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This Week in Games - Shiny Objects


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heavyweather



Joined: 29 Aug 2008
Posts: 97
Location: Fargo, ND
PostPosted: Fri Feb 26, 2021 9:38 pm Reply with quote
Japan Studio closure: This sucks, no two ways about it. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are masterworks, and the Gravity Rush games are two of the most unsung gems of the PS4 generation.

As an aside, I still hope that the PS5 will get strong Japanese games. The big Japanese developers mentioned in the article have really hit it out of the park this generation, especially after the less great PS3/X360 gen, so I'm hoping for more good stuff

Tekken: There was some speculation that the new Character is Ciri from The Witcher series. The reasoning being that 1) Bandai-Namco have a working relationship with CDPR (Geralt was in Soul Calibur 6) 2) Ciri is a time traveler, and 3) The Witcher is based on Polish novels and from a Polish studio.

I think it's a bit of a stretch, but it'd be cool to see.

FFVII remake PS5 stuff: I JUST beat the game on PS4. Great timing, Square-Enix...

Frys Electronics: I missed out on them. I never had one near me. I remember Zac talking about them on old episodes of ANNcast, and how they apperently had a bunch of older anime DVDs at full price well after they were released. It would have been cool to see at some point.
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Triltaison



Joined: 03 Jul 2011
Posts: 717
PostPosted: Fri Feb 26, 2021 9:44 pm Reply with quote
We actually have (well, had) a Fry's here in Georgia on the East Coast! I frequented the Duluth area location, and I believe there was also another location in Milton. They sadly weren't themed in any way and were more like a BrandSmart or Best Buy. My favorite was either the Sunnyvale or San Jose locations... I think it was Sunnyvale that had a museum of old technology about the history of electronics, with examples of the first Apple computers and other neat things. I always loved to look at all the old stuff when buying my anime or whatever. Super thankful that I got to check out those CA locations back in the heyday of the early 2000s. Such a shame that I never got to see the aliens at Burbank.

I'm super looking forward to all of the Pokémon games, too. The chibi look for BDSP is so adorable. They look like the Pokémon Kids figure line to me and I love it.
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Horsefellow



Joined: 01 Jan 2020
Posts: 262
PostPosted: Fri Feb 26, 2021 10:46 pm Reply with quote
heavyweather wrote:
As an aside, I still hope that the PS5 will get strong Japanese games. The big Japanese developers mentioned in the article have really hit it out of the park this generation, especially after the less great PS3/X360 gen, so I'm hoping for more good stuff.


Sony seems to be all but bowing out of the Japanese market and leaving it to Nintendo. We'll still see cross culture appeal titles like Resident Evil, but PS5 is going to be even less Japanese than the PS4 was.
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Rogural



Joined: 28 Nov 2017
Posts: 47
PostPosted: Sat Feb 27, 2021 7:41 am Reply with quote
Definitely kind of upsetting to hear about Japan Studio. I enjoyed their titles, they were nice and quirky, and while it is nice to hear that ASOBI is staying around, and I do love Astro-bot, I can't help but think that shirking the Japanese talent is a step in the wrong direction. At the very least it's not going to do any help in proving that Sony aren't snobbing Japanese developers, no matter how much Jim Ryan says they're not.
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AksaraKishou



Joined: 16 May 2015
Posts: 1410
Location: End of the World
PostPosted: Sat Feb 27, 2021 11:06 am Reply with quote
Heads up Heidi, check Oda's twitter. Rollback incoming to KoFXV!!!
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TranceLimit174



Joined: 21 Jul 2004
Posts: 958
PostPosted: Sat Feb 27, 2021 12:20 pm Reply with quote
Anthem Next: This whole situation is the worst of everything. I have no sympathy for EA & BioWare, and as foolish as fans were for continuing to believe in this I can't help but feel for them being betrayed. Bottom line is EA & BioWare have been lying about a product for two years and still made money off it. What's worse, people will still buy games with the EA label & most are going to buy the new Mass Effect & Dragon Age anyway out of franchise loyalty. I'd like to see some free market punishment here, but it won't happen.

