Kadokawa Shoten's peculiar, abstract and downright creepy PS2 puzzler still holds up very well today.

Hello Patrons and prospective Patrons! Here's what you might have missed on MoeGamer this week.

Shmup Essentials: Steel Dragon EX
A look back at one of the PS2's Simple 2000 series, incorporating a port of the Raiden-like shoot 'em up Shienryu (aka Steel Dragon) and its console-specific sequel Shienryu Explosion (aka Steel Dragon Evolution).

Puzzler Essentials: Hell Girls
Ecchi puzzle games are making a bit of a comeback on PC, and there are some great examples out there. Hell Girls may be a little rough around the edges in places, but it's a very good time indeed.

Stormblood: The MMO as Musical Theatre
August's Cover Game features conclude with this in-depth look at Final Fantasy XIV's soundtrack, and how it approaches things rather differently to many other games out there. This article was also presented as a video on YouTube.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed: Driving Into Dreams
I friggin' love this game, and everyone else should too, particularly if you've ever thought Mario Kart's single-player offering was lacklustre. Find out why!

PS2 Essentials: Party Girls
Also known as  Mogitate Mizugi! Onna Mamire no THE Suiei Taikai (Fresh-Picked Swimsuits! The Swim Meet of Covered Woman), Party Girls is a delightfully silly installment in D3 Publisher's Simple 2000 series for PS2, with fun arcade-style minigames and lots of pretty girls.

Coming up this week: a week's interlude from Cover Game features as I prepare for next month's delve into the sprawling world of Fate/stay night, plus more Shmup, Puzzler and PS2 Essentials.

Don't forget you can follow MoeGamer on Twitter for updates on new articles as they're published (although don't try and contact me through there, as that account isn't monitored), and hit up my YouTube channel for gameplay videos and plenty of other good stuff.

Thank you for your ongoing support, and please continue to help MoeGamer by sharing my articles and my Patreon page whenever you can. Every pledge helps expand my collection of JP games and gaming hardware, and this in turn lets me produce better content. Every dollar is very much appreciated!

Hi everyone!

The wife and I are planning a significant revamp of our living room at some point in the near future, so the way I display my games will be changing (hopefully for the better!) — as such I thought now would be a good time to share the current state of my collection for those who were interested in such things!

At present, the physical video games are stored across two Ikea Billy bookcases, one of which is shared with some board games. (There's also a third Billy just for boardgames, but that's probably a story for another day!) Our plan is to replace these with some wall-mounted shelves that will hopefully be a bit more flexible as well as providing a better way of displaying stuff like limited editions and suchlike.

But that's for the future! We're all about the now, uh, now, so here we go.

We begin in the top left with ol' faithful, the PS1. My collection here actually isn't as big as I'd like, because over the years I've traded a bunch of stuff in only to discover to my dismay some twenty years later that the stuff I traded is now incredibly valuable. Oh well.

I still held on to things that were important to me at the time, though, and as such my copies of Alundra, Smash Court Tennis and the Final Fantasy series are all my originals from first time around. I've also re-acquired US copies of Brave Fencer Musashi, Parasite Eve and Lunar Silver Star Story Complete, since these were all defining influences on my gaming tastes.

The meat of my collection today consists of my rapidly expanding PS2 library. This is because PS2 games are hella cheap right now — particularly if they're obscure, weird Japanese games, with the exception of some RPGs — and as such it's a great time to build up a collection. So I'm doing that.

And doing that a bit more. (The fluffy thing is Cat, a toy that our dearly departed pet rats Lara, Lucy, Clover and Socks used to play with; we keep it around in their memory, along with its companion Elephant.)

And, uh… a few more for good measure, plus some chibi Senrans that I won from Marvelous on Twitter in the first ever instance in my life of winning something in an entirely luck-based competition.

I love my PS2 collection. I've got a few of the games everyone "has to have", of course, such as Final Fantasy X, X-2 and XII, but the majority of my collection is interesting, weird stuff that very few people have heard of.  You can expect to hear a lot more about it on MoeGamer over the next few months.

