Matt S. is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of DDNet. He's been writing about games for over 20 years, including a book, but is perhaps best-known for being the high priest of the Church of Hatsune Miku.
If I were to create a laundry list of what I look for in a JRPG, the simple reality is that the Ys series doesn’t tend to check many of those boxes. They’re not known for in-depth narratives, iconic characters (aside from the series protagonist, Adol, who has a very “blank template” look to him), or particularly thoughtful, nuanced combat.…
To get this out of the way up-front: We need to be wary about art (games, films, books, whatever else) that depict apocalyptic scenarios where some form of invader from without swarms the world and you’re in control of the last nation standing, holding back the horde. It’s an incredibly…
Hello everyone, and Happy Holidays! What a year it has been, too.…
It’s that time of year again! We’re counting down the days to…
I do not understand Sker Ritual. At all. It seems that at every opportunity the developers took what was great about Maid of Sker and do the exact opposite to it, and so now, across just two games in the “Sker” property, we’ve got a confused mess across the “franchise”…
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World War 2 continues to be one of the most in-demand theatres of war for strategy and/or tactical games. That makes sense for many reasons: The battles themselves and the tactics that were on display lend themselves to video game mechanics in ways that other wars at around the same…
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Those who have been reading DDNet for some time know that for a few years now I’ve been working on a visual novel that’s on a subject close to my heart: Ballroom dancing! Why has it taken so long? Because the scope of this project is just that significant, and…
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I’m playing through Broken Roads right now. It’s basically “if Fallout was set in Australia,” or “if Mad Max was made into a game that actually respected Mad Max as a concept,” and I’m loving it. I’ll have a full review later on this week, but I wanted to use…
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In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have played ArcRunner. While it looks the part of a cyberpunk dystopia, the game itself was clearly only ever going to be a roguelike shooter drenched in neon. While it’s easy to say that you shouldn’t criticise a game for not being something it never…
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Once upon a time Kemco was a developer and publisher of a very wide range of games. These days it sticks to generic RPG Maker-like JRPGs designed primarily for mobile, but the company has been operating all the way back to 1984 and the NES era. Back in those days…
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With the same creative team behind it as Olympia Soiree, Tengoku Struggle: Strayside was always going to be an interesting visual novel. As it turns out, it’s going to be particularly interesting for people that are students of Japanese historical figures and spirituality, and perhaps a little befuddling for those…
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I cannot think of a worse possible time to release Outward Definitive Edition on Nintendo Switch than right now. Just weeks after the almost shockingly similar-themed Dragon’s Dogma 2. One’s an JRPG, the other is a survival-style RPG, but they both want to be the same thing, and the former…
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I can only assume that the modern media’s obsession with the idea of a metaverse has to do with the fact that in this particular reality that we live in, we drew a really crappy hand, where stupid things are happening with such frequency that it’s nice to imagine that…
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I love playing cricket on the go. I think it’s because of the longer span of time that it takes place over. With football, or ice hockey, or tennis, or volleyball, a game’s over in under an hour (when playing in video game form) and so, consequently, when I sit…
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