Bravely Default: Flying Fairy (HD Remaster)

Bravely Default: Flying Fairy, ridiculous title aside, is clearly meant as another callback to 16-bit Final Fantasy, copying in particular from Final Fantasy V.  The overall storyline and job system is there, with each of the 24 jobs having around 20 abilities to unlock, as well as the ability to mix-and-match class abilities and skill sets to create hybrids.  Aside from that, the new additions are mostly ancillary - there's a little achievement system built in for filling out the bestiary, equipment lists and hitting certain story points, and various other little quests to complete that serve as compliments to the tutorial messages by awarding items when you successfully put their lessons into action.  A major subplot/sidequest is rebuilding a town by assigning workers, which takes numerous hours of real time; finding "Passing Souls" (avatars of other players on your friends list) will give you more workers to utilize to speed up the process, and the town in question can be accessed at any time outside of battle via the menu to take advantage of its services.  The only notable addition to combat is the titular Brave and Default system - Default is your Defend but also stores up an extra turn for you to use, and Brave spends those extra turns, as well as letting you spend later turns in advance, allowing you to get up to four consecutive actions per character in a round.  All this sounds interesting, but they forgot to make any of it particularly fun or engaging.  Combat is super slow and drawn-out, with even normal enemies being walls of HP that take numerous turns to whittle down, and boss battles reach into almost unbearable territory.  The incredibly high encounter rate manages to make even relatively short dungeons torturous, and even the option to turn it down to half doesn't help much. Fights all give a pittance of Experience and Job Points so it takes absolutely forever to power up and learn skills, and that's just ridiculous; modern RPGs, even ones that are allegedly "homages" to what came before, should be more briskly paced and less grindy than games from the '80s and '90s, not worse in both categories.  It never feels like you're building an effective team to counter a bosses' patterns or exploit their weaknesses, just trying to outlast them through sheer endurance regardless of your party build.  Also not helping the engagement factor are the extremely basic and derivative story, clichéd characters and ultra campy dialog that feels like it came straight out of an episode of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  It's just baffling why they got big-name VAs like Erin Fitzgerald, Bryce Papenbrook and Spike Spencer aboard just so they could waste their talents with terrible directing and such an insipid script.  I only spent about five or six hours with Bravely Default; in that time, I saw nothing to convince me that this isn't just another forgettable, mediocre game coasting on nostalgia for an earlier era,  which makes little sense considering the games it's clearly aping from were readily available on numerous platforms even at the time it was originally released on the 3DS.  Really,  just grab a copy of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters instead of settling for this lame knockoff; Final Fantasy V is a timeless game that still holds up beautifully, whereas this game (and franchise) will only get a few more fleeting months of attention before everyone remembers why it sucks and it's cast into bargain bins to be forgotten once again.  And hey, you get five more games for your $60 with the Pixel Remaster collection; four of them are even good!

Developer: Silicon Studio/Cattle Call
Publisher: Square Enix
Released: 2012,2025
Platform: 3DS, Switch 2

The Legend of Legacy

While there are plenty of Final Fantasy copycats out there, some of which have become pretty respected franchises in their own right (Shadow Hearts coming to mind), there are very few games that try to copy Square's SaGa franchise.  Maybe not the most surprising thing since it's a far less popular series, but it has been around almost as long as Final Fantasy and continues to have a dedicated fanbase so it was bound to happen eventually.  The Legend of Legacy is one of those rare SaGa clones, and it's a pretty authentic experience considering its development team has several Square Enix alumni in its ranks.  With game design by Kyoji Koizumi (who also designed several of the SaGa games), written by Masato Kato (of Chrono Trigger/Cross and Xenogears fame) and featuring music by Masashi Hamazu, they set out to make a game that felt like a '90s SaGa title and succeeded for the most part.   Set on the island of Avalon, the game features seven smaller stories in a shared setting and a focus on open-ended exploration and strategic combat. Stats and skills level up semi-randomly by participating in combat, and available techniques dependent on each character's type of weapon and their proficiency with it, randomly "Revealing" new techniques or upgrading existing ones (similar to "Sparking" in the SaGa games).  A strategic bent comes in the form of party formations chosen at the start of each turn; for example the Unicorn formation puts one person on point, and if they choose to block using a shield, they will intercept attacks directed at the allies behind them.  HP is also restored to full after each battle, though if a character is KO'd in battle their maximum HP will be reduced until they return to town to rest; further hits taken while downed will further reduce it.  Running from battle also operates differently from most RPGs in that the party will not just escape from their enemies, but retreat all the way back to the entrance of the current map.  Like SaGa, the open-ended design proves to be a double-edged sword; in the course of exploring you can easily stumble across a high-level area, get trapped in a boss fight and wiped out with no prior warning, necessitating a reloaded save and a fair bit of lost progress.  You also do have to pay close attention to clues and story beats and do a fair bit of searching to figure out what do do next, so it's not just a matter of following a marker to hit the next plot beat until you win like most JRPGs.  Still, if you like the unique and off-beat blend of Japanese and western elements that the SaGa series provides, the Legend of Legacy is one you may want to check out too.

