This Week in Games

Hellos and Good-Byes

Well, with Heidi gone I guess it's time for someone new to take the reins at This Week In Games!. It's a big role to fill, you need someone passionate about the classics, with a sharp-eye for the current stuff. It can't be any old quartermuncher, you need—

Oh crap.

That's me.

I am that bitch.

Hello, everyone. My name is Jean-Karlo. You might recognize me from ANN's other regular column, This Week in Anime! You might even recognize me from that really fun Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture column our sweet Heidi Klem collaborated on with me. I've collaborated with Anime News Network since 2020, and I've been reading the site since 2007. I'm from sunny Puerto Rico, where I wrote what I think was the first Master's thesis on the island on video game journalism. I cut my teeth on Dragon Quest, the Puzzle Bobble song is my brain's “hold” music, and I bleed SEGA sky blue. I'm humbled to have been Heidi's first choice to replace her after five long years of covering This Week In Games!, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to be part of your weekly read. I love games, and while I was growing up Electronic Gaming Monthly was my bible. I held the names of Dan “Shoe” Hsu, Jennifer Tsao, Shane Bettanhausen, Jeremy Parish and Seanbaby in the highest of esteem, and I never thought I'd actually follow in their footsteps and talk about games.

So, allow me to start on the right foot.

The anime industry was rocked last week by the tragic news of Kazuki Takahashi's passing. Takahashi, best known as the creator of the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga, was also thusly responsible for the trading card game of the same name.

Yu-Gi-Oh! isn't just important by merit of its card game being one of the biggest in the world, up there with Magic: The Gathering and the Pokémon Trading Card Game, nor because of the countless game spinoffs it received over the decades. Takahashi was very clued into what kids liked in the 90s, and the early chapters of the manga had Yugi and his other Egyptian self playing with other games: battling virtual pets, playing collectible figure games, even computer RPGs. In-universe, Duel Monsters wasn't just a card game for kids: it was a way to bridge the gap between people and understand each other's hearts. And the same goes for the actual real-life card game: much like Yugi making friends with Joey/Junoichi, countless children worldwide made lifelong friends courtesy of this game that allowed them to face other people (shout-out to Gerald, I love and miss you lots man). Gaming can be a social activity, and Takahashi helped remind us of that. We're all better for someone who understood what playing games is all about having reminded us of that through his fun story about a kid and his best friend, the Egyptian lich who really liked wearing a leather collar.

In one of those really weird pranks from the universe, 57th Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe also died about a day after Takahashi, after he was fatally shot by an assassin. The alleged assassin was apprehended and arrested, but it hasn't stopped people on the internet from spreading all kinds of misinformation... such as falsely accusing freaking Hideo Kojima of having been the gunman.

The tweets have since been deleted but the audacity of this kind of blatant misinformation actually happening is just mind-boggling. To say nothing of how, as many have pointed out, Kojima's Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty was all about the internet and the threat of widespread misinformation. Kojima's Kojima Production company has since reacted to the news and has threatened to sue over the obvious damage to his reputation. There's a lesson in here about how we should be a bit more careful with what we shitpost about on the internet because some unscrupulous folks might take that stuff and run—after all, look at all the people who don't know that “the fire within me was hotter than the fire that surrounded me” is a freaking Fallout: New Vegas quote.

Anyone else excited for the upcoming Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core port? Okay, besides Maximilian_Dood? Aw, who am I kidding, everyone is—it's easily one of the best RPGs that came out for the PSP and it's been missing for so long that everyone's chomping at the bit to re-experience it, especially since the upcoming re-release polishes so much of the game for a smoother experience. Folks have wondered for ages why it was that Crisis Core didn't get a re-release sooner—and at least we know now what wasn't a factor.

For years, a long-standing bit of scuttlebutt was that contractual issues involving the Okinawan singer GACKT, whose likeness was used for the character Genesis, was part of the reason behind the game being left off the shelves. Possibly something to do with his likeness rights, or otherwise flexing other some kind of legal muscle. And... it seems to have all been bunk! All these years, and Square Enix's reason for not re-releasing Crisis Core was basically “they didn't feel like it”!

Considering all of the wild, wild shenanigans that Square Enix has been through in the years since Crisis Core's release—the tumultuous history behind the Fabula Nova Crystalis trilogy, the subsequent troubles behind Final Fantasy XV's release, the fall and rise of Final Fantasy XIV, the also-complicated development for Kingdom Hearts III, them not doing jack with Chrono Trigger—I can forgive Square Enix for just... not having the spoons to do something with Crisis Core. It's weird how this rumor got as big as it did, to say nothing of how people just accepted it as fact when there was so little evidence for it in hindsight. But that's the rumor mill for ya. Anyway, GACKT low-key confirmed for the Final Fantasy VII: REUNION release, we'll be popping the biggest of bottles once our boy Genesis is back in the game.

