Hey everyone, and happy four day weekend to my American readers-slash-pals-slash-buddies. No hard feelings from this Brit, so you do you this weekend. Get drunk and crawl into a bathtub like a PUBG wiener, with my blessing. Today marks the first day of July and the start of the second half of the year. I won't get all political into how much of a mess this year has been for all sorts of non-video game-related reasons, so let's just stick to our interactive media for the time being.

As is customary for a big calendar event such as this, I feel compelled to explore what's coming up in the video game release schedule that I might potentially be interested in. The second half of 2017 is going to have a heck of a time living up to the first half, which has already given me a wishlist over ten games long - and those are the ones I feel I absolutely have to play, not just the ones I'm mildly curious about and have added to various wishlists on Steam, Amazon and elsewhere. There's a few games in the third quarter of this year that are worthy of some attention, so let's check a few of them out:

1. Children of Zodiarcs: This Indie SRPG is out in a couple of weeks (as of writing) and I'm hoping it both turns out well and inspires many more SRPGs from the Indie community to come. That's for the sake of all those that Kickstarted it, of course, but also for Erica "@aurahack" Lahaie, friend of the site and the game's art director. Also I just like SRPGs in general, so I'd be down for a good one no matter where it comes from.
2. Pyre: Supergiant Games's next game is also out this month, and while I've yet to truly love one of their games I thought Bastion and Transistor were very competently made action-RPGs with some neat ideas and wonderful presentations. The voice acting and music in particular have been top-notch so far. If Pyre ends up being the game that sells me on the gameplay as well as the trappings surrounding it, more power to Greg Kasavin and his team.
3. Hey! Pikmin: I have some reservations about this new entry in Nintendo's Pikmin franchise, in particular its 2D format and that it's being developed externally, but Pikmin as a whole hasn't steered me wrong yet. I can only hope this game is great, sells well, and prompts Nintendo to work harder on making Pikmin 4 for Switch happen even sooner.
4. Tacoma: One of a few games on this list that feels like it's been in development forever, Tacoma is the outer space successor to Fullbright's Gone Home and can hopefully follow in its footsteps as an immersive exploration-based adventure game with a similar pedigree of plotting and suspense.
5. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice: I'm not sure what to take away from Ninja Theory's new bloody action game, which looks kind of Souls-ish so far, but I do appreciate that the team is trying to bring back the "middle tier" of gaming, where games can still have high production values but are generally shorter in length and can be produced and sold for less money as a result. I'd hoped Blood Dragon would begin a wave of standalone smaller games built on the tech of full AAA, but we've only seen a sparing amount of those so far.
6. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy: I'm theoretically always down for some more Uncharted, and perhaps moving on from Nathan Drake to a more ruthless pair of treasure hunters can mitigate some of the issues folk have with all the murderin' that the heroic Drake seems to do, but I wonder if enough time has passed since Uncharted 4 for people to be psyched for another one. They do all tend to stick to a certain formula, for better or worse.
7. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle: It's crazy to think that this game, which we've only officially seen for the first time this E3 (even if there's been leaks for a while), is out towards the end of August. That's super close! The XCOM-lite that combines Ubisoft's proto-Minions and Nintendo's Mario and friends has all the makings of a surprise hit, and perhaps the start of a beautiful friendship between the two companies. Hey, maybe Nintendo can step in and buy them before Vivendi does? Wouldn't that be fun for Ubisoft.
