So, I managed to revise two of my most recent stories this week, and next week I am both ending a job and attending school at a big girl’s university. Life is going to get hard and hectic, according to my mother who never attended university. Though, I’m not worried about that. I am sorta worried about getting out content regularly, but I think I should be able to publish 52 game reviews this year and finish up Psycho Bullet Festival 2: Bury My Children. Oh, and publish a Rundown every Sunday. Header image is by NSFW artist ModeSeven.
I swear half of these rundowns this year will mention Pokemon Sun and Moon in some way… Anyways, five more new Pokemon were revealed, including three previously leaked Pokemon with Sandygast and Palossand, the pair of soul stealing sandcastle ghosts, and Stufful, the pre-evolution to Bewear. The two brand new ones were Turtonator, a spiffy Fire Dragon type that resembles a weirdly angular turtle, and is a massive coward who hides behind his back while shooting explosive fireballs from his nose. He also has a move that is basically counter, but presumably deals greater damage or is fire type.
The other was Crabrawler, a pure fighting type who, unsurprisingly, resembles both a crustacean and a boxer with its strangely shaped claws that resemble boxing gloves, his guarding idle animation, and the fact that one of his eyes is perpetually drooping, as if he has a concussion. Again, I do enjoy all of these designs, and look forward to obtaining all of them to complete my Pokedex once and for all, when the game comes out on November 18th, 2016. I seriously think I will have every Pokemon by December 1st.
In addition to all of that, GameFreak curiously put up an unannounced game on Steam Early Access. Boy was that a weird sentence to write. Giga Wrecker is a platformer about gathering debris and scrap in order to turn them into weapons and using it to avoid obstacles. A novel premise, but one is not quite enough to sell me on the game, mostly due to how hard it is to see anything in the trailer they put up, with the main character being ant sized. Plus, I truly did not enjoy their prior attempt at a platformer, Tembo the Badass Elephant. Still, I feel obligated to play this game based on the developer, and will a while after it is finished.
There were rumors floating around last week about Final Fantasy XV being delayed until November 29th, and they were later confirmed this Monday by the game’s director, Hajime Tabata. While the game is complete, and has gone gold, there are still numerous fixes, updates, and general improvements that the developers wish to make via a day one patch, but instead of making it a day one patch, they apparently want to goldmaster the game once more with everything the patch would contain. I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m sure that lots of people would love to have played this game on September 30th instead, day one patch be darned. For now, people just need to hold themselves over with a 52 minute gameplay reel. Which I’d talk about now, but I’d rather wait until I play it, assuming there is a PC version.
Moving on, um, do you recall how I started revisiting the Mass Effect series last month? Well, it turns out that my planned revisiting of these games may have been a little premature, as EA went from being opposed to remastering old titles, to being very open about the idea of a remastering of the original Mass Effect trilogy. Something I would appreciate very much, though I would likely not touch for years and years, as I am determined to keep playing the original releases and go through all of them before year’s end.
Since bailing out of the game industry with all the grace of a trash fire a year ago, Konami has been an entity that I’ve barely thought about, but it appears that they still want to have some presence in the industry, or just make more money off of Metal Gear. The first post-Kojima Metal Gear title will be Metal Gear Survive, a survival based cooperative game based on the groundwork of Metal Gear Solid V and set in an alternate universe with crystalline zombies… They actually did the most trite and generic thing they could by making a zombie survival game. Well done Konami, well done. Anyhow, the game will be a $30 title, coming out for PS4, XBO, and PC in 2017, and should ideally bomb in order to send a message to Konami that nobody wants this tripe.
Speaking of tripe, Microsoft clarified their stance on what exactly Project Scorpio means for owners of the original Xbox One… Goodness does that not sound good to say. Original Xbox One. Basically, while the company ascertains that they will not cut people off of new console game releases, they do say that they do not view VR as console gaming, which really just exposes how slimy they will surely be in two or three years when games begin being exclusive for Project Scorpio. Yeah, don’t trust the company that, three years ago, tried to kill off used games.
Moving onto the PC port announcement section of this rundown, the excellent looking Neir: Automata, which I have been very excited for due to a let’s play of the original Nier by the Super Best Friends, will be launching in early 2017 for PC and PS4, which is exactly what I was hoping to hear after I learned just what this weird Platinum Games project was.
I regularly go on about the great Steam leak of 2015, and while this is not a port, it has been announced that the acclaimed visual novel Steins;Gate is coming to Steam in September 2016. Marking the final game on that list to be released, excluding Criminal Girls: Invite Only. I don’t know what’s going on with that. Anyways, this game was formerly released on PC via publisher JAST USA, who also brought the game to PS3 and Vita. However, it will not be on a far larger platform, and will hopefully see a discount high enough for me to warrant picking it up. Because I am a cheapskate.
That’s about it for this week, now to– Wait, what?
Cygames is a mobile focused Japanese game company who were established in 2011. Since then, they have dabbled in a number of projects, established an anime division, and announced that they would also work on making console games a little over a year ago. They held an event on Sunday morning, right before I got up to finish this little Rundown of mine, so I may as well talk about what they announced.
The big one is Granblue Fantasy Project Re: Link, a fantasy action RPG developed in association with Platinum Games, and boasting a soundtrack featuring Nobuo Uematsu of Final Fantasy fame. While certain design elements look rather stock for an RPG, and the characters have weird overly shiny shading applied to them, there is enough going on in the gameplay to make this look to be, at the very least, a solid action game with four playable character and an RPG backdrop.
The other three games included Lost Order, a smartphone exclusive strategy RPG with appealing visuals by Platinum Games. An smartphone anime RPG developed by CyGames and named Princess Connect Re:Dive. Along with the undetailed upcoming console game Project Awakening. No, not Project Awakened by way of Phosphor Games. You see, the first is a fantasy based affair we know nothing about. The other is a modular superhero game that no publisher wanted to back, but apparently lived on to an extent in a game called Gemini: Heroes Reborn, which I never heard of until now.
Anyway, that’s it for this week. Be merry my children, and get the heck off of my lawn!