This Week in Games

Chuuni Corpses

Welcome back, folks! By the time you read this, I'll have watched Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg at a local theater. I first heard of the movie 15 years ago (thank you, Grumpy Jii-san, I miss you), and was thoroughly convinced it would never get a legitimate release in the US. It was just too weird and experimental. But hey, in the years since we've seen Belladonna of Sadness come stateside, so I sure got proven wrong. There's a lot that's messed up in the world, but good stuff still happens. Good stuff still gets made. We should take solace in that.

Xseed is pretty dedicated to doing right by its fanbase, so when it comes to bad news, there's likely nobody more disappointed than them. And unfortunately, they had some bad news for us last week: the announced Corpse Party Tetralogy compilation had its American release cancelled.

As per Xseed's announcement, the Corpse Party collection "doesn't comply with current platform guidelines," much like what had happened with Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth games. Most folks are somewhat understanding, since Corpse Party is, uh... well, it's Corpse Party; there are a lot of scenes with middle-schoolers struggling with needing to use the bathroom, and watersports are one of those things that understandably would get a game slapped with an "AO" rating in a hurry. On the other, Corpse Party and Corpse Party: Blood Drive are up on the eShop right now. Having never played any of the Corpse Party games, I can't go on the record with how far any of the other two games in the series go into matters. As a result, there is significant criticism of Nintendo for the perceived shift in standards.

A lot of people are quick to cry foul given the glut of AI-generated "hentai" games on the eShop. As a matter of fairness: all of those games are rated "T" (same as Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth), and about as revealing as, say, one of Ryza's more fanciful costumes in the Atelier Ryza games (again, much like Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth). Those AI-generated games can burn in a garbage fire, mind, and the world would be better for it. But it's a long line from some cleavage and middle-schoolers on the verge of wetting themselves.

Given the facts so far, my inclination is that this isn't entirely Nintendo's fault. They're bending the knee, to be sure, and they deserve criticism for that—but my first guess is that this has more to do with our old enemy, payment processors. The battle for allowing adult content to be sold and distributed on the Internet despite payment processors has been ongoing for the better part of the year now, such that one of the loudest voices in the discussion has effectively become fully-unbanked. A lot of folks talk about Sony and Nintendo having "swapped places" in terms of permissiveness of certain themes, and it's all hot air; we're already seeing payment processors causing problems on pretty much every other platform out there, so there's no reason to assume they're not giving Nintendo headaches, too. Remember, it's in Nintendo's best interest to have more stuff on their platform, not less (and they were clearly okay with the compilation to at least start the process with Xseed).

This sucks, make no mistake, and I definitely wish we could pull a Chaos;HEAd and get it rectified. But it's a lot harder to do that when your game has so many potty-problems. If anything, this further underlines the need to contact payment processors and demand accountability for their irrational standards.

We got a sneak peek at the upcoming Zelda movie earlier this week! And...

... yep, it sure looks like a Zelda movie! Nintendo knows that Zelda is one of its pillars, as far as franchises go; Nintendo is likely cracking the whip with regards to every last detail in the movie. So don't expect any wild swings even remotely like the Bob Hoskins Super Mario Bros..

With that said, the images look fine, maybe even a bit understated. Both Link and Zelda's designs give powerful "1980s sword-and-sorcery film" vibes, along the lines of Willow or Legend—or The Princess Bride. Those films were extremely contemporary to the original The Legend of Zelda, so using them as an aesthetic basis is fitting. Link's iconic tunic gives Twilight Princess vibes, too—which is also a good decision, since that was easily the most "realistic" game in terms of aesthetic and color palette (compared to the brighter and cartoonier designs in Skyward Sword or Breath of the Wild). I see some disappointment that Link doesn't have his hat, but again, this is an extremely "safe" movie they're working on; Nintendo doesn't want to scare off the squares by giving Link a hat that makes him look like a Keebler elf.

So, yeah: that Zelda movie sure looks like a Zelda movie.

With 2025 being the 30th anniversary of the Tales of... series, Bandai Namco has used this year to announce several remasters for newer consoles. The last we heard, Tales of Xillia was getting remastered, and just this week we found out which game was next on the docket. And it's Tales of Berseria...?

