Cardy, Matt, and Mat are back for some February Friday fun and frolicking as a range of delights are explored, including first impressions of the multiplayer spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign. There’s also time for a look at awards contender The Brutalist, new Adult Swin animation Common Side Effects, and visual novel dice-roller Citizen Sleeper 2.
Remember to send us your thoughts about all the new games, TV shows, and films you’re enjoying or looking forward to: ign_ukfeedback@ign.com.
All eyes are on the Birdman.
Earlier this week, professional skater Tyshawn Jones mentioned how he was in a new Tony Hawk remaster “coming out” soon.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
More will be revealed next week.
Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP has received all sorts of updates since Juliet’s return last September, and the next one appears to be another update fans won’t want to miss.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
SEGA is gearing up for the February 21st release of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii on PlayStation®4, PlayStation®5!
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii places Goro Majima as the sole main character of the story set after the events of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Set on the tropical waters and islands of Hawaii, Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii offers an unpredictable assortment of high seas thrills. Sail aboard the Goromaru and enjoy hot-blooded battles, a treasure trove of minigames.
Meet a charismatic cast of new characters, brought to life by star-studded actors, including First Summer Uika, Kenji Matsuda, Munetaka Aoki, Ryuji Akiyama, Ayumi Tanida, and Shunsuke Daitoh!
After losing his memory, Goro Majima, a once-feared legend in the yakuza world, sets sail in search of treasure.
Half a year after teaming up with Kiryu for a massive battle in the Millenium Tower, Goro Majima washes up with the wreckage of a boat on the shore of a remote, sparsely populated island. With no memories—not even his own name—Majima joins forces with Noah, the young islander who saved his life, and embarks on a search for clues to his forgotten past. However, what waits for them is a powder-keg world where scoundrels vie for a legendary treasure.
In addition to his signature Mad Dog style, which is all about speed, Majima can also use his Sea Dog style to wield a cutlass and other buccaneer gear.
With his Mad Dog style, Majima blends together a combination of punches, kicks, and knife strokes to make quick work of his enemies.
Additionally, you can swap to Sea Dog style, a swashbuckling fighting style befitting a pirate at sea. With a pair of cutlasses and three sidearms at his disposal, Majima can easily make shark bait of his enemies.
Using the Madness Gauge, Majima can summon dark deities capable of turning the tides of battle. Conjuring them requires treasures known as Dark Instruments, which you’ll need to plunder from the ships of defeated rival pirate crews.
The game takes place on and around the islands of Hawaii, where different motives collide. As you sail across the Pacific, foster bonds with your maties and battle against the scoundrels that roam the high seas!
Captain the Goromaru as you explore the vast ocean! During your voyages, you’ll discover lighthouses, treasure islands, and various other locations. However, don’t forget to ready your cannons, as you may have to go to pirate battle with the dangerous marauders that lurk in wait!
Maneuver around enemy bombardments and send volleys of cannonballs into their ship’s hull! Once it has taken enough damage, board their ship with your crew and brawl it out to secure victory!
To really kick ass in pirate battles, you’ll need to modify your ship, strategically deploy your forces, and power up your crew! Meet over 100 recruitable seafarers and modify your ship with options that range from different designs and decorations to armor and stronger cannons!
You can also have fun with Karaoke, Dragon Kart, Outfits, and many other activities!
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii Product Information:
| Title | Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii |
| Release Date | February 21, 2025 (Fri) |
| Platform | PlayStation®5 / PlayStation®4 |
| Languages | Subtitles: Japanese, English, Korean, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified) |
| Website | https://ryu-ga-gotoku.com/pirate/asia_en/ |
| SEGA Asia Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/sega.asia.EN |
| Copyright | ⒸSEGA |
After over two dozen mainline games, I can only imagine how difficult it must be to innovate and stay relevant in an era where a great game is coming out every few weeks, but that’s exactly what KOEI TECMO aims to do with the next entry in its long-running Atelier JRPG series, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories and the Envisioned Land. After spending over six hours gathering resources, doing Sailor Moon-esque magical dancing rituals, and riding around on a motorbike, I’m inclined to believe they’ll pull off just that, yet again. With more engaging combat, improved visuals, more convenient crafting, and an entirely new building system that lets you put your own personal touch on the world, there’s quite a bit to be optimistic about, even if what I saw of the story and characters was, at least so far in the opening hours, pretty boilerplate stuff for the genre.
