Month: April 2018

We’re in Golden Week right now, a week when a number of Japanese holidays just happen to be bunched together on the calendar. To celebrate, Square Enix has dropped prices on a number of PC games, notably on many entries in the Final Fantasy series. (Sony is doing a Golden Week PS4 sale as well). Below are the standouts from Square Enix’s sale; you can see the full list here.

To start with, you can get Mini Ninjas for free. To take advantage of this offer, just add it to your cart and use promo code MINININJAS at checkout. From GameSpot’s Mini Ninjas review: “This action adventure is low on gruesome assassinations and high on lighthearted fun, but that doesn’t mean fans of stealth-kill simulators, or anyone else for that matter, should skip over it.”

Now onto the price drops. You can save 50% on just about every Final Fantasy game available on PC right now. Core installments III – VI are $8, while the later games range from $6 to $10 each. Those are great prices on some of the best RPGs in history–even if you don’t prefer the art style changes Square Enix made to some of the games.

In non-Final Fantasy news, Dragon Quest Heroes and its sequel are also on sale for between $20 and $30.

Some links to supporting retailers are automatically made into affiliate links, and GameSpot may receive a small share of those sales.

You can now dress up like everyone’s favorite paranormal mercenary thanks to a new Monster Hunter World event. The latest in Capcom’s cross-promotional quests lets you play as Dante, if you’re able to grind out enough materials from a relatively tough battle on PS4 and Xbox One.

The official Twitter account announced the new events. Dante is tied to the “Code: Red” event, a rank 14 Arena quest that has you slaying Anjanath, Odogaron, Rathalos, Teostra. Beating them all will net you Red Orbs, a special material used to craft Dante’s equipment. Each individual piece of armor needs one Red Orb, and his signature Devil Sword needs two, so you’ll need seven in all to get the full look. The full armor set is called Dante α, and his sword is a Charge Blade. The event quest will be available until May 10 at 5 PM PT / 8 PM ET.

The Monster Hunter series has been known for featuring cameos of other popular Capcom properties, and World is no different. Only a few months into release the company has already released special quests allowing you to dress your Palico like Mega Man and earn armor to look like various Street Fighter characters. This all follows a PS4-exclusive quest to look like Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn, so the company is free to spread the love to other series as well.

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Imagine the bleakness of the man versus giant creatures gameplay of Shadow of the Colossus as a definitively Nordic tale, and you have a general idea of what Jotun is. Sprinkle in a little bit of Dark Souls’ difficulty and a malevolent sense of challenge, and you’re closer to hitting the bullseye. Now imagine all of that hand-drawn in a style somewhere between Dragon’s Lair and Princess Mononoke, and you’ve got Jotun.

Boiling the game down to its disparate parts does the game a mild disservice, though. In execution, Jotun is a perfect storybook, a game that seems ripped from the imagination of a Viking child being told tales of warriors of old facing down their gods. It’s a wonderfully wild, vibrant bedtime story told with fire and verve, even when the game is at its most stark and lonely.

Jotun tells the tale of Thora, a Viking shield maiden who falls from her boat during a voyage and drowns. Because passage to Valhalla is only granted to those who fall in battle, Thora is given the chance to earn her way into the golden halls by finding and killing the Jotun, the Titans of Norse mythology. Along the way, the gods assist her, granting her new power when she finds their shrines and pays her respects. Otherwise, all she has is an iron axe and an iron will. We learn between stages where Thora’s determination comes from in a fantastic, steely narration performed in Icelandic. Each new piece of her story would be worth it on its own, revealing years of underestimation, neglect, and later, a sibling jealousy that turns tragic. Even if the gameplay wasn’t as good as it was, being able to help Thora achieve glory would be more than worth the effort.

Behold, the tree of life.

Gameplay is 16-bit levels of simple, and yes, that is a compliment. You have a light attack with Thora’s axe, a hard-hitting heavy attack with a major delay, and a dodge. Thora can find massive shrines to the Gods in each stage, and by praying there, she earns new magical powers specific to each one–Thor allows her to use Mjolnir for a short time, Frigg allows her to heal at will, Loki creates a decoy that eventually explodes after a time–but all six of the powers have limited uses, and none are what you would call a guaranteed solution to any sticky situation. Primarily, timing, cunning, and luck will get Thora to Valhalla.

For most of the game, that cunning involves mastery of the environment. Jotun’s six stages, which can be tackled in any order, are impeccably designed. They are deceptively linear, laid out in such a way that gives the impression of vast, stunning tableaus in places dwarfed in size by your typical Diablo III dungeon. The illusion works. Grand, breathtaking vistas are the norm in Jotun, and they often serve as a wicked distraction from the dangers mere inches away. They’re also often rather desolate places, dark locales that no mortal has tread upon in ages. The game isn’t swarming with enemies, except for one particular stage that sends a veritable legion of dwarves your way. This bolsters the comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus, where the loneliness of what Thora has to do makes the sheer distance between each new obstacle feel like a greater journey. The real problem with that desolation is that more than a few times, you’ll need to backtrack through some of these areas to find much needed power ups, or because you’ve missed a crucial switch in order to get to said power ups, or because you’ve ended up in an area and the game’s obtuse pause screen map didn’t help you.

