This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Natalie is Afraid of Commitment!
- Japan Established Indie Games Grant Program (Up to $62,000 USD for Indie Devs Goes A Long Way~!)
- The Subnautica 2 Situation is OVER! (Krafton Lied and Got Punished. Yay~!)
- DLSS 5 Will Turn Your Games Into AI Slop (The AI Enshittification of Life Continues)
- Neptunia Unlimited Announced (It Took A Decade for a New Numbered Neptunia… And It’s Not Even Numbered!)
- Shenmue III Enhanced Announced (You Can’t Enhance A Dead Dog!)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie is Afraid of Commitment!
So, what to talk about this week? How about how I’m becoming dearly afraid of doing things.
As you should probably have picked up by how much I complain about it, I have a very odd work schedule. I start each day not knowing what I will be working on, when I will actually start working, or when work will end. As someone who is very regimented with time, and tries to abide by a schedule, this has been driving me nuts for over five years at this point, but it’s getting worse. The client list keeps getting longer, my boss’s health continues to decline, and it becomes increasingly difficult for me to put a barrier between work and pleasure as I am expected to do more pesky little things for my boss, and I am filled with paranoia about not being able to get things done in time. Basically, my boss has a procrastination fetish. Lots of old people do. While I HATE the idea of procrastinating.
Despite this awkward schedule, I have been trying to focus on my current major project, Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 Act III, which is going pretty well. Anybody who says writing 140,000 words in two and a half months is slow can freely decease themself. I try to focus on this novel, and my Rundowns, as my main thing to do other than working, eating, dishes, exercise, showering, and various chores. However, this is naturally not all that I want to do, and I feel the need to use my time to do something else. My problem is more figuring out what I should do, as I have no shortage of things to do.
I could work on a TSF Showcase despite the series being on hiatus until who knows when. I could read TSF comics so that I can amass more material, references, and genre understanding. I can work on my stupid filing system for artwork. I could play any of the dozens of video games I buy and don’t touch every ding-dong year. I could watch a movie to unwind and amass some inspiration. I’ve heard Together (2025) and The Substance (2024) are good. I could go through some of the recommendations Missy— the time harlot— assigned me like Delicious in Dungeon, Severance, and Chicago (2002). ALL of which could prove to be sources of inspiration for me and affect how I do this, that, or the other thing. I just don’t know!
I have too many things on my plate. it is impossible for me to be bored, as it is for most people— but I try to push them off so that I can focus on writing. If I assign myself a project, like a review or Ramble, that becomes my main objective, and I try to focus on this main objective— and Rundowns— when I am not doing one of my life chores. Except there are times when I don’t feel like writing or working on these objectives, and I just hate when this happens.
It often happens due to overwork, like when I put in a ten-hour day, and don’t feel like pursuing a creative venture. When I finish a chapter at night and don’t feel like beginning another one when it’s, like, a quarter to midnight. When I only have, like, 30 minutes before a meeting, as I cannot get into the zone for writing a novel when I only have 30 minutes. I need an hour at a minimum to get into the zone. Sorry if that makes me a bad writer. Or when I am filled with a burning desire to fucking kill myself so my stupid boss can get my $500,000 USD life insurance policy and retire. That last one doesn’t need an explanation. As a rule, you should not write when you’re rage-suicidal. But you should write when you’re regular suicidal. Some writers say that’s when they do their best work…
So, what am I to do during these moments? Well, that’s a problem for me, as I do not know what to do. I have too many options, am terrified of making the wrong one, and often wind up dicking around like a dumbshit until it is time for me to something else. The half hour gaps between work— caused by my boss running errands, taking 15:00 lunch breaks, and taking calls— are the worst. Because I do not want to commit to anything, as work can begin at any moment, and if a self-described fuck-up of an old man wants to work, then I need him to work. I am NOT ALLOWED to finish anything without his blessings.
It is a disorderly situation that I supplement by microdosing on things that are vaguely productive. Checking my social media feeds for cultural information, talking to friends, checking my RSS, personal email, the gaming discourse proxy that is ResetEra, the TSF bastions of my DeviantArt and Pixiv feeds, watching YouTube/Nebula while doing nebulous stuff. It’s all informative to my brand somehow, it’s all information I’m synthesizing, or fuel that keeps this busted up truck going.
Now, you might be wondering if this is an artifact of working from home and being in the same room for 22 hours a day. (My closet is a different room!) Possibly, but this would not be fixed if I worked an office job. It would be WAY WORSE. I cannot drive, need to rely on public transit, and while I have ready access via the CTA and Yellow Line, that does not neatly get me to everywhere I need to go. I can rely on paratransit, as I am sufficiently disabled for that, but… I do not want to waste an hour waiting for a car to arrive and spend an hour in a car so I can get some place 15 minutes away.
Commuting is a pain in the ass. I would know. I worked in downtown Chicago for two years and had a 20 minute car commute to my doctor’s office job from 2016 to 2020. It adds loading times where I cannot do much of anything other than sit there.
