Welcome to Waypoint's End of Year celebration! This year, we're digging deep into our favorite games with dedicated podcasts, interviewing each other about our personal top 10 lists, and reflecting on the year with essays from the staff and some of our favorite freelance contributors. Check out the entire package right here!
I feel dumb that the bumper music was made by some fellow named Mellow. I legitimately thought they were using Gaur Plains from Xenoblade 1.
My prediction:
Death Stranding will be divisive.
Thank you, thank you… I’ll take my wizard award now, please.
I am super excited about Ace Combat 7 Mech Warrior 5 and Mount and Blade Bannerlord also whatever random indie sleeper hit pops up to surprise me this coming year.
P.S. I also really want Hearts of Iron 4 Man the Guns, I don’t even remember what content its adding but HOI4 is now my most played game on steam.
I’m super curious to dust off my VR Goggles and play, Ace Combat 7 and Sword and Sorcery.
I remember Elite Dangerous was the only VR game to give me a sick feeling, so I can’t imagine how Ace Combat is gonna make me feel. :S
With talk of labor in Smash Brothers I do need to share this video
Strangely I think the first 3 games I’m going to buy in 2019 (not counting Sekiro, which I have already paid money for) are Tales of Vesperia (remaster?), Resident Evil 2 (remake?), and the PS4 release of Trails of Cold Steel 1 (re…master?).
As an individual whose opinion on Metal Gear Solid series can be divisive, yeah. On the other hand, I would keep prediction for 2020 given that I can hardly see it coming out within 2019.
Resident Evil 2, Ace Combat 7, Sekiro and Anthem, all pre ordered on PC…2019 is going to be busy on this front.
WARNING: THIS IS KINDA OFF-TOPIC
OK, so this started as just a clarification on the Shonen Jump thing Austin mentioned, but became a much bigger thing. Skip to the bolded text if you just want more info about the current state of Shonen Jump
This is not thoroughly researched, so definitely correct me when I’m wrong.
So, Weekly Shonen Jump is a japanese publication that collects shonen (the young boy demographic) manga like Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Yu Yu Hakusho, Yu-Gi-Oh!, etc. (not all at the same time though, those are just some highlights). New chapters are published weekly.
Similar to anime fansubs, a huge part of the propagation of manga outside of Japan has been through illegal uploads online with translated text, called “scanlations” for manga. Scanlations became so prevalent because it used to be the case that there was a huge time difference between when the chapters would be published in Japan and when they would be available officially outside of Japan. This was because the official translations would be of the collected editions of the manga, which would collect around 10-ish chapters, which takes 10+ weeks to release. Scanlations could shorten that time to weeks, and could release each new chapter at shorter intervals.
So. In 2002, a translated, monthly, printed version of WSJ (this will always be Weekly Shonen Jump over the Wall Street Journal for me) called Shonen Jump began being published in the North America collecting a month’s worth of chapters for both finished and currently ongoing series (not necessarily that month’s chapters, and not all the series that WSJ would run. Despite this, scanlations never disappeared because of how much easier, cheaper, and faster they were. I still have a copy of the first issue of the English Shonen Jump that I got in second grade.
Fast forward to 2012 when the monthly, translated, print Shonen Jump ended, and the digital Weekly Shonen Jump began being published in North America, and by 2013, was international, and published simultaneously with Japan (though not all the series in the Japanese version would appear in the international version, and vice versa). Again, people still used/use scanlations because it’s free, and leaks of chapters from printed versions during transportation result in scanlations often coming out even earlier.
This is where you should start reading if you just want the meat of it.
Now, smash cut to 2018. The digital Weekly Shonen Jump ends, and the new Shonen Jump begins (at least in certain areas). All new chapters are published online for free, and for USD 1.99 a month, you get access to the back catalogue of all chapters of all series that have been published in English by Shonen Jump, with a limit of reading 100 chapters a day.
What does this mean for scanlations? Who even knows. One can only hope that the people that can are motivated to pay for the service so that more money can go to the mangaka (the manga artist), their assistants, and everyone else that puts effort into the publication.
I’ve written too much already, so I’m not gonna talk about the stuff I’m super not familiar with, but I’ve been into American comics for a while now and the difference between publication approaches is staggering (see Colin Spacetwinks’ twitter if you wanna see someone go in hard on the American comics industry)
On another note on Jump Force, I was hoping for at least a caveat from Austin on the inclusion of Rurouni Kenshin characters, and Shonen Jump’s response to the creator. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I found an article here discussing it here:
If the site decides to do more in depth coverage of Jump Force, I hope you’ll consider speaking about that.
