A ONE-PERSON PRESS · JOHANNESBURG
Companions
for retro JRPGs.
A guide is supposed to get you through the game. I’d rather get you further into it.
A guide is supposed to get you through the game. I’d rather get you further into it.
Every game I cover gets the same treatment: five books, five ways of looking at it. The first three teach you to play it well. The last two are about loving it — and they’re half the reason the set exists.
How the game actually works, taught once and taught properly — the mechanics under the hood, and what makes each one worth understanding.
The cast as playable people — how each one is built, who they become, and who they belong beside. Opinions, ranked, and defended.
The fights that define the game — what each one is testing, how to read it, and the approach that answers it. Not a wall of tactics; the shape of each fight.
The game read as craft, after you’ve finished it — the themes, the arcs, the moments the whole thing is built toward, and why they land. A re-experience, not a recap.
The game as a made thing — how it came together, the music, the strange corners, and where it earns its place in the genre.
The last two books are the ones I couldn’t leave unwritten.
It stages a full opera on a cartridge, lets the villain win at the halfway mark, and hands the lead to fourteen people instead of one. Five books on how a game that ambitious holds together.
Open the set »
Half a finished masterpiece and half a game that ran out of budget and said so, to your face, on the second disc. The seam is the reason I love it, not the reason I forgive it. Five books on a game that reached past what it could hold.
Open the set »
Only games I love get made, and the rhythm is fixed: a new five-book set the last Friday of every month. Each date below is the day it drops — not a window, not an estimate.
There’s a page in every one of these I’ve been waiting to write.
Book 1 of every set is free — a real, complete book, yours to keep. The other four live on Patreon, and I've stopped putting a fixed price on them. Pay what the work is worth to you: a dollar a month opens all of it, and anything more helps keep the lights on and the doors open here. I'd rather someone who can't spare much read the whole set than let the price be the thing that turns them away.
I’m Pierre. I write and design every one of these myself — the whole object — because a game worth this much attention deserves a book that reads like one.
Pokémon Red on the original Game Boy. That cartridge started everything — the moment I realised games could have stats, progression, and a world that felt alive, I was hooked. Every JRPG I’ve played since traces back to that little grey brick.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Technically French, not Japanese — but it’s a JRPG in spirit, and it’s the game that made me cry harder than any other. I chose the Maelle ending. I’m still thinking about it. Everyone in my life is tired of hearing me talk about it.
Final Fantasy, no contest. I love every mainline entry from VI through XVI — yes, including the XIII trilogy. It had its problems, but I’ll still defend it. Never touched the MMOs; XI and XIV aren’t for me, and I’m at peace with that. I still need to play the I–III Pixel Remasters. My favourite entry is Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Rebirth took it even further — they took everything I loved about the original and made it better, twice. I’ll defend the original’s charm any day, though. And if Part 3 delivers on what the first two built, it might be the best trilogy in JRPG history.
Atlus games — they make JRPGs with a flavour nobody else can replicate, Persona 5 Royal especially. Fire Emblem, because the tactical side of my brain needs feeding too. Trails / Falcom, for when I want worldbuilding that never ends. And Pokémon — I still play every mainline entry. There’s a big nostalgia component to why, and I’m not ashamed of it. Anything with “Xeno” in front of it, too — Gears, Saga, Blade. Takahashi never learned how to make a small game, and that overreach is exactly what I keep coming back for.
Parasite Eve — a cinematic survival-horror RPG Square clearly poured itself into, and that most people forgot the moment the series lost the thread. Shadow Hearts, which built a whole horror world around the Judgment Ring — a combat mechanic good enough to have been stolen a hundred times over, and somehow never was. And Star Ocean, career bridesmaid, running real-time battles a console generation before its turn-based peers would dare. None of the three got the run they earned — which is usually the exact reason I fall for a game.
When I put the JRPGs down, it’s almost always for Japanese survival horror — the PS2-era kind, before the genre traded dread for action. It’s the same pull as the JRPGs: nobody tells a story quite the way the Japanese do — unguarded, strange, willing to mean something — and that instinct doesn’t stop at adventure. It just goes quiet, and cold. Fatal Frame armed you with nothing but a camera and made that scarier than any gun; Rule of Rose is cruel, half-broken, and impossible to shake once it’s in you. The same storytelling, pointed at fear.
The Atelier series. For years I dismissed it the way most people do — too cute, too cosy, not for me. Ryza was the first one I played, and it surprised me in a way I didn’t see coming. The synthesis system is one of the deepest crafting systems in any JRPG. The character writing is gentle in a way almost no other series allows itself to be. And the cosy slice-of-life vibe — which I’ve bounced off in every other game that tried it — works here in a way I still can’t fully explain. Also: Lila Decyrus. I have no defence.
Gaming PC and Switch. I’ve owned Xboxes and PlayStations over the years — I’m not loyal to any brand, just to good games.
“Away” from Final Fantasy XVI. The choir, the strings building underneath, the Prometheus lyrics — and it hits during what I believe is the single greatest opening set piece in Final Fantasy history. Maybe in all of gaming. Phoenix Gate. If you’ve played it, you’re already hearing it. A close second: “Normal Battle 1” from Octopath Traveler II. You hear it in the very first random encounter and your jaw hits the floor — this is the standard battle theme? Yasunori Nishiki at his peak.
To Zanarkand. Suteki Da Ne. Both from Final Fantasy X. When I first heard them I was a kid, and I just thought they were beautiful — I didn’t realise they were about losing something you can never get back. Now I do. Somewhere along the way they stopped being about Tidus and Yuna and quietly became the anthems of the melancholy I sometimes feel for my own childhood.
Two chords, two days in a Dublin studio, and the story behind the score.
The book that explains all of it — and never left Japan.
SNES, GBA, or Pixel Remaster? The trade-offs, and the right pick for you.
Stuck on a boss, or just want to talk JRPGs for an hour — either one. The door’s open, and there’s only me behind it.
