Matroska

DQIII. Man, it puts most JRPGs released since the original to shame with the sense of adventure and exploration. It's brought my Veilguard playthrough to a screeching halt.

>"Sparking! Zero is based upon — the Budokai Tenkaichi series"
It's not based upon them, it's the same series. The Sparking series was called Budokai Tenkaichi in the West to tie them into the Budokai series for marketing purposes. You had Sparking, Sparking Neo and Sparking Meteor, which we got as BT1-3.

I really didn't like FFXVI but Ben seems really cool and like he really appreciates and respects his role in it, and the wider gaming community. "60fps, get 'em Torgal!"

@riceNpea I know, every time I see "tidbit" and stuff like that... I guess that's the issue with being an internet journalist, you're just embedded so much in American culture.

@Zemo55 It's a jokey word used in a lighthearted way, like yank and limey. Also, remember, a word is only offensive if you find it offensive. Australians use it in a bantery way, I can't imagine a British person in Australia being surrounded by Aussies as they're taunted with "pom" while crying. It's just a little fun jab, and we do the same back. Like how you're cheekier with your friends than you'd be with a stranger.

@LavenderShroud Well it should be the least English thing since he's using Australian slang (and is Australian, but he's playing it up here because the article's about Australia) whereas the other writers are English. 😄

@breakneck Wow, Astro seems way more recent to me. Time is going way too fast.

As always, some of these discounts are pretty weak. You can get Sonic for just £4 more on Amazon and that's not a discounted price.

@breakneck It was 45% off on Amazon the other day but sold out almost immediately. There are a few games up there that are newer than Metaphor, I think, like Astro Bot.

@Drago201 Well this one isn't even made by the same company. It's just the same Lego license. Everyone seems to think it's the same devs as the other ones. I don't think any of them are that good, but this seems to be an absolutely bare bones game that would basically be a minigame in another game. The others are basically Metroidvania collect 'em ups.

@danzoEX DQ is, and was, way bigger in Japan than CT.

According to Wikipedia:
"Dragon Quest III sold over one million copies on the first day, with almost 300 arrests for truancy among students absent from school to purchase the game.[59] It set sales records by selling 1.1 million game cartridges in Japan within a day[60] and 3 million in a week,[61]"

And Chrono Trigger
"The game was a best-seller in Japan,[140] where two million copies were sold in only two months.[141]"

Both huge successes, both all time greats, but DQ in Japan is on another level. I think the only thing on its level is Monster Hunter.

@Nem It's not what about I consider an indie developer, it means "independent" as in "independent from a major publisher" the same a with indie music and indie films being independent of a major record label and film studio respectively. If you mean "low budget" then just say that - major publishers like Nintendo or Ubisoft can still do low budget games.

Yes the tone is different with Yakuza and Shenmue but they're both massively about exploring the town you're in and getting really familiar with it until it feels like a real place to you. They're both very character focused. They both typically have stories based on getting revenge for something (a classic martial arts movie trope). In Yakuza you could spend hours playing darts and Virtua Fighter before doing some karaoke. It's not just constant fighting. Even the style of combat is similar, very martial arts movie style, very arcadey - Shenmue combat was modified Virtua Fighter.

@Nem The same indie descriptor is meaningless. Cyberpunk 2077 is an indie game. Bastion, which seems like an indie game, is published by Warner Bros, one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. And Yakuza is clearly built on the ideas in Shenmue. You explore an urban location that's depicted in amazing detail. There's an intimate, almost soap opera style to the story, but crossed with a melodramatic martial arts storyline. The gameplay is basically a beat 'em up. You can play various Sega arcade games. There's life sim elements.

The creator of Yakuza, Toshihiro Nagoshi, worked in AM2 for years under Yu Suzuki, the creator of Shenmue. He was even the supervisor on the first Shenmue game. He was the director and producer of Shenmue in the last months of development despite saying prior to that that he wasn't happy how it had turned out. He's said since there's no one he's learned more about game development from than Yu Suzuki.

@Anke Yeah, to be fair, it does do the feeling of a group of friends really well. Well, for me 4 and 5 did. I never really clicked with 3's cast.

