I know I’m late with writing this review. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, otherwise known as “the remaster of Final Fantasy Tactics” was released while I was away in Japan, and it’s been enormously difficult to catch up, given that I’ve needed to prioritise the new games, also releasing like a broken dam right now. However, that’s a me…
The HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest III went down really well with players and critics, so it was perhaps inevitable that Square Enix would give the same treatment to the first two titles in the trilogy. Wisely packing them together (much as the port of Dragon Quest 1 and 2…
Game Freak can’t do anything without pissing off a good chunk of…
In all the ways that really matter, Persona 3 Reload on the…
Odencat isn’t exactly a household name, but this Japanese studio, behind the likes of Fishing Paradiso and Bear’s Restaurant, has been steadily building up a reputation for interesting ideas, executed well. The team’s next game is called Meg’s Monster, and it’s got a lot of promise. The game’s concept is…
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“It’s more of the same!” You just know that this is going to be the main comment (and complaint) about Octopath Traveler II. “It’s too much like the first.” Except it’s not. Of course it’s not. Octopath Traveler was a narrative-driven game that focused on the stories of eight distinct…
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Little Witch Nobeta has been a significant (and perhaps mildly surprising) hit since first releasing on PC last year. For a game developed by a tiny team, having a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, off more than 8,300 players, is a significant achievement. Soon, courtesy of Idea Factory International, 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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I don’t really understand why Idea Factory continues to experiment with action combat systems. Action combat systems are far more resource intensive to get right, and for a company producing JRPGs on a very small budget, it seems counterintuitive. Recent Neptunia titles, including Neptunia Virtual Stars and Cyberdimension Neptunia, have…
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I have reviewed Persona 4 Golden twice at this point. The last time I did – the PC release – I wrote 2,000 words about it. I’ve also penned several essays about the game’s themes, and enthused about it to just about everyone that will listen for the past decade.…
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Magical rings are such a well-trodden fantasy trope that they’re now at the point of clichéd symbolism that would score you an “F” grade in your creative writing course. With rings being the focus of Fire Emblem Engage, and Engage itself being a loving homage to everything that came before…
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Mystery. Romance. Monsters. These are common elements of JRPGs. And they are all part of Path of the Midnight Sun, a new indie entry to the genre that has just released. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to preview the game last month. Even in my brief (two…
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Starting in 1977, the legendary rock musician David Bowie produced the Berlin Trilogy of albums. In a surprising move, he chose the avant-garde, ambient artist Brian Eno as a songwriting partner. One of Eno’s biggest contributions to the albums was his “oblique strategies” – a deck of cards with different…
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One Piece Odyssey is a particularly impressive game for one reason in particular: You don’t need to be a fan of One Piece to enjoy it. So often anime tie-in games consolidate the main anime plotline to an extreme degree, just so the developers can squish some form of it…
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