#oneaday Day 329: Open your wallet

One thing that has been a constant in all the discussions over the death of Giant Bomb and Polygon yesterday is that we need to support independent creators. We need to support worker-owned organisations, we need to support publications that aren't corporate-owned, and perhaps most importantly, we need to support individual creators who, in many cases, do not have the backing of a corporation or even an organisation to help them out.

What this means in practical terms is that if you like something a particular creator or group of creators does, you should open your wallet and toss them a bit of change now and then. It doesn't have to be a regular pledge, it doesn't have to be a lot of money, but it's something we all need to get better at doing.

Of course, for those of limited means, ways of supporting creators that don't involve spending money are helpful, too. Telling others about the creators and their work; sharing links to ways people can support them; telling their own stories about why that creator and their work are important to them.

But there has to be a slightly mercenary element to this: there are people out there working hard who deserve to get paid for the work they put in — particularly if it is their actual job — and that payment shouldn't be contingent on SEO optimisation and ad revenue. The obsession with those to the exclusion of all else — including the quality of the work — is what has led us to a situation where almost the entirety of the traditional games press has collapsed, with the scraps being hoovered up by corporations that pay peanuts for absurdly unreasonable quantities of work. And when that happens, you get an Internet flooded with shite. And when there aren't workers to do that but the content still needs to flow, that's when you get an Internet flooded with AI-generated shite that is riddled with errors as well as being crap.

In many ways, the democratisation of information that the Internet has brought everyone is an amazing thing. There is no need to spend thousands of pounds on an Encyclopaedia Britannica because you have access to all that information and more via the Web. But the trouble is, this same democratisation of information has led everyone to expect everything for free. And that is simply not sustainable. People who make things as their job need to get paid. That money needs to come from somewhere. And we've proven pretty clearly beyond any shadow of a doubt that the ad-driven model is not a good way of doing things, for a variety of reasons: the workload it places on underpaid workers; the unreliability of it as an income stream; and the fact it encourages a race to the bottom in terms of content churn rather than the production of actually meaningful, worthwhile work.

So I say again: open your wallet. Think back to the days when if you wanted to read something about your hobby, you'd walk into Smiths and pick up a magazine, maybe flip through it a bit, then walk over to the counter and pay a few quid for it. You might do this multiple times a month for different aspects of your hobby, or, hell, for different hobbies altogether. You might even set up a subscription so you got the magazines sent straight to you. In doing that, you were supporting the people who made the magazines, the people who wrote the articles, and you were helping to ensure the continued existence of that magazine.

Sure, you could read the whole thing for free in Smiths if you wanted to, but I think most people were honest enough to actually pony up for a copy of a magazine if they had a quick flip through and saw one or two things they thought were worthwhile. More often than not, you'd find things you didn't expect to find interesting when you later perused the magazine in its entirety later in the day. And sometimes, you'd even return to that magazine years later and rediscover things you had forgotten about, or notice things you never saw first time around.

You can't easily do that with the churn of SEO optimised website content because of the sheer volume of it — and the inability to guarantee that the information will still be there [x] years down the line. Someone on Bluesky earlier noted that they were doing research for a video they were making and found a good article from 2014, but was unable to follow up on any of the sources that article cited because every link in it was broken.

So, I say again: open your wallet, if it is within your means to do so. Help writers produce fewer articles with more words that are better and which stick around for longer. Help video makers produce fewer videos that are better quality, more in-depth and completely devoid of SEO or ragebaiting.

And if anyone makes a new paper magazine about your passions, you throw those goddamn heroes a subscription.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 328: Polygone

Well, another one bites the dust. Today, we learned that gaming site Polygon has been sold to Valnet, the sweatshop of online media, and that, as is standard practice in this situation, pretty much all the regular writing staff have been let go, to be replaced by contractors who will be paid absolute fucking peanuts to churn out SEO-baiting drivel and contribute nothing of any real value to the broader conversation about video games.

