What's the Best Game of the Week?

Pirate Yakuza, Avowed, or (half of) Don't Nod's latest adventure?

Author

Robert Scarpinito
February 21, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

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The next chapter in the Like a Dragon/Yakuza story released today, and it’s a totally random dive into piracy and treasure hunting. It’s an overall lighthearted side story in the larger universe, and you can finish it within 30 hours (including a majority of the side content).

If you’ve never played these games and are curious what all the hype is about, Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is an interesting place to hop on. Majima, the protagonist, has amnesia, so you’ll learn about major context at the same time as him. But it’s also pretty different from the rest of the series, though its heart is in a similar place.

But Here’s Its Competition This Week

Avowed, the latest from Obsidian, released on Tuesday, and it already looks like a contender for RPG of the year.

Don’t Nod also released the first half of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, which shares a lot of DNA with Life Is Strange.

Final Fantasy is making its way to your tabletop, with an exciting collaboration with Magic: The Gathering. We’ve got the lowdown on quite a few legendary creatures and art variants in the article above. But the real question is, will there be a way to limit break the rules and deal 9,999 damage in one turn? You might be surprised.

In related Hasbro news, the development team behind Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 is working on a new AAA game using another one of Hasbro’s tentpole IPs. It’ll be a single-player action game with multiplayer options. Maybe it could be the Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance game we were all hoping for?

Next Thursday, Pikachu is going to reveal the next big chapter in the Pokemon universe. Maybe we’ll see more details about whatever Pokemon Legends: Z-A will be. Or maybe we’ll see the next major mainline duo of Pokemon games to release—which is extra exciting, since it would (probably) coincide with the Nintendo Switch 2.

However, if you have some spare My Nintendo Gold Points lying around, you might want to use them soon. Nintendo is pausing the program at the end of March.

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In a stunning surprise to pretty much everyone, a Seattle arm of NetEase was shut down. Turns out, whether you’re a Concord or a Marvel Rivals, this industry has very little mercy.

That’s not the only collateral damage done under NetEase this week. Just Cause studio Liquid Swords also suffered some downsizing. Granted, their projects aren’t quite as celebrated as something like Marvel Rivals, but it’s still unfortunate to hear.

Marvel Rivals also hit a different milestone this week, as NetEase announced that it has 40 million registered users in Marvel Rivals (partially thanks to the work done by that Seattle team). This is all in light of the game adding two new heroes today, which normally is (and arguably still is) an exciting moment for the game.

But with the added business context, it paints a stark picture for this industry we all love, where company bottom lines matter more than people’s livelihoods.

According to a report by Bloomberg, Niantic could sell off its gaming business to the Saudi Public Investment Fund for roughly $3.5 billion. However, the deal isn’t confirmed at the time of writing. But knowing that Niantic’s AR games could sell for that much is staggering, to say the least.

Officials at the Itate Hyozu Shrine in Japan are raising concerns over its portrayal in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which is just under a month away. As of now, this doesn’t seem like it will impact the game’s release, but you can learn more about their concerns in our story above.

The AI future is here, and it’s building games for us now. Microsoft is calling this the first World and Human Action Model, or WHAM, and it was trained on that one live-service game Bleeding Edge, if you remember it.

I wish I could have Microsoft’s confidence in all this.

I honestly don’t know what gives me more of the ick, the AI story or this one. Christopher Barrett, who claims he was unfairly terminated from Bungie, has been litigating with the company for almost a year. Now Sony has clapped back with some fairly decisive looking evidence of just how scummily Barrett treated the women he worked with at the time.