Just a quickie: I added Discord rewards to both tiers, since I wanted to offer something else to those of you kind enough to give me money!

You should get automatically invited to the MoeGamer Discord if you have a Discord account and have connected it to Patreon. If you have any difficulties, please let me know and I can get you added manually.

Hello everyone! Apologies for missing this last week, it's been a strange time with public holidays and whatnot and now I'm off on a "proper" holiday for a week! (I'll still be posting stuff each day, though — I have the laptop and a number of gaming devices with me so you can't get rid of me that easily!)

As such, we've got two whole weeks to catch up on! Here's what you might have missed:

What's in the Box: Shantae 1/2 Genie Hero Ultimate Day One Edition
The latest physical release of the new Shantae game features some nice extras for no additional expense — here's a look at what the Ultimate Day One Edition offers.

Switch Essentials: SkyPeace
A game for under £2 with no microtransactions? Surely it's shit? Think again!

Waifu Wednesday: Kurona
A closer look at the main antagonist of the last two Gal*Gun games, the irreplaceable Kurona.

GalGun 2: Introduction
Kicking off a new month of Cover Game features focusing on Inti Creates' GalGun 2 for Switch and PS4, we take a look at how the new game differs from its predecessor Double Peace.

Requiem for a Dead Game: After Burner Climax
After Burner Climax was a great update to a classic Sega arcade machine… but you can't get it any more! One of the earliest casualties of the digital age is still well worth checking out if you get the opportunity.

The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 1 – The Goosebump Effect
I sit down with my friend Chris to discuss the latest happenings in the games biz, the games we've been playing recently and the games that give us goosebumps with their music.

Switch Essentials: Super Mario Odyssey
What an incredible game. You probably already know this, but it deserves a ton of love regardless. If you have a Switch, you need this game.

Waifu Wednesday: Chiru Kondo
We take a closer look at one of Gal*Gun 2's main heroines. This week it's the turn of the reclusive Chiru Kondo, a girl I found immediately striking and compelling.

GalGun 2: A Strange and Sexy Little World
We continue our GalGun 2 exploration with a look at how the game builds a world with relatively minimal resources — by providing convincing environments, a recognisable cast of characters and plenty of background material.

What's in the Box: Megadimension Neptunia VIIR
Neptunia's latest adventure comes with the option one of Idea Factory International's characteristically pleasant limited editions, so here's a look at what you get.

As I mentioned before, I'm off on holiday this week, but I'll still be covering stuff, including the continuation of our Gal*Gun 2 exploration and more. Thank you, as ever, for your continued support — and please continue to help out the site by liking, sharing, commenting and all that good stuff. It really helps, even if you're not able to make a financial contribution!

If you could share this Patreon page with other people, that would also be just peachy. I'm up to 93% of my file storage space used, so it's getting to a point where I actually need to upgrade the site hosting now, regardless of whether or not I've reached the $100 per month target I set for myself for that to happen. At $78 per month at the time of writing, I'm close to that target, so it would be awesome to hit it.

Anyway. Self-shilling over — I hope you have a lovely week and continue to enjoy my work! You're the best! Yes you are!

Hi folks! Been a while since a Patron-only update, I know, and I apologise for that! I thought I'd take the opportunity to share what I was up to over the weekend, and upcoming plans for the site.

The Davison Cup

As I've gotten older, there are fewer and fewer friends I have the opportunity to see on a regular basis, mostly due to them having "adult" commitments like children and whatnot. I, on the other hand, have a wife, two cats and an enormous game collection, and intend to keep it that way without any sprogs to ruin my life. But I digress.

There are four friends I see semi-regularly for fortnightly board gaming evenings. All of them are nerds to varying degrees — though interestingly, none of them are particularly Internet-literate in the sense of understanding stuff like memes, social media trends and suchlike — and all like video games. Even if one of them plays nothing but Skyrim these days.

Last year (also around my birthday, as I recall), I decided to host a session that would both tickle their nostalgia glands where applicable as well as introduce them to some games they might not have played before. And I thought I'd make a competition out of it.

The Davison Cup was born; a series of challenges loosely inspired by the '90s TV show GamesMaster, in which the participants compete in a variety of games from the 2600 era onwards to today in order to demonstrate Who Is The Best.

