
After completing Jade Cocoon, a new and almost endless area is unlocked which contains randomly generated dungeons and new Minions to collect. Jade Cocoon is a brief and enchanting experience, and followed-up excellently with Jade Cocoon 2. Jade Cocoon is also notable for being almost fully voice-acted, a rarity for PS1 games (and the voice acting is actually pretty good, too!).

Minions function as both battle companions and currency, and can be fused and customized to obtain new and stronger Minions. He travels in search of an herb said to be able to lift the curse and must use the power of Minions, bug-like creatures that can be captured and purified, to traverse the deadly forest. The player takes on the role of a Cocoon Master, who is tasked with reviving villagers stricken with a curse of eternal sleep. Jade Cocoon is something of an unsung gem featuring character designs from Studio Ghibli’s Katsuya Kondou, sophisticated and unique pet-raising mechanics, sumptuous visuals, and a plot centered around coexisting with nature.
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It’s a deeply unique and essential game, especially for fans of things like FromSoftware’s King’s Field series or fans of the apocalyptic mood of the older Shin Megami Tensei games. There’s a remake of Baroque out there for PlayStation 2 and Wii that was localized outside of Japan, but no Western release of the original game exists. The only surefire equipment you’ll be going into Neuro Tower with is a rifle called Angelic, which can be used to one-shot a highly limited number of enemies. In classic roguelike fashion, your level is reset and you lose all equipment each time you die, starting you with a fresh slate on each successive run. Decades before Hades, Baroque told its story through a series of successes and failures, unlocking new cutscenes and dialogue from the denizens of a nearby village after exploring and eventually dying in the Neuro Tower.

In Baroque, you play a nameless amnesiac whose only impetus is to explore a labyrinth in a desolate wasteland calle the Neuro Tower. It’s a shame how fractured it’s left the community.īaroque is a first-person dungeon crawler inspired by Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon series, and among the first of many to do something interesting and innovative with the format. The lack of regard for preservation as well as the gatekeeping of emulation and fan efforts is one of the biggest gates in maintaining an actual historical record of games as a medium. Still, these remasters are often the only reliable way to play these games legally in the modern day, with copies of out-of-print games becoming collector’s items only available for exorbitant prices.
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Some, like the remaster of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, are disproportionately priced (with the full game coming in at around $70) for the amount of effort put in to preserving the experience, framerate, and original intentions of the visual design. Many of the big publishers struggle with providing worthwhile ports and remasters of older games. What a translation it was, too-the script came courtesy of (former Paste contributor) Tim Rogers, who rendered the text with passion and humor, proudly showcasing why the game is so well-regarded and a great example of just how many of the greatest games for the PS1 never made it outside of Japan. Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, a seminal work that’s inspired many games since its release, received its first Western release last August. Elsewhere, some games lost in the annals of the first PlayStation like Legend of Mana, Grandia, and Saga Frontier received the remaster treatment, with Frontier even including completed scenarios made up from scrapped material. and game music while offering a scant selection of games on Nintendo Switch Online or manufacturing scarcity with time-limited releases. Nintendo has begun mass takedowns of fanmade content.

Over the last year or so, there’s been a keen uptick in interest in videogame preservation.
