Gabe Durham, "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" (Boss Fight Books, 2020)

New Books in Japanese Studies · Oct 26, 2023 · 59m

For the third anniversary of the Asian Review of Books podcast, I wanted to do something a little different today—and talk about another one of my hobbies, video games.

For video game players of—let’s call them the elder millennial set and older—there’s something special about the final dozen or so years of the 20th century. The Super Nintendo, the Sega Genesis, the Nintendo 64 and the Sony PlayStation: it was a period of technical advancement and creative experimentation that led to classics still beloved today.

Exploring many of these classics—big and small, Japanese and Western, console…