2023 Showcase review (Part 2)
Brief summary:
Tier 1 absolutely must-play day one games for me: Metaphor: ReFantazio, Persona 5 Tactica, Persona 3 Reload
Tier 2 games with high probability that I'm gonna play, but maybe not day one: Hellblade 2, Path of the Goddess, Cyberpunk 2077 - Phantom Liberty
Tier 3 games, I'm interested in, but might skip: 33 Immortals, Avowed, Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, Clockwork Revolution, Dungeons of Hinterberg
Tier 4 games, that I'm probably gonna just try in GamePass for a couple of evenings: Flight Simulator 2024, Forza Motorsport
The showcase goods:
- As you can see, not that many games from the total count I'm super interested in. But that's actually a great thing about this show. I'm not an egoistic person, so I clearly understand that I can't expect the showcase to just meet my taste and nothing else. Would be silly to expect that. Nice to see Xbox diversifying their lineup and bringing something for everyone. I think the diversification of lineup was great in this showcase. Well, someone probably could have wanted to see a "Sony game" from Xbox but it wasn't shown.
- The pacing was great and focus on the quality instead of quantity.
- Almost all the games shown are coming to GamePass, which is a good thing I guess.
The showcase negatives:
- The run time as mentioned before. It would actually be fine if we have another showcase of this scale around the end of the year, but I doubt it.
- Ubisoft being present at the show as mentioned in Part 1
- DLC and GaaS stuff that should be left out for social media announcements
- (Personal) - Nice to see that Xbox and Atlus are being this close that Atlus has 3 games at Xbox showcase, but the fact that there haven't been other JRPG developers besides SEGA present is a bit worrying.
- (Personal) - No SMT this year. I guess we ain't getting the main line SMT games after all. (At least not until next year). It's a bit worrying because I'm starting to think that team Xbox only cares about Persona franchise as it's popular and highly demanded. So, there won't be a push like that for SMT games and they will never come to Xbox maybe. Yes, SMT V is still might be tied to Nintendo by exclusivity contract, but SMT Nocturne HD should be an easy port as it's on everything by Xbox already. I get that these games are super hard and sometimes jokingly get called "Dark Souls of JRPG" for a good reason, so the player base might not be there for these games on Xbox. But still, I wanna believe. Team Xbox, please make it happen.
P.S. Though a bit about upping the score to 8/10 simply based on how good Metaphor: ReFantazio is, but I'll keep it a 7.5/10, so that to keep Team Xbox focused on improving. If they can delivery another showcase like this, I'll give them 8 next time.