Under that we have some big-box PC releases of visual novels, including Clannad, School Days HQ, Shiny Days and the Grisaia trilogy, which currently only has a physical version of The Fruit of Grisaia in it owing to Sekai Project being slow. (I've also got a Grisaia Complete Box on the way at some point, so that may take its place.)

Then it's on to PS3. At this point I own nearly every JRPG released for the system, with the exception of stuff that perhaps got an enhanced (physical) release on other platforms, such as the Disgaea series. My pre-release unlabelled copy of The Witch and the Hundred Knight bugs me a bit, too, so I might nab the PS4 edition of that at some point.

Under PS3 is PS4, ably guarded by Blanc from the limited edition of Megatagmension Blanc + Neptune vs. Zombies. I'll always buy physical releases of PS4 games where they exist, since I'm paranoid about digital copies going poof one day. (Also, physical is actually the only way to get Puyo Puyo Tetris on PS4, which pleases me somewhat.)

Under that we've got my beloved Vita games, another library I'd like to expand considerably in the coming months and years, since it's a system that just… mmm, tickles every part of my pleasure centres. The two unmarked boxes are pre-release copies of Danganronpa and Demon Gaze, both of which I reviewed when I was still at USgamer. Again, I'll always buy physical versions of Vita games where possible.

Next to Vita is my modest 3DS collection. I quite like the 3DS, but it isn't my favourite system, so consequently I haven't really prioritised collecting for it. If you're wondering where Senran Kagura 2 is, it's in its limited edition box.

Under that we have the temporarily messy storage of my limited editions. I don't buy LEs for every game, but I'll generally grab ones from Idea Factory and the Senran Kagura series, since they tend to be affordable and provide some nice goodies therein. Plus they remind me of old-school big-box PC game releases, which makes me happy. There's an article in that somewhere…

Oh, yeah, also, this is the only copy in existence of the only MoeGamer book, which republishes my Senran Kagura Estival Versus Cover Game articles in dead-tree form. I'm not sure of the legalities of selling these with all the artwork inside, so I haven't pursued producing these en masse, but as an experimental production, I was very happy with this glossy little number.

Under the LEs we have Wii games, which I always find I have more of than I think. The Wii actually had some really cool games on it, particularly from Japanese devs, so it's well worth exploring that back catalogue if you haven't already.

I've also got a modest Gamecube collection, as my Wii is the original model that will read Gamecube discs. That copy of Fire Emblem cost a fortune and I still haven't gotten around to playing it. I just like having it.

Then we have Wii U. Ahh, Wii U, dear old Wii U. Truly, you were the Dreamcast of your age. I have an almost-complete library of what I consider to be "essential" Wii U games here; I think I'm only lacking Pokken, Yoshi's Wooly World, Kirby's Epic Yarn and Paper Mario.

My DS library is small, like my 3DS library, but again there are some great games in there, including all the Ace Attorneys.

Then we've got 360 games, a libary which I consider almost complete from a JRPG and shmup perspective — I think I'm just missing Magna Carta 2 for a complete set of JRPGs on the platform, and I have a goodly selection of region-free shoot 'em ups from Cave and other developers.

And finally the bottom shelf is the few physical PC games and visual novels I have, along with a few anime DVDs. A couple of my visual novel cases are backups of digital versions with custom boxart I assembled because I liked them enough to want them on my shelf.

And that's it! Apart from the retro room I'm putting together upstairs, but we'll save that for another day. Hope you enjoyed this little guided tour, and thank you once again for supporting MoeGamer.

I was feeling a little sorry for myself after the events I described yesterday,  so with it conveniently being the weekend I decided to take a trip into town. I am an unrepentant filthy capitalist, after all, so acquiring material goods makes me feel better.

I came back with a stack of PS2 games from my local CEX, which came to just over £15 altogether. Bargain.

Some of these I'm well familiar with, some of them I've heard of but never played, and a few others I've never even heard of, but thought they looked or sounded interesting. So expect… something on these over the course of the next few weeks and months.

You've probably noticed a fair bit of PS2 content on both my YouTube channel and MoeGamer recently. This is because I've been keen to do a bit more in the way of retro content, and the PS2 era is actually surprisingly underexplored in this regard; most retro specialists online tend to focus on the 8- and 16-bit eras (with perhaps some PS1, Saturn and N64 games) rather than anything later, and that's a bit of a shame.

