Fantasy News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

With Sunday here, the weekend is almost over—but there are so many great deals to check out before it ends. We've rounded up some of the best deals you can find this weekend, with everything games and technology included. The best deals for Sunday, April 21, include the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless Headset, HORI Split Pad Compact, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Super Mario RPG, Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, Persona 3 Reload, and more.

Final Fantasy XVI: The Rising Tide story expansion is out now, and as you’d expect, it includes some new gear, including the best weapons in the game thus far. One of these is the Tonberry Knife, which isn’t the most powerful in the game in terms of raw damage, but is the most best in terms of inflicting “Will” or stagger damage. For those familiar with FF16’s combat system, staggering enemies frequently is arguably more important than just dealing raw damage, so you’re going to want to get your hands on the Tonberry Knife. Here’s how to do so…

While Atlus has largely become synonymous with the Persona and Shin Megami Tensei series, their next big RPG is actually a new IP – Metaphor: ReFantazio. Developed by a team led by many of the minds that created Persona 3 through Persona 5, Metaphor looks to expand that trademark Atlus RPG style with a more expansive dark fantasy world. Well, today Atlus announced Metaphor: ReFantazio will be launching in October of this year. You can check out a fresh trailer for the game, below.

Metaphor: ReFantazio, the next RPG from Persona developer Atlus, now has a confirmed release date: the 11th October. And to properly kickstart our march towards launch, we've been treated to a 25-minute presentation, which features a load of fresh gameplay footage.

A side quest in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth reveals that Jessie was planning to make a love potion pizza for Cloud in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, or that she was at least aware of the ingredients.

Game Rant interviewed George Velev and Andrew De Sousa on Hero Talent and dungeons in The War Within, discussing the upcoming Dragonriding Escort Dungeon, the Dawnbreaker, and Hero Talents! Game Rant Interview We've briefly summarized some of the major points below, but please read the full interview for more interesting questions and full context!

Saturday is here, and that means the weekend has officially kicked off! We've rounded up some of the best deals you can find this weekend, with everything games and technology included. The best deals for Saturday, April 20, include the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless Headset, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Super Mario RPG, Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, and more.

No rest for No Rest For The Wicked's developers, it seems. The punishing action-RPG launched in Steam Early Access last week with performance issues, among other issues, and Moon Studios have now deployed their first hotfix.

Accompanied by strains of vocal-led orchestral music, the Moon Studios title rises into view. For many, this is reason enough to sit up and take notice of No Rest For The Wicked. For the studio behind the sublime Ori series, a visually arresting and emotional pair of platformers, this is the tricky third album: a new IP, a new direction, and a launch into Early Access along with it. Taking a swing at the action RPG genre, there’s echoes of From Software alongside Diablo here, and yet, Moon Studios’ enigmatic outlook shines through. On first impressions alone, there’s nothing to be worried about for fans of the studio – excusing the decadent horrors that lie within.

No Rest for the Wicked's first early access hotfix has been rolled out, and a second patch is «already in progress».

We've datamined numerous cosmetic armor sets from the War Within alpha that resemble civilians from a fantasy town would wear in their daily life. From merchants to scholars, there's a set for all walks of life. While we don't know how to acquire these sets quite yet, one of the «merchant» sets is fittingly available from completing a dungeon meta achievement. Check out all the different armor tints below, or preview them in our TWW Dressing Room by clicking on the links above each image.

In an interview with Hirumaredx, Lead Visual Development Artist Gabriel Gonzalez and Senior Narrative Designer Abigail Manuel discussed the art, story, world building, and zones coming in The World Within!

Last week, Square Enix revealed the benchmark trailer for Final Fantasy 14’s upcoming expansion, Dawntrail. While Dawntrail’s showcase of new in-game areas, enemies, and combat garnered positive feedback online, the lifeless eyes of its character creator left a lot to be desired, fans said. In response to the negative feedback, Director Naoki Yoshida has promised a graphical update that will fix its character creator’s soulless eyes.

The Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail benchmark is here, giving MMO fans a glimpse into what their characters will look like after the graphical update in patch 7.0. While plenty are rather pleased about their Warrior of Lights glow-ups, some have been left looking worse for wear.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth could have rolled credits much sooner in the story if the game's writer stuck to his original idea.

Snail Games has just launched one of its popular PC titles on Android. It’s Dark and Light Mobile, the mobile version of the original Dark and Light PC game that dropped in 2017. If you’re in the United States, Europe or Southeast Asia, you can get a sneak peek at this survival game on Android.

Lured like an unsatisfied sailor by the siren song of alleged performance woes, I’ve been giving No Rest for the Wicked a cursory benchmarkin’, and yes! The isometric ARPG does suffer from all the early access wonkiness you’ve likely heard about already today.

No Rest For the Wicked launched in early access yesterday, but has unfortunately hit a few bumps on its debut.

Final Fantasy is a long running series at this point — it's easily one of the most storied franchises in gaming. But when you're up to the sixteenth mainline entry, you must start wondering whether fresh installments still have the power to pull new players in. Indeed, audience growth will be an important metric for the suits upstairs at Square Enix.

For all the positive things players have to say about Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, one aspect of the game which we've seen nothing but ire directed towards is its confusingly worded retry screen, which players will be hit with in the event of a Game Over. Thankfully, this issue has been quietly addressed in the game's most recent patch, which fixed Platinum Trophy progression, making it at least slightly less confusing now.

It's fairly common knowledge that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth enjoyed a relatively smooth development cycle, owing to the fact that Final Fantasy 7 Remake's team was largely kept intact, and the first game had obviously laid the foundations in terms of visuals and gameplay systems. It took Square Enix around three years to craft Rebirth, and it expects the same kind of timeline when it comes to the third (and final) title in the trilogy.

Unless a game is breaking records, it's quite rare that we get direct sales data from publishers — and Square Enix in particular is somewhat notorious for this. As such, interested parties usually have little choice but to try and determine commercial success through other means.

Update: Final Fantasy 16 update 1.31 is available to download now on PS5, ahead of The Rising Tide's release on the 18th April. It weighs in at 2.8GB, and you can read the full patch notes below, in the original article.

The Rising Tide, the second and final expansion for Final Fantasy 16, is set to feature some of the game's most challenging combat scenarios. That's according to DLC director (and a lead combat designer for the base game) Takeo Kujiraoka, who, in an interview with Push Square, told us that the addition of DLC has allowed the development team to push the title's combat system.

Sony has today updated the Last Chance to Play section of its PS Plus service, revealing far and away the biggest batch of PS5 and PS4 titles leaving at once. On 21st May 2024, a whopping 25 games will be taken off PS Plus Extra and PS Plus Premium, including some quality Final Fantasy entries and indie hits. The complete list is as follows:

Square Enix is a famously hard master to please, and eagle-eyed fans interested in industry analytics will have noted that despite launching over a month ago on 29th February, exclusively on PS5, hard sales figures for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth are yet to be released. Considering it took just three days for the firm to trumpet Remake's success during a similar period and six days for Final Fantasy XVI, it should be no huge surprise that the sequel is underperforming in some sense.

Final Fantasy 16 was one of our favourite games of 2023, and so we wanted to find out more about The Rising Tide — the title's second and final expansion — ahead of its release on the 18th April. Fortunately, we were lucky enough to land an interview with Takeo Kujiraoka — the veteran Square Enix dev who's actually the director of Final Fantasy 16's DLC, having previously been a lead combat designer for the base game.

The release schedule is really slow right now, after a mad dash to the end of the fiscal year. It means this is a good opportunity to catch up on titles from your backlog, or revisit a favourite from yesteryear.