@Anke "the joy and life of a Persona."
The joy of everyone becoming depressed and listless before turning into a coffin? Or the joy of miming a gun suicide thousands of times? Or the joy of an abused schoolgirl attempting suicide? I love the Persona series, I was absolutely obsessed with 4 when it came out, but I don't really link joy with them. Also since so much of it is so mundane, boring daily life - intentionally, I know, but still - it doesn't feel full of life, just that it's depicting the more repetitive and regimented elements of it.

@ApostateMage It was on sale for £35 on Amazon yesterday but it seems it's gone back up again now.

@Balaam_
Yes, very generic. All those anime with... whatever this thing is.

@Wario_Waha You're talking about Sony not making their own games but doing deals for things to be exclusives, then saying you love Nintendo even though they're the same. The companies that make Pokémon, Smash Bros, Kirby and Fire Emblem are all made by companies not part of Nintendo but bound to them with certain games through legal contracts. Intelligent Systems, who make FE, have also made Wario Ware and Paper Mario games.

Then you have Nintendo buying up other companies and stopping them making games for other platforms, like Monolith Soft and the Xeno series. And they've been doing exclusivity deals since the NES with Mega Man, Castlevania, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and just about every third party game that didn't appear elsewhere. This is the company that sued the creator of Fire Emblem for leaving Intelligent Systems and making his own game like Fire Emblem for PS1. Imagine if Sony sued Miyazaki for making a game with similar gameplay to Bloodborne for the Switch.

@MrMagic Well Horizon has 600 not 6000 (and already down to 217 peak in the last 24h) so it's, what, 4th lowest if you add it to that list. But yeah, most of them don't do well. Though it's not exactly a direct comparison since this isn't made by the same devs as the other ones, and doesn't have the same type of gameplay - going off Push Square's review anyway.

@Jrs1 To be fair, it can really pay off. BG3 benefitted massively from doing early access and getting a year or so of feedback from thousands of players. And in a way, games that release in a bad state but later get fixed are effectively in early access, like NMS or CP2077. Better to get the jank out the way before release, though, so it doesn't cause a massive controversy like with those two games.

>"all of this could just be referring to content that was cut from Dragon's Dogma 2 during development. Datamines like this can be difficult to read into"
Yeah, like Shin Megami Tensei 3 has the Star Wars theme on the disc, weirdly. There's a great site detailing loads of examples of cut content:
https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor

Anyway, that'd be cool but I'd rather have more story stuff or gameplay additions.

It looks really cool, I love the style of it, but I just checked on Steam and it has a 'very negative' rating now. A quick scan of it suggests people think it has potential but is nowhere near a decent state now and isn't worth the money.

@somnambulance I think it peaked at 600 concurrent players on Stream, whereas DQ, which is below it on the above chart, has 45,000. So yeah, it not doing well. It's probably only up there so relatively high on the physical charts because it's more of a kids game and parents seem to prefer physical rather than putting credit card details into the console.

Then acquire Kojima Productions so we can rename the main character of Death Stranding to Sony Walkman.

>"Spike Chunsoft is also owned by the Kadokawa Corporation, the studio behind titles like Danganronpa."
And Dragon Quest I to V, when it was just Chunsoft.

I get a feeling Legacy of Kain will have aged like milk, but I have nostalgic memories of playing that at my friend's house when I was about 15 so I'll be checking it out. I basically remember it felt like a slightly janky and somewhat desperately edgelordy LttP, but it's one of those games that just stuck in my memory.

It depends on the DLC to me. Shadow of the Erdtree takes 25 hours to finish and 51 to do everything, Astro Bot takes 12 to finish and about 17 to do everything. This DLC is more substantial than a full priced game. It's like The Witcher 3 Blood & Wine too - bigger, longer and better than most non-DLC games. It seems weird to ignore them because of a term that doesn't really sum up what it covers - e.g. Blood & Wine is DLC, so is a bikini in DoA, so is some BGM for DQXI. So with that term we're covering an expansion to game, a skin, and some music - all DLC.

