It's here! My Moero Crystal H review is live on Nintendo Life. Please go check it out! 

I'm excited about this review for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's simply a great game that I'm very happy I had the opportunity to write about. Secondly, and probably most significantly, it's a sign of a certain amount of… "progress", I guess you'd call it.

For those of you who don't know, I was one of the founding members of USgamer.net. When that site first launched, it was envisioned as a place where its writers would each focus on their particular specialisms, allowing the audience to come along and gravitate towards their favourite writers — the people who gave them what they wanted to read about. All was well for a while; I wrote about interesting Japanese arcade games, RPGs and visual novels, Jaz Rignall wrote about racing games, Mike Williams wrote about big stompy robots… and so on. All was good.

Unfortunately, as tends to be the case with writing intended to bring in the ad revenue, the suits decided that wasn't a sustainable model, so a couple of things happened. Firstly, the site shifted away from its more "article-based" model with personal specialisms to a traditional news-and-reviews site. Secondly, Jeremy Parish was brought on board to be the site's editor-in-chief.

Parish is a respected figure in the industry, but I found him exceedingly unpleasant to work with. He frequently belittled my opinions, insisted on having "approval" over every news article I wrote, and on more than one occasion tried to chew me out for things that I actually hadn't done — the most memorable of which was the time I mocked other sites' coverage of Lightning's "boob jiggle" in Lightning Returns, instead focusing on my actual hands-on impressions of the game I'd had from the Eurogamer Expo. He (wilfully?) misunderstood what I was doing as actually covering boob jiggle and nothing else, thereby making it clear he hadn't actually read the article he was so mad about. I had to have uncharacteristically stern words with him over that one.

The reason MoeGamer exists relates to all this. Those of you who have been following me for a while may recall a notorious review of Hatsune Miku Project Diva F for PlayStation 3 written by a freelancer, in which said reviewer referred to the game (which, as anyone who has played it will know, is incredibly wholesome and pleasant) as "bringing the creep factor overseas" and described its audience as "degenerates". My colleague Cassandra and I took great umbrage at this, and the result was the launch of MoeGamer's spiritual predecessor: my column JPgamer, which afforded me a weekly opportunity to once again talk about the games that, in the early days of the site, I had helped build a solid reputation for.

That Miku review hurt a significant part of the audience, because my previous work had shown that USgamer was a lot more friendly to the otaku audience than pretty much any other site around at the time — this was when ragebaiting audiences by insulting them and the games they liked was just starting to get popular — and said otaku audience, quite rightly, felt somewhat betrayed by this. So the first installment of my JPgamer column provided an opportunity to show that no, this wasn't what USgamer was all about, and that yes, there absolutely was a place for the otaku audience to call home here. Because I wanted it too.

The reason why I bring all this up is that while I managed to cover most of the things I wanted to in JPgamer, Parish specifically forbade me from covering the first installment in the Genkai Tokki series, Monster Monpiece. He didn't like the ecchi artwork, so no-one else was allowed to talk about it either. When I say I was forbidden from talking about it, I absolutely mean it; I couldn't even post news stories talking about its release date, or about how it was a pleasant surprise such a niche-interest sort of game — it is, at heart, a collectible card game with really solid mechanics, if you never played it — had ended up localised.

I stuck to Parish's rules to the letter for a quiet life, but I can't help but feel my eventually being laid off from USgamer "so that the site could have an all-American team" (the reason I was actually given… on my birthday, no less) was at least partly a result of him seeing me somehow as a "risk". I mean, we couldn't possibly have "his" site sullied with games he didn't like now, could we? Better to get the perverted Englishman with his dangerous, perverted audience out the door and bring on board some sycophants who will never question his judgement.

Sigh. But anyway.

Now we fast forward to today and here I am posting a review of the official English localisation of the third Genkai Tokki game, Moero Crystal. And giving it a glowing review, too. While I do genuinely feel that it's an absolutely excellent game and would encourage those of you who enjoy good dungeon crawlers (and don't mind a healthy dose of ecchi) to check it out, I also can't help but see the publication of this review as something of a victory over a frustrating aspect of my professional past.

I'm still upset and bitter about the way I was treated at USgamer; I feel I had a promising career (with said promise backed up by site stats and audience engagement) cut short because of all this nonsense. I suspect that if I ever meet Parish in person, I will probably at the very least want to punch him right in the dick for his role in quite literally ruining a significant part of my life, and playing a huge part in the mental health issues I deal with on a daily basis today.

