Heroes of Might and Magic is finally back, and I couldn’t be happier. This is one of my favourite franchises of all – I even have the entire, expanded board game adaptation of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 thanks to a very generous brother who bought the whole damn thing for me. The port of Heroes of Might and…
Fuck AI. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. Kazuma Kaneko’s Tsukuyomi is a good example of why game developers should never touch Gen AI. It’s an actual insult to the intelligence that Kazuma Kaneko would actually put his name to this and believe that people would just accept it. For…
Tove Jansson’s Moomin characters long ago stepped outside the pure world of…
The Two Point series has a lot to answer for. Yes, SEGA’s…
Suikoden might not have quite the same profile as Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, but this is a beloved cult JRPG franchise, stretching back to the original PlayStation. And I really do mean beloved. Many who have played it list Suikoden 2, in particular, list it as one of the…
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I guess, given the success of Azur Lane, Girls und Panzer, KanColle and whatever else, it would be inevitable that at some point someone saw warplanes and thought “yeah, you sexy thing, what if you were an anime girl?” And so we have Kamikaze Lassplanes, a visual novel/SHMUP combination by…
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The games we play when we’re young absolutely do shape our appreciation of gaming when we’re older. If you had asked me when I was about 14 what the best game in the world was, the answer would have been easy. Bubble Bobble, and obviously that’s still scientifically true, but…
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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…
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There was a time when the 3D platformer was one of the most creative genres out there. Driven by the delight that people had for Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, and others, developers fell over themselves to try to carve out their own niche with quirky, different ideas. Most of those…
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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…
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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.…
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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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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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