To understand why that question won’t leave me be, you’ve got to ride back a minute. 1998. The television I played it on wasn’t even mine, some hand-me-down set wrapped in that fake wood paneling every house down here seemed to own back then. That cartridge, though, I guarded like it was gold. The title screen would fade out, Link would take off galloping across Hyrule Field, and I swear the whole room would go dead quiet behind me. My nephew froze mid-sentence. Open space stretched wider than anything we’d touched before. Z-targeting rewired how a generation swung a sword. Turning night into day with a tune, calling a horse, unlocking the Door of Time with a melody, all of it read as straight witchcraft to a boy raised on side-scrollers.

Here’s what nobody young enough to miss it truly grasps. That adventure wasn’t merely good. It rewrote the rulebook. Countless 3D action titles that followed owe it a debt, whether the designers cop to it or not. Combat, puzzle rhythm, the sense of a place that breathes while your back is turned, every piece helped shape a blueprint that developers would study for years. People still argue it’s the finest ever made, and I won’t stand here calling them fools.

Which carries me to the sweaty part. Nintendo says they’re rebuilding the whole thing. Richer models, lighting that behaves like actual sunlight, and the bold gamble of performers lending voices to characters who spent decades communicating through text boxes. My eyebrow climbed the second that last detail hit.

Think about our boy in green for a beat. Link still isn’t talking, and that’s important. His silence lets you pour your own breath into the adventure, your own grit, your own reason for storming the final castle. A champion who stays quiet becomes a mirror. You slip inside him. What has changed is the world surrounding that silence. People who once lived inside dialogue boxes now have performers giving them voices. Maybe that makes Hyrule feel more alive. Maybe it crowds out some of the imagination we supplied ourselves. That’s the gamble that worries me, and if you were there, odds are it worries you too.

Then again, picture Navi shrieking in my ear every twelve seconds, and a slice of me wonders whether a genuine performance might sand down some jank we all quietly tolerated. Nostalgia lies to us, fam. We cling to the wonder and conveniently bury the aggravation.

The controls, though? Right there sits my hope. That old three-pronged controller was an alien relic, a gadget dreamed up by someone who’d never shaken a human hand. Camera movement amounted to a prayer. Aiming a slingshot meant wrestling plastic that fought back. Proper sticks, responsive buttons, and a camera you can actually steer without cussing, none of that tampers with a landmark. Nintendo is even adding dedicated jump and dash commands, giving players more freedom to move through Hyrule. It finally hands the thing the body it always deserved.

History hands me reasons to exhale, if I’m honest. The company has walked this stretch before and mostly treated us right. Wind Waker in high definition looked like a canvas come alive. Twilight Princess got its flowers. Ocarina of Time itself received a remarkable makeover on the Nintendo 3DS back in 2011, complete with improved visuals and updated controls. Even that Link’s Awakening redo from 2019 spun a Game Boy gem into a toy box you wanted to crawl inside. These creators know the material carries weight. They’ve brought enough classics back to life over the years to earn a sliver of faith.

Faith, though, isn’t a blank check. See, a gulf separates polishing a jewel from swapping it for a flashier fake. A redo can pile on resolution and misplace its spirit. More pixels, less heartbeat. I’ve watched cherished properties get the glow-up and limp out the far side resembling a wax dummy, technically dazzling and stone dead inside. Nobody craves a Hyrule that gleams yet forgets why we fell for it.

The word better keeps shifting on me the deeper I dig. A fresh wave of Black kids who never gripped an N64 controller is about to meet the hero for the very first time, and they’ll meet him through this window, not mine. For them, voiced scenes and silky movement won’t register as betrayal. They’ll read as the floor, the baseline, the norm. The weight of my memories means nothing to a twelve-year-old discovering the Water Temple raw. Maybe that’s the actual point. You don’t restore a monument for the crowd already in love with it. The rebuild exists for the next wave, so they get to tumble just as hard as we did.

I keep settling into an odd spot, somewhere between a believer and a bouncer guarding the door. One half of me wants to shield what we held, to protect the 1998 version like a family recipe nobody better touch. The other half knows art frozen in amber eventually quits breathing. A song gets covered. Stories get retold. Each generation earns its own doorway into the greatness we take for granted.

Will this one clear the bar? Honestly, I can’t say, and anybody swearing they’re certain is peddling something. Every piece looks right on paper. Nintendo knows this world better than anybody. But the soul of that original lived in more than its components, in a current you can’t bottle or patch in later, and that current is exactly what I’ll be hunting the moment I press start.

Come November, I’ll be posted up with the lights dimmed, just like ’98, ocarina within reach. Should my chest tighten the way it did when that open plain first unfurled, they’ll have done the impossible. If it plays like a stranger wearing my childhood’s face, well, we’ve got our answer right there too. Either way, I’m copping it day one. Some legends you simply have to witness again, flaws and all.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Red and Blue gave you a fixed roster. One hundred and fifty-one creatures, and every single one earned a slot in your head. Kids could rattle off Bulbasaur to Mew without blinking. That number mattered because it was finite. You could work toward completing the original Pokédex, even if the elusive Mew remained a mystery to most players. “Gotta catch ’em all” wasn’t marketing fluff back then. It was a real goal you could see and chase down.

Here’s the clever part. Buy one copy and you literally could not fill your Pokédex alone. Red locked away Ekans and Arbok. Blue hid Sandshrew and Vulpix. Game Freak built the need for cooperation right into the design, then handed you the solution: a friend with the other box. Suddenly, the schoolyard turned into a marketplace. You needed people. That was the whole idea.

Which brings us to that gray cord. The link cable was a small miracle of plastic and copper. You plugged two handhelds together, sat shoulder to shoulder, and watched pixels stroll from one system to the next. No WiFi, no cloud, no account login. Trading meant showing up in person, sitting close, and trusting the other person not to yank the connection in the middle of an exchange. Anybody who lived through it remembers the panic of a bad link.