Akumako: “Dafuq you talking about? Don’t you have a phone?”
Ugh. Phones are not productive tools. You can watch things on them, you can read things on them, and you can sorta write things on them— which DOES NOT work with how I format my novels. However, I cannot comfortably do things like that on public transportation for two reasons. One, I get motion sick very easily when focusing on something while on a moving vehicle. It’s been a problem since I was a little kid, and I never grew out of it. Two, I have a complex about being seen doing things in a public place.
When in public, when seen by a large group of strangers, I don’t like projecting a personality. I do not like being seen doing something, or warranting the attention of others. I like to be anonymous, generic, and unseen when in a public setting, and I have a very dated view of phone culture. I do not like being seen using my phone unless it is being used for something practical, like figuring out where someplace is using Google Maps. (If there is a better alternative, please tell me.) If I step aside and use my phone to verify where I am going, or answer a phone call, that is okay, that is a firmly practical use of the technology.
If I am watching something on my phone, reading something, it does not matter what, I would be embarrassed if someone saw it. Because I do not want to express traits. I do not want to be seen. I am incredibly open with myself on Natalie.TF and when with my friends, but I am so fearful of rejection, of committing a faux pas that, when in public, I would FAR rather do nothing than do something.
Akumako: “The hell kind of sense does that make? Do you think anybody who uses their phone on public transit is weird? Do you judge them for what they watch or what they’re doing?”
No, absolutely not. People can watch videos, play games, use a laptop, and do whatever on public transit. They can go nuts. I just have strict rules for myself that I do not impose onto others, and deeply believe myself to be a bad, defective, lazy, stupid, and vehemently unregimented person. Because I have experienced so much self-loathing in my life that the thought of loving myself is unpleasant. I will never make anything great. I CAN never make anything great. But I have a responsibility to produce, to make things, and to chronicle the fact that I existed.
…Also, these rules change depending on the type of vehicle it is and the duration. If I am in a car with someone I know, I have a social responsibility to not use my phone unless it is for strictly practical purposes. If it is a regular bus or train, then the acceptable things I can do is idle or sleep. If I am on a 2 hour bus ride and have my own dedicated seat with a hint of privacy, like what I took in England, you are supposed to be on your phone or doing something. And if you are on an airplane, it is deranged if to sit there, doing nothing. They literally give you a free screen with TV, movies, and music to enjoy. Use it or use your phone to watch, I dunno, a 4 hour video essay on Nobunaga’s Ambition!
Akumako: “Your standards make no sense.”
…I’m illustrating an autistic person’s perspective on the social order of the world. It’s not going to make sense, because it is a wrong interpretation of an illogical system that only makes sense if you go with the flow and shrug things off as being facts of life.
Also, I definitely have childhood trauma from something where I learned the wrong lessons from formative experiences, but that’s true for, like, most people.
Akumako: “You also completely lost track of what you were trying to say here and went into a different topic altogether. Again.”
I sure did! And at 1,500 words, I’m in too deep to pivot. Onto the Rundown~!
Japan Established Indie Games Grant Program
(Up to $62,000 USD for Indie Devs Goes A Long Way~!)
So, here’s a softer story to begin this week with. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry recently launched a new program that will give grants to Japanese independent game developers for creating new IPs. The program, called IP360, will distribute up to 10 million yen (roughly $62,000 USD) to independent developers, including those who are operating as unincorporated individuals. Which seems like a low bar to me, as anybody can make an LLC for a couple hundred bucks in America, but I’m guessing this is a hassle in Japan.
The grant funds cannot exceed half of a game’s eligible costs, but it can be used for oodles of different things. Pre-production, localization, promotion, commissioning artists, traveling abroad to conventions, and “communication expenses.” In order to apply for a grant, a prototype and business plan must be presented, which seems like a pretty small barrier.
Now, ten million yen is not a ton of money, but it goes further in Japan, where the cost of living is lower than a lot of Western countries. How far it goes varies, but depending on the game, it could cover things like multiple localization passes, fund a promotional campaign, and almost pay for two people’s annual wages. For super tiny productions, this could just be the entire localization, art, and sound budget for a lone bedroom programmer. Or it could pay for console ports and promotional materials— like trailers, PR copy, and helping the developers communicate their game to other people.
This sounds like a fantastic program to giving Japanese indie games the final push they need to get out the door, get some attention, and I am glad that this managed to get through.
(For those not in the loop, Japan recently elected a right-wing anti-sleep workaholic prime minister who probably has a closet full of awful opinions. It’s never just one thing with these people.)
Now, this type of arts funding is actually not especially new. A year and a half ago where I did some digging into a critically acclaimed indie game called 1000xResist, finding out that the game had roughly half a million USD in terms of Canadian arts funding. Well, as far as I could tell. It possibly had more! Indie games, despite often being propped up as self-funded ventures, fairly often rely on external funding to get made. Private investors, small publishers, and of course government funding. All of these are important avenues to consider, but I think there needs to be more discussion in how governments can or should prop up their countries’ art programs, as they otherwise risk irrelevance in an international stage increasingly dominated by America and China. It’s a form of soft power that is meant to endear the people of the world through quality popular culture, and some artsy fartsy stuff. If someone does not know ANYTHING about a country, it is trivially easy for them to just shrug them off as an un-place. If they like their cultural exports though, they will treat them with more of reserved hand. I think most of the world is like that with American media.
