Ralizah

@SplooshDmg I love XC3. One of the best JRPGs I've ever played. Especially the way it centers human experience at every level of the writing, with even the rather dramatic final revelations working well on the level of analogy. Which is, IMO, the highest possible function of fantasy writing, because otherwise you're literally just making stuff up for no reason.

It also fixed nearly every structural issue that cropped up in previous games.

No game is perfect, but it's easy top ten of all time material for me. It really blew me away.

If you liked XC1's habit of characters babbling on about arcane fantasy metaphysics and/or wanted XC3 to be a comic book-style crossover event instead of the thoughtful fable it wound up being, you might like it. It's intended to wrap up the inane Klaus mythology from the first two games.

Although Moebius are still in it. This IS set in Aionios, after all.

So, on a writing level, I'm deeply disappointed with it so far. Thankfully, the gameplay is still pretty much perfect, so I think I'm going to take it slow and enjoy the exploration/side-questing/battles before pressing the story onward.

Persona 3 Portable tonight. Will probably also dip into Splatoon 3 and Advance Wars as well. Maybe a bit of XC3: Future Redeemed on the side.

I don't blame them for 'remaining committed' during the appeals process. You don't spend this long working out a deal and then just abandon it without going through the processes available to you.

Once the acquisition has formally crashed and burned, though, Microsoft seriously needs to re-evaluate its strategy with Xbox, because what they're doing isn't working. Especially not when their primary competitor will use every dirty trick in the book to remain dominant.

Among other things:

• Work out smaller-scale acquisitions that'll slip under the radar.
• Form partnerships with other companies to supplement their published output, like Nintendo does.
• Whip their existing developers into shape instead of allowing them to waste years on weird non-starters like Everwild, even if that means replacing them with more productive talent.
• And, crucially, actually fight for their share of the market like Sony does, even if that means engaging in underhanded deals to achieve that goal. Phil Spencer keeps bringing friendship bracelets to gun fights.

Microsoft has all the money in the world, but if the people leading the Xbox division don't have fire in their bellies, nothing will change.

@NEStalgia He does indeed give me strong westaboo vibes. I'll almost be disappointed if he doesn't wear a cowboy hat and interject random English words into his otherwise fluent string of Japanese in his personal life.

Well, Platinum and Capcom know what they want their games to be. They don't need to wildly flail around and change the genre of their flagship series with new entries.

Some amount of change is expected from entry to entry in Final Fantasy. Some are more story-heavy, some are more linear, etc. But they all feel like JRPGs. Yet people who just want [insert brand name] to succeed feel the need to gaslight naysayers and act like mainline single-player Final Fantasy titles being grimdark character action games is within the expected level of change for this series.

At least the FF7 Remake series is still a thing.

A weird rhythm platformer/Dreamcast throwback that dropped day one on a popular subscription service didn't sell well? Color me shocked.

@Snake_V5 I won't even buy Game Pass titles on other platforms. There have been at least a few indies that I didn't buy simply because they went to Game Pass at launch.

I'm a person who follows incentives. Same reason I don't buy Playstation games at launch anymore: I know they'll go down to $10 in a sale before too long.

@SplooshDmg I modded out the energy requirements for the power cores pretty quickly, but I just kept finding aspects of the game I wanted to change via mods, and eventually realized I'd destroyed all semblance of game balance in the process. At that point, you have to ask yourself hard questions about why you're even playing the game in the first place.

Skyrim was heavily modded as well, but I wasn't messing with the core mechanics and balancing of the game, so it turned out fine. It was mostly adding on extreme content to accompany my evil edgelord of a character, anyway. Like, the game allows you to purchase a torture chamber, but doesn't give you all that much to do in it.

@NEStalgia Yoshi-P would agree. He feels very uncomfortable with 'Japanese-ness' being identified with his games, and calling something a JRPG is taken as a slur. If you think about it from that direction, Final Fantasy XVI really is the perfect Playstation exclusive.

@mousieone Watching sports, in any capacity, confuses me. If you don't have some sort of vested interest in one side winning (via betting, being related to someone on the team, etc.), why would you care who wins at all? As far as I can tell, the proper response is to tribalistically cheer for whichever team is representing your state, college, etc., but it's not like you're personally getting anything out of it.

