Category: Gaming

Here’s an early Valentine’s Day present for you: The Legend of Zelda and Splatoon concerts will be streaming on YouTube next month.

Nintendo of America made the announcement on Twitter/X on Wednesday, both on its own page and that of Splatoon’s North American branch. The Zelda Orchestra Concert will start streaming on Nintendo’s official YouTube channel on February 9, while the Splatoon 3 Deep Cut concert will be uploaded on February 10.

Both concerts will be pre-recorded instead of live-streamed, so no one will be jealous of anyone who went to the concerts in person — if there will be a live audience at all. Here’s what Nintendo tweeted for each concert.

The Zelda and Splatoon concerts were originally going to be part of Nintendo Live 2024 in Tokyo this month alongside Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 esports tournaments. However, Nintendo was forced to cancel the event after it received persistent threats against its staff, attendees, and spectators because it couldn’t ensure their safety if the event went on.

Nintendo also postponed the Splatoon Koshien 2023 National Finals and Splatoon 3 World Championship 2024 to indeterminable dates along with the Mario Kart 8 esports competitions.

The Zelda orchestra concert was previously held at the Nintendo Live 2023 event in Seattle, Washington back in September along with the Super Mario Super Big Band concert.

The Zelda and Splatoon concerts are in good company with other symphony performances being officially taped for YouTube. For example, the Sonic Symphony Orchestra was live-streamed from Prague, Germany was recorded during Sonic the Hedgehog’s 30th anniversary in 2021. It gained critical acclaim from fans for playing both classic and modern Sonic music in two parts, especially with Crush 40 performing in the latter part. Today, the Sonic Symphony is on a world tour.

If only those video game concerts would get the same theatrical treatment as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé’s concert tours.

Cristina Alexander is a freelance writer for IGN. To paraphrase Calvin Harris, she wears her love for Sonic the Hedgehog on her sleeve like a big deal. Follow her on Twitter @SonicPrincess15.

A Cyberpunk 2077 player has discovered an Easter egg more than three years after the game launched, denoting a very on-brand theme of the game hidden within a secret message written in Latin.

Reddit user CommercialLeg2439 spotted the secret message in Pacifica, specifically on the Grand Imperial Mall. As the sun sets in Night City, the lights of the mall flicker, and only a select few in its name actually light up.

Instead of Grand Imperial Mall, the sign instead reads “gra d imperi l mali”. Fans have debated a little how this translates exactly, but “gra imperi mali” means “thanks to the evil government”. Another possible solution keeps the first “d” in, translating to “degree of evil government”. One user even suggested the random “l” towards the end could be the roman numeral of 50, meaning something like the “degree of 50 evil governments” or “thanks to the 50 evil governments”, a reference to the 50 states of America.

Regardless, the hidden message feeds very well into Cyberpunk 2077’s core themes, that of a corrupt world in which regular people systematically fall victim to the laws and corporations which tower over them.

“This is one insane catch,” AHappyRaider commented on the post. “I swear, all the clever and hidden s**t in this game that I don’t initially catch is making me feel stupid,” Adjunct_Junk added. “Let alone all that borderline David Lynchian FF:06:B5 stuff.”

This references Cyberpunk 2077’s biggest ongoing mystery, which will no doubt have fans obsessing over again thanks to this Latin message being spotted. The mystery, known simply as FF:06:B5, began when players discovered the code on a statue worshipped by monks in Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City. A series of other numbers hidden throughout the city attracted even more attention, and a Reddit page dedicated to FF:06:B5 now has more than 24,000 members.

It even seeped beyond Cyberpunk 2077 and into CD Projekt Red’s other franchise with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The release of Cyberpunk 2077’s game-changing Update 2.0 included even more clues, but fans have yet to solve the bizarre riddle.

To see all the other wild and wacky Easter eggs present in Cyberpunk 2077, check out IGN’s guide dedicated to the topic.

Image Credit: CommercialLeg2439 on Reddit

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Spoiler Warning: The following article contains spoilers for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its Blood and WIne expansion.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is getting a direct sequel in the form of a Dark Horse comic book called The Witcher: Corvo Bianco.

Revealed on Dark Horse’s website, the Corvo Bianco name will be familiar to those who played the Blood and Wine expansion, which took players to Toussaint and rewarded protagonist Geralt of Rivia with his own vineyard.

That vineyard was called Corvo Bianco, and while Geralt retired there with his beloved Yennefer (or Triss), the comic will see that lush life uprooted as he must return to the rugged life of a witcher once more.

“For a witcher, the simple life can be hard to come by, and even harder to pass up,” the official synopsis said. “When Geralt acquires a taste for a slower pace — good wine and good company — the routines of a witcher are easily eclipsed. With Yennefer at his side, one might hope that Geralt will truly get to enjoy a taste of the good life. But the stains of history are deep, and with blood and wine, every drop attracts those who want more.”

The first issue of the five part comic will arrive on May 8, 2024, three months after the current comic run, The Witcher: Wild Animals will end. It’s written by Bartosz Sztybor with art from Corrado Mastantuono. Corvo Bianco will be the ninth comic released by Dark Horse that tells a fresh story within CD Projekt Red’s canonical Witcher universe.

Another game is coming too, though what’s essentially The Witcher 4 but codenamed Polaris will not follow Geralt and instead tell a new story.

Image Credit: Dark Horse

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Palworld’s explosive launch shows no sign of slowing down, with the ‘Pokémon with guns’ crafting and survival game selling another million copies in a day.

According to developer Pocketpair, Palworld has now sold over seven million copies in just five days.

“Thank you very much!!” a tweet from the developer read. “We continue to be hard at work addressing the issues and bugs some users are experiencing.

“Thanks for your support!”

The Game Awards boss Geoff Keighley tweeted to say he had confirmed with Pocketpair that the seven million sold figure is for Steam sales only, and so does not include Xbox and Windows PC sales. It’s worth noting Palworld launched day-and-date on Game Pass, too.

“That translates into approximately $189 million USD in Steam sales in 5 days,” Keighley added.

It’s an incredible result for Pocketpair, whose game has dominated the video game community since going on sale on January 19.

Yesterday, January 23, Palworld posted an incredible 1,864,421 peak concurrent players on Steam, a figure that saw it overtake Valve’s own Counter-Strike in Steam’s all-time most-played games list.

