In honor of One Piece's 1000th episode, Fathom Events is releasing One Piece Film: Strong World in U.S. theaters for the first time on Nov. 7 (English dub) and Nov. 9 (English sub). In honor of the theatrical release, we're revisiting the movie.

One Piece Film: Strong World may have debuted 12 years ago, but it's still living rent-free in fans' minds. Though it's been available as a home video release for some time, it's now hitting U.S. theaters for the first time in celebration of the anime series' impressive 1,000-episode milestone. And it’s still just as excellent as it was then, perhaps even better by now, aging like a fine wine like so many great anime films often do.

Strong World takes viewers on a trip alongside the Straw Hats, the infamous One Piece pirate crew led by Monkey D. Luffy (Colleen Clinkenbeard), on a trip back home to East Blue. Unfortunately, their journey is cut short when they run into the infamous pirate Shiki, the Golden Lion (Scott McNeil). Comparable in power and clout to the legendary Gol D. Roger, Shiki has spent the past twenty years out of the spotlight.

Now, however, he's finally ready to conquer East Blue and all its inhabitants. First, he needs a navigator, and Nami (Luci Christian) looks to be the woman for the job. Shiki's powerful animal hybrids and bizarre power to make everything float leaves the Straw Hats forced to battle through hordes and hordes of the ferocious beasts as well as droves of pirates. Home isn't that far away, if they can manage to free themselves to set sail as well as rescue Nami.

One Piece has always been about the wild, sometimes bizarre premises introduced with each new character and location. Strong World is no different, cranking the weirdness up to 11 in ways that both newcomers to the series and longtime fans can enjoy. From the genetically enhanced minion bird Billy (Josh Grelle), owned by Shiki's minion Dr. Indigo (Sean Schemmel), to Shiki's plan to force the World Government to surrender, everything is just as absurd and madcap as you'd expect.

You have the entire Straw Hats crew stranded on a floating island positively brimming with strange creatures. Nami has been plucked away from her safe space and forced to help Shiki, and Zoro and Chopper eventually find a young girl named Xiao, who leads them to a village plagued by poisonous plants. The plot switches rapidly between each instance, and it can feel a bit breakneck for this. But that means there's plenty of time for action and even more time for jokes.

That trademark One Piece silliness permeates every scene, without letting Strong World get too out of bounds or interrupting the multiple action scenes. The laughter is tempered by some of the more somber moments, such as when we find out Nami believes she has to say goodbye to the crew, or Shiki seemingly having stolen all of the "IQ plants" needed to cure all of the island villagers poisoned by the plants surrounding their home.

It's exhilarating even if you aren't familiar with One Piece's usual crew: Sanji (Eric Vale), Usopp (Sonny Strait), Roronoa Zoro (Christopher Sabat), Tony Tony Chopper (Brina Palencia), and the others. That's the mark of what makes Strong World such an intriguing standalone movie and addition to the One Piece film series. But you’ll really find yourself becoming even closer to Nami while watching. Given Nami's few chances to impress audiences following the One Piece series' time-skip, it's refreshing to see her have her fair dues and extensive time in the spotlight with this film. There’s more to the character than meets the eye, and there’s a lot of effort that went into proving this to the casual observer for this adventure.

It isn’t all perfect, though, as Strong World flies a bit too close to the sun at certain points. At times, the movie does tend to drag on a bit, and there do seem to be a bit too many storylines converging at once. It can be a lot, for example, to follow Shiki's plan, all of the Straw Hats splitting into groups, understanding Nami's past, the poisonous plants around the floating island, and everything else that happens to arise. Strong World could certainly do with a bit of trimming of the fat, so to speak, or even split into a quick series arc. Luckily, the over-the-top action scenes, humor, and sheer heart make it all worth the while.

Shin Megami Tensei V feels like the edgier, less sociable younger brother of Persona 5, even though Persona began as a spin-off to the series. Both branches of the family share much of their cast of highly customizable demons, like mythological Pokemon you smash together to make even more powerful ones. They have similar, excellent turn-based combat systems that encourage you to fish for your opponents' weaknesses and make smart use of every resource available to you. What's missing from the Persona formula here is a lot of its heart, but Shin Megami Tensei V still rises to succeed in most other ways.

