This Week in Games

Space Snakes, Samurai Dates, and Tekken Patch Woes

Welcome back, folks! I wanted to take a moment to thank people for the warm reception to the interview with Story of Seasons' series director Hikaru Nakano in last week's column. I was quite worried it would get overshadowed by the bigger news that week. Nakano was wonderful to speak to, and he easily tops my list for one of my favorite interviews I've ever done (and this is after interviewing Mori Calliope--who was also nothing but gregarious). Nakano's insight into the Story of Seasons games with regards to the series' history was incredible and changed how I look at the series. It's an opportunity I never thought I'd get with regards to writing this column, and I look forward to more in the future! But back to this week, shall we?

In the spirit of some of those older anime tie-ins that we've seen lately, like UFO Grendizer: Feast of the Wolves, another old property is getting a modern-day revival! Space Adventure Cobra brings back Buichi Terasawa's cigar-smoking hero in a run-and-gun platform shooter, along with his lovely companions Lady Armaroid and Jane. The game is steeped in the retro "city-punk" aesthetics of the 1980s and filled with all of the giant alien ladies that you'd expect. The late Terasawa would be proud.

Space Adventure Cobra is quite the deep cut, though; I don't think many people who read Jujutsu Kaisen or Ichi the Witch know that something like Cobra is a very important part of Weekly Shonen Jump's history! (Then again, I don't think many shonen readers these days care for much of anything from before 2005--alas, poor BASTARD!!.) Cobra feels more like a pulpy story from Heavy Metal Magazine--it certainly had enough naked butts for it! The story begins with a businessman taking a trip to a nearby dream store that lets him experience being a bounty hunter named Cobra, going up against space pirates--which was weirdly not on the menu. After a car crash with what seemed to be one of the criminals from his dream, the man goes to his apartment and finds his secret stash of weapons, discovering that he is Cobra, after cosmetic surgery and a memory wipe. With his companion, the Hajime Sorayama-esque Lady Armaroid, Cobra sets off on countless violent, butt-filled adventures with intrigue, gunplay, and lots and lots of aliens. Chief among his recurring antagonists is Crystal Bowie, a transparent cyborg who I swear must've been inspired by the Microman toys.

Cobra ran from 1978 through 1984, with a subsequent theatrical film directed by Osamu Dezaki truly propelling the series into the limelight, paving the way for its television anime series. I've heard claims that the Cobra anime used to air on Puerto Rican television, but nobody I know seemed to have heard of it. I, at least, discovered Cobra through Jump Ultimate Stars, that phenomenal 2D mascot fighter on the Nintendo DS that was chockablock with characters from throughout Weekly Shonen Jump's history. It's a cornerstone of science fiction manga, inspiring creatives from all over the world (particularly France). Terasawa was also working on a Cobra sequel right up until he died in 2023, unfortunately leaving the identity of a pair of characters in limbo.

All this to say that Cobra is a very inspired choice for a video game adaptation. A bit too old for most anime fans, sure, and it doesn't have the immediate appeal that an older super-robot show would have (I could at least assume someone would be familiar with it through Super Robot Wars), but the stylization might endear it to folks. Look out for it on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Steam, and Nintendo Switch this August 27th!

The eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that I didn't touch upon any of the "April Fool's" jokes from across the game industry last week. The reason for this is simple: the "jokes" aren't funny. We've thankfully seen more reluctance on behalf of studios in the United States to not make more jokey-joke "dating simulator" spin-offs of their games, if only because more and more people are sick and tired of the bit. We get it, studios in America are contemptuous towards visual novels, but the bit has worn thin so you'll forgive me for not laughing at PUBG's Winner Winner Romantic Dinner. Sure, Kadokawa got into the act with an otome game based off of the Re:Zero series--but Kadokawa has actually published otome games like Prince of Stride: Alternative or Sengoku Night Blood. They're not taking the piss out of an entire genre. And hell, a lot of Re:Zero fans might actually enjoy an otome game spin-off of Re:Zero.

