In this video I talk about Chunsoft’s Sound Novel franchise, a hugely important series in the history of Japanese video games that served as the progenitor to the visual novel genre and a source of inspiration for all kinds of creators. This is a video I’ve been meaning to make since I started this channel. In fact, it was the release of 428: Shibuya Scramble back in 2018 that motivated me to b...
Last year I made a video talking about Zero One SP on the Gameboy Advance, a cult-classic Japanese adventure game made by a former arcade developer called Fuuki . Recently a member of the game’s development team reached out to me and shared a few stories about the title’s creation. The person wishes to remain anonymous but I was given permission to share a summary of the stories they told me. I...
SPOILER WARNING! I do talk about some spoilers for Cold Steel 3 and 4 so read at your own discretion. I had burned out kind of hard on the Trails series back in 2020-2021. I had started Cold Steel 4 but just couldn’t find the motivation to finish it after playing so many entries in a row and wasn’t really feeling the game back then. Plus I hadn’t yet finished Trails to Azure at the time and the...
SPOILER WARNING! I Don't get into too many specifics but I do spoil some things about both games. I’ve been a longtime fan of the adventure games developed by Cing, specifically the titles created by Rika Suzuki and Taisuke Kanasaki (even more specifically Hotel Dusk and Another Code R). So it was pretty heartbreaking when the studio closed in 2010 and the developers were scattered to the wind....
This video spotlights the self-proclaimed largest adventure game on the Game Boy Advance, Zero One by Fuuki. Learn about this ambitious handheld adventure along with Zero One SP, a remake that features character designs by the creator of Outlaw Star, Takehiko Ito. Sources 1997 Print Ad for Fuuki’s Arcade Business 2003 Fan Review for Zero One 2004 Fan Review for Zero One SP ADV Fan Site that Con...
This is my new video where I talk about the history of Leaf , an adult PC developer that not only created many popular franchises ( To Heart , White Album , Utawarerumono , Tears to Tiara , etc) but who also pioneered the visual novel genre as we know it today and inspired a generation of creators in the late 90s/early 2000s. Sources 20 Years of Aquaplus and Future Prospects: Interview with Pre...
This is my new video about Japan's first graphical adventure game, the company that made it, and how the title caused an "adventure game boom" in Japan's PC market during the early 80s. That game being Mystery House created by Micro Cabin in 1982. Not to be confused with Mystery House created by On-Line Systems in 1980.
This is a video I made about the history of Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright and how its development affected the future of the Ace Attorney franchise (directly leading the creation of the Great Ace Attorney sub-series). Hope people enjoy it.
This is a video I made about the Korean RPG Arcturus: The Curse and Loss of Divinity and how it influenced Falcom’s Trails franchise. I had known about this game for a while but started thinking about it again after making my Falcom history video last year. I decided to play through Arcturus myself and make a short video about it back in November but it ended up taking a long time to get throug...
This is a video I made about the early history of Nihon Falcom . I started out researching the company since I'm a fan of the Trails series, adding information to the wiki here and there, and eventually ended up creating this huge thing. I spent about 4-5 months making this video, by far the largest project I've ever undertaken, and I hope it is a fun watch. I realize the video is pretty long b...
After playing the game for 130 hours over the course of 8 months, I finally managed to finish Cold Steel III . I was very excited to play this game not only because I love Cold Steel I & II but also because there was so much anticipation for this title. I finished Cold Steel II when III was getting ready to be released in Japan but it would take two years for the game to finally reach western s...
Here is a video I made talking about the history of an often forgotten company called Hirameki International Group Inc . They were one of the very first publishers to release visual novels to a mainstream audience in America and the first English company to actually call their products VNs, basically defining how the word is used in the West. I had been updating the Giantbomb page for this comp...
**I wrote this shortly after finishing AI: The Sonmium Files but never got around to posting it. Now that we are at the end of the year, I thought I’d polish it a bit and finally upload it. As I say in the write up, I actually do like this game but this post is more about me venting about my issues with the title and how I thought it could have been better. For an abridged version of my thought...
I've been a fan of the Sakura Wars franchise for a while, and have posted about the series several times on this site, so I experimented with making a video where I share some random fun facts about this once prolific Japanese franchise. Hope you enjoy it!