Sure, arts funding might seem like “frivolous spending,” but would you rather have a country spend money on missiles or freaking video games?
The Subnautica 2 Situation is OVER!
(Krafton Lied and Got Punished. Yay~!)
Well, this is a story that I actually just forgot about, but it’s nice to see things like this have such a public and triumphant follow through.
Back in July 2025, Krafton attempted to take over Subnautica developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment. They fired studio heads Ted Gill, Charlie Cleveland, and Max McGuire, ran what I would generously describe as a smear campaign against them, and put some dude who never even played Subnautica in charge of the studio. Why did they do this? In short, money.
When Krafton acquired Unknown Worlds, they signed a contract with the studio heads promising to pay out a $250 million potential payout package to Gill, Cleveland, and McGuire, along with dozens of other developers. Unknown Worlds was well on their way to meeting the terms of the contract— releasing Subnautica 2 in 2025— and Krafton, naturally, did not want to pony up the money, so they fired the studio heads. I called Krafton a bunch of “liars and thieves” for their utter disregard of contract law, saying “I truly cannot even fathom a scenario where they are in the right.” That was bullish on my part, but after eight months of legal proceeds, the wheels of justice have finally spun a full rotation.
Per Bloomberg, a judge in the Delaware Chancery Court concluded that Krafton violated their contract. Krafton was deliberately trying to avoid paying the founders of Unknown Worlds the amounts outlined in their contract and wrongfully removed them from their positions. Krafton must reinstate Ted Gill as the CEO of Unknown Worlds. The deadline for the $250 million payout has been extended to September 15, 2026 to account for the legal hurdles and loss of key employees as a result of this contract violation, and if Subnautica 2 was on track to be released by the end of 2025 earlier, the game’s probably just an update or two away from a 1.0 launch by now.
I would recommend reading the full story behind this lawsuit, as it is hilarious, describing how Krafton’s CEO Changhan Kim scrambled to get out of this contract by asking ChatGPT. How dumb do you have to be to consult a fucking AI to do crimes? How shriveled does your brain have to be to think, as a millionaire executive, to think that this would not come to bite you in the back? Is there anything more damning you can say about a CEO is that they were stupid enough to enter into an agreement where they had to pay “3.12 for each additional dollar of sales” but to be so bad at leadership, they had to ask a damn LLM how to commit crimes.
What a lark. I hope Krafton has to pay up extra for their incompetence when this is all over and the CEO gets smeared by the Korean media for being criminal scum.
Akumako: “Not likely. Krafton just announced a billion dollar deal with the Korean military, which seems like their attempt at saving face given the timing.”
…WHY IS A GAME PUBLISHER PARTNERING WITH A NATIONAL MILITARY?!?!
Akumako: “The same reason some people try to buy clothes at the soup store~!”
DLSS 5 Will Turn Your Games Into AI Slop
(The AI Enshittification of Life Continues)
I was going to pass this story by, but after seeing how vitriolic a lot of discourse around this has been, I figured that I may as well go on another anti-AI rant. I think I am entitled to one of those a month.
DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, was an interesting technology when it was first revealed, a way to cheat a game’s performance so that games can look better or run better on weaker hardware. It seemed like magic when described, but every time I stopped to look at what it did for games, the more ugly it looked to me. I view clarity and crispness as the two highest virtues when rendering a game, as it is simply easier to process the image, react to what is going on, and distinguish the difference between set dressing and interactables.
To me, DLSS and their fake frames, however good they may look, was always a bandage solution to the problem of game publishers prioritizing graphics over optimization. I truly believe that we have enough power that all games should be able to run at 1080/60 even on an xx60 graphics card, or whatever the AMD equivalent is. 1080/60 has been the goal for well over a decade, and… we as a society should be there for every game. We don’t need games to LOOK better, we need them to RUN better.
We need… we need stuff like the Switch 2 update that just came out, letting you play Switch 1 games in handheld mode as if they were running in TV mode. Which, depending on the game, can be the difference between 720p and 1080p! I won’t use it, because I am not allowing myself to play video games right now, but I am glad to see it regardless.
Instead, the graphical envelop keeps getting pushed, leading a growing number of people to rely on DLSS, leading consoles to incorporate their version of the tech, and leading a lot of footage of these games to feature smeary fake frames. Still, I am fine with it as an option. …The problem is that, with big tech, options are only options until they’re mandatory, and until they become the only way people can play certain games. We’re not there YET, but the more people become reliant on these technologies, the more they can radically change how games are made and how they look. Case in point, Nvidia recently showed off what the next generation of DLSS, DLSS 5, will look like, and it looks awful. Not because it adds fake frames, but because the technology is going well beyond its intended purpose. It’s not just changing the lighting, upping the resolution, or adding frames. It is simply changing the way characters’ faces look.
