Who doesn’t love their Switch? It is arguably the finest console of all time (though the arguments you can make in favour of it are very compelling), and this week we dig into some of our most-played games of all time. Given that it’s the 2024 Olympic Games, we also…
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The basic concept of Tokyo Xanadu is “Nihon Falcom make an action version of Persona. Oh, and it looks like the Trials of Cold Steel games.” None of this is a bad idea by any means, and Tokyo Xanadu has been around for quite some time now. We published our…
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I’m about to really age myself, but when I was young, the idea of (legitimately) free video games was very different to what it is today. There were no microtransactions, and no Fortnites, Genshin Impacts, or MMOs. If you were playing free, you were either playing shareware demos or very…
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It’s hard for us in the West to fully appreciate just how core idol companies and groups are in Japan. It’s not just about the music and performance, though that is certainly a big part of it. Idol groups act as talent feeder pools for just about every other part…
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Esports has become a ridiculously big business, sucking up so many dollars that could have gone into interesting, artful games instead. They’re holding an Olympic Esports Games now… and stupidly the IOC chose the authoritarian, puritanical hellnation, Saudi Arabia, for it. Hey, IOC, put Dead or Alive on the competition…
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One of the things that I find continually surprising about video games is the idea that, on the one hand, we consider them to be inherently an art form, but on the other, we just never talk about games in the same frameworks that we talk about every other art…
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I don’t want to spend too long mulling over its flaws, but Princess Maker 2 Regeneration is a good example of a remake handled poorly. I’m not commenting on the quality of the game itself, which is genuinely good and entertaining, and I’ll get to that as soon as I…
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There are conventional visual novels, and then there are the kinds of visual novels that Type-Moon produces. Tsukihime is a game that has a fearsome reputation, being one of the very first works of the company (it came before Fate/Stay Night, which has become the Type-Moon behemoth), and was essentially…
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The Japanese are a growing force in global tabletop game design. While the association with Japan and video games is long and deep, traditionally we haven’t embraced too many of their tabletop games (classic or modern). This is partly because many of the best were never localised, and partly because…
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The Legend of Heroes series turns 35 this year, and with 21 titles in it, it is inarguably the most ambitious and largest-scope JRPG property in existence. Unlike Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, The Legend of Heroes is constant, with every game taking place in the same universe, sharing a…
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