Strap in, folks. This is a roller coaster ride of a retrospective, which may or may not show a maturity of thought. Definitely not maturity of composition.

As a sendoff to the month of May, in which we sought to examine narratives and narrative elements in Role-playing games, I thought it would be proper to write a critical analysis article for a video game. This is a review and revisit of Child of Light. The year is 2014, and Ubisoft Montreal is in the mood for something a bit different. While the Japanese Role-playing genre is alive and well, the western front largely relies on big-budget, high-investment immersive sims in order to fill that same void. Some independent developers create their own unique titles, but a high-profile Role-playing game utilizing classic gameplay is an alien thing.

Video games have evolved in ways previously thought impossible since their inception, largely thanks to the rapid growth and improvement found in iterative hardware and the importance of such devices in the digital era. What was once a rudimentary open-world game like The Legend of Zelda pales in comparison with Breath of the Wild, both games offering freedom and exploration in vastly different ways. Because of the rapidly-changing standards, however, titles that were once considered the highest quality of their era are constantly challenged by newer efforts. What was once hailed as revolutionary is now considered a relic, usually only in terms of aesthetic, nothing more. So when developers claim that they are attempting to evoke a "classic" feeling, what are we to expect from their product? It isn't necessarily the same as what is "retro," which, depending one your tendencies, is anything produced within the previous fifteen to twenty years. As men...