This Week in Games

"I'm The Mario!"

Hi, everyone! It's been a busy week for us here. I've been busy covering Gundam Evolution for a review that should be out sometimes soon—look out for it, it's a fun one. Still not much to report in the Xenoblade Chronicles. Who would have thought that covering games for a living meant not having much time to play them? But I did finally receive my Special Edition set I was able to snag off of Nintendo! Acquiring it was like pulling teeth, but the art book is phenomenal. Heck, now I wish I had the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 set.

I've got something else I need to talk about, so let's dive into things real quick-like. This is This Week in Games.

Back in late August, we discussed how Chaos;Head Noah had been banned on Steam in anticipation of its October 7th release, most likely due to content. What content exactly, nobody really knows; Chaos;Head Noah isn't an erotic visual novel. And while it features some degree of violence it isn't anything worse than, say, Hatred or Dead Space. Nevertheless, the developers at Spike Chunsoft and its localizers plugged ahead, sure that they'd be able to smooth things over with Valve and ensure the game's release.

Last week, Spike Chunsoft put out the announcement that Chaos;Head Noah's planned Steam release was been officially cancelled. This was reversed at the eleventh hour on the 6th of October, but for a while the Nintendo Switch release seemed to be the only way to play Chaos;Head Noah. And as the dust settles, all we can ask is... why? As mentioned before, there are plenty of outright-erotic games on Steam, many of which are visual novels drawn in an anime-esque art style. Or, y'know, actual nukige localized by Mangagamer. And we can't pretend AAA games haven't been dipping their toes into more and more explicit content, either—lest we forget everyone's current-favorite redeemed-by-the-animated-adaptation Cyberpunk 2077, which made plenty of noise about being able to customize your character's boobs and genitalia. Y'know, the ones you otherwise wouldn't see out of cutscenes because the game is first-person.

And again, if it's because of the violence... we can't pretend there isn't already a cadre of hyper-violent games on Steam. The argument I've heard going around is that the cast consisting of high schoolers wearing very-obvious school uniforms makes Steam rather reluctant to host the game on their servers—which is valid, and something I don't exactly have a solution for. But I feel that this is one of those cases where the content has more merit to it than just showing teenagers in peril or getting chopped up. And again, how is it any worse than something like Until Dawn where people get chopped in half with a giant buzz saw, or The Quarry where an old lady gets her face shot off?

Things worked out in the end for our friends at Spike Chunsoft, even if they came down to the wire. At the time of publication, Chaos;Head Noah is now available on Steam and the Nintendo Switch alike, and fans can rest easy that a good VN is getting its due. In a press release published by Spike Chunsoft, Valve is quoted as saying that they'll be re-examining their policies to help prevent this happening again in the future. Meanwhile, Spike Chunsoft is very gratefully thanking their fans for the support in the endeavor. It's not every day we get a victory story like this. Congratulations, Science Adventure fans: you won!

A lot of news from this past week doesn't necessarily have much to do with Japanese gaming, but I feel is important to discuss nevertheless. And this right here is a big one; any of my long-time readers will know I care very deeply about all folks who write about games, be it for a living or as a side-gig. This one hurts to discuss: Fandom has bought out a massive swath of websites, and GameFAQs and GiantBomb.

The full list includes over websites like Metacritic and ScreenJunkies, but GameFAQs and GiantBomb are the ones that people will really care about. As far as gaming goes, GameFAQs is a regular Library of Alexandria, featuring video game guides going back decades for all kinds of games, big or small. It's got extensive forums where people could gather and share info or FAQs on games, serving as an important repository of information for gamers seeking instant information. It featured the Questions pages, which was a relatively-simple way of getting minor queries about games answered.

Most important were the FAQs themselves. Let's ignore how some of these FAQs could tend to have some of the most-amazing ASCII art you'd ever hope to see (some have likened it to monastic scribes of the 2000s and honestly, yeah, there are some real Name of the Rose-madmen for sure). These FAQs were some of the most-comprehensive guides you could ever hope to find, and in many cases they were absolutely invaluable repositories of guidance for players that you'd absolutely never, ever see replicated anywhere.

