Sega’s Yakuza series is perhaps one of the most misunderstood franchises out there to people who haven’t played it.

Prior to its original release, it was assumed that the game would be a Japanese clone of Grand Theft Auto. Then people saw its real-time combat and started assuming it was a brawler.

It is neither of these things. It is, in fact, one of the most well-disguised JRPG series you’ll ever play.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

Let’s look at the facts. While Yakuza obviously doesn’t take place in a vast, sprawling, hypercolour fantasy world populated by talking balls of fluff and big-eyed anime girls, there are plenty of established conventions that it does follow.

You’ll get into random battles as you wander around, allowing you to grind for experience. Special attacks become increasingly elaborate and ridiculous as the game progresses. And the main plotline is resolutely linear from start to end, with very few meaningful choices for the player to make throughout.

However, like any good JRPG, it’s possible to pretty much abandon that plotline for hours at a time — even if someone/the city/the world is in dire peril — and go off to complete a ton of side content.

And what side content. Throughout the Yakuza series you’ll be doing everything from attempting to romance cabaret girls to running your own club via handling a full-scale murder investigation. You’ll be chasing down criminals, teaching dogs new tricks and going shopping with a little girl. You’ll be spending hours trying to master an arcade machine, levelling up series protagonist Kazuma to learn new moves and taking candid photographs of bizarre happenings to inspire “revelations.” You’ll — you get the idea.

It is, of course, possible to run through all the Yakuza games from start to finish in less than 12 hours apiece, but while doing so will probably give you a more coherent sense of the very complex narrative, you miss out on one of the best things about the game: its incredibly authentic-feeling rendition of what life is like in modern Japan.

By taking time out to hang out with cabaret girls, sit in a “video booth,” visit the batting cage or go bowling, the player gets a real sense of being in Kazuma’s shoes. He becomes a whole person who does “human” things as well as exhibiting astonishing displays of superhuman strength. While he may spend a lot of his time in the story fighting for his life against gangsters, special agents, tigers and raging bulls, he’s also not above spending some time with the people he loves — most frequently, Haruka, the little girl whom he rescues in the first game and who grows up gradually over the course of its subsequent sequels.

While the game world is a big draw to the Yakuza series — particularly the fact that the player gets to see its iconic (and fictional, albeit based on the real locale of Kabuki-cho) setting of Kamuro-cho grow and change across all the games — it’s the characters that will make you want to stay. It would be less appealing to spend time in Kazuma’s shoes if he was a dumb, testosterone-fuelled asshole, for example, but thankfully, he’s not. In fact, Kazuma is one of the more memorable characters to come out of any video game in the last few years, effortlessly blending “cool,” “badass” and “sensitive” together into one awesome package that I’m not afraid to say I have a bit of a man-crush on.

But it’s not just Kazuma who is an interesting character, either. His psychotic “friend” Majima, whom he ends up fighting at least once in every game, is hilarious, and the calm demeanor of Detective Date complements Kazuma well. Haruka, too, could easily have ended up being an annoying child that you want to ditch as soon as possible, but she has been handled well enough that the player develops a genuine feeling of affection for her as her relationship with Kazuma develops. Even the “hostess” girls whom Kazuma chats to in the cabaret clubs have well-defined personalities and are interesting characters in their own right — despite being part of a sequence of events which some players won’t touch at all.

In short, the whole experience of the Yakuza series feels coherent, well thought out and highly immersive. Nothing feels “tacked on” for the sake of it, and it’s abundantly clear that the people who worked on the game have genuine affection for this setting and characters. Those who settle in to play the series for the long haul often end up feeling the same way.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that the series isn’t without a few issues, however. The fighting engine improves enormously over the course of the series but remains a little clunky at times, with punching the air rather than the enemy in front of you a persistent problem. The first game’s dub, while featuring decent quality English voice actors, is peppered with so many F-bombs that it actually becomes distracting. (Thankfully, from Yakuza 2 onwards, the team made the wise decision to retain the original Japanese voices and use subtitles.) The third game’s “chase battle” sequences are rubbish. Getting 100% on any of these games is an exercise in frustration unless you have a guide to hand and well over 50 hours to spare per game. And the complex web of relationships and “families” in the game is immensely confusing to newcomers — and particularly to those who don’t know the conventions of Japanese society, especially with regard to addressing people by their first and last names.

These issues aside, though, Yakuza is a high-quality — and highly unusual — JRPG that is well worth your time if you enjoy the structure and mechanics of the genre but feel like escaping from brightly-colored fantasy worlds for a while. It’s also further proof that the JRPG genre is anything but stale — its mechanics and structure can easily be picked up and transplanted into a non-conventional setting and still work well. (You can even still put swords in it.) Which, of course, begs the obvious question: why don’t we see this more often?

I can’t answer that. But I’d certainly be happy to see more developers tackle JRPGs in non-conventional settings in the future. How about it?

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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With any big online game — particularly one that has been around for several years — it can be difficult to know where and how to get started. Granblue Fantasy is no exception.

With that in mind, I thought I’d outline my experiences over the last three weeks as I learn about the game, how it works and what I can expect from it in the future.

This is by no means an attempt to say “this is how you should play the game” — doubtless the more hardcore players out there will have strong opinions about how “best” to progress! — but rather a reflection on the experience of one timid newbie and his attempts to understand the many hidden depths of this surprising phenomenon.

When you kick off Granblue Fantasy, you’ll be walked through a few introductory quests and introduced to the core characters of the narrative. You’re also given the opportunity to draw some initial weapons and characters to start building your party, which forms the core of the overall metagame.

Once you’re through these tutorials, which are pretty self-explanatory, there are a number of different directions you can go depending on your own personal priorities.

A good place to start is the main scenario, which takes you from location to location across Granblue Fantasy’s world of Phantagrande Skydom. Each chapter includes a four-part fully voiced main quest, which provides additional opportunities to get loot over sidequests and doesn’t cost any of the game’s “energy” resource, AP, to play for the first time. In this way, even if you’re out of AP from doing other things, you can always attempt to make progress on the main story — and perhaps even replenish your AP if you manage to earn enough RP to rank up.

Each chapter of the main scenario also includes a number of sidequests, each of which are one-shot affairs that cost AP to participate in. It’s worth doing these alongside the main quest, as completing any content for the first time rewards you with something — generally Crystals, which can be used to do Premium Draws for new weapons, characters and summons.

There are a number of ways to progress in Granblue Fantasy, and while the main scenario is a lot more forgiving than some of the other content in the game, it pays to stay on top of all aspects of progression and get as ahead of the curve as you can.

The first and most obvious means of progression is your player rank, which increases with “RP” (Rank Points) you earn by defeating enemies. Ranking up increases the base stats of the protagonist Gran (or his female counterpart Djeeta) and, at certain milestones, unlocks new content.

Being a high enough rank to enter a certain piece of content doesn’t mean it’s going to be practical for you to challenge it, however. Much more important than your overall rank is your party’s power level and star rating, which can be seen on the main menu screen when you open the game. Power indicates your total attack power from characters, weapons, summons and other bonuses, while the star rating gives you a rough idea of what “tier” of content you’re able to challenge and not be overwhelmed: each solo quest has a star rating that indicates its rough level of difficulty. Star rating rises naturally as your power increases; there’s nothing that affects it directly.

The biggest boosts to your overall power level come from your weapon grid. Here, you can equip up to ten weapons at once: one is your “main weapon”, which is used by Gran and must be of a type his current class is proficient in, while the other nine are equipped to add HP and attack power to your party as a whole. Rare (R) weapons and higher also have passive Skills attached, which can offer further bonuses to characters of a particular element, so it pays to focus a party on a single element in most cases.

Weapons can be levelled up through the game’s “upgrade” system, whereby you can consume up to 20 fodder weapons at a time to give the item you’re upgrading experience points. R weapons or higher provide a chance to increase the level and overall effectiveness of passive skills, while special Angelic weapons are pretty much useless in combat but worth much more experience than standard loot drops.

Summons also have a “grid” system similar to weapons, though you only equip five at a time in this case. Your “main summon” has an aura effect that provides a passive bonus or benefit of some sort, while the other three are both summonable as special attacks in combat as well as providers of additional HP and attack power to your party. Summons, like weapons, can be upgraded by “feeding” them other, unneeded summons.

Weapons, characters and summons all have level caps, too, initially set by their rarity. Anything SSR (the highest rarity) has a higher level cap than SR, which in turn has a higher level cap than R, and so on. These level caps can be raised in various ways: characters generally require collecting a combination of rare treasure items, while weapons and summons simply need to be fused with additional copies of themselves or special items. Fully uncapping something (sometimes referred to as “MLBing” or “Max Limit Breaking”) often unlocks new skills or improves existing abilities considerably, so is well worth the effort.

It’s worth knowing all this stuff up front so you don’t waste your time and resources progressing in areas that aren’t worth focusing on. A good initial priority, it seems, is to focus on building a party and a weapon grid that complements it — in my case, I’m aiming for a party of Water-type characters, with a grid of Water-type weapons to boost their attack power wherever possible. I chose this element for a fairly simple reason: because I have a good selection of Water-type characters already. Some of the first characters who join you as part of the main scenario are Water-type, and an early SSR draw was also Water, making this an obvious choice for me to focus on, at least initially.

This isn’t to say you have to pin yourself down to a particular element immediately, especially not in the early game where your weapon inventory will likely be a hodgepodge of mismatched elements rather than the coordinated elegance of high-level players. Regular events provide opportunities to acquire SR and SSR weapons and characters if you’re willing to put in a bit of work, and it’s very much worthwhile to do so.

I’ve participated in two events since I started playing; I joined just as the Little Skyfarer A La Sacre Blumiel event was coming to its conclusion, and am currently knee-deep in the Idolmaster-themed Piña Hazard event. Both have provided some great rewards for participating, and both unfolded in rather different ways.

Little Skyfarer was a story-heavy event in which Gran and his crew were tasked with creating the perfect “grown-up” lunch for a dimunitive holy knight captain called Charlotta, who was fed up of eating kids’ meals. Completing this event involved a combination of reading through the visual novel-style preamble, participating in multiplayer raid battles against powerful bosses, and making use of the loot acquired to cook meals for Charlotta. Each meal you cooked raised her Loyalty value, and she would join your party permanently when this reached its maximum. Loyalty would grow faster if you gave her the foods she wanted, which she provided hints for, but you would still get some credit if she didn’t think much of your dish.

Piña Hazard, meanwhile, is a little more complex. Once again, there is a narrative preamble, but this time there are battles involved in the story, and after this is complete, a number of Special Quests open up, allowing you to acquire tokens that can be traded in for loot. There are also a number of Challenge quests, which give you a predefined party and challenge you to use their unusual combinations of skills to defeat a boss monster. These battles are a real highlight, incorporating almost puzzle-like elements as you determine how best to defeat your foes, and the rewards are great: the guest characters in the predefined parties join your lineup after successfully completing the battle. If you ever wanted Mika Jougasaki and friends in an RPG… now’s the time to start playing Granblue Fantasy.

Granblue Fantasy is, like more traditional computer- and console-based MMOs, a game designed to be played for the long haul — though not necessarily in single sessions as long as titles like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV demand. As such, I’m learning, you shouldn’t get discouraged if you find yourself getting distracted from the main story for long periods by grinding for event loot and characters; that main story will still be there when the event ends, and the rewards from the event will make your journey a lot easier in both the short and long term.

After three weeks with the game, I feel like I have a fairly firm handle on how the game works, how to progress and how to spend my time with it effectively. I still have a long way to go — the folks who jump into raid battles and immediately throw out seven-figure damage without breaking a sweat show that very clearly, while I often struggle to break five after spending a long time buffing everyone — but the journey, so far, has been enjoyable, and every time I play I feel like I learn a little more about the game and progress a little further into the rabbit-hole that is its surprisingly compelling metagame.

Ask me again in a year if I’m still interested and you might get a different answer. But right now, I’m absolutely on board.

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The original Gravity Rush was an important release for Sony’s Vita handheld: it was a high-profile, first-party release, which the system has not, to date, seen all that many of, and is unlikely to see any more.

It was positively received at the time of its original release by press and public alike, but Sony’s consistently poor marketing of the platform — coupled with a general sense of apathy by the more “mainstream” parts of the gaming community — meant that it passed a lot of people by.

And that’s a great shame, as it was an excellent game. Thankfully, Bluepoint Games managed to give it a second chance on the much more popular and widespread PlayStation 4 in the form of enhanced port Gravity Rush Remastered, so a whole new audience can discover the joy of swooping around Hekseville.

As a game, Gravity Rush is actually a little difficult to describe or pigeon-hole into a genre. This is actually a good thing, and one of the numerous aspects that makes it so memorable: it’s not really just one thing.

There are elements of open-world action adventures. There’s the item collecting of 3D platformers. There’s the combat of character action games. There’s the progression of RPGs. And it’s all tied together by the presence of one of the most memorable protagonists in recent memory: Kat.

We don’t really know anything about Kat from the outset of the game — and neither does she. In fact, she doesn’t even know her name at the beginning of the story: she only gets called “Kat” in reference to the mysterious, star-filled cat that appears to have taken a liking to her, and which is the source of her mysterious ability to shift gravity in any direction around herself. The name sticks, however, and it fits her perfectly.

Kat reveals herself quite quickly to be a somewhat flighty young girl who is rather immature in many of her attitudes. She’s kind, optimistic and naive, always keen to do the right thing and not quite sure what to do when it all backfires on her — as happens in the introductory sequence, where she manages to rescue someone, but is unable to save their home — and she frequently indulges in the flights of fancy you’d expect from a typical teenage girl. She wants people to think she’s cute, she has an idealised view of romance and she always wants to assume the best intentions from people, even when they’re obviously complete dickheads. Her relentless positivity is infectious, and a wonderful antidote to the negativity and grimness we get from many other modern games.

She’s fun to play as, too. When on the ground, she runs around with an endearingly determined posture — a particularly impressive achievement, given the heels she’s wearing — and shifting gravity causes her to tumble chaotically through the sky rather than flying gracefully like a more conventional “superhero”. Her Gravity Slide ability shifts the pace and feel of traversing the world into something that temporarily feels more like an extreme sports skateboarding title, while aerial combat can be performed either up close or at range using her Gravity Kick and Stasis Field manoeuvres, the latter of which even gives the game a “shooter” feel at times.

You’re free to use each of Kat’s abilities as you see fit from the outset of the game, with different ones being more or less suited to various situations. For example, aerial combat might seem frustrating against fast enemies, until you realise that throwing objects using the Stasis Field to hit them at range is much more effective. Chasing an enemy might seem impossible on foot until you decide to pursue them by Gravity Sliding instead. And hiding from enemies that you don’t want to see you takes on a whole new dimension — literally — when you get your head around the fact that Kat can stand on walls and ceilings positioned at angles completely at odds with where you think “down” is.

Once the introductory sequence is over, Kat has a choice of things to do. There is a linear main storyline to follow, which gradually unlocks the complete map as Kat restores transport links between the districts of Hekseville and recovers missing sections from otherworldly “Rift Planes”, but in between times there are a number of locations where Kat can donate “Precious Gems” she has collected to unlock “Challenge Missions” as well as a series of DLC missions (bundled in with Remastered) themed around different costumes.

The Challenge Missions have nothing to do with the main story and indeed no narrative context whatsoever, but they provide a good opportunity to get to know Kat’s arsenal of moves as well as testing the effectiveness of powering them up — a process which also uses collected Precious Gems. The challenges Kat is tasked with taking on range from defeating as many enemies as possible in a set time to completing races using her gravity-shifting or sliding abilities and, while simple, they’re both a lot of fun and a good source of Precious Gems to improve her power.

The Challenge Missions are one aspect of the game that very much brings to mind titles such as Rare’s platformers on the Nintendo 64 and later games such as Naughty Dog’s Jak and Daxter series. They’re designed to be replayable, with three tiers of target times or scores to achieve, and even feature online leaderboard functionality, but are mostly a straightforward, gameplay-centric way to showcase all the different abilities that Kat has as well as challenging the player to apply these in a variety of unusual situations.

They can also be absolutely infuriating, of course — but incredibly addictive.

The story missions, by contrast, are more involved affairs that feature multiple stages of objectives punctuated by narrative sequences. Through these missions, we learn more about Kat, the world in which she finds herself and what, exactly is going on. Hekseville is a city floating in the sky, beneath which is an ominous-looking “gravity storm” from which monsters called “Nevi” occasionally appear. At the time we join Kat, all this is just accepted as a natural part of life by Hekseville’s residents, but Kat’s natural curiosity — another aspect in which her name is entirely appropriate — leads her to investigate things in more detail.

