Category Archives: Articles

All the non-Cover Game articles and features in one place.

Waifu Wednesday: Kat

Gravity Rush and its sequel are both great games, for sure, but they just wouldn’t be the same without the presence of their heroine Kat.

While the simple act of floating around exploring the weird, wonderful Moebius-inspired worlds is a joyful experience in itself, to do it accompanied by a protagonist who is such a pleasure to be around elevates the experience into something truly special and memorable.

So why is Kat such a good heroine? Let’s take a closer look.

Continue reading Waifu Wednesday: Kat

Puzzler Essentials: Gunpey

There’s something about handheld systems that just makes puzzle games feel right.

The PlayStation Portable was no stranger to games of this type, of course, what with the excellent Lumines being a launch title for the system and a wide variety of other brainteasers making solid appearances on the platform over the subsequent years.

One of the most interesting and unusual titles on the platform is 2006’s Gunpey, actually the latest installment in a series that got its start on the Japan-only WonderSwan system.

Continue reading Puzzler Essentials: Gunpey

Extra Life: Game Day is Soon!

November 4 is Game Day for this year’s Extra Life — at least for me.

You can find some information about the event and my contribution to it on my fundraising page — as well as make a pledge — but today I wanted to share a bit more information about what I’m planning for the day itself.

I don’t tend to do a lot of streaming, but my 24-hour stint playing Final Fantasy XIV for Extra Life two years ago was a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to this session too! I hope you’ll join me for some of the day.

Continue reading Extra Life: Game Day is Soon!

Waifu Wednesday: Alice Kamishiro

It’s the last Waifu Wednesday before Halloween, so who better to explore this week than an honest to goodness witch?

Alice Kamishiro is one of the central characters of minori’s Supipara, a proposed five-part series of visual novels of which we’ve seen the first in the West so far, thanks to MangaGamer. Although the first chapter isn’t Alice’s “route”, instead focusing on the protagonist’s second cousin Sakura, she still plays an important part in the story as a whole — and is a mysterious, intriguing character in her own right.

As the series continues to unfold, we’ll have the opportunity to learn more about this rather odd girl and her remarkable powers.

Continue reading Waifu Wednesday: Alice Kamishiro

The Death of a Community

The last few years have been a strange time for the gaming community at large — if such a thing even exists as a single entity any more — with one of the most surprising incidents being the apparent fall of NeoGAF.

I won’t be shedding any tears over the site’s possible demise, since its shift into heavily left-leaning progressive politics, the idolisation of women and minorities as infallible beings to be worshiped and unquestioningly protected (as opposed to regular human beings, the same as anyone else) and the immediate, uncompromising exclusion and demonisation of anyone who didn’t fall in line with these values had made the site a laughing-stock for anyone who just wanted to, you know, talk about games. Plus, most relevantly to us here at MoeGamer, many readers will know that the site had been unfriendly to discussion of many modern Japanese games for some time now, with threads on some titles such as Criminal Girls completely banned, and the entirety of the site’s substantial Senran Kagura community unceremoniously ejected one day without any prior warning or explanation.

But the fact remains that what was once a proud institution in gaming culture — one of the longest surviving gaming forums, and formerly a hangout for journalists, developers and gamers alike — now lies in ruins. And that’s significant to anyone who was ever part of it.

Continue reading The Death of a Community

Blogwarming Party!

Hi everyone, just a quickie for a now — a full article is coming later today, but I wanted to bring this up while it was fresh in my mind!

MoeGamer has kind of stood by itself for a while as I wanted it to be a self-contained site that people could refer to in order to find out information on Japanese games and visual novels. Indeed, that’s not going to change at all — the All Games page is growing on pretty much a daily basis and you’ll hopefully have noticed I have been very good about creating new Hub Pages for games as and when I bring them up!

However, just recently I’ve been making a bit more of an effort to engage with the broader WordPress community and have encountered some thoroughly lovely people, one of whom is Irina from the wonderfully titled I Drink and Watch Anime, a blog about, among other things, anime and drinking games you can play while enjoying it. Well, obviously.

