Never Ending Realm
14 years after Grandia III (PS2), and we never got Grandia IV. We might have to blame the aforementioned 3rd iteration of the franchise (I refuse to acknowledge Grandia Xtreme’s existence) for the death of the series. True, the JRPG genre in general, peaked in the late 90’s and early 00’s, then gradually declined back […]
Today’s throwback is none other than the legendary Final Fantasy VI. For about half a decade, the game was known as Final Fantasy III on the west, as Squaresoft had bypassed Final Fantasy II, III, and V in the US. Released in 1994, the Super Nintendo Japanese role-playing game has become one of the more […]
The Legend of Dragoon has been one of the strangest titles that I have ever reviewed. The Playstation Japanese Role-Playing game, released in the year 2000, isn’t a really a special RPG, but it is the one game that I felt was the definition of “Pedestrian” when I first reviewed it, and yet, somehow, it […]
The Golden Era of Japanese Role-Playing Games during the original PlayStation days produced many a great RPG on a consistent basis. It seemed then, that every month a new JRPG AAA title would arrive at store shelves for players to buy and immerse themselves for dozens of hours. During this period, in between the Final […]
Many will remember Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy VII (1997) as the first great Japanese Role Playing game for the PlayStation. However, a few months earlier, April 1997 to be exact, Wild Arms arrived on Sony’s debut system with a great JRPG experience for fans to enjoy. Wild Arms holds an 83 Gamerankings (The 90s Metacritic) rating. […]
The Legend of Zelda is one of the most successful video game series of all time. Here, I rank the series from the ‘worst’ (is there a bad Zelda game?) entry to the best entry. I’m obviously excluding the dreadful Phillips CD-i Zelda releases, as the creation rights were licensed to Phillips by Nintendo as […]
Game Arts Grandia II was released on December 2000 as a Dreamcast title. The game was the awaited sequel of 1997 (1999 on PS1) Sega Saturn’s Grandia, as such it was one of the most anticipated Dreamcast titles for RPG fans. The game offered a clear upgrade in graphics over its predecessor, and featured fully […]
Those of us who loved Chrono Trigger, and its – not so direct – sequel Chrono Cross, might never get to see a third game in Square’s most critically acclaimed series. However, Xenogears in some ways felt like a spiritual cousin of the legendary SNES title. Made by a team composed of many of the […]
Breath of the Wild if anything else is a sobering reminder that Nintendo still is in the top class of the development industry, and that the rest of the development world has been lucky that Nintendo since 2006 has been producing consoles that are a generation behind the competition thus officially placing its development teams […]
More than two decades ago, Final Fantasy VII was released in North America. The game achieved previously unseen levels of critical, and commercial success for a title on its genre. FFVII drove the blooming J-RPG genre into the mainstream, turning what was a mostly niche genre (as far triple A titles went) into the most […]