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Battles

Monks appear at Grog Hill.
Game Reviews

Players Are Getting Jump-Scared By One OfFinal Fantasy Tactics’ Most Iconic Battles All Over Again

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There’s a special battle in Final Fantasy Tactics that’s been punishing unsuspecting players for generations. Thanks to The Ivalice Chronicles remaster, fresh recruits can witness the joy and terror of randomly getting jumped by 11 monks in one of the strategy RPG’s lesser-known endgame challenges.

Every spot on the map in Final Fantasy Tactics comes with an array of random encounters the game can pull from depending on which side you enter from and how far along you are in the story. Once you hit Chapter 4, the game’s “rare” random encounters become accessible. These special battles are weird, hard, and memorable. None more so than the 11-Monk brawl on Grogh Heights (known in the original PS1 version as Grog Hill). They hit hard and have great range thanks to the Monk’s versatile Martial Arts abilities. God help you if you accidentally drop into the battle while trying to train your squad up on weaker jobs they don’t have many abilities for.

Fans on the Final Fantasy Tactics subreddit have been posting about these Monks for years. Every so often, someone new to the game takes a photo, uploads it in a thread, and writes something to the effect of “WTF?” Community hero Kronikle has been cataloging every instance and posting each of them under every new thread. This happened again over the weekend.

“Homie really pulled up with the receipts,” wrote one fan in response. “Dude replies this every time and adds to it. It’s my most favorite thing ever on this subreddit,” wrote another. A third chimed in, “gotta respect the dedication.”

While the Monks are arguably the game’s most absurd rare battle, there’s close to a dozen others scattered across the map, each with a chance of occurring when you walk to that specific point from the right direction. A small army of Calculators can spawn at Lenalia Plateau, Yuguo Woods can spawn seven Samurai, and Germinas Peak can spawn a group of Chemists and Orators with powerful guns worth stealing. Certain rare monsters like Tiamats can only spawn in the Bariaus Valley rare battle.

Some players seek these fights out in order to farm abilities off the crystals the enemies drop. Others just like the added challenge and variety. Most story battles in Final Fantasy Tactics only draw from a very limited pool of Jobs, making the rare battles extra fun. Fortunately, with the Enhanced mode’s ability to retry and flee battles, you’ll never have to worry about seeing hours of progress get wiped out this way.



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Capcom wants Resident Evil Requiem boss battles to test your wits rather than your shooting skill
Game Updates

Capcom wants Resident Evil Requiem boss battles to test your wits rather than your shooting skill

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Capcom has said it’s looking more to the original Resident Evil games for ideas about how to challenge players with boss battles in the ninth Resident Evil game, Requiem.

Specifically, game director Koshi Nakanishi said he wants to test your wits rather than shooting ability.

“Of course there will be boss battles,” Nakanishi told Automaton. “However, rather than defeating enemies in a flashy manner as you progress through the game, like in games that emphasise gun shooting action, the style is more like Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2, where players expand their exploration area in a closed space and overcome obstacles using their wits.”

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The game’s new protagonist, Grace Ashcroft, is central to this. Unlike Leon Kennedy, she isn’t a veteran killer with hardened nerves, so she won’t immediately be capable of gunning down hordes of undead. Nakanishi has said before that Leon Kennedy is “actually quite a bad match for horror”. So unlike Kennedy, Ascroft will start the game as quite defenceless. But she will learn.

“One thing that’s so appealing about the Resident Evil series is that characters who are initially terrified grow stronger as they gain experience in extreme situations,” Nakanishi said. “Grace is scared at first, but the situation eventually causes her to snap, and she becomes able to fight her enemies.”

We had a chance to sit down with Nakanishi at Gamescom to talk about pacing. Alex thinks Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is one of the best-paced entries in the series, and Nakanishi directed that game as well. “My approach is the same this time…” Nakanishi said, before launching into a longer explanation.

Resident Evil Requiem launches at the beginning of next year, on 27th February.



