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Whereas Game Freak’s menagerie of pocket monsters evolve at a robust rate, the actual Pokémon franchise develops languidly, with each new iteration typically ushering in a restrained set of refinements. The reason for this protracted ...

Although the term katabasis may not be in every player’s lexicon, they’re likely well acquainted with the concept. Used to describe the motivation for a hero’s decent into the underworld and the subsequent return to ...

It’s hard to have a conversation about the Golden Age of Arcades without somebody bringing up Warlords. One of a very few early four player arcade titles, Warlords was essentially a Breakout-style game that had ...

“It seems like an NIS game”, is a common, albeit reductive comparison for both Japanese role-playing devotees and detractors. Under scrutiny, Nippon Ichi’s publishing efforts share some broad similarities, but upon deeper inspection, their output ...

Save for Pierce Brosnan’s farcical depiction of a melancholic, middle-aged hit-man in The Matador, media routinely romanticizes the assassin. From Chow Yun-Fat’s debonair, yet doting, gun for hire in The Killer to the exploits of ...

The game industry is no stranger to the oxymoron. From the endurance of the Final Fantasy franchise, the amount of wholly original content in New Super Mario Bros. 2, to control schemes which provide only ...

Too often, death is little more than an irksome impediment in gaming. Amidst the coin-op era, the manacles of mortality could be undone by an additional quarter or token. At home, a visit by the ...

Following Tomonobu Itagaki’s departure from Team NINJA in 2008, the Toyko-based development team has irrefutably struggled. From the superfluous changes and reduction of viscera made to Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 as well as the critical ...

One of the more dubious propositions in contemporary gaming is the reinvigoration of an adored classic. As the botched reboots of respected titles such as Yar’s Revenge, Golden Axe, and Syndicate have demonstrated, modernizing a ...

Eleven years ago, Sonic Adventure 2 was a divisive game. It was a turning point in the series, when a lot of fans started to write the series off. It’s often considered the beginning of ...