This Week in Games

Not The Best Of Pals

Welcome back, everyone! It was very nice to have such a warm welcome from everybody last week. And! We got something fun in the mail! Never mind me getting my copy of Another Code: Recollection (Look forward to a review shortly), I got some nice tchotchkes!

Look at this bunch of jokers! I was lucky enough to get my Shulk Amiibo a few years back, but I leaped at the chance to get the Noah and Mio Amiibo—and not a moment too soon! Noah's sword is kinda bent, but it's still really nice to have him and Mio on my shelf. And, curiously, both Noah and Mio have unique bases with the Xenoblade Chronicles's "X" logo on them instead of the Super Smash Bros logo on Shulk's Amiibo. Now, all I'm missing are Pyra and Mythra...! I forgot to pre-order them when they were available, and I've been kicking myself ever since because they've been gone, baby, gone for over a year with no restock in sight. Maybe I'll have luck finding them at a not-eye-gouge-y price at the Portland Retro Game Expo.

I haven't talked much about the trailers that Atlus has been periodically releasing for Persona 3 Reload before its February release for a simple reason: there isn't much to say about them. They sure are trailers revealing the beloved members of the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad and their hotly-anticipated new voice cast. As genuinely cool as these trailers are, other more pressing matters are at hand. But this one stands out because... well, look.

I don't watch much TV outside of anime, so I don't know who people are or what's trending with folks. I only really look into stuff because folks I know mention it. And I know even less about The Umbrella Academy, let alone the actor Aidan Gallagher. I know some folks liked The Umbrella Academy, and it helped promote Gallagher to stardom (good for him), that much I can glean. So here he is, running through several locales from Persona 3's Iwatodai City, culminating in becoming a video game character and lunging at a Shadow. Which is... kinda boss, actually?

I know it's a stretch to have a celebrity hawking an RPG, but goodness knows, I've seen folks confused by the decision to have Gallagher starring in a Persona 3 commercial. But being that the commercial features Microsift's Xbox branding, I think it's an attempt on their behalf to promote the game among audiences that aren't normally into anime or Japanese games. And using someone people recognize is a great way to do that. Nintendo did just that back in 2010 when they were pushing Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Sky on the Nintendo DS, bringing in famed nerd and creator of Robot Chicken Seth Green to appear in several commercials for the game. Did it work? You tell me—it sold 5.5 million copies worldwide. Even accounting for a bigger chunk of those sales being in Japan, its US sales alone likely eclipsed those of the non-Seth Green-promoted 3DS port of Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King. Again, there's a lot of promoting power in making someone go, "Hey, I know that guy!".

... Christ, I hate justifying Chris Pratt being cast as Mario.

It's not even an inherently American phenomenon; just look at that time Game Freak brought in Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt as their spokesperson for Pokémon Sun/Moon. Are they successful methods of promoting games? I'unno, but they're entertaining and better than just tossing a trailer onto Twitter and hoping for the best, especially with how painfully unattractive the notion of playing a Japanese RPG can be to American audiences.

I think the added boost will greatly help Persona 3 Reload. The original Persona 3 is the dawn of Persona's relevance, as far as the gaming public is concerned (maybe even Atlus, with how much they ignore Maya and Tatsuya and company). But the original Persona 3 was released back when it was really uncool to be a Japanese game. Oh sure, it exploded into popularity and made Persona a household name, but it also ensured Persona was the poster child of "Japanese games." I've gone on record about my issues within the Persona series: the bullshit gender politics, the disservices done to the female cast, the deeply unacceptable-yet-recurring gay-panic "jokes." But—and here, I must be genuine—the moment Lotus Juice starts rapping, I'm 18 again, and I'm just excited to see a new Persona after years of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment being a secret handshake between folks. Iwatodai Dorm's background music is burnt into my skull, in a good way. The sounds of a female chorus shouting BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY is in my blood, man (I've legit heard weird remixes of it in my dreams years after the fact). Persona 3 is nevertheless near and dear to my heart, and I'm happy if we can get more folks into it. I hope folks can understand why Persona 3 came to mean so much to folks.