The bulk of the action takes place across four expansive, open areas of the Netherworld: an alternate reality reflecting a post-apocalyptic Tokyo crawling with mythological beasts and heroes. They range from the sun-baked desert expanse of Minato to the gloomy, blood red badlands of Shinagawa, and each one echoes an area of real-world Tokyo with ruined buildings and major landmarks jutting out of the wastes. They all have a very distinct vibe, diverging from a central theme of surreal, techno-religious weirdness. While you'll fight lots of intense battles within them, these bizarre cityscapes also encourage exploration and even involve some tricky platforming to find all of the hidden Miman – little red dudes who give you a currency you can use on miraculous bonuses for your whole party or to customize the protagonist.

And customization is the main pillar of SMT5. Since there are no human party members who stay with you the whole adventure, you'll build a rotating team of three demons who all have their own strengths, weaknesses, and special tricks. Fusing two or more demons into stronger ones is central to your progression, but you can also hoard items called grimoires that let you continue powering up a couple specific demons you want to keep with you for the long haul, which I really appreciated. Gaining new demons involves a negotiation system which requires learning each demon's personality and what kind of responses will please them, which admittedly seemed overly random at times. But it could also be pretty funny when I picked what seemed like the perfect response only to have the rug pulled out from under me by an unexpected objection – like a vainglorious fairy who runs away if you call her beautiful because she's too shy to handle such a compliment, or an unhinged horse demon who only takes a liking to you if you insult him repeatedly.

ESSENTIAL ESSENCE

Things really get interesting when you factor in the essence system, though, which lets you teach skills from a different demon to an existing one, and even inherit their elemental resistances and weaknesses. Between fusion, miracles, and essences, it's possible to create some absurdly powerful and specialized teams that can take on almost any challenge. The way these systems interact isn't spelled out especially well, but I really enjoyed the gradual path to mastering them myself through trial and error. A hunger to experiment is a huge plus in this netherworld.

And mastery is basically a necessity unless you want to play on the easier difficulty. Shin Megami Tensei has a reputation for being brutally difficult as a series, and I was able to see why, even on its Normal mode. Just using the strongest demons I came across naturally, I often got chewed up and spit out pretty quickly – especially against certain bosses and in the last quarter of the story. But that's only until I realized that the real challenge was in meticulously creating the perfect team for each area, and sometimes even each fight. All of the tools are there, and if you know how to use them, you can blow right past enemies that once seemed unbeatable. But there is no mercy to be found if you don't, so going in with the right mindset is a must.

There's also a fair bit of grinding involved if you want to keep pace with the challenges ahead, which isn't that unexpected for a JRPG. It definitely drags on at times when you might have to fight the same group of enemies 10, 15, or even 20 times in the same area to level up. Some sort of randomized battle modifier just to shake things up now and then would have been really welcome. Again, I think about the Showtime attacks and unstable shadows added in the Royal version of Persona 5 as examples of how Atlus has tackled this problem successfully in the past. You can skip some amount of grinding by cleverly exploiting a specific enemy type that you'll have to figure out for yourself, but you can't avoid it entirely – especially toward the very end.

When you're not exploring and battling your way through the wastelands, you'll spend a few short interludes back in the non-apocalyptic version of Tokyo, which felt kind of like an unnecessary minigame. You move a little pawn around a zoomed-out cityscape where there's really not much to do or interact with, but these segments are generally over before you know it. Each chapter also concludes with a substantial mega dungeon – though only one of the three, a hellish fortress complete with challenging jumping puzzles, felt significantly different from the rest of the adventure. The other two are mostly just hallways filled with monsters. The final dungeon sort of half tries to introduce an interesting new mechanic with doorways that start and stop time when you pass through them, but it ends up being less of a puzzle and more of a way to force you to backtrack. The solutions were all too mindlessly straightforward to feel like I'd accomplished anything.

Why Can't We Be Friends

The other area where SMT5 consistently fell short for me was the writing. It takes upwards of 20 hours to find any personal motivation beyond survival and figuring out what's going on, and the companion characters are also very under-developed. You don't get to spend enough time with most of them for one thing, since they don't usually join you in battle or even have their own side stories. You run into them for a few minutes during cutscenes after many hours of adventuring, and none of them seem to have in-depth backgrounds or even much of a character arc. They exist mostly as decoration on a story that cares more about big concepts than people.

