Shin Megami Tensei V is currently in development for the Nintendo Switch, which may come as a surprise to longtime fans of the series. The gap between SMTIII and SMTIV was a substantial nine years, jumping from the PlayStation 2 to the Nintendo 3DS. The advancements between these two titles were few, with the latter actually taking a step back in representing its monsters as 2D portraits, but SMTIV was still very much a gargantuan Role-playing game, featuring 70-90 hours of gameplay, a fully-voice-acted story, and many monsters to obtain and unlock.

The Alliance Alive is a relatively new game, and those who have followed these articles know that its predecessor, The Legend of Legacy, has already been covered because of its unique elements. With a month of content dedicated to narrative elements, there is one particular aspect of The Alliance Alive that stands out in relation to many of its contemporaries- the overlapping narrative that takes place during the first quarter of the game. Although it certainly is not the first Japanese Role-playing game to implement the idea, the game revisits the concept at multiple points and benefits from the concept a great deal.

It comes as a great surprise to me that Square Enix has announced the far-off Final Fantasy VII remake will be released episodically. While any story-based game- and Role-playing games, especially- can have its narrative broken into smaller pieces, the pacing and amount of content per portion in Final Fantasy VII is questionable, and not necessarily clean-cut. Unless, I don't know, you break it up by the literal CD swaps from the original PS1 release. While many games have attempted episodic release schedules in the age of digital distribution, there are very few that seem justified in doing so. An episodic game needs to have a structure in which each installment tells a concise narrative, no matter how much cliff-hanging the writers wish to create in order to encourage a player to buy the next installment. What is stranger- to me, at least- is that there are specific franchises that feel primed to adopt an episodic release schedule yet have not done so.

Pokemon is arguably one of the most popular and widely recognized Role-playing games in the world, which is quite a feat for a genre with relatively low sales. Its addictive monster-catching gameplay is by no means revolutionary, but it is bolstered by an approachable battle system and strong core mechanics that have more or less endured the span of twenty years through the introduction of additional wrinkles. For newcomers, these can be seen as a gimmick- something new that appears in each new generation that may appear frequently during the course of a playthrough. For high-level and professional players, they are aspects that define and shape the competitive metagame based on their permanence- or lack thereof, if you consider the weather wars of generation five.

If you're an avid fan of Role-playing games, it's likely that you have some level of text comprehension and reading skill. The genre is not necessarily plagued with verbosity, but it does rely heavily on dialogue and in-game text in order to communicate its narrative. Having a great deal of dialogue can be beneficial to the plot and character development, but the effectiveness of this text is also determined by the tone, level of nuance, and depth of character that it actually communicates.

Most of the role-playing games I've talked about on this site have been narrative-driven, linear affairs. There's nothing wrong with this, and I've mentioned before that the appeal of these kinds of games is inheriting a role- being an active participant in a story. If this is the reason you play these kinds of games, you have an incentive for engaging in combat on a regular basis- you need to be strong enough to take on the next foe, so that you can progress the story, etc etc. The most frequent method of incentivizing a player is by crafting engaging narratives and allowing them to inherit a crucial role in the narrative. This leads a player to want to discover more from a narrative perspective, rather than through compelling gameplay. This is not to say that this model cannot have compelling gameplay- it largely depends on the sorts of organic progression the developers place in their way, as well as combat motifs and core mechanics. However, this can often present a...

I took a look at the Octopath Traveler demo version recently, and it left quite an impression on me. I'm still not quite sure whether it was positive or negative, however, mostly because the game's intentions are still somewhat elusive. While there are some aspects of the demo that appealed to me a great deal, others feel a bit nebulous, and the game as a whole seems to lack some direction. While the developers have apparently taken some of the concerns of those who evaluated the game to heart, there is still much that has not been said about Octopath Traveler, and while its aesthetic is striking and its homages evident, I hope to address some concerns regarding this new Square Enix RPG.

For those with an interest in Japanese Role Playing Games, there are a number of iconic developers who have been churning out new and exciting releases. Square Enix, Atlus, Falcom, and others have contributed a great deal to the landscape of this current console generation. But FuRyu might not be a familiar or memorable name to many, and that's admittedly because only a few of their games have made it over to the West. On the 3DS, FuRyu has released two particular titles of note, with a third on its way- Unchained Blades, a first person dungeon crawling RPG with an emphasis on story, and The Legend of Legacy. The latter of the two possessed an impressive pedigree, with a number of veteran creative forces working on the title, in particular, Masato Kato and Masahi Hamauzu, writer of a number of classic JRPGs and the ambient composer for several titles, respectively. Kyoji Koizumi, a longtime veteran of the SaGa series, was also a lead game designer, which can be felt in a great deal...

Much like its predecessor, the Nintendo 3DS has amassed a number of high quality role-playing games in its library. With its backwards compatibility with Nintendo DS game cards, however, stating the system may have one of the best comprehensive JRPG libraries is not a bold statement. Remastered versions of old classics, new and exciting series and installments, and the occasional singular entry that stands well on its own. Something the 3DS benefits from is its eShop, a place where independent developers could flex their muscles and release smaller titles at affordable prices. In its early days, the eShop was a saving grace for the system's somewhat starved retail library, but as the 3DS grew to prominence, the eShop became a stage for experimentation. Nintendo and third parties could take risks with less-familiar intellectual property and toy with small scale concepts.

January 11 th was the night of the first in-depth press conference for the Nintendo Switch, and I remember jokingly telling my friends at the time that I would likely hold off on buying the new system until Monolith Soft announced their first title. Imagine my surprise when I saw the first, bare-bones teaser trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (XC2) that very same evening, with a tentative release date of 2017 attached. I reined in my expectations in the months to come, knowing full-well how XCX had taken such a long time to develop, and how little of this new title we had seen. News that the original soundtrack had just finished recording before E3 did not give me much hope, but the game would be featured there and given a release date in the same holiday time-frame as XCX. Shocked and now enthralled, I began to listen more intently to how the game's mechanics would work and play. While the Treehouse demo was informative, it had only a few instances of exceptional pl...