Gaming Weekly: Tarnished Edition Comes to Switch 2, Onimusha Returns, Gamescom Wraps#

Long Zhiri | August 31, 2026

Hello everyone, Long Zhiri here. As I write this, it’s the afternoon of August’s last day outside my window, and Shanghai’s cicadas are finally showing signs of an exit. The newsroom ran hotter than the weather this week — Gamescom in Cologne wrapped first, then the Tarnished Edition burst out of nowhere, then Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy and Star Wars Zero Company became talking points one after another. By week’s end, several of us were nearly hoarse from arguing.

This weekly column has quietly passed its first month. Since that World Cup night in late July, every Sunday evening I’ve laid out the newsroom’s back-and-forths and talked them through with you. This issue opens with the protagonist that cost the entire newsroom two hours of sleep that night.

A word up front: this was not the easiest week to write a weekly report — precisely because it was so full. Good content never fears volume; it fears losing the point in the noise. So this issue picks only the four topics most worth discussing, and the leftover scraps all go into the quick hits near the end.

The Tarnished Edition Is Here: The Lands Between Moves Into a Handheld for the First Time#

The heaviest news of the week is none other than Elden Ring’s Tarnished Edition landing on Switch 2.

FromSoftware and Bandai Namco have brought the open-world action RPG that put countless players through the wringer onto Nintendo’s new console. The Tarnished Edition is no bare port — it bundles the base game and the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion in one go, and adds entirely new content: two new starting classes, four new armor sets, and the ability to change the spectral steed Torrent’s appearance.

The story starts with a message in the group chat. Late that night, Zixing forwarded leaked Switch 2 gameplay footage with a caption: “The Lands Between is on a handheld, and the frame rate is actually holding steady.”

The newsroom exploded instantly.

Zixing was the first to calm down and run the numbers: “This isn’t just ‘playable.’ The whole thing comes down to two words — stable frame rate. The Tarnished Edition was developed with handheld performance optimization baked in, miles beyond that early test build that dragged on for two years. This is what decides a handheld experience’s ceiling — however good it looks, dropped frames kill it.”

Wubian added: “And this release is synced across all platforms. It’s not just Switch 2 — veterans on other platforms can buy the standalone Tarnished bundle and pick up the new starting classes and armor. FromSoft learned Capcom’s ‘version segmentation’ playbook awfully fast.”

Chasun pulled the focus back to gameplay: “The two new starting classes, the Edith Knight and the Heavy Knight, are clearly built for newcomers. One leans agile, one leans defensive — effectively two clear growth paths preloaded for players entering the Lands Between for the first time. Veterans won’t care, but for new players, the barrier just softened considerably.”

I leaned back in my chair and cut in: “Does nobody care about Torrent’s looks? I’ve ridden that old nag around the Lands Between for nearly four years — he’s due a new skin.”

Zhanlan Yingren sent a voice reply from under the blankets: “…It’s the middle of the night and that’s your takeaway? Still, dressing him up does get me. Wooing veterans with this kind of art detail is smarter than padding stats.”

So this week, the complete Elden Ring guide and its companion Tarnished Edition hub became documents anyone might yank out mid-argument — one of us checking the new classes’ growth curves, another verifying new armor combos, and one person (yes, Zixing) calculating Switch 2 handheld-mode power draw. The Lands Between has settled into a handheld, and the rest of us spent a white-knuckle week right along with it.

Circling back to the handheld question itself: the Tarnished Edition means more than “playable on the go.” From a 2025 delay to a settled 2026 release, FromSoftware spent a full year sanding down “a stable experience on a handheld.” That willingness to wait rather than ship rough, in an industry that rushes to shelves and patches later, reads as almost precious now.

Of course, there are doubters. Some feel stuffing Elden Ring into a handheld is “a port for the sake of a port,” losing the ritual of “suffering alone in front of a big screen.” It sounds reasonable at first, but my view is this — being able to raise a storm on the subway has always been one way this game keeps itself alive. Ritual is seasoning for the memory, not an entry requirement.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword — Twenty Years Later, Miyamoto Musashi Returns#

The week’s second big topic: Capcom dug Onimusha out of its coffin.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is dated for September 4, three weeks ahead of the originally planned late September. After nearly twenty years, the sword-combat series that ruled the PS2 era is finally coming back with a new face.

The new entry moves the stage to Kyoto in the early Edo period, starring the legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. As ever, he wears the Oni Gauntlet, cutting his way through miasma-filled streets crawling with Genma. Director Satoshi Nibii was clear in interviews: this installment deliberately avoids today’s fashionable open worlds and soulslike play, returning to linear stages, tight, responsive melee, and the Issen system veterans never stopped thinking about.

Opinion in the newsroom split in a genuinely unexpected way.

Long Zhiri (that’s me), naturally the most excited: “For a lot of people, the name Onimusha is the white moonlight of their PS2 years. Grinding out that Issen timing back then gave real, earned satisfaction. Nibii is right — not every game needs to be an open world, and not every fight needs to be dodge-roll spam. Timing-pure Issen is actually the rarest kind of thrill on the market right now.”

