Don’t scratch too far beneath the surface, and it’d be easy to write off Harvestella as a somewhat undercooked mashup of JRPG and farming sim. Indeed, I’ve seen more than a few comments asking such lines since the game launched a few months ago (sorry for this extremely late review!), …
Before Final Fantasy Tactics, there was Tactics Ogre. It’s hard to overstate the significance of Yasumi Matsuno’s Super Famicom epic—not just in how heavily its ideas drove the iconic FF spinoff, but in how it influenced a whole breed of tactical RPGs. Even if you set that legacy aside, Tactics …
Even without any personal nostalgia to draw from, there’s always something enchanting about rural Japanese settings in games. From Persona 4 to Root Letter, Boku no Natsuyasumi to The Kids We Were, it’s not an uncommon backdrop, but one that always comes with its own unique magic. It’s that same …
It’s hard to overstate the impact of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It took an excellent but comparatively niche franchise and threw it into the mainstream, and did so without diluting any part of what made the series special to begin with. (Heartthrob characters and tea dates are the perfect gateway …
The revamped PlayStation Plus subscription service is here, bringing with it a library of a few hundred games (for the Extra and Deluxe tiers, at any rate). The value is clear—it takes playing just a few games from the list for the subscription to work out cheaper than buying the …
Metal Max Xeno isn’t something I’d expect to see getting a major overhaul. The original is just a few years old, met with middling reviews, and never really made much of a splash despite an intriguing premise and some unique ideas. A rebirth might be just what it needed, though: …
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. …
The late ‘90s were an odd time to be a JRPG fan outside North America or Japan. The genre had been steadily growing in the West, and the runaway success of Final Fantasy VII in particular opened a whole lot of doors for localising games… at least, in the States. …
A Demon Lord so powerful and dangerous that Gods and Demons put aside their differences (and endless warring) to stop the threat gets sealed away, only to wake up a few years later to a world that’s… changed. Gods and Demons don’t exist anymore, magic is scarce, and humans live …
