Nintendo’s E3 plans are a fucking embarrassment.

Nintendo Was Not Fucking Joking When They Said E3 Would Be All about Zelda

Last week Nintendo of Japan tweeted:

“The new Legend of #Zelda will be the focus of #E3 2016. It will launch simultaneously on both Wii U and NX in 2017.”

They were certainly not kidding about this. Over the previous few years one has tended to think of Nintendo’s annual June Nintendo Direct stream as an abject cop out, seeing as it is intended in lieu of an actual E3 conference. However lame or cheap Nintendo’s prior Direct streams may have been though, they do not even come close to what Nintendo has planned for E3 2016. This week Nintendo has released their E3 plans, and for E3 2016 Nintendo do not plan to hold any conference at all – not even a pathetic Nintendo Direct streaming conference. Instead Nintendo will have their new Zelda game playable on Wii U in their E3 booth – indeed it will be the only game that is playable in their E3 booth. Other than this, the subversive degenerates at Nintendo Treehouse will be hosting an all-day livestream of the Zelda title. Suddenly all the rumours about Nintendo gender-swapping Link are starting to make sense, as the last thing that Nintendo would want to happen on air is for one of these snowflakes to start freaking out because they have been triggered by the male gaze of a cisnormative gross pissbaby fuckboy Link!

Nintendo’s weak-ass reasoning for this move is because they want the press to spend some time with the game [like that would not have happened anyway] on account of the drastic changes that have been made to the Legend of Zelda gameplay mechanics:

“will be a clean break from the conventions of previous games, removing boundaries that forced players to follow a set patch and introducing new gameplay that has not been experienced in previous games in the series.”

The charitable way to interpret this would be that the game is open and non-linear just like A Link to the Past, whereas an uncharitable way to interpret this is that the game is open and non-linear just like whatever game Ubisoft last released. Whatever the case, this E3 strategy seems to be based more on miserly cost cutting than on actual, well, strategy. It is a dangerous game that Nintendo is playing however, as not only will they be going the entire year with essentially no presence whatsoever at retail, but they will have also voluntarily benched themselves for E3 in the year leading up to the launch of their NX console. It is like Nintendo has absolutely no concept of what mindshare is, nor the role that it plays in the consumption of consumer goods. At this point it is looking increasingly unlikely that there will be any further Nintendo consoles after NX. Even if the big N’s executives want to continue chasing casual gaming butterflies, it is unlikely that the board of directors will allow them to continue to pour good money down the sinkhole that is Nintendo’s home console business.

Persona 5 is a JRPG for JRPG enthusiasts…

Atlus Throws down the Gauntlet to Square Enix with Persona 5 Release Date

For years now Japanese gamers have, with a few notable exceptions, consistently placed Persona 5 ahead of Final Fantasy XV in terms of their interest and purchase-intent. Eventually, when it became clear that Final Fantasy XV was all but complete, people began to speculate that Square Enix was holding back on announcing a release date because they were nervous about putting Final Fantasy XV up against Persona 5 in their domestic market. This suspicion was later confirmed by a Square Enix survey which sought to ascertain whether their fans were also interested in Persona 5, and whether those fans would purchase Persona 5 ahead of Final Fantasy XV. Given the way Famitsu polling has tended to go, Square Enix were likely not reassured by the findings of that survey – though there is no real way for us to definitively know short of Square Enix releasing that information to the public. At any rate, unfortunately for Square Enix they played the waiting game, but Atlus played it better. Square Enix eventually had to announce Final Fantasy XV‘s release date for September 30, and mere weeks later Atlus has announced Persona 5‘s release date for September 15 – a mere two weeks before the release of Final Fantasy XV.

This is simultaneously a masterstroke for Atlus, and absolutely terrible for Square Enix. Atlus will capture most of Japan’s hardcore JRPG crowd, and then two weeks later their game stands to be a beneficiary of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XV marketing blitz, as casual consumers who buy a new PS4 in order to play Final Fantasy XV may also be tempted to pick up another new release game to have something else to play on their new machine. Meanwhile, many hardcore gamers will not be finished with Persona 5 by the time that Final Fantasy XV releases, and so they may defer their purchase of Final Fantasy XV. Because of the massive quantity of games that Square Enix ships to retail, their games are usually highly susceptible to rapid price drops, as stores look to shift unsold stock. This is true for the West, and it is doubly true for Japan. Japanese gamers will be able to enjoy a significant price cut to Final Fantasy XV by simply waiting four to six weeks before picking it up. This is good news for Japanese Gamers, and bad news for Square Enix.

To be clear, Final Fantasy XV will still almost certainly outsell the PS4 version of Persona 5 [the game will also be available on PS3] in Japan. Square Enix’s enormous advertising spend will see to it that the general public is far more aware of Final Fantasy than of Persona. That being said, do not expect the difference between both games to be as large as one would think. Currently there are a little over two million Japanese gamers who own a PS4, and it seems likely that those people are more interested in Persona 5 than Final Fantasy XV, so if Final Fantasy XV is to best the PS4 version of Persona 5, then it will be relying on a combination of new PS4 owners and current PS4 owners who buy both games. As for whether Final Fantasy XV will be able to outsell the combined total of both versions of Persona 5, that probably depends a lot on word of mouth. That should be concerning for Sqare Enix, as thus far their domestic audience has been somewhat divided over the game’s combat mechanics.

[PICTURED]: Ubisoft creativity.

Yves Guillemot: Vivendi Takeover Will ‘Kill Creativity’ at Ubisoft

Throughout 2016 Vivendi has increased their stake in Ubisoft from 6% to 15%, and then just recently they upped this figure slightly to 17.73% of capital shares and 15.66% of voting shares. Contrast that to the Guillemot brothers, who between them own 10% of Ubisoft and 16% of the voting rights. Vivendi has not formally declared their hand, but the financial world is pretty much in agreement that the end goal of their actions is to continually increase their stake until they are in the position to launch a hostile takeover bid. At the same time Vivendi also sits poised to launch a hostile takeover bid against Gameloft, a sister company to Ubisoft that is similarly under the control of the Guillemot brothers. Vivendi has a 30% stake in Gameloft, and proceedings are already underway for the hostile bid to go ahead.

Guillemot is obviously furious at what is happening, yet he has little other recourse than bluff and bluster. Chief among his talking points seems to be the dire threat that any attempted hostile takeover would effectively “kill creativity” at Ubisoft, and Vivendi would just be buying an “empty shell“. Speaking at post-launch celebration event for The Division, Yves Guillemot went on to elaborate is strategy for fending off takeover bids:

“We had ups and downs on this game but we persevered. This is the kind of energy we need to show our strength, our values. It’s up to us to perform, to boost our company value and to make it harder for anyone to take us over.”

Michael Pachter has also weighed in on Guillemot’s novel approach to maintaining independence:

“If there’s a hostile takeover by Vivendi and Guillemot leaves, every person who is good at Ubisoft would be recruited by EA, Activision and Take Two.”

Everyone who is good at Ubisoft… Talk about slim pickings. Ignoring Raving Rabbids and Just Dance for the moment, Ubisoft has essentially only released one game since 2007: Assassin’s Creed. Sometimes it is set in Rome, and Sometimes it is set in France, and sometimes it is called Watch Dogs, and sometimes it is called Far Cry – but essentially since 2007 Ubisoft has only released Assassin’s Creed, and then they have re-released it, and then they have re-released that re-release ad nauseum. This being the case, Guillemot’s appeals to creativity probably is not the most winningest strategy he could have adopted. If Vivendi launched a hostile takeover and a few Ubisoft producers left for EA, then surely Vivendi would just continue the Guillemot strategy of re-releasing Assassin’s Creed. This is not rocket science. Perhaps if Ubisoft had taken more risks and made a better and more diverse product then he would still have a rhetorical leg to stand on, but Guillemot instead oversaw a strategy that has ultimately resulted in his IP being worth more than his workforce. Any developer of sufficient size can create Assassin’s Creed at this point, because it is such a well worn concept. Bioware made Assassin’s Creed and then sold it as Dragon Age: Inquisition. Guillemot’s bluster has all the deterrence force of a wet handkerchief.

Kazuma is a man who likes his pantsu.

Anime Spotlight: Konosuba – God’s Blessing on This Wonderful World! [2016]

Konosuba is fantastic! One day otaku shut-in Kazuma reluctantly leaves his house in order to purchase a game, and is then killed in a most humiliating fashion on his way home. Kazuma wakes to discover that he is in the afterlife, and a beautiful goddess named Aqua offers him three choices: go to Heaven, be reborn in Japan, or be sent to a parallel universe fantasy realm with his choice of mystical item. Kazuma chooses the latter option and sets about deciding upon his starting item, but when he begins taking too long Aqua starts becoming obnoxious, which in turn causes Kazuma to rashly choose Aqua as his starting item. The joke is on Kazuma however, as Aqua turns out to be completely useless. These two are then joined by Megumin [a powerful mage that can only cast one spell a day] and Darkness [a crusader who is also a hardcore degenerate with an abuse fetish]. From here the party must accept quests in order to earn money and gain EXP in order to level up.

Konosuba is hilarious and charming, with an endearingly crude sense of humour. Upon learning the thief ability, Kazuma uses it primarily to steal panties – Konosuba is that kind of show. The characters are also adorable, and are much more than the stock archetypes that one would expect to see in a series like this. Simply put, this is the best use of an MMO setting seen in an anime to date, and the relatively brief ten episode run means that Konosuba is the kind of anime series that one can watch in a single sitting. All of the episodes have been aired, and are available for streaming on Crunchyroll – watch it!

The Wii U has one hell of a software drought ahead of the release of Zelda.

NX: Nintendo Should Hope That More People Buy Their Console Than Buy Their Lies

The Nintendo NX will be launching in March of 2017, missing the crucial holiday season which might have provided it something of a boost out of the gate. This will result in Nintendo’s new system hitting the market several months after the release of the Playstation Neo, meaning that the NX will not even present an appreciable leap in capabilities over what is already on the market. One is not overly supportive of Sony’s plans for a mid-generation refresh, yet one has to respect Sony’s play to handily cockblock the big N. It seems unlikely that Nintendo would deliberately plan to miss the 2016 holiday season, so there is even every possibility that they had to do so on account of Sony entering Neo production before they could, and monopolising Foxcon production bandwidth to such an extent that Nintendo had to push back their release plans in order to build up the requisite inventory. In any case, regardless of the reasoning behind the decision, it nonetheless amounts to Nintendo releasing their console at a time when there is little appetite among consumers for buying new consoles.

This also means that the NX will not be shown at E3, as ten months prior to release is apparently way too early for Nintendo to be showing off one of their new products. Because of this Nintendo will be focusing their E3 efforts on their new Legend of Zelda title, which has been pushed back to March of 2017 – a mere ten months after E3.

“The new Legend of #Zelda will be the focus of #E3 2016. It will launch simultaneously on both Wii U and NX in 2017.”

The reason for Nintendo’s new Legend of Zelda title being delayed to March of 2017 is in order for the team to give it some extra polish and iron out some bugs – it assuredly has nothing to do with the launch of the NX. @Cheesemeister3k confirmed this by translating a tweet from Nintendo of Japan which confirms:

“Zelda for #WiiU, planned for 2016, has been delayed to 2017 in order to improve quality. #WiiU and #NX versions release together.”

Well, that is a relief. One is glad that Nintendo can be upfront like this. Perhaps NX has been delayed to ‘improve quality’ too. At any rate, the launch of the NX promises to to be a historic event, as one can scarcely recall a console ever launching without first being shown off at either E3 or CES before it. Even the shambolic launch of the Sega Saturn occurred at E3, giving it some much needed exposure to general consumers. Nintendo, a company in deep decline, will be launching their NX without the benefit of this kind of exposure, in a period directly subsequent to the glut of luxury spending which comes with the holiday season. Well played, guys!

It has not been so terribly long since PSN was regarded as more of a liability.

PSN Now More Lucrative Than All of Nintendo

With Nintendo operating as a nonentity throughout the majority of the console generation, sales of Sony’s PS4 have soared. Moreover, Nintendo is understood to have pretty much nothing significant in store for Wii U owners until their new Zelda title releases almost a year from now, meaning that, much like Sega after the Saturn, Nintendo will go almost a full year without having any kind of home console presence at retail. Hell, by the time Zelda actually does release for the Wii U, owners will likely have to order it online, as the Wii U will have relinquished the scant retail space that still remains to it at present.

As Nintendo shrinks Sony expands, and nowhere is this more evident than in the hard numbers. This week both Sony and Nintendo have released their numbers for the 2015 financial year, revealing that PSN alone is now earning more revenue than Nintendo as a whole. This generation Sony has started charging money for Playstation owners to access online game features, and given that the PS4 has shipped over 40 million units as of the 31st of March, that means that Sony is bringing in a tidy chunk of revenue along with the digital sales of PS4 software:

“Sony’s PlayStation Network sales hit 529,000m yen which means that PSN generated more revenue than the whole of Nintendo (504,000m yen).

Yes, you’re reading that right. PSN generated more revenue than all Nintendo revenue in FY2015/16.”

To put this in US dollar terms, the revenue from PSN was 4.97 billion dollars, while the revenue of Nintendo as a whole was 4.74 billion. In broader terms the revenue from Sony’s gaming division as a whole was 13.7 billion dollars, and now accounts for nineteen percent of all Sony revenue. Because of this Sony as a whole has returned to profitability in 2015 after several years of posting losses. One hopes that they use this breathing room to get the rest of their house in order, so that when these stellar PS4 sales numbers diminish other divisions of the company will be able to hold their own.

As for Nintendo, they do have a large warchest left over from the Wii, so they are in no imminent danger of going out of business. That said, if the NX does poorly and Nintendo’s mindshare and marketshare continues to decrease, then it is difficult to see how Nintendo’s shareholders could allow the company to throw their hat into a subsequent console generation. It is not even as though Nintendo handhelds can take the slack anymore; the 3DS might look great in comparison to PS Vita, but it has still yet to reach 60 million units sold after five years on the market – a far cry from the 154 million units of DS hardware that Nintendo moved during the previous generation. Moreover, Nintendo’s financials could be looking even worse were it not for the runaway success of Amiibo, which went on to generate almost 500 million dollars for Nintendo in 2015, which is roughly half of the revenue accrued by 3DS software sales in the same period.

“Fun Fact: All 3DS software generated $1B for Nintendo over the last 12 months Clash of Clans generated ~$1.4B alone in the last 12 months

Nintendo have now sold in approximately 35.2 million amiibo figures (More than half in the US/Canada) and 28.9 million amiibo cards.”

Aspiring game developers will never get the chance to ask Journey’s director how he became so successful at such a young age.

SJW Professors Rob Students of Rare Learning Experience

File this one under pure blithering idiocy. What do Rob Pardo [former CEO of Blizzard], Jenova Chen [founder of thatgamecompany], Dave Stohl [president of Infinity Ward], Brandon Beck [CEO of Riot Games], Peter Levin [president of Lionsgate Interactive], Min Kim [former president of Nexon America], and Jeffrey Kaplan [former director of World of Warcraft] all have in common? Besides being massive industry heavyweights of course. What commonality do these individuals all share with one another aside from the fact that they are immensely important and influential gaming professionals, any one of which would be worth seeking an audience with? The answer to that is quite simple – all of these very important people had taken time out of their busy lives in order to fly to LA so that they could attend a USC panel titled ‘Legends of the Game Industry’. Not only had these industry titans made themselves available to answer the questions of USC game design students, but they were also prepared to take a look at the game design projects that the students had been working on. For most people this would be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Sadly, it was not to be. Professor Anthony Borquez had organised the event, yet he was only granted the space on the provision that he would not assemble an all male panel. With this stipulation in mind Borquez assembled a panel which included an [as yet] unnamed female gaming professional, yet due to a scheduling conflict she had to pull out at the last minute. A mere four hours before the panel was due to get underway director of USC Games Tracy Fullerton cancelled the event because there was not going to be a female on the panel.

“Dear Students, Faculty and Invited Guests:

Thank you for your commitment to USC Games.”

This is profoundly sickening in terms of its sheer wastefulness – both regarding the unique opportunity lost to students and the faculty’s flagrant disregard for the time of the guest speakers who had flown out to be there. If the department is able to put together another panel then one imagines that it will look a lot less like ‘Legends of Gaming’ and a lot more like ‘Rejects of Tumblr’. Brianna Wu is a shoe-in to attend for the attention, and so too are the duo behind Tale of Tales [provided the University puts on a free lunch]. However, it is difficult to imagine an actual industry professional taking this joke university seriously enough going forward to waste their time on another such panel. These morons are supposed to be educators, yet they just ruin it all for everybody. Nobody who was actually serious about a career in gaming would have passed up this kind of opportunity in protest over something as silly as gender composition, and unintentional gender composition at that. Of course, the faculty in question likely could not appreciate this, on account of the fact that they were never themselves able to make it in the game industry, and so became career academics instead. Those who can do, do; those who cannot do, teach. Now one just hopes that Lusipurr will give this author a sporting head start before he looses the hounds!

[UPDATE]: Tracy Fullerton has attempted to explain why she decided to fuck over her students due to petty nonsense:

“There was no perfect choice here. There was only the choice to stand for one set of values or another. So, I chose the path I believe in. You all are free to disagree, but I think it is the right side of history.”

There is no right side of history for hysterical SJWs. Their day in the sun is rapidly setting.

Endride has your generic fantasy needs covered.

Anime Spotlight: Endride [2016]

Shun Asanaga is a fifteen year old Japanese kid who happens to be transported to another world on account of a mild case of kleptomania. Emilio is an Endran prince who is languishing in prison after attempting to avenge his father against the current king of the realm. The former enables the latter to escape, and they subsequently encounter Alicia who has her own pet dragon! In the series Endride the Earth is hollow and contains a second planet beneath its surface known as Endora. The show starts off with both boys attempting to evade the King’s soldiers as they make their getaway, and from there Shun needs to find a way to get home, while Emilio needs to find a way to avenge his father.

Endride is… retarded. The show is somewhat generic, Shun makes for an annoying protagonist, and the quality of animation is less than resplendent. The whole thing feels more than a little goofy. As far as mediocre anime is concerned, Endride is somewhat more interesting than is typical. It is reasonably watchable, yet with so much great anime around there is not really much of a compelling reason to settle for this. Endride is licensed with Funimation, and new episodes are simulcast on Saturdays at 3:00 pm Eastern.

Final Fantasy XV: Cook your snacks with friendly firaga!

Final Fantasy XV News: The Bad

Speaking frankly with Game Informer, Hajime Tabata readily admits that prior to beginning active development on Final Fantasy XV back in 2012, the team conducted an analysis of the franchise’s position within the domestic market and found that over a decade of milking the Final Fantasy brand in order to sell mediocre cash-in titles had rendered Final Fantasy a dying series that had already peaked and was now in the midst of decline. There is the sense that if Final Fantasy XV does not succeed in reversing the franchise’s fortunes then the entire ship could be sunk.

“The gravest situation of all was that, at the time we were starting Final Fantasy XV, we didn’t see an increase in new fans of the franchise. The brand image of Final Fantasy wasn’t really clear.

The reality is not that the situation is okay or in favour of us. Rather, it is more grave and serious than we had initially thought… The way we understood Final Fantasy after our analysis is that it was a dying IP that had peaked.”

This is what Tabata readily admits, and that being the case one can only conclude that the man is intent on being the one who delivers the killing blow to the Final Fantasy series, as he seems to be pathologically incapable of rejecting a single bad decision to cross his desk.

Final Fantasy XV‘s recent Platinum Demo featured a solitary party of one, as players were tasked with guiding Noct alone through its dreamscape. As such it neatly obscured the fact that using magic incurs friendly fire damage for party members:

“This makes it difficult to use multiple spells in rapid succession, since they require you to be careful and deliberate.

The effort pays off with impressive visual effects, setting the ground ablaze or creating a deep freeze in a wide area. Be careful not to hit your party members, though, since they can be damaged by friendly fire.

This is a ‘fantasy based on reality’ after all, and there is nothing more ‘reality’ than party members incurring friendly fire damage from your own spellcasting! This is actually a thing: friendly fire for spellcasting! How bold and progressive! All heil the current year!

When Tabata was discussing the possibility of bringing air travel to the wold of Final Fantasy XV last year, he specifically mentioned that the team was working with Avalanche Studios to re-purpose Just Cause 3‘s flying mechanics for the game. That being the case, one kind of suspects that they went on to do exactly the same thing with Just Cause 3‘s grenade mechanics, and then just animated magical spells over that explosive projectile damage model. It would certainly explain the janky aiming mechanics and friendly fire.

Things do not get much better when it comes to enemy design. The creatures of Final Fantasy used to be vividly coloured fantastical creatures, yet at Tabata’s request both enemy aesthetics and gameplay design have been subordinated to realism, as everything had to look like National Geographic. Tomohiro Hasegawa reveals:

“The first monster we designed for XV was the Behemoth. What Tabata-san said was that our goal was National Geographic. Think of a Behemoth that we could have a documentary program about.

Some people said, ‘If we do it that way, then it won’t really be much of a game,’ but then Tabata-san said, ‘Disregard that. Create a living creature.’ So we’ve spent evenings watching videos and studying them.”

Apparently this realistically fickle AI is also true of the game’s summons [referred to in-game as Astals and/or Archaeans], as CG graphics director Akira Iwata goes on to explain:

“When called upon, Titan will think and react depending on where he is in relation to Noctis. For example, perhaps it’s closer to run, or perhaps it’s easier to throw a boulder. Or he may give up and go home! So there are these different action triggers that determine his events.”

Great, so rather than making the effort to work out alternate summon depictions for difficult areas of the map, the summons themselves can just decide to bugger off back home.

Finally [and obviously] the Final Fantasy XV team has confirmed that the title’s fantastical elements have been scaled way back, and even where they are present they have been implemented in such away as to tether them to the drab reality of the game world. Tomohiro Hasegawa states:

“When you’re looking at previous Final Fantasies, something that stands out is the unique, fantasy-oriented designs. That was the nature of how those titles were designed, but we narrowed down the points in which we reached that fantasy level. We were very particular about choosing the moments to showcase in that fashion. There are aspects geared towards that fantasy, but narrowed down. Everything is grounded and designed academically.”

Everything has been designed academically with calculators and shit – because that is the optimal way to mathematically create diet fantasy. When this ‘fantasy based on reality’ was initially announced back in 2006, one initially thought that it was brilliant in concept, as it does not necessarily follow that the presence of design elements that are drawn from our mundane reality should result in a corresponding diminishing of fantasy elements. This juxtaposition of the mundane and the fantastical has been well executed in enough animes to amply demonstrate that point. Hell, the Shadow Hearts series was set in our real world, yet the resulting games all seemed much more fantastical than Final Fantasy XV. Unfortunately, in typical Square Enix fashion they have chosen to implement the concept of ‘a fantasy based on reality’ in the worst possible way.

Careful where you throw that magic!

Final Fantasy XV News: The Good

That is not to say that all recent news about Final Fantasy XV has been bad however. Because of the way that Episode Duscae was structured, one’s biggest fear was that Final Fantasy XV would be structured like the typical sandbox RPG. That is to say that there would be a central notice board in every town to collect reams of sidequests, and then each region would have three or four main story missions which would be inevitably lost between all the busy work. After reading Game Informer’s impressions of the first chapter of the game however, one is much relieved [but still slightly wary] about Final Fantasy XV‘s use of an open world environment:

“The term ‘open-world’ has grown to mean more than a description of an environment; it carries expectations for exploration, quests and structure. With that in mind, describing Final Fantasy XV as an open-world experience is not entirely appropriate. It isn’t about creating your own emergent story, finding a new sidequest around every corner, or getting wrapped up in a district-conquering metagame. This means the technical backbone is focused on creating an expansive and interesting environment, but it doesn’t sacrifice the narrative-driven experience fans expect.

Final Fantasy XV definitely isn’t The Witcher 3 or Dragon Age Inquisition in terms of your to-do list. That isn’t necessarily bad, because your quest log also isn’t bloated by insignificant or uninteresting tasks. You still have things to do, but the map isn’t packed with quest-givers or activities, which may surprise someone looking for a typical open-world experience.

Hajime Tabata then describes the team’s approach to open world creation:

“From the start of development, we set out to make something that wasn’t completely free-roaming, open-world. The technology is definitely built on an open world, but the way we approach this freedom aspect is to not have freedom come first, and then us implement the quests. Rather, we have the story first then create as much freedom as we can within the story.”

It is not just the structure of the story which serves as a step in the right direction, as its content appears to be on the right track too. Final Fantasy XV may be a ‘fantasy based on reality’ that eschews much of the series’ traditional fantastical element, but at least the story deals with matters that are beyond the realm of the mundane. Human conflict may serve as the catalyst for the journey to get underway, yet the story also deals with the supernatural element, as nights are growing increasingly longer, threatening to plunge the world into perpetual darkness. In fact the phrasing of this looming threat almost makes it sound like Final Fantasy XV is borrowing from Game of Thrones’ ‘winter is coming’ shtick.

Final Fantasy XV may tell a dark story, but the team has sought to mix things up by injecting a lot of humour into character conversations, which is something that Final Fantasy XIII often forgot to do [intentionally] amid all of its melodrama. Better entries in the series have shown themselves to be quite capable of treading a balanced path between serious drama and comedic interludes, so it is heartening that Final Fantasy XV will at least be attempting to replicate this:

“The overarching story of the game is definitely hefty and serious. Of course, Noctis will face his destiny and grow emotionally, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that their road trip will be grave and serious. It’s more natural to have that fun element to it. So, it’s really combining the naturalness and the seriousness to create the human drama of Final Fantasy XV

Finally, another piece of very welcome news is that the team is attempting to provide the game with one clearly defined main villain, replete with relatable human motivations [as opposed to the inscrutable shitpile that was Final Fantasy XIII‘s Orphan].

“It’s not an ensemble cast of villains, there’s clearly one evil entity in the game.

I think a good villain is a character that you could potentially create a project or a game around as the main character – one with a clear background and drama.”

One does not want to dislike Final Fantasy XV upon its release. The title seems like it is doing many things very right, which only serves to make it all the more perplexing that Hajime Tabata has chosen to incorporate so many bad ideas to balance out the good. Because of some of the completely bonkers decisions made one has significant reservations about the eventual quality of the game, but one would also very much like to eat crow in September.

Nintendo are disingenuous shitheads who make games for babies.

Nintendo Attempts to Use Atlus as a Buffer Against Censorship Controversy

This week Bandai Namco made the big announcement that the scantily clad heroine of Tales of Berseria would not be censored when the game releases in the West in 2017. Nintendo holds a huge portion of blame for the fact that non-censorship is even regarded as newsworthy in the current year. Nintendo Treehouse directly fucked the localisations of Fire Emblem Fates, Fatal Frame V, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes to name a few. Meanwhile Nintendo regional publishing regulations required that Square Enix butcher their Western release of Bravely Second: End Layer, and now the same thing is happening to Atlus with the release of Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, the crossover between Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem. Having Nintendo as publisher means obliterating even the slightest hint of cleavage, while transforming panties into spats. Presumably, something will also be done in order to make characters wearing swimsuits less attractive, though this has yet to be confirmed. Because of the way in which game content is being butchered, many people had initially assumed that Nintendo Treehouse was handling the localisation, yet Nintendo representatives seem very intent on shifting blame for the localisation fuckery onto the shoulders of Atlus through their use of vague and suggestive language.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE was localized by Atlus in a way that is consistent with the localization work they do on games they publish.It was a priority to ensure the game feels familiar and appeals to longtime Atlus fans. Any changes made to the in-game content were due to varying requirements and regulations in the many different territories Nintendo distributes its products.

