Since Starfield was revealed, fans have been wondering what framerate the sci-fi RPG would run at on console. In a new interview with IGN, creative director Todd Howard confirmed the Xbox Series X/S version would remain locked at 30fps to maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the game.
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“I think it’ll come as no surprise, given our previous games, what we go for,” Howard told IGN after the Starfield Direct today. “Always these huge, open worlds, fully dynamic, hyper detail where anything can happen. And we do want to do that. It’s 4K in the X. It’s 1440 on the S. We do lock it at 30, because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff. We don’t want to sacrifice any of it.”
The longtime Bethesda game designer added that the game is “running great” and even sometimes at 60fps. “But on the consoles, we do lock it because we prefer the consistency, where you’re not even thinking about it,” he said. It’s also apparently performing well on the less powerful Xbox Series S where Howard said he plays most of the time since his kids monopolize the Xbox Series X.
Higher framerates, something players on PC with higher-end gear have long had access to, were one of the big selling points for the “next-gen” consoles. Recently, however, some big blockbusters have struggled to hit that mark. Gotham Knights was locked at 30fps on console, and Arkane Austin’s Redfall, an Xbox first-party console exclusive promoted with 60fps gameplay footage, won’t get a 60fps mode until sometime in the future.
But given Bethesda’s past track record with sprawling open-world RPGs at launch, a stable 30fps will probably be a pleasant surprise for most fans.
Kotaku is covering everything Summer Game Fest, from the main show on Thursday to other events happening throughout the next week. Whether you’re into larger-than-life triple-A games or intimate, offbeat indies, you can keep up with all things SGF here.
Hauntii is an upcoming twin-stick adventure game from Moonloop Games in which you play an adorable little ghost capable of haunting objects and using them to traverse the game’s version of eternity. Eternity features beautiful, bespoke graphics (almost all of which the four-person team illustrated on an iPad using Procreate), that are folksy and whimsical—the perfect vibe for a cozy ghost game.
Hauntii’s protagonist is, of course, a cute little ghost with glowing green eyes. You can use the twin-stick combat to shoot “essence” at objects, either destroying ones that will give you in-game currency or haunting ones that can be used to move around the game space. At one point, I jumped into a set of statues that I needed to move to unlock a teleport. At another point, I jumped into a tree that shook off some currency for me, my glowing green eyes peering out from the giant plant.
Hauntii – Official Announcement Trailer | Day of the Devs 2023
Hauntii also has a beautiful score to go along with its breathtaking illustrations, and though I only had ten minutes with it, I found myself wanting more. It’s due out for PC and console in 2024.
During Summer Game Fest, host Geoff Keighley debuted a new Lies of P trailer that came with some gorgeous classic music. There was a treat in it, though: the Bloodborne-inspired Soulslike is not only coming to most platforms on September 19. But you can play the action RPG right now if you wanted to.
The world of Sanctuary is huge and fast-travel alone won’t get you everywhere you need to go. Fortunately, Diablo IV gives players mounts to help them travel between dungeons and side-quests more quickly. Here’s how to get your first one.
The Week In Games: What’s Releasing Beyond Diablo IV
It’s actually really straightforward: Get to Act IV. When you arrive at the capital of the Fractured Peaks, Kyovashad, you’ll automatically get the quest “Mount: Doran’s Favor.” Simply head to the stables, talk to the stablemaster, then find Doran at the Cathedral. Boom, you’ve got a horse now! Sounds easy enough.
Unfortunately, you can’t do any of this until Acts I through III are completed. They can be done in any order, but III in particular can be a slog. If you mainline Diablo IV’s story, you can hit the beginning of Act IV in about 8-10 hours. From there you can indulge in Diablo IV’s horse armor microtransaction economy at length, or wait for sets to randomly drop from world events. What fun.
Still, it’s kind of a bummer that it takes so long to unlock mounts. The only real advantage is cutting down on backtracking—precious minutes that could be spent bashing skulls and finding more epic drops instead of running to the next quest marker. The good news is that unlocking mounts on one character will unlock them on all future characters, so when restarting with a new class you’ll have access to improved travel from the start, assuming you don’t opt to bypass the main campaign altogether on your alts.
Mounts are a first for Blizzard’s action-RPG series, as it trends toward becoming a live-service MMO. They help players quickly navigate the space in-between fast travel points. They’re finicky creatures though, and one important thing to note on PC is that your horse’s speed is directly proportional to how far away your cursor is from your character on the screen. Of course, if you’re playing as a Rogue like I am, you can effectively become your own mount. Neat!
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 on Switch was a mess from the start. Like the original game’s buggy and incomplete release back in 2004, last year’s port to Nintendo’s handheld hybrid launched with a bug that made the game impossible to beat for some players. Subsequent patches added other issues. And now players will no longer be getting the free Restoration Content DLC they were previously promised.
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The studio behind the port, Aspyr, delivered the bad news late Friday night, telling Switch owners of the game that the update to add support for a series of fan-made mods that fix certain bugs and round out KOTOR 2‘s characters and rough ending had unfortunately been canceled. It’s basically the unofficial “final cut” of Obsidian Entertainment’s excellent RPG, and Switch players will now essentially miss out on it, despite the fact it was previously marketed alongside the port’s 2022 release.
“Sadly, today we are announcing that the Restoration Content DLC for the Nintendo Switch version of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords will not be moving forward for release,” the studio tweeted on June 2. “We’d like to thank everyone for their continued support by providing a complimentary video game key to players that purchased Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords on Nintendo Switch before this announcement.”
The games impacted players can choose from include the following list of other Star Wars ports Aspyr has worked on:
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords (PC)
The first game on the list is the PC version of KOTOR 2 which does include the Restoration Content DLC, though if you only own a Switch that’s not going to help you much. And as some players have pointed out, it’s not clear how the studio will make it up to those who might already own all of these games already, which when it comes to Star Wars fans isn’t an entirely unlikely scenario.
Things just aren’t going Aspyr’s way at the moment, it seems. The Austin-based studio behind a bunch of otherwise decent Star Wars ports and remasters was purchased by Embracer for $450 million in 2021. That same year it announced a remake of the first Knights of the Old Republic at a PS5 showcase that immediately generated tons of excitement. A year later Bloomberg reported that the project was already running into trouble and would be moved to a completely new studio under the Embracer umbrella.
