and it was one of the few times where I was hoping Twitter or X or whatever the hell they call it now actually did go down as opposed to all the times it wasn’t supposed to break but did anyway. That doesn’t stop the news from coming down anyway!

Volition Studios Shutdown

This week, it was announced — well, presumed based on some vagueposting and LinkedIn updates and then announced — that Volition studios, the Illinois-based game developer behind the Saints Row and Red Faction series, is closing down. Founded as Parallax Software, the studio has been around since 1993 with the aerial shooter Descent and had their biggest run of success about 12 years ago with Saints Row the Third and Saints Row IV.

In more recent years, however, the studio has faced somewhat of an identity crisis after the closure of THQ and subsequent acquisitions by Deep Silver and then Embracer/THQ Nordic. Games like Agents of Mayhem and the most recent Saints Row came out to muted receptions and it seemed that Embracer was banking on big returns from the latter, to the point where they did not mince words about the closing studios earlier this year. Volition it seems was just the first to get the ax.

Of course, to put all this on the shoulders of Volition or Saints Row would be silly, no matter how much Embracer wants that to be the implication. The truth of the matter is that Volition’s closure is the end result of a series of ill-placed bets from Embracer, who has been borrowing tons of money from South Korean banks to fund their acquisition spree. There was a belief within the company that revivals of older IP like Kingdoms of Amalur were simply waiting for cult status and an eager audience, but the remasters failed to really stir any audience of note.

Eventually the debts had to be paid off and their prospective reported cash infusion from the Saudi Investment fund failed to materialize — most likely because it would go to paying off acquisition debt and that’s not really how the PIF rolls with its investments — so something had to give. It’s unfortunate that the people who suffer here are the ones who make games and not the people who made the bad decisions in the first place.

Most ghoulishly, Embracer chose to close the studio at the very end of the month, ensuring that no one gets health insurance beyond their employment. Severance health insurance usually lasts through the rest of the month, but not if you lay everyone off on the final day of August.

Reviewers Don’t Really Have Agendas So Shut Up About It

God, I don’t know why this needs to be said, but it apparently does. No one reviews a video game just to give it a bad score. Maybe your small sites where people get paid $5 and a review code for the review, but by and large, no one is risking their professionalism and job to tear down a game regardless of its quality.

If you’re arguing that someone isn’t being completely objective and is subconsciously holding something against a game without being fully aware of it: yeah! That’s humanity, baby! That’s how criticism works, you come in with different contexts and life experiences and you leave a piece of art with different interpretations and thoughts. The people who don’t like open world Zelda should be allowed to review Tears of the Kingdom, people who don’t like guns should be allowed to review GTA, etc. If you’re suggesting you would somehow be immune to this, you’re already disqualified for being too stupid to think hard enough about it. Why should I trust you to review a game when you can’t even display a sense of introspection?

Moreover, this isn’t actually about bias or anything like that. People just have extreme emotional reactions when a thing they like is not liked as much by someone perceived to have authority on the subject. To that I say, get over it. Stop being such a baby. People in life are not going to like what you like to the same extent you do, or maybe will like something you loathe, and you can fill as many diapers as you want until you learn to deal with it.

Sony Raises the Price of PSN By Leaps and Bounds

You ever wonder how platform holders sell hardware for minimal or even no profit? Now you know.

Other Things:

• I’m working on getting Materia Possessions back soon!
• I’ve been watching my wife play Sea of Stars and the game looks very cool. I get the Chrono Trigger comparisons, but I think I’d liken the game more to Golden Sun overall than Chrono Trigger.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (8/25/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. I’m back after getting married last week in an event that was supposed to include a Pokemon battle between me and my wife. We had spent a while creating teams of Pokemon, EV training them, and essentially manufacturing a team of Pokemon that referenced our relationship. Unfortunately, the battle never happened because there was some weird connection issue — both local and online — at the reception. We later figured out that there was a mismatch between our Wild Area events and when that happens Pokemon Sword & Shield just kinda doesn’t want to do multiplayer. Great design, Game Freak!

Baldur’s Gate 3 Comes to Xbox with a Caveat

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how a policy decision to keep Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X at feature parity was preventing Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian’s wildly successful new D&D RPG, from coming to the Xbox before 2024. The issue at hand was local co-op, which was possible on all the other platforms of the game, but caused problems on the comparatively weaker Xbox Series S. Due to said existing policy, neither version could come out. This week, Larian announced that they will be able to bring the game to Xbox this year after all thanks to an exception in that policy.

Larian CEO Swen Vicke tweeted that they have “found a solution” after meeting with Xbox chief Phil Spencer. That solution seems to be that the Xbox Series X version of Baldur’s Gate 3, like its PC and PS5 brethren, will feature local co-op, while the Xbox Series S version will lack it. It’s good news for the Xbox audience that wants to play this game but doesn’t care about local co-op, bad news if you deeply cared about local co-op, and weird news for the Xbox in general.

On one hand, this is overall a win for Xbox, which is why I think Phil Spencer granted this exception in the first place. It was embarrassing for the Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate to be months later, especially when it feels like a big deal right now. It, among other things, provided a PS5 counterargument to Starfield with high review scores and good sales on PC. Making sure it comes to the Xbox sooner rather than later ensures that the Xbox doesn’t look like an also-ran ecosystem.

On the other hand, it does make the Xbox Series S look like an also-ran system! If you have a Series S and found out you just couldn’t do something literally everyone else with the game can do — even the Steam Deck with a command line addition — then it doesn’t reflect well on this console that Microsoft said could do everything the Series X could do. Resolution and framerate tolerance levels are in the eye of the beholder, this is an entire feature that some people may have been looking forward to using themselves. In co-op, one player can sneak around a room and loot it while another player engages the victim in conversation, something you can’t really do in singleplayer.

On the other, final hand, this puts that policy as a whole into question. Baldur’s Gate 3 was granted an exception, but would it have were it not an incredibly successful game critically and commercially? What do you say to other developers and publishers that are struggling with the Series S? Do they also get exceptions? In cracking a window, Spencer has opened the door to a flood of speculation. It is not like they can or should ditch the Series S — it makes up a significant portion of the install base and is their gateway into subscription sales. But this is the first major case of it not being able to do something the other consoles can do and Microsoft deciding such a thing is fine given an unattractive alternative. Are they going to find themselves in a similar rock and a hard place again? It’s hard to assume that’s impossible. And with Spencer’s recent insistence that they won’t be doing any mid-gen upgrades, the Xbox Series S could turn out to be equal parts sail and anchor.

BioWare Eliminates 50 Roles Ahead of Dreadwolf’s Release

BioWare, an internal studio of Electronic Arts, announced that it is eliminating 50 roles from their studio. The people being laid off are almost entirely senior staff that command higher salaries, with some having been at the studio for nearly two decades. BioWare says this move is necessary to make it a “more agile and more focused studio.”

A few people I talked with connected to and still employed at the company paint a more dire picture, though. Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, which they don’t believe is ready for a launch in the first half of next year, absolutely has to hit or it might be it for the studio. They point to confusing comparisons during development, with games like God of War 2018, Jedi Fallen Order, and Persona 5 all being named as what the studio is aiming for without a clear sense of what path between those Dreadwolf is charting for a lot of the game's development.

For their part, EA seems frustrated with the game’s development going wildly out of scope and seems to want both a critically and commercially successful game that isn’t in development for another year. It remains to be seen how any of this is going to shake out, but it sounds like morale is at an all-time low for BioWare at an extremely pivotal point.

The PlayStation Portal is Detailed

The PSP is dead, long live the PSP. Sony has finally given details on their streaming-only PS5 companion, the PlayStation Portal. The device is essentially a bifurcated DualSense with a screen in the middle that can stream games from your PS5 over WiFi. Unlike a Wii U, there is no direct connection between the Portal and the console, but also unlike a Wii U, you can bring the Portal to anywhere with a WiFi connection and play your PS5 remotely from there.

At $199, it’s a bit high of an asking price for the use case. I’m sure there’s a few people for whom the PlayStation Portal solves a home problem but I’m not sure it solves a home problem a $150 TV doesn’t already solve for most. For travel, it's a gamble that the Steam Deck is not and leans heavily on the quality of the WiFi and whether it's $199 better than using your phone or a tablet and a controller. 

Wireless headphones are also not compatible, presumably because it would likely lead to audio desyncing, so PlayStation is creating unique earpieces to work with the Portal. Probably better for the long term quality, but it makes an expensive proposition more expensive.

This seems like something to own rather than something to use, which doesn’t make me particularly enthused about owning one. But for the people that it does something for, go with God.

Charles Martinet Retires as Mario’s Voice Actor

So earlier this year, before the Mario movie came out, I was speaking with someone at Nintendo who had Japan’s ear about upcoming games. This person mentioned that Nintendo was unsure of what the future of Mario as a character looked like, contemplating whether a successful movie would change the perception of what Mario is supposed to act and sound like. If the movie were successful, which we eventually discovered it was in spades, then does that mean an entire generation will grow up expecting Mario to speak in full sentences?

I am not saying that is why Charles Martinet is retiring as the voice of Mario. It could be that he’s older, maybe he has trouble doing the voice, maybe his legacy is secured and is being offered money to do nothing rather than play four characters. But it does coincide with Nintendo’s apparent contemplation of what Mario sounds like for a modern audience.

I expect Nintendo is also kind of tired of having a Mario that sounds vaguely like a weird little cartoon stereotype. It’s not widespread, but some people have expressed some concern about it and maybe they want to tamp down on it.

I guess we’ll find out, as Super Mario Wonder is the first game without Martinet’s voice since the plumber started talking. I imagine any big changes will have to wait for the next appropriately sized 3D game.

Other Stuff:

• Final Fantasy XVI review still incoming.
• I started playing Captain Toad and I feel like we need another one of these.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (8/11/2023)

Hi! This is normally where the newsletter would be, but it takes a small backseat for this week and next week as I, you know, get married and stuff. We'll be back after that to cover whatever needs to be covered.

On a side note, that FFXVI review is still in progress and, uh,

yeah

Everything Everywhere Once a Week (8/04/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. This may be the most old man thing I’ll ever say, but is it me or are there just fewer types of candy bars at the fronts of grocery stores these days? Like, if you don’t like Reese’s, then a fourth of the entire endcap is worthless to you between the Reese’s Cups, Sticks, Big Sticks, Big Cups, Pieces, etc. I feel like this is where candy you’ve never seen commercials for that have cartoon characters from Sweden or something used to live.

Quarterly Nintendo Sales Strike Back

It’s that time again! Nintendo has given their quarterly sales numbers and this time around it includes what is likely their biggest release since 2020, Tears of the Kingdom. The newest Legend of Zelda title had been in development for six years, far longer than the average Nintendo development cycle, and commanded a higher $70 price point because of it.

It has sold 18.51 million copies so far.

There’s a lot you can probably attribute that to. Breath of the Wild was a transformative experience for a lot of Switch owners and far less divisive than internet commentary would have one believe. There’s probably a large segment of the audience that had simply been waiting for the sequel as soon as it was possibly available. Add to that, I think it’s fairly proven now that mass consensus of good reviews absolutely contribute to sales. You might argue that those good reviews, complete with Metacritic attention to embargoes dropping, only ever happen with much-hyped games to begin with and I can’t really disagree, but it’s rare to see a game from a major publisher getting high scores and not cleaning up at retail as well.

The rest of Nintendo’s numbers are not exceptionally interesting. Fire Emblem Engage did not really set the world on fire compared to Three Houses, indicating that there’s a much stronger appetite for satisfying characters, story, and relationships in the series over gameplay. Ideally the two concepts could marry, but that seems to be one type of shipping that we aren’t getting in the Fire Emblem series.

The Switch has officially hit 129.53 million, which means it’s likely at 130 million by the time of writing. That also means that it’s time for the occasional assessment of whether the Switch can catch the DS (154 million) and PS2 (155 million) in consoles sold. My own estimation is that, no, probably not. Assuming a Switch successor at the end of next year, there’s about a year and a half left of sales, and not a lot of presumed console-movers in that time to get it up another 25 million units. It’s not impossible for sure, but I’d imagine Super Mario Wonder has to really take off to get it there.

The PS2 and DS largely got up to that number for different reasons, including being cheap entry points and having annual sports games, neither of which really apply to the Switch. To some extent, it is probably its own accomplishment that the Switch can even sniff those numbers without ever getting a base-version price cut (depending on what you consider the Switch Lite, but it certainly never hit the mainstream $200 threshold). Having multiple units per family is probably a big reason why, but the same could be said for the PS2 and DS as well. The race will probably be a squeaker either way, but it should be interesting to see how it turns out.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Delayed for Xbox Due to Policy Decisions

I’ve been excited for Baldur’s Gate 3 ever since wrapping up Divinity Original Sin 2. The newest title for Larian seems to hit it out of the park based on the early access impressions and the little bit I played on PC release date, with a PS5 version coming a bit later this month. While Larian has stated they intend to bring the game to Xbox, it will seemingly be in 2024 due to an issue with the game’s local co-op and feature parity with the Xbox Series S.

Baldur’s Gate 3’s local co-op allows the party to spit up and just do their own thing across the entire game world. Essentially, this requires that the game be playable four times, which is not really a problem online but is a pretty big drain on resources when playing locally. The feature works fine on PCs within spec and seemingly also on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, but isn’t quite doable on the Xbox Series S. Xbox engineers have been working with Larian on crossing the finish line, but they don’t expect it to be done until next year.

In response, some fans have suggested that Larian simply axe the mode on Series S, which is against Microsoft’s policies. What wouldn’t be against Microsoft’s policies is to remove the mode on both Series S and Series X, but that’s also bad for Microsoft for different reasons. The second you differentiate the gameplay experience on Series S and X beyond, like, resolution and framerate, you sell the former out as an also-ran console. Considering that it appears to outsell the Series X, you’re not going to suddenly just convert a bunch of people to the higher-tier system, you’re going to sell fewer consoles period.

There’s no good answer here that doesn’t make the Xbox seem like a less desirable place to play the game — or by extension, any multiplatform game, and that’s a bad reputation to start. The thrust of the Series S/Series X dynamic is that gameplay is identical with only graphical differences. Once you start undermining that, the idea of “Play Anywhere” becomes more of a shrug than a statement with a presumed “Probably” appended.

I think the best time for a solution to this was years ago, when Larian could have sought Microsoft help on this issue before a time crunch. But that’s not always possible and almost assuredly wasn’t realistic in this case. There’s no good answer here except for Xbox owners to take the lumps, because any policy change will be harmful to the business beyond just this one game.

Rumors of a New Switch

This week, VGC reported on a host of different Switch rumors, including among them that devkits are in the hands of third party partners, a 3D Mario is likely to launch alongside the system, and that it boasts an eight-inch LCD screen. While I don’t know what to make of these specific rumors, some of them make sense either due to taking a wild guess who these devkit sources are or just thinking about development timing as a whole.