If ever there was a sentence which required the use of a motherfucking asterisk, it is this one. The localisation of Tokyo Mirrage Sessions #FE is not consistent with the localisations of games that Atlus publishes themselves, as they are not wont to gut perfectly harmless content for Western markets. The changes present in the product are not there due to territorial requirements and regulation, as depictions of women in bikinis have not yet been banned in the West. Rather, they are there because of the arse-backwards regressive content policies of Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe. Nintendo are a pack of disingenuous shitheads, and if they think that unconvincing weasel words will prevent Lusipurr.com from nailing their patronising arses to the fucking wall then they have another thing coming. Why would anybody support a company like this? Why would anybody want to buy into the NX? Nintendo richly deserves every iota of failure that they have heaped upon themselves and their brand. Fucking piss poor!

The depiction of All Might draws inspiration from oldschool Western super heroes.

Anime Spotlight: My Hero Academia

When overnight eighty percent of the world’s population mysteriously develops special abilities [referred to as quirks], it gives rise to the emergence of both super heroes and super villains in society. Izuku wants more than anything to become a super hero, and even carries around a book filled with his observations about the prominent heroes and villains that he studies. Unfortunately for Izuku he is part of the twenty percent of society born without a quirk, which leads to him being bullied by his super powered classmates. Undeterred, Izuku plans to sit the entrance exam for U.A. High School, which is Japan’s premier institution for the training of super heroes – this initially looks like a hopeless endeavour until he manages to catch the eye of All Might, Japans greatest super hero, by saving the class bully from a villain.

My Hero Academia is a brightly coloured super hero comedy that is very much in the same vein as last year’s superb One Punch Man. Granted, My Hero Academia is not as funny, weird, or attractive to watch as One Punch Man, but it is nonetheless quite adequate at filling the void left in the wake of One Punch Man. It creates a vibrant and interesting world, and a few of the jokes are quite amusing. The art style is fairly unattractive, but My Hero Academia looks very good in motion, as the fight sequences are well choreographed and quite smoothly animated. My Hero Academia is simulcast on Funimation Sundays at 5:00 am Eastern. The first episode was very enjoyable, and the series looks to be quite promising. Recommended.

Rapp has increased her bargaining position: Who wouldn’t want to pay a few dollars to blow their load across the public face of Nintendo?

… And Her Husband Is a Literal Cuck!

Two weeks ago Lusipurr.com reported that the reason that confirmed pedophile supporter Alison Rapp had been fired from Nintendo Treehouse was because of softcore pornography photo shoots that she was attempting to sell online. This would have been a great reason to fire her, as would have been the fact that she supports the legalisation of child pornography, yet it would appear that there is an even more likely candidate than these two marks against her character. It would seem that somebody who had been digging into Alison Rapp’s online presence had discovered that she was allegedly moonlighting as a Seattle prostitute, selling her body for $250 an hour. Prostitution is illegal in Washington. For the last couple of weeks the liberal regressive press has been denouncing Nintendo, saying that Nintendo were merely caving in to the pressure exerted by gamers, and gamers would thereby be further emboldened to be horrible little misogynists. Turns out there was precious little else that Nintendo could have done, as the intensely image conscious company had a literal prostitute on their payroll, and serving as their public face at that! How the fuck did that happen?

How did it happen? Well it would seem that the simplest explanation is that the Treehouse HR department found itself dominated by SJWs, and from there HR pozzed the rest of Treehouse beyond any hope of rehabilitation by predominantly hiring people from within their own clique while turning a blind eye to types of controversial [and illegal] behaviour that they themselves are sympathetic to. This is evidenced by the unusual concentration of radical leftists that Treehouse has been visibly seen to employ; largely concerning themselves with butchering game localisations and antagonising Nintendo customers on Twitter. Now Nintendo of America would be best served by amputating Treehouse, and disposing of that entire division with cleansing fire – as that is the only way to prevent contagion throughout the rest of the company.

Ultimately what we have here is a bunch of knee jerk ideologues raking Nintendo across the coals for firing someone who was a very obvious liability even before her streetwalker status was revealed, and now it turns out that there was pretty much nothing that Nintendo could have done differently. Even if prostitution was legal in Washington, which is not the case, even then Nintendo would have suffered irreparable damage to their image by keeping on a known prostitute as their PR spokesman. Nintendo may suffer a little damage to their brand regardless, but at least there is not the ongoing association with Rapp to perpetuate it.

Rapp has torched her career. She will not be doing PR for any sizable corporation after this fiasco, but in one’s humble opinion she is not worth feeling sorry for. If Rapp had lost her job for previously working as a prostitute at some point in the past then that would be fairly heartbreaking, but instead Alison actively sought prostitution work while working for Nintendo as a PR rep, knowing full well what it would mean for Nintendo’s reputation if she were discovered – but perhaps that is just the risk companies run by employing individuals from the MEllennial generation. If there is somebody worth feeling sorry for in all of this then it is probably her hopelessly cucked husband, Jake Rapp [yes, he took her last name]. Jake appears to have been a good Christian kid who sought dating advice from his Pastor before meeting her, yet Alison took him and turned him out to the point where he is now a gay prostitute with a ‘Prince Albert’ piercing in the head of his penis – and now thanks to Alison the entire internet knows about his complete debasement. One at least hopes that maybe this situation will prove shocking enough to open up a window of possibility for the poor guy to be red pilled by the people in his life who actually care about his well being [assuming they have not already been frozen out by Alison]. And there is a silver lining for Alison too; sure, she may have completely obliterated her career in PR, but she is now the biggest celebrity prostitute in the world of gaming, and so she could probably raise her hourly rate and make a killing from all of the thirsty cunts at NeoGaf.

How much more insanity can this story generate?

Final Fantasy VII Remake is being designed for [CURRENT YEAR].

Hironobu Sackaguchi: Yoshinori Kitase Is a Bad Producer

Famitsu hosted a NicoNico Live stream this week to promote the forthcoming release of Final Fantasy XV, which was presented by the game’s director, Hajime Tabata, and the father of Final Fantasy himself, Hironobu Sackaguchi. Sackaguchi was quite drunk off of wine, and [as is often the case with drinkers] he let slip a rather unguarded comment. Amid praising Tabata’s talents as a director, Hironobu Sackaguchi mentioned as an aside that he thinks Yoshinori Kitase is a bad producer. At this point the men all burst out laughing while the social media feed scrolling across the screen became filled with comments like “WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW“, which is basically the Japanese equivalent of typing ‘lololololololololol’. Hajime Tabata then hurriedly blurted “I respect Kitase’s producing ability“, before the show cut to commercial break. Perfect. Upon returning from break Sackaguchi attempted to backpedal from his comment, but he need not have bothered. The audience knew it for the truth. As a director Yoshinori Kitase has been responsible for the creation of most of the best Squaresoft games in the company’s history, but as a producer he has gone on to oversee many of the worst products in the Square Enix catalogue. He is responsible for giving Motomu Toriyama enough rope to hang himself, and he is now overseeing the rape of Final Fantasy VII.

Speaking with Game Informer Kitase has revealed that Final Fantasy VII Remake‘s director, Tetsuya Nomura, feels that realtime combat in the series is best represented by Dissidia: Final Fantasy. That is what is regarded as best practice. Floaty junk.

“As our director [Tetsuya] Nomura-san says, Final Fantasy (in terms of action games) is best represented by Dissidia in the current landscape. In terms of the Final Fantasy action battles people have experienced themselves, that is most familiar to them these days. In terms of the image of the battle system, that’s where we’re getting the feel from. It won’t be as action-focused as Dissidia, of course, but the the visuals and how the gameplay feels in essence will be drawn from that Dissidia-esque style.”

Great. Final Fantasy VII‘s combat will be just Dissidia! Floaty worthless junk! What role can materia even play in this situation? Will materia be accessed by pulling off a shoryuken? Game Informer explicitly asked Kitase why a faithful remake of Final Fantasy VII was not adopted, as many fans of the original game wanted:

“Some fans seem to want a remake that is mainly visual upgrades, with none of the story or gameplay altered. Was that ever considered for the project?

To which Kitase replied:

“The starting point was – and our executive producer [Shinji] Hashimoto-san has mentioned this – it would even be okay if we just upped the graphics to the quality of Advent Children. But, in terms of game styles and battle systems, it’s been 20 years since the original, and a lot has changed. Trends have changed, and I believed that we needed to revisit and rethink that aspect for the remake.”

Great. Final Fantasy VII‘s well received ATB battle system has to be changed because it is [CURRENT YEAR]. [CURRENT YEAR] is a great reason for changing everything fans enjoyed about the original game – that logic is watertight! How fortunate for us that Square Enix has adopted the Justin Trudeau design philosophy for making video games! But why stop there? Surely the game’s cast and story should be redesigned for [CURRENT YEAR] too? Phew, well it seems that this bad Square Enix producer has us covered. Just in case Final Fantasy VII fans were worried that characters from the extended Final Fantasy VII universe would not make an appearance, Kitase has revealed that the team is working hard to retcon in characters that were created during the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII cluster fuck:

“It’s not to say that all or some of the characters from the spin-offs or other Compilation works will appear in the remake, but if there are any areas where we can use the settings or the characters, we do want to try to incorporate it in there, so it gives off that sense of nuance and those other stories existing.

There may be instances where the characters appear themselves, or are just referenced in dialogue. But, of course, it would be difficult to follow up on everything that happened in this universe. So, maybe some of the characters who weren’t as famous won’t appear or be mentioned. But in terms of the characters and instances that remain in the memories of our fans, we do want to try our best to integrate that in some fashion in the world.”

This is fantastic news for fans of beloved Final Fantasy VII characters like Weiss the Immaculate and Gackt. Final Fantasy VII is so stunning and brave for [CURRENT YEAR]! Please buy a lot!

Clearly not a game for [CURRENT YEAR]!

I Am Setsuna Director Curb Stomps Kitase’s Anti-ATB Propaganda

It is [CURRENT YEAR] too for Square Enix subsidiary Tokyo RPG Factory, yet funnily enough they seem to be operating under the mistaken assumption that great battle systems are timeless. Chrono Trigger may have been an instant classic that is still often referenced even today in the [CURRENT YEAR] as being the most flawless JRPG ever produced, yet it would be unthinkable to release an RPG with Chrono Trigger‘s battle system today because it is [CURRENT YEAR], and that sort of thing is just not done. Despite this immutable fact the madmen at Tokyo RPG Factory actually intend to this [CURRENT] year release a game into the West which features and ATB command-based battle system, which we all know to be the worst thing ever in [CURRENT YEAR]. This week Tokyo RPG Factory’s Atsushi Hashimoto was interviewed by SIliconera, and was arrogant enough to not even apologise once for using such an antiquated battle system throughout the entire discussion:

“I feel there is a trend that a lot of games, even RPGs have leaned towards action oriented combat. Tokyo RPG Factory’s mission for I am Setsuna was to bring back the turn based RPG battle system which worked really well in the golden era of JRPGs. We wanted to feature that in the game. I can’t say for all of our titles that will be a characteristic we will incorporate, but turn based battle systems were one of the charms in the 90s.”

When asked whether people’s preference was based purely on nostalgia, Hashimoto went on to unrepentantly claim:

“I believe turn-based battle systems can be loved by all. It’s an interesting system that I hope even younger gamers who aren’t familiar with this style of RPG will enjoy. There are other elements in the game that draw players in. In the story, we put a lot of effort into making it interesting. As well as the motifs illustrated in the game. There is a lot of snow in the world which plays a crucial role within the narrative. The background music has a lot of piano that also helps illustrate the environment and world of I am Setsuna. I hope with all of these elements even the newer generation will also take notice that this is something new and refreshing.”

This is completely nutty. It is not even as though Tokyo RPG Factory are using this battle system out of laziness, as they seem to have taken great pains to recreate the flow of gameplay found in their primary inspiration, Chrono Trigger:

“We wanted to make I am Setsuna as seamless as possible. We felt Chrono Trigger did transitioning into the battle sequence from the field so well that was the look we wanted to achieve. We did a lot of research on how we could achieve that and not interrupt the immersion factor for the players and be able to keep a good tempo with the narrative.

One of the ways we did research is we went back and played Chrono Trigger. We measured the time it took while you’re moving around the field, how long it took to move a certain distance, and how long a battle was. Then we measured how long a transition took and wrote down the numbers for each action. After we gathered the data, we looked at how the flow was structured and we tried to derive how much time you can spend on certain transitions to keep that good pacing for a player to be comfortable and satisfied with the tempo to have an exhilarating gameplay experience. From that information, we would apply it to how I am Setsuna was structured. For example, if we inserted some loading time here I think the players won’t experience any kind of discomfort. We started building the structure based on what we believed was a good progressive pace.”

Bah, there is nothing progressive about spurning the prevailing trends in [CURRENT YEAR]. Everyone only likes things one way, and that one way is how they like it! It is not as though one would find Pokemon using such a retrograde command-based battle system in [CURRENT YEAR], which is precisely why Pokemon became a super button-mashy action RPG years ago. Square Enix need to put a lid on this craziness

I know the casting seems obnoxious, but the film is going to be so bad that it should hardly matter.

Anime Opinion: SJWs and Weebs Join Hands in Condemning ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (2017) for Whitewashing

This week the condemnations have been coming in thick and fast for Ghost in the Shell (2017), after news came to light that ghastly white actress Scarlett Johansson would be playing the role of Motoko Kusanagi, a character who had a Japanese background in the original source material, and people have been absolutely losing their shit. Regressive liberals are talking about this event as though it were a prelude to a second holocaust, as apparently there are no roles for Asian actors and Asian identity is being erased. Meanwhile the weebs are basically up in arms because this is a change that is being made from the source material. Here is the thing though, Ghost in the Shell (2017) was never going to be faithful to the source material. The movie has been in production limbo for almost as long as live action Akira, and none of the details to emerge have been any more promising. The fact that either Ghost in the Shell or Akira exist at all as live action Hollywood productions should be held as deeply offensive to any fans of the source material, but within the context of both projects being hulking piles of shit, the fact that a non-Japanese actress has been cast as Kusanagi does not seem like such a big deal. This is not to say that fundamentally altering a beloved character for greater appeal is not deeply offensive in itself, but how many fans of Ghost in the Shell were ever all that keen to watch a terrible Hollywood adaption of their cherished anime?

This live action film adaption exists for the same reason as any of the awful reboots and remakes floating around Hollywood at present. The industry is terminally uncreative, and so properties like Ghost in the Shell are licensed as a shortcut to thinking. This is not a film that is being created for fans of Ghost in the Shell. The film’s intended audience does not even know that the anime or manga exist. Dreamworks is spending $100,000,000 on the film’s budget, and likely the same again on its marketing – and because of this they want a well recognised and bankable actor to assume the lead role, because money. Lucy Liu had been lined-up to play Kusanagi years ago when the project was first mooted, but she is obviously too old to play the lead now, and Hollywood does not have any other Lucy Lius at present.

Hollywood is not being racist or attempting to erase any kind of identity, they are simply risk averse and do not have a more culturally appropriate leading lady available for the role. And there are plenty of film roles available to Asian actors by the way; they all exist in the excellent South Korean and Japanese film industries [which feature comparatively few non-Asian actors]. When one gets down to it, most of the people to have been quoted by regressive leftist outlets for kicking up a fuss about Johansson’s casting have themselves been mediocre Asian-American actors, so self-interest obviously comes into the equation. They would love to sleepwalk their way into the lead role on account of their heritage because they could not get access to such a role based on their accomplishments alone. At any rate, as someone who enjoys anime the casting of Scarlett Johansson as Motoko Kusanagi is deeply offensive, but no more so than the very existence of this film as a whole.

She must not be forgotten.

Final Fantasy VII Remake to Be a Hot Mess!

This week has seen the release of May’s issue of Game Informer, and an in-depth interview with Square Enix’s Yoshinori Kitase et al. serves as its leading story. The bulk of the interview predictably focuses on Square Enix’s upcoming release of Final Fantasy XV, yet one or two nuggets of information were allowed to slip regarding Final Fantasy VII Remake, and like all information surrounding the game it serves as one giant red flag for fans of Final Fantasy VII. The information is not exactly new per se, but rather it is Square Enix choosing to double down on regrettable ideas that one might have initially hoped were a poor choice of words or a passing fancy.

First up is something that is painfully apparent just from watching the trailers, yet comes across as bracingly obnoxious when pinned down in actual human words. Kitase, Nomura, and Nojima worked on the original Final Fantasy VII, and because of this they feel entitled to change, modify, or strip out any element they see fit. To this end they have made it quite clear that there are no sacred cows where Final Fantasy VII is concerned, as everything is on the table for a potential re-write, re-imagining, or absent-minded tinker:

“I, along with [Tetsuya] Nomura-san and [Kazushige] Nojima-san–who are involved with the remake–were also involved with the original Final Fantasy. We were the people who created it, so in that sense, we don’t think anything is untouchable.”

Look forward to the retconning of Genesis into the timeline! Square Enix still has not grasped the fact that when something is popular on the scale that Final Fantasy VII was, then it no longer wholly belongs to them, as they must now share it with its own huge audience. Sure, they may still wholly own it in a legal sense, and are at complete liberty to thoroughly ruin it accordingly, but there are millions of people who feel a very strong sense of ownership over the game, and not all of them will be amenable to such wholesale changes. The Lusipurr.com readership is probably tired of hearing this by now, but why bother to remake a game when the plan is to alter it in its every aspect? If the team had all these plans for a game which differed radically from Final Fantasy VII, then why not allow them to make that different game instead of reskinning it in the garb of Final Fantasy VII?

Final Fantasy XIII is just the gift that keeps on giving. Moving on from discussing Square Enix’s plans to change everything that ten million people already like about Final Fantasy VII, Kitase next went on to reveal how the decision to break Final Fantasy VII Remake into multiple parts has been modeled after the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, wherein each entry was radically different from the last:

“When the project was first announced, people were confused by its multi-part nature, but the goal is to structure it more like Final Fantasy XIII than an episodic series.

It will essentially be a full scale game for each part of the multi-part series. In XIII each installment told the story from a different angle.”

Perhaps this turn of events is kind of fitting given that Final Fantasy VII Remake‘s iteration of Cloud mostly looks like Lightning’s blond twin sister. Kitase deliberately highlights how each entry in the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy is presented from a different angle to one another, and one suspects that this is not just an idle observation – meaning that we will now also have to worry about wild tonal shifts between episodes!

The real tragedy of Final Fantasy VII Remake is that before Square Enix confirmed it and started announcing their awful plans the potential for a faithful Final Fantasy VII remake existed in the realms of possibility, but the mere existence of this deeply flawed iteration means that we will now never get a remake of Final Fantasy VII that is done well. This is it. It is for this snuffing out of potential that one now mourns. One suspects that entire books could be written on the subject of how wrong Square Enix will eventually get this game…

Now is not a good time to run out of gas!

Final Fantasy VIII-2

… And a companion text could very well be written about Final Fantasy XV, the real subject of May’s issue of Game Informer – and things do not sound much more promising on this front. The game itself looks to take some major influences from Final Fantasy VIII, a title that is held in high esteem for its quality game systems! Anybody who played the recent Platinum Demo will no doubt already know that, like Final Fantasy VIII, magic in Final Fantasy XV will be a finite resource which can be stocked like an item. This is after all a ‘fantasy based on reality’, and what could possibly be more realistic than magic as a single use consumer good? Presumably characters will be able to carry around a maximum 99 of each spell/item, which should be ample considering how thoroughly useless magic is in Final Fantasy XV. What players of the demo might not know is that in the world of Final Fantasy XV magic stock can be recharged at specific points on the map, much like Final Fantasy VIII‘s draw points.

Also like Final Fantasy VIII is the fact that the party’s car [named the Regalia] will need to be refueled, else it will stop working. This is after all a ‘fantasy based on reality’, and what could be more real than having to stop at every service station along the way to refill gas so as not to become stranded in the middle of nowhere? There is a reason that more realistic games like Grand Theft Auto lack this mechanic – this is because it is not fun. The Regalia is also set to present players with yet another source of frustrating encumbrance when it comes to item storage. Most of us take for granted our ability to access party items at any time outside of battle, as this has been RPG best practice since time immemorial, yet this mechanic is yet another baby that Square Enix has thrown out with the bath water. In Final Fantasy XV party items are accessed by opening the Regalia’s trunk; after all this is a ‘fantasy based on reality’, and what could be more real than withdrawing 99 disposable firaga spells from your car’s trunk?

Final Fantasy XV is set to begin with a big battle of some description [probably similar in nature to the beginning of Final Fantasy XII], but after that chapter one begins with the Regalia breaking down, and the party having to push it to the nearest service station where Cid and Cidney will give them several sidequests to complete whilst it is being repaired. To put this another way – the game literally begins with players having to slog their way through Episode Duscae again! One kind of hopes that the particulars of this section will have been changed somewhat since Episode Duscae, but one never knows with Square Enix.

According to Hajime Tabata Final Fantasy XV will be a ‘make or break’ moment for the company, which will determine whether the series will be able to attract a new crowd while enticing back lapsed Final Fantasy fans. Tabata has identified three core qualities which he feels defines the final fantasy series: challenging the status quo, providing an exceptional experience, and using cutting-edge technology. Tabata feels that Final Fantasy VII was the last game in the series to have embodied all three of these qualities. Apparently Final Fantasy XII never happened.

SJWs are now making games worse retroactively.

How to Make Enemies and Influence Nobody

Most games have a hard enough time at retail without making additional hurdles for themselves. Now imagine that the game in question is in fact an expansion pack to a classic computer RPG from 1998, which is still adored by a smallish niche of people but has become increasingly overlooked by modern gaming. Now imagine that the expansion added crippling multiplayer bugs and broke a number of popular mods. Finally, imagine that this expansion was not developed by the original team, but instead by a little known studio by the name of Beamdog who essentially just fucked everyone’s shit up out of a commitment to social justice dogma – that is what just happened to Baldur’s Gate. With the release of Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear Beamdog filled the game with heavy handed social justice ideology and Tumblr memes, neither one of which respected the gameworld’s existing lore. Niche Gamer’s Carl Batchelor describes it as such:

“After five hours with the game, I encountered numerous situations where a combination of very poor writing and social justice pandering began to weigh the game down. Technical and gameplay missteps were one thing, but the sheer amount of modern 2016 Tumblr-level politics turned what was once a grand medieval swords & sorcery epic into the equivalent of a emotional teenage girl’s self-insert fanfic.”

Of course many Baldur’s Gate fans were unhappy about what had been done to the game, and of course Beamdog’s initial response was to smear them with sneering derision. To listen to Trent Oster, the founder of Beamdog, the only reason that people were upset was because of the mere existence of a male transvestite in the game. Never mind the fact that the only point of the character is to serve as a screeching virtue signal, who divulges his trans status within moments of first meeting the party [because apparently that is typical for transvestites]. Also, never mind the fact that the existence of a transvestite does not even jive with the game’s own lore, as in the world of Baldur’s Gate it is entirely possible to magically switch genders properly, rather having to resort to halfway measures. People’s objections to the character were centered around the poor writing on display, and the fact that it sought to beat them about the head with ideology. Kainé [Nier] and Flea [Chrono Trigger] are two very popular characters in gaming, and they are also trans [more or less]. The difference here is that they were situated naturally within their gameworlds and did not exist for the sole purpose of transmitting heavy-handed political messages. Moreover, this point of contention was only one point on the laundry list of shittyness that was Siege of Dragonspear‘s release. Regardless, Beamdog preferred to stick their collective heads in the sand and make out like the people criticising them were not even Baldur’s Gate fans, as can bee seen from Dee Pennyway’s embarrassing Twitter antics:

“@JEZEBELMagazine @femfreq These are not real #BaldursGate fans.

@JEZEBELMagazine @femfreq GamerGate launching a negative review campaign for a game that includes one line about a transgender character.”

Ultimately though, the poor writing seen in Siege of Dragonspear can really be traced back to just one person, and that person is Amber Scott, the game’s writer – and boy is she a piece of work. Her stated MO when writing for a game is to cram in as much diversity as possible, and she does not care how forced and fake the dialogue may sound as a result:

“As I’ve said before (and I won’t say much more on this subject other than to get my perspective out there):

/end”

Well that is just brilliant, the writer of Siege of Dragonspear does not care how cringey her own writing sounds – and the results certainly speak for themselves. Her crimes against Baldur’s Gate did not end with merely bad writing though, as Amber Scott will probably be best remembered for [and loathed for] completely altering the personality of an established party member because she was not feminist enough:

“If there was something for the original Baldur’s Gate that just doesn’t mesh for modern day gamers like the sexism, [we tried to address that]. In the original there’s a lot of jokes at women’s expense. Or if not a lot, there’s a couple, like Safana was just a sex object in BG 1, and Jaheira was the nagging wife and that was played for comedy. We were able to say, ‘No, that’s not really the kind of story we want to make.’ In Siege of Dragonspear, Safana gets her own little storyline, she got a way better personality upgrade. If people don’t like that, then too bad.”

In the original Baldur’s Gate Safana was a flirty seductress who used her feminine wiles to manipulate men, while in Siege at Dragonspear her personality has been replaced with snarky girl no.1 – that is quite some upgrade! Niche Gamer’s Carl Batchelor describes the lobotomisation of Safana in fairly concrete terms:

“So what did they do? They completely altered Safana’s personality. No longer is she anything close to resembling the sultry seductress that defined her character both in vanilla Baldur’s Gate and various user based mods over the last 18 years. Now, she is a sarcastic, sometimes ungrateful, always spiteful thief who begrudgingly follows your orders. The difference, especially if you’ve ever ran an evil party with Safana, are extraordinarily profound.”

Siege of Dragonspear got off on the worst possible foot, but the situation really came to a head when Trent Oster started deleting Steam criticism and then implored members of the Beamdog forums to go and flood Steam, Good Old Games, and Metacritic with positive reviews in order to counteract the negative reviews that the game was receiving:

“Hi everyone. I usually spend most of my time lurking here, but I’d like to ask a favour. It appears that having a transgendered cleric and a joke line by Minsc has greatly offended the sensibilities of some people. This has spurred these people into action, causing them to decide this is the worst game of all time and give it a zero review score on Steam, GoG and meta critic. Now, I’d like to ask for that favour. If you are playing the game and having a good time, please consider posting a positive review to balance out the loud minority which is currently painting a dark picture for new players.

Thank you.
-Trent”

Apparently all those zero review scores were really hurting the game on Steam, a platform which curiously lacks the ability for users to give any game a zero rating, but that is a little beside the point. Oster’s comment was posted on his own company’s forums. Even if he just asked that people post their honest reviews it still would have been mostly positive, yet choosing instead to beg specifically for positive reviews in order to undermine the ‘evil bigots’ really does not look terribly good, and served to intensify the tornado of criticism swirling around the launch of the game. At this point rather than acknowledging that he had fucked up irrevocably, Oster decided to defend his soliciting of positive reviews to Tech Raptor:

“As for my post on the forums, I merely asked people who were enjoying the game to share their positive feedback. I know our fans can become engrossed in their enjoyment and I really don’t want potential fans to miss out on the series because of protest reviews by small minded individuals.”

