Julius

Reviews and impressions are going live, and it's sounding like a banger: It's early doors for reviews, but after 20+, the game is currently sitting at 94 on Metacritic and 95 on OpenCritic, making it one of the best reviewed games of the year. What a year it's been for JRPGs, seriously. Hope those hopping in now enjoy it!!

I mean it makes sense in that the entire AAA industry seems to have shifted to Unreal Engine over the course of the last decade (outside of proprietary engines), and Halo moving to UE5 is just one in a very long list of very public announcements of developers moving to the engine: there was CDPR after the whole Cyberpunk 2077 fiasco; Respawn I think have said that they're moving to UE5; The Coalition was one of the first big names to put attach themselves to the engine; Valorant recently had a UE5 announcement; the next Tomb Raider was said to be built in UE5 as far back as 2022; and so on. It's a long list and so they're in good company, I think it only makes sense that the AAA space has started to lean on one particular engine - though I'm not saying that it's necessarily good - especially with how learning a new engine at every new job in an industry which seems hellbent on making every dev jobless at some point was never going to work. Ultimately, it is what 343i, now Halo Studios, decide to make of it. Unreal Engine has seen some great games and some absolutely awful ones in equal measure, and I feel like it was undeniable last gen on UE4 that a good number of games certainly ended up with a similar look and feel, which seems to have pivoted into stronger art direction taking centre stage; Arkham Knight on UE3 looks gorgeous to this day and is still my favourite example that new tech coming in means very little without great workers behind it. Halo Infinite was seemingly a mess in development until Staten came onboard to salvage what he could, but was that on the engine, necessarily? Probably not, it was probably down to 343 just not having a strong idea of what they wanted to achieve with the game, or a realistic way in which to bring that idea to fruition. I think this is a move they've made just to have an engine that simply works (ironic considering it doesn't really feel like anyone's done a great job with UE5 yet, at least if you go off what the Digital Foundry guys believe) – does what it says on the tin, Bob's your uncle, and everyone knows and likes him. I'll need to read up on it more because the biggest question on my mind right now is whether this was a 343/Halo Studios decision, or an Xbox decision. And yes I'm thinking that because surely if it were up to Xbox they should be pushing for Bethesda (Game Studios, not id) to do the same, right? Considering that they're effectively running games on a super old engine and *surprise* it's become even more obviously broken with every new release for like a decade. Fallout 76 and Starfield in particular seemed to launch in absolutely atrocious states. So yeah, Elder Scrolls VI on UE...7, I guess?

Cutscene: "THERE'S A HORDE COMING, GET OUT OF THERE!" me: runs away Game: YOU ARE LEAVING THE MISSION AREA me: "oh maybe I went the wrong way, let's try following the waypoint marker again" Game: leads me into the middle of the horde JUST SAY YOU WANT ME TO FIGHT THEM COME ONNNN

These goddamn crows By far the most annoying enemies in the game and not even joking

