Two days ago, Bungie turned off the Destiny 2 servers while the studio looked into a problem that had players apparently losing progress on in-game challenges. This outage lasted a bit longer than everyone expected, with the free-to-play loot shooter remaining offline for nearly 20 hours. So what happened? Today Bungie pulled back the curtain and explained exactly what went wrong and why it had to roll back the game, erasing a few hours of folks’ quest progress in the process.
On January 24 at around 2:00 p.m., Bungie tweeted that it was taking Destiny 2 offline while it investigated an “ongoing issue causing certain Triumphs, Seals, and Catalysts to lose progress for players.” A few hours later, at 5:51 p.m., Bungie tweeted that it had possibly found a fix for the issue and was testing it, but was unable to specify when or if Destiny 2’s servers would come back online. Nearly four hours later, Bungie tweeted for the last time that night, announcing that Destiny 2 would not be playable that evening. Nearly 12 hours later, at around 9:55 a.m, Bungie announced it had finally solved the problem and servers would be coming back online following a hotfix. The nearly 20 hours of downtime had some players worried about the game’s health, and its future. After years of bugs and broken updates, it was really starting to feel like the seven-year-old shooter was being held together with duct tape.
So what happened during those 20 hours and why was the game down for so long, seemingly with little warning? Bungie has explained what broke, why, and how it was fixed in its latest blog post. And surprisingly, the developer is more transparent than you might think, going into technical details of the issue.
According to Bungie, shortly after releasing a previous update for the game (Hotfix 6.3.0.5) players began reporting that many Triumphs, Seals, and catalysts had vanished. Bungie realized that this was being caused after it moved some “currently incompletable” challenges into a different area of the game’s data. To do this, Bungie used a “very powerful” tool that lets the studio tinker with a player’s game state and account. Apparently, due to a configuration error, Bungie accidentally “re-ran an older state migration process” used in a past update. Because of this error, the tool copied old data from this past update into the current version of the game, which basically undid some players’ recent in-game accomplishments
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“Once we identified that the issue resulted in a loss of player state,” wrote Bungie, “we took the game down and rolled back the player database while we investigated how to remove the dangerous change from the build.”
After creating a new patch that removed the mistaken change the issue was fixed, and following some testing, Bugnie deployed the update. However, as a result of this patch, all player accounts had to be rolled back a few hours before the troublesome update went live. This means any player progress made between 8:20 and 11 a.m. on January 24 was lost. Any purchases made during this time got refunded, too.
While it sucks that the game was down for so long and that the team was forced to spend what sounds like many late hours trying to fix their mistake, it’s refreshing to see a developer be so open and honest about what happened and how it was fixed. In a time when games feel buggier than ever and players are fed up with delays, outages, and broken updates, it’s smart to pull back the curtain and show everyone just how hard it is to make, maintain, and sustain video games as complex as Destiny 2.
Hopefully, next month’s new Destiny 2 expansion, Lightfall, and the upcoming Season 20 rollout will go a little smoother than this recent 20-hour hiccup.
Free-to-play online MMO looter shooter Destiny 2, released in 2017, is one of my favorite video games. I play it all the time. I have multiple characters. I own all the recent seasons. It’s fantastic. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned for the game’s future, as with each passing season, it seems to become more prone to breaking. In fact, as I write this very paragraph at around 4:00 p.m. on January 24, the game remains offline as Bungie continues to investigate the latest problem. Meanwhile, many players are hoping for a brand-new engine and game, likely in the form of Destiny 3. But things are never that simple.
Earlier today, Destiny 2 was taken offline across all platforms as Bungie investigated players losing progress on triumphs and seals, which operate like in-game achievements and challenges. It’s not the end of the world, sure, but just last week a few players reported losing their characters along with all their progress and items. And before that, it was a new mission not updating properly for players. And before that it was something else. In 2023, after years of updates, expansions, and more, it feels like Destiny 2 is starting to buckle under its own weight.
Taking a peek at Bungie’s official support account on Twitter—which often updates frequently to let players know about upcoming patches, server issues, and other vital info about Destiny 2—you can find a lot of tweets that amount to Bungie going “Welp, this isn’t working. We are trying to fix it. More info later.” Online games not working every day isn’t new and it’s not a problem exclusive to Destiny 2. But is starting to become a more prevalent issue with the aging shooter. Looking at that support account, a lot of the tweets about bugs or broken missions don’t have weeks between them, but just a few days or less.
Anecdotally, my time playing Destiny 2 lately has been buggier than ever. This new season brought with it both cool new heist missions and weird lag that I’ve never seen before. I still run into the problem of the game not counting every PvP match, making us play more to finish challenges and weekly quests. And I’ve just accepted that in-game bounties tied to kills, missions, or other activities won’t always update as they should. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I and other players I know have just gotten used to Destiny 2 not being reliable. And it seems to be getting worse, not better, as the game expands and adds more layers and systems.
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Look online and you’ll quickly see players suggesting that Bungie needs to move on to a theoretical Destiny 3, a game that likely will happen—and is maybe in development already—but which hasn’t been confirmed. During today’s extended downtime, Destiny 3 was trending on Twitter as players argued over the shooter’s future and stability. For some, the idea of a new engine and fresh slate felt promising, giving hope it would solve many of Destiny 2’s problems. Others pointed out that a brand-new game isn’t easy to make or simple to launch, and would likely be missing features or content at release. Plus, there’s no guarantee it would fix all of the emerging problems.
Personally, I think a new Destiny would likely be a good move to eventually make. It could allow the devs to make something more flexible and able to handle the type of events they’ve spent years crafting and perfecting. But I also am not naive enough to believe it would fix everything or be easy to create. Still, I get the frustration players are feeling as Destiny 2 remains consistently inconsistent.
Like an old PC or blender, Destiny 2 mostly works, but it’s covered in duct tape, dents, and dirt. And every so often you have to kick it or mess with the cord to get it to start. Sure, it still rumbles to life for now, but you’ll probably need to replace it one day. And with Destiny 2, I get the feeling Bungie will be slapping on the tape for as long as it takes for Destiny 2 to survive through the end of its planned roadmap, which will likely see the final season arriving in 2024. Past that, well, I don’t know. Hopefully by then, the game will at least feel more stable and reliable, not worse.
It’s right there in the Bible—ask, and it will be given to you. It’s also right there on gaming Twitter, where the small gaming podcast Super Pod Saga posed an innocent question on January 15 and people showed up to respond in droves: “What is the most useless piece of video game knowledge you know?”
Apparently, there are a lot of people that think a lot of useless thoughts about video games. Who knew? In the week and a half since posting, Super Pod Saga received over ten thousand responses to their tweet. But a lot of it, I’d say, isn’t necessarily useless, but essential.
Take this response about action-adventure series Devil May Cry, for example: “Dante and Vergil have an insane healing factor that essentially heals as the damage is being done, so no wounds or scars. Due to this, they’re likely uncircumcised.”
Tell me honestly. What was I supposed to do if I had never read that? Never know whether or not Dante and Vergil are circumcised? Be forced to wander the Earth, alone forever in my confusion? Can you even imagine that?
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Or what about this: “In Xenoblade 3, all characters in the game’s files are listed with a number for gender. Zero is male, One is female; however, the character Juniper is listed as two. Furthermore, in Xenoblade 2, the character Roc’s gender is listed as four. Thus, there are at least five genders in Xenoblade.” I mean, that’s just inspirational.
Ah, the breeze of womanhood! Dinosaurs!
Kotaku staffers have been holding onto their own niche video game info, too. I know this, because I begged them to tell me in pursuit of self-actualization.
“The li’l fire breathing dinosaur from Super Mario World is named after the singer in Nine Inch Nails,” social media editor Jeb Biggart told me. “That feels pretty useless.”
Yes, great stuff. More, give me more.
“In the Halo 2 level Quarantine, Flood [parasitic creatures] can be seen driving around in Warthogs/tanks/etc. This is the only time in the series where they do this, and it’s really weird,” staff writer Zack Zwiezen said.
“The music in NES Back to the Future, a terribly obnoxious, grating repetitive theme that bears no immediately apparent resemblance to anything is actually a wildly sped up version of the hit song from the movie, ‘The Power of Love’ by Huey Lewis and the News,” said managing editor Carolyn Petit. “Perhaps because they programmed the music, but then found out they didn’t have the rights to the song, so they just sped it way up. I do not know the reason for this.”
Thank you all. My power grows. My mind expands. My trivia senses are tingling.
Now, what’s your favorite bit of random video game knowledge? Let it out, it’s for my health.
Image: Nintendo / PNGWing / Kotaku / designer491 (Getty Images)
A YouTuber created an alternative Nintendo Switch controller for their pet fish, which allows them to play video games on livestream. That fish managed to spend real money on some digital purchases while trying to beat a gym leader in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (h/t: GamesRadar). And all of this happened because Scarlet and Violet are so buggy that they can sometimes cause the game to crash to the home page.
Mutekimaru Channel is a popular Japanese YouTuber who streams fish playing video games via an assistive device—an initiative that was intended to help viewers stay home during the pandemic. When a fish swims over a certain area of the “controller,” the game registers it as a specific button input. It’s not just one fish playing Pokémon either. The owner of the channel rotates fish every twelve hours in order to keep them healthy.
If the entire story stopped at “a fish was playing Pokémon on stream,” then I would have been suitably impressed. But no, the fish took things a step further. Not only have multiple fish managed to travel through towns and the wilderness with a specialized controller, they have even managed to spend its owner’s real-life money. I’m a little afraid to think about what else these fish might be capable of. Armed robbery?
ライブ配信でペットの魚にクレジットカード情報を公開され、挙句の果てに決済されてしまった件について
Normally, only one fishy gamer is allowed into the Switch tank at any given time. Once the owner walked away from the game, multiple fish took over and planned their nefarious heist.
The fish had been in the middle of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, but the game crashed due to its infamous performance issues. Once the fish was taken to the main Nintendo Switch home page, they managed to open the eshop, where its owner’s credit card information had been saved (and doxxed as a result).
The fish added 500 yen into their owner’s account. Then it used the resulting Nintendo gold coins (a loyalty reward from digital purchases) to buy a golfing cosmetic from Nintendo Switch Sports. According to Sora News 24, the owner intends to request a refund from Nintendo.
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Be careful out there, gamers. Not only can hackers and other unscrupulous types get your credit card information, so can common pet fish. So don’t put your credit card number on shared devices!
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are about two months old at this point, but the quest to find out which Pokémon are the very best like no one ever was is an ongoing conversation among the competitive community. Smogon, one of the biggest hubs for competitive Pokémon on the internet, has been trying to sort through the games’ meta for awhile now, and while talks are still unfolding, we do have some idea of who the best Pokémon are in Generation IX.
If you want to just see the top Pokémon, feel free to ctrl+f/command+f “Who are the top ranked Pokémon in Scarlet and Violet?” Otherwise, let’s run through some context for those that don’t know how competitive Pokémon rankings work.
How do Pokémon competitive tiers work in Scarlet and Violet?
There are a lot of Pokémon, and a lot of disparity between them in terms of stats. So when it comes to creating a tier list for a Pokémon game, the community doesn’t just make one giant list. Instead, the Pokémon are divided into separate tier lists that have their own tiers. It sounds confusing, but think of it like this: the gap in stats between a little baby Pichu and Actual God Arceus is huge, and there are hundreds of Pokémon with different stats, movesets, and abilities that make them more or less competitively viable. Overall, the prospect of a perfectly balanced Pokémon game is unattainable in its current form, so rather than try and make a giant list and compare Pichu to Arceus, Pokémon fans divide Pokémon into different tiers that put different mons alongside others that are close in viability.
These tiers have contained rule sets that include and ban certain Pokémon for competitive play, but you’ll see a bit of overlap between the different tiers, as some ‘mons are considered viable in different tiers of play. These different tiers include:
Standard/Overused: This is often considered a ‘baseline’ experience for competitive Pokémon battling. Here you’ll find a lot of the most popular, non-legendary Pokémon.
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Underused: The next tier below is for the middle of the road Pokémon who are decent, but there are typically better options depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.
Rarely Used: Here is where we start to get to the Pokémon that would be a rarity to see in any higher tier play, as a lot of these critters have either some notable drawbacks or would just be better off replaced by a different Pokémon.
Never Used: These are the real stinkers. The losers. The weakest links, as it were. While Never Used is not the standard way of play, some folks just prefer the Pokémon who occupy the less competitive space as it can make for a more interesting or at least different type of competitive environment. Personally, Beautifly is one of my favorite Pokémon, and it’s considered a Never Used Pokémon. Sometimes your friends are just not as good as the pros, and that’s okay.
Uber: This is the tier where most legendary Pokémon fall. Palkia, Arceus, Mew, the Lati twins? All of them exist here alongside a select few normies who have some great stats or strategies. A great deal of Pokémon that fall into the Uber tier are banned elsewhere, and for good reason. They’re the most powerful Pokémon in the game and can pretty easily bulldoze over everything else. So now they get to be in their own pool and fight each other, rather than stomping on a family of Maushold.
A lot of players will pick the Pokémon they like to play the main game, but competitive play tends to require a more calculated team.Screenshot: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
What is Smogon?
For the uninitiated, Smogon is basically the officially unofficial hub for competitive Pokémon. Though the site technically abides by different rules than the official Pokémon competitive leagues, it has a pretty robust and thorough system for tier rankings that has become extremely common vernacular for the Pokémon community. It’s so prevalent that it’s recognized across Pokémon hubs like Serebii. So if you’re looking for an official ranking of the best Pokémon straight from The Pokémon Company’s mouth, that’s not what Smogon is. Plus, these kinds of discussions are often spurred by the community, as they’re the most equipped to speak candidly about the strengths and shortcomings of a game. So if you want to learn more about the best Pokémon to make up a competitive team, you won’t find a source more qualified than the users at Smogon.
The site also publishes usage statistics to give people a sense of how often certain Pokémon show up in competitive play, and based on December’s stats, it seems Paradox Pokémon are occupying a lot of space in standard play. Great Tusk was the most used Pokémon in December, with Iron Valiant, Roaring Moon, Iron Tusk, Iron Moth, and Iron Hands all appearing in the top 36 Pokémon in the tier.
Who are the top ranked Pokémon in Scarlet and Violet?
As previously outlined, who the “best” Pokémon are varies by tier, but it’s not just stats that determine how high a Pokémon will rank. There are also abilities, attacks, and stat training that will help a Pokémon climb the ranks. So while those are all key factors, the Smogon community has been debating and discussing the matter since Scarlet and Violet launched.
The easiest place to start is the Uber tier, as that’s where the most powerful Pokémon are, though a lot of them you won’t be able to use in competitive play outside of that tier. Unsurprisingly, the game mascots Koraidon and Miraidon are ranked at the very top of the Uber tier list. It’s often the case for most Pokémon games for the legendary box art characters to rank high, as they’re propped up as a powerful entity at the end of your journey. In Scarlet and Violet, you befriend these two almost immediately as the game starts, but they aren’t usable in battle until the endgame. They have powerful stats, abilities that give them stat boosts the second they’re on the field, and have a lot of tricks in their moveset.
Unsurprisingly, Miraidon and Koraidon are at the top of their tier.Screenshot: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
Further down the list, the A rank of best Pokémon is primarily made up of both the secondary legendary monstersPokémon you’ll meet in the Paldea region (Chien-Pao, Ting-Lu, and Chi-Yu are here, though Wo-Chien is not part of the Uber tier) and the Paradox Pokémon that are ancient or futuristic relatives to established Pokémon. Flutter Mane, Great Tusk, and Iron Bundle lead the pack, with Iron Treads coming at the bottom of A-tier. There are a few normies here, as well, with Corviknight, Gholdengo, and Skeleridge also in A-tier.
When you go from Uber to Overused, you’ll notice some Pokémon who were ranked lower than others in Uber are ranked higher in lower ranks. This is because having some of those Uber Pokémon in the pool changes things in the meta, and as they’re not in the OU pool, some Pokémon who suffered from significant counters can rise in the ranks. So right now, Gholdengo, Dragapult, and Great Tusk are at the top of Smogon’s OU rankings for best Pokémon. This is above several legendaries like Chien-Pao and Ting-Lu, who fall into the A ranking alongside some Paradox Pokémon like Iron Valiant and Roaring Moon, as well as some standard Pokémon like Dragonite, Espathra, and Kingambit. As the A ranking goes down the list, some Pokémon that were ranked high in Uber like Corviknight, Iron Treads, and Glimmora appear alongside Dondozo, Graganacl, and Grimmsnarl.
The Paradox Pokémon ranking high makes sense, as they’re meant to be primal/synthetic versions of typical Pokémon with more powerful stats, more diverse movepools, and new typings that often give them a leg up on their modern day counterparts. They are, inherently, meant to be more powerful and dangerous Pokémon than the ones you’ll come across in the rest of Paldea. So they’d naturally float to the top of competitive play, as well.
Paradox Pokémon like Iron Bundle are some of the strongest new additions in Scarlet and Violet.Screenshot: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
Should you use the top Pokémon from the competitive tier lists?
Crucially, if you’re looking here for ideas on how to build a good competitive team, know that a tier ranking is not the end all be all of a Pokémon’s viability. For example, a lot of competitive players have latched onto Murkrow because it can use the move Tailwind to increase your team’s speed, and the Prankster ability gives you turn priority when using it. So while Murkrow’s stats are nothing to write home about and it doesn’t show up in most competitive rankings, it’s still a very useful addition to your team.
At the moment, it seems like Legendary and Paradox Pokémon are coming out on top for competitive play in the Uber and Standard tiers, but these rankings are still in flux and will change in the months to years to come as players discover new strategies and builds. These changes are pretty frequent right now because the game is still so new. So things are shifting around with some pretty broad strokes. So it will be interesting to see how the meta changes as time goes on and players learn new combinations and builds.
Now that 2022 is over (thank God), the NPD group has done its thing, collecting and processing all the resulting sales data. Now we can look back at the last 12 months and see what games and consoles sold best, and how much money people spent on this stuff. Shocking nobody, Nintendo had another successful year while Elden Ring nearly topped the charts, beating out both God of War and Madden.
Yes, it’s once again that time of the year when the NPD Group—a decades-old retail tracking and market research company—releases data on what people bought last year. While the group tracks and monitors many different industries, since 1995 it’s monitored the sale of video games and consoles in the United States, and usually publishes some of this data every month.
Nintendo is likely pleased to see that in 2022 the top-selling video game console in the United States was the Nintendo Switch. The NPD doesn’t release specific sales numbers publicly, so we don’t know just how many Switch consoles were sold this year, but Nintendo’s aging console outperformed the PlayStation 5, which was the second best-selling platform last year, and Xbox Series X/S, which came in third. It should also be noted that the Switch was the best-selling console of December 2022 so it appears the Switch is still the hot item to get around Christmas. And two new Pokémon games in 2022 (even if they were buggy) probably helped, too.
Late last week, the NPD Group also released its list of the 20 best-selling games of 2022. Before we jump into the list, remember that Nintendo doesn’t share its digital numbers with the NPD, potentially hurting its own games’ rankings. But anyway, here’s the NPD top 10:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Elden Ring
Madden NFL 23
God of War: Ragnarök
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Pokémon Scarlet/Violet
FIFA 23
Pokémon Legends: Arceus
Horizon Forbidden West
MLB The Show 22
While Elden Ring was on a roll this year and still ends up as the second best-selling game of 2022, it wasn’t able to defeat the juggernaut that is Call of Duty. There’s a reason Activision continues to focus almost all of its resources and studios on Call of Duty: because it makes a lot of money. And as always, some big-name sports games and console exclusives fill out the rest of the list. This data is also a great reminder that most folks outside of the people reading this or commenting below don’t care about bugs, as Madden NFL 23 and the new Pokémon games launched in fairly rough states yet they still cracked the top 10.
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Now that 2022 is over and done with, it’s time to place your bets for the best-selling game of 2023! The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom seems like a solid bet…assuming it releases this year.
“Just buy a PS5? What, is it hard?”Screenshot: Square Enix
Final Fantasy XVI, the upcoming installment in the long-running JRPG series, drops on June 22 as a PlayStation 5 exclusive. That exclusivity is a bit of a bummer as other Final Fantasy games, such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, were also available on PC. And the last mainline entry, Final Fantasy XV, was multiplatform. Unfortunately, at least for now, the new Final Fantasy game will remain on PlayStation 5 only, according to the game’s producer.
Producer Naoki Yoshida, colloquially known as Yoshi-P, was interviewed at a Mahjong tournament over the weekend, where he was whether Final Fantasy XVI would come to PC, something Square Enix confirmed when it revealed the game almost two years ago. However, despite that detail found in the footnote text at the bottom of the trailer, Yoshi-P said the release information is wrong, according to a “rough translation” by the Japanese gaming news Twitter account Genki_JPN. In fact, there may not be a PC version coming at all, as Yoshi-P is apparently suggesting folks go out and buy a PS5 instead.
“Nobody said a word about a PC version releasing,” Yoshi-P said. “Why is it like a PC version is releasing six months later? Don’t worry about that, buy a PS5! Sorry, I went overboard. We did our best so please look forward to it.”
It’s interesting Yoshi-P is purporting that a PC version isn’t planned. Scrubbing through some old Final Fantasy XVI trailers, such as the “Awakening” one from September 2020, it was definitely stated that the game is “not available on other platforms for a limited time after release on PS5,” suggesting it could possibly hit other consoles in the future at the very least. Such was the case with the Final Fantasy VII Remake, where the “limited time” window was about a year. However, all recent marketing for the game, from newer trailers to its official website, now makes no mention of it coming to PC. This is unfortunate considering other Final Fantasy games are on more platforms than just PlayStation and the fact that Sony’s newest console can still be difficult to find. But in the grand scheme of things, knowing how deep Square Enix’s relationship with PlayStation is, it’s not surprising. At least the exclusivity deal should take advantage of the PlayStation 5’s hardware so that there’s no loading.
Kotaku reached out to Square Enix for clarification but did not receive a reply before publication.
Alongside sticking firmly to PlayStation consoles, Final Fantasy XVI has been rated mature for certain types of content featured in the game. Specifically, according to a translation on the Brazilian Ministério da Justiça website, for hate crimes (yikes) and sex scenes (nice).
Last month, the legendary co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog was arrested for allegedly purchasing shares in a development studio before its involvement in a Dragon Quest game was announced. A month later, he was arrested a second time for reportedly buying stock in a company that was set to work on a Final Fantasy spinoff. Yesterday, Tokyo prosecutors formally charged Yuji Naka for inside trading roughly $1,080,000 in Final Fantasy stock.
According to NHK, the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office determined that Naka had been making a profit on insider trading (Thanks, VGC). For the uninitiated, insider trading is when someone with non-public knowledge of a company is able to use that information to trade stock at an advantage. Doing so is illegal in Japan. So Naka ran afoul of the law when he purchased shares in ATeam before the studio had announced that it would be developing the mobile game Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier, a battle royale that was exclusively released for mobile devices. Though the game was announced in 2021, Naka was arrested on December 7 of this year.
This was a month after he had been arrested the first time for buying shares in Aiming, the studio that created Dragon Quest Tact. In both of these incidents, he was arrested alongside Square Enix employee Taisuke Sasaki. Sasaki was indicted for trading roughly $782,000 in stock.
If the two made a profit off the ATeam stock, it was presumably before The First Soldier was canceled less than a year after its launch. Square Enix had clearly been hoping to capitalize on the popularity of Fortnite and other battle royales. Instead, First Soldier suffered severe performance issues and was exclusively available on mobile.
Naka had joined Square Enix in 2018 to direct Balan Wonderworld, a strange action-platformer that was near-universally panned as a flop. The game was unfocused and confusing to many reviewers, and Kotaku included it on a list of the year’s biggest gaming disappointments. The director departed Square Enix in June 2021. Maybe Naka would have been better off if he had been focused on directing a good game instead of manipulating the stock market.
While competitive players continue to plumb Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s strategic depth and tease out its tactical wrinkles, one creature has gotten a shocking amount of playtime over the last month: Murkrow. The unevolved flying dark type isn’t a heavy hitter and its stats are absolute trash, but it does have a unique advantage over every other Pokémon in the game that’s sent it straight to the top of the competitive charts.
