7 public reviews
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During the PS1 era Square was so far ahead in JRPG design that they started making everyone else in the genre look amateurish - and this posed problems for all of the smaller and less popular JRPG franchises, who tried to mimic what Square was doing (usually with smaller budgets) in hopes they could ride the wave to profits. The problem is that decades on, when removing nostalgia from the equation, the most tedious,…
I picked this game up because it was a late-era PS1 game that had a great look to it and had the trappings of a hidden gem - I'm no big Tales fan but I've enjoyed a few here and there. As I play through JRPGs as an adult, with a more complete understanding of what even semi-competent writing and game pacing is, I find "classic" JRPGs I (re)visit tend fall into one of two camps - truly stellar on all fronts and…
I came to this game for the first time in 2019 - I was something of a casual Souls fan but had never played any of their Playstation-era titles, despite having heard for years from fans of old-school dungeon crawlers that the King's Field games were something special. I don't consider myself an especially, uh, "core" gamer - I have a soft spot for old-school RPGs and tend to love first-person dungeon crawlers from a…
I had been looking forward to Legaia - I had been going back through PS1 games I missed back in the day to see what games managed to stand the test of time, and it had been recommended to me by several people as an overlooked gem. First, the good stuff. The combat system *is* quite good - it manages that excellent JRPG balancing act of keeping you engaged minute to minute during combat without being fiddly or…
Like most I found From Software by getting pulled into Dark Souls / Demon Souls , and a few years later I found myself spelunking From's old PS1 releases out of curiosity. First King's Field 2 (a magnificent game), then the critically-panned and obscure Shadow Tower. So is Shadow Tower aged, crusty, player-hostile shovelware we should all forget about, or is it a carefully-designed bit of magic? It is old and crusty…
Thunder Force IV is the reason for a lot of the love the Thunder Force series gets, and for good reason, it was a technical tour-de-force on the Genesis with some of the best visuals of the generation and one of the finest OSTs on the platform, if not the finest. Unfortunately, if you play TFIV today, you'll quickly realize it's a very memory-heavy shooter with a lot of stage hazards and unpredictable GOTCHA…
PDS is a "grail" game, going for ridiculous prices on eBay and spoken of in hushed whispers by people in odd corners of the internet. That interested me, especially since I missed the Saturn back in the day. I’d been playing games since the Genesis and, until 2005, was quite fond of your average JRPG. Around that time however, whether it was a higher level of maturity or greater demands on my time (or both), I began…
