This is the rain in question. What do you think?Gif: Game Informer / Capcom / Kotaku
First, there was Spider-Man’s infamous Puddlegate. Then there were the not-so-watery streets of Cyberpunk 2077. Now it seems video game fans’ next watery, pre-release controversy involves the heavy rain seen in some early gameplay of the Resident Evil 4 remake. Some think it looks as bad as the awful-looking rain the GTA Trilogy remasters. Others are convinced it’s just video compression. And remember: None of them have actually played the game yet.
Rumored for some time, Resident Evil 4 was officially announced by Capcom back in June 2022. This new remake will update the game’s controls and combat, while keeping the same basic story and characters. Once again players will play as Leon as he travels to a rural part of Western Europe to save the President’s daughter and gets caught up in a whole lotta campy, horrific shenanigans. But based on newly released gameplay by Game Informer, some Resident Evil fans seem to think Leon’s biggest threat won’t be giant monsters or infected villagers, but lackluster rain.
Across Reddit and Twitter, you can find many players who think the in-game rain looks awful in the upcoming remake. While I’m not sure who was the first person to share these concerns online, they’ve quickly spread around the community. Some have even suggested the rain looks as bad as the infamously horrendous rain seen in the critically thrashed Grand Theft Auto Trilogy: Definitive Edition. That rain was so bad looking that it made the game nearly unplayable during storms and was eventually improved by the devs via a post-release patch.
Anyway, here’s the remade RE4’s rain that’s causing such a kerfuffle:
Capcom / Game Informer
I’ll fully admit that I watched this footage twice when Game Informer first posted the video and didn’t think anything of the rain. But even in the comments on YouTube, you can find people worried about how intense and distracting it is.
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Kotaku has contacted Capcom about the weather in the upcoming remake.
Others think people are being too nitpicky and suggest that the real problem isn’t the rain but YouTube’s awful video compression. I’m inclined to think YouTube’s compression is definitely not helping this rain look good, but I can also see how some might find the large and distinct white drops of water to be too much.
Of course, this being the internet and gamers, some people are going too far and suggesting the devs are lazy or that this is a sign the entire game will be a giant, rushed “cash grab.” That is completely silly and asinine. Remember: None of us have played the game, which isn’t even finished yet.
Resident Evil 4 is due out March 24, 2023 on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Maybe it should include a rain intensity slider.
Super Nintendo World in Los AngelesPhoto: CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images
It’s a classic theological question: Could Bowser (the Koopa King) create a theme park ride so restrictive that even he couldn’t ride it?
Said question is front and center for plenty of Nintendo fans this week, with new reports that the upcoming Mario Kart ride, Bowser’s Challenge—set to be the main draw (and only actual ride) at Universal Studio’s new Super Nintendo World—will only accommodate riders with a 40-inch waistline or smaller. This is per our colleagues over at Kotaku, who report on a number of people raising issues online this week about Universal’s decision to impose the size limits.
Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge at SUPER NINTENDO WORLD Opens Early 2023
An import from the Japanese version of Super Mario Land, Bowser’s Challenge is what’s known as “dark ride,” i.e., one of those space-efficient, thrill-deficient arrangements where you’re strapped into a car and then swerved on a track in front of a bunch of 3D screens and actual live elements. (In this case, lifted from Nintendo’s beloved Mario Kart franchise.) As such, it’s not entirely clear why such tight size restrictions are being imposed; certainly, it seems like some alternative solution could be used. (Disney, for instance, tends to use benches and lap-bars for this sort of thing, which accommodates a much wider variety of body types.)
The 40-inch waistline requirement is fairly standard at Universal Studios, where it’s also applied to dark rides like Harry Potter And The Forbidden Journey and Revenge Of The Mummy: The Ride. From personal experience, this 6′, 4″, 290-pound writer will note that there is some wiggle room on those requirements when you’re actually at the park—but also that the process of forcing yourself into those seats (or using the tester seat provided, as with Mario Kart) can be both uncomfortable and embarrassing. More to the point, it all feels profoundly unnecessary: There’s no reason for Universal not to update its sizing on rides to allow a more diverse group of riders to enjoy the Super Nintendo Land fun, especially as the opening of the new area has drawn renewed interest and attention to the park.
Leon can, in fact, block Chainsaw Man (Capcom edition)‘s overhead. Sadly, it comes at a price.Screenshot: Capcom / Kotaku
In a new Game Informer cover story, Capcom detailed some of the changes that the hotly anticipated remake of Resident Evil 4 is making to the original, hugely influential horror game.
One of the major changes coming to the RE4 remake revolves around how Ashley Graham (not the supermodel) works in scenes when protagonist Leon S. Kennedy must escort and protect her. In the original RE4, players had to keep a watchful eye over Ashley’s health bar and ensure enemies didn’t carry her away. Ashley desperately, and frequently, screams out Leon’s name the instant players fail to do any of the aforementioned tasks.
In the remake, Ashley no longer has a health bar. Should President Graham’s Dumbo-eared daughter take too much damage while Leon attempts to escort her safely away from Las Plagas, she’ll enter a downed state and need to be revived, IGN reports.
According to a Capcom representative, this change to Ashley’s gameplay mechanic was made to make her “feel more like a natural companion and less like a second health bar to babysit.”
Read More:All The Changes We Spotted In The New Resident Evil 4 Remake Trailers
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Another change coming to RE4’sremake is weapon durability, specifically for Leon’s combat knife. As seen at the end of last October’s extendedgameplay trailer, Leon’s trusty knife being capable of parrying a chainsaw comes at a hefty cost. Instead of toting around “ol’ reliable” throughout the entirety of the RE4 remake to open wooden boxes, chip away at zombies, and conserve ammo, Leon’s knife will deteriorate over time, but players can have multiple knives in their inventory, which still takes the form of Leon’s iconic attache case.
Read More:Someone Finally Made The Inventory Briefcase From Resident Evil 4 A Puzzle Game
Side-quests are also making their way to the RE4 remake. According to IGN, blue flyers scattered about the game let you acquire optional tasks you can complete as side-quests. Lastly, the Game Informer cover story mentions that quick-time events, a frequent element of the original RE4, have effectively been removed, though this aspect of the remake had been mentioned in earlier interviews as well.
“I’d say there are ‘barely any’ QTEs. Different people have different definitions of what a QTE is, so while I can’t tell you that there aren’t any at all, I can say that there aren’t prompts to press buttons mid-cutscene,” producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi told IGN in a prior interview.
Resident Evil 4 (Remake)is slated to release on March 24 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S.
Just trying to get away from the fakes.Image: Nintendo
A big fighting game tournament, Genesis 9, took place from January 20-23 in San Jose, California. Top talent from around the world, including Super Smash Bros. competitors Leonardo “MkLeo” Lopez and Samuel “Dabuz” Buzby, gathered at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center to play games like Guilty Gear Strive and Rivals of Aether. But for one Super Smash Bros. Melee pro, British player Elliot “Frenzy” Grossman, the Genesis 9 tournament started with an illegal taxi and, he claims, a near kidnapping.
“Got tricked into an illegal taxi coming out of [the San Francisco International Airport] and nearly got kidnapped,” Frenzy tweeted on January 19 with a picture of his scarred-up right hand. “Jumped out of the car after seeing the police chase after the vehicle and very luckily only bruised and scraped my hand and back. In the hospital [right now], [but I have] no idea how anything works here [to be honest].”
You might be wondering what the hell Frenzy’s talking about, as it sounds like some action movie stunt with Tom Cruise or something. Well, as it turns out, the Falco main, who was making his way to the Genesis 9 tourney, encountered some…complications when he touched down in California.
“So, I had just got off an 11-hour flight from London Heathrow Airport to San Francisco International Airport,” Frenzy told Kotaku in an email. “I was planning to get an Uber to my hotel in San Jose, but my phone had run out of battery on the way and wifi was often spotty at the airports. I decided to get a taxi instead and so, I walked out to the taxi stand.”
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Frenzy is a pro Melee player for the British esports organization Reason Gaming. Hailing from England and maining Falco, he is the UK’s second-best player and the 47th-best Melee competitor in the world as of 2022. His record speaks for itself, though. He regularly places in the top 10 bracket at most tournaments he participates in and has a few first-place wins under his belt as well, with his last one being at the Galint Melee Open: Fall Edition 2022 back in November. The dude can game! However, he wasn’t prepared for the game of California transportation.
Beyond the Summit
“A driver approaches me and asked if I was looking for a taxi, to which I replied yes and then asked where I was going as per usual,” Frenzy said. “He shows me to the car and opens the door for me to get in with my things and as I close the door and belt up, I look out of the window and see multiple police officers with weapons drawn running towards the vehicle and shouting ‘Stop the vehicle!’ and ‘Get out!’ The driver ignores this and then accelerated immediately as I was still getting in and belting up, at which point I knew that I had made a massive mistake. In the moment I just decided that if I got out quick enough, it was safer than either the driver getting away and being at his mercy or getting involved in a police chase which could end in a crash at higher speeds.”
“When I turned around to put my seatbelt on, I saw multiple cops running out to surround the car out of the window,” Frenzy said. “They had guns drawn. The driver then accelerated, foot to the floor, and tried to get away. That was when I decided to bail out. I was familiar with this sort of thing happening from the internet, but I was caught completely off guard by this specific attempt, so I knew exactly what was going on.”
Read More: Top Smash Ultimate Player Throws Controller At Tournament, Sparks ‘Privilege’ Discourse
Frenzy said he was in “such an adrenaline rush” that things went blurry. One minute, he was buckling his seatbelt to head to Genesis 9. The next, he was “rolling on the ground” after jumping out of the fake taxi cab. He said he “didn’t land badly or have anything else on the road” near him to cause further injury as he rolled onto the asphalt, the car going around 15-20mph. Still, he was in “pretty serious pain,” with a backpack only somewhat cushioning his tumble and his right hand taking most of the impact. The Mills-Peninsula Emergency Department in Burlingame said Frenzy didn’t break anything but had “really bad swelling, abrasions, and bruising” on his right hand as well as “friction burns” on his back from rolling on gravel and “low blood pressure” for a while. He also got in touch with cops after the incident for a quick police report.
“The cops asked a lot about what the criminal’s exact actions were and they explained they had been after this guy that had been running this scheme for a while,” Frenzy said. “They gave me some information about the case number and who to contact. I’m not 100% sure how they caught the vehicle or the criminal as I was recovering from the jump, but I saw he was in handcuffs far away as I was being attended to later on.”
A San Francisco Police Department officer told Kotaku over the phone that, although they couldn’t divulge any specific information about the incident, Frenzy’s case is real and an “ongoing investigation” is currently in progress. The officer also told Kotaku that the individual conducting the investigation will give us a callback, but that hasn’t happened yet.
“These sorts of schemes are all over the world and, as a pretty experienced traveller, I’m usually aware of them,” Frenzy said. “However, in a lapse of judgement and after a long flight, I got tricked. They try to trick you by positioning close to where the legitimate taxi stands are and even color their cars in the same layout as legit ones. They will approach people, especially those who are on their own or who are tourists, and ask if they are looking for a taxi and where they are going. Because of this, I usually tend to stick to ride share apps when traveling, but on this occasion my phone was out of battery so I was in a rough situation.”
Read More:Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Competitive Community Really Hates Steve From Minecraft
In the end, Frenzy made it to Genesis 9 to play some Super Smash Bros. Melee thanks to the help of the tournament’s organizers. After taking a day or two to heal up, he said he felt good enough to compete. He didn’t place that well, getting 49th in the tournament. However, he said the “event itself was amazing even despite what happened” and is “eager to return in full form next year.” Here’s hoping he gets there much safer next time.
At the start of 2023, Twitch streamer MissMikkaa made headlines for beating Elden Ring’s notorious rot queen, Malenia, Blade of Miquella, with two completely different controllers at the same time. It was a ridiculous feat of dexterity and focus, but would you believe this method of play was how she finished FromSoftware’s latest Soulslike in its entirety? Well, it turns out MissMikkaa has been embarking on what she’s dubbed the “Ultimate Challenge Run” and, now that she’s wrapped up Elden Ring, she’s doing the same thing with Dark Souls Remastered.
MissMikkaa
Challenge runs aren’t new within the FromSoft community. Kotaku has reported on plenty of wild ones, from using a drawing tablet to playing with an electronic saxophone. MissMikkaa’s, however, is probably the most intense challenge run I’ve seen in a minute as she plays two copies of the FromSoft game simultaneously with two different types of controller inputs: a DDR-compatible dance pad and a PlayStation 5 DualSense. This is the basis for her “Ultimate Challenge Run.” As MissMikkaa specifies in her livestream overlays, the goal is to “kill bosses on the same try on both game instances” using the two different controllers. Kotaku caught up with MissMikkaa to pick her brain about playing FromSoft games in such a peculiar and difficult manner.
This Takes Lots Of Focus To Pull Off
Image: FromSoftware
MissMikkaa explained the process of setting up the “Ultimate Challenge Run,” including the model of the dance pad she’s using. After getting the dance pad hooked up to her PC, she used the software remapper JoyToKey to synch the pad’s movement arrows to the WASD keys, with the other buttons performing actions like attacking, dodging, healing, and the like. The dance pad has a limited number of buttons, though, so she would sometimes have to “create specific profiles for certain bosses or scenarios” to switch between before encounters like the one with Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy. But aside from fine-tuning the dance pad’s keybindings, this “Ultimate Challenge Run” challenged MissMikkaa in many other ways.
“In the beginning, I had a lot of trouble focusing on playing two games at once. It’s not an easy task trying to position your character, attack, dodge, and heal twice as much as what you’re used to,” MissMikkaa tells Kotaku. “There were a few days where I was feeling mentally fatigued from the amount of work my brain was doing, but the further I got in the run the more used to it I became. Physically it wasn’t much different from the previous runs I had done, luckily I was already used to 6-hour dance pad sessions. Midway through this run there were definitely a few moments of smooth sailing, but towards the end, things definitely got much harder and that was also partially used as a motivator to get me through.”
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Focus was difficult to maintain during the entire run, MissMikkaa says. Playing a FromSoft game, whether that’s Bloodborne or Sekiro, can already seem like an insurmountable challenge requiring tons of concentration. These are punishing games, after all! Adding a second layer on top—that is, playing another instance of the same game but with a separate controller simultaneously—increases both the level of difficulty you’ll face when playing and the focus required. Gravity killed her, a lot, because she “lost track of [her] character’s position and instead focused more on attacking and dodging.” But navigation got better as time went on.
The Bosses Were Equally Challenging
MissMikkaa
As you might expect with a FromSoft game, the bosses were a particular sore spot for this “Ultimate Challenge Run.” MissMikkaa says she died some 198 times to Malenia and her long sword alone. It doesn’t compare to the level 1 dance pad run she did back in October, in which she died over 500 times to the goddess, but she still points to Malenia as a true test.
“Malenia was by far the hardest boss in this run,” MissMikkaa admits. “She is a true test of skill and experience in most challenge runs. It was a lot of trial and error to kill Malenia both in regards to figuring out what build I wanted to use and just trying to survive when I got two waterfowl dances at the same time. But besides the obvious answer, I had a lot of trouble with Margit due to falling out of the arena. I was also struggling a lot with Mohg, specifically with his second phase transition since I didn’t use any in-game items like Mohg’s Shackle or Purifying Crystal Tear.”
That she prevented herself from using specific equipment also added to the difficulty. MissMikkaa says she not only tried to “not use any weapons or Ashes of War that would be considered too ‘OP’,” but she also couldn’t summon anyone or use any of the spirit ashes in battle.
It was just her, the enemies in front of her, and her two controller inputs. That’s it. In addition to these self-imposed limitations, MissMikkaa explains that she relegated herself to certain kinds of character builds, starting with a strength-focused one in the beginning before switching to an arcane one for the late game. Thankfully her gear of choice—bleed weapons such as the Great Stars great hammer and high-defense armor like the Bull-Goat set—helped ease the restrictions a little bit by letting her “outpoise [a boss’] poise damage in order to hit them through their attacks.” She’s tanky. And of course, because she’s playing two copies of the same game, she’s forced to have equipment parity between her two characters.
Giving Up On This Was Never In The Cards
Image: FromSoftware
Regardless of how challenging this “Ultimate Challenge Run” has been for MissMikkaa, she promises that she “never once thought about giving up.” The difficulty is a big reason why she was so motivated to finish the challenge. She found herself adapting to the process after every livestream and, once she got to Malenia, who is already an optional endgame boss, MissMikkaa said she was “pretty confident” that she could beat the queen of rot alongside many of the game’s other brutal enemies.
“The easiest part of this run was keeping myself motivated throughout,” MissMikkaa explains. “It was a fun challenge and I enjoyed every aspect of learning and mastering it. I love finding new ways to challenge myself, especially in Elden Ring. This idea was not really seriously considered at first, but when I found myself with an extra capture card in my streaming PC I started thinking to myself, ‘What would happen if I played two games at once?’ At first, I was unsure if the challenge was even possible to begin with, and so were the people around me. But I was kind of curious to see how far I could go. I’ve got to say…I’ve never had so many people coming in and questioning my sanity as I have during this run.”
I mean, I’m questioning MissMikkaa’s sanity, too. It’s hard enough stepping into a FromSoft boss arena on just one platform. Doing that twice, at the same time, with one of your controllers being essentially a slipper bath mat, and still walking away victorious makes me both envious of her skills and stoked about her accomplishment. Talk about “getting good.”
MissMikkaa tells us she finished Elden Ring around January 8, performing an All Remembrances playthrough which requires you beat a FromSoft game by defeating all the bosses that drop consumable “boss souls.” Since then, she’s been bouncing between games on Twitch, like Forspoken and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, while embarking on another “Ultimate Challenge Run” in Dark Souls Remastered. At some point, she said she wants to play through Elden Ring with “a real guitar,” with actions like attacking and healing tied to full chords instead of just individual strings. Lord help her.
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).