Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 i Edge

We’re often struck by the contradiction innate to videogames, an endlessly forward-thinking medium that forever has an eye on its past. But this month takes that concept to extremes. That’s not to say there is nothing in this issue that reflects the here and now: indeed, halfway through production of this issue we had to scramble to make room for the surprise arrival of the wonderful Apex Legends. Elsewhere we speak to Google’s DeepMind about how it’s built an AI capable of beating pro StarCraft II players, which has tantalising – and arguably terrifying – implications for the future of interactive entertainment. Yet two of our biggest stories this issue began more than two decades ago. In Grain Of Truth we catch up with Sam Barlow, whose breakout hit, 2015’s…

Speaking to a rapt audience at The National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, Rami Ismail briefly pauses his talk to ask a question: “Who here has shipped a videogame?” Only a few arms are raised. But a sea of hands greets his follow-up, when he asks who is studying or making their first game. Now in its third year, the Yorkshire Games Festival is a young event attracting a young crowd: we’re sitting among a new wave of game developers, all keen to learn from those who’ve already made it. There can be few better people to inform and enlighten about the vagaries of independent game development than Ismail, and his entertaining A-Z is one of the highlights of the festival programme. Among the other speakers, IO Interactive’s Mette…

Thoman and his colleagues spend a while investigating the source code of a game for a general overview of the work involved – which can vary greatly. “For example, a port to PC from a modern console on an established engine? That’s really one guy working for a month or so – it’s really not expensive,” he says. “But you can have ports that require a whole team working for up to a year, if it’s, say, a custom engine made for a large-scale game with different platform-specific dependencies.” PH3’s job is then to determine a base level of quality for a port and discuss potential additional features that may or may not interest the publisher, before supplying a final quote.…

Game Chrono Regalia Manufacturer Sega Arcade games are typically fast-paced, offering quick thrills in a short amount of time to keep punters moving and paying. As such a realtime strategy game feels like a curious fit for Japanese game centres, but here’s Sega’s Chrono Regalia anyway. The game is played using a touchscreen – in addition to an arcade version, it’s also in development for smartphones – and has you take a party of four into head-to-head battles. It’s fairly standard stuff, with a couple of twists, including a super bar that fills up over the course of the match and, when filled, can heal or buff your party, and Climax, a time-manipulation mechanic that sees the game speed up as the battle nears its end. While primarily a multiplayer…

BOOK Zach-Like bit.ly/zachlike This is exactly what we’d have expected a book from the maker of mechanical puzzle-programming game Opus Magnum to look like. Zach-Like is a hefty 400-page paperback filled with intricate, annotated design documents from every one of Zachtronic’s games, from Exapunks to Infinifactory, plus unreleased and unfinished games. There are sketches from lead designer Zach Barth’s installation-based college projects, and even a cluster of pencil-and-paper puzzle games that never made their way anywhere else. It’s a veritable encyclopedia of Zachtronics’ primary material, then (if you’re looking for narrative history or game-design theory, you won’t find it here), and although a niche collectible has smashed its Kickstarter target. A full free PDF will release online at a later date. VIDEO Destiny Lore: Thorn and The Last Word bit.ly/gunlore In…

As any parent will tell you, one of the good things about having kids is introducing them to the things you love and insisting that they love them too. Christmas is a good time for this, since we have so many little rituals that are great for kids. Once we put the tree up, we light a fire, and sit down in front of Muppets Christmas Carol. This begins a fortnight-long journey through our seasonal favourites (the family-friendly ones, anyway). We’ve done this for years, long before kids were on the agenda, and it’s much nicer now – once we find the film we want. The DVD collection went to charity years ago. Is it on Netflix? Amazon? Now TV? Do we need to (gasp) acquire it on the seven…

Devil May Cry 5 PC, PS4, Xbox One With review code imminent, an invitation to play five hours of Hideaki Itsuno’s latest action masterclass at a swanky London junket goes unanswered – it would only make us sadder the full game isn’t in our hands yet. We’re brushing up on our Royal Guard skills in eager preparation. The Walking Dead PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One The name may be forever infected by the sorry demise of Telltale, and to be honest we drifted away from the game a couple of seasons ago. But Skybound’s bid to ensure Clem gets the send-off she and the game’s remaining fans deserve is enough to earn our attention. Review next month. Days Gone PS4 The last time this impressed us was the day it…

