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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Here’s the problem with playing a single-player spinoff from a multiplayer property: If you don’t particularly care about the multiplayer that the franchise is built on, the single player, where developers will almost always double down on the various in-fanbase jokes, aesthetics, characters and themes, is really not going to…
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What happens when you take Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering and smoosh them together? Culdcept. Culdcept is what happens. It’s perhaps a marriage between two very different genres of board game that no one really asked for, but the series has been around since 1997 and the Sega Saturn, so…
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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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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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Dungeons & Dragons is great. Really, really great. But it’s a massive time sink and even bigger commitment from the entire group. The last couple of times I’ve tried to get in on a D&D campaign, it has fizzled out once people started to get busy with work, weekends, or…
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Lylat Wars (as Star Fox 64 was known in Australia) was a pioneering game, and people who bought into the Nintendo 64 early on probably ended up buying a copy of it. It helped that it came with a Rumble Pack, though. Remember the days when rumble was a really…
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It was originally a Wii title that, famously, fans had to fight really hard to get localised. Then it had a 3DS port because Nintendo needed something to showcase the power of a more powerful edition of the console. Then it got a port to the Switch. Now it’s enhanced…
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