I was socially shunned for my childhood obsessions with tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, so it’s been gratifying to watch mainstream media successes like Stranger Things and Twenty-Sided Tavern make RPGs appealing to a wider audience.
But none of those shows have dug beneath the fantastical surface and delved into D&D’s deep emotional impact on adolescent outsiders quite as effectively as Qui Nguyen’s 2011 award-winning dramedy She Kills Monsters, the eye-popping and -moistening onstage epic now running at Valencia College’s East Campus Black Box through Feb. 24.
Photos by Chris Bridges for Valencia College Theatre
Nyaira Beene as Tilly in ‘She Kills Monsters’ at Valencia East
As tough as it was on me to be a gaming geek, it would have been exponentially worse for Tilly Evans (Nyaira Beene), a 15-year-old Black girl who was just coming to terms with her sexual orientation before dying with her parents in a tragic preamble. The only thing of Tilly’s left behind for her aggressively ordinary older sister Agnes (Learsi Rivera) to connect with is a custom-made D&D adventure, so she recruits a teenage dungeon master (Michael Sullivan) to guide her through a maze of monsters that feed on her guilt-ridden grief.
I don’t often write about educational theater, but I was drawn to this production by the presence of longtime Phantasmagoria collaborators Bill Warriner (director/stage combat), Dana Mott (projection designer) and Lisa Smith (puppet design).
As anticipated, they have crafted an immersive, visually inventive multimedia experience, bursting with hilariously epic sword-swinging battle scenes (backed by kick-ass rock songs by Meka Nism) which look like Lord of the Rings as reenacted by the cast of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. And whether or not you guffaw out loud at a random Gary Gygax reference, anyone can appreciate a giant man-eating gelatinous cube made from shower curtains, or a deflating beach-ball Beholder descending from the ceiling. (If you are a total newbie, plan to arrive early enough to read Mott’s preshow projections that TL;DR the RPG rulebook.)
Photos by Chris Bridges for Valencia College Theatre
Cast of ‘She Kills Monsters’ at Valencia East
However, I wasn’t entirely prepared for the razor-sharp comic timing Warriner coaxes out of Steve (Jonah Cottrell), the hapless student, and his harried guidance counselor, Vera (Liv Nunziante), among the script’s other smartly realized characters; the Twin Peaks-loving slacker Orcus (Samuel Wetherbee) and berserk ballerina-fairy Farrah (Dafne Cardena) are also side-splitting standouts. Most importantly, I was completely blindsided by the impressive emotional depths displayed by Rivera’s performance when Agnes confronts her internalized homophobia, nor did I expect how the cathartic Tiamat-slaying finale concluded with such a tear-provoking coda.
She Kills Monsters makes a valid case that role-playing is more than just a game; it’s also a valuable tool for generating empathy. Under Warriner’s direction, Valencia’s version scores a critical hit by honoring outsiders without becoming mere nerdsploitation, while still making audience members roll with laughter whether or not they’ve ever rolled a D20.
You technically don’t need to spend a whole lot of money to play Dungeons & Dragons or other tabletop roleplaying games. But like most hobbies, the game is more than happy to welcome your investment with endless maps, minis, countless dice, and, of course, rulebooks to purchase. Now, it seems, the game is going to get a bit pricer following news from Wizards of the Coast that new D&D rulebooks will see a 20 percent price hike moving forward.
This Arcade-y Basketball Game Brings The NBA Jam Vibes
Rulebooks are the bible of any tabletop roleplaying game, providing players and game masters with all necessary math, descriptions of game systems, and sometimes even critical lore information depending on the kind of book. Since the current, fifth edition, of Dungeons & Dragons, physical books, like the three core ones essential for a group to play (Dungeon Masters Guide, Player’s Handbook,and Monster Manual), have retailed for $49.95 each in the United States. Additional D&D-brand books of similar scope sold for the same price (others have sold for less depending on the amount of content). Wizards of the Coast is now signaling that the rising costs of book production will bring the price of physical copies up to $59.95 for new books. Digital content and previously published material is said to remain unaffected by the new price.
