So recently, I’ve been playing through Breath of Fire III again. It’s not the best game ever made, it might not even be the best BoF (II is pretty damned great after all), but it really is simply, good old-fashioned fun that just emanates nostalgia from every orifice. I’m just going to copy-paste what Pike said in her SMRPG post:

a relic of a different time: a time when RPGs weren’t about who has the fanciest cutscenes or who has the most photorealistic hair or who has the most immersive fantasy world. Rather, they were about traveling from weird town to even weirder town, beating up random enemies for gear, and saving the world. No nonsense. Just beating the big bad guy at the end with all of the epic loot that you had to cross the universe to find.

It sums it up pretty well. One of my party members is an ambulatory onion mutant thing.

It’s all around just a solid, fun game that knows what it is, doesn’t try to hide it, but sometimes throws something subversive in that makes you stop and think “Wait a second…”. Like when you come across the disabled guy who has been placed in a chair by a window, the sun streaming in. He just mumbles, but if you talk to another person in the room you learn that he was injured in an attack by a dragon years earlier. That is to say, he was one of the first people in the game you fought, and he was just a guy doing his job, mining to make his living. Every so often it’ll hit you with something like that, something brutal or just a bit cruel, never hammering it into you too hard, just letting you think about it.

And it has some great music.

Are you guys playing anything a bit older this weekend? Maybe battening down the hatches and riding out Irene with an old favorite? Do tell!