Despite what seems to have become de rigeur for the gaming industry, making a game a roguelike is not actually cruise control for making it a game with endless content. In fact, I can think of a lot of games lately that have tried to keep themselves engaging by making themselves into roguelikes when neither
For better or for worse – probably worse – the late 80s into the early 90s were a real time that actually happened. Some of us lived through them. And there was a time, perhaps not so long ago in memory, when there was a real sense of a sun-drenched lush paradise ruled over by
Despite what it may seem like, I am actually not an enormous Fire Emblem fan. I am, however, an absolutely unreserved massive fan of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. This isn’t to say that I traditionally have disliked Nintendo’s long-running second-party series of strategy RPGs, just that they have rarely risen above “well, that was fun
First and foremost, I think it’s important to look at Power Chord as it presents itself compared to what Power Chord actually is. Because I believe that it’s easy to get swept up in the game’s presentation in such a way that you lose sight of the fact that the game itself is actually simpler
If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you have probably noticed by this point that I periodically make a point of picking a game up that I am in no way qualified to review. This would be one of those times, because quite frankly? If there’s one genre I tend to actively dislike,
It takes very little effort – bordering on no effort – to get me interested in the prospect of a cat cafe. My two cats are two of the most important living things on the planet to me, and I love cats in general. They’re stupid furry pillows full of knives who vibrate and make
On January 28th, 1998, Square-Enix released Final Fantasy Tactics to a North American audience. People who played that game have spent twenty-four years looking for more. I open with that because I feel it’s very important to note my biases at the very least. When I first heard about Triangle Strategy my immediate dream was
Here’s the hidden secret about Metallic Child: It is perhaps best understood not by what it claims to be on the cover but by a series of otherwise ornate references to other games. At a glance, this game is a roguelite, and indeed that’s what it claims to be right on the cover when you
So, the first of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters are out. And it is impossible to review the whole product just yet, because the whole product isn’t available right now. We haven’t yet played the Final Fantasy IV through Final Fantasy VI remasters. They’re simply not available to be experienced yet. At the same time,
So here it is, the sequel. It’s not exactly a mystery that The World Ends With You became a cult hit on its release, and with good cause. It wasn’t just that it had a very different setting than normal, setting itself in the beating heart of a stylized version of Shibuya with a cast
Sometimes, it feels almost wrong to really criticize a game for what it’s trying to be, even though there’s absolutely stuff to be critical about with regards to its design. For example, take the time-honored tradition of the mobile gacha game. It’s clear that there are some major issues with these games in terms of
Let me tell you, there’s nothing that gets me to give something side-eye faster than when it doesn’t want to be up-front about what it’s trying to sell me. Maybe a given store is trying to tell me moldy hot dogs. I don’t want moldy hot dogs. No one should ever be trying to sell
There’s a very delicate balance to be struck when making a game that expects the player to walk in and die on a regular basis. Roguelikes and their kissing cousins, roguelites, have kind of exploded in popularity in the past few years. At the core level, they’re pretty easy games to make. You give players
For a while there, it really looked like we were done with side-scrolling shoot-em-ups for good. I say that without any particular joy at that fact, obviously, because I really like this genre. But it seemed like the spark had gone out, the genre had been pushed as far as it could go, and without
It’s always refreshing to review a game that isn’t trying to be anything other than itself. There’s more to discuss when it comes to Olija, of course, but one of the things that struck me early on was the fact that, unlike all too many games that are attempting a spin on X formula or
The Ys series is an odd one in the annals of JRPGs. On the one hand, it is very much in the original school of these games, with the first installment coming out in 1987, and there was a definite push to bring it to North America. Unfortunately, due to a variety of different factors,
At a certain point, you simply have to accept that there are certain flaws in your approach to life that you clearly do not have much interest in solving. Between this and Fairy Tail, it is obvious that I have a bad habit (some might say an unconscionable one) of picking up titles based on
Some games are really tough to review coming in from the outside. Case in point? Fairy Tail. Much like when I reviewed Gensou Skydrift, I am aware walking into this particular situation that this is material adapting a well-known and well-loved shonen manga. Fairy Tail is based quite directly on a manga that had an
The release of the Sony PlayStation in North America in 1994 was an enormous and unprecedented event, one which drew a great deal of attention from both game journalists and video game players at the time. An affordable 32-bit console with excellent performance for 3D games was immediately notable as a novelty, with early titles
I found myself feeling very divided in my opinions as I played Signs of the Sojourner. Actually, that’s not altogether true; my opinion was relatively clear insofar as it was a game I really wanted to like if the darn game would stop getting in the way. But that may or may not be its