But I still ain't letting Atlus off easy for doing Minako dirty.

I don't consider myself particularly old, but I have witnessed how fast technology has advanced in the past 30 years—especially since I couldn't enjoy much of it directly. I have made some pretty big jumps in tech. I went directly from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and other platformers on the Sega Genesis to dabbling a little with PlayStation One—and then we got a PS2, and I got to see games look really good. But throughout the industry, I've also seen some absolutely retrograde decisions, like alternate costumes and characters, formerly stuff you'd unlock in the game itself, being relegated exclusively to an after-the-fact purchase tacked onto the game. And it never stops feeling positively galling.

So here we have Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, a highly-anticipated sequel to the esteemed Like A Dragon series. Folks are amped to play what could be the capstone to Kiryu Kazuma's adventures and to see him undergo what looks to be his biggest battle yet. But as many other publications have pointed out, Sega has decided that certain key gameplay features don't need to be in the base game. Infinite Wealth, like many other AAA games, is released in various versions: there's the Standard edition of the game, the Deluxe Edition, and the Ultimate Edition, each with staggered rewards, all for paying extra upon release. The Standard edition, of course, doesn't have many of these feelies—which, for some reason, includes New Game Plus.

Some espouse the opinion that games "ought" to be more expensive because games "haven't really increased in price," and if you account for inflation, then allegedly, those old NES titles would have been sold for $120, which is a far more "fair" price for a AAA release. I like how Stephanie Sterling of The Jimquisition frames it: it's not about need; it's about greed. And we're already paying $120 for AAA games these days anyway: $70 is just a shell price for an incomplete copy. I love Nintendo and Super Smash Bros, but if I want to use Terry Bogard or Joker, I have to shell out an extra $55 for both fighter passes. And I think we can all agree that if a fighting game is missing character, it sure as heck isn't "complete." At least that's "just" $110 for a complete Super Smash Bros Ultimate, as opposed to the $120 people usually cite.

And that's just with characters or outfit packs. Studios have always been fairly brazen with how they handle monetization in games, because they know that the "true fans" will either help them make "fetch" happen (like with Bethesda and Oblivion's horse armor), or because they know they can walk back their brazen choices to something that still sucks but appears on the surface to be a compromise. Most developers know better than to pull these kinds of stunts with core gameplay features (outside of that time Konami decided it was kosher to charge Metal Gear Survive players $10 for extra save slots). Sega made a bad decision by banking on XQC to be their big sponsored streamer for Infinite Wealth (fans were not happy with the decision); they seem actively poised to sabotage Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth with keeping New Game Plus behind a paywall. Why in the world would you pay people to maintain your big blockbuster's replayability? What's worse is that several achievements are locked behind New Game Plus. If you want to get that 100% achievement rating on Steam, you must shell out extra cash for New Game Plus.

The decision has been widely criticized on social media, and there is no undoing this. Hopefully, Sega takes enough heat from all this to not make this kind of boneheaded decision in the future. Real yakuza don't scam players like that. That'll earn you a Tiger Drop.

"Hrrghn, Metal Gear Solid coming to Fortnite?"

Ahem. I can always count on Fortnite to fill up some news space every few months or so. While I agree with Maximilian_dood that Super Smash Bros is the reigning champ of being "Video Games: The Video Game," Fortnite is lousy with wild crossovers. It's one thing when they bring in a ton of mainstream anime characters like Goku or Deku, it's another when they bring in... the cast of Metal Gear Solid. Yes, even with the specific cardboard box that says "THE ORANGE" on it.

As seen in the trailer, Solid Snake and Raiden join Fortnite; Snake and his duds are part of a unique Battle Pass, and Raiden is available as a premium character. Snake comes in Solid or Old variants, while Raiden can have his famous luxurious hair swinging free or his little diving mask from the start of his sequence in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any way to get Raiden in his Revengeance look. And for those wondering: yes, Snake's cheeks have been deflated. (COWARDS.) Alas, he and Pyramid Head both suffer together. And since Fortnite characters don't really talk, the beloved David Hayter won't be back to voice Snake and all his dialogue parroting.

