Update - 3/26 - Nier, Guwange, Zelda's Adventure, Front Mission update

Last year, cavia's Nier surprised everyone by being a damn fine piece of work, not only for being a classy action-RPG with bounding amounts of creativity, but for being a Japanese game that wasn't terribly written. As far as anyone can tell, it kinda flopped, partially due to lousy marketing and critics who totally misunderstood it, reasons which are all outlined in the article. I ended up getting about halfway through the game before I got distracted, but even putting it back in to take some screenshots, there's a certain dream-like quality to the game, a large part in due to the fantastic soundtrack.

Our Cave coverage is also expanding with a look at Guwange, which was released for the Xbox Live Arcade at the end of last year. It can be had for $10 and is most definitely worth it - I hadn't played a whole lot of it until this came out, even though it's been emulated in MAME for years, but it's probably one of Cave's most unique shooters.

Derboo is hard at work in the second part of his massive History of Korean Games feature. His latest entry is an extensive interview with Mirinae Software, one of the most prolific companies in the 90s.

This site has apparently become somewhat infamous for being one of the few places to defend the silly looking Zelda CDi games, a position I'm willing to take because, as the article says, most of the people up in arms have never actually played them. However, this only applies to The Wand of Gamelon and The Faces of Evil. Zelda's Adventure is a right old piece of garbage, and you can read here to find out why!

We're bringing back the Spotlight Articles for a bit, this time to update the Front Mission article, which includes a review of the recent Western-developed Front Mission Evolved. A lot of longtime fans blew their gasket when this was announced to leave behind its SRPG roots in favor of the ever-popular third person shooter genre, but the review treats it fairly, even though it's still underwhelming. It's not like a genre shift is without precedent, considering Front Mission: Gun Hazard for the Super Famicom was a side-scrolling platformer. I still haven't played Evolved, but I can understand why people are miffed, especially since Square-Enix neglected to bring Front Mission 5 here, despite being one of the best SRPGs of the last generation.