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Throwback Bit Thursday is a weekly Thursday feature on Never Ending Realm. Read all of NER’s #TBT articles here!
Before I get started, I want to state that playing 2000’s Summoner over the past few days reminded me of two things: How subpar the PS2’s launch lineup was, and how far away Western RPG developers were behind their Japanese counterparts 20 years ago. How times have changed. Role-Playing Games were Essential to Console…
This week, I reached the Super Mario Odyssey credits for the second time since 2018. The first time around, I mainly rushed through the game trying to get just enough moons to reach the finish line. It was a fun experience, and I greatly enjoyed Nintendo’s technical mastery of the Switch hardware at the time….
To be honest, Resident Evil 5 had tough shoes to fill. Resident Evil 4 was seen as a watershed moment for the series, and its unprecedented critical and commercial success paved the way for the massive wave of hype surrounding the franchise’s 5th entry. Resident Evil 4 shook the very foundations of the 3rd…
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is my favorite Castlevania game of all time. Yes, I know, blasphemy! But keep in mind that I have always preferred 3-D over 2-D gaming, and that Castlevania 64, despite all its flaws, has been the Castlevania game that I have played the most. Castlevania is a series that never quite got…
The dream is over…for Lunar fans who awaited a 3rd entry in the beloved 16-bit era series which earned worldwide renown when it was ported to the PlayStation in the late 1990s. Sean Lowe, the man behind the efforts to revitalize the series received (reportedly) a message from Game Arts earlier this month confirming that…
While the Nintendo 64 is my favorite console of all time, I would be doing myself and our readers a disservice if I told them that Paper Mario was my favorite N64 game. Heck, it wasn’t even my favorite RPG on the system. While critics raved about Paper Mario 22 years ago, I never found…
This week, Final Fantasy VII turned 25 years old (Japanese release), and it seems like the perfect moment to think back and reflect on how big a game it was for both the Japanese Role-Playing genre and the PlayStation’s emergence as the dominant home console player in the mid to late 1990s. Squaresoft Never…
The PlayStation 3 was an interesting machine, to say the least. It was a tech marvel when it first launched back in 2006 as it featured Blue-Ray playback right out of the box and a “cell” CPU that was, at least on paper, state of the art. However, the system’s performance in actual game…
Before anyone complains about Dark Souls not being ‘Throwback” material, know that it has been more than 10 years since Dark Souls was first unleashed upon the gaming world, and that it was released two console generations ago on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. What made me consider the game for today’s weekly section…
Console generations come and go. Every new generation brings forth a feeling of excitement and anticipation that is hard to describe in words. Bigger, prettier, smarter, and better games are expected with each subsequent leap in technology. In the year 2000, I welcomed with open arms the PlayStation 2 as a replacement to my old…