Stalker 2’s Xbox Showcase trailer was fully focused on gameplay. Monsters were shot, vendors were visited, doors were pried open, and apocalyptic locations were explored. You can check out the trailer below.
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Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl releases September 5. For more on Stalker 2 head here.
Prince of Persia: The Sands Of Time reemerged during Ubisoft’s Forward event, but only slightly. Basically, Ubisoft confirmed the game is still in development, but it won’t be releasing until 2026.
The game has hit some development difficulties over to course of its creation. When announced, Ubisoft Pune and Ubisoft Mumbai were said to be developing the game, but in 2022 it was shared that development duties would be handed over to Ubisoft Montreal. It seems at that time development was effectively fully reset because it will be some time before release.
For more on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake, head here. For a look at the original game, you can check out our recent episode or Replay below.
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Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is getting an update on June 18 that “addresses some community feedback and adds stability improvements to the game,” but the more exciting detail is the addition of eight new suits, one of which is in reference to the Spider-Verse films.
A suit inspired by Peter B. Parker’s look will be available for Peter Parker, seen below, although it does lack his telltale gut. The other seven suits, which can be seen on PlayStation’s blog, have been created by guest designers KidSuper, Vini Jr, Lando Norris, and Rina Sawayama. There are also a few suits referencing specific Spider-Man lore, and a new Mile Morales suit (seen above) that “is reminiscent of classic cartoons and comics of old.”
For more on the web-slinger latest video game adventure, you can read Game Informer‘s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 review here.
Netflix had released a new trailer for Season 2 of Arcane, the hit animated series set in the League of Legends universe. Set to premiere in November, show creators Christian Linke and Alex Yee confirm the upcoming season will be the show’s last.
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Season 2 is billed as “the final chapter” and will center on Jinx’s attack on the Council, which will be the centerpiece of the escalating Piltover/Zaun conflict. Hailee Steinfeld (Vi) and Ella Purnell (Jinx) will reprise their roles in Season 2. While Arcane will conclude, Christian Link stated during a League of Legends dev update today that it won’t be the last animated tale based on the franchise.
“Arcane is just the beginning of our larger storytelling journey and partnership with the wonderful animation studio that is Fortiche,” said Linke. “From the very beginning, since we started working on this project, we had a very specific ending in mind, which means the story of Arcane wraps up with this second season. But Arcane is just the first of many stories that we want to tell in Runeterra.”
You can watch the first teaser for Arcane Season 2 here. For more on League of Legends, check out our in-depth preview of 2XKO, the franchise’s upcoming fighting game.
Madden NFL 25 (the new one, not the bizarrely titled 25th-anniversary entry of the same name from 2013) has found its cover athlete. Hot off his run to a near-victory in Super Bowl LVIII comes San Francisco 49er running back Christian McCaffrey.
The reigning NFL Offensive Player of the Year will grace the standard and Deluxe Editions. You can view both covers in the gallery below.
EA has yet to detail Madden 25’s gameplay but teases the next evolution of current-gen/PC exclusive features such as FieldSense, new commentary and presentation, and updates to Franchise and other modes. A press release states EA plans to announce gameplay details “soon.”
Madden NFL 25 launches on August 16 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. You can read our review of last year’s Madden NFL 24 here. For the first time in years, Madden won’t be EA’s only licensed football sim this year, as EA Sports College Football makes its comeback on July 19. You can watch the first trailer here.
Citizen Sleeper took me by surprise in 2022, giving me a rare new video game experience, both mechanically and narratively, and my dice-centric role-playing adventure has stuck with me since. I still think about my Sleeper and what they’re up to now. In a year where Elden Ring didn’t release, it would have been my game of the year with a bullet – read my Citizen Sleeper review here to find out why. Now, a little more than two years later, I’ve played parts of the opening hour of Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and find myself desperate to play more. It brings back its incredible sci-fi score, cyberpunk (yet distinct) visual style, and thought-provoking and stress-inducing writing. It infuses everything I love about the first Citizen Sleeper with new mechanics that fuel the game’s central decision-making processes.
Like the first game, I assign my Sleeper one of three classes. I go with the Operator, which the game describes as physically fragile but great at working in interfaces and computer systems. Immediately, I notice the selected class plays a more significant role in how your experience will play out because the Operator lacks access to an entire skill. This means I’m automatically at a disadvantage with any action requiring said skill. However, I have access to the Reboot skill that allows me to reset my system, which mechanically means I gain a dice reroll. It’s a risky skill, as I could roll an even lower number, putting whatever action is at hand further into jeopardy. I could also roll a significantly better number, too, though.