As a neat bonus, Snake has some loading screens as part of his rewards, but uh... they're kinda done up in a basic "anime" style. This is a bit of a downer, considering how integral Yoji Shinkawa's art has been to Metal Gear Solid; I'm sure they would have been willing to sketch something up. Oh, well. Solid Snake's battlepass are available for purchase until March 8.

Oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph H. Christ. Part of why I love being into RPGs is because it's easy to ignore the tempests in a teapot. If someone in desperate need of touching grass gets mad about vagina bones, block them on Twitter and move on with your life. I can put my energy into stuff I care about because I'm here for a good time, not a long time. If I were going to make myself miserable, I wouldn't be in this line of work. But then Palworld came out and sold over 8 million copies in less than a week, and now you've got folks screaming that it's the death knell for Pokémon and others howling for blood.

Palworld, the latest game from Japanese developer Pocket Pair, is an open-world survival game where the twist is that you can collect and tame any of 111 "Pals": colorful monsters that wander the land. The trailers put attention to things like having a sweatshop of pals toiling away at an assembly line or gunning down Pals with machine guns. In many ways, it was nothing I was interested in, and I was ready not to comment on it and just ignore it because I've got better things to do and better games to play. But like I said, Palworld sold six million copies in four days and has boasted over a million active players on Steam. These numbers exist at the same time as a very active current of gamers who have a lot of gripes about Pokémon, be it the games having terrible performance on the Switch, lack of innovation, or any other number of criticisms. Many now tout Palworld to be a Pokémon killer, if not a demonstration of what Pokémon should be, then at least a demonstration of what Game Freak could do if they weren't "lazy."

Meanwhile, much heat has gone around due to Pocket Pair's backgrounds as developers. The CEO of Pocket Pair has infamously been vocally supportive of AI generation and has openly admitted in interviews to mostly follow trends (famously, he admits he'd be a "bad fit" at Nintendo given Nintendo's desire to innovate). Folks point to Pocket Pair's previous games, Craftopia and Never Grave, the latter being highly similar in style, presentation, and gameplay to Hollow Knight. There have been a lot of claims that Pocket Pair used AI to generate its list of Pals—a claim which is, up until now, inconclusive and unsubstantiated. Many believe that more than several Pals are retextured models ripped from Pokémon. This is also unsubstantiated.

It's my experience that a lot of gamers have issues with Pokémon. A lot of folks in my social circle started mainlining Palworld and holding it up as "Pokémon finally having competition." So I sank $30 into playing it for eight hours to see where folks were coming from. I made a cute little cottage and stables for my pals. Then my copy of Another Code came in the mail, and I figured I had enough.

Never let it be said that I don't put my money where my mouth is when I critique something. (If your response is, "Why'd you play it if you were just gonna shit on it," I ask if you would have preferred if I didn't try it in the first place.) Anyway, the claims that Palworld is "Edgy Pokémon" are vastly exaggerated, cultivated maybe by the infamous trailer but nevertheless disingenuous. If anything, Palworld plays like a sloppier version of Ark: Survival Evolved. The stuff you'd expect from a Pokémon game—fun characters, an ongoing story, competitive battles against other trainers—aren't there. What you have is an open-world game where monster-taming (like in Ark) is given a Pokémon-esque twist through the use of "Pal Spheres" to capture and summon your Pals. Pal designs range from "Blorbo" to "Electabuzz Drawn With My Eyes Shut," but the design of the Pals is pretty pointless: like with AI, the ugly fingers aren't the issue. Honestly, I have more of an issue with how mish-mashed all the art assets are, between my avatar's "Handsome Squidward" face, Pokémon-esque designs on monsters, and the realistic object textures.

