Julius

Some PSVR 2 news coming out of CES:

I didn't watch too many new films in 2021 - amidst the raffle of films making it to cinemas, region exclusive streaming platforms, and COVID scares - and honestly I think you guys have covered a lot of them, but I'd throw Tick, Tick... Boom! into the mix. I'm not typically someone seeking out musicals, but it's Lin-Manuel Miranda's directorial feature film debut and Andrew Garfield gives one heck of a performance, with his singing but especially also with his acting. I'm going to be really surprised if he doesn't get an Oscar nomination for this film.

See, I was thinking along similar lines to begin with, but the base game and the expansion planned are only two of the five "versions" currently available, and if I'm remembering right a sixth "version"/fifth expansion was announced a while ago. I guess it depends on how far they would plan to go with it, if and when it comes to the West, but bundling it all together in one package - assuming they do all of the expansions - when it's done seems like they'd be leaving money on the table unless Nintendo are covering S-E's losses and then some, just considering that the base game is probably a £50 title and the first expansion £20 - £30 based on the Japanese prices above. I also have to imagine that saving it all to drop in one go would take quite a long time due to the translations, which would also see them sitting out on potential earnings by choosing to not release things when they're ready to go. Then again, they could absolutely just be taking advantage of their rabid Japanese audience over there. The more I think about it - especially with DQ not being huge over here in the first place - they have a real mountain to climb in getting it all out over here -- heck, there are zero plans to do this with XIV at any point according to Yoshi-P, and it's the biggest MMO right now. At a push I could see them maybe including the first DLC expansion with the base game, heck maybe even the first two? I know they've released all-in-one packages at separate points for the game in Japan, but they seem to be treating this as a new and entirely separate entity in that regard, I guess they're just waiting to see how well it sells.

Just finished the first episode of The Book of Boba Fett. Scattered thoughts: Overall, a solid but subdued opening episode, hopeful for next week!

Yep, that feels like the best month we've had in a while, solid start to 2022 Can see myself playing all of these: Deep Rock Galactic with friends, Strikers at some point when I feel a Persona itch, and Dirt 5 could maybe help tide me over until Gran Turismo 7 in March

Per Gematsu -- Square Enix has delayed the release of the base game to an ambiguous Summer 2022 slot from it's previous 26th February 2022 release date. The first expansion, The Sleeping Hero and The Guiding Ally, has also been delayed, from Summer 2022 to Fall 2022. On the upside, here's a new trailer to help tide people over: I think we all expect this to come to the West, but question for you all: when do you expect it to be announced and actually release over here? My hope would be we get an announcement at E3 or in the second half of the year for the release of the base game and first expansion here in 2023, but I'm not sure.

Nice, I also ended up in B myself! Would've been nice to have it next month, but I've got plenty of other games to play so I'm probably in the opposite of a rush for it, and it also gives me a bit of time to really look into what I want to pick up for it, outside of the few GBA games I already have lying around.

Belated Merry Christmas everyone, hope you all stayed safe and had a great day Christmas and my birthday are back-to-back, so got a neat little pile of books, films and games from them both (EDIT: and also a GameCube controller and Switch adapter which aren't pictured!): Not related to gifts, but I've spent the last two weeks practicing my baking skills for the first time in a long time, trying to recreate a chocolate clafoutis I last made around a decade ago (with no access to that recipe, I ended up tweaking another one I found based on taste and feel). On Christmas it meant I could bake them for all my family, and they turned out great! Wish I took a picture of the gooey inside, but I was too hungry to wait, so that didn't happen

Nice! Also seems like they're finally sharing the original soundtrack in an official and modern capacity with this chunky two and a half hour playlist:

