We Talk Over the E3 2018 Square Enix Press Conference

Woof.

This was an ok showing from Square. They have some good looking stuff coming and a couple of new announcements. Suprised that we didn't see the Avengers game, which makes me think that that thing is not close at all or is being saved for Sony, and nothing about the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, not that I really care about it though.

I am looking forward to Tomb Raider, its seems like more Tomb Raider mixed with Batman. I wasn't as high on Rise Of The Tomb Raider as most people seem to be but loved that first one. Haven't played FF14 and don't plan on starting now. The crossover with Monster Hunter World was pretty unexpected though. Also haven't played Life is Strange so Captain Spirit isn't doing it for me. First time I have seen anything from Dragon Quest XI but remember the 8-4 guys loving it. Will definitely be picking this one up, last one I played was Starry Skies and loved it.

Babylon's Fall looks promising but we really don't know much about it. Seeing a PlatinumGames logo on it has me both excited and cautious (hopefully this is made by good Platinum). I keep forgetting about the existence of Octopath Traveller so every time I see the art style it blows me away. Just hope the game part of it holds up. Again Just Cause 4 looks cool, just hope I enjoy it more than 3. I have no idea what to expect from The Quiet Man. Never played a Kingdom Hearts game and man some of the dialogue in this trailer was bad. Probably give this one a miss, don't think I was to go back and play all the previous ones.

Overall it was fine, a lot of what they showed did not have an Xbox logo on it which I found interesting. They can get away with a shorter, more sparse showing with the Nintendo Direct style presentation which I thought was pretty well paced and produced. Happy to be up at 3am to hear some Keith David :) On to Ubisoft!

*Wet Fart*

Here for my daily dose of comment cynicism.

HDMI levels are set to limited for all the press conference coverage so far.

Man they don't want to go over bandwidth limitations for this show. But, I really am looking forward to octopath traveler. I liked the demo enough.

@ybbaaabby Really impressed at how quickly these archives are going up, keep up the good work!

thought the Babylon thing was a new White Knight Chronicles for a moment there.

Tomb Raider felt like a prettied-up last gen game. Maybe it's because MGS5 has passed, but when 2 enemies discover a body, and you run up to knife both those fools while they are at high alert & looking at your bush,the illusion breaks for me. Were they really not able to get a shot off or a shout to get their other 2 buddies at the other side of the camp to get on high alert? Like if Lara was sneaking up on them from behind and stealth killing them while they didn't notice it, that's cool. But running up to two guards to kill them, that should be at least punished by an alert mode.

Also, what's up with the `Stealth Kill!` it almost feels like they want to give you a pat on the back for it :D

The 2 teasers looked interesting. Love the sound of 'The Quiet Man' as a title.

Bad game series gets dunked on, news at 11

And here we have a typical Kingdom Hearts fan in their element.

Well, this thing happened...

Just for clarification purposes - FF11 is still running on PC. The Playstation 2 and Xbox 360 versions had their servers shut down in 2016 I believe. FF11 is in maintenance mode on PC though, which means no new content (or very little anyway) and just bug fixes at this point. But yeah, its still running after 16 years now.

Why can't you give us another Avengers teaser?

God forbid someone like a thing that's really popular and get sick of literally all of games people feel like they need to prove how cool they are by saying how uninterested they are in it. It's been old for a while.

But I guess I'm just adding more fuel to the fire here, so, whatever. I'm largely used to it at this point.

Weaponized Dad Jokes from Vinnie... And a slow clap. <3

It's not like they haven't given it a fair shot. https://www.giantbomb.com/kingdom-hearts-hd-1-5-remix/3030-39815/videos/

See that tornado... You can kill it.

I appreciate Alex at least trying to talk about Kingdom Hearts 3 as something that fans of the series are looking for, even if he’s not. That seems like a fair approach.

Also, I could absolutely use more Tomb Raider in my life. As weird as it sounds, I like that the enemy AI isn’t “too smart” during stealth sections; I’m not great at stealth games, and I like that I can succeed by being good enough to hit bow headshots and little else.

I thought it okay. My own taste is leaving me out all over the board, but that Babylon Downfall(?) seemed okay, with Brad's caveat about it.

I don`t think a video series built around not paying attention to the game and the joke of how no one wants to be there can really be called giving the game a fair shot.

@matthewgm: jury's still out whether that was a fair shot or a joke series to be fair. I'm not a kingdom Hearts fan, but by episode 1 it was clear that this series was not going to reach double digit numbers and that Ben bonding with his collegues one at a time was going to be the main appeal. Well Rorie reading weird emails for an hour was probably the real highlight.

The recent Tomb Raider film was actually pretty decent. A successful film adaptation of the first reboot game.

Octopath and DQ looked good. Kingdom Hearts seems like a game out of time.

Not sold on Just Cause, I'm surprised at the benefit of the doubt GB is giving it. JC3 was a technical mess on PC at launch. Really, they're 1 for 3 on that series, and Mad Max wasn't stellar either.

At some point, I'll finally go back and play more than the first 5th of Tomb Raider...

You're allowed to like what you want. That's what opinions are.

