Around this time next year, there will be a special event near Fuefuki in the heart of Yamanashi Prefecture (the one you travel through to get to Nagano from Tokyo). For decades there has been an annual recreation of the Battle of Kawanakajima, one of the most compelling and dramatic…
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Once on the DDNet podcast, we got to talking about “canon” games – ones that many people would consider to have historical or aesthetic significance. These are games that are worth going back to, even after technological increments have iterated and refined their design. For the JRPG genre, we immediately…
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“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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The Rurouni Kenshin film series consists of five films in total (with the fifth, and final, released worldwide and exclusive to Netflix, in 2021). In the time since the first film, 2012’s simply-titled Rurouni Kenshin, the series has become one of the largest film properties of all time, with three…
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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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Loneliness is a theme that has threaded its way through a great body of Japanese literature over the past 120+ years. It’s something that has been explored by the country’s greatest writers in several ways, showing it as a result of subjects as varied as fractured psyches, troubled marriages, and…
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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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Ocarina of Time’s Link isn’t what you’d picture when you think of a video game protagonist – at least not at first. Not the first time you play it. There’s nothing special about Link. He’s a kid in the Kokiri Forest, the only one without a fairy. When he finally…
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