And oh, the stories. Every lunch table had a kid swearing up and down that he knew the truth. Move the truck near the S.S. Anne and Mew appears. Fill all 150 slots and something secret unlocks. Follow some mysterious sequence of button presses and the game rewards you big. Most of it was pure fiction, passed mouth to mouth like folklore. But that was the beauty of the era. Before you could Google an answer in two seconds flat, mystery had room to breathe. A single rumor could live for months.

Now here’s the twist that kept the whole myth machine running. A few of those tales weren’t tales at all. MissingNo., that garbled blob lurking off the Cinnabar coast, was the real deal. Follow the right steps, surf along the eastern shoreline, and collide with a corrupted mess of a sprite. Suddenly, the item sitting in your sixth Bag slot multiplied out of nowhere. Half the room swore it was a hoax right up until they watched it unfold on their own screen. That smear of broken code earned its legend status for one reason. People could actually prove it.

Strip away the nostalgia and the bones still hold. Combat ran on a rock paper scissors logic anybody could grasp in a minute yet spend years mastering. Fire beats grass, water douses fire, grass drinks up water, and the loop kept unfolding into deeper territory. The difficulty respected you. No coddling, no glowing arrows pointing the way. You got a town, a rival, a starter, and the freedom to explore Kanto, one new route at a time.

Speaking of that rival. Gary. Blue. Whatever you named him. He showed up right when you were low on potions and high on confidence, always with that grin, always with a team a notch above yours. Beating him settled something. And before any of that, you had to make a call nobody prepared you for. Bulbasaur, Charmander, or Squirtle. Folks still defend their pick like it says something about who they are. Charmander loyalists took the rough road early. Squirtle folks played it smart. Bulbasaur heads breezed through the opening two gyms and never once apologized for it.

What these carts kicked off is almost tough to measure now. A trading card empire. An anime that ran what felt like forever. A phone app in 2016 that had grown folks bumping into light poles chasing digital critters through the park. None of it happens without those original Game Boy adventures. Some guy named Satoshi Tajiri liked catching insects as a kid, and that hobby of his eventually helped inspire a franchise recognized around the world.

You’d think all that would bury the debut. Hundreds of new critters since, full color, 3D towns you can spin the camera around in. And yet the old one refuses to sit down. Some of that is just how firsts work. They dig in and stay. But it runs deeper than sentiment. Those early adventures asked you to imagine, to fill the gaps the hardware left wide open. Grainy sprites forced your brain to supply the coloring. Silence between chiptune bleeps left space for wonder. Tight limits sparked creativity in a way that polish sometimes smothers.

Three decades later, the pull hasn’t faded one bit. Somewhere right now a parent is handing a wide eyed kid a worn cartridge, watching them meet Oak and pick their first Pokémon, and the cycle keeps spinning. Those first 151 aren’t a pile of dead code rotting on old silicon. They’re the thing you and some kid you haven’t seen in twenty years can still bond over in a single sentence. A tiny gray box held a whole world once. Wild part is, boot it up today and the world’s still in there.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

It’s got a name at last: World of Warcraft: Forever. Launch is set for November 4, with beta opening September 17 for eligible upgrade buyers. Once Forever goes live, the WoW subscription you already pay covers the game itself. The optional packs unlock extras, including access to the new Skyborne race and other cosmetics. Simple.

Here is what makes me lean in, though. This is not another Classic rerun. The studio was blunt about that on the panel. It is not a mode, not a season, not a loop you grind for a summer and abandon. They are calling it a third permanent pillar, sitting beside Retail and the 2019 relaunch, with its own long tail of patches promised for years out. Same 2004 bones. Brand new muscle grafted onto them.

And that muscle is going exactly where longtime folks always wished it would.

Take the Riverglades. That stretch of eastern coast wedged among Redridge, the Burning Steppes, the Badlands, and the Swamp of Sorrows has sat mostly empty since day one. Now it is the biggest leveling region in the drop, packing over 150 quests, a goblin port, plus orcs and ogres and gnolls all scrapping across a frontier where help never came generations back. Lead designer Tim Jones described the pitch plainly. This is not a tale about saving the planet. It is a tale about living on it. Read that twice, because it quietly explains the whole project.

Then Shen’dralas, those ruins you soared past a thousand times with no reason to land. Finally a real destination, roped into Eldre’Thalas lore and the old centaur tribes, handing you actual cause to run Maraudon again. Mount Hyjal opens up too, set in the wake of Archimonde getting dropped, so you walk the forests as they knit themselves back together. Remember that Azshara gate? Behind it now sits Blackmaw Hold, a furbolg city clawing against corruption. The devs literally pointed at every spot we used to wonder about and said fine, come see.

That instinct is the smart move, and it cuts against how this franchise normally treats its own history. For most of its life, each expansion meant bulldozing. Cataclysm rewrote the map. Outland made your hard won gear obsolete in a single afternoon of questing. The treadmill demanded you leave everything behind and climb all over again. Meanwhile the disposable Classic seasons gave you the old map back yet froze it solid, a museum you could tour but never touch.

Growing the original instead splits the difference beautifully. Memory, for gamers who logged untold hours between 2004 and 2011, was never only the ground you walked. It was the ground you imagined. Every locked door and unreachable island became a little pocket of personal headcanon. By filling those pockets rather than paving over them, the studio is betting that honoring what you dreamed up beats the shine of yet another continent you have never heard of. Good bet.

They tested the theory already. Season of Discovery back in 2023 was the trial balloon, an experiment gauging how far you could bend vanilla before it stopped feeling like itself. The team says they located that ceiling. They also learned the community had no appetite for a temporary playground. Folks wanted a house they could actually live in. Hence the name.

