Archive for the ‘Games’ Category

20 Mar

Top Ten Nintendo Directs of the Switch Era

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, Switch. Tagged: , , , , .

It’s as difficult to believe as any other milestone in the life of the Nintendo Switch, but the little hybrid that could just turned eight earlier this month. You may have missed the anniversary, of course, because the Big N has been as quiet as a joy-con mouse about the system’s upcoming games; in fact for the first time in half a decade, there was no Nintendo Direct presentation in February this year. As Mar10 Day has come and gone and I highly doubt there will be one right before the big Switch 2 blowout on April 2nd (EDIT March 28th: I was somehow wrong, but the below countdown still stands), I think we can declare the time of the Switch 1 Direct pretty much over, and that means it’s finally time to post the nerdiest countdown idea I’ve had simmering for the past several years: let’s rank some Directs.

In the cold light of 2025 it’s perhaps tricky to analyse the strength of shows filled with hype for games that have long since released, but I am a big fan of packaged videogame presentations, and to me each one of these Directs represents a clear point in the Switch’s life – I can still remember exactly where I was when I watched most of them. Revisiting these showcases today brings back enough memories that I can just about compare them on a reasonably level playing field. It’s also hardly controversial to say that Nintendo’s Direct format matured and even peaked during the Switch’s life cycle, and there are some real bangers to revisit as a result.

To determine this ranking, I take into account the significance of what could be considered major announcements within each Direct. However there’s little doubt my own personal tastes, the pace and structure of the presentation, and a dash of contextual nostalgia are probably weighed more heavily in the process. I also do not consider the eventual release quality of any announced games here; these shows are all about hype and so is my assessment of them.

By my count, the era of the Nintendo Switch encompassed at least 23 Direct shows that weren’t explicitly devoted to a single game or franchise, weren’t of the “Indie World” persuasion, and were longer than 20 minutes in runtime (that might seem like a ton of qualifiers but there really were a heap of these things). Out of these, the following are my ten personal favourites.

10. March 2018 Direct

HEADLINES: Mario Tennis Aces deep dive, that Smash Bros finale teaser

PERSONAL GEMS: Okami HD, Octopath Traveller, Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion

Remember when Nintendo Directs had 3DS sections at the start? They often felt like underwhelming warm-up acts at the time they were airing, but looking back now I kinda miss their whimsical ideas and the odd side effect of building anticipation for the Switch stuff even further. This is a Switch Direct ranking, though, so we focus on the meat of the show – and it is meaty indeed. The only March Direct of the entire Switch era followed a uniquely brisk “Nintendo Direct Mini” just two months earlier, during the most delirious period of online anticipation Nintendo had seen in at least a decade. That tiny show was pretty exciting itself – heralding the return of The World Ends With You, announcing Mario Tennis Aces and then confirming portable Dark Souls – but the main course to follow easily overshadowed it.

The age of the pantomime “oh wait, there’s still one more announcement” was still in vogue at Nintendo – in contrast to the comparative lack of pretense at the end of Directs nowadays – and you could argue March 2018 was their best use of that trend ever. One of the seasonal Splatoon update trailers that were already a reliable part of Direct showcases by 2018 escalated to an extremely cool 1980s-dirty-neon trailer for what would become one of Nintendo’s most revered DLC expansions ever: Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion, but then that in turn escalated to an initially-confusing homage to the first Splatoon‘s iconic trailer – which of course dimmed the lights and became a teaser for the then-untitled Super Smash Bros Ultimate. I still get goosebumps watching this thing, complete with its distant echo of that new theme song.

Smash was the kind of announcement strong enough to lift the entire show onto this list all by itself, but its easy to forget the importance of that thorough Mario Tennis Aces deep-dive to its legacy as more than just a lame follow-up to the awful Wii U Ultra Smash. Aces would go on to become my most-played Switch game of 2018, and the clarity of those fighting-game-esque mechanics set the stage for the multiple in-person tournaments I enjoyed that year. The Okami HD port was very well received during that early Switch phase devoid of classic Zelda, and the double-whammy of a release date and a demo (poorly communicated as a progress-carrier) for Octopath Traveller set up an underrated second year for the Switch.