The story picks up after my Sleeper has been helped by their friend Serafin. I’ve recently rebooted my entire system, ending my dependence on the Stabilizer drug that plays a major role in Citizen Sleeper and the gang leader Laine, who supplies it to me. It’s these types of touchstones to the first game players will find in the sequel, which is its own standalone story. However, the reboot was just a partial success. Sure, I no longer need Stabilizer, but my artificial body is malfunctioning. Serafin and I flee on a ship called the Rig, which we steal from Laine and take to Hexport.
Laine, unhappy with everything we’ve done, is after us by way of gang members, bounties, and more. He’s someone my Sleeper once saw as a protector, a savior even, but now, they know him as “a pursuer, a tormentor, a nightmare.” I can’t help but notice the setup for Citizen Sleeper 2 is nearly identical to the first game – a Sleeper whose body is fighting against them is on the run from someone bigger than them. Gareth Damian Martin, the sole developer at one-person studio Jump Over The Age (though Martin has some help in developing Citizen Sleeper 2), says that’s intentional.
“I’m a big fan of noir storytelling,” Martin tells me. “I guess it’s a bit of old-fashioned storytelling, but I like the idea about an ordinary person who’s getting sucked into extraordinary circumstances trying to improvise their way through it.”
They say they wanted to change it up a bit for the sequel – instead of running from a corporate conglomerate, you’re running from a singular person and his gang of underlings. Martin says they feel the result is a story that’s a “bit more intimate and intimidating, and in a way, weirdly scarier because it feels a little more dangerous.”
Laine
After selecting my Sleeper, I’m thrown right into the dice action that returns from the first game. Serafin is going to check on something, so they task me with going to the Hexport Docks to pick up some small gigs. I put a 5-dice (the higher the number, the more likely the action I assign the dice to ends up with a positive outcome versus a neutral or costly negative one) on a “Chat to Crews” function here to get some tips on potential crew recruits and contacts. However, despite the high positive chance with a 5-dice, I get a neutral outcome and only get material. From here, I explore the area more and eventually unveil a new location after completing enough actions at a different spot. It’s “The Bends,” and I can gamble some Cryo (currency) in the Star and Stoker game or buy some fries to restore my energy.
You lose one segment from your energy bar for each cycle or day of action (largely determined by your running out of dice). If this bar is empty, you starve and gain one stress bar per cycle. It’s here I learn Martin has taken a recurring feeling from the first game – the stress one experiences while playing and its effect on your decision-making – and turned it into an actual in-game mechanic aptly named stress. This dictates how much damage your dice will take when rolled. Damage a dice three times, and it breaks until it’s fixed.
Stress joins another new mechanic called Glitch, which I don’t experience in my hands-on demo but witness in a hands-off preview played by Martin. If you roll your dice while you have some Glitch, which, like Stress, is represented in the U.I., you can roll Glitch dice. These have an 80% chance for a negative outcome but a 20% chance for the best possible outcome, once more playing into the risk-and-reward feel permeating the game. You gain Glitch based on how you repair or heal your body – scrap parts might yield more Glitch, whereas more premium resources yield little to none. Together, these mechanics add an exciting but stressful new layer to each decision you make with dice.
“When you look up there [at your U.I. bar], there’s this kind of game of plates spinning,” Martin tells me. “The big part of those plates is actually you dealing with the facilities and capabilities of your body. Even when you heal one of your dice slots, you’re having to deal with the fact that you’re taking on Glitch, and therefore, you’ve got to think about, ‘Do I go on a job right now when I’ve got this level of Glitch or do I rest a bit?’ In general, this is connected to me adding a bit more mechanical heft to the game, especially when it comes to players who aren’t necessarily drawn to the role-playing without some kind of mechanical support for that.”
Martin hopes these additional layers of mechanics provide new pathways for role-playing. With Citizen Sleeper, they noticed some players would lean into the role-playing aspect, making money and decisions based on how their Sleeper might. However, some players said, “I like to make money wherever I make the most money.” It was strictly mechanical for them.
“I always felt like, ‘Oh, that’s a shame because I want you to engage with this character that you’re playing and the story they’re telling,’ so this time around, if I want players to think about how they have to deal with something, there’s a mechanical effect,” Martin says.
