Game collections are all the rage these days, and are becoming increasingly something that goes beyond just the game. Retro collections aim to be museums as much as things you play, with Digital Eclipse in particular mastering the “interactive museum” format. Riki 8Bit Game Collection isn’t really a “retro collection,” though it looks like it from the screenshots. Rather it’s…
Idea Factory International is bringing otome visual novel Battlefield Waltz to the West over a decade after its original Japanese launch. First announced during IFI’s Summer Festival 2024, the game will be available in physical and digital editions.) It follows a young woman named Lan on her journey as the…
Welcome to Digitally Downloaded’s weekly catch-up news feature, the catch-up coffee. I…
Koei Tecmo’s JRPG house, Gust, is a factory for the genre. It’s…
Very, very rarely does a game get made about the Tokugawa Shogunate. There are thousands of games about the Sengoku wars that came immediately before, and there are plenty made about the end of the Shogunate as well. The 250 years in the middle, however, are largely blank (at least,…
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I joke frequently about how I’ve never made it off the tutorial plateau of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so it’s just as well that you don’t need to have played that game to get stuck into Tears of the Kingdom (though I’m sure it helps). Tears…
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We got our first look at Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook in last September’s NIS America Showcase featuring games coming west in early 2023. Well, the “early” part of the year has nearly passed, and the games have mostly been released… except Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook. It’s a new…
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I know exactly where I stand on modernizing books from the past: I despise it with every fibre of my being. I recently reread a bunch of Lois Duncan books but they were newer versions, and despite being set in like the 70s every had cell phones (just forgot them…
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I have lost track of how many Mercenaries games there have been at this point. Developer, Rideon, certainly churns them out, and the series has evolved into a comfort food experience. They look vaguely like Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre, and play like a vaguely decent homage to those…
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Dokapon Kingdom: Connect is a clever little attempt to take the board game format, and apply it to an RPG. Just go in with the expectation that it’s the latter that only looks like the former, and you’ll be well placed to have a good time of it. Related reading:…
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Don’t Nod is one of my favourite developers (though I keep forgetting the slight name change), thanks in large part to the original Life Is Strange. It’s made some solid games otherwise, though, including Tell Me Why and Gerda: A Flame in Winter. Its next title, Harmony: The Fall of…
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At first I was disappointed with the concept of Ash of Gods: The Way. The original Ash of Gods (subtitled Redemption) was a gritty little tactics RPG with rich, albeit dark storytelling. Clearly inspired by The Banner Saga, it never eclipsed that masterpiece, but it still stood in the same…
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I had never played a farming sim until I played Farm Manager 2022, and now I’m intrigued by just about all of them. While DDNet hasn’t reviewing the Farming Simulator franchise since the 2019 version, Matt had good things to say. There hasn’t been a title since 2020’s, so there’s…
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I just want to start this review by saying that I love Tiara, the blue-haired secondary protagonist from the Fairy Fencer series (it’s a series now that there are two games). Like, I really, really, love Tiara. As far as anime female design goes, she’s my third favourite character ever,…
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