Joshua Rivera

The Opening To Vagrant Story Still Holds The Heck Up

On a whim last night, I downloaded a copy of Vagrant Story to my PlayStation Vita (may it never, ever break). It’s one of those games I missed out on but always meant to go back to, especially since I’ve been digging into director Yasumi Matsuno’s back catalogue lately. Having played Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics…

Pa’lante, Kotaku

There are a lot of reasons to not write about video games. For most of my career, I’ve written for mainstream publications unconcerned with the games industry. I was offered a job at Kotaku because I had figured out a way to do games criticism outside of the sphere of games journalism. I rarely had…

Actually, Legend Of Mana Is Good

As one of the few proud PlayStation Vita holdouts (chants: Vita means life! It only rhymes with wife!) I spent a lot of my holiday travel time playing old PlayStation JRPGs I’ve amassed for $6 a pop. While it can’t compare to staying up late in front of a boxy old TV, it’s been wonderful…

The Year In Title Screens

I’m the biggest sucker for a good PRESS START screen. For all the many hours I spend with a game, I reserve a lot of fondness for those first moments before I even push a button. Final Fantasy X-2, Persona 3 FES, Chakan: The Forever Man—I’m sure they’re all games I’d remember even if I…

Every Game Should Let You Skip To The Side Quests

During my holiday travels, I’ve been messing around with the Switch port of The Witcher 3, partly out of morbid curiosity and partly because I’ve never actually played its two expansions. Much like the Complete Editions on other platforms, the Switcher lets you jump straight to the DLC by generating a save in which the…

I Can’t Get The Song From Netflix’s The Witcher Out Of My Head

I’ve always been fascinated by Christmas music. It’s incredibly odd that we have a whole genre of popular music dedicated to the last month of the year, some of it awful, some of it charming, most of it involving sleigh bells. I like the oddball tunes most of all: “Last Christmas” by Wham!, “Don’t Shoot…

If You Read This Website, You Should Watch Serenity

I love year-end season, when everyone is looking back on the last 12 months and figuring out what they loved most or least—or more importantly, catching up on a few things they missed out on. Today, I’d like to bring to your attention a movie that you may have missed, one that I’d argue is…

The Decade In Five Games

It’s true: Five is a ridiculous number for summing up a decade’s worth of video games. It’s far too small. One can’t even put together an already-insufficient list of one game per year with that little real estate. You should know, then, that this is a different kind of list. This isn’t a list of…

Axiom Verge is getting a sequel. Axiom Verge 2 was just announced during Nintendo’s Indie World showcase, and is coming Fall of 2020. It looks….like Axiom Verge! Hooray!

Actually, It’s Good When Video Games Start With Your Character Waking Up

A whole lot of video games begin with your character waking up. It’s one of those things that you can’t stop noticing once you start. Most Zelda games start this way, as well as any number of classic role-playing games like Chrono Trigger. The awakening scene in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a popular meme.…

I Love Having My Own Spaceship In Video Games (And In Real Life)

Here’s a good way to win me over in both real life and in video games: Give me a damn spaceship. If you did, you’d find that the majority of my complaints against your considerable flaws (we all have them, except Toad, who is the best) would disappear. Because I now have a spaceship, and…

Outer Wilds Has Made Exploration In Other Games Boring

When it comes to video games, “exploration” is kind of a bullshit word, a sexier way of saying hey you’re gonna be doing a lot of running and stuff. “And stuff,” in this context, can be climbing, walking, riding a horse, swimming, or what have you. All the basic ways you get from here to…

Life Is Strange 2 Is A Heartbreakingly Accurate Brotherhood Simulator

I’ve been playing a lot of Life Is Strange 2 lately. While I’m mostly doing this to catch up for the final episode dropping on December 3, I also find that it’s a very good game to play around this time of year—a slow, soothing contrast to the harried pace of the holiday season. It’s…

Stop Wasting My Time And Just Give Me The Double Jump

Double jumps are a wonderful bit of video game nonsense, something that appears in game after game because they are, honestly, pretty cool. Double jumps, as my colleague Heather Alexandra wrote, make video games better. I have never once played a game and thought, this would be better without a double jump. I have, however,…

The Nintendo Switch version of Alien: Isolation will arrive December 5th. The port will come with all 7 DLC add-ons, so get ready to bring your pal the Xenomorph with you on all your holiday travels.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order: The Kotaku Review

There hasn’t been a better time to be a Star Wars fan. As this is being written, the ninth and final entry in the saga that began with George Lucas’ 1977 film Star Wars is one month away from release, concluding a story over forty years in the making. The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star…

The Best Way To Play Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Is On Hard

One of the biggest surprises in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, out today from developer Respawn, is how much its approach to combat takes cues from the blueprint established by FromSoftware’s action role-playing games. If you’ve played Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, you know what to expect: Melee fights that…

Fallen Order Takes Star Wars Music In A Fun New Direction

No one can really bullshit their way through Star Wars.The Star Wars universe is one of the most fully-realized and obsessed over fictional settings. It’s also one of the most tightly managed, with an astonishing level of minutiae known by both franchise stewards and fans. The engines and blueprints of starships, droid models—you name it,…

I Think I’ve Been Bullied Into Getting A Pokémon Game

For most of my life, I have not played Pokémon games, and I’ve been fine with that. Like a lot of people my age, I was swept up in Pokémania and loved Red/Blue and later, Gold/Silver, but after that, I just sort of moved on. Pokémon was my gateway to the wider world of Japanese…

It’s Amazing That I Ever Finished My First Hardcore RPG

Inspired by the recent 10-year anniversary of Dragon Age: Origins, I decided to revisit the BioWare role-playing game for kicks. I loved the game when I played through it in late 2009 and early 2010. It was my first BioWare RPG—I didn’t have a gaming PC growing up, and I generally came to a lot…