Phoenix Point owes its existence to the 10,314 backers who helped its Fig campaign raise over $765,000, and the tens of thousands who have preordered the game in exchange for early access to regular ‘backer builds’ of the game. Before the crowdfunding began, a survey helped Snapshot decide a multiplayer mode wasn’t worth pursuing – so how much do these backers affect development now? Gollop says the funding has mostly been invested in expanding the art team, to help it better compete with the slick presentation of Firaxis’ games, but the scope of the game hasn’t changed significantly as result. As for player feedback, it certainly seems to have influenced decisions such as how to approach characters’ classes, but hasn’t led to “any major changes in the game’s design.”…

Katana Zero came to our attention via the annual charity speedrun marathon Awesome Games Done Quick: publisher Devolver Digital is a sponsor of the event, and it was a savvy choice of venue for the game. Fast-paced, action-packed, with instant restarts and a narratively justifiable dialogue skip, it’s a speedrunner’s wet dream even before you start to consider how level runs might be better optimised – and there’s certainly plenty of that, with many levels having multiple routes, and enemy spawn placements changing depending on where you die. It may have only made the advertising hoardings at AGDQ, but Katana Zero looks set to become a fixture on the speedrun circuit itself before long.…

Sam Barlow is honest to a fault. Talking with him about his work, in fact, is eerily like playing one of his games. We watch him on our screen, speaking into his webcam: he recounts the design pillars he set out for Her Story, then rewinds to his time on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and the cancelled Legacy Of Kain, before free-associating rapidly between Basic Instinct and Hitchcock and social media and Breath Of The Wild and a 107-minute art film of David Beckham sleeping – and his new game, Telling Lies. It is exhausting but exhilarating to watch his mind work to explain itself. Wide-ranging, non-linear, full of seemingly disparate parts that only make sense when taken together, his story – of how he accidentally placed himself at the…

Peter Molyneux Creative director, Fable II When an idea is met with resistance, how do you decide if it’s worth persevering? There are three factors you have to measure when you’re creating something. There’s the sanity of an idea and then there’s what the team thinks of an idea. People who are going to work on it have to be excited about the idea, otherwise it’s not worth their salt. And lastly there is the amount of time your publisher has given you. When I first proposed to the team that the big feature of Fable II would be a dog, their first reaction was, ‘What the fuck are you talking about, man, that’s just the most stupid idea we’ve ever heard.’ And in my mind I was thinking, ‘Okay,…

Developer Respawn Entertainment Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now This is how genres evolve, and why gaming needs its copycats. To see Apex Legends’core conceit written down is to behold a deeply offputting sort of buzzword salad, a game that hitches itself to every popular games-as-service bandwagon of the past couple of years. It takes the hero shooter of Overwatch and Rainbow 6: Siege, drops it into PUBG’s Battle Royale, envelops it in Fortnite’s free-to-play and chucks in every vaguely workable monetisation model it can think of. On paper, it looks like a travesty – until you get to who is developing it. In Respawn Entertainment’s hands, what might have been a disaster becomes something quite transcendent. This is the biggest leap forward for…

The Gummi Ship segments of Kingdom Hearts III, as ever, are close to interminable. It’s the main method of transportation between Disneyfied planets: after over a decade of development, you’d think Square would come up with something better than a flight sim fished out of the Dreamcast’s bargain bin. Flying between worlds is a slog, and you’re often forced to fight limp, protracted battles with enemy ships before being allowed to land at your destination. The ability to customise your ship’s appearance to a generous degree does offset some of the irritation – it’s difficult to take anything too seriously when you’re piloting a candied effigy of a cheeseburger.…

A level-ranking system rather optimistically encourages repeat play, and for the maximum you’ll need to find all the coins (typically 100) strewn about the levels – many of which have their own unique interpretation of collision. You’ll need to be quick (most of our silver trophies come as a result of taking too long) and, crucially, clean, since your death total is taken into account. So, you’ll need to be thorough, fast, and flawless – the latter requiring that you commit to memory which platforms are real, and which only appear to be.…

First StarCraft II, then the world. Such is the trajectory of neural network AlphaStar. Trained in 18 months by a team at Google’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind, it’s designed to play Blizzard’s realtime strategy game at a competitive level. In a test match at the tail end of last year, DeepMind pitted AlphaStar against top-ranking professional StarCraft players – and humans – Dario “TLO” Wünsch and Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz. “I was just hoping to see the agent play like it knows how to play,” lead researcher Oriol Vinyals says. “I didn’t want it to break, of course, and I hoped to see a reasonably long game, hopefully balanced in terms of not being too one-sided – for the human.” AlphaStar trounced both players 5-0. As ever, though, this is not…