I was never a huge fan of Polygon, I'll confess. But this isn't about me. It's about yet another significant pillar of Video Games Journalism collapsing — because make no mistake, being sold to Valnet means that your brand is going to have very little value left afterwards — and the entire landscape of this section of the media getting just a little bit worse.

To make matters worse, it appears that Giant Bomb is circling the drain, too. I don't think anything "official" has been announced on that front yet, but from what some of the people involved have been saying publicly… yeah, that site isn't long for this world, either.

Why does this keep happening? Why are we allowing sites that are demonstrably good at what they do to get destroyed in this way? At this rate, we're going to have absolutely no "big names" in the games press left.

And perhaps that might, over the long-term, be a good thing. Because every time something like this happens, it feels like more and more worker/creator-owned outfits pop up and show that yes, it is possible to do things a bit differently; it is possible to put together an interesting and enjoyable site without resorting to SEO-baiting bilge and Guide Content; it is possible to build a sustainable publication that doesn't rely on ad-revenue and instead asks its most interested readers to pony up a couple of quid a month in exchange for stuff that is actually worth reading.

But will this successfully become the norm? We have to make that happen. We have to look beyond the search engine algorithms, start following the sites we actually care about… and support them. One of the worst things to ever happen to the press in general — not just in gaming — was to set the expectation that everything, everywhere, should be free, always. It's devalued the hard work of people working in the media, it's normalised paying people an absolute pittance for hard work, and it's actively making useful information and meaningful commentary harder to find. None of that seems the slightest bit desirable, but we keep heading down that path.

I already support a few folks I like via Patreon. I think it's probably about time I start ponying up for a subscription or two for sites I think are doing worthwhile work. Off the top of my head, I recommend Aftermath for gaming-related stuff, and 404 Media for tech journalism. Both are doing great work, and both are doing well through support from their audiences.

The issue, of course, is that if you end up supporting a lot of sites in this way, it can get pricy. But then think of it this way: did you buy every magazine that existed every month, or did you have a favourite? There you go. I guess the answer is to read fewer, better sites. And don't support the shittier behaviour of the sites that have already been fed to the Valnet monster, or which are in the process of sliding down that drain. You can solve today's Wordle by yourself, believe me. I believe in you!

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#oneaday Day 327: Catch-up club

I missed yesterday in all the excitement. We went to Ikea and had meatballs. Yes! What a tremendously exciting day that was. I joke, of course, but it was a perfectly nice day, and the last of my time off for my birthday, so I enjoyed just having time to relax.

Today, it's back to work, although it's only a couple of days and then a long weekend for the May Day bank holiday, so it's not so bad, even if I have to endure a bunch of meetings in the meantime between now and then. I'd much rather just get on with my work, y'know?

Meetings are a scourge of modern existence. I hate Microsoft Teams and find waking up to Teams notifications one of the most depressing things imaginable, but at least if your meetings are on Teams you can get on with other things while other people are rabbiting on about bollocks you don't care about or which aren't relevant to you.

I have to give a little credit to my job here: the meetings are, for the most part, reasonably helpful and productive, and there aren't too many of them. It's not like my last job, where we would have a meeting called the "Good Morning Call" every Tuesday morning, which involved sometimes up to two hours of listening to our French colleagues very slowly reading out everything from our project management tool. When COVID hit and we all started working from home, I actually took to going back to bed while this meeting was on speakerphone (and turning my microphone and camera off, obviously) — I literally slept through pretty much every one for about six months, and no-one ever noticed.

I feel like if meetings were completely eliminated from the weekly work calendar, everyone could get so much more done. Since more often than not, meetings are used as a means of going "what stage are we at and what needs doing?", it would be far more productive for everyone to just agree that, say, on a Monday morning they just send out an email saying what they're going to be working on and if they need anything from other people. "This meeting could have been an email" is a meme for a reason, after all.

