Welcome to The Lone Bard's new home
Hey, I'm Jake Zemeckis! I write about solo RPGs and tabletop gaming. My main goal is to showcase the incredible variety of solo games out there, especially on the indie scene.
Most of my content is actual plays, but I also post reviews, recommendations, ramblings, and whatever projects I'm working on.
- To check all playthroughs and posts in alphabetical order, go to The Chronicle.
- For all content from most recent to oldest, go to the Blog.
- To see stuff I've created, go to Projects.
- If you wanna get in touch, feel free to send me an email!
latest
now
- Legends & Latte is solid! Exactly what I was expecting, some low-stakes fantasy fun. Really cool read.
- I dropped Saga Frontier 2. I feel a little bad, but it was all nostalgia pulling me in.
- I finished Legend of Mana, though. To me, it still holds up. It's full of charm, honesty, and authenticity, things lacking in a lot of games today.
I'll say, though, that it's also full of odd design choices. They are especially noticeable when comparing to the opposite direction that modern games adopt.
For instance, it highly punishes exploration. I mean, that's odd even for a JRPG.
If you go to a city for the first time at the wrong time (like Geo), you can be permanently locked out of quests and storylines.
When doing a quest, if you move to a wrong part of the map or talk to a random NPC, you might permanently fail that quest.
Quests can't be retried.
It deserves its spot along the golden era of JRPGs, but man, those were games partly made to sell guides.
