David Harbour’s character, Alexei, is known in the comics as The Red Guardian, a Russian WW2 hero who was actually married to Natasha for a period of time. It’s unclear what Alexei’s story will be in the MCU, but Harbour walked out on stage wearing a Captain America t-shirt under his suit coat. When the panel moderator asked if Cap was his favorite, Harbor teased that his character has some “complicated feelings” on the matter, leading us to believe that we may get some connection between Alexei and WW2, if not Steve Rogers himself, in the movie.
After all, with Hydra and the Red Room skulking around Europe through the end of the war, it would make sense for other cryo-freeze experiments to have been taking place, right? Maybe Steve isn’t Marvel’s only “man out of time.” Otherwise, Red Guardian is traditionally positioned as Russia’s original answer to the Super Soldier project–so that could be another potential explanation if they choose to drop the WW2 connection. Either way, things are likely to get pretty complicated and very, very interesting.
Platinum Games upcoming Nintendo Switch title, Astral Chain, makes you a metaphysical anime K-9 cop. It’s as cool as it sounds, mixing some light investigation mechanics with a little bit of platforming and a two-character combat system that gives a new twist to Platinum’s approach to stylish, hard action.
At San Diego Comic-Con 2019, Nintendo offered GameSpot our first chance to get hands-on with Astral Chain. We played a small portion of the game that took place a few hours in, which seemed more akin to a side quest than a main story mission. The slice gave a brief look at a lot of what Astral Chain has to offer, including its combat system and investigation mechanics, and how they’ll both work together with the game’s central conceit–controlling two characters at once.
You play a member of a special police force unit called Neuron in Astral Chain, and your duties include dealing with the fact that the astral plane is spilling over into the real world. With it comes monsters, but you have a special trick for dealing with those, too: a Legion, your own astral plane entity that can fight monsters for you automatically or follow your commands. Your Legion is basically like a sword-wielding dog you lead around on a leash. The Legion attacks hostile creatures on its own, but you can also tell it where to go and what to attack.
Your Legion is basically like a sword-wielding dog you lead around on a leash.
The slice of Astral Chain we played started with a case about a missing woman who had seemingly come under attack from an astral plane monster, known as a chimera. Heading to the crime scene means walking through Astral Chain’s city, where you’ll find citizens to speak with and shops where you can buy useful items. Talking with people can give you information about the game’s story and the cases you’ll work on as you progress through the game, and like a real cop, you’ll keep notes about important information you learn along the way. Conversations that took place before our slice of the game had brought up mention of something called “the Red Ghost,” which turned out to be the chimera we’re hunting.
Arriving at the crime scene gave a quick sense of what Astral Chain’s investigations are like. This case required checking certain spots on the ground where evidence had been marked. We were able to see a reconstruction of the victim lying on the ground after the attack and picked up some other information about the event, and eventually, we found a place where the chimera’s astral plane energy had warped reality slightly. That was the clue we were looking for.
Using Your Supernatural Police Dog
As you walk around in Astral Chain, your Legion isn’t necessarily always by your side, but you can just about always summon it with a quick press of the ZL button. You can use it to analyze astral plane evidence, and when we brought our Legion to check out what had happened at the crime scene, it was able to detect an astral trail the chimera had left behind. Now we were using the Legion like a bloodhound, navigating through the streets as it illuminated the trail. Before long, Astral Chain presented another use for the Legion–it can allow you to cross large gaps and leap to distant locations.
When you summon the Legion, it’ll float around on the end of its spectral leash and follow you, but you can take control of its movements by holding ZL and using the right thumbstick. Positioning the Legion on the far side of a gap lets you use it to pull you across the abyss, making it useful for platforming. You can also direct it to specific spots to activate switches and solve simple puzzles.
Eventually, the Legion led us to a portal to the astral plane where the chimera had taken the woman. The astral plane is a spooky, strangely geometric and minimalist landscape, basically filled with arenas for battling enemies and locations to use your Legion to solve puzzles. It was here that we got our first taste of combat, which, despite sometimes requiring you to control two characters in the heat of battle, is actually intuitive and easy to pick up.
One Player Co-op Combat
You only have one attack button in Astral Chain, which you’ll pound away on as you fight enemies to create combos. Variety in combat is created by how your weapon can transform seamlessly; you wield a high-tech police baton that can change shape to fit the situation. It starts as a small, fast melee weapon, but can be switched to a powerful, slow, heavy sword called a gladius, or morphed into a pistol. You can switch your weapon on the fly to change your attacks as you pummel enemies, and stringing several attacks together builds a combo.
Fighting is less about performing a bunch of complex moves and more about exact timing to link your attacks with those of your Legion. String six hits together and you’ll see a blue circle appear on your character as time briefly slows, prompting you to hit ZL to summon your Legion. Do that in time, and the creature will spring into action, adding another big hit to your attack. You can then follow up with another strike of your own, which triggers another Legion prompt, and so on. After you’ve done enough damage, you can also activate finishing moves with your Legion, which sends your partner to rip out a chimera’s “ability core,” and restores your health and increases how long your Legion can fight at your side.