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Crypto Trends

Crypto Market Battles Sea of Red and Growing Fear, But HYPE Floats

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In brief

  • Hyperliquid surges 9.26% to $44.11 as the only top 10 crypto in green while the rest of the market tanks 1.8%.
  • BNB drops 0.14% to $947.55, as the worst performer in top 10 after the Aster-driven spike fades.
  • The Crypto Fear and Greed Index marks the most bearish reading since April. Here’s what the charts say traders can expect.

The crypto market is nursing a nasty hangover after a major panic episode earlier this week, with the total market cap of crypto sliding 1.8% to $3.75 trillion as the infamous Red September curse threatens to claim another victim.

Yet in this sea of red, there’s at least one token staying afloat: Hyperliquid’s HYPE is up a defiant 9.26% and standing as the only cryptocurrency in the top 11 showing green on the day.

Meanwhile, traditional markets are playing a different tune entirely—the S&P 500 edged up 0.22% to 6,619 points while gold climbed 0.33% to $3,762 per ounce, showing investors still have appetite for some risk assets, just not crypto risk—at least not right now. What’s more, President Donald Trump announced a package of tariffs set to take effect October 1, which has the potential to send risk assets scrambling for cover.

The Crypto Fear and Greed Index has plunged to 28, firmly in “fear” territory and the most pessimistic reading since April, when Trump’s previous tariff announcements sent markets into a tailspin.



Even still, there’s a fascinating subplot unfolding in the perpetual futures DEX wars that’s turning conventional wisdom on its head.

Hyperliquid price: The HYPE is back?

While its rival Aster has been stealing headlines with a jaw-dropping surge since its launch last week, Hyperliquid is quietly mounting its own comeback.

Hyperliquid is both its layer-1 blockchain network and a decentralized exchange that specializes in perpetual futures—derivatives contracts that never expire and allow crypto traders to both hedge risk and essentially bet on the future price of digital assets, such as Bitcoin.

The exchange is powered by a token of the same name, which trades as HYPE, and both the exchange and the token have experienced a rush of interest over the last several months. For context, despite the recent ups and downs, HYPE is up more than 20% in the last three months and up close to 600% in the last year, currently commanding an impressive $12.2 billion market cap.

The Hyperliquid token surged today from a low of $40.376 to its current price of $44.114, representing a 9.26% gain in a market where everything else is bleeding.

Hyperliquid (HYPE) price. Image: Tradingview

Looking at the technical breakdown, HYPE is displaying the sort of behavior that traders would interpret as potentially the end of a major correction. The price of the coin, after all, is down close to 10% in the last 30 days.

The Relative Strength Index, or RSI, is one such technical indicator that traders rely on. RSI measures price momentum on a scale from 0 to 100, where readings above 70 signal overbought conditions and below 30 suggesting oversold.

Hyperliquid sits at 41—technically bearish territory, but here’s what traders need to understand: After a token corrects from $56 to $40, an RSI at 41 actually signals healthy consolidation rather than weakness. This is like a reload zone where smart money accumulates before the next leg up. Traders typically see RSI readings between 30-45 after major corrections—notice the chart is still on an upwards trajectory—as buying opportunities rather than sell signals.

The Average Directional Index, or ADX, for HYPE is at 29, which shows strengthening trend momentum. ADX measures how strong a price trend is regardless of direction—readings above 25 confirm an established trend, and at 29, we’re seeing HYPE break out of its consolidation phase. The major dip cooled the ADX a lot, but still wasn’t enough to wipe out the upward trend in place.

Exponential moving averages, or EMAs, give traders a sense of price resistances and supports by taking the average price of an asset over the short, medium, and long term. Hyperliquid is still a young coin, without the trading history of an asset like Bitcoin, but the EMA picture appears bullish.

At the moment, HYPE’s 50-day EMA is sitting above its 200-day EMA, meaning the average price over the short term is still higher than the average price over the long term. This configuration typically signals that short-term momentum is overpowering long-term pessimism, suggesting the path of least resistance is higher.

But as a warning sign, the gap between both EMAs is closing, which could potentially lead to a death cross formation (when the EMA50 moves below the EMA200). In this scenario, some traders may opt to set up buy orders near the EMA200 for those thinking the token may continue its bearish correction before bouncing.

