When this week’s Cooking Eorzea column goes live, it will be the first day of this year’s Saints Wake event in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online. It will also be the start of the end of the year rush through October, November, and through the Starlight Celebration and into the Heavensturn.

It doesn’t honestly feel like the holiday season is starting for me until the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Halloween-equivilent event begins, and then everything happens so fast that I find myself almost unable to keep up with it. I find myself organizing a pair of Secret Smilebringer events in real life, the weather turns incredibly cold, I travel to see people, I shop for sales, and I wonder how I am going to make the next year better than the year that just passed as I somehow also find the time to squeeze in doing the fun little events that happen in game.

Somehow, I will still find time to write this column as we go along through the busy upcoming holidays.

Now, if only I could figure out a costume to wear…

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s side dish comes from the Thanalan region and it has a ‘Medium’ difficulty! While this is the 50th dish in the cookbook, it is only the 49th one I’ve made. I am deliberately waiting to make The Minstrel’s Ballad: Almond Cream Croissants until the very end of the column, since it has an Extreme difficulty rating.

I have never used arborio rice in a dish, let alone making risotto of any sort. I was honestly quite excited to see a dish that often gets featured in cooking competitions on TV, and I was extremely hopeful that I would be able to make it with no issues.

Anyway, here is what the Cheese Risotto is supposed to look like:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Arborio rice is an Italian rice used in making risotto and rice pudding. Normally, when I use rice in a recipe, I first cook it in a rice cooker. Making cheese risotto was the first time I’ve ever used rice raw within a recipe, and I honestly found that to be so unique to use. All of this made me want to pick arborio rice as my ingredient of the week for this week!

My Cooking Attempt

First, a shot of all the ingredients used for Cheese Risotto:

First, I peeled and minced up the parsnips. This week’s Cooking Eorzea column was actually the first time I have ever bought parsnips in my life.

Setting the parsnips aside, I next peeled and diced up the onion. I had forgotten how the tears from chopping up the onions sting in my eyes!

Finally, I minced up the garlic.

I then measured out the chicken broth, added in a sprig of rosemary and a bay leaf, and brought it up to a boil.

While the chicken broth heated up, I shredded the Parmesan cheese wedge.

Once it was boiling, I put it on a different burner on low and then I got out another pan and melted butter into it.

Once the butter was melted, I added in the garlic, the parsnips, and the onions. I then blended them all together in the pan while they softened for about five minutes.

Once the vegetables were ready, I added in the arborio rice, and I stirred to coat the rice with the butter and vegetables. I then let it all sautée for a couple of minutes.

Once the rice was ready, I poured in a half cup of white wine and blended it in too. I kept blending it in until the white wine was fully absorbed by the arborio rice.

Next came the longest, most annoying part of the dish. I kept measuring out a half cup of the chicken broth (after I removed the rosemary sprig and bay leaf) and adding it to the main dish. Once I poured out the half cup, I would whisk it all together inside the pan to blend it all together. I would keep mixing it until all the liquid was absorbed. I would then repeat it again and again and again. The longer I worked, the more engorged the rice became, and the longer I had to stir into order to get all the liquid soaked up.

Once I FINALLY got all the broth used up, I took the pan off of the heat and added in the cottage cheese and the shredded Parmesan cheese.

I then sprinkled in pepper and salt on top for seasonings.

I then blended all of that together again.

I then scooped the cheese risotto out into a bowl and added the furikake on top.

And here is this week’s final Cooking Eorzea dish for Cheese Risotto!

I am going to be honest about this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish: I didn’t care for it. It wasn’t because the dish was bad – far from it – it was more the texture. It reminded me of thick porridge, and the parsnips and onions gave it a bit of a soft crunch on top of that. I didn’t care for how it felt in my mouth, to be honest. Additionally, I wish it was a lot cheesier than what it was!

Afterword

If I was to make this dish again, I would want to make it with a lot more cheese. I would probably also try to mince the parsnips up even more, as the soft crunch got distracting after a short bit. I would probably try to add in even more salt and pepper than I did to see if it enhances the flavor further. I just don’t know if I could get past the texture of the arborio rice when mixed in the other ingredients!

Alright, it’s time to run through the list of people that I want to thank for making this week’s column possible! First, I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look- including this week’s one for Cheese Risotto. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on X– and you really should look at them!

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. Even though we are far and away into Dawntrail at the moment, it took the efforts of both to create Eorzea as it stands today.

Next Time, In November

Imam Bayildi is the next Side dish that I will be making in Cooking Eorzea!

I have never actually baked eggplants before, and so I am excited to work with it. Please be sure to return in November to see how the dish turns out!

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 49: Cheese Risotto (FINAL FANTASY XIV Online) appeared first on oprainfall.

I wasn’t expecting to go on a months-long hiatus again.

At the end of March, I got seriously injured and I ended up not being able to walk or live independently for months.

While I spent a lot of my recovery in Eorzea, I found myself being drawn into spending as much time as possible in the world of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth. I had tickets to see the orchestra performance in Los Angeles for the North American premiere, and then again to see the show in Munich, Germany a month-ish later, and I thought that I should play the game first.

A large part of why I wanted to see the concert in two places as far flung apart as they were is because I wanted to thank both Hamauzu-san and Suzuki-san for helping me discover my love for the piano through the wonderful music they created for the SQUARE ENIX game Lightning Returns: FINAL FANTASY XIII. I talked a little bit about how amazing the soundtrack was earlier this year for the game’s tenth anniversary, and I wanted to take the time to thank them both in person for helping create my real love for music. It’s hard to explain how important music can be to me now, especially since I listened to so little of it in high school.

The fact that I wanted to thank both of them is a large part of why I pushed myself so hard through my rehab. If I couldn’t function independently, then I wouldn’t be able to make it out to Los Angeles – let alone Munich – to see them both.

I even got both of them, and both Mr. Arnie Roth and Mr. Eric Roth, to sign my FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth program – and you can see that in my final dish image for this week’s Cooking Eorzea.

You can check out my full concert review here. If you get a chance, you should really see the concert live and play the game. I promise you that you won’t regret it, and you can still even get tickets.

What about this column going forward?

I am definitely going to try to get back to doing this column weekly again when I can. I love cooking and Cooking Eorzea has been with me through so much of my life in California. It helped me handle my breakup after I moved here, and it gave me something to look forward to after the apartment fire I had. I can’t imagine not finishing this cookbook out: especially when there are simply so many amazing dishes left to try out!

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

The 49th recipe in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and hailing from the Hingashi region of Eorzea…is Chawan-Mushi! With a hard difficulty rating, this Cooking Eorzea dish is one that looks deceptively easy to make, but in fact can be quite hard to create if you leave air in the custard or you overcook it on the stove top. This is also the start of the Sides section of the cookbook! It is crazy to think about how much I’ve made so far, and honestly…how much more I still need to create.

Chawan-Mushi also has a lot of different meat options in it, and it reminded me a bit of the Bouillabaisse I made way back in Week 27 because of that.

Anyway, here is what the dish is supposed to look like in the hands of a professional:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

This week’s featured ingredient is mitsuba.

It is also probably the second hardest ingredient I’ve had to find for Cooking Eorzea since I started writing it, right behind the mahi-mahi that I had to end up ordering in another state and cooking at a friend’s place. I spent my weekend searching every Asia grocery within a two-hour drive of my phone, and I could not find it anywhere. It turns out that while Italian parsley is quite common…mitsuba is not.

I ended up having to order it online and having it delivered to my home. It was either doing that or do a day trip down to Los Angeles to try to get my hands on some.

Mitsuba, also known as Japanese parsley, is known for its three leaves and for having a slightly bitter flavor.

Honestly, it was because of the sheer difficulty of obtaining it that it stuck out in my mind so much. I didn’t want to compromise on Cooking Eorzea by leaving this ingredient, even if it really is just garnish, out.

My Cooking Attempt

For my first installment in the Sides section of Cooking Eorzea, here are all the ingredients that I ended up using:

I first sliced up the chicken into bite-sized pieces.

I then removed the tails from the shrimp and cut them in half.

Finally, I quartered the scallops.

Once all the meats were set aside, I sliced up the shiitake mushrooms and thinly sliced the kamaboko.

After setting all of those cut ingredients aside, I made the dashi stock. First, I added water to a pot, added a dashi stock packet to the pot, and then brought it to a boil for three minutes.

Once the timer was up, I pulled the packet out and then poured the dashi stock into a measuring cup.

Setting the dashi stock aside, I placed the cut chicken into a small bowl, measured out sake and soy sauce into it.

I then let the chicken marinade for about 10 minutes.

During the 10 minutes, I cleaned the small pot I made the dashi stock in, and then added water to it, inserted a steamer basket into the pot, and then heated it up.

I then started to make the custard. First, I cracked three eggs and then added the dashi stock to the bowl.

I then added the salt, sake, and soy sauce to the custard. I then whisked it all together inside the bowl. I had to be careful to only whisk it just enough to make sure that the ingredients were blended together, but not so much that the custard had too much air and bubbles in it.

Once it was all blended together, I started to filter the custard mix from pot to bowl and back through a fine-mesh strainer so I could remove as much of the bubbles as possible.

At this point, I started to assemble the chawan-mushi dishes. First, I put a layer of chicken pieces down and then topped it with the shrimp layer.

I then added a layer of scallops on top and then a lawyer of shiitake mushrooms.

Finally, I added a layer of kamaboko on top.

I then poured the liquid custard on top of the multiple layers until it was just barely away from the top of the chawan-mushi cup. I also used a toothpick to pop any bubbles that rose in the liquid custard so that it wouldn’t interfere with the custard setting.

Once the bubbles were all popped, I added the lids to the chawan-mushi cups and then added them into the steamer basket. It turned out I could only fit three into the pot at a time, and so I had to cook the fourth one later on.

After replacing the pot’s lid, I let the whole thing steam cook for 20 minutes.

After the timer was up, I removed the chawan-mushi lids and saw that the custard had set.

I then removed the cups from the steaming basket, and then added a layer of ikura and a stem of mitsuba to each one to finish off the dish!

And here is the final dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea!

The overall dish was incredibly savory, and I was surprised that the custard really worked well with the mixture of chicken and seafood. I couldn’t really taste the soy sauce or the sake, and the ikura definitely reminded me of boba bubbles while I was eating the dish. Unfortunately, the custard didn’t fully cook through, and so it was a bit watery at the end. The fourth cup, the one that I made after these three, I cooked for around 6-7 minutes longer, and that one cooked through.

Overall, it was a very unique and enjoyable dish, and one that I wouldn’t mind making for other people…if I could find mitsuba a little easier again.

Afterword

If I was to make chawan-mushi again, I would definitely let it cook for more than twenty minutes. I had no issues with the custard itself, other than I didn’t let it cook long enough. It was quite enjoyable, and I could see it being a fun side dish for people to enjoy.

This is where I start with the ‘thank yous’…Even if it has been awhile! I want start off by thanking Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on X.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. When I wasn’t spending my recovery playing FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth, I spent a lot of it in Eorzea.

Next Week

Assuming I don’t get injured again, next week’s dish is Thanalan’s Cheese Risotto!

As I am sure you won’t be surprised by…I haven’t made this dish before either, and so it will be a brand-new experience for me to explore!

Please tune in to see how it goes!

Have you made chawan-mushi before?

Have you been to the FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 48: Chawan-Mushi (FINAL FANTASY XIV) appeared first on oprainfall.

You can also buy a membership for next year’s Dragon Con here.

2024 marked my tenth year of in-person Dragon Con events. Even though I’ve been writing about this convention that takes place over Labor Day weekend since I first joined oprainfall in 2015, the first time I attended in-person was in 2013. It was my first real convention ever at the time. And even excluding the 2020’s online-only event, I still find myself with brand new things to attend after a decade of solid attendance.

When I first started to attend Dragon Con 2013, Thursday nights was the night when people started to arrive and there weren’t any panels. In 2024 though? Thursday night is the night for Dragon Con Wrestling. With this year being the twenty-fourth show, Dragon Con Wrestling fills up the Marriott Regency Ballroom to capacity before the show event starts and you get to see all the kayfabe, babyface, and heel cosplay wrestlers enter the squared circle and wrestle. The Hooligans- the biggest, rowdiest fans who all come dressed in matching outfits and cheer and jeer as needed- show those who are new to pro wrestling that it’s okay to cut loose and juts have fun.

While Dragon Con Wrestling may all be a work, it was fantastic to watch all those participants pull off some genuinely amazing moves and fights back to back across the three-hour time block. And at the conclusion of this year’s series of matches, the work became a shoot as the overarching plotline- to prevent Dragon Con Wrestling from falling into the hands of Scott E. Cramton of the Establishment- happened as AJ (one of the founders of DCW) formally stepped away from the event.

Dragon Con 2024 was also the first year that I was ever part of a live album. Raspberry Pie, who I first saw at FreeCon a half-decade ago, announced through an email that they are making a live album at Dragon Con and they invited everyone to come be a part of the record. While Arizona Drive-In did not make the cut, so many other songs did, and I cannot wait to buy the CD when it comes out and hopefully hear myself as part of the crowd on it! It is also worth noticing that they all take the time to say ‘hi’ to anyone who wants to stop by the merch table afterwards.

If being part of a music album wasn’t enough, I attended my first Dragon Con game show too: the Match Game. If you somehow missed seeing the show on the Game Show Network with Jamie Farr as a perpetual guest, then the rules are simple. There are celebrities of various levels of fame on the stage, and two contestants are called up. The host reads a fill-in-the-blank question for one contestant, and the celebrities write their answer on a whiteboard. The contestant then gives their answer, and they see how many celebrities’ answers match the contestant’s answer. The Dragon Con Match Game has clearly been going on for many years, and it was filled with a LOT of fun answers and humor all throughout the entire panel. The best part, though, was that whenever someone won, they would try to take just one prize and then the host would tell them to go take a lot more because he does NOT want to be taking any of the prizes on the table home with him.

There were small moments that I finally also got to enjoy for the first time! Towards the end of Dragon Con, I finally saw DragonConTV (“DCTV”) film a segment live. I was passing through the Marriott, and I saw them interviewing Batman of all people! DragonConTV is the television network that runs 24/7 during the convention that you can watch before/after panels and in your host hotel room. If you don’t want to brave the two-plus hours outside to watch Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, and Elijah Wood (aka ‘Hobbits’) reflect on their careers and lives, you can just turn on the TV in your room and watch it all there. And thanks to the power of Discord, you can even submit questions to be asked during the panel too while watching it on TV! More than just showing off panels, there are fun nerdy music videos, comedy skits, and bumpers that play all throughout Dragon Con too. I have never seen a segment before actually being filmed, and it was really cool to see it happen in person.

Another small moment that I got to experience for the first time, even though I have been going to Dragon Con for ten years, was a marriage proposal. During Firefly Drinking Songs on Friday night (think songs about the show/movie Firefly set to original and non-original tunes), a man took the stage during the set and asked his girlfriend- who made both their costumes- to spend the rest of her life with him. And naturally, she said yes. It’s one of those you-had-to-be-there moments, but it was absolutely unforgettable to see. I’ve met multiple people who have gotten together with their significant other at Dragon Con before, but I have never seen someone take that next step before- much less at a sing-a-long panel!

Finally, Dragon Con ends on Monday. Almost everyone is leaving and going back to their own lives once the Closing Ceremonies panel is wrapped up. I stuck around for another day to see Avril Lavigne perform, and so I wondered around the hotels on Monday afternoon to see how different things looked. As I was walking by the Marriott Regency Ballroom, I peeked in to see 1) windows everywhere and 2) the tech group for Dragon Con had finished their eight-hour loadout and was about to take their ‘family photo’. Naturally, I volunteered to take it for them- and I took a photo for myself, too. I always leave Dragon Con on Monday to either go home or to cover another event such as Nintendo Live 2023: Seattle. Staying behind this year meant that I got to see Dragon Con end for the first time, and I got to see all the hard work that the volunteers put into wrapping up the event even after everyone else has left.

And the thing is- this was just my experience at Dragon Con this year. There is so much to do that I still missed out on and that I wished that I could have made the time to see despite some panels making their appearance year after year after year. Dragon Con is one of those events that you will never feel like “I have seen it all” at. I’ve been going a decade, and I can absolutely attest to that. If you’re looking for something to do over Labor Day weekend in 2025, you should really consider heading down to Atlanta, Georgia, and make time for Dragon Con.

You won’t regret it.

You can buy a membership for next year’s Dragon Con here.

Have you ever been to Dragon Con?

What is a panel that you wish you could see that you haven’t before?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Even After Attending 10 Years, I Am Still Seeing New Things At Dragon Con appeared first on oprainfall.

After attending the debut performance for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour in Los Angeles, I was lucky enough to sit down for an interview with one of the two conductors for the tour, Arnie Roth. In Part Two of this two-part interview, we talk about how setlists are determined for Distant Worlds and FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour, what he is currently listening to, about FINAL FANTASY VII- A Symphonic Reunion, and more.

If you missed Part One, you can read it here.

You can check out my review of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour here.

You can also purchase tickets for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour now.

Finally, you can find out more about AWR Music at their official website, on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and on X.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

OR: Did you pick and choose what music pieces to include in the setlist for the FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour?

AR: No, that was actually picked by the FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth team. [Tetsuya] Nomura was a big part of that, and the entire team. They gave me the line up – the one thing I am doing is shifting some of the score order. Which performance did you hear, the LA?

OR: The debut in LA.

AR: So, that was the first performance. And one thing that I had pointed out to them, even before we started the tour, was ‘wow, we have a very long first half in terms of the balance.’ It’s almost 60 minutes of music in the first half [and] the second half goes much more quickly. And there’s also another dichotomy in that we really had the end of the first half going into Golden Saucer.

We tried in Chicago, just this last Saturday night – we did two concerts. In the second concert, we shifted Bare Your Soul and Welcome to Golden Saucer to open the second half, and then Loveless, just to help with the minutes of music and also, programmatically, it makes sense. And I think we’re probably going to stick with that order. I have some influence in terms of helping with the order decisions, and that kind of thing.

In Distant Worlds, I have a lot more programming autonomy. I have a couple of framework and concepts that we try to stay with in programming, but they allow me to shift all the music scores. I mean, Distant Worlds, we have 160-170 scores right now. And so, you never really have to repeat everything, although there are a couple of classics that we like to show. But with Remake or Rebirth and Chapter Three, when it comes down the road, I think it’ll be very well picked and sculpted by the team.

OR: I was there on a very snowy night in March 2008 for the North American debut of Distant Worlds at the Rosemont Theatre in Chicago. Now for me, it was amazing and unforgettable hearing Distant Worlds from FINAL FANTASY XI Online expansion Chains of Promathia being performed life. What was that night like for you? What were your thoughts after that night was over?

AR: I do remember that fantastic opening night here. But it wasn’t the very first performance of Distant Worlds – the first on was in December 2007 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in Stockholm. And I remember that being, again, because it was the first one, an unbelievable experience. One of the reasons it happened that way was because we had recorded our Distant Worlds I album with that orchestra and we happened to premiere there. Nobuo was there for that one, as well.

I also remember, probably the biggest shocking experience for me, was the very first Dear Friends in 2005 that I did. That was also in Chicago, in February at the Rosemont Theatre – you know, 4,000 people that sold out. And at the time, many fans weren’t sure if there were going to be more – Distant Worlds wasn’t created yet – but if there were going to be more concerts of this. So, there was a worry about that with a lot of fans. It was an absolutely electric moment, and so was the beginning of Distant Worlds.