A recent analysis has revealed an interesting statistic about a pair of playable demos on PS5. According to Ampere, Stellar Blade's demo, at its peak, had almost twice the number of daily active players compared to the peak for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's demo.

The first quarter of 2024 has been crazy, especially if you're a fan of Japanese games. The release schedule has been pretty much non-stop since January, and so earlier in the week, we asked the Push Square community to vote on their favourite titles of the last four months.

The second and final expansion for Final Fantasy 16, titled The Rising Tide, is out now on PS5 — and if you can believe it, we're fast approaching the base game's first anniversary. But such a realisation has made us wonder… Are you returning to Final Fantasy 16 in order to play through this new DLC? Or could it be that the expansion is arriving too late for your tastes?

With the release of 's second DLC expansion,, the game received all of its planned content — but newer players may not get to experience the DLC until significantly later portions of the game. As a more story-oriented package than 's previous DLC, focuses heavily on under-explored aspects of the original game's story and lore, centering primarily around the mysteries of Leviathan, the only Eikon to be mentioned, but not seen, during the base game's main story.

Final Fantasy 16‘s base adventure is already a long and winding tale full of intrigue, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more story to be told in its world. Like the Echoes of the Fallen DLC before it, The Rising Tide DLC serves as an additional journey for Clive and company to undertake, providing players the opportunity to discover various all-new enemies, locations, and characters. This fresh content even includes Leviathan as a new Eikon for Clive to encounter, making it a must-play for completionists hoping to experience everything in the game. If you’re wondering how to start The Rising Tide DLC, look no further — we’ll tell you how to do so below.

Isekai Dispatcher is a new title that’s a tad different on the horizon. It’s a Pixel art RPG created by Ignition M. In case you remember, I covered another quirky casual title dropped by them recently, PreCats! -Idle Cat Raising.

Thinking about Dragon’s Dogma 2’s interestingly scrappy combat recently took me back to another time when a major role-playing game series tried something very different with its combat mechanics. In this case, the designers’ goal was the same as Capcom’s with the first Dragon’s Dogma: a single-player RPG that felt like a massively multiplayer online game to play. But the resulting system couldn’t have been more different, and stands as one of the most fascinating dead ends in game design history.

Nowadays, I'm more than happy to sacrifice high frames and a big screen for the comforts of the Steam Deck. I like lounging on the couch, the light forearm workout, and heating my room in only a few minutes. So it's good news that Moon Studios' upcoming ARPG No Rest For The Wicked will be playable on launch for Deck, the ROG Ally and other handhelds. Minimum PC specs also don't look too taxing, but those after the shiniest-looking game on recommended hardware may be in for a shock.

GameSpot has released a writeup of their hands-on experience with The War Within, citing it as more of the same Warcraft, but in a good way! GameSpot Hands-on The War Within

Sega is delving deep into its enviable IP archive to bring the world an animated adaptation of its 1989 side-scrolling arcade beat-'em-up Golden Axe.

World of Warcraft will, in its 20th year of operation, implement an arachnophobia mode. It's been developed for the new War Within expansion, which heavily features the spider-like Nerubian race, but it won't be exclusive to it.

In the autumn of last year, Holly Longdale, the executive producer and vice president of World of Warcraft, made headlines by saying the team talks about putting WoW on console «all the time». It's a question the company has been asked repeatedly over the game's near 20-year lifetime, and it's an answer we've heard before, but it gained new momentum in light of Microsoft's recently completed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. When better to bring the game to Xbox than now?

We've datamined all the Warrior Tier Set appearances coming in Season 1 of The War Within. Season 1 Tier Sets will be available from the Nerub'ar Palace Raid featuring eight bosses, culminating in a showdown with Queen Ansurek, the Nerubian ruler who's leading her people down a dark path. First Look at the Nerub'ar Palace Raid Tier Set bonuses are still unavailable to be datamined but stay tuned for updates when they become available.

