Vanillaware's 2011 PSP exclusive Grand Knights History is bursting with the developer's trademark visual splendour - and the game knows it. So proud is this strategic battle buffet of its good looks the team took the time to include an anytime, anywhere, screenshot function, making it easy to share direct captures of the game's warm tones … Continue reading A fighting fantasy
Fans of the original Dungeon Master will find Dungeon Master Nexus' opening eerily familiar: Once again you are Theron, a brave young man who can't seem to keep himself alive and corporeal for more than five minutes, once again made to rescue his magically unavailable master Greylord from another huge dungeon of nefarious design using a player-picked selection … Continue reading Authentically different
Pocket Dungeon is as much a succinct description of the contents within as it is a game's title. You see, even though this game was sold as a PlayStation disc, the portable part of Pocket Dungeon is not a cute minigame to be put aside after five minutes or a clever extension of a traditional title, … Continue reading Battery powered dungeons
Dempa's X68000 remake of Falcom's eternally popular Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished opens with a superb digitised recreation of the sumptuous Yoshitaka Amano illustration found on the front of the game's box. As first impressions go, this would have been about as perfect as anyone could've hoped for... if only any care at all had been taken … Continue reading Ancient style vanished
Eldorado Gate Vol. 7, the final disc in Capcom's ambitious Dreamcast RPG saga, opens not with the usual fourth wall breaking intro from party leader/player host Bantross but a quick recap of the previous disc's finalé, Razin's tablet shattered into four pieces and scattered who knows where. With just two scenarios to go I was … Continue reading All good things…
There are just two scenarios contained within Eldorado Gate Vol.6's GD-ROM, and the first is short even by the series' already pleasantly zippy standards. The chapter title "Operation: Wipe out the Gabri tribe" wastes no time in establishing the threat to Eldorado Gates' cute and colourful mascot-type monster by those pesky holy knights first introduced a … Continue reading The beginning of the end
How could I possibly resist a Shin Megami Tensei themed SRPG, the happy combination of two of my favourite things - tiny people waiting to be ordered around a large map and demon-infested 90's cyberpunk? And oh, that soundtrack! Hidehito Aoki's work on Majin Tensei's soundtrack is just superb, a sort of dark industrial goth rock via the SNES' soft-sounding … Continue reading HUGE art… and really tiny scraps of strategy
Eldorado Gate Vol. 5 opens with a scenario titled "Monster Hunter Sophie", accidentally naming Capcom's wyvern-bopping series over two years before its Japanese PlayStation 2 debut. Unlike the characters in that eventual multi-million selling showstopper, Sophie's monster hunting manifests as a capturing/summoning system that will no doubt bring Game Freak's Pokémon series to mind, but in practise … Continue reading The calm before the storm?
After Volume 3's unexpected but not unwelcome pair of stories Eldorado Gate's back with another three scenario disc, with three new characters for our ever-expanding team to go with it - Mimi, Mamma, and Gigi. Again the manual implores newcomers to treat the stories contained within as standalone adventures (and read the updated on-disc encyclopaedia when they've … Continue reading That awkward middle bit
A half-demon man, a demon prince, a young woman kept alive by magic, and the direct descendant of a goddess meet mostly by chance before going on to finish once and for all a world-shaking set of events that were set in motion almost two decades earlier, completely destroying an ancient Daoist training ground and … Continue reading Points of view
Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 