Diving into the booming retro RPG world

Also: Henry Kissinger, Sandra Day O'Connor... and Albert Brooks?

Courtesy: Sabotage Studio

Regular readers will recall my occasional dispatches on Sea of Stars, the gorgeous retro game explicitly inspired by SNES classics like Chrono Trigger. It’s a prime example of the old-school JRPG boom that contributor George Yang profiled in an article I edited this week:

Sea of Stars sold over 100,000 copies during its first release day, despite being included for free in Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass and Sony's PlayStation Plus subscription services at launch.

Square Enix's retro-inspired Octopath Traveler II, which came out this past February, sold over one million copies as of June. A spiritual successor to the epic Suikoden series, Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes, became the most-funded video game Kickstarter of 2020 and is now set to release April 2024. All while many, many more smaller pixel RPGs continue to flood the market.

These games emulate the style and substance of earlier titles, while attempting to trim out what actually make them frustrating to return to.

"People tend to remember old games through rose-tinted glasses," says solo developer Matthias Linda, who debuted the criminally overlooked Chained Echoes last year. "They remember the epic boss fight they had, but they forget the hours of grind."

Yang ends his exploration with Pixelated Milk studio head Bartosz Łojewski, the developer behind the upcoming SacriFire — an RPG that blends pixel sprites with polygonal environments:

"With the bigger companies pivoting towards the creation of huge, open-ended worlds, it creates a vacuum for games with a more 'standard' progression, smaller but tightly designed maps, and traditional approaches to combat," Łojewski explains. "The successes of Octopath Traveler, Wandering Sword, and now Star Ocean: The Second Story R prove that players old and new still have a lot of love for a more traditional era of JRPG-inspired games. The trick is adding some new ideas to the mix as well, and hopefully we've done that."

By happy accident, this article ran alongside a story about the discovery of a trove of unopened Super Nintendo games. Among these, Chrono Trigger: the title that got Sea of Stars auteur Thierry Boulanger into game development.

Here & Now Highlights

• I produced two updates on the Israel/Hamas war with NPR’s Daniel Estrin earlier in the week. When Henry Kissinger died at 100, I pivoted along with much of the show into pieces discussing the impact of his particular brand of realpolitik. I managed to squirrel US China Commission expert James Mann into the DC Studios minutes after he met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill — he joined host Scott Tong to discuss Nixon’s fateful 1972 trip to China. Elsewhere on the show Thursday: Kissinger’s role in the carpet bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973.

• Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, also died this week. She left a very different legacy, as NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports.

• Albert Brooks is NOT dead. But the innovative comedian’s still getting honored this week in a new HBO documentary directed by his childhood friend Rob Reiner. I got TV critic Eric Deggans onto the show to discuss it.