The notion of two disparate species of animals coming together to help one another is not particularly new in the world of storytelling. The trope goes all the way back to the likes of Peter Rabbit, in which our intrepid titular hero enlists the assistance of Squirrel Nutkin to help fend off the dastardly fox, Mr. Tod. It’s a concept that just works and is immediately endearing to both children and adults; so it’s no wonder, then, that Blanc resonated with so many upon its initial reveal. But does the actual gameplay hold up? Mostly, but with some important caveats.
Blanc stars two playable characters – a wolf cub and a fawn – both of whom have been inadvertently cut off from their respective families during a sudden snowstorm. As the two try to get their bearings, they run into each other over two sides of a frozen river, and ultimately decide to help each other return to their parents and siblings. Considering there’s absolutely no dialogue in Blanc, developer Casus Ludi has done a remarkable job in communicating exactly what’s going on with the two main characters in question, despite the admittedly simplistic plot.
Season rewards: This season’s rewards include three new Premium tanks for World War II and Cold War gameplay.
Classic game elements: We’re honoring the legacy of our long time tank commanders with features like the Classic HUD and a Garage Swap option.
New content throughout the season: Get ready for new 3D Commanders, vintage-style Pin-Up Skins for player-favorite tanks, revamped maps, and challenges to commemorate historic events.
Courage. Grit. Heroism. If you have these qualities, then you belong on the World of Tanks battlefield. And if you’ve got those qualities in spades, then our latest season, Valiant, is just the opportunity for you to prove it!
The Valiant season starts on February 14 and runs through April 10. It gives you eight weeks to take on challenges, earn points, conquer 100 levels, and claim reward after reward as you go.
Like our previous seasons, Valiant lets you choose one of three paths you can follow to earn your rewards:
The Free Rewards path gives you rewards every few levels and is automatically open to every player.
The Season Pass gives you all the Free Rewards plus additional rewards at every level.
The Ultimate Season Pass gives you everything from the Free Rewards path and the regular Season Pass, plus 25 levels already completed and bonus content that you receive as soon as you purchase it.
You’ll start out on the Free Rewards path, but you can upgrade to a Season Pass or Ultimate Season Pass at any time and get all the rewards you’ve earned up to that point, no matter when you get it. And we think the temptation to upgrade will be hard to ignore!
Get the Season Pass, and you’ll be on your way to earning not one but two new Premium tanks that are making their debut this season: the perfectly named Valiant medium tank for World War II, and the CATTB “Thumper” tank destroyer for Cold War. No matter which game mode you prefer, the Season Pass gives you options.
Want more? Then don’t miss the Ultimate Season Pass, which comes loaded with the newest British bastion, the FV4003 Centurion Mk. 5 AVRE medium tank. This is a powerhouse top-tier (Tier X) vehicle that makes the Ultimate Season Pass an unbelievable deal!
If all this wasn’t enough, Valiant also marks the beginning of Resolutions, a bold, year-long event that rewards our most dedicated tankers for each season they complete throughout 2023. Keep an eye out for more information – this is the year to pursue your tanking legacy.
Valiant was designed to satisfy your hunger for new thrills in your console battles. However, we can’t ignore this game’s history. After all, World of Tanks is celebrating nine years on Xbox this February! To commemorate the occasion, the Valiant season also arrives packed with features that are a salute to our longtime players.
The Garage Swap option lets you choose the look of your garage from several styles that have existed in the game over the past nine years. Whether you prefer the classic hangar or a rugged outdoors scene, the choice is yours as to how you display the powerful tanks under your command.
Similarly, the return of the Classic HUD brings back player-requested features like repositioned enemy target info and a clearly visible base capture status bar to make you more informed and more effective in every match you play.
As you explore these and other updates, keep an eye out for events this season that put you at the center of the game’s own history as well as its historical connections. In store for you are a community event that leads to the return of the classic Swamp map, an in-game Challenge that commemorates the historic Battle of Kasserine Pass, the Mary the Mechanic 3D Commander, vehicle skins inspired by vintage pin-up posters, and so much more.