I think the reasoning behind this situation is the fact that 8- and 16-bit games are, in many cases, markedly different to the games we have today thanks to their more obvious technological limitations, whereas the PS2 era is pretty much where we started to see what we can think of as "modern gaming" get underway. The system was much more comfortable with 3D polygonal graphics than its predecessor, developers and publishers started to grow in size and the games in general started to get a lot more ambitious.

The PS2 era also started to get underway as the Internet was becoming a more important part of everyone's lives, which means there are a lot of previews, reviews and interviews already online from when these games were originally released. Perhaps this makes people feel that there isn't a need for "new" content on PS2 games in 2017. But the PS2 launched nearly 20 years ago now! That's definitely "retro" or "old-school" by most people's definition.

That old content doesn't tell the whole story, either; it tells the story of those games in their original context when they were released into an increasingly crowded marketplace, struggling for attention. And this caused a lot of titles to get passed by, particularly low-budget games such as those of D3 Publisher's Simple Series. It was the beginning of a problem that has become particularly pronounced in today's games press: the fact that there are more games out there than can be reasonably covered by even a well-staffed site.

This led to an awful lot of games becoming incredibly obscure; sometimes deservedly so, sometimes less so. I've found it particularly fascinating to revisit the Japanese games of this era, as there are some hidden gems among them that just don't get talked about enough… or at all in some cases.

Of course, there's some unmitigated garbage, too, but I often find there's some value in taking a look at that, too, because a developer didn't usually set out to make a stinker, and sometimes considering their intentions can be rewarding in itself, even if the game they ended up with wasn't all that fun or well put together.

What I've found interesting, though, is that looking back at many of these games from the perspective of a modern gamer can be very different to how it would have felt to pick them up "in context" during the PS2 era. Whereas once you might have thought, say, "why on Earth would you play Energy Airforce Aim Strike! when Ace Combat 4 exists?" (I'm casting no aspersions on Energy Airfoce Aim Strike! here, since I haven't tried it yet, though Ace Combat 4 is amazing), now there's little risk in trying these games out and seeing if they do anything particularly interesting or enjoyable… because, well, they cost 50p each, and you can't even get a cup of coffee for that these days.

So if you're into the retro thing… now's a great time to start expanding your PS2 collection with some more obscure titles, because you can get them for insanely cheap prices in most cases if you know where to look. Alternatively, if you have some PS2 games (preferably PAL region) you don't want or need any more… well, maybe let's talk, because I know a very good home for them.

Now, let's just hope the retro collector market doesn't jack the prices up too much before I manage to track down the origins of the Oneechanbara and Earth Defense Force series…

Hello dear Patrons,

I quit Twitter last night. Not for the first time, and I don't want to say for sure whether it will be the last… but for my own good, yeah, I quit. I wanted to take a moment to explain why, because I know a number of you good people follow the MoeGamer account there and may find yourself wondering why, from today, it's going back to an account purely to share links to my articles and YouTube videos.

Those of you who know me personally will know that I deal with a delightful cocktail of mental health issues including depression, anxiety and Asperger syndrome, the combination of which makes it quite hard to deal with certain situations, most notably intense, relentless negativity. (The Asperger's does, however, help with having an obsessive interest in things and desire to talk about them, mind you, so I don't resent that side of things too much.)

Twitter has, over the last few years, stopped being fun. I originally joined (under a different account name) as a means of staying in touch with people I used to regularly chat about games with on the 1up.com forums. Over time, as my interests shifted, so too did my friendship groups and the things I liked to talk about, though gaming remained a constant presence in one form or another. My priority was always to find like-minded people with whom I could enthuse about the things I was enthusiastic about, nothing more; I wasn't interested in putting down things that I wasn't into, I most certainly wasn't interested in the growing trend for politicising gaming, and I didn't want to get embroiled in negativity.

I don't want to get too bogged down in the politics side of things, but in some ways it's unavoidable, since my outlook in this regard is what led to me starting MoeGamer in the first place. For now, suffice it to say that I am primarily interested in writing about games themselves: their mechanics, their narratives, their aesthetics and their historical contexts.

