I have to admit that, in spite of the slightly wonky graphics/cut scenes, I have a real soft spot for Gremlin Interactive‘s 1997 PC MS-DOS release, Realms of the Haunting. Mostly because I was lucky and got to visit Gremlin‘s offices in Sheffield to see the game in production, and to talk to the people who were making it. I drove all the way from Bournemouth – where I worked as a video games magazine editor – and spent an entire day there to preview the game for PC Power magazine.
Tag Archives: 2D graphics
Flat, two-dimensional graphics, usually constructed of pixels. Not three-dimensional.
Final Fantasy Legend III, Game Boy
As Final Fantasy Legend games go this third instalment in the series is a little weird. It plays just as good as the previous two games (maybe even better because it has the advantage of refinement), but the way it’s presented is somewhat strange.
Final Fantasy VI Advance, Game Boy Advance
Final Fantasy VI Advance was released in Japan in 2006, and 2007 in English language territories. It’s a remake of the Super Nintendo original, developed by a Japanese company called Tose.
Final Fantasy VI, Super Nintendo
Final Fantasy VI (six) is where the series started to move away from its ‘cute’ roots and into darker story-telling territory, foreshadowing the distant Final Fantasy VII. It was initially released on the Super Nintendo in 1994.
Final Fantasy V Advance, Game Boy Advance
Final Fantasy V Advance is the third Tose-developed remake for the Game Boy Advance and was first released in 2006.
Again: it uses the same refined interface and beautifully-drawn and coloured graphics of the previous two Tose remakes and somehow manages to make the Super Nintendo original look a little drab in the process.
Final Fantasy V, Super Nintendo
Final Fantasy V (five) was released in Japan for the Super Nintendo in 1992 although it did not get an official English language translation until it was later re-released on the Sony PlayStation in 1999.
Final Fantasy IV Advance, Game Boy Advance
In the mid Noughties Japanese developer Tose undertook the task of converting and updating the early Final Fantasy games to the Nintendo Game Boy Advance for Square Enix (as they were known then).
Final Fantasy IV, Super Nintendo
Looking a little primitive compared to the 2005 remake for the Game Boy Advance, this original, 1991 Super Nintendo adventure nevertheless is a pioneering game. It was the first Final Fantasy game released for the Super Nintendo (the previous three all being Famicom releases), and the first to use the “Active Time Battle” system.
Final Fantasy III, Famicom
The third Final Fantasy game was released for the Nintendo Famicom in Japan in 1990. It wasn’t officially translated into English until many years after its initial release, so a variety of fan translations exist online, and their quality varies wildly. The TransTeam translation I found to be pretty good although the font and text alignment isn’t perfect.
Etrian Odyssey, Nintendo DS
This pioneering Japanese RPG was first released in 2007 and paved the way for one of the greatest series in the history of level-grinders… The Etrian Odyssey series.
Number three is my favourite, but one and two are excellent too (see also the Nintendo 3DS fourth instalment), and all follow the same credo. Which is: to base a game around exploration, mapping, and turn-based combat. And to make the party system flexible, so that adventurers can take out different parties and experiment with character skills.
The King of Grabs 