While this game has issues - a loooooooot of issues - I'm pretty sure I've reached the last act now, and there's something intangible to it which makes it so easy to drop hour after hour into. I'm 20-something hours in at this point, and it's so far proving to be very moreish. Story has been predictable like I said before (and my previous predictions have already kind of come to pass), but there's an earnestness and honesty in how it presents some romantic relationships which I feel like you just don't really see in a lot of games. Swimming in 7s for sure right now, in much stronger waters than the weak rapids I felt I was swimming in after my first session with the game, and while I'll wait until it's wrapped up to see exactly where I land on it and if it tries to set up a sequel or leaves things a bit more open, there's an obvious enough foundation here which could have been built on very comfortably with a sequel. Right now, I honestly still maintain an opinion I had before starting the game, which I've held since news first came out that PlayStation passed on Bend doing a sequel: this should have been a TLOU spin-off, but not an obvious one. You said it before @Hero-of-Time but they already had a zombie property in TLOU, AND it was one with incredible sales and critical acclaim at that, so I think a true spin-off which dropped the name after they'd worked on a spin-off with the name in Uncharted: Golden Abyss would've been a wise step for the studio in building up their confidence. This game has so many freaks but none of them quite match up to their counterparts in TLOU, and the game is constantly hinting at their evolution, so imagine if the game's credits ended with the audio of a Clicker? There's only so much we know about the early days of the Outbreak in TLOU that something like this set closer to the start of it in a different state with its own set of characters and relationships and a totally different dynamic in the open world would make sense: these freaks are much more manageable at this point. I feel like just having it be tied to another property would demand a level of quality not on show here, but I'm not sure if Bend would have gone for it, which is a real shame. Because there's a level of hubris to this game playing through it now which is incredibly apparent to me after seeing the Days Gone creative director blow his fuse over Deacon being in Astro Bot, as a VIP Bot, which screams that Bend stupidly tried to go it entirely alone and thought they knew better – I'll try to seek out some bits and pieces on development after I complete the game but there's just that vibe to it. There are lessons from other PlayStation first-party games launched before this one which feels like they have been entirely ignored, and whereas, for instance, this game has loading screens galore, I played Ghost of Tsushima at launch on a base PS4 around a year after this dropped and the loading screens were some of the shortest I'd ever seen. I can't remember if I've ever played a first-party PlayStation game with a story emphasis whose cutscenes, and thus story, felt so disconnected and disjointed because of the loading screens and fade-to-blacks which run long, hell I had a fade-to-black yesterday which was so long I thought the game had crashed. Still a mixed bag, but so far it's a fun yet ultimately forgettable mixed bag. If I don't finish this up today I'll probably do so tomorrow

Just got done watching this video... ...in which Bosman brings up Yves Guillemot saying that Nintendo kind of warned Ubisoft that some games are a once-a-generation thing, and in hindsight Ubisoft probably should've held off on releasing Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope until the Switch 2 launch window. I've been thinking about it a bit lately and this video just reinforced the question internally for me: just how many people are holding things back to announce right now until that potential big blowout Switch 2 event? I can't help but think back to the January 2017 Switch presentation and how things like SMT V and Octopath Traveler were some of the biggest commitments we saw coming out of the show. Now? Atlus are likely prepping Persona 3 Reload and Metaphor ReFantazio ports for that launch window, but with how Atlus have seemingly turned their backs on PlayStation team-ups for that sweet Game Pass money, it doesn't seem impossible at all to me that something like Persona 6 could be getting announced here now that the series is on everything. Meanwhile, Square Enix haven't said a peep about the Final Fantasy IX or Tactics remakes which were leaked FOREVER ago in the Nvidia leaks, and while plans change and maybe those projects were even cancelled (I say, knowing full well that IX's 25th anniversary is next year, and I'll be damned if S-E don't do something for it), it's one of those situations where, hey, they're probably waiting for this thing to be announced at this point, right? I imagine it's similar for Dragon Quest XII, because seeing how poorly the series consistently does over here in the West (to the collective chagrin of literally every single JRPG fan outside of Japan), and how poorly the PS5 and Series X|S are doing in Japan, why wouldn't they just wait until the Switch 2 announcement to pull that trigger? And speaking of triggers: Chrono Trigger. 30 next year. HD-2D time. Do that thing S-E. I swear to Magus. DO. THAT. THING. So, outside of Nintendo themselves and straight-up ports, does anyone else have any ideas of other companies or games they feel in their bones are holding back for the announcement of this thing? I'd seriously hate to be the person needing to liaise with these companies to curate third-party support and potentially be turning so many big names away for a big, January 2017 Switch Presentation sort of event, but you just know that their inbox is packed full after the success of the Switch. It well and truly feels like just about anything is on the table this time around.

...aaaaaaaand this now has me questioning whether I still plan to get to Persona 3 Reload before this or just leave it until another time and have Metaphor be my fill of Persona for the year. Thanks Shorty

So, uh, to most people's surprise (including my own), reviews for the game have dropped and it has been received really well! Currently at 87 on Metacritic and 86 on OpenCritic: Some reviews and impressions: Kudos to Bloober and Konami! Very curious to see where the consensus lies after the fog has cleared on whether newcomers should play this or the original.