Well, here is the 2021 update -- more (hopefully) coming in Spring 2022. Surprised they left it this late to give an update like this, but I guess Yoshi-P and co. have also been crazy busy with Endwalker. I've mentioned before that I expected an update, and admire Yoshi-P's candidness and openness here like I do with his XIV updates, especially in calling out the specifics of what they're working on (polish). Seems like they'll be aiming for a late 2022 release based on this message, what they've told us previously (not wanting to show the game again until we were getting closer to release), and it being the 35th anniversary next year. Now whether or not it actually makes next year is another question entirely, COVID is still a real thing and that or a multitude of other factors could cause a further delay to production, but it's nice to think we could be in the home stretch and have a new Final Fantasy to play within a year. To further clarify the game's situation, Imran Khan has shared that pre-COVID, from what he heard it seemed like both Forspoken and XVI would bookend 2021: I don't think is that surprising. Everyone and their mother is (quite understandably) ready to dunk on FF given its history of coming out with news too early, but once VII Remake was brought back into the limelight it was out within a year. Almost as if Square Enix's restructuring worked. And in this year's Famitsu developer comments looking ahead at 2022, Yoshi-P has seemingly clarified they are in the process of polishing the game: I'll just be waiting here, patient but excited, until Spring I guess

Early rumours are that next month's games will be Deep Rock Galactic, Persona 5 Strikers, and Dirt 5. I was planning on picking up Deep Rock Galactic to play with friends anyways, but I'll gladly take any help I can get to convince them to play it Strikers would be great too!

Eh, we'll see. I think it's possible it's not, but I also think this might just be a case of it not being a great entry point to the genre? I'll always appreciate respectful discourse, so thanks I think some of my below point kind of touches on @Sheikah's second: I actually really did love that fourth boss fight! Think I was just tired when I typed it up Actually, speaking of the boss fights, how would everyone rank them? For me it would probably be...

Fifth boss beat last night, great fight. Definitely one of the easier ones I think, but I thought it was really enjoyable in that you needed to pace yourself and fight a bit more smartly than you needed to with some of the other bosses. Credits have rolled, and while overall I enjoyed it, with some excellent highs (some of those bosses have to be up there for me in the Top 10 I've faced, especially the third), it was honestly a bit more of a mixed bag for me than I sense it was for others. It's one of those games where I can see why it clicked for others, and I'm happy to see that it did, but even though the gameplay itself clicked for me, the actual core of the game - going on runs until you drop - really didn't. I do want to speak to the positives first, because there are plenty of them. The boss fights are some of the most exhilarating I've played this year, and I would love a Boss Rush mode to be added at some point down the line -- how it essentially becomes a third person shmup is insane (imagine some of NieR Automata's bosses but much more intense). It's very much a skill-based game, which was perhaps my favourite part of the boss fights, because you really need to get to grips with Selene, as I've mentioned before. Yes, there are OP weapons and such that will put things in your favour, but even then, you're unlikely to be walking all over bosses, and even some of the mini-bosses, without really getting to grips with your weapon and the timing of dodges and jumps. It's one of the best looking and best sounding games on the PS5 so far, and Housemarque did an amazing job at making it feel cohesive, from it's biome variety with native alien fauna, to the sound profile of each biome's inhabitants, and the game simply looks gorgeous. It's yet another experience enhanced greatly by the DualSense's haptics and adaptive triggers, and the game's soundtrack is gripping. Now onto why it just didn't click for me, in terms of the gameplay loop. In part, I think this is because some weapon and perk combos are OP as all heck, so there's less of an incentive to go with what you know rather than something that will demolish everything on sight (see: my experience with the third boss). 99% of the time, parasites and the like seemed kind of useless, and if they weren't, the game did a terrible job of making me want to use them, so the risk-reward nature of the game had little bearing on my playthrough in the end, and along similar lines, as my first roguelike that wasn't a Mystery Dungeon game, I think it doesn't do a great job of explaining things or highlighting things that are going to be particularly helpful (see: my experience with the Astronaut Figurine; also my experience in the penultimate biome, where I accidentally attached a parasite which slowed my dodging and melee recharge time considerably while trying to grapple to a higher platform during battle). I also think the last biome sucked. It really, really sucked, to the point that it almost felt like it was inviting me to sprint from room to room. And - a pretty big one - the mini-map was pretty atrocious. The mini-map is like a bird's-eye view of the map you get from opening up the map from the touchpad, which distorts floors into overlapping where there is no clear overlap. I last count of the times I would head to where some resin was on the mini-map to be left looking up and down to see if it was above or below me, before opening up the map and manipulating it to see it was in a different part of that room all along. I think the major sticking point for me with this game is that I struggle to see why it needed to be a roguelike, because even by roguelike standards (from what I know of other games), there just wasn't enough variety for me on each run. I quite enjoyed the story, but it felt like the story itself was promised part and parcel with the game being a roguelike -- but it could just as well have been a linear game with longer levels consisting of more rooms being included with more paths to head down, and I think could've been a stronger experience because of it. It sucks, because it's one of those rare cases where it sounds like I'm tearing the game apart when I also think it's one of the most exhilarating and visceral gameplay experiences I've had this year, but the loop just didn't work for me, which is the very foundation of this game, so I'm grappling with it a bit. I think it's a tough game to recommend to someone not already pretty deep into gaming - either very good at them, or very interested in the medium - and even then I think it has its flaws -- very high highs, and some middling lows. It just wasn't completely for me in more ways than one, and that's okay. Still, I'm very excited to see what Housemarque does next. I want more boss fights like this please!

