Matroska

XV has also really damaged the brand. It was so disappointing for so many. Then there was a huge gap of 7 years before this came out. And then I think XVI has put itself in an odd position of not actually being a JRPG but basically fantasy DMC with some open areas, so that's likely to put off older fans and general JRPG fans. So it's going for the casual, mainstream audience - but the gamers I know like that wouldn't touch fantasy stuff, or giant monsters having anime fights, with a 9999 foot bargepole.

I'm enjoying it, especially after some parts where the game stops being Hallway Fantasy XVI and starts letting you explore, starts making the world look like an actual environment and not a corridor that delivers you to the next movie. There are some really magical bits I'm sure I'll remember forever. And then sadly quite a few bits that feel like they're from a PS2 beat 'em up but with shinier graphics.

@MayaMousavi Yeah, exactly. It's like me saying that I spent billions to buy an entire town because a person I don't like was trying to rent a house there, just for a few months perhaps. That would make me sound like a psycho. As you said, they could've just bid more (a lot more) so this notion that it was somehow rational to spend $7.5 billion on a company rather than just bidding higher for exclusives is madness.

@ApostateMage Pretty much. I'm enjoying it but as a TV series, not a game. I got to the first vaguely open area the other day but it's still effectively linear as it has one entrance and one exit, you can't enter any buildings, there are no NPCs, and the only thing to do is kill some enemies and pick up two items.

@Tharsman It's the other way around, really. It's not that people want it because it's the top seller, it's that it's the top seller because people want it. There just isn't a reason to get a Series X over a PC, PS5 or Switch. I don't say this in a fanboy way - I had an Xbox, Dreamcast, Gamecube and a PS2, and I had a 360, Wii and not a PS3. Since then I, and other people I know, haven't seen a reason to carry on getting Xboxes, though. I haven't even seen an XB1 or Series X in real life. It's like Xboxes haven't existed since the 360 for most gamers, and the stats referred to above seem to back that up. The weird thing is that even if this acquisition goes through, you'd still be better off getting a PC over an Xbox. They're in a really odd position.

>"Considering its anime roots"
The origin of the Fate franchise isn't an anime, it's an adult visual novel. Probably the most famous VN to this day. So yeah, it started as hentai, albeit with incredibly detailed lore and world building, and a weird obsession with using sea life similes in sex scenes, if I remember correctly. 😂

@Shadcai Nioh is hard because it's made by Team Ninja. The makers of Ninja Gaiden. Koei Tecmo are just the publisher and the overall company to which Team Ninja belong. This game's being made by another Koei Tecmo subsidiary, Omega Force, who make the Dynasty Warriors games so it'll probably be more like that or one of their various licensed spin-offs like Hyrule Warriors (though they can vary a lot; the Persona 5 one is very different from the Berserk one, for example.)

@Synthatron_Prime "All that talk about the demo being based on an older version was not true."
It is true, you can see the version number in the demo. I guess they just didn't manage to fix it with those patches.

@Feena Yeah, the "it's on bad hardware" defense would make sense if every game on the Switch was a lurching, flickery mess that often drops to sub-HD resolution. It also seems to be describe a very bad state of affairs that I'm not sure a Nintendo fan would mean to imply; that a company can intentionally release weak hardware and then overcharge for it, which leads to their games running and looking awful, still charge prices for them similar to more expensively made games, and then all get forgiven for the game being 27fps at 480p while the shadows flicker like a PS2 game.

The reason for the crappiness is down to them; it's like if I used my foot to steer my car and when I crash into a wall, all my fans say "you can't criticise him for crashing, he was using his foot to steer and it's very difficult to steer like that! Anyone would've crashed!" If it was down to the hardware, that was Nintendo's choice. But as you say TotK is particularly bad.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner It could be that, but it also seems to love employing people that don't seem to be particularly into gaming and just want to vent about whatever the current chip on their shoulder is.

@Mauzuri RPGs naturally have difficulty settings in the sense you can intentionally under-level, not keep your equipment up to date (or just not wear armour), don't upgrade skills, etc. The easy mode of the game is down to equipping certain special accessories, normal mode is simply not equipping those, and an effective hard mode is only using the starter equipment or something along those lines.