But at least I can enjoy this small victory for now. Which, in these troubled times, is something to celebrate, at least.

Review safely squirrelled away; the embargo is up tomorrow, so with any luck it will actually go live tomorrow. It's not a "big" game as such, but I'm not sure offhand what other major releases are around right now, so it might actually go live on time for once.

I mentioned this recently, but I definitely think it's time to take a Twitter break for a bit again. While, as I mentioned, the weekend of HololiveEN's launch was thoroughly lovely, the last few days have been a torrent of negativity and whataboutery and all manner of other stuff I really don't have the patience or indeed the mental wellbeing to deal with at the moment. And, thinking about it, most of the positivity surrounding Hololive was actually on YouTube rather than Twitter — although seeing people sharing fanart on Twitter has been nice; I picked up some nice Amelia pics for today's post.

I'm not going to make a big deal about not being around, and indeed there will still be posts going up on the MoeGamer account — the daily promotional posts will continue and I'm going to be better about remembering to "Buffer" a random selection of posts to show up throughout the day, as those always get a nice number of eyes on them, but I've deleted the Twitter app from my phone and am going to make a distinct effort to avoid using it on the computer. It's just not being good for me right now.

Different people have different experiences with the platform, I know, but I've tried numerous strategies to escape the sides of it that I don't like — including both the "drown it out with art" approach that a lot of people advocate, along with mass unfollowing sprees — and it's still a source of considerable anxiety for me. It's silly to keep doing that to myself, so for now at least, balls to it; there are plenty of other means of getting in touch with me.

A few people I know say the Instagram community is nice, but I never really know what to post on there, since it has no link handling and its obvious emphasis on images or short videos. Plus the seeming necessity to load up every post with a zillion hashtags for any chance of getting seen just seems enormously tiresome, particularly on mobile.

I suspect I'm just not built for today's Internet. We had a good run, but these days I just want to get on with writing my words and making my videos; arguing with strangers or seeing the stupidest of stupid takes thrust into my face is not (and never has been) a desirable part of my life.

Anyway! Hope you're doing well. Have a pleasant evening, and look out for my review on Nintendo Life tomorrow… hopefully! 🙂

I'll level with you, reader, I'm not 100% sure what to write about today, so I'm going to do one of those stream of consciousness posts where I just start typing and see what happens. My Switch controller ran out of battery, y'see, so I couldn't keep on doing what I was doing, so I thought I might as well do this while I thought about it.

There's been a lot of very silly takes on social media today, mostly attempting to ride the tails of the English Hololivers' sudden explosion in popularity. This is kind of frustrating because, as I said the other day, the whole debut day for the Hololive English girls was remarkable in that it was a rare instance of everyone involved being happy, filled with joy and appreciating something all together. The "hot take" machines weren't paying any attention to it, what with it being a relatively niche interest thing, and so everyone was just free to enjoy things as they saw fit.

Today? We've had people trying to connect Western vTuber fandoms to bigotry and Nazism, paedophilia, sexual assault, groomers and all manner of other disgusting shit. This is really getting extremely tiresome, because it's a seemingly endless cycle; something new and exciting that people are genuinely happy for comes along, and the miserable bastard brigade have to come along and declare how it's "problematic" for everyone and you should probably feel ashamed for some reason because they said so.

Well, balls to all that. Once again, I find myself drifting noticeably away from any meaningful discourse on Twitter, and the temptation to just abandon it entirely raises its head once again. I might take another self-enforced break from the platform temporarily, because once again I can feel the never-ending negativity causing obvious cracks in my mental state. It's not healthy, and I hate it — particularly at a time like now, when there are people who want to be unconditionally enthusiastic and happy about something they're enjoying.

Anyway, that ended up being more of a rant than I intended it to be, but there you go. Have a lovely evening!

Ahhhh. Kind of champing at the bit to talk about the game I'm playing for my current Nintendo Life assignment, but embargoes. I know there's no real way of the people who enforce such things knowing that I'm talking about it (unless they happen to be Patrons, which I'm pretty sure they aren't) but still. I like to be careful.

The reason I want to talk about this game is because it's fantastic. I was planning on playing it anyway, but I've been absolutely glued to it since I got my review code the other day — and not just because the embargo is up on Thursday and I want to get as far through as possible before actually writing something about it.

