One of my earliest video game memories is sitting on the living room floor of the house my family was moving into and playing Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. It was the mid 90s, so I was playing on a Super Nintendo on a probably 20-inch CRT TV sat atop a brick hearth in an otherwise empty room, and I was too young to entirely understand the game. Either way, it was a formative experience. Now all I want to do is find potions and level up.

Star Ocean: First Departure R, the latest JRPG I played, came out in the same forever-romanticized era of SNES JRPGs. It’s the first game in the Star Ocean series I’ve played, and I feel like I missed out a bit by not knowing them at the time. It wouldn’t be a top pick for me, as my rigid and rotten fantasy brain finds the sci-fi elements kind of unwelcome, but they’re fairly minimal, and the game was otherwise a pretty standard JRPG romp: you kill a bunch of poorly-defined pixelated monsters, and the protagonist is some blue-haired goof with zero personality, and every town has some vague theme along with five houses and a king, which doesn’t seem to be a viable economic or political structure to me.

The blue-haired protagonist, Roddick, meeting a cat

It’s interesting to play a JRPG from this era for the first time as an adult, because it lets me look at it fresh, unclouded by my childhood opinions. Everything about the discourse around 90s JRPGs is mired in nostalgia, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the old games you like were actually good, or if you’ve just wrapped them up in the memory of a time when you were still young enough to believe that there was a future and that the world might get better instead of worse. Every game seems fun when the only thing you know is a quiet, empty living room.

Unfortunately, a significant portion of JRPG fans (and game developers inspired by JRPGs) seem to embrace the miasma of nostalgia. When they look back at these games, it seems like they’re often not really interested in them at all, but interested in the obviously impossible task of recreating the wonder of childhood. As a result, they seem to focus not on the elements that made those games so engaging during childhood, but on the surface-level aesthetics of the era. I completely understand the appeal of retro pixel art and those squashed little sprites – I feel it, too – but that wasn’t at all what made them engaging at the time.

The blue-haired protagonist, Roddick, meeting another cat

What I believe is flawed in a lot of attempts at recreating the charm of these childhood gems is that I don’t think the intended audience should be, or ever really was, children. A big part of the appeal of a game like Final Fantasy VI, for example, was that it felt very adult to me in a way that almost nothing else on the Super Nintendo did. Something seemed condescending about Mario, or Donkey Kong, or Kirby; these were colorful abstractions bouncing around for no particular reason, arbitrary stimuli, baby stuff. Final Fantasy, on the other hand, treated me with respect. It was accessible to kids, but it wasn’t necessarily made for them.

Star Ocean is a much simpler game than Final Fantasy VI, but I still see that same sensibility. It’s got an engaging ensemble cast of characters, though there are some who I hate with my life – I’m looking at you, Ioshua – and it tells a somewhat ambitious story, even if it is rudimentary in its character development compared to something like Final Fantasy. It feels like a much thinner game overall, but still working with a lot of the same basic materials. It’s not at all a game that sets out to make you feel like a child. It takes you seriously, as much as it can.

The blue-haired protagonist, Roddick, meeting another cat

I wish more of the developers interested in retro aesthetics saw it that way. I like that pixelated look, just like every stupid millennial – it’s nice, and it reminds us of the saccharine pre-9/11 world of childhood where everything was going great because Bill Clinton was ignoring Rwanda and we didn’t know what Yugoslavia was and NAFTA seemed like it was probably fine – but the look isn’t what I remember making my eyes widen at the screen. What does that is seeing Maxim and Selan die in the prologue to Lufia and thinking, “wow, this is drama,” or watching the absolutely bleak struggle of Celes desperately collecting fish for a dying Cid in Final Fantasy VI.

These games shouldn’t make me feel like I’m a child again. They should aim to tell stories that are as engaging as the ones that made me love these kinds of games in the first place. They should aim to create well-developed casts of engaging characters, plus at least one guy who I hate more than anything (Ioshua). They should aim to make me feel something, and not a memory of a previous feeling, but something new, because that was why I liked them back then.

And yeah, sure, they should let me get potions and level up.