According to IGN, Wizards of the Coast specified the price hike will first hit the upcoming Bigsby Presents: Glory to the Giants followed by the Planescape supplement due out on October 17 of 2023. The October release will refresh a beloved campaign setting many might know from the PC game, Planescape: Torment, which featured interdimensional magic, along with dark, strange, and surrealist motifs in its art and stories.
Kotaku reached out to Wizards of the Coast for comment.
This price hike follows some turbulent times for the D&D publisher. Earlier in 2023, Wizards of the Coast rolled a critical fail with restrictive, proposed changes to its longstanding open license ahead of the upcoming revision of the core rules. Unchecked, those changes would have dramatically constrained the freedom for third party publishers to create compatible rulebooks with the game (something that has been a core part of the industry since the early 2000s).
It is rare that everyone at a game of D&D has all the books. Typically, the dungeon master will purchase the most rules as they’re the ones adjudicating everything; that’s an issue Wizards of the Coast has highlighted as a sore spot for them, expressing a desire in 2022 to try and find more ways to monetize the hobby, hoping to generate “the type of recurrent spending you see in .”
Because Final Fantasy XIV has somehow evolved into one of the biggest video games on the planet, Square Enix has decided to grab some of its older content out of the back of the fridge, reheat it in the microwave for a bit and serve it up to a whole new audience of players who probably weren’t around when it was first released.
Hollow Knight: Silksong’s New Gameplay Trailer Is Living Rent-Free In Our Brains
I’m talking specifically here about the game’s second major expansion, Stormblood, which was released six years ago as a premium piece of downloadable content, but which for the next few weeks will be made available for free (provided you’ve already got a paid subscription, they’re not just giving it away to free/trial players).
As the game’s site points out (thanks, Eurogamer), the free offer runs until May 28. Importantly it’s not free-to-play, it’s free-to-download, so provided you grab it before that deadline you’ll be able to play it whenever you want.
It’s good for both the console and PC versions of the game, though as this official FAQ points out, you need to make double sure on PC that you’re downloading the correct edition, as only the Steam download will work if you bought the game on Steam, etc.
Incredible visuals This smart TV has access to a wide array of streaming services, all of which are easier to navigate, has 4K visuals for a stunning picture, and comes with an Alexa Voice Remote too.
Final Fantasy XIV is one of the best massively multiplayer online role-playing games going, one of the few able to maintain a monthly subscription model in a day when even an Elder Scrolls MMO has to go free-to-play. Stormblood’s epic narrative, gorgeous new locales, spectacular battles and some fresh gameplay mechanics make a great game even better.
I am never going to finish it and no one can make me.
Between games, art, and even journalism, a lot of industries are dealing with the rise of artificial intelligence removing the human element of creative works. As people have begun using AI and algorithms to create art rather than hiring workers to do it, companies are making hard stances about whether or not they’ll allow work made by these means to be used on their projects. This includes table-top developer Paizo, which has taken a hard stance against AI art being used as art and writing prompts with its products.
In a post on its website, the Pathfinder and Starfinder developer says it is adding new language to its contracts that will require any work submitted to the company to have been created by a person and not an AI. The statement makes it clear it believes AI art and writing are a “serious threat” to the livelihood of its creative partners and workers, and it wants a human touch in all its products moving forward. This extends to products on the community content marketplace for both Pathfinder and Starfinder.
“Our customers expect a human touch to our releases, and so long as the ethical and legal circumstances surrounding these programs remains murky and undefined, we are unwilling to associate our brands with the technology in any way.
Stated plainly—when you buy a Paizo product, you can be sure that it is the work of human professionals who have spent years honing their craft to produce the best work we can. Paizo will not use AI-generated ‘creative’ work of any kind for the foreseeable future.
We thank the human artists and writers who have been so integral to our success in the past, and we look forward to working with them for many years to come.”
