Final Fantasy XV and XIV Stormblood, the SNES Classic, and Other Big Headlines From the Past Week

Hello! Matt here filling in for Nadia on this week’s Ending Credits. How was your week? Felt pretty long on my end, but that’s that video game grind for ya. Here’s all the sweet USgamer content you might have missed this week.

There was a bunch of Final Fantasy XV happenings this week. The story DLC, Episode Prompto, lets everyone take control of the pretty selfie-taking teammate (who apparently isn’t that popular according to character popularity polls). If Prompto isn’t your dude, here’s a teaser for Episode Ignis whose vocal dissonance still kind of bugs me. Oh, and now there’s a FFXV cookbook to download and a hack to let you enter god mode whenever.

Oh, but the mobile FFXV game is bad.

Other USgamer offerings from this week include:

• A bunch of details regarding the SNES Classic, which was announced this week. Here’s a look at the game library differences between US/Europe and Japan (US/Europe has a better line-up), questions surrounding Star Fox 2, our rankings of best SNES Classic games, what games should be on the SNES Classic (but aren’t), and a sweet reaction from an original Star Fox 2 programmer.
• Oh, and if you want a SNES Classic get ready to fight some scalpers.
• Back to Final Fantasy for a moment. Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood is out now! Read Mike's review here. I renewed my sub for Stormblood, did you?
• Sega Forever rolled-out but it came out a little wrong. Sega doesn’t want to repeat its mistakes on this one. Also they talk a bit about working with Atlus on PC releases.
• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds adds a July update while the producer talks up cross-platform between PC and Xbox One.
• Little Witch Academia (the anime series premiered today on Netflix) is getting a video game!
• Kat reviewed Valkyria Revolution! It was… not pretty.
• But Kat also wrote about Madden 18 which has some big story mode updates, but might disappoint fans of Career mode.
• Some BioWare news! Anthem is sci-fantasy, kind of like Star Wars. However, BioWare’s other sci-fi series, Mass Effect: Andromeda, is probably not going to get any single-player DLC (or a sequel).
• Caty wrote about Monument Valley 2, which offers a motherhood story in a sea of dads, and she wrote about Tokyo Jungle, which will be free for PS Plus members in July (PS3).
• Ubisoft is still fending off Vivendi in a hostile takeover bid. But! Vivendi might, maybe, probably not, but could, drop its takeover bid.
• Nintendo held a shareholders meeting again. Nintendo wanted to talk about the Switch which passed a million sales in Japan faster than the PS4, but one investor just wanted to know if they could get advance tickets to Super Nintendo World at Universal.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild DLC is out! Suit up in the new Tingle outfit and sneak faster at night.
• The Pokemon gym update is causing some consternation among trainers, even creating a hostage crisis for some gym leaders who just want to collect their daily coins.
• Arkane Studios President and Founder leaves the company, but mostly he just seems tired of the grind. Who can blame him?
• Crash N.Sane Trilogy is out. Remember those weird ass Crash commercials from the 90s?
• Netflix's Castlevania series reveals its geeky voice cast!
• Lastly, here’s our favorite video games of 2017 so far. There’s just been so many good games this year which is a blessing and a CURSE.

I know Nadia ends these things with an end theme so here’s one of the end themes for Nier: Automata, which is probably my favorite end theme of the year (so far).

Composed by Keiichi Okabe and sung by J’nique Nicole, “Weight of the World (English)” is just one of multiple versions of the ending themes you can unlock. I stuck with the English one so as to not spoil anyone on how awesome the final ending theme sounds.

The Nier franchise always had an amazing soundtrack, and the developers definitely know it. I feel like they went particularly all-out on Automata, but hey, I’m not complaining. I strongly recommend you play through the whole game to listen to the whole album. It’s just so good *crying emoji*

As always, thank you for reading USgamer and tune in next week for even more words about video games!