While number scores often make for good shorthands in summarizing how one feels about a piece of media, they don’t always tell the full story. This is especially apparent with the score of a 7/10, which for us at NookGaming is the lowest score we still describe as “recommended” out the gate. And while some […]
Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy is the latest installment of the Mado Monogatari (Sorcery Saga) series, a very long-running JRPG franchise composed primarily of rather cute dungeon crawlers. It’s the series the Puyo Puyo franchise originally spun off from (and eventually far outgrew), hence the presence of several characters and franchise iconography. But […]
After another three year gap, it’s time to psync back into the ABIS once more with the third title of the AI: The Somnium Files series. While the previous installment, Nirvana Initiative, operated largely as a direct follow-up to the first title and featured different protagonists, No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The […]
I’ve always had great fondness for tile-matching puzzle games. Whether it be playing Pokemon Puzzle League on Christmas the first morning after I got my Nintendo 64 or playing old Tetris and Columns machines at the arcades, a lot of my formative experiences involved lining up blocks and breaking them down. There’s a simple yet […]
Three years after 2019’s AI: The Somnium Files, Spike Chunsoft released a sequel titled AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative (sometimes stylized as nirvanA Initiative and often shortened to AiNi). Set six years after the events of the first Somnium Files, the Advanced Brain Investigation Squad (ABIS) must again solve a strange new murder […]
Following their generally successful Zero Escape trilogy, Spike Chunsoft decided once again to partner with director and writer Kotaro Uchikoshi to create another mystery adventure game. This manifested in the form of 2019’s AI: The Somnium Files. This title is a murder mystery game with elements of sci-fi, loads of drama, and a rather wild […]
Kanade is a short all-ages visual novel developed by Frontwing and Good Smile Company. It features a scenario penned by Asou Ei (euphoria, Lilja and Natsuka: Painting Lies) alongside several Frontwing veterans such as Kazuya, Yusano, and Matsumoto Fuminori (GINKA, ATRI -My Dear Moments-) who did direction, primary character design, and music respectively. This story […]
A Tithe in Blood (A Tithe in Blood ~Chi no Chigiri~) is a kinetic visual novel developed by Studio Élan, the studio behind works like Highway Blossoms and Please Be Happy. Like their other works, this is a yuri/girls love story, this one pitched as a dark tale of love, mystery, and magic. Love Across […]
Saeko: Giantess Dating Sim is a Japanese indie adventure game by Safe Havn Studio and published by Hyper Real. As the name suggests, the story follows a young man who must endure an experience with a woman hundreds of times his size named Saeko. While this obviously carries certain implications for a niche audience with […]
Beginning as a duology of turn-based Japanese RPGs for the somewhat ill-fated Sega CD, Game Arts’s Lunar series was one of the defining cult classics of the genre since the ’90s. It was able to carve out a niche for itself in the JRPG landscape thanks to its use of full-motion video for certain cutscenes, […]