Tag Archives: looking forward

Planning for 2019

Happy new year, everyone! I hope you all had a suitably tolerable New Year’s Eve. I spent most of mine editing and preparing videos, but to be honest, this is the sort of thing I’d rather do these days anyway!

Today I thought I’d take a moment to look forward to 2019, make a few plans and inform you of what my intentions for MoeGamer and my other projects are for the coming year. None of said projects are going anywhere, I hasten to add — I am, however, expanding on or rethinking a few things here and there.

Let’s get right into it then!

Continue reading Planning for 2019

Looking Forward

I’m still beavering away on the fifth Project Zero game to finish off this current (rather longer than anticipated!) Cover Game feature, so I thought now would be a fine time for an update and a look forward to 2019.

In particular, I wanted to highlight (and in some cases reiterate) my plans for the site as a whole, share a few things I’m interested in looking at in detail next year, and hear what you might be most interested in seeing over the course of 2019, too.

So let’s take those things one at a time after the jump!

Continue reading Looking Forward

Interlude

Since we had five Wednesdays this month, I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk a bit about what’s coming up here on MoeGamer.

In the immediate future, you can expect the full Cover Game treatment for the rather peculiar autoscrolling roguelike One Way Heroics next month, starting from next Wednesday. During the course of September, we’ll look at the original One Way Heroics, its substantial expansion One Way Heroics Plus and the brand new re-imagining of the game by Spike Chunsoft, Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics, which, conveniently, is due out for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and PC in mid-September.

Following that, in October you can expect an in-depth look at Inti Creates’ rail shooter Gal*Gun Double Peace for PlayStation 4 and Vita, including a detailed look at how it blends mechanics from rail shooters, dating sims and visual novels to create something altogether unique — and something that has far more depth than might be immediately apparent.

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Gal*Gun Double Peace is coming soon to MoeGamer.

After that, with any luck I’ll have made it through Compile Heart’s latest (at the time of writing) opus Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force, so that takes care of November. Advent Dark Force is, for the unfamiliar, not only a revamped version of the original PlayStation 3 version of Fairy Fencer F, but it also incorporates two brand new scenarios that diverge considerably from the original storyline. Featuring art by Tsunako of Neptunia fame plus contributions from Final Fantasy veterans Yoshitaka Amano (concept art) and Nobuo Uematsu (music), it’s not a spoiler to say it’s a game that fans of JRPGs won’t want to miss.

By then it will be December and the end of the year will be closing in. With Final Fantasy XV now coming out in November, I’m keen to write about that in some point in the near future, but without playing the game I don’t know if I’ll have done so to my satisfaction by the time December rolls around. Final Fantasy XV, of course, is not exactly a “niche” game, but it’s too big to ignore completely — particularly as the level of trust the general public has had in the series since XIII has been… a little lower than in its heyday, let’s say. In other words, it’ll pay to do some in-depth analysis on what promises to be a remarkable and possibly divisive experience. So I’ll pencil that in for December, though this may end up being replaced by something else I can write about at more short notice if it turns out to be a behemoth, no pun intended.

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Whatever you think of what’s been shown so far, Final Fantasy XV is going to be impossible to ignore.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has shown their support for MoeGamer to date, with a particular emphasis on those who have been kind enough to demonstrate their support with financial contributions via Patreon — if you’d like to join them, please click here. The more I make each month, the less I have to worry about paying the mortgage and bills and whatnot; since I’m between “real jobs” at the moment, and have been for several months now, this is a very real concern, and it would be utterly wonderful to be able to go back to the halcyon days of being paid a living wage to do what I love.

I’m currently looking into other ways that readers might be able to show support on a non-recurring basis, and am leaning towards the idea of a MoeGamer Compendium — a book featuring all the in-depth articles from this year (plus a few extra bits and pieces exclusively for the book), edited for print format and tarted up with all manner of nice shiny coffee table book prettiness. If this proves to be popular, I’d like to make this an annual thing in the long term, building it up into a collection of books that any collector or fan of Japanese games would be proud to have on their shelves.

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A mockup of what a MoeGamer Compendium might look like.

Another alternative that I’ve been kicking around is a MoeGamer magazine to act as a collectible companion to the site’s monthly content, gathering both the Cover Game articles from the site with some additional supplementary goodies about the game(s) in question.

If either of these options are of particular interest to you, please let me know and I’ll look further into getting things rolling on them.

In the meantime, another hearty “thank you” to those who have shown their support for MoeGamer since its inception — or in some cases, since my earlier JRPG and visual novel columns on Games Are Evil (RIP) and USgamer. I love playing and writing about these games, and knowing that my work is appreciated means the world to me. I hope I can continue to delight you with tales of underappreciated classics and highly creative works of flawed genius for many years to come — so long as there are new experiences out there to be had, I’d love to keep writing about them.

Arigatou!