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…
Tag: JRPG
JRPG stands for Japanese Role-Playing Game. This unique genre of game combines the Western RPG or Role-Playing Game genre first popularized by Dungeons and Dragons with Eastern storytelling and cultural references often seen in anime or manga. JRPGs are almost exclusively made in Japan.
Read all of NER’s articles about JRPGs here!
Throwback Bit Thursday: Alundra, More Than Just a Zelda Clone
Go ahead, enter a gaming forum, and search for an action RPG discussion. The Legend of Zelda Series will usually feature a prominent role coupled with more modern titles such as Dark Souls and The Witcher 3. One game, that few, if any, mention is 1997’s PlayStation’s Alundra. Alundra is a wonderfully crafted 2-D Action…
Throwback Bit Thursday: Grandia II
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…
Kitase Doesn’t Confirm or Deny If FFVIIR’s Ending Changes Story Going Forwards, FFVIIR-2 Development Continues
One only needs to read social media comments to see that one of the biggest points of contention in regards to the Final Fantasy VII Remake and its future installments, is its ‘weird’ ending (in an already weird re-telling of the first section (Midgar) of the original Final Fantasy VII). It can be inferred by…
The Rise and Fall of Japanese Role-Playing Games (JRPGs)
Before we start, let us make one thing clear: Japanese Role-Playing Games are not dead. The genre never died, its games are everywhere around us in portable machines, mobile phones and in-home consoles. The word ‘demise’ in reference to the JRPG genre is more a description of the genre’s current state in comparison to its…
Throwback Bit Thursday: Final Fantasy VII Could Have Been Xenogears
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…
Nintendo’s Switch is the Biggest Winner of the Pandemic’s Video Game Sales Boom
While the effects of the Pandemic and the subsequent worldwide lockdowns hurt world economies and many industries a few have seen growth, in some cases exponentially. The Video Games Industry had one of the biggest surges in sales ever recorded for a month of March in it history. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One sales grew…
The Top Ten Greatest Final Fantasy Games of All-Time
The Final Fantasy series has been the torch bearer for Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPGs) since the 90’s (at least in the Western markets), and consequently, has spawned a long running series with 16 numbered entries accompanied by a number of spin offs based on the property. This top ten will do away with the…
Throwback Bit Thursday: Ocarina of Time – The First Person Adventure That Almost Was
Every Thursday the Never Ending Realm will pay homage to older games by discussing tidbits of information that you might not know about the development of some of the most iconic titles in Video Gaming History. In this first installment we travel back in time to the mid 90’s where Nintendo’s EAD was hard at…
Final Fantasy VIIR, Tetsuya Nomura, and The “Kingdom Hearts like Bulls*&^”
Warning Plot Spoilers Ahead: For starters, this isn’t a review of FFVIIR, I fear that a review of that particular title from myself, would end up being more like EGM’s review of the title in terms of its low score, than of some of other positive reviews on the net. Instead, this is an analysis…