Flashback twenty-four years ago: it's 1990 and the RPG is a fledgling concept. The introduction of a console with the first-ever CD-ROM peripheral allowed expanse material to be brought to the TurboGrafx-16- in specific,  titles like Ys Book I and II. Revolutionary for its time, Ys featured action-based gameplay with role-playing elements, a pounding soundtrack, and a surprisingly in-depth story. With Ys VIII's recent release on Steam and the increased exposure of the series thanks to its imminent release on Switch, it is as good a time as any to evaluate what makes Falcom's signature Role-playing series so unique. Like many of its kind, however, Ys has undergone several improvements and changes throughout the years. This feature will take a look at some of the best parts of Ys Book I and II, highlighting why it is still holds up in its base form almost a quarter of a century later.

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.

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.