As a child who loved JRPGs yet couldn't often access the Internet, saving txt-files of GameFAQs guides for my favorite JRPGs like the Digital Devil Saga games, the comprehensive path guides for Chrono Cross or the breakdowns for how to unlock all of the secret mecha and weapons in Super Robot Taisen: Original Generations were worth gold to me. Sure, I bought plenty of BradyGames guides (because those were the closest things I could get to art books as a kid)—but few BradyGames guides had the sheer amount of work put into them that some GameFAQs guides had. You had folks calculating Shining Force 2 stat growths to the last decimal point, putting to rest decade-old arguments about the usefulness of each individual character. You have guides walking players through the ins and outs of Jump Ultimate Stars, one of the most-imported DS games ever that you couldn't really beat unless you could read Japanese. You have extensive Chrono Cross guides dipping into really deep character lore found only in then-Japan-only release Radical Dreamers to help flesh out the story. (Fun fact: these guides were written by "ToastyFrog", who grew up to be noted games historian Jeremy Parish—I read his guides start-to-finish decades before his journalistic work went on to be the subject of my Master's Degree thesis). Nevermind how so many of these guides are for games way too old or obscure to have been covered by the likes of BradyGames or Prima Guides, the sheer passion and work exhibited by these writers would document all kinds of wild, obscure bits and pieces of gaming.

So, why am I putting so much into this? Because frankly, Fandom sucks. Currently serving as the hosts for countless Wikia pages covering all manner of, er, fandom topics: from widespread stuff like The Office to Ultra-kaiju repositories. and every last one of those pages is utterly, hopelessly illegible: intrusive ads, auto-playing videos, massive banners covering half the damn page... it is an absolute miserable chore to read what is basically a wiki-entry and glean any kind of information on anything. And it's even worse on mobile, where at best you can only really get a quarter of the page visible at any time with the rest occupied by worthless cruft.

This bodes ill for all of the invaluable information and guides stored on GameFAQs. And that's all before the possibility of employee layoffs or restructuring. Again, it's a modern-day burning of Alexandria, and we won't even see the rivers running black with ink after it all. Stop this ride, I wanna get off.

Remember last week when I talked about Mega Man: Powered Up on the PSP and how Capcom kept up the servers for the level creator mode online for sixteen years? That was an amazing act of goodwill on their behalf, yeah? And all that for a game that didn't even do that well in its time!

Yeah, big 'ol Blizzard—one of the Three B's in Gaming™—couldn't keep Overwatch 1 online for more than six.

Everything surrounding Overwatch 2 has been a big, fat garbage fire ever since it was first announced. Originally announced as a very-obvious distraction by Blizzard during BlizzCon 2019 in an attempt at drawing attention away from the Blitzchung Controversy (for God's sake, it has a Wikipedia article), Overwatch 2 was originally billed as existing alongside the original Overwatch. This confused a lot of people, who weren't really sure what it was Overwatch 2 brought to the table. As time went on and Overwatch 2 put more on the table, the less appealing Overwatch 2 became as a product. It offered a PVE mode... but no new multiplayer stages (they were all the old stages set at a different time of day). It offered a new 5v5 experience, as opposed to the original's 6v6 set-up... except none of the maps were redesigned to incorporate the newer limited team numbers. It offered one new character, who was a bit of a dud upon arrival (read: nobody made porn of her, when Tracer had naughty fanart being made practically within the day—a serious canary in the coalmine). It doesn't help that the character was yet another Japanese ninja, in a game where the other two Japanese characters were also ninja. Oh, and then Blizzard recanted and they decided they'd shut down Overwatch—so now if you buy a copy of Overwatch, it'll just prompt you to download the Overwatch 2 patch. Note that Overwatch is a retail release, so... sorry if you actually paid money for this game Blizzard decided was a worthwhile casualty?

This isn't the first time Blizzard has thrown one of their own games under the bus; years back, Blizzard left their official Heroes of the Storm teams unemployed after their sudden decision to cut support for their in-house MOBA. Warcraft III: Re-Forged was released and supplanted the original game in Blizzard's Battle.net launcher—so even if you have the old Warcraft III, you can't really connect it to the internet to download updates or else it'll prompt you to purchase and install the Reforged version. And, y'know, Blizzard's also got the years and years of obscene corporate layoffs and the ol' toxic work environment.