Palworld is second only to PUBG, whose remarkable Steam concurrents peak of 3,257,248 was set during the game’s glory days amid the battle royale boom, and is unlikely to be topped.

While Palworld is already one of the biggest game launches ever, it’s also one of the most controversial. Pocketpair has said its staff have received death threats amid Pokémon “rip-off” claims, and Nintendo has moved quickly to remove an eye-catching Pokémon mod. Palworld’s enormous launch has seen its servers struggle, too.

IGN’s early access review of Palworld on Steam returned an 8/10. We said: “Palworld may crib quite a bit from Pokémon’s homework, but deep survival mechanics and a hilarious attitude make it hard to put down – even in Early Access.”

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

You never quite know what you’re going to find on the other side when you step through the stargate, and when it came to Stargate: Timekeepers, I certainly wasn’t expecting a very competent stealth tactics game. All the same, slinking across varied alien worlds and setting up well-timed tactical ambushes ended up feeling like a natural fit for the types of budget-constrained capers SG-1 got up to in earlier seasons of the show. The story isn’t anything to report back to command about, but the vibes and presentation hit the spot.

Timekeepers definitely takes its cues from the Stargate: SG-1 television show – though it focuses on a completely new team of quippy characters. The slightly campy tone is pleasantly reminiscent of an era before prestige TV, when things were a bit less grim and serious and you might see United States Air Force officers knocking out alien soldiers and tying them up with ropes. At the same time, it doesn’t come off as overly goofy or comedic, striking what I found to be a good balance.

The fast-paced plot is set in the same universe as SG-1 and Atlantis, picking up during the seventh season’s climactic Battle of Antarctica, before following a parallel adventure completely new to Timekeepers. Therein lies a bit of a problem, though. If you don’t know anything about Stargate lore, the writers are basically hurling you off a cliff. There’s no effort made to explain what Stargate Command does, who the Jaffa or the Goa’uld are, or why Earth is currently at war with someone named Anubis. I had to go wiki diving to remember what was going on at this point, and I’ve seen the whole series multiple times – granted, it’s been more than 10 years since my last rewatch. It seems intended for existing SG-1 fans only.

The team I assembled across Timekeepers’ seven initial missions – the first half of what is planned to be a 14-episode “season,” with the second half coming later this year – is made up of soldiers and misfits who are a bit two-dimensional in their portrayal, but endearing enough. Each deployment can take anywhere from 45 minutes to a couple hours, depending heavily on how careful or aggressive I wanted to be. Our intrepid leader is Store Brand Samantha Carter: Colonel Eva McCain. No, I mean really – from appearance to personality, it seems almost like this character originally was intended to be Amanda Tapping’s Colonel Carter from the TV show. At least, they’re definitely cut from the same cloth. Not that I mind that too much.

We also have the too-cool-for-school sniper Max Bolton, a rebel Jaffa named A’ta who comes with her very own “Indeed,” and the nervous, quirky scientist Derrick Harper. The way they play off each other in dialogue isn’t especially impactful, but how their skills mesh together certainly can be. Timekeepers reminds me, more than anything, of now-defunct studio Mimimi’s excellent Shadow Tactics and Shadow Gambit games. Each area is a delicate knot of enemy vision cones and well-placed obstacles that I loved picking apart from the edges using each character’s abilities in combination.

Most areas can be approached with a range of playstyles. Eva is particularly good at a run-and-gun doctrine, clearing out whole squads with an exciting barrage of grenades and rifle fire. Limited ammo and the risk of alerting other nearby enemies meant I had to carefully consider when to go full commando, though. Alien expert Sam Watson, on the opposite end of the spectrum, can disguise himself as a Jaffa and even speak their language, keeping guards distracted with small talk while the others slip by. This mechanic is especially interesting as only enemies of lower rank will be fooled, so missions with Sam often revolve around looking for more senior warriors you can isolate and knock out to upgrade your disguise.

The handy Tactical Mode makes it easier to coordinate multiple characters. I found the ability to issue multiple orders and automatically sync them to happen at the same time especially useful, for instance, when you need to knock out two guards without either of them noticing. I was a bit disappointed there’s no action queue, however – though you can tell a character to move to a specific spot before using an ability. Selecting multiple characters can also be a bit of a pain, especially if they’re not standing close together. I would have killed for a Ctrl + A command to select all my units like in an RTS, or the ability to hold Shift when hitting the F1 – F5 keys to add a squadmate to my existing selection, instead of cycling through them one by one.

Also, for all the freedom of playstyle it offers, Timekeepers doesn’t really reward stealth or nonviolence in any particularly impactful ways. There are lethal and nonlethal attacks, and for the first few missions I tried to only use nonlethal ones. The Jaffa are just brainwashed humans, after all. But I was never even verbally commended for doing so, much less given any kind of mechanical reward. Decisions in one episode don’t seem to carry over to the next.

And while you will be told how many alarms you triggered at the end of a mission, there isn’t even any kind of medal or S-rank for going undetected. The only reasons to use stealth and nonlethal options at all, it seems, are to keep from alerting certain enemies who can call reinforcements – which will make the whole level harder – and the fact that ammo and grenades are a limited resource.

Timekeepers doesn’t look half bad, all things considered. The portraits, character models, and particle effects aren’t especially modern or detailed. But each level features rich and interesting alien environments, from a starlit forest settlement to an ancient jungle temple, with plenty of character to keep things from feeling repetitive. The level design also provided a satisfying difficulty curve, adding in new elements, like patrolling drones, at a steady pace and always making me think on my feet to adapt to the scenario.

I also really liked the mission intros, which are formatted like the “Previously on…” recaps from the TV show. A couple of them cut off awkwardly and seem like they may be missing some animations that were meant to transition seamlessly into a level. But it’s a nice touch. I feel like I’m playing through an episode of SG-1, and that’s a welcome experience for me. I also have to give a nod to the clean, readable UI and dialogue subtitles. The loading screens even show coordinates being dialed in on the stargate, which is pretty neat.

Things can go a bit sideways sometimes, though. In one mission, a patrolling enemy randomly found a body I had hidden something like 30 minutes ago and alerted all of his friends to come look for me. But we’d already left the area completely, so they were just running around randomly in a panic, bunching up on ladders, and completely breaking each-other’s AI and animations. What makes this worse is that you can’t save your game if there are any enemies alerted anywhere on the map. So I just had to hit fast-forward – a great feature for speeding up patrol cycles, and dealing with nonsense like this – and wait for them to calm down and go back to their posts.

