Final Fantasy VI is an RPG where each of the 14 party members has their own special command, and anyone can learn any spell as long as you hand them a piece of Magicite. All that freedom is exactly why it is easy to get stuck on questions like who to level up and when…

Tengai Makyou II: Manjimaru is a Japanese-flavored RPG released in 1992 for the PC Engine SUPER CD-ROM². It pulled an outrageous 32 points from Famitsu and a reader score of 27.92 in PC Engine FAN, the highest of any game on the system, and it is still talked about as the high-water mark of the…

Shin Megami Tensei if… is a strange beast within the Megami Tensei series. The setting isn’t Tokyo, and it isn’t the Expanse — it’s Karukozaka High School. A vengeful classmate drags the entire campus into the demon world, and the students find themselves trapped in dungeons themed on the seven deadly sins. That combination of…

Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen. Released on the Famicom in 1990, it was the first game in the series to use an “omnibus” structure, following the stories of its five protagonists one at a time, and that structure got everyone talking. The PlayStation remake arrived in 2001 as a full ground-up rebuild in…

Final Fantasy IV (FF4 from here on) was the first game in the series to bill itself as a “dramatic RPG.” Party members come and go, betray you, sacrifice themselves, and then walk back into your life. On the Super Famicom in 1991, this was the title that drove a brand-new stake into the ground…

This is a full Chrono Trigger strategy guide, and it covers every version from the original Super Famicom (SNES) release to the Steam version. Dungeon layouts, boss weaknesses and the stats of all seven characters are identical across every release, so everything here applies no matter which version you’re playing. The only things that change…

Shin Megami Tensei, born on the Super Famicom in 1992, tore the rulebook of the RPG to pieces. This is not a story about a hero slaying a demon lord. A nuclear missile erases Tokyo, and you are dragged into a proxy war between gods and demons in the wreckage that remains. On Christmas Day…

This is a full strategy guide to Final Fantasy V, and it covers both the PS1 version and the Pixel Remaster. That’s possible because FF5’s dungeon layouts, the order you unlock all 22 jobs, how each ability performs and every boss weakness are identical from the SNES original all the way through the Pixel Remaster….

Terranigma is an action RPG that Enix released for the Super Famicom on October 20, 1995. It tells a sweeping story modeled on the Book of Genesis, in which the hero Ark brings a dead world’s continents, life and civilization back from oblivion. Quintet handled development, and manga artist Kamui Fujiwara did the character designs….

Wizardry runs on one addictive loop: dive into the maze, hunt monsters, upgrade your gear, then dive deeper still. But Wizardry Empire: Princess of the Ancient, which Starfish and Taito shipped in December 2000, wires a bomb into that familiar cycle — party compatibility. Depending on how race and gender line up across your party,…