Square Enix

I can't help wondering how much Final Fantasy IX really deserves my praise, and whether I should instead be paying homage to the earlier games in the series for providing so much of its inspiration.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Blood, Violence

There have been "Big Robot" games available as long as there have been consoles, but we've had a real bumper crop this year. I'm certainly not complaining, but the games in this genre typically share a number of traits, and with so many released in such a short time, it only magnifies their similarities. Don't get me wrong; I'm definitely a fan, but a greater amount of variety and divergence is needed.

When referring to an 'RPG'-style videogame, the game in question is usually a game made in Japan for consoles. The structure of the game is generally that of a group of adventurers traveling through lands, killing monsters and collecting treasure using largely non-reaction based gameplay while an epic story unfolds. Unlike the pen-and-paper Role Playing Games that the genre is named for, videogame RPGs are generally fairly linear in the sense of plot, with the player having little or no control over the actions of the characters.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Mild Language, Mild Violence

Game Description: This is the story of Sora, a 14-year-old boy whose world is shattered. When a violent storm hits his island-paradise home, he is separated from his two best friends and goes to look for them. Meanwhile, King Mickey is missing from Disney Castle and Captain Goofy and the court wizard Donald are off to search for him. When Sora, Donald and Goofy meet, they hear about the Heartless: Strange and powerful creatures who caused the terrible storm and kidnapped King Mickey. They'll work together to help each other meet their goals - and have an incredible adventure as they go!

Kingdom Hearts was formally announced at the Electronics Entertainment Expo of 2000, which I was fortunate enough to attend. Most convention-goers (myself included) waiting in the mile-long line for the preview left stunned, amazed, or a quivering mixture of both. The game that was shown represented nothing less than a completely unexpected merger of two colossal forces, two seemingly invulnerable icons, each at the summits of their respective media.

We've all lost people we love. I'm not referring to the spectacular cataclysms of Hollywood fare, but to the more typical losses caused by errors of the heart—mistakes that we were too vain to foresee and too proud to atone. If you could revisit that moment of your past, try to win back that person's trust, would you go?

Videogames have come under heavy criticism in recent years for conventions they refuse to retire, conventions that, the argument goes, are rendered absurd by the graphical realism and sophisticated 3D environments that have become commonplace. The RPG genre in particular has been the target of much of this criticism, but the reason is fairly complicated.