By the time you reach Final Fantasy XVIafter a minimum of 35 hours, protagonist Clive Rosfield can call upon the power of eight different magical beings called Eikons, each the guardian of a specific element. Phoenix fire offers several different ways to scorch enemies, and Shiva’s ice can freeze them solidly. But if you want to be ready for what awaits you in the endgame, you’ll need to prepare with a very specific build. In fact, it’s such a good build that you can take it in pretty much any encounter, whether it’s a high-level hunt or a side quest.

Some Eikon abilities are great for crowd control. Others are great for single target damage. Therefore, the best abilities for a given battle depend on what you will encounter. Without spoiling too much, the final gauntlet of battles is against a single target that’s roughly Clive’s size. It is therefore similar to the fights against Lord Commander Sleipnir of the Kingdom of Waloed or the battle against Odin’s Dominant, Barnabus Tharmr. As such, the best kit is going to focus on counter attacks and single target damage.

With all that in mind, here are the Eikons you’ll want to channel:

If you’ve upgraded all of the best Eikonic abilities enough, you’ll be able to equip them regardless of which three Eikons you channel (or equip). The only reason you would channel any Eikon is to take advantage of his Eikonic Feat, the innate feature like Phoenix Shift teleportation.

Channeling Titan is a must, especially against single enemy fights so you can take advantage of the innate Eikonic Feat Titanic block. Tapping the circle at the right time triggers a precision block that launches a three-hit counterattack that fills up Clive’s Limit Break gauge at an accelerated rate and deals a solid amount of damage.

Learn more: Final Fantasy XVI: 8 useful settings to adjust for the best experience

With Arm of Darkness, the circle button allows Clive to wield Odin’s sword. All attacks charge the Zantetsuken gauge to be an ultimate attack that slows down time and deals a lot of damage.

These are the Eikonic abilities you want:

PulseAir BlastRising FlamesRanging FistsGigaflareDancing Steel

Screenshot: Square Enix

Bahamut’s Pulse has great DPS bonus potential as it sends out multiple spheres that track targets and deal continuous damage, and it has a very reasonable cooldown. Whether you’re going up against a crowd of enemies or a boss, it’s a solid choice. Garuda’s airburst summons a tornado that deals a massive amount of Willpower damage, so it will stun enemies faster than anything else and stalk enemies…just like Impulse!

Phoenix’s Rising Flames is a must-have for any build at any stage of the game. Although its damage is lacking compared to most other abilities, it has one of the shortest cooldowns of any attack and is easy to land. Spam it as often as possible between regular attacks. Titan’s Raging Fists is a good game to pair with Rising Flames as it has a modest cooldown that is reduced by 50% if you execute a well-timed block against enemy attacks. In theory, if you time your blocks well, you should be able to spam both of these attacks. And that gives you a counterattack option on two of your three Eikon channels.

Odin’s Dancing Steel is an excellent ability that summons twin blades for a flurry of attacks that charge the Zantetsuken Gauge. So you’ll want to channel Odin so you can capitalize on access to Zantetsuken, part of his Eikonic feat which deals a huge amount of damage with two powerful slashes. Gigaflare is by far the absolute best Eikonic ability. Not only does it get top marks in raw damage, but it also has a slowing effect while Clive summons wings of Bahamut and blasts enemies in a straight line with a massive beam of energy.

Final Fantasy Gear You’ll Need Bahamut’s Mercy – Reduces Gigaflare cooldown by 6.0 seconds. Genji Gloves – Increases damage dealt to enemies by 5%. Berserker Ring – Temporarily increases attack skill with each precision dodge.

Gigaflare’s big downside is its long cooldown, so equipping Bahamut’s Mercy mitigates that significantly. It’s a reward for completing the “A Tail to Tell” quest, in which you find a flower for Harpocrates to give to Dion at the very end of the game.

Increasing all damage by 5% with the Genji Gloves is also better than pretty much any other damage increasing accessory. (Most of them increase the damage of a single ability by 10%.) This one is a reward for reaching 2365 Renown at Boss’s Whisper, so if you miss out, complete more side quests and hunts until so that you can earn it from the NPC Désirée in the mess.

Learn more: 15 critical tips to know before playing Final Fantasy 16

The Berserker ring is also a great choice, as it improves attack skill with each successful precision dodge, something you’ll want to do constantly anyway. This is the first Patron’s Whisper reward at 85 fame. If there’s one item you can swap for something else, it’s this one.

The strategy to bring it all together in FF16

Always start with Aerial Blast then Impulse. This will deal a solid amount of Willpower damage that will cause the enemy to stagger. And, if necessary, use Titanic Block against any attack that comes your way.

Then it’s time to switch to Phoenix to use Rising Flames and go for a Raging Fists block. But as soon as that’s done, go straight to Odin and unleash Dancing Steel. This will recharge Zantetsuken a lot. If you were successful in staggering the enemy, now is the time to start blasting with Gigaflare. Otherwise, you might as well use Odin’s Arm of Darkness for a while, focusing on the Flash of Steel precision dodge counterattack and Steel Counter parry. (That’s where that Berserker Ring will come in handy.) Pop Zantetsuken as soon as it’s ready. And keep going through your abilities in this way.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more effective combat flow than this to handle just about anything Final Fantasy XVI can throw at you.

Well, friends. We’ve come to the end of the road, at least for now. Episode nine of HBO’s The Last of Us is the season finale, bringing us to the end of the story told in the first game. Even the episode’s title, “Look for the Light,” neatly closes the loop opened by that of the first episode, “When You’re Lost In the Darkness.” Deeply faithful to the game’s provocative, morally ambiguous ending and other famous story beats in its final chapter, the episode nonetheless departs from the source material in a few key ways, starting with its opening. Let’s start with the beginning of the end.

Ashley Johnson as Ellie’s mother Anna

Notably, this is the first entry since episode two that begins with a cold-open prologue rather than the title sequence. After the first two episodes, I actually thought this was something the show might be committed to in the long term, with each episode kicking off with a different, relevant glimpse of life before the pandemic or some other thread that could inform our understanding of what was to come. But no, the device fell away early on, only to make one last return for the season finale, with a flashback that doesn’t exist in the game and that gives us a new perspective on two key characters: Marlene, and Anna, Ellie’s mother.

A few days ago, Neil Druckmann, co-creator of the game The Last of Us and one of the showrunners of HBO’s prediction, tweeted this:

The image here is not a reference to a real thing that exists in our world. Rather, it’s a fictional comic book referenced in Uncharted 4, the final game in Naughty Dog’s other big franchise of the past 15+ years. But it speaks to the idea that Anna, Ellie’s mother, is a character who the writers of the game (and now the show) have thought a lot about, even if, until now, she’s never actually been seen. Players of the game will know that she and Marlene were friends, that Marlene promised Anna she’d look after Ellie, and that Anna was alongside Marlene in the fight for a better world, but this is her first actual appearance in official The Last of Us media, and the actor playing her is none other than Ashley Johnson, who plays Ellie in the games.

We see Anna running through a forest, pursued by shrieking infected. As if that weren’t tough enough, she’s pregnant and going into labor. She emerges into a vast clearing dominated by a farmhouse, the Firefly insignia emblazoned on the nearby grain silo.

Racing to the top of the house, Anna barricades the door with a chair and draws a familiar-looking switchblade. Tragically, the determined infected busts through, and though Anna plunges the switchblade into its neck, it’s not before she’s bitten, sealing her fate. Ellie is born, and Anna cuts the umbilical cord. It must be something about the timing of all this that resulted in Ellie’s immunity.

Anna takes a moment to bond with her daughter, as we watch, knowing she has a few hours at best to spend with the child. And the credits roll.

