Author: Trafficblast

With more and more people staying home amid the COVID-19 crisis, the gaming industry is experiencing growth as people look for stuff to do. Xbox is seeing an increase in Xbox Live users and Xbox Game Pass subscribers. While the lockdowns are seemingly good for business, it’s also a challenging time in the world where people are facing difficulty and hardship related to the pandemic and other factors.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer told Business Insider that Microsoft is trying to avoid “exploiting the situation” for its own gain. Instead of focusing on changing up its business models to leverage the increase in players, the company is primarily trying to keep Xbox Live up and running to meet the increased demand.

“We want to be very thoughtful and not exploiting the situation,” Spencer said. “We’re not putting in place any different business tactics or other things. We’re just trying to keep all the services up, trying to keep the games enjoyable, keeping our networks safe and secure. And being there at a time of need. I’m proud that we can provide this activity for people.”

Also in the interview, Spencer said Microsoft has held internal discussions regarding this unique time in the world. Business is good, but people are struggling.

“You wouldn’t wish this is the way we get here,” Spencer said. “We’ve talked [internally at Microsoft] about this. It’s about, ‘How do you feel that gaming is doing well at a time where the world is hurting?'”

As part of Microsoft’s latest earnings report, the company announced that content and services revenue rose by 2 percent (up $33 million) due to the COVID-19 crisis that is keeping people at home. Xbox Live monthly active users reached nearly 90 million, while Xbox Game Pass has now surpassed 10 million paid subscribers.

Warning: There are going to be spoilers, obviously. Read on at your own risk.

The impressive thing about Final Fantasy 7 Remake is how grounded so much of it feels. Even if you’re not familiar with Midgar, mako, or Materia, for the most part, the remake does a remarkably good job of dropping you into its world without leaving you to flounder. That’s thanks to its expanded character development and focus on the human side of its major events–you might be wandering through a fantasy world, but you can relate to the people who live there and their universal hardships and triumphs.

Sure, there are scenes where a guy with a five-foot sword and a giant man with a gatling gun for an arm ride a subway and discuss being inconspicuous. But there are also more human moments, like when the members of Avalanche consider the collateral damage of their mission to blow up dangerous mako reactors, or when Shinra’s employees express the fears they have about simply going to work with terrorist attacks on the rise.

So much of FF7 Remake is anchored in realistic human experience and relatable characters–and then you get to the game’s conclusion. The ending has stirred up some controversy among fans for a few reasons, including the fact that it takes serious liberties with the existing FF7 story. But beyond a purist love of the original, the ending is also just kind of bad. It’s a big narrative left turn in the last moments of the game; its meanings and implications–and even just the events being depicted–are unclear, and most of all, it doesn’t feel like the rest of FF7 Remake.

That last point is the most important. FF7 Remake’s Chapter 18 is a jarring departure from what makes the rest of the game work, and that’s why it feels so off. It abandons relatable stakes for superheroics and chucks out knowable, human villains with clear (if cartoonishly evil) motivations for wholly supernatural entities that haven’t even functioned as characters. The remake’s ending stumbles because it feels like it belongs to a different game and a different story, confusing not just the FFVII Remake’s narrative, but its approach to its themes and characters.

All of the “ending stuff” in FF7 Remake is relegated to Chapter 18, which sends the characters through a portal to fight the physical manifestation of fate: the Whispers. Those strange, ghostly flying cloak creatures have been present throughout the game, and figuring out their deal is a big element that the remake adds to the FF7 story. But their supernatural addition to the tale only becomes off-puttingly weird when the game’s climax takes you to another dimension to fight a giant ghost-creature and its minions. While the Whispers have been around throughout the story, the game has never built them up as actual antagonists–and yet at the most important moment in the game’s story, you’re not fighting Shinra or working to save your friends in Sector 7, you’re battling a bunch of literally faceless ghost-monsters whose motivations you barely understand.

Everything about the ending feels like it’s out of step with the rest of the game. Remember how Cloud, Tifa, and Barret were outflanked when Shinra raised a ladder out of reach in the Sector 5 reactor? Remember when the team was gassed and locked in a dungeon by a local mob boss and his group of idiot lackeys? Remember when Tifa almost died when she tried to jump from one light fixture to another, misjudged the distance, and dropped 30 feet to the floor below?

