Six years after its original Japanese launch, Cupid Parasite is now coming to PC later this year. This is Idea Factory International’s first PC otome release since 2018. The Steam versions will be available in North America and Europe, and feature Japanese voiceovers with English text. Anyone who orders the game from the IFI Store will get a trading card…
Idea Factory and its otome factory, Otomate, is at its best when working with stories based in history. Hakuouki, for example. Or the first Birushana, which was set in the Heian period of Japanese history and let you hang out with Benkei and other famous boys (made pretty) while the…
People love K-pop idol groups, and this is one of the least…
As you all know, I’m working on a visual novel about my…
Japanese romance visual novel Memories Off launched for PlayStation in 1999, spawning an entire series that goes by the same name. The mainline series currently includes eight games (I’m not even going to get into the extended world of direct prequels, sequels, and spin-offs). Seven of those are available in…
Read More
Idea Factory and Otomate have brought us some incredible flights of fantasy over the years. There are the historical dramas, allowing us to hang out with and romance the Shinsengumi or Beinke. Then there’s the bright and bubbly Cupid Parasite, where you play as Cupid herself, or the almost brutally…
Read More
Death Mark deserves better recognition than it gets. The first two games in the series (Death Mark itself, and then Spirit Hunter: Ng) are both incredible horror visual novels, through which Experience Inc. has given us some of the finest art and suspense narratives that we’ve seen. And yet to…
Read More
Well, Konosuba: Love for These Clothes of Desire certainly has its eye-opening moments. This is a game that likes to get downright dirty in places, and embraces (with gusto) every possible sexualisation trope you can imagine in anime. It has a ball doing so, and as long as isekai-style narratives…
Read More
It is finally happening! For years and years now, Fate/Stay Night has been perhaps the most important visual novel to never be released (officially) in English. Despite launching a massive media property, including untold numbers of games that have been localised, the original visual novel has languished, only available to…
Read More
What do tornadoes, a cult, and a man in a trunk have in common? You’ll be surprised. Bahnsen Knights is the third in LCB Game Studio’s Pixel Pulp series. The series takes pulp fiction, gives it a paranormal twist, and turns it into a video game. To date, it has…
Read More
The next Steam Next Fest is next month (that’s a lot of nexts), which means developers and getting demos ready now. At full launch, visual novel The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty will be available in English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese – but the demo…
Read More
Some licensed games aim to introduce people to the property, and in doing so help to expand the overall number of fans the thing has. Koei Tecmo has been particularly successful at that over the years, applying the Warriors (Musou) formula to several emerging IP. Arslan: The Warriors of Legend,…
Read More
One – also known as Kagayaku Kisetsu e – is one of the legends of the visual novel genre. Originally released way back in 1998, it was one of the early projects by a developer called Tactics, which is notable because many of the creative team moved on from that…
Read More
Cupid Parasite is one of the stronger visual novels launched this decade. In Matt’s review for DDNet, he writes, “Comedy’s always hard to get right, especially when there’s an underlying subversive quality to it, but Cupid Parasite never falters… This is one of Otomate’s finest.” That was two years ago,…
Read More