The story missions include a combination of challenges set in and around the city of Hekseville, and in three fantastic Rift Planes, each of which feature impossible landscapes and distinctly more “game-like” challenges. The first takes place in a series of shattered ruins floating high in the sky, the second in some gravity-defying lava caves and the last in a rather Alice in Wonderland-ish world of giant mushrooms, floating lily pads and precarious jumps. The latter, on your first visit, provides a significant twist on the core gameplay seen up until that point by severely limiting Kat’s abilities after her cat Dusty eats something he shouldn’t have, and it’s surprising quite how much difference this makes to getting around: you come to realise quite how much freedom Kat’s gravity-shifting power has really given you up until this point.

Once you’ve cleared the Rift Planes for the first time, there are even some further Challenge Missions that take place in them, many of which provide some of the most satisfying, difficult tasks in the game. There’s an immensely challenging roller-coaster race through the lava-themed Rift Plane, for example, which feels stomach-churning while you’re in the middle of it — and so good when you eventually beat it — and the ruins play host to an immensely enjoyable enemy-bashing mission where Kat’s normally limited super special moves are totally unlocked and unleashed, allowing you to summon black holes, throw boulders and turn Kat into a human drill with gay abandon.

There’s something of a “dream-like” feel to the setting and the overall story — which, it becomes clear later in the narrative is entirely deliberate — and a lot of things are left quite vague and up to interpretation. This is not a game that will answer all your questions by its conclusion; indeed, there are a number of sequences in the late game that provoke more questions than they answer, and it’s not until the sequel that some of them get addressed. This is good to know now, but was a little confusing back at the time of its original Vita release, leading some critics to feel like the narrative had lost its direction a bit in its latter hours.

Gravity Rush’s many mysteries are compelling, though — particularly with the knowledge that the sequel addresses and explores them in further depth — and alongside its Franco-Belgian comic book-inspired aesthetic, give the whole experience a feeling somewhat akin to a French arthouse movie.

It’s a game that will keep you thinking long after you’ve put it down, and absolutely one of the most memorable titles in Sony’s library, both in its Vita and PS4 incarnations. If you have the chance to play it, don’t sleep on it!

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Sega’s Mega Drive console — or the Genesis to those of you in the States — was a wonderful machine.

In many ways, it started the process of making gaming “cool”, and laid the groundwork for Sony’s solid efforts to make our whole form of entertainment a lot more mainstream with the first PlayStation. But more importantly, it played host to a wide variety of absolutely fantastic games.

One such title was Game Arts’ Alisia Dragoon, an unusual action game that combines elements of disparate genres to produce an extremely memorable, enjoyable and addictive game that still holds up well today.

Game Arts is primarily known today for its excellent Lunar and Grandia RPG series, but the company has turned its attention to a wide variety of game styles over the years. The company’s first game, 1985’s Thexder, was a run and gun shooter for Japanese home computers that was subsequently ported and brought West by Sierra and, later, Activision, and since that time we’ve seen Game Arts shoot ’em ups, action RPGs, card games, sports games and mech sims.

1992’s Alisia Dragoon is, in many ways, a return to Game Arts’ roots, in that it could quite reasonably be described as a run and gun game, but at the same time it provides enough interesting twists on the base formula to make it very distinctive amid what became quite a crowded genre in the 16-bit era.

It was distinctive in another way, too: developed in collaboration with anime production house Gainax, whose video game products had typically erred on the side of dating sims and visual novels, Alisia Dragoon was a break from the norm for the studio, at least when it came to software. The story and artwork, which combined both fantasy and sci-fi influences as was fashionable in Japan at the time, drew a great deal of inspiration from Hayao Miyazaki’s animated movies, particularly Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind — understandable, given that a number of Gainax’s founders had previously worked alongside Miyazaki.

In Alisia Dragoon, you take on the role of the titular heroine as she attempts to avenge her father. Mr. Dragoon, Sr. was a big deal back in his day, as he successfully sealed the villain Baldour in a cocoon and shot it in to space, but he subsequently found himself tortured to death by some rather disgruntled followers who found themselves without a big evil thing to follow. To make matters worse, Baldour’s cocoon has now crashed back to earth and its contents look rather likely to wake up and cause havoc, so naturally it’s up to Alisia to sort this whole mess out a little more conclusively than her old man did.

As was a rather common practice back in the day, Alisia Dragoon was heavily localised when it was brought West. The young anime-style sorceress of the Japanese original’s box art became a muscle-bound female gladiator straight off the cover of a heavy metal album, and the story was changed slightly so that Alisia’s father had only previously attempted to stop Baldour rather than succeeding; in the US and EU versions of Alisia Dragoon, Baldour had simply been “dormant” for a number of years before returning to Earth in his “silver star”.

The exact reasons for the localisation aren’t entirely clear — presumably the assumption that distinctly more “Western” cover art might be more universally appealing — but this isn’t a story-heavy game by any means and the changes are limited solely to the packaging, manual and limited in-game text. Alisia’s in-game sprite is clearly her Japanese incarnation, and her reliance on magic rather than brawn for combat kind of undermines the whole “gladiator” thing that the US and EU box art has going on. It ultimately doesn’t matter all that much, but it’s interesting to observe, particularly when even minor changes to Japanese games tend to incite the wrath of many Western fans today.

Alisia Dragoon’s gameplay is part shoot ’em up, part platform game, part brawler. You proceed through a linear sequence of levels from left to right, blasting enemies with Alisia’s powerful thunder magic  and collecting powerups. Alisia shoots bolts of lightning in a straight line from her hands, and these can be maintained for as long as she has power remaining; they also automatically lock on to enemies so long as she is facing them. Allowing Alisia’s magic to charge up to its maximum allows her to unleash a sweeping lightning attack across the whole screen rather than in a single direction at once; this is good for clearing out weaker popcorn enemies, but isn’t always the most useful thing to do in a boss fight, where you typically need to focus on a single weak point with careful timing, so managing Alisia’s energy level is a key part of the gameplay.

Alisia is supported in combat by one of four different monsters, each of which has its own unique way of attacking. Her dragon shoots fireballs, her… weird whirly blob thing hurls itself at enemies, her griffin emits powerful blasts that damage everything on screen and her lizard shoots boomerangs. Each are useful in different circumstances, each can be powered up independently of the others, and each has its own life bar. If one of Alisia’s monsters dies, it is gone semi-permanently, though revival items are hidden in a few locations throughout the levels.

Rather than lives, Alisia has a HP bar that can be expanded by collecting the appropriate powerups. When she runs out of HP, it’s an immediate game over — though continues can be found as collectible items in a number of the stages. Continuing sends Alisia back to the beginning of the whole stage rather than simply allowing you to immediately pick up where you left off, though; this is a title very much inspired by the arcade games of the era, which were similarly unforgiving in many cases.

It works, though. This is not a game you can “brute force” your way through simply by credit-feeding — largely because said credits are in short supply! — and as such making significant progress feels like a genuine achievement. It’s relatively rare for modern games to demand that you “git gud” at them in order to see everything they have to offer; in modern triple-A games, generous checkpoints tend to pretty much guarantee you’ll get to the end with enough perseverance, while even modern arcade-style titles tend to allow the use of infinite continues.

Not so in Alisia Dragoon. If you want to see the end sequence, you’re going to have to master the game properly. And that means not everyone who plays Alisia Dragoon is going to see that ending — let alone the final stages, the final boss, or perhaps even past, say, stage 5. (Can you guess where I’m stuck at the time of writing?)

I kind of miss this; on the one hand, it’s understandable why modern games are designed the way they are — in most cases, they’re a lot longer than Alisia Dragoon is, so punishing the player harshly for making a mistake is out of the question if the creators actually want the player to experience everything they worked on — but at the same time, it’s really nice to feel a real sense of satisfaction when you finally overcome a bit that has been giving you grief for days, weeks, months, perhaps even years.

It also makes the game highly replayable; if there’s no guarantee that you’ll make it all the way through every time you play, there’s plenty of reason to revisit it every so often, just to see if you’ve still “got it”. That’s not something you can really say about a lot of modern games, which most people primarily replay for the sake of story or, in the case of modern arcade-style games such as shmups, score. Perhaps the closest modern equivalent is the pursuit of the elusive “one-credit clear”, but not everyone has enough willpower to resist using a continue when infinite credits are on offer!

Alisia Dragoon remains an enjoyable game today thanks to tight design, unusual mechanics and some strong audio-visual presentation, even keeping in mind the technical limitations of the time. It’s not Game Arts’ most well-known game, even despite critical acclaim on its original release, but it’s well worth spending some time with, even if it’s just to contemplate the magnificence of Alisia’s powerful thighs.

For those who do want to play it today, your only real option outside of emulation (which, of course, has its own legal issues that we won’t go into here) is tracking down some original Sega hardware and a copy of the game on cartridge. If you’re willing to do so, though, there’s a great game waiting for you — and then you’ll have a Mega Drive too, which is home to a variety of other top-notch games that are still worth playing in the 21st century.

Which, conveniently, we’ll be exploring in this very column in the coming weeks! How about that?

Mega Drive Essentials is an ongoing column looking back at both classics and obscure titles from 16-bit console era on Sega’s Mega Drive/Genesis platform.

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The Nintendo DS might not be the first place you’d think to look for some quality visual novels, but in actual fact Nintendo’s diminuitive and immensely popular handheld has played host to a number of interesting titles over the years.

Besides the well-known Ace Attorney series, there’s Kotaro Uchikoshi’s Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the Hotel Dusk series… and then there’s the title I’d like to discuss today.

It’s an offering from Japanese developer Spike (now Spike Chunsoft who, in a pleasing coincidence, both developed and published 999 between its two constituent parts) known variously as Resident Doctor Tendo 2: The Scales of Life (Japan), Lifesigns: Surgical Unit (North America) and Lifesigns: Hospital Affairs (Europe).

As you can probably tell from the game’s Japanese title, Lifesigns (as we shall refer to it from now on to save my sanity) is actually the second game in a series that launched in Japan back in 2004.

Lifesigns does make reference to events that occurred in the first Resident Doctor Tendo game, which never saw a release outside of Japan, but these references are all explained well enough that the lack of an English language version of the prequel isn’t an issue.

It’s a shame we’ll probably never get the chance to play the original Resident Doctor Tendo in English (officially, anyway), as if Lifesigns is anything to go by it’s an interesting series that is well worth your time and attention, so long as you go in with the correct expectations.

Let’s address those expectations before we go any further. Lifesigns is a game about being a doctor in a hospital, and occasionally requires the player to perform surgery on their patients. It is not, however, Trauma Center – a fact it suffered from somewhat upon its initial Western release, where it was widely criticized for having “too much talking” and not enough “gameplay” when compared to its contemporary. (In actual fact, the first Resident Doctor Tendo game predates the first Trauma Center by a whole year, fact fans.)

If you’re reading this column, however, you are probably already of the opinion that traditional “gameplay” and “fun” certainly isn’t the be-all and end-all of interactive entertainment, and that games about talking can be just as compelling as games where you’re playing a more active role in proceedings.

Specifically, in terms of execution, Lifesigns is closer to Ace Attorney than it is to Trauma Center, with the vast majority of your time spent moving between well-drawn locations talking to stylized, memorable anime-style characters about various subjects, while the plot for each of the game’s five episodes gradually advances as you engage in these various social interactions.

At various points in the plot, you’ll be required to perform diagnoses and surgical procedures on patients, and your performance in the latter in particular will often determine which of several endings to each episode you’ll see — or, if you mess up completely, whether your game ends entirely.

Unlike Trauma Center, however, the game is not structured with a mind to getting the player into the “action” as regularly and quickly as possible; instead, it’s very common that you’ll have several hours of nothing but talking followed by ten minutes of surgery. It’s this narrative-heavy structure which critics expecting a new Trauma Center considered to be “unbalanced” and, consequently, caused them to write off Lifesigns as somehow being a bad game.

Let’s look at why you should give this game a chance if you’re a fan of narrative-centric interactive experiences and visual novels.

Like Ace Attorney, we’re inhabiting a world which resembles reality, but which isn’t afraid to throw in heavily-stylized caricatures in place of more realistic characters. Tendo himself is probably the most normal of the bunch, following the frequently- (though not exclusively-) used visual novel trope of making the protagonist as inoffensive as possible in order to allow them to act as a cipher for the player.

That’s not to say he’s a silent protagonist or in any way flat, however — he has his own thoughts, anxieties and feelings on everything that unfolds (plus everything that apparently unfolded in the previous game) and he is most certainly fallible. It’s in his interactions with the other members of staff at the hospital where he works that the game really shines.

The game opens with a dream sequence in which we learn Tendo’s attitude towards several of his colleagues. We learn that he’s clearly harboring romantic and/or sexual feelings towards his mentor Suzu-sensei, and that he’s aware of nurse Hoshi’s attraction to him. As the game progresses, several other characters make an appearance, with probably the most important among them being first-year intern Aoshima, whom Suzu assigns to Tendo as a means of making him take a bit more responsibility.

Aoshima is one of the more realistically-represented characters in the game: she looks relatively “normal” rather than being a stylized caricature; she has very “human” reactions to things; and she’s the character who provides the closest depiction to what life for a real young doctor is like — stressful, tiring and often thankless. While she’s certainly got a degree of “fire” to her personality, she’s one of the more sympathetic members of the cast, and the early episodes do a good job of making you want to find out more about her. In many respects, she’s a character that we, as the Western audience, can latch on to more readily, since she, like us, is coming in to Tendo’s life when things have already happened.

While the majority of the “talking” parts of the game focus on Tendo and his relationships with his colleagues, this doesn’t mean that the patients get neglected, even outside of the diagnosis and surgery sequences. Indeed, through Tendo’s interactions with his patients, the game tackles some fairly weighty issues — single “parenthood” (well, actually a sister taking care of her younger brother) and other strained familial situations; androphobia; depression; suicidal thoughts; the teenage cult of celebrity — the list goes on.

While some aspects of Lifesigns are distinctly lighthearted and deliberately humorous, the game knows when to rein it in and get serious with some compelling, interesting and sometimes uncomfortable medical drama. And, pleasingly, there’s no guarantee that Everything Will Turn Out All Right thanks to a patented Dr Tendo Magic Bullet — each episode can conclude in one of several different ways, usually only one of which can really be considered a “Happily Ever After” sort of ending.

Sometimes people will die despite your best efforts; sometimes you could have done more and just couldn’t manage it; sometimes life just isn’t fair. Not only is it emotionally engaging to occasionally be slapped in the face with unexpected tragedy despite your best efforts, from a gameplay perspective it provides a considerable incentive to replay the game once you’ve finished. It’s also quite amusing that there’s an FAQ section in the game’s manual that explicitly points out the fact that each episode has several endings in case the person playing “isn’t satisfied” with the ending they get!

Lifesigns was a very pleasant discovery when I decided to take a chance on it — but it’s also a sad indictment of today’s Metacritic-centric reviews culture and how it doesn’t cater to everyone’s wants or needs.

Because of the game’s middling-to-negative Metascore (61 at the time of writing) it’s highly probable that a lot of people  – in some cases, even those who enjoyed Ace Attorney, which scored a much more positive Metascore of between 76 and 81 for the various entries in the series – passed up a chance to play Lifesigns.

In short, if you own a Nintendo DS and you’ve been looking for something to scratch that narrative-heavy itch (you should get that looked at) then Lifesigns is most certainly a very good use of your time.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

One interesting contrast between Western and Eastern role-playing games is the way they each handle their core “rulesets.”

Western RPGs tend to follow a model that is somewhat closer to tabletop role-playing, whereby all the rules are set out clearly in front of you from the outset. You generally spend the entire game applying these rules in different ways, gradually growing in effectiveness (usually through increased likelihood to succeed at various challenges) as you proceed.

This is perhaps a side-effect of the fact that Western RPGs have their roots very much in Dungeons & Dragons — in fact, many early Western RPGs quite simply were Dungeons & Dragons games — but even today with franchises like The Elder Scrolls, we see what are often some relatively straightforward rules being applied consistently throughout the entirety of a game.

Japanese role-playing games, on the other hand, play things a little bit differently.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

Japanese role-playing games have absolutely no qualms about gradually increasing in complexity as the game progresses, and nor do they have any issue whatsoever about incorporating special mechanics just for a single scene or a particular context.

Consider, if you will, something like the classic Final Fantasy VII. In that game, you spent a lot of time wandering around and engaging in combat, sure, but you could also breed Chocobos, race Chocobos, go snowboarding (pictured above… ahh, simpler times), pilot a submarine, ride a motorbike and participate in numerous other activities.

If you followed the story straight through from start to finish without stopping for sidequests, you’d encounter each of these activities precisely once over the course of the whole game and then never see them again — and yet somehow they didn’t feel massively out of place at the time.

Why this huge disparity in games that are ostensibly part of the same “genre” then? Well, it’s probably something to do with the way they were designed — we discussed above that Western RPGs very much have their feet firmly planted in tabletop role-playing for the most part, while Japanese role-playing games tend to be designed as video games first and foremost, which means they don’t have to be tied down to an established ruleset quite so much. That’s something of a simplification, of course, but I think it might account for a lot.