One lie comes before another

Night falls, and three lights cut through the darkness, a possible visual nod to the Firefly slogan. Marlene and two men find Anna still in that room, quietly singing to baby Ellie. The song she’s singing is “The Sun Always Shines On T.V.” by A-ha. It’s a song we know Ellie hears later in life, as she has a cassette tape of A-ha’s greatest hits in episode seven, which makes use of the band’s “Take On Me” at one point. (Interestingly, though “Take On Me” was a bigger hit in the U.S., “The Sun Always Shines On T.V.” outperformed it in the UK.)

Screenshot: HBO

Marlene immediately sees the bite on Anna’s leg, and here’s where something extraordinary happens: Anna says she cut Ellie’s umbilical cord before she was bitten. Of course it’s perfectly understandable. She did cut it only moments after, and whatever survival instinct she may have once had for herself has likely now transferred onto her daughter. She wants to give her daughter a chance. But as a thematic device, it’s significant because it bookends this final episode with lies. Ellie’s life begins with a lie, and later, it’s changed by one, both from people who, in their own ways and for their own reasons, are very invested in keeping her alive.

Anna, reminding Marlene that they’ve been friends for their whole lives, tells Marlene to kill her and to take care of Ellie, and to give her the switchblade. Marlene protests that she can’t, she can’t do any of those things, she especially can’t kill her friend, but then she musters the strength to do so. She is no stranger to gritting her teeth and doing what must be done in the struggle for a better world. You can tell it eats her up inside, but the world of The Last of Us offers little alternative for one who is truly, deeply committed to making a difference.

Outside Salt Lake City

Now the show leaps into its approximation of the game’s final chapter. In both, Joel is uncharacteristically chatty, his bond with Ellie no longer in doubt after all they’ve been through together and especially after the harrowing events of episode eight. Ellie, by contrast, is preoccupied, remote, distracted perhaps by the magnitude of what their arrival in Salt Lake City could mean. While the Joel of the game talks about what a beautiful day it is, TV Joel excitedly shows Ellie that he found a can of Chef Boyardee, calling back to their campfire meal in episode four when the good chef’s awesomeness was one of the few things they could agree on. Both Joels talk about one day teaching Ellie guitar, and though she says she’d like that, it’s clear that right now, she has other things on her mind.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

One interesting detail from the game that’s omitted from the show is a dream that Ellie tells Joel about, in which she’s on a plane and it’s going down, so she busts into the cabin only to find that there’s no captain. So she takes the controls but she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and just as the plane is about to crash, she wakes up. It’s a pretty typical anxiety dream—I actually have nightmares about plane crashes from time to time myself—and it makes sense that Ellie would feel that her life is out of control, but she remarks on the strangeness of having a dream set on a flying plane when she’s never flown on a plane in real life. She never got to experience the pre-cordyceps world, and yet the ghost of it is everywhere around her.

The famous giraffe scene

Joel and Ellie cut through a building on their way to the hospital, and in the show, for what I’m pretty sure is the first and only time, Joel does something he does repeatedly in the game: he boosts Ellie up, here so she can lower a ladder for him. However, the usually attentive Ellie is caught off guard by something and instead ends up just dropping the ladder and running off to look at something. Joel pursues her, perhaps worried at first that she’s in danger, and what follows is one of the game’s most famous moments, faithfully recreated in the show.

Screenshot: HBO

What he finds is Ellie, standing awestruck by the sight of a giraffe, peacefully munching on some leaves growing on the building. In the game, Joel encourages Ellie to pet the giraffe. In the show, he encourages her to grab some leaves and feed it a little bit, and the sight of its long tongue reaching out for that green goodness is pretty great. For Joel, though, the best sight here is the sight of Ellie enjoying this moment. You can tell, particularly in the show thanks to Pedro Pascal’s acting, that Joel is happy to be alive to witness and share in this moment with her. So often, it’s not the thing itself that matters, so much as it is the sharing of it with someone.

Read More: The Last Of Us Show Tries To Change What The Game Tells Us About Joel

Perhaps part of why we’re drawn to apocalypse stories is the way they can help us focus on what really matters. There’s a line in last year’s HBO post-apocalypse prestige drama Station Eleven (based on the novel by Emily St. Mandel) from central character Jeevan who says, “Having just one person, it’s a big deal. Just one other person.” I’m reminded of that in this scene. Like Station Eleven, The Last of Us is deeply concerned with what makes our lives mean something, and in my experience, that’s always tied up in connection with others, in one way or another.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

Screenshot: HBO

Moving to another spot which lets them watch the whole giraffe family walk off into the distance, Joel asks Ellie a question he asked her much earlier in the game, or, in the case of the show, way back in episode two, as they stood looking toward the capitol building in Boston. “So, is it everything you hoped for?” Ellie recalls that moment too and says it’s had its ups and downs before repeating something she said back then as well: “You can’t deny that view.” It’s a moment that makes us feel the journey they’ve been on, all the ground they’ve covered, the time that’s passed, and all the ways in which things between them have changed from that moment so much earlier, when all Ellie was to Joel was some human cargo he resented having to deal with. Coming to this moment in the game again as I replayed it for this recap, knowing what was coming, I almost wanted to linger there forever, to let them linger there forever, and spare us all the pain ahead.

Now, he doesn’t want to imagine his life without her again, and so he tells her that she doesn’t have to go through with this. In both the game and the show, her response is the same: “After all we’ve been through, everything that I’ve done, it can’t be for nothing.” She tells him that once this is done, they can go wherever he wants, but “there’s no halfway with this.” In the game, Joel looks up just in time to see the last giraffe disappear into the distance. The moment has passed. Their choice is made.

Joel confronts the past

Next, their journey to the hospital takes them through a triage camp the army set up in the days immediately following the outbreak. In both the game and the show, this is the site for a confrontation of sorts with Joel’s past, though that takes very different forms in each version.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

In the game, Joel mentions having been in a similar camp after the outbreak. When Ellie asks if it was after he lost Sarah, he says yes, and she tells him how sorry she is for his loss. Previously, Joel’s forbidden Ellie from mentioning any of his losses, from talking about Tess or his daughter, but this time, he says “That’s okay, Ellie.” A short time later, Ellie gives Joel the same photograph of himself with Sarah that he refused earlier when Tommy offered it to him. Ellie says Maria showed it to her back at the dam and she stole it. Joel, obviously moved, says, “Well, no matter how hard you try, I guess you can’t escape your past. Thank you.”

In the show, however, we return to something first teased back in episode three. At the time, Joel said that the scar on his forehead was from someone shooting at him and missing. Now, he tells Ellie that the wound is what landed him in triage, and also that “I was the guy that shot and missed.” After Sarah’s death, he “couldn’t see the point anymore,” he says, but he flinched when he pulled the trigger. “So time heals all wounds, I guess?” Ellie asks. Joel says “It wasn’t time that did it” and gives her a meaningful look.

Screenshot: HBO

After this emotionally heavy moment, Joel seeks to lighten things up by actually requesting some shitty puns. It’s a great little exchange, with Joel and Ellie disagreeing on the quality of some of the jokes—one she declares “actually good” and he calls “a zero out of ten”—but my favorite bit is when Ellie says “People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.” Joel at first looks scandalized but when Ellie asks, “Too soon?” Joel says, “No, it’s topical.” Joke time is soon interrupted, though, when some kind of gas grenade gets tossed their way, Ellie is dragged off, and Joel is conked on the head with a rifle.