This year I organised things to minimise console HDMI cable and disc-swapping, with dedicated rounds for Atari 2600 games (via the PS4 versions of Atari Flashback Classics), Namco arcade games (via the Switch version of Namco Museum), Taito arcade games (via Taito Legends on PS2), SNES games (well, Super Mario Kart and Street Fighter II), Neo Geo games (via Hamster's Switch ports), PS2 games, Wii and Wii U games and finally modern Switch and PS4 titles.

This year's challenges only had three participants, unfortunately, as two of our number had prior commitments, but we still had a good time — even if we had to call things early due to one of our number having to run home and rescue his wife from their children. (And you ask why I don't want children?) Unfortunately we only managed to get as far as the PS2 round, but that was plenty to fill a good 6 hours or so!

Things still worked well despite having an odd number of people; for two-player games we adopted a random seeding system, where two people would play against each other, and the winner would go on to confront whoever won a dice roll before the game began. For games based around high scores, this was simple enough to manage. And there was also a bonus round in which I gave everyone five minutes with the Honey Select Unlimited character creator to come up with… something, which my wife would then judge. And, uh, well…

I was delighted to discover that the games the guys knew less well — such as the 2600 titles and some of the obscure PS2 games, like the utterly absurd BCV: Battle Construction Vehicles — proved to be the most popular by far. This is perhaps because one of our number is considerably better than the others at games like Super Mario Kart and Street Fighter II and thus the results there felt a bit like a foregone conclusion. Combat on 2600 with invisible tanks, though? I dominated!

If you have the opportunity to do something similar with friends (and the available hardware with which to do so!) I highly recommend it. It's a great excuse to bust out bits of your game collection from all eras as well as share your passion for your hobby with people who might, as in this case, focus mostly on brand-new titles.

Upcoming plans

Okay, so onto what's next for MoeGamer. I have a tentative plan in place for the next few months that looks something like this:

May: Gal*Gun 2
June: The Shantae series
July: Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash
August: The Sonic the Hedgehog series

Yes, that's right, August is going to be Sonic time, though with there being a whole lot of Sonic games out there I won't have time to cover all of them.

As such, I need your help! If any of you reading this are actual fans of Sonic I'd be interested to hear which games in the series you'd regard as the most interesting — not necessarily the best, but the ones that at least try something different, regardless of whether or not they're successful.

I'm particularly interested in the post-Dreamcast games (and primarily the console games, since handhelds aren't practical to screenshot/capture), as I have decent familiarity with the Mega Drive and Dreamcast titles in particular; I'd like to know which of the "modern Sonic" games you think might be worth checking out.

Currently I'm interested in Sonic Generations, Sonic Colors, Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces (as well as Sonic Mania, whose Plus version will have released just before I run this feature, hence its timing) but if there are any others you think worth a look, let me know!

All right, that's enough for now. $5 Patrons, watch out for a wallpaper later! And, as always, thank you very much for reading and supporting my work. You are all wonderful people!

Hello everyone! And welcome to MoeGamer's fourth year on this Earth. Somehow, it only occurred to me last year that I share my birthday with my site, but sure enough, if you look at the first ever post on the site, you'll see the evidence there plain as day. I guess I had blotted out the negative associations with that period, as that was also when USgamer laid me off… but ultimately that led to the creation of MoeGamer, so it turned out to be a pretty neat thing, huh.

Anyway. Here's what you might have missed last week on MoeGamer.

The MoeGamer Podcast Pilot Episode: Sega, Sega, Sega
My friend Chris Caskie and I have been talking about getting together to do a podcast for ages, and we finally got around to it. We were pretty pleased with the results, and we're going to try our best to make it a regular-ish thing; hopefully we'll be recording a new episode this coming weekend, all being well.

Blue Reflection: Sounds of School Days
I couldn't let Blue Reflection go without highlighting its wonderful and unusual soundtrack. It's one of the most distinctive scores I've heard for a long time — and the final boss theme (not in this post) made the whole finale an emotionally devastating masterpiece. Wonderful stuff — but I'd expect nothing less from Gust.