On Myriad, a prediction market developed by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, sentiment on HYPE hasn’t yet reached the bullishness exhibited in the charts. At the moment, Myriad traders don’t expect the price of HYPE to rise to $69 any time soon, placing those odds at just 30% when measured against the odds of it dropping below the $40 mark.

Key Levels:

  • Immediate support: $36.00 (EMA200)
  • Strong support: $28.00 (visible on the chart as previous resistance)
  • Immediate resistance: $48.00 (EMA50)
  • Strong resistance: $$56.00 (previous high zone)

BNB price: Paying the price for Aster’s success

The story of BNB today is a classic “sell the news” scenario, as the Binance-issued token drops 4.23% to $947.55 in the last 24 hours, making it the worst performer among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

As discussed earlier this week on Decrypt, BNB had been on fire lately, and was on Tuesday the only coin in the top 10 by market cap in the green. Much of the price movement could be attributed to an increase in activity on the BNB network as a result of the explosive growth of Aster, a Hyperliquid competitor on the BNB Chain.

But, as we’ve seen so many times in markets: what goes up, must eventually come down. And at the moment, the, er, hype around Aster has slowed. And BNB now appears to be taking a hit as a result.

BNB price. Image: Tradingview

BNB’s RSI is at 51, which sits right at neutral and typically indicates a market in equilibrium waiting for the next catalyst. For traders, this dead-center reading often precedes sharp moves in either direction as the market breaks out of indecision.

The ADX at 36 confirms a strong established trend, but the Squeeze Momentum Indicator shows a bearish impulse in underway.

When ADX is high but momentum is bearish, it typically means sellers are in control and dip buyers should be cautious. This combination often results in continued pressure until ADX drops below 25, signaling trend exhaustion.

Looking at the price action on the chart, BNB opened the day around $946, reached a high near $959, but has since retreated to $947.55. Today’s doji (a candlestick with no body, basically showing that the opening and closing prices are almost the same)shows significant volatility and selling pressure at round number resistance. The 50-day EMA sits well above the 200-day EMA, maintaining a bullish longer-term structure, but the immediate price action below both the opening price and the psychological $960 level suggests near-term weakness.

The catalyst for BNB’s initial surge was clear: BNB Chain’s 24-hour perpetual volume stands at $36 billion, overtaking Hyperliquid’s $10.8 billion, driven primarily by the meteoric rise of Aster. However, today’s correction suggests traders are taking profits on the Aster-driven rally.

Image: Dune

Key Levels:

  • Immediate support: $920 (visible support on chart)
  • Strong support: $880-$900 (EMA50l)
  • Immediate resistance: $1,000-$1,080 (psychological round number and all-time high)

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.

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Pokemon Legends Z-A's new structure and battles have the power to make a Pikachu terrifying - hands-on
Game Reviews

Pokemon Legends Z-A’s new structure and battles have the power to make a Pikachu terrifying – hands-on

by admin


Even after a little under an hour of hands-on play, it’s clear that Pokemon Legends: Z-A is the most interesting and unique Pokemon title since, er… the last one of these, when Game Freak and The Pokemon Company put out 2022’s Pokemon Legends: Arceus. Now established as what looks like a permanent secondary strand of the ‘main line’ Pokemon titles, Z-A continues with the more bold and experimental development philosophy of Arceus – though this time, I expect further temerity of design – and with it, perhaps a more mixed measure of success.

Back when Legends: Arceus was released, we at VG247 were positively frothing with excitement at the thought of where this series could go. Seeing Z-A, we clearly approached this differently to Pokemon’s developer stewards. We envisioned ‘Legends’ coming to mean Pokemon stories set in the past – Galar as Victorian England, Unova’s Poke-New York in the roaring 20s, or Kalos in the grip of a less bloodless version of the French Revolution where the people and nobility settled matters with Pokemon battles.

In the end we did get Pokemon’s version of France, but not during the revolution. Z-A is once again set in Pokemon’s version of ‘today’, but this time it has a unique twist: the entire game is set in one enormous city, leveraging the status of Paris (in Pokemon’s world known as Lumiose City) as a major built-up area to provide a network of buildings, backstreets, tiny city parks and the like as a new sort of Pokemon world. In this, the spirit of Legends: Arceus is alive but in a mirror image – that game was sparse, full of rolling fields and the like where you’d crawl through long grass to try to surprise an unsuspecting critter or trainer. Z-A is dense, and while things like stealth still exist you’ll instead be hiding around the corner of buildings or behind a parked car.