FFVII: Remake Intergrade: It feels way too early to be seeing anything for Part 2, so this was a hell of a surprise after a boring presentation that felt like, "We're doing it because Nintendo did one last week." Getting a whole new episode with Yuffie as an expansion / holdover I am 100% happy with. A little annoying I can't play it since I don't have a PS5, but I'm not that mad about it. The whole Ever Crisis thing is also just kinda all-around mind blowing that it is exists. Took nearly 25 years, but FFVII fans are finally getting everything they want & served up two ways.

KOF XV: #SNKRollback was so deafening, that it literally halted the hype train. We finally get the character, the team, after an 18-year absence and people did not care because they were more concerned with the rollback question; SNK's social media & comments sections were flooded. To make matters worse, coming off the heels of StrIVe's beta, the whole situation was giving off very strong DBFZ VS MvC:I vibes. So imagine our surprise when we wake up to Yasuyuki Oda's Tweet yesterday confirming in-house early rollback development. Suddenly, all is right in KOF Land & SNK can market their game again.

These character reveals are gradually going to get more interesting and I was thinking, since Team Reveals are a thing, how cool would it be if Rugal got revealed as a solo boss entry? Would be pretty sweet.

Guilty Gear: StrIVe: Not only am I thrilled to have I-No as the final character, but I love, love, love her re-design. Game is gonna be something special.

All-in-all, crazy week for gaming news with a lot of ups & downs.
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El Hermano



Joined: 24 Feb 2019
Posts: 450
Location: Texas
PostPosted: Sat Feb 27, 2021 1:27 pm Reply with quote
TranceLimit174 wrote:
Anthem Next: This whole situation is the worst of everything. I have no sympathy for EA & BioWare, and as foolish as fans were for continuing to believe in this I can't help but feel for them being betrayed. Bottom line is EA & BioWare have been lying about a product for two years and still made money off it. What's worse, people will still buy games with the EA label & most are going to buy the new Mass Effect & Dragon Age anyway out of franchise loyalty. I'd like to see some free market punishment here, but it won't happen.


There was a time when I'd have loved a KOTOR 3 from Bioware. But just about every founding and talented person working there has left, so they're not the studio they used to be.
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DRWii



Joined: 16 May 2007
Posts: 636
PostPosted: Sat Feb 27, 2021 1:51 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
I mean, what's the last major Japan Studio release you can name off the top of your head? Probably The Last Guardian, right? Maybe Knack if you're feeling meme-y.

I weep for Gravity Rush 2.

I would complain about the closure, but I own hardly any games Japan Studio was involved with so I'd feel like a hypocrite. Hopefully everyone who left finds success.


Last edited by DRWii on Sat Feb 27, 2021 10:44 pm; edited 2 times in total
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BadNewsBlues



Joined: 21 Sep 2014
Posts: 5886
PostPosted: Sat Feb 27, 2021 3:25 pm Reply with quote
Rogural wrote:
At the very least it's not going to do any help in proving that Sony aren't snobbing Japanese developers, no matter how much Jim Ryan says they're not.


It's more likely the studios are snubbing them than the other way around. But it's also likely another sign of the stability issues and weirdness of the Japanese game market.

TranceLimit174 wrote:
What's worse, people will still buy games with the EA label & most are going to buy the new Mass Effect & Dragon Age anyway out of franchise loyalty. I'd like to see some free market punishment here, but it won't happen.


If we're being fair DA3 had a much less icy reception than Mass Effect 3 (which has seemingly been vindicated) and Andromeda. So people anticipating that release and buying it makes a substantial amount of sense.
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enurtsol



Joined: 01 May 2007
Posts: 14746
PostPosted: Sat Feb 27, 2021 10:24 pm Reply with quote
Murder, She wrote:

That makes it much harder for a Japanese-focused game to sell on PS platforms. Plus, with game development for PS5 being extremely pricey, you need to make games with mass global appeal… which means a heavy bias towards Western aesthetics and game design. (There's a lot to discuss about the West's hegemony for all things entertainment, but that's well beyond the scope of this column.)


In a bizarre way, this seems like reverse karma swinging around from back at the turn of the century, when Japanese would dismiss Western games as automatically kusoge (for the uninitiated: “kuso” meaning shit and “ge” meaning game)

Japan Studio was Sony's oldest studio, but unlike the days when Playstation had effectively 3 disparate markets (Japan, Europe, America) with their own regional operations working semi-independently off each other, the cost-benefit of AAA game development seems necessitate for the widest audience possible. As PS chief Jim Ryan already admitted:
Quote:
"The nature of AAA PlayStation 4 and certainly PlayStation 5 development... We're obviously not going to have Worldwide Studios make a game for one specific European country. And that might have been the case back in the PSP times with Invizimals [which was popular in Spain]."


