The Story of the First Game, Reimagined

Samurai Warriors 5 is a sequel, but it’s also a partial retelling of the original game. It will cover stories that haven’t yet been told in the series, including Nobunaga Oda’s younger years and his first meeting with Mitsuhide Akechi, as well as famous incidents from the era, including the battle-to-the-death involving the Oda family and the Incident at Honnōji.

A More Limited Focus

While Samurai Warriors 5 is a retelling, it’s more limited in focus compared to previous games. It will focus on the events leading up to and including the Honnō-ji Incident. Nobunaga Oda and Mitsuhide Akechi will be the main characters, and their relationship will be a core part of the game. Players will experience the story from both sides as they battle across Sengoku Era Japan.

A Gorgeous Art Style

Samurai Warriors 5 features an absolutely gorgeous and heavily stylized visual style based on traditional Japanese art. The style looks somewhat like cell-shading, and it’s incredibly visually appealing, so it’s a nice addition that really makes the game pop. You might not expect Samurai Warriors 5 to be a looker, but the characters, environments, and effects are gorgeous.

There are a Ton of Characters

Samurai Warriors 5 features 37 playable characters. 21 of those characters are returning from previous entries in the series, but the other 16 are new. 10 of those characters are support characters, which means they can only play in Free Mode and do not have full movesets. This is less than Samurai Warriors 4’s 55 playable characters, but all but one of the returning characters have been completely redesigned.

A Really Good Tutorial Will Teach You Everything

Samurai Warriors 5 starts slow; you only have access to Nobunaga for the first few levels, but the game does a nice job of teaching you everything you can do before giving you new options and characters to play with. Whether you’re a series veteran looking to master Samurai Warriors 5‘s new additions or a newbie trying to learn how musuo games work, you’ll be up to speed in no time.

Every Character Can Use Every Weapon

While each character comes equipped with a preferred weapon, they can learn to use any of the ones in the game. That means you can carry over your favorite weapons to whoever you like. There are benefits to using a character’s preferred weapon, however, as it unlocks additional moves that are otherwise unavailable.

Stock Experience Is a Godsend

You’re naturally going to have your favorite characters, but that doesn’t mean that the characters you don’t use will be left behind. In addition to the experience that characters get in levels, you also gain stock experience that can be allocated among characters as you see fit. How much experience you get is based on your level score – S, A, B, C, and so on – so there’s benefits in getting a high score, because you can upgrade characters faster – even the ones you’re not using.

Hyper Attacks Cover Ground and Keep Combos Going

Hyper Attacks are a new addition to Samurai Warriors 5 that allows you to cover ground quickly, keeping a combo alive while rounding up lots of nearby enemies and chaining it into regular attacks to keep the hits coming. Hyper Attacks allow you to chain together combos that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, so using them is a necessity if you want to get a high score.

Combine Normal and Power Attacks for Unique Combos

Samurai Warriors 5 isn’t a complicated game, but it does have a combo system that offers the player some freedom. Light attacks can be chained into heavy attacks, with the combo performed changing depending on how many hits it is before you finish it off with a heavy attack. Some launch enemies into the air, clear out large groups, act as projectiles, or stun and deliver large amounts of damage. Learning the right combo for each situation is crucial.

Pick Up Some Ultimate Skills

Ultimate Skills are equippable abilities that deplete your gauge but can be used to cancel animations and string together combos that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. You can equip four ultimate skills at a time. Ultimate Skills might offer buffs, character specific attacks, combo opportunities, or can even refill your Musuo gauge.

The Musou Gauge Gives You Supers

Filling the Musuo gauge allows you to use a character’s Musou attack, which is capable of clearing out huge groups and even boss enemies. While it’s tempting to save these, you should spend the meter pretty judiciously. You get it back pretty fast.

Fill the Rage Gauge

In addition to the Musou Gauge, there’s also a Rage Gauge. When full, it enhances your speed, power, and other attributes, and gives you access to an incredibly powerful Frenzy Attack if you have the Musou Gauge to spend. It’s the single most powerful attack in your arsenal, so use it wisely.

Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade

Almost everything in Samurai Warriors 5 can be upgraded: character skills, weapon levels, Castle buildings, weapon abilities, you name it. It’s easy to just go from battle to battle, but make sure you spend some time in My Castle to get the most out of your upgrade options.

Team Up With a Partner

Samurai Warriors 5 is co-op, but you can play with another character even if you’re playing alone. The game allows you to switch characters on the fly in addition to giving your partner orders, allowing you to continue combos and coordinate attacks. It’s a seamless and easy to use system, and offers tactical possibilities you wouldn’t have with a single character.

