This Week in Games

Unlimited Glitch Works

Welcome back, folks! Folks know I love Digimon, and I feel bad for forgetting about Odaiba Day last week. I've spoken out about dumb "nerd holidays" like May 4 or March 10, but Pokémon Day and Odaiba Day at least make sense in the context of their respective fandoms. Pokémon Day commemorates the anniversary of Pokémon Green's release in Japan, while Odaiba Day celebrates the in-universe day where the Digidestined (or "Chosen Children," if you insist on the Japanese nomenclature) were first sent to the Digital World in Digimon Adventure. "Odaiba Day" is also important since the Digidestined themselves put an effort into commemorating it in-universe in honor of events like Wizardmon sacrificing himself against Myotismon (even if that one technically took place on August 3). It was also the 25th anniversary of Digimon Adventure, which was so momentous even reported on the news in Spain. Toei made a cute PV that really grabs at the heartstrings, but I'm just waiting for my 25th anniversary Digivice toy arriving in the mail. You better make an updated D-3 toy too, Bandai!

In a twist that could have only come on a Friday, we saw the complete dissolution of GameInformer last week. Just a total shutdown of the magazine and its website, resulting in a loss of years and years of writing—and of course, many of the folks who worked on the site didn't find out until the day of. Folks were working on stories right up until the closure event. GameInformer was one of the last print publications in the U.S. that focused on current games, particularly what you could think of as one of the last of the old guard; its contemporaries GamePro, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Nintendo Power all bit the dust as well, leaving a massive void in the industry. While GameInformer was owned by GameStop (with many of the stores hawking GameInformer subscriptions), they didn't let that get in the way of their passion or effort in covering games. A lot of people might shake their fists at them for giving a game a review score they didn't like (which is nevertheless the pettiest of complaints to have towards any publication), but that nevertheless doesn't take away from the effort of the people working at the magazine. We can't even point to any of their old articles anymore because GameStop even deleted the whole GameInformer website—it just takes you to a generic landing page. Worse still, when folks who still had access to the official GameInformer Twitter page made a proper farewell post, GameStop's owners pulled the plug on that too.

The term "cultural vandalism" applies to a situation like this. I don't know what else you call it when someone erases 33 years' worth of effort. And for all the jeers from people who resent the games press, the gaming community loses out the most. This is gaming history that's lost. These are perspectives from the past that are lost. This is in service of nobody but the people who want you to do nothing but preorder the newest game and all its associated season passes and DLC, nevermind if anyone even beats the game before the next big AAA pre-order comes along.

Bad times for the game industry don't just put game developers at risk; they put everyone on the fringes at risk—including writers and fans alike. If you should see any of the ex-GameInformer staff on Twitter, give them some support. It's a shame you can't keep a business afloat by selling games anymore.

Oy. The Olympic Games have been a total mess this year no thanks to transphobes making a hissy fit over women they claim aren't "really women," leading to a ton of harassment and poor sportsmanship. The upside is that the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has seen equal amounts of support following her harassment—support that some VAs in the gaming industry could also see.

Sena Bryer is the voice actress for Wuk Lamat, a major new character in Final Fantasy XIV. We've talked about Wuk Lamat before; she previewed the design for the female Hrothgars (fans have taken to calling them "Hrothgals," which I like), and she's a major figure for the new Dawntrail expansion as she's the newest member of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. And unfortunately, she's been at the center of a maelstrom of criticism. See, Wuk Lamat is a pivotal character for the new expansion: much of the story revolves around the Warrior of Light (the player character) helping her win a succession crisis. But Wuk Lamat's character falls flat for folks; among fans in Japan and the U.S., folks have been a little cool on the idea of the WoL being a side character in another character's story. On the one hand, your character now basically plays the role of a mentor to someone else—the favorable comparison to Jotaro Kujo in Diamond Is Unbreakable has been made before. On the other hand, the writing doesn't quite bear that out. I haven't played Dawntrail yet, but a lot of folks don't like the heavy exposition or the pacing of Wuk Lamat's development as a character. There are also criticisms of Sena Bryer's portrayal of Wuk Lamat, which a lot of people have taken to "shouting in lower-case," which is just as easily attributed to Bryer being fairly green as a VA or bad voice direction.