I dunno what amazes me more: Blizzard systematically assassinating each and every last joule of fan goodwill with every last decision they make, or the fact that somehow there are still people who are lining up to play World of Warcraft: Classic—and yes, Overwatch 2. I mean, sure, I bought Xenoblade Chronicles 3 knowing about Nintendo's own in-house toxicity, but I think when you're getting a statewide auditing people need to weigh their nostalgia for Lost Vikings and ask if it's really worth it. Employees deserve better. The fans deserve better. Blizzard, do better. Nobody who spends any amount of money on a game should find themselves in the situation where they can't play it. And that's ignoring the countless dollars Blizzard has made off of the lootboxes in Overwatch, it was a retail release.

I mean, jeez. A freaking PSP game outlasted your big AAA squad-shooter.

Huh, let's see if there's any Bayonetta news—

Eh, I'll take it.

As fans await the latest non-stop infinite climax adventure from Platinum Games and their leading witch, there isn't too much to talk about. All the trailers have been shown, all the reels have been sizzled, and Bayonetta's new duds have even been shown off on Platinum's Twitter page. (I especially love her cute casual sweater, which is a reference to a hilarious image Bayonetta character designer Mari Shimazaki drew of Bayonetta trying to wake up her hung-over roommate wife Jeanne, who fell asleep with her makeup on.) But there is some news a lot of fans (and myself) have been abuzz over: the trailers have made it evident that Bayonetta's sporting a different voice actress. While some—again, including myself—have theorized that this involves some degree of multiverse-hopping, the truth was illuminated by Platinum Games, and it's a lot more mundane.

In an interview with GameInformer, Platinum Games explained that longtime-Bayonetta voice actress Hellena Taylor was simply unavailable to reprise her role for Bayonetta 3, citing "overlapping circumstances". Which is sad to hear, but an unfortunate reality of voice acting: sometimes, the actor in question simply isn't available for whatever reason. Scheduling might have conflicted with their day job, family issues might have popped up, it could have been anything. Platinum's Yusuke Miyata went on to confirm that Taylor's role was filled in by longtime voice actress Jennifer Hale, whose work we are assured "isn't jarring" and in Miyata's words "was way beyond what they could have imagined". Hale is no stranger to voice acting; I first discovered her as the voice of Sheena Fujibayashi in Tales of Symphonia, and she would go on to achieve widespread acclaim as the voice of Fem!Shepard in the Mass Effect series. She's a seasoned pro, so I'm confident she's got the chops to fill in for Hellena Taylor. As for Taylor: we hope she's okay and that whatever prevented her from being able to reprise her role as everyone's favorite cool sapphic British goth-aunt didn't cause her much grief, and we look forward to her possibly voicing Bayo in the future.

... I mean, it's way-early, but there's gonna be a Bayonetta 4, right?

... Right?

Keiji Inafune's aborted Mighty No. 9 will go down in history as one of the worst crowdfunding campaigns ever carried out, as well as one of the quickest incidents where fandom goodwill was absolutely trashed. But its infamy overshadowed a second project that Inafune had attempted to bring to light at the same time: Red Ash. While Mighty No. 9 attempted to capture the spirit of the classic Mega Man games, Red Ash was an attempt at a spiritual successor to Mega Man Legends/Rockman DASH, the fan-favorite spin-off featuring Mega Man Volnutt and his many ruin-traipsing adventures in a post-apocalyptic world heavily inspired by Laputa: Castle in the Sky. The idea was sound, especially since folks are still sore about Mega Man Legends 3 having gone down the way it did. But Red Ash's crowdfunding campaign came out right on the heels of Mighty No. 9's campaign, long before anything tangible had arrived in the hands of waiting fans. What's more, a second Red Ash crowdfunding campaign popped up shortly after that, this one to fund a short animated pitch for a possible Red Ash series. You certainly couldn't blame Inafune for his ambition, but you could blame him for having entirely too many irons in the fire.

Nothing really came of Red Ash, sadly. The pilot was produced, but that was it; with the tremendous failure of Mighty No. 9, I don't think many people have been in much of a hurry to attach Keiji Inafune's name to anything. But about that pilot: as you can see above, Studio 4C released it this past week! It's available on their YouTube channel subtitled in English, albeit for a limited time. You can watch it for aproximately one month, with November 4th being the last day you'll be able to see it.