Suffice to say that besides my Nintendo Life review on it, there will also be some substantial words written about it on MoeGamer in the very near future, likely as a multi-part feature running alongside the continuing Atelier MegaFeature. (I don't feel too bad having not started my replay of Atelier Meruru yet, since I'm a little ahead of schedule on the articles, making it an ideal time to get stuck right in to [REDACTED].)

Anyway. Those of you who might have spoken to me privately will already know what it is I am talking about, and others of you might be able to figure it out anyway, but suffice to say… it's good. Real good. Real good. And I look forward to my review almost certainly ending up at the top of the Metacritic list for the game, haha.

Anyway. Sorry for the gratuitous tease, but I wanted to let out a bit of that frustration and you were nearby. Apologies for that. I'm off to bed now. Have a lovely evening!

I stayed up until after 3AM watching the HololiveEN girls' debuts last night, and I don't regret a thing. It was really interesting to immerse myself in a side of online culture that I haven't explored before, and I have to say, I rather liked it.

I mentioned yesterday how the whole experience was just pleasantly positive, with no-one complaining or whining or trying to one-up one another; it was just a bunch of people who had turned out to watch animated 2D women do things. And everyone was having a thoroughly lovely time, even during Amelia Watson's acid trip of a debut stream, which was one of the most bizarre things I think I've ever sat through in my life.

Today, the girls were getting started on some of their "real" streams, and I caught a couple. Calli and Kiara had a joint stream (hosted by Calli) where they were talking about her music, her inspirations and suchlike, and Kiara was driving the shippers wild. Those two have an excellent dynamic together that I hope we see more of; Kiara in particular is a natural entertainer, and Calli, while clearly still suffering some nerves — at least partly as a result of her potato PC meaning the visual side of her performance could have been a little smoother — most certainly has considerable talents to share with us. Not least of which are her rapping skills, which I encourage you to check out in this shockingly catchy number here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y3xh8gs24c

Ina then did an art stream which was wonderfully chilled out and relaxing. She has an incredibly soothing voice and manner about her, and she's become a real favourite of a lot of people thanks to this thoroughly lovely personality. She's also a hell of an artist too, cranking out some decent quality sketches of four of the HololiveEN girls in less than an hour.

I don't know how much time I'll find myself spending watching these girls in the long term, but I feel like if they ever end up streaming in the daytime while I'm working the day job, they'll prove a rather pleasant distraction from the ever-present tedium. The thing I find with streamers in general is that I usually don't want to spend time just watching them — ideally, they'd be on while I'm doing something else that doesn't require much brainpower.

Unfortunately, with the way my Aspie brain works, this means that gaming is usually out, because dividing my attention between two things that I enjoy engaging with actually makes me extremely anxious. So it's probably going to be restricted to times when I actually have the freedom to sit down and watch without "guilt", or those times when I'm doing something utterly mindless. Or perhaps trying to sleep.

We'll see. For now, I'm very much impressed with the girls' first steps, and I wish them every success.

It was the official debut of the English-speaking Hololive crew today, also known as "HoloMyth" thanks to the fact that they're all based loosely on mythological creatures, figures or concepts. At the time of writing, I'm eagerly awaiting Amelia Watson's stream at midnight my time, and have really enjoyed what I've caught of Mori Calliope (Death), Takanashi Kiara (chic… I mean PHOENIX), Ninomae Ina'nis (priestess of the Ancients… plus tentacles) and Gawr Gura (SHARK).

All of them had a relatively formulaic, structured stream, but this worked well, as it gave them an opportunity to talk a bit about themselves (or their characters, at least) as well as show off their Live2D models, their ability to speak multiple languages, their own personal creative projects and their musical talents. By the end of each girl's hour-long stream, everyone had a pretty decent idea of what to expect from each of them, along with an idea as to what their upcoming streams would involve.

I don't watch a lot of streams as a general rule, as I've noted here before, but the Hololive girls are filled with such infectious personality that I feel like I'm probably going to spend at least some time checking their stuff out. I am, obviously, probably most interested in their gaming streams, but Ina'nis is doing a drawing stream tomorrow that I think will be interesting to check out — she's done some of the promo art for the group and has already proven herself to be rather talented in that regard.