Klonoa, Bandai Namco's cute dream-dwelling cat mascot, is finally back! You'd be forgiven for not knowing about the release of the Klonoa: Phantasy Reverie Series collection that updated and ported the first two titles in the series to current consoles because they did a pretty poor job of putting the word out. The game came out last week in America, and the Nintendo eShop didn't list the game's release date up until it actually came out. Bandai Namco has put almost zero effort into promoting the game, too—we didn't get a review code until the day before it was released. Yours truly is, at the time of writing, currently working on that review—know that so far, the game is a blast and every bit as fun as you've heard.

It's a shame Bandai Namco has just tossed the game out the window when there's so much charm and love put into the game. The launch trailer actually reuses the original Japanese trailer's song for the first PS1 game (like how Link Between World's Japanese trailer reused the original Japanese Zelda rap for Link To The Past)—and that's just the trailer. The actual game itself is every bit the loving package fans and newcomers could hope for. It's a real bummer that Bandai Namco has given everyone the old wink-wink-nudge-nudge “Hey, support the game and you might get a Klonoa 3!” message because nevermind poor Klonoa being tossed out the window... we shouldn't support a game like this to break a sequel out of ransom. We should support it because it's fun.

And hey, at least the trailers we did get aren't as weird as the 90s magazine spreads for Klonoa. Poor kid can't catch a break. It's okay, Klonoa, the 90s can't hurt you anymore...

In the category of “two obscure franchises getting Frankenstein-ed together”, few things surprised me more (or captured my imagination) quite like Ultra-Kaiju Monster Rancher.

I mean. Guys. It's Monster Rancher. With Ultraman kaiju as the monsters!

Ultra-Kaiju Monster Rancher was announced a few weeks earlier, but we didn't get a solid confirmation of the game's release in the U.S. until the just last week. It's definitely a bolt from the blue! The Monster Rancher series has many ardent defenders and fans, but it's always been a C-lister compared to the likes of Pokémon and Digimon. A pity, because outside of its conceit of spawning in-game monsters using real-life physical media, Monster Rancher boasts a very engaging monster raising system based on actually training your monster through drills in order to boost its attributes before sending them off to compete in competitions. The likes of Suezo and Pixie never stood a chance. Thank goodness for the iconic kaiju from the Ultra series! The likes of Gomora, Alien Baltan, Eleking, Red King, King Joe and the Dadats have endured for 56 years and even now appear in modern-day Ultra-shows. Studio Tsuburaya has really hit the pedal to the metal with bringing Ultraman to America, with a Marvel comic series and weekly streams of Ultraman Decker on YouTube. Is there a crossover between Ultra-fans and the Monster Rancher faithful? I'd ask Akane Shinjo, but she's been AFK since 2018. For now, we can wait patiently for later this year to see what happens when you fuse Jamila with Bemular. Or if you're really impatient, you can try out Monster Rancher 1&2 DX on Nintendo Switch and Steam! They're a little janky, but trust me: they're some of the most characterful monster collecting games you'll ever play.

There's a bit of cosmic irony, I think, in me taking on a new gig with This Week In Games while a lot of other people end up on the road. Last week, GameStop made waves by firing large swaths of its employees, including their CFO Mike Recupero. This included three employees at GameInformer Magazine, the official magazine of GameStop—which has already seen almost half its workforce laid off over the past year.

On top of that, the GameStop brass have decided that a different sort of investment is worth their time.

GameStop decided an NFT marketplace would be the best thing to make now that the bottom has fallen out of NFTs at large.

This rankles my hide quite a bit. I mentioned earlier that I got into games through Electronic Gaming Monthly and the many men and women that put ink to its pages. The peanut gallery may sneer at the term “games journalist”, but uh... being someone who's covered a few games for the past few years, I can promise you this is something you do because you enjoy it, not because it's the road to Easy Street. And there's still a great need for folks to put the word out about games talk about the industry. In another life, I could have been one of the poor people at GameInformer, whose only mistake was getting into a doomed position at a time where the powers that be decided that pixelated monkeys were more important than press. My heart weeps for the folks who've lost their jobs and I hope they can find better positions soon. At any rate, we (and GACKT) can look forward to popping the other biggest of bottles once this whole venture falls flat on its face.