Paizo and its employees have been central to conversations around labor in the tabletop space, with the studio having formed the first tabletop union back in 2021. The United Paizo Workers allied with the Communications Workers of America, which has had a hand in much of the unionization efforts within the video game industry over at Activision Blizzard.
After seeing Honkai: Star Rail for a few minutes during a live media preview, I mostly liked what I saw. HoYoverse’s “space fantasy” RPG doesn’t reinvent turn-based combat, but the performance was smooth. The fighting animations were among some of the best I’ve seen out of anime games in recent years. The combat’s turn tracker, team combos, type matchups, and battle animations were reminiscent of games like Shin Megami Tensei and Persona 5. But HoYoverse absolutely does not want you to think of it as either of those games. Besides the seeming identity confusion, my conversation with the developer left me without much optimism about racial inclusion in Star Rail’s space fantasy.
Here’s how Star Rail works: Although you start off with a protagonist character, most of your roster will come out of rolling for wives and husbands through the gacha system. You use them to explore maps filled with enemy encounters (rather than real-time combat like in HoYoverse’s current mainstay Genshin Impact).
Once you run into an enemy, you’ll start a turn-based battle. Each of your four party members will have two skills. Some will be offensive, while others will be support or healing based. Each attack corresponds with an element, and using elemental type matchups effectively will allow you to break shield bars. Once an enemy is vulnerable, you can use team combination attacks to kick them while they’re down.
Screenshot: HoYoverse / Kotaku
Despite the relatively simple combat, the game will feature an auto-battle mechanic. This should make it easier to grind daily battles for resources, which is an essential feature some modern gacha use to keep the games alive.
Star Rail will have a main story campaign and regular sidequests. While it shares similar characters from Honkai Impact 3rd, Fish Ling, a representative from HoYoverse, assured me that there wouldn’t be any story crossover with their incredibly lore-heavy real time action game.
Driving Honkai: Star Rail’s development was HoYoverse’s desire to diversify its portfolio from the usual action games it’s released, according to Michalel Lin, another representative for the developer. Secondly, HoYoverse felt turn-based combat was conducive to “the story that we want to tell.” Its design philosophy was driven by the desire to make turn-based combat approachable for newcomers.
Things got murkier, however, when I tried to ask who the target audience is. The Star Rail presentation mentioned that the game would feature different cultures. Remembering how badly Genshin Impactflubbed depicting darker skinned people and Southwest Asians in the Sumeru update, I asked how the developers intended to improve representation in Star Rail. What lessons did they learn from the overseas community?
“The game is set in a fictional world,” Lin said. “What we do is dependent on how the IP grows. As a combination of cultures in our world, there’s not a specific culture we target. We will continue listening to fans’ feedback, but how the world will be built, we can’t say for certain.”
Screenshot: HoYoverse
It’s 2023, and Asian RPGs keep dropping the ball on diversity. This immensely disappointing answer reminded me of Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida’s response as to whether or not that game would include people of color. Their answer was that their world was fantasy, so it couldn’t be held to any diversity standards at all. Star Rail includes characters who are culturally Chinese, so it feels really shitty that its launch characters seem to be even more light-skinned than those in Genshin Impact. Once again, we have to start holding Asian RPGs to higher standards.
I got similarly vague answers when I asked where Star Rail took its inspiration from. “We think turn based RPGs are very engaging and have an active audience in the market,” Lin said. It took me a couple of minutes to remember that the Persona series has sold 16.8 million units globally and was probably at least one of the games alluded to. When I pressed about the studio’s creative inspiration, Lin told me Star Rail’s team consists of 500 individual developers. Therefore, it would be impossible to narrow down specific influences.
I can guess why HoYoverse is being so coy about its Persona 5 game set in space. It’s likely because the internet tore into Genshin Impact at launch for its similarities to Breath of the Wild, to the point where the developer had to reassure players that the game was more than a clone. But Star Rail will likely release sometime this year, and people will be able to see the Persona DNA embedded in how the game plays.
