2023 began for me in the same way 2022 ended: Attending far too any funerals of both close and far relatives, and in moments of grief, numbing myself by playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses. In times like those, and in global times like t...

With the explosion of the JRPG genre in the 16-bit era, new games needed something to differentiate them from established franchises. Media.Vision's answer to that challenge was fusing the well-worn fantasy trappings of the genre to a ...

Everything about Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain can be explained by director Denis Dyack's desire to make "a game which adults would want to play". As a result, Silicon Knights made a game that deserves the M rating according to the ESRB, ...

The most striking thing about Jade Cocoon: The Story of the Tamamayu is its relation to the excellent work of Studio Ghibli thanks to the involvement of Ghibli's Katsuya Kondo in the design of the world and characters. It is immediatel...

If you thought that a third Syphon Filter game in three years is a sign of creative fatigue, then you have thought right. For all intents and purposes, Syphon Filter 3 is almost identical to the second game but with poorer pacing and s...

The first Syphon Filter game followed the steps of Metal Gear in making an Action-packed game with some cinematic sensibilities, and it proved to be one of the better games that partially imitated the great PS1 classic.Syphon Filter 2 ...

Games like Metal Gear Solid showcased the development in gameplay and storytelling that was possible on the PS1, and many aspiring developers raced to follow its example. Several attempts failed at providing a compelling narrative, com...

Following the surprise success of the Broken Sword Adventure games on the PS1, a success that was surprising because the genre usually thrived on PCs but struggled on consoles, Sony reportedly requested that Revolution Software make a ...

We are now closing in on the final third of Retro Sanctuary's Top 100 PlayStation 1 Games list and we are naturally getting the good stuff. However, there are some serious errors on this list. For me, it's extremely inappropriate to ha...

Made by some of the same team that developed the uber-serious Xenogears game, at a time when Square seemed to have a Midas touch, Threads of Fate was made to be a contrasting light-hearted adventure that still makes an impression. At t...

Producer: Tatsuya Minami Director: Koji Okohara Release: 2001 Console: PS1   Commonly thought off as one of the worst games in the series, there is a lot of truth to that sentiment. At its best, Mega Man X6 is an imbalanced mes...

Producer: Tatsuya Minami Designer: Koji Okohara Release: 2000 Console: PS1   Released three years after the masterful Mega Man X4, X5 was a game made at a time when 2D platformers were looked at with disdain as relics of the pa...

Quintet was a legendary under-the-radar developer in the days of the SNES, responsible for making games such as ActRaiser and the brilliant Heaven and Earth Trilogy (Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma. The fact that this brillia...

Producer: Keiji Inafune, Yoshinori Takenaka Designer: Koji Okohara, Mitsuru Endo, Hiroyuki Yamato Release: 1997 Console: PS1/Saturn I have a confession to make regarding these series Retrospective blogs: Mega Man X4 was always a fa...

The PlayStation 1 had such a massive library of games that it is impossible to do it justice with a simple top 100 games list. As such, I decided to supplement my usual review of a top 100 games list (this time, I used the top 100 PS1 ...

Released at the tail end of the PS's cycle, more than a year after the release of the PS2, C-12: Final Resistance was incredibly late to the party. Yet, being so late in its release may have been in its favor, as all the development se...

Producer: Tokuro Fujiwara Director: Keiji Inafune Release: 1995, 1996 Console: SNES, PS1/Saturn   Developed at the tail end of the 16-bit era, Mega Man X3 was as anachronistic to the times as Mega Man 6 was at its release, even...

The move to 3D game development in the 5th Generation of Consoles introduced several interesting design problems regarding translating well-liked genres, such as 2D Shooters like Contra, into 3D space. Many developers went in different...

After the two COVID years, I thought I will finally tame my backlog. Yet, what many predicted came to pass, and the post-COVID game releases came thick and fast, obliterating my control over it. Now, I have many games released in 2022 ...

Producer: Tokuro Fujiwara Designer: Sho Tsuge, Yoshihisa Tsuda Release: 1993, 1994 Console: SNES   Making a sequel to the excellent Mega Man X was never going to be an easy task, and Mega Man X2's divisive reputation is a testa...

Producer: Tokuro Fujiwara Designer: Yoshinori Takenaka, Keiji Inafune, Sho Tsuge, Masayoshi Kurokawa Release: 1993, 1994 Console: SNES   After spending the latter years of the NES crafting a distinct and almost unaltered identi...

Being the third game in the series, but only the second game released in the West after Tales of Destiny, this game was mistakingly branded with the Tales of Destiny II moniker as to attract fans of the first PS1 Tales game. This decis...

Producer: Kazuhiro Tsuchiya Director: Koji Oda Release: 2018 Console: Switch, PS4, Xbox One   After an eight-year hiatus, in which one of the franchise's main founders (Keiji Inafune) left the company and a long-awaited project...

Producer: Keiji Inafune, Takuya Aizu, Hironobu Takeshita, Toyohiro Serita, Akiko Ito Director: Ryota Ito, Hayato Tsuru Release: 2010 Console: WiiWare, PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade   With the success of Mega Man 9, Capc...

The Tales JRPG series is nowadays synonymous with comfort food; a satisfying meal that is neither complex nor memorable. Full to the brim with anime archetypes and genre cliches, it is honestly difficult to pick the different games apa...

Producer: Keiji Inafune, Takuya Aizu, Hironobu Takeshita Director: Hayato Tsuru Release: 2008 Console: WiiWare, PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade   After the release of Mega Man 8, the classic series underwent an extended h...

Past the halfway mark in Retro Sanctuary's Top 100 PlayStation 1 Games list and we are supposedly going to get to the good stuff. This appears to mostly be the case despite Tomb Raider polluting the list (it deserves a place on reputat...

Producer: Keiji Inafune Director: Hayato Kaji Release: 1996, 1997 Console: PlayStation, Sega Saturn   As the first Mega Man produced by Keiji Inafune after the legendary Tokuro Fujiwara left Capcom, it is fitting that this game...

If you notice in the game's cover art, it's titled Tomb Raider II: Starring Lara Croft. At this stage, it was clear that the character and game became iconic in the gaming landscape, and that was enforced by an extensive and extremely ...

Producer: Tokuro Fujiwara Director: Yoshihisa Tsuda Release: 1995 Console: SNES   Mega Man 7 occupies the awkward spot of being the first game officially confirming that the Classic Mega Man series that started on the NES is di...