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.
I don’t often write about films these days, but I recently saw something at the Japan Film Festival in Australia that was powerful, profound, and haunting enough that it has since occupied all my thinking. Kokuho, directed by one of Japan’s most noteworthy art film directors, Lee Sang-il, is, as we enter an era where AI is undermining the very…
The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Elite is a good headset. This is by far the most uncontroversial thing I’ve ever written at DigitallyDownloaded.net, because with a price tag of AU$1350, you would hope that it’s a good headset. SteelSeries has packed as much sound quality as possible into this thing and,…
Disclaimer: I’m making this quick disclaimer so it’s clear and up-front. I…
Kirby Air Riders is fun. It’s not any more than that, and…
After ten years there’s finally a new Dragon Age game. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the biggest disappointments of the year. So we dig into that a bit, looking at where things went to wrong and what the game really should have been. We also look at the newly-released Nintendo…
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First and foremost, Dragon Age: The Veilguard isn’t a Dragon Age game. It doesn’t look like one, it doesn’t play like one, and while there are cameos that superficially resemble the heroes of the original series, it doesn’t tell a story like one either. Unlike actual Dragon Age titles, it’s…
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Writing horror is a tough gig. It’s challenging for writers to create and maintain fear and tension. Horror needs to be character-driven and it needs to make the audience care about the horrible things that are happening to those characters. Meanwhile, it’s difficult for visual artists because even the slightest…
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Ys isn’t the oldest JRPG property out there, but it’s one of them, and it’s also one of the most prolific. If you ignore all the re-releases and just concentrate on the main series, there is just one period where there was a substantial hiatus (1996-2002). Otherwise, the longest fans…
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At some point, someone sat down and decided to make an RPG which would be narrative-heavy, but it would be almost entirely emergent narrative. Where every plot direction and key moment was a consequence of the player’s actions. Where characters and their personalities would be entirely defined by player decisions,…
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On the one hand, the people behind I*CHU: Chibi Edition have done the world a big favour. The developers and publishers (PQube in the West) have taken a mobile gacha game that was effectively killed a half-decade ago and given players the opportunity to enjoy it in its full glory…
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Dance is a difficult subject to tackle, for many reasons. These challenges are, fundamentally, why it’s not a topic that video game developers typically touch (or filmmakers, or novelists, or painters, or most other art forms). The Ukrainian developer behind Light de Deux has given a ballet-themed visual novel a…
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The remake of Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII is now out in the wild, and it is a very good game. It’s excellent for newcomers while also offering something for the series faithful, all wrapped up in some truly gorgeous art. We were able to send some questions over…
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Remaking strategy games comes across as an odd decision, because strategy games are principally defined and remembered through their mechanics, and that is something that typically improves over time. Take Civilization 2 as an example. It’s my single favourite strategy game of all time, but it would be downright strange…
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There has already been a remake of Romancing SaGa 2. We have a review of it on DigitallyDownloaded.net and everything. But that was a relatively simple effort, in that the developers modernised the sprites and art so the SNES original was then in “HD,” and otherwise left it at that.…
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