Not that I’m complaining, you understand the vast majority of the post mortem releases have been of stellar quality, with puzzlers such as Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles and Fruit’Y scratching an itch and shooters like Sturmwind putting most ‘official’ titles to shame. Granted, we had the superb Leona’s Tricky Adventures a few months back, but the lion’s share of releases for the Dreamcast in recent times have squarely occupied the two mentioned genres.

To reiterate everything I bleated about in the preceding paragraphs, the most refreshing thing about Zia is the very fact that it isn’t a shmup and it isn’t a puzzle game. Orion's Zia and the Goddesses of Magic was released at the beginning of September 2016 and is the latest new title to grace the Dreamcast, so let's take a look at what this curious little game is all about. What has all this guff got to do with the Dreamcast you may be wondering? Well, the latest indie release for Sega's little white box has landed.and it's an RPG!

Haters gonna hate and I won't be posting this on Reddit anyway, so there's a 65% risk reduction of that straight out of the gate. I'm already expecting a whole load of comments completely ignoring the main purpose of this review and just focusing in on the fact that I described any of the aforementioned games as RPGs, but fuck it. That said, I have played other non-Dreamcast RPGs so I do have a decent level of appreciation for the genre (Ocarina of Time, Link's Awakening, Rainbow Moon, Fallout 3, The Witcher etc), and naturally there's also Shenmue but I'm apprehensive to class that as an RPG unless a hate mob of Shnemue truthers be mobilised against me. The latter because it’s about as interesting as watching a group of pensioners play boules down the park on a Sunday morning. I'm going to be honest here and state that my experience with RPGs isn't as extensive as some other members of the Junkyard team, and I'm happy to admit that I've never finished Skies of Arcadia or Time Stalkers. The thing is, these examples are not classed as role playing games, or ‘RPGs.’ No, RPGs fall into their own little genre identified by magic potions, stat points, levelling up and pointy ears/gigantic beards/scantily clad nymphs (delete as applicable). Similarly in Virtua Tennis, you assume the role of a square-headed Tim Henman and do things the man never did in real life, such as winning trophies and therefore Virtua Tennis should technically be designated as a phantasy role playing game, too.

I know I’m talking (writing) utter rubbish, but what do you expect here? Look, in Crazy Taxi you play the role of Gus, picking up passengers while wearing an open shirt and exposing the odd man boob. I get the connotations and I understand that titles with which it is associated must meet certain criteria to be classed as such.but don't you play a role in any game you play? Bear with me on this one, OK.

The term 'role playing game' has always puzzled me.

Happy skies of arcadia dreamcast ost