The legacy of World of Tanks was always rich; we’re just giving you new ways to explore it!
They say that fortune favors the bold. We say that victory favors the valiant. Gear up, Commander: The Valiant season is waiting for you starting February 14!
Act boldly and charge toward victory with the FREE Valiant Starter Pack! This DLC bundle is packed with Boosters and Premium Time to increase your earnings as you prove your mettle in the latest season of World of Tanks. Fight with honor—good fortune awaits!
Bundle includes:
• 3 Days of Premium Time
• (5) x2 Silver Boosters
• (5) x3 Vehicle XP Boosters
• (5) x4 Commander XP Boosters
World of Tanks is a global online multiplayer free-to-play game dedicated to tank warfare in the mid-20th century. Custom built for Xbox, World of Tanks features realistic vehicles and environments, enabling players to command history’s most powerful tanks and experience combat on Xbox like never before.
Features:
• Strategic, fast-paced 15 vs 15 online action.
• Over 700 authentic tanks to choose from among 12 nations.
• Battle across a variety of environments with varying terrain and weather effects
• Built-in support for Xbox One X pushing the boundaries of graphic fidelity.
• Regular updates offer new content and frequent special events.
Warning: The below article has spoilers for 2018’s God of War and God of War Ragnarok.
In an early draft of God of War Ragnarok, Kratos was originally going to die at Thor’s hand. According to narrative director Matt Sophos, Thor would kill Kratos during their fight at the beginning of the game.
“It wasn’t a permanent death. He would get pulled out of Hel, essentially, by Atreus. But it’s now been 20 years have passed,” Sophos explained in an interview with MinnMax. However, this outline didn’t stay around for long as it didn’t feel right to the development team. Kratos has come back from death plenty of times in previous games.
Sophos continued, “As we were developing the story, we knew that we wanted the story to be one about letting go and changing…nothing is written that can’t be unwritten. As long as you’re willing to change, then you’re not bound to fate.” In God of War (2018), Kratos was prophesized to die. So if he had indeed perished, then that would’ve undermined the message of the game.
In IGN’s God of War Ragnarok review, we said, “An enthralling spectacle to behold and an even more exciting one to take the reins of, God of War Ragnarok melds action and adventure together to create a new, unforgettable Norse saga.”
George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.
When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey
Huge, possibly day-altering news: It’s nearly time for the 4th Annual Impy Awards! The Impys is our yearly event where we celebrate the very best things made in Dreams over the past year, as well as the lovely coMmunity in and around it. Back in November, we opened up nominations – and loads of you submitted your favorite creations, creators and coMmunity members for awards consideration across a whopping 23 categories. Cheers for doing that!
We’re currently in the middle of putting together a fabulously over-the-top awards show on Sunday March 26 at 9am PT / 5pm GMTto announce the winners of this year’s Impy Awards – some judged by us with the help of friends from across the creative industries, with others voted on by the CoMmunity. (More on how to vote in a bit!)
How fabulously over-the-top, you ask? Well, we couldn’t seem to find the perfect venue for our awards show this year, as some places have very strict safety rules around fire and giant flesh-monsters (honestly, you can’t have any fun these days). So we simply created our own in Dreams! A whole archipelago, in fact. Here’s a cheeky little peak at some of the virtual sets we’ll be livestreaming from:
‘Peak’? Eh? Because of the mountain? …Wow, tough crowd. Fine, here are some more:
We thought we’d take advantage of all this extra space by turning this year’s Impys season into a multi-day festival – and combining our real-world selves with the virtual world. In the lead-up to the main awards show on March 26, we’ll be hosting several livestreams from the beautiful Nomi Nations on our Twitch channel. We’ve got all sorts of events on the schedule, from behind-the-scenes interviews with our developers and coMmunity artists, to musical performances, highlights reels from the past year and much more.