Waifu Wednesday: Milla Maxwell
I love Milla. I love Milla. I absolutely loved the two Tales of Xillia games, and Milla was a big part of that. I need more Milla in my life. Fortunately, as I discovered this week, she makes a guest appearance in Tales of Berseria, which I happened to pick up with some birthday money over the weekend…

Namco Essentials: Galaga '88
I didn't know anything about this game prior to giving it a go in Namco Museum for Switch, but now I'm a big fan. A wonderful "16-bit" adaptation of the Galaga formula, this is an underappreciated gem in Namco's back catalogue.

Blue Reflection: Narrative, Themes and Characterisation
Blue Reflection is a powerful game with some deep themes. It's one of the most beautiful, emotionally affecting games I've had the pleasure to experience for quite some time. Here's an in-depth exploration of how it tells its story, and the people in the cast who help make that happen.

Four Years of MoeGamer, 37 Years of Pete
Yes, as previously noted, it was both my birthday and MoeGamer's anniversary over the weekend, so I took the opportunity to look back over the best year the site has had to date. A sincere thank you to all of you who have helped make that happen, whether it's through simply reading, liking, commenting and sharing, or actually flipping some money my way.

I'd like to continue growing and improving the site this year, and we're reaching a point where there are some expenses involved in doing that. Specifically, I need to pony up for a WordPress premium package for additional media storage space, and ideally I'd like to pay up for a SoundCloud account too to host audio-only versions of the podcast.

Those of you already contributing, it's very much appreciated; please do me a favour and share this page with family and friends who you think might be interested! At $100 a month I'll pay up for the WordPress upgrade (which will also remove WordPress' ads from the site) as that's the priority right now; I'll figure out the SoundCloud stuff after that.

Once again, thanks for your continued support, and I hope you continue to enjoy my work!

Hi folks! Been a while since a Patron-only update so I thought I'd take a moment to share what I'm planning to work on over the course of the next few months.

First up, as you've doubtless already seen, this month is all about Xenoblade Chronicles 2. This is a higher-profile sort of game than I typically cover on MoeGamer, but with online discussion of the game surrounding its launch dominated by all the crap over its female characters' appearance, I thought it was important to take some time to look at it in detail, because it's a fascinating game. You can follow the month's features on it here: https://moegamer.net/all-games/xenoblade-chronicles-2/

From then on… well. I have one hell of a backlog of things I want to cover, as well as some upcoming things I definitely want to highlight. From the backlog, I wanted to take a bit of feedback from you folks — more on that in a moment, but first an outline of what's likely to be coming over the next couple of months.

Depending on when the final release dates of these games are, I'm definitely going to be doing full Cover Game features on Gal*Gun 2 and the Shantae series as a whole, following the "Ultimate Edition" release of Shantae: 1/2 Genie Hero. The latter isn't a Japanese game, of course, but it carries more than enough Japanese influences to make it something well within MoeGamer's remit!

Beyond that, I want to cover Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash at some point over the summer in an attempt to be vaguely seasonal — doing so around then will also allow me to write about another Senran Kagura title around the second year anniversary of my launching of the Cover Game format! — but from there… well, there are lots of choices.

Off the top of my head, here are some games, both old and new, that I'd like to give some in-depth coverage to. As always, these aren't necessarily games from the here and now — there are a few PS2 games in there, for example — but those which I feel are worth investigating for historical reasons, or just because I like the look of them. I'd be interested to hear from you if there are any in particular that you'd like to see some detailed articles on!

• Nights of Azure 2

• Blue Reflection

• Dark Rose Valkyrie

• Mary Skelter: Nightmares

• Fate/Extra (and/or Fate/Extella)

• Atelier (the Iris, Arland and Dusk trilogies in particular)

• Xenosaga

• Unlimited SaGa

• Chaos;Child

• Steins;Gate Zero

• Demon Gaze II

• Akiba's Beat

• Trails in the Sky/Trails of Cold Steel

• Ys VIII

• Yumina the Ethereal

• Seinarukana

• Eiyu Senki

There are about a bajillion more that I haven't mentioned, but these are ones that spring immediately to mind that I feel have interesting elements well worth talking about. If you're interested in me pushing any of these towards the front(ish) of my upcoming schedule, please let me know and I'll see what I can do!