As there’s no point in spoiling the narrative events that transpire in this preview build, given how narrative-focused the series is, I’m going to jump ahead to another new mechanic: Contracts. After picking one up at the Hexport contract board, I learn these high-risk, high-reward jobs greatly expand the scope of Citizen Sleeper 2. Unlike the first game, which primarily takes place on a singular space station called the Eye, Citizen Sleeper 2 gives players access to a large star map with various points of interest.
Before embarking on this contract, the game warns me to ensure I have enough fuel to travel to the contract, supplies to keep my Sleeper and crew going, and that I take the opportunity to scout out new freelance crew members to join. Your crew plays a significant role both in the main narrative of Citizen Sleeper 2 and these contracts, which Martin describes as vignettes or episodes inspired by, for example, sub-arcs in series like Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, or other sci-fi greats. They say you might do two or three contracts and see the same character repeatedly, or there might be contracts where you meet a character for the first and last time. Regardless, it’s about the “little story” you get from these contracts. Some are high intensity, others are more laid back, Martin says. The one I do in my preview falls into the former.
After traversing across space to a security drone with something inside I need, I learn that said drone is rigged to blow. Four mistakes and the contract could be over on account of an explosion. As such, I must disable parts of the drone in a semi-sequential order while maintaining a balancing act of dice, supplies (and energy), and more. Supplies, of which I can carry a maximum of five at this point and do before leaving for this contract, automatically replenish energy after each cycle during a contract. When you run out of supplies, your energy will deplete each cycle, and as your energy depletes, your dice get worse, jeopardizing the mission at hand. That’s why preparing ahead of time for a contract is essential.
However, with a drone rigged to blow after four mistakes, I can’t risk using low-number dice with high chances of failure or my low-number crew dice, which, like mine, take into effect our skill proficiencies and can be used alongside my own Sleeper’s dice. Not wanting to risk the low-number dice, I end cycles prematurely, crossing my fingers that I roll some higher-number dice the next day. Fortunately, I do and complete the contract. Some intriguing story stuff happens when I return to Hexport that I won’t spoil here, and my demo is over.
During the preview Martin plays, I see even more of the mechanical and narrative synergy (and stress) of Citizen Sleeper 2 at play. You can utilize Push to get dice bonuses, but doing so immediately adds to your Stress meter. The skill tree is more expansive and customizable, designed with freedom in mind rather than guiding players toward a specific build. Everything I see excites me.
Martin says they’re halfway through developing the game and already at 120,000 words – Citizen Sleeper and its DLC totals 180,000 words, promising a rich storytelling experience in the sequel. There’s a larger push from Martin to lean into Citizen Sleeper’s tabletop inspirations and its cyberpunk themes. Citizen Sleeper 2 is, on paper, a classic example of more story, more systems, more to do. But critically, Martin isn’t just going bigger, instead carefully curating an experience that strikes sharply at the heart of what made the first game work so well: the oh-so-fine balance between success and failure and the stress that lives between the two. If the heart-pumping I felt during my hour with the game is any indication, Martin has rolled a strong set of dice in this first preview cycle for this sequel.
The lucky players who took a chance on 2021’s Before Your Eyes were rewarded with a well-written, highly emotional narrative adventure with a unique mechanical twist. Players control a departed soul traversing the afterlife who relives his entire life, and it can be played entirely by blinking, utilizing webcams to capture their optical input (though the best version is on PlayStation VR2). I loved it, writing in my review, “It’s a concept I’d love to see further explored in a follow-up, and I couldn’t be happier that something like this exists.”
That sentiment was shared by Graham Parkes, who wrote Before Your Eyes and now serves as creative director and writer at Nice Dream. He and Oliver Lewin, co-founder, producer, and studio director at Nice Dream, formed part of the team that created the game, Goodbye World Games, itself a loose collective of designers. Goodbye World spent seven years developing Before Your Eyes, a cycle Parkes describes as a winding road of twists, turns, and, in his words, “so many dark days.” By the time it launched, Parkes says he was just happy to get the game out the door. He and Oliver didn’t anticipate how much of a success, especially critically, it would be. “Honestly, I’m still sometimes kind of shocked by it,” says Parkes.
Before Your Eyes has clearly resonated with players. Lewin reveals that a university student recently contacted him to say they had created a musical theater adaptation of the game for their school. “We still see so many people kind of contributing their own creativity and imagination to it,” says Lewin. “And it sort of continues to live on in that way, so that’s always really motivating and inspiring for us.”