The game's soundtrack is now up on Spotify! Now to add the jolly vibes of Tite Mites and Marine Serene to my alarm music playlist

Still looking great: Just please don't release that last week of Feb/first week of March, I beg of you!

Shenmue has been on my mind a lot lately, and I'm not really sure why that is. I love the game's soundtrack, and I still listen to this orchestral arrangement on a regular basis: Genuinely one of my favourite non-JRPG OSTs in gaming, which is to say it's one of my favourite OSTs in gaming, period. It's incredibly distinct and just so magical. I loved its vibe, its characters, its earnestness; heck, when I played Shenmue and Shenmue II for the first time, back-to-back with the HD remasters which released back in 2018, I really found some enjoyment in the game's systems and mechanics. There was making the bus on time to get to work, forklift races, spending too much on the gacha machines, standing around waiting for time to pass, waiting out the front of a seedy yakuza office, looking after a cat, hunting down a sailor, brooding over Lan Di. A LOT of brooding over Lan Di. In the second game there was arm wrestling in the docks (my thumb still suffers with the flashbacks!), harassing local kids, hunting down the masters in Hong Kong, making my way through the Kowloon Walled City, which in and of itself feels like an immortal and interactive monument to a city which is no more, and of course, there's that magical meeting and ending. These games are undeniably special, and even with them now feeling like they're somewhat of a proto-Yakuza, to this day there is no experience I've had in gaming which comes close to comparing to the scale and feeling of Shenmue. Despite the fact that I had no nostalgia for the games before playing the remasters in 2018, buoyed on by Shenmue III hype and anticipation, playing Shenmue and Shenmue II back-to-back is one of my favourite experiences in gaming, despite how poorly they've aged in some regards, they're timeless in so many of the others - and most notably, in the intangibles - to me that it's hard to nail down anything more concrete than the feeling that they are special. And yet, I have absolutely no desire to return to Shenmue. It dawned on me eventually the other day that my experience of Shenmue and Shenmue II were so heavily tied into my life at that time – I'd just finished college and was distraught at the prospect of not going to university because of my physical and mental health at the time, and here came along these games, nearly two decades old and just a couple of years younger than me, ready to teleport me away to the cosy vibes of Yokosuka, juxtaposed with the grand adventure I would find myself on in Hong Kong. It was a much-needed escape, like a bowl of soup on a rainy Sunday afternoon, or wrapping yourself in a blanket during the British winter. I just can't bring myself to go back, perhaps in hopes of preserving my appreciation and affinity for my time with those games, but also because they were such an early part of my gaming education that going back to it almost seems unfair and unnecessary. I know deep down that it just won't be the same. So, I ask you N-E: for whatever reasons you may have, are there any games which you love but struggle to return to? Or worse yet, don't think you'll ever return to? Would love to hear your thoughts

