About

Marathon Recaps is split into two formats: the Journals, which are about games we’ve never played before, and longer-form Retrospectives about games we know very well. If you want to find your way around, I recommend the top bar, which includes links to the start of each game and to Directories that provide links to each, individual post. You can also use the Categories and Tags in the side bar on the sidebar, if that’s what you’d prefer.

Feel free to pop into your favourite game without worrying about going out of order, you might miss a few jokes but it should still hold together in the end. Or, if you just want to get started at the start, you can start reading the Final Fantasy Marathon here, or the Kingdom Hearts Retrospective here! Or check out our list of obscure games!

Retrospectives cover games I’m already familiar with, and are written with hindsight and research. The Journals try to capture our first impressions, so they’re written shortly after playing. From Final Fantasy I through the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII (plus Persona 1), I wrote the Journals after finishing the game, but from Final Fantasy Tactics on, we changed things so that I write each section of the Journal immediately after our play sessions, only doing hefty research after the final Journal is complete, to capture our original thoughts and mistakes!

The archive is arranged so that each game is in release order, except direct sequels and prequels are posted together. We’ve made a special exception for the Final Fantasy VII Remake series, which will be its own entry (distinct from the original FFVII) once we hit 2020, but I believe that’s our only current exception. At the end of each post, you’ll find “Prev” and “Next” links that go through the posts in archive order, or you can use WordPress’ previous and next links to go in posting order, in case you just can’t stand to miss an in-joke. Your choice!

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Who are we? Kyle and I are two lifelong best friends, me an ex-programmer and short-lived game developer, and Kyle a tabletop roleplayer and veteran LARPer. We like to play entire game series from start to finish. It used to be a race, but now it’s a chance to take in the classic games we’ve never had the chance to play. If you ever wondered what it would be like for a fan of turn-based RPGs to play genre darlings like Final Fantasy VI and VII for the first time, this is the place to be, because I grew up without them, and Kyle’s got his share of gaps, too. And if you want to see a programmer and writer deconstruct his favourite games to the last line of code, the Retrospectives have you covered.

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If you want the full story, it started 2008, Mega Man 9 was coming out in just a few months, and Kyle and I got together with a plan. We would play all nine previous mainline games (1-8 and Mega Man & Bass) aiming for speed, so long as we made sure to catch every single Robot Master. Enthusiasm turned to pretend zealotry, to free the world from the evil Robot Masters and their evil, evil crimes, as rapidly as possible. The Mega Man Marathon.

Once we ran out of “jerkbots,” we needed fresh blood: more series that could provide us with a sense of thorough, and sometimes rapid progression through the series, top-to-bottom. Especially if they were games we had never played before. We hurried on to Mega Man X, Trauma Center, and Kingdom Hearts, until finally we faced our destiny: turn-based RPGs. The Marathon is our favourite way to hang out and a great way to play the big classics we never got a chance to play. As we played, I wrote. And I wrote and I wrote. And now it is time to share our findings with the world.

We hope you enjoy your stay, death to Dynamo Man, and god help us all, these games won’t be the death of us yet.