All this does suggest that a new Switch is imminent, engaging in Nintendo’s least favorite activity: putting the ball back in the air for a generational transition. The platform holder has never really nailed how generational transitions work, succeeding sometimes and faceplanting others. There’s a laundry list of reasons why, including allowing the previous console to wither on the vine or mismarketing the successor, but handoffs have never really been Nintendo’s chief talent. Credible rumors starting a year and some change before the expected release at least mean that Nintendo is planning pretty far ahead of time for the new console’s release.

I’d expect at least one major title from Nintendo and a fair few older ports, but that’s pretty much what I’d expect from all console launches at this point.

Other Stuff

• I am working on writing a Final Fantasy XVI review as the longer I sit after finishing that game, the more baffled I am. Expect that in the coming week.
• I named my Druid in Baldur’s Gate 3 Drew-Id.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (7/28/23)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XVI recently and, well, I’ll finish that game before I give final thoughts but man do the first 8 hours of that game write a check that the third act cannot cash. Maybe it picks up the ball before it ends, though.

Ubisoft Cancels Immortals: Fenyx Rising Sequel

This week, VGC reported that Ubisoft Quebec had been working on a sequel to 2020’s Immortals: Fenyx Rising. The open-world adventure game sold a decent number of copies in the few years since release, but a lot of them seemed to be a direct result of Ubisoft’s trademark drastically reduced prices a few weeks after a game comes out. According to Axios’ Stephen Totilo, the new game was intended to be about Polynesian Gods rather than the first’s walkthrough of the Greek pantheon. The original, and I guess only, Immortals game was — to put it generously — incredibly inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. With Tears of the Kingdom seemingly smashing sales records earlier this year, there seems to be a healthy market for these kinds of games Ubisoft could safely slide into.

On the other hand, maybe that’s actually the problem. Perhaps the way Tears of the Kingdom dominated conversation here made Ubisoft feel like there’s not enough room in said market for an also-ran and they decided to pivot to throwing everything they can at Assassin’s Creed instead.

Ubisoft has definitely had the strangest journey of the last few years in terms of big publishers, unless you count Konami as a contemporary, but Ubisoft was miles ahead of the Metal Gear Solid publisher in terms of both revenue and games published. The French behemoth began scaling the proverbial skyscraper of the video game industry during the PS2 generation and was considered a towering menace of its own in the PS3/360 generation. Somehow since then, mostly in the last few years, the publisher has been kind of a confused mess, groping around in the darkness for critical hits. While old stalwarts like Far Cry continue to sell incredibly well, the pace of development has slowed down, with more cancellations than releases in the studio’s recent portfolio.

The simple reason for this is, well, games are more expensive and complicated to make. Ubisoft has more or less taken this problem to new extremes by focusing on 60-hour open world content-a-paloozas made to take up as much of your time as humanly possible. This isn’t every game from Ubisoft, but it’s a lot of their biggest hitters, and they’re consequently much harder to make because of it.

The more complicated reason is the international nature of their studios seems to be a constantly-shifting house of cards. They do good work, but few are ready to take on entire projects themselves outside Quebec or Montreal and the few that are ready can really only make one game every few years. I’m sure it would be way better for Ubisoft if the Mumbai studio could have handled the Sands of Time remake, but instead it got send to Montreal after falling into development hell, which means the opportunity cost is heavy.

Having Ubisoft Singapore working on Skull & Bones forever, a game that is just incredibly unlikely to be a hit in the mass market, when it probably should have gone to a more experienced team is just kind of poor planning on their part. But also, their more experienced teams were busy and, say, Quebec working on that when they could have been working on Assassin’s Creed would have been a bad choice too.

Then you throw in Ubisoft’s weirdly experimental stuff that either gets put out without care or concern for sales (a 2D Prince of Persia Metroidvania) or gets canceled before it sees the light of day (that Ghost Recon Battle Royale they announced, scheduled a beta for, and then rescinded the beta inside of like two weeks) and you have a portrait of a company suffering an identity crisis.

Final Fantasy XIV Coming to Xbox

At Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest in Las Vegas this year, Xbox chief Phil Spencer came on stage with FFXIV producer Yoshida and Square Enix CEO Fukushima to announce that Final Fantasy XIV is coming to the Xbox. Square Enix has said for years that they want to bring the MMORPG to Microsoft’s console, but that certain policy limitations (read: most likely crossplay) were holding them back. In 2018, Microsoft made a big to-do about being for crossplay and Sony being against it and seemingly that was when Final Fantasy XIV likely got its greenlight.

During the on-stage appearance, Fukushima said that they are working hard to bring other Final Fantasy titles to Xbox without a lot of detail. That statement could mean a lot of things, like FFXVI or Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade/Rebirth or Pixel Remasters, who knows. There’s a lot of runway there for it to mean whatever a traditionally hesitant (though seemingly now on-board) Square Enix wants it to mean.

Earlier this year, while sitting on the Giant Bomb couch at Summer Game Fest, Phil Spencer says he takes Japanese support like Persona 3 Remake and Metaphor: ReFantazio to other Japanese third parties like Square Enix to convince them there’s a market there. By the same token, I wonder how getting Final Fantasy on board convinces any other hesitant Japanese third parties that still aren’t committing to day-and-date Xbox releases.

Then again, we don’t know if Square Enix is committing to day-and-date Xbox releases either. FFXIV is a welcome addition to the library, but it’s also years late. One would hope it’s a make-good and not a new strategy.

Sakurai Expects to Keep Making Smash Bros.

In the latest entry of Masahiro Sakurai’s video series, the former head of Sora Ltd. talked a bit about how Super Smash Bros. Brawl came together and that he was only asked to direct it after Nintendo had already announced the game. Toward the end of the video, he admits that he doesn’t really have anyone in mind to take over the reins for the series and does believe that he will be heading up the next game just as he has for the original, Melee, Brawl, 4, and Ultimate.

That next game, however, may be fairly far away. Sakurai also confesses that he’s not really sure where to go with the next entry. It is pretty hard to follow up a game titled “Ultimate,” which boasts a character roster that’s fairly unrivaled by other major fighting games. With Ultimate being such a success, and likely an unrepeatable endeavor, a lot of fans are going to go from the biggest something will ever be to a smaller downgrade in roster size for the next go-around.

Both Smash Bros. and Mario Kart find themselves in this unenviable position where there’s no real way to go up from here, you can only really go laterally. That isn’t to say these games are perfect, there are absolutely quality of life improvements you can make, but not enough small improvements can make for another 30-60 million selling game.

As more Switch rumors start swirling (many of which I don’t believe and you shouldn’t either, but a few that do give me pause), I imagine Nintendo has either figured out what to do about their evergreen titles and their eventual successors or they’re still puttering around in pre-production as they try to manifest what these things should look like. It’s never easy and it’s especially never easy to follow up success with more of the same.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (7/21/23)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. This week, at the grocery store, I overheard two men talking about Tears of the Kingdom. The only reason I noticed (aside from forgetting my headphones) was that one of the men was making fun of the other for going in a different order with the dungeons. He remarked, with a joking sense of smugness, that “You really messed up, unlike me, by helping those stupid Gorons.”

A.I. is Ruining Everything

This week, two stories about AI — artificial intelligence that has been around for quite a while but has made large strides in the last few years — in the gaming space that are a little horrifying. In one, a World of Warcraft subreddit noticed that information from their community was being scraped by an A.I. and turned into news stories on a less-than-scrupulous site. The subreddit decided to make a post about the introduction of Glorbo, an entirely fictitious fan-requested feature that the original poster was happy and excited to see finally implemented. The things that Glorbo does and opened the door for as described in the post are complete and utter nonsense, but a site called ZLeague did write a story about it. Moreover, they did so under the name of Lucy Reed, so not even telling readers that it’s a bot-written article based on misinformation.

The other bit of AI-in-gaming we’re discussing actually dovetails with the recent SAG-AFTRA strike commencement, wherein union actors in Hollywood have decided to strike after not being satisfied by answers from studios about on-time payment and use of artificial intelligence to steal an actor’s likeness rights and use it for free in perpetuity. Victoria Atkin, the voice of Evie Frye in Assassin’s Creed, talked with IGN about how fan mods were using her voice for new content. In essence, A.I. creates a voice print of someone through listening to their lines, then it can generate new acting for the dialogue. That sounds great if you’re some dude making a mod and want it to seem legitimate and a dystopian nightmare if you’re anyone else, much less the person whose voice has been stolen.

These stories represent kind of a tip of the iceberg in how A.I. is going to change a lot of creative work around us. Infamously, G/O Media — the parent company of Kotaku and its other sister sites — has been publishing articles written by A.I. with no intention to stop. If you want to protest this at least as far as G/O goes, you can write a letter to them here. In both these situations, A.I. is just a tool that crooked people use, even if they somehow had the best of intentions in using them. But that tool scrapes from actual work that people have made in order to learn or, to say it better, copy the homework from.

The modders behind the Assassin’s Creed Syndicate content were never going to pay Atkin for the voice of Evie Frye in their mods and Ubisoft would not have let her do that in the first place. But, like, oh well. Them’s the breaks. You don’t just get access to someone’s voice because you really want it. Especially as we’ve already passed the meditation point wherein people have used A.I. voices in pornographic game mods, that’s something you need control over or it will go fully off the rails.

Sites that are scraping the internet for potential A.I.-written stories are embarrassing, but there’s no shaming the people who issue these edicts because all they care about is how much less money they have to pay real humans. But it’s quickly becoming a snake eating its own tail, because you need human writers for the A.I. to have something to steal and getting rid of all the human writers for the A.I. articles means you’re going to end up with a recursive loop of misinformation.

As we move into a more modern and present internet that only exists to show you things made in the last six months, using A.I. to replace people means losing foundational knowledge and skills that make these things interesting. I would hope that people subscribed to a patreon about games writing understand how important it is to think about the human rather than the tool but there’s plenty of tools out there with money that don’t care about the human aspect at all.

Bandai Namco Shuts Down Gundam Evolution Within a Year of Launch

You might remember Gundam Evolution as that game you would see during gaming showcases where you would go “Huh, looks like a Gundam Overwatch” and then you probably forgot all about it. For a small group of others, it was a fun enough multiplayer game but not really anything that took over anyone’s life. Unfortunately, live service games can’t really exist in that realm, and Gundam Evolution is sunsetting in preparation for a full shutdown.

Maybe a Gundam multiplayer shooter was not poised to takeover the world, but it feels increasingly like companies are making these things under the assumption that they have a year. I think, in some sense, that’s actually kind of realistic and probably keeps these games from being major investments that become difficult to extract themselves from. On the other hand, it makes it difficult for players to want to jam another live service game into their already busy schedules when they know it will likely end in tears.

There’s probably no good solution for everyone here. You just kind of have to hope you hit on that next big idea and that gives you enough runway to build on it. But how common is that, really?

I Love It When Non-Gaming Celebrities Don’t Understand the Gaming Industry’s Secrecy Part II

We talked about this before with Tony Todd and we’ll talk about it again with composer Gustavo Santaolalla. The Last of Us maestro mentioned in an interview with Blender last week that he will be making an expanded cameo appearance in the “new editions” of Part II to play certain themes. He seemed to quickly realize he should not be saying anything and clammed up.

There’s been no official announcement, but it seems likely that Sony is going to put The Last of Us Part II on PC and PS5 if only to take advantage of the groundswell of new fans from the TV show. Sony’s quixotic relationship with PC ports notwithstanding, titles do eventually come, and this is a good chance for the already-successful TLOU Part II to get another bite at the apple.

Other Things:

• Materia Possessions is taking a small break while I plan my wedding. It should return in late August. Apologies for the inconvenience!
• Apparently Pikmin 4 is good, which is great, but I’m still playing FFXVI. After that, I want to finish Rain Code. There’s just too many video games and not enough time in the day to play them.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (7/14/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. Apologies for the really scattered cadence lately. Turns out planning a wedding, shipping a game, and writing a book all simultaneously tends to just eat up whatever time and brain power one has left. Add to that, I’m also working on a long piece that I’m intending to drop on this Patreon soon and it’s all kinda fallen by the wayside. Still, this will be a good week to do this newsletter as a lot happened and I’d like to talk about it.

Everything Seems Green for Microsoft’s Acquisition of ABK

This week, the FTC officially failed to make its case for stopping Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King, a 68 billion dollar deal that has been roughly a year-and-a-half in the making publicly. The judge in the case seemed to agree with some of what the FTC was arguing, but they failed to make the basic argument about consumer harm beyond harm to Sony. Which is, well, true, the FTC made a pretty bad argument all around and not for a lack of arguments to make.

There’s good and bad things about Microsoft buying Activision-Blizzard, but you don’t have to dig particularly hard to find the bad things. They’re just not legally relevant at an injunction hearing. This is an escalation of an arms race that is going to make the industry materially worse for both the people making video games and the people playing them. It makes the entire industry smaller — not by inches, but by leaps and bounds. Consolidation, even for immediate gains, creates bigger behemoths that are harder and harder to topple when those gains become unrealistic or unfriendly for the consumer and that’s a problem, just not one that can be articulated as a legal argument.

Not that the FTC tried, nor would they have succeeded if they did. All that said, I have seen more than a few people act like the FTC case — or even all regulatory pressure, for that matter — has been unnecessary or a waste of tax dollars. Many of these same people point out that the things Xbox has been promising, like Call of Duty on more platforms and a larger reach for their cloud service, would be great for gamers and that agencies like the FTC are stopping these things from happening. That is, I think, incredibly untrue. Those concessions only came about because Microsoft was desperate to pre-empt regulatory concerns.

In a world where there would be no issue from the governments of the world with Microsoft gobbling up the publisher of the best-selling third-party game in America every year, I do not believe that we would see Switch versions or even PlayStation versions in perpetuity. I fully believe that, capitalism being what it is, they would have very little interest in making sure other platforms could share in Call of Duty, much like they’re doing with Bethesda. So maybe keep the roll eyes emojis in your pocket over regulation even when it comes to your favorite video game companies.

This is, in theory, the last time we will talk about this acquisition until it goes through, as it’s likely that Microsoft will make a deal with the CMA and close the sale by next week. It’s been an exhausting process to talk about and analyze, so we no longer have to talk about it as a process and can talk about what will result from it.

We know that it’s unlikely at this point for Microsoft to withhold Call of Duty from PlayStation, which begs the question of how they do leverage this massive buyout for their own benefit. Game Pass would make the most sense, as a (by all appearances) “free” Call of Duty sitting right next to a $70 version on PlayStation 5 makes a strong argument in favor of playing the game on Xbox, along with all your friends. Though I actually don’t expect to see Call of Duty sales on PlayStation 5 dip all that much. Assuming the Switch versions are anywhere near decent, they should make up for any dips that may occur, but I think people that like playing Call of Duty on PlayStation will probably just continue to do so.

