Hyperdimension Neptunia and Senran Kagura seem like a natural fit for a crossover. They’re both series driven by irreverent senses of humour and fanservice, underpinned by much richer characterisation that you might expect from a quick glance. They approach from very different angles—Neptunia is an RPG series built on game …
Despite the rather surprising ending of Kingdom Hearts III, a sequel was inevitable—series creator / director Tetsuya Nomura confirmed as much even before III came out. But now it’s officially official: during a Kingdom Hearts 20th Anniversary event overnight, Square Enix unveiled Kingdom Hearts IV with an intriguing-looking new trailer. …
A decade since the last new game in a series with a dedicated fanbase—and with the bankruptcy of one studio and formation of another in the meantime—there’s some weight on the shoulders of Rune Factory 5. With expectations riding high, it’d be easy to get overly ambitious, to try to …
I am loving this new subversive streak from Tetsuya Nomura and Kazushige Nojima. They’ve worked together plenty as a creative director/scenario writer duo and often push the bounds of creativity (whatever jokes you want to make about what Kingdom Hearts has become, it remains a fascinating concept). But more recent …
Ah, good old Eurojank. They’re a curious thing, those games that are unwieldy, unpolished, even slightly broken, yet fascinating in the depth of their systems and creative ideas they entertain. Nobody does Eurojank quite like Piranha Bytes—after all, the pretty much invented the style with Gothic. The studio has come …
The mashup of golf and 2D action RPG sounds like an odd one. Sports RPGs certainly aren’t unusual, and Golf Story (to which RPGolf Legends will inevitably be compared) is a great example of that. But we’re talking about a mash-up in the more literal sense: a Zelda-esque action RPG …
While everyone else was getting excited about what a FromSoftware / George R. R. Martin mashup could bring, the announcement of Elden Ring honestly just made me feel tired. What could the Game of Thrones author bring to the table that Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team don’t already do better? …
You could be forgiven for never having heard of Xuan Yuan Sword, given that, until now, it’s had almost no international presence—a couple of poorly-translated multilingual Steam releases and Asia-region versions with English language support being the full extent. But this is a series with a long and storied history …
Like a lot of people, NieR Automata was my introduction to the world of NieR and the works of Yoko Taro. It’s no exaggeration to say that it quickly earned its place as my favourite game of all time, with its beautiful, heartbreaking story, its sense of humour, its subversive …
It’s easy to overlook just how crucial level design is to Monster Hunter. It’s the way little details in each map vibe together—the landscape, the topography, the way different sectors connect to one another—that allows everything else to click into place, even if the tense showdown with whatever massive beast …
