They’re not the worst thing ever, but I’m happy when a game finds another way to challenge the player that isn’t “throw an enemy encounter at the player every ten steps”.
Nowadays I particularly enjoy games where the encounter is fought on the map itself instead of having a transition screen and a separate map. Games like Sea of Stars, or Yakuza Kiwami for example. I find that removing the transition screen also removes much of the tedium I feel with enemy encounters in video games.
This generation is already pretty weak, and it was hard to justify the original PS5 which, after a whopping four years, still has too few exclusive titles to justify the increased price point. Now they are asking for $700 (and they increased the controller’s price, too), but there’s still too few next gen titles, and it doesn’t even come with basic features like a disc tray and a vertical mount. Not even a better form factor, it’s the same old ugly case, but somehow bigger.
The only premium thing about this thing is the price tag. $700 dollars but €800, because apparently they are dominating the European market so much that they don’t even have to try to sell it at an honest price point. With all those money you can just buy a PC. I honestly don’t think that many people who are interested in the console market (which, historically, has always been a “low budget” entry into modern gaming) would be willing to spend so much money on one.
I guess we circled back to the PS3 era, when Sony got drunk with overconfidence. Only, this time they’ll get away with it because their main competitor is somehow even more incompetent than them. I wonder if the handheld PC market will pose a threat to their dominance in the future - at the moment, it’s a very small niche.
I haven’t seen it nearly this bad until this year. This is the worst year I’ve ever seen for it, and Hoyo games are by far the worst
Congrats for lasting this far. I quit the anime world years ago when it became clear that that shit was becoming the norm, and 95% of products specifically catered to that demographic.
I seem to remember MS claiming they were opening the “first AAAA dev studio” (The Initiative). Since then, the studio has been radio silent, lost a bunch of talent, and needed help from Crystal Dynamics to work on their first game (Perfect Dark reboot).
If that’s the reason, it doesn’t paint MS in a good light. Bullying small indie devs out of spite. Especially considering that, after saying that in March, Jyamma spent time and money to release the game on Xbox the same day as the other platforms.
But I honestly doubt it. Corporations are NOT people (even if the law would like to pretend otherwise) and they don’t think the same way as people. They don’t play favourites, they don’t play nice or bully others because they feel like to. They chase money, and that’s it. A game releasing on their platform is literally free money. This is just a fuck up on their part. If I had to guess, MS cut jobs and replaced them with AI and left a skeleton crew working on this.
The beauty of Final Fantasy is that, with each entry being different from the others, every game of the series ends up resonating differently with different people.
The “best” Final Fantasy varies greatly depending on who you ask, for a combination of factors, including nostalgia and subjective opinions on the different aspects of the game (story, characters, gameplay).
It’s what I love about this series. You may play ten games, but the eleventh will still surprise you in some way. Even if I don’t like a specific entry, I can still appreciate that they tried something new and unique, and I always look forward to playing the next one.