One last dance with infected before all is said and done

This episode and its differences from the game’s corresponding sequence reveal some interesting differences in how the game and the show approach pacing and combat. In the show, episode eight was the final crucible, the peril and terror of that situation solidifying Joel and Ellie’s bond, and it likely would have been anticlimactic for the two to have another encounter with infected at this point. The dramatic purpose of such encounters has already been fulfilled. There’s really nowhere else for them to go. In the game, however, as a mainstream commercial product released in 2013, it would have been strange for there not to be one final encounter with infected. For many players, such combat is first and foremost what they come to a game like this for. So you do have one final encounter with a whole mess of infected (including multiple bloaters) in the partially flooded tunnels near the hospital. Once they’re all finished off, Joel utters Ellie’s favorite catchphrase, “Endure and survive.”

Look for the light.Screenshot: Naughty Dog

They’re not out of the woods yet, though. A bit later, Joel gets stuck in a bus that’s rapidly filling with water. Ellie (who can’t swim) attempts to rescue him, but is herself swept away. The current carries Joel toward her and he sees her, framed by light, before pulling her up out of the water and attempting to resuscitate her. This is where the Fireflies find them, and knock Joel unconscious.

Marlene and morality

Joel wakes up in a room with Marlene (Merle Dandridge in both the game and the show), who marvels at the fact that the two of them came all this way and survived, that Joel actually managed to deliver Ellie there, when the same journey cost the lives of so many of her people. “It was (all) her,” Joel says. “She fought like hell to get here.”

Screenshot: HBO

When Joel insists on seeing Ellie, Marlene tells him he can’t. “She’s being prepped for surgery.” When Joel realizes that cordyceps grows in the brain and that the surgery Marlene is describing means Ellie’s death, well, he knows what he has to do.

Notably, in the show, Marlene offers a more detailed explanation of Ellie’s immunity, and how the doctor intends to use that to create a cure. I suspect that this, along with Joel’s line back in episode six suggesting that if Marlene says they can make a cure, they can do it, are meant to deflect the fairly common response to the show’s central moral dilemma, a response I saw as recently as this past weekend on Twitter, that says “They probably wouldn’t have been able to make a cure anyway.”

My issue with this response is that I view it as a reluctance or refusal to engage with The Last of Us on its own terms. I think it’s a copout, a way to more easily justify what Joel does by saying “the stakes weren’t that big anyway” by disregarding the internal logic of the work itself. Sure, if you view The Last of Us in “realistic” terms, you can say that the odds of a vaccine being made weren’t great, but that’s not the moral dilemma we’re being asked to engage with here. The game and the show both work to establish this as a situation in which a vaccine is clearly possible.

The game does this in part through an audio diary you can find in the hospital in which the lead surgeon rattles off a bunch of whatever the medical equivalent of technobabble is, terms and phrases that are meant to sound legitimate within the fiction of the game and establish that the surgeon knows what he’s talking about. He then says, “We’re about to hit a milestone in human history equal to…the discovery of penicillin. After years of wandering in circles, we’re about to come home…All our sacrifices, and the hundreds of men and women who’ve bled for this cause, or worse, will not be in vain.” We are meant to view what Joel does as in opposition to that, as overriding all of that. That’s not to say that we can’t still conclude that Joel is right to do what he does. But we should at least consider it within the moral calculus that the game and the show actually establish.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

Ten years ago, I felt that so many players’ reaction to the game’s climax was not just one of agreeing with Joel but one of cheering “Fuck yeah!” while he did what he does, of reveling in his undoing of everything the Fireflies have done, in his murder of Marlene, and I wonder if some of that isn’t just because it’s very easy to feel fully aligned with someone when you’ve spent so long walking in their shoes. But I can imagine a game focused on Marlene, one that follows her for years and years, from establishing the Fireflies, working with and then tragically losing Ellie’s mother Anna, watching over Ellie from afar while trying to undermine FEDRA and seeking a cure or some way to unfuck the world, all the while seeing her fellow passionate believers fight and die alongside her, and then coming to the heartbreaking moment where her own best friend’s daughter is the world’s last best hope. I wonder if, given the chance to experience Marlene’s struggle that way, to see things from her perspective, some people who see the ending of The Last of Us in very simple terms might find their view of it complicated.

And this was Anna’s fight as well. You can find an audio log that’s effectively Marlene speaking to Anna, to the memory of her friend, and in it she says “Here’s a chance to save us…all of us. This is what we were after…what you were after.” I don’t think any of this is at all easy for Marlene. I think she’s just learned by now how to do even the things she finds very, very hard, if she believes it supports the greater good.

None of this is simple. I’m conflicted about it myself, and I do sometimes put one life ahead of many. (It’s just a game, of course, but you’d better believe that at the end of Life Is Strange, I made the choice to save the one person I felt close to and cared about deeply over a town full of others.) And I have no problem with Joel doing what he does. As I’ve said before, I want art and media that depicts human beings doing questionable or complicated or awful things sometimes. I just want people to actually engage with that complexity, rather than acting as if feeling at all conflicted about how all this plays out is silly and that Joel does the only reasonable thing he could have done.

Saving Ellie, dooming the world

Marlene, sensing that Joel is gonna be a problem, tries to have him escorted out of the building. However, he kills his escort, and fights his way through the hospital to save Ellie. In the game, I find this sequence quite challenging. The hospital provides your Firefly enemies with so many opportunities to flank you. The Joel in the TV show seems to have it considerably easier. (And in case anyone is wondering, yes, in the game you do get a new weapon, the assault rifle, here, just like Joel does in the show.) In any case, he kills a whole mess of dudes on his way to Ellie.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

Arriving in the operating room, Joel orders the doctor to unhook her. He grabs a scalpel and stands in Joel’s way. Joel kills him, too. Yes, the doctor was about to take her life. By doing this, though, Joel has taken the life of someone who was deeply loved by somebody else. And how many of the people he killed on his way up here will also leave a void in the lives of people after today? God, what a moral mess.

Joel has one last encounter before he makes his escape, this time with Marlene. In both the show and the game, Marlene asks Joel to consider what Ellie herself would want. The look that plays across his face in both cases shows that he knows what he’s doing isn’t what she’d want.

After years and years of working tirelessly for a shot like this at a better world, after sacrificing so much, Marlene, too, is killed. “You’d just come after her,” Joel says, before pulling the trigger.

Joel’s lie near Jackson

Ellie wakes up in the back of a car, still in her hospital gown. Joel’s driving them to Jackson, and when she asks him what happened, he feeds her a lie about there being dozens of people who share her immunity, and the doctors not being able to make any use of it all, to the point that “they’ve stopped looking for a cure.” Ellie is obviously crushed.

Significantly, in the game’s short final sequence, you play as Ellie as she and Joel walk the last bit of distance toward Jackson. Joel, ready for his life with Ellie to begin in earnest, starts talking about how much he thinks Sarah would have liked him. Ellie is, of course, preoccupied, and eventually she stops Joel, and starts talking about how she lost Riley.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

The point of the story, I think, is that Ellie felt left behind (sorry) by Riley’s death, that she would have rather died if it could have meant a cure than being alive, and that she suspects Joel made a choice of his own accord to save her rather than let that happen. Joel, perhaps sensing where this is going, tries to offer some of his old-fashioned wisdom about how it can be tough to come to grips with surviving but you keep finding things to live for. But she demands a straight answer, asking him to swear that everything he said about the Fireflies is true. “I swear,” he says.

Screenshot: HBO

There’s a long pause. Is she doubting him? Deciding whether she can trust him? Debating telling him that he’s full of shit? Where would any of that leave her now, in this world where everything she thought she was living and fighting for has now evaporated into nothing?

“Okay,” she says.