If you’ve played any of the recent Atelier games, then you probably won’t be shocked by Atelier Yumia at first glance. All three of the pillars that have been around since its conception are still alive and well: exploration, where you run around collecting resources and solving puzzles; combat, where you fight baddens with a party chock-full of pretty anime friends, and synthesis, where you combine your hard-won resources into alchemical creations that make you stronger. But each has been given a substantial overhaul (not to mention a serious facelift) that breathes new life into a familiar formula.
Combat seems to be getting the biggest rework, with action-based systems that let you perfect parry, dodge out of the way, and switch to different range bands depending on whether you’d like to thwack enemies in melee or take them down from a distance. At lower levels, combat seemed fairly undemanding, as I was able to just unload every ability I had, swap to other characters to do the same, then repeat it all again, ending most encounters in a matter of seconds, but later on (and especially when I wasn’t properly leveled) I seriously got rinsed if I wasn’t paying attention to enemy attack patterns and working on my timing. It never got especially challenging so long as I was properly leveled, but it was nice to see a less passive combat system that I couldn’t just steamroll through while on autopilot.
Exploration also had some improvements, like having a gun to stun enemies and collect resources at a distance, ziplines that help you navigate the map more easily once you find and activate both sides of the line, and, crucially, a badass motorcycle for you to speed around on that makes getting around much easier. Finally, there’s Synthesis, which in typically Atelier fashion is so dang complicated, you could spend quite a bit of time customizing and min-maxing every aspect of your gear and crafting new items and attacks to use in battle. Or, if you don’t have the patience like me, you can just hit “auto mode” and it’ll automatically optimize all of it for you. Not that I don’t enjoy this aspect of the series, but it’s certainly nice to have the option of leaping back into the action quickly for times where I wasn’t in the mood to tinker.
Atelier Yumia also shakes things up by adding a fourth fairly significant activity to the list of things to do as you explore and level up: the ability to build and customize settlements throughout the world map. That’s right – Atelier Yumia seems to be leaning into the cozy craze, so now you can have a little bit of Animal Crossing or Sims with your JRPG by constructing your fantasy cottage on a patch of land and spending some quality downtime with your party members. I was only able to dabble in this a bit, given the constraint of the resources available to me in the early part of the story, but I could definitely see myself sinking quite a bit of time into taming the wilds with an elaborately decorated home.
With all Atelier has going for it, I will say that it did very little to make itself stand out in terms of story. The characters and foreshadowing of the undoubtedly epic and convoluted story that starts to develop in the opening hours aren’t bad by any means, but at least so far everything has been quite predictable and retreads a lot of ground we’ve seen from JRPGs of the past. This is especially true of the characters I met during my explorations, like the ditzy by wholesome Isla and the stoic and no-nonsense Viktor, both of whom I feel like I’ve seen half a hundred times already. But this is the beginning of a JRPG, so in all likelihood it’s just going to take a while for the story to start rolling or for characters to show their true colors to any level of satisfaction, leaving plenty of opportunity for my concerns to disappear given more time.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Atelier Yumia marks the first time the series will appear on the Xbox platform, and as a Westerner who would quite like more JRPGs to be readily available, that’s pretty awesome to see. Achievement unlocked!