There's also so much downtime in professional sports. Particularly football. Every time the channel would flash past an event, the players would all just be standing around, and announcers would talk in the background. I'd watch for a moment, grow deeply bored, and change the channel. Turn it back an hour later, and the players are in a different position on the field, still just standing around not doing anything. I made the joke to a sports-appreciating family member that it was like an activity populated entirely by Weeping Angels, who would do stuff when you happened to be on another station, but they didn't appreciate what I was trying to say.

@SplooshDmg I could understand getting invested in sports if you enjoy playing them, but sports CULTURE and fandom absolutely baffle me. And not in a "I don't get the appeal" sort of way, but more in a "I feel like I'm surrounded by aliens" sort of way.

Tbh, I never played Fallout 76, as I couldn't get on board with the idea of an online Fallout game. But yeah, FO4 comes out, and, like, despite being vastly more demanding, it doesn't really look all that much better than the previous games, and power armor is suddenly mecha that requires power, and everyone wants you to run around crafting stuff all the time, and I just couldn't do it, man.

I know there's some crafting in Starfield, but I'm hoping it's less intrusive and more intuitive.

@SplooshDmg Nothing comes close to Tears of the Kingdom for me, but between Sony and Microsoft's upcoming slate of games, Starfield is the exclusive I'm most interested in.

I finally managed to snag a decent GPU for my new rig this month, which I upgraded the other components for during the pandemic. It's now Starfield ready. I've built my last three rigs around the need to play Bethesda's newest RPGs at 60fps at launch (Skyrim, Fallout 4, and now Starfield). But Fallout 4 was so bad I quit playing it halfway and never booted it up again, which sucks, because I put hundreds of hours into Skyrim and FO3.

I want to be excited, and I'm giving them one more chance to win me over like they did with their seventh-gen games.

You can buy most of their games for $18 outright a few months after launch. Who in their right mind is going to pay that per month?

It's a Bethesda game. You're lucky if it runs at 30fps at launch.

They can't stop me from trying for 60fps on PC, though. I'll crank up FSR and run on lower settings if need be.

@mousieone Well, if you don't show stuff, people get antsy and say your platform has no games.

IMO they need better communication between the developer and Xbox corporate managers. They would have known for a long time now that the game wasn't going to be ready for primetime by May.

If they were unsure on the date, they could have announced the release as being in June/July/whatever the worst case scenario date ended up being, and then just pulled back on the date to something sooner if the project was running ahead of schedule.

Almost any solution would have been better than "our single-player open world shooter is going to launch with an always-online requirement and without any sort of performance mode on our 12 TF console." It's ludicrous.

@SplooshDmg The poor folks at Bethesda have inherited the responsibility of almost single-handedly making up for the near complete dearth of other first-party content on Xbox, lol.

They really should have just delayed it again. Xbox owners are used to going long stretches of time without new exclusive games to play; they can manage. But launching it in May in this state, and right next to a couple of blockbuster releases like Zelda and Star Wars? It's being sent out to die.

Fully expecting Starfield to be a mess at launch as well. It wouldn't be a Bethesda RPG if it wasn't. Complete with a 30fps cap on XSX to maintain parity with the struggling Series S version.

@BrilliantBill I feel character design and the general look of the gameplay are more to blame. The characters look like the random sort of focus-tested designs you'd get from a large studio. Too many of the enemies don't look or behave sufficiently vampiric. Your dull heroes have superpowers. The combat looks very looter shooter-y to me.

In terms of image quality, I do think the unimpressive lighting makes this look worse than it otherwise would.

Haha, literally all of the Youtube comments are just making fun of the person playing the game.

While I like the concept, nothing about the game in execution has ever looked interesting. Which is a huge shame, because a vampire-themed horror FPS could have been a great thing.

I'll agree that it's probably for the best to focus on what IS hitting Xbox, instead of fixating on publishers that don't want to support the platform.

@SplooshDmg FFXII was awesome, and felt like a true evolution of the franchise. Almost proto-Xenoblade in terms of its gameplay and environmental scope. It also demonstrated that the series could attempt a more grounded, politics-heavy storyline while still feeling like Final Fantasy, which is more than I can say for XVI so far.

XIII took every problem I had with X (weird characters; lack of exploration, towns, etc; excessive narrative railroading) and made them 100x worse, while tacking on new problems as well. I never even bothered playing the sequels.

@SplooshDmg Getting FFXIII at launch, and then playing it when I got home from school on my 360 will always be one of my most vivid memories of pure disappointment.

They haven't released a good numbered single player entry since 2006. :/

Never heard of this, but the character models sort of look like they were ripped from the cinematics in a Dreamcast game.

