Ghost of Tsushima is finally getting the PS5 / director’s cut treatment. That said, Sony sure could have been done things cheaper, which is why we’ve scouted you a better deal on it. While we were out there, we also spied low-cost AC games, budget Battlefields and Zeldas to boot…
At Anime Expo Lite, Crunchyroll revealed its slate of new and upcoming anime series for Summer 2021 and beyond, including Battle Game in 5 Seconds, Peach Boy Riverside, and Restaurant to Another World 2.
The slate of new anime was unveiled at the Crunchyroll Industry Panel, and the company gave a preview as to what fans can expect for this year and next, as well as giving more details on the Virtual Crunchyroll Expo and news on Crunchyroll Games mobile titles.
The full slate of anime set to debut on Crunchyroll in Summer 2021 is as follows;
Battle Game in 5 Seconds – A battle of quick wit and power commences as a group of individuals battle every five seconds after meeting! Premieres July. Crunchyroll also included a special video message from Ayumu Murase, the voice of Akira Shiroyanagi from the series.
Peach Boy Riverside – One princess aims to travel the world when one day she encounters a famous ogre-slaying warrior! Premieres July.
Girlfriend, Girlfriend – From the creator of AHO-GIRL comes a story of a triangular relationship as one high schooler dates two girlfriends at the same time! Premieres July.
TSUKIMICHI -Moonlit Fantasy- – Shunned by a goddess by not being enough of a hero, one former high school student aims to survive in a new fantasy world! Premieres July.
Seirei Gensouki: Spirit Chronicles – Realizing his mysterious past, one orphan sets out to live a better life attending a prestigious academy for noble children.
Fena: Pirate Princess – After an orphan escapes to the high seas, she takes her place as captain of a pirate crew for a swashbuckling adventure! Fena: Pirate Princess is a Crunchyroll and Adult Swim Original premiering this summer. Adult Swim will air the English dubbed series in North America and Crunchyroll will stream the subtitled series worldwide outside of Asia.
Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S – Tohru, Kobayashi and all the dragon friends are back in all-new episodes of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S! Premieres July.
My Next Life As a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! X – All routes lead to another great season of Catarina Claes’ comedic adventures in love. Premieres July 3
Drug Store in Another World – The Slow Life of a Cheat Pharmacist – One man sent to another world is going to make the best of his medicine crafting skills, and that’s the doctor’s orders! Premieres July.
Crunchyroll’s newly announced series that are a bit farther out are as follows;
Restaurant to Another World 2 – There is a certain restaurant that looks completely normal through the week, but on Saturdays, it opens in secret exclusively to some very unique guests in various areas of a parallel world. Premieres October.
SAKUGAN – This original anime follows a father and daughter on an epic journey that brings them face to face with danger in order to uncover the truth. Premieres October.
The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window – In this horror mystery anime, bookstore employee Mikado has a fateful encounter with an exorcist named Hiyakawa and must help out with exorcism duties. Premieres October.
The World’s Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated in Another World as an Aristocrat – When a great assassin is reborn in another world, he finds himself the heir to a long line of killers from the shadows. With both his modern-day knowledge and experience and the special magic and techniques of this new world, he could very well become the most unstoppable assassin in history…! Premieres October.
In the Land of Leadale – A leisurely adventure tale is about to begin, featuring a girl transported to a game world and the smiles and tears she shares with her quirky companions! Premieres January 2022.
Orient – This is a story about Musashi, a 15-year-old boy who lives in Japan during the Sengoku period where Japan is ruled by demons and Mushashi must try to confront these creatures with a certain special power!
During the panel, it was revealed that the cast of Restaurant to Another World 2 would be part of Virtual Crunchyroll Expo that takes place August 5-8. Three actors will be gathering for a panel to discuss the upcoming anime, and they are as follows;
Junichi Suwabe – the voice of Shopkeeper (also known for his work in JUJUTSU KAISEN as Sukuna Ryomen, My Hero Academia as Shota Aizawa, and Yuri!!! on ICE as Viktor Nikiforov among many others)
Saori Onishi – the voice of Kuro (also known for her work in Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? As Ais Wallenstein, Umamusume: Pretty Derby as Mejiro McQueen and Haikyu!! As Kanoka Amanai)
Sumire Uesaka – the voice of Aletta (also known for her work in DON’T TOY WITH ME, MISS NAGATORO as Hayase Nagatoro, My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! X as Susanna Randall, and The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated! as Kyoko Jingu)
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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Capcom has revealed Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruins’ post-launch roadmap through October 2021, and it includes free new Monsties like Monster Hunter Rise’s Palamute and a few co-op quest exclusive monsters.
