#JRPGJuly 2025 Introduction

Welcome to another #JRPGJuly! Here’s to another year of communities coming together to love, play, and talk about JRPGs. For those that are unfamiliar with the event, it was created as a community game-along by Anne Lee of Chic Pixel and hosted by MDi. What is the goal of #JRPGJuly? To play JRPGs and share the experience with others through blogging, social media, and on the RPGamer Discord server. Join us on social media using #JRPGJuly and engage with your fellow JRPG fans!

As always, the RPGamer crew loves being a part of the event. Let’s see what folks are going to be blogging about in weekly updates this month! Also, our stream team is excited to be featuring a variety of JRPGs during July! We’ll have all our regular streamers, including Scar’s Friday Night SNES wheel spins, alongside special guests playing more Final Fantasy than you can shake a stick at. Games we’ll be playing include: Persona 3 Reload, Nier: Automata, Super Robot Wars: Original Generations, Final Fantasy IX and XIV, Visions of Mana, and more!

Hey everyone, I’m Joshua Carpenter, and I work on editorials and features for the site, and I can sometimes be heard on RPGCast. #JRPGJuly is one of my favorite things we do at the site, and this year I’m especially looking forward to playing a game from one of my favorite series. A fan translation recently released for Sakura Wars 2: Thou Shall Not Die so I’m going to be leading the Flower Division in tactical mecha battles while keeping everyone undercover by putting on performances in the Grand Imperial Theater all month long. You can follow my escapades through the Taishō era on Bluesky.

#JRPGJuly is my favourite time of the year. I’m Andi, one of the site co-owners. I do mostly behind-the-scenes things, sometimes write reviews, and pop up regularly on the RPGCast, our weekly current news podcast. For #JRPGJuly this year, I’m mixing things up and eschewing a turn-based RPG, instead diving into Farmagia, followed by Ys X: Nordics. I’m looking forward to both, though for different reasons!

While many of us play JRPGs all year long, who doesn’t love an event like #JRPGJuly, where as a community we collectively play and share our love of JRPGs? I’m Sam Wachter, Operations Manager of RPGamer. I write features, reviews, and play a lot of questionable games to share with our community! For this #JRPGJuly, my goal is to play something new and something old. I will be diving into Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army first, and if I manage to beat it before the end of the month, we are going to complete Valkyrie Elysium, which I started at one point and then got distracted by something shiny. I look forward to sharing my thoughts on both throughout the month!

I am Cassandra Ramos, contributor to many a feature here at RPGamer. I’m usually playing one JRPG or another, but during #JRPGJuly, I get to share what I’m playing with our readers here and possibly on Bluesky. This year I plan to start and play through Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, a game that I have been looking forward to for a while. I greatly enjoyed the original game on the 3DS, so I’m hoping that I will enjoy this new game at least as much. I intend to play it on the Nintendo Switch, which I hear is suboptimal, but it is the most likely way for me to play it. Here’s hoping my write-ups will be about how much I enjoy it and not about how it runs on the Swtich! I spent over 100 hours on the first game, so it’s unlikely I’ll get to another game, but I always have another JRPG on the backlog if it comes to it.

Hi! I’m Jervon, one of the features writers here at RPGamer. I’m joining in for #JRPGJuly this year with Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin on PS5. I had a hard time deciding what to play at first, but I kept coming back to something a little more hopeful and heroic. I’m going through a big transition in my life right now, and the idea of a classic turn-based journey with a strong emotional core felt like the right kind of anchor. This also doubles as my warm-up for getting into the Monster Hunter series more broadly, which has always felt a bit intimidating from the outside.

I’ve never quite clicked with the real-time combat in the main games, but I’ve always admired the worldbuilding and characters. I really enjoyed what I played of Monster Hunter Wilds during the early access period, so that helped tip the scales. Still, for #JRPGJuly, I wanted something more grounded in traditional combat systems. I went back and forth between the two Monster Hunter Stories games and ended up choosing the second entry after playing both openings. Its accessibility and cinematic flair won me over. Looking forward to the rest of the month and seeing what everyone else is playing!

Hey there! I’m Robert Sinclair, aka lolwhoops. I’m a contributor to random features mostly, so of course I couldn’t wait to get into this year’s #JRPGJuly. I was looking through my backlog, and I’m sitting on some heavy hitters, so I decided to knock one out by playing Metaphor ReFantazio. The game has received solid recommendations from some people I know, and I’m looking forward to digging into it. It has been out a good while now, but I thankfully have avoided spoilers for the most part and will be going in completely blind. It’s going to be a great time. I hope you all enjoy hearing my thoughts on it.

Another year, another round of #JRPGJuly. I’m Ryan McCarthy, and while I haven’t been very active on the site recently, I contribute to reviews and features whenever I can. For the month, I decided to tackle Metaphor: ReFantazio as it is a recent release that has gotten a lot of praise from other staff members, and I’m curious where I’ll land on it. I’ve avoided spoilers on the game as much as possible so that I can go into it fresh. However, I know it’s a beefy game, so I’m also playing Final Fantasy IV for something relatively shorter and already have a head start on that one since I was in a Final Fantasy mood and couldn’t wait for the month to start to satiate it. Hope everyone is looking forward to my thoughts on these games both here and on Bluesky.

The RPGamer stream team is also joining in to celebrate #JRPGJuly all month long, beginning a little early on Sunday, June 29th.  We’ll have an amazing ten(!!!) different streamers celebrating RPGs new and old, seven days a week on our Twitch channel.  Be sure to give us a follow and watch for streams including:

• Final Fantasy IX
• Final Fantasy XI
• Final Fantasy XIV
• NieR: Automata
• Persona 3 Reload
• Suikoden II
• Super Robot Wars: Original Generation
• Visions of Mana
• And more~

Of course, the SNES Retro Wheel also continues all month long!

We hope you enjoy keeping up with our staff’s adventures this #JRPGJuly. Let us know if you are participating and what you will be playing in the comments.