Interview

As the director of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, Wolf Children, The Boy and the Beast, Mamoru Hosoda has crafted films that have delighted audiences, charmed critics, and won numerous awards. With ...

With a body of work that includes salient efforts such as the Zero Escape series, scenarios for visual novels like Ever 17: The Out of Infinity and Remember 11: The Age of Infinity, as well ...

Referred to as the visual novel for people who don’t like visual novels, 428: Shibuya Scramble has the privilege of being the genre’s only effort to obtain a perfect Famitsu score. If that’s not intriguing ...

Franchises like Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo dominate the contemporary racing genre, which is not surprising, as each series is crafted by a legion of developers and is refined across multiple iterations. But when the ...

Like music itself, rhythm games often follow convention while simultaneously contributing their own form of innovation. This dialectic is especially evident when examining PM Studio’s SUPERBEAT: XONiC, a franchise which follows mainly of the conventions ...

For over thirty-five years, Nihon Falcom has crafted a steady succession of enjoyable, consistently charming and wonderfully melodious role-playing and action role-playing games. In anticipation of the release of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, we ...

Like Sandro Botticelli, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, and Edgar Degas, Kenichiro Takaki is infatuated with the female form. As the producer behind titles like SENRAN KAGURA, and VALKYRIE DRIVE, Takaki-san and his teams have created ...

After a portion of a lifetime spent playing role-playing games and years working for a publisher that has localized some of Japan’s best efforts, it’s not surprising that Nick Doerr understands turn-based battles. But what ...

Game launches are complicated affairs- we’re repeatedly reminded of that statement every time a triple-A, big budget title stumbles at release and PR issues it’s subsequent apology. For smaller studios without the payroll to hire ...

Between acclaimed franchises such as Hyperdimension Neptunia, Fairy Fencer F, and Mugen Souls, Shibuya-based Compile Heart has cultivated a legion of global fans. Not content to rest on their laurels, the studio has spawned an ...