theconstellationiris

I always saw him as sort of a PlayStation analogue to Satoru Iwata, and hoped he’d get to lead the company one day (if he wanted to). He always seemed to have more of an innate passion for games and how they impact people emotionally, that I feel is starting to become a lost art at PlayStation, than most other gaming execs. There have been more than a few “end of an era” moments in gaming over the last few years in particular, but I have to assume that for those of us who’ve been on PlayStation from the beginning, this sure does feel like more of a gut punch. I hope he gets to do more of what he loves most now, and wish him the best. It’s been a damn good run.

Lunar Remastered easily stole the show. I may have jumped up out of my seat. 😅

People are comparing this with Square characters showing up in Smash, but it’s important to remember that those characters took a long time to come to Smash. Multiple generations, in fact, since there had been hints since the Wii U era. Cloud, Sephiroth, Sora, et al didn’t show up until well after both the Switch and Smash Ultimate were clearly very successful, and there was added incentive (sales of amiibo for collectors, etc); I’m not convinced that it’s so much that Square doesn’t want its characters showing up in Astro Bot, so much that it doesn’t want to showcase its characters in a game that might not sell well (for all Square knows at launch).

@MikeOrator I’m not sure I understand what constitutes a “real fan” in this case, but I generally agree with the first part. That’s a separate concern from what this “bundle” is, though, I think.

@nomither6 Sure do, Nintendo still makes ‘em.

Back in my day, when you paid more for a product, you typically had something to show for it.

Love to see it. Long live Final Fantasy XIV (not least of which for Square’s sake, since it seems that game alone pays the bills over there).

Already have both on Switch, and better frame rates definitely aren't getting me to pay $60 to double-dip for just one of them. Both games are great, don't get me wrong...but seriously, $60?!

EDIT: I guess the bundle for both is $75, which is....better, but still too much IMO, and only works if you didn't already buy II (which is also $60 on its own).

So excited! Astro’s Playroom was such a delightful celebration of classic PlayStation, and this looks like it manages to recapture that classic PlayStation spirit while still massively expanding on Playroom. September can’t get here soon enough. I hope it knocks it out of the park for Team Asobi, and Sony realizes that they don’t need every game to be the next big AAA live service game.

I hope this is as awesome as it looks. Square’s recent comments about doubling down on the relative “safety” of AAA titles (regarding sales, anyway) make me worried for the future of smaller series like Seiken Densetsu, but goodness do I love seeing a high quality new entry in the series. I’m super excited.

@Shepherd_Tallon Oops, yeah, I see now that I misread your comment, ha. It is interesting how incongruent it seems to be with her character otherwise.

@Shepherd_Tallon The line before the update is much better, but either way, I see it sort of as a reference to the bit in Crisis Core where she tells Zack about how she’s fearful of the sky (a bit that I’d completely forgotten about until replaying it last week ahead of Rebirth’s launch).

I didn’t even realize Tokyo RPG Factory was still around. The only game of theirs I ever finished was I Am Setsuna, when it came out. Wasn’t mind-blowing, but it showed some promise. I was so excited for Lost Sphear when that came out, because it seemed to expand on all the things that were limited in Setsuna, but I got about 20-30 hours in before realizing that I just did not care. Never even tried Oninaki. Team Asano did everything better, with the exception of naming their games.

@Martijn87 Took the words right out of my mouth. I understand turning the original into a trilogy, and even changing the story a bit here and there to make it interesting, but needing to have the epic encounter at the end also completely ruins the pacing of the story, at least to me. After fighting a city-sized plot ghost and a version of Sephiroth roughly equivalent in power to the final battle at the end of the original game, the party is now supposed to be intimidated by the Midgar Zolom? Right, okay.

We don't even need Kingdom Hearts IV anymore, at this rate; we're already getting plenty of it with the FFVII Remake trilogy. On the plus side, at least it's flashy and fun to play.

I have my vote, but yeah, all this tells me is that damn, we had some heavy hitters this year. I wish it had been as great a year for developers as it’s been to enjoy their work.

@KundaliniRising333 With you on this one. It blows my mind that we had no less than three different versions of the first game in the span of ten years, and now a remake of the second game at less than five years old. FFVIIR has its own faults, to be sure, but it at least gets some small merit in that it’s a “remake” of a nearly 30 year old game (that, let’s be honest, doesn’t hold up as well as it used to, even if it is undeniably a classic).

@Ravix I was legit just about to comment that Tchia deserved a mention here, although it’s not a 2024 game. A Tchia x PaRappa collab would be rad.