I’d like to specifically examine Gust’s Ar Tonelico 2: Melody of Metafalica from this perspective today. The first Ar Tonelico did some really interesting things, particularly with its battle system and its “cosmosphere” mechanics, but was, for the most part, a relatively straightforward JRPG at its core. The second game, meanwhile, keeps piling new mechanic after new mechanic on top of each other to make a game which, while complex, somehow manages to not be completely overwhelming.

Let’s explore some of these interesting mechanics.

The first one you’ll encounter is the game’s battle system. Rather than the turn-based system of the original game, Ar Tonelico II’s combat system is a curious combination between real-time and turn-based. Battles alternate between two “phases” — an Attack Phase, in which the player’s front-line fighters have the opportunity to unleash various attacks on the enemy while the back-line Reyvateil casters charge up their magic, and a Defense Phase, in which the player must carefully time button presses to make their front-line fighters shield the back-line casters from damage.

It’s far from being a button-masher, though — in the Attack Phase, a little meter in the corner of the screen shows the Reyvateils’ “emotions” and suggests the specific moves (triggered with a directional key and the button according to the character doing the attack) the front line should perform, and fulfilling these desires has various effects. Filling the meter if it’s pointing to the left, for example, increases the “burst” gauge, which makes the Reyvateils’ spell more effective, while filling it upwards increases the “harmonics” level, allowing access to more powerful attacks that take a little longer to charge up.

This combat system is initially completely bewildering and confusing, but after a few battles, you start to get the feel for it surprisingly naturally. It’s actually relatively straightforward at its core, but the fact you always have to concentrate on carefully timing your button presses rather than mashing the “attack” button repeatedly means that every combat is interesting and fun, which helps make the fact the game still incorporates random encounters — a convention that has become less fashionable in recent years — somewhat easier to swallow.

Beyond the battle system, the “Dive” system is back, allowing the protagonist Croix to enter the “cosmospheres” of his female companions and help them come to terms with various anxieties and problems.

Unlike the first game, however, where these mini-stories largely solved themselves as protagonist Lyner observed, there are a number of situations in Ar Tonelico 2’s cosmospheres where the player has to make a choice in order to proceed. This is then taken one step further by another system called the “Infelsphere” a little later in the game, in which choices made not only affect how the mini-stories unfolding in the girls’ minds progress, but also literally affect the world itself. It’s relatively unusual for a JRPG to feature any sort of “consequence” for choices, as most of them feature plots that are rigidly on rails — another aspect in which they contrast strongly with their Western counterparts — but Ar Tonelico, as we’ve seen a number of times up until now, likes to do things a little differently.

And then we start getting into strange territory. Early in the game, you’re introduced to the phenomenon of “I.P.D. Reyvateils” — Reyvateils who have gone berserk and need to be contained. These are randomly scattered around the various dungeon maps and must be located using a “hot and cold” radar system.

When they’ve been defeated and contained, one of the two heroines is able to perform “Dive Therapy” on them and cure their mental instability, which in turn allows them to be “equipped” in the “Girl Power” slot of each character and apply various bonuses, and also, if they happen to see the other heroine Cloche performing various cool actions, may join her fan club. If they’ve joined her fan club, their power can be harnessed in a special attack called “Replakia,” in which the Reyvateils’ burst gauge fills up considerably more quickly the more fan club members Cloche has.

And let’s not even get into the fact that the only way to level up Reyvateils is for them to have a bath together.

It all sounds utterly insane on paper, but somehow, all of these systems intermingle with one another to produce a surprisingly coherent whole.

As the game progresses, more and more mechanics are introduced at a sensible rate, meaning you’ll never find yourself overwhelmed with too much new stuff to deal with at any one time. You’re always given a decent period of time in which to familiarize yourself with the new mechanics before something new is added, and this means that the game can continue growing in complexity as it progresses without ever feeling like it’s “too much.”

It’s a fine example of how to keep game mechanics feeling fresh over the course of a lengthy game — and something that a lot of other JRPG developers could certainly learn something from.

A common criticism of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIII is that it had a “20-hour tutorial.” Ar Tonelico 2 actually does some very similar things to Final Fantasy XIII in this respect by spreading out the introduction of all its mechanics over a lengthy period of time rather than throwing the player straight in at the deep end, but the difference between the two is that Final Fantasy XIII’s mechanics were arguably relatively straightforward and didn’t really need that amount of time to be explained to the player.

Ar Tonelico 2, meanwhile, is constantly introducing new, wildly different things to the player and then allowing them a bit of time to play around with them before moving on. It’s a subtle but noticeable difference, and in my experience with the game it’s absolutely one of the best, most interesting things about it.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

Japanese role-playing games have long been known for having some of the most memorable soundtracks in all of gaming. And, surprisingly, mobile takes on the genre are no exception.

The news that Cygames’ incredibly popular Granblue Fantasy has a fantastic soundtrack will probably not come as a surprise, however, given the incredibly strong pedigree of the talent behind it. The work of longstanding Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu and his bandmate Tsutomo Narita from the Earthbound Papas, Granblue Fantasy’s soundtrack covers a surprisingly diverse range of musical styles, and is clearly one of the areas that has had the most love and attention lavished on it.

That sounds like a good excuse to enjoy some of its finest moments to me!

And where better to begin than with the main theme? Beginning with the gentle, delicate sounds of the flute and harp, the scene is set for a fantastic adventure, the deceptively calming opening of the piece reflecting the “humble beginnings” of protagonist Gran’s adventure. Then we move into driving percussion rhythms and a triumphant trumpet melody that forms one of the most well-known parts of this piece — largely due to it being frequently heard during regular events such as the “daily bonus”.

The relentless, ongoing percussion rhythm beneath the orchestral melodies and harmonies is a frequently used musical device in Japanese role-playing game soundtracks — particularly those by Uematsu and those inspired by his work — to represent airship travel. Similar motifs have been heard on a fairly regular basis throughout the Final Fantasy series, as well as in other titles where airships play a strong role such as Skies of Arcadia.

Granblue Fantasy’s main battle theme is excellent, and again quite characteristic of Uematsu’s past work. The driving syncopated rhythms that start the whole thing off are strongly reminiscent of the battle themes to Final Fantasy VII and VIII in particular, as is the combination of acoustic orchestral and modern electric instruments. Meanwhile, the “dynamic” nature of the track — in which the clear sections heard in this static version correspond to progress through a battle or quest — is quite similar to how the aforementioned Skies of Arcadia handled its battle themes.

The pounding bassline and rhythm guitar throughout brings one of Final Fantasy VIII’s finale tracks “Maybe I’m a Lion” to mind, but it’s also a fairly characteristic sound of Uematsu’s band The Earthbound Papas and their predecessors The Black Mages. The catchy, irregular rhythms combined with a clear, memorable melodic hook throughout help ensure that this piece — which regular players will hear a whole lot — doesn’t become tiresome, even after many hundreds of times hearing it.

This particularly lovely piece — heard upon reaching a particular area early in the game — is a strong example of Narita making use of influences from traditional Western orchestral “art music” to create a strong sense of time and place in the listener’s mind.

The opening, featuring a solo violin accompanied by deliciously concordant-sounding piano arpeggios, is strongly reminiscent of compositions from the Romantic period and early 20th century, and the use of compound time gives the whole thing a pleasingly relaxing lilt to it. When the piece shifts to a melancholy solo piano melody, it also moves back into simple time, marking a rather different feel to the whole thing; still relaxing, but now somewhat calmer and less energetic; perhaps the different between day and night in the region.

Here’s a good example of the diverse influences on Granblue Fantasy’s soundtrack as a whole. This boss battle theme combines both acoustic and electric instruments to create a distinctively Gothic-sounding track that gradually builds in intensity as the battle progresses. While we start with an orchestral opening to reflect the beginning of the confrontation, this is swiftly followed by jangly electric guitars and drums once the battle proper begins.

The piece then combines Baroque-style instruments such as the clavichord with Celtic fiddle and flute — the latter two being aspects heard sporadically throughout the whole soundtrack, reminding the player of Gran’s somewhat rustic, humble beginnings. As the intensity grows, the jangly guitar gives way to full-on distorted electric guitar, and the backing harmonies are filled out by the sounds of a choir, giving a strong “Gothic rock” feel to the piece, somewhat reminiscent of Michiru Yamane’s work on the Castlevania series prior to its controversial shift in direction with Lords of Shadow — a shift which also saw its soundtrack move from its prior Gothic rock angle to a more conventionally “Western”-sounding orchestral soundtrack.

This track demonstrates the diversity of the soundtrack in a different way by going in a markedly contrasting direction rather reminiscent of Masashi Hamauzu’s soundtrack to Final Fantasy XIII. Combining driving ostinato rhythms in the lower strings and percussion with light, playful and occasionally discordant piano lines and strong melodies from the string section, this piece is effectively used in the game to mark significant, dramatic moments and battles — much as it was used in Final Fantasy XIII for its boss fights.

This track, which accompanies the battle in game against the “Rose Queen”, starts off by sounding like something from Sword Art Online’s soundtrack: a strong melody from the upper strings accompanied by close harmonies from the cellos and basses, followed up with some strong backing vocals — the discordant harmonies a little reminiscent of Gust’s treatment of the Reyvateils’ songs in the Ar Tonelico series — and a modern drum kit providing some energy.

The use of a vocal soloist — and the fact the orchestra moves into an accompanying role rather than being the main focus — gives this track a strong “anime” feel to it, rather reminiscent of the sort of thing you’d expect to hear in the opening titles to a popular series with a decent budget. (Granblue Fantasy does, in fact, have an anime, but it uses a different song for its title sequence.)

In other words, it’s pretty clear that this piece accompanies a very important, dramatic moment — though I must confess, I haven’t yet reached that point in the game myself as yet, so I’m looking forward to hearing it in context!

Granblue Fantasy’s soundtrack is pretty spectacular all round, and testament to the degree in which this humble mobile game has become a worldwide phenomenon. To date, since its launch in 2014, the game has spawned a spinoff anime, a series of web-based comics, three soundtrack CDs (including a spectacular disc of fully orchestrated arrangements) and, almost certainly, more doujinshi than you could possibly hope to consume in a lifetime.

With the game currently celebrating 15 million registered players across the world — though, cutting through the hyperbole, this doesn’t mean 15 million active players — it doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon. And with music like this on offer, I hope it doesn’t go anywhere any time soon.

Thank you to all the YouTube users who have kindly uploaded tracks from the OSTs and rips from the game that were used in this article.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

Yes, it’s that time of year again when a million credit cards cry out in anguish: the Steam Summer Sale.

So what better excuse to look back over some of the games we’ve discussed here on MoeGamer, and point you in the direction of an opportunity to acquire them at reduced rates? None, that’s right, there’s no better excuse.

Before we kick off, I’ll just take a moment to remind you (or perhaps inform you, if you haven’t been paying attention) that MoeGamer has a Steam Curator page, where I do my best to include all the PC versions of games we talk about here. You can check it out here (or use the link in the left sidebar/down at the bottom if you’re on mobile) — though at the time of writing note that the Steam servers are, as usual, taking a good ol’ pounding at the hands of bargain hunters, so you may have to reload once or twice.

Without further ado then, let’s check out some fun times you can have for considerably less than their normal price, in no particular order. (And if you’re reading this after the sale’s already over… these games are still well worth picking up!)

Astebreed (67% off)

Absolutely one of the most stunning shoot ’em ups you’ll ever play, Astebreed is an ambitious title that blends a stirring, thought-provoking sci-fi story with spectacular cinematic blasting action. Piloting the giant robot Xbreed in an attempt to take humanity’s fight to the mysterious and terrifying Filune, you’ll hack, slash, blast, lock on and dodge your way through swarms of enemy ships on your way to discover the truth.

The PS4 version of this game is arguably superior thanks to the addition of some new music and a more refined control system, but the PC version is still well worth your time if you don’t have access to a PS4.

Read a full writeup
Get it here

Aselia the Eternal (40% off)

An unusual hybrid of strategy RPG and visual novel, Aselia the Eternal tells a philosophical story about free will and how power corrupts. With multiple narrative routes and a selection of difficulty levels, in terms of bang for your buck, this one is really hard to beat — so long as you don’t object to vast expanses of narrative exposition, sometimes right in the midst of battle.

Aselia the Eternal features some of the finest worldbuilding in a fantasy game thanks to its strong writing, characterisation and lore, and is a challenging but fair strategy title with some memorable, unusual mechanics.

Get it here

The Fruit of Grisaia (60% off)

If you’re yet to delve into Grisaia, one of the most impressively ambitious series of visual novels out there, now’s a great time to get started, with a bit of a caveat: the version on Steam is the “all-ages” edition which completely lacks erotic content, but in exchange has some additional event images that were only in the Japanese Vita version.

Because the all-ages and 18+ versions are based on different code, this also means that there isn’t an easy way to patch in the 18+ content as with some other visual novels on Steam, so bear this in mind before purchasing — particularly as the erotic content in Grisaia is rather tightly integrated into the plot in the vast majority of its routes.

Read many thousands of words about Grisaia
Get it here

The Labyrinth of Grisaia (50% off)

See above. Everything that applies to The Fruit of Grisaia also applies to this direct follow-up.

Go on, read all these words about Grisaia
Get it here

Ne no Kami (50% off)

Combining a deep exploration of Shinto mythology with modern influences to create a highly memorable experience, yuri visual novel Ne no Kami blends fantasy and reality to create an enormously compelling whole with some incredibly memorable characters. A second part is due later this year, but in the meantime this is a wonderful story in its own right.

Like Grisaia, note that the version of Ne no Kami on Steam is all-ages, but in this case the 18+ content can be patched in with a piece of $5 DLC from publisher Denpasoft.

All about Ne no Kami
Get it here
Get the 18+ patch here

Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force (80% off)

The definitive way to experience the story of Compile Heart’s Fairy Fencer F plus two completely new narrative routes through the second half of the game, Advent Dark Force is a solid RPG with excellent mechanics, beautiful art, a memorable cast and some great music from genre veterans.

Taken in context of Compile Heart’s complete catalogue, it’s one of their most consistently solid games, too, and proof that with each new title they put out, they come on in leaps and bounds.

Read up on Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force
Get it here

Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics (90% off)

Spike Chunsoft’s reimagining of SmokingWOLF’s unusual roguelike may have had a slightly rocky launch on PC, but a series of updates have put the game on a par with its console brethren. Blending traditional roguelike exploration with the forced scrolling of ’90s platform games, there’s nothing quite like One Way Heroics out there, and Spike Chunsoft’s take on the game is filled with audio-visual polish and plenty of content.

If you’d prefer the rather more retro-looking original, that’s also on sale. Make sure to grab the One Way Heroics Plus DLC for the best experience.

Proceed to the right and read all about the One Way Heroics series
Get it here

The Ys series

With the first all-new installment in quite some time almost upon us here in the West, now’s a great time to get involved with Falcom’s flagship action RPG series Ys, since most of them (with the exception of Vita title Memories of Celceta, itself a remake of the PC Engine/SNES Ys IV games, and the PSP-only Ys Seven) are available on Steam.

Ys games feature solid gameplay, great music, gorgeous graphics and character designs and some incredibly well-considered lore and worldbuilding. You can jump in at any point, but it’s worth at least playing Ys I, Ys II and Ys Origin in order.

Read up on the whole series to date
Get Ys I and II
Get Ys Origin
Get Ys: The Oath in Felghana
Get Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim

RPG Maker MV (65% off)

The latest and greatest version of the long-running game creation tool, RPG Maker MV is a fully-featured piece of software that comes with enough pre-built graphic and sound assets to get you making games right away. Once you’ve learned the ropes, it’s a simple matter to import your own art, music and sound effects, and to customise your experience with the wealth of JavaScript plugins available from talented coders on the Web.

RPG Maker is an incredibly powerful tool capable of making some excellent games. Don’t be put off by the stigma that surrounds “RPG Maker games” in certain parts of the Internet; there are few things more satisfying than putting together something of your own creation and even sharing it with others, and RPG Maker MV makes it easier to do that than ever before, with output to Windows PC, Mac OS X, mobile and HTML5 available.

Read up on how to get started with RPG Maker MV
Get it here

The Neptunia series

A genuine worldwide phenomenon, Compile Heart’s flagship series has gone from strength to strength over the years, growing and refining with each installment. And now most of it is available on Steam, ranging from the first three Re;Birth games to 3D beat ’em up Neptunia U and its follow-up Blanc and Neptune vs Zombies via strategy RPG Hyperdevotion Noire, then finally to modern masterpiece Megadimension Neptunia V-II.

