August 2023

Capcom made two Street Fighter 6 announcements this weekend at Evo 2023.

The first was a reveal for the game's next character to be added, A.K.I., and the second was for an upcoming collaboration with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to promote the latter's new movie.

A.K.I. is described as a "maniacal poison aficionado", and it's easy to see why from her reveal trailer.

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Sales of Final Fantasy 16 did not meet Square Enix's high expectations, said president Takashi Kiryu.

Last week the company's latest earnings report was released and while net sales increased, operating profit dropped 79 percent from ¥14.4bn to just ¥3.0bn.

During a post-earnings call to analysts, Kiryu said the high end of the company's expectations were not met and the slow adoption of the PlayStation 5 was a limiting factor, Bloomberg reports.

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Square Enix shared new concept art and details of Aerith wearing a dress in FFVII Remake. The art shared includes color and black and white versions of one of the three dresses Aerith can wear in the game. Depending on how many Odd Jobs Cloud completes during Chapter 8 of the game, Aerith will be able to wear one out of three different dresses.

The concept art shared focuses only on the second dress. To obtain it, players need to complete between 3-5 side quests during Chapter 8. Aerith wears this dress to infiltrate Don Corneo’s mansion during Chapter 9 of FFVII Remake.

This particular dress includes floral motifs in various places, including the necklace Aerith wears, and decorations added to the dress. Additionally, Square Enix pointed out that Aerith’s hair is also slightly curlier than in her usual model.

You can take a better look at the new FFVII Remake concept art of Aerith wearing a dress here:

https://twitter.com/FFVIIR_CLOUD/status/1688384468686671872

Similarly, Tifa and Cloud can also obtain three different dresses depending on the player’s actions at different points in the game. Square Enix recently shared some concept art of one of Cloud’s dresses.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is readily available for the PS4, PS5, and Windows PC.

Pokémon fans come in all shapes and sizes. There are the competitive sickos, the shiny hunters, or the lore nerds that just want to learn more about Game Freak’s world with each game. On top of that, there’s anime watchers, card game collectors, Pokémon Go players whose biggest touchstone with Pikachu is catching one…

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Baldur's Gate 3 is the CRPG with a billion and one features, but there will always be players who want a billion and two and yes, I am among these insatiable souls. I cracked a fresh save over the weekend, having bid a sad goodbye to my early access Tiefling rogue, and I already know what I’d like from the game’s modding scene, or preferably, a forthcoming official update. No, it isn’t new races, or increased party sizes, or the removal of the weight limit (which you can get around by offloading spare loot to your Tardis-esque interdimensional campsite). What I’d like most is the ability to switch between characters during dialogue. You’ll trigger many of these conversations without warning as you explore the world, and I routinely bumble into chitchats the character I’m controlling isn’t quite prepped for.

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It's been a hot minute since we first started looking for a news editor to take the reins of RPS' daily news posting, but today I'm very pleased to announce that search has finally come to an end. Please give a very warm welcome to Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, the latest addition to the RPS hivemind.

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Universal Studios Hollywood and Orlando will be hosting a The Last of Us theme park ride, and actors Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson will reprise their roles as Joel and Ellie respectively for it.

The ride will open as part of this year's Halloween Horror Nights at Universal, and will take plenty of inspiration from the original game, rather than HBO's successful TV adadptation.

Speaking to SFX Magazine, Universal Studios show director Lora Sauls discussed The Last of Us director Neil Druckmann's input into the attraction and working with Baker and Johnson.

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Pokémon Go's newly-introduced Showcases are one of my favourite additions to the game in years. They're local leaderboards, in a nutshell - a feature which first debuted in developer Niantic's now-canned NBA All-Stars - that let you show off specific Pokémon and win in-game rewards. What's really great about Showcases, though, is their smart design with a very low barrier to entry, meaning there's no need to meet other players, or cough up for premium items in order to get involved. This ease of taking part has ensured Showcases are a success, but has also led to something of a revelation for me, as I've looked at my local leaderboards and read dozens of player names I've never seen around my area before. These are people who aren't in my local raid groups and whose names don't regularly appear in gyms, but who are still clearly playing and enjoying the game every day. And the fact this is possible is a great sign for Pokémon Go's ongoing popularity in general, I think - that a very wide spectrum of people are playing and finding fun in the game, and doing so in different ways.