That latter aspect certainly sometimes involves sociopolitical aspects when they were developed partly as a response to a particular event — you can't talk about Hyperdimension Neptunia U without talking about "Gamergate", for example, at least in terms of its localisation — but the key difference between what I'm interested in writing about and what I find so utterly fatiguing on Twitter (and in the mainstream commercial press) is that I'm not passing any sort of judgement on the developers and publishers of these games, nor the people who enjoy them; I'm just interested in looking at their "meaning", and talking about why they're fascinating, inspiring or products of their time.

I'd been growing weary of Twitter for some time, particularly since the election of Trump, which had led to a sharp rise in the amount of people trying their hardest to demonstrate that they had what they perceived to be the "correct" political views. It's not fair to blame this purely on the US election, though; this trend had been on the rise for a while, and had led to numerous incidents of "public shaming", in some cases of people I had worked with or considered friends, simply for them saying what some considered to be "the wrong thing". (In some cases, "the wrong thing" was simply stating the facts of a situation rather than passing judgement on it.)

I've mostly escaped public censure for the things I'm into (at least to my knowledge), though I did find myself doxxed by a troll group on one occasion for nothing more than expressing an appreciation for Lauren Faust's excellent My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (which any fan of JRPGs should watch, like, for realsies), an incident which led to me 1) abandoning my first Twitter account and 2) discovering that the UK police did not, at the time, take so-called "cyber-crime" particularly seriously, even when it concerned people finding not only my personal information but that of my friends and family, then contacting them to spread horrible, horrible lies about me.

Last night, the main catalyst for me deciding to finally cut the cord was someone reaching out to me and accusing me of being a bad person for not addressing what they perceived to be the games industry's biggest "problems".

I was furious and upset at their accusations, because they stemmed from a position of exactly the sort of ignorance that led me to start MoeGamer in the first place. The matter of what this person described as the "rampant sexism" of the industry, for example, is repeatedly addressed in the wide variety of articles I write about the fascinating female characters in Japanese gaming; you only have to look at the many thousands of words I wrote on the cast of visual novel series Grisaia for just one example of many.

What I don't do on MoeGamer is write sociopolitical articles that are only tangentially related to gaming — and I have little patience for them when they crop up elsewhere, which is, I suspect, where this person's accusations came from. But that is not what MoeGamer is about, it's not what I want it to be about — and it's not, I suspect, what my readers want it to be about, either. Any time someone has reached out to express their gratitude for my work — or even, as in your cases, to actually pledge their support in a more tangible manner — it has been for my honesty, my willingness to engage with games on their own terms and to look deeply into why people are so passionate about them, rather than some sort of attempt to figure out a way in which [game X] is somehow bad for the world and everyone in it.

To put it another way, my desire for MoeGamer in the long term is for it to be able to function as a "reference" of sorts; loosely inspired by Hardcore Gaming 101, I want people to be able to dip into my All Games list and read up on games that they find interesting, and I want them to be able to do so without being confronted with politicised articles that are only relevant to a particular time. (There are exceptions to this when I feel it is important, of course, such as my response to Destructoid's vile review of Valkyrie Drive, but I try to keep these to a minimum, and to make these articles about ongoing considerations as much as possible rather than specific concerns from a particular time.)

So basically, this person accusing me of being a bad guy for doing what I do is what tipped me over the edge. They're not the only reason I've stepped away from Twitter, they were just the proverbial straw that broke the chocobo's back. I don't have the patience or the inclination for this any more; I don't have anything meaningful to add to these endless non-debates online, particularly to people who make their minds up beforehand and, in this person's words, "aren't interested in discussion". I am here for one reason only: to celebrate games. And getting mired in negativity on Twitter takes time and mental energy away from that mission, so it gets the chop.

Twitter is, unfortunately, something of a necessity for anyone hoping to get their work seen, which is why I'm keeping the MoeGamer account open, but purely as a place for articles and YouTube videos to get automatically shared rather than anything else. The account will not be monitored, so don't try and respond to anything — I won't see it! (I will see comments on the site, however, so if you have something to say please feel free to leave a comment!)

I would, however, greatly appreciate any likes, quote tweets and retweets you can offer for anything I post that you particularly enjoy, as that helps me to grow my audience, and perhaps also helps more people to discover games that they might not be aware of, which is ultimately all I'm trying to do!