Also, people who want a "quick call" to confirm something with you rather than just putting what they want in the chat or an email can get to fuck, too. I've got shit to do, and the last thing I want to spend time doing is sitting in an environment I feel uncomfortable (video chatting) when I could be just getting on with the big pile of shit that is continuing to build up while these distractions are happening.

Ahem. Anyway. Those are my thoughts on meetings. If you can successfully run a company without endless, pointless meetings, you have my respect. Keep it up. Your employees with thank you.

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#oneaday Day 326: It's officially my birthday

It is, as promised, Actually My Birthday now, since I have been to bed since last night's post and woken up since then. I have had today (and the days surrounding it) off work for reasons I've already outlined, so today has been mostly about playing more Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and then going out for a nice pub dinner with Andie this evening. I have simple tastes.

One thing many of you will have doubtless discovered as you get older is that people inevitably find it harder and harder to buy presents for you. Gone are the days when you could circle things in the Argos catalogue and hope that one of them would be your "main" or "big" present on the big day. Nope, much more common as a grown-up to get a few little bits and pieces from your Amazon wishlist — which I'm very grateful for, by the way, those who sent such things! — and "I'll just give you some money" from the parents.

I would like to reiterate: this is fine, and not in the "room is burning around me" sense. This is good, even! Much better that one is able to get something they actually want to celebrate their birthday rather than running the risk of getting gifts they already have, gifts they don't really want but are obliged to look like they like or any of the other situations in which people in 2025 are, in my experience, brazenly ungrateful.

I got some very generous monetary gifts from both my parents and my mother-in-law, both of whom are very clearly trying to spend some of their accumulated cash to minimise the impact of inheritance tax in the future. My parents' gift paid for my Nintendo Switch 2, which is nice, and my mother-in-law has bought (well, pre-ordered) me a MiSTer Multisystem 2 from Heber Electronics.

If you are unfamiliar with the latter, it's an all-in-one FPGA console designed for playing retro games from a wide variety of home computer, arcade and console systems. FPGA means something inordinately technical that I don't understand at all, but it basically means that it's the hardware pretending to be a classic system rather than a piece of software doing its best to imitate it. That means that the recreation of the experience is pretty much 1:1 of What It Was Actually Like without any sort of emulation quirks, but with modern benefits such as HDMI out, USB storage and suchlike. There are even addon thingies you can get to use original controllers and other peripherals.

To put it simply, the Multisystem 2 is a console that plays almost any retro game you can throw at it, making it a nice all-in-one, self-contained system for authentic-feeling retro game fun, on either a classic CRT or a modern HDMI display. (Or both at the same time, even!) With old gaming hardware and media becoming increasingly expensive and impractical to collect for a variety of reasons, this is a great option for just… enjoying retro games. Which, ultimately, is what I really want to do with all this stuff. And having the opportunity to easily hook it up to capture hardware via HDMI is even better, 'cause then I can share what I'm doing and what I'm interested in and the things I've discovered.

So yeah. My "big presents" this year are a Nintendo Switch 2 and a MiSTer Multisystem. Pretty great, I'd say. I know my child self would be thrilled, even if I have to wait until June for one and August for the other.

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#oneaday Day 325: It's technically my birthday

It is, as the headline says, technically my birthday, but only because it has passed midnight due to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33-related reasons. I will celebrate my "official" birthday with tomorrow's post.

I spent most of today making some videos. I haven't made any for a few weeks, and I wanted to get back into things, so I picked out a few favourites from the Atari ST back catalogue to cover. Expect videos on Star Fleet I: The War Begins!, Continental Circus and Total Eclipse very soon — all three are games that are quite dear to me for one reason or another, so I'm happy I've finally made some time to play through them and provide some commentary.

This was the first recording session in the "new" study, too, and things went well. Not that there was any reason they shouldn't, mind, since the actual layout of the study hasn't really changed, just the decor. I also have a lot more stuff "put away" when I'm not using it now, too, so it's not quite as chaotic. The tidiness is rather nice; I should try my best to keep it that way. I have succeeded thus far.