This year’s BAFTA Young Game Designers competition closes on March 13. Those interested in entering can visit ygd.bafta.org for all the resources. Phillips has noticed a trend towards more autobiographical elements among recent submissions, revealing young designers are using games to express themselves. “It’s something we can certainly work with, especially with children in care,” she says. “For a kid, telling an adult about their life can be daunting. But if you say, ‘What if we designed a game about your life? What would be the challenges? What would be the goals?’ I think that’s more interesting.”…

Kitty Ray, or Kitty as she’s known professionally, is an American musician whose brand of dreamy pop-rap propelled her to internet stardom, spawned several EPs and led to work soundtracking games. Here, she talks discovering Mass Effect via Myspace, the therapeutic nature of GTAV and the merits of owning your vulnerability. What’s your earliest gaming memory? When I was little, my mom was like, obsessed with me being smart. ‘We’re going to nurture her brain!’ So I never really played games or watched a lot of TV – until my little brother was born and then she was like, ‘Fuck it’. He was such a handful that she got out my dad’s old NES. We sat there and played Super Mario 3 for like, years. I remember my brother making…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to PlayStation Plus, courtesy of Sony Interactive Entertainment Desired state At the end of last year my wife and I went through some upsetting news. This may not seem relevant to Edge, but hopefully it gives some colour to what the subsequent era held. During this time, and particularly during long stretches waiting for news, I found escapism in three games which I played excessively. I found these three titles as somewhat solace from or, to an extent, mindfulness for dealing with our situation. The first was Yakuza Kiwami 2, which transported me to a different place and time, and allowed me to gain an absolute form of escapism.…

As soon as the teaser trailer for Journey To The Savage Planet hit the internet, we heard a few things. Among the most frequently asked were: why is there no animation in the video, and when will we see gameplay? The first question is easily answered – the video was put together from in-game assets, bubblegum and string, and we didn’t have money to splash around – while the second requires some nuance, although the basics are also simple. We weren’t quite ready to show gameplay, and we also want to have a rollout of assets so we can build interest over time with a series of (hopefully) newsworthy or shareworthy announcements, instead of dropping everything in one hit at the start. But now GDC is upon us and we’re…

Variations return in Mortal Kombat 11, allowing you to select from one of three sets of attacks and abilities for your fighter. But you’ll also be able to tweak each variation further with custom character variations that will use gear (as in Netherrealm’s excellent system in Injustice 2). According to the studio, the options are largely weighted towards the cosmetic, but with consumables and weapons also in the mix we’ll inevitably start to see a metagame evolve online – presumably in a separate mode so as not to anger purists, as studio creative director Ed Boon has promised “regulation” versions of each character for more serious tournament-style play.…

Hidden Layer Games’ previous output is completely unlike Inmost, being a collection of Flash games and some rather predatory-looking mobile titles. But it was shrewd business on the part of artist Alexey Testov and programmer Andriy Vinchkovskiy: following political tensions in their respective home countries of Ukraine and Russia, the two used their previous earnings to relocate to Lithuania and begin work on the game they wanted to make. The first demo won Best Indie Game at 2017’s DevCamm conference and they netted a £23,000 prize to continue funding the project. Flash forward to 2019, and the game’s appearance on Nintendo’s recent indie showcase drew the attention of many industry luminaries. Those Candy Crush clones seem like a lifetime ago.…

Barlow wants to discourage completionist attitudes in Telling Lies. “With Her Story, I was surprised by how many people got 100 per cent, which was maybe my bad because there was a chart that allowed you to see it. So in this one, we don’t have that. And some clips are deliberately long, and there are these periods where nothing’s really happening.” The idea is to encourage players to slow down and take in the actors’ subtle behavioural cues. Hyperlinked words in subtitles, however, will allow players to clip-hop at speed if they’d like.…

David Polfeldt began his career as an illustrator, after gaining a masters’ degree in graphic design from renowned Swedish art school Konstfack. After a spell working for marketing and communications agencies, he joined Massive Entertainment, which was then owned by Vivendi, as VP and director of marketing in 2005. Three years later he was appointed managing director when Ubisoft acquired the studio, and in the years since has steered the studio through a period of rapid growth. When he took over, Massive’s headcount was around 40. These days it has 700 staff across two cities, and is in the process of renovating an entire city block for its new HQ.…