I appreciate that some of you enjoyed chatting with me on Twitter, though, so I'd like to offer you some alternative means of getting in touch if you'd like to continue talking. You can, of course, always comment on these Patron-Only posts or on MoeGamer itself, but here are some other ways to reach me:

• Discord: Pete [MoeGamer.net]#2465
  – Email/Google Hangouts: Contact me via MoeGamer's Contact page and I'll respond via email

You can also reach me on the following gaming networks:

• Steam: steamcommunity.com/id/angryjedi
  – PSN: Angry_Jedi (please leave a message with your friend request so I can distinguish you from randos/bots!)
  – Xbox Live: sonicfunkstars (though I'm not active much on there!)

Once again, thanks for your support, and I hope you understand my decision. I'm doing this primarily for my own mental health, but it will also enable me to focus more on what MoeGamer should be about. It's a project that is deeply important to me, and it means the world to me that there are people out there willing to support my work in a tangible way.

So thank you. Sincerely. I love you a bit.

Pete x

Hello, dearest Patrons!

You might have noticed a bunch of videos appearing on my YouTube channel and on the Hub Pages for games on MoeGamer recently. This is because I finally bit the bullet and invested in a video capture device — specifically the Elgato Game Capture HD, which I found a good deal on a refurbished package of.

I've been having great fun over the past couple of days recording videos from various sources (primarily obscure PS2 games) and uploading them, but there's a little more to what I'm doing here, too.

Simply put, I've come to believe that video content is an important part of what I want to achieve with MoeGamer as a whole. And by "video content" I don't necessarily mean pieces with me commentating over game footage, or me speaking directly to camera — though I'm not ruling either of those out — but definitely simple gameplay footage of the games I'm talking about, so people can see and hear how these games look, sound and play.

MoeGamer's "mission" of sorts as expanded as my enthusiasm for the overall project has grown — and the support from generous people such as yourselves has grown with it — into a game database of sorts. What I'd like it to do is highlight interesting, unusual, overlooked and underappreciated games from throughout the ages, either those created in Japan and nearby Asian territories, or heavily inspired by the Asian way of development.

Part of that mission involves archiving material about these games. The first (and to me, most important) step in all that consists of my writeups, which explore the history and context of the games as well as their mechanical, narrative and aesthetic aspects. But for a fully rounded picture of what makes a game tick, you need other supporting material, too: screenshots, videos, audio files and perhaps even, at some point, scans of manuals and additional physical content.

Looking around, this would seem to be something that is particularly important to those platforms for which emulation has never quite taken off, thereby making it quite difficult to capture footage without investing in additional hardware. For some of the games I've covered — or plan to cover, as in the case of Crimson Tears seen in the attached video — there is very little or even no footage online, and that's a real shame.

So I'm doing my bit! Expect more and more videos when I have time over the course of the coming weeks and months; at the very least, I'd like to have at least one gameplay video for each month's Cover Game going forward, and ideally one for each Hub Page. Capturing these videos is proving to be an enjoyable process, so I'm very glad I invested in the Elgato. Who knows, I might even develop the confidence to do some streaming sometime… perhaps for this year's Extra Life? We'll see!

Anyhow. Once again, thanks for all your support; your Patreon donations were one of the things that helped make this new aspect to MoeGamer's mission happen, so I'm extremely grateful. I hope you'll continue to enjoy my content, and please, as always, feel free to share anything you find particularly interesting or noteworthy!

Hello, dear Patrons!

You may have noticed on Friday that I've kicked off another of my ongoing "Essentials" series, this time for the PlayStation 2. You can expect some pretty regular content for this column going forward, as I've recently acquire a whole heap of interesting PS2 games with a mind to writing about them — and for about 50p each, which is simply smashing. In other words, if you're a game collector, now is apparently a great time to expand your PS2 library… but not before I've grabbed everything I want to, thank you very much!

One of my more recent discoveries thanks to someone on Twitter (I forget who, so apologies if you're reading this and I haven't acknowledged you by name) is a range of games collectively known as the "Simple Series", or more accurately in the case of their PS2 incarnations, the "Simple 2000 Series".

