Of all the games I expected to launch a drama storm, Dragon's Dogma 2 was pretty far down on my list. I suppose the big difference is that, for whatever reason, this is one of the most popular Capcom launches in a long time. This is selling faster on Steam than the Resident Evil 4 remake. This is the Asmongold difference.

Whatever the reason, Dragon's Dogma 2 has a massive audience of new eyes who would (understandably) not have been okay with the original. Same microtransactions, same obtuse design, same framerate on life support whenever something more complicated than one character walking forward is happening on the screen. Of course, fans of the original were able to either look past or learn to love the jank, and it's become an undeniable cult classic. The danger of a cult classic getting a follow-up is that people outside the cult aren't primed for the material the way that the cult is, and they newcomers are not going to be open to the same things. Defenders of cult classics will usually call these people "tourists", and it's not hard to find people who are really really fucking mad about this tourism. I don't particularly care, but I can relate to that feeling of "you really don't get it" when something niche ends up attracting a mainstream audience who legitimately don't get it.

I don't think people actually have as much of a problem with the microtransactions as they've been making themselves out to be, and it's instead one of those situations where one thing fucking up makes people less willing to forgive other fuckups. The "real" issue I imagine most people having with the game is the performance; we're in an era where 1080p/60 fps is the last-gen standard for PC users, and the fact that this is experiencing Nuts.wad-esque CPU overload from NPC routines is probably getting under a lot of fingernails. If you were a Dragon's Dogma fan before this month, you probably don't care that this new game runs like shit, because the old one did too. If you're one of the people getting in on the new hype train, you're going to be real mad that this is barely holding 30 frames while walking around town.

Still, though, Capcom's "microtransactions to trick suckers" business model is fucking shitty, and I'm glad they're finally getting some serious pushback on it. There's nothing here that you can't earn relatively easy in-game without needing to pay for it, but this is an obtuse game. People aren't going to think to delete their local and cloud saves to start a new game, they're going to look for the new game button. People are going to struggle through the world without fast travel, and when they see "fast travel for sale" in the store (even though it's just a waypoint you need a consumable to fast travel to), they'll get mad. People are going to want to hire strong pawns, and if you can pay for the ability to hire the strongest pawns, they'll get mad. It really is just giving players the option to pay to skip content, but that's not a non-issue. What's the excuse? If they're selling things that you can find in-game easily, then they're just tricking people who don't know better into spending their money. That's not defensible. It isn't okay when Capcom does it and bad when Ubisoft does it just because you like one company's games and not the other's. The fact that none of the early reviewers mentioned this despite saying that they knew about it means that they were probably under NDA, which means Capcom probably knew that adding all of these microtransactions weren't going to be a very good look.

God, remember horse armor?

I know it's been said to death, but this series is just so fucking stiff and ugly.

Mortal Kombat is easily the best-selling fighting game, period. Whenever the new fighting games roll out, the latest Mortal Kombat is always on top, and it's usually not even close. Millions and millions of copies sold are the gap between Mortal Kombat and other, better titles like Street Fighter and Tekken. This sucks ass as a spectator sport, and I know most people aren't playing it for the deep strats or intricate combat. Is MK's success really just due to being simple and gory?

I think it is, yeah. That's why I bought Mortal Kombat 9 back in the day. You go to a friend's house, pop this in, do all of the fatalities and x-ray moves, and go "OHHHHH!" on the couch as you watch in amusement and horror. After this, you never touch it again, and it collects dust on your shelf. The core audience of this franchise could save $70 every couple years by watching fatality compilations on Youtube. Fewer bugs, too.

Does NRS playtest these things before they get sent out, or do they know that they're just making digital LiveLeak compilations and the actual game is secondary to that?

This is more directed at everything from Gen 6 and onward, but I've played everything up to Gen 7. The rest has been on Showdown.

I really don't like how Game Freak keeps introducing new gimmicks every gen only to completely abandon them in favor of something else the next. It probably wouldn't burn me as bad if the new gimmicks were improvements over the old ones, but I still don't think anything has even come close to Mega Evolutions.

Megas were a phenomenal way of shaking up the meta by giving older, worse Pokemon — and let's be fair, a lot of Pokemon who really didn't need the help — some new buffs and playstyles that brought them into being somewhat viable. Beedrill was not seeing any fucking play before they gave him his stone, is all that I'm saying.

Z-Moves came afterwards, and they were nothing more than a win-more button. Dynamaxing was fucking terrible because it meant that every single Pokemon you had could suddenly get a massive health pool and absurd damaging moves out of nowhere, making it so that reading your opponent was less important than stockpiling your dynamax to counter their dynamax. The newest gimmick of terastilization is easily the worst it's ever been, because it makes the already-absurdly strong Pokemon even stronger. Kingambit does not need access to double damage Dark moves or the ability to bait a Close Combat by turning into a flying type and sweeping. There are like twenty Pokemon in the Gen 9 Regional Dex banned to Singles Ubers. It's ridiculous. VGC Doubles isn't much better, but at least it's not the graveyard that Singles is.

Regardless, I'd like for Game Freak to figure out one idea to develop into something greater. Legends Arceus has been broadly seen by many as an excellent first step, but a first step all the same; I doubt Game Freak is ever going to revisit this concept, and are instead just going to peel off elements of it for the mainline games. It's gotta be hard being a Pokemon fan and liking what Game Freak has done in the latest game, because you know that it'll be gone by the next one.

They are apparently bringing back Megas for the new Paldea DLC, though, so hopefully they're looking to turn a corner in regards to throwing out all of their prior good ideas.

Why is this being held hostage on PS4?

Why? Genuinely, why? Sony has been making such an active effort to port most of their exclusives to PC, so I don't understand why this one game in particular isn't allowed to come over. That big Geforce Now leak from a while back has seen an absurd amount of confirmations, and the Demon's Souls remake was among them; we can probably expect to see it get a port eventually, if not soon. So why is Bloodborne still locked on PS4? They haven't even made a version for the PS5. What gives? Do they think it wouldn't sell? Someone is sitting on easy money and I can't think of a reason why they're not cashing in on it.

I probably wouldn't even play it if it got ported, but I can't understand why it isn't.