But they’ve continued to be electric – especially when we play cities that we haven’t in before or that were rarely [visited]. Royal Albert Hall in London is fantastic, Carnegie Hall in New York [City], all the LA concerts are fantastic. But so is Seattle and San Francisco, and so is Berlin. [In] Paris – the French crowd is fantastic. The Italian crowd in Milan and Rome [are] fantastic. And southeast Asia is fantastic too, we want to get back to Australia again. We haven’t been there since 2018 or 2019? We’d like to get back there. We’re working on that for next year.

That was an electric moment, that first Distant Worlds – which other concerts have you seen?

“But thankfully, the series keeps going, right? So, there are new games, and there are some fantastic stuff in XVI that we are finally just now playing and that’s been a lot of fun to do. Everything keeps developing.”

OR: I’ve seen pretty much everything – and I [want] to ask you about FINAL FANTASY VII Symphonic Reunion which happened in June 2019.

AR: That was an unusual one, right?

OR: It was! While it showed the playthough of the entire FINAL FANTASY VII game on PlayStation One, what threw me about it – and I wrote about this – there were 14 live performances, three piano solos, and a lot of pre-recorded music playing. It’s the first and only time I’ve been to a FINAL FANTASY concert that didn’t have a fully live score. Can you talk a bit about that?

AR: Just to point it out – that was a one-time performance. It was conceived of by SQUARE ENIX. They brought me in as conductor. I didn’t produce that, and I didn’t pick the pianist or any of this. They wanted me to conduct those scores. I think they, honestly, know that there needed to be improvements on all of that.

The point of doing that concert was not clear to a lot of the fans, and to call it a concert, as a matter of fact – as a lot of fans pointed out – there was a lot of pre-recorded video on that too. So, it was a little confusing to fans because it was billed as a concert. SQUARE ENIX understands, they read all the feedback and they understand that. I really don’t have any more comments about it, other than it was an assignment that they asked me to conduct. We did that.

I think they were, maybe, trying to introduce – remember, a lot of things for many years were programmed around E3 in LA. I think that was one factor about this as well. ‘What are we going to do for E3 this year?’ or something like that. If I recall, it was alongside E3 or around that time, I could be wrong. I don’t think they’ll do that again.

OR: They did another concert, KINGDOM HEARTS Orchestra -World of Tres- the night before. I reviewed that one as well. It was an interesting event.

AR: That may be more convention-style than concert-style. They were heading that direction for those like-presentations. So, we’ll be working on a lot more projects as well with them going forward.

OR: When we briefly met at FINAL FANTASY VII Orchestra World Tour in Los Angeles, I asked you this – but I want to ask you here again. With Distant Worlds and A New World: Music from FINAL FANTASY– which your son, Eric Roth, conducts – and other various concert series, all of that music is drawn from the mainline numbered FINAL FANTASY entries. There are amazing tracks from sequels, such as Lightning’s Theme – A Distant Glimmer from Lightning Returns: FINAL FANTASY XIII, that would be amazing for an orchestra to perform. Is it a conscious decision to limit the music to only [the] mainline numbers? If so, why?

AR: The answer is very easy. Yes, it is a conscious decision. Yes, I agree with you that there’s lots of other music on the offshoot games. So many of them, way more than the main roman numerals, right? It was a conscious decision simply because every single concert has a limited amount of minutes. If your goal is to represent FINAL FANTASY I through XVI, you’ll already, even if you just did one score from each of those – you’re already at two hours of music.

If you also have a couple of classics that have to be in there: two from FINAL FANTASY VII, two from VIII, two from XIV, or whatever – you have really eaten up your concert right away. It’s really a function of time, not anything else.

We have talked at times about doing some kind of a gala where we could present other things over several days. Maybe at some point in the future, we’re able to do that. But thankfully, the series keeps going, right? So, there are new games, and there are some fantastic stuff in XVI that we are finally just now playing and that’s been a lot of fun to do. Everything keeps developing.

And the other thing is that SQUARE ENIX is allowing me to do more themed Distant Worlds concerts. So, instead of this kind of broad-representing everything in every Distant Worlds concerts, I am able to do a thrust of XIV or XVI or maybe VII-IX-X, or whatever it may be. So, we’re experimenting around with being able to do that kind of thing. It doesn’t mean we’re not performing things from the other games, it just means that there may be a little more concentration.

Now, that worked very well when we had our concert in Carnegie Hall and Seattle with Soken, and we’ll be having more of those concerts. But we’re encouraged by that kind of programming, that that might be another way forward.

OR: Is there any particular piece that you would love to conduct from FINAL FANTASY that you haven’t done so yet? Anything from a spinoff?

AR: You know, that’s a tough question. I don’t think I can give you a specific piece. There are some specific pieces that we haven’t been able to perform very much. That’s one of the reasons that we’ve brought back Dancing Mad – people ask for that all the time. It was programmatically perfect for bringing back at the 20th anniversary of FINAL FANTASY VI, and also, it’s referenced in XIV. So it fit very well in that program, and we’re going to try to do some things like that going forward.

But trying to give you a specific piece that we haven’t done? I don’t have that for you right now. We get suggestions all the time, by the way.

“So, I will never take it for granted that we’re just going to keep going forever and be able to do these [performances] because there can be COVID or any number of things that will stop us in our tracks.”

OR: Your son, Eric Roth, is a conductor in his own right, and he is also conducting multiple stops on the FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour too.

What is it like for you to have him both follow in your footsteps and yet standout beyond them as an accomplished conductor in his own right – including on the A New World: intimate music from FINAL FANTASY series? I did attend [it] in Berkeley, California back in April 2022.

AR: I mean, it’s fantastic. Eric has a bachelor, masters, and PhD in music, music composition, and scoring. He has a wonderful analytical mind for these things. I think early on, it wasn’t necessarily decided that he was going to go into our commercial trust that we’re in.

But, I think once he started doing some of these concerts, he’s absolutely fallen in love with it and he’s embraced bringing in a lot of new scores, which has been really a lot of fun. We get a lot of latitude from what we can do with A New World, and we’re able to bring in a lot more new scores there. With Distant Worlds, we have to go through a larger approval process and there are many teams that we go through with SQUARE ENIX. With A New World, we do have approvals, but we can suggest a lot more and they are allowing us to do a lot more. Eric has had a great time doing that. Yeah, it’s fantastic – it’s really great – that he’s able to do that.

But I’ll tell you: We’re building up so many productions these days, and there are more to come here in the next few years. We probably will be looking at adding another conductor because [of] the amount of stuff going on concurrently – this is the first time, historically, that SQUARE ENIX has allowed us to do [this]. I’m in Japan doing [FINAL FANTASY] VII Rebirth, Eric is doing Rotterdam and Munich and Rome, right?

This is the first time that they’ve allowed the same production to be in two different continents at the same time. Previously, they didn’t allow that. They’re expanding with all that stuff. Now that they’re allowing us to do that, it allows us to plan other types of events like that. So very interesting, moving forward. It’s opening the door to a lot of interesting scheduling and programming.

OR: Who are you currently listening to?

AR: I’m listening to – well, let me preface before I get into that. I’m constantly listening to all the music that I have to deal with in our concerts. Especially go into VII Rebirth – tremendous amount of listening to the mini demo scores and all that we’re sent, along with sending the scores. That takes up a lot of my time.

In terms of casually listening? There’s some great new jazz artists that’ve come out. You know, there’s some wonderful contemporary classical music that I’m listening to. But I will tell you that a famous Chicago symphony musician once said to me: ‘Music is my life, all day long and all night. Every week when I go home, I like some silence.’ *laughs* And the reality is: refreshing one’s ears is a real factor. Listening to other things, other genres, and not the repertoire that we’re working on all the time. But I have to tell you that the ear and the brain are a muscle that has to be exercised as well.

The more that I can get the scores into my head – and I will say also that in VII Rebirth, we have many more medleys that we’ve had in previous productions. And with that is a lot more demanding tempo transitions, sections, and things like that we have to move 100 musicians on the stage into that. And some of these are what we call in the industry ‘scissor cuts’. There is no setup to it, you just go right into the next tempo. So, teaching that, and showing that – again, with the hands – is a big mental exercise and something I work on so that in my limited rehearsal time with them, I can pull them through on all this. It is very important quality – I am spending a lot of time working on these things.

Samara Joy: a beautiful jazz singer – I’ve really enjoyed her work. There’s a whole bunch of singers that I’m enjoying working with. I’ve also enjoyed working with Amanda Achen recently, she is doing a great job. And we’ll do more [with her].

OR: Last question: To those people out there who are thinking about attending DISTANT WORLDS or FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour, or another production put on by AWR Productions but haven’t attended one before, do you have anything that you want to say to them?

AR: Well, there’s a couple of things. One is that we were shocked, when we did the recent FINAL FANTASY XIV/XVI Distant Worlds programs, we had a tremendous amount of people attending who had only gone to XIV Fanfest or that kind of thing and were attending a Distant Worlds concert for the first time. That is very interesting and gratifying to us. That means that we’re bringing in yet more fans, because we have tremendous very loyal Distant Worlds fans who come back for many concerts. That’s one thing.

The other thing is that we tried to keep these concerts extremely fresh – and by that, I mean there are new scores coming all the time. Not only new but bringing back some scores that haven’t been performed in maybe 10 years. Recently, we brought back things like Vamo’alla Flamenco from IX, or as I mentioned – Dancing Mad. And the [Maria and Draco] opera we did in San Francisco, recently. We love bringing these things back. We love doing that. For fans that have not gone to Distant Worlds, I think that they know the community already, they don’t need me to say ‘Talk to the fans who’ve been to Distant Worlds, don’t listen to me trying to explain why you should come.’ I will just say that most people who’ve attended have said that it is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the real diehard, the real core, FINAL FANTASY fans to hear these things live with 100 musicians on stage.

And I don’t take this for granted. I mean, putting these productions together is a very big piece of work each time. A hundred of the top musicians in the world in each city, you really have to kind of work at all the logistics involved. Availability, venue, sound – all of these things are part of it, and the rehearsal schedule. So, I will never take it for granted that we’re just going to keep going forever and be able to do these things because there can be COVID or any number of things that will stop us in our tracks.

I would encourage people: take advantage of it, we’re trying to present these concerts in as many cities as we can that can support it. It’s just not possible to bring it to some of the very small, smaller, population bases – even though we have. We’ll go to Omaha, and we’ll go to some of the smaller cities, but we can’t do it very often with that kind of expense and personnel. But we really try to bring it all over the map in North America and [to] many cities in Europe as well. We’re expanding in southeast Asia; we’ll do more concerts there. And we want to get into Australia and some of the other territories as well.

OR: Thank you!

I want to thank Arnie Roth and AWR Music for taking the time to set up and participate in this interview!

You can (and should!) purchase tickets for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour now.

What music pieces would you like to see in a future Distant Worlds performance?

Are you planning on attending FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post INTERVIEW (Part Two): Conductor Arnie Roth talks FINAL FANTASY Orchestra Setlists, What He’s Currently Listening To, and More appeared first on oprainfall.

After attending the debut performance for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour in Los Angeles, I was lucky enough to sit down for an interview with one of the two conductors for the tour, Arnie Roth. In Part One of this two-part interview, we talk about his background, the role a conductor has in an orchestra and with a video game concert series, and more.

You can check out my review of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour here.

You can also purchase tickets for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour now.

Finally, you can find out more about AWR Music at their official website, on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and on X.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Operation Rainfall: My name is Quentin H. with Operation Rainfall, and you are?

Arnie Roth: Arnie Roth – I am the producer, conductor, and music director of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour. I also did [FINAL FANTASY VII] Remake [Orchestra World Tour], producer and conductor of Distant Worlds for many, many years, NieR – another video game series – and several others. But that’s me!

OR: You said in an interview with GameCloud back in January 2016 that you studied the violin when you were eight, and that became your focus when you received your Bachelor and Master of Music degrees at Northwestern University before you gradually shifted into a role of producer, conductor, and composer/arranger. And I think this started with the video game Halo where you were a musical arranger alongside actually performing the violin on the score in 2001, and as a composer/conductor on the movie Barbie as Rapunzel in 2002.

What made you want to go from only playing music on the violin to being more involved with the whole creative process? It is a pretty big step, after all.

AR: You have to actually go back and look – I commend you on the history. But you have to go back and look at more, because that will inform the decision a little bit. Yes, I was a violinist for…I don’t know how many years…Fifty years? Or more? But the point is that as I was doing more and more national television and radio recording work, album recording, and things like that – I was doing a big volume of writing arrangements for the various artists and products as well.

As I would do more writing, I would be asked by the actual artists themselves to come out to do the concerts live when they performed these new arrangements. So, I was doing more and more conducting and writing and arranging. Eventually, some artists started asking me to produce entire concerts and shows for them. Diana Ross, Peter Cetera, Jewel, Charlotte Church, a whole bunch of artists over the years.

And that led to my being appointed the music director and conductor of Chicagoland Pops Orchestra here in Chicago. That orchestra was in existence for a good number of years. While it was in existence, we were doing research about new products and new entertainment options because I would be creating the subscription series every year – three or four artists, that kind of thing, with the orchestra.

I decided after researching about what Japan was doing with video game concerts in the late 1990s and early 2000s to offer to do Dear Friends: Music from FINAL FANTASY. And that was actually the start of all the video game production in terms of AWR producing concerts.

Yes, you’re correct: I did, as a violinist and an arranger, work on Halo. Because it happened that the two composers, Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori, very close friends of mine – they were working here in Chicago, and we were working on many other projects. It just happened that they were working on Halo, and I helped them with some orchestra arrangements on that.

“And I can stretch these things with particular poignant moments with Aerith or an exciting moment with a battle medley. We can go further with that live in the concert. We can do bigger hits on some of the same points, different than what they saw in the game – yet preserving the performance as very much the same as they are dealing with in the game.

So yes, we’re trying to stay as close to the performance template as they heard in the game, but we make the music breathe alive.”

OR: Did you have a background in playing video games before this?

AR: Not really before that, only just casually. Not with the intent of it ever becoming a concert situation. Which is interesting in and of itself – I mean, [that] my life went that direction. I think you need to look again at a wider net, if you look at what orchestras are doing these days. There’s an awful lot of movies with live orchestras happening. This never happened 15, 20 years ago. That started happening almost concurrently when we were starting to introduce video game concerts. I think there is kind of a broadening of all these things. At the very beginning, it was something like ‘is that really going to be a ticket-selling entertainment item?’ Many orchestras and presenters didn’t believe that [it would be] at the beginning. So, it’s taken a good number of years – now it’s quite in-demand – and we’re going all over the place, all over the world, with these things. But it’s been an interesting road.

OR: Did you see the movie Tár?

AR: I did.

OR: During the [movie’s] opening, Lydia Tár talks in an interview about how time is the essential piece of interpretation, and how her left hand shapes the music while her right hand marks time and moves it forward and stops it as she wishes.

In the lead up to the ending where she is conducting a Monster Hunter: World orchestra performance, the film takes pains to make it look like she has no ability to interpret that game’s score beyond what is on the paper and what the composer thinks about it.

How true is this? Are you merely a human metronome through and through at a video game concert? Or do you have the space to interpret the music score of composers like Nobuo Uematsu, Masayoshi Soken, Yoko Shimomura, and Masashi Hamauzu for yourself to an orchestra and for the public?

AR: There’s several parts to that question.

From the movie Tár, and I only saw it once – but at the end of it, where she was sayin the basic concept that you’ve giving the orchestra the basic timeframe work with your right hand, mostly – those that are right-handed – and with your left, you’re doing some separate cuing and shaping. You’re doing that with your right hand as well. There is a lot that can be done with the two hands. There’s a lot you can do with the two hands with shaping music.

Now, you have to look at what we do in the various productions. There are productions where we need to stay very faithfully with the pre-lay and the tempo met[ronome]. Sometimes that’s met with a click track that’s fed to some of the musicians in the orchestra and the conductor. Sometimes the entire orchestra – I can give you examples of that kind of thing.

I am very fortunate that for Distant Worlds, they are allowing me – and this is very much because of the way we started this with Nobuo Uematsu – but they [SQUARE ENIX] are allowing me and AWR to be more free to conduct this music without a click track. It’s my duty to get close to the way that all the fans have heard it in the game, of course, and Distant Worlds was kind of a unique situation. In Distant Worlds, we have each one of the scores represent one song or one sequence from a specific game. And obviously, in Distant Worlds, we’re trying to represent the entire FINAL FANTASY series as much as we can.

So, that’s challenging in and of itself. But the idea of having freedom to be able to stretch a cadence a little longer, to be able to push a tempo a little faster – we use synchronizing techniques. Obviously, it’s not using a click track with Distant Worlds, for the most part. But there are visuals, there are various things that I can watch on the conductor video [so] that I know the arrival point is happening [for it]. And knowing the music really well, I am able to accelerate to get to that arrival point – or if we’re ahead, I’m able to pull it back a little bit.

The good news is that all of these things are not designed by SQUARE ENIX to be what we call ‘hard sync.’ To give you an example of ‘hard synchronization:’ if the rabbit hits the wall, and the cymbal crashes five seconds later, even a five-year old knows that there is a problem, that the sync isn’t working. So, we never have that kind of thing like a cartoon – slam into a wall, everything has to stop or crash, right? We have battle scenes, of course. It’s mostly gameplay cuts and things like that. So, that gives us more flexibility in terms of our sync and how tightly we have to be in sync with that.

Now FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth – we are staying very tightly in sync with the video as much as possible. But still, we’re staying in the same template of not using a click track for the entire orchestra. As soon as you do that, if you put all the musicians on stage with a click track, they start tuning out some of their own performance. They’re focused in on the metronome that’s going on in their ear, basically. And we really prefer for the orchestra to work with me, musically, if the music can breathe.

You also have to look at this from a video game standpoint. These players, of listening to the same recording of the same music with the same dynamic progression and the same tempo every time they play the game. For the first time they come to the concert, and all the sudden they can see the full dynamic range, really, pianissimo and fortissimo off the top – because in the game, they don’t want the players to have to reach for the volume, obviously, reaching to move it up and down all the time. So, it’s very compressed, right? Everything kind of meets in the middle. So, we can do that. That’s another function of what the live concert can do.

And I can stretch these things with particular poignant moments with Aerith or an exciting moment with a battle medley. We can go further with that live in the concert. We can do bigger hits on some of the same points, different than what they saw in the game – yet preserving the performance as very much the same as they are dealing with in the game.

So yes, we’re trying to stay as close to the performance template as they heard in the game, but we make the music breathe alive.

“You’re pointing out…some of the reasons and directions that a conductor can have on the performance and the very reason that we’re not using a metronome or a click track.

It’s for that reason I can shape that Aerith’s Theme melody with the pianist. I can ask where they might put the emphasis on which note to make it a little more poignant or make a little more finality to the cadence of that melody. There are all these little things that I can do with rehearsal.”

OR: I want to follow up on that. How do you see your relationship with the orchestra? I know that Andris Nelsons, who is the music director at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, believes that the composer is the driving force, the conductor encourages and leads the performers, and there is a hierarchy there. How do you see your role with them?