There's something off about this implementation of the HD-2D aesthetic. In that first pic, it looks like giant low res cardboard cutouts have been placed in a village. Normally the pixellated sprites and environment blend well to give a kind of FFVI, Romancing Saga 3 or Seiken Densetsu 3 kind of look. This just looks odd, like a realistic-ish PS3 RPG town with giant standees in it.

Much better review than the Guardian which spent a while moaning about how it doesn't have "people of colour", and how people have European features, and how the slaves aren't black (weird complaint). She even complained about them using stereotypical "Oriental" music. Not sure if she thinks the game is American or something. 🤔

I still have concerns about the world feeling fake due to mainly being corridors that are only connected by teleporting around. It's not about it being open world in the genre sense, but just a believable world that feels like an actual place rather than a corridor with plot points every so often. That said, I still can't wait to play it at midnight. I can't do anything else because all I want to do is play it - everything else seems boring.

@Cherip-the-Ripper Brace yourself! Boring, empty and bland world. Almost parody levels of terrible side quests (drive 20 minutes to bring a man some tomatoes from a box in the middle of nowhere). You don't spend any time in your hometown before it's destroyed so have zero attachment, same for your dad dying, the cutscene of it being destroyed is just clips from the movie, right after your dad is killed you're helping a woman collect frogs and racing chocobos. Boring characters that barely change or develop for dozens of hours, their main character moments are removed from the game and sold as DLC.

Terribly told story where you see the main female character for about 20 minutes in the whole game and antagonists with zero development just turn up and die. Awful combat where you just down potions to survive any fight, and you can literally complete the hardest dungeon in the game by holding one button. Only 1 town for most of the game, but the same copy-pasted petrol station over and over. A ridiculous world where there are monsters everywhere and supposedly everyone is scared of them yet everyone wears no armour and lives in places with no walls or defences at all. Enemies bought from asset stores like a cheap Steam game... The list goes on.

Look for Super Eyepatch Wolf's review on YouTube. He totally nails why people don't like it and were so disappointed.

@ApostateMage Yeah, I love XII. I didn't like it at first and actually stopped playing it after getting to the beach area. I tried again and loved it. It does take a while to get to the point where the actual story kicks in, and it makes the mistake of not building up things properly so when they happen, you can't really care. Like, it means something when Barret fight his old friend Dyne because he's Marlene's father. You like Marlene, met her ages ago at that point, and probably realised Barret wasn't her biological father. It's a great payoff. It also coincides with Barret's backstory. In XII Balthier fights and kills his dad but it feels so emotionless and meaningless as there was no build-up or drama around it. But yeah, the feeling of adventure and discovery is amazing.

XVI seems to be the opposite; the story kicks in early, gives you reasons to care early, but has no sense of adventure or discovery as it's completely linear and just teleports you from cutscenes to boss fights. Hopefully that gets better as it goes on.

I think the on-rails nature of the game will be the thing that holds it back in scores, if anything does. In the demo, it's basically 3 boss fights and an on-rails shooter where you can't die, separated by 2 hours of cutscenes that teleport you from place to place. If the game stays like that throughout, that's going to get very old.

The story has me hooked so far but it might as well be a TV series if the gameplay is going to be so infrequent and linear. It should get a bit less like being shepherded between boss fights as the game goes on, though.

Why does Aloy only have 3 fingers on her right hand? Also Kena's more distant eye is larger than her closer one.

@Triumph741 I actually find first-person less immersive. It feels like you're a camera with a gun underneath it, flying around at head height. As you walk around in real life, you can see your arms, not just your hand stuck next to your right cheek. The third-person view gives you a sense of having a body; seeing the hair blowing in the wind or getting wet, seeing the feet slipping on muddy ground as the boots get covered in mud, seeing them get out of breath after sprinting (e.g. BotW). You feel different IRL based on what clothes you're wearing - imagine wearing a high vis vest and helmet compared to a tuxedo and top hat. That's represented in third- but not first-person.

It ties me into the character that represents me, physically, rather than, as I said, feeling like I'm a hovering camera unaffected by the world around me.

This might be quite smartly chosen advertising because it needn't cost that much. They have to pay one guy's wages for a few months and then at whatever it is to include a sword in an exhibition. I can't see that being more than a few thousand. To put an advert on once at prime time in the UK costs up to £35,000 on ITV - and you have to make it first, which can cost up to £250,000.

