ShogunRok

@J-Dubs It's a hard Trophy list. You need to beat the game on the hardest difficulty and do a bunch of specific combat challenges. Not impossible but you'll really need to know the game inside-out in order to get the Plat.

If anyone's got questions about Deadlink let me know and I'll try to answer them.

Really good game! I'll likely be keeping it installed on my PS5 for a long time.

Has anyone here tried this game out? How does it work and does it just feel like a weird reskin of Persona 5? Because that's what it looks like sometimes to the untrained eye.

@Keyblade-Dan True enough. Now I want her to be in it purely to see what they do with her!

@Keyblade-Dan Does Orihime have any combat powers in the first and second story arcs? I can't quite remember (I don't think she does?).

Might be tough to work her into a playable fighting game character, unless they do some kind of fun take.

"Your interaction with Barnsworth and its citizens is limited to jumping and slapping."

This pretty much sold me on the game.

@Yousef- I think they were just talking about the dev's past experiences with the franchise, and how the older games have informed what they're trying to do with Origins. Nothing crazy, from what I can tell.

It's a decent idea, but no Yakuza 0 is a criminal offence.

@PocketHotDogs This is one of the only times Sony's officially addressed it (specifically as the 'slimmer' model) since it launched, too.

@kyleforrester87 @dschons I went back over loads of previous quizzes and it's actually insane how often @playstation1995 is top of the leaderboards, or close. He's basically a living Push Square legend.

Yes, the PlayStation General Knowledge quizzes are finally back!

Longtime Push Square readers will know that we stopped doing these quizzes a couple of years ago. They require a surprising amount of work and we just couldn't do them justice on a regular basis.

However, new quizzes have been requested ever since and after deciding that we wanted to run them again, we also wanted to make them better than before.

Thanks to @antdickens' hard work, quizzes now have the following features:

• Each question now shows answer percentages, so you can see how many people got it right
• WE HAVE LEADERBOARDS! If you have a Push Square account, your first run of the quiz will be automatically added to the leaderboard, which shows the top 20
• The user interface has been refined

If you have any feedback or ideas on how to improve future quizzes, please let us know.

You can find all of the site's previous quizzes here: https://www.pushsquare.com/quizzes

And yes, the old quizzes have been updated to include all of these new features. Even the leaderboards work based on the original data.

Enjoy!

This sounds superb. Really seems to have gone under the radar!

@Yousef- Yep, it should automatically show your own local time!

@NoHope Sony's spent the last three console generations improving its console UIs, and yet with each new system it's felt like two steps forward, two steps back. The PS5 in particular has loads of weird interface quirks that make it awkward to navigate.

You do get used to it when you use the console as much as people on this website tend to, but I've seen family members and friends really struggle with it.

Like I wrote in the article, the open beta will give us a much better indication of what the game will do, but yeah, those Steam numbers make for a sobering read.

@Ravix Spot on, and you'd think that Sony would have one of its own blockbusters lined up to demonstrate just how much of an improvement the Pro is.

But we know that it's just LEGO Horizon, Concord, and Astro Bot this year. Sony could lean on third-party stuff though, like you say.

It's a bit mad that not one of those games listed made the top ten.

I get that Like a Dragon, Tekken, Persona, are somewhat niche, but they all had huge marketing campaigns behind them. Rebirth and Stellar Blade were obviously pushed by PlayStation as well.

It's surprisingly damning, to be honest.

Sammy took no prisoners with that opening sentence.

@voltum3l Blame Chadley.

Here are some interesting stats from the poll:

• Hi Fi Rush (23 votes) and Sea of Thieves (15 votes) got some recognition
• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown missed out on the top ten by just three votes
• I think Helldivers 2 (3rd) to Stellar Blade (2nd) is one of the biggest gaps we've ever had in a poll (a difference of over 800 votes)
• Only one person voted for Rise of the Ronin using the 'Other' option on the poll

It'll be interesting to see which upcoming games enter the top ten by the end of the year.
-

@DonJorginho You're not allowed to post this without telling everyone who you'd have on the cover!

@UltimateOtaku91 It's really, really good. I wasn't going to watch it at first but I'm glad I did.

@Czar_Khastik There's another Trails panel tomorrow at Anime Expo that covers the series' history... You never know!

Got to give NISA / Falcom some praise here, they've done really well in getting these games over this quickly. Especially with how massive the script is in Daybreak.

