Finally! My review of Studio Nanafushi's Dead or School is out on Nintendo Life! You can read it at this link; please do so, share it around as much as you can and say hi in the comments — it's really helpful to show the site that there's an audience for coverage of this sort of game.

http://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/nintendo-switch/dead_or_school

This game has excited me a great deal. I'd had my eye on it for a while — I actually bought the Early Access version on Steam in a sale ages ago, but never got around to trying it — but wasn't expecting it to be as good as it was. As it stands, this is a game that had me absolutely glued to my Switch for nearly a week non-stop — and not just because I had a deadline. I was simply having a wonderful time with it.

A thousand words isn't much, though, so there's a lot about this game I wasn't able to say in this review. With that in mind, I'll be doing a much more in-depth article on MoeGamer early next week, where I look at the game in its broader context and go into a bit more depth on its various mechanical aspects.

For now, be a sweetie and give the review a click — and if the game sounds like fun, it's out today on PS4 and Switch, including a packaged release here in Europe!

I've seen some rumblings this morning about "Patreon banning all Japanese-style art" and just wanted to say a couple of important things about it: please don't panic and fly off the handle based on a random Twitter screencap and please don't punish the creators you support for Patreon's business decisions (if, on the off-chance, any of this turns out to be true).

Both of these are extremely important.

It is super-easy for misinformation to spread, particularly on Twitter, and it pays to maintain a healthy skepticism any time something obviously wrong and stupid appears to raise its head. If Patreon is discriminating against creators who do things relating to Japanese-style art (which most people are interpreting as "anime") then that's obviously a bad thing, but until we hear any sort of official word on the matter, I would encourage you to keep an eye on the situation, but not make any sort of knee-jerk reaction.

Secondly, many creators rely on Patreon as a primary income stream. I'm fortunate (well, kind of) in that I have a day job through which I can support myself, and my Patreon income is additional pocket money I can use to invest into my site, but there are plenty of creators out there using Patreon as their primary source of money coming in each month. If you quit Patreon over these rumours — as I've already seen some people do, though thankfully no-one among you lovely people — then you're punishing the creators you support more than Patreon themselves.

Patreon isn't perfect. But at the moment, it's the most well-known platform for creators to crowdfund ongoing support for their work; people are hesitant to trust other platforms such as SubscribeStar for various reasons and I completely understand that. Just please remember you're supporting creators more than Patreon themselves.

I beat the game! 100% completion, too. Well, of the main story content and optional sidequests, anyway; there's a thing where you can fight all the bosses again at various levels that I didn't go too deep into, but that at least provides an "endgame" of sorts if you need one.

I wasn't sure I was going to make it before the deadline, but here I am. That leaves me free to finish and polish the review tomorrow and have it submitted and ready to go well in time for the embargo lifting on Friday. Then you can all find out what I've been talking about if you hadn't already figured it out.

I checked with Damien at Nintendo Life and he's also cool with me writing stuff about games I cover for them on my own site, so there'll probably also be some more in-depth thoughts on it either on Friday or early next week.

I really enjoyed this game! Looking forward to sharing it with you all very soon. Now I'm off to bed!

The last couple of days have been pretty much non-stop gaming on the game I talked about yesterday. I have a deadline, y'see (Friday!) and I'm one of those old-fashioned sorts of people who likes to play something through to completion before writing a review. I got this from my brother; he used to insist that everyone on EGM and OPM (and, I believe, PC Zone before that) finished the games they were covering before writing about them.

This is super-important, as far as I'm concerned, though I also suspect it doesn't happen all that much, judging by a lot of reviews I've read around the place. The rapid, daily churn of the gaming news cycle means that there simply isn't time for a full-time staffer to be able to bang out a 40+ hour game as well as doing all the other things they're supposed to be doing. Which, of course, is why we end up with garbage reviews where people rabbit on about things that offend them rather than saying anything meaningful about the game beyond its first half an hour.

The game I'm currently playing has been rewarding my commitment. There have been some really wonderful moments in the later stages that I simply wouldn't have seen if I'd decided to play just the first couple of hours (at most) and call it a day. And so I'm very glad that I'm doing a thorough job; hopefully that will be reflected in my review when it shows up.

Anyway, my eyes are going a bit squiffy and I have to go back to work tomorrow so I'd better head to bed!

I've spent almost the entire day playing the game I'm reviewing for Nintendo Life next, and dear lord is it exceptional. Not from a technical standpoint, no; it's janky, the cutscenes look like ass and the framerate tanks in more complex environments. Nor from a narrative perspective; the very premise is kind of stupid, though to the game's credit it absolutely runs with it and has total commitment.

No; this is just a game clearly designed with love. The creators love what they've created. They love designing games. They love throwing surprises in the player's path. They love providing opportunities for the base mechanics to be used in interesting, creative and absolutely delightful ways.

It saddens me a bit that the combination of technical jank and… certain assumptions some people will make about it probably means hardly anyone is going to play this. But you better believe it's going to get a glowing review from me, because it absolutely deserves it.