9. September 2018 Direct

HEADLINES: Luigi’s Mansion 3, the launch of Nintendo Switch Online, that double Animal Crossing tease

PERSONAL GEMS: Starlink: Battle for Atlas, a truly ridiculous Final Fantasy segment

We double up on 2018 shows to start this countdown, and with good reason. This would be my pick for Nintendo’s second-best use of the “one more thing” technique, as just like earlier in the year they tied a Smash Bros announcement to another franchise *ahem* directly – and this time they didn’t even interrupt the two linked bombshells with a cut to any presenters. Yes, it was just a franchise logo with a date on it, but the announcement of a new Animal Crossing right after the addition of a second franchise representative into Smash Bros Ultimate hit super hard with fans of a series that had never quite been able to break through to Nintendo’s top echelon. Little did we all know what was in store for New Horizons come 2020…

Speaking of series destined to jump to the next level of popularity, the kick-off reveal of Luigi’s starring debut in HD via Luigi’s Mansion 3 confused a bunch of Americans who technically never got a 2, and set up a hype cycle that would end with the game smashing sales records. Notably, said reveal came before the customary 3DS announcement block, signalling a shift in Nintendo’s presentation craft that would come to prioritise the impact of both the front and back of almost every showcase afterward.

Nintendo Switch Online is hardly a fun topic of conversation in 2025, but it’s easy to forget that before this Direct the service looked even worse in prospect. When first announced, the plan was to offer just one or two temporary NES/SNES games per month as part of the deal, but thankfully the midsection of the September 2018 presentation definitively contradicted that with a 20-strong NES launch lineup. The slick character-leaning explainer video duly provided meme and headline content for years afterwards, which was a nice bonus.

A strong Ubisoft E3 showing (oh, the days) from Starlink: Battle for Atlas that essentially turned the Switch into the game’s lead platform was backed up by a rad Wolf O’Donnell appearance that upped my interest considerably, but it was Square Enix’s deluge of Final Fantasy announcements near the end of the showcase that knocked my socks off hardest. The return of Crystal Chronicles (long before the release let everyone down) got me to pop off, but the rapid-fire follow-ups FF XV Pocket Edition, World of FF Maxima, Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon, and finally FF XII The Zodiac Age, FF VII, FF IX, and FF X / X-2 absolutely dazed me, and I remember the headlines right afterwards blurring into the background. A re-release salvo bearing that much weight will probably never happen again; well, unless Nintendo themselves goes third-party one day.

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28 Feb

Cool Fun Take: Pokemon Brilliant Diamond Is Still Fun, Actually

Posted by vagrantesque in DS, Games, Switch. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

“Not another Pokemon replay post!” I assume you cry in anguish, promptly scrolling past and continuing to live your life. Well, to that I say:

  • It was Pokemon Day yesterday and I have nothing else to write about in February;
  • Nintendo recently announced that Nintendo Switch Online Game Vouchers won’t work on Switch 2 games, they’re being awful quiet about their 2025 Switch 1 releases, and I’ve had a spare voucher sitting around on my account for months;
  • I wanted to play something requiring minimal attention while bingeing Formula 1: Drive to Survive this past week in preparation for the new racing season, and let’s be honest, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond / Shining Pearl are the most mindless Pokemon games available on the Switch;
  • I actually never got a chance to write properly about BD/SP, because in 2021 I hadn’t yet started my annual Game Re-Releases countdown.

What do you know; another perfect-storm excuse to play through an old Pokemon game and turn a critical – albeit rather quick – eye on it as we go.

Wow, People Hate This One

It’s not hard to find negative opinions about this one: just about any Pokemon YouTuber or writer around seemed to have a sour impression of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl when the games launched in late 2021. As far as I can tell those impressions have either been reinforced or forgotten about entirely almost three and a half years later; despite 15 million copies sold worldwide, there aren’t a ton of softening opinions to be found (yet). And the sentiment is rather easy to explain. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: it’s all about expectations.

The Pokemon Company used to set a pretty regular precedent of remaking older games to keep the series’ momentum going, and they were usually well-received. Gen IV remakes were rumoured among fans for much longer than any prior generation, and that hype was never quelled or addressed in any official capacity. Yet last year’s so-called “Game Freak Gigaleak” revealed that Gen IV remakes may not even have been planned at all until the eleventh hour, as the studio was focused mainly on the relatively fresh series direction represented by Pokemon Legends: Arceus – which conspicuously launched a mere two months after Brilliant Diamond.

As a result those very remakes were the first-ever main series games to be outsourced to a new developer, ILCA, and the lack of development time afforded that studio is sadly plain to see in the end result. Am I here to argue that this product does not feel rushed?