I noticed that yesterday.

All the same to me. It's not like I'll be playing Xbox-adjacent games outside of GP, and playing the PC versions of games on the service still seems to do the trick.

I'm dying to see this running natively on the Switch. I might even spring for it. I just know I'll love my ugly baby.

Loop Hero is one of those games I'm vaguely curious about, but not enough to actually buy. So it'll be nice to have a version I can try out on Game Pass.

Did this today. Only needed two achievements in Ben10 for some reason.

They need to consolidate reward tracking for PC Game Pass users. Currently, I use a Microsoft Rewards app on my PC, a Microsoft Rewards dashboard/extension access via PC browser, an Xbox app on mobile, and a Game Pass app on mobile to manage all of my various rewards. There are various things I can and can't access on each. So stupid.

The front is a little too busy for my liking. I'll stick with the pretty blue one I bought on sale.

Nice top pick. REmake is a masterpiece: one of the greatest and most atmospheric survival horror games ever made.

@SplooshDmg I agree that if more games are coming, they're coming via GP. Square-Enix doesn't seem to consider ports profitable outside of those deals.

The real question is whether Microsoft is even game or not. If engagement with their titles is low on Game Pass, there's not much incentive for Microsoft to keep funneling money their way.

It works both ways, though. There's likely a reason Microsoft seems to keep renegotiating to keep the Yakuza games up on the service.

When it comes to Atlus, once the inevitable SMT V ports happen, I'm curious to see if those hit the service or not.

I'm guessing sales and overall engagement with the games that have come over, like Octopath 1, DQXI S, and Crisis Core, must have been pretty bad for S-E to not even consider cheap ports of former Switch exclusives on Xbox to be potentially profitable.

@GeeEssEff I wasn't implying that Microsoft was behaving altruistically with regard to indie developers. All of these companies are machines designed to generate a profit. ESPECIALLY Microsoft. I'm just pointing out that there's a big difference between how Microsoft and Sony are tackling timed exclusives this gen. Comparing some of the biggest releases in the industry to a smattering of indies seems... disingenuous.

They (ironically) attempted to lock down Starfield. They've locked down multiple Final Fantasy games. They're likely going to lock down Dragon Quest XII. And probably made attempts at many other games as well. Sony's strategy since the PS1 has been pretty consistent, in this regard: maintain dominance by starving the competition.

I opened by acknowledging they've all done this sort of thing in the past. Microsoft in the 360 era. Nintendo was pretty ruthless in the early 90s. No company has clean hands, in this regard. I just think it's silly to invoke the past sins of competitors to justify Sony's hyper-aggressive behavior now.

For the record, I wouldn't describe Sony as "anti-consumer." That's a silly buzzword that doesn't mean much of anything.

@GeeEssEff All of the big three has snapped up timed exclusivity for a variety of titles over the years. If you're asking why it's a bigger deal for Sony to systematically attempt to lock down as many of the biggest releases of the generation as possible in order to damage the viability of the competition than for Microsoft to boost a few indies with Game Pass deals (which tend to not remain exclusive indefinitely), I think the answer is self-evident. When Sony can't get exclusivity, they start making deals for exclusive content or preferential treatment for their platform, as seen with multiple Call of Duty games, Hogwarts Legacy, etc.

@Sebatrox Nintendo publishes a lot of games every year of various quality and belonging to various genres. None of them being the sort of pick me, cinematic TGA-bait that has come to almost exclusivity define Sony's output.

Metroid Prime Remastered scored extremely well. TotK almost certainly will as well. That'll help balance out stuff like Kirby and Fire Emblem that hasn't scored as well this year.

Ports of the 3DS duology would be huge. Especially considering the looming eShop closure.

I'd love if they took the opportunity to polish up SMT IV a bit. It's so close to being an amazing game.

IV: A is already polished and amazing, so no need to make any real changes.

@NEStalgia Disgaea has been quite successful on Switch, as have many similar games from other companies. A Game Pass deal isn't going to solve their real problem, which is that they've oversaturated the market with Disgaea games in recent years and failed to evolve the series in such a way as to expand the appeal of the series.

@BleedingDreamer Yep, on GameCube, which was remastered for modern platforms years ago. It's one of the best remakes of all time.

RE4 has aged incredibly gracefully.

This remake obviously looks better, but after playing the demo, I don't think it's worth buying at full price. It's not the night and day difference you got with the remakes for the first three games.

