Author: Colin Buchanan

Despite how many times I feel like I’ve written about the end of it, the Cyberpunk 2077 universe marches on, as Netflix’s “Geeked Week” event dropped a very short teaser trailer for another tie-in project, likely another anime. Netflix and Studio Trigger partnered to release Cyberpunk: Edgerunners in September 2022, an anime project that was received extremely well by critics and fans alike, holding a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. It told an original story set in CD Projekt Red’s version of the Cyberpunk universe, shared with the 2077 game and the upcoming untitled project codenamed Project Orion. This new teaser trailer,…

It is impossible to discuss or show footage of Dragon Age: The Veilguard without necessarily spoiling the ending of Inquisition. You have been warned. Solas and the Betrayal: A New Chapter in Dragon Age A decade after the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition, I think it’s fair to say that BioWare needs a win. They’ve had a project cancelled, released two critically-disappointing games, and lost a lot of their luster as a reliable producer of single-player RPGs, a reputation they’d had since the 1990s. Where both Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda were noted for feeling rushed out, the studio knew it had to take its time and…

Towerborne Preview – Stoic Studio’s Live-Service Beat-Em-Up Journey When it leaked way back in 2021 that Stoic Studio, developer of the critically beloved The Banner Saga titles, was crafting a side-scrolling action game, I think many of us imagined something that looked a little different from the title that was officially revealed by an Xbox presentation last year. Now, Towerborne is preparing to launch into paid Early Access ahead of a free-to-play full release next year, and pretty much everything about this idea is leaving me with questions. Gameplay Overview: Classes, Combat, and Customization Towerborne is an action beat-em-up game with RPG elements. The…

Welcome back to “Getting Good at FFXIV,” the blog where I document my journey to go from casual player to Final Fantasy XIV expert and hopefully encourage readers to follow along and embark on their own journeys. This game can look incredibly intimidating if you take a single step outside the kiddie pool, but if you never jump into the deep end, you’ll never know if you can handle it! Month 1 Recap In Month 1, despite having no Wi-Fi and needing to play off my phone hotspot for most of the month, I managed to accomplish both of the goals I had…

Capcom revealed a second edition of their classic fighting game collection (simply titled Capcom Fighting Collection 2) during today’s Nintendo Partner Showcase. Capcom Fighting Collection 2 will release in 2025 for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam, and will include Capcom vs SNK Millennium Fight 2000 Pro, Capcom vs SNK 2 Mark of the Millennium 2001, Power Stone, Power Stone 2, Capcom Fighting Evolution, Street Fighter Alpha 3 UPPER, Project Justice, and Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein. The collection will add online play, training modes, fourteen languages, concept art galleries, display filters, and save states to all eight titles,…

The upcoming HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest III showed new footage during the Nintendo Partner Showcase in August 2024, showing off several new features. The remake will add the ability to customize the appearance of your party in addition to their classes and abilities, and a brand-new Monster Wrangler job that looks visually inspired by the recent Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince protagonist. The new job will allow players to use monster abilities in combat after learning them, similar to sister series Final Fantasy’s Blue Mage recurring job. Pre-orders are now available via the Switch eShop alongside all other…

Following several leaks, Electronic Arts officially unveiled a remaster of the first two MySims titles for the Nintendo Switch, including both the original MySims game and its followup MySims Kingdom. MySims is a spin-off franchise of The Sims, originally created to appeal to an Eastern audience with a significantly more stylized visual style and Animal Crossing-esque gameplay. Rather than taking care of your character’s individual needs, the first game sees the player’s created avatar helping to rebuild and repopulate a small town by designing new homes and furniture for the residents, using “essences” collected from the nearby environment as material…

Publisher SEGA revealed at the Nintendo Partner Direct showcase in August that a port of Yakuza Kiwami, originally released on PlayStation 3 (in Japan only) and PlayStation 4, would be coming to Switch on October 24, 2024. This port will cost $19.99. Kiwami is a remake of the original Yakuza title for PlayStation 2, with high-definition graphics and expanded side content. This remaster is likely intended to coincide with the forthcoming Amazon Prime live-action adaptation of the series, which will air its first three episodes the following day on October 25th. The Switch is notably the only platform not to…

Developer LocalThunk revealed during the Nintendo Indie World livestream in August 2024 that a free update (called the “Friends of Jimbo” update) for hit indie title Balatro, launching later that day, would include four brand-new crossover skins for the game. Balatro is a roguelike poker game that already features multiple skins for its card decks, but this update will give players access to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Among Us, Dave the Diver, and Vampire Survivors. Publisher Playstack recently revealed that Balatro had sold two million copies since launch, and had two “summer surprises” in store, one of which was…

Introduction to Star Wars: Outlaws There’s a commonality between pretty much all of the recent new Star Wars games we’ve gotten since Disney and EA more or less took over the franchise. It’s that they’re all fairly straightforward big-setpiece blockbusters that take place in and even expand the Star Wars universe but don’t really let the player live in the most famous setting in science fiction. This isn’t a complaint, mind you – Jedi Survivor was one of my top games of last year, after all – but when Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment’s Star Wars: Outlaws made me promises of…

