Illustration by Game Informer
I've been seeing everyone else do this, so it's high time I post about my favourite genre as well!
RPGs, what else is there to say? Epic adventures that you can spend/waste hundreds of hours on. Beautiful worlds with in-depth lores, characters and everything else.
I've already posted about some RPGs here in HGC, such as Persona 5, Yakuza 7 and Dragon Quest XI S, but I've never said where my passion comes from, where it all started, so I figured I might as well get to it!
There are two games I can attribute my love of RPGs to, and these are:
Pokémon Yellow
As a kid who loved the show, playing the game was the logical next step. Luckily at 11 years old I already spoke enough English to understand what was going on and managed to play through this masterpiece entirely on a Nokia C2 phone via a Gameboy emulator.
This game taught me all the conventions of an RPG, stats, levels, buffs, debuffs, type advantages, etc.
Admitedly it's still quite simple, after all, it's Pokémon, but I had a blast on my adventure with my trusty Pikachu.
Dragon Warrior I and II (GBC)
And on the same emulator, I had this as another one of my games. I had heard about the Dragon Quest franchise and wanted to get into it, I felt the first games would be ideal... For a zoomer kid they kind of weren't, I was looking at guides and maps all the time on my PC but gosh darn it, it was fun. It felt special, it felt like I was on a grand adventure and I just loved how everything looked, from the sprites to the simple menus. Even the abbreviation of words was charming for me - something felt different about this game, and playing all that on my old Nokia C2 was quite a cool experience.
The precise model I had.
After that, my next step was Final Fantasy IV, translated into Portuguese, on a SNES emulator for the PS2. Latam kids might remember the disc I'm talking about, that came with tons of SNES roms.
I had one of those with translated RPGs, it was AWESOME!
Final Fantasy IV had a great story with lots of moral ambiguity, something that for 11/12 year old me was kind of new in games. I was playing way more graphically impressive games on the PS2 by this time, but none of them gripped me the same way as this and other SNES RPGs did.
Then after that, my memory is a blur. I don't even remember all the titles I played afterwards, but for a while I rememer being stuck to FPS titles, specifically CSGO - but then one game got me back into RPGs...
After having it recommended to me by a friend, I purchased Persona 5 for the PS3 - and if you know me, you know how much I fanboy for this game.
It was a refreshing experience, very different from the other RPGs I had played up to that point. It felt a lot more linear, but way better structured and really kind of felt like an anime at times - lucky me since this was around the time I was watching a ridiculous amount of anime.
I'm still playing Persona 5 (Royal now) all these years later and I don't see myself stopping my new playthroughs. Of course I'm also exploring Persona 4 Golden through Steam, it was a very worthwhile purchase as that game feels like more of what I loved in P5, even if it's a little rougher around the edges. After that I'm definitely moving onto P3 via Gamepass. I just absolutely love Persona <3
After Persona, my love for the genre was revigorated, I played tons of new RPGs through Steam, even RPG Maker games, I played Undertale which took the genre and turned it upside down, then came Dragon Quest XI S and then Yakuza 7 and more and more, and now I just can't stop.
In fact, I stopped my first time playthrough of Ni no Kuni II to write this post, and after I'm done here... I'll go back to playing that.
Which is why I'm wrapping it up here. If you wanna talk about RPGs, let's talk about RPGs! But now, the world of Ni no Kuni awaits me, I have to help Evan get his throne back and nothing will stop me for the next 50+ hours.
Thanks for reading!