Developer: Cattle Call, Grezzo

Publisher: FuRyu, Atlus, NIS America

Released: 2015, 2016, 2024 (HD Remaster)

Platforms: Nintendo 3DS, Switch, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, PC

Metal Max Xeno: Reborn

Metal Max is a franchise built around open-ended exploration and vehicles you can find and customize to aid you in battle, all set in a post-apocalyptic setting; sort of like Wasteland or Fallout but with JRPG-styled turn based combat.  Metal Max Xeno is only the second game in this franchise to be localized, and it does its best to try and fit in with a more modern school of design.  The minimal approach to story scenes and characterizations and the overall desolate world gives it a slight Fallout 3 vibe.  Its gameplay takes a few cues from games like New Vegas as well, with a lot of side-quests to undertake and incidental objectives called "miniquests" that give you bonus experience for doing even mundane things - collecting a certain number of an item, customizing your tank for the first time, finding new records for the jukebox back at your base, and so forth.  Switching between combat and exploration is pretty seamless - instead of having a separate combat screen, enemies draw a (literal) line of sight to you, and if you fail to move out of range before the gauge fills completely, you move a turn-based engagement; however, you can still move about freely in the time between your turns, allowing you to position yourself behind cover to avoid attacks or flee combat before you take too much damage, and once you defeat a foe, you move straight back into exploring.  Weapons also have ranges now, covering a blast radii or cone-shaped areas of effect, allowing you to hit multiple enemies at at a time with well placed shots.  Per previous games, there is a pretty heavy focus on collecting parts to build new weapons, engines and armor plating for your tank, and extras can be sold for a good bit of cash; far more than you get from battle.  It still hits some common pratfalls for the series, though - as you travel about you'll frequently encounter boss-tier monsters whom you can defeat for large bounties, but they're often far, far beyond what you can handle at first, necessitating that you avoid them and come back later (with no indication of how much later - you don't ever get to see how much HP an enemy has).  The overall bleak tone is also a detriment to a series which, up to this point, was known for its oddball humor; now the whole world is one big desert with almost nobody in it, making the whole thing feel pretty drab and lifeless, and you don't get oddball enemies like a giant subterranean VW beetle anymore - just a lot of repetitious tanks and mechs.  Metal Max Xeno tries to be something more akin to the modern Fallouts, but in doing so loses much of its own identity.  More damningly, it's missing that all-important satisfying gameplay flow, sense of freedom and subtle storytelling that make good open world RPGs so compelling.

Developer: Kadokawa Games, Cattle Call, 24Frame
Publisher: Kadokawa Games, NIS America
Platform: Playstation 4, Switch, PC
Released: 2022

Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen

The fourth game in the Dragon Quest franchise and the last to be released on the NES/Famicom changed up the format once again, going for a chpater-based approach that would later be copied in games like Wild Arms.  But does Dragon Quest IV prove to be another worthwhile entry to the classic franchise, or does it just fizzle out compared to other games from the era?

