I remain very impressed with any developer that takes a swing at a Soulslike. In fact, post-Elden Ring, I’m possibly even more impressed by the gonads it takes to try and develop one. This is a genre that is so overwhelmingly dominated by one company’s creative vision, and any other effort is going to be immediately compared to it. I…
My personal experience with prolific (VERY prolific) Japanese developer, Tamsoft, is mostly with its work with the action-based Hyperdimension brawlers, Senran Kagura, and the highly fanservicey stuff like Onechanbara and School Girl/Zombie Hunter. For the most part, these have been like pared-down Dynasty Warriors/Musou games. I wish Bleach Rebirth of…
There was a brief period of time where the tower defence genre…
Xenoblade Chronicles X was arguably the most ambitious game to land on…
I knew what I was getting when I stepped into Legend of Ixtona. It is a Kemco game, after all, and that means Z-grade storytelling and the cheapest of presentational standards. However, as a life-long fan of tactics JRPGs, I wasn’t going to pass up on this one either. I…
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13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim did to me what all good science fiction does – it made me, just for a little bit, question my perception of reality. Vanillaware’s latest title deviates from its gorgeous 2D fantasy brawlers to deliver a visual-novel-RTS hybrid that’s heavily focused on character interaction. The strategy…
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Trust Richard Garfield to reinvigorate my interest in deckbuilding roguelikes. I thought I was done with them. 2017’s Slay the Spire is excellent, but didn’t need to spawn an entire genre over the course of just five years, and we’ve already reached the point where the likes of Monster Train,…
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I’m going to simply copy in a big chunk of my original review of Neptunia X Senran Kagura: Ninja Wars on PlayStation 4 for this review of the new Nintendo Switch edition. I almost wasn’t going to play this version at all, as the updates that were being trumpeted in…
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A game… where you might learn something?!?! Perish the thought! That is what Chinatown Detective Agency is, though. It’s inspired by the classic Carmen Sandiago (the only game we were allowed to play on school computers when I was in primary school), and it’s a puzzle-based adventure game where the…
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Many years ago now (back in 2013), when DigitallyDownloaded.net was still just a startup website and really little more than a blog, I was fortunate to land an interview with the good people of Paradox Interactive. To this day I remember that interview, and a big part of the reason…
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In the world of PC gaming, Steam is inundated with absolute trash that only fits the definition of “game” by the slimmest of margins, and relies entirely on nudity and/or sex to make a quick dollar. It looks like Nintendo has opened the floodgates for this too, and Hentai Uni…
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It’s a lightgun game where the lightgun aim doesn’t work properly. It’s an arcade game that offers no challenge no penalty for running out of lives. It’s a remake that has lost all the atmosphere and appeal of the base game. Congratulations, developer MegaPixel Studio, I genuinely have no idea…
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Taito Milestones is undeniably cynical. The publishers have the gall to claim that it is a compilation of some of Taito’s most important historical work, and yet there are some absolutely massive, glaring omissions in the library. More than that, though, it’s disappointing that one of the best retro arcade…
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Before I sat down to play The Cruel King And The Great Hero, I thought it was going to be in the same vein as The Liar Princess And The Blind Prince, a previously-published NISA title with a very similar aesthetic. That would have been enough for me. The Liar…
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