Netflix Games is doing better than ever, says Netflix. But that may not be saying much, given past data on the streaming service’s gaming offering.

Today, Netflix reported its full-year earnings for fiscal 2023, during which it reported that gaming engagement “tripled” last year. This was in part due to the release of the Grand Theft Auto trilogy on the service near the end of the year. Netflix calls the GTA Trilogy its “most successful launch to date in terms of installs and engagement, with some consumers clearly signing up simply to play these games.”

But while that’s all well and good for Netflix, don’t expect to see the streaming service competing with Sony and Xbox anytime soon. CNBC reported data from Apptopia back in October that indicated less than 1% of all Netflix’s then roughly-250 million subscribers were playing a Netflix game on a daily basis.

Netflix seems aware of its own position as a grain of video game sand here, too. The company acknowledged itself that its games division was “small” and “certainly not yet material relative to our film and series business.” It’s intent on further growth, too, stating that it’s interested in “broadening” its offerings in the space and continuing to invest. For now, it hasn’t said anything further on rumors that it may introduce in-app purchases or ads to its games platform down the line – those ideas seem to just be discussions internally for now.

Elsewhere in Netflix’s earnings, we learned that the company saw a 13 million subscriber surge in the final quarter of the year, and that it’s planning to release Squid Game season 2 sometime in 2024.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Note: This review is specifically of the PC version of Palworld available through Steam. Because the Xbox version and the PC version available via the Microsoft Store (both on Game Pass) has significantly more issues and different features, which the developer says is due to the certification process, we will post a separate review of that version later this week.

Nothing about what Palworld does seems like it should work in the slightest. A thinly veiled Pokémon clone where you and your collectible monsters shoot people in the face with literal guns? A base building survival game where you use your kidnapped creatures as laborers, and may even resort to cooking and eating those unpaid employees when times get tough? An open-world co-op adventure where you and your friends thwack helpless sheep over the head with baseball bats to harvest their wool? Defying the odds, this wholly irreverent, gun-toting take on the creature collection genre has been unrelentingly fun across the 100-plus hours I’ve spent shooting cartoon kittens in the face. As an early access game, it’s got plenty of bugs and performance issues to go around, and sure, it shamelessly cribs the design for many of its collectible creatures. But its survival mechanics are intuitive and deep, its action-packed combat is silly and satisfying, and exploring its world in search of new Pals to kick the snot out of hasn’t come close to getting old. I am baffled to report, dear reader, that Palworld is very good.

Despite the clear, eyebrow-raising inspiration it takes from a certain creature collecting powerhouse, Palworld more closely resembles a formulaic survival game like Grounded, with a roster of lovable monsters to capture as a clever twist on that formula. You find yourself inexplicably dropped into the wilderness of a strange land filled with oversized, dangerous beasts called Pals. From there you’ll need to build a base, hilariously force the local fauna into your servitude, and upgrade your gear to wage war against the rotten human factions who try to murder you with assault weapons every chance they get. You won’t find yourself hanging out in idyllic towns or challenging gym leaders to friendly contests – this isn’t that kind of adventure. Instead, your goal is to survive the harsh land and face off against evil and/or psychotic Pal trainers who raze villages, attack your base, and command foreboding towers and dungeons filled with goons who shoot to kill.

And yeah, tonally, that’s an utterly unhinged combination. One moment I was taking in pastoral views as I explored for new Pals, gliding, climbing, crafting, and cooking like this was an off-brand Tears of the Kingdom. The next moment I was firing guns at armed thugs and considering the possibility of butchering a Pal who had been mentally broken by the poor working conditions of my sweatshop so I could consume his meat to avoid starvation. Rather than not addressing the questionable aspects of the creature collecting genre, Palworld amusingly leans into them and lets you do absurd things like pick up your fiery fox Pal and use it as a flamethrower to burn your enemies to a crisp, or equip your monkey Pal with a machine gun (which sure beats using Tail Whip). Once you get over how incredibly weird that all feels, it’s a complete blast.

It’s hard to overstate just how effortlessly funny Palworld is, often feeling like a satire of the creature collection genre rather than another straight-faced iteration of it. For example, later in my playthrough I accidentally discovered you can capture humans in your Palspheres, binding them to your will and allowing you to put them to work at your camp or take them with you on adventures like regular Pals – an insane inclusion that’s never advertised to the player and has no purpose aside from being ridiculous. Or how you can just give an rocket launcher to your panda Pal, then sit back and watch him blow some poor woodland creatures into oblivion. Palworld is steeped in utter irreverence every step of the way, and that works to its benefit since creature collecting is already silly as heck to begin with.

Catching Pals out in the open world is a ton of fun, though it’s definitely a bit weird to hack a small penguin unconscious with an ax before you can stuff it into a Palsphere – or, even more alarmingly, to take out a gun and riddle it with lead. It feels extremely wrong at first, to be sure, but I found myself disturbingly used to the ritual after just a few hours. I mean, is doing the dirty work myself really all that different from battling them with another captured creature instead?

The Pals themselves, on the other hand, aren’t quite as original as the process of catching them, as I’d describe the majority of them as “almost copyright infringement.” Seriously, there’s a mouselike lightning Pal, a sassy two-legged cat Pal, a dinosaur with a flower on its head, and many more that reminded me an awful lot of some collectible monsters from the days of my youth. That said, uninspired and derivative as they are, the designs are still mostly pretty neat and have a lot of personality, which makes each one a ton of fun to hunt and do battle against. I’m especially fond of the ditzy and nigh-helpless Dumud, a complete blob of a creature who thrives bouncing around the desert in delighted defiance of Darwinism.

Though capturing, leveling up, and fighting alongside Pals is a major and awesome part of the adventure, you’ll likely spend much more time hanging out at the various bases you’ll build. It’s there you can craft useful items and facilities, cook meals, and arm yourself for war in the epic battles ahead. Just like most other survival games, you’ll need to keep a steady stream of crafting materials flowing in, like wood, stone, and food, and the key to automating that process so you don’t spend endless hours mind-numbingly chopping down trees and swatting rocks with a pickaxe is by making clever use of the Pals themselves. For example, farming could soak up lots of your time as you plant seeds, water your plots, and then harvest the crops, but once you’ve captured some Pals and put them to work at your base, you can have a plant Pal spit seeds out of its mouth, then have a water Pal blast them with water, before another Pal comes along to harvest the crop and move it to your storage container.