Monster Hunter Stories 2 will be released on Nintendo Switch and PC on July 9, and the first post-launch content will be the aforementioned Palamute Monstie that arrives on July 15.
On August 5, Free Title Update #2 will bring with it a Kulve Taroth as a co-op quest exclusive monster and Hellblade Glavenus and Boltreaver Astalos Monsties. In September, two updates will drop that include five new Monsties – Soulseer Mizutsune, Elderfrost Gammoth, Oroshi Kirin, Dreadking Rathalos, and Molten Tigrex. There will also be a High Difficulty version of the Kulve Troth co-op quest.
In October 2021, Free Title Update #5 will add a new mysterious High Difficulty co-op quest exclusive monster and the Silver Rathalos and Gold Rathian Monsties.
This 4th of July has brought with it fireworks, good food (we hope) and tons of tech related sales. The best one right now is over at Best Buy. You can grab yourself a Razer Basilisk Gaming Mouse and get a $50 Steam Gift Card for free. There’s also tons of deals on MacBooks and gaming Laptops, a stunning monitor from Alienware and so much more.
A group of hackers has begun hacking Apex Legends following frustration at the current hacking and server problems players are facing in the original Titanfall.
As reported by Kotaku, certain Apex Legends players on PC are noticing hacked in-game playlists and notifications that features text that is both complaining about the hacking situation in Titanfall and advertising SaveTitanfall.com, a website that is claiming EA and Respawn – the company behind both these games – is not doing enough to keep 2014’s Titanfall safe from attacks.
Visitors to SaveTitanfall.com are greeted by a message explaining the situation alongside links to help others learn about the current state of these problems.
“Titanfall is a beloved franchise by many, and hacker issues have been at rise,” the aforementioned message reads. “The Titanfall community has been begging Respawn to fix this issue for over three years, but to no avail. Today the game is still being sold, while being completely unplayable. It’s time we speak up.”
These hacked messages in Apex Legends don’t appear to be happening to everyone, and the majority of the screenshots and clips of the hack are from PC. The biggest problem is that these affected players aren’t even able to join other playlists outside of the problematic ones.
We’re back with more secrets that you probably don’t know about in Breath of the Wild! This time we dive into miniaturized items, carrying snowy weather across Hyrule, Yiga Blademasters stealing the Master Sword, and much more! Rin’s Combat Glossary – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qtYT06sxweRW3tRnovcCc-f4xIOGFNsD02pG1TzloHc/edit?usp=sharing
In the video above, we cover 29 tips and tricks that aren’t quite as well known, ranging from secrets to glitches, some that are pretty simple and others that are fairly complex. Breath of the Wild has been out for four years at this point, and players have found some amazing things, intended or not, that keep the game and its sense of discovery feeling fresh.
Lucasfilm and Disney+ unveiled the first look at the anime series Star Wars: Visions alongside revealing that all nine episodes will debut on September 22, 2021.
The news was shared during Anime Expo Lite, and it was revealed that this anthology of animated shorts celebrating Star Wars is being created by seven Japanese anime studios that will use “their signature animation and storytelling styles to realize their own visions of the galaxy far, far away.”
Lucasfilm made the decision to allow these creators to tell stories that didn’t have to fit in the official Star Wars timeline, even if they wanted to use established characters.
“We really wanted to give these creators a wide creative berth to explore all the imaginative potential of the Star Wars galaxy through the unique lens of anime,” James Waugh said. “We realized we wanted these to be as authentic as possible to the studios and creators who are making them, made through their unique process, in a medium they’re such experts at. So the idea was, this is their vision riffing off all the elements of the Star Wars galaxy that inspired them — hopefully to make a really incredible anthology series, unlike anything we’ve seen before in the Star Wars galaxy.”
The list of studios and their Star Wars: Visions shorts are as follows;
From The Duel that features Samurai-esque Jedi and Sith to Lop and Ochō which stars a “space bunny-person,” to a new tale of dark side twins and the story of master and padawan in a twist on “hallmark Star Wars motifs,” there will be a ton of variety and uniqueness in each story.
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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Warning: Full spoilers for The Forever Purge follow…
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Those who’ve already watched The Forever Purge witnessed what was originally meant to be the end of the Purge saga. That is until creator James DeMonaco had an idea a few months ago on how to continue the series. Even after the total implosion of America at the finish of the film.
