A Return to the Modern Age
For the past 2 years I have been obsessed with retro gaming.
This came specifically from an acute interest in retro handhelds and the emulation of bygone consoles. To have essentially unlimited games at your fingertips as long as they could run on a mobile device scratched the part of my brain that longed for both a device to tinker with and a game library to build. In these respects, the hobby succeeded in keeping my attentions locked in for many months but also fed a nagging reality behind the hobby: I hadn't played a single game yet on these things.
After spending about $1000 on hardware and countless hours loading ROM libraries and playing with settings, I had yet to really commit to playing a game on one of my retro handhelds. There certainly is nothing wrong with building devices as a hobby, but that nagging in the back of my head finally gave in recently as I made my way through Final Fantasy Resonance.
In late 2025, I had begun playing the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, a nearly 130 hour undertaking that I played on the Steam Deck. After beating all of these classic adventures, I was sure more than ever that I loved the retro style of JRPG. I wanted to go back and play more of the classics with a new ferver. My original plan was to play through each Final Fantasy game in turn, but I think that Final Fantasy 6 had convinced me that the ATB system was really just not for me and it made the PS1 era difficult to dive into. Thus my retirement from Final Fantasy.
Then it happened, I picked up an old device that I had given new life to recently. My old Nintendo 3DS. With this device I spent the entire summer of 2026 dedicated to playing through Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey, and I loved it. Shin Megami Tensei taught me two very important things. The first was that I should put down a game when it stops being fun (this is all for fun after all). And second, game systems have evolved. Developers that love their combat systems and gameplay have been iterating on their best selling formulas for years and we now have the ultimate expressions of the lessons learned in the last 3 decades. I wanted to go back and play more Shin Megami Tensei from the vault of ages past, but we have the fifth mainline installment and it is a triumph to play.
Strange Journey had many dated design choices that I disliked despite being a game that I loved and dedicated an entire summer to. It's not even that old of a game being a release of 2009. Heck I had just played Final Fantasy 1 and loved that game as well and that game was from 1987! But truthfully I loved the pixel remaster of the game with modern graphics, sound, and features. As I played through the opening of Final Fantasy Resonance, I found that this was what I wanted to play over any classic game in my backlog.
The new graphics, the great acting, and the huge amount of gameplay variety were everything that I've wanted in a Final Fantasy. It even cut the trademark ATB system for a new hybrid system that combines modern timeline turn based with the best parts of Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy XIII. This is a true evolution of gameplay designed by people who have studied the genre and know what's fun. It was then that I made a return to the modern age.
I put my 3DS, my Vita, and my Retroid Pocket Nova away and pulled out my Switch Lite to use as my every day carry to play at work on break. I made a new backlog full of great games from the last decade on either the Switch or Steam Deck that I'd been meaning to play or replay. It's nothing against retro games, but I had realized that in my fleeting spare time I wanted to spend it playing these new titles that push a game system to the limits of complexity and accessibility.
I've been playing Digimon Cyber Sleuth on my Switch while playing Final Fantasy Resonance on my Steam Deck and it's been serving as a great pairing with the only down side being that I can only play one at a time. Perhaps I return to retro gaming eventually, but for now there's a world of modern JRPG's that I've been missing out on in my retro handheld cave and I can't wait to see what the modern day has in stor for me.