This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: The Natalie Who Leapt Through Time
- Palworld: Palfarm Announced (Because I Guess Palworld Didn’t Have Enough Farming?)
- Ananta Looks Like What I Hoped Games Would Look Like 15 Years Ago (But It’s Still A Damn Live Service)
- Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties Announced (Because We Need a New Like A Dragon Game Every Year!)
- Deus Ex Remastered Announced! (Peak Narrative is BACK!)
- Dynasty Warriors 3 Complete Edition Remastered (Peak Action is BACK!)
- State of Play Scraps #1 (Housemarque’s Saros Was Showcased)
- State of Play Scraps #2 (Marvel’s Wolverine Was Showcased)
- Fire Emblem Shadows Announced (Because We Needed TWO Fire Emblem Mobile Live Services)
- Forza Horizon 6 Announced (I Still Want Microsoft to Be Erased…)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
The Natalie Who Leapt Through Time
This past Sunday, after five bloody months, I finally finished my tenure with The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (2025). A truly impressive visual novel SRPG, a once in a generation overachieving title, a glorious display of the eccentricities of two of my favorite visual novel creators, and the best 8/10 that I have ever played. I will be delving into my thoughts on the game with over 20,000 words sometime next month, but before I do so, I felt that it was necessary to investigate something that has been bugging me for a while.
Why do so many Japanese games feature time loops as a gameplay and narrative mechanic? Whether it be something iterative and linear like how Higurashi is just one big series of time loops as friends search for the one true ending. Characters going through an alternate history retelling that is actually a sequel like Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020). Any game that canonizes a new game plus or alternate route as taking place in a multiverse of some manner. Or a Japanese adventure game that not only offers a series of branching plotlines the player can explore, but has them all congeal together into something true and definitive?
Well, just off the top of my head, I have several obvious theories. When Japanese game developers were laying the foundation of game design, they quickly determined not only their ability to tell stories, but to have stories branch off into different player-defined endings. Something that you just could not do in books, manga, TV, or movies. And since games were viewed as an all-ages activity in Japan, and Japanese people read, narrative games were an easier sell. Maybe Japan has a specific cultural fixation on doing the past differently due to the mess that was 1920s to 1950s Japan. Maybe it is some residual knock-on effect of the bubble years, where some people timed things right and made out like bandits, while the others saw the bedrock ‘forever’ systems of their new post-war society begin to crack. Or maybe this is all because of the success of Kamaitachi no Yoru (1994) and Chunsoft’s highly influential sound novel series.
…But then I decided to just check the Wikipedia page for time loops, which attributed the popularity of Japanese time loops to the 1965 novel The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. If that name sounds familiar, good. It should, as TGWLTT has been the subject of all manner of adaptations over the years. TV series, film adaptations, sequels to the original story in both animated and live action flavors. It’s something that clearly has some lasting cultural panache in Japan, and while I could read the novel— it’s officially translated and not particularly long— that is not necessarily the most influential iteration. Instead, that honor probably goes to the 1983 film adaptation, which I watched and it’s… not quite what I expected.
SPOILER WARNING FOR A FAMOUS 42-YEAR-OLD MOVIE!
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983) starts as a mellow paced teenage drama with a twinge of romance about a 15-year-old schoolgirl, Kazuko, going through life in her tranquil 1980s Japanese town. A beautiful yet grounded little place full of lush greenery, simple wooden homes, and a copious amount of tripping hazards with decades-old stone infrastructure, narrow walkways, and a mountainous geography. I really like looking at places in movies, especially Japan, so this was a highlight to me. Allusions to the time loop are made, along with vague flashes where time seems to skip, but the film remains a lowkey slice of life until the 40 minute mark. This is where an earthquake, fire, and roof collapse all happen within the span of a few hours, and as Kazuko gets caught in the roof collapse, she hops back in time by 24 hours. (More like 25 and a half, but that’s being a pedant.)
This all sounds rather straightforward. Kazuko has a no good very bad day and must use the power of a time loop to save herself and her two love interests, Goro and Fukamachi. Except that’s not what actually happens. The earthquake seems like the ushering in of something supernatural and otherworldly, but aside from knocking down some furniture, nobody is actually harmed. …Then Kazuko goes outside and sees that Goro’s house is on fire, leading her to run over there to help. However, the fire is already out by the time she arrives. Huh. Then, the next morning, while walking home from school, she sees Goro walking underneath a building as tiles start falling off its roof, loosened by the earthquake. She grabs him, seemingly protecting him from the tiles, and then the time loop begins.
The next 20 minutes are pretty much the typical start of a time look. Kazuko thinks Fukamachi getting hurt was just part of a bad dream, she goes about her days thinking it’s Tuesday when it’s Monday, and uses her foresight to her advantage before confiding in Fukamachi about what happened. After proving her knowledge to Fukamachi, he tells her about the sci-fi concepts of teleportation and time leaping, believing she has gained these powers and urging her to not become a “departed spirit of time.” Kinda suspicious that he knows about that stuff, but if it makes the plot go vroom…
Kazuko, despite going through this time loop only once is very perturbed by this and wants to go back to normal, and after waking up, she rushes to save Goro from the falling roof tiles once again. This, for whatever reason, allows her to escape the time loop and return to the linear progression of time. Hooray! …But we have almost 30 minutes left.
Inspired by her conversation with Fukamachi and prior experiences with the plant lavender— which seemingly means time travel in the language of flowers— Kazuko then ventures into a previously established greenhouse. Kazuko huffs the scent of lavender and this somehow enhances her time travel powers, allowing her to teleport to a cliffside facing the ocean, where Fukamachi is picking flowers, literal inches away from a deadly cliffside. Kazuko again confides with him, only for him to…push her off of the cliff, causing her to fall through time. Then he jumps after her, falling through time himself.