In the meantime, I'm also interested in starting to experiment with providing anime coverage. Like my gaming coverage focuses on the idea of the "late review", I'm not especially interested in trying to keep super up to date with current seasonal anime and reviewing things on an episode-by-episode basis; rather, I'd like to look back on series I've enjoyed from the recent or distant past and provide a rundown of why they're interesting and perhaps worth checking out. There's certainly not a shortage of things to talk about!

As always, thank you for your support; it really is appreciated. MoeGamer has grown hugely over the course of the last year in particular, and people like you have been a big part of helping to make that happen. Together we can show that there's a place for a different kind of "writing about games"!

Big love!
Pete

Although there are many negative things one can say about the overall online experience today — particularly now we live in the age of a certain proportion of the population being perpetually offended about one thing or another — one of the best things about it for people like me is the fact it's a lot easier to discover new friends.

This may not sound like a big deal to some of you, but as someone who has always struggled with meeting new people and getting to know them (primarily due to, as I discovered last year, the Asperger Syndrome I've apparently been living with my whole life, and the associated social anxiety) it's a vital part of life in the 21st century.

Twitter and other social media platforms are an important part of all this, of course, and probably the primary way people get to know one another nowadays — though Discord is becoming very popular for smaller groups to hang out more "privately". But for me, there's always been something great about getting to know people through gaming.

My wife and I have both played a lot of Final Fantasy XIV over the years. I'm not an active player at the moment, but my wife still plays. We used to both be part of the Giant Bomb Free Company on the Ultros server, but through them we met a small group of close-knit friends from the neighbouring house in the game's housing district. It turned out that the majority of members of this Free Company, the Loose Cannons (or "LoCo" for short) were actually from the UK like us, while the Giant Bomb FC were primarily from the States.

I actually met a number of the Giant Bomb FC on several occasions — most notably a group visit to PAX one year — but with most of them being on the opposite side of the Atlantic this is not something that could happen all that frequently, unfortunately. It was more likely that those of us from LoCo would be able to meet up a little more often.

Or so we thought, anyway; as it transpired, it took two members of LoCo from across the pond coming to visit for us to actually get together and hang out in real life. It finally happened, though; my wife has spend much of her week off hanging out with these chaps, and I battled my own social anxiety to go join them on Saturday.

Meetups with people you know from online can always be a challenge because you never quite know if the people you thought you had a handle on in the online sphere will be the same in reality. Thankfully, in this case, everyone was largely as I expected, and we all had a great time. Even the delightful ball of depression, anxiety and social awkwardness that is me.

Events like this can be pretty powerful, because it reminds you that those people you're playing with, hanging out with, typing messages to and sending anime tiddies to are actually real. It can be easy to forget that sometimes — particularly, unfortunately, if tempers flare — and it's good to remember it.

I'm still painfully awkward and largely terrified of the prospect of meeting people from online. But in my thirty-six years on this Earth, I've only really had one vaguely "bad" experience, and that was back when I was about fifteen — and wasn't even that bad, just slightly awkward. So maybe I should try and do this sort of thing a bit more often…

You may recall over the past few months when I've talked about a couple of language learning services, specifically Duolingo and Memrise. Both are good, but I've been particularly enjoying the additional variety that the latter offers — so much so that I decided to take advantage of a 50% off annual subscription fees offer and sign up for a year of the service's "Pro" offering.

While the service isn't perfect — for some reason the Pro variant of the Japanese course repeats a lot of content and seems very hesitant to actually teach me new words and phrases unless I specifically tell it to — the fact that it provides a number of different ways to learn besides that which is offered with the free account makes daily study sessions much more varied and interesting.

So what does Pro actually offer? Well, let's take a brief look at each component.

Besides the standard "learn new words, review those words, speed review those words" that a free account offers, another few variants on reviewing what you've learned are offered in the form of "Learn with Locals", "Difficult Words" and "Listening Skills".

Learn with Locals is occasionally incorporated into the standard learning/review process in the form of questions that make use of a short video clip of a Japanese person saying a phrase or full sentence. Learn with Locals simply gives you an entire sequence of these questions, tasking you with either transcribing what they say or translating its meaning into English. It's a nice distinction from the dry, careful pronunciation heard elsewhere in the course, and encourages you to be mindful of things like accents and the fact that "real people" speak more quickly or blend words together.