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17 Jan

OK It’s Happening, the Nintendo Switch 2 is Real

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, Switch, Switch 2. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

Sweet, sweet relief. That’s most of what I feel.

There has never been, in the entirety of my 25-odd years of following the videogame industry, a more tiring new console hype cycle.

It’s been almost four years since all that supposedly guaranteed “Switch Pro” bluster turned into the Switch OLED model, and to this day it seems just as likely that internal plans at Nintendo changed late as a “Pro” model never existed in the first place. The internet learned nothing from that experience, of course, and essentially all of the online – then, eventually, the increasingly offline – hardware speculation since has centred on the system’s successor. Reports have indicated the Switch 2’s hardware specs may have been finalised as early as 2022. Analysts have thrown out ironclad predictions and been wrong repeatedly. Entire YouTube channels have made their names off speculation and anticipation.

The wait for a Switch 2 reveal was so long that Nintendo themselves felt the need to add a “no new console news” asterisk to the announcement of every new presentation. Eventually third-party accessory manufacturers conspired to leak the dimensions and form factor of the system, emboldened by the number of competitors doing the same thing. By the middle of December 2024 we had essentially seen everything it was possible to see about the supposed chassis of this machine; by the time the January 2025 date had reached double digits we had seen and cross-examined every inch of the new dock, joy-cons, even a motherboard. All that was left was for the big N to draw aside that stupid curtain and show up in an official capacity with the new console.

And then yesterday, at long last, they did. What a day.

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30 Dec

Best of 2024: Top 15 Games

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2024, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

Look, I know I tripped over myself to emphasise repeatedly just how good 2023 was as a videogame release year, and I stand by that; it really was an all-timer. However, while that year had a real “something for everyone” vibe going on amongst its treasure trove of big-budget heavy-hitters with huge review scores, 2024 was arguably just as good if viewed through a narrower genre lens. If you’re a fan of RPGs – especially if you partake in the Japanese variety – the sheer onslaught of quality that hurtled past you this year was every bit as crazy as in 2023; maybe even more so. The more mainstream western genres did show up by the end, thanks largely to a resurgent Microsoft/Ubisoft double act (which was nonetheless blunted by the late delays of Avowed and Assassin’s Creed Shadows respectively) and a very important EA release, but the weebs of the world will likely remember this one for a long, long time.

I must also give a shout-out to the general cadence of the releases this year: I wasn’t truly overwhelmed by the volume of releases on my personal hype list at any point throughout the year, but from mid-January to yesterday, I was always playing something good.

Of the fifteen games that make the 2024 list, only a third were developed by Western studios, and only one of those is American. That latter stat may be an all-time low for this website, but not simply due to the Japanese gaming heartland’s banner year: China and Korea also took larger chunks out of my playtime pie chart than ever before, and I certainly wasn’t alone in that experience. We’ve also got two “reimaginings” on the list – otherwise known as re-releases too ambitious for last week’s countdown – and one of the longest honourable mentions sections ever.

What we don’t have, unfortunately, is Dragon’s Dogma II, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero (a few dragons going about this year), Another Crab’s Treasure, Visions of Mana, Warhammer: Space Marine II, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Lorelai and the Laser Eyes, Tekken 8, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, UFO 50, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble, Star Wars Outlaws, Marvel Rivals, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, The Plucky Squire, Metal Slug Tactics, GranBlue Fantasy: Relink, 1000xRESIST, or Mario & Luigi: Brothership. All of these games were either on my wishlist, briefly owned, or even started by me throughout the year, but fell victim to the relentless passage of time, soft reviews, and/or the always-rolling videogame release calendar, preventing me from reaching the five-hour playtime threshold I use to determine eligible games. There’s also no Palworld or Hades II, because we’re still miles away from a year with a dry enough schedule to convince me to break my personal rule against games with some form of “early access” tag.

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VR BEST OF 2024 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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15. Another Code: Recollection (NS)

Released at precisely the wrong time for a whole community of Nintendo fans reeling from the news there’d be no Switch successor till 2025, Another Code: Recollection was largely dismissed when it squeaked out at the very beginning of 2024. You could argue a slow-paced double-bill adventure game throwback was hardly going to set the charts on fire anyway, but I think it was still rather unlucky, because the striking comic-panel art direction that drives the ground-up reimagining of 2005’s Another Code: Two Memories handily reinvigorates a DS cult classic two decades on, leaving many obtuse quirks behind to ensure the game’s devotion to both atmospheric puzzle-solving and unsettling mystery help it stand out from its fellow Switch exclusives.

