RPG

A Walk On The Pharmaceutical Side The Atelier series has always been more of a marginal franchise compared to the larger, more established JRPG properties like the mighty Final Fantasy or even Namco’s Tales series. Despite that smaller niche within a niche, Gust has managed to crank out 14 of these games since 1997, and the latest one, Atelier Ayesha carries on the tradition, albeit in a...

The JRPG We Always Imagined When we first arrived at this current console generation way back in 2006, expectations from JRPG fans were high. There’d been a flood of quality games, both from expected sources like Square-Enix, and surprise upstarts like Atlus that gave fans of the genre a reliable, regular source of quality gaming. The bold experimentation of the Persona series, the grandiose efforts of Final...

A Surprising Vita Must Have The JRPG hasn’t had a great run this console generation. Even former stalwarts like Square-Enix failed to live up to the greatness they were once known for. But even if the consoles are experiencing a dearth of quality JRPG titles, the same can’t be said for the portable gaming scene. Both the DS and PSP established themselves as new venues for fantastic...

Back in ye olde days of the N64, Nintendo decided to bring Mario and his Mushroom Kingdom buddies back to RPG-land following the instant classic that was Super Mario RPG. However, what those coin-chugging programmers whipped up was not merely a straight sequel to their SNES title. Nope, it was a completely new game called Paper Mario that turned Mario and co. into 2D cardboard cutouts in a world...

Another Pokemon game? The release of a new Pokemon game shouldn't surprise anyone. As one of Nintendo's top selling games, the company has begun to shovel them out to the general public on a near annual basis. While the abundance of Pokemon games is great for newcomers to the series, old fans purchase the new games with hopes of added content or new features we haven't seen...

Game of Thrones, the latest videogame version of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, attempts to do everything right. Its developers, Cyanide, take into account the wild success of the televised adaptation and the story’s ability to obliterate generations of fantasy tropes with its cynical view of morality, “righteous” warfare and, even, truth. The designers’ attempt to bring Martin’s complex politicking and multifaceted character creation into...

A Story Of TraditionThere aren’t that many “good old JRPGs” out there anymore, but the Tales series from Namco’s Tales Studio—now defunct and absorbed into Namco proper, by the way—has always clung stubbornly to the idea that their formula was cut from a cookie that the audience would be happy to eat up again and again. In light of Square-Enix’s innovations in gameplay at the cost of a compelling...

Geralt of Rivia makes his way on to the Xbox 360 in the Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition. Bringing the hit action-RPG to the consoles with some tweaks to help out the console gamers. The Enhanced Edition adds several new hours of gameplay to the game. There are some new areas introduced as well as new characters. Both of these add more depth and background to the already...

After getting a lot of hype from our neighbors overseas, Xenoblade Chronicles has finally made its way to North American with some considerable expectations. There have been whispers of it being one the of the finest RPGs of its generation and certainly the best on the Wii (which admittedly, doesn’t offer a hell of a lot of competition in the genre). Well, the game is finally here and the...

Closure at Last Five years and a whole of licensed products later, gamers have finally arrived at the conclusion of the first Mass Effect trilogy. What started as an experimental RPG science fiction shooter published by Microsoft in 2007 has turned into a flagship franchise for Electronic Arts with novels, comics, statuettes, action figures, social media games and even an upcoming direct to video anime. But when...

More Lost Hours of Your LifeWhen Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was first announced, there was a lot of potential on show thanks to the big names involved, but there was also a lot of doubt. An RPG in an FPS market? A new IP going up against the current monster, the Elder Scrolls series? Art direction that was colorful instead of dark and gritty? Could this possibly survive in...

Crystal Chronicles RevisitedAs with Final Fantasy X, Square has seen fit to do a direct sequel to Final Fantasy XIII, a game which was commercially successful, but less so critically. The original game, while hailed for its high quality graphics, received a lot of criticism for its gameplay, story and most of all, its linear nature. The new game meets all the criticisms heads on, and with the exception...

The Monster Series Returns Within the genre of RPGs, it’s understood by fans that these games will normally take tens of hours to complete, with 30 as the approximate average and 60 for those that want to do a little more exploration, and then, for most, the apotheosis is 100 or so hours if you really want to see every damn thing the game offers. The...

I've committed the journalistic sin of not finishing the game I was assigned. I hope I can be forgiven, but I'll settle for some understanding. We've all been there: playing a perfectly decent game and being bored. It would be different if the game was bad: I love playing bad games, savouring every glitch, every poorly written line of dialogue, every weapon imbalance, ready to skewer it. Dragon Quest...

The narrator of Bastion tells us that stories usually start at the beginning, but that this time it's different. It's a tease, of course, but a well constructed one. Bastion, the new xbox live arcade from Supergiant Games is all about the slow reveal, from aesthetics to story to mechanics, everything, it's all about the gradual building of something powerful. You control the Kid, one of...

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D proves that there’s a place for history in the current gaming landscape, primarily because it’s everything a remake should be. It introduces modern updates that make the game palatable for a new generation without alienating fans with fond memories of the original, and is consequently tied to the past, present, and future of gaming. At it’s core, Ocarina of Time...

Another Early Crest In The Diablo WaveThe big tsunami for an entire genre, Diablo III is still gathering momentum somewhere out in the sea of game development, but there are plenty of titles attempting to fill the dungeon crawling void until it comes in. The indie hit Torchlight is one example, the recent Dungeon Hunter: Alliance was another and now, with mild surprise, we have the arrival of Dungeon...

Witch, Please The Witcher 2 is the sequel to (you guessed it) The Witcher, a love-it-or-hate-it 2007 action RPG from ambitious Polish developer CD Projekt. Setting out to right the wrongs of its inaugural release, the studio (now developing as CD Projekt RED) has spent the last four years in making a sequel that attempts to reach the lofty heights promised — and almost achieved — by its...

When the first images of Pokémon: Black and White appeared and Zoroark, a dark, fox-like Pokémon was revealed an unbridled giddiness ran through my core. A new game with over 150 more Pokémon to collect! The prospect was so enticing that I could hardly wait for the game to arrive. One year and 20 hours of game time later, my giddiness is more deflated than a sleepy Drifloon. For...

A Return To ThedasBioWare has been on a something of a roll the last few years. Their two new original franchises, Mass Effect and Dragon Age have garnered the same success for them as their games in the Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons licensed arenas. Now Dragon Age joins Mass Effect in giving players a second title, but where Mass Effect 2 was an unqualified success in “streamlining”...