Akiba's Trip: Undead and Undressed is fun while it lasts. Though it is not for everyone, and though there is much more that could have been done to make the parody theme stronger, if you are willing to check your brain at the door, there is a good time to be had here.

The pacey, stylish, and colourful action, complemented with the neat strategy elements and interesting - albeit high-energy narrative, combine to make The Princess Guide quite unlike the other JRPGs out there.

Goblin Slayer is a perfectly adequate tactics JRPG that people who have nostalgia for the genre back on the PlayStation will have a particular fondness for. Mileage may be slightly better for the fans of the anime, but even then I think the big problem this game has is that it’s very superficial and shows very little interest in making any kind of statement or point. In other words, it plays exactly like an ‘anime tie-in’ game, and nothing more or less than that.

It’s a good game if you’re fully caught up with Gundam lore, but even casual fans might struggle to get along with this one.

Necropolis is best taken as a satire. It’s not perfect in that role, but it’s good fun nonetheless, and a healthy foil to the kind of experiences that have become so in-demand with the success of the Souls games. If you’re able to get the full complement of four players together, you’re in for some classically entertaining and self-aware dungeon crawling fun.

Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers biggest problem is that there are so many more memorable JRPGs available on Nintendo Switch. It's a sweet little entry-level game, and is refreshingly brief in length and scope. It also has a streamlined, nearly retro approach to its combat, and it has fun with its time travel theme. It might not be particularly profound, but it is sweet and cheerful and has a really good soul.

Hiragana Pixel Party is a game with an identity crisis – it’s too shallow to be a serious learning tool but it’s too serious about learning to be just fun. It’s on a console with more than a few proper rhythm games which feel more intuitive to play, and honestly you’ll pick up about as much Japanese from this game as you would while playing Project Diva with dual language subtitles on. I would have loved it to be more ambitious, and to find more ways to be a useful language acquisition tool, but as of now it’s only useful to players who want to learn just hiragana and katakana.

One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows is aimed firmly at the target audience of games such as Jump Force. It finds subtle ways to translate One Punch Man’s comical lore into gameplay but forgets to polish the central experience before padding it out with filler. There’s a respectable degree of fanservice here, but little to see for casual fans. The silver-lining is in the anime aesthetics, which make the game worth a second glance for those on the fence.

The console can do much better than Drive.Club Unlimited 2. This is just unacceptable.

In theory I would love a game like Fossil Fighters, but while I was willing to forgive the original on the Nintendo DS as a good-but-flawed new IP, by now the game should have a far more refined identity by now. There's still potential in Fossil Fighters, but the series needs to head back to the drawing board for a thorough rethink.

A resounding success as both an example of the genre and a homage to everything that makes it fun.

The problem McDroid has is that it really doesn’t offer anything that we haven’t actually experienced in a game before, and for a while now the consensus seems to be that people are bored with the tower defence genre.

Forged of Blood is ambitious well beyond its means, and it has so many systems at play at once that there are moments where, mechanically, they fall down. Thematically, however, it’s a gorgeous blend of complementary fantasy genres and approaches, and it's done differently. We need to see more original and different games being made, and it’s great to see something of this vision and presentation coming out of emerging game development nations like Indonesia.

So we’ve got a game that has zero respect for aesthetic traditions, gameplay that is no more than a shallow grind, and a game about Japanese demons that somehow fails to be interesting to a guy that has a library shelf filled with books about yokai, yurei, oni and the rest. What an intolerable disgrace this is to video games as an art form.

The House of the Dead is a classic and monumentally important video game. I didn’t even bat an eyelid when this popped up on the eShop. Even knowing that as a Forever Entertainment project it probably wasn’t going to be all that, my fierce loyalty to the brand caused me to buy this instantly. As I wrote in the introduction to this review, however, The House of the Dead Remake makes Uwe Boll’s film seem like a masterpiece by comparison. At least Boll had the good sense to put gratuitous B-genre exploitation nudity and unintentionally hilarious directing in his film. His film was a thing you could enjoy drunk. You play this game and you’ll just jump straight to the hangover.

The game is delightfully odd and will absolutely make you laugh at least a handful of times. Unfortunately, the overwhelming lack of care put into some stuff that modern developers really shouldn't be getting wrong is noticable.

Iro Hero ambitiously seeks to reinterpret polarity switching shooters. Baffling design choices render it alienating even to seasoned shoot ‘em up fans, however. The blueprint for a clever shooter is here and it’s possible the developers will rectify that base game with patches and updates, but the Iro Hero of today does not reflect that lofty potential.

While I do admire the attempt to give players the power fantasy of playing as a guy so utterly, brutally powerful that he can calmly walk through a bullet ballet, Gungrave G.O.R.E burns its goodwill far too quickly and from there it’s too exhausting to bother with.

Wayward characterisation, however, Aegis is genuine fun, and a genuine twist on a very staid genre.

I just didn’t expect it could be this bad. Dark Alliance is a functionally broken product. When enemies simply ignore you as you carve their health down to zero, when there’s so little to the game that that’s all you’re doing, and when the multiplayer experience is only superior because it’s a chance to share the misery with someone else, some passable graphics and one neat checkpointing system aren't anywhere near enough to redeem this game. This is the poorest handling of a license since Superman 64.

While this means in total the game offers 60 puzzles I felt while playing it that I could play the game for much longer. However the game's story been told in cut scenes throughout the game, and I don’t think that could have been presented as well with a longer game. Perhaps we can get more content in a sequel.

Kemco produces JRPGs on a budget that are designed to give people a momentary throwback to the 16-bit era of the genre, and while I don't expect anything mind blowing when I do go into these games, I find things this soulless and unimaginative very, very trying indeed.

As much fun as it is to play, the sad irony of Mugen Souls Z is that it is best played by people who hadn't experienced the original, but the only people that could possibly be interested in the game must have played the original.

The game doesn’t stand up especially well by itself, and the Remaster has only addressed the superficial issues with the DS original.

The next step for Big Ant would be to start capturing the nuances of the sport and convert excellent ball-to-ball action to give us the full match experience, when events that happened in the 10th over can impact on how bowlers, batters, and the crowd itself behave in the 40th. If Big Ant can get there, make it feel like tactics matter and results are less pre-determined and arbitrary, and then they will produce a cricket game that will finally move from the cusp to sit alongside EA, Sony and 2K’s sporting titles in offering something that truly understands and captures the spirit of the sport.

There’s also the problem of the game’s lore, which has signs of potential but is lacking in its execution.

Its simplistic combat and dull mission structures mean it quickly runs out of steam for anything other than quick bursts of play, and the Switch has plenty of games that can fill that need in a far more compelling way.

There are two endings to Theseus, though either way the game itself isn’t that long. It does tell the story it wanted to, though, and does so in a comprehensive enough way that I wasn’t left wondering. It’s a crafty little proof-of-concept and experiment in making VR work in the context of a third person adventure experience. It’s a little limited for what I ultimately want VR to deliver, but it’s worthwhile nonetheless.