Durante’s Best Games Played in 2024

2024 was the most successful year I’ve had of starting and finishing games I’d never played or beaten before than I’ve had in over a decade. There could be any number of reasons for this, but as it pertains to videogames themselves, I think it’s just that I’m more inspired by games that have come out recently than I have been in quite a while, as this year was headlined by three of the better new releases I’ve seen in quite a while. I may not even easily remember everything I’ve played, but let’s give it a shot.

GAME OF THE YEAR: DEATH OF A WISH by Melessthanthree

Worth noting before I begin praising this game up and down: lead developer Colin Horgan and I are friends. I’m the world record holder for the 100% speedrun of the prequel to this game, LUCAH: Born of A Dream, and I called that game the game of the 2010s. I also playtested DoAW pretty extensively before it was released. Spoiler alert: this is the game of the 2020’s so far and one of the best games I’ve ever played. (And if you think I think a game is better because I had input on it: you’re god damn right I do.) A truly absorbing, testing, and draining piece of work, and the sort that, much likes its predecessor, both promises and delivers a large-studio, big-budget quality of work being produced with none of that systemic support. Make no mistake that Colin Horgan is a developer incredibly dedicated to their craft.

My steam review of the first game reads thus:

LUCAH: Born of A Dream is the best game to come out this year by a pretty significant margin in my opinion. It is at once, a solution to the Action-RPG problem, deftly blending character action gameplay with interesting and WELL BALANCED stats/perks, and a tour-de-force of the capabilities of videogames as a narrative form that confronts themes crucial to the moment we live in, and unlike recent big-budget titles, it simply refuses to make any compromises to make all of that fit because it simply does not *have to.*

All of the above applies to its sequel exponentially. While it does sacrifice a little bit of the mysterious Lynchian nature of the original games narrative to tell a story that’s a little more concrete, a little more based in character relationships that get a chance to grow and evolve in a more concrete sense, nothing else is lost. This game is even more thematically bracing, totally upfront about a revolutionary viewpoint that at no point does it water down for the sake of pleasing the more milquetoast and fortunate among us, nor does it compromise remotely in its harsh visual style that feels comfortable not making “clarity” its core purpose (though, thankfully, this is something that you the player can de-intensify a little bit with some well-designed visual options), nor does it compromise on gameplay that is fast, testing, and lethal. While the 2020s looks like there are going to be far more major commercial titles that I enjoy than in the 2010s, there is an overwhelming likelihood that none of them will have a chance to displace DEATH OF A WISH as the best precisely because they will make those compromises that make them better products and worse art. Which is strange given that it isn’t all that hard to remember an era of commercial games that were themselves as uncompromising as DoAW, at least as pieces of design. (No big-budget game has radical politics of this clarity, it’s basically impossible that they would.)

On top of all that, this thing is as feature rich as any PS2 game, including now both a randomizer mode that can increase the difficulty of the game to an absurd degree, plus a new Martyr Mode that does the same by challenging end and post-game builds by slowly granting more and more help to the enemies. In any case: please play this.

Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters

My great shame as an outspoken admirer of the FF titles is that in reality I’ve actually finished fewer of them than I haven’t. Most of them I’d played a significant amount of, but never finished a file. That changed thanks to the “Pixel Remaster” iterations of these older titles which made them practical to play and finish in ways they simply hadn’t been before. I have only the smallest nitpicks with these versions, but those are more than outpaced by the quality of the presentations. Number one here is the music, which sounds amazing. Uematsu apparently was directly involved with these and I don’t think it’s hard to tell given the fidelity that these takes on the songs have to their previous “high definition” upgrades such as the DS versions of FFIII and FFIV as well as the PS1 versions of FFI and FFII.

Probably my only real gripe is that the difficulty of the games has been adjusted quite significantly from the original releases, but I don’t really see that as a massive negative in the long run, especially considering these seem easily hacked for that to be remedied if it’s a significant issue.

FFI — Simple and satisfying. It’s still a lot of fun to try out unique parties and see how well they handle this well-trodden scenario. Mages have also been done a significant favor in that their spell damage is no longer fixed due to an ancient coding error, though to be totally honest I was still let down by their endgame damage on offensive spells like Flare. Still, for Warriors to reach their maximum damage output, they will still need a Mage’s help, making them still the 2nd most important class to have for an optimal party even if they are, by themselves, probably the game’s worst or second worst class. Battles are quick executions of simple strategy made much more expedient by the presence of the now-ubiquitous auto-battle feature with, of course, iconic music. What really ages well for this one in particular is the mystery of the world you’re exploring as you work your way outward. The “inner world” is a predictable collection of fantasy kingdoms ruled by humans and elves, as you work your way outward you discover abandoned cities underwater and in the sky, and a town inhabited by (descendants of?) the sky beings who speak a language totally misunderstood by your party until the location of a magical artifact (there’s also a dialogue hint that your faceless party is secretly from the sky city, cool!).