Demolition Girl/The Daibijin

The Simple Series as a whole was an initiative by D3 Publisher to put out a wide range of low-budget and budget-priced games from a wide variety of developers, initially for the PS1 and PS2 and later expanding to a couple of other platforms such as the DS and PSP. The Simple 2000 subseries was so named because all of the games in it cost 2,000 yen (about £15) and consisted of everything from straightforward adaptations of board and card games to flawed but nonetheless enjoyable experimental games such as Demolition Girl (or The Daibijin, as it was known in Japan)

In essence, the Simple Series effectively fulfilled the function that publishers of digitally downloadable indie games do today: it provided developers with a means to get their work seen by the world, even if they weren't top-tier triple-A quality games. The low price point for these games outright acknowledged that perhaps these weren't the greatest (or maybe more accurately, the most technically impressive) games you would ever own for your PlayStation 2, but that's not really what the series was about.

As the name suggests, the Simple Series was primarily about providing experiences that were… well, simple. Many of the earlier titles in the series in particular were straightforward adaptations of things like tennis, mahjong and suchlike — and had endearingly straightforward names like The Mahjong and The Tennis as a result. As the series progressed, however, we started to see more and more creative games developed within tight budgetary constraints, such as the aforementioned Demolition Girl, Radio Helicopter (aka The Helicopter) and numerous others.

Radio Helicopter/The Helicopter

One of the most interesting things about these games is that a surprising number of them actually got localised for the European market, though their names were often changed and the concept of the "Simple Series" as a whole was removed, primarily due to a number of different European publishers handling them. Outfits such as 505 GameStreet (now just 505 Games, responsible for handling some well-regarded indie games such as Assetto Corsa, Terraria and Rocket League) and Midas Interactive became known for these low-price releases, which were often perceived as low-quality shovelware at the time, particularly when compared to the big-budget releases of larger companies.

In fact, both 505 and Midas brought across a whole host of interesting Japanese games that we probably wouldn't have seen in the West otherwise, both within the Simple Series and from the broader budget-price Japanese gaming market as a whole. This is especially interesting to consider within the broader context of the Western games business at the time; the PS2 era was around the period that Western developers were increasingly trying to make big-budget, movie-like "blockbuster" experiences, and the concept of "straight to budget" games, once a mainstay of the 8- and 16-bit home computer markets in particular, had all but ceased to exist in the West. It would come back with a vengeance (albeit in a slightly different form) once digital storefronts had become more of a thing, of course, but that wouldn't happen until the next generation of consoles and the widespread uptake of broadband Internet connections.

What the Simple Series (and games like it) shows us, then, is a different side to an era in gaming to what is normally looked back on through nostalgia goggles. Everyone knows that the PS2-era Final Fantasy games were great, for example; everyone knows that PS2 Gran Turismo was an impressive-looking game; everyone knows that Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 were landmark experiences. But what about those other games that were ignored at the time for not measuring up to their contemporaries in terms of technical expertise or amount of content?

Kuri Kuri Mix/The Adventures of Cookie and Cream

What I've found with revisiting some of these games recently is that they're a lot easier to appreciate now than they might perhaps of been "back in the day". None of them are particularly great "works of art" or anything, but what they do provide fairly consistently is a series of solid, enjoyable and worthwhile experiences that are ideal palate-cleansers between more substantial games.

So expect a lot of these games to crop up over the course of the next few weeks and months, both from within the Simple Series and also games that are of a similar "tier", such as City Crisis and Air Ranger: Rescue Helicopter (both of which, as an ardent player of SimCopter way back when, I'm particularly excited to try).

You can, of course, expect a selection of other games, too; coming up soon I'll have a writeup on FromSoftware's unusual co-operative puzzle platformer Kuri Kuri Mix (aka The Adventures of Cookies and Cream) and Spike's action RPG brawler roguelike… thing Crimson Tears, among a variety of others. Please look forward to it and all that.

Once again, thank you all very much for your kind support of MoeGamer, and I'll speak to you all again soon!

