After the first two episodes made a strong start to Telltale’s Game of Thrones series, episode three saw the story slow to a crawl, as most characters encountered little action and excitement. Episode four, Sons of Winter, fares a bit better for three of the playable characters, with one notable exception in King’s Landing. Still though, with two episodes to go, it appears Telltale is capable of righting the ship and delivering a strong finale, thanks to the legwork performed here in episode 4.

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Just Cause 3 has a simple ethos at its heart: every moment in a video game can be made better with an explosion, and the more explosions the better. Just Cause 3 is absolutely loaded with things that blow up, and somehow each explosion feels more visceral and beautiful than the last. But like any Hollywood blockbuster that relies on pretty special effects to wow an audience, the overall package can seem kind of hollow once the smoke has cleared. Just Cause 3 has a few more tricks up its sleeve to complement its bevy of explosions, but the series still has a ways to go before it can measure up with the best open-world games on the market.

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Even before it was released, Final Fantasy XIII was already being both criticized and defended by a divided fanbase. Development for the game began in 2004, only a year after Final Fantasy developer Square was acquired by Enix. The game was revealed at E3 in 2006, where Square Enix also announced that it would be just the first in a series of games built around the same engine. Originally envisioned as a PS2 title, Final Fantasy XIII was bumped to the PS3 and delayed when it became clear that Final Fantasy XII would barely make it to the PS2 before the PS3’s launch date. A further delay came when Square Enix decided to release Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360 in addition to the PS3, and longtime series fans began to complain. Their patience, spoiled by a run from 1997-2002 in which Square had churned out Final Fantasy VII through XI (and the acclaimed Tactics spinoff to boot), was strained. Many people had already gone sour on the franchise after Final Fantasy XII, which saw the series transition from command-based to AI-based combat. When Final Fantasy XIII finally arrived in the West in 2010, several pockets of a frustrated fanbase tore it to pieces, criticizing everything from the story to the characters to game’s utter lack of nonlinear exploration. The one aspect of the game met with nearly universal praise was the battle system – and even that consensus compliment came with the caveat that the first twenty hours of gameplay were an elongated tutorial on how to use it. Most rational people agreed that Final Fantasy XIII wasn’t a straight-up bad game; it was just a disappointment in a variety of ways, particularly given its development timeline and the strong legacy of the Final Fantasy series. To make matters worse for Square Enix, they were on the hook for two sequels to the game after investing so much time and money in the Final Fantasy XIII engine. Development on Final Fantasy XIII-2 began immediately, and the design team was painfully aware of the previous game’s perceived shortcomings.

It’s no coincidence, then, that Final Fantasy XIII-2 feels like a self-aware direct response to all of the complaints levied against Final Fantasy XIII. But in addressing so many flaws, Final Fantasy XIII-2 swings far enough the other way to create a few new ones.

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The ongoing cultural conversation over video games and their place in our culture is a fascinating one with many separate components. One of the less interesting topics that seems to come up constantly is whether or not video games can be considered “art.” I mean, of course they can be! But not all of them should be. Most probably shouldn’t be, but then, the same can be said, broadly, of most movies, most photographs, most drawings, and most human creations in general. I don’t want to spend much time defining my stance on this one, but art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder – and so is quality. For instance, I consider Braid one of the most memorable and thematically complex games I’ve ever played. Soulja Boy, meanwhile, gives it high praise from an entirely different perspective. (Watch him do so here. Seriously.) Now, granted, I’d have linked to that video for just about any reason, but my real point here is that whether or not a video game has any artistic merit doesn’t really matter as much as whether or not the game is any fun to play.

Advance Wars isn’t art, nor does it pretend to be; instead, it’s just a confidently great strategy game.

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What makes for a good mystery? It’s an inherently subjective question with no clear cut answer, but general guidelines have existed for as long as the mystery genre itself. At the most basic level, the goal when creating a fictional mystery is to entertain an audience by inviting that audience to solve the mystery for themselves alongside the detectives in the story. In practice, this involves striking a delicate balance when it comes to respecting the audience’s ability to reason, to intuit, and to problem solve. Make the answer too obvious, and there’s no fun to be had in cracking the case. On the other hand, if the conclusion can only be reached by making drastic assumptions or leaps of faith, an audience may feel cheated out of a satisfying resolution. Of course, the willingness and ability to solve any mystery varies drastically from person to person. A conclusion that one person arrives at effortlessly may not even be a consideration for someone else. At the very least, ideally, an audience should have all the same information as the mystery’s protagonist. That way, even those who couldn’t put everything together on their own can still respect the paths of deduction once they’ve been revealed. Not everyone will try to figure everything out as the story progresses, but even those who are merely along for the ride will feel cheated out of a good story if the resolution comes entirely out of left field or if the narrator withheld any amount of essential information. Perhaps above all else, everything should make sense, from the perpetrator’s motive down to the very laws of nature. There’s no foolproof way to create memorable mystery fiction, but most good mystery fiction abides by these general guidelines.

As mystery fiction, the Professor Layton games are absolutely terrible. As video games, they’re still largely enjoyable – and The Last Specter is no exception to either of these rules.

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Back in the early ’90s, when Capcom began to develop a Mega Man game for the new and impressive Super Nintendo console, the company initially chose to ditch the franchise’s familiar protagonist entirely. Instead of merely sprucing up the look and feel of the happy little blue android, lead character designer Keiji Inafune opted to give Mega Man a full-scale redesign for the upcoming Mega Man X. The result was a substantially more aggressive-looking battle robot with red armor, a horned helmet, and long blond hair. Inafune was pleased with his creation, but ultimately decided that this new character was too different from the original Mega Man to serve as the new face of the franchise. So Inafune tasked another designer with creating a Mega Man X more in line with the legacy protagonist. Rather than scrapping his own design, however, Inafune doubled down on his fierce-looking red automaton and decided that he should serve as X’s superior, mentor, and idol.

Thus, Zero was born, and he was born a total badass.

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