The endgame of a fantasy RPG blending in elements of science-fiction is one of the oldest, arguably most cliche, and yet always entertaining elements of any game it appears in, but I think the original FF might be the oldest RPG to use to idea of, specifically, a technologically advanced civilization from the past being brought low by its ambition and avarice. Dungeon design is also way ahead of the curve here, you travel to a volcano and enter via the top only to have it become wider and wider as you traverse downward and most of the other major dungeons are at least in that neighborhood. Towns convey a similarly effective sense of place. An all-time classic game for a reason and a really breezy experience in this particular format. And in this version, you still feel like you’re actually playing the NES game, as opposed to the previously-ubiquitous GBA version upon which later versions were based that took out spell charges and added MP plus free multi-targeting, making the whole game way too easy. Finding the proper balance of legacy features/code and modern accessibility without leaning too hard towards the latter was the main challenge this edition of the game needed to address and it does so with aplomb.

FFII — The NES version of this title is correctly regarded as one of the worst games ever made. A version of it as heavily revised as the Pixel Remaster makes the game playable, even enjoyable, but it does also make massively apparent just how much of the game is dysfunctional outside of its infamously broken character stats. For one, even with the much-revised character stats, the game is still basically dishonest about what actually works: to beat the final boss you will need to have at least one character who is heavily proficient in magic, an issue that isn’t really apparent anywhere else and came as a nasty enough surprise that I left my file incomplete at the final encounter. If you plan on playing this and beating it, you might as well ignore functional battle strategy and simply alternate between physical attacks and magic use on every other turn to build characters with the best chance of winning the entire scenario. The bigger issues are these: FFII is the series’ first attempt to have player motivation driven heavily by the narrative (rather than the narrative simply being a means of delivering the play scenario, as in the original) and said narrative is too weak on actual character writing and too bleak tonally to function classically as player motivation. You will lose count trying to track how many times that you were completing an objective only for one of the towns in the world to be left destroyed and destitute, leaving you by the endgame feeling like you are left fighting for a world that is already over. (Hm, I wonder where this might recur . . .) The much more pressing issue is that these dungeon designs are truly devious. What makes the dungeons of literally every other 2D numbered FF game great is that they consistently use different shapes to effectively convey a sense of place. FFII has one flavor: complex mazes that consistently lead you to one form or another of dead end whilst ramming your head against an extremely high encounter rate. Worst of all is the infinite recurrence of doors that take you into empty rooms that the party spawns in the middle of rather than right next to the door, vastly increasing the likeliness of experiencing a random encounter on the way out. I honestly think the “make it up as you go” experience of building your characters is a lot of fun and leads to the sort of free-form gameplay that would eventually make a title like FFVIII stand out so well, but by the end this really was just a miserable experience sadly.

FFIII — Stop what you are doing and play FFIII immediately if you are a veteran of turn-based RPGs that has somehow never touched it, as I managed to be. FFIII has the fun job system, a really lovely setting, and Uematsu’s best music up to that point, but what makes it impossibly great is how absurdly fine tuned it is as a machine that generates meaningful random encounters, which I would argue is the most fundamentally strong trait that a JRPG can have. You can have the best music, the best script, the best aesthetics and technology, but there is no safer a bet as the core building bloc of a good (and indeed great) JRPG than meaningful random encounters that test the player constantly on how much they’re really paying attention, keeping them sucked into the granular pace of unedited narrative in videogames’ classic take on epic fantasy storytelling. There is a really simple math to this, in my opinion: in FFIII, if you get hit, you’re likely going to have to expend an understood unit of healing to resolve that wound, and especially in the early game when those healing resources can be precious, that means that the party must consistently act aggressively to resolve encounters as swiftly as possible. This conveys a realism and gravity to the role playing situation that can be lacking in an easier RPG. The game then doubles down on this by limiting what healing resources you can buy at the shops you have easiest access to, preventing you from flooding your inventory with every grade and unit of healing, and also slowly curbing the effectiveness of exclusively item-based healing over time. As such, FFIII provides one of the purest dungeon crawls there is: if you want to beat a dungeon, you’ll need a party that is equipped with the expendable resources to not only survive the dungeon itself, but then also have enough leftover at the end to overcome the boss at the end. This was such a refreshing experience after the much more loosey-goosey design of FFII, not to mention the return of dungeons that had things like shapes and concepts. One of the great turn-based RPGs of all time, and not at all surprising if somebody on the team said “we’ve mastered turn-based, we need to do something new.”