Need a full Purge series catch-up? We broke down the entire saga in chronological order…
That’s right, (once again, spoilers) The Forever Purge wraps things up with all of America in flames, the entire nation having been taken over by the NFFA’s most racist and violent voting base – to the point where even the NFFA itself was battling back against these Ever After Purgers. Speaking with DeMonaco, he had this to say about the way the movie left things: “The love story was at the heart of everything. I wanted to follow this cyclical journey of these people coming from Mexico and seeking the American dream in an America that was dying. And then returning home. We flipped everything on its head and Mexico becomes the safe haven. And people are now going that way, and everything is turned upside-down. I thought that was an interesting way to take it.”
In the film, Ana de la Reguera (Army of the Dead) and Tenoch Huerta (the upcoming Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) star as the Mexican couple, Adela and Juan, who flee their country only to find that things are even worse in the United States.
“Like I’ve said, I thought it was the end [of the Purge universe],” DeMonaco explained. “I thought I was painting the end of this kind of country in a way. So how do I go forward? And then I woke up one day and was like, ‘I think I figured it out.’ I can’t give it away. I wish I could, but they’d kill me.
“I think I came up with the way that sort of changes the geographical structure of the nation, in a way that allows us to proceed and really, hopefully, expand the franchise into something bigger. I hope we can go and take things a little bigger now. But at first I thought it was definitively an ending. But even with that ending, I think some of the current politics fed into something new that I think I can create.”
Shooting That One-Shot Action Scene
The Forever Purge not only extends the Purge Night carnage out into the day as the Ever After Purge consumes everything in its path, but the franchise, for the first time, uses a one-shot — a “oner” — to follow our heroes through the chaos.
“As soon as I wrote the El Paso sequence in the script, Everardo [Gout], our director, said, ‘I want to do it as a oner,'” DeMonaco laughed. “I remember his original thought was, ‘I want to do the whole thing in a oner,’ and I was like, ‘That’s going to be a 15-minute oner, man.’ I’m like, ‘You’re insane.’ And he kept pushing, and I think it ended up being about two minutes. At some point I think it was actually longer. We may have cut a little bit of it. But he pulled it off. We shot it on the Universal lot and it was a crazy night. He pulled it off. He had it in his head the whole time. We had a tank and a helicopter. It was crazy to do. The actors had to hit their marks.
“It’s not that I’m not a fan of oners, but I think they’re just a gimmick sometimes, to be honest,” he said. “Sometimes it feels like the filmmaker is just playing a game. But there’s something that Everardo did that just makes it into such a visceral experience. He captured something. It’s beautifully done.”
Star Ana de la Reguera also spoke to us about that big tracking shot. “That was very exciting, but also very scary,” she said. But also we worked all night. We had to rehearse the whole thing with choreography because it’s all one shot with no cuts. We were at Universal Studios and we were inside of a truck and then as the truck went along you could see what we were looking out from inside the truck. And then the camera comes out of the truck and follows us through the whole town. And it’s a cool moment in the movie because there are these bombs and these fire shots and special effects and water and gas.”
It might’ve been a cool moment, but the actress also says it was pretty scary.
“And I was terrified because if anything goes wrong — like you could slip, you could get hit, there’s real fire… so we had to go through that,” she said. “So I was screaming outside of the frame, when I wasn’t in the shot for real. In the shot I was acting like I was tough and when I wasn’t in it I was like, ‘Ahhhhh!’ I was so afraid. And then when the camera would go back on me I would change my expression into something back in the moment. But it was a lot of fun too. It was a team effort.”
This Saturday has brought with it a bunch of PC related sales that are just too good to not talk about. MacBooks are on sale still at Amazon, while gaming and productivity laptops and desktops are available over at Dell. Want to build your own? Newegg has the latest Intel CPU on sale, as well as an awesome CPU cooler, and a nice mix of other deals rounds out our list.
Destiny 2‘s weekly story in the Season of the Splicer has been some of its best ever. A big part of that is the ongoing, unfolding mystery of the actions undertaken by Savathun, the looming Hive god enemy Bungie has been slowly developing since the release of vanilla Destiny 2. Savathun’s whole deal is executing elaborate, spooky plans that are all about deception and obfuscation–tricking you literally makes her stronger. And that makes this week’s new events in Destiny 2 extremely suspect. Warning: We’re about to get into story spoilers for this season.
If you’re not fully caught up, the Season of the Splicer has been marked by the Endless Night, a weird Vex simulation that’s somehow blocked out the sun in the Last City, where all the humans and Guardians live. It might be the slow-burningest threat ever in Destiny; the Endless Night isn’t a bomb or a ship that’s going to crash into the Tower, but instead a miasma that is slowly draining electrical power, encouraging sickness, burdening resources, and damaging morale. The Endless Night has been making people edgy as food becomes increasingly scarce and infrastructure fails. It’s like the City is under siege but without a clear enemy, and that has caused a number of people to turn inward to find someone to blame. There’s distrust in the City’s military leadership, the Vanguard, and there have been attacks against alien refugees, the Eliskni, who have been given shelter within its walls.
