Video game reviews, fan fiction, gaming news, and more! Since 2003. We especially love JRPGs, RPGs and the best of the rest. Never Ending Realm: Where your favorite games live forever!
When we think expensive retro games, for some strange reason, Nintendo 64 games do not come to mind. This is true, despite the fact that just last year a sealed copy of Mario 64 was sold for a whooping 1.5 million dollars at an auction. Yeah, that’s way more expensive than ‘kidney’ money. This week,…
Namco’s Tales series is popular these days thanks to the recent (successful) release of Tales of Arise. However, JRPG fans have been around this series for a quarter century. Despite the long running nature of the series, the PlayStation pair of “Destiny” titles both remain the most legendary and hard to find, making them “kidney”…
When we think about old classic turn-based Japanese Role-Playing games, Final Fantasy Tactics and the Shining Force series come to mind. A game that is not often mentioned, and it should be (mentioned) among those great titles, is Dragon Force. Dragon Force is a tactical Sega RPG. It was published by Sega in Japan, but…
The original PlayStation was the home to many great Japanese Role-Playing games. Some of these games (Wild Arms, Suikoden) were modestly successful on their PS debuts and spawned franchises before dying off in the mid 2000s. Today’s subject in the weekly “Games that will cost you a kidney” series is a game that didn’t have…
The Sega Saturn is, at least to me, the most legendary of the 32/64-bit era machines. The reason? I didn’t own one, and I only know a single person who did. Furthermore, this person lost the console two decades ago. As a JRPG fan, it was painful that the Sega Saturn was also the home…
Another week, and another ill-fated Working Design’s PlayStation 1 release. Vanguard Bandits was a decent JRPG/Strategy game based on stereotypical anime mech troupes. Vanguard Bandits had a little more ‘flash’ than most Japanese strategy games of the time. It featured multiple story events with different ramifications given the choice of the protagonist, and consequently, multiple…
Thousand Arms, like other games on this weekly feature, is not prohibitively expensive. If you are willing to gamble with your money on “resurfaced discs”, you can get the game on Amazon for about $189.00. This (the price point) is a whopping $169.00 more than I paid for my physical copy of the game about…
Editor’s Note: We have read your comments from our previous “Games That Will Cost You a Kidney” features, and most have been positive, and thoughtful. However, some of our readers have complained that a few of these games “do not cost a literal kidney” because they could be found for much less than $600 in…
Konami’s Suikoden is a respected franchise within the Japanese role-playing game genre. The series has been dead in the west for about a decade and a half as its last title Suikoden V was release in 2006 to little fanfare. As it often happens with dead role-playing game series, its older titles gain monetary…
The Dreamcast’s greatest Japanese role-playing game, and perhaps the best JRPG of the 2000s, is not as costly as other entries on this weekly series. However, purchasing a working copy (with case and booklets) of Skies of Arcadia remains a considerable investment in both of its versions. Skies of Arcadia the Greatest JRPG of…