-Here is the idea: we make a crossover between Pokemon combat and FF combat, but real-time instead of turn-based. There will be monsters to catch and tough boss battles. And I mean proper tough! Players will have to die and adjust their team compositions and strategy. All the game outside the combat is going to be basic as hell, standard RPG grind. Don’t forget plenty of back-tracking. 

-What about the story?

-The story will be packed with cliches and tropes from several well-known cultures in real life, so no need to be original there. Characters will be clueless about the most obvious things. The main protagonist will be a little boy and his mom dies in the first minutes of gameplay. He will have a Jamaican-accented (*note: In the English version) sidekick who will shame and bully the kid into overcoming his trauma to save the world. Basically, this will be a story for a kindergartener with the gameplay for an experienced player.

-Dunno. Feels a bit stretched…

-We get Studio Ghibli to make the models and fully animated cutscenes. That will make it work, surely?

And it did. The end.

This is how I imagine Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch got developed

I am one of those people who used to pirate games back in the days of my school days, since I’ve had no money to just buy them. Nowadays when I stumble upon those games, I buy them for my library collection. A lot of old games finally spilled into Steam lately and I was notified of the fact the King’s Bounty was available. Not the 1990 King’s Bounty, but it’s “spiritual successor” from 2008. It turns out that they they also released a couple of DLCs and I thought that I’d give a quick try to the last one in the line – King’s Bounty: Warriors of the North.

As I started the game, a picture of a surprisingly suntanned viking looked at me from the starting screen and a thought crossed my mind:that I have seen that bulging forearm somewhere before. I am only aware of one glorious barbarian in pop culture, so a quick search for “arnold with sword” revealed that I was probably correct in my assumption.

A sudden reminder that the industry has been photobashing since before people even knew what Photoshop is.

Some cool visuals from the latest raid in Final Fantasy 16. Now I really need to play NeiR Automata, because the soundtrack is too cool. The developers used the NieR soundtrack in the raid, it makes the encounter feel positively epic.
Edit: There was a soundtrack here, but copyright ate it, unfortunately 😦