On that note: the Hakuoki series. Created by Idea Factory in 2008, the series goes over the many details of the tomboyish Chizuru as she looks for her missing father in Edo-period Japan. Helping her are the members of the Shinsengumi, the Shogun's ruthless military police. Except in this case, they're not just quelling imperial sentiment, they're also killing demons. The series was quite successful, owing to its strong character writing and its phenomenal protagonist in the form of Chizuru. It earned a few sequels and spin-offs, but--as usual--some of them didn't come to the United States. One of them, finally, is, at least! Put another one on the board!

Hakuoki SSL ~Sweet School Life~ transplants the Edo-period characters and settings of the Hakuoki series and re-imagines them all as students or teachers enrolled in high school. Shenanigans ensue as Chizuru and company fret over mid-terms or get into silly watergun fights--with the Shinsengumi characters holding everything as they would a katana (like boat oars). The game originally released on the PS Vita way back in 2014, but was sadly passed over for a U.S. release--until now! With Hakuoki SSL having gotten a Switch release in Japan back in 2023, eastasiasoft has finally decided to bring it stateside.

If this isn't a tiny miracle, nothing is; while otome games are certainly a thriving sub-culture in the US, those games nevertheless get passed over but hard on a mainstream level. The reason is simple: they're "dating sims," but for giiiiirls. That's, like, "not a real game" almost three times over. But That Bitch™ doesn't brook that kind of thinking here at This Week in Games. The same way endless isekai light novels are based on Dragon Quest, countless of the "villainess" light novels and manga are based on otome games--specifically, Angelique, a long-running otome series dating back to the eponymous 1994 title on the Super Famicom. And Angelique hasn't even been released in the US--as foundational a loss as if none of the Princess Maker games had never been released stateside. The PSP and PS Vita were a curious moment where otome games started getting really popular in America, not just through Hakuoki but also through titles like Sweet Fuse: At Your Side, where you played as the niece of video game developer Keiji Inafune. (This was, uh, a good deal before Mighty No. 9 happened.)

Otome fans can look forward to pre-ordering Hakuoki SSL ~Sweet School Life~ starting this April 10th on PlayAsia. There will be physical and digital copies of the game, as well as a fancy limited-edition set with acrylic stands, Joycon stickers, and an art book. Only 2000 copies of the limited edition set will be available, so I hope you're able to nab one if you want one!

It's been a rough time for Tekken players! While I'm not the hugest of Tekken fans, I can appreciate that the game has a great deal of intricacy and strategy involved; just movement alone is practically an art style, involving maneuvers that hinge upon the mechanics of joysticks to function (read: the Korean backdash.)

Of course, balance can still be an issue with Tekken, like with any other fighting game. "Balance" isn't just a matter of raw damage from attacks; a lot of factors go into a fighting game attack being "balanced" or not. For example, consider a kick attack with a funky hitbox. It might look you'd only get hurt if you're directly in front of the character when they kick, but if the hitbox is too wide or too tall, you open the door to weird scenarios like being hit when you're otherwise over the animation. An attack might have a long "reset," wherein your character is unable to do anything for the handful of frames it takes for their animation to put them back into their "neutral" stance—and even though those frames are just a fraction of a second, that fraction of a second is all it takes for an opponent to get one over on you. You might be able to "tech" an attack, wherein you can finnagle it to work in ways that weren't intended—like timing your aerial punches with your jumps so that the punch's reset is cancelled by your character's landing animation, making it faster to just punch in the air than even spamming ground jabs.

There's only so much a developer can do to handle this kind of thing; you can determine animation speeds, inputs during frames, hitboxes, and damage values, but players will find ways to exploit them nevertheless. Sure, that one command throw has a long wind-up... but it turns out you can tech it by dashing, making your grappler a moving torrent of grabs. Sure, that crouching-jab is just supposed to be a safe option... but it turns out that you can read inputs at any point after the third frame of animation, making it an extremely safe option for poking at your opponent. This is where a ton of emergent gameplay comes in; players study character matchups and determine which characters have the toolkit that can most easily answer the threats posed by other characters.