Neptunia is a wild ride that combines witty comedy, biting satire and one of the strongest, most memorable casts in all of gaming. Take care, though; once you take your first steps into the world of Gamindustri, it’s hard to let go!

Find out more
Get Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 1
Get Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 2: Sisters Genneration
Get Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 3: V Generation
Get Hyperdimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed
Get Megatagmension Blanc and Neptune vs Zombies
Get Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart
Get Megadimension Neptunia V-II

Nights of Azure (30% off)

The only game I’m aware of where the main character is a lesbian vampire demon, Nights of Azure is an excellent action RPG with a mature, dark narrative, wonderful music and some excellent characterisation. It represents developer Gust’s first foray into the PC market as well as a rare departure from their iconic Atelier series, and is a wonderfully enjoyable game.

Taking on the role of aforementioned lesbian vampire demon Arnice, it’s your job to investigate the mysterious “Nightlord” and see if you can put a stop to the world being shrouded in eternal darkness without sacrificing the one you love to save everyone.

Read more
Get it here

Senran Kagura

While the mainline installments in the series affectionately known as “titty ninjas” remain confined to Nintendo’s 3DS platform, some of the best spinoffs are available on PC, including the two 3D brawlers Shinovi Versus and Estival Versus, and bizarre “rhythm cooking” game Bon Appetit.

Senran Kagura is much more than a pretty face and 25+ big pairs of tits, however; it’s a series with some of the most consistently strong characterisation in all of Japanese gaming, featuring challenging and thought-provoking narrative themes alongside plenty of breezy comedy. It has a whole lot more heart and soul to it than mainstream critics would like you to believe, so if you’ve never had the pleasure of fighting (or cooking) alongside these busty ninja girls, now’s a great time to jump in and find out all about “life and hometown”.

Read the scrolls of hidden nin-po
Get Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus
Get Senran Kagura: Estival Versus
Get Senran Kagura: Bon Appetit

Supipara (35% off)

One of the most beautifully presented visual novels you’ll ever see, Supipara is an absolutely charming tale that tells the story of a young man struggling to rebuild his life with his mother after a terrible accident left her comatose for a long time. Along the way, he’ll learn a great deal about himself and his peers — and come into contact with the mysterious Alice, who claims to be a witch. But witches don’t really exist, do they…?

Supipara is intended as the first episode in a series, with future installments dependent on how well this one does. It’s a gorgeous game with a lovely atmosphere, and well worth your time — so do your part and help make the other episodes happen!

Read more
Get it here

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

Those of you who enjoy visual novels have probably come up against at least one gamer friend who has refused to even entertain the possibility of exploring this interesting medium on the grounds that it’s “too much text” and/or “not enough gameplay.”

In fact, in several cases, visual novels which have hit “mainstream” platforms such as the Nintendo DS have found themselves saddled with middling or low review scores on these grounds — usually indicating that the reviewer has missed the point of the experience somewhat or is unfamiliar with this type of game.

So what I thought I’d do today is outline some reasons why exploring visual novels is a worthwhile use of your time.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

Spike’s Lifesigns, which we talked about last week, is one such example of what we’ve just described, forever branded as a mediocre game on the grounds that you don’t actively “do” much while you play, despite the fact that its story and characterization is actually very good. (As it happens, Lifesigns is on the “more interactive” end of the visual novel spectrum thanks to its minigames and surgery sequences, but all this achieved with regard to reviews was some rather unfair comparisons to Trauma Center.)

I’d like to examine this idea from two main perspectives: the angle of people who think they’d rather play games with more “interactivity” to them; and the angle of people who think that if you’re going to read something, you might as well, you know, read a book.

Here beginneth the lesson.

Multimedia and immersion

Chances are you haven’t heard the word “multimedia” used seriously since the mid-’90s and I apologize for its gratuitous resurrection in today’s column, but it’s hard not to mention it when discussing visual novels. They are, in essence, multimedia productions in their purest sense: they tell a story or explain something using several different forms of media blended together to create a coherent experience.

At the heart of a visual novel is, of course, the text. But the very nature of visual novels means that you’re rarely, if ever, dealing with just text.

No, your typical visual novel also incorporates any combination of sound, music, voice acting, static images and sometimes animations into the mix to create something that is immediately visually and aurally appealing and striking, and which helps to immerse all the senses into the story.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the way books do things — engaging the imagination using (more often than not) nothing but words — but the fact that when reading a visual novel you can see and hear the characters as well as imagine what they’re like is a main distinguishing factor of the medium.

And there’s still room for your imagination to do some work, too — with a few notable exceptions (yes, this is where I drop in my weekly mention of School Days HQ), visual novels tend to make use of a lot of text atop static images, meaning that the creative part of your brain still gets to “fill in the blanks” and imagine exactly what’s going on in a scene according to the narration, even with a still of it on screen.

This combination of different forms of media to create the entire experience helps give visual novels the appearance of being a “video game” — because, well, they are — and also serves as a fantastic way to encourage people who might not engage their brain with reading as much as they’d like the opportunity to do so in a manner which is somewhat more comfortable to them.

Themes you don’t get anywhere else in gaming

Ken Levine’s most recent opus Bioshock Infinite garnered plenty of praise for exploring weighty themes in a manner which is accessible to the mainstream, and the press and public alike tripped over themselves to point at it as an example of the medium trying — perhaps not completely successfully — to mature a little bit. [Editor’s Note: I could use a more contemporary example here, I know, but this was relevant at the time this piece was originally published and so I have decided to leave it as-is.]

At heart, though, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Bioshock Infinite was still a first-person shooter — and an (arguably) unnecessarily violent one at that — and thus some of the impact of its stronger messages was perhaps lost somewhat.

Here’s where visual novels’ jettisoning of the traditional reliance on “gameplay” is actually a good thing — by realising that no, you don’t have to let the player “do” every single thing in the story for it to be an interesting narrative that still retains a degree of player agency and interactivity, visual novel authors have been able to explore subject matter, themes and events that simply wouldn’t be particularly using more conventional game genres.

Would Katawa Shoujo be a superior experience if you got to control protagonist Hisao as he wandered around and had palpitations every time you pressed the “run” button? Probably not — though that’s not to say it wouldn’t be an interesting experience of a different kind.

Would Kana Little Sister be a better experience if it took a more “simulation” approach, with you taking the role of Kana’s caregiver and administering medical treatment as appropriate? Again, probably not — but again, that’s not to say it wouldn’t be an interesting area for a different game to explore; it just wouldn’t be Kana Little Sister any more.

Did Kira Kira need to be any more interactive than it is in order to tell its story? Absolutely not.

Consider, too, the “dating sim” genre, often incorrectly lumped in the same category as narrative-centric visual novels — something like Casual Romance Club is a very different experience to something like, say, The Sims because despite the fact that in both games you’re building relationships, in the former you’re exploring an author’s depiction of a number of different characters, while in the latter you’re exploring the effects a bunch of AI routines have on each other when they interact.

While many other games — particularly RPGs — have relationship-building elements, it’s only in the visual novel and dating sim genres you’ll find interactive experiences that are purely about relationships and nothing else. Even people who aren’t ninjas/pirates/aliens/legendary heroes/The Chosen One are interesting — so I embrace the opportunity to play something that is purely about talking to people and not about some Great Evil that needs defeating.

The importance of the fact that many visual novels also incorporate adult-themed content (both in terms of sex and violence) without treating the player like they’re an immature teenager is also worth highlighting. Yes, there are visual novels in which the sex and/or violence is gratuitous or purely there for titillation — there’s even a name for this type of experience: nukige — but a good visual novel can incorporate these things into its narrative without them feeling like they’ve been forced in for the sake of being “edgy.”

Choices with consequence

Visual novels vary enormously in their approach towards player agency. Some, known as “kinetic novels,” are rigidly on rails from start to finish, with no input from the player required. These are most like books in their execution, though they benefit from the multimedia angle we discussed above. Ne no Kami, School of Talent and Supipara are all excellent recent examples of this, with none of them suffering at all for the lack of player input.

Many others, though, allow the player to make decisions over the course of the narrative — and because the number of times the player gets to make a choice is typically relatively limited, these decisions have meaning, consequence and real weight.

Even within branching path visual novels, there are different approaches: School Days HQ’s use of a “sliding scale” rather than triggering flags with your choices means that seemingly-innocuous decisions made at the beginning of the game can actually have a significant impact much later on, for example.

At the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, My Girlfriend is the President features precisely one meaningful decision in the course of the entire game which determines which character’s “path” you end up on. The Fruit of Grisaia works rather like this, too — though each route does at least have a “good” and “bad” ending based on later choices — while its direct sequel The Labyrinth of Grisaia explicitly allows you to pick which route you want to read before you start playing.

In many cases, visual novels that feature player choice include at least one decision point that has a significant impact on how the rest of the story goes. This impact could range from picking a fixed “route” through the game to influencing the subsequent events or even shunting the player off down an optional side story path. A good multi-route visual novel will encourage the player to think “I wonder what would have happened if…” and not always make it immediately obvious that the choice they’ve made is a significant one.

Right here is a big distinguishing factor from books, Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy aside, obviously: the fact that the story can potentially branch off in one of several different directions.

Rather than diluting the overall sense of narrative, however, a good multi-route visual novel will give the player a much fuller understanding of the characters and the events they are involved in by allowing them to witness various happenings from different perspectives. It’s not impossible for books to do this, of course, but depicting the same scene several times from different perspectives in a linear, fixed narrative tends to be a little more jarring than when it occurs in something which is made to be re-experienced with different choices.

Having choices with consequence also allows us the guilty pleasures of the “bad” ending without it feeling like a “game over” — we discussed this in more detail here. Stories don’t always have to have happy endings, and a well-crafted “bad” ending can be even more powerful than a “good” one. Katawa Shoujo is a great example of this — several of the paths’ conclusions feel a lot more “fitting” with what is technically the “bad” ending than the usually rather happily-ever-after nature of the “good” conclusions.

So there we have it. Visual novels will likely always be a niche interest to one degree or another — for some players, the concept of “video games” is too inextricably tied to the concept of “shooting dudes in the head” to even contemplate exploring anything else — but that doesn’t mean we should stop celebrating them.

The very nature of the fact that many of them have been composed as “creative works” rather than “products” makes them particularly noteworthy in this modern age of big-name games seeing the “business” part of the industry interfering with the “artistic” part more and more — and hey, if nothing else, they’re the source of some great stories that you simply can’t get in any other type of game.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

If you owned a Wii, whinged about there being no good games for it and didn’t own a copy of Xenoblade Chronicles then, well, frankly we need to have words.

Xenoblade Chronicles, you see, is awesome. I’d probably go so far as to say it’s one of my favorite RPGs in recent memory. I’m not convinced it is my all-time favourite — with so many great games out there today, I’m pretty hard-pressed to pick an all-time favourite, to be honest — but it’s certainly right up there with the best of them.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes it such a remarkable game.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

The reason Xenoblade Chronicles is so good is the fact it bucks almost all of the trends of the JRPG genre to create an experience that is fresh, exciting, sprawling, engrossing and likely to keep you busy for a very long time.

Allow me to set the scene a little, on the offchance you’re unfamiliar.

Xenoblade Chronicles is an open-world JRPG in which you, as ever, assemble a band of plucky heroes to defend the world from whichever menace is threatening it this time. So far, so predictable, you might think, until you discover that Xenoblade Chronicles’ world is far from normal. Nope — in fact, it’s one of the strangest, most imaginative worlds I’ve seen in any game ever.

The world’s lore runs that two titans known as the Bionis and the Mechonis fought many years ago, and each struck a fatal blow at the same time. Frozen in time forever, the two giants gradually began to play host to life — biological life on the Bionis, mechanical life on the Mechonis. The people of the Bionis have long been at war with the Mechons, the indigenous mechanical lifeforms of the Mechonis, who appear to be little more than cold, soulless killing machines. As time goes on, however, it emerges that something far more sinister is going on when Mechons with faces and voices start to show up, throwing our hero Shulk and his friends’ relatively peaceful existence into turmoil.

Thus begins a grand adventure that is somewhere between Final Fantasy XII and World of Warcraft in execution. Controlling a single active character out of the three party members available at any one time, the player has freedom to roam where they please in the game’s massive, sprawling zones and do what they wish: uncover parts of the map, pick up quests from the relevant people and get into fights with wandering baddies.

When it comes to combat, it’s a sort of real-time affair — you take control of the character you’ve chosen and can trigger their skills from a hotbar at the bottom of the screen, while the other two party members cooperate with you thanks to some surprisingly solid AI. Positioning is important, as some skills deal additional damage or inflict additional effects if they strike the enemy from the side or back, so a big part of fighting effectively in Xenoblade Chronicles is somewhat akin to the intricate dance MMO players do on a daily basis — managing aggro with the “tank” characters, slipping behind with a damage-dealer and using a support character to ensure everyone is fit and healthy and/or the enemies are on fire.

The fact that you can freely switch who you’re controlling at any time you’re not in combat makes for a hugely flexible experience. Each character plays markedly differently from one another when you’re in direct control of them, and each has their own wide selection of abilities for you to unlock as they progress through the game, allowing you to customize each of them as you see fit. If you don’t enjoy the play style of one character, just leave them up to the AI and take control of another — the same is true if you’re just getting tired of seeing the same spread of abilities and want to try something new.

The game features a fantastic visual feature where every piece of armor and weapon has its own unique “look” on each of the characters, too, so by equipping characters with various items you can customize them visually just as much as in terms of abilities — and their potentially-ridiculous outfits persist in cutscenes, too, which is always nice to see.

Gameplay in Xenoblade Chronicles largely involves a bunch of questing in a zone to build up experience and collect equipment, money and then like, then moving on to the next story beat. It’s a simple structure, well-beloved of MMOs, but it works well here, meaning that you can always feel like there’s something to do, even if you don’t have a lot of time to play in a single session. Some of the quests are mildly frustrating, requiring the farming of enemies and gathering points for rare ingredients and the like, but there are often multiple solutions to a problem, causing the quest to have a different outcome.

Then there’s all the other stuff you can engage in — finding the “Heart to Heart” lookout points to trigger intimate interactions between two party members (not that kind of intimate, hentai), building up your “affinity” with the residents of an area and discovering the social links between all the characters in the game world, trying your hardest to complete all the maps, or perhaps challenging the game’s comprehensive achievement system.

There’s a veritable bucketload of things to do, in short, so if you’re hungry for something that will take you at least 100 hours to get to the end of — possibly twice that if you want to see everything — then Xenoblade Chronicles is the way to go.

It’s not perfect, of course — what is? The Wii’s technical limitations mean that the 480p visuals look increasingly rough the larger your TV is — though it’s worth noting this is still one of the best-looking Wii games out there in terms of overall art direction and world design.

The game gets a bit grindy when you start getting towards the end, too — though if you’ve been fastidious about cleaning up your quest log before moving the story along this shouldn’t be an issue — and the New Game+ option seems largely redundant for little more than romping your way through the story with overpowered characters. None of these issues are enough to detract significantly from what has come to be regarded since its release as one of the best JRPGs of all time.

And if you’re still being sniffy about it because it’s on the Wii, consider this: this game almost certainly only exists because of the reduced development costs that the Wii’s technical limitations pass on to developers. Developing assets for a game like this on HD consoles would have likely been prohibitively expensive, and the relatively niche nature of JRPGs today means that it would probably never have gotten greenlit by a big publisher only to sell a fraction of what the latest and greatest first-person shooters and open world action games sell.

We’re lucky that Nintendo took a risk on publishing this in Europe and the U.S. — let’s hope this willingness to court “risky” titles continues well into future hardware generations.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

Japanese mobile-social gacha-based RPGs — or “mobages” as they’re colloquially known today, after the social network many of them are hosted on — were originally described when they first appeared as “card battle” games.

Looking at Cygames’ previous title Rage of Bahamut, it’s easy to understand why. Everything about the game had the feel of a collectible card game about it, from the simplistic battle system (which primarily consisted of ensuring your numbers were bigger than the enemy’s) to the fact that the main incentive to collect all the available units (through blind draws) was to see the beautiful artwork. About the only thing missing was the ability to actually trade “cards” with other players.

In recent years, while the basic structure of these games has remained similar — draw cards, level them up, upgrade them to higher rarity versions, challenge more and more difficult content — there’s been a noticeable shift away from the “card game” feel in favour of something a lot more interesting. And Granblue Fantasy is a particularly good example of this evolution.

Pretty art is a good incentive to keep players interested in a game involving collection, of course — particularly if you involve a variety of guest artists, as Rage of Bahamut did throughout its lifetime — but if successful console and handheld franchises such as Senran Kagura, Neptunia and their ilk have taught us anything, it’s that strong characters are a particularly powerful way to keep people invested in the long term, even across multiple games.

