Well, in E3 there always has to be a duff conference and I’m sorry to say that Square Enix really did not live up to the others that had come before it. After the dizzying heights that the first day gave us, we came crashing back down to Earth with something that really did resemble something like a corporate meeting than a showing of the latest and greatest games to grace consoles. Although, to their defence, a lot of the big announcements had already happened via XBox and PS4. So just what did Square Enix give us that we hadn’t already seen?
Well, not a huge deal to be honest. Most of the show was, as you’d expect, made up of JRPGs. Final Fantasy XV, World of Final Fantasy, the FF7 remake, Star Ocean and an all new RPG element from a freshly set up company called the Tokyo RPG Factory, with only concept art to show any view of content. There was also an announcement of the next in the series of Star Ocean.
The non RPG things were a little better, but again some of the big names we had already seen. The conference started with a rather average trailer for Just Cause 3, a game with so much ambition and potential, marred by a standard video. Rise of the Tomb Raider, the XBox timed exclusive, was also on show, but again we could only see videos, which didn’t really show off the actual code in action live. The other two titles were a little better. Hitman and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided gave us gameplay footage to start salivating over, but again it was through a video. In a time where we are spoiled by the big guns showing actual code working on the floor, this did seem like a disappointment, but at least we got a date for Square Enix Montreal’s cyborg stealth game, penning in at early 2016, so expect it around Easter.
For the Disney fans their announcement was obviously Kingdom Hearts 3. This did look beautiful, but there was not very much to show, with the team keeping things pretty close to their chest, which is a shame. Oh for the benefit of gameplay, right? Kingdom Hearts: Unchained Key was also mentioned, but the only good thing about that was that a few fanboys in the audience thought it was for III and got so let down that the crowd went from excited whooping to muted applause in 2 minutes. That was worth the admission alone.
Other than a new Nier, which I think most people had genuinely forgotten about since the PS2 and that was about it, really. A disappointing conference, made worse by the fact there wasn’t ANY actual code shown on stage and that the event as a whole wasn’t really staged that well.
We have actually saved you time on your life. You should thank us. It was close enough that we were doing what you see below for real to keep the adrenalin up.....