Our first stream on the road to this year’s Impys kicks off today. Join us at 9am PT / 5pm GMT over on Twitch, where we’ll be celebrating Dreams’ 3rd birthday with a look back at the year just past – and a very special coMmunity quiz.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to secure some coveted real estate of the Nomi Nations for yourself, why not get involved in our latest coMmunity challenge in Dreams by customizing your very own floating island? Imagine what you could build on your very own piece of paradise. A frog pond filled with lemonade! Seventeen cars! Another identical, but much smaller, island! The possibilities are truly endless. Head to the front page of DreamShaping in game to get started with one of our handy island templates. We’ll be featuring your creations in–game and, of course, checking them out on our Impys livestreams.
Time to bring you out of the clouds and back down to Earth, though. Let’s reveal which amazing Dreams creations and creators made the final shortlists for the 4th Annual Impy Awards.
Before we get into it, a reminder: the following categories are coMmunity–voted, meaning the winner is decided by all you arbiters of good taste out there.
Community Collaboration
Most Helpful Dreamer
Breakthrough Dreamer
Curation Star
Contribution Beyond Dreams
Evolving Experience
Innovation in Create
Community Star
Don’t forget to vote for your winners via this survey by 23:59 GMT on Tuesday February 21 for your vote to be counted!
R.I.F.7 (Spot the difference) – KabarudonphaN18, xMorpheuus
TricoBiddy Bus Company – Tricobalt, blackcat_tracks
We saw an incredible number of submissions from Dreams coMmunity members this year, played a lot of quality creations during the shortlisting process – and read so many heartfelt messages from people explaining why particular creations and creators were the highlights of their year. Regardless of whether you made it to the final shortlist or not, a huge congratulations to everyone who received a nomination: You really made an impact on your fellow dreamers this year.
Right – back to the Nomi Nations we go. Fortunately, the phone signal up there is quite good: why not get in touch via our social channels? We’ll be checking out the hashtag #ImpyAwards, so pop that on your Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok posts if you’ve got any questions/comments/loud noises about the upcoming livestreams.
RPS Magic Week, but I wanna learn how to actually be a witch, you know? I wanna learn the witchy ways, and not just from some not-so-well informed TikToks.
Thankfully, So May It Be has been my gateway to Witchcraft 101. It’s a sapphic dating sim about a bunch of witches just hanging out doing witchy things. You’re part of a small coven with your three friends, and you all meet online every night to chat about school, shitty part-time jobs, and of course, witchcraft. At the end of each evening, you can privately ask one of your friends to hang out the next day 1 on 1, getting to know them better and just doing cool witch shit.
A year ago a game showed up in Nintendo’s February 9 Direct presentation that took me by such surprise I couldn’t quite figure out where and how and to whom to express my elation to. Was there anyone in my circle of friends and coworkers similarly passionate about this forgotten gem of an RPG? You see, I thought Live A Live – brought back to life on Switch this past July – was gone; forgotten. Never to be seen again. Pining for the fjords. A victim of franchise love and loyalty that demands more Final Fantasies and more Dragon Quests from Square Enix. A casualty of that pesky reality at any company that employs creative dreamers: that their creations have to make more than just the money needed to bring their ideas to life. Way more money.
And Live A Live didn’t do that. But the story isn’t as simple as Square (which didn’t merge with competitor Enix until 2003) gambling on a new roleplaying game brand and falling flat. Though it’s impossible to find verified sales information on the game today, Live A Live is commonly cited as having sold 270,000 Super Famicom/SNES carts. But while Square’s games surely weren’t cheap to make, they also commanded a high price. A new copy of Live A Live sold for 9,900 Yen. That’s $100 in 1994 and a whopping $200 in today’s dollars. Final Fantasy VI, which had come out just a few months earlier, was priced at an even steeper 11,400 Yen ($114).