The trouble with mess is once you create a little bit of it, it then inevitably spreads to cover all available surfaces. Leave a coffee cup on the side for a day or two and more will join it. Leave wires dangling everywhere and you'll eventually reach the conclusion that "ah, it's fine" and add more wires. Leave books and magazines out rather than on the shelf, and more will gradually pile up atop them "just so you know where they are". Chaos, inevitably, ensues when all of these things happen at the same time.

I do wonder sometimes why it's so hard to keep things tidy. I remember often being told as a young'un that I should tidy my room, and I often found it a bit challenging to keep my student houses under control. I suspect at least some of it is down to autism/ADHD-adjacent considerations, as I know that some other folks who deal with these mental health issues also have similar tidiness problems.

The one thing I console myself with, even when the house is an absolute pigsty, though, is that I've never got into the "hoarder" state one person I used to know had their house in. One time we went to visit them, and I'd never been in there before. I was genuinely shocked to find a house like something off a reality TV programme: literally no floor visible underneath all the crap that was everywhere. And the whole house was like it. I didn't say anything, because it's impolite to and there are almost certainly private, personal extenuating circumstances for when a living situation gets to that state.

But I've always used that as a sort of benchmark. As long as things don't get that bad, a bit of tidying up — with a bit of moaning and complaining along the way as required — it's fine. And nowhere I've lived has ended up in that state just yet, thankfully.

Anyway, that was a stream-of-consciousness ramble of the kind you only get at 1am. Time for bed. Then I can wake up and officially be a year older. G'night!

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#oneaday Day 324: A quiet weekend

First things first: I wrote about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 over on MoeGamer, so go give that a look if you've been curious about this game and want to hear about it from my particular perspective. I have been playing this game for most of the weekend, so it's fair to say that I like it very much indeed.

As much as I enjoy having eclectic tastes and celebrating the overlooked and underappreciated games of the world, it is nice to be able to be part of "the big conversation" once in a while. For various reasons, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has seemingly been hitting the right notes with many different types of player, which is a good thing. I hope it 1) does well and 2) inspires other developers to do something like it. Because I'm all for good RPGs that aren't The Elder Fucking Scrolls making a mainstream comeback.

Anyway, aside from that, I've got the next three days off from work because I took them off. It's my birthday on Tuesday and I'm buggered if I'm going to work on my birthday. And the days surrounding it.

I've definitely written about this before, but I'm of the firm belief that one's birthday is absolutely sacrosanct. One should never have to suffer anything "bad" on their birthday, and one should absolutely not have to work on their birthday. The last "big corporate" job I had at Garmin allowed you two extra days off per year: once for your birthday, and once for your anniversary of starting your job there. I wish that was standard practice; it was a very nice thing for them to do, and certainly a far cry from the shitty way other corporate jobs I've worked treated their employees.

I don't think we're doing anything particularly exciting or elaborate for my birthday. I suspect we'll get a nice dinner delivered from somewhere and I will drop some hints to Andie that I would like a cake of some description. I may be coming up on 44 years old, but the Inner Child is still very much present and correct, as if you needed that spelling out for you.

Ideally it would be nice to see some other folks and have a proper celebration with cake, presents and video games, but honestly, I've kind of stopped bothering trying to get people to come and see me. There have been so many excuses on so many separate occasions that I just can't be arsed right now. I know that's probably selfish and self-absorbed and other things beginning with "self", but really, there's only so many times one can take resistance and rejection before one just thinks "fuck it" and resigns oneself to a life of loneliness. At least with my wife and my cats I am not completely alone, and I am sure I will hear from my family on my birthday, too.

But anyway. The weekend is coming to a close and I probably shouldn't blast Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's soundtrack at high volume for too much longer, if only because my wife has to go to bed and get up for work tomorrow morning. But maybe just an hour or two more…

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#oneaday Day 323: Bing biddly bing bong bingy bong boooo

Regular readers will recall I started rewatching Friends a while back. I'm up to the fifth season out of ten as of the time of writing, and I'm really enjoying it.