Microsoft also now has a plethora of old IP from Activision that they’re sitting on and will no doubt be endlessly criticized for doing nothing with. Do they rearrange the entire Activision development structure to get Call of Duty off its yearly schedule and free up Toys for Bob to make more Tony Hawk games? Is that a good use of 70 billion dollars? Do they assign those IPs to other internal studios? Is that a good use of 70 billion dollars? Do you rock the boat at all?

I suppose the biggest pressure on Microsoft after this deal closes is that there’s no longer any excuse for Activision to be a shitty workplace anymore. One of the frequent calls for urgency from the gaming fanbase has been that Activision is, at its best, a bad place to work, and Microsoft acquiring them will clean that up. The “day two” question now is: how? When? Are there plans to remove Kotick? If so, when? If not, why? If so, how much of a golden parachute does he get on the way out? Is Ybarra still running Blizzard alone? Are studios going to be audited one-by-one? Does a Microsoft that historically has not used a heavy hand when dealing with their acquired studios have it in them to clean up the bad studio heads and shitty legacy leadership that invokes stacks of complaints already?

Do they have it in them to proactively investigate and clean up the studios where people have been too afraid to complain?

These are questions that still need to be answered and I’m not super inclined to give them an excessively long grace period on it. If you’re going to make the industry that much smaller under the guise of being welcomed as liberators, then action has to start from day one. We’ll see how it goes, but I think if Microsoft were expecting their feet to no longer be held to the fire now that the deal is closing, I hope the gaming community has it in them to prove the platform holder wrong.

We’re Going to Need the WB Warning for Games

I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out how to start writing this topic for about ten minutes now and I feel like maybe the best way is to just post this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sa48rbFzws

This week, Limited Run Games announced that they were remastering the Gex trilogy from the late 90s for modern platforms. If you are not familiar with Gex, he is an avatar of the changing times from the cutesy Mario platformers to edgy stand-up comedian humor platformers. Gex, voiced by writer and general comedian Dana Gould, traveled through levels based around movie and genre parodies with all the grace of a cow on skates — a metaphor that itself would probably fit in pretty well in the game. The video above is pretty much all you need to watch to see how well this aged.

I bring this up because I was thinking recently about the WB warning, which is placed before a lot of older cartoons in modern releases, such as streaming. Things like Bugs Bunny getting real racist about the Japanese were, well, still pretty racist at the time. It’s easy to say they were a product of their time, but also the time was racist, even by its own standards. WB, rather than editing that stuff out or not streaming it, puts a warning explaining that these depictions were wrong then and are wrong now and it makes sense to show how wrong they were in the right context.

I wonder if Limited Run Games is thinking about putting something similar in front of something like Gex. Moreover, I wonder if that is a thing we should start thinking about as the clamor to re-release older games gets justifiably louder (a study from the Video Game History Foundation found that 87% of classic games are not available today). Like, as much as I love Punch-Out, maybe we need to talk a little bit about that thing in the right context!

Anyway, I encourage people to ask LRG how they’re planning to handle things like that. I’m genuinely curious.

Other Things:

• I’m playing FFXVI and really digging it, but hey, why is it every woman who is clearly a great fighter only gets awakened to their powers when threatened with sexual violence? Granted so far it’s only been two in a row but that’s, like, a lot to have in a row.
• Ghost Trick is still a 10/10.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (6/23/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. We took a little time off, to get sick and get better, but we’re back to start discussing video games again. And I suppose, after finishing Zelda, start actually playing other video games again too. Currently have Diablo running on my Steam Deck (for all of an hour and a half before the battery runs out), Street Fighter 6 on my PS5, and FFXVI downloaded and waiting in the wings.

The Injunction against Microsoft

Right now, as in right as I type this, there’s a courtroom battle going on between the Federal Trade Commission and Microsoft with regard to the Activison-Blizzard-King acquisition. The FTC asked for an emergency injunction to stop Microsoft from going ahead with the acquisition until they can present their case; the proceedings happening right now are Microsoft arguing that there is no need for the injunction while the FTC argues that it’s in the best interest of anti-monopoly justice for them to have more time.

In theory, this small part should be a slam dunk for the FTC, as most judges are likely to act conservatively when it comes to injunctions leaving the burden of proof on Microsoft to prove why having an injunction is actually bad. If this process had stopped yesterday afternoon, I’d have said this almost certainly was careening in that direction, giving the FTC ample time to build up a case to attempt to block it. But today was definitely a reversal of fortunes.

Yesterday, the FTC made the argument that Microsoft would leverage acquisitions to put software exclusively on their platforms using Bethesda as a showpiece. Pete Hines, Bethesda’s head of publishing, seemed surprisingly skittish about the whole thing, and admitted that games that were once multiplatform in development had their PlayStation versions halted and scuttled after the acquisition, Indiana Jones by Machine Games being a prominent example. Hines would, at times, point to this as a good thing, arguing that Starfield would be significantly delayed had they included a PlayStation release to also prepare and QA. But by and large, Hines alone did not do a satisfactory job convincing anyone that Microsoft would not pull something similar with Call of Duty in ten years.

Though to be fair to Hines, he wasn’t supposed to sell the acquisition, he was supposed to tell the truth.

All that said, if the FTC case looked solid yesterday, it was significantly weakened today when Phil Spencer took the stand. Sarah Bond had already done a pretty good job of answering FTC questions on the stand, but the government agency seemed entirely unprepared for Spencer, and at times it felt more like they were asking him questions to learn how it worked versus interrogating him to prove their case. Moreover, the judge was learning from Spencer how exclusives and acquisitions work in practical terms and not from the FTC’s argument.

I still suspect this injunction to go through, but it might have exposed severe weaknesses in the FTC’s case. They’re going to be hard-pressed to tell a compelling narrative about monopolies and anti-competitive exclusives if the case even does actually go forward.

One small tidbit that came from today’s testimony is that Spencer admitted that Xbox is not currently hitting the numbers expected of them and that Microsoft’s $68 billion dollar check for Activision-Blizzard is an investment in reversing that trend. It’s probably Spencer’s first admission that the numbers aren’t where they are supposed to be, rather than his usual wording of individual parts making money or arguing that they’re successful by their own metrics. It’s not dire, but it’s a bit of a crack in the “as long as it works” public face they’ve been putting on when it comes to the business side of console wars.

Next week, Nintendo of America’s licensing vice president Steve Singer will take the stand. Not sure what he’ll say, but I imagine it behooves Nintendo to argue that they are competing directly with Microsoft and Sony in the console market. Sony has been trying to bifurcate the market as high-end and lower-end, with Nintendo occupying the lower-end space and Microsoft and Sony in high-end. For Sony, this shows that Microsoft is harming them directly with a Call of Duty monopoly, but adding Nintendo to the mix means that Sony could operate just fine without those games.

I suspect that Nintendo will be uncomfortable being tagged as the sole lower-end gaming competitor, which also opens up its own considerations of monopoly for a market they never claimed they lead.

Nintendo Direct and Major Games

For all of Nintendo’s smart business moves, the company has never really been able to handle generations correctly. Their mistakes largely come as a result of a two-pronged misstep: 1) They assume that each new console is a reboot of everything that was built up from the previous console and 2) They assume that each new console is a reboot of everything mishandled with the previous console.

So when a new platform comes around, the Kyoto giant usually expects people to forget about a host of features, built-up digital libraries, etc. and also forget that the previous console withered on a vine in its final year. It is contributory to why they will go from selling huge numbers of consoles to catastrophic failures in the span of a generation.

Without knowing exactly when a Switch successor will launch, it does seem like they are at least trying to do something about the withering part. If we’re in or approaching the final year of the Switch (give or take six months), they seem to be trying to still pack it with a fair number of games.

This Direct, which aside from Nintendo’s titles felt more like filler than usual, showcased a safe but quality lineup for the remainder of 2023. There’s a handful of sequels, ports, remakes, and new games to run down the rest of the calendar year when we’ll likely see the full-extent (or disappointing re-utterance) of their sunset plans for the Switch.

I do want to particularly hit on two titles, though, the first being a remake of Super Mario RPG. The original game may be one of the most personality-filled titles in history and stems from that era where Nintendo did not have a brand bible for all things Mario. In that game, Mario had to be held back from beating up an annoying child, Bowser wrote haiku and cried, there’s an extended Power Rangers reference, an arc that can end in Mario being kissed by Bowser and the Wario-like Booster, etc. In a lot of ways, it set the foundation for how strange Mario can be that would later disappoint slightly with games like New Super Mario Bros., which never leveraged that strangeness.

Moreover, it was a game that was already parodying RPGs by the time it came out. It felt like people who have been making RPGs decided to have fun with and subvert the common tropes by realizing that no one would necessarily take Mario seriously in that situation. I’m very curious to know how a modern generation takes to the game now.

The other game I wanted to touch on was Super Mario Bros. Wonder, a title that I am guessing is meant to sound like “Super Mario Bros. One-der” to emphasize the roots of the game. It looks neat, I am digging the artstyle change, and am fascinated by the business decision to release it this fall. 2D Marios are generally long-tail sellers, which tells me that Nintendo expects a Switch successor to come around a year or so after this game’s release. Though, honestly, who knows.

Maybe it’s actually backwards-compatible! Maybe they expect it to sell on a successor system that launches next summer! Maybe they don’t care about the long tail! Maybe they expect Switch games to just keep selling on a huge install base regardless!

Anyway, game looks good, I want to play it.

Other things

• New Materia Possessions! Michael Higham reviewed FFXVI for Gamespot and is here to talk about it!
• I played the demo of FFXVI! It seems good but I want to be able to change the dodge button.
• I’m playing Diablo 4 on Steam Deck and it’s really quite a nice experience but that thing just chews through the Steam Deck’s battery. I get maybe 90 minutes before I have to charge to full.
• Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode isn’t what I call good, but it is dumb, and that’s some virtue.

Materia Possessions 15 - Summer Game Rest

Wow, we're back! We've gone to Summer Game Fest, gotten sick  (unrelated), gotten better (related), and played some video games in the  meantime! This week, Imran is joined by Natalie, Nerium, and Michael  Higham to talk about going to Los Angeles for what used to be E3 and now isn't, the return of the Xenoblade Minute Brought to you by Natalie, and discussion of Final Fantasy XVI from GameSpot's reviewer himself.

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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (6/02/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. I often feel like every time I step away from Tears of the Kingdom to do anything else, I’m dragging myself away from it. But after about 120 hours, I think I’m finally starting to pull away a little bit and can actually, you know, do other things. Maybe I start casting an eye toward the endgame soon.

Nintendo Announces Everybody 1-2 Switch

I can’t not start with this.

About a year ago, I wrote a piece titled The Wild Story Behind Nintendo’s Unannounced 1-2 Switch Sequel - which was as much about reporting sourced information I heard about a then-unannounced Nintendo game as it was explaining how finished games sometimes get stuck in limbo. Not terribly long after publishing that story, we got laid off, the site was essentially shuttered to all content outside of a few games, and I more or less unofficially left games writing. That story is, in some ways, my last big piece. Hell, even when writing it, I felt like I was pulling a ripcord to try and save the site with a high-traffic post. Every single Direct that passed by without Nintendo actually announcing it, though, made me more and more nervous.

I could be extremely confident in something and still feel like a fraud because other people don’t know my sources and can’t see the actual proof of it. There’s a sense of relief when something you report bears out and people can finally see you weren’t just going forward with something poorly-sourced.

Nintendo officially announced Everybody 1-2 Switch on Thursday night with maybe the most joyless and begrudging tweet I’ve ever seen them produce. The title, of which all scant details seem to match my original reporting, is going on sale for $29.99 and seemingly only announced for the eShop, which feels like a last ditch attempt at getting some kind of revenue out of this game. I suspect that the game boxes I had heard that were sitting in a warehouse were likely converted to Tears of the Kingdom boxes instead.

I’m hoping maybe in the last year they improved this game greatly and it will be a surprise summer hit, but I sincerely doubt that will happen. It’s nestled between Tears of the Kingdom and Pikmin 4 in the vague hopes that it will sell without anyone taking too close a look at it critically.

God, even the Horse was real. I didn’t actually believe that originally when my sources told me.

Variety’s Bobby Kotick 12-Step Rehabilitation Program

There’s few people in the industry that I think believe themselves to be the hero to the extent that Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision-Blizzard-King, does. I think a lot of people think it on a superficial level, but I think Kotick believes it, and the way in which he acts on it makes it clear that he believes right and wrong exist relative to his actions.

That is to say: he’s not wrong, it’s the children that are wrong.

Though in this case, the children seem to be all ABK employees and media reporting on him. So, what’s an unfairly maligned hero to do in a situation like this? Let Variety do a completely uncontradicted puff piece, of course!

The piece, which ran this week, paints a very different picture of Bobby Kotick than most other news sources do and yet he still managed to kind of fuck it up. Rather than just letting the outlet expend the labor to carry him over the finish line, Kotick repeatedly spoke up with quotes about how there’s been no systemic harassment issues at ABK (an internal report released the same day contradicts this, substantiating at least 29 incidents of harassment in the company) and that the real trouble is caused by rabblerousers trying to unionize.

I think Variety’s piece is wildly irresponsible, if only because it provides Kotick a platform and a microphone to stand there and say whatever he wants without it being checked in any way. He’s a Fortune 500 CEO, if he wants to just endlessly bloviate and generate quotes about how the union upperdecked his private bathroom he can easily do so, the press should not uncritically provide these things to him.

But like I said, Kotick self-styles as if he is the hero of the story. Variety is merely backing up his assertion through omission of response.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Nailing Down Release Date

In what may be one of the oddest Q&A-style updates on a game I’ve seen from a major publisher in some time, Square Enix tweeted today with a reminder that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth development is still progressing and they’re working on committing to a release date — likely still within the initial window of “winter.”

I bring this up because I had heard recently that Square Enix is panicking slightly over Final Fantasy XVI preorder numbers, which are tracking behind FFXV even accounting for the lesser number of launching platforms. Granted, those are pre-order numbers and they’re usually only useful to gauge guaranteed day-one sales (versus potential day-one sales), so the actual number could blow everyone away. But with the current tracking, I wonder if they want to remind people the next chapter of Final Fantasy VII’s remake trilogy exists and give it more marketing time than they had planned.

The initial sales of Remake were quite good, but it slowed down faster than Square Enix seemed to expect, so I imagine they really want Rebirth to sell as well as possible. Well, of course they do, but I imagine they’re really, really hoping for an uptick in sales.

Other Things:

• I played some Street Fighter VI last weekend and it was the most fun I’ve had playing a fighting game in years.
• I’m going to put Diablo IV on a Steam Deck and then just sit inside and play that for a month after Zelda.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (5/26/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. This week had previews and showcases and all sorts of other things to keep us busy and talk about, so let’s not waste time and jump into the biggest stories of the week.

