James Mason's Blog -or- The Journal of Contemporary Lunacy

Yikes A bit of accidental good timing with the share button caught the above moment. I love how nonchalant Cloud looks in the frozen moment: "Meh, hang in there."

It's #JRPGJuly - the time of year to really focus on those JRPGs in your playlist or backlog and share some screenshots, anecdotes and (quite possibly) rants. I've been nursing along several JRPG play-throughs recently but without any strict focus due to travel, other things on the go, and my crippling inability to focus ;) Here's a quick list of possibles and probables: I have my umpteenth play-through of Suikoden II [PSX] nearing the end - 30+ hours in and with all 108 characters recruited. I've also spent some time re-playing Grandia [PSX] with the (relatively) new and complete un-dub patch. Feeling nostalgic, I started a replay of Lunar: Eternal Blue [PSX] last week Lufia II [SNES]. I'm several hours in but stopped playing for a while due to how formulaic and "samey" things were feeling. Might be worth going back for another look. Phantasy Star [SMS]. Holds up incredibly well for a Master System game. Warrants some more hours of play....

Without wishing to make too much of what is very much a first world problem, it was a bit of a miserable experience growing up as a fan of JPRGs in Australia (end elsewhere in PAL territories). Limited local releases It wasn’t that we missed out on obscure or fringe titles either - the “big hitters” of the genre, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were completely absent from shelves. The very first Final Fantasy to see a PAL release was VII on the PlayStation. Dragon Quest took even longer - the PlayStation2’s Dragon Quest VIII was the initial appearance for the series (the number was even dropped from the title, something that also occurred with the EU/AU/NZ Nintendo DS releases of Dragon Quest IV, V and VI. Presumably this was done to prevent any confusion but I like to imagine marketers saying “what other Dragon Quest games?” while whistling innocently. Interestingly, some titles did still slip through the cracks. Lufia II [SNES] appeared as simply “Lufia” (the first game, wh...

Compare the pair (and more) So many versions/ports/translations of Final Fantasy VI, which leads to the inevitable question: which is the version to spend 60 hours playing through? It's a question that's been asked all over the net with as many opinions as there are interested gamers. It can actually be quite fascinating, there are comparisons based on translation, looks, censorship (or the lack thereof), nostalgia, system of choice, and more. As an aside, The Legends of Localization site has a wonderful breakdown and comparison of the different translations (complete with video), and is well worth having a look through. It's certainly not a choice I've been able to make 100%, but I have ended up settling on a SNES play-through using the (admittedly flawed) RPGOne re-translation. I've also sunk a lot of hours into (but not completed) the GBA and PSX ports. The GBA is (IMHO) the best of the official ports, but it does require some patching to restore the ori...

AVGN's latest video has made me nostalgic for all things SNES, so I've drawn up a list of games to revisit. First cab off the rank is Final Fantasy VI, which I've never actually completed due to starting over on multiple platforms. I started on the SNES version, switched to the PS1 release at some point and put most of my hours into the GBA remake (which was very nice but loses a little something on the small screen). I wound up losing track of where I was up to at some point and left it for so long that restarting is probably a decent option anyway. Other games I plan to get to include: Super Mario RPG, Zelda, Super Metroid and Super Mario World.