The "culture shock" of watching it for the first time in more than ten years has mostly dissipated now, and the fact that no-one is ever seen fiddling with a mobile phone, looking things up on the Internet or experiencing life entirely through their camera lens feels pretty much natural now. Stop to think about it, and it's still clear that the world has changed a lot — mostly for the worse, I'd say, unfortunately — but after a while, Friends has, for me, shown that it has that magical "drawing you in" nature that means it doesn't matter that it's dated in some ways.

Friends was never really about a specific time period, anyway. Sure, it acts quite nicely as a snapshot of the late '90s and early (pre-smartphone) '00s now, but I'm not sure it was ever intended to be that. Instead, it was a show that was always about the people: specifically, it was about the concept of found family, and how the group of people you chose to surround yourself with was just as important as — or in some cases, more important than — those you were related to by blood.

I must admit to a certain melancholy about viewing Friends in this light, because for all the wonderful conveniences and whatnot we have today, I miss just… hanging out with friends. I miss everything from walking a couple of miles into town during a free period of sixth form in order to get peer pressured into buying a new N64 or PlayStation game. I miss skipping lectures to go play Perfect Dark. I miss Board Game and Curry Night being a regular thing. In short, I very much miss having that "found family", because in 2025… it just doesn't feel like it's there any more, for a whole manner of reasons, not just technology-related.

But at the same time this is why I find an occasional rewatch of something pleasantly familiar like Friends to be extremely comforting. I may not literally be there with the main cast — and I wasn't back at the time, either — but the nice thing about the show is how it makes you feel included. You see the ups and downs of each of the main cast's lives; you see the little in-jokes they have with one another and you understand where they came from, because you were there when they were first coined. And you root for them; even seeing what colossal dildos they all are at various points in the series — particularly both Ross and Rachel — you cannot help but root for them and wish them happiness.

And the nice thing is, you know they get that happiness, because it's that kind of show. Even if you've never seen the show all the way to the end, you almost certainly know what at least some of the main "resolutions" are going to be. Arguably it's only really Joey who is left without a real sense of wrapping things up neatly — and his spin-off series didn't really fix that either, though I must confess I haven't seen it — but even so, one gets the feeling he's probably going to be all right.

It's a bit sad how many of the Friends cast are no longer with us. Matthew Perry was, of course, a tragic loss a couple of years back, and I was sad to learn recently that James Michael Tyler, who played the recurring coffee house barista Gunther, passed away in 2021. Add this to the fact that several people from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I watched all the way through a while back, are also no longer of this world, and it's a little bit sobering. At least they all have a wonderful legacy to leave behind.

This got a little more morbid than intended, but whatchagonnado. Friends is still a wonderful thing, and I am really enjoying my rewatch of it. There's nothing quite like returning to the media you loved in your formative years to bring a teensy bit of comfort to the bleakness of modern existence. If you haven't done it for a while, I highly recommend it.

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#oneaday Day 322: The Expedition

Hello. It's after 1am and I haven't written anything, I need a bath (that can wait until tomorrow) and I'm quite tired. So this will probably be a short one. I did want to acknowledge something, though, which is that I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 this evening, and it's real good.

I was a little skeptical about it after feeling a bit burnt by the Blue Prince situation, but this time around it's just flat-out a good game, not "a good game if you have the right kind of brain and 150 hours to plough into it".

I will write more about it on MoeGamer anon, but I did want to acknowledge that my first impressions are very good indeed, and that it has a very distinctive atmosphere about it. I'm getting quite strong Nier vibes from it in terms of its rather melancholy atmosphere — indeed, my wife walked in at one point and asked if it was another Taro Yoko joint. I explained that no, it's French, but I can completely see why she would think that just from overhearing the music.

