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It took me quite a while to get around to playing Persona 5: I don’t normally play games close to their release date, but given how much I liked Persona 4 and Tokyo Mirage Sessions, I would have expected Persona 5 to be an exception. But some of the stuff I’d heard about the game […]

Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE is by the Persona team; it’s effectively a lighter-weight Persona game (plus a very light dusting of Fire Emblem), with an idol plot. And it is amazing. I’m trying to remember what in the game first made me sit up and take notice. I have to think that it involved Kiria: […]

I didn’t know how much I needed to play Persona 4, but wow, it really was the perfect way for me to spend my game-playing time over the last two months. (Many thanks to Dan and Adam for nudging me to play it!) I’ve gotten sick of games that present you as an all-powerful hero […]

Preamble So: after that grab bag of impressions of Dragon Age: Inquisition, what do I think about the game as a whole? One question is: what do I wish the game was? Given the importance of relationships and romances in the game, “a dating sim” is a not outlandish answer. I don’t think it’s my […]

I’ve already talked about the puzzle gameplay in Catherine; what about the rest of the game? For me, the tone was set with the very first question I got asked in the confessional: “Does life begin or end at marriage?” Which is an analysis of marriage that I would never for a moment consider performing: […]

So. Dragon Age: Origins. I’m a pretty big BioWare fan, though more on their action RPG side: Jade Empire was the game where I fell in love with them, and of their two recent games, it’s not due to chance that I played Mass Effect 2 first. But I enjoy their games in general, and […]

Here’s a summary of what I’ve done in Dragon Age so far. Note: when I say “city” or “dungeon” in the following, I don’t mean a literal city or dungeon, but rather a relatively free-form inhabited area (with other traditional associated trappings, e.g. shopping) versus a relatively linear combat-focused area. I decided to play as […]

There was a time towards the end of 2008 when it seemed like everybody in my twitter feed was talking about Yakuza 2. It was apparently a Shenmue-style action RPG (also published by Sega), but (as Steve Gaynor so eloquently outlined in the 2008 holiday confab) filled with delightfully quirky side missions, missions that added […]

The Vintage Game Club chose Beyond Good & Evil as its fourth game. I played the game when it first came out; I enjoyed it, but it didn’t make a big impact on me, and I mentally pigeonholed it as a short Zelda clone. Still, I was happy enough to have an excuse to replay […]

Searching for others’ blog posts about Persona 3 got me exposed to the different kinds of posts people write about games. And I was surprised about the extent to which my search clarified my feelings about what kinds of posts I like. Generally, the posts fell into a few different categories; I could break them […]

I’d heard a lot about Persona 3 over the last year, and was torn: on the one hand, it sounded both good and interestingly different, but on the other hand, people reported it as taking 70-100 hours to finish. So it kept on never quite making it to the top of the list to play: […]

I finished Spore quite some time ago, but I’ve been putting off blogging about it: it’s a hard game for me to wrap my brain around. Still, a month is long enough to procrastinate, so I suppose I should say something now. I’ll begin from the point of view of a traditional video game player […]