This defiance was really just the last gasp of Beamdog’s resolve however, as not long after this Oster announced that a particularly noxious meme would be removed from the game and that the transvestite character would be re-written to make him more than a blatant mouthpiece for the game’s writer. That said, making these minimal changes kind of misses the point, as they will do nothing to alleviate the game’s most grievous transgression: the assassination of Safana’s original personality. Even if Beamdog recognised this is a problem, it is still doubtful whether they even have the resources to fix the character – especially when they have Amber Scott as a writer. It is not logical to expect superior results from an inferior writer, so it is unlikely that Siege of Dragonspear will ever be more than a lamentable mess. Gamers do not want to play it because it is bad and broken, while SJWs do not want to play it because they do not play games. It is unclear precisely what Trent Oster even expects from this halfway backdown, as his stated course of action does not come close to fixing the game’s problems, while he manages to sour his standing even further by smearing his customers yet again in his backhanded announcement:

“While we appreciate all feedback we receive from our fans, both positive as well as negative, some of the negative feedback has focused not on Siege of Dragonspear but on individual developers at Beamdog — to the point of online threats and harassment.

I just want to make it crystal clear that Beamdog does not condone this behavior, and moreover that it will not have the desired effect as we stand behind all our developers 100%. We created the game as a group, and moving forward we’ll work on the game’s issues as a group, which I believe is exactly as it should be.”

No, fuck head. Amber Scott has a disgusting attitude which manifested itself as disgusting writing in your broken-ass game – and it is entirely appropriate that she be personally criticised for it. If she does not like that, then too bad! criticism is not the same thing as harassment. She is being criticised for a reason – people paid $20 for an experience which her poor writing partially ruined, and they are entitled to express their anger and frustration without Trent Oster finger wagging at them from his high-horse. If people have been making specific threats to Amber Scott then that is clearly not cool, but this author will be in his cold grave before he ever listens to and believes such claims from Trent Oster’s forked tongue. Oster has attempted to disingenuously smear his customers every step of the way, so any protestations now sound a lot like crying ‘wolf’.

Close enough.

Anime News: New Berserk This July!

In terms of dark fantasy there is no bigger title in the world of anime than Berserk, a series which swept to popularity in 1997 and remains a notable work to this day. Given the popularity of the series it is somewhat odd that it has never received another series until now [though it did receive three films], yet that is about to change in July with the release of Berserk (2016). Berserk (2016) will not be treading old ground either [as so many other animes do], as the series will follow Guts in his ‘black swordsman’ story arc from the manga, which was only briefly touched upon in Berserk (1997). The primary Japanese cast from the Berserk: The Golden Age Arc trilogy of films will return to reprise their roles, though the same might not hold true for the English cast as the films were released through Viz Media while Beserk (2016) is being simulcast through Crunchyroll. The series is set to receive a full twenty-four episode run, so hopefully Berserk (2016) should feel every bit as epic as its 1997 counterpart – though speaking frankly, the state of the 3D animation in Beserk (2016)‘s teaser trailer has left one a little concerned about its eventual visual quality.

That’s a Rapp!

Treehouse’s Pedophile Princess Gets the Sack!

Nintendo Treehouse has long had a problem with Rapp Culture (TM), which is to say a pervasive institutional culture which attempts to minimise and normalise the violation of small children by grown-ass adults. This week Nintendo were able to end Rapp Culture forever, happily ridding themselves of a turd in the process – though whether she was actually canned because of her disgusting views on child sexual agency is a question that can only be guessed at. Alison Rapp was ostensibly fired for moonlighting a second job which conflicted with her role doing PR and marketing at Nintendo, and Nintendo have confirmed as much. Alison Rapp was [presumably] fired for modeling for raunchy images where she used Nintendo products as props, which she later planned to sell online. It is unclear whether she went fully nude in the photoshoot, as only a few teaser images were made available, but regardless her posing with Nintendo products makes it appear as though she was attempting to trade on her association with Nintendo in order to titillate her Nintendo fanboy followers. She was also stupid enough to advertise this material on her Twitter account which is associated with her Nintendo Treehouse PR work. Nintendo were obviously never going to tolerate something like this from one of their employees, especially from someone in PR who has publicly represented them numerous times at tradeshows and on camera. This in itself makes for a very compelling reason for Nintendo to have fired her, but it is not the only one.

For months now Alison Rapp has been under fire from gamers who object to her public advocacy for pedophiles and her support for the legalisation of real life child pornography. It has been speculated that Nintendo of America wished to be rid of her, but did not want to draw attention to the fact that they had hired a pedophile supporter in the first place, leaving them disinclined to explicitly fire her for her views on child pornography. It has been further speculated that Nintendo then set to scrutinising her behaviour with a fine tooth comb until they came across this latest smoking gun which placed her in breach of her contract. It is not drawing too long a bow to suggest that this speculation on Nintendo’s motives is fairly accurate, as on March the 1st [exactly one month ago] Jamie Walton of the Wayne Foundation spoke to Nintendo corporate and was promised action on the Alison Rapp issue:

“I just spoke with @NintendoAmerica corporate. They were NOT aware of @alisonrapp’s comments.

Spoke with @NintendoAmerica supervisory line. @alisonrapp, you are about to be contacted. ‘We will handle this IMMEDIATELY. Unacceptable.’”

As if that did not already provide enough impetus for Nintendo to sack her, Rapp then goes on to paint a very strained relationship with her employer in her own words. Apparently Nintendo were not overly keen on Rapp’s slovenly appearance, and wanted her to stop making insane claims about ‘rape culture’ – yet she fought them on this:

“About a month after starting, I was asked to not tweet about rape culture because “it could become a big story.”

I was consistently made to worry that getting another tattoo or piercing would mean they’d pull me from public appearances.”

Fancy having an image conscious corporate employer be actually concerned that an employee from PR looks like a biker who has fallen face-first into a tackle-box! Surely this sort of thing does not still happen in [CURRENT YEAR]?! At any rate, Rapp went on to describe how her child pornography scandal blew up while she was on honeymoon, which led to her being stripped of spokesman status upon her return, and caused Nintendo to take a closer interest in her online activity – ultimately leading to their firing of her:

“The latest GG-centric stuff happened while I was on my honeymoon.

Among the list of concerning tweets? Talking about my college thesis and posting my wishlist.”

Goodness, an image conscious corporate entity did not want a vocal child pornography advocate to serve as their public face? What heartless monsters! This meant that Nintendo were stuck with an employee who could no longer perform the job she was hired to do, yet she was still attracting plenty of negative attention. Obviously something had to give. Rapp then goes on to fire the parting shot:

“Here’s the thing: Do u honestly think that without GG’s attacks, the “lateral move” and the obsessive privacy digging would have happened?

The amount of obsession it must take to dig up old tweets, find addresses, link me to anon things not related to games is NOT. NORMAL.”

Combing the internet in order to uncover the poorly concealed skeletons of an SJW degenerate is not normal behaviour. Gamers can be autistic as fuck when it comes to an issue they feel passionately about, and that is one of their most endearing and useful qualities. Alison Rapp’s above comments can be more accurately read as:

“… And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those meddling kids!”

In her hour of defeat Alison Rapp has literally become a Scooby Doo villain. Gamers are only even tangentially responsible for her eventual downfall, as it was the excellent work of Jamie Walton which brought her child porn advocacy to Nintendo’s attention, and it certainly was not gamers who uncovered her secondary income streams, as that discovery would have led to the creation of dozens of image macros on Twitter before Nintendo ever caught wind of it. Despite this it is gamers that Alison Rapp places front and centre as being to blame for her sacking, which means that it will be a small miracle if she has not set up a Patreon account within the next week. She will probably launch a sham ‘not for profit’ anti-harassment racket while she is at it. If an individual is defined by their enemies, then gamers can wear Alison Rapp with pride. Wear her like a hat!

Will this be the game we have been waiting for?

Final Fantasy XV Will Release on September 30

Several weeks ago Hajime Tabata confirmed that Final Fantasy XV would feature an airship, and stated that fans would think this airship uniquely and perfectly suited to the game. This sounded awfully cryptic at the time, but how true it ultimately proved to be. This week’s trailers have reveled that at some juncture the party will be able to upgrade their car to the point where it is able to sprout wings and take to the skies whereat Noct can get his Harry Potter on! This is absolutely fucking hilarious, though one kind of wishes that this little nugget could have been left unspoiled for maximum impact.

So the rumours are true, and Final Fantasy XV is coming out September 30, which is pretty much six months from now. Final Fantasy XV is no longer just the game itself, but several associated products, some of which are completely free and available right now! First and foremost is the Platinum Demo, which is available gratis to all PS4 and Xbox One owners – though this is probably old news to most interested readers. Next up is Final Fantasy XV: Brotherhood which is a series of five ten minute anime episodes focusing on the relationship between the party, the first of which is available right now on Youtube. Next up is Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, which is a computer generated film and runs concurrent with the start of the game, covering events from the perspective of Noct’s father, Regis. The film will star Sean Bean as Regis [meaning he will almost certainly die], Lena Heady as Lunafreya, and Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul as Nyx Ulric. Interestingly, none of these actors will be reprising their role’s for the game, which is bound to make things feel a little disjointed. Finally, there is Justice Monsters Five, which is a mini-game playable within the world of Final Fantasy XV, but it will also be available for Android and iOS devices. The game is based on pinball but with some light RPG mechanics thrown in, and will be free-to-play but not pay-to-win, as Chris Privitere found out much to his chagrin.

Finally, in the spirit of saving the worst for last, the game’s theme song [whatever happened to Somnus?] will be a cover version of ‘Stand by Me’ which is performed by Florence + the Machine, and sounds like a bag full of molested cats yowling. Moreover, Lusipurr.com has long maintained that we wish to dress Noct in attire a little less prone to ridicule, to which end the suit that he is often seen wearing would be perfect. It turns out that it will actually be possible to do this – for a price. The option to dress Noct in clothing which isn’t completely emo and awful will be available exclusively to people who order one of the the collector’s editions of the game, so fuck you Square Enix!

Does this look like a culture that is going to be receptive to your SJW bullshit, Square Enix?

Our SJWs Are Now a Problem for Japanese Gamers Too

The sacking of noted pedophile supporter Alison Rapp may have been good news for gamers this week, but it is a case of one step forward and two steps back in this instance. This time however the SJWs may have gone one step too far where Japanese Otaku are concerned, as known harassers like Anita Sarkeesian have now bullied Square Enix and Tri-Ace into messing with their pantsu. In the game Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness an eighteen year old character by the name of Miki Sauvester has a wardrobe which really lends itself to up-skirt camera angles, which the developers decided was too risky for Western audiences. Rather than simply butchering the Western version of the game, both companies instead decided to censor all versions of the game, denying the game’s Otaku audience their pantsu in the process. The way they went about censoring the game was not to merely lengthen the character’s dress to prevent up-skirt shots, but rather to exchange Miki’s cutely diminutive pantsu for what looks like a hulking big diaper [no doubt thrilling the Deviant Art community in the process].

“Recently there’s been a trend in games where if you put out a character that shows a lot of skin, later on you might have to make a lot of revisions, ‘although she’s erotic, there’s not a lot of skin showing’ is the feeling you get.

Recently, there’s been a lot of flak from overseas countries saying that if you put teens in ‘sexual’ underwear it’s not good, so we increased the amount of clothing.”

In point of fact there has not been a lot of flak recently from overseas countries about pantsu, rather there has been a lot of flak from a tiny minority of non-gaming puritans on the internet. When George Kamitami basically called Jason Schier a raging poof after he insulted his work on Dragon’s Crown, the audience responded by making Dragon’s Crown the most successful release in Vanillaware’s history – yet developers like Tri-Ace and Square Enix only seem capable of learning the wrong lessons from the West. Case and point: by remedying this non-issue they have only managed to upset their game’s domestic audience – to a fairly hilarious degree:

“Foreigners are shit.”

“All foreigners play games where you slaughter people indifferently, so they’ve got a lot of nerve to speak up about small things like this in other countries’ games.”

“Foreign teens wear sluttier underwear anyway. LOL.”

“DO NOT CONSORT WITH FOREIGNERS!”

“This is the same failure as the SFV devs.”

“Make separate versions for Japan and the foreigners you incompetent fucks.”

“Gaijin are impossible.”

“Way to prostrate yourselves to your white masters, devs.”

“Fuuuuuuuuck foreigners.”

In recent weeks the Japanese gaming, manga, and anime industries have been fighting off UN pressure seeking to force them into desexualising women in Japanese entertainment media, to which end hundreds of female game, manga, and anime creators have co-signed a petition telling the UN to go fuck themselves. This is important to the creators of Japanese entertainment and it is important to their fans. With that being the case, it takes a special kind of tone-deafness in this sort of situation for Square Enix and Tri-Ace to then come along and blithely announce that they have voluntarily censored their game in order to appease the foreigners. It is pretty clear that they could not have delivered a bigger ‘fuck you’ to their audience if they had tried.

Most orphans just sweep chimneys…

Anime Spotlight: Mobile Suit Gundam – Iron-Blooded Orphans (2015)

Iron-Blooded Orphans takes place three-hundred years after the ‘Calamity War’, a conflict waged between Earth and the outer colonies. During this time Mars has been terraformed, and its impoverished domestic population of colonists have begun to rise up against Earth’s rule. Amid this backdrop of discontent Kudelia Aina Bernstein, a Martian princess, begins calling for the people to reject Earth’s governance in favour of seizing their freedom. She enters into the protection of the CGS, a mercenary paramilitary group, ahead of her diplomatic mission to Earth, yet while she is stationed on the base Gjallarhorn, an Earth-based military force, attacks in the hope of Killing the Princess and ending Martian rebellion. Iron-Blooded Orphans is very good, with an intricately detailed setting, but it is also extremely serious. There is very little humour here, just a lot of detailed world building and gorgeous mech animation – so one kind of has to be in the right frame of mind to watch it. Also, Mika is a stone cold badass. Extremely cool.

Iron-Blooded Orphans is set to end its initial run this week, so all twenty-five episodes will be available for viewing on both Funimation and Crunchyroll – so take your pick. Additionally, it has been confirmed that Iron-Blooded Orphans will receive a second season, which is set to begin airing October 2016, so it promises to be a rather epic ride.

Pictured here is Lusipurr himself with a Fable box on his shelf.

Lusipurr.com’s crack team of photoshop experts have investigated this picture and unanimously concluded that it is, in fact, real. However, there has been no confirmation that the leaked video is also real. There are many other questions the public needs answers to: who leaked the footage? Why was the footage leaked? Who recorded it in the first place? Why would Lusipurr lie to his fans for all these years about his hatred for Fable? We may never know the truth, but Lusipurr.com will update this article as more information is released.

1:15 P.M. EST UPDATE: Lusipur has released a statement about the leaked footage. We have included highlights from the statement below, but the release in its entirety can be read here.

An artist’s representation of what Lusipurr does during his time with Fable.

“I apologize to all my fans for lying to them for so many years. Yes, that was me playing Fable. I do not hate the series at all. In fact, I like it more than cricket. Any time I am not playing Fable I am thinking about what to do in my game next.”

Lusipurr then goes on to say why he was playing Fable instead of Fable 2: “Yes, I was playing the first game in the series, even though the second one is much better. Yes, the entire series IS crap, but at least I was not playing that crappy Kinect version, right?”

Lusipur’s confirmed Fable character.

The famed website owner offered to field any questions, but since this statement was given while he was alone in his room, there was nobody to respond. Due to public outcry and pressure, Lusipurr ended his statement by stepping down from his post and handing the website over to Nate “Bup” Liles. Liles immediately shut the site down and sold it to Kotaku.

[PICTURED]: The totally legit prototype of the Nintendo NX!

NX Controller Leak Was a Hoax

Last weekend news broke that a picture of Nintendo’s new NX prototype controller had leaked its way onto the internet. It was a ridiculous oval shape, and lacked any physical face buttons, as it apparently just used the device’s touch screen for button inputs. In fact images of the device looked just like the NX patents which surfaced in December of last year – which is exactly why one did not report on the story in last week’s post. The shape of the device looked to be utterly ridiculous and impractical in the patent design, so one imagined that Nintendo would almost certainly give it an ergonomic redesign before actually assembling their prototypes and disseminating them throughout the outside world. When the ‘leaked’ NX prototype was seen to have strictly adhered to the patent one dismissed it as a forgery, and so did not report on it.

Something happened midweek to make one do an about-face on the whole hoax stance, as another game blog released another NX controller leak from a completely different source – making the initial ‘leak’ appear to be fairly rock solid. As a result one was completely committed to writing about how Nintendo’s NX plans had been revealed until mere hours ago when both leaks were shown to be complete hogwash. In the case of the first ‘leak’ it was revealed that the source was able to fake the photo by designing the NX controller in a digital modelling program. The second leak was even more elaborate, as a Youtuber going by the name Frank Sandqvist revealed that he had recreated the hoax controller in 3D software, and had then used a 3D printer to create a physical forgery. Ultimately, this ‘leak’ has not panned out, and when we do finally see Nintendo’s NX controllers they will almost certainly be redesigned into a more ergonomically and aesthetically pleasing shape. However, readers should not be too mollified by this artifice, as there has been persistent rumours that the NX controller will not have face buttons, so it is entirely possible that Nintendo’s final revision of the NX controller will feature many of the bad design elements evident in this hoax gamepad.

Nothing. Literally nothing will save the Wii U.

Wii U to Cease Production

In other Nintendo news all lame things must come to an end. Nintendo can say that ‘the NX will not replace the Wii U’ all they like, but they have just consigned it to the dusty old broom closet like so many forgotten Wiis. After just over three years on the market, and just under thirteen million consoles sold, Nintendo have this year decided to call it quits on their failed Nintendo Wii U console – this before ever implementing that long-promised second tablet-controller functionality [like anyone expected it to happen]. According to Nikkei the Wii U will end production some time this year and many Wii U peripherals have already ceased production some time ago. This should not be surprising given how poorly the Wii U has been performing, yet it is still a little surprising to see a console being discontinued before its successor is even unveiled – though to be fair Nintendo likely has enough built up Wii U stock to last them for years to come.

Sony’s PS2 was released in Japan in May of 2000 and it did not cease production until the start of 2013, which was after the release of the Wii U. By contrast the Wii U was released at the end of 2012 and will cease production some time during 2016. To the best of one’s knowledge both the PS3 [2006] and Xbox 360 [2005] are still in production, yet soon the Wii U will not be. Nintendo’s own GameCube, widely viewed as a failed console, launched at the end of 2001 and was not discontinued until 2007 – it had sold over twenty-one million units, which is nearly twice that of the Wii U. With the Wii U Nintendo launched shit underpowered hardware with a controller that could only be used for two hours at a time on account of dire battery life. Nobody bought into it and all games, save for the ones developed by Nintendo, ceased in their production. Nintendo fucked up with the lack of a proper 3d Mario title, and they fucked up by dint of their preoccupation with B-titles like Pikmin 3. When Nintendo finally did have some interesting looking games on the horizon they fucked them up with poor localisations and unnecessary censorship. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE looks awesome, but has already been confirmed for containing loads of unnecessary censorship, and probably a very bad Treehouse translation. Now the NX is coming out, and the controller probably will not have any buttons. Why would anybody buy into such a shit company? Why would anyone buy such awful products? Nintendo deserve their failure.

For better or worse release is now immanent.

Final Fantasy XV News

Several details about Square Enix’s upcoming albatross, Final Fantasy XV, have emerged ahead of their Uncovered event where the release date for the game is set to be announced in just a few days on March 30. There has been a persistent rumour floating around that the game’s release date has already leaked, and is set to be September 30, so we will see in a few days whether there is any truth to this.

In terms of the game’s progress, Hajime Tabata has revealed in an interview that while the team has targeted a consistent 30fps framerate, they have not been able to achieve this yet in every instance. He says that the team will be working from now until the game launches to bring the framerate up to 30fps – which makes it sound like they are in the final phase of the game’s production: adding polish. This phase tends to last between two and three months for most developers, though it could last much longer in this instance if the rumours about a September release prove to be correct.

To aid with polishing up Final Fantasy XV‘s framerate it was this week announced that Square Enix has licensed software from a company by the name of Umbra which assists them in culling off-screen geometry in order to ensure that the engine is only working to render graphics which are actually visible to the player:

“By using Umbra, frame-rate performance could be improved over two times than before in characteristic scenes. The tool is extremely easy to use with a simple API build that allows paralleling computation to be handled with ease as well.”

Lastly, Hajime Tabata has this week revealed several welcome details about the game. Cactaurs have been confirmed for enemies, and are said to be so quick that they can even avoid the player’s Shift Breaks. Airships have been confirmed, so we should all cross our fingers that their inclusion is more tangible than simply acting as a facade overlaying a fast travel system. And finally, Tabata claims that the game’s volume is now up to fifty hours of gameplay to complete the main quest. This is up from the forty hours of gameplay he claimed several months ago, so hopefully it is not all just padding. At any rate, expect more Final Fantasy XV news next week after the Square Enix event.

Dagashi Kashi is a show about a girl putting things in her mouth…

Anime Spotlight: Dagashi Kashi (2016)

It has been a while since Lusipurr.com has tackled a series explicitly dedicated to lewdness, so one figured he was on safe territory with an anime about a big titted sweet fiend with a special interest in senpai. Not so much. Sadly one cannot always judge a book by its cover. Kokonotsu is being pressured into taking over his father’s business running a sweet shop, but really he just wants to be a manga artist. Hotaru is the well-endowed daughter of the head of a famous snack company who has come to recruit Kokonotsu’s father, but she cannot do this until he agrees to take over the shop. Saya is the final piece of the love triangle, she is the girl next door who runs the local cafe, and she has had a crush on Kokonotsu since they were children. If Dagashi Kashi could be said to have one strength it would be extremely likeable characters, more so than most anime. The eccentric Hotaru in particular deserves special mention as being super cute [and lovingly animated], and entertaining as all hell when she goes off on one of her rants about sweets. Sadly, in the first three episodes the plot does not really go anywhere – and by plot one of course means fan service. In most other fanservicey animes the protagonist would have at least been slapped by now after accidentally fondling someone’s breasts, yet all that Dagashi Kashi gives us after three episodes is a very brief shower scene and Hotaru accidentally spilling some sugar on her chest. This situation might be more tolerable if there was a more interesting plot to pick up the slack, yet sadly Dagashi Kashi does not seem at all interested in telling a story. One is hesitant to completely write-off the series because the characters are excellent, so the show could become instantly compelling if everything were to just click into place in a later episode – however, the first three episodes move so slowly that one feels disinclined to watch any more of it.

Or for an alternate take on the series:

“Dagashi Kashi looks like the remains of a failed hentai; to save his work the author added clothes in every sex scene and replaced all the penises with food.”

Dagashi Kashi began its run on January 7 and there are currently twelve episodes available on Funimation, some of them dubbed [the dub is good]. Simulcasts are on Friday at 9:30 pm Eastern, and new episodes of the dubbed version are broadcast on Wednesday at 8:00 pm Eastern. One could really go either way on Dagashi Kashi.

This isn’t the revolution they think it is.

PSVR Will Cost $500

When one initially heard the news that the PSVR peripheral would cost a princely $399, it seemed extraordinarily brazen given that $399 was the price at which the PS4 console itself went on sale for. Of course that view was formed before reading the fine print on that particular offer – as the PSVR headset will not actually work without the PS Camera, and most games will also require the use of the PS Move controller. Customers who do not already own these required peripherals will be able to acquire them in a bundle containing the PSVR headset, a PS Camera, two PS Move controllers, and a copy of Playstation VR Worlds. This bundle will cost $500 – the same price that the Xbox One infamously launched at!

A $500 price point was enough to assure that the Xbox One would only sell half the number of units as the PS4, but somehow Sony thinks it is a winning formula for their PSVR – or perhaps they do not. They made their big announcement claiming that the thing would cost $399, which seems to have been a misinformation tactic aimed at getting stupid consumers up to a Gamestop counter only to be upsold to an actually usable SKU that runs $100 USD more expensive. Obviously it is easier to make that sale once consumers are already in a store and mentally committed to walking out of it with a PSVR.

It is telling that Sony chose to lead their announcement with news of the $399 SKU, yet when pre-orders opened it was for the $500 bundle. In fact Niche Gamer has been reporting that the $399 SKU will not be available for pre-order. The $399 core SKU is nothing more than an afterthought, which only exists to help out with marketing. Sony’s strategy in this has been shady as all hell, and one heartily wishes this product to fail. Once pre-orders opened, stores began to sell out of their PSVR allocations pretty quickly – but it is entirely possible, nay likely, that all this stock is being bought up be scalpers with a view to turning a profit. If this is the case then one hopes that their stake in this enterprise fares just as poorly as Sony’s VR plans on the whole.

The Vita has been locked out of I Am Setsuna’s release plans.

I Am Setsuna Has Been Given a Q2 Summer Release Date

The news we have been waiting for is finally here! The release of I Am Setsuna [formerly Project Setsuna] has been confirmed for a second quarter Summer release in the West. The second quarter is comprised of the months April, May, and June, while the American Summer spans June, July, and August – so that pretty much pins down I Am Setsuna‘s release for some time in June [If all goes well]. There is also some good news here for PC gamers given that the game is set to launch on the PC alongside the PS4. There is some bad news for anyone who planned to play the game on Vita however, with that version being dropped entirely from Western release plans.

According to the game’s director, Atsushi Hashimoto, if there is enough demand in the West for a Vita version then Square Enix might reconsider their release plans:

“Of course, there is a large Vita market in Japan. If there is a swell of demand in North America [for the Vita version], though, we will consider it.”

One would caution readers against getting their hopes up however, as this seems to be the kind of non-committal answer that companies give to fob off fans without invoking their rage by giving them a hard ‘no’. All this being said, perhaps it is for the best. The performance of the Vita version is held to be notorious bad by anyone who played its Japanese release, so it is understandable that Square Enix would not want to bring the game over to the West’s tiny Vita market, as doing so was only likely to cause them problems without contributing significantly to the game’s fortunes. One has long felt that if a company cannot release a polished game, then it is better to release no game at all – though that likely provides cold comfort to anyone who planned to pick up the Vita version out of necessity.

‘We don’t take kindly to accurate translations in these here parts!’

GDC 2016: Capcom Localisation Team Openly Mocks the Nintendo Treehouse Method

This week has seen 2016’s Game Developers Conference come and go, along with all of the assorted nonsense that goes with it: industry hangers-on got to feel self-important, NeoGaf collapsed to their fainting couches after Microsoft hired sexy dancers, and pretty much everyone pretended that VR is going to be the biggest thing ever [PROTIP: it is not]. Among all of this hullabaloo based Capcom localisation director, Andrew Alfonso, was dropping truthbombs and lobbing red pills at the show’s attendees, using this soapbox to call out Nintendo Treehouse in a massive way. Alfonso served as localisation director for Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, and was present at GDC to give a talk on the localisation process required to bring that game over to the West. Alfonso quickly began to gain online attention however when images began to circulate on social media of one of his presentation slides, which stated:

“Don’t Drive To Meme Country.”

He then further elaborated on this integral component of good localisation:

“I started thinking that I don’t want people picking up my games on release saying, ‘I like these in-style meme references,’ and then another player picking up the games four years later and thinking, ‘They referenced 300 — that sucks!”

This of course comes hot on the heels of Xseed’s announcement last week that they would not be arbitrarily cutting content from their release of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd – and both of these stories have occurred in the recent wake of several high profile botched localisation attempts by Nintendo Treehouse. Nintendo Treehouse not only boarded the retard train to Meme Country, they also took up residence there and became naturalised locals. It is for this reason that the dialogue in Fire Emblem Fates will not stand the test of time, whereas the text found in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate will remain perfectly serviceable into perpetuity – because it uses language that is timeless. Destroying a game’s localisation with tons of internet meme references obviously makes Nintendo Treehouse employees feel like they are clever and super edgy, but all it really demonstrates is their disdain for the medium and Japanese culture on the whole.

