Hand of Fate 2 plays nothing like any other Role-playing game I have encountered, yet very clearly is a Role-playing game. The depth of its combat mechanics and the variations that it layers atop the foundations of its progression and narrative structure are smart and nuanced. The way it challenges the player to continuously achieve and succeed while tackling its chapters is commendable. The difficulty present in its scenarios is intense and unyielding. These phrases could be applied to a number of different titles, and this has something to do with the nature of personality in video games.

January 11 th was the night of the first in-depth press conference for the Nintendo Switch, and I remember jokingly telling my friends at the time that I would likely hold off on buying the new system until Monolith Soft announced their first title. Imagine my surprise when I saw the first, bare-bones teaser trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (XC2) that very same evening, with a tentative release date of 2017 attached. I reined in my expectations in the months to come, knowing full-well how XCX had taken such a long time to develop, and how little of this new title we had seen. News that the original soundtrack had just finished recording before E3 did not give me much hope, but the game would be featured there and given a release date in the same holiday time-frame as XCX. Shocked and now enthralled, I began to listen more intently to how the game's mechanics would work and play. While the Treehouse demo was informative, it had only a few instances of exceptional pl...