This is a big part of what makes fighting games so fascinating for many, not to mention why members of the fighting game community are so passionate about their character. Fighting games are a lot like the practice of actual martial arts in that they require a specific philosophy, an outlook towards the world: "What do I need to learn to get better at something?" Hence why so many are willing to spend hours learning "bread-and-butter combos" (the basic combos to maximize your character's damage—which might be basic but not easy to execute). This is why so many can be so attached to their characters—or even to a specific game.

With all of that preamble out of the way: Tekken 8 recently had a patch meant to balance things out a bit. Bandai Namco referred to it as the "Defense Patch"... but in practice, it's more of an "Offense is the best defense" patch. There's no easy way to break down the patch notes, since they're very extensive and get into very technical matters involving almost every character in the game. But long story short: the patch effectively makes the entire game a super-risky endeavor. Strong characters became even stronger, attacks with some degree of risk effectively became surefire hits, and certain characters known for having high skill ceilings became very, very easy to use. The Heat system was reworked, granting characters a variety of new offensive options, and throws became both far easier to escape while also becoming far less risky upon missing. To put it lightly: this didn't go over well. It's not just that characters were reworked into a different strategy, it's that the entire game's balance has been thoroughly scrapped. The community that has built up around Tekken 8 since its release last year are extremely unhappy; the current Steam score ranks the game at "mixed," with recent reviews giving the game an "Overwhelmingly Negative" rating.

I don't want to wag my finger at the Tekken community too much, because I get it: the game has been fundamentally altered in a way that not only completely upends any kind of play style that has organically developed over the year-and-change that Tekken has been out, but in a way that also makes the game tangibly worse to play. The strong got stronger, characters that used to require a bit of time and effort to learn are now "braindead" to use. Normally, I'd very loudly sneer at anything that was remotely connected to the "git gud" mentality—et me take a moment to actually laugh at it. Okay, now that I'm done laughing; the thing that makes this kind of thing particularly damaging in a fighting game versus, say, a boss getting nerfed in Armored Core is because at the end of the day, the Armored Core boss is supposed to be defeated. Nobody cares that you beat it with a DDR dance pad. The developers intended for you to be able to beat the boss, but realized that they may have needed to tone things down for the intended challenge. But you're not meant to "beat" a fighting game. This is why a lot of people still flock to older titles like Street Fighter III: Third Strike or Virtua Fighter 4 years after the fact, long after the games have received new characters or have received a whole new sequel. It's not that you're meant to beat your head against a wall to learn how to use Akira; it's that doing so is usually a mark of a deep understanding of how the game works, how to read your opponent, and how best to move in that virtual space. A character like Akira isn't "strong" because they're hard to use, they're just hard to use. But if you know what you're doing, you'll be able to completely shut your opponent down. You'd be just as good with anyone else; Akira just has a better kit for countering before your opponent can realize they're being read. All this to say that this makes the effort of learning your character, learning your match-ups, practicing inputs, "labbing" your character—which, in the eyes of dedicated FGC members, is the meat of playing a fighting game—is effectively worthless. Rub your face on the joystick, who needs to learn the game when you can just button-mash your way to victory?

Here's the thing: the way the Tekken community has decided to express a lot of this just isn't right. A hot take for someone like me who's never gone to locals (I just really like Ángel), I'll be the first to admit. But the reaction to the patch, disastrous as the patch is, speaks to a seething antagonism between players and developers that just turns my stomach. Like, yeah—the devs did playtest these patches. They did consider how these might affect the game. But I think what we have here is a failure to communicate: devs can't factor in the extensive ways in which a fighting game is adopted or modified by way of the community. Oh sure, they can try—there's a lot they can do in that regard. They can study footage from major events, they can study how high-profile players execute the game.