AR: The conductor is the leader. The orchestra doesn’t start, doesn’t pause, doesn’t take a tempo for any of this without the conductor showing them. And he or she is also the leader in terms of making the musical interpretation and statement. You can set up a click track and a metronome, and just have them play the notes. And certainly, all the greatest orchestras have played many of these pieces, classic scores – you know: Brahms, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Ravel – they can play this, that isn’t the issue. The notes are there. The issue is trying to make a musical statement, and pulling it back, arriving at a certain point, maybe you want to accent something new in the rhythm to push a particular structural point you’re trying to show people.

All of these things have to be thought about by the conductor in advance of any rehearsing. And I’ll say another thing: musicians are very particular about rehearsal technique. It’s critically important that you not waste their time or any rehearsal time. That you really have a plan mapped out, that you make very good use of all the precious seconds and minutes you have. For many of these things – because we don’t have that many rehearsals – they may be fabulous musicians, but you really have to have a plan heading into this of how much time can I spend on this score, how much can I move forward. How much I’m able to show them in the concert – and I don’t have to go over this again in the rehearsal. I can save some of the gestures for later.

I will tell you that when I first started doing these, you filled up the experience of how to do this over many years. This isn’t something you learn immediately. And that’s one of the issues for conductors: There’s not as much opportunity for new conductors and young conductors to get out there and practice rehearsal technique. That’s really critically important.

OR: To add on to that: Looking at the FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour schedule: on August 31st and September 1st, you conduct the Osaka Symphony Orchestra, on September 7th and 8th, you conduct the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in Kanagawa, and then on September 13th, you conduct the Metropolitan Festival Orchestra and Singapore Choir in Singapore. You’re working with all of these orchestras in a very compressed time [window] as a guest conductor because you’re not their full-time conductor.

AR: Correct.

OR: Taking Aerith’s Theme in the performance’s second half as an example: you can easily explain the technical language of the score. For example, asking your pianist to play a D Major triad in inversion followed by a first inversion A minor triad, all of these broken chords in common time – it is the famous six-note non-functional harmony everyone recognizes.

But how do you get across the emotional and associative language of that music’s heart with the game, its story, and its characters in that narrow of a time window with these different orchestras you’re popping in with? After all, technicality alone doesn’t show the soul of a musical piece.

AR: You’re pointing out by that question some of the reasons and directions that a conductor can have on the performance and the very reason that we’re not using a metronome or a click track. It’s for that reason I can shape that Aerith’s Theme melody with the pianist. I can ask where they might put the emphasis on which note to make it a little more poignant or make a little more finality to the cadence of that melody. There are all these little things that I can do with rehearsal. Every one of these three that you just mentioned – Osaka, Tokyo Philharmonic, Metropolitan Festival – and by the way, this next weekend, I’m going to Forth Worth for the Fort Worth Symphony – I’ve worked with every single one of those orchestras before in the past. So, although I am a featured guest conductor, these are all familiar orchestra who’ve worked with me. I’ve worked with them many times, and I have no problems with them.

So, I’ve worked with all of them before, so it won’t be a big surprise to them or to me to work together. Not only that, but when you mention something like Aerith’s Theme, this is something we would have played in Distant Worlds concerts as well. So, they have some experience with that. We’ve actually gotten to an age with video game music – particularly classic ones like Aerith’s Theme, One-Winged Angel, To Zanarkand – for many of these orchestras have played these things with me before. So, there is some knowledge of what I’m going to do with them.

With FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth – there’s a lot of big surprises in there for them. Even though a lot of it is based on things, you have this huge battle theme from FINAL FANTASY VII, you have this really difficult J-E-N-O-V-A battle epic – lots of very difficult things. You also have the very fun Suzuki scores that we are doing: Bare Your Soul and Queen’s Blood, the card game, is fantastic. And by the way: [Queen’s Blood is] very difficult for the orchestra as well. It’s a very fast tempo thing. And in this concert, the orchestra’s being asked to do many different styles.

We have a big band in Queens Blood, you have a grand parade in Rufus’ Welcome Ceremony, you have all this battle music, and then of course, you have this classic, poignant music like Aerith’s Theme. I would say more than Remake, we have many more styles in this one that an orchestra has to be able to handle well.

OR: One of the biggest surprises for me at the FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour was that No Promises to Keep was presented as an instrumental, and that in the game itself, it is a vocal song.

Why go that route in presenting that score instead of having a guest vocalist, assuming Loren Allred wasn’t available, [to] perform it at different stops? To add onto that – how did you go about adapting a vocal piece to become an instrumental?

AR: You actually heard the adaptation of the vocal piece as an instrumental. It’s really not my decision whether to use a vocalist or not. [SQUARE ENIX] made a decision that if we were going to present this as a vocal, we had to have Loren Allred. She wasn’t available for the entire tour, which is no surprise. We were very fortunate to get her to be available for the New York performance, and that’s the only one she’s doing. But the reality is that SQUARE ENIX made the decision that we would do it as an instrumental.

I understand the frustration with that, and we could have hired another vocalist to do it. They didn’t want to substitute with somebody who wasn’t in the game. I will tell you that it’s a challenge for me, in that one of the ways that you can do that is give the first violins the basic vocal melody for most of it and then it goes to some other instruments throughout the arrangement. That’s the easy way to replace the vocal. What’s difficult for me, speaking of timing here, is trying to match the tempo exactly with Aerith on screen singing this thing and her lips literally on the same rhythm as we’re doing. That one is kind of tough to do with the orchestra. You can be a fraction of a second off, but I think everyone understands that it is an instrumental, it’s not a vocal singing that, so. But other than that, I think it works, but clearly everyone loves that song, which is interesting to me.

You know Nobuo is famous for that kind of song – it’s his classic M.O. He’s done a lot of those pop classic-kind of songs. You think of Kiss Me Goodbye, you think of Eyes On Me – they are all in that ‘mold’ of Western-classic song-style. A different one is like Suteki De Ne, from [FINAL FANTASY] X, which is quite different. We love that. Or the anthem from FINAL FANTASY XIV, Answers, very different, a beautiful piece. We love all the different songs that are involved. We just actually worked with Amanda Achen doing a lot of the XIV songs that Soken has written, and she’ll be doing more work with us as well.

And that wraps up Part One of our interview!

Please return on Friday for Part Two where we talk a bit more about the setlists for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour and Distant Worlds, about the one-off FINAL FANTASY VII Symphonic Reunion concert in 2019, and more!

Tickets for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour are on sale now.

Have you attended FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour? 

If so, what do you think of it?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post INTERVIEW (Part One): Conductor Arnie Roth discusses FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour, Conducting, and More appeared first on oprainfall.

If you’re a FINAL FANTASY XIV Online fan, then Eorzea Café is a must-visit stop in Akihabara. You can check out the latest menus online here and make reservations for the Akihabara location here.

If you want to see a spoiler-filled review, then jump to the next paragraph below the photo.

I went to the Akihabara Eorzea Café location in July 2024 as part of my recent trip to Japan, and I booked my reservation 30 days beforehand on the Eorzea Café website. Unlike my prior visit in 2015 which required me to visit a Lawson’s store in Tokyo and navigate a Japanese-only menu to make a reservation (or just show up and hope for a free time slot), this time around the reservation was effortless to make and book in English through Table Check. After clicking through about if I had any food allergies and if I wanted to eat in the café or in an un-themed karaoke room, I was all set for my lunch time seating.

Finding Eorzea Café was fairly easy in Akihabara. The restaurant is just a few minutes’ walk away from the Akihabara metro station, and they smartly have large signs outside that let you know where to enter at and what floor to go to.

When you go up to the correct floor, you’re greeted by a reception area that also has a LOT of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online merchandise for sell that I looked through after checking in for my visit. As you can tell from the pictures, everything there is also available on the different SQUARE ENIX stores. The highlight for me was that it was nice to finally get to smell the different room diffuser scents in person. My favorite? Sharlayan. There is also a spot for taking photos with small signs to hold up and a place where you can write and post small paper notes for your fellow adventurers.

When the reservation started, we were escorted into the Eorzea Café itself. It is a decent sized room with a bar in one corner, TV screens that show game clips on a wall, and tables smartly arranged in the room. Relic weapons from A Realm Reborn adorn the walls (and they were there during my 2015 visit in fact!), and there are copies of the High-Precision Art prints on the walls for sale too. The middle of the restaurant shows off the different Primals and Jobs as stone coasters behind glass, some life-sized Moogle statutes, a FINAL FANTASY XIV Online themed-PC that you can buy, and more. Finally, there is FINAL FANTASY XIV Online music playing nonstop throughout that included everything from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker.

Overall, you could tell that a lot of heart and charm went into designing the Eorzea Café room itself, and it felt genuinely charming. While no one said it outright, this café location is clearly meant to take place in Gridania based upon the backwall design, and it felt like I was really stepping into a place unabashedly meant for FINAL FANTASY XIV Online fans. I was caught off guard by Flow playing midway through my visit, and I found myself catching more small cute details everywhere I looked. All that said, despite being there during the launch of the new expansion, I was a little surprised to not hear any music from Dawntrail despite the restaurant celebrating the expansion’s release.

Photos by author.

When I first sat down at the table, I was given a slip of paper to select my cover-charge included drink and coaster pair. The drink list included one for each job (including Viper and Pictomancer!), a set of drinks themed after the Scions, and a special Dawntrail beverage. There was also your standard sodas and alcohol options. You can also select coasters from the different jobs and Scions.

After placing that paper order, I leafed through the menu. Instead of physical menus like in 2015, it all now takes place on a tablet. The menu had an English language option, and it was easy to navigate through and order from. There are a lot of different drink, food, and dessert options to pick from, and you’re welcome to order as much as you want. There was also staff present who can speak decent English, though it was by no means universal among everyone who was working there.

July 2024 Menu. (Photos by author).

About 10 minutes after we were all seated, what I can only describe as a hypeman took the microphone and held a Cactpot drawing in Japanese after much excitement. Each seat has a number attached to it, and three numbers were drawn. Third prize gets one of a set of mini-tin badges, second place gets a Cactpot-themed mat, and first place gets a HoneyToast dessert. We won the second-place prize, and therefore got the placemat! Additionally, we also got a Dawntrail-themed placemat for attending the café. It was quite cute, to be honest.

While looking through the drink selections, I was struck by how much Eorzea Café clearly focuses on sweetness over anything else. I did not see any options for a spicy, bold flavoring or even a sour/tart focused-drink. Instead, all of the drinks have some type of fruit-based syrup or fruity involvement in them. I am also going to point out here that with each additional order item, we were given an opportunity to select a random sleeved coaster out of a basket.

In celebration of Dawntrail, there were a Golden Passion Soda and a Dawntrail parfait for sale. There is also a Monthly Drink Special based off of the Twelve going on, and I was there in time for Byregot, the Builder’s drink option. Between the two of us, we ordered the Byregot drink, both Dawntrail beverages, and the Pictomancer drink. We considered ordering the Viper beverage, but the three drinks and the parfait was enough sweetness already.

The Pictomancer drink came with three syrups to squeeze into the drink: sakura syrup, bulgar syrup, and passionfruit syrup. The syrups are clearly meant to invoke the Pictomancer painting elements, and the menu encourages you to make your own ‘masterpiece’ by squeezing them into the drink that is a purple haze syrup. I did as instructed before drinking it. I was…not impressed. The drink tasted like a mish-mash of cold super-sweet syrups, and I could not pick out any particular flavor from the four syrups that were now mixed together. That is unfortunate, as I loved the idea behind the drink, but I would never order it again.

The second drink we tried was the Byregot, the Builder beverage. This came with the same purple haze syrup as the Pictomancer, but this time it also had an energy soda and some candy to be added into it on the side. This was surprisingly good. The energy soda was citrusy, and it blended well with the purple haze syrup to add that right amount of sweetness. The candy ‘popped’ in my mouth as I drank, but it did not overpower anything else. There was no taurine bitterness like you’d expect from an energy drink, and I did not feel a ‘jolt’ of energy from the soda itself, which makes me wonder exactly what kind of energy drink they included in it.

Finally, there are the two Dawntrail drinks. The Golden Passion Soda has blue lychee and passion fruit syrups, soda water, champagne gold jelly, and a slice of lemon. This actually was my favorite soda overall. The blue lychee and passionfruit both clearly came through, and the soda helped to cut through the flavors and prevent it from being a sweet mish-mash like the Pictomancer drink. The champagne gold jelly came in small chunks that I kept sucking up through the straw that reminded me more of boba than anything else. Finally, the lemon added just the right amount of citrus flavoring to off balance everything else. I drank most of this in a few moments, realizing what I was doing, and then offered the rest to my partner.

The Dawntrail parfait is not a drink despite being listed in that section. It comes with champagne gold jelly, custard whip, mango fruit, sponge cake, orange sauce, vanilla ice cream, orange slices, white chocolate, French parsley, and a wafer. This parfait was not just ‘good’ in comparison to everything else, but a genuinely good dessert dish in its own right. The sponge cake mixed with the gold jelly, mango, vanilla ice cream, and orange sauce to create something that reminded me exactly of a breaded dreamsicle. It was sweet and creamy, and there was just the right balance of everything for the parfait. That said, the white chocolate and parsley was quite superfluous, and it did not add anything to the overall parfait.

As for food, I ordered the Adventurer’s Taco in honor of G’raha Tia, and my partner ordered the Mabimabi Fish and Chips. Both foods arrived fairly promptly, and we dug in. Unfortunately, the food was the worst part of the entire experience, despite both being a filling meal portion.

The Adventurer’s Taco is a single, plate-sized taco, and was served to me cold. It came with lettuce, taco meat, cheese, salsa, red onion slices, and tortilla chips inside of a flour tortilla. As I ate it with a knife/fork set, I found myself thinking that there was no seasoning added to the taco meat whatsoever. Serving this dish cold was also a baffling decision, as it did not help to cohesively blend the flavors together. Instead, I could taste each food ingredient on its own even while being eaten together. It did not taste bad, don’t get me wrong, it just was extremely bland and mostly flavorless.

The Mabimabi Fish and Chips didn’t fare much better. The chips (‘french fries’, really) were regular cut and crispy, but they tasted unsalted and unseasoned. The fish did taste like fish, but they were fairly lightly battered without any seasoning added to them. The sauces (tonkatsu, tartar, and ketchup) included with them were fairly unremarkable as well. That said, it was a filling meal portion for this dish as well.

Despite my partner’s initial reservations on if we would be able to really spend an hour-and-a-half there, we did. Because we had ordered the parfait and split it, we did not order any additional dessert. Instead, we just hung out and chatted while enjoying the music and decorations. When time was up, we filed out into a line and paid. The checkout process was unremarkably smooth, and while they had a stamp rally going on at the time, we definitely did not order anywhere near enough to warrant us winning anything from it.

Ultimately, I am giving this place a four out of five stars. That is odd, considering the quality of the food at…well…a restaurant. For me, the ultimate question was: Is Eorzea Café worth spending your time at when you’re visiting Japan? For fans of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, the answer is yes. The process of getting a reservation is simple with multiple time slots during the day, it is simple to get to the café location, and it is painless to order from even if you don’t speak Japanese. The theming is incredibly on point too, and I loved being immersed in a place that is tied to a video game that I adore so much. I just wish the food itself was better, unfortunately. I am guessing this is meant to make sure the place appeals to as many people as possible by making the palette as simple as possible. All that said: my trip to Eorzea Café was easily slotted into my overall time in Akihabara as our lunch meal, and I am personally glad that I did so.

Review Score
Overall

Have you been to Eorzea Café? What do you think of the food and drink selection there?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post REVIEW (7/2024): Eorzea Café in Akihabara is a Gorgeously Themed FINAL FANTASY XIV Restaurant appeared first on oprainfall.

Flame Fatales 2024, hosted by Frame Fatales, is running from August 18, 2024, to August 25, 2024, on Twitch and you can check out the upcoming runs here.

You can also donate to the Malala Fund, this event’s charity, here.

It is Tuesday night. I have laundry to do, an interview to work on transcribing from FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour, and yet I cannot tear myself away from watching as much Flame Fatales as possible on Twitch while they raise money for Malala Fund. If you’re not familiar with Flame Fatales, then what you need to know is this is one of two events put on every year by Frame Fatales: a community of women and femmes who love speedrunning video games, raising money for charity, and gaming in general. Frame Fatales welcome cisgender, trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming individuals, and all you have to do is DM their Instagram account or email them to join.

I’ve been catching Flame Fatales (and Frost Fatales, their wintertime event) since 2019, and I always find myself setting aside everything else I have to do that week to see as much as possible of it. While Flame Fatales does come under the larger GamesDoneQuick (for which I covered AGDQ 2020 in person) umbrella, these Fatales events feel like a bunch of friends got together, decided to do some genuine good in the world, and host some of the best speedrunners in the world while occasionally letting absolute chaos reign inside the studio in the process. It’s like the best possible real-life version of Kidsongs.

All of the speedrunners, donation hosts, commentators (or ‘couch’), and volunteers for Flame Fatales come from the people the Frame Fatales community represents. And I wasn’t joking about the high quality of the runs. If you’ve got 12 minutes, check out this run from Tuesday night by Zoreowo, as they play through the Valve-classic Portal BACKWARDS with dizzying speed and skill and while also doing their own commentary alongside their couch:

You cannot watch that run and tell me that it wouldn’t fit right in on the Awesome/Summer Games Done Quick stage. I caught it live Tuesday night, and I just couldn’t look away. And you know what? Every single run, no matter the title or genre, is like that.

In between the runs (which you can check out the whole week’s schedule for here), there are the in-studio antics. Every morning, Flame Fatales opens up with the latest installment of Screen Savers – a speedrunner-centric take of The Office, with the slogan “your time matters!” – plays. This scripted serial skit is earnest in its humor while it also does not take itself too seriously. Whether it’s Swiftalu’s joyous obsession with cats, Kungfufruitcup’s grizzled “I’ve been working here too long” attitude, or Rubiehart’s hilarious take on being a boss, these morning skits are simply fun to watch and really set the Frame Fatales events apart from the larger AGDQ and SGDQ events as a scrappy, indie event all of their own. This sense of fun persists all throughout the day during The Chomp (where they recap the day before and talk about the upcoming day’s runs), the prize segments (anytime Corvimae appears, I know that I am guaranteed to be falling over laughing), or the random other studio segments and interviews that are occasionally interspersed in.

For all this crazy fun and high-end speedrunning, Frame Fatales successfully demands to be taken seriously as they raise money for charity. This year’s Flame Fatales charity is the Malala Fund, an international, non-profit that advocates for girls’ education. You can (and should!) read more about them on their official website, but the Malala Fund invests money in everything from supporting Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education for young women in Pakistan to creating safe learning spaces for girls in northern Nigeria. And this year, Frame Fatales got the Malala, the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner who co-founded Malala Fund alongside her father, to sit down for an interview with frozenflygone to open the event up:

Take the time to watch that interview and the questions frozenflygone asks, as you won’t regret it.

As of me writing this article, Flame Fatales has raised $38,542 USD for the Malala Fund so far. That’s a lot of money that will do a lot of good in this world. And you know what? Flame Fatales is not even half-over yet.

There are still runs for Sonic CD Restored (run by FawkesRocks), Sonic Origins (SnowballSMB), and Sonic R (Risuruuu) today. If you’re free tonight, then there is a bonus game for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (goodgortho) and an expert guitar showcase in Rock Band 3 (dijonketchup) to watch. And as we head into the weekend, you can catch runs of a Fresh Hops kazio run by frozenflygone, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (Master Collection) by Kialee, and Super Mario Odyssey by CheeseJay to close the event out. The run that I am personally looking forward to the most is to see Corvimae run Pokémon Alpha Sapphire with Sanjan and Swiftalu on the couch on Thursday afternoon. This is because I know that will be a blast to watch as these three riff off of each other (especially since Corvimae and Swiftalu have been incredibly funny and entertaining when on camera together/separately in the past) while also showing off all of three’s deep knowledge of the Pokémon franchise and speedrun strategies.