This Pal-based cooperation is not only ridiculously adorable to watch, but gives you even more reasons to catch every creature you find. You might not have much use for the fox-like Pal Foxparks in battle, but if you keep one at your base, whenever you fire up the grill to cook or use the furnace to smelt some ingots, your charming fire friend will come running to shoot fire at the appliance and make the task go by faster. Even the weakest creatures give you a whole new reason to catch not just one of them, but a whole bunch to be put to work at whatever it is they do well. As you level up your character and capture Pals with different abilities, you’ll be able to transform your bases from shabby camps to industrialized fortresses, complete with conveyor belts for your Pals to go to work assembling weapons and ammo for you to use against your enemies – a hilarious transformation that made me question how much better I was than the villainous rival trainers I faced out in the wilds.

That said, there are areas where the work of maintaining your bases requires far too much grinding to keep up with. For example, the near-constant need for ore, which is used in dozens of vital recipes, becomes increasingly cumbersome the longer you play as you start consuming massive amounts of the material. Instead of being able to fully automate the process of harvesting and refining this resource like you can do with wood and stone, you have to stop what you’re doing regularly to farm some ore and turn it into ingots just to fuel your basic needs. One of the most constant uses for ore is to craft Palspheres, which are used at a rapid pace as you try to catch increasingly powerful Pals with very low capture rates – and since some sphere recipes require five ingots to create a single one, I found myself halting my adventures for 20 minutes to grab a ton of ore to build spheres, then running out again an hour later, forcing me to start the process all over again. Here’s hoping they’ll add more advanced options to automate some of this stuff later on, because for the time being there’s far too much manual work required just to get back out in the field putting your Pals to good use.

The 10 Best Survival Games

Thankfully, once you get away from the base to explore the absolutely enormous map, it’s consistently fun to run around looking for hidden chests and eggs, battle dangerous boss Pals, raid dungeons stuffed with loot, and chat with the handful of NPC and vendors scattered throughout the wilderness. In one area I get chased by wild packs of snow cats and their giant papa cat, in another I found a creepy blackmarket trader who sold rare, probably illicitly obtained Pals, and in another I watched a squad of suicidal tucan Pals rush into a camp of poachers and self-detonate, sending the whole place up in smoke. Sometimes the action even finds you, like when various enemy groups or wild Pals organize raids against your bases, including a personal favorite moment when seven high-powered “Bushi” Pals attacked my camp with samurai swords (this is the nature of war, after all).

Once you unlock the ability to ride Pals, especially flying ones, the world really opens up, and you’ll find miles and miles to explore, from bamboo forests filled with goofy panda Pals to murky swamps overrun with goblin Pals. There’s even an active volcano to be scaled where all the Pals are, predictably, made of fire. Crafting gear and leveling your Pal squad to survive increasingly unwelcoming parts of the world is rewarding, not just because of all the interesting new Pals to find a capture, but because certain biomes will give you access to materials you’ll need to bring your base and equipment to the next level. Even cooler, you’ll be able to see at least a few massive spires rising in the distance from anywhere on the world map, serving as a reference for your ultimate goal – to reach them all and challenge the lethal bosses lurking within.

Like most survival games, everything Palworld offers immediately becomes more fun when joined by friends in multiplayer – up to 32 people can be in a single server on the Steam version, though that number is currently capped to a paltry four on Xbox and the PC Game Pass version. Running wild throughout the open world, taking down powerful bosses together, and managing a collective base all work without hassle (aside from some short-lived server issues right around launch). Seriously, this thing just demands to be played with friends, especially since it also alleviates some of the stress of having to grind for resources all the time… if those friends are willing to chip in and not steal all your stuff, that is.

Every IGN Pokemon Review Ever

It probably goes without saying for an Early Access game, but be warned that you are bound to encounter technical issues and bugs on occasion, though the issues I’ve seen are fortunately mostly minor so far (at least on Steam). I’ve been hit with rough framerates and stuttering, hard crashes, and multiplayer disconnects, but none of that was so commonplace or game-breaking that it ever significantly got in the way of good times. There’s a lot more that Palworld could benefit from, like a fleshed out story and more NPCs or evolutions for the Pals, to avoid so many of them becoming irrelevant at higher levels, but I’m surprised by how polished the whole package already feels at this early stage.

Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children Complete will be playing in U.S. theaters for two days only in February.

Square Enix announced its partnership with Fathom and Sony Pictures on Tuesday to bring the director’s cut of the CGI cinematic sequel to the original Final Fantasy 7 to theaters for the very first time. The English dubbed version of the movie will play on February 21, and the English subbed version plays on February 22 — just one week before the launch of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

Before the start of each screening of Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children Complete, which is 26 minutes longer than the original film, fans will get to see an introductory reel that breaks down the history of Final Fantasy 7, the game’s connection to the movie, and gameplay footage of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. They’ll also watch interviews with Tetsuya Nomura, Naoki Hamaguchi, and Yoshinori Kitase as they discuss the making of the upcoming remake title, which won Most Anticipated Game at The Game Awards 2023.

For those who’ve never seen Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children before, it picks up two years after the events of Final Fantasy 7, where Cloud comes out of hiding to join Tifa and the gang to fight a mysterious illness quickly spreading throughout Midgar. At the same time, they have to face off with a villainous trio who plan to resurrect Sephiroth using the remains of the extraterrestrial villains Jenova.

Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children came out as a direct-to-DVD film in both Japan and the U.S. in 2005 and 2006, respectively, never receiving the same theatrical release treatment Final Fantasy: Spirits Within did. Three years later, Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children Complete was released on Blu-ray, delighting fans with extra action sequences. Seeing the movie on the big screen for the first time ever will be an even bigger treat, especially since the theatrical release will be in the U.S.

Because Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children Complete is having a limited theatrical run, you may want to check Fathom’s website to see if the movie is playing in theaters in your area.

Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth releases February 29 exclusively on PS5.

Cristina Alexander is a freelance writer for IGN. To paraphrase Calvin Harris, she wears her love for Sonic the Hedgehog on her sleeve like a big deal. Follow her on Twitter @SonicPrincess15.