This leads into the final stretch of the movie, and it is a gosh darn trip. A piece of genuinely captivating filmmaking that imagines time travel through a use of filters and a choppy framerate, breaking up the motion of film into a series of rapidly shifting photographs. Transitions take the form of waves that wash over scenes, sending Kazuko back to the sea of time. Almost immediately, Kazuko becomes overwhelmed by everything before her. The totality of time, of her life at the very least, is splayed before her, free to explore, and she finds herself semi-consciously drifting to and from the past.
Whenever she ventures back, she shifts reality, for two people cannot exist at the same time. Her past selves must hide away, enter a place of existence yet non-existence, until she departs, allowing her past self to return. Still, she keeps going back, reliving key moments of her life, discovering that things are not quite how she remembered them, before getting hopelessly lost in time. …At least until Fukamachi follows her, picks her up, and uses his time powers to bring her back to the beginning of the movie, the science lab where she fainted upon smelling a lavender scented concoction.
Up until this point, it was clear that something was up with Fukamachi. He lacked a scar Kazuko thought he should have, he just knew everything about time travel, and he knew enough to rescue her. But nothing could have prepared me for the bombshell of who Fukamachi actually is.
Fukamachi is actually a time traveling pharmacist from 2660 who went back to the 1980s to acquire long-dead plants, like lavender, for future science purposes.
Meaning he posed as a child who died in an accident a decade prior. He used future pharmacy powers to mind control people into thinking he was always around. And he grew plants in the greenhouse while attending 1983 Japanese school as a teenage boy. Because that makes sense! Dude could have just posed as the son of a farmer, grown his plants in a bigger greenhouse, and dedicated his time to learning more about ancient Earth plants. He could have just brought some future minerals back to the past, sold it for money, and bought the plants he needed from a florist! But nooooo! That wouldn’t be sexy!
This is already a lot to take in, but then Fukamachi drops that he needs to erase Kazuko’s memory. She resists, as she fell in love with him— because he’s such a mature and handsome lad— but he does not relent, and erases her memory with future powers. Fukamachi then leaves her, erases himself from history, but promises that some way, some day, they will meet again. …Which leads into an 11 year time skip to 1994. Kazuko is now a pharmacist at the local college, indicating that she somehow remembered Fukamachi’s words and wanted to follow in his footsteps, presumably hoping to create the breakthrough drug that makes time travel possible. Then, as she carries a reckless amount of books through the halls, she bumps into a man, an older Fukamachi, who asks her for directions while she continues with her research. …Until the 2010 live action sequel.
I can see how The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983) was influential… but not in the way that I expected. As a time loop story, it does not use the concept particularly well. I mean, its time loop only happens once. It’s more of a ‘typical’ time travel story about a girl who gains the power to hop through time and nearly loses herself in the process, before being freed from this power. Freed from the curse of being a vagabond of time. However, the seed of an idea is there, I can tell how a curious child or creative of the time would look at this movie and be inspired by the potential of what this movie offers. And that is, ultimately, how genres grow, how norms are established, and it is interesting to see how early examples of a genre defy modern expectations. Kind of like how Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls (1911) is a surprisingly unique possession story that is erroneously considered a body swap story by people who have never read it.
Beyond being a time loop story, I also found various aspects of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983) to feel like glimpses into the origins of norms and standards that I’ve just accepted in Japanese anime and games. The subplot involving faded or distorted childhood memories that literally scar the protagonist, giving her a shared physical connection to one of the love interests. The fixation on a nursery rhyme that is used as a point of connection between childhood friends on the cusp of adulthood. And… basically everything with the bonkers third act, right down to its presentation choices.
The film was not what I was expecting and… I kind of love that! I love being surprised by the relics from the past, having my mind blown, and simply finding something different from what I was expecting. Some fear having their minds changed, in learning that their history is wrong, that there is nuance, and that things are not aligned by a rigid binary, a narrative that echoes through every iteration. But I love it. I love how vast, messy, and complex the world can be, and I find that to be a strength, something worth celebrating.
…Also, I was going to do something regarding Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984), another time loop movie that Wikipedia seems to think was a big influence. And I was also flirting with the idea of talking about Otogirisou (1992), since the game is apparently pretty short, but this preamble is already too long! So you’ll just have to wait until… I decide to pick up this topic again. If I decide to pick up this topic again!
Palworld: Palfarm Announced
(Because I Guess Palworld Didn’t Have Enough Farming?)
Well, I guess I should talk about Palworld again. A game that was a genuine sensation in February 2024, and a game I personally had a great time with thanks to my buddy Cassie. But I had had to put it aside due to other obligations, and now I mostly hear about when when a new expansion is announced or another stone is thrown in Nintendo’s ongoing legal battle against developer Pocketpair. Which is still happening, but not in as dramatic as a fashion as one might anticipate. Mostly just a bunch of patent malarky.
It’s always odd when a game like this seems to fade out of the limelight. When over 20 million people buy a game with consistent updates and multiplayer, the title rarely ever falls off as much as the scale deflates to something reasonable. There are over 40,000 people playing Palworld on Steam as I am writing this bit. It’s doing slightly worse than Limbus Company and better than Overwatch 2. It’s still getting substantial updates every few months. And it’s planning on leaving early access in the next year.
You just need to look a little to find this data, because the vast majority of games people actually play do not wind up in your feed. Gaming is big, gaming is vast, and I don’t think anybody has great numbers on what games people are actually playing or talking about. Because the world is simultaneously too fragmented and too centralized and tech companies are so data obsessed that they refuse to just share all their user engagement data publicly. I guess doing so would embolden their competitors with data and harm the pocket industry of data guessers. Seriously, how are you supposed to even account for browser games with 50k daily active users? Or games where 80% of their community is based in a difficult to monitor Discord channel? …God do I love me some indulgent preambles like this.
