Fire Emblem, one of the oldest tactical role-playing series, debuted in Japan in the spring of 1990. The series didn't come to the U.S. until 2003. Five years ago, Nintendo belatedly translated into English the first Famicom game, subtitled Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, and released it on the Switch to celebrate its 30th anniversary (though it was soon removed from the eShop). Now it celebrates its 35th anniversary! A tactical RPG is defined as an RPG that uses either grid- or hex-based combat after the style of tabletop wargames like Warhammer, Stratego, or chess. Instead of controlling a party of adventurers exploring dungeons and fighting monsters (a la Dungeons & Dragons), in tactical RPGs you control an army confronting other armies on a battlefield. You array your units strategically based on the terrain and enemy positions. You can't just select "fight" from a menu and then pick a target. Many factors must be accounted for, such as bottlenecks on b...

The popular Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) came to the United States at the beginning of 1999, a few months after the original Game Boy games and simultaneous with the anime show. One year later, on April 10, 2000, the first digital implementation of the game arrived in the form of a Game Boy Color game. Although it features only the first three sets–just over 200 cards–and a low-resolution interface, it is a complete and faithful reproduction of the card game. I've played Magic: The Gathering, the world's first (and best) TCG, since 1994 but only got into the Pokémon TCG a couple years ago thanks to the free digital version. As a teenager I dismissed Pokémon as too simple, but the game is a lot of fun. I no longer see the simplicity as a drawback. There is plenty of strategy, and tournament-quality decks can do crazy things thanks to powerful deck-searching cards. A skippable tutorial teaches you how to play the Pokémon TCG. Players use their card collection to build decks of...

Just in time for its 30th anniversary, Nintendo added the Game Boy game, Mario's Picross, to its Switch Online Expansion Pack. The portmanteau "picross" refers to the fact that each puzzle is solved by cross -referencing both vertical and horizontal numeric clues on a grid, creating a picture . The game is barely known in the States, though it led to several Japanese sequels. Each puzzle is made up of columns and rows of boxes, somewhat like Sudoku, either 5x5, 10x10, or 15x15. Each row and each column is labeled with one or more numbers. These show how many consecutive boxes in that column or row must be filled in. When all the right boxes have been filled in, a simple picture, like a cactus or frog, will have been formed. Before you fill any boxes, you can accept a "hint," meaning one column and one row are filled in for you—a significant headstart, which I enjoy. To solve these puzzles, you have to use logic to deduce which boxes are the targets. For example...

My lifelong love of role-playing games began with a free copy of Dragon Warrior—part of a promotion by Nintendo Power. The game was primitive, as Western ports of Japanese RPGs lagged years behind. Dragon Quest III came out in early 1988, just three months after Final Fantasy , but we didn't get Dragon Warrior III until four years later . (The name had to be altered because someone had trademarked "Dragon Quest" in the U.S.) By then the Super Nintendo was already out; Dragon Warrior III made almost no impact. Enix declined to localize V and VI. (Fortunately, Squaresoft and Enix merged in 2003, and the new company ported both to the DS for international release!)  Dragon Warrior III and IV are easily the best RPGs on the NES. DW3 does everything Final Fantasy does and more. Instead of choosing your party of four only at the beginning, you control a central hero or heroine (you choose the gender, although they are called Ortega's "son" either way), who can re...

Ridge Racer 64 brought Namco's arcade/PlayStation racing series to a Nintendo console for the first time. Releasing between R4 and Ridge Racer V, it includes tracks from the original Ridge Racer arcade game as well as the PlayStation sequel, Ridge Racer Revolution. (I never played either, though I did enjoy Rad Racer and Cruis'n USA as a child.) It's a fun game, if you like old-fashioned arcade-style racing. The racing formula found in many other games holds here: you choose one of four cars, its color, automatic or manual transmission, then a track to race on against computer-controlled cars. Cars are rated on four stats: speed, handling, acceleration, and grip. You can also play multiplayer (up to 4) with split screen. Courses are arranged as three sets of three. The three starting tracks are a cityscape (the short track from the original arcade game), mountains and valleys (the easy track from Ridge Racer Revolution), and a new track called Renegade set in the desert o...

Mega Man X reinvented the Mega Man series to universal acclaim, and X2 stays the course. The strength of the formula, which rewards you incrementally as you upgrade the robot hero X, sustained my interest despite the game's difficulty. X again faces eight "Mavericks" (animalian robots) as well as, this time around, three additional "X-Hunters," named Violen, Agile, and Serges (a mistranslation of the French Sagesse, which means wise ). Before you select a stage, you are shown in which stage each X-Hunter is hiding at the moment. Every stage has a secret boss room where they can be fought. Each holds a piece of the robot Zero, who nobly sacrificed himself in the previous game. If X finds and defeats all three hidden bosses, Zero is reassembled. This adds replay value to the game for anyone who doesn't hunt down all the X-Hunters in their first playthrough. As in all Mega Man games, each robot boss has its own themed stage, with different enemies and a differ...