Asked about the status of the game at the parent company’s recent earnings presentation, CEO Lars Wingefors responded with an exasperated “no comment.”
Beware, Diablo IVadventurers, for dark whispers speak of a horrific beast of great power that can spawn ungodly numbers of clones and totally fuck you up. It’s not a lie! I’ve seen it happen to many folks, and not all have returned to tell the tale.
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Diablo IV’s launch has been pretty damn uneventful and smooth, which in 2023 is actually impressive and newsworthy. But no game, especially not a game as fresh out of the oven and massive as Diablo IV, can launch in a perfect state. So of course there are some bugs and other issues in Blizzard’s latest action-RPG. And perhaps the funniest involves an enemy named Darcel who can—and seems to often—spawn dozens and dozens of himself.
In Diablo IV there’s a fairly simple, not-too-exciting side-quest called “Stolen Artifice” in the region of Scosglen. The short side-quest asks you to hunt down a big baddie, kill him, take his runic charm, and bring it back to someone. This is your bog-standard video game fetch quest, of the sort you’ve likely done variations of more times than you can remember at this point. However, there’s currently a bug with “Stolen Artifice” that leads to clones of the quest’s boss—Darcel—spawning almost endlessly, causing problems.
Some players are reporting that Darcel will just spawn forever, causing crashes or making it impossible to finish the quest. Some have had luck defeating Darcel, the neverending monster, by killing the original Darcel before he can spawn far too many copies of himself.
While this bug is pretty damn funny to watch, I can imagine someone playing a hardcore-mode character (which has only one chance at life, and is gone forever upon death) finding this bugged quest and screaming in terror as they realize, far too late, that they are about to get wrecked by a clone army of Darcels. RIP to those poor souls.
To say Capcom fumbled Street Fighter V is an understatement. SF5 launched in an incomplete state, going all-in on “esports” to the point that it shipped without even basic single-player modes, and the flat, offense-heavy combat came off so canned, so rote, that it almost felt turn-based. (Also, Ken had bananas for hair.) Years of patches corrected some of this (the bananas remain), but SF5 will always be a wounded animal in a series of apex predators. So Capcom had its work cut out for it with Street Fighter 6.
Thankfully, Capcom’s latest take on the classic fighting series feels like it’s learned the right lessons from the last game’s drubbing. Street Fighter 6 both sets a stellar foundation for the next decade of Street Fighter’s competitive scene and gives the button-mashers among us something robust, if sometimes frustrating, to sink our teeth into.
A return to first-class fighting
Street Fighter 6 is a return to form, but the most pronounced upgrade is in how much it captures the spirit of its characters, both in and out of fights. Personality and swagger practically drip from this game. Consider the bumpin’ intros before versus matches. They create some striking and often hilarious contrasts, such as Ryu stoically walking toward the ring with determination while Blanka does cartwheels down the runway. Each character feels fully realized through their moveset, voice lines, and often-charming win screens—witness newcomer Manon’s, in which the elegant dancer smiles and waves for a photo as she’s deemed the victor. Where oftentimes Street Fighter V could feel sanded down and sterile, Street Fighter 6 oozes confidence, which helps make it as entertaining to watch as it is to play.
Image: Capcom / Kotaku
It would be easy to dismiss that confidence as style over substance, but it also bleeds into the way Street Fighter 6 plays. The game is flashier than ever, but its new mechanics make old characters feel fresh and new ones feel like meaningful additions. The most fundamental change comes in the new Drive Gauge system. Now the Super meter is just for your powerful Super Arts, and the Drive Gauge governs everything else. It fuels a number of tactics and maneuvers both old and new, and is central to every fight.
For example, you can spend your gauge on a wind-up blow called Drive Impact, which is great for creating openings, and has armor to push out of endless corner combos. Drive Gauge also fuels Overdrive attacks (the new term for EX moves), which are more powerful versions of special attacks, like a fireball that can beat other projectiles or a faster lightning kick. You can also perform a Drive Parry, Drive Reversal (like an old Alpha Counter), and Drive Rush (cancel moves to extend combos). The Drive Gauge regenerates over time, but be careful not to let it fully drain, as that puts you in a devastatingly vulnerable “Burnout” state.
Screenshot: Capcom / Kotaku
On paper, the Drive Gauge making so many strategies universal—in contrast to the hyper-specialization of SF5’s V-Triggers—might sound like a flattening of Street Fighter’s diverse roster. For example, Ryu and a small handful of other warriors no longer have a monopoly on parries. Instead, I found it freed up design space for the aspects of each character that actually make them special to rise to greater prominence.
The new characters are fresh, and so are the old ones
I’m a long-time Ryu main (I’m a sucker for the beard, okay), and his Street Fighter 6 incarnation has the most filled-out moveset in quite some time. Changes like Hashogeki (a close-range, energized jab) no longer being tied to a counter, or the Denjin Charge (which powers up his fireballs distinct from any use of meter) opened my mind to new strategies after playing the character for years. Even after hundreds of matches in Street Fighter 6, I’m still learning new things about my main, and how foes I’ve faced plenty of times in other games are now different, and often more dangerous.
Screenshot: Capcom / Kotaku
On top of reimagining old faces, Street Fighter 6’s new additions are all forces to be reckoned with, some of whom I’m curious to see how the community reacts to in the coming months. Manon’s grappler moveset is complimented by a mechanic which makes her grabs more powerful with each successful use. (As you’d expect, you’ll want to keep your distance and rely on ranged attacks, lest you end up being used as an unwilling dance partner.) Kimberly’s a student of Guy, and not only is her spray-paint-enhanced ninjutsu playstyle vicious and agile, she’s a style icon who I want to be like when I grow up. JP, who steps into the main villain role now that M. Bison is gone, commands a fight with space-manipulating moves. While I’m still getting used to facing him, I always feel like I’m playing defense and reacting to how my opponent uses his incomprehensible magic to attack me from all angles.
This is the kind of game I want to take online for months or even years to come, and thankfully, Street Fighter 6‘s online has been an effortlessly enjoyable experience thus far. Running around lobbies as my custom avatar, sitting at cabinets with friends, and welcoming passersby to join our queue makes online feel like as communal an experience as you can get in a digital space. Getting in and out of matches is pretty simple, and you can make menu-based private rooms with friends rather than entering the 3D public lobbies if you don’t want to deal with a rando interrupting you and your friend’s sessions. It’s also easy to spectate other players’ matches, and watch replays of the greats. Between both the beta and the final game, I’ve put over 20 hours into Street Fighter 6 online without much of a hitch. I had a few matches against players with worse internet than others, but broadly, my experience online has been pretty great.