Building off of the success of Palworld, Pocketpair has taken it upon themselves to announce the first proper Palworld spin-off, Palworld: Palfarm. A farming game with heavy influences from Harvest Moon Story of Seasons Bokujou Monogatari (Farm Story), the much beloved Stardew Valley, and flashes of Animal Crossing, if only relating to certain presentational quirks. All of which is clearly built off of the technical foundation and assets of Palworld, and flashes of its ‘darker’ elements. The trailer itself flutters between concepts and activities with such speed that I’d hesitate to call this much more than proof of concept work, rather than representative of how the game will actually play.
Between farming, fishing, mining, chatting with characters, caring for critters, and engaging in various forms of leisure, the game is presenting a lot of things to do. However, nothing in this trailer answers the most obvious question. Why are they making a Palworld farming game, when Palworld is already sort of a farming game? Cassie had a robust operation at our base, and while its structure was less… grid-based than the farms shown in the trailers, it was enough to satiate the farmer’s itch. Well, I think the idea here is that Palworld is built as an exploration and combat driven affair first and foremost, and that is unappealing for some people. Meanwhile, a creature collector and farming game appeals to a different yet semi-related demographic, and is fairly easy to facilitate with a spin-off. The guts of a farming game were already present, the animations are already made, and this is the easiest avenue available to them for a spin-off.
I asked Cassie what she thought about Palfarm, and she said “I’m not the type of person to play these games.” Then I snuggled her and in response, and she snugged me back.
Ananta Looks Like What I Hoped Games Would Look Like 15 Years Ago
(But It’s Still A Damn Live Service)
For as much as I want to say that the modern era of gaming has all bases covered, there are all sorts of niche edge cases where that is not the case. A good example is good sports games that are not designed as simulators, but designed as video games, but I blame the game devs for that. However, another one of these gaps is strangely open world urban sandboxes. A genre that ideally should have been the tentpole example of AAA production values following landmark achievement that was Grand Theft Auto III (2001). A game that offered a deluge of player freedoms, interactivity, and world building on a level that had scarcely before been seen. Yes, there were games that tried similar things in their own ways, but fully 3D and reactive worlds that resemble actual cities were a novel concept, and served as the foundation for some of the most successful video games. …Period.
This unsurprisingly led to a collection of imitators— GTA-clones— but the genre largely petered our around the end of the PS3 era with games like Sleeping Dogs (2012), Saints Row: The Third (2011), and Watch Dogs (2014). Which seems crazy, considering the monumental success of Grand Theft Auto V (2013), but rather than aim for something just like GTA V, developers decided to make open world games, rather than sandboxes. They have also frequently set them in more fantastical or exotic worlds, but at the cost of the modern urban aesthetic.
This is a very nebulous distinction that is hard to parse, but I think the best way to describe it is that the specific subgenre I am talking about is one where you feel like someone going through a city, walking on it ground level, driving cars, and occasionally going on some form of mayhem, just ‘cos that seems fun. Like a Dragon does not count because it’s set in small nooks, and you can’t drive in those games! Well, outside of driving sections. Similarly, Spider-Man (2018) would not count because it is not a street level experience, the city is meant to be traversed by rooftops as a primary form of transportation. Plus, Peter Sparker can’t drive. His Spider Spenses would go cuh-razy!
Watch Dogs would absolutely count. Too bad the IP has been vaulted. But I would not consider Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) to count, given how the way you interact with the game differs from a GTA-like, and how it prioritizes character building and RPG systems. An RPG is not a sandbox, sorry. And I think that an open world sandbox just feels better if it’s in third-person.
Akumako: “What a strange fixation.”
Okay, so… it is harder to feel like the protagonist is part of an environment in a first-person game. If the player is just controlling a pair of hands, a gun, wheels, and a camera, the player will feel more disconnected from the world than if they were controlling a third-person avatar. Yes, doing so exposes certain interaction limitations that are abstracted away with a first-person perspective, and the first-person perspective is more ‘immersive’ because real life is a first-person experience. (Allegedly.) With a third-person perspective, the player can see where the protagonist is standing, how their body meshes with their surroundings, and the traits of the characters they are controlling are more immediately obvious. The characters’ feats and personality are more pronounced, and they can simply do things that would be disorientating or confusing if viewed from the first person.
Mind you, I have no problem with first person games. There is no such thing as an objectively superior way to present or structure most things. The limited visibility, lack of visual character, and general focus offered by first-person games is a boon as much as it is a limitation. However, I generally prefer third person, because it feels more like the player is a part of this world via an avatar, not some drone.
Akumako: “600 words deep, and she hasn’t even gotten to the subject.”
DAMN ME AND MY LOVE OF CONTEXT!
When I saw Project Mugen two years ago, I was deeply annoyed by the fact that it existed. Because it looked like one of my dream games. An urban sandbox full of some of the best, coolest, and flashiest things to be featured in a city game in the past 15 years. …But crystalized through the aesthetic of anime and production values that you could only achieve by China! It looked like something that I had wanted ever since… I started this site, playing games like Saints Row 2 (2008) and doing anime reviews every week or so. A mingling of things I loved, rendered with production values that would be achievable after over a decade of technological advancements.
Later renamed Ananta, the title has only gone on to look more impressive with each showing, becoming this dazzling combination of Grand Theft Auto, Watch Dogs, Spider-Man, Sleeping Dogs, and… even sprinkles of stuff like City Shrouded in Shadow (2017). It genuinely looks like they put every idea they possibly could into this game, and I am simply dazzled that it can so much as exist… in a cohessive enough form to facilitate a seven minute trailer. …And a 10 minute trailer that people compare to GTA because they only ever played, like, 30 video games.