It seems to really play on its connections to Mighty No. 9 the same way Mega Man Legends played on its connections to Megas Man; where Legends!Roll Casket was an adventurer who traveled with her adopted brother, Mega Man Volnutt (named after her favorite video game character), Red Ash features Beck and Call, a boy/girl duo that share their name with the leading duo from Mighty No. 9. Mega Man Legends takes place in a world inhabited by Carbons, humanoid replicas that are almost-indistinguishable from actual humans, and centers around the last days of the actual flesh-and-blood human race. Red Ash takes place in the distant future where organic humans are called the Pure Race, and they oppress a people called the Nano Race—humans with nanomachines in their blood. Beck and Tyger (an expy of Mega Man Legends's sky-pirate, Teisel Bonne, from his spiky ponytail to his red artificial eyes) encounter Call; while Beck is a Nano, he wants to undergo a procedure that would turn him into a Pure. Meanwhile, Call is a Pure...

It's an interesting concept for sure, and the world setting looks fascinating. The concept is a good blend of the original Mega Man Legends with a bit of Galaxy Express 999 thrown in, what with our protagonist wanting a special procedure that'll change their body. Also, Call being "found" evokes Sera from Mega Man Legends 2.

It's a fascinating look at what might have been. Would this ever reinvigorate interest for Red Ash? Probably not; we're a long way away from Inafune's crowdfunding failures, but fandom memories run long and deep. And with how much attention Capcom has been showing the Mega Man franchise lately, we're probably likely to see a Mega Man Legends Legacy Collection sooner or later.

I don't like gacha mechanics. I think they're exploitative and have no merit on a consumer basis. This is my stance, and it has been for a while. I've always argued that gacha games should instead offer characters for sale on an individual basis, and it looks like gacha games want to do that in the most frustrating way possible, like toddlers who don't want to clean their room.

Let's start with Mario Kart Tour. So, Tour had a gacha system for its karts and racers, with exclusive variants and everything. Of course, racers and karts have unique stats so getting the best times in races requires you roll the gacha to get a good kart and a good racer. This sucks, especially for a racing game, so the system was mostly changed. Mostly.

Eesh. Making your carts and racers worth about $80 in non-space-bucks money feels like a spiteful move more than anything else. That's one racer, worth about what it costs to get yourself Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and all the DLC on the Switch. And when one character is worth about the same as a fully-featured game... I think you need to rethink your pricing scheme.

I had to deal with this earlier this week, too. Longtime readers know I'm a fan of Action Taimanin, a sanitized mobile brawler based off of the Taimanin Asagi franchise. It's not great, but it's a fun little time waster, and the game has some genuinely cool characters (and it's nice to see a Taimanin title where the main character isn't meat for the grinder). Now, Action Taimanin was already quite unreasonable when it came to some of its skins—while you can buy skins earned with in-game gems, the conversion rate is pretty pants. Your average skin comes out to about 300 gems—which you can spend up to $24 for in the store. $24. For a costume. For one character. No, it doesn't really change their animations, your ninja of choice is just wearing a school uniform or a maid outfit. That's pretty bad, but the limited-time costumes are worse: you can spend up to $34 for them! They sweeten the deal a little by adding in special UR weapons or Supporters with the costume, but that's still $34 for a costume. It's a highway robbery, and that's why I was never able to get Asagi's white battle-suit from Taimanin Asagi 3. I love it, but I don't "spend as much money on it as I would for Fuga: Melodies of Steel"-love it. But hey, at least 300 gems is something you can get with a few days work, so I can deck out my ninja in maid outfits and school uniforms most of the time.

But here's where things get really suck-y: this month was Action Taimanin's second anniversary. As part of it, fans were polled on which Taimanin-character to add to the game. There were a lot of choices, many from Taimanin spin-offs, and the winner was Annerose Vajra from Witch of Steel Annerose. She's a cool, cute half-demon witch, and fans were excited for her to be added to the game—and she was, as a part of Action Taimanin's anniversary!

... For almost $50. $90 if you wanted a bunch of bonus gems while you were at it.

It would be bad enough if Annerose was just $50 on release but later available for the usual 1200 gems, like every other character—but according to the patch notes, she's only going to be available for sale with actual cash money. No gems later down the road. And this is their big Anniversary celebration: spend $50 for a character you voted on seeing in the game. Suffice to say, a lot of fans aren't happy. It's one thing for a character's outfit to be worth more than a lot of full-featured releases, it's another for entire characters to go more than retail game releases (heck, and that's considering some games are already going for the ludicrous retail price of $70). I've always maintained that you should never waste your audience's time—and as they say, time is money.