Meanwhile, we’ve been attacking the Vex networks out in the solar system to try to disrupt the Endless Night and figure out what its whole deal is. Last week, we discovered the truth that had been suspected since the beginning: the Vex are actually under the control of Quria, a Vex machine that numbers among the Taken. The Taken are enemies that were magically manipulated by Oryx, the Hive god from Destiny 1’s Taken King expansion–Oryx could use his special powers to rob them of their free will and turn them into weird spectral monster things.
Quria is a special Taken. In Destiny 2’s lore, the Vex created Quria way back to study Oryx and figure out his weird “taking” power, since it’s one of those interesting Destiny things that defies the laws of reality (see also: all the players’ Guardian powers that are also known as the Light, and all the Darkness powers–this all falls under the category heading of things that are “Paracausal,” and it’s how Destiny gets away with space magic). Apparently, Quria did figure out how to “take,” despite then being enthralled by Oryx.
This is an ongoing thing in Destiny 2. See, we killed Oryx in The Taken King, so there shouldn’t be any new Taken, since the guy who can do the taking is dead. But new Taken have been popping up all over the place since vanilla Destiny 2. The story and lore has built over time to make it clear that Quria is the new thing doing the taking, using what it learned about Oryx. And we know from the lore that, way back in the past, at some point, Oryx “gifted” Quria to Savathun.
Being Vex but also Taken, Quria has been extremely useful to Savathun. Quria is how Savathun managed to grow the ranks of the Taken and do a whole bunch of things over the course of the last few years, including attacking key locations on Earth and creating the “curse” in the Dreaming City that traps it in a three-week time loop. With the Endless Night, Quria has been doing something similar to the Last City, creating a Vex simulation that mixes with Taken power to wreck everything and sow dissent and distrust–Savathun’s favorite things.
So that brings us up to now. Once we discovered Quria was controlling the Vex and running the Endless Night simulation, we were able to track it down and destroy it this week in a big, intense showdown battle. According to characters in the game and lore entries, the Endless Night is slowly starting to abate. It was tough, but we won, as usual.
Except there’s no way that’s all there is to it. In fact, I’m not convinced what we killed was even Quria.
As mentioned, Savathun’s whole deal is misdirection. Through their weirdo darkness magic, the Hive gain their immense power and even their immortality through a symbiotic relationship with evil worms they keep inside them. They constantly have to feed the worms, or the worms will consume them, so the Hive feeds them with violence (it’s a magic thing, don’t worry about it), and that’s why they’re always conquering. Except Savathun feeds her worm with other people’s “failure to understand me.” She literally needs to deceive people to stay alive and grow more powerful.
So that means we need to think about what Savathun gained from deploying Quria to create the Endless Night and what other angles she might be playing. First, getting Quria killed seems like a major loss. After all, if Quria is the weapon Savathun can use to create new Taken and has power to subvert the Vex’s will to do things like create the Endless Night in the first place, that seems like a helluva useful piece to lose on the game board. Meanwhile, what did Savathun actually get out of this attack? The Endless Night created some cracks in the unified front of humanity, and those cracks might broaden over time–but even if that long-term gain proves useful to Savathun, she still sacrificed a lot for it.
If we accept that Savathun’s plans aren’t what they appear to be, then we have to accept that there’s more going on with the Quria situation. Why would Savathun sacrifice what has to be her most powerful asset, essentially just to mess with us? Even if we assume Savathun was operating on the idea that the Endless Night would somehow be more successful and that we threw a wrench into her plans by allying with Mithrax and the Eliksni to defeat her, it was still an enormous risk to throw Quria out there where we could kill it. So what else is going on?
There are a couple of distinct possibilities, and more if we consider that there are a lot of things we probably don’t know.
First, there’s the ongoing assumption that Savathun has a spy within the City, likely in the leadership, that looks like a human but is actually Savathun herself in some kind of shape-shifted form. The smart money all season has been on this person being Osiris, who has been acting exceedingly weirdly for a long time now. Assume Osiris is really Savathun and most of his dialogue this season has sounded like the real purpose of all these Endless Night shenanigans has been to gain intel on Guardians. If we also buy the premise that Savathun is hoping to somehow trick or employ Guardians to kill her worm and free her from being forced to endlessly feed it–that’s my personal theory, as I laid out a couple weeks ago–then the Endless Night as an experiment to study us and our capabilities makes a lot more sense. But it still doesn’t seem like a win that’s worth sacrificing Quria.