In other words, there is literally something for everyone to watch during Flame Fatales. And if donating for women’s education is not a good enough reason to watch, then how about possibly winning some awesome prizes?

Every day of Flame Fatales, there are various prizes that you can win for donating. For a minimum donation of $5, you can be entered to win something incredibly cool like a Sleepy Kirby Perler (donated by gretaicevixen) on Day four. On Day three, a minimum donation of $50 earns you an entry to win a papercrafted doghouse from Silent Hill by Sky Burkson. And if you donate $200 cumulatively over the entire Flame Fatales event, you can win a bundle of Fire Emblem’s Edelgard Axe, a Nintendo Switch, and a copy of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, all donated by Cute Monster Props. Just look at the axe you can win:

If you tune into Awesome Games Done Quick and Summer Games Done Quick, then you should definitely take the time and catch a run or two (or three!) of Flame Fatales. And you should definitely donate some money to the Malala Fund through the GDQ website and go buy some of the official event merch through The Yetee, who donates a portion of the merchandise’s proceeds to the Malala Fund as well. When you donate, be sure to select an incentive. These incentives do everything from make the speedrun harder for a particular game to naming a character or even picking which ending to achieve. They are a fun way to influence the event itself, and they give minigoals throughout for donators to watch.

The event runs from 12:30 PM Eastern to roughly 12:30 AM Eastern every day through Saturday night, and they replay most of the day’s events overnight as well. And any runs you miss are put up fairly quickly on the GamesDoneQuick YouTube channel.

If you’ve made it this far, and you’re somehow STILL not convinced that Frame Fatales deserves your time and your charity dollars, then let me present you with this run of Waluigi’s Taco Stand from Frozen Fatales 2023’s event.

While Char_bunny and jenneticist were racing to see who could complete the game first, there was simultaneously a donation bid war going to determine what ingredients (ranging from eyeballs to bully horns and hot sauce) the two runners were then going to build their tacos with live on camera to eat afterwards. Oh, and they are both dressed like Waluigi in the ROM-hack game because a pre-run donation incentive was met. And finally, as you watch this, just keep in mind that Char_bunny does not like spicy food. I cannot think of anything that so perfectly encapsulates the humor, friendship, craziness, and quality speedrunning that Frame Fatales puts into every single one of their events than this video below:

Take the time to tune in during the rest of this week to Flame Fatales. And go donate to the Malala Fund while you’re at it. You won’t regret it. Trust me.

Flame Fatales 2024, hosted by Frame Fatales, is running from August 18, 2024, to August 24, 2024, on Twitch and you can check out the upcoming runs here.

What is your favorite run from Flame Fatales 2024? What are you looking forward to seeing?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Flame Fatales 2024 Is A Fun And Amazing Must-Watch Speedrun Event appeared first on oprainfall.

Tickets for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour are on sale now.

If you’re reading this review trying to decide whether to go to see FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour, then the answer is ‘Yes’. All the new music you love will be in it, and it is all performed amazingly by the ShinRa Orchestra and ShinRa Chorus.

Surprisingly, you also do not need to have played FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth in order to enjoy this concert. The cutscenes paired alongside the music from FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour very, very loosely retell the plot of the game but without any more spoilers in context than you would get from watching the game’s pre-launch trailers.

Finally, the concert is around two hours long with a 20-ish minute intermission after the first hour or so, and it was all quite tightly paced together.

If you want a more detailed review, jump below the following picture to see on.

Review Score
Overall

Spoilers Start Here

I attended the world premiere of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and I really loved what I saw and heard as this tightly timed concert very loosely follows the plot of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth from start to finish over just a bit more than two hours. It opens up with music playing over the game’s prologue, and it ultimately finishes pre-encore with the ending fights of the game. All of the in-game chapters in between – the Grasslands, Costa Del Sol, Gongaga, Golden Saucer, and more – are very much represented here both on screen and in music.

What really surprised me though was how the music was arranged, as around a fourth of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour was performed as part of one medley or another. It would often seem that we were spending far too short a period of time with one piece or another before it would seamlessly shift into something else. For a nearly 20-minute segment of the performance, all of the field region pieces, which included Grasslands, Hollow Skies, Junon Region, With Heavy Heart, Mt. Corel, South Corel, Jungles of Gongaga, Cosmo Canyon Region, and Nibel Region, were filed down to around two minutes each and played one after another more or less seamlessly.

Thankfully, the majority of the pieces, such as Galian Beast and Queen’s Blood, were played in full. As a Queen’s Blood fanatic, I thought the live ShinRa Orchestra pulled it off perfectly, even though the deck in the videos that accompanied it was maddeningly simple considering the wide variety of cards and strategies available for people to select and play with. It was also a lot of fun to see the Grand Parade mini-game played in full with all the correct button presses during Rufus’ Welcoming Ceremony, and I could actually watch the parade happen for once instead of trying to keep time with what buttons I am supposed to hit next on the PlayStation 5 controller.

The ShinRa Orchestra played all of this music masterfully, and it was almost indistinguishable from the music heard in FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth. This is a truly professional orchestra, and one that knew we wanted to hear the music we fell in love with in the game. I was sitting in the second row from the front, and all the different sections worked beautifully in harmony together, as conducted by the revered Arnie Roth, without overpowering each other. Despite what Mr. Roth said was a compressed rehearsal schedule, they played all of the music like seasoned professionals and there was a lot of heart to it all. I do want to especially point out the horns section during Welcome to the Golden Saucer: they really elevated themselves above and beyond everyone else present.

Surprisingly, the only thing that outshined the ShinRa Orchestra was the ShinRa Chorus. I have attended concerts for many years now, and this was probably my favorite chorus so far. The moment I was most eager to hear in person, the music from the Gongaga Jungle, had the perfect amount of haunting vocals present, and I honestly would have believed it was faked if I didn’t seen the people singing firsthand. And this was not a one-off situation, either. Whether Loveless Symphonic Suite- Gift of the Goddess or Sephiroth Reborn Symphony was being performed, the ShinRa Chorus was crisp, easily heard, and blended so well together they overshadowed everything else in a positive way.

Towards the top of this review, I talked about how FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour does not spoil the plot of the game beyond what you would see in the pre-release trailers. And this is quite true. While you will undoubtedly recognize the different areas of the game if you’ve only seen the trailers and maybe played FINAL FANTASY VII when it came out for the PlayStation One, you will not be spoiled on this new game’s story in a significant way. In fact, the heavy story beats from the last fourth of the game, including the moment from the apex of the story that I most wanted to see, is not present at all. If you’ve played FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth, then you will know what I am talking about content-wise.

For me, this…was surprising. A lot of the biggest, heartfelt moments in FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth come from this absent content. To see so little of those big emotional story beats from the last part of the game, other than perhaps a little bit in the medley of A Portentous Sky and End of the World and in the encore, surprised me. I was fully expecting to cry during this concert from the one part of the game that made me gasp and do so, and I was surprised that didn’t happen. (And yes, I am being purposefully vague, but you know what I’m talking about if you’ve played the game.)

FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour ultimately made me feel like SQUARE ENIX wanted to err on the side of caution to not fully spoil the game for people who either haven’t played it or haven’t finished it yet. Even of the new content FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth plot-heavy cinematics present, it felt definitely like it was made up of clips that you wouldn’t quite grasp without surrounding context. Considering that other SQUARE ENIX concerts previously did not shy away from indulging in spoilers to great effect, it makes that choice here all the more baffling for me. After all, if you’re coming to a video game concert, you assume that you’re going to be spoiled on the full game.

One other, minor, issue, I had with the cutscenes was that it felt like some of them didn’t know quite where to end and so more or less just cut themselves off. Without spoiling everything, I was surprised that Towards Mt. Nibel and Main Theme of FINAL FANTASY VII- Battle Edit ended the way they did on a slightly weird note. That said, there are others, like Galian Beast or Cosmo Canyon- Sanctum of Planetology, that ended perfectly in a fully satisfying way cinematically.

Finally, one other issue I had with the concert was the performance of No Promises to Keep- Loveless Version. To my great surprise, it was presented as only an instrumental. While the strings section was clearly intended to replace Loren Allred’s voice in the performance, I think they struggled to do so here. This was an especially jarring choice since they played the full game cinematic against it where the song is in fact vocally performed. While I understand that Ms. Allred can’t come along for a full worldwide tour, I was surprised they didn’t have a guest vocalist to fill in.

Now, all of this does not detract much from the concert. Far, far from it. SQUARE ENIX and AWR Productions have managed to create a breathtaking concert that shows off a lot of the new music in FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth over slightly more than two hours. And honestly? I adored it. Jungles of Gongaga, even though it was part of a medley, was everything I wanted to hear in person, I loved Loveless Symphonic Suite- Gift of the Goddess, and Galian Beast is probably one of the best pieces that HAS to be heard and seen live.

There are two encore numbers, which shouldn’t surprise anyone as they have been mainstays of any FINAL FANTASY orchestra performance for over a decade-and-a-half now. And the reason they always fall into those encore slots is because they are so beautiful to hear in person and so strikingly different from each other that everyone has to hear them at least once in person.

Ultimately, if you love FINAL FANTASY VII, and even if you haven’t quite yet gotten around to playing FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth, you should attend FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour.

Review Update (September 19, 2024)

Since the original publication of this concert review, I attended the Munich, Germany performance of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour at the Olympiahalle. At that performance, Eric Roth (who previously conducted the A New World: intimate music from FINAL FANTASY concert that I reviewed in 2022), conducted the ShinRa Symphony Orchestra. While I would say there was less cosplay at the Munich show than at Los Angeles, the cosplay that did show up was no less amazing.

The concert was still absolutely amazing to watch. The overall setlist was the same as during the Los Angeles debut performance, but the changes that Arnie Roth discussed with me during his interview to shift the Golden Saucer songs starting with Bare Your Soul to after the intermission was implemented for this performance. In my opinion, moving both that song and Welcome to the Golden Saucer to after the intermission really helped to even out both halves of the concert in a very positive way.

Eric Roth was energetic, and he kept stepping back and forth on the stage while working his magic upon the orchestra. Both him and the other conductor, Arnie Roth, are excellent in the conducting roles and I honestly do not prefer one conductor over the other. Eric Roth also interacted with the audience between a lot of the different pieces being played, and he made sure to introduce the different musical numbers after he finished conducting them. I enjoyed his light banter, and I could tell he really loved conducting the music on stage.

Something I also experienced for the first time during this show was the use of stage lights. Each song performed had a different color of light or lights backing it up across the stage and the Olympiahalle. For example, Queen’s Blood had a mixed blue and red motif, Galian Beast was solid red, and Aerith’s Theme was white. These lighting elements really enhanced the orchestra performance by adding a visual ‘pop’ of color to the audio/video components already present. I really hope this is something that FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour and AWR Music will be implementing whenever possible at future shows.

If you asked me what performance was better, I would be hard pressed to tell you. Both the Los Angeles and Munich ones were fantastic, but I really think the edge goes to Munich solely due to the rebalancing of the setlist before and after the intermission. If you can attend this concert somewhere in the world, and you’re a FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth fan, then you should definitely go – whatever issues I listed elsewhere previously in my review notwithstanding. I certainly wouldn’t mind attending a third time, if possible.

At the close of this updated review, there is one last thing I want to point out. When the opening notes of Aerith’s Theme played in Los Angeles, there was what I would describe as a ‘gasp of happiness’ that overcame the crowd. You could tell that a lot of people in attendance were excited to hear that particular piece live – most likely for the first time ever for them. When I went to Munich, I was definitely surprised to hear that exact same sound wash across Olympiahalle during those same opening notes. There is apparently something absolutely universal, no matter what country you’re in, about Aerith’s Theme for fans of FINAL FANTASY VII and FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth.

Review Score
Overall

Tickets for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour are on sale now.

What is your favorite music composition from FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth? 

 Are you planning on attending one of the upcoming concert dates?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post REVIEW: FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour (Updated) appeared first on oprainfall.

This article is based on play of an in-development build of FINAL FANTASY XIV: Dawntrail, and content in the final version is subject to change.

“What we want to bring to all of you Warriors of Light is the very best summer vacation a hero could possibly have. I realize this is like a sudden change from the feeling of Endwalker. But I mean, you did save not only all of Hydaelyn, but kind of the whole universe, so we thought maybe we’d give you just a little break.

So, the site of this vacation, and a brand-new adventure, will be what you know as the ‘New World’…what we know as ‘Tural’.”

~Naoki Yoshida (FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024 Keynote Address)

In my hands-on demo of Dawntrail as part the Dawntrail Media Tour, my mind kept going back to those statements made in Las Vegas. I am veteran of Eorzea. I’ve played since alpha of 1.0, and I have completed every storyline and explored every new region as the story drove itself towards its almost inevitable conclusion that (perfectly, in my opinion) bookended the story that started so long ago for me in the Sixth Astral Era.

Personally, I am incredibly ready for something new and different. And yes, that includes even a summer vacation.

My hands-on Dawntrail demo was not the full expansion, unfortunately. I was limited to exploring the city of Tuliyollal, the field areas of Urqopacha and Kozama’uka, and a new dungeon that comes fairly early on called Ihuykatumu. I did that dungeon both as part of a media group as the Pictomancer job, and I attempted it later on both new jobs solo with Duty Support.

I won’t spoil what little of the storyline I saw in Ihuykatumu other than to say that the division of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn into different competing camps to determine the new Tural king that was teased in the Growing Light patches is not a pre-expansion gimmick, but it actually looks to be genuine. I am glad about this, as I hate it when intriguing storylines are set up and then immediately discarded afterwards. And honestly, what can be more interesting than having dear friends turned into competitive foes as a narrative hook?

But let’s talk the landscape and cities of Tural, because what little I got to see of Dawntrail is unlike anything we have seen so far in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online. Dawntrail is FINAL FANTASY XIV’s most beautiful expansion to date, and one that I never stopped discovering new things in during my demo. The place I kept coming back to during my Dawntrail demo, even to just watch the sun rise and eventually set, was Tuliyollal. This city is drenched in vibrant colors and was laid out in such a natural way that I did not feel like I was being bottle-necked into one part or another like I was by the bridges in Stormblood‘s Kugane.

A Day in the city of Tuliyollal. © SQUARE ENIX

Tuliyollal is built on a hill, with the dock and markets at the foot and the Royal Palace at the top, and the entire cityscape exists out in the open air. Tuliyollal did not feel excessively stretched out over a large map for the sake of making it appear ‘big’ or needlessly complex for the sake of looking complex, and there was something quite magical about being able to look down from a higher elevation and see the city (and a few other members of the media!) bustling down below. There is one certain spot, near the top, that I think will be an extremely popular spot to just people-watch from when Dawntrail launches because you can see so much of the city below it against the backdrop of the sky and ocean.

True to Dawntrail’s cultural inclusivity lore in Tural, Tuliyollal has a lot of NPCs of different races chatting with each other, sitting at a table, or even demonstrating combat for an adoring crowd. While we were warned there are quite a few NPCs missing in the city to talk to (and all they could say anyway was ‘Welcome to Tural!’), Tuliyollal feels like a real, lived-in city that was built up around the environment it inhabits instead of a place built to spite the environment like Rhalgar’s Reach does.

The two outside areas I could visit, Kozama’uka and Urqopacha, could not possibly be more different and they both were gorgeous in their own ways. Kozama’uka is a colorful, forested area with giant waterfalls that dwarf everything around you, while Urqopacha is mountainous with volcanoes with glowing lava cracked across the surface. While not everywhere in both areas was accessible to us, I was incredibly impressed with how much there was to discover. These photos below really only give a glimpse of everything there is to find there.

There is so much to see and visit in Kozama’uka and Urqopacha. © SQUARE ENIX

Both of these areas, and the tiny towns that exist inside both of them, are places you’re going to want to explore in depth while flying on a mount, as they are clearly geared towards that. To show just how much there is to find in these areas: it was only towards the end of my hands-on demo that I found a small, out of the way, pathway that had mysterious paintings inside across the walls.

I believe that I was part of the first non-SQUARE ENIX-employed North American group to clear the Ihuykatumu dungeon, and I did so as the new Pictomancer job. While my thoughts on the job can be seen here, I just want to say briefly that Pictomancer is incredibly versatile, and you will be utilizing both Aetherhue Actions and Motif/Muse Magicks quite a bit. As for Viper, you can see my full thoughts here about that job, but it will be the most complicated job in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online when Dawntrail is released. This is because there are multiple combos you need to execute in different ways in order to maximize your damage output. Once you try it out, you’ll get the hang of it. Trust me.

“Dawntrail is FINAL FANTASY XIV’s most beautiful expansion to date, and one that I never stopped discovering new things in during my demo.”

Ihuykatumu is a level 91 dungeon, and my character was level capped down to level 92 from 100 for it. Presumably, this sets Ihuykatumu as a fairly early dungeon in Dawntrail. One of my biggest questions coming into this expansion, especially with all the new Xbox Series S and X players, and the ability to buy scenario skip items in the online shop for a large discount at the moment, was if Dawntrail would be a good jumping on spot for brand new players.

Based solely upon my experience raiding in the dungeon, the answer is ‘no.’ The boss mechanics at each of the three major fights of that dungeon have Areas of Effect that crisscross the battle area in large patterns, and the enemies have special attack moves and patterns that clearly expect the players to know what to do based upon prior dungeon experience in prior expansions. In other words, this is a strong continuation of the gameplay style and degree of difficulty from Endwalker. If you’ve completed maybe only A Realm Reborn’s basic storyline and you want to jump into Dawntrail, then (based solely upon this dungeon) you’re going to have a hard time as the difficulty level is far higher than even the final ARR fights.

Something else that I wondered about would be if there was going to be a return of dungeon gimmicks/mechanics. I was curious about if this was going to make a resurgence due to another SQUARE ENIX-published title, BABYLON’S FALL, actually introducing the concept of dungeon mechanics during the Tale of Two Ziggurats substory that was released in May 2022.

Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P), however, stated that they want to introduce fresh mechanics back into the gameplay during the Dawntrail Day 1 Q&A. Unfortunately, Ihuykatumu did not have that. Ihuykatumu was the fairly standard ‘fight enemies, kill enemies, get to a miniboss, kill that, and repeat two more times’ type gameplay that has been around since the Stormblood expansion.

Personally, I am of a split opinion of this: while the dungeon mechanics do get annoying when you’re running the dungeon for the umpteenth time to try to get the latest Tomes, they do break up the standard dungeon format into something new. I am hopeful that with Yoshi-P’s comments, we can get more dungeon mechanics like firing cannons at Cuca Fera during Heavensward’s The Stone Vigil (Hard) dungeon. Therefore, I am hopeful that Ihuykatumu will not be indicative of the entire expansion.

There is a lot of enemy variety in Dawntrail. The enemies throughout the overworld and inside the Ihuykatumu dungeon are both unique and were not barely reskinned from elsewhere in Eorzea with a higher level and a different name (well, except for possibly the Malboros). Whether I am running away from Mountain Bears or even a reimagined Cactuar (yes, they are there, and I need that plush now on the SQUARE ENIX Store for purchase!), I kept gawking at them before dispatching them. I even ganged up with my fellow media Warriors of Light to take down a Rank A hunt, Queen Bee, that had fun new mechanics that required us to work together as a group to kill.