It's not that you need to grind - god knows the encounter rate is high enough to keep you at the right level - but these people aren't buffing or debuffing, and aren't using the different items because they're probably used to FF where you very rarely use items.

Status effects are actually viable to use on bosses too, unlike most RPGs, so like what's basically blindness from FF, and paralysis, silence etc. This version is actually considered easier than previous versions because the game is constantly throwing stat seeds at you and the mechanics have been changed so Wisdom increases spell damage whereas it didn't in previous versions. Classes that were useless before are now actually good.

You can actually beat the game using only the hero, though that does actually involve a lot of grinding...
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/gbc/450388-dragon-warrior-iii/faqs/31969

@get2sammyb Dating sims tend to not have much of a story, if any, you just do daily stuff and basically level up affection. Usually pretty sandboxy. Visual novels are typically massive stories, again just a novel with pics of who's talking, like Fate/stay night (it's twice the length of Lord of the Rings, amazingly) that may have branching paths. I can see why there a crossover in some people's minds because a lot of VNs also have romance stuff.and waifus.

>Visual novels can be fun, but this seems like it’ll run out of steam quite fast
Is Sammy getting "dating sim" and "visual novel" mixed up? Visual novels are, well, novels - but on a computer and with pictures and sometimes choices. This doesn't look like that.

@Northern_munkey Well the situation is cut from different cloth, you could say, because there's only one hardware configuration (as in combinations of different parts) and each game is specifically tailored to that config. Whereas with PCs there are countless combinations not to mention the millions of combinations of software that people could have running. Whereas consoles are a closed system with a known hardware configuration. That's basically the whole point of consoles. You give up on the best hardware and control over the system and software, and in return you get a simple experience that just works for you, right out of the box.

@SilentBluntman Well the reason I picked ME is that it was always just a part 1. It's full of loose ends, and choices that don't do anything until 1 or 2 games later. Of course, yeah, most games are just made as a one-off and then they're like "oh wow, that sold well - let's do more" but when games are released just as a part 1 without calling themselves that, people don't normally mind. Also, think of expansions that are there to finish the story too, like StarCraft Brood War and Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction. And the new Diablo IV one, come to think of it.

As for the cost, bear in mind we're talking like £60 spread out over 3 or 4 years. I'd get it if you paid £60 and the game ended after a bit and said "please pay another £60 to carry on" and kept doing that in quick succession. But this is a series of long games that come out once every 3 or 4 years. Yeah it's £180 in total, but over almost a decade. I don't think people are going to feel the sting of that. I do think they'd feel the sting of a convoluted story that's falling over itself to be meta as f**k while also, for a lot of players, being quite tough and stressful.

@SilentBluntman I don't think it's that. It's not like Mass Effect was called Mass Effect: Part 1. Obviously, we call it ME1 now but it was simply ME at the time. Or, I guess, LotR: Fellowship of the Ring instead of LotR: Part 1. I think the drop-off was a mixture of negative reaction to the plot changes, particularly the time ghosts, and the gameplay being so different - and honestly quite gruelling compared to the original which was pretty smooth sailing.

Also, if I unknowingly bought something which was just part 1, and assuming I actually liked it, I'd be really inclined to buy the next parts when they came out.

@AinsleyE Yeah, and like XII they'll probably have an anchor coming down from the sky rather than have it land on the ground like in the original. It's way too big to land in most places.

@get2sammyb Yeah, of course products being available is the default but it's not the default that they get discounted within days of launch. That shows a critical lack of sales (at least here) rather than simply a healthy supply of products. Within a week retailers are choosing to cut into their own profits to get rid of stock. Even those damn scalpers are doing it and given how greedy they are that's saying something.

The Switch got a fairly slow start, decent but not great, and went on to be the 2nd best selling console of all time, so it can certainly be turned around... But it also wasn't discounted within about a week. I guess you can at least say not selling out AND being discounted is a sign of Sony overestimating the appeal.

@Lofty1985 GPUs that cost twice that much have sold out (within minutes of release in some cases) so it's not just the high price, I'd say, but the combo of price and the perception that the improvements it brings are somewhat lacking

https://www.pcmag.com/news/despite-high-price-nvidias-rtx-4090-sells-out-fast-on-launch-day

You could get half a disc drive with those savings.

