Today I posted the Tail Concerto retrospective from GameSpite Quarterly 8, though I’m sorry to say it went up at 1UP, because that is often where I post my own work these days regardless of why it was originally written. Does this mean I’m a sell-out? Yeah, probably, sort of. But in this case, it seemed like appropriate symmetry, since we also published the first of Xseed’s localization diaries about Tail Concerto’s upcoming sequel, Solatorobo. And make no mistake; despite CyberConnect2 calling Solatorobo a “spiritual successor” to Tail Concerto or whatever, that was a total lie to trick Namco into funding the game’s development; it’s completely a sequel, to the point that the first game’s princess shows up about an hour in.

Anyway, I wrote a few pieces about why Solatorobo is fairly wonderful back when the Japanese version came out last fall. If you have some free time, you should re-read them to remind yourself to buy it. I’m not going to claim Solatorobo is a masterpiece or anything, but it really does exist at a certain delta between “freewheeling charm” and “production values” that is entirely too rare nowadays.