Yes, alright – there’s a lot of reasons we can ridicule Square Enix these days. A lot. One thing you can’t say, however, is that the folks at SE don’t know how to make them some PSP games. Title after title, the publisher continues to release titles for Sony’s handheld that seem able to do things graphically the hardware was never, ever meant to do.
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Category: RPG
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Final Fantasy Type-0 Still Looks Good
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Atlus Announces Persona 2: Innocent Sin for North America
Over on NeoGAF, member creid noticed something strange about the Atlus Faithful email newsletter he received today: it has a most peculiar date.
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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona
In 1988, I played a relatively unknown Master System RPG titled Phantasy Star, and it forever changed me as a fan of video games. Then, eight years later, another Japan-born role-playing romp would come along and leave an equally impactful mark on my life; the similarly obscure Atlus release Revelations: Persona.
Phantasy Star taught me that I loved JRPGs; Persona taught me what I wanted from them.
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The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road
There were countless reasons why I loved the last great hardware effort from Sega (the Dreamcast, of course), but somewhere at the top of that list was the overall wonder I felt at the system’s game library. It was the console that, for me, made gaming fun again, as it seemed developers Japanese and Western alike took chances on ideas that they might not have attempted elsewhere. It isn’t to say that every Dreamcast project was totally unique and groundbreaking, but there was this overall sense of creativity that seemed to re-assure games that it was okay to try new things and dare to be different. It was the world were Jet Set Radio, Seaman, Napple Tale, and Shenmue were the norm, not the niche; a world that I came to love living in.
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Half-Minute Hero
When 2009 comes to a close and we look back to reflect on the year now behind us, a countless amount of lists will emerge that attempt to run down, in order, the “best” or “worst” of varies things over that past year. This will, of course, also happen in our little video game industry, and while not all of the nominations or winners may yet be clear, it isn’t hard to make an educated guess (or two) at what may be up for awards.
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Retro Game Challenge
Shinya Arino–one of the two members of Japanese comedy duo Yoiko–hosts a late-night TV show in Japan called GameCenter CX. GCCX is a celebration of video gaming, but more specifically, it is a celebration of the days gone by of video gaming. Arino himself is a huge game fan, and every episode–at least, for every episode I myself have personally seen–he helps bring us a look back at gaming’s golden days, from what titles were released by a particular company back in the 80’s, to interviewing folks like Yuu Suzuki about his start at Sega, to meeting a man living somewhere in Tokyo who proudly owns every Famicom (Japan’s version of the NES) game ever released.
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Persona 4
Each character is a tragic hero, and yet, they are at their core nothing more than ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. Because of this, we can relate to them, progress with them, live the adventure that is Persona through them.
Eleven years ago, I wrote those words as part of the opening to the official GameFan strategy guide for a quirky new RPG brought to the United States by Atlus called Revelations: Persona. It is funny that they would then end up being at their most relevant nearly a decade later at the release of the franchise’s third official chapter, Persona 3.
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Valhalla Knights
Though survival horror may have swept into my life and stole away my heart, there is no genre of video game that I have loved longer or more completely than Japanese RPGs. Almost twenty years ago I first set out into the world of Phantasy Star, and from that moment on, I knew the genre was for me. Unfortunately, the love affair has been a bit rocky as the years have gone on. I still love JRPGs, but there’s just no getting around it; the genre, in my eyes, just hasn’t seen the kind of gameplay progression that other genres have seen, and has suffered because of that.
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