So that’s the principle that Granblue Fantasy starts from. Not only does it have absolutely beautiful art from Final Fantasy veteran Hideo Minaba, but each and every character is explored as a person as well as a collection of stats and abilities. This, in turn, encourages the player to develop a strong sense of attachment with their collection of characters as well as satisfying those who enjoy playing games for the narrative.

Granblue Fantasy explores its characters in multiple ways. The core cast of the game is introduced through the linear main narrative, which provides the player with free “SR”-rank characters at various important moments, usually after completing their introductory arc. The player character Gran (or his female counterpart Djeeta), who is a silent participant in the narrative but not the main protagonist, is brought in to the various events by characters addressing them directly. In some cases, characters such as the constantly present Lyria — arguably the real protagonist — speak on behalf of Gran or Djeeta, while at others the player has visual novel-style options to deliver a response of their choice. These responses don’t have an impact on the overall plot, but allow for minor variations in scenes.

Over the course of the main narrative, the cast travels to various islands and meets a variety of characters, some of whom end up becoming party members while others become antagonists. (In some cases, they can become both, though more on that later.) Each island tends to be its own self-contained episode in the overall story, which is in turn split into individual chapters, and subsequently split further into a four-part main quest and one or more sidequests. The main quest advances the overall narrative, while the sidequests are self-contained, single-part “short stories” that tend to focus on daily life in the region for the core cast members, particularly Gran/Djeeta, Lyria and resident “mascot” character Vyrn.

So throughout Granblue Fantasy’s main story, we get a decent sense of context to the world and the characters’ place in it, as well as the growth of the core cast as they take on increasingly difficult challenges. But that’s not the only way that the game explores its characters — particularly those who aren’t directly involved in the central narrative.

At regular points in real time, the game runs special events for a limited duration, which often provide the opportunity to acquire one or more unique characters that cannot be obtained in any other way. At the time of writing, the most recent event was Cinderella Fantasy: Piña Hazard, which featured characters from the popular Japanese anime and game series Idolmaster. This allowed the player to recruit one character through building up their “loyalty” by participating in battles with them, another to be acquired via loot tokens and a selection of further playable characters available as a reward for completing special puzzle-like battles that required specific strategies to complete rather than brute force.

Events of this type typically have a story running through them; in the case of Piña Hazard this was delivered through a combination of a short, linear sequence of quests followed by daily events that advanced the overall narrative. Others might require more active input from the player to proceed; a previous event, for example, required participation in battles to gather ingredients, then the player to make choices in a story scene to decide what type of food they wanted to make for a fussy eater based on her cryptic clues. There’s a lot of variety in these events, and they typically highlight characters who perhaps only put in a brief, relatively minor appearance in the main story — or, in the case of Piña Hazard, characters who aren’t in the main story at all due to the fact they come from another franchise altogether!

Any time you acquire a new character in Granblue Fantasy, whether it’s through an event or by drawing a “character weapon” in the gacha, you unlock something the game calls a “Fate Episode”. These come in two parts: firstly, a single-part story-only episode that introduces the character and the narrative context in which they meet the rest of the party and, once the character has been levelled up sufficiently (or, in some cases, sufficient progress through the main scenario has been made) a second, multiple-part episode with battles that allows them to unlock a new ability.

One interesting thing about Granblue Fantasy is that the gacha contains characters who are presented as antagonists in the early hours of the game. A good example from my personal experience is a character called Sturm, who is a regular thorn in the party’s side in the early hours of the main scenario. I drew Sturm as a playable character in my first attempt at the gacha despite the fact that, at that point in the story, he was still technically a “villain”.

The game handles the sort of continuity errors this might create by preventing you from using characters that would cause narrative issues in main scenario battles, but allowing you to freely use them in other content such as raid battles and events. You’re also locked out of seeing Fate Episodes for characters such as Sturm until you’ve reached a particular point in the main scenario; in other words, in mechanical terms, while you have access to Sturm and his abilities for challenging, non-story or event content, in narrative terms he’s not really “there” in the party until events in the story dictate that it would make sense for him to show up and cooperate.

Fate Episodes in general allow us to learn a great deal more about each and every character in Granblue Fantasy, and, while they’re entirely optional, the game rewards players generously for engaging with the extensive cast in this way. The introductory episodes provide Crystals as a reward, which can be used to draw rare weapons, summons and characters in the gacha, while the second multi-part episodes allow the characters to become more powerful or increase their utility with additional skills.

More than anything, the way characters are handled throughout Granblue Fantasy makes it abundantly clear that each and every member of the increasingly sprawling extended cast has been thoroughly designed not just as a piece of artwork, not just as a collection of stats and abilities, but as an interesting person that you might want to find out more about — or even build a party around just because you like them, rather than them being “good” in mechanical terms.

Choose your Granblue waifu or husubando carefully, though; you’re going to be spending a lot of time in their company!

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It may seem faintly sacrilegious to include a game like Deep Space Waifu in the same column as legends such as Thunder Force II, Raiden IV and Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours. But the fact is, this rough-around-the-edges, budget-price affair is actually well worth your time and attention.

Developed by the mysterious “Neko Climax Studios”, whose only online presence appears to be a Facebook page under the ID “@nekohentaiking” and whose credits consist entirely of initials, Deep Space Waifu describes itself as a “casual strip ’em up action game, full of colours and girls”. And, really, that’s pretty much the perfect description.

At first glance, this appears to be a game that does not take itself at all seriously. But beneath the neon colours, chaotic visual effects and questionable artwork, there’s a surprisingly solid shoot ’em up that has clearly been designed with some care and attention.

In Deep Space Waifu, you take on the role of King Bear, who rides a motorcycle and is obsessed with finding the perfect waifu via a Tinder-like app on his phone. Upon picking a potential paramour that tickles his fancy, the action shifts to a top-down perspective where the apparently tiny King Bear rides his motorcycle back and forth across the multiple screen-filling body of an anime-style girl. He then proceeds to blast a variety of alien scum out of the sky while simultaneously attempting to shoot the clothes off his “date” in an attempt to get her naked before defeating the stage’s boss.

Completing a level in Deep Space Waifu consists of several components, not all of which need to be completed in a single attempt. Firstly, shooting aliens adds to your score, which in turn feeds into a star meter, rating your shooting ability between zero and five stars. The more stars you collect, the more girls you unlock, so it’s in your interests to try and score as highly as possible to see everything the game has to offer.

Scoring points is a matter of both shooting enemies and collecting the stars they drop when they explode. These both reward you with points and charge up your special weapon, which you select before jumping in to a level. In most levels, you have the choice between a “bomb”, which destroys all bullets on screen and turns them into black stars, making it a good screen-clearer, and a temporary burst of slow-motion, allowing you more time to react for a short period. In one level added specifically for the Steam Summer Sale, however, these special weapons are replaced by a screen-filling shower of cash that obliterates everything in its wake; in this level, your bike also fires dollar bills instead of its usual laser bolts.

The second component involves shooting off the girls’ clothes. These are divided into various weak points, marked with brackets and hit point meters once you hit them for the first time. Destroying all the weak points allows you to finish off the complete item of clothing by shooting it anywhere until it disintegrates. Prior to encountering the level’s boss, you can only strip the girl down to her underwear; once the boss appears, her underwear becomes vulnerable too, allowing you to strip her completely naked so long as you do so before whittling the boss’ life down to zero.

An interesting twist on this second component comes in the form of the hardest difficulty, known as “Gentleman Mode”, in which you are punished rather than rewarded for damaging the girl’s clothes during your “date” with her. In this mode, you have to be very careful about positioning as you attempt to destroy the enemies without hitting her clothing’s weak points. It’s a fun, challenging twist that inverts the game’s usual formula and provides some variety.

The third component of progress — so far as the game’s 69 (of course) achievements is concerned is whether or not you can complete the level in “One Hand Mode”, which is justified as “leaving your other hand free to do something else”. In One Hand Mode, your ship autofires and its special weapon is fired using a shoulder button on the controller rather than a face button, meaning you can indeed complete a level using nothing more than your left hand, with an achievement waiting for you for each girl if you finish them off in such a manner.

That is essentially all there is to Deep Space Waifu, with the main variety coming from the different difficulty modes and the many girls to unlock, each of whom play on a particular, popular character trope. There aren’t that many different enemies to confront in the game, you’ll fight the same bosses numerous times in your various runs and once you’ve completed the game to your satisfaction there’s probably little reason to return — but it’s most certainly a fun ride while it lasts.

The game’s psychedelic neon colour scheme and excellent synth-heavy soundtrack give the whole experience a distinctly ’80s feel, with the heavily pixelated, artifacted graphics for the girls adding to the retro arcade feel and fitting in well with the overall aesthetic. There is, in fact, also a “retro” option in the graphics settings, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it actually did, since there was already so much visual noise going on that it was difficult to determine what had been changed.

In some regards, Deep Space Waifu reminds me of work by Llamasoft’s Jeff Minter, in that it’s colourful, chaotic and strongly evocative of simpler times in gaming. Minter’s work, of course, tends to focus less on anime girls and more on stereotypically “British” things as well as his beloved furry and fluffy animals such as sheep, camels and llamas, but there’s a similar feeling that both Neko Climax Studios — whoever they really are — and Minter are making the sorts of things that they enjoy making rather than what they think people want.

Consequently, much like with Minter’s best work, there’s a refreshing sense of honesty and joyful shamelessness to Deep Space Waifu that makes it hard to dislike, even with its various shortcomings such as lack of enemy types and inconsistent graphical quality. It’s a game that invites you to roll around in the mud with it for no other reason that it will be enjoyable to do so; you might come out of the whole experience feeling a bit dirty, but you’ll certainly have had a good time in the process!

Deep Space Waifu is available now for PC, Mac and Linux computers via Steam.

Top Tip: Create a blank text file in the game’s directory and name it “nude.patch” to uncensor the artwork and enjoy full nip-and-vag action.

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In making the jump from the handheld PlayStation Vita to the much more powerful PlayStation 4, Gravity Rush 2 ups the ante from the original considerably in terms of scale, scope and ambition.

While the first game, in some ways, felt somewhat like a proof of concept — admittedly an enormously enjoyable, playable and compelling proof of concept — it’s Gravity Rush 2 where it truly feels like the series has truly hit its stride, both in terms of mechanics and narrative.

What’s rather impressive about it more than anything else, though, is that despite releasing five years after its predecessor, it’s clear that there has been a solid plan in place from the very beginning, making this sequel not only an excellent game in its own right, but a fantastic follow-up that is immensely satisfying for fans of the original who wanted answers to its unresolved questions.

Gravity Rush 2 begins mysteriously: we’re given control of someone wearing a bulky-looking environmental suit who is apparently on some sort of mining expedition. After a bit of teasing exposition, we discover that, of course, we have been in control of Kat this whole time — though after some events that apparently occurred between the end of the first Gravity Rush and the sequel, she has become separated from her cat Dusty and consequently is presently unable to shift gravity at will.

The prologue serves to reintroduce veterans to Kat and, for those who jumped straight in with the second game, introduce her in the first place. By withholding her powers from her from the outset, we’re made to focus on her as a character rather than as a “superhero”; we see how she goes about her daily life in the floating houseboat fleet of Banga, how she interacts with others and get some hints about what happened to put her and her friend Syd into what initially appears to be a rather oppressive situation.

The idea of systemic oppression is a running theme throughout Gravity Rush 2, and through its complete narrative we see a variety of different perspectives on the topic — and how things aren’t always what they seem in this regard.

In the initial chapter, for example, we see that despite Kat and Syd apparently occupying the very lowest rung on the social ladder among the people of Banga, very few people in the settlement are particularly well off in the first place, and what you might initially interpret as “oppression” is actually simply a small society having to live by strict rules in order to ensure that everyone is treated fairly. In turn, Banga as a whole is exploited and oppressed by a tense working relationship with a merchant who screws them over at every opportunity — and in turn, said merchant is also being oppressed by a considerably greater force well beyond his power to resist. The further in the game you go, the more layers of exploitation you discover until you eventually come across the most fundamental conflicts in the game’s unusual world.

Once Kat reunites with Dusty, all bets are off, and you know things are going to change, not just for our heroine but for everyone around her. Interestingly, though, despite Kat’s obviously “superheroic” powers, she remains the rather humble young girl she was in the original, never really taking on the role of a “leader” and instead preferring to act on other people’s suggestions. While it’s ultimately her abilities that tend to turn the tide in favour of “the good guys”, she’s not one to go looking for trouble herself — nor do you ever get the impression that she thinks of herself as invincible or as a one-woman army. In particular, it’s very touching to see how much more confident she is when cooperating with her friend and recurring character Raven.

This works from both a mechanical and narrative perspective; Kat is not the “leader” type, so it would be wildly out of character for her to lead the charge and come up with strategies herself, and likewise putting the player in the role of strategically leading any sort of “revolution” against the various oppressors you encounter in the game would require considerably more mechanical flexibility than your typical open world action game is able to provide — although it would most certainly be an interesting experience, it would also be a very different game. As such, Kat does what she’s told; the player does what they’re told; everything proceeds as planned. Except when, of course, the narrative dictates that it doesn’t.

Gravity Rush 2 is split into four main chapters: a short prologue chapter that focuses entirely on the small Banga settlement, a longer chapter in the new city of Jirga Para Lhao, a return to the original game’s setting of Hekseville, and a final chapter that explores where Kat came from before bringing things to a spectacular conclusion that wraps up the complete narrative that began in the original.

Each chapter is largely self-contained, with its own overarching plot featuring a beginning, middle and end. There are connections between the chapters, however, some of which are immediately obvious while others don’t become clear until much later. The links between Banga and Jirga Para Lhao are immediately apparent, for example, when the houseboat fleet docks in the city and just becomes part of one corner of the map; once Kat returns to Hekseville, however, it’s easy to feel like you’re playing a different game for a while — until things start to wrap up and we encounter a few connections between the two.

The end of the Hekseville chapter is actually treated as an “ending” to the game, since it includes a climactic boss battle and even a credits roll after you’ve successfully completed it. However, the final chapter goes on to bring Jirga Para Lhao and Hekseville together as one big “world” before sending Kat on her way to discover the truth about the strange happenings that appear to be ramping up. The conclusion to this part of the game, meanwhile, is very definitely “final”, though it leaves just enough teasers for another sequel to be a possibility at some point in the future.

In many ways, Gravity Rush 2’s overall structure reminded me of Clover Studio’s classic action adventure Okami; this, too, was a game that featured distinct, discrete “chapters” with their own self-contained stories, and which tricked the player into thinking it was all over several times before revealing that there was, actually, quite a bit more to do.

This kind of structure can easily be frustrating if the game as a whole drags on for too long, but fortunately Gravity Rush 2 keeps things reasonably pacy, with a total of about 25 main missions to complete in the main story, everything else being completely optional.

Like the previous game, Challenge Missions make a comeback, providing gameplay-centric, narrative-free opportunities to test your skill with Kat’s various abilities — and, as we’ll discuss in a moment, Kat has a much larger arsenal of actions to master this time around — while side missions act as their own independent “short stories” that help to flesh out the world as a whole.

Unlike the first Gravity Rush, whose few side missions were short, self-contained story arcs that primarily acted as an excuse to put Kat in a variety of different cute costumes, in Gravity Rush 2 they’re spread throughout the duration of the narrative and provide a means of introducing new characters, unlocking new Challenge Missions and simply putting everything else you’re doing in context.

Alongside these two sets of activities, you also have the opportunity to visit mining sites — the equivalent of the first game’s otherworldly Rift Planes, featuring similarly fantastic landscapes — to collect precious gems to upgrade Kat’s abilities and, more importantly, acquire talismans. Kat is able to equip three talismans at once, and they provide a variety of helpful passive abilities that range from simply enhancing the power of her attacks to automatically healing her over time in exchange for energy from her special attack meter or automatically picking up physics objects using her Stasis Field ability, ready to throw them at enemies..

The talismans also tie in with one of the biggest new features in Gravity Rush 2: the addition of two new “gravity styles”. Besides her ability to “fall” in any direction from the first game, Gravity Rush 2 also adds the ability for Kat to switch into the low-gravity Lunar Style or the high-gravity Jupiter Style, and each of the three different shapes of talisman favours one of the three styles in particular.

Each style has its own unique set of abilities, benefits and drawbacks, and all are useful in various situations. The Lunar Style’s “Spring Jump” ability, for example, allows you to reach high platforms in situations where your gravity power is limited, and its teleporting “Wormhole Kick” move is especially effective against fast-moving aerial enemies, which could be a real pain to defeat in the original game. Conversely, Jupiter Style’s heavy gravity puts considerably more power behind Kat’s attacks, often adding splash damage to surrounding enemies, as well as allowing her to move more quickly through the air at the expense of manoeuvrability.

