Julius

I played Judgment back in May after burning out on it last summer in its third chapter, and I think it's up there with 0 and Kiwami 2 in terms of being one of the stronger stories from RGG. It's another great cast, another great protagonist (is Yagami close to the greatness of Kiryu? No, but for a first new protag for them in forever, a solid first attempt), another solid story, plenty of hilarious substories; it's definitely up to the RGG standard. Combat is a little lacking, but well, guess they wanted to strip everything back as much as they could with a new protag. Unfortunately, I also think if you like to really dive in with these games, it's one of the easiest to burnout on. Since Yakuza 5 I've been treating these games like a JRPG and doing as much as I can as soon as it becomes available, especially when it comes to substories and the like, but Judgment simply had too much to offer in this respect – if I'm remembering right, there were 50 Side Cases (basically substories) and 50 Friendship Missions (basically the lighter substories), which compared to the 70 - 80 in bigger games like Yakuza 5, when this is definitely a shorter game by comparison? It meant you had the kitchen sink of side missions thrown at you by the end of the third chapter, at which point I think I'd spent substantially more time on side content than I had on the main story, which wasn't really true for the other games. Made for super weird pacing. Definitely has a better payoff than the other games I'd played before it, though, when it comes to the last few of those, so Also, I've got to say, for a detective story, it was a pretty big letdown in the twists department. In all the Yakuza games I've played, while you might have a general idea of what's going on, there's always some crazy twist out of nowhere which makes it feel more like a soap opera than a balanced story. In Judgment? I wrote down what I thought had happened about a third in and was pretty much spot on. Really looking forward to getting around to Lost Judgment at some point and seeing if they've tightened things up a bit, with a bit more focus I think it should be a great time. Plus, the skateboard would have been a huge help in traversing Judgment, so that's a welcome addition I'm looking forward to

Well at least it'll be easier to find this thread once the title's updated now Yep, lovely artwork, though doesn't quite translate to the box art as well I feel? Also can't help but wonder if we'll see different regional artwork for the box art like we did with the first game. If they make this a trilogy though, having the first game have Link centred (earth) and the second having him off in a top corner (sky), they've got to bring it home and position him at the bottom of the box art – assuming we're getting more than the tease we got a while back of an Underworld in this game, I'm imagining a scuba-diving Link underwater. Anyways, other than the release date and title reveal...honestly, not a great trailer, probably the weakest one it's had so far. I'm sure we'll see more in the coming months, there's still plenty of time (May 12th is close but so, so far!), and good marketing is always a difficult balance to find, but going the Ragnarök route of "we ain't showing you anything, sorry" just seems like a bit of a poor idea when it comes to marketing an open world game. It could work on their favour and blow us away when the game releases with all of the changes which might be present in the world, but I imagine until we got a solid chunk of gameplay, we're going to see a lot of people concerned about not knowing just how different it's going to be. The logo design and opening of the trailer looks like they're delivering on the Zonai stuff from BotW - which is cool, I know this game came about from expanding on DLC ideas, but I was half-convinced they weren't going to touch that stuff - and I've got to say, the title grows on me the more I read it; I know there's been some time travel speculation about the game, but with the title too, it would be pretty cool to see an ancient civilisation torn apart, definitely gives an ominous, almost Pompeii-like vibe to the game. Would be even cooler if there's time travel involved with the present day and puzzles hinting at things, but not seeing how it all plays out until the very end, maybe the destruction of an ancient kingdom either giving rise to, or empowering, present-day Hyrule? Would make it very melancholic! Still very excited for this game, it's safe to say!

A short bit of combat from Game Informer's cover story: Odd to get our first look at a short bit of continuous gameplay like this, but oh well, they know what they're doing looks like GI will be sharing more on Tuesday

The game has got off to a great start: 500k units worldwide in a month and a half!

French site Cdiscount may have potentially leaked the game's release date as being 13th December 2022? Dragon Quest Treasures releases 9th December, so that would seem to be a bit too close, but then again, Square Enix have been releasing games like crazy this year. Heck, towards the end of September they have DioField Chronicle releasing on the 20th before Valkyrie Elysium drops on the 29th. It's also totally possible that this could be a human error for ye olde faithful placeholder date of 31st December being put in as 13th December. Either way, guess we'll just have to wait and see!