The move from snappy stylus controls and once-unprecedented kitchen sink gimmickry to proper third-person 3D exploration and fully-voiced cutscenes means puzzles have been changed and/or completely removed, the time between brain-teasers is noticeably longer, physical layouts have been shaken up, and some of the creepier touches have been sanded down. But the more lively, believable environments in the 2024 release help tie together the game’s overall story in an arguably superior fashion, delivering twists with a pulpy watercolour flair and sticking the landing under a clearly modest budget. As the credits indicate, this is very much a “based on” angle from developer Arc System Works, taking inspiration rather than instruction from the original.

And those drastic changes don’t just serve the first game: the previously Japan/Europe-only Wii release Another Code R not only makes its worldwide debut here, but the story continues unbroken from the Two Memories save file and uses all the same UI elements, producing a near-seamless end result. The second reimagining in the package sacrifices puzzle density for plot even more than its predecessor, but with a cast so large that it feels like Game of Thrones in comparison and some truly heady Black Mirror-esque sci-fi ideas along for the ride, it’s justified in doing so. The fabulously-titled Recollection may be of modest means, but I have never seen anything in the vast realm of videogame revisitations use an approach quite like this, and it deserves a nod at the top of this list.

14. Helldivers II (PS5)

An entire book could be written on the life and times of Helldivers II – and I wouldn’t be shocked if that does actually happen one day – but the occasionally scandalous mismanagement of the game’s trailblazing Steam-on-day-one release strategy, not to mention the odd parasocial relationship built afterwards between players and developers of the game, is not enough to negate the crazy amount of fun I had spreading managed democracy among the fictional planets of Helldivers II in the early part of the year.

Among the legitimately countless tales of failed online multiplayer titles across all of 2024, the fact that one of the only real success stories came from a comparatively small team that made a brutal top-down twin-stick shooter on the PS Vita back in the day just warms my cynical heart. The fact it launched at a significantly lower price point than, I dunno, random example, Concord – with much fewer opportunities for microtransactions to boot – is hilarious. Helldivers II feels magnificent to control, looks far better than its relatively low resolution settings would suggest, and only kicks you down in a way that you quite literally asked for when you knocked that difficulty up a notch.

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26 Dec

Best of 2024: Top 5 Game Consoles

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2024, Console, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

If you believed the online speculation roar, it was supposed to be the year of the next Nintendo console, with strong whispers of an upgraded PS5 machine swirling amidst potentially exciting new hardware developments from Microsoft as per those juicy 2023 leaks. While things didn’t quite turn out according to the hype sheet, 2024 was still a fascinating year to write this list. Well, for the current-gen consoles anyway. Get ready for a wildly unbalanced personal ranking based on which console’s 2024 presence negotiated its year of terrible PR with the fewest stumbles. Uh, yay?

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VR BEST OF 2024 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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5. Xbox One

LAST YEAR: 4th

The top three are pretty wordy this year, so I’ll give the aged-out Xbone about as much attention as Microsoft did this year: it was a fun, often unpredictable console to cover over the years, it got a few new games in 2024, but this may actually be the last time I count it on this top five list.

4. Playstation 4

LAST YEAR: 5th

The biggest 2024 event for the PS4 may just have been the sensational May news story from Sony that revealed fully 50% of Playstation gamers still play on the PS4, despite the fact that virtually all PS exclusives have abandoned the machine by now. The pandemic and its chip shortages may have indirectly assisted the eleven-year-old Playstation 4 by turning the successful purchase of its successor into a pricey flex for a couple of years, but thanks to the low graphical requirements of the world’s most played games and the ever-shrinking size of generational tech leaps, the widely-loved slanted box just keeps on trucking. It may have been a quiet one by this list’s criteria, but I say well played.

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22 Dec

Best of 2024: Top 5 Disappointments

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2024, Games, Lists, Movies. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

So that was a bit of a turbulent year for entertainment media, huh?