Pointedly, though, unlike most Vex Hydras that we kill in Destiny 2, a big chunk of Quria was left behind at the end of the fight during this week’s new mission, Expunge: Delphi. Another fishy thing Osiris previously suggested was the idea of capturing Quria instead of killing it–but after floating that idea a while ago, he never brought it up again, even when we were actively shooting the damn thing. If Osiris is Savathun and Savathun suggested capturing Quria as part of her master plan (or even if Osiris is just Osiris and actually believed in that idea), why not bring it up again and try to stop us from wrecking the valuable Taken Vex? The answers are either that Savathun abandoned that plan because it was too suspicious, or that Savathun was just making that suggestion to sow doubt (which worked)–or, finally, that a surviving chunk of Quria might be enough for Savathun to enact that plan. If the Vanguard nabs that hunk of Quria and drags it back to the City, we could be in very big trouble.
Another possibility is that Quria wasn’t just some tool for Savathun to use but was more like an ally with, potentially, its own agenda. Consider last week’s Expunge mission, when we discovered that Quria was talking with us by leaving messages on our heads-up displays. It was a creepy moment that suggested Quria had more power than we knew, but it also established a Vex machine as being a lot more human than they ever have been before. The alien computer was taunting us. It seemed simultaneously arrogant and angry. These machines aren’t really known for their emotional output, so clearly there was more to Quria than we know.
Add to that the fact that Quria was originally a gift from Oryx. The thing about the Hive is, as much as they work together, they also are constantly fighting one another, and that’s most true of the Hive gods. Oryx, Savathun, and the third Hive god, Xivu Arath, spent eons killing each other whenever they could to increase their own strength. That’s their whole deal–anything that can be killed must be killed, because the Hive’s ethos is to destroy all weakness until only the strongest possible life remains. That’s the Sword Logic, and in the lore, we’ve seen numerous moments where the gods betrayed each other simply as a matter of course. Hell, that’s how Oryx wound up taking Quria to begin with, because Savathun executed a plan to get Oryx’s son, Crota, attacked by the Vex just to screw with him.
So it seems really, really dubious that Oryx gave Quria to Savathun just to be a nice guy. Being nice is against everything the Hive believe. If we assume an ulterior motive with that gift, then it stands to reason that Savathun and Quria might not have been allies at all, or that Quria might not have been fully under Savathun’s control. After all, the Taken King was Oryx.
Maybe assuming Quria was Savathun’s greatest asset is wrongheaded. Maybe Quria had plans of its own, or was as much an enemy to Savathun as an ally. Maybe part of Savathun’s machinations with the Endless Night was to hang Quria out to dry, in hopes that it would get rolled by some Guardians, since that’s exactly what happened.
And finally, there’s that possibility I floated up above, that what we just killed wasn’t Quria at all. We’re dealing with the queen of misdirection here. Quria is an enemy we’ve been hearing rumblings about for years. It would probably be very beneficial for Savathun to make us think we’d destroyed Quria, which might provide some leeway for her to continue with additional Taken plans without us realizing what’s going on. The Dreaming City, after all, remains caught in its Quria-created time loop.
Not long ago, Osiris speculated that the Vex network, the strange computer world we’ve been diving into in order to disrupt the Endless Night, is a lot like the Hive’s Ascendant Realm. That’s another weird lore thing, but essentially, the Ascendant Realm is another dimension where powerful Hive’s souls go when they’re killed in the material world. Since you only killed their material body, the Ascendant Realm makes these Hive effectively immortal. That’s why we’ve been forced to go into the Ascendant Realm to kill major Hive bosses so many times; if you don’t kill them in the Ascendant Realm, they aren’t really dead.
We don’t know how the Vex network actually works, but Osiris’s comment about it being similar to the Hive’s alternate dimension brings up the possibility that maybe killing Quria in that place didn’t fully destroy it–just like killing a Hive in the “real” world doesn’t fully destroy it. After all, you can copy files in a computer, and delete those copies, without harming the originals. That analogy might not be exactly what’s going on here, but the idea of a Vex equivalent of the Ascendant Realm adds some possible complications.
All that to say, of course, that it’s tough to put a finger on what exactly is going on. But if we know anything about Savathun, it’s that the easiest and clearest explanation of events is never the truth. Maybe we did wipe out Quria this week, but it’s probably a mistake to believe we just made Destiny’s biggest threat any weaker. That’s just what Savathun wants us to think.
