IroIro's Retro Emporium is exactly the kind of site I love finding. It's a personal homepage on Neocities dedicated to reviews of anime and video games from the 80s and 90s, built with simple HTML and zero pretension. No JavaScript frameworks, no analytics popups, no newsletter signup modals. Just a person who loves this stuff writing about it on a page they put together themselves.
The site's creator explains their reasoning on the About page pretty clearly: they tried YouTube and Twitch but never warmed up to them, their voice gives out after five minutes, and they missed building sites like they did in the late 90s. So they went back to doing it the old-fashioned way. There's something genuinely appealing about that. When they say "it makes me really happy" to slap these pages together, I believe them, because that energy comes through in the writing.
And the writing is the real draw here. IroIro has built up a serious archive of reviews covering stuff that most people have never heard of. I'm talking about anime OVAs like Joker: Marginal City, a 1992 adaptation so stripped of context that only manga readers could follow it, or Cosmo Police Justy, which apparently went from decent manga to "incoherent mess" in the jump to animation. There's a review of Baoh, an early work by the creator of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, where IroIro traces the seeds of Araki's later style in the exaggerated poses and elaborate costumes. The review even digs into who else worked on it, noting that Hideaki Anno of Evangelion fame was one of the key animators. That kind of detail tells you this person actually cares about what they're covering.
The game reviews are just as solid. There's a nice write-up of Breath of Fire on the SNES that acknowledges both its innovations (characters with unique field abilities beyond combat) and its frustrations (random encounters every three steps and serious grinding). A piece on G-Darius gets into the series' trademark mechanical fish enemies, the capture ball system, and especially the soundtrack, which IroIro describes as having "truly otherworldly melodies" with more in common with anime music than other shoot 'em ups. The review of Clash at Demonhead on the NES makes a good case for a game I'd honestly never thought much about.
What I appreciate most is the tone. These aren't breathless "everything is amazing" reviews. IroIro is honest when something doesn't work. The Enemy's the Pirates! gets called "incredibly middle of the road" and "largely forgettable." Rail of the Star is praised for touching on Japan's wartime actions in Korea, but the reviewer is upfront that it only scratches the surface. The Legend of Black Heaven gets a thoughtful look at its messy genre-hopping and a wife character so unsympathetic that IroIro admits they would have been fine if the protagonist just ran off with the alien. It's personal and opinionated writing, which is exactly what you want from a site like this.
The links page is a nice touch too. It's a short, curated list of other old-web anime and gaming sites, some of which haven't been updated in over a decade. IroIro calls out Districts, a web directory, and says they find directories "way more useful for discovering web sites than anything modern search has to offer." Hard to argue with that.
Clicking around IroIro's Retro Emporium feels like finding someone's carefully maintained notebook of opinions about all the weird anime and games they grew up loving. It hasn't been updated since 2022, but the archive is substantial and worth digging through. If you have any fondness for 80s and 90s anime, retro games, or just the experience of reading a genuine personal website built by someone who wanted to share what they love, go give it a browse.