As a theme, hopelessness rarely appears in Japanese RPGs. Sure, any good story includes a moment when all seems lost for the heroes, but we know they will win out in the end. That is because most Japanese RPGs follow the time-tested model of the hero’s journey. At first glance, Phantasy Star II might seem [...]
Archive: September 2012
Where did Psycho Fox go wrong? Pretty much any way you slice it, Psycho Fox was Sonic the Hedgehog before Sonic the Hedgehog. Levels are huge sprawling affairs, with multiple paths at differing elevations. We have a cute cartoony animal mascot whom one can reasonably say is possessed of attitude. He has a set of [...]
The Revenge of Shinobi can safely be considered a watershed title for Sega’s young 16-bit system. While previous games like Altered Beast or Golden Axe tried to mimic their older arcade brothers as closely as possible, the first 16-bit adventure of Joe Musashi was not only developed exclusively for the home console, it also surpasses [...]
I published an article last week that took the “Japan is so wacky and full of perverts because all the games that come from Japan are pervy” stereotype/meme head-on and, to the best of my ability, debunked it by explaining that (1) those games are hardly representative of the entire Japanese gaming market, (2) they’re [...]
The first game in Falcom’s venerable Ys series, this particular release has the distinction of being the first version of the game to appear on U.S. consoles. Ys is a simple RPG focusing on the adventure of the red-haired swordsman Adol as he tries to discover the vanished land of Ys. It breaks down the action [...]
The system wars of the 16-bit era meant that companies had to allocate their time between the two front runners, but a 50/50 split of content between them was rare. Publishing giant Capcom may have seen fit to deliver some really interesting Disney platformers unique to the Genesis, but the lion’s share of their big [...]
Looking back over Sega’s two-decade stint as a first-party console manufacturer, what truly stands out in the cold light of retrospection is the fact that the company seemed to languish in the trenches of the eternal underdog. No matter how hard Sega worked, no matter how good their software output, no matter how compelling their [...]
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