I wasn't planning on doing two Patron-Only posts today — and I'm certainly not going to make a habit of it, for those concerned about their inboxes — but what with all the Senran Kagura announcements earlier it seems like a good opportunity to post a few immediate thoughts, and also to summarise what was announced for those who happened to miss the stream and/or subsequent discussion on social media.

Quickly, then, here's what was announced and/or confirmed:

• Senran Kagura Refle for Switch got some new video footage showing how you'll be able to interact with Asuka using the JoyCons.

• Senran Kagura: Peach Ball was announced for Switch, but no game footage was shown. The game features the Senrans in cute animal-themed outfits and is apparently a pinball-style game of some description.

• Senran Kagura Burst is getting a remake for PS4 in the form of Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal. The new version reimagines Burst's 2.5D brawler gameplay in the full 3D style of Shinovi Versus and Estival Versus. First footage here.

• Senran Kagura 7 confirmed for 2018 after being teased in Peach Beach Splash. Again, no game footage as yet, but a teaser trailer suggests a potential return to the "main plot" of Shinobi vs. youma, as well as the presence of the extended cast, who were absent from Deep Crimson.

• Senran Kagura New Link coming to mobile, as a follow-up to New Wave. The game looks considerably technically superior to the HTML-based New Wave, with full 3D depictions of characters and battles, but details are pretty scant for now.

—

On the whole, these are pretty cool announcements. I'm particularly excited about Senran Kagura 7 — and intrigued by its title, since the last Senran Kagura game to have a number in its title was 2 or Deep Crimson on 3DS, which was actually the third game to come out. By my reckoning, we have Burst, Shinovi Versus, Deep Crimson, Bon Appetit, Estival Versus and Peach Beach Splash as the first six games, suggesting even the sillier titles in the series (like Bon Appetit) are considered canonical.

I'm especially happy about Senran Kagura 7 because, as I say above, the teaser trailer looks a bit like we'll be returning to the overall dramatic plot of ninjas vs demons that we last saw all the way back in Deep Crimson. I have nothing against the character-centric stories of the Versus series and in fact they're a big part of the series' ongoing appeal for me, but it will be nice to get the "big plot" moving again.

Refle I have no idea what to make of right now because it's still not 100% clear to me what kind of game it is. I mean, obviously you get to hang out with Asuka and… do things to her, but the big question is why? Still, it looks like a charming enough game, and if all the visual novels I've played over the years (not to mention Summer Lesson on PlayStation VR) have taught me anything, it's that games where you get to just hang out with a character can be highly enjoyable too. Also Asuka is lovely, so there's that, too. (Why isn't this a PSVR game, though? HD rumble be damned!)

Likewise for Peach Ball. I like pinball and I like Senrans, so this sounds like a fun time. Will there be any substance to it beyond it being Senran-themed pinball though? That remains to be seen, but if nothing else this game lends further credence to my theory that the Senrans are a strong enough ensemble cast now to transcend the style of game they originally appeared in — something which Bon Appetit and Peach Beach Splash have both ably proven, too.

As for Burst Re:Newal, I'm very happy to get a chance to revisit where it all began, and I hope Deep Crimson gets a similar treatment in the near future. I'm a little disappointed that they haven't stuck with the 2.5D brawler format of the 3DS originals — the fact that they were essentially modern Streets of Rage-style games was a big part of their appeal to me — but the Versus series, Estival in particular, has shown that Takaki's team are pretty good at making solid, challenging 3D brawlers now, so it makes sense.

And New Link? Hm. I tried New Wave and found it tedious and dull (not to mention indecipherable, due to it not being in English and my Japanese being rudimentary at best) but will admit it has some absolutely gorgeous art on its collectible cards. New Link sounds like it will be put together to feel a lot more like a "proper game", but it will still almost certainly be yet another free-to-play gacha-based game. That said, Granblue Fantasy and Fate/GO have both shown me that this type of game isn't automatically bad, and so I remain cautiously optimistic about this — albeit unconvinced that it will get localised, as New Wave still doesn't have an English version.

All in all, it was a good day to be a fan of the titty ninjas. And if you're not already? Well, I got plenty of stuff for you to read and educate yourself!