The First PlayStation Showcase in Two Years

Over the years, I’ve asked various people who would know why Sony seemingly dislikes the traditional gaming showcase model so much. They parachuted out of E3 before the plane’s engines gave out, they backed out of Paris Games Week, PSX, etc. In the era where game announcement streams became the replacement for the major event presentations, PlayStation has always seemed not quite avoidant but certainly not embracing of the concept and I was curious why.

The answers I got never really made for a solid, single answer. Some people told me it’s less expensive and clearly successful to do it the way they currently do, which is a fair answer. One person suggested that bureaucracy would prevent any major structural changes so why push for something that doesn’t seem necessary? There was also more than one person saying they want certain game reveals to feel like events and not just be another announcement in a list next to a CG trailer.

But all eyes were on their showcase this past week if only because they have their coming out parties so rarely these days. All those eyes on their event this week and still the reaction was decidedly mixed. I personally dug the show as several things shown — Dragon’s Dogma II, Spider-Man 2, Granblue Fantasy Re:link. Metal Gear Solid Delta — were things I am looking forward to playing. A lot of other people were hoping for a series of bangers that defined the PlayStation’s remaining generation.

I don’t think it’s wrong to want that, but I think the reasons we didn’t get that were partially strategic.

They Dug a Reputational Hole

PlayStation is fighting a war on several fronts, but one of the most prominent is the ongoing case against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. Sony has been arguing through the entire process that buying Activsion-Blizzard would give any platform holder a monopoly over the exclusive video game market, while Microsoft’s counter to this has always been that Sony’s exclusive software stable is so bulletproof that it doesn’t matter what they do from the back of the line.

While I’m unsure this was the entire motivation, I can definitely see a line of logic in pulling some big things — hypothetically, a new Uncharted or a new Ghost of Tsushima — to prevent the appearance of an overwhelming wave of first party content. Those hypothetical games will still come regardless of when they’re announced and one of Microsoft’s arguments against a monopoly is not strengthened due to announcing games too early.

Just a theory.

Game Development is Catching Up to Sony

The types of games Sony makes and publishes now are different from the quirky and often experimental house they were in generations prior. They’ve carved out their place as the purveyor of the biggest, highest-budget AAA single-player games out there and they deliver on that promise both critically and in sales. They seem content to keep doing exactly this, too, with additional diversification into GAAS titles with Bungie acting as the Worldwide Studios tastemaker.

I don’t see them ever giving up that crown, but I do think they realized a few years ago that it is only going to take longer and get more expensive to keep doing this. It’s entirely possible that they plan to hold off showing single-player titles until they’re closer to release but announce GAAS games further ahead of time to recruit employees, get word out about betas, etc.

You can’t push out the kind of games they make every few years, as much as people think a five-year-dev cycle is an indication that something is broken and not just a sign of the times.

Dragon’s Dogma Was Great

If you never played Dragon’s Dogma, Hideaki Itsuno’s 2012 fantasy action-RPG, you might have looked at the trailer for Dragon’s Dogma II with some bafflement. Others who are familiar with the game but not obsessive with it might just be thinking, that was it? That just looks like Dragon’s Dogma!

Which, yeah. Hell yeah. I’m glad that they’re not trying to smooth Dragon’s Dogma into something else. That thing was weird as shit and had its own identity that they’re seemingly leaning all the way into. There’s also hints in that trailer that they’re following the original game’s actually batshit ending, which I couldn’t be happier about.

Metal Gear Solid /\

Finally announced this week was a Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake titled Metal Gear Solid Delta. Metal Gear Solid 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, so I’m excited about this, but also apprehensive for those same reasons. I had heard about this remake years ago and am surprised it has taken so long for it to surface, but again, games take a long time.

Playing Resident Evil 4 and other reimaginings recently have given me some thoughts on the various paths remakes can take. Final Fantasy VII Remake, for example, is a game made by a mix of fans and leads who worked on the original game wanting to shake things up. To them, a shot-for-shot remake was boring to make. Resident Evil 4, also not a shot-for-shot remake, was made by fans of the original game inside Capcom who saw how it influenced the shooter genre for the last two decades. The game they made was a love letter to the original by bringing it to a modern era.

I don’t know if there’s anyone on Metal Gear Solid 3 that worked on the original, but it’s obviously not going to include Kojima. For better or worse, that means it is going to be missing something. I say for better or worse because Kojima’s influence does affect the games he makes, but also that guy just went fully off the rails after MGS3 in a way that I wonder if a remake of the game under his guidance wouldn’t make a few turns for the worse.

It’s hard to say. I guess the best I can hope for is that the people remaking the game now are as reverent of the original as RE4 Remake’s developers were of its source.

The PlayStation Project Q Seems Dumb

I don’t really get it. I’ll probably buy one.

Other Things:

• New Materia Possessions this week! We talk a lot about Zelda. Like, a lot.
• Conan O’Brien’s been doing a readthrough on his podcast of a lost Hans & Franz movie he wrote in the early 90s and it’s been great. Highly recommended listening.

Materia Possessions - Episode 14: Top Tiers of the Kingdom

We're back because we were really busy playing Tears of the Kingdom!

Considering that really all we've been doing the last few weeks is playing the new Legend of Zelda game, it makes sense this week's episode will be primarily focused on that. GameSpot's Michael Higham, Fanbyte's Mike Williams, and If Your Driving's John Warren join me to talk all about what I start the conversation with calling "maybe the best game I've ever played."

Minimal story spoilers, but lots of stories about things we've seen and done in the game.

If you're not big on Zelda or want to save it for later, there's a small bit of PlayStation Showcase discussion starting at 1:05:15.

It's like Princess Zelda says, "Link, come find me, on your favorite podcast RSS feed or app."

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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (5/12/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. This week is less about news and more about, well, all things Zelda. Most people who are reading this, or would be reading this, are probably out actually playing the game. I’ve only been playing it for something like eight hours, so I’m nowhere close to doing a review on it. But this seems like it would be a good time instead to talk about a related subject: how do game reviews work?

Review Revue

This past week, video game website IGN kind of stepped into it when they released a video on social media explaining the average score of 7 for most reviews. The video implied that games not reviewed by IGN were likely not worth reviewing in that they’re probably not very good to begin with — something that a lot of developers who don’t get their games reviewed by IGN took issue with. The tweet was taken down, but not before it was saved and shared with less-than-glowing reviews itself.

On its face, though, the statement is not entirely incorrect. It’s way, way too general and seems to take a weird amount of pride in reviewing through omission, but finite resources are absolutely the driving factor when it comes to what gets reviewed and what doesn’t. And those resources can’t always be dedicated toward “what is the best actual game” because the literal best game could come out tomorrow and still not be reviewed on a major site if no one cares to read about it. Kind of an “if a tree falls in the forest” scenario.

A reviewer might play a game, champion it for a review, predict that the game’s about to break out big and thus it’s worth the time to do it. But independent discovery for reviewers is also pretty rare. Certainly not impossible, but rare. It’s also just exceedingly unlikely to roll out that way, you’re far more likely to find actual asset-swapped garbage that way than the next big thing.

But I think it’s important before we go any further to clarify the role that traffic plays with reviews, which is to say, it doesn’t really. Now the big sites with the big games, like say an IGN or a GameSpot with a Zelda review or something, those will be heavily visited pages with many people at least going to scroll to the bottom and check the score. But for most everyone else? They almost don’t matter. Even reviews way outside the mean don’t do appreciably better or worse than usual. For the vast majority of outlets, reviews are more about creating a personality for the site and engaging in criticism than making money.

Which is why just throwing more resources at reviewing more things is just not going to happen. So things get picked and chosen depending on a variety of factors and it creates what looks like homogeneity to the consumer — which it is, but unintentionally. Turns out that disparate audiences are still usually only served by one kind of thrust.

But that also brings us to scores! I go back and forth on scores personally. I think they can aid self-reflection in criticism, otherwise you sometimes risk trying to balance a review between good and bad factors without being decisive on it. But it’s also true that they undermine all the words above it to an extent. People do look primarily at the scores as a, pardon the repetition, method of scorekeeping for games and that sucks. It sucks for the writer who wrote a whole lot of words that get ignored for numerical summaries, it sucks for the reader who doesn’t actually gain anything from this experience, and it sucks for the discourse on the games.

On the other hand, every review editor for a major site I know also insists scores are necessary. Some of those virtues are ones I mentioned before, but it’s also very hard to get people to engage with a review without a score at all. Like, yes, a plurality of people will just ignore the text of a review to look at the score and either fist-pump or shake their fist in anger, but people are much more likely to be on that page and possibly read the review than not if there is a score bringing them there.

I am of the belief that you should be relatively outlet agnostic when it comes to game reviews. Find the people that you tend to agree with and stick with them. The byline is far more important to knowing whether a review will speak to your opinions than the header. But also I’m increasingly wondering if a day-one review driven by an embargo really matters.

Well, let me be clear, it obviously still matters. People love treating them like sports and attention is driven to the people that write them. I’m more wondering if the day 20 or the day 60 criticism is more important. I guess that likely depends on the audience and what they want and by and large they want the initial sense of quality, but I’d honestly rather find out what someone thinks of Tears of the Kingdom in two months than I am interested in knowing what someone thought about it the day before release.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (5/05/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. It’s Cinco de Mayo, which a lot of people use as an excuse to pack bars and pretend there’s a reason for it. It always kind of struck me as odd when we celebrated it in schools — not because we shouldn’t learn about other cultures, we should, but because no one actually really explained what it was about. We would just say it’s a Mexican holiday and then eat tacos or something. But also the casual racism of primary education is another subject entirely! This week, we’re going to cover Microsoft, Zelda leaks (not the leaks themselves, but the furor around them), PixelOpus, and more.

Let’s, as we often do, start with Microsoft and a not very good week.

The Ghost of Bethesda

This week, Redfall reviews came out. I have tooled around with the game a little bit, as I preinstalled it via Game Pass the moment it became available to do so, and figured I might as well invest at least as much time into playing the game as I did downloading it. As much as people want the salacious headline of “Redfall is literally the worst game of all time,” the sad truth is that it’s mostly just boring and mediocre. The real bad parts, the bugs, aren’t particularly funny to look at, as they take the form of lost button inputs or scripting errors.

The game was delayed a year, so I don’t believe that Microsoft or Bethesda rushed this out the door out of some obligation to a clamoring public or an assumption that it would do well whenever they released it. I suspect Arkane Austin simply ran out of runway and things that needed to get fixed weren’t given enough time with all the other fires that likely needed to be put out along the way. An extra few probably could have stamped many of those bugs out and put it more in line with the 60FPS patch, but — purely as an informed guess — that was most likely off the table the second Starfield got pushed to September.

Also, like, this is neither here nor there but I’d probably stay away from mass vampires as enemies in games in the first place. There’s a suspected floor of intelligence of vampires cultivated through years of mass media and popular art that is very, very difficult to replicate in an action video game. That’s true even at the best of times, it becomes much more immersion-breaking when their AI itself breaks and they can’t find their way through a door.

But, well, bad games happen. This one is more notable because it’s a big first-party game from a company that doesn’t have that very often. It contributes to a narrative that Xbox fans desperately want reversed, that Microsoft’s best first-party efforts are from smaller out-of-nowhere titles like Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush and the bigger, marketing-driven titles are failing to stand up to the other platform holders’ first-party efforts. Which is, like, true. Whether or not you think that’s not the same game Microsoft is or should be playing, it is true that their current first-party AAA portfolio is not in the same arena as its contemporaries.

That said, let’s talk about why.

Full Spencer

On this week’s Kinda Funny Xcast, Xbox chief Phil Spencer joined in to answer some questions and talk a bit about the overall Xbox strategy recently. Spencer likely expected a more jovial sitdown, but considering Redfall’s reviews and the relative dearth of major Xbox titles recently, it became a lot more interrogative than I imagine he was hoping for when he originally agreed. Still, the Xbox chief is always known for being candid, and he did answer questions in a way that generated headlines and talk about how rare and refreshing it is for an executive to speak this way and admit to mistakes.

For example, Spencer took responsibility for Redfall’s response, stating “There’s nothing that’s more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community, and just kind of watch the community lose confidence [and] be disappointed.”

At another point, Spencer said “We're not in the business of out-consoling Sony or out-consoling Nintendo. There isn't really a great solution or win for us.”

And these are very candid, human things. You tend not to hear this from other media-trained executives that know exactly what to say to keep the market from fluctuating based on a misplaced vocal pause, but Spencer tends to come out every year or so and admit the faults and promise to do better in the directions that Xbox thinks it should go. It kind of helps that the stock market tends not to care that much about the Xbox division.

But, well, among other problems, one issue is that he has done this multiple times. Going back to sitting on a couch with Jeff Gerstmann and taking the brunt for games being delivered unfinished, Spencer does live out the mantra of the buck stopping with him, a sign that Harry Truman famously placed on his desk in 1945. But after enough years of saying it, I’m less concerned with where the buck stops and who is taking responsibility for these things than I am in ensuring these things never happen again. I acknowledge that’s not easy, it’s not like they’re choosing to flick a switch that says “Release unfinished games on it,” but man, it shouldn’t be as hard as they’re making it look either.

I also think perhaps Spencer should not have done this interview at all. All love and respect to my former colleagues at Kinda Funny, but if I were Spencer, I would have canceled for any number of common executive scheduling reasons to maybe come back on a week where you don’t have to explain yourself. This interview won him candid points, but winning those points with the audience means you have to give them up somewhere else.

If I were at Arkane Austin and I were already having just a not-great week, I imagine morale at the studio would plummet when the head of your parent company’s gaming division is out there taking the blame for the game being bad and talking about how you didn’t meet your internal goals. He would have looked silly defending it, too, but also that’s exactly why he shouldn’t be giving an interview the week those reviews came out.

I think what Xbox fans want is for the company to fight on Sony’s turf with the exact same weapons and strategies and see who emerges from a bloody, bitter battle that benefits consumers. I kind of have to respect their decision to not waste ammunition on a war they don’t think they can win. Spencer said in this interview that the worst generation to lose was the Xbox One/PS4 gen, where everyone was building their brand loyalty and digital libraries and wasn’t going to switch.

He’s right and he’s wrong. It was a bad generation to lose, but it wasn’t as irreparable as he thinks. Pretty much every one of these console manufacturers has bounced back from a failure and they largely did so on the strength of the games. Spencer’s correct that an 11/10 game would not get the audience to sell their PS5s to buy Xbox consoles. But multiple high-quality games at a decent frequency? That’s a different story.

All that said, man, I do not envy Starfield. The pressure on that game to deliver right now is actually ridiculous.