Screenshot: Capcom / Kotaku
I can’t wait to watch pro players take advantage of these new characters and max out their potential, but I’m also interested to see how casual players take to them, because Street Fighter 6 does a lot to try and court the casual audience, from a simplified “modern” control scheme (specials come out of single button presses, at the cost of lower overall damage) to a surprisingly deep RPG-like mode that gives you a story to go along with all the punching and kicking. However, I’m not sure just how much a casual player who button mashes their way through arcade modes will jive with what the game has to offer unless they’re willing to put in time for the grind.
We all live in a Street Fighter world
One of the headline features of Street Fighter 6 is single-player World Tour mode, a story mode that lets you create your own character, interact with the primary cast, and run around its silly little world solving silly little problems. As far as fighting game stories go, it’s no Mortal Kombat or Injustice, but I can’t deny I was absolutely sucked into Capcom’s attempt to make Street Fighter feel like a world that actually exists, rather than just backdrops you fight in.
World Tour’s character creator is one of the most robust I’ve ever recreated myself in, and as a short king, I loved how it let me not only be that in the game, but recognized it mechanically. My character’s a little guy, which means my kicks don’t have as much reach but my hurtbox is smaller. More often than not, character creators can feel like everyone’s dressing up the same two mannequins, but Street Fighter 6 really commits to letting you create who you want and letting them take up real space, literally and figuratively. You can create some real weirdos and the game doesn’t bat an eye, but you can also faithfully recreate yourself and have it be recognized.
The actual story World Tour is built on top of is pretty light fare; you get your anime fighting rival and there’s some drama and talk of what “strength” means. That’s all fine and well, but I was genuinely surprised and delighted not by the story, but by the social elements in the gaps.
World Tour lets you meet and train with each character in the main cast, and on top of learning their moves and grafting them together to make your own moveset, there are also social elements that let you develop a relationship with them. Straight up, this is the best part of World Tour. Some of my favorite Street Fighter 6 moments have been listening to Ryu recount old stories and learn how to text (he didn’t know smartphones were a thing). In general, most of the characters don’t have a ton of involvement throughout the main story, but the smaller stories that I passed through remain highlights of World Tour given that I’m not really enamored with its structure beyond that. (After you complete the story, there’s still side-quests and leveling up to do so you can take your character online, but getting to that point feels like a bit of a chore.)
Screenshot: Capcom / Kotaku
Rise and grind
For a while, I found World Tour frustrating because I was naturally trying to play it like a fighting game. You can run around a small open-world area and meet NPCs with their own problems and missions to send you on, but you can also challenge them to fights, and that part is where World Tour goes from a fun jaunt through the streets to a weird, often grindy and tedious exercise in button mashing. While World Tour’s fights are real-time action affairs they’re heavily governed by RPG-style stats. There are levels to gain and stats to juice, but even when you’re at or around the same level as a major boss, they still have more health and hit harder than you can.
Whereas playing as the main cast online offered balanced fights that were quick affairs of outsmarting one another, World Tour fights often felt like wars of attrition in which I would have to laboriously wear down enemies who had bigger life bars and could cut mine in half with a quick combo. Instead of playing to my character’s strengths, I was spamming hadokens just to chip away at their giant health pools. The stakes often feel high, as retries are limited and only replenished by spending time walking through the world, making them a precious resource. You can use items to boost your power and heal during these fights, but it sure sucks if you burn the precious items and then lose anyway.
Screenshot: Capcom / Kotaku
Across the board, World Tour’s combat felt arduous, whereas it felt effortless and rewarding in any other mode. I loved putting myself into Street Fighter’s world and interacting with characters I’d loved for years, but every time a big story moment came I dreaded having to confront another OP boss. World Tour contains some of my favorite things to come out of Street Fighter in years, but the unfair-feeling fights felt like vegetables I had to power through to get back to dessert.
It’s a shame that the actual fighting is the worst part of World Tour, because it has so many cool ideas. Making a customized moveset full of different character’s attacks (à la Ace from Street Fighter EX3) feels like I’m keeping pieces of the people I’ve met throughout my journey. I love the idea of players creating their own builds and pitting their avatars against each other in the online lobbies, I just feel like World Tourleans so hard into the RPG framework that it loses a lot of the skill-based satisfaction that comes with getting better at a fighting game.
If you’re the type who loves a grind and enjoys the prospect of wailing on a bunch of civilians to make numbers go up, this mode has that. If you want to play through some really fun stories featuring your favorite Street Fighter heroes and villains, that’s one of World Tour’s biggest draws. But if you’re interested in a tight, satisfying fighting game experience, World Tour isn’t quite that, and it sucks because a mode geared toward people who don’t want to be FGC experts shouldn’t so often feel frustrating and insurmountable for reasons that go beyond how fighting games typically play. I wonder if World Tour will put more casual fans off at least as much as it draws them in.
Screenshot: Capcom / Kotaku
Despite my frustrations, I left World Tour with a greater appreciation for all the best parts of Street Fighter 6. It’s a sublime fighter that makes smart changes that honor what makes the series great. It’s also a full, complete game from the start, that won’t need to be fixed and extended with endless updates later. The game’s energetic street fights, bolstered by a filthy visual flair that feels down and dirty in a way the series hasn’t in years, makes it as fun to watch as it is to play. It’s style and substance. It’s depth and spectacle. Street Fighter got its soul back, and I can’t wait to see where Capcom takes it as the next generation of fighting games kicks off.
I haven’t seen The Pope’s Exorcist, the horror movie starring Gladiator and Beautiful Mind actor Russell Crowe out in theaters right now, but it sounds like the film is pretty middling, and that Crowe can’t elevate the poor take on supernatural demons in the Catholic church. Frankly, I hadn’t heard of it before today, and the reason I finally did is actually pretty hysterical. See, the film, which incidentally is billed as being “inspired by the actual files” of the Vatican’s chief exorcist, sees Crowe’s character learning some chilling things about a founder of the Spanish Inquisition. And according to people who have seen the film, ituses art from Dragon Age: Inquisition when referring to the real-world, Spanish one.
