E3 is running full steam, with conferences from nearly everyone, save Nintendo, out of the way at this point (as well as the “this could be a good drinking game if it didn’t hurt so much” PC Gaming Show). SquareEnix kicked off Monday… and I’m not sure what emoji best works to convey a “why even bother,” so I’ll let you fill it in yourself. Probably some combination of the poop and octopus emojis.
There are some huge games in the pipeline for SquareEnix: we saw Kingdom Hearts III shown at the Microsoft conference, so this was a perfect opportunity for them to give even more and convince people that it’s really going to come out this time. Instead, they showed the exact same trailer.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is also coming soon, and they showed off a lot during the Microsoft presentation, but there’s plenty more they could show us. Nope, same trailer. Then, Just Cause 4 and… you guessed it… the same thing.
Completely absent from this showing: any of the Marvel games that they partnered to deliver last year (done by the same studios working on the Tomb Raider game). A remake of a little indie title few people have heard of, called Final Fantasy VII, was also absent (which will happen first, FF7 comes out or the sun burns out and all life dies). Dragon Quest XI got some playtime, but it’s already out in Japan, so… I guess yay?
There were a couple of new games “announced,” in that they showed a title screen and a bit of non-game video: Babylon’s Fall and The Quiet Man. When Bethesda dropped a couple of little titles like Starfall (a new IP) and the Elder Scrolls VI, it made sense as teasers at the end. The Quiet Man is apparently a video game about a young Matt Damon wearing a Patty Duke wig and playing a deaf fighter. It could be interesting, but there’s nothing there to really go with.
Babylon’s Fall had even less, it was basically just screenshots and cryptic text. It’s being made by Platinum Games, makers of Bayonetta (if you have a Switch, you should have Bayonetta 1 / 2, they’re awesome). Hopefully that’s a sign that it will be on multiple platforms, but Square isn’t known for its support of the Switch past a couple of RPG titles (Octopath Traveller wasn’t shown, but comes out in a month and looks amazing). So many games from SquareEnix would be great on the Switch, but they were mum on where most of these things were going.
I honestly don’t get what’s up with SquareEnix these days, and this press conference just makes them a bit more out there than usual. We got next to nothing, and what we did get, was seen elsewhere.