I'm still not 100% sure I "get it", but I certainly like these girls a great deal already, and am interested to see if they can keep my attention over time. Hololive is a huge phenomenon out East, and I'm interested to see quite how much it catches on in English-speaking territories.

If nothing else, these streams have been a wonderful escape from the negativity, doomsaying, cynicism and outright nastiness of the rest of the Internet for an hour at a time. Each one has been an injection of pure happiness, which is exactly what we all need right now. And that alone makes what these girls are doing worthwhile.

I beat Atelier Totori tonight, and did much better than my first time through! First time, I managed to just about scrape the Normal ending, but didn't even see the "final boss" of the game. This time I not only saw it, I beat it — and even got a character-specific ending. (Melvia's, in this case, which I'm happy with — I messed up Mimi's events along the way so would have gone for hers otherwise.)

I'll obviously be writing more about this in the near future, but Atelier Totori is a really interesting game in that structurally it almost resembles an old-school Western RPG as much as anything else. You're moving around a map, taking specific amounts of time to get places, and things happen at certain times. There are things around the world that will absolutely definitely beat the shit out of you if you don't go in properly prepared (aforementioned final boss being one of them, but he is the least of your worries if you want to see everything in the game!) and tons of interesting secrets to discover.

I mentioned in my recent features on Atelier Rorona how that game has a much more freeform, non-linear structure than its immediate predecessors, and this is even more true in the case of Atelier Totori, which essentially says "you have three years to achieve this one thing, get on with it" and then invites you to approach said task however you see fit.

Getting the "True" ending, which involves fulfilling the conditions for all the other endings simultaneously, seems like an enormous challenge, but one I'm keen to take on at some point. The nice thing about the Arland games is that a single playthrough is short enough that it doesn't feel like a huge effort to go through again, particularly since you can carry equipment and money over to your next playthrough.

I'm a little ahead of schedule now, so I'm going to have to take a little time away from Atelier to tackle a new Nintendo Life assignment in the coming days. It's a game I'm looking forward to exploring — and one I was going to play anyway at some point — but it's embargoed for the minute so that's all I can say for now!

Anyway, it's 2AM. Time to sleep, I think!

I was pondering my own mental health earlier, as I often do. And there are some things I need to try and do.

First, I need to figure out what has happened to my attention span with regard to things that I don't particularly want to do. I'm trying to determine whether my atrocious attention span right now is due to going stir crazy at home, if it's due to the medication I take for anxiety (which anecdotal reports seem to suggest can affect one's attention span at least temporarily) or if it's a combination of many and varied factors. I suspect the latter; I've been taking the meds for a while and thus I feel like I'd have probably noticed this a bit sooner if it was just them causing issues.

Secondly, I need to figure out how to just… cope with day to day life. Realistically, I need my day job for the moment, and however much I find myself not enjoying it, trying to "avoid" it, as I have been to a certain extent, is not going to help matters; in fact, it will probably create problems in the long term. This side of things is something I can at least do something reasonably concrete about.

One of the reasons my day job frustrates me is because it's boring and easy, which makes me not want to fart around with it. Which means I end up putting things off for hours and hours without really achieving anything productive or helpful in the meantime. So, clearly what I need to do is simply take the boring and easy things and bash them out as quickly as possible as one of the first things I do in the day. That way, they're done, and I potentially have the rest of the day to do whatever I want to do, since I'm working from home and there's no-one to check up on me.

When you're talking about the irrationality of mental health, all this is, of course, much easier said than done, but recognising an issue is an important first step in being able to deal with it. So I'm going to do my best to start looking at things… if not positively, then at least a bit more practically from tomorrow morning, and we'll see how things go.

There's always Magicami, Atelier and Olympic video games to distract me for a little while if it all gets a bit much, after all.

I'm almost certain we'll discuss this on the MoeGamer Podcast at some point, but the thoughts are fresh in my mind right now, so I thought I'd pop them down on paper with no real organisation.

I'm not excited for "next-gen". I've said this before, but this is the most not excited for "next-gen" I've been in the history of next-gens.

My reasoning behind this is that the things people seem to be getting excited about are the absolute antithesis to the things I like about gaming. The main case in point at the time of writing is the recent reveal of the Xbox Series S — a smaller, lighter, 1440p version of the next-generation Xbox with no disc drive and a 512GB SSD. Everyone seems super-hyped about this because 1) it's launching at $299, which seems eminently reasonable for a new console and 2) something about Xbox Game Pass.