The new race option coming to Dawntrail is the female Hrothgar. I spent my entire demo playing as one, and I was more than pleased with how the character model looks. I don’t think it is a big secret that there aren’t a ton of male Hrothgar characters out fighting in Eorzea, but I would be absolutely shocked if we don’t get a lot more female Hrothgars long-term in the game. Everything from the character face to the fur looked detailed and amazing, and I was quite pleased with how the female Hrothgar looked in various job gear.

There is one more thing that I want to talk about, and this takes place back in Tuliyollal. Towards the end of my Dawntrail demo, I visited what I assumed will be the in-game market area in the city for tomes trade ins, NPC item sellers, and such. If you’ve played FINAL FANTASY XIV from A Realm Reborn through the Endwalker expansion, then there is one thing that you can count on when you visit any NPC shops: they will all be bare-bones cut and paste graphic images of each other’s stalls, no matter where you go in the world. There will be large, stacked bags, generic armor suits, and a few baubles here and there on display. Even at the most lavish lore-wise shop locations in-world, such as the Steps of Nald in Ul’dah and the East/West Balshahn Bazaar in Radz-at-Han, suffer from this generic sameness.

Yet, Tuliyollal’s shops could not be any more different. When started as a quick run through turned into a long, lengthy walk as I kept stopping to gawk at all of the small details the developers placed in. There are so many shops with jewels, individual books, different fish on display, and none of it – even the bookshelves – look to be a copy and paste job between shops. This part of Tuliyollal feels like an actual marketplace that has real, unique, shops in it that is absolutely stuffed to the proverbial Namazu gills with items.

What I presume to be the NPC shops in Tuliyollal are the most detailed ever in this game.

If you’ve read the past two paragraphs, then you’re probably wondering why in Etheirys I am talking about something like basic NPC shops in such detail. Basic service NPC shop background graphics are the kind of thing that no player ever really has talked about for the past decade-plus of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online. In fact, the development team could have probably just done the same bare bones basic work for it for Dawntrail that was put into every other prior expansion, and no one would have noticed or likely cared.

Yet, the fact that the details of NPC shops is something that’s been changed, that this is something SQUARE ENIX has taken the undoubtedly precious time to improve on, speaks volumes about the care and attention to detail the development team is bringing to Dawntrail. After all, if the development team cares this much about improving such a tiny detail of the game, which also haven’t been talked about at a Fan Festival or in a Producer Live Letter so far, then what other improvements and surprises await all of us Warriors of Light in Tural?

I, for one, cannot wait to find out.

There is a large variety of new enemies in Tural. 

If you cannot tell just from reading all of this so far, I was seriously impressed by my hands-on time with Dawntrail. This expansion’s hands-on demo, especially coming off of Endwalker, pulled off the equivalent of a Four Kan or Thirteen Orphans hand in Doman Mahjong for me. Tural feels truly like a fresh break from all of the prior expansions, and this expansion has real promise to be the best expansion yet. This opinion comes from having tried out the two new jobs, seeing the care and attention being given to the graphics and intimate, small details of Tural, and just how simply new everything feels.

Oh, and the music.

You cannot forget the music. Masayoshi Soken has composed music that sounds wildly different than anything that has come before in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online while also feeling appropriate to the atmosphere and the summer vacation goal Naoki Yoshida laid out in Las Vegas. I cannot wait to hear Tuliyollal’s theme at a future Distant Worlds: Music from FINAL FANTASY, A New World: intimate music from FINAL FANTASY, or Eorzean Symphony- FINAL FANTASY XIV Orchestra performance.

All of this is very high praise, considering how much I have loved this critically-acclaimed MMORPG. I spent almost ten hours in just a handful of areas, and yet I feel like I have yet to see everything there is out there. Tural feels like a giant, colorful, beautiful world with so much potential present to be the best expansion yet. And so I am just counting down the days until Dawntrail enters early access on June 28 and is fully released on July 2.

Please check out my thoughts on the new Viper job, on the new Pictomancer job, and about Naoki Yoshida’s Media Q&A from Day 1!

If you want more FINAL FANTASY XIV Online-themed content, then be sure to check out my ongoing cooking series, Cooking Eorzea!

Also, check out what eleven FINAL FANTASY XI Online enemies that I think need to be part of the upcoming Echoes of Vana’diel raid series in Dawntrail.

What do you think of Tuliyollal, Urqopacha, and Kozama’uka?

Did you preorder Dawntrail so you can get in during the June 28 early access period?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Dawntrail Media Tour: Dawntrail Shows Promise to be the Best Expansion Yet appeared first on oprainfall.

At the conclusion of Day 1 of the Dawntrail Media Tour, members of the media were permitted to submit questions for Naoki Yoshida, the producer and director of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, to answer over an hour block of time. The gamut of questions ranged from suggestions for gameplay about Materia to whether or not Dawntrail is the start of a new saga for FINAL FANTASY XIV Online.

Below is a summary of that Q&A for all of the questions asked.

This Q&A has been edited for content and clarity.

Are there any examples of “improved reward” as shown in previous PLL [OR Note: Producer Letter Live] and also today’s presentation? Is it more tomestones cap over 7.x patches? Is it more gear drops from 8man/24man raids or existing contents? Or simply just more rewards like cosmetic purposes (minions/mounts)

Yoshida-san made it clear the tomestones cap will not be increasing. [OR Note: It was announced earlier this week that new tomestones will be released and others will be discontinued, however.] Some of the feedback they’ve received is that the rewards are lacking (including in amount) for a lot of the dungeon content, especially for the variant dungeons. They did not have the resources to allocate towards having player-fulfilling rewards for offered content, and so they want to improve upon the rewards given and to increase the reward amounts for dungeons. This does not mean just for minions and mounts, but gear and weapons.

Another factor is they want to bring in different content than what has been offered before, and those rewards will be to fill in gaps – the gear drops may not provide maximum iLvls, but they will still raise average iLvl to midlevels. Yoshida-san admitted it is hard to explain in words, but to look forward to Patch 7.1 for more information. He did reiterate they will increase the amount of gear given as a reward.

I would like to know if there are plans to create a central Party Finder since many raiders DC travel to Aether for NA if they want to find groups. We could even tie in the Oceanic region as well!! This leaves players without access to FC buffs, mail, retainers, etc while they are trying to fill groups. Also, since we are getting many graphical and system updates in Dawntrail, are there plans for a modernized friends list similar to Blizzard’s Battle.net or Steam friends?

Yoshida-san said they are aware players want this, but he said traveling between different physical data centers and having different party finders will need a separate system to manage. If they had this in place, it would solve a lot of problems, but it would be nice. It would take two to three years of work to make happen, and so they wonder if there is an alternative method that would work. They are currently focusing resources on 7.0 at the moment. Once that has settled down, they will talk more about this subject. Yoshida-san said that he does want to solve this, he isn’t giving up on it, but they have to talk about it more.

As for the friends list and improvements, there has also been a lot of feedback for it. But they are improving the blacklist first, and once that has settled down, they are looking at adjusting the friends list as well. Yoshida-san noted that Battle.net, etcetera, are things companies have put their full resources into. They will try to do their best.

In terms of new player experience, can we see more skills becoming available to players at low levels (as has been done in the past) to refresh that starting experience?

Yoshida-san said with the level cap growing to 100, the team had to review each job’s available actions and their level distribution. He said they tried to keep a good balance across the levels, but they aren’t completely sure about the lower levels, and they do welcome specific feedback on the forums.

It does raise a question about striking a good balance, because people expect they will get new actions when the level cap goes up. They can always increase the number of available actions, but there can be too many and it will be cumbersome. He pointed out that conversely, if you learn it all at lower levels, then what is the purpose of leveling at the higher levels? Furthermore, they don’t want to decrease back to, say, level 50. They said they do think about this, and they are trying to do their best too.

If you could recommend any quests (job, side content, etcetera) to complete before Dawntrail, which would you recommend for players really into FFXIV lore?

Yoshida-san pointed out that if people are really into lore, then they would have already done a lot of the side content. He said he doesn’t want to give away too much, but the most recent alliance raid, Myths of the Realm, would give background information. He also referenced the names of all 14 seats of the Convocation. He said that is a good place to start to get into FINAL FANTASY XIV Online lore.

What were some of the inspirations for Dawntrail?

Yoshida-san referenced what he said during the Fan Festivals, and that one of the inspirations was giving a summer vacation for players. He stated they previously went to the edge of existence in Endwalker and to the Thirteenth in more recent patches. He said what they were doing started to feel all narratively similar, and so they wanted to bring in a new perspective in the Source with a new adventure and new lands and diverse cultures and people with different values. The theme is more uplifting and with adventure – to bring that kind of vacation feel.

Yoshida-san drew a comparison to the real world and all the sad news about war and chaos taking place. He stated with FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, they want to focus on relationships between people for both in-game people and real-life players with different values. They are showing this through the history of Tural and the cultures they represent and how they interact. He hopes it brightens the real-life future as well. Additionally, Warriors of Light wouldn’t be excited with just relaxation, and so there are exciting battles and content ahead, and Yoshida-san encouraged people to play all the way through 7.0.

With the introduction of Viper, there are now six melee DPS. Within these six jobs there are: Striking, Scouting, and Maiming left-side gear as well as Slaying and Aiming right-side accessories. As you can imagine, these make managing gearsets and Materia melds (specifically for skill speed) very hectic. Are there any plans moving forward for either consolidation of melee gearsets and/or Materia loadouts?

My suggestion to fix this easily would be to have players meld material onto their job stones or a skill tree instead of directly onto gear which is being shared across multiple jobs.

Yoshida-san said he is always wondering what direction they want to take simplifying into and how much they should support that. He stated how they wanted to bring a more fulfilling gameplay experience from 7.0 into the 7.x patches, and they talk about how to make more robust content that will challenge players. They looked at more recent content, including battle content, and it started to feel more similar to each other. They have used unique mechanics in the past where parties had to get creative about it. Over the years though, the development team has gotten more conservative about those mechanics, and the player feedback has been harsh about it too. The development team therefore included less unique dungeon elements.

He said they want to address any ‘pain’ points for players – and he described the targeting circle sometimes being as big as the entire field as an example of that. They are trying to shift focus into more robust gameplay, such as the main tank and off tank having specific tasks to be doing or removing one of the DPS and having them fighting a different enemy. They want to introduce fresh mechanics into battle. They’ve also heard comments about how a lot of the content feels similar. He also pointed out that there is feedback from players about how one job has a particular action and yet another job does not. They are not saying that player feedback is bad, but they want to make sure that players are having fun with the game.

Yoshida-san feels, though, that they have gone a bit too far. They would love to go into the various jobs and make them all individual but won’t do it at the same time as they are adjusting gameplay content, because doing it all at once would be a problem. Their current goal is to work through 7.x series to improve on content and then bring a fresh a new perspective to players. Yoshida-san then said that it comes down to different jobs and how much do they accommodate that kind of support on the developer side. He explained that with the different jobs available, if they make it simpler to manage melded Materia for gear – like making it one-button clickable to replace the Materia – the question becomes if it will contribute to a fulfilling gameplay experience.

They are serious about the adjustments and the choices they make but the team does feel they have introduced too many types of Materia, and they should revise that system. Yoshida-san stated this was a good idea that was put forward in the question, and that he may talk with the team about among the other discussions.

How is Dawntrail shifting away from the single player orientation brought about during Shadowbringers to encourage collaborative play [among] the Warriors of Light?

Yoshida-san said that he, and other core team members, wanted to emphasize they are watching your streams and that they want feedback. He said it is not a shifting away, per se. The development team have a long-term goal to accomplish – and this is part of it. The biggest reason people hesitate to play an MMORPG is because people don’t want to play with other players. He wanted to change that hesitation, and he said that one advantage they have is that the story is so good. He wanted to pull people into FINAL FANTASY XIV Online without them having to deal with the pressure of working with others. If he got those people who hesitated to jump in, then that increases the number of players who are available to play together. They decided to make solo-focused gameplay because of it.

Yoshida-san further explained this solo-based content built a playerbase that allows them now, with Dawntrail, to go back to the MMORPG elements to play together in a new stage of the game. He said he is sure that people will find out that the FFXIV community is kind and helpful, and he said if a Sprout fails a mechanic, then they aren’t going to be yelled at or anything. He further explained the solo runs are used by some people as ‘practice runs’, so that when they are grouped with other people, they will have knowledge of the dungeon so it will go more smoothly.

In the future, are [there] plans to rehaul the iLvl sync system? Currently, the calculations are very convoluted and confusing for new players when syncing for various contents, including high level raids, where the higher iLevel gear may not actually be best in slot. For example, this is in part due to Materia stats not being included in syncing.

My suggestion would be to include Materia stats, in addition to the base stats, but also put a cap on them.

Yoshida-san said that calculations for iLvls are quite complex, and it does put a load on the servers. He said they are aware there is a misalignment with Materia. The iLvl system comes from FINAL FANTASY XI Online and the formula for it was developed solely by Mitsutoshi Gondai. [OR Note: iLvl was introduced in 2013’s Seekers of Adoulin expansion.] With the iLvl sync system in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, they got Gondai-san to program it in. He was also the first battle director for FFXIV. He is still involved with FFXIV, and he is a very dedicated team member.

Yoshida-san further explained that iLvl system in FFXIV was rather rushed, because they were trying to get the game ready for launch. He said it was a good idea and they will take it back and discuss it further while trying to also keep a lower load on the servers.

In Producer Live Letter 81, you stated that the discussions for the next expansion -8.0- had already started. Is Dawntrail the start of a new saga that will be continued into further expansions, or is it intended to be a standalone story?

Yoshida-san opened by saying that whether or not they want to make Dawntrail an ongoing saga or not has not been determined yet. He said that this is because when they released Heavensward, they did not know it was going to be one long saga. At the time, they were focused on rebuilding FINAL FANTASY XIV Online after the harsh 1.0 launch, that they wanted to just make sure to continue the game and that it would continue to exist. He said that at that time, it was just one step at a time, and they didn’t have a mind to go to SQUARE ENIX and tell them that it would be just one long saga because they would just call it crazy.

He said that around the time of Stormblood, they started to say it looks like it is just one continuous story for them to tell. He said that there was some foreshadowing in Heavensward and Stormblood in the hopes they would be able to depict a larger overarching story. In similar fashion, there will probably be some foreshadowing that might lead to something throughout Dawntrail’s story.

Yoshida-san said he has to wait to see how players react to Dawntrail’s story and the finale of the expansion. But they do have several ideas in their pocket about where to go to. They have something incorporated into 7.0 that is exciting that they can’t say quite yet. Yoshida-san said that they will wait and see what the future holds. He said in his mind, there are storylines for the next two expansions, and so he hopes that players will continue to be excited over FINAL FANTASY XIV Online and he will see the players reactions to Dawntrail. He said Dawntrail is all about a summer vacation, so next time may be all ice and frozen. He concluded that rather than worrying about it all being one long saga or not, he wants to bring excitement, new exploration, and new elements to players for them to enjoy in Dawntrail.

Please check out my thoughts on the new Viper job, on the new Pictomancer job, and what my overall thoughts are for the Dawntrail demo.

If you want more FINAL FANTASY XIV Online-themed content, then be sure to check out my ongoing cooking series, Cooking Eorzea!

Also, check out what eleven FINAL FANTASY XI Online enemies that I think need to be part of the upcoming Echoes of Vana’diel raid series in Dawntrail.

What new features would you like to see in Dawntrail and in future expansions?

Are you ready for a summer vacation in Tural?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Dawntrail Media Tour: Media Day 1 Q&A with Naoki Yoshida appeared first on oprainfall.

This article is based on play of an in-development build of FINAL FANTASY XIV: Dawntrail, and content in the final version is subject to change.

Introduction to Viper

Viper is the other new DPS job introduced in the upcoming Dawntrail expansion, which uses two one-handed blades that can be combined into a single two-handed weapon to fight with. This job utilizes weapon skills to attack enemies and calls upon the memories of ancient hunters contained within their soul crystal to enfeeble opponents and enhance themselves for a period of time.

Because this job does not have such an obvious inspiration as Pictomancer does from FINAL FANTASY VI, Viper has the opportunity to make its own unique mark on the FINAL FANTASY job canon. I was able to take up this job and spend some serious time with it in Tural as part of the Dawntrail Media Tour, and I found it to be a complicated but incredibly fun job.

Playing as Viper

Viper is a complicated job that focuses primarily around enfeebling foes and enhancing your Viper, pulling off multiple basic combo variations, gaining and using Rattling Coil stacks, and finally using the Reawaken ability to pull off a nine-ability combo sequence that you can then do a second time through the 120 second cool down Serpent’s Ire action.

Please note that I was able to demo Viper at the 100-level cap.

Enfeeblement and Enhancements

The longer I kept killing enemies in Tural, the more I realized Viper’s first priority is to enfeeble your enemies and enhance your own Warrior of Light. Unlike Pictomancer, Viper does not enhance anyone but themselves, and does not increase damage to the enemy for anyone else but themselves. As for what options you have, please look below:

These are not minor enhancement/enfeeblements but are instead quite significant to have in effect during battle. For instance, if you have both Noxious Gnash and Hunter’s Instinct in effect, then you’re doing quite a bit more harm to your enemy than you would otherwise.

Combos

Combining Noxious Gnash, Hunter’s Instinct, and Swiftscaled together significantly increases the amount of damage Viper can dish out by a significant amount by both pure numbers and the reduced cast/recast delay. Thankfully, these can be initiated by the first two steps of the 1-2-3 combo with Dread Fangs > Swiftskin’s Sting or Steel Fangs > Hunter’s Sting. You’ll want to complete out the full 1-2-3 combo to enhance the potency of another combo finisher as well in order to increase the Serpent Ire Gauge by 10 before switching to the other combo. These combos will be your standard combo cycle, and thankfully the 1-2-3 combo rotates through a single hotkey.

AoE combos start off with Steel Maw or Dread Maw, and they also combo out from there like above.

In addition to all of that, there is a lot of combo crossover in order to maximize damage through Swiftskin’s Venom Effect and Fellskin’s Venom Effect. These two effects bolster the damage potential of the third step of the combo, which gives a real incentive to do both combos back-to-back. And if that wasn’t enough, then you can execute Death Rattle or Last Lash on top of all that at the end of each combo.

Every 40 seconds, you can also fire off Dreadwinder into Hunter’s Coil/Swiftskin’s Coil and then into the other second skill of Hunter’s Coil/Swiftskin’s Coil that you did not use moments before. Furthermore, using Hunter’s Coil/Swiftskin’s Coil as a finisher to that second combo gives you access to Twinblood Bite and Twinfang Bite. Not only does this second combo grant the full array of enfeeblement and enhancements, but it also increases the Serpent Ire Gauge and grants a Rattling Coil. These Rattling Coil stacks appear as the red gems on the Vipersight bar. Rattling Coil stacks can be used to activate Uncoiled Fury, which does significant AoE damage.

I’ve barely discussed some of the combo possibilities here, and so I would urge you to review the action assignable and unassignable charts below to see how everything can be utilized. I promise you: it is a lot.