Final thoughts

Playing through the game again alongside watching the series gave me a lot to think about. Perhaps most of all, I thought about how, just by virtue of being an interactive experience that’s set in perhaps the most lovingly rendered vision of the post-apocalypse ever created, the game The Last of Us is much more about the haunted world than the show is. Naughty Dog clearly approached designing the locations you pass through very thoughtfully. They didn’t just design some assets and then toss them together. Quite the opposite. For every house or apartment you enter, you can tell that Naughty Dog asked themselves questions like: Who lived here? What was their cultural background? What did they do for a living? Did they have any pets? Most of us probably know the sense of emptiness a person can leave behind when they die. Closets filled with clothes they’ll never wear again. A toothbrush in the bathroom. This is a world filled with that emptiness.

On the other hand, I appreciate that the television show found a few opportunities, here and there, to remind us that even in its world, love is possible, and by extension, lives of meaning are possible. The game, with its framing of Bill and Frank’s relationship, with the tragedy of Henry and Sam, leans so relentlessly into loss and tragedy, with little dramatic counterpoint to remind us what love in this world—any kind of love, the love between a man and his adopted daughter, for instance—can even look like. Of course episode three—the Bill and Frank episode—was the most radical instance of the show departing from the game to offer an image of love, but it wasn’t the only one. Marlon and Florence in episode six got so little screen time, but there, too, thanks to the two wonderful actors cast in those roles, we got a sense of a real, lived-in relationship, people being there for each other across decades.

All of this is to say that I appreciate that the creative team behind the HBO show approached this undertaking as an adaptation, not merely a retelling or recreation. Now the wait begins for the show’s next season, when I look forward to finding out how they continue to not just re-tell the exact same story we’ve already experienced, but adapt it for a new medium.

If, like many others, you’ve waited nearly a decade for Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, you’ve also lived on crumbs for the series since Dragon Age: Inquisition launched in 2014. Well, thanks to the wonders of the In social media engagement farming, we’ve had some new insights into Bioware’s fantasy RPG development to guide us until we get more Dreadwolf news.

It all started with a Twitter trend asking what “useless” trivial people knew about various art forms and media properties – there was “useless” knowledge of video gamesfor example, as well as “useless” animation facts– and finally we made one that asked people for their most useless Dragon Age facts. While some people have talked about well-known facts, like the show’s world name, Thedas, was a code name that stood for “The Dragon Age setting” who stayed, there were a few BioWare developers who chimed in and told behind-the-scenes stories about RPG development.

Horses don’t actually sprint in Dragon Age: Inquistion

One of the funniest came from John Epler, currently creative director on Dreadwolf, explaining that despite having a sprint option in Dragon Age: Inquisition when you mount a mount, the game doesn’t actually increase your movement speed, it just add some effects and movements. slightly the camera so that the player has the impression of going faster. It’s an illusion, and now that I’ve spent over a hundred hours in this game, I feel incredibly stupid for using the feature in the first place.

Why Iron Bull’s Romantic Scene Is Different From Others

While some of these stories remind us that much of the video game experience is smoke and mirrors, some of them are really interesting in the way they illustrate that surprising problems require surprising solutions. . For example, Epler said that the romance scene you can share with Inquisition’s resident pansexual hunk, Iron Bull, takes place in a different tower than the scenes with other romantic characters. For characters like Dorian and Sera, the player finds their love in their quarters to do the horizontal tango, which is located in the central tower of the party base. For Iron Bull, however, part of the scene takes place in a separate tower, and it takes a comedic twist when several characters enter the room after the lovers have had a good time. Because the scene’s mocap involved your allies Josephine, Cassandra, and others walking through a doorway, the scene wouldn’t have worked in the player’s quarters, as the entrance to this room has a staircase. So the developers created a special sex tower just for this scene.

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Dragon Age: Inquistion’s ending had more permutations

Whether prompted by the trend or not, David Gaider, who previously acted as a writer on the series before departing in 2016, posted what was the original roadmap for Dragon Age: Inquisition’s ending. The ending that launched with the game featured a short stinger of Solas, the party member turned surprise villain, meeting with enigmatic series mainstay Flemeth and seemingly absorbing her life and power for his own. As it turns out, there was an outline for the ending that would have ended with the player or her daughter Morrigan killing her, instead. This would have been tied up in a decision earlier in the game in which the player decides to drink from the Well of Sorrows, essentially giving Flemeth control of the one who partook. The controlled character would have fought Solas on her behalf, but it seems, regardless, Solas would have left and either the player or Morrigan would have killed Flemeth. There’s not a ton of detail, but it does seem Inquisition’s finale had a lot more conflict going on at one point.

Gaider said in thread that he was okay with the ending of the final scene, comparing it to a Marvel-style dart that would hint at something to come, and says the team did not make a playable build of the original outline. Curiously, the player character is also present in the scene that unfolded, offscreen and in the bushes. It’s not for any narrative reason, though. Gaider speculate this is because the player had to be present in a game environment to play the cutscene.

As interesting as it is to hear more behind-the-scenes stories about the creation of Dragon Age: Inquisition, it would be even more enjoyable to learn more about Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. The sequel has been in the works for almost a decade at this point. Recently, fans got a chance to experience the universe in a new way with the Dragon Age: Absolution anime on Netflix, which also included what appears to be clues to a new season or story beats in Dreadwolf.

Oddly, after a biophagous mutant, limbs falling off as easily as picking up a pudding, puts his hands in my mouth and rips my jaw out of my face for the fifth time, it comes to me: Oh, that’s a transportation game.

Callisto Protocol is set on a moon ruled by sprawling enemies with loose limbs, but Dead Space game designer Glen Schofield’s so-called spiritual successor prefers to lead you by the hand through its squishy, ​​dank, and visually impressive maze. rather than letting you revel in killing. these enemies. Killing is never really the goal, getting to the next location so you can escape is. It’s more Death Stranding than Dead Space.

As cargo pilot Jacob – who I think looked very much like soap opera star Josh Duhamel before realizing it was soap opera star Josh Duhamel reproduced in sweaty, heroic detail – you need all the possible help to escape the black iron prison on Jupiter’s moon, Callisto. You don’t know why you were thrown into one of its inhospitable cells to begin with, why something called a CORE device was stuck in your neck, synchronized with your thoughts and your health, why there are monsters everywhere, or whether you should trust inmates Elias (Zeke Alton) or Dani (Karen Fukuhara), the latter of whom crashed your ship and put you in this shit.

Screenshot: Striking Distance Studios/Kotaku

But when they tell you to join them on the tram, or take an intimidating ladder underground, or activate this or that control panel, you listen and start running. What else are you gonna do? You’re trapped, there’s blood everywhere, do you have a better idea?

Not really. You do as Elias and Dani tell you, their voices crackle through your DualSense controller (or CORE device) as the prison creaks and crumbles. The sound design is incredibly meticulous – Black Iron is filled with an ambient groan, chunks of metal crashing and echoing, as your zombified, or biophagous, enemies take on the low notes, scuttling, screams and gurgles all around you.

I don’t think Callisto is a particularly scary horror game – watching Jacob’s neck twist and crack like a knuckle is entertaining the first time around, then an inconvenience once I realize that death scene is repeating and can’t be ignored – but its multi-layered audio keeps me at dizzying low-level anxiety. Like waiting for a text, or staring at the sun and realizing you can’t see, for a moment, after looking away.