Before Your Eyes
This motivation fueled Graham, Oliver, and Before Your Eyes’ other core team members’ ambitions to create their own studio after shipping the game. The team’s goal: create smaller games that emphasize narrative.
“Oli and I have always loved narrative games and [are] really just excited by the potential for games as the next narrative medium,” says Parkes. “I think that it’s just about being so surprised by the success of [Before Your Eyes] and seeing that there is an audience that likes these shorter, focused narrative experiences and that being something that we’ve always really loved and believed in. And so it’s like, ‘Oh, we have this shot to do that again’ and potentially build a studio around delivering those things.”
Thus, Nice Dream was born. The Los Angeles-based indie studio includes Bela Messex (lead designer/lead programmer), Richard Beare (lead engineer), Dillon Terry (audio lead, composer, designer), and Elisa Marchesi (3D artist). As the team explored its debut project, it held regular pitch meetings, tossing out ideas, arguing about what to do next, and creating prototypes. One thing they agreed on, though, was to pursue eye-tracking again. While creating Before Your Eyes, the team dreamed up other creative uses for the technology that ultimately didn’t fit with the game’s design or story. Before Your Eyes still managed to use blinking and closing your eyes to create magical moments in a more metaphorical sense. But Graham points out that the idea of controlling something with your face has always been conveyed in fiction as a trigger of power – to create genuine magic.
“If you watch Eleven in Stranger Things or different characters with psychic abilities, often they’ll be blinking, or they’ll be closing their eyes and doing things like that, and this kind of literalizes that and makes you really feel like you’re doing something magic,” says Parkes. “So I think that was kind of our initial thing that we were creating prototypes around, like ‘Okay, what if this is a psychic kid story?’”
Goodnight Universe
Around this time, Messex had his first child, a girl named Io. For the next few months, Messex would bring Io to the office, and Parkes says her presence began to influence the team. Originally, Nice Dream played with the idea of beginning its game with players controlling the psychic character as a baby before they presumably matured. But as it prototyped the concept of a psychic-powered infant while also being exposed to Io regularly, they became increasingly delighted by the infant perspective, and the narrative and mechanical potential began to click.
Lewin also believes that having a baby protagonist fits how video games usually work in terms of progression. Babies, like most video game characters, develop rapidly and acquire specific, crucial skills as they experience life. You’re also just dropped into a world with no knowledge of how it works, meeting strangers who you rely on to learn and survive and obtain a lot of knowledge just poking at things and seeing what happens.
Nice Dream had its protagonist for Goodnight Universe. The team used Io for reference, with Terry recording a large bank of baby noises while playing with her that players will hear in-game. As for its story, Goodnight Universe stars Isaac, a six-month-old baby born with psychic powers and a heightened intelligence and awareness of his abilities and the world around him. He’s the latest addition to a family that, though loving, has become emotionally detached from each other. The family is unaware of Isaac’s powers, and despite his powerful mind, he’s still limited by his infantile inability to communicate verbally. However, the family’s troubles cause him to realize that he must keep his powers a secret.
“[Isaac] then realizes that it’s very important to his mother especially that he be a normal baby because he was born prematurely, and they had all these health scares when he was first born,” says Parkes. “And so he kind of takes the lesson that he needs to keep his powers and his differences secret from his family. And his decision to hide himself is sort of mirrored in what he’s learning about each of the family members and the ways that they’re hiding themselves from each other.”
To this end, Issac becomes a secret helper by observing his family’s issues and using his powers to ease their burdens. His abilities include moving objects with telekinesis and using telepathy to read family members’ minds to gain insights into their thoughts and feelings. Nice Dream states that additional abilities will become available as the game progresses but doesn’t specify them other than that you’ll be using your face to activate them. Parkes describes using blinking for smaller interactions, such as an early sequence where Isaac discovers his powers while watching a kid’s show he loathes. By blinking, he can change the channel to something more preferable (think that one scene in X2 with the mutant kid watching TV we all vividly remember).
An expanded version of Before Your Eyes’ blinking tech will allow a broader range of facial inputs to activate your powers. The team is still conceptualizing how this feature will work exactly, but it is exploring using mouth shapes, such as smiling and frowning, and other gestures.