Because it is sexy!

Anime Spotlight: Yurikuma Arashi (2015)

One initially did not get around to watching Yurikuma Arashi during its 2015 run on account of not knowing what to make of its rather unique premise. Some years before the start of the series the planet Kumaria has exploded, causing the world’s bear population to become violent towards humans. The humans then build ‘The Wall of Severance’ to protect them against the bears, yet some are still able to make it through, causing the population to live in fear of bear attacks. Kureha Tsubaki is a second year student at Arashigaoka Academy with a fierce hatred for bears, on account of the fact that her mother was killed by one – but little does she know that two bears have infiltrated her local school grounds and they have Kureha in their sights.

On the face of it humanity VS adorably depicted bloodthirsty bears is humourously appealing in concept, but one never bothered to look further into the series at the time on account of suspicion that this joke would wear thin – that was a mistake, as the synopsis BEAR-ly scratches the surface of the most delightfully weird and surreal anime of 2015. A show can tell you a lot by its name alone. Both the events and name of Yurikuma Arashi are based on Kuma Arashi, which was the novelisation of Japan’s worst known bear attack incident. Yurikuma Arashi also directly translates into ‘Lesbian Bear Storm’, which serves as a fitting description of the show.

The two bears that infiltrated the Arashigaoka Academy school-grounds [Ginko and Lulu] have disguised themselves as human, and while they initially wanted to devour Kureha, Ginko eventually decides to give her a ‘promise kiss’ instead. The bear’s interest in the girl has not gone unnoticed however, and at various points they are called upon to give account at the ‘Yuri Trials’, which are presided over by the prosecution [Life Cool], the defense [Life Beauty], and the judge [Life Sexy]. Once the bears have given answer to Life Sexy’s satisfaction he then hands down his verdict with the solemn declaration: “Because it is sexy. Shaba-da-doo.” – at which point the bears are allowed to eat honey from Kureha’s flower. There is more to the premise than that, but it is honestly a little tricky to put into human words.

Suffice it to say that if copious amounts of thinly veiled lesbian bear innuendo are your thing, then Yurikuma Arashi makes for a solid weekend’s entertainment. Hell, the show is worth watching up to the fourth episode just to see this seven second masterpiece within its proper context. Obviously, being a 2015 series, all twelve episodes are already currently available [both subbed and dubbed] over at Funimation. Yurikuma Arashi is an awful lot of fun.

Lusipurr.com declares victory in the war on Fable!

Microsoft Dissolve Lionhead in Grovelling Submission

Lusipurr.com takes gleeful pride in the fact that we are one of the most humble blog sites on the internet, and as such we would certainly be the very last publication that would ever want to toot our own horn by seeking to lay claim to accomplishments that are not our own. That being said, it is probably not overstepping the mark to suggest that Lusipurr.com’s Zestria (TM) blockade of the Microsoft Game Studios offices proved instrumental in undermining employee morale, ultimately leading to their acceptance of our terms for a full and unconditional surrender: namely the cancellation of Fable Legends and the dissolution of Lionhead Studios. Proof of this can be observed by dint of the fact that Microsoft did just that. Fable Legends has been unceremoniously cancelled without so much as a word’s warning to the Lionhead staff that were working on it, and Lionhead themselves are to be shuttered at the end of the month – as per our demands:

“After much consideration we have decided to cease development on Fable Legends, and are in discussions with employees about the proposed closure of Lionhead Studios in the UK. Additionally, we will close Press Play Studios in Denmark, and sunset development on Project Knoxville.

These have been tough decisions and we have not made them lightly, nor are they a reflection on these development teams – we are incredibly fortunate to have the talent, creativity and commitment of the people at these studios. The Lionhead Studios team has delighted millions of fans with the Fable series over the past decade. Press Play imbued the industry with a unique creative spirit behind games like Max: The Curse of Brotherhood and Kalimba, which both captured passionate fans. These changes are taking effect as Microsoft Studios continues to focus its investment and development on the games and franchises that fans find most exciting and want to play.”

While the above paragraph might suggest that Lionhead Studios is simply being shuttered because they do not make games that people find “exciting” and “want to play”, and while the casual observer might simply conclude that this is the logical result for a studio when their last well received title was released over eight years ago – both of these explanations serve as a mere smokescreen for Microsoft to save face in the hour of their greatest defeat at the hands of the world’s foremost Zestria (TM) Barron, Lusipurr. In a state of Zestria-deprived delirium Microsoft’s hand was forced, and as a result the streets now run red with the blood of Lusipurr.com’s enemies. In the mid-to-late 2000s Lusipurr.com was created for the express purpose of decimating Lionhead Studios and ending the Fable franchise once and for all. This week our plans have finally come into fruition, and Lionhead studios will never recover from this mighty blow we have dealt them! Let it never be said that Lusipurr.com does not play the long game.

Let’s talk tits!

A Very Important Announcement About Tits

It is time to talk about TITS, and who does not like TITS? Substantial and well rounded – a pair is certainly more than a handful, but three is just ideal! To this end JRPG fans were given some incredibly good news this week with confirmation that The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd will be seeing a 2017 release for PC! For a while there it seemed unlikely that this game would ever see a release in the West owing to the extremely tight effort-to-sales ratio in translating such high volume games for the moribund PSP platform, however 2014’s Steam release of the original game in the trilogy opened new doors, as by all accounts it proved to be much more successful than anyone was expecting. Sadly, this time around Xseed were unable to swing a PSP/Vita release of the game, but it was not through lack of trying:

“To address some common questions thus far:

-Tom”

One finds it rather telling that JRPG localisation butchery has become so bad of late that companies now have to pointedly announce ahead of time that they do not plan on deliberately ruining the games they bring over, but what else can one expect in [CURRENT YEAR]? It really is too bad that Xseed could not complete the trilogy on the PSP, but it is also incredibly fortunate that they found success on the PC when they did. To this end Xseed have announced that between Trails in the Sky, Trails in the Sky SC, and Trails of Cold Steel the series has now sold over 350,000 copies in the West, which is great to see since it helps to secure the future localisation of these games. Xseed also took the opportunity to announce that Trails of Cold Steel II will be releasing for the PS3 and Vita in the Fall. In celebration of these announcements Trails in the Sky and Trails in the Sky SC have been heavily discounted for the next week on both PSN and Steam. The former has been discounted by 50% to $9.99, while the latter has been discounted by 30% to $20.99 – so there is no time like the present to add both highly regarded titles to your Steam library!

Given the quality of Square Enix writing, the ‘Noct dies’ ending may actually come as a relief.

Final Fantasy XV Director Aims to Make Players Cry

This week the director of Final Fantasy XV, Hajime Tabata, revealed that he has been developing the game with the aim of making players cry. It is good to finally have confirmation on this point. As far back as the Episode Duscae demo it seemed like the game might be being developed to make players cry, but it was also possible that the elements seen in Duscae simply coalesced into an unhappy accident that was wholly unintended. With that in mind it is a very good thing that we finally have confirmation that Final Fantasy XV is being developed for the express purpose of making gamers unhappy, because Tabata looks to be right on target to deliver on this ambition!

“I want to create a very emotional ending to the game and want to make as many people cry as possible. You’re spending so many hours playing the game, so when I finish a game and it ends on a sour note and it doesn’t move me, it gets me disappointed. At least make me cry or give me some emotion! I want to give a moving ending for the consumers who invest so much time.”

Speaking seriously now, many fans have interpreted this to mean that Noctus dies at the end, and one certainly could not blame them for reaching this conclusion. If the death of Aeris taught Square Enix anything, it was that literally the only human ’emotion’ that matters is sadness – though possibly the saddest thing about this is that Final Fantasy fans have likely guessed the ending of the game months before it has even been released. The reason that the death of Aeris had such an impact on gaming was because Squaresoft used to be able to keep a secret, and nobody saw it coming. If in the run-up to Final Fantasy VII‘s release Yoshinori Kitase had been giving the gaming press repeated winks and nudges about the permanence of Aeris, then it is unlikely that her death would still be such an iconic moment in gaming. It made an impact because its suddenness felt like a gut-punch.

Beyond this frustration, many Final Fantasy fans have reacted with exasperation to Square Enix killing off a character as a shortcut to manipulate player emotions, when in fact Square Enix struggle to even write believable characters these days, much less ones that players can establish an emotional connection with. One can only agree with this sentiment to an extent. Tragic tear-wringing endings are certainly a valid direction that a narrative can be taken in, and are a potent tool for making an impact upon a game’s players – but the thing is that such endings have to be justified throughout the narrative as a whole, and executed near perfectly. How many of Final Fantasy XV‘s elements could one claim to have been executed perfectly? The full game is still months away, but Episode Duscae was certainly sufficient to cast doubt on the game’s overall quality. One feels that fan misgivings about Final Fantasy XV‘s ‘sad’ ending are rooted in the fear that it will simply be a transplant of Zack’s ending from Crisis Core, and one could hardly fault them for harbouring this concern.

Fusing with magical goddess waifus…

Anime Spotlight: Luck & Logic

Luck & Logic is a magical girl anime with a difference – namely that the show’s protagonist [Yoshichika] is a guy. This seems like a pretty obvious harem setup, and after watching a couple of episodes that certainly seems to be the direction it is being taken in. The premise involves goddesses who have fled to the human world after losing a war to demons in their home realm. This causes the demons to turn their focus on the human world, and they are able to open dimensional gates and possess human hosts in order to wreak havok. In order to protect the human world the goddesses are able to combine their logic with that of humans known as logicalists, in order to clothe them in some fancy monster-bashing magical girl uniforms. In the world of Luck & Logic ‘logic’ and ‘paradox’ levels pretty much stand in for Dagon Ball Z-esque power levels for the heroes and villains respectively. That aspect is a little tedious, though the show on the whole makes for some light-hearted fun. Luck & Logic‘s strength is probably in its setting and art design, with special mention also going to Yoshichika’s father and sister, who make for some fairly decent comedy skits.

Luck & Logic began its run on Janurary 9, and there are currently nine episodes available. It is licensed with Funimation, and new episodes are simulcast on Saturdays at 8:30 am Eastern. Honestly, this is probably not a show that is worth planning one’s schedule around, but it is still quite fun for what it is – making it a good filler anime to watch in between episodes of more important shows.

This is the closest thing to a Coleco Chameleon that the world will ever see…

The Coleco Chameleon Is Finished

The Coleco Chameleon has certainly lived up to its name, morphing from the Retro VGS into a licensed Coleco console, before transforming into a SNES Jr and then a capture card – but one gets ahead of one’s self. Lusipurr.com has previously covered the failure of the Retro VGS Indiegogo campaign [largely due to the console’s $300 price tag], and also the console’s transformation into the Coleco Chameleon in order to escape the stench of failure and mismanagement. The Coleco Chameleon team had to previously fend off fraud allegations when what appeared to be a prototype console was actually a translucent Jaguar shell containing a picture of a PCB board that was printed onto a piece of paper. However, when they were called out the team pointed out that it was only intended as a mock-up and that gamers would get to see a full working prototype at the 2016 North American International Toy Fair.

The 2016 North American International Toy Fair kicked off on the 26th of last month, and it certainly proved to be illuminating. Less than an hour after footage of the Coleco Chameleon ‘prototype’ console had been uploaded to the internet the Atariage forums had already concluded that it was actually the innards of a SNES Jr stuffed rather crudely into a Jaguar shell and then fastened together by electrical tape. SNES gamepads were hardwired into the front of the console casing where the USB ports were supposed to be housed. The power switch was inoperable because the SNES Jr was already switched on inside the Jaguar shell. The console was being powered by one of those generic classic console power supplies which have two plugs; one for SNES and one for Genesis. The back of the console housed exactly the same power and AV inputs as the SNES Jr, with everything spaced just as far apart and in the same dimensions. The console featured the same cartridge slot as the SNES Jr, and inserted into the slot was a cart which from the front looked like a Jaguar cart, yet from the back it was shaped as a SNES cartridge, and was later concluded to be a SD2SNES flash cart. Any one of these irregularities would be enough to cast deep suspicion on the Coleco Chameleon, but combined they made for a conclusive case. It was a SNES Jr, and obviously the only games that it was seen playing were SNES ones.

It is obvious that Mike Kennedy and the Coleco Chameleon team think that gamers are fools, as this is one of the most inconceivably shoddy attempts to fake a console that one can conceive of. When dealing with modern electronics the easiest control input that one could install is an off-the-shelf USB port, and the easiest way to export a game’s visuals would be to install an off-the-shelf HDMI port – and in fact this was the intended set-up for the Coleco Chameleon. In stark contrast to this we are somehow expected to believe that there could be a possible reason for a prototype model to use proprietary Nintendo control ports and AV ports. Nintendo component cables do not even export the same kind of RGB video signal as HDMI cables, so unless Mike Kennedy had Rube Goldberg on the design team then the console simply did not add up.

When this controversy broke one of the more common forum comments to appear were suggestions that if the team actually did have a working prototype, then they should show it off in a translucent casing so that detractors could see its inner workings and thus be assuaged. Funnily enough no sooner did these comments begin to appear than the Coleco Chameleon crew did just that, uploading a translucent Jaguar case containing a PCB board to Facebook, and announcing that the console’s proposed Kickstarter would be temporarily postponed in order to shore up developer support. This was very much a response to the doubters in the Atariage forums:

“There has also been a whirlwind of interest, speculation and curiosity regarding the insides of the Chameleon. We are delighted by this and happy to confirm that we will be releasing photographs of the system now on our Facebook page, and we’ll focus on turning our prototype into a production-ready product.”

This looked a lot more convincing than what was shown off at the toy fair, but then a more convincing prototype does nothing to dispel the irregularities that were in evidence with the previous model, and so the Atariage forums kept digging. A couple of days later on the 29th it was revealed on the forums that this ‘prototype’ was indeed another fake, as the PCB board seen through the translucent casing turned out to be a DVR capture card. Many electrical goods contain such boards, but in most cases the goods in question are never opened up and documented, so there is very little visual reference material available on the internet. Instead of pilfering a board from an old microwave though, the masterminds at Coleco Chameleon decided to use an off the shelf PC card: a consumer product where the board itself is the product, and thus there were tons of visual reference materials available to anyone who knew the right ballpark to be looking in.

If you are going to be dishonest then at least be good at it! Mike Kennedy has been caught in lie after lie after lie, and now the man’s reputation accounts for precisely nothing. If Kennedy wants to bring the Coleco Chameleon to market then he best be able to bankroll it himself, as a successful Kickstarter is beginning to look a little far fetched at this point.

There is little point in buying into an incomplete library…

New 3DS Gets New Exclusive Software!

Remember the New 3DS? It is still a thing, right? New 3DS was the handheld that Nintendo just had to release as its more powerful hardware allowed it to play demanding games that otherwise would have been impossible on the regular 3DS, such as Xenoblade Chronicles and… SNES ROMs? That is right, this week sees Nintendo finally releasing Super Nintendo Virtual Console titles for the New 3DS, but not for the regular 3DS, as the regular 3DS is simply not powerful enough to emulate a system which runs on a beefy 3MHz processor like the SNES! Never mind that jailbroken vanilla 3DS’ are able to emulate Super Nintendo games just fine – for free!

It gets even better, as Nintendo’s stated reason for only releasing the games to the newer console is because only the New 3DS has the power to display these SNES ROMs in Perfect Pixel mode (TM) – So essentially Nintendo not only has contempt for their vanilla 3DS audience, but they think that consumers on the whole are barely sentient drones in the bargain! The screens of both the 3DS and New 3DS are 400 x 240 when not in 3D mode, a resolution that is far from optimal relative to the processing power available to the 3DS, and was essentially the trade-off Nintendo made to fit the console with a pixel doubling 3D screen. SNES games are 320 x 240, a resolution which easily suits all models of the 3DS – and so Nintendo expects us to believe that the vanilla 3DS hardware is not powerful enough to display a 240p image! Fuck off. At least when Sega made claims of ‘blast processing’ the term actually meant something. Nintendo just makes up lies.

Gosh, Mr Nintendo – one is terribly sorry for only purchasing the 3DS and later the 3DS XL, so please arbitrarily withhold content from one’s pleb console, as it is only fitting that second-tier owners like this author should enjoy second-tier experiences! This is just another example of why Nintendo is a shitty company that gamers should not buy into. The New 3DS has not been useful for fuck-all ever since its release, so Nintendo obviously felt like they had to throw owners a few crumbs on account of it being a system which only exists because greedy Nintendo wanted a new model of the hardware to push! Thus they lock regular 3DS owners out of content that could easily be run on their system, marking them as second-class customers in the process.

Personally, one sees very little point in buying into an incomplete Virtual Console library which is tied to a device, and will not carry over to future Nintendo hardware. What point is there in a SNES library that does not include Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger? Nintendo has not been able to offer a robust Virtual Console library since the Wii, and frankly all models of the 3DS are living on borrowed time at present, so it seems extremely unlikely that the New 3DS will gain access to much of a SNES library – thus one does not view this as a massive blow. That being said, this instance is nonetheless useful in demonstrating what an awful and niggardly company Nintendo is.

[PICTURED]: The typical Treehouse employee.

Nintendo News Round-Up

Speaking of awful company, Nintendo Treehouse’s Erik Peterson resigned this week. There is no news yet on whether he is one of Nintendo’s resident pedophile supporters like Alison Rapp, but he certainly seems to be a dirty big SJW. It is probably a little premature to celebrate his departure given that HR is likely to just fill his shoes with another SocJus thrall, and Peterson himself is likely to shit-up whatever company he goes to next – nonetheless change does have to begin somewhere.

In the case of Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem change begins with the name, which is to say that the game has been renamed to Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. Upon seeing the hashtag in the game’s name one initially thought it was more of Nintendo Treehouse’s ‘quirky’ handiwork, yet the hashtag is present in the Japanese title too, so the cancer that is Treehouse must be spreading like a contagion throughout the rest of the company.

One change that does have Nintendo Treehouse’s finger prints all over it however is the decision to censor the game. Very little is known about the game at present, and so many more censorship changes will likely become apparent in the coming months, but just watching the game’s first English trailer is enough to reveal that main characters have been altered in order to erase even the faintest hints of cleavage. Given the healthy appreciation for sexuality which pervades the Persona series, it is extremely disappointing that Treehouse has been able to pervert this particular title. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is a game which focuses to a large extent on Japanese idol culture, and yet Nintendo Treehouse have decreed that all woman must cover up – these two things are at odds, and the game’s immersion will likely suffer as a result.

The only part of Atlus’ original vision which looks to have survived intact is the games’ Japanese voice acting – not out of appreciation for the title’s native voice acting, but likely because Treehouse were not willing to allocate the budget required for English voice overs. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE has been given the Western release date of June 24, but one honestly does not know whether it is worth making the mental accommodations necessary to play it. If the Wii U jailbreak community decide to translate the uncensored Japanese original, then it might be better to simply install custom firmware and download the patched ISO.

Finally, Nintendo this week announced that Dragon Quest VII has been delayed from a Summer release into late 2016 so that Nintendo Treehouse can have more time to just fuck its shit up. This week’s Nintendo Direct listed the game’s complete re-translation as a bullet point in its favour, stating that the new translation makes it a completely different game – which is obviously the reason that Treehouse were given extra time to polish up their dialogue memes.

Speaking personally, one has always preferred milk adapters.

Anime Spotlight: Divine Gate

When the divine gate opened it ushered in an era of chaos upon the world, while connecting the heavens to the underworld in the process. To combat this the World Council was formed, and in the ensuing peace that it established the existence of the divine gate passed into legend. However, the Council continues to recruit children who exhibit potential, in the belief that those who reach the divine gate will be able to remake the world. When Aoto, a water adapter, is able to save a young girl from a fire adapter, both Akane and Madori are sent by the World Council to recruit him – yet Aoto is initially not too keen about joining up with the Council.

Divine Gate is not actually based on a manga, but rather an iOS and Android game – probably of the visual novel persuasion. One has not had time to watch Divine Gate on account of a recent Kill la Kill addiction, but the premise sure sounds interesting. The series began its run on the 8th of January, and there are currently nine episodes available. It is simulcast on Fridays at 9:30am Eastern on Funimation.

It is mind-boggling to see people who are open pedophilia advocates working for such a child-friendly company as Nintendo.

Nintendo’s Poison Tree

In the wake of the horrible perversion that is Fire Emblem Fates‘ American localisation, there was a bit of minor controversy this week when it was found that one of the Treehouse employees responsible for the game’s localisation, was directly paying money into the Patreon of the internet’s least convincing transvestite, Andrea Ritsu. For those who do not recall [which should be most anyone] Andrea Ritsu was the man who lied about players being able to drug and rape the character of Soleil. This lie then caused a wave of hysteria among hipster game ‘journalists’, which they used to cudgel the game and Nintendo – arguably preparing the optimal conditions for the localisation travesty which was to follow. That Nich Maragos, the employee in question, would be directly paying money to this awful person who was actively attempting to undermine his first treehouse project frankly speaks volumes about the attitude he adopted while translating the game’s dialogue. One says ‘translate’, but really Fire Emblem Fates has never been translated, unless one counts the Japanese version’s fan made English patch – which really is the way to play the game.

The Maragos affair was nothing compared to what was to follow however. Later in the week it came to light that Alison Rapp, a Treehouse employee that this blog mentioned some weeks back, was in fact a strong advocate for the decriminalisation of child pornography. Just how somebody who openly advocates for legalising child pornography could get past Nintendo’s vetting process is anyone’s guess. Hell, does Nintendo even have a vetting process? Does NoA even have any oversight over what goes on in Treehouse? Perhaps when Ken McCulloch gets out of prison he can go work for Nintendo Treehouse? Perhaps Denis Dyack can join him?

Whatever the case, the child-friendly company of Nintendo now has somebody working for them who is very happy to openly champion pedophilic causes – and this is not just a recent affectation. Alison Rapp’s interest in supporting child pornography stretches at least as far back as 2011 with her paper Speech We Hate, which can be read in full here. In it Rapp asserts that pedophilia is not a dangerous condition, while the paper attempts to make the case that the international community pressuring Japan to criminalise child pornography equates to cultural imperialism. It also attempts to argue that there is no causal relationship between the consumption of child pornography and the sexual abuse of children, despite the production of RL child pornograpy requiring victims.

To Rapp the responsibility for the children victimised during the creation of child pornography extends no further than the people who physically produce and distribute the material, and since Japan has criminalised its production then that is as far as they should be expected to go. And of course with strictly only the producers of child pornograpy being held culpable, Rapp asserts that there is absolutely no correlation between the consumption of child pornography and the sexual abuse of children, when in fact it is the sick appetites of child porn consumers which creates demand for this abuse in the first place.

Finally, Alison Rapp argues that the censorship or banning of child pornography is the same thing as criminalising thought, which she thinks is unbecoming of countries such as the US and Japan which have constitutional free speech provisions. Rapp concludes that countries are wasting their time by attempting to outlaw child pornography, and that a better way to prevent children from being sexually exploited is to improve healthcare, the education system, and other such things that liberal regressives like. She states that she supports decriminalising the consumption of child pornography, rather than the production and distribution thereof – but to support the consumption of child pornography is to support its production and distribution, and to say otherwise is a nonsense.

At this point one wishes to make one thing very clear, as there has been a tremendous amount of disinformation spread by shills, sycophants, and fanboys online ever since this scandal broke. Alison Rapp is absolutely talking about possession and consumption of child pornography as a whole – and she takes no pains at all to hide this. Many awful people have attempted to play this off as Rapp merely supporting the consumption of child pornography manga, which is demonstrably false for anyone who actually bothers to read her comprehensively shabby article. She is talking about child pornography as a whole, and in the few instances where she wishes to equivocate she specifically mentions that she is talking about 2D rather than 3D. Nice try, shills!

One actually had a number of Rapp’s tweets saved for the purpose of this post, but after getting stuck into her article they hardly seemed necessary. There is no claiming that character limits are to blame for loss of nuance when dealing with a journal article, and after reading it in its dreadful entirety one can only conclude that Alison Rapp’s support for the consumption of child pornography is absolutely unequivocal – or at least that was the case back in 2011. If she feels any differently today then she has yet to indicate a change of heart. At any rate, this is the type of person that child-friendly Nintendo is happy to have acting as their public face at numerous events and trade shows. Some might suggest they clean house, though as one has previously indicated Nintendo would be better served by burning the fucking thing down. Treehouse has gone off the rails.

The Chinese Room were given a fantastic opportunity and they squandered it…

The Chinese Room Spills Their Spaghetti

What do consumers owe development studios? The answer to that question is absolutely nothing at all. It is not the duty of gamers to throw their money at studios, irrespective of how hard they work on a game, if they do not first find that game to look appealing and worth the asking price. It is the task of game developers to create something that looks enjoyable, and to price it accordingly. A gamer will tend to look at the price of a game and then compare that game’s quality and content with other games of that price, and then decide whether or not the game is worth the money on that basis. And that is precisely as it should be. It is understandable that a studio would think of their game as being their baby, but consumers are pretty obviously not going to feel this way, and will walk on by if an experience does not seem worth the asking price.

Sometimes studios have a difficult time taking ‘no’ as an answer however, as just this week two independent studios made the news by complaining about gamers not wanting to purchase their games at full price. The situation occurred on the Steam forums for Brigador when a consumer voiced the opinion that the game would be so much more attractive as a $15 game as opposed to a $20 game. The game in question is an isometric mech shooter that is still in early access, meaning that it lacks the full polish and content of a finished game – and so even $15 seems over-generous. At this point Hugh Monahan, the founder of Stellar Jockeys, stepped in to complain about and guilt trip this individual for suggesting the game should be priced a little lower – going so far as to compare its price to a series of unrelated things such as a pair of Calvin Klein underwear and even a Nickelback poster. Monahan wins points for at least making the post fairly humourous, yet his attempting to shame someone for not wishing to buy an unfinished game for $20 really is a bit much. Different games are worth more or less to different people, and so Stellar Jockeys are certainly not obliged to sell their game for less than $20, as there may be many people who are perfectly willing to spend the money on an isometric mech game. That said, it is perfectly reasonable for a consumer to suggest that $20 for an unfinished game is a little on the expensive side – the studio is then free to disregard feedback as they see fit. What is not OK is for that studio to then turn around and browbeat that consumer for not wishing to purchase the game on the studio’s preferred terms.

All in all though, this one somewhat humourous forum post made by a small-time developer was not really all that offensive or noteworthy. What elevated this situation to a state of hilarity was when The Chinese Room then picked up this ball and ran with it on Twitter:

“Apart from the depressing fact that this is still having to be spelled out, this is really well put.

The only winners in a price race to the bottom are the big companies that can loss-lead to drive competition out of the market.”

All this over someone suggesting that $5 should be bumped off of the price of an unfinished game. For Lusipurr.com readers not familiar with the illustrious career of The Chinese Room [which I hope would be all of you], the studio made their debut with the overhyped and pretentious walking simulator, Dear Esther. They next made their mark on the gaming world by ruining the Amnesia franchise by turning it into a walking simulator with A Machine for Pigs. Most recently they have developed what looks to be the most boring walking simulator ever devised with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, which could probably be more aptly termed a walking through treacle simulator. If waiting for their non-games to go on sale before purchasing them was all it took for The Chinese Room to cease producing them, then one would heartily encourage it! In the case of Brigador one at least felt some empathy for their wrong-headed position, given that the game was self-financed and actually looked pretty interesting. Being a small indy company designing an ambitious game cannot be the easiest thing in the world – it is when one looks beyond that to the entitled moaning of The Chinese Room that the schadenfreude is truly possible to be savoured though. The Chinese Room do not make games, they only produce smug pretension along with piles and piles of graphics. Gamers are not wrong to avoid them.