Square Enix revealed new information about Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, including the Japanese voice actors for the main cast of the game. The company also unveiled the Japanese art box alongside the release of a new story and gameplay trailer. [Thanks, 4Gamer!]

The upcoming new entry in the monster collecting RPG series is also known as Dragon Quest Monsters 3 in Japan. The game follows Dragon Quest IV villain Psaro in his quest to become Master of Monsterkind as he recruits powerful monsters and treks across the land of Nadiria.

Here are the Japanese voice actors for the main cast of Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince:

• Psaro: Daisuke Ono
• Rose: Reina Ueda
• Toilen Trubble: Yoshitsugu Matsuoka
• Fizzy: Hina Suguta

And here is the Japanese art box for the game:
[gallery columns="1" size="full" ids="976747" link="file"]

You can also check out the new trailer for the game below. The trailer is only available in Japanese.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7v7DfngnhE

Baldur’s Gate 3 players who experienced bugs and crashes immediately after launch may find some relief with a new update. Larian announced a new version of the game is live. Updating it brings it up to 4.1.1.3624901. This update doesn’t add any new features. It also temporarily halts cross-saves, due to saving issues, ahead of fixes to prepare it for the PS5 launch. The full Baldur’s Gate 3 Hotfix 1 patch notes go over all the changes.

Fixing Baldur’s Gate 3 patches and bugs blocking progress is such a major focus with Hotfix 1 that there is a whole section dedicated to them. There are 18 specific ones handled. Some of them are major, like Steam API startup crashes or one that keeps you from progressing after talking with a certain boss. A few are incredibly specific and let someone finally have a Zariel tiefling Guardian.

However, the Baldur’s Gate 3 Hotfix 1 patch notes section with the most fixes is the Cinematics one. There are 38 issues tackled there. Six of them deal with spoilers.  

Here are the full Baldur's Gate 3 Hotfix 1 patch notes for 4.1.1.3624901 from Steam. Note that there are some spoilers in the "Cinematics" section.

Atlus shared a new Persona 5 Tactica character trailer focused on Yusuke Kitagawa. His Phantom Thief codename is Fox, and he fights alongside his Persona Goemon. Yusuke is an art student from Kosei High School. The new introduction trailer showcases one of Fox and Goemon’s new skills.

Although Yusuke looks like a composed and polite young man, his devotion to art often leads him to say things that are out of touch with the real world. The contrast between his appearance and behavior often leaves everyone around him perplexed.

The latest Persona 5 Tactica trailer showed one of Yusuke’s new abilities. The name roughly translates to “A Phantomlike Thief,” and it allows him to create three copies of himself with the smoke of Goemon’s pipe. The smoke clones can be used to distract enemies and draw agro from them.

Check out the new Persona 5 Tactica trailer introducing Yusuke here:

https://twitter.com/p_kouhou/status/1688384470574063616

In the original Persona 5, Yusuke joined the Phantom Thieves during their second heist against his former mentor and adoptive father, when he awakened to his Persona after confronting his mentor’s Shadow.

Over the weekend, thousands of fighting game fans descended on Las Vegas, NV for Evo 2023, the biggest fighting game event of the year. It was a reminder of how cool esports can be, especially when built of the passion and tenacity of grassroots communities. For some competitors there was just one problem: some of the…

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After years of waiting and months of reignited rumors of a remaster, Rockstar Games has finally revealed a port for the first Red Dead Redemption. Over a decade after its release, the critically-acclaimed third-person shooter is making the jump to PlayStation 4 and Switch on August 17, but a “next-gen” upgrade for…

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One important tip for folks to keep in mind heading into Baldur’s Gate 3: always save your progress. Shit can go bad real quick in Larian Studios’ RPG, and I don’t just mean in combat scenarios. One bad dice roll and you can lose a party member because you did something to annoy them. But friends, I come to you as the…

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Red Dead Redemption is one of the best games of the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 era, and it hasn’t migrated from those platforms since it arrived in 2010. After 13 years, that finally changes with a surprise jump to PlayStation 4 and Switch.