PlayStation Shutters PixelOpus

PlayStation Worldwide Studios developer PixelOpus, the small development team behind Concrete Genie, announced its closure today via a tweet. IGN later confirmed with Sony who gave them a weirdly cold statement affirming the closure.

“PlayStation Studios regularly evaluates its portfolio and the status of studio projects to ensure they meet the organization’s short and long-term strategic objectives,” the statement reads. “As part of a recent review process, it has been decided that PixelOpus will close on June 2.”

I suspect this means they don’t make the AAA games that sell 20 million copies and they don’t make GAAS games, so they don’t really fit into the current or future models PlayStation wants in their portfolio.

A few years ago, I got to visit PixelOpus at their new offices located on the PlayStation campus in the Bay area. Actually looking up the preview, I think this actually might have been one of the last trips I took for Game Informer before I got laid off a few weeks later. The visit involved playing the game for a little bit and then taking a tour of the new studio space, which they had moved into a few months prior, and finish it off with an interview with the PixelOpus heads.

Everyone there seemed extremely jazzed about not just the game, but the closer working relationship with PlayStation. During the interview, they spoke about how reaching out to producers and PlayStation contacts to talk was more about walking across the campus or even across the hall to show someone concept art or new ideas. They were excited about it and that excitement was infectious.

I’m glad they got to put out the game they were working on and it’s a shame they no longer fit into PlayStation’s current vision. But, whether it’s because of the timing or that excitement, I’ll probably remember that visit throughout my career.

Tears of the Kingdom Leaked: Is it Okay to Write About?

Excuse me while I pop my collar shortly before putting my head in the lion’s mouth.

This week, an early copy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaked through what is most likely a Collector’s Edition stolen from a store. It soon made its way onto the internet for anyone that wanted to download and play. Undoubtedly this will end with Nintendo finding that person and suing them into oblivion like with New Super Mario Bros. Wii in Australia, but it’s also not entirely unexpected. It’s happened before and the only way to ensure a store gets enough supply of a game on day one is to ship them there early.

I’ve not read the leaks and I’m also not in a position where I would have to make a call about whether or not an outlet I am working for would write about them. My process usually involves asking how something would serve our readers — is this something they need or want to know about? That’s not always an easy question to answer. There’s no right or wrong there, as I might say no and another person might say yes. Hell, different segments of the audience can be served independently and oftentimes contradictorily, so one might be served and another might be aghast. That’s kinda just the way it works.

That said, I do not think there’s anything inherently wrong with writing about the leaks. I think linking to a torrent of the file would probably be a step too far, but otherwise, journalism often looks at information that is publicly available and then disseminates it for people in a digestible way. It’s not about taking part in some company’s PR campaign.

One of the biggest tech reports of the last decade was from someone just finding an unreleased iPhone at a bar and reporting on it. It’s interesting news! It serves the readers! It’s also ethically dicey. It didn’t cross a line, but there’s absolutely some debates that could be had about it. But once that information is out there, it’s out there, and anyone else that reports on it is well within their rights to do so.

There’s also been conversations about blacklists and there’s some deserved ones over the years — cutting out shitty, harass-y sites, removing people that flagrantly break embargo and NDAs, etc. — but there’s never been a case of a justified blacklist that involved simply reporting on things a company doesn’t like. Companies are free to do it, sure, but they should get constant shit over it. That said, I also maybe wouldn’t punctuate my point about blacklists being bad by comparing said companies to nazis, but your mileage may vary.

Other Things:

• There’s a Materia Possessions (Episode 13) this week that went up…right now! This week we talk Jedi Survivor, Roots of Pacha, and a surprising amount about Honkai Star Rail.
• Every single time I break a treasure chest in Jedi Survivor and a new beard or hair style pops out, I absolutely lose my shit. It’s the funniest non-diagetic game mechanic I’ve seen in years. I’m willing to forgive how absolutely silly it is if they intended it to be as comedic as it is in execution.

Materia Possessions 13 - Gacha Galaxy

*rolls*

You got a 5-star podcast! Thanks to your generous contribution of  Materia Possessions Bucks (MPB), you have won a podcast of the highest SSRR rarity. In this podcast, Imran, Michael, Andrea, and Mike talk about the latest gacha game from Hoyoverse, Honkai Star Rail. Andrea then talks about Roots of Pacha, which can be reductively boiled down "Stardew with cavemen." Imran and Mike also talk about Jedi Survivor and  the struggle between delineating between a great game with several pain points.

Now roll again for even better podcasts!

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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (4/28/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. Happy end of April, so we’re one-third through 2023. Did you know you perceive time differently as an adult versus when you were younger, so things felt like they took longer back then and eventually it speeds up to where nothing feels like any amount of time at all? So not only does it feel like time is passing you by, it’s literally a symptom of aging! Have fun with that knowledge.

Activision, Acquisitions, Ack

This week, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has formally issued a ruling on Microsoft’s nearly-$70 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. Rumors, largely coming from Microsoft sources themselves, had been spinning for weeks that the CMA was more than ready to approve the deal and remove one of the biggest obstacles to this now-15-month process.Those rumors were incorrect.

Citing the cloud gaming market as their chief concern, the CMA has blocked Microsoft’s potential acquisition in the UK, a major blow to the possibility of completing the deal. With this ruling from the CMA and the upcoming Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit, two of Microsoft’s biggest worries have now been made manifest. The acquisition has genuinely never been in more danger than it is right now sandwiched between these two events.

Now, you might be sitting there and scoffing at the idea of cloud gaming, a small medium that failed to achieve liftoff with Stadia and is currently only a small part of Microsoft’s gaming strategy. The key word there, though, is “currently.” Throughout the CMA’s report, the authority makes mention of redacted future plans for Microsoft that don’t necessarily seem tied to hardware and are generally referred to as services. The CMA knows what these things are, but for business interests redacts them from the final public report. What we can read, however, indicates that they have big future expansion plans for these services within Microsoft.

Moreover, the CMA specifically cites the death of Stadia as a major consideration when it comes to future monopoly concerns. That leaves the two competitors in the arena as Microsoft and Nvidia, to whom Microsoft has offered some streaming concessions but nothing compared to the concessions offered to other hardware manufacturers. When people point out that cloud gaming is not so notable that it is worth blocking this deal over because there’s only really two competitors, I have to reply, that’s the point.

Throw in the fact that Windows presents an ever-present and looming danger for keeping everyone on one track and it becomes pretty sticky.

The CMA, either based on supposition or based on the information presented to them, believe that Microsoft presents a monopoly threat within cloud gaming and that the company will attempt to grow this market from the front rather than be king of an anthill. Putting Activision-Blizzard in their control would essentially seal the deal, especially with Call of Duty as the crown jewel of this portfolio. It is exceedingly difficult to break up a monopoly after it forms, so maybe you could argue the CMA is being over-cautious, but it’s not without reason.

Considering that and with the looming threat of the FTC on the horizon, Microsoft is not quite backed into a corner but they’re quickly running out of options. They offered numerous concessions to Sony and Nintendo (a relative non-factor in a lot of these decisions) around Call of Duty, but they don’t really have a lot of space to offer more concessions to cloud competitors because, like, there aren’t many. They’ve signed deals with streaming companies like Ubitus to sing their praises to the CMA but there’s not that many left to keep doing that with.

The poison pill that would likely do it but they absolutely don’t want to try is divesting from Blizzard and spinning them back off into their own entity. This would probably squeak them through both the CMA and the FTC even with Call of Duty still in their armory because it takes things like World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo, etc. off the board. I don’t think they want to do this, but is it possible they one day might be forced to that point? I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility, no.

There’s also the chance they just abandon the whole deal, but I consider that less likely. They will have to pay out a few billion dollars to Activison for not completing the acquisition, which is more or less throwing money away for the Tacoma-based company. It also sets a pretty nasty precedent for any other big acquisitions if they fail to bring this one to completion, so to speak. If they do whiff on this and then try to pick up, I don’t know, Ubisoft, I doubt it will fare any better.

It’s becoming a war on two fronts when they were very much expecting it to be bumpy but doable.

Honkai to the Stars

This week, Honkai Star Rail came out on PC and mobile with PlayStation versions planned down the line, the latest from Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse. I like Genshin so– okay, well, let me rephrase. I play Genshin, I am not sure if I still like Genshin. But I figured, based on that, I would give Honkai Star Rail a try. I’m surprised to find out it’s..actually pretty good?

I won’t belabor this with impressions since I am sure we are going to cover it in next week’s Materia Possessions, but I kind of dig the game. The music especially really surprised me. Maybe give it a shot if you’re looking to burn a few hours until Zelda comes out or something.

The Mario Bros. Movie’s Effect Will Be Good and Bad

It’s very likely that The Super Mario Bros. Movie (which I thought was fun but not actually good) will cross a billion box office dollars this weekend, which will further the record it’s already set for being the most successful video game adaptation of all time. I don’t suspect this will immediately spark a gold rush for video game adaptations, but we’re going to see that dam wall crack more and more over the next year and it’s not all going to be great.

I suspect that the lesson Hollywood will take from this movie is that plotless entities — such as the newly-announced Vampire Survivors TV show — are ideal because they allow you to just make up whatever and fill the gaps with references. As much as the internet clamors for a Zelda movie, which is surely coming eventually, I suspect something like Donkey Kong or Splatoon which are considerably more story-lite are better options. We’ll probably see Portal before an Undertale or Hotline Miami before a Life is Strange.

These games aren’t bereft of stories, but they’re presented in a way that allows a screenwriter to go nuts and a producer to fall asleep dreaming about all the toy opportunities.

On the other hand, you have The Last of Us which was a mostly-straight adaptation of an exceedingly story-driven video game and that show took over the world for like six weeks so really who knows. The actual takeaway should be that different approaches work as long as they express a love for the source material in a relatable way and there’s always the loosest possible chance someone actually learns that lesson.

Goodbye, Waypoint

This week, VICE Games — known originally and always in spirit as Waypoint — was officially shuttered by its parent company, being given one more month left to create content. VICE had been hemorrhaging jobs and roles for months and eventually was going to move on to reaping Waypoint as well. The scuttlebutt I had always heard is that Waypoint+ acted as a shield to these layoffs, though, and the small team was not in imminent danger. I don’t know if that scuttlebutt was incorrect or VICE decided to mow them down, anyway, but I’m comfortable being upset with the executives either way.

I have several thoughts on this, but I’ll start with this one: losing Waypoint is a big blow, personally. The site was one of the last bastions — the proverbial Northern Wall — of games writing left on the internet. Your IGNs and Gamespots still exist and still produce their fair share of good writing, but the gaming essay is itself soon-to-be-lost art and people that know how to do it well are fleeing or being forced out of game journalism at an alarming pace. Waypoint was somewhere I wanted to work if I ever decided to come back to game journalism. It was an argument that labor reporting in the game industry was not simply a side project when big news happens, but a constant beat that needed to be poked and prodded often. It was a statement that good work still mattered.

I have not used this newsletter or this patreon to really soapbox about game journalism since more or less exiting it, though it’s pretty much a constantly simmering kettle in my mind. At some point, though, it kind of has to be pointed out that games criticism is dying and its murderers are wearing suits and ties and high-fiving each other in board rooms. There’s a segment of this audience, people who likely shoot steam out of their ears if you mention any handful of women in the game industry circa 2014, that would prefer it this way. But the slow evisceration of games crit and reporting is going to make video games worse and it’s wild that anyone would deny that.

I think we’re currently in a transitional period, one that will eventually bounce back to needing talented writers to think and analyze and provide the dissenting voices and unearth the buried stories that never get told. But this transitional period is going to wreck so many lives before it’s through, so an executive can buy another boat or catch a ride on the next bullshit dumb-as-balls scheme that will get them short-term gains and long-term harm.

Am I bitter? Yeah. As would be anyone that went to war and came home with holes in them. But at some point we have to recognize what’s happening and either take steps to stop it or figure out what the next phase of game journalism looks like. It’s not Patreon, as much as I enjoy it. It’s not influencers who aren’t held to any ethical guidelines beyond whatever makes the numbers go up. It’s entirely possible the change comes from destroying the venture-capital culture that is strangling the life out it in the first place.

Other Things

• We took a week off from Materia Possessions this week, but we’ll be back next week to talk about things like Honkai Star Rail and Jedi Survivor.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (4/21/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. We took a small break last week led partially by Patreon just kind of…not working, but we’re back at it again. This week, we’re going to talk a little bit about something dominating the news in fits and starts: studio acquisitions and why they suddenly feel more prevalent than ever.

Games Are Complicated

So let’s say you’re a game developer looking to make something hovering around AAA — not quite a God of War 2018, something more like a Darksiders III. To do this, you need to immediately assume you’re going to spend the next 3-5 years on this project, rack up something in the area of $40 million for that time frame, and then need an infusion of double that production cost to actually market and sell the damn thing. That’s a lot of time and money spent on creating something that might sell for a few months if you’re really, really lucky.

Now assume that you’re in charge of ensuring 4-5 of these come out every year.

This week, PlayStation added Firewalk Studios to its Worldwide Studios portfolio, adding to an acquisition list that includes Jade Raymond-led Haven Studios, Returnal developer Housemarque, remake specialist Bluepoint, PC porthouse Nixxes, and others. The industry scuttlebutt has been, and has pretty much born out to, Sony is assuming a “contract-to-acquire” model with many of their recent publishing arrangements. If they signed a publishing deal with you and they’re impressed by what you have going and prove you can handle this kind of thing under their watchful eye, PlayStation is probably pretty eager to talk acquisition.

By doing it before the project finishes, they also get to avoid payouts for a successful project completion in addition to the sale price.

It’s a strategy that is markedly different from Microsoft’s, which is largely about looking for studios with proven independent track records who can manage themselves with just funding and occasional pats on the back. This difference is kind of cultural, though not in a broader Eastern vs. Western sense (both gaming divisions are as western as they come these days). PlayStation WWS just has certain ways they like to operate their first party output, while Xbox prefers to be hands off. They do not, in theory, need to watch everything DoubleFine is doing at weekly meetings with Xbox producers.

But despite these differences, the idea behind these acquisitions is the same: fill the calendar with games. Despite how easy that sounds, it’s a problem that is becoming more and more difficult. A platform holder like Sony or Microsoft can’t keep just acquiring studios forever as the management of all these studios will eventually become a problem. Microsoft is betting big on the Activision-Blizzard deal and is extremely likely to lose their taste for anything near as big after this. Their eventual theoretical wall on this will come and they can’t necessarily count on third-party developers to fill in the gaps because they’re running into the exact same problems.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean they’re acting against their self-interests here. Until they do hit that wall, they should probably be going at full speed, because anything else is likely going to result in unacceptable gaps in release schedules. For PlayStation, which seems a big weakness in terms of live-service, multiplayer games in their portfolio, acquisitions like Bungie and Firewalk make sense to expand out in different directions. Microsoft meanwhile is trying to compensate less in diversity (which they do pretty well already) and more in frequency.