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Monday 3:53PM
The Inquisition in BioWare’s fantasy series is the faction the player commands in the 2014 RPG, and it has a symbol it uses to represent the group throughout. It shows an eye with a sword behind it, which is a reference to two in-universe constellations called Visus and Judex. You see the sigil on armor sets, flags, and other props throughout Dragon Age: Inquisition. On top of showing up in the game and on merchandise, it also shows up if you search “Inquisition symbol” on Google, and it seems like that’s what the Pope’s Exorcist team did for a scene in the film, because they use the Dragon Age iconography in a scene where it’s talking about the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the real-world religious institution that was responsible for centuries of violence against non-Catholics from the 1400s to the 1800s in Spain.
I laugh through the pain because it sounds like we won’t get Dragon Age: Dreadwolfanytime soon, since publisher EA’s earnings report earlier this week said the game wouldn’t be out in 2023. It’s been almost a decade since Dragon Age: Inquisition launched in 2014, so fans have been waiting a long while to see the conclusion to the Solas storyline introduced at the end of that game’s Trespasser DLC. Though the series has had some signs of life through projects like Netflix’s anime series Dragon Age: Absolution, now the most recent thing I’ve seen of Dragon Age has been in a religious horror movie slapping its iconography into a scene without a second thought. Dorian Pavus, I miss you. Call me.
Back in the 1990s, Philips tried to break into the video game market with its doomed-to-fail, multimedia set-top box standard called CD-i. Many brands and models of CD-i players were released but all of them were flops and mostly forgotten in 2023. However, Philips did acquire the rights to develop three Zelda games for its unpopular machines. They were terrible. Now, a fan has taken what’s perhaps the worst of those games, a top-down RPG starring Zelda herself, and unofficially ported it to the Game Boy.
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You might be wondering how Philips was able to create Zelda games, and on a non-Nintendo platform. The answer to that involves Sony, weirdly enough. In 1989, Sony and Nintendo signed a deal to create a CD-based add-on for the SNES. However, Nintendo would later back out of the deal and instead work with Philips. Sony was bitter, and decided to develop its own game console, a little device you might have heard of called the PlayStation. Meanwhile, Nintendo saw the poor reaction to the Genesis’ Sega CD add-on and backed out of its planned SNES CD hardware entirely. It’s believed that, as some recompense for dissolving the deal, Nintendo ended up licensing some IP to Philips, allowing the company to make its own Zelda games. They weren’t great, and one of the three, Zelda’s Adventure, is seen by many fans as the worst of the bunch, and is often cited as the worst Zelda game ever released.
Still, even if it’s a bad game with terrible controls and awful live-action FMV cinematics, it’s still a Zelda game, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it has its fans. One of them has spent a few years developing a full port of the CD-i flop for Nintendo’s Game Boy. And now it’s out, and it’s really cool!
John Lay
The story behind the new Game Boy Zelda
Zelda’s Adventure for Game Boy was developed by John Lay, who describes himself as a programmer and graphic designer. According to Lay—a big fan of the 2D Zelda games—out of the three CD-i Zelda games games, Zelda’s Adventure “looked interesting.” And after stumbling across an early version of modern development tool GB Studio, Lay decided to start working on a demake during covid-19 lockdown as the idea of a portable version of the unbeloved game seemed like something he’d want to play. So he started work on a proof of concept that was just the first dungeon and the initial part of the overworld, which he estimates to comprise about 20 percent of the overall game.
“After I finished I took a short break and during that time GB Studio released an update I was eager to try,” Lay told Kotaku. “So I…continued the game where I left off and developed approximately another 40 percent of the overworld and dungeons.”
However, he ran into some GB Studio limitations, so he had to modify the engine with custom-created code to make the full demake feasible.
“I then used this modified engine to develop a third prototype with the remaining 40 percent of the overworld and the final dungeons,” he said. “During this time GB Studio released a third update with a bunch of improvements, so I sat down and planned out how to combine all three prototypes into a single game.”
Lay says from start to end this whole process took about 14 months, since starting work on the game in April 2020.
According to the Itch page for Zelda’s Adventure, it was developed to aesthetically resemble 1992’s Link’s Awakening, but also includes some features from the Game Boy Color duo Oracle of Ages and Seasons. Lay calls his creation a complete port of the full game, and the music was composed by Beatscribe.
How to play Zelda’s Adventure for Game Boy
If you want to play this neat port on a Game Boy emulator, you can download the ROM from Lay’s Itch page. However, you can also play it in your browser without having to download a thing, or just watch a full playthrough of the fan game on Lay’s YouTube channel.
John Lay
Honestly, Lay’s new fan game is probably the best way to experience Zelda’s Adventure, that odd and barely remembered piece of Nintendo ephemera. I mean, unless the upcoming Tears of the Kingdom decides to include some deep-cut references to it, in which case we all might have to go back and reassess the CD-i disaster. Though I very much doubt that’s going to happen.
As for Lay, he doesn’t have plans to demake the other two Zelda CD-i games, Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, on Nintendo’s portable or any other console. But he did enjoy working on the project, and wanted to shout out to both his composer Beatscribe and the “incredible developers” behind GB Studio.
“Thanks to everyone who supported the project,” Lay said. “I’ve been overwhelmed by the positive feedback so far, it really makes it worthwhile. I hope you enjoy the game!”
Oshi No Ko Is An Early Anime Of The Year Contender
This video by a user called Art from the Machine shows “a Skyrim mod which allows for conversations with NPCs via ChatGPT, xVASynth (text-to-speech), and Whisper (speech-to-text). This update introduces Skyrim scripting, which allows for lip syncing of voices and NPC awareness of in-game events.”
That’s the aim, anyway. Here’s what all that looks and sounds like in practice:
It’s a horror show, I know. Particular highlights are the way the video has to be sped up to mask the amount of time it takes the game to respond to questions, the terrible synthesised voice acting and the bland, generic standard of all the “writing”. Oh, and the fact the people running Skyrim’s stores—in a world without watches—will now tell you their opening hours like they were getting a phone call in a mall. Sorry, sir, we close at five pum.
A console staple Because the Xbox Series S is $30 off, you can put that $30 towards storage, an extra controller, or the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
I spent ages writing earlier drafts of this blog where I took this opportunity to launch into a tirade against the idea that machine learning can or should replace human artists, but you know what? This is a Skyrim mod. If this is what a lot of people still playing this game want—and clearly it is, even though what they actually want is to play a tabletop RPG with friends—then have at it. If you’re happy with word soup dialogue written by a machine that was trained on stuff that was already pretty generic in the first place, no amount of me saying “we need to value human art as the only true human experience” will convince you that if this is the future of video games that you want, you’re going to get everything you deserve.