FFIV — A game that goes from strength to strength. While I think that most of the strength of this title’s revolutionary narrative comes very early on (which is a nice way of saying that the story basically stops being good after Cecil becomes a Paladin), after that point you get a series of interesting midgame dungeons and boss fights that test your cleverness before an endgame that really does convey a genuinely otherworldly atmosphere, taking you to a moon that feels alien and mysterious, obviously taking a lot of notes from space as presented in Kubrick’s 2001. Uematsu of course continues to grow, his biggest growth here coming in the form of the “Love Theme” for Cecil and Rosa that would evolve into his heartbreaking motifs for female characters going forward.

FFV — I was really looking forward to this one after how fun the jobs were in FFIII and honestly it was a bit of a letdown. I’d played significant portions of V before and had never finished it, and my opinion has remained largely unchanged: I still see the narrative here as being mostly a backslide from the extremely ambitious FFIV that aims for comedy that frequently is just not that funny for me. Perhaps it is best to accept comedy as FFV’s ambitious experiment, to include the flavor of the inherently ridiculous and cut through the thick air of what was already becoming a very self-serious genre. However, given no one series did more to advance self-seriousness in the genre than Final Fantasy, I end up returning to my initial feeling that a title like this is . . . antithetical to the cause, as it were.

One bit of historical revisionism to do here: Final Fantasy honestly took a long time to figure out main villains, and before they hit what ended up being a historic turnaround for the next game that lasted throughout the series’ critical peak, they had some real fucking stinkers, none worse than the absolute non-entity ExDeath who in his final form literally does just look like a big string of ExCrement. Making up for him quite a bit is his lackey-turned-friend of the party Gilgamesh (the only consistently funny thing about the game, if FFV were a western title you’d expect he was based on somebody’s absurd Robin Williams-esque tabletop character), who would end up becoming the first character in the franchise to make crossover appearances in other numbered title, making a hilarious mockery of the concept of a linear FF “canon” in the process.

Underserved especially by the relative lack of drama is Uematsu, who brings, once again, his best effort yet on a soundtrack that has gone massively, massively underrated over the years, featuring in particular one of his very best main battle themes (30 seconds of pure energy and bliss,) as well as an opening theme that really, really arrests you out of whatever nonsense you’re dealing with in daily life and pulls you into its high fantasy. Still a very good game, but one that has resonated with others significantly more than me.

FFVI — And speaking of! I used to shit all over this game just out of sheer retaliation for its sterling reputation, and in fairness that was obviously at least somewhat mistaken. Here are the positives: FFVI was, especially on the day of its release, exceptionally pretty, very well-composed, narratively sprawling and exciting, and wildly ambitious, carrying the JRPG not just into industrial aesthetics, but then pushing that straight over the edge into post-apocalypse with its famous “World of Ruin.” The problem is that whoever told you to play this told you it was the greatest game ever made, a heartbreaking work of staggering literary genius with characters and music and gameplay that could not be topped. This is simply not the case. Kefka, just as a singular example, is a huge boost in the onscreen charisma of FF villains. Up to this point, they’d been a procession of evil knights in face and body obscuring armor seeking to do evil deeds with very little in the way of backstory, motivation, or onscreen appeal of any kind. With Kefka we get an actual aesthetic, and enough of a personality that interactions with the main cast are memorable, but for him to really hold the crown over he-who-shall-not-be-named, I’d need to know a lot more about this guy than I’ll ever get the chance to learn. That mostly applies to the playable characters as well, who each come with some amount of psychological depth, which obviously makes them much more interesting fragments of culture than the vast majority of videogame characters, but they still each only have extremely limited dimensions to who they are, made worse by the fact that usually you get everything about a character within one significant dramatic sequence, rather than having little bits of each of them doled out over time in ways that layer over each other and make their relationships more interesting. The gameplay is also: good. If you’ve never played FFVI you obviously owe it to yourself to rectify that, but I, unlike so many others, will not mislead you into disappointment.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth — I’m simply shocked how good this is. With its only real flaw (aside from the aforementioned Compromises that are inevitable to a project of this budget) being that it is telling the 2nd of 3 portions of a story and is thus both beginning and ending in the middle of a story without much of the grander stakes having been resolved, VII Rebirth makes a singular case for the continuing existence of the AAA space by providing players with the sorts of things that only games of this budget and scope can convey. The combat, being itself iterative on FFVII Remake which I’ve come to settle is itself one of the greatest games of all time (a game I had not-insignificant complaints about when it came out and then I realized I’d played it four times since it came out), is a non-stop thrill ride from beginning to end that is consistently asking you to become more and more efficient about dropping bigger and bigger bombs, reaching heights of bombast that I previously only fantasized were possible in a videogame. The music hits yet new heights by playing with the motifs of what is itself one of the finest game OSTs (in particular the new primary battle theme that mixes the motifs of the main theme and the original battle theme is an instant classic, one of the best FF battle themes in a franchise almost defined by it.)

