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
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
Before Xenoblade Chronicles, there was Xenosaga. That’s not what we’re talking about today. Before Xenosaga, there was Xenogears—a directorial debut for the sometimes controversial, though no doubt beloved, Tetsuya Takahashi. Off the heels of working on field maps and graphics on several genre-defining titles (Final Fantasy IV–VI, Front Mission, Chrono Trigger), Takahashi and his wife … 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
It’s easy to dismiss Pokémon Red and Blue as ‘having aged poorly.’ And, to an extent, coming back to the original Game Boy from the Switch, many of the quality-of-life features present in later generations are sorely missed. It’s certainly annoying to have to deal with the item limit, for example — I could not … Read more
