Can't help but feel disappointed by modern JRPGs? Let's review and take a closer look at Star Ocean: The Divine Force and what it has gotten wrong. Is this Square Enix game worthy of the PS5?
I've been blocked by game director Brian Horton and the official Tomb Raider twitter page. Do they think that will stop this review of the latest (hopefully last) of the awful Tomb Raider games that Square Enix has published? Tomb Raider Reloaded, it's terrible, obviously.
Metal Gear Solid fans might want to check this game out for better or worse. Action Man: Mission Extreme (also known as Operation Extreme) takes a lot of inspiration from the hit PS1 game and in this review I'll show you how. The game, based on the popular action figure, came out in the late 90s just a year after MGS1!
ECHO is an indie stealth game that touts a unique AI system that can learn from what you do and how you play. In this review, I reveal if that claim is too good to be true and whether ECHO can serve as inspiration for AI innovations moving forward.
The sequel to the Japanese exclusive King's Field, the first RPG on the Playstation & From Software's first game is said to be better in many ways. Hold on a second, let's take a look in this review of King's Field II.
Another Retro Perspective review on Amnesia Rebirth. Does it live up to the original Dark Descent? I tried to keep this review as spoiler free as possible it was a bit off the cuff so it's not the longer critique that I've been keeping to recently but I felt the game at least needed a look. Especially in the Halloween season when people are looking for the best horror games to play!
Since the release of the Western developed Silent Hill games, fans did feel that Konami failed in delivering a horror game that lives up to the series terrifyingly well-conceived roots. In this review & in depth critique of Downpour on PS3, we will discover where Silent Hill went wrong.
Boot Hill Heroes is the first game from indie studio Experimental Gamer, a developer which aims to bring elements from classic RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger and breathe life into the genre once again. This very small team had a successful kickstarter campaign in late 2012 and Boot Hill Heroes was released on Steam and XBox Live Arcade in October and December of 2014 respectively. It originally caught my eye because of its striking resemblance to Earthbound and I thought it would be the perfect game to play in the run up to the release of Mother 4.
In a list of games I played over and over again as a kid, Rugrats: Search For Reptar would be up there near the top. Let’s see if this PS1 game from 1998 stands the test of time. Surprisingly this was the first game based on Nickelodeon’s Rugrats cartoon that started in 1991, featuring Tommy Pickles, Chucky, Phil, Lil and Angelica as playable characters across a series of surprisingly varied levels.
King's Field is a Japanese exclusive PS1 game by From Software that released in 1994, shortly after the launch of the console. In this King's Field review I wanted to go back to a style I tried when I first started The Retro Perspective. A more detailed, broken down look at the individual elements that make this game what it is.
In 2010, the proper version of Star Ocean 4 was released on the PlayStation 3. It contained both English and Japanese voice-over, a choice of 2 UI styles and an extended soundtrack that was included in the Japanese version, and all on 1 disc instead of a ludicrous 3, which needed to be changed when travelling to different planets. It was also bloody awesome.
EA Redwood Shores would later change its name to Visceral, the team behind the beautifully scary Dead Space. They created possibly the best sports game of all time in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 and one of the best racing games on the PS1 with NASCAR Rumble. But even before that, with their very first game, they absolutely nailed it with what is undoubtedly my favourite PS1 game and that game is Future Cop: LAPD.
Have you fallen out of love with Japanese RPGs lately as I have? Often we have to return to the golden age of JRPG’s to remind ourselves how good the genre can be but a surprising amount of these games flew under the radar during the Playstation 3’s lifetime. I will definitely be talking about Folklore some other time, but for now, it’s Time And Eternity, a game which puts you in the shoes of a newlywed princess Toki whose perverted husband gets assassinated immediately after saying I do. Luckily the princess has the ability to reverse time to the months leading up to the wedding and with the help of her pet dragon and the soul of another woman, Towa, who also inhabits her body, tries to uncover the mystery behind the attack on her wedding in the hopes they can prevent it….did I mention this game is Japanese?
You’d be hard-pressed to find people with any kind of childhood that didn’t at some point arrange their toys in such a way to form some sort of city or contraption, guiding miniature figures through & imagining crazy stories & scenarios in their kid brain. I know I certainly went through a phase of driving toy cars along the carpet, up the wall, down bannisters...on the ceiling if I could reach it. So when I first played a demo for Toy Commander on the Dreamcast back in 1999, I was struck by how the game captured that essence of childhood imagination so perfectly and that short snippet of the game stuck with me ever since.
In my last Kingdom Hearts video it would be an understatement to say that I was pessimistic. Square Enix’s insistence on releasing games in the series so frequently on every platform imaginable, with massively fluctuating quality in aesthetic and gameplay terms, has left the series in the unfortunate position of having more bad games than good. But I thought I’d give Kingdom Hearts one last chance, knowing all along that if Kingdom Hearts 3 went the way of Final Fantasy XV (a buggy, ugly, unfinished train wreck) I could safely say I would never buy another Square Enix game again. Ever. So unlike a lot of commentators I’ve noticed on social media who outright bum every nonsensical story trailer or screenshot of one of Tetsuya Nomura’s ludicrous cast of Final Fantasy rejects, you can rest assured I’m about to give this game exactly what it deserves.