Your other major ability is a quick dodge that can get you out of harm’s way, and slipping past incoming attacks at the absolute last second gives you another opening to send your Legion in for an attack. Combat quickly becomes a fast-paced concert of attacks on open opponents and dodges that give you chances for counter-attacks, with your Legion leaping in and out to extend your combos. When you’re not actively telling your Legion what to do, though, it engages whoever’s closest on its own, without requiring you to babysit it.
The result is the ability to control both characters, or just one, depending on the situation. You still need to be aware of both characters, though–your Legion disappears if a timer that starts when you summon it runs out, and more time gets subtracted as it takes damage.
The Legion has a few other tricks, too. The creature is leashed to your wrist with its spectral chain, but if you control the Legion directly, you can wrap that chain around enemies (including bosses), which briefly locks them in place and stuns them. And like your weapon, you can switch it between a few different versions, like a sword-wielding take, or a slower, more hulking one. The sword Legion can be called on for special moves, too. We fought a big shield-wielding enemy, which required lots of combos with the Legion to beat, but later, it was joined by a floating pink baddie that could create a tether between it and its allies, rendering both invulnerable. Calling on the Legion allows you to take direct control of it for a sword strike that can cut things in the environment, including that energy tether. Slicing through it broke the invulnerability bond, allowing us to send the Legion to fight one enemy while we took on the other.
After fighting some smaller enemies, we took on the chimera we’d been hunting, a multi-headed dog creature called, of course, Cerberus. The boss fight felt pretty typical to action games, with the monster winding up for big ground-smashing attacks that sent shockwaves outward, or leaping into the air to come hurtling back down toward us. The skill in the fight was in recognizing and dodging incoming attacks to create openings for the Legion to strike at the Cerberus. Avoiding attacks was a big focus since the boss could do massive damage to both you and your Legion; you need to protect yourself and pay attention to where your partner is to keep both of you alive and dishing out combo damage.
More Astral Police Work
The fight was tough, but in all not too overwhelming. Astral Chain’s combat feels relatively simple when you first pick it up, which helps keep it accessible, but the number of things you can do with your Legion as you get used to the speed and timing of a fight adds a lot of complexity. The result is a combat system that allows you to do a lot of cool things as you get better at it, but which adds difficulty in the amount of attention and coordination it demands. Astral Chain wants you to be constantly thinking in two directions, and the skill involved in its fights comes both from quick reactions and timing, and from keeping track of both characters so you can use them effectively without getting either one killed.
The Astral Chain demo wrapped up with defeating the boss and returning the woman safely back to the human world–only to discover that in the meantime, chimeras had started appearing all over the place and the astral plane was bleeding through into the real world. Civilians were scattered around the area where chimeras were showing up, so we were tasked with clearing out the enemies–along with a giant, sword-wielding boss creature–in order to save them.
Astral Chain wants you to be constantly thinking in two directions.
Though the demo only lasted 20 minutes or so, our look at Astral Chain was enough to get a sense of how fast and satisfying its combat can be. It looks as though your Legion will be an integral part of the entire experience, which offers a lot of depth to a combat system that’s otherwise simple enough that just about anybody can pick it up.
The demo was a little thinner on what the other half of the game will be like, as you venture through the city talking to other humans and solving metaphysical crimes. The investigation in our slice of the game was pretty shallow and simplistic, but the inclusion of the notebook suggests that doing police work will be a bigger part of the game and might be more complex than just interacting with certain spots on the ground.
What’s clear is that there are a lot of cool ideas at work in Astral Chain. Platinum Games’ newest take on combat changes up the usual approach to action games just enough to feel fresh without being overwhelming, and its metaphysical setting and two-character mechanics suggest everything beyond fighting will be pretty interesting, too. We won’t have to wait long to see how Platinum’s new ideas work together as a whole; Astral Chain is due to hit Nintendo Switch on August 30.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the latest movie from iconic filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, shines a spotlight on a very specific era in Hollywood: the late 1960s. It’s a time during which Tarantino was a young kid, but one he seems to almost worship in this movie, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt as a washed-up TV cowboy and his stunt double/best friend. The two live next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate’s house in the Hollywood hills–the house where, on August 9, 1969, members of the Manson family cult murdered the latter, her unborn child, and three of her friends.
That’s how it happened in real life–but events in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood play out slightly differently. This is your final spoiler warning.
The Manson cult’s portrayal in the movie is, largely, accurate. The “family” really did occupy Spahn Ranch, where an aging George Spahn let them run amok in exchange for their help with operations. Tourists getting horseback rides at the ranch seems entirely plausible. And the cultists who set out to do “the devil’s work” that night are accurately portrayed in the movie as well, including Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel.