Palworld is in early access, so ironically, it only runs marginally better than Pokémon Scarlet/Violet: while the game has good draw distance and immediately "pretty" graphical textures, the underlying systems need a ton of work. Your furniture doesn't snap to a grid when you're building stuff; trying to get a roof onto a wall is an exercise in pulling teeth. Pal pathfinding is hit-or-miss. Each Pal can do certain things on your base, like watering crops or helping build things, but it'll do the first thing it finds that it can, so if it can take items to a storage box, it'll do that until you start building something—then it'll start helping you. In my time playing on our community server, there were various issues with lag and connectivity, with several people dropping out of the server or lag spikes interrupting gameplay. The game doesn't know what to do with Pals crossing bodies of water, so Pals will... "hop" across the water until they hit land. Falling through the map can happen occasionally (one of my buddies ended up under a mountain).

Palworld had a lot of hype (Geoff Keighley highlighted it in his annual clown show), and anything that drops a name like Pokémon's in its description is going to get a lot of eyes on it. As far as genres go, crafting survival games is the kind of thing that people can't seem to get enough of, regardless of their quality. Do I think Palworld plays well? No. Do I think it has potential? I honestly don't care; like I said, I've got better games to play. But my opinions don't matter; we have a confluence of narratives here.

A lot of players are saying, "Pokémon is bad now!" based on a variety of opinions, be they the result of years of playing the games and being disappointed with their rushed development cycles or because people are furious about the time they made an ice cream cone a Pokémon or because Pokémon doesn't stray from being a turn-based RPG.

"Palworld is plagiarized!" is another opinion, built from either the valid concern of Pocket Pair's CEO's past or trend-hopping nature or people mindlessly parroting tweets of varying degrees of research. (The terms "plagiarism" and "parody" are now right up there with "censorship" as far as "words nerds shouldn't be allowed to use without a license.") You have a "David versus Goliath" story of the tiny Palworld studio (famously, one of their modelers is a high-school drop-out) against a multinational corporation that doesn't give the fans what they want. You have the story of a ruthless cynic grasping at straws at whatever will get eyes on his project, hoping nobody catches onto his prior scams before he can make bank. Social media isn't a very good medium for discussion either, be it due to the influx of hyperbole or the indifference of gamers who "just want fun games." The devil takes the details.

This past weekend, I went through my collection of physical Switch games and appreciated how amazing it is that some of them even exist. Last year, we got a new Double Dragon. We had an amazing surprise in the form of Signalis. The Switch has been host to a king's ransom of remakes, ports, and original indie titles, the likes of which we haven't seen in years. The very fact that Nintendo remade Another Code with some serious "oomph" behind it is a tiny miracle of its own: a long-forgotten DS game with a cult audience, remade for a new generation on the Switch. Where Another Code was originally puzzled over for being such a low-key puzzle game that folks hadn't seen since Myst (and even then, the story in Another Code is so much more low-stakes), it's now in good company be it from the appreciation for "walking simulators" in this day and age or from the renewed interest in "cozy" games. And it's selling well, too—accounts claim that the game is currently sold out at both Amazon and Best Buy. Even if it had a tiny print run, the game sold out. Not bad for a game people didn't know what to make of in 2005.

And it's not even the only Nintendo oddity that got a new lease on life. Nintendo brought Famicom Detective Club back—if you haven't heard of this game from that one random trophy in Super Smash Bros Melee, you likely have never heard of that game before. Nintendo went on a limb and remade the first two Advance Wars games. And none of these are half-assed remakes—Arc System Works developed the Another Code remakes. Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp was developed by American studio WayForward Tech. However beleaguered as its development is, Nintendo returned to Retro Studios to make Metroid Prime 4. Golden Sun was ported to Nintendo Switch Online+. Nintendo experimented with battle royale games three times with Tetris 99, Mario 99 and F-Zero 99."