More random, but still often admirable, it’s getting there that most interests the game – fighting a biophage is a temporary distraction. Your plan to escape Black Iron sends you flying through the sewers, through a snowstorm, and through dark corridors covered in organic matter, fleshy pods, winding tendrils, and slime. It sends you everywhere, past beautiful lunar vistas and lit desktop screens hurtling through space. Immaculate white walls. Sticky floors. Bloodstained air vents and loaves of glistening pink flesh. It makes me want to see more. And on the PS5, Callisto is able to deliver all the brilliant, polished detail without any issues. Or, close to zero, sometimes my weapon would mysteriously disappear before reappearing.

The Callisto Protocol also plays with the pacing of this journey, often forcing Jacob to quietly crawl through narrow cave walls or around blind Biophages or roar his large spacesuit body in a heavy sprint. Confronting so many different textures at so many different speeds is enjoyable with haptic feedback – even grabbing an ammo box or the in-game currency, Callisto Credits, triggers a satisfying and unique thwack. Callisto is like tangible cinema in this way, slow and steady, which might require readjusting some expectations if you were hoping for horror on your toes.

But as varied and masterful as getting there often looks and feels physically, I eventually grow weary of hearing my companions tell me that I’m approaching only to fall through a collapsed walkway, or finally reach the surface. cold of Callisto only to be immediately invited inside by the Herculean zombies. At these points the game seems aimless and I have no idea how much progress I’ve made. My frustration only increases when I’m stuck in a room full of relentless zombies.

Nothing a little concealer won’t help.Screenshot: Striking Distance Studios/Kotaku

Zombies might be the least enjoyable part of Callisto’s journey, which isn’t ideal, considering they’re Jacob’s motivation to get out, and likely your motivation to be curious and find out where they came from. . As I learn by dying so, so, so many times – so many times, that halfway through the game, I turn on the simplest setting, which still inexplicably lets some enemies kill you in two lazy shots – zombies are coming from everywhere.

I love Dark Souls, the famous benchmark for challenging games, but unlike a boss fight from FromSoftware, you can’t “learn” how to progress past Callisto Protocol’s hordes of Vitriolic Biophages because they seem to spawn randomly and out of nowhere. “Are they invisible now? I yell at my PS5, before or after yelling, “I hate this fucking game!!!”

Biophages will suddenly come out of air vents or an otherwise empty room. They’ll look like they’re frozen, encased in ice, and then suddenly very much alive, warm, and murderous. They come in many different forms: standard rotting, rotting with armor, rotting and projectile vomit, wiggling with snowball-sized erupting pustules on their backs, coming towards you by looking like an evil mutant axolotl and then turning invisible (?!).

You have an arsenal to deal with it, mainly a sizzling baton for close combat, a hand pistol and an explosive riot gun, and a Gravity Restraint Projector (GRP) sleeve that bends gravity to restrain captive enemies in the air until you throw them into a spiked wall, or a spinning fan blade, or onto a ledge.

At the start of the game, only the stick and its signature hit feel like they’re actually doing something useful – enemies absorb your default shrimp balls like you’re throwing marbles into a funeral pyre, making also impossible to effectively deal with hordes. But as you progress, you can find the additional weapon blueprints like an Assault Rifle and Skunk Gun, and use Callisto Credits to buy upgrades at Reforge slots throughout the game. , which, to my amusement, does not allow you to buy more than one. thing at a time. Before each boss fight, I would spend five minutes individually buying ten boxes of ammo.

Callisto wastes your time with useless little things like that. The audio logs you collect from corpses throughout the game should help you uncover story secrets, but they don’t play automatically. You have to enter your menu manually, select them and stay in the menu. If you quit, they will stop playing.

But the most irritating waste of time that made me, at my lowest moments, consider throwing my PS5 controller into the muddy depths of the Gowanus Channel, is Callisto’s sometimes faulty dodge mechanism.

When facing an enemy, you must dodge their attacks by holding your left stick in the opposite direction of their swing, or down if you’re blocking them. The game tells you there is no timing window, do it, but I dodge so many times and get another long unskippable death animation – Jacob’s skull gets dabbed and turns into a spurt of blood in the ocean, Jacob’s eyes gouge out from big zombie thumbs, Jacob’s nose going concave from all the big zombie smacks to the face – to know it can’t not be true.

Callisto’s two-headed bosses are the worst for fumbling your dodge mechanic. Might as well think about hitting them with your stun baton instead of staying away and shooting them will lead to an immediate skewer through the chest. Also, be sure to spend five minutes collecting bullets or health refills from Reforge. Resources found are limited, and manually saving the game launches you from your last checkpoint, so if you start a fight with low health and a depleted weapon, consider your fate sealed.

But despite all these temporary irritations, I finished the match in style. “There’s always a price to pay,” a villain repeats throughout The Callisto Protocol, reminding Jacob that making fallible, flabby humans great requires sacrifice. And in pursuit of video game greatness, I loved what I saw, so much so that I was willing to pay the price for faulty dodge mechanics. But as far as the actual price goes, I don’t think anyone should buy a $60 game, period, but especially not the one that currently seems to be runs poorly on PC and won’t get PlayStation’s New Game Plus until a free update lands on February 7, 2023. But.

I consider The Callisto Protocol to be one of the most ambitious games I’ve played this year, perhaps even the closest to Elden Ring (although I think Elden Ring is in a league of its own – I don’t know if something will be able to approach its depth and sophistication for long). Its thoughtful attention to environment, sound and touch is what I think next-gen gaming should be: an experience with the senses and with the story. The game also has its problems, which cannot be ignored. But at least he feels human.

Image: Second Supper/Marvel/Kotaku

marvel snapBoss Ben Brode recently sat down and talked about the popular free-to-play card game. He revealed a few decks he’s currently playing – one of them being a nasty job that probably annoys a lot of players – and said who his favorite character in the game is. It’s Mysterio aka Jake Gyllenhaal in the Marvel movie Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Far From Home. You see, I said I would explain it.

Marvel Snap seems to be everywhere these days, with nearly every site covering the best and worst maps, strategies, and more. Lots of Kotaku staff are currently playing it. My friends play it. Random people I follow on Twitter are playing it. And I understand! The game is great, change some of the old ways card games generally work while ditching the loot boxes and pay-to-win items that so many F2P card games suffer from on mobile. So it only makes sense that in today’s environment, where everyone is hungry for Marvel Snap content, Ben Brode sat down with IGN and shared his favorite decks, how they work, and why Mysterio of all cards is his favorite. (Spoiler: Doesn’t seem to have anything to do with movie star Jake”Chest James“Gyllenhaal.)

Speaking to IGN, Brode revealed three decks he currently plays with. The first was what he called the “Omega Red Deck” which is built around Iron Man, Onslaught, and Omega Red.

Image: Second Supper/Marvel/Kotaku

“With this combo,” Brode explained, “You just have a huge amount of power in one place because Omega Red is five power, Iron Man doubles that, and then Onslaught doubles that double again.” Since Omega Red adds extra power to other areas if placed in an area where you are leading with 10+ power, the card will definitely put you in a good position to win the match. And Brode uses Invisible Woman to hide it all until the very last turn, keeping your opponent in the dark.

The second deck he showed off was originally named the “Dickwad” deck, but Brode says his son made him change the name to the “Butthead” deck. As the names imply, this deck is all about being super shitty to your opponent using annoying cards to screw with them and cause problems.

“It’s a lot of really, really mean cards,” admits Brode. “So I play The Hood and then give you The Hood. It plays Debris, so it fills the board with rocks. It plays Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, and Polaris, so I’m trying to basically lock you out of some locations. And then it plays a bunch of cards like Spider-Woman, Hazmat, and Black Widow to clog your board and then give all your cards minus power. That’s kind of the shtick.”

