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MoeGamer

MoeGamer

The best of overlooked and underappreciated computer and video games, from yesterday and today. It's pronounced "Mo-ay-gay-mer"

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Silent Hill: Townfall – the real enemy is [REDACTED]

Silent Hill is a consistently fascinating series to me. Initially incorrectly positioned (mostly by games journalists who didn't know any better at the time) as a rival to Resident Evil, over the years the series has become increasingly creative and experimental. Well, okay, there was a long period where, like many of Konami's other classic...

Konamiplaystation 5

Nighthawks: this is who you are in the dark

For all the chaos we see on a seemingly daily basis in the games industry of 2026, good things are still happening. One of my favourite trends is the resurgence of what I like to call, using my own idiosyncratic taxonomy of the genre, the "storytelling RPG". This is a very distinctive type of game...

adventure gameben chandler

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana – adventuring at the end of the world

Yes, I know I'm a bit late, given that I covered the rest of the Ys series just before Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana first released (ten years ago at the time of writing), and then promptly... did not cover Ys VIII. But here we are now. Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana first released in...

Action RPGFalcom

From the Archives: The Art of Penmanship

Video games have a bit of a perception problem. Actually, they have lots of perception problems, but one of the most grating ones for me personally is the frequent assertion that games in general have "bad writing." Japanese games are hit particularly frequently with this accusation. It's not always an unfair accusation, of course. Few...

Ace Attorneybad writing

Super Mario Galaxy and the joy of a game that is purely about play

These days, I find there is a temptation among certain types of people to only ascribe worth to games that have "something to say", usually in a narrative sense. It wasn't always this way -- and it doesn't have to be this way! While I was away on holiday last week, I played through all...

3D platformergameplay

Big Walk: social gaming done right

I have long been resistant to so-called "friendslop" -- games that are designed to primarily or even exclusively be played in cooperation with other people. There are numerous reasons for this. Chief among them is, quite simply, the fact that I have never really felt like I have many (or any) people to play them...

big walkcooperative game

Truxton Extreme: a classic brought right up to date

The original Truxton is an all-time classic of the shoot 'em up genre. Released in 1988 by Toaplan, it's a notoriously challenging example of the vertically scrolling shoot 'em up, and widely beloved in both its arcade and home console incarnations. Many of the original members of Toaplan have, in more recent years, reformed under...

arcade gamesmasahiro yuge

Terranigma: humanity’s second chance

An interesting question that some games, particularly RPGs, occasionally ask is whether or not the world you're trying to save is actually worth saving -- and perhaps by extension, if it's even possible to save it after it reaches a certain point of decay. Terranigma, the third entry (after Soul Blazer and Illusion of Time)...

Action RPGheaven and earth

Splatoon Raiders: thank cod it’s not a roguelike

I'm sure it was exceedingly tempting for the team behind Splatoon Raiders to make the game into a roguelike. After all, the very design of the game arguably lends itself particularly well to what we today understand as "the roguelike formula"... even if that has, over the years, somewhat diverged from the original meaning of...

Action RPGlooter shooter

Illusion of Time: darkness and light

After 1992's excellent Soul Blazer, Quintet followed up with a spiritual successor a year later. Illusion of Time, known as Illusion of Gaia in North America and Gaia Gensouki in Japan, was not a direct sequel to Soul Blazer, but rather a game that tackled similar themes, albeit from a different perspective. This time around,...

action adventureAction RPG

Soul Blazer: all things bright and beautiful

I'm not a religious man, but I do have some enduring memories of my time attending a Church of England primary school. One of those was, presumably as part of our government-mandated Daily Collective Act of Worship, hearing stories of what God, Jesus and friends had been getting up to in Olden Times, but presented...

Playing Final Fantasy XI for the story: Part 1 – The Zilart Saga

I have been meaning to play through Final Fantasy XI's story for literal decades at this point. Ever since I first tried it, shortly after its original English release, I was fascinated by this game, but never managed to make much progress through it. On its original launch, this was down to how deliberately slow...

chains of promathiaffxi