Dragon Warrior title screen I actually played this in February, but only got around to writing a review now. I like old-school JRPGs. There’s something about their simplicity, straightforwardness and honesty that I enjoy, despite their often repetitive and grindy nature and very simplistic, often irrelevant plots. Read More…

Box art for Mônica no Castelo do Dragão This is another one of those games I played during my childhood and never managed to finish. I must’ve been around five or six years old, and I remember renting it from a local video store. Read More…

Two quick reviews for two quick games this time. Gato Roboto Gato Roboto Gato Roboto is a simple metroidvania with interesting 2-bit (monochrome) graphics and some interesting gameplay mechanics. It’s clearly inspired by NES Metroid in its environment and setting, but instead of being dark and mysterious, it’s silly and lighthearted. Read More…

As a professional software developer, it’s impossible to ignore the impact large language models (LLMs) are having on the industry. I toyed with the first versions of ChatGPT back in 2022/2023 and, apart from it being a novelty and a really good chat bot, I wasn’t very impressed at the time. Especially given how often it hallucinated and gave blatantly incorrect responses as if they were correct. GitHub’s Copilot was promising, and it did help generate boilerplate code and fill gaps based on prompts. However, I started to get really impressed when I started testing Claude. Read More…

What a Wonderful World! What a Wonderful World! Brazilian edition cover My first contact with manga author Inio Asano was in the Sol Bookstore ⤴ in the ethnic Liberdade neighborhood ⤴ of São Paulo. I was just browsing random manga and the cover of What a Wonderful World! Read More…

After getting this as a gift from a cousin on Christmas of 2023 (so more than a year ago 😬), I’ve finally decided to play it. There was a lot of buzz and hype for this game, so I was excited to try it. In a nutshell, Sea of Stars is a traditional turn-based JRPG with heavy inspiration from the SNES classics, especially Chrono Trigger (I’ll probably cite CT many more times throughout this post 😬). It’s a love letter to these timeless classics, with modern mechanics and sensibilities. Read More…

After finishing U.N. Squadron, I wanted to play something I never played before. A short, old school JRPG seemed like a good choice for the next few days, so I chose The Final Fantasy Legend, released in 1989 for the Game Boy. Read More…

I wanted this to be part of the Mini Reviews 1 post to have an SNES game there, but I wasn’t able to finish it in time it’s a hard one. Like the other games in that post, I first played U.N. Squadron when I was a kid, around 8 or so I think. Back then I actually played the original Japanese version, which is called Area 88 (エリア88), which was based on a manga and anime of the same name. Read More…

During the holiday break I used my Anbernic RG40XXV to play and finish 3 games I had played during my childhood, each one for a different console. It was a little weird playing them on a crisp LED screen, without the CRT TV blurring - they almost felt like different games than the ones I remembered 😂. Read More…

Lufia & The Fortress of Doom is an old school SNES JRPG. It’s grindy, repetitive, and annoying sometimes, but it’s charming in its simplicity. It’s a 16 bit RPG with an 8 bit soul. Read More…