Finally, when you have 50 in the Serpent’s Ire Gauge, you can use Reawaken. Reawaken does solid AoE damage to surrounding enemies, but more importantly…it grants five stacks of Anguine Tribute. At this point, you can utilize the insanely complicated combo at level 100 of First Generation > First Legacy > Second Generation > Second Legacy > Third Generation > Third Legacy > Fourth Generation > Fourth Legacy > Ouroboros. Each Generation step uses up one Anguine Tribute, and Ouroboros uses up the fifth and final Anguine Tribute. If you then pop the Serpent’s Ire action (120 second timer) immediately afterwards, you not only are granted a stack of Rattling Coil, but you then have the ability to use Reawaken, and all nine other linked actions, in the combo a second time.

Combine that with a Role Action such as Bloodbath, and you’re a walking, damaging, self-healing DPS machine…especially if you have all three major enfeeblement and enhancements active as well. Please check out the end of the YouTube video linked at the top to see this full Reawaken combo in action!

Direction-Oriented Attacks

In what is probably the baffling decision for Viper, Swiftskin’s Coil and Hindsting Strike/Hindsbane Fang does more damage when executed from the target’s rear, and Flanksting Strike/Flanksbane Fang does more damage from the target’s flank. Thankfully, you do get Truth North as a Role Action to negate the directional angling, but it is still something that is quite a surprise to find for this job and it honestly does not fit in as you already have enough to worry about already.

Viper Actions Charts

Viper Unassignable Actions Charts

Viper Role Chart

Viper Traits Chart

Final Thoughts on Viper

If you’ve followed along with this all so far, then you’ve probably reached the same conclusion that I have: Viper is a very weaponskill heavy, complicated job. In fact, I suspect that Viper will be the most complicated job in all of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online when Dawntrail is released.

It can be very easy to lose your place in the weapon skill rotation, as both the single target and the AoE rotations have multiple weapon skill paths to go down to complete the combo — and you’ll want to do so in order to max out your enfeeblement and enhancements. FINAL FANTASY XIV Online’s smart AI is a Twelvesended gift, because the hotbar will light up the weapon skill with a higher effect to do next, and this will help you keep pace with alternating between the different combos. For me, this meant I could hit the combos constantly and consistently without remembering exactly what I had already hit. Without this, Viper would be infinitely harder to play and utilize appropriately in combo for anyone but the most skilled of players.

I do think that the directional-oriented bonuses to damage are something that requires quite a bit of movement and makes Viper a bit like Dragoon because of it. Thankfully, True North can negate that need to direct yourself if you don’t want to deal with repositioning every so often during the fight. I frankly don’t care for that mechanic because it feels a bit tacked on, and I am glad that not every combo and weapon skill requires me to be rotating to different positions around the enemy in order to execute effectively.

Finally, you’ll notice that I haven’t talked about single bladed and dual bladed weapons, despite that being what is advertised in the Viper job description. Watching the blades come together and come apart is quite cool looking graphically, but I found myself focusing on enhancing/enfeebling, filling up the Rattling Coil and Serpent’s Ire Gauge, and trying to pull off back-to-back nine-hit combos through Reawaken action and Serpent’s Ire action when I wasn’t utilizing my other combo sets.

Viper is ultimately a lot of fun to play, make no mistake about it. It is also the one job that I am dying to see be utilized in Crystalline Conflict PVP due to simply how much damage it is expected to dish out as quickly as possible. I really think that if players take the time to experiment and learn this job, then they will fall quickly in love with Viper like I ended up doing.

Please check out my thoughts on the new Pictomancer job, and about Naoki Yoshida’s Media Q&A from Day 1, and my opinion on the Dawntrail demo as a whole.

If you want more FINAL FANTASY XIV Online-themed content, then be sure to check out my ongoing cooking series, Cooking Eorzea!

Also, check out what eleven FINAL FANTASY XI Online enemies that I think need to be part of the upcoming Echoes of Vana’diel raid series in Dawntrail.

Are you going to pick up Viper when the upcoming Dawntrail expansion releases?

What do you think about directional-based actions?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Dawntrail Media Tour: Viper is a Complicated, and Fun, DPS FFXIV Job appeared first on oprainfall.

This article is based on play of an in-development build of FINAL FANTASY XIV: Dawntrail, and content in the final version is subject to change.

Introduction to Pictomancer

Out of the two new jobs, I would definitely say that Pictomancer is the easier of the two to quickly grasp and use. As I experimented more and more with this job, I found myself assigning the various actions/role categories across two cross-bars in order to utilize the Pictomancer toolkit to its fullest. This job is debuting as part of the upcoming Dawntrail expansion and draws upon the Pictomancer class first brought to life by Relm Arrowny in FINAL FANTASY VI (that’s FINAL FANTASY III for those of you who are playing on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES).

Playing as Pictomancer

Billed as a magical ranged DPS job, there are two major aspects to Pictomancer, Aetherhue Actions and Motif/Muse Magicks, with a smattering of other abilities thrown in. Each of the two main categories are assigned a different player HUD display: Paint/Palette Gauge and Canvases, respectively. I will first be diving into both of these, and then addressing the miscellaneous other abilities below. Please note there are Role Abilities for this job too, but none of those are unique to Pictomancer.

Please note that I was able to demo Pictomancer at the 100-level cap.

Aetherhue Actions

First up are Aetherhue Actions. Despite what you may think or anticipate, Aetherhue Actions are intended to be the bread-and-butter 1-2-3 combo actions for Pictomancer. Your regular cycle starts off with Fire in Red (single target) or Fire II in Red (AoE). Once that is activated, you next use Aero (I/II) in Green and then finally Water (I/II) in Blue to complete the combo. At this point, you accumulate a White Paint and you get 25 aether on the Palette Gauge HUD. White Paint can be consumed to use the spell Holy in White, which is an AoE attack. If you use Subtractive Palette when the Palette Gauge has 50 points in it, then you gain the effect of Monochrome Tones, which converts a single White Paint into a single Black Paint, and you get three stacks of Subtractive Palette to utilize.

Only once Subtractive Palette is active can you use the other 1-2-3 spell combo: Blizzard (I/II) in Cyan to Stone (I/II) in Yellow to Thunder (I/II) in Magenta. These are MUCH more damaging combo attacks than the Fire/Aero/Water combo, but they also grant you a White Paint and Aetherhues. With the converted Black Paint, you can cast Comet in Black, which is a more potent AoE attack than Holy in White. It is important to note that you can only use Comet in Black while under Monochrome Tones, and you can only cast the Blizzard/Stone/Thunder combo while Subtractive Palette is in effect. You can also still fire off Holy in White back to back with Comet in Black or with other Holy in White spells, even under the effect of Subtractive Palette.

This all sounds complicated, but it definitely is not. The majority of your damage is going to come through your Aetherhue Actions, and by doing the Fire/Aero/Water combo until you can swap over into the Blizzard/Stone/Thunder combo while firing off Holy and Comet AoE spells for as many times as you can. It was quite fun to do, and I was surprised at how little that I had to pay attention to the Palette Gauge in order to track my Aetherhues.

Your Aetherhue Actions are directly influenced by your Landscape Motif/Muse Magics, as I will detail below, and are the major reason why you’ll want to be firing off Starry Muse every chance (okay, every 120 seconds) that you get.

Motif/Muse Magicks

The second major half of this job is the Motif/Muse Magicks, and they are what you are thinking about the most when you see this job: A Pictomancer will paint Creature Motifs, Weapon Motifs, and Landscape Motifs on each of three canvases, and then bring them to life with magic.

First up, the Creature Motif. This spell has a 2.92 second cast time, with a 3.90 second recast timer. It also is a constantly changing action that will go from Pom Motif, Wing Motif, Claw Motif, and finally Maw Motif (in that order) when used. Once you use the Pom/Winged/Clawed/Fanged Muse ability (Living Muse Action turns into whatever painting is on the Canvas), it will then add that particular Depiction to the slot above the canvas as well as damage the enemy. Each Muse has a 40 second cooldown as well. When you have both Depiction of Pom and Depiction of Wings active, you create a Moogle Portrait that hangs out at the top of the Creature Canvas and will signal that you can use the Mog of the Ages ability that does significant AoE damage. Additionally, Retribution of the Madeen becomes available at level 100 when you have all four Motifs painted. These two Moogle and Madeen actions honestly really cool, and you will want to fire it off every 40 seconds or so in order to add another Depiction to the Creature canvas so you can build up to bringing out either the Moogle or Madeen to obliterate your foes.

The Weapon Motif is absolutely the most personally useful out of the three. First, you use the Hammer Motif ability, which appears when Weapon Motif is placed on the hotbar, and it paints a hammer on the Weapon Canvas (yes, that is the only weapon available so far). When you have a hammer on the canvas, you can use Striking Muse. This uses up the hammer painting and grants three stacks of Hammer Time. When you have Hammer Time active, you can then use Hammer Stamp to deal critical AoE damage at a large range. Hammer Stamp turns into Hammer Brush, and then into Polishing Hammer to complete the combo. Most crucially, you can still use the Hammer combo even while running away from enemies and it won’t be interrupted…which I found out firsthand during a FATE gone bad.

Finally, there is the Landscape Motif, which paints a starry sky over on the Landscape Canvas through the Starry Sky Motif when that particular action is placed on the hotbar. Every 120 seconds, you can then use the Starry Muse ability. This ability throws down a party AoE buff around the Pictomancer that increases the affected party members’ damage by 5%. It also gives the effect of Inspiration, which reduces the cast/recast timer for Star Prism and Aetherhue spells by 25%, lets you cast back-to-back Rainbow Drip spells, and lets you cast Star Prism. Star Prism restores the health of nearby party members and does AoE damage to enemies. Finally, there is the Hyperphantasia effect. If you perform five Aetherhue Actions or Star Prism spells, you are then granted the Rainbow Bright Enhancement. While that is in effect, Rainbow Drip (discussed in the next subsection) becomes an instant cast spell and has a reduced recast timer. If you can’t tell, Landscape Motif is more of a buff Motif than anything else, but it has a lot of really cool effects to help the party with. The AoE for party members was surprisingly large too, and I kept being surprised at how much I didn’t have to be in the deepest thick of battle to activate it.

If the Aetherhue Actions are the heart of the job’s mechanics, then the Motif/Muse Magicks are the extra necessary bits you will have to master the timing of in order to really execute Pictomancer successfully, since they simply add so much more damage with each Creature or Weapon cycles you do in combat. Also, because each motif can be recast immediately after battle, any Pictomancer worth their Archon Loaf will be reupping the motif paintings after battle and will be casting them whenever they can between Aetherhue Actions.

Miscellaneous Actions

Besides the Aetherhue Actions and Motif/Muse Magicks, there are a handful other Pictomancer actions. For example, there is the Tempera Coat, which acts like the Stoneskin of yester-era by absorbing damage up to 20% of your maximum HP and Tempera Grassa that absorbs 10% damage for yourself and other nearby party members. There is also Smudge, which lets you dash 15 yalms forward and gives you a very brief movement speed increase. Finally, there is Rainbow Drip. That spell does significant straight-line damage to enemies and also grants a White Paint. If you have Rainbow Bright Enhancement active, that means that you can rapidly stack up White Paints to then cast back-to-back Holy in White spells for even more damage.

Tempera Coat and Tempera Grassa are incredibly useful, if you can’t tell, and you will be using Rainbow Drip whenever you can to add that extra bit of damage to the battle — especially if you can cast a Holy in White Spell immediately afterwards with that new White Paint. Smudge is okay, but I found myself wishing that the movement speed boost lasted longer for out of battle purposes.

Pictomancer Actions/Unassignable Actions Charts

Below, I’ve attached collage photos of all of the different Pictomancer actions, roles, and traits that were available during the Dawntrail media tour so you can see it all for yourself.

Pictomancer Role/Traits

Additionally, here are the Pictomancer Role and Traits that were available during the Dawntrail Media Tour for me to try out.

Final Thoughts on Pictomancer

If you’ve made it this far, then you’re probably wondering how Pictomancer fits in with all the other jobs available to play. Pictomancer is primarily a magical ranged DPS job that offers limited party support through the Landscape Canvas and through the Tempera Coat and Tempera Grassa abilities. Pictomancer does not approach the support versatility of Dancer or Bard, but the 5% damage increase through the Landscape Canvas and Starry Muse is quite noticeable if it isn’t kept up whenever possible. Instead, Pictomancer utilizes all eight elements of the wheel (before Red Mage got to, surprisingly) to rotate two different color-themed combos with White/Black AoE attacks while simultaneously painting on the Weapon Canvas and Creature Canvas whenever those times are up. Additionally, there are few things more fun that activating Starry Muse, getting that Rainbow Bright Enhancement, and just spamming as many Rainbow Drip and Holy in White spells as possible during that timer window.

Pictomancer is a lot of fun to play, and it was not as difficult as it made it out to be when it was first demoed. The biggest challenge for this job is going to be remembering to use the appropriate Muse whenever the timer is up, so you can keep building those Creature and Weapon combos every chance you get. Finally, while I do not want to tout my own skills too much…I was able to pull enmity off the tank during the player dungeon we did during the Media Tour. It is an absolute BEAST of a job when it comes to doing damage if you can keep up on everything.

Please check out my thoughts on the new Viper job, see what Naoki Yoshida said during the Day 1 Media Tour Q&A, and what my overall thoughts are for the Dawntrail demo.

If you want more FINAL FANTASY XIV Online-themed content, then be sure to check out my ongoing cooking series, Cooking Eorzea!

Also, check out what eleven FINAL FANTASY XI Online enemies that I think need to be part of the upcoming Echoes of Vana’diel raid series in Dawntrail.

What do you think about Pictomancer? Are you excited to try it when Dawntrail is released for pre-order early access on June 28, 2024, and worldwide on July 2, 2024?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Dawntrail Media Tour: Pictomancer Is Far More Than Just Painting-By-Numbers appeared first on oprainfall.

You can check out more about Arzette at the game’s official website.

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is available for purchase NOW: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC

Finally, you can check out my impressions of a hands-on demo here.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Operation Rainfall: My name is Quentin H. with oprainfall, and you are?

Seth Fulkerson: Seth Fulkerson, developer and creator of Arzette from Seedy Eye Software.

OR: Can you tell us a bit about Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore?

SF: It is a spiritual successor to a pair of infamous fantasy-adventure games from the early 90s, like CD-ROM era. The game has full motion cutscenes, is full of crazy animation, hand-painted backgrounds, and it is done in a familiar [and] beloved style.

OR: What is your personal history with the Phillips CD-i?

SF: So, a few years ago, I made a fan remaster of Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: Wand of Gamelon. I did that to fulfill an in-joke with friends, but also to explore the potential of ‘Well, what if those games were cleaned up a little bit, they might be a little better?’. The response to that was a lot better than what I thought. I was lucky enough that I had a lot of animators and artists that are my close friends. So, we were always sort of kicking around doing our own take on those games. And the time was right, so yeah, it was where the genesis of Arzette started. My producer, Audun Sørlie, got in contact with me and we started working together to make Arzette to what it is.

“I know a lot of people looked at Arzette and thought ‘Why is he making this? Is he making this as a joke?’

No, I wouldn’t spend three to four years of my life making a joke- I want to make a good game.”

OR: You mentioned a little bit ago, and in a prior interview in a January 2024 interview with Game Developer, you said that you took on the challenge of remastering two CD-i Zelda games: Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon as an in-joke. What kind of in-joke makes you want to develop a game for four years?

SF: So, in 2016, that’s around the time that Twilight Princess HD came out, me and some friends were literally joking ‘What if that, but The Faces of Evil?’. And so, I started trying to scope it out, and I’ve been making games for a long time – mostly really small stuff like game jam type stuff. But I had a hard time finishing projects – especially that were not bigger scope, but along the lines of that.

So, it was a dual purpose: ‘Hey, I’ll finish the joke but also finish a game.’ And in the course of developing those [remastered CD-i The Legend of Zelda games], I learned how to make a game for real and I also learned the development history behind the games and the circumstances that lead to them being the way they were. I found it really inspiring, and it really had a profound effect on me and how I wanted to approach future projects and also what I wanted to do with Arzette.

OR: CD-i aficionados will tell you that there is a third CD-i title out there – Zelda’s Adventure. Why did you not take on remastering [that] game as well? Did you use that particular third game any when creating Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore?

SF: Basically, the duology of games – The Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon – they share the same engine, they are almost the same game. Zelda’s Adventure is a lot different; it is a top-down game. But personally, it is going to sound controversial, but I do not care for Zelda’s Adventure. I know it has a lot of its fans, but for a game, basically The Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon, for all their flaws, had a pretty solid gameplay loop – especially for Western games released in 1993.

It’s very prototypical Metroidvania – multilayer levels – you collect items through people or collect powerups, you go back through levels with new powerups. Zelda’s Adventure does not really have that at all. In fact, there are lots of items that are red herrings – it’s a very mean game to the player. I do not like it.

OR: Let’s follow up on the gameplay loop. You’re taking gameplay from games published in 1993, and putting it into a 2024 gaming atmosphere. We have had at least two generations of gamers come up during that time period. How do you take that and make that relevant to a modern-day audience while still staying true to the original 1993 releases?

SF: So, right away, when I was prototyping, I identified a lot of elements that I knew I would include in Arzette. The gamefeel, how it looks – a lot of things. For instance, if someone were to look at Arzette from a distance, they would say ‘Oh, I know what that is’ or ‘That looks familiar’ and pick it up. Maybe they will get the feeling that this is like a CD-i like game, but they aren’t aware that they are getting the five-star hotel treatment of CD-i. There’s a lot of lives, there’s generous checkpointing, the gameplay’s a lot faster, there’s certain design elements that are intended to be more player friendly.

For instance, keys are always found in the same area if there is a locked door. But in the original game, keys could open whatever door they wanted across the entire world, [and so] it was a lot more obtuse. So, take the essence of those original games and apply a lot of modern sensibilities – ‘cause I don’t want to frustrate the player, I don’t want them to want to give up or think this is poorly designed on purpose.

I know a lot of people looked at Arzette and thought ‘Why is he making this? Is he making this as a joke?’ No, I wouldn’t spend three to four years of my life making a joke – I want to make a good game. It is a delicate balance of jumping, how you attack – it has to feel a certain way and [I] sort of dial it in. Because if I give too many lives, then I can go too far in the opposite direction. But, if you try to stay true to what those games were while polishing off the rough edges, then that is the sweet spot.

“Part of me being sincere and serious about making this a spiritual successor was to get some of the legacy staff on board.”

OR: How did you develop Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore‘s story, and keep the game from falling into an awful parody of the classic CD-i games instead of paying an earnest homage to it?

SF: From the beginning, I knew that I didn’t want to make a wink wink, nudge nudge meme game that was mean-spirited. This was an earnest homage to those games. I wanted to make sure the writing was sincere – it is a strange world with strange characters, but they don’t know that. They are just kind of living their lives. It was important to me and my co-writer to make sure that the atmosphere was Saturday morning cartoons. Sometimes the humor didn’t land, but for the most part, it was a good-spirited world with a good-spirited antagonist.

To me, Arzette would never work if it was mean to itself. It’s a loving homage, and everyone that worked on the game – they all knew what we were doing, they all have the same sort of strange fondness for the [CD-i] games.

OR: About how many minutes of cutscenes are there in this game?

SF: There are 45 minutes of animation in the game.

OR: How do you decide when to use an animation to tell the story and when not to use animation in developing your story?

SF: The original games, for all their flaws, they had a really clever way of delivering player information – and that was through the cutscenes. A lot of the scenes in Arzette deliver gameplay information, like it might seem nonsensical at first, but the drunk guy at the bar is actually telling you that you can reflect projectiles by stabbing them, even though it seems like he is just going on a drunk rant. We added a few minor quests in the game that don’t have animation, but for the most part, I wanted to make sure that the entire thing was fully voice acted and animated.

