Couldn't make it to Anime Expo 2018? GameSpot has you covered with some photos of the amazing cosplay at the event, from anime like My Hero Academia, Dragon Ball, One Piece and more. Click ahead to check out some of the best cosplayers we saw at the show!
This week's Nintendo Switch news is light once again, but there are some highlights you won't want to miss. We got release dates and updates for several forthcoming titles on Switch, and there are some pretty sweet summer sales happening right now.
We saw release dates for Bandai Namco's My Hero: One's Justice and Adult Swim's Pool Panic, and as far as updates go, both BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle and Mega Man 11 saw new character reveals. If you're playing Fortnite on Switch, a rare skin is available once again. Don't get too excited for Rocket League 2--rather than a sequel, the dev team is considering continuing the game as a "games as service" title. Summer is one of the hottest times of year for deals, and there are plenty to go around. Be sure to hit up the Eshop, GameStop, and Best Buy to pick up your favorite titles for reduced prices.
Anime Expo is coming to a close soon and with it, but we've already had loads of updates about forthcoming anime titles coming to PS4. This week we also saw more information about other JRPGs coming to the system, and lots of updates related to Fortnite.
Not only did we get to see a new gameplay trailer for Kill La Kill The Game: IF, we also saw My Hero: One's Justice get a release date. New characters have been revealed for Code Vein, Jump Force, BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, and SoulCalibur 6. If that wasn't enough, the remasters of Shenmue 1 and 2 now have release dates. Fortnite's next season is starting soon, and with it comes the arrival of a bunch of anomalies. Playground Mode is going away soon, a rare skin is available once again, and the rocket launch event has scarred the map. Be sure to catch Unravel 2's 10-hour trial this month, and Monster Hunter World's Twilight Fest event. There are also plenty of awesome summer deals to snag from the PSN, GameStop, and Best Buy.
2018 is the year of battle royale games, and Xbox One isn't shying away from it. This week's news has more on Fortnite and other battle royale titles, anime brawlers, and some new details on forthcoming RPGs.
Fortnite's Season 5 is going to kick off soon. A rare skin is available again, there are some freebies for Twitch and Amazon Prime members, and the clock is ticking on Playground Mode. But on top of this battle royale hit, there's a new one available on Xbox One now called Darwin Project. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has 8 million players on Xbox, and a new PUBG console bundle has been unveiled. Rare has also spoken up about a potential battle royale mode in Sea of Thieves.
My Hero: One's Justice has a release date, and Jump Force, Code Vein, and SoulCalibur 6 all have new character trailers. Shenmue 1 and 2 has an official release date now as well, and We Happy Few won't be banned in Australia. A new update for Xbox One is also out this week, alongside new Games Pass and backward compatibility titles, and loads of new deals.
Rainbow Moon wasn't a hugely impactful game when it released in 2012, but it was nevertheless a charming and scrappy RPG that found an audience who remember it fondly. The belated follow-up, Rainbow Skies, is decidedly less memorable, serving up an RPG experience that's better at filling time than providing entertainment. It has an enormous amount of content and a story that will take dozens of hours to play through, but unfortunately that doesn't count for much once boredom sets in.
Rainbow Skies begins in Arca, a skybound city that floats above the continent of Lunah. Damion, a monster tamer in training and your typical RPG foolhardy hero, is preparing for his final test (which serves as a battle tutorial, naturally). Things go wrong and Damion, along with his frenemy Layne, end up falling from Arca. Down on Lunah, a young magician named Ashly is trying to master a bonding spell that will make monsters follow her commands, and after a series of predictable mishaps she ends up bonded to Damion and Layne, the three unable to leave one another's company.
Searching the world to find the counter spell that will undo this bond is the primary motivation for the first fifteen-or-so hours. It's not a particularly strong motivating force, and while there are attempts made to have fun with it, the game suffers from a waffly script that grows less charming the further you get in. By the time a more substantial 'save the world' plotline kicks in halfway through the game, it's not enough to drive a deeper sense of investment into the game's bland world.
Lunah is not an exciting world to explore. There's little sense of variety or personality between its numerous townships and dungeons, nor are the NPCs you meet along the way lack any distinct charisma. It also suffers from an unsightly art style, with repetitive settings and monsters that often look plasticky. The few scant cut-scenes and voice samples are similarly unappealing. The old-school eight-directional movement feels rigid, and the movement speed through the world is irritatingly slow.
The combat system is more exciting than anything the overworld can offer up, as the mechanics that dictate your skills and the game's difficulty have some flair to them. Some enemies are visible in the game world and can be run into, initiating combat, or you can choose to activate random encounters by pressing 'X' when you're informed that an enemy is nearby, which is a welcome touch.
In battle, you and your opponents are transferred to a grid-based map. Your team consists of the three protagonists and an increasing number of monsters you can recruit to your side (this is a game with many different mechanics--you're still getting tutorials past the twenty-hour mark). Combatants each take turns in an order determined by their speed stats, and are able to perform a limited number of 'actions'. Moving just one square costs a single action, and you can't make many actions on a turn, meaning that you may of often resort to planting characters in a stationary position and hurling whichever attacks are able to reach nearby enemies. Each battlefield is virtually identical (a small obstacle or two being the only differentiator), meaning that there's little room for tactical nuance beyond deciding which enemies to hit first.