Hey everyone, just a couple of things to note about the poll:

1. We don't include DLC / expansions in our usual GOTY votes so they're not included here either. Full games only.

2. Older games that have only just released on PS5 this year are included. That's because a lot of PS5 users won't have played them before now.

3. We had to keep the poll at a manageable number of options since everyone only gets one vote. We cut it down to the 40 highest-rated games of 2024 so far.

4. If your favourite game isn't in the poll, make sure to click the 'Other' option at the bottom and write your own answer.

@Terranauts Thanks! Really great game, I'm sure it'll end up quite high on this list once more people have played it.

I'll be keeping an eye out for the next issue of PLAY...

@Terranauts Definitely thought about it, but my worry is that it just makes things even more confusing if you're new. And it's obviously a much different game, structurally.

Having said that, I do think it's an offshoot that might be worth mentioning — maybe even alongside the Ys series, purely from a Falcom perspective.

@Pandalulz While it does leave some big questions unanswered by the end, I still think it's most 'standalone' Trails game yet. Daybreak's core storyline begins and ends in this one game, which is a rarity!

@Xbox_Dashboard It can depend. I have older family members who play games every now and then, but they don't have the time or the dexterity to properly learn the mechanics — they just want to experience a world or the story.

So they'll often play on the easiest difficulty settings, for example, or they'll use accessibility options that make the gameplay more automatic. Honestly, they'd probably play on a no death mode in a lot of situations.

That's not to say all games should cater to everyone — not the way it works — but it's nice when a game is comfortable with offering these kinds of options.

@CWill97 Brand new.

@dark_knightmare2 Yep, five difficulties going from Very Easy to Nightmare.

@Savage_Joe Yeah the PS5 version is really stable at 60fps and 4K resolution. There are just some minor frame rate drops in certain locations.

Things does open up past the initial chapters, in terms of handholding, although it is a linear game overall. You go to a location, follow objective markers, do a dungeon or two, etc. A few areas are bigger and offer additional exploration.

If anyone's got any questions about the game or the review, let me know and I'll try to answer them.

I've reviewed so many Trails games over the last five years or so, to the point where the series has become a huge part of my gaming habits. Keep them coming, Falcom!

When we made the poll for this article, I couldn't believe there were 70 games. Where the hell did they all come from?

That headline from GamingBible is egregious.

@Mostik Nah there's no physical edition as far as I know. I suppose there's a chance that it gets picked up later down the line by a company like Limited Run Games, but might be a stretch.

@HotGoomba It's one of those games where it's got a few frustrating elements that can drag things down, but if you really like the visuals and the charm of it all, then I think you'll still have a great time.

@BearsEatBeets Yeah, the character creation demo is its own thing. The characters you make in that can be transferred into the trial and the full game.

@wildcat_kickz True, and Ubisoft's actually big enough to get it done. I do still think it's quite funny how it's remaking the games that oversaturated the franchise in the first place, though. The kind of thing that almost feels like a parody!

@Flaming_Kaiser Yeah Syndicate is a good game — I just think the franchise felt tired by then. Not the fault of the game, but the fault of yearly releases I suppose.

So... Ubisoft had basically driven Assassin's Creed into the ground by the time Syndicate came out. It then reset the franchise with Origins and vowed to take longer breaks between games in order to ensure higher quality.

And now the plan is to just remake those old games in order to fill the gaps between the bigger, new titles? History really is circular.

@colonelkilgore I first read that as "From Soft killing the masses", which I suppose would also be correct.

@Papery0shi I replayed Symphonia not too long ago and I totally agree. I thought it was an amazing game when I was younger, but the flaws are much easier to see now. The pacing falls off a cliff about 3/4s of the way through, and you just end up flying from place to place to watch one cutscene at a time. The dungeon design can be really archaic, too.

@Ken_Kaniff Jeff Grubb only just commented on this today. We felt the rumours were too shaky to report on before that.

Well, it got me to watch the trailer, so it's doing something right.

@GumbaMasta It released about a month ago — our review's really late!

Comments: Bad game, not a real Final Fantasy, etc.

Poll: 48% Fantastic game, 24% Good game.

For me, still a fantastic game, but I'll definitely be skipping the vast majority of side quests when I play it again.

Will likely start it over on PS5 Pro, and I'm looking forward to it. Really does have some of the most spectacular boss fights in gaming.

@TedLassoNikes I should clarify, "sold-through" also means sold to consumers, so what we might consider "proper" sales.

Sometimes publishers will use "shipped" instead of sold, which can refer to copies that have been shipped to retailers, and not necessarily sold-through to consumers.