It'll go to Game Pass at some point. I'll play it then.

Probably won't bother with it. 2D fighters aren't really my thing.

@Banjo- So, Moonscars has an achievement for killing enemies by knocking them into spikes, an achievement for stunning a certain number of enemies, and an achievement for dying a certain numbers of times. Extremely early on, you'll be prompted to craft something. I went with this sort of sledgehammer weapon. It made getting the cheevos easy, since hitting enemies with them stunned them, and there are several sections where you can knock them onto spikes. Anyway, once I got to an ideal spot, I just went through an area, killed the enemies, suicided by jumping onto spikes, and then repeated the process a few times.

Then uninstalled the game, since it's not my sort of thing.

I grabbed Paranormasight to go along with Fatal Frame, since they're both games themed around Japanese supernatural subject matter and released on the same day.

I didn't get on with the first Ni no Kuni at all, but it has its fans. Hopefully you enjoy it more than I did.

@Banjo- Took me less than an hour to get four achievements from Moonscars.

Jeez, modern reviewers really don't seem to get on with classic survival horror game design.

Didn't care for the original Ni no Kuni at all. Maybe this one will improve on the problem areas in that game.

Still need to try one of these games.

If FH6 is set in Japan, I probably won't be able to resist playing it. If it runs OK on my computer, that is.

Soul Hackers 2, for sure. It's what I resubbed to play. No interest in the rest.

@EvilSilentFrame I don't even own a modern Xbox console and I'm all over Microsoft Rewards. They're actually super generous with points if you combine web searches/quizzes + Game Pass quests.

Contrast is supposedly a very quick experience, so scoring three achievements in it probably shouldn't take too long.

Supposedly Little Witch doesn't even have achievements.

@Romans12 The ten year deal was to port CoD games to Nintendo systems, not to grant access to Xbox Game Pass.

@Romans12 Game Pass is not on Switch.

@InterceptorAlpha What good TV series does Nintendo have?

@NEStalgia Engage is probably the most tactically satisfying FE game to date. Or at least on par with Conquest. The "weebier" these games get, the more improved their tactical gameplay is.

Mario + Rabbids 2 underperformed because the Nintendo playerbase wised up to Ubisoft's pricing antics. Strangely enough, parading around the first game on sale for $10 with all DLC included made people less willing to part with $100 for the game + all DLC. You literally couldn't go anywhere online without people making "this game will be $10 in a year" comments.

Nintendo fans are less used to and accepting of abusive pricing strategies like this. When we pay full price for a game, we expect it won't be in the bargain bin within the year.

Although it's also true that Switch is wildly oversaturated with SRPGs at this point. I'm actually sort of surprised the genre is still selling as well as it is, given this fact.

As someone who was a pretty big fan of the Xbox 360 (minus the controller), I've given up on the brand when it comes to Japanese games outside of the most mainstream publishers like Capcom and Sega. The player base doesn't seem interested in those games, and Japanese publishers frequently need to be bribed with GP deals to even consider porting their games to the platform. The existence of the Xbox fan who is also into Japanese games is one that is marked by pure, unfettered suffering, which is why you don't see very many of them.

Nintendo either exists or doesn't exist depending on the point these companies are attempting to make. It's silly, but if it keeps them from being sucked into this never-ending legal drama, I doubt they care too much.

@NEStalgia @mousieone It'd be pretty sad if a Wii U-exclusive flop did worse than a flop available on most modern platforms! The funny thing is that I think the Switch remaster somehow did worse, despite nearly everything selling better on Switch. Aside from those twelve people who really wanted a TMS remaster, everyone was over it.

I own both versions of the game, btw.

It's hard to imagine this particular development team getting more work any time soon. Even Atlus' less well-known series, like Etrian Odyssey, still tend to find a passionate niche that love and support them.

I should appreciate their work properly, though. I've only played through the first several dungeons of TMS on Wii U. I'll be playing Soul Hackers 2 soon, and then, afterward, I'll go back and give the Switch version of TMS a proper go.

@HarmanSmith "I know BT is a talented studio (otherwise, Konami wouldn't have chosen them for the Silent Hill remake) but I am not a fan. "

Considering their botched HD collection of the PS2 games and the way they handed the series off to random Western developers to mess with in the seventh gen, I'm not entirely sure I agree with this sentiment.

I do hope Bloober doesn't botch the remake, though. SH2 is a classic and deserves only good things.