It’s like they trained an AI on every facial texture in the game, told it to enhance them, and instead it mixed them with an “idealized” face to make the characters look conventionally attractive. In the examples shown, it is blatantly obvious that they are not even making textures sharper or anything. They are simply changing them. Lighting is more uneven to accentuate certain facial features. Eyes are radically transformed to the point where they don’t even look like the same texture, period, and female characters are given both larger lips and makeup. I wish I was making this up, but no. DLSS 5 is marketing itself as a tool to make the women in video games “hotter” by making them look like an airbrushed RealDoll centerfold. (Some people call it yassification, but I don’t know what yass means nowadays, and prefer my 2010s terminology)
This is objectifying, gross, imposes unrealistic beauty standards, looks patently unrealistic— which is exactly what you want in a grounded realistic game— and dumps on the artistic vision of the dev team. The developers put thousands of hours into crafting and making this attractive young woman, and then Nvidia comes in and blends her face with a RealDoll reference to make her look plain by comparison. I hate the people who make those “females beautification” mods for games, and this is just pre-installing it for millions of people, twisting their perceptions of the game, unaware that anything is even being changed.
Okay, so… why do this? Why create something that robs games of their artistic vision and homogenizes its characters based on toxic beauty standards that benefit capitalists above all else? Why, because it benefits Nvidia in other ways, and the tech industry as a whole. DLSS 5 makes games look more like AI slop, and that is the goal. The more AI slop someone sees, the more normalized it will be, the harder it will be for them to discern it, and the less visceral their reaction will be. It will stop being something objectionable and become something you see every day.
This is much of the reason so many companies have been shoving AI down people’s throats, why there is such a strong news cycle around AI, and why investors are shoving money in it. Because they want to make AI a part of life, a necessary utility, and want to destroy people’s ability to distinguish between what is and what is not AI. Governments are posting AI propaganda to normalize the practice. Prominent creators are platforming, sharing, and are generally joyous over AI, as they view it as a tool to help them maintain or expand their influence. It saves them the trouble and effort of actually making something, letting them deliver slop in exchange for eyes, engagement, or just flat out cash.
This has all become overt and obvious to me, and I am constantly aghast at how people choose not to focus on the real ground-level impacts of AI, instead talking about the best model for X, Y, or Z, and how it will benefit “the economy.” Hell, I’m writing this after having to sit through two men gas up AI as a tool for productivity for a full hour while I was doing real work. (I was matching transactions and using my brain to systematically remove 5,000 instances of garbage.)
There is so much hype about the next step for AI, what it is going to do, when it distracts from what it is actually doing, right now, and will keep doing.
AI is raising our electric bills, poisoning our water, polluting our planet, making tech more expensive for the next few years at least, is causing seismic and sudden shifts in our economy as money leaves other industries in order to inflate the AI bubble, destroying thousands if not millions of careers in the process, is being used to systematically murder people in illegal wars, destroying the structure of education for people of all ages, risks depriving a generation of people of critical thinking skills, is making people genuinely INSANE, and eroding the very concept of truth.
Yet we are supposed to give AI a pass just because it promises productivity? Productivity for whom? Productivity for what? Productivity that results in fewer job positions opening up? Productivity that sees employees doing more work for no additional pay? Productivity that leaves behind a massive real unemployment rate? Productivity that means people don’t need to pay artists, actors, graphic designers, programmers, writers, musicians, or anybody in a creative field? Is this what you need? Is this what you want? A world where people are overworked or unable to find work, and more and more people are dependent on trillion-dollar companies? A world where the bottom 80% of humanity ceases to matter in “the real economy” because they only own 20% of all wealth? Because that’s the end goal this is all rushing towards.
Yes, I am all for technology improving the lives of others, but we have seen what happens when people become overly dependent on subscription services. And it SUCKS! AI, in the general case, is not a tool to benefit humanity. It is a tool to benefit the power structure of society, to allow the rich to get richer while the majority of humans are deemed irrelevant.
Stuff like this make me wish I wasn’t trans and had taken shop class. That way, I could harness this rage into something productive. Like blowing up a data center! Because if we want to stop these things from being build… that would definitely help. Blowing up a pipeline works, dude.
…
God, it would be dope if the Boomers were willing to do suicide bombings of the problems their generation created. That would be the MOTHER of all redemption arcs, ya mean?
Neptunia Unlimited Announced
(It Took A Decade for a New Numbered Neptunia… And It’s Not Even Numbered!)
I often look back at my prime Natalie.TF game reviewer era, from 2013 to 2016, as being a major highlight for my relationship with video games. While I had a lot of bad, flippant, or emotional opinions about games during my community college arc, I was also throwing myself into a lot of different games. I played odd games, small games, niche games, and games that I just thought seemed neat, all while undergoing depression and burgeoning post high school gender dysphoria.
