by Old School Gamer | Jun 26, 2026 | 1980s, 1990s, Magazine Preview
JRPGs are a genre that didn’t always take off in popularity on the NES the way Japanese developers had hoped. Despite all this, several titles were still localized over the years, so let’s give a gander at a few of the most notable ones. For the purposes of this...
by Matthew Floyd | Jun 24, 2026 | 1990s, 2000s, Magazine Preview
People who play Japanese role-playing games, such as myself, have become somewhat desensitized to the strangeness that these games can evoke. After all, there are very few genres where pre-teen kids are frequently flung into life-threatening circumstances, and all...
by Steve Juon | Jun 22, 2026 | 1990s, 2000s, Magazine Preview
So you’re thinking about playing Chrono Trigger. Your friends and peers have already told you it’s the greatest JRPG ever made, but you were born too late to experience it in its heyday on Super Nintendo. It only gets worse if you decide you want to live that...
by Brian Lesyk | Jun 21, 2026 | 1980s, 1990s, Magazine Preview
If you were yearning for a solid role-playing game in the late 80s and resided in North America and happened to own a Sega Master System console, you were certainly in the right place at the right time. As luck would have it, you were unknowingly on the cusp of being...
by Jeremy Parish | Jun 18, 2026 | 1980s, 1990s, 2010s, Magazine Preview
If you’re old enough to remember the NES launch in America, you’re likely old enough to remember residual hand wringing in Washington, D.C. about the so-called Cold War “missile gap.” In the 1950s and ’60s, that doctrine stated that the Soviet Union had a numeric...
by Old School Gamer | Jun 12, 2026 | 1990s, 2000s, Magazine Preview
Enix’s Dragon Quest is one of the most important Japanese RPGs, as it establishes many of the genre conventions that are used to this day. But it certainly wasn’t the first of its type, as Japanese gamers had been experimenting with their own ideas on computers....