It’s no exaggeration to say that Final Fantasy VII had a major impact on me. It marked my introduction to JRPG’s and broke me of my N64 stockholm syndrome and its slow trickle of games to embrace the Playstation, the platform I look back on as the defining point of my gaming life. I spent so much time breeding chocobo’s and grinding that goddamn crashed Gelnika ship that I continued to play for months after I’d killed Sephiroth and avenged Aeris’ famous death. I hadn’t experienced anything like it. Then I came to despise it and what it became in the years after its release. I thought back on the tangled weave of Cloud’s angst and Sephiroths madness and the nonsense turns its plot takes. But when you can no longer remember why you dislike something, perhaps it’s time to return and look with fresh eyes.
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Chrono Trigger’s Clockwork Precision
∞ Play Time
Out of all of Chrono Trigger’s significant contributions, New Game+ most epitomizes its soul. Not only does it recognize the player’s hard work, allowing them to return to the beginning of its story with all their experience and rewards, it’s consistent with its time-travelling premise. Of course, NG+ would be pointless if the games core wasn’t worth returning to, but it’s a wondrous adventure, stocked with a great cast of characters full of personality. Fitting a premise that can have small moments have big ramifications, it starts with a fateful encounter.
Bayonetta’s High-Flying, Pistol-Stiletto Burlesque
Lights Down, Curtain’s Up
Bayonetta’s prologue starts conservatively, with a nun clad in white quietly praying over a grave. It primes the world’s Victorian aesthetics with a puritanical morality up front that wouldn’t fool anyone who had seen even the box art. That a flock of angels descend from heaven and cut off her clothes to reveal the scantily-clad Umbran Witch underneath who lithely dances around shooting them in the head is perhaps the proper way to open the show.
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Asura’s Wrath: The New Anime
Asura’s Wrath contains one of the most brilliant player-directed narrative sequences in videogames; a fist fight. The two brawlers dance about the screen, one trying desperately to explain his actions to the other among a flurry of attacks. To evade them, the player must nail the timing for the increasingly frequent on-screen button prompts as any mistake is punished with a fist to the face, interrupting the dialogue and completely ending the conversation.
Zelda’s Missing Link
Early on in A Link Between Worlds, the travelling merchant Ravio takes up shop in your house, lines it with The Legend of Zelda’s classic complement of items and offers to rent Link each and every one. This event single-handedly eradicates the suffocatingly linear item-based progression that had reached its logical conclusion even before Twilight Princess put its staggering deficiencies on display. A Link Between Worlds is in many ways an alternate take on an old story, one that reveals its true ambitions at the beginning of the second act as Link squeezes through a tear in the fabric of Hyrule and discovers that every inch of the world and its seven palaces are accessible with the right tool in hand.
The Saint’s Flow: Purple Stuff
The Japanese ad for The Saint’s Flow Energy Drink shows Pierce, the hip and youthful face of the Third Street Saints brand division, being mercilessly beaten on a basketball court by armed punks. The situation looks bleak, until an anthropomorphized purple can of Saints Flow descends from heaven and gives him the strength to throw off his attackers, unleash a savage volley of fists, kicks and a clothesline before shooting a Ryu-style fireball from his hands and closing out the performance by atomic dunking a basketball that appeared out of nowhere to a shower of neon stars. The Third Streets Saint’s lifestyle has been canned and is ready to be swallowed.
A Super Mario World: Exploring Dinosaur Land Through Play
Super Mario World starts at Yoshi’s House and gives the pudgy Italian plumber the freedom to explore the overworld to the left or right. To the left is Yoshi’s Island 1, a bright and colorful place with tank top-wearing koopa’s, small purple dinosaurs and giant goddamn bullet bills. Beat it and the area around will come alive underfoot. The path dead ends at the Yellow Switch Palace sitting on top of a cliff and the large button that causes matching boxes to fill in throughout the world. With this one action, large scale change has swept across Dinosaur Land. It will never be the same.
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Mother 3: A Game’s Story
For all their merits, traditional JRPGs haven’t exactly positioned themselves as videogame’s most cohesive narrative experience. One reason is foundational to the genre: the separation of world exploration and menu-based combat breaks player immersion from the story and characters. The other reason is true for the majority of games period: they all know how to implement a story but few understand how to exist as one. While still very much a traditional JRPG, Mother 3’s story takes root at its core, finding ways to incorporate all its elements into a whole that is surprising and emotional.
Mega Man Legends & The Future Archaeology
For a decade across the 8 and 16-bit generations, Mega Man had been an action-packed dynamo, but after some twenty odd games, his aging framework was in need of some vital upgrades. Powered by the PlayStation hardware, Yoshinori Kawano and his crew of robot masters successfully forged a new Blue Bomber, translating his action concepts onto a three-dimensional world.
The new 32 bit tech gave the series a chance to break away from the techno-future aesthetic found in both the Classic and X series with their cities dependent on robots for manual labor. Mega Man Legends is an adventure in a world covered in endless water where diggers explore the ruins of a lost civilization amongst the scattered land masses for Zenny and treasure.
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Blast Corps’ Controlled Demolition
For anyone who used to make believe with a box full of Tonka Trucks and action figures, Rare’s Blast Corps is a special kind of game, one that takes you back to the timeless parts of your childhood that don’t fade just because you’re now an adult. It allows you to relive the freedom that comes from the act of playing and the simple joys that come from pretending that you’re taking control of a roughneck crew out to save the world through demolition.
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