There’s been a lot of attention on substandard localisation work for Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, to the point that NIS America president Takuro Yamashita apologised for it and promised sweeping improvements. All that criticism was well-founded, but it also drowned out another really important detail: Ys VIII is a …
Gaming
The Western debut of Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection is one of the most delightful surprises of the year. It’s a localisation of Zwei II, one of Nihon Falcom’s lesser-known titles and a game that, having originally released in Japan in 2008, is almost a decade old. I can’t imagine there …
Mystik Belle is a neat Metroidvania with a heavy focus on item puzzles, all wrapped gorgeous pixel art that calls to mind the last days of Super Famicom. Belle McFae is a freshman at Hagmore School of Magic, skilled at fire magic and getting into trouble. One fateful night, that …
Since its release, Danganronpa V3 has been a controversial game for a bunch of reasons. A lot of fans are unhappy with the big twist ending. The localisation quality has come under fire. It’s a new direction for the Danganronpa series—at the very least, it’s a fresh start, with no …
To this day, the best take on the increasingly popular “people trapped in an MMO game” premise is Star Ocean 3. The big twist in that game (spoiler alert for a 14-year-old game, yadda yadda) was that the main characters are actually NPCs in an MMO game of sorts, and …
I’m loving this new trend towards less-violent shooting games. There’s something inherently exciting about shooting game mechanics, but they’re almost always tied to violence—understandably so, given the genre’s origins, but it’s always nice to see games question the ubiquity and necessity of violence as the main form of interaction. Gal*Gun …
When Square Enix announced Life is Strange: Before the Storm, I was skeptical for a whole bunch of reasons. Chief among them was the the question of how much the original game could gain from a prequel, compared to how much it stood to lose. Life is Strange left a …
When it first came out a couple of years ago, Pillars of Eternity was widely praised, and for good reason. Many a game tries to capture the magic of Infinity Engine games like Baldur’s Gate, but more often than not, it’s a superficial homage that begins and ends with an …
In a combination of moreishness and nostalgia, I followed up SteamWorld Dig 2 by immediately firing up SteamWorld Dig for the first time in years. I knew that the new game was an improvement over the same ideas that drove the original—such is the way with sequels, generally—but I didn’t …
I used to be one of those people who wrote off the Musou series as “boring” and “repetitive”; a mindless button masher with little going for it beyond the brief satisfaction of swatting enemy grunts away like flies. I’ve come to appreciate the series a lot more in recent years, though, …