I was tempted to resist writing anything about the announcement of Ghost of Yōtei. It’s increasingly difficult to have a mature conversation about anything to do with video games without one pile-on or another happening, and I had more than enough of a pile-on from my review of Ghost of Tsushima to last me a lifetime. But I’ve been very…
“What games have you regretted buying the most?” It’s one of those silly questions that a Twitter account throws out there to maximise engagement (and it worked, with 100,000 views at the time of writing). But it did get me thinking, in the sense of “how can people that claim…
“Dune: Awakening, the survival MMO from Conan: Exiles developer Funcom, will “sidestep”…
I know DDNet’s been relatively quiet this week. I’ve had a Dee…
“New US$69.99 price may negatively impact PS5 game unit sales, data suggests. Reports indicate that PlayStation users are buying less (sic) games, and Sony’s data suggests that higher costs are a reason why unit sales have dropped.” This lede, published by TweakTown, seems ludicrous. It’s one of those real stating-the-obvious…
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Around this time next year, there will be a special event near Fuefuki in the heart of Yamanashi Prefecture (the one you travel through to get to Nagano from Tokyo). For decades there has been an annual recreation of the Battle of Kawanakajima, one of the most compelling and dramatic…
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Once on the DDNet podcast, we got to talking about “canon” games – ones that many people would consider to have historical or aesthetic significance. These are games that are worth going back to, even after technological increments have iterated and refined their design. For the JRPG genre, we immediately…
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“Oh! Rikku’s wearing a bikini! It’s bright yellow and it’s a THONG!” Looking at Final Fantasy X-2 now, with its PlayStation 2-era fuzzies and jaggies, it’s hard to believe that it was once right up there with the most controversially fanservicey things out there. I remember the discussions that raged…
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The Rurouni Kenshin film series consists of five films in total (with the fifth, and final, released worldwide and exclusive to Netflix, in 2021). In the time since the first film, 2012’s simply-titled Rurouni Kenshin, the series has become one of the largest film properties of all time, with three…
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There’s no way I can start this article without acknowledging that professional wrestling, the one “sport” that I properly follow, is a staged performance. “Fake” is often thrown around, but that’s not entirely accurate when you’re talking about a performance that can involve being thrown off a ladder through a…
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In 2016, a study by Paul J. C. Adachi and Teena Willoughby was published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence that found that of people aged 17-25, playing sports video games increased involvement in real-life sports. “Sports video game play may be an effective tool to promote real-life sports…
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Loneliness is a theme that has threaded its way through a great body of Japanese literature over the past 120+ years. It’s something that has been explored by the country’s greatest writers in several ways, showing it as a result of subjects as varied as fractured psyches, troubled marriages, and…
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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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