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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Tag: jrpg
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Final Fantasy Type-0 Still Looks Good
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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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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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