You forgot Joel DuQue’s best piece :O

This sounds cool, but I wouldn’t mind if they took things another step further and had her play a little bit differently than Link. I can handle Zelda fighting with a sword, but she should still have a different style and maybe rely on light magic or other things a bit more. One of the things I’ve always wanted to see…

I take it they aren’t orchestrating the soundtrack like they did with DQ8?

The FFIV remake is a technical and artistic masterpiece in every category EXCEPT gameplay, which is a train wreck. If you like encounters that alternate between trivially easy and impossibly hard, where an enemy can wipe your entire party in one shot before any characters get a turn, then you are in luck. Basically…

“Setzer stands for technology and science with his airship” I feel like that’s a bit tenuous, and overlooks the more important point you brought up: that Setzer (not unlike Cyan) had his defining wound inflicted before the World was ruined, and it took the end of the world to allow him to confront it and ultimately…

“Not everyone needs everything in-game,”

“Final Fantasy IX went on to become, perhaps, the most critically acclaimed of all the FF game.” Oh don’t do the thing where you make a hyperbolic statement and then throw the word “perhaps” in to hedge it.

Hiroyuki Ito worked on all three, but it would be misleading to say they had the same director. VI was directed by Kitase (and Ito) with Sakaguchi Producing. IX was directed by just Ito, and Sakaguchi produced by the bulk of that work was done by Shinji Hashimoto. FFXII was a totally different crew - no Amano, no…

It may be a high salary but it’s not high for the expense rate for an employee. You’ve got to include costs for their machine and software (can be as high as five figures for some software), office space and utilities, benefits, etc... If that’s their expense rate per employee the salary is likely around $60K on…

A beautiful article. Thanks Jason =)

The first three games form a bit of a trilogy, and the second set of three form another pseudo trilogy (neither is chronological), but after that they are all fully self contained. None of the games truly require knowledge of the others to follow, but the first two trilogies definitely offer many nice easter eggs if…

Virtually every Pokemon game irks me in this regard. The UI is largely unchanged from the first gameboy game (the aesthetics are updated but not the logical flow). “Pikachu levelled up! Want to learn a new move (we won’t tell you what it does)? Uh oh you need to erase a move. Want to erase a move? Which one? Okay,…

There must have been something weird going on. The game is virtually lag-free but for a brief segment near the end of one very fast stage (and given the situation most people welcome the lag). Even then input lag should be zero. That should be it for the entire game, no other exceptions. The game is pretty much the…

You had me until you said “Dark Souls”. You know we can talk about games without referencing Dark Souls, especially when there is zero overlap between era, theme, and genre.

He’s got to reel in that aesthetic a bit though... way too much visual noise in the wrong places.

I thought Braixen/Delphox looked like it was wearing a dress and looked feminine, but I don’t recall any complaints about it back then. Pokemon X/Y was only about 3 years ago, did all this weird gender-based overreaction garbage start happening just in the last three years?

At some point in time Squeenix started making all of their trailers have nothing but disjointed dialogue overlaying J-Pop ballads, and that’s right around where they lost me.

That’s true, although how do you reconcile that with Sega’s behaviour then? In theory they know this as well, and they do have lawyers and all that.

Pushing a stalled car to a Florence and the Machine cover of “Stand by Me” seems a bit off. I continue to be cautiously optimistic *and* cautiously pessimistic about this game.

What an uncharacteristically competent decision from Squeenix. After all of their “Lightning modelling designer clothes” stuff I kind of thought they were more into weird brand-synergy stuff, but *this* is an artistically justifiable decision.

Also: “I don’t really like Florence + The Machine”
If you liked these songs,…