The main story is definitely interesting at least, and not just another rehash of God vs Satan for control of humanity's destiny. While I won't spoil anything, the three possible endings are a bit more nuanced than that. Although, your decisions right up to the moment you "lock in" to one path don't seem to affect them at all, and things become pretty convoluted at the very end. It introduces an entirely new metaphysical concept through an expository dialogue dump at basically the last possible moment, which seems meant to recontextualize the whole situation, but then doesn't really explain how it works or even what exactly happened with it after the final battle. This left the last hour or so feeling like a somewhat cold, confusing conclusion to an epic, 80-hour undertaking I otherwise enjoyed.

At least the art throughout is exceptional. It's every bit as visually stylish as any other Atlus game, and I love the design of the main character. The demons, both new and familiar to series veterans, look and sound awesome, and have some fantastic unique attack animations. There are definitely some framerate issues in certain areas though, and details like grass that only pop in when you're very close can be distracting. Atlus really tried to push the limits of the Switch's hardware, and it's a gamble that pays off in some spots and not in others. On the other hand, the moody music is pretty great, too, even if it’s never as emotional or memorable as Persona's iconic vocal tracks.

FromSoftware has released 15 minutes of new gameplay footage from Elden Ring, the studio's highly anticipated next game.

The gameplay is comprised of multiple segments, each looking at Elden Ring's many fundamentals. While looking much like Dark Souls in many ways, there are clearly many differences in the way Elden Rings plays. The open world provides a somewhat Skyrim-like atmosphere, something particularly heightened when a dragon descends on the player character out of nowhere.

The gameplay reveals that Elden Ring's bonfire alternatives are known as a Site of Grace, and they project rays of guiding light that can be used to find new areas. The open world nature of the game means you can ignore such guidance and go wherever you please, though.

A map, built out using map fragments, can be customised using pins to highlight finds such as crafting materials or dangerous enemies. Much like in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, beacons can be placed on the map that appear as pillars of light in the game world, for use in navigation.

Much of the gameplay shown involves the discovery of Stormveil Castle, a big dungeon in the Limgrave region of the world. Here we see the difference in navigation between the big open areas of The Lands Between, which can be explored on horseback, and the more labyrinthine dungeon interiors.

A huge amount of combat is shown off in the gameplay, which demonstrates how magic is much more core to the experience this time compared to Dark Souls, Sekiro, and Bloodborne. We see spirits being summoned to attack enemies, flaming swords, and even the head of a dragon being summoned to work as a flamethrower. There are special magical attacks used with weapons, such as a wind strike that can be seen used to break an enemy's guard. And in the open world, combat can even be performed on horseback.

Of particular note in the gameplay is a boss fight with Godrick the Golden, who resides in Stormveil Castle. This multi-armed monstrosity swings a colossal golden axe, and is able to grapple your character with an arm that instead of a hand has a fire-breathing dragon head. If you've not noticed by now, dragons seem to be a pretty big deal in Elden Ring.

The gameplay demo concluded with the news that there will be special editions of the game now available for pre-order. The Collector's Edition will come with the game in a steelbook case, a 40-page artbook, a digital soundtrack, and a 23cm tall statue of Malenia, Blade of Miquella (the red-haired, helmeted character who was seen in the very first reveal of Elden Ring). The Premium version of the Collector's Edition, meanwhile, comes with all that plus a 1:1 scale replica of Malenia's winged helmet. The Premium Collector's Edition is exclusive to the Bandai Namco store.

Elden Ring will release on February 25, 2022, although those who signed up for the closed network test may be able to play a small section from November 12-14. Previously, IGN was able to see 15 minutes of gameplay which we spoke about in the first Elden Ring preview. Over time, we've learned a lot about Elden Ring, including its soul-collecting mechanic, and how its large, free-form map works.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

Black Friday deals are now kicking off, and that means it's time to top up on your Game Pass membership. You can currently get 3-Months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for $24.99 (was $44.99) in the Black Friday sales (see here). This is just at Target for now, but we're also expecting other retailers to price match this soon, so stay tuned, and follow @IGNDeals for updates.

This is a deal of epic proportions, as this code will stack on top of your current Game Pass membership, extending it for 3-months at a reduced cost. You can do this multiple times as well, continuously stacking the discount.

Black Friday 2021: 3-Months of Game Pass Ultimate for $25

This is the perfect time to jump into Xbox Game Pass at the moment, with the likes of Forza Horizon 5 (which we gave a 10/10 in our review), GTA San Andreas, and It Takes Two all available now. Halo Infinite's campaign is also coming up soon on December 8.