It's here I also have to make a digression that Dawntrail was always going to be a very contentious expansion because it represents the beginning of a new story arc in Final Fantasy XIV, as well as a major changing of the guard; Natsuko Ishikawa, who was responsible for a lot of the acclaimed writing in the Endwalker and Shadowbringers expansions, stepped back from writing duties. So folks are, of course, going to have a bit of a transition to the new "feel" of the current scenario writer, as well as the new scenario writer getting a feel for how writing a "live" game like Final Fantasy XIV is handled. Plus, there's the nature of this being a new arc, so of course, the stakes will be fairly low at the onset.

All of that is overshadowed by a simple element: Sena Bryer is a transwoman. Woolie Madden and Pat Boivin have a moment in their Castle Superbeast podcast discussing Dawntrail where Pat holding this fact for the last minute makes Woolie suddenly understand the whole ordeal; regardless of the Dawntrail criticisms that may or may not be valid, the loudest voices in the room are hiding behind bigotry to send hate towards a highly-visible transgender voice actress who is ultimately not responsible for the entirety of the expansion. And Bryer herself has words on the matter.

Yeah, that's... not a good look considering Final Fantasy XIV won awards for "Best Game Community"—twice in a row.

The matter of Bryer's performance is always going to boil down to this: a transwoman was cast in a highly-visible role, and the worst people on the Internet decided to make that everyone's problem. Bryer (and the character she voiced) were reduced to the figurehead for the criticisms towards Dawntrail, regardless of how much Wuk Lamat as a character is to be blamed for things. It doesn't help that there's a ton of dishonesty concerning the criticism, like complaints with regards to how long it takes to reach your first dungeon (previous expansions had the same issue without the same degree of hand-wringing) or vocal direction (Yda and Thancred were also pretty flat when they debuted). Excuses are also made about Bryer's experience, or lack thereof, claiming that "such an important role" shouldn't have been given to such a "new" voice actress. Similar arguments weren't made with Briana White, who began voicing Aerith in the Final Fantasy VII Remake games, or Kevin Afghani, whose credits are also similarly thin before inheriting the role of the Mario Bros. before Super Mario Wonder. And even then, that's not something you freaking harass people over, you cretin.

Let's hang around Kevin Afghani for a bit; a few columns back we talked about Nintendo's practice of keeping studios or voice actors under wraps until a game's release. It's not the best practice, given that this makes archiving games and studios an uphill battle, but in light of the heavy scrutiny and harassment that studios and voice actors can face, it feels like a necessary action. Afghani likely saved a lot of grief from people who'd bellyache about the pronouns in his bio by not being revealed as the new voice of the Mario Bros. until Wonder was released. Meanwhile, folks were chomping at the bit at the mere possibility that what was revealed to be Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club was being produced by Bloober Team.

Harassment has, for better or worse, become a tool of many major players in fandom for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the current social media networks value engagement above all else, and nothing nets engagement like giving folks windmills to tilt at. In light of that, it's irresponsible for studios not to factor that in somehow; we're long past the "don't feed the trolls" because people have made careers off of making controversy where there is none. People are vested in starting beef with developers and talent, regardless of what they do or don't do; they won't stop because you asked nicely. And this goes double for people from marginalized communities: if you're queer, non-white, or otherwise outside the norm, there's a target on your back from people who might not even believe it when they say you're sabotaging the industry; they just like the paycheck they get for saying it. Studios have a responsibility to cover their talent because, more and more, we're seeing gadflies comb through registries to find someone to be their new Boogeyman of the Week. Working on games is hard enough when you don't have the risk of harassment dangling over your head like some perverse Sword of Damocles.