This one is a bit eyebrow-raising for fans. Not that Tales of Berseria is bad, mind. However, I've never played it. I was once applauded for referring to it as "the chuuni-est game ever made" ("That's like accurately calculating the height of a mountain range by examining the surrounding hills," a reader once said, which I'll mount on my wall). It's still fondly regarded as a Tales of... series, not the least of which thanks to the belated Mutsumi Inomata's character designs—especially for protagonist Velvet Crowe. (Also, Velvet is voiced by Christina Vee in English, which is a shortcut to making me love a character.) The famed "RPG for Living True to Yourself" takes place in a world called Desolation, where humans and "malakim" struggle against the disease known as "daemonblight," which robs people of their rationality and turns them into Daemons. With Velvet turning into a Daemon, she can absorb other Daemons, battling across the land to solve the mystery of the Daemonblight plague.

It's a great set-up, make no mistake, and the game is apparently plenty of fun. And it's not even like Tales of Berseria is horribly recent—it'll be a decade old next year. The problem is that Berseria debuted on Steam and the PlayStation 4... and runs perfectly fine on the PS5. It's still playable right now. About the only advantage to the remake is that Berseria would finally release on Xbox's consoles, along with the Switch—on top of the PS5 (which runs Tales of Berseria perfectly fine) and Steam (ditto). Far be it from me to refuse a remaster of a game featuring a protagonist designed by the esteemed Mutsumi Inomata and voiced by Christina Valenzuela (I'm not sure she does video games anymore, outside of Shantae), but I get where a lot of fans were coming from regarding their disappointment at the announcement. A personal friend, who's a way bigger Tales of... fan than I am, pointed out that Tales of Eternia and Tales of Legendia are both landlocked on their original consoles; Eternia's PSP port never came to America, so we only have the PS1 original around (good luck finding that), and Legendia hasn't been seen since the PS2 era. Heck, I could up the ante and point to Tales of the Abyss, a wildly beloved entry that hasn't been seen since its 2011 re-release on the 3DS. Heck, they could have announced Tales of Zestiria and it probably would've gotten a better reception, given that Zestiria not only came out just a year before Berseria but also takes place in the same world.

Like many others, I'm scratching my head at the news. But at least the game is getting a port to some newer consoles, I guess... And we won't have to wait too long, either; Tales of Berseria Remastered comes this February 26, 2026.

Have you, too, been wondering what beloved game maker and lover of robo-butts Yokō Tarō has been up to lately? Has it seemed like he hasn't been up to much? Well, Taro has explained that! Courtesy of a panel he hosted along with Hideki Kamiya at the Korean convention G-CON, Yokō Tarō gave some insight into what he's been up to. And when I say "gave some insight," I mean "vaguely mention some projects in an extremely non-specific way." And when I say "what he's been up to," I mean "what he's not working on anymore," because, according to everyone's favorite masked developer, those projects were cancelled mid-development.

Said Taro, "I've actually been working on some stuff, it's just that it never ended up seeing the light of day. I got paid for it, so I personally have no issues with that, but people seem to think that I haven't been doing anything just because none of the work I've done is being released." This sadly checks out; Square Enix has gone on record that more of its business plans will involve moving away from producing mid-budget games in favor of projects with larger scopes and budgets. And for the most part, those mid-budget games were Yokō Tarō's bread and butter, starting with the game that put him on the map in the first place—Drakengard (or Drag-On Dragoon, as it was called in Japan). As big as NieR: Automata is now, it's easy to forget that the original NieR was a very experimental title with a limited audience.

And Taro's output isn't even alone in that mid-budget range; recent years have seen new RPGs come out from Square Enix that don't have AAA status but still brought in major audiences; Octopath Traveler comes to mind, as do the recent SaGa remakes, the HD-2D Live-A-Live remake, and the upcoming (and highly-anticipated The Adventures of Elliot: The Millenium Tales. It's all good and well to focus on the big-name Final Fantasy VII remakes, but people need something to play in the meantime.