However, there’s one key difference in the movie that causes the whole ordeal to end on an entirely different, and much happier, note during the film’s climax: The reality is that DiCaprio and Pitt’s characters, Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth, are entirely fictional. Everything that involves them never happened, including Booth’s visit to Spahn Ranch, Dalton’s haranguing of the cultists as their loud car idled in front of his house, and the fight with the cultists at the end.
In real life, Tex and his cohorts entered Tate and Polanski’s house and murdered Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, along with her friends Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and Abigail Folger (of the Folgers coffee family).
In the movie, Kasabian (played by Stranger Things Season 3’s Maya Hawke) abandons her co-conspirators after their encounter with Dalton in the cul-de-sac. The remaining three cultists enter Dalton’s house–not Tate’s–where Booth recognizes them as the “hippies” he encountered at Spahn Ranch. Booth sics his very good dog Brandy on Tex, and manages to (brutally and with extreme conviction) kill or maim all three. When the last cultist stumbles outside into Dalton’s pool, blindly firing her gun, Dalton retrieves his flamethrower from the shed and roasts her.
In the end, Tate and co. remain safe and sound next door, and Tate finally invites Dalton in for a drink. Booth has a minor stab wound from which he’ll recover. Brandy will receive lots of treats, scritches, and pats. Presumably, they all become friends and live happily ever after.
Even as Once Upon spends ample time in asides and flashbacks watching Dalton shoot Westerns and seeing Booth beat up Bruce Lee, it deftly builds tension. By the time the movie actually gets to that fateful night, you might even realize that you don’t actually want to see what you fear is about to happen. In that way, OUATIH’s altered ending is a relief.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s ending is not unlike that of Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s 2009 film in which a ragtag squad of scrappy Jewish marines succeed in assassinating Hitler along with most of the Nazi leadership in one spectacular and supremely unexpected climactic scene. OUATIH is built on the dread of what the audience knows is coming–the Tate murders–much like first-time viewers expected Inglourious Basterds’ assassination plot to fail.
A shot from the movie within the movie, The 14 Fists of McCluskey
The comparison is overt. Tarantino even acknowledges it himself when, during OUATIH, Dalton thinks back on his starring role in the fictional film The 14 Fists of McCluskey, in which he torches a room full of Nazi generals from a balcony–which is similar enough to the actual climax of Basterds that it’s clearly deliberate.
But there’s more to this ending than mere shock value and wish fulfillment. In case you couldn’t tell from its title, it bears pointing out that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a fairy tale–one about this specific era in Hollywood. It’s a glorification of figures like Dalton and Booth, who, despite feeling used up, clearly have real, not superficial, value–or so Tarantino wants to convey. The point of this movie seems to be that this really was Hollywood’s golden age, and Tarantino appears to wish it had never ended. Fairy tales have happy endings, and that’s why, in the film’s version of events, a couple of old TV cowboys prevent the Tate murder from taking place, ensuring the golden age could live on.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses offers you a very important choice in Chapter 1 – you must choose one of three houses to lead at the Garreg Mach Monastery. Your choice here will determine how the story progresses through Part One and into Part Two when war ravages the land of Fodlan.
Because you are locked into your path the moment you choose which house you’ll be teaching, it’s important to consider the various factors. This page contains non-spoiler information what you’ll get out of each path, from possible characters, perks, and romantic pairings.
Video: Which House Should You Choose in Fire Emblem: Three Houses?
Each of the three houses includes a roster of eight students (including the young lord that acts as House Leader who will someday lead their respective nation). While many characters can be recruited to join your house over the course of Part One, some cannot be convinced to join.
The Black Eagles house consists of students of the Adrestian Empire, and their house leader is Edelgard von Hresvelg. They boast the highest amount of magically-inclined units in the game, and Hubert is the one of the only default mage characters that knows dark magic at the start. However, along with the least amount of Crests of any house, they suffer from a lack of dedicated physically defensive and mounted units. With the right training, Ferdinand can swap between a cavalry unit with being an armored knight, and Petra can easily learn to become a wyvern rider.
Of their personal abilities, Dorothea‘s Songstress ability should be noted as it can heal up to 4 adjacent units per turn, along with Lindhart’s Catnap that allows him to heal on his own by waiting.
Consider recruiting tougher units from other houses like Sylvain, Raphael, Leonie, or Ingrid to make up for the Black Eagles shortcomings.
The Blue Lions house consists of students from the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, and their house leader is Prince Dimitri Blaiddyd. As this nation values chivalry and honor, they have some of the best mounted units and physically tough characters of all the houses. However, they only have room for two magic users within their ranks, and a single natural bow user. Because of this they may struggle to deal with ranged threats, and the abundance of mounted units can leave your vulnerable to bows or horseslayers. With enough training, you can unlock the budding talents of Felix and Sylvain to increase their magic prowess.
