Rest in peace, Takahata-san. Your Grave of the Fireflies will forever be the easiest way to make the most stoic of nerds sob like babies for at least an hour, and your Pom Poko will always be the quintessential primer in testicular warfare.

This is my biggest gripe about Ni No Kuni 2. The characters have little bits of incidental dialogue that flash up at the bottom of the screen in teeny weeny text in a teeny weeny text box, linger for a period of time that is far, far too brief, and then disappear forever.

I would imagine that this trend of highly male-dominated leadership contributes to the very male-dominated virtual worlds that Rockstar creates, which probably contributes in turn to a feedback loop of attracting more predominately male talent.

This article is fantastic. I forwarded it to my church’s criminal justice taskforce.

1. It doesn’t matter how she looks, it only matters how she games, but...

Sure! So many Southerners do! What’s ironic is that there were white sharecroppers being treated just as horribly and essentially living off the same diet of cheaply-grown crops, but the dominant culture of racism perpetuated in part by the minstrel shows allowed them to find humor in black stereotypes, despite the…

It’s a little bit more nuanced than “black people like fried chicken.” In the South, fried chicken and other stereotypical “black” foods like watermelon, collard greens, cornbread, and grits are traditional elements of soul food (a lot of which is super tasty). The depressing origin of this style of cuisine, though,…

I’ve never understood why people play games that stress them out. Is it the adrenaline rush? I play games to relax, which is why I pretty much only play fairly chill single player RPGs. The idea of playing a game in which other people are literally screaming at me over voice chat sounds deeply horrifying.

I’m divorced and in a new, wonderful, committed relationship, and I kept my wedding dress and many of my photos. It was a great wedding, even if the relationship was not. I even used the dress for a Halloween costume a couple of years ago. There’s a lot more that goes on in a wedding than just a celebration of the…

I had a Star Wars-themed Tamagatchi knock-off in which I got to care for a tiny, barely recognizable mass of black pixels meant to represent R2-D2. It made perfectly recognizable Artoo noises, though, which was both my favorite feature and the reason that it was eventually taken away from me in class.

29 hours seems so...short for a JRPG. I sank a good 110 hours into the first Ni No Kuni, but I also completed all of the sidequests and spent way too much time trying to catch all of the familiars that looked like Totoro, so I may not be the best judge of actual length.

If someone would make a game exactly like this for my PS4 but featuring sexy appropriately aged shirtless anime men, I would purchase it in approximately 2.5 seconds (and if some intrepid commenter replies with an example, I’ll be really excited).

And retranslates the whole script.

I know people think we ride bikes everywhere here in Oregon, but as you can see, it’s actually giant bunnies.

My friends and I had dramatic readings of the Very Secret Diaries in college. To this day, whenever I watch LotR, I have a tendency to mutter, “Still the prettiest!” whenever Legolas appears onscreen.

But I’m already playing Tokyo Mirage Sessions.

But I’m already playing Tokyo Mirage Sessions.

My sister and I weren’t allowed to play video games very much as children, but my uncle bought us an Atari 5200 and a shoebox of carts for it at a yard sale for a couple of bucks. Most of the games weren’t very interesting, but I loved Vanguard. The fanfare at the beginning still pops up in my head from time to time.…

In addition to being a gamer, I’m also a writing professor. I like reading games journalism both to keep up with the culture surrounding games that I will never play and to quietly judge the quality of the writing. I’ve been reading Kotaku almost daily for a year or two now, and I’ve found myself more and more…

Researchers have spent decades studying the links between violent games and real violence, and have failed to come up with any correlation.