Twenty, even thirty hours into Trails of Cold Steel, and you’ll still be getting to know the class of nine students that form the core cast (and that’s not saying anything of the other characters that become important later on). This is a slow burn and dense game, and, while it does…
Read MoreSummon Night 5 is a strategy JRPG and part visual novel, released for the PSP, but also playable on the PlayStation Vita. It’s not going to revolutionise the genre, but it is, nevertheless, a very fine example of it. Related reading: Strategy RPG fans really need to check out Disgaea…
Read MoreIt’s always a good idea to play the worst games in your favourite genres. That way you can appreciate the good ones. Chronus Arc is one of the worst JRPGs I’ve ever played. In theory it wants to be a glorious throwback to the SNES JRPG tradition, but in practice…
Read MoreXenoblade Chronicles on the Nintendo Wii (and, later, New Nintendo 3DS), is a sprawling game with ambition well beyond what anyone thought the console could handle. At the same time, despite the game’s openness, its love of sending players on fetch quests, and the near endless incentive to keep backtracking…
Read MoreLevel-5 has, for the longest time now, been hesitant to localise its Yo-Kai Watch franchise into western markets. One presumes that the underlying reason for that hesitancy is due to the intense cultural relevance the Yo-Kai games have to Japan, and the assumption that a great deal of the underlying…
Read MoreAtlus’ various Shin Megami Tensei spinoff series’ have always been good at using various JRPG traditions to frame social or political commentary. The two Digital Devil Saga games offered some deep insights into the role of religion in society, while Persona 4 was, in part, a deconstruction of the nostalgia…
Read MoreFans of the series have been waiting for a long time for the localisation of the second chapter of Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. Having announced only a week prior to its release that it was finally here, the Second Chapter has been made digitally available on both…
Read MoreSword Art Online: Last Song hits a lot of really comfortable notes along the way, making some improvements to gameplay over the original game that should make it more accessible to most players. However, the target audience here is clearly fans of the source material, and others might not come…
Read MoreI first got a taste for Zodiac two years ago, where, as a freshly announced game, it occupied a major-sized booth at Tokyo Game Show. Buggy as it was back then I saw an awful lot of potential in it as a 2D RPG with similar production standards that won…
Read MoreStella Glow is Imageepoch’s swan song. Heartbreaking as it is to see yet another set of capable creative minds disbanded, it’s the most apt tune the company could have composed to go out on. It’s a game that brings the company full circle; Imageepoch kicked off with the niche but…
Read More