The best way to learn a new language is to actually practice that language in real-world context. If you travel around Japan you will, at some point, almost certainly be accosted at least once by a group of school kids who are clutching a workbook and told to practice their…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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We’re being spoiled for Musou right now! A month after Koei Tecmo released the exceptional Dynasty Warriors Origins, the company went and stealth-dropped Warriors: Abyss as part of a Sony State of Play show. This is an action roguelike heavily inspired by Vampire Survivors and similar “horde” games, and while…
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When a series is known for being as surrealistic as the Yakuza series is, keeping it fresh over the long term is all the more challenging. After all, the oddball stops being oddball when it becomes mundane. Thankfully, to date the developers at Ryu Ga Gotoku have been able to…
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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…
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Civilization VII is disappointing. To be clear, this doesn’t mean it’s not well-made, and I’ve enjoyed it enough, but it represents the most radical change for the series in perhaps its entire history, and as someone who has spent more than 1,000 hours in Civilization VI, not all of these…
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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…
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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…
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