Every world visited, every story told — in the order they were written. A traveller's record of the games that left a mark.
✦ Chapter I
The game that became my favourite of all time. The ending I still can't explain without sounding like I've lost the plot.
✦ Chapter II
Where it all began. A storybook kingdom, a thief who stole a princess, and a small black mage who asked the question I didn't know I was already asking.
✦ Chapter III
Final Fantasy made me feel wonder and grief. Persona 4 Golden did something neither managed — it made me feel seen.
✦ Chapter IV
An empty hospital. Blood on the floor. No explanation. Nothing in Final Fantasy had prepared me for what Nocturne was about to do.
✦ Chapter V
The sequel that took something sacred and made it pop. I resented it. And then the ending did something I wasn't prepared for.
✦ Chapter VI
I played Final Fantasy VI without understanding it — literally. And wandering lost through it turned out to be the perfect way to experience a world built by a nihilist.
✦ Chapter VII
No grinding. No going back. A PS1 tactical RPG about giant robots that was quietly, persistently, about accountability.
✦ Chapter VIII
I came for the job system. I stayed because the game quietly told me history is written by the people who remain — and they are not always the ones who deserved to.
✦ Chapter IX
Mobius Final Fantasy shut its servers in 2020. This is a record of what it was — and of a moogle who kept one memory private because some things are too important to share.
✦ Chapter X
Persona 3 opens with Memento Mori and never lets you forget what it means. A game about mortality that is also one of the warmest things ever made.
✦ Chapter XI
176 characters. Every one with a daily schedule. A world that didn't wait for you — and that made it feel real in a way most games never manage.
✦ Chapter XII
After Nocturne's broken world, a soul-trapped cat and a teenage detective in 1920s Tokyo were exactly the breath of fresh air the franchise needed.
✦ Chapter XIII
The counterfeit copy stopped halfway through. Years later the original arrived in a soda-stained case. The disc was fine. The game was exactly as good as remembered.
✦ Chapter XIV
Most LOTR games want you to be the hero. The Third Age wanted you to follow — ordinary people in the margins of the most important war ever fought.
✦ Chapter XV
Fable promised you could be a hero or a villain, loved or feared. It kept most of those promises. What it built inside that smaller-than-advertised world was stranger and more honest than its reputation suggests.
✦ Chapter XVI
Dark Cloud 2 gave you a ruined world and asked you to invent the future that would save it. Not restore — invent. A PS2 RPG that nobody had quite attempted before.
✦ Chapter XVII
A story told from two directions — a hero searching for someone lost, and a god learning what it means to feel everything humans feel. They were always going to meet in the middle.
✦ Chapter XVIII
A licensed GBC tie-in that had no right to be as thoughtful as it was. Released at the peak of a franchise's cultural dominance — and quietly, unexpectedly, worth remembering.
✦ Chapter XIX
A time machine, a cast of characters assembled across centuries, and endings that trusted you to have paid attention. Chrono Trigger remains the standard against which everything else is measured.
✦ Chapter XX
No random encounters. A programmable AI party system. A political story where the heroes were bystanders. Final Fantasy XII was the most ambitious misfire in the series — and it was correct about almost everything.
✦ Chapter XXI
Lenneth was supposed to collect souls and feel nothing. She felt everything. Valkyrie Profile built its tragedy from that single failure of divine indifference — and it remains one of the most quietly devastating JRPGs ever made.
✦ Chapter XXII
Nintendo handed Mario to Square and Square made a turn-based RPG with timed hits, a villain who joined your party, and a story that somehow earned its emotional moments. It shouldn't have worked. It did.
✦ Chapter XXIII
Cecil began as a Dark Knight serving a king doing terrible things. Final Fantasy IV asked whether someone who has done wrong can become someone who does right — and answered without pretending the question was simple.
✦ Chapter XXIV
A justice system that worked exactly as designed and reached the wrong conclusion. A paladin who served an institution until it did something unforgivable. The most interesting question wasn't whether she fell — it was how and why.
✦ Chapter XXV
Played in the wrong order — Drakengard 2 before the first game. Arriving at a story from the middle changes what you see when you finally go back. Sometimes the wrong order is the right one.
✦ Chapter XXVI
Persona 5 Royal is the most stylish JRPG ever made — and the style is the argument. Every menu, every transition, every UI decision is saying something about who these characters are and what they are fighting for.
✦ Chapter XXVII
Borderlands 2 understood that the grind only works if the world around it refuses to take itself seriously. Handsome Jack made sure of that — the funniest, most quotable villain the genre has ever produced.
✦ Chapter XXVIII
GreedFall put you on an island that did not need saving by the people who came to save it. A rare RPG honest enough to make you the complicated part of someone else's story rather than its hero.
✦ Chapter XXIX
Odyssey buried its own series under a genuinely massive RPG — dialogue choices, romance, a skill tree the size of a small country. It barely felt like the franchise it carried the name of. That turned out to be its greatest strength.
✦ Chapter XXX
The dreamer is still walking. The next chapter is on its way.
✦ The road continues ✦
🐺 Lumen
*ears prick up* A new traveller at the campfire. Ask me anything about these worlds.
Lumen
Wolf Companion · Always at your side