The guardrails matter as much as the terrain. Flying mounts? Gone. Level scaling? Not happening here. The old continents stay wide and a touch dangerous, which means a mountain range is still a genuine obstacle and a long road is still a journey worth taking. Jones framed the governing rule as the world being the main character, with leveling treated as the point rather than a chore you rush past to reach endgame. There is even a camping feature now. You plant a site out in the wild, other travelers wander up, everybody chips in trade skills for a shared buff, and, God willing, two strangers actually swap a word or two. A mechanic built entirely to fight the loneliness modern MMOs quietly slid into.

The dungeon lineup eats well too, with nine new instances available as Forever gets underway. The raid game follows on December 9, led by the 10 player Barrow Deeps and the 20 player Hyjal Summit. More encounters unlock as the roadmap rolls forward. Hardcore arrives after that. A revamped legend of a raid waits farther out on the schedule. Asked what else might land eventually, the crew shrugged and said nothing is off the table, not even a fresh class. That is a team building for the long haul, not throwing a one weekend carnival.

Now let me keep it a hundred, because a good blerd never sells you pure hype. Under the shiny coat, this remains the 2004 engine philosophy at heart. Tab targeting lives on. Some veterans, including a few sharp voices in the press, wanted a full ground up remake with modern combat, maybe even a console release to court a whole audience. That dream did not show. What arrived is closer to Classic Plus in a very nice outfit, prettier lighting, volumetric fog, real shadows creeping over the hills at dusk, a toggle to flip the old character models back on if the fancy ones bug you. Gorgeous, yes. Reinvention, no.

So the honest question sitting under all of it: is deepening a map two decades old enough to hold people who know every pixel of the place by heart? My gut says yes, and here is the reasoning. The itch these players keep describing was never really for something unrecognizable. It was for more of the specific ground they loved, tended with care, without their history getting wiped in the process. That is precisely what got announced.

November 4. The sub you probably already pay covers the whole thing. And somewhere out past that gate in Azshara, a furbolg city has been waiting twenty two years for you to finally walk through.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

It didn’t.

Keep that in mind, because the newest one is nearly here. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World hits December 3, 2026, a hair under three months out, on PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2, and PC. More than 500 creatures to round up this time. Synthesis returns as well. Fuse two of your creatures into one meaner beast, sometimes something you had no clue was even in there. Bianca and Nera, the famous brides from Dragon Quest V, headline the entire adventure as children this go-round, wandering a dying land named Witherwood and working to breathe green back into it. It also marks the first numbered Dragon Quest Monsters entry centered on two female co-protagonists, which counts as a quiet milestone.

Good hook. Strong art. But that launch is really just my excuse to say something bigger.

We need to retire the reflex.

Here is the timeline, plain as day. That fifth mainline chapter reached the Super Famicom in 1992, and it let certain defeated monsters join your party after battle. Recruit them. Build a squad out of some of the same beasts you had just been swinging swords at. Now check the calendar on the pocket phenomenon: Red and Green landed on Japanese shelves in 1996. More than three years separate the pair. Enix had folks assembling teams of recruited enemies before Satoshi Tajiri’s brainchild ever reached store shelves.

So the question of who copied who gets murky fast, and the honest answer sits closer to “nobody, exactly.” Pokémon itself had already been in development before Dragon Quest V arrived, so this is not a clean story of one studio stealing from another. A couple of studios were digging in similar soil around the same era. One struck gold worldwide. The other kept quietly refining an idea it had already planted.

By 1998 that concept got a dedicated home. Terry’s Wonderland arrived on Game Boy Color in Japan, then crossed to Western players in 2000 under the clunky label Dragon Warrior Monsters. The game drew heavily from Akira Toriyama’s established Dragon Quest character and monster designs. The blue slime, grinning with that little teardrop shape, became as recognizable to a certain kind of player as any yellow rodent. And underneath the cute surface sat something surprisingly deep: a breeding setup, later reshaped into synthesis, where pedigree and bloodline decided what your next fighter would become.

I’ll give the skeptics one inch. There is no denying that Enix launched that spin-off into a market Pokémon had already transformed. Chasing a hot market isn’t a crime, and pretending the timing meant nothing would be silly. But wanting a slice of the moment and being a hollow imitation are a pair of very different accusations. What arrived in 1998 was an expansion of a system the property already held, dressed up for a hungry market. Not a costume thrown over somebody else’s skeleton.

The differences run all the way through. In these titles you can scout the franchise’s legendary bosses and pull them onto your bench, final villains included. You are not filling a book with fresh designs invented to fuel a fad. You are digging through decades of established lore and drafting your favorites. Combat stays loyal to the mainline saga instead of reinventing the wheel. That fusion engine turns team-building into a genealogy project, where you plot two generations ahead to create the fighter you actually crave. Distinct flavor. Anybody who has sunk a weekend into Joker or The Dark Prince knows the itch it scratches lives in a different corner of the brain.

Why does the “clone” label keep sticking, then? Part of it is plain exposure. For a lot of us on this side of the ocean, the yellow-rat empire came first and came loudest. It shaped the very vocabulary we reach for, so anything shaped along similar lines reads as derivative by default. Understandable instinct. But it also shows how easily our first exposure to something can get mistaken for the place where the whole idea began. The West’s first taste of something gets treated as its birthplace, and everything predating our awareness gets shoved into a footnote.

The past doesn’t owe us that arrangement. The studio was crafting this stuff for a home audience long before most American kids knew the genre existed. Two traditions grew alongside each other. One learned to market itself as a global lifestyle. The other stayed a beloved institution back home while holding devoted cult status abroad. Neither owes the rival its origin story.