Of note as well is the absolutely gorgeous (if fragmented) open world that they’ve crafted, with tons of memorable nooks and crannies such as a combat encounter that takes place deep beneath the earth-reclaimed remains of a broken highway system near the shattered Gongaga reactor, or the hill of flowers with a view of Midgar in the grasslands, which is not to mention spaces that continue from world map wilds directly into towns with no additional loading. Exactly the right compromises were made to sell this as an open world, and at the cost of being able to walk to it end to end, the chunks you can explore are incredibly detailed.

But the real surprise here for me is the script. I stand before you stunned that they’ve only managed to make that story better by filling out the margins. What they manage to do, incredibly, is expand beautifully on the relationships between the characters that were already so compelling. Of particular note here is that whereas in the original I would call Cloud and Barrett mostly coworkers, in this one you see Barrett really going the extra mile to, as he had established in the first game, “take the load off [his] shoulders.” Cloud will, as he often did in the original, have a traumatic flashback or premonition related to Sephiroth, but in this case that will often lead not just to a brief headache but to outright exhaustion. (I’ve been joking with friends that if you pay attention to the cutscenes, Cloud never gets a full night’s rest for the whole game.) It’s in these scenes where often Barrett leads the charge, showing the emotional intelligence of a father and a leader as he finds safe places for Cloud to rest and then tries to break his shell and get him to confide in the people around him. While Tifa and Aerith certainly both do also make efforts to do that as well, it is incredibly refreshing to see male characters lifting each other up like this in a (good) Final Fantasy story where so often the man’s character flaws are used as the hook to set up the key romance. Yuffie benefits a lot from having more “designed” screen time, although having Cid and Vincent hanging around and not saying or doing much is definitely weird. That said, if people think that’s bad, well . . . it is, but nothing’s perfect.

Almost every relationship between the playable characters has an interesting dynamic to it: as seen in the first remake, Tifa and Aerith are great friends, and each shares their own strong romantic tension with Cloud. (As well, I feel unqualified to really comment on this but you’d have to be blind to not notice some romantic implications between Tifa and Aerith as well, which only serves to make Cloud’s potential romances with both characters all that much stronger. Like, not subtext, just text.) But there’s also that stronger budding friendship between Cloud and Barrett. Red XIII and Barrett share an initial distrust of each other (hinted at in XIII’s brief appearance in the first Remake) that also becomes a strong bond by the end (Barrett calls him “Nanaki” in an endgame cutscene! It’s so cool!), Red XIII and Aerith share a cultural connection over both having connections to the Cetra and also the mysterious “whispers” with strong sway over the fates of people.

This is of course, unbelievably impressive for a game that it could be easily debated needs absolutely zero touching up from a scripting standpoint. FFVII features a richly developed main cast of characters, up to and including Yuffie and Vincent whose backstories went “unfinished” and yet their cut content still features as some of the most memorable stuff in the original game, and as well, every major location as a notable connection to the story and themes, bereft is FFVII of towns that exist merely because that spot on the world map needed an inn and a weapon shop. Perhaps that’s why this works, because locations like North Corel are already viable containers to fill with more good stories, but again, you could also (and it’s certainly the opinion of plenty) argue that it’s outright arrogant to think you can make the story of one of gaming’s best stories better. I’ll do you one better: it is arrogant. But they were also right. And that’s what really blows me away. Persistently the history of both the original FFVII and now the two remake games is that of teams embracing the common cultural meaning of the number 7, that being good luck and fortunate gambling, and believing that they can do better than playing it safe. Across three games to tell the story of the mercenary Cloud Strife, they have been correct, even if the commercial returns haven’t been as big for the remake as one might hope. God, Square somehow turned the FFVII Remake into a financial risk. I love you guys.

There’s not much to say other than that the game is worth your $70. If you were a big fan of Remake, it might even be worth the price of admission of buying an entire PS5, but of course the game is likely to end up on PC sooner rather than later anyway. I firmly believe the game would be getting significantly more positive press if hadn’t had a console-exclusive launch. (I also think that as a gameplay system that FFVIIR would get a lot more positive press if it wasn’t burdened by the cultural weight of playing host to FFVII’s beloved characters and story, but that’s a different discussion.)