…Except this is a Net Ease joint, meaning this is going to be another damn live service! UGH! Why does this keep on happening? Why can’t Chinese developers just make real games and not these always online crapshoots that are made to die? Why is it more profitable for games to have a starting price of nothing and then loop players in with these ancillary progression blocking mechanics that are designed to make games worse? Why does the structure of so much of modern game development need to be built around shipping incomplete games that will need to be finished later? China, Korea, why did you have to blight the world with these systems that I know your countries popularized? Just make a game good, make it once, and sell it! Why does that need to be so expensive, so much harder than just shipping a game and have it be good? God… Fuck this industry, I wanna get out.
I will say it gets points by not being a gacha game, instead being buoyed by microtransactions à la Grand Theft Auto Online (2013), the ‘real game’ of GTA V. But… No. That’s still bad. I’m just tired of this monetization approach, and would rather see games just come out for $100 and precipitously decrease in price before going for $20 after 5 years on the market. While whales won’t be a thing under this arrangement, you don’t need whales if people are spending the same amount of money across multiple titles. You just need to attract more players by making your game less of a life-sucker!
Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties Announced
(Because We Need a New Like A Dragon Game Every Year!)
Every day it gets harder to start getting into the Like A Dragon series…
Continuing the tradition established in 2023, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio announced their next Like A Dragon game schedule for release in Q1 of the following year. And while they could have done pretty much anything at this point, they are opting to do a full ground-up remake of Yakuza 3 (2009). A title that I have seen relatively little love levied towards over the years. Whereas the original Yakuza (2005) was a bold innovator, and Yakuza 2 (2006) was a more refined sequel that improved upon nearly everything, Yakuza 3 was… the first HD installment released to international audiences. RGG had growing pains with their new technical framework. The story, while grand conceptually, did not resonate with people as much as it could have. Despite aiming to make this third entry bigger and better, it’s seldom considered anyone’s favorite. And compared to the downright excessive scale of its sequels, Yakuza 4 (2010) and Yakuza 5 (2012), it’s easy to view it as the uneven stepping stone. …And a notable dip in production quality for anyone who wants to play the version of these games on modern systems.
As such, even though it was given an HD refresh in 2018, Yakuza 3 is a title I have seen some desire for a remake. We know that RGG Studio are going to fill up their slate with remakes, and what else can they remake at this point? Kenzan and Kurohyou? Nah. The first one is supposedly too iffy to remake, and most fans forget those PSP spin-offs even happen. So, instead, they are just doing Yakuza Kiwami 3.
However, rather than just refresh and rebuild a game that diehard fans would have already played, they are pairing this remake with a new separate sub-game by the name of Dark Ties. A prequel story centered around the main antagonist of Yakuza 3, Yoshitaka Mine, in order to flesh out his character. A move that I respect. It’s expanding a story that had problems with supplemental material and introducing a new playable character for a smaller, more focused sub-game with a tweaked different combat system.
Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties will be released on February 12, 2026 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam. And, leading up to its release, Sega and RGG Studios plan on reissuing the other ‘middle era’ Yakuza games. The slightly expanded Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut is being released as a full retail title for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC on December 8, 2025, with no upgrade path. On the same day, an updated English/Japanese dubbed version of Yakuza Kiwami (2015) and Yakuza Kiwami 2 (2017) will be released for PS5 and Xbox Series, while the PC version will get the English dub as a free update.
…It’s always a bit frustrating when publishers re-release games that have been discounted to hell and back as brand new titles five to ten years later with few meaningful upgrades, but whatever. It’s a Sega game. Wait a few years, and it will be marked down by 70% at some point.
Also, it is still bloody bizarre how inconsistent Sega has been with the naming scheme of Yakuza / Like A Dragon. If you are re-releasing these games, just change the titles! You don’t see Square Enix calling anything Dragon Warrior these days!
Deus Ex Remastered Announced!
(Peak Narrative is BACK!)
Well this is a pleasant surprise from Sony’s latest State of Play. After remastering the Tomb Raider sexology, Soul Reaver duology, and garnering an (un)surprising level of success, Aspyr and Eidos Montreal are collaborating yet again to freshen up a bona fide classic. Deus Ex (2000) has a reputation that precedes itself, and you probably don’t need me to recite that it’s oft considered one of the best games of all time. Its conspiracy laden plot is so grounded in truth and structural understanding that it feels more prophetic with every passing year. Its ‘immersive sim’ gameplay invited a bevy of playstyles, allowing any two players to have different, yet comparable, experiences. Its quest system, branching choices, and global scale narrative made it a truly massive game for its era, even more so when considering its map sizes. While far from a sandbox, it was a game with such a sense of scale, and such a grounded nature, that it served as a key inspiration for a lot of developers over the years.
Deus Ex (2000) was lauded by critics of its day and became one of the most recommended video games amongst gaming forum users throughout the early 2000s. It has has continued to be held up as a benchmark for some, even 25 years after its release, but while its reputation is golden, I feel like nowhere near enough people have played it.
Akumako: “YOU never played it! And you own the game! Just play it, you bitch!”
With a keyboard and mouse? No thank you! Those are for productivity, not play!
Like many games of its era, Deus Ex (2000) was built for the PC, period, and was not designed around the dominant console market. The game eventually received a PS2 port in 2002, but the game was compromised and retrofitted for consoles in a way that… was more accepted at the time. It was far from the ideal way to play it, and it was the only way to play it on consoles until… the PS2 port was re-released for PS4 and PS5 earlier this summer. So it is still the only way to legally play the game on consoles. 25 years later.