“We did kind of want to use all parts of the buffalo on this one,” says Parkes. “I felt like with Before Your Eyes, it was very much like, ‘Okay, the tech can do a lot more than just blink’…So we are trying to have fun with the camera. That’s part of the fun for us is just being like, ‘Okay, cool, what else can this weird controller do for us?’”
Like Before Your Eyes, Goodnight Universe can be played with traditional controls. Nice Dream states that it noticed how many Before Your Eyes players enjoyed playing the game with traditional controls instead of using the webcam. It recognizes this and says it’s designing Goodnight Moon to be a wholly enjoyable game whether you’re interacting with your face or your controller. The team says the face-tracking isn’t as intrinsically tied to Goodnight Universe’s storytelling and themes as it was with Before Your Eyes, so it feels more like an optional play mode this time.
Nice Dream also describes Goodnight Universe as more mechanically dense, featuring more traditional puzzle-solving. For example, players use their powers to complete a checklist of creative tasks inspired by titles like Untitled Goose Game. For other sequences, it examined on-rail shooter sequences and hints at similarly designed gameplay moments. “There may be a motorized crib,” teases Lewin. But in between instances of performing psychic-powered tasks, Lewin says there are segments where you’ll experience the humble reality of simply being a baby.
If you’re still emotionally recovering from Before Your Eyes, Nice Dream describes Goodnight Universe as a lighter, wackier adventure by comparison. “We didn’t want to just try to break everyone’s hearts again,” says Parkes. That doesn’t mean the story won’t have heavy or heartfelt moments, but given that Isaac’s abduction by a shady government agency is the central plot point, it’s a more comedic but tonally balanced adventure.
Goodnight Universe will be longer than Before Your Eyes but similarly brief overall, with Nice Dream targeting a roughly two-to-four-hour experience (though this is still being determined). Graham says he prefers making an experience that can be finished in one sitting after realizing that many players who tried Before Your Eyes finished it. Additionally, Graham himself is an avid gamer and with so many great games releasing all of the time, he says he’s more likely to gravitate towards shorter experiences to enjoy more of them.
Goodnight Universe also features narrative branching based on decision-making moments. While the game isn’t about creating dramatic story differences, expect your actions to have a ripple effect on the events. Nice Dream states the ending, while still a focused conclusion, can have different variations based on choices, but the extent of this is unclear and still evolving.
As I spoke with Parkes and Lewin, their excitement for Goodnight Universe was palpable. Besides the inherent joy (and anxiety) of discussing the game in depth for the first time, it’s clear that Before Your Eyes’ success has galvanized the team to create something bigger and bolder while still adhering to the design philosophies that made the game work.
Lewin says the team was worried players wouldn’t understand or resonate with Before Your Eyes’ unique premise and mechanics. But after its positive reception, Nice Dream now feels emboldened to get wilder in Goodnight Universe without the fear of people not “getting it.” Parkes adds that the team feels calmer about what it can achieve now that it’s on the other side of Before Your Eyes. While it does feel the inherent pressure of making a follow-up – even a spiritual one, in this case – it’s starting from experience now.
Goodnight Universe is off to a good start; it’s one of the seven games currently being showcased as part of the Tribeca Film Festival’s annual games selection. On top of that, the game now has an adorable unofficial mascot in Io, now a toddler, so that’s pretty cool.
Before Your Eyes floored us with its originality and writing, and we’re excited to see how Goodnight Universe matures over the coming months.
Despite being a flagship franchise, Atlus has never shied away from taking risks and experimenting with Shin Megami Tensei. Even without taking spinoffs like Persona or Devil Summoner into consideration, the “core” series has taken new forms and reinvented itself over multiple decades and platforms. 2021’s Shin Megami Tensei V was a prime example, both respecting its oppressive, hardcore roots while embracing Atlus’ evolving audience and conventional shifts in games as a whole. It only makes sense that in revisiting such a recent title, Atlus has done far more than produce a simple port with some bonuses. Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is aptly titled; it’s an act of defiance against convention, criticism, and maybe even its own reputation.
SMT V was a big deal for the series, its HD debut after previously moving from the PlayStation 2 to the 3DS. It was a novel combination of post-apocalyptic doom and gloom with colorful superhero action. As the “Nabohino,” a powerful fusion of human and synthetic demon, players traversed the sand dunes of a long-dead Tokyo, fighting for control of the future in the aftermath of a war between Heaven and Hell. While some found the story lonely with a distinct lack of supporting characters, I found SMT’s recurring theme of a lone human fighting a hopeless battle in a world already lost more resonant than ever in the middle of a pandemic.
