FF7 Rebirth slated for winter 2023:

Some news has come out concerning the Final Fantasy Remake.  There will be three games in all, and the second is slated for winter of 2023.  Crisis Core, a spinoff featuring Cloud's predecessor Zack is slated for release this winter.  It's probably going to be a good game too.  I don't know how they'll squeeze all of FF7 into three games considering how little ground they covered in the first, but I'm sure it will work out somehow.  Most likely the plot will be radically altered from the original so it will no longer have to cover everything.

The winter of 2023 is a long ways away.  FF7 Remake came out in April of 2020, so that's three and a half years (if the launch isn't delayed).  This for a game where all the music, character models, plot, everything was already finished.  Only the actual high definition graphics needed to be newly created, but still it takes this long.  I don't get the reasoning behind this.  If it's a tedious, time-consuming process, hire more people and have them work in parallel.  Break the game down into small parts -- you build this house, you build this monster, etc., until everything is built, then put it together.  The game could be finished in a week if you did it that way.  Instead we're waiting 3.5 years?  What is the bottleneck?

Ironically, if FF7 Rebirth had a reasonable release schedule, like say a year after Remake, I couldn't have played it anyway, because there are no PS5's with which to play the game.  Maybe Square Enix decided there was no purpose releasing the game when no one could get the console it is designed for anyway.  Sony says it's going to make PS5's available for the masses soon, but I'll believe it when I see it.

One game I can play is Fire Emblem: Three Houses.  I finished the Verdant Wind route on Maddening-Classic difficulty, the highest level difficulty.  Now I'm working on Silver Snow.  If I can beat this route I'll have beaten the entire game at the highest difficulty level, which essentially means beating the game.  But even beating the game won't be enough for me.  I've reached S+ skill level on every trainable skill for my protagonist, Byleth, but I haven't yet mastered every class and unlocked their unique class skills (or seen them in action by actually using them.)  So there's still more to do even after I've beaten the game.  The fact that the game is this replayable and can occupy me for this long really does make it the best game ever made.  FF7 Remake certainly is the better story, but as a game Fire Emblem prevails.  Games are meant to be played and I can play Fire Emblem forever.

I'm also watching the new Disney+ series, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ms. Marvel.  They're both decent, at least better than the sequel Star Wars movies.  But at one episode a week the plot certainly crawls along.

The third season of Honzuki no Gekokujo is already over, but it ended with a 'to be continued' promise.  There's no telling when it will be continued, but these promises tend to work out.  They promised Sailor Moon would be continued in the same manner, and eventually Sailor Moon Cosmos was revealed as in development.  I'm always eager for more Honzuki.