Once again, sorry for the vagueness, but it's embargoed so I probably shouldn't even be saying what I've said here! You won't have long to wait to find out the full truth, though! Watch this space!

I started Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth of Destiny and I'm officially declaring an S-rank Cute Girls Emergency Situation.

This is Viese, the female lead.

This is Noin, who introduces herself to male protagonist Felt by kicking him right up the arse for being an idiot.

And this is Mitsue, who appears to be a shopkeeper of some description, but the fact she has a bust figure suggests she may be of some importance.

Well, I think it's safe to say that I'm 100% on board.

I really like the art style to this one so far. The sprites and backdrops are pretty similar to Eternal Mana, but the character bust figures really seem to be playing up the "90s anime" feel a lot. And I am all for that.

Not much more I can say just yet, but… well, first impressions are very good!

I've started looking at the next game I'll be doing a review of for Nintendo Life. Owing to embargo shenanigans, I won't name it or give much in the way of specific details, but I will say that it's really, really frigging good — like, way better than I expected it to be.

It's also a bit rough around the edges in a few ways, but these days I tend to find that that sort of thing gives something a certain degree of charm rather than being something to be put off by. It's a game that I think may well have been done a bit on the cheap, but that doesn't mean that it has, in any way, sacrificed its sense of style. In fact, it's one of the most stylish, visually distinct games I've played for quite a while.

Suffice to say, I booted it up for a quick go earlier and didn't stop until over two hours later, I was having such a good time. It's always a real pleasure to encounter something like this: something that you just want to play, enjoy and engage with for hours on end. So yes, I'll be putting a decent amount of time into this before penning some words for Nintendo Life, for sure — and I'm looking forward to doing so.

Sorry I can't be more specific, but you only have about a week to wait before you can find out exactly what it is I'm talking about!

A week? Shit, better play a bit more…

I beat Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana. The last boss is tough! There's also some postgame content that I've explored a bit, but I'm not going to go crazy with it; the superboss is ridiculous, so I'm probably not going to bother with that. You can go back and fight the final boss again for a different ending though, so I'm going to do that tomorrow just for completion's sake, then we're all done!

Not before time, too. I actually have a couple more Nintendo Life assignments coming up. Both are embargoed so I can't talk a lot about them, obviously — and even though this blog is private, I'm going to refrain from naming the games just in case — but they're both games that are very intriguing indeed. In fact, I already had the physical version of one of them on preorder anyway, so now I just get to play it a bit early!

One is a yuri visual novel; the other is an open-structure 2D platformer. That's all I'm going to say for now; the reviews in question should be up on the 19th and the 13th respectively, so I'm fairly pushed for time on both — especially as they're both quite long! With this in mind, I've taken a couple of days off from the day job to put some real time into both — alongside the usual stuff you can expect from MoeGamer, of course!

And we're recording a podcast tomorrow too. Oh, it's nice to be busy, isn't it…? Isn't it?

I should beat Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana tomorrow. I'd go for it tonight, but after an emotionally exhausting couple of days, I don't think I quite have the mental fortitude to give it the attention it deserves this evening. I'm prepped and ready to go for the final dungeons, though, so it should be a pretty straight line to the finish.

With this in mind, I'm not sure if the final Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana piece will be tomorrow or not, as I want to prioritise actually beating the whole game before writing about the narrative as a whole, funnily enough. It will definitely be either tomorrow evening or over the weekend, though, so keep an eye out for it then.

I've really enjoyed this game. I'm glad I finally got to it, because it's a really excellent, unusual, memorable and engaging RPG with some wonderful characters, a great setting and a variety of interesting stories. Plus its non-linear "feel" — even if the main narrative is still strictly linear — makes it interesting to explore, since it always feels like there's something going on everywhere in the world.

I'm definitely excited to see where things go next from here, so you better believe I'm jumping right into the second Atelier Iris once I'm done here!

For now, though, bed. Have a pleasant evening!

As pretty much any one of you could have probably predicted, today wasn't nearly as bad as I'd built it up to be in my mind. But that's the thing about anxiety disorders — particularly if you combine them with something that interacts with them, such as Asperger's — they don't make you think particularly rationally. And, as such, that makes you terrified of things that are probably quite mundane.

It doesn't really change the fact that the over-the-top rules of corporate life stress me out quite a bit, but at least now I guess I have some sort of confirmation that they're not something one really "needs" to worry about too much.

I'll be honest, it felt like a weight off my shoulders after it was all over earlier today. Perhaps now I can focus a bit more on things that actually matter. Thank you all for your understanding and putting up with my irrational, anxiety-induced freakouts, and normal business will promptly resume.

$5+ Patrons, I'll get you your wallpaper for this month once payments have cleared. This'll be the arrangement from now on so I don't find myself in a mad panic at the end of the month to think of something to do, and the notification of receiving payment will be my reminder to sort it out 🙂

Anyway. I think I'm going to go to bed now… hopefully for a more restful night's sleep than last night.