The Touch Detective series has always been a bigger deal in Japan than the West, and it is easy to understand why. When the original was released in Europe and North America, it was several months after Phoenix Wright landed, and (in Europe, anyway), a few months after the first…
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If there’s anything that’s going to inspire me to get super fit, it’s Hatsune Miku. Well now, Big Fitness, you figured out the trick with me and I now belong to your cult. In all seriousness, though, Fitness Boxing feat. Hatsune Miku is a great time and it does, in…
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Violet Wisteria is two things – firstly, it’s a brute of a game that wears its old-school homage on its sleeve. It’s also heavily inspired by the classic Valis series of fanservicey magical girl platformers. Things start off really well with a story sequence pulled directly from the PC-98 era…
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Legend of Legacy is one of the many 3DS titles that deserved to be preserved for hardware that wasn’t dated to a single console. Thankfully, now it has been. This was always a lovely-looking and well-designed, classically-styled JRPG. Now it has not only been preserved across multiple platforms, but it…
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Princess Peach must be a difficult character to work with now. Originally she was the archetypal damsel in distress, which made for a convenient single-line narrative to power Super Mario Bros., but that trope hasn’t done so well over time. Where Princess Zelda has been relatively easy to empower without…
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It feels like I’ve been asking for a new Ogre Battle title for decades (probably because I have been). No, not Tactics Ogre, though those are also very fine. I do mean Ogre Battle, the JRPG/Real Time Strategy series of just two titles that I was obsessed with back on…
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Ever since I read my first Moomin book as a child – I dimly think it might have been Comet in Moominland – I’ve been besotted with Tove Jansson’s endlessly fascinating Finnish trolls and their motley crew of quite literally fantastic friends and family. The books have always been the…
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We live in a world where we’re all working harder and longer than ever, and what little free time we have really needs to count. I’ve addressed this in opinion pieces in the past that developers aren’t really competing for people’s money any more. Cost of living crisis or not,…
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Kashido is one of the more interesting, downright fascinating board games I’ve played in recent years. It comes to us from Japan, and is an abstraction of a significant and cultural part of Japanese food culture. It is a physical board game in Japan, but as far as I can…
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The “roguelike” has become a term applied to so many different games that it’s functionally lost all meaning. Indies, in particular, have embraced it with the same vigour that big AAA developers have embraced unsustainably expensive open worlds. In that context, it’s actually refreshing to play a traditional, classical roguelike…
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