I mean, their argument seems sound to me

Started this up tonight as my first themed game for October after agreeing to play it alongside some friends this month a while back (one replaying the game and another also playing for the first time), and, well, yeah, what a mixed bag of a game in these opening 3-4 hours. Regardless of what I say below - and I am coming in straight up with a spicy take and will probably seem a bit harsh on the game, as I feel I always do after a first session - I will be trying my best to see this one through, as I always try to do when I start a game up. While I'm all for giving games a second chance, I feel like I can already see why PlayStation didn't give this one a sequel, because even after all these patches – it's so obviously on a completely different page to the rest of Sony's first-party that I'm honestly shocked that this saw the light of day, and I have to imagine that the reason Bend isn't closed right now is because this game sold incredibly well. I keep thinking this was a 2018 game – this released on 2019?! A year before Part II and Tsushima, and a good bit after the likes of God of War, Spider-Man and Horizon had already hit the PS4. The nicest way I can say this: it feels so much older. I also don't know who thought it was a great idea to name the blonde white female character at the centre of the main character's past in the PlayStation zombie post-ish-kinda-apocalypse game "Sarah", because how stupid can you honestly be to use the EXACT SAME NAME OF A CHARACTER WHO HAS A VERY SIMILAR PURPOSE TO THE STORY FROM THE FREAKING LAST OF US. BEND WHAT ARE YOU DOING. The game's opening was bad – oh cool, it's outbreak day! No wait are these just riots? Did he just say she got stabbed by some random kid? Oh wait no those guys are in hazmat suits I guess it is outbreak day! - and they don't really talk about the Freakers (this world's zombies), like...at all? Which is super bizarre. There was a long-ish loading screen before hitting the home screen, there are these long fade-to-blacks between cutscenes and gameplay and even cutscenes and other cutscenes, and it's all been so weirdly handled so far. I know that it's much better now than it was at launch, supposedly, but I genuinely can't remember the last time I saw so many loading screens - I've seen loading screens BETWEEN cutscenes!!! - in an SIE-published game. Maybe Bloodborne when I played it last year, that game from 2015? The story and characters feel pretty one-note so far, and very predictable, though it's cool to see a protagonist who doesn't mind carrying out some shadier deeds, and I appreciate the sarcasm – being a fan of Sam Witwer before this definitely helps. But anyways, then we have this guy who is supposed to be like a brother to us who I've spent all of 5 minutes with before he's been injured and is now just RPing as a guy from Firewatch, checking in on me while I do all the hard work and he's up in the watchtower? I've had no time to get attached at all to anyone so far. Going into this I'd already been made aware that it does run longer than some other PlayStation first-party games if you're just going through the story, and so it kills me to say this, but 3-4 hours in as I am now...I feel like I've kind of seen most, if not all, of what this game has to offer from a gameplay perspective. Like I said I will be seeing it through and maybe I'm wrong and there's this second map and all this new stuff introduced later on, but so far it is drive from point A to point B, complete mission, refuel; drive from point B to point C, complete mission, refuel; and so on. There's such a lack of variety to the main and side missions so far that it feels incredibly outdated and generic for an open world, you'll get the occasional new thing pop up in the open world to distract you - like getting shot off your bike by a sniper - and then you'll see it again 30 minutes after the first time it happened and just be like "oh, wait, so is this it?" also! Taking out the nests to clear out an area? Very time consuming and I genuinely can't see the benefit, I know it allows for fast travel routes to go through that area and revisiting the area safer, but, uh...just drive around the Freakers? Let's draw some blood from this stone and talk about what I like so far. The recordings coming through the controller is pretty cool? There's some emergent gameplay from time to time, I was getting chased by a small group of zombies and drove off on my bike to guide them towards some guy who had been chasing me for a minute or so; similarly, the wolves also hate noise, so one of the first missions when I was low on ammo I could just aggro enemies into shooting at me and the wolves would chow down on their faces, that was cool. I actually don't mind needing to refuel in and if itself? I think it's there to promote stopping by and doing side activities to get a chance to fill your tank back up, but the problem is I don't think those side activities so far have been particularly interesting. So, yeah, real mixed bag of sorts so far. What's saving this game for me right now is I came in expecting a 7 and it is absolutely swimming in the fact that it's nothing but a 7. And lastly, to put my money where my mouth is on this game being predictable as hell, my predictions:

First sign of a review, per Famitsu and their weird review system: 37/40. This matches Persona 5 Royal (also 37/40), but comes in below the likes of the original Persona 5 (39/40). But yeah that means basically nothing. Of actual interest, though, in line with what we've heard recently about the length of the game, Famitsu are putting this down as 80 hours for the main story and 100 hours including extras. So yeah, a big ol' chunky boi of a game.