Founded 2004 Employees 1,500 Key staff Gilles Langourieux (CEO), Elijah Freeman (GM, Virtuos Shanghai), Tian Li (GM, Virtuos Chengdu) URL www.virtuosgames.com Selected softography Crash: Mind Over Mutant, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Heavy Rain HD, Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection, Dark Souls Remastered Current projects Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Trends come and go, but there are two simple and inescapable truths in the modern videogame industry: games are getting bigger, and there are more of them than ever before. As a result, between blockbusters and remasters, publishers and developers alike are becoming increasingly reliant on outsourcing, inviting external studios to help make up the numbers whenever more artists and coders are required. This naturally represents an opportunity for those prepared to capitalise on those needs, and few companies are better positioned to do so…

Kings Canyon is the sole map in the game at launch, though Respawn confirms more are in development. Like Black Ops IIII’s Blackout, it feels like a bunch of deathmatch maps stitched together, but just about hangs together as a place. There are no obvious focal points like Fortnite’s infamous Tilted Towers; rather, those looking for a sweaty start can head to the part of the map that’s highlighted with a blue ring to denote its high-tier loot drops. A supply ship also drifts across the map at the outset for those who want to gamble a possibly short life against the strongest of starts.…

The Metro series’ commitment to immersion is exemplified in its efforts to minimise menus and HUD elements. As such, much of the vital info in Exodus is worn by Artyom: a timer on his wrist indicating how long your air filter will last, a radiation levels readout next to that, a physical map and compass he checks manually to find his way. More complex information, such as weapon modifications and their effects, are relegated to menus, but they’re tucked away in the periphery while the weapon itself sits on a workbench, keeping you tethered to the environment. Ranger Hardcore difficulty removes all HUD elements altogether, including ammo readouts and the crosshair. Finding a laser sight becomes a real priority.…

Whether your first playthrough is as Leon or Claire, the second character’s campaign remixes just enough to keep you on your toes, from puzzle solutions to enemy placements – Mr X seems to arrive a lot sooner, too. Still, you can rely on your memory of safe combinations and the like to hurry things along, which means you can reach the new stuff all the sooner – although rushing too much is naturally fraught with risk. There are bonuses for finishing both campaigns on Standard difficulty and above, but if you’re finding it all too much, Assisted mode offers the cushion of an auto-save, while giving you a small health top-up when you’re injured. Hardcore mode makes the zombies even tougher, while forcing you to locate ink ribbons for the…

At the start of each of the game’s ‘acts, the full map is revealed, and carefully plotting your path across it is vital to success. Some corridors are blocked by Elites, dangerously powerful monsters poised to exhaust your resources. At first you’ll learn to avoid them, conserving your health, but as you gain skill and experience you’ll find that the artifacts they’re guaranteed to drop are too precious to pass up. Shops dotted around provide new cards and items, but at prices that force you to plan ahead – realistically, how much gold do you expect to have four fights from now? Meanwhile, random encounters add atmospheric spice with their weird, text-based asides, often offering up tricky decisions that can have lasting effects on your run.…

Watching footage of an AI dispatching its enemies with cunning and efficiency is as fascinating as it is uncomfortable: we can’t help but think of the potential military applications, for instance, of a program specifically designed to outwit unpredictable human behaviour. “Each time a tool like this comes along, it provides a lot of potential for how it may be used, and of course we should be very cognisant of the fact that tools can be used for means other than the ones we created them for,” Silver says. “At DeepMind, we’re trying to build these AI tools in a way which can allow for a lot of progress to happen. But we also take very seriously the role that we have in that in making sure that happens in…

The headlines claimed it took Peter Thoman – then known only by his online handle Durante – just 23 minutes to fix the PC version of Dark Souls. That legend has now become accepted fact. But while the 80KB download, known simply as DSfix, was indeed available within half an hour of the port’s launch, that was only thanks to 30 to 40 hours’ worth of preparatory work in the weeks before. Regardless, Thoman found himself suddenly thrust into the spotlight, and a little over six years later, he’s managed to parlay his hobby into a fulltime career. Alongside two close friends, he recently founded PH3 Games, a studio dedicated to porting console games to PC. Thoman was already a keen modder when he made DSfix. A PhD student, he’d…

