PixlBit

Sorry about the lateness of my reply. I agree with Matt. The SNES had notable RPGs, to be sure, but its library in that department was nowhere near the breadth and depth of the PS1, and it had a lot of throwaway RPGs too. The PS1 had so many games I loved - the Final Fantasies (the three main games plus Tactics), the Lunars, Xenogears, Valkyrie Profile, Dragon Warrior VII, Tales of Destiny/Eternia. One thing the PS1 had in its favor was that there were far more companies making RPGs for it, therefore a much wider variety of voices beyond those of Squaresoft, and there were far more games getting localized rather than being stuck in Japan. My favorite Final Fantasy games are VII and IX (along with XII on PS2 and Tactics on PS1) on top of all that.

I had an opportunity (which sadly, I failed to take) to see Sakimoto in person at the Distant Worlds concert in Pittsburgh last summer. I met Nobuo Uematsu in Omaha at Distant Worlds in 2013 and had him sign my FFIX cover jacket. If I had gone to DW Pittsburgh, I would have asked Mr. Sakimoto to autograph either my FFXII case or the instruction manual for Tactics.

Agree full-on about Mr. Matsuno. I wish he'd become a full-time producer on Final Fantasy, but apparently working on XII (my second favorite game in the series after VII, with Tactics tied with IX for third) was too taxing for him.

Any long-running series runs across this. The Simpsons is a prime example. When it was in season 7, people claimed that it all went downhill after season 4. In season 10, it was season 8 that was the jump the shark point. Now season 15 seems to be the jump-the-shark point. In video games, you see this a lot with Final Fantasy and Zelda, with VI, VII, X, and to a much lesser degree, XII, all being the "last great FF game".

I was just being facetious on this one. :) I honestly haven't heard much about this one as I don't pay much attention to the Kickstarter scene.

I wish Sega was still making fighting games. I like Sega fighting games better than Namco fighting games, for the most part.

I'm more excited about under-the-radar stuff than I am about the annual AAA refreshes myself. I don't think it's hipsterish if you're not hating stuff just to jump on some hate bandwagon. God forbid you could genuinely not be interested in the latest CoD, Battlefield, AssCreed, or whatnot.

You're wrong. Adventure and Pitfall inspired them. :)

I'm lucky to do a Blog a Year. :)

Oh, man, I love Trails of Cold Steel. I'd be playing it now, but I have the PS3 version and a dead PS3. :(

I'm on the fence about FF Explorers, but recently I downloaded Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on Wii U and started a playthrough of that. Really enjoying it.

I used to see stuff about the trade gap with Japan all the time, and I saw a lot of American companies end up under Japanese ownership. Columbia Pictures went from Coca-Cola to Sony Pictures (which still owns it), and economics magazines depicting the Statue of Liberty dressed in kimonos and carrying paper fans instead of the torch and tablets. In my family, my mother was all "buy American", and she still is. She's never driven a non-American car. By contrast, my dad has driven nothing but Japanese vehicles since 1989 or so.  My father was in the Navy from 1957-1971 and loved being stationed in Japan, and he worked for the Postal Service thereafter. My mother worked at a Motorola plant in Arizona for a couple of years.

The thing is, we did have the "burn anything not American" mentality coming from the government in the 1980s, but very few people walked the walk. People kept buying Sony TVs over Zeniths and Toyotas over Fords and Chevys, while politicians beat the populist "buy American" drum while insisting on a deregulated trade market that worked in favor of Asia and Mexico at the expense of American workers. Wal-Mart used to post "Made in the USA" signs, but that pretty much went away after Sam Walton died.

And in video gaming? Trust me, there was nobody out there that believed that the Atari 7800 and the Atari Lynx were viable alternatives to Nintendo. Atari even touted "Made in the USA" as an advertising campaign for the Jaguar. :)