#JRPGJuly 2025 – Final Round-up
Welcome to another year of everyone’s favorite monthly gameathon. #JRPGJuly was created as a community game-along by Anne Lee @ Chic Pixel, and hosted by MDi. Once again, the RPGamer staff is showing their support for the event by playing some JRPGs. If you’re participating, make sure to use #JRPGJuly or share your feelings over on the RPGamer Discord server.
We’ve made it to the end, folks. Check out the staff’s final thoughts on their selected games. We hope you’ll join us again next year!
Joshua Carpenter
It’s probably no surprise by this point that I’ve adored my time with Sakura Wars 2: Thou Shalt Not Die. Going in, I was pretty sure I would find the 90s-era anime trappings to be charming, but I was less sure how the tactical combat would hold up in this nearly thirty-year-old game. Thankfully, I’ve been quite impressed with some inventive map design, unique boss abilities, and a surprising amount of challenges.
Some of the difficulty comes from leaving certain tasks a bit vague. There was one map where I had to defend a weak point on the Flower Division’s airship, and it took a while to figure out the areas of the map where enemies could pull off kamikaze attacks and which were safe from attack. Maybe that would have been clearer from the artwork in the original TV format, but I still think a modern strategy game would have flagged the relevant tiles for the player. These few frustrations didn’t take away from the majority of combat, which included some close-run affairs that were very satisfying to pull out victories.
The story has a ton of corny earnestness that really just clicks with me. I found myself enjoying every time that the “power of friendship” defeats the bad guys once again. While plenty of JRPGs are steeped in anime influences, playing Sakura Wars 2 has reminded me of just how radically different the genre is today than it was thirty years ago. Personally, I could go for a bit more earnest silliness in my JRPGs.
Jervon Perkins
Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin
So I didn’t finish Monster Hunter Stories 2, but I made a solid dent in it. Overall, I did enjoy my time with the game, especially the bond between my character and Ratha. The emotional beats landed when they needed to. That said, the grind made it hard to love. There were stretches where I had to push myself just to keep going, and for a player like me with a stack of comfort games I replay every year (looking at you Baldur’s Gate 3) and a backlog full of remakes and new releases, that’s tough.
Funny enough, the third Monster Hunter Stories game was just announced for 2026, so I guess I’ve got time to finish this one and maybe go back to the first. I just hope the next entry trims some of the fat. The core story is strong enough that it doesn’t need all the extra padding. I’m still invested in seeing where the journey with my character and their grandpa ends, and I do think this world has something special. Here’s hoping the next one leans into that even more.
Andi Privitere
I stayed up way too late on July 30th and knocked out the final boss of Farmagia! There’s a little bit of post-game, mostly defeating a bunch of the bosses I’ve previously tackled for more seeds, but after nearly 50 hours, I’m ready to move on to something different. There’s still a distinct chunk of the talent grid that I’ve never unlocked — it’s for crafting recipes allowing monsters in your party to level up past the main game’s cap — and maybe I’ll return to that some time in the next couple months. The ending does feel a little unserious, mostly revolving around which characters did and did not end up having plot armour, but the story does wrap up nicely. I’d originally intended to jump straight into Ys X immediately following Farmagia, but with so many action RPGs recently, I’m starting to crave something turn-based again. I’ve never returned to Octopath Traveler II, my #JRPGJuly fail from 2023, so it’s time to give it a second shot. Wish me luck!
Sam Wachter
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak
One of the nice things about being on vacation is the amount of time I have to play video games. While it’s been a busy week, I spent a large chunk of Wednesday working on and completing chapter 3 in Trails Through Daybreak. This chapter had just as much intrigue as the previous, and I loved the idea that we were assisting in a film festival where… there were only four awards. No shade! I mean, more awards would have extended that section longer than it needed to be. I loved meeting the head of Almata, and this series is one of the few outside of Like a Dragon where there is so much mafia presence within the narrative that I gobble it up. While I like our female leads, I will say that Van and Aaron definitely steal the show, and one particular interaction sealed it for me. I’m having a great time, even if these games are a bit too long!
I would say that this was a very successful #JRPGJuly for me, as I completed both Raidou Remastered and Valkyrie Elysium. I also made excellent headway in Trails Through Daybreak, and I plan to continue through August unless I get hit with a review assignment for the site. I hope everyone had a great month of gaming, and I cannot wait to do this all again next year!
Robert Sinclair
July has come and gone, and I unfortunately couldn’t finish Metaphor: ReFantazio. I knew going into it that it was a long game, but even 50 hours in, it still feels like there’s a ton of game left. I’m on the cusp of some very interesting narrative stuff, and I’m 100% still going to beat this thing, but I feel like it’s going to be a 100-hour epic. Here’s hoping it continues to draw me in.