There are tomes and tomes of knowledge developers could glean from the player base... but that knowledge is still just data. When you're working on patches to update the game, you don't know how stuff will be received until it is. Consider the case of Street Fighter 2; after experiencing the janky (but fast-paced) bootleg copies of Street Fighter 2 that were floating around, CAPCOM devs experimented with the idea of making Steet Fighter 2 run faster—both as a means to make the game more fun, and also to encourage more money from players (faster games meant shorter rounds, which meant more games played). CAPCOM higher-ups were convinced this was a bad idea until location tests revealed that the decision was widely liked by the player base. Hence Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting. On the other hand, fans don't know what it is they want; if Henry Ford had asked people what kind of vehicle they wanted, they'd probably have asked him for a faster horse.

All this is to say that the decisions behind Tekken 8 weren't arbitrary. Maybe the research was off, but it was done in good faith. And I think people forget that. There is this absolutely miserable antagonism that players can have towards developers over perceived slights, as if a game has to be protected from its creators. All you have to do is take a cursory glance at Katsuhiro Harada's Twitter page to understand that the man and his team put a ton of thought into their game.

I've always despised the gamer/developer antagonism. I can disagree with a creator on any number of creative choices: character design changes, lore changes, changes in gameplay mechanics. I don't have to like any of that. But it's also unfair to immediately assume these changes are done arbitrarily or in an attempt to spit on the audience. The very notion of that flies against the entire creative process—especially given that developers don't only answer to their audiences, but also their managers and CEOs (when the money says "Jump!", you ask "How high?"). This feeds into a lot of the reactionary movements in the gaming community, the idea that a usurper has infiltrated the development team to lead the project astray. Sometimes an idea just doesn't pan out! Sometimes a thing sounds like it might be fun in isolation and tests well, but doesn't stand up to the rigors of on-the-floor play! Creation isn't a zero-sum game; an idea might have a ton of effort put into it, and just not pan out. A game isn't bad just because development was rocky—famously, Metroid: Other M's development went off without a hitch, while Metroid Prime's development was a complete mess. And doubly so for a live-service game--how a game plays now doesn't dictate how it'll play for the rest of its existence. Skullgirls players used to not live in fear of Big Band playing "Happy Birthday," for example. Games are constantly works-in-progress, especially games based around head-to-head match-ups.

For what it's worth, Harada and his team are aware of the problems—and even Harada has chalked it up to a disconnect between the audience and the tuning results. But the community needs a sit-down; there's a way to talk to people and there's a way to communicate with them. Shouting folks down, tossing slurs around—that's no way to live your life, and that's no way to talk to people. Not even developers, just people. And that's before you get to the cottage industry of Youtubers scouring through the social media pages of these developers, trying to pick apart unrelated tweets in an attempt at "studying" what's going on with development (or criticizing the studio at large). The gaming community is way too comfortable with the idea of just going completely bugnuts for matters like these. I remind you—Tekken 8's ratings are currently tanked after the patch, and likely will be until the patch is fixed. The extent to which players are allowed to tar and feather developers—and the eagerness with which they do it—is unconscionable. I've raised criticism about games plenty of times, but there's a reason I always underline the need to do so respectfully. It's not a matter of getting what you want. It's just a matter of not being an asshole.

Besides, it could be worse for Tekken—they don't have to deal with the Cristiano Ronaldo cameo.

Fans of side-scrolling beat-'em-ups have a lot to look forward to, courtesy of the upcoming remake/upgrade of the fan-favorite Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds. Titled Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate, this 2D action game based off of the Phantom Breaker fighting game is due out on April 17th, courtesy of Rocket Panda Games. We had a chance to sit down with "Mikey" McNamara, CEO of Rocket Panda Games, in advance of its release to talk some about the game.

Anime News Network: What led to the decision to remaster Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds?

Mikey McNamara: While I thank MAGES for bringing the Phantom Breaker franchise to life, under their reign the releases were fragmented across platforms, leaving users confused about what content / features were available on which platforms, and which versions had online play. And, as the new stewards of the Phantom Breaker franchise/IP, PBBGU was the perfect project to show the world we're taking our role seriously.