Browse social media, hang out on the Smogon message boards, or climb the ranked ladder and you won’t be able to escape Murkrow. The tiny black bird first introduced in Pokémon Gold and Silver is finally back in the spotlight, and former Pokémon World Champion Wolfe “WolfeyVGC” Glick explained the reasons why in a recent TikTok:
The first is Tailwind, a move the Gen 2 bird has had from the jump, but which is supremely important in the current landscape, providing all other Pokémon on the team bonus speed for four turns. The second is Prankster, a passive ability that lets Murkow’s non-damage-dealing moves, like Tailwind, take increased turn priority during battles, thus allowing it to strike first. In Scarlet and Violet’s Gen 9, Murkrow is the only Pokémon who has both, guaranteeing a match-defining speed boost on turn one.
But why Murkrow and not its evolved form of Honchkrow? Well, Murkrow’s evolved form loses Prankster in exchange for the damage-oriented passive ability Moxie, ruining the whole strategy. Plus, players can mitigate some of Murkrow’s drawbacks by equipping the held item Eviolite which boosts the normal and special defense of Pokémon who aren’t fully evolved.
“Don’t get me wrong, the combination of Prankster is really good but it isn’t the only reason that Murkrow is popular,” WolfeyVGC added in his recent TikTok. “Murkrow also gets the attack Haze which removes all stat changes from the battlefield. This is relevant because one of the most powerful new Pokémon added is Dondozo who has a way to boost all of its stats by 2.” Haze completely nullifies that, making Murkrow a perfect counter to Dondozo in addition to being a major utility pick for boosting the rest of your team.
That’s been enough to make Murkrow the second most picked Pokémon in competitive play for December, just one percentage point behind all-star crypto coin mascot Gholdengo. As WolfeyVGC wrote in a Twitter thread a couple of weeks ago, Gholdengo’s dual ghost/steel type make it a great defensive pick, while special ability Make it Rain does a ton of damage.
The Swords-Dance-wielding Garchomp and Bulk Up defensive tank Annihilape are also top contenders, as is Hydreigon who can finally use the new games’ Terastalization mechanic to mitigate its traditional 4X weakness to Fairy-type moves. The mushroom bug Amoonguss, meanwhile, has been tearing things up thanks to Rage Powder which forces opponents to target it rather than buff themselves.
A game not included on our list of major 2022 games that died this year was Square Enix’s kart racer, Chocobo GP. There’s a reason for that, as it will remain playable for the foreseeable future. However, as Square Enix announced on December 21, the game is effectively dead now since “no further large scale updates” are coming any time soon. RIP.
Chocobo GP is the sequel to Square Enix’s 1999 speedster, Chocobo Racing. Another entry planned for the Nintendo 3DS, Codename: Chocobo Racing 3D, was announced at E3 2010 but quickly canceled before ever seeing the light of day. Chocobo GP, which launched onMarch 10, 2022 for Nintendo Switch was a surprising return for the long-dormant franchise that drew ire from fans for its grindy mechanics and expensive battle pass.
Read More: Square Enix Apologizes For Chocobo GP Grind Following Backlash
Now, in a maybe not-so-surprising turn of events, Square Enix has ended support for Chocobo GP just nine months after the game’s launch. It wasn’t even a year old yet, but in an important notice on the game’s website, the publisher said “there will be no further large scale updates (e.g. new characters or new maps) [added] to [Chocobo GP] after the Season 5 update on Wednesday, December 21.” Rankings will continue without the use of the battle pass (called prize pass in the game), but you can no longer buy the premium in-game currency Mythril from the Nintendo eShop. The in-game shop you’d use said Mythril, along with any unspent Mythril you have, will vanish entirely from Chocobo GP on January 6.
“Furthermore, new items will continue to be added to the Mythril shop during Season 5 as before, but the same items may also be added to the Ticket or Gil shops at the same time and become available to obtain without spending Mythril,” Square Enix said. “Items originally sold in the Mythril Shop during the Season 1 to Season 4 periods may also be added to the Ticket or Gil Shops. We hope you continue to enjoy Chocobo GP.”
Kotaku reached out to Square Enix for comment.
Square Enix didn’t provide a cause or explanation for it’s unceremoniously ending support for the Mario Kart-like racer. Maybe allocating resources to the game proved untenable or developer Arika is focusing its attention somewhere else. It’s hard to say, but regardless, you will still be able to play Chocobo GP until it’s taken offline. Whenever that happens.