It’s starting to feel like western Nintendo Directs are downright incomplete, because the games being shown off exclusively in the Japanese version are basically the games I need in my life. Last year, this was The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story. It turned out to be a great game (my…
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Today’s Nintendo Direct was, by any measure, an impressive one. Nintendo announced a boatload of new games (many of them big-time exciting), and also finally brought the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance to its retro libraries for subscribers. It is the most obscure of these games, and possibly the…
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Octopath Traveler broke some impressive ground back in 2018. As the first effort with the all-new HD-2D visual engine, it presented us with a new vision of what sprite-based games could look like. It backed that up with a wonderful fusion of the kind of turn-based gameplay that had been…
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It’s not really February until there’s a Nintendo Direct, is it? The last one that lasted 45 minutes was in September 2022, but honestly this one is way better. Yes, there’s news of Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins coming to Switch, but there’s also that Zelda release date…
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If you’ve got access to Netflix, then you’ve probably seen the Rilakkuma animated series. Rilakkuma and Kaoru launched back in 2019, and a second season: Rilakkuma’s Theme Park Adventure, finally landed, after some delays, in late 2022. As stop-motion animations, each of the short, generally sweet episodes across both seasons…
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Brave’s Rage is fine. It’s a new entry in a very over-saturated genre, and doesn’t do nearly enough to stand out, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the game itself. It’s just disappointing that there seems to be a shrinking pool of gameplay structures that indies work with, at a…
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A high-profile and very controversial game released this week. I’ve been loathe to mention it by name, because we made the decision very early on that we wouldn’t be covering it, but Hogwarts Legacy has created a lot of discourse this week, and there is something of tangential relevance to…
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In the grand scheme of things, Yasuke wasn’t the most significant, nor celebrated samurai of the Sengoku era. He wasn’t one of the three great unifiers: Nobunaga Oda, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, or Iyeasu Tokugawa. He also wasn’t one of their powerful rivals. Yasuke wasn’t even credited with a battle win. And…
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At one point, March 2023 and the launch of Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key seemed like a lifetime away. Now, we’re basically hurtling towards it. Koei Tecmo and Gust have been releasing tons of information along the way, including seven characters (learn more here…
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There are so many games based on the classic Chinese novel, Journey to the West, that it’s almost impossible to count them. That’s not a complaint, of course, because it is a book that lends itself to video games nicely, and Journey to the West is perhaps the most global…
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