Once these abilities are unlocked through story progress, you’re free to use them as you see fit in the open world to help you get around and explore — though certain missions restrict your abilities due to various circumstances — and indeed a variety of game features encourage you to deviate from the critical path to enjoy the beautifully crafted settings. Again, these activities are completely optional, but engaging with them leads to a deeper appreciation of the excellent job the team has done with worldbuilding on this game.

One of the major optional sidequests in the game involves taking photographs of various things. Kat acquires a camera early in the story and is able to take pictures either from a first-person perspective or by placing the camera on a static “tripod” (even in mid-air!) to take selfies. To complement this feature, there are a variety of different costumes and gestures you can unlock through the game’s side missions, allowing you to take pictures of Kat pulling silly faces and performing various actions — rather pleasingly, the NPCs that wander around the game world often react to these emotes, jumping back in surprise and dropping what they’re carrying when she tries to “scare” them; clapping her when she sings; looking up to the sky when she points in the air. This can make for some excellent pictures that are full of personality.

The photography sidequest doesn’t require the use of any of these features aside from the camera; it simply tasks you with tracking down twenty specific people (ten men, ten women) based on a cryptic clue and the name of the area they’re in, followed by twenty pieces of street art in awkward locations, and finally twenty landmarks from across Jirga Para Lhao and Hekseville. It ultimately has no impact on the game whatsoever, but it’s a satisfying and enjoyable diversion from the main story, encourages exploration and provides a way to learn more about the setting in various ways.

In narrative terms, the variety of different things you’re able to do in Gravity Rush 2 is entirely in keeping with Kat’s joyful personality. She loves her home, despite the fact it does, at times, mistreat her; she’s proud to act as its protector by helping out its residents through the side missions, and excited to appreciate it fully through photography and exploration.

In a broader sense, Gravity Rush 2 is a particularly good example of a “superhero game”, in which Kat acts as a lone, powerful figure of justice with a sincere and honest desire to help the people. In a world filled with gritty reboots of our favourite comic book heroes that attempt to muddy their motivations and make them into more interesting, often tragically flawed characters, Gravity Rush 2’s interpretation of the superhero genre is refreshingly simplistic and easy to derive joy from. Kat wants to help people, so she does. She doesn’t use her power to obtain an unfair advantage in any way — she lives in the sewers, for heaven’s sake — and her motivations don’t get any more complicated than this, even once we reach the revelations of the final chapter and discover who she really is.

While Gravity Rush 2’s overall narrative is a lot darker than the first game — particularly towards the conclusion of the Hekseville chapter — it is still, at heart, a very traditional, old-school superhero story about “good” triumphing over “evil”. And it’s hard not to love it for that. It’s a game that encourages its players to derive joy from the simple act of getting around, and a game that makes you feel good about playing the role of the sometimes clumsy, sometimes careless but always absolutely earnest, honest and downright lovable figure of Kat.

It’s a brilliant game, full stop, and a fitting follow-up to the low-key charm of the original. Here’s hoping this isn’t the last we’ve seen of our gravity-shifting heroine and the peculiar world in which she lives.

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When I beat Lifesigns: Hospital Affairs (aka Lifesigns: Surgical Unit, aka Resident Doctor Tendo 2) I was ultimately very satisfied with the whole game.

But the fact that I didn’t get the “best” endings to each chapter throughout very much made me think of a now-famous video clip from popular Irish comedian Dara O’Briain, which you may have seen do the rounds on the Internet in the past.

It concerns the concept of how video games, in many cases — though there are exceptions, particularly in more recent years — demand a certain level of competence in order for you to be able to see everything they have to offer.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

Allow me to quote the most pertinent point he makes for those of you too lazy to sit and watch the full eight minutes:

“I love videogames for this reason over all other art forms; they do a thing which no other art form does.

“You cannot be bad at watching a movie; you cannot be bad at listening to an album; but you can be bad at playing a video game, and the video game will punish you and deny you access to the rest of the video game.

“No other art form does this; you’ve never read a book, and three chapters in the book has gone ‘what are the major themes of the book so far?’ You’ve never been listening to an album and after three songs the album has gone ‘dance for me! Show me how good your dancing is!’

“You’re dancing, and you’re going ‘is this good enough?’ and the album has gone ‘no!’ and stopped. Games do this all the time.”

This is actually an issue which, for the most part, visual novels tend to sidestep due to their focus on narrative over gameplay rather than, as is more typically the case, the other way around. In the case of most visual novels, it is absolutely impossible to screech to a halt and be denied access to the rest of the game; the choices you make might lead to a bad ending, but the story is always moving forwards; there’s never a stage at which you have to reload and do the same bit over and over again.

There are, however, exceptions to the rule. Aselia the Eternal, which we last talked about quite some time ago, demanded that the player get their head around the challenging strategic metagame in order to progress through the story, but dealt with the sense of “dissonance” between the two parts by blurring the lines between “story” and “game” moments rather than segregating them.

Meanwhile, Corpse Party on PSP is, for the most part, a linear run to the finish, but there are occasional points where your progress is dependent on making the correct choice and, even more rarely, successfully navigating a simple “action” sequence that usually involves ensuring you don’t have a genuinely horrendous death inflicted on you by a ghost.

Both of these games deal with “failure” in different ways: Aselia simply gives you a “game over” if one of the main cast dies, while Corpse Party “rewards” you for failure with one of its many “wrong ends” and actually, in many ways, encourages the player to seek out these unpleasant early conclusions before moving on with the plot. They both have one thing in common, though: they end the game.

Lifesigns (as we will refer to it from hereon for simplicity’s sake) handles things a little differently. While making a hash of one of the game’s relatively infrequent surgery sequences and causing the patient to die through your own cack-handedness does usually result in a “game over,” there are a number of situations throughout where the different endings are dependent on your performance in skill-based minigames ranging from the surgery sequences to cooking takoyaki at an island festival.

For example, towards the end of the game’s first chapter, two emergency patients are brought in, both in critical condition. If you save the first one within three minutes (actually relatively easy if you’ve done it once before and can remember the steps; somewhat more difficult the first time you take it on) then you can move on to the second one, save them both and be home in time for dinner. If you save the first one a little too slowly, however, the second one dies in the meantime, which adds something of a bittersweet feeling to the end of the chapter. And if, in an earlier sequence, you fail to convince your highly strung fellow doctor to calm down and handle things in a rational manner, the first patient dies, while you are able to save the second instead.

I found this really interesting, as at no point during playing the game was I aware that it was doing this; it wasn’t until I looked at some walkthroughs after progressing past that point that I discovered things could have unfolded very differently. The game handles it well; it implies strongly that things could have gone better somehow, but it doesn’t make this explicit and nor does it “punish” the player by refusing to allow them to go any further.

The effect this has in the long-term is to make the game very replayable — while the overall unfolding plot will be the same each time, as there aren’t really any “branch points” in the complete narrative, the fact that there are several endings for each episode means that you can potentially have a noticeably different experience each time you play.

I’m all for multiple endings, but I am slightly torn on how they’re implemented here — and particularly the fact that they’re so dependent on player skill rather than anything else. There’s nothing wrong with doing it this way, of course, and in the high-stakes world of emergency medicine it’s perhaps entirely appropriate that things like your ability to save both of two critical-condition patients is dependent on how quick and skilled you are with your surgical tools.

I did also find it somewhat interesting that certain things do carry across between the otherwise self-contained episodes — for example, your efficiency at performing one of the surgical procedures in the game’s second chapter determines, through a somewhat convoluted series of circumstances, which of the game’s “love interests” you’ll be able to date in the final chapter.

What I think is important, however, and the reason I’m ultimately not mad at Lifesigns for throwing me a couple of bad endings to chapters along the way, is this: never once did I feel like the game was punishing me unfairly. The few “game over” screens I did see along the way were due to my own incompetence rather than something I had no control of, and the bad endings I did get felt like perfectly valid conclusions to that part of the story rather than a sign that I had failed somehow. And, as noted above, the knowledge that yes, I actually could have done better is sufficient incentive for me to return to the game in the future and revisit it.

All this aside, Lifesigns left me with one strong feeling that far outweighed any criticisms I could otherwise level at it: I would love to see more medical drama games, as Lifesigns is absolutely proof that you don’t have to veer off into Trauma Center crazytown to make a convincingly satisfying experience. As review scores will attest, this is not something that every gamer will engage with, of course, but since when have all games had to be all things to all people?

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

I made a throwaway comment to a friend a while back that I wanted to check out more of Nippon Ichi’s games.

This was partly due to some past positive experiences with Disgaea back in the PS2 days, an enjoyable bit of time spent with the surprisingly tragic The Witch and the Hundred Knight as well as a great deal of enjoyment of products NIS had contributed to, such as the early Hyperdimension Neptunia games.

Zip forward to the time of writing (Editor’s Note: 2013… and this is a game I’d like to cover in more detail in the future!) and I’m thoroughly engrossed in one NIS offering in particular: a PSP game from the team behind Disgaea. And, boy, does its heritage show.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

I always liked the Disgaea series, but I’ve never beaten one. I always got far too sidetracked with the fact you could take your army into the weird “item world” inside a stick of gum and level it up to be slightly better at healing. It was fun, but ultimately I found myself too overwhelmed with possibilities to get through the game’s story — which was something of a shame, as it was a game filled with wry humor, witty writing and lovable characters.

Zettai Hero Project: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman (Z.H.P. for short to save my sanity) maintains the things I liked about Disgaea while transplanting it to a personal favorite RPG subgenre — the randomly-generated, turn-based dungeon-crawler, aka the roguelike. Actually, to call Z.H.P. a roguelike isn’t strictly accurate, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The premise of Z.H.P. is that your character, canonically named Main Character, is thrust into events beyond his control when he witnesses the world’s hero, the Unlosing Ranger, being run over by a car and killed while on his way to fight the final boss Darkdeath Evilman. The Unlosing Ranger passes on his powers to Main Character, who subsequently finds himself in battle against Darkdeath Evilman and gets rather soundly trounced.

In fact, he gets knocked all the way out of orbit and on to Bizarro Earth on the other side of our sun, which just happens to be the place heroes are sent to be trained. Subsequently, under the stern tutelage of the mysterious, stroppy girl Etranger and the fatherly if dim-witted concern of the former Unlosing Ranger’s ghost, Main Character is sent to train his skills by righting the world’s wrongs in the hope of powering him up enough to take down Darkdeath Evilman.

There are a few different aspects to Z.H.P.’s gameplay, all of which are introduced through some excellently entertaining introductory quests. While at “base,” Main Character can wander around, shop for items, repair damaged equipment and take advantage of other services that gradually become available as the game progresses. These range from a Prinny wife who demands living expenses at regular intervals and makes Main Character lunches on request, to a caravan which brings some of the base’s services to the depths of a dungeon.

The dungeoneering is where the interesting gameplay comes in, though. Presented from an isometric perspective much like Disgaea, Z.H.P. is a turn-based role-playing game much like a traditional roguelike. Main Character moves, enemies move, repeat. There are some intriguing elements to the gameplay that make this far more than simple hack-and-slash, though. For example, enemies all have a visible vision radius, and if Main Character enters this area, they will give chase and alert any other enemies whose vision radii overlap their own. Likewise, when an enemy dies, they will cry out, and any nearby enemies will come and investigate the source of the noise. This can be used to your advantage.

Equipment is highly disposable in Z.H.P. — everything has a durability value which declines rather quickly. When the durability is used up, it no longer provides bonuses so must be repaired. Alternatively, if you so desire, you can simply fling broken pieces of equipment at enemies, and this often has special effects. Like Disgaea, it’s also possible to pick up and throw enemies you’re standing next to, meaning savvy players can manipulate the flow of battle to their advantage with a bit of clever grappling.

There are a lot of things to pay attention to, which is perhaps why the game takes a turn-based approach. Not only do you have to keep an eye on your health, but much like in a traditional roguelike, you are constantly getting more and more hungry as you move, attack and use skills. If you’re hungry, your health will gradually decline, but if you’re well-fed, your health will gradually increase, making it in your interests to keep stuffing your face with the lumps of meat you occasionally find around the place.

Unlike your common-or-garden roguelike, death is not the end in Z.H.P. In fact, it’s a key part of the experience. When you die, you see, any levels you gained in that dungeon run are added on to Main Character’s “total level,” which in turn affects his base stats. Every time he enters a new dungeon, regardless of whether he completed a previous one or died, he starts again at level 1 — but the higher his total level, the “better” that level 1 is. Finding a dungeon difficult? Gain some levels, die, run it again and enjoy more success. The eventual aim is to get Main Character’s base stats and abilities to such a level where he is able to defeat Darkdeath Evilman in increasingly-elaborate JRPG combat, beginning with an 8-bit first-person battle reminiscent of Phantasy Star and progressing through the eras of presentational awesomeness.

So the game part is great, but what really surprised me is the story. The premise is utterly ridiculous and I was expecting the narrative to be little more than a throwaway concern, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised in that the tale it tells has some depth. Rather than being a cheesy tale about fighting evil, Z.H.P. is actually a story about overcoming your own weaknesses and finding the strength within to better yourself.

This is reflected in the dungeons Main Character has to run — they usually involve rescuing the Bizarro Earth version of someone from doing something stupid, be that killing themselves over the Unlosing Ranger’s apparent defeat, or getting into a cycle of bullying as a result of being bullied themselves. The incidental character arcs that Main Character helps to resolve with his training are all rather touching and relatable in a vaguely Persona-esque way, and the themes of conquering adversity are very well-represented through the game mechanics themselves as well as the story sequences.

I’m a relatively short way into the game as I write this, but it’s already proving to be a surprisingly compelling experience as well as an excellent fit for the portable format. It also works just fine on Vita (and PlayStation TV!), so if you’ve been looking to give Sony’s underappreciated handheld some love, then this is a great option.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

One interesting thing about Granblue Fantasy when compared to a more traditional MMO on computer or console is the fact that what we’d typically regard as the “endgame grind” is actually spread out throughout the whole game.

This is partly due to the game’s overall structure and progression: you’re not levelling up a single character and thus there isn’t a “level cap” to reach because at any time, you can switch out your party members, your weapons and your summons to create a new experience for yourself.

Aside from this, however, it allows players to get into the multiplayer content — often restricted to high-level play in other mobile-social RPGs — almost right from the outset.

There’s a certain degree of freedom in how you choose to approach your overall progression in Granblue Fantasy. There’s nothing to stop you focusing exclusively on the main story and each chapter’s sidequests, using only the party members you’re awarded for free as the narrative proceeds. This may not be the most efficient way to play, but it’s certainly a way to play that anyone can enjoy without having to commit too much time or effort.

What most people quickly find themselves getting drawn into, however, is the extensive metagame of collecting characters, weapons and summons that synergise nicely with one another, levelling them up and making their party as efficient a killing machine as possible. Interestingly, the game never really specifically encourages you to do this, but if you’re paying attention it’s not hard to figure out.

By far the most common approach to developing a powerful party is to focus exclusively on a single element. In my case, I’ve opted for water, since my SSR draws in the gacha so far have netted me the water characters Izmir, Erin and Silva, early story characters Katalina and Io are both water-based, and two solid-seeming characters from the recent Idolmaster event — Anastasia and Minami — were also water-type.

Building a party is much more than just picking all characters of the same type, however. A much more time-consuming and challenging job is ensuring that your ten equipped weapons and main summon all have passive skills that complement your party’s build, ideally by buffing water-type characters’ attack power as much as possible. And then ensuring that those weapons are levelled up. And that those weapons’ skills are powered up, too. And then breaking their level caps to make them even stronger.

There’s a lot to do, in other words, and the sort of things you’ll likely find yourself drawn into even in the early hours of the game — much as I have — are the kinds of things more typically reserved for endgame activities in more conventional MMOs. Consider something like Final Fantasy XIV, for example; as you progress through the early levels, you can simply acquire equipment from vendors and dungeon drops, but when you reach levels 50, 60 and 70 (the “endgame” levels for the original game, the Heavensward expansion and the most recent Stormblood expansion respectively) you have the option to undertake much more involved and time-consuming quests to acquire powerful weapons that demand a lot more from the player than simply handing over a fistful of gil.

In Granblue Fantasy, however, this grind to achieve the best possible loadout begins from the very outset and is constant throughout your entire experience with the game. This is partly due to the fact that the game is balanced rather differently to something like Final Fantasy XIV, having more in common with a single-player RPG than a typical MMO. What this means is that rather than the emphasis being on acquiring gear that will simply allow you to survive a challenging encounter, in Granblue Fantasy the game mechanics practically encourage you to get as overpowered as possible so you can rip through even multiplayer raid bosses’ HP bars with ease. Because the more easily and quickly you’re able to shred enemies, the easier it is to grind for the next step in your grand ambitions. And so the process continues.