@KundaliniRising333 Yeah the game pops up a tutorial that says that bit it isn't specific - but it has to be gil, exp and/or better drops. And I saw someone get a unique item named after the boss after defeating Benedikta without taking any hits.

@KundaliniRising333 To be fair, that's pretty standard in gaming. You can cheese bosses in Bloodborne and Elden Ring. You can get really good and complete them at level 1 or you can overlevel and/or summon help and/or cheese encounters. In any FF, you can get by just using basic attacks and healing when needed - you very rarely have to even do something as "deep" as exploit elemental weaknesses. Being good at a game is always something you do because you want to, not because you have to. Why get so good you can complete Halo on Legendary when you could just be crap and play on Easy? Because you want to. It's the same with XVI.

And to be fair to XVI, the game rewards you based on how well you play. Pretty sure you get more exp and gil, and you get better drops. Major bosses even give you a unique reward if you don't get hit at all.

@ChrisDeku And also that if it's not his religion, it's cartoonish or fantasy but when it's his it's different. Imagine if in God of War, you killed Jesus and his disciples - he'd have a stroke.

I've had my eye on Carto for a while. It looks like a nice, comfy game. Other games that stand out to me, I've already played. The Peppa Pig game could be good when my nephew and nieces come around. Usually they play the Sackboy game so it'll be nice to eventually see something different (though he, only 6, does like SF6 and Elden Ring, a good sign for his future tastes as a gamer 😆)

@Zoidpilot4 Look in the mirror and say "Jim Ryan" five times and he'll appear.

Companies always seem unnecessarily worried about this, then act erratically. You have Square changing FFIV and FFVI to FFII and FFIII in America because they were the second and third to be released there, but then calling FFVII by its actual name even though it was the fourth - and the first in Europe.

Then the same company, having decided it's okay for FF to be numbered properly, removes numbers from Dragon Quest in the west with the rereleases on DS, and VIII - but then calls XI and XII by their numbered names. Even things like Diablo III's logo having the III be a subtle background element behind the word 'Diablo' to try and make it look like the first in the series to those not familiar with it.

I can't believe Clive is killed by Voldemort. And Cid was a ghost all along!

@NEStalgia Yeah, they always feel like real adventures whereas some JRPGs feel like you're just hiking around while fighting animals (and as much as I liked the story, lore and characters, FFXVI so far is just being teleported between battle arenas and cutscenes.) I like how some have mutually exclusive characters and various endings for them.

@Gitface I know this is controversial but I never liked Kefka. It's so impersonal with him as far as I remember. He just does stuff because he feels like it and you're just one of many of those affected. Still, at least he does some really significant stuff and is around for a lot of the game, unlike Ultimecia who just pops up at the end.

@Juanalf It could just be what they did with FFVII where they said Square could have a larger share of profits than Nintendo had allowed them. Not to mention how they've been paying to promote it as it was a new Uncharted or Horizon.

@Nepp67 She's from a tech demo from 11 years ago that has absolutely nothing to do with FFXVI other than obviously being a hypothetical FF game. That pic isn't the cover art, I think it's just something Sammy googled up and didn't realise she's not from XVI.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UVX0OUO9ptU&

@mariomaster96 I was thinking that. It'd be like if Rebirth's articles had Cloud next to Zell from FFVIII. I wonder if he thinks she's from XVI...

@ApostateMage I know what you mean. Sometimes they were impressive but not always. One thing is the NPCs are done to a similar standard to the main characters - usually they look much more basic (like in X they were basically mannequins with the clothes drawn on) so that's cool. I was disappointed in some environments too. The throne room and a room Joshua's in later were really bland and basic. Kind of like locations in massive open world game rather than a hyper linear experience with no optional areas.

I can't wait for the full game because I can't wait to kill a certain backstabbing you-know-who (though I doubt that'll happen; there'll be some other form of justice). Maybe a controversial opinion but the FF series often has pretty weak villains in terms of you actually wanting to kill them - some notable exceptions like, of course, Sephiroth - but some are either just basic sketches of characters or too silly to take seriously. This character in XVI is nowhere near being the main villain and yet I can't wait to see them get their comeuppance.

