RPG criticism with group-chat velocity.
RPG Bookclub treats role-playing games like shared reading assignments, stopping at checkpoints to argue through plot beats, mechanics, jokes, and odd little choices. Its rhythm is messy in the useful way: life updates first, sharp game talk next, with plenty of detours along the road.
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RPG Bookclub is built like a book club for role-playing games, with regular checkpoints instead of chapters. The speakers play a set slice of a game, return to the table, and talk through what happened. That structure gives the show a spine, but the fun comes from how much refuses to stay neatly on it. A Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth episode can start with Mario movie chatter, Tomodachi Life experiments, salary talk, or a stray health update before it lands back in Kowloon, Eden, hackers, Eaters, and Totina’s increasingly strange detective life. The recaps are dense. They remember names, routes, mechanics, bosses, side quests, and plot reveals, then immediately color them with jokes, disbelief, or delighted nitpicking. When the game gets odd, the show leans in. When the writing overexplains itself, someone notices. When a boss fight is unfair, messy, or secretly clever, the disagreement becomes part of the texture. The JRPG Canon episodes give the feed another mode, using short play sessions to place games like Phantasy Star and Moon: Remix RPG Adventure in a wider genre story. Those entries are more historical without becoming museum pieces. The Moon discussion, for example, connects Yoshiro Kimura, Onion Games, Toby Fox, fan translation interest, and indie-game admiration into a lively account of influence and rediscovery. RPG Bookclub also makes room for creator-adjacent silliness, including an interview-style Possum Boy episode where the form itself becomes part of the joke. The show’s best quality is its combination of specificity and looseness. It knows the games well enough to track their systems and narrative turns, but it is comfortable sounding like a group chat that wandered into game criticism and decided to stay. Sam, Bernard, and Trish appear in its episodes, with a quick rhythm that allows interruptions, corrections, callbacks, and sudden sincerity. The result is not polished lecture audio. It is enthusiastic, cranky, funny, and unusually attentive to how RPGs actually feel while being played in pieces.
Made for: For RPG players who like detailed recaps, genre history, and messy conversational chemistry more than polished review segments. It especially fits fans of JRPGs, strange games, and playthrough discussions.
What sets it apart: RPG Bookclub combines checkpoint-style playthrough structure with an unusually loose ensemble rhythm. It can explain a dungeon, argue a boss, trace a design lineage, and wander into personal nonsense without losing the thread.
Join Sam, Bernard and Trish as they play through classic RPGs together, pausing each week to talk about what has happened so far, and speculate, and discuss, and all those good things that bookclubs do.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
RPG Bookclub combines detailed story recaps, mechanical scrutiny, and playful disagreement to capture what playing an RPG actually feels like.
RPG Bookclub turns shared play-throughs into lively conversations about how games tell stories and how their systems feel in practice. Sam, Bernard, and Trish reconstruct chapter-sized stretches of Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, Mega Man Battle Network, and Lufia & the Fortress of…
MagicMan.exe is easy until it isn't; you get the chip-folder debate behind that split verdict.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
An Asakusa dungeon, a tentacle-bodied Eater, and a living-doll side quest give this recap its uneasy shape.
RPG Bookclub's Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth review turns the Asakusa stretch into a tight read on the game's weirder fears. Totina forgetting to explain Connect Jump, Arata's apology, and the digital-shift maze all give the episode a clear spine before the Eater consumes a human…
A lively path from Moon's obscurity to the creators and comeback story it helped inspire.
Moon Remix RPG Adventure lands here as a game-history curiosity: an obscure PlayStation title the hosts describe as barely played outside Japan, not especially big in Japan, yet deeply influential.
An electric sneeze, a failed stealth program, and Jimmy Kin's entrance turn chapter six into controlled chaos.
RPG Book Club treats Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth chapter six as a stealth scene that slips out of the game's hands almost immediately. Totina's electric sneeze breaks her Digital World dive, knocks the stealth program loose, and leaves her exposed to Zaxxon hackers before Yugo…
A Digimon meetup mystery turns Eden's virtual geography into a relaxed online scavenger hunt.
RPG Book Club begins its Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth coverage with a modest virtual mystery and a lot of easy conversational drift. Totina Frechetta enters Eden to meet Akino and Blue Box, but neither is there, and Mr. Navit contacts her after she heads to the community center.
A messy, funny completion episode where MagicMan's crowded fight turns chip-folder strategy into the sharpest debate.
RPG Bookclub's completion run through Mega Man Battle Network turns a progress check into a loose, lively argument about MagicMan and late-game adjustment.
A Hope Ruby rescue turns into a funny, sharp look at JRPG guidance, supernatural logic, and old-school wandering.
RPG Bookclub treats Lufia and the Fortress of Doom as a rescue errand that keeps revealing stranger choices. The search for Reina moves from Midan to a haunted cave, past a guard who fails to stop a sickly ten-year-old, and toward a hard phantom fight over the Hope Ruby.
A candid Possum Boy interview where identity, unfinished ideas, and version chaos share the microphone.
RPG Book Club gets a clean angle on Possum Boy by staying close to the choices that shaped the game during and after production. Trish's conversation with Bernard, the game's writer-director, and head programmer Sam Allman is strongest when it moves from hindsight into process:…
Game Informer's editors review new releases and debrief hands-on previews from events like Summer Game Fest.
The hosts discuss their week, focusing on the new Pokemon game's lack of voice acting, before continuing their playthrough of Folklore.
The hosts discuss the Steam Spring Sale and share game recommendations, starting with a story about visiting wolves.
The RPG Book Club podcast finishes covering the PS3 game Folklore, with a discussion of Pokemon Legends ZA and a trigger warning for suicide and self-harm.
Sam, Bernard, and Trish continue their playthrough of Lufia & the Fortress of Doom, covering the Hope Ruby scenario and saving Jaren.
Trish interviews game developers Bernard Houck and Sam Allman about their new visual novel, Possum Boy: The Ballad of Joey Virginia.
Sam and Bernard trace Brave Fencer Musashi’s chapter-five route from a dry well to the Isle of Dragons, where the chapter title is nearly the only clue to use rock salt on a slug.
RPG Book Club spends this Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth recap on Totina’s Chapter 10 run through Nakano Broadway, the Tokyo Metropolitan Office, Tower Records, and Kamishiro’s Avalon server.
Moon Remix RPG Adventure (1997) is presented as a PlayStation game on Nintendo Switch that Sam Allman and Bernard describe as both obscure and influential.
RPG Book Club covers Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth through chapter six, with Yuko Kamishiro sending Totina after Makoto Yamashina and the Kamishiro files tied to Nile Corporation.
The RPG Book Club podcast continues their playthrough of Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, discussing their week and the new Tamodachi Life demo.
Sam Ullman introduces the JRPG Canon series by playing the first two hours of Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System, explaining the concept of playing many JRPGs briefly to understand the genre.
Hosts Sam, Bernard, and Trish of RPG Book Club begin their playthrough of Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, covering through the end of Chapter 1.
Hosts Sam, Bernard, and Trish of RPG Book Club complete their playthrough of Mega Man Battle Network, opening with personal updates including Sam's promotion to lead software developer with an over-$1,000 monthly raise and Bernard's newly hacked refurbished 3DS.
Trish interviews the developers of the newly released game Possum Boy about their creative process and personal anecdotes.
The hosts finish their playthrough of Lufia II and discuss the game Blueprints.