Sony have been making a lot of mistakes over the past couple of years, including things like mistakenly thinking they could release 12 live service games by 2026, but the more immediately annoying one is its whole PSN thing. I probably don’t need to remind you of that whole Helldivers 2 fiasco, where they tried to make logging into a PSN a requirement for those on PC and later scrapped this because it went down horrendously. However, there has been one other snag that came with all this PSN nonsense: region locking.
Back in 2006, when blending fantasy farming and combat was a dream, Rune Factory felt like a breath of fresh air. Originally born as a spin-off to the more farming-focused Story of Seasons (then known as Harvest Moon) series, Rune Factory has come into its own over the past near-2 decades.
With five main games and three spin-offs, there’s plenty of Rune Factory to go around on Nintendo’s consoles. So, with the recent release of Guardians of Azuma on Switch 1 and Switch 2, we thought it was high time to gather the fantasy farm sims together and see what you lovely readers think of them.
There’s still a few days to go until Remedy Entertainment’s latest entry into their Connected Universe, FBC: Firebreak, is unleashed onto the world. Whether it’s any good or not in its entirety, we probably won’t know for a while yet given that online shooters of its ilk are always guaranteed to receive numerous patches to iron out some kinks. Our own Nic found a good bit to like about the game in his preview, ignoring the at the time rubbish guns, at the very least.
If you could hire any director to make an Elden Ring movie, who would you pick?
You might settle for fantasy heavyweights like Peter Jackson or Guillermo del Toro, or maybe you’d tap Miguel Sapochnik, the man who brought you many of Game of Thrones’ biggest battles, including Hardhome and Battle of the Bastards. If you’re looking for something a little more avant-garde, you could even pick Robert Eggers (Nosferatu), Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), or Bong Joon Ho (Mickey 17) – filmmakers who, like Elden Ring developer FromSoftware, relish in the surreal, cryptic, and uncanny.
Chances are, you wouldn’t pick Alex Garland. The British writer and director is known for the grounded, slow-burning science fiction dramas Ex Machina and Annihilation, as well as the inventively named war films Civil War and Warfare – none of which resemble FromSoftware’s work in any notable way. However, Garland is precisely who film studio A24 has selected to adapt Hidetaka Miyazaki’s magnum opus for the big screen. Considering Garland – who, in addition to directing, is also set to write the screenplay – isn’t one to take his multi-digit checks and phone it in, you have to wonder how he’ll try to make this work.
At a glance, Garland and Elden Ring do indeed seem like an odd match. Despite his considerable experience with sci-fi, Garland has yet to try his hand at hardcore fantasy – a tricky genre in its own right, and even trickier when dealing with video game adaptations. On top of this, his style doesn’t have a lot in common with FromSoftware’s. The narratives of Ex Machina and Annihilation are rooted in plot, dialogue, and characterization, while games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring tell their stories largely indirectly, through item descriptions and environmental design. (Civil War, set in tomorrow’s United States, was widely criticized for its lack of deep backstory).
But just because Garland has never made a fantasy film, doesn’t mean he can’t. He’s reinvented himself and ventured out into new frontiers before – Civil War and Warfare are radically different from Ex Machina and Annihilation, which are themselves unlike the films he wrote before making his directorial debut – so who’s to say he won’t do so again?
Actually, making an Elden Ring movie wouldn’t entirely constitute uncharted territory for Garland. Many people – including his own fans – don’t know this, but he’s actually an avid gamer. His experience playing the Resident Evil games apparently inspired his script for the 2002 horror 28 Days Later, and the 2000 film The Beach – based on one of his novels – features a game-inspired scene which Polygon’s Matt Patches described as “the closest thing we will ever get” to a Banjo-Kazooie movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Warfare evokes surprisingly similar feelings to those experienced while playing Elden Ring: outnumbered, outmatched, overwhelmed, afraid for your life (or runes).