I remember it well because I stood in line to buy both games in Akihabara, Tokyo, on their respective release days. As a student living in an expensive city, these were significant investments. Live A Live was the equivalent of 50 Tonkatsu sando lunches, or more than 100 McDonald’s hamburgers. But it was money well-spent on both of those games. And if the 270k sales figures are true, it was money well-earned too. While the creative talent behind Live A Live is extensive, it likely wasn’t expensive – the game started active development just a year before release and was headlined by first-time director Takashi Tokita. Tokita, lead designer of Final Fantasy IV, would later become the head of Square’s Product Development Division 7, tasked with getting more value out of their ’90s classics by re-releasing Final Fantasy games on GBA and extending the FFIV’s story with The After Years.
Live A Live received plenty of media coverage in Japanese magazines leading up to its release. One of the things that first attracted me to the game – apart from the visual similarities to Final Fantasy and the fact I was a JRPG-devouring machine who considered sleep optional – was the developer’s unique approach to the creative process. I remember reading in Famitsu (Japan’s popular weekly gaming magazine) that Live A Live was constructed more like a collection of short stories from different authors than a classic Square RPG. While composer Yoko Shimomura (Street Fighter II, Breath of Fire, later: Kingdom Hearts) flexed her musical muscle by imbuing each chapter with a matching – and distinct – soundtrack of its own, the seven initial scenarios each had their own art director. Under the supervision of Tokita and lead designer Nobuyuki Inoue, this group of manga artists left their own signatures on the disparate parts of the whole. The artists were largely unknown at the time, though Gosho Aoyama, who oversaw the Edo Japan chapter, started to turn heads with a new manga called Detective Conan a few months into development.
You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing or hearing about FFVI. Live A Live, not so much.
Which brings us back to the fact that Live A Live certainly was profitable. Created in about a year’s time on a smaller budget, it didn’t come close to Final Fantasy’s multi-million unit sales. But it released to positive reviews by the Japanese press, and I can attest to the lines of gamers waiting for their copy on launch day despite the relatively muted advertising. Final Fantasy VI was everywhere in Tokyo in 1994. You couldn’t ride the subway or turn on the TV without seeing or hearing about FFVI. Live A Live, not so much.
As a Square RPG fan, I didn’t care. I played it and loved it, though I do remember my disappointment that Live A Live didn’t quite live up to the visual bar set by the Final Fantasy Super Famicom outings. But the music, the variety of settings and gameplay systems – the many homages to my favorite movies – made it such a memorable experience that I held on to my copy of the game and dragged it with me from Japan to Germany and eventually to the US.
Since then, I’ve brought up Live A Live in conversations with friends and coworkers – frequently surprised how few people outside of Japan even know about the game’s existence. Whenever someone tells their story about falling in love with RPGs, I mention Live A Live in the same breath as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
The fact that it didn’t make it out of Japan is no doubt a result of many factors. Square wasn’t exactly known for taking chances with its RPG portfolio – and Live A Live certainly wasn’t the first or the last higher-profile game to be denied localization. Here’s a quick playlist, if you’re curious:
But more importantly, Square went public in August 1994 and perhaps the company became even less risk averse in light of the additional scrutiny and the impending Super NES market decline in 1995. Remember, releasing cartridge games carried significant production and inventory cost – a miscalculation could have serious financial consequences. And the bigger the cartridge size, the higher the risk. In some cases, the developers used every byte available to them, which left little wriggle room for localization (English language text takes up more space than Japan’s kana and kanji). The latter played a role in Seiken Densetsu 3 (now available as Trials of Mana) never getting localized – and perhaps even Live A Live’s 16-bit (4MB) cart size was too much hassle and too expensive of a bet for an unproven series. No matter the reasons, things got quiet around Live A Live and the game all but faded into obscurity.
