Niktaw

Can someone explain why companies announce games with release dates yet don’t make the game available to preorder physically? I type in “TAC” on Amazon and Tactics Ogre Reborn is the top search, yet it’s not listed yet. You’d think Square would want to capitalize on the immediate hype. But why would I expect them to do anything that makes sense I guess. This is Square after all. Remaking Live a Live before FF6, remaking Tactics Ogre before FFT, remaking Chrono Cross (poorly) before Chrono Trigger. Nothing they do makes sense. It’s like they hate money.

Maybe they’re adding some gameplay that doesn’t involve crawling around and hiding. One of the worst trailers I can recall. It looks like A Plague Tale minus all the fun parts.

Wow what a passionate comments section. It’s a game. It will be available for purchase. Please buy it if you want. If not carry on.

@Grimwood I agree it’s irrelevant, but if a new game comes out (especially indy), and I love it, I like to see that it’s popular because that supports the developer and increases the chance for a sequel. Other than that yes, caring that other people like what you like is a useless but remarkably common societal hitch.

I’ve gone back and forth a bit over the years, but I’d say X is my favorite FF game of all time. As much as VII blew us away on PS1, X was even more mind blowing compared to the previous generation. The story is awesome even though a little weird and the combat mechanics are close to perfect, and no FF has done the OP end game content better.

No option for I don’t like cats but I have cats against my will.

@get2sammyb I disagree. Let’s go over the major additions listed in the article.

Coordinators and weekly goals - these fall into the same category in that they were only mechanically viable for a couple seasons. By the 3rd season your coordinators were maxed out so there was never a reason to fire them, in fact the mechanic highly discourages changing coordinators. Thus the weekly goals were useless since they give you XP to improve your coaches.

Scouting - super glitchy, poorly implemented, and it was never fully explained. Many times I selected 3 focus players and only got a bonus on one. It was almost impossible to get through a season and have 100% scouting for 2 players at 2 different positions. The scout hiring mechanic was totally broken, many times there were zero scouts available for the position I wanted and the bonuses the 2 lower tiers gave you were nominal at best. If you accidentally missed a week where you were supposed to do something scouting related too bad, that part of the feature was gone.

Did they make some additions? Absolutely, but they were hacked on and poorly executed, 2 main descriptors of a lack of caring. Not to mention we had to wait 2 months after launch and restart our franchises just to get the half baked scouting. I’m incredibly cynical at this point, but franchise mode hasn’t had any major improvements in years. I would argue it’s worse since they simplified the player XP system several years ago. The X factors have been a good feature, but those are just a byproduct of MUT, they were never tailored to franchise.

@Kugetsu sometimes it’s ok to put the controller down and get a cup of coffee or a snack. It doesn’t make the game any less strategic. Strategy RPGs are turn based.

this game looks fantastic. After some of the garbage trailers we got last week, like that horrific looking Lord of the Rings game, this was a very nicely put together treat.

This game was the best couch co-op experience on PS2. That trailer though, wtf. Talk about not doing a game justice.

@Mad001 loved Heavy Rain, one of the very few games I’ve platinumed, and really enjoyed Until Dawn. The Quarry felt like the story wasn’t put together great, and the actual user input was minimal to say the least. It just didn’t keep me engaged enough to want to go through it multiple times. I did enjoy my playthrough, I was just a little disappointed.

I thought PS nailed their review. There wasn’t enough user input in The Quarry to make the game fun. We played through it once and couldn’t bring ourselves to do it again. For a $70 game it definitely was not worth it in my opinion; it felt very much like a budget release. Until Dawn is still far and away their best game.

This game was far from “endless replayability”. There’s hardly any user input, so it would be like watching a 12 hour movie then starting it over and watching it again. No thanks.

@PlatinumGamer you can still preorder it. I assume you get to pick you console at a later date.

https://sea-of-stars.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/

Extra is an outstanding value in my opinion. Even though it was only a few bucks more I didn’t go for premium. There’s plenty of great ps4/5 games on Extra for me to bother going back to ps3 and earlier. If I had unlimited time sure. But I don’t.

Ys 8 and 9 are the reason I upgraded to ps+ extra. Widely regarded as some of the best action RPGs ever made. Not sure they need to tweak the formula, especially with how good Falcom is at story driven RPGs.

@Ralizah awesome, I regret selling my copy for what I thought was a nice profit 10 years ago. This is a classic game that was never re-released and is impossible to find. An absolutely perfect game for Sony to include in their premium library.

@paulbuck1996 it sure as hell isn’t worth $70. We beat it in about 12 hours, which was expected. The story doesn’t make sense and there’s very little user input. You’re basically watching a movie.

My buddy and I both got launch ps5s and an extra controller. All 4 controllers got stick drift, 2 were out of warranty. I love the dualsense, it’s my favorite controller ever, but the stick drift thing is ridiculous. I’ve owned 4 generations of Sony consoles and never had a controller with stick drift, then suddenly they forgot how to make an analog stick.

@Nem these games have an unprecedented amount of written and spoken dialogue, and they don’t let NIS start translation until the game releases in Japan. I read somewhere that Cold Steel 3 had 3 times more Japanese characters than Persona 5. In other words we’ll never see a worldwide release of a Falcom game. It’s not ideal, but if Falcom can keep dropping amazing and impeccably translated JRPGs year after year it’s worth it.

@GamerDad66 I’ll second that, was disappointed not to see a question about the sky trilogy ps3 ports being brought west. Thank you for the great interview though, any Falcom news is good news.

@Lorcan I would agree the first sky game is quite slow. Maybe watch a summary video of the first game and starting with the second game. I haven’t played it but it does appear to have a much better pace. Also if you play the cold steel games then go back to the sky games, a lot of the characters will be familiar which should help you stay interested.

@Korgon that would be amazing, but I did not see them on there and I looked through all the ps3 games. I knew it was too good to be true. Sadly no Trails games for the US, but we did get Ys 8 and 9 at least.

The ps4 and ps3 libraries are really good. Didn’t expect to see Ys 8 and 9 on there, tons of classic ps3 games that I’d enjoy playing. The ps2/ps1 library is pathetic though. 37 games total and 90% of them were already available. I’ll probably upgrade for the rest of my sub to try it out, then I’ll make the call whether to keep going next year based on how much the classic library improves.

EA has zero problem lying, they do it every year with madden. They’re about making money and they’ll do whatever it takes to maximize profits. I have no reason to believe anything they put out in a press release.

I guess is this is the “Connected” version? Because as others have said I have Tetris Effect physical edition from LRG already.

@Athrum lol you are right about that, I expected a decent leap from cold steel 2 to 3, but honestly I can barely tell them apart. However, I decided a few years ago that I’ll take middling graphics with a captivating story, deep characters, and innovative yet classic combat over amazing graphics with a convoluted poorly translated story and progressively bland action leaning combat. Once I got over the fact that I’m using my ps5 to play a bunch of vita ports, I’ve been a happier man for it.

@Rob_230 odd that a studio with 6k employees can only release one flagship rpg every couple years. Falcom seems to be doing better with a few hundred people.

@johnny30 well that explains it lol. I’m 90 hours in no end in sight, so when I saw 25-30 hours I was like what am I doing wrong?

@johnny30 there is more than 30 hours of dialogue in Cold Steel 3. There is no way you could finish it in under 50 hours unless you skipped all the dialogue and played in high speed mode the whole time. Just going through the game normally and doing the side quests that are presented to you, it’s 100 hours easy.

That’s actually a pretty good list. Ghosts of Tsushima is worth a few months of subscription on it sown. If we get something close to that catalog of JRPGs that will be awesome.

@NEStalgia I actually made it through Oblivion on my PS3 somehow, one of the worst optimized games ever, but 70 hours into Skyrim it could take no more. After the 100th system locking glitch it finally YLOD’ed. pretty sure my copy of Skyrim is still in the disc drive.

Way to rub the trails in the sky HD remasters in our faces.

@NEStalgia people that have to have trophies are 56% more likely to be serial killers. #science

@KilloWertz it’s going to look horrific that’s a guarantee, unless they quadruple the resolution. I recently popped in Vagrant Story and my god it looks brutal on modern big screens. Who cares about trophies, they need to upscale these bad boys.

@Lexluther23 and there’s no special trophy that means you beat the game, it’s just another lame trophy like all the others. Maybe if there was a Diamond trophy or something that you got when you beat a game I might glance at my trophies every now and then.

@get2sammyb that was literally the only game that caught my eye. Looking forward to playing that again but overall this list is sorely lacking, made up almost entirely of games that were already free or were already offered on psnow. I’m sure the final list will be better though.

They can’t even predict what month they’ll give us an update. Square Enix is the embodiment of a dumpster fire.

As an English speaking Falcom fan, I’ll be buying PS4 games until 2025 at least.

Maybe Sony is waiting to close the deal on square so their ps3/ps2/ps1 library can be featured on ps+ premium. 🤞🤞🤞

what JRPGs? What was the last one? FFVII remake, a 3rd of a remake of a 20 year old game? The Japanese division of SE doesn’t do much of anything with JRPGs these days, other than taking 10 years to develop sub par half finished games. Unless I’m missing something, they released one (half finished) Final Fantasy game, a couple middling remakes of SNES games, and 1/3 of a FFVII remake during the entire PS4 generation and that sums up their JRPG contribution. And FFXV was a massively delayed PS3 game. Thankfully they partner with other developers from time to time so we actually get good games like Nier Automata.

I would love it if Sony bought SE, maybe we’d get sequels to some of the seminal PS1 and PS2 games that they’ve been ignoring all these years. Maybe we wouldn’t go 10 years between Kingdom Hearts games and maybe we’d be able to make sense of the stories. Maybe we wouldn’t get all these weird FF games that try every gimmick in the book other than delivering an amazing story and deep turn based gameplay that the series used to be known for.

@invictus4000 you didn’t like X? That was the last great traditional classic in my opinion. I loved XII and I actually really like XIII, but X is my favorite. The last great turn based FF.

Anyone know if these are co-op? Wasteland 3 was a blast to play with a friend.

It would be nice to have a few words about the co-op experience in each summary. For example Elden Ring is super easy to play with a friend, but I had heard that Demons Souls is a major pain.

@dark_knightmare2 well for me one big thing is I can play Elden Ring co-op. It’s absolutely amazing with a friend, and it’s super easy to do. Of course horizon has a better story and characters, but ER’s understated story fits perfectly with the rest of the game. I don’t want all my games that way, but I find it a refreshing change of pace from the typical cut scene laden plot heavy RPGs.

I love Horizon, it’s everything I hoped it would be. Most years it’s my GOTY. Unfortunately for Horizon, Elden Ring came out a week later. 230 hours in, still playing, haven’t touched Horizon since. I'll for sure go back and crush HFW but it’s just not on Elden Rings level.

@AtlanteanMan in fairness if I recall the spin off was a stretch goal, so they secured the additional funding needed to pull it off I guess. I’d rather see them focus on the main game as well but at least they didn’t pop this one out of nowhere.

Not really excited about Rising, but Hundred Heroes is one of my most anticipated games. It looks amazing and maintains the classic Suikoden feel. Absolutely cannot wait for that one.

Who cares. Square has all but burned their bridges with me. KH3 was a mess, nothing resembling a cohesive story. FFXV was a half finished mess with a horrific last 10 hours. And these are games that took eons to develop. Kingdom Hearts skipped the entire PS3 generation. Then I see other companies like From Software put out excellent games every 2-3 years.

No pricing on the premium tier yet?