There is a structural difference to the design of the world, then – but the real significant change comes in combat. For the first time in such a prominent Pokemon release, Z-A shifts to real-time battles. This is still absolutely a role-playing game – but battles now have an extra shot of action-like feeling to them.

Starter for 10-year-olds. | Image credit: Pokemon/Nintendo

Moves are no longer limited by ‘PP’ which drains with each use, for instance – they’re now on a cooldown. New alongside this shift is the fact that battle placement matters – if a Pokemon isn’t physically in the way of a move, that attack will simply whiff. Those previously-mentioned narrow city streets make tactical battlegrounds; a parked taxi is suddenly not just set dressing, but something you as a trainer or your Pokemon can duck behind to avoid incoming attacks.

The act of moment-to-moment play feels a little more segmented, too. The city is a civilized place, so battles can’t happen just anywhere. ‘Wild Zones’ are designated areas where untamed Pokemon roam free, and this is where you’ll be able to enter to catch and battle unaccompanied Pokemon.

Once night falls, trainers can head to the similarly-defined Battle Zones for fights. This is where the titular Z-A Royale takes place: the protagonist tasked with battling their way up from Rank Z through to Rank A. Gym showdowns are replaced with ‘promotion matches’ – gather enough points by defeating opponents in Battle Zones and you’ll gain a ticket that can then be used to go and fight a specific challenger in order to rank up.

The structural change is relatively fascinating and feels like it’ll satisfy. Such regimented segmentation always has the risk of feeling suffocating, but in this hands-on it all tracks and makes sense – and within each zone, some delightful moments await.

Gotta match em all up. | Image credit: Nintendo

I enjoyed, for instance, how perilous the Wild Zone I got to test could feel. The majority of Pokemon there were breezy to battle and acquire, and catching in particular feels more kind in this game because you get a shot (though no guarantee) at catching any defeated wild Pokemon even if you deplete all of their HP. This leads to a generally chill time that channels tooling around the world of Legends: Arceus chain-catching stuff looking for shinies. But then when exploring I clamber atop a rooftop and discover a high-level ‘Alpha’ Pikachu. Its eyes glow red, and it’s absolutely feral.

I try to fight it, expecting the usual Pokemon stuff – being relatively able to cheese through such a fight with healing items and the like. My notes tell a different story. Scrawled hurriedly in my notepad is the following, with grammar tidied and one word not suitable for a preview of a game for children replaced with a bit of blasphemy: “Terrifying level 40 Pikachu. Careful strength and weakness use gives you a chance. Actually, it’s too hard. Oh god, it followed me off the rooftop.”

It’s in this moment, jumping off a rooftop to what I think is safety only to be followed by this hulking, evil Pikachu, that Z-A most thoroughly clicks. Though it feels like tradition with Pokemon, such emotions do inevitably come with caveats.

For one, let’s talk about those environments. They shine in the battle zones, where those tight city streets lend themselves well to light-touch stealth encounters. Back in 1996, Pokemon introduced the concept of line-of-sight between Pokemon trainers initiating battle. If you meet gazes, you fight. Here, in an action RPG, with seamless fights, that concept comes to a pretty glorious natural conclusion. The tall grass stalking of the last game is a foundation; you add to that an urban labyrinth and you’re crouching behind a parked vehicle, or a conveniently-placed crate, waiting for a trainer to turn their back in order to land a sneak attack. Missions given to you in Battle Zones encourage you to engage in such tactics, too. In exploration, the fact you’re using such moves in real time out in the world means the act of using classic Pokemon skills to open up new areas and such feels much more organic than ever before.

But then there’s the flip side: in battle, these things are as much a frustrating obstacle as they are a tactical boon. I watched as a breathtakingly thick Pokemon took my orders to directly attack the enemy as one to stand behind a parked vehicle and whiff its key attack into it, because the enemy was on the other side. The world oscillates in that sense; the brilliance of simple stealth, but then frustration in combat. How static and dead it can often feel, but then a real sense of explorative joy when you stand high on a rooftop and see a distant collectible elsewhere in the city’s sprawl.

