Video game
Mystery Dungeon is built on one very specific flavor of dread: game over means every item you were carrying is gone, and you walk right back down into the dungeon anyway. It started with Torneko’s Great Adventure in 1993, then branched off into Shiren, Chocobo, Pokémon, Etrian and beyond, racking up more than 23 million…
Sega
The Sega Saturn. When SEGA unleashed this machine on the world in 1994, it planted two mighty pillars in the Japanese games market — 2D fighting games and gorgeously rendered RPGs — and went toe-to-toe with the PlayStation in one of the fiercest console wars ever fought. Arriving as the successor to the Mega Drive…
Video game
Nearly 40 years after its 1987 debut, Street Fighter remains the gold standard of the genre — the fighting game series players all over the world keep coming back to. The series has shipped more than 55.5 million copies (as of fiscal 2023). Words like “Hadoken” and “Shoryuken” have soaked so deeply into pop culture…
Video game
The worlds are all secretly connected. The story goes to some genuinely dark places. The music is on another level entirely. If you’ve heard the reputation but keep wondering “where am I even supposed to start?” — you’re not alone. The Drakengard and NieR series form a lineage of dark action RPGs stretching back to…
Anime
“Who’s the best character in the Persona series?” — ask ten fans and you’ll get ten different answers. Some of us were floored by Joker’s cool, defiant streak. Others cried through Aigis’s bittersweet coming-of-age arc. And plenty more had their hearts wrecked by Shinjiro Aragaki’s clumsy, wordless kindness. For this feature, the SpotGeeks editorial team…
Video game
“Which one should I start with?” “Which one is actually the best?” Those two questions come up every single time Armored Core enters the conversation. FromSoftware has been building this 3D mech-action lineage since 1997 — roughly 26 years of it — and each entry tastes so different from the last that a single tidy…
Video game
“Which SaGa should I start with?” Ask a room full of RPG fans that question and watch how few of them can answer on the spot. The line runs from 1989’s Game Boy original, The Final Fantasy Legend, through Romancing SaGa and SaGa Frontier, all the way to 2024’s Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the…
Video game
The Like a Dragon series — known in the West as Yakuza for most of its life — has been carrying Japanese game history on its back since the original launched on PS2 in 2005. Over 20 years, Sega’s action RPG franchise gave us Kazuma Kiryu, a once-in-a-generation protagonist, and used the fictional red-light district…
Video game
“Which Resident Evil should I start with?” — it’s the question that stops so many players dead in their tracks when facing this legendary 30-year series. Since the original launched in 1996, there have been more than 10 mainline entries alone, and once you count remakes and spin-offs, you’re looking at nearly 20 games. The…
Video game
Say the word “Castlevania” out loud and there isn’t a gamer alive whose blood doesn’t stir a little. Konami’s legendary series started on the Famicom back in 1986, and across nearly 40 years it has produced classic after classic. Stage-based action with real muscle, sprawling castles you pick apart Metroidvania-style, and eventually a full 3D…
