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.
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 Girlscompletely banned, and the entirety of the site’s substantial Senran Kaguracommunity 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
It’s Ridge Racer month here on MoeGamer, and you didn’t think I was going to let Reiko Nagase slip by unnoticed, did you?
First appearing in Rage Racer’sCG intro (or perhaps Rave Racer’s attract mode, depending on who you want to believe) but shooting to prominence in Ridge Racer Type-4, Reiko Nagase is as much an iconic part of the Ridge Racer franchise as its exaggerated drift handling and memorable soundtracks.
She’s also one of the first examples of a “virtual idol” in computerised entertainment, helping to lay the groundwork for future success stories in this field such as Crypton Future Media’s Hatsune Miku and friends.
Let’s get one thing out of the way up front, because it seems to be a common point of confusion if Steam reviews are anything to go by.
The Winged Sakura series is not the same as the Sakura series. The Sakura series is a sprawling range of ecchi and hentai visual novels with a distinctive anime-inspired art style, developed by Western indie group Winged Cloud. Meanwhile, the Winged Sakura series is, at the time of writing, a trilogy of three disparate games with a shared cast, a (different) distinctive anime art style, this time developed by Winged Sakura Games, also known as one-man studio and BCIT graduate Hong Dang (plus freelancers).
To put it another way, if you’re one of those people who sees a new game with Sakura in the title and thinks “oh no, another Sakura game” or makes other similar assumptions, note that Winged Sakura: Endless Dream is nothing to do with those games, despite similarities in both its title and the name of its developer. It’s also really rather good.
As we bid a fond farewell to September’s Cover Game Fate/stay night, it’s only fitting that we celebrate one of this incredible visual novel’s most enduringly popular waifus.
Rin Tohsaka is a constant presence in all three of the main narrative routes in Fate/stay night, despite only Unlimited Blade Works technically being “hers”. As such, aside from protagonist Shirou, she’s arguably the character we get to know the best over the course of the complete narrative.
She’s noteworthy not only for being a great character in her own right, but also for arguably being one of the most significant defining influences on what has become an incredibly popular — some might argue clichéd — character trope today: the tsundere.
