Japanese Video Games


 Video games are my true passion, so I have a lot of experience in many different kinds of games that come from many parts of the world. The resurgence of video games after the Video game crash of 1983 was even thanks to the help of a Japanese product, the Nintendo Entertainment System. 

The NES was Japan's first foray into the international video game market, and it was a huge success. In Japan, however, the NES was something completely different. It was known as the Family Computer, or Famicom. It had cartridges that were completely differently shaped from the ones on the NES and it had a completely different color scheme and controllers. The NES was made more bulky and had more monotone colors, to fit into the western market more. The name change was also to make sure that it was not confused with the PCs and such that were also in the market around the time.

Since then, video games have become a huge and accepted part of society, with many different series' and references becoming mainstream. Some of my favorite video games are Japanese, so I'll go over a couple of them really quickly.

One of my favorite Japanese game series' is Final Fantasy. This series is made up of a bunch of role-playing games (RPGs) that are not connected in story whatsoever. RPGs are a pretty popular genre in Japan, to the point where the formula for RPGs invented in Japan are call Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs). The most popular of the Final Fantasy games are Final Fantasy VI, VII, IX, X, and XIV. My personal favorite one is IX. It has the best game mechanics and story in my opinion, with a really good cast of characters, including some of my favorites from the whole series.


My other favorite JRPG series is the Persona series. This series became more popular in gaming spaces recently, with the release of Persona 5. Plenty of people enjoy all of the games in the series, thanks to the ability to collect demons to use in battle, and creating a strategy by fusing them together to create demons with specific skills. The casts of all of the Persona games are very well developed due to the gameplay of going to school and hanging out with them, then going into the dungeons of the game and fighting with them. 


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