Yakuza 7: Like A Dragon

If you need any proof that turn-based role-playing games are significantly less niche than it might be believed, including by the developers most closely associated with the genre, look to the fact that in 2020 an established, successful franchise of action games took the leap into straight up turn-based combat and the resulting game was so commercially successful that they made the switch permanent.

Sometimes, all you have to do is fill a niche. You know what I am? Amongst other things, 30 years old, which by gamer standards means I’m fucking ancient, and aside from that I already had very “old” tastes growing up anyway. Turn-based combat and menu-based character management may be extremely suited to either high fantasy or light science fiction, but there’s never been any rule that says you have to be writing in those genres for that set of mechanics to make sense. It makes only all the sense in the world that with the demographic of JRPG players in particular getting older and not younger (source: vibes,) that somebody would eventually make a game with a sort of magical realist bent where the setting is Real Life and the jobs are things like “Freelancer” or “Host/Hostess” or “Foreman” and you eventually substitute a fight against a dragon with a fight against construction equipment. Sure, we’ve had JRPGs that take place in the modern world before, but in terms of major franchises, that idea has been mostly confined to the Persona games which are an absolute non-starter if you have no interest in reliving or rewriting your high school days. (And in my deeply held opinion, you should not!)

It should surprise fucking nobody that Like A Dragon was a massive commercial success.

But aside from the superficial niche-filling, Like A Dragon is also simply excellent, very obviously one of the best turn-based RPGs ever on the strength of its narrative alone which is extremely high level, and while I wouldn’t say that the combat or soundtrack is consistently up to the level of the writing, both of those elements also do show up in big spots when they need to, like the “glue guys” on a pro sports roster. To wit, while the gameplay is incredibly straightforward turn-based decision making for most of the game, the late game really steps up with some tricky and difficult boss fights that will test the strategic acumen of all but the most efficient parties, and in those spots as well are some unforgettable pieces of soundtracking, even if in the overall I wouldn’t tell you to play this game to experience its combat or hear its soundtrack.

The narrative itself is, well, baroque and melodramatic, but in exactly the way one would desire from an RPG. What really impresses me though is that it lives in a post-Metal Gear world and sees games as I see them: true multimedia where the gameplay is not necessarily centered unless it makes sense. The opening chapter of Like A Dragon, for example, is roughly 2 hours long and I think features maybe three of the most absolutely basic turn-based fighting you’ve ever seen in your life. Why? Because this is a system that exists to tell a story and not a story that exists to deliver you to a system. The story doesn’t even start with the birth of the main character, it actually starts with the early life of his surrogate father, and luxuriates in delivering you through to the end of the 20th century where the story of the main character actually begins. And this works because the writing, voice acting, and cutscene direction, are all absolutely fantastic. It’s no sin to take your time telling a story when it’s this good.

The real thing though of course is that, even though the tone of the game is very much the tone of an expensive, overlit soap opera, you cannot kill a JRPG that demonstrates real empathy for working class people. Something inherently works about refusing to sidestep the obvious parallel between mechanical systems that grade people based on experience and wealth and real world socioeconomic stratification. And unlike the other primary game that did such a great job doing this in the late 90’s that was also the 7th installment in a long-running franchise (hint: I wrote a book about it,) Like A Dragon is not complicated in the slightest by the need to put their version of these issues into an entirely fictional universe with a fictional history. This is a game about Japan, and real problems that exist in modern-day Japan right now, and to borrow an idea from gaming youtube original Emcee Prophit (who I am happy to hear is doing well,) it is a game that says that this real world needs heroes like in those fantastical tales of yore, crusaders who will take the risk of life, limb, and status to lift up those around them.

Which brings us to the star of the day. On top of the almost cheat code it is for an RPG to center its plot around real world issues (or at least allegories for them,) the other way to write your own ticket directly into the RPG canon is for your game to center around an instantly iconic protagonist, and Ichiban Kasuga, born in a soapland, raised by gangs, and victimized by his organized crime family to face nearly 17 years in prison, lose his youth, and be forced to a life on the streets only to rise up out of it largely on the power of his own will, charisma, and moral backbone, becomes something along the lines of the Patrick Mahomes of JRPG protagonists, a heroic figure clad in red cloth who establishes immediately that they are among the greatest we’ve ever seen. Ichiban Kasuga is who your favorite JRPG protagonist wants to be when they’ve grown up.

There is one massive caveat though: this series loves to be silly, and virtually all the thematic resonance I described goes out the window when you finally participate in the “optional” (with the biggest air quotes you’ve ever seen, like Shaq-sized air quotes here) business management minigame which has its entire own sidestory, its entire own super bland optional character who’s a super bland optional love interest for Kasuga, and also hides at, what is basically the end of required content if you ever want to buy some decent gear, the arguably too easily gotten best attack in the entire game: Essence of Orbital Laser, which can clear most encounters in the game at the touch of a button and an easily regained amount of MP. I strongly feel this portion of the game was ill-considered even if it comes off as being a non-canon sidestory in its own game. (The character mentioned here, Eri, disappears from Infinite Wealth, which I think says plenty.)