When I had to send in my 3DS XL to Nintendo for repairs and lost five years of game saves for all the data on my SD card, I was heartbroken and I learned a valuable lesson: always buy physical, because data is impermanent. So on that note: man, did people who paid actual cold-hard cash for digital copies of Assassin's Creed Liberation almost get hosed over.

Ubisoft, themselves no stranger to controversy and employee abuse, announced they'd be delisting the aforementioned Assassin's Creed Liberation as well as Silent Hunter 5 from Steam. For a while—too long, I'd say—there was a much concern over whether this meant owners of the titles would just lose access. Ubisoft later confirmed that anyone who bought the games would still be able to play them. They'd just lose access to the DLC and the online components.

This kinda thing is way too common in the industry—just ask a Marvel Vs Capcom 2 fan how they feel about Capcom's handling of the title. Digital scarcity is pretty inexcusable, and archival for video games is becoming more and more fraught by the day. The metrics of delisting the one Assassin's Creed title starring a Black woman doesn't exactly look good for Ubisoft, either. So I guess if you wanna ensure access to the game, your time to buy it is now.

This is not a drill—we have Bayonetta 3 news!

Folks worldwide have been chomping at the bit for more Bayonetta 3 news—and we hit the motherload this week! First off, there's a new trailer for folks to oogle, which reveals the American release date: October 28th, 2022.

The trailer also gives us some nice tidbits about the story: man-made monsters called Homunculi are attacking the world, and Bayonetta and friends team up with a sporty, fashionable young woman named Viola to seek out Dr. Sigurd and stop the homunculi. Viola strikes me as a distaff counterpart to Nero from Devil May Cry, and she has a giant cat creature to help with her combos. Speaking of combos: Bayonetta now has the Demon Masquerade ability, which merges her with her demonic familiars, resulting in some sexed-up Devil-Trigger-esque designs that are sure to sweep at this year's Comiket. Still no word about why Bayonetta's voice actress is different, but I feel we might get more insight—after all, there are more worlds than just Paradiso and Inferno, with their own Umbral Witches.

While the preorders are already up on Nintendo's store, there's also a snazzy Special Edition set that includes a 200-page artbook and some nice slip-cases for all three games. We will also get physical copies of Bayonetta 1 hitting shelves on September 30th. Presumably, these will be sold exclusively on Nintendo's storefront, in a move that does nothing to assuage the nerves of people still reeling from the Xenoblade 3 special edition fiasco...

In other witchy-news, Platinum announced that Bayonetta 3 will have a “Naive Angel” mode. Long story short: you have an option for Bayonetta's spells and transformations to show off less skin than normal. You can go either way, and honestly... I'm indifferent to it? Even die-hard Bayonetta fans I know admit that they can't exactly play the segment introducing Joys with other people in the room (note: link is their quite-unsafe-for-work intro). And with the Switch being portable, people are gonna want to play this on the bus without getting thrown off because the driver didn't wanna hear their explanation on why Bayonetta's hair strips her nude when she does her big spells. Calling this “censorship” of any sort is just bad faith when you remember that Nintendo not only encouraged Platinum to make the Nintendo-themed costumes in Bayonetta 1 as sexy as possible, but also went so far as to commission a Bayonetta-themed photoshoot in freaking Playboy Magazine to promote Bayonetta 2. (PS: shout-out to Pamela Horton, she's a real trooper!).

SEGA buffs will tell you there were three models of the original SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive console, with some minor tech variances between them. Fittingly, SEGA is gearing up to release a second Genesis Mini model!

The Genesis Mini 2 is based off of the Model-2 Sega Genesis (fun fact: I had that very same model growing up!). It'll come with 50 pre-loaded games, which so far seem to include a mix of Genesis and Sega CD titles like Sonic CD and—more importantly—Shining Force CD! Between that, Lightning Force and Alien Soldier, you almost have a mini-console worth the $100 asking price. Almost. I haven't seen the Japanese Mini 2's lineup, but by looking at the US's lineup I get the feeling it'll have a few better titles by default. Is The Ooze really the best they could get? Did we really need another Bonanza Bros port? There are at least some “surprise” announcements slated, and we have a teaser of some of them with Fantasy Zone and Star Mobile. And again—Shining Force CD. That game almost never gets ported. You also get a six-button controller, at least. You can decide if the preorder is worth it at Amazon's page. The console ships this October 27th.

This year's Anime Expo was filled with way too many people. It also had a lots of undercover VTubers patronizing its over-crowded halls. But also-also? We had a lot of game reveals—many of them visual novels!

