Gaming off the Beaten Path

In recent weeks, I've been doing a lot of research into RPGs that never left Japan. I haven't covered a game that never came to the U.S. in quite a while, so I figured now is as good a time as any. There are always going to be games that get stuck in Japan or only get ported to PAL regions, whether its for financial, cultural or other reasons. But during the 5th generation, it was extremely common for games to stay on the mothership, especially when it came to RPGs. Simply put, the genre just wasn't as popular in the west and it was often not worth the time and effort to localize them. I talked a little bit about this with Sweet Home (though that stood zero chance of ever being released here) and Terranigma (which was not released in North America for more business related weirdness), but it still amazes me how many games never made their way to the West and how many of them I had never heard of until much later. When I started GOTBP, I kind of made it a point to not focus ...

  I think it's pretty obvious I'm a huge nerd, I wouldn't be talking about old video games on the internet if I wasn't. But as nerdy as I am, tabletop games have always been a blind spot for me.  I've talked a little bit about this before, but the Satanic Panic was still very much alive in the 90's. It may have been on its last legs, but it was still there. Violent video games gave the collective outrage mob a second wind, with games like Mortal Kombat, Night Trap and, especially, Doom serving as fresh new targets to sink their claws into. Other more traditional game formats weren't safe either, as Magic: The Gathering also became a punching bag, though I have to admit that was a little more understandable when you try to walk in those folks shoes. Not even Pokemon was safe, especially when the TCG came out and the usual suspects started claiming it was intentionally designed as a gateway drug to get into Magic. We aren't talking about the folks that had...

  As usual, it took way longer than it should have, but I did EVENTUALLY do exactly what I said I was going to. It's a year late, but I've finally made my way through the Quintet trilogy. Playing these three games became a stated goal of mine since I started podcasting last year. One of my earliest episodes covered Soul Blazer, the first title in the pseudo series. The second game, Illusion of Gaia, was also a landmark episode as it was the first one to include the intro song ("A Glass Half Full of Tears" by Aura Blaze, who's music you should check out here ). Both of them received pretty solid scores, though I didn't quite like the latter quite as much as a lot of people seem to. After all these years, I'm still surprised I never played these games when they came out. Both were definitely right up my alley and readily available to buy or even rent at my local video store, but I just never picked them up. It's a little more understandable that I had ne...

  I'm not one for overly difficult games, but this one has been on my list for a long, long time. I think I've covered more Mega Man titles than any other series. What can I say, I've always loved these games. Despite being an iconic video game character, the blue bomber fits more into the whole "off the beaten path" theme than you would think. I forget where it was, I ended up looking at the series' sales figures and was shocked to find just how few units it has moved. I guess it makes some level of sense. Mega Man has had quite a few fits of starts and stops, often coming out with two, three, four titles in the span of a few years before going dark. A lot of this is due to spinoffs, I always considered the classic and X series to kind of be one and one A, but there is also Battle network, Legends and a host of other interesting outliers. A lot of folks consider these games to be incredibly difficult. Honestly, I just don't see it. Maybe it's because ...

  The way things stand, yours is a world where wishes can't come true anymore. It goes without saying, but certain combinations just work. Sometimes, those combinations are obvious while other times, they aren't. It's weird, because Super Mario RPG always kind of fit both categories. On one hand, how could a joint effort from Nintendo and Square (still Squaresoft at the time) go wrong? Both of these companies were riding high, especially in the mid-90's when it felt like neither of these juggernauts could do any wrong. Yet at the same time, the thought of platforming icon Mario starring in a turn-based RPG felt a little...off. How was anyone going to take a plumber who jumps on turtles in linear levels and turn him into a full-fledged  RPG hero? Would this experiment  work out? Or would it crash and burn? I think we all know the answer to that, but I don't think a lot of people really look at why this game was so successful , why it was so revered and why it receive...

Making a good sequel is easier said than done. For all the good that can come from change, a lot of bad can come from it too. And sometimes being more ambitious leads to bigger pitfalls that simpler games just don't have to contend with. Illusion of Gaia isn't a true sequel to Soul Blazer, which I looked at earlier in the year, but it is the second title in what's come to be known as the Quintet Trilogy. I talked at length about my experience (or lack thereof) with these games and the story behind them already. To summarize, they were a series of action RPGs developed by Quintet and published by Enix in the 90s. Illusion of Gaia was released in the West in 1994, two years after Soul Blazer. It was by far the most readily available of the trio, Soul Blazer was hard to find near me and Terranigma wasn't even released in the U.S. But Illusion of Gaia was available for rent just about every week at all of my local video stores, so it still shocks me that I had never played ...