Fortunately, Deus Ex Remaster is finally fulfilling this dream, repacking the game, giving it optional ‘remastered’ graphics that bumps the fidelity up to somewhere around an Xbox 360 game. As to be expected, there are some slight shifts to the art direction and lighting, though I can clearly tell that the developers are trying to stay faithful to the original, which I cannot say for some remasters. I have seen some people criticize this direction, with their umbrage seemingly stemming from the 2005-ass gloss-ass, Butcher Bay-ass lighting system, but I personally find it to be charming. If you don’t like it, you can just play the game with the original graphics. Or if you preferred the modest visual upgrades of the Deux Ex Revision mod, go ahead. The game runs on a darn toaster.
I think some people are just salty about the unfortunate Battlefront Classic Collection, which I’m inclined to blame on contract negotiations with Disney and Aspyr not having enough budget, rather than choosing to put out a dogwater product. …And the genuinely terrible decision to use an AI to replicate the French voice actress of Lara Croft instead of, you know, asking her to do some voice acting. At least they removed it… six months after the story broke.
Anyway, I’m hoping for the best with this one, as Aspyr’s recent non-multiplayer efforts have been pretty solid. But everybody seems to think this looks terribad, so maybe I’m just in the wrong. We’ll just need to wait and see who’s baddy bad and who’s goody good! Deus Ex Remastered will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, and PC on February 5, 2026.
Dynasty Warriors 3 Complete Edition Remastered
(Peak Action is BACK!)
…Oh shit, this is basically the exact opposite of the last story.
It is no secret that different games are viewed differently by different cultures. That’s kind of a basic logical thing. However, the 2000s were a period where gaming tastes really started to deviate between The America and The Japan. Xenophobia became more culturally accepted following 9/11. American made games were amongst the best-selling in the world, marking a turning point in cultural influence, buying power, and American game developers gaining the experience to make good console games. The delineation between what was a Japanese and American game was becoming more clear as localization changed less and more overt anime-inspired elements were retained. And things that were seen as Overtly Oriental were often met with a level of cultural pushback, at least amongst vocal chuds or tastemakers. And magazine writers who were told to write for homophobic 12-year-old White boys in a 90% White mid-America town.
I think one of the best examples of this 2000s gaming racism was in the cultural divide in the Dynasty Warriors games. In Japan, these games were monumental PS2 bangers. Dynasty Warriors was up there with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest as the highest grossing series on the platform. Not counting off-shoots for Gundam and Sengoku, the series sold nearly 6 million units in Japan on the PS2 alone, and if you know anything about Japanese sales numbers, you know those figures are crazy. Even as Omega Force was pumping these out like mad, with updated revisions and expanded versions with more strategy elements, they still sold like gangbusters, and they were similarly well-loved by Japanese game publications. They were hit action games that took a history that Japanese people were familiar with, but realized it, guad-ified it, and paired it with a truly brilliant casual action system.
Dynasty Warriors, and the broader Musou series, are power fantasy, crowd mowing, flamboyant action games with fluttering hints of strategy. They are widely accessible to game players of all skill levels, offered a deluge of content with each new installment, and featured enough iterative improvements that new entries felt novel enough to warrant a new entry. …At least during the PS2, and PS3, era, before the games started going through some mutations that I don’t wanna talk about here. I’m more of a Sengoku Basara girl anyway…
The point I am getting at is that Dynasty Warriors was huge in Japan, but not in America. In America, it did well, but often seen as a lesser game on multiple fronts. Racists looked at these Chinese historical figures with B-tier voice acting and goofy outfits and thought that it was gay and R-slur Asian shit. Action game elitists who fawned over the likes of Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry, and fighting game looked at Dynasty Warriors’ ‘mindless’ combat and considered it to be a culturally negative entity worthy of mockery. And others were just not really into what these games were throwing down, fatigued by how many releases the series saw, as they were pumping out two a year in some cases.
This negativity gave these games a rather murky reputation, and you can see this reflected in how people have been referring to the series for decades. Many critics have felt the need to preface their enjoyment of these games, saying they are mindless, junk food, or some other derogatory term meant to excuse their enjoyment. To convey to people that ‘I know it’s bad, and stupid, but it’s fun to turn your brain off and bash stuff, amirite?’ I’m convinced that this, along with modern China preferring more serious portrayals to their history, is what led Dynasty Warriors 0X: Origins (2025) to turn out how it is. A game that lacks the same camp, sauce, and personality as prior games in the series, being a far more stripped down and limited experience. The roster of giant playable characters? Gone. The variety of unique weapons? Restricted severely. The gayness? Unintentional! The sauce? Empty! The critical reception and sales? Damn good!
There is an argument that Omega Force should just go back to their roots. Do a do-over of old school Musou, and capitalize on what the series used to be, to do a full-on remake of an older game, and test which approach is better. The vibrant and homoerotic past, or the dismal black robed future. And to prove this, they are bringing back the raw, the classic, the original banger that is Dynasty Warriors 3 (2001)!
Akumako: “What about Dynasty Warriors (1997)?”
That was a decent 3D weapons fighter that got its lunch, and ass, eaten by all the other sick fighters coming out in that era. Not a flop, but not really noteworthy.
Akumako: “What about Dynasty Warriors 2 (2000)?”
A very successful launch title that showed off what the PlayStation 2 could do by rendering so many characters. However, by being a bold, new game, the first entry had a lot of kinks to work out. Something the developers addressed in Dynasty Warrior 3, making it a far better title.
Akumako: “Why is Dynasty Warriors 3 (2001) called Shin Sangoku Musou 2 in Japan?”
Because Sangoku is Japanese for Dynasty and Musou is Japanese for Warriors. Just like how Famicom is Japanese for Nintendo!
Akumako: “You been wanting to make that reference for months, haven’t you? …Answer my question, why are the numbers all fucky?”
