Every now and then, a truly great game will emerge, revitalizing a beloved genre and reminding us why we fell in love with it in the first place. In 2025, that game was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a turn-based RPG developed by Sandfall Interactive, which wears its...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

Their frustrations are often built on the backs of nostalgia, an aching for a bygone era when they first saw Nidorino and Gengar do battle on their Game Boy. That yearning for a youth long gone is what inspired Satoshi Tajiri, Pokémon’s originator, to come up with the...

As one-half of the aforementioned moniker, the Metroid and Castlevania franchises served as the bedrock upon which all other non-linear, multi-scrolling 2D platformer video games were built. When you play other Metroidvania titles like Guacamelee! (DrinkBox Studios,...