OR: Did you direct the voice acting?

SF: I had a professional voice director that worked alongside me while voice casting for the game.

OR: And I think you brought back some classic voice actors from the CD-i era. Can you tell us about that?

SF: Part of me being sincere and serious about making this a spiritual successor was to get some of the legacy staff on board. I managed to network and find contact info for some of the original voice actors and one of the original artists that worked on The Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon, Rob Dunlavey – he did the world map for Arzette and one of her levels. He was one of the background painters for Faces of Evil and he did the world map for the game as well.

Jeffrey Rath, who voiced Link in the original games and Bonniejean Wilbur who voiced Zelda – I explained the project, and that yes, it’s been 30 years [but] I promise I’m not crazy. I outlined that it’s an homage, right? They understood, because they’re fully aware of the reputation that the games have. I think for them, it’s really rewarding to see people wanting to revisit their work. They were very receptive [to this], and a joy to work with.

OR: Can you tell us about your partnership with Limited Run Games to publish this title?

SF: After I decided that I wanted to do this game, I started pitching it to various publishers. I sat down with Josh Fairhurst, the CEO of Limited Run, to pitch a physical version of the game. He saw approximately 30 seconds of an early version of the shopkeeper scene, and he decided this was a game they wanted to do. Limited Run seems to want to take risks on games that nobody else would, because Zelda CD-i spiritual successor is certainly a risk. But I think he knew exactly what I wanted to do and how it would be a special game. The game has been a success, so it certainly has been a wonderful relationship with Limited Run Games.

OR: In a 2020 interview with Eurogamer, you mentioned that it took you about four years to develop the remasters of Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. Did any of that experience play into developing Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore?

SF: Absolutely. I learned a lot more about programming, project management, and how to structure a game from those. They also share the game engine – Gamemaker Studio 2 – I’ve been using Gamemaker since I was 12 years-old, so a fairly long time and I’m fairly familiar [with it].

But it’s learning lessons from those games as well. Even remastering those games – I learned what works and what doesn’t for Arzette to give a modern gameplay experience for players.

OR: There is also a new CD-i controller that was released through Limited Run Games. Can you tell us about that and why would you want to do that yourself?

SF: That was one of the things that we had a discussion about, was doing that controller. It’s just one of those silly, fun things that Limited Run loves to do. For the authentic homage, you can pick up one of those retro controllers. It’ll work on any Switch game. I would not recommend players playing through Arzette the first time with the controller, but it is certainly playable. I’ve played through the whole game with that.

OR: And how was that experience playing with the CD-i controller?

SF: I will say…interesting. I will say, interesting.

OR: That is a loaded statement.

SF: Yes, it is.

OR: Now with Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore released, what’s next? More CD-i inspired titles? Are you going in a different direction entirely? Or what are you planning on doing in the future?

SF: I would love to keep exploring lesser-loved games and everything else. But really, a lot of it depends on the success of Arzette for where I would go next. But yeah, I’m pretty much up for anything.

OR:  Thank you.

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is available for purchase NOW: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC

Have you ever played either of the classic The Legend of Zelda CD-i titles?

What do you think about the new retro-style controller?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post PAX EAST 2024 INTERVIEW: Seth Fulkerson on Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore appeared first on oprainfall.

This interview about Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution was originally supposed to go live during the time window while you could still pre-order a physical Game Boy Advance copy of the game from Limited Run Games. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, this interview ended up being delayed into May for publication. However, Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution will be coming to home consoles, and so you can still definitely pick up a copy of the game then.

You can find out more about WayForward and Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution on the official website, on Discord, on Facebook and Instagram, on X, on TikTok, on YouTube, and on Twitch. 

You can also check out my impressions of a hands-on demo of Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution here.

Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution is set to release in 2024 on Game Boy Advance, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Operation Rainfall: My name is Quentin H. with oprainfall, and could you two introduce yourselves?

Matt Bozon: I’m Matt Bozon, I’m the director of the Shantae series — but specifically here, Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution.

Erin Bozon: And I am Erin Bozon, the creator of Shantae.

OR: Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution started at a Game Boy Advance title in 2002. What can you tell us about this title, and why was it never released?

MB: Well, it is a sequel to the original Shantae game — early, early ideas for this game started in November of 2000, which was when we got our dev kits. Shantae 1 was still in development, so we were starting to think about what a sequel might be. I actually started to have some of its early, early framework — or I guess design ideas, I should say — getting worked on even while the first game was not quite done.

You asked why it was not released. So, Game Boy Advance was very difficult at retail. It was very license driven, toy aisle, movie tie-ins, TV show tie-ins. It was very challenging. And prices of those cartridges were very expensive, so it was very hard to get publishers to want to take a gamble on an expensive cartridge for a completely unknown property. [And] the first game hadn’t even come out yet. And by the time it did come out, it had proven to not be a great seller. It was a fan favorite-

EB: -it only sold 10,000 copies.

MB: So yeah, it got cult [classic] status.

EB: It had a limited release.

MB: Yeah, it had a fan following, but not really a lot. Not enough to prove it would be successful as a Game Boy Advance game. Which, as I mentioned, was so much more expensive to manufacture and produce. Margins were very slim, and so, ultimately, there were a couple of places that looked at it and went ‘Maybe we could do something with this if you can get it on the cheapest cartridge and you can cut the content down.’ Really nice people who tried their best. But we’re like ‘We can’t even fit the demo on one of these tiny cartridges, much less the whole game — there’s just no way.’

EB: We [had] maxed out all the features, so to cut it down wouldn’t have worked.

MB: So, it just got put away and Shantae didn’t really come back again until digital distribution, which was like a rebirth — that was Shantae: Risky’s Revenge, which was a completely different game. This one just kind of went away and stayed away.

EB: And waited for more updated technology.

MB: For us, Risky’s Revenge was the third game we developed. But it’s the second game anyone ever saw.

“We’re always trying to do the next Shantae game, always. It’s always on the forefront.”

OR: How much progress was actually made in Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution before the project was shelved? How much of what WayForward did back in 2002 was actually still usable for this upcoming release?

EB: I think 50 percent?

MB: Fifty percent of the game’s systems, all of the player mobility, transformations, animations, big ideas that had already been built — engine, all that kind of stuff. What it didn’t have was the Golden Path adventure. You could only do 25 percent of it. So, if you’re speaking purely of game development, that is about halfway through the development process. Usually, the back half is a lot of ‘Now you’ve got to mass produce your content.’ We had done all the legwork, but we hadn’t done all the other stuff where you build out the full game experience.

This was really, really important at the beginning of the project: ‘Were we going to just resume work?’ And we ended up doing that. It’s just the same work, same code, same tools — tried to put our computers in the state they were in 20 years ago, back when resolutions of 1024 by 768 was as big as your computer monitor could possibly display. We had to go back in time and actually work in those constraints. Stuff and tools that were not even Windows-compatible yet, they were in DOS. Animations were made in DOS. A lot of this stuff — we’re working on stuff that is old, even back then. In the early ’90s, we were working on tools from the ’80s.

EB: Dpaint! [OR Note: Also known as Deluxe Paint.]

MB: Dpaint, yeah!

EB: DPaint was our go-to for the first game and the second one.

MB: All that stuff was still the same stuff. While we made improvements, we didn’t ditch the old things. We just continued. And that’s kind of like having one or two hands tied behind your back, honestly. So, you get none of the advantages of modern game development, other than being able to communicate with Teams and talking and chatting on a video call. But not the game.

EB: You were saying that there was no ‘undo’, right?

MB: There’s no undo! *laughs* We didn’t have that kind of technology yet! It’s Game Boy Advance, through and through. That’s what it is.

OR: Why look to the past to bring Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution back now instead of working on the next ‘big thing’ after Shantae: Seven Sirens and after the re-release of the first two Shantae games?

MB: That’s the best question ever.

EB: We’re always trying to do the next Shantae game, always. It’s always on the forefront. But you have to find someone to help fund it, you have to find the time and the staff and a slot — because a lot of times, you have to work on other titles in order to afford to do something that’s an indie game. So we came to a point where’s it’s like ‘Okay, we can afford to work on another Shantae game because he had just finished working on — I’m not sure we can say it-‘

MB: *laughs* I help out a lot at the studio! I was between projects I was helping out on.

EB: Yeah, we can’t say exactly what he was working on, but he had been on something for a year, and then he was going to have a time where he could actually work on maybe a Shantae game. So, we did talk about doing the next one in the series. But there was this one that had never been released, and it told us a little more of the story. It’s like — it’s there, and when can we release it? And retro stuff is really on the rise right now. So, it’s like ‘Yes, we could do a new one, but when are we ever going to go back to finish this one?’ And so, it just seemed like a good time.

And we did ask different companies if they could help fund it, and we did show them different games. And they were like ‘Yes! Let’s do this!’ and we were so thankful that someone will help fund it so we can get another Shantae game out.

So things lined up — Michael Stragey was available, and he did the engine for the first game, and Matt was available, and we had a lot of the art already done. So instead of maybe taking a year or two to do the whole new game, this one could fit into a slot that was less than a year. So timewise too, for Shantae fans, you don’t want them to go too long before a new game comes out. So to know that it had already been since 2020 or 2019 since the last Shantae game came out, we were like ‘Ahhh, if we can just get another one to play while we work on the next one, that would be great!’

MB: Completely along with that — Limited Run Games had been doing more reproduction cartridges — like that great thing with Shantae on Game Boy Color. It was like everything aligned nicely.

EB: Josh [Fairhurst] is such a fan that he was all for it, and that they would come on board and help us make another game. We can’t do it ourselves.

MB: He totally believed in us and in the preservation mission that he has. ‘Yeah, we’re finding an old game — here is an old copy laying around on a hard drive, and it should have existed but it didn’t.’ And so, he gave it another shot.

And like you said — Mike Stragey — we weren’t working together anymore. He had gone on to do other things, and it had been 20 years. So, he was between projects, and the timing was right. He’s like ‘I could do it, is it real?’ and we were like ‘Maybe it’s real! I don’t know!’ And then all the pieces fell into place. Super cool, also kind of a now-or-never thing. I feel if this was five years later, I’m not sure it would have made any sense — I feel like it would have gone away again.

EB: Especially as we continue to make more and more advancements with the Shantae series, I feel like now is a good time because we’re still [re]-releasing some of the older ones.

MB: Definitely.

OR: You streamed Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution demo as part of the Kickstarter campaign for Shantae: Half-Genie Hero in 2013. During that demo, you mentioned “I’m playing this game with an analog stick — this game was not designed for an analog stick” — and obviously, platforming with a D-Pad is way different than platforming with a Switch [Joy-Con] or PS4/PS5 controller, and this game has been announced for modern consoles.

How difficult was it to adapt the game’s GBA controls to modern console controllers?

MB: So, I guess I’ll say that that is a work in progress. The closest thing to this game, and I know it’s very strange — once this game is done, it will be as though it was done 20 years ago. Pretend that it was remembered fondly by people who played it — even though they didn’t — and now pretend that it is now time for the port by Carbon Engine team to modern consoles. It will be very similar to how they did the port for Shantae Game Boy Color. And since we’re working on it together — WayForward and Limited Run — it’ll also be very similar to when we ported Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse from the Nintendo 3DS with that upscaler kind of look to it. Not upscaling the pixels, the pixels are clean — I don’t like blurry pixels, it’s a thing of mine I can’t stand that, I like clean pixels — but the illustrations.

Erin’s group has artists redrawing everything at 4k resolution, and it will be beautiful. Your Carbon Engine port will have your Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse­-like, if you’re playing that game on a modern console, similar. You have your pixel art in the middle, your beautiful portrait art on the edges, your illustrations. And if you want, you can still play the cartridge version on [modern consoles], too.

So, if you are like ‘I want the way it really looked without all the high-res art’ — same with the controls. Just like on Pirate’s Curse, you can use the control stick to move around. If that’s what is comfortable for you, you can do that. But for, I think a lot of players, they are going to reach down lower on the controller and get the control pad and use that for the more traditional controls. So you can use both.

For me? I actually tend to play it both ways. When I’m getting into the precision-type fighting moments, I go down on my control pad. When I’m starting to wonder about, I’m taking a little rest and using my analog stick for my thumb. So, you can do both. But traditionally though, people are gonna wanna use the control pad.

Or I’ll plug in my Super Nintendo controller — I use that all the time for Switch stuff. I love plugging that thing in — any device that will support my SNES controller. I love it.

OR: Something interesting for a Game Boy Advance game — you can’t really patch it after release. We saw that when Nintendo tried to Berry patch Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire. How does it feel knowing that you have to get it right now?

MB: I’m nervously laughing. The reason I’m nervously laughing is — okay, Erin and I have done so many games. We have a Sabrina game that got 25 percent of the game deleted the day before the game shipped. Not the day before — at midnight, it was shipping in the morning to manufacturing. You really made 25 percent of the games, between midnight and 6 a.m.? Does that sound familiar?

EB: And I was pregnant — I was eight- or nine-months in.

MB: So, you’re making levels and people at the same time? *laughs* That’s crazy. It is a completely different mindset that I think is kind of gone from the world today. You have to live with everything that’s going out there. When it’s done, it’s not done. You have people who play it — as many people as can get hands on it.

EB: That’s why, after beta, we have a playtesting phase that goes for a month or something. You have as many people get their hands on it to try to find as many bugs. Our son was a play tester for years, and now he animated some of the Shantae characters. But he was a play tester since he was 15, until a couple of years ago.

MB: He’s good with the glitch theory-type stuff.

EB: He tries to break it.

MB: He’s like ‘If this is a game that is built on these types of things, then theoretically, they will probably do these things.’ And then he goes checks it.

EB: He’s a genius — he is like ‘I can break it, I know I can!’

MB: So there’s ‘Yeah, we’re gonna do the traditional Q&A looking for bugs’, and we’re also more like the quality — is it fun? And then there’s a whole other thing that Limited Run is going to do — and I had never heard of such a thing, and I thought it was actually crazy when I heard this. They have a fairly involved manufacturing process, because they are creating a specific chip set to make sure this thing runs just right on the card. And then they are going to individually test each individual cart by hand. I have never heard of such crazy stuff before.

EB: Just such quality assurance.

MB: I guess what that means is — and back in the day, old school development, you always shipped knowing there was a bug. Not one you knew of, but you knew. Once this thing expands out into the hands of [the public], something will be found. When it’s found, it will probably have to be like ‘Yeah, that’s part of the game’ and you hope it isn’t some egregious thing.

And yeah, you’re right, you cannot patch it. The only thing that can happen is you could — in this case, there is something a little slightly different because there is a Carbon Engine port coming [and] you could patch that original game. And then include it — that would be the fixed or patched version of the game. But even that is even a little bit unusual, because we’ve done re-releases of games in the past — like Shantae 1. Shantae 1 has some well-known bugs or weird exploits.

EB: We’ve seen people do run-throughs where they could skip stuff because they went through a wall. But it’s kind of fun to see people break the game.

MB: And if they like it, we want to leave it in. It’s only the things that would spoil the experience — we don’t want to spoil the experience for anyone. If there are some things that are kind of fun to break, then it probably is best that it be left in there. But you’re right, you can’t patch it, so you gotta check it and check it and check it again. But from the beginning of time, until only around not so long ago, you couldn’t patch anything anyway.

So, all we’re doing is going back to how you had to do things before, when you had to be absolutely sure before you hit that submit button — that you were absolutely done.

OR: Something else mentioned during the livestream was that [Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution] would be 20+ hours, which would make it the lengthiest Shantae game by far. Has that length been retained for this coming release?

MB: No, no. I think that would have been based on everything we had come up with to that point. Now that we’ve actually made the game, and it’s full quest line, I can say, I think with a fair amount of confidence, that that would have been a fairly drawn out 20 hours. This clocks in with much better pacing right around…I would say a little longer than, considerably longer than, Risky’s Revenge and a little shorter than Pirate’s Curse. Not as long as Half-Genie Hero with all of its DLC options. Right around in that sweet spot is where it lands. I think it’s going to be a satisfying length and move at a good pace for most of the people who are going to be into it.

EB: Not including the speedrunners.

MB: Yeah, without overstaying its welcome. Another way to put it is that every Shantae game has a ‘How fast can you beat it time?’ seems to be clocking in at about all of the other Shantae games. What you don’t want is a 20-hour game where it’s 10 hours of backtracking. A nice, clean, streamlined, respect-your-time game. As a result, shorter, but I think, more dense. Less watered-down flavor.

“And so, what happens, of course, with all of the Shantae games is when something finally doesn’t happen, all of those animations don’t get thrown away because I don’t like to waste anything.”

OR: Let’s talk about some other Shantae cancelled projects.

In an April 2021 interview with Nintendo World Report, you said that “CAPCOM did entrust us with a Dolphin development unit sometime around 2002 in hopes that we could come up with a Shantae GameCube sequel” and that “[w]e did some very early exploration into this idea, but ended up focusing on Shantae Advance instead ‘because that was where the work-for-hire jobs are and you have to keep the lights on’.”

Can you talk any about that early exploration with the GameCube? How far along did you get, and what was the concept behind the title? What was it like to essentially tell CAPCOM ‘thank you, but no’?

EB: GameCube is like my favorite console.

MB: This one is tricky. The reason it’s tricky is because I don’t know all of the facts. So, [CAPCOM was] very happy with Shantae Game Boy Color. That was excellent, they weren’t worried that it didn’t sell well. They were just happy with the quality — for them, it was very high. I was aware of a whole CAPCOM thing, they were trying to greenlight five CAPCOM games at the time. What was it? Viewtiful Joe, P.N.03, Resident Evil 4, and a mystery cancelled game. [OR Note: The cancelled title was ‘Dead Phoenix’, and the fifth unmentioned title was ‘Killer7’.]

So, we found out about that too. We didn’t know if we were one of those five, or not. I always wondered if we were supposed to be, but the timing was always the same — ‘oh, that’s why they gave us a kit.’ But we were new to 3D [and] we were trying to figure it out. And so we didn’t have a ton of confidence — there was a lot of R&D and experimentation phase during that time.

So, what ended up happening there was ‘Well, Shantae shouldn’t probably be the experiment — we should go straight into the thing that’s working that at the time was our core business.’ Which was the handheld team. So that’s why I went in that direction, and just let some of the — handheld was a small part of the studio at the time. About six out of the 20 or 30 people. So, I was like ‘Okay, we’re going to huddle up, focus on this, get really good at handheld’ — which is what evolved from Game Boy Advance into the DS.

Other parts of the company were going more 3D, PC — trying out various things on console, testing our reach as a studio. And those early, I guess, experiments, just kind of kept shifting from one thing into the next. So, while it was Shantae, I can tell you that the theme of the [GameCube] game was river rafting. The concept was revisited for Nintendo DS, which would have been Risky Waters.

There was concept art, there were some test videos made using really crude 3D. Not anything that was put through an actual art team — just ‘Hey, let’s make some basic geometric shapes and try moving a raft through it.’ And the concept of that was ‘What can the controller do, and what’s that like?’. And it’s like ‘oh, it’s fun to squeeze those analog triggers, it could feel like paddling through the water. Maybe this is what we do. Put all four characters on a raft, have four inputs, you’ll paddle paddle paddle, you’ll smack monsters, you’ll pull over off onto the shore, go into a dungeon, do traditional Shantae gameplay, pop out of the dungeon, get back onto the raft.’

