Here’s the problem with playing a single-player spinoff from a multiplayer property: If you don’t particularly care about the multiplayer that the franchise is built on, the single player, where developers will almost always double down on the various in-fanbase jokes, aesthetics, characters and themes, is really not going to…
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Look, the Nippon Professional Baseball league – the NPB – is just better than the MLB. I don’t mind if you disagree, but you’re wrong. From the personality of the teams to the quality of the games, the way the league is organised, and the atmosphere when you’re actually there,…
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What happens when you take Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering and smoosh them together? Culdcept. Culdcept is what happens. It’s perhaps a marriage between two very different genres of board game that no one really asked for, but the series has been around since 1997 and the Sega Saturn, so…
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Granblue Fantasy: Relink was one of the more surprising JRPGs in recent years. This is partly because the game had a notoriously troubled development cycle, yet turned out to be excellent (generally, if something takes eight years and multiple different developers to finish, it’s going to be terrible). It’s also…
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I knew that I was in for a mighty slog when the tutorial of Sword Art Online: Echoes of Aincrad, felt like it went for an hour all by itself. What a winding, long-winded, slow-paced dungeon that was. And then the game opens up to become a massive… long-winded, slow-paced…
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Digimon is doomed to forever walk in Pokémon’s shadow. Part of the issue is the obvious similarities in the names, but on a superficial pass there are more similarities than that, and Digimon doesn’t always do itself favours there. Both games feature cute anime monsters, but Pokémon’s artists come up…
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To review the Gothic 1 Remake, I played it side-by-side with the original Gothic, as released on the Nintendo Switch. One hour in the remake, one in the original. Then back to the remake. I did that because Gothic is, in its own little way, an enormously influential classic. It…
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The origins of the Rhythm Heaven series are noble. One of the legends of Japanese music, Tsunku, got involved with Nintendo and produced the first game in an effort to develop the player’s rhythm skills. You might assume that all rhythm games do that, but in reality, most rhythm games…
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Dungeons & Dragons is great. Really, really great. But it’s a massive time sink and even bigger commitment from the entire group. The last couple of times I’ve tried to get in on a D&D campaign, it has fizzled out once people started to get busy with work, weekends, or…
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I was genuinely concerned that Dead or Alive was, well, dead. On its original launch, Dead or Alive 6 was largely seen as a misfire by just about all camps: Koei Tecmo clearly wanted to elevate it into the rotation for serious fighting games, but on reputation alone it was…
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