Fantasy

The fear was reasonable. It was a fear I also carried. Uncertainty about whether or not I should tell the story now, and whether or not it was right to air what many consider family secrets, crept into the back of my mind. But I knew this…

When it came time to make Metaphor: ReFantazio, developer Atlus had a guiding principle: make a video game that was a culmination of all the beloved RPGs the company had made before it. “We decided to challenge the fantasy genre,” director…

One assurance of navigating the vast expanse of social media is that The Discourse never stops. It's: death, taxes, and never-ending discourse. Mass consensus is all but extinct. More than anything, fandoms dictate so much of conversation…

I’m a guy “in real life,” but I’ve always played female characters in video games. More and more people say this means I’m either secretly gay/trans or a total creep. Am I allowed to just prefer it? —Gender PlayerDear Player,It sounds like…

There’s no more important death in video games than that of Final Fantasy VII’s flower girl, Aerith. In the 1997 game, Aerith meets her end at the hands of Sephiroth, who brutally stabs her in front of the game’s hero, Cloud Strife, and by…

1899, a science fiction series from Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, creators of the hit TV show Dark, premiered on Netflix in November 2022. TV producer Ruairi Carroll enjoyed the show’s mysterious characters and storyline. “Whatever way…

Several people are typing, and they’re all saying Netflix’s Leave the World Behind is wildly prescient. The movie, directed by Sam Esmail, opens on a world where communication has been knocked out following a cyberattack. And earlier this…

Squander enough time on TikTok these days and the signs of creative deceleration are everywhere.“Try-hard” slang is spreading. Competitive aging is a thing. Classic episodes of The Sopranos are fed to you in polished 25-second bites. Last…

Carol Pinchefsky has written almost 2,000 articles about geek culture for outlets such as Forbes.com, Playboy.com, and Syfy.com. Over the past 20 years, she’s watched fantasy and science fiction grow from a niche interest to a massive…

The reboot cycle that began with 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake was a creative risk. It transformed a single PlayStation game into a trilogy meant to retell one of the most celebrated RPGs of all time. Remake was a slower, more elaborate…