In Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, many communities have no access to clean water. Travelling miles each day to find collect water and lug it back home is a task that falls overwhelmingly on women, taking away from time they could spend learning and helping their families. The UN …
I wasn’t a big fan of Nights of Azure when it first came out. I liked some of the ideas behind it, and the art direction and character designs are fantastic, but I felt that clunky gameplay and poor storytelling held it back. In the years since, I’ve come to …
For whatever reason, I thought (or assumed?) that Tokyo Tattoo Girls was an RPG of some sort. I’ve spoken to a few other people who thought the same, so I know it’s not just me missing something glaringly obvious from the game’s trailers and marketing. “Choose your companion character to …
It’s always interesting when a Japanese developer takes on a Western-style RPG or vice versa; that combination of influences is how we get brilliant games like Dark Souls and Child of Light. A few years ago, Capcom released their take on a Western-style RPG in Dragon’s Dogma. The game offered …
Playing through Four Horsemen for the first time, I assumed that the writer was from Southeast Asia. The group of immigrant teenagers at the centre of the game had a way of talking that mirrored the slang I heard growing up in a community with a lot of Filipino and …
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 …
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 …
From the brilliant mind of Miwashiba comes 1bitHeart, an a funny, heartfelt adventure game about making friends and coping with social anxiety. A few hundred years from now, in a time when everyone and everything is connected to a central network by “BitPhones”, a boy called Nanashi lives alone in …