I have a similar deck to this and I feel bad using it but hey, a win is a win. Speaking of, this reminds me of a deck our own John Walker has started using recently…

Image: Second Supper/Marvel/Kotaku

Finally, the third deck he spoke to IGN about was “The Beast” deck. It’s an odd creation, with Brode even admitting he’s unsure of its quality. The deck is filled with almost every low cost card, in fact there isn’t a single four, five or six cost card in all of this. The idea was to build a deck around Beast and Falcon.

“So Beast returns your other cards to your hand and they cost one less, so you can make a free card that way,” Brode said. “Then Falcon will return them again and they’ll still be free. So you can play them multiple times. I play Iceman. I play on Korg. I play Elektra. I play Hood. And The Collector, because I bounce cards in my hand all the time. Of all his creations, this one intrigued me the most. Unfortunately, I don’t have all the cards needed to run it, but I might create it when I do.

Read more: Marvel Snap’s Big New Black Panther Season: What You Need to Know

As for his favorite map, Mysterio, Brode said it was one of the first maps the folks at Second Dinner started working on when marvel snap development began over four years ago. And Brode says that, early on, highlighted what was really fun about Snap: the mind games.

Image: Second Supper/Marvel/Kotaku

“When you play Mysterio, it’s a five power, two energy card. Very powerful,” Brode explained. “But he disguises himself and he plays two other disguises in the other places, so your opponent doesn’t know where you played Mysterio. They only see three Mysterio question mark cards. And they kind of have to guess, “Where would this real Mysterio have played?”

This leads to a very tense situation where your opponent is trying to figure out where the best area is to play Mysterio in this match. But then they also have to ask themselves: are you deliberately playing it somewhere else, even maybe in the wrong place, just to avoid the opponent guessing correctly and counter-attacking? Or maybe you’re building to put it in a bad position, but then put it in a good position, assuming the other player is overthinking your moves? Or maybe… well, you see how it goes.

“So there are some really interesting mind games with this card,” Brode said. “I just think it’s fascinating.” You see, even the creator of Marvel Snap is playing the game like an asshole. Sorry, asshole.

Image: Warner Bros. Games.

The best video games are imaginary. Often they exist completely in our heads, or in the dream space between their initial announcement and what we end up playing. This is where “Arkham World” exists. Born out of a gag from the 2011 Video Game Awards, the completely fictionalized entry into the wildly popular Batman Arkham Series is now all some fans can talk about.

Earlier this month, posts about a supposed Arkham World started to take over the Batman Arkham subreddit. Despite being dedicated to an aging single-player series, this particular internet watering hole remains surprisingly active. It has over 150,000 members, with hundreds or more active at any given time. “This subreddit is dedicated to discussing all of Batman Arkham Lore,” reads the subscription. “Including the Rocksteady Trilogy, Arkham Origins, and all related games and comics, including the new Arkham World Edition.”

Arkham World isn’t real, but that hasn’t stopped the subreddit from celebrating one year anniversary of its launch on August 2. “I liked the open world of this game the most because it was a literal world,” wrote Reddit user FrozeninIce248. “A world full of criminals and madmen and the updated gameplay of Arkham Knight make this game the best superhero game ever.”

Dozens of other commenters responded with their own reviews, sharing their favorite moments and biggest surprises. “Dude I’m currently stoned at a zombie gig Rob and I’m 90% sure this game isn’t real and I’m scared to know if it is,” read one comment buried deep among critical praise.

The one-year anniversary was just the start of Arkham World’s multi-week tribute. The tradition surrounding it has since expanded to include a special mission where you play as Alfred, a crossover with Spider-Manand even a Darth Vader boss fight. Spider-Man Community Players even joined, treating the crossover as canon. Reddit is full of shitposting, but it’s still rare to see fans rallying a bit so aggressively and maintaining it for weeks on end. So why bother manifesting a game that never existed?

FrozeninIce248 told Kotaku in a Reddit chat that they stole the idea from the Titanfall community, where pretending Titanfall 3 already exists is a continuous part of subculture. The name Arkham World, meanwhile, was an obvious choice since it was a codename teased by the Joker in a cutscene created by Rocksteady to win best character award at VGA 2011. The final game that was released was Arkham Knight, leaving “Arkham World” free to fill the void in players’ imaginations when they had no real Batman game to look forward to in the near future.

In the upcoming Gotham Knights game, made by Warner Bros. Montreal, the studio behind Arkham Origins, Batman is already dead. Nor is it technically part of arkham verse. Rocksteady’s next project, Suicide Squad, is set in the same world as the Arkham games, but Batman hasn’t been revealed to be part of it, and he’s a shooter rather than a stealth brawler.

“Suicide Squad is set in the same universe but isn’t Batman-centric at all, we don’t even know if he’ll appear at all,” Reddit user BigSexy17 told Kotaku. “r/ArkhamGames and Arkham fans in general have turned to the series because of Batman, Batman fans around the world praise and revere these games as the true Batman experience.”

Now unleashed, Arkham World has taken on a life of its own. “You’ve got this whole group of people pretending we’re all talking about a game that ‘doesn’t exist,'” Unhappyworker77 said.

Reddit user LukeDBZ2 compared it to the fascination with the Morbius meme”it’s Morbin’s time” from the beginning of summer. It was silly, wonderful, and became so popular it may have convinced Sony to set millions on fire. bring Morbius back to the movies so he can bomb a second time. “Morbius never said ‘it’s Morbin time’ and there’s no sequel to Arkham Knight…or is there?” they said. “One thing is confirmed, after years of no new content, the submarine has become Arkham Asylum itself.”

There is also precedent for Arkham World in other fandoms. When Elden Ring went years during development with no new details, some fans feared the worst. As with Titanfall, The Elden Ring subreddit at some point started to pretend the game was already released, invent famous boss battles and more. “It exists because the fans are starving [for] content and enjoyed the moment they were anticipating the release of the next Arkham title,” TheXpender told Kotaku.

The shitposting is still going on and has even led to some Reddit users trying to turn Arkham World into its own subreddit. Some fans want to dump memes there. “If we’re going to flood the sub with more Arkham World and less real messages about real games, then everything should be moved to its own sub. r/ArkhamworldFanboyxxx wrote. “We need to take a step back and reflect on what we’re doing, and honestly if it’s smart and fun, that’s fine with me, leave it alone now.”

But that doesn’t seem likely. Arkham World was born on r/BatmanArkham and that’s where it will likely stay. At least until Gotham Knights, Suicide Squad, or a proper Batman Arkham sequel launches. “Arkham World means the world to me,” Redditor Nadongus told Kotaku. “Nothing brings a community together like a collective fever dream fueled by disjointed shitposts. I’m having the best time of my life here.

Image: WB Games Montreal

Over the past few weeks, WB Games Montreal has shed some new light on its upcoming Batman-less Batman game, Gotham Knights, and some details have left fans skeptical about where the game is headed with Bruce Wayne’s survival. bat family. First, a 13 minute gameplay video revealed that GK’s incarnation of Nightwing uses a jet glider, while Red Hood was given wild “soul energy” abilities. By far the most disturbing revelation came from a biography of Batgirl, posted on the game’s website, which suggested that she recovered from her disability through “raw willpower and determination”.

During a question and answer session in the official Gotham Knights Discord Channelcreative director Patrick Redding addressed the backlash to Batgirl’s callous character biography and gave some insight into Nightwing’s glider and Red Hood’s new powers.

The Batgirl character biography on the Gotham Knights website discusses Barbara Gordon’s history as Batgirl and Oracle. The Oracle was Gordon’s technological genius alter ego who offered invaluable support to Batman after a confrontation with the Joker, depicted in The killer joke, left her paralyzed. The reason WB Games Montreal was criticized for the biography is that it said Gordon was prompted by her father’s death to “recover from her injuries so she could return to active duty as Batgirl. “. This led to fans calling out the game for using the tired comic book heroes trope. overcoming their handicap out of sheer will.

