We tend to remember E3s not for the moments of triumph but those more commonplace, faintly tragic and often very comic interludes we set our watches by the start of every summer: Kudo Tsunoda’s ‘Bam, there it is’ that killed off Kinect before it’d even properly launched; Mr Caffeine and his poop on your toothpaste; pretty much everything that unfurled in the theatre Konami booked out for its 2010 E3 presser.
Add to that ever-growing list the reveal of Final Fantasy spin-off Stranger of Paradise during Square’s show on Sunday night. I’d assumed the move away from a live show would mean a move away from the awkward theatrics that once defined E3, but how gloriously wrong I was: in the announcement trailer that seemed to stumble forth from a different era entirely, we got an entire conference’s worth of cringe crammed into two and a half minutes. It was spectacular.
It didn’t stop there, either. The PS5 demo that was due to hit the PlayStation Store in the immediate aftermath of the show did turn up on time. The only problem was, it was corrupted – a problem that persisted for an entire 24 hours before finally being addressed earlier today. All of which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it?