Thankfully, since Granblue Fantasy has been around for so long now (relatively speaking, anyway, having enjoyed a particularly impressive run for an online mobile game) there’s plenty of content in the game to challenge even seasoned players with frighteningly powerful party lineups. Able to solo normal raid bosses? Then try a Hard one. Then a Very Hard one. Then an Extreme one. Then an Impossible one. Or how about a Nightmare one? And if you reach a stage where you can’t even make a dent in a boss’ HP bar, you can always call in other players to help and discover that yes, you clearly still have a long way to go.

I’ve used the word “grind” throughout this piece, and that term often has negative connotations, but in Granblue Fantasy it manages to always feel rewarding, whether it’s simply being able to deal some respectable damage to a boss that had previously been giving you grief, or unlocking new character art and skills by raising your party members’ level caps.

One nice thing is that there are usually multiple ways to go about something you want to achieve. Take uncapping a character, for example: this is a process that requires the acquisition of a number of different treasure items according to the character and how many times you’ve already uncapped them. One option to acquire these items for free is to run the appropriate daily dungeons throughout the week, which have a random chance of dropping the items you need. Another is to collect lower-tier (and more common) versions of the items you need, then trade them in for the actual one you want. Or attempt to loot them from raid bosses. Or regular story quests. Or, as I most commonly find myself doing, trade in Cerulean Stones acquired from playing the gacha — which, let’s not forget, you can play for free on a fairly regular basis if you ensure you make progress through any available uncleared quests whenever you can — to just get the items you need.

Weapons and summons are a little trickier, as these typically require another copy of the same weapon or summon in order to uncap them. This isn’t an easy feat to accomplish, particularly in the case of SSR cards, so there’s also the option of acquiring various loot items as an alternative to just repeatedly playing the gacha and hoping. In the case of event-exclusive summons, too, there are often ways to acquire additional copies through earning trophies even after the event has concluded; the recent Idolmaster event, for example, allows you to pick up additional copies of the Brunnhilde summon simply by summoning her a set number of times. Of course, this would appear to assume that you remembered to grab a Brunnhilde during the event in the first place, but once you have one, you can grind your way to fully uncapping her at your own pace rather than having to squeeze it all in to the limited event period. Alternatively, if you didn’t get your own Brunnhilde, you can still acquire one by summoning other players’ Brunnhildes enough times to get the trophy, though this, of course, requires that they have her set as one of their support summons.

This flexibility and variety in Granblue Fantasy is one of the game’s great strengths, though it’s also something of a mixed blessing; it makes the game appear quite complicated and daunting to newcomers, and not much of this is explicitly explained from the get-go, leaving new players to either work things out for themselves or rely on the extensive collected knowledge of the rest of the Internet. (The Granblue Fantasy Wiki is a good place to start.) Once you get your head around the various systems and start to set your own goals, however, it’s hard not to get hooked on the game’s gradual, constant progression… and before long you’ll find yourself hosting regular Omega raids, attempting to fill out your weapon grid with the “perfect” combination of equipment and buffing up your summons to maximise your damage output.

The rabbit-hole runs deep. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

I’ll freely admit that, up until the time of writing, I’ve had little to no familiarity with the Fate series as a whole aside from recognising various Saber incarnations and Tamamo no Mae on sight, and having some complicated feelings towards Astolfo.

But with the North American release of Fate/Grand Order — accessible outside the US by using a service such as QooApp for Android to download the app — I decided that I’d jump in. (I’m also planning to jump right back to the beginning of the series and the Fate/stay night visual novel in the next few months, so please look forward to that.)

And what do you know? I’ve been having a grand old time with a game that, while superficially similar to other mobile-social RPGs such as Granblue Fantasy, successfully distinguishes itself with a strong degree of audio-visual polish, some interesting mechanics and one hell of a lot of words. Pretty appropriate for a work whose source material is notorious for being roughly on a par with Lord of the Rings in terms of length.

In Fate/Grand Order (Fate/GO hereafter), you take on the role of a new recruit in a mysterious organisation that is attempting to protect the future of humanity. Before you get a chance to really understand what is going on — but after you fall asleep in your orientation session and get yelled at by your new commander — there’s a huge disaster in the base that culminates with the discovery that humanity will become extinct at some point within the next year. Not the best start to your new career.

As one of only a few apparent survivors of the disaster at the base, you find yourself Rayshifted to Fuyuki City in 2004, setting of Fate/stay night. Something seems to have gone terribly wrong here, too, though; the city lies in ruins and things have not unfolded as history suggests they should have. Accompanied by Mash Kyrielight, a friend from the base who absorbs a Heroic Spirit into herself and becomes a “Demi-Servant” in the process, it’s up to you to investigate what is going on, correct it and see if that has an impact on humanity’s chances of survival.

From here begins a long and complicated tale of time travel, temporal singularities, historical figures and concepts made flesh… and lots and lots of chopping up skeletons and dragons.

Like most games of this type, Fate/GO is split into a number of different components. At its core is a linear storyline that you progress through a quest at a time by completing battles. In between story chapters, you have the option of revisiting areas on the node-based world map that you’ve previously cleared and fighting enemies for drops, completing daily missions to earn experience-boosting items and money, completing “Interlude” chapters for the characters you’ve unlocked… and, of course, collecting and powering up new Servants to add to your party.

Let’s look at Fate/GO’s battle system first, as it’s probably the most interesting and unconventional aspect of the game in a crowded, often rather copycat genre. Rather than being a simple case of telling characters to attack and perhaps occasionally unleashing skills, here we have a card-based system that adds an element of chance to combat.

Each character in your active party — two of whom are from your own collection and a third who is either drawn from other players or, at various moments in the story, an NPC, has five different cards, all of which are shuffled together into a fifteen-card deck at the start of battle. Cards are one of three types: Buster cards are strong attacks, Quick cards create more “critical stars”, which are distributed across the next turn’s hand to increase the chance of critical hits, and Arts cards allow a character to build up their Noble Phantasm gauge in preparation to unleash their special moves. Each character has a different combination of these three types of card, making some more suited to various roles.

Each turn, you draw a hand of five cards and can play three of them. The first card you pick adds an element of its effect to all subsequent cards, but the later cards you play have a more powerful impact. For example, play a Buster card first and all cards will do more damage than usual even if they aren’t themselves Buster cards, but a Buster card played third will do considerably more damage than a Buster card played first. Obviously you can use this fact to your advantage by playing a Buster card first to buff all cards’ damage, then ensuring that there’s another Buster card in the last slot for maximum pain.

It’s not just a case of playing what you think are the “best” cards, though. The order and combination in which you play cards is important. Playing three cards depicting the same character is called a “Brave Chain” and allows them to unleash a fourth, powerful “Extra Attack”, for example — but the tradeoff for this is that if this character defeats an enemy before all their attacks have gone off, they won’t automatically switch targets. Instead, for efficient killing, you need to use multiple characters in a single turn, since if one character defeats an enemy, a different one jumping into the fray will head for a new target rather than wailing on the foe their peer has already made mincemeat of.

Then there’s the fact that if you play three cards of the same colour, their effect is considerably enhanced, so playing three Arts cards in a turn will net you a much bigger increase in your Noble Phantasm gauge than just one or two. And this can be combined with the Brave Chain mechanic, too, so if you, say, play three Buster cards from the same character you’ll not only do obscene amounts of damage with each attack, you’ll also get an extra (buffed) bonus attack, too.

The card-based system can, at times, be frustrating if you find yourself with a poor hand, but you can mitigate unfortunate circumstances to a certain extent by using characters’ skills, their Noble Phantasms (which aren’t always offensive in nature) and even your own Master Skills from the “Mystic Code” you have equipped. What it does mean for the game as a whole is that battles are always interesting and varied, and it adds an extra layer of strategy to the metagame, as for an optimal party you’ll need to pick not only characters with good stats, but those with a good deck of cards too.

Building a party in Fate/GO is a little different from Granblue Fantasy in that it pays to have a bit more breadth rather than focusing on a single type. Instead of elemental weaknesses, Fate/GO uses classes, which interact with one another in various ways. There are two main “triangles”, for example — Saber beats Lancer, which beats Archer, which beats Saber; Rider beats Caster, which beats Assassin, which beats Rider — but there are also characters from outside these triangles too. Berserkers, for example, are strong against everything but also weak against everything, while Mash’s Shielder class, which you have from the beginning of the game, isn’t strong or weak against anything. You’ll also encounter others, such as Jeanne D’Arc’s Ruler class, as you progress through the story.

Because characters in Fate/GO don’t level up simply by use as they do in Granblue Fantasy, you’re a lot more free to experiment with party lineups, shifting around according to what you think might be most helpful. Before you embark on each quest, you get an indication of the enemy classes you’ll encounter — though just the types and not the number of each. Using this information, you can predict which characters will be the most useful to you at any given time, but the flip side of this is that it’s important to keep a broad array of characters — ideally at least one of each class — levelled up appropriately in order to not find yourself underpowered when you come up against a boss.

Characters in Fate/GO can be buffed up in a number of ways. For one, a temporary increase to their attack and HP parameters can be achieved through the use of Craft Essences, equippable items that can be levelled up independently of the characters. These also often carry a useful passive skill of some description, with some complementing particular classes better than others.

More permanent upgrades can be achieved by fusing your characters either with other characters or, more practically, with various grades of “Ember”, which award varying amounts of experience according to their rarity. It’s also possible to fuse characters with special cards that increase their attack and HP parameters directly — up to a cap, anyway. On top of that, you can level up their Noble Phantasms by fusing them with copies of themselves, increase the power of their skills by using special items, break their level cap (or “Ascend” them) by firstly reaching said cap and then using a particular combination of items, and break their level cap further by using Holy Grails.

Further incentive to keep all classes levelled is provided by the game’s “Support” system, whereby you can mark one of each class as available for borrowing by other players. Both the player who borrows your characters and you are rewarded for this, so it’s in your interests to make your offerings attractive to other people by keeping them levelled, ascended… and, to be honest, ensuring they’re popular characters, too.

Fate/GO’s gacha system comes in two parts. The premium draw allows you to use “Saint Quartz”, most commonly acquired by completing story quests, to summon three-star or higher Servants and Craft Essences. Meanwhile, you’re able to draw ten low-rarity Servants and Craft Essences for free every day to use as fodder (or even to put in your party, if you ever wondered what it would be like to see William Shakespeare, Mozart and Mata Hari fighting skeletons), with further “free” draws available through the use of Friend Points, which you acquire both by using other players’ support Servants and having your own used. The gacha is notoriously unforgiving, often throwing you a handful of admittedly useful but not very exciting Craft Essences rather than new characters — but it’s important to note that the North American incarnation of the game is still in its early days, and so far there are only 59 Servants available to acquire anyway, many of which you’ll acquire naturally through casual play.

While the new game’s translation to English has drawn some criticism for textual errors that should have probably been caught in proofreading, the overall experience for those who didn’t play the Japanese original — and those who are new to Fate in general, for that matter — is very good, and the team has already said it’s working on updating and improving the typos and other errors that have been reported.

For now, the few flaws the game has certainly aren’t enough to outweigh what a compelling, enjoyable experience it offers, particularly for free — so if you’re a fan of pretty girls and burly men chopping up bad guys and shouting a lot punctuated by reams of entertaining and dramatic dialogue, Fate/GO most certainly deserves a place on your phone.

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Nekopara (or “Cat’s Paradise”, if you prefer) is a series of catgirl-centric visual novels that has become a genuine worldwide phenomenon since its launch in 2014.

Since the release of first game Nekopara vol. 1, developer Nekoworks has brought out roughly one new installment a year, beginning with the short fandisc prequel Nekopara vol. 0 in 2015 before continuing with vol. 2 and vol. 3 in 2016 and 2017 respectively.

Unusually for a visual novel, the whole Nekopara series has seen simultaneous worldwide releases since its inception rather than releasing in its native territories first then localising later. This has helped fans across the world enjoy its lightweight slice-of-life comedy together, and has almost certainly been a huge contributing factor in making it so popular in both the East and West.

We’re going to start our look at the series with a broad exploration of where the catgirl phenomenon as a whole came from, and how Nekopara fits in with all that.

The image of the catgirl is said to have originated in the early 20th century, with its creation attributed to Shōwa era children’s author Kenji Miyazawa and his 1924 work Suisenzuki no yokka, in which a cat-eared girl played a prominent role.

Miyazawa’s work is actually rather interesting to consider in light of some of the themes Nekopara explores, particularly that of innocence. Writing in 1986, scholar Takao Hagiwara explained that Miyazawa’s works typically explored the concept of innocence in several ways, particularly through dichotomies such as the natural world versus the urban environment, art versus reality and even life versus death.

“Kenji was an artist who was ‘obsessed’ with the ‘different space’ or the other world, and who constantly pursued it,” writes Hagiwara. “Kenji sought this different world because, like many other artists, he was not quite satisfied with the world he was born into. For Kenji, the different space was in many ways better, truer, more beautiful, and more perfect — it was the realm of primal innocence from which, as various myths from all over the world tell us, man has been expelled since time began.”

The idea of this “different space” where things are simpler, better, calmer and more peaceful is a common one in literature — and indeed in culture at large. Who hasn’t looked at a happily playing child (or even animal) and wished, even momentarily, that they could live in their world for a little while? It’s a common, relatable fantasy — and one which we can tie back into Nekopara in numerous ways.

Firstly and most obviously is the fact that Nekopara as a work is pure, escapist fantasy, based as it is on a completely fictional premise: the idea that genetic modification has allowed for the creation of “catgirls”, who mature and grow at the speed of cats and retain many of their feline counterparts’ instinctive behaviours, and that humanity is absolutely fine with considering these distinctly human-like people as “pets” and considering themselves their “owners”.

It would be easy to get hung up on this point as a heavy-handed allegory for sociopolitical concepts such as slavery and societal inequalities, but from the very outset Nekopara’s tone makes it abundantly clear that it has no intention whatsoever of encouraging its readers to consider it in such a way. This is just how it is, the work seems to say. It’s pure fantasy, pure escapism, and you don’t need to read anything deeper into it to have a good time.

Nekopara, in other words, could be argued to be occupying that “different space” outside of reality: a space filled with innocence rather than the trials and tribulations of modern life. Of course, there’s nothing to stop a critic from attempting to read more deeply into the way humans and catgirls interact throughout the story — indeed, with how socially conscious we’re encouraged to be these days, it’s difficult not to, in some ways — but it’s extremely apparent what the authorial intention is: a simple, lightweight, amusing and heartwarming story about catgirls, and nothing more.

Many of Nekopara’s characters occupy this “different space” in their own right, too. In particular, the female leads of vol. 1, Chocola and Vanilla, have willingly immersed themselves in innocence; having grown up as strays knowing hardship before being rescued by the protagonist Kashou and his family, they now enjoy their lives to the fullest while knowing that they will always be protected by their “Master”. Indeed, Kashou refers to them several times throughout the narrative as being “like his daughters”, and he takes the raising of them very seriously; like any concerned parent of young children, he is keen to shield them from the harsh realities of the world and allow them to maintain their youthful innocence for as long as possible. (This is not, of course, taking the sexual content of the games into account, but that’s something to discuss when we come to talking about the individual titles in more detail.)

Returning to the history lesson, the first appearance of catgirls in modern popular media is credited to Mitsuyu Seo and his 1949 anime Osama no Shippo, a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes which struggled to find a distributor at the time of its original production due to being considered “too leftist”. The trope didn’t gain hugely in popularity until the late ’70s and the production of the manga The Star of Cottonland, however, in which the main character was an abandoned kitten named Chibi-neko, represented as a young girl with cat ears and a tail to reflect her own belief in the possibility that cats could become human.

The idea that cats “want to be human” is a common one among those who keep real cats as pets, with many attributing distinctly human characteristics to what are, in most cases, simple animal instincts. It remains an enduring perception, however; certainly in my own household, our two cats are treated pretty much as full members of the family, and I’m sure we all know at least one person who talks to their pets as if they were people. (If you don’t, well, hi. Now you do!) We also see a similar idea to The Star of Cottonland’s core concept even in up-to-date popular media: in Atlus’ Persona 5, for example, the character Morgana is depicted as a cat that only the main cast can hear speaking; everyone else simply hears meows — this idea echoes how Chibi-neko believed she could speak the human language, but no-one seemed to understand her.

In many ways, Nekopara comes at this idea from the opposite angle: by literally making cats into “humans” and making them behave in ways that are distinctly cat-like, we can contrast with our real-world projection of human characteristics and behaviours onto domesticated animals. The writers behind Nekopara clearly know cats; throughout the narrative, we see each and every member of the cast behaving in a distinctly “believable” manner, even given the inherently fantastic and unbelievable premise. For example, partway through vol. 1, we see the young catgirl Coconut express great pride in her ability to remain calm and focused even with distractions going on around her, and she seems to live up to her self-professed reputation right up until a fly enters the room and completely monopolises her attention. And this is far from the only example of the cast demonstrating authentically cat-like behaviours.

