There are few things that I enjoy more than a good retro games collection. Sure, emulation exists and it’s not going anywhere any time soon, but as someone who creates for a living, I do like the idea of supporting other creators by actually buying their creations. In the retro space, however, that’s an increasingly pricey prospect, not helped in…
Amongst the pantheon of games, if you ask DigitallyDownloaded.net editor, Matt, which is the greatest, he’ll often reply that it’s Toaplan’s 1990 platformer Snow Bros, inspired (cough) by titles such as Taito’s sublime Bubble Bobble. Yeah, I sit with a different capture-and-break-enemies platformer as the greatest game of all time,…
We, long-suffering SaGa fans, have been utterly inundated with the franchise over…
In a world that is as toxic, complex, and fundamentally unpleasant as…
Doraemon is one of the most iconic, influential cultural icons in Japanese entertainment history. It’s a blue robot cat with a pocket that contains everything, and he and his human pals (Nobi and co) have gone on so many adventures that it’s almost impossible to count. The manga came first…
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What if Harry Potter was something that you could enjoy without the knowledge that every word you read came from someone who is deeply, aggressively hateful? What if you could jump into the body of a student of magic and fall in love with all the characters? That’s essentially where…
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Spike Chunsoft is onto a particular theme right now. A few weeks ago it released a game designed to evoke a very specific cultural nostalgia that is core to a lot of aesthetics and narrative themes over there. Now, with Bakeru, it is tapping into something very different in terms…
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Ticket To Ride is, along with Catan, on the way to be our generation’s Monopoly and Risk. First released back in 2004, is has sold 18 million copies, been translated into most major languages, and has had innumerable expansions added to it. There have also been multiple video game adaptations,…
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It’s amazing to think that this is the first time there has been an official release of Fate Stay/Night outside of Japan. This visual novel kicked off one of the biggest anime properties of all time, turned into one of the biggest free-to-play mobile games, and made the companies producing…
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Hakuoki was my first otome game, right back when it was released on the PlayStation 3. Actually, I think it might have been my very first visual novel. It seems hard to imagine now, but a decade ago, digital distribution wasn’t in the same place, and visual novels being released…
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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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