(Yakuza 8) Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

I really was ready to embrace Infinite Wealth as the total improvement of a sequel that it seemed to be at first glance, but in the long run it pans out as a game that can’t quite match the narrative excellence of the 7th title but does manage to be a much more strategically meaningful game from the outset. Watching your characters get more and more powerful in this game is a truly delightful process and by the end game you’ll find your teammates just dogpiling on enemies with coordinated group effort attacks.

What doesn’t register quite as well is the story. I don’t think it’s a bad story, and much like another famous example of a large franchise following an iconic 7th title with a bit of a letdown for #8, there are some things the narrative does that are, as individual nuggets, even more impactful than the overall package of Like A Dragon: reminiscing on Kiryu Kazama’s long and eventful life registers quite well even for somebody who hasn’t played all the games starring him, and the story of one Yutaka Yamai has to be seen to be believed. Eric Tomizawa is also, much like Yu Nanba before him, just an awesome sidekick character.

But there’s just so much that could be better, and I’ll just go ahead and list the stuff that comes to mind. Kasuga’s story never quite finds the thing it should be about? His plot revolves around chasing down a woman who may or may not be his mother who may or not be alive, but when the truth of those matters is finally revealed the resulting emotions are ultimately fairly tame, we don’t really find Ichiban growing, changing, or complicating as a character as a result of discovering things about his life that should be life-changing. (This sort of follows on from a critique I didn’t mention about the original LAD which is that there are some soap-y revelations about Kasuga that I felt were the wrong direction to go in.)

You can tell that from the Hawaii-vacation concept through most of Hawaii’s sidequests that they were in the mood to make a much goofier game this time around, and when you play the two games back to back as shot and chaser, that doesn’t hit the palette quite right. The clash between the serious content of the main narrative and the very frequently cartoonish elements of the side stories can be a real clash. What’s much worse though is that regarding side content in general, the pacing of how it is doled out in Infinite Wealth is genuinely just terrible. Easy example: characters have bond levels that grow when you trigger area-specific conversations between Ichi and the party member in question. Maxing out these bonds takes no time at all because the game makes the serious mistake of immediately showing you where pretty much all of the conversation nodes are immediately, so every time you get a new party member, for as much as these conversations enrich those characters, it does become something you’re doing as a chore to make your characters better and not for the love of the text. The way these conversation nodes appeared in the original game was significantly more organic. That becomes a general trend as well, with there sometimes being both floods and droughts of significant side-content. With the pacing issues plus it being a longer game than the original, you can be certain that by the time you’re finished with Infinite Wealth you’ll also be very ready to be done with it. Certainly doesn’t help that, unlike the international version of Like A Dragon, the new-game plus difficulties come at an upcharge, which ends up casting suspicion on everything from the balance of the games mechanics to whether they knew they could pull that off because combat is more engaging in Infinite Wealth.

The biggest recurring issue though is that while Like A Dragon does a fantastic job of convincing the unsuspecting rube like me that it knows quite a lot about contemporary Japanese sociopolitics, it demonstrates an equal amount of ignorance about America, where most of the same issues are prevalent. Eric Tomizawa would seem to be the perfect vessel by which to discuss the prevalence of homelessness and gun violence in America, as well as the cultural differences in organized crime between the US and Japan, but it just doesn’t happen to my satisfaction, it’s a lot of missed potential. And far be it from me to claim that any Japanese artist owes anything to an American audience, but the letdown does feel appropriate given that the big narrative moment they use to show how deep-rooted Hawaii’s issues are it’s one of the silliest narrative turns I’ve ever seen.

None of that can take away from the Hawaii vacation aesthetic being genuinely relaxing though, nor the fact that this is one of the most compulsively playable turn-based RPGs ever.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

I’ll have more on this one at a later date. Rest in Peace, Andrew C. Greenberg, we truly did hardly know ye. Suffices to say that just about any PC can reliably run Digital Eclipse’s recent remake of Proving Grounds and that if you consider yourself a student of the medium’s history, you should give it a shot. As somebody who tried, I can tell you there’s certainly no more accessible a way to play what is more or less the original home gaming RPG.

Wizardry VI: Bane of The Cosmic Forge

This one was a long time coming. In 2020 I started a run of this game that met a tragic fate right at the start of the endgame when I could simply no longer locate a key item. In 2024, I finished what I started.

