Keisuke Isobe

From Final Fantasy XVI to Guardians of the Galaxy rumors, we share our hopes, expectations, and dreams for Square Enix at E3 2021.

Two Final Fantasy superfans discuss the remake (why is everyone so hot?) and the series with a newbie.

Mango wins The Big House 9, and the Melee community rejoices. On Mango, Melee, and what it means to love a game that seems eternal and forever.

E3 2019 is officially over, y’all. Though the world’s biggest gaming expo came and went faster than Elon Musk swiping that 2B artwork, the conference left us with plenty in the way of announcements to dissect and games to fawn over. As with our pre-E3 2019 coverage a few weeks back, your favorite panel of dream chasers — David Silbert, Sam Martinelli, and Kei Isobe — will be doing a rapid-fire post-mortem on the best and worse of this year’s show. Easy peasy, Keanu Reevesy?

Ahead of E3 2019, several Punished Backlog writers compiled lists of predictions for each press conference. Who will win? Who will lose? Here are our initial thoughts.

The Book of Melee is the perfect primer for those interested in the story of the competitive scene, from triumphs to turmoils, over the course of 18 years.

PAX East has come and gone. In the days following the trade show, The Punished Backlog’s Kei Isobe sat down with fellow writer David Silbert to discuss the good, bad, and ugly of this year’s show.

Super Smash Bros. Melee and Ultimate Can, and Should, Sustain Each Other Going Forward Genesis 6, the latest in the long-running Super Smash Bros. super-major series, came to a close at 3 a.m. Eastern on…

The Allure of AAA Pulls Me Back In 2018 was an atypical year for me in media consumption. I took a bit of a sabbatical from playing games for the first half of 2018 and…

Meet the Newest Generation of Platform Fighters The “platform fighter” genre has existed for decades, even if the specific phrase to describe them didn’t reach mass relevance until years later. For the longest time, it…