Microsoft has “let Blizzard be Blizzard” following its acquisition of the studio last year.

Blizzard has said that it still has discussions a console version of World of Warcraft.

Blizzard has revealed the World of Warcraft: The War Within 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition.

Wowhead is happy to announce that our The War Within Talent Calculator is now live and updated for all classes & Hero Talents! Plan, theorycraft, and share your talent builds including all Hero specs! Wowhead's The War Within Talent Calculator

Blizzard has just given the wider public its first proper look at The War Within, the next expansion to World of Warcraft coming later this year and the start of its three-part, MCU-like Worldsoul Saga.

Public Alpha testing for The War Within, the tenth World of Warcraft expansion, is about to begin. Ahead of this important development milestone, Wccftech joined a roundtable Q&A session featuring Blizzard's Michael Bybee (Production Director on all World of Warcraft), Sean McCann (Senior Content Designer), and several colleagues from the press for an hour-long conversation.

Square Enix has deployed Final Fantasy XVI update 1.31 for PlayStation 5, packing various improvements alongside changes and bug fixes.

My Favorite Anime is a column dedicated to collecting the stories of the biggest celebrity anime fans in the world, charting a path from their earliest introductions to Japanese animation to the series and films they love today with two questions: What was your first favorite anime, and what’s your favorite anime now?

Video game subscription services are fantastic for those of us who are fed up with spending $70 on new games, not to mention the opportunity they provide to catch up on your backlog without having to buy even more games. The downside is relying on a service to have the games you want to play, and even worse, as PlayStation Plus has demonstrated this week, games leaving the service with little warning. PlayStation quietly confirmed 25 games will be leaving its PS Plus library next month, and a significant chunk of them are big Final Fantasy titles.

Square Enix tried really hard to make Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's mako vacuuming minigame more enjoyable than the painfully tedious practice in masochism that it is by all measures. In fact, it was originally a lot worse.

Helldivers 2 is a live service game, and that title comes with a lot of expectations. It seems like every constantly updated online game has to have a series of crossovers these days, whether it be Fortnite teaming up with Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sonic teaming up with Monster Hunter, or Final Fantasy 14 crossing over with itself. Helldivers 2 is an anomaly in the live service space though, and its opinions on crossovers are no exception.

GameStop is currently offering a buy two, get one free sale on its entire catalog of pre-owned titles. Add three eligible games to your cart, and the cheapest one will be free. The pre-owned prices on most of these games aren’t much lower than what you’d pay for a new copy, but the inclusion of a free game and plenty of new releases to choose from makes this worth checking out.

A new adaptation of Isuna Hasekura's beloved Japanese light novel series Spice and Wolf has arrived – and with two of the original voice actors from the English dub of the 2008 anime.

A bloody new trailer has arrived for Blood of Zeus season 2, which sees an all-out battle for ultimate rule of the heavens.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi is struggling to decide how to kick off the third and final installment in the series.

World of Warcraft is setting a whole new story arc in motion with its next expansion, The War Within. If you can’t quite wait until this summer to see what the first chapter of the new Worldsoul Saga trilogy has to offer, you might not have to wait so long. Blizzard are running a beta for War Within that will give testers the chance to delve into the subterranean addition early - and sign-ups are now open.

The official mod editor for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on Steam is now open for playtesting.

In a move that's sure to be familiar to all you Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth fans, Bandai Namco is telling Elden Ring fans to "treat" themselves to 18 inches of Messmer the Impaler by picking up the Shadow of the Erdtree Collector's Edition. Quiet in the back, now.

25 games are set to leave PlayStation Plus next month as part of one of the biggest clearouts of the subscription service.

As a big fan of Ori And The Blind Forest, I am very excited for Moon Studios' new venture No Rest For The Wicked, an online ARPG which swaps the cutesyness of Ori and that ickle wickle forest for top-down fights against abominations slathered in muck and entrails. A new early access release trailer highlights said fights, alongside the devs saying that there's going to be no microtransactions, no always-online requirement, and no anti-cheat software bundled in. I don't want to speak too soon, but so far, it looks like we're onto something pretty darn good here.