Well, Rise of the Tomb Raider was awful but what do we have here, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is developed by Eidos Montreal, the studio that brought us the excellent Deus Ex: Human Revolution & Mankind Divided. Surely they played Rise of the Tomb Raider, laughed their arses off at its ludicrously easy combat difficulty, its barely developed characters & its complete lack of meaningful improvement over the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, & simply proceeded to make their own Tomb Raider game...but then Square Enix stopped them & said “No! That will cost too much money.”
Soulcalibur VI might be a glimmer of hope for the series for fans who felt let down by the lack of content in the previous two games. Here's my (almost) review as I definitely wanted to get my thoughts out on this game.
The original Half Life & its sequel Half Life 2 were ground breaking games in many ways. In this review we discuss how in some ways Valve's FPS series has never really been topped by modern games & many video games still struggle to design fun gameplay scenarios as well as Half Life did years ago.
1997’s Theme Hospital is undoubtedly a classic in every sense of the word & it has never really seen a true successor but with the release of Two Point Hospital by a team consisting of some of the original developers of Theme Hospital, we could finally see a hospital simulation game that moves past some of the limitations of the 90s or even reaches the full potential of this unique idea. Two Point Studio’s Mark Webley & Gary Carr have seemingly been biding their time for many years, knowing full well that a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital would pique the interest of many PS1 era or classic PC gamers. They were there for many of Bullfrog & Lionhead studios’ best works from Theme Park to Black & White so they’re no strangers to sim games.
Apocalypse starring Bruce Willis. I know what you’re thinking: “it’s a licensed game based off of one of the many movies Willis starred in around the creative boom in the late 90s” but actually the only thing Activision licensed for this game is the likeness & voice of the man himself. When I was a kid & some of my favourite films were the likes of Twelve Monkeys & The Fifth Element I always assumed one day I’d get to see this awesome, non-existent movie. The gloomy & dark cyberpunk atmosphere of the game certainly took inspiration from some of Willis’s best works.
Kuri Kuri Mix is an interesting take on the co-op puzzle platformer genre made by From Software....yes, that From Software. Join us as we play through the story mode & go head to head in this PS2 hidden gem!
If there's one good thing that has come out of the current generation of gaming it's the huge surge of people realising what they've been missing all these years in the Yakuza series. Ironic then that just as Yakuza explodes into bigger success than ever before, the final chapter in main character Kiryu’s story wraps up. On the other hand, the brand new ‘Dragon Engine’ & promise of future games makes Yakuza 6 both a fresh start & a final curtain. Does it pull it off? Let's find out!
Level 5 took a break from milking their cash cow Yo Kai Watch on the baby DS to do what, In the past, they’ve always done best: put square Enix to shame with another huge JRPG that outright rips off mechanics from a Nintendo game. Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is a sequel to the sublime Studio Ghibli collaboration...but Studio Ghibli have unfortunately not contributed this time.
It was the turn of the millennium & the golden age of Japanese RPGs was still in full swing. Final Fantasy was still enjoying its place at the top but many Playstation fans of the time remember The Legend of Dragoon to be one of the biggest contenders to the throne. Having never played the game myself I felt it was time to go back and see if this game by Sony’s own Japan Studio could hold a candle to the much loved Squaresoft.
Translating the Dissidia Final Fantasy games that originated on the PSP system to the PS4 was never going to be easy. The original & its sequel Dissidia Duodecim were some of the most feature rich games, not just on a handheld but possibly of all time. But now that the series has been given more of an online multiplayer focus in an era of microtransactions & incomplete games, Square Enix & developer Team Ninja have had more ways than ever to mess this one up...but did they?
On Puzzle Dimension’s official website it states that “There have been people asking for a puzzle game like Kula World for modern hardware” and it’s clear that this game hopes to be the answer to that. Directed by Kula World developer Jesper Rudberg, this relatively unknown game came onto my radar through researching the cult PS1 title but now with its spiritual predecessor fresh in my mind, it’s time to find out if Puzzle Dimension was worth asking for.
Kula World is a rare Playstation 1 game by an obscure developer called Game Design Sweden. Nevertheless, Kula World seems a very well known game amongst Playstation fans, probably due to its widely played demo published in several playstation magazine demo discs. But how is the game beyond that demo & is Kula World deserving of its cult status?
Kingdom Hearts, what a unique video game franchise. Despite only having two numbered games in the series so far, Kingdom Hearts has a mind boggling amount of entries across an equally mind boggling amount of platforms many of which are essential to understanding the overarching plot. Kingdom Hearts 2.8 is the latest piece of the puzzle and all of it is meant to contextualise and precede the highly anticipated Kingdom Hearts III.....It’s also a load of old bollocks!
South Park: The Fractured but Whole, the sequel to the critically acclaimed Stick of Truth is here at last to coincide with season 21 of the South Park TV series. A lot has happened in the humble town of South Park since The Stick of Truth: PC Principal took over South Park Elementary, SodoSopa brought gentrification to the town and the Canadian Devil Beelzaboot released his freemium Terrence & Phillip game to exploit children for money. So, has South Park: The Fractured but Whole changed and matured along with the show and how has Ubisoft inevitably managed to mess it up?
4 years ago, I interviewed Feili from Rocket Juice Games, who was working on an open-world adventure RPG game which was set to stand out in one key way: Your sole means of transport is rollerskating! I love the idea of checking back on projects I've done interviews on. Feili and his very small team have now taken Neon Tail out of early access, with plenty more updates set to come and I was excited to see if their hard work had paid off!