I REALLY wish that I could have kept this up, but things became harder for me when I started real college in the latter half of 2016. Then, when I was done with school in December 2019, I had switched over to prioritizing other writings. I actually gave a shit about Rundowns, tried to put out a Ramble each mother, was busy re-editing my novels before writing some more and, well, I sort of let video games fall by the wayside as I suckled Dragalia Lost until the minute it died.
ANYWAY, Neptunia!
Neptunia was my comfort food game series for several years. The series is a cluster of sugary 3 to 7 out of 10 RPGs with fun characters, funny dialogue, colorful graphics, and so-so gameplay. They are by no means a must-play. They do not use their premise of girl-ified game consoles and companies particularly well. And while I reviewed a lot of these games, pretty much every one left me slightly disappointed. Especially the high school zombies one. That one just SUCKED!
I probably have enough Neptunia knowledge and memories in my mind to facilitate a novella-length Ramble, but at this point I don’t really think I can consider myself a true fan of it, as I have not kept up with it. And, well, who can blame me? This series has produced an utter deluge of titles since its inception in 2010, and while I have played ten of them, that’s just a morsel.
Seriously, just look at this list:
Hyperdimension Neptunia (2010)
Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 (2011)
Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory (2012)
Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection (2013)
Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 1 (2013)
Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 2: Sisters Generation (2014)
Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart (2014)
Hyperdimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed (2014)
Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 3: V Generation (2014)
Megadimension Neptunia VII (2015)
MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies (2015)
Superdimension Neptune vs Sega Hard Girls (2015)
Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online (2017)
Megadimension Neptunia VIIR (2017)
Super Neptunia RPG (2018)
Neptunia Virtual Stars (2020)
Neptunia x Senran Kagura: Ninja Wars (2021)
Neptunia: Sisters VS Sisters (2022)
Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution (2023)
Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos (2024)
Admittedly, there are three re-whatevers thrown in there, but that still averages out to one original game every year for 15 years! How can Idea Factory and Compile Heart do this? …By being a bunch of cheapwads, recycling assets, and outsourcing several of these games, mostly to the premium kusoge manufacture Tamsoft.
I am glad that so many Neptunia games have been produced, and that there have been efforts to expand what the series can be. …But the series has felt particularly rudderless without a new “mainline” game to cement what the series is. The last one was Megadimension Neptunia VII (2015), which was later re-whatever’d into Megadimension Neptunia VIIR (2017), and since then… I don’t know which one was meant to be the “next step.”
Super Neptunia RPG was a spin-off developed by another studio, and not a particularly great one. Virtual Stars was a VTuber crossover hack and slash that cosplayed as a shooter. Sisters VS Sisters was an attempt at making an action RPG, but it had spin-off written all over it with its change in focus to the little sister characters. While Game Maker R:Evolution felt the same way. I’m sure there are cool ideas in these entries, but when they come out every year, and every one can be skipped, it’s hard to know what you should experience… and also where you should experience it.
Nowadays, the simultaneous release is the standard. Games come out in Japan, America, Europe, and ROW at the same time, and generally hit every platform in one go, barring some belated ports. Idea Factory is a sizable company with an international branch, Idea Factory International, so they should be able to follow this now standardized release model, right? Wrong!
Every Neptunia game has three release dates. The Japanese release date, the English release date, and the PC release date. I understand that there are production reasons for this and that Idea Factory have always been a fucky operation, but it’s not 2015 anymore, guys. This approach simply leads to lower sales, lower excitement, and makes it even harder to keep track of where the series is at, when games are coming out, and what the reception is.
ANYWAY, Neptunia Unlimited!
A decade after the last mainline game— which was Megadimension Neptunia VII (2015)— Idea Factory has finally announced a new core entry in the series, Neptunia Unlimited. The title is positioned as the first major advancement in the status quo since, well, Neptunia VII. It returns focus to the “console wars” by introducing new characters based on the modern consoles. It shifts away from the “mainline” turn-based combat for an open zone action RPG affair where the big new mechanical innovation is a lack of arena encounters and the ability to fly through areas. Which, in all fairness, is pretty cool. Not enough games let you just fly around. Oh, and there are boss battles in space where your entire party of four fight against a giant enemy. As a noted SPACE enjoyer, I approve.
It generally does not look like a huge step forward for the series— I’d guess this is heavily built off of the last few games— and despite being positioned as a return to form, I think it’s making a few missteps.
Firstly, it is expanding the action-oriented combat system of Sisters VS Sisters and Game Maker R:Evolution, just without the loaded battle zones. Back when I played the games, the Neptunia titles had a nifty position-oriented battle system. You moved characters around a small battlefield, angled their attack radius to hit multiple enemies simultaneously and spread out your teammates to avoid large AOE attacks. Attacks involved a basic combo system that would let players mix regular damage, guard damage, and meter generation. While the games were rarely difficult, their system had just enough tension where you had to move and think about encounters, just a little bit.