Xbone got no game!

Xbone Cannot Hold on to Its Exclusives: NIS Edition

Zombi U may have raised eyebrows, but there has never been a console exclusive more truly baffling than Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness on the Xbone. The game is based on a very popular anime comprised of two series, a manga, and a 2015 feature length movie, but the Xbone only ever stood to sell a handful of units in Japan. How was Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness ever going to sell? Even if it sold two copies for every one Xbone sold in Japan, that is still only like eight copies of the game… Did 5pb and Microsoft think there was a particularly big audience for sci-fi visual novels among US servicemen stationed in Okinawa? Whatever the case one has the sneaking suspicion that the title bombed pretty hard upon release in May of 2015.

Needless to say it was not long before the existence of PS4 and Vita versions were announced in December of 2015, for a Spring 2016 release. Now just this week NISA has announced that they will be localising Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness for Western release in the Fall. There even seems to be a Steam PC version in the offing, though it is unknown whether this version will be released along-side the Playstation versions of the game. The one version of the game which remains conspicuously absent however, is the Xbone version – which will not be getting a Western release. The Xbone cannot hold on to its exclusives. The Xbone got no game! This is perhaps something to remember in light of the forthcoming Xbone exclusive, Raiden V. One intends to hold out for the PS4 version!

It is loli Inspector’s duty to get in the way of the Enforcers doing their jobs…

Belated Anime Spotlight: Psycho Pass

Given the forthcoming release of Psycho Pass: Mandatory Happiness, one figured that there was no time like the present to look in on the 2012 series which spawned it to see what all the fuss is about. The initial three episodes are certainly enough to pique one’s interest, though their strength is definitely in establishing an interesting premise and entertaining with some slickly produced animation – as the series is not as immediately engaging as something like Dimension W, which tries a bit harder to have fun. That said, the intriguing premise does make up for this somewhat, as the cracks in Psycho-Pass‘ distopian utopia of a setting are immediately evident from the first episode onward.

It is the year 2113 and almost all crime has been eliminated thanks to the Sibyl System, which is able to scan people’s brains in order to detect any latent criminal urges – these brain scans are referred to as a person’s ‘psycho-pass’. If a person’s psycho-pass reaches a certain threshold they will be incarcerated until such a time as they can lower it with therapy [which is not possible in all cases]. If a person’s psycho-pass becomes too high however, then Sibyl will simply instruct Investigators and their Enforcers to execute them – which tends to result in a satisfyingly bloody display. Enforcers are individuals who Sibyl has deemed to be latent criminals due to their high psycho-pass, yet they have managed to retain a degree of freedom on account of their usefulness in tracking down and apprehending other latent criminals – meanwhile it is the task of Investigators to assume control over the Enforcers. Many of the Enforcers happen to be former Investigators who ended up being classified as latent criminals because of stress and trauma associated with their jobs.

On top of all this there is the pervading suggestion that the Sibyl System is not as immune to external manipulation as things may initially appear. There is certainly plenty of latitude for the world that is being established to implode at a moment’s notice, which is pretty much what one would expect given the premise. As to whether the show is worth a recommendation, that will really depend on whether the intricacy of the initial premise is able to pay off further down the line, as the characters alone are not sufficient to sell it. That said, the chances of a payoff are good, given the success of the series in Japan. Both seasons of Psycho-Pass are available for streaming at Funimation, and it does have a reasonably solid dub available.

Treehouse do not localise games, they vandalise them!

Nintendo Treehouse Has Completely Fucked Fire Emblem Fates

Nintendo Treehouse has completely fucked Fire Emblem Fates. In the run up to the game’s release it looked as if something like this may have been on the cards, but the state of Fire Emblem Fates at launch is certainly a worst case scenario – on multiple fronts. Firstly, without even getting into the reams of unnecessary censorship and name changes, Treehouse have managed to drop the ball on one of the most fundamental aspects of the localisation process, which is to say that they have produced mediocre English voice tracks which are far bellow the standard set by Fire Emblem Awakening. The reason for this is quite simply because the voice actors were given no direction or context this time around. Rena Stroba, the voice actress of Azaura, revealed that Treehouse did not show her the lines of dialogue that she would be responding to, nor did they tell her the name of the character she was portraying or even the name of the game that she was providing voice acting for. It is a small wonder then that the dialogue recorded was able to be used at all.

Moving on to the meat of the issue, the localisation of Fire Emblem Fates was fucked well beyond what poor voice acting alone could have accomplished. Character names have been altered for no reason other than vanity, often times being altered by the mere addition or subtraction of a single letter. Location/map names have been altered too, in many cases simply in order to infuse the game with Treehouse’s own brand of quirky meme humour. To make matters worse Treehouse decided to rename several long-standing character classes and skill names – for instance ‘Pegasus Knights’ are now ‘Sky Knights’. Finally, dialogue has also been altered to better reflect the refined Treehouse sense of humour. For instance the line:

“I don’t have to hold back from now on, right? We’ll always be together, right?

I’m so happy…!”

Becomes:

“…Rrrghg rawrgghh rrrh!

That’s dragon for ‘I love you!’”

If ever there were a line to instantly engender buyer’s remorse among players who romantically paired their protagonist with an NPC, it is certainly the cloying latter of these two exchanges. It is as though Nintendo Treehouse are actively courting furfags and dragon dildo fanciers at the expense of actual paying customers.

Cloying retard humour is not the only culprit for dialogue alterations however, as the Nintendo Treehouse also have an ideological barrow to push, and thus much of the game’s content has been edited to service the goals of Social Justice! For example the character of Effie is said to be a caring gentle giant type character in the Japanese version of Fire Emblem Fates, yet in the Western release she is a butch ‘strong independent womyn that don’t need no man’. Then of course there is all the content that was not so much altered as it was completely gutted and then dumped in the garbage skip out behind the Treehouse. The skinship sections of Fire Emblem Fates [along with other such character developmental nasties] have been hacked out with such abandon that the Western release of the game now features fewer than half the number of audio files as the Japanese version. It must be so easy to localise a game once half of its content lies aborted on the cutting room floor. At least when Planned Parenthood remove content they are prepared to sell it back to the highest bidder, but no such luck with Nintendo – the skinship content is just gone. Finally, swimsuits have also been cut from the game, because apparently swimming is sexist, and is not at all a popular Summer pastime. Honestly, one simply cannot fathom how Richard Amtower, Nintendo Localisation Manager [and vocal Zoe Quinn supporter], ever could have allowed this game to ship in such a state!

I’m sorry, does this make you uncomfortable?

United Nonces Push Japan to Ban Sexy Girls

Speaking of vocal Zoe Quinn supporters, the UN certainly is an utterly useless institution. They will not say boo to countries like Saudi Arabia sitting on human rights councils, but will then turn around and expend all of their energy on trying to browbeat Japan into censoring and banning all of their sexy games and anime. When one thinks about it like that, the UN really is the apex SJW in their toilet bowl ecosystem!

So Anita and Zoe visit the UN, and mere months later the UN is violating Japan’s national sovereignty by attempting to strong-arm them into banning their own culture. It is almost as though Anita has been trying to kill video games at their source: Japan. Feminists are totally not trying to take our games away though, guys!

“The Committee strongly urges the State party to ban the sale of video games or cartoons involving rape and sexual violence against women which normalize and promote sexual violence against women and girls. The Committee also recommends that, as indicated in the delegation’s oral assurance during the constructive dialogue, the State party include this issue in its revision of the Act Banning Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.

Please indicate the measures taken to ban the sale of video games or cartoons involving rape and sexual violence against girls and women and to raise awareness among the producers of such materials, in line with the Committee’s general recommendation No. 19 on violence against women. Please also indicate the measures taken to address the mass production, distribution and use of pornographic videos in which women are targets of sexual violence, as well as the portrayal of sexualized commercial images of women.”

It is interesting to note that the bulk of their demands of the Japanese government are concerned with “sexual violence”, but just at the end they decide to link this to the far more general ‘portrayal of sexualized commercial images of women‘, which is where they let slip their real agenda. What do sexy images of women have to do with sexual violence? Fucking nothing is what, but feminists would love to be able to link the two within the public perception – and it actually seems to be working in the case of companies like Nintendo, Capcom, and Tecmo Koei.

Looking beyond this, it is perhaps pertinent to ask why this initiative is even required. Ever since the RapeLay incident blew up several years back the Japanese industry has been ‘voluntarily’ self-regulating their products to prevent sexual violence from ending up in games and anime – and we have every reason to believe that they have been successful given the absence of any other such moral outrages in the intervening years.

“Concerning video games and films, self-imposed regulation by the industry and its independent rating organizations have been carried out through ratings and reviews of such media containing sexually explicit and violent scenes or scenes including anti-social behavior, to ensure that ethically inappropriate games and films are not distributed.”

One gets the very distinct impression that the UN is not trying to ban games which feature sexual violence as normal people would understand it, because those titles are already effectively banned. Rather they are likely applying their own nebulous definition to the term, and they probably consider ‘psychic violence’ to be an actual thing. They are very probably attempting to prevent all our best waifus from whimpering in delight every time circumstances transpire to force Senpai into accidentally copping a feel of their generous bosom! A change in rating systems under a leftwing Australian government saw a game [Atelier Totori Plus] that was rated PG [suitable for children] reclassified to R18+ for strong sexual violence – and one suspects that the UN is working under similar frames of reference. At any rate, the UN will have to make at least some kind of case for their hysterical claim of rampant sexual violence in Japanese entertainment before they are afforded anything other than scorn and ridicule by right-minded people – because right now the accusation is the evidence! And if the UN really wanted some credibility on the issue, then they might consider not passing around emails full of CP!!

Tokyo RPG Factory has looked to a classic for inspiration.

Project Setsuna Releases in Japan

One must have completely spaced on the release of Project Setsuna [Ikenie to Yuki no Setsuna], because this gorgeous looking game was released several days back. The piano soundtrack is completely gorgeous, and the game features a number of the trappings of classic RPGs that many of us have been pining for in the modern era. These trappings include nameable characters, giant glowing save points, text only event scenes, event scenes which are not partially occluded by giant character portraits, a fixed angle isometric camera, an ATB system, a world map, and onscreen party members that appear out of nowhere for event scenes like in Final Fantasy VII. It is such a breath of fresh air in the current year!

The Unity engine is fast gaining a reputation as being an engine which achieves horrible results on the PS Vita, and the PS Vita version certainly does nothing to change this. The PS4 version of the game appears to be solid as a rock [as you would expect], but the PS Vita version is plagued by long loading times and slowdown during battles. As previously mentioned Project Setsuna uses an updated version of Chrono Trigger‘s ATB 2.0 system, however it has been garnished with two further gameplay systems. The first is the Setsuna system, whereby the Setsuna gauge fills during battle, and when full players are able press a button in time with a command in order to buff the action they are performing. The second system is the ability for characters to slot in gems which contain both passive and command abilities. As characters level up they gain jewel slots marked as A, C, and S type slots, which stands for All, Command, and Support. The types of gems that can be used fall into seven categories: Wall [reduces damage], Provoke, Firebit [fire attributes increased], Stonebit [petrifies enemies], Caloric [widens various areas of attack], Harvest [HP regen], and Avenger [reflects damage].

Enemies drop materials instead of money, and once materials are sold to shops they can then be used to craft new gems – which effectively eliminates the conundrum of whether to sell materials or keep them for crafting. The Setsuna system is able to interact with both innate as well as jewel abilities and commands. Finally, the game is said to take 20-25 hours to complete, and features a recurring enemy simply known as Scythe Man. Project Setsuna still has a tentative 2016 Western release date, though the final Western name of the game has yet to be officially revealed.

Durarara!! is the tale of a courier in search of head!

Anime Spotlight: Durarara!!X2

Durarara!!X2 follows on from 2010’s Durarara!!, and begins at the point when the peace achieved at the end of the first series begins to fracture. There is a looming turf war between the Dollars and the Yellow Scarfs, which seems to be being exacerbated by a third party. Meanwhile a zealous new motorcycle cop is after Ikebukuro’s fabled Headless Rider. Celty Sturluson is a courier played with warmth by Kari Wahlgren, who also played Asche in Final Fantasy XII, and Karin in Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Celty is also an Irish dullahan who is in Ikebukuro looking for her missing head. Durarara!!X2 is a fantastically energetic and intricately plotted series, which conveys its narrative through the perspective of a massive cast of over ten characters, which each have their own satellite characters.

Because there are so many moving parts to the Durarara!!‘s scenario it is initially a little disorienting to jump into this series without first viewing the original 2010 series, however by around the third episode this author felt sufficiently caught up to become invested in Durarara!!X2 – and subsequently binge-watched up to episode 13 in an evening. As of writing thirty episodes have aired, with a further six to come. If one prefers to watch the dubs then there are currently twenty-four episodes available. Despite ample material suggesting that Durarara!!X2 would begin streaming on January 10 over at Crunchyroll, one was only able to find videos from the original series – so it is anybody’s guess as to what is going on with that. Regardless, Durarara!!X2 is a lot of fun, and as such is highly recommended.

Anyone else notice that the company began to right their ship after Keiji Inafune left the company?

Capcom Series including Onimusha May Be Revived

In late 2013 it was revealed that Capcom almost went broke. They had mere tens of millions of dollars in the bank, and it was only the release and subsequent success of Monster Hunter 4 that staved off complete disaster for the company. Fast forward to 2016, and the company has a very solid two year track record of making good decisions. A change in direction first came with the release of Resident Evil: Revelations 2 – the game was somewhat unoriginal, yet it jettisoned much of the moribund bloat and silliness which had been strangling the series like a cancer. Following that Capcom delighted fans with two high fidelity ports of well-regarded GameCube classics, Resident Evil and Resident Evil 0. The former game sold like absolute hotcakes on PSN, while the latter appears to have replicated that feat, releasing on the 23rd of January of this year and racking up sales of 130,000 on PSN, 40,000 on Xbone, and 10,000 on PC. To top this all off 2015 saw the announcement of a Resident Evil 2 remake, and now it appears that Capcom are of a view that it is time for other cherished Capcom franchises to make a comeback as well – and this could potentially include the Onimusha series.

One mentions Onimusha specifically because Yoshinori Ono was asked specifically about that franchise, and revealed that there had been recent internal discussions about bringing the franchise back – however that is not a done deal. What is certain however, is the fact that Capcom seem committed to bringing back fan favourite franchises, with Ono specifically stating that some of these franchises will come back:

“All I can do for now is reassure fans that conversations are happening at high levels. We [Capcom] realise the need for different series to maybe come back into the forefront and although there’s nothing to talk about right now, I’m sure in the future there will be news on variety of series that will keep the fans happy. [Fan’s] favourites are going to come back.”

The pragmatic conservatism of Capcom circa 2016 should provide a glimmer of hope to anyone who has ever despaired at the out of touch arrogance and incompetence of modern day Square Enix. Prior to 2013 many had given up on Capcom, with Resident Evil 6 serving as something of a nail in their coffin. They had abandoned making the kind of games that their fans enjoyed playing, and instead had increasingly been producing games targeted towards other markets. To this pre-2013 Capcom mindset gamers no longer bought Japanese games, and survival horror was a dead genre – and as such surely the market could be expected to purchase such Westernized bilge as DmC. This wrong-headedness came to a head when the company almost went under in 2013, and to their credit Capcom were self-aware enough at this eleventh hour juncture to step away from the abyss and begin righting their business. Capcom has once again dipped their toe into the production of survival horror, and have found that the audience for these games never actually went away. Now it appears that the Company is looking to replicate the success they had in reviving traditional style Resident Evil with their other franchises. As such HD remakes and sequels for classic Capcom franchises, including Onimusha, are now on the table. Do not be surprised to see a proper sequel to Devil May Cry announced at some point to cleanse the palate from that Ninja Theory abortion.

The lesson of this tale is that Square Enix need to face financial ruin, as it is perhaps the one thing that could potentially save them.

Xbone has reached its Quantum Breaking point!

Xbone Cannot Hold on to Exclusives

For much of the previous console generation the Xbox 360 had the PS3 at a disadvantage when it came to installbase, and even when the PS3 managed to pip the 360 at the post the difference in console sales continued to be somewhat marginal. This directly translated into the Xbox 360 being a formidable platform on which to sell games, which in turn made it far easier to justify making certain software titles exclusive to that platform, since the audience could be relied upon to purchase a substantial volume of content. That obviously is not the case with the Xbox One, as every week it is outsold by the PS4 on an almost 2:1 basis. The PS4 can keep its exclusives, but the Xbox One cannot do the same, as Microsoft tends to over-rely on third party exclusives, and third party companies tend to want to actually sell a few copies.

Early on in the generation PC ports of Xbox “exclusive” games were at least not announced prior to the Xbox One version going on sale, and indeed the PC version would not tend to release until up to a year after the game had made its debut on Xbox One. That is certainly no longer the case, with Remedy announcing ahead of Quantum Break‘s April release that the game will be releasing concurrently on the PC! This port is no mere afterthought, as within a day of announcing its existence Remedy had already provided ‘minimum’, ‘recommended’, and ‘ultra’ requirement guidelines, indicating that the PC port is mature, and has been actively developed alongside its Xbox One counterpart for some time. As a sidenote: one look at the ‘recommended’ settings is enough to make Lusipurr’s famous 32gb of RAM not seem so silly after all. Quantum Break was the one Xbox One exclusive that this author was sad to see stranded on the Xbone, and as such it is the sweetest instance of a game breaking Xbox exclusivity yet! Now, if only one’s computer could run it without going up in smoke!

Still a better story than…

Twilight of the Sods

It is funny to think that when The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess first debuted on the Wii and later the GameCube there was no such thing as Amiibo. No diminutive hunks of plastic to gate off content. No thriving grey market predicated on their scarcity. There was just a game release, and gamers were able to play that release provided they owned a copy along with the requisite console to play it on. How naive we were. What point is there in Nintendo even releasing games if they cannot be used to stimulate sales of cheap plastic Nintendo figurines?

Last month Lusipurr.com brought you tidings of an extremely solid rumour which had its basis in a listing by Amazon France, that suggested Nintendo was planning to lock away an entire in-game dungeon in their upcoming Twilight Princess HD port for the Wii U. This week Nintendo have unambiguously confirmed the rumour true by releasing a trailer to cudgel their would-be consumers into purchasing an assortment of plastic crap. No fewer than four Amiibo will be required if gamers wish to unlock every function that Nintendo has gated away in this port – though to be fair two of these functions are essentially mild cheats.

Owners of the ‘Link’ and ‘Toon Link’ Amiibo will be able to instantly refill their stock of arrows, while owners of the ‘Zelda’ and ‘Sheik’ Amiibo will be able to instantly refill their hearts. Owners of the Ganondorf Amiibo will be able to use it in order to make enemies deal twice the amount of damage. The game already sports a ‘Hero Mode’ where enemies are able to deal twice as much damage to Link, and the effects of the ‘Ganondorf’ Amiibo are able to stack on top of this, so that enemies will deal four times the standard amount of damage. Finally, the ‘Wolf Link’ Amiibo (included with the physical game at launch, but obviously not included with the digital version) will be used to unlock the ‘Cave of Shadows’, a new forty floor dungeon of trials – where each floor is home to unique enemies and environmental obstacles to overcome.

Any return player tackling ‘Hero Mode’ will want to play with the full 4X damage instead of just 2X, obliging them to pick up a Ganondorf figurine. Anyone wishing to tackle the ‘Cave of Shadows’ dungeon [which will probably be most return players] will be obliged to pick purchase a physical version of the game which (at least at launch) comes with the Wolf Link amiibo. But, if the histories of amiibo availability and special ‘launch editions’ are any indication, then the only way that players will be able to guarantee day one access to the Wolf Link Amiibo is to put down a pre-order for the physical edition of the game. That is no doubt what this trailer was designed to communicate to gamers.

Congratulations, Nintendo, your avarice knows no bounds!

Do androids dream of electric lolis?

Anime Spotlight: Dimension W

It is the year 2071, and the discovery of a a fourth dimension has gifted mankind with an unlimited source of clean power. The discovery of this dimension has made New Tesla Energy the world’s biggest corporation through their monopoly on ‘coils’, which are essentially high capacity batteries. New Tesla Energy’s monopoly on coils has basically made them a law unto themselves, much like the Shinra Electric Power Company, and they have effectively made third party coils illegal – these illegal coils are then confiscated by ‘collectors’, who operate in a similar way to bounty hunters. Incredibly, the protagonist of the series,Kyoma, is a man – not a sixteen year old boy, but an actual flesh and blood adult man with a beard and mullet! He is gruff, mature, and is generally just a complete badass. Kyoma hates all coil technology, and lives a completely lo-fi life, to the extent that he drives an exorbitantly expensive gas powered car and uses throwing spikes rather than a coil-powered gun. Fate then conspires to partner Kyoma with with Mira, the robotic creation of the late founder of New Tesla Energy, Shidō Yurizaki. Leading into the start of Dimension W Yurizaki had become a recluse for some two years after New Tesla Energy murdered his wife and child, and shortly before suiciding to evade capture he instructs Mira to follow the source of the illegal coils that have been flooding the market.

One’s initial impressions are that Dimension W is excellent. The conceptual art upon which the world is based is arresting, the animation quality is absolutely gorgeous, and the stylised presentation just exudes an effortless sense of cool. This anime is more serious than most, in the sense that it depicts a reasonably mature sci-fi setting without a lot of comic elements in evidence, but it also does not forget to have fun. This is not a sci-fi world that will bludgeon viewers with endless reams of technobabble in place of world building, but rather it is an action series which has thus far mostly used sci-fi as a backdrop. Dimension W began its run on January 10, and there are currently five episodes available. It is simulcast on Funimation Saturdays at 9:00am Eastern. Highly recommended.

Nintendo should have died with Iwata.

Nintendo Is Addicted to Censorship

Done. One is thoroughly done with Nintendo. One is done with them regardless of how attractive their NX console and handheld appear. One is done with them despite the fact that they are pretty much the only game in town when it comes to handheld gaming. They have bet big on SJWs, and as a result of that they have lost this gamer. It is one thing for Nintendo to starve Nintendo owners of content, but, now that some games are actually on the way, it is quite another thing to watch helplessly as week after week Nintendo announces that they have gutted their games for Western sensibilities in an effort to appease people who were never going to buy them in the first place! That will not gain Nintendo customers. It will lose Nintendo customers. So fuck Nintendo, they have brought their irrelevance down upon their own heads. It is for the SJWs to keep Nintendo in business now, because gamers are dead, apparently.

Goodness knows it was not merely enough for Nintendo to cleanse Fire Emblem Fates of important character development to spare the feelings of special snowflakes, nope, this week it has come to light that the game has been stripped of fun game mechanics too. The uncensored Japanese version of the game featured a petting mode where party members could be stroked with the stylus in order to strengthen the bond between characters, much like the petting feature seen in Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance. This feature has been stripped entirely from the game to protect our delicate Western sensibilities. If readers are tired of being treated like babies by Japanese publishers then one would heartily encourage them to stop buying products from Nintendo. An individual may not be personally impacted by any one instance of censorship, yet they would have to be severely myopic not to appreciate the ramifications of their complacency. The only effective way to prevent any one instance of censorship, is to strongly oppose all instances of censorship. Fuck Nintendo.

Apologies, fully grown adults. Your moral superiors have determined that you must not be allowed to play sexy games!

Capcom Admits to Lying About Malign SJW Influence

Ever since it was revealed that the animations for R. Mika and Cammy had been altered, Capcom has been blowing smoke up the collective butts of gamers. Capcom employees spouted unconvincing drivel about how it was an internal decision, and it had nothing at all to do with the outside pressure that the company had received for their depictions of sexy female characters. For their part the SJWs repeated the happy lie that it was not they who were to blame for the game’s censorship, and the mantra of ‘it’s just localisation’ was parroted back ad nauseam by the kind of censorious cunts who absolutely would start a letter writing campaign over a digital butt slap.

It turns out that both Capcom staff and the SJWs were indeed lying previously, as this week Street Fighter V‘s producer, Yoshinori Ono, admitted that the game had been censored due to a large outpouring of negative feedback.

“You may have seen sometime ago, for R. Mika’s Critical Art cutscene, the camera angle was changed a bit, and we made some other changes with how the camera angles worked with the characters. That was one of our answers to some of this feedback.

We want everyone to be able to enjoy playing this game. We don’t want anything offensive in there; we want everyone to be able to enjoy the game as much as possible. So we’re working to be able to provide a friendly environment for everyone.”

The game environment would have been plenty friendly enough with the mildly sexy animations left intact. No one piece of entertainment is ever going to satisfy all audiences, and nor should it. Capcom ought to look after the customers they have before courting a crowd that does not play video games. To make matters worse Ono warns that more of these ‘adjustments’ may have to be made before the game releases.

“The message we want to provide for our hardcore fans is that we are cognizant of the series’ identity, and we are going to make sure that the Street Fighter identity is in place. We may be making more adjustments moving forward, but the fighting experience, the battle, is the same.”

Get with the program, fans! We may be watering down your favourite franchise left and right, but the identity of the series is still in place – because here at Capcom we enthusiastically believe that the core identity of Street Fighter players is to be massive cucks, so roll over and take it! Please buy lots!!

The game looks like a piece of shit.

Mighty No. Nein!

Oh boy! One keeps attempting to start writing this story up, before having to leave off in fits of laughter. This week Mighty No. 9 backers must feel an awful lot like Double Fine backers, because Comcept have had to delay the game for a third time, and this time they are not even confident enough to give it a replacement release date! This is the same company that in July/August of last year went back to Kickstarter in order to ask for two new projects to receive funding – one a game and the other a ten minute anime. For obvious reasons gamers rejected his ploy to get at more of their money, yet somehow Inafune’s Red Ash anime project did manage to get funded. Now Mighty No. 9 has been pushed back to an unspecified 2016 launch date, and the unverified word on the street is that Inafune’s Xbox exclusive, ReCore, has been delayed into 2017!

The reason for this latest round of delays really is quite hilarious, you see apparently the game engine Comcept is using, Unreal Engine 3, has ceased to be updated. This has resulted in the game’s multiplayer modes being ravaged by bugs, and the development team themselves having to make changes to the engine in order to fix them. On top of everything else Mighty No. 9 is a big multi-platform release, and the bug fixes required tend to be unique to each individual platform. The hilarious thing is that Mighty No. 9 is ostensibly a single player game anyway, so this multiplayer mode could just be patched in later rather than allowing it to derail the entire launch of the game. Ultimately however, it probably does not even matter – as by all accounts the game is actually quite poor, and people have already lost interest in it. Hideki Kamiya was right – Inafune is a business man, not a creator; and he is not even a particularly good business man, given how poorly he has been managing his projects.

Time travel is often fun…

Anime Spotlight: Erased

‘It’s Groundhog Day!’ – well, not quite. Satoru Fujinuma is a part-time pizza delivery man and budding manga artist, a character description which belies one very unique gift – namely the ability to travel several moments back in time to prevent deaths and accidents. Fujinuma’s gift is radically expanded following the death of his mother, as he is thrown back eighteen years into the past, where he is able to prevent the deaths of three friends back in Elementary School. Things are about to get a whole lot more complicated however, as he is framed for his mother’s death.

Erased is being directed by Tomohiko Itō, who also directed the extremely popular Sword Art Online II, and co-directed Deathnote – one certainly hopes that Erased does not take itself as seriously as the latter production. Erased began its run on January 8, and is simulcast on Funimation at 12:30pm Eastern time on Thursdays. There is currently three episodes available for viewing.