While many filmmakers seemingly feign interest in the material they’re hired to adapt in order to placate said material’s existing fanbase (to this day I refuse to believe M. Night Shyamalan watched even a single episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender), Garland’s love for The Last of Us, BioShock, and – most importantly – Dark Souls seems to be sincere. He appears to have a decent grasp of what makes the series unique and special compared to other games. Talking to Gamespot back in 2020, Garland said, “The Dark Souls games seem to have this kind of embedded poetry in them. You’ll have some weird bit of dialogue with some sort of broken soul sat outside some doorway and it feels like you’ve drifted into this existential dream.”
Sticking to this image of an “existential dream,” Garland could take his Elden Ring adaptation in the direction of Annihilation, which upon release was praised for its psychedelic visuals. This would work, but it is not the only path forward. Another less obvious but arguably more effective plan of action would be to adapt Elden Ring in the mold of Warfare, Garland’s nail-biting thriller about Navy SEALs fighting in Iraq. I say this not because there is something fantastical about this film – on the contrary, it’s been marketed as the one of the most realistic war films ever made – but because watching it evokes surprisingly similar feelings to those you experience while playing Elden Ring: outnumbered, outmatched, overwhelmed, afraid for your life (or runes).
Swap the war-torn Iraqi town of Ramadi for the ruins of Limgrave, alleyways of Leyndell, or badlands of Caelid, and what you’re left with is a film that adapts not the game’s encyclopedic, overarching backstory – the backstabbing saga of Marika, Godrick, Radagon, and the Demigods – but the minute, moment-to-moment experiences of the player’s Tarnished character wading through the Lands Between, so caught up in reaching the nearest Site of Grace in one piece that they have completely lost sight of their larger quest to become Elden Lord, whatever the hell that means.
Given that Garland is reportedly looking to cast one of the actors from Warfare – Kit Connor – in the lead, it’s possible that his Elden Ring adaptation will end up adopting a similarly suspenseful tone, not to mention retread those themes of fear, despair, and senseless violence that Connor has already proven himself capable of conveying. Using Warfare as a blueprint for Elden Ring would not only take advantage of Garland’s strengths as a filmmaker who explores psychology through graphic, carefully choreographed action, but also follow the example set by the – fight me – only solid video game adaptation out there, season one of HBO’s The Last of Us, whose quality is in large part derived from the fact that its creators understood what made the original great as a game.
Elden Ring, like FromSoftware’s other games, is not a power fantasy where heroes with supernatural abilities beat up giant monsters through flashy cutscenes and epic quick time events. It’s an anti-power fantasy that reduces players to nameless warriors who become well-acquainted with death and bang their head against the fog wall until they finally succeed. For Garland’s adaptation to reach the heights of his previous films, he’d do well to capture that bittersweet sentiment. And through his work on Warfare, we can catch a glimpse of what could be when Elden Ring finally arrives in cinemas.
Tim Brinkhof is a freelance writer specializing in art and history. After studying journalism at NYU, he has gone on to write for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Polygon, GQ, Esquire and more.
I have been wanting to ask a bunch of people this question for a while now, and it seems this is as good a time as any!
It’s a question of gaming habits really, and how you approach doing things within them, that I’m sure holds up a mirror (mode) to our personalities in the ‘real world’ and all that, but I’m not a certified mind…person…so let’s skip getting into anything deep.
Our fingertips are blistered, our eyes are square, and that blasted Mario Kart World music won’t get out of our heads, but we’ve had a full week with Switch 2, and the smiles are still large on our faces.
The latest patch has now arrived and it comes with a bunch of bug fixes specifically for Clash of Super Heroes and MvC2:New Age of Heroes. Here’s the full details, courtesy of the official patch notes:
According to Piscatella, this is an “all-time launch week unit sales record for video game hardware in the US”, with “over 1.1 million units sold” (week ending June 7, 2025). The previous record was held by Sony’s PlayStation 4, and the sales calculated here for the Switch 2 exclude My Nintendo Store purchases.
