Bubble Bobble is one of the greatest games ever made, and it’s also my go-to game when I’ve been asked about my favourite game of all time. Taito’s certainly done some interesting things with the Bubble Bobble IP over the years, and while a lot of the spinoff games have been excellent – I’m thinking titles like Rainbow Islands, Parasol…
Very, very rarely does a game get made about the Tokugawa Shogunate. There are thousands of games about the Sengoku wars that came immediately before, and there are plenty made about the end of the Shogunate as well. The 250 years in the middle, however, are largely blank (at least,…
Read MoreIt’s unclear to me what audience LEGO 2K Drive is intended for. It’s very capable at what it does, but it also seems to be an effort to shove a whole lot of best practice big game stuff into a package, and in doing so comes across as a little…
Read MoreI joke frequently about how I’ve never made it off the tutorial plateau of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so it’s just as well that you don’t need to have played that game to get stuck into Tears of the Kingdom (though I’m sure it helps). Tears…
Read MoreI have lost track of how many Mercenaries games there have been at this point. Developer, Rideon, certainly churns them out, and the series has evolved into a comfort food experience. They look vaguely like Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre, and play like a vaguely decent homage to those…
Read MoreDokapon Kingdom: Connect is a clever little attempt to take the board game format, and apply it to an RPG. Just go in with the expectation that it’s the latter that only looks like the former, and you’ll be well placed to have a good time of it. Related reading:…
Read MoreAs I do with FMV games, I’ve had my eye on Mia and the Dragon Princess since it was announced last year. This one is a pretty straightforward interactive film with branching narratives. It’s made by two of the heavy hitters in contemporary FMV gaming, Wales Interactive and Good Gate…
Read MoreAt first I was disappointed with the concept of Ash of Gods: The Way. The original Ash of Gods (subtitled Redemption) was a gritty little tactics RPG with rich, albeit dark storytelling. Clearly inspired by The Banner Saga, it never eclipsed that masterpiece, but it still stood in the same…
Read MoreI just want to start this review by saying that I love Tiara, the blue-haired secondary protagonist from the Fairy Fencer series (it’s a series now that there are two games). Like, I really, really, love Tiara. As far as anime female design goes, she’s my third favourite character ever,…
Read MoreMugen Souls is a game that is all about larger-than-life excess. The action is over the top. The narrative and characters are ridiculous and, despite being chibi in visual design, larger-than-life in personality. This is not a game interested in subtlety or nuance. It’s brash and in your face from…
Read MoreTrinity Trigger set out to capture nostalgia for 90s JRPGs. That is precisely what the game delivers. Were it not for the fact that the game looks modern, I myself would have thought I was playing a long-lost classic from the era. It is an action JRPG, where you control…
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