Suck on it!

Social Justice World Warriors

The Social Justice World Warriors at NeoGaf are not happy. With the previously discussed censorship of Street Fighter V‘s super animations they figured it would be smooth sailing for the rest of the game’s development, however this week’s update to the Street Fighter V beta proved to be most triggering indeed. Alternate costumes are now available in game, and one of the most notable new costumes is Laura’s, which comes replete with two massive helpings of jiggly underboob! This is certainly a bit of welcome fan service, but it is truly perplexing as to why Capcom has previously censored character animations. Neither character animation was as gratuitous as Laura baring her lovely mammaries, so both development decisions appear to be completely at odds with one another. Gamers are still upset with the animations being censored, but now SJWs are also upset with the cleavage on display. To top it all off Capcom unconvincingly claimed that the censorship was done in order to avoid getting a mature rating from the ESRB, and then they go and do this, which completely undermines their flimsy excuse. At any rate, with the arrival of Laura’s delectable jugs there is at least the faint hope that Capcom will go back and fix the super animations. After all, it is not like SJWs actually buy games.

In other news, SJWs were also no doubt wracked by PTSD this week when Tecmo Koei showed off their latest feature for Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 – ‘owner mode’. Owner mode will allow players to more effectively ogle their harem of luscious kawaii beauties, interact with them, and have them put on new skimpy outfits. If one is willing to forego the superior visual fidelity and tasty physics of the PS4 release, then the Vita version even allows players to squeeze the girl’s breasts together using the touchscreen and to create gusts of wind by swiping the touchscreen, which can be used to blow up girl’s skirts! All in all Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is shaping up to be a quality release for admirers of the female booty.

Another Nintendo game that I will not be buying.

Nintendo Censors Fire Emblem

The week has not been uniformly kind to proponents of free expression in gaming however, with Nintendo ruining yet another one of their games, this time by taking a big red marker to its script and removing all content that le Social Justice army has designated as wrongthink. We have already seen how recent Nintendo games such as Xenoblade Cronicles X, Fatal Frame V, and Bravely Second: End Layer have censored aesthetic content in order to kowtow to people who are intolerant of diverse cultures and points of view, but their first title to do this for a substantial chunk of story content is Fire Emblem Fates.

The game in its original form featured a romance option between the protagonist [Kamui] and one of his female soldiers [Soleil]. It is strongly implied that Soleil is attracted to women, and that this attraction is causing her to grow faint and underperform on the battlefield. In order to try and solve Soleil’s problem Kamui slips some magic tablets into her drink which cause her to perceive people as the opposite gender. A side effect of this is that Soleil perceives Kamui as a female and falls for him, and her feelings for him persist even after the magical drugs have worn off. Eventually the two are able to marry.

It is probably obvious to readers why this plotline may have led to the severe arsehurt of SJWs, given the parallels that can be drawn between it and the various faith-based ‘cures’ for homosexuality that were relatively popular in some parts of America until recently. This is not what actually happened though – instead multiple gaming blogs including Destructoid decided to run stories claiming that the game allowed players to drug and rape a lesbian woman, which then led to a massive moral panic within communities of SJW non-gamers. Thus it is easy to see from where the direction to remove this plotline may have come, however the game likely never had a chance given some of the people working on it – Nintendo’s Product Marketing Specialist [Alison Rapp] for instance. When news that Fire Emblem Fates had been censored broke to series fans, Alison Rapp made sure she was around on Twitter to inform them about just how unimportant games are:

“did you know that video games are not the most important things in the world

If u wanna have intelligent convos about games, you need to educate yourself on life & intersectional social issues totally outside of games.”

One imagines that Alison Rapp has never had an intelligent ‘convo’ about games in her life. As usual this will not be a game that one has any inclination to purchase. The content being cut does not seem to be overly integral to the game, but unnecessary censorship should be protested wherever it occurs.

One is intrigued to see the changes that have been made to the battle system since Duscae…

More Final Fantasy XV Tidbits

Given that Final Fantasy XV will be releasing in under a year it would be nice if the development team would just furnish us with all relevant information about the game’s systems, but one supposes the slow rate at which they dole out information is done deliberately so as to ensure a steady rate of news coverage. Perhaps more information would be able to mitigate some of the negative speculation surrounding this game. At any rate, the official English language site for Final Fantasy XV can actually be a source of valuable information on occasion, as members of the development staff are known to answer questions in the site’s forums. When asked about the huge floating city seen in trailers [Altissia], Final Fantasy XV planner, Ishikawa Tomonori, revealed that the location was fully explorable, and so large and labyrinthine that even the game’s developers get can get lost while trying to navigate it. Apparently there are shipbourne cafes and restaurants, markets, and even parks, and players are able to take gondola rides in order to see the sights. Tomonori mentions cafes and restaurants as places that players will enjoy discovering and visiting, continuing the development team’s slightly odd preoccupation with food. With the open world nature of the game one hopes that the team is somehow still able to make locations feel interactive and immersive, as it is better for content to be small but dense than large but sparse.

“Altissia has many and varied locations, such as multiple cafes, ship-bourne market places and parks etc. The city is of a considerable scale, to the extent that even the developers sometimes get lost there!

So we have created lots of different things to enjoy in Altissia and hope everyone is looking forward to visiting!“.

When asked about whether the game would feature multiple difficulty modes, Final Fantasy XV lead game designer, Takizawa Masashi, replied that difficulty can be adjusted by changing the battle mode. Apparently Square Enix have designed one battle mode for gamers who like action and another battle mode for gamers who like combat at a relaxed pace. ATB battle systems certainly allow gamers to enjoy combat at a relaxed pace, but one has zero confidence in Square Enix’s ability to make good decisions. Rather, this probably just means that the Final Fantasy XV team designed a version of its action battle system that is slowed-down and boring in order to accommodate the fact that the game’s regular fast paced battle system can feel borderline broken at times.

“The equivalent to difficulty level settings in FFXV is a system where you can switch between different battle modes. By having this ability to switch modes, we want to make it so that both players who like action oriented, technical gameplay and also those who want to fight at a slower, more relaxed pace can all enjoy the combat in their own style. This switching system is a key part of the gameplay that we decided to introduce based on the feedback we received from the Episode Duscae demo. We will go into more detail about the system closer to the game’s launch so stay tuned for more information.”

Sekko Boys is like the junk food of anime.

Anime Spotlight: Sekko Boys

How often is it that one finds an anime series that is its own original property, and not based on a previous manga? Sekko Boys is just that, and moreover it is deliciously funny. Miki Ishimoto is fresh out of art college, and is just starting in her new job within a talent agency. She is shocked to discover that the boy band she is to manage is comprised of four classical stone busts, as the agency prefers to handle stone busts rather than human celebrities. The band is comprised of the leader [Saint Gorgio], the original celebrity [Medici], the multitalented one [Hermes], and the lover [Mars].

The show itself is packed full of excellent humour, and there is an extremely low barrier to entry given that episodes are under ten minutes in duration. Sekko Boys began its run on January 8 2016, and new episodes are simulcast on Fridays at 8:40am PST. There are currently three episodes available, and the show comes highly recommended.

Amiibo make for fine toys…

Nintendo, Stop!

Oh my God, Nintendo, just stop. You are drunk. Have a cold drink of water and go home! Well – it was probably only a matter of time. With the tremendous success of Amiibo as unlock keys for non-essential game content, one initially hoped that Nintendo would remain mindful of just where the line in the sand should be drawn in order to prevent this situation from becoming a shitshow. After all, Nintendo deliberately manufactures Amiibo in such scarcity that obtaining them has even been likened to having sex with Jeffery Dahmer. Thus, assuming that not everybody will be able to have access to any given Amiibo, it would make sense not to lock vital game content behind their purchase, as jumping through the hoops necessary to obtain them is simply asking too much of the consumer.

One was initially completely on board with picking up a copy of March 4th’s release Twilight Princess HD, yet it seems of late Nintendo is able to take one’s most sincere purchase intent and set fire to it with gasoline. It would have been nice to pick up Xenoblade Chronicles X and Fatal Frame V, but Nintendo ruined both of those releases with unnecessary censorship at the behest of SJWs. Now Nintendo has taken the release of Twilight Princess HD, and have made it almost impossible to purchase on account of the company’s extreme greed.

Existing Zelda universe Amiibo may be used to unlock optional extras such as regenerating health and extra arrows, which is completely fine. This is how Amiibo should operate. However, one Amiibo is set to function differently to the rest of them, in that it is being used to lock away a substantial chunk of new gameplay. That Amiibo is ‘Wolf Link’, and it has been confirmed by Amazon France to lock away an entire dungeon known as The Twilight Cave. Obviously this new content is going to prove to be the strongest draw for any Wii U owner who has already completed the game, so it seems aggressively greedy and arrogant for Nintendo to demand that Zelda fans wanting to experience this content first buy a full price game and an Amiibo figurine. It would be disgusting if fans merely had to buy the game and accompanying toy at regular RRP, but Nintendo’s business model demands that many of them will have to purchase the latter at a >100% mark-up from scalpers. So fuck Nintendo.

[PICTURED]: Sony, stealing all our shit!

And Fuck Sony Too

Arrogant Sony are back! Sony are once again making a mockery of their Playstation 4 slogan ‘For the players’. What is the single most out of touch thing Sony could do? What would be the most brazen act they could perpetrate against the gaming community in order to take something away from ‘the players’ that ‘the players’ themselves brought to the table, not Sony. The answer to that is simply that Sony is attempting to trademark the concept of ‘Let’s Play’ videos. More precisely they are attempting to trademark ‘Let’s Play’ as it pertains to:

“Electronic transmission and streaming of video games via global and local computer networks; streaming of audio, visual, and audiovisual material via global and local computer networks.”

Sony intends to take something that was created by the gaming community for the gaming community away and make it their own corporate property. Given Nintendo’s gaming of Youtube copyright in order to control how people are able to stream Nintendo games, one can easily see a scenario wherein Sony will attempt to make it so that Youtubers will have to partner with Sony if they wish to monetise ‘Let’s Play’ videos. This would not matter to some of the smaller hobbyist Let’s Players, but for any Youtuber attempting to make an income from their streaming it is bound to hit hard. And what claim does Sony even have to this form of content? It was created by gamers, not by Sony. Gamers would have been more than happy to share, but Sony wants it all for themselves.

Really, the only hope here is that the body responsible for granting trademarks determines that the ‘Let’s Play’ concept is too broad for any one entity to trademark – and there is actually some hope here, as they have rebuffed Sony once already. Sony made their application for the ‘Let’s Play’ trademark on October 28 of 2015, but on the 29th of December it was knocked back on the grounds that further clarification was required. Sony have until the 29th of June 2016 to put together a more solid submission, else the trademark will be abandoned. At any rate, fuck Sony – this is some of the slimiest shit that one has seen outside of Zynga and King.

Hitman is more suited to an episodic release than Final Fantasy VII.

Square Enix Doubles down on Episodic Content for Hitman

In the wake of the revelation that Final Fantasy VII: Remake is going to be episodic content Square Enix appears to be really warming to this publishing model, so much so that after a few hiccups in relation to the development of Hitman Square Enix has decided to break the game up into component parts and sell it piecemeal. If readers are confused as to why one is reporting on the release of a game that came out over fifteen years ago, it is only because there needs to be a special hell set aside for people who decide to reboot a series using the same name as its initial entry. The reason that Hitman‘s 2016 iteration appears to have gone full episodic is in order for the team to have more time to develop each location. The base game was originally intended to come out in December of 2015, but ultimately it was not ready in time and got pushed back until March 11 2016. Now it would seem that even that additional development time was not sufficient, and only the first part of it will be released on the March release date.

“We decided to take the full leap and publish HITMAN as a truly episodic game experience. Part of that decision is for that little bit of extra time to ensure every location we release is at the quality level fitting for a HITMAN game. But the main driving reason is that this will allow us to create a living game that will expand and evolve over time and establish a foundation for the future – this is the first game in a storyline which will continue and expand with future Hitman games.”

To paraphrase the above statement: part of the reason for the episodic release is because IO Interactive needs more time to finish the game, but the main driving reason for an episodic release is because IO Interactive needs more time to finish the game. Okay.

When Final Fantasy VII: Remake was split into multiple parts that was a decidedly negative thing as it cannot help but hurt the structure and the pacing of the game, this will not necessarily prove to be the case with Hitman though. In terms of both structure and value the game remains a virtually identical proposition. The base game was originally intended to contain three sandbox environments and retail for $35 – and was later set to receive three additional DLC sandbox areas at $10 a piece. Now the prologue and first sandbox area will retail for $15, and each of the additional areas cost $10 a pop – with the retail disc being released at the end of the year. An episodic release is ideal for such a game, with its six self-contained environments each being able to be segmented into discrete episodes.

Square Enix’s strategy in this instance is mainly of interest because it highlights the desirability of tailoring a game’s release strategy to the requirements of the game itself, and not the other way around. It does this in two ways; firstly, the game’s release plans had to be completely redrawn because the deadline IO were given was not sufficient [which was also the case for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided], and secondly, Square Enix have decided to release the game in a way that is complimentary to its design. This is certainly not the case for other episodic material – as the format did not do much for the Half-Life 2 episodes, and it stands to absolutely blight the experience of Final Fantasy VII: Remake. A game’s release date should be determined not by marketing but by the developer themselves [within reason], and if a game is to be episodic then it should be designed in a modular way that compliments that kind of release. The latter will never be true of Final Fantasy VII: Remake. At any rate, Hitman‘s episodic structure is ideal for this author, as the first episode will likely prove more than enough game to satiate curiosity.

[PICTURED]: Anime in near realtime.

The Shittiness of 3D Anime Explained

Something a little different this week. Earlier in the week Anime News Network published a fascinating explanation as to why 3D anime often looks so janky in motion. Because of tight budgets, grueling schedules, and a dwindling workforce, anime employs a lot of cost cutting measures in order to stretch resources. This is primarily achieved by often using a far lower framerate than film, and also by offloading much of the animation work to either foreign animation studios or to domestic 3D animation – and here is where the problem arises.

When anime is created using conventional 2D methods much of the cost-cutting can be mitigated by the director having complete control over where it occurs. Some scenes will benefit more from a higher framerate than others, and in some instances there can even be different framerates operating within the same scene. 3D anime also cuts costs by lowering framerate, yet unlike 2D anime it is not currently possible for it to be produced using multiple different framerates. Because of this it tends to operate at a universally low framerate, which is why there is often a perceptible judder during high contrast scenes. Other than this, 3D cell-shaded anime can look quite beautiful, and is often indistinguishable from 2D animation when not in motion – yet because of its inflexibility 2D animation will continue to reign supreme until a solution can be found.

Fig backers and investors do not deserve to have their money treated with respect.

All Your Money Is Figged!

A fool and their money are easily parted, so what does that say about the idiot gamers who practically lined up to divest their hard-earned capital with Rabbi Schafer once again? Schafer’s track record with spending donator money is readily apparent at this point – he uses it no more sparingly or thoughtfully than if it were cheques from Activision. He expected backers to act with grace and compassion when he ran out of their money halfway through development, which they might have done if he did not squander their money on mediocre Hollywood voice talent – but it would seem there are plenty more fools where they came from.

We have all seen that former Double Fine COO, Justin Bailey, set up his own bespoke crowd funding platform called Fig in August of 2015, with Schafer on the advisory board [he also serves as a member of the advisory board of Fig’s parent company, Loose Tooth Industries]. We have seen that the company allows money for one project to be used on another, and we have also seen with Schafer’s own Psychonauts 2 campaign that he is able to freely extend the duration of a campaign’s funding period – but apparently none of this was enough to make gamers balk, as Psychonaut 2‘s asking price of 3.3 million has been funded within the last day or so.

However, all of this pales in comparison to what appears to be going on with the investor side of things. Previously investment laws required investors to possess a certain amount of capital before buying into investment schemes, but on May 16 of 2016 that safeguard is set to me stripped away – opening the floodgates for anyone with enough money to purchase a share. The first cab off the ranks [so to speak] of companies looking to capitalise on this new class of plebian investor is Fig, offering terms that would never fly with people who were experienced investors. Fig is entitled to freely share investor money around between projects just as it does with backer money, and moreover investors are not entitled to a red cent of a game’s earnings until the company has recouped their investment – it has been calculated that Psychonauts 2 will have to sell over seven hundred thousand copies [at full price] in order for investors to even make back their investment, much less see a profit. None of this is the worst part though.

The thing is that Fig is not just a funding platform, but also serves as publisher to any project that is successfully funded using the platform. As well as being a publisher Fig is also a shell corporation, and looks to have been deliberately designed to fail. The company carries twice as much debt as it does assets [120k in assets to 240k in liabilities], and Double Fine’s own accountants have already determined that it faces immanent collapse inside a year – indeed the only thing propping it up is the fact that its parent company, Loose Tooth Industries, continues [for the moment] to service its debt. Investor money is taken in by Fig Publishing, before being funneled through Fig Grasslands, and is ultimately delivered to its beneficiary [Double Fine]. Each of these is its own separate corporate entity, and only Fig Publishing holds any kind of responsibility towards investors.

In the event of a collapse developers get to keep the money invested in their projects without owing a single dime to investors, Loose Tooth Industries has no liability for squaring things away with Fig’s creditors and investors, and nor does Fig Grasslands for that matter. Meanwhile Fig investors are at the back of a very long queue when it comes to recouping funds through the sale of Fig’s meager assets, behind both creditors and Loose Tooth Industries themselves. In short Fig looks to have been designed so that its beneficiaries are able to raise millions of dollars from both backers and investors before pulling the pin on the entire operation and pocketing the money with impunity.

Investors are given no voting rights within the company, and they are not even able to trade their shares for between six and twelve months. Tim Schafer could quite literally use investor money to set up his daughter’s college fund and there would be nothing that investors could do about it. The game could even be completed, go on sale, and become a massive success – and still investors would not be owed any kind of dividend if the game is not published by Fig Publishing. This is truly the greatest shitshow on earth – and one only hopes that all of the Fig shills over at Polygon invest heavily in Psychonauts 2 so that they can be there when it all goes up in smoke!

It’s good to see Yoichi Wada back in the news! ^_^

Dark Clouds on the Horizon for Square Enix

The conventional thinking behind Square Enix’s perpetual cocktease of a Final Fantasy VII remake has long been that Square Enix were saving the game until the company was in deep financial dire straits as their ‘get out of jail free’ card. Thus, when Final Fantasy VII Remake was announced this author initially theorised that the company had gone way over budget on Final Fantasy XV, and that the company were not confident that the game was of anywhere near a high enough quality to recoup its costs – and thus Final Fantasy VII was required to right the ship. While one is still of a mind that Final Fantasy XV is probably a contributing factor in playing the Final Fantasy VII card, the decision seems to be more immediately based on at least one bad investment decision that Square Enix is being rightly punished for.

Gamers, by-and-large, are not interested in cloud-based gaming. It is the corporations who are interested in cloud gaming because it strips gamers of the last vestiges of game ownership, but gamers themselves are not interested in cloud gaming, ergo there is not much of a market for it. Why rent a game and have to deal with the technical hiccups of cloud gaming when the same titles can be had for cheap on Steam? This lack of gamer interest has not stopped corporations from pushing cloud gaming however, and readers may remember that back in 2014 Square Enix set up their own cloud gaming platform, Shinra Technologies, headed by former Square Enix president Yoichi Wada. The Shinra Technology site still proclaims it to be “The Next Evolution of Gaming”, but in truth it has proved to be more of a dead-end mutation than an evolution, and Square Enix has announced plans this week to dissolve the company after no external investors could be found.

“As a cloud platform operator, [Shinra] has been trying to raise funds necessary for further business operations from third party investors. However, [Shinra] has found no prospective investors at this point, and therefore has to discontinue its business.”

Shinra Technology Japan is set to be dissolved in June of 2016, while for some reason Shinra Technology’s New York headquarters cannot be dissolved until March 31st of 2019 [which marks the end of the 2018 financial year]. As a result of the dissolution of Shinra Technologies Square Enix is warning investors of a 2 billion Yen [or 16.8 million USD] extraordinary loss for the end of the 2015 financial year. That said, the operation of the New York headquarters is likely to be an ongoing drain on the company until it ceases to operate in 2019, unless of course its forward operating expenses have been written off as part of Square Enix’s 2015 extraordinary loss.

With this in mind, it is very easy to see how Square Enix’s decision to break Final Fantasy VII Remake into multiple parts has as much to do with them releasing the game ASAP for immediate liquidity as it does with them maximising profits by having gamers purchase multiple products at regular intervals. It is a cheap and nasty remake, the form of which has been influenced by Square Enix’s need to remedy a financial mistake. Thus, game content is set to be stretched like taffy and filled to the brim with filler content and busy work. At any rate, it certainly looks as though Yoichi Wada has finally gone the way of President Shinra!

Expect to see more environmental storytelling than lavish cutscenes (though expect to see plenty of those too)!

Final Fantasy XV Will Be like The Last of Us!

Final Fantasy XV director, Hajime Tabata, has been quite busy over the Christmas break period. Last week he was singing the praises of The Witcher III, before delivering the dire New Year’s Eve threat that gamers would definitely be blighted by Final Fantasy XV within the next calendar year. This week he went one step further in his praise of Western game design by directly comparing Final Fantasy XV‘s story to The Last of Us.

“We are really trying to aim for something where the gameplay and storytelling are really one in the same. It’s important that the story progresses through the gameplay in a very unforced way, in a similar way that it was done with The Last of Us, for example. The difference is Final Fantasy XV is a full RPG so you have a lot deeper, heavy and full story that shows the development of characters along a more broad angle.”

What he essentially seems to be saying is that Final Fantasy XV will feature a lot of environmental storytelling, along with scenario gameplay objectives which function as their own plot points. This might actually work out in Final Fantasy XV‘s favour if it is able to eliminate cutscenes that are as painful to watch as the ones endured in Final Fantasy XIII. That being said, it is one thing to accomplish environmental storytelling within linear experiences like The Last of Us or, say, Resident Evil 4, but it is quite another feat entirely to tell a coherent story in a game which lacks the funnel points that are inherent to linear game design. How does one tell an effective story if gamers may never even discover their meticulously crafted narrative tableau?

It is to this point that Hajime Tabata’s second nugget of Final Fantasy XV news for the week indirectly pertains, as he has claimed that Final Fantasy XV will have the best of both worlds when it comes to linear VS openworld styles of game design. Though whether anything can ever truthfully be described as ‘the best of both worlds’ when it is so clearly a compromise does seem somewhat dubious.

“Each region will move the journey forward. How the story is handled, it’s not 100 percent pure open-world, but it’s also not a pull along the rails kind of story. It’s very much a hybrid of those two styles, which I think is the best of both of them.

As you travel through each region, you’ll see different kinds of enemies and will take different paths that make you do unique things in each one of them. As you move through each region, the options for character growth and the different skills will start branching out as well.”

Ideally what this approach to game design would mean is that the game would feature many discreet indoor locations which are designed as linear environments [much like all the locations in Arkham Knight]. What Tabata really means though is that there will be occasional bits of gameplay which change things up a little, like the Behemoth stalking section of the Episode Duscae demo. If Tabata is unable to take this approach drastically further than it was presented in Episode Duscae, then one will be unable to concede that it constitutes ‘the best of both worlds’ in any aspect other than disappointment.

Kids can catch crooks too!

Anime Double Vision: Case Closed / The File of Young Kindaichi Returns

Sometimes an anime can give every appearance of being a cynical cash-in on a currently popular anime series, yet other times animes can share a virtually identical premise on account of nothing more than sheer happenstance. The latter is almost certainly the case with The File of Young Kindaichi Returns and Case Closed [AKA Detective Conan], both of which are part of Crunchyroll’s Winter 2016 Season Simulcast, and both of which date back to the early 1990s. The File of Young Kindaichi Returns follows Hajime Kindaichi, the grandson of a famous detective, who appears to be a regular high school student, but helps the police to solve any big crime that crops up. Case Closed follows Shinichi Kudo, the son of a famous mystery writer, who appears to be a regular school kid, but assists local police as a student detective! As readers can probably imagine this author did a double take after perusing the synopsis of both these shows while bumming around on Crunchyroll. The File of Young Kindaichi Returns is simulcast on Saturdays at 4:00am, and Case Closed is simulcast on Saturdays at 12:00pm. It is a bit of a shame that the shows are not simulcast a little closer together, as they would make a hell of a double feature!

This is how I’d love to see Square Enix go about mastering the game’s backgrounds…

Final Fantasy IX Is Coming to PC

Final Fantasy IX is coming to the PC – talk about an ambiguous statement. Square Enix has today launched a product page and trailer for Final Fantasy IX, which lists the game as “coming soon” for PC, iOS, and Android. This could either be the best thing ever, or the typical niggardly Square Enix cash grab. A native PC port of Final Fantasy IX presents Square Enix with the opportunity to significantly update one of their very best games in a way that keeps it relevant going forward, which in turn will allow them to continue selling it into the future. The resolution of 3D game assets can be easily displayed at a higher resolution in order to make them look acceptable by modern standards, yet the pre-rendered 240p backgrounds are not so easily upgraded, and tend to look quite pixelated when displayed at higher resolutions. The one glimmer of hope [faint though it may be] is that the studio responsible for porting the game will be able to use various filters and edge enhancing techniques in order to remaster the game’s backgrounds. Capcom was able to do this to stunning effect when remastering Resident Evil‘s already beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds, though it would be prudent to not go in expecting as much from Square Enix [because they are whores and also bone lazy]. Still, any improvement to visual fidelity would be greatly appreciated by the game’s fanbase, even if it merely consists of an optimal method of scaling the game’s low resolution imagery to display on HD displays.

I’d like to see Square Enix deliver something a little closer to how I remember the game looking in 2000…

The one Reason to hold out hope that Square Enix might address the game’s graphical elements is that there is no existing PC port of Final Fantasy IX, meaning that if they want to produce a native version of the game then they will have to convert all game assets from the original PS1 title, which in turn will require the team to consider how to best go about that. That being said, Square Enix may not necessarily be looking to create a native PC version of the game, and may instead be looking to just dump the PS1 ISO into a nasty emulation wrapper and call it a day. Fuck glitches get money. The cheap and nasty emulation option will mostly look fine on diminutive smartphone screens, so if this is the crowd that Square Enix are after then the PC version might have just been thrown in as an afterthought. This is the company which famously released horrendously ugly flash graphics smartphone versions of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI onto Steam, so it is entirely possible that they do not give two shits about the user-experience of PC owners. At any rate, until Square Enix fucks us yet again there is at least the faint glimmer of hope that they will do right by fans in presenting Final Fantasy IX in a way that looks acceptable on modern TVs and monitors.

Funnily enough Lightning actually looks more tangible than the stick-thin wraiths that model this clothing in RL.

Tetsuya Nomura, Please Quit Your Day Job

Just lately Tetsuya Nomura has taken some time out of his busy schedule of wrecking Final Fantasy VII in order to pursue a project closer to his heart – namely fashion. This week it was revealed that Louis Vuitton’s artistic director, Nicolas Ghesquière, had partnered up with Tetsuya Nomura and Visual Works [Square Enix’s bespoke CG studio] in order to put together Luis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer 2016 “Series 4” prêt-à-porter line – a line which is distinguished not only by the fact that it sounds like an expensive French toilet, but also by the fact that the garments are being modeled by Final Fantasy XIII‘s Lightning.

