This is ignoring the fact that Pokémon is a franchise with a strong collectible facet. Trading is of course allowed because it’s a key component of the franchise. Pokémon is actually closer to a TCG than any other competitive game.

Final Fantasy discourse in the west makes it really apparent just how many people have a Dragon Quest blindspot.

FF is allowed to experiment and evolve in large part because DQ stays the same. Nobody that’s a genuine fan of both actually wants them to do the same thing. The problem is, to people with little exposure to…

Yes, but Pokémon remakes are a little bit more complicated than your standard remaster like Reforged. Almost all of them add something new to the experience—they’re different games in their own right that take place in different timelines separate from the original. The experience the protagonist has in ORAS is wholly…

I’ve never understood this line of thinking. It makes even less sense to exclude remakes from being mainline when they’re literally remakes of mainline games.

It’s not. Arceus is a mainline game—it was confirmed before the game was even released.

Why are we still trying to pretend like there haven’t been two mainline releases since SWSH? What’s with the usage of “mainline” here?

You could just say “first new generation in 3 years” or “most anticipated release in 3 years” (since new generations are definitely the biggest events), but the subheader, as it stands,…

It’s widely believed that the FFVII Remake incident was a marketing stunt from the NA side that the teams back in Japan just kind of went with.

I may be uniquely qualified to comment on this as someone who actually played Babylon’s Fall for several hundred hours. I can say wholeheartedly that the game was not nearly as bad as people made it out to be—especially when you got closer to endgame and actually started to feel what they were going for. I think the…

Babylon player here. I would argue the game actually is fun to play, but the problem is that is takes roughly 20 hours to get there minimum. I saw the potential in the demo and kept going with the full release and I was pretty sold by the half way point of the main story. Boss design is especially good, I think.

It’s not just FFXIV and CBU3. All of the divisions that deal with Dragon Quest are run very competently, for example, and then there’s Team Asano, and many, many other great examples.

People just love to highlight the shortcomings and pretend the sky is falling because they don’t have the full picture of the…

This has been talked about at length since the announcement of Bayonetta 2. Literally nobody would fund it—Nintendo is the reason the Bayonetta sequels even exist.

On the Union X front, the game has been reworked into an offline version. The gameplay is gone, but you can view all of the cutscenes offline to see the entire story. Dark Road, the other game in the app, will be playable in its entirety come the next update in September.

Extra steps are sometimes taken for the…

Jeff’s been very vocal over the years about how working in games and growing older in general changed him—he’s not proud of his EverQuest days. He’s a genuinely good guy.

Great write up! One correction, though—”Weight of the World (Prelude Version)” wasn’t actually Soken’s work. Okabe redid the track himself as a guest creator on the raid.

It’s actually right there in Irvine as well.

HGSS released in 2009 for Japan. The international release was in 2010.

CDs too, especially in Japan. I have a huge collection of physical media for music from games and anime—I almost never buy digital for that stuff.

They get those big names because Aniplex is literally part of the planning committees that fund and create those shows in the first place. They’re not exactly the typical North American licensee.

I didn’t mean to come off preachy and it wasn’t really directed at you, it was just a musing inspired by what you were saying about testing for full compatibility. My point was really just that I don’t think the common gamer fantasy of “Netflix but video games” is a good model for the industry and I think Nintendo…

This and also there’s genuine merit to the drip feed approach. Nintendo has always understood this.

Society is far too spoiled by things like Netflix and other instantly accessible, massive libraries of content to the point where people have lost sight of the genuine reasons why things are best spaced out.

In the days…