Palworld – the brand new, sort-of-Pokémon, open-world, third-person, shooting, action adventure, crafting, survival, animal collecting, and other popular buzzwords – game launched on Steam and Xbox on January 19. It immediately blew up, selling six million copies in four days and instantly becoming a force to be reckoned with while simultaneously opening the floodgates of discourse surrounding intellectual property theft in video games. Since being revealed two years ago, Palworld – created by a developer named Pocketpair – has been commonly referred to as “Pokémon with guns” by anyone who has looked at it for more than three seconds. But as people dig deeper, they are discovering that Palworld is both a game that does enough to distance itself from Pokémon mechanically while also being a little too close for comfort to Pokémon artistically. So let’s dig into this controversy and figure out exactly what’s happening with Palworld.

Palworld is a hit for completely obvious reasons: it kitbashes a bunch of tremendously successful genres and previously proven gameplay mechanics under a warm and inviting art style for all ages. It’s got the third-person gunplay from Fortnite, the crafting and survival of Ark, and a ton of extremely Pokémon-looking — but not quite exactly Pokémon — animals from Game Freak’s beloved series. It also satisfies the lifelong dream of anyone who wanted to see Pokémon fire machine guns. It’s the game equivalent of a cooking video where a mom puts McDonalds french fries, Kraft Mac and Cheese, and Ore-Ida Tater Tots into a bunch of Old El Paso soft tortilla shells before serving it to her kids. It’s crowd pleasing junk food, but it’s also comfort food and it doesn’t really matter how innovative or original it all is if the end result sort of tastes good.

There are several less obvious reasons why Palworld is such a huge success. For one, on PC, where Palworld is seeing the overwhelming bulk of its sales, you can’t legally purchase and play a Pokémon game. You can boot up an ancient rom or jump through some hoops and emulate a modern Pokémon game, but Pokémon simply has no presence on the Steam store or similar platforms since the Pokémon Company has opted instead to only release Pokémon games on Nintendo platforms and mobile devices. There are similar games, like Cassette Beasts and TemTem, but there’s still a massive, largely untapped market for Pokémon games on PC that isn’t being frequently served and that market is clearly hungry for a thing they can’t have. And honestly, most of those people simply don’t care that Palworld features some especially derivative Pokémon designs – they simply want a Pokémon-ish experience on PC that the Pokémon company won’t give to them, so another company did. Palworld serves that audience while also throwing in a bunch of other gameplay ideas and themes that are already super popular on PC so it’s not hard to see why it was an instant hit.

Then there’s the more cynical explanation that accounts for a smaller but still valid group: Pokémon fans that are helping Palworld become a hit because they think the Pokémon Company has a modern history of shipping Pokémon games that haven’t evolved on the formula, run poorly on the Switch, and don’t get the patches and updates they need to improve. After all, competition breeds innovation and while Palworld being a huge hit won’t immediately force the Pokémon Company to add assault rifles to the next Pokémon game, finally having a big competitor on its turf may inspire it to innovate on a series that many fans believe has grown stale and occasionally phoned-in over the years. That’s what this group hopes, at least.

But even pushing all of those factors aside, one of the big reasons that Palworld keeps selling more and more is because people love it. As of the time of writing there are nearly 45,000 reviews for Palworld on Steam and 93% of them are positive. That means Palworld is a great game in the eyes of players and confident word of mouth around games like this goes a really long way. Countless established and popular game franchises have launched on PC, riddled with technical or networking issues that take weeks or even months to be fixed, and had their user scores tanked by frustrated audiences who couldn’t properly play a product they paid for. Palworld has its own share of launch issues, of course, but it’s also an early access game and the audience seems to be forgiving of them in favor of the larger experience which is generally well received so far.

Finally, there’s a much tinier but not insignificant factor I also wanna throw in here: people think that since Palworld is so similar to Pokémon it could get legally removed from the internet at any given moment. Pushed by that perceived ticking clock, they wanna get in while they still can. People want what they can’t have or might not be able to have soon, a concept you’ll be familiar with if you tried to buy toilet paper in April of 2020. Given its success, close approximation to Pokémon, Pokémon’s corporate connection to Nintendo, and Nintendo’s long history of cease and desisting anything and everything remotely related to their intellectual properties, you probably wouldn’t be unwarranted to expect Palworld to go the way of the Doduo bird by the end of the month. That was a bad joke and I am sorry but I had to get it out of my system…

Anyway, Nintendo is a powerfully litigious and thoroughly protective company when it comes to its characters and games. It owns a third of the Pokémon Company and they’ve spent decades working together on projects, leading many to wonder when Nintendo will drop a massive lawsuit or cease and desist on the creators of Palworld and shut down the game for good. However, Palworld is in a uniquely different spot than the typical fan made game that Nintendo tends to pull down from the internet the second it hears about it. Nintendo regularly takes legal action against projects that use original Nintendo game assets or even things like names, logos, and characters. It takes down unlicensed PC ports, HD remakes it didn’t create itself, sues rom distribution sites, fan art pages, and more, to the point that it’s become a running joke that “Nintendo Ninjas” will strike and destroy every time any remotely interesting but definitely unlicensed Nintendo fan project pops up. Just last month it got a PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening pulled from the internet for infringing on Nintendo’s properties, and that wasn’t even a game you could legally buy on Steam. Given that history and Palworld’s success, you might be justified in expecting the ninjas to show up and start slashing throats at any given moment.

But Palworld doesn’t use Pokémon sprites or models ripped directly from Pokémon games, or music or sounds or characters or menus, right? It mostly just uses a bunch of stuff that feels really, really close – like, dangerously close – to Pokémon without actually being Pokémon. Seeing them side by side it’s pretty undeniable how much they have in common, like seeing a box of Fruit Rounds cereal next to a box of Fruit Loops. Both are loops, or, uh, rounds, and the weird bird mascot character looks infinitely more depressed than the one on the Fruit Loops box. But if your store only has Fruit Rounds and you’re really craving a bowl of small, colorful breakfast circles being championed by an exotic bird on a bright red box (super specific craving, by the way) what are you gonna do, buy Cheerios? Or Tasteeos? Nah, you’re probably going home with the Fruit Rounds. Palworld is an amalgamation of ideas, none of which are wholly original, but none of them are directly dragged and dropped from a Pokémon game’s engine. And so, it’s hard to say if Nintendo and the Pokémon company have a legal leg to stand on here, even if they wanted to.

After all, is making a video game clearly inspired by other video games a crime? If it were, we’d have to throw a lot of video games in the garbage.