Hello, dear patrons. Before we begin today, I'd just like to take a moment to say a big thank you to each and every one of you; pretty much all of you reading this are long-term supporters of my work on MoeGamer, and I wanted you all to know that it's genuinely very much appreciated. Knowing that people enjoy my work enough to dig deep and help support it means the world to me, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

All right, on to more pressing business.

What's this all about?

I've been feeling like I should make better use of my Patreon for some time now. Up until now, it's basically been a "tip jar" in which I don't offer anything in exchange for your generous donations other than that which I already provide on MoeGamer.

In some ways, I was happy with that; while I firmly believe that creators should get paid for their work via means other than ad impressions, I'm not a fan of paywalling content and preventing those who are unable to pay for whatever reason from enjoying something.

In others, though, I felt like I wanted to offer something a bit "extra" for those generous enough to support the site. Something a bit more personal and special, but which hopefully wouldn't take up too much time — I run MoeGamer alongside a day job, after all! — and be relatively straightforward to produce.

As such, I now have two tiers of digital rewards: $1 a more per month gets you access to this feed, while $5 or more per month gets you access to this plus a special monthly wallpaper featuring site mascots Midori, Yumi and Penelope. (Not pictured below, those are the Nekopara catgirls.)

What's this feed for?

Anything, really! The focus will still be on video games, of course, but here I'll be posting more immediate reactions to things and updates on what's going on with the site as opposed to the more structured articles you'll find on the site itself. In the process, you can get to know me a bit better, find out what I'm up to and perhaps just have a bit of a private chat in the comments if you feel like it.

Expect at least two of these per week, but I'll endeavour not to spam you with rubbish if there's nothing worthwhile to say!

Okay. So, uh, what's up?

Glad you asked! Lots of things. I have a bunch of things in the pipeline right now. Besides the things I outlined in this recent post on the site, I have some smaller bits and pieces I'm interested in covering.

In particular, this week I'm intending to write a bit about Sega's classic arcade racer OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast, which I managed to track down a working PC copy of last night, and a bit about how virtual reality is bringing light-gun shooters back from the dead for the second time.

My friend Chris also made me aware of a game called Crimson Tears for PS2 following a discussion about Ehrgeiz on PS1, which those of you of a certain age may remember was an awesome 3D fighting game that, bizarrely, also included a complete action-RPG dungeon crawler. Crimson Tears is apparently an expanded reimagining of that concept, and Chris assures me it is an underappreciated, pretty much completely unknown gem. Ideal MoeGamer fodder, in other words, so I'm looking forward to exploring that when it arrives.

Besides that, I'm continuing to plough through Persona 5 (slowly, since my wife enjoys watching it, but she also enjoys playing Final Fantasy XIV) and Final Fantasy XII. I'm interested in writing something about the latter at some point, but with this month being devoted to Stormblood, I don't want to do too much Final Fantasy in too short a space of time! (I'm also really keen to cover the complete Final Fantasy XIII trilogy at some point, too, but holding off for now for the same reason.)

I'd say I'm interested in writing about Persona 5, too, but I kind of feel like it's a game that's been discussed to death even by the mainstream press (albeit with some gloriously dumb hot takes) so it's not a high priority right now. Other, lesser-known and underappreciated games need some love more!

Can I help with anything?

Why, how generous of you to offer! Of course you can. The most helpful thing you can do is continue to enjoy, like, comment on and share my articles. I've noticed a bit of a trend on social media recently that things people disagree with or find objectionable are much more likely to get shared, so I'd like to encourage all of you to consider sharing things you enjoy or find enjoyable — not just from my site, but from all over the Web. In doing so, we can try and create a more positive atmosphere for everyone, which will be nice.

It'd also be lovely if you could share my Patreon page with people who you think might be interested in my work. I'd love to get the monthly total up to $50, as that will cover some monthly expenses I have and allow me to plough anything beyond that into improving the site and expanding my hardware and software libraries.

Oh, also, don't forget to share the Nekopara giveaway with anyone who might be interested. Leave a reply to the appropriate comment for the episode you (or your friend/family member/lover) want(s) to win on the Nekopara Hub Page. Closing date is this Friday!

In the meantime, if you've got anything you want to chat about, feel free to leave a comment here, on MoeGamer or reach out to me on Twitter. I hope you all have a lovely week and I'll speak to you soon!

Pete x