My preferences in video games

I consider myself to be an all around gamer, playing a wide variety of games with only a couple exceptions. I love variety and new discoveries: discovering new mechanics, new powers, exploring new worlds, seeing new characters and experiencing new stories. As such, RPGs constitute my favorite genre hands down. Always big new worlds filled with secrets to explore, battle through with different characters, mechanics and powers, specializations (I love making builds) and stories, sub-stories, etc… While I do appreciate a lot of western RPG series such as Dragon Age, Mass Effect, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout and the Witcher (I so love the Witcher…) I tend to prefer J-RPGs (I’m a Japan fan after all) such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Dark Souls, Nioh, and so on… I do love all types of RPGs, be it classic turn based ones to action RPGs, tactical RPGs or MMORPGs. I especially love japanese chara design and OSTs in those games and the over the top powers you get to use that are both ridiculous and spectacular. I love the feeling of progression in those games and seeing as you start out with just rags and a wooden sword and end up saving the world within the week.

Right next comes the survival horror genre. I’m a big horror movie fan and I love anything paranormal/ghost/undead related. I do not believe in any of them but I’m fond of the atmosphere these create. even in RPGs my favorite places and often the paranormal bits such as Doom Train in final Fantasy 6. As I crave this atmosphere I play games such as Resident Evil, The Evil Within, Deadspace, The Forbidden Siren, etc… I just can’t get enough exploring haunted places and defending myself against hordes of undeads. Playing those characters lost in these deadly places fighting for survival against odds out of this world is just so thrilling for me.

Fighting games are next. Like many, I discovered this genre with Street fighter 2 at the time and got sucked into it pretty much instantly. I was pretty much a first for me to play against my friends instead of with them, and it was pretty thrilling. I spent hours and hours fighting against them and had lots of fun out of it. Later with the advent of internet and online features, it became a great battlefield around the world and sometimes I feel the urge to launch of these and go fight it out with people out there. It never gets boring.

To sum up the rest of the types of games I enjoy, I would say any kind of beat’em up (I used to play them a lot in arcade centers: Final Fight, Knights of the Round, Cadillac and dinosaurs, Alien vs Predator, or more recently Devil May Cry, God of War, etc…), action platformers (Mega Man, Castlevania,…), third person shooters (Uncharted, Tomb Raider,…) and all kinds of fun little retro games.

To be honest, I play almost everything, except sports games or anything vehicle based (I hate driving in games). I’m also not fond of FPS and almost never play these with a few exceptions like Borderlands or Metro.

How this website works for me

First of all I would like to get something out of the way: I am NOT a professional by any means. Not a professional gamer, not a professional critic, or writer, or teacher. I consider this website a fanzine of sorts where I will be free to play and talk about my passion and make it evolve as I please. I’m a big video game lover, as well as animes, mangas, Japan in general and the japanese language, and this website is a platform I’m having fun making and I want it to remain this way. As such, I do not want to force myself to play games I don’t want to, or talk about games I don’t feel like talking about (or at least I won’t go as far as writing a whole article on such a game).

I have called my game articles “reviews” for lack of a better word for now, but they are not professional reviews: they are about my own personal experience with those games, and what I liked or didn’t like about them. I do set ratings on graphics, audio, etc… But it’s for fun: I loved those magazines in that kind of format as a kid and I want to create the same kind of atmosphere here. So please don’t take these ratings at face value, they are not objective, they are my opinion and how I felt about a particuliar game. I will leave the comment section open on every article as I would love to hear some constructive opinions about how everyone feels about those games as well. Any opinion is valid as long as it’s constructive and polite. My goal is to make a website with a nice mood and community if possible, and while I value every opinion even if they’re opposite to mine, I will of course delete/ban any toxic comments. Critics and trolls are welcomed, toxicity isn’t. Finally, I wish to only talk about games I’ve actually completed (100% whenever possible) so I won’t ever be writing anything about a game I only played for a couple of hours. I’m a trophy hunter at heart, so finishing games 100% is something I tend to do a lot. If anyone wishes to check which games I have completed (at least for the ps3 and ps4) you’re welcomed to check my PSN profile page (the link is at the top of this page in my profile summary).

For the Japan section, I wish to talk about various things, such as my experiences when I went to Tokyo for a month, japanese culture (especially folklore), movies and more. I will also try my hand at making some very specific “lessons” in the school section where I will try to teach what I know about japanese and how to use it for gaming, and probably give some vocabulary useful in games to get started for anyone curious about the language and willing to try playing some games in japanese. I love this language and it will be a great opportunity for me to practice again and keep learning as well. It will not be “professional” once more, but I believe learning with things you love (video games and mangas in this case) is the ultimate method to learn, much better than a boring classroom.

Finally, I am alone making this website and It’s my first time making one. I am not experienced so I will have technical limitations as I’m learning how to do things, as well as limited funds. So please do not expect anything above amateur level until I get better at it if I have the opportunity. Feedback is always welcomed.