And this goes way past one game franchise. Slap the “clone” tag on every creature-catcher that isn’t Pokémon and you wipe out a chunk of real history in one lazy move. You lose the studios chasing the same idea from another direction. You lose the regional wrinkles that gave each series its flavor. What’s left is a flat story where a single name invented everything and the rest borrowed from it. Every debate collapses into who won, and that’s the most boring lens you can put on any art form. I’d rather sit with a game and work out what it was swinging for, then grade it against that instead of somebody else’s scoreboard.

Which loops me back to Witherwood. The Withered World isn’t showing up to challenge anybody’s throne. It is the fourth numbered Monsters entry in Japan, part of a bloodline that has been running this dance since the last century, built on Toriyama designs and a fusion engine sharpened across generations. Judge it by the standard that actually fits. Is the setting charming? Is the roster deep? Does that combining system still spark the “just one more synthesis” compulsion at 2 in the morning?

Bring your memories of Bianca and Nera. Bring your love of the little grinning slime. Leave the tired comparison at the door, because it was never accurate to begin with. This corner of gaming carries a past all its own, a distinct family line, and reasons for existing it never had to borrow. It’s earned the right to headline instead of playing support act.

December 3. Go build a beast you’ve never raised before. Just don’t call it a clone.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Now let me talk to y’all like folks instead of like a press release.

I came up on a beat up SNES that lived under a milk crate in my grandmother’s den. Blanket over the window, sun beating outside, controller cord stretched across the carpet like a tripwire. What kept me in that room for months at a stretch was not the graphics. It was the crew. Fourteen playable folks in FF6, and every last one of them had a reason to exist. Sabin threw suplexes at a locomotive. Cyan swung a sword with a menu that made you hold your breath through four levels of stance. Edgar carried a toolbox like a mechanic who moonlighted as royalty. Gau ran wild on the Veldt learning moves off monsters nobody else could touch. Setzer gambled with slot reels that could either erase a boss or blow up your whole squad.

That roster was a posse cut. Everybody got a verse, everybody had a flow you could pick out blindfolded, and nobody was riding on somebody else’s beat.

Compare that to what the publisher has been handing us lately and something feels hollowed out.

Older entries built their emotional weight on the idea that a group of broken people had to lean on each other. FF4 practically ran on that engine. Allies joined, allies betrayed you, some got yanked off the board at the worst possible moment. Palom and Porom turning to stone still stings decades later because those twins were mechanically useful and annoying and lovable all at once. Losing them cost you real damage output. Grief and strategy hit at the same time, which is a trick very few games pull off.

FF9 did it differently but just as well. Vivi was a walking existential crisis wrapped in a hat too big for his head, and he also happened to be the reason you survived certain fights. Steiner started as a joke, a stubborn tin can yelling about protocol, then evolved into a wall you actually needed. Freya carried a whole tragedy on her back while jumping halfway off the screen. Quina ate enemies. Amarant sulked in the corner and threw things. Eight permanent party members, eight distinct rhythms, one story that felt like a found family instead of a solo tour with backup dancers.

Ten had my favorite version of this. That swap system where anyone on the bench could tag into an active turn meant benching somebody was never permanent. Lulu, Wakka, Kimahri, all of them stayed relevant to the final hour because the system refused to allow you to forget they existed. Blitzball nonsense aside, Wakka’s accuracy made him the reliable answer to flying enemies my sword users kept missing. Auron broke armor. Rikku stole and mixed. You learned every kid on that pilgrimage because the combat forced an introduction.

Somewhere along the way that philosophy got traded for something sleeker and lonelier.

Fifteen gave us four boys in a car and a soundtrack that made you cry in a gas station parking lot. Genuine love for Prompto, Gladio, and Ignis over here. Problem is, at launch, you directly controlled only Noctis. The homies fought under AI control, while most of your direct input came through their Techniques and cutscene warmth. Square eventually added full character switching in December 2017, a little over a year after launch, which tells you exactly where that feature sat on the original priority list. A brotherhood tale where you can only ever be one brother is a strange contradiction to build a sixty hour campaign around.

Sixteen went further and made Clive Rosfield the only human character under direct player control. Jill shows up in your camp with a whole tragic history and fights beside him, but never once takes a turn under your command. Torgal the dog gets more direct input from the player than most of the humans. Yes, the wolf is a good boy. Yes, I petted him every chance the prompt appeared. That does not replace a lineup.

Here is where I have to be fair, because I do not do the thing where fans pretend a good game is a bad one just to win an argument.

Sixteen’s combat is excellent. Combat director Ryota Suzuki brought experience from Capcom titles including Devil May Cry 5 and Dragon’s Dogma, helping shape something with genuine weight and precise timing, and those Eikon fights are the most spectacular set pieces the series has ever produced. Titan alone justifies the purchase. Clive’s arc about branded slaves and stolen agency is the sharpest political writing Square has attempted in years, and centering him serves that theme deliberately. A story about one man refusing to be a tool for other people’s power arguably needs a narrow lens.

Real time brawling also carries technical constraints. Steering four bodies at once creates chaos that turn based systems handled gracefully and twitch systems generally do not. Design teams face actual tradeoffs, not laziness.

But the excuse only stretches so far, because the counterargument came from inside the same company.

Remake and Rebirth run on real time action and hand you three characters to flip between mid swing. Barret tanks. Tifa builds pressure with speed. Aerith zones the field with wards. Yuffie throws that star and changes her ninjutsu element to exploit weaknesses. Red XIII builds vengeance gauge off blocking. Switching feels like changing instruments in the middle of a song, and the fights ask you to do it constantly. Rebirth even added synergy abilities that only trigger when two teammates coordinate. Somebody in that studio clearly believes an ensemble can survive a modern battle system.

Meanwhile the rest of the genre kept the faith without breaking a sweat. Metaphor ReFantazio gave us archetypes and a crew you build relationships with. Persona 5 built an entire second layer out of confidants. Baldur’s Gate 3 sold millions on companions so specific that people argue about them like family members at a cookout. Octopath split its narrative eight ways on purpose. Nobody told those developers that audiences only want one guy.