Dragon Quest continued on with no sign of stopping throughout the 80s and 90s, getting four entries in as many years on the Famicom and NES alike.  This would be the last one localized for a good while, though, as Enix passed on bringing over 5 and 6 from the Famicom and 7 would see release on the Playstation, while an advertised remake of 4 for the platform would go unreleased due to the company set to localize it going out of business.

The fourth game is also one of the rarer games on the NES platform; little surprise as it saw release in 1992, when the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis rivalry was reaching new heights.  Even RPG fans tended to overlook it, as games like Phantasy Star II and III and Final Fantasy II (actually IV) were coming out on those platforms.  But of course, those who only had an NES to play found a surprisingly good game if they picked up Dragon Warrior IV.

The first three Dragon Quest games all were set in the same world, but this was not the case for the fourth entry, which is set in an entirely new one (albeit retaining many of the series' iconic monsters).  Still, while the core gameplay and overall presentation remain much the same as previous Dragon Quest games, the fourth entry definitely changes up the format in an interesting way.  Rather than just having one story to experience, Dragon Quest IV has five.  The first four are short stories each featuring a different protagonist pursuing their goals, while the fifth and sixth star the game's protagonist and have him allying with the protagonists of the other stories throughout the game.  Later remakes add another chapter to the game as well, serving as an alternate ending and having the heroes ally with the game's final boss to defeat the true antagonist behind all of the game's events (a concept that many of the Final Fantasy remakes would also utilize).  Interestingly, one of these characters in particular (Torneko) would later become something of a face for the series, even getting his own spinoff on the Playstation called "Torneko: The Last Hope" that utilized the engine from the Mystery Dungeon franchise.

Some new elements are added to the gameplay too.  One prominent change (at least in the original NES/Famicom release) is that the player can only control the main character in the latter two chapters; the rest are simply commanded by the AI, though the player can give them general commands to heal, cast spells or simply attack, et cetera.  While this does speed up the game a bit by cutting down on the amount of time you spend inputting commands, the option to assume manual control would be nice; indeed, most of the remakes do allow this, so it seems even the developers heard a lot of fan complaints about it.  The player can now search bookshelves, jars, and so forth to find items, in particular the series staple of "Hero Medals" that can be traded for rare items.  A casino appears that allows the player to gamble and earn some extra cash and prizes.  Finally, the player is given a "Wagon" for use on the overworld, which allows them to swap party members on the fly, rather than having to return to town to do so.

Being a game of the era, though, it does fall prey to a few of the same pitfalls.  The game is still a long and grindy one, with frequent encounters that give only a pittance of XP, requiring you to stop at several points and farm experience and gold for a good while before you stand a chance against a particular boss (which really got me at the end for the final boss; I had to gain at least five levels before I stood a chance, and with battles only giving about 100 experience a pop, that took almost a full day to do).  Limited inventory space is also an issue, particularly as you can only carry a small handful of healing items at a time and have to rely on magic for the rest, so dungeons are a test of your level and endurance than anything else.  Save points are also relatively few and far between in the original release, though some later versions do add a quick save feature that let you save progress from almost anywhere (but erase your save on load).  Thankfully grinding is less of an issue in the remakes too.

Even with a few shortcomings, though, Dragon Quest remains one of the standout RPGs of its time period.  With a narrative unlike anything else seen on the NES and quite a lot of content to explore, it was a fine last hurrah for big-name RPGs on the system.  Later remakes only did it more favors, adding in a few modern conveniences, cutting down on the grinding element and even expanding its story, and its legacy was enough to get the hero included in the new Super Smash Bros. game as a downloadable character.  Definitely worth a look.

Developer: Chunsoft (NES), Heartbeat/ArtePiazza (Playstation), Cattle Call (Nintendo DS)
Publisher: Enix
Platform: Famicom/NES, Playstaiton, Nintendo DS, Android/iOS
Released: 1990, 1992, 2001, 2007, 2014
Recommended Version: I've only played the NES version personally, though I am aware that most later ports make significant improvements to the game's presentation and gameplay style, as well as allowing you manual control over your allies.  The iOS and Android ports are currently the cheapest ones available and the most fully-featured.