One of the most fun parts of Persona 5 is the fusion system. You enlist a variety of demonic allies, then mix them together to create even more powerful personas to use in combat. For the sake of balance, most of these creatures have strengths and weaknesses – but what if you’d rather be ridiculously overpowered? There is a way to minimize your vulnerability by creating a persona that only takes damage from an extremely narrow selection of sources – and who has a devastating physical attack.

[Note: This feature contains no story spoilers, but it does reveal the names of a handful of late-game personas.]

What you’re doing

In the second installment of our GI Game Club for BioWare's latest RPG, we discuss the content-rich middle section of the game.

Not every tabletop game is about rolling dice, shuffling cards, or table-spanning boards. Flick ‘em Up is one of a growing category of dexterity games, in which direct and active manipulation of the game’s components guides the gameplay. Developer Pretzel Games and publisher Plan B Games has a phenomenal game on their hands with the western movie-themed Flick ‘em Up, which they’ve been building out with different versions and expansions for a few years now. 

The concept is simple; wooden cowboy figures duke it out amid a backdrop of cardboard standee saloons and banks. Cacti and hay bales litter the playfield. Opposing players take turns flicking tiny discs around the table. If one of those “bullets” hits and topples an enemy figure, they lose health, until one or the other team wins out. Think paper football, but with lots more figures, obstacles, and options for outmaneuvering your opponent.

With our new cover story on Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, we've shown off plenty of gameplay footage from Ninja Theory's game. Today, the game's creative director Tameem Antoniades explains more about how the talented studio arrived where they are today. After an ambitious game named "Razer" was rejected from publishers, the team made the decision to think outside of the box and develop and publish Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. So what does the future look like for Ninja Theory? We spoke with Antoniades about the studio's split going forward between safer/licensed games and escaping the publisher cycle with more experimental experiences like Hellblade.

Watch the video below to see more gameplay footage from Hellblade and learn about the team's creative journey moving forward.

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Diablo III's necromancer class arrives sometime this summer as DLC, and Blizzard is currently running a closed beta for players to dig in and unearth the classes' secrets. While some aspects are in placeholders stages, there's still plenty of skills, passives, and synergies to explore, including the corpse resource.

Join Daniel Tack and Jeff Cork as they take a look at this classic Diablo II class as it comes back for more in Diablo III. Note that everything is in beta and subject to change!

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As I sit here putting together Blog Herding, all I can think is how great this community is when writing about a diverse range of topics. Thanks again, bloggers, for another great week of reads!

Community Blogs For April 6 – April 12:

Heropon's Top 30 Video Game Songs I still hum tunes from the very first Super Mario game, so I love seeing a list of the best game songs by Heropon. While the writer does have to do away with Final Fantasy songs, I wish they had been included. What are some of your favorite video game tunes? I still jam out to a bunch of OSTs.

When the UFC expanded to include a men's flyweight division in 2012, Demetrious Johnson emerged as its first champion. Fast forward five years and "Mighty Mouse" still dons the championship belt. He has not only consistently been the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, but Johnson has been so dominant that the UFC's reality show, The Ultimate Fighter, dedicated one of its 2016 seasons to finding someone to beat him – a fight that Johnson also won. Despite having his eye on the record for most title defenses in UFC history – an honor currently held by the legendary Anderson Silva – Johnson has dedicated himself to growing his audience streaming video games on Twitch.

This article was originally published in issue 289 of Game Informer

Johnson is a lifelong gamer, which explains why an elite athlete in one of the world's biggest sports organizations is passionate about streaming video games. The 30-year-old fondly recalls his first game of Super Contra on NES, which he played with his mom.

With our new cover story on Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, we're shining a spotlight on the innovative work from the developers of Heavenly Sword, Enslaved, and DmC. Ninja Theory has long been known for being on the forefront of motion-capture technology, going back to the early days of the PS3 when it worked with Andy Serkis on Heavenly Sword. In an effort to make the entire mocap process faster and cheaper, in the hopes of selling their games for less to consumers, creative director Tameem Antoniades and the team converted a meeting room into a full mocap studio and has emphasized capturing performances in real time. It's important to note that only a handful of scenes in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice were recorded with the real-time process shown off in the video, but the studio hopes to use it more in the future. If you're interested in learning more about Ninja Theory's process of building an internal mocap studio, watch their informative dev diary videos on the process.

Watch the video below to see Game Informer's Ben Reeves bring pure absurdity to the process alongside Melina Juergens, the actress that plays Senua in the game.

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This week, Blizzard began its latest Overwatch limited-time event, Uprising. In addition to bringing 100 collectibles ranging from skins to sprays, April's offering introduces the eponymous Uprising mode. In this four-player co-op mission, you battle against the invading Omnic robots in a mission that takes anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes to complete. It's a short experience, but it kicks up a notion I haven't felt since the game launched last year.

Last May, I initially thought the game was lacking in content. I saw a handful of maps with only a few different multiplayer modes tying them together. Because of this, I felt like a story mode would do wonders for the content present in the game. However, as I played more and learned about the nuances of the gameplay and the dynamics of the characters, I learned that the multiplayer provides more than enough content for Overwatch (I've now played well over 100 hours over the last 12 months).

Last year, over the course of four months, we played through Shenmue for the Dreamcast in its entirety. It was an experimental video series, with an undefined schedule that allowed us to take in all the feedback for each episode by reading and responding to comments in (almost) real time. The experiment was a success! So we immediately decided (after playing through Dark Souls III, Tex Murphy: Under A Killing Moon, Shadow of the Colossus, and Resident Evil 4) that there was no time like the present to return to Yu Suzuki's masterpiece. For the sequel, we're playing the Xbox version that was published by Microsoft in 2002.