Why does this matter beyond mechanics? Because ensemble storytelling reflects something true.

Nobody I grew up around got by without help. Church mothers, uncles who fixed cars in the driveway, cousins who fed everybody, the neighbor who kept an eye on your door. Survival was rarely a solo act, and stories that pretend otherwise ring false to anybody raised inside a real community. The old rosters modeled interdependence. Your mage covered what your fighter could not. Your healer kept the whole operation breathing. Somebody had to draw aggro so somebody else could set up the kill. That is not just game design, that is Sunday dinner logic applied to dragons.

A single chosen one carving through everything by himself is a different premise with different values baked in. Sometimes that story is worth telling. Told exclusively, it starts feeling like the franchise forgot what made people fall in love with it.

So what do I want from the next numbered Final Fantasy?

Give me four bodies I control. Give me a healer whose absence I feel immediately. Let somebody leave the roster halfway through the run and let it hurt because I built around them. Bring back mechanical identity so distinct that I can name a character by their menu alone. Keep the flashy action, keep the production values, keep the orchestral swell when a summon lands. Just remember that the reason people still hum Terra’s theme thirty years later is that she was surrounded by folks who mattered.

Square knows how to do this. They wrote the manual. The Final Fantasy VII remake project and Square Enix’s Octopath games have already proved that ensemble driven RPG design still works on modern hardware.

Put the band back together. I am tired of listening to a solo.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Nightreign takes that whole philosophy and tosses it in the fire.

Released back on May 30th, 2025, this thing is a different animal. It’s a roguelite, which already feels like the developer loosening its collar a little. You drop into a place called Limveld as a Nightfarer, you got about forty five minutes, and the map is shrinking around you like a slow motion battle royale while some end of days darkness creeps in from the edges. Three days, three nights, and waiting for you at the finish line is a Nightlord, one of these towering horrors that exists purely to humble you and everybody standing next to you. Quick, brutal, replayable. You lose, you reset, you run it back.

Here’s the part that matters, though. You are not meant to do any of this on your own.

From the ground up, the game was engineered for a squad of three. Not two. Not a brave solo flex. Three. Director Junya Ishizaki and the crew balanced damn near everything around that number, and you feel it the second you load in. Each Nightfarer carries their own kit, their own personality, their own flavor of chaos. The Wylder swings heavy and pulls aggro. Your Recluse hangs back bending magic to her will. A Guardian eats damage so nobody else has to. Alone, any of them can hold a fight. Put them shoulder to shoulder, though, and suddenly somebody’s tanking while somebody’s healing while somebody’s raining hell from the back line, and the whole thing locks into a rhythm no single warrior could ever pull off solo. Right there is the heart of it. Folks at From finally designed a world where you genuinely need other people, and need is not a word that studio throws around lightly.

Then there’s the revive system, which is honestly one of the funniest and most beautiful ideas they’ve ever cooked up. Your homie goes down. In most games you’d jog over, hold a button, watch a little progress bar fill. Not here. Here you bring them back by hitting them. Smacking your fallen teammate with your own weapon chips away at this Near Death meter until they pop back up swinging. Sounds disrespectful. Sounds like betrayal. It’s actually genius, because a ranged Nightfarer can revive somebody from clear across the arena without stepping into the fire, so positioning and trust start to carry real weight. You don’t babysit each other every second. You explore at your own pace, do your own thing, but the moment it hits the fan you’d better know exactly where your people are.

And the stakes run shared all the way down. Every enemy your trio drops feeds runes to all three of you, so nobody’s hoarding, nobody’s getting left behind on levels. You rise as a unit. You also fall as one. The whole group gets wiped at the same moment? Game over, straight back to day one, everybody scraped down to level one again. There is no individual glory hiding in that math. No carrying dead weight to the credits while they watch you cook. Either the squad makes it or the squad starts over, and that one little design choice quietly rewires how you treat the strangers and the friends fighting beside you.

Here’s the thing folks are falling in love with. The shared W.

I’ve felt it myself. Picture it. A Nightlord sitting at a sliver of health, two of your people are down, you’re the last one standing on fumes, and you somehow thread the needle and drop the thing. If you got mics, the chat erupts. If you’re rolling with randoms and nobody’s talking, somebody throws up a celebration gesture and you throw one right back, and for one second three strangers who never met just shared something true. Hits different than soloing a giant by yourself. A solo kill is a flex, a private trophy you tuck away in your pocket. This is a memory you made with other human beings. Those stick around in a way bragging rights never do.

Now let me zoom out, because Nightreign isn’t happening in a vacuum. Whole industry’s been drifting this way for a minute. Helldivers had grown men screaming about democracy with their boys at two in the morning. Lethal Company turned scared people whispering in the dark into pure comedy gold. Hunger for stuff you live through with other people instead of merely beside them has been building and building. And now the company most famous for isolation just planted its flag squarely in cooperative ground. When From of all developers decides community is worth building an entire game around, that tells you the floor has shifted under all our feet.

What makes it land is that they refused to dull the bite to get there. This is still their world. Those Nightlords still hit like a freight train. The dark still wants you in the dirt. They just decided the path through it now runs straight through other people, and then they trusted us to find the harmony ourselves with almost no tools to talk it out. No text chat at all. A ping here, a gesture there, voice only if you bring your own crew. That’s the whole toolbox. And somehow it works, because the design forces a kind of wordless understanding, the same way a good pickup run at the court does. Nobody’s calling plays out loud. Everybody just knows.

Communal feeling like that is something a lot of us already chase anyway. Half the joy of being a Blerd is the group chat blowing up at midnight, the Discord call running for hours, the three of us hopping on after work to get bodied by the same boss eight times and laughing the entire way through. Nightreign reaches right into that energy and makes it the actual gameplay loop. It rewards the late session, the inside jokes, the “go left, no my left” confusion that turns into a rescue at the last possible second. For folks who grew up gaming as a way to stay close to people, that recognition feels personal.