Anime News Network: Are any members of the original Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds team involved with the remaster?

Mikey McNamara: Definitely. The main producer on the project, Masaki Sakari is spearheading the development, and is adamant about keeping the DNA of the game, while refreshing it to 2025 standards.

Anime News Network: What can fans look forward to in addition to the Unreal Engine 5 updates?

Mikey McNamara: The biggest surprise is definitely playable enemy characters, including one of the dev teams' favorites: the Truck and the Drake. PBBGU offers a lot for beat'em up fans with an “easy to pick up / hard to master” learning curve. But one of the biggest “fun factors” is going to be the chaos people will experience with 6-player co-op and 8-player VS multiplayer. The dev team is also looking forward to seeing chaotic streams.

Anime News Network: Will this game compile all of the extra content from across the older versions of Battle Grounds?

Mikey McNamara: It definitely will. The guest characters from Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes will be available in the base game, in addition to the cosmetic upgrades that was DLC in the original Steam version. This is the “complete” Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate experience.

Anime News Network: Were there older decisions or gameplay balances that developers felt like they wanted to improve with this remaster? If so, could we get an example?

Mikey McNamara: Previous versions of PBBG were built on 15+ years of old “spaghetti” C++ code, which made it very difficult to expand on the game with additional characters or features. At the same time, trying to make even small gameplay changes (make this character's attack wide range, etc.) could cause unexpected issues in other areas. To answer your question, a lot of the issues were “under the hood” so to speak, which is why we chose to completely rebuild the gameplay engine in UE5 from scratch.

Anime News Network: What sort of challenges presented themselves with regards to attaining the cross-platform accessibility?

Mikey McNamara: Cross-platform play was possibly one of the most difficult aspects of development and one of the key reasons why the game had to be delayed. As an indie developer with a small team, testing all the different cross-platform permutations presented a challenge from a man-power perspective. Likewise, we're relying on EOS (Epic Online Services) within Unreal Engine to achieve cross-platform multiplayer – and EOS was designed for FPS and not action games, so the engineers had to do a lot of customizing on the game-side to solve a lot of the input / sync / latency issues. Nevertheless, we understand fans want value (because so do we!), and if one developer raises the bar, we need to do the best we can to deliver.

Anime News Network: Do you have any final words for our readers?

Mikey McNamara: On behalf of the entire team, we appreciate the chance to chat with Anime News Network. PBBGU has been a passion project for us, and we've got a lot more passion to go around after the game's release.

Otome fans can look forward to the US release of Illusion of Itahari this autumn! Play as the noble-born Hinagiku as she's caught in a web of intrigue involving her home in a flying city. Pre-orders are up on Aksys Games' website.

Fans of the Hyperdimension Neptunia games can look forward to Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos finally arriving on PC this April 30th. You can also get a "Magazine Edition" of the game with an art book done up like a motorcycle magazine.

Remember when Sega acquired Angry Birds creators Rovio? The result of that acquisition is now incoming: Sonic Rumble, a 32-player battle royale game featuring Sonic and friends. This includes a racing mode, a survival mode, and a ring-collecting mode. Look forward to it on Android and Steam this May 8th.

That'll do it for this week, I think. Slow week! I think studios might be holding off their bigger releases or reveals for the summer. It's a good time to get some Spring sunlight—the flowers are blooming, so it's a great time to take a walk and get some air in your lungs. I learned this week that you can eat magnolia flowers—and they're actually kinda sweet! (They taste a little like cinnamon.) Be good to each other! I'd say "I'll see you in seven," but I think you guys will see me a bit sooner--

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This Week In Games! is written from idyllic Portland by Jean-Karlo Lemus. When not collaborating with Anime News Network, Jean-Karlo can be found playing JRPGs, eating popcorn, watching v-tubers, and tokusatsu. You can keep up with him at @ventcard.bsky.social.

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