It was not particularly unique, but it was a good foundation for a series of very samey games. So seeing them strip this away for something action-oriented is not particularly interesting to me as, well, that has become the default form for the series, and there has not been a turn-based entry since 2018. Sure, turn-based games have less spectacle, but… what are the best selling Neptunia games? The Re;Birth trilogy and Neptunia VII. So why go against something that was never broken? No idea!
Secondly, it is committing the Neptunia problem of introducing a new group of characters, who will likely be forgotten about or relegated to side roles in subsequent games, while the main cast rarely changes. This is a bugbear of mine with the Neptunia series, as I really enjoyed the bit characters throughout the series, and liked playing as them, but they are routinely cut, not mentioned again, and treated as temporary gimmicks. Which is fine if it’s their story, and it is their game— I don’t mind that Segami was a one game character, as she was the de facto protagonist. But other characters have just been forgotten since 2015.
The new characters this time around are meant to represent the current* generation of game consoles, something the series has refrained from doing despite it being 2026. Rouge represents the Switch, Ciel represents the PS5, while Anna and Lot represent the two halves of the Xbox Series X|S. All of which have fine if a bit underwhelming design, but I think the entire existence of these characters is missing the point.
A core idea of Neptunia is that the established characters of Blanc, Noire, and Vert are meant to represent Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox consoles. Efforts were made to update them somewhat in Neptunia VII, giving them Next Forms that better represented the designs of the current consoles. But since then, they have just stopped updating these characters, what they look like, and what they represent. They have been stuck in the WiiPS360 era for 15 years now. I can easily imagine Blanc fighting with her sisters, Rom and Ram, in order to represent the Switch and its Joy-Cons. Updating Noire to represent the PS5 is a bit tricky as… it’s not BLACK. And if you want to represent the Xbox Series S… then progress your characters and give Vert a little sister.
They are clearly not afraid to update or change characters’ designs with a new entry. They did so in Victory and are doing so in Unlimited, so why not make a permanent shift to upgrade the cast around the modern games industry? …Probably the same reason why they are putting out a Switch girl in 2026, and not a Switch 2 girl. Because someone lost the plot!
Anyway, I just needed to vent about that a little bit. I’m probably not going to get back into my beloved Nep-Nep with this entry because of time management issues that I was complaining about in the preamble, but I’m glad to see an effort here.
Neptunia Unlimited will be released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, and Switch 2 on August 27 in Japan. And who knows when it will be out on PC!
Shenmue III Enhanced Announced
(You Can’t Enhance A Dead Dog!)
Oh Shenmue… I really wish that Sega just re-released you and left you by the wayside.
Shenmue (1999) is a deeply important video game in chronicling the history of the medium, and you probably don’t need me to regale you with assorted pop factoids. How it was the most expensive game ever made at the time of its release, how it was so bold and innovative with its time of day system, how it assigned schedules to NPCs, how it attempted to create a truly grounded and lived in world where players could interact with so many things, go anywhere in a small town. It was a truly visionary game that wanted to do SO MUCH, and I would say it definitely had influence on gaming, on game designers, and was in a sense a blurry preview of what games could be.
However, the game also has loads of problems, was a bit too uncompromising in its vision, and in an attempt to create a realistic experience, they made a game that can often feel like a damn job to play. However, by virtue of being a game on the Dreamcast, of being subject to copious amounts of hype, it was heralded as a lost gem, a game that was gone too soon, and one that should have seen its full vision told. …Also, Shenmue II (2001) had a limited Xbox release in 2002, which was WAY better, but nobody played it.
Following this commercial failure, the series was effectively dead. Sega nearly went bankrupt thanks to the Dreamcast, and funding games like Shenmue. The 3D worlds and grounded interactivity of Shenmue failed to seem anywhere near as revolutionary after the PlayStation 2 came out swinging with titles like Grand Theft Auto III (2001). But despite this, lapsed Sega fans still clamored for a Shenmue III, a conclusion to this story, and a follow-up to the pretty buck wild final stretch of Shenmue II.
People wanted this, or at least a re-release of the first two games as… there were probably less than a million copies of Shenmue II in the world. Then, in 2015, Sony made gaming wet dreams real by announcing The Final Fantasy VII Remake and the Kickstarter for Shenmue III. Through the power of hype and fanboys, the game’s Kickstarter went on to break records and amass over $6 million dollars in funding. I would know, I supported it at the time. Why did I do so, when I had never played Shenmue? Well, that has to do with something that… I’m going to call the lost gem effect.
When a game is a critical darling, commercial failure, and generally inaccessible to the wider audience, there is a tendency for gaming enthusiasts to praise it. They gas it up, and celebrate it as a something fantastic, that NEEDS to come back, and that should be more widely praised and acknowledged. This happened a lot in late 2000s online gaming culture, where people would tell these enthusiastic stories about their favorite unsung games and how they want to see them come back in some nebulous way. From RPG heads praising Lufia II to far too many people praising Earthbound, and people waxing poetically about the virtues of Shenmue. Also, see people still salty about how it’s been twenty years since the last good Star Fox or F-Zero game, despite having only played one of them.