@__Seraph They lost billions on the original Xbox it sold so badly, and I guess they just kept on going like that. It's less like they entered the entertainment industry and more like they just try to trick people into giving them money by manipulating perceptions. All companies do that but they also back it up with actual reasons to part with your money rather than deceptive, pretend reasons.

I mean... It's pretty desperate when you have to pay or legally bind people to pretend your console is more worthwhile than it really is. Put that effort into making games instead of pretending you have exclusives, Phil.

@MayaMousavi It is strange. I'm also not sure how they still don't have a PS5. Everyone I know that wants one has one and had no problem getting it. They didn't even realise it was meant to be hard to find as they don't go on gaming sites. It's in stock on Amazon now, just checked. If money is the issue, you could've saved something like £3 a week and would now have enough to buy it. I'm poor as **** and managed to get one at launch.

@personauser93 To be fair, the demo is v1.01 whereas the most recently shown trailer footage is 1.03 so it's had two patches since then. There's not really much else they could be tweaking at this stage apart from performance so it should be better. I didn't have any problems myself, incidentally, other than I think it did drop to 50 something at a point where you have a dynamic lighting thing hovering by you.

@MFTWrecks It's not deceiving when the outcome of the analogy is the same in both cases. The point is that it's a terrible business model that would obviously stop most people buying games in the same way free, or so cheap it's basically free, beer would stop people buying it by the pint normally. (If you want to get really accurate, it'd be a single beer that potentially lasts for over 100 hours of drinking for £60, so it's not as bad as what you and I just said.)

Anyway, the point is it's a no brainer it'd cannibalise sales and it's also clearly shown that it doesn't really help Xbox as it's been outsold massively again.

It's like I had air conditioning units installed by someone on mushrooms.

Hey everyone, free beer. And if you're interested I'm also selling beer for £60. This business plan can't possibly go wrong.

I actually really enjoyed it, but just down to the story and world building. I really cared for the characters by the end, and I can't wait to see where the story goes. It's a shame it's just an action game with a very basic skill tree, and not an RPG. It's also a shame the whole world seems to be one long corridor, or a series of disconnected battle arenas. It's weird when something like Assassin's Creed is more of an RPG than FF. That said, a pillar of FF has always been the story and characters and XVI does them very well.

More importantly, how was this article posted 4 minutes into the future? (I know it's a site glitch). Anyway, I still haven't had a chance to play it. Is there much exploration or NPC interaction?

@DiscoStuUK Yeah I know what you mean. I'd like something where each area has a boss monster - it'll probably be too tough when you first get there. But if you beat it, you unlock a waypoint.

@Mitsui I'm sure there are. But Diablo is a traditionally PC series and at the time D3 was the fastest selling game on PC of all time. But yeah, it'd be nice to get actual numbers. It's strange that we don't - outside of the Japanese charts.

He kind of let himself down as being one of us when he actually made something of his life and became a CEO. Real gamers, such as myself, refused to become CEOs even though we could have and chose to argue about RPG battle systems on PlayStation sites. I think I made the right choice.

Particularly impressive for D4 considering a huge amount of sales will be on PC and thus digital.

DD2 can basically be the same as the first game but more modern and it'll still be amazing. Anything else will be a bonus. It already had satisfying and deep combat that changed impressively based on your class. Exploration was rewarding. The pawn system was surprisingly deep. Loads of lore and world building. Unusual things like being able to marry any NPC and make fake copies of items to complete quests while keeping rare or unique items. I can't wait to see what new stuff they come up with.

@Rob_230 Yeah I thought that too. Imagine this ad on the side of twin skyscrapers in America...

@UltimateOtaku91 Yeah, for all those various ups and downs, Sony have always been good at marketing. Ever since the PS1 days, I'd honestly say they're the best of all time in gaming.

Haven't had a chance to play it yet and I'm out at the moment. Can anyone tell me if there's much exploration or is it just combat?

So how do you get Kudos outside of the daily, weekly and monthly challenges? Because there doesn't seem to be much available through them, especially if you don't play multiplayer.

With FFXVI and Rebirth's marketing overlapping, the Final Fantasy series is actually like that old phrase about buses - you wait ages for one and then two come along at once.