I don't like Xbox Game Pass, and it kind of baffles me why so many people are so thoroughly on board with it. And I'm not just saying this to be contrary; I have fresh memories in my mind of how vociferous the resistance to "not actually owning your games" has been in the past when, for example, games have ended up delisted from various digital storefronts. Hell, in the last week we've had people chewing out Nintendo for the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection no longer being available after March of next year.

So what's different about Game Pass? I guess it's "cheaper" in that you pay less up front and have access to all the games you want from their catalogue rather than paying more, once, for a single game. But I'm not convinced that's necessarily a good thing, for several reasons. Firstly is the obvious one: stop paying, you no longer have access to any of the games.

Secondly is perhaps more of a concern when we think about how few people already bother to play their games all the way through. With a vast, ever-growing catalogue of new experiences to try on Game Pass, people are going to be even less likely to see things through to their respective conclusions, which means 1) said people are going to miss out on some fabulous finales, and 2) developers and publishers are going to do their best to implement "retention strategies" in order to keep people playing.

Because the business model for Game Pass pays out to developers and publishers according to play time, it's in companies' interests to put out one, continuously updated game that never ends, a la Fortnite or its ilk. Throw in some microtransactions on top of it and they have the potential to make even more money atop whatever they get out of Game Pass. EA signed up to make their EA Access catalogue part of Xbox Game Pass today, and you can be damn sure they'll be on the front line of implementing this bullshit with anything even vaguely online-centric.

Game Pass does have value in that it's a risk-free way to try things out without buying them… but that used to be what demos were for, and older demos often provided unique experiences to the full game. Plus how many people do you think are going to find something on Game Pass that they like and then buy it if they already have access to it? Not many, I'd wager.

On top of all that, the meagre 512GB SSD the Xbox Series S comes with means that deleting games to make room for new ones will be an absolute necessity. And I suspect not many people will bother to redownload something they consider themselves "done" with if something new and shiny is just a click away.

I don't like the direction things are going, and I don't like how bafflingly positive people have been about all this, given, as I say, past criticisms of digital distribution models. Sony has some work to do in order to convince me next-gen is worth jumping in on. And I suspect the various limited run companies are going to be very busy in the coming years, too.

I don't like to be negative about what should be an exciting time, but frankly, most of what I've seen about the new generation of consoles fills me with worry rather than anticipation. I hope I'm wrong.

Since covering Winter Games on Atari A to Z recently, I've been delving into the recent history of official Olympic games on various platforms — primarily the Xbox 360 at this point, but I have a copy of the currently Asia-only Tokyo 2020 Switch game on the way for tomorrow, too.

I'm finding myself reminded how much I enjoy these games, and how they have a definite appeal, particularly in this era of very long games. Each of these Olympic Games… err, games… provides a short, simple, self-contained collection of Things to Do that are fun. And while there's some overlap between versions, each package does offer its own distinct, unique twist on things to keep things interesting.

Currently, I'm playing Vancouver 2010 from Eurocom and Sega, and having a really nice time. They did a great job with the atmosphere on this one; there's some fantastic sound design on some events, with the ski jump being a particular highlight. The range of events is a little limited, but such is the nature of the Winter Olympics to a certain degree.

The game as a whole offers a bit of longevity, though; besides the "Training" mode (which is actually pretty much a "Compete in One Event" mode, given that it has leaderboards) there's the main Olympic mode, plus a Challenge mode that tasks you with taking on the various events with additional conditions to fulfil while you're doing your snowy, icy thing. On some of the skiing events, for example, you have to either avoid or crash into snowmen; some ski jump events have you attempting to land at specific distances; several events have "average speed" challenges to tackle. It's fun. And, despite this being a point of criticism for a lot of reviewers, I actually like the fact there's no long-term "career" mode. It's a pick up and play game. Sit down, play with some skis, snowboards and skates until you've had enough, then go do something else. No commitment, still fun. I like it.

I'm intrigued to check out the Tokyo 2020 game as it sounds like it has a fun character creator and makes some interesting decisions in the name of making it a better video game rather than an accurate simulation of The Olympics That Never Were. More on that in the near future, though — and perhaps some sort of "Olympic Supertest" in the slightly more distant future. I have a few more official Olympic games to collect first though!