First up, we have My Hero Ultra Rumble, based off of the incredibly-popular My Hero Academia anime. The upside: it's not another 3D arena brawler based off of an anime property! The downside is, it's a battle royale based off of an anime property instead. Players will form teams of three composed of heroes and villains from My Hero Academia and beat the stuffing out of each other. Each character has their powers from the show; the trailer reveals Deku, Bakugo, Mt Lady, Uraraka, Toga, and plenty other characters. It's interesting to see a brawler-based battle royale, but I still wish we'd gotten an honest fighting game with these characters...

Second, in a nice list of visual novel announcements: we have a new VN to continue the “Science Adventure” series of that includes Steins;Gate, Robotic;Notes and Occultic;Nine: say hello to Anonymous;Code. Taking place in the year 2037, the trailer gives us the tagline “HACK INTO GOD” while giving us some brief teasers into a colorful cast of people (my favorite is Momo, the girl in the dog costume). Our protagonist Pollon Takao is tasked with navigating the myriad branches of reality as he seeks the world's save file that can prevent devastation. It sounds like an interesting take on the VN format, and we won't have to wonder too long about what else it entails: it'll come to the US sometime next year in a snazzy steelbox set. Presumably, an anime will follow as well.

Up next, we have Inupara: Dog's Paradise. A dog-based spin-off of the Nekopara games, where you navigate a world with catgirls (as in, girls that are basically actual cats in girls' bodies), Inupara was originally presented as an April Fool's joke this year. Turns out, they meant it, and Sekai Project announced it'll be bringing it to the U.S. in the indeterminate future. Nekopara has a lot of genuine fans, so it's fascinating to see a doggy-version of the game. I myself have never played a Nekopara game but given their prevalence and popularity I have a quiet respect for them and the people that love them. We'll follow this story in the near future, I'm genuinely curious how this'll shake out.

And finally: Witch on the Holy Night is confirmed for a U.S. release on the PS4 and Nintendo Switch! I was introduced to the madness that is the Nasuverse through a Latin-American broadcast of the Tsukihime anime that a lot of unfunny people claim doesn't exist, and liked Tsukihime enough to import the guidebook from Japan. I also tried out Melty Blood and learned to love Neco-Arc in short order. Witch on the Holy Night serves as something of a prequel to Tsukihime: starring Aoko Aozaki, the witch that teaches Shiki Tohno how to control his Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. The story was composed by Kinoko Nasu and Takashi Takeuchi, prior to founding TYPE-MOON. They sat on the script until producing the game in 2012; this release features full voice acting and HD visuals. My favorite part is Haruka Tomatsu voicing Aoko; that woman stole my heart in her performance as Candelira in Kyoryugers. You might best know her as Matsuri Hyou from Star Driver.

• Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris is confirmed for a Nintendo Switch port in the near future! No word yet on a U.S. release, but here's hoping. If you're interested, you can play it now on Steam, PS4 and Xbox One.

• SEGA has confirmed that Phantasy Star Online 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis will both come to the PS4 globally on August 31st!

• Mato Anomalies, a new JRPG from the US/Chinese studio Arrowiz games, has been announced. It's a stylish RPG set in a “neo-futuristic” city called Old Shanghai. The game boasts a fascinating aesthetic that's a cross between 1920s fashion and Blade Runner-style cyberpunk. Definitely keep an eye out for it.

• Anyone remember the Touch Detective games on the Nintendo DS? Success finally did! They announced a compilation of the entire four-game series Nintendo Switch. No word on an American release, but here's hoping—and here's hoping they remember Izuna the Unemployed Ninja sometime soon...

• Nintendo of Japan pushes for better support of its employees: same-sex partnerships and heterosexual common-law marriages can now enjoy worker's benefits. Also, their regulations now openly prohibit discrimination and harassment regarding forced outing, gender identity, or sexual orientation—a landmark announcement, as these benefits don't exist by law in Japan.

And that leaves us off at the end of our first foray into This Week In Games together. I hope you guys look forward to new, fun developments with me. A lot of this is still quite new to me and I'm still not very sure how I got here—but it's my hope to do right by our readership and maybe help you guys find new games you might love. Maybe one of the many visual novels announced at AX caught your eye? Are you interested in checking out Ultra-Kaiju Monster Rancher? Do you have any fond Yu-Gi-Oh! memories? What's your over-under on GameStop's NFT marketplace taking a dirt nap before the year ends? The forums are yours, have at it. I'll see you guys in seven.