I don’t do an annual “top news stories” list, because year-to-year there’s no guarantee there would be enough to even make one; it would also be kind of difficult to rank their impact when certain headlines seem outwardly positive while so many others skew negative. But wow, it sure would have been fun to tackle one in 2024. By the end of March alone there was already enough content to knock out a solid top five, as the three main videogame console manufacturers had already provided more than enough twists and turns.

For now, the standard disappointments format will have to do, which means only stuff that undercut some form of my own personal expectation counts. Hey, if ain’t broke…

The list is once again a top five this year, so I’ve tried to group each entry into some kind of common trend wherever it makes sense. Let’s get this out of the way.

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VR BEST OF 2024 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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5. This is Getting Ridiculous, Ninty

I just have to squeeze in a really personal whinge here. Even though Nintendo were guilty of moves much more worthy of other people’s disappointment shortlists this year, I’ve been following the company for so long now that nothing really gets my hopes up enough to shatter them these days – except the ongoing absence of the Nintendo Switch successor console in any official capacity throughout 2024.

The death by 1000 cuts started early: all the way back in January those sensational “internal delay” reports broke, suggesting the machine was planned for release this year but was pushed into 2025. Widespread assumptions that the house of Mario wouldn’t have enough games to fill out another year without a “Switch 2” were gradually proven wrong – and definitively so in a stellar June Direct – but even as the year rolled on and the system’s absence proved those January reports more likely every day, all the hype-fuelled YouTube channels and outlets turned their attention to the possibility that at least we’d see an official reveal this year… Right?

But things got real weird in the year’s second half. When Nintendo crammed a Museum Direct AND an unprecedented double-feature Indie World / Partner Showcase into the final week of August, a console reveal in the traditionally blockbuster September seemed almost guaranteed, but instead we got tumbleweeds; even a set of credible hardware photo / render leaks didn’t expedite Nintendo’s plans. Then came the weirdest October in recent memory: a new Nintendo alarm clock, a sort-of-secret online playtest for a mysterious multiplayer game, and a new mobile music streaming app each came out of nowhere and released almost immediately. Nintendo was trolling fans at that point.

I’m usually an absolute glutton for videogame console speculation, but by November I had well and truly checked out. This disappointment was largely self-inflicted, I admit, but whatever chaos was going on behind the scenes, the Big N’s marketing machine well and truly knew what it was doing.

4. The Wrong Kind of Aussie Film Nostalgia

It’s been a little while since living in Australia has felt like an outright disadvantage for active cinema movie-watchers, but 2024 had me feeling like the old days had returned on at least two oddly similar occasions throughout the year. To be fair, the second instance was a bit more worldwide, but it still formed a nasty pattern from my perspective.

Around April, the latest in a weirdly rapid-fire line of pulpy Guy Ritchie action flicks was set to release, and despite the relatively poor reception of his recent work I was still keen to switch my brain off and enjoy the unique brand of banter he so regularly delivers. But after release date listings all over reliable sites mysteriously vanished one day with no explanation, it was weeks until my friends and I were able to get any answers as to why The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare was not showing in any cinemas, despite Ritchie’s last effort making its slot on time as expected. Apparently it was a weird Amazon deal that wasn’t made massively public in Australia, and a couple of months later the movie unceremoniously hit streaming services. Just what a silly bombastic WWII movie needed. Yay.

Then in September came something even more drastic: I saw (and enjoyed) trailers for George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s much-hyped Oceans reunion Wolfs more than once in cinemas, and marked its late September release date on the calendar. Just one week before that very release date, chief bankroller Apple announced that the movie would no longer receive a cinematic run at all, going straight to the Apple TV+ streaming service instead to help boost subscribers. In terms of late rug-pulls, I’d never seen anything quite like it, but the gambit appeared to work, resulting in huge early watch numbers. Soon enough a major consequence came to light: director Jon Watts revealed he dropped plans for a sequel as a direct response to that exact big-screen backflip. Tell ’em, Jon.

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30 Nov

Was 2024 SEGA’s Best Year This Century?

Posted by vagrantesque in Games. Tagged: , , , , , .

From 2018 to 2022, one of the annual countdown lists on this site was a collection of “special awards”, one-off chances to talk about stuff I really enjoyed or admired but couldn’t squeeze into a full standard list. Usually one of those awards was for the third-party videogame publisher who released the most impressive combination of quality and quantity that year, and some years the winner was easier to pick than others. Now this countdown may return one day, but not this year, and I simply cannot abide letting 2024’s would-be winner go by unrecognised. I feel the need to write an entirely separate post just to make up for the fact that renowned Japanese publisher Sega would have won the category this year in an essentiality unprecedented landslide.