Today, catgirls — and kemonomimi (animal-eared) characters in general — are part of a more broad trend towards moe anthropomorphism and personification. We, after all, live in a world where many popular manga, games and anime personify everything from historical figures to real-life warships via household appliances as attractive (and usually female) characters.

The popularity of animal girls shows no sign of slowing down, however; At the time of writing, one of the most popular recent anime was the surprise hit Kemono Friends, which took the idea of kemonomimi and ran with it, featuring attractive young girls representing not just the more commonly seen cats, rabbits and foxes, but also unexpected animals (i.e. those not typically associated with “attractiveness” or, perhaps more accurately, agility, grace and visual appeal) such as the hippopotamus, beaver, shoebill and many others besides.

In recent years, we’ve also seen shows such as Monster Musume, which featured more explicitly animalistic, “monstrous” characters such as the snake-tailed Miia and the spider-woman Rachnera, as well as the rather more subtle Interviews with Monster Girls (aka Demi-chan wa Kataritai), both of which explored the difficulty non-human characters had adjusting to a world that wasn’t quite designed for them. The theme of an “outsider” learning to adjust to their surroundings is a common one in Japanese popular media, even outside the realms of moe anthropomorphism, but it also happens to fit in rather nicely with the concept of characters who are “sort of human, but not quite”.

Such is the case with Nekopara. As we’ll explore further when we look at the individual games in detail, while the main cast may appear to have superficially human characteristics and even feel like they successfully fit in with human society to varying degrees, they all have their own challenges to overcome and their own work to do before they can be truly independent.

But make no mistake; far from being harrowing stories of an oppressed minority’s struggles against seemingly insurmountable odds and personal tragedies, the Nekopara games simply take us by the hand and encourage us to take a short holiday in Miyazawa’s “different space” to enjoy ourselves and have a good time; a world of innocence, colour, fun, cakes… and, of course, catgirls.

And I think we all need that sort of thing from time to time.

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What would you do if you suddenly found that you’d changed sex?

That’s the core question in Crowd’s X-Change, localized for us Westerners by Peach Princess. At heart, it’s an interesting question and, frankly, one that I have found myself pondering in quieter moments — as, I’m sure, have many of you reading this, regardless of whether you identify as male or female, or even if you’ve taken that next step and started to explore your gender identity further.

Either way, wondering if the “grass is greener,” so to speak, is a fundamental part of human nature, so of course I was always going to jump at the opportunity to play something that explored these themes.

What I found was… hmm. Perhaps not the best example of a visual novel you’ll ever come across, to say the least, though it is at least something that warrants a certain amount of discussion, if only because it’s quite a well-known title.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

In X-Change, you’re cast in the role of Takuya Aihara, who is, at the outset of the game, not a particularly likable character. Through an unfortunate combination of circumstances, however, he finds himself splashed with a mysterious chemical while cleaning up the school science lab and later discovers, to his great surprise, that he’s turned into a girl. Thus begins girl-Takuya’s grand adventure through womanhood, which is not an easy, umm, ride.

There’s nothing really fundamentally wrong with the core concept of X-Change. Gender-bending comedies are fairly commonplace and successful in Japanese media, and not just in the realm of eroge — consider the long-running Ranma 1/2, for example, which ran for 38 volumes of manga between 1987 and 1996 and subsequently spawned two different anime TV series, three anime movies and a whole host of other spin-offs. And, as noted above, it’s a potentially interesting subject area to explore.

Which is why it’s a bit of a pity that X-Change takes a bit of a “lowest common denominator” approach and focuses almost exclusively on the sexual side of things — rather to the detriment of its overarching storyline. There is an overarching storyline, of course — Takuya’s attempts to return himself back to his more familiar form — and there are several endings to the game, not all of which are particularly positive outcomes for Takuya, but for the most part we are squarely in nukige territory here. (Nukige, if you’ve never come across that term before, refers to a particular type of adults-only visual novel that tends to put the sex before the plot, rather than the other way around.)

The sexual exploits that Takuya gets up to while in girl-Takuya form are many and varied, ranging from being raped on a bus to having sex with a classmate on the rooftop of the school under circumstances where the question of consent is… well, somewhat up for debate.

There’s a lot of rape in X-Change.

Girl-Takuya, for the most part, appears to just sort of put up with all of it as a matter of course, as just something that sort of “happens,” and it gets to a point after a while where you, the player, stop feeling surprised that someone is violating Takuya yet again. This is not a particularly comfortable place in which to find oneself, though it’s perhaps open for debate as to whether or not the game is trying to make you feel uncomfortable.

Were the game itself not quite so gleeful in its portrayal of Takuya’s various violations as being in some way titillating or arousing, there might perhaps be some sort of meta-point to be made about the way that women are seen by men and that Takuya is just getting a rather extreme lesson in what it’s like to be objectified.

With the way the game handles these scenes and depicts Takuya’s reactions to them, though — girl-Takuya more often than not ends up perversely enjoying her various misadventures to a certain degree after a while — it’s difficult not to feel like an opportunity to say something a bit more profound has been lost.

On the flip-side, though, X-Change is pretty up-front about what sort of experience it’s offering to the player, and thus most people who go into it will probably at least have some idea of what to expect, particularly if they’re familiar with other forms of Japanese media and the changes in Japanese society’s cultural norms over time.

The use of sexual deviancy and sexual violence in Japanese popular media is a side-effect of the country’s varying attitudes towards women over the years — attitudes which have changed enormously as the centuries passed. It took until 1946 for Japanese women to get the right to vote, and until 1986 for an Equal Employment Opportunity law to be enacted.

Even with the majority of legal barriers to gender equality in Japan lying in tatters — and this whole process happened a lot quicker in Japan than in many Western countries — it’s not so easy to deal with firmly-held societal norms and opinions that you can’t easily legislate against. Many older Japanese men, suddenly finding their power over half of the population stripped away from them, became resentful of their diminished “authority”; and meanwhile, some younger Japanese men just coming into adulthood suddenly found themselves without the benefits of power that their elders had enjoyed. This is a good thing on the whole, of course — yay for equality and all that — but these big societal changes did have something of a knock-on effect on the media.

Specifically, some content creators used the fantastic nature of manga, anime and related media to express themselves, and to express opinions and viewpoints that were no longer “acceptable” to do so in polite society. That means media in which women were placed in positions to be dominated by men, and arguably the most extreme form of male dominance over a woman is rape.

The use of sexual violence in Japanese media, initially pushed underground by societal changes, became part of the culture surrounding those creative works, and consequently we still see a lot of these knock-on effects today in modern media that is firmly in the public consciousness. You can probably name a few notorious Japanese works that involve sexual violence without having to think too hard — even if you’re not really into hentai.

Some would argue that this situation isn’t particularly good for the representation of women in the media, of course, but there is at least a case to be made that pushing misogyny and sexual violence into the purely fantastic lands of creative, cultural works while simultaneously allowing “real life” to proceed in an ultimately more positive direction is probably a better way to do things than maintaining a society in which women do not have equal rights… so long as those clear boundaries between fantasy and reality are maintained. And most of us are intelligent enough to be able to do that.

It’s worth acknowledging, too, that there are people out there — both men and women — who fantasise about matters such as rape, sexual violence and other forms of “deviancy” from the perceived norms of society, and that it’s important for them to have an outlet in which they can express, explore and question those desires without hurting anyone. Fiction — particularly interactive fiction — provides an ideal opportunity to do just that.

It’s an exaggeration to say that sexual violence and deviancy is “prevalent” in Japanese media as a whole — there’s plenty of popular material that doesn’t even touch on sexual content, violent or otherwise — but at the same time it’s not something that can really be ignored, either. The reasons for its existence, however, might not be what you may initially believe them to be.

I couldn’t say for certain one way or another whether X-Change’s creators have any particular grudge against women or whether they just wanted to make a gender-swap nukige in which the character moved rather rapidly from one sexual scene to another with minimal narrative justification. The actual female characters in the rest of the game besides the protagonist certainly aren’t treated harshly — in fact, a number of them exert a considerable amount of power over Takuya in various ways — but every time I think of this game I’m reminded of how often girl-Takuya is forced into sexual situations against her will or without her consent, and the questions that raised in my mind, despite how unabashedly erotic the on-screen images were clearly intended to be.

Ultimately, I’m probably giving X-Change a lot more thought than it deserves — a single playthrough is over and done with in less than an hour and just one playthrough is plenty to give you an idea of whether or not it’s something you want to spend any more time with. For me, it ended up being a little too much porn and not quite enough plot — yes, such works do exist — but your mileage may, as ever, vary. Even with my mixed feelings towards it, however, I still think the core concept is a sound one, despite the execution being somewhat off in this particular title.

X-Change spawned two sequels, imaginatively titled X-Change 2 and 3, and a spin-off series known as Yin-Yang! X-Change Alternative featuring a similar situation but a different protagonist. I’m open-minded enough to give the other entries in the series a chance, as some of Crowd’s other titles — most notably Tokimeki Check-In – are rather fondly regarded by fans of the medium, and if nothing else I rather like their art style.

As for the original, though? Well. You know what you’re getting into from the moment you boot it up. And whether or not you’re into that is a matter of personal preference!

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or become a Patron. You can also buy me a coffee if you want to show some one-time support. Thank you!

This week, Destructoid’s Jed Whitaker posted a review of Valkyrie Drive Bhikkuni, a PC port of a Vita game produced by Senran Kagura creator Kenichiro Takaki’s new studio Honey Parade Games.

The review, such as it was, angered a lot of people — and with good reason, since it began with the headline “Dynasty Warriors for paedophiles” (later edited to “Dynasty Warriors for aspiring paedophiles” and finally “Dynasty Warriors for aspiring paedobears”) and didn’t improve from there, demonstrating throughout that Whitaker was unwilling to engage with the game in good faith and raising serious questions about his professional rigour in covering a title.

Whitaker’s article isn’t the first to follow this mould; it’s just the latest. But it’s a problem. It’s more than just “bad games journalism” — something that can be laughed off. It’s a problem that needs to be tackled.

We’ll get into more specific issues with the article in a moment, but for now let’s consider that headline: “Dynasty Warriors for paedophiles”. It’s not difficult to determine why it might be a mistake to make this the first thing the reader sees when they click through onto the review, but let’s spell it out anyway.

Paedophilia is, if you’ll pardon my stating the blindingly obvious, a crime — or, at least, acting on paedophilic urges is. In today’s society, sexual abuse of children is treated (quite rightly) as one of the most serious crimes there is, and several reports from over the years — such as this one from ABC in 2003, or this one from Vice in 2015 — suggest that even the most hardened criminals in the prison system look down on those who sexually abuse children, often with fatal consequences.

To compare the enjoyment of anime-style games featuring pretty girls to such a hideous crime is ridiculous first and foremost, swiftly followed by being incredibly, spectacularly offensive.

“Paedophile” is not an insult you can throw around casually, because its implications can have absolutely devastating consequences; British schoolteacher Neil Carr discovered this in 2012, when an offhanded homophobic remark from some children in a corridor resulted in a “Ku Klux Klan-like” campaign of hatred against him from parents responding to nothing but hearsay. Carr was ultimately cleared of 20 sexual offences against seven young boys that he stood accused of, but he described the experience as “like his life imploding” — particularly as, even once the verdict had been decided, there were still people who did not believe he was innocent.

Casually accusing a portion of your readers of being “paedophiles” because they are interested in a video game is disgraceful behaviour that should have been caught by Destructoid’s staff at the editing stage — and, moreover, swiftly removed and apologised for after concerns were raised. Unfortunately, this was not to be, as Destructoid’s publisher Niero Gonzalez updated the article’s headline to remove the explicit accusation of paedophilia but maintain the intent, and furthermore to belittle anyone who had taken umbrage at Whitaker’s choice of words. At the time of writing, the article still refers to the game’s audience as “aspiring paedobears”.

The “games about anime girls are for paedophiles” argument is a spinoff of the “games with attractive women in them are misogynist” angle that has been being pushed for a few years now, particularly since the widely discredited but still inexplicably popular Anita Sarkeesian came on the scene.

These are both arguments whose exponents have never been able to provide evidence in favour of, causing them to be commonly (and likely correctly) interpreted as “I don’t like this, so no-one else should either”. There’s also an element of social capital involved; to be seen saying the “right” things by the fashionable “progressive” crowd helps people to feel like they’re “on the right side of history”, as they often describe it, but as people such as video games and culture critic Ian Miles Cheong and feminist YouTuber Laci Green have discovered, questioning the beliefs of the “progressive left” can and will quickly see you ostracised with no hope of “redemption”.

Moreover, and in stark opposition to what the “progressive” crowd claim to be fighting for, these arguments completely erase the existence of certain groups who might be interested in this kind of content. Kenichiro Takaki’s games, including both Senran Kagura and Valkyrie Drive, have a strong following among gay women, for example, but this is never acknowledged by those who criticise these games.

For just one particularly potent example of how important these games and their characters are to some people out there, take a look at this wonderful essay from “Atma Weapon”, a 30 year old martial arts expert from California who found a kindred spirit in Senran Kagura’s Katsuragi, a character that helped her come to terms with her homosexuality and what she describes as its “messy past”. And for an excellent rebuttal of many of Whitaker’s points, take a look at this epic rant from Annie Gallagher who is, in her words, a “22 year old trans lesbian gamer, otaku and writer”.

This is why articles such as Whitaker’s Valkyrie Drive review are more than just “bad games journalism”. They fail to acknowledge the diversity of viewpoints out there, even going so far as to marginalise groups that the “progressive” crowd usually stand up for — not to mention the continued demonisation of white, heterosexual men, which has been going on for a while now and we’re all getting rather tired of.

But, oh, Whitaker’s article is most certainly also bad games journalism. As Gallagher points out in her piece, Whitaker’s piece on Valkyrie Drive is, at just under 600 words, barely enough in terms of length to be considered for publication as a GameFAQs user review, let alone a review on a well-established commercial site in the business. And in those just-under-600 words, Whitaker makes a number of mistakes that undermine his credibility, even putting the “paedophile” remarks to one side for the moment.

For starters, he sets some context by describing the Senran Kagura series as being a “fighting game” when, in fact, as we’ve extensively discussed here, it is and always has been a brawler in the grand tradition of Renegade, Streets of Rage, Double Dragon and the like. He also compares Valkyrie Drive to the Warriors series, demonstrating ignorance of both series in the process. While both have similar core fighting mechanics, their overall structure and focus is very different indeed, making them fundamentally different experiences. So his assessment of the mechanics — what few words he expends on them — is almost entirely incorrect.

Whitaker then criticises the game’s story as having “nothing to say” but admits that “after two levels worth of these scenes, I started to skip them all”, undermining his own argument. This is something that has also happened in past reviews of Senran Kagura games, and is evidence of not engaging with the game in good faith: Whitaker clearly went into this with his own prejudices, decided they were confirmed after just two levels and decided not to investigate further, thereby failing to demonstrate the degree of rigour we should expect from a professional review.

We, in fact, have no real evidence in the article of how far Whitaker actually did play in Valkyrie Drive — for all we know, he could have only played those two levels and then stopped, much as Vice’s Mike Diver played less than two hours of Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson before penning a thoroughly distasteful review about it some time ago. Perhaps not coincidentally, Diver also accused fans of being sex offenders, though in his case he only suggested that it was “better that [they] feel up fictional girls on [their] 3DS screen rather than grope a stranger on the bus” rather than calling them paedophiles.

Whitaker then goes on to describe the game as being “buggy as hell”, which a casual look at the Steam store page would appear to refute; at the time of writing, the game has a “Very Positive” overall rating with most negative reviews referring to not enjoying the style of gameplay rather than any technical issues. (There are admittedly, from the sound of things, issues with some controllers, but the developers have already posted an extensive thread on the Steam forums clarifying compatibility and workarounds for those who need them.)

He then uses his assessment of the game as being “buggy as hell” as a reason to write off a significant proportion of its experience, noting that he “didn’t bother with the online modes or any other supplementary modes”, thereby once again demonstrating that he is unwilling to engage with the game on anything more than the most superficial of levels.

Whichever way you look at it — whether you’re considering the offensive headline or the poor quality of the review itself — this was not an acceptable article for a professional, commercial website to put out. Any good editor worth their salt would have tossed this right back to Jed, told him to play the game properly and write at least a thousand words about it, none of which insulted the site’s readership. Unfortunately, this is a business where good editors are sadly hard to find, and many big sites now operate more like communal blogs than having any real sort of editorial direction at the helm.

It’s sad to see, as a former member of the professional games press circuit. But what’s more sad to me is that this sort of thing isn’t surprising any more. It doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. But I’ve stopped being surprised when I see stuff like this awful, awful review.

Jed Whitaker’s Valkyrie Drive review was a disgrace to games journalism, criticism and appreciation. Both Jed and Destructoid should be ashamed of themselves.

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