I was really excited for Annerose. At this rate, I can pass on her.

Well, we gotta talk about this.

After months of threats and fans sucking air through their teeth, Nintendo finally unveiled the teaser trailer for the upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie from Illumination during a Nintendo Direct that was also livestreamed at New York Comic Con. And to be fair: it's a pretty good teaser. The movie looks a sight better than Illumination's other works. Bowser's flying airship is stellar, and I was surprised to see the trailer throw out Bowser's decrepit underling Kamek the Magikoopa (or what I hope is Kamek).

First, the good: Bowser looks stellar. Full-stop. The Koopa King has literally never looked better, and Jack Black is evidently having a blast chewing the scenery as the big lug. And while Bowser (thankfully) hasn't had any kind of redesign for the sake of making him look more like his voice actor, I swear that the trailer gives him some of Black's facial mannerisms. I like it! I know a lot of people don't like Jack Black, but I've always loved him and the sheer energy he brings to the screen. He's like Chris Farley: he's a big guy, he lives large and he laughs larger. And people love Bowser too, so we can look forward to him being the best part of this movie (similar to how Bowser is one of the best parts of the Mario games, hence Bowser's Inside Story).

So. About Pratt.

After all that hustle-and-bustle about how his performance would be "like nothing we've ever heard", it sure sounds like Chris Pratt being Chris Pratt. To be fair: he only gets, like, two lines. To be fairer: Illumination and Nintendo knew this was gonna be the linchpin for fans. Just rolling over is a valid way to go (because let's face it, about the only thing that would calm folks down is just recasting Pratt with Charles Martinet—and folks remember how Ugly Sonic was dealt with). But I think I'll kick and scream all the way down anyway.

A number of voice actors, including Erika Harlacher-Stone and Tara Strong, have voiced serious discontent over the stunt casting, and for good reason. As Strong put it, voice actors put in a tremendous amount of effort honing their craft, helping build up a show through their performances (and earning the bigwigs a lot of money), all for them to get snubbed when it comes time for movies. And that never stops feeling disrespectful, especially with how long many of these voice actors have been doing what they do. Tom Kenney has been SpongeBob since 1999. John DiMaggio has been Bender "Bending" Rodriguez for only a few months longer than that. They may not "own" those characters, but it's pretty clear Futurama isn't "Futurama" without DiMaggio's way of telling people to bite his shiny metal ass.

Every time stunt casting comes up, I think of the Jetsons movie from the 1990. Janet Waldo, who'd been the voice of Judy Jetson for 28 years at that point, had all of her lines in the film replaced because the studio heads figured casting popstar Tiffany would result in better ticket sales. Not only did it not work (the film opened fourth in the box office and only made a meager profit), it didn't save the film from a pretty rotten reception on pretty much all fronts—and you guys had to go Google who the heck Tiffany was in the first place. Would Janet Waldo have saved the movie? Probably not, but it would have saved one of Hannah-Barbera's best-known voice actresses a lot of grief. Joseph Barbera went to his grave regretting the decision, and not even acting in a Jetsons movie could maintain Tiffany's relevance as 1990 rolled on.

Charles Martinet has been the voice of Mario since 1996. We had Captain Lou Albano and Bob Hoskins before him, but Martinet has been Nintendo's go-to guy for as long as the biggest plumber in gaming had voice files to put into a cartridge. Five years from now, kids won't remember that the guy from the Parks and Recreations reruns was the guy in the Mario movie. But Charles Martinet is still gonna be yahoo-ing his way as the Mario Bros, and Wario, and Waluigi. And if Nintendo sees fit to keep him around, the question is going to remain: why wasn't he good enough for Mario's big break?

With Colleen O'Shaughnessy still getting top billing for voicing Tails in the Sonic movies, the words "Sega Does What Nintendon't" still ring true. Don't cash the checks all in one place, Chris.

And that's this column. With things getting colder and greyer, I find myself antsy over the winter months. But writing these columns gives me a lot of fun stuff to do and cover, even if it's as potentially unpleasant as the Mario movie. Thanks, as always, for being around! What's new from you guys? Did any of you get your Xenoblade art books? Have any of you played any of the Naruto games? Are they any good? Are there any gacha games you gave up on because they got too greedy? Feel free to talk about it! Be good to each other, I'll see you in seven.