It’s been a long time since I’ve really enjoyed a Tales game. There was a time when it was one of it favorite series’, but the last one that really hooked me was Tales of Eternia on PSP – and even that was a re-release of a much older game. …
JRPG
It’s been a long time since I’ve done a Now Playing post. What better time than with the holidays kicking off? Here’s what I am playing, and will be playing, over the break. Shantae: Half-Genie Hero (PS4) I was a latecomer to the Shantae phenomenon, so I didn’t get a chance to back Shantae: …
In a world full of retro-styled JRPG throwbacks it’s hard for a game to stand out, but Norwegian indie studio Snowcastle Games found a way with Earthlock: Festival of Magic. It’s a game that’s heavily inspired by the RPGs of the ‘90s, but instead of banking everything on nostalgia, there’s …
I imported I Am Setsuna earlier this year when it first came out in Japan, though I never got around to playing more than the first couple of hours. Having now played the English version, I’m glad I didn’t play much of the import, because with my cursory understanding of …
Playing Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing a completely different game to other reviewers. Maybe the lukewarm reception tempered my own expectations somewhat, but what I played was a good game—a great game, even. There are a lot of minor annoyances that …
The tactical RPG genre is one that is, for the most part, fairly rigid. That’s no bad thing, of course, but it means I thought I knew what to expect from Grand Kingdom going in. I did not. This is a game that’s taken a well-established genre and turned it …
I Am Setsuna is the latest in a long line of Japanese games that have been butchered in the name of “localisation” to appease the delicate sensibilities of the Western audience. Nintendo had the gall to inject Western-centric humour into Fire Emblem Fates, a game that otherwise has absolutely no …
Coming out very late in the PlayStation 2’s life cycle, Odin Sphere perhaps didn’t get as much attention as it deserved. It was a critical darling (and rightly so) and sold fairly well, but it was niche game fighting against a newly-released PlayStation 3 and all the hype that goes …
This week, Square Enix released Romancing SaGa 2 on iOS and Android. With the publisher’s obsession with porting older games to mobile, there wouldn’t be anything remarkable about this release, if not for the fact that this is the game’s first official localisation in 23 years since it came out in Japan. …
One of the best things about the recent surge in indie game development is the chance to hear stories from so many different voices; voices that are all but locked out from the traditional, AAA route. The relative accessibility of game creation tools, running the gamut of complexity from Twine to …