It’s hard to shake the feeling that with Super Bomberman R 2, Konami has finally got its groove back with its iconic mascot. This series is going to have a major audience again. And I’m not just saying that because just today I bought a pile of merchandise from a Bomberman merchandise store (the existence of a merch store here…
You know how the saying goes: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” I do feel both very foolish and a great deal of shame for playing Taito Milestones 2. It’s not because this is a retro compilation of poor games. Far from it. The…
Samba de Amigo is a game of pure joy and high-octane energy…
Reality is increasingly uncertain, and this is fascinating. Anonymous;Code, the latest in…
There has been a deluge of Harvest Moon and Rune Factory-likes in recent years. Square Enix, bringing the resources of a large publisher to bear, has made the best of them. Harvestella is the new benchmark for the genre, combining breathtaking aesthetics, superb characterisation, and – the first time I’ve…
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Gaming history is important – if you don’t think so, you’re reading the wrong site, I fear – but all too often, collections of important gaming archives boil down largely just to dull lists of simply emulated games, robbing them of their all-important context. It’s the cultural equivalent of displaying…
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Doraemon’s second crossover outing with the Story of Seasons/Harvest Moon formula isn’t as impressive as the first. The basic game is the same, but while the first comes across as an inspired effort to bring two of the most wholesome Japanese properties together, now we already know it works, so…
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Paradigm Paradox has a smart idea behind it: This is a magical girl story where most of the girls are, in fact, boys! The boys (and love interests) in this otome story magically turn into women when they are out there saving the world, before shifting back to male form…
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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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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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