Yes, your team does some amazing stuff throughout the course of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, but for the most part, it feels grounded to an extent. The stakes are clear and the characters face danger. Cloud might pull off a cool flip or fling a motorcycle at a helicopter here and there, but for the most part, when people fire guns at your characters, you know they could be hurt or killed. When someone almost falls off the side of a catwalk or a building, you recognize that they wouldn’t have survived (unless there was a convenient bed of flowers waiting to cushion the landing).

Chapter 18, on the other hand, has the characters leaping between floating chunks of concrete, punching and kicking through piles of concrete and debris like so many Chris Redfields, and dodging the enormous fists of what might as well be a Final Fantasy Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. It’s all a lot more like FF7’s CGI-animated sequel, Advent Children, than like the rest of the remake–and that movie was similarly criticized for focusing on superhero antics that were at odds with the original.

And that’s to say nothing of the way the game introduces new elements and tells the story of its ending. Suddenly, Red XIII is an exposition machine ready to fill in details about how fate works, and Aerith is giving the Avalanche group a pep talk about killing a god (one assumes) as if she was just reading ahead in the script, Mel Brooks-style. If you’d never played FF7 and didn’t know what was coming, the ending would be confusing, but even with full knowledge of what is meant to happen in future installments, the whole “lets stop and go kill Destiny” thing gets almost zero setup or explanation. It gets even worse once you win, with the ending throwing in a totally baffling scene between Cloud and Sephiroth immediately following their battle (apparently that previous battle was with a fake Whisper Sephiroth and the individual in the cutscene that follows is the true Sephiroth). And after that, the ending gives a zero-context look at Zack, a key character in Cloud’s backstory, without providing any information about what it is you’re seeing or why. That scene only makes sense if you’re an FF7 fan, and even then, what it’s supposedly showing us is completely opaque.

FF7 Remake’s ending illuminates almost nothing at all. It’s out of step with the entire rest of the game and it haphazardly throws in new narrative elements and characters without providing them any context–while also bending the existing characters into new shapes in order to make the ending work. It doesn’t fit with the game, and in other circumstances, it would be a big letdown. But I’m still optimistic about FF7 Remake and what’s to come later, because I think (and I’m hoping) that Square Enix has gotten all the weird nonsense out of the way.

Yes, Chapter 18 doesn’t match the tone, the character, or the methodology of the rest of FF7 Remake. But while endings are important, it’s also worth noting that Chapter 18 winds up being a super-small chunk of the overall experience. If 95% of FF7 Remake is relatively grounded and intensely focused on character development, it stands to reason that this is the approach the development team feels represents the game (and the series) they are making. The ending is an abnormality compared to the rest of FF7 Remake, which hopefully means it’ll be an abnormality for the ongoing series, as well.

It’s also important to consider the narrative work that Chapter 18 does. It might go about it in a goofy, chaotic way, but Chapter 18 opens the door for Square Enix to continue to reshape FF7. That might not be what every fan wants out of the remake, but it’s clearly what the team making the game wants. Chapter 18 does carry all the narrative weight of explaining why it’s possible for the story to change in the future–which hopefully means future installments won’t have to spend that time themselves. Put another way: If we already fought and killed Destiny, the story doesn’t have to do any additional weird fighting and killing Destiny stuff. That strangeness is now handled and out of the way.

And as Senior Editor Tamoor Hussain put it in our FF7 Remake spoiler chat podcast, the writing team on this game has earned the benefit of the doubt. So much of the story and character development in FF7 Remake works exceedingly well–better than it has any right to, really. Moments that are cringe-worthy in the original story are rescued by the remake, from the approach to dressing up for Don Corneo, to Aerith and Tifa’s quick-developing friendship replacing a rivalry over Cloud. FF7 Remake improves a lot of things about the original; its creators deserve the leeway to continue telling the story as they want to tell it.

I think we’ll get more of the 95% of what makes FF7R great, with the added benefit that now, longtime fans and newcomers alike are facing down a new, unpredictable story. Unfortunately, we don’t know how long we’ll have to wait to find out if I’m proven right.

