This Week in Games

Akiba's Vampires, Heavenly Expulsees for Hire, and Sony Closing the Gates

Welcome back, folks! The OVA Festival this weekend was a lot of fun; we got to see Voices of a Distant Star, Demon City Shinjuku, Golgo 13: Queen Bee, and Mazinkaizer Vs Great General of Darkness. Great stuff! They also had a few shorts from dwarf studios, including a little music video from Tatsuro Yamashita promoting the next season of Pokémon Concierge (his little puppet-self is cute). It's always nice to get to see these old OVA shows. I encourage folks to join in on them if they're lucky enough to have them in their city.

Sony Confirms: Single-Player Titles Won't Be Coming to PC

It's been rough for Sony lately, and the pain train won't be pulling into the station anytime soon. Rumors were circulating back in March that Sony would end its practice of releasing its games on PC; earlier this week, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier was finally able to confirm it. Recent releases like Saros and Ghost of Yotei will not be hitting PC, and upcoming single-player titles like Insomniac's Wolverine title will follow suit in the future. Multiplayer games like Marathon and Helldivers 2 will still get PC support.

The decision is baffling, for several reasons. Now, I still believe exclusive titles are important for any console—if you're producing and selling a console, people need a reason to buy the console. And Netflix and YouTube aren't enough of a reason. This is why Nintendo's consoles have maintained their value with consumers: there are games you can play on a Switch, and always will be. Sony's had a major problem with the PlayStation 5, though: no thanks to Sony's failed attempts at capitalizing on numerous live-service games, Sony hasn't really produced many major titles for their platform. The games on PS5 are few and far between: outside of timed third-party exclusives like Stellar Blade and the Final Fantasy VII remakes, we've seen a lot of The Last of Us remakes, Ghosts of Yotei, Astro Bot, and God of War: Ragnarok. Their multiplayer games have made bank... no thanks to the occasional slip-up, like with Helldivers 2. Which, I might remind you, was restricted from sale in over 177 regions worldwide for a time. This was corrected in 2025, but still, for a good while, people in my native Puerto Rico (a current United States colony) wouldn't and couldn't buy Helldivers 2 on Steam.

The problem isn't that the games haven't been good; the problem is that there haven't been nearly enough of them to justify the high price of Sony's console. With the PS5 starting at US$600 for the Digital Edition, and going all the way up to an eye-watering US$900 for a PS5 Pro, anyone would need plenty of incentive to invest—and the incentive just isn't there. You can play a ton of old PS4 titles, sure... but even then, those were some fairly slim pickings (and a lot of The Last of Us by volume). While I wouldn't say the value proposition of a PlayStation 5 is completely ruined, it's hard to put any genies back in the bottle without some extreme course-correction. And I don't see that happening; any major title is still a bit of a way off, and one or two single-player games (great as Saros might be) won't be enough to make up for the price tag.

The PlayStation 5 has sadly been a complete wash. Which is a shame because it's a great console and a great platform. Heck, Sony could coast by on the PS5 for another six years and still wow people with amazing titles if they bothered to produce any. But they won't, because for some reason Sony feels they need to continuously improve on what are already diminishing returns. It's bad enough that the PS5 Pro has barely perceptible improvements; a theoretical PS6 is not going to be worth the possible four figures the tech will incur.

There's so much that Sony could've done to curtail this. They could've kept their first-party Japanese studio open. They could've capitalized on the many IPs that were put under the public eye via Astro Bot. They could've remastered some of their older beloved titles like Ape Escape or Jak & Daxter. They could've circled the wagons on older franchises with dedicated fanbases, like Legend of Dragoon or even Gravity Rush. Hindsight is 20-20, which is why the course of action they did take is so frustrating. This is a thing that can be fixed, but it needs time and money--and you won't see improvements for over a year.

In addition to everything else, Sony has also announced a price increase for its PlayStation Plus online service. The good news is that the price increase will not affect anyone currently holding a subscription (pray your credit card doesn't expire on you without you remembering). On the other hand, that's still US$11 for a one-month subscription.

Man, a Gravity Rush sequel couldn't have been that hard.

Expelled from Paradise Visual Novel Announced

With the long-awaited Expelled from Paradise sequel currently slated for release later this year, fans of the 2014 film are itching to be reunited with Gen Urobuchi's post-apocalyptic world of robots and people in vat-grown bodies. And it looks like we might even have something to tide us over, as Toei Animation and Studio51 have announced, of all things, a visual novel to bridge the gap between both films!

Titled Expelled from Paradise: The Stellar Angel, the visual novel picks up where the first film left off, with the troubleshooter Dingo teaming up with cybercop-in-a-teenager-body Angela Balzac, navigating the fallout from the events of the film. After all, Angela has to get used to being in an organic body, and Dingo has to get used to a companion at his side at all hours!