And that was it. I thought. I should’ve guessed that there were plenty of positive memories and adoration for Live A Live within Square’s own development teams. Octopath Traveller was basically a throwback to Live A Live’s eight-scenario setup – minus the Dark Tower-esque coming-together from multiple dimensions and time zones. And perhaps I should’ve seen the Trials of Mana remake as another harbinger, proof that this decade’s celebration of (/obsession with?) the past and pursuit of (/reliance on?) nostalgia could bring back some obscure delights.
In this case, I couldn’t be happier with the outcome. In July 2022, Live A Live returned with some significant visual upgrades, orchestrated music and voice acting, some content tweaks, and some new surprises. Not everyone may be able to get lost in its 16-bit trappings and enjoy it – it’s very much a product of its time – but it’s wonderful to see such a unique creative endeavor get a second chance at life. A gem – but with sales already outpacing the original, not a forgotten one anymore.
That’s what this column is about. Every month, I’ll unearth a buried treasure. A forgotten gem of a game that may not have risen above obscurity. Games that showed sparks of greatness but never got a sequel or saw wider release. Or a once-beloved series that faded as the tastes of time – or its creators – turned elsewhere.
Firewatch devs announced their tomb-raiding adventure, In The Valley Of Gods, and in that time the idea of the game itself has fossilised. The first-person archaeology game was put on hold in 2019 after Valve acquired Campo Santo and had them support other Valve projects like Half-Life: Alyx. Now Campo’s in-limbo game has a December 2029 listing on Steam, which almost certainly means nothing, but it’s fun to dust off some memories.
It doesn’t happen often, but it’s always nice when it does. Right now, Nintendo is running a sale that drops prices on a decent selection of games down to $39.99 or less. Anyone who pays attention to such things knows that’s about the best we can hope to see from the Mario company, which refuses to allow the deeper discounts we see on pretty much every other game on the market.
The games on sale this time around include The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and also its Expansion Pass, which you might want to pick up before Tears of the Kingdom arrives. You can also find deals on some excellent JRPGs, a few mini- and micro-game collections, and quite a bit more. Let’s have a look.
Nintendo Switch Game Deals
There’s a good chance you can find something worth picking up in this sale. I recommend Link’s Awakening and WarioWare: Get It Together for good fun times. Live-a-Live is an excellent RPG that’s divided into relatively bite-sized chapters, so it’s not like you’re embarking on one ridiculously enormous quest. And the combat system in Bravely Default II is almost perfectly tuned.
If you want more digital and physical options, you can take a look at the full sale at Best Buy. Best Buy generally does a better job of keeping everything in stock than Amazon does.
Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed or on Mastodon @chrislreed.
Overwatch 2’s third season is well underway, adding more of the usual maps, modes, and cosmetics. The big surprise this season is the Valentine’s themed Loverwatch, a non-canon text adventure that allows you to court either Mercy or Genji. Naturally, I chose to date Genji (described as Overwatch’s “bad boy”), and the results were surprising. It’s cringe-y and occasionally grating, but it’s also surprisingly charming and stuffed with referential humour that OW fans will surely love.
Written by co-director of The Video Game History Foundation.
Last week, the fantastic Boss Fight Books began revealing Season 6 of its documentary-style books along with the first book, which looks at PaRappa the Rapper. And today, the publisher has announced that the second book will be very much in our wheelhouse by focusing on Animal Crossing.
Written by Kelsey Lewin, co-director of The Video Game History Foundation and co-owner of Pink Gorilla Games in Seattle, Washington, the book promises to look at the magic of the first game in the series, which had humble origins as a Japan-only N64 release in Dо̄butsu no Mori. The game eventually came to the West thanks to a GameCube port with expanded features.
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RPS Magic Week, but I wanna learn how to actually be a witch, you know? I wanna learn the witchy ways, and not just from some not-so-well informed TikToks.
Firewatch devs announced their tomb-raiding adventure, 
Overwatch 2’s third season is well underway, adding