Elena Castillo
Staff Writer & RPG Specialist
Console Codex · JRPG & Adventure Games Expert since 2016
About Elena
Elena Castillo came to retro gaming through the JRPG rabbit hole — one borrowed copy of Final Fantasy VII that turned into a decade-long obsession with every RPG the PlayStation era produced. She has since expanded her focus to cover the entire breadth of classic gaming, but JRPGs remain her heartland.
At Console Codex, Elena covers the RPG and adventure game catalogues in depth, responsible for the 79+ RPG reviews on the site. Her writing goes beyond mechanics to explore narrative structure, world-building, and the cultural context that shaped Japanese game design in the 1990s — why those games told the stories they told, and why those stories still resonate.
She is the site's leading authority on the Castlevania series (she has completed every mainline entry), Final Fantasy from I through IX, and the PlayStation-era RPG canon. Her familiarity with Japanese gaming history includes knowledge of localisation differences, regional release variations, and the often-dramatic cuts made when games crossed the Pacific.
Elena also writes Console Codex's development trivia articles, drawing on interviews, developer retrospectives, and documented production histories to surface the stories behind the games. She has a particular interest in the "golden era" of the mid-1990s, when technical constraints and creative ambition collided to produce some of the most inventive game design ever made.
Areas of Expertise
Writing Focus
The best JRPG writing explains why a game matters to people who haven't played it — what emotional or mechanical hook it uses, what it was trying to say, and whether it succeeded. A Chrono Trigger review that only describes the battle system is missing the point. The non-linear time travel narrative, the multiple endings, the fact that a cast of characters you meet briefly in the prologue can be dead in one timeline and alive in another — that's the story worth telling.
Elena's trivia articles aim to give games their full context: the developers who made them, the constraints they worked under, and the decisions — creative, commercial, technical — that shaped the final product. Games are not made in a vacuum, and understanding the vacuum helps you appreciate what came out of it.