Nintendo, meanwhile, just seems wholly uninterested in gaming studio acquisitions. I suspect that they’re scared off by what happened with Retro Studios, where they bought a company and then had to deal with talent leaving. Satoru Iwata said as much, without specifics, in 2008:

“However, in most cases, the value of software developing companies is attached to its people, not the company, which is merely a vessel for its people. So, when we purchase a company, we can purchase the vessel, but we cannot necessarily purchase the contents. Even if we should compete with others to purchase a software company, although we might be able to increase the sheer number of our developers and to gain a short-term result, we do not think it will do good for us in the long run.”

He explained that Monolithsoft worked because they knew the owners and the talent and were reasonably confident they wouldn’t leave, but it’s probably why they’re unlikely to just go out one day and pick up Supergiant or something.

They do, however, just buy all sorts of other things that are not just gaming studios. They acquired Dynamo Pictures last year despite establishing a clear working relationship with Illumination for movies, indicating they’ll probably still do some of that stuff in-house. They purchased the distribution company Jesnet to smooth out the network of how they move their products around in Japan. They established a joint company with DeNA late last year despite more or less abandoning mobile, the platform the two companies originally came together to collaborate on.

This is all a way of saying two things: 1) That the acquisition train is unlikely to stop and 2) there’s a reason it’s unlikely to stop. The inefficiencies of creating art are not going anywhere — they can’t, really, otherwise we risk what actually makes them art — but the money required to actually bring them to fruition at a steady pace needs to keep flowing. So many studios see these acquisitions as incredibly useful for their long term existence and platform holders see them as necessary gears to keep the machinery fully functioning. And that’s kind of just, like, a best-case scenario right now.

But, if we’re talking how healthy this is for the industry and whether this acquisition spree ends up being ethical overall, well, that’s a different essay.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (04/07/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. This week, we’re going to cover the general news, but I’ll also start with a review of the Super Mario Bros. movie. Yes, let’s all jump back into a Chrysler Voyager and head to the 1993 movie theater for—wait there’s a new movie?

It’s-a Him, Mario

The Mario movie — this new one, by Illumination — was in some ways three decades in the making. Not in the James Cameron way, where he wrote script 30 years ago and has been shoving it in people’s faces forever until they finally made the blue water people movie, but in the way that it’s probably been percolating in different people’s minds for that long. I’m sure that, as aghast as Miyamoto was by the Max Headroom-style fever dream that was the 1993 original, he has been considering what ideas he wants to have for a second chance at a major theatrical Mario movie ever since.

And that’s kind of what this movie is, thirty years of ideas for what should go into a Mario movie without a narrative spine to keep it standing upright. It’s not that The Super Mario Bros. Movie has no story, it just has kind of a limp and jelly-like story that clearly takes a backseat to a cavalcade of references, music, and just things. All the things. By the end of the movie it’s not even really clear if most of the characters know or like each other, but you know they know what a fire flower is. You the viewer also know what every single mechanic from Mario Kart 8. You know there exists some kind of troubling reality where the NES launched without Super Mario Bros. in America, which creates a ton of unanswered questions.

The references are good! It’s an enjoyable time! But it really could have used an actual story! The first twenty minutes of the movie establish that the emotional core of the narrative is Mario & Luigi’s relationship. After that, they’re pulled apart, Luigi does nothing until the last five minutes, and Mario is mostly pulled by the arm from scene to scene. It’s a baffling script choice, because it feels like someone who has kind of vaguely sort of heard of the hero’s journey but doesn’t want to waste time looking it up on Wikipedia.

To which the usual refrain is that, it’s a kid’s movie, who cares? But Toy Story is a kid’s movie. The recent Puss-in-Boots is a kid’s movie. So is Coco, Encanto, The Iron Giant, even Spirited Away. You can argue that those are “all-ages” movies but I’d probably argue back that Super Mario Bros. aims more for 35-year-olds than it does 5-year-olds. It just doesn’t do a great job of satisfying either with a fully-fleshed out experience. This is not at all to say the movie isn’t worth a watch, just that it should be better.

I hadn’t eaten anything all day before we got to the movie theater because I was fasting the entire time, so I waited in line for half an hour through the previews to get a large popcorn and a drink. By the end of the movie, my partner and I had finished off the entire Question Block-shaped tin that was larger than my head full of empty-calorie nutritionless movie theater popcorn. It wasn’t a meal, but it was good enough for two hours, which could not have been a more perfect metaphor for the Super Mario Bros. movie.

Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Fixes Most of Its Original Problems

The console ports of Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remasters are taking a lot of fan feedback into account over their original PC and Mobile release. The high-resolution font is being replaced with a pixel font that more closely resembles the original games, which I’m told was one of the first things planned for the console port when it was originally decided upon. There’s also music choices between original and remastered soundtracks and credits being added back into Final Fantasy VI’s opening so it’s not just Magitek Armor walking forward into the horizon for three minutes.

These are all improvements and you might think it’s wild that they were not in the original release. While not saying these are the specific reasons behind Pixel Remaster’s games not having them, sometimes developers and publishers scope per platform. That is to say, sometimes but not necessarily this time, they look at a PC and mobile release and imagine it will get (X) sales whether they do (Y) or not and thus decide to keep working on (Y) for a later port rather than just waiting a year+ to release everything at once.

It’s kind of like Early Access without being labeled as such and without ever actually guaranteeing that later fixes will apply retroactively. The (X) sales fund the (Y) features down the line and the continued development. For some games, not necessarily this one.

Capcom is Once Again Trying Live-Action Street Fighter Movies

Maybe this is the best possible week to announce a revival of gaming movies that tried and failed in the 90s, but Capcom announced that they were working with Legendary on a new live-action Street Fighter movie. It’s not only another stab at making a live-action Street Fighter movie, but another of Capcom’s concerted attempts in expanding their major IPs into film franchises.

They’re never going to get over how successful Resident Evil was for them in that arena.

Who knows, maybe this time it works. Capcom was partially at fault for the poor quality of the first movie, insisting that all the World Warriors make some kind of appearance in the movie, a problem that has likely been exacerbated over the years with dozens of new characters added to the series. The other issue is that Street Fighter is just inherently goofy and a movie that doesn’t recognize or lean into it is going to run into the same problems the Monster Hunter movie did. Take your world as seriously as the games do and not one iota more.

But we’ll see! I hope they make a game based on the movie again. The last one was such a failure that the actor who played T. Hawk literally left before they could film him to convert his footage into sprites. Just vanished off the set and went home. I love that story for some reason.

Microsoft Removes Emulator Use From Xbox Consoles

A loophole that allowed emulators to run on Xbox consoles, downloading them through the Xbox store for dev mode and then using them on the resource-lite retail mode, has been closed. Emulators no longer run on retail mode, though dev mode still works for the people that have access to it.

On Twitter, some accounts cited a Microsoft representative stating that Nintendo was the reason behind the change. Microsoft told IGN that’s not accurate. Weird, a Twitter Blue-verified account said it, doesn’t that mean anything to Microsoft?

The platform holder instead insists this is merely enforcing already existing policies that have been on the store since its inception. They did not outright say what prompted this sudden enforcement of those policies, however. As the IGN article notes, Xenia — an Xbox emulator itself — has become quite popular as a downloadable emulator on the store. It also, as of earlier this year, began supporting Xbox 360 games on the Series X version, letting users circumvent Microsoft’s own store where it sells a fair number of Xbox 360 games.

Not hard to see where the line was drawn for the company when you look at the timeline like that.

Other Things:

• Hey, this Resident Evil 4 Remake is pretty good.
• Expect us to talk about RE4 and other things on Materia Possessions next week!

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (3/31/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. I expected that I’d do an “E3 Edition” of this newsletter eventually — presumably around, you know, E3 — but it seems we’re getting into it far earlier than usual. If you’re looking for Tears of the Kingdom thoughts, we talked about it in the latest podcast, though I suspect this newsletter will be eventually affected by TOTK either as content or as a reason I forget to do the newsletter one week. For now, let’s dive into the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2023.

E3 is Dead, Long Live E3

IGN reported and then subsequently confirmed this week that E3 2023, which had been taking registrations for passes and booths since late last year, would not be happening this June as originally planned. This is not the first time that E3 has been canceled — 2020 and 2022 were both canceled for COVID-related reasons (though I suspect that was a bit of an exaggeration in 2022) and was only a brand across different streams and panels online in 2021. In other words, E3 has not been a thing since 2019, a year in which I distinctly remember walking out of the Los Angeles Convention Center thinking “Damn, this show does not have long left.”

This year, with PAX-runners ReedPop taking the reins, the show has seemingly been canceled for a lack of publisher interest. The show survived Sony pulling out entirely, then Microsoft, but it was unlikely to survive Nintendo, Ubisoft, and other major publishers passing on operating booths on the show floor this year. Eventually there comes a point where the lure of game demos with absurdly long lines cannot entice people to fly to LA for anything beyond the name “E3,” as storied as that name may be. And when you hit that point, you might as well throw in the towel.

It’s kind of tough to lay this on the feet of publishers alone, as I’m told from both ESA and ReedPop sources that both organizations are blaming each other for the cancelation of this year’s event. The show has become somewhat of a relic that massively benefited, and then immediately suffered from, the proliferation of high-speed internet across the world. As the world got smaller and more and more people immediately got news from E3, including streams directly from the press conferences into the homes of pretty much anyone who cared to watch them, the ESA put on dinosaur costumes for a meteor watch party.

Which might be an uncharitable interpretation, because there is not much the ESA could have done about said incoming meteor, but they were perfectly content to stand on their tip-toes to meet it face first. The E3 that people knew and loved died in 2015 or 2016 and everything after was the slow realization that no one’s needs were being met by the current process. The ESA wanted more money out of this endeavor and publishers supplying the actual content for tens of millions of dollars (per publisher) out of their own pocket are competing with everyone else for coverage and marketing. The directions the two wanted to go for those goals — make more money and spend less money — were inherently incompatible.

Think of E3 like Twitter, but it only runs for one week a year. They make a schedule along the lines of “Hey Nintendo you can tweet on Tuesday morning” and then just let people scream whatever thought enters their mind in the non-scheduled times. In an effort to maximize the use they get out of this, everyone starts tweeting whenever they can, and it becomes everyone’s job to look at all these tweets and write news stories about them. And eventually someone goes “What if we posted somewhere else?” while at the same time the guy running Twitter is trying to figure out how to make more money out of it and making it harder for the people supplying the content that makes that money to get a time-limited amount of attention.

There’s also the problem where, like, running E3 is not anyone at the ESA’s full time job. Maybe if it were, there would have been someone sounding the alarm bells in 2017, or someone spending all of their work time trying to figure out how to bounce back after 2020’s cancellation like PAX and GDC were both ably doing. But it was a thing that passed around multiple people when they had time to do it and Reed, a company I’m not overall wild about, was dealt a shitty hand trying to put on a show in 2023. Add in that prerecorded livestreams just get a quantifiably better return on investment and the death of E3 was inevitable.

The event was also not all roses and sunshine for press. Despite the narrative that E3 democratizes game impressions — the show famously allowed almost any press that registered into the convention center — it kind of really only mattered to the biggest players. If you were a favored outlet, the kind that PR contacts you to set up demos and interviews, then you were likely to maintain that lead with exclusives that smaller outlets would never get. E3 without being a golden child is no picnic, it’s an ouroboros of lines and reinforcements of existing standards. This is even putting aside that putting all major game news in one big event of the summer kind of sucks for filling news in the rest of the year.

A lot of people have complicated feelings about the death of E3, with some verbally lashing out at those that are positive or neutral on the news. I think that’s understandable to an extent. To many, E3 was something more than it actually was. To people who thrived off gaming news, it was an espresso shot of serotonin of announcements and trailers and impressions and booths. Video game companies eventually decided to take advantage of that and tailor messaging as if it was a generous gift to the consumer with a bottomline for themselves.

Am I saying that someone’s nice memories from home about E3 are invalid? No, of course not. Am I saying that they were absolutely being taken advantage of and further propagated? Yeah.

All that said, I get it. I’ll miss aspects of E3 too. My career has in several ways tracked alongside it and I’ve been at various shows since 2004. There was a magic air to the show in concept that is unlikely to ever be repeated. I never agreed with the people that called it “Gaming Christmas,” but I understand why they thought that from their positions. For many, this medium is more than just a hobby, it’s a way of life, and an industry gathering offered so many opportunities for enrichment of that. Maybe not healthy, but neither is a Big Mac and we eat those.

There’s a hope from some, including Geoff Keighley, that Summer Games Fest will fill the vacuum E3 has left. This suggestion has also generated outrage in people. To them, Summer Games Fest has always been a pale shadow of E3’s biggest bangers. Which, like, yeah. You’re right. Summer Games Fest is never going to replace the highs of E3 because the market doesn’t work like it did when E3 had highs.

Let’s take E3 2015 as an example, a year when Sony revealed Final Fantasy VII Remake, Shenmue III, The Last Guardian, Hitman, and more. That’s several third parties intermixed with first party content. There’s something to be said for having a big stage to debut your game, but if you can’t steal the spotlight, then you’re only really harming yourself in terms of opportunity cost.

Summer Games Fest — hell, also Gamescom Opening Night Live and The Game Awards — share that problem. You’ll get some occasional big titles, like a Death Stranding 2 or an Elden Ring trailer, but why would Square Enix want to share the FFVII Rebirth news cycle with Elden Ring DLC? I’ve heard in the past that platform holders have swooped in and taken reveals set for Keighley’s shows for their own, which is actually the most E3-like thing about the summer. It’s an open market at the moment.

My guess is that, despite this week’s multiple eulogies for the show, E3 is only dead in spirit, not in brand. The corporeal form of the show will shuffle along, transmogrified into something more PAX-like but with E3 logos splashed everywhere. I don’t know if that really makes anyone happy, but that hasn’t stopped anyone yet.

Materia Possessions 11 - Total Recall

This week, a slightly smaller crew gets together because the universe  has decided that Andrea and Natalie can never be on the same podcast. Natalie soldiers on despite this, though, and joins Imran and Michael Higham to talk hands-on impressions of Tekken 8 (in a segment we like to  call Talkin' 8), Octopath Traveler II (in a segment we like to call  Talktopath Traveler II), BugSnax, Vampire Survivors, Bear &  Breakfast, Powerwash Simulator, and more. Of course, we also talk for a bit about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, ironically forget entirely about the Recall power, and ask the bravest question possible: is it weird to just like all the Zelda games?

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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (3/25/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. We’re a day later than usual today because I wanted to write about GDC, the game developer’s conference, but that meant having to actually attend GDC through Friday. I also had a couple of other topics in mind I wanted to hit so we’re running a bit behind.

