Staff Profile
- Username
- SwitchVogel
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Review Ni no Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch - Level-5's RPG Classic Will Bewitch Your Switch
"It's flippin' finally on the Switch, en't it?"
In 2008, Level-5 was coming up on its tenth anniversary and wanted to produce a project that its staff was passionate about, regardless of how well it would sell, and the world was introduced to Ni No Kuni: The Another World. A two-pronged project, one version of it came to the Nintendo DS as the...
Guide Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Get Started With These Heroic Tips
"Oh my, what could've brought you here?"
It could certainly be argued that Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the most complex release yet in the long-running strategy series, which is no mean feat considering the intimidating barrier to entry many previous games have had. It’s extremely rewarding, of course, but juggling time in the Monastery, building...
Review Super Kirby Clash - Monster Hunter Meets The Cute Pink Puffball
And it's free to play, to boot
When Kirby: Planet Robobot launched in 2016, one of the sub-games included was a neat little RPG-lite take on a boss rush mode called Team Kirby Clash. A year later, HAL opted to expand on the concept further in a free-to-play release on the 3DS eShop called Team Kirby Clash Deluxe, which added in several more bosses,...
Review Risk of Rain 2 - Rough 'Early Access' Edges Can't Spoil This Rewarding Roguelike
It's a wonderful day for rain
It’s always fascinating when a 2D game series makes the jump to the third dimension, as the developers are given the impossible task of keeping the gameplay more or less the same while also instituting huge change. Many franchises—such as the Sonic the Hedgehog and Castlevania series’—arguably fail to make the...
Review Torchlight II - A Brilliant Dungeon-Crawler Expertly Ported By Panic Button
Fill your boots
Looking at it from a purely objective standpoint, Torchlight II seems like a game that would grow stale within a matter of minutes. You kill, you loot, you level up, and then you do it all over again with slightly bigger numbers all around. Rinse and repeat for a few dozen hours, and that’s more or less Torchlight II in a nutshell...
Chicken-Wuss!
Imagine being in the unenviable position in which Square Enix found itself following the release of Final Fantasy VII in 1997. The studio had just put out a genre-defining game that many still say they haven’t topped and had catapulted itself to a position that invited unrealistically high expectations. Gamers are a notoriously...
Review RAD - A Gnarly Roguelike Which Is Let Down By Balance And Performance Problems
Get bent, muties
Double Fine has long since made a name for itself as a rather ‘out there’ studio that nonetheless produces quality work, such as Brütal Legend, Psychonauts, Headlander, and Costume Quest. Its latest release, RAD, fits right in with this lineage, blending in crazy '80s themes with an action-heavy roguelike gameplay loop. It’s...
Review Grandia HD Collection - Two Classic Games, Shoddily Remastered
Not as grand as we'd hoped
You’d be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the Grandia series at first glance. This adventurous JRPG series is one of those that – for better or worse – never really found its footing with a wider audience, and though it had a strong start in the late ’90s, Grandia mostly fizzled out by the mid-2000s for a...
Review Oninaki - A Decent Daemon Distraction
Continuing the cycle of rebirth
The JRPG genre is one that’s gone through immeasurable change in the few decades that it’s been around, but there’s something about the ‘old school’ style of 90’s turn-based RPGs that still holds a lot of sway with modern fans. To cater to this demographic, Square Enix formed Tokyo RPG Factory in 2015 to...
Review Picross Lord Of The Nazarick - Solid Puzzling With A Shoehorned Story
And they say Super Smash Bros. is the ultimate crossover...
Jupiter’s Picross series has remained a reliable fixture in Nintendo’s digital release schedule for several years now, delivering a steady and ever-improving stream of addictive nonogram puzzles for fans to solve. Over those years, the series has dabbled in a few crossover releases as...
Review Fire Emblem: Three Houses - The Zenith Of A Legendary SRPG Series
House party
Fire Emblem has been through quite a rollercoaster journey on its path to success. After an initial debut on the Famicom in 1990 with Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, the series remained a niche exclusive of the Land of the Rising Sun for thirteen years until it made its way westward, spurred on by the appearance of...
Review Terraria - A Fine Switch Port That’s Missing One Key Ingredient
A decent port of a legendary game
If there’s one game in the world that has been cloned to death, it’s Mojang’s seminal sandbox block-builder, Minecraft. Most of the ‘me-too’ versions of it have been content with simply offering a vastly inferior experience that seldom adds much, if any, interesting new content to the tried and true...
Review Dragon Quest Builders 2 - Beating Minecraft At Its Own Game
Building a new legacy
Though the Minecraft formula has been iterated on to hell and back, Square Enix managed to offer up an interesting take on the sandbox classic with Dragon Quest Builders. All the blocky aesthetics and open-ended crafting were present and accounted for, but these things were all couched within a wider narrative arc that included...
Review Citizens of Space - Fans Of The Super Mario RPGs, Take Note
Higher, further, faster, baby
Four years ago, the 3DS and Wii U were graced with a JRPG from Eden Industries called Citizens of Earth, which emulated the offbeat style of Nintendo’s cult-classic EarthBound to wonderful effect. Still, it was a bit of an uneven experience at times, with a series of niggling little issues that a sequel would likely...
Review The Last Remnant Remastered - An RPG With Fine Ideas Scuppered By A Lack Of Clarity
A remnant of a different time
You’d be forgiven if, when watching the surprise announcement of The Last Remnant Remastered coming to Switch, your first thought was “What?” Though the The Last Remnant has largely been forgotten in the current gaming industry, it once hopefully represented the future of Square Enix, with the president of the...
Nothing hollow about this one
Sword Art Online has been around for quite a while now; what started in 2002 as a simple light novel series has gone on to span a multimedia franchise including several books, manga adaptations, video games, movies, and – yes – an impending live-action Netflix series. It was only a matter of time before the...
Review PixARK - A True Survival Horror, And Not In A Good Way
Let this one go extinct
In 2009, the gaming industry was forever changed when a humble indie game called Minecraft was first made available to the public, introducing the world to a new genre of sandbox gaming that would go on to be cloned and mimicked to death in the ensuing decade. One of the most recent offshoots of this concept is PixARK, a...
Review Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth - The Last Picture Show
You'll find me in the matinée, the dark of the matinée...
Atlus has been one of the strongest supporters of Nintendo’s 3DS handheld over the years, keeping RPG fans busy with a total of seventeen stellar RPGs from the company. These releases have been coming at a consistent and reliable pace since the 3DS’ first year, so it's only fitting that...
Review Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack - A Fine Platformer That's Over All Too Quickly
"Indescribable... Indestructible! Nothing can stop it!"
Many of you are no doubt familiar with DrinkBox Studios for their work on the Guacamelee! games, but prior to their crazy luchador Metroidvania endeavours, the company was known for another platformer series about, well, blobs. Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack was originally published as a...
Review Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland - A Captivating Concoction That JRPG Fans Will Adore
Double, double, toil and trouble...
In 1997, Gust corporation kicked off the Atelier series, which would go on to span a whopping twenty-two platforms (including the WonderSwan) across the thirty-seven titles that comprise the series. Unlike your standard JRPG, Atelier games are typically not concerned about the fate of the world or something...
Review Redout - A Slightly Rough Port Of An Otherwise Decent Wipeout Wannabe
Seeing Red
One of Nintendo’s most popular (and amusingly, least supported) franchises is the F-Zero series, which popularized the concept of high-intensity, low-gravity racing. In the void created due to Nintendo’s reluctance to release more games in the series, plenty of other ‘me-too’ titles have released, such as Wipeout and FAST, and...
Review Venture Kid - A Workmanlike And Forgettable Mega Man Clone
You're not gonna go far, kid
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; if that is indeed the case, then few games are more overtly flattering to the classic Mega Man series than Venture Kid. This new release from FDG Entertainment isn’t shy when it apes the concept of Capcom’s legendary series, and while it does a reasonably...
Review Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age - This Is How You Handle A Remaster
Vaanderful
2006 was an interesting time for the Final Fantasy series, as Square returned to a single-player driven entry in the series after the MMO experiment of Final Fantasy XI. The development of Final Fantasy XII was rocky to say the least, as its protracted five-year development cycle cost Square close to thirty-five million dollars and its...
Review The Swords of Ditto: Mormo's Curse - A Roguelike Take On Zelda
Alright, let's do this again...
Those of you that go to the trouble of connecting the ‘timeline’ of the Legend of Zelda series are no doubt aware of how there’s a sort of meta-narrative at play, in which the hero and villain are locked in an endless battle that reignites when they’re both reborn in new generations. The Swords of Ditto:...
