You know what a modern Tsukihime would look like? It'd be titled something like "I Got Reincarnated In Another World Where I Killed The Vampire Princess With My Eyes Of Death But She Survived And Became My Lover". Or it'd be some kind of infinite vertical scroll webtoon bullshit where Shiki got a floating RPG stat window with "Skill: Mystic Eyes" on it because dungeons started sprouting up around Tokyo and he becomes The Strongest Hunter. It would be atrocious.

I am not immune to propaganda. Show me a trailer for an indie JRPG featuring scripted encounters on the field maps, dual techs, and guest tracks by Yasunori Mitsuda, and I'll go "oh, a Chrono Trigger inspired indie JRPG, I sure hope they actually learned the right lessons from the classics" and drop $30 to see if they did.

And at this point I find myself wondering... yes, I have seen these things before, but have they ever been done well, in any battle shonen? Am I just fucking deluded? Mahito kills or disables three characters over four episodes purely to raise the stakes for Yuji, and I find it narratively lazy, tiresome, borderline insulting. Is it any different from when Nappa systematically murders Yamcha, Chiaotsu, Tien, and Piccolo in Dragon Ball? My gut says yes, surely it must be, but the seed of doubt remains. This is just how these shows are, right? They're clearly all just kind of stupid like this. What was I expecting?

Join us across the sea of stars, where Gee and Iro watch the seminal 1988-1997 Legend of the Galactic Heroes OVA a few episodes at a time. Keep an eye out for this podcast between main installments of The GLORIO Chat as we work our way through the history books.

Gameplay wise, 7SU is made in RPG Maker 2000 and aesthetically patterned off The Final Fantasy Legend - aka Makai Toushi SaGa, the first SaGa game and the first Square game to sell over a million copies - for the Game Boy. This means it's a good 'ol monochrome, grid-map, turn-based JRPG. I originally played the monochrome version, but for this series I'll be playing the "R" patch for the first time, which includes a number of quality of life features such as color(!), removal of certain tedious random elements, and more lenient requirements for NG+.

This is great because it establishes that sense of tangibility to my character. No matter how nice I want to be in Disco Elysium, fact of the matter is that yesterday I ramped my car off a billboard and broke the bridge while in a drunken stupor. "I was... a different person then..." is not an excuse that is going to fucking cut it. I have to deal with those consequences and that's part of the game.

A potentially tough question, since CRPGs (the C stands for Computer!) have a fairly long history and often pretty antiquated (or, if you're feeling generous, classic) gameplay. On the bright side, that means even the big ol' AAA Baldur's Gate 3 isn't really re-inventing the wheel much; if you could get a handle on the number of buttons and abilities you accumulated over BG3, figuring out the older stuff shouldn't be too bad! Chances are you even have some Steam keys for these floating around in...

Everyone playing casuals got kicked off the consoles, and the names for the first round of players got called. My first opponent was the very man who lent me his PS2 controller to use during casuals earlier – he was apparently the first person to register for P4A before me. After exchanging a handshake and wishing each other luck, the battle commenced. Kanji Tatsumi vs. Kanji Tatsumi. Man-to-man combat.

I trounced him. No mercy, even among comrades.