I think the series has been fucking garbage all along. I tried playing KH1 when I was 14 and thought it was terrible. The story was garbage, the combat was awful, the controls were poor. Each time I check in on it it has gotten more convoluted in every way.

Turns out there is room for more than one opinion. And you need to get thicker skin when people make some pretty innocuous comments on video in which they are giving their opinions about E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G. they are seeing. They aren't insulting you. They are talking shit about a video game series that they don't give a fuck about.

And if you think "literally all of games people" don't like the series, then maybe you need to go to Metacritic and see the absurdly high scores almost all of the games in the series have. But I suppose that doesn't fit your narrative, and you especially are being trodden on by the big bad games media.

This was such a pointless press conference. Everything they showed was known about or already seen, the couple of things that weren't would have got better placement at MS or Sony :S

I am probably the most excited for shadows of time raider than anyone on this Dragon ball z podcast website is. Lara as the predator holy shit I hope they listen to the bomb crew and make a shoulder mounted cannon dlc. Dragon axe, just cause, shadows, hot Damn even more great ass games to look forward to. Shadows and another game both come out on Sep 14th. I can't remember which one it was there are just so many awesome things happening right now with games

That Tomb Raider footage really wasn't doing it for me - Lara Croft just mindlessly murdering fools didn't feel right. Yes you CAN kill people in those games, but to make combat the FOCUS seems weird.

As someone who loves FF14 and plays it religiously, it was kinda weird to have them show a trailer for the most recent patch, which dropped like a month ago. And I'd also love the crew to give the game another shot, especially cus a lot of them keep saying they're somewhat interested! :)

the quiet man protagonist is just kristen stewart

playing through the second new tomb raider game right now and she absolutely butchers everyone so its unsurprising that the new new one is even more murdering

e: also the beginning discussion in this video was really funny and i liked it

Very weak conference. It seems like the most money they spent was hiring Keith David to do the narration. No detailed talk about up coming games, no update on FF7: Remake. No brand new games in the works years down the road. However, Sony has its own live event, The Sony Experience, that they do near the end of every year. They seem to save their big announcements until then.

@stordoff: Hasn't it always been? I've played both of the new games and murdering dudes is like, the thing you do more than anything. Hundreds and hundreds of dudes just get straight-slaughtered over the course of each of them games individually with some light exploration sprinkled on it.

@lesca4: I just don't watch their coverage of Kingdom Hearts. Even went to the regular feed during the Microsoft conference trailer. I agree they don't need to be so negative. It's looking incredible so far!

Dad Vinny is the best Vinny

Giantbomb - I don't know what it is but this year your videos have been mixed at a lower volume than anything else on the internet or youtube. I have to max my volume level to hear your videos (and even then I wish I could turn them more up), but meanwhile most Youtube videos I can listen to at 50% volume. Just FYI.

So... the japanese dude at the beginning was telling us all to make sure we waited 'til the end for... Kingdom Hearts?

Needlessly, badly workshopping jokes is one of my favorite schticks. Less than 5 minutes in and I am on-board!

That was a terrible "conference". They somehow outdid EA.

I think people are really piling onto Square Enix, going with what Alex was saying at the end...

They came out and showed the games they have coming out soon so that people could get hype for them, and dropped a couple of new IPs. I can understand why people would want to hear something about Avengers or FFVII but if they don't have anything to really say, having it at this conference wouldn't do much since they are known as existing so the next step would be getting gameplay or something more substantial. Of the games showed I am excited for most of them, could they have done better? Sure. Was this press conference as awful as the internet has made it seem? Not by a long shot.

I enjoy the KH games but they are flawed and deserve the occaisional dunking, it doesn't hurt anyone to have a few laughs. I don't understand the people who feel the need to defend the games' honor to the death or whatever.

I liked this conference. It's shorter than expected, but for what size Square is, I'm fine with that.

Is Kingdom Hearts Sonic?

Underwhelming conference.

Even as a Life is Strage fan, these Captain Spirit trailers are a little too saccharine. I'm sure it goes somewhere interesting and ya can't beat a free advertisement lead-in to Life is Strange 2!

Props to Alex for at least trying to give Kingdom Hearts a fair shake. Despite not being interested in that overwrought nonsense whatsoever, at least acknowledging that some people enjoy it is better than nothing.

I don't really care about Kingdom Hearts and probably never will, but straight up negativity is always off-putting, so big props to Alex for treating it like he would have other games that don't interest him.

Kept waiting to see something for Hitman 2 until I realized it wasn't a SqEnix thing anymore.

@bushlemon: there is lots of fanart of that on the internet if you hate yourself enough

Every since the reboot of Tomb Raider I have thought they were on the wrong track. What do I know..
Yet, I just think the whole series is going from one tone deaf conception to another. And, they just keep on aspiring to make murdering people seem cool.

Even the concept of raiding tombs just seems a bit...thoughtless. It woudl not be hard to make Lara entire roles to be about PREVENTING tombs from being raided. That allows her to be in the tombs, explore the tombs, avoid the traps....but not take people's culture to shove in a London museum or wear it like a superman cape.

Like I said, these modern games just rub me the wrong way. I don't think they read as delightful adventurous; these games read as violence porn by a college student who doesn't give two fucks why she can't own & take something put in a place 3,000 years ago for a purpose.