For as dramatic as the genre often is, one thing that RPGs rarely do is delve into shock and taboo. If you’re willing to forgive a little tastelessness in the pursuit of that (hint: think Resident Evil: Code Veronica,) then Wizardry VI rewards you with as unflinching a look at the corruption that absolute power brings as any good story in the genre. At the very least if nothing else, the hook of just having to know what happens next drives the player from area to area, and each new cutscene of revelations brings purple text and juicy, juicy melodrama.

Released in 1989, Bane of The Cosmic Forge came as an attempt by Wizardry’s publisher, Sir-Tech, and its second-generation auteur, design and programming wiz DW Bradley (if you want to know how good he is, just ask him, he’ll tell you,) to re-establish that fading franchise as it came to be left behind by a market full of franchises who owed their existence and success to the popularity of the original Proving Grounds in 1981 as well as the rival Ultima franchise, whose more consistent release schedule and massive technical leaps between titles helped it maintain course in the marketplace without the need of a major second wind. By contrast, Wizardry had faded tremendously. The first two sequels to the original games would be considered DLC in the modern parlance, introducing basically zero new original mechanics and making the commercially fatal mistake of outright requiring that characters be created in the original game to be imported into the second and third. The fourth title, Return of Werdna, which took as long to develop as the time between the release of the first and third games, was as divisive as it is legendarily difficult, working from a gameplay premise completely different from that of the original three games, and when it showed up looking like the original wireframe Wizardry games, that left audiences seeking shiny new graphics cold. Heart of the Maelstrom, the fifth title, didn’t solve that problem either, but at least it returned to the original game’s party-creating and inn-sleeping roots.

It was only then that this sixth title really rejuvenated the concept. And, in fairness to the creativity of project lead Bradley, it brought about this renewal by essentially selling an entirely new vision of CRPG dungeon crawling under the banner of the Wizardry IP. The amount of races and classes totally exploded, granting players countless minor variations with which to approach the same combat problem-solving. New as well? Graphics. Shockingly limited graphics by the standards of the time, but it must be understood that up until this point Wizardry’s dungeons were portrayed entirely in wireframe and basically with two colors, white and black. Bradley, even while failing to create tilesets that accurately reflect the areas being described in the flavor text, still manages to sell a much more convincing setting simply by having a slightly more tangible place (it helps that the game’s only real tileset perfectly matches its banger classic opening dungeon, the Castle of the Bane King,) and boy almighty this flavor text is powerful stuff. I really came away from this game wondering about the “show don’t tell” principle given the absurd amount of resources that consistently requires from a developer, and I have to be honest and say that Bradley’s written description of a dingey, dusty, long-abandoned office and desk has stuck in my brain so much more than so many of those locations that are lovingly rendered with the best technology.

Wizardry VI also has a banger, awesome combat system where subtlety is how you get yourself killed and mercy is the quality of a loser. What, you’re worried about using the best group damage spell your mage has on the opening turn of an encounter against low level enemies? Fool! Be not deceived by the wizened copyright year of 1989! Beneath the surface of a product so ancient is the philosophy of a much more modern game! Bomb your enemies to the bowels of hell, then rest and save and rest and save (and rest and save again) until you are back to full resources. Don’t like savescumming? Don’t play this. People used to have to savescum because the games were just that damned difficult. If it makes you feel better, and you should: encounters are shockingly rare in this game. I love me a JRPG battle that ends when two targets are instantly killed by my best physical attacker, but at some point you need more meat and meat is what you get, with enemy groups sometimes entering the 20s for random battles, forcing players to either bomb or be bombed and pray for the best on the first turn of combat. It’s very difficult early on (hilariously, level 1 characters can swing at enemies that are fucking asleep and miss,) and it always feels urgent throughout and as a now very experienced RPG player I appreciate when a combat system can muster that feeling.

Of course, the game is still certainly archaic. Without a key mod, character creation can take up your entire first session, and not because you’re fiddling around with the nose slider. Resting and saving is a very tiresome process by the end of the game when you have and use more spell points at one time. Late game 7th level spells are also pretty dysfunctional though this is also solved with an easy mod. None of this is to mention that you will also need to go through the process of installing an automapper mod unless you plan to go the true old school way of drawing your own maps. Hint: don’t do that! You need position tracking!

Did I mention that you can take characters from this game and import them not just into 1992’s Wizardry VII: Crusaders of The Dark Savant, but also to 2002’s Wizardry VIII? And that you can take some items all the way from the 89 DOS game into the 2002 Windows game? And that all three games in a row tell a continuous story? A story about not just the fate of one world like in most RPGs, but the fate of the universe itself?

Trust me, it’s at least worth poking around in to see if you can get it popping. If you do, very much worth the time. More on this one from excellent retro RPG youtuber Michael Snow.

