Game-related ramblings.

Month: November 2019

History Lessons: Phantasy Star

Other History Lessons posts can be found here. This post makes many references to the entries for Dragon Quest II and Final Fantasy. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

My quest to play the early Japanese-style role-playing games continues. I failed to start at the beginning, unfortunately, playing Final Fantasy before realizing that the Dragon Quest series got there first, releasing two games before anyone else caught on. But I’ve now gone back and played both of those. Add in Final Fantasy and I’m all caught up, but there’s no time to rest on my laurels: on December 20, 1987, a mere two days after Final Fantasy was released, Phantasy Star appeared. Developed in-house by Sega, it was intended as a showcase for their Master System console, a direct competitor to Nintendo’s Famicom which ran Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. And since both the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series took their sweet time coming to the United States, Sega actually beat them to the US market, releasing an English-language version of Phantasy Star in November 1988.

History Lessons: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Other History Lessons posts can be found here. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is only seven years old, but I couldn’t help but compare it to its contemporaries and successors in the role-playing genre as I played. Hence, a History Lessons post. I actually bought the game when it was released, because reviews suggested it tried several interesting things, even if it didn’t qualify for classic status. Today, the game is more famous for the scandal that followed its release: developers 38 Studios, founded and run by retired star baseball pitcher Curt Schilling, infamously imploded a few months after the game came out, resulting in bankruptcy and a tangle of litigation related to loans from the state of Rhode Island. Stories of poor management and exorbitant spending (largely on perks for employees, at least) were everywhere at the time. But when THQ Nordic announced they had acquired the old 38 Stuiods IP (including Kingdoms of Amalur) in September 2018, the game was briefly back in the press spotlight, and a lot of people pointed out that the game itself was actually pretty good. That inspired me to finally give it a spin.

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