It was a surprisingly strong week for horror games this week, with an excellent remaster of a Project Zero game joining the spectacular visual novel by Square Enix, Paranormasight. In reading some of the reviews of these games I was reminded that far too often people treat Japanese and Western…
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We’re at that point in the development of our medium where there’s a game for every imaginable task and occupation; or at least, that’s what you’d think on a cursory google of any job followed by the word “simulator”. And yet, it’s rare to find many games which seek to…
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A Time Magazine article from 1958 describes a group of Japanese labourers who, while digging a road into a hillside during the postwar building boom, uncovered a cache of strange terracotta figures: clay representations of people, horses, birds, and houses. Having no idea what to do with them, the workers…
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The High&Low film series (available via Netflix in the west) is many things. First and foremost, the film series offers some of the most wildly entertaining action to come out of Japan’s cinema industry in recent years. The action in these films is big. So big that you’d be forgiven…
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If you’ve got access to Netflix, then you’ve probably seen the Rilakkuma animated series. Rilakkuma and Kaoru launched back in 2019, and a second season: Rilakkuma’s Theme Park Adventure, finally landed, after some delays, in late 2022. As stop-motion animations, each of the short, generally sweet episodes across both seasons…
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In the grand scheme of things, Yasuke wasn’t the most significant, nor celebrated samurai of the Sengoku era. He wasn’t one of the three great unifiers: Nobunaga Oda, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, or Iyeasu Tokugawa. He also wasn’t one of their powerful rivals. Yasuke wasn’t even credited with a battle win. And…
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It’s easy to understand why One Thousand and One Nights – also known as 1001 Nights and Arabian Nights – has fallen out of vogue in modern culture and has rarely been touched in video games. There are dozens of games produced based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Grimm’s…
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I once found it quite hard to get into racing. I have friends who are big fans, and who can talk endlessly about the microscopic detail that goes into every car, but as an outsider, I admit it’s easy to miss the complexity for the simple – cars go fast.…
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Most people with a casual interest in Japanese culture are aware of kabuki theatre on some level. Even if they’ve never witnessed a performance, the mannerisms and make-up of kabuki theatre are one of Japan’s great artistic exports. Noh is to kabuki what opera is to Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals,…
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“We’re screwed. Writing is over. That’s it. It’s time to pack away your quill, your biro, and your shiny iPad: The computers will soon be here to do it better.” This quote came from a writer for The Spectator, and it was in an article talking about the explosive growth…
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