Oh, that’s easy! Koei circa 2000 was staffed by a bunch of short-sighted fools who thought that 2000’s Shin Sangokumusou should be treated as a numbered sequel to Dynasty Warriors (1997), so they called it Dynasty Warriors 2. Personally, I would have called it Super Dynasty Warriors, and just let the series adopt dumb names like Super Dynasty Warriors 7 Xtreme Legends. It’d be better than ‘Shin‘ because what homophobic 12-year-old White boy in a 90% White mid-America town circa 2000 would know what ‘Shin‘ means? Ain’t that right, Shin Abigale Quinlan from Verde’s Doohickey 2.0?
Shin Abigale Quinlan: “Would you kindly resume writing your novels? It’s been over a year since I’ve seen my wives…”
Anyway, I have a lot of respect for Dynasty Warriors considering I never played the series, and have come to accept that Dynasty Warriors 3 (2001) is where it got real, where it got good. And as a 24-year-old video game, its nostalgia factor is HOT at the moment. So I will fully open my mind to the idea of a remake, as Omega Force is doing. …And they have chosen to call it Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered. …Okay, I have a few qualms with this project just from the title.
One, you had the opportunity to fix the numbering, buy you blew it. Minus ten points! Two, why bother calling it complete edition? We know this is a Koei Tecmo joint, so it will have an ass-full of DLC. Minus thirty points! Three, this is not a remaster, you absolute clowns! This is a full-on recreation of Dynasty Warriors 3 in the Dynasty Warriors Origins game-toolset-stuffies, complete with a bevy of artistic changes with lighting and environmental design to make it look more ‘realistic.’ Minus one-hundred points for false advertising! GO TO JAIL!
Also, I am not going to defend the artistic integrity of the original Dynasty Warriors 3 because… it looked like a bunch of brown fields. The artistry of classic Dynasty Warriors came from its music, cutscenes, animations, and UX. Nobody was playing for the floor textures, when they were one of the main characters. I don’t think that the remake looks great from what was shown, but what really matters is if they keep the English dub. Because that… that was when games became high art.
Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered will be released on PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2, and PC via Steam on March 19, 2025
State of Play Scraps #1
(Housemarque’s Saros Was Showcased)
Seeing as how I started by talking about the cool and important old stuff announced at this State of Play, I should talk about the bogus and lame new ish.
Housemarque showed off the first gameplay footage of their second roguelike third-person shooter, Saros. A successor to Returnal (2021) that differs in setting, aesthetic, and most things… aside from the core gameplay and premise, which are basically the same. A bearded bloke investigates a distant planet, gets stuck in a time loop, and must attain persistent progression upgrades in order to defeat whatever lies at the end of a run. …Which really may as well be called ‘the roguelike premise’ at this point. So, what does this first-party Sony title do to distinguish it from the offering of bedroom developers? (I say as someone who works in their bedroom.) Uh… production values.
I have been beating this drum for over a decade at this point, so I’ll make this quick. The most important aspect of any visual art is colors, color balancing, and creating an image that, even when blurred or obscured, has a recognizable identity. Enemies should be easy to distinguish from the background, the UI should be readable, effects should be easy to parse, and colors should be used to distinguish between what things are meant to be. And the higher fidelity, the more you NEED to practice color theory. When everything is earth tones, then nothing stands out. And while real-time lighting has been a huge innovation, it has also caused a lot of environmental artists to forget how things are supposed to look in the language of games. If something looks too dark or hard to see, according to a 40-year-old with glasses, in a well-lit bargain bin monitor, then the developers are doing something wrong.
It pisses me off because of how rarely this was a problem with a lot of games in the 20th century. But now that developers can rely on thousand dollar monitors with all sorts of color features and HDR features, they neglected what the game looks like when streaming to someone on a phone with 20% brightness. Or on a $100 monitor. Saros is far from the worst offender of this, but the dark environments and fixation on particle effects for lighting makes the game look firmly unattractive in my mind.
Saros will be released for PS5 on March 20, 2026, with a PC release coming whenever they feel like it.
State of Play Scraps #2
(Marvel’s Wolverine Was Showcased)
Marvel’s Wolverine by Insomniac Games (2026) was the big capstone announcement of this showcase, offering the first sanctioned look at the game after its announcement back in… September 2021? Bloody hell. If someone was starting Freshman year of high school in 2021, they would be starting their first year of college now! Game development like this cannot continue!
The trailer itself is a carefully curated collection of setpieces that mostly consist of Wolverine cutting up dudes, real nasty-like, with no hesitation or regret as he skewers brains and murks American fuckbags, like a real Canadian ought to do. And considering how the gory and visceral the previous gold standard Wolverine video game— 20th Century Fox’s Marvel’s Raven Software’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine: The Official Game of the Movie – Uncaged Edition; for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Windows PCs (2009)— was, this is a good call.
Akumako: “They really need to port that game to modern systems. …Or just re-list the Steam version.”
Beyond the gore, the other main takeaway is a clue into the game’s structure, as it features so many environments that would not naturally mesh together that it’s safe to say the game will be a more linear story-driven affair. That should be obvious, but with the gradual RPG-ification and open world-ification of so many AAA titles, it’s hard to tell which structure a game will have from a vague teaser. And, personally, I’d rather see games of this scale focus on the good stuff, be all killer no filler, than for it to double its runtime up with babbles and bobbleheads to collect for a 10% boost to standard melee attacks.
Marvel’s Insomniac’s Sony’s Wolverine for the PlayStation 5 Family of Video Game Entertainment Systems will be released in 2026.
