Jrpg Jungle

When I was a kid, before there were JRPGs in my life, there was anime. And while JRPGs eventually became the thing I loved more, I loved anime for similar reasons when I was most into it. Its inspirational characters, gorgeous animation and stories I couldn’t find anywhere else kept me coming back to it at different times in my life, whether it be for the childhood inspiration magical girl anime provided or the darker side of the genre I found as an adult. As much as my relationship with anime has changed, I’m sure it led me on the path to JRPGs in different ways, from making me drawn to its visual style in games or introducing me to story styles that are some of my favourites regardless of the medium. Anime might be a smaller part of my life now, but these are five of the anime series I enjoyed watching that I can link a few of my JRPG choices to at different points in time. Sailor Moon, Magical Girls and Blue Reflection Sailor Moon had a profound impact on my life in my childhood, pr...

February was an interesting month in terms of the way my gaming time went. With Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker’s Memory all finished, I was left with time to come back to my long term JRPG quest Persona 2 and time to catch up on Japanese demos like Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time and Atelier Lydie and Suelle that had been sitting on my hard drive for a while. There were also a few random delays, with Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s New Game+ mode that I’ve been looking forward to ever since I finished it getting a delay and the full version of Little Witch Academia not coming out in English when most people (myself included) expected it to. Luckily, the main JRPG I was looking forward to did come out towards the end of the month in the form of Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet and I can look back on the last month and say I had a lot of fun with what I played, so here are all the JRPGs I Played in February. JRPG of the Month: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 While I intended last month to go de...

January was a very good month for JRPGs and also a month where I had to quickly accept that it would be impossible to play everything. After all, I started the month on the tail end of December’s Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and while I had a solid game plan in the form of Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker’s Memory for January, various experiences from betas to demos to indies kept popping up and all I could do was try stick to my plan while playing what I could in between. I did manage to try a lot of the experiences I wanted to try in January for varying lengths of times and feel positively about most of them, so here are all the JRPGs I Played in January. JRPG of the Month:  Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker’s Memory Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker’s Memory has been the JRPG I wanted to start 2018 with ever since it got given a release date thanks to the first one making me fall in love with my PS4 . Armed with my PS4 again, I entered Hacker’s Memory with not much knowle...

Tokyo Game Show this year was pretty good. Even if there wasn't an announcement that particularly blew my mind, there were enough trailers of games I was already keen for to keep my hype going hopefully until the end of the year. TGS 2017 for me is mainly just a reminder that the next 12 months are already looking fantastic, with interesting new IPs coming out, great remasters and spinoffs, and some of my favourite series getting new additions. With plenty of hope that it's given me hype that will last, these are my favourite announcements and trailers from TGS 2017. Code Vein Code Vein continues to show itself as a title to watch for JRPG fans, especially if you like the idea of Dark Souls but in an anime style. Most people know by now to expect challenging gameplay and quite a few games media sites wrote about Code Vein’s difficulty after playing it, which I’m looking forward to experiencing for the first time as someone who hasn’t played the Souls series yet as I think this ...