There’s something about Sonic games where I kind of let my guard down and just enjoy them for what they are. And I’m happy to say that I’ve genuinely enjoyed my time with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, which I played an hour of during Summer Game Fest. It’s a kart racer that, in my short time with, nails the core tenets of a good kart racer – fast and intense races, powerups that turn the tide and leave you salty, and a good vibe that celebrates the characters from its source material. I can’t really ask for much more than that, yet there’s still more to chew on that we haven’t seen in previous Sonic racing games.
Let’s start with the CrossWorld mechanic, which varies up each race – the first lap starts on the selected track, then whoever’s in first place in the moment chooses where the entire race warps to for the second lap. This can range from an icy world with aurora borealis in the skybox, to a storming sea among a ship’s wreckage, or a volcanic zone with laser grids as obstacles. And then the third lap returns to the normal track. It’s a novelty that you may get used to over time, but it does provide some level of dynamism from race to race and adds a bit of unpredictability to keep things fresh.
In those crossing worlds, you’ll be flying, hovering, and surfing depending on where you warp to, and so there’s a great sense of variety to your vehicles since you’re not just on the ground drifting with your karts. I quite like the flying sections since your aircraft controls well and brings a certain verticality that’s surprising for a kart racer. If anything, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is blasting your eyeballs with chaos happening on screen, and maybe overdoing it. Not that it’s a major complaint I hold against it, but this is a very visually busy game to the point where it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s really going on – and I think these moments are more in service of the spectacle rather than being a serious competitive racer.
I’m happy to say that I’ve genuinely enjoyed my time with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.
However, it does have that competitive edge with how you outfit your kart. You can customize parts like the body, tires, and boosters to tweak stats such as top speed, acceleration, and handling. What’s more is that you can attach perks to your kart as if it’s a loadout. You get six slots for attachments, and some attachments take up more than one slot – for example, I used a three-slot acceleration booster and a two-slot perk that improved my recovery time after getting hit by an item. And these things actually affected my performance in a meaningful way. I got hit with a rocket in lap three alongside another racer, but was able to pull ahead of them significantly after getting hit because of both of those perks I equipped. So, if you’re really serious about kart racing, I think there’s room for being a real sicko about it.
I only had access to the Grand Prix modes, which pits you in a series of four races, awarding points for your position and determining a winner by the end of the series. It’s pretty standard stuff with a few quirks along the way. I’m not sure if this is embedded in Sonic lore, but one racer will be declared a rival mid-Grand Prix and will act more aggressive toward you and stay more competitive throughout the series. The fourth and final race will also reward more points for first place, so you can turn the tide at the last minute if you’re a few points behind. However, I’m curious about how the other game modes in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds will play out, because as fun and dynamic as normal races are, longevity will rely on Sonic Team being able to capitalize on its potential in other creative ways.
Perhaps some of that will come from its crossover characters – not only is this about Sonic as a whole, it’s a celebration of Sega’s recent history as well. During Summer Game Fest, Sega revealed that characters like my precious boy Kasuga Ichiban from Yakuza / Like A Dragon, Joker from Persona 5, and my vocaloid queen Hatsune Miku will all be part of the roster. Seeing Ichiban relive his days of Dragon Kart from the 2020 RPG is adorable and a welcome extension of his character, while seeing Miku on a hovering board racing through Sonic worlds is enough to get me bought in (and we should have Miku in more games, to be honest, shout out to Fortnite). It’s not like crossover characters are a new thing for a Sonic racing game – I mean, look at the wild lineup for Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing. But Sega’s catalog has grown a lot since then, so perhaps this new era of characters can spice things up in a way that makes more sense.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds doesn’t have to revolutionize the kart racing genre, and I think it’s staking its claim on being a fun and carefree racer that celebrates Sonic and the larger Sega pantheon. It’s a vibe, and one that I’ve enjoyed and will look forward to drifting through when it launches on September 25 of this year on the last two PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo consoles, as well as PC.
