Gaming off the Beaten Path

  Last week, we took our first look at indie RPG Sea of Stars and its  story, plot and characters. This week, it's time to move on to the more technical aspects of the game. SOS had some positives and some negatives when it came to story, but overall it was far more good than bad. But how did it feel technically? First, I want to call out the graphics, because I feel like I don't do that enough when I talk about RPGs. I'm not usually a graphics-centric kind of reviewer, but SOS offers some truly spectacular pixel art. It's about as clean as you can possibly get and a clear example of using new technology to get the most out of a classic look. The world is spectacularly colorful and the color palette  is about as unique as I have ever seen. That may be a weird thing to call out, but some of the colors and combinations of colors here are truly striking and help elevate the game. Your characters are expressive and full of life and the enemy attack animations are top notch.

  It's been a big year for indie RPGs. Not going to lie, I was thinking I might skip this one. But with all the hype around Sea of Stars, coupled with the fact that I really liked Chain of Echoes earlier in the year, I decided I had to give it a shot. Not to be confused with Star Ocean, the other game with a maritime metaphor for space in its title, Sea of Stars is the latest heavily hyped, 2D RPG designed as a callback to the classic golden age RPGs that many of us grew up with. It was developed by and published by Sabotage Studios, a Quebec-based indie developer best known for their 2018 action platformer The Messenger. For the record, the two games allegedly take place in the same universe but have nothing else really to do with each other. Sea of Stars began its life in 2020 as a kickstarter campaign, with the studio wanting to produce a title that had more depth than its previous offering. It was heavily influenced by games like Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, Final Fantasy V

  Last week, we looked at Yakuza: Like a Dragon, a refreshing modern take on a JRPG based on a series more known for third person action. The story and presentation, while not perfect and often long winded, was outstanding. It was backed up by an all time great cast of characters and some of the best voice acting around. But how did the gameplay fare? Much like last week, we have the best and worst of both modern and old school gaming on display. RPG veterans will feel right at home with the combat system, which is a callback to the old-fashioned turn based battles they are used to. That coupled with the polish typical of modern games makes the combat incredibly fun, if a little repetitive. Encounters are all touch based, any potential enemies will have red arrows over their head and a field of vision cone on the map. Cross this field of vision and stay there too long an it will trigger an encounter. Battles are fought in an incredibly traditional turn-based style, where characters can

When I came to this world, I did not even know the meaning of humanity's power, so how could I believe? But you changed all that, Hiro. You showed me the power of your inner strength and made me believe. After almost five years of blogging, I've determined that the late 90's and early 00's are my favorite era in gaming. Let's say from 1996 to about 2004. There's an entire post's worth of reasons as to why, but the most important of such reasons is a simple one: RPGs were mainstream. Nowadays, I would consider a grand total of one RPG franchise to be mainstream: Final Fantasy, and even that franchise is not as popular as it once was. I guess Pokemon is about as mainstream as it gets, but it's kind of it's own thing with a much different feel than the kind of RPGs I'm talking about.  Persona, Tails, Trails and even Dragon Quest are comparatively "mainstream" amongst RPGS fans, but they are still relatively obscure when considering the gam

  Believe it or not, I actually do have goals. They may be stupid, but they are technically goals.' One of my stated goals this year is to play through the entirety of the Quintet trilogy. You would think I would make my goals stuff like learn a skill or a language or something. Why waste time on a hobby you enjoy, right? Anyway, the Quintet trilogy is a series of highly regarded action RPGs which, for whatever reason, I never got around to playing. That's kind of odd for me, because I played tons of RPGs in the 90's and 00's. I hit most of the main SNES titles, but I missed these three, Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma (at least the two games that came out in the U.S., Terranigma was never released here). Some people consider The Granstream Saga, which I played a long time ago, to be the fourth game in the series, but that's not always the case. They always seemed up my alley, but just kind of passed me by. Anyway, the three games in question are not re

Earlier this year, I did a preview of indie RPG Chained Echoes , a title that has garnered tons of attention in the gaming community. Now it's finally time for a proper review. I don't usually do "initial thoughts" or anything like that, but there was so much buzz surrounding Chained Echoes I had to strike when the iron was hot. It takes me a while to complete games nowadays, especially long RPGs, but I'm finally done and ready for a proper review. I like to make sure I beat games, at least the main stories, before I write anything up because you never know what could happen.  I feel like a lot of reviews are just based on an hour or two of gameplay and while that is okay for some genres, I don't think that's the case for RPGs. By now I think the story around Chained Echoes is pretty common knowledge. It was created by a single developer, Matthias Linda, over the course of seven years. Linda, a German national, grew up creating fan games in RPG Maker. He w

  I knew I was going to get here eventually. For what feels like a decade now, I've heard about Sweet Home, the NES game that served as the basis for Resident Evil. It's one of those games I knew I was eventually going to review, and it looks like now is the time. I think a lot of gamers know the story by now. Resident Evil started as a remake of Sweet Home, with the latter's director Tokuro Fujiwara working with the former's originator Shinji Mikami. After realizing the technical limitations of the relatively new PlayStation hardware, as well as a variety of other snags, the project evolved into the zombie-filled survival-horror icon we know and love. It's a title that most people know is influential, even if all they know about it is its name.   You know, for all of the talk about how influential it is, I barely knew anything about Sweet Home's gameplay. I was totally expecting some level of action game, maybe akin to the original Metal Gear. I was shocked, p