Just substitute Spain for any country (not named USA)
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OtherSideofSky





PostPosted: Sun Feb 28, 2021 12:35 am Reply with quote
The Japan Studio closure sucks. I always found most of their games rough-around-the-edges, but they also stood out enough for me to have bought and played most of them. I'm honestly getting less and less certain that I'll ever feel like buying a PS5.

I've heard people talk about Fry's, but I've never actually seen one. It's a shame, because all the remaining physical retailers in my neck of the woods are awful, and I don't like most of the online ones much better.

The Strive beta was amazing. I love all the new looks (I think May is an especially dramatic improvement), and I-No's reveal certainly didn't disappoint.
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Denys Lalande



Joined: 28 Jan 2018
Posts: 88
PostPosted: Sun Feb 28, 2021 12:56 am Reply with quote
The fall of Fry's: The store in Burbank is in the same parking lot as where the Civil Air Patrol Cadet squadron I was in met (our meeting building was the small office block just west of the Fry's). Oh well.
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FireballDragon



Joined: 17 Nov 2014
Posts: 682
PostPosted: Sun Feb 28, 2021 12:37 pm Reply with quote
So to those who were concerned that Sinnoh remakes were out of the question, I say: No need to worry. See what I did there? Only Pokémon fans would get that joke.
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AiddonValentine



Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 2201
PostPosted: Sun Feb 28, 2021 7:33 pm Reply with quote
-Pokemon: The remakes are welcome and Legends looks interesting, if just because of it going back in time and making it a sort of Edo-era Pokemon. I wonder how much will be different, like how there's no League.

-Japan Studio: Utterly pathetic on Sony's part.

-FFVII:....Okay, Square, we need to talk. This whole "remake" thing has gotten out of hand with you doing some Compilation thing and now Battle Royale: Soldier. The Compilation was not good, it was laughably bad. In fact, you can't do "extended universes" to save your life (well, Matsuno could, but he was driven out by executive incompetence) so just stop it. Advent Children, Before Crisis, and Dirge of Cerberus were all bad, so stop sulking at people not liking it.

-Anthem Next: Yeah, that was a mess. Supposedly they've also axed multiplayer for Dragon Age 4, so it's looking at another moonshot for the studio.

-Fighting games: An amusing bit of trivia is that Chizuru is now voiced by Sayaka Ohara, the older sister of Shun'ei's voice actor Takashi Ohara.

As for other news, Koei-Tecmo unveiled more of Samurai Warriors 5 and they've gone full in on a massive overhaul, down to recasting most of the characters and giving them radical redesigns, like Imagawa being a threatening warlord and Ieyasu being outright bishified. Here's hoping we finally get Yasuke.
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Rob19ny



Joined: 13 Jun 2020
Posts: 1655
PostPosted: Sun Feb 28, 2021 9:42 pm Reply with quote
Pocket Monster remakes of Diamond and Pearl look boring, which is why I haven't been into the series after finishing Y (anime version is badass and the best) and why I've been on Team Digimon Story for almost 6 years now, a game that fills the hole in my heart because it gives me what I want.

Jim Ryan has been nothing but a curse to the history PS brand and a negative to Japanese devs who have had their games censored. The man is a liar and anything he says about Japan always ends up being bad. They need someone like Andrew House back who understood Japan way more than Jim Ryan ever will and at least tried because he cared.

The FF7R DLC being only on PS5 was a dumb move, especially in Japan. The game sold over 1m in Japan and the PS5 is currently at 400k there. By time Intergrade releases in June, the PS5 will be at give or take around 700k if it continues to sell 20k per week (because Jim Ryan doesn't care as much as he tells you he does to increase stock). You're just forcing JP gamers to watch it on YouTube because that's their only option (aside from borrowing a PS5 and the game from a friend). I can understand Part 2 being only on PS5 (especially when 16 is only on PS5, development has shifted).

Gackt on mobile baby!
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