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…
Nintendo’s WarioWare series has represented the company at its whimsical purest since the Game Boy Advance. Players play through hundreds of micro-games, each a few seconds long, in rapid-fire succession. With every minigame being a microcosm of pure and unfiltered creativity, WarioWare has always boasted vivacious energy and charm in…
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If you polled the Star Ocean fan base on which is the finest in this relatively obscure but long-running sci-fi/fantasy series, Star Ocean 2 would pop up quite often, if not in most cases. I would personally argue that Star Ocean 3: Till the End of Time is slightly more…
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Hello Kitty and Friends Happiness Parade was meant to be out much, much earlier in the year. It had even briefly appeared on some eShop storefronts around the world. Something must have been wrong with it, however, as it was unceremoniously pulled and put back into development for some months.…
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There’s a certain end of the video game industry that mistakes emotional manipulation for quality narrative. The goal is to find the right voice actors, get the players invested enough in the world that they spend a lot of time in it, and then make sure those key scenes are…
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Archetype Arcadia has an awful lot of content. The PR material claims 50 hours, and while I have a gut feeling that that’s assuming a fairly slow reading speed, I read quickly and I wouldn’t be surprised if I did actually spend that long getting to the end. It’s generally…
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Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue is not the Danganronpa clone it seems to be. It looks the part, but rather than being a “death game,” it’s closer to the first 90% of Lord of the Flies (the part where there’s tension but no murder) than Saw. Or Blue Lagoon were…
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Remember that time Sony’s head suit, Jim Ryan, got up and said “…the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?” The Metal Gear Solid Collection shows just how genuinely shallow and unintelligent that statement was. You should want to play the Metal Gear…
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Unfortunately for Crymachina, NieR: Automata exists, and so as a concept “post-apocalyptic world where robots ask existential questions about what it’s like to be human,” is probably a theme that should be scratched from all other developers’ brainstorming sessions. Despite that very prudent advice, the team that took on Crymachina…
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Hellboy has almost always been a property that has deserved better than it has been given. Ron Perlman starred in a spectacular film, but outside of that the property has had all the potential going for it, but only ever middling execution. It’s almost as though the people who work…
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Exactly two things got me through the darkest days of the pandemic. One was my family, and a careful consideration of hygiene and risks in equal measure. The other (without exaggeration) were the Jackbox Party Pack games. Related reading: Many years ago we reviewed the very first Party Pack. Our…
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