If projects with Yokō Tarō's name attached getting cancelled is a wild concept to you, don't worry: there are mountains of other projects out there that are similarly cancelled. I can't even say it's a particularly rough time for the entertainment business because it always has been; sure, some high-profile cancellations might turn heads, but countless titles don't make it past pre-production or even the early stages of production. Visibility is heavily skewed toward projects with tons of reputation; an unproduced Ultima sequel will definitely get talked about. A new project from a relatively fresh team without any major IP attached is much more likely to vanish into the night, never to be seen again. For all of the discussion that a lot of talking heads offer on video games online, there's very little actual understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of it all—not just the process of coding, but the social aspect of game development. The meetings, the planning, the organizing, the having to budget time and resources, concepts that have to be left by the wayside because they didn't have the time, features that they had to abandon because the tech to implement them was prohibitively untested... It's romantic to give studios props when they shoulder through it, but by no means are devs "lazy" when they're unable to surmount those obstacles. (Now, when the figurehead is someone like Peter Molyneux who routinely runs his mouth about features at the last minute, that's a different story...)

It's similarly easy just to decide that the easiest thing to do would be for all of these developers to go indie and make their own dream project away from the bureaucracies of middle managers and out-of-touch executives. The problem is that dreams don't pay rent or health care; in the here-and-now, these things are paid with dollars, not Internet followers. Hence why developers still work at AAA studios; we all know how badly some people get treated there, but they still get paid.

In the meantime, Yokō Tarō maintains a chipper attitude about the cancellations, chalking it up to a matter of quality. “I believe that if I'm going to release something weird, I'd be better off not releasing anything at all," he said. (Given the nature of this being translated, I think "weird" is in the context of the game lacking in quality as opposed to being, y'know, Taro's brand of weird, which I'm pretty sure he knows his audience loves.) Taro is sure to land on another project in short order. In the meantime, people who would like to support games that Taro has worked on are invited to check out the Voice of the Cards RPGs, a trilogy of card-based RPGs available on Steam and NIntendo eShop. And I do mean "card-based"—think more "Crimson Shroud with cards" and less Baten Kaitos.

It's well known at this point that FromSoft is very cagey about explaining the lore of its games. It's not even a particularly recent thing; the details of games like King's Field or Armored Core are quite obtuse and require close attention to pick up. But something about the Souls series' traditional, vague storytelling captivated its fandom, leading to the rise of scribes who pick the series apart to figure out what everything means. What does "linking the flames" really entail? What are they linked to? What are these half-sane bosses rambling about all the time? Few scribes in the space are as well-known or respected as the buttery-voiced (and fan of the best Legend of Zelda villain) VaatiVidya, an Australian man who has made a career producing videos breaking down the particularities of the Souls games. While he indeed stands on the shoulders of giants and builds upon theories crafted by others in the fandom like Zullie the Witch, he's still a great resource for breakdowns on who all of these figures are in the world of Boletaria, Lordran, Drangleic, Lothric, or The Lands Between.

That last one is particularly noteworthy; Elden Ring's lore is particularly extensive, helped in no part by A Song of Fire and Ice author George R. R. Martin's contributions to the script. It all starts with Queen Marinara pissing off God; her half-god offspring have to compete to see who can die the least while beating The Allegations™, and it ends with someone literally walking away with the epithet "the Loathsome Dung-Eater," also, there are tons of fingers and jar-people involved. Or at least, that's as much as I can gather—I'm still finishing Future Redeemed, I don't even own Elden Ring. No worries if you need help piecing all the lore apart, because VaatiVidya is writing a book about the stuff!

While an unofficial book being produced without authorization from FromSoftware, Vaati and his collaborators are nevertheless doing everything they can to compile as much lore as possible from all of Elden Ring (including its DLC, Shadows of the Erdetree and its spin-off, Nightreign). I feel like "definitive" might be a bit much, given how much of Elden Ring is entirely open to interpretation by design, but it'll be as complete as anyone could hope for. Much of the writing will be composed of scripts Vaati has written for his YouTube videos, with a bit of polish, along with tons of original art commissioned for the book. You can currently pre-order it in digital, paperback, or hardcover; with the holidays inbound, it's sure to make a great gift for the Souls lover in your life.

That'll do it for this week, I think. This Week in Games will be taking next week off. It's Thanksgiving next weekend. I've got a nice, long vacation planned for myself in the wake of Thanksgiving—from my main job, at least, so you can look forward to me returning to This Week in Games the week after next. The holidays can be a rough time; not everyone has the luxury of a family they can look forward to reuniting with. I hope that my readers can take solace in the community they have, and both enjoy and share goodwill with people they care about. Be good to each other. I'll see you in seven.