RS Gaming

Octopath Traveler II is a mesmerizing free fall into why traditional JRPGs are an irreplaceable art form. The sequel from Square Enix and Acquire hits every note that the 2018 original so carefully illustrated – the eight co-protagonists, the hyper-stylized turn-based battle systems, and “HD-2D” visuals that make Final Fantasy …

Like a Dragon: Ishin! originally debuted in 2014, just before its parent series Yakuza got its big break outside of Japan with Yakuza 0. While entries after that game quickly came westward (and now launch the same day worldwide), Ishin remained out of reach for audiences outside Japan until now. …

Released in 2002 for the GameCube, the original Metroid Prime feels like a concept that frankly wouldn’t be made by modern Nintendo. At the time, the Japanese company was coming out of their first ever major defeat in the console wars with the Nintendo 64 having been outsold by Sony’s …

Hogwarts Legacy, a hotly anticipated new role-playing video game set in the magical world of Harry Potter, is already breaking records. Its early access launch made it most popular title on the streaming platform Twitch, even before its official Feb. 10 release. But with the fantasy franchise increasingly tarnished by …

Rhythm games, as a rule, have largely been ignored over the past decade. Though Guitar Hero made a splash in the early 2000s and spawned a wave of me-too music titles that persisted throughout the late 2010s, the genre has all but evaporated. Long-running franchises like Dance Dance Revolution and …

A newHarry Pottervideo game is ostensibly trying to distance itself from J.K. Rowling and herstring oftransphobic commentswith the introduction of the series’ first trans character — and many fans are calling it a cynical way to make up for the creator’s rhetoric. Over the weekend, the first reviews of Hogwarts …

Since the first popular video game was released more than 50 years ago, they have often been brushed off as niche and nerdy — the arena of the basement dweller, the outcast, the arcade-addicted kid who didn’t want to engage with the real world. But that’s never really been true …

Like it or not, we’re firmly entrenched in a sea of video game remakes. With the success of 2022’s The Last of Us Part I and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, alongside the upcoming Resident Evil 4, it’s clear that the trend is here to stay. But if there’s …

FOR ASHLEY JOHNSON, the chance to be a voice actor in the post-apocalyptic video game The Last of Us Part II was both a risk and irresistible. It was her first gig as a video-game protagonist, as her character, Ellie, moved up from a supporting role. But Part II wasn’t …

LAST JUNE, Overwatch, a well-known multiplayer shooter from Blizzard Entertainment, tweeted that the long-awaited sequel was coming, receiving around 70,000 likes. Four days after Overwatch 2 came out in October, a porn-animation artist called Memz revealed that they had obtained the updated character models. That tweet received nearly 100,000 likes. …