So here’s the honest summary of Star Rail: It’s a space fantasy game that you’ll probably enjoy if you’re a fan of the Persona or Shin Megami Tensei series. Be careful of the gacha system, and don’t hold your breath over improved diversity from what we’ve seen so far.
2022 was the year that Genshin Impact’s developer rebranded to HoYoverse to convey its ambitions for expanding its offerings to global audiences. It was also the year when players left the Japan-inspired region behind in order to explore Sumeru—a nation based on Southwest Asia, South Asia, and North Africa (SWANA).
Not all changes were warmly received. The Sumeru leaks received significant backlash for colorism, orientalism, and fetishization, but mechanical changes to exploration and resource gathering were welcome. And the new Dendro element made the combat feel exciting and new again. Which makes it an even bigger shame that not everyone can enjoy playing Genshin without reservations. I know that light-skinned folks from the SWANA region exist, but it even feels awkward to me that every city-dwelling NPC with an Arabic name is light-skinned. For a game that sells the idea of an immersive world, Sumeru kept taking me out of it.
It also sucks that we’re not getting a new endgame mode. But I find the new card game so much fun that I don’t really care. I can’t wait for more people to learn the rules so that I can squash them in Genius Invokation matches.
Here are the fun additions to the game, the grievances both new and old, and controversies that tore its community apart.
The Good
Screenshot: HoYoverse / Kotaku
Sumeru transforms open world exploration
After months of burnout, the addition of a new North Africa/Southwest Asia/South Asia inspired region helped Genshin feel like a fresh open world game. I absolutely adored zipping around the forest canopies and waterfalls, which allowed me to explore more of the map than I otherwise would have. I just wish that the designers kept it up for the more recently introduced desert area, which still demands that I leg boringly plain distances.
The Dendro element revives disfavored characters
Remember how bummed the community would get whenever it was revealed that a cool new character would have thunder powers? Electro was once widely considered the worst element, and for good reason. Its reactions with other elements weren’t as powerful unless a character was built as a rare physical attacker. Its main role was to provide energy particles—but there are other ways to gain energy. Using an electro character was almost considered a waste of a party slot.
Sumeru Preview Teaser 01: The Fascinating Dendro Element | Genshin Impact
Not anymore. The new “quicken” reaction allows Electro characters to cause additional damage that scales with their “Elemental Mastery” stat. This means that Fischl is now one of the most valuable characters in the game (Yes, yes, I know about taser comp), Yae Miko becomes an absolute DPS monster, and Lisa becomes viable for the first time since Genshin launched.
I’ve always hated how certain gacha characters are more “meta” than others, and that rarely changed without some kind of numbers buff. Genshin is constantly reinventing its meta by adding new ways that powers can interact with each other, and I’m absolutely living for it.
The Japan-inspired region finally earns its tragic gravitas
Last year, I wrote that the Inazuma storyline was kinda mid, and the best stories were found in the mundane sidequests. The writing felt weak, and I worried that the developers couldn’t sustain the previous narrative quality while releasing live service updates for a new region. My concerns were quickly dispelled with the new year.
HoYoverse released an underwater sub-region with some of the creepiest lore in the game so far. The quests of Enkanomiya are full-throated about how the current rulers of Teyvat are genocidal conquerors from another world. This was heavily implied if you bothered to read the 139,847,934 tomes of in-game lore. Most people (understandably) didn’t. This subregion is technically “optional,” but I don’t think it should be.
Version 2.4 “Fleeting Colors in Flight” Trailer | Genshin Impact
None of the Enkanomiya quests are mandatory. But Genshin trusts a significant portion of its players to care about these injustices, and the rewards for following the breadcrumb trails are sublime. When I ran a dozen fetch quests for faceless NPCs, I wasn’t thinking about the premium currency that I could earn. I was thinking of the Sunchildren, ancient puppet rulers who were burned alive before adulthood. How did their story end? For all the jokes that the Genshin community is primarily motivated by primogems, we’re even more obsessive about good stories.