Fire Emblem Shadows Announced
(Because We Needed TWO Fire Emblem Mobile Live Services)
Okay, so… after seeing the trailer for this, that it was available now, I was perplexed and, rather than relying on Nintendo’s word, I decided to spend an hour playing their second Fire Emblem mobile game. And it’s pretty damn basic.
Fire Emblem Shadows was shadow dropped during the lead up for Tokyo Game Show, where its press release positioned it as a real time social deception real-time strategy game. But that’s not really the most honest way to describe it, in part because of how basic the game is. Structurally, the game has all the hallmarks of a typical live service RPG. Equipment, oodles of units, an elemental system, and myriad ways to upgrade them or alter their kit. You can buy time savers in the shop, and the story is delivered piecemeal via low budget visual novel segments. Well, I guess they don’t have a proper gacha system, but with only 14 characters at launch, that would be criminal. However, progression, getting stuff, and playing the game is all done via a single online multiplayer PvPvE battle mode.
Three players are paired up. Two of them are on team light. One is on team shadow, and they must undergo two phases of combat. In phase sun, they must collaborate to battle enemies while the shadow player uses magics to inhibit or damage their allies, while trying to avoid suspicion. After the sun phase is over, the players pick who they think is the shadow player. If the light players guess right, they get two extra lives when entering the moon phase, and if they guess wrong, they only have one extra life. Regardless of what players guess, the shadow player’s character morphs into a monster with higher health and attack stats and the two light players must band together to defeat them and their shadowy mooks.
That is not a bad structure, but what is the gameplay like? Well, characters automatically move across a teensy chessboard-sized chunk of terrain, doing basic attacks. Meanwhile, the player is tasked with using magic skills to damage, buff, or heal targets, with friendly fire enabled for all players. You use magic by dragging icons onto the chessboard map, which triggers a cooldown before the player can do anything else. And… that’s kind of it. You have a decent collection of abilities, they can be upgraded by using a wide variety of characters, but the game does not strike me as particularly remarkable.
If anything, my persistent impression when going through this game, seeing its relatively low fidelity models on mostly static backgrounds, with fixed 2D character portraits, was that this game felt old. The mobile market has undergone dramatic growth since Genshin hit the scene, and this game feels like it’s still stuck in the era of Little Noah (2015). It’s pretty limited as far as I can tell, has a lot of menu faffing about for a game with only one gameplay type, and… I’m sorry, this is not Fire Emblem.
Yes, yes, Lyn the Centaur is part of the season pass. There are technically Fire Emblem characters haphazardly added here. And the game’s story and art direction can maybe feel like Fire Emblem, but without that, this would just be a whatever generic mobile game. Which leads me to ask… what the hell is this? Why is this here? Why was this released just days after Nintendo announced a real Fire Emblem game for Switch 2? Why release this when Fire Emblem Heroes is still trekking along? Why is it so limited and why does it appear so… dated? Was this just some project DeNA had lying around in their back catalog that they decided to make a Fire Emblem game? Because it sure seems like that. Or a side project made by, like, 20 people.
I don’t know, and after writing this segment, I no longer care. This is not Fire Emblem, it’s just another multiplayer dependent live service thing, and not even a sexy one!
Forza Horizon 6 Announced
(I Still Want Microsoft to Be Erased…)
Whatever respect I had for Microsoft as a gaming company at the start of the year has been effectively erased. Their rampant layoffs, continued cancelations, inability to put out titles of consistent quality, utter disrespect of their own legacy, and enabling of genocide have all made them number one on my gaming shit list. It’s at the point where I think the industry would be better without them, and based on the sheer excess of layoffs they have indulged in, maybe they think that too! I would love to just cut them out of my life, but I rely too much on software that only works in their ecosystem to make that a possibility, and my workplace uses Microsoft’s ‘ecosystem.’
Things changed at Microsoft this year, but they are committed to just prattling along on their usual business, pushing out new tariff-enriched hardware and announcing new games. Like Forza Horizon 6, as Forza Motorsport may be in the grave, but Forza Horizon will continue, as odd as that is. And seeing as how they opted to announce it at the Tokyo Game Show, it’s no surprise that it’s going to be set in Japan. A move that makes sense if one is even tacitly familiar with the concept of Japanese street racing, or Initial D. It’s a good setting, but… if you want to publish a major AAA game set in Japan, why are you having a British developer make it? Actually, strike that. I don’t want a Japanese studio to be so directly associated with an American company responsible for so much malarkey.
Akumako: “Actually Natalie, Microsoft has ended some of their services for the Israeli military, so they are not assisting in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians— at least not as much— anymore. It took months, and this story broke just a few days after Britain, Canada, and Australia all recognized the State of Palestine. So maybe the world, except for the United States, is finally going to start turning on these genocidal fuckwits.”
As a reminder for all you folks in the back rows, Akumako is ‘Persian,’ so this subject hits fairly close to home for her.
Akumako: “Eyup! And just ‘cos they backed down doesn’t mean that they deserve any kudos. They knew what they are doing, and are backing down after being pro-genocide became slightly less fashionable. Well, outside of the Trump administration.”
Yeah, I also hate how politicized the act of being invested in an industry and medium has become nowadays… Anyway, that’s the segment. Forza Horizon 6 is coming to PS5, Xbox Series, and PC in 2026. But if you are principled, I would advise just not engaging with Microsoft’s products.
Akumako: “Beyond acknowledging them and talking about how much you dislike the company?”
Yes!
Progress Report 2025-09-28
Hey, remember when I used to use this segment for actual updates and then got so embarrassed by my dwindling progress this just became a random extra segment? Well, now that I am FINALLY done with Hundred Line, I think I can give you an actual schedule update. Plus, we’re pretty much done with Q3 2025 and… my plans for Q4 are pretty girthy.