Redding revealed in the Q&A that, following the criticism they received, the team worked in conjunction with AbleGamersa non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility in the video game space, “to learn more about the different types of spinal injuries and whether someone can regain their mobility “.

“As with many of our characters and plot elements, the circumstances surrounding Barbara’s injuries differ significantly from how they have been portrayed in the comics,” Redding said. “Barbara underwent multiple surgeries followed by a lot of physiotherapy and pain management [in Gotham Knights].”

Redding went on to say that the team acknowledged the criticism and replaced the contentious description with, “With extensive training and rehabilitation, she recovered from her injuries and returned to active duty as Batgirl.”

Redding then discussed the creative decisions behind Nightwing and Red Hood’s traversal abilities, primarily Nightwing’s Green Goblin-esque glider and Red Hood’s new jump ability.

During the 13-minute gameplay demo, Nightwing is shown traversing rooftops using a techno-glider called the Flying Trapeze. According EurogamerNightwing’s techno-glider is a reference to Batman’s retro Bat-glider. Redding said the creative team liked the idea of ​​Grayson using one of Batman’s stealth drones in order to gain more altitude to perform his death-defying stunts.

“[The Flying Trapeze is] designed to feel a bit improvised and reliant on its extreme athleticism, which is Nightwing’s approach to everything,” he said. “Making it fly has such a different feel to Batgirl’s cape-gliding, and it pairs really well with her bigger parkour and jumping moves, as well as grappling.”

The most bizarre reveal in the Gotham Knights gameplay trailer, at least for me, was Red Hood, aka Jason Todd, leaping through the skies of Gotham in a clearly supernatural way using his new ability, Mystic Leap. . Redding said the development team relied on Red Hood’s origin story – which involves death at the hands of the Joker and subsequent resurrection in the Lazarus Pit– approaching his new powers, intending them to serve as a manifestation of Todd becoming his.

“We really liked the idea that when Jason starts dealing with the trauma of dying and being brought back, he starts being able to tap into some lost abilities,” Redding said. “In the same way that he tried to reinvent himself from anti-hero to hero while maintaining his strengths, he discovers that he can channel these mystical talents in a way that is familiar to him: through his physique. [and] in the way he moves, but also in the way he fights and even in the way he uses his weapons.

Redding explained Todd’s new ability as “just a manifestation of those powers” he received after being resurrected in the Lazarus Pit. I just hope those powers include fixing my son’s skull so he doesn’t have the bone structure of a Lego.

Gotham Knights is set to release on October 25, now only on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

It’s no secret that many aspects of FromSoftware’s Soulsborne games are inspired by Kentaro Miura’s popular manga Berserk. In fact, Elden Ring already pays homage in many ways, right down to Blaidd the half wolfstrangely resembles Guts, protagonist of Berserk. Now, the Elden Ring manga reference cycle has come full circle with Guts himself getting isekai’d in the Lands Between via a new mod.

Call of the Abyss, from COTA Studios modder Papa Appa, aims to let you play as the dark swordsman himself as you venture into the Lands Between. The mod is under heavy development but currently available for download via COTA Studios Patreon. You can see it in action through its latest dev diary video:

Current or planned features include a realistic Guts character model, his jagged armor, a recreation of his famous hand-mounted cannon and a “berserk” state when Guts loses control and gives in to his rage, and a summonable/boss version from Guts who has a more acrobatic moveset loosely based on Blaidd’s.

Papa Appa’s has also partnered with eye gardenthe modder and YouTuber behind the “Let Me Solo Her” Spirit Summon Mod, to create the Elden Ring Multiverse video series, in which they modify their favorite anime characters in the game as bosses. In the new episode 2, the pair feature Guts as a boss fight in the Mohgwyn Palace area in the late game.

“Berserk was an easy first choice because [Souls-series game designer Hidetaka] Miyazaki said the Berserk manga was a huge inspiration to himself for the Souls series, as seen in many bosses and characters,” Papa Appa told Kotaku.

Garden of Eyes told Kotaku that the idea for Elden Ring Multiverse came about a year before Elden Ring was released.

“[Berserk] holds a special place in the hearts of many and deserves a proper mod,” Garden of Eyes continued. “So naturally, we found it entirely appropriate to do this as our introduction to the multiverse. … I’m also a huge fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so that also played a big part in my wanting to bring this idea to fruition.

Papa Appa, who befriended Garden of Eyes through their shared love of Soulsborne games, said he worked on the modding side of Elden Ring Multiverse while Garden of Eyes crafted its narrative.

As soon as the boss fight begins in the Elden Ring Multiverse episode, “Guts” frantically rushes from side to side and knocks his opponent down before greedily devouring his flesh, just as he does when he is overwhelmed by bloodlust in the manga. This particular attention to detail is due to the Herculean efforts of Papa Appa, who put a lot of love and care into the lore-specific details of his Call of the Abyss mod.

“I tried to bring you the best Guts armor and the best Guts mod in all of Elden Ring modding,” Papa Appa said in his latest YouTube CotA demo video.

Although the current state of Elden Ring modding is limited to importing custom animations from other games, Garden Of Eyes told Kotaku that Papa Appa was able to derive Guts’ movement from the schematics. attack of Blaidd the Half-Wolf.

“Blaidd was the perfect choice for this as a base,” Garden of Eyes said. “With appropriate modifications to his model, movements, and visuals, a true Guts berserker was born.”

Call of the Abyss isn’t your typical model-swapping job. Papa Appa said it took him about a week to create a bunch of special features that die-hard fans would appreciate. For example, when playing as Guts, his “berserker” feature triggers once you drop below 50% HP and has four tiered states, signaled by his glowing red eyes. dark beast helmet and a red and black smokescreen following in its wake

“For you big Berserk fans, as you know, the Dark Beast is not an actual being, but an amalgamation and accumulation of all of Guts’ childhood traumas, fears and worries that he had” said Papa Appa. in the CotA update video. “I really wanted to materialize this via the black fog because I think it fits the [armor] very well regulated.

Read more: 7 Possible Berserk References In The Elden Ring

The Berserk state grants a 15% increase in stamina and damage recovery, but the longer you stay in berserker mode, the more your health will deplete, which is pretty accurate compared to how overwhelming sadness de Guts evolves with his superpower in the manga. .

My only criticism of Papa Appa’s mod so far is that Guts falls too easily into the Garden of Eyes video. This may be due to the majority of Guts’ manga-specific moves still missing from the mod. If Guts’ cannon arm, knife throwing, crossbow, and bombs had been present, I imagine the boss fight would have been more of a knockdown and prolonged brawl.

Papa Appa told Kotaku that while Elden Ring still has a limited modding scene, he plans to add Skull Knight as well as new features like the aforementioned hand cannon, which you can watch a preview here.

“It’s still just the tip of the iceberg for projects related to Berserk and other things in the multiverse, whether it’s new bosses, weapons, armor and much more. “, Garden of Eyes told Kotaku. “We have a huge passion for the game and aim to have the best mods for Elden Ring.”

As a longtime Berserk fan, I’d love to see mods where Guts is swapped with Blaidd and the prolific POS Griffith replaces Maleniebecause I have to get my own Berserk ending somehow.

Picture: Lucasfilm/Disney

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a very, very big game filled with hundreds of characters, ships, planets and weapons from every Star Wars movie ever made. But throughout life star wars nerd, i’m very good at nitpicking things i like and after thinking about it for a while, i’ve put together a list of seven characters who should have been included as playable characters in this latest and greatest adventure from Star Wars.