For those who don’t have the patience to explore all of Enkanomiya, the second part of Raiden Shogun’s storyline is much easier to digest. I liked that this arc relied more heavily on emotional beats and well-paced writing rather than flashy animations. Earlier quests had fancy special effects, but they couldn’t save the main scenario from feeling rushed and poorly constructed.
The storytelling becomes more mature
2022 is when Genshin started making NPCs more important to its central storyline than ever before. We met compelling side characters in Inazuma last year, but some of the rawest lines I’ve ever heard were from random soldiers and explorers in the spring Chasm update. And the sickly heiress we meet in the main quest scenario was the real star who outshone our overpowered heroes. Genshin isn’t the first video game to say that ordinary people are the protagonists of their own lives, but HoYoverse is committed to actually showing it.
I also wanted to give a quick shoutout to the animated cutscenes, which have been improving drastically over the past year. I’m not talking about the technical improvements, but how Genshin uses more varied camera shots to create scenes that feel like movies (rather than talking heads).
Genius Invokation TCG
Genshin’s take on Gwent has become my new favorite reason to log into the game. I love this card minigame because it never feels like I’m truly backed into a corner. The mechanics are forgiving, and the rules allow me to convert useless resources into more helpful ones. So if one of my characters falls, it feels like I actually earned that L.
Best of all, there’s no gacha component in Genius Invokation. I was worried that I would have to grind matches endlessly for booster packs, but I just have to buy individual cards straight from the shop. It’s such a welcome reprieve from yelling at my screen because I flubbed my artifact rolls again.
Genshin is getting an anime
HoYoverse is partnering with the anime studio Ufotable to produce an animated series, which is the best news to come out all fall. Ufotable has produced crowd pleaser hits such as Demon Slayer and Fate, and hey also produce animation for video games such as the Tales series. Their work is sheer wizardry, and now they’ll be animating the biggest weeb game in the world.
The Genshin fandom rarely agrees on anything. So it’s nice that we can get such a massive collective W like this.
The Chinese opera revival
Chinese opera is widely considered to be a dying art, yet HoYoverse chose to include it in the main quest scenario that happened around Chinese New Year. The character Yun Jun is an opera singer, her design is based on the performers’ outfits, and she has a real opera singer as her second voice actress. After the update was released, millions of people got to experience a cultural artform that they had never seen before.
Story Teaser: The Divine Damsel of Devastation | Genshin Impact
This wasn’t just an important moment for the Chinese diaspora who have had less palatable aspects of their culture maligned. It was meaningful to all the YouTube and Twitter commenters who never knew that Chinese opera could convey such profound emotion. Yun Jin’s performance didn’t just move her own audience, but people of different nationalities around the world.
The Bad
Image: HoYoverse / Kotaku
Farming mats in Sumeru is awful
Everything is spaced so far apart, and the only multi-node resources are cooking ingredients. And good luck if you need any scarabs—the little bastards are almost impossible to see in the desert sand unless they’re scurrying away as you approach. Worst of all, none of the useful flowers can be grown in the housing system right now. So good luck—especially if you don’t have the premium 5 star Nahida to help you gather flowers from the cliffsides.
The conflicting quest backlog situation is getting ridiculous
It used to be that new players couldn’t access newer content until they finished enough of the main quest. Now older players are being hit by the unwieldy quest log too. If you accept certain sidequests too early, then you can be locked out of the main quest scenario.
I’d understand if there was some kind of chronology requirement, but the game is doing this solely to prevent an NPC from being in two places at once. This is incredibly silly, and I hope that the developers will get rid of it soon.
Game delays due to the coronavirus lockdowns
While other gaming companies had to push their release dates because of the pandemic, HoYoverse seemed to be the only studio that seemed delay-proof. That ended when Shanghai underwent severe lockdowns and food crises. Genshin experienced its first delay since its 2020 release at the end of April. The housing system was locked in maintenance mode, and Ayaka Kamisato had the longest gacha banner in the game’s history… but only by a period of two weeks. It seems that not even coronavirus lockdowns can stop HoYoverse’s developers for long.