The community can do better, and we can do better. It's as simple as telling folks, "Hey, that's not cool, cut that out." Or, y'know, point out how weird people are to fixate so heavily on their chosen boogeyman—we've recently seen that many folks don't like it when you point out their vitriol isn't normal. Support and defense shouldn't just be offered to your major players exclusively; Liam O'Brien and Tara Platt didn't wake up as major figures in the voice-acting industry overnight. Even Christina Valenzuela was a neophyte with nothing but a twinkle in her eye once upon a time. It's rough enough to develop talent in the industry without cretins targeting people they decided they don't like.

Hey, so Type-Moon really isn't playing around anymore. This past week gave us a slew of news from them—specifically, related to Fate/Stay Night. The original Fate/stay night was a highly-anticipated game from fans in the U.S., if only because it hadn't been made available for years and years—and the Fate franchise is such a major global phenomenon, what with the megabucks Fate/Grand Order has made. The story of a series of proxy battles carried out by modern-day mages allied with reincarnated heroic spirits from mythology and folklore, Fate/stay night is a fascinating urban fantasy that has given fans plenty to sink their teeth into for years now—but that main game eluded us in the United States for so long. Well, Type-Moon has decided to make sure our cup runneth over. For starters, last week, we got a release date for Fate/Stay Night Remastered's U.S. release. And that date was...

...this past Wednesday! Fans can now enjoy the story of the highly-perceptive Emiya Shirou and his misadventures in the battle for the Holy Grail right now on either Steam or Nintendo eShop. I wish I could have said it was a phenomenal release, and everyone was happy, and many bowls of rice were given to Saber, but it seems like fate (the concept, not the franchise) had other plans in store.

Folks excitedly downloaded their copies of Fate/Stay Night and found that something was... off. Backgrounds didn't seem to line up with certain scenes; character sprites seemed to be misused. First, people worried if it was their own copy. But eventually, you get enough people in the same room worrying about their own copy until you realize it's all the copies. For some reason, Fate/stay night Remastered across the Switch and PC was bugging out and putting up the wrong sprites and backgrounds. The good news is that it's fixed; a patch came in for the Switch version pretty quickly, but it took a few extra hours for a patch to be made for the Steam port. In the meantime, folks found a very... shall we say, "2005" solution to the problem: switching the AppLocale on your PC to "Japan." For some reason, this made the game work how it should. This was also part of why the bug sneaked under the radar: the people working on it were using computers set in a Japanese region. Longtime VN fans are well-used to having to change AppLocale to get Japanese games working (a lot of folks who played Artificial Academy would've had to do that). The whole thing will surely go down in Type-Moon fandom history as one of "those" things, and it's at least good to know it's been quickly resolved and immortalized in funny Internet videos. And if that's not enough Fate for you...

Fate/hollow ataraxia was also announced for a U.S. release! A pseudo-sequel to the original Fate/stay night, hollow ataraxia covers a unique timeline that mixes the best elements of all of its predecessor's myriad arcs—with a few new wrinkles like a time loop, a new mage in the form of Bazett Fraga McRemitz, and the introduction of a new Servant: the disturbing Avenger. Like Fate/stay night, Fate/hollow ataraxia will be released on Steam and the Nintendo eShop. No release date has been announced yet, but who knows—it might get a stealth release at this rate!

And the hits keep on coming. While news of Fate/EXTRA Record had dried up for a bit during the development of Fate/Samurai Remnant, we finally have more news on the updated remake of the beloved PSP game. Specifically, it'll be published in the U.S. by Bandai Namco (as opposed to Marvelous) and released in 2025 for PS4, PS5, Switch, and PC. I don't understand enough about Fate lore to give much of an explanation of EXTRA's setting. Still, the most important thing about it is that it introduced two of the most essential characters in Fate: Saber and Caster. Er... but not the original "Saber" and "Caster" as seen in Fate/stay night (even though the EXTRA Saber is a "Saberface"). See, Fate/stay night has a curious bit of lore where each summoned Servant is summoned in an RPG-esque "class," whereupon their class name exclusively refers to them to keep their identity secret. Since so many of these Servants are famous mythological figures, it's in their best interest to obfuscate their identity so that nobody can take advantage of their historical weakness, like, say... Cú Chulainn not being able to eat dog meat, or Marie Antoinette's weakness to getting her head chopped off. So EXTRA has some of the original heroes from stay night, but instead of having Medea and Altria Pendragon as Caster and Saber, we have Tamamo-no-Mae and Nero Claudius. And they're both kinda the best girls in all of FATE (Aoi Yuki notwithstanding)? In true Fate fashion, their characterization is fascinating, and some tragic writing belies their cutesy anime behavior. The original Fate/EXTRA was landlocked onto the PSP, so it'll be nice for a wider audience to see the birth of everyone's favorite fox-wife and the fuel for everyone who's uguu~ for umu~s.