Of their personal abilities, Dedue‘s Staunch Shield makes him the perfect defensive unit by gaining +4 Defense if waiting, and Ashe‘s Lockpick allows you to skip out on certifying anyone to become a Thief or buying keys.
Consider recruiting magically inclined units from other houses like Dorothea, Lysithea, or Linhardt to fill in the gaps.
The Golden Deer house consists of students from the Leicster Alliance, and their house leader is Claude von Reigan. As the house with the most commoners among them, they excel with bows and have some of the best long range characters of all the groups. Lysithea is something of an anomaly as she possesses not one but two different Crests. They are a more well-rounded cast of characters that are most evenly spread in their abilities to cover a wide range of roles, but don’t excel as a group in one category. Both Hilda and Raphael can adapt as Armored Knights, and Lorenz and Ignatz can excel as magic users if needed.
Of their personal abilities, both Hilda‘s Advocate and Leonie‘s Rivalry work exceptionally well when attacking alongside male units, as they’ll deal 3 extra damage and grant Leonie 2 extra damage while taking 2 less.
Depending on how you adapt your students, any focused students from other houses will make great recruits.
Lord Comparisons – Hero’s Relics and Bonuses[edit]
Each of the Lords of the different houses each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and while they may start off fairly similar, they can easily grow into quite different characters.
Edelgard is unique among the other Lords for a very specific reason – She will quickly reveal that she has the power of two Crests – the Minor Crest of Seiros and the Crest of Flames – allowing her to both raise damage using Combat Arts, and also restore health when attacking and even stop counterattacks at times. As her default class goals go, she will become an Armored Lord by Act 2 that boasts a tough defense as well as a strong offense, though she can also be trained in the use of magic as well – which may require her to be reclassed as needed. By Act 2, her Personal Ability will change to Imperial Lineage+, which grants her +4 Res if she waits, allowing her to withstand magic attacks in her armored form.
Dimitri‘s Minor Crest of Blaiddyd allows him to sometimes double his attack and weapon uses during Combat Arts, which can make him an extremely damaging force if protected well. He will become a High Lord by Act 2, l, and can further his high strength and dexterity, but his lower defense and resistance means he’ll need protection. His Personal Ability will also grow to Royal Lineage+, granting him an extra +20 Avoid when at full HP. He can also make use of his budding talent to become a fast-moving Paladin to move at a quicker pace with the rest of the cavalry in the Blue Lions.
Claude‘s Minor Crest of Riegan can help heal him in battle when using combat arts, making him a great unit for hit and run attacks when combined with his bow proficiency. In Act 2, he will become a Wyvern Master to further his range and sniping skills, and will most likely gain more Dexterity and Speed as a result, but he might be the physically weakest of the Lords on his own. His personal ability will expand to Leicester Lineage+, and allow him to move through enemy units to attack behind enemy lines, further cementing his role to snipe risky targets and flee. Unlike the other Lords, his budding talent for Axes won’t directly clash with his default class upgrades.
Each of the Lords will also eventually obtain one of the sacred Hero’s Relics, much like Byleth‘s Sword of the Creator, and each are versatile in their own right. Though they all possess only 20 durability and are more expensive than other items to repair, they are peerless in battle, especially with their exclusive Combat Arts:
Of the Three Houses, Byleth is able to pursue an S-Rank romance support relationship with any character, but some characters can only be romanced in their own house as they cannot be recruited, and others may be easier if your character does not have to meet certain criteria to recruit from another house.
Characters in Bold are exclusive to the Black Eagles House and cannot be recruited. Characters in red support a bisexual female romance, and characters in blue support a bixsexual male romance.
Warning – the following section contains very brief info on where each of the paths will lead, as each house will have a different story in Part Two, and may contend with different enemies or have different objectives in the war. Details will be vague, but caution should be used.
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The Black Eagles Path will see the Adrestian Empire declare war on the Church of Seiros, and by extension – any who stand in the way of Edelgard‘s goals. Because of this, any allies you recruit who are members of the Church or the Knights of Seiros will disband from your party. A main objective will include waging war on the Kingdom of Faerghus against Dimitri to reunify the land through force.
The Blue Lions Path will focus on stopping Edelgard and the Adrestian Empire from taking over the continent of Fodlan. Dimitri himself will have his own reason for wanting to defeat Edelgard, making it a primary objective of the war.
The Golden Deer path will be caught up in the war between the Adrestian Empire and its adversaries, but will instead focus on unveiling certain mysteries and fighting the ones who Slither in the Dark, a group that operates behind the scenes, pulling the strings to further an agenda against the Church of Seiros.