Well, it's official, and we'll be getting more on it at next week's Ubisoft Forward: Totally didn't leak. Nope. Ubisoft never leaks. Ever. And here are the previous leaks (and Schreier soft-confirming it for Spring 2023). I'll put the leaks in a spoiler tag, but the main takeaway is that it will supposedly be a return to classic AC.

Well, local campaign co-op has been cancelled, confirmed in a sidenote to a wider Autumn/Winter roadmap being shared for the game: Sucks for those that were waiting for it, and...yikes, that's not a great look any way you cut it.

Yep, that 24 hour Glimwood stream was abysmal, so glad that they're continuing with this doc-style stuff instead, more along the lines of the found footage they used to tease Hisuian Zorua and Zoroark last year which was also great. What I wouldn't give for a Planet Pokémon documentary! Heck, there was an excellent Ultra Beasts video for Pokémon GO last week which was also great, they've really tightened the ship on their marketing I feel over the last year or two: As for Grafaiai...it's fingers give me the creeps UPDATE: and here's a look at Grafaiai in-game;

Well, now we've got a doc-style video for Grafaiai which gives us a proper look at it:

Looks like we'll be getting something more concrete very soon: RGG are having a livestream on 8th September with a "sneak peek trailer". With just how close it is to TGS, I've got to imagine this is a Yakuza 8 teaser, which they can dive into the weeds a bit more on during TGS. I was planning on getting to Yakuza: Like A Dragon soon anyways, so that works out perfectly well for me

Square Enix's TGS schedule is up, and both Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Final Fantasy XVI are going to be there in some capacity, as well as most of the other things currently announced on S-E's docket (apart from DQ III Remake and DQ XII ). Which is to say it looks stacked.

It's a rumour that's been around for years, nothing concrete or official from Nintendo. I think it's been around since the first year of the Switch as a remake rumour because of Prime 4 being announced at the Switch's first E3 in 2017, and it's never gone away. Heck, I'm sure just a straight port was being talked about back when Eurogamer were reporting GameCube Virtual Console before the Switch was revealed back in 2016! When Prime 4 moved over to Retro I seem to remember there was a lot of talk about Retro making a port of Prime for Switch as their kind of audition to get Prime 4? But yeah, just rumours, turned back up in June this year from Grubb again. For me, even with COVID being a factor, considering that Nintendo did essentially nothing for Zelda last year (and most of their other IP for that matter), if anything happens with Metroid I think it's less a case of it being for an anniversary and more just, hey, empty slot, what have we got that's been in the slow cooker. It's frustrating to say the least. I have genuine issues with leakers who ruin announcements for devs (like Schreier), but in the same vein, I'm tired of the nonstop "leak" culture which means we're in a permanent state of ultra-awareness for announcements and such. It just creates more tension with devs - which is so stupidly backwards, if you think about it they never really got the benefit of social media because rumour and leak culture has been a constant - and, well, as if the human race's collective attention span wasn't shot already

So, it's that time again. We didn't get a traditional Direct in June, instead we've seen Nintendo's plans split across multiple Directs throughout the summer to success, but now we're one day away from September kicking off - a month I think most are half expecting a Direct to show up in - the "leakers" are here to "leak" without skipping a beat. From VGC: I feel like September's going to be a looooooong month.

I hadn't checked what time the matches were today, and so wrongly assumed the half game may have been one he was subbed in for and that this match was over. No, he has a hat-trick in the first half, because of course he does. 9 in 5? What's the record for a 38 game season, Salah's 32? And Shearer and Andy Cole's 34 in 42? Unless he gets injured, I'd be very surprised if he doesn't break those records. He's not going to the World Cup for pity's sake. Meaning we'll all be having nightmares thinking about a rested Haaland sprinting at our team's exhausted defenders returning from World Cup duty

In addition to the TGS slate, NIS America have also announced their own Showcase to take place on 7th September. UPDATE:

Another official poster for Andor: Think I prefer the first one, but still, it's nice enough. Saw's hair sure is something, though

These are the games being added at the higher tiers on 20th September. Extra / Premium - Game Catalog Additions: Premium - Classics Catalog Additions:

Feel like this is one of the faster confirmations we've had on free games? But yeah, shocker, 'tis official, with the free games arriving 6th September:

Early review scores are in: And the Digital Foundry tech review is a beefy 50 minutes long: EDIT: watched the Digital Foundry review earlier, in which John kind of squashed any questions over the effort put into this remake. It looks spectacular. Definitely a couple of things I'll be keeping an eye out for when I play through it myself, though. I'm still not a fan of Joel's look, especially his hair; it just looks way too light compared to his original look, much more a light brown than a rougher mix like it was before. There are also a few times in the DF review where John mentions a focus on natural lighting, but didn't really mention the fact that Naughty Dog have changed the lighting in some scenarios entirely by punching a very literal hole in the ceiling which wasn't there before (as shown in some side-by-side shots comparing it to Remastered in the review), so that's something I'll be keeping an eye on too. The atmosphere and tone is something I'm a little worried about, as the muddy greens, greys and browns that the original game felt like it was built on - in the ground and in hazy areas - seem to be pretty much gone.

In this week's month's year's episode of KONAMI - What the hell are they doing!?, apparently they'll be announcing a new game in a beloved series at TGS next month which is not related to Metal Gear, Castlevania, or Silent Hill. I think we all know what this means... it's Suikoden time!

The full TGS streaming schedule is up! All times shown are in JST, so -8 hours for us Brits, so take it from there. This means a lot of the big streams will be around lunch or in the afternoon for us, which is always nice! Curiously, I feel like this TGS might be the first worthwhile one in a while, just given how many of these publishers didn't turn up in some form at Not-E3 or during Gamescom's ONL. Fingers crossed, hopefully that SEGA / Atlus stream treats us to some Yakuza and Persona news...

Always been a fan of Zullie the Witch, who exclusively digs into Souls games in a similar way to Boundary Break as @Cube mentioned (who are awesome!). It's less than a minute long, but my favourite example of hers has to be the Ornstein and Smough fight from Dark Souls, when one of them gets supersized...

Well that's an unfortunate sum of typing stuff with swipe-to-text while rubbing sleep out of my eyes Ahem, I mean, no, I'll double down. Leakers are tum– Schreier has acquired your location

I was going to say I'm not usually, but I just flicked through the last few thread pages and I've been the one posting both the tumour and confirmation since...April? In which case... Now that defending my honour is out of the way... Well, I already own NFS Heat. I played it for a little bit, thought it was fine, but like most NFS games of the last decade, my interest dropped off a cliff after a few hours. Not necessarily a reflection on the game, but if I want to play an open world racing game, I'd rather seek out a Series X just for Forza Horizon Toem has been in my wishlist for a while, always thought it looked incredibly charming, definitely think that's one to check out @drahkon. If you haven't already looked it up, a trailer for your perusal Lastly, Granblue Fantasy Versus has been sitting on my shelf and installed for...a year and a half or so, I think? I picked it up when it was on sale, I haven't played many fighters but I figured, hey, I'm hyped for Relink, might as well get invested in these characters ahead of time outside of the few hours I've spent on the wiki/in the mobile game. And then Relink has just been pushed back time and time again, so it's still just been sitting there, menacingly, on my shelf. I seem to remember Ben Moore really loving the game and just how much character it had, and I remember reading @Hero-of-Time's testimony in the Gaming Diary thread - two years ago I think? What year are we in again? - which is pretty much all I need to want to dive in. So yeah, I'll definitely need to give it a look at some point! But maybe closer to Relink, when that releases in a decade or two I just looked this up and wow, had no idea about that! Not totally shocking considering the company it came from, but big yikes that PlayStation would let them pull stuff like that. Time to go check which edition of the game is sitting on my shelf...

Ragnarök will be Game Informer's next cover story, meaning it's time for some great cover art! You know, I hadn't really thought about it before seeing this cover art, but with Atreus saying in one of the trailers that Kratos should be a General and it looking like there's a battle raging on in the background of the cover art...I wonder if we're actually going to, you know, go to war and live up to the title? Or a wide-scale battle for a setpiece? Because that'd be pretty awesome! EDIT: better look at the cover; There's also a short synopsis of what to expect pertaining to Ragnarök: A lot to break down there, but more accessibility options available from launch is a huge win! Crazy that we're a little over two months away and it feels like we've seen and know nothing. Love it