Vibes: Slice-of-life journeys through heartache, music, and moving on Availability: 2023 Windows, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5
Set in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, Afterlove EP explores the life of Rama, whose romantic partner passes away. It’s definitely a heavy subject, but with the manga-inspired artstyle, and use of music in rhythm mini-games, Rama’s story looks like a slow, delicate tale of what it means to move on after losing someone.
Afterlove EP describes itself as a mashup of a narrative adventure, dating sim, and rhythm game, along with branching narratives and different endings.
Wartales is currently in Early Access on Steam. It’s being developed by Shiro Games, the French studio behind the Viking RTS Northgard. And it has been taking up a lot of my time this month.
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There’s a lot going on in Wartales, a lot of influences getting thrown into a pot and swirling around each other, so the best (or at least most succinct) way I’ve seen it described is “Wartalesis a medieval open world role-playing game with turn-based combat in which the player leads a group of mercenaries.”
It’s mercenary management, basically. With some fighting. And a story. It’s like the management side of XCOM added the dietary and resting needs of a survival sim, then decided it wanted to go on a little RPG adventure. I have heard people say there’s some Mount and Blade here. Others say this is very close to Battle Brothers.
I could go on. But instead of continuing to confuse and bury you in references to existing video games, please just watch this release trailer instead:
Wartales – Official Release Trailer
I’ve been playing the game all week, and—this part is important—what I’ve played has been fantastic. The turn-based combat, while not exactly breaking new ground, works well enough. Your travels are full of story-driven quests full of morally ambiguous decisions, which as anyone who has played medieval-adjacent role-playing games will tell you, are the best types of decisions. The survival-style management of your party, which means everyone can die and you can hire replacements, has the same Fire Emblem, XCOM-y pull it always does when a game entrusts you with a (digital) person’s life.
Great for work or play This laptop boasts a 15.6-inch touchscreen, an Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, a webcam, and more. It also has a variety of ports for connectivity’s sake, making it versatile for use as a display or even a desktop replacement.
Fighting in Wartales is resolved through turn-based combat, in a way that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever played a turn-based tactics gameScreenshot: Wartales
Know why I’m loving the game, though? It’s that viewpoint. While the camera zooms in for battles and conversations, most of your time in Wartales is spent wandering around an isometric overworld, your party meandering their way through forests and mountain passes and lovely little rural laneways.
It’s well-established here that I am an enjoyer of good isometric video games, and this is one of the nicest I’ve ever seen. It’s a whole game based around those scenes in Fellowship of the Ring where you see everybody striding across mountains and grassy plains. It’s combination of lush landscapes, slow pace and wide horizons makes this game seem vast, like it’s a world so big and full of possibilities that you’re about to get lost in it, but that’s also so quaint and immediate with its concerns that you don’t mind simply walking around for ages taking in the sights.
It doesn’t feel like a stage, or a level, or a map. It feels like a world.
I emphasised “what I’ve played” earlier because, by a lot of people’s accounts who are a lot further into Wartales than I am, everything that makes the opening hours such a blast—the feeling of wide open spaces, the constant resting and eating to keep your soldiers happy and breathing, the overworld battles—starts to become a bit of a grind later on.
Maybe it does, and when this game gets out of Early Access and I get that far, I’ll see if that’s actually the case. But for now, around 15 hours in, the open-ended mission structure that lets you take on contracts at your own leisure means that, for all its potential as a day-waster, its actually perfectly suited to what’s become a pretty busy part of my life, as I can jump in, finish a contract or two, set up camp, save the game then revisit it the next time I get a chance.
As a series dating back to the 1980s, you normally expect a new Street Fighter game to play it safe. Sure, every generation or two there might be a visual shift, but Street Fighter is Street Fighter, it began as a 1v1 fighting tournament and shall forever be one. Until, that is, Street Fighter 6 came along.
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I’ll note before we go any further that I’m nor a serious fan of this series. I played the shit out of the second, I admired the third’s graphics from afar and have had little to do with it since, since I’m both terrible at fighting games and not really that interested in them.
But I am very interested in Street Fighter 6, because it’s fancy new ‘World Tour’ mode looks like everything you could ever dream of when a developer decides its time to shake things up. While we’ve known the vague outline of what this new game mode would entail for a while, a new showcase released today goes into huge detail about what we can expect.
It’s basically an open world RPG mode. For, you know, Street Fighter. Don’t believe me? Look at this screenshot, which is for an upcoming game in the Street Fighter series:
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Incredible. You can also customise your appearance, which I think we already knew, but what I love about it here is that it’s not just cosmetic; because this is an RPG mode your choice of sneakers or boots will have an impact on your, uh, kick strength and, um, vitality:
Image: Capcom
Also incredible is the fact you get to fight a fridge, which I know I spoiled in the headline and top image, but I’m going to post the same gif here again because I like it so much:
I cannot stress how good this all is. I love this as much as I loved Yakuza’s pivot to turn-based combat, which while not proving a universal success, was at least a brave and fascinating attempt to breathe new life into a long-running series. Developers in charge of historic game franchises, please take note: it is greatly appreciated every time you try something new.
The wait is nearly over. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom finally hits the Switch on May 14, 2023. Three epic trailers plus a look at some gameplay have only made us even more excited to finally dive into the next chapter in Nintendo’s adventure series. This time around, Link has a number of sweet new abilities. One of them is a clever take on crafting, which the game calls “Fuse.”
Link’s new “Fuse” and “Ultrahand” abilities, as teased in trailers and fully explained in a gameplay deep dive on March 28, is actually a pretty sweet crafting system. Instead of just following preset recipes for crafting, players will be able to combine all manner of unique objects they find around Hyrule to forge makeshift weaponry, Mad Max-worthy vehicles, and who knows what else? Footage so far has shown the ability to create custom designs with simulated physics like buoyancy and air propulsion. Other examples show off weapon upgrades that trigger status effects like freezing.
With such a versatile system, the sky’s the limit for what you might be able to craft come May 12. To give you some idea of just how handy Link can get, we’ve cataloged everything we’ve seen our hero Fuse thus far. You’ll see he’s actually very handy.