Sega may have built its videogame fortune by making consoles in the 1990s, but those days are sadly so far behind it now that the third-party publishing era of the company has thoroughly outlasted the glory days of mind-blowing 2D sprites and edgy television/magazine advertisements. They’ve been well-managed enough to stick around, and there have been quality releases here and there, but the original videogame blue team haven’t exactly been known for consistency or dense periods of heavy-hitting, head-turning product launches. Though a hefty dose of serendipity was doubtless involved, 2024 finally changed that.

On Top Atlus(t)

Let’s ignore that I may just have written the single most tortured pun of the last twelve years and move on to the elephant in the room: the number one reason Sega owned 2024 is the well-timed fruit-bearing of several Atlus projects within one 12-month period. Sega officially acquired Atlus all the way back in 2016, but reorienting the one-time JRPG hipster house away from its stubborn habits of releasing major games in the west months or years after Japanese launch has been a slow process. But if you had to pick one year to mark a definitive end to that old-timey era, 2024 is that year.

In February, Persona 3 Reload became the first major release in its series to hit major markets worldwide on the same day, a massive deal for anyone who has ever spent any time online with a Persona fan community. But that series has broken into the mainstream since its last new numbered title, so the increased eyeballs may be largely responsible for this. What is arguably an even bigger deal is that under this modern Sega initiative, Atlus got freaking Vanillaware to release a new game worldwide simultaneously; that’s right, the developers that kept the best videogame story of the decade so far, 13 Sentinels, from the west for almost an entire year. Not even an entirely untested new IP like Metaphor: ReFantazio was safe from Atlus’ renewed organisational power, bringing its wonderful weirdness to all major markets at once.

And would you look at that: all these games sold really well!

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30 Oct

Finally, An Excuse For a Banjo-Tooie Retrospective

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, N64, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

The bear clings to the ledge, like I once clung to my sanity.  

Feels like as good a time as any, right?

I struggle to motivate myself to sit down and write anything unless I can link it – however trivially – to something topical or current. But during the mind-numbing malaise of the 2021 lockdowns, I almost posted a Banjo-Tooie-themed article that had no such link. Almost. The half-written retrospective has sat in my drafts folder for years now, but since Nintendo and Microsoft at last decided to release the game on the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack service last week (fittingly two years after Banjo-Kazooie hit the program, mirroring both the original release and story gaps), I have not only a bona fide excuse to replay the game yet again, but to revive, massively expand, and publish that very draft.

Here we go then.

It’s been over five years since Banjo and Kazooie were announced as a joint DLC character for Super Smash Bros Ultimate and their trilogy of corresponding games on Xbox received a slew of 4K-enhanced patches. It’s been five days since the game hit NSO. Now, after I revisited Donkey Kong 64 with a critical eye in 2015 and played all of Conker’s Bad Fur Day in one day in 2018, I present to you the next entry in the library of opinionated late-90s Rareware platformer coverage on this site: my unsolicited, recently-refreshed musings on the slightly divisive sequel to the star-making, Jiggy-collecting Banjo-Kazooie.

Just… so 4K.

Screenshots from both the Switch and Xbox versions will appear throughout this article; can you tell which is which? There are literally no prizes for guessing correctly!

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30 Sep

Fifteen Years of Persona Changes You

Posted by vagrantesque in Games. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

On a large, overhanging screen within a dimly-lit videogame store in March of 2009, my gaze gradually fixated on a trailer that would alter the course of my life. A sharply-dressed Japanese kid with silver hair closed his fist and manifested a gigantic, colourful monster to attack his enemies, then a second later was shown working a boring dishwashing job in a sleepy town before looking into a murder mystery plot. This brazen mix of disparate parts apparently called itself Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, and in the desolate JRPG landscape of the very late 2000s it had the gall to release on the years-obsolete Playstation TWO. I was immediately struck by its confidence and style, and got myself a copy as soon as the game was available.

Need I say what happened next? Well you’ve probably met a Persona fan or two, dear reader; you know what happened next. But I’m still going to talk about it. As we rapidly approach the next major release from the head honchos of Persona development, the heinously-named Metaphor: Re Fantazio, I present my own personal retrospective of a truly incredible RPG series.

