PixlBit

The voice cast was great, too. Troy Baker was perfect as Yuri.

I knew they used the SoM engine for Evermore. It's kind of too bad that Square USA didn't go anywhere as a developer, with Square moving out of Redmond after their new alliance with Sony and their corresponding falling-out with Nintendo and all.

And I agree with you, Trials of Mana blew Secret of Mana out of the water. The latter is still a good game, to be sure, but Trials plays so much better it's not even funny. However, Cary made a great point about the translation. Ted Woolsey got 30 days to translate FF6, and he had to compress the story on top of that because Japanese could convey far more information with fewer characters than English.

The Outer Worlds is great. I got it on Switch. It actually runs better on Switch than people said it did.

I used to live a few miles from the Pimlico Racecourse in Baltimore, which is the home of the Preakness Stakes. 

I'm running into that with Phantasy Star IV. Some of its later dungeons are huge mazes. It generally doesn't have save points in them, either, thought the medium through which I am playing it (Sega Genesis Classics on Switch) does allow save states. I'm stuck on the Air Castle near the end.

I saw this. Not quite as good as the games it aspired to, namely Secret/Trials of Mana or Earthbound. Interesting though.

The team that made this game went on to form a company called Craveyard, made of Square employees in Washington who wouldn't relocate after Square moved its US headquarters to California to be near Sony, and they made a PS1 RPG called Shadow Madness that attempted to be a Western take on FF7.  It was packaged with a demo of Jade Coccoon. It didn't do too well either. They were supposed to do a N64 RPG based around Caesar's Palace in Vegas.

So you died while playing the T2 arcade game from the 1990s?

Vesperia is amazing, and I've grown to appreciate it more over the years. The playable cast has such good chemistry. I finally beat it on Switch. I wish they'd port Symphonia to Switch, only make it based on the Gamecube release instead of the PS2/PS3 release. The Gamecube version was 60 FPS where the PS2 and PS3 versions were only 30 FPS.

I do too. The game certainly might have looked disappointing if you were looking for Final Fantasy level graphics, but the detail put into the game world was amazing. The monsters had interesting designs. The only real downside were the two-frame sprite animations during battles.

Each of the stories has its own strengths and focus on a different area of the game. My favorite story is Emilia, but Asellus is the fan-favorite.

I can't argue that, and I don't think the team that worked on it would argue that point either. It's not an AAA RPG, but I think it does (and did) have interesting style. And that music.

My first exposure to Pokemon was the Nintendo Power article where they first talked about Pocket Monsters, I got Pokemon Red in 1999 for my 21st birthday. But I also had a young nephew with whom I'd watch the Pokemon cartoon, and i got him and myself one of the gold-plated Pokemon cards from Burger King.

Of the Pokemon spinoffs, Pokemon Stadium on N64 looked most interesting, mostly because i thought it was going to be a full on RPG and I wished to God that Nintendo would make a couple of N64 RPGs, that being back when I still held out hope for Earthbound 64.I could see the appeal of having your Pokemon live on TV in 3-D. A lot of the battle animations were actually more detailed than in Sword/Shield. That said, didn't invest in Stadium. I never played Colosseum, either, but I was kind of interested because the region it's set in is based on Phoenix. 

Other than Pokken, I never got into the other spinoffs.