Knowing and coming to terms with the fact that no idea is original when interacting with art means you can recognize the two major branching paths these things tend to go down: did this product improve or evolve on the idea that inspired it, or did it just replicate it, often shamelessly? If you’ve played a game on a mobile phone in the last 15 years you’re probably familiar with a company named Gameloft. Gameloft made knockoffs of popular console games for a mobile audience who otherwise couldn’t play them on their phones. Games like Gangstar, a Grand Theft Auto clone; Modern Combat, a Modern Warfare clone; Nova, a Halo-slash-Crysis clone; and Shadow Guardian, an Uncharted clone. (That last one is particularly shameless.) It’s really no different than what the straight-to-home-video ‘mockbuster’ studios like The Asylum has been doing with popular movies for ages now. This weekend, why not unwind with a classic movie like Transmorphers, Snakes on a Train, Alien vs Hunter, or Jurassic Domination? Or maybe even check in on everyone’s favorite globetrotting treasure hunter Alan Quartermain and the Spear(..?) of Destiny.

Is there a huge difference between Alan Quartermain, Gameloft’s Shadow Guardian, and Naughty Dog’s original Uncharted series? Not really. They all heavily lift large chunks of inspiration and source material from the original Indiana Jones movies. Uncharted wouldn’t exist without those films, or at the very least it wouldn’t exist without Tomb Raider, which also wouldn’t exist without those films. But Indiana Jones wouldn’t exist without being inspired by old pulp comics, the Doc Savage novel series, and (ironically) the original Alan Quartermain books, to name a few. So you can realistically trace almost everything back to an idea that came before it and the lines frequently start to blur.

As for the games Pocketpair made before Palworld, the studio’s entire history can be summed up with the “we have blank at home” meme. One of its biggest games before Palworld is called Craftopia, an open-world action adventure and crafting game where an elf-ish character fights bootleg Moblins, Bokoblins, and other various enemies that look remarkably similar to Zelda enemies while also paragliding, building vehicles and contraptions, and doing the signature run up the mountain as the camera pans over the whole kingdom thing from Breath of the Wild. Craftopia does do a few things differently to set itself apart, but it’s all pretty shameless stuff on the surface. The paraglider specifically feels almost identical to Breath of the Wild.

Then there’s the upcoming Pocketpair title Nevergrave, which seems heavily inspired by the smash hit Metroidvania game Hollow Knight, right down to the color palette, combat, and traversal. Again, it adds enough new gameplay elements into the mix to kind of stand on its own, but if there’s an argument that Palworld deserves to copy Pokémon because Pokémon games are becoming stale and phoned in every year, can the same really be said for the Hollow Night and Zelda franchises? Not quite.

While describing Palworld’s similarities to Pokémon, I find myself talking about how such similarities are“on the surface”. Most of the controversy is around what people can immediately see and recognize as being something that looks like Pokémon. Looking at both Pokémon and Palworld designs as they’re running in their respective games reveals some similarities but nothing that feels like a specific one to one copy. But some folks have started to look under the surface at Palworld’s creature designs – specifically the way its 3D models are built – and that’s where a bunch of smoking guns start to show up. Twitter user byofrog took several 3D models from Palworld and overlapped them with 3D models from Pokémon and found a bunch with proportions that line up directly. The results are – at least on the surface – pretty damning. Now, this could all be a huge coincidence, but coming from a studio with a history of borrowing visuals, gameplay mechanics, and more from already established franchises, the benefit of the doubt starts to diminish rapidly.

Pocketpair’s CEO Takuro Mizobe issued a response to the accusations, saying “While we have received various opinions about Palworld, it is important to note that the supervision of all materials related to Palworld is conducted by a team, including myself. I bear the responsibility for the produced materials.” That’s a fairly empty, nebulous statement that is mostly just saying “we look at everything before we put it in our game”, which doesn’t exactly confirm the accusations or deny them. It’s saying that several humans are involved in the art asset approval process before they become interactive elements in a product you can purchase and play, but it’s not saying anything about the creative process that gets them to the approval table to begin with.

As of right this second, there’s certainly a lot of smoke but not necessarily a fire. But as people continue to dig deeper into Palworld, who knows what kind of stuff they’ll dredge up. We’re sort of in uncharted territory here (or Alan Quartermain territory if you prefer) but we’ve also seen this kind of thing happen tons of times before in the great medium of video games. We know how Nintendo and Pokémon’s legal team operate, but we know that it’s totally feasible to create and sell a Pokémon-inspired game legally without getting cease and desisted to death.

As a longtime fan of the series, 2020’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon came as a bit of a shock to my system. Fun as it was, the sudden switch to stop-start, turn-based JRPG attacks was a lot to get my head around after more than a decade of enjoying the series’ signature combo-based beat ‘em up action – a bit like spending over 10 years getting really good at thumb wrestling and then being asked to play chess. Thankfully its follow-up, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, substantially retools the combat system: it’s still turn-based, but the tactical decision-making introduced by its predecessor is enhanced with more flexible movement and proximity-based attacks that better reflect the rough-and-tumble tactility of the traditional Yakuza street fights. As a result, Infinite Wealth’s brawling feels more like the best of both worlds, and its stunning new Hawaiian setting provides the perfect playground in which to unleash its superior style of smackdown.

Main hero Ichiban Kasuga returns from Yakuza: Like a Dragon and remains the loveable human labrador that he was before – unwaveringly upbeat no matter how often he’s beaten down – and this time he’s paired up with series stalwart Kazuma Kiryu, who we find in a more reflective mood due to his recent cancer diagnosis. This odd couple travels to Hawaii in search of the biological mother that Kasuga has never known; however they soon find themselves caught in a compelling conspiracy involving a local religious sect and multiple crime syndicates. The ensuing mystery quickly takes some dramatic twists and turns without ever becoming as tangled as some of the more convoluted plots of the series’ past. Along the way a number of contemporary issues like environmental mismanagement and the spreading of online misinformation are explored, and all of those themes mixed together to give me more to chew on than a konbini bento box.