Chasun stayed cool: “Hold the hype. Returning to the classics is fine, but shipping linear stages in 2026 carries no less risk than building a sandbox. Player tastes have been spoiled rotten — if Musashi’s blade isn’t fast enough or satisfying enough, nostalgia won’t rescue sales. That said, I admit I once spent an entire evening grinding one Issen window back in the PS2 days.”

Wubian stabbed in from the industry angle: “Look at the launch window — September 4, wedged between EA’s Star Wars Zero Company and a pile of indies. If Capcom dares to slot a flagship IP there, it’s confident in the quality. And the ‘Japanese sword-combat’ lane has almost nobody working it these days — pure blue ocean.”

Zixing only cares about the tech: “RE Engine handles this with room to spare — physics and particle work in a sword-fighting game is Capcom’s home turf. What I’m watching is the Switch 2 version: gyro sword swings, motion dodges. If that Joy-Con 2 kit is tuned properly, they’ll have truly mastered the hardware.”

I summed up: “Either way, September 4 settles it. If the Issen is still there and the blade is still sharp, I’ll eat that nostalgia meal happily.”

Gamescom Wraps, the Fighting Continues: New Releases Storm Late August#

The week’s third topic has two faces: Gamescom in Cologne wrapped up, and two wildly different new releases landed at almost the same time.

The show first. This Gamescom has been called by industry watchers “a barometer for the back half of the console generation,” with Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Ubisoft, and Capcom taking the stage in rotation — from Death Stranding 2 to closed-doors Switch 2 demos, the information flow never let up. We also put together a show roundup on the site.

But however good the show is, what lands is what counts. Two wildly different titles arrived at once, and the newsroom split into two detachments immediately.

One detachment went medieval. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is Asobo Studio and Focus Entertainment’s Plague Tale prequel, set fifteen years before Requiem, with young Sofia taking over as protagonist on the mysterious Minotaur island. The biggest change this time — you can finally fight head-on. Parrying, countering, and proactive offense are written into the core loop.

Zhanlan Yingren, rarely this earnest, offered one compliment: “Asobo’s lighting never disappoints. This cursed island is creepier than the plague.”

That sparked a debate over proactive combat versus stealthy claustrophobia. I argued the pivot was brave; Chasun countered that the series’ soul is that helplessness — let it fight and it stops being A Plague Tale. Neither of us budged. Steam’s 93% positive rating and an 85 on Metacritic ended up bailing both of us out — it seems veterans and new mechanics each found their audience.

The other detachment went to the galaxy. Star Wars Zero Company is Bit Reactor and EA’s single-player turn-based tactics game, set in the late Clone Wars, where you play former Republic commander Hawks leading Zero Company against a threat consuming the galaxy. The core team carries XCOM lineage — cover, action points, and operator progression are all present and accounted for, and user reviews closed in on 10,000 within four days of launch.

Chasun was the busiest of all, practically disassembling Zero Company’s tactical systems down to the bolts: “The XCOM skeleton is all there, wearing a very good Star Wars skin. The cover-and-action-point rhythm feels right, and operator progression has genuine trade-off fun.” Zixing grumbled: “EA’s pricing — 198 yuan with not a single discount off. That’s real confidence.”

Two days, two new releases, two camps. One swings a heavy blade with Monster Hunter-style satisfaction (or should that be sword-combat style); the other peers through binoculars counting action points. This is the happiest part of making game content — there’s always a fresh battlefield to argue over.

Same-day collisions like this aren’t common in gaming, least of all between two titles so far apart in positioning and temperament. For players it’s a spectacle; for editors it’s a happy dilemma — you can only start one side first and save the other for late night.

Still Happening This Week#

The Elden Ring live-action film keeps moving forward, while over at Capcom, word of a Resident Evil remake, the return of Rayman, and Monster Hunter Stories 3 kept churning too. On buzz alone, though, nothing beats the Tarnished Edition discussion — whether you can truly “suffer” on a handheld became one of the community’s loudest topics this week.

The Steam weekend sale and the Future Games Show opened together, with plenty of August releases discounted. Our Steam weekly roundup gathered a batch of noteworthy bargains — anyone just back from Cologne should go flip through it.

The Onimusha: Way of the Sword demo is live — roughly half an hour of content, a Kiyomizu-dera stage, and Sasaki Ganryu to spar with. Keep the demo save and you’ll claim an “Omamori: Lamplight” trinket in the full game. I ran it a few times; the Issen feel is intact — that alone has me camping the September 4 launch.

Ahead of Star Wars Zero Company’s launch, EA put out a batch of gameplay demos pushing the hardcore tactical identity — take cover when cover is there, save action points when they’re scarce. Early-bird pre-orders throw in several exclusive weapon skins, and both longtime Star Wars fans and tactics newcomers are watching.

Switch 2 chatter shows no sign of cooling. Beyond the Tarnished Edition wave, rumors from Gamescom’s closed-doors demos kept spreading, with performance, backwards compatibility, and the new Joy-Con as the focal points of speculation. Nintendo, as ever, sits comfortably — smiling and saying nothing.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach remains one of the hottest post-Gamescom exclusives; Hideo Kojima’s demonstration of the “Social Strand System 2.0” made “building bridges together, sharing networks together” a trending topic on social platforms. In the newsroom, Zhanlan Yingren spent ages praising its art while Zixing kept picking apart the drift-bottle mechanic.

