Retrograde Amnesia is a deep-dive video game podcast dedicated to exploring classic Japanese Role-playing Games (JRPGs), chapter by chapter, beat by beat. The show blends structured narrative analysis, humor, and immersive production to guide listeners through the worlds, characters, and themes of the genre’s most beloved and strange stories.
Praised for its thoughtful pacing, encyclopedic research, and a blend of sincerity and irreverence, Retrograde Amnesia offers a cozy look back for players who want to engage more deeply with their favorite games within the medium. Play along with the hosts or reminisce your enduring thoughts as we trek through the stories we grew up with.
Each season covers a single game in exhaustive detail, using a a meticulous scene-by-scene format to reexamine every moment. Whether it’s dissecting the political intricacies of Final Fantasy Tactics, or unraveling the existential dread of Xenogears, the show approaches every game with a balance of critical insight and deep appreciation for the medium.
Listeners have described the show as:
“One of the best out there”
“If you love retrospective type podcast this is one of the best out there. They pick great games and take their time going through them. Just the perfect type of podcast for me. It’s like getting to live through these games from my childhood again without having to play all the way through them. Great job guys, I hope there are many more episodes to come.”
— SIumlord, May 27, 2024“What a gem”
“Discovered these guys when I was searching up stuff on Xenosaga, and saw a back catalog of amazing games. Started with [Final Fantasy VIII] and am about to do the next season. Chris and Eric are hilarious, insightful, and worth your time to listen to. Also Fakenet will you marry me.”
— laser canon death sentance, January 23, 2024“Witty, smart, and highly detailed”
“Chris and Eric rock. They play off each other super well, it’s like hanging out with a couple guys with a bottle of whiskey and even though you never have a chance to get a word in, you don’t really want to. Thoughtful and interesting with hilarious in jokes they are more than happy to bring you in on.”
— alinktreetothepast, October 19, 2023
Since 2019, Retrograde Amnesia has been a destination for thoughtful JRPG fans seeking to reckon with the games they grew up loving — while learning to love the ones they missed.
Retrograde Amnesia is hosted by Eric and Chris — two old pals who have been thinking about JRPGs for multiple decades.
It’s the same for me. It’s just something I can do. What you can do is listen to us talk about double-momming Allen, wondering if Captain Matthews cuts Chris’ lawn, seducing Shion with wine, firing 9MM bullets in space, excelling over others in…
Let’s meet the space junkers. Let’s also make sure we’re owing money to the Kukai Foundation, presenting as another nerd class, warning others of our addictions via head-based apparel, disrespecting space corpses, expressing interest in space…
KOSMOS has the capacity for being sassy. We don’t, but we’re debating the rules of Gnosis-touching, engaging the Hilbert Effect, cutting sausage goblins, fiddling with the menus, demanding our deaths mean something, wondering of Asimov’s laws of…
The company says we can’t free the slaves. While you’re in our company, we’re pounding human meat into bloody shit, violating privacy agreements, sucking a Gnosis out the airlock, dying like it’s our job, moving randomly, citing divine…
Cosmos is pronounced differently than KOS-MOS. This time we’re treating DME addiction as a casual hobby, jamming to the Seraphim Sisters, wondering if Realians deserve equal rights, not delivering the sexy murder robot project on time, hiding a…
Better safe than curry. On this episode we’re diagnosing problems with Realians strapped to inversion tables, writing Realians off as infants, equating fables and proverbs to myths and legends, driving free will out of a machine, finding ourselves…
Who is the most human character in Xenosaga, and is that individual even human? To figure that out, we’re chatting up our Vector co-workers, diagnosing Allen’s patheticness, discussing Jung’s origin of all shit, refusing to ask out our boss,…
Can robots experience emotions? Can we? Listen to use try as we’re advancing time by 40 centuries, obscuring facial details, losing our minds in technobabble, looking for scientific evidence of the human soul, dancing around to move the shit of the…
Hi. Welcome to season five of Retrograde Amnesia. As we let the Saga take us, we’re talking about when and where Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht came out, observing the will to power, establishing Xeno-links, finding inspiration in…
This the final farewell. On our final episode for season four, we’re closing the loop on a humiliated Lucia, owning the shit out of Han Cunningham, licking the carpet, rattling death over Seed and Culgan, thinking killing is a good thing, breaking…