Metaphor: ReFantazio has been a long time in the making. It was announced in 2017 as Project re Fantasy through a weird long video that said very little. Since then, Atlus has swapped the Project for Metaphor and scoured Google Translate to find a cool way to say'fantasy.' It's also made a giant fantasy JRPG -- and after rolling through a demo at Summer Game Fest last weekend, I'm dying to play it. ReFantazio is the first original title by Studio Zero, a relatively new Atlus division headed up by Katsura Hashino.

This week has felt like a month worth of news, now that we've wrapped up Apple's WWDC 2024 and Summer Game Fest in LA. In this episode, Cherlynn and Devindra discuss their final thoughts on Apple Intelligence and the company's upcoming software, and they chat about some of our coverage highlights from the pseudo-E3 Game Fest. Also, we dive into X making likes private (what is Elon hiding?!) and the news around Sony buying the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain. Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News! Summer Games Fest highlights: Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, LEGO Horizon Adventures, and an Assassin's Creed finally set in Japan – 25:06 X makes users' likes private – 40:27 Devindra: We are back from Apple's WWDC, and we have thoughts. And I feel like, It's just one of those whirlwind things. Both Trillin and I got back in from California yesterday. After recording this, I still feel like my body doesn't know, like, where I'm in, Trillin, or what time zone. I don't know how you feel. Cherlynn: I went to the gym at 8 a. m. Devindra: I like how you fit in the humble brag there. We're also going to be talking about Summer Game Fest, folks. We weren't there for that and I was trying to get Jess Condit on, but she's super busy still writing up stuff from that. So we have got a lot of coverage around that and there's some stories I want to highlight that Engadget has done. Also some games that looks pretty cool. Also joining us this morning is podcast producer Ben Ellman, who I'm sure has thoughts on Apple and the game stuff. And [00:01:00] as always, folks, if you're enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcast or of choice, leave us a review in iTunes. I would love to answer some reader questions. You can also typically join us Thursday mornings around 10 30 a. m. It's just like about scheduling, but that's about the time you can carve out in your schedule for us. You could see us on video. Sometimes we'll demo gadgets and We'll just have a great Q and a session too. I do want to point out if you're just listening to this episode, we did do a bonus episode at Apple's campus and it actually turned out pretty well because for Lynn and I were like right outside the, was it the Mac cafe or cafe Mac? But we were outdoors surrounded by traffic and other noise, but it actually ended up sounding pretty good.

Day of the Devs is always one of the biggest highlights of Summer Game Fest and The Game Awards. The showcase places the spotlight firmly on emerging indie games and underground titles, and each event always has at least a few projects that are worth adding to your wishlist. Now, Day of the Devs is shaking things up by becoming an independent non-profit organization. It started in 2012 as a collaboration between iam8bit and Double Fine, which Microsoft bought in 2019. The restructuring means that Day of the Devs will no longer have a formal affiliation with Microsoft and has more leeway to do its own thing while becoming truly platform agnostic.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3, is officially dead. "After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories," the Entertainment Software Association, E3's organizer, wrote on X. The industry trade group wrote closed out the statement with "GGWP" or "good game, well played." E3's troubles have been well documented in recent years, with the pandemic arguably exacerbating the video game expo's demise.

Madison Karrh's booth at Summer Game Fest 2022 was on the far right side of the demo area, hugging a wall at the front of the small industrial space in downtown Los Angeles. Her game, Birth, was one of the first projects you'd see after grabbing a swag bag, but it was easy to overlook in a sea of neon pixels and mainstream names like Street Fighter, Cuphead and Sonic. Birth is a thoughtful game of bones, puzzles, loneliness and decay, rendered in earth tones and captivating, hand-drawn vignettes. In a Day of the Devs cluster at Summer Game Fest, the Birth booth was a bubble of respite from the fast action showcased on surrounding screens. "Showing Birth at conventions feels like putting my whole, raw, beating heart on a table in front of a bunch of strangers and asking if it is enough for them," Karrh told me a few months after Summer Game Fest. Birth is, essentially, a game about death.

In the interim, other events, such as The Game Awards and Summer Game Fest have grown in prominence. Both are hosted and organized by Geoff Keighley, a longtime host at E3 until 2020 when he announced that he would not be returning to the trade show, citing concerns about its lack of innovation. Keighley's Summer Game Fest in 2021 was a resounding success: The show received over 25 million live streams with a peak of 3 million concurrent viewers globally, according to figures shared with The Washington Post, and it hosted the first gameplay reveal of FromSoftware's mega hit, "Elden Ring." Despite both Summer Game Fest and E3 both being slated for June 2023, Keighley has maintained that the two events are not competitors.

We're 19 months into a fresh console cycle and support for the PS4 and Xbox One is finally tapering off as developers shift focus to the PS5, Xbox Series X and PC cloud gaming platforms. The pandemic slowed or paused development on a generation of games, and studios of all sizes are being absorbed by the biggest names in the room. The industry is in flux and the rest of the year reflects this instability. Put simply, there aren't a lot of huge games coming out in the second half of 2022. Right now, the video game space is made up of delays, big promises and more delays.

It's early Monday morning for most of you, but the work week started early for Engadget, with Xbox's big Summer Game Fest showing. Given how many game studios Microsoft now has for its consoles and game streaming service, we were expecting a whole bunch of announcements, trailers and things to have strong opinions on. There were plenty of familiar Xbox reveals -- more Forza announcements, for one -- as well as major updates from Blizzard Activision (soon to be part of the Microsoft family) regarding Overwatch 2 (free to play!) and Diablo IV. Bethesda finally had something more substantial to reveal for its next big game, Starfield. A first look into the game had a lot of No Man's Sky vibes, but with this studio's flair for glossy world-building and narrative.

It's June, and video game fans across the globe know what that means – it's not E3. The old, in-person gaming show has been canceled for the third year in a row, but this summer will still be filled with news and virtual events, thanks in large part to Canada's sweetheart Geoff Keighley. It all takes place in early June, which is like right now, so let's take a look at the schedule for Summer Game Fest and break down what to expect from the studios involved. Summer Game Fest is less a singular event and more a state of mind. It comprises a handful of virtual shows spread over 10 days, starting on June 2nd with the PlayStation State of Play stream.

You'll find no bigger fan than me of what E3 represented to the industry. And I went to it for 25 years,