"Difficult Words" is essentially the same as the standard review process, but focuses on the words that you've previously struggled with — either by getting questions wrong, or using the "Show Answer" function to skip that question and remind yourself of what it should actually be. This is a good way to focus specifically on the trickier aspects rather than padding things out with things you're well familiar with.

"Listening Skills" removes most of the reading side of things from the equation altogether in favour of either asking you to translate something you can only hear, not read, or picking the correct audio clip to match the provided meaning. Not having to get hung up on individual characters is a good way of familiarising yourself with how various words and phrases work; because, as an English speaker, Japanese text doesn't look like it has a lot to do with how it sounds, it can be good to focus on one aspect or the other.

There are also two "bot" exercises you can do — Chatbots and Grammarbots. In both instances, these take the form of a virtual text messaging session; in the former, you're generally tasked with providing the correct responses or Japanese words for a real-world context such as asking for directions, while in the latter you're drilled on structures such as using "~か" to turn sentences into questions, or "~せん" to negate verbs. These are good, but there aren't enough of them; there only seem to be one or two of each for the whole course, so you repeat them a lot. And while Memrise is based around securing things in your long-term memory through repetition, you can have a little too much of a good thing!

I've found that Memrise has helped my confidence with Japanese enormously. It throws you into using kanji alongside hiragana and katakana even quicker than Duolingo does, and you might be surprised how quickly you start to recognise and understand the characters. I still don't think I'd feel particularly confident writing kanji with a pen, but I am getting to a point where I can recognise the characters enough to be able to use the Japanese keyboard setting on the computer and pick the right option.

Is Pro worth it? Hmm, I'm not sure. I don't think it's worth its full price, for sure, as the additional content offered over and above the free plan doesn't feel quite fleshed out enough. At 50% off for the year (about $30), I'm happy with what it offers, though, and I fully intend to keep up my daily studies!

If you've read my About page on MoeGamer, you'll know that one of the core philosophies behind my site is the idea of "the Late Review". Today I wanted to talk a little about that, and why I think it's important.

Timely reviews have a place, of course — it's helpful for consumers to at least have an idea of whether or not a new release is going to appeal to them, whether it actually works as intended and whether there are any controversial issues such as lootboxes involved. But there's a significant downside to these "on release" reviews, too, primarily due to the highly competitive nature of commercial sites (and plenty of non-commercial ones too, for that matter) and their desire to be the first outlet with something up about [latest new game]: quick coverage is not always accurate, in-depth coverage, particularly when it comes to large games such as RPGs.

There are also instances where it's simply not possible to judge a game accurately immediately on launch, either. Take the recent release of the new Dragon Ball fighting game, for example; I'm not going to pretend to know anything about that game, since I am terrible at fighting games, but even I know that putting a review of a fighting game up before you've had a chance to adequately judge the online community is not a good way of doing things… particularly when the high-profile beta test for the game brought up some significant network issues for some players.

There's another benefit to coming to something late, too, and that is the ability to divorce the individual game from its original context, and resist comparing it to other things that are around at the same time. While sometimes this can be helpful and interesting, often it simply encourages a rather reductionist approach to criticism in which heavy emphasis is based on the comparison aspect rather than simply judging the individual game under the microscope on its own merits.

I've been aware of this for a while, but it became particularly apparent to me when I covered the Ridge Racer series a few months back. I never played Ridge Racer 6 and 7 back on their original release because, at the time, I recalled them getting relatively mediocre reviews, primarily due to the fact that there were considered to be other, "better" games around at the same time as them. Ridge Racer 6 in particular took a beating from its contemporary Project Gotham Racing 3 despite the two games being very different styles of racer; coming to the former many years later, on the other hand, allowed me to completely disregard the latter and judge Ridge Racer 6 entirely on its own merits. And what do you know? It's a superb arcade racer that I really wish I'd played back when it was "current"!

This matter is also interesting when it comes to games with controversial elements. Next month, as I noted in last week's roundup post, I'm intending to take a look at Inti Creates' recent output, and as part of that I decided I'd give the notorious Mighty No. 9 a go. (I know this isn't entirely Inti Creates' work, but they were still involved, so it's relevant.)

