With Pokémon Violet and Scarlet, it feels like Game Freak has come full circle. What the company set out to achieve with the original Red and Blue, way back on the Game Boy, is effectively exactly the same as what the team has looked to do with this game. It’s an incredible success. I haven’t had this much fun with…
There are a lot of big, world-shattering things that go on in Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and yet the best parts of it are the interactions between the small, close-knit group of characters that form the core of the story. This was much the same with the two immediate predecessors, but…
Doraemon’s second crossover outing with the Story of Seasons/Harvest Moon formula isn’t…
I find the concept of the succubus to be fascinating. As a…
Card Shark is what happens when you take the act of cheating at gambling and make it cultured. Devolver Digital has the most incredible knack for finding games that are just plain good fun to publish, and this is a very good example of that ability. It can be infuriating,…
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Ogre is a classic board game that has been around in some form or another since the ‘70s. It is fondly remembered in the same way that the likes of Hero Quest or earlier editions of Dungeons & Dragons are: for older players, these are the kinds of games that…
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Is there a video game character that has been more exploited than Pac-Man? I’d argue – and I’m right – that Toru Iwatani’s famous pizza slice (or corruption of the Japanese kanji for mouth, depending on which interview he’s giving) – is the video game character that’s been most exploited…
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Touken Ranbu is a game about pretty boys. Who are swords. And travel around time, Quantum Leap-style. I’ve got to be honest with you, if you had told me that at some point in my life I’d be playing an anime boys game whose closest direct comparison is an ‘80s…
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Before there was Bubble Bobble, there was Snow Bros., and the original remains the best. I should explain. Bubble Bobble did actually come first chronologically, but Snow Bros. (the “clone”) was the first single-screen platformer I personally played. Way back on the Game Boy, there was a shrunk-down version of…
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And today’s eShop nasty is… Beach Girls: Don’t Lie In Summer! Like Hentai Uni and Waifu Impact before it, Beach Girls landed on the Switch eShop with a minimum of fanfare and little but the promise of sexy fan service. Its goal? To flog it off to a few people…
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Seven Pirates H has hit my limit. I am more than happy to whip out Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, Gal*Gun, Hyperdimesnion Neptunia, Nekopara, or any other fanservicey Switch game that you can think of on the train or any other public space. I just don’t care if people look…
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Nippon Ichi is at its best when it is at its most inscrutable and inaccessible. The more heavily a NIS game’s humour leans into a surrealistic anime-style over-the-top tone (whether for comic effect or otherwise), and the more numbers the game can throw at players, the more they tend to…
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Before the film that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp had way too much fun with, and before even the Stephen Sondheim musical that more people should see a production of, Sweeny Todd was a Penny Dreadful. People don’t really know what these are anymore, but they were once wildly popular…
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It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that “Waifu Impact” was a play on Genshin Impact. That’s the most interesting thing about this game, though I must admit that in the hand of competent developers this concept could have been spun into something good. The basic concept is…
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