There’s a genre called the tactical RPG, or strategy RPG (SRPG). You move units across a grid, read your opponent’s next move, and build a plan around it. It delivers a kind of “cerebral pleasure” that action games just can’t. Classics like Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre have built up a long…

It has been roughly 40 years since Mega Man first appeared on the NES back in 1987 — and the series is still adored by players all over the world. From the Classic games that wrote the rulebook for action platforming, to the X series that overhauled the visuals and the feel of the controls,…

Plenty of people stare at the Atelier series and have no idea where to jump in. Kicked off in 1997 with Atelier Marie: The Alchemist of Salburg, the franchise has grown to more than 25 games through 2025’s Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land, and it has shipped over 8 million…

“Died on B2. Turned to ash. Didn’t even leave a tombstone behind.” Wizardry is the holy ground you only reach if you can take a sentence like that as a reward. More than forty years have passed since the original was born on the Apple II in 1981, and the veterans who’ve been baptized by…

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…

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…