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Across the last decade and a half, the Guilty Gear and BlazBlue fighting franchises have cultivated legions of fans, thanks to well-polished play mechanics, distinctive rosters, and competitive matches that rank among the best in ...

If the success of an anime can be measured by its emotional impact, then the Mari Okada-penned Anohana: The Flower We Say That Day easily ranks among the medium’s best works. Alternating between life-affirming beauty ...

Although Japanese role-playing games are habitually criticized for having derivative battle mechanics, verbose dialog, and trope-filled plots, the genre flaunts one prodigious advantage; no other type of game routinely offers such a rich depiction of ...

WayForward has made a name for itself as one of the premiere developers for 2D platformers. In a time when proper side-scroller physics and level design seem like a lost art for software houses, titles ...

As studio names go, WayForward Technologies has one of the more incongruous monikers in the industry. While the Southern California studio’s designator seems to infer an output of bleeding-edge innovation, in reality WayForward’s greatest achievement ...

Much like EA Sports’ athletic franchises, Omega Force’s Warriors titles offer an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary approach to their properties. In execution, both companies offer annual iterations of their renowned titles, maintaining core play components, ...

At times, cosmetic themes and backdrops become so ingrained in a genre that even small variations are enough to set new entries apart from competitors. High-fantasy is perhaps the most common example, being often associated ...

When NIS America published Hyperdimension Neptunia in 2011, the title was an unmistakably mixed bag. In concept, the game’s allegory of anthropomorphized gaming machines reconciling their differences to fight a common enemy was one of ...

As fans of fighting, platforming, and rhythm-based games likely know, genres can be curiously cyclical. Case in point: the first-person dungeon crawler, a type of game which rose to prominence during the ‘80s with the ...

These past few years, retro-inspired titles became mostly associated with indie developed releases. This trend stems from the lower production values required to recreate a 16-bit gaming experience, and the fact larger developers have all ...