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…
It feels good to be home. It might be sauna-hot (despite being well into Autumn now, the sticky humidity of Japan’s summers has stuck around), and I’m tired as everything having done my usual thing of taking the overnight flight and then failing to sleep at all, but I’m back…
Read More
It would be easy to dismiss Monochrome Mobius as being a “too-traditional” JRPG, turn-based warts and all. Indeed, that is what far too many other critics have done when covering this game, and that’s doing it a disservice. It seems that just about everyone has missed what makes this a…
Read More
Here’s a tale of two very different sides of the games industry for you. On the one hand, I was recently given an hour-long look into The Plucky Squire, an upcoming Devolver Digital-published game about a character that can pop into and out of the “real world” from a book,…
Read More
Got a Nintendo Switch? At some stage you’ve probably taken it out in public. After all, gaming on the go is very much the point of that thing. But would you necessarily want other people to know what you’re playing? That’s the topic for this podcast discussion: the games we…
Read More
We’ve all had this experience at one stage or another: We’ve been playing a game that we totally love and thing it will be one of our favourites… only for it to ultimately disappoint us. What causes that, and why? That’s the topic for this part of the September 2023…
Read More
You know how the saying goes: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” I do feel both very foolish and a great deal of shame for playing Taito Milestones 2. It’s not because this is a retro compilation of poor games. Far from it. The…
Read More
Samba de Amigo is a game of pure joy and high-octane energy (with some acid surely thrown in when it was being developed). It comes across as an even more explosive explosion of colour and humour than Bandai Namco’s excellent Taiko the Drum series. In the party context that this…
Read More
As we start to ramp up towards the end of the year, the release schedule for games is… well, it’s starting to become intimidating. But of course, there’s so much to look forward to that it’s a nice problem to have. Let us know which games you’re looking forward to…
Read More
Reality is increasingly uncertain, and this is fascinating. Anonymous;Code, the latest in the series that has brought us Steins;Gate, Robotics;Notes and Chaos;Head, is a play on this idea, and it, too, is fascinating. Quite possibly the most fascinating of all this series of visual novels, precisely because it is so…
Read More
It’s September already! We recorded this episode well in advance for scheduling reasons, and so some of the things we say in here will be out of date… but we still have a good laugh, despite not knowing what has happened over the last six weeks. So this week we…
Read More