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 …
One of the best things about the wide net Koei Tecmo casts with licensed Warriors games is seeing the clever ways the Musou formula can be twisted. From Zelda-style items and puzzle bosses in Hyrule Warriors, to Dragon Quest Heroes and Persona 5 Strikers being a full-fledged JRPGs, the influence …
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 …
Every time I review an Atelier game, I always seem to wind up talking about their laid-back charm and how wonderfully uplifting they are. That may be partially due to a lack of creativity on my part, but it’s most just because… well, it’s consistently true. Gust has spent decades …
“Dynasty Warriors mashed up with Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” That’s the elevator pitch for the Dynasty Warriors Empires spinoffs—the turn-based strategy of Koei Tecmo’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, but with battles playing out in Dynasty Warriors action-strategy fashion, instead of simply icons on screen to show you …
A new trailer for Touken Ranbu Warriors dropped overnight, and alongside an overview of game systems and introduction of a mysterious new character, there’s a preview of a beautiful opening theme by Akiko Shikata. Prolific as she is in the videogame music scene, Shikata’s layered vocals and evocative compositions will …
Blue Reflection was one of the most uplifting, joyous—dare I say wholesome—games of 2017, even if that point seemed to get lost on a lot of folks. A story about an aspiring ballet dancer who suffers a career-ending injury, and then finding new meaning in a life that she’s mostly …
Playing Monster Rancher in 2021 is a surreal experience, to say the least. On one hand, it’s a ’90s game through and through, when CDs were still the standard music format and the relative novelty of a disc-based game console made a fun gimmick out of putting your music into …
When I played the original release of Project Zero: Maiden of Black Water on Wii U, I really didn’t like it. It was a game that, on paper, sounded exactly like my kind of thing, but all I found was squandered potential. In reviewing it (for another site that’s no …