I'm more interested in whatever instant classic comes out at the same time and totally overshadows it, like BotW and Elden Ring did before. I mean, with how the timing is lining up with the Switch 2, there is actually a decent chance the next Zelda releases around the time of the next Horizon.

@ECharles Not to speak for him but I can't possibly summon up any interest in what games a group of complete strangers liked. It's like getting hyped to see what Bob from Tennessee's favourite ice cream flavour of the year was. It's not even like we get a written review. Imagine on this site if we got no articles for a year but then suddenly one from an anonymous person saying "I most liked that DBZ game 😀"

@ApostateMage Did you drink the tea at a steady 60fps?

@Czar_Khastik What if they add trophies to the site for reading articles about nothing?

@Ralizah Good point, I somehow missed that he'd said that. He always seems to make mistakes like that.

@dskatter What's the CPU got to do with being Pro enhanced? It has the same CPU as the normal PS5, doesn't it? This game does, however, have a performance and fidelity mode, meaning it only runs at 30fps with the higher quality graphics, so they could have had the Pro do it as fidelity quality but actually at 60fps.

@Savage_Joe "And the biggest indicator of all, Bioware canned all plans for DLC"
Can you find a post where EA talk about their plans for DLC that they then cancelled? Because over a month before the game came out, they said there wouldn't be DLC, it wasn't something said only after release. And at no point did they say they planned for DLC.

And incidentally, the only time I can think where DLC plans have been cancelled was with FFXV. One of the best-selling FFs, having sold over 10 million as of 2022. So even if your fictitious point was true it wouldn't relate to the success of the game. But as far as I can see it, it's not true anyway.

@BIG3 Jesus Christ, that one pic... I mean they're all good but you know the one I mean

@KingPev Obviously microtransactions come into it, but to recoup $76 billion it would take roughly 1.26 billion sales of CoD at $60 per game. To put that into perspective, the original Xbox lost Microsoft somewhere between $5 and $7 billion it was such a flop. They've now lost 11 to 15 times that amount until they make it back - and soon enough to matter. I know it's not just about CoD, but to even break even if it was just down to CoD (just as an example) they'd need to sell 50 million copies of CoD each year for the next 25 years. Well, more than that since a large cut goes to the platform holder. The best selling CoD of all time is apparently Black Ops with 30 million but that's total sales across numerous years, not just in one year.

As we both said, microtransactions are part of it too but we have no way of knowing how profitable they are each year. But we do know that the decision to buy Activision Blizzard was seen as so bad that the higher ranks of MS stepped in and made them release various exclusives on PS5.

@JuiceboxMeister Yeah okay. I wasn't saying "men" in a consciously gender focused way. I'm a man myself. I was just saying it as a default thing - if anything sexist against women as I accidentally assumed it would be mainly men. The main point was it was legislation by people out of touch with what they're legislating about.

@Titntin "Virtually all of the time" isn't the same as "all of the time". Look at the meaning of the word. It means "almost": https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/virtually

It's that choice of words that I read in the article that made me say what I said. If I hadn't read the article I'd have assumed it was a consistent 60 since it's first party and originally on PS4.

It's a bit underwhelming that what was originally a PS4 game, albeit an amazing looking one, still isn't getting a completely consistent 60fps. It seems consoles are doomed to not have 60 across the board. It's a shame they don't offer more specific graphics settings so you could tweak something and get it to stay at 60.

@LifeGirl Yeah, well at least Subsistence. That was the first MGS that had controls I actually felt comfortable with. MGS2 was awful with its weird aiming and shooting controls using the pressure sensitive face buttons.

Rebirth obviously has great music but for me it's arguably not the same thing since the original compositions happened in the 90s for the PS1 FFVII. I mean, if you don't look at it that way, SE could release a game each year with some FFVII music in and every year it should win awards. Just keep releasing slightly different versions of Theatrhythm, a game with dozens of the best pieces of videogame music ever.

This is my surprised face 😐