I’m sleeping on this one. It’s just not what I think of when I think of Bayonetta. Which is fine, I realize it’s a spin off, but it’s also not one that I’m interested in playing.

I also hated how Bayonetta 3 ended, like with a passion that I don’t think I’ve ever felt for a game’s ending before, so frankly I’m waiting to see what they do with Bayonetta 4 before I decide whether the series is even still alive for me at all.

I had a good feeling about it since Yoshi-P is involved, but the demo still impressed me anyway. Fun to play, just enough story to get me hooked, and actually quite a meatier demo than I was expecting. I thought the Eikonic Challenge would just be a bit of combat demo to follow the story demo, but then it turned out to be even more story! And I actually quite like the Devil May Cry-style gameplay, even though I never played it (but I did play Bayonetta, which is close enough). I’ve always been a staunch turn-based RPG fan but some of these recent FF games have been pleasantly surprising me. Stranger of Paradise came out of left field for me, for example, and I thought it was stupid at first, but I ended up really enjoying it.

Can’t wait for June 22!

I mean, there’s a lot of the game that you’re not going to see in a 2 hour demo. A lot of FF games don’t have special races but this one does feature beastmen (we’ve seen goblins so far, and “beastmen” in other FF games can be quite varied so I’m sure there are more to come), and we already know Moogles are going to be in the game.

As for me, the return to the fantasy setting is something I’ve been waiting for for a long time. I mean, I like the modern/futuristic settings of games like FFVII, but there have been a lot of those recently (VII, VIII, XIII, XV, not to mention the VII remake). The more fantasy setting is like a return to the series’ roots.

This is the part that really worried me. They were talking about how the planets are procedurally generated but have the little “environmental narrative” elements that Bethesda is known for. So I thought, okay, maybe they procedurally generated 1000 planets and then populated them by hand with quests, NPCs, etc.

Then they go on to talk about how “your experience on a planet may be different from your friend’s experience on the same planet,” and they show an obviously procedurally generated fetch-quest from a generic NPC. So I’m getting the feeling that anything to do with the main story or the main faction quests is done by hand, but everything else in the game is just going to be procedurally generated nonsense. I could be wrong, but it’s worrying.

Considering that for years Bethesda couldn’t fart without their fans asking “Where is ES6? Just let us know ES6 exists!”, I’m not too surprised. They rushed a teaser just to shut people up, but in the process set themselves up for years more of “Show us more ES6!”

Peak Bethesda for me was announcing Fallout 4 six months before release date. None of this 10+ years to build up hype that the game can’t live up to.