After over two dozen mainline games, I can only imagine how difficult it must be to innovate and stay relevant in an era where a great game is coming out every few weeks, but that’s exactly what KOEI TECMO aims to do with the next entry in its long-running Atelier JRPG series, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories and the Envisioned Land. After spending over six hours gathering resources, doing Sailor Moon-esque magical dancing rituals, and riding around on a motorbike, I’m inclined to believe they’ll pull off just that, yet again. With more engaging combat, improved visuals, more convenient crafting, and an entirely new building system that lets you put your own personal touch on the world, there’s quite a bit to be optimistic about, even if what I saw of the story and characters was, at least so far in the opening hours, pretty boilerplate stuff for the genre.

If you’ve played any of the recent Atelier games, then you probably won’t be shocked by Atelier Yumia at first glance. All three of the pillars that have been around since its conception are still alive and well: exploration, where you run around collecting resources and solving puzzles; combat, where you fight baddens with a party chock-full of pretty anime friends, and synthesis, where you combine your hard-won resources into alchemical creations that make you stronger. But each has been given a substantial overhaul (not to mention a serious facelift) that breathes new life into a familiar formula.

Combat seems to be getting the biggest rework, with action-based systems that let you perfect parry, dodge out of the way, and switch to different range bands depending on whether you’d like to thwack enemies in melee or take them down from a distance. At lower levels, combat seemed fairly undemanding, as I was able to just unload every ability I had, swap to other characters to do the same, then repeat it all again, ending most encounters in a matter of seconds, but later on (and especially when I wasn’t properly leveled) I seriously got rinsed if I wasn’t paying attention to enemy attack patterns and working on my timing. It never got especially challenging so long as I was properly leveled, but it was nice to see a less passive combat system that I couldn’t just steamroll through while on autopilot.

Exploration also had some improvements, like having a gun to stun enemies and collect resources at a distance, ziplines that help you navigate the map more easily once you find and activate both sides of the line, and, crucially, a badass motorcycle for you to speed around on that makes getting around much easier. Finally, there’s Synthesis, which in typically Atelier fashion is so dang complicated, you could spend quite a bit of time customizing and min-maxing every aspect of your gear and crafting new items and attacks to use in battle. Or, if you don’t have the patience like me, you can just hit “auto mode” and it’ll automatically optimize all of it for you. Not that I don’t enjoy this aspect of the series, but it’s certainly nice to have the option of leaping back into the action quickly for times where I wasn’t in the mood to tinker.

Atelier Yumia also shakes things up by adding a fourth fairly significant activity to the list of things to do as you explore and level up: the ability to build and customize settlements throughout the world map. That’s right – Atelier Yumia seems to be leaning into the cozy craze, so now you can have a little bit of Animal Crossing or Sims with your JRPG by constructing your fantasy cottage on a patch of land and spending some quality downtime with your party members. I was only able to dabble in this a bit, given the constraint of the resources available to me in the early part of the story, but I could definitely see myself sinking quite a bit of time into taming the wilds with an elaborately decorated home.

With all Atelier has going for it, I will say that it did very little to make itself stand out in terms of story. The characters and foreshadowing of the undoubtedly epic and convoluted story that starts to develop in the opening hours aren’t bad by any means, but at least so far everything has been quite predictable and retreads a lot of ground we’ve seen from JRPGs of the past. This is especially true of the characters I met during my explorations, like the ditzy by wholesome Isla and the stoic and no-nonsense Viktor, both of whom I feel like I’ve seen half a hundred times already. But this is the beginning of a JRPG, so in all likelihood it’s just going to take a while for the story to start rolling or for characters to show their true colors to any level of satisfaction, leaving plenty of opportunity for my concerns to disappear given more time.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Atelier Yumia marks the first time the series will appear on the Xbox platform, and as a Westerner who would quite like more JRPGs to be readily available, that’s pretty awesome to see. Achievement unlocked!

Activision may finally be ready to start talking about its next Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game, and it seems to be using a sneaky Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Easter Egg to get the conversation started.

Call of Duty outlet CharlieIntel spotted and shared references to the publisher’s legendary skateboarding video game franchise in a peculiar place after the Black Ops 6 Season 2 Reloaded update went live today. Included with an ammo chest of new features, weapons, and more content was the return of the fan-favorite skate-themed map, Grind. The skatepark arena has been brought back mostly as fans remember it, with one exception being a giant, in-game TV screen featuring a very Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-looking logo and a date of March 4, 2025.

Looks like a teaser for something related to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has been found in Black Ops 6’s Grind MP map!

