I use Sambal Oelek in very small quantities to add spice to my mild Golden Curry. My partner is very sensitive to spiciness, so the medium Golden Curry is too much for him, but I like just the tiniest bit of kick. I don’t really know what Sambal Oelek tastes like because it requires such a small amount to add some…

I collect video game music boxes! I was all ready to get this one...but $230 is just too much for me to justify, alas.

You had me at “There’s a dedicated honk button.”

I exclusively play single-player games, mostly RPGs, and the one kind of update I always appreciate is new difficulty modes. Ni No Kuni II was boring as hell until they added a harder difficulty, and I straight up stopped playing Blue Dragon because it was so easy. (I know there’s a difficulty patch for that game,…

I’d add Ni No Kuni II to this list. The subtitles during cutscenes are decent, but dialogue during world exploration or the battle skirmishes is small enough to be unreadable. It forced me to sit on the floor closer to my TV, craning my neck up at it because I couldn’t read the text from the couch.

I can’t wait to play this with my partner!

I just sank 100+ hours into beating this game on my Wii U, and I loved it so much. You are rewarded every so often with amazingly animated music/concert videos which then become performance-based super attacks in battle. They recorded a full album’s worth of amazing J-pop tracks that are so good that I imported the CD…

This is magical. I’m so used to favorite franchises ruining their turn-based gameply by switching to action (*cough*Final Fantasy*cough*), but a franchise switching to turn-based? Yay! I might actually play a Yakuza game now instead of just watching my partner play.

My partner collects big box PC games, so I preordered the physical edition of this as a gift for him months ago. It hasn’t yet arrived. He was looking forward to it quite a lot, but now we just kind of feel gross about the whole thing.

I got through my dreadfully boring Health 101 lecture class in my freshman year of college by playing this game on my red GBA SP, hidden inside of my textbook. It was the first handheld console I’d ever owned, purchased at a weird used game store in my hometown right before I left for college. (In retrospect, it may…

Oh dear, this sounds like another RPG to add to my already distressingly long list of RPGs to play...

Ugh, now I feel weird and unhappy about preordering the big box for my partner.

How is this different from Target and Walmart selling exclusive action figures or toys? No one ever seems to have a meltdown over that.

This is my JRPG life.

As a female-identifying human with actual breasts, this debate is infuriating.

I have three different chronic health conditions (being me is fun! wheee!) that mean I spend more time than most either having to stay still on the couch because I’m in too much pain to move or wanting to stay still on the couch because I’m too depressed to move. In this respect, video games have been a Godsend to me.

I only just started the game earlier this week, because I wanted to wrap up playing all of the other games on my anthology editions, and I have been delighted with it so far. It’s a big, stupid, beautiful mess, and while I can’t understand why we needed inexplicable super attacks based on Disneyland rides, I’m…

FFIX filled me with so much joy because of this.

Dramaturgs represent! It’s always delightful to see how much crossover there is between hardcore theatre nerds and hardcore gaming nerds. Let’s be real -- most JRPGs are basically Shakespeare plays if Shakespeare plays were a hundred hours long.

I wish Nintendo and Sony made adaptive controllers so I wouldn’t have to mod the hell out of my Nintendo and Sony controllers.