posts like this are supported with money from patreon. Your support allows us to take time out of our month to play a game we probably usually wouldn’t (again) and write about it. We try to keep the pace of doing one a month, and this one was what we were playing during EVO2019.

Rogue Galaxy was finally released in the United States in January of 2007. That’s after a handful of years where I, an impressionable teen, slavered over every piece of media related to it. It’s a wonder that I did, really, because I didn’t remember basically anything about what it was like to actually play it until I recently bought it again.

I didn’t actually expect to sit down and write about it, but I almost never know what’s actually going to catch my eye about something. I should probably learn to expect it, because after all, most of the games we write about here are starting to get pretty old. A lot of them are just old enough that there really wasn’t this level of introversion about them.

The evolution of Video games is not a wholly linear one. Nothing in the realm of art progresses along a single, logical line. There’s room for dead-ends, deviations, deconstruction. Lots of words that start with DE-

The term “before its time” gets banded around a lot. Often, by critics (like me) who saw something in a videogame that the rest of the world didn’t. Sometimes it’s just simply an idea that couldn’t properly be realized by the technology available at the time. I’m sure somewhere, someone is yelling “SEAMAN 2020” from the top of a roof.

Rogue Galaxy plays like a game that is hungry for your time. It is a vampire of a videogame, where the hallways are long and the encounters are frequent. Teenage me supported all of this based on just how Anime the spine of the creature was, but now it’s come back to lurk in the shadows of my life.

To what end does a game need time like this? In 2007, it seems like the creators of the game were looking towards future horizons. Now we’d call them something like “games as a service”. After all, we’re all used to this now. There are games that don’t just want you to play them today or tomorrow, but forever if you can.

Catching myself laughing while I was playing, I started to think to myself that Rogue Galaxy would be offering me premium currency to reduce the encounter rate, or max out my weapons immediately so they can be combined. It is that sort of game, before its time in the worst of ways.

“Videogames did not evolve in a static line” but it can sometimes feel as if where we are now has been lurking underneath the surface the whole time. Waiting until the water is so still that the simple act of dipping our toes in it would be enough to alert us to where it is. Does it wait in the shallow tide, or somewhere far from the safety of shore?

There is something pleasantly nostalgic about playing this type of JRPG again. One where every new world revealed also gives us a new set of mechanics to play with. If Rogue Galaxy had dating sim elements, two years ago I would have been joking about it being the most perfect videogame. Afterwards, I probably would have forced Violet to play it.

I don’t find myself wanting to return immediately. Lured back by half-remembered set-pieces involving an entire world of characters that look like Osamu Tezuka references. There’s probably more to the depth of anime in it, but I’m absolutely not short for videogames that want to suck the time from my life like blood from a vein.