Introduction to Star Wars: Bounty Hunter Remastered A few months ago, I reviewed the hastily put-together Star Wars Battlefront: Classic Collection, developed and published by Aspyr Media, and had very little good to say about either the weirdly revamped multiplayer gameplay or the package as a whole beyond it looking somewhat passable. This team has had years to get better at remastering these games, and I have to wonder, moving onto Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, whether Aspyr is at this point just checking boxes off of a list rather than putting any real passion into this franchise. Nostalgic Storytelling with Dated Gameplay Bounty…

The following is a spoiler-free look at the four new Normal-tier raid fights added to Final Fantasy XIV in Patch 7.01. During the Fanfest Japan event this year, the Final Fantasy XIV fanbase was given its first look at the new Dawntrail-era eight-player raid series, and to say it’s a departure from what we’re used to is a bit of an understatement. What we got to see was a shiny purple arena with spectators in stands surrounding the battlefield, the exterior of the building (looking like a 1:1 scale representation of NVIDIA’s next maxed-out GPU), and the name “the Arcadion”. At the final…

(This piece is spoiler-free, and intended to be accessible to people at all levels of progress in Final Fantasy XIV.) This might be the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever written for Noisy Pixel, but this is a bit of a different kind of piece. To pull back the curtain somewhat, I found myself somewhat out of my element when I was invited to the Final Fantasy XIV media tour a few months ago. I greatly appreciated and embraced the opportunity, and I met a lot of really cool people, but as the day went on I started to realize just…

Introduction to Sword of Convallaria I feel like every two months or so, a new mobile game starts to flood my YouTube ads and become completely unavoidable. Sometimes, it’s a new Hoyoverse title with new four-minute animated commercials; sometimes, it’s yet another extremely generic anime auto-battler or idle game, and every once in a while, it’s something actually worth talking about. Sword of Convallaria interested me enough to fall into the third category, as a game clearly trying to ape the look of Tactics Ogre…with music by the actual composer of Final Fantasy Tactics, Hitoshi Sakamoto. Nostalgic Elements and Modern Twists If…

Introduction: The clumsily named “Metroidvania” (a word I hate more every time I have to type and then read it aloud) genre is, frankly, one of the most saturated grounds in the indie game space. It can be challenging for new titles from unknown developers to properly establish themselves, so you should spend your time and money on the m instead of one of the others. Sometimes, though, all it takes to grab attention is the elevator pitch. What if the game was different every time you play? What if it was made by the guy who originally created the…

Introduction to Dawntrail: It’s always a little strange to review a game that’s already accessible to the public, particularly one as significant as an expansion to the world’s most beloved MMORPG. I can’t help but come across innumerable opinions from others that I have to work not to internalize so I can form my own thoughts. But thus far, roughly a week and a half after the game’s launch, the primary word I would use to describe Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail’s reception is “polarizing,” which begs the question: Did we play the same game? Because I was enthralled almost from…

This morning, Square Enix’s official Final Fantasy XIV channels livestreamed the final “Letter from the Producer LIVE!” broadcast before the launch of the game’s next expansion, Dawntrail. The stream began with the expansion’s launch trailer, which is available in multiple languages (the stream showed the Japanese version, but the English one can be found below). Additionally, Producer Naoki Yoshida gave a final confirmation that Patch 7.0 would be arriving as scheduled, two weeks from today on June 28th. (The expansion content will also be available on that day for all pre-orders, with the “full launch” of the game coming on…

Rediscovering a Classic After many years of completely losing any identity the franchise had once had, Nintendo surprising us with a remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, now regarded as one of the best games of the sixth generation, was not on my bingo card. While this generation’s Origami King was a step in the right direction, it was still yet another divisive entry that was clearly not what longtime fans truly wanted from the series. What they wanted was a true successor to this particular entry, and so – twenty years and five games since its original release…

A New Chapter Begins: Dawntrail Expansion Final Fantasy XIV is in a strange place in its history. Despite much of the community being less-than-thrilled about the post-launch support for 2021’s Endwalker expansion, the game is still gaining in popularity, hitting thirty million accounts this year. The release of Patch 6.55 (essentially a prologue to the next expansion, Dawntrail) came with a massive wave of fan support for new party member Wuk Lamat. The hype is huge, even if the game is coming off a bit of a rough spot. The Impact of COVID on Development and Expectations Dawntrail itself is coming a bit later than…

All things must come to an end, and in the last few years, that’s rung especially true for the world of live-service games. In the last three years, during my time at Noisy Pixel, two separate Tales of mobile titles have launched and then permanently shut down. While the last franchise title standing—Tales of the Rays—actually closed all but its Japanese servers six years ago, the game has continued strong with regular releases of new content in its home country…until now. NOTE: The following was written before the shutdown was officially announced.  At the moment, for the first time, Tales of…