(s) Archive
2018-01-05
Final Fantasy XIII: Blinded By Lightning by Peter Triezenberg Final Fantasy XIII is a difficult game to defend. It’s got serious problems, born from its tumultuous development and a lack of oversight from the developers. Yet, it’s also the first game I played on a newly opened PlayStation 3 back in 2010, so I’d be… Read More »
2017-12-29
Final Fantasy XI: Camaraderie by Derek Heemsbergen I lost a lot of my life to Final Fantasy XI. Then again, I lost a lot of my life to every Final Fantasy that came before it, too. I spent much of my childhood and adolescence immersed in RPGs, drinking deep of their narrative draughts to escape… Read More »
Final Fantasy XII: Better Late Than Never by Robert Steinman Final Fantasy XII should have been the Final Fantasy game made for me. It had the director of Tactics, a fantastic new artstyle, and a complicated new battle system based around strategy and careful planning. I was super excited to play it, but I just… Read More »
2017-12-19
Final Fantasy IX: Tonight We Dine on Whale Zombie by Alana Hagues Final Fantasy IX was one of the first games I was ever good at. I’ve got really fond memories of training up each of my eight characters, making sure everyone had learnt all of their skills. It was incredibly rewarding, especially as an… Read More »
Final Fantasy X: Comeuppance by Alana Hagues Oh, America. I remember how you wished you could play the international version of Final Fantasy X. You had to wait until 2014 to get your hands on all of the nasty challenges waiting for you. Me? Well, I had to experience them when I was nine years… Read More »
2017-12-15
Final Fantasy VIII: Air Bud VIII: Time Kompression by Mike Salbato Having not played Final Fantasy VIII since 1999, I’m hazy on many aspects of the love-it-or-meh-it game today, but one thing I’ll never forget is my battle against Ultimecia, the biggest, baddest sorceress this side of Esthar. She has a nasty move that can… Read More »
Final Fantasy VII: Step Aside, NBA Live by Rob Rogan When Final Fantasy VII came out in 1997, I’d been gaming since I was a wee lad playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and Tecmo Bowl on the NES. It was a hobby I enjoyed, and I dabbled in various genres, but I hadn’t played many RPGs.… Read More »
2017-12-08
I’ve pretty much lost count of how many times I’ve said that the War of the Lions retranslation of Final Fantasy Tactics led me to my current career as a translator of video games. It wasn’t my first time with the original Ivalice game, but in a way, it felt like it. But first, let’s… Read More »
2017-12-05
Final Fantasy V: Cartography FTW by Michael Sollosi Final Fantasy V‘s world map is an exercise in foreshadowing. In the first two-thirds of the game, players traverse two separate worlds and may notice a veritable gallery of inaccessible areas: a pyramid in the center of an impenetrable desert, a temple on a tiny island enclosed… Read More »
Final Fantasy VI: Shaved Moogles by Mike Salbato I adore Final Fantasy VI, which some of you may already know from comments I’ve made over the years. But my fellow editors will likely have better-written prose to sing the praises of my favorite Final Fantasy. Instead, like I did in 2010 when I envisioned FFVI‘s potential… Read More »
2017-12-01
When Final Fantasy XIII was first unveiled at E3 2006, many fans breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a strange and tumultuous time for the storied franchise. The CGI movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children had simultaneously impressed and bewildered audiences with its cutting-edge animation and incomprehensible plotline. The most recent mainline entry,… Read More »
2017-11-28
Final Fantasy IV: To the Moon, Rosa! by Alana Hagues As a kid, I can’t think of anything else that fascinated me more than space. To think that there was something beyond the clouds completely blew my mind when I was younger. But there was no way I’d be able to get there in this… Read More »
Final Fantasy III: Get a Job by Peter Triezenberg Fun fact: Final Fantasy III was the first game in the series I played to completion (on the Nintendo DS, thankfully: I’m not planning on going anywhere near the Famicom original). That’s not to say it’s one of my favorites, per se, but I do have some… Read More »
2017-11-21
Final Fantasy II: Hostility Breeds Innovation by Robert Fenner Final Fantasy is one of those grossly monumental series with a reputation that each successive release is more divisive than the last. However, one opinion that the majority of the fanbase shares is a seething hatred of Final Fantasy II. It’s not altogether unjustified: Final Fantasy… Read More »
Final Fantasy: Transformation by Michael Sollosi I wasn’t terribly impressed with the original Final Fantasy the first time I played it. I had played through parts of Final Fantasy IV with a friend at a sleepover, but in 1994 I only had the regular NES. I was desperate to play more of these mysterious “RPGs”… Read More »
Our entire Fabula Nova Anniversaris feature is filled with content: In-depth examinations of characters, recurring themes, and more. But the heart of it all is here, in Memoria. We posed a simple question to the staff: To share a short memory of one or more Final Fantasy games, with the intent of having one to… Read More »
2017-09-26
2017 is a banner year for Ys fans. Not only have we received a new entry in the form of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana as well as a PC port of Ys SEVEN, but the series also celebrated its 30th anniversary in June. You might’ve heard quite a bit of buzz about Ys over… Read More »
2017-09-07
Often, when we think of a memorable RPG ensemble, we tend to think of the hero and their party: the friends and allies we meet along the way assembled into a merry band on a collective mission of world salvation. And with good reason; whether it be the larger-than-life BFFs of Persona 4, or a… Read More »
The Tales series is one of the best examples of a series with consistently fun and enjoyable characters. Each entry manages to deliver a cast that I’ll remember for years to come. No other cast has stood out more than Tales of Vesperia‘s: they’re a bunch of mismatched individuals who form an unlikely friendship in… Read More »
Want to know how to grab my interest before I play a game? Show me your main characters performing gun kata against one another to culminate in a post-fight execution. That’s what Resonance of Fate did before I even hit start on the controller. It was a bold move to start off with that kind… Read More »
WARNING – Spoilers for Persona 4 follow. Most Persona games can be summarized as follows: a Japanese town experiences a supernatural event, which escalates into a world-ending threat, and the planet’s only hope is an unlikely group of teenagers. In Persona 4, the Japanese town is the sleepy, rural Inaba and the supernatural event is… Read More »
One thing I knew right away when I was asked which game had the best ensemble of characters, my answer was the Mass Effect series. However, there was a problem for me: I couldn’t pick the series as a whole. I had to narrow down which game from the series had the better characters. Was… Read More »
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a bishop, a psychic, and an baron/author from the 1800s* walk into a haunted monastery, where they must then learn to work together to unravel its dark secrets and correct the hideous deeds that occurred there in the past — if they want to escape alive. This is… Read More »
Final Fantasy XII‘s tale of a political power struggle in a land plagued by war is nothing groundbreaking; the premise is common and has arguably been done better. Still, while reviewing the remastered version of the game, The Zodiac Age, I found myself far from bored. The overall plot might have been very conventional, but… Read More »
Final Fantasy VII was a watershed title not only in terms of opening the floodgates for JRPG localization in the Western Hemisphere, but was also a personal watershed title for many of our individual gaming histories, mine included. A huge part of why Final Fantasy VII is a personal icon lies in its cast of… Read More »