And just in case that's still not enough news, we have one more Lunar Legend Tsukihime character making the transition to Fate/Grand Order: the curry-loving warrior from the Church, Ciel. Isn't it just like her to arrive at Chaldea after Arcueid does? She's sure to have a bunch of gags about her rivalry with Arcueid, maybe a reference to her weird horse/girl/weapon companion Seven... Yeah, that's a good capstone to all the Fate-ery this month. Type-Moon fans, your train has arrived. Now we just have to hope Type-Moon comes to their senses and changes their minds about localizing "Arthur Pendragon"'s real name to "Altria" instead of "Arturia"...

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is set to release next month, so it's right around the corner. It's a fairly simple concept, so you wouldn't think there's much to reveal about how it works, but Nintendo has a few wrinkles in the formula to keep things interesting. In that spirit, they released a trailer detailing travel in Echoes of Wisdom.

So, Hyrule in Echoes of Wisdom promises to be a massive open-world setting, so there will be a warp system where you can teleport to certain waypoints. Also, Echoes of Wisdom will be the first 2D Zelda game where you can ride a horse! Zelda can create Echoes of carrots, which can summon a horse to carry her around, run over weaker enemies, and even jump over small hills. The mechanic looks like a ton of fun, and it's the kind of thing I was disappointed that none of the 2D Zelda games did way back since I played The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons back in 2001. It does, however, reveal one major issue a lot of folks are trepidatious about Echoes of Wisdom. Folks were pretty burnt out on Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, keeping all of its many items on a scrolling menu bar; in a game that gives you such an extensive inventory, that gets annoying to scroll through in a hurry. And it'll only get worse in Echoes of Wisdom if there are that many Echoes Zelda can collect. Hopefully, they introduce some kind of hotbar system.

There is also the Bind system for moving around. Bind feels like something blatantly lifted from Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom: Zelda can use it to chain herself to an item to move it around. The trailer shows how it can be used to move objects around... but its polarity can also be reversed so that Zelda is the one moved around by a moving object! The trailer shows Zelda flipping polarities so that a combination of her movement and a spider's climbing is used to scale a cliff. So, all in all, I think the best part of Echoes of Wisdom is going to be solving how to get from Point A to Point B; even something as simple as scaling a cliff is incredibly open-ended, depending on whether you decide to stack furniture or create a rising tower of water to swim up or even decide to bind yourself to an enterprising Skulltula.

The rest of the trailer introduces neat lore stuff. We finally get to see some of the political strife between the Sea Zora (the blue ones from Ocarina of Time and the River Zora (the green ones from the older games that spat fireballs at you). The Deku Scrubs are back, which makes me happy. Those buggers are cute. Gerudo inhabits the Gerudo Desert, and Zelda can even wear Gerudo garb. And we see Zelda jump into the Void with a shining portal, so this might be another one of those Zelda games where you travel between the Light World and the Dark World. We still have a month and change before The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom releases in the U.S., Nintendo still has time to surprise us!

This one was brought to my attention by an invalid name last week in the comments, so thanks to them for bringing it up. I can't cover every last bit of gaming news that comes out when it comes to some release or other, but this one bit is something I'm glad didn't escape my radar. If you didn't know, the website Denpasoft handles some localization of some Japanese adult games and hosts several other eroge published in the U.S. by other companies like Shiravune (who we've talked about before) or Kagura Games. If I haven't talked about them before, it's because I genuinely didn't know about them, but their repertoire includes stuff from NYO-NIN-JIMA – My New Life in Charge of a Tropical Island – to original American-made H-games like Slime Girl Smoothies. Early last week, Denpasoft released a notice detailing a list of games they'd be removing from their storefront. The reason? Their bank had flagged the titles.

