Square Enix

Imagine my trepidation when Legendary Entertainment announced plans to tackle Life is Strange, Dontnod Entertainment’s episodic exploration into teen life and time travel as a live-action series.

From cards and arcades to races and theatre performances, these mini-games did more than distract. They downright seemed as though they should have games of their own. These are the top 5 mini-games in Final Fantasy games.

Final Fantasy XV is an ideal experience for a new age of the franchise, and I’m looking forward to diving back in to see what I missed the first time.

Few franchises have as long and storied of a history as Final Fantasy. Over the last 30 years this role-playing game megalith has won the hearts of gamers around the globe with countless games featuring rich worlds to explore, engrossing gameplay, and fantastic characters. World of Final Fantasy throws on a pair of rose-colored glasses to take a look at Final Fantasy’s past with a Japanese role-playing game that’s indelibly modern. Whether or not that look is a good one may depend on how much Final Fantasy you know.

Square Enix’s flagship Final Fantasy series has undergone many evolutions in the last 20 years, but there are still some hallmarks expected from a game in the core franchise. Final Fantasy XV does have some of these familiar elements: dudes with hair reaching varying degrees of spikyness; a grand, high-stakes story involving a prince undertaking an epic journey; there’s even a grumpy old man named Cid. But these familiar details are juxtaposed with some pretty big departures from the formula. That’s not necessary a bad thing, as I discovered during my hands-on session with FFXV earlier this week. If anything, the demo showed me that the long-awaited next entry in the series is a lot of fun if you’re willing to let go of nostalgia and embrace the new.

Turn-based battles. Straight-up dungeons. Random encounters. For decades, these were the calling cards of the Final Fantasy series, making it one of the most prolific and beloved RPG franchises of all time. In recent years, however, Square Enix has strayed from its origins, using more real-time, action-based fighting sequences set on wide-open maps. Whether or not that’s a good thing is entirely dependent on your perspective, but one thing’s for sure: there’s still plenty of room in the modern gaming world for the turn-based RPG, and World of Final Fantasy scratches that itch in the cutest possible way.

Few role-playing games have as much staying power as Square’s Chrono Trigger. With star talents such as Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii, and Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama behind the wheel, the game had the direction it needed to be an instant classic and still ranks highly on many top video game lists even by today’s standards... Read

It was on this day in 1990 that North America invited the original Final Fantasy onto its shelves and gave us the first taste of what would be a long and bountiful series.

Hitman is shaping up to be the hit that no one saw coming. Despite the controversial decision to break the game into an episodic format, especially so close to its release, the format has served it well. If even just the few maps that have been released so far were released all at once, it would feel overwhelming. The time in between each batch of content is ample for digging into each of the incredibly dense environments and explore all of their nooks and crannies. Case in point, Marrakesh, the latest expansion for Hitman. This map is easily the most detailed and tightly packed so far.

The Hitman series has always been a series of duality. It’s a place where you can be as messy or as clean as you desire in your operation of the man known only as Agent 47.