As my house gradually returns to normal from the building site it has been turned into, we find some time between the noise of sanding and angle grinding to record a new episode of the podcast — as always, featuring both myself and Chris Caskie of MrGilderPixels!

The MoeGamer Podcast is available in several places. You can subscribe to my channel on YouTube to stay up to date with both the video versions of the podcast and my weekly videos (including the Atari A to Z retro gaming series); you can follow on Soundcloud for the audio-only version of the podcast; you can subscribe via RSS to get the audio-only version of the podcast in your favourite podcast app; or you can subscribe via iTunes and listen on Spotify. Please do at least one of these if you can; it really helps us out!

Or you can just hit the jump to watch or listen to today’s episode right here on MoeGamer.

In today’s episode, we kick off, as always, with a discussion of the recent gaming news. There hasn’t been a whole ton of exciting stuff of late — well, I mean, Unreal Engine 5 and Xbox Series X, but whatever — but we still manage to find some stuff to talk about.

There are Toaplan shoot ’em ups on the way to modern consoles, Thunder Force AC is coming to the Sega Ages collection, there’s a new heckin’ Paper Mario, two Pokémon clones with their own unique twists on the formula, a lost Playmore fighting game and plenty more besides.

After that, we have our usual chat about what we’ve been playing lately. Being cooped up inside means we’ve both had plenty of time to play some stuff in depth, so Chris offers some commentary on “the pointy hat man game” Blasphemous and the new Sakura Wars, while I talk about A Hat in Time and Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon.

Then finally we move on to the show’s main topic: a discussion of battle systems we have loved over the years. This is a topic we last explored around this time last year, but were keen to return to — particularly because as soon as we hit “Stop” last time around Chris was kicking himself for not mentioning Valkyrie Profile.

As you might expect, I have plenty to say about the Atelier games that I’ve played through for the MegaFeature so far, and Chris offers some variety with talk of the aforementioned Valkyrie Profile, Bravely Default, Guardian’s Crusade, Resonance of Fate and Legend of Dragoon.

We had a lot of fun recording this one, so we hope you enjoy it!

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