The list includes some "darker" titles like Kuroinu 2 or Holy Slave Academy, but I feel like the content of the games is fairly irrelevant because the ultimate point is that a handful of titles exclusively meant for adults on a website meant for adults have been banned from sale by virtue of... payment processors—people who are otherwise removed from the business side of the production, localization or anything else related to these games. And concerns were wisely brought up about what this might mean for the future of adult content on the Internet. It's a valid concern; I follow a lot of adult artists, and a major issue for them is how hard it is to make a living with adult art because of how hard it is to monetize. Plenty of platforms like Patreon or OnlyFans court an adult audience at first to build up their numbers, only to axe the audience once the platform hits "mainstream." The algorithms that fuel social networks can obfuscate pages with "adult content" on them, further challenging adult artists to reach any kind of potential artist. And the worst part is that it's tough for these artists to find any place where they can safely monetize their art because, ultimately, monetization requires some sort of solution for processing payments—and when pretty much everything hinges on Visa or Mastercard, your options are limited. Digital payment services like PayPal aren't much of an option since they prohibit adult content from the get-go.

The reluctance of banks and credit card companies to get involved with adult media makes sense considering how things started in the 1990s—lots of people had to hurriedly demand refunds for their subscription to some porn site or other after their partners saw the infringing website on their credit card statement, which is a whole headache and a half for banks. But in this day and age where more and more people buy stuff online (and the porn industry hasn't gotten any smaller), that kind of thing really shouldn't be an issue. Sadly, the powers that be really hate anything they deem to be "sexual content," effectively making it an uphill climb for any company in the U.S. that wants to handle adult media. And the anime industry is no stranger to this. I live in Portland, the hometown of Fakku; those guys have done loads to bring adult manga to the U.S. and even have a section of their website dedicated to adult games. All it takes is one stern email, and a whole company would have to resort to money orders to sell their stuff—which isn't going to fly in 2024.

A lot of folks are understandably concerned about what this means for adult games in the U.S., but the other part of the problem is what this might mean for the queer community in the U.S. "Sexual content" is a really, really broad term—by design, because it's convenient for a lot of people in power that non-heterosexual themes are inherently viewed as "sexual." So this not only threatens porn games, it also threatens anything that has anything remotely resembling gay themes in them. I can think of several artists I follow that are threatened by this, like Aurahack, better known as the cover artist for Limited Run Game's release of VA-11 Hall-A... but also, this kind of crackdown could also affect a game like VA-11 Hall-A, which is fairly upfront about protagonist Jill Stingray being bisexual (and painfully crushing on her female boss, Dana). A game like Signalis, which is dripping with sapphic themes, might be considered "too sexual," even if it's just a gynoid and a human woman. And that goes double for Swery65's The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, which ends on the revelation that its protagonist (the titular J. J. Macfield) is a transgender woman.

I'm equally concerned about both of these accounts. I follow several Japanese eromangaka. They're good people: they're passionate about what they do and excited at the prospect of sharing their work with fans around the world. I also follow a lot of queer creatives: writers, artists, and game makers whose only desire in life is to just live in peace. Both of them deserve better, and both of them deserve not to have to worry about their livelihoods. Politicians regularly try to pass legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which in truth, is nothing more than an attempt at a gag law for the queer community at large (and believe me, if a few pornographers get caught in the crossfire, the powers that be will not care). The best thing we can do to support our favorite adult creators is support initiatives that combat KOSA and anything similar to it.

That'll do it for this week, I think. The tough times are continuing for a lot of creatives in the gaming world; it's more important than ever to support them and let them know they're appreciated. Heck, just this past week was the birthday of Yoshida-On (better known as the artist behind the Izuna games that I love so much). I even sent him a comment thanking him for his years of work, which he appreciated a lot. Don't underestimate what a simple comment can do for an artist you follow! Especially at a time like now when belts are getting tight on everyone. Be good to each other; I'll see you in seven.