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Grisaia’s totally an anime that you could drink and watch. But you should really play the visual novels instead. You may need a full case of booze, though.

I bring up Irina and her blog specifically because she’s making efforts to help newer anime bloggers who are just getting started to meet the broader community and perhaps make some new friends, and that’s something I’d very much like to support — particularly as there’s a lot of crossover between enthusiasm for anime and a fondness for Japanese video games and visual novels. Also speaking purely selfishly, it may also be a great opportunity for me to meet some new people who share some interests, too — and I hope it doesn’t sound too arrogant of me to say that they may find something of interest here on MoeGamer too.

If you’re a new anime or manga blogger and want to take your first steps into a very friendly and welcoming community — or just want to find some cool new blogs to read! — I encourage you to stop by Irina’s post here and get your own personal Blogwarming Party started!

Thank you for your time, dear reader. Normal business will resume later today — and expect more Community posts like this alongside the site’s main articles in the near future!

You Can Keep Your “Games as a Service”, I’m Fine with Single-Player, Thanks

EA’s recent announcement that it was shuttering Visceral and “pivoting” (ugh) the Amy Hennig-fronted narrative-centric single-player Star Wars project it had been working on probably didn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

It did, however, rekindle a discussion that last cropped up back in 2010 — once again involving Visceral, interestingly enough, this time with regard to the addition of multiplayer to Dead Space — when EA Games’ Frank Gibeau commented that he believed “fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you’re out” experiences were “finished” and that “online is where the innovation, and the action, is at”.

The “pivoting” of the new Star Wars project is based on many of the same principles as Gibeau’s arguments from 2010: indeed, EA’s executive vice-president Patrick Söderlund claimed that the decision was due to a perceived need to “deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come” — or, to put it another way, the oft-mooted idea of “games as a service”.

I don’t want that. And I’m certain I’m not the only one.

Continue reading You Can Keep Your “Games as a Service”, I’m Fine with Single-Player, Thanks

Waifu Wednesday: Ist

Dungeon Travelers 2 is one of the best dungeon-crawlers of all time — I’d even go so far as to say it’s one of my favourite RPGs I’ve ever played.

A significant part of the reason for why I regard it so fondly is its large cast of memorable female characters, each of whom offer something unique both in mechanical terms and in how they contribute to the overall “party dynamic” with their characterisation.

It’s hard to pick a favourite from such a consistently loveable cast, but somewhere near the top of the list for me is Ist.

Continue reading Waifu Wednesday: Ist

Doki Doki Literature Club: Cute Girls Write Poems

I normally don’t bother with spoiler warnings here on MoeGamer, since it should be fairly apparent that in the process of analysing certain works in depth, “spoilers” are something of a necessity.

I will, however, make an exception in the case of Doki Doki Literature Club, a Japanese-style visual novel from independent Western developer Team Salvato. This is a game that is best experienced completely and utterly blind, so if you have the slightest interest in a visual novel that subverts expectations and makes astonishingly good use of its medium, I recommend you go play it through now before reading any further. It’s completely free, can be cleared in an afternoon, and is available either via Steam or itch.io.

Beyond this point lie hefty spoilers, so consider yourself warned!

Continue reading Doki Doki Literature Club: Cute Girls Write Poems

SNES Essentials: Super Mario World

One of the biggest sources of playground arguments in my youth was whether Super Mario World or Sonic the Hedgehog was “better”.

I owned a SNES, so I should have been firmly in the Team Mario camp, but at the same time my brother was working on games magazines and regularly brought consoles home with him for us to try out — including a Mega Drive with Sonic the Hedgehog. And as such I learned to appreciate both on their own merits.

While less outright “impressive” in terms of spectacle than Sega’s classic — a fact that Team Sonic liked to rely on in aforementioned arguments — Super Mario World was certainly a game that kept me coming back for more. And for my money it remains one of the best Mario games — perhaps one of the best platformers — of all time.

Continue reading SNES Essentials: Super Mario World