When a Japanese developer wants to dig up a long-abandoned franchise and market it to westerners, one common tactic is to outsource it to a western developer. Sometimes, especially in the 2000s, this came with a mandate to make the series relevant to gamers looking for some hard-boiled nihilism, and the results stand as monuments to a strange era of gaming defined mostly by Grand Theft Auto making piles of cash. With help from PNB Podcast's TL Foster, let's look at five of the grittiest reboots of (already gritty) Japanese classics, after which we'll blast off to Outer Wilds and Void Bastards, catch some Pokémon news, and look at the features you wish more games would copy.