It’s easy for people to like the idea of a game more than the game itself. You could say the same thing about pretty much every other facet of nerd culture, but games are inherently a conversation between players and the game. The player puts themself into it to make the game a video game, whereas a movie does not need someone to be a movie. Combined with how young games are, this fact, the fact that you are the experience, makes players extra crazed, extra possessive, when it comes to them and… Shit, I need to get this out in an hour, so let me move on to the next part of this topic.
Shenmue III (2019) is a game made of mistakes. While the drop in interactivity and depth of environments is an expected compromise with time and a Deep Silver budget, Shenmue III utterly failed to be what people wanted it to be. It did not aim to end the story of the series— hell, it barely progressed it in a way that would be audacious even if the game came out in 2003. It had a repetitive structure built around artificially earning money through shitty minigames and gambling, clearly unaware that was a CRITICISM of the first few games. Beyond that… it just lacked the same charm and character in general. I don’t think it is a matter of time and place that made it a bad game. I think it was just bad at a purely conceptual level.
Things could be done to improve the game, such as cutting out some of the grind, some of the numbers, and the slow animations that play out when doing crap like picking flowers or opening a drawer. It was cool how you could do that in 1999, but most people will view a 2019 as a 2019 game. What made it novel once made it a pain in the ass and a bore in this different context, and everything it was trying to do was, well, done better elsewhere. You can call it uncompromising, faithful, and a direct continuation, but context is everything, and the context around this, that it took four years to make a game that still feels like it was stuck in 1999, was not good.
This brings us, of course, to Shenmue III: Enhanced, recently announced for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and PC.
…So, why are they remastering it for modern systems? Well, money is probably the main reason. I have no idea if developer Ys Net is making a Shenmue IV, but if they do, they probably want an excuse to release a new collector’s edition of this game and get it up on more digital stores. Hell, maybe now, almost seven years after the initial release, the developers reconsidered some things and want to change them.
Well, the latter seems partially true given what changes promise. Increased NPC density to make environments feel more lived in. Stamina system adjustments to let players do more in a day. “Reduced money barriers” to get items required to progress in the game. The ability to skip mini cutscenes, which sounds like a godsend. And some menu reworks. All of these sound like good, significant, quality of life changes that should have been added in a patch, yet are now being sold as part of new release. Based on everything I saw from the PR from the above source, this sounds like an improvement.
…But it none of this will fix the fact that so little happens in this game. Shenmue was a slow prologue, a humble beginning, about a hero gaining the skills before setting off on his journey. Shenmue II was the first step of that journey, taking the protagonist to a foreign land, have him amass some allies, and go to some BONKERS places. Shenmue III ends with no closure, no relief, and not even a cool magic sword that promises SOMETHING. The bad guy just wins and gets away AGAIN, a temple gets burnt down, and the cast of characters resume their journey.
Maybe, if you had to wait 18 years to make the next part of a story, you should make that part the final part of the story? If Shenmue III was positioned as the penultimate chapter and ended on a note that hooked people, provided some big revelation, that would be one thing. A great conclusion can redeem a lackluster journey, but they did not do that.
I ultimately want the saga to be completed, because I like it when things are DONE, but I doubt there will be the same love, anticipation, and drive to return to Shenmue even if a theoretical Shenmue IV concludes the story. …Shit, they did an anime adaptation of Shenmue back in 2022, didn’t they? …At that point, why not just end the series with an anime? Closure is closure, dude!
As a last minute extra thing, here’s a mini review of Re:Zero that I wrote for Cassie after watching the first season of the anime. I could just let it live in Discord. …But I wrote it, so it’s getting shoved into this Rundown!
So, all I really knew about Re:Zero for YEARS was that it was an isekai anime with some pretty good character designs that became big when the isekai genre was really gaining steam. What I didn’t know about it was that it was a time loop anime about the protagonist trying to find the best through line for the future, and undergoing an utter deluge of trauma and hardship as a result. This is a subgenre that I personally enjoy, as it feeds into the common fantasy of “if I knew that I would have done things better,” but it takes it to an intense, immediate, extreme by having no reservations about putting the protagonist through the worst shit. Re:Zero can be cruel, it can be relentless, it is fucking mean. But it never does so out of malice or hatred, a desire to see suffering for the sake of it.
The protagonist, Subaru, loves the people he comes to know, wants to protect them, and as he fails, as he dies, he only becomes more committed to protecting them, to do right by them, and grows stronger as a person. Subaru is by no means perfect. He has a lot of hang-ups, personality flaws, and is, at least starting out, a cowardly hothead. He does not always do the right thing. He puts himself before others, does not always respect what they want, and clashes with them in many, many instances.