Lightning Rounds of Games I Didn’t Finish (but Still Intend To!)

Wizardry VII — IMPORTING CHARACTERS FROM WIZARDRY VI IS NOT EASY OR CONVENIENT.

Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne — Nothing in particular stopped me in my tracks while playing through this revered dungeon crawler, but it certainly is exactly what people try to sell you, a chewy, mean dungeon crawler with very meaningful combat and some brutally difficult bosses. If the Matador doesn’t get you, Dante will!

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana — Listen, I’m gonna get back to this, but generally I think if I play a game for 25 hours and I’m still looking for the thing that’s gonna blow my mind, that’s not a good sign. I have a feeling I may have chosen the wrong Ys game as while boss encounters have generally been a highlight, those have usually come at the end of a series of mostly uninteresting combat encounters and fairly plain level design attached to a novel and yet uncompelling narrative.

Trails in The Sky 2nd — I honestly can’t remember what year I started and didn’t finish this but I did attempt to give it my second go this year and lemme go ahead and say that certainly one issue with extending any “one game”s worth of story into multiple titles is that it becomes pretty exhausting to simply imbibe all of that story continuously as it spans out into the multiple hundreds of hours. This is also a problem with the FFVII Remake trilogy! At two-of-three titles it’s already roughly 120 hours even with just the main story, trying to play the story of FFVII from front to back exclusively through the remake trilogy is going to be exhausting! In the interest of fairness though I should also say more about Trails FC: it’s very good! Some pretty excellent character writing and a fantastic, meaningfully challenging combat system (“Sophisticated Fight” is an all time main battle theme) with a naturally low number of total encounters and an overall very chill vibe. Wasn’t a life-changer for me, but you’re silly if you don’t give it a shot.

Radiant Historia — It’s nice when you get to a game that hipsters have been telling you to play for a decade plus and it seems to live up to the hype. So here’s a fun story: a little while ago the Internet Archive went down right when I was about to download a 3DS emulator. (More on that next entry.) As such, I decided whilst between bigger games to try out a DS RPG, since the DS was such a solid platform for the genre, and decided to go with this one which is most famous to folks like me as being the game from (sigh) the very first Extra Credits “Games You Might Not Have Played” video. Ugh, how time has continued to toll the clock. Anyways, this one has a really good grid-based combat system that’s about using your turns and stringing them together to force enemies onto the same panel of the board and thus turn single-target attacks into multi-target attacks. It’s very compulsive and good. The soundtrack does pull a big name, Yoko Shimomura at the absolute peak of her powers, but sadly the actual OST mostly sounds like Kingdom Hearts 2 leftovers and you would think that would be a compliment but in this case it’s not. Also fun, though the game really doesn’t seem to have figured out the story it’s trying to tell me yet by using this, is the games approach to time travel where you play along the lines of two plots that play out as the result of a key fork in the road at the beginning of the game, with you being forced to hop between them using items and skills gained from one timeline to advance the other. It does, if nothing else, capture a really lovely little piece of metatext, breaking the fourth wall by breaking what is usually the totally linear construction of a JRPG story. I look forward to having more to say about this one later.

Bravely Default — The only reason I haven’t finished Radiant Historia is because I wanted to get a 3DS emulator to play this and as soon as the internet archive was back up that’s what I did. I hope to, again, have more conclusive things to say about it later, but what I can tell you is that Bravely Default’s early game specifically is just some of the finest dungeon crawling and combat ever conceived, it reminded me a lot of FFIII and I really appreciate any game where the side questing in fact means getting to explore entire other dungeons. The issue is that as I head into the midgame the difficulty seems to be spiking severely and that’s not just a me issue. Still, I look forward to finishing this and recommend anybody else give it a shot. “That Person’s Name Is,” the song reserved for “Asterisk” boss fights is at least a contender for best JRPG battle track ever, and god only knows how much that’s carrying the game.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake — This is going to sound a lot more negative than I really mean it: even Kinda Screwed Up Dragon Quest III is still one of the better JRPG campaigns ever conceived. There’s that coziness you associate with modern games in this series, a really richly detailed world map, and the new voice acting is fantastic. What I’m not so sure on quite yet is the balancing, or rather rebalancing, of one of the most beloved systems in the genre. Still, hard not to call this a recommended purchase after the time I’ve had with it.

Metaphor: ReFantaszio — and I only put down DQIII for this, what I’m currently playing. If I start describing this game it’ll take hours, it suffice to say that the 30 hours I’ve spent with it so far have all been worthwhile. ATLUS made a Final Fantasy and it’s pretty good!

I’ll see everyone again in a bit when I’ve finished some of these games.