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On the surface, SMT V: Vengeance is a home run without any extra effort. The original game being a Switch exclusive meant it arrived with inevitable technical compromises. Vengeance is still on the Switch, but its multiplatform debut means every inch of its world is out in full force. This game is as colorful as it is dour, juxtaposing multicultural religious imagery with post-apocalyptic destruction. Simply being able to dash across the shining dunes of Da’at (formerly Tokyo) without the frame rate sputtering is worth the price of admission.
But there’s so much more to Vengeance than a touch-up under the hood. Rather than being a sequel in the style of SMT IV: Apocalypse or a pseudo spinoff like SMT: If, Vengeance offers a totally new campaign scenario. Nearly the entire story is completely retold, using the original premise as a springboard to leap into a scenario with new central characters, antagonists, and entirely different endings. On top of that is a massive amount of retooling, with changes and adjustments that range from quality-of-life tweaks to brand-new features entirely. Vengeance is almost a whole new game that treats the original as a rough draft. “Almost” is a keyword here, because the original scenario is also selectable at the beginning, so you can still experience the original story while enjoying the new features and adjustments.
In many ways, the new scenario feels like a direct response to problems players had with SMT V the first time around. As a returning player and a longtime fan of the series in general, it’s a bizarre setup with an impressive level of self-awareness. Moments occur when the story appears to change from the original in a direct and crowd-pleasing way, only for it to yank the rug out from you violently, twisting the twist to make it even more unpleasant than before. While I didn’t agree with the criticisms that led to this new campaign in the first place, having a whole new story to dig into that toyed with my previous knowledge was a lot of fun.
The new character was intriguing and added a lot to the scenario, and getting more of the returning cast admittedly fleshed out the plot more. I did find having them playable to be kind of silly, as using a team full of my own demons was always more productive anyway.
This remixed approach could be confusing to a newcomer. Luckily, Vengeance accounts for that too, and the choice of which version to pursue is presented in-game in a way that’s practically seamless. It simply feels like yet another option in a game and series full of choices that impact where the narrative goes. There isn’t special attention drawn to it, nor does it feel like an awkward attempt to replace or undermine the original. It’s just more SMT V to dive into, which for an already jam-packed RPG full of narrative agency and monster-collecting action, is more food on the table for the feast. And it was a hell of a feast to begin with.
Square Enis has announced that Visions of Mana launches August 29 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It did so with a new Visions of Mana trailer that runs for nearly four minutes and features plenty of gameplay and details about the upcoming RPG.
For the uninitiated, Visions of Mana is the first new mainline game in the franchise in 15 years. Across its 30 years of existence as a franchise, there have been 17 games, though what is now the Mana series today actually began as Final Fantasy Adventure in 1991.
In the trailer, we get a look at the five playable characters, including Soul Guard Val (voiced by Stephen Fu), Oracle of Wind Careena (voiced by Rachel Rial), Radiant Sword Morley, (voiced by Kaiji Tang), Queen of the Deep Palamena (voiced by Vanessa Lemonides), and Woodland Custodian Julei (voiced by Amber Aviles). Players can swap these characters in and out to create three-person parties and can change each character’s class to attune to different elements. They won’t be alone, though, as non-player companions can assist the player’s party in combat, according to the trailer.
Check out the Visions of Mana release date trailer for yourself below:
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The standard edition of Visions of Mana will cost $59.99, but there is a Collector’s Edition for $199.99 that features a Ramcoh plush, the Art of Mana special issue, a Visions of Mana original soundtrack collector’s edition special box, and of course, the physical game. However, Square Enix says the PlayStation 4 standard and collector’s edition will not be available in the U.S.
Here’s a look at the Visions of Mana Collector’s Edition:
Visions of Mana hits PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on August 29.
For more about the game, watch the Visions of Mana reveal trailer, and then check out this gameplay trailer from earlier this year.
Are you going to be playing Visions of Mana this August? Let us know in the comments below!
Whenever a legendary trio of game creators known for a single franchise embark on a new IP together, it rightfully captures a lot of attention. That’s exactly what director Katsura Hashino, art director Shigenori Soejima, and composer Shoji Meguro, the trio best known for the beloved Persona series, is doing with Metaphor: ReFantazio. Though it derives inspiration from many of Persona’s most prominent elements, Metaphor is a wholly new experience disconnected from the Persona franchise.
