Him, The Smile & Bloom is a surprisingly “innovative” otome, at least as far as the narrative goes. I use the inverted commas because that word is bandied around far too much (and is far too associated with techbros – and yes I realise the contradiction between my disdain for…
Read More
Urban Myth Dissolution Center is an interesting game. Set in modern-day Tokyo, this ADV from developer Hakababunko and publisher Shueisha Games features a series of episodes involving the titular Urban Myth Dissolution Center, an organisation that specializes in solving peculiar cases involving such anomalies. University student Azami Fukurai had a…
Read More
If you were to try and narrow the entire range of TCGs out there down to the “big three”, you’d surely land on Magic the Gathering, Pokemon TCG, and Yu-Gi-Oh!. Of those three, Yu-Gi-Oh is the one that has relied the most on console video games to build the fanbase.…
Read More
Kotaro Uchikoshi will be remembered as one of the finest writers to work in the visual novel (and VN-adjacent) space. He is of course best known for the Zero Escape series and, more recently, the two utterly exceptional AI titles. Right at the start of his career, however, he worked in…
Read More
Two rugby games have been released within a span of a week of one another. For such a niche sport (in the world of video games), I’m not sure that was in anyone’s greatest interest, but nonetheless rugby fans get a choice: Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge 4 is a sequel…
Read More
When retro-inspired visual novels like Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog pop up on my radar, I jump at the chance to play them. These games remind me of my childhood when the outside world never felt “safe.” Like many others in the same position, I found my place in other…
Read More
There’s a literary device called the Deus Ex Machina (no, the game series didn’t invent that cool-sounding word), which describes when an author uses a plot device to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story. It’s possibly the most difficult literary device to use, since, if you calibrate it…
Read More
Some of you are probably wondering: “What is a Sugoro?” Well, it’s easy to explain. Sugoroku is a classic Japanese board game where players roll the dice to move their pawns from the start of the board to the goal. There are many takes on Sugoroku in video games, including…
Read More
Hello Kitty Island Adventure is such a clever game in so many ways. Superficially, it looks like Animal Crossing, and will no doubt attract a similar audience for that reason. But it’s also a game that has an identity all of its own once you dig beyond the superficial, and…
Read More
I never thought I’d be playing a Neptunia take on Mario Kart’s Battle Mode mixed with Katamari Damacy, but here we are. The latest oddball spinoff for the most oddball video game properties is Neptunia Riders Vs. Dogoos. It’s nuts. It’s also wonderful, and really good fun. The story, such…
Read More