It’s not flawless, and the community was loud about it. At launch there was no way to roll as a pair, just you by your lonesome or a full three stack, which left a whole lot of best friends standing out in the cold. FromSoftware eventually answered that complaint with Patch 1.02, adding Duo Expeditions and adjusting the game’s balance around the current number of players. The funny thing is that the loudest gripe was basically “let me bring exactly one more friend.” Kind of proves the entire point, doesn’t it. People weren’t begging to be left alone anymore. They were begging for more company.

And here’s the real headline buried in all of this. We crossed a line. The company that made loneliness an art form spent a decade convincing us that suffering tastes best quiet and personal, then turned around and made something that only sings when there’s a chorus. Audience didn’t push back on it either. Folks sprinted toward it. We’re out here forming squads, reviving each other with our own swords, splitting runes down the middle, throwing up goofy little gestures over a corpse, and restarting all the way from day one without a single complaint because the people make the loss worth swallowing.

For the longest time this genre treated playing with others as a feature you flip on when you got bored. Nightreign treats it as the whole reason you showed up tonight. Not some small tweak in a patch note either. It’s a statement about where this hobby is headed, and From just said it louder than anybody else in the room.

So go grab two of your people, or roll the dice with two strangers, and march out to take down a Nightlord. Lose a few. You will, trust me. Then win one, all three of you, by the absolute skin of your teeth, and try to tell me you don’t feel something move in your chest. What you’re feeling right there is the future knocking. Might as well answer the door.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Like Destiny 2, WF is very much a live service game meaning it’s meant to stay active via constant seasonal content and updates as well as regular expansions. These games make their bread either by selling the expansion while the game itself is free, having stuff that can be purchased in the premium shop, seasonal passes—or all three. Oftentimes, all three are utilized since the seasonal pass and seasonal content keeps things alive.

Live Service is a Hard Road to Travel

Most of the time when a game is developed it’s either meant as a one-off story, a potential series-starter, or a sequel but it’s often a contained story that might get DLC before the studio moves on. They’re rarely meant to be live like the multiplayer modes of Call of Duty. Live service is more the realm of MOBAs and MMORPGs which come in as massively online experiences as soon as they’re installed.

As it would go, live services exist within MMO’s metropolitan area without having a residence in the city proper. But the studio has to be able to support it consistently. That means regular seasons every two to six months that have a theme and keep players involved and engage in the game world followed by an expansion.

The expansion serves as a mini-sequel or soft sequel without being a full-on sequel with a number and subtitle. Mind you, Bungie sells expansions for the price of a full game but those come around every year or two but they have the fanbase and the players tend to be enthusiastic even if there are elements they don’t care for much.

That’s ultimately what a developer takes this road wants: a dedicated fanbase for the title. You only get that with rewarding missions and gameplay and an engaging, constantly evolving story. The mix of this concoction varies from game to game and developer to developer but those who apparently hit that perfect mix for them tend to stick around for a long time. Sprinkle in free-to-play and boom!

Much like Warframe.

Warframe is Hanging in There

Again, released in 2013, WF is a sci-fi third-person shooter where you as a recently unfrozen Tenno—humanoid warriors who are one with their bio battle suits—to combat a variety of alien lifeforms. Tennos utilize different kinds of weaponry as they take on galaxy-spanning missions to deal damage and defeat these hostile lifeforms.

Typical sci-fi stuff, really. Like other live service games, a premium store where things and currency can purchased that can be used with any particular in-game mechanic. There’s always a special currency with these types of games—such as platinum in Diablo IV.

The story is just enough that a developer can keep going with the game while throwing in storyline stuff and pushing the main story along every few years. What keeps players engaging with WF is some fun gameplay, decent gameplay, cosmetics and better gear to snag, and a leveling system players can work on.

The goal is to make it challenging and rewarding for the dedicated players and accessible enough for new and returning players. It’s a real tightrope act because if you make things too easy, your diehards are going to be annoyed since their effort for years prior might come off as pointless. However, if things are too difficult or convoluted, that’s a good way to not see return players or retain them.

You simply end up with your diehards who—while loyal—you can never truly satisfy. There will be something they didn’t enjoy and those players are regulars and might be familiar to the team. The loudest and rowdiest tend to have a voice in the core community.

Of course, that all only matters if you’re really involved with the community. If you’re not in the official Discord or on their forums, it doesn’t matter. You’re here to play the game. With that said, Warframe has a dedicated community that keeps the game alive and keeps the devs busy.

There are a few games that should be watched to see how this is done. While WF doesn’t have the live population of Diablo IV or Destiny 2, it has stayed alive for over a decade with a population often in the lower five figures.

Do you play Warframe, Diablo IV, or Destiny 2? What keeps you playing and what would make you take a break from the grind and the loop? As always let us know!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

For those who never experienced it or played the game when it ended on storefronts, Kingdoms of Amalur was an open-world action RPG taking place in fantasy world brimming with magical and ancient dangers, well-crafted lore, and a good amount of quests and side quests to keep you busy.

Following a decent character creation process, the main character’s story begins after challenging Fate and reviving after certain death. There is a brutal conflict going on but the Gnomes are busy conducting research into resurrection and getting their Well of Souls working.

The MC proves to be a success and of great interest to one researcher who accompanies the MC in escaping hostile forces and puts them on the path to finding out more about their new existence. Along the way, the main character experiences many adventures while also lending their power to the difficult forces combating the Tuatha and more regional dangers and threats.

Kingdoms of Amalur Had a Lot Going for It

Honestly, that’s as brief an explanation of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (or Re-Reckoning, the remaster). There’s a lot of stuff going on here. It featured everything that would’ve been standard for an open-world game at this time.