Arguably, this is a role much more suited to the stoic Lightning, as it does not require her to say a single thing. Inarguably, this is a role more suited to Nomura, who has always been more interested in visual design than making games that are fun to play. Whatever the case, Lightning certainly proved more fetching in Luis Vuitton garb than the half-emaciated child models employed to parade these wares in RL, so they might actually be onto something with this fashion/gaming partnership. Regardless, one hopes that this proves to be a smashing success for this creative union, so that Tetsuya Nomura can begin the next stage of his career: as a designer of high fashion, mercifully free from the strictures and limitations of the world of video game design.

One hopes that NeoGaf is prepared to buy enough Playstation VRs to keep the market viable!

Virtual Banality

This Christmas VR enthusiasts have been given a rare treat by Sony, in that Sony has just sent out the Playstation VR development kits into the wild, meaning that ample online pictures and documentation of the hardware now abounds – and boy were Sony not kidding when they said that they planned on selling Playstation VR as though it were its own console! Apparently sensory deprivation was not enough of a burden when playing vidya in a room full of people, now Sony wants to tether the head of every VR enthusiast to a small brick so as to prevent them from just drifting up and away, buoyed as they are by a headful of high ideals!

Playstation VR will not simply connect to the PS4, but rather it will connect to its own console [it is roughly the size of a Wii], which will then connect to the PS4. Apparently the brick even has a processor which runs hot enough to require an exhaust fan for cooling. One might very well ask why Playstation VR requires any sort of brick, and why such a brick would require its own cooling solution; and the answer to that is very simple. The Playstation 4 was never intended to support VR – and so the console must be jerry-rigged in order to play host to this parasitic technology.

In order for a video game to be enjoyed on a nice big TV thirty frames of animation per second serves as the bare minimum standard, while sixty frames of animation will provide users with a good experience. On the other hand requirements for virtual reality gameplay are in a whole different league, as thirty frames of animation per second while using VR will make many people physically ill on account of there being very perceptible lag between a user’s head movements and the visual representation of that movement displayed by the goggles. The absolute bare minimum acceptable framerate when using VR is 60fps, yet in order to have an actually good VR experience something in the order of 90-120fps is required. Because of this Sony engineers built the Playstation VR headset with a 120hz display, the only problem being the PS4 struggles to consistently output any framerate higher than 30fps [and sometimes it struggles even then]. Thus, the Playstation VR brick is an alchemy box which Sony claims will scale the PS4’s framerate up to 120fps by taking existing frames of animation and using them to create a composite image which is then slotted between them as though it were another unique frame of animation. Needless to say one is all rather dubious about the efficacy of Playstation VR’s alchemy brick, because if boosting a console’s framerate was so easily done then Sony would not even have to produce the Playstation VR, as people would be willing to buy the brick alone for a less janky 120hz console experience.

One punch!

New 2016 Anime from ‘One Punch Man’ Creator – Mob Psycho 100

Get ready to be excite! In December it was confirmed that Mob Psycho 100 would be adapted into an anime series by animation studio, Bones. This is significant on two counts. Firstly, Mob Psycho 100 was created by One, the guy behind One Punch Man, which was probably the biggest hit of the 2015 anime schedule [at least in the West]. Secondly, Bones is the studio responsible for producing 2003’s superb adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist, meaning that the project is being handle by a studio that is both seasoned and competent.

Mob Psycho 100 follows the daily life of Kageyama Shigeo, a middle-schooler who is so bland and unassuming that he has been nicknamed Mob [which appears to be the Japanese equivalent for ‘John Doe’]. Appearances can be deceiving however, as Mob is far from the average student on account of his powerful ESP abilities. Mob was able to bend spoons with his mind from an early age, yet began to reject his abilities because of the negative attention they were bringing him. As such he has been doing his best to eschew his powers by regulating his emotions since early childhood, which is part of the reason that he appears so bland and emotionless. Despite this apparent lack of use, Mob’s powers have grown to apocalyptic proportions by time he has reached middle school, but of course that only becomes pertinent if and when his emotions are pushed over the edge and he loses control. Good thing then that Mob spends his days in middle school, where nothing bad ever happens!

Fans of One Punch Man will definitely want to watch out for this show, especially considering the premise of both shows sound so similar to one another. That is to say that One appears to enjoy writing protagonists who are aggressively mundane in superficial terms, yet are also capable of wielding the power of a god. Given the relative newness of the show’s announcement, this author would expect it to begin airing no sooner than mid-2016 – so look forward to some mid-year awesomeness!

The Final Fantasy battle system – now with steak!

Square Enix Are Wary about Persona 5

Does anyone else remember when mainline Final Fantasy titles used to be the biggest releases of any given year’s gaming calendar? No? Well that is hardly surprising seeing as it has been an age since that was the case. At any rate at one point in time that was the case, before Square Enix started trashing the Final Fantasy brand after becoming bored with making JRPGs. Squaresoft and Enix each used to do one thing well – produce industry leading JRPGs. Following the merger this was no longer the case, as the company lurched from attempting to turn Final Fantasy into a shooter [Dirge of Cerberus] to an RTS [Revenant Wings], but none of it came off well. The years of bait-and-switch have certainly taken their toll, and never was that so apparent than this week.

The zeal of fanboyism is such that developers are rarely ever punished for just one bad game. Happily though, if an audience is let down repeatedly and consistently over a protracted period of time, then it will eventually harm the the performance of future product releases. This is what has happened to Final Fantasy. Last week this author specualted that Square Enix appeared to lack confidence in the potential of Final Fantasy XV, owing to the fact that they were going all out to promote the existence of Final Fantasy VII Demake at the expense of the soon-to-be-released Final Fantasy XV. This week one is even more comfortable making that diagnosis, as Square Enix is clearly worried about the effect that launching too close to the Persona 5 release date will have on Final Fantasy XV game sales.

This week Square Enix has sent out a survey to Japanese customers in order to ascertain whether they are Persona fans, and whether they would be inclined to purchase Persona 5 ahead of Final Fantasy XV. This is a clear indication that Square Enix are concerned about the sales of Persona 5 eating into the sales of Final Fantasy XV. This also means that Square Enix predict that they will have Final Fantasy XV finished in time for an early 2016 release, but are considering delaying the release so that it will not have to go up against competition. At one time Square Enix would hardly even have to consider what other games they put the latest Final Fantasy up against, but now days they are right to be fearful of the outcome of putting Final Fantasy up against Persona. Atlus is a studio that understands who it is that they are making games for, and they have always done right by Persona fans. A gamercentric approach has helped grow the Persona brand into a huge multi-media money earner, including fighting games, rhythm games, and some well received anime. Persona 5 is not so big that it will best the sales of Final Fantasy XV, but it is big enough that it would put quite a dent in them. As such, it is quite prudent of Square Enix to have so little faith in Final Fantasy XV when put up against Persona 5.

Tom Braider has been held back through the sheer incompetence of his parent company.

Rise of the Tomb Raider’s Exclusivity Was Only Meant to Be for 4-6 Months

Square Enix’ Final Fantasy XV fears were not even the full extent of the embarrassing revelations to escape the company this week, as it would seem that Rise of the Tomb Raider‘s Xbone exclusivity was even more of a drastic own goal than many people had predicted. To recap, Square Enix initially announced Rise of the Tomb Raider as a multiplatform title, before Microsoft began throwing around their cash, and Square Enix decided that they wanted some of those shekels. It turns out that was a very bad bet on the part of Square Enix, as the PS4 went on to perform much better than the Xbox One, and the PS4 port will not perform nearly as well as it could have when it releases a year late. When Tomb Raider (2013) released it was able to sell five million copies across Xbox 360, PS3, and PC; when that same game was later re-released for next gen consoles the Xbone version was able to sell 450,000 copies. Since its release on November 10 Rise of the Tomb Raider has sold just 500,000 copies on the Xbone – a mere 50,000 more copies than the re-release of an old game. Rise of the Tomb Raider is a trainwreck and the PS4 version is not set to bolster its sales for almost another eleven months. One would not know anything were amiss to hear Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg talk about it though:

“It launched in a very crowded window, but it has done well. A lot of people bought both Fallout 4 and Tomb Raider. At the same time we know a lot of people may have bought Tomb Raider and wait on Fallout or bought Fallout and waited on Tomb Raider.”

Nobody waited on Fallout. One is tempted to say that Xboners waited on Rise of the Tomb Raider, only that seems to imply that they actually plan on buying Tomb Raider which is far from certain.

Here is the crazy thing though, multiple Square Enix insiders have claimed this week that the original exclusivity deal entailed Rise of the Tomb Raider‘s Xbone exclusivity lasting a mere 4-6 months, meaning that the PS4 version was originally intended to launch alongside the PC port in early 2016. After the initial exclusivity announcement Square Enix went dark on all discussion of a PS4 port, which generated a strong and persistent backlash against them. Out of a desire to mitigate this backlash Square Enix convinced themselves that they had to confirm to PS4 owners that their port was still in development, however their agreement with Microsoft prevented them from doing so until the exclusivity period had ended. Square Enix and Microsoft went back to the negotiating table, and it was decided that Square Enix could talk about the PS4 version if they were willing to extend Rise of the Tomb Raider‘s exclusivity to a full twelve months – prolonging the game’s release by roughly 6-8 months! Good call, Square Enix!

How could any one man be so punchable?

The Week in Crowdfunding Fraud

Lusipurr.com readers may have been a little surprised earlier today to discover that after all these years Coleco [of Colecovision fame] was on the verge of releasing a new console: the Coleco Chameleon. It is amusing that the team decided to go with calling their console the ‘Chameleon’, given that it is literally just the Retro VGS console masquerading as a successor to the Coleco consoles. The first time around the Retro VGS was unsuccessful in its bid to be crowd funded on account of the fact that a prototype of the console had not even been designed [much less built], not to mention these knuckle-heads were demanding three-hundred dollars for it. The team plan to take the Coleco Chameleon to Kickstarter in the new year.

In other news, last week Lusipurr.com warned readers about the massive conflict of that Tim Schafer created when he took his Psychonauts 2 project to FIG crowdfunding platform, seeing as he is a FIG consultant as well as an investor in FIG’s parent company. This week we have seen Schafer arbitrarily adjust the campaign counter to give himself thirty-seven days instead of thirty-two. Moreover, it has been discovered that any money donated to a specific FIG project can be used on that company’s other projects freely. The games media that should be warning consumers are all busy shilling for the Psychonauts 2 campaign, and several of them are likely investors. How have these people not been arrested?

Gotta go fast!

Anime Spotlight: Prince of Stride – Alternative

The extreme sport of ‘Stride’ involves teams of six people striding around a city in a sort of parkour-based relay race. Takeru Fujiwara and Nana Sakurai are first years attending Honan Academy, but when they get there they discover that the Honan Stride team has been shut down. Fujiwara and Sakurai must restart the Honan Stride team and recruit six members if they want to win the ‘End of Summer’, which is the top Stride competition that all the local schools will be vying to win. Interestingly, rather than being based on an existing manga, Prince of Stride – Alternative is based upon a visual novel on the PS Vita. The anime is set to feature the same voice acting cast as the game. Prince of Stride – Alternative begins its run on the 5th of January, 2016 – though the series does not appear to have been licensed for simulcast outside of Japan, meaning that one might have to view it on a streaming site that is a mite more dubious than Crunchyroll or Funimation if one is so inclined. Anime Box is a good choice, assuming that it adds the series.

That #%&$ pizza makes for some pretty unsettling scenery…

Square Enix Is the Ultimate Corporate Troll

The Final Fantasy VII Remake [‘Remake’ is officially part of the game’s title FYI] was only announced six months ago, and already it has exceeded all of Lusipurr.com’s most pessimistic predictions. It was announced this week that the game has been broken into multiple episodic releases, no doubt looking to channel the winning formula of Tim Schafer. The game has been broken into several pieces, let that sink in. According to a Kitase/Nomura Famitsu interview this week, it was necessary to break the game into multiple parts because the original release of Final Fantasy VII had too great a volume to be faithfully replicated with today’s technology without making cuts to content, so rather than cutting content the team has decided to break the remake into multiple parts. But not to worry Final Fantasy fans, as the project being broken into multiple parts will allow the team to add much more volume to each part, so that each release will be the size of a full game. Unfortunately however, this added volume will mean that some parts of the original game will have to be cut. One is not even kidding. Square Enix will be cutting content and then filling the holes with Square Enix bloat – the Final Fantasy VII Remake team sound as though they have borrowed liberally from the design philosophy that Peter Jackson employed in making The Hobbit film trilogy.

“If we were to try to fit everything from the original into one remake installment, we would have to cut various parts and create a condensed version of FINAL FANTASY VII. We knew none of you would have wanted that.” ~ Kitase

“For example, you’ll get to explore various parts of Midgar that you weren’t able to in the original version; however, in order to do that, it would need to be pretty dense. Of course, that also means that some parts will be cut from the game, but overall they’re adding much more to it.” ~ Nomura

So Square Enix will be cutting old content and adding new content, which they plan on over-encumbering the project with to such a degree as to make each episodic installment the length of a full game [each episode confirmed for full price BTW] – but beyond any subjective feelings that one might have towards the balance between old and new content, it has to be wondered whether anyone involved with the project ever stopped to ask themselves whether adjusting the game’s balance of content is actually a good thing, even if all of the added content is uniformly excellent. Less is often more. The reason that so many of us fell in love with Final Fantasy VII back in 1997 was due to the breathless pacing of the many strands of its plot. The game never bogged itself down in any one place for too long, and there seemed to be a new substantive event scene around every corner. Square Enix are proposing to take this game structure and bog it down with endless reams of sidequests, ensuring that the game’s events slow to a crawl and its locations overstay their welcome. Literally nobody asked for this shit because it is not a shit worth taking.

[Real Talk]: Modern Square Enix is a company that loves to split their high profile games into multiple releases in order to maximise profits. They did it with Fabula Nova Crystallis, they did it with the Final Fantasy VII Polymorphic Content (TM), They did it with Kingdom Hearts, and they even did it to a lesser degree with Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy: Type-0. Now they are announcing their intention to do exactly the same thing with Final Fantasy VII Remake, splitting it into multiple parts and selling them at full price. So which Square Enix game is the odd one out here? It is Final Fantasy XV, right? Square Enix have already promised that there are not going to be any sequels to that game – why? When Square Enix first announced that Final Fantasy XV would be a stand alone title, many gamers interpreted it as a good faith move on their part in trying to provide a single satisfying experience, yet in the wake of this Final Fantasy VII Remake announcement it is beginning to look like a tacit acknowledgement that they have produced a turd. Why else announce multiple Final Fantasy VII Remake projects a full year [or more] before Final Fantasy XV releases, and then compound it with the release of substantial in-game footage? Square Enix wants the investors to know that Final Fantasy XV is not the future of the company.

This engine only goes where its tracks take it…

Crazy Train

It is probably a good thing that the characters of Final Fantasy VII tend to have hair that is short, spikey, or otherwise clumped together, as Square Enix has confirmed this week that Final Fantasy VII Remake will use the Unreal Engine 4, and we all know how Unreal Engine 3 handled hair follicles [which is to say that it did not]. As if Final Fantasy XV was not looking like enough of a developmental dead end, Nomura has decided to forego the custom-built Lumious Engine in favour of off-the-shelf middleware. One has not actually played a game developed on Unreal Engine 4 as of yet, and at this point it is more or less unknown whether the large-scale use of it will result in an entire generation of games looking horribly samey, the way it did with Unreal Engine 3. Square Enix are also using the Unreal Engine 4 middleware to create Kingdom Hearts III and Dragon Quest XI, so it is possible that their experiences with the engine thus far have proved to be very positive. That being said, one cannot help but recall Square Enix’s disastrous experience developing The Last Remnant on Unreal Engine 3.

“We realize how special Final Fantasy VII is to fans, and we place our trust in Unreal Engine 4 technology and tools to help deliver this long-awaited remake, crafted for modern platforms. Working with the team at Epic and having their support throughout this process was invaluable and we’re excited to bring the product of that collaboration to long-time fans and newcomers to the series.”

And so at long last we finally see an end to the era of top-tier Final Fantasy games being made using bespoke game engines. One has no idea how robust the Unreal Engine 4 will ultimately prove to be, but the reason that some development studios have traditionally opted to build their own engines is because middleware has to cater to everyone, which means that it is software that is not designed with a specific purpose in mind. Unreal Engine 3 was an extremely flexible seventh generation game engine, but it could not render character hair to save its life and its suitability for creating RPGs was dubious at best.

I are sick of Square Enix trying to ruin this game.

More Tragic than Magic

Finally, with the release of Final Fantasy VII Remake gameplay footage last weekend came the worst news of all – the game’s battle system has been completely butchered, and it is almost a worst case scenario. One says almost because at the very least it is not Final Fantasy XV. Rather, the battle system is pretty much a direct transplant from Kingdom Hearts, and this is not to say one of the later Kingdom Hearts games where the battle system has been fixed so that players could cycle between magic with L and R and then execute spells with a dedicated button. No, this looks pretty much like a direct transplant from the original Kingdom Hearts title, where players would have to rummage through menus in order to select spells to cast even as the fast paced action gameplay continued around them in earnest. The magic system was so cumbersome and unintuitive as to be effectively useless – everyone who played Kingdom Hearts was presented with a choice; either rely on melee combat or fail miserably, and Final Fantasy VII Remaster looks to be much the same. The only apparent difference between the Final Fantasy VII Remaster and Kingdom Hearts battle systems is that the remaster will have an ATB bar. The ATB bar will not actually determine when players are able to attack, so it will probably just serve as a stamina bar like in the Final Fantasy XIII games. The Kingdom Hearts battle system is extremely barebones so any added complexity is very welcome, but as additional strategy goes a tacked on ATB status bar is extremely marginal.

“It might not be as much of an action title as say Dissidia Final Fantasy on arcade or the Kingdom Hearts series, but it leans more towards there.

There is an ATB gauge, but it won’t be like the original version where you get to attack when the gauge fills up, but an action-based system that can only be done through the Final Fantasy VII Remake.”

Materia was absolutely central to the narrative of Final Fantasy VII, which is why it was only proper that the use of magic was integral to the core gameplay. One of the joys of that game was selecting all the right combinations of materia in order to maximise the attack stat of some characters while maximising the magic stat of others. It was a supremely flexible system where any character could serve any role, and, along with Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy VII can probably be said to have the most malleable and adaptable character progression system of the entire series. Square Enix have taken this strong foundation and thrown it unceremoniously out of the window. Unless Final Fantasy VII Remaster has a mechanic to slow in-game time while players select spells then the game’s entire magic system will be completely useless and largely go unused. Sure, it may still be worth a player’s time to summon an Ifrit or cast a cure, but it will likely be much more intuitive to just wail on enemies with Cloud’s Buster Sword than to exploit an enemy’s elemental weakness with magic. Nomura had one job, and he has fucked it.

Wherein evil roams the lands!

Anime Assblast: Garo – Guren no Tsuki

In the Imperial capitol evil has swept the land. Every night when dusk falls dark spirits [called horrors] roam the towns and streets, while the citizens cower in their abodes – lucky for them these lands are under the protection of that gold plated dog-monster from Power Rangers and some faggot with a lute. This is the general gist of the plot as best as one can figure it, though coherent writing is not exactly Garo‘s strong suit – nor is entertainment for that matter. Being a bit shit is Garo – Guren no Tsuki‘s strong suit. As the current anime season marches on, reserves of untapped anime goodness are beginning to dwindle, leaving behind dreck in their wake, and boy is Garo – Guren no Tsuki ever dreck.

This 26 episode run of Garo – Guren no Tsuki follows on from the 24 episode run of Garo – Honō no Kokuin in 2014. Inexplicably there has been two large-scale seasons of anime produced from this horrible slop. Garo began its run on October the ninth, and there is currently ten episodes available on Funimation where it is simulcast. Check out Garo – Guren no Tsuki if you enjoy being bored.

This man is a fraud!

Do Not Give Money to Tim Schafer

Tim Schafer is at it again! In 2012 Tim Schafer’s Double Fine made Kickstarter history by pulling in more than 3.3 million dollars, but it was not long before Schafer, a notoriously poor budgeter, ran into money troubles. Schafer then cut the Broken Age project in half, and put half of the game up on Steam Early Access in the hopes that it could pay for the remainder of the production. It does not seem as though the game made a whole heap of money on Early Access, because the second half of the game was comprised almost entirely of assets from the first half of the game, and is widely held to be excessively truncated, with an ending that shocked players in that it came from nowhere.

This is all a very round-a-bout way of saying that Tim Schafer’s handling of money is a running joke. The man is a joke. His credibility is shot. He could not expect to return to crowdfunding and meet the same kind of success. Queue nostalgia. Ten years ago Double Fine released the only good game they have ever made, Psychonauts. The game was not uniformly good, but the characters were charming and the overworld was fun to explore. And thus Schafer has deployed the prospect of Psychonauts 2 in order to once again get at free gamer money – 3.3 million dollars to be precise. This time around Schafer has not even gone the Kickstarter route, possibly because he has yet to even deliver campaign tier rewards for Broken Age backers, and has instead opted to create his own crowdfunding page – which should inspire gamers with confidence.

Schafer could not make a 2D point and click adventure for 3.3 million dollars so it is inconceivable to think that he will be able to produce a robust 3D platformer on the same budget. Even if Schafer is able to tap external investment partners for a matching contribution, the project is still an order of magnitude more dubious than even Shenmue III, since at least Yu Suzuki is competent. Disappointingly, the game has already raised 1.2 million dollars with thirty-four days to go, meaning that unless something calamitous befalls the campaign it will be funded. On the other hand, the surfeit of idiots willing to bankroll Schafer’s buffoonery do at least enable the rest of us to pull up a chair and enjoy the trainwreck. At any rate, one is predicting it now: Schafer will squander at least half of all funds raised on hiring his celebrity friends.

Club Nintendo – no seriously, club them!

NX Is Thought to Launch Mid-2016

Big news out of Nintendo this week, this time by way of component suppliers for the NX. Nintendo is allegedly gearing up to begin mass producing NX consoles at the end of the first quarter of 2016, so as to begin shipments during the second quarter of 2016, to go on sale mid-2016. This is obviously a lot sooner than many people had anticipated. With the Wii U Nintendo sent out devkits about a year and a half prior to launch, yet with the NX they only went out quite recently, giving developers around eight or nine months to develop launch software. This suggests that the NX launch library will look pretty scant. More surprising [and hilarious] than Nintendo’s launch schedule is that their plan was to have twenty million consoles ready to sell on launch. Component suppliers have shed some doubt on this possibility, indicating that available components may limit Nintendo to only producing something in the vicinity of twelve million units for launch. What were Nintendo even going to do with twenty million units? Were they looking to produce all the consoles they could ever sell up front?

If the NX truly combines both console and handheld hardware then Nintendo’s thinking may be that they stand to sell enough NX units to equal the launch of both a Nintendo console and a Nintendo handheld, but even then twelve million units is probably an overgenerous estimate of required stock. Especially given Nintendo’s treatment of Wii U owners. The Wii U’s failure was wholly of Nintendo’s own making, and largely down to grotesque amounts of hubris on their part. That being said, Wii U owners have long since forgiven Nintendo’s mistake, and have shown themselves to be, by and large, content to enjoy the Wii U with realistic expectations for what it is. What Wii U owners did require though was that Nintendo support their console as best they could with what they had – and this is truly where Nintendo failed. Instead what Wii U owners got was Nintendo censoring bikinis in their mature-rated games at the behest of SJWs, and being price gouged in the most niggardly and arbitrary of ways. Nintendo’s treatment of the people who stuck by them when they were down does very little to inspire confidence in their NX console. Nintendo has made it abundantly clear that their consoles are not intended for adults, while today’s children tend to prefer their gaming on smartphones. Nintendo does not have an audience. They will not need twenty million NX consoles in 2016. They will likely not need twenty million NX consoles in 2017, or ever.

Yes, but at what price?

PS2 Classics Are Upon Us

From tomorrow PS4 owners will now be able to purchase PS2 Classics from PSN, a service that has been in high demand since the launch of the console. These will not be mere vanilla PS2 Classics as seen on the PS3, but will instead be presented in HD resolution along with a higher framerate in instances where that will not break the game in question. There is set to be eight titles available at the launch of this service. Six of the titles are priced at [the higher than usual] $14.99, and include Dark Cloud, Rogue Galaxy, The Mark of Kri, Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Was three Grand Theft Auto titles really necessary? Rounding out this number are two titles priced at $9.99 – Twisted Metal: Black and War of the Monsters.

Here is where the good news ends. One doubts that anybody seriously thought that PS4 owners would be able to put their physical PS2 discs into the console and have them work like Xbones do with 360 discs, but surely Sony would honour the previous purchase of PS2 Classics on the PS3?! Well, not so much as it turns out. It has been revealed that the two libraries of PS2 Classics will not be compatible or transferable. This stinks, and is mean to the point of mirroring Nintendo’s business practices. In most cases people have already bought these games physically the first time around, they then have to subsequently purchase them digitally [fine] in order to take these titles along with them within the Playstation ecosystem – but at this point they rightly expect to never have to purchase this software again. Speaking personally, one owns an armload of PS1 Classics that have yet to even be played – they were purchased simply to fill out one’s collection. Now PS4 owners will probably be expected to repurchase their entire PS1 libraries too! unacceptable! Fuck! Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida has promised the regular release of further PS2 Classics over the coming weeks and months:

“We will be working tirelessly to bring you your favorite PS2 games with new releases on a regular basis”

Do not look for Final Fantasy XII to be added to this list, as Square Enix continues to pussyfoot around the question of whether or not to release it as a HD remaster. At any rate, one is very glad to have never bought a PS2 Classic on PS3 due to hard drive space. One will be seriously fucked off if PS1 Classics are non-transferable, assuming that PS1 emulation even comes to the PS4.

DD Fist of the North Star II promises more adorable slaughter.

DD Fist of the North Star II

DD [design deformation] Fist of the North Star II is the follow-up to [as one might expect] 2013’s DD Fist of the North Star. Readers will need little explanation of the post-apocalyptic epic, Fist of the North Star, which sees protagonist, Kenshiro, brutally obliterating various bandits and ravagers in a nuclear wasteland. DD Fist of the North Star is the SD telling of the legend of the Fighting NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) North Star. The series is set in an alternate timeline wherein the nuclear war of 199X never occurred, and the characters now live in modern day peacetime Japan, with Kenshiro working in a convenience store.

DD Fist of the North Star II‘s run began on the 6th of October. There are twenty-four episodes planned, with nine episodes currently available. The series is simulcast by Crunchyroll on Tuesdays at 10:45am PST.

In 2013 Bravely Default’s Happy Merchant class was not considered overly problematic…

Cowardly Default

Everything fun and frivolous in daily life is being quickly eroded. Hot on the heels of numerous completely retarded college costume crises over the course of Halloween 2015, comes Square Enix’s latest genius decision to outsource all creative decisions to America’s adult campus babies. Apparently the act of dressing up as an old-timey Indian as a bit of fun is now to be treated as though it were as much of an affront as erecting a burning cross in front of a black ‘safe space’ while pinching out a poop swastika. Never mind that tee-pee Indians serve as an inextricable vein of our Western pop culture identity, never mind the central role they play in historic retellings of how the West was won and the founding of the United States of America, and never mind the fact that we all played cowboys and Indians when we were young. No, dressing up as an Indian is literally worse than Hitler, and this is the message that Square Enix took to heart when deciding to censor Bravely Second.

