There’s a lot to like about Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds. It comes out swinging with a full-motion video opening that’s both intense and charmingly retro. From there, you’re thrust into a gorgeous world of hand-painted, pre-rendered backgrounds, anime-style character designs, mystical prophecies, and strange monsters. For a game …
Before Cyberdimension Neptunia, before Sword Art Online, before Star Ocean 3, there was .hack (pronounced “dot hack”). The immense popularity of the anime .hack//SIGN and a handful of game spinoffs in the early 2000s popularised the premise of players trapped inside an MMO game, and you can see that …
Omega Quintet was a welcome addition to the PlayStation 4 library when it first came out in 2014. At the time, Japanese developers were only just warming up to the PS4, so it lacked the sort of bright, colourful JRPGs that have always found a home on Sony’s consoles. Then …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Moero Chronicle is a lewd game. It knows this and it owns it, and there’s something refreshing about that. This is an ecchi game through and through: it’s full of scantily-clad women and liberally employs clothing destruction and rubbing mechanics. That’s obviously not going to be for everyone, but Moero …
A couple of years ago, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita owners got introduced to The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, one of the best JRPGs in years. Sadly, the Western release came in the waning years of both those platforms, so it didn’t make as much of a …
Yukie: A Japanese Winter Fairy Tale is a haunting interactive folk tale, and another example of what can be done with RPG Maker and a bit of creativity. Despite the limitations of RPG Maker as a development tool, a lot of folks have been able to produce some fascinating games …
I have a weird relationship with tactical RPGs. I don’t dislike them as such, but most of the time when I enjoy a TRPG it’s in spite of the genre’s unique qualities, rather than because of them. I’ve played plenty and enjoyed plenty of them, but I tend to find …