Game Pass Ultimate is the perfect form of Xbox subscription as well, as it contains Xbox Live Gold (for online play), Game Pass on console, PC, and on cloud so you can play on your phone or laptop at no extra cost. It also includes EA Play, which means you can get access to the Battlefield 2042 10-hour trial from November 12.

Black Friday: 3-Months of Xbox Game Pass PC for $1

Game Pass also has PC games, and new or returning members can get a cheap and easy access subscription right now for just $1. 3-Months of Xbox Game Pass on PC, for just $1 (see here). That's a great deal, considering you'll get access to both Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 within the next month.

More Black Friday Sales

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Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.

Elden Ring is set to release for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC on February 25, 2022. Anyone who buys the PS4 or Xbox One version will get a free next-gen upgrade as well, which is always nice to see. Elden Ring is the next game from the makers of tough-but-satisfying action RPGs like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

The game comes in a standard edition as well as a cool-looking collector's edition, and it's available for preorder now. Read on to see what comes in each edition and where you can lock in your Elden Ring preorder.

Elden Ring Collector's Edition

PS5

• Get it at Best Buy – $189.99
• Get it at GameStop – $189.99
• Get it at Target – $189.99
• Get it at Amazon UK – £179.99

PS4

• Get it at Best Buy – $189.99
• Get it at GameStop – $189.99
• Get it at Target – $189.99
• Get it at Amazon UK – £179.99

Xbox Series X|S / Xbox One

• Get it at Best Buy – $189.99
• Get it at GameStop – $189.99
• Get it at Target – $189.99
• Get it at Amazon UK – £179.99

Preorder the collector's edition of Elden Ring, and you'll receive the game itself along with the following items:

• Statue of Malenia – Blade of Miquella (9 inches)
• Exclusive steelbook
• 40-page hardcover artbook
• Digital soundtrack

Elden Ring (Standard Edition)

PS5

• Get it at Amazon – $59.99
• Get it at Best Buy – $59.99
• Get it at GameStop – $59.99
• Get it at Walmart – $59.99

PS4 (includes free PS5 upgrade)

• See it at Amazon – $59.99
• See it at Best Buy – $59.99
• See it at GameStop – $59.99
• See it at Walmart – $59.99
• See it at Amazon UK – £49.99

Xbox One / Series X

• See it at Amazon – $59.99
• See it at Best Buy – $59.99
• See it at GameStop – $59.99
• See it at Walmart – $59.99
• See it at Amazon UK – £49.99

As for right now, the standard edition is the only one available. There are no separate editions (yet?) for PS5 and Xbox Series X, but we have confirmed that the PS5 and Xbox Series X upgrades will be free for anyone who owns the previous-gen version. When that changes, we'll update the info above. Still, you can preorder it at the retailers above.

Preorder Elden Ring in the UK

What is Elden Ring?

Elden Ring is an action-RPG that represents a confluence of fandoms. On one hand, you have From Software's Hidetaka Miyazaki, the creator of the exceptional, brooding games mentioned above. On the other, you have George R.R. Martin, the mind that brought you Game of Thrones, helping build out the story.

As for the game itself, it's an action RPG that doesn't look like it will stray far from the gameplay popularized in the Dark Souls franchise. You can expect super-precise combat controls and towering bosses to take down. These games are certainly challenging, but if you keep trying, you'll likely learn the enemies' moves and improve your skills enough to succeed.

As for the story? From Software's games have never been very forthcoming with their stories, even within the games themselves. Bandai Namco released an Elden Ring plot summary, but it doesn't help all that much, either. As far as I can tell, a bunch of demigods each have a piece of the powerful Elden Ring. Your job is to relieve them of these pieces in order to put the ring back together.

Elden Ring Will Have a Free Next-Gen Upgrade

Anyone who buys Elden Ring for PS4 will be able to upgrade to the PS5 version for free. The same goes for Xbox: buy it for Xbox One, and you'll get a free upgrade to the Xbox Series X or Series S version. That's something of a relief, as many games don't offer a free upgrade path, and many PS5/Series X|S games cost $69.99 instead of $59.99.

Preorder Bonuses

While no universal preorder bonuses are available for Elden Ring, several retailers have their own unique preorder bonuses.

• Best Buy – free steelbook case
• GameStop – free spectral steed whistle replica

Chris Reed is IGN's shopping and commerce editor. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.