The writer O. Henry is alleged to have said of New York City, “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.” I have a very similar feeling about Minecraft Legends. Its mix of real-time strategy and third-person action seems like it could be a splendid game, should Mojang ever get around to completing it.
Legends is an ambitious concept. As Minecraft Dungeons is to the action-RPG, Minecraft Legends is to the strategy game, another spin-off from the almighty franchise that attempts to make a complicated genre more immediately palatable to a family audience. However, where Dungeons is a roaring success, a delightful game to sit and blast through, Legends is a bemusing and messy creation that runs out of ideas before it runs out of tutorial.
How Minecraft Legends Becomes Strategic
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
It’s peculiar, reviewing something in the Minecraft milieu. It doesn’t matter a bit what I or anyone else has to say about it, because it’s predestined to be a phenomenon. My local department store is already filled with tie-in promotional products, from toys to t-shirts, a week before it’s even released. “Friends & Allies” reads one such kids’ shirt, showing the traditional Minecraft enemies stood alongside a heroic Steve-like, capturing the game’s USP: This time you fight alongside the Creepers, Zombies, Skeletons and so on, in a united front against a Piglin invasion of the Overworld.
In a large map (growing in size depending upon your difficulty level) that’s randomly arranged at the start of a single-player campaign, you are selected by three somewhat celestial beings, Knowledge, Action, and Foresight to repel the piggy invasion. These porcine pests are determined to take over the villages of the franchise’s erstwhile Villagers, building their own encampments, and despoiling the very ground beneath them. To fight against this, you play in third-person controlling your hero, accompanied by a team of golems that you create via spawners, who (are supposed to) follow you wherever you go, and follow your issued orders during on-the-fly battles.
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
It all begins pretty well. Knowledge, Action, and Foresight are all brilliant characters, excellently voiced and welcoming to new players. They are there to explain the basics of the game, as new concepts are introduced in the initial stages of play. You learn how to gather resources, starting off with wood and stone. Then how to build spawners, generate golems (and later Skeletons, Creepers, Zombies, etc), beginning with two types, a ranged arrow-firing block-like creature, and a melee rock-type, that furiously punches at enemies and enemy structures. Once this is established, Minecraft Legends lets you get into scraps with the Piglins, then you find a village, and get a rundown on the basics of protecting each location’s central well, done by building walls and defensive structures.
You roam the beautiful world on the back of one of four mount types (one’s a beetle that’s great at climbing, another’s a bird that can glide from heights without taking damage), all used to negotiate those familiar Minecraft biomes, mountains, and seas. But you can also build in this world by holding down the left trigger, then placing objects RTS-style around you, or drag-dropping lengths of wall into place on the ground near your character.
With all of these gameplay elements put in place, Minecraft Legends then just sets you free with almost none of the most important mechanics properly explained, while blathering new information at you while you’re trying to come to grips with what a complete mess the controls are. Devolving entirely into “tell, don’t show,” I was left struggling to work out how I was supposed to improve my tools, as it keeps demanding you should. Via trial and error, I eventually figured out it’s about building new structures at a central location, using materials it hasn’t told me how to get yet, and oh good Lord.
Why Minecraft Legends Is So Frustrating
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
Eventually, I figure all Minecraft Legends’ mechanics out. I get there. But it’s such aa frustrating experience, only to learn that one whole mess—of placing special towers that can variously improve the amounts of resources you can carry, the numbers of golems you can have in your army, the ability to have your alleys gather new resource types, and even the ability to gather other tower types—would have been far better as a skill tree in the menus. Then it would be clear, visibly understandable, and much better communicated to players.
But communication is Legends greatest failure. There’s just so much that’s so peculiarly missing here, not least when it comes to the game’s map. It allows you to fast travel between discovered villages, and also shows the location of different biomes, mount types, potential allies (the Skeletons, Creepers, etc), and the Piglin encampments. Hover over many of these and one of the characters will—after a weirdly long delay—tell you some information. Perhaps this Piglin camp is planning to create a new site tonight, or that this village is intended for attack by the Piglins and needs your help defending itself.
But what it absolutely doesn’t tell you, neither in the pop-up text nor the voice over, is whether a Piglin camp is possible to attack. To find that out, you have to run vast distances across the terrain to reach its borders, where either a (splendid) cutscene will play introducing that battle, or a text box will pop up saying you’re not yet ready to attack it. Again, get close enough and its difficulty level will appear on screen—1 to 4—giving you an idea of the challenge ahead. But that information isn’t on the map, either before or after you’ve learned it elsewhere. Why not? This is such basic stuff. The amount of time I wasted running toward battles I couldn’t play is galling, and could so easily have been prevented.
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
And when Minecraft Legends does give you valuable on-screen information, it’s often obfuscated and unexplained. I eventually work out which unlabeled number represents how many characters I currently have following me anywhere, and which represents how many of my total possible golems currently exist in the world. The two can’t usefully be matched up, because the former contains any random animals you might have picked up on your travels, given the only way to select units around you is to hit X, and grab the attention of anyone in a very small circle. Which means, yes, there’s literally no way to call your units to you when exploring or battling without going up to their immediate vicinity and hitting X. Instruct them to attack that structure over there, and they’ll rush off to do so, and then when it’s done, stand there. Forever. You have to run to them, and meticulously select them all, to issue another instruction. Which is bewildering.
It gets significantly worse because of the atrocious pathfinding. Most of the Piglin bases are on raised platforms, requiring you to build ramps for your troops to ascend between the rocky plateaus. But none of them can cope with the narrow paths and enemy structures that bounce them off the platform, meaning you constantly lose your units to the ground below. Down there, rather than make their way back to you, they’ll instead just stand there, uselessly, not even defending themselves from attacks. If you’re five platforms up, trying to fight an enormous Piglin elephant-thing, while attempting to destroy enemy towers that are raining fire on you, at the same time as thirty Piglins are fighting you from all sides, you are forced to jump all the way down, gather your stragglers, guide them all the way back up to the battle, and then watch them idiotically walk off the sides again. Over and over and over.
Lose your troops entirely, as you often will, and you need to run away from the battle site to the nearest spawners you’ve placed to generate some fighters. In a traditional RTS game, this would involve zooming out from your godlike view of the map, clicking on facilities that generate new units, then commanding them to head toward your fight. But in Legends, it involves riding your purple tiger away from the hundreds of enemies all attacking you, bounding across the terrain to your nearest spawners (only possible to place on non-enemy terrain, hence the journey), create new ones, then manically gather them to follow you because they’ll just stand there if you don’t get every single one within your tiny X-circle, then run with them all back to the battle, up all your ramps again, into the fray, likely to see half of them immediately killed by a massive fireball, and the other half throw themselves off the sides to get lost in the ground below.
