Jojo’s All Star Battle R, Valkyrie Elysium, Exoprimal, DioField Chronicle & more: PlayStation’s State of Play recap & opinion
PlayStation showcased a bunch of upcoming games for PS4/PS5 in their “State of play” event today, and there’s a lot to be excited for.
What’s PlayStation State of Play
“State of Play” is PlayStation equivalent of Nintendo direct, a streaming event in which Sony is showcasing upcoming titles, oftentimes with new trailers and exclusive announcements to keep us PlayStation fans excited throughout the year 🙂
Today’s event was full of pretty exciting stuff, in my opinion. In no specific order, Sony announced and/or released new trailers for:
Exoprimal (2023)
A new IP from Capcom featuring intense multiplayer co-op battles, against…dinosaurs? I won’t lie, this looks dumb and totally fun. I love how the black hole thingy just dumps dinosaurs like some sort of trash, and they even look a bit confused by what’s happening to them. And man, that T-rex at the end of the trailer!
Ghostwire Tokyo (March 2022)
A quite awaited release this month is Ghostwire Tokyo. Sony have released a new trailer for the upcoming action-adventure game, set in modern Japan. Some of these Youkai are really scary.
Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin (April 2022)
One of the less interesting games of today’s State of Play from my perspective, but I’m sure the fans will be happy to know a demo with the 3 first levels is now available. Launching in April this year.
Forspoken (October 2022)
Square Enix’s promising new IP has been delayed to October this year, but they’ve just released a new trailer in which we see the heroin Frey use her powers. I’m not a big fan of open world games, but I won’t lie, this trailer looks really cool.
Gundam Evolution (2022)
Look, I get it. Gundam evolution looks like a boring and very generic team FPS. But it could redeem me in the eyes of my son, who hasn’t spoken to me since I sold our last PS3, preventing him from playing Gundam Dynasty Warriors. Might be fun. If only they offered a split-screen option for couch co-op…
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection (2022)
Old Farts like me will enjoy this collection of 15 old school TNMT games, some of which had a reputation of being extremely hard. Hopefully this release will have savestates or something. And hey, maybe it’ll have a hidden SNES emulator embedded that could be repurposed…? Ha.
Gigabash (2022)
Look, I think Sony should just stop trying to come up with their own Smash Bros clone. Even with a cool Kaiju theme, it won’t work as well as Nintendo’s.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle R (Fall 2022)
Not being a fan of fighting game, or of the Jojo’s universe, I can’t really say this one got my attention. But with 50 playable characters, and millions of fans of the manga, this is bound to be successful as long as it’s not complete ***.
Trek to Yomi (Spring 2022)
Probably the highlight of this “State of Play” for me, mostly because I hadn’t heard of this game before, and the artistic direction looks very ambitious. This is an action game made to look like old (as in, black-and-white, old) samurai movies from Kurosawa. It looks gorgeous to me. It feels like an Indie concept with an AAA budget.
Returnal Ascension
An update to the surprise PS5 Hit Returnal, Ascension brings an (online) co-op mode and an “endless tower” mode of challenges. Free update for an already acclaimed game, yes please.
The DioField Chronicle
I personally feel the Tactical RPG genre is under represented, and with FF Tactics being one of my favorite games of all time, nice to see a new strategy RPG from Square Enix. Their new “Real Time Tactical Battle” mechanism could make it or break it for me though, so I’ll have to wait and see.
As always with Square Enix though, the game looks gorgeous, in particular the battlefield dioramas which look like we’re playing on a physical wargame board 🙂
Valkyrie Elysium (2022)
More Square Enix. The game looks gorgeous but feels generic to me. Maybe because I don’t know the franchise? Interested to hear people’s thoughts on this one.
Conclusion
I feel this “State of Play” event announced a load of cool stuff I’m excited about, including some new games I wasn’t ware about. Which of these games are you excited the most about?
Actually quite saddened by Valkyrie Elysium. Valkyrie Profile on the PS1 was one of the most underrated RPGs in my opinion. The second game had very unique mechanics and was both innovative and fun. Shame the series is now going to be taken down the generic open world hack and slash with minor RPG elements-route that so many are these days but that’s very much SE’s path and current trends so what can you expect really?
Valkyrie Elysium is not developed by the same people of Valkyrie Profile, it’s a different game, different engine, different gameplay.
Has anything to do with the franchise? Yes.
Has anything to do with the acclamated Valkyrie Profile series? No.
There is another game of the frachise called Valkyrie Anatomia.
lol
To my taste, it’s actually quite refreshing to see a line-up of trailers like this at least.
Tenshi chiming in: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle was an incredibly flashy fighter for the PS3 that had a couple of hiccups; namely, it was so flashy to view because of its attention to detail to the source material that the core fighting gameplay was a bit slower than it needed to be. Despite that, it’s still reasonably full-fledged and solid enough to play, and much better than the arena fighter Eyes of Heaven that would come after it.
This revisit is going to feature explicit changes to the mechanics that will make it less stilted to play; we don’t know a lot yet, but it seems like direct counters and more manual cancels are on the table. The voice cast from the Part 5 and 6 anime will also be coming in to dub the characters that they didn’t before (since the original game came out before those seasons were animated), if you care about that.
The original game is still available on PS3 and even had a (rare in the States) physical release, so it’s not so much a preservation boon, but this does give a good fighter another chance now that the community that can appreciate it is more widespread, and old fans will get some remuxed mechanics to play with… I wonder how my Josk8 will stack up in the new meta?
Even though I don’t know the original material myself, it’s great to know they’re using the same voice actors as the anime. I think it helps tremendously with immersion.