I’m really liking Metaphor more as I advance. I appreciate that every visit to a follower is done at a time that levels up that relationship. After playing Persona games and having to waste days doing nothing story-wise, just a raise the relationship up enough to advance its story, I feel like Metaphor really values the time you spend with your followers a lot more. I’m hoping it can keep up the pace. I’d hate to spend 100 hours playing a game that could be half that and just as good or better.
Ryan McCarthy
I think some personal issues I’ve been dealing with recently have kept me from getting into Metaphor: ReFantazio as much as I would have liked. That said, I feel like the game has finally hit something of a stride. After taking on a bounty to kill the disgraced ex-knight Heismay, the party reached the castle town Martira, where they ended up going to a sandworm-infested desert. It was there they had met Heismay, the big-eared batlike eugief who turns out not to be the one responsible for the kidnappings of Martira’s children. This is where it’s revealed that the children have actually been taken to an underground chamber hidden under the castle. Heismay’s resolve over the death of his son allows him to awaken to the same Archetype powers as the rest of the party.
A huge part of what’s winning me over in this section of the game is how shockingly well-handled Heismay has been as a character so far. After a lot of the initial fantasy racism didn’t seem to do anything besides the typical “racists act like jerks” thing, Heismay’s sympathetic backstory of him suffering systemic prejudice has been shockingly impressive. It took 20-something hours, but I finally feel like I’m completely locked into the game, and although I only placed a fraction of the game for #JRPGJuly, I’m looking forward to what else the game is gonna throw at me.
Cassandra Ramos
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
I’ve spent a little over 22 hours on Fantasy Life i, adding nearly another ten hours over this past week. I admit a lot of that time was spent cutting down trees and mining for ore. There’s just something fun about harvesting all the trees and ore in an area. I find myself gathering materials while watching YouTube. Plus, I can complete the Life challenges needed to get to a higher Life rank. While I’m having fun with the miner and the woodcutter, I want to start up a lot of Lives. Fantasy Life i adds two new Lives, the Farmer and the Artist, and while the game early on introduces you to characters that have these jobs, I’ve yet to try them out.
While I’ve mostly been working on leveling up my Lives, I did progress the story a bit more. Edward was freed from the previous room, but he wasn’t trapped in yet another one. There is a large hostile robot protected by a barrier deeper in the Depths, but Edward isn’t trapped with it this time. I’m also glad to now have a means to take an elevator to lower levels of the Depths, avoiding walking the whole way. The robot’s barrier can only be broken by a legendary weapon, and we managed to obtain one by competing in a coliseum. Also, what may be the main villain has made an appearance. The 3DS Fantasy Life game had a few antagonists, but no actual villains, so this is an interesting development. There’s still so much to do and see, and I can see myself playing this game for weeks, maybe even months, until I’ve completed it. #JRPGJuly may be over, but my time with Fantasy Life i is not.
Stream Team
One last week of streaming for #JRPGJuly, and we say goodbye to some new friends, while also welcoming a permanent addition to the stream team:
- Noodle finished a month of Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail and bid us goodbye for now — but don’t fret, she’ll return for our Extra Life Extravaganza happening in November!
- TheMightyTAM laid out two extra-long streams to cover our Saturday and Sunday, making significant progress in Super Robot Wars OG 2. Dodge tanking seems to be bringing our team the most success, and many units are now level 30+!
- Scar continues to spin the Wheel of SNES RPGs. We’re now firmly into fan translations and mods such as Super Luigi RPG, so if you want to explore a variety of games you’ve never heard of before, be sure to stop by Tuesdays and Fridays beginning at 6:30pm Eastern Time.
- SmokinJoeGamer took a brief break from his Visions of Mana playthrough to dive into Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma! We’re also excited to confirm Joe will be staying with the stream team through the rest of 2025, so be sure to tune in weekly on Tuesdays at 10:00pm Eastern Time, and Thursdays at 9:00pm Eastern Time each week.
- SpareOmbres returns to dungeon crawling for spare parts. If you didn’t catch his first stream of Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra, you can watch the vod, then wake up early Saturdays at 8:00am Eastern Time.
- Of course, we can’t forget our two podcasts — Q&A Quest and RPG Cast — which both had shows this week. The RPG Cast gushed about the recent Nintendo Direct, with two special panelists: Sam Wachter, reviewer extraordinaire, queen of cussing, and the site’s operations manager, alongside Matt Masem, half of our RPG Backtrack hosting team, and resident Dragon Quest expert.
Catch Q&A Quest Mondays at 11:00pm Eastern Time, and the RPG Cast Saturdays at 12:00pm Eastern Time. The stream team wants to give a hearty thank you to everyone who tuned in throughout the month! We had many new faces, and of course, we couldn’t do this without our regular viewers as well. Your subs to the channel continue to support the stream team with needed hardware and games, including Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. We hope you continue to tune in for your fave streamers all year long.
OKreams: Be sure you’ve given our channel a follow and turn on notifications to know when we’re going live: twitch.tv/rpgamer
That’s all for this #JRPGJuly! Let us know if you were successful in completing any JRPGs throughout the month!
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