Expelled from Paradise was a fun film, but in hindsight, the most fun I had was seeing its visual parallels with Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Expelled from Paradise's character designer, Masatsugu Saitō, would go on to provide the character designs for the main characters in Xenoblade 2, and the result of the whole thing was Mythra looking enough like Angela Balzac such that Angela could reasonably be considered a "prototype" of Mythra's design: the hair color, the predominantly black-and-white outfit with neon-green highlights, and the stand-offish attitude are all there. Which is probably why Angela's design has been changed a bit for the new film (read: she's traded in her massive twintails for a cute, fluffy bob). And it's not even limited to Angela and Mythra: Angela's rotund mech-suit ARHAN in Expelled from Paradise also shares some of its design cues with Xenoblade Chronicles 2's Poppibuster (also designed by Saito), down to its unique physique and its ball-shaped alternate form. With Xenoblade Chronicles 2 having been released three years after Expelled from Paradise, I can't blame Saito for wanting a second go at several fun design choices.

The Expelled from Paradise visual novel doesn't have a set release date outside of "Winter 2026," and appears to be slated for the Nintendo Switch and Steam. Also, as per the official website, it seems to be getting an English translation. More to follow.

Akiba's Trip Reaches A Million Sales

We like to celebrate games reaching certain milestones because, let's face it, we need the joy. And sometimes, these milestones are a long time coming! ACQUIRE's Akiba's Trip has finally sold a million units, between its digital sales and its shipped physical copies--and all at the same time as its fifteenth anniversary!

Akiba's Trip is certainly a zany high-concept game: set in a painstakingly-rendered recreation of Akihabara, you play as a young man who's been forcibly turned into a vampire. The good news is, you can fight back against the vampires (dubbed the "Shadow Souls"). The bad news is, you have the same weaknesses as they do: exposure to the sun. You capitalize upon this weakness by stripping your opponent in battle; as you fight enemies, you damage their clothing, either shredding it to pieces (leaving enemies in their skivvies) or just flat-out ripping their clothes off of them and adding it to your inventory. The problem is, you can also get stripped. No matter: a local sex worker (voiced in Japanese by the adult actress Noa) can teach you new stripping techniques.

As you can tell, the concept for the games is decidedly goofy, and even I was charmed by the writing when I reviewed the Switch port back in 2021. The gameplay is pretty clunky. I've been told the sequel improves on the gameplay at the cost of the writing; I'll take folks' word for it. But even so, the real fun of Akiba's Trip is how enmeshed it is in Akihabara as a setting. It's a bit stark to think on it now, but Akihabara has seemingly lost its reputation of being a major mecca for anime fans, be they in Japan or abroad. It used to be that Akihabara was the place to go, what with locations like its many arcades, the former Gundam Café (now a Tamashii Nations store), game stores like Super Potato, and the many, many maid cafes. And sure, a lot of those places are still around, but many of those arcades have shuttered, and a few of those game stores have relocated. Not that otaku culture isn't around anymore; it's just a sad truth of the economic downturn, even in Japan. As my buddy Karl put it, Akiba's Trip is a time capsule of a specific era of Akihabara's history that's slipping away.

And even when Akiba's Trip was more relevant, this was the fun of the games: all of your in-game friends were unrepentant nerds who fiended for maids and cast-off PVC statues and piles and piles of eroge. Your friends all encapsulated the many stereotypes of otaku, from the backpack-carrying guys wearing plaid to the otherwise-normal-looking guy who was obsessed with 2D girls. Even though my fellow weebs growing up were all Puerto Rican like me, it was easy to see parallels between the protagonist and his friends with my own experiences as an anime fan.

But also heartening is that Akiba's Trip even made it to one million sales to begin with. Fifteen years is ages for a game! To put this into context: it took us fourteen years in the United States to go from the original Legend of Zelda on NES to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (1986 and 2000, respectively). In a time where many games are declared as failures for not selling a certain amount of units on their opening weekend, it's nice to know that smaller games can still maintain their relevance and audience over a decade and change. Games don't stop mattering once the hype cycle ends. Few things truer to the otaku spirit than being the one guy doing the wotagei dance in a dark basement venue for an underground idol whose total fanbase numbers in the low tens; we love things not because they are popular, but because they mean something to us, whether it's trains, motorcycles, underground singers, rare discontinued crayon colors, or obscure video games.

Good job, ACQUIRE. You earned it.

Let's wrap up with some quick tidbits:

That'll do it for this week. I'd like to take a final moment for my readers, if I may; this week has been marked by a lot of tragedy. It's the anniversary of the passing of our good friend Zac, for one, but it's also the anniversary of the loss of the streamer Etika. He would've been 36 if he were still with us—exactly my age. My own social circle was also shaken by news of the passing of the vtuber Konzetsu. It has been a very challenging time for a lot of people in my six degrees. As I'm wont to do, I encourage people to keep close with the people they love and to let them know how much they mean to you. And to folks who are struggling in their personal lives: we are here to help. I promise you, it gets better. The world is a lot darker without our friends. I also encourage reaching out to The Trevor Project and the International Association for Suicide Prevention. Be good to each other. I'll see you in seven.