Employment law and the “progressiveness” thereof doesn’t matter on Kojima’s level. High level execs—especially Rockstar style, “face of the brand” execs— unless they’re fired for some sort of criminal offense (see Jared from Subway), get what they negotiate and what they negotiate is invariably well, well above what…

Eh. Wada engineered the ouster of a man who is probably exactly as talented as Kojima and was even more responsible for his company’s success (Hironobu Sakaguchi) than Kojima could be argued to be for Konami. It was in circumstances that were nearly as shady (though it probably carried a bit better business…

It could be argued that he’s been too loyal. The old moratorium for FF13 strongly suggests that Motomu Toriyama was negligent enough on that he’d not have survived at a US company (strangely, Toriyama’s the guy who hung himself in that interview...”well, I forgot to do focus testing until we were almost ready to…

As someone who’s prone to rants, myself, let me just say that this is not the time or place for this rant.

He’s keeping his mouth shut because he probably had to sign an NDA to receive his severance package. Standard operating procedure.

Yoichi Wada, who used to run Square Enix

Between the introduction and the reference section, it’s fine. The introduction has some...shall we say...problematic wording.

The introduction to this document conflates corporate/institutional speech with violence in a way that makes me extremely uncomfortable.

Merits of “Grim Dark” in a broad, culture-wide sense are, perhaps, debatable, but what’s not debatable is that there’s a great deal of dissonance when a game sounds like this (seriously, the whole score sounds like this with few deviations)

Yeah, but I mean, even for Japan or Squex, the guy’s ridiculously thin. I don’t think Vaan was this emaciated, was he? Certainly not thin enough that I was wondering if he had a drug problem. And Vaan was a kid, Cloud’s not. I mean, there’s thin, then there’s heroin chic.

For six years, David Prowse was the one people knew as Darth Vader

The Gaius Baltar resemblance has to be intentional with Druckmann.

Clearly, when I used Manny Pacquiao as an example of a target size, I was really negotiating for Squex to make their protagonist into Halfthor Bjornsson.

Good to know, thanks.

I’m positive there are graphics mods on PC for the blobbishness, but yeah, I understand. Personally never got around to playing Witcher 1 before Witcher 3. Just felt too primitive.

Seriously, lol. They could add 30 pounds to the guy and he’d still be able to fight at featherweight without needing to cut.

I don’t have the PC version of the original, but I’d be floored if there’s not a mod out there that cleans up the translation.

I’m not sure if it is an ARPG or if it just looks like one. I mean, visually, it’s sort of Devil May Cry, but if you watch the bottom left corner, the player seems to just be picking from attack/magic/etc.

Game’s going to live and die with the motion capture, voice acting and localization.