8. Yakuza Kiwami: I'm really not sure if I'm prepared to play through a remastered version of a Yakuza game I've already completed, especially with 5, 6 and 0 yet to tackle, but what I am looking forward to is a "Beast of the East" playthrough that I won't need to avoid for the sake of spoilers. Also out at the end of August, I'm not sure if the Beast crew will be jumping in quite so soon after 0 but I hope it becomes content at some point later this year.
9. Life Is Strange: Before the Storm: I'm curious enough, and invested enough in the world and its characters, to perhaps give this Life Is Strange prequel a shot at some point. I have to wonder what the game's puzzles will be like without time-shifting powers, and I'm sort of dreading a more permanent variant of the series's Telltale-style "big decisions". Of course, I doubt there's any way to actually kill Chloe, but then it wouldn't be the first time the death of that gal has caused a paradox. She's worse than Revolver Ocelot in that regard.
10. Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana: September is absolutely packed with ringers, starting with this long-awaited sequel to the PSP RPG Ys SEVEN. The Ys series is perhaps my favorite JRPG franchise, simply because the pace and sense of excitement is second to none in its genre. Not one to give players an overabundance of cutscenes and menus, the Ys series has always had an "arcade" feel in comparison to its peers. As the first fully 3D game in the series, I want to see if VIII keeps that spirit alive.
11. Divinity: Original Sin II: If Ys VIII is the JRPG release I'm looking forward to most from the year's third quarter, the follow-up to Divinity: Original Sin is easily the CRPG equivalent. The original game was a pleasant surprise, presenting one of the most tactical and versatile turn-based combat systems for a CRPG in a long time, and I can't imagine they're resting on their laurels for this sequel. I'm also looking forward to what former GameSpot reviews manager Kevin VanOrd has cooked up for the game's story (a lot of former GameSpot people this update, huh). He's been posting tidbits of that thing all over his Twitter, so I'm hyped to see the results.
12. Metroid: Samus Returns: Another E3 announcement from Nintendo with a surprisingly close release date, Samus Returns is the official big Metroid 2 remake that Nintendo's been working on. Its devs probably didn't anticipate that it'd have some serious competition from the fangaming community and their AM2R project, but I think a little competition is healthy. So is having more Metroid games than you know what to do with, for that matter.
13. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: I've only just recently become acquainted with the Danganronpa series, which combines visual novel murder mysteries with Ace Attorney trial mini-games and coats the whole thing with a veneer of over-the-top dramatic lunacy, but I hope to have both the first two games in the bag by the time the third comes about. I know very little about the game since I'm on spoiler-shielding mode, but I'm sure it'll be just as insane as the others.
14. Cuphead: Cuphead is the other game on this list that's been in development limbo for so long I can scarcely believe it has a release date, finally. It's been wowing E3 viewers for years with its Fleischer-style animations, which feel almost unreal when you see them in action. If it really is out this September like they're claiming, it's going to have a heck of a job living up to all that hype. The question remains: will be an enduring Indie classic, or a storm in a teacup? (copyright, copyright, copyright, professional reviewers don't steal.)
15. Star Fox 2: Given recent accomplishments, I'd be remiss to not mention Star Fox 2's debut for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Specifically, its surprise appearance on the SNES Classic miniature console that's due for release at the end of September. It'll be the first SNES game in a while that won't have a fully complete wiki page, but I hope to fix that soon enough.

