Megami Ibunroku Persona (PS)
The Persona series is a unique one as it’s sort of the first Japanese RPG to break containment in the West since game journalists in 2011 collectively decided that Japanese games are bad and gay, actually, and Uncharted is the peak of video entertainment. Thankfully, we’re past that era, but while developers like From Software have kept Japanese games on the map, the humble Japanese role playing game remains a niche pursuit in English-speaking circles, compared to Japan where the RPG is still the “default” kind of game. Persona, though, has had wild success in the West, starting with 4 but really solidifying with 5, so it’s been a series I’ve been meaning to jump into since even before I spoke Japanese… but of course, I’m a weirdo who always has to start at the beginning, so here we are, with Persona, no numbers, the first one. I long intended to play the PSP remake of this game, but at the eleventh hour I learned that they made the absurd choice to replace the game’s original soundtrack with new compositions from Meguro Shoji in that version, and knowing how much PS1-era Atlus’s music slapped (Shin Megami Tensei on the PlayStation is one of my favorite soundtracks of all time) I ended up playing the original version. There’s a lot to like about Persona but even more to dislike. The atmosphere is unique and for the era, the story about high schoolers trapped in an evil SMT dimension is a curveball. The demon-fusing mechanics are just about as addictive as they are in any SMT-adjacent game, at least until you figure out what the most exploitable skills are and every combat encounter degenerates to spamming the same attack… And it just kind of degenerates from there. The story is worth experiencing, but I would’ve have finished this game without a no-encounter cheat in the end, as not only is the encounter rate high, with slow battles, but the final dungeon is just enormous. Anyone who successfully finished this game on original hardware deserves a Purple Heart. The good news is Persona 2 is often cited as the best entry in the series, and I get to play that one next.
Ryu ga Gotoku 4: Densetsu wo Tsugu Mono (PS4)
The Year of Yakuza stretches into its 15th month and we arrive at the fifth entry in the series. I left a bit of a gap between 3 and this one, because 3 was kind of tiring with its terrible combat and pants-on-head story, but Ryu ga Gotoku 4 does everything right to wipe out any potential series fatigue. For one, you don’t even play as Kiryu Kazuma for the first three quarters of the game—a daring choice, but they start you off with such a brilliant anti-hero in Akiyama that I wouldn’t have even been upset if this was just the new protagonist of the series from now on. The story remains stupid in places (don’t even get me started on “stun bullets”) and drags in others (the prison break goes on for way too long) but after the moronic CIA conspiracy plot in 3, it’s nice to get back to a more “traditional” yakuza power struggle about money and honor. This time we even delve into themes of corruption among the Japanese police, through one of our protagonists being a crooked cop with a soft spot for illegal immigrants, which is a surprisingly daring theme for a game from a country that generally tends to venerate their police. The inclusion of the aforementioned illegal immigrants is nice to see as well, since in real life ethnic minorities are inextricable from the story of organized crime in Japan, but our Ryu ga Gotoku games have tended to feature them only as villains to this point. Unfortunately, if you’re the kind of person who likes to play the side activities alongside the main story in these games, the multi-protagonist design also kind of works against itself since there is no way to swap player-characters until the postgame, but certain side activities are locked to certain protagonists, so for example you just get locked out of Akiyama’s cabaret management side-game or Saejima’s MMA manager diversion for like twenty hours after you progress past their parts. I tend not to play games after the credits roll, so this meant I just ended up not touching a lot of the more involved side-content. Still, it’s a return to form for the series for sure and a heartening sign that Ryu ga Gotoku Studio is willing to do things to shake up the formula.
Ys Memoire: Felghana no Chikai (Switch)
I’m rapidly converting to the church of Falcom. The Kiseki series has already become one of my favorites, but their most famous series, Ys, is also full of bangers. After Napishtim no Hako last year, Felghana no Chikai is more of the same, just more refined. It’s got the same awesome, fast-paced action RPG gameplay that Ys is known for, but unlike the previous game, it has one of the most perfectly tuned level curves of any RPG I’ve ever played. Just going through every dungeon normally gets you right to a level where the next boss is a solid, but doable challenge, and if you find it’s too tough, you typically only need a scant one or two levels more to tilt the scales in your favor. I even like the story here: even if it is a little “standard,” it’s well-executed, and it was fun to get some background on Dogi, everyone’s favorite interior renovator.