Last year I made a blog post about the history of visual novels . Originally I had thought of making that post as a video but I quickly realized that it would be a lot of work, especially since I didn’t know how to record gameplay footage at the time nor use any editing software outside of Windows Movie Maker. However, this year, I made a resolution to teach myself some basic editing skills and...
I feel like the term “visual novel” is fairly new for a lot of western game fans. If I had to be exact, I’d say a majority of English speaking players had only been vaguely aware, or completely unaware, of the word “visual novel” until maybe January 4, 2012 when the English freeware game called Katawa Shoujo hit the scene and made many people fans of the genre (at least that is the impression I...
I finished Valkyria Chronicles 4 last week and decided to quickly write down some of my thoughts on the game in a hope to start a general discussion about what everyone’s opinions are now that they’ve completed it. Throughout this year I've played a bit of each mainline entry in the Valkyria Chronicles series, finishing Valkyria Chronicles 3 in the beginning of the year, replaying two thirds of...
While most Western Sega fans are excited about some of the recent announcements at Sega Fes 2018 , such as Shenmue HD and the new Sega Genesis Mini , I am instead over-the-moon about one piece of news from the event that isn't being discussed by many English fans. A brand-new Sakura Taisen game was announced! While details are still scant, and we don't currently know the exact scale or nature o...
Most of my blog posts have been about video games in some way, because Giantbomb is obviously a gaming site, but I don't just play video games all the time, I also watch a lot of movies. While I was still in college I actually minored in film studies and, inspired by the classes I was taking at the time, began keeping a list of every movie I watched and the exact date I saw them. This didn't in...
Before I share my thoughts on Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice , I think it is important to explain my history with this goofy courtroom drama that has been going on for more than a decade now. History With Ace Attorney I've been playing the Ace Attorney series almost since it first became a thing in the West, playing the original game in 2006 on the old fat Nintendo DS . I love...
This is a re-posting of something I wrote on Tumblr back near the end of April. It is obviously not really about a video game but a lot of the voice talent mentioned in the blog are actors from various video games and the company that released the show in the US was a former visual novel publisher, so I thought the community here might find this interesting. Make sure to click on all the fun hy...
With the new remake of White Day: A Labyrinth Named School being released in English for iOS and Android, as well as the PC sometime soon , now seems like a good time to revisit, or experience for the first time, the original Korean classic that started it all. Although it was never officially localized, the original White Day can still be played in English thanks to a fan mod that was released...
I was very strapped for cash in 2015 with almost no spending money to use on video games or buying new hardware, I still don't own any of the new consoles. So this year I made a serious effect to finish some of the bigger titles in my backlog and only got around to playing a few games that were released in 2015. Originally I thought I was missing out on a lot of great games, and I'm sure I was,...
October seems to have become the month of Corpse Party for me, although I didn't really plan it to be. I completed several different Corpse Party titles throughout the month of Halloween in anticipation for the latest English release in the series, Corpse Party: Blood Drive . After all the spin-offs, pre-sequels and adaptations, Blood Drive was finally the direct sequel that I had been pinning...
Find out more information about Corpse Party by reading my previous blog post and by visiting XSEED’s official website . I started playing Corpse Party on November 22, 2011 and I finished it 5 days later on the 27th. Corpse Party is not a "short" game it took about 10 or 12 hours for me to complete it, so if you can't tell by how quickly I finished it I really liked the game a lot. Few games ha...
Corpse Party (PSP) PSP version Japanese Box Art Original PC-98 version One of my favorite video game genres are adventure games, such as the Ace Attorney series and the old Scumm games. I also love discovering obscure Japanese games so Corpse Party caught my eye when I first read about it in a Siliconera news article. Corpse Party is a horror themed adventure where you play as a group of studen...
I really like video games therefore I own a lot of them. However, many of these games sit on my shelf unfinished. I could make the excuse that “I’ve been very busy lately. I don’t have time for games.” but the truth is that I play my games all the time. The problem is that I keep getting distracted by shiny new games. I have now accumulated quite a large back log of unfinished games and it’s be...