Matt S. is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of DDNet. He's been writing about games for over 20 years, including a book, but is perhaps best-known for being the high priest of the Church of Hatsune Miku.
Brigandine is one of those cult franchises that you don’t really expect to be on any development radar, but every so often someone dusts it off because there is a tiny core out there and there’s not much else really scratching the itch. The original Brigandine was a PlayStation 1 release, and then in 2020 there was the excellent Brigandine:…
“Cry to save the world,” “’Classmate’ (i.e. breed) to save the world,” “Defeat a person’s deviances (sorry ‘distorted desires’) to save the world,” “Sing to save the world.” The JRPG genre is positively filled with these abstract ideas of turning a certain emotion or action into a mechanic to build…
My favourite Serious Sam title to date is the PlayStation 2/GameCube spinoff,…
As someone who travels around enough that I like to think of…
Why, FromSoftware. Why? The Duskbloods is so damn intriguing, and having played it during the network test, I’m even more intrigued. Richly, evocatively urban gothic, like a Dracula or Jekyll and Hyde gone even darker, Duskbloods has all the potential in the world to be something I connect with even…
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I have wanted to get back into Final Fantasy XIV for quite some time. I am a massive fan of everything it offers, from the art direction to the scope of the world and adventures that are held within it. I love the way that it handles narrative within the…
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Was Defender of the Crown the first “4X” strategy game to come from Western developers? I know it’s not a proper 4X, as several of the “Xes” are severely undercooked or nonexistent, and Japan’s Nobunaga’s Ambition beat it to market by several years, but when you look at it, you…
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There was a time when visual novels were a rare thing in the West, particularly on consoles. Steins;Gate, from 2009, was one of the pioneers in changing that. Brought to the West on PS3 and Vita, it turned heads by proving to a wide and mainstream audience that it was…
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It’s been three years since the last Fire Emblem (Engage). In a world of annualised franchises, that’s almost quaint, given how commercially successful the series is for Nintendo, but I’m very glad that Intelligent Systems is given the time to explore what it can achieve with its property. Fortune’s Weave…
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The Touhou Project continues to be one of the most interesting experiments in the video game industry. It’s been going since 1997, and that means it’s on the cusp of 30 years. In that time it’s had more than a game released every year… and that’s just the “main” titles,…
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We finally have the version of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that Monolith Software intended. The original release on the Nintendo Switch was an exceptional game with some truly ambitious scope, but that came at the expense of frame rates, and even I, a person who doesn’t usually care for frame rates,…
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Blue Reflection has been a difficult series for Koei Tecmo to manage thanks to its enormously niche premise. Four products in, it’s also difficult to suggest that bad missteps were not made along the way. The original Blue Reflection got itself released and then un-released in parts of the world…
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I have lost track of how many times I’ve played Final Fantasy X (and X-2) now. I remember playing it for the first time on the PlayStation 2, and then getting into fights on early-era bulletin boards on who was best out of Rikku, Lulu and Yuna (Rikku, of course).…
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EPOMAKER is rapidly becoming a favourite keyboard manufacturer. I love the company’s typewriter-shaped keyboard, which has become my device for writing for pleasure. The HE75 V2, meanwhile, is just a gorgeous option for gaming. As we all know, I don’t really play games where extreme speed matters and latency is…
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