Trailer for Attack on Titan: The Final Season - Part Two...

Honestly, anything and everything this game can do to help differentiate itself from Breath of the Wild is only going to be a good thing in my eyes. I have many concerns going into this game, arguably the biggest of which is if my memories of this upcoming game are going to end up getting mixed up with memories of the first game (compounded by the possibility of the open world not changing all that much), so a slight change in tone and a noticeable shift in colour palette could be the way to do it. The first game was very heavy on lighter colours for instance, such as light greens and blues, as well as natural textures of the surroundings; something as simple as making the grass a few shades darker could make a huge difference I feel. It's funny because I think the first trailer for this sequel nailed it thanks to the environments shown: everything just looked visually darker (most of those shots being interior shots helped), which matched the tone of that trailer perfectly. We then start to see Hyrule Castle rumble in a very familiar looking open world, but it taking off almost makes you ask the question of what changes this would bring. There's a lot of reds, shadows, and purples in the trailer, which heavily contrasts against flashes of light (Link's arm, the glowing strands at the start and end of the trailer, etc.). The second trailer starts out with this before we see Link going all Fortnite and dropping in from the sky, which takes us through a few scenes up in the clouds to show off a colour scheme which generally looked even lighter than what we saw in the first game: yellow and golds of trees contrasting against the whites of the clouds, and the blue of the sky. So the potential underground and skies look fresh, but then I think seeing Hyrule at ground level still have that largely unchanged colour palette just really makes me a little nervous about this game's visual identity when compared with the first. Your post also reminded me of some great speculative fan art which came before the second pack of DLC, which I think kind of nails the colour and tonal shift, as well as the weirdness: Like @Sméagol said, some people don't consider that a Zelda game... ...they just consider it a Saturday night.

Oh yeah, I know it's stuff he's heard off the record at a social event, it's just one of those situations where I'd be very surprised if anyone who works at Nintendo would actually turn around and openly say to someone - even in a social setting - that they aren't feeling good about 2022, or doubt that BotW2 is making next year? And if they did -- would Peer actually share it in that situation? Because I'm not sure he would. For me it's nice to see someone saying that basically they haven't heard anything about it being pushed back, but hearing this doesn't really move the needle for me we've already been told to expect BotW2 in 2022, and we can already see from Nintendo's 2022 slate that it's shaping up to be a stacked year. It's just another six months until E3 (holy smokes E3 2021 was already six months ago?!) and then I think we'll have a crystal clear idea on when BotW2 is coming. I'm basically hoping for the best (2022) and preparing for the worst (2023) These two minutes basically sum up how I imagine Schreier when he gets to leak something or fearmonger