Atelier games have been around since the late ’90s, with more than two dozen titles shipped in that time – but you’re forgiven some unfamiliarity the series, as Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories and the Envisioned Land will be the very first to arrive on Xbox. After playing through the first few hours of the game and speaking with producer Junzo Hosoi, it’s becoming clear that the first Atelier title on Xbox isn’t simply the latest in the series, it’s the most ambitious entry yet.
“As a huge Xbox fan, I’m thrilled to finally bring the series to the system,” Hosoi told me via email, “But when I look at the game as a whole, I don’t describe Atelier Yumia as the next Atelier game. I describe it as a completely new JRPG series that has Atelier features.”
My preview session bore that out; players will find familiar RPG elements aplenty – strategic, real-time battles, crafting, exploration – but they come together in way that feels altogether different from others in the genre. The secret ingredient, if you will, lies in the super deep crafting system.
“The charm of the Atelier series is about synthesis and the alchemy process,” Hosoi-san confirmed. “The game cycle is pretty unique as there is collecting in the field, fighting in battle, and utilizing the synthesis system, and all three of those things are related.”
That charm is also evident in the playable cast of characters, especially the eponymous Yumia Liessfeldt, a more grown-up character than some past series headliner heroines.
Hosoi-san shares more background: “Since Yumia is 21 years old, the story is about her growing into adulthood. This is shown throughout the story through her strong core values… independence and charm. With [heroes of previous titles] Ryza and Sophie, they were younger, so they needed mentors in order to grow up, but with Yumia, she has her own identity and decision-making skills.” Oh, and she owns a motorcycle!
Because Aladiss, the new continent introduced in Atelier Yumia, inherently distrusts alchemy, the game’s early hours see Yumia seeking to prove her worth. While her synthesis skills differentiate her from other characters in the game, bolstered by a new building system that crafting survival fans will enjoy, in my playthrough, it was Yumia’s battle prowess that surprised most.
For nearly all of the series’ history, Atelier titles were turn-based affairs. The recent Atelier Ryza titles were to first to move to real-time, and for Atelier Yumia, the team heard player feedback, resulting in a huge amount ofc ombat options for players to master.
“The mechanics of battle have been completely redesigned for this game as close and ranged combat has been added,” Hosoi-san explains. “Within the two attack zones, players can move the active character freely around the enemies or between the two attack zones in battle. You can also guard and dodge attacks in real-time and even pull off a powerful cooperation attack with other characters when an enemy is stunned. For Atelier Yumia, we are focusing on actually showing the player’s skills during battle.”
In practice, battles move quickly; players can control Yumia or shift at any time to one of her traveling companions. Placement is key; you can see when and where attacks will hit, but timing out a precision guard (or getting the heck out of the way) takes good timing. It’s not too challenging when going 1 on 1 with a regular mob, but in a multi-enemy rumble, with fewer safe areas, there’s a whole lot to account for.
Add in varying enemy weaknesses, opportunities to execute powerful Friend Actions, balancing offense and defense at different ranges – I didn’t expect a game this adorable to require such situational awareness! Fortunately, your squad enters and exits battle seamlessly as you explore, and it’s fast and fun to build up fighting experience, or to avoid encounters when you just wanna zipline back to town.
As mentioned, Yumia isn’t on this journey alone; you’ll meet several companions in the game’s prologue before rewinding to an earlier point in the tale. I found one character particularly entertaining, and Hosoi-san surprised me by unexpectedly bringing up an Xbox icon when asked about Flammi, Yumia’s floating, funny little companion.
“Flammi was actually inspired by Halo’s Cortana. I wanted to make something where we could have a conversation between a main protagonist and somebody close to them who are always together. Playing Halo was so much fun and that’s why I really wanted to add a mascot for Atelier Yumia.“
Atelier Yumia arrives at a very prolific time for Koei Tecmo: Dynasty Warriors Origins was well-received on its recent launch, Team Ninja surprised everyone with Ninja Gaiden 4’s announcement, and we’ve been spoiled with shadow drops of Ninja Gaiden 2 Black and Warriors: Abyss. To hear it from Hosoi-san, the positive energy is boosting everyone’s projects.