Having done a remix for the original, Ray was asked to fully soundtrack Beasts Of Balance’s Battles DLC. “The music is really important, signifying animal combinations, who’s winning, the score – everything affects the music, so I had to make a lot, and it all had to fit together perfectly. It was a challenge, but I’m proud of it.” Ray’s music also features in forthcoming rhythm game Spin Rhythm, including one custom track. “It’s cool: when you focus on the game, you’re actually focusing on the song. When I was writing mine, I was thinking about something that would be fun to spin and lose yourself in.”…

What is a puzzle? The word has become the umbrella term for any kind of videogame challenge that is not exclusively twitchy-kinetic, but it yokes together a huge range of activities. At the basic end, it’s a “puzzle” if you have to find the right key for a door, or press a couple of buttons in the right order. At the other end, it is a series of tasks so fiendish that an entire global community of players fails repeatedly at it, and the developer feels forced to dissolve the implicit puzzle contract whereby a prize is withheld until a solution is found. That is what happened to Bungie earlier this year, when Destiny 2 unveiled a new area featuring a series of puzzles called Niobe’s Torment that players had…

The barrier to success has never been higher. During the production of this issue, EA execs admitted to investors that sales of Battlefield V had been disappointing. It shifted seven million copies. Activision, fresh from its split from Destiny developer Bungie, has as we send to press announced plans to lay off some 800 staff after what, by its own admission, was a record year for its financials. For all that they may be seen as its bad guys, the industry would be poorer without these gargantuan companies backing games to the tune of tens of millions. And of course they are going to expect a return on their investment. But with development and marketing budgets on an inexorable rise, games can no longer be solely niche pursuits. This month’s…

Your personal hub space offers a more tangible incentive to explore Dreams’ various capabilities than simply scratching your creative itch. Whether you’re completing tutorials, playing games, watching films, composing a beat, learning the Logic visual coding system or remixing other people’s creations into your own, you’ll earn rewards. These come in the form of decorative objects – animated sketches and stamps, spiral staircases or giant curved walls – that you can use to personalise your hub. Meanwhile, Dreams will monitor what you spend the most time doing as you level up, and will build you a creator profile that helps potential collaborators identify your strengths and level of experience.…

Developer/publisher Snapshot Games Format PC, Xbox One Origin Bulgaria Release 2019 Julian Gollop’s latest game is facing a rather unusual challenge: existing within two separate legacies, and needing to satisfy both at once. There’s the one that goes back a quarter of a century, to 1994’s UFO: Enemy Unknown (commonly known as X-COM, its US title), and the much more recent lineage spawned by Firaxis’2012 XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The two might share a name, but they have distinct audiences, each with their own demands – as Gollop, whose Snapshot Games has funded Phoenix Point’s production through a mix of crowdfunding and early-access preorders, is all too aware.“There are basically two groups in our backers. There are those who want something more like the original X-COM but spruced up,” he says.“The other camp…

The cards are styled like punch cards, in keeping with the SteamWorld lore that imagines an alternate universe where inventor Charles Babbage’s steam-powered computers were successful. Inevitably, there were complaints that the perforations appeared identical, but Sigurgeirsson is happy to clarify that these were placeholders, and the final cards will carry individual patterns. As for the SteamWorld timeline, the medieval fantasy setting takes the series from implausible scenarios to an impossible one, though that was part of the appeal – “It’s so dumb that we really felt we should do it,” he says – and the game will derive much of its humour from the fish-out-of-water contrast. “We’re flirting with a particular movie and as soon as you see the intro you’ll understand right away where we took the inspiration…

Developer Askiisoft Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC Origin US Release March Here, the drugs really do work. Katana Zero casts you as a contract killer, a former soldier in a brutal war who, thanks to a military drug, is able to see the future. Its levels play out in opposite fashion to Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time, which memorably justified its checkpoint system with the line, ‘Wait… that’s not how it happened.’ Here, you play the game in theory, precognitively; kill all the enemies on screen and the protagonist mutters,‘Yes, that should work,’ before your successful run plays back on a grainy black-and-white display. Your moveset is slender – a roll, a jump, a slash – but you’ll rarely want for anything else It’s a fine idea, and immensely…