Practically every aspect of your character can level up, from individual attacks to weapons and armor--the more you use something, the stronger it gets. Seeing your characters evolve and improve is rewarding, and if you play at the default difficulty setting you rarely need to grind--if an enemy proves too difficult, you probably need to upgrade your skills and equipment with the money and skill points you've unlocked up to that point.
However, the most effective ways to strengthen your characters in battle can also encourage repetition. Because most of your strongest attacks are reliant on specific placement of your characters and the enemies on the battlefield, and your bigger attacks tend to use up more action points and a lot of mana, it's often not worth getting too fancy in a skirmish unless you get lucky and happen to have, say, four enemies standing in the exact squares your strongest attack will hit.
I found myself using the first attacks I unlocked in the game, which leveled up and could do a lot of damage to a single enemy, over and over until the end of the game. The versatility of Ashly's fireball, a single-unit attack with low mana cost and enormous range, meant that it far outstripped every other ability I gained in terms of usefulness. This meant that most of the battles in the game played out the same way, with only very occasional boss fights demanding any more acumen or strategic thought.
If you're interested in greater challenges however, Rainbow Skies does take an interesting approach to difficulty. In most towns, you can increase the game's difficulty if you have met certain conditions. To jump from the second difficulty to the third, for instance, you need to win ten fights at that level. If you turn the difficulty back down to the default (which can be done at any time from the menu) you'll need to win ten fights again to move back to the second difficulty. It's a smart system, although for many players the default difficulty will be enough. It's not hugely challenging, but each increase means significantly more grinding is necessary. If the game wasn't already extremely repetitive this might be a more enticing prospect.
Perhaps Rainbow Skies' best feature, if you own a Vita, is its implementation of Cross-Save. If you buy the game on PS3, PS4, or Vita you immediately own it on all three of them, and can swap saves between them. The Vita experience is the same as the PS4 version, and if you have Internet access you can download your save file from the server and keep going. The art looks better on the smaller screen, and it's a game that benefits from not having your full concentration on it--one better suited to quick pre-sleep sessions, or as a distraction while half-watching TV.
Rainbow Skies is the RPG equivalent of a store brand Cola--cheaper, but with far less flavor than the bigger brand names, and liable to go flat on you much faster. It gets the job done if you're looking for a real time sink, and there's potential depth there if you're willing to wade through repetitive combat to get there, but it's simply isn't enjoyable enough to justify the commitment it demands.
Idea Factory, the developer of the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, has announced a new title for PS4. During a panel at Anime Expo, the publisher unveiled the genre-changing RPG Death End Re;Quest, which will launch physically and digitally for Sony's console in North America and Europe in 2019.
Death End Re;Quest tells the story of video game programmer Arata Mizunashi and his colleague, Shina Ninomiya. Following Shina's mysterious disappearance, Arata discovers that she's actually trapped in an MMORPG they developed together called World's Odyssey, and the only way for her to escape is to complete the game and unlock its perfect ending--a feat that only has a 1% success rate.
Players will need to jump between the real and virtual worlds in Death End in order to unravel the mystery of World's Odyssey and help Shina escape. The game features a turn-based battle system, but it's most distinctive feature is the ability to change the game into a completely different genre during battle, such as a first-person shooter or a fighting game. Players will need to switch between different genres to gain an advantage over enemies and bosses.
Additionally, players will be able to utilize "Bug Skills" while exploring dungeons to discover otherwise inaccessible areas and bypass certain environmental obstacles, such as gliding over a pit of lava. Players will also be able to summon some of the bosses they've previously defeated into battle to help take on even more challenging foes.
Idea Factory hasn't pinned down an exact release date for Death End Re;Quest yet, but the game is slated to arrive early next year. In the meantime, you can watch its announcement trailer and check out a handful of screenshots from the title above.
Multiplayer action game Warframe will be released for Nintendo Switch, developer Digital Extremes has announced. The announcement was made during TennoLive 20189, a yearly event where new details about the game's future are revealed.
A short trailer of the game was also released and it reveals that Panic Button is working on the Switch version. Panic Button has worked on bringing a number of games to Nintendo's latest platform, including Wolfenstein 2 and Doom for Bethesda, and Rocket League for Psyonix.
As of yet, a release date for the Nintendo Switch version of Warframe has not been confirmed. The subject of how the game will approach offline play on Switch has also not been discussed yet.
Warframe is a free-to-play game that's also available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. The game launched to a mixed reception, with GameSpot awarding it a 6/10. "Some problematic menus pale in comparison to Warframe's real problem: a pervasive tendency toward repetition," said Chris Watters in his Warframe review. "Whether you're forging ahead with a high-level suit or leveling up a new one, Warframe repeats enemies, environments, and scenarios too frequently.
"Without new challenges for your combat abilities, the excitement soon dries up, leaving you without a compelling reason to keep playing. This free-to-play shooter is still technically in beta, so changes may come that make a substantive difference. But as of now, Warframe's interesting combat mechanics are too quickly overcome by the grind of repetition."
Since then, developer Digital Extremes has continued to make tweaks and introduce new content to the game. As a result, Warframe has developed a passionate, dedicated fanbase. On PC, it is frequently one of the most-played games on Steam, alongside DoTA 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and PUBG.
Mary and Mike are back from E3 and their time with Resident Evil 2 Remake - it's time to slay some Zoms.
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