PC Requirements

Thinking of picking up Samurai Warriors 5 on PC? If so, don’t worry: the system requirements don’t seem too demanding. On minimum settings, you’ll need Intel Core i5-4460 or the AMD equivalent, a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 / AMD Radeon R7 370, and 6 GB of RAM. Meanwhile, recommended requirements stipulate a an Intel Core i7-4770 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600, a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 / AMD Radeon RX 590, and 8 GB of RAM.

Special Editions

In addition to the standard edition, Samurai Warriors 5 will also come in a Digital Deluxe Edition. The Digital Deluxe Edition will include the base game, the Season Pass (which includes Additional Scenario (6 sets) & BGM (6 sets), additional Weapons (5 sets w/ 3 weapons in each set), and 6 additional Horses), several special weapons, a horse, a gem set. and a compact tool.

Well, July 2nd is here, and the PSP store is no more, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy digital games for the platform anymore, or that any games are now inaccessible. You can still buy them; you just can’t do it on the PSP. The news comes from Sony themselves, who have updated their website to confirm that the games will still be available for purchase on the PS3 and PS VIta, and can be downloaded and played on the PSP via the handheld’s Download List.

“You’ll still be able to purchase and play PSP content that is available on the PS3 and PS Vita stores,” reads the message on the PlayStation website. “However, you’ll no longer be able to make purchases via the in-game store for PSP content.”

It’s great news all around, and while it’s a shame to see the PSP’s digital storefront go, it’s good that players will still be able to access and play the system’s games, even if they won’t be able to make purchases in the in-game store. Game preservation is important; several of the titles exclusive to the PSP are classics, and it’s good that players will still be able to buy, play, and enjoy them. Even if doing so won’t be as easy or convenient as it used to be, this is still an unqualified win for game preservation and anyone who cares about the medium.

Apparently, Nintendo thought so, too, because the company has recently revived the series under a new title: Ask a Developer. The new series kicks off with an interview with Nintendo EPD’s Kosuke Teshima and Naoki Masuda focused on their most recent game: Game Builder Garage, a game that teaches players how to make games and allows them to make their own titles, to boot. As before, interviews were conducted in Japanese and then translated into English.

Game Builder Garage, it turns out, was inspired by Toy-Con Garage, a VR portion of the Nintendo Labo: VR Kit. Masuda and Teshima noticed that a lot of players and developers were enjoying using Toy-Con Garage to develop their own games, but they’d often get stuck if they didn’t have proper programming knowledge. At that point, Masuda realized “that we might be able to expand that fun if we had a system that provides guidance on how to create games using Toy-Con Garage, making it more approachable for players,” and Game Builder Garage was born.

The entire interview is both lengthy and fascinating, and a must-read for anyone interested in Nintendo or game design. It evokes the best parts of the Iwata Asks series, which Nintendo has archived for those interested, and which was also partially collected in a book about Iwata’s life called Ask Iwata. Hopefully, Ask a Developer will continue to honor that legacy, and run for a long, long time.

In Blightbound, players will take control of up to three heroes who depart their safe haven in the mountains to take on the Blight – “a mysterious and corrupting fog that enshrouds the land.” Players will be able to explore several handcrafted dungeons and acquire up to 20 unique heroes, each with their own skills, abilities, and unique stories, all of which are fully narrated.

In addition, players will also craft and collect loot and improve their mountain stronghold to better train and upgrade their characters. The game will also have three distinct areas to explore, several character classes to master, and if the game’s trailer is anything to go by, some truly gorgeous art. Blightbound will also support cross-play and local multiplayer.

You can watch the latest trailer for the game below:

Aside from being one of the strangest crossovers you’ll ever see, Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead allows players to construct paths that will lead characters from The Walking Dead to safety and build traps for walkers. There’s also some impressively hilarious ragdoll physics for players to enjoy when things go right (or wrong).

Ironcast, on the other hand, is pretty different. Inspired by Victorian-era science fiction, Ironcast is a turn-based strategy title that drops players into the top hat or bonnet of a refined Englishman or woman in 1880s England as they try to defend the British Empire against an invading force of mechs with one of their own.

Both games sound pretty wild, and you can’t beat free, so be sure to check them out when they’re free on July 8th, and to pick up The Spectrum Retreat if you haven’t already.

July’s titles will replace Star Wars: Squadrons and Operation Tango, which will continue to be available to users until July 6th. June’s other free title, Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown, will continue to be free until August 2nd, along with July’s other PlayStation Plus titles.

