“Oh! Rikku’s wearing a bikini! It’s bright yellow and it’s a THONG!” Looking at Final Fantasy X-2 now, with its PlayStation 2-era fuzzies and jaggies, it’s hard to believe that it was once right up there with the most controversially fanservicey things out there. I remember the discussions that raged…
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“My job is different now since Midjourney v5 came out last week,” an artist at an independent game developer wrote in a recent Reddit post. “I am now able to create, rig, and animate a character that’s spat out from MJ in two or three days. Before it took us…
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There’s no way I can start this article without acknowledging that professional wrestling, the one “sport” that I properly follow, is a staged performance. “Fake” is often thrown around, but that’s not entirely accurate when you’re talking about a performance that can involve being thrown off a ladder through a…
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In 2016, a study by Paul J. C. Adachi and Teena Willoughby was published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence that found that of people aged 17-25, playing sports video games increased involvement in real-life sports. “Sports video game play may be an effective tool to promote real-life sports…
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It was a surprisingly strong week for horror games this week, with an excellent remaster of a Project Zero game joining the spectacular visual novel by Square Enix, Paranormasight. In reading some of the reviews of these games I was reminded that far too often people treat Japanese and Western…
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We’re at that point in the development of our medium where there’s a game for every imaginable task and occupation; or at least, that’s what you’d think on a cursory google of any job followed by the word “simulator”. And yet, it’s rare to find many games which seek to…
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A Time Magazine article from 1958 describes a group of Japanese labourers who, while digging a road into a hillside during the postwar building boom, uncovered a cache of strange terracotta figures: clay representations of people, horses, birds, and houses. Having no idea what to do with them, the workers…
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The High&Low film series (available via Netflix in the west) is many things. First and foremost, the film series offers some of the most wildly entertaining action to come out of Japan’s cinema industry in recent years. The action in these films is big. So big that you’d be forgiven…
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If you’ve got access to Netflix, then you’ve probably seen the Rilakkuma animated series. Rilakkuma and Kaoru launched back in 2019, and a second season: Rilakkuma’s Theme Park Adventure, finally landed, after some delays, in late 2022. As stop-motion animations, each of the short, generally sweet episodes across both seasons…
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In the grand scheme of things, Yasuke wasn’t the most significant, nor celebrated samurai of the Sengoku era. He wasn’t one of the three great unifiers: Nobunaga Oda, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, or Iyeasu Tokugawa. He also wasn’t one of their powerful rivals. Yasuke wasn’t even credited with a battle win. And…
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