Game Developers Conference 2024

I’ve been to every GDC since 2017, which sounds a little less impressive when you consider that it got canceled as a physical event for pandemic-related reasons a few years in there. But with those exceptions, I’ve suited up with a backpack and a media badge to wander the halls of the Moscone Center in search of stories in a lecture room or the unreported-but-useful stories at the bottom of a bar tab. This year, I attended with both Industry and Media badges, going to GDC for panels that help me with my job between pitch meetings, pre-arranged catching-up meetings, several lunches a day, and some really long nights.

If GDC 2022 was the year of blockchain and crypto, 2023 was the year of a sheepish admittance that 2022 did not really pan out. The wall of blockchain sponsors and enthusiasts dwindled significantly this year and an exhibition hall that was once sparse but for the rattling of crypto-carnival barkers is now a bit more full with, like, non-terrible things. Rather than learn any lessons from all this, though, this year we were treated to a similar circus of Metaverse content that existed without any real explanation of what the Metaverse is or how what these people are selling in any way benefits games.

The conference feels like a yearly bellwether of the direction people with money want us to go versus the direction we’re actually heading. At least if you look at the signs and banners, the actual meat and potatoes of GDC is in the panels where people learn things to the best of their ability and schedule. Feels unfortunate that the panel about Kirby and the Forgotten Land and God of War: Ragnarok’s end sequence were scheduled concurrently, but at least they’re archived.

There’s probably a pretty valid conversation that needs to happen about GDC”s accessibility, too. The conference is not cheap — an all-access pass for developers is around ten bills and that’s before you factor in things like food, lodging, transportation, etc. A sandwich at the convention center is $15 and a can of Diet Pepsi is $6 and sometimes you just have to pay that to get to your next meeting without collapsing. GDC should cost significantly less so it’s not a privilege for big AAA developers-only to learn how to make their next game better.

Talks are archived, sure, but that doesn’t help when you want to ask a question about the talk. The video isn’t going to answer. It’s not going to help you mingle to find your next connection for a future job opportunity. It won’t help you check out interesting new middleware tech on the exhibition hall floor that might massively change something about your next project. With GDC actively cutting away at bringing in diverse speakers and panelists and paying for them to be at the show, discussions of how to course-correct on this need to happen sooner rather than later.

Is it Ethical to Breathlessly Praise Diablo IV?

So this week, I’ve been playing a lot of the Diablo IV beta, the one I bought and ate half of a Double Down for. The beta is fun and I went from playing through a decent part of Act I to preordering the game online pretty quickly. I’ve seen some discussion elsewhere on the internet about the press reaction to the game, which is largely positive and effusive, and whether it undermines the still-ongoing problems at Activision-Blizzard, especially in light of the metronome-like waffling over the wizard game recently.

There will be people for whom the only stance is whether the game is fun or not and that’s all that matters. That’s a stance I can respect, even if I do not necessarily agree as a foundational principle. Sometimes that’s a large concern, but I also think it kind of does games as an artistic medium a disservice for it to be the only concern. I wouldn’t watch a Kevin Spacey movie today and go “Well say what you want but he’s a great actor!”

On the other hand, I’ve met and know quite a few people at Blizzard and on other similarly controversial games and corporations. I’ve known people who work at shitty companies that are doing their best to change it from the inside both in terms of culture and product. I’ve met people who have worked on controversial games that have thanked me for saying things they weren’t allowed to say. And I know for a fact there have been people who are proud of their work even on games that remain controversial for bad reasons and really wish everyone would shut up about it.

The point here is that there is no single answer or line that fits everyone. There’s no blanket “but think about the developers” claim that covers the full breadth of everyone working on or at a Blizzard or an Activision or what have you. People who pull out things like that generally just want to justify something to themselves rather than make an argument or an overall case.

So when it comes to Diablo IV, man, it’s tough. I think personally I’m going to enjoy that game, but were I still running a news department, I might be having a lot of conversations about our coverage of it. I made the call to not cover Overwatch 2, but that was also pretty easy because that game wasn’t doing significant numbers and still hasn’t really made anywhere near the kind of impact the original did. But Diablo probably will do good numbers and it probably will be pretty good and, considering the bloodbath games media has been lately, telling people to back off a sure thing is a dumb idea.

But back to the original question: is praise of something that was birthed problematically ethical? To that I have to say, no, probably wholly not. But also, there’s no good answer there that protects the people that are trying their best and punishes the people that are doing the worst without some degree of crossover.

Some part of me is just waiting for Microsoft to finish the acquisition so that they can clean house, but I doubt it will ever be that simple.

I Love When Celebrities Don’t Understand that Video Game Industry’s Stupid Secrecy Exists

This week, veteran actor Tony Todd — the voice of Venom in Insomniac’s upcoming Spider-Man 2 — replied to a tweet about the game saying he was told it is coming out in September with major advertising starting in August. Presumably he’d know this because PlayStation would be putting him on interview circuits and whatnot around that time. Todd then had to delete the tweet and jokingly handwave any mention of it. What’s Sony going to do, yell at Tony Todd?

It’s another example of celebrities openly talking about gaming projects because it’s justifiably ridiculous for them to think a thing that is coming out in six months has not been given a date yet. More than that, that the release date is some big secret that needs to be guarded as part of the marketing beat. We had something similar recently where Norman Reedus said Death Stranding 2 is in development roughly seven months before it was actually revealed.

And the walls did not fall down because he said it. People were still just as hyped for the reveal of Death Stranding 2 as they would have been had Reedus not said anything.

I see an argument often that talking about games before their official surprise reveals hurts the developers who are making the games, which it does to an extent, but I’d argue that’s only true because we have cultivated a culture where secrecy is paramount. We value the surprise over the work and then have spent years — decades — conflating the two until we see a ruined surprise as anything more than an annoyance for marketing.

It doesn’t help that consumers love the idea because hype is more important than the end product. But that’s a conversation no one really wants to have because that introspection is tough.

Other Things

• New Materia Possessions next week!

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (3/17/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about everything that’s happened in the video game industry this past week. Well, usually, but not a lot has actually happened this past week solely in games. Those that did are also kind of bummers! So this week, I’m going to talk a little bit about something that’s slowly been taking over the industry: remakes.

Why Are So Many Games Being Remade Right Now?

Good question! So far in 2023, we’ve had a fair few remakes as major tentpole titles. This of course won’t sustain, the rest of the year is packed with newly-created games that can’t be classified as remakes. But in early 2023, we’ve had Dead Space, Metroid Prime, and Resident Evil 4 to hold up as major titles for the quarter. These aren’t just (potential) sales successes either, these remakes are some of the most critically-acclaimed games in some time. It’s likely that the latest Kirby title, itself a remake, will sell a cool million or so off the name alone. If you lay claim to some of that nostalgia, whether through direct work or IP ownership, it’s increasingly starting to feel like dereliction of duty if you are not monetizing it through a new remake or remaster.

It’s not hard to see why remakes happen with such frequency from that perspective. They’re usually decent guarantees that an existing enthusiast audience is eager for it, a non-enthusiast audience remembers it, and a brand new audience from a larger-than-ever gaming industry can be exposed to it for the first time. But that’s the financial argument, which is kind of obvious to everyone. Instead, I’d like to make a creative argument for remakes.

At E3 2019, which was Final Fantasy VII Remake’s re-debut, when I was still working at Game Informer I got to sit down with Kitase in a casual conversation. Kitase himself had worked on the original game as the Director and Scenario Writer and viewed a remake as a fun challenge. He spoke about getting a chance to try again at something that a lot of people felt was perfect the first time around and, for a lot of creators, that’s not really possible. You make the thing and move on.

More than that, though, he talked about how the team making the game played Final Fantasy VII growing up and were vocal about their love for it. Despite loving the game, though, they didn’t just want to make the same game over again, they wanted to make the game they believed Final Fantasy VII could be back when they were first playing it. Kitase remarked that he knew the game wouldn’t be trapped in the past because people who played it then weren’t looking at a game they developed, but at a game that built a foundation for their development.

(In retrospect, man, I really should have seen that FFVIIR twist coming, huh.)

I don’t know if every remake ever made has these same kind of epiphanies or motivations for the people making them, but I do think it’s very easy to look at game remakes and consider them bereft of new creativity. Even the shot-for-shot remakes like, say, Link’s Awakening on Switch are joyful expressions of love for a game that mean something for the people making them. In an ideal world, that should translate to meaning something to the player, too.

I feel like there’s an inherent cynicism about remakes that views them as side projects or inferior work, which I get to an extent. They’re definitely safer choices to make. Games take so long to make now that you could start a project that completely misreads the market in five years, but remaking a classic like Resident Evil 4 will likely not find itself out of step with the marketplace in 6 months or 60 months. It’s why Nintendo could just release Metroid Prime Remastered whenever they want because there’s no market trends they really need to consider there.

This isn’t to argue that all remakes are good or that all-remakes would be a good direction for the industry, but it’s not baffling to figure out why we have so many right now. They’re easy bets at the moment and they give new players an experience that older players used to have. Someone who wasn’t gaming in 2006 can next week experience one of the best games of all time within a zeitgeist of other players experiencing it. And sometimes, like Final Fantasy VII Remake, the games can fuck with our existing knowledge in a way that some will appreciate and some very much will not.

Either way, I would like to play Resident Evil 4 now, please.

Other Things

• New Materia Possessions this week, where we talk Wo Long, Sons of the Forest, Atomic Heart, and more!

Materia Possessions 10 - Double Down for Diablo

This week, John, Andrea, and Nerium listen to Imran recount his food  crimes in pursuit of a Diablo IV beta code. We also talk about Sons of  the Forest, Final Fantasy Theatrhythm, Octopath Traveler II, and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. Is it a very easy Soulslike or a very difficult one? Or does the game itself have no idea what it actually wants to be?  Also, where are all the Arby's?

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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (3/10/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the gaming industry and what’s going on in it. It’s Mario Day, a day to celebrate all-things Mario, and a number of things have happened this week including a Starfield delay, Forspoken sales, a Resident Evil 4 demo, and more. And we’ll get to that, but I wanted to hit a subject that’s been on my mind recently.

Is JRPG a Distasteful Genre Name?

If you know me, you know I think genres are generally bullshit. They’re occasionally useful for categorization, but by and large most games defy simple genre labels by being multifaceted and mechanically dense. You have to get incredibly broad and fairly non-specific for these things to matter as information conveyance, like saying “First-person shooter” to accurately describe Call of Duty but also to describe Splitgate, Apex Legends, and Cyberpunk 2077 — three games that are all pretty different from Call of Duty in various ways. It’s better to just compare games to close cousins than try and use a genre name without a ton of explanation and qualifiers. And I think largely we have moved in that direction both in the industry and in gaming discussion spaces.

One genre name that has endured, however, is the JRPG. I first came across the term in the PlayStation 2 generation, when it was used to delineate between games like Final Fantasy and Knights of the Old Republic, though it surely was used in circles before then. The latter was referred to with multiple different monikers, including CRPGs (for Computer), WRPGs (for Western or sometimes White), and D&DRPGs, which I don’t think ever really took off.

A few weeks ago during the Final Fantasy XVI preview (which we discussed with hands-on impressions here), producer Naoki Yoshida commented that he didn’t necessarily like the term “JRPG.” From Kotaku’s transcription:

“For us as developers [in Japan], the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term,” explained Yoshida. “As though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past.”

“It wasn’t a compliment to a lot of developers in Japan. We understand that recently, JRPG has better connotations and it’s being used as a positive but we still remember the time when it was used as a negative.”

The comment sparked off a debate about the use of the phrase, its history, and what place it has in a modern game industry.

I feel like it is important to note that saying Yoshida is correct about this is not really a defense of Final Fantasy XVI’s more ridiculous aspects, such as the off-putting argument it makes about a lack of racial and ethnic diversity being more realistic. I need to make that clarification because a person who is wrong about X thing can still make a valid complaint about something else. I know this because I am often wrong about things. In fact, I think Yoshida’s point is well past due and maybe, separate from my general opinion about genres being outdated, we should all just abandon the term.

If you weren’t gaming in the mid-2000s, or weren’t connected to enthusiast gaming circles, you might not have a good sense for how weird anti-Japanese sentiment got about games from the east. The Japanese industry was dealing with growing pains from western competition, HD development, the futility of proprietary video game engines, and a market that was increasingly looking for Grand Theft Auto over Asura’s Wrath. The media reflected these changes, or maybe even drove them, and it lead to a lot of shit like this from gamers trying to be funny because that’s just what you did. Nuke jokes were just all the rage back then.

But even if you weren’t witness (or party) to these events, you definitely saw it in other aspects of entertainment culture. There was a period from the late-90s to, like, Obama being elected where making fun of Japan was just the height of comedy. Anime parodies, replete with Speed Racer-style voice acting, were a primary comedic vehicle alongside portraying it as a nation of game show wackiness and garbage English. If your show didn’t have a Pokemon parody where people squinted really tight and said made-up asian-sounding words then the train was leaving the station without you on it.

That Japanese gaming was falling behind the desires of the western market and failing to properly internationalize was a mockable thing, and also true. But it being true was wildly disproportionate to the prevailing sentiment that the Japanese game industry was dead and its creatives hopelessly stuck in the mud due to cultural or I guess ethnic limits that prevented them from writing video games as well as Bioware. The term JRPG was not a genre description so much as a reason to qualify any hope you might have for a game being good.

As Yoshida notes, that sentiment has been coming around in recent years. A game being labeled a “JRPG” is not slanderous like it once was and is now used primarily to describe a type of game rather than a regional variant. Titles like Chained Echoes are labeled JRPGs because of the way it hearkens back to classics like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, despite being created in Germany. The same is true for Child of Light, Battle Chasers, Undertale, and more. The term “JRPG” does not just mean what it used to mean and is no longer widely derisive.

But also that history doesn’t just wash away. It still happened and it has been internalized by the people creating it, to the point where they’re eager to get away from it.

If someone started labeling my work as “Good for Brown writing,” I’d have several thoughts about it, regardless of what that person meant by it. They could say that my “Brown writing” is the best writing they’ve ever seen and I’d still feel incredibly put-off by being placed in this box that identifies me by my ethnicity alone. This doesn’t mean my ethnicity isn’t a part of me and my identity, but I get to decide when it is.

Sometimes we have all the best intentions in the world with something and are using it in a way that makes total sense to us and the idea it could be used nefariously or ignorantly is ridiculous. I don’t think the world will end tomorrow if we continue to use JRPG as a genre description, but we’ve long moved past its usefulness. Even the occasional Chained Echoes or Octopath Traveler appears and would benefit from a four-letter descriptor rather than a two-sentence one, the term has so much baggage that it’s best to just move on from rather than trying to find the best way to fit a Square Enix peg into a round hole.

As an aside, I also feel pretty similarly about calling non-animated things “anime.” Just kind of feels like a blanket xenophobic term. But that’s another subject altogether.

