The Amiga was home to a whole host of exceptional games in its time, but not all of them earned the right to be called true classics, even if they were innovative for their time. Advancements not only in visuals but also gameplay design have left some old school retro “classics” as interesting curios to look at, but not exactly…
To start this review with something very personal: My father passed away last week. It’s been difficult, to put it mildly. The reason I bring it up is that Dad absolutely loved Ten-Pin Bowling. Had his own ball, ball bag (I had no idea they made bowling ball bags), shoes,…
Having not played the original Code Vein, I have no idea whether…
It’s incredible that Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergarde plays so well on…
The people at Bandai Namco have a good problem with their Taiko no Tatsujin series of rhythm games. They’ve created something that is mechanically perfect. Their cute drum mascot is immediately recognisable and endlessly versatile, and whilst other rhythm games require abstraction and concentration, Taiko is easily understandable and a…
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Japanese horror tradition is more about tragedy than violence. Whether it’s the yurei (ghost) stories of old, the modern horror of The Ring or Ju-On, or games like Yomawari here, the focus isn’t on giving you big monsters to slay bloodily. Nor is it torture porn, and focused on inflicting…
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Taiwanese publisher/developer, Softstar, is best known for being a rising global force with its RPGs. Sword & Fairy and Xuan-Yuan Sword are rapidly gaining prestige worldwide (and with good reason, too). There’s more to the “Square Enix of Taiwan”, though. Softstar is also the company behind the Richman series of…
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Star Ocean acts as something akin to the “b-tier” for Square Enix. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest are, of course, the big guns, but this series is not insignificant. It’s been around for 25 years now, and The Divine Force is the sixth of the main series entries. I’ll tell…
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It feels almost ironic that Bayonetta, one of the most grandiose action properties in gaming (if not the series that takes the crown), would somehow end up being exclusive to the Nintendo Switch. This is a series where the action, creatures, humour, narratives and setpieces are so fundamentally big on…
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Fragment’s Note+ has some decent art, and a surprisingly good localisation for a project of relatively modest scale. I’m used to having to deal with translations that are barely better than a Google machine translation and this game is not that. Unfortunately, I’ve run out of good things to say…
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It took a little over 15 years to get Kamiwaza localised in the west, and while this is an incredible niche title, it’s well worth trying. To this day it comes across as overly ambitious to what developer, Acquire, perhaps had the resources to deliver, but this game and its…
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If you enjoyed the very famous Steins;Gate, or the much loved Robotics;Notes, then chances are you’ll like Chaos;Head Noah. It’s certainly a more extreme experience than those two, but this was the very first entry in the “Science Adventure” series, and it offers excellent, intense storytelling similar to its later…
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As anyone that follows me on Twitter knows, it’s not just that I just have an interest in politics, but I’m also quite certain that politics in the world is fundamentally broken. In most countries around the world, the political sphere is dominated by two or three neoliberal parties that…
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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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