It has always surprised me that there have been relatively few spinoffs from the Story of Seasons (formerly Harvest Moon) property. This is a beloved series that stretches right back to the SNES, and it has a lot going for it – charming characters, cute animals, and a wholesome joy…
Read MoreIf the promise of JRPG-style hijinks across a painstakingly-recreated Shibuya sounds good to you, then you’ll want to pay close attention to Reynatis, the latest FuRyu special that NISA will publish out west. FuRyu continues to be the Japanese studio for creative ideas. If The Caligula Effect and Monark struck…
Read MoreIdea Factory and Otomate have brought us some incredible flights of fantasy over the years. There are the historical dramas, allowing us to hang out with and romance the Shinsengumi or Beinke. Then there’s the bright and bubbly Cupid Parasite, where you play as Cupid herself, or the almost brutally…
Read MoreI’m starting to get a little peeved at Nintendo for not remaking Fire Emblem (as in the first Fire Emblem to be released in the West; the one with Lyn). Not only is there a game there that would desperately benefit from modern production values (Lyn and her lovely dress…
Read MoreMy only experience of Tomb Raider (before the reboot) was a demo of the first game. I’m about to show my age here, but remember gaming magazines that had demo discs you could load up and play? One of those had a snip of Tomb Raider 1 to play. I…
Read MoreDeath Mark deserves better recognition than it gets. The first two games in the series (Death Mark itself, and then Spirit Hunter: Ng) are both incredible horror visual novels, through which Experience Inc. has given us some of the finest art and suspense narratives that we’ve seen. And yet to…
Read MoreWell, Konosuba: Love for These Clothes of Desire certainly has its eye-opening moments. This is a game that likes to get downright dirty in places, and embraces (with gusto) every possible sexualisation trope you can imagine in anime. It has a ball doing so, and as long as isekai-style narratives…
Read MoreOriginally released back in 2017 on PlayStation 4, Tokyo Xanadu eX+ was a JRPG that was unfairly overlooked… including by me. Looking back at my review, I scored it 3.5/5, but in hindsight I was probably unfair to it, as the game has stuck with me much more than that.…
Read MoreWhat do tornadoes, a cult, and a man in a trunk have in common? You’ll be surprised. Bahnsen Knights is the third in LCB Game Studio’s Pixel Pulp series. The series takes pulp fiction, gives it a paranormal twist, and turns it into a video game. To date, it has…
Read MoreReigns has become a substantial little platform that the developers, Nerial, and publisher, Devolver Digital, never thought would extend as far as it has. Yet it has, and now it seems like there’s no end to what the developers can do next, now that they’re tapping into everything from popular…
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