Miguel Moran
This author account hasn't been claimed yet. To claim this account, please contact the outlet owner to request access.
Writing For
TheSixthAxis Latest Reviews
Code Vein II is so much more than I expected. As much as I loved the first game, it was pretty plainly “anime Dark Souls” at a time when soulslike competitors were still relatively few in number. It was successful enough to earn a sequel, and so I naturally expected to find something immediately familiar in Code Vein II. By the end of my time with it, though, I was blown away by how original, engaging, and uncompromised the vision for this game is – and how much I loved playing it.
Recently, I’ve been trying to work through some issues I have with the way I approach playing & beating video games. For the longest time, I’ve felt like I need to make sure I see every possible piece of content in a playthrough of a game – and that drive to avoid missing anything often leads to me turning games into a checklist of tasks and a monotonous guide-assisted slog. Sometimes, missing out on an item or a boss in a game can be punishing – but punishment and frustration aren’t bad things to experience when gaming. Like any piece of art, entertainment might not always be the goal. Like real life, you’re always bound to miss out on something, somewhere. Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered has ended up becoming the perfect exposure therapy for me to remind myself of and embrace these qualities, and enjoy this one-of-a-kind open-ended RPG experience with no hesitation or remorse.
I’m rarely one to replay a game, so with how often new entries in the Atelier series come out, I usually only manage a single playthrough before it’s time to move on to the next. I’ll happily make an exception to that trend for the Atelier Ryza trilogy, though. I’m a huge fan of Ryza as an Atelier protagonist, and getting to watch her grow and mature across a full trilogy was a beautiful shake up to the usual Atelier formula of new protagonists in each game. I also loved what this trilogy did with combat, turning it into a unique hybrid of turn-based battles and fast-paced real time action. Needless to say, I was beyond excited to hop into the new Atelier Ryza Secret Trilogy Deluxe Pack re-release.
My experience with the Dragon Quest franchise over the years has been anything but linear. Growing up, I exhaustively played Nintendo DS entries like Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime and Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, while I’ve more recently enjoyed other spinoffs like Dragon Quest Builders and Dragon Quest Treasures, and the incredible mainline adventure of Dragon Quest XI. Yet I’ve never really felt the desire to go back to the originals. I love admiring retro games, but it’s tough to gel with a NES RPG, especially when they’re such barebones experiences. With the Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake double-pack, Square Enix has gone out of their way to elevate these originally paper-thin RPGs with a wealth of content that bring them up to bar with any other entry in the series.
In a world of gaming dominated by the ever expanding range of Souls-likes, it can be easy to forget that character action used to be king. High octane Japanese game series like Ninja Gaiden used to dominate consoles, but over the years this iconic Team Ninja franchise has steadily faded into irrelevancy. It’s easy to see why, when Ninja Gaiden 3 managed to cater to neither existing fans or newcomers. Whatever spark and soul that entry lacked, Ninja Gaiden 4 makes up for in spades, and it’s an awesome reminder of why the classic action game will never truly die.
Of all the anime properties that could get a fighting game adaptation, Hunter x Hunter never really seemed like the most logical choice to me. While the iconic manga & anime series is technically full of fights and has a pretty prominent tournament arc, the characters, their abilities and behaviours in that series rarely play out in a traditional hot-blooded action atmosphere. It’s a series focused a bit more on heart and mind-games than pure battles. Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact doesn’t just fail to feel like a fitting extension of the original franchise because of this, but it fails to feel like a properly satisfying fighting game all together.
With Atelier being my favourite JRPG series, I’m usually excited and optimistic whenever a new entry is announced. I’ve felt the exact opposite about Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian, though. There’s good reason for this, as this game is a successor to the free-to-play gacha spin-off Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy and the Polar Night Liberator, which was quickly shut down in the West. This new release is mostly presented as a standalone adventure, but it’s still got a mish-mash of mechanics and lore-elements from this now Japan-only gacha game and a sprinkling of cameos from across the franchise. As a result, it ends up feeling far more like an anniversary adventure made out of obligation than a fresh new Atelier world.
It feels like ages since I’ve played a proper Japanese dungeon-crawler. Back in the 3DS and PS Vita era, we were spoiled for choice – a new Etrian Odyssey entry was always around the corner, the Persona Q spinoffs were coming out at a steady clip, and there was a horde of dungeon crawlers to choose from on the iconic PlayStation handheld. As the visual and content expectations for modern games has grown, it’s kind of outpaced the lo-fi and scrappy nature of a traditional first-person dungeon crawler. The only reason I’m diving into a new one now, that title being Class of Heroes 3 Remaster, is because it’s an updated release and first-time localisation of a game that came out over 15 years ago. Diving into it now is a delightful blast from the past that I had no idea I was in such dire need of.
When The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy launched, Kazutaka Kodaka joked that his studio Tookyo Games might go bankrupt if the game didn’t do well. Thankfully, the massive visual novel experience ended up doing so well he later clarified that the team no longer felt that bankruptcy was a possibility. Despite that, it felt like it might take a miracle for the team to be able to put out another game if they were so close to shuttering after completing this one. As it turns out, Kazutaka Kodaka treated us like the victims in his own infamous twist-filled mystery thriller games. He quickly announced the development of a new game alongside DMM Games and Spike Chunsoft where the gimmick is that it is actually five different games in one – and that smorgasbord title is called Shuten Order.
I have to admit, I’ve got mixed feelings when it comes to the Demon Slayer franchise. I’ve never really enjoyed Shonen battle series, save for the ones I grew up with, like Naruto and Bleach. I appreciate that Demon Slayer has become a similar entry-point for countless fledgling anime fans across the world, but as someone with no real passion for the series, seeing some of my favourite animation and game studios working in the mines pumping out content for it has me feeling jaded. I’m a massive fan of the CyberConnect2 developed Naruto Ninja Storm series, but it’s an interesting feeling to play a game without also having a personal attachment to the source material. I don’t feel like Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles 2 is a bad experience at all, but I also don’t know if it’s an entirely necessary or groundbreaking one.