This week in Rentonauts, grab your chainsaw.

We're goinghrone God.

That's a tall order for a two-hour podcast, but I believe in us. I think we can do it.

But no, in all seriousness, this is not, this is not an episode about heresy. It might be an

episode about heresy, but we are not going to be heretical necessarily. This is the, a little,

okay, this is the another episode, another installment in the Trends and Influences line of Retronauts podcasts.

I am your host, Jeremy Parrish, and Trends and Influences episodes are really more about the things that shape and inspire and influence, if you will, video games and video game trends.

This is a follow-up to our recent Satanic Panic episode, and I've called in some of the

same folks from that episode, but also another folk who I think will have a lot to say

about this episode, because we're really specifically, really the focus of this episode, as you might be able to infer from the title, is about how Japanese games specifically treat Western religion.

It's not about religion in video games as a whole.

That's more than a single episode.

But it's really talking about how God appears, the Western God, in Japanese RPGs and other things like that.

And the ultimate question is why?

And this is a podcast that I've really wanted to put together since before there were podcasts, I thought about

creating a website about religion and JRP's back in the 90s, inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics.

And I never did because that would require time and research. But a podcast is the perfect format for that not to wear out.

It's welcome.

So let me introduce the rest of the cast and also kind of give a baseline of where we're approaching this topic from.

I love me some JRP's.

And I grew up, as I mentioned in the satanic panic episode,

going to church usually three times a week, a very conservative Christian church.

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