There is actually another somewhat hidden path that does not follow any of the Three Houses. This path can only be undertaken by joining the Black Eagles. However, near the end of Part One, you are given a warning of an important choice to aid Edelgard. If you refuse when asked, you will instead defend the Church of Seiros from the Adrestian Empire, and lose access to both Edelgard and Hubert in the process. During the war, your true objective will be to uncover the forces behind the scenes, those who Slither in Dark, and uncover their schemes against the Church of Seiros.
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s ninth and penultimate movie before he says he’ll stop directing feature films, cleverly showcases the writer-director’s encyclopedic knowledge of cinema and pop culture while also serving as a loving tribute to a bygone era of films and stars. Despite incorporating many elements of the filmmaker’s signature style — dark wit, moments of explosive violence, kitschy references, a great vintage soundtrack, and an overall “cool” vibe — Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood shows a more sentimental side of the Kill Bill filmmaker. And yet it also displays many of his self-indulgences and weaknesses. It’s not Tarantino’s best work, but it’s still better than the best efforts of other filmmakers.The movie reflects the sensibilities of an older and possibly more thoughtful filmmaker than the indie bad boy who stormed the industry back in the ‘90s with his “cool criminal” fare like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. There’s still an undeniable coolness —there’s that word again! — exuded throughout this film, but like an older man, it moves a bit slower, is more contemplative and mindful of the end being nigh, and struggles with things not being the way they were back in the day. Perhaps it’s because he’s set a retirement goal for himself with his tenth film that Tarantino leans so heavily into nostalgia here, staging a last hurrah for a breed of aging Hollywood types out of step with their times.
Tarantino largely focuses his story — which is primarily set over three days in Hollywood circa 1969 — on washed-up actor Rick Dalton and his best pal, former stunt double-turned-flunky, Cliff Booth. Rick is deftly played with feverish desperation and crumbling vanity by Leonardo DiCaprio, while an almost transcendently cool Brad Pitt delivers his best performance in years as Cliff, whose sun-kissed appearance belies the inner darkness that’s cost him everything but the affection of his dog and Rick. Cliff may project a Zen-like chill but there’s a coiled intensity lurking under the surface that speaks to the violence he’s capable of committing. Cliff is in many ways a more interesting and complex character than the narcissistic and fragile Rick, but DiCaprio and Pitt share a breezy, boozy chemistry that makes them great foils for one another.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Gallery
The third pivotal character here is actress Sharon Tate, a beauty whose star is on the rise even as Rick’s is on the decline. This is no A Star is Born-esque showbiz drama, however. It’s historical fiction. Portrayed here as Rick’s next door neighbor, Sharon Tate, of course, was a real person whose brutal death — slain while pregnant by followers of cult leader Charles Manson — has overshadowed her brief film career.
Margot Robbie plays her with a free-spirited vivacity, but the character of Tate herself is not well developed (Robbie has much less dialogue than nearly all the other leading characters). She’s more a symbol of Hollywood dreams than she is a flesh and blood protagonist like Rick and Cliff. Tarantino seems more interested in the idea of Sharon Tate than he necessarily is in exploring who she really was. While she may get short-changed here in some ways, Sharon still gets one of the film’s more emotionally engaging sequences, one that registers on a far more intimate level than some of the scenes featuring Rick or Cliff.
Indeed, that’s the biggest drawback of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Rick’s travails and Cliff’s side story are enjoyable but it’s nevertheless tough to fully connect with them. In the end, you’re left wondering what Tarantino wanted audiences to feel about them or his film save for leaving with an appreciation for Hollywood’s yesteryear. That may be enough, intellectually, for those who want to ruminate on the film industry, past and present. But emotionally speaking, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and its characters never quite register as strongly as many of Tarantino’s other films and protagonists.
Tarantino has once again assembled a stellar ensemble cast that includes several veterans of his past films like Kurt Russell — who occasionally provides jarring and unearned narration that comes across like a narrative cheat — and great new additions, such as scene stealers Mike Moh as an egotistical Bruce Lee and Julia Butters as a precocious child actor Rick meets on the set of a potential comeback role. But the biggest supporting player in the film isn’t even a person.
It’s become a cliche to say a location is as much a character in a movie as the people but in this case it’s true. This film is as much a love letter to the Los Angeles of 1969 as it is to the films, TV shows and pop culture of that tumultuous era. Tarantino and production designer Barbara Ling — complemented by Robert Richardson’s warm cinematography — have painstakingly recreated the greater L.A. area of that period and its many landmarks. But did we really need to see every street and stretch of freeway Cliff drives along? Nope, and those unnecessarily bloated stretches only makes one feel the film’s nearly three-hour runtime all the more.
The film is also chock full of asides to Rick’s faux movies and TV shows, from his heyday as the star of the ‘50s TV show Bounty Law to his later spaghetti westerns, war movies, and exploitation films. These are often hilarious and spot-on send-ups that lovers of B-movies and the Golden Age of Television will appreciate and laugh at more than casual (and frankly younger) viewers who lack the pop cultural context to get the references Tarantino is making. Indeed, Once Upon a Time …in Hollywood’s effectiveness depends in large part on one’s fondness for the bygone era Tarantino is honoring. But there are times where Tarantino veers into self-indulgence.