Persona 6 has kept Atlus fan communities in a frenzy since its first concept teaser. Ninety seconds of silhouettes only, but the “modern Tokyo × surrealist labyrinth” art direction has longtime Persona fans running mental laps for days.

Halo: Campaign Evolved keeps climbing across all platforms, cross-platform play discussion keeps heating up, and it stands as a significant footnote proving Microsoft’s first-party “multiplatform by default” strategy.

The Steam Deck scene stays lively too — playing Elden Ring Tarnished Edition on handhelds became this week’s community pastime, with players posting handheld-mode frame-rate screenshots. Zixing has been collecting them one by one to verify, claiming he’s “writing a handheld performance report.”

How to Fish keeps on its viral tear — a million copies sold within two days of its August 20 release and the top of Steam’s global best-sellers chart, making it the most dazzling indie dark horse of the year’s second half. In the newsroom, Wubian has been posting his save file in the group, and even Zhanlan Yingren couldn’t help asking, “So how do you actually catch these fish?”

Black Myth: Wukong discussions continue as well; with Gamescom wrapped and a wave of new releases out, the player community has started looking ahead to its long-tail support. Whatever comes next, the mark this game left on the history of Chinese single-player games won’t be easily replaced any time soon.

Monster Hunter Traveler hands-on discussions stay hot; Capcom has toured it through Gamescom and multiple other shows, and players are excited about the “modern hunting grounds + classic hunting” pairing — though the actual release still awaits official word. Judging by the queue length at the Gamescom booth, everything that needs saying has been said.

Crimson Desert and Phantom Blade Zero, two of 2026’s most anticipated Eastern-themed titles, kept preheating on the Gamescom tailwind, with gameplay demos and media hands-on reports landing one after another and banking momentum for the blockbuster wave ahead over the next few months. The dual domestic-and-global positioning of their publishers shows clearly in both titles, and the newsroom will keep following along.

Newsroom Talk#

On Sunday evening, the gang squeezed around the newsroom’s old table again, a pile of street-stall oden spread across it.

Wubian opened between bites of a fish ball: “The sheer volume of news this week was terrifying. Tarnished Edition, Onimusha, two new releases, the Gamescom wrap-up… I got dizzy just reading it all.”

Zixing typed away at his laptop without looking up: “No matter how loud the news gets, it comes down to one question — will players pay for these games, and spend their time on them. I spent all night calculating the Tarnished Edition’s power draw; handheld-mode battery life actually matters a lot.”

I crunched a radish: “You’re too practical for your own good. Doing power math over a game — what are you chasing?”

Zixing: “Chasing the ability to fight Radahn on the subway.”

The table cracked up. Chasun took a slow sip of tea and added: “Come to think of it, this week’s freakishly dense release pile ran four different gambles — A Plague Tale Legacy gambled on ‘make the series fight,’ Zero Company gambled on ‘stuff XCOM into Star Wars,’ the Tarnished Edition gambled on ‘bring the suffering to handhelds,’ and Onimusha gambled on ‘dig up a twenty-year-old brand.’ Four directions, four bets.”

Zhanlan Yingren looked up from his phone, rare for him: “More bets, more fun. Against that old line about ’everything nowadays being a reskin,’ I’d say the teams willing to do linear stages, Issen, and turn-based tactics properly in this era are actually the least conformist ones.”

I nodded: “Exactly. Watching everyone go red in the face this week over an Issen window, over handheld power draw, over whether proactive combat belongs — I suddenly felt at ease. In this line of work, the thing to fear isn’t running out of topics; it’s the day none of these games can get a rise out of us anymore.”

Zixing stretched: “Honestly, the thing I feared most this week was opening the Tarnished Edition on the subway and finding a parent with kids standing next to me — that ‘are you seriously suffering on the subway’ embarrassment hurts worse than losing to Radahn.”

I added: “Which is why I mute everything first and keep the save-before-leaving habit. Handheld suffering is all about keeping a low profile.”

Chasun smiled: “By next Sunday, that ‘Radahn on a handheld’ guy will probably have his guide written — so let’s not compete over who died more; let’s compete over who writes faster.”

Wubian raised his oden box for a toast: “Relax, the arguments never run out. See you next Sunday.”

I glanced at the sky darkening outside; the late-summer breeze coming in actually felt a little cool. August is ending, but this love of games, and this argument in the newsroom that never quite stops, will likely keep going for a long time yet.

Right on cue, the streetlight outside flickered on, and everyone started packing up to leave. The oden on the table went cold, but nobody wanted to be first out the door — after all, Monday morning brings the next round of sparring.

That’s the late-August weekly. Come September, Onimusha is about to leave its sheath, and the Tarnished Edition’s buzz hasn’t cooled either. A new month, a new battlefield — all waiting ahead. Friends, see you next issue.

See you next week.

— Long Zhiri, NTGame Editor-in-Chief