Rockstar announced today that Double Eleven Studios is creating these ports, which include the zombie-themed Undead Nightmare expansion in one package. This also means that PlayStation 5 players can experience the game due to PS4 backwards compatibility. While it's unclear if these versions feature any kind of performance or graphical improvements, they do have additional language support for simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Latin American Spanish. 

Following her announcement as the first all-new character to join the Street Fighter 6 roster by way of DLC, A.K.I. gave fans a taste of what to expect when she is added to the game this fall. During this weekend's Evo 2023 fighting game tournament, we received a host of new announcements, including new characters added to the roster of the upcoming Mortal Kombat 1 and even a surprise TMNT collaboration with Street Fighter 6. However, Capcom didn't stop there, as it gave us the first teaser trailer for its 20th playable character, A.K.I.

Described as "a manaical poison aficionado," A.K.I. certainly seems to fit right in with the long lineage of over-the-top and deranged characters within the Street Fighter universe. You can check out the surprisingly dark teaser trailer for A.K.I. below.

Publisher Tate Multimedia and developer Trialforge Studio have released the debut trailer for Deathbound, its new Soulslike action RPG with a unique class-based twist coming to Steam next year. 

Set in a crumbling civilization where unnatural science clashes with fanatical faith, players take on the role of a warrior set on confronting the Church of Death. In this world – Ziêminal – there's no good and no evil; just monsters and enemies in your way. And if today's Deathbound trailer is anything to go on, they won't go down without a fight. 

Check out the Deathbound reveal trailer for yourself below: 

As you can see in the trailer above, players can freely switch between various heroes of different classes in a party at any time, and they'll need to do so to survive in specific situations. Trialforge Studio calls this a "Binding System, allowing players to absorb the essence of the fallen warriors found throughout the world." Using the collected essence, players can obtain new skills and abilities to transform their playstyle, or they can use it to form a party of heroes they can then switch between. 

Perhaps inevitably, Digital Foundry Direct Weekly returns once again with a new episode and it's fair to say that we have an exceptional line-up of topics and supporter questions this week. We've already posted an article about path-traced lighting coming to Skyrim, but what stood out to me this week was news about the discovery of a new exploit for PlayStation 5 - and it's already delivering 60fps upgrades for PS4 titles that never received any kind of official patch.

Console exploits aren't talked about much because of their piracy-adjacent nature, but the scale and scope of the 'PS5 Hack' is limited by a number of factors, not least that the exploits have already been patched by Sony. To use an exploit on the PS5 means you can't run any new games and you can't go online. It then becomes more of a technical curiosity, and one of those curiosities is that a range of frame-rate unlocking patches that only work on exploited PS4 and PS4 Pro consoles can now be adapted to run on PlayStation 5, with most of the patching work being carried out by an individual known as Illusion.

Rockstar Games has just announced that Red Dead Redemption is making its way on to newer consoles for the first time: PS4 and Switch.

Originally released in 2010 for the PS3 and Xbox 360, rumours of a remaster have been bubbling for a while, following reports of its development. Last month, a new rating for Red Dead Redemption was spotted, which kept hopes alive.

The release on PS4 and Switch isn't a remaster unfortunately - Rockstar has called it a "conversion" produced by Double Eleven Studios, which has quite a bit of experience in porting games to modern consoles.

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Konami announced that the Metal Gear games franchise achieved sales of 60 million copies worldwide. This information was revealed in the latest update to the company’s corporate information, placing Metal Gear among their most high-profile franchises. [Thanks, Anime News Network!]

While there haven’t been any new games in the Metal Gear franchise since 2018’s Metal Gear Survive, the high sales number indicates that it's still popular. There is a revival on the way though. The Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1, a remastered compilation of Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3, is coming to modern systems on October 24, 2023. Metal Gear Solid 3 is also getting a remake in the form of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater.

