My shelves are lined withrole-playing games.I have posters on my wall of Suikoden 2, Jade Cocoon, and Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. I’m infamous at my college for, among other reasons, having gotten tipsy at a bar one evening, boldly striding forward to a potential romantic interest, and asking them… whether they’d heard of Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis. I kind of have a thing for RPGs.
Under normal circumstances, there’s nothing wrong with this. Under unfortunate circumstances, such as in the late 2000s and early 2010s - a sadness-inducing dry spell for my preferred styles within the genre - I’ve even been known to partake in new hobbies. Thanks to so few good games in 2009, I got into kayaking. It was great!
But the past few years have been neither normal nor unfortunate. In 2022 alone, Square Enix launched 21 new games. Some of them weren’t good, and one of them was Babylon’s Fall, which is bad enough to cancel out a few more by proxy. My point is, that’s a lot of video games. 11 more arrived in 2023, and if we zoom out from this weird paragraph-long obsession with Square Enix specifically, we’ll see there have also been several dozen worthwhile RPGs from other companies in both years.
2024 is showing zero mercy. Just take a look at February alone. The long-awaited Granblue Fantasy: Relink rang in the month on February 1. A day after Granblue came Persona 3 Reload, a remake of the seminal school-meets-save-the-world spectacle. How will I fit in a playthrough of Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island on February 27 when Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth arrives on February 29?
Put it on the backburner, I hear you cry, because FF7 Rebirth is a bigger deal? Dear readers, no! What if my sale (or lack thereof) is somehow the deciding factor in whether Spike Chunsoft continues to release Shiren the Wanderer games overseas? It isn’t easy being a fan of so many RPGs from Japanese developers, you see, especially if you survived those aforementioned late 2000s and early 2010s.
I’ve been conditioned to believe a failure to support interesting titles will seal the fate of future ones, and failing to do so would mean my only choices in 2025 will be whether to snag a Final Fantasy game modeled after Call of Duty, or a Pokemon game modeled after Grand Theft Auto. Which would actually be kind of funny. But that’s not the point.
Zooming out from February. How’s the rest of the year looking for us role-playing gurus? It looks fantastic. And I hate it. At the risk of oversimplification, Vanillaware’s Unicorn Overlord looks like a stylish spin on the classic Fire Emblem formula, and it’s out on March 8. For those keeping score at home, that’s just eight days after FF7. Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 hits shelves on March 22, and it looks excellent.
In April, I’m somehow supposed to choose between Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes on the 23rd and SaGa Emerald Beyond on the 25th. The former is a spiritual successor to the outstanding Suikoden (complete with creator Yoshitaka Murayama on board), and the latter is the latest in Square’s forever-underappreciated, gorgeously experimental, SaGa series. So, we’re basically looking at the sixth Suikoden game that never was, which, OK, you know what, I’ve decided, I’ll prioritize Eiyuden Chronicle. I apologize to SaGa Emerald Beyond, I promise I’ll buy you.
The remainder of 2024 will leave me breathless. Metaphor: ReFantazio is a fantasy-tinted Persona. Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is the start of a new journey for my Warrior of Light. Visions of Mana might well be another Square Enix success story. I am inundated. I can scarcely draw breath just thinking about all of these role-playing games that I will proudly engage with, fulfilling my duty as a sucker for the industry who will undoubtedly dislike some of these games. But that’s all right, damn it, because the rest will make up for it. I think.
How much time will I have left for my other hobbies? Like hiking, traveling, and spending Audible credits on historical books that teach me about all the places I can neither hike to nor travel to? Never mind the fact that there are thousands of non-RPG video games en route, plenty of which look nifty? I don’t have an answer to these questions. I might not have much time to leave my post, AKA my living room couch. Surely, I’ll be left with no recourse on many battle-weary evenings but to order delivery from my favorite sushi restaurant.
As 2024 begins, I take my place as a seasoned soldier ready for one more war against the ticking clock, one more goal to finish as many new RPGs as is humanly possible. Every year, it gets a little harder; every year, I’m expected to do a little more in the ‘real world’, and a little less in front of my TV. Somewhere out there, someone is still wondering whether I’ll ever stop talking about how to make the perfect Final Fantasy 10 Blitzball team, and embrace the popular realm of baseball fandom instead.
But I just can’t leave this arena. Go easier on me in 2025, won’t you, video games?
