About JRPGpedia

Who runs this

My handle is Altopraxis, and I built JRPGpedia.

My first JRPG was Pokemon Yellow, although I had no idea at the time that I was playing a Japanese role-playing game. All I knew was that the little world inside that cartridge was more interesting than almost anything happening outside it, and I wanted as much of it as I could get. The strategy guide came home before the cartridge did, which probably tells you everything you need to know about the kind of kid I was.

Final Fantasy followed almost immediately, and from there the rest of the canon, until at some point in high school I had quietly decided that the only sensible response to this much obsession was to learn Japanese, move to Tokyo, and eventually marry a Japanese girl so the whole arc would feel like a story rather than a hobby. It made perfect sense at the time, in the way that nothing about being seventeen makes sense in retrospect.

Life, of course, had other ideas. There were jobs to take and a household to run, and then the kids arrived, and somewhere in the middle of all of that the PlayStation went into a box in the closet. For a long stretch I was the guy at the party who used to be into games but now mostly talked about strollers and sleep schedules, which is a respectable transformation but a quiet one.

What pulled me back was the PS Vita, and specifically a slow replay of Final Fantasy VII on it during a string of long-haul flights I would rather not remember. By the time the credits rolled the second time, the whole obsession had quietly come back: Pokemon, Final Fantasy, the entire genre, all of it queued up on a handheld in my carry-on. I never did marry a Japanese girl, but I have been to Japan many times and intend to keep going, and I think that is a fair compromise.

JRPGpedia is what I built once I realised I had three decades of opinions about this genre and the technical skills to make a database that did them justice. If you want a single game to thank or blame for the project itself, it is Ys VIII. Adol washed up on a beach, and a few weeks later I was washing up at my desk at 1 AM working on a side project, and somehow both of us kept walking.

If you are here, welcome. There are several thousand JRPGs on this site and a few opinions per game that I am willing to defend in writing. The site is free, the opinions are not always right, and both of those are part of the point.