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Sunday Summaries: 19/06/2016

This is going to be a short one this week. With E3 and my various side-projects last week taking up almost all my free time, certain sections of the Sunday Summary are going to be on the dry side. Speaking of which, it's been an exhausting but elucidating week for the site with all this news both external (all those new game announcements!) and internal (I'm gonna miss ya, @austin_walker! Good luck at Vice Gaming, or "NARC" as I hope it gets called).

The one big thing I want to promote before we get into the usual Sunday Summary content is this enormous and ill-advised list I created that reviews each of the E3 trailers, though I cheated a little by doubling up on some of the games that saw more than one. @marino posted 142 of these on the site this year, and they all appeared so quickly and in such great numbers that I figured a few might get lost in the shuffle. I'm also concerned that some of the more JRPG-y ones will go without a QL now that Anime Editor Austin is leaving, but the staff likes what they like and it's down to JRPG fans in the community to get the word out. Pushing through all those trailers definitely gave me some wishlist ideas at least. Might be the one silver lining to that dumb idea.

New Games!

There's nothing about this screen I don't like.
There's nothing about this screen I don't like.

I think the stand out for this upcoming week is Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, the Fire Emblem/Shin Megami Tensei crossover that appears to be based around a giant futuristic singing talent show based on its trailer. The Fire Emblem characters are, in this case, spirits from another world called "Mirages" that the various characters in the contemporary Tokyo setting use the same way they might Personas in one of the games from that series. The combat looks to take various elements from both franchises and merge them too, with the rock-paper-scissors system of Fire Emblem's units and the elemental weaknesses (and opportunities for big attacks after exploiting them) from Shin Megami Tensei. Given both Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei have a lot of stock with JRPG players, I think there's going to be a hell of a lot of people wondering what the heck this is. Certain weirder aspects like the focus on Japanese celebrity and the inclusion of Vocaloids as Mirages might attract a few outsider otakus too.

Either way, if you're an anime fan, you're almost certainly going to be opting for the above over Mighty No. 9 and its derogatory nonsense, which completes its troubled journey from conception to production to publishing this Tuesday. Keiji Inafune's not-Mega Man has been courting controversy for almost as long as the project's been alive, and we're all very curious to see if it can walk the walk. Feels like the whole video game industry, or at least the small part concerned about Mega Man spiritual reboots, has been left suspended in mid-air waiting for this game to come out, like Mega Man himself while entering boss doors. Meanwhile, another alternative for aggrieved anime fans is Grand Kingdom, a PS4/PSV strategy RPG from some ex-Vanillaware people that is getting published in North America and Europe by some heavy hitters in the strategy RPG genre - Mystery Dungeon's Spike Chunsoft and Disgaea's NIS Europe - so it would seem that the pedigree is there. It certainly looks as good as a Vanillaware game, but here's hoping the gameplay is as in-depth and detailed to match.

It's definitely more Rhythm Heaven, for (mostly) better or worse.
It's definitely more Rhythm Heaven, for (mostly) better or worse.

I should also mention the two surprise releases from E3 week: Rhythm Heaven Megamix, which sees Nintendo's fantastic rhythm game bring together a lot of its best mini-games and a few new ones besides, and Trials of the Blood Dragon which takes the 80s insanity of Far Cry Blood Dragon and adds it to the already off-their-gourd sensibility of the more recent Trials games. Both seem like a tremendous amount of fun, and I'm sure all the journalists at E3 appreciated the fact that they couldn't stop to play them with all the interviews and write-ups they had left to do.

There's a huge amount of great-looking games coming out on the 28th too, so look forward to that next Sunday as we hit the mid-point of 2016.

Wiki!

Nada! I didn't get around to doing any wiki work this week; there's a legion of dedicated power-users on here that were creating game pages for everything featured at E3 as soon as they were announced, and I'm reluctant to get in their way. As stated last week, I'm going to be focusing on the roster for the upcoming Summer Games Done Quick 2016 event in a fortnight and putting the SNES stuff on the back-burner for a while. I'm probably not going to be quite as thorough with releases and the like for these games - the goal here is to ensure that every game has enough of a wiki page that Twitch will acknowledge it as a "non-stub" so that the speedrunners, and those specifically in charge of the Twitch broadcast, aren't caught short when Twitch decides the next game on the speedrunning chopping block doesn't exist.

After this Sunday Summaries goes up, I'm going to get started on catching up with last week's podcasts while starting on this SGDQ schedule, so here's hoping I make an appreciable dent.

Rudra no Hihou!

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Not a whole lot to say here - I've thoroughly explicated, expatiated and expounded on Squaresoft's 1996 Super Famicom RPG Rudra no Hihou/Treasure of the Rudras in my five-day LP series I created as an "Alternative to E3" for those as fed up with the event as I was. Days Zero, Zero Again, One, Two and Three are all here for your viewing pleasure. Remember to open the spoiler blocks for all the screenshots/captions!

For me Rudra isn't quite the big, tragically forgotten classic of the 16-bit JRPG generation, but neither is it one of those games that deserves to be lost to obscurity because of the only recently-conquered language barrier. Like Square's Live a Live, it's a game with a lot of ideas and ambition that flubs and succeeds at a similar ratio, and that risky idealistic approach would go on to serve Squaresoft well during their "golden" PlayStation era where more of their output was fortunate enough to see North American and European localizations - off-beat games like Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy Tactics, SaGa Frontier, Brave Fencer Musashi and Parasite Eve come from the same school of thinking that created Rudra no Hihou and Live a Live, and the creativity of the video games medium is better for having all of them.

If you consider yourself a fan of Squaresoft at their peak, by all means please check out that Treasure of the Rudras playthrough and analysis. For a throwaway series meant to childishly dismiss E3's irritating emphasis on promotion and hype, I think I accidentally stumbled on some video game history worth putting out there.

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