PixlBit

Played this as a loan from my dad's physical therapist when I was a teenager, ended up buying it myself. I didn't get my SNES until 1994 and only had an increasingly out-of-date PC, so this game was a pleasant surprise from the RPGs I'd had to content myself with for the previous few years. Really wish they would release the Nintendo-era Final Fantasy games on Switch.

In 2013, I had the pleasure of hearing the opera performed by Susan Calloway at Distant Worlds in Omaha. The evening topped off with an audience sing-along of One-Winged Angel. Afterwards was a meet-and-greet with Nobuo Uematsu and Arnie Roth - it happened to be March 21, which is Mr. Uematsu's birthday, so it was extra special. He signed the cover art for FFIX, which I still have.

The box art is a picture of the card. 

Wondet why the Master System went so cheap on box art?

Valkyria Chronicles and Three Houses are two of the most awesome games I've ever played. Three Houses, however, pushes the Japanese SRPG a step beyond what Valkyria Chronicles provides.

I had an Atari 130XE as a kid, and it was honestly second only to the NES as a 1980s gaming machine. It could handle games much, much better than the Apple II, C64, or the IBM PCs at the time, and had a lot of arcade ports because Atari bought up the rights to so many of them. A few of them sucked (Dig-Dug was atrocious), but Atari 8-bit Donkey Kong was better than the NES version. I had Zaxxon on it as well. 

I think Jaleco's best-known game was City Connection. The company that owns their IPs is actually called that and I think it was founded by the original founder.

Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Fame opened the floodgates for a bunch of other "sim" games. There is now an upcoming game called Squirrel with a Gun. Take a guess what it's about.

Fire Emblem is such an awesome game. One of my favorites of the decade.

I quit chasing achievements/trophies years ago. Too many of them required what I felt was boring, repetitive busywork. The only game I ever got a platinum trophy on was FF7 on PS4.

Stage Select:

I was going to come up with some elaborate reworking of a favorite franchise, but after reading stories about how much money Actiblizzard is making off of Diablo Immortal, screw it. If you really want to make money, just call Tencent or NetEase and throw some mobile gachapon stuff together and and call it a day, since all you need is a few rich whales to keep you afloat. More and more, video game technology is about monetization rather than graphics, sound, and gameplay.

Cage Match: 

Gonna go with the Colonel Sanders visual novel on this one. That said, it's too bad that Wendy's didn't turn its pen-and-paper RPG Feast of Legends into a video game.  I thought about trying to rework it into a computer game using RPG maker and running it past Wendy Thomas or Nelson Peltz to see what they say about it.

Hope you enjoy Three Houses!

Advance Wars is on indefinite hold, and while I know that Nintendo is trying to navigate what's happening in Ukraine in real time, I hope it sees a release. I was really looking forward to it. Wouldn't be the first time a game got delayed because of real world events. Fun fact: GTA III got delayed by several months because they wanted to remove references to the World Trade Center, since GTA III released in 2001.

My first exposure to FF5 was through references in Tactics, and then a year later I got FF Anthology and played it. I thought it to be the weakest of the PS1 games at first because its narrative was a little thin compared to IV, VI, and VII, but my appreciation for V has grown over time. 

Based on the numerous references it gets in other games compared to VI, it seems to be the most fondly remembered of the Nintendo-era FF games for Japanese players.