Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the RPG Reload, the regular feature where we sometimes take a moment to check our status screens and admire our stats. While I had originally planned for this week's installment to continue our dive into the history of action-RPGs, it was brought to my attention that we passed another milestone this week. Our humble little corner of TouchArcade is now officially three years old, so I'd like to dedicate this week's column to a little navel-gazing in honor of that accomplishment. Put on your mystic caps of self-indulgence, friends, because we're going on a magic carpet ride of RPG Reload history! If you're here for the action-RPG series, we'll be returning to that next week.
When I first answered to one of TouchArcade editor-in-chief Eli Hodapp's calls for new writers, one of things I hoped to bring to the site was a perspective more informed by the Japanese side of the business. Regular readers know that I call Japan my home, and while I was an avid reader of TouchArcade, I felt like a lot of Japanese mobile games were slipping through the cracks. I was lucky enough to get hired in May of 2013 and, being the low writer on the pole, mostly wrote reviews for whatever was left after the senior staff had their pick. Reviews of major RPGs largely fell to the exemplary Eric Ford, with things like gamebooks and Kemco RPGs coming my way. As Eric's day job got busier, more and more RPG reviews fell to me. As I hit my first anniversary of working ...