Talk about an unlikely sequel. Shenmue, once the most expensive videogame ever made, died a quiet death as Sega halted production of the Dreamcast. But so beloved was Yu Suzuki’s idiosyncratic, melancholy martial arts series that, thanks to years of campaigning from fans and over $7,000,000 of crowdfunding money, the story of Ryo Hazuki is finally to resume. Shenmue III continues the series’ distinctive mix of life simulation, amateur detecting, fighting-game combat and atmospheric world building. Thanks to the almost two decades of advancements in technology and design that have occurred while Hazuki has been staring into mirrors on the sidelines, his return will also feature deeper systems rooted in roleplaying games, and a fascinating new dialogue system that promises to make character interaction more sophisticated. Once again, our sullen…

Barlow continued working with video footage with #WarGames, a season of an interactive TV show about a young clan of modern-day hackers. “It was my attempt to say, what does a Choose Your Own Adventure look like if you don’t have choices, if it’s all kind of behind the scenes?” But it struggled to find an audience upon release. “It was pitched as a free interactive show. And then it became a sponsored piece – initially sponsored by Walmart, which was kind of an interesting mix with subject matter there. I don’t think it was necessarily put in front of the audience it was written for. But it was an interesting experiment.”…

Format 360 Developer Lionhead Studios Publisher Microsoft Game Studios Origin UK Release 2008 Everyone remembers that promise. When Lionhead co-founder Peter Molyneux said Fable players would be able to plant an acorn and eventually see it flourish into a giant oak tree, his mouth was writing a cheque the game would never be able to cash. But if Fable didn’t quite live up to Molyneux’s ambitious billing, the debut game from brothers Dene and Simon Carter and their team at Big Blue Box (which was subsumed into Lionhead) captured the hearts of players across the globe with its irresistible humour and a gorgeous world that, oak trees notwithstanding, responded to your actions. Its sales impressed publisher Microsoft, and a sequel was a cast-iron certainty. Fable II, however, got off to…

Round these parts we are, as you might expect, ardent fans of the written word. And if you’re reading this, we assume you are too. Yet it’s not easy communicating through text the intricacies of a game’s appeal. Indeed, reducing some of the games that have fallen under our critical gaze this month to their component parts does not make for enthralling reading. Perhaps the biggest culprit is Apex Legends (p102). If we told you the Titanfall devs had just surprise-released a free-to-play hero-shooter battle royale, would you run for the nearest console, or simply to the hills? It’s a deeply uninspiring pitch, surely the product of the boardroom before the development floor. It is not so much an idea for a videogame as the centre of a buzzword Venn…

There are no real secrets in videogames any more. Someone, somewhere, is always in the know, and often only too happy to share. The videogame press may not be in the business of spoiling a company’s impending announcements, having decided some time ago that it didn’t want to stand in the way of the hype train, but it loves a good gossip as much as any other profession. And so, in the handful of days between EA flying select influencers, #content creators and online media to the US to play Apex Legends and it being announced and released, more than half a dozen separate sources got in touch to ask if we were aware of it. We were not, and neither seemingly was anyone else, which is some achievement. It…

The sheer variety of units can’t really be faulted, with medieval archetypes joined by some monstrous additions – there may only be cosmetic differences between, say, Vampires, Harpies and Leafwings, but it gives each CO a distinctive-looking army. Yet the designs don’t always scale particularly well, lacking the clean, simple designs and chunky, tactile feel of Advance Wars. That’s especially true on the tile info screen, where you can see which enemy types your selected unit is vulnerable to and effective against – the muddle of tiny, barely decipherable icons reminds you of how needlessly complex the relationships between units can be. It’s noticeable on the battlefield, too, which gets messy when units bunch up. And though they look good and move smoothly in the cutaways, many attacks lack weight.…

Revolve 8’s two singleplayer story modes see heroes from Japanese folklore (Momotaro) rubbing shoulders with European fairy tale characters (Red Riding Hood). These double as extended tutorials for the characters involved, letting you get to grips with their strengths and weaknesses in short, discrete missions away from the pressure of an online game. The story interludes, which you can either tap through in silence or subtitled Japanese, are pretty dreadful, but happily you can skip straight to the playable sections.…

It would be remiss to revisit a Square JRPG without mentioning Richard Honeywood, the Australian localisation director and translator responsible for many of the publisher’s best English-language adaptations. Honeywood began his career as a programmer on Final Fantasy VII, a game infamous for its spotty English translation, but eventually became head of a dedicated internal localisation team. Now at Level-5, his credits include four Final Fantasy games and three Dragon Quests. Chrono Cross is peak Honeywood in how it finds English-speaking equivalents for the nuances of Japanese pop culture and myth. Its characters speak a delightful range of British and American accents, in a script that balances whimsy, grandeur and pathos.…