The core supporting cast from Yakuza: Like a Dragon are also along for the ride, joined by likable locals Eric Tomizawa and Chitose Fujinomiya, and there are some wonderful scene-stealing villains to encounter. That includes a mob boss played by a gruff-as-ever Danny Trejo, whose contract may or may not have stipulated that his character, Dwight Mendez, wields a pair of machetes. Despite the fact that some of the lengthier conversation cutscenes took longer to wrap up than a phone call from my parents, by and large I found the writing in Infinite Wealth to be some of the strongest in the series to date, whether it was during the heightened moments of serious drama or the many lowbrow bursts of comic relief. As was the case with the gang’s previous adventure, I particularly enjoyed the idle banter between them as I roamed the streets – whether they were musing about the limited battery life of Sega’s Game Gear handheld or debating the differences in taste between Japanese and Hawaiian soy sauce.

Marking the first time that a Like a Dragon story has shifted beyond the shores of Japan, Infinite Wealth’s Hawaii doesn’t just feel like an invigorating new setting for the series, but for games in general. Typically the only games set in the exotic US island state involve operating battleships in World War II or steering sports cars around its coastline highways, so it’s nice to play a game that allows you to slip on a pair of flip-flops and explore this fictionalised slice of paradise on foot – or on a zippy motorised Segway, if you really want to look like a tourist. I’m sadly not nearly as familiar with the real Honolulu as I’d like to be, but perhaps because of that I loved roaming around Infinite Wealth’s surprisingly spacious setting, from its sandy shorelines to shiny shopping malls, grabbing local delicacies like shave ice to replenish my health and throwing a friendly “Aloha” to everyone I passed with a tap of a button.

That said, the Honolulu map – which is so vast you could apparently fit nine Kamurochos inside it – isn’t the only location to explore in Infinite Wealth, and after spending the bulk of the story’s first half helping Kasuga’s search through the streets of Waikiki, Kiryu eventually returns to Japan to try and unravel the mystery from a different angle. As a result, for a handful of the campaign’s 14 chapters (totaling around 50 hours) you get to explore both the Yokohama and Kamurocho maps from previous games in the series, each complete with a unique set of substories and side activities that see the gravely ill Kiryu reminisce about his many earlier adventures and make amends with some of the survivors he’s left in his wake. The bulk of these bucket list tasks are optional, and if you’re new to the series you might not get much out of them beyond the token experience points for ticking them off, but I enjoyed the opportunity to take a detour away from the streets of rage for a sentimental trip down memory lane.

Surf and Turf Wars

Along the way it becomes clear that while you can take a Like a Dragon game out of Japan, you can’t take the heaving hordes of weirdo enemy types out of a Like a Dragon game. Despite the fact that the bulk of Infinite Wealth takes place on US soil, I once again found myself indulging in regular battles against hundreds of hilariously off-kilter assailants with pun-based names like Hungry Hungry Homeless and Imp Patient, as though I was locked in an ongoing war with a gang of grown-up Garbage Pail Kids. However, this time around each freaky face-off feels far more lively and intuitive than the comparatively stilted scraps you get into during Yakuza: Like a Dragon, thanks to the added freedom to reposition each of your four team members within a set movement arc at the start of each turn.

This very clever change means you get to inflict bonus damage by moving your character to attack an enemy up close or from the rear, and you can also grab objects like bicycles and explosive barrels and crash them into crowds in order to share the suffering around. In Yakuza: Like a Dragon your team members would occasionally grab makeshift weapons automatically, but here you get to decide exactly which object to use, and there are a lot more to choose from with explosive gas canisters to pick up and throw and even rocket launchers to wield.

What’s more, as the bonds between each member of your party strengthens additional supporting moves are unlocked to create powerful chain reactions, to the point that you can intentionally knock an enemy towards another team member and have them spike them face-first into the dirt like they’re a human volleyball, or sweep kick an enemy off their feet and into the air and have one of your teammates jump-kick them to the curb – not unlike the XCOM-inspired team moves from Marvel’s Midnight Suns and Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope.

Controlling Kiryu offers the closest resemblance to the series’ street fighting of old, since he’s able to switch between three fighting stances: Brawler for balanced attacks; Rush, which gives you two consecutive attacks per turn; and Beast for devastating grapple moves. Additionally, Kiryu is also able to gradually fill his trademark Heat gauge which, when triggered, gives you full control of his movement for a brief period and allows you to unleash a series of simple yet supremely satisfying button-based combos in real-time. Kiryu was my favourite character to use in Infinite Wealth by far, but even when he was absent from my party the combat remained considerably more kinetic than it ever was in Yakuza: Like a Dragon. This game delivers a riotous level of chaos and carnage that makes its predecessor’s more modest turn-taking seem almost polite by comparison.

What’s more, Infinite Wealth consistently adds interesting wrinkles to each fighting arena that forced me to switch up my strategies. One boss fight in a flaming forest had me scrambling for smoldering logs to snatch up and swing around in order to dish out more savage burns than an insult comic, while another skirmish in a room full of poisonous gas added a greater sense of urgency to each of my turns as I frantically hurried to end the fight before my entire squad collapsed. In one late-game battle aboard a tugboat I was able to intentionally knock enemies into the open maw of a great white shark waiting in the waters, then watch as the beast shook them around and then hurled them back into battle bleeding from a latticework of lacerations. Although there are certainly some repetitive random encounters to be found out in the streets, the bulk of Infinite Wealth’s story mission encounters are gripping to play and extremely hard to forget.

Tricks of the Trade

The job system from Yakuza: Like a Dragon returns in Infinite Wealth, allowing you to alter the class of each character to best suit the makeup of your party. Last time around I tried to have an Idol on my team at all times due to their invaluable support abilities, and I persisted with that safety-first strategy in Infinite Wealth and found it just as reliable here. But otherwise, I found the new jobs to be considerably more appealing than those of the previous adventure, and I enjoyed shuffling them around the remaining members of my squad, whether it was Kasuga as a wetsuited Aquanaut Point Break-ing noses with his surfboard attacks, Adachi as a katana-swinging Samurai, or newcomer Tomizawa dual-weilding a pair of pistols as a dusty Desperado. With each job class I added into the rotation, Infinite Wealth’s colourful clashes started to feel even less like standard turn-based scraps and more like fights that had broken out at a cosplay competition.

Some jobs I favoured for their practical value, such as Heiress, which allows you to lob different grenade types that inflict status effects on wide groups of enemies. Others, though, I chose purely based on how entertaining they were to use. I never knew how badly I wanted to see Kiryu impersonate Bruce Lee until he was clad in the yellow Game of Death jumpsuit and fly-kicking and high-pitch-squealing all over my television screen as the nunchuck-wielding action star. Each job expands with a growing number of special attacks as you level them up, and almost every one of these are as damaging as they are dazzling – I never got tired of throwing a frisbee to an enemy goon and watching their confused looks as they caught it… just before they were set upon by a pack of exceptionally aggressive puppies to rapidly nibble away at their health bars, for example.