In addition, July in particular is going to give us the following: the Summer Games Done Quick charity speedrunning event due to begin tomorrow, new seasons of Game of Thrones and Rick & Morty which I'm super psyched about, and that really weird but potentially kind of cool animated Castlevania series on Netflix. Who said Summers were quiet? I mean, besides me, but I can be wrong sometimes.

Speaking of not very quiet, here's this week's rundown of blogging and reviewing:

• The Top Shelf checked out Sega Wow's Nightshade, but it didn't really agree with me at all. Too much of what I don't like about character action games, in particular the way every stage is simply two or three dozen fights in boring empty rooms with big wall barriers in the way that stay there until you've killed everything. I almost dropped out of Bayonetta because I found this approach to level design tedious, and Nightshade isn't anywhere near as polished. Still, this does mean we're one step closer to finalizing that Top Shelf roster.
• The Indie Game of the Week was the underlooked cutesy spacewhipper Wuppo, which has received a recognition boost recently due to a blog on Steam's "diamonds in the rough" that has been making the rounds of late. Wuppo's got a goofy MS Paint presentation and is full of terms like "wum" and "splenhakkers", but it all belies an in-depth game with a lot of wit and humor, tough boss fights and many novel gameplay ideas under its hood. Right now I'm doing odd jobs in a subterranean city in a sequence reminiscent of Delphine's Flashback, and it's the last place I expected this game to go.
• It's not exactly a new piece of content, but I've been updating the Trailer Blazer: E3 2017 list throughout this week. Last Saturday it had 50 games, and now it has 110. I'm still around forty games off completion, but it's something I'll be working on this upcoming week between SGDQ speedruns. Be sure to check out what's been added and the atrocious puns I've been making, if that's something you can countenance.
• Finally, I wanted to promote Wiki Project: Super Finale: the last Wiki Project to be based on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Every game for the system now has its own page in a "completed" state (all releases, plenty of screenshots, all relevant data, and at least one paragraph of description). It's been a long road, to paraphrase our cynophile community manager, since I started tinkering around with SNES pages back in August of 2013, which was before I was even a moderator. As well as producing a database that I hope will be useful to many video game academics and history fans, it's given me a head full of SNES and Super Famicom trivia which I'm sure will serve me well for the rest of my life. Cough.

Tales of Zestiria

I've only played a small amount of Tales of Zestiria so far - Wuppo turned out to be surprisingly dense - so I'm still not sure what to make of it. The plot's gearing up for the usual chosen one savior arc, though I suspect it'll go in some unexpected directions soon enough, and the four characters they've introduced so far have been, well, on the generic side, even for Tales. Some small amounts of quirk are beginning to shine through the archetypes, but I guess I won't see them come into their own until there's more oddballs in the party to bounce off in skits and the like.

On the other hand, mechanically the game seems very different. It's building on the Xillia model for its world design, with large maps with many points of interest to discover, but the combat's shifted into this sort of unusual (for Tales) Final Fantasy XIII real-time thinking-on-your-feet approach where the three types of artes the player can use - essentially fast attacks, slow power attacks and magic attacks - have a rock, paper, scissors relationship where using the right one against another will not only overpower and interrupt the opponent while doing significantly more damage, but also lets you get away with uninterruptible spell casting. I haven't got the hang of it quite yet, and am just kind of mashing the attack and block button because I keep forgetting which is which, but I can see some dividends come from this system further down the road when I have more characters to select between and more practice identifying what kind of attacks the opponent is primarily using and how best to counteract them.

In addition, the game's introduced a whole bunch of new mechanics and have refined others. If I didn't know this game came directly after Xillia, which I've also played, I'd swear there were two or three games separating them with all the series tweaks they've added. Small handy touches like an in-game timer that has a separate parenthetical timer that tells you how long it's been since you last saved, or having skits (little optional conversations) only appear at save points so you don't miss them while exploring, or how characters can be set to look for nearby points or interest or set to produce snacks every so often which work like free healing items. The game will eventually let you warp between save points to go back for missing treasures - a few chests are locked and need keys you earn later in the game - or bestiary entries you might be missing. There are bigger features also, however, like the new levelling system which greatly reduces how much stat gain you receive per level: instead, you earn more HP by defeating bosses (both story and optional - the HP earned from story bosses also increases the health of regular monsters too) and gain stats through equipment and the series's now-plentiful herb consumables like saffron and rosemary. The equipment system of the game works a little more like Darksiders 2, where you find a lot of weapons and armor of the same basic types just from defeating local monsters, and can combine them together at stores to create stronger variants with additional latent skills attached. The core character building currency is "AP", which can be spent activating skills you've learned: many earlier Tales games have the same system, but it wasn't quite as pronounced. There's hints at a "Lord of the Land" system where you earn new quirks from purifying regions of their "malevolence", but I've yet to activate it in the story.

So far, while the story and characters don't feel particularly novel, there's a lot of big shifts to the gameplay and I'm curious to see where the game goes with them. Tales can often feel a bit safe sometimes, which is sometimes welcome if I'm a little drained and want the video game equivalent of comfort food, but if Zestiria is trying something different I'm happy to go along with the ride. (I've been told the combat is a little similar to Graces F, which I've not yet played, but everything else seems exclusive to Zestiria. Well, for all I know, since Berseria's another one I've yet to play.)