Starfield Delayed

Microsoft announced this week that Starfield, the latest game from Bethesda Game Studios, will get its own “Direct” in June after the Xbox Games Showcase that is not tied but is parallel to E3. In the process, they revealed that Starfield will actually release in September of this year, three months from the anniversary of last year’s showcase, which stated that every game shown was to be released in the following 12 months.

Which, sure. You could delay a Bethesda game seven years and not stomp out every bug, but if three months helps a little, then go nuts. I’m mostly just concerned that now that Starfield has broken the seal, the mostly-unrelated Silksong might also not make it before June.

Square-Enix Calls Forspoken Sales “Lackluster”

In a February financial briefing, outgoing Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda said that sales of Forspoken were not up to their expectations. He noted that while there was positive feedback about several aspects of the game, reviews for it were “challenging.” The developer, Luminous Studio, is being folded back into Square Enix proper, though their structure had pretty much always left that time bomb ticking for tax writeoff reasons so that’s not a major shock.

Matsuda had been pretty confident in Forspoken during its development and moved his office closer to the game’s development studio to keep his eye on it. He had also done this previously for Avengers for the same reason, so maybe he’s not great at picking them out. That said, Forspoken seems to largely be at least considered “Okay” and it has likely broken the curse of Square Enix releasing one of the worst games of the year every January.

If Forspoken is somehow the worst game of 2023, then it’s going to be a pretty good year overall.

• Other Things:
  
  New Materia Possessions next week! I’m going to talk about Wo Long, which might be the easiest Soulslike I’ve ever played after its weird difficulty-spike of a first boss.
• There might be some reviews on the way soon, too.

Materia Possessions 09 - Devil May Clive

Materia Possessions is back after a short hiatus for people to do things like research books and play Final Fantasy XVI. In this episode, Imran, Michael Higham, Nerium Strom, and Mike Williams get together to talk about playing the newest Final Fantasy game. We also get a little choked up talking about Space for the Unbound, get fired up about Like a Dragon: Ishin, and pontificate on what Monster Hunter could learn from Wild Hearts.

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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (2/24/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a newsletter driven by your Patreon contributions. This week, I’m writing the newsletter from Atlanta, Georgia while I do research on a book about Yoko Taro’s Nier and Nier Automata titles for Press Run Publishing. That book should, in theory, be out later this year. But before all that, we have some stories to run down from this past week.

Microsoft and Nintendo (And Others) Reach 10-Year Call of Duty Deal

As part of the ongoing and seemingly never-ending Activision-Blizzard acquisition, Microsoft is handing out party favors left and right without trying to compromise the main reasons they’re actually acquiring Activision-Blizzard. A few months ago, they announced an intention to strike a deal with Nintendo for Call of Duty ports on Nintendo consoles and this week finalized the deal with Nintendo and more skeptical parties like Nvidia, with the obvious caveat that the acquisition deal has to close for these things to happen. So, for better or worse, these companies have become stakeholders in the deal in a somewhat indirect way.

Tossing Nintendo Call of Duty has some benefits, such as accessing an audience of 130 million and hoping that Nintendo’s successor system follows suit. Microsoft is also, by their own admission, pursuing the mobile market with the King third of their ABK acquisition and having experience with mobile chipsets like the Switch (and the presumed successor) likely aids them there. But ultimately, the biggest benefit is that it’s a balloon to float when a regulatory body says Microsoft is acting anti-competitively with very little lost to direct competition.

Offering day-and-date Cloud releases of PC Game Pass titles on Nvidia’s GeForce Now service is a bit more of a painful deal, however. While Microsoft may not view Nintendo as competitors for the same market that the Xbox is in, Nvidia is sure as hell in the same market that Xbox Cloud Streaming is in and is a direct competitor for Microsoft. I am not sure if this is an immediate reaction to the Competition and Markets Authority of the UK, which has expressed vivid skepticism about the deal, or just about Nvidia’s own incredulousness about it, but it probably helps to wobble some pins at the end of the lane. For their part, Nvidia has withdrawn their opposition to the acquisition after the GeForce Now announcement, quelle surprise.

I’ve been asked here and there if I think Microsoft will withdraw their bid for ABK in the face of all this resistance and I’m of two minds on it. On one hand, they clearly would not have even attempted to do this if they weren’t insistent upon the need for Activision-Blizzard in their portfolio. When they began this journey, Nadella and Spencer were likely prepared for a lot of regulatory opposition. On the other hand, the CMA has a laundry list of things that would mitigate what they view as monopolistic acquisitions, many of which are going to be completely non-starters for Microsoft. They’re unlikely, for example, to divest themselves of Call of Duty and let an external company run it outside of their umbrella. And if the CMA does not get on board, the deal is just straight up not happening. The FTC can be beaten back, the CMA must be acquiesced to.

Though, who knows? Maybe this is all more intransigence than they thought they would face. At some point, the sunk cost might get to be too much and an Activision-Blizzard-King that has to, say, spin off Blizzard into its own company might not be worth it if it comes to that.

Shinji Mikami Leaves Tango Gameworks

The creator of Resident Evil and founder of Tango Gameworks under Bethesda has confirmed through Bethesda that he’s leaving the studio 13 years after starting it. No reason has been given, but as someone who spent plenty of time close to the situation, I can tell you Mikami has considered leaving more than once. Ultimately he has always decided that Tango would likely get shut down without him, which either means he no longer thinks that, or that it’s not his problem anymore.

There’s been a lot of speculation that he will be going to M-Two, a development house under Capcom that was more or less created specifically to lure him away into working on the Resident Evil 4 Remake. I am not positive that’s the case, but I wouldn’t necessarily be shocked if he did. I think he may be done with big corporations. I could also see him in theory joining Ikumi Nakamura’s studio, as everything about her departure from Tango seemed really fishy.

After Mikami left Capcom and worked freelance with PlatinumGames — he was never an official employee of the company — he has wanted to make a sci-fi game that he frequently described as “a Mass Effect-style shooter.” Bethesda reportedly kept deferring this dream project, insisting that first he provide them a Resident Evil, though his heart was not entirely in The Evil Within according to people I talked to about the subject. Mikami isn’t the type to bear grudges, but I do wonder if he occasionally bristles at Starfield existing when his own game couldn’t achieve liftoff.

Mortal Kombat 12 Announced Offhandedly

During a Discovery-Warner Bros. earnings call, Mortal Kombat 12 was announced as almost an aside among listing reasons for optimism in the coming calendar year. I don’t have a lot to say about this other than it’s probably the worst kept secret in gaming. To the point where I wonder if even WBD thought it had been announced.

I mean, obviously not. But damn, I’ve been on podcasts with people that offhandedly mentioned the existence of this game to me. I’ve talked to people who have been told the story concept and setup! Though one person did tell me a different name than Mortal Kombat 12, so I wonder if that’s true or still to be revealed.

Anyway, Mortal Kombat 11 had a four-month turnaround from announcement to release and I suspect they’ll follow something similar for this game. Maybe a Summer Games Fest reveal with a September release date?

Suicide Squad is a GAAS and That’s Kinda Boring

A blowout reveal for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League took a hefty chunk of this week’s State of Play and it confirmed what we already kind of knew: Rocksteady’s new title is a looter-shooter GAAS. But it’s, like, a GAAS with all of the bad parts and none of the good ones? By all appearances, it’s a straight campaign with a definitive ending to the content, but it’s also always-online, has colored loot, and looks like the kind of fake video game you would see in a movie.

Maybe it’s unfair to hold a studio’s success against them, but seeing the originators of a simple-but-iterated-upon melee combat system that spawned dozens of successors create a bland shooter is inherently kind of disappointing. Throw in the long wait between Arkham Knight and this game’s release, even accounting for things like COVID, and it’s hard to really raise up a lot of excitement for Suicide Squad outside of pedigree.

I’m open to being surprised, but I’ve been open to being surprised for like six years and all that’s gotten me is disappointment.

Nintendo is Not Attending E3

It’s been reported for some time that Nintendo is not going to have a presence at E3 this year on the show floor and Venturebeat has confirmed with Nintendo that they will indeed be skipping the Los Angeles show this year. Citing that E3 does not fit in with their strategy, the company has not announced any alternative plans or if there will be a coincidentally-timed Direct or anything of the sort.

We can quibble all day about why Nintendo isn’t attending — there’s reporting that they simply have nothing to show (I don’t really buy that), or maybe they’re not on great terms with the ESA. I don’t think the reasons matter as much as the fact that even a Nintendo that had reasons not to attend E3 would completely pull out when E3 mattered more.

In other words, the story here is that E3 is not as relevant a show if Nintendo didn’t feel the need to have the floor all to themselves.

Which, well, also isn’t that much of a story. It’s more of a reiteration of a thing we already knew. But it’s still wild to see happening in real time.

Go Watch the Doublefine Psychonauts 2 Documentary

It’s a long watch but I’m pretty sure if every gamer watched the whole thing, we’d get a lot less toxic discussions about video games and how they’re made. Part of the reason those discussions fester the way they do is because secrecy breeds this assumption that greatness comes naturally and easily. Ergo, any game that for any reason looks like it’s struggling in development must not be something worth paying attention to. Which is wrong.

Anyway, go watch the thing.

Other Things:

• No Materia Possessions last week due to me being out of town, so we got it this week! Expect discussions of Like a Dragon: Ishin!
• Speaking of which, you can also find my review for the game here.

Like A Dragon: Ishin!

It used to simply be a fact of the video game industry that not every title would make it over from Japan. I would flip through the Game Players magazines or Next-Generation or what have you and oggle their import pages with simultaneous wonder and bafflement. There would be so many games that just never came to America for whatever reason with exotic and mystifying names that all followed patterns like “Go! Go! Hyperman Fight!” that were inscrutable in terms of determining how the game played but it certainly sounded fun as hell.

In modern days, most games come over, and the internet has demystified those that don’t so we can pretty quickly figure out why the Japan regional train management simulator that is storming the nation is not getting a U.S. release. One notable exception to this, however, has always been Ryu Ga Gotoko Ishin, a historical sidestory to the Yakuza — now Like A Dragon — series that uses familiar faces to essentially play the roles of Edo Period-Meiji Restoration figures.

It’s not that it was impossible to figure out why Ishin never graced U.S. shores. The main Yakuza series itself was essentially teetering on the edge of becoming Japan-exclusive, really only bailed out in ounces by Sony and in gallons by a major push for the English localization of Yakuza 0. That left the game between them, Ishin, stuck in an unenviable position, certainly being done no favors by being unrelentingly mired in Japanese history. It would be like selling a narrative drama about the Revolutionary War outside America and assuming that most who played it would have little idea who George Washington, the Minutemen, or the British were.

But times change and Yokoyama, the current head of the RGG Studio, had even said that games like Ghost of Tsushima were indicators that the climate was right to bring Ishin to the west. The only way to really do this was to remake the game, as the original release only saw PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 versions. Thus, in what might be the only example of a remake appearing on the same console the original game released on, Like a Dragon Ishin was born for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Series X|S, and PC, which brings us to today.

I had long heard that Ishin is truly special and that, had it only come out in English, would be praised as the highwater mark of the series for its fantastic story and gameplay. Obviously there had to be some hyperbole due to the alluring nature of the Japanese-only release, but I have been eager for years to find out how true that praise might be.

It’s not completely there, but Ishin is a strong title in the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, with a few caveats that are sometimes easy to ignore and other times points of frustration.

Every localizer who sighed when I mentioned Ishin in an interview, explaining that the game is steeped in Japanese history that is not easy to explain, was completely correct. That shit is not easy to explain. Ishin even has glossary terms for you to get historical context during dialogue, which will absolutely compromise the dramatic pacing of a scene but sometimes you once again need an explanation of what the Bakufu are despite understanding it a few hours prior. This doesn’t hurt the story, which is still well-told and compelling, but does add a bit of distance that might be too much for players that already struggle to keep up with the twists and turns of a Like A Dragon story.

Battles are the beat-em-up gameplay from titles pre-dating the now-confusingly named Yakuza: Like A Dragon, which switched to a turn-based RPG. In Ishin, protagonist Ryoma has a sword, a sidearm, and his trusty fists to guide him through battle. In one style, he combines the sword and firearm to spin like a top while firing and slashing. In terms of utility, nothing’s really as effective as just using your katana and you really only switch to other styles because you want to rather than you must. Other styles start feeling better and more fun to use as you progress down their skill trees, but it’s easy to see how they crossed the distance from this game to Yakuza 0 later.

The main story’s quest design feels as archaic as the game’s period setting at times. If you simply want to follow the main quest, which on occasion impresses on you an urgent need to warn a character or to confront the next villain, it is absolutely bonkers how often it just pinballs protagonist Ryoma from one end of the city to the other. For literal chapters, you go from Teradaya — the boarding house where Ryoma lives — and the Shinsengumi headquarters at the far end of Kyo. Back and forth. Over and over. It clearly wants you to do other things in the city, to fight scattered bandits, to come across subquests, but if I had hair I would have been tearing it out the sixth or seventh time the game told me to go back to Teradaya after having just left from there to go to the headquarters once again.

I’d also be remiss if I did not mention that this has been the glitchiest title in the series I have ever played. Perhaps it is the change from the Dragon Engine over to Unreal, but there were multiple problems during the review period with UI elements not appearing, battles not starting for 10-15 seconds after the trigger, or people in town literally disappearing into the ground. I am told there is a day-one patch, but I have no idea what it fixes. Hopefully a number of these things get addressed. None are game-breaking, but they’re a step down for a series that has traditionally avoided these immersion-breaking glitches and inconveniences.

Despite these complaints, man, nothing hits quite like a Like A Dragon story. As annoyed as I might get with the path leading up there, experiencing Ryoma stubbornly pushing through obstacles and in a Forest Gump-kinda way find himself standing in the gaze of history is powerful. The sidestories are charming, though decidedly gaunt compared to Yakuza 0, and will sometimes unexpectedly pull on heartstrings you did not realize you had for a small 19th century Japanese child who regrets yelling at his friend for moving away.

There’s no other game series where I can put down my controller, bring my hand to my chin, and feel glued to my TV as I watch two characters converse in a hotel room, then immediately fight that person in a sword fight to the death, summon the wrestler Kenny Omega’s essence into a whirlwind sword hit, and then do a QTE where I kick their sword back at them to win the fight. The extent to which Ishin exemplifies what is great about Like A Dragon reminds you that no other games get it quite this right even when it provides friction along the way.

I fell in love with the series with Yakuza 0 but have been playing these games for quite a while before that and Ishin does not radically alter my hierarchy of favorites. I do wonder if time and distance will amplify the aspects of Ishin that left me cold or if all I will remember are the things I loved about it, but fresh off the experience, I can recommend it for fans of the series or fans of samurai drama and Yakuza 0 for everyone else.

7/10