How Minecraft Legends Buries Its Fun
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
I’ve described the above at such meticulous lengths, because that’s the majority of the experience of playing Minecraft Legends. It’s about painstakingly guiding these gormless troops via punishingly poor interaction into distant battles, over and over until you’ve finally whittled away at things enough to destroy the central portal. And all the time, you can see the fun you should be having, the solid family-friendly game that hides beneath all this clumsy crap, but you can never quite touch it.
Everything is so opaque. New structures are added with no fanfare, no notice, and are only discovered when you remember that there’s an in-game book-thing that lets you rearrange your UI. As the game progresses, you end up with the farcical issue of having about 15 different structures you want to have access to at any time, but a UI that only lets you select eight of them at a time. You’re supposed to endlessly juggle them about, which would be massively annoying if it weren’t for the next huge issue: you can’t sodding pause.
Because the game has been designed with co-op or combative multiplayer in mind, the single-player campaign that it presents as its main mode is forced to be an always-online experience. So when you hit pause to answer the front door, or deal with the kids, Minecraft Legends just carries on playing almost invisibly behind the apparent pause menu, killing your troops, and advancing time so the Piglin bases expand unchecked, villages are attacked, and allies lose faith in your support. The same is true when you’re opening the ‘book’ to try to rearrange your UI, so you can build the attacking structure you need to defend a village, but have your units wiped out while forced to fight with these menus. Idiotic.
An 8-Year-Old’s Review Of Minecraft Legends
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
All these frustrations aside, the game beneath them sadly all also falls short. Once you’ve defended a bunch of villages, and attacked a bunch of Piglin bases, it very quickly becomes apparent that you’ve seen all it has to offer. And unlike Dungeons, where replaying the same dungeons lets you make progress in your armor, equipment, etc, there’s nothing like that in Minecraft Legends. You get access to more golem types and more structures, but once they’re all in place there’s no carrot remaining to motivate continued play.
Of course, this is all based on the single-player game—my many hours with it were spent before release, and as such, before there was anyone else to cooperate or compete with. However, given the mad mess of awful unit controls, dreadful pathfinding and AI, and a lack of variety in what you get to do, I struggle to see how things could be dramatically improved by subjecting someone else. And it’s crucially important to note that unlike Dungeons, there’s no couch co-op here, and never will be, which is disastrous.
However, and this is a very significant however, I’m not the only one in my house who played Minecraft Legends. I was accompanied for much of my time by my 8-year-old son, currently on his school vacations, and he’s spent a good deal of time playing it for himself. His view is different. In fact, I commissioned him to write about them (paying him from my fee for this review, I stress). His view, from a much more relaxed approach to playing, just muddling about and not focused on attempting to make strong progress, was far more positive. Here’s Toby’s review:
I much prefer Minecraft Legends than normal Minecraft but Legends has bad things about it,too. Like for instance, I much prefer animals in normal Minecraft than in Legends though, I do quite like the Piglins so mixed feelings. I prefer mining in normal Minecraft and I prefer how you level up and beat the game in normal Minecraft. Minecraft Legends brings fights to another level. The Piglin bases are fun to fight, challenging and not too challenging. Also defending villages is super fun because of building defenses and attacking the mobs. I prefer building in normal Minecraft but that’s no big deal. So overall I think that Minecraft Legends is great and I really like it. THE END!!!
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
So there you have it. As I said at the beginning, a 45-year-old games journalist’s views on Minecraft Legends are close to irrelevant. It’s going to be on Game Pass (along with the grimly inevitable in-app purchases for skins and cosmetic nonsense). It seamlessly transfers between your PC and your Xbox (we played the game on both, picking up downstairs where we left off upstairs), meaning it’ll be there on the couch or on your laptop. And perhaps most significantly, it’s going to be in every toy store, supermarket, and bus stop for the foreseeable future.
That it’s not a very good game, and one that desperately needed a lot more development before this seemingly premature release, will matter almost not at all. It’s stunningly pretty, it lets you make friends with the Creepers, and the cutscenes are brilliant. And it matches those new pyjamas. Should they ever finish Minecraft Legends, allowing you to instantly gather your spawned troops from anywhere, fixing the atrocious UI, giving your units some vestiges of pathfinding, and hugely increasing the mission variation, I think it could be a great place.
My life changed forever when I got a copy of Final Fantasy VII in 1997 (losing those discs has haunted me ever since). While I enjoy much of the 2020 Remake, the original experience is irreplaceably special to me. I start a new playthrough of it at least once a year, every year. Other times, I’ll just jump into a random save file I was working my way through at some point. It must be on anything I own that can run it.
Since 2015, the remaster (not Remake) has made the experience much smoother; and it’s always fun to occasionally mess around with mods that tweak character models or apply AI upscaled backgrounds to clean up the image.
The story, the characters, the landmark soundtrack with gorgeous compositions and tear-jerking melodies surpass the limitations of the rather humdrum sounds the midi-controlled sequencer on the PSX produced, it culminates into not just one of my favorite video games of all time, it’s one of my favorite media experiences, period.
Final Fantasy VII, in its original form, is an epic story of identity, friendship, love, and struggle in the face of insurmountable odds against seemingly unstoppable foes. I delight, as I did in my youth, blissfully getting lost in it. Its world, with blocky polygonal models might seem primordial by today’s standards, but to me its graphical limitations are an abstract that paints a bigger picture in my head—one that no amount of modern, hyper powerful game engines with all the bells and whistles will ever be able to touch.
And, yeah, you were right, Aeris; it was always the only way.
Ryuichi Sakamoto, the famed Japanese musician and composer, has died at the age of 71.
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He had been battling failing health for several years, having been diagnosed in 2014 with throat cancer, then bowel cancer in 2021. Through all his treatments and surgeries, however, he continued to write music and perform, even giving an online performance as recently as December 2022.
Sakamoto is perhaps best known for his work composing the score to several films, especially The Last Emperor (for which he won an Academy Award), The Last Buddha, The Revenant (which saw him nominated for a Golden Globe) and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, in which he also appeared on-screen alongside David Bowie.
