If Octopath Traveler were a book, it wouldn’t be a novel but a collection of short stories. The game is not your typical epic JRPG, ambitious and epic, but it’s very modest in scope, telling stories that never intertwine to form a big narrative. Nevertheless, it excels in what it sets out to do, presenting a beautiful world while discussing …

A society where just a handful of people have control over the transmission of information, where history is being constantly revised to hide the nature of uncomfortable events, where certain gestures and thoughts are subject to severe punishment – not because they’re harmful to other people, but to the status quo –, and where the government doesn’t hesitate to violently …

The novella Carmilla, written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, presents a female vampire who begins a peculiar relationship with her victim: instead of treating the young Laura just as prey, Carmilla tries to befriend her. For the female vampire, sucking blood is not enough; she must enter her victim’s private life, becoming a part of it. However, that intimacy, homosexual …

The Lovecraft Project: Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding. The plan is to write a few …

This article contains spoilers for Octopath Traveler (as I hope you would have guessed). “The game is not your typical epic JRPG, ambitious and epic, but is very modest in scope, telling stories that never intertwine to form a big narrative.” When I wrote my review of Octopath Traveler I thought this fragment merited a more in-depth analysis. After all, …

Kingdom Hearts is an ambitious crossover between Disney and Final Fantasy that, much ironically, is at its best when it’s not covering either brand, but being its own weird thing. The protagonist is a boy named Sora,  who lives on an island and dreams of traveling with his friends, Kairi and Riku, to discover new places. One day, they start …

A Dance with Dragons, the fifth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire,  despite being one of the more concise volumes in the series, containing virtually only three main plots – which helps to move the narrative forward –, still suffers from the remnants of the bad planning surrounding the previous book, A Feast for Crows. A Dance with …

If it is said a reader lives a thousand lives before they die, how about an author? Telling the life story of Julian Carax, a mysterious writer, and that of Daniel Sempere, the eleven-year-old boy who picks, from the labyrinthine shelves of a forgotten library, exactly the last book written by Carax, The Shadow of the Wind is a novel …

A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in A Song of Ice and Fire, was released five years after A Storm of Swords, following a troubled writing process. George R. R. Martin first decided that the plot would jump five years in time, which would allow the children and dragons to grow. However, long after he had produced enough material, …

Zero Time Dilemma, the third and final entry in the great adventure series Zero Escape, has a narrative structure as complex as those of previous games, although it introduces less interesting characters and ends with a couple of questionable twists that don’t survive retrospection. The game begins when nine people wake up trapped in a cell and are approached by …