Hippos on the roof!? | Image credit: Nintendo

I guess what I’m saying is that it feels like Pokemon, right? These games have long felt like a jumble of strange and fascinating contradictions; of boons and trade-offs. Legends: Z-A feels like it too will strike that balance; sometimes brilliant, sometimes frustrating, but always strangely gripping.

All of this is said, of course, from the standpoint of an extremely short hands-on experience. These games run to as much as 40x longer than what I played; and so it is too early to judge. What I see, in the end, is Pokemon’s caretakers taking a characteristically large swing – with equally characteristic restraint. The result seems to me to be most likely more reminiscent of Legends: Arceus than not – and for my money, that was the best Pokemon game in 20 years. It perhaps is therefore no surprise that I’m eagerly awaiting its release next month – when I can judge the complete package in full.



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Winklevoss Twins Heave $21M Toward Republicans in Next Year's Congressional Battles
Crypto Trends

Winklevoss Twins Heave $21M Toward Republicans in Next Year’s Congressional Battles

by admin



Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss said they’re spending $21 million to continue the crypto policy momentum led by Republican lawmakers, countering a wider industry effort that’s carefully supporting politicians from both major parties.

The U.S. congressional midterm elections are approaching next year, and they promise an intense political clash that could leave President Donald Trump without the Republican control of Congress that’s helped him push crypto policy past the finish line. The brothers are giving to the Digital Freedom Fund political action committee to support GOP candidates, they said on Wednesday.

The contribution made in bitcoin

“will identify and support champions of President Trump’s crypto agenda in primary races and the midterm elections,” Tyler Winklevoss said in a post on social media site X. If Democrats prevail in the midterms, as opposition parties often do in the middle of a presidential term, Winklevoss said they’ll get in the way of the Trump agenda.

“We know from their past behavior that they will resort to whatever bad faith tactics and tricks they can think of (e.g., bogus impeachments, lawfare, etc.) to try to derail the President,” he wrote.

The brothers who run the Gemini crypto exchange and have become a fixture at White House crypto events and have been publicly praised by Trump, but their endorsement of Republicans runs afoul of the industry’s wider insistence that crypto policy is bipartisan and that politicians from both parties should be supported as long as they favor the sector.

In last year’s consequential congressional elections, the crypto industry erected an unprecedented tower of campaign cash in the Fairshake PAC and its affiliates, outspending other industries and even rivaling the big party-led PACs. The binge of campaign spending resulted in dozens of political victories that helped pad the industry’s level of support in the current Congress, which has moved rapidly to support digital assets initiatives — most notably the recently passed Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.

Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican who now chairs the Senate Banking Committee, thanked the industry for unseating former Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who previously ran the committee, on Tuesday at SALT Wyoming.

Fairshake, which has already amassed $141 million for the next congressional elections after a recent $25 million bump from Coinbase, has split its allegiances deliberately between the parties. The industry has long pushed the talking point that its aims are nonpartisan, and Fairshake’s affiliates sought to underline that position by supporting both Democrat and Republican candidates who are willing to champion crypto bills.

The super PAC favored by the Winklevoss brothers was formed last month, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and hasn’t yet disclosed its donor activity. It’s set up to spend money independently, meaning the campaigns it weighs into can’t have any direct involvement with the PAC’s spending decisions. That super PAC structure also lets it spend unlimited amounts, such as the tens of millions the industry expended in places like Ohio and California last year.

The Winklevosses are pursuing U.S. crypto market structure oversight that “avoids the pitfalls of overregulation, bloated licensing regimes, and increased red tape that only serves to choke off innovation, grow the Regulatory Industrial Complex, and empower the swamp,” Tyler wrote.

This marks a second recent development in which the men behind Gemini are going their own way from the bulk of their industry. Tyler Winklevoss stood up as a major critic of President Trump’s nominee to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brian Quintenz. All of the leading crypto lobbying groups sent a letter to Trump on Wednesday in vigorous support of Quintenz, who used to be a policy executive at a16z.



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