Final Fantasy VII Remake

SAN FRANCISCO—Last year's inaugural PlayStation Experience closed 2014 with a surprising number of game and product announcements, and Sony appeared ready to double-down on this new end-of-year tradition with a follow-up, fan-focused convention full of playable demos and new products, and its two-hour keynote led off with the big Final Fantasy remaster that Sony announced at this past summer's Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Enlarge / Final Fantasy VII Remake's battle system still has a menu system, but it plays out from a behind-the-back angle with apparent active maneuvering, a la the series' more recent entries.

Final Fantasy VII Remake—the classic remaster's official name—had a gameplay-trailer reveal that showed less of a remaster and more of a total overhaul. For starters, the new version of FF7 includes a third-person, over-the-shoulder camera as its default viewpoint. That'll certainly show off the new, fully 3D content better than the original version's pre-rendered, top-down environs—and the footage showed more intense movement maneuvers like slides and hops through the world of Midgar, so the camera change isn't just for show. The trailer's dialogue was entirely spoken aloud, as well, and its combat showed off an apparent active-battle twist, though it was hard to tell whether players will gain as much active control of Cloud Strife and other characters as the trailer appeared to show, or whether the footage simply looked more dynamic from a new perspective.

Final Fantasy big-wig Tetsuya Nomura took the stage after the presentation, but not with news of a release date or when fans can expect any playable access to the remaster. Instead, he announced that the PC version of Final Fantasy VII had already launched on PlayStation 4 via its online store.

The keynote was packed full of reveals from other known and unknown upcoming PlayStation 4 games for 2016 and beyond. For example, Uncharted 4 kicked the show off with a dialogue-loaded conversation between Nathan Drake and his brother Sam set in front of a slick-looking sunset-draped bay, and it revealed one new feature for the Uncharted series: dialogue trees. It certainly wasn't the kind of explosive sequence that has been shown off at other major expos, but it looked pretty slick noneoftheless.

Enlarge / Flaming sword, undead baddies—that's Team Ninja's new game Nioh.

We're admittedly huge fans of Brutal's ASCII-inspired aesthetic, but there's no telling whether that alone will make its slice-'em-up gameplay all that unique.

SCEA

In terms of new IP, Team Ninja came to the show with its reveal of Nioh, an obvious descendant of the Ninja Gaiden series. Meaning, it revolved mostly around slicing waves of bad guys, though in this game's case, that meant wielding a flaming sword and fighting off apparent undead baddies in a gorgeous, rural-Japan setting. More interesting to us was the brief reveal of four-player indie slice-'em-up Brutal, whose reveal included an ASCII-loaded aesthetic and warriors made up of terminal keystroke characters.

Adult Swim Games announced plans to release a smattering of games for PS4 next year: Death's Gambit, a retro-themed side-scroller with obvious Castlevania overtones; Pikmin-like Ray's the Dead; bizarre Contra-like Duck Game, the beautiful, Limbo-like indie puzzle-platformer Rain World; and a new, futuristic platformer from Double Fine, with apparent Oddworld inspirations, titled Head Lander. Double Fine's Tim Schafer took the stage shortly afterward to show off authentic-looking footage of its previously announced Day of the Tentacle remaster—meaning, the original game's 2D art completely cleaned up, as opposed to blatantly redrawn—which also got a release date for PlayStation 4 and Vita: March 16, 2016.

To keep the remaster train going, Schafer also announced Full Throttle Remastered, which will launch on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita on an unspecified date. And Psychonauts: The Rhombus of Ruin was announced as a PlayStation VR exclusive, and totally independent of the Psychonauts 2 crowdfunding campaign that was announced earlier this week. Neither of those announcements came with screenshots or footage.

Street Fighter V lead designer Yoshinori Oro took the stage to reveal the 2016 game's final default fighter, a cape-draped, goatee-sporting weirdo named F.A.N.G., and he also announced the first list of DLC characters coming to the game throughout 2016, all of whom come back from classic Street Fighter games: Alex, Guile, Balrog, Ibuki, Juri, and Urien. '90s fighter fans also learned that PlayStation 4 would be the console-exclusive home of the next SNK fighting game, King of Fighters 14, though no date was announced for its launch.

The PSX show floor is covered in PlayStation VR demo kiosks, and we imagine those will be a better way to experience the company's upcoming virtual reality offerings than the awkward battle-game demo we saw at the keynote. In that demo, two men tried and failed to throw attacks at each other across a virtual room. Shortly after that demo, however, Sony had quite the VR announcement: Rez, the trippy Q Entertainment rhythm-action classic, will be coming to PlayStation VR as Rez Infinite. The keynote presentation showed game creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi (wearing a very odd outfit apparently made of something shiny) controlling the action by looking around, with headset on, to aim his laser shots.

Sony announced that Harmonix will have a VR "rhythm game" coming to PlayStation VR (though no telling if it will resemble the Rock Band VR game being co-produced with Oculus Studios), while one of Ars' favorite VR games for the HTC Vive, Job Simulator, was newly announced as a PlayStation VR game, as well. Sony's own Modern Zombie Taxi Co appeared to be a VR take on Crazy Taxi, in which players pick up and drop off silly-sounding zombies through a cartoony town.

All of those paled, at least in terms of crowd response, compared to the newly announced game 100 Foot Robot Golf, which, as you might guess, had giant robots play games of golf through huge cities as if they were Godzillas (and could smack each other around between drives and putts). Sony's VR keynote content concluded with the reveal of Ace Combat 7, which was announced as a PlayStation VR exclusive.

We're in San Francisco to try out as many of these games as possible on the PlayStation Experience show floor all weekend long. Keep it tuned here for our impressions of new games for PlayStation VR and PlayStation 4—along with our sadness over the apparent death of content for our beloved little PlayStation Vita portable systems (which only got love during the keynote from Double Fine's announced remasters).

Listing image by Square Enix