Given the current climate of censorship on the Wii U, one feels pretty comfortable in saying that this decision has Nintendo’s fingerprints all over it. That being said, Bravely Second, unlike its predecessor, is being published by Square Enix rather than Nintendo, so we cannot conclude for a fact that Nintendo is to blame. Whatever the case, one of the parties concerned has decided that the class of Tomahawk is too ‘problematic’ for Western audiences, and so the class has been unceremoniously transformed into the Cowboy class, which apparently is not considered to be cultural appropriation for use in a Japanese game on account of being derived from white culture. Identity politics, people, get with the program! Nintendo has! It is right about now that the people looking forward to Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem should be becoming extremely anxious.

A little bit of peeping never hurt anyone!

‘Problematic’ Blade & Soul Quest Censored into Blatant Propaganda

One would love to report that the censorship of one of Bravely Second‘s job classes was the only censorship news for the week, but sadly that is not the case. This story carries with it echoes of the Prison School debacle from several months ago, in that it sees a writer on the localisation team working on NCsoft’s martial arts MMO, Blade & Soul, making the decision to completely violate another person’s creative work in order to push an agenda. This is a move that has not gone over at all well with gamers, not least on account of NCsoft’s previous promises that the game would not be subject to censorship. Needless to say that all discussions pertaining to the game’s censorship have been banned on the official Blade & Soul forums, because attempting to suppress the spread of inconvenient information worked out so well for Mrs Streisand!

In the business of localisation the localisation team has one job, and that is to translate the spirit of the original content as accurately as possible. Sometimes this may involve changing particular details to provide Western consumers with a more intuitive frame of reference, or it may involve substituting one joke or turn of phrase with another, so as to make sense in a foreign market, but this small degree of creative freedom does not grant license for writers to transform the work into their own personal fanfiction. Such a thing appears to have happened during the Blade & Soul localisation process.

The questline in question was altered by the localisation team’s lead writer, known on the Blade & Soul forums as Last Writer Standing [which is presumably their only qualification for the job], who found it to be ‘uncomfortable’. It involves an NPC who is an impotent pervert that tasks the player with carrying out various quests to cure his impotency. Several quests involve the player obtaining aphrodisiacs and home remedies to cure the NPC’s impotency, but the questline culminates in the NPC spying on a group of Lycandi as they bathe, and instructing the player to steal their clothes so that they will be unable to dress upon emerging. This is fairly harmless stuff, and is essentially no worse than the hijinks one would observe in Porky’s or Revenge of the Nerds, but it was certainly sufficient to trigger Last Writer Standing. The questline has been fundamentally rewritten so that the perverted NPC is now a thirsty Tumblr-tier whiteknight cuck who tasks the player with obtaining information on Lycandi culture so he can better understand them. The quest’s story-arc then concludes with this beta tool meeting a Lycandi who turns out to be a scholar that is interested in learning about his own culture. Basically the quest has been transformed from a lewd comedy caper into a love story for people who find forced propaganda to be sexy.

Obviously there is absolutely no aspect of the author’s original tone or intent that has survived translation in this instance, and the arsehole responsible is as unapologetic as they are shameless:

“It’s not a matter of censorship or anything like that. There are a number of quests and NPC interactions in the game that go into playful innuendos and the like. It’s more a question of whether or not we wanted to include some genuinely questionable and uncomfortable content when we had the ability to make it something more welcoming. When I’m presented with the choice of writing a character and story line that is pretty reprehensible without it being critical commentary on his actions, or reworking it to a more positive direction that isn’t going to make me and others squirm, I’m not exactly going to hesitate to go for the latter.”

This is what you get when you hire a sophist to translate your game. Apparently no censorship took place – content was merely suppressed to avoid offense! It is no surprise that so much censorship takes place within this industry when an ever increasing number of people do not even understand what the word means. At any rate, once one gets past all the weasel words the real meat of the above statement is the localisation team behind Blade & Souls brazenly telling gamers that they are “not exactly going to hesitate” to fundamentally alter game content that they personally disagree with. Way to keep things professional, cucks!

‘Too sexist? I think you mean too sexy.’ ~ Play-Asia

Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Cancelled in the Wake of SJW Hostility

Time and again SJW shills have protested that they are not going to take our games away, and that all they are doing is standard criticism as is befitting of art – and every single time this is shown up for the utter lie that it is. The jewel in the crown of news this week would have to be the fact that Tecmo Koei have decided to cancel the Western release of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 because they do not want to have to deal with our awful Social Justice Warriors. This is not even an issue of the SJW hassle not being worth the cost of localisation, as the Asian version of the game is set to offer English language support, meaning that at the very least they could have slapped the game up on PSN to earn some extra dollars.

The fact that Tecmo Koei was concerned about a feminist backlash was in evidence earlier in the year when they mooted the possibility of bringing Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 to the West with edited content, so as not to attract the ire of the feminist gaming press. Subsequently, Western coverage for Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 has been unrelentingly negative for the most part, which ultimately appears to have led Tecmo Koei to decide that releasing the game in the West simply was not worth the blowback they would receive:

“We do not bring DOAX3 to the west and won’t have any plan change in the future.

Do you know many issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female in video game industry? We do not want to talk those things here. But certainly we have gone through in last year or two to come to our decision.”

Having Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 cancelled at the assistance of hipster feminists came as a blow to be sure, but in the aftermath of this something amazing happened. Play-Asia made absolutely no bones about the fact that they held SJWs responsible in their unambiguous condemnation:

“#DOAX3 will not be coming to the US due to #SJW nonsense. However, we will have the English Asia version available: http://par.bz/87f”

This sentiment was then effectively co-signed by Direct2Drive who quoted Play-Asia’s tweet and told them “Well played“. Tecmo Koei also effectively co-signed Play-Asia’s tweet, with their official European Twitter account sending a tweet linking to the Play-Asia product page for Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, accompanied by the message:

“Kudos to the TN’s CM for being honest. But if you really want it, you can import the EN version.”

Play-Asia are now effectively the publisher-approved source for the game in the West. They later continued the Play-Asia love-in by congratulating them for the comprehensive support they were receiving from the gaming community:

“@playasia Congrats <3”

And there really was a lot to congratulate. Play-Asia followed up their initial tweet with a full day of mocking Social Justice, and rubbing SJW noses in the impotency of their threats to blacklist and boycott. Play-Asia started the day with 9,000 Twitter followers and ended it with 24,000 followers, extending their social media reach by over two and a half times what it had been, which led Play-Asia to note:

“now this is some social media justice, don’t you think?”

For their part, SJWs were absolutely infuriated by this turn of events. A double digit list of game bloggers publicly decried Play-Asia, and pledged to never buy from them again [as though hipster bloggers ever have to buy their own games]. A couple of said game bloggers made the threat that Play-Asia would now be placed upon an industry blacklist [the kind made famous by GameJournoPros], and one pedophilic owner of Final Fantasy Shrine even suggested that s/he would be attempting to get Play-Asia shut down by the government for victimising poor Social Justice Warriors. The SJWs sure were angry – part of this was of course down to the fact that Play-Asia effectively legitimised gamers, and SJWs are wont to treat providing a platform to gamers as a declaration of war – but the affront to SJWs also went beyond this.

The aspect of this incident which the SJWs appeared to find most upsetting was the fact that the charges laid at their feet by Playasia and Tecmo Koei forced them to engage in a spell of self-reflection, even if just for a moment, and of course they did not like what they saw. The core of every SJW is ugly, barren, and twisted with contradiction. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a thing; most of these people appear to have blinded themselves to the fact that their conduct is causing very real harm to the video game industry, so when a mirror was held up to their worthless existence they recoiled in surprise and confusion. This confusion then quickly turned into anger at being made to feel bad feelings about themselves, and it was soon accompanied by denial to salve the rupture caused by the sundering of their worldviews. Everyone from John Flynt [Brianna Wu] to Tauriq Moosa publicly protested that nobody they knew had said a single thing about Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, which is perhaps a foolish lie to make when it is so easily falsifiable. It certainly stood in stark contrast to the collage of hit-pieces that gamers were able to screen capture, depicting Social Justice game bloggers bad-mouthing the game. At any rate, TotalBiscuit probably had the best response to all the bluster and impotent threats being spewed by these identity politicians:

“If I were a retailer, alienating people that don’t buy videogames to begin with would not be a big concern of mine.”

13+ means no overt lewdness…

Anime Spotlight: Shomin Sample: I Was Abducted by an Elite All-Girls School as a Sample Commoner

In the world of Shomin Sample Japan’s high class noble girls are educated in a hidden school, surrounded by mountains, where they are taught everything that a lady of standing aught know. This is done in order to maintain their purity and innocence. Unfortunately graduates of the school are increasingly failing to cope with integration into the outside world on account of their secluded upbringings. To remedy this deficit in the girl’s upbringing the school decides that the best course of action is to abduct a male commoner. Kimito Kagurazaka is the normal everyman through which this narrative is framed. He is just an average high school student until he is abducted by the secret girls academy due to their mistaken belief that he is a homosexual with a muscle fetish, and thereby would pose no risk to the girl’s chastity.

Obviously Shomin Sample is a harem series, but its 13+ rating pretty much guarantees that it will not feature the kind of lewdness that Lusipurr.com favours. That being said, one figures that the unusual premise pretty much still ensures that it is worth a viewing. Shomin Sample began airing on Funimation on the 7th of October, and there are currently eight episodes available to stream.

Poor Lara has taken a mauling…

Tomb Raider Fails to Rise

Fallout 4 is a big deal. The game might have not blown anyone’s mind with respect to innovating upon the Fallout 3 formula, but in terms of sales potential the game is a monster – and Square Enix and/or Microsoft were literally insane to launch Rise of the Tomb Raider within the same week. The jury is still out on how Rise of the Tomb Raider performed in North America, but in terms of UK sales [the most Microsoft-friendly region of Europe] it is fairly safe to say that the title underwhelmed.

The game is known to have sold fewer than 60,000 copies in the UK, with the breakdown thought to be 48,200 on Xbox One and 8,500 copies on the 360. By contrast Fallout 4 sold 482,000 copies for the week, with the PS4 version alone selling more than the combined first week sales of both Rise of the Tomb Raider and Halo 5. 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot managed to 183,000 copies during its first week on sale in the UK, meaning that the PS4 version will have to sell roughly twice as many copies in its first week in order to merely place it on par with the performance of its predecessor, a feat that is unlikely to happen for three important reasons. It will be a year old game that will have been languishing on the shelves for a full twelve months, its release will follow the highly anticipated release of Uncharted 4, and the reason for the game’s delay has been due to Square Enix fuckarsing about with Microsoft exclusivity shenanigans, a practice which only serves to hurt Playstation owners.

Square Enix would have anticipated that holding back the launch on the PS4 would harm that version’s sales, and this would likely have been factored into the money that Microsoft paid to them to secure exclusivity. That being said, it becomes increasingly unlikely that either party would have predicted that exclusivity would have harmed Rise of the Tomb Raider‘s sales by quite this much. This is a classic lose-lose-lose-lose situation. Microsoft money will not compensate Square Enix for lost sales, Microsoft has wasted money seeing as Tomb Raider exclusivity has clearly failed to cause much of a spike in Xbone sales, Sony-based Tomb Raider fans are artificially prevented from playing the game for twelve months, and Xbone owners miss out on having this money spent on something more useful to them. The funny thing is that Square Enix’s reason for doing this was in order to grow the Tomb Raider brand by pairing it with Microsoft’s advertising muscle, yet they have only succeeded in shrinking the audience and pissing off Playstation owners with their lack of coherent communication about the game’s exclusive status.

Amusingly, at least one Sony executive was not above concern trolling Square Enix’s misfortunes this week, as the senior product manager, Chris Brown, took to twitter to proclaim:

“Poor Tomb Raider. UK sales: Rise of the Tomb Raider <63k. And #Fallout4 - despite Microsoft Xbox One support - still sold better on PS4.”

He was then joined by the director of Driveclub, Paul Rustchynsky, who opined:

“Don’t worry Tomb Raider will do just fine next year when it’s released on PS4 next year ;)”

One is inclined to disagree with Rutchynsky, as, even if Square Enix can avoid putting it up against a massive title like Fallout 4, it still seems unlikely that Rise of the Tomb Raider will do anywhere near as well on the PS4 as it should have. Smart PS4 owners will not pay $60 for a year old game, and are likely to either wait until the game falls in price, else Gamefly it. At any rate, the game’s performance in America is still an unknown quantity, so it is still possible that strong support in the US could compensate for a weak showing in the UK. Whatever the case, launching during a crowded holiday season is perhaps not the finest hour for Square Enix corporate strategies.

Project Setsuna is set to take its cues from the finest JRPG of the SNES generation.

New Details Emerge About Project Setsuna

Project Setsuna is a JRPG being developed for the express purpose of appealing to fans of 1990s style JRPGs, which means that Project Setsuna is a JRPG being developed for the express purpose of appealing to Lusipurr.com! It promises exploration across vast world maps, through towns, and even inside houses! Square Enix has desperately needed to make an RPG in this vein for about ten years now – one that scales back its graphical ambitions in order to scale up its design ambitions [one is deathly weary of their visually opulent one-note facades]. Happily for fans of gaming’s golden era, Square Enix has this week seen fit to update the game’s website with several new descriptions.

“Traveling to the farthest ends of the earth, the escort group progresses onward visiting various towns, preparing equipment, and defeating wild monsters along the way. We are pursuing the fundamental enjoyment of an RPG where the progress is truly felt.”

Lusipurr.com has previously mentioned that the game features an ATB battle system, and based on that coupled with seamless battle transitions we theorised that the game would be using an ATB similar to the one found in Chrono Trigger. As it turns out we were bang on the money, with the site now confirming that Project Setsuna uses an iteration of the ATB 2.0 battle system of Chrono Trigger – meaning that players can look forward to the flexibility that that system affords, such as range playing a part in attack strategies, and the ability to time the attacks of party members in order to create useful combinations. Built on top of the excellent foundation offered by ATB 2.0 is the Setsuna system. The Setsuna gauge will fill up as characters perform actions, take damage, and as time passes in battle. Players can then tap into this resource through correctly timing their button presses during battles, which will add additional effects to attacks.

The site also details two of the game’s party members, Kuon and Yomi. Kuon was a mysterious wanderer who eventually took up residence in the game’s starting village, and is regarded as a sister by the game’s titular sacrificial character, Setsuna. Kuon apparently feels a strong sense of responsibility, and experiences a certain amount of friction with the game’s silent protagonist. Meanwhile Yomi is a veteran of a previous sacrifice pilgrimage, leading the party to seek his advice on the journey at hand. He is often times excessively cheerful, and as such he is sometimes mistaken as a fool. Yomi appears to be the ‘old man’ character of the group, which probably means he is about thirty.

A robust PS2 library would make the PS4 an instantly more attractive proposition.

PS2 Emulation Finally Hits the PS4

The road to PS4 backwards compatibility has been a long and windy one. PS3 backwards compatibility is still no nearer to becoming a reality, and will probably always be relegated to Playstation Now, yet PS2 emulation has long been rumoured to be on the cards. Because of the lack of official confirmation along with the relative scarcity of information pertaining to the project, it has often been easily dismissed as merely being a rumour, yet ultimately this week has seen the debut of PS2 emulation on PS4.

Given that PS2 emulation on the PS4 is something of a holy grail, it is somewhat curious as to why Sony decided to put it out there with so little. Instead of crying it from the rooftops Sony stealth released it this week through the emulation of Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter, Star Wars: Racer Revenge, and Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, all games that are only available to buyers of the Star Wars Battlefront PS4 console bundle, limiting their penetration somewhat among PS4 owners. Make no mistakes however, these games have been tested and they are definitely running on emulation. For one thing they show the PS2 logo when launching, and for another they also emulate the function of the PS2’s memory cards in much the same way as was done with PS2 Classics on the PS3.

In terms of technical aspects, game performance is much improved, with at least one of the games seeing a boost in framerate from 30fps to 60fps. Resolution also sees a welcome boost, although not to 1080p as one might have hoped for. Instead the resolution is set to 1292×896, which is a little bit better than 720p. The games also enjoy full trophy support, which leads one to speculate that they are using individual emulation wrappers rather than a comprehensive system-wide emulation solution – this in turn likely means that we never be able to play back our existing PS2 disc collections.

There is always a tsundere one…

Anime Spotlight: Anti-Magic Academy: The 35th Test Platoon / Taimadou Gakuen 35 Shiken Shoutai

Anti-Magic Academy is a fantasy harem series which is situated around an academy which specialises in training up witch hunters to seek and destroy magical threats. Events focus around the 35th test platoon, which has been nicknamed Small Fry Platoon, on account of the fact that it is comprised of individuals with uncooperative personalities and other such personality defects. Of course, if Small Fry Platoon could but overcome their personal ticks then they have the potential to become the top class in the school. Takeru Kusanagi is inexperienced as a commanding officer, yet he is caring and supportive of his fellow team members, making him well suited to leadership. Ōka Ōtori is the loner prodigy of the group, so readers will already know who plays the role of tsundere. Of course this party would not be quite complete without the emotional one [Usagi Saionji] and the genius one [Ikaruga Suginami], so we had better add those ladies to the mix to get a proper harem.

Anti-Magic Academy debuted on October 7, and is scheduled to run for twelve episodes – there are currently seven episodes available. The series is simulcast on Crunchyroll Wednesdays at 10:45am PST.

Is a little vidya too much to ask for?

Operation Supply Flop

Operation Supply Drop was conceived as a ‘for gamers, by gamers’ initiative. Playing his GBA was what kept Operation Supply Drop founder, Stephen Machuga, sane during his tour in Iraq, and video games were what enabled him to reintegrate into civilian life. It was with this in mind that he created Operation Supply Drop in 2010, a charity which supplied overseas troops with video game consoles and software, while facilitating gaming-related trips for them to expos and competitions. Owing to the nature of this niche charity, it became very successful off the backs of gamers, who found much to support in the concept of gamers banding together in appreciation for fellow gamers who were fighting for them overseas. It is too bad that gamers cannot have nice things however, as money tends to change everything.

After making several large donations to Operation Supply Drop, Glenn Banton was made CEO in 2014. Banton promptly set about isolating Stephen Machuga within the company, and appointing people to the board who shared his vision of leaving gamers behind in favour of pursuing corporate donations and going toe-to-toe with heavyweights such as wounded warriors. At first Glenn Banton adopted a softly, softly approach, by portraying changes in the company’s operations as diversifying the services they were providing, and by the time that Stephen Machuga noticed that something was amiss he was already powerless within his own organisation. Earlier this month Machuga was forced out of the company, and it was then revealed that Banton planned to change the name of the organisation from Operation Supply Drop to XVACS, losing all the gamer-related company insignia in the process. Operation Supply Drop was to become a subordinate brand under XVACS, and would have presumably been reserved for times when company strategy sought to shake down gamers for their hard-earned shekels. The only thing that has put a temporary halt to the rebranding of the company has been the employee revolt and mass exodus of volunteers [who have taken up positions within Machuga’s new charity, Stack-Up.Org]. One former Operation Supply Drop volunteer recounts:

“It started out as diversification. It didn’t start as, we’re shifting our focus. Then gamers started being pushed aside full force to the point where they just looked at gamers as a revenue stream and didn’t care at all about gamer culture. It was like, gamers can raise money for us to do the stuff we really want to do. They were looking at gamers as cash machines.”

In less than a year of being appointed CEO Glenn Banton had become unsatisfied with with this million dollar charity merely servicing the needs of a sizable niche of gaming soldiers and ex-servicemen, and had determined that he must grow it into a multi-million dollar entity capable of soliciting large corporate donations. Gamers, while generous, still were not sufficient to grow Operation Supply Drop to the scale desired by Banton, while at the same time he considered gamers to be the cause of his failure to attract multi-million dollar funding from corporate sponsors – so gaming had to go. A former Operation Supply Drop volunteer makes no bones about the fact that these changes have been implemented in response to the smearing of gamer culture by game bloggers, the mainstream press, and low-class productions like Law & Order SVU:

“I believe the general perception of gamers in the media is exactly what Glenn is concerned about. That’s the perception he doesn’t want for OSD. He buys into the vision of gamers as kids living in their parents’ basements.

I definitely believe that has a lot to do with his decisions, like the name change and removing the controller from the logo. They say they’re doing plenty in the gaming space still. Well, maybe. Until something better comes along.”

Banton claims that “We have done more in gaming this year than in the previous four years combined. Next year, we will most likely do more than the previous five.“, and yet he goes on to state that he is “frustrated with this concept of gamer-only water fountains and a trend of not letting non-gamers participate in gaming activities.“, proving that he does not care to understand the culture at all. In case those comments were a little too oblique, allow Banton to elaborate:

“As you continue to grow, and the need is out there, you start looking at the generational relevance and the fact that gaming, in and of itself, is something that a lot of people participate in… When you look at that, you have to realize that what we do is first and foremost for veterans. It’s not just for gamers, it’s not just for gaming veterans; it’s for veterans.

If we want to remain small and not grow and not listen to our beneficiaries, that’s fine. Maybe it’s me, but I know our board believes the same way. We’ve been given the opportunity to support veterans in a unique way. We have a duty, with this bigger challenge. Some people would rather see a tiny organisation that does a few things. I’m more interested in growing because it’s our responsibility to do so.”

Because why would Intel be expected to know about gaming, right? It is not like gamers are the ones driving demand for their expensive multicore i7 processors! It is not like Intel could immediately make the connection between gaming and the high power CPUs they produce. It would not possibly occur to them that donating hardware might lead to positive outcomes for ex-service men and active soldiers. Poor old Intel must be so confused when contacted by a gamer-oriented charity. No, the association with gamers is clearly what is holding Operation Supply Drop back!

The funny thing is that the smear tactics of social justice goons are being allowed to dictate the direction of veteran’s charities, when social justice goons, in most cases, demonstrate abject antipathy towards veterans. Who could really be surprised that SJWs hold contempt for wounded soldiers; after all, they are predominantly male, and they are mostly involved in fighting terrorist fucks. This is literally they type of person who plays the tune to which Glenn Banton now dances to, and the spineless cuck knows it:

“We’ve had some organisations where the bigger liability is veterans. We spoke to one medium-sized indie game studio who told us, ‘I would rather go bankrupt and live in a cardboard box on the street than support veterans.’ We hear that kind of crap all the time. It’s disgusting, in some cases.”

The disdain for fellow humans. The lack of fiscal responsibility. A medium-sized indy game studio. One is calling it now – Operation Supply Drop got shot down by Tim Schafer! And yet this is the type of gamer-hating imbecile that Glenn Banton is now bending over backwards to placate in order to encourage corporate donations. The question remains however, why on earth would anybody donate to Operation Supply Drop/XVACS now? Their success until now has been built on the backs of gamers as a result of the organisation’s niche appeal and specific functions, yet Glenn Banton has now thrown gamers [along with Stephen Machuga] under the bus in order to chase after corporate donations. But why would XVACS be awarded with corporate donations when Wounded Warriors is so much more well established and capable? Gamers too now have a better option in the form of Stephen Machuga’s Stack-Up.Org, which operates under exactly the same pro-gamer premise that Operation Supply Drop used to. In short Operation Supply Drop/XVACS is now a useless organisation. It attempts to do things that other organisations do better. And it is headed by a cartoon villain.

THANKS, NEOGAF!

More SJW Censorship Woes From Nintendo and Capcom

This is becoming an uncomfortably common occurrence. First there was the news that Nintendo had censored out bikinis from Fatal Frame V, this was then promptly followed up by evidence that their forthcoming December release of Xenoblade Chronicles X had been censored for much the same reason. The fifteen year old character Lin has been modified so that a previously skimpy bikini is now much more conservative. All that pales in comparison however when viewed along-side Nintendo’s latest censorship efforts. Nintendo has been so cowed by Social Justice hellions that they have now seen fit to remove the breast slider from Xenoblade Chronicles X‘s character creator, forcing everyone who wishes to main with a female character to make do with medium-small jubblies. Great going Nintendo, less player choice is always best – and goodness knows that large breasts are shameful and should be hidden away!

Not to be outdone, Capcom has managed to give Nintendo’s regression a good run for its money this week with the censorship of harmlessly cheeky sexiness in Street Fighter V – a move that has effected at least two of the game’s characters. The character R. Mika previously gave herself a cheeky slap on the butt during the animation to her super, yet now the move has been edited so her cute backside has been cut out of the framing of the sequence. Then there is Cammy’s intro sequence which used to have a low-angle shot of her backside, but has not been edited so that her leg is in the way. Of course the SJW defense force have been shilling for this regressive edit big time, with one of the five guys, Kotaku’s Patrick Klepek, even claiming that it is not censorship because she is slapping her butt[???]:

“Not censorship. You’re fussing over a character slapping their butt.”

According to bendy SJW logic something is only censorship if the content being censored meets the minimum standard of some sort of arbitrary goal they have set concerning taste. Protip: that is stupid and wrong. At any rate, readers may record their objections to Capcom’s censorship of the title here if they so wish. It is currently unknown whether all versions of the game have been effected, or whether it is simply an alteration that has been made to the Western version of the game in response to the atmosphere of chilling repression that has been foisted on us by Social Justice puritans. If the latter proves to be the case then PS4 owners should be able to import the title in order to avoid a gimped experience.

Link at every size.

Nintendo Tries to Meet the SJWs Halfway

Ever since Zelda U was unveiled awful feminists have been shrilly demanding that Nintendo transvestite Link into a woman. This week during the first Nintendo Direct since the passing of Iwata the company showed that they were actually listening for once, and were willing to meet SJW naggers halfway. They have created the Female character of Linkle, who is basically a gender-swap version of link, and she will debut in the 3DS version of Hyrule Warriors, which is scheduled for release in early 2016. Initially one thought this quite a bad decision on the part of Nintendo, in much the same way as apologising to SJWs is a bad idea, since they will never accept anything less than full obeisance. Thus, I imagined that SJWs would appreciate Linkle, but that they would not be satisfied with this peace offering, which would ultimately renew their angry totalitarian demands that Link be made into a girl for Zelda U.

Funnily enough Nintendo’s concession did not even buy them this much leeway, with many SJWs instantly hating Linkle for myriad [often conflicting] reasons. They hate Linkle because of how derivative she is of Link as a Mrs Male Character, but they also hate Linkle because of her differences from Link in that she lacks his sword, circular slash, and the fact that her name is Linkle instead of Link. Most egregious of all is she is cute is all heck, which is an unforgivable heresy in the eyes of SJWs. It is also for this precise reason that gamers have taken to Linkle rather fondly, a fact evidenced by the vast quantities of sexy Linkle art that have already pervaded the internet. In short, Nintendo’s overtures were completely wasted on SJWs because even they do not know what they want, but creation of the character was not a total loss, as she seems quite charming. At any rate, one looks forward to further butthurt once Zelda U releases featuring shitlord Link in his full misogyist glory.

Representing the very best in clip art!

Anime Spotlight: Lupin III Part IV

After a thirty year hiatus Lupin III is returning to television screens for a fourth entry in the storied television series. The titular character, Arsene Lupin III, is an Italian thief who always leaves his calling card in this adventure-comedy-drama. Fans of the legacy series will be happy to hear that that the fourth series retains its original composer [Yuji Ohno] along with its original production studio [TMS Entertainment], so it sounds pretty solid in terms of continuity.

Lupin III Part IV began airing on the first of October in Japan, and there are currently seven episodes available. Oddly the series actually began airing in Italy before it did Japan, commencing on the thirtieth of August and finishing up on October 19, meaning that the entire series is actually available if one is content with the Italian dubbing. Stranger still, the series is not being simulcust on Funimation or Crunchyroll, meaning that Lusipurr.com readers will have to rely on their guile if they wish to view it within any sort of reasonable time frame.