NXT’s Keith Lee has made waves over the past year in WWE. He was a main attraction for Team NXT at 2019’s Survivor Series, dethroned Roderick Strong for the North American Championship, appeared in 2020’s Royal Rumble match, and sang his way into our hearts in the Netflix movie The Main Event. However, it doesn’t stop there. Lee will defend his title against Damian Priest on the April 29 episode of NXT on USA.

Early in April, Lee faced Dominik Dijakovic and Priest in a triple threat match for the North American Championship, successfully retaining it, but Lee thinks a one-on-one with Priest won’t be as challenging. “I think that one-on-ones are oftentimes easier matches because you can focus on one opponent,” Lee told GameSpot. “But as we’ve seen, he was a crafty guy, so there is still danger with him.”

That’s not the only challenge Lee will face when defending his title. Wrestling at the Performance Center, without an audience, is not something professional wrestlers are used to, as the roar of the crowd can help energize the performers. “[This is] something that I’ve actually talked about with so many of my other athletic friends and associates–just there’s a bit of a void when it comes to not having the crowd for that initial level of adrenaline,” Lee explained. “So not having them there takes away a little bit of electricity. It makes it slightly difficult and a little different experience. So there’s that lack of adrenaline. Things often hurt even more than usual because I don’t have such a wide array of people kind of uplifting me. I tried to explain to fans how much they mean to me, but I don’t know if it gets across.”

As for how wrestlers have been keeping busy while stuck at home, NXT’s Adam Cole has been playing a lot of video games. Lee has been doing some of that, but he’s mostly been building himself a computer and watching a lot of anime. “Major anime for me are One Piece, Black Clover, My Hero Academia–which just ended a bit ago–and there is one that I just finished called Vinland Saga, and those are kind of like my main anime that I watch at home,” said Lee.

As for his favorite anime, Lee said that right now, based on story and character growth, it’s One Piece, and yes, he resonates with Luffy. “A lot of anime that I watch often lines up with my own beliefs in life as far as meeting difficult obstacles and then growing from them and overcoming them. And so that’s kind of the main formal story that fits for me and I enjoyed that.”

You can see Keith Lee on WWE’s Wednesday night show NXT, which airs on the USA Network at 8 PM ET / 7 PM CT. On April 29, he’ll defend his championship against Damian Priest.

With the release of the acclaimed Final Fantasy VII Remake, we’ve been seeing a ton of great deals around older Final Fantasy games, which is perfect timing for those who are itching to go back and play some of their favorites. PS4 and Xbox One players have sales of their own to take advantage of this week featuring deals on the original FFVII and later entries like X/X-2 HD Remaster and XII: The Zodiac Age. But if you’re looking to go further back and play some of the older Final Fantasy games, a new Square Enix sale offers discounts for those classic games on iOS and Android. You’ll also find deals on the Dragon Quest franchise and other classics like Chrono Trigger.

The sale includes markdowns spanning from the first Final Fantasy, which is just $4 right now, to the original Final Fantasy VII, which is on sale for $9. Several of these games regularly go for about $15, so it’s a good chance to grab some of these older FF games for less than $10. You can also snag the excellent Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions for just $7 (the iPad version is discounted to $8).

Besides Final Fantasy, the time-traveling epic Chrono Trigger is a full 50% off, selling for $5 on iOS and Android. You’ll also find a host of Dragon Quest deals, including Dragon Quest VIII for $15 (normally $20) and the earlier games for $10 or less. You can check out all the current mobile deals below. It’s unclear how long these deals will be available, so don’t wait too long if any of these games catch your eye.

Best mobile game deals (iOS)

If playing games on a phone or tablet isn’t your thing, be sure to check out all the other digital game deals floating around this week on PC and consoles. PSN just launched a huge sale on PS4 games under $20, and Xbox Live is also going hard on deals this week with markdowns on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Diablo III: Eternal Collection. Some fantastic PC games, like Titanfall 2, are as cheap as $3 on Amazon right now. Plus, check out all the free games you can claim to keep this week.