Taking place in the fantasy kingdom of Euchronia, Metaphor tells the tale of a world riddled with prejudice. The main protagonist is of the Elda tribe, and during the earliest stages of my demo, his fairy companion, Gallica, expresses shock at how out in the open the prejudice against him was. The two then talk of a fabled world where true equality exists and fantasize about such a society. One of the things people love about Persona is its willingness to tackle challenging topics other games might veer away from, and Metaphor seems to carry that same quality into its narrative.
“What we’ve tried to do in the past with Persona and in this game… both of them are a little bit different from each other,” Hashino says. “In the past for games like Persona, it’s not like our goal was to challenge difficult social problems. What we were really trying to achieve was, ‘We have a story about a young, kind of naïve person growing up and entering into the world of adulthood, and that’s not an easy thing to do. There are a lot of challenges you will face. There’s a lot of ways that you need to grow in order to do that. So by facing difficult problems in those characters’ lives, they can grow into being who they are and figure out who they want to be. That was our goal with Persona. So, it’s not like not like we have this problem we want to cover; we have this character we want to develop, and since it’s set in Japan, it was a method for us to explore these characters’ personalities, by having them grow up in a Japanese society and facing problems in that way.”
“However, Metaphor is not really so much about that sense of growth. It’s more about how we can explore the concept of human imagination and human feelings and thoughts, and how we can learn from these experiences to grow and be better people,” Hashino continues. “That’s what we are more looking at in this game. For Metaphor, what we’re trying to think of was going as broad as we possibly could. We are trying to achieve something where we’re talking about things that affect people of all times, all ages, everywhere in the world. That’s why we focus on this concept of fear and anxiety, because I don’t think there’s anybody at any time who hasn’t lived with some fear or anxiety.”
Combat feels like the next evolution of the turn-based system seen in the Persona games. Most encounters begin with a strike on the enemies in the field before entering the game’s primary turn-based combat mechanics. If you stealthily strike the enemies, you can land multiple hits on them, knocking their health down considerably; you can even kill weaker monsters without entering the turn-based battle.
Metaphor also incorporates a line-based formation system where you can choose which of your party is in the frontline and who hangs back. Those in the back take less damage, but their melee attacks are weaker, while those in the front often receive the brunt of the attack but can also land their own attacks at full strength. During my time with this system, I found the best results came from putting magic wielders and healers in the back, and the more physical warriors up front.
In battle, characters can also summon Persona-like creatures called Archetypes. These powerful entities leverage magic based on traditional fantasy tropes like Knight, Warrior, and Seeker. While they’re strong on their own, Archetypes can also perform team-up attacks called Synthesis. These moves allow one character to lend their strength to another to perform more powerful and affecting attacks. During a boss battle I played, I used Synthesis attacks to great effect, with some applying different elemental effects and others spreading out the damage to all enemies instead of just one.
Speaking of elements carried over from Persona, Metaphor uses similar UI as Persona 5 Royal, giving it an unmistakable style. Flashy menus and gorgeous art accentuate the trademark Soejima style, while the music by Meguro replaces his hip-hop and jazzy rock-inspired soundtrack from the Persona franchise with tracks that feel more inspired by war chants.
“When I first approached the design for this game, I thought, ‘I personally love fantasy. I will do my best to throw away everything I’ve done to date and just design a fantasy character and challenge myself with a new style,” Soejima says. “What kind of ended up happening was that it felt really fun – I had a lot of fun doing it – but I was coming up with something that was kind of an imitation of styles that I had seen. I was thinking, ‘Well, what can I bring to the fantasy genre? How can I add to it and use what I know, use my own style, and bring my own riff on it? So, that was part of what helped inform my design for it. A lot of time with Persona and the other games, we are making games set in the real world, but it’s not to try to make something that’s cool in a game; with my art, I was trying to make something that’s cool in the real world that people like and enjoy, and then bring it in to the medium of the game. For this one, as well, I didn’t want to just go, ‘Okay, what do people like about the fantasy genre? Let’s just make more of that.’ Instead, I tried to bring out more of what people think are cool from other areas and then put that into the game.”
Though I’ve always appreciated Persona’s real-world setting, Metaphor’s fantasy kingdom, narrative threads, and appropriately grotesque beasts pulled me in and made me excited to experience the next evolution of this team’s work. I’m excited to get my hands on the final version when it launches this October.