“The First One You Play is Probably Your Favourite”

It was a slow, gradual realisation, but by 2009 I knew I liked Japanese Role-Playing Games: Pokemon Yellow had been my first videogame, after all, and I had also sunk a weird amount of time into that turn-based Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Game Boy game; then when I was lucky enough to acquire a GBA a few years later it came with the unique lightning-in-a-bottle moment that was Golden Sun. In the ensuing years, the likes of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Tales of Symphonia, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Kingdom Hearts (vicariously) and eventually the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV would help me determine enough of the incidental characteristics shared by members of the genre to convince me of my taste for them. So come to think of it, that fateful 2009 Persona moment was probably the earliest time in my life I saw a game without a single shred of understanding of its history, recognised it as a JRPG, and bought it primarily on that basis.

But as we all know, a Persona game isn’t ‘just’ a JRPG; the series offers quite a bit to distinguish itself from the crowd, and chief among that list is style. The very first thing that greets you when you boot up Persona 4 is a lavish, provocative music video heaving with equal parts grimy retro-tech nostalgia and sharp yellow/black contrasts dialled right in to the contemporaneous 2000s Apple marketing playbook. The lyrical essays scrolling past in every direction to mimic the information overload within those very lyrics made an indelible impact on me as a millennial teenager whose active memories stranded both sides of the social media divide; I was instantly drawn in.

That love of yellow and black persists throughout the game’s striking UI, which also marks menu transitions with a neat faux-CRT TV colour-banding effect reminiscent of modern-day Netflix branding. And that tune was an instant ear-worm, a chaotic Shoji Meguro instant classic solidified by its presence on an honest-to-goodness soundtrack selection CD included as standard in that PS2 game case – the first game I can remember owning that did so. I wore out the tracks on that disc long before I heard them within the game, and the identity of the Persona series as an audiovisual feast unimpeded by ageing hardware was unmistakable from my very first day with it.

Beyond this clear stylistic identity, Persona 4 is defined by its intimate small-town scale, filling out a small cast of characters with layers upon layers of depth and going to some uncomfortable – not to mention ambitious and a teensy bit Jungian – thematic places without ever losing a sense of warmth or its perfectly-balanced humour over a year-long main story. The idea of a narrative taken day-by-day, filled with small relatable choices bearing meaningful consequences but never overwhelming in number, was absolutely delightful. It would be many years before brute force and hindsight would help me empathise with fans who had jumped on the Persona train with the groundbreaking Persona 3, a game with a much darker and edgier presentational wrapper around it and a greater emphasis on plot over levity or egalitarian character study. But for me, the damage was done: this mellow, vibes-first creative direction was Persona to me.

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31 Jul

Revisiting My “Favourite” Pokemon Game After Two Decades on a Console For Ants

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, GBA. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

Life can be pretty predictable at times, but often it just has a funny way about it. This site may have already enjoyed a slightly more-active-than-usual 2024, but following the traditional post-June hype season lull it was probably going to stay pretty quiet for a few months as per tradition. But suddenly, there is something else to write about.

You see, long after I had given up hope of playing a working Game Boy Micro – let alone owning one – a deal too good to refuse came across my entirely metaphorical desk out of nowhere a couple of months back. I am now, at long last, in possession of a tiny baby handheld console I didn’t even register as existing until long after Nintendo had stopped manufacturing it. And with a barely-believable GBM comes the question “What do I even play on this thing?”

A minor excavation campaign revealed some potential candidates: Advance Wars feels like it was made for this machine, and it’s been a real long time since I played through Final Fantasy Tactics Advance – with no sign it’s coming to Nintendo Switch anytime soon either. But would you look at that, Pokemon Leaf Green just so happens to turn 20 this year, and for a decent chunk of my life I told people it was my favourite Pokemon title. Across multiple forms of public transport and various hotels and other locations, I’ve been working my way through a long-overdue playthrough; let’s see how it holds up then, shall we?

But first:

It’s So Tiny!

The Game Boy Micro feels so miniscule in 2024 that it’s barely believable. The thing is a quarter of the size of my phone, which was already the smallest device capable of playing games in my life. Picking up the tiny AyaNeo Air Pro after a session with the Micro makes it feel bulky and cumbersome, to say nothing of the even larger Switch OLED. Of course back when it came out it was competing with a fleet of already-small dedicated Game Boy handhelds, but let’s not understate things here: even compared to those, this one is an almost cartoonish miniature.

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