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…
Koei Tecmo’s JRPG house, Gust, is a factory for the genre. It’s just as well that their output is a reliably good time, but they are without a doubt a studio that churns out its work. Fairy Tail 2 comes four years after the original (with a whole lot of…
“They don’t make them like they used to” is such a facetious…
As a rule of thumb, it’s a good thing when developers and…
Every so often a new sport gains traction. It usually starts as a casual hobby activity, but then people being people find a way to make it competitive, and before you know it sponsors and organisations get involved and BAM, you’ve got a professional sport. The challenge these emerging sports…
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Here’s something about Japan that a lot of people in the West wouldn’t be aware of: The word “natsukashii”. There’s no real translation of that word into English. It’s related to “nostalgia,” in that it deals with memories of the past, but where nostalgia is typically associated with a longing…
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At first, when I heard that the revival of The Denpa Men was going to be a free-to-play title, I was disappointed. The three Denpa Men titles that were released in English on the 3DS were favourites. They were nothing spectacular, but as grindy, retro-themed JRPGs with an enormously quirky…
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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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