You know what? Griffith from Berserk only did three wrong things. One, care for Guts enough so that he was torn apart over his departure. Two, rape the princess and steal away the virginity that the king hoped to steal with his musky old penis. Three, let Guts and Casca live when he could have easily killed Guts and Casca was rendered mentally retarded due to all of the demon rape. Everything involving him sacrificing his army and family for more power? That was a rational and well formed decision. It could be that I forgot some things, as it has been 5 years since I read the manga in full, but I don’t believe anyone who says they would not kill their family when they are unable to so much as lift a spoon to their mouth.
Cellar Door Games, the developers of the wonderful Rogue Legacy have announced their next titles, Full Metal Furies. The game is a “RPG-laden action brawler” that hopes to modernize and innovate in the beat ‘em up genre by removing commonplace irritations and offering its own unique flavor with equipment, skill trees, and four distinct playable characters. The game also has a unique visual style that blends retro flavored pixel art with modern 2D backdrops, and features combat that looks to have some genuine depth to it all, especially with the ability to freely switch between characters. The game will release sometime later this year for Xbox One and PC, with the expected PS4 release being strangely absent.
Back in 2015, Square Enix announced that they were forming a new subsidiary studio to worker on smaller and more focused titles with a smaller audience. The result of this was Tokyo RPG Factory and I Am Setsuna. Presumably wanting to emulate that success, Square Enix has established Studio Istolia, a game development studio that hopes to create games with engrossing narratives and will be working on a game given the tentative name of Project Prelude Rune. Now, while I will mock Square Enix regularly, I am happy to see them branching out in this way and attempting to deliver compelling experiences, and hope that ventures like this prove successful, as the company has become a bit too enamoured with creating incredibly expensive AAA games with overly lengthy development periods.
Speaking of which, I Am Setsuna is coming to the Switch as a launch title, and with the system a mere week away from launch, Nintendo has finally provided game enthusiasts with new information about the system… by sending it to the gaming press and have them cover it. From there, they discovered things about the system’s slick user interface, how the battery life is pretty bad, lasting under three hours while playing Breath of the Wild, and how players’ hands can disrupt the connection between the Switch and Joy-Cons. All of which was capstoned by the bad news that the Virtual Console will not be available at launch. While the absence any media applications or a basic web browser at launch have been previously documented. Oh Nintendo. I love you, but you are made of nonsense.
Now that all of the big boy news. Time for the stories that only Natalie likes to talk about because she wants every game to come to her platform of choice. It’s time for PC port news! As part of Idea Factory International’s continued efforts to bring their catalog to this platform, the publisher will be bringing Monster Monpiece to PC via Steam on March 14th, with release on other storefronts likely planned. In case you forgot, Monster Monpiece is that Vita game where the player can rub their fingers all over the system to molest anime girls. While I heard the game is pretty solid despite that potentially unsettling feature, I’m really not interested in playing games with super lewd elements like that. I say as someone whose most popular posts are about games that use repurposed eroge assets.
On the same day, March 14th, the deal Capcom had with Microsoft over the exclusivity window for Dead Rising 4 will be uplifted as the lukewarmly received installment will also be coming to Steam. A note that does not pertain much interest to me, but this does make me wonder what this means for the Armature and Comcept developed third person shooter Recore. Was the game developed as a proper exclusive? Will it never be released on other PC storefronts? I don’t know, but I’m hoping that the answers to both of those questions are no.
The next story is not quite an announcement of a PC port, as much as it is denying the console exclusivity of one game that I would have never expected to land on anything other than a Sony console. That game is Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy. As confirmed by Playstation Ireland, the remake compilation of the first three games in the series will simply be launching on PS4 on June 30th, 2017, and afterwards, it will be ported to other systems. While Crash Bandicoot has been a multiplatform game franchise for most of the series’ life, the original three titles have become ubiquitous with Playstation, so it would be odd to see these games wind up on the PC or Switch.
Beyond that, there are two leaked game I have lined up to talk about once they are inevitably announced, but for the time being I have little to say about the basically confirmed Middle-Earth: Shadow of War and the continued rumors of a Shenmue HD Remaster. I have no interest in the aesthetic of Middle-Earth and while I would like to play the first two Shenmue games in HD, I’m not too excited to delve into those massive time sinks.