If you’re looking to jump into an adventure where you slash through enemies without the grind, Mobirix has a new game for you. The team has just dropped Devil Knights Idle, a dark fantasy action RPG on Android. By the way, Mobirix has built some other popular sim games, like Spirit Girl Idle, Ghost Hunter Idle and Demon Hunter Idle.

Hot on the heels of the breakout success of The Last of Us and Fallout TV shows, many are wondering which video games would make a great pick for the next great series. Dragon Age is often suggested as a good candidate for the TV show treatment, but according to its co-creator, that would be a “terrible idea.”

Let's begin with a shining pearl of wisdom—when Pokémon games go 40% off, secure a copy. Why? Because Nintendo AAAs seem to retain their value, and their prices don't often swoop this low. Also, the fact that Brilliant Diamond hasn't seen a similar chop suggests that this could well be an anomaly. Whatever the case, capitalise now.

If you've been playing through Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, or have even finished it, you'll know that things can get pretty wild when it comes to alternate timelines, universes, and all sorts of strange, meta mumbo jumbo. It can be difficult to keep track of everything that's happening and being said, especially when Cloud himself is immensely unreliable as a main character and his headaches are a primary source of confusion.

If you've been itching to dive into World of Warcraft's new subterranean expansion The War Within, there's an opportunity to do so ahead of release, with beta testing sign-ups now open.

Final Fantasy XVI famously didn't meet the sales expectations of Square Enix, though that was partly blamed on slower than anticipated adoption of the PlayStation 5 (the only platform where the game is currently available). However, there is at least one area where the developers reportedly hit their original goals. Speaking to Push Square, Final Fantasy XVI DLC Director Takeo Kujiraoka said:

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is reportedly underperforming commercially.

Players can now register for the chance to participate in beta testing for World of Warcraft’s next expansion, The War Within.

Tower of Fantasy (ToF) 4.0 patch trailer, titled “4.0 PV,” is in the talks. Before I get into the ‘why,’ let me tell you a little about the trailer. It shows a trip through time in Asperia, the game’s world. Structures that look like towers poke through the sky, and characters clad in futuristic garb fight with weaponized gadgets.

The latest Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth patch has quietly fixed an issue that's been confusing players since release.

The lead writer of BioWare's Dragon Age series has shared what games he thinks will make a great TV adaptation, and the BioWare RPG isn't one of them.

Square Enix has released a benchmark tool for Final Fantasy 14 ahead of its upcoming Dawntrail expansion.

The full patch notes for the Final Fantasy XVI 1.31 patch going live later this week were shared online, detailing balance changes, quality of life improvements, and more.

A tweet from film critic Darren Lucas, asking what people would like to see adapted after the enormous success of Fallout, has been making the rounds, and former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider himself responded.

Uniqlo is on a roll right now. Only a week after it revealed an official Tears of the Kingdom range coming to its Japanese storefront - and almost certainly the rest of the world in the near future - it has announced a Final Fantasy collection will be joining it. Uniqlo's first Final Fantasy designs feature elements and characters from Final Fantasy 16, Final Fantasy 14, and Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster.

Final Fantasy 14 players are logging into the MMO to find that their characters have gotten a makeover, thanks to the Dawntrail benchmark. This optional update lets you see if your system is able to run the upcoming expansion but also lets you preview some of the graphical overhauls that are coming alongside Dawntrail.

Barret Wallace is the easiest character to date in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, according to the recent Ultimania explainer book.

Earlier today, Square Enix released the Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail benchmark. This is par for the course, as the Japanese company has always released benchmarks whenever a new expansion for the popular MMORPG was about to launch.

The recently released Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Ultimania confirms that the third game's story has already been written and that it could end up releasing in 2027.