- 2025-10-08: Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy Review
- 2025-10-10: Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy Route Reviews
- 2025-10-21: TSF Showcase 2025-12: Turned into a Breast Milk Fountain by a Beautiful Vampire (Original)
- 2025-10-28: TSF Showcase 2025-13: Turned into a Breast Milk Fountain by a Beautiful Vampire (Remake)
- 2025-11-18: FlipWitch: The Forbidden Sex Hex Review
- 2025-11-25: TSF Showcase 2025-14: She Is Me
- 2025-11-??: Pokémon Legends: Z-A Review
- 2025-11-??: TSF Series #019: Suicide for Salvation
- 2025-12-25 Needy Streamer Overdose (Rain Request)
- 2025-12-30: TSF Showcase 2025-15: Trans Venus
- 2025-12-31: Natalie Rambles About 2025 (The Trial of Natalie Neumann)
Now, this is indeed A LOT, but I would like to stress a few things. One, I am no longer playing Hundred Line, which was a major progress block for the past five months, and I had already written 22,000 words of my two part review by the start of this week. Two, my workload will decrease significantly after October 15th, as that is the BIG tax deadline. Three, the caretaking trip that I had planned for October 2025 has been confirmed, and if I am going to be stuck at some house in England, I’m going to spend it writing! Four, I am implementing restrictions on how long Rundowns are allowed to be going forward.
Rundowns will now have a soft cap of 7,500 words, and a hard cap of 10,000 words that can ONLY be exceeded if there was a major gaming showcase. So, for this week, I was allowed to exceed 10,000 words because of State of Play and Tokyo Game Show. However, I will not be able to exceed this limit again until The Game Awards with Rundown (12/14/2025). In the event that a Rundown exceeds 10,000 words, I MUST carry over less pertinent topics into next week’s Rundown.
(In fact, I already did this with a story about the privatization of EA. Because I needed to explain why private equity sucks.)
Akumako: “Are you gonna change your date format so it’s less stupid? You use the YYYY-MM-DD format in these Rundowns’ production files, because you know it’s the best one. So why don’t you use it for the names of these posts?”
Because most of my readers are in the US.
Akumako: “That’s not true. That is not true, at all. Americans make up less than a third of your audience and your number two country is China. Hell, you have been getting more Chinese views over the past few weeks than you have been getting American views.”
…How the hell did that happen?
Akumako: “I dunno! But isn’t that a good thing? Don’t you want your work to be read by a wider group of people? By people belonging to the Objective 21st Century Cultural Zeitgeist that is China?”
Yeah, but… we are getting off track. Those are my plans for 2025, but I do have a list of things I already have scheduled for 2026, where TSF Showcases will be put on the backburner and games will be… well, we’ll see. Here’s my tentative to-do list for 2026 activities:
- 2026-03-06: Natalie Rambles About Pokémon Black (Skillet Request) (15th anniversary of North American release)
- 2026-06-03: re:Dreamer Review #5
- 2026-??-??: TSF Series #020: Chateau del Bitz
- 2026-??-??: Fate/Stay Night (Shiba Request)
- 2026-??-??: A Mirror’s Curse Review
- 2026-??-??: Coffee Buns Review
- 2026-??-??: Thread – A Tale of Identity, Monsters, and College Review
- 2026-07-01: Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp Act 3: Worldly Wonders
Can I accomplish all this? I have no clue! Depends on if I can ease my temptations, avoid getting locked into huge crypto tax projects, and lock the fuck in as I work on actual important shit! …That nobody will ever read, but that’s fine. I do all of this for one person. ME!
2025-09-21: Anime night with the girls, where we wrapped up Data A Live Part 2, including the movie. I FINALLY 100% completed Hundred Line. I thought that with 3 million words, the game would have enough room to answer every question, but it doesn’t. The final route REALLY feels like it was meant to be expanded upon with certain decisions, and I am hoping that the DLC does just that. Also, some of the routes are just bad and wastes of time, genuinely detracting from the experience and detrimental to the characters. Others are a glorious culmination of decades of experiences and 40 years of genre development by veteran genre leaders who were kids when Japanese adventure games started being a thing. I still love the game, it is the best 8/10 that I have ever played, and is going on my top 25 list, right behind Nier: Automata, because they’re kind of the same game. Whatever that means!
2025-09-22: Worked a 10 hour day and had too much brain fog to hunker down on the Hundred Line review like I wanted. Watched Time Leap Gal for the Rundown preamble, because I was genuinely curious about the film, and wrote 500 words of the preamble.
2025-09-23: Uh… I think I somehow managed to write 3,500 words today despite being busy with an 11/12 hour work day. How TF did that happen?
2025-09-24: Wrote 2,500 words for the State of Play showcase stuff. Checked out Fire Emblem Shadows, realized it was bad, wrote 600 words.
2025-09-25: I wound up working consistently from 10:30 in the morning to 1:20 in the morning, only taking breaks for dishes and exercise. Then I did assemblies, because that’s also part of my job. So I did not have ANY time to write anything.
2025-09-25: I was really wiped from the work I did last night, and getting bad sleep for the past few nights. I even had to take a nap after finishing up work for the day! Edited this Rundown and prepared the header image. Wrote 1,700 words for next week’s Rundown, explaining the evils of private equity in terms a child can understand. (I INTENTIONALLY write at an 8th grade level!) And wrote maybe 300 words for Hundred Line’s review.
2025-09-26: GARF! Wrote another 700 words to finish up the current draft of the Hundred Line review, but it will take a hot minute to revise this 24k word BEAST. I had some focus issues, so I started on the 1,000 word preamble for next week’s Rundown, but kept getting distracted by Skillet. I love that girl, but she just hits my brain in a way that turns me into the Chattiest Nattie there ever was. I could genuinely talk to her for 12 hours straight and not get sick of her.