Well, seems like the Nintendo case has only made them push even harder, because Krafton have secured a deal with Pocket Pair for the Palworld license to make a mobile game. This news hot off the heels of the PS5 announcement and shadow-drop. They have absolutely zero shame about all of this and it's kind of hilarious

Fast forward to the Switch successor event "...and capable only with the increased power of the Switch 2, we present to you: F-Zero 100"

There's a full list of mods available up on the BG3 mods page, and you can filter by your console or PC to see what's available on your platform of choice. For PS5 so far? A lot of UI stuff, some cool new dice, the Bag of Holding, some new classes and subclasses, plenty more customisation options, weightless gold and other stuff like that, and YOU CAN BE A KUO-TOA Very much hoping to see some more new races and new race appearances added to the mods available on console. Let me finally be my dwarf-sized Dragonborn I wanted to from the start, gosh darn it!

And we finally have a trailer for Music By John Williams: So excited

And, after nearly 52 hours and reaching Level 48, that is a wrap on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Quick and rambled thoughts with no time to sit on how it all wrapped up incoming! Finale and story spoilers For as flawed as I think Rebirth might be - some of the issues with combat from Remake that I had have stuck around, the story elements not from the original can be a bit hit and miss, and the open world I found almost entirely redundant - I've got to say: I had an absolute blast. As for GOTY discussions, well and truly, for me: The music, the characters, the vibe, Cait Sith going from like a D-tier character at best up to a clear and obvious A-tier, the mini-games, the music, the boss fights, the Synergy stuff, the incredibly expensive but also fantastic looking set dressing of an open world, the playability involved when travelling through and from certain areas, just the vast look and feel of this game world and the abundance of people in it and in certain cutscenes, not to mention how well the "camera" is used for some really unique shots and perspectives, and last but not least, let's not forget to mention the music for the third time!! The real winner for me with this game, though, is just how much it has made me want to revisit the original – and so I've got it pencilled in already for a potential replay next year off the back of this. I played this game through once close to a decade ago now and I feel so incredibly strongly about it that I think it's worth a revisit, especially before the final part, because I keenly remember that being the weakest part of it all for me, and where it fell apart in a way some of my other favourite JRPGs haven't. I'm really curious now too to see if they can change my mind about the last act with the final game in the trilogy. Which is all to say: I can't wait for the seemingly inevitable DLC and the third and final entry in this trilogy. It's been a hell of a time, and so for now, until next time, Unknown Journey

Got to acknowledge just how great No Promises to Keep from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth turned out now that I've heard it all in its fully glory: Goes toe-to-toe for me with any of the other vocal FF performances I've heard. The instrumental version you hear bits and pieces of throughout the game is wonderful, too. I'm sure I'll be back with more Rebirth to drop in here when I give everything a listen through track by track, but seriously: when all is said and done, and the trilogy draws to a close, the Final Fantasy VII Remake project as a whole will probably be the greatest collection of songs of any game project. I'm seriously struggling at this point to see how you could make a case for anything else, and I'm also struggling to see how you could one-up what will likely end as a trilogy and two spin-offs (?) packed with music just from a practical production and industry perspective. Just imagine being asked to bring that original Uematsu VII score into a modern game, and not only succeeding, but not putting a single foot wrong and turning some tracks which were already 10s into 11s, injecting new life into the soundscape of VII beyond merely bringing it up-to-date. Freaking insane what they've pulled off so far – "they" of course being Masashi Hamauzu and Mitsuko Suzuki. Deserve their names up in lights

And the monthly Essentials games for October are up:

@drahkon it has arrived: Yeah I have absolutely no idea when I'm getting back to BG3 for a solo run

Bahahahahahahaha Chapter 13 spoils

Yeah, yeah, Call of Duty, we know

So, what's tickling everyone's fancy to pick up for their PlayStation this October? For me, I think this might be the first month in a little while where I don't pick anything up at release. Metaphor ReFantazio I'm saving for Christmas as my big time sink during my time off, whereas for Silent Hill 2 I'm waiting to see how the reviews turn out – and even then I'm weighing up whether I want to play the remake or the original. Maybe Neva? But then there are other indies I want to catch up on which are on sale, too Yeah, between my planned Halloween games and potential going back to indies or making use of PS+, probably a quiet month for me on the pick-ups front!