I never expected to see ActRaiser again. A memorable and successful early release for the 16-bit Super NES in North America, ActRaiser hasn’t had a lot of luck since then. It was followed up by an incredibly misguided sequel that seemingly killed the franchise. Then its developer, Quintet, faded out under mysterious circumstances, taking much of its IP with it. The game’s publisher, Enix, merged with Square and the new company appeared to have little interest in massive chunks of Enix’s historical output. ActRaiser got a Japan-only port of its action stages for feature phones, and a Virtual Console release early on in the Nintendo Wii’s life. And then there was silence.
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For about as long as I’ve paid attention to smartphone gaming, I’ve seen a lot of people wishing that the Game Boy Final Fantasy Legend games would come to mobile. It makes sense; mobile gamers tend to have an affinity for gaming on the go, so they probably put in a lot of time on their Game Boys back in the day. And if you were a Game Boy gamer who loved RPGs, you almost certainly came into contact with one of the games from Square Enix’s Final Fantasy Legend trilogy. The years passed, and we got a lot of Square Enix games. Remakes, re-releases, and so on. But the Final Fantasy Legend games never came… until now.
Final Fantasy IV has had more remakes than any Final Fantasy game save the original. Up until now, there have been no less than eight distinct versions of this game, and Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster ($17.99) marks its ninth. Is this finally the definitive version, or are we left with yet another case of a version that is better in some ways and worse in others? If you know the general idea behind these Pixel Remaster games, you probably already know the answer to that question. Let’s ride it out anyway, friends.
Fantasian has proven to be a tremendously challenging game to review. It’s an Apple Arcade game, so you don’t exactly need advice on whether or not you should buy it if you already subscribe to the service. When it first launched, it was only the first part of the game and I didn’t think it was necessarily fair or a good idea to judge an RPG on its first half. And I’m glad I waited, because the second part really did change my opinion on Fantasian as a whole. There are still bits coming in future updates, but the main game is here and I suppose I have to do this now.
Wingspan ($9.99) by Monster Couch is a digital adaptation of the original board game with the same name designed by Elizabeth Hargrave. This digital release already debuted on other platforms including Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox and it has finally arrived on iOS and iPadOS as a premium game with every feature you’d expect from prior versions. With many board games getting digital adaptations, the iPad in particular feels like a perfect fit with its large screen and touch support. I hadn’t played Wingspan before on any platform, so it has been interesting learning how to play it and experiencing it over the last two weeks. 
When the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series was announced, one of the games caught my eye more than the others. While it’s natural to get excited over a more faithful rendition of the original game, or to want to see how the Super NES games would look with a new style, many Final Fantasy fans probably immediately jumped to Final Fantasy III. Historically it has been one of the less available games in the series, often skipped over for rereleases. The 3D remake was the first time it appeared in the West, and yes, that version has gotten around. But that version is also more different from its source than most Final Fantasy remakes. Thus, the Final Fantasy III ($17.99) Pixel Remaster represents the first time the original game has been officially made available outside of Japan.
It takes a lot of work to be the black sheep of a series as inconsistent as Final Fantasy, but Final Fantasy II has generally found itself in that position since it first released on the 8-bit Famicom back in 1988. It’s an odd game, in many ways establishing the SaGa series more than it sets up further Final Fantasy games. It went unlocalized for a rather lengthy period of time, which meant when it finally did come it was being judged against games that came ten years or more after it. Memes about the game were established in the West before the game itself ever had a chance. Unfortunately, I feel like the Final Fantasy II ($11.99) Pixel Remaster has once again drawn the short straw. Of all the Pixel Remaster games so far, this is the one that loses the most.