Yeah, always loved hearing Peer back when I listened to NVC. It's kind of a nothing statement - the last thing we officially heard about the game was that it was slated for 2022 back at E3, and would there ever be a year where Nintendo isn't excited about their upcoming year? - but it's nice to hear at the very least. I'm going into next year on the fence about whether it releases in 2022 or in 2023, mainly down to COVID impacts, but also it's the kind of project seemingly growing bigger and bigger with the more that we hear about mechanics and their ideas for it, but I'm more than happy to wait. I'll take this over Jason Schreier fearmongering over games like this and Elden Ring getting delayed any day of the week. I guess the trade-off for his contacts in the industry is that he's a bit of a hype killer.

Suikoden is the new hotness confirmed

Final Fantasy VI's Pixel Remaster is coming in February 2022:

You monsters.

Made more progress on Saturday. Third boss reaction: And that fourth boss... This game is goooooood

The PlayStation Plus version of Final Fantasy VII Remake is being made upgradeable to the PS5 version of the game from Wednesday, and Intermission will be 25% off for a limited time. Must be annoying for those that went and bought the game after finding out that the PlayStation Plus PS4 version wouldn't be able to upgrade back near the start of the year.

I don't follow the box office as closely as I used to, but No Way Home has thrown the entire kitchen out -- it's opening weekend (and launch around the world) has been absolutely insane! From Box Office Mojo: So, in summary: Biggest opening weekend for Sony of all time, finally surpassing Spider-Man 3. Instantly the sixth best performing film of 2021 at the box office. Third highest global and domestic opening weekend of all-time, behind Infinity War ($258m / $640m) and Endgame ($357m / $1.22b). It outperformed The Force Awakens in the midst of a pandemic! Speaking of which, and I suppose this goes without saying when you look at the other numbers above: it's the biggest film opening of the pandemic by a loooooong shot. It's the first film to surpass $90m domestically since The Rise of Skywalker did so to round at 2019. Very much deserved in my opinion and a massive shot in the arm for cinema chains I'm sure, but even with how sold out Odeon showings were all day, and just how absolutely packed the Odeon I went to was on a Wednesday (!), I still think it has to be noted how insane this opening has been. It's the most flatfooted I've been by an opening since Jurassic World. I don't expect it to have crazy legs - MCU films are known to be some of the most predictably frontloaded in terms of box office performance - and I think Omicron will likely deter people from repeat viewings (I know that's the case for me -- any year before COVID I would have already been three times at a minimum!), as well as any other restrictions which might be coming our way (i.e. the potential for lockdowns following Christmas). Normally I'd expect it to close somewhere between $1.3b - $1.6b, but it's just so impossible to predict given the circumstances it's released into. Still, kudos to Marvel and Sony for a stellar film, they got it right creatively, commercially, and critically, which is to say they really nailed it. It was a strange experience for me (anyone else got more audience reactions than we seem to get on the UK? Not to complain but it felt bizarre!) but it felt so great to be watching a massive film like this in the cinema, which I haven't done since The Rise of Skywalker (and, you know, which didn't tarnish my affection for a franchise). Can't wait to see where they go with it next!

Yeah, I'd definitely second what @Happenstance said and recommend Brotherhood -- for me it's comfortably in my three favourite anime series. I haven't watched all of the original Fullmetal Alchemist, but it does take a bit more time with setting things up...before they ran out of material and started with the filler/going their own way with the anime. I say this just in case you don't gel with FMA, because FMA:B is a faithful adaptation made after the manga was completed, so they're two shows which start in the same place, have a lot of overlap in cast, but diverge pretty noticeably at a point. If you ever do want to check out Brotherhood, I think it moved from Netflix to Funimation just a few months back. Still, curious to hear you get on with it! I should probably get back to the original series at some point