HoYoverse announces that Genshin will not have endgame content
Oh boy. There’s never been any doubt that Genshin is a game catered towards casual players. But the combat is so well-designed that many meta-centric players latched on early, so they felt like they were being slapped in the face when the developers confirmed that the Spiral Abyss would be the only endgame for the foreseeable future.
The Spiral Abyss is a challenge dungeon in which players can clear four new levels every six weeks. It’s a DPS check where players try to kill all the enemies within a certain amount of time. Every time the Spiral Abyss refreshes, the fights also come with new conditions. But it’s still stuff that you can clear in a single evening, rather than an endless endgame mode.
Here’s why this is such a big deal: Some of the most competitive players have been spending large amounts of money to get extra abilities and weapons from the gacha. So there’s the feeling that HoYoverse owes them more challenge modes in which they can test their gameplay prowess. Right now, most of the studio’s development muscle has been focused on story-centric events and challenges that are catered towards players who don’t have a lot of characters. HoYoverse understands that appeasing the casual players is what gives F2P games their longevity. But it still sucks to see that a passionate section of the community is being thoroughly neglected.
The Ugly
Image: HoYoverse / Kotaku
Sumeru is too white
As usual, Genshin’s upcoming gacha characters leaked far ahead of their official announcements. Many people were disappointed that the Chinese RPG continued its tradition of populating the world with mostly light-skinned characters. Previous nations were based on Germany, China, and Japan, so fans expected more melanin variation from a fictional country based on North Africa, Southwest Asia, and South Asia. People also pointed out that Liyue and Inazuma were based on specific East Asian countries. It sucked that Sumeru seems to be a hodgepodge of multiple cultures and nations.
While there are dark-skinned NPCs with sympathetic backstories, the gacha characters are the “protagonists” of the game. The majority of those originating from Sumeru are light-skinned, and no canonically Black characters currently exist in the game at all. Gacha is a video game genre that sells personal attachment and sex appeal. Whether or not HoYoverse includes darker characters isn’t a matter of “wokeness” as some delightful commenters say—it’s a question of whether or not HoYoverse considers melanated skin to be desirable. So far, the answer seems to be “Sometimes, but not past a certain point.”
We knew this was coming. HoYoverse did not have a good reputation with how they portrayed darker-skinned characters even before Sumeru had been released. But a lot of players had hoped that the studio would be listening to feedback and taking the community’s feelings into account. There’s still time to fill the roster with more diverse characters, but the period of goodwill seems to have passed.
HoYoverse accused of bribing fans for votes at The Game Awards
Seasoned gacha players know that they’ll give out premium currency for almost anything. Anniversary? Here’s some gacha money. Maintenance went on too long? We have apology money. HoYoverse usually distributes some currency every time that Genshin wins an award, and the internet wasn’t happy about it. Specifically, the Sonic Frontiers fandom started to accuse HoYoverse of buying votes with in-game currency. Some even suspected the fandom of using bots to cheat in a popularity contest.
There were several reasons for this. First, Sonic Frontiers was neck-and-neck with Genshin in the polls, but it’s a single-player game that can’t use premium currency for marketing. Second, there’s the perception that the studio had already cheated by entering a game from 2020 into the running. Thirdly, it’s a common perception that most Genshin players are gambling addicts. It wasn’t just the unsubstantiated botting accusations that were ugly, but the casual ableism that gamers threw out in order to justify their hatred of Genshin. There are valid reasons to criticize companies, it’s what we do here all the time. But something has gone horribly wrong when gamers will use mental health as ammunition against a community that they know little about.
Genshin did go on to win the Player’s Vote award, and every player received enough currency for five rolls—or around $12.
A high schooler is accused of “satanism” for painting a Genshin character
Satanic panic in 2022? You read that correctly. Michigan parents bullied a teenager at a school board meeting after she painted a queer-positive mural as part of an official school contest. One of the contested images was the mask worn by the Genshin character Xiao. He’s an evil spirit hunter, so it’s more accurate to say that Xiao is the anti-Satan.
