Joseph Riina 
Space Runaway Ideon is a nearly forgotten 1980 mecha anime that’s mostly remembered for two reasons: One, it’s the show Yoshiyuki Tomino worked on after creating the original Mobile Suit Gundam the year before, and two, it was a huge influence on Neon Genesis Evangelion, especially its postscript movie The End of Evangelion. I’d heard … Read more
I’m no horror aficionado. I think the sum total of horror games I’ve finished is An Outcry, the Faith trilogy, and Silent Hill (and that was just a week and a half ago!), and my track record with movies is no better. The only horror movie I’ve seen in the past ten or so years … Read more
There’s a bit of a CRT television craze going on right now in the retro gaming market. There are quasi-viral videos comparing how Peach looks in Super Mario RPG on LCD vs. CRT; prices of even the most budget CRT sets have risen from “just take it off my hands” to “100 dollars”, and membership … Read more
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky is one of those games that periodically makes the rounds on the social media nostalgia circuit. It was more popular than it feels, a massive cult classic, and just a great game with pretty varied appeal. It’s got raw dungeon crawling for the sickos, heavy story focus for the … Read more
TRIGGER WARNING: Mentions of Suicide and Trauma Five or six years ago, I was served up a tweet where somebody had posted a few screenshots of some movie and was gushing about how cool the guy in the screenshots looked. I agreed, so I grabbed one of the images and sent it over to my … Read more
Why are forgotten civilizations so ubiquitous in our stories? Humanity has, for all of written history, always lived in the ruins of the past. The Pyramids of Giza were more ancient to Cleopatra than she is to us, and the Egyptians who built those pyramids were far from the first people in the area. It’s … Read more
Western RPG video games have always stayed closer to their tabletop roots than Japanese RPGs. Not only is there a huge lineage of many of the most popular and most influential Western RPGs like Baldur’s Gate being literal adaptations of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), but even the games that exist outside of the license remain obviously … Read more
The SaGa series is an old one, almost as old as the ever-present Final Fantasy, yet to my knowledge it’s been either maligned or unknown in the West until somewhat recently. Part of that reputation may be that the series is the brainchild of Akitoshi Kawazu, a man most well known for Final Fantasy II … Read more