You have your farming of materials, crafting, a decent-sized skill tree with flexibility for some flexible build crafting, rewarding side quests and encounters that allow you to test and stress your progress and build.

The developer, Big Huge Games had a boatload of ideas and managed to put the majority together and craft their mechanics around them. And it works! Whenever I installed this game, I ended up sinking hours into the quests, building up my Fateless One (the main character who exists beyond Fate which governs the world), and crafting gear and weapons to better utilize those skills.

It’s all stock open-world RPG fare but it’s all put together in a way that works and is actually fun. In addition, you had two creative powerhouses in fantasy and comics with novelist R.A Salvatore and writer/artist Todd McFarlane fleshing out the setting of the Faelands, its lore and inhabitants.

What I found interesting about all of this is that at the time of its release, visually Kingdoms of Amalur looked like nothing too special. There were definitely that looked better crafted graphically but Amalur was far from a horrible-looking game. In some ways it existed between slightly dated and of its time but didn’t come off as a game that would push the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or gaming PCs of the early 2010s.

The World and Scale

Instead you had regions that were colorful, bold, and at times dark and gloomy. You actually felt that your Fateless One was engaged in this large, lengthy quest where you decided how it progressed. Adding to this was the scale of the world. You could look at the map and see what region your were in and which ones were close but traveling through these areas wasn’t exactly a quick jaunt.

You were going to clash with enemies and beasts, you would be distracted by loot and stories, and enticed by exploration. The size of different areas within a region encouraged exploration and after a few encounters, that curiosity in what else could be gained as far as gear and weapons.

I would say this is what really kept me in Amalur: the scale and crafting. Sure, the combat was fine but the possibilities and tiers of crafting material and what could be made had me trying to create the best possible gear for my adventures. The game encouraged that heavily but made it so that if you were into combat, there was plenty of that but you had to explore to be more effective.

Fate of the Kingdom

Ultimately, Kingdoms of Amalur managed to move a million copies but the developer closed due to financial factors as EA had to be repaid for investing a significant amount into the project. Also, the development itself had some issues that seemed to be am indication of how things would shake out for the end product.

Despite the cash sunk into Amalur, there were unfavorable takes into different elements of the game. It was viewed favorably enough to warrant a remaster by Kaiko roughly eight years later. While there is a potential series or even a franchise there, Amalur hasn’t seen much interest or movement in future entries.

Share your thoughts on Kingdoms of Amalur. With the other RPGs of a similar vein out and thriving at that time, did you have expectations of a sequel? Or did you gather that “Too much was out into this game, it was going to get the axe and thrown in the vault”?

Let us know!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

It’s a slower burn but Little King’s Story even eased that to where it was manageable for players not familiar with RTS. The Wii was meant to reel in all kinds of gamers despite experience, genre preference, or free time. Little King’s Story was somewhat different in that RTS aren’t exactly “I’ll play a bit and come back to it later.”

No, like RPGs, simulation games, and strategy games; once you start it up, you’ve pretty much accepted that you’re going lose time in that day. Again, this game dropped in 2009 and was well-received, so where are the sequels?

Where’s Little King’s Story?

LKS was developed by Cing, a defunct indie developer that went under in 2010, just under a year after releasing this title. Most their titles were on the Nintendo DS with a run of roughly seven years. You could say they got a lot done before shuttering.

Their work included games in the Another Code and Hotel Dusk series as well as the DS debut of Monster Rancher. Of their games Little King’s Story and Monster Rancher DS were the two I played the most.

It was an interesting time in gaming with the Nintendo printing money despite having a home console that was underpowered and lacked the expected features of that period, an approach that has continued into the Switch 2. If anything, Cing should’ve made money as well due to its close working relationship with Nintendo starting in 2005.

An issue could’ve been the pace at which Nintendo released games (which is still on the sluggish side) but that’s mainly with its first party games. The company takes its time for Mario and Zelda for quality reasons. Think how long it was between Metroid Prime 3 and the fourth entry release in 2025. In that 19-year period, we saw a number of remasters, spinoffs. Mind you, Prime 4 came out roughly four years after the previous main installment Metroid Dread, which is a solid amount of time between main games in a franchise if there are no other major titles being developed.

Again, all of that is for a first-party game being developed by Nintendo’s own development teams. Cing was an indie developer who happened to have a regular working relationship with Ninty. The fate of Little King’s Story was up in the air.

The Game Ended on a Cliffhanger

With Cing shut down, the rights to LKS fell to Marvelous, which published the game in Japan on the Wii. On paper, that looks fine since Marvelous is still putting out games regularly and working on titles in known properties. They’re active but they have a lot on their plate with their own titles and others.

While LKS is one of their titles and proved to be a popular title, that was in 2009-2010. Gaming has changed a lot since then and a title like Little King’s Story might appear dated or unpredictable in performance compared to its tried and true titles Rune Factory, Story of Seasons, and Senran Kagura as well as handling Monster Hunter Stories, No More Heroes, and Valhalla Knights.

Now, I regularly bring up titles that I’d like to see revived and believe that developers technically have a new franchise in an older one if we haven’t seen anything from that franchise in decades. I’m still waiting on Capcom to drop another Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance. However, LKS like Beat Down has gone too long without anything new or fresh to get a franchise going.

It’s unlikely that a Little King’s Story 2 that continues from the game’s ending is developed and we likely won’t see a reboot. It would take Marvelous having a “what’s old is new again” approach similar to TV and film studios with these sitcom revivals and continuations.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Now, I’m not as hardcore a Destiny 2 player as my younger brother. As a matter of fact, while I did catch the most recent “World’s First” raid, I wasn’t heavily active during the expansion launch. A large part of that had to do with crashes on PlayStation 4.

