One of the best things about eFootball Kick-Off is that it has a global championship mode, structured just like a FIFA World Cup, with all the players and nations you could hope for, without it being a World Cup. You can buy this and enjoy all the thrills of The Beautiful Game of football without contributing to the second most…
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is what happens when the Octopath Traveler team decides they’re going to tackle Zelda next. It’s an incredibly brave project. Zelda doesn’t really need a “spiritual sequel,” with Nintendo very much committed to its continuation. And it’s Nintendo’s single biggest property. To actively…
Idea Factory and its otome factory, Otomate, is at its best when…
I don’t have too much to say about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth…
There is a moment in the original Final Fantasy VII where, after hours of scrapping around an ugly, horrible city, the party breaks out into the wider world, and it’s one of the defining moments of the game. Suddenly, an adventure that seemed narrow in scope became huge and expansive:…
Read More
Idea Factory and Otomate have brought us some incredible flights of fantasy over the years. There are the historical dramas, allowing us to hang out with and romance the Shinsengumi or Beinke. Then there’s the bright and bubbly Cupid Parasite, where you play as Cupid herself, or the almost brutally…
Read More
I’m starting to get a little peeved at Nintendo for not remaking Fire Emblem (as in the first Fire Emblem to be released in the West; the one with Lyn). Not only is there a game there that would desperately benefit from modern production values (Lyn and her lovely dress…
Read More
My only experience of Tomb Raider (before the reboot) was a demo of the first game. I’m about to show my age here, but remember gaming magazines that had demo discs you could load up and play? One of those had a snip of Tomb Raider 1 to play. I…
Read More
Don’t Nod has, traditionally, done storytelling well, but struggled to pair it up with gameplay that people could love. Life Is Strange was the breakout title for the company, and it worked well enough because it was a point-and-click adventure that wasn’t testing the player’s button-pressing skills, but Vampyr, on…
Read More
Death Mark deserves better recognition than it gets. The first two games in the series (Death Mark itself, and then Spirit Hunter: Ng) are both incredible horror visual novels, through which Experience Inc. has given us some of the finest art and suspense narratives that we’ve seen. And yet to…
Read More
Well, Konosuba: Love for These Clothes of Desire certainly has its eye-opening moments. This is a game that likes to get downright dirty in places, and embraces (with gusto) every possible sexualisation trope you can imagine in anime. It has a ball doing so, and as long as isekai-style narratives…
Read More
They don’t really make that many games like Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs The Thrilling Steamy Maze Kiwami any more. Anime fan service games complete with bath scenes, destructible clothing and school uniform costumes are few and far between (in part because of the spectre of consoles and/or Steam…
Read More
Stargate: Timekeepers is not a great attempt at bringing Stargate to video games. I say this with all due respect to the developer and publisher in Slitherine, and in isolation, divorced from its license, Timekeepers is good fun. It’s just a very strange project and I’m not sure who it’s…
Read More
The Atelier franchise has long been one that suits the gatcha “free-to-play” genre. Thanks to the over-20 games that have been developed across two decades, there are an almost unlimited number of characters to draw on, and the core alchemy system that sits at the centre of Atelier lends itself…
Read More