It comes as a great surprise to me that Square Enix has announced the far-off Final Fantasy VII remake will be released episodically. While any story-based game- and Role-playing games, especially- can have its narrative broken into smaller pieces, the pacing and amount of content per portion in Final Fantasy VII is questionable, and not necessarily clean-cut. Unless, I don't know, you break it up by the literal CD swaps from the original PS1 release. While many games have attempted episodic release schedules in the age of digital distribution, there are very few that seem justified in doing so. An episodic game needs to have a structure in which each installment tells a concise narrative, no matter how much cliff-hanging the writers wish to create in order to encourage a player to buy the next installment. What is stranger- to me, at least- is that there are specific franchises that feel primed to adopt an episodic release schedule yet have not done so.

With an HD port in Code of Princess EX and characters appearing in the soon-to-be-released Blade Strangers, it seems that this delightful little action-based Role-playing game is getting some love. Whether or not this is warranted, however, is another story. Code of Princess is, in many ways, a conundrum. Featuring absurd character designs, a wacky localization, incredibly extensive online functionality, and a slew of customization options, this game also suffers from terrible performance issues on the Nintendo 3DS, punishing difficulty, and a bland soundtrack. It is far from a perfect experience, which is perhaps why the prospect of co-operative play and altered enemy A.I. are large pushes- and welcome changes- in the EX package.

I took a look at the Octopath Traveler demo version recently, and it left quite an impression on me. I'm still not quite sure whether it was positive or negative, however, mostly because the game's intentions are still somewhat elusive. While there are some aspects of the demo that appealed to me a great deal, others feel a bit nebulous, and the game as a whole seems to lack some direction. While the developers have apparently taken some of the concerns of those who evaluated the game to heart, there is still much that has not been said about Octopath Traveler, and while its aesthetic is striking and its homages evident, I hope to address some concerns regarding this new Square Enix RPG.

January 11 th was the night of the first in-depth press conference for the Nintendo Switch, and I remember jokingly telling my friends at the time that I would likely hold off on buying the new system until Monolith Soft announced their first title. Imagine my surprise when I saw the first, bare-bones teaser trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (XC2) that very same evening, with a tentative release date of 2017 attached. I reined in my expectations in the months to come, knowing full-well how XCX had taken such a long time to develop, and how little of this new title we had seen. News that the original soundtrack had just finished recording before E3 did not give me much hope, but the game would be featured there and given a release date in the same holiday time-frame as XCX. Shocked and now enthralled, I began to listen more intently to how the game's mechanics would work and play. While the Treehouse demo was informative, it had only a few instances of exceptional pl...