Oh man, the music. One of the most important things to get right in a dramatic RPG, and boy did they get it bang on in this game. Sweeping orchestral pieces, triumphant choirs, lonely soloists, tinkling pianos, it's all there, and it all hits one right in the Feels.

I was a little concerned about coming to a "J-style" RPG that everyone was saying was the best thing ever when chances are the last "JRPG" they played was Persona 5; I thought it would be an interesting exercise to approach the game from the perspective of someone who has been consistently engaging with this type of game for the last 20 years, while many other folks haven't for various reasons. And I think it's still going to be interesting, but so far my impressions are that no, this isn't just "good if you haven't played an RPG in the last 20 years", it's a good RPG.

There's Nier, there's Final Fantasy, there's even bits of Souls in Expedition 33's DNA, and it all works together in a thoroughly interesting fashion. But, like I say, it's after 1am and I really should probably go to bed. I will write more about this game — much more — over on MoeGamer very soon. But for now, I bid you good night!

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#oneaday Day 321: My Switch 2 concerns

I still have my preorder in for a Nintendo Switch 2 and I'm looking forward to having a play with it. But I am quite concerned about some things that seem to be cropping up in these initial pre-launch months.

Chief among these is the "Game Key Card" thing. For the unfamiliar, this is effectively a replacement for the "code-in-a-box" nonsense some publishers pulled with Switch games, where you'd buy a "physical release" and get nothing more than a box with a voucher for the digital version of the game in it. The box was then completely useless because there was nothing to put in it. The sole justification for this, one might argue, is that it allows "digital" games to be given as gifts. But only the ones that have actually had this treatment, of course.

Game Key Cards is… possibly a step forwards from this, but still not in any way desirable. Effectively how they work is that they're a cartridge you put in your Switch 2, and this then automatically causes the digital version of the game to download from the eShop. There are a few justifications for this: it keeps costs down while still allowing for a boxed release of sorts, which in turn can be given as a gift just like code-in-a-box.

Unlike code-in-a-box, however, Game Key Cards are transferable. They need to be in the Switch 2 to play the game even once it's downloaded, and they can be loaned, traded or sold to others. This is arguably an improvement in that they make digital purchases more portable — you can take a game over to a friend's house, for example, although one might argue the inherently portable nature of the Switch 2 makes this a moot point anyway — but one suspects it is going to be used by a lot of companies as an excuse for cost-cutting.

We're already starting to see a number of games that have announced their "physical" release will be on one of these Game Key Cards, with no other option than the digital-only version. As a collector of physical media, neither of these options are desirable.

Some have conjectured that this situation has arisen because Switch 2 carts are, supposedly, expensive — like, $16 a unit expensive. That means once companies have paid their cut to Nintendo, paid manufacturing costs, paid marketing expenses and everything else that goes into making a game, there potentially won't be much left for games sold around the £30-40 mark. This is, apparently — and remember this is mostly hearsay at the moment — the reason that physical releases like Mario Kart World are £70 or more.

Thing is, I'm not sure I understand why they're so expensive. They're essentially flash carts. Admittedly, in the case of Switch 2, they're high-speed flash carts, which are slightly newer (and thus more pricey) tech. But $16 a unit for something that supposedly only goes up to 64GB seems… high. (Oh yes, that's seemingly the other reason some are going for the Game Key Card approach — games such as Street Fighter 6 flat-out won't fit on one.)

I've long said that if a console generation arose that was digital-only, I would probably bow out and stick to my existing library of games — which, as most of you probably know, is pretty enormous. Nintendo, whose consoles have long been a champion of physical media — Switch 1 carts are the only releases of the current(ish) generation that don't require lengthy installs before you can play — seem to be pushing towards that all-digital future that I'm not sure anyone really wants, particularly those involved in a hobby that has always been, to some degree, about collecting.

I'm willing to give Switch 2 a chance. I'm even getting the bundle with the digital version of Mario Kart World included — I figure as a game with an online component, it's probably going to have regular updates and/or DLC, making the physical edition useless after a while anyway — but I'm still a bit concerned.