Yet he was also famous for his earlier pop career, both as a solo artist and as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, an electronic group that was huge in Japan in the early 80s. YMO had an impact on Western musicians and markets as well; their song “Computer Game” charted in the UK, and they appeared live on Soul Train in 1980.
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Over his decades-long career writing music Sakamoto even worked on a few video games, from 1989 RPG Tengai Makyou: Ziria, the first game in the long-running Far East of Eden series, to 2006’s Dawn of Mana, for which he composed the opening theme (for more on this surprisingly excellent but also confusing credit, see here)
His most recent contribution to a video game was 2014’s wonderful Hohokum, in which (among other excellent selections) the track Reticent Reminiscence, a collaboration between Sakamoto and electronic musician Christopher Willits, appears.
Sakamoto died on March 28, with the announcement of his passing coming after his funeral on April 2. He is survived by his four children, one of whom is Japanese pop star Miu Sakamoto.
It’s almost poetic that, in a genre built on many people fighting to stay alive until just a few remain, so many battle royale games have launched, flopped, and died over the last few years. Not every new battle royale can find the same success as Warzone or PUBG. In fact, most will be lucky to survive at all. And many haven’t, as this list shows.
While fan-made mods have added battle royale-like modes to games like Arma, the genre truly exploded with the release of Player Unknown’s Battleground and, shortly after, Fortnite’s take on the genre. These games exploded in popularity, with Fortnite alone jumping from 20 million users in 2017 to 125 million in 2018. Publishers took notice, and more studios began spitting out battle royales to cash in on the trend. And it makes sense. These games aren’t too tricky to make if you already have a shooter engine or existing IP that works within the genre and a talented team of devs. However, they need constant upkeep, fresh content, and a large player base to live. And that’s not easy to achieve.
So, as we wrap up our fantastic week focused on battle royale games, it seems like the perfect time to stop and acknowledge all the games that tried to survive and thrive, but in the end, for various reasons, didn’t make it. They all got sniped from afar and were left in a ditch, surrounded by digital corpses of other failed attempts to be the next Apex Legends or Fortnite.
Epic Games held a little showcase at the Game Developers Conference earlier today, called State of Unreal. Designed as a way to keep everyone who makes games up to date on what’s in store for the industry-dominating Unreal Engine, the highlights are also obviously interesting to anyone who plays games as well.
Both Epic and some external studios took the opportunity to show off some of the stuff they’ve been working on in Unreal Engine 5. The shortest video, and perhaps most impressive, is this clip from Ninja Theory’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, which highlights some incredible facial animation capabilities (using Metahuman, which we’ve written about previously):
State of Unreal – Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II | GDC 2023
It still doesn’t look real, there’s something about the exaggeration of the lips and her teeth that I can’t fully explain, but it still looks amazing.
Another subject of the technical showcase was action RPG Lords of the Fallen, with a more conventional look at how games are made using the engine:
Lords of the Fallen – State of Unreal Technical Showcase Trailer GDC | Wishlist: PC, PS5 & Xbox X/S
Next up is this gameplay demo from Infinitesimals, a backyard bugs game that I’m pretty sure was first announced years ago, but which is still in development. This clip is a little more developer-focused, but still gives you a look at how Unreal Engine 5 handles the scale of a large open world:
Infinitesimals – Unreal 5 Gameplay Demo | State of Unreal 2023
And finally we’ve got this driving video, which is not just an ad for Unreal Engine and Epic’s Quixel, but for EV company Rivian as well (their car’s dash screens run on the Unreal Engine). This one is showing off some lovely foliage, along with some impressive driving physics as well (it’s particularly neat how the car will hit small rocks that will then fly away):
Unreal Engine 5.2 – Next-Gen Graphics Tech Demo | State of Unreal 2023
While it’s expected to take everything shown at these presentations with a grain of salt, it’s encouraging that three of the four videos here were of actual games currently in development, meaning that the usual “well, your actual games aren’t going to look this good” caveats we normally need on these posts aren’t quite as needed here.
The internet’s been buzzy of late for the freshly announced Persona 5 spin-off game, Phantom of the Night (P5X). Fans were intrigued by the new characters, but they were also excited to meet their old favorites again. But when I looked at the screenshots, I noticed one person missing: Goro Akechi. What gives, Atlus? You can’t just pretend that Persona 5 Royal’s main antagonist wasn’t also the series’ most compelling character. He was a true member of the Phantom Thieves group, and his haters can die mad about it.
Goro Akechi is a high school student who acts as a rival for the main protagonist of Persona 5. In the original game, he’s known for betraying the party after pretending to be their friend. He also does this in the enhanced Royal release, but this 2019 update of the game adds additional scenes for him. These social interactions make Akechi feel more like a deeply troubled friend, rather than a shithead cop who had a change of heart at the very last second.
Like most RPG antagonists, Akechi has a tragic backstory. His mother died when he was young, and he grew up as an orphan (who generally face considerable social stigma in Japan). Akechi wanted revenge against his neglectful and cruel father, so he cooperated with him in order to get close enough to assassinate him. Unfortunately, his father also planned to assassinate his son all along. Akechi eventually recognized that the protagonist is a similar person to him, and chose to sacrifice himself to ensure the escape of the heroic Phantom Thieves.
It also helped that in Royal, players got to spend more time with him in an entirely new arc. The post-game added a new semester in which reality has been completely changed. In this altered Tokyo, every character has their personal tragedy undone, and each person lives a happy life. This is the only scenario in which Akechi can be saved. However, he rejects the artificial world and the false happiness that comes with it. Since he’s implied to have died in the original plotline, defeating this world’s owner means he will cease to exist. He doesn’t care. For him, dying is preferable to living under the thumb of some higher power.
But I wanted him to live! When you pursue the ending in which the artificial world is destroyed, Royal teases the possibility that Akechi might have survived. And so I held my breath for the possibility of being able to see Akechi again in the sequel game Scramble. I never ended up finishing that musou game despite completing so many others. Akechi wasn’t in it, and that was definitely part of the reason. I wasn’t terribly invested in a P5 in which he didn’t exist.
I hoped that it was a fluke. Akechi is good, and he deserves to appear in other spinoff games. Now it seems like P5X might let me down too, and I’m starting to lose hope that Atlus remembers who he is. This is homophobia, and I won’t stand for it. Atlus, give us my feral bird son or give me death.
