For people who enjoyed the vibes of Monster Hunter, but found the challenging, highly technical action combat to be overwhelming, Capcom came up with the Monster Hunter Stories series. The first two were enjoyable, but with Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection, Capcom has landed on something really special indeed. It also feels like Capcom’s response to criticism that has…
The game that got me looking at Odencat was Fishing Paradiso, which was an absolute pleasure to review many, many moons ago. Now, the Japanese developer has announced that its acclaimed 2023 RPG Meg’s Monster will launch on smartphones this May, with pre-registration available on both the App Store and…
Another Eden Begins is a time-travelling turn-based JRPG whose development is being…
Dragon Quest VII did need a reimagining. I don’t say this as…
The embargo for our Tactics Ogre Reborn hands-on preview lifted late on Friday night, so we didn’t have time to do an article for it here (we were off celebrating our IT Journo Lizzies Award win). However, this game is absolutely amazing, and Tactics Ogre is FINALLY back! One of…
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News about Marvelous’ next upcoming project, Loop8: Summer of Gods has been gaining momentum in both Western and European news circles for a few weeks now after an announcement was made last month that would indeed be getting this promising-looking game on our shores. Now we have a specific date.…
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It’s difficult to write within the fantasy genre in 2022. On the one hand, it’s painfully easy to write something so self-serious and overwrought that it comes across as a desperate and doomed effort to channel Tolkien. Writing fantasy that people will take seriously is monumentally difficult because fantasy by…
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Valkyrie Elysium isn’t for everyone. The game has a specific tone and structure that has ensured that it will only ever appeal to a small, niche demographic. And yet it shares structural, thematic and aesthetic similarities with, in one way or another, the likes of Chaos Legion, NieR (original, not…
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Valkyrie Elysium seems destined to be one of the rapidly forgotten Square Enix titles… and yet it doesn’t deserve to be. In playing it I was strongly reminded of games like Chaos Legion and NieR (before NieR: Automata convinced people to reassess the original); games that have a loftier aesthetic…
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Some of the greatest feats of media can draw back their origins to some of the most primitive corners of the Internet. Just think about how great Kingdom of Loathing or Nethack has been over the years. And that’s why we’re paying attention to ASTILBRA Revision, a side-scrolling action RPG…
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It’s really disappointing that Square Enix would dump the third Voice of Cards release in the middle of such a jam-packed schedule. Even from Square itself. The company has released DioField Chronicle, NieR Automata on Switch, and Valkyrie Elysium in the span of just a few weeks and it has…
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A deluge of Harvest Moon/Rune Factory/Stardew Valley-likes have come out of nowhere, but there really has been a lot of them in recent months. Perhaps it is something cultural. Perhaps developers are observing an increasingly tired and agitated community around them as the ongoing terrors of climate change, pandemics and…
Read More“Fire Emblem meets Baldur’s Gate” is certainly a five-word phrase that will get me to pay attention to something, and that’s exactly what DioField Chronicle is. With some incredibly gorgeous production values backing it up, this is a game that, almost by stealth, has come through to be one of…
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The Legend of Heroes series is famous for being impenetrable for newcomers and also having a fanbase that likes it that way. They’ll insist that you absolutely cannot play any game in this series without having magically played all the other games first. And if you like the wrong ones…
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