When you think about the most influential games of all time, your brain will reach for Goldeneye, Doom, Final Fantasy, Super Mario Bros., Smash Bros and Super International Cricket (no? Just me?). You’re probably not going to cite Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon, though. Probably because the game was never actually released…
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“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…
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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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Granblue Fantasy: Relink was one of the more surprising JRPGs in recent years. This is partly because the game had a notoriously troubled development cycle, yet turned out to be excellent (generally, if something takes eight years and multiple different developers to finish, it’s going to be terrible). It’s also…
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I knew that I was in for a mighty slog when the tutorial of Sword Art Online: Echoes of Aincrad, felt like it went for an hour all by itself. What a winding, long-winded, slow-paced dungeon that was. And then the game opens up to become a massive… long-winded, slow-paced…
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Digimon is doomed to forever walk in Pokémon’s shadow. Part of the issue is the obvious similarities in the names, but on a superficial pass there are more similarities than that, and Digimon doesn’t always do itself favours there. Both games feature cute anime monsters, but Pokémon’s artists come up…
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