I cancelled my pre-order after I read the Kotaku and Polygon reviews. They confirmed for me that the leaks were true (which was already obvious of course) and that “context” was only going to make the over the top brutality even more pointless. Thank you guys for actually taking a critical look at the game.

Using EA as an example is weird since they basically have no presence on Switch already and nobody seems to be worried too much about that. I mean, you mentioned Madden but that series has never been on Switch. They’ve literally only put out five games on the system in the three years since it launched: https://www.ea.…

eeeeh...I feel like we’ve done this dance so many times that it’s near automatic.

“ooooh, this might be time when Nintendo is in trou—oh, nah they’re fine.”

NIntendo has spent the better part of the decade finding itself as the “second console” for most gamers. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that most people…

All donations are tax deductible you dunce. It’s structured that way to encourage and incentivize donating in the first place.

I imagine the reason that this demo only exists on the PS5 is because UE5 is still under development, and it was probably a ton of work and debugging just to get this demo running on the PS5 itself. The version of the engine on display here was probably very carefully tailored for this particular demo, because it’s…

So basically a bunch of dumb marketing bullshit speak.

That really hinges on how cooperative Square Enix will be on making it because of complicated rights ownership between SE and Nintendo on the game.

Even Geno’s cameo in ML:SS warrants a special thank you note to Square in its credits. 

Why?  Because the marketing department took a different route?  What a weird thing to connect.

Also want to echo you on this. I love Jason, but his review of XC2 was deeply flawed and really did not provide an honest assessment of what the game was or who would enjoy it. All because of mismatched expectations (did he really think they were going to make Xenogears 2?).

Mike, I’m so glad to see YOU specifically posting this note prior to the game’s release. Nothing against Jason personally (and I wish him the best after his departure), but his reviews of Xenoblade always were hard to read as someone who holds the franchise in very high regard. Xenoblade 2 is still one of my favorite…

The difference is that Tim Follin mastered the NES sound chip.

How can anybody prefer those god awful ugly original models?

I never played a Xeno game until I bought XC2 on a whim and, other than Tora and Chapter 4, it became one of my favorite RPGs ever made. I can’t wait to play this for the first time.

“Nothing” might be a bit strong, but yeah so much of what it does for the VII universe is either pointless or badly written. I do think the parts that highlight what happened in the VII flashbacks are good: the Nibel incident with the fight against Sephiroth and the final stand in particular. And while those were done…

Thank you! I’ve been saying this for years! It was a good looking game that played well, but it had terrible writing! I’m convinced that people remember it fondly because the frankly incredible ending tricked enough people into retroactively thinking the rest of it was good.

i’m gonna level with you, crisis core isn’t that good. combat-wise, it’s fun, and the stuff that directly ties into the OG, like Zack’s final stand, is nice. the soundtrack’s really good at times. but the majority of the writing is pretty piss, and revolves around there being a bunch of other characters who do the…

Hah! Touche!

Had no idea, but I do not blame someone from wanting to get away from it, haha

Ugh, if this retelling is predicated on Advent Children, then we’re screwed. 

“I recall, he’s utterly indifferent to Cloud during the Midgar portion”

It isn’t even that. He *doesn’t even appear* in Midgar in the original. He’s spoken about, and you see some of his aftermath carnage (like killing the president), but at no point during the Midgar section does the party ever actually come…

The ending was kind of just... wasted on pretty much everyone. It felt odd, especially the Sephiroth fight. For the Fate, it was Kingdom Hearts level of Making Sense. It seemed like they felt like they *had to have* a grandiose, supernatural end fight to appease audiences/shareholders.