I guess one thing worth waiting to see is what the limited-press physical houses do — if anything — with Nintendo Switch 2. A significant portion of my Switch 1 library consists of limited-print physical releases of games that would have otherwise been digital-only. If that situation continues, then I think I'll be all right. I know some folks hate the limited-print stuff, but I suspect it's going to become an increasing reality of video game collecting in the coming years. We'll have to see, I guess.

I wish we could just be excited for New Thing. It feels like a long time since we've been able to be unreservedly excited for New Thing. The last few New Things we've had — particularly in gaming — seem to have had particularly big caveats involved, and Switch 2 is no exception.

Think back to the run-up to the PlayStation 2's launch. Nothing but excitement. A new system that could produce incredible visuals, could take full advantage of the new DVD format for storage, and which was fully (almost) backwards-compatible with the previous PlayStation? Sure, the price was a sticking point for some, but that came down. And the PS2 went on to be one of the most beloved systems of all time, with good reason.

I wonder if the last couple of generations of console hardware are even going to have a legacy to leave behind once their digital services are turned off.

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#oneaday Day 320: Attempting to list one turn-based RPG a year for every year between Final Fantasy X and now

The recent release of Obscure Claire or whatever it's called has spawned some frankly toxic discourse about turn-based vs. real-time RPGs and the perceived accessibility of the RPG genre, so I thought I would take a moment and see if it was possible to name at least one turn-based RPG that had come out every year between Final Fantasy X, which a frightening number of people think was The Last Great Turn-Based RPG, and now.

I'm taking English language releases as gospel here, not Japanese release dates in the case of games that originated there. Because we're talking about English people and their weird selective memory. I'm also going to try not to include more than one entry from a series, and I'm not restricting the list to just "JRPGs". Anything where you take turns to make numbers pop out of monsters is fair game.

Are you ready? Here we go! (Ya ya ya ya… wait, no, wrong genre.)

2001: Final Fantasy X
2002: Suikoden III
2003: Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire (yes, they count)
2004: Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (aka Final Fantasy Tolkien)
2005: Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time
2006: Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia
2007: Eternal Sonata
2008: Etrian Odyssey II
2009: The Last Remnant
2010: Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland
2011: Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2
2012: Fire Emblem: Awakening (strategy RPGs are still turn-based RPGs!)
2013: Bravely Default
2014: South Park: The Stick of Truth
2015: Shadowrun: Hong Kong
2016: Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
2017: Blue Reflection
2018: Octopath Traveller
2019: Death end re;Quest
2020: Trails of Cold Steel IV
2021: Mary Skelter Finale
2022: Dungeon Travelers 2-2
2023: Sea of Stars
2024: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
2025: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Cor. Some crackers among that lot, for sure, many of which I'm still yet to play.

And, it should probably go without saying, these were far from the only turn-based RPGs released each year, to say nothing of RPGs that don't specifically use turn-based mechanics but are nonetheless particularly noteworthy, such as the Xenoblade Chronicles X rerelease this year.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: turn-based RPGs have never, ever gone anywhere. The only difference with Clair Obscur is that all eyes are on it thanks to it using fancy new Unreal Engine 5 tech — which some are already saying is a bit of a hindrance rather than a benefit.

The fact that a lot of the above games don't get much attention outside of niche-interest circles is, more often than not, down to a refusal to engage with anything that might be on the lower budget side of things, or particularly if it involves an anime art style. I know people who have missed out on some absolutely fantastic games just because they refuse to engage with anything that looks a bit anime, regardless of subject matter. And that's their loss.

Getting people to "read" a bit more widely is, I'm sure, a problem with every medium. But dear Lord is it ever frustrating when you've spent years of your life screaming about games you find fascinating, only for people to shrug and make it very clear that they haven't paid any attention whatsoever.

Oh well. As I say, their loss. I know what I like, and I have plenty of the stuff that I like on my shelves. And I guess that's all that really matters at this point.

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