Other high-profile franchises in Konami’s financial information include Yu-Gi-Oh! and their sports titles. The Powerful Pro Yakyu baseball series sold 24.8 million copies on consoles, with roughly 40 million downloads for the mobile titles. Their soccer series, eFootball, reached 700 million sales, if sales of older Pro Evolution Soccer and Winning Eleven games are included.

Toho Animation announced the My Hero Academia anime series is getting a fourth movie. The reveal comes alongside a new key visual for the film. Like with all three previous movies, this entry will offer a completely original story, and manga author Kohei Horikoshi will be in charge of supervising the movie, writing the script, and creating the characters. [Thanks, Oricon!]

The movie will be set in a collapsed society. No more information about the plot has been given. Studio Bones returns as the studio in charge of animating the new film. It handled the anime and past movies.

You can check out the new key visual for the fourth My Hero Academia anime movie here:
[gallery columns="1" size="full" ids="976787" link="file"]

The teaser shows Izuku “Deku” Midoriya, with All Might showing up in the background. The Japanese caption “The next is X” appears to the right of the visual, with X being two Japanese characters scratched and rendered illegible.

The three previous movies are Two Heroes, Heroes Rising, and World Heroes' Mission, released in Japan in August 2018, December 2019, and August 2021, respectively. World Heroes’ Mission earned a total of over 3.4 billion yen at the Japanese box office, as well as earning over 1.6 billion yen over the course of its first ten days at Japanese theaters.

A Final Fantasy collaboration is coming to Magic: The Gathering. Wizards of the Coast made the announcement at GenCon 2023 as part of the Magic at 30 panel.

Details are sparse on what designs will be featured in the Final Fantasy set. However, Wizards of the Coast confirmed that the series will cover the whole series, covering everything from the first game to Final Fantasy XVI. The set will be released physically and will be available on MTG Arena, the digital version of the game.

It’s not the first time that Wizards of the Coast worked with Final Fantasy staff. In 2019, the Japanese release of the War of the Spark expansion featured unique art from Japanese illustrators. One of these was famed Final Fantasy character and logo designer Yoshitaka Amano, who produced artwork of Liliana, Dreadhorde General. Other Japanese artists who've produced artwork for Magic: The Gathering include Yoji Shinkawa and Junji Ito.

The first new manga series to appear in Shonen Jump in August 2023 is Shojo Null by Kanae Nakanishi and Akima. The first chapter is available to read worldwide via MangaPlus and Viz Media. It is free to read online.

Shojo Null begins with a rather shocking panel of a character in a dress saying, “I’ve made up my mind! I’m going to kill all those nasty humans!” It then reveals that the character is a robotic creation known as a Gijin. These are designed to be mindless automatons who perform less desirable tasks and jobs. That initial character is Fuji-93106, a military Gijin who was the only survivor of a crash. We then learn that a young boy named Riaha, whose father realized Gijin were sentient beings. He found and saved Fuji-93106, who says their name is Marie, and is housing them. The first chapter deals with what happens when Marie is exposed to the outside world.

This is one of three new Shonen Jump manga to show up lately. Sachi’s Records: Sachi’s Book of Revelation and Wild Strawberry both started their runs in July 2023. However, this is the first new series to start in August 2023. Before that, Ice-Head Gill debuted in June 2023.

Shojo Null is now running in Shonen Jump, and the next new chapter of the manga will appear on August 11, 2023.

Some good news and bad news for you all, today. In case you missed it, Rockstar just announced that Red Dead Redemption is coming to PlayStation 4 and Switch later this month. That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: These ports are extremely barebones, completely lacking multiplayer support, and seem to offer few…

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For the first time since the switch to the new era of Pokémon TCG, it’s all about Charizards again. With next week’s release of Obsidian Flames, players and collectors will once again be making a very big fuss about the cuddly orange dragon, with three different ‘Zards to collect in the set. But that’s not all that’s…

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Activision has officially teased 2023's Call of Duty after months of leaks. Titled Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, it will seemingly be a direct sequel to last year’s game and it’s coming out on November 10.

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