“Within Koei Tecmo games, the brand producers get along really well with each other. We have a conference where games under development receive opinions from each of the brands, so not only do we listen to each other’s opinions, we then get to see their games in development as well. We utilize each other’s opinions to help us develop and create better games. In the end, that helps in my goal of making Atelier Yumia known worldwide as the best game in the series.”
The post Atelier Yumia: New Features Explained – and a Surprise Connection to Halo appeared first on Xbox Wire.
Now coming in July.
Wētā Workshop has announced that the cute and cosy life sim Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game has been delayed from 25th March to 29th July 2025.
The developer, which is known for special effects, prop creation, board games, and miniatures, shared a statement on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) earlier today stating that the game “needs a bit more simmering…”
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
The post Dungeons and Dragons: A New Quest Now Available in the Minecraft Marketplace appeared first on Xbox Wire.
Activision may finally be ready to start talking about its next Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game, and it seems to be using a sneaky Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Easter Egg to get the conversation started.
Call of Duty outlet CharlieIntel spotted and shared references to the publisher’s legendary skateboarding video game franchise in a peculiar place after the Black Ops 6 Season 2 Reloaded update went live today. Included with an ammo chest of new features, weapons, and more content was the return of the fan-favorite skate-themed map, Grind. The skatepark arena has been brought back mostly as fans remember it, with one exception being a giant, in-game TV screen featuring a very Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-looking logo and a date of March 4, 2025.
Looks like a teaser for something related to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has been found in Black Ops 6’s Grind MP map!
Announcement on March 4. 👀 pic.twitter.com/8efl6Qansl
— CharlieIntel (@charlieINTEL) February 20, 2025
It stops short of being in-your-face but is still undeniably an eyebrow-raising reference for fans who have been on the lookout for another entry in the Pro Skater series. Rumors that another installment could soon be announced began earlier this week when fellow skater Tyshawn Jones let it slip that he would soon be featured in an upcoming Tony Hawk video game (via VGC).
“I’m in a Tony Hawk coming out, so that’s cool,” Jones said during a conversation on The Breakfast Club podcast. “They got a new one they remastering so that’s about to come out. I was in the last one.”
It was a curious comment that had fans excited, with today’s newly revealed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Black Ops 6 Easter Egg letting them know when they can expect to learn more. Unfortunately, there’s no telling what exactly that March date has in store.
Activision tried to breathe life into the franchise with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 back in 2015 but has yet to release another new numbered entry since. However, in 2020, fans received the Pro Skater 1 + 2 remakes from Vicarious Visions. That means it’s been five years since a Tony Hawk game hit store shelves. With so much evidence lining up for a big reveal next month, it seems the wait may soon be over.
While we wait to see what that March 4 reveal has lined up, you can read up on a few of the other skateboarding-themed inclusions in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 2 Reloaded, including a pack of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cosmetics that have some fans upset. You can also see Tony Hawk himself confirm that he was working with Actvision again as of last year.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
One of my Xmas selection box games last year was Withering Rooms, a delightfully frightful haunted house action-RPG that balances mazey Metroidvania level design with the ability to be a witch who can supersize herself and gallop around on suits of magic armour. With a quick glance over my shoulder at our dear friend Sir Eugene Optimisation, I dare to describe it as a bit like Bloodborne, if Bloodborne had been made by a tiny independent developer.
Also rather Bloodborney: the recently revealed Withering Realms, a sequel of sorts in which you play a ghost girl clinging to the back of a customisable combat doll. Sir Eugene Optimisation requests I add here that the doll conceit reminds him of well-received Soulslike Lies Of P. Which is a fair observation, I think, though I would also say the doll’s lipless, one-eyed grimace reminds me of Mouthwashing. How’s that, Eugene – three for three? Anyway, here’s a trailer.