I’m not invested in defending his honor to some Republican parents, but I do think homophobia and xenophobia is shitty. Maybe worry a little more about how your kids will feel while living in a bigoted community rather than if a video game character’s mask is promoting Satanism.
Looking to the future of Genshin Impact
Sumeru’s story arc hasn’t concluded, andthere are still so many remaining questions about capital Genshin nouns such as the Scarlet King, Irminsul, and the Descenders, or where Istaroth went after saving Enkanomiya from the Dragonheirs. Every year of lore updates seems to bring up far more questions than answers, so I’ll likely be trapped in this gacha hell with the rest of the community for the entire ride.
HoYoverse usually releases a major nation every year, and our next destination is the France-based region of Fontaine. This is where the god of justice resides, but I find this a little ironic. It says in the lore that she’s not willing to challenge the divine—the rulers in Celestia who have colonized this world and caused multiple genocides against its inhabitants. How could she be just if she won’t challenge the rulers who demand the world’s fealty by force? By now, I know that HoYoverse has a good answer planned. We just need to wait an entire year to find out what it is.
DOHA, Qatar — For a nation that has frequently flattered to deceive at soccer’s major tournaments, a card game that relies on the art of deception is strengthening the bond among England’s players ahead of their match against Senegal in the World Cup round of 16.
Werewolf, a game of roleplay and deduction, has become a popular pastime for the squad between games.
“It’s about being the best liar,” said midfielder Declan Rice. “The villagers have got to snuff out the wolves and the wolves have got to lie and tell everyone why they are not a wolf. There is a lot of teamwork, ganging up.”
Whatever England is doing at its base in Qatar, it’s working so far.
It plays Senegal on Sunday after topping Group B and tying Spain as leading scorers in the tournament so far with nine goals.
No other team picked up more than the seven points England recorded on its way to the knockout round and it is only one of three still undefeated.
Yet the message from coach Gareth Southgate and captain Harry Kane this week has been about maintaining focus and standards.
Belgium and Germany were high-profile departures from the group stage, while defending champion France, along with Argentina, Spain, Brazil and Portugal have all been on the wrong end of upsets.
And to think England’s 0-0 draw with the United States was considered enough of a shock that it prompted loud jeers from Three Lions fans after that match last week.
“I think it’s always difficult when you see big teams or big players in teams that don’t have the success that you want or don’t live up to the expectation of a nation or where they see themselves,” said defender John Stones. “We don’t ever want to fall into that category. I think that is great motivation for us as a reminder — you never want to take anything for granted or who you are playing against.”
England may be considered a major soccer nation, but its only tournament success came when it hosted and won the World Cup in 1966.
The years since have been pitted with disappointment and underachievement.
There has been an upturn under Southgate, who led the team to the semi-finals of the World Cup in Russia in 2018 and to the final of last year’s European Championship, which it lost on penalties to Italy.
The bond he has developed among the players is seen as a key factor in England’s improvement.
Southgate is also meticulous about his planning, from psychological help to deal the pressure of taking penalties to even the most minor details.
At a team meeting this week, players were reminded about leaving their socks out the “right way” for the kitmen to collect after training.
“We get on each other for things like that because we have created those standards,” said Stones. “If you start getting sloppy with the little things, the bigger things start to get sloppy very easily. Any one percent or two percent of things that we can do to get better … obviously those are small things, but they matter to us.”
So there should be no danger of England taking Senegal lightly.
The African Cup of Nations winner finished second in Group A behind the Netherlands. That was despite suffering the pre-tournament disappointment of star striker Sadio Mane being ruled out.
“They’re knockout games now: if you win, you get to stay here; if you lose, you go home,” said Senegal coach Aliou Cissé. “There’s no need to overthink things, every team is at the same level.
“Our squad is experienced today, they’ve gone through a lot together and they know how to prepare for this type of game now, in competitions like this one,” he added.
———
James Robson is at https://twitter.com/jamesalanrobson
———
AP World Cup coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/world-cup and https://twitter.com/AP—Sports
