Recently I got The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and it's become addictive. This videogame has everything, or almost everything that I always wanted in a single videogame. I have especially loved open-world videogames since I played Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. Add to this that one of my all-time favorite games is Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and you can imagine I absolutely had to have this game. The Zelda franchise was always one of my favorites, and I've played a number of those. And in TotK they have clearly shown they know what they are doing, as, in my opinion, everything is done just the way it ought to be done. In short, their experience making videogames shines in every aspect of the game.
At least that's how I feel about it.
Interestingly, playing this game has consistently reminded me of another game I had been playing (and left unfinished!) a little while back. It's not that the games are at all similar, but there is one thing that they have in common, and in TotK it is (as far as I can remember) new in the franchise (I haven't played all of Zelda games, so I may be all wrong). The presence of an old, lost civilization and it's ruins is what I am talking about. It's one topic that always seems to go well with videogames, for some reason. Indeed, in Morrowind there is also a lost civilization, and you can find their ruins all over the land. I also remember I really really liked the theme as it appeared in the Metroid games, especially on the Metroid Prime series (of which I really only played Metroid Prime 2, iirc).
But neither of these is the one that I keep remembering, but another one, one that I keep wanting to go back to because it was so damn good. I am talking about Grandia for the PSX. Just last year I found out about it and it quickly became one of my all-time favorites. It's kind of silly, I don't have much to say about this game right away, the story is beautiful, I can very much relate to the protagonists, and the combat system is fun, with a level of difficulty without becoming a grind like some games of the kind. As I said, being in the face of a lost civilization in Zelda always makes me remember this older game.
It is an older game, indeed, much simpler in it's programming than the one I am currently playing. Games have evolved quite a bit these days, TotK being a particularly good example of the direction they've taken. But being more complex doesn't necessarily make them better. Sometimes, it can make them worse!
Grandia is a representative of a genre of videogames which were not incredibly complex in their mechanics. I imagine they would actually be rather easy to implement. And yet, a whole genre spawned with lots of awesome titles. It is this period in the history of videogames that this post is about and which is also my favorite genre of all: the JRPG.
JRPGs were fun. They had nice pixel-art graphics, they had a relatively simple and straightforward format, with a turn-based combat that is also rather simple in it's essence, but they made up for that with the story which they presented. Certainly, some of the first of these, such as Final Fantasy 1, had a very simple story, and yet I remember it was very fun to play. Without necessarily being an open-world game, you got to explore new regions and towns, and I always liked going around and talking to people to figure out what to do next. It was simple, yet it was fun.
The Dragon Quest saga, though I didn't play to many of those, was, as I remember, one of the very best. I don't even remember which DQ games were those that I played, all I remember is that they were fun to play.
The genre is now pretty much forgotten, and that's a shame. So I plan to play as many of these old games as I can get my hands on (and as I manage to get the time to play them), starting from the classic ones as they can be found on the PSX (and that I can thus play on my PSP). I also have a NDS lying around, though I would need to get a charger for it. I can play the DQ saga on that one, I think.
These are the first games I have on the list:
So um, perhaps this is the start of a new series, though it'll take me a lot longer to make posts for these, as I will be making them as I finish the games. Let's call them something simple: JRPG Review.
Hopefully soon!