It’s an impressive lineup for PlayStation fans, offering one of the most popular shooters around in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, an excellent fighting game, a surprisingly good arcade-style wrestling brawler, and one of the best narrative titles of 2019, which will see a higher framerate, better resolution, and faster loading times on PS5.

All told, there’s plenty to be excited about if you’re a PlayStation Plus subscriber in July. Just make sure you grab Star Wars: Squadrons and Operation Tango before they’re gone, if you haven’t already.

Final Fantasy 1, Final Fantasy 2, and Final Fantasy 3 will set you back $11.99 each. Pre-orders are currently available at a 20% discount, dropping the price to $9.59 each. The entire collection, which will comprise Final Fantasy 1 – Final Fantasy 6, is available for $74.82, a 22% discount off the base price. Folks who pre-order will get free soundtracks and wallpapers for each game.

Each game will feature completely new graphics and audio. The updated character designs were done by Kazuko Shibuya, who was the original artist and is currently collaborating on the Pixel Remaster series. The music, meanwhile, has also been remastered under the supervision of original composer and Final Fantasy legend Nobuo Uematsu.

In Planet Alpha, players are marooned on a strange planet and will have to venture through beautiful and dangerous environments to unlock the planet’s secrets, escape relentless enemies, and harness the power of both night and day to survive. Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break combines a sprawling story with wild takes on legendary characters from history and fiction. Players can also design, build, and share custom levels with friends in what is both a ridiculous tower defense and arcade games.

Conker: Live and Reloaded is a remake of N64 classic Conker’s Bad Fur Day in which players guide the foul-mouthed squirrel through a “raunchy world full of twisted characters, innuendos, and outrageous movie parodies.” Midway Arcade Origins, meanwhile, collects more than 30 arcade games including Defender, Gauntlet, Rampart, and more, without requiring any quarters.

The games combine for an MSRP of $79.96 and 3000 gamerscore. Planet Alpha will be available from July 1st to 31st. Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break will be available from July 16th to August 15th. Conker: Live and Reloaded can be claimed from July 1st to 15th, and Injustice can be picked up from July 16th to 31st.

You can watch a trailer for this month’s Games with Gold below:

Argonaut closed its doors in 2004, but that doesn’t mean the people who worked on the original Star Fox games have forgotten about them. In an interview with GameXplain, Giles Goddard – one of the programmers at Argonaut who worked on Star Fox – admitted he wouldn’t mind working on the series again when asked what Nintendo IPs he would be interested in working on.

“It would be interesting to do a Star Fox, I think,” Goddard replied. “But not how the other ones were done.” When asked what he meant, Goddard explained: “I think I would just dial it back a lot and not in gimmicks like, you know, the stuff Star Fox Zero had, and maybe not even put in the free roaming aspects and stuff like that. I would just bring it back, pull it back into what made the original Star Fox fun, and just make one based on that. I don’t know how popular it would be, but it would be cool to try.” Goddard did say, however, that he isn’t interested in bringing back the game’s retro visual style.

As fun as a classic Star Fox sounds, it seems something Nintendo would be unlikely to go for. Fans mostly just want a proper sequel to Star Fox 64, but Nintendo seemed more content to add gimmick after gimmick than just make a similar game. The end result was Star Fox Zero, which is pretty bad. Hopefully, Star Fox will get another chance one day, and maybe Goddard will even get to work on it.

https://youtu.be/22Ipwp7DxRw

The update came via from the latest episode of video show Forza Monthly, in which Playground discussed what the impending release of Forza Horizon 5 meant for content development for Forza Horizon 4. As you’d expect, development of new content on Forza Horizon 4 is essentially coming to a halt. After the launch of Forza Horizon 4’s Series 37 update on June 29th, updates will no longer include new content.

“With Forza Horizon 5’s release being our priority over the next few months, we’ve made some changes to Forza Horizon 4’s monthly series updates,” said senior producer Tom Butcher. “So starting with Series update 38, players who know the game well will start to see the return of content from Series 7 to 32. Think of it a bit like a mix tape, featuring the return of some of your favorite content combined with recently added new features.”

Butcher went on to emphasize that players “should have a lot of fun revisiting these moments and seeing how you handle them the second time around. And obviously with all of our recent Series updates, you’ll have photo challenges, rewards, Forzathon Shop, and backstage voting all going on as well as usual.”

When asked if Forza Horizon 4 would still receive updates after Forza Horizon 5‘s release, Butcher said Playground “plan[s]s to make sure Forza Horizon 4 continues to be a fun experience, but we aren’t ready to share exact plans quite yet.”

You can watch the June episode of the Forza Monthly show below: