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!
This one was a fun article to write and one that required a great deal of thought. The 1990s were filled with JRPGs, and most titles of the era received sequels…even within the span of a year or two after the release of the first game in their respective series. The games listed here are…
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”…
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…
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…
This week, as I continued to play Elden Ring, I began to look back at what games were tough, or tougher than Japan’s newest poster boy. Some of the 2-D Castlevania games were very difficult. Even Castlevania 64 was quite challenging if you went for the good ending. Castlevania 64, in particular, did not…
It could be said that Namco’s Tales series might have reached its zenith in terms of popularity last year with Tales of Arise (2 million units sold to date). However, what perhaps remains the franchise’s most valuable game is a 25-year-old entry. 1997’s (1998 in the U.S.) Tales of Destiny is a game that will…
For week number two of our new weekly feature “games that will cost you a kidney,” we have another Japanese role-playing game from the genre’s golden decade. The game? Lunar 2: Eternal Bue Complete. While our focus will be on the PlayStation 1 version, know that the original Sega CD version is retailing for $499.99…
Ah! 1997! The year where pop music and JRPGs boomed into mainstream consciousness. By this time, the Sega Saturn was done, as rumors of a successor codenamed “Black Belt” were flourishing quickly in western media. Proof of the Saturn’s impending doom is that none of its games made it to the top ten listing…