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Chrono Trigger, A Hollow Masterpiece

  The fourth generation of video game consoles, with the Super NES and the Sega Genesis, bred innovation in many genres of video games, including RPGs. With increased ROM size, developers were much more free to deliver massive worlds with rich stories, and the SNES was host to many of those legendary titles. Chrono Trigger is often lauded as the best of them all. It has a massive reputation, appearing on dozens of publications as one of the greatest video games of all time, even more so than most of its contemporaries. It was with these expectations that I entered the game. Japanese RPGs are known for their epic storytelling, and Square (now Square Enix) has pushed the boundaries of what was possible in these games since its very first hit, 1987’s Final Fantasy. Chrono Trigger was the culmination of their efforts in 2D RPGs. It was made by the “dream team” of Hironobu Sakaguchi, who had created Final Fantasy, Yuji Hori, who had created Dragon Quest, and Akira Toriyama, who design...
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The Highs and Lows of FF16's Combat

  The first experience of combat in Final Fantasy XVI, featuring a young Clive training with a wooden sword, gives a small taste of what is to come. You learn all the basic moves that continue to benefit you for the rest of the game: your melee combo, ranged magic attacks, magic bursts, parries, and dodges. The dodges, in particular, were my favorite part of the combat--they feel very responsive and intuitive while still being very challenging, and it always felt very rewarding when you got multiple dodges in a row. The player gets to learn more in the first dungeon, where Torgal, Clive’s trusty canine companion, who can heal Clive and augment his combos with a finisher. (One thing to note is that even at the higher difficulty, the game gives you rings that can do your combos, automatically provide healing with potions, and can complete the Torgal combos without your inputs. I consider this a great move for accessibility, though I question why button remapping was not a possibil...
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Sumeru, The Aranyaka Quests, and Adaptations of Hindu Themes

  “Nara” is a word you hear a lot while doing the Aranyaka questline in Genshin Impact, referring to the traveler. While doing the Varuna Gatha chain, upon seeing some references to the Mahabharata , an ancient Hindu epic, I started thinking about why they chose that word to refer to humans. When I was a child, two names that would come up in succession during prayer were Nara and Narayana. I assumed they were both gods. After all, they looked like twins, and even had similar names. To my surprise, though, Nara and Narayana referred to the relationship between mortals and the divine. They were two sides of the same coin, and they were equally powerful and wise. In Hindu mythology, Gods and men cannot exist without one another. The humans, or Nara, and Aranara in Genshin Impact have a symbiotic relationship as well. The Aranara are creations of Rukkhadevata, known by them as an Aranyani. There are two notable things shown by their naming conventions here. For one, the Aranara saw Ru...
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