When he fucks up, and he does a lot, he is punished for it. He suffers emotional damage as people turn away from him and as he witnesses them die. While also undergoing his own share of immense physical pain as his body is mutilated throughout the series. Pain that only matters, that only feels real, because it is given the appropriate weight. The series is not afraid to just MURDER a beloved character, to inflict them with immense psychological damage, or turn them into a frenzied best who can only think about bringing death to their enemies. Which, in a medium that I feel can often be a bit too safe, due to marketability reasons, hits REALLY HARD.
Subaru is constantly tested as he undergoes this trauma. His resolve is weakened, his fill to fight is diminished, and he left unable to console with anyone or express what he has truly been going through. He breaks, he shatters, he has every reason to just GIVE UP. But through his own determination, and especially the kindness of others, he is able to pull through. He is able to keep on fighting, pursuing a better future. A future not only for himself, but for the people he loves.
Pre my reading of it, Re:Zero is ultimately a story of relentless hope in the face of adversity, of willing to do whatever it takes to achieve a good future, and of pushing oneself to newfound limits. Even if they don’t really know what they are doing. Even if the path getting there is full of pain. Which I think is such an amazing through line for a time loop story in general. One that is not necessarily about fixing the past or undoing mistakes, but about making the best future. It treats the pain and suffering with the attention it deserves, and by featuring these lows, the highs of success feel like utter triumphs.
…Which is before getting into everything else that is good about the show. The characters are loveable and I can easily see why such a fandom formed around them, especially Emilia, Ram, and Rem. The animation is fantastic in many of the most meaningful and intense moments of the series, capturing an appropriate level of spectacle and selling the intensity of the scenes. And the Japanese voice actors gave consistently captivating performances. I don’t know what people generally consider to be among the best anime of the 2010s, but if this isn’t up there, something is wrong.
Progress Report 2026-03-22
Here’s something I scrapped from the government funding bit earlier, as it just did not make sense with what I had written, but I think it is still interesting enough to include here.
Side note that’s only semi-related, but a lot of people who talk about how the stimulus checks messed up the US economy during the pandemic are actually referring to the PPP (Payroll Protection Program) Loans and other government relief programs. They are NOT actually talking about the $1,200 checks given to most people. The PPP loans arguably prevented America from undergoing the same economic issues that many other countries faced after the lockdown phase of the ongoing COVID pandemic, and helped out a lot of self-employed people. For example, my father and I both got around $8,000 from PPP loans I applied for— but they were also abused by a lot of people, as the program was so heavily automated with no major oversight. (Also, I helped my other employers apply for similar programs, including a medical provider relief program that returned upwards of $700,000 in funding.)
A significant amount of people either scammed the government by lying, or they did not use these funds to secure payroll. Instead, they used it to gamble away their funds in crypto, stocks, and digital gambling, laying the groundwork and foundation for the gambling epidemic currently plaguing America. Some of these people were just irresponsible, but many were filled with a sort of financial nihilism that made it hard for them to think that the world could ever “return to normal.” With no obligation, with the loan forgiveness process being pretty trivial as far as I recall, they just did whatever with the money.
While I believe in Universal Basic Income, I also recognize that if you give people several thousand dollars meant to last them several months. Some will just use it on dumb nonsense that does not directly help anyone but the wealthy who are already benefitting from a system they helped build. Me? I just used my PPP loans to buy treasury bonds that I sold when Elon “Alt+88” Musk started cosplaying as the president. Then I used that money to pay down my mortgage.
To make UBI work, I worry that certain cultural incentives need to be realigned, and that people need to be willing to invest in things that actually benefit people, or just throw their money in a sensible savings account for a rainy day.
2026-03-15: Finished Re:Zero season one with friends, and GOD what an anime. If I had a younger in my family, and they were 13 or older, I would have them watch it. 4,000 words written for VD2.0 CH 7-09. Got to almost the end, but realized I lacked the gas for a transformation sequence.
2026-03-16: Wrote 2,500 words for the first three Rundown segments. Wrote the 1,500 word preamble as more of a vent piece, as that’s what preambles are nowadays. For worse or for worse!
2026-03-17: Was busy with work from the moment I woke up until like 21:00, barring maybe 90 minutes of true downtime. Still worked through it to write 2,400 words for VD2.0 CH 7-09, finishing a segment. Will I finish this story arc by the end of this week? Eh, I doubt it, as that section is going to be tricky to write and involve me checking out hotels in Cancun for visual reference points.
2026-03-18: Another LONG day, so I just made the header image and edited this dastard.
2026-03-19: Worked from 9:30 until 2:00. Didn’t do SHIT!
2026-03-20: Worked from 9:30 until 3:00. Didn’t do SHIT!
2026-03-21: Woke up late, did chores, worked from 13:00 until 21:00. Hastily made the Neptunia and Shenmue segments, which were 3,000 words of unproofread FEELINGS.
Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report
Current Word Count: 139,565
Estimated Word Count: 250,000
Words Edited: 0
Total Segments: 30
Segments Outlined: 30
Segments Drafted: 16
Segments Edited: 0
Header Images Made: 0
Days Until Deadline: 101