I was unsurprised to discover that Mighty No. 9 actually isn't a bad game at all. Sure, it has a number of flaws and areas where it could be better — its performance problems in certain areas being the most glaring issue — but it turns out the game itself is playable, charming and enjoyable; these aspects just got overshadowed by the absolute dog's dinner that was made of the Kickstarter, its marketing, its community and pretty much everything surrounding it that wasn't the actual game itself. Again, it's nice to be able to divorce the game from all that and just judge it on its own merits. But more on that next month.

Anyway, while it's sometimes nice to write about something "current", for the most part I find that the most effective analysis and criticism can be done once the initial media frenzy and hype storm has died down. And that's why I'll continue to run MoeGamer in such a way that affords me plenty of time to explore a game in its entirety before I ever put "pen to paper" about it.

I've got some time off from the day job later this week, so I'm going to take the opportunity to do a bit more experimenting with video now I have my voice back after grappling with winter colds.

I'm interested to hear what you, the people who are directly supporting the site, would like to see more of, and as such I've set up a short survey asking for your opinions. If you have two minutes to share your ideas with me, that would be absolutely marvelous!

You can find the survey at https://goo.gl/forms/GJlu1KEFEGlUICCn1 — please don't share the link publicly for now as I'd like to give you folks priority in terms of input on this 🙂

If you'd told me a few months ago that the hot new meme of 2018 would be hordes of deformed 3D Knuckles models wandering around in virtual reality quoting a low-budget Ugandan action movie at anyone and everyone who would listen, I would have probably laughed at you and said "what the fuck?" But this, it seems, is the world we live in. And I kind of love it.

Unfortunately, that ever-reliable source of finger-wagging, public-shaming "games journalism" (and I use that term loosely) Polygon has elected to write a finger-wagging, public-shaming news piece on the new phenomenon, even going so far as to call it their favourite word "problematic" and actually put some pressure on the makers of VRChat to ban the meme. It's "racist", you see.

This is just the latest in a long line of incidents where people who don't bother to do a bit of basic research into something that is going on feel like they should make sweeping moral judgements about things. Japanese games, of course, are particularly prone to getting this sort of negative attention about them, with the latest example being Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

I posted about this recently on Twitter, but it bears exploring in a little more detail. Having spent most of the weekend playing the game, I came to the unsurprising conclusion that everyone who had been complaining about how "problematic" Pyra's outfit and figure were had not even bothered to consider her as an actual "person"; all they had done was judge her by her appearance.

Pyra is, for those who have not played the game, an absolutely lovely person. She's kind and caring, has some nice chemistry with protagonist Rex, and is badass when she needs to be, yet also has an endearing fragility about her that makes you want to protect her — not because she's a woman, but because she's just someone without whom the world would be a darker, less happy place. She is much more than a pair of boobs.

This is, of course, not the first time this has happened; I've previously commented on some absolutely vile reviews of the Senran Kagura and Valkyrie Drive games in which supposedly professional reviewers admit to playing less than a couple of hours of the games and write them off as mindless fanservice, completely failing to take into account any of the actual characterisation and narrative arcs throughout the games. I'm yet to play Valkyrie Drive — I'd like to cover it in detail later this year, actually — but I can speak from extensive experience with Senran Kagura that there is not a single character in that enormous cast who is not a fascinating individual in one regard or another.

This sort of thing is why I find myself getting frustrated, and why I feel sites like MoeGamer are important. While professional, commercial sites are calling for things to be banned because they don't understand them, as in the case of Polygon and VRChat, and large communities such as ResetEra are libelling legally available titles like Criminal Girls as being "child pornography" without having any actual experience of what the game really is, we have a problem. A serious problem.

It's easy to get angry and frustrated at this situation, and indeed I know I have done in the past. It's less than productive to lash out wildly, though, since this just causes people to be further entrenched in their positions. Instead, what I intend to put a greater focus on going forward is ensuring that MoeGamer provides ample resources for people to be able to argue against ill-informed opinions based on nothing but hearsay and superficial glances.

There are already more than 350 articles on MoeGamer, covering over 150 games. I hope at least some of them help you find out a bit more about games that habitually get misrepresented by the supposedly "professional" side of the press, and perhaps even win an argument or two. 🙂

Thanks, as ever, for your support.