I'm pointing this out because when it comes to stuff like Palworld or the endless "Nintendo Hire This Man" Mario-In-An-Unreal-Engine-5-landscape stuff we see, there's this bigger narrative that these ideas are doing what Nintendon't. Which, fair, Nintendo isn't making a crafting survival game. Nintendo didn't make a cover-based third-person shooter. Nintendo didn't make an MMORPG. Whether or not Nintendo needs to, though, really boils down to taste. My hours with Palworld didn't leave me convinced—it's not anything I ever wanted out of a Pokémon game, and honestly, it hasn't got a damn thing to do with Pokémon outside of a collection of colorful monsters. But people want it to be. People want Palworld to be a slap to Nintendo's face and to make Game Freak "make better games." People want to see Nintendo knocked off their perceived high horse. They want to see Nintendo's decisions end badly, to point at any random misfortune, and claim that this could've all been avoided if Nintendo did the "logical" thing and made a Switch Pro. And I don't have time for any of that.

Nintendo does take chances on weird games. They're just the painfully "unsexy" games that mainstream gamers fast-forward through during Nintendo Directs as they wait to see a new Zelda. Sometimes, those chances give us the Wii and Wii Sports. Sometimes, they give us the Nintendo Switch. Sometimes they give us Wii Music and Star Fox Zero. It ultimately doesn't matter: the Switch's successes mean nothing to people convinced that the Switch's graphical weakness means it can never have a "good game," whatever that might mean to them. Game Freak's genuine craft in the Pokémon games means nothing to people who stick to surface-level "Lol, look at the framerate and draw distance!" complaints—especially when these same folks wouldn't look twice at Cassette Beasts or Dragon Quest Monsters as an alternative. Gamers are gonna believe what they wanna believe. Folks are going to maintain whatever cognitive dissonances make them happy. But you are what you eat, and if you support the cynical cash grab, then don't be surprised when the rest of the industry decides to go for the cynical cash grab.

Pokémon has always been about the ultimate childhood fantasy: going around the world without grownups breathing down your neck, without having to go to school and do homework, and making friends with dinosaurs. In a 1999 interview with Time Magazine, series creator Satoshi Tajiri said, "When you're a kid and get your first bike, you want to go somewhere you've never been before. That's like Pokémon. Everybody shares the same experience, but everybody wants to take it someplace else. And you can do that." When asked about his creative vision, Pocket Pair's CEO responded, "I don't have a creative vision. I just want to make a game people like."

I'll criticize Pokémon's technical faults and rushed development cycles until the cows come home—I have in the past. But I think a lot of folks who wring their hands about The State Of Pokémon™ would be better off just realizing that they outgrew Pokémon and stop making that Game Freak's fault.

• I don't usually report on voice actor casting, but I want to give a shout-out to J. Michael Tatum on his casting as Cid Highwind in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. As much as the remakes have changed the script, I'm kinda hoping he gets to shout, "Sit your ass down in that chair and drink your goddamn TEA!!"

• Nintendo announced that all online functionality for Wii U and 3DS software will officially be discontinued on April 8; folks have until March 11 to transfer whatever money they still have on their Wii U or 3DS eShop accounts onto their main Nintendo Online accounts. Only two apps will continue to see support: Pokémon Bank and Poké Transporter.

• Remember IntiCreates' Umbraclaw? Don't worry, I forgot about it too—IntiCreates was pretty tight-lipped about it following its reveal last May. It's striking Metroidvania about a cat named Kuon trying to return to life (and its owner) by manifesting the powers of other animals while not losing the rest of their nine lives—think a Metroidvania crossed with some striking Okami art, with Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter's use of death and resurrection. It looks like a fun time, and we just received a release date: May 30, 2024!

I think that'll do it for this week. I trust you guys not to be inflammatory if you have thoughts and not to go out into the world being some kind of conflict-seeking drone. Life is too goddamn short to be a cynic edgelord, and if I leave you guys with anything I hope it's the enjoyment that comes from being sincere. This has been a difficult week for creatives of all stripes on the Internet; as I often do, I ask you guys to send some love to your favorite artists out there. You never know; it could mean a lot to them. Even for American fans and mangaka, the support and compliments go a long way. Be good to each other. I'll see you in seven.