Before I review any of the game announcements, I will say that this was a pretty ramshackle press conference. It goes to show that if you take a few years off doing this kind of thing, it's hard to get back in the game and put together a polished presentation. The language barrier makes it harder, since the main devs are either Quebecois or Japanese. A lot of the speakers were also hurt by the weird teleprompter placement; people with good grasp of language, nice voices, and decent public speaking capability spent their whole speeches with their heads cocked slightly sideways. Every time they tried to look at the audience it would be a bit jilted.
Just Cause 3: 6/10. Visually looks good. Gameplay looks like a Just Cause game. I'm excited to play it, but paradoxically I think the manic and emergent fun of Just Cause doesn't demo very well. It's really exhilarating to play and create chaos, but less cool to watch someone else do it. So we got a very very long trailer filled with boring explosions, I thought.
Nier 2: 7/10. The existence of this product is kind of a miracle. The concept art looks good. The presentation was gibberish. The funny thing is everyone I was talking to during the conference freaked the hell out because they knew all the staff names and the project sounded cool... but I bet the audience was mystified because it was a whole lot of nothing poorly explained, and then a guy comes out with a character head on and says some stuff in Japanese. Given that Cavia is gone and Platinum is developing, I bet this will have more of an action focus.
Rise of the Tomb Raider: 5/10. Game looks great, I gave it a better review during the MS conference, but the trailer was a same-ol' and the behind-the-scenes video was boring. Models look great though, this will definitely future-proof very well on the PC.
Lara Croft Go: 9/10. Looked beautiful, great art style, and I suspect it will cost very little so I'm more than willing to give it a shot.
Kingdom Hearts Chi: 5/10. It looks cute, but it's a port of a browser game to mobile. I think we all know that low expectations are appropriate here. Maybe it'll end up cool. I'll try it.
Kingdom Hearts 3: 8/10. This might actually be the best looking in motion game I've ever seen. Clean, crisp, bright art, great looking effects. Tangled is cool. Pity they opened with plot gibberish. I'm interested in knowing if SE's recent reorientation to PC will lead to them to porting Kingdom Hearts, especially in light of Disney also becoming more PC friendly. Right now just announced for PS4XBO.
World of Final Fantasy: 5/10. I gave this a better review in the Sony conference, because this was basically the same thing. The new details they gave about monster teams and stuff were not interesting. "First on PS4 and Vita" poses an obvious question to me--what would it next be on? iOS? 3DS maybe? PC maybe? Xbox One maybe? NX? Who knows.
Hitman: 10/10. Beautiful looking, cool concept, sounds like a great reboot. I wonder if it's more like an always-online MMO or more like weekly challenges for an otherwise campaign driven game. I find it funny that the trailer shows lots of killing when in practice you do very little if you're good at Hitman.
Star Ocean 5: 1/10. It's a Star Ocean game. Gaudy bright haired anime doll characters. Even though they didn't show the battle voices, I can hear the nonsense battle voices now. "Deoxyribonucleic Acid Storm!!!!" "Nihilist Inferno Twist!" "Snow White and the Seven Dive Bombs!" "Unending Lonelyhearts!!!!" This was never my franchise. The environments look a little less flat than usual, that's a pro. Dude's popped collar was terrible.
Deus Ex 4: 6/10. BIg fan of the franchise, but I felt like this segment showcased the stuff I like less. I don't see it as an explosion driven action shooter. The political elements seem a little more on the nose than usual, less nuanced, more "AUGMENTED APARTHEID" I wonder if the plot will actually sync up with DE1/2.
Project Setsuma: 8/10. Obviously they didn't show the actual game so it's hard to say, but the principles make sense. I am not interested in fashion culture, or in Dragon Ball cliche spouting. Final Fantasy XV looks frankly disgusting to me, everything about it is the exact opposite of what I'd want to see in a game. So when SE gets on stage and announces a title with a calm, serene name and says it's about recapturing the spirit of how RPGs used to be, my ears perk up. Here's hoping it turns out.
All in all, more than SE normally shows, but probably less than most of the larger publishers do, and definitely a bit amateur hour. Glad to see not all hope is lost for strange or small games, despite their focus on big actiony hollywood stuff.
