Square Enix has announced that the total global shipment for the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game Opus series has exceeded 5.5 million packs worldwide. The anticipated “Opus III,” the third wave of cards available for the series, will be available on August 4th in North America.
The Final Fantasy Trading Card Game Opus series is based on the Japanese “Chapter” series, which captivated TCG fans for fifteen chapters from February 2011 through March 2015.
This new edition features improved game balance and card design as well as the addition of new illustrations from recent FINAL FANTASY titles and localization into six languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.
New from developer Grezzo and published by Nintendo, Ever Oasis joins the 3DS library to answer the age old question “what happens if you combine Monster Hunter with Animal Crossing?”. While this may not be a question players may not have thought to ask, Ever Oasis offers a fun, unique experience that people will be happy got answered.
The art style of Ever Oasis is very cute and colorful. The locations are beautiful and vast. The desert is a beautiful gold, shining color that changes colors throughout the day. The caves have beautiful dark blue and purple tones with bright colors splashed throughout depending on the items and materials you can collect. There is bright waters and flora in your Oasis and overall the palette is beautiful and the actual structures have beautiful shapes and designs that will definitely catch your eye and keep you exploring. The characters are in a super deformed, child like style and come in a variety of colors and fashions. From the seedlings to the merchant s to the Noots, you will not get bored of these characters whose personalities are just as unique as their designs. Overall, this is a very pretty game to look at.
Ever Oasis’ gameplay revolves around the idea of you maintaining your oasis and fighting enemies to keep the peace for your residents and keep everyone happy. Some of the people that come into your Oasis want to sell goods, some want to buy goods, and some want to help you in your journey of exploration and peace. Esna, your water spirit guide, will assist you and give you advice along the way, and there are friendly merchants who also will help give you helpful tips and even gear or potions. You decide who you need for a quest you want to go on and travel to various caves and locations to reach your goals. You will need different classes in your party to solve various puzzles that will roadblock you from completing your quest. These classes have skills that include being able to become a cannon ball, break boulders, fly above canyons and fit through small holes to get into a room that is locked. Part of the strategy is finding out who you will need. Completing quests not only helps you continue the story of your seedling and Esna and obtain more villagers, but exploring in general helps you obtain more materials and more materials means expanding your Oasis and creating a more lovely place for your residents Materials also are required to stock your merchant’s stores which mean more shoppers which make your merchant residents happy.
The Monster Hunter aspect comes in when you have to fight the Chaos and other various enemies. You will enter a battle and the fighting is in real time and use various buttons and combinations of buttons to execute attacks and target your enemy. You will need certain types of weapons that the enemy is weak against and collect materials they drop, much like Monster Hunter. You will sometimes need special materials for certain quests or items. The battle mechanics are not entirely new or revolutionary, but it is fun enough and pretty smooth in execution. If you have played Monster Hunter or a similar type of game you will pick this up pretty quickly and even if you haven’t, the mechanics are not hard to learn. It is the puzzle solving aspect of the gameplay that kept me more entertained than the battles in the end, but the battles were still well done.
Ever Oasis is a very charming, fun game with creative aesthetics, characters and filled with a lot of content to discover and explore. If you like Animal Crossing and like the gameplay of Monster Hunter you will find a fun combination in Ever Oasis. Get lost in the visuals, expand your Oasis and bring peace to a chaotic world on the 3DS.
Last year’s Doom reboot was both a critical and commercial success that build upon the gruesome nature of the franchise’s past while introducing new mechanics like weapons with secondary modes and dismemberment. Before the “back to basics” reboot of “Doom” there was a numbered sequel in development at id that would see multiple iterations and reboots in the midst of a buyout by Zenimax (owners of Bethesda).
Detailed in an excellent piece by Kotaku’s Jason Schreir in 2013: The project then known as “Doom 4” entered development sometime in 2007 and continued until ZeniMax acquired id Software in 2011. At one point in development, Doom 4 was internally jokingly referred to as “Call of Doom” – featuring more realistic weapons and scripted hallway sections akin to Activision’s Call of Duty titles.
Quoting a source in Jason’s article:
“There were jokes like, ‘Oh, it’s Call of Doom.’ They referenced it because of the amount it was scripted—there were a lot of scripted set pieces. There was kind of the recognition that in order to be a big shooter these days, you have to have some amount of the big, bombastic movie experience that people get pulled through.”
We haven’t seen much of the 2007 – 2011 “Hell on Earth” version of Doom 4, showing what would happen around the world if the Demonic forces made it through the dimensional vortex onto the soil of a futuristic earth, rather than the red sands of the Moon Base. A new video posted by YouTuber Alternative Gaming Channel shows us a blurry demo reel of weapon animations, finishing moves and crowds of (presumably) rebellion NPCS taken from this cancelled version of the storied shooter.
What do you think? Despite the five years of development hell and the clashing tones of a set piece driven gameplay style and shotgun fueled mayhem – would you have played this version of Doom? It didn’t make it past various prototype builds from the sounds of things but I’m hopeful that if Doom (2016) gets a sequel we at least revisit the idea of humanity’s response to the demonic horde. Following the older 90s Doom cannon that is where things should go, and being on Mars for the second time wouldn’t be all that different from the first game.
Update:
After publishing this article I was reminded of the NoClip documentary that was released just after Doom (2016)’s release last year. In the documentary, the team speaks with developers who have been with id since the Quake III and Doom III days. They go through what the 2007 Doom 4 project was – confirming it made its way development to the point of being one of three fully formed teams at id. Eventually, the ax came down when management and Zenimax were dissatisfied with the direction of Doom 4. This decision wouldn’t just cost them Doom 4 but also an in-production sequel to 2011’s RAGE as the three teams were merged together into a single whole in order to complete the DOOM that we eventually got.