Easily among my most anticipated games of 2024, it looks incredible. Hopefully the Suikoden remasters will actually be ready before then, too (although it seems doubtful). It's gonna be another incredible year for RPGs, and I'm still catching up with this past year! Apologies to my wallet in advance.

Speaking for myself, I'm firmly in the "gaming enthusiast" category, and the only reason I'm not currently eyeing a Portal is because my handheld use case is still being served by my massive (read: incredibly daunting) Switch backlog.

@Shepherd_Tallon That's kind of what I'm thinking, as well, that it'll eventually have some standalone streaming PSN capability. Which would be awesome.

Great to hear. I've definitely enjoyed XVI very much overall, but we've had plenty enough of the sequelization and expansion of new FF entries over the preceding handful of titles, thank you very much. One and done is great, and another welcome throwback to the older games in the series.

Very curious about the line in it with new challenges in the next game in the series. That suggests that CBU3 will handle the next one, as well, but is far from confirmation. I certainly don't hate the idea, although I will be a little surprised if it's actually called Final Fantasy XVII. We have at least a few years until then, though.

@Olmaz If it helps you feel any better, I definitely thought Metaphor would rank a good bit higher. Admittedly, it's a pretty stacked list to begin with.

Damn, I thought the joke was over, but then they had to respond with “the metrics”. 🤣

Easily one of the highlights of the show, IMO. Kinda wild that they got it out of the way so early on, but I’m happy just the same.

Definitely need to see more, but I’m intrigued so far. Always happy to see new entries in the Mana series.

Welp, time to play through this again for the….I dunno, fifth time? Sixth time? Either way, a pleasant surprise, which will be more so when it actually goes live on the PS Store.

@EvenStephen7 Indeed. Also missing from the context of a lot of these debates is an element of classism and means, frankly; the comments section here seems like a pretty fortunate group, overall, but a lot of families have to choose between something like a tablet that everyone can use for a variety of tasks, that is more likely to play Minecraft or Roblox or what have you, or an older used console that can still play some of the less resource-intensive live service games, than a shiny new PS5 that might be twice as expensive, and only ever buy complete games (maybe at full price, maybe not) that their kids might lose interest in not long after purchase. Conversely, many people live in areas that don't have the robust infrastructure needed to support downloaded and live service games, and can only really rely on physical releases on a dedicated system, expensive as it may be.

Any time one group starts to dictate to the other how things "should" be done is a bad time. That goes for those playing and buying games, and it goes for the platform owners investing in those ecosystems as well. Fortunately, again, gaming is a large and diverse community, so there's plenty of room for both.

Change is hard, I know, but here's a wild idea: maybe there's room for more than one way to enjoy games?

Gaming is really big and really diverse nowadays. Far, far more so than when a lot of us of a certain vintage were starting out decades ago. You can have a quick time waster on your phone, a subscription/free-to-play game for those times when you don't want to have to invest a bunch of time and energy into a brand new experience, and you can have whole-widget, brand new games on disc or cart or download or whatever when you're ready for that.

Perhaps I'm fortunate, but my own kid enjoys all of those things. She asks for Nintendo Switch games sometimes (lately, Fire Emblem and Tales RPGs), we're looking forward to FFVII Rebirth, and we've been having a blast with Mario Wonder together. She also really loves playing Minecraft with her friends, so we have a Realms subscription that adds new content pretty regularly. Services like PlayStation Plus allowed her to find really fun games like Tchia, or Stray, that maybe she might have been less incentivized to try out over something else. She also enjoys FFVII: Ever Crisis and various Apple Arcade games on her hand-me-down iPad when a quick fix is in order.

I'm certainly not about to tell other parents how they should approach anything to do with raising their kids, but I do think it's important to consider that our kids aren't merely extensions of ourselves — one of the best ways to build trust and respect with them is to allow them to explore their own interests, free of our own influence. Even if it isn't what we grew up with or what we prefer, meeting them where they're at, building that relationship, and enjoying that experience together is far more valuable than whether they'll still have Roblox on a cart or disc in 20 years.

Sometimes I still pop a disc into my old, original PlayStation and fire it up for a nice, nostalgic evening. Sometimes, I hop online for an hour or two to enjoy Final Fantasy XIV (a game that not only requires a full-game purchase every couple of years, but also a monthly subscription, and will go away entirely when they eventually spin the servers down for good).

It's easy to complain, sure; it's even easier to just enjoy whatever good game experiences you find, in whatever forms they come in.

This is a pretty quiet exit for someone so integral to the success of the platform, and the industry as a whole, that it’s hard not to read into it and think maybe it’s not all a matter of rosy retirement. Her resume has to be among the most staggering, legendary list of achievements in all of gaming. Best wishes and good luck to her with whatever’s next, and what a massive loss for the PlayStation community.

Probably the only thing I’ve missed from leaving Twitter are moments like this, so I appreciate it being shared here. This brings me great joy. 🥹

This looks like it’s going to be absolutely massive. Love seeing what looks a little like an FFVII take on Chocobo Hot & Cold from IX. It’s a little worrisome, in a way, that they’ve focused so much on all the sandbox stuff and not very much on the story so far, but perhaps that’s to not spoil too much ahead of time; hopefully they learned a bit of a lesson about that from Remake. Either way, I’m glad to see how this complements XVI, with having all the things that that game felt lacking in.

We all knew this was the true endgame all along, anyway. 😂

Wow, they even added screen tearing, just like the old ones! Gotta love that attention to detail.

As much as I really enjoyed FFXVI, it being worked on concurrently with XIV made it feel like CBU3 was really strained, and it shows most especially in the world map and side quest design for the game. This looks like the one that’ll deliver more of that modern-but-old-school RPG experience that was missing from XVI (the TGS gameplay made me think I was watching Xenoblade X with FFVII characters), and I am here for it.

“Don’t worry about that, we have every intention of letting this thing suffer under the crushing weight of fan expectations in the end.”

Between this, the price hikes, the focus on live service/gacha games, the $200-$400 dedicated streaming handheld, and the ports of releases like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Spider-Man, Sony seems almost hellbent on turning PlayStation players into PC players this generation. Weird business strategy, but what do I know.

@tabris95 I mean, everyone should just play Xenogears anyway, heh.

I love Final Fantasy as much as the next fan, and VI is far and away my favorite game ever made…but I saw what happened with Seiken Densetsu 3/Trials of Mana. Hard pass.

@LifeGirl Fully agree. Honestly, if Yuna was on this list, probably the only person I’d be slightly inclined to vote for above her would be Terra, but there’s a lot of nostalgia at play there for me. Either way, Yuna is honestly just one of the best protagonists in video games, much less Final Fantasy games.

Despite its faults, I haven’t had this much fun with a new Final Fantasy game at launch since IX or X. I’ve played through it three times already. There are parts that don’t work very well on their own, but as a complete package, FFXVI is an astounding work of art. I’m glad to hear Square agrees. Easily my favorite PS5 game so far.

Also, I quite literally can’t stop listening to Away on repeat.

Good to see the discourse around the latest Final Fantasy game is as healthy as ever. 😅

@Loamy Indeed, I'd like that to be true, as well — the only way I could get my hands on a PS5 at the time was with the Digital Edition, which is generally fine, but it'd be nice to have the option to still pick up and use physical media for at least some of my more favored games. That said, I don't know that I trust Sony to do something quite that consumer-friendly.

….why not sell a disc drive that works with the existing Digital Edition, and make that the standard lineup? Don’t we have enough manufacturing problems in the world right now? You have to install games before you run them anyway, it’s not like we need the drive read speeds to be as fast as the internal storage.

@OrtadragoonX I think you’re talking about Asphalt? That’s still a running series, too, last I knew.

Ah, I see we’ve found our spiritual successor to the late 00s/early 10s Gameloft release strategy.

Looking at this list, it occurs to me that I’m still mostly playing Switch, or last year’s games. 😂 As such, my three aren’t so much my favorites so far this year, but the only new releases so far this year for me on PlayStation. So, FFXVI, Star Wars, and Tchia.

I think I’ll need to play it again, and again, in order to figure out where I’d rank it. Darn. /s

Not even a little surprising that FF would swap spots with Zelda. We’re talking about an M-rated game that’s exclusive to an expensive home console that’s only just started to hit its stride, versus a storied first-party release for one of the top-selling video game systems of all time, that’s just about all-ages. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

If it drops from the 2nd spot next week, that might be a little concerning, I suppose. Still wouldn’t be atypical for Final Fantasy, though, I imagine. I guess some people are trained to think that you have to sustain being #1 to be worthwhile now?

I gave it an 8, will be finishing it this weekend. There are some truly incredible moments that build on the 35-year-plus legacy of the series, and have had me grinning from ear to ear…and there are some elements of the game that are truly maddening, and definitely needed more consideration (IMO). Overall, it hits much more than it misses, and deserves its place in discussions of series high points. And I think there’s absolutely a case to be made for Valisthea being a new Ivalice for the series (as long as they show us lands and cultures beyond the Twins next time); the Matsuno influence is very, very strong.

Sure does paint that prerecorded video appearance from Jim Ryan at the FFXVI launch event (“we value everything that we do together”) in a whole new light.