Review by Matt S. I really like the concept of Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 1. Nippon Ichi has dipped into its deep history to dust off two of its games that would be a tough sell as separate releases without a massive project behind them to remake them. Bundled…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Pretty Girls Panic! by Zoo Corporation is basically the same game as Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic!, a previous title that it (via publisher EastAsiaSoft) has already released on the Nintendo Switch. It is, basically, Qix, but rather than clearing blank or generic backgrounds, you’re instead revealing…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. On its surface, you would never suspect that Rune Factory world work. Taking the tranquility of Harvest Moon and mashing it together with the inherent violence of RPGs seems counter-intuitive, and yet the developers of Rune Factory and various associated homages and pastiches have somehow refined…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. One of the first things that I realised when I started playing Nostalgic Train was that I haven’t actually played any Japanese “walking simulators” before. Not that I can remember having played, at any rate. It’s a genre that seems to have either spoken to western…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Auteur theory, and whether it should be applied to video games, is one of those more interesting debates that we can have about this medium. Most of the time it’s difficult to identify a single person as being responsible for the creativity in a game; the…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. When you hear the term “Eurojank,” you might well assume that it’s being said as a pejorative, but no. That’s not the case at all. “Eurojank” games are, as the name suggests, titles that come out of Europe from the B-tier developers. Developers that can’t match…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Unfortunately, WitchSpring3 [Re:Fine] is simply not a good game. There’s the germ of a good idea in there, and as someone that loves Atelier and JRPGs that respect your time, I loved that this one was a brief experience of a few dozen hours (at most),…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I never did review the original Curious Expedition. But I did do a video on it. In that video, I called it a “cracking roguelike.” Given that Curious Expedition 2 is better than the original, I guess that makes this game “cracking+”. It could have gone…
Read MoreNews by Matt S. Nexomon: Extinction was a really nice surprise when it launched on consoles last year. A Pokemon “clone” that did some interesting things with the Pokemon formula, this was one of the better mobile-to-console ports that we’ve seen. Apparently, it was a success because the publisher, PQube,…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Heroes of Might & Magic is a dead franchise. As beloved as it is, Ubisoft now owns it, and has absolutely no interest, whatsoever, in indulging niche strategy RPG things (unless the execs can ruin it by turning it into a live service). What that means…
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