Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the RPG Reload, the regular feature where we always have an adventure in our pocket. To be specific, welcome to the RPG Reload Glossary, where we sift through the piles of historical debris and messy semantics to try to make some sense of it all. This time around, we're continuing our look at the history of the JRPG sub-genre. In the last part, we covered the debut of two of the biggest JRPGs of the 1990s and the subsequent boom in popularity for the genre worldwide. As the thousands digit rolled over on the calendar, people were throwing parties everywhere. Nintendo was awash in the surprising global success of Pokemon, providing the company with a valuable crutch in the face of a weakening console business. Square was virtually on top of the gaming world. The next ten years would prove vital for both companies, and the fortunes of both companies would have a major impact on the now-trendy JRPG genre. To repeat the note from last time: due to the immense size of this particular sub-category, I'm going to be focusing on only the titles that were critical to the development and/or popularization of the genre. This is a necessary move to keep this particular historical retelling from growing to an absurd size.

Only a few months into the year 2000, Sony's PlayStation 2 made its debut in Japan. By the end of the year, it would be released in every major gaming market. While Sony's first console had debuted with a cloud of uncertainty about...