Announcement on March 4. 👀 pic.twitter.com/8efl6Qansl

— CharlieIntel (@charlieINTEL) February 20, 2025

It stops short of being in-your-face but is still undeniably an eyebrow-raising reference for fans who have been on the lookout for another entry in the Pro Skater series. Rumors that another installment could soon be announced began earlier this week when fellow skater Tyshawn Jones let it slip that he would soon be featured in an upcoming Tony Hawk video game (via VGC).

“I’m in a Tony Hawk coming out, so that’s cool,” Jones said during a conversation on The Breakfast Club podcast. “They got a new one they remastering so that’s about to come out. I was in the last one.”

It was a curious comment that had fans excited, with today’s newly revealed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Black Ops 6 Easter Egg letting them know when they can expect to learn more. Unfortunately, there’s no telling what exactly that March date has in store.

Activision tried to breathe life into the franchise with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 back in 2015 but has yet to release another new numbered entry since. However, in 2020, fans received the Pro Skater 1 + 2 remakes from Vicarious Visions. That means it’s been five years since a Tony Hawk game hit store shelves. With so much evidence lining up for a big reveal next month, it seems the wait may soon be over.

While we wait to see what that March 4 reveal has lined up, you can read up on a few of the other skateboarding-themed inclusions in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 2 Reloaded, including a pack of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cosmetics that have some fans upset. You can also see Tony Hawk himself confirm that he was working with Actvision again as of last year.

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Years ago, a video game like Solasta II might’ve been a niche product. Old-school computer RPGs, bound by dice rolls and Dungeons & Dragons rulesets, tend to be popular within exactly one demographic of the gaming populace; the same one that possesses fond memories of a long suspended campaign in Neverwinter Nights. Conventional thinking stated that the quirks of the genre—the punishing difficulty, the baroque questlines, the constant threat of permadeath—sealed off mainstream avenues. Or, so we thought. Because in 2025, we live in a post-Baldur’s Gate III world, which proved without a shadow of a doubt that society at large could absolutely fall in love with a quirky traipse through all of these quirky systems. Solasta II is hoping that lightning can strike twice.

The first Solasta arrived in 2021, and by and large both games are bringing the same formula to the table. Like its predecessor, Solasta II is a turn-based tactical RPG undergirded by D&D structures, and in the two-hour demo I had access to, many of the rudiments were immediately legible. My party of adventurers had arrived at a rocky cliffside village, and I point-and-clicked my way through town to learn, exactly, what was ailing the citizens. A tribe of marauding kobolds were causing some problems on the border and unexplained tremors were destroying buildings, all while a crew of lost fishermen had been pinned down by flesh-eating giant crabs. The core plot points forked off in subtle ways, providing a variety of methods to approach the crises. Do you want to slaughter the kobolds in their camp? Or, perhaps, sneak off and nab one of the dragon scales they cherish, convincing them that you belong to the same cult? So, off you go to solve these problems, hoping for a bounty of loot—or at least a few gold pieces—in return.

All of these decisions are meted out in garden-variety skill checks, auditing your capacity for persuasion, perception, historical fluency, and so on. One crucial change Solasta II has made is that, from what I can tell, it doesn’t matter which party member you are currently controlling when you navigate those dice rolls. The party is treated like an all-encompassing unit, which cuts down on the annoyance that comes when you accidentally wind-up in a high-stakes parlay with your low-charisma barbarian. I also appreciated how, with the stroke of a button, players can control their group using their WASD keys—ditching the traditional top-down view entirely. It makes navigating some of the tighter corridors around the map much easier.

The combat, too, is retrofitted in some smart, modern ways. Nothing major has changed—you will still roll for initiative, and expense spell slots to cast Magic Missiles. But as someone who occasionally gets lost in the morass of D&D iconography, the UI in Solasta II is highly accommodating. For instance, some of the high-level techniques available to my sorcerer were presented to me right on my action bar, in plain English. Same with my rogue’s economy of bonus actions. The learning curve in Baldur’s Gate is considerably steeper and rife with early-game mistakes as you’re still getting used to the cadence. Solasta II, meanwhile, got me up to speed much quicker.

And frankly, I think that’s my only concern going forward. All of the nice things I can say about Solasta II are cordoned off to smart, assiduous quality-of-life improvements. The demo itself didn’t do much to distinguish itself from other RPGs on the market. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it was noticeable—especially when it looks unfavorable in comparison. One of the calling cards of Baldur’s Gate III is just how pervasively interactive it is. Every NPC can be interfaced, unfurling more intrigue in seemingly limitless dialogue trees. But the portion of Solasta I saw was much more cloistered. Doors wouldn’t open, townsfolk didn’t speak to me, and my party was funneled down the narrow streets. The splendor of a tabletop campaign—how all options are on the table to the player, whether they want to raze the world or save it—didn’t quite present itself. Solasta II has the basics down, but I hope when I play the retail version, it has the capacity to strike that erstwhile sense of wonder within us.