Mikaiketsu Jiken wa Owarasenai to Ikenai Kara (PC)
This game wasn’t anywhere near my radar, but after seeing a huge amount of Japanese game developers praising it, I had to check it out. I think this is actually a Korean game originally, but I played the Japanese localization, so the title here is in Japanese. The long and short of it is that Mikaiketsu Jiken represents a genuine stroke of genius in the genre of interactive fiction. I like detective games, and I’ve played a lot of them, from your Gyakuten Saiban to your L.A. Noire, from your Dangan Ronpa to your Sherlock Holmes. A common feeling in these games though is that you are really just solving a puzzle and trying to fit the pieces into the correct places in the right order, and you can often succeed without having to do any deductive reasoning at all. It’s not infrequent that I’ll “solve” an interrogation in Gyakuten Saiban just because I figured out what evidence-shaped key went in the testimony-shaped lock, and then Naruhodo starts talking about some insight I never came close to having. Mikaiketsu Jiken is brilliant because it really does make you feel like you are thinking about the case, not just playing with game pieces. It casts you as an amnesiac retired cop who is reviewing their one unsolved case, but all the testimony is missing information about who gave it and when. It’s up to you to read through the text and infer who was saying what, when, and about who, and to piece together the case organically yourself. It’s only about a three hour experience but it’s totally captivating, and even if the overall narrative didn’t totally land for me, it really makes you feel like a detective for that short while.
Mafia: Definitive Edition (PS4)
Being that I am one of those weirdos who likes to follow traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto games, when I first read about the Mafia series all those years ago, it stuck in my mind. You have to drive the speed limit or the cops will stop you? This game sounds amazing! Fast-forward twenty some-odd years and apparently they’ve remade Mafia for modern platforms with fancy graphics. I can’t remember what made me pick this up—maybe it was just on sale for cheap—but it turns out Mafia has a lot more to offer beyond being that cute game where you have to drive the speed limit and put gas in your car. Drawing as it does from the canon of American mafia cinema, this game has some of the best god damn acting in any video game I’ve ever played. It sort of plays a trick on you in that while there is a big open map you can drive on, this is not a GTA clone; it’s a linear action game, and there are no map markers to chase down or side missions to pursue. I briefly felt betrayed (I went in wanting a GTA clone) but the characters grab you so viscerally that I couldn’t put the game down until the end. It is kind of like an American Ryu ga Gotoku game without the humor: everyone is betraying everyone else, there are double- and triple- and quadruple-crosses, and everyone talks like a wiseguy. It’s great and I’m totally bought in for the later games in the series.
Samurai Kanzenban (PS2)
In the process of getting very into the Ryu ga Gotoku series last year, I was reminded of another niche Japanese series: The Way of the Samurai. Known as Samurai-Dou in Japan, I remembered the third (or maybe the fourth?) game in the series, on the PS3, garnering a fair amount of praise and comparisons to the Ryu ga Gotoku series, so I figured I should check this one out, too. I don’t know if the later games are more similar, but it turns out the original Samurai isn’t like Ryu ga Gotoku at all: in fact, it’s actually a narrative- driven rogue-like? A single run through the story of Samurai can take a couple hours; you’re intended to play through the game several times and trial-and-error your way through the backwater town set upon by a power struggle between samurai, bandits and the government in the Meiji period. There are a dozen ways you can go through it, siding with one faction or the other, or none at all, and the game grades your “samurai honor” at the end, too. It’s a lot goofier than that description probably makes it sound (there is a black dude with a big afro there for some reason) and the setting is rather memorable, with super-powered anime warrior type characters on all sides of the conflict. While the ultimate execution doesn’t make for the most fun game, especially coming at it in 2025, it’s unique as hell and easy to see why this game was a cult favorite back in the day.
Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights (PS4)
This is one I picked up as part of my effort to play more indie games in 2025; it had been on my wishlist for a while because I liked the look of the vaguely Nier-inspired aesthetic. I’ve started to realize this year that Metroidvanias are a genre I like a lot, and this is one of the big games that brought that about. The very cool, horror-fantasy aesthetic comes with some great gameplay and a brilliantly-tuned difficulty curve. The game is consistently challenging but I don’t recall myself ever getting frustrated except against maybe a boss or two; even the final boss felt merely hard-but-fair. You unlock several dozen abilities over the course of the game and can equip six in two sets of three, which gives you a lot of flexibility to build a moveset that fits the way you want to play the game. I actually got the Platinum trophy in this game, only the third one I’d ever unlocked. It did take me a solid couple of months to clear as it was a lot longer (19 hours) than I was expecting and it was my “third game” that I’d bust out maybe once on the weekend, but it really worked as a nice change of pace. There’s a sequel that I’m looking forward to checking out maybe next year.
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