It’s worth noting that for this list, I’ve (mostly) avoided complaining about missing characters from TV shows, comics, or other non-movie media. It’s very clear that TT Games focused almost exclusively on live action skywalker saga movies when creating his character roster. So while I’m sad we don’t have Cad Bane, Thrawn or Aphra, I understand why.

However, there are still characters that appeared in the movies, with speaking roles and even names, that didn’t make it into playable characters.

So, with all that out of the way, here’s my list:

Garindan (Imperial Spy)

Picture: Lucasfilm/Disney

This is probably the saddest omission on the list. Back to the old Lego Star Wars games, this snout alien spy was a boss you fought in episode IV campaign. Flashforward to 2022 and the release of Skywalker Saga and not only is he no longer a boss, he’s not even a playable character. It’s quite the downgrade. Sorry, Garindan.

Quinlan Vos

Picture: Lucasfilm/Disney

Technically, Quinlan Vos barely appears in The Phantom Menance, appear in the background of a scene on Tattooine. In the movie, he has no name and no dialogue. However, in the years that followed, he was given a name, a backstory, and transformed into a Jedi who would eventually appear in numerous comics, books, and even the animated show Clone Wars. And he already has a Lego minifigure. What I’m saying is add this cool Jedi via a DLC pack, please.

Agen Kolar

Picture: Lucasfilm/Disney

I don’t want to throw too many Jedis on this list because Skywalker Saga already has a ton of them, so who needs one more. However, Agen Kolar should have made the cut as a playable Jedi in skywalker saga. The guy was there when the Jedi, led by Mace Windu, confronted Palpatine and tried to stop him. This is a great moment in Star Wars history. Yet it’s still in the toy box for this latest Lego game. Maybe because he died after 2 seconds of fighting?

Elan Sleazebaggno

Picture: Lucasfilm/Disney

Yes, the guy with the death sticks from episode II should be in this game. Come on! He has a speaking role, a bit of a character arc, and is in a memorable little scene. Of course, he never officially received a Lego minifig. But I don’t think that should completely exclude poor Sleazebaggno from the game. Especially if TT Games is doing well, including a (possible) murderous droid. Someone even petitioned for the guy to be included. He got less than 25 signaturesbut still… someone cares.

John Yowza

Picture: Lucasfilm/Disney

Sy Snootles and Max Rebo are in Skywalker Saga, but John Yowza is not it? For shame, TT Games… for shame. You may have finally included Yaddle, and I thank you, but do not break the Max Rebo group. I know we all hate”Jedi rocks”, but we can’t hold that against Yowza all these years later.

Grebleips

Picture: Lucasfilm/Disney

The Asogians were a species that was part of the Galactic Republic at the time of The Clone Wars. If they look familiar, it’s because they’re a direct reference to the ET movie and are designed to look like the main alien from it. Grebleips appears, technically, in a scene in the blink of an eye and you’ll miss him found in Episode I. And yes, his name is Spielberg spelled backwards. star wars is mute. Sorry. It doesn’t matter. Forget this one.

Matt the radar technician

Picture: Lucasfilm/NBC/Kotaku

Okay, that was never going to happen, but considering how many random references to things like South Park, Better Call Saul, and Taken can be found in this game, I was shocked they didn’t included a fun nod to one of the best and most popular SNL skits from the past decade.

Can love even flourish on a cyberpunk battlefield? Anno Mutationem says yes. Image: ThinkingStars

I was immediately taken with Anno: Mutationem’s sleek side-scrolling pixel art and explosive, beat ’em up-inspired action sequences. However, even those notable highlights pale in comparison to its wondrous portrayal of Ayane, one of the game’s supporting characters, who morphs from a mere NPC into the emotional line of the entire game.

You play as Ann Flores, a cyber-combat specialist in search of her kidnapped brother. Although she is more than capable of holding her own in a fight, she does not work alone. Next to him (via digital projection) is the super-genius, talkative hacker Ayane Misuno. While Ann’s relationship with Ayane is hinted at even in the demo, in the full game the hacker’s adoration for Ann bubbles up in side missions and boss fights. To my surprise, the bond between Ann and Ayane is an essential part of Mutationem’s story, and it is arguably its most captivating facet.

Their story begins when Ayane sends Ann a communication droid to mark their second anniversary of friendship, just like you do. As the droid’s gameplay goal allows Ann to call Ayane for her hacking expertise, Ayane drops all pretenses, telling Ann that her fancy mail-order droid serves as her means of being. closer. Always be my beating heart. Whether in the heat of battle or in the middle of a shower, Ayane has Ann’s back! And sometimes border issues.

Read more: Friendship ended with Cyberpunk, now Anno: Mutationem is the new best friend

Because Ann is a kuudere protagonist, meaning she’s kind of strong and quiet, it’s up to Ayane to not only inject life into the game with offhand remarks about the bizarre world they inhabit, but also to crack the stoic shell. of Ann, making her more attractive protagonist of the process. This is epitomized by the couple’s cute animations and stellar vocal performances from their English voice actors. Every time scenes of Ann and Ayane popped up on my screen, my eyes sent my brain a searing dose of dopamine. Their funny/cute dynamic, sometimes reminiscent of classic comedy duos, could generate enough energy to power a small town.

I would like to take a moment to congratulate myself for calling the ship between these two from the moment I saw them interact for the first time in the demo. While I was only half joking when I mumbled “Oh they’re gay”, I didn’t think ThinkingStars would hint at their canon status in the actual game. I’ll have to check my house for hidden mics…

The pair’s dialogue thickens it. Ayane rarely calls Ann by name, instead opting for “sweetie”, usually accompanied by hearts floating above her head. Ann gives in to the pet name when Ayane asks if she prefers to be called “Baby”, “Honey”, or “Lover”, proving that she has a preference. ?

Ayane, the paragon that she is, goes beyond being your “wife in the chair.” She also serves as Ann’s emotional support sidekick. Whenever a quest-giver NPC asks Ann for a favor, Ayane takes on the player’s frustrated voice. While Ann reluctantly accepts the missions, Ayane fights for her, absently calling out the NPCs’ selfish requests. If Ann didn’t want pickles on her burger, you better believe Ayane would raise hell. Whenever the going got tough in Mutationem, Ayane rushed in like a cool summer breeze and gave the game some welcome levity.

Harold, they’re lesbians. Screenshot: ThinkingStars/Kotaku

No matter how many times Mutationem kicked my ass, I kept coming back. This dedication wasn’t just based on my journalistic duty to finish the game, or even on my wounded pride. No, I persevered just to hear Ayane’s celebratory banter. When conquests in Mutationem ceased to be rewarding, Ayane’s words of encouragement revived my tired gamer bones and made the pain of replaying extremely frustrating boss fights more bearable.

Ayane doesn’t just shine during Mutationem’s main story: her charisma is so strong that it spilled over into side quests, spurring me on to characters I wouldn’t otherwise care about. For example, I put the brakes on Ann’s quest to save her kidnapped brother when we passed a street concert and Ayane mentioned that she would like to know the secret identity of a virtual idol.

I know this makes me sound heartless, but hear me out. Everything I know of Ann’s brother comes from a handful of random, archived codices and voice recordings. Ayane, on the other hand, went to war alongside me. She made my journey through Anno: Mutationem’s cyberpunk dystopia an ongoing delight, simply by the sheer force of her charisma. No hard feelings for Ann’s brother, but Ayane is built differently, and when I’m on the mean streets of Anno: Mutationem, her needs come first. Try the game yourself and you’ll understand where I’m coming from.