There’s another and arguably larger curiosity factor for those going to see this film than what pop culture riffs they’ll get from the director who wears his influences on his proverbial sleeve, and that’s the Manson family murders in August ‘69. Critics have been forbidden from revealing how Tarantino handles one of L.A.’s most infamous crimes, but suffice to say his interpretation was always going to prove divisive and the end result most certainly will. As exploitative and jarring as the whole sequence can be, it also gives the film a jolt in its uneven second half.
Could it have been handled differently? Of course, but this is Quentin Tarantino’s world we’re in here and his bloody and lurid approach serves as an almost meta-commentary on his own films and what he knows his audience expects from him. While this climax never matches the masterful building of suspense in an earlier sequence where Cliff encounters the Manson family on an old movie ranch, the homestretch reminds Tarantino fans of the edgy provocateur he started out as after sitting through two plus hours of slow-moving industry nostalgia.
NECA is back with another great SDCC lineup of super detailed collectibles. This year they’re leaning heavily into the horror movie genre with Pennywise figures from both the TV and movie adaptations of It, a Halloween II Michael Meyers, a really gross Candyman, Leatherface, “Ultimate” Annabelle and Crooked Man figures from the Conjuring universe, Pinhead and more.In addition to the cool horror icons, there are a bunch of neat figures from the Terminator, Alien and Predator movies, including a Parker action figure from Alien, a 1/4 scale Alien, a “Rhino Alien”, Arnold and Sarah Connor figures from Terminator: Dark Fate, and several Predator variants, including the awesome looking Alpha Predator.
NECA Brings Horror Icons and Alien, Predator and Terminator: Dark Fate Collectibles to SDCC
Fire Emblem: Three Houses asks a lot of you. Every piece, from battle to friendships to training your units, must be managed both individually and as part of a whole. It can be intimidating, but when it all clicks together, it really clicks. Mastering the art of thoughtful lesson planning as a professor improves your performance on the battlefield, where success relies on calculated teamwork and deft execution. Cultivating relationships during battle in turn draws you closer to each of the characters, who you then want to invest even more time into in the classroom. Every piece feeds into the next in a rewarding, engrossing loop where you get lost in the whole experience, not just in the minutiae.
Three Houses casts you as a mercenary who, while out on a mission with their father, runs into a group of teens under attack. After a brief introduction and battle tutorial–which you shouldn’t need, since you’re apparently already an established mercenary, but we’ll go with it–you learn that they are students at Garreg Mach monastery. Each of them leads one of the school’s three houses: Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer. At the behest of the church’s archbishop, who definitely gives off nefarious vibes but is also a gentle mom figure, you end up becoming a professor and must choose which of the houses to lead. There is a lot of mystery to the setup, with consistent hints that something is not quite right, and it’s easy to get absorbed in trying to figure out what the archbishop and various other shady figures are up to.
Your main role as professor is to instruct your students in matters of combat and prepare them for story battles at the end of each month. Battles in Three Houses feature the same turn-based, tactical combat at the heart of the series, albeit with some changes. The classic weapon triangle is downplayed quite a bit in favor of Combat Arts, which have been altered somewhat from their introduction in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Combat Arts are attacks tied to a weapon type and can boost a unit’s attack power at the expense of weapon durability; some are effective against specific enemy types, like armored units. You can also unlock skills outside of Combat Arts that grant you better stats with certain weapons, like a heftier boost for using an axe against a lance user, similar to the old weapon triangle. It’s the same complexity the series is known for but less abstracted, making it a bit easier to strategize without sacrificing depth.
One of the big combat additions is battalions, mini armies you can equip that provide various benefits to a unit during battle. They also give you a new type of attack called a Gambit, which varies based on the type of battalion–magic-focused, brute force, and so on–and stuns the enemies it hits. Gambits are limited-use and can be incredibly powerful against the right enemies. You can increase a Gambit’s effectiveness even further if one or more of your other units are within attack range of the target, a tried-and-true Fire Emblem concept that applies to all kinds of attacks. There’s also an anime-style splash screen as you attack that shows each character involved in the Gambit looking fierce, which adds a nice bit of drama.
How much you use Combat Arts and Gambits depends on what difficulty you’re on. On Normal difficulty, well-trained units will likely be able to dispatch most enemies in one or two hits without the help of Combat Arts or Gambits. On Hard, however, enemies hit harder and withstand your attacks better. You have to think much more carefully about unit placement, the best time to use a Gambit and take advantage of its stun effect, and how many Combat Arts you can fire off before your weapon breaks. This is where things get exciting; after a few turns of cautious setup, you (hopefully) get to knock out tons of enemies as your plans fall into place.
Some of the early-game and optional battle maps are open spaces that don’t require you to think too hard, especially on Normal. But the story battles throughout feature a variety of map layouts–from pirate ships to what appears to be a lava-filled cavern–that challenge you to consider where your units need to be, both in the next turn and several turns down the line. Many of them have different routes, enemies coming at you from multiple angles, optional treasure to chase, and other quirks that require you to split your party up or change their equipped classes to suit the situation. Thieves, for instance, can open chests and doors without a key, while flying units don’t take damage from ground that’s on fire.
The depth of strategy in these elements really shines on Hard difficulty, but especially so when coupled with Divine Pulse, another limited-use ability. Divine Pulse allows you to rewind time in order to redo all or part of the battle, usually if one of your units dies. Rewinding with Divine Pulse shows just how important unit placement and attack choice can be, as even a slight change can make or break the encounter. It’s also just a nice quality-of-life feature if you play on Classic mode, in which units who die in battle are lost forever and can’t fight or train anymore. You might still soft reset from time to time, but it’s great to be able to rectify a mistake right away and get a shot of instant gratification for a job well re-done.
Battling, of course, is only one part of life at the monastery. The backbone of Three Houses is the monthly school calendar, and if you like organizing things, planning ahead, or school in general, this can be the most engrossing part. On Sundays, you have free time you can spend in one of four ways: exploring the monastery, participating in side battles, holding a seminar to improve your students’ skills, or simply taking the day off. Mondays are for instruction, which consists of selecting students from a list and choosing a few of their skills to boost. The rest of the week goes by automatically, with a sprite of the professor running along the calendar and stopping occasionally for random events or story cutscenes. It sounds a bit hands-off, but there’s a lot to think about as it is, and the week-by-week rather than day-by-day structure keeps things moving and ensures you never have to wait too long to progress in any area.
The predictable structure of each month–and the fact that you can see the full month’s schedule with events listed ahead of time–gives you the foundation to make effective plans. All that time management can definitely be overwhelming, at least at first. You have to keep tabs on your students’ skills and study goals, your own skills, everyone’s inventory, and various other meters and menus while planning for the lessons and battles to come. But you’re treated to a near-constant stream of positive reinforcement as those meters fill up week by week and your students improve their skills. You’re always moving toward the next thing: the next level up, the next skill you need to develop, the next month and what may unfold.
To complement this, your activities when exploring the monastery (as well as how many battles you can participate in, if you choose to battle on your day off) are limited by activity points. You get more as your “professor level” increases, which means you have to balance activities that boost your professor level with ones that help your students grow. Activity points also ensure that the month continues at a healthy pace, preventing you from lingering on any one Sunday for too long. Seminars and rest days just eat up the whole day without consideration for activity points, which can break up the more involved weeks and provide their own benefits.
How you choose to spend your time also comes down to how motivated your students are to learn. Each of your students has a motivation gauge that’s drained when you instruct them, and they can’t be instructed again until you interact with them and get their motivation back up. You can do this most effectively when exploring the monastery–where you get to talk to different characters, give them gifts, and share bonding time with them–whereas battle only rarely increases motivation levels. While you can skip a lot of the school life bits and even automate instruction, you won’t get the best results. You’re directly at a disadvantage in combat if you don’t make time for your students, which is by design.
Like all recent Fire Emblem games, keeping you invested in your units and their relationships is the glue that binds the whole experience together. It’s incredibly effective in Three Houses, where your direct involvement in nearly all aspects of a unit’s growth trajectory gives you a special stake in their success. After spending time and effort to help a character achieve their full potential, you’re not just satisfied when they win a fight–you’re proud. And the more you invest in someone–both emotionally and through months of lesson plans and instruction–the more cautious you’ll be about putting them in harm’s way, and the more you’ll work to come up with a solid battle strategy.
Considering you’re a teacher, it’s good rather than disappointing that there’s almost no romance to speak of. Some students are flirty, but mainly, you’re fostering camaraderie rather than playing matchmaker or romancing them yourself. As you unlock new support levels with different characters–both by interacting with them at the monastery and by using teamwork in battles–you get cutscenes that flesh them out more. Some are charming, lighthearted conversations between two friends, while many of them give you insight into more serious matters–a father forcing his daughter into marriage, discrimination within the monastery, the dark reason behind someone’s lofty ambitions. For the most part, each support conversation is just a piece of who a character is, and as you slowly build support levels over time, you begin to uncover the full picture of each person. As a result, learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.
Every NPC is fully voiced in both English and Japanese, which brings a lot of life to the brief support conversations. Disappointingly, though, the professor is silent. They do have a voice–they’ll occasionally say a line when leveling up or improving a skill–but in cutscenes and when talking to students and faculty, they just nod or shake their head flatly. There are brief dialogue options during conversations, but where they could give way to a full, subtitled sentence or two from the professor, you’re just left with the other character’s reaction. Characters do, however, refer to the professor’s personality and how they come across throughout the game, which is odd considering they mostly nod at things. This puts distance between you and the characters you’re bonding with, and it’s a missed opportunity in a game where the protagonist has an otherwise set look, personality, and backstory.
It’s not hard to like a lot of the characters, though. They draw you in with anime archetypes–the ladies’ man, the bratty prince, the clumsy but well-meaning girl–and surprise you with much more nuance under the surface. Some of the funniest scenes early on involve Bernadetta, a shut-in with extreme reactions to normal social situations, but her inner life is a lot darker and more complicated than those early conversations let on. You might discover a character you thought was a jerk is actually one of your favorites or slowly stop using a less-than-favorite character in battle. You also have the option of having tea with someone, during which you have to choose conversation topics according to what you know about them, dating sim-style. Knowing what topics they’ll like is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and successfully talking to a favorite character–even if the tea setup can be a little awkward in practice–is a small victory.
Each house’s campaign feels distinct but not so different that one seems way better than the other. Every house has a mix of personalities and skills, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Students from different houses can form friendships with each other, too, and you can eventually recruit students from other houses to join yours. Rather than being repetitive, on a second playthrough, recruiting gives you access to different relationship combinations; you can see a different side to a character through a different set of support conversations. And while the overall setup of the game is largely the same across the three houses, each has its own web of B plots, and the second half of the game will look very different depending on who you’re with and the choices you’ve made.
The first half concerns the church, its secrets, and the fact that the professor knows very little about their own identity. As the basic loop of each month pulls you forward, so too does the promise of learning the truth about something, whether it’s why the archbishop wanted you to be a teacher in the first place or who a suspicious masked individual is. These threads remain pretty open, though, at least after one and a quarter playthroughs. You get different details in each route, and so far it’s been a long process to piece everything together.
Learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.
After a five-year time skip, you enter the “war phase” of the game. While the structure of the game is the same–you even instruct your units, since you still need to train for battle–the focus shifts to the house-specific stories. They involve a lot of hard decisions, with old friends becoming enemies, people you wish you didn’t have to kill, and students who’ve changed either in spite or because of your guidance. Late-game battles are especially challenging, with higher stakes and multi-lane layouts that require a lot of forethought. Success in these battles is incredibly rewarding, as you’re seeing dozens of hours of investment in your students reach a crescendo, but they’re bittersweet in context.
When all was said and done, all I could think about was starting another playthrough. I was curious about the mysteries left unsolved, of course, but I also hoped to undo my mistakes. There were characters I didn’t talk to enough, students I didn’t recruit, and far more effective ways to train my units. A second playthrough treads familiar ground in the beginning, but after learning and growing so much in the first, it feels fresh, too. That speaks to Three Houses’ mechanical complexity and depth as well as the connections it fosters with its characters–and whether you’re managing inventories or battlefields, it’s the kind of game that’s hard to put down, even when it’s over.
Season 10 of Fortnite is just around the corner, but in the meantime, the game’s second birthday event is now underway. Alongside the event comes a handful of challenges, each of which will unlock a new birthday-themed reward when completed, with a special birthday cake pickaxe awaiting those who finish all of the tasks.
There are four birthday challenges to complete in total, most of which are self-explanatory and can be cleared fairly easily simply by playing the game as normal. The one that may give you a bit of trouble, however, is to dance in front of different birthday cakes. A similar challenge was featured as part of last year’s birthday event, but these cakes are hidden in different locations, which may pose a problem if you don’t know where to look. Fortunately, we’ve put together a handy map and guide to help you find the birthday cake locations.
Where Are The Birthday Cake Locations?
You need to dance in front of 10 birthday cakes in total in order to complete this challenge, and they’re scattered all across Fortnite’s island. Fortunately, once you know where to look, the cakes should be easy enough to spot, as they’ll be surrounded by balloons. We’ve put together a map of the birthday cake locations below:
How To Complete The Challenge
Once you know where to look for the birthday cakes, completing this challenge is simply a matter of going to the right location and then busting a move in front of the confection. If you’re low on health, you can also grab a slice of cake to recover; not only will it help replenish your health and shield, it’ll count toward your progress in a separate birthday challenge, allowing you to kill two birds with one stone.
Unlike some other challenges of this nature, which allow you to revisit the same locations in different matches and still make progress toward completing the task, you’ll need to visit 10 different cakes in order to clear this challenge. If you need a visual walkthrough, you can watch us complete the challenge in the video at the top of this guide.
Fortnite Birthday Celebration Challenges
Play matches (10) — Wrap
Dance in front of different Birthday Cakes (10) — B-day Beats music track
Outlast Opponents (500) — Spray
Gain health or shield from Birthday Cake (50) — Banner
Reward: Birthday Cake harvesting tool (after completing all four challenges)