And this is why pruning your garden once a week is just so important.

The main events of the game, however, are the Jotun themselves as bosses. The Jotun are simply awe-inspiring enemy design, taking the rather threadbare descriptions from Norse lore, and extrapolating them to the nth degree, with each one several times Thora’s size onscreen.

The best is still the first: A nature giant that feels like Ursula from The Little Mermaid made entirely out of living trees and vines. Still, each of the bosses are just wonderfully realized, and you get maybe a good minute to marvel at them before the pain starts. A terrifying shield-swinging giant can summon a legion of dwarves out of the ground to rush at Thora with a scream. Halfway through the frost giant’s fight, the playing field turns into a sheet of slippery ice; when it’s down to a quarter bar of life, a white-out blizzard starts. A blacksmith giant has you fighting in a neverending firestorm. What the Jotun typically lack in speed, they make up for in power, where being in the wrong place at the wrong time during a fight will mean your end in two hits. The Jotuns’ patterns and weak points aren’t hard to suss out whatsoever, it’s simply a matter of using your limited arsenal to deal with them, and often with the horde of peripheral obstacles/enemies each Jotun will throw at you during, and quite often it will still not be enough. The game gives Thora infinite tries, and will start her right at the boss with each of her powers replenished each time she dies. Persistence and learning from the numerous failures will lead to success, but the game will not coddle, and every victory will be well-earned beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The PS4 and Xbox One ports of Jotun are very much on par with the PC version. The only major difference is the addition of Valhalla Mode, a boss rush that opens up after you beat the campaign. Aside from expanded health bars, an extra element of danger has been added to each boss battle taken from the campaign, forcing you to alter your attack strategy. The first stage’s plant boss now has poisonous spores surrounding her weak points, making it a game of hit and run rather than patient strikes. Alternately, a sword-wielding forge boss has a much shorter window in which to strike. Valhalla Mode is a small addition, but a welcome one.

One solemn face and 200 angry dwarves.

The Switch version of the game stands tall next to its more powerful console brothers, with not a single frame out of place, and no slowdown, even in the game’s busiest and most expansive areas. In handheld mode, the moments where the camera zooms out to give players a full view of their surroundings, or to behold the game’s numerous, massive bosses can sometimes make poor Thora a tiny red needle in a haystack. These moments are scarce, though, and it’s a small price to pay for the game’s epic scope.

The Switch port does, however, have one problem that’s much less tolerable: A much longer load time stretching between 15-30 seconds when entering a new area or respawning after a death. The initial load for a stage is acceptable, and transitions to new areas within a stage are much quicker, but for a game whose greatest challenges come from trial-and-error bosses that can sometimes kill with a single hit, the wait time to have another crack and be maddening. It’s a single flaw, but it’s a crucial one that can add insult to game’s legion of fatal injuries.

Jotun is a short game, and good players can probably plow through it in about 3 or 4 hours, but even with the ending behind me, I find myself dying to witness some images again and wanting to try different strategies. I want to hear Thora tell her tale again. Any good bedtime story that makes you want to hear it again right after it’s over is one for the ages.

Editor’s note: Portions of this article were featured in our PC, PS4, and Xbox One Jotun review.

Fortnite‘s meteor saga appears to be nearing its climax. After harmlessly adorning the sky in Battle Royale in recent weeks, meteors are actually crashing into the island, according to reports by several players.

Videos such as the one below have been making their way onto social media and Reddit. Small meteors streak down out of the sky and collide with the ground, destroying anything in their path–whether it’s part of the island or a player-made structure. It’s unclear at this point if the meteors would actually damage a player if someone is unfortunate enough to be hit by one, but it’s likely only a matter of time before we find out.

Beyond them hitting the ground, there’s been no further developments–they aren’t leaving behind any aliens or having any other effect. Meteors eventually crashing seemed inevitable when it was discovered that sound effects related to just that were included in a recent update’s game files.

There doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to where the meteors are landing. While the video above shows one hitting Tilted Towers, they’ve also struck down elsewhere, too. Fans have speculated that Tilted Towers would be demolished by a large meteor, something that Epic acknowledged in the 3.6 update. But so far, the map hasn’t been changed in any way by meteors finally starting to touch down.

This week saw an emergency broadcast show up on TVs in-game, and Epic has teased that something is about to unfold. Meanwhile, it’s also offered up the first image related to Season 4, and it suggests that it could be superhero-themed. How that connects to the meteors or speculation about aliens–if it does at all–remains to be seen, but Fortnite players certainly have a lot to keep them busy between all of this and the new Week 10 challenges.