Monster Hunter has always been a tricky series to get into. The idea at the heart of it is simple—hunt monsters, collect materials from their corpses, and craft that into stronger equipment that lets you hunt stronger monsters—but the wealth of different systems underscoring that was always difficult to wrap …
The Secret of Mana remake launched last week, to a somewhat mixed reaction. It still retains the charm and adventure that made the original such a classic, but a lot of people aren’t too pleased with the switch to 3D graphics and voiced dialogue. I’ve only played a little bit so far, …
Being a sequel, SteamWorld Dig 2 was necessarily focused on improving upon everything that made its predecessor work. It was incredibly successful at that—as I said in my review—had the side effect of giving me an urge to play the original SteamWorld Dig again. I re-downloaded the PS Vita version …
Dynasty Warriors 9 feels like the game that Omega Force has been wanting to make since the series’ birth. They’ve finally got the budget and technology to really capture the grandiose epic of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and to convey that feeling of being a soldier on the …
Tokyo RPG Factory’s 2016 debut, I Am Setsuna, was a masterpiece. More than simply a throwback to the JRPGs of the ’90s, it was a deep exploration of the very concept of nostalgia, and the weird cocktail of emotions that comes with it. That didn’t stop it from being …
Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood‘s regular content updates are now well underway, with patch 4.2: Rise of a New Sun marking the second major update since Stormblood‘s launch last year. If you’ve been playing the game at all since its 2014 relaunch, you surely know what to expect from each new …
I’m pleasantly surprised at how much I’m enjoying Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. I wasn’t a big fan of the previous Dissidia games, and this one’s 3-on-3 focus certainly didn’t fit with my general dislike for team-based multiplayer games. Perhaps more significantly, I have a weird bias against Dissidia at a …
Shadow of the Colossus is one of the most remarkable achievements of the video game art form. That was true in 2005, when it first came out on PlayStation 2. It was still true in 2011, when it got ported to PlayStation 3 alongside its predecessor, Ico. And it remains …
Dragon Ball FighterZ feels like two very different games rolled into one, depending on what angle you approach it from. If you come at it as Dragon Ball Z fan first and foremost, you can look forward to one of the best licensed games to date, with a wealth of …
Will O’Neill’s Little Red Lie is a challenging game. I don’t mean that the way people usually do when they describe a game as “challenging”—after all, there’s very little traditional “gameplay” here. No, Little Red Lie‘s difficulty comes through the ideas it explores and the way it explores them: it’s …
