Square Enix E3 2019: The Best Of Show

Before this conference started, Square Enix fans were expecting the developer to bring the fire, and for the first time at E3 this year, they got the closest to perfection, and boy what a show it was. They started with a bang by showing Final Fantasy 7 Remake in an amazing way. The original opening cinematic was shown in the remake engine and what a beautiful sight it was. After that Kitase Yoshinori made his way on stage, letting the world know that this remake is allowing them to make this experience and story more in depth, with enough content to take up two blu ray discs. This means that the Midgar section of the story will be it's own stand alone game. They also did a deep dive on the action combat which looks amazing. Which while the combat is action based it uses the active time battle which activates a slower tactical mode which allows you to use items, magic, and abilities. The materia system is back and better than ever, and you get to switch characters in your party on the fly.

Even cooler when they showed an early boss fight and showed off that they added phases to these fights, they also decided to reveal Tifa, and boy does she look amazing, which is another character in this game that looks like an updated version of their original appearance rather than needlessly changed, which is a good thing. This game looks to be one for the record books, and if they keep their eye on the prize this will be amazing, the future for this game is looking good when part 1 releases on 3rd March 2020. After that there were a few trailers for a number of games, first was Life Is Strange 2, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remaster trailer, which while looking graphically slightly better, still seems to be suffering with frame rate, but it has till winter 2019 to fix the issues. They showed a trailer for Octopath Traveler, which is now on PC, and Last Remnant is now available on Switch digitally.

Dragon Quest Builders 2 had a really good trailer, which showed the co-op, along with some of the new features added to the game, such as swimming, and gliding, with a demo coming to PSN on 27 June. After a trailer showing Dragon Quest 11 Definitive Edition S for the Switch which releases in the fall, they brought up the Square Enix Collective a intiative that helps indie devs get their games out into the world, and they mentioned two games, a top-down racing game called Circuit Superstars with a 2020 release window, and Battalion 1944, a competitive multiplayer FPS which has integrated tournament capabilities available today on Steam. After a short ad letting it be known that Square Enix music is now available on music streaming services they showed off an old trailer for the Kingdom Hearts 3 DLC.

Thankfully that was quick and painless, after which Yoshida Naoki; the director and producer of Final Fantasy 14 appeared on stage to show the launch trailer for the new expansion Shadowbringers. After that revelatory trailer a short trailer for Dying Light 2 was shown, while new it wasn't really all too interesting, aside from the info of a spring 2020 release. But what was interesting was the announcement that two games from the Saga series that never made it out of Asia is making their way to the west, Romancing Saga 3, and Romancing Saga Scarlet Grace. After an interesting trailer for Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, and they next chapter War Of The Visions, they showed a trailer for the new game Outriders which was cool, but sadly they also went the way of the dev diary, after informing of a release window of summer 2020, and the game is 3 player drop-in drop-out co-op that looks interesting.

They showed a trailer for Oninaki that finally gave enough of an idea of the game to increase interest and showed that there is a lot more production value in this than the previous Tokyo RPG Factory games, they gave a surprise of something that was completely unexpected to ever happen, a remaster of Final Fantasy 8, with a release window of sometime in 2019, releasing on everything. They then closed the conference with a blowout on the new Avengers game. Started with an interesting trailer that give the general idea of what the story is, aesthetically they are definitely more close to the comic version of the Ultimate version of the Avengers, while retaining their own game specific individuality. The game is going to be a singleplayer game that can also be played co-op with up to four players, at launch there will be 5 playable Avengers, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, and Iron Man, with more to be added later. You will be able to customize your chosen hero, and more areas in the game will be added, along with more heroes, both of which will be for free, with cosmetics being their form  of monetization. Luckily there will be a lack of loot boxes and pay-to-win items. The game will release on Console, PC, and Stadia on 15 May 2020, with extra goodies going to Playstation, who also gets early access to the beta.

Overall while this conference was a bit long in the tooth in the mid point, the there were enough strong points to it that this is by far the best conference of E3 2019. They could have easily cut out some trailers, or at least made some of them slightly shorter, but for the power of a large amount of the announcements, and the info given, this one gets the highest score so far.
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