That was the concept, and in that era, a lot of games were doing sort of strange and unusual things. It felt like experimentation was in the air, and it was a fun time.

OR:  You mentioned in a 2007 interview with MTV that you assembled a treatment for Shantae: Risky Waters on the DS after the console was announced, but you couldn’t find a publisher for it. Can you tell us more about that treatment? How close was it to the GameCube version?

MB: Okay, I can talk about that! No one’s ever asked about this as far as I know — this is a really funny one.

So, it was very similar. Our early test kits for Nintendo DS did show that you could do things that were very similar to GameCube. Like, ‘that’s very similar — let’s get this design out and bring it back in!’. So, what I had for that was — it was dual screen, which we didn’t end up doing until Contra 4 — I designed and directed Contra 4, so a lot of those same designs and ideas — I was like ‘I want to play with this and that for Shantae’ — did get experimented with. It was dual screen gameplay, so what you had gameplay on the top and bottom, and you had to manage both.

So, when you’re on the bottom, rafting in 3D, on the top, you had Sky on her bird. I don’t recall what the task was, but you were doing flyby things. You could target and drop powerups onto the crew below on the raft. When you pull over to a place to go into a battle area or a labyrinth or a dungeon, then you would have the action on the bottom. You’d be exploring, and your team members would be on the top. And you could manage them also just using L and R buttons. It’s like, ‘Can you play two games at once? Can you do platforming while managing some light gameplay on the top?’.

And the way that worked was that you had Uncle up top mixing potions and health items, and then he would throw them down into the dungeon for you. And each character had its own sort of thing. Rottytops would play almost like a tower defense thing where a bad guy would would come in, and she would be ripping off her leg and beating up the bad guys as they’re trying to get in — which would keep the number of bad guys down in the labyrinth in the bottom of the screen from getting overwhelming.

And so, what happens, of course, with all of the Shantae games is when something finally doesn’t happen, all of those animations don’t get thrown away because I don’t like to waste anything. Those animations got all put into Risky’s Revenge. So, the reason that you fight Uncle Mimic in that game is — you get to a point where you’re like ‘What’s the boss of this area going to be?’. Well, we had this full animation set of Uncle Mimic fighting and mixing potions, throwing bombs, all of this stuff. That was him as a helper character from what would have been the Shantae dual screen game. But instead, it’s like ‘Well, we’ll make up a new guy, he’s the Hypno Baron, he is making Shantae think she is fighting her uncle.’ There, I’ve got all the animations and I don’t have to throw them out and I can use them. And that’s what that was.

That’s about as much as I can get into without going back and re-reading that document.

OR: You were also the first e-Reader licensed in the United States.

MB: I think we were the only one, at least Nintendo told us at one point that we were the only person to ever ask for e-Reader.

OR: What was the process like to become a licensed e-Reader developer, and can you talk about that from the developer side? It’s a Nintendo product that really fell on the wayside.

MB: I love, I love the e-Reader, or Card e-Reader, or the e-Card Reader, depending on what region. We ran to the Celebi movie [OR Note: ‘Pokémon 4ever’] to get the cards to watch the little cartoon in the e-Reader. Totally loved that device. I was pushing really hard for a Shantae game on the cover of Nintendo Power — ‘I want to print the code, have people swipe their e-Reader cards through the Nintendo Power cover and get a little game.’

Because of that, I asked our CEO: ‘Can someone at Nintendo get us that dev kit?’. His response after awhile was ‘No one has ever asked for that dev kit, because who would want that?’ And I was like, ‘I want that!’. So, they sent us a dev kit, and I’m sure there is a lot of NDA stuff that is like ‘Don’t talk about what’s on the thing’, but it was a development kit with an e-Reader where you could look inside and see the guts of it, see what it was capable of doing.

We did some experiments. The experiments were Shantae battle cards, and you couldn’t physically do this, in theory what you would have done — is you’d swipe your move through. ‘I want fireball, I want hair whip, I want a high kick’, and you’d swipe them through. And there was just enough space to have really simple, tiny, tiny, I think the animations had to be down to 14k or something — like barely anything — but we did make a tiny animation set of Shantae. She looked just like the Game Boy Color Shantae for all practical purposes, but she could just do one of a few actions. And you’d just swipe in a bad guy card and swipe in up to, I think, three Shantae moves, and you’d be able to combat a thing and see if you would win or lose.

Not sure why it never went anywhere — I think it was because, honestly, that era ended so quickly. We had those Super Mario Bros. 3 cards come out, and then it very quickly became Pokémon Battle-e, and then they were kinda gone. So, it had its really cool moment, and there was just no catching up to it and getting into the card manufacturing. Man, if we could do that today? Because we do card manufacturing. I mean, actual trading cards- cards. We can do Shantae cards now. But no one had those anymore.

EB: We love all that old school stuff — Pogs, etc.

MB: The Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution game is only available until April 7th, but there is no preorder. In the future, you can’t get it anymore. So, when the preorder closes-

EB: -You can get it on other systems, but if you want a cartridge, it’s the only time you can get it. They aren’t going to reprint it. So, the collectors who really want to play it on the system, you really have to get the cartridge before April 7th when its gone.

MB: Yeah, after that, you’re just waiting on the Carbon Engine. Which I have a lot of confidence that will be a great port, but the port is not the same as the game. Even if the port has all these cool bells and whistles.

EB: I think a lot of Shantae fans are collectors, and sometimes they will get upset: ‘Oh, you need to re-release this thing!’, so if they can hop on when its actually pre-orderable, that’s the best.

OR: Lastly — there is a four-player mode announced for Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution. Can you tell us briefly about it?

MB: Yeah, the four-player battle mode is for two to four players. You only need one cartridge, so you don’t need to go buy four. You can plug in anywhere up to four Link Cables. Once you do that, it transmits the game to all the empty devices, and then you’ve got four people playing in a combat arena. It’s a constantly rotating play field, where if you don’t grab onto the fence, you will fall off and land on some spikes and die. It’s kind of last-man-standing, like Bomberman.

Everyone has a different animation, but you basically have a punch attack, a character-up-and-release attack that will clobber a guy and send him bouncing all around, and then you’ve got to watch out for when that arena is about to rotate. Then you grab a fence, or you’re going to fall and get knocked out. It’s just fun, light-hearted Link Cable stuff [that] the world hasn’t seen in a long time.

OR: Thank you very much.

Are you excited for Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution? What is your favorite Shantae title?

Did you ever play with the e-Reader?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post GDC 2024 INTERVIEW- WayForward Talks Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution, the Nintendo e-Reader, and Other Cancelled Shantae Games appeared first on oprainfall.

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Teatopia is one of those games that feels absolutely peaceful and a bit like a slice of life game. The basic premise is that you inherited land from your grandfather, and you have to build your own farm up and integrate your life into the community at large. While the demo I played was a bit limited in content, I really enjoyed what I found and it made me want to see everything Teatopia has to offer.

The graphic art style is absolutely gorgeous. Quite frequently, Chinese-inspired slice-of-life games will go for a paint-and-brush art style that seeks to invoke calligraphy in the gamer’s mind. Teatopia instead uses vibrant colors that pop off of the screen with clearly defined art to bring its world to life — and I kept commenting on how beautiful everything was during my demo. The character models are 3D and the world itself is 2D, which helps to really make the NPCs stand out among everything else going on. Teatopia is truly a very cozy world to exist in.

Of course, gameplay is what makes or breaks a game. Thankfully, I was able to try out a handful of activities in Teatopia ranging from fishing, breaking rocks, and planting crops.  The gameplay mechanics for farming and clearing land thankfully aren’t out of the ordinary. I also was able to try out the fishing mechanics — and while they were a bit rough (it is a minigame experience!), I was pleased with that too. After GDC 2024, I popped over onto the official Teatopia account, and I saw there are other gameplay mechanics such as building a waterwheel connecting the local stream to your crops to help irrigate them. This game simply oozes creative potential for gameplay and exploration.

Teatopia, which has a Kickstarter that will eventually be launching, honestly has a lot of potential. During my demo, there was a lot of talk about being able to cook all sorts of dishes, raise animals, make tea, play gambling games like Cee-lo, and more in the world. I checked out all of the videos the development team has put out, and I was more than a little impressed with how they are committed to making sure even tiny details like having the plants sway when you walk past them are included in Teatopia. We unfortunately do not have an officially confirmed date for the Kickstarter to go up. However, just from my brief time with the game? I think it is something worth keeping an eye on as it heads ultimately towards release.

Are you excited to make tea and raise animals? What about gamble and fish?

Let us know in the comments below what you want to see in Teatopia!

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When I played a demo of Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore at PAX East 2024, the biggest impression I walked away with was that Seedy Eye Software had done the impossible: they created a game that invoked the heart and soul of the CD-i console platform and made it into a quality gaming product for 2024. Set in the land of Faramore, Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore has the titular hero go out on a quest to stop the evil Daimur.

The creator behind the game, Seth Fulkerson, has repeatedly stated that Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is inspired by The Legend of Zelda CD-i games, and I certainly believe that. The gameplay is a 2D adventure where you jump and slash your way through enemies towards the end of the level. The gameplay itself fits well in 2024, and I was happy to find out that the enemy hitboxes were on point, and the platforming controls worked well. Even as I killed enemies and fought a boss at the end of the demo, I found myself becoming thoroughly engrossed by the gameplay itself. The game bills itself as Arzette being able to unlock more abilities as it progresses, and I am personally curious to see what all she can do when she is fully unleashed. During my demo, I was able to try out the bombs, and I ended up using them to great effect to help destroy the stage-end boss.

Of course, the hallmark of the CD-i was the animated cutscenes, and Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore does not disappoint. The distinct, low quality art style of the CD-i games has been lovingly recreated for Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore. The voice acting is over the top, and the cutscenes pop up to tell the story more frequently than what you would expect. The world levels themselves are beautifully done, and you can tell that a lot of care went into them. The more I kept playing, the more it reminded me of Working Designs’ Popful Mail in terms of gameplay quality and charm.

There is one other important note to mention: I tried the game with both the 2024 controller option and the remade CD-i controller option that was released through Limited Run Games. Unfortunately, that CD-i controller is awful, and I found it difficult to control Arzette with it. Using that controller really made me appreciate joysticks and other video game innovations in the past 20-plus years.

Ultimately, the PAX East 2024 demo I played of Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore takes inspiration and heart from a long-dead, barely remembered home console, while simultaneously transcending it into a final product that is far better than its inspiration. The final product was released back in February, and I think it is well-worth trying it out if the demo is any indication of the final game…and thankfully, it is out now!

Did you ever play any CD-i titles? Are you planning on picking up Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore?

Let us know in the comments below!

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Renaine is a Kickstarter-originated title that bills itself as “a game about overcoming failure.” The protagonist, Aine, is able to come back to life an infinite number of times, but also has to defeat a Dragon as an act of revenge while traveling across the Kingdom of Lineria. You jump, roll, and attack with your sword in order to move across the 2D map in an action-adventure, platforming, adventure with very busy pixelated graphics.

I am going to just open with my favorite two parts of my Renaine demo: the writing and the music. The NPC dialogue is frequently snarky and fantastic, and I kept wanting to laugh while playing. For example, when you enter the dojo at the start of the demo to learn how to play the game, one of the NPCs gives the cliché statement that how anyone can become a pro with enough hard work and determination. Immediately to the right, another NPC states a more realistic answer of how SOME can become a pro with enough hard work and determination. After training and learning basic combat, a different NPC explains that advanced lessons are for the full game, and you’ll even run into an NPC with an upside-down head who talks about it and tries to get you to relate to him. This style of snarky and fourth-wall break humor was peppered throughout the demo without wearing out its welcome. The music, which is a very jazzy set of tunes, is incredible as well and is a fairly unique aspect for a platforming title. I actually found myself wanting to buy a copy of Renaine’s soundtrack to just put on in the background while I am living my day-to-day life. If you listen to the above linked trailer, you’ll see what I mean!

Of course, Renaine is more than just music and humor, and thankfully it also delivers in gameplay. The platforming and combat controls were pretty tight, and I felt like I could accurately judge where Aine was going to land when he jumped, and that if I was fast enough, I could hit what I was aiming at with my weapon. The real surprise though was that there is a fairly unique powerup gameplay loop. Whenever you kill enemies, you get money to collect. And fairly frequently, you run across an NPC shop that gives you different weapons or abilities to buy for a price — and you could get one at a time. You’re making choices between a fire rod that shoots flames, bombs that walk around, and so much more. There are even more surreal items such as different mushroom powerups that…well…turn you into an actual mushroom. All of this actually incentivized me to kill all the enemies I could find in order to get more money to keep trying out new powers as I would come across them. In the second half of the demo, I actually was partnered up with another, much larger, NPC, who helped me to fight enemies all throughout a sand area and I loved how it mixed up the gameplay.

Overall, Renaine was a blast to play and to experience. I was not expecting such sharp humor and writing while demoing it, but that, along with the constant powerups gameplay loop, really drew me into wanting to see more and more of the kingdom of Lineria and its inhabitants when it eventually releases for PC and for Nintendo Switch.

Are you excited for Renaine? What powerups are you hoping to find and use in the game?

Let us know below!

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The longer I kept playing The World of Kungfu: Dragon and Eagle, the more I kept thinking “this is so cool!” and the more I wanted to keep playing and wanting to get it when it is released. The World of Kungfu: Dragon and Eagle bills itself as “an old-school wuxia turn-based RPG set in the chaotic times of ancient China,” and it has you start off as a no-named individual who has to learn martial arts as you shape the fate of Wulin.

While the game’s website claims it is a turn-based RPG, the demo I played at GDC 2024 was more like a grid-based tactical RPG game with up to five combatants on your side at once instead. During battle, you can move your characters a certain number of squares around, and you can also attack only within a certain number of highlighted squares too. This isn’t a knock against The World of Kungfu: Dragon and Eagle whatsoever, but I do think it is important to be clear what this game is and is not.

What sets The World of Kungfu: Dragon and Eagle apart from any other RPG of its genre is the combat move pool itself. Every attack is drawn from a pool of over 200 styles of martial arts, and so you will get to experience a lot of different moves. As you use moves over and over again, they will get stronger and level up over time. In other words: you’re literally practicing martial arts in the game and getting stronger and better for it. You can also learn new moves through manuals you collect throughout the world. I hardcore geeked out over all the ingenuity in combat, as I practice kendo in my spare time and it honestly reminded me of walking along the Avenue of the Stars by the Victoria Harbour waterfront in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong.

The enemy AI felt fairly fleshed out and intelligent, and I was impressed that I had to use tactical thinking in order to win my fights (bouts?). While I did not get to experience much of the storyline, as I had to skip a lot of the dialogue to fit the whole demo into my timeslot, I was entertained by what I saw of the wuxia and historically-based atmosphere. Finally, the graphics are detailed pixel-art with vibrant colors. While I was playing my demo, the developer told me that The World of Kungfu: Dragon and Eagle is supposed to be 30-plus hours and it has multiple storylines for you to complete. I am honestly excited for when this game comes out, as I want to play it, and I think you should consider picking it up too if you like the demo/early access that is currently out on Steam.

What martial arts style do you hope makes it into The World of Kungfu: Dragon and Eagle?

Do you plan on picking the game up?

Let us know in the comments below!

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Bread & Fred is deceptively simple: two people, each controlling a penguin, have to work together to climb higher and higher in the snowy mountain environment until you reach the top and finish the game. Oh, and you’re tied to each other by a rope. However, Bread & Fred is anything but simple in practice. During my hands-on demo during PAX East 2024 with one of the developers as my co-penguin, I found a brutally difficult — yet incredibly fun — game that required us to count in unison to time jumps, swings, and wall grabs.

The pixel art is beautiful, and I loved how the colors popped off of the screen. The controls were also incredibly fair, and every time we fell down, it was absolutely deserved. The gameplay though? Brutal. A lot of the jumps and rope swings have almost no room for error, and everything has to be perfectly timed in order to climb further upwards. If you and your partner do not have excellent communication and a willingness to plot the next several jumps ahead of time, then you won’t get far in Bread & Fred. This game is incredibly challenging in gameplay execution versus mechanics, and I think that really works to show off Bread & Fred’s strengths to force people to cooperate to succeed. As you climb higher and higher, the terrain can get more and more difficult with environmental hazards, such as the blowing wind, that can derail even the most calculated of jumps.

As a side note, I did not try the single player mode — Bread & Fred is clearly meant to be a co-op experience.

During my PAX East 2024 Bread & Fred demo, I also was able to try out the new race content. In this, you and your partner penguins are competing against a polar bear in a closed map environment to see who can get to the end first. During the race I tried out, it felt like it was more complicated than the gameplay environment I was previously in, and it was less forgiving with how far you ‘drop’ if you miss a jump. The polar bear also repeatedly fell, surprisingly, and so it did not make me feel like the race was over the moment I or my partner miscued a jump or swing from platform to platform. Ultimately, I think it is a nice little add-on to Bread & Fred.

New content for Bread & Fred includes competitive races on new maps!
They are harder than they look. (Images courtesy of Apogee Entertainment.)

So, I’ll be honest: I loved Bread & Fred and the new race content, but it definitely isn’t for those who cannot communicate with their partner penguin well. It took me and one of the developers (who made the game!) time to connect well enough to get our penguins partway up the mountain and to try to (but fail at) crushing the polar bear during the race. Bread & Fred’s already out now, so definitely give it a try!

What do you think of difficult co-op games? Have you tried out Bread & Fred?

Let us know in the comments below!

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One of the most exciting things for me to try out at PAX East 2024 was an early hands-on build of Turbo Overkill on PlayStation 5. Developed by Trigger Happy Interactive and inspired by classics such as Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, Turbo Overkill has you play as Johnny Turbo as he returns to his hometown and finds everyone possessed by a rogue AI and its associated army.

The biggest difference between the PC version and the upcoming console build is just how slick everything feels, and how it is clear Trigger Happy Interactive really wanted to plus all the gameplay by making this the best possible version of the Turbo Overkill. The original PC build was designed to have you go as fast as you can through each area while solving combat puzzles and killing enemies, and they have tweaked the PlayStation 5 build to remove any potential slowdown spots in the game. I slid around a lot on my chainsaw leg (it is a weapon too!) and I ended up relying on that ability to repeatedly kill as many enemies as possible in areas where I had to kill everyone to proceed. Combat flowed so incredibly well, whether I was shooting or attacking through movement, and I had the biggest silly grin on my face during the entire demo.

As I alluded to, Turbo Overkill is a game designed to have you move fast, and that was perfectly showcased on the PlayStation 5. I was throwing myself from ledge to ledge, rooftop to the ground, and through tunnels and everywhere you could imagine as I tried to go as fast as I could while slaughtering anything that got in my way. It felt a lot like a 2024 version of Mirror’s Edge at times with how fluid and satisfying it felt to platform and move my way around the level while running and gunning.

Something that not every PC-to-console port does well is setting up converting a PC/mouse control scheme over to a controller without sacrificing any of the gameplay quality in the process. Thankfully, there was no such issue here for Turbo Overkill. The controller controls felt incredibly natural, and I would have been hard-pressed to tell you that this was not a game designed from the ground-up for the PlayStation 5 by the time I was done with my demo.

Did you play Turbo Overkill on PC? Are you excited for the upcoming console release?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post PAX East 2024 PlayStation 5 IMPRESSIONS: Turbo Overkill appeared first on oprainfall.