While there’s a greatly expanded list of jobs to take on, actually playing Infinite Wealth never feels like a chore. One of my biggest gripes with Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s campaign was that my progress stalled when frustrating difficulty spikes in its latter half sent me off to repeatedly grind for experience points for hours on end in order to slowly increase the levels of my party members. This sort of stonewalling of story progress might be fairly commonplace in the JRPG genre, but personally I’m not a fan of playing games that feel too much like work – and neither, it seems, are the designers behind Infinite Wealth.

I’m happy to report that I ran into no such roadblocks in this campaign, and although the challenge and intensity in its marathon final chapter ramps up more often than an inner city car park, I never encountered any overpowered bosses capable of wiping out my team in a single blow or other cheap tricks. Some of the fiercest fights at the pointy end of the story may have felt somewhat attritional but never unfair, and I generally felt like I was always there (or thereabouts) in matching the power level of the enemies I was confronted by without having to go out of my way to play catch up. It helps that you’re typically given a heads up about the recommended level for your squad members and gear before you head into each major battle sequence, so I never found myself inadvertently progressing beyond a point of no return and getting caught with my pants down. I just caught plenty of trenchcoat-clad creeps with their pants down instead.

That said, while I definitely appreciated the more gradual difficulty curve in Infinite Wealth and found it manageable as someone who doesn’t play a lot of turn-based JRPGs, it does strike me as being a little odd that there are no difficulty settings to speak of for your first playthrough of the story. Unlike last year’s Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name or other modern JRPGs like Final Fantasy VII: Remake, there’s no way to throttle the challenge up or down until you beat the story and unlock the more challenging Hard and Legend modes. Why lock the option to increase the difficulty behind over potentially 50 hours of gameplay? Even if you loved a game that long on the first run, it’s a lot to ask to immediately go again.

Conversely, if you’re finding Infinite Wealth too tough the first time around, the absence of an easy mode means your only option is to grind through both of its two randomly generated dungeons in order to over-level yourself to be more resilient to enemy attacks, which seems equally impractical. In this era of improved accessibility, the lack of difficulty options in Infinite Wealth seems slightly behind the times. Still, I suppose at least Sega isn’t charging extra for an easy mode, like it seemingly is with New Game+.

Kawaii Hawaii

It wouldn’t be a Like a Dragon adventure if there wasn’t an enormous amount of supplemental content to enjoy, and in that regard Infinite Wealth doesn’t disappoint. Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s Sujimon system, which basically allowed you to catch and catalogue peculiar men in place of pocket monsters, returns in Infinite Wealth – only now it’s been greatly expanded to include countless limited-time-only raids, training, and stadium battles. Super Crazy Delivery is an addictive arcade time attack minigame that’s effectively what would happen if a driver from Crazy Taxi hopped onto a DoorDash bike, and Sicko Mode tasks you with photographing a series of Speedo-clad musclemen who are hiding in bushes and startling the local dogs. But that’s not as easy as it sounds because you do it as you’re riding around a trolley circuit that hopefully doesn’t go within a thousand feet of any local schools. Each of these are fun and extremely slick, and I’m not just talking about the baby oil that’s dripping off the sickos.

But that’s not all – not by a long shot. One of the more extensive new side activities in Infinite Wealth is Dondoko Island, which could possibly have been called Animal Double-Crossing if Nintendo didn’t have such expensive lawyers at its disposal. This separate resort island that you can travel to from the main Honolulu area allows you to cut down trees, smash rocks, and clear out trash bags in order to gather resources, which can then be used to craft a staggering number of furniture and structures used to beautify your own home and surrounding areas of the island in order to lure new guests.

You can also fish, catch bugs, and fend off occasional attacks from pirates, and the best part of all is that there’s no Tom Nook to continually bust your balls about the bells you owe him. It all works well and seems surprisingly deep, and although my modest interior and exterior design skills haven’t been enough to elevate my island rating beyond a one-star level thus far, I’m keen to invest more hours into it now that I’ve finished the main story – if for no other reason than the fact that Kasuga’s entertainingly manic crafting sequences make him seem less like a carpenter and more like a member of an F1 pit crew.

While I felt that the substories in Like a Dragon Gaiden lacked a bit of spark, it’s clear that developer Ryu Ga Gotuku Studio was saving its best material for Infinite Wealth since it managed to pleasantly surprise me on almost every other street I explored. At one point I stumbled into serving as a stuntman on an action movie set, swerving on foot through high-speed traffic and explosions like I was trapped inside the most frantic and fiery form of Frogger. Later I volunteered to be a contestant on a quirky escape room TV show, and had to sneak through a shopping mall answering trivia questions about the local area for bonus points. That sort of thing made for a stimulating change of pace.

The best part about it all is that you’re constantly earning experience points and unlocking new combat moves and other useful features, whether you’re fighting or not. You can get regular dopamine hits by hitting dopes and meanies, but you can also unlock unique combo attacks to perform with your allies simply by having a beer with them in between brawls – at the same time gaining an insight into their backstories and better fleshing out their characters.

In fact, almost everything in Infinite Wealth seems worthwhile in more ways than one, and there’s a dizzying amount of enjoyable things to do. It seems like Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has put everything but the kitchen sink into Infinite Wealth, but for all I know there might be a giant sink boss possibly named Drain Johnson lurking in one of its dungeons, flanked by his offsiders Tap-tain America and Farrah Faucet. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised, especially since at one point I very much did come up against one unlikely boss in the form of an anthropomorphic cigarette. Defeating it was certainly a new way to kick some butt.

Infinite Wealth also benefits from countless minor design decisions that combine to make for a more seamless experience, such as the ability to fast travel to cab ranks from any point on the map, or the option to see which weapons are in stock at each store at a glance without having to actually visit them. I particularly like how groups of enemies in the world feature colour-coded symbols so that you know which ones to engage with and which to give a wide berth without finding out the hard way. Once you become too powerful for certain enemy types you can just tap the left trigger to instantly wipe them out and snatch some cash and XP, rather than having to go through the motions of wasting time on a fight that you’re always going to win comfortably. There’s not quite an Infinite Wealth of intelligent ideas like these, but there’s certainly a healthy surplus.