Review by Matt S. Crime Opera is a wildly ambitious project for a development team that wasn’t quite ready for it. This visual novel features 20-odd characters, a plot that shifts between six perspectives, and, thematically, is brutal. This is a story about crime families, with a patriarch that openly…
Read MoreBook review by Matt S. I have previously reviewed Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque, but with Out, she has solidified herself as my favourite modern Japanese author. Out was actually the first Kirino novel to be translated into English, and if you’ve not had the opportunity to read it yet, you should…
Read MoreBook review by Matt S. Have you heard of Higashino Keigo? If not, you’ve not delved deeply enough into Japanese crime fiction writing. Higashino has published something like 66 novels (and that doesn’t count his many short story collections), and of those, some 20 have been turned into television series’…
Read MoreBook review by Matt S. Matsumoto Seichō is one of Japan’s most prolific – and influential – crime fiction writers. Japanese crime fiction is one of the rare few areas where a good weighting of works have been translated into English (and other languages), and in many ways we can…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. A week ago the American Justice Department decided that it would be reinstating the federal use of capital punishment (the death penalty). While the majority of American states have never stopped using the death penalty, at a federal level that particular legal punishment had been dormant…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Jake Hunter is pretty popular in Japan, but the series is rarely localised into English. I haven’t played any of the handful that have been translated previously, but if the series is of the standard of Alternate Jake Hunter: Daedalus: The Awakening of Golden Jazz, then…
Read MoreBook review by Matt S. Published a little over a decade ago (2008), Minato Kanae’s Confessions was the book that immediately established her as one of Japan’s pre-eminent crime fiction writers. Like many of the best modern crime fiction works, Confessions isn’t so interested in figuring out whodunnit – that’s…
Read MoreLiterature by Matt S. Kirino Natsuo is one of the most important figures in modern Japanese literature – right up there with Murakami. Kirino’s writing isn’t exactly pleasant to read, and you’ll walk away from Grotesque feeling more than a little deflated, but the way she structures her writing, and…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Whoever managed to come up with the concept for Detective Pikachu deserves real respect for being a mad genius. You look at Pokemon, and everything the franchise has been over the years, and of all the spin-offs you could think of, the last that you would…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Chaos;Child is loosely related to one of the (if not the) greatest visual novels ever made, Steins;Gate. Developed by MAGES and 5pb, Chaos;Child also belongs to the Science Adventure Series from the development duo – a series of science fiction games that seek to greatly normalise…
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