Seeric

I wasn't expecting it, but this actually looks like a fun fighting game. The fights look nice and fast and the movesets look pretty varied and interesting even without taking into account the assist characters.

Story Mode looks to be about as dumb and pointless as you would expect from a fighting game which is both a giant crossover and made of anime and there are parts of it which I could definitely do without (Sonico's mid-fight cutscene certainly comes to mind). Still, the overall creepiness aspects of this game at least seem like they're nowhere as prevalent here as in some other anime fighters and the gameplay itself looks to be entertaining enough that I can probably look past a few rather questionable costumes and cutscenes.

Store-exclusive pre-order content was already a sort of iffy thing and I'm not at all sure that I'm fine with a retailer being this closely involved on the publishing side of things. Though it probably won't happen, I can see things getting really ugly if this idea actually takes off and more retailers get involved on a larger scale; GameStop and other retailers might very well be willing to shell out a significant amount of money to cover the ever-increasing costs of game development if it means grabbing the exclusive rights to physically distribute something along the lines of a AAA-tier game.

I doubt any developer out there would ever agree to something like 'no digital distribution period' regardless of the funds offered, but if this is successful I don't think it would be outright of the realm of possibility for digital launches to be delayed. We're already in the realm of 'temporary exclusivity' for console launches, so extending this concept to physical vs digital launches doesn't sound too far-fetched to me if the funds and profits are there.

No matter how this plays out, I honestly feel sorry for anyone over at Game Informer since they'll probably be under a ton of needless stress and pressure from higher-ups over this.

@austin_walker This is a fantastic initiative and I may very well end up sending in pitches at some point. However, I do have a few questions which I think others might also want to know the answers to. First, is there a specific format you would prefer to receive pitches and/or the articles themselves in? Also, is there a minimum word count or a general range that you're ideally looking for for the types of articles in question? Finally, is there any sort of time frame (ex: six months) you would prefer us to wait for before attempting to resubmit rejected pitches or would you prefer for rejected pitches to not be resubmitted at all?

This one looks pretty good (though that Paper Toad stuff does look like it goes on way too long), I might pick it up even though I skipped over Dream Team (maybe I'll even go back and get that one day). I think the original Mario & Luigi game is still my favorite, though that might in large part be due to it being the first one.

Partners in Time is the only one I actively disliked; far more of the jokes missed than hit with me and all of the battles dragged because everything had way too much health (especially the final fight, I think it literally took me somewhere around like 45 minutes).

As far as showing my love for games I adore goes, I usually do this by trying to share the game via media since I believe this can be a very real way to simultaneously help the developer to obtain additional sales (or just additional attention in the case of freeware) and to likewise help others to find a game that flew under the radar.

If I like a game, I'll usually write and article or a review on it and/or make a video or do a stream of it if possible. However, I do think that misrepresenting a game by hiding or ignoring its faults does neither the audience nor the game itself any favors so I make sure to point out shortcomings as well.

That said, I do often enjoy games which are 'uniquely bad', ones which, for whatever reason, are clearly not good, but which still offer up a profoundly unique and surprising experience, if unintentionally so (I suppose you could call them the game equivalents of B-movies). In cases such as these, I try to make it as clear as possible that the game is not good and possibly horribly broken while also pointing out why the very reasons why it is flawed make it entertaining and possibly worth checking out.

I think $60 is a reasonable price for this game, but I'm saying that as a fan of shooters and as someone who played quite a bit of Darius Gaiden on the Saturn. In terms of content, most shooters in the $15 range have about 6-8 stages, but it's looking like this game has 24 different stages between Original and Original EX Mode so in terms of quantity for price it seems to be about on par (though I suppose it could be argued that games with fewer stages often also offer multiple difficulty settings which can dramatically change said stages while Darius does not).

Plus, from what I understand of it Chronicle Mode functions by assigning players to groups (these are the 'cabinets') and unlocking various planets (the Steam page claims 3000+) once the group as a whole achieves certain scores or completes certain areas. Planets look to consist of various arrangements of bosses and stages in a similar fashion to Theatrhythm's 'Quest Medley' mode, though it looks like the length never exceeds 3 stages + 3 bosses and I believe the planets are custom-made rather than randomized. I cannot tell if the stages and bosses are simply scrambled around into various combinations, or if they actually make tweaks to the changes and/or add additional challenge requirements (ex: no powerups, one life only, etc).

So, as far as the genre goes, they have a good amount of content and utilize it in several ways for those looking for 'more to do' beyond replaying the standard game. The one downside I can see is the whole 3 stage thing; one of my favorite parts of Darius has always been the giant interconnected stage map and breaking it up into two separate maps, each of which have three different starting positions, looks weird and really limits both the length of and the choices you can make during a run.

I am actually in favor of the remake being episodic as long as Square actually takes advantage of the benefits the format has to offer.

Namely, it gives them the ability to gather feedback from one episode like 'it was too linear' or 'I wish you could do so-and-so in combat' and then use that for making later episodes better; I wouldn't expect something as dramatic as what the Penny Arcade games did, but Square has proven itself to be more than willing to make tweaks and significant changes between sequels and spinoffs before.

I'm also going to guess that Midgard itself might be expanded so that the first episode ends upon leaving it, which isn't really a bad thing.

I feel like most of the 'negatives' tied to it being episodic would have occurred regardless. It was already almost guaranteed to be more linear and cinematic in nature than the original version (which was already pretty linear and cinematic all things considered).

While I would love a world map, Final Fantasy 9 was the last main entry to have a traditional world map and that was a long time ago so it was pretty unlikely to begin with; the combat also looks to take place in the world itself and not in a separate battle screen so that already more or less confirmed that we're either getting big, open areas to run around in like in every game since 11 or we're getting nodes to hop between like in 10.

Even though this was done with good intentions, and a publisher/developer has every right to remove their game from being purchased, forcibly removing it from hard drives with the promise of a refund feels like an escalation of what Konami did with PT and I really hope it's a trend publishers don't latch onto.

I think a better way of handling this would have been to have first pulled the game from the store and then create a generous window in which purchasers could voluntarily refund the game. Perhaps they could have even implemented a patch into the game to give a notice upon launch concerning said refund window. As to how to actually implement this, perhaps those who agreed to a refund would be marked in some way to have the game pulled from their systems after a certain date and compensated in PSN store credit. It would likely have been trickier to implement than their current method and there may have existed a fear that customers would find a way to abuse the refund, but a publisher deciding to forcibly take back a product and refund a customer is a very worrying action, even if the intentions behind it are well-meant.

Neither version seemed that great, though the Wii version's faults seemed to be more or less entirely due to the camera being poor while the Wii U version somehow looked to have an even worse camera with astoundingly awkward controls.

The Wii U version also honestly just looks much worse to me as far as aesthetics go. It has better graphics in the raw technical sense, but so much of it looks dull, washed out, or otherwise just far too brown (the grass and dirt especially look awful) compared to the highly-saturated and more appropriately cartoon-styled graphics on the Wii version.

I wonder how much pressure was on them to get this out before the deluge of games coming out in 2016 and how much time was spent on the online component. Something like this, which seems to be polished while severely lacking in content, definitely feels like the result of being rushed and needing to make decisions on what to prioritize.

Maybe they thought they could always patch in a bunch of the side modes in the future so they focused on creating a polished game engine with barely any content over a rough game with a lot of content, but I don't think that strategy will work out for them (if that is indeed what they were planning) as the significantly negative first impressions are bound to result in relatively poor sales and that community will likely trickle away rather rapidly before any new content can be introduced.