In this week’s newsletter: JRPGs can be an acquired taste – but fortunately it’s one I can’t get enough of. Plus, a bumper crop of games for horror fans • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here What I have always admired about Japanese role-playing games is their unashamed grandiosity. The likes of Final Fantasy, Persona and Shin Megami Tensei don’t restrict themselves to the familiar trappings of good v evil, wizards-and-goblins, swords-and-magic; they absorb all of those things, and plenty else besides, from science fiction and mythology and comic books and psychology and classical art and whatever else interests their creators, and construct these absurdly ambitious worlds and narratives out of them. The themes are never small, the playtimes never short. Think of them as the operas of the video game world: a theatrical synthesis of different virtual arts, from storytelling and stagecraft to music and movement. And as something of an acquired taste. Metaphor ReFantazio – out this week – is the most extravagant example of this genre that I’ve played in many years. It is lavishly over-the-top. In the first few hours, you are introduced to a world segregated by a controlling monarchy, military and religion into strict racial hierachies, where people with cat ears and tails are subservient to those with horns, or longer elven ears. (Your perfectly manageable task? Dismantle all of this and bring forth a new age of equality.) Characters pull out their own metal hearts, engrave them and transform into robot-styled manifestations of their inner power. You encounter your enemies: monstrous, powerful chimeric grotesqueries, tangles of legs and tongues and spikes and teeth. They are called “humans”, and they are more powerful and crueller than any of the game’s races. Subtlety is never on the table. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Konami, cute RPGs, weird but wonderful indie games – everything I saw at Japan’s biggest gaming convention • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Tokyo Game Show takes place at the Makuhari Messe, a series of cavernous halls in a suburban complex about 45 minutes east of Tokyo city centre, and given its late September slot in the calendar, it is always either horribly hot or pouring with rain. Either way, it’s humid as heck, and there are many thousands of people crammed in, creating what can only be described as a suboptimal sweat situation. Nonetheless, I’ve always had a soft spot for TGS. I attended my first one in 2008, and so the experience of playing games in packed halls while understanding very little about what is happening has become powerfully nostalgic. And I surely wasn’t the only person feeling nostalgic in Tokyo last Friday, because the halls were filled with series and characters from 15 years ago. Silent Hill 2 was back on the Konami stand, along with Solid Snake’s grizzled face for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater remake. Capcom had two huge areas given over to Monster Hunter, a series that was unbelievably popular in Japan throughout the 00s and finally broke through to the world with Monster Hunter World in 2018. Sony was also back at the show in a big way for the first time in five years, showing off the PlayStation 5 Pro, and its especially gorgeous-looking PlayStation 30th Anniversary special edition. The Japanese-made Astro Bot was also everywhere at the show – I hope its sales have reflected how brilliant it is. Continue reading...

Museum features consoles from 1983’s Famicom to 2017’s Switch, as well as honouring Nintendo’s pre-video-game era Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come for momijigari, the turning of the autumn leaves in the city’s picturesque parks. This autumn, however, there is a new draw: a Nintendo museum. The new attraction, which opens on Wednesday, is best described as a chapel of video game nostalgia. Upstairs, Nintendo’s many video game consoles, from 1983’s Famicom through 1996’s Nintendo 64 to 2017’s Switch, are displayed reverently alongside their most famous games. On the back wall, visitors can also peer at toys, playing cards and other artefacts from the Japanese company’s pre-video-game history, stretching back to its founding as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in 1889. Downstairs, there are interactive exhibits with comically gigantic controllers and floor-projected playing cards. Continue reading...

From playing Super Mario on a giant control to spotting Pikmin hiding in corners, my visit to this delightful museum in Kyoto offered up experience over education • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto, 100 years before the release of the Game Boy. Long before it was a video game company, it made toys and hanafuda cards adorned with scenes from nature, used to play several different games popular in Japan. By 1969, Nintendo had expanded its business to include western-style playing cards, and the company built a plant to manufacture them in southern Kyoto. Until 2016, the Uji Ogura Plant was a card factory and as a repairs centre for the company’s consoles. It has been turned into a Nintendo Museum, opening on 2 October, where the gaming giant’s entire history will be on display. Nintendo flew me to Kyoto to see the museum. Along with the Super Nintendo World theme park, at Universal Studios in Osaka, it will be a major draw for video game tourists in Japan. It’s laid out across two floors: upstairs, there is a gallery of Nintendo products, from playing cards through to the Nintendo Switch. Downstairs are the interactive exhibits, where you can play snatches of Nintendo games on comically gigantic controllers that require two people to operate and immerse yourself for a not-entirely-generous seven minutes in a NES, SNES or N64 game in the retro area. Or you can step into a re-creation of a 1960s Japanese home and whack ping-pong balls with a bat (the Ultra Machine batting toy was developed by Gunpei Yokoi, the inventor of the Game Boy, and released in 1967). Continue reading...