There’s a curious sort of amnesia that afflicts the players of Yoko Taro’s
Nier series. It’s almost like one of those bizarre mystical diseases that are always threatening to destroy the games’ protagonists, and the teetering-on-the-edge-of-apocalypse worlds in which they live: Like magic, the moment you look away, the most annoying, frustrating, or boring parts of
Nier’s designs always seem to fade from memory. What’s left behind, inevitably, are the highs, the moments of transcendent cleverness, narrative impact, or outright beautiful cruelty that writer and director Taro traffics in at his best. The phenomenon is pronounced enough that it feels shamefully petty, for instance, to note that 2017’s
It’s been 24 years since the original release of Square’s
SaGa Frontier, one of the stranger entries in the company’s juggernaut run across the PlayStation One era. To celebrate the milestone, Square Enix is gearing up to release a glossy new
Remastered version of the game on PS4, Switch, PC, and mobile systems, allowing players everywhere to experience, or re-experience, the obtuse oddness of this particular dose of RPG history.
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We’ve been re-immersing ourselves in
SaGa Frontier for the last few days watch our What Are You Playing This Weekend? column this week for fuller impressions on the experience and thought it might be interesting to stream an hour of early gameplay today to show off its improved graphics and still-relentlessly difficult approach to role-playing game combat. You can tune into the
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Every Friday, A.V. Club
staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question:
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There are certain words, in a video gaming context, that get my antennas immediately up, and my idiosyncratic saliva glands metaphorically flowing. (Actual drooling is a bad habit to mix with gaming; it tends to short the controllers out.) These topics all speak to my particular obsessions: Words like “time loop,” and “detective game,” and “no swimming, please.” But one of these regular obsessions has dimmed a bit, of late, sullied by a steady tide of lackluster execution. Which leads me to ask: Why is a good job system in video games suddenly so hard to find?
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How idle does a video game have to be before we label it an “idle game”? Can a game be a perfect mobile game if it’s not available on mobile? Is it still “tower defense” if you’re rooting for the little dude to make it through? Will these goddamn vampires get off my back for a second so I can drop my food orbs back off at camp? These are the kinds of questions that race through my mind while playing
Loop Hero, the new small-dose strategy game out this week on Steam from Four Quarters, and published by Devolver Digital. Which means I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot, because