However, as far as Destiny 2 creators and keeping up with news, I follow to a degree. Even while playing, unless I’m playing with my brother, I tend to get in and find activities where I can just get in and slam such as Iron Banner, strikes that are on the shorter side, or just public events. I’m not particularly interested in jumping puzzles or figuring out mechanics, two important ingredients in the franchise’s gameplay.

Destiny: Rising Launches

I had come across Destiny: Rising on the Google Play Store when it was still in the pre-register phase. Mind you, I didn’t pre-register as I was looking for another game to play. Since it was a bigger mobile game—I don’t reckon Sony or Bungie would get on board with a trash mobile title—it would remain in the “For You” section until launch.

After my brother reminded me that it had launched, I logged on the day after launch and dove into the issues of Haven, the hub city of Destiny: Rising. As mentioned above, this is a sequel to the main Destiny games and I’d say that so far, it’s a good entry.

I’m still going through the story—in true Destiny fashion, character really chat. Everyone’s a yapper in the game and the urge to hit “Skip” was ever present. Fortunately, some cutscenes allow the player to double the speed as a soft skip. I feel this should be for all cutscenes and cinematics.

Move it along, already.

It should be noted that as a NetEase title, there’s the expected gacha element here. It’s actually an important element of the gameplay since the characters are all built to substitute for the more focused build and gear crafting of the main titles.

Characters and Build Crafting

That isn’t to say this game is pick-and-play. The Guardians (characters) all have a light element: solar (fire), void (gravity/space), and arc (lightning). Stasis (ice), strand (kind of like void and stasis) and prismatic (all abilities) aren’t featured yet. However, in true gacha fashion, expect more characters to drop and some to be loaded up with the best skills of those elements.

In Destiny 2, players are free to jump among elemental subclasses as desired and craft builds around certain abilities and aspects. Over on Destiny: Rising, the characters have pretty much settled into their most proficient subclass. The player just has to select the best Guardian for the activity.

Players will get to do some build crafting here but it’s streamlined for both mobile gameplay and how players tend to play mobile. For those who have explored Destiny 2, you will know it’s a bit of a time investment regardless of your skill level. Whether you’re mainly a PvP (player vs. player) or PvE (player vs. environment) gamer, you’re sinking time into the game because there’s so much to manage, improve, craft, and hunt for—never mind actually getting into the adventuring, raiding, and dungeon delving. It’s not necessarily a game where you can jump in for 10 minutes here and there for bite-sized, quick sessions.

In Rising, the approach is geared mainly towards shorter sessions or if you really want to just drain your battery. On the road to team level 61 at the time of writing this, I’ve hovered between both.

Back to the characters! They’re pretty much different subclasses with baked in builds—or abilities geared towards their intended combat and utility style. From there, you’re able to level up their relic abilities—the elemental powers Guardians can use in combat and improve your weapons.

If you haven’t gotten into Destiny: Rising, you might be wondering about armor sets and the like. Don’t worry about that, the focus is on weapons in DR—meaning the Guardians are just rocking with their established armor sets. No one’s running around with mismatched gear or anything.

All of that has been streamlined to cut down the micromanagement aspect of Destiny for mobile. There’s still micromanagement but the amount of stuff to manage is reduced.

Gameplay and Adventuring

I’m certain the build crafting and micromanagement are big draws of the franchise for some players but this game shines with the actual adventuring and in-the-field stuff. The activity and menu UI sets up everything in mainly one location while checking your ghost (your Light imbued companion who guides and revived you).

From the main story mission to PvE, PvP, PvPvE activities, players can find it here along with stuff like rankings, the map, season level, characters, and items. Just like the main games, selecting any kind of adventure or activity will get it started for matchmaking.

There are some adventures that require the player to travel to certain areas. The game will drop you in the region at the closest fast travel spot but there might be some hiking required to the objective. It occurs for some main story missions but for specific characters that aren’t Wolf, the game just drops you in the location their story takes place.

The gunplay in Destiny: Rising is really good. It’s not to the level of Destiny 2 but for a mobile adaptation, it’s really fun and easy to learn. The game allows the player to experience the game in third-person or first-person and I strongly remember going with first. When using super abilities, the perspective is snapped to third-person for the duration as it does in the main games.

I found it odd that third-person was even an option but NetEase Games tend to offer both.

Loot and Odds N’ Ends

Any combat activity or adventure rewards loot in the form of leveled engrams (which can have weapons, weapon mods, etc), one of the game’s various currencies, fragments that can make full engrams), weapon enhancement material, and miscellaneous loot that can be used for other activities.

For instance, you could get bait for fishing from doing strikes or whatever activity. Fishing itself rewards nothing but the fish and occasionally guns, but fish can be sold for fishing shop currency—which can then be used to purchase a variety of fishing and non-fishing goods.

Matchmaking for fire teams tends to be very quick. Very rarely have I left the matchmaking or mission screen because the matching was taking a while. Players are even warned that matchmaking could take a while because of a low participation pool (which I got twice).

Speaking of warnings, in a nice bit of a quality of life feature, Destiny: Rising warned me that a character mission would take at least 15 minutes. I greatly appreciated that.

Another warning: this is a gacha game as far as the meat and potatoes of its business. That means some characters can be purchased and getting the battle pass is recommended but not necessary. The extra bonuses are nice but the grind isn’t too bad in this game. Hell, I primarily grind strikes and other PvE activities…and fishing.

The first wave of characters can be gained via pulls using the associated currencies. Those can be purchased as well or gained as a potential reward. Expect Rising to push players more towards purchasing content when even better or more interesting characters are released.

As a matter of fact, two new characters have been announced